And while we are on the subject of heroes....
What was the most glorious moment in the history of England? Most of us, of course, would single out the awe-inspiring defiance of the summer of 1940, when, left with no allies and uncomfortably few weapons, the United Kingdom had to face an apparently invincible enemy coalition across three continents - and peace feelers from Germany were met with the response that of course Germany had the choice to surrender unconditionally! But that defiance, splendid though it was, and gilded by the immortal rhetorical genius of Winston Churchill, was marred by the fact that Britain had simply been forced into that position after twenty years of continuously pro-German and anti-French policy. From 1919 to 1938, against the repeated and clear advice of many wise and prominent men such as Churchill and Chesterton, Britain had insisted on treating Germany as a friend and France as a prospective enemy. The catastrophe of 1940 had been the inevitable result of this thrice-accursed policy, and the very hero of the final struggle, Winston Churchill, had long said that the war - a war that consumed continents and cost 55 million lives - had been unnecessary.
There is one moment in English history which, to me, outshines even the summer of 1940. It is the last day of December, 1862. For more than a year unemployment and underemployment have raged across England's industrial North, as the heart of its industry, the cotton manufacturers, lie idle for lack of raw material, now locked in the secessionist Confederate States of America. Raw cotton from India and elsewhere is insufficient to fill the gap, and workers are close to starvation. In America, the white industrial working classes look on prospective competition from freed blacks with fear and resentment, and in a few months the Irish of New York are to explode in what is probably the worst and deadliest race riot in American history. But the workers of England, starved and damaged in their interests as they are, have no such worries. A mass meeting of workers in Manchester votes to send the President the following resolution:
To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States:
As citizens of Manchester, assembled at the Free-Trade Hall, we beg to express our fraternal sentiments toward you and your country. We rejoice in your greatness as an outgrowth of England, whose blood and language you share, whose orderly and legal freedom you have applied to new circumstances, over a region immeasurably greater than our own. We honor your Free States, as a singularly happy abode for the working millions where industry is honored. One thing alone has, in the past, lessened our sympathy with your country and our confidence in it-we mean the ascendency of politicians who not merely maintained negro slavery, but desired to extend and root it more firmly. Since we have discerned, however, that the victory of the free North, in the war which has so sorely distressed us as well as afflicted you, will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and earnest sympathy. We joyfully honor you, as the President, and the Congress with you, for many decisive steps toward practically exemplifying your belief in the words of your great founders: “All men are created free and equal.” You have procured the liberation of the slaves in the district around Washington, and thereby made the centre of your Federation visibly free. You have enforced the laws against the slave-trade, and kept up your fleet against it, even while every ship was wanted for service in your terrible war. You have nobly decided to receive ambassadors from the negro republics of Hayti and Liberia, thus forever renouncing that unworthy prejudice which refuses the rights of humanity to men and women on account of their color. In order more effectually to stop the slave-trade, you have made with our Queen a treaty, which your Senate has ratified, for the right of mutual search. Your Congress has decreed freedom as the law forever in the vast unoccupied or half unsettled Territories which are directly subject to its legislative power. It has offered pecuniary aid to all States which will enact emancipation locally, and has forbidden your Generals to restore fugitive slaves who seek their protection. You have entreated the slave-masters to accept these moderate offers; and after long and patient waiting, you, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, have appointed to-morrow, the first of January, 1863, as the day of unconditional freedom for the slaves of the rebel States. Heartily do we congratulate you and your country on this humane and righteous course. We assume that you cannot now stop short of a complete uprooting of slavery. It would not become us to dictate any details, but there are broad principles of humanity which must guide you. If complete emancipation in some States be deferred, though only to a predetermined day, still in the interval, human beings should not be counted chattels. Women must have the rights of chastity and maternity, men the rights of husbands, masters the liberty of manumission. Justice demands for the black, no less than for the white, the protection of law-that his voice be heard in your courts. Nor must any such abomination be tolerated as slave-breeding States, and a slave market-if you are to earn the high reward of all your sacrifices, in the approval of the universal brotherhood and of the Divine Father. It is for your free country to decide whether any thing but immediate and total emancipation can secure the most indispensable rights of humanity against the inveterate wickedness of local laws and local executives. We implore you, for your own honor and welfare, not to faint in your providential mission. While your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high, let the work be finished effectually. Leave no root of bitterness to spring up and work fresh misery to your children. It is a mighty task, indeed, to reorganize the industry not only of four millions of the colored race, but of five millions of whites. Nevertheless, the vast progress you have made in the short space of twenty months fills us with hope that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed, and that the erasure of that foul blot upon civilization and Christianity-chattel slavery-during your Presidency will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honored and revered by posterity. We are certain that such a glorious consummation will cement Great Britain to the United States in close and enduring regards. Our interests, moreover, are identified with yours. We are truly one people, though locally separate. And if you have any ill-wishers here, be assured they are chiefly those who oppose liberty at home, and that they will be powerless to stir up quarrels between us, from the very day in which your country becomes, undeniably and without exception, the home of the free. Accept our high admiration of your firmness in upholding the proclamation of freedom.
