The Most Glorious Revolution IF I had not been to England I should have continued in a wholly wrong view of the English social and economic revolution of our times. It has been represented to the outside world, so far as it has been explained at all, in a very partisan light, as the achievement of the Labour Party. We in India with our bias in favour of Labour have given it an even more flamingly partisan colour, and come to regard it as the victory of the good Englishmen led by Attlee over the wicked ones led by Churchill. In brief, to most of us the English Welfare State is the product, if not the mere by- product, of a class conflict, in which we have every right to be the tertius gaudens. This is not as absurd a mistake as many Englishmen might sup- pose. We have no means of knowing how much of the class animus of the Labour spokesmen is only a political convention or at the worst the continuation of an emotional disposition acquired in the past but of no practical importance now. Even today some genuine Labourites have within themselves a wholly superfluous string which vibrates to the underdog leitmotif, and some spurious ones, who are mostly the maladjusted scions of the old ruling class, cannot forget their sense of grievance against their parents even though they have no real grievances left. These talking fossils are taken very seriously by us, because our slogan for a world policy is, "Malcontents of the world, unite!"
It was only after visiting England that I realized what a mistake I was committing. Even the little I saw convinced me that the English revolution of our times was in the first instance a national revolution, and not the class revolution that I had imagined it to be. I found no trace of resentment against it, I mean real anger as distinct from the grumbling in all circumstances which is normal in Englishmen. There was resignation even to the heavy taxation. It was a case either of demoralization of the once-privileged classes or of co-operation on their part even at their own expense. I would not say that the English upper classes are absolutely free from the feeling that they are being hit hard and even treated unjustly, but it is equally certain that as a whole they would not like to see undone anything that has been brought about by way of equalization of incomes and national welfare.
I am sure I am not wrong in thinking that the Welfare State is a state of the English conscience rather than of the English econ- omy. Perhaps if the English people had considered their economy dispassionately there would have been no Welfare State at all. I should have been surprised by this economic imprudence if I did not remember that the English upper classes always had a very active social conscience. If at times in the past they could not make out why those who wanted dinner did not simply ring for it, they also got into a terrific state of excitement and consciousness of sin when they found out that ringing was not enough. I do not under- stand why it should be forgotten that social reform in England began to come from the top long before it was demanded from below.
In saying this I have no wish to deny to the Labour Party the credit that is due to it. But in 1905 it was as nearly a national party as it is possible for any party to be. The English party system originated in factions, but it is the glory of English political life to have broken this wild horse to a beneficent purpose, to have utilized it in such a way that something which was regarded by moralists as an eternal and universal evil has become a mechanism of change and growth. Thus in matters of national policy the English people are united to a degree of which the outside world has a very imperfect idea. We in the East still think of the English party system in terms of the old quarrels between the Oligarchs and Democrats, Guelphs and Ghibellines, or of the new quarrels between the Communists and Socialists, Leftists and Rightists, without considering that for the English people such party differ- ences would be a relapse into barbarism. This makes me say as well that the return of the Conservatives in would not have made any practical difference. Only, given the mechanism of political action in England, that was psychologically impossible. The next impression that I formed was that the English revolution was not a proletarian revolution at all. Though it has made very great progress towards creating a classless, or more accurately a one-class, society, it is meaningless and even absurd to call it Communistic or even Socialistic. It is not even a trade unionists' revolution, powerfully as the Trade Union movement has contributed to it. It is really a revolution which is almost a contradiction in terms-a bourgeois revolution. Or should I say that all revolutions, including the French and the Russian- the two which have come to be regarded as supremely typical-have been bourgeois revolutions and that the phrase 'proletarian revolution' is itself a contradiction in terms? Anyhow that is what has happened in England, and was bound to happen. The English people have always been so class-conscious that their egalitarianism could only be an ideal of levelling up, attended by some levelling down only because there was not enough going to build everybody country houses or confer peerages on all. I think, if they had the means, they would have done that. Since they have not, the unavoidable compromise is to make everybody middle-class. In England a new classless society is coming into existence in which most people will be able to feel class-proud. The English revolution appeared to have a third feature of which even Englishmen seemed to be unaware. It was an indus- trial revolution in a new sense, because it was transforming not only economic life and organization, but also human personality and character by giving both an industrialized cast. I had no suspicion of this before I went to England, and indeed could not have, living in India. In my country the distinction between the peasant and the townsman- the agricultural and the industrial man-is as fundamental even today as the distinction between the hunter and the peasant was in the early age of agriculture. Besides, I had read so much about the English peasant that I had no inkling of the fact that he had disappeared from the English scene. I-expected to meet him in the English countryside as I meet the Indian peasant in the Indian countryside. But I failed to meet Farmer Oak in Wessex. I saw many English villages which answered every previous conception I had about them, but the English peasant no longer lived in them. The village had survived architecturally, but not, so far as I could judge, socially. This cannot seem more strange to Englishmen than it did to me.
