Fifty Years In England

In the present short sketch of English life as I have known it during the fifty years, 1879-1929, I shall quote no book, and cite no professor of history. Born of poor parents in 1855, I attended no distinguished school; I sang in a boys’ choir at Windsor Castle; became an Elementary School-teacher, abandoned the Christian creed, left the teaching-profession, worked actively in the Ethical, Rationalist and Socialist Movements, went on educational tours twice in the United States and (in 1913) in the Bombay Presidency, and, since 1920, have labored very actively in promoting the ideals of the League of Nations. As I reach my 74th year, I glance at the England I have known since the age of 24, and trust my views may have an interest for Indian readers.

As in world-history, so in this limited record, I put economics first. I have seen a decline in agriculture, and a drift into crowded centres, so that more than three-fourths of the population now dwell in towns. Food-supplies from oversea have vastly increased; frozen meat first arrived from Australia in 1880. Trades-unions, struggling for higher wages and shorter hours, have grown enormously. The working-class Co-operative Movement led by such men as my old friend G. J. Holyoake) has established innumerable shops, and has an annual turnover of millions of pounds. Material relief has come to multitudes in the form of old age pensions, unemployment pay, sick pay, etc. Unemployment (that is, inability to get wage-paid work) is a present evil; but the spread of sanitation, and the lowered death-rate are marks of a much-improved environment. Meanwhile, in England as all over the civilized world, the old ‘capitalism,’–the domination of wage-earners by manufacturing ‘masters,’ –has yielded to a new domination of industrial ‘masters’ or ‘men’ by banks and international finance. Fortunately, a movement led by Major Douglas is leading England and the world towards a happier conception of ‘Soical Credit’ and, as he calls it, Economic Democracy. I have followed Douglas since 1920. At the close of 1929, he visited Japan, where his doctrine is known to an intelligent few.

Popular appreciation of art–that is to say, poetry, drama, music, etc., has risen, though all too slowly. The vast multiplication of schools, dating from the impulse of 1870-1880, has not yet developed an ample sense of beauty in the English proletariat. But pleasant signs of a better aesthetic are the revival of old folk dances and music, the extension of the Garden City ideal, the anxiety to preserve our noble landscapes and woodlands from motor-car damage and careless litter, and the spread of well-illustrated cheap books. In the realm of literature, fine avenues of understanding have been opened between our West and the Indian East. In 1880, soon after I came up to London from a remote village, I heard Dr. Moncure Conway lecture on the legend of the Christian saint Josaphat, which was really a transformed version of the story of Buddha. I am sorry I cannot saythe English masses are interested in Hindu epics and history; but I can say that for a thoughtful minority, the works of such scholars as Max Mueller, Rhys Davids, and T. W. Arnold have revealed noble aspects of Hindu and Muslim literature. Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia has lent radiance to Oriental religion, and the writings of Tagore have wafted a splendid breath from the East. On the folk-lore and animism of Europe, Asia and the world, the works of J. G. Frazer (Golden Bough, etc.) have shed a magnificent light. An enlarged respect for Indian art and history necessarily lessens the respect for the old narrow-minded Christian missions to Indians.

I can remember the excitement caused by the issue of Darwin's Descent of Man (1871). The Christian priests, who had for centuries taught the Bible-legend of the direct creation of the first man Adam by God, were alarmed at a theory of humanity's kinship, by heredity from ape-like brutes, with the so-called ‘lower animals.’ Just as the old Church of Rome began to lose its power in Europe when it rejected the Copernican theory of the earth's revolution round the sun, so both the Roman Church and the younger Protestant Church lost power by sneering at the Evolution theory of Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, and Haeckel. New visions of the starry heavens and new visions of men's physique have attracted millions of people out of the ancient Christian orthodoxy; and, in such a situation, it is all an absurdity that British missionaries should preach in India a creed which masses of thinking men and women in Britain have discarded. In 1890, I was one of a small group of Rationalists who resolved to circulate printed expressions of the unorthodoxy and science of the modern mind. Our work slowly grew. In 1899, we established the Rationalist Press Association, which has circulated millions of reprints of the works of Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall and other scientific pioneers; and the R.P.A. literature has had no small vogue in India. Many Christians have turned ‘Modernists’; that is to say, they seek to change their creed in conformity with modern ideas of the origin of the universe and man. The scientific movement has practically shifted ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’ from accepted ‘truth’ to the realm of myth and poetry. These remarkable changes I have witnessed in my own lifetime. And such changes have naturally reacted on education. When I was a child, the majority of the schools in which poorer children were disciplined lay under the rule of the priests, though they bore the ironic name of ‘National’ Schools. Now we possess a vast municipal and State-aided network of schools, and the age of leaving school will be raised, in 1931, to 15; and obviously the future will raise the age to 16, and 17, and 18, and beyond. As the age rises, the system of training will widen into methods of arts, crafts, agriculture, engineering, etc. That the ancient ‘Religious Instruction’ will long continue to dominate this vigorous young system is impossible. We in England (and active minds in all the continents) are gradually constructing a nobler mode of history-teaching which will make the record of humanity and civilization the real inspiration for moral and civic instruction and youth-development. Since 1908, at International Congresses in London, Hague, Berlin, Geneva and Rome, I have met the leaders (and some were Asiatic) in this, splendid spiritual revolution.

In 1881, I first listened to such speakers as Frederic Harrison, who expounded the Religion of Humanity, as expressed by the French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857). As a school of thought, Comte's ‘Positivist’ followers in England are few and diminishing. But Comte's maxims, such as: "Love for Principle, Order for Basis, Progress for Aim", "Live for others: Family, Country; Humanity", etc. utter the finest spirit of the 20th century. It is a spirit that appeals to Asia and Europe alike. This spirit, quite clear of theology and, militarism, has worked in such ways as the following:- The purer currents of Socialism, as illustrated in the career of my friend Hyndman, a steadfast friend of India, (whom in my biography of him I term ‘Prophet’); in the anti-Imperialism of Harrison, Beesly, Bradlaugh, and (to refer to names familiar to Indians) Wedderburn and Henry Cotton; in the displacement of the militarist conception of the ‘British Empire’ by the conception of the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ as a federation of self-governing Dominions and of communities moving towards self-government; and in the sympathy,–more marked in England than in any other country, –with the ideals of the League of Nations; a sympathy indicated by the membership of nearly a million persons in the League of Nations Union. Comte once said that the old Catholic-Feudal age had bequeathed to Europe two problems to be solved–the emancipation of the proletariat and the substitution of a human religion for a theological religion; and he also said that the modern unrest could never be stabilized until the revolution became feminine; that is, until the best genius of womanhood rose to moral supremacy in the world’s civilization. These three movements,–the liberation of Labour, the liberation of Woman, and the liberation of the sprit of Harmony and Fellowship, are becoming the glory of our time, triumphing over anarchy and tragedy.

But what have I just done? In recounting the short story of fifty years in England, I have told of one brief breath in the life of a nation; one brief breath of progress; one breath of that marvelous economic and spiritual progress which pulses in the evolution of Europe, of India and mankind.