Subject: GKC - on the WILL - here you are, as promised.
Hope you can find somewhere to use it where it will strike a real chord...I find his reference to peasant religion and peasant equality (meaning back to religious first principles, to the religious beliefs that made England great, and also the recognition that whilst peasants may occupy a comparatively lowly station in life, compared to the great men of commerce and industry, the landed aristocracy and gentry, yet they too are men like as those, and it behoves the more materially fortunate to treat them on an equal footing, as men speaking to men)
That point comes out most sharply when GKC highlights the continual inequality of treatment of the "ordinary" (ie the poorer) people, in his wonderful poem "The Secret People". Kipling addresses much the same issue in one of his poems:
"It's Tommy this, and Tommy that and Tommy, go away -
But it's "Thank you, Mr Atkins" when the band begins to play"
Kipling.
From a collection of GKC's journalism "Generally Speaking" published in 1928.
The following some of his observations on what he saw as the decline of a once-powerful nation-state, Holland:
"Holland only went the way that every great State has gone of which the greatness was purely commercial and colonial; which did not, when the time came, take thought for peasantry and popular religion, and all the more rooted things. Goldsmith, in The Vicar of Wakefield, pointed out that the mercantile aristocracies of England and Holland were alike forgetting the populace.
England was then in the noon of her glory, and Holland in her sunset; and that was one hundred years ago. The mark of this mercantile decline is that it is always gradual and almost unconscious.
The Dutch cities contain hotels that were once obviously aristocratic mansions' but our own aristocratic mansions are already being turned into hotels. There are Rembrandts in the National Gallery; but the "Blue Boy" is already in the United States."
"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act. If I treated the matter merely as one of necessity and the nature of things, I should say that England was following her sister States of Venice and Holland. If I had ever talked all the mean materialism about living nations and dying nations, I should say that England was certainly dying. But I do not believe that a nation dies save by suicide. To the very last, every problem is a problem of the will; and if we will we can be whole. But it involves facing our own failures as well as counting our successes; it means not depending entirely on commerce and colonies; it means balancing our mercantile morals with more peasant religion and peasant equality; it means ceasing to be content to rule the sea, and making some sort of effort to return to the land."
GK Chesterton
GKC - the wealthy get away with it
From same collection of GKC's journalism, published 1928 Generally Speaking:
On The Pillory
"As a rule, those who discuss the good old days and how bad they were are a little vague about how old they were....In a recent case which I have in mind, the writer fixed on a particular date in the past, for purposes of comparison...He was concerned with some documents dealing with the years 1745-47; and told us the usual things about London being without lamp-posts, or having stage coaches instead of railway trains.
Now the first thought that actually occurs to me about the years 1745-47 has nothing to do with trains or lamp-posts. It is this; that those years mark more or less the last time in our history when any great estates were confiscated or any great lords suffered punishment for a crime against the State. The Jacobite nobles who were executed after the suppression of the'45 must have been the last of a long line of wealthy criminals or high-born martyrs who had found throughout the centuries that the law was higher than themselves. I am not exulting over their end; on the contrary, I am something of a Jacobite myself. I am only noting the fact that the taking of their lives and more especially the taking of their property was the sort of thing that has not happened since. Other sorts of legal operations, of course, have happened since. The punishment of poor people, for the sort of crimes that are the temptations of poor people still went on then, and still goes on now. But the idea of punishing a public man as a public enemy has, for good or evil, become an impossibility. And the idea of taking away the private wealth of a public man is equally inconceivable, especially if he is a really wealthy man. It is said that modern government makes life safer; and the claim is very tenable. But at least it is certain that modern government makes life for the governing classes safer; and never before in the whole history of the world has it been so safe a business to govern.
Let me take only one example actually mentioned in the newspaper article. Among the horrors of Old London, it mentions not only the absence of lamp-posts, but the presence of pillories. I have never been able to see myself that a pillory is necessarily worse than a prison. It need not in most cases be a more drastic punishment. It was certainly in all cases a more democratic punishment. A man was not only tried by his peers, but punished by his peers. It was no idle distinction; for he was sometimes acquitted and applauded by his peers. If a man were pilloried for a crime which the populace regarded as a virtue, there was nothing to prevent the populace from pelting him with roses instead of rotten eggs.....
The objection to the pillory suggested in the article consists in its ruthless publicity. But in the matter of punishment I am not reassured by privacy. I know that the most abominable cruelties have always been committed in complete privacy. I am not sure even about the punishments that are now hidden in prisons instead of being displayed in pillories. I do not say that we should do in public all that we now do in private. But it might well be questioned whether we ought to do in private the things we are so much ashamed to do in public. If there has been one respectable thing about the executioner, I think it is the fact that he was called the public executioner. I do not like his becoming the bearer of the bowstring - the secret messenger of a Sultan. But...it is enough to note here that there was at least good as well as evil in the publicity of the pillory. Indeed, there is only one real and unanswerable objection to the punishment of the pillory; and unfortunately it so happens that this is also the chief objection to the gallows, the prison, the reformatory, the scientific preventive settlement for potential criminals and everything else of the kind. The only real objection to the pillory is that we should probably put the wrong man into it......
Now a man could be put in the pillory in mediaeval times for what was then called forestalling, and is now called making a corner. In some countries he could be hanged. There are at this moment walking about Europe and America a number of placid, well-fed, well-dressed gentlemen who boast of having made corners. Suppose I were to suggest that they should stand in the pillory. Suppose I were to suggest that some of them should hang on the gallows. Suppose I were to propose to punish them in modern times as they would have been punished in mediaeval times; suppose that, and you will measure the whole distance and difference of which I spoke when I said that the really powerful man has never been really punished since 1745....
It is no answer to say that the powerful have not broken the law. Those who are powerful enough to make the law do not need to break it. The acts are not punished in modern times which were actually punished in mediaeval times. Nobody is so silly as to offer either period as a golden age; and there are real superiorities in the more modern epoch. But I doubt whether the matter is settled by pointing at a lamp-post; and I fear it may merely serve to remind us that the only tyrants who have suffered in our times have been hanged on lamp-posts in revolutions."
GKC - On the Pillory
NB -The italicised sections are my italics for emphasis.
ellipses indicate sentences omitted from GKC's original text. JN
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