III. “Mater Americae”

“England, England, how I prayed for England!” — St. Vincent de Paul.

ENGLISH parliamentary government was initiated in 1215 by the Magna Charta. Seven years later the Hungarian nobility extorted from their king a similar document. Neither charter has anything to do with “democracy.”¹⁹⁸ Neither country is a democracy in the classical sense today. In both cases we observe that privileges are granted to the First and the Second Estate and in both states trends toward semirepublican forms were apparent.*

The power of the English nobility was weakened through the War of the Roses and the subsequent centralism and absolutism of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Yet a new aristocracy arose fortified by the plunder and loot of convents and monasteries. They supplanted the old families, and the seventeenth century offers us the spectacle of a gradual retreat and decrease of monarchical power before the onslaught of a plutocratic aristocracy, determined to transform England into a republic in every respect but in name.

The Whigs were the representatives of this new independently minded, vigorous aristocracy and upper class, while the Tories standing in loyalty beside the throne were the exponents of the aulic aristocracy.¹⁹⁹ In England alone do we encounter the phenomenon that the new moneyed class treads in the footsteps of the old, dynastic, rural, and independent aristocracy. One can therefore hardly be surprised to see the English monarchy succumbing to the assault of the Protestant moneybag in combination with the medieval, independent aristocratic spirit. It was indeed a rare and weird combination of forces which led to the retrenchment of royal power in the British Isles.*

In the centuries between the Great Charter and World War II the English aristocracy was forced to give up many important positions. Thirty years ago there was, even in connection with the reform of the House of Lords, an antiaristocratic agitation strongly expressed in the election posters, but the sentiments which were aroused in this campaign went only skin deep. Today it is practically impossible for a peer to become Prime Minister, and thus we might speak about disabilities going together with titles. England is an amazing and paradoxical country; there are, in spite of the great emphasis upon “democracy,” all indications of the existence of an aristocratic and oligarchic rule, yet this generally recognized fact caused little if any human resentment among the lower classes. There are actually a few dissatisfied, ambitious people among the middle classes who have a personal grudge against the old school tie and the reverses in the present war have made their protests appear louder than they are. It may be argued that these sentiments expressed are rather antiplutocratic than antiaristocratic. Yet the tacit and genuine, human acceptance of aristocratic or at least upper class leadership gives Britain the right to call itself a “democracy” without being one in reality. Hierarchic feelings always were very strong in England, but the extreme elasticity of the class system has always mitigated the apprehensions if aroused. Nowhere are classes more receptive to new elements, nowhere is it easier to rise socially, yet nowhere are the differences between the classes so marked as in England (with the exception of India and certain sections of the United States). Prewar Alpine Austria or Germany, Spain or even Poland were socially more democratic. Neither has any country in the world an Upper House made up solely of the lords and the bishops of the state Church. The Upper House of Hungary, a country notoriously “reactionary,” has a large nonaristocratic majority and representatives of the Jewish faith (not to mention the Lutherans and Calvinists).**

It is worth while pondering over the fact that England, the country with the maximum of liberty in Europe, has the greatest social inequalities, while Germany and Soviet Russia, the fortresses of egalitarianism, have the least liberty.

There was in England not only a tacit acceptance of the class system but also a real admiration of the upper ten — an admiration which permeated all other classes. Nowhere else in the world would socialist papers print descriptions of the dresses worn at the Royal Garden Party, and people will always prick up their ears if they hear a “strange” accent unavoidably betraying social background. Each class admires the “next higher” class and the members of the lowest classes have still the consolation that they might rise by virtue of their abilities to a higher station in life. England is a country of amazing careers; she abounds in self-made men and yet she is not and never will be ochlocratic unless her days of decline set in. The man who has risen from the gutter to the exalted position of a peer will surprisingly seldom be snubbed by his colleagues in the House of Lords, but he may not get the full recognition by those in the lower stations of life. The thought of the fabulous rise of his father or grandfather, on the other side, will cause very little distress to the present bearer of the title.*

A title does not mean everything in England. But the “blue blood” will always remain a factor in the British nobility. The Continental as well as the American frequently forget that a simple name does not always indicate, in England, a simple origin. A Herr Hitler could not possibly be a direct legitimate male descendant of a duke or prince, but Mr. Churchill counts the dukes of Marlborough as his direct ancestors.