Nothing nobler, nothing braver, nothing more opposite to self-interest can possibly be imagined. These men were not only going against their own interests, they were going against the ruling classes' view of England's interests, at a time when England's political leadership leaned heavily towards supporting the slave cause. Of their children and grandchildren Gilbert Keith Chesterton was to say in days to come: "Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob." And these were their fathers - who were willing to see the bread dashed from their children's mouth rather than consent for any reason to the abomination that was slavery. And these, I may conclude, are the people whom the last epigonoi of a bad ruling class have locked in jail-like estates, deprived of the very ability to conceive of working, destroyed in their family relationships, and whose children have been left uneducated by a school progress that is little more than a preparation for illiteracy and criminality. The ragged rabble of the Manchester streets may have silenced and shamed their masters in 1862, but the descendants of those masters have made damn well sure that it could never again presume to do so in 2011.
There is one moment in English history which, to me, outshines even the summer of 1940. It is the last day of December, 1862. For more than a year unemployment and underemployment have raged across England's industrial North, as the heart of its industry, the cotton manufacturers, lie idle for lack of raw material, now locked in the secessionist Confederate States of America. Raw cotton from India and elsewhere is insufficient to fill the gap, and workers are close to starvation. In America, the white industrial working classes look on prospective competition from freed blacks with fear and resentment, and in a few months the Irish of New York are to explode in what is probably the worst and deadliest race riot in American history. But the workers of England, starved and damaged in their interests as they are, have no such worries. A mass meeting of workers in Manchester votes to send the President the following resolution:
To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States:
As citizens of Manchester, assembled at the Free-Trade Hall, we beg to express our fraternal sentiments toward you and your country. We rejoice in your greatness as an outgrowth of England, whose blood and language you share, whose orderly and legal freedom you have applied to new circumstances, over a region immeasurably greater than our own. We honor your Free States, as a singularly happy abode for the working millions where industry is honored. One thing alone has, in the past, lessened our sympathy with your country and our confidence in it-we mean the ascendency of politicians who not merely maintained negro slavery, but desired to extend and root it more firmly. Since we have discerned, however, that the victory of the free North, in the war which has so sorely distressed us as well as afflicted you, will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and earnest sympathy. We joyfully honor you, as the President, and the Congress with you, for many decisive steps toward practically exemplifying your belief in the words of your great founders: “All men are created free and equal.” You have procured the liberation of the slaves in the district around Washington, and thereby made the centre of your Federation visibly free. You have enforced the laws against the slave-trade, and kept up your fleet against it, even while every ship was wanted for service in your terrible war. You have nobly decided to receive ambassadors from the negro republics of Hayti and Liberia, thus forever renouncing that unworthy prejudice which refuses the rights of humanity to men and women on account of their color. In order more effectually to stop the slave-trade, you have made with our Queen a treaty, which your Senate has ratified, for the right of mutual search. Your Congress has decreed freedom as the law forever in the vast unoccupied or half unsettled Territories which are directly subject to its legislative power. It has offered pecuniary aid to all States which will enact emancipation locally, and has forbidden your Generals to restore fugitive slaves who seek their protection. You have entreated the slave-masters to accept these moderate offers; and after long and patient waiting, you, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, have appointed to-morrow, the first of January, 1863, as the day of unconditional freedom for the slaves of the rebel States. Heartily do we congratulate you and your country on this humane and righteous course. We assume that you cannot now stop short of a complete uprooting of slavery. It would not become us to dictate any details, but there are broad principles of humanity which must guide you. If complete emancipation in some States be deferred, though only to a predetermined day, still in the interval, human beings should not be counted chattels. Women must have the rights of chastity and maternity, men the rights of husbands, masters the liberty of manumission. Justice demands for the black, no less than for the white, the protection of law-that his voice be heard in your courts. Nor must any such abomination be tolerated as slave-breeding States, and a slave market-if you are to earn the high reward of all your sacrifices, in the approval of the universal brotherhood and of the Divine Father. It is for your free country to decide whether any thing but immediate and total emancipation can secure the most indispensable rights of humanity against the inveterate wickedness of local laws and local executives. We implore you, for your own honor and welfare, not to faint in your providential mission. While your enthusiasm is aflame, and the tide of events runs high, let the work be finished effectually. Leave no root of bitterness to spring up and work fresh misery to your children. It is a mighty task, indeed, to reorganize the industry not only of four millions of the colored race, but of five millions of whites. Nevertheless, the vast progress you have made in the short space of twenty months fills us with hope that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed, and that the erasure of that foul blot upon civilization and Christianity-chattel slavery-during your Presidency will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honored and revered by posterity. We are certain that such a glorious consummation will cement Great Britain to the United States in close and enduring regards. Our interests, moreover, are identified with yours. We are truly one people, though locally separate. And if you have any ill-wishers here, be assured they are chiefly those who oppose liberty at home, and that they will be powerless to stir up quarrels between us, from the very day in which your country becomes, undeniably and without exception, the home of the free. Accept our high admiration of your firmness in upholding the proclamation of freedom.
Nothing nobler, nothing braver, nothing more opposite to self-interest can possibly be imagined. These men were not only going against their own interests, they were going against the ruling classes' view of England's interests, at a time when England's political leadership leaned heavily towards supporting the slave cause. Of their children and grandchildren Gilbert Keith Chesterton was to say in days to come: "Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob." And these were their fathers - who were willing to see the bread dashed from their children's mouth rather than consent for any reason to the abomination that was slavery. And these, I may conclude, are the people whom the last epigonoi of a bad ruling class have locked in jail-like estates, deprived of the very ability to conceive of working, destroyed in their family relationships, and whose children have been left uneducated by a school progress that is little more than a preparation for illiteracy and criminality. The ragged rabble of the Manchester streets may have silenced and shamed their masters in 1862, but the descendants of those masters have made damn well sure that it could never again presume to do so in 2011.