Another Sheaf, by John Galsworthy.

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Galsworthy continues thoughts, as WWI comes to end, about what comes next.

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CONTENTS

THE ROAD

THE SACRED WORK

THE BALANCE SHEET OF THE SOLDIER-WORKMAN

THE CHILDREN’S JEWEL FUND

FRANCE, 1916–1917

AN IMPRESSION

ENGLISHMAN AND RUSSIAN

AMERICAN AND BRITON

ANGLO-AMERICAN DRAMA AND ITS FUTURE[C]

SPECULATIONS[D]

INTRODUCTORY

WHEAT

HOLDINGS

INSTRUCTION

CO-OPERATION (SMALL HOLDINGS)

CO-OPERATION (ALLOTMENTS)

VALEDICTORY

GROTESQUES

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THE ROAD

A dream, a vision? About the coming of WWI, or it's end?

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"The road stretched in a pale, straight streak, narrowing to a mere thread at the limit of vision — the only living thing in the wild darkness. All was very still. It had been raining; the wet heather and the pines gave forth scent, and little gusty shivers shook the dripping birch trees. In the pools of sky, between broken clouds, a few stars shone, and half of a thin moon was seen from time to time, like the fragment of a silver horn held up there in an invisible hand, waiting to be blown.

"Hard to say when I first became aware that there was movement on the road, little specks of darkness on it far away, till its end was blackened out of sight, and it seemed to shorten towards me. Whatever was coming darkened it as an invading army of ants will darken a streak of sunlight on sand strewn with pine needles. Slowly this shadow crept along till it had covered all but the last dip and rise; and still it crept forward in that eerie way, as yet too far off for sound.

"Then began the voice of it in the dripping stillness, a tramping of weary feet, and I could tell that this advancing shadow was formed of men, millions of them moving all at one speed, very slowly, as if regulated by the march of the most tired among them. They had blotted out the road, now, from a few yards away to the horizon; and suddenly, in the dusk, a face showed."

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July 19, 2021 - July 19, 2021.

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THE SACRED WORK

Restoration of the veterans to health.

"The sacred work fights the creeping dejections which lie in wait for each soul and body, for the moment stricken and thrown. It says to Fate: “You shall not pass!”"

"Each comrade who for his Motherland has, for the moment, lost his future is a miniature of that shattered temple.

"To restore him, and with him the future of our countries, that is the sacred work."

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" ... That loveliness which is the creation of the æsthetic human spirit; that flowering of directed energy which we know as civilisation; that manifold and mutual service which we call progress — all stand mutilated and faltering. ... "

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"Consider what it means to fall suddenly out of full vigour into the dark certainty that you can never have full strength again, though you live on twenty, forty, sixty years. ... The Russian “Nichevo” — the “what-does-it-matter?” mood — besets you. Fate seems to say to you: “Take the line of least resistance, friend — you are done for!” ... "
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" ... Of little use to man or nation would be the mere patching-up of bodies, so that, like a row of old gossips against a sunlit wall, our disabled might sit and weary out their days. If that were all we could do for them, gratitude is proven fraudulent, device bankrupt; and the future of our countries must drag with a lame foot."

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"The sacred work is not departmental; it is one long organic process from the moment when a man is picked up from the field of battle to the moment when he is restored to the ranks of full civil life. ... "
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July 19, 2021 - July 19, 2021.

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THE BALANCE SHEET OF THE SOLDIER-WORKMAN

About estimating effects of war on men who fought, and what future they shall expect, or forge, in view of events in Europe, as Galsworthy wrote this in 1917; he does not mention Russia, the revolution, or the falling of monarchies across much of Europe, with most great ones vanishing into being allowed to live as ordinary citizens, escaping fates that befell most of Romanovs.

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"Talking with and observing French soldiers during the winter of 1916–1917, and often putting to them this very question: How is the war going to affect the soldier-workman? I noticed that their answers followed very much the trend of class and politics. An adjutant, sergeant, or devout Catholic considered that men would be improved, gain self-command, and respect for law and order, under prolonged discipline and daily sacrifice. A freethinker of the educated class, or a private of Socialistic tendencies, on the other hand, would insist that the strain must make men restless, irritable, more eager for their rights, less tolerant of control. Each imagined that the war would further the chances of the future as they dreamed of it. If I had talked with capitalists — there are none among French soldiers — they would doubtless have insisted that after-war conditions were going to be easier, just as the “sans-sous” maintained that they were going to be harder and provocative of revolution. In a word, the wish was father to the thought."
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"First, what will be the physical effect of the war on the soldier-workman? Military training, open-air life, and plentiful food are of such obvious physical advantage in the vast majority of cases as to need no pointing out. And how much improvement was wanted is patent to any one who has a remnant left of the old Greek worship of the body. It has made one almost despair of industrialised England to see the great Australians pass in the streets of London. ... One-half of us regard good looks as dangerous and savouring of immorality; the other half look upon them as “swank,” or at least superfluous. Any interest manifested in such a subject is confined to a few women and a handful of artists ... If that training had stopped short of the fighting line it would be physically entirely beneficial; as it is, one has unfortunately to set against its advantages — leaving out wounds and mutilation altogether — a considerable number of overstrained hearts and nerves, not amounting to actual disablement; and a great deal of developed rheumatism.