About the public school — not to be confused with the American public school — one must show a little more healthy skepticism. In its spirit it is ordinarily herdist and bourgeois and not in vain are the Communists such fervent admirers of a collective boarding school education which separates child and adolescent from the family. Eton is one of the few schools with a personal touch where the bourgeois hatred against the boy, who dares to be different, is reasonably absent.

The public school is, in spite of its bourgeois undertone, nevertheless a class institution. Out of 615 members of the House of “Commons” over 400 are former public school boys. Of these 104 come from Eton alone. In the United States it would be an unheard of thing to see the Congress packed by one sixth of — let us say — Groton boys. Yet the papers in England commented very favorably upon the fact that Eton contributed so heavily to the burden of popular representation and not even the Daily Herald attacked Baldwin when he declared, immediately after his appointment to Downing Street, that he was going to pack his cabinet almost exclusively with Old Harrovians. He did not keep his promise though. The choice of the average voter is, as one can see, frequently only between an Old Etonian, an Old Harrovian, or an Old Wickhamist — these candidates being provided by committees who pick out those most likely to attract the masses.* Even the Labor Party has an ever increasing amount of ex-public school boys among their local and national leaders.

One must yet add in all fairness that this elite — of birth rather than of intellect — is well aware of the current public opinion. They are actually clercs in the sense formulated by Julien Benda. Though they cannot extricate themselves completely from the prejudices and vested interests of their class, history can scarcely refrain from giving the verdict that they have honestly striven to serve the public good and the general will. But sometimes, as, for instance, in the case of Hoare-Laval** plan, one would rather have seen them following their own judgment than the general will.

We come here to the painful chapter of British foreign policy. It was always a weak spot of England. Britain’s policy toward continental affairs suffered from two shortcomings: its general tendency as well as its inconsistency. The latter is the result of the Parliamentary changes which also affected the foreign policy to such an extent that Britain was called “perfidious Albion.” The defects in the general tendency are largely due to psychological reasons; shortsightedness, wrong speculations, lack of intuition and phantasy, a total misunderstanding of the continental psyche are just some of the characteristics. Neither foe nor friend was ever treated in the proper way. Neither France, nor the Germanies, nor Russia, nor Spain was ever properly evaluated. And the reason for these blunders and hesitations is the lack of the thing the Germans call Einfühlungsvermögen, the ability to slip into the skin of somebody else and to look at the world with his eyes. The result was that England was great in feeding vipers in her bosom, while alienating her best potential friends.

The basic reason for this psychological shortcoming has to be found in England’s insularity and isolation, which is not predominantly of a geographical nature. The Scandinavian peninsula is to all practical purposes also an island; the fact that Scandinavia is connected with the European continent through the desolate boulders and glaciers of Lapland in the far north does not alter the necessity of approaching Sweden and Norway over a lesser or larger stretch of water. Neither was England insular during the Middle Ages when the channel proved to be no barrier for English thought entering the Continent or continental ideas conquering England. In spite of miserable communications European unity was never as strong as during the centuries preceding the discovery of America.

It was the fact that England of all European countries alone had a religion for itself — the Church of England. Europe resounded, after the reformers appeared, with the unending din of theological quarrels between Rome, Byzantium, Geneva, and Wittenberg. England which broke away from the Church, which had shaped the cultural and political face of the Continent, was now even spared the military and theological struggle between the Church and the heresies. England turned its face toward the seas and the very beating of England’s heart, hitherto synchronized with that of the great Continent, adopted another rhythm. England, like no other European country, had its own Shintō, its own creed, and national messianism as well as total isolation were inevitable consequences of the willful cutting of the spiritual ties.