I saw agriculture and animal husbandry everywhere. Even though I had come from a country which was overwhelmingly agricultural I was astonished by the standard of English agriculture and animal husbandry. I had never seen anything like it. Ours in comparison was so very primitive and poor. But the peasant, the shepherd and the herdsman were absent. I saw hardly half a dozen people at work on the land, and I came across only three horse- drawn ploughs. Agricultural and pastoral activity appeared to be impersonal.
Then I inferred what I did not actually see. I concluded that the men and women who were engaged in tilling the land and rearing livestock in England in our age were no longer the peasant and cattle-raiser of tradition and history but had been transformed into a sort of industrial worker. This process was making a substantial contribution to the emergence of the one-class bourgeois society about which I have already written.
To me it seems very strange that the English people, who are so acutely conscious of the industrialization of their landscape, and very alarmed and aggrieved about it, should be so silent about, if not unaware of, the industrialization of personality and character. Yet I thought that the changes in the English scene were minor compared with the changes in the human beings. The encroach- ment of industrialism on the landscape is a sore point with all Englishmen. Perhaps I may set down my impressions about it. If I were asked how much disfigurement I noticed I would say that to my way of thinking it was not much, and even of this I should not have become aware unless I had previously read à good deal about it. It may give some comfort to Englishmen to learn that in my own lifetime I have seen greater and uglier encroachments on nature in India, which has still to industrialize herself, than all that has come about in England in two hundred years. Even waste land has been robbed of its gaunt and ascetic dignity.
Besides, I perceived a fundamental difference between the industrial landscape that was now being created in a deliberate and planned manner and that which had been brought into existence by the first uncontrolled and indisciplined onrush of the Industrial Revolution. This distinction is comparable to that which exists between the industrial worker of today and the exploited factory hands of a hundred years ago. Shortly after my arrival I saw an old and a modern factory of a well-known firm of manufacturers which made me conscious of this. Later on I observed a good deal more of this contrast.
I think the spirit of planned urbanism, about which I have" already said something, is very active and it is replacing the old thoughtlessness. What I saw of contemporary industrial building gave me the impression that the industrial landscape was being lightened up, made quict, and given restfulness. I feel sure that within a foreseeable time industrial England will no longer look like what it was even twenty years ago, and this will give a tangible, material expression to the welfare of the people, for one of the worst things about industrialism so far has been that through sheer ugliness in building it created an appearance of poverty even where there was no poverty.(If industrial England is redesigned and rebuilt as it promises to be, the appearance of the country will create an impression as misleading in its way as the old industrialism did in another way-(it will make people believe that there is more wealth and prosperity in England than actually exists)
But I must also say that it is too early in the day to forecast the exact appearance of the industrial landscape of the future. In England the Industrial Revolution has still a long way to go, and whatever the manner of the industrial expansion it will make further inroads on the traditional English landscape. In point of fact I was always asking myself- In what relationship will the industrial landscape stand to the traditional scene? Will the new one, in which the airfields will be as great landmarks as cathedrals were in the old, destroy its predecessor? I could not answer the question definitely, though I did hope that everything would come right. What, however, I could see at once was the incon- sistency between lamenting the industrialism of the landscape and working furiously for the industrialization of society and human personality. Why do they want a plebs urbana to live in an Arcadia? I shall now put down my final impression of the English social and economic revolution: It is no revolution at all. A great red- wood tree in California has as much or as little right to call itself the child of a revolution as the social state of the English people today! No true revolution is ever accomplished without doctrin- aire revolutionaries, and they have never had a place in English reform. That is enough to reveal the true character of the English revolution, whose great glory lies in being anti-revolutionary. It is the climax of their history, and it began, not even in the times of the Tudors, but farther back with the Black Death. In any case the modern English language and the English revolution are con- temporaries.