"Peace will send back to their work very many men better set up and hardier; but many also obviously or secretly weakened. ... "

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" ... If the army life of the soldier-workman stopped short of service at the front one might say at once that the effect on his mind would be far more disastrous than it is. The opportunity for initiative and decision, the mental stir of camp and depôt life is nil compared with that of service in the fighting line. And for one month at the front a man spends perhaps five at the rear. Military life, on its negative side, is more or less a suspension of the usual channels of mental activity. By barrack and camp life the normal civilian intellect is, as it were, marooned. On that desert island it finds, no doubt, certain new and very definite forms of activity, but any one who has watched old soldiers must have been struck by the “arrested” look which is stamped on most of them — by a kind of remoteness, of concentrated emptiness, as of men who by the conditions of their lives have long been prevented from thinking of anything outside a ring fence. ... Far be it from this pen to libel the English, but a feverish mental activity has never been their vice; intellect, especially in what is known as the working-class, is leisurely; it does not require to be encouraged to take its ease. Some one has asked me: “Can the ordinary worker think less in the army than when he wasn’t in the army?” In other words: “Did he ever think at all?” The British worker is, of course, deceptive; he does not look as if he were thinking. ... But actual physical exertion, and the inertia which follows it, bulk large in military service, and many who “never thought at all” before they became soldiers will think still less after! ... "

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" ... The recuperative powers of youth are so great that very many of our younger soldiers will unrust quickly and at a bound regain all the activity lost. Besides, a very great many of the younger men will not go back to the old job. But older men, though they will go back to what they were doing before more readily than their juniors, will go back with diminished hope and energy, and a sort of fatalism. ... "

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"For years no one has built houses, or had their houses done up; no one has bought furniture, clothes, or a thousand other articles which they propose buying the moment the war stops. ... and, above all, we must positively grow our own food in the future. ... "

Was John Galsworthy aware of harvest being stolen by Brits in India, causing millions of Indians to due of starvation, which British government thought was of no account and only necessary to clamp down on media reporting it?

" ... indeed, unless we have some really attractive land scheme ready we may lose a million by emigration alone. ... "

Funny, for decades - most of two centuries if not longer - policy of landholding classes through Britain, and British landholders of Ireland, was to starve and squeeze out the poor and force them to emigrate, whether by encouraging them with fares paid, or otherwise!

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Galsworthy foresaw the depression, if not the Wall street crash.

" ... But in all the great countries of the world, even America, the peoples will be faced with taxation which will soak up anything from one-fifth to one-third of their incomes, and, even allowing for a large swelling of those incomes from war savings, so that a great deal of what the State takes with one hand she will return to the investing public with the other, the diminution of purchasing power is bound to make itself increasingly felt. When the reconversion of machinery to civil ends has been completed, the immediate arrears of demand supplied, shipping and rolling-stock replaced, houses built, repairs made good, and so forth, this slow shrinkage of purchasing power in every country will go hand in hand with shrinkage of demand, decline of trade and wages, and unemployment, in a slow process, till they culminate in what one fears may be the worst “times” we have ever known. Whether those “times” will set in one, two, or even six years after the war, is, of course, the question. ... "

And here's a clue to mindset of supposedly liberal, progressive intelligentsia amongst Europe, such as John Galsworthy.

" ... A certain school of thought insists that this tremendous taxation after the war, and the consequent impoverishment of enterprise and industry, can be avoided, or at all events greatly relieved, by national schemes for the development of the Empire’s latent resources; in other words, that the State should even borrow more money to avoid high taxation and pay the interests on existing loans, should acquire native lands, and swiftly develop mineral rights and other potentialities. ... "

Seriously???!!!!

Galsworthy advocates invasion by England of more of lands outside Europe, to squeeze them and let the locals starve to death, while he's strenuous about advocating Britain defending rights of small nations, which then presumably applies only to those of Europe and those populated by those of European descent?

Rank, rabid racism? Or worse, a foreshadow of the Nazi thought thst emerged soon enough? How was the latter different in applying to Europe what Galsworthy preaches British do to rest of the globe?

