The Thing / Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like the

war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken free.

For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full and

physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing

itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of

beech.

Let me explain. The vitality and recurrent victory of Christendom have

been due to the power of the Thing to break out from time to time from its

enveloping words and symbols. Without this power all civilisations tend

to perish under a load of language and ritual. One instance of this we

hear much in modern discussion: the separation of the form from the spirit

of religion. But we hear too little of numberless other cases of the same

stiffening and falsification; we are far too seldom reminded that just as

church-going is not religion, so reading and writing are not knowledge,

and voting is not self-government. It would be easy to find people in the

big cities who can read and write quickly enough to be clerks, but who are

actually ignorant of the daily movements of the sun and moon.

The case of self-government is even more curious, especially as one

watches it for the first time in a country district. Self-government arose

among men (probably among the primitive men, certainly among the ancients)

out of an idea which seems now too simple to be understood. The notion

of self-government was not (as many modern friends and foes of it seem to

think) the notion that the ordinary citizen is to be consulted as one

consults an Encyclopaedia. He is not there to be asked a lot of fancy

questions, to see how he answers them. He and his fellows are to be,

within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives. They shall

decide whether they shall be men of the oar or the wheel, of the spade or

the spear. The men of the valley shall settle whether the valley shall be

devastated for coal or covered with corn and vines; the men of the town

shall decide whether it shall be hoary with thatches or splendid with

spires. Of their own nature and instinct they shall gather under a

patriarchal chief or debate in a political market-place. And in case the

word "man" be misunderstood, I may remark that in this moral atmosphere,

this original soul of self-government, the women always have quite as much

influence as the men. But in modern England neither the men nor the women

have any influence at all. In this primary matter, the moulding of the

landscape, the creation of a mode of life, the people are utterly impotent.

They stand and stare at imperial and economic processes going on, as

they might stare at the Lord Mayor's Show.

Round about where I live, for instance, two changes are taking place which

really affect the land and all things that live on it, whether for good or

evil. The first is that the urban civilisation (or whatever it is) is

advancing; that the clerks come out in black swarms and the villas advance

in red battalions. The other is that the vast estates into which England

has long been divided are passing out of the hands of the English gentry

into the hands of men who are always upstarts and often actually

foreigners.

Now, these are just the sort of things with which self-government was

really supposed to grapple. People were supposed to be able to indicate

whether they wished to live in town or country, to be represented by a

gentleman or a cad. I do not presume to prejudge their decision; perhaps

they would prefer the cad; perhaps he is really preferable. I say that

the filling of a man's native sky with smoke or the selling of his roof

over his head illustrate the sort of things he ought to have some say in,

if he is supposed to be governing himself. But owing to the strange trend

of recent society, these enormous earthquakes he has to pass over and

treat as private trivialities. In theory the building of a villa is as

incidental as the buying of a hat. In reality it is as if all Lancashire

were laid waste for deer forests; or as if all Belgium were flooded by the

sea. In theory the sale of a squire's land to a moneylender is a minor

and exceptional necessity. In reality it is a thing like a German

invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion.

Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes

round about every five years a thing called a General Election. It is

believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system of

self-government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questions

about everything except what he understands. The examination paper of the

Election generally consists of some such queries as these: "I. Are the

green biscuits eaten by the peasants of Eastern Lithuania in your opinion

fit for human food? II. Are the religious professions of the President of

the Orange Free State hypocritical or sincere? III. Do you think that the

savages in Prusso-Portuguese East Bunyipland are as happy and hygienic as

the fortunate savages in Franco-British West Bunyipland? IV. Did the

lost Latin Charter said to have been exacted from Henry III reserve the

right of the Crown to create peers? V. What do you think of what America

thinks of what Mr. Roosevelt thinks of what Sir Eldon Gorst thinks of the

state of the Nile? VI. Detect some difference between the two persons in

frock-coats placed before you at this election."

Now, it never was supposed in any natural theory of self-government that

the ordinary man in my neighbourhood need answer fantastic questions like

these. He is a citizen of South Bucks, not an editor of 'Notes and

Queries'. He would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whether

farmsteads or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whether

stupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village. But these

are precisely the things which the oligarchs will not allow him to touch

with his finger. Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny and divine

mission to alter, under their guidance, all the things that he knows

nothing about. The name of self-government is noisy everywhere: the Thing

is throttled.

The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through; in

scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordances of

martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums of Napoleon

and all the tongues of terror with which the Thing has gone forth: the

spirit of our race alive. But when I came down in the morning only a

branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none of the great

country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as would have

happened if the Thing had really been abroad.