Oh, to Live in Lubberland!
THE MATERIAL well-being of the people of England put me in a very happy frame of mind, and made me take a roscate view of their contemporary existence and future. If a vague memory of their economic problems on the national plane still lingered in my mind I gave no thought to them nor did I try to reconcile my firsthand sense impressions with what I had read and heard. When I had to express an opinion on their present economic state I said that I was no economist, and quite possibly my enthusiasm was groundless. But I also said that even if one society had succeeded in eliminating human misery in its most painful form, that is, want of food and clothing for the great majority of its members, that itself was a magnificent achievement. In England I could easily see that poverty in our sense of the word did not exist. It was not simply that I did not come upon the kind of poverty which has made the masses of India dead to the feeling of poverty, there was not even that poverty which has been a life-long companion to a man like me. When I said something to this effect to a friend in England he replied in the characteristic English way that certainly if a man was not very careless or lazy there was no reason for anyone in England to be half-fed or half-clad. There was no suggestion in his tone that he was speaking about a condition in human society which was unprecedented. That too was remarkable, So I thought that, whatever the future might hold in store for the English people, it was something to have this state of well-being even as an interlude of fifty or twenty-five years. All that I had read about the economic troubles of the English people became for the time being wholly unreal to me.
But the exhilaration of the first impression could not last indefinitely. When after my return to India it had worn off and I gave more thought to what I had seen, I realized that I was looking at the situation of the English people from one particular angle, that of the past in England and the present in India. I was not considering the feelings and experiences of those who were living in the Welfare State as it was. Then I saw the possibility that the Welfare State Triumphant might be totally different from the Welfare State Militant.
Even when seen in the light of the past it could be said that if the Welfare State meant great gain, some losses were also bound to come in its train. England was no more to have a Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Wilberforce or Shaftesbury; Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, or for that matter even the Webbs would no longer write; there would be no Chartism, Suffragette agitation, or even genuine Trade Unionism, as distinct from the championship of a vested interest, which it has become today. Still, I would say that all this would be well lost if the English people could create for their new existence ideals, aspirations, and activities as fine in their way as were the old ones in theirs. Moralists have always said that prosperity corrupts. I do not know, but I definitely know that it bores. This leads me to consider the circumstances in which, to my thinking, men can be happy in the sort of life the English people have recently created for themselves.
The very first condition of ensuring happiness in the Welfare State seems to be that it should not be stagnant, that there should always be something new to be done in it-I mean doing in the real sense, creative activity of all kinds. If I am to be frank, I would say that though the Welfare State is largely the product of com- passion for ordinary folk, for the common man as the democratic cliché has it, it will be the exceptional men, those who are ready to do something in the sense I have in mind, who will ultimately justify its existence. For individuals, as for nations, doing well in life and doing something in life are contradictory aims. The real test for the Welfare State will be whether it has been able to merge the two ends, so far as they can be merged.
But it seems to me that this very important condition for the Welfare State's success is difficult of fulfilment in contemporary England. This difficulty is not due to the absence of men with a will to do something. The real trouble is that there is very little to do, and it is hard to arrive at a clear perception of what to do. On this point, ever since the end of the war, I have had a feeling that the English people are in the closing stages of one cycle of their existence and have not as yet entered on another. In fact, I said this in so many words as far back as December in an article published in The New English Review. This is what I wrote:
'Although Labour itself is working under the joyous belief that its ideas are the ideas of tomorrow, an outside observer gets the impression of seeing the past reversed in a mirror. The Labour administration is going to close an era, not open a new one.
'In due course the Leftist movement will have burnt out the legacy of Fascism and in Britain levelled up in addition the swamps left undrained in the interwar period. Then a great void is bound to be felt. Perhaps it is being felt even now, as the aftermath of the war is throwing up one harassing problem after another, and it is being discovered that there is no specifi- cally Leftist answer to them.'