This “splendid,” or rather not so splendid isolation engendered a destructive attitude in foreign relations which cost England very dearly.* There always were certain aristocrats (frequently Catholics) who had the advantage of social ties or blood relationship on the Continent, and who brought some accurate information and sound ideas to small, but usually not uninfluential circles. Yet public opinion in the past decades was largely fed by two very negative channels: semi-intellectualized Leftists, who were frantic in their admiration for Viennese and Berlin socialism, Russian Communism, Spanish “democracy,” and French laïcisme — and a few moronic press lords of the worst reactionary type who were so unintelligent that they fell for National Socialism. Yet the latter are a recent phenomenon and the others have a certain tradition behind them. The Whigs were certainly not herdists²⁰⁰ but the liberal simpletons of the nineteenth century who displayed a delirious joy about the German and Italian risorgimento had little in common with their more far-seeing forerunners. These poor thinkers did not welcome the fall of Rome in 1870 less than the defeat of the Austrians at the hands of the prim, Protestant and progressive Prussians in 1866. How they had sabotaged the work of the Holy Alliance!** How they had worked with never relaxing fervor to undermine monarchical power on the Continent whenever the occasion arose!²⁰¹ These sins lose nothing of their magnitude on account of the fact that they were perpetrated by a fundamentally conservative freedom loving, aristocratic, and antiherdist nation. Just the contrary.

Britain’s whole record during the twentieth century in foreign affairs has been deplorable. There we have the malevolent destruction of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy which led to the powerful expansion of the Third Reich, the substitution of the patriarchal regime of the Habsburgs by brutal, sordid little “democracies” who changed quickly into dictatorships, the idiotic neutrality toward the Communists in Spain, the dismemberment of Bulgaria which drove her finally into the arms of the Axis, the favoritism manifested toward Japan at the beginning of the century, the wrong handling of Russians and Scandinavians, the half-witted and unfortunately successful interventions against the Habsburgs,²⁰² Manchuria, the Italian sanctions, the dealings with Hitler; there is a whole pagoda built up of endless mistakes and faux pas in the past forty years.²⁰³ In foreign affairs England has just the opposite of the Midas touch; whatever she tries to handle almost immediately turns into dross.*

If we consider with St. Thomas Aquinas aristocracy to be, together with monarchy and republic, one of the morally justified forms of government, we still have in the present form of government in Great Britain a good institution and maybe even one of the best in a rather evil world.²⁰⁴ The aristocratic sentiment, surviving in spite of the surge of a formless and enormous middle class, poor in traditions, is a powerful obstacle against uniformism and identitarianism. This is of special importance at a time when Great Britain is forced by circumstances to abandon many of her great traditional values and when she also has to sacrifice so many personalistic traits to the inexorable moloch of efficiency. The anti-identitarian aristocratic tradition, even when it is represented by Colonel Blimp, will be of the utmost value in the present struggle — and after all it is now up to the much maligned Colonel Blimp and the despised uneducated Cockney, and not to the “brilliant young men” of Bloomsbury, to save Britain as well as Europe.

England’s hope and England’s strength is thus diversity. This diversity is even stronger in Scotland and Ireland,** which are more mountainous, more clannish, more divided in violently antagonistic spheres of interest. Scotland, besides the Eastern Alp area, is the only region in Europe where the national dress is still worn by the upper classes who in other countries have a disdain for “peasant costumes.”

There are certainly grave social injustices to be found in the United Kingdom. In certain regions conditions can be found which cry to heaven for vengeance and have to be remedied.* But all precautions should be taken lest this process of rendering social justice become an excuse for a totalitarian and identitarian transformation of British social and political life. It is decidedly not Low’s asinine Colonel Blimp who is a real threat to Britain but Strube’s petty bourgeois “Little George” (a ratlike edition of Mr. Milquetoast) who would not be too discriminating in choosing another color for his shirt, like his German counterpart Herr Munkepunke with the fat neck and the bellowing voice, of the Fliegende Blätter. Neither the mining towns, nor the palaces or the farm yards menace the Occident, but Suburbia. And Suburbia stands for equality which destroys true society. Inequality is exactly Britain’s strength and guarantee that “Britons never will be slaves.”

