George Orwell

W HY

W RI TE

Contents

Why I Write

The Lion and the Unicorn

A Hanging

Politics and the English Language

Follow Penguin

George Orwell

1903–1950

Why I Write

From a very early age, perhaps the age of ﬁve or six, I knew

that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages

of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this

idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was

outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should

have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of ﬁve

years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was

eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and

I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me

unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely

child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations

with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my

literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being

isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with

words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that

this created a sort of private world in which I could get my

own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the

volume of serious – i.e. seriously intended – writing which I

produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not

amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my ﬁrst poem at the

age of four or ﬁve, my mother taking it down to dictation. I

cannot remember anything about it except that it was about

a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ – a good enough

phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s

‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war of 1914–18 broke out,

I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local

newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of

Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote

bad and usually unﬁnished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian

style. I also, about twice, attempted a short story which was

a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious

work that I actually set down on paper during all those

years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in

literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order

stuﬀ which I produced quickly, easily and without much

pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers

d’occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what

now seems to me astonishing speed – at fourteen I wrote a

whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a

week – and helped to edit school magazines, both printed

and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful

burlesque stuﬀ that you could imagine, and I took far less

trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest

journalism. But side by side with all this, for ﬁfteen years or

more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite

diﬀerent kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’

about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I

believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents.

As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin

Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures,

but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude

way and became more and more a mere description of what I

was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this

kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He

pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam

of sunlight, ﬁltering through the muslin curtains, slanted on

to the table, where a matchbox, half open, lay beside the

inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to

the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was

chasing a dead leaf,’ etc. etc. This habit continued till I was

about twenty-ﬁve, right through my non-literary years.

Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words,

I seemed to be making this descriptive eﬀort almost against

my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’

must, I suppose, have reﬂected the styles of the various

writers I admired at diﬀerent ages, but so far as I remember

it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of

mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The

lines from Paradise Lost,

So hee with diﬃculty and labour hard

Moved on: with diﬃculty and labour hee,

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent

shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’

was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I

knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I

wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write

books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic

novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions

and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in

which words were used partly for the sake of their sound.

And in fact my ﬁrst complete novel, Burmese Days, which I

wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather

that kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not

think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing

something of his early development. His subject-matter will

be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in

tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he

ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional

attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his

job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid

getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse

mood: but if he escapes from his early inﬂuences altogether,

he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the

need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for

writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in diﬀerent

degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the

proportions will vary from time to time, according to the

atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about,

to be remembered after death, to get your own back on

grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is

humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong

one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists,

politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in

short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass

of human beings are not acutely selﬁsh. After the age of

about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many

cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being

individuals at all – and live chieﬂy for others, or are simply

smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of

gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own

lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious

writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-

centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the

external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their

right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on

another, in the ﬁrmness of good prose or the rhythm of a

good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is

valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive

is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or a

writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which

appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel

strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the

level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic

considerations.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to

ﬁnd out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the

widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain

direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society

that they should strive after. Once again, no book is

genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art

should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political

attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war

against one another, and how they must ﬂuctuate from

person to person and from time to time. By nature – taking

your ‘nature’ to be the state you have attained when you are

ﬁrst adult – I am a person in whom the ﬁrst three motives

would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have

written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have

remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I

have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I

spent ﬁve years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian

Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty

and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of

authority and made me for the ﬁrst time fully aware of the

existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had

given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism:

but these experiences were not enough to give me an

accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish

Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a

ﬁrm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at that

date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been

Two hundred years ago,

To preach upon eternal doom

And watch my walnuts grow

But born, alas, in an evil time,

I missed that pleasant haven,

For the hair has grown on my upper lip

And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,

We were so easy to please,

We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep

On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own

The joys we now dissemble;

The greenﬁnch on the apple bough

Could make my enemies tremble.

But girls’ bellies and apricots,

Roach in a shaded stream,

Horses, ducks in ﬂight at dawn,

All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;

We maim our joys or hide them;

Horses are made of chromium steel

And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,

The eunuch without a harem;

Between the priest and the commissar

I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune

While the radio plays,

But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,

For Duggie always pays.

I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls,

And woke to ﬁnd it true;

I wasn’t born for an age like this;

Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936–7 turned the

scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of

serious work that I have written since 1936 has been

written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for

democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me

nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can

avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in

one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side

one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one

is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has

of acting politically without sacriﬁcing one’s aesthetic and

intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten

years is to make political writing into an art. My starting

point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.

When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am

going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is

some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to

draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long

magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even

when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a

full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able,

and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view

that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and

well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to

love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid

objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying

to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my

ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-

individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of

language, and it raises in a new way the problem of

truthfulness. Let me give just one example of the cruder

kind of diﬃculty that arises. My book about the Spanish Civil

War, Homage to Catalonia, is, of course, a frankly political

book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment

and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole

truth without violating my literary instincts. But among

other things it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper

quotations and the like, defending Trotskyists who were

accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter,

which after a year or two would lose its interest for any

ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect

read me a lecture about it. ‘Why did you put in all that

stuﬀ?’ he said. ‘You’ve turned what might have been a good

book into journalism.’ What he said was true, but I could not

have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few

people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent

men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry

about that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The

problem of language is subtler and would take too long to

discuss. I will only say that of later years I have tried to write

less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I ﬁnd that

by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you

have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the ﬁrst book in

which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to

fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I

have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write

another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is

a failure, but I know with some clarity what kind of book I

want to write.

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I

have made it appear as though my motives in writing were

wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the ﬁnal

impression. All writers are vain, selﬁsh and lazy, and at the

very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a

book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of

some painful illness. One would never undertake such a

thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one

can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that

demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall

for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write

nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to eﬀace

one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window pane. I

cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the

strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed.

And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably

where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books

and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without

meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and

the English Genius

Part I: England Your England

As I write, highly civilized human beings are ﬂying

overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual,

nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the

saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted

law-abiding men who would never dream of committing

murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them

succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb,

he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his

country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one

recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism,

national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down,

at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a

positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity

and international Socialism are as weak as straw in

comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in

their own countries very largely because they could grasp

this fact and their opponents could not.

Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation

and nation are founded on real diﬀerences of outlook. Till

recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human

beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use

his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour diﬀers

enormously from country to country. Things that could

happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s

June purge, for instance, could not have happened in

England. And, as western peoples go, the English are very

highly diﬀerentiated. There is a sort of back-handed

admission of this in the dislike which nearly all foreigners

feel for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure

living in England, and even Americans often feel more at

home in Europe.

When you come back to England from any foreign country,

you have immediately the sensation of breathing a diﬀerent

air. Even in the ﬁrst few minutes dozens of small things

conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the

coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements

are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their

mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are

diﬀerent from a European crowd. Then the vastness of

England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your

feeling that the whole nation has a single identiﬁable

character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we

not forty-six million individuals, all diﬀerent? And the

diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the

Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the

Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour

Exchanges, the rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs, the old

maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the

autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but

characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one

make a pattern out of this muddle?

But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers,

and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is

something distinctive and recognizable in English

civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is

somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy

Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green ﬁelds and

red pillarboxes. It has a ﬂavour of its own. Moreover it is

continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is

something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What

can the England of 1940 have in common with the England

of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child

of ﬁve whose photograph your mother keeps on the

mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the

same person.

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However

much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy

away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and

the red pillarboxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil,

it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will

never get away from the marks that it has given you.

Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is

changing. And like everything else it can change only in

certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That

is not to say that the future is ﬁxed, merely that certain

alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or

not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a

parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and

determine what England is, before guessing what part

England can play in the huge events that are happening.

National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when

pinned down they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to

have no connexion with one another. Spaniards are cruel to

animals, Italians can do nothing without making a deafening

noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling. Obviously such

things don’t matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing is

causeless, and even the fact that Englishmen have bad

teeth can tell something about the realities of English life.

Here are a couple of generalizations about England that

would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the

English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as

the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never

ﬂourished in England as they have in France. Another is

that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They

have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any

philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because

they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for

themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town

planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to

everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling

system that deﬁes analysis, and a system of weights and

measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of

arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere

eﬃciency. But they have a certain power of acting without

taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-

faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound

up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole

nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species

of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by

almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that

Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’,

would have been better applied to the English. Not that

there is anything to be proud of in being called a sleep-

walker.

But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is

extremely well marked though not often commented on, and

that is a love of ﬂowers. This is one of the ﬁrst things that

one notices when one reaches England from abroad,

especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not

contradict the English indiﬀerence to the arts? Not really,

because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feeling

whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another

English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we

barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and

spare-time occupations, the privateness of English life. We

are a nation of ﬂower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-

collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-

snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the

culture that is most truly native centres round things which

even when they are communal are not oﬃcial – the pub, the

football match, the back garden, the ﬁreside and the ‘nice

cup of tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in,

almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to

do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for

proﬁt. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do

what you like in your spare time, to choose your own

amusements instead of having them chosen for you from

above. The most hateful of all names in an English ear is

Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely

private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people,

the English are in process of being numbered, labelled,

conscripted, ‘coordinated’. But the pull of their impulses is in

the other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can

be imposed on them will be modiﬁed in consequence. No

party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no

Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations. No Gestapo

either, in all probability.

But in all societies the common people must live to some

extent against the existing order. The genuinely popular

culture of England is something that goes on beneath the

surface, unoﬃcially and more or less frowned on by the

authorities. One thing one notices if one looks directly at the

common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are

not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much

beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes,

and use probably the foulest language in the world. They

have to satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing,

hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts, etc., etc.)

which are designed to interfere with everybody but in

practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common

people are without deﬁnite religious belief, and have been

so for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real hold

on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and

the Nonconformist sects only inﬂuenced minorities. And yet

they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while

almost forgetting the name of Christ. The power-worship

which is the new religion of Europe, and which has infected

the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common

people. They have never caught up with power politics. The

‘realism’ which is preached in Japanese and Italian

newspapers would horrify them. One can learn a good deal

about the spirit of England from the comic coloured

postcards that you see in the windows of cheap stationers’

shops. These things are a sort of diary upon which the

English people have unconsciously recorded themselves.

Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their

mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme

gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all

mirrored there.

The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its

most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set

foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are

good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no

country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people

oﬀ the pavement. And with this goes something that is

always written oﬀ by European observers as ‘decadence’ or

hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism. It is

rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle

class as well as the working class. Successive wars have

shaken it but not destroyed it. Well within living memory it

was common for ‘the redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets

and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse

to allow soldiers on the premises. In peace time, even when

there are two million unemployed, it is diﬃcult to ﬁll the

ranks of the tiny standing army, which is oﬃcered by the

county gentry and a specialized stratum of the middle class,

and manned by farm labourers and slum proletarians. The

mass of the people are without military knowledge or

tradition, and their attitude towards war is invariably

defensive. No politician could rise to power by promising

them conquests or military ‘glory’, no Hymn of Hate has ever

made any appeal to them. In the last war the songs which

the soldiers made up and sang of their own accord were not

vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist. The only enemy

they ever named was the sergeant-major.

In England all the boasting and ﬂag-wagging, the ‘Rule

Britannia’ stuﬀ, is done by small minorities. The patriotism

of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They

do not retain among their historical memories the name of a

single military victory. English literature, like other

literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing

that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of

popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There

is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance.

Sir John Moore’s army at Corunna, ﬁghting a desperate

rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like

Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most

stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry

which charged in the wrong direction. And of the last war,

the four names which have really engraved themselves on

the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and

Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the

great battles that ﬁnally broke the German armies are

simply unknown to the general public.

The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts

foreign observers is that it ignores the existence of the

British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the

English have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to

it by means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round

and say that war is wicked?

It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their

Empire. In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of

not knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of

standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy

employs comparatively few people, and it is an external

weapon which cannot aﬀect home politics directly. Military

dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as

a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly all

classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the

swaggering oﬃcer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of

boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word

‘Prussian’ had much the same signiﬁcance in England as

‘Nazi’ has today. So deep does this feeling go that for a

hundred years past the oﬃcers of the British army, in peace

time, have always worn civilian clothes when oﬀ duty.

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of

a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is

really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet,

expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for

instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far

more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an

aﬃrmation of naked power; contained in it, quite

consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot

crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence,

for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh

at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is

the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven

knows, plenty of army oﬃcers who would be only too glad to

introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people

in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military

display is only possible in countries where the common

people dare not laugh at the army. The Italians adopted the

goose-step at about the time when Italy passed deﬁnitely

under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it

less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if it

survives, is bound to introduce a stiﬀer parade-ground

discipline into what is left of the French army. In the British

army the drill is rigid and complicated, full of memories of

the eighteenth century, but without deﬁnite swagger; the

march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society

which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which

must never be taken out of the scabbard.

