Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome

CHAPTER IX

PREPARATIONS FOR REVOLUTION—ENGLAND

WE must here say a few words about the meaning of the great struggle which took place in England between the King and the Parliament. The King, Charles I., aimed at completing the monarchical absolutism begun by the Tudors, while at the same time his course was clearer to him, because the old feud between nobles and King had quite died out, and, as before said, the nobles, from being powerful and often refractory feudal vassals, had become mere courtiers whose aims and interest were identified with those of the monarch. On the other side stood the bourgeoisie, who had thriven 115 enormously on the growing commerce, were becoming powerful, and aiming not merely at social and economical freedom, but also at supremacy in the State. To the bourgeoisie also adhered the yeomen and the major part of the country squires, to which group Cromwell himself belonged.

The struggle began on the Parliamentary side with the assertion of the rights of Parliament, and the profession of an almost pedantic devotion to the quasi-historical constitution, which was, nevertheless, in the main a figment of the period. Perhaps the most constitutional act of the rebels was the trial of the King for his life, one precedent, at least, for which existed in the condemnation of Edward II. But as the Parliamentary struggle gave place to civil war, and it became clear that the rebels would be worsted unless the bourgeoisie were given the leading part, this sham-historical constitutionalism gave place first to republicanism, with an infusion of theocracy, and finally to the dictatorship of the victorious general, who in the end could scarcely 116 brook the thin veil of a nominally independent Parliament. The effects of the disappointment of the purist republicans, like Colonel Hutchinson, were sternly repressed, and still more so the little spurts of rebellion tried by the religious enthusiasts, amongst whom we must count the Levellers, whose doctrines included a commission of a similar character to that put forward by John of Leyden in the first half of the sixteenth century.

It is worth noting, as illustrating the growth of a widespread Puritanism in England, which in fact embraced the whole population, and which no political change has much affected, that both sides in the struggle were steeped in Bible phrases and illustrations, showing, amongst other things, the extent to which the English version was being read by the population.

On the other hand, the severity of triumphant Puritanism, and the iron rule of the Lord Protector, made his government unpopular amongst a people who have always resented harsh mechanical organisation of any kind. 117 The latitudinarians, always the most numerous, became the most powerful, and at last it was an easy matter for a ambitious self-seekers to bring about the restoration of the hereditary monarchy in Britain.

This restoration of the Stuart was, however, after all but a makeshift put up with because the defection from the high-strung principle of the earlier period of the revolution left nothing to take the place of Cromwell’s absolutism. The nation was mainly out of sympathy with the Court, which was unnational and Catholic in tendency, and quite openly debauched. The nation itself, though it had got rid of the severity of Puritanism, was still Puritan, and welcomed the Sunday Act of Charles II., which gave the due legal stamp to Puritanism of the duller and more respectable kind. But though enthusiastic Puritanism was no longer dominant, it was not extinct. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress shines out, though a religious romance, amidst the dulness of the literature of the time. The Quakers, who represented in their 118 beginning the peaceable and religious side of the Levellers, arose and grew and flourished in spite of persecution; the Cameronians in Scotland made an ineffectual armed resistance to the dying out of enthusiasm; while across the Atlantic the descendants of the earlier Puritans carried on an almost theocratic government, which, among other things persecuted the Quakers most cruelly.

Little by little, however, all that was not quite commonplace and perfunctory died out in English Protestantism, and respectable indifferentism had carried all before it by the end of the century. Politics and religion had no longer any real bond of union, and the religious side of Puritanism, Evangelicanism, disappears here, to come to light again in the next century under the leadership of Whitfield.

English Puritanism had left behind it a respectable, habitual, and formal residuum strong enough to resent James II.’s Papistry, and to make its resentment felt; while at the same time the constitutionalism, which began the anti-absolutist opposition in 119 Charles I.'s time, and which had been interrupted by Cromwell's iron and Charles II.’s mud absolutism, gathered head again and soon assumed definite form. The Stuart monarchy, with its “divine right” of absolute sovereignty, was driven from England in the person of James II, a constitutional king was found in William of Orange, and constitutional party government began.