The end of all hierarchy is the end of Britain. If Britain would follow the lead of Mr. H. G. Wells, the great prophet of Suburbia, visualizing the ultimate victory of ants or termites over humanity, the very end of Britain would be a foregone conclusion. But Britain is not a nation of shopkeepers as it is generally assumed; the shopkeeper complex is rather the dismayed discovery of aristocrats who suddenly became aware with horror of the commercialization of their country. The surprising amount of commercial spirit in the (older) English aristocracy is also due to the determination to survive under whatever circumstances.

Such an attitude has its dangers if one keeps in mind that a class might lose its own soul. The inclusion of persons in the rank of nobility on account of their wealth,** through an (indirect) buying of arms and titles, is another source of the plutocratization of the aristocracy and nobility.

Apart from Britain’s hierarchic structure there are even greater positive values which will always keep her afloat. A specially hopeful sign is the intellectual strength of her Christianity which is matched by a beautiful life of faith. Christian concepts have shaped the characters and minds of persons so different as the late Mr. George Lansbury and Lord Halifax. Britain’s participation in the present crusade for Europe and the Christian traditions of the Occident, as well as her courageous stand in adversities are a further indication that England has not “come to an end”²⁰⁵ as her enemies and apprehensive admirers alike had so often prophesied. England has left the path of splendid isolation (whether against or according to her wish is impossible to tell), an isolation which harbored the danger of self-complacency, decay, and sterility.

Britain’s isolation, keeping her aloof from the Continent,²⁰⁶ which was characterized by such phrases as “Dark men begin at Calais,” has been terminated. Yet her reunion with the old, dark, sinister, motherly Continent will not be a joyous one. It will be bought, as every other historical achievement, by streams of blood and tears. There was something great in that gesture when England came to the defense of Poland; it was the denial of an immensely egoistic past, marred by the memories of the Opium War, and South Africa; it was the acceptance of suffering involving the risk of her very existence in order to save great final values. And it is exactly by this ordeal that England is going to expiate the sins of her past.

These include — last not least — those committed toward Ireland. It was in the case of the Evergreen Island that England’s inability to understand a “foreign” psychology seemed most fatal. Ireland shared furthermore, with the Continent, the Catholic mentality, which the Protestant is practically never able to grasp, and while the Continent remained England’s China, Ireland became England’s Korea. Nothing would have been easier than to appease Ireland and to preserve it — not perhaps within the United Kingdom — but as an integral part of the British Commonwealth of Nations.²⁰⁷

There is always the danger that Britain’s lack of intuitive understanding²⁰⁸ in continental matters will prevail after her victory and that the commitments she already made will bind her to a new disorder. But if England is in this war not with a feeling of racial superiority, like her opponents, or for the self-appointed glory of an international policeman, but guided by a sentiment of contrition, determined to serve the Occident and Christianity humbly and dutifully, then this war will be won by her morally and spiritually, unlike the last one which was a total loss.²⁰⁹ Then all nations will look up to her and the motto on the arms of the heir to the throne will shine in new glory.

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* The Magna Charta may be a “democratic document” if we consider the change from monarchy to aristocratic oligarchy a step toward democracy. Such a view is nevertheless entirely unjustified. Democracy in a social sense is usually far stronger in absolute monarchies (Russia, for instance) than in aristocratic Republics (Genoa, Venice, etc.). The only “democratic” features of Magna Charta are the restrictions imposed upon the Jews.

