Perhaps you concluded, after a time, that there must be some temperaments communistic or socialistic by nature, like the “souls Christian by nature” of the theologians. You might even have suspected that in all this wide field of dispute the most fundamental difference is not between the intrinsic and absolute merits of the individualistic and of the communistic State, but between two contrasted human types—the type which is actually happiest in communal messes and dormitories and playgrounds and forced labour and State-fixed pay in a State-chosen career, and the type which exults in even the smallest separate cottage and garden, as a lion rejoices in his own den; the type which cooks its mutton with a special rapture in an exclusive oven, however imperfect, and sallies forth rejoicing, as the bridegroom goeth out from his chamber, to angle for the dearest market for the labour of its hands and the cheapest for its victuals. So that the only ideal solution might be to cut up the world, or each of its States, into two hemispheres, as trains are divided into “non-smoking” and “smoking.” A little difficult, perhaps; but then it is difficult to make either breed be happy in the other’s paradise.
II
Other speculations were apt to visit your mind if, later on in the war, as a New Army officer, you watched, open-mouthed, the way that much of the Regular Army’s business was done. In civil life you might have had wild dreams of what business life would be like if its one great, black, ruling, quelling possibility were forever removed, if the last Official Receiver had gone the way of the great auk, and the two-handed engine of bankruptcy stood no longer at the door, its place being taken by a genie carrying countless Treasury notes and ready to come in and “make it all right” as soon as you gave the slightest rub to the electric lamp on your desk. How nobly free you would be from the base care of overhead charges! How pungently you would keep in his proper place any large customer whose tone displeased you! How handsomely, when in a generous mood, you would cast away the sordid preoccupation of getting value for money and indulge yourself with a sight of the smile-wreathed face of a friend to whom you had given the bargain of a lifetime! How dignified a leisure you would enjoy after all those years of answering letters on the day you got them! Or, if that were your line, how high you would wave the banner of an ideal precision, stooping to none of the slavish, supple complaisances of competitive commerce, but making everyone who wrote a letter to you mind his p’s and q’s, and do the thing in form, and go on doing it until he got it right, as long as the forests of Scandinavia held out to supply you both with stationery!
In the throes of a great war, and within sound of its guns, the genius of our race achieved, at any rate in some minor departmental Edens, this approach to a business man’s heaven. To the rightful inhabitants of these paradises the intrusion of an ordinary fallen business man, with his vulgar notions of efficiency, gave something of a shock. He seemed cold and clammy—a serpent in the garden. “At the War Office,” an old Staff officer plaintively said to one of these killjoys, “we never used to open the afternoon letters till the next day.” He felt that life would lose its old-world bloom if he had to do things on the nail. “After all, it won’t kill the British taxpayer”—that was another golden formula.
III
Returned from these illuminating experiences the victorious soldier finds the British taxpayer—not, indeed, killed, but rubbing his wounds and groaning and being advised by several different kinds of friends to try if a hair, or perhaps the whole skin, of the dog that bit him will make him feel better. “Put your trust,” say the august political authoritarians, “in your natural rulers, from Lord Chaplin and the Duke of Northumberland down to about as low as Sir Eric Geddes; scrap all the outworn and discredited humbug of democracy and parliamentarism; recognize that only a governing class with ample traditions of skill and devotion can govern to any effect.”
“Rats!” observe the Extreme Left; “all that ramp was exposed long ago—ruling class and Parliament, and all of it. Turn down aristocracy and democracy, too, and put your money on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and—” At which the poor taxpaying proletarian looks up with a gleam of hope and asks if he may begin dictating now. With a pitying smile the Extreme Left explains that it is to be named his dictatorship, but that it will be exercised not by him but by the Proper Persons. Will he elect them? he asks. Oh, no; that would be mere bourgeois Liberalism, quite out of date. Well, he asks, how is he to feel sure that they will do what he wants? Can he doubt it?—he is reproachfully asked. Does he not see that men ruling only as dictators for the whole nation, men serving only their country and no grubby individual employer or caucus, will and must be fired, at once and forever, with a new spirit of devotion, wisdom, purity, humanity, and love such as was never yet seen on earth—indeed, could not be seen on it while its surface was defaced with Houses of Parliament and joint-stock mills?
At this point the demobilized business man is likely to go out sorrowfully, reflecting that thanks to the war he has known, in turn, what it is to be one of the