And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up

with barbarities and anachronisms. Our criminal law is as

out-of-date as the muskets in the Tower. Over against the

Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically English

ﬁgure, the hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his

mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage

sentences. In England people are still hanged by the neck

and ﬂogged with the cat o’ nine tails. Both of these

punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but there has

never been any genuinely popular outcry against them.

People accept them (and Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as

they accept the weather. They are part of ‘the law’, which is

assumed to be unalterable.

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the

respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the

law’ as something above the State and above the individual,

something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any

rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone

knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the

poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone

takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be

respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not.

Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything

wrong’, or ‘They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part

of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of

society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One

sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have

Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies

that take place at the trials of conscientious objectors, in

letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors,

pointing out that this or that is a ‘miscarriage of British

justice’. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be,

ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially

administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such

thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even

the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the

expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the eﬀect

that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’

totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such

arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as

no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and

objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions,

but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them

inﬂuences conduct, national life is diﬀerent because of

them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the

rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still

in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot

go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for

instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it

is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But

until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it

cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the

polling booth to ﬁnd men with revolvers telling you which

way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any

direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The

hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-

hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach

what century he is living in, but who will at any rate

interpret the law according to the books and will in no

circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic

ﬁgures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of

reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and

decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the

nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

I have spoken all the while of ‘the nation’, ‘England’,

‘Britain’, as though forty-ﬁve million souls could somehow be

treated as a unit. But is not England notoriously two nations,

the rich and the poor? Dare one pretend that there is

anything in common between people with £100,000 a year

and people with £1 a week? And even Welsh and Scottish

readers are likely to have been oﬀended because I have

used the word ‘England’ oftener than ‘Britain’, as though the

whole population dwelt in London and the Home Counties

and neither north nor west possessed a culture of its own.

One gets a better view of this question if one considers the

minor point ﬁrst. It is quite true that the so-called races of

Britain feel themselves to be very diﬀerent from one

another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you

call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel

on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no less

than six diﬀerent names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the

British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted

moments, Albion. Even the diﬀerences between north and

south England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow

these diﬀerences fade away the moment that any two

Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet

a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish

between English and Scots or even English and Irish. To a

Frenchman, the Breton and the Auvergnat seem very

diﬀerent beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a stock joke

in Paris. Yet we speak of ‘France’ and ‘the French’,

recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which

in fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the

outside, even the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a

strong family resemblance.

And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles

somewhat when one regards the nation from the outside.

There is no question about the inequality of wealth in

England. It is grosser than in any European country, and you

have only to look down the nearest street to see it.

Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three

or four. But at the same time the vast majority of the people

feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of

resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always

stronger than any kind of internationalism. Except for a brief

moment in 1920 (the ‘Hands oﬀ Russia’ movement) the

British working class have never thought or acted

internationally. For two and a half years they watched their

comrades in Spain slowly strangled, and never aided them

by even a single strike. But when their own country (the

country of Lord Nuﬃeld and Mr Montagu Norman

) was in

danger, their attitude was very diﬀerent. At the moment

when it seemed likely that England might be invaded,

Anthony Eden appealed over the radio for Local Defence

Voulunteers. He got a quarter of a million men in the ﬁrst

twenty-four hours, and another million in the subsequent

month. One has only to compare these ﬁgures with, for

instance, the number of conscientious objectors to see how

vast is the strength of traditional loyalties compared with

new ones.

In England patriotism takes diﬀerent forms in diﬀerent

classes, but it runs like a connecting thread through nearly

all of them. Only the Europeanized intelligentsia are really

immune to it. As a positive emotion it is stronger in the

middle class than in the upper class – the cheap public

schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic

demonstrations than the expensive ones – but the number

of deﬁnitely treacherous rich men, the Laval-Quisling

type,

is probably very small. In the working class patriotism is

profound, but it is unconscious. The working man’s heart

does not leap when he sees a Union Jack. But the famous

‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far stronger in

the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries

the poor are more national than the rich, but the English

working class are outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign

habits. Even when they are obliged to live abroad for years

they refuse either to accustom themselves to foreign food or

to learn foreign languages. Nearly every Englishman of

working-class origin considers it eﬀeminate to pronounce a

foreign word correctly. During the war of 1914–18 the

English working class were in contact with foreigners to an

extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they

brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans,

whose courage they admired. In four years on French soil

they did not even acquire a liking for wine. The insularity of

the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a

folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time.

But it plays its part in the English mystique, and the

intellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally

done more harm than good. At bottom it is the same quality

in the English character that repels the tourist and keeps out

the invader.

Here one comes back to two English characteristics that I

pointed out, seemingly at random, at the beginning of the

last chapter. One is the lack of artistic ability. This is perhaps

another way of saying that the English are outside the

European culture. For there is one art in which they have

shown plenty of talent, namely literature. But this is also the

only art that cannot cross frontiers. Literature, especially

poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke,

with little or no value outside its own language-group.

Except for Shakespeare, the best English poets are barely

known in Europe, even as names. The only poets who are

widely read are Byron, who is admired for the wrong reasons,

and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English

hypocrisy. And linked up with this, though not very

obviously, is the lack of philosophical faculty, the absence in

nearly all Englishmen of any need for an ordered system of

thought or even for the use of logic.

Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for

a ‘world-view’. Just because patriotism is all but universal

and not even the rich are uninﬂuenced by it, there can be

moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together

and does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf.

There was such a moment, unmistakably, at the time of the

disaster in France. After eight months of vaguely wondering

what the war was about, the people suddenly knew what

they had got to do: ﬁrst, to get the army away from Dunkirk,

and secondly to prevent invasion. It was like the awakening

of a giant. Quick! Danger! The Philistines be upon thee,

Samson! And then the swift unanimous action – and then,

alas, the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided nation that

would have been exactly the moment for a big peace

movement to arise. But does this mean that the instinct of

the English will always tell them to do the right thing? Not at

all, merely that it will tell them to do the same thing. In the

1931 General Election, for instance, we all did the wrong

thing in perfect unison. We were as single-minded as the

Gadarene swine. But I honestly doubt whether we can say

that we were shoved down the slope against our will.

It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it

sometimes appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge

inequality of wealth, the unfair electoral system, the

governing-class control over the press, the radio and

education, and concludes that democracy is simply a polite

name for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable

agreement that does unfortunately exist between the

leaders and the led. However much one may hate to admit

it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the

National Government represented the will of the mass of the

people. It tolerated slums, unemployment and a cowardly

foreign policy. Yes, but so did public opinion. It was a

stagnant period, and its natural leaders were mediocrities.

In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it

is fairly certain that the bulk of the English people were

behind Chamberlain’s foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain

that the same struggle was going on in Chamberlain’s mind

as in the minds of ordinary people. His opponents professed

to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to sell

England to Hitler, but it is far likelier that he was merely a

stupid old man doing his best according to his very dim

lights. It is diﬃcult otherwise to explain the contradictions of

his policy, his failure to grasp any of the courses that were

open to him. Like the mass of the people, he did not want to

pay the price either of peace or of war. And public opinion

was behind him all the while, in policies that were

completely incompatible with one another. It was behind

him when he went to Munich, when he tried to come to an

understanding with Russia, when he gave the guarantee to

Poland, when he honoured it, and when he prosecuted the

war half-heartedly. Only when the results of his policy

became apparent did it turn against him; which is to say

that it turned against its own lethargy of the past seven

years. Thereupon the people picked a leader nearer to their

mood, Churchill, who was at any rate able to grasp that wars

are not won without ﬁghting. Later, perhaps, they will pick

another leader who can grasp that only Socialist nations can

ﬁght eﬀectively.

Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine

democracy? No, not even a reader of the Daily Telegraph

could quite swallow that.

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It

is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old

and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to take

into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all

its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of

supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe that is

not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals

into exile or the concentration camp. At this moment, after a

year of war, newspapers and pamphlets abusing the

Government, praising the enemy and clamouring for

surrender are being sold on the streets, almost without

interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom of

speech than from a simple perception that these things

don’t matter. It is safe to let a paper like Peace News be sold,

because it is certain that ninety-ﬁve per cent of the

population will never want to read it. The nation is bound

together by an invisible chain. At any normal time the ruling

class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck;

but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get

a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling, and it is

diﬃcult for them not to respond. The left-wing writers who

denounce the whole of the ruling class as ‘pro-Fascist’ are

grossly over-simplifying. Even among the inner clique of

politicians who brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful

whether there were any conscious traitors. The corruption

that happens in England is seldom of that kind. Nearly

always it is more in the nature of self-deception, of the right

hand not knowing what the left hand doeth. And being

unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at its most obvious

in the English press. Is the English press honest or

dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the

papers that matter live oﬀ their advertisements, and the

advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I

do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be

straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the

Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could

notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds

of cheese. Public life in England has never been openly

scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of disintegration at

which humbug can be dropped.

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-

quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr

Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather

stuﬀy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but

with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich

relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations

who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of

silence about the source of the family income. It is a family

in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the

power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden

aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its

common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it

closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control

– that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing

England in a phrase.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-

ﬁelds of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars

have been lost there. One of the dominant facts in English

life during the past three quarters of a century has been the

decay of ability in the ruling class.

In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening

with the speed of a chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of

writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the

knife which has had two new blades and three new handles,

the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was

in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-

owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of

disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried

with the merchants, manufacturers and ﬁnanciers who had

replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies

of themselves. The wealthy ship-owner or cotton-miller set

up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his

sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which

had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled

by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus. And

considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and

considering that they were buying their way into a class

which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one

might have expected that able rulers could be produced in

some such way.

And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability,

its daring, ﬁnally even its ruthlessness, until a time came

when stuﬀed shirts like Eden or Halifax

could stand out as

men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not

even dignify him with the name of stuﬀed shirt. He was

simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England’s

domestic problems during the nineteen-twenties had been

bad enough, but British foreign policy between 1931 and

1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What had

happened? What was it that at every decisive moment made

every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring

an instinct?

The underlying fact was that the whole position of the

moneyed class had long ceased to be justiﬁable. There they

sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide ﬁnancial

network, drawing interest and proﬁts and spending them –

on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire

was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire

was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the

Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out,

and even England was full of slums and unemployment.

Only half a million people, the people in the country houses,

deﬁnitely beneﬁted from the existing system. Moreover, the

tendency of small businesses to merge together into large

ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their

function and turned them into mere owners, their work

being done for them by salaried managers and technicians.

For long past there had been in England an entirely

functionless class, living on money that was invested they

hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose

photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander,

always supposing that you want to. The existence of these

people was by any standard unjustiﬁable. They were simply

parasites, less useful to society than his ﬂeas are to a dog.

By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all

this. By 1930 millions were aware of it. But the British ruling

class obviously could not admit to themselves that their

usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would

have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to

turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American

millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and

beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs.

After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition,

they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for

your country, if necessary, is laid down as the ﬁrst and

greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel

themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their

countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them –

into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape

only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was

possible. Diﬃcult though this was, they achieved it, largely

by ﬁxing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the

changes that were going on round them.

There is much in England that this explains. It explains the

decay of country life, due to the keeping-up of a sham

feudalism which drives the more spirited workers oﬀ the

land. It explains the immobility of the public schools, which

have barely altered since the eighties of the last century. It

explains the military incompetence which has again and

again startled the world. Since the ﬁfties every war in which

England has engaged has started oﬀ with a series of

disasters, after which the situation has been saved by

people comparatively low in the social scale. The higher

commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never

prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they

would have had to admit to themselves that the world was

changing. They have always clung to obsolete methods and

weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a

repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for

the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before

the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of

thousands of men in England are being trained with the

bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins.

It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air force,

have always been more eﬃcient than the regular army. But

the navy is only partially, and the air force hardly at all,

within the ruling-class orbit.

It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful

the methods of the British ruling class served them well

enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them.

However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any

rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police.

The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has

ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of

the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found

necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under,

and looking at them merely from a liberal, negative

standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. They

were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and

Fascists. But it has long been obvious that they would be

helpless against any serious attack from the outside.

They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism,

because they could not understand them. Neither could

they have struggled against Communism, if Communism

had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand

Fascism they would have had to study the theory of

Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the

economic system by which they lived was unjust, ineﬃcient

and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact that they had

trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as

the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns –

by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres, they

had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were

hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they must

be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly

frightening spectacle of Conservative MPs wildly cheering

the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish

Republican government, had been bombed by Italian

aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that

Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature,

the huge military eﬀort it was capable of making, the sort of

tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much

political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny

pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result

would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet

generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study

of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political

ignorance runs right through English oﬃcial life, through

Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges,

magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the ‘red’

does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he

did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class

might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think

that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by

ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the

ramiﬁcations of the underground parties.

The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in

thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any

rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism

than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One

ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole German and

Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural

instinct of men like Simon, Hoare,

Chamberlain etc. was to

come to an agreement with Hitler. But – and here the

peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the

deep sense of national solidarity, comes in – they could only

do so by breaking up the Empire and selling their own

people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have

done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had

not gone that distance in England. Politicians who would

make cringing speeches about ‘the duty of loyalty to our

conquerors’ are hardly to be found in English public life.

