ever, that he may find
his best physical good by going into the workhouse, as he often found it
in pagan times by selling himself into slavery. The point is that the
solution remains servile, even when Mr. Bumble and the Board of
Guardians ceased to be in a common sense cruel. The pagan might have the
luck to sell himself to a kind master. The principle of the New Poor
Law, which has so far proved permanent in our society, is that the man
lost all his civic rights and lost them solely through poverty. There is
a touch of irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that the
Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black
slavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. The
slave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called
blackmail; but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to
deny the sincerity of the sentiment. Wilberforce represented in this the
real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction against
Calvinism, and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is
something romantic in the English mind which can always see what is
remote. It is the strongest example of what men lose by being
long-sighted. It is fair to say that they gain many things also, the
poems that are like adventures and the adventures that are like poems.
It is a national savour, and therefore in itself neither good nor evil;
and it depends on the application whether we find a scriptural text for
it in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abide in the
uttermost parts of the sea, or merely in the saying that the eyes of a
fool are in the ends of the earth.

Anyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-century movement, so slow that it
seems stationary, was altogether in this direction, of which workhouse
philanthropy is the type. Nevertheless, it had one national institution
to combat and overcome; one institution all the more intensely national
because it was not official, and in a sense not even political. The
modern Trade Union was the inspiration and creation of the English; it
is still largely known throughout Europe by its English name. It was the
English expression of the European effort to resist the tendency of
Capitalism to reach its natural culmination in slavery. In this it has
an almost weird psychological interest, for it is a return to the past
by men ignorant of the past, like the subconscious action of some man
who has lost his memory. We say t