Thus, in spite of interruption, was carried out the middle-class revolution in England; like all other revolutions, it arrived at the point which it really set out to gain; but not until it had shaken off much which at one time helped forward its progress, and which was and still is mistaken for an essential part of it. Religious and Republican enthusiasm, although they (especially the former) played their part in abolishing the reactionary clogs on the progress of the middle classes, had to disappear as elements which would have marred the true historical end of that revolution; to wit, the creation of a powerful middle class freed from all restrictions 120 that would interfere with it in its pursuit of individual profit, derived from the exploitation of industry. Thenceforth, till our own times, respectable political life in England has been wrapped up in whiggery; tinged, on one side, with the last faint remains of feudalism in the form of a quite unreal sentiment, involving no practical consequences but the acceptance of the name of Tory; and on the other by as faint a sentiment towards democracy, which was probably rather a traditional survival of the feeling of the old days of the struggle between King and Parliament, than any holding out of the hand towards the real democracy that was silently forming underneath the government of the respectables.

The first part of the eighteenth century, therefore, finds England solid and settled; all the old elements of disturbance and aspiration hardened into constitutional bureaucracy; religion recognised as a State formality, but having no influence whatever on the corporate life of the country, its sole reality a mere personal sentiment, not at all burdensome to the 121 practical business of life; the embers of the absolutist re-action on the point of extinction, and swept off easily and even lazily when they make a show of being dangerous; the nobility a mere titled upper order of the bourgeoisie; the country prosperous, gaining on French and on Dutch in America and India, and beginning to found its colonial and foreign markets, and its navy fast becoming paramount on all seas; the working classes better off than at any time since the fifteenth century, but hopeless, dull, neither adventurous nor intellectual; Art, if not actually dead, represented by a Court painter or so of ugly ladies and stupid gentlemen (Sir Joshua the king of the said painters); a literature produced by a few word-spinning essayists and prosaic versifiers, like Addison and Pope, priding themselves on a well-bred contempt for whatever was manly or passionate or elevating in the past of their own language; while their devotion to the classical times, derived from the genuine and powerful enthusiasm of the Renaissance, had sunk to nothing but a genteel habit of expression.

Here then in England we may begin 122 to see what the extinction of feudality was to end in, for the time at least. Mediaeval England is gone, the manners and ways of thought of the people are utterly changed; they are called English, but they are another people from that which dwelt in England in the fifteenth century when “forestalling and regrating” were misdemeanours; when the guild ruled over the production of goods, and division of labour was not yet; when both in art and literature the people had their share,—nay, when what of both there was, was produced by the people themselves. Gone also is militant Puritanism, buried deep under mountains of cool formality. England is bourgeois and successful throughout its whole life; without aspirations, for its self-satisfaction is too complete for any, yet gathering force for development of a new kind, —as it were a nation taking breath for a new spring.

For under its prosperous self-satisfaction lies the birth of a great change—a revolution in industry—and England is at the time we are writing of simply 123 preparing herself for that change. Her prosperity and solid bureaucratic constitutional government—nay, even the commonplace conditions of life in the country, are enabling her to turn all her attention towards this change, and towards the development of the natural resources in which she is so rich.

The fall of the feudal system, the invasion of the individualist method of producing goods, and of simple exchange of commodities, were bound to lead to the final development of the epoch—the rise of the great machine industries—and now the time for that development is at hand. The growing world-market is demanding more than the transitional methods of production can supply.

In matters political prejudice is giving way to necessity, and all obstacles are being rapidly cleared away before the advent of a new epoch for labour; an epoch of which we may say that if no great change were at hand for it in its turn, it would have been the greatest disaster that has ever happened to the race of man.