A Miscellany of Men | Page 5

sounds full and
physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing

itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of
beech.
Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have
been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from
its enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations
tend to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of this
we hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from
the spirit of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of
the same stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded
that just as church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are not
knowledge, and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to find
people in the big cities who can read and write quickly enough to be
clerks, but who are actually ignorant of the daily movements of the sun
and moon.
The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one
watches it for the first time in a country district. Self-government arose
among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the
ancients) out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood.
The notion of self-government was not (as many modern friends and
foes of it seem to think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be
consulted as one consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked
a lot of fancy questions, to see how he answers them. He and his
fellows are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own
lives. They shall decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the
wheel, of the spade or the spear. The men of the valley shall settle
whether the valley shall be devastated for coal or covered with corn and
vines; the men of the town shall decide whether it shall be hoary with
thatches or splendid with spires. Of their own nature and instinct they
shall gather under a patriarchal chief or debate in a political
market-place. And in case the word "man" be misunderstood, I may
remark that in this moral atmosphere, this original soul of
self-government, the women always have quite as much influence as
the men. But in modern England neither the men nor the women have
any influence at all. In this primary matter, the moulding of the
landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people are utterly

impotent. They stand and stare at imperial and economic processes
going on, as they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.
Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking place
which really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether for
good or evil. The first is that the urban civilisation (or whatever it is) is
advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and the villas
advance in red battalions. The other is that the vast estates into which
England has long been divided are passing out of the hands of the
English gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts and often
actually foreigners.
Now, these are just the sort of things with which self-government was
really supposed to grapple. People were supposed to be able to indicate
whether they wished to live in town or country, to be represented by a
gentleman or a cad. I do not presume to prejudge their decision;
perhaps they would prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say
that the filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his
roof over his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some
say in, if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the
strange trend of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to
pass over and treat as private trivialities. In theory the building of a
villa is as incidental as the buying of a hat. In reality it is as if all
Lancashire were laid waste for deer forests; or as if all Belgium were
flooded by the sea. In theory the sale of a squire's land to a
moneylender is a minor and exceptional necessity. In reality it is a
thing like a German invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion.
Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes
round about every five years a thing called a General Election. It is
believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system of
self-government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questions
about everything except what he understands. The examination paper
of the Election generally consists of some such