Tossed to and fro between their incomes and their principles,

it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do

anything but make the worst of both worlds.

One thing that has always shown that the English ruling

class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are

ready enough to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls

and whatnots were killed in the recent campaign in

Flanders. That could not happen if these people were the

cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It

is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one

cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them

is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity,

unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the

wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked;

they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and

power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp

what century they are living in.

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years

aﬀected everyone in England, but it had an especially direct

eﬀect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class.

One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally

nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing

intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic

opposites – the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and

diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his

domed forehead and stalk-like neck – are mentally linked

together and constantly interact upon one another; in any

case they are born to a considerable extent into the same

families.

Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its

vitality. The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the

proliﬁc lowbrow families whose sons oﬃcered the army and

navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth

from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before

1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a

narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall,

there was every year less room for individual initiative. Men

like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would ﬁnd no place for

themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly

every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of

Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits

and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked

over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view

of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The

one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of

clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper

and red tape. In the early twenties one could see, all over

the Empire, the older oﬃcials, who had known more

spacious days, writhing impotently under the changes that

were happening. From that time onwards it has been next

door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any

part in imperial administration. And what was true of the

oﬃcial world was true also of the commercial. The great

monopoly companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders.

Instead of going out to trade adventurously in the Indies one

went to an oﬃce stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life in

Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life

in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the

middle class, owing to family tradition, but the job of

administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able

men went east of Suez if there was any way of avoiding it.

But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some

extent of the whole British morale, that took place during

the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing

intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from

the stagnation of the Empire.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that

is not in some sense ‘left’. Perhaps the last right-wing

intellectual was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone

describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic

discontent with the existing order. Necessarily so, because

society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an

Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed

nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people

whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to

be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could

understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the theories of Karl

Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out

of any important job. The intellectuals could ﬁnd a function

for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing

political parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be

studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The

immediately striking thing about all these papers is their

generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack

at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in

them except the irresponsible carping of people who have

never been and never expect to be in a position of power.

Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness

of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact

with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were

ﬂabbily paciﬁst up to 1935–9, and then promptly cooled oﬀ

when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true

that the people who were most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the

Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying

this is the really important fact about so many of the English

intelligentsia – their severance from the common culture of

the country.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are

Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their

opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the

country they form a sort of island of dissident thought.

England is perhaps the only great country whose

intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-

wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly

disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to

snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to

suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably

true that almost any English intellectual would feel more

ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’

than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical

years many left-wingers were chipping away at English

morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes

squashily paciﬁst, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but

always anti-British. It is questionable how much eﬀect this

had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suﬀered

for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the

Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it

was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from

the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesman

and the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich

settlement, but even they had done something to make it

possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting aﬀected

even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had

been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed

forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire the military

middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread

of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

It is clear that the special position of the English

intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely negative

creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class

stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got

it in them to see that devotion to one’s country implies ‘for

better, for worse’. Both Blimps and highbrows took for

granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce

between patriotism and intelligence. If you were a patriot

you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God

that you were ‘not brainy’. If you were an intellectual you

sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage

as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous convention

cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his

mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel.

A modern nation cannot aﬀord either of them. Patriotism and

intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact

that we are ﬁghting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war,

that may make this possible.

One of the most important developments in England during

the past twenty years has been the upward and downward

extension of the middle class. It has happened on such a

scale as to make the old classiﬁcation of society into

capitalists, proletarians and petit bourgeois (small property-

owners) almost obsolete.

England is a country in which property and ﬁnancial power

are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern

England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and

possibly a house. The peasantry have long since

disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being

destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in

numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so

complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers

of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians

of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn

call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers,

teachers, artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced

capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class

and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.

But much more important than this is the spread of

middle-class ideas and habits among the working class. The

British working class are now better oﬀ in almost all ways

than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the

eﬀorts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere advance of

physical science. It is not always realized that within rather

narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise

without a corresponding rise in real wages. Up to a point,

civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However

unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are

bound to beneﬁt the whole community, because certain

kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire

cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while

darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of

civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-

free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free

education of a kind. Public education in England has been

meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless improved,

largely owing to the devoted eﬀorts of the teachers, and the

habit of reading has become enormously more widespread.

To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same

books, and they also see the same ﬁlms and listen to the

same radio programmes. And the diﬀerences in their way of

life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap

clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward

appearance goes, the clothes of rich and poor, especially in

the case of women, diﬀer far less than they did thirty or

even ﬁfteen years ago. As to housing, England still has

slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has

been done during the past ten years, largely by the local

authorities. The modern council house, with its bathroom

and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but

it is recognizably the same kind of house, which the farm

labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a

council housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is –

more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown

up in a slum.

The eﬀect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is

enhanced by the fact that modern industrial methods tend

always to demand less muscular eﬀort and therefore to

leave people with more energy when their day’s work is

done. Many workers in the light industries are less truly

manual labourers than is a doctor or a grocer. In tastes,

habits, manners and outlook the working class and the

middle class are drawing together. The unjust distinctions

remain, but the real diﬀerences diminish. The old-style

‘proletarian’ – collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped

by heavy labour – still exists, but he is constantly decreasing

in numbers; he only predominates in the heavy-industry

areas of the north of England.

After 1918 there began to appear something that had

never existed in England before: people of indeterminate

social class. In 1910 every human being in these islands

could be ‘placed’ in an instant by his clothes, manners and

accent. That is no longer the case. Above all, it is not the

case in the new townships that have developed as a result of

cheap motor cars and the southward shift of industry. The

place to look for the germs of the future England is in light-

industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough,

Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes – everywhere, indeed,

on the outskirts of great towns – the old pattern is gradually

changing into something new. In those vast new

wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the

older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the

country, with its manor-houses and squalid cottages, no

longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it is

the same kind of life that is being lived at diﬀerent levels, in

labour-saving ﬂats or council houses, along the concrete

roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It

is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned

food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion

engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an

intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete

ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people

who are most at home in and most deﬁnitely of the modern

world, the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers,

the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, ﬁlm

producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They

are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class

distinctions are beginning to break down.

This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the

existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people

who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as the

pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar ﬂavour.

The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but

these things are only the rash that accompanies a change.

In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be

deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of

earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or

Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the

hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and

the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet

puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great

disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy,

to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be

pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor,

the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday

camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but

England will still be England, an everlasting animal

stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living

things, having the power to change out of recognition and

yet remain the same.

Part II: Shopkeepers at War

I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin

this second chapter in the added racket of the barrage. The

yellow gun-ﬂashes are lighting the sky, the splinters are

rattling on the housetops, and London Bridge is falling

down, falling down, falling down. Anyone able to read a map

knows that we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we

are beaten or need be beaten. Almost certainly the outcome

depends on our own will. But at this moment we are in the

soup, full fathom ﬁve, and we have been brought there by

follies which we are still committing and which will drown us

altogether if we do not mend our ways quickly.

What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism

– that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines

and transport are owned privately and operated solely for

proﬁt – does not work. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact

had been known to millions of people for years past, but

nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from

below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained

themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point.

Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of

property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all

was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a

physical debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at

any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-

grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is

no way of faking the result.

When the nautical screw was ﬁrst invented, there was a

controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-

steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-

steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who

supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a

distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle-

steamer of equal horsepower stern to stern and set their

engines running. That settled the question once and for all.

And it was something similar that happened on the ﬁelds of

Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that

a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But it is

necessary here to give some kind of deﬁnition to those

much-abused words, Socialism and Fascism.

Socialism is usually deﬁned as ‘common ownership of the

means of production’. Crudely: the State, representing the

whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State

employee. This does not mean that people are stripped of

private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it

does mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines,

ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The

State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that

Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is

certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of

production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist

economy can never consume all that it produces, so that

there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces,

herrings dumped back into the sea etc., etc.) and always

unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has

diﬃculty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is

produced unless someone sees his way to making a proﬁt

out of it.

In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The

State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does

its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the

amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal

purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and

becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in suﬃcient

quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be

available at the moment.

However, it has become clear in the last few years that

‘common ownership of the means of production’ is not in

itself a suﬃcient deﬁnition of Socialism. One must also add

the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be

no more than approximate), political democracy, and

abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education.

These are simply the necessary safeguards against the

reappearance of a class system. Centralized ownership has

very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living

roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control

over the government. ‘The State’ may come to mean no

more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and

privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.

But what then is Fascism?

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of

capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as

will make it eﬃcient for war purposes. Internally, Germany

has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership

has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and

workers, and – this is the important point, and the real

reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize

with Fascism – generally speaking the same people are

capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi

revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply

the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls

investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours,

wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for

practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager.

Everyone is in eﬀect a State employee, though the salaries

vary very greatly. The mere eﬃciency of such a system, the

elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven

years it has built up the most powerful war machine the

world has ever seen.

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably diﬀerent

from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims,

ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings.

It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism

assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi

movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority

of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule

the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognize

any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have ‘proved’ over

and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have

even mooted the idea that non-nordic peoples (such as

ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a

species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its

attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an

exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc. is

simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and

get in return just as little as will keep them from open

rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to

manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with

Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in eﬀect, at setting up a

kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding

rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top

comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German

people, third come the conquered European populations.

Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the ‘semi-

apes’ as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite

openly to slavery.

However horrible this system may seem to us, it works. It

works because it is a planned system geared to a deﬁnite

purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private

interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way.

British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive

system in which private proﬁt is and must be the main

objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in

opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as

often as not totally opposed to those of the State.

All through the critical years British capitalism, with its

immense industrial plant and its unrivalled supply of skilled

labour, was unequal to the strain of preparing for war. To

prepare for war on the modern scale you have got to divert

the greater part of your national income to armaments,

which means cutting down on consumption goods. A

bombing plane, for instance, is equivalent in price to ﬁfty

small motor cars, or eight thousand pairs of silk stockings, or

a million loaves of bread. Clearly you can’t have many

bombing planes without lowering the national standard of

life. It is guns or butter, as Marshal Goering remarked. But in

Chamberlain’s England the transition could not be made.

The rich would not face the necessary taxation, and while

the rich are still visibly rich it is not possible to tax the poor

very heavily either. Moreover, so long as proﬁt was the main

object the manufacturer had no incentive to change over

from consumption goods to armaments. A businessman’s

ﬁrst duty is to his shareholders. Perhaps England needs

tanks, but perhaps it pays better to manufacture motor cars.

To prevent war material from reaching the enemy is common

sense, but to sell in the highest market is a business duty.

Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were

tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell

Germany tin, rubber, copper and shellac – and this in the

clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in

a week or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody

a razor to cut your throat with. But it was ‘good business’.

And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that

Germany was rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his

head knew that war was coming. After Munich it was merely

a question of how soon the war would begin. In September

1939 war broke out. Eight months later it was discovered

that, so far as equipment went, the British army was barely

beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers ﬁghting

their way desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane

against three, with riﬂes against tanks, with bayonets

against tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers

to supply all the oﬃcers. After a year of war the regular army

was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There had even,

previously, been a shortage of uniforms – this in one of the

greatest woollen-goods producing countries in the world!

What had happened was that the whole moneyed class,

unwilling to face a change in their way of life, had shut their

eyes to the nature of Fascism and modern war. And false

optimism was fed to the general public by the gutter press,

which lives on its advertisements and is therefore interested

in keeping trade conditions normal. Year after year the

Beaverbrook press assured us in huge headlines that

THERE

WILL BE NO WAR

, and as late as the beginning of 1939 Lord

Rothermere was describing Hitler as ‘a great gentleman’.

And while England in the moment of disaster proved to be

short of every war material except ships, it is not recorded

that there was any shortage of motor cars, fur coats,

gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings. And dare

anyone pretend that the same tug-of-war between private

proﬁt and public necessity is not still continuing? England

ﬁghts for her life, but business must ﬁght for proﬁts. You can

hardly open a newspaper without seeing the two

contradictory processes happening side by side. On the very

same page you will ﬁnd the Government urging you to save

and the seller of some useless luxury urging you to spend.

Lend to Defend, but Guinness is Good for You. Buy a Spitﬁre,

but also buy Haig and Haig, Pond’s Face Cream and Black

Magic Chocolates.

But one thing gives hope – the visible swing in public

opinion. If we can survive this war, the defeat in Flanders

will turn out to have been one of the great turning-points in

English history. In that spectacular disaster the working

class, the middle class and even a section of the business

community could see the utter rottenness of private

capitalism. Before that the case against capitalism had

never been proved. Russia, the only deﬁnitely Socialist

country, was backward and far away. All criticism broke itself

against the rat-trap faces of bankers and the brassy laughter

of stockbrokers. Socialism? Ha! ha! ha! Where’s the money

to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords of property were ﬁrm in

their seats, and they knew it. But after the French collapse

there came something that could not be laughed away,

something that neither cheque-books nor policemen were

any use against – the bombing. Zweee –

BOOM

! What’s that?

