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ENGLAND SPEAKS
Published in the International New York, New York, U.S.A. (page 2)
“The most noble the Marquess of Lansdowne—the American People.” Indeed some such word of introduction is necessary, if not quite decent. In the Continental fashion, let me explain the quality of the person to whom I wish to introduce you. Lord Lansdowne is The Fitzmaurice, and comes to us as a product of careful biological selection since William the Conqueror. He has never taken any very active part in politics, except the Battle of Hastings, merely accepting the Foreign Office or some similar post to oblige his country, and discharging its duties on sane, conservative lines.
Lord Lansdowne represents all the best Englishmen. He does not represent those who have been crushed biologically by industrialism, or the alien money lenders who have England by the throat. He speaks for the nobility, the gentry, and the yeomanry, for the men who were English (not “patriots,” please!) at Agincourt, whose future is as indissolubly linked with English soil as is their past.
It is, therefore, natural that Lord Lansdowne should have said exactly what I have been saying in this paper ever since its owners, in a magnificent spirit of Fair Play, offered England (in my humble person) a voice in America.
For some curious reason, perhaps because I like to collect lunatics as George Windsor likes to collect postage stamps, I find myself regarded by superficial thinkers as a radical and revolutionary. I am in truth the most crusted of Tories, bred in the bone, and dyed in the wool. I believe, for example, that if we abandon the Catholic ideal of marriage, one may as well not have marriage at all. So, if we abandon the hierarchical system in religion or politics, one cannot stop short of anarchy, as soon as some occasion of stress forces people to make decisions. The Church of England had more dissenting movements in a century than the Church of Rome in ten. It was a makeshift. So were the Girondins; so was Kerensky. Once leave the unintellectual, illogical, unjust anchorage of Wisdom, and you are tossed madly on the insane waves of Reason.
Men are fit to hunt, fight, and create; women to cook, to labor in the fields, and to bear children. Abandon this conception with all its obvious demerits, and you merely arrive at a Bottomless Pit of vague argument, ending in the query “What is a man? What is a woman?” A very nauseating mess!
The strength of England has always lain with this “impossible” class of stupid brutes, who are always right, because they are swayed by racial instinct (or “wisdom”) instead of by reason.
A pointer knows more about the location of a pheasant than Darwin after half a century of Natural History. Similarly, in Germany, it is the landed aristocracy that speak and fight for their country. Your Liebknechts are always being swayed by “argument”; your Junkers know without being told. The class with “a stake in the country” is the class to trust. England knows that a Lansdowne or a Harcourt will never be false, and never foolish, though he may be utterly stupid.
Now Civilization itself is menaced by the war—or rather by the revolutions attendant on the collapse of certain systems which had become unwieldy. Russia is only the advance guard of Bolshevikism. These people will have to be swept away by cannon, and knouted into common sense, before we have any true peace in the world again. Junkerthum and English Feudalism have their bad points, but they stand strain. It is only when all the individuals of a nation are as intelligent and clear-sighted as the French that democracy has any chance to live; and, in point of fact, Joffre would have been beaten at the Marne if he had not turned angrily on the politicians in Paris, with his famous, “Aujour d’hui, messieurs, c’est moi qui parle,” turning the Republic into a military autocracy by a single sublime gesture.
Similarly, as this country is ruled by strong men of practical common sense, war measures were taken here which no Tsar would ever have dared, with the result that, so far, America’s military achievement stands as the world’s record for all time.
The hierarchical and caste system is the system with biological truth to back it, and it always comes back as soon as the organism is in danger. This war will make an end of the “brilliant,” “intellectual” nonsense of the George Bernard Shaws and the Leon Trotzkys; aristocracy will be re-established in a more enlightened form. Birth is not everything; we need brains as well. But we must put an end to the power of money, which is the corruption of all Virtue.
Listen to Lord Lansdowne; his voice is England’s; England, sooner or later, will forget Lloyd George, and do what her heart and soul bid her. Our family quarrel with the Hohenzollerns was all very well; in fact, it was rather bad form of the blighters to bring in their beastly science. Damn those Liberals all the same! However, the mischief’s done, and we can’t help it. But, now, these Lenine fellows are trying to butt in, it won’t do, don’t you know? |