Prime Ministers and Some Others Part 18

"Of all who under Eastern skies Call Aryan man a blasted n.i.g.g.e.r."

Now, of late years, John has altered his course. Some faint conception of his previous foolishness has dawned on his mind; and, as he is a thoroughly good fellow at heart, he has tried to make amends.

The present war has taught him a good deal that he did not know before, and he renders a homage, all the more enthusiastic because belated, to the principle of Nationality. His latest exploit in this direction has been to suggest the creation of a Jewish Regiment.

The intention was excellent and the idea picturesque; but for the practical business of life we need something more than good intentions and picturesque ideas. "Wisdom," said Ecclesiastes, "is profitable to direct;" and Wisdom would have suggested that it was advisable to consult Jewish opinion before the formation of a Jewish Regiment was proclaimed to the world. There is probably no race of people about which John Bull has been so much mistaken as he has been about the Jews. Lord Beaconsfield's description of Mr. Buggins, with his comments on the Feast of Tabernacles in Houndsditch, is scarcely yet anachronistic.[*] But slowly our manners and our intelligence have improved in this as in other directions; and Lord Derby (who represents John Bull in his more refined development) thought that he would be paying his Jewish fellow-citizens a pretty compliment if he invited them to form a Jewish Regiment.

[Footnote *: See _Tancred_, Book V., chapter vi.]

Historically, Lord Derby and those who applauded his scheme had a great deal to say for themselves. The remote history of Judaism is a history of war. The Old Testament is full of "the battle of the warrior" and of "garments rolled in blood." Gideon, and Barak, and Samson, and Jephthah, and David are names that sound like trumpets; and the great Maccabean Princes of a later age played an equal part with Romans and Lacedaemonians. All this is historically true; but it never occurred to Lord Derby and his friends that the idea which underlay their scheme is the opposite of that which animates modern Judaism. Broadly speaking, the idea of modern Judaism is not Nationality, but Religion. Mr. Lucien Wolf has lately reminded us that, according to authoritative utterances, "The Jews are neither a nation within a nation, nor cosmopolitan," but an integral part of the nations among whom they live, claiming the same rights and acknowledging the same duties as are claimed and acknowledged by their fellow-citizens. It is worth noticing that Macaulay accepted this position as disposing of the last obstacle to the civil and political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the English Jews, and ridiculed the notion that they would regard England, "not as their country, but merely as their place of exile." Mr. Wolf thus formulates his faith: "In the purely religious communities of Western Jewry we have the spiritual heirs of the law-givers, prophets, and teachers who, from the dawn of history, have conceived Israel, not primarily as a political organism, but as a nation of priests, the chosen servants of the Eternal."

Mr. Claude Montefiore, who is second to none as an interpreter of modern Judaism, has lately been writing in a similar strain.

The Jew is a Jew in respect of his religion; but, for the ordinary functions of patriotism, fighting included, he is a citizen of the country in which he dwells. A Jewish friend of mine said the other day to a Pacificist who tried to appeal to him on racial grounds: "_I would shoot a Jewish Prussian as readily as a Christian Prussian, if I found him fighting under the German flag_." Thus, to enrol a regiment of Jews is about as wise as to enrol a regiment of Roman Catholics or of Wesleyan Methodists. Jews, Romans, and Wesleyans alike hold with laudable tenacity the religious faiths which they respectively profess; but they are well content to fight side by side with Anglicans, or Presbyterians, or Plymouth Brethren.

They need no special standard, no differentiating motto. They are soldiers of the country to which they belong.

Here let me quote the exhilarating verses of a Jewish lady,[*] written at the time of the Boer War (March, 1900):

"Long ago and far away, O Mother England, We were warriors brave and bold, But a hundred nations rose in arms against us, And the shades of exile closed o'er those heroic Days of old.

"Thou hast given us home and freedom, Mother England.

Thou hast let us live again Free and fearless 'midst thy free and fearless children, Sparing with them, as one people, grief and gladness, Joy and pain.

"Now we Jews, we English Jews, O Mother England, Ask another boon of thee!

Let us share with them the danger and the glory; Where thy best and bravest lead, there let us follow O'er the sea!

"For the Jew has heart and hand, our Mother England, And they both are thine to-day-- Thine for life, and thine for death, yea, thine for ever!

Wilt thou take them as we give them, freely, gladly?

England, say!"

[Footnote *: Mrs. Henry Lucas (reprinted in her _Talmudic Legends, Hymns and Paraphrases_. Chatto and Windus, 1908).]

I am well aware that in what I have written, though I have been careful to reinforce myself with Jewish authority, I may be running counter to that interesting movement which is called "Zionism."