Oh, only a bomb on the Stock Exchange. Zweee –

BOOM

Another acre of somebody’s valuable slum-property gone

west. Hitler will at any rate go down in history as the man

who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its

face. For the ﬁrst time in their lives the comfortable were

uncomfortable, the professional optimists had to admit that

there was something wrong. It was a great step forward.

From that time onwards the ghastly job of trying to convince

artiﬁcially stupeﬁed people that a planned economy might

be better than a free-for-all in which the worst man wins –

that job will never be quite so ghastly again.

The diﬀerence between Socialism and capitalism is not

primarily a diﬀerence of technique. One cannot simply

change from one system to the other as one might install a

piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before,

with the same people in positions of control. Obviously there

is also needed a complete shift of power. New blood, new

men, new ideas – in the true sense of the word, a revolution.

I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity

of England, the patriotism that runs like a connecting thread

through almost all classes. After Dunkirk anyone who had

eyes in his head could see this. But it is absurd to pretend

that the promise of that moment has been fulﬁlled. Almost

certainly the mass of the people are now ready for the vast

changes that are necessary; but those changes have not

even begun to happen.

England is a family with the wrong members in control.

Almost entirely we are governed by the rich, and by people

who step into positions of command by right of birth. Few if

any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of

them are not even fools but as a class they are quite

incapable of leading us to victory. They could not do it, even

if their material interests did not constantly trip them up. As

I pointed out earlier, they have been artiﬁcially stupeﬁed.

Quite apart from anything else, the rule of money sees to it

that we shall be governed largely by the old – that is, by

people utterly unable to grasp what age they are living in or

what enemy they are ﬁghting. Nothing was more desolating

at the beginning of this war than the way in which the whole

of the older generation conspired to pretend that it was the

war of 1914–18 over again. All the old duds were back on

the job, twenty years older, with the skull plainer in their

faces. Ian Hay was cheering up the troops, Belloc was writing

articles on strategy, Maurois doing broadcasts, Bairnsfather

drawing cartoons. It was like a tea-party of ghosts. And that

state of aﬀairs has barely altered. The shock of disaster

brought a few able men like Bevin to the front, but in

general we are still commanded by people who managed to

live through the years 1931–9 without even discovering that

Hitler was dangerous. A generation of the unteachable is

hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

As soon as one considers any problem of this war – and it

does not matter whether it is the widest aspect of strategy

or the tiniest detail of home organization – one sees that the

necessary moves cannot be made while the social structure

of England remains what it is. Inevitably, because of their

position and upbringing, the ruling class are ﬁghting for

their own privileges, which cannot possibly be reconciled

with the public interest. It is a mistake to imagine that war

aims, strategy, propaganda and industrial organization exist

in watertight compartments. All are interconnected. Every

strategic plan, every tactical method, even every weapon

will bear the stamp of the social system that produced it.

The British ruling class are ﬁghting against Hitler, whom

they have always regarded and whom some of them still

regard as their protector against Bolshevism. That does not

mean that they will deliberately sell out; but it does mean

that at every decisive moment they are likely to falter, pull

their punches, do the wrong thing.

Until the Churchill Government called some sort of halt to

the process, they have done the wrong thing with an

unerring instinct ever since 1931. They helped Franco to

overthrow the Spanish Government, although anyone not an

imbecile could have told them that a Fascist Spain would be

hostile to England. They fed Italy with war materials all

through the winter of 1939–40, although it was obvious to

the whole world that the Italians were going to attack us in

the spring. For the sake of a few hundred thousand

dividend-drawers they are turning India from an ally into an

enemy. Moreover, so long as the moneyed classes remain in

control, we cannot develop any but a defensive strategy.

Every victory means a change in the status quo. How can we

drive the Italians out of Abyssinia without rousing echoes

among the coloured peoples of our own Empire? How can we

even smash Hitler without the risk of bringing the German

Socialists and Communists into power? The left-wingers who

wail that ‘this is a capitalist war’ and that ‘British

Imperialism’ is ﬁghting for loot have got their heads screwed

on backwards. The last thing the British moneyed class wish

for is to acquire fresh territory. It would simply be an

embarrassment. Their war aim (both unattainable and

unmentionable) is simply to hang on to what they have got.

Internally, England is still the rich man’s Paradise. All talk

of ‘equality of sacriﬁce’ is nonsense. At the same time as

factory-workers are asked to put up with longer hours,

advertisements for ‘Butler. One in family, eight in staﬀ’ are

appearing in the press. The bombed-out populations of the

East End go hungry and homeless while wealthier victims

simply step into their cars and ﬂee to comfortable country

houses. The Home Guard swells to a million men in a few

weeks, and is deliberately organized from above in such a

way that only people with private incomes can hold

positions of command. Even the rationing system is so

arranged that it hits the poor all the time, while people with

over £2,000 a year are practically unaﬀected by it.

Everywhere privilege is squandering good will. In such

circumstances even propaganda becomes almost

impossible. As attempts to stir up patriotic feeling, the red

posters issued by the Chamberlain Government at the

beginning of the war broke all depth-records. Yet they could

not have been much other than they were, for how could

Chamberlain and his followers take the risk of rousing strong

popular feeling against Fascism? Anyone who was genuinely

hostile to Fascism must also be opposed to Chamberlain

himself and to all the others who had helped Hitler into

power. So also with external propaganda. In all Lord Halifax’s

speeches there is not one concrete proposal for which a

single inhabitant of Europe would risk the top joint of his

little ﬁnger. For what war aim can Halifax, or anyone like

him, conceivably have, except to put the clock back to

1933?

It is only by revolution that the native genius of the

English people can be set free. Revolution does not mean

red ﬂags and street ﬁghting, it means a fundamental shift of

power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is

largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the

dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who

grasp what changes are needed and are capable of carrying

them through are not conﬁned to any one class, though it is

true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among

them. What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary

people against ineﬃciency, class privilege and the rule of

the old. It is not primarily a question of change of

government. British governments do, broadly speaking,

represent the will of the people, and if we alter our structure

from below we shall get the government we need.

Ambassadors, generals, oﬃcials and colonial adminstrators

who are senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous than

Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in

public. Right through our national life we have got to ﬁght

against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted

public-schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent

mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest individuals

among them, we have got to break the grip of the moneyed

class as a whole. England has got to assume its real shape.

The England that is only just beneath the surface, in the

factories and the newspaper oﬃces, in the aeroplanes and

the submarines, has got to take charge of its own destiny.

In the short run, equality of sacriﬁce, ‘war-Communism’, is

even more important than radical economic changes. It is

very necessary that industry should be nationalized, but it is

more urgently necessary that such monstrosities as butlers

and ‘private incomes’ should disappear forthwith. Almost

certainly the main reason why the Spanish Republic could

keep up the ﬁght for two and a half years against impossible

odds was that there were no gross contrasts of wealth. The

people suﬀered horribly, but they all suﬀered alike. When

the private soldier had not a cigarette, the general had not

one either. Given equality of sacriﬁce, the morale of a

country like England would probably be unbreakable. But at

present we have nothing to appeal to except traditional

patriotism, which is deeper here than elsewhere, but is not

necessarily bottomless. At some point or another you have

got to deal with the man who says ‘I should be no worse oﬀ

under Hitler.’ But what answer can you give him – that is,

what answer that you can expect him to listen to – while

common soldiers risk their lives for two and sixpence a day,

and fat women ride about in Rolls-Royce cars, nursing

pekineses?

It is quite likely that this war will last three years. It will

mean cruel overwork, cold dull winters, uninteresting food,

lack of amusements, prolonged bombing. It cannot but lower

the general standard of living, because the essential act of

war is to manufacture armaments instead of consumable

goods. The working class will have to suﬀer terrible things.

And they will suﬀer them, almost indeﬁnitely, provided that

they know what they are ﬁghting for. They are not cowards,

and they are not internationally minded. They can stand all

that the Spanish workers stood, and more. But they will want

some kind of proof that a better life is ahead for themselves

and their children. The one sure earnest of that is that when

they are taxed and overworked they shall see that the rich

are being hit even harder. And if the rich squeal audibly, so

much the better.

We can bring these things about, if we really want to. It is

not true that public opinion has no power in England. It

never makes itself heard without achieving something; it

has been responsible for most of the changes for the better

during the past six months. But we have moved with glacier-

like slowness, and we have learned only from disasters. It

took the fall of Paris to get rid of Chamberlain and the

unnecessary suﬀering of scores of thousands of people in

the East End to get rid or partially rid of Sir John Anderson.

It is not worth losing a battle in order to bury a corpse. For

we are ﬁghting against swift evil intelligences, and time

presses, and

history to the defeated

May say Alas! but cannot alter or pardon.

During the last six months there has been much talk of ‘the

Fifth Column’. From time to time obscure lunatics have been

jailed for making speeches in favour of Hitler, and large

numbers of German refugees have been interned, a thing

which has almost certainly done us great harm in Europe. It

is of course obvious that the idea of a large, organized army

of Fifth Columnists suddenly appearing on the streets with

weapons in their hands, as in Holland and Belgium, is

ridiculous. Never- theless a Fifth Column danger does exist.

One can only consider it if one also considers in what way

England might be defeated.

It does not seem probable that air bombing can settle a

major war. England might well be invaded and conquered,

but the invasion would be a dangerous gamble, and if it

happened and failed it would probably leave us more united

and less Blimp-ridden than before. Moreover, if England

were overrun by foreign troops the English people would

know that they had been beaten and would continue the

struggle. It is doubtful whether they could be held down

permanently, or whether Hitler wishes to keep an army of a

million men stationed in these islands. A government of—,—

and—(you can ﬁll in the names) would suit him better. The

English can probably not be bullied into surrender, but they

might quite easily be bored, cajoled or cheated into it,

provided that, as at Munich, they did not know that they

were surrendering. It could happen most easily when the

war seemed to be going well rather than badly. The

threatening tone of so much of the German and Italian

propaganda is a psychological mistake. It only gets home on

intellectuals. With the general public the proper approach

would be ‘Let’s call it a draw’. It is when a peace-oﬀer along

those lines is made that the pro-Fascists will raise their

voices.

But who are the pro-Fascists? The idea of a Hitler victory

appeals to the very rich, to the Communists, to Mosley’s

followers, to the paciﬁsts, and to certain sections among the

Catholics. Also, if things went badly enough on the Home

Front, the whole of the poorer section of the working class

might swing round to a position that was defeatist though

not actively pro-Hitler.

In this motley list one can see the daring of German

propaganda, its willingness to oﬀer everything to everybody.

But the various pro-Fascist forces are not consciously acting

together, and they operate in diﬀerent ways.

The Communists must certainly be regarded as pro-Hitler,

and are bound to remain so unless Russian policy changes,

but they have not very much inﬂuence. Mosley’s Blackshirts,

though now lying very low, are a more serious danger,

because of the footing they probably possess in the armed

forces. Still, even in its palmiest days Mosley’s following can

hardly have numbered 50,000. Paciﬁsm is a psychological

curiosity rather than a political movement. Some of the

extremer paciﬁsts, starting out with a complete renunciation

of violence, have ended by warmly championing Hitler and

even toying with antisemitism. This is interesting, but it is

not important. ‘Pure’ paciﬁsm, which is a by-product of naval

power, can only appeal to people in very sheltered positions.

Moreover, being negative and irresponsible, it does not

inspire much devotion. Of the membership of the Peace

Pledge Union, less than ﬁfteen per cent even pay their

annual subscriptions. None of these bodies of people,

paciﬁsts, Communists or Blackshirts, could bring a large-

scale stop-the-war movement into being by their own

eﬀorts. But they might help to make things very much easier

for a treacherous government negotiating surrender. Like the

French Communists, they might become the half-conscious

agents of millionaires.

The real danger is from above. One ought not to pay any

attention to Hitler’s recent line of talk about being the friend

of the poor man, the enemy of plutocracy, etc. etc. Hitler’s

real self is in Mein Kampf, and in his actions. He has never

persecuted the rich, except when they were Jews or when

they tried actively to oppose him. He stands for a

centralized economy which robs the capitalist of most of his

power but leaves the structure of society much as before.

The State controls industry, but there are still rich and poor,

masters and men. Therefore, as against genuine Socialism,

the moneyed class have always been on his side. This was

crystal clear at the time of the Spanish Civil War, and clear

again at the time when France surrendered. Hitler’s puppet

government are not working men, but a gang of bankers,

gaga generals and corrupt right-wing politicians.

That kind of spectacular, conscious treachery is less likely

to succeed in England, indeed is far less likely even to be

tried. Nevertheless, to many payers of supertax this war is

simply an insane family squabble which ought to be stopped

at all costs. One need not doubt that a ‘peace’ movement is

on foot somewhere in high places; probably a shadow

Cabinet has already been formed. These people will get their

chance not in the moment of defeat but in some stagnant

period when boredom is reinforced by discontent. They will

not talk about surrender, only about peace; and doubtless

they will persuade themselves, and perhaps other people,

that they are acting for the best. An army of unemployed led

by millionaires quoting the Sermon on the Mount – that is

our danger. But it cannot arise when we have once

introduced a reasonable degree of social justice. The lady in

the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a ﬂeet

of Goering’s bombing planes.

