The Present Situation of England

...The most obvious of these externals or symptomatic changes is the license in fiction, but here again it is a symptom and not a cause...

...It was an unmistakable thing like a flavor or a scent—and it is gone...

...The populace (save perhaps in the majority of our villages—and these do not account for a tenth of our population) do not desire to be ruled by the gentry, and have largely lost their instinctive sense which told them where the gentry could be found, and which recognized the type...

...There is nothing, therefore, astonishing in the probability that perpetually increasing intercommunication and numbers of travelers should bring, not more intimate knowledge of foreign nations, but less...

...But all things depend upon the mind, and these other modifications which we notice are but products of the inward change, or when they are not products, are but subsidiary things...

...There is no growth, for instance, of democratic feeling in politics...

...I do not think so...

...I am not suggesting that there has taken place in England through the moral revolution of which I speak, a change from better to worse...

...But the words he used and the passions to which he gave expression, were those of an utterly different man...

...I am not describing the transformation as a loss of something I would rather have seen preserved...

...The essential of the older England was the particular type of national Protestantism which inspired it...

...for instance, the disappearance of the English Sunday, the disappearance of Bible reading...

...There has been wide change in her economic circumstance...

...The various functions of an aristocratic state retain a similacrum of life, but the life itself has almost gone...

...But I will maintain that a man who should have lived in the heart of England, being himself English, and intimate with the national soul during the last days of Queen Victoria, wholly cut off from England in the interval, and returning today—would find it a foreign country...

...One day, after a brief absence, I met him in the street at Oxford...

...but to bear such testimony has a practical value because the evolution of which I speak must, with no great delay, have its effect upon international relations...

...I say again and for the last time that I am not here praising or blaming...

...Bible reading might be as common as it was in the seventies, and a London Sunday might still be what it was in the seventies, and yet the spiritual atmosphere be changed completely...

...There are two fundamental things about any nation which determine the character of its society...

...The one great mark of England was that England was an aristocratic state...

...On the political side the change is as profound...

...At any rate the fact is there without a doubt...

...Superficial critics remark the disappearance of its externals...

...The second, commonly a product of the first, is its political genius: not its constitution, still less the mechanism of its political action, but the spirit in which its citizens regard themselves and the state...

...There is no growth worth speaking about of Catholic or of any other positive non-Protestant spirit in religion...

...Our phase of change, at the moment, is not like the reversal of a tide: it is like slack water at the end of a flood...

...The one great note of modern England is the extreme rapidity of its spiritual change, contrasted with the equally striking immobility of its external framework, and of the titles by which that framework is described...

...Now an aristocratic state is a peculiar phenomenon in history, a very rare one, and unmistakable in its effects...

...I relied a good deal upon his advice, and I noticed the respect in which he was generally held...

...and the proof of it is found in the astonishing judgments passed in every country upon the others, in fiction and in journalism, and in history...

...Well, the aristocratic quality of the English state, though it has not evaporated so thoroughly as has the old religious savor, is at any rate largely volatilized...

...Of course what I have to say is only one man's judgment, and may very well be wrong...

...It was unmistakable...

...It was the only aristocratic state of Europe since the extinction of Venice at the end of the middle-ages...

...Without distinguishing what was good and what was bad therein, one can affirm securely that this spirit was of great strength and highly individual...

...The gentry, on their side, are no longer a homogeneous and cohesive body, and are no longer absorbing and digesting into their own organism the new material on which it should properly feed...

...No abstract word translates it at all...

...It does not mean that that class is set apart...

...To call it Puritan or sentimental or rigorous or self-respecting or highly disciplined or full of illusion, gives no hint of its May 8, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 13 quality...

...Meanwhile, there is one very interesting point to be added to the negative quality of the change, which is this: no corresponding positive is, so far, apparent...

...Thus, detailed study will render a man weak in general judgment: a great wealth, so far from curing avarice, increases it—and so on...

...It had been an aristocratic state since the middle of the seventeenth century when the wealthier classes destroyed the monarchy...

...The best metaphor I can apply to this great but occult event is one drawn from a private experience of my own which profoundly affected me when it occurred and which will ever remain sharply impressed cipon my memory...

...It does not mean of course a state in which there is an aristocracy...

...His features and even his expression were unchanged...

...It means a state where the idea of human equality is obnoxious to the national temper, and one in which the idea of the community acting as a whole through agents of its own, is despised as unreal...

...but these do not give the scale of the change at all, still less its quality...

...This is perhaps what the wise would have expected...

...English architecture has changed less than French or German, the names of English institutions have not changed at all, the procedure of law, political assembly, administration, public service, education, uses the same terms and seems to be doing the same thing as it used and did at the end of the last century...

...Now in both these characters, the change in England is profound...

...as well as in the appalling mistakes of foreign policy...

...I know that most natives (with whom the stages of the change have been imperceptible) would, even if they agreed with me, say that I am exaggerating...

...his gait was the same...

...I am doing no more than bearing testimony...

...For the wise discover that what should appear for superficial reasons is nearly always (for profound reasons) absent...

...It means a state in which the mass of the people expect to be governed, and like to be governed, by a special class...

...There has been a complete change in the strategical situation and military security of Britain...

...When I was a young man I had an acquaintance, almost a friend of my own age, serious, reticent, sober, of good judgment and eminently sane...

...I would like in this article to speak of the situation of England as it now appears to me, a theme constantly present in my mind, and urging me to expression whenever I come back from these European rambles...

...We have passed within my own lifetime, and especially during the last twenty years, through a revolution the like of which no other European society has known...

...But it is a moral revolution, affecting the outward surface comparatively little...

...On that I would here pass no judgment...

...But the spirit in which they are done is transformed...

...If it meant that, then nearly all states would be aristocratic and similar...

...Thus, aristocracy is the exact opposite and enemy of monarchy...

...I give it for what it is worth...

...I do not think that anyone not English, not even anyone sympathetic with England and of long acquaintance with England, but of alien early training, would agree...

...Far from it, such a class can only exist as a permanency if its recruitment is open and its renewal continuous...

...The first, and of course by far the most important, is its religion—meaning by that word, not the doctrines explicitly professed (though these are the framework) but the whole bundle of sanctities, ethical habits and spiritual attitude...

...There has been great change in the distribution of population and of wealth, and instruction— and so on...

...Or rather, its opposite is present...

...a branch and not a root...

...Compared with this great change in the intimate structure of the country, religious and political, it does not seem to me that lesser and more obvious changes count...

...12 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 THE PRESENT SITUATION OF ENGLAND By HILAIRE BELLOC IN MY recent travels which, since the war, have included North Africa and nearly all the European countries outside Russia (and a brief visit to the United States as well) what has struck me most has been the apparently increasing lack of comprehension between modern peoples...