It is not for a Gentile to take part in the dissensions of the Jewish community; but I may be permitted to express my sympathy with a n.o.ble idea, and to do so in words written by a brilliant Israelite, Lord Beaconsfield: "I do not bow to the necessity of a visible head in a defined locality; but, were I to seek for such, it would not be at Rome. When Omnipotence deigned to be incarnate, the ineffable Word did not select a Roman frame. The prophets were not Romans; the Apostles were not Romans; she, who was blessed above all women--I never heard that she was a Roman maiden. No; I should look to a land more distant than Italy, to a city more sacred even than Rome."[*]

[Footnote *: _Sybil_, Book II., chapter xii.]

III

_INDURATION_

Though my heading is as old as Chaucer, it has, I must admit, a Johnsonian sound. Its sense is conveyed in the t.i.tle of an excellent book on suffering called _Lest We Grow Hard_, and this is a very real peril against which it behoves everyone

"Who makes his moral being his prime care"

to be sedulously on his guard. During the last four years we have been, in a very special way and degree, exposed to it; and we ought to be thankful that, as a nation, we seem to have escaped. The constant contemplation, even with the mental eye, of bloodshed and torture, has a strong tendency to harden the heart; and a peculiar grace was needed to keep alive in us that sympathy with suffering, that pa.s.sion of mercy, which is the characteristic virtue of regenerate humanity. I speak not only of human suffering. Animals, it has been said, may have no rights, but they have many wrongs, and among those wrongs are the tortures which war inflicts. The suffering of all sentient nature appeals alike to humanitarian sympathy.

It has always seemed to me a signal instance of Wordsworth's penetrating thought "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life," that he a.s.signed to this virtue a dominant place in the Character of the Happy Warrior--

"Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!

Turns his necessity to glorious gain";

and who, "as more exposed" than others "to suffering and distress,"

is

"Hence, also, more alive to tenderness."

This tribute to the moral nature of the Warrior, whether his warfare be on land or on sea or in the air, is as true to-day as when Wordsworth paid it. The brutal and senseless cry for "reprisals" which of late has risen from some tainted spots of the Body Politic will wake no response unless it be an exclamation of disgust from soldiers and sailors and airmen. Of course, everyone knows that there is a sense in which reprisals are a necessary part of warfare. Generation after generation our forefathers fought bow to bow and sword to sword and gun to gun against equally armed and well-matched foes; this was reprisal, or, if you prefer, retaliation. And when, in more recent times, the devilish ingenuity of science invented poisonous gas, there was nothing unmanly or unchivalrous in retorting on our German enemies with the hideous weapon which they had first employed.

But this is not the kind of reprisal which indurated orators demand.

They contend that because the Germans kill innocent civilians, and women, and little children in English streets, Englishmen are to commit the same foul deeds in Germany. "It is hard," says the _Church Times_, "to say whether futility or immorality is the more striking characteristic of the present clamour for reprisals in the matter of air-raids.... Mr. Joynson Hicks would 'lay a German town in ashes after every raid on London,' and he is not much worse than others who scream in the same key." Nay, he is better than many of them. The people who use this language are not the men of action. They belong to a sedentary and neurotic cla.s.s, who, lacking alike courage and mercy, gloat over the notion of torture inflicted on the innocent and the helpless.

A German baby is as innocent as an English baby, a German mother is as helpless as an English mother; and our stay-at-home heroes, safely ensconced in pulpits or editorial chairs, shrilly proclaim that they must be bombed by English airmen. What a function to impose on a band of fighters, peculiarly chivalrous and humane!

I refer to the pulpit because one gross and disgusting instance of clerical ferocity has lately been reported. A raving clergyman has been insolently parodying the Gospel which he has sworn to preach. Some of the newspapers commended his courage; and we do not know whether his congregation quitted the church or his Bishop rebuked him. Both results are possible, and I sincerely hope that the latter is true. The established and endowed teachers of religion have not always used their influence on the side of mercy; but on the question of reprisals I have observed with thankfulness that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London have spoken on the right side, and have spoken with energy and decision. They, at any rate, have escaped the peril of induration, and in that respect they are at one with the great ma.s.s of decent citizens.

I am no advocate of a mawkish lenity. When our soldiers and sailors and airmen meet our armed foes on equal terms, my prayers go with them; and the harder they strike, the better I am pleased. When a man or woman has committed a cold-blooded murder and has escaped the just penalty of the crime, I loathe the political intrigue which sets him or her free. Heavy punishment for savage deeds, remorseless fighting till victory is ours--these surely should be guiding principles in peace and war; and to hold them is no proof that one has suffered the process of induration.