Part III: The English Revolution

The English revolution started several years ago, and it

began to gather momentum when the troops came back

from Dunkirk. Like all else in England, it happens in a

sleepy, unwilling way, but it is happening. The war has

speeded it up, but it has also increased, and desperately,

the necessity for speed.

Progress and reaction are ceasing to have anything to do

with party labels. If one wishes to name a particular

moment, one can say that the old distinction between Right

and Left broke down when Picture Post was ﬁrst published.

What are the politics of Picture Post? Or of Cavalcade, or

Priestley’s broadcasts, or the leading articles in the Evening

Standard? None of the old classiﬁcations will ﬁt them. They

merely point to the existence of multitudes of unlabelled

people who have grasped within the last year or two that

something is wrong. But since a classless, ownerless society

is generally spoken of as ‘Socialism’, we can give that name

to the society towards which we are now moving. The war

and the revolution are inseparable. We cannot establish

anything that a western nation would regard as Socialism

without defeating Hitler; on the other hand we cannot

defeat Hitler while we remain economically and socially in

the nineteenth century. The past is ﬁghting the future and

we have two years, a year, possibly only a few months, to

see to it that the future wins.

We cannot look to this or to any similar government to put

through the necessary changes of its own accord. The

initiative will have to come from below. That means that

there will have to arise something that has never existed in

England, a Socialist movement that actually has the mass of

the people behind it. But one must start by recognizing why

it is that English Socialism has failed.

In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever

seriously mattered, the Labour Party. It has never been able

to achieve any major change, because except in purely

domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely

independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the

trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving

working conditions. This meant that all through the critical

years it was directly interested in the prosperity of British

capitalism. In particular it was interested in the maintenance

of the British Empire, for the wealth of England was drawn

largely from Asia and Africa. The standard of living of the

trade-union workers, whom the Labour Party represented,

depended indirectly on the sweating of Indian coolies. At the

same time the Labour Party was a Socialist party, using

Socialist phraseology, thinking in terms of an old-fashioned

anti-imperialism and more or less pledged to make

restitution to the coloured races. It had to stand for the

‘independence’ of India, just as it had to stand for

disarmament and ‘progress’ generally. Nevertheless

everyone was aware that this was nonsense. In the age of

the tank and the bombing plane, backward agricultural

countries like India and the African colonies can no more be

independent than can a cat or a dog. Had any Labour

government come into oﬃce with a clear majority and then

proceeded to grant India anything that could truly be called

independence, India would simply have been absorbed by

Japan, or divided between Japan and Russia.

To a Labour government in power, three imperial policies

would have been open. One was to continue administering

the Empire exactly as before, which meant dropping all

pretensions to Socialism. Another was to set the subject

peoples ‘free’, which meant in practice handing them over to

Japan, Italy and other predatory powers, and incidentally

causing a catastrophic drop in the British standard of living.

The third was to develop a positive imperial policy, and aim

at transforming the Empire into a federation of Socialist

states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet

Republics. But the Labour Party’s history and background

made this impossible. It was a party of the trade unions,

hopelessly parochial in outlook, with little interest in

imperial aﬀairs and no contacts among the men who

actually held the Empire together. It would have had to hand

the administration of India and Africa and the whole job of

imperial defence to men drawn from a diﬀerent class and

traditionally hostile to Socialism. Overshadowing everything

was the doubt whether a Labour government which meant

business could make itself obeyed. For all the size of its

following, the Labour Party had no footing in the navy, little

or none in the army or air force, none whatever in the

Colonial Services, and not even a sure footing in the Home

Civil Service. In England its position was strong but not

unchallengeable, and outside England all the points were in

the hands of its enemies. Once in power, the same dilemma

would always have faced it: carry out your promises, and

risk revolt, or continue with the same policy as the

Conservatives, and stop talking about Socialism. The Labour

leaders never found a solution, and from 1935 onwards it

was very doubtful whether they had any wish to take oﬃce.

They had degenerated into a Permanent Opposition.

Outside the Labour Party there existed several extremist

parties, of whom the Communists were the strongest. The

Communists had considerable inﬂuence in the Labour Party

in the years 1920–26 and 1935–9. Their chief importance,

and that of the whole left wing of the Labour movement, was

the part they played in alienating the middle classes from

Socialism.

The history of the past seven years has made it perfectly

clear that Communism has no chance in western Europe.

The appeal of Fascism is enormously greater. In one country

after another the Communists have been rooted out by their

more up-to-date enemies, the Nazis. In the English-speaking

countries they never had a serious footing. The creed they

were spreading could appeal only to a rather rare type of

person, found chieﬂy in the middle-class intelligentsia, the

type who has ceased to love his own country but still feels

the need of patriotism, and therefore develops patriotic

sentiments towards Russia. By 1940, after working for

twenty years and spending a great deal of money, the

British Communists had barely 20,000 members, actually a

smaller number than they had started out with in 1920. The

other Marxist parties were of even less importance. They had

not the Russian money and prestige behind them, and even

more than the Communists they were tied to the nineteenth-

century doctrine of the class war. They continued year after

year to preach this out-of-date gospel, and never drew any

inference from the fact that it got them no followers.

Nor did any strong native Fascist movement grow up.

Material conditions were not bad enough, and no leader who

could be taken seriously was forthcoming. One would have

had to look a long time to ﬁnd a man more barren of ideas

than Sir Oswald Mosley. He was as hollow as a jug. Even the

elementary fact that Fascism must not oﬀend national

sentiment had escaped him. His entire movement was

imitated slavishly from abroad, the uniform and the party

programme from Italy and the salute from Germany, with the

Jew-baiting tacked on as an afterthought, Mosley having

actually started his movement with Jews among his most

prominent followers. A man of the stamp of Bottomley

Lloyd George could perhaps have brought a real British

Fascist movement into existence. But such leaders only

appear when the psychological need for them exists.

After twenty years of stagnation and unemployment, the

entire English Socialist movement was unable to produce a

version of Socialism which the mass of the people could

even ﬁnd desirable. The Labour Party stood for a timid

reformism, the Marxists were looking at the modern world

through nineteenth-century spectacles. Both ignored

agriculture and imperial problems, and both antagonized

the middle classes. The suﬀocating stupidity of left-wing

propaganda had frightened away whole classes of necessary

people, factory managers, airmen, naval oﬃcers, farmers,

white-collar workers, shopkeepers, policemen. All of these

people had been taught to think of Socialism as something

which menaced their livelihood, or as something seditious,

alien, ‘anti-British’ as they would have called it. Only the

intellectuals, the least useful section of the middle class,

gravitated towards the movement.

A Socialist Party which genuinely wished to achieve

anything would have started by facing several facts which to

this day are considered unmentionable in left-wing circles. It

would have recognized that England is more united than

most countries, that the British workers have a great deal to

lose besides their chains, and that the diﬀerences in outlook

and habits between class and class are rapidly diminishing.

In general, it would have recognized that the old-fashioned

‘proletarian revolution’ is an impossibility. But all through

the between-war years no Socialist programme that was

both revolutionary and workable ever appeared; basically,

no doubt, because no one genuinely wanted any major

change to happen. The Labour leaders wanted to go on and

on, drawing their salaries and periodically swapping jobs

with the Conservatives. The Communists wanted to go on

and on, suﬀering a comfortable martyrdom, meeting with

endless defeats and afterwards putting the blame on other

people. The left-wing intelligentsia wanted to go on and on,

sniggering at the Blimps, sapping away at middle-class

morale, but still keeping their favoured position as hangers-

on of the dividend-drawers. Labour Party politics had

become a variant of Conservatism, ‘revolutionary’ politics

had become a game of make-believe.

Now, however, the circumstances have changed, the

drowsy years have ended. Being a Socialist no longer means

kicking theoretically against a system which in practice you

are fairly well satisﬁed with. This time our predicament is

real. It is ‘the Philistines be upon thee, Samson’. We have

got to make our words take physical shape, or perish. We

know very well that with its present social structure England

cannot survive, and we have got to make other people see

that fact and act upon it. We cannot win the war without

introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without

winning the war. At such a time it is possible, as it was not in

the peaceful years, to be both revolutionary and realistic. A

Socialist movement which can swing the mass of the people

behind it, drive the pro-Fascists out of positions of control,

wipe out the grosser injustices and let the working class see

that they have something to ﬁght for, win over the middle

classes instead of antagonizing them, produce a workable

imperial policy instead of a mixture of humbug and

Utopianism, bring patriotism and intelligence into

partnership – for the ﬁrst time, a movement of such a kind

becomes possible.

The fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a text-

book word into a realizable policy.

The ineﬃciency of private capitalism has been proved all

over Europe. Its injustice has been proved in the East End of

London. Patriotism, against which the Socialists fought so

long, has become a tremendous lever in their hands. People

who at any other time would cling like glue to their

miserable scraps of privilege, will surrender them fast

enough when their country is in danger. War is the greatest

of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out

minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all,

war brings it home to the individual. That he is not

altogether an individual. It is only because they are aware of

this that men will die on the ﬁeld of battle. At this moment it

is not so much a question of surrendering leisure, comfort,

economic liberty, social prestige. There are very few people

in England who really want to see their country conquered

by Germany. If it can be made clear that defeating Hitler

means wiping out class privilege, the great mass of middling

people, the £6 a week to £2,000 a year class, will probably

be on our side. These people are quite indispensable,

because they include most of the technical experts.

Obviously the snobbishness and political ignorance of

people like airmen and naval oﬃcers will be a very great

diﬃculty. But without those airmen, destroyer commanders,

etc. etc. we could not survive for a week. The only approach

to them is through their patriotism. An intelligent Socialist

movement will use their patriotism, instead of merely

insulting it, as hitherto.

But do I mean that there will be no opposition? Of course

not. It would be childish to expect anything of the kind.

There will be a bitter political struggle, and there will be

unconscious and half-conscious sabotage everywhere. At

some point or other it may be necessary to use violence. It is

easy to imagine a pro-Fascist rebellion breaking out in, for

instance, India. We shall have to ﬁght against bribery,

ignorance and snobbery. The bankers and the larger

businessmen, the landowners and dividend-drawers, the

oﬃcials with their prehensile bottoms, will obstruct for all

they are worth. Even the middle classes will writhe when

their accustomed way of life is menaced. But just because

the English sense of national unity has never disintegrated,

because patriotism is ﬁnally stronger than class-hatred, the

chances are that the will of the majority will prevail. It is no

use imagining that one can make fundamental changes

without causing a split in the nation; but the treacherous

minority will be far smaller in time of war than it would be at

any other time.

The swing of opinion is visibly happening, but it cannot be

counted on to happen fast enough of its own accord. This

war is a race between the consolidation of Hitler’s empire

and the growth of democratic consciousness. Everywhere in

England you can see a ding-dong battle ranging to and fro –

in Parliament and in the Government, in the factories and

the armed forces, in the pubs and the air-raid shelters, in the

newspapers and on the radio. Every day there are tiny

defeats, tiny victories. Morrison

for Home Secretary – a few

yards forward. Priestley

†

shoved oﬀ the air – a few yards

back. It is a struggle between the groping and the

unteachable, between the young and the old, between the

living and the dead. But it is very necessary that the

discontent which undoubtedly exists should take a

purposeful and not merely obstructive form. It is time for the

people o deﬁne their war aims. What is wanted is a simple,

concrete programme of action, which can be given all

possible publicity, and round which public opinion can

group itself.

I suggest that the following six-point programme is the

kind of thing we need. The ﬁrst three points deal with

England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire

and the world:

1. Nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and

major industries.

2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest

tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by

more than ten to one.

3. Reform of the educational system along democratic

lines.

4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to

secede when the war is over.

5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the

coloured peoples are to be represented.

6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and

all other victims of the Fascist powers.

The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable.

It aims quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary

war and England into a Socialist democracy. I have

deliberately included in it nothing that the simplest person

could not understand and see the reason for. In the form in

which I have put it, it could be printed on the front page of

the Daily Mirror. But for the purposes of this book a certain

amount of ampliﬁcation is needed.

1. Nationalization. One can ‘nationalize’ industry by the

stroke of a pen, but the actual process is slow and

complicated. What is needed is that the ownership of all

major industry shall be formally vested in the State,

representing the common people. Once that is done it

becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere owners who

live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the

possession of title-deeds and share certiﬁcates. State-

ownership implies, therefore, that nobody shall live without

working, How sudden a change in the conduct of industry it

implies is less certain. In a country like England we cannot

rip down the whole structure and build again from the

bottom, least of all in time of war. Inevitably the majority of

industrial concerns will continue with much the same

personnel as before, the one-time owners or managing

directors carrying on with their jobs as State employees.

