I knew also one other man (whom, for the honour I bear him and because he is still alive, I shall not name), an Englishman; at the outbreak of war in South Africa he said to all who would hear him, and printed in a journal to which he had admission, the simple truth that this adventure would be the beginning of a decline in the financial credit of England. To discover whether he was right or wrong, look at any curve of that credit and mark the dates. He said to all who would hear him that from this adventure onwards we should find ourselves increasingly embarrassed, with increasing taxation, with an increasing uncertainty in our foreign policy, and in our hold upon the markets we desired to control abroad. His action was not that of the prophet, but of the reasoner. His unpopularity was extreme. He was the only public man who talked conscientiously and rationally in this affair of the Boer War, and who did not confuse his conclusions with that disgusting antipathy to their own country which marked the most of those who protested against the war. As for the enemy, the South African Dutch, he knew them and heartily despised them. The Outlanders he also knew, and thought them the scum of the earth. But he acted on no mood of like or dislike. He was concerned with the future of England and he reasoned. He talked a sort of mathematical sense, and all his words were true; but he shall know no reward. Only, this remains true also; that all who heard him or read his writing have secretly returned to those words in their own minds, and have said: ‘He was right and we were wrong.’
There is another form of impressing the truth, and testifying to it, and doing good by it, which is the dogmatic assertion of truth by the old and the experienced and the revered, to the young. It is out of fashion; it is invaluable. I can myself testify to two such experiences which stand out supreme among many hundreds in my own early life. I am afraid they may seem trivial to my readers; I can only say that for myself they were as strong experiences as any great joy or pain could be. One was a sentence which Cardinal Manning said to me when I was but twenty years old. The other was one which the Master of my College, Dr. Jowett, of Balliol, said to me when I was twenty-two years old.
The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: _All human conflict is ultimately theological._
It was my custom during my first days in London, as a very young man, before I went to Oxford, to call upon the Cardinal as regularly as he would receive me; and during those brief interviews I heard from him many things which I have had later occasion to test by the experience of human life. I was, it may be said, too young to judge things so deep as sanctity and wisdom; but, on the other hand, youth has vision, especially upon elemental things; and Manning did seem to me (and still seems to me) much the greatest Englishman of his time. He was certainly the greatest of all that band, small but immensely significant, who, in the Victorian period, so rose above their fellows, preëminent in will and in intelligence, as not only to perceive, but even to accept the Faith. Not only did his powerful mind discover, but his powerful will also insisted upon all the difficult consequences of such an acceptation. He never admitted the possibility of compromise between Catholic and non-Catholic society. He perceived the necessary conflict, and gloried in it.
This saying of his (which I carried away with me somewhat bewildered) _that all human conflict was ultimately theological_, that is that all wars and revolutions and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine, was utterly novel to me. To a young man the saying was without meaning: I would have almost said nonsensical, save that I could not attach the idea of folly to Manning. But as I grew older it became a searchlight: with the observation of the world, and with continuous reading of history, it came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that it reached to the very roots of political action, so extended that it covered the whole.
It is, indeed, a truth which explains and coördinates all one reads of human action in the past, and all one sees of it in the present. Men talk of universal peace: it is only obtainable by one common religion. Men say that all tragedy is the conflict of equal rights. They lie. All tragedy is the conflict of a true right and a false right, or of a greater right and a lesser right, or, at the worst, of two false rights. Still more do men pretend in this time of ours, wherein the habitual use of the human intelligence has sunk to its lowest, that doctrine is but a private, individual affair, creating a mere opinion. Upon the contrary, it is doctrine that drives the state; and every state is stronger in the degree in which the doctrine of its citizens is united. Nor have I met any man in my life, arguing for what should be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar foundation for all mankind. Hence battle.
The truth Dr. Jowett gave me came thus. He asked me the political question which was always uppermost in his mind, and which he believed all young men should consider. It was, ‘Under what form of government is the state of man at its best?’ I answered as all young men should answer, ‘A republic,’ to which he answered gently in his turn, ‘You cannot have a republic without republicans.’ Now that, for terseness and truth and a certain quality of _revelation_, was worthy of Aristotle. It is the full answer, historical and moral, to every honest man who desires, as most honest men do, democracy, and who wonders why it is so hard to attain. But I had never considered that answer; and I think if I had not heard these half-dozen words I might never have considered it.
Democracy—that is, the government of the community by the community: a state wherein a man stands equal with his fellows, and has to suffer neither subservience nor the corruption of flattery and power: a state in which office alone commands, and not the being clothed with office—that is the ideal at the back of every man’s mind who cares for right in public affairs, and who has within himself anything left of private honour. It is simplest put by saying that democracy is the noblest form of government. But the moment you begin to deal with men, you find in varying degree, according to the human material handled, a difficulty in the direction of such an affair. You have experience of the wickedness and folly of men, and if you add to such growing experience the vast experience of history, you will find that, save in some few, and those small, communities, the ideal of democracy must break down in practice; and that so far from enjoying the noblest of social conditions, men attempting democracy in great states are soon suffering the basest forms of control by the rich. That is because most men, though intimately desiring a republic, are not republicans: when you have great numbers, those worthy of democracy are few. In the same way most men, though individually desiring peace within, have not the control of themselves which makes such peace possible.
So much for the Master’s excellent platitude.
It is strange that things worth saying and hearing, guiding things, should always have that quality of turning into platitudes, once they are familiar; for they were sudden revelations when first they came. To me now the impracticability of democracy among men indifferent to honour and justice is so clear that I never pause to consider it, well knowing that you cannot have the thing in any modern plutocratic state; that even in small states it needs a peculiarly admirable and rare temper in the human material of them. But this conviction came slowly, and all started from those few words.
And what has all this to do with the sailing of the sea? Nothing, save that it is during the sailing of the lonely sea that men most consider the nature of things.
The day broke long before we were anywhere near Fishguard breakwater. We must have done, I suppose, ten or twelve miles by the time it was broad light. Strumble Head kept on flashing, white and inept, under the daylight, and then went out. When it ceased there was no sign of land where it had been. Also the wind had fallen sluggish and we were not making three knots. But such as it was, it was steady; and by mid-morning we saw all the coast quite plain, and, shortly after, the low black line of the breakwater which they have built out here to make their great artificial harbour of Fishguard.
With the wind still falling we drifted rather than ran for the point of it and crawled in out of the wide sea. Even in that last hour, as we came in, we began to note a long heave gradually sweeping up out of the Atlantic through Saint George’s Channel, as though it had wind behind it; but since it set northeastward it did not affect the calm of the broad roads within the breakwater. We very slowly crawled to that inner southern part where boats of our sort could lie without interfering with the steam monsters, and there, after just twenty-four hours of the passage across Cardigan Bay, a run of seventy-odd miles, we let go the anchor, and, tying up our canvas in a very slovenly fashion, we hailed the shore and got a boat to come out, seeing that I had lost my own dinghy during the tempest in Bardsey Sound.