THE WELTER


Soused still to the ears in the lees of war, I win a rueful reminder
from a stray volume of _Hours in a Library_. Was the world regenerated
between 1848 and 1855? Were English labourers all properly fed, housed
and taught? Had the sanctity of domestic life acquired a new charm in
the interval, and was the old quarrel between rich and poor definitely
settled? Charles Kingsley (of whom the moralist was writing) seems
really to have believed it, and attributed the exulting affirmative
to--the Crimean War! The Crimean War, after our five years of colossal
nightmare, looks to us like a bicker of gnats in a beam; yet perhaps
any war will do for a text, since any war will produce some moral
upheaval in the generations concerned. Let us suppose, then, that the
British were seriously turned to domestic politics in 1855; let us
admit that they are so turned to-day, and ask ourselves fairly whether
we are now in a better way of reasonable living than history shows
those poor devils to have been.

If we are, it will not be the fault of the old agencies, in which
Kingsley always believed. Church and State are adrift; organised
Christianity has abdicated; the aristocracy no longer governs
even itself; Parliament has died of a surfeit of its own rules.
If fundamental reform is to come, it will be forced upon us by the
working class, and (at the pinch) opposed tooth and nail by the
privileged. But is it to come? Is the working class deploying for
action? In all the miscellaneous scrapping which we watch to-day is
there one strong man with a sense of direction? It doesn't look like
it.