Here I am not ashamed to make common cause with the stout old Puritan in _Peveril of the Peak:_ "To forgive our human wrongs is Christian-like and commendable; but we have no commission to forgive those which have been done to the cause of religion and of liberty; we have no right to grant immunity or to shake hands with those who have poured forth the blood of our brethren."

But let us keep our vengeance for those who by their own actions have justly incurred it. The very intensity of our desire to punish the wrong-doer should be the measure of our unwillingness to inflict torture on the helpless and the innocent. "Lest we grow hard"--it should be our daily dread. "A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn character: b.e.s.t.i.a.l, childish, stupid, scurrilous, tyrannical." A pagan, who had observed such a character in its working, prayed to be preserved from it. Christians of the twentieth century must not sink below the moral level of Marcus Aurelius.

IV

_FLACCIDITY_

My discourse on "Induration" was intended to convey a warning which, as individuals, we all need. But Governments are beset by an even greater danger, which the learned might call "flaccidity" and the simple--"flabbiness."

The great Liddon, always excellent in the aptness of his scriptural allusions, once said with regard to a leader who had announced that he would "set his face" against a certain policy and then gave way, "Yes, the deer 'set his face,' but he did not 'set it as a flint'--rather _as a pudding_."

To set one's face as a pudding is the characteristic action of all weak Governments. Lord Randolph Churchill once attracted notice by enouncing the homely truth that "the business of an Opposition is to oppose." A truth even more primary is that the duty of a Government is to govern; to set its face, not as a pudding, but as a flint, against lawlessness and outrage; to protect the innocent and to punish the wrong-doer.

This is a duty from which all weak Governments shrink. If a Minister is not very sure of his position; if he is backed, not by a united party, but by a haphazard coalition; if he is unduly anxious about his own official future; if his eye is nervously fixed on the next move of the jumping cat, he always fails to govern. He neither protects the law-abiding citizen nor chastises the criminal and the rebel. In this particular, there is no distinction of party.

Tories can show no better record than Whigs, nor Liberals than Conservatives. It is a question of the governing temper, which is as absolutely requisite to the character of the ruler as courage to the soldier or incorruptibility to the Judge.

It used to be held, and perhaps still is held, by what may be styled the toad-eating school of publicists, that this governing temper was an hereditary gift transmitted by a long line of ancestors, who in their successive generations had possessed it, and had used it on a large scale in the governance of England. "How natural,"

they exclaimed, "that Lord Nozoo, whose ancestors have ruled half Loams.h.i.+re since the Conquest, should have more notion of governing men than that wretched Bagman, whose grandfather swept out the shop, and who has never had to rule anyone except a clerk and a parlourmaid!"

This sounded plausible enough, especially in the days when heredity was everything, and when ancestral habit was held to explain, and if necessary extenuate, all personal characteristics; but experience and observation proved it false. Pitt was, I suppose, the greatest Minister who ever ruled England; but his pedigree would have moved a genealogist to scorn. Peel was a Minister who governed so effectually that, according to Gladstone, who served under him, his direct authority was felt in every department, high or low, of the Administration over which he presided; and Peel was a very recent product of cotton. Abraham Lincoln was, perhaps, the greatest ruler of the modern world, and the quality of his ancestry is a topic fit only to be handled in a lecture on the Self-Made Men of History.

When we regard our own time, I should say that Joseph Chamberlain had, of all English statesmen I have ever known, both the most satisfactory ideal of government and the greatest faculty for exercising it. But the Cordwainers' Company was the school in which his forefathers had learnt the art of rule. Ancestral achievements, hereditary possessions, have nothing to do with the matter. What makes a man a ruler of men, and enables him to set his face as a flint against wrong-doing; is a faculty born in himself--"the soul that riseth with him, his life's star."

And it has no more to do with politics than with pedigree. Sydney Smith, though he was as whole-hearted a reformer as ever breathed, knew that sternness towards crime was an essential part of government, and after the Bristol Riots of 1831 he warned Lord Grey against flaccidity with great plainness of speech. "Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol. I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported, and thirty imprisoned. You will save lives by it in the end."

It was a Tory Government which in the London Riots of 1866 made, as Matthew Arnold said, "an exhibition of mismanagement, imprudence, and weakness almost incredible." Next year the Fenians blew up Clerkenwell Prison, and the same acute critic observed: "A Government which dares not deal with a mob, of any nation or with any design, simply opens the floodgates to anarchy. Who can wonder at the Irish, who have cause to hate us, and who do not own their allegiance to us, making war on a State and society which has shown itself irresolute and feeble?"