It was not the English people alone who were in this predica- ment, it was the same with almost all mankind. As I said in the same article:
'Even if the future were not generally unpredictable and relentlessly ironical of those who violate its mystery, we live at a juncture of history when it is inscrutably baffling. The very foreground is occupied by the uncertainties generated by a devastating war, which call more for an alert asepsis than quack remedies. But, puzzling as the aftermath of the war is, it is nothing compared to the fundamental uncertainty of the general human situation today. Mankind is at the initial stage of a revolution in its way of living to which probably even the introduction of agriculture furnishes no parallel....
'Man's utilization of power outside his body began with the denomination nearest his own, that of animals. It has gone forward to that which is most alien to him, mechanical cosmic power. Yet we are nowhere near the term.... We do not know and cannot even now foresee what effect it will have on man's social organization, on his habits of thought, even on his physical organism and on the material resources of the earth on which it is operating. Everything is fluid."
That was what I wrote and the situation has not changed. So even with the best of wills what could be done?
It seems to me that the second condition of living happily in the Welfare State is equally impossible to fulfil. It is the condition that once the great majority of men in a particular society have had enough to eat they should do nothing, and only sit down and doze like cattle and sheep on their pastures. But man has left the wisdom, sanity, and the impeccable moral behaviour of the beasts far behind. Once he is relieved of anxiety in regard to survival the democratic common man will make mischief in small magnitudes but on so universal a scale that he will become more dangerous than a Chenghiz Khan or a Hitler.
There is no prank a bored human being will not play. He or she will gamble, run after other people's wives and husbands, read crime stories, dabble in sex psychology, be caddish or rowdy- all just for the sake of being uncommon. Such behaviour does not pass wholly unnoticed, but it is not considered as unnatural as it would have been among livestock.
It would seem that the Welfare State of our times has arrived too late for both of its purposes, that is to say, to be put to the best use as a means to an end, and also to be enjoyed as an end in itself. It is belated also in another very important way. It has come with the triumph of modern democracy, when the theorists and practi- tioners of this democracy are trying hard, out of a mistaken and even undesirable idealism, to supplement political and economic "equality with the equality of the mind. Now, it is a good thing to do away with the caste system by birth, also by wealth, but a deadly mistake to tamper with the natural caste system of the mind. There is nothing men resent more than to be raised above themselves against their will, which means the same thing as beyond their capacity. If I might put it that way as a Hindu, the eternal Sudras prefer to remain eternal Sudras, a very good state to be in if the Sudra is left to himself. It is curious that Europeans who are so enthusiastic over Negro and all primitive art should forget that. True Sudrahood is the lowest common denominator of a dignified and happy human state, to which at times I feel I should like to glide down instead of wearying myself by trying always to fly like Icarus, son of Daedalus.
But modern democracy is making it impossible for the good Sudra to remain a good Sudra by giving him its characteristic training and education. It has already destroyed his folk-civilization in many countries, and made a half-caste of him. In revenge the new Sudra is bringing down everybody else to his level, and he has the power to do so, for the same democracy has made him the ruler of the other castes. Thu the very democratic sentiment which has made the Welfare Stat: possible is also contributing to its failure.
But it must be understood that I am not charging the new democracy with great vices. As a class, it has become incapable of great crimes, and even its naughtiness is trivial and vicarious. On the contrary, if I'am to judge by the tone of its serious literature, it seems to be remarkably virtuous and proper in its aspirations and sentiments. But as I wrote as a young man: 'Detractors of human- ity are wrong. Idealists are equally so. The average man is neither so good nor so bad as we take him to be. But this mediocrity is so terribly hard to endure."
I am not surprised, therefore, to find that some English intellec- tuals are already revolting against the Welfare State, of which generally speaking the English people are so proud and as it seems to me justly proud. It is contributing its share of discontent, supplementing the quota from political frustration and economic anxiety. Perhaps more rebellion is in the offing. But the worst part of this suffering is that it is so drab. Even in writing about the present state of the English people I have caught its contagion. I am afraid this part of the book has been very dull, and boringly argumentative. I would only plead in defence that the fault is not wholly mine, a part of it is in the subject.
