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Tag Archives: British History

How the Great War Created the Modern State

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics, War

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

A. J. P. Taylor, Britain, British History, Conservativism, England, English History, European History, Government, history, Liberalism, Paul Cambon, politics, The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, War, Winston Churchill, World War One, World War Two

A.J.P. Taylor

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income… [B]roadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.”

__________

Pulled from the opening chapter “The Effects and Origins of the Great War” in A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914-1945.

In The New Cambridge Modern History: 1898-1945, there’s a substantial discussion of this link between the First and Second World Wars and the rise of the modern administrative state. A summary paragraph:

Until after 1847 direct income tax had been a device almost peculiar to Great Britain… During the 1890s, pari passu with the great expansion of governmental expenditures on armaments as well as on social services, Germany and her component states, as well as Italy, Austria, Norway, and Spain, all introduced or steepened systems of income tax. French governments repeatedly shied away from it, though they resorted to progressive death duties in 1901, and it was 1917 before a not very satisfactory system of income tax was introduced. The great fiscal burdens of war accustomed people to heavier taxation.

In 1920, Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador to Britain, told Winston Churchill, “In the twenty years I have been here I have witnessed an English Revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself.” He continued, “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.” Cambridge summarizes this: “If M. Cambon was exaggerating in 1920, he was perceptively prophetic, for his description became substantially true after the second world war.”

Read on:

  • What’s the point of reading history if you’ll just forget it later?
  • How Wittgenstein found god (and wrote a masterpiece) in the trenches of World War One
  • David McCullough provides an unbeatable answer to the question why history matters

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Why Poetry?

14 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

≈ Comments Off on Why Poetry?

Tags

A.E. Housman, BBC, Britain, British History, education, Hymns, Peter Hitchens, poetry, Question Time, Writing

Peter Hitchens

Questioner: I teach five-year-olds and we’ve been doing poetry — they love writing it. But making them sit down and recite poems would just be a waste of their time and a waste of my time.

Peter Hitchens: Well, I’ll recite you one a teacher taught me some 40 years ago:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

[Applause] And I’m very pleased that my head is full of things like that, and also lots of hymns, which I also remember — and I feel very sorry for anybody who hasn’t had the chance to learn them. And I think it is a great condemnation of our school system that so few people, and particularly only those whose parents are rich, can actually afford to have their children taught things like that, and have their minds furnished with beauty for the remainder of their lives.

And to pour scorn on it, and to say that it is unimportant, is to declare yourself a spiritual desert. Of course people need these things; and what’s more, they’re a profound part of being British. If you don’t know the literature and the poetry and the music of your own country, then you aren’t really fully conversant with its history and its character.

You’ve lost touch with what your ancestors knew, and you won’t be able to pass it on to your own children and grandchildren.

Of course these things should be taught. I wish our government actually had the power and the policies to make it happen. I really do think it’d be a good thing. I also think that people, particularly teachers, should not say these things don’t matter; they matter immensely.

__________

Peter Hitchens, appearing on BBC’s Question Time on June 14th, 2012.

Continue by memorizing for yourself the Housman poem, “Those Blue Remembered Hills”. Then take a look at Peter debating his brother Christopher — first on Nietzsche then on the motion “Can Civilization Survive without God?”. Watch Peter’s epic testimony here. Read the great David McCullough answer Why History?.

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