§ 25

The spirit giveth life! Matter is like an eggshell. We have gone round in a circle in the later pages, and come back to the point of starting. The soul of a country is what matters; it and it alone can control the matter of it! We have seen a great country break down under the curse of materialism. Explosives, foul gas, and every instrument of destruction have been the gods of the Germans, and they have ruined them. Germany sold her soul to the Devil to attain her lust, the conquest of the world. She failed because she killed the spirit of God in her, setting in His place monsters of iron, steel and poison. If matter divorced from spirit can win, Germany would have won. Is England going to imitate Germany, the country that is fallen from a high estate to an abject condition of failure? Or are we to be influenced by Russian disorder and anarchy? Both are bad, and neither should influence us except to avoid the grievous errors which have led to such disaster. Anarchy, as every plague, is catching. It seems to promise to uneducated and undisciplined minds a panacea. It may offer that, but it grants only additional miseries. Over and over again it has been tried and has invariably failed!

So let us not repeat a blunder, but shape a new course upon ground which has never revealed pitfalls, which is not subject to earthquakes, that is on rock, not sand, that is productive, not sterile, fruitful, not destructive. Let us see that the Great Spirit which inspired England is with us still, but in a wider measure than heretofore—the spirit that gave her Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning and Morris in poetry; in science, Harvey, Bacon, Locke, the Herschells, Faraday, Darwin, Huxley and Lister, to mention only a few great names in occult and humane science. The spirit which inspired our great artists—Reynolds, Wren, Chambers, Blake, Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, Wilson, Alfred Stephens, Rossetti, Hunt, Millais, Leighton and Watts. For music we cannot claim so many, but in folk song England has been rich, perhaps richer than any other country, while her stately Church music has been quietly developing from Purcell to Sam Wesley, the last of the severe Church composers. Of novelists, Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, Thackeray, Dickens, the five kings of that art; while in the second order Meredith, G. Eliot and Charlotte Brontë are eminent. Let us emulate the builders, craftsmen and decorators who made our cathedrals, which we now see denuded of much of their wealth of beauty by wrong-headed Puritans and religious faddists who have worked so much mischief to the country in too many directions.

But, we shall be asked, “Is it possible to work our several faculties simultaneously in opposite directions: those which are seeking utility, facilities for still more rapid translation from place to place, for a restless life which leaves few moments for thought, but which do not conduce to wealth inasmuch as money can give it, but which must, if they are further developed, stultify other faculties which, to reach their highest point of excellence, demand concentration, leisure and peace?” Yes, it is possible; it has been done, but it cannot be done if the point is overstrained, which is to say, if wealth, as applied to money, means that money only matters, if to get rich is the ideal towards which the whole nation strains. Money is only a means to an end. Like labour, it is mischievous when wrongly applied, and it is so wasted upon implements of destruction, gambling and coarse pleasures which poison or atrophy the higher senses and nobler ambitions. It is wasted also when spent upon idle officials, unnecessary committees, the fetish of politicians when they have got themselves into a muddle. Before spending money surely the first question should be: “Is the object of lasting or purely ephemeral importance? Will it return an interest commensurate to the expenditure pro bono publico, i.e., a national more than individual interest?” Thousands upon thousands of public money were wasted in war time to support political or party schemes for which we pay dearly now. Money is being wasted upon extravagant wages in all directions and at this moment when the nation is deeply in debt. Taxes and rates are at a fabulous premium, raised to pay for experiments, mistakes and reckless extravagance, and have to be met by increased taxation which is impoverishing enterprise of every description, so much so that no surplus is left to meet demands that are necessary for the intellectual progress of the country. Does any one suppose that the Labour leaders are doing their mischief unpaid? They are living (on the contrary) on the fat of the land. Their salaries are large and are taken from their followers, who claim to be in such straits. These mischievous agents of Anarchy are better off quâ money than thousands of their betters, than men whose education has been expensive and who are the intellectual bulwarks of Britain.