It would have been surprising if we had not been told at the time of the Election (Evening Standard, November 9, 1922) that it would be won, if at all, on the Eton Playing Fields, seeing that Mr. Bonar Law’s Government contained no fewer than sixteen Old Etonians and a number of other public schools men. Our public schools have long been regarded as the chief bulwark against Socialism. Whether they have yet discovered what Socialism means, I do not know; probably not, if one may judge from the letters still addressed to newspapers by well-educated persons; but certainly at the period to which my recollections go back, the eighties of the last century, the queerest notions prevailed at Eton as to the designs of the “revolutionists,” for that was the name under which all social reformers were genially classed.
A little over forty years ago my brother-in-law, J. L. Joynes, and I were assistant masters at Eton; and as he became closely connected with the Social Democratic Federation after we left the school in 1882, and as I was a writer in Justice, I found myself somewhat of a suspect among my colleagues, many of whom favoured me with their personal views as to the hollowness of the Socialist ideals. It is a little difficult at this distance of time, to realise what a scare H. M. Hyndman made with so small a party as the S.D.F. then was: his very name was a terror, and in a revised form of the Litany which Edward Carpenter and I prepared for the use of the respectable classes we felt compelled to substitute “Hyndman” for “Satan” in the prayer: “And finally to beat down Satan under our feet.”
I regret now that I did not take some notes of the talk about Socialism that I used to hear at Eton, whether at dinner parties, or in the course of walks with other masters: it was so charmingly and frankly inept. The general nature of it, however, I remember well; for indeed I doubt whether anyone ever had the dear old fallacies dinned into him more assiduously than I. At least “a billion of times” (as De Quincey would have said) must I have been told that if all the wealth of the country were distributed in equal shares among the needy, they would in the sequel be no better off. Not less often was I reminded that if the incentive to work were once removed, the prosperity of our country would be sapped; and that it was to thrift, not to confiscation, that we must look for national safety. There was humour, and plenty of it, in the zeal with which the duty of thrift was inculcated by the idle classes in those days, not at Eton only, but on innumerable platforms, and Sunday after Sunday at outdoor meetings in the parks. It became such a fetish as to inspire a Socialist poet (report said it was Morris) with these feeling lines:
“Reward of saving…” he began;
The day was very hot:
The people rose up like one man,
And slew him on the spot.
I could have wished that some of my colleagues at Eton might suffer that fate.
A lecture which Morris gave before the Eton Literary Society caused considerable excitement, for though Socialism was not directly discussed in it, the suspicions of his audience were aroused, and a good deal of hissing was mingled with the applause bestowed on him. I remember just after that lecture, hearing R. A. H. Mitchell, the great cricketer, then a master at Eton, explaining to a circle of friends, who listened with grave approbation, the impossibility of Socialism. There was not a single political economist, he said, who did not condemn it.
I lingered on at Eton till the end of 1884, but was subject to the reproof and admonition of my friends on many occasions before I made my escape. It was a habit of Hyndman’s to talk rather big about the forces at his disposal, and in one speech that he made he mentioned that he had won recruits even among the Assistant Masters at Eton. This led to my receiving a letter from an old schoolfellow, Dr. E. C. Selwyn, then Principal of Liverpool College, afterwards of Uppingham, insisting that I should repudiate Hyndman’s statement on pain of being myself disowned by my friends; an absurd ultimatum which I mention merely to show the sort of feeling that was prevalent at that time. I lectured once to the Ascham Society, a body of Eton Masters, on “Liberty”; and the next day I was asked by F. W. Cornish, one of the leading Liberals of the school: “Well, did you establish licence?” For sheer stagnation of thought, the Eton of forty years back must have been almost unrivalled.
When I took leave of the Headmaster, Dr. Warre, some reference was made to Socialism, and, as I have elsewhere related, he exclaimed: “Socialism! Then blow us up, blow us up! There’s nothing left for it but that.” Such was his idea of the movement. A few hours later one of the senior assistants, Arthur James, a schoolmaster to the core, asked to have a word with me, and pointed out that, whereas during the previous ten years I had been doing good, solid, constructive work as a teacher at Eton, I was now about to undo and ruin it all by spreading abroad the mischievous and vicious tenets of Socialism. I was really left in no doubt as to the opinions of a public school on that subject.
Nor did it end with my departure from Eton; for several times in after years I was amused by getting retrospective glimpses into the public school mind. The one I most enjoyed was when Leonard Abbott came to tell me how, when he was a boy at Uppingham and had been caught reading a Socialist pamphlet in school, the Headmaster, my old friend E. C. Selwyn, had given him a paternal “talking to” and, as a crowning proof of the folly of Socialism, had remarked: “In all my life I have only known two Socialists, Joynes and Salt; and they both came to a bad end.” Nothing could have been more conclusive.
But the respectability of Eton got some severe shocks when Dr. Lyttelton became Headmaster, in succession to Dr. Warre; for not only was he a vegetarian, but he had a dangerous tendency to hear both sides on social questions, and there was one terrible occasion (February, 1908) when, as the Eton College Chronicle expressed it, “a working man, a person, too, of the blood-and-thunder type, almost an anarchist,” was permitted to address the school on the subject of unemployment, standing on the chapel steps in the school-yard. Upon which a correspondent, “One of many Old Etonians,” wrote thus to the school journal:
“May I trespass on your valuable space for the purpose of endorsing every sentiment expressed by your correspondent of last week (as quoted by the Daily Mail) on the subject of the desecration of the Chapel steps by the so-called representatives of the equally so-called unemployed?
“We should be glad to know, why every stone in the school-yard was not pulled up in defence of our most cherished and valued traditions. We should have as soon expected to read that the representative in question had been allowed to address the House of Lords, as that Etonians of today had permitted the man to command their attention from the Headmaster’s steps.
“Are we really to believe that, in all that large gathering of members of some of our best families, not one voice was raised in protest against the bullying extravagancies of—we cannot say workmen, for work they would not, if they could—uneducated beings of meaner intellect. God help England in future ages and future emergencies, if it really was so!”
This was comical enough; yet it may be that Socialism will someday find itself up against a difficult problem in dealing with this arrogant public school spirit; for though these “old boys,” as they like to call themselves, are very good fellows, none better, on cricket-ground or football field, they are determined, where property is concerned, to hold on to “the good old rule, the simple plan,” which has served them so well in the past; and we may be sure that the lesson of Fascismo is not being overlooked. As for the “democratic tone” which we are told is now permeating the schools, I doubt whether it means more than the fluent talk about “goodwill” between employers and employed—a good will which is an indifferent substitute for good deeds.
When I was an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, we had an annual cricket-match with the college servants, and the game was followed by a dinner at which we sat “in and out,” each undergraduate between two servants, and each servant between two undergraduates. Doubtless the one party disliked it as much as the other; and the thought which alone sustained us was that the occasion, like Christmas, came but once in the year. Of such kind is the sham democratic spirit of which we now hear a good deal, and which is evidently intended to be a buffer against Socialism itself. The real struggle lies beyond and behind.