There is reason to think that many of the smaller capitalists

would actually welcome some such arrangement. The

resistance will come from the big capitalists, the bankers,

the landlords and the idle rich, roughly speaking the class

with over £2,000 a year – and even if one counts in all their

dependants there are not more than half a million of these

people in England. Nationalization of agricultural land

implies cutting out the landlord and the tithe drawer, but

not necessarily interfering with the farmer. It is diﬃcult to

imagine any reorganization of English agriculture that would

not retain most of the existing farms as units, at any rate at

the beginning. The farmer, when he is competent, will

continue as a salaried manager. He is virtually that already,

with the added disadvantage of having to make a proﬁt and

being permanently in debt to the bank. With certain kinds of

petty trading, and even the small-scale ownership of land,

the State will probably not interfere at all. It would be a

great mistake to start by victimizing the smallholder class,

for instance. These people are necessary, on the whole they

are competent, and the amount of work they do depends on

the feeling that they are ‘their own masters’. But the State

will certainly impose an upward limit to the ownership of

land (probably ﬁfteen acres at the very most), and will never

permit any ownership of land in town areas.

From the moment that all productive goods have been

declared the property of the State, the common people will

feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State is themselves.

They will be ready then to endure the sacriﬁces that are

ahead of us, war or no war. And even if the face of England

hardly seems to change, on the day that our main industries

are formally nationalized the dominance of a single class will

have been broken. From then onwards the emphasis will be

shifted from ownership to management, from privilege to

competence. It is quite possible that State-ownership will in

itself bring about less social change than will be forced upon

us by the common hardships of war. But it is the necessary

ﬁrst step without which any real reconstruction is

impossible.

2. Incomes. Limitation of incomes implies the ﬁxing of a

minimum wage, which implies a managed internal currency

based simply on the amount of consumption goods

available. And this again implies a stricter rationing scheme

than is now in operation. It is no use at this stage of the

world’s history to suggest that all human beings should

have exactly equal incomes. It has been shown over and

over again that without some kind of money reward there is

no incentive to undertake certain jobs. On the other hand

the money reward need not be very large. In practice it is

impossible that earnings should be limited quite as rigidly as

I have suggested. There will always be anomalies and

evasions. But there is no reason why ten to one should not

be the maximum normal variation. And within those limits

some sense of equality is possible. A man with £3 a week

and a man with £1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow

creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers

on the Embankment benches cannot.

3. Education. In wartime, educational reform must

necessarily be promise rather than performance. At the

moment we are not in a position to raise the school-leaving

age or increase the teaching staﬀs of the elementary

schools. But there are certain immediate steps that we could

take towards a democratic educational system. We could

start by abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and

the older universities and ﬂooding them with State-aided

pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability. At present,

public-school education is partly a training in class prejudice

and partly a sort of tax that the middle classes pay to the

upper class in return for the right to enter certain

professions. It is true that that state of aﬀairs is altering. The

middle classes have begun to rebel against the

expensiveness of education, and the war will bankrupt the

majority of the public schools if it continues for another year

or two. The evacuation is also producing certain minor

changes. But there is a danger that some of the older

schools, which will be able to weather the ﬁnancial storm

longest, will survive in some form or another as festering

centres of snobbery. As for the 10,000 ‘private’ schools that

England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve

nothing except suppression. They are simply commercial

undertakings, and in many cases their educational level is

actually lower than that of the elementary schools. They

merely exist because of a widespread idea that there is

something disgraceful in being educated by the public

authorities. The State could quell this idea by declaring

itself responsible for all education, even if at the start this

were no more than a gesture. We need gestures as well as

actions. It is all too obvious that our talk of ‘defending

democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth

that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the

education it deserves.

4. India. What we must oﬀer India is not ‘freedom’, which,

as I have said earlier, is impossible, but alliance, partnership

– in a word, equality. But we must also tell the Indians that

they are free to secede, if they want to. Without that there

can be no equality of partnership, and our claim to be

defending the coloured peoples against Fascism will never

be believed. But it is a mistake to imagine that if the Indians

were free to cut themselves adrift they would immediately

do so. When a British government oﬀers them unconditional

independence, they will refuse it. For as soon as they have

the power to secede the chief reasons for doing so will have

disappeared.

A complete severance of the two countries would be a

disaster for India no less than for England. Intelligent

Indians know this. As things are at present, India not only

cannot defend itself, it is hardly even capable of feeding

itself. The whole administration of the country depends on a

framework of experts (engineers, forest oﬃcers, railwaymen,

soldiers, doctors) who are predominantly English and could

not be replaced within ﬁve or ten years. Moreover, English is

the chief lingua franca and nearly the whole of the Indian

intelligentsia is deeply anglicized. Any transference to

foreign rule – for if the British marched out of India the

Japanese and other powers would immediately march in –

would mean an immense dislocation. Neither the Japanese,

the Russians, the Germans nor the Italians would be capable

of administering India even at the low level of eﬃciency that

is attained by the British. They do not possess the necessary

supplies of technical experts or the knowledge of languages

and local conditions, and they probably could not win the

conﬁdence of indispensable go-betweens such as the

Eurasians. If India were simply ‘liberated’, i.e. deprived of

British military protection, the ﬁrst result would be a fresh

foreign conquest, and the second a series of enormous

famines which would kill millions of people within a few

years.

What India needs is the power to work out its own

constitution without British interference, but in some kind of

partnership that ensures its military protection and technical

advice. This is unthinkable until there is a Socialist

government in England. For at least eighty years England

has artiﬁcially prevented the development of India, partly

from fear of trade competition if Indian industries were too

highly developed, partly because backward peoples are

more easily governed than civilized ones. It is a

commonplace that the average Indian suﬀers far more from

his own countrymen than from the British. The petty Indian

capitalist exploits the town worker with the utmost

ruthlessness, the peasant lives from birth to death in the

grip of the money-lender. But all this is an indirect result of

the British rule, which aims half-consciously at keeping India

as backward as possible. The classes most loyal to Britain

are the princes, the landowners and the business community

– in general, the reactionary classes who are doing fairly well

out of the status quo. The moment that England ceased to

stand towards India in the relation of an exploiter, the

balance of forces would be altered. No need then for the

British to ﬂatter the ridiculous Indian princes, with their

gilded elephants and cardboard armies, to prevent the

growth of the Indian trade unions, to play oﬀ Moslem against

Hindu, to protect the worthless life of the money-lender, to

receive the salaams of toadying minor oﬃcials, to prefer the

half-barbarous Gurkha to the educated Bengali. Once check

that stream of dividends that ﬂows from the bodies of Indian

coolies to the banking accounts of old ladies in Cheltenham,

and the whole sahib–native nexus, with its haughty

ignorance on one side and envy and servility on the other,

can come to an end. Englishmen and Indians can work side

by side for the development of India, and for the training of

Indians in all the arts which, so far, they have been

systematically prevented from learning. How many of the

existing British personnel in India, commercial or oﬃcial,

would fall in with such an arrangement – which would mean

ceasing once and for all to be ‘sahibs’ – is a diﬀerent

question. But, broadly speaking, more is to be hoped from

the younger men and from those oﬃcials (civil engineers,

forestry and agriculture experts, doctors, educationists) who

have been scientiﬁcally educated. The higher oﬃcials, the

provincial governors, commissioners, judges, etc. are

hopeless; but they are also the most easily replaceable.

That, roughly, is what would be meant by Dominion status

if it were oﬀered to India by a Socialist government. It is an

oﬀer of partnership on equal terms until such time as the

world has ceased to be ruled by bombing planes. But we

must add to it the unconditional right to secede. It is the

only way of proving that we mean what we say. And what

applies to India applies, mutatis mutandis, to Burma, Malaya

and most of our African possessions.

5 and 6 explain themselves. They are the necessary

preliminary to any claim that we are ﬁghting this war for the

protection of peaceful peoples against Fascist aggression.

Is it impossibly hopeful to think that such a policy as this

could get a following in England? A year ago, even six

months ago, it would have been, but not now. Moreover –

and this is the peculiar opportunity of this moment – it could

be given the necessary publicity. There is now a

considerable weekly press, with a circulation of millions,

which would be ready to popularize – if not exactly the

programme I have sketched above, at any rate some policy

along those lines. There are even three or four daily papers

which would be prepared to give it a sympathetic hearing.

That is the distance we have travelled in the last six months.

But is such a policy realizable? That depends entirely on

ourselves.

Some of the points I have suggested are of the kind that

could be carried out immediately, others would take years or

decades and even then would not be perfectly achieved. No

political programme is ever carried out in its entirety. But

what matters is that that or something like it should be our

declared policy. It is always the direction that counts. It is of

course quite hopeless to expect the present Government to

pledge itself to any policy that implies turning this war into

a revolutionary war. It is at best a government of

compromise, with Churchill riding two horses like a circus

acrobat. Before such measures as limitation of incomes

become even thinkable, there will have to be a complete

shift of power away from the old ruling class. If during this

winter the war settles into another stagnant period, we

ought in my opinion to agitate for a General Election, a

thing which the Tory Party machine will make frantic eﬀorts

to prevent. But even without an election we can get the

government we want, provided that we want it urgently

enough. A real shove from below will accomplish it. As to

who will be in that government when it comes, I make no

guess. I only know that the right men will be there when the

people really want them, for it is movements that make

leaders and not leaders movements.

Within a year, perhaps even within six months, if we are

still unconquered, we shall see the rise of something that

has never existed before, a speciﬁcally English Socialist

movement. Hitherto there has been only the Labour Party,

which was the creation of the working class but did not aim

at any fundamental change, and Marxism, which was a

German theory interpreted by Russians and unsuccessfully

transplanted to England. There was nothing that really

touched the heart of the English people. Throughout its

entire history the English Socialist movement has never

produced a song with a catchy tune – nothing like La

Marseillaise or La Cucuracha, for instance. When a Socialist

movement native to England appears, the Marxists, like all

others with a vested interest in the past, will be its bitter

enemies. Inevitably they will denounce it as ‘Fascism’.

Already it is customary among the more soft-boiled

intellectuals of the Left to declare that if we ﬁght against the

Nazis we shall ‘go Nazi’ ourselves. They might almost

equally well say that if we ﬁght Negroes we shall turn black.

To ‘go Nazi’ we should have to have the history of Germany

behind us. Nations do not escape from their past merely by

making a revolution. An English Socialist government will

transform the nation from top to bottom, but it will still bear

all over it the unmistakable marks of our own civilization,

the peculiar civilization which I discussed earlier in this

book.

It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish

the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the

Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends

everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horse-hair wig and

the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons. It will

not set up any explicit class dictatorship. It will group itself

round the old Labour Party and its mass following will be in

the trade unions, but it will draw into it most of the middle

class and many of the younger sons of the bourgeoisie. Most

of its directing brains will come from the new indeterminate

class of skilled workers, technical experts, airmen, scientists,

architects and journalists, the people who feel at home in

the radio and ferro-concrete age. But it will never lose touch

with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that

is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them

a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit

them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but

it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word.

Political parties with diﬀerent names will still exist,

revolutionary sects will still be publishing their newspapers

and making as little impression as ever. It will disestablish

the Church, but will not persecute religion. It will retain a

vague reverence for the Christian moral code, and from time

to time will refer to England as ‘a Christian country’. The

Catholic Church will war against it, but the Nonconformist

sects and the bulk of the Anglican Church will be able to

come to terms with it. It will show a power of assimilating the

past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make

them doubt whether any revolution has happened.

But all the same it will have done the essential thing. It

will have nationalized industry, scaled down incomes, set up

a classless educational system. Its real nature will be

apparent from the hatred which the surviving rich men of

the world will feel for it. It will aim not at disintegrating the

Empire but at turning it into a federation of Socialist states,

freed not so much from the British ﬂag as from the money-

lender, the dividend-drawer and the wooden-headed British

oﬃcial. Its war strategy will be totally diﬀerent from that of

any property-ruled state, because it will not be afraid of the

revolutionary aftereﬀects when any existing régime is

brought down. It will not have the smallest scruple about

attacking hostile neutrals or stirring up native rebellion in

enemy colonies. It will ﬁght in such a way that even if it is

beaten its memory will be dangerous to the victor, as the

memory of the French Revolution was dangerous to

Metternich’s Europe. The dictators will fear it as they could

not fear the existing British régime, even if its military

strength were ten times what it is.

But at this moment, when the drowsy life of England has

barely altered, and the oﬀensive contrast of wealth and

poverty still exists everywhere, even amid the bombs, why

do I dare to say that all these things ‘will’ happen?

Because the time has come when one can predict the

future in terms of an ‘either – or’. Either we turn this war into

a revolutionary war (I do not say that our policy will be

exactly what I have indicated above – merely that it will be

along those general lines) or we lose it, and much more

besides. Quite soon it will be possible to say deﬁnitely that

our feet are set upon one path or the other. But at any rate it

is certain that with our present social structure we cannot

win. Our real forces, physical, moral or intellectual, cannot

be mobilized.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually

the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to

something that is always changing and yet is felt to be

mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and

the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an

internationalist.

During the past twenty years the negative, fainéant

outlook which has been fashionable among English left-

wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and

physical courage, the persistent eﬀort to chip away English

morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it

attitude to life, has done nothing but harm. It would have

been harmful even if we had been living in the squashy

League of Nations universe that these people imagined. In

an age of fuehrers and bombing planes it was a disaster.

