rth and the more
subtle barbarism from the East. It increased in liberties and local
government under kings who controlled the wider things of war and
taxation; and in the peasant war of the fourteenth century in England,
the king and the populace came for a moment into conscious alliance.
They both found that a third thing was already too strong for them. That
third thing was the aristocracy; and it captured and called itself the
Parliament. The House of Commons, as its name implies, had primarily
consisted of plain men summoned by the King like jurymen; but it soon
became a very special jury. It became, for good or evil, a great organ
of government, surviving the Church, the monarchy and the mob; it did
many great and not a few good things. It created what we call the
British Empire; it created something which was really far more
valuable, a new and natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and even
humanitarian than most of the aristocracies of the world. It had
sufficient sense of the instincts of the people, at least until lately,
to respect the liberty and especially the laughter that had become
almost the religion of the race. But in doing all this, it deliberately
did two other things, which it thought a natural part of its policy; it
took the side of the Protestants, and then (partly as a consequence) it
took the side of the Germans. Until very lately most intelligent
Englishmen were quite honestly convinced that in both it was taking the
side of progress against decay. The question which many of them are now
inevitably asking themselves, and would ask whether I asked it or no, is
whether it did not rather take the side of barbarism against
civilization.

At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things,
we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with the
barbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and the
Frenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should be
on the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wasted
Wessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certain
tests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory of
civilization. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades or
covered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behind
him the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself should
judge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of savagery is
slavery. U