* The greater affinity of the Tories toward Catholicism is due to their patriarchal tradition of loyalty and their stronger sense of hierarchy. Yet this is far from implying that the Whigs were by their very nature more akin to the ideas of the Reformation. Magna Charta and its libertinarian spirit antecedes that development by many centuries.

** We have no information whether the two Jewish Rabbis in the Hungarian Upper House continued their membership under the present German controlled regime.

* See the novel Christmas Holiday, by Somerset Maughan which describes a very typical case of the social rise of an English family from suburban gardeners to titled aristocrats.

* Thus the member of parliament is not the personification of his constituency and his voters, like the ochlocratic “leader,” but a man who rather embodies a projection of aristocratic values.

** The defeat of the Hoare-Laval plan through general elections necessitated the employment of sanctions against Italy and resulted in the total annexation of Abyssinia by Italy. The sanctions drove Italy into the arms of Germany. Mr. Eden is thus the Father of the Axis. The establishment of the Axis was the death warrant for Austria. The fall of Austria brought the total encirclement of the Czechoslovak republic. This encirclement forced the issue at Munich. Munich deprived the purely Czech parts of the republic of natural defenses which thus led to the events of March, 1939, and to the establishment of the protectorate over Slovakia. The occupation of Slovakia made Poland defenseless, depriving her of the last section of border which might have been left without protection.

The reader is advised to check these facts on a map. The borders of 1919 were indeed drawn in such a fashion that the loss of only one single country involved the breaking down of the whole artificial building.

Sir Charles Petrie in his twenty Years’ Armistice and After (London, 1940), expresses a similar idea and emphasizes the fact that Sir Austen Chamberlain saw clearly the danger (p. 165). Yet he traces the disastrous development back to the building of the Westwall, not to the sanctions. Both made western intervention impossible. Yet the Westwall was far from being ready in March, 1938. The real blow was struck by Eden and the peace balloteers.

* There is also such a thing as North American insularism.

** Which, of course, infected by the terroristic ideas of the French Revolution, was too blindly confiding in mere power; the Holy Alliance was doomed by the lack of a dynamic appeal and the emphasis on “don’ts” rather than on constructive ideas.

* A similar view, though slightly less outspoken can be found in Douglas Jerrold’s excellent small book Britain and Europe 1900–1940, London, 1941. Proof of Britain’s miserable statesmanship (and not of an alleged basic immorality) is the fact that most decent causes in Europe have been cleverly linked up by the National Socialists directly or indirectly with their revolutionary war. The freedom of Croatia, the freedom of Slovakia, the Hungarian revision, the Bulgarian revision, the return of Bessarabia (to Rumania), the Finnish revision and territorial claims, the “liberation” of the Baltic states, the destruction of communism, the Spanish counterrevolution. Yet it is equally characteristic of the National Socialists, though adopting just causes, that they have always made them serve their own ends and this insincerity has affected all individual arrangements; thus the “liberation” of the Baltic states ended in their subjugation, the revision of Hungarian claims resulted in untenable and impossible borders, the whole Danubian solution as inaugurated by Berlin bears clearly the stamp of the Divide et Impera. The borders of Slovenia or the maritime share of Croatia have been allotted in a most cynical mood, the Hungarian-Slovakian relationship is perfectly hopeless. We do not even mention the disadvantages of the “New Order” for Poland because the will for destruction was here evident from the beginning.

** Scotland has the advantage of a far better educational system than England. Every good educational system is highly “democratic” in its social and financial aspects but brutally aristocratic in its scholastic standards.

Ireland suffers particularly from the fact that its Second Estate has to supplement a non-Catholic First Estate. We have there a similar situation as in feudal-clerical-democratic French Canada.

* See MacArthur and Long’s No Mean City, a terrifying, dramatized description of the slums in Glasgow (London, 1936).

** In most parts of Europe titles were only given for achievements in the administration, the army and navy, in arts, sciences, and education. The richest German with many civil merits was merely given a knighthood (Krupp), Maurice Maeterlinck on the other hand was made a count.