However little we may like it, toughness is the price of

survival. A nation trained to think hedonistically cannot

survive amid peoples who work like slaves and breed like

rabbits, and whose chief national industry is war. English

Socialists of nearly all colours have wanted to make a stand

against Fascism, but at the same time they have aimed at

making their own countrymen unwarlike. They have failed,

because in England traditional loyalties are stronger than

new ones. But in spite of all the ‘anti-Fascist’ heroics of the

left-wing press, what chance should we have stood when the

real struggle with Fascism came, if the average Englishman

had been the kind of creature that the New Statesman, the

Daily Worker or even the News Chronicle wished to make

him?

Up to 1935 virtually all English left-wingers were vaguely

paciﬁst. After 1935 the more vocal of them ﬂung themselves

eagerly into the Popular Front movement, which was simply

an evasion of the whole problem posed by Fascism. It set out

to be ‘anti-Fascist’ in a purely negative way – ‘against’

Fascism without being ‘for’ any discoverable policy – and

underneath it lay the ﬂabby idea that when the time came

the Russians would do our ﬁghting for us. It is astonishing

how this illusion fails to die. Every week sees its spate of

letters to the press, pointing out that if we had a

government with no Tories in it the Russians could hardly

avoid coming round to our side. Or we are to publish high-

sounding war aims (vide books like Unser Kampf, A Hundred

Million Allies – If We Choose, etc.), whereupon the European

populations will infallibly rise on our behalf. It is the same

idea all the time – look abroad for your inspiration, get

someone else to do your ﬁghting for you. Underneath it lies

the frightful inferiority complex of the English intellectual,

the belief that the English are no longer a martial race, no

longer capable of enduring.

In truth there is no reason to think that anyone will do our

ﬁghting for us yet awhile, except the Chinese, who have

been doing it for three years already. The Russians may be

driven to ﬁght on our side by the fact of a direct attack, but

they have made it clear enough that they will not stand up

to the German army if there is any way of avoiding it. In any

case they are not likely to be attracted by the spectacle of a

left-wing government in England. The present Russian

régime must almost certainly be hostile to any revolution in

the West. The subject peoples of Europe will rebel when

Hitler begins to totter, but not earlier. Our potential allies are

not the Europeans but on the one hand the Americans, who

will need a year to mobilize their resources even if Big

Business can be brought to heel, and on the other hand the

coloured peoples, who cannot be even sentimentally on our

side till our own revolution has started. For a long time, a

year, two years, possibly three years, England has got to be

the shock-absorber of the world. We have got to face

bombing, overwork, inﬂuenza, boredom and treacherous

peace oﬀers. Manifestly it is a time to stiﬀen morale, not to

weaken it. Instead of taking the mechanically anti-British

attitude which is usual on the Left, it is better to consider

what the world would really be like if the English-speaking

culture perished. For it is childish to suppose that the other

English-speaking countries, even the USA, will be unaﬀected

if Britain is conquered.

Lord Halifax, and all his tribe, believe that when the war is

over things will be exactly as they were before. Back to the

crazy pavement of Versailles, back to ‘democracy’, i.e.

capitalism, back to dole queues and the Rolls-Royce cars,

back to the grey top hats and the sponge-bag trousers, in

saecula saeculorum. It is of course obvious that nothing of

the kind is going to happen. A feeble imitation of it might

just possibly happen in the case of a negotiated peace, but

only for a short while. Laissez-faire capitalism is dead. The

choice lies between the kind of collective society that Hitler

will set up and the kind that can arise if he is defeated.

If Hitler wins this war he will consolidate his rule over

Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and if his armies have

not been too greatly exhausted beforehand, he will wrench

vast territories from Soviet Russia. He will set up a graded

caste-society in which the German Herrenvolk (‘master race’

or ‘aristocratic race’) will rule over Slavs and other lesser

peoples whose job it will be to produce low-priced

agricultural products. He will reduce the coloured peoples

once and for all to outright slavery. The real quarrel of the

Fascist powers with British imperialism is that they know

that it is disintegrating. Another twenty years along the

present line of development, and India will be a peasant

republic linked with England only by voluntary alliance. The

‘semi-apes’ of whom Hitler speaks with such loathing will be

ﬂying aeroplanes and manufacturing machine-guns. The

Fascist dream of a slave empire will be at an end. On the

other hand, if we are defeated we simply hand over our own

victims to new masters who come fresh to the job and have

not developed any scruples.

But more is involved than the fate of the coloured peoples.

Two incompatible visions of life are ﬁghting one another.

‘Between democracy and totalitarianism,’ says Mussolini,

‘there can be no compromise.’ The two creeds cannot even,

for any length of time, live side by side. So long as

democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form,

totalitarianism is in deadly danger. The whole English-

speaking world is haunted by the idea of human equality,

and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we or

the Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still,

the idea is there, and it is capable of one day becoming a

reality. From the English-speaking culture, if it does not

perish, a society of free and equal human beings will

ultimately arise. But it is precisely the idea of human

equality – the ‘Jewish’ or ‘Judaeo-Christian’ idea of equality –

that Hitler came into the world to destroy. He has, heaven

knows, said so often enough. The thought of a world in

which black men would be as good as white men and Jews

treated as human beings brings him the same horror and

despair as the thought of endless slavery brings to us.

It is important to keep in mind how irreconcilable these

two viewpoints are. Some time within the next year a pro-

Hitler reaction within the left-wing intelligentsia is likely

enough. There are premonitory signs of it already. Hitler’s

positive achievement appeals to the emptiness of these

people, and, in the case of those with paciﬁst leanings, to

their masochism. One knows in advance more or less what

they will say. They will start by refusing to admit that British

capitalism is evolving into something diﬀerent, or that the

defeat of Hitler can mean any more than a victory for the

British and American millionaires. And from that they will

proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is ‘just the same

as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism. There is not much

freedom of speech in England; therefore there is no more

than exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a horrible

experience; therefore it is no worse to be in the torture-

chambers of the Gestapo. In general, two blacks make a

white, half a loaf is the same as no bread.

But in reality, whatever may be true about democracy and

totalitarianism, it is not true that they are the same. It would

not be true, even if British democracy were incapable of

evolving beyond its present stage. The whole conception of

the militarized continental state, with its secret police, its

censored literature and its conscript labour, is utterly

diﬀerent from that of the loose maritime democracy, with its

slums and unemployment, its strikes and party politics. It is

the diﬀerence between land power and sea power, between

cruelty and ineﬃciency, between lying and self-deception,

between the SS man and the rent-collector. And in choosing

between them one chooses not so much on the strength of

what they now are as of what they are capable of becoming.

But in a sense it is irrelevant whether democracy, at its

highest or at its lowest, is ‘better’ than totalitarianism. To

decide that one would have to have access to absolute

standards. The only question that matters is where one’s

real sympathies will lie when the pinch comes. The

intellectuals who are so fond of balancing democracy

against totalitarianism and ‘proving’ that one is as bad as

the other are simply frivolous people who have never been

shoved up against realities. They show the same shallow

misunderstanding of Fascism now, when they are beginning

to ﬂirt with it, as a year or two ago, when they were

squealing against it. The question is not, ‘Can you make out

a debating-society “case” in favour of Hitler?’ The question

is, ‘Do you genuinely accept that case? Are you willing to

submit to Hitler’s rule? Do you want to see England

conquered, or don’t you?’ It would be better to be sure on

that point before frivolously siding with the enemy. For there

is no such thing as neutrality in war; in practice one must

help one side or the other.

When the pinch comes, no one bred in the western

tradition can accept the Fascist vision of life. It is important

to realize that now, and to grasp what it entails. With all its

sloth, hypocrisy and injustice, the English-speaking

civilization is the only large obstacle in Hitler’s path. It is a

living contradiction of all the ‘infallible’ dogmas of Fascism.

That is why all Fascist writers for years past have agreed

that England’s power must be destroyed. England must be

‘exterminated’, must be ‘annihilated’, must ‘cease to exist’.

Strategically it would be possible for this war to end with

Hitler in secure possession of Europe, and with the British

Empire intact and British seapower barely aﬀected. But

ideologically it is not possible; were Hitler to make an oﬀer

along those lines, it could only be treacherously, with a view

to conquering England indirectly or renewing the attack at

some more favourable moment. England cannot possibly be

allowed to remain as a sort of funnel through which deadly

ideas from beyond the Atlantic ﬂow into the police states of

Europe. And turning it round to our point of view, we see the

vastness of the issue before us, the all-importance of

preserving our democracy more or less as we have known it.

But to preserve is always to extend. The choice before us is

not so much between victory and defeat as between

revolution and apathy. If the thing we are ﬁghting for is

altogether destroyed, it will have been destroyed partly by

our own act.

It could happen that England could introduce the

beginnings of Socialism, turn this war into a revolutionary

war, and still be defeated. That is at any rate thinkable. But,

terrible as it would be for anyone who is now adult, it would

be far less deadly than the ‘compromise peace’ which a few

rich men and their hired liars are hoping for. The ﬁnal ruin of

England could only be accomplished by an English

government acting under orders from Berlin. But that cannot

happen if England has awakened beforehand. For in that

case the defeat would be unmistakable, the struggle would

continue, the idea would survive. The diﬀerence between

going down ﬁghting, and surrendering without a ﬁght, is by

no means a question of ‘honour’ and schoolboy heroics.

Hitler said once that to accept defeat destroys the soul of a

nation. This sounds like a piece of claptrap, but it is strictly

true. The defeat of 1870 did not lessen the world-inﬂuence

of France. The Third Republic had more inﬂuence,

intellectually, than the France of Napoleon III. But the sort of

peace that Pétain, Laval and Co. have accepted can only be

purchased by deliberately wiping out the national culture.

The Vichy Government will enjoy a spurious independence

only on condition that it destroys the distinctive marks of

French culture: republicanism, secularism, respect for the

intellect, absence of colour prejudice. We cannot be utterly

defeated if we have made our revolution beforehand. We

may see German troops marching down Whitehall, but

another process, ultimately deadly to the German power-

dream, will have been started. The Spanish people were

defeated, but the things they learned during those two and

a half memorable years will one day come back upon the

Spanish Fascists like a boomerang.

A piece of Shakespearean bombast was much quoted at

the beginning of the war. Even Mr Chamberlain quoted it

once, if my memory does not deceive me:

Come the four corners of the world in arms

And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue

If England to herself do rest but true.

It is right enough, if you interpret it rightly. But England has

got to be true to herself. She is not being true to herself

while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned

up in concentration camps, and company directors work out

subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Proﬁts Tax. It is

goodbye to the Tatler and the Bystander, and farewell to the

lady in the Rolls-Royce car. The heirs of Nelson and of

Cromwell are not in the House of Lords. They are in the ﬁelds

and the streets, in the factories and the armed forces, in the

four-ale bar and the suburban back garden; and at present

they are still kept under by a generation of ghosts.

Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the

surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is,

is secondary. By revolution we become more ourselves, not

less. There is no question of stopping short, striking a

compromise, salvaging ‘democracy’, standing still. Nothing

ever stands still. We must add to our heritage or lose it, we

must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or

backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall

go forward.

A Hanging

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly

light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into

the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells,

a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal

cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was

quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of

drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were

squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round

them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged

within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a

Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague

liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly

too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic

man on the ﬁlms. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him

and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by

with riﬂes and ﬁxed bayonets, while the others handcuﬀed

him, passed a chain through his handcuﬀs and ﬁxed it to

their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They

crowded very close about him, with their hands always on

him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while

feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men

handling a ﬁsh which is still alive and may jump back into

the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms

limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was

happening.

Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the

wet air, ﬂoated from the distant barracks. The

superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the

rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised

his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey

toothbrush moustache and a gruﬀ voice. ‘For God’s sake

hurry up, Francis,’ he said irritably. ‘The man ought to have

been dead by this time. Aren’t you ready yet?’

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit

and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’

he bubbled. ‘All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss

waiting. We shall proceed.’

‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their

breakfast till this job’s over.’

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either

side of the prisoner, with their riﬂes at the slope; two others

marched close against him, gripping him by arm and

shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him.

The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind.

Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession

stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing

had happened – a dog, come goodness knows whence, had

appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a

loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole

body, wild with glee at ﬁnding so many human beings

together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah.

For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone

could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and

jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too

taken aback even to grab at the dog.

‘Who let that bloody brute in here?’ said the

superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone!’

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after

the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach,

taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian

jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the

dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again.

Its yaps echoed from the jail walls. The prisoner, in the grasp

of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was

another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes

before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my

handkerchief through its collar and moved oﬀ once more,

with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare

brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He

walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily,

with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens

his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place,

the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet

printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of

the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped

slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what

it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw

the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the

mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short

when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive

just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were

working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails

growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery.

His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop,

when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second

to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls,

and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned –

reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of

men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling,

understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a

sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one

world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main

grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly

weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with

planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar

with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict

in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his

machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered.

At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the

prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to

the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the

hangman climbed up and ﬁxed the rope round the prisoner’s

neck.

We stood waiting, ﬁve yards away. The warders had

formed in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when

the noose was ﬁxed, the prisoner began crying out on his

god. It was a high, reiterated cry of ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!’,

not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but

steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog

answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still

standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a

ﬂour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the

sound, muﬄed by the cloth, still persisted, over and over

again: ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!’

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the

lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muﬄed crying

from the prisoner went on and on, ‘Ram! Ram! Ram!’ never

faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his

chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps

he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a ﬁxed

number – ﬁfty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had

changed colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad coﬀee,

and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at

the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his

cries – each cry another second of life; the same thought

was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop

that abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing

up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. ‘Chalo!’

he shouted almost ﬁercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The

prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I

let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of

the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked,

and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood

among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went

round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was

dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very

slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked

the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. ‘He’s all right,’ said the

superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and

blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his

face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. ‘Eight

minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning, thank

God.’

The warders unﬁxed bayonets and marched away. The

dog, sobered and conscious of having misbehaved itself,

slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past

the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the

big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the

command of warders armed with lathis, were already

receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each

man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets

marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely,

jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come

upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to

sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone

began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the

way we had come, with a knowing smile: ‘Do you know, sir,

our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his

appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the ﬂoor of his cell.

From fright. – Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you

not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two

rupees eight annas. Classy European style.’

Several people laughed – at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking

garrulously: ‘Well, sir, all hass passed oﬀ with the utmost

satisfactoriness. It wass all ﬁnished – ﬂick! like that. It iss not

always so – oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor

wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the

prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!’

‘Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,’ said the superintendent.

‘Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One

man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to

take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six

warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We

reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said, “think of all

the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But no, he

would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!’

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was

laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant

way. ‘You’d better all come out and have a drink,’ he said

quite genially. ‘I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We

could do with it.’

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into

the road. ‘Pulling at his legs!’ exclaimed a Burmese

magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all

began laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote

seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together,

native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man

was a hundred yards away.

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit

that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally

assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything

about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language – so

the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general

collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of

language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles

to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath

this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural

growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own

purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must

ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due

simply to the bad inﬂuences of this or that individual writer.

But an eﬀect can become a cause, reinforcing the original

cause and producing the same eﬀect in an intensiﬁed form,

and so on indeﬁnitely. A man may take to drink because he

feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more

completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing

that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly

and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the

slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have

foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad

habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided

if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid

of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think

clearly is a necessary ﬁrst step towards political

regeneration: so that the ﬁght against bad English is not

frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional

writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by

that time the meaning of what I have said here will have

become clearer. Meanwhile, here are ﬁve specimens of the

English language as it is now habitually written.

These ﬁve passages have not been picked out because

they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I

had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the

mental vices from which we now suﬀer. They are a little

below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I

number them so I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who

once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out

of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder

of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms

which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up

with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by deﬁnition it is not

neurotic, for it has neither conﬂict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are,

are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the

forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their

number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or

culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing

but the mutual reﬂection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the deﬁnition

of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a

place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist

captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the

rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of

provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to

legalize their own destruction to proletarian organizations, and rouse the

agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervour on behalf of the ﬁght

against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and

contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and

galvanization of the BBC. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the

soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but

the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s

Midsummer Night’s Dream – as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new

Britain cannot continue indeﬁnitely to be traduced in the eyes, or rather ears,

of the world by the eﬀete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading

as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock,

better far and inﬁnitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than

the present priggish, inﬂated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of

blameless, bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart

from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of

them. The ﬁrst is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of

precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot

express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is

almost indiﬀerent as to whether his words mean anything or

not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is

the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and

especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain

topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no

one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not

hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for

the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked

together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list

below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by

means of which the work of prose construction is habitually

dodged:

Dying Metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists

thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand

a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e.g. iron resolution)

has in eﬀect reverted to being an ordinary word and can

generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between

these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out

metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are

merely used because they save people the trouble of

inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the

changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride

roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into

the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, ﬁshing in

troubled waters, rift within the lute, on the order of the day,

Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used

without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for

instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently

mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what

he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been

twisted out of their original meaning without those who use

them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line

is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the

hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication

that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the

anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a

writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be

aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original

phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of

picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same

time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an

appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render

inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make

contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for,

have the eﬀect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself

felt, take eﬀect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of,

etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs.

Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil,

mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or

adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as

prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive

voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active,

and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by

examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs

is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations,

and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity

by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and

prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to,

having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the

interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of

sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding

commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of

account, a development to be expected in the near future,

deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory

conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element,

individual (as noun), objective, categorical, eﬀective, virtual,

basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize,

eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements

and give an air of scientiﬁc impartiality to biased

judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic,

unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable,

veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of

international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying

war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic

words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed ﬁst, trident,

sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign

words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien régime,

deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo,

Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of

culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations

i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the

hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad

writers, and especially scientiﬁc, political and sociological

writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin

or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and

unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict,

extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and

hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-

Saxon opposite numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist

writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these

gentry, lackey, ﬂunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists

largely of words and phrases translated from Russian,

German or French; but the normal way of coining a new

word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate aﬃx

and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to

make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible,

extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think

up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The

result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and

vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in

art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across

long passages which are almost completely lacking in

meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead,

sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are

strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not

point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even

expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The

outstanding feature of Mr X’s work is its living quality’, while

another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr X’s

work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a

simple diﬀerence of opinion. If words like black and white

were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living,

he would see at once that language was being used in an

improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The

word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it

signiﬁes ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy,

socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of

them several diﬀerent meanings which cannot be reconciled

with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not

only is there no agreed deﬁnition, but the attempt to make

one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that

when we call a country democratic we are praising it:

consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim

that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop

using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest

way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private

deﬁnition, but allows his hearer to think he means

something quite diﬀerent. Statements like Marshal Pétain

was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the

world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are

almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words

used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less

dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive,

reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and

perversions, let me give another example of the kind of

writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be

an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good

English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-

known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the

swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the

wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour

to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena

compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive

activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with

innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the

unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3, above,

for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of

English. It will be seen that I have not made a full

translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence

follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle

the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into

the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive

activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of

the kind I am discussing – no one capable of using phrases

like ‘objective consideration of contemporary phenomena’ –

would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and

detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away

from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little

more closely. The ﬁrst contains 49 words but only 60

syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The

second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are

from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The ﬁrst sentence

contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and

chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains

not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90

syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning

contained in the ﬁrst. Yet without a doubt it is the second

kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I

do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet

universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and

there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to

write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we

should probably come much nearer to my imaginary

sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does

not consist in picking out words for the sake of their

meaning and inventing images in order to make the

meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips

of words which have already been set in order by someone

else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is

easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my

opinion it is a not unjustiﬁable assumption that than to say I

think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t

have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother

with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are

generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

When you are composing in a hurry – when you are dictating

to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech –

it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like

a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a

conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save

many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using

stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental

eﬀort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only

for your reader but for yourself. This is the signiﬁcance of

mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a

visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist

octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into

the melting-pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is

not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in

other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the

examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor

Laski (1) uses ﬁve negatives in 53 words. One of these is

superﬂuous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in

addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further

nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which

increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays

ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write

prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday

phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the

dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an

uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless:

probably one could work out its intended meaning by

reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the

writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an

accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves

blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost

parted company. People who write in this manner usually

have a general emotional meaning – they dislike one thing

and want to express solidarity with another – but they are

not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A

scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask

himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to

say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will

make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an

eﬀect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I

put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably

ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You

can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting

the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will

construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts

for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform

the important service of partially concealing your meaning

even from yourself. It is at this point that the special

connexion between politics and the debasement of

language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad

writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that

the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private

opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever

colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The

political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles,

manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-

Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they

are all alike in that one almost never ﬁnds in them a fresh,

vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some

tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the

familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained

tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to

shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not

watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a

feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when

the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them

into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.

And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that

kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning

himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming

out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be

if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is

making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over

again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying,

as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this

reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at

any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the

defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of

British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations,

the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be

defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for

most people to face, and which do not square with the

professed aims of political parties. Thus political language

has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and

sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are

bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the

countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on ﬁre

with incendiary bullets: this is called paciﬁcation. Millions of

peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along

the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called

transfer of population or rectiﬁcation of frontiers. People are

imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the

neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is

called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology

is needed if one wants to name things without calling up

mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some

comfortable English professor defending Russian

totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing

oﬀ your opponents when you can get good results by doing

so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits

certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to

deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of

the right to political opposition is an unavoidable

concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours

which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo

have been amply justiﬁed in the sphere of concrete

achievement.

The inﬂated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of

Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the

outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of

clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between

one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were

instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a

cuttleﬁsh squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing

as ‘keeping out of polities’. All issues are political issues, and

politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and

schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad,

language must suﬀer. I should expect to ﬁnd – this is a guess

which I have not suﬃcient knowledge to verify – that the

German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated

in the last ten or ﬁfteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also

corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and

imitation, even among people who should and do know

better. The debased language that I have been discussing is

in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not

unjustiﬁable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would

serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do

well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet

of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this

essay, and for certain you will ﬁnd that I have again and

again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By

this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with

conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt

impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost

the ﬁrst sentence that I see: ‘[The Allies] have an

opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of

Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to

avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the

same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and

uniﬁed Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write – feels,

presumably, that he has something new to say – and yet his

words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group

themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern.

This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the

foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be

prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and

every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is

probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they

produced an argument at all, that language merely reﬂects

existing social conditions, and that we cannot inﬂuence its

development by any direct tinkering with words and

constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a

language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail.

Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not

through any evolutionary process but owing to the

conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were

explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which

were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long

list of ﬂy-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of

if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it

should also be possible to laugh the not un-formation out of

existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the

average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed

scientiﬁc words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness

unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of

the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it

is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the

salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the

setting-up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be

departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned

with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn

its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and

syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes

one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms,

or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the

other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the

attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even

imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin

one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest

words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all

needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the

other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with

words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete

object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to

describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably

hunt about till you ﬁnd the exact words that seem to ﬁt it.

When you think of something abstract you are more inclined

to use words from the start, and unless you make a

conscious eﬀort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come

rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring

or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put

oﬀ using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings

as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.

Afterwards one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases

that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and

decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on

another person. This last eﬀort of the mind cuts out all stale

or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless

repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one

can often be in doubt about the eﬀect of a word or a phrase,

and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.

I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other ﬁgure of speech which you are

used to seeing in print,

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientiﬁc word or a jargon word if you can

think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they

demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown

used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep

all of them and still write bad English, but one could not

write the kind of stuﬀ that I quoted in those ﬁve specimens

at the beginning of this article. I have not here been

considering the literary use of language, but merely

language as an instrument for expressing and not for

concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase

and others

have come near to claiming that all abstract words are

meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating

a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what

Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need

not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to

recognize that the present political chaos is connected with

the decay of language, and that one can probably bring

about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If

you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst

follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary

dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity

will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and

with variations this is true of all political parties, from

Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound

truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance

of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a

moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and

from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough,

send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot,

Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable

inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin

where it belongs.

THE BEGINNING

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‘A Hanging’ ﬁrst published 1931

‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ ﬁrst published 1940

‘Politics and the English Language’ ﬁrst published 1946

‘Why I Write’ ﬁrst published 1946

This collection ﬁrst published in Penguin Books 2004

Taken from the Penguin Classics edition Essays, introduced by Bernard Crick

ISBN: 978-0-141-98060-7

THE LION AND THE UNICORN: SOCIALISM AND THE ENGLISH GENIUS

Lord Nuﬃeld: car manufacturer, philanthropist. Montagu

Norman: Governor of the Bank of England.

Pierre Laval: French politician, pro-German. Executed for

treason 1945. Vikdun Quisling: Norwegian collaborator

with Germany. Executed for treason 1945.

Lord Halifax: Chamberlain’s foreign secretary 1938, thus

closely associated with appeasement with Germany.

John Simon: Chamberlain’s chancellor of the exchequer,

1937–40; Churchill’s lord chancellor 1940–45. Samuel

Hoare: politician, forced to resign as foreign secretary over

the Hoare-Laval pact, which recognized Italy’s conquest of

Ethiopia.

Sir John Anderson: politician. Home secretary and minister

of home security 1939.

Horatio Bottomley: colourful journalist involved in a

number of dubious activities leading to many court cases.

Herbert Morrison: Labour politician, home secretary in

Churchill’s wartime coalition government.

†

J. B. Priestley: novelist and playwright. In 1940 broadcast a

daily ﬁve-minute ‘Postscript’ after the evening news.

POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Stuart Chase: American social scientist.

Why I Write Essay

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Apply this example's core structure, strategic pacing, and structural hierarchy directly to your own topic.

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