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Notice what he isn't willing to admit explicitly:-

" ... The soldier-workman will go back, I believe, to two or three years at least of good wages and plentiful work. But when, after that, the pinch begins to come, it will encounter the quicker, more resentful blood of men who in the constant facing of great danger have left behind them all fear of consequences; of men who in the survival of one great dislocation to their lives, have lost the dread of other dislocations. The war will have implanted a curious deep restlessness in the great majority of soldier souls. Can the workmen of the future possibly be as patient and law-abiding as they were before the war, in the face of what seems to them injustice? ... "

Notice what he isn't willing to admit explicitly - it's that, whether by contamination of thought through news spreading, or because such thinking might be right after all (the fear of upper classes as defined by wealth, property, land possession, and aristocracy set up merely through royal whims, with a royalty topping the pyramid via a superstition about royal blood!), the European- and much more so English - upper castes were quaking in thrir boots, for fear of a revolution arriving in their own lands!

They had survived the french revolution, got rid of Napoleon who was after all a people's leader who conquered most of Europe and had aristocracy of Europe bend before him as much as the conquered and most of other royals did until his fall, and had seen France go firmly democratic, finally, with royalty thrown out for good; and as Galsworthy wrote this, Russia had followed suit in a revolution just as bloody, with news trickling out, of the royals, and generally most Romanov and others of aristocracy of Russia who had not managed to flee, having been massacred.

So what Galsworthy isn't saying explicitly here, is that upper castes of England were quaking in their boots, even as over half of European royalty was dismissed from their posts, and most countries let them live without the ownership of the countries.

Galsworthy elaborates:-

" ... The enemy will again be Fate — this time in the form of capital, trying to down them; and the victory they were conscious of gaining over Fate in the war will have strengthened and quickened their fibre to another fight, and another conquest. The seeds of revolution are supposed to lie in war. They lie there because war generally brings in the long run economic stress, but also because of the recklessness or “character” — call it what you will — which the habitual facing of danger develops. The self-control and self-respect which military service under war conditions will have brought to the soldier-workman will be an added force in civil life; but it is a fallacy, I think, to suppose, as some do, that it will be a force on the side of established order. It is all a question of allegiance, and the allegiance of the workman in time of peace is not rendered to the State, but to himself and his own class. To the service of that class and the defence of its “rights” this new force will be given. In measuring the possibilities of revolution, the question of class rides paramount. Many hold that the war is breaking down social barriers and establishing comradeship, through hardship and danger shared. For the moment this is true. But whether that new comradeship will stand any great pressure of economic stress after direct regimental relationship between officer and man has ceased and the war is becoming just a painful memory, is to me very doubtful. But suppose that to some extent it does stand, we have still the fact that the control of industry and capital, even as long as ten years after the war, will be mainly in the hands of men who have not fought, of business men spared from service either by age or by their too precious commercial skill. Towards these the soldier-workman will have no tender feelings, no sense of comradeship. On the contrary — for somewhere back of the mind of every workman there is, even during his country’s danger, a certain doubt whether all war is not somehow hatched by the aristocrats and plutocrats of one side, or both. ... "

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July 19, 2021 - July 20, 2021.

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THE CHILDREN’S JEWEL FUND

About need of Infant Welfare Centres in Britain, due to infant mortality and worse.

" ... Each year in this country about 100,000 babies die before they have come into the world; and out of the 800,000 born, about 90,000 die. Many mothers become permanently damaged in health by evil birth conditions. Many children grow up mentally or physically defective. One in four of the children in our elementary schools are not in a condition to benefit properly by their schooling. What sublime waste! Ten in a hundred of them suffer from malnutrition; thirty in the hundred have defective eyes; eighty in the hundred need dental treatment; twenty odd in the hundred have enlarged tonsils or adenoids. Many, perhaps most, of these deaths and defects are due to the avoidable ignorance, ill-health, mitigable poverty, and other handicaps which dog poor mothers before and after a baby’s birth. ... "

The title is explained at the end.

" ... Mothers, and you who will be mothers, and you who have missed motherhood, give them their chance, bless them with a gem — light their lanterns with your jewels!"

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Galsworthy writes:-

"It is written also:—”After the war a very large increase in the birth-rate may be looked for.” For a year or two, perhaps; but the real after-effect of the war will be to decrease the birth-rate in every European country, or I am much mistaken. “No food for cannon, and no extra burdens,” will be the cry. And little wonder! This, however, does not affect the question of children actually born or on their way. If not quantity, we can at all events have quality."

Presumably he is thinking only about the British, not about those of the colonies whether the ones he considers human or otherwise, and also not those of Europe. If he was aware of the German propaganda about German babies starving to death due to allies demanding reparations (although Germany spend huge amounts of gold for this propaganda, and more for propaganda to destabilise France via spread of extreme leftist agitations), he's not mentioning it.

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"On the general question of improving the health of mothers and babies I would remind readers that there is no great country where effort is half so much needed as here; we are nearly twice as town and slum ridden as any other people; have grown to be further from nature and more feckless about food; we have damper air to breathe, and less sun to disinfect us. ... "

And yet, in Sheaf, he opined that British Isles had the excellent circumstances of not too much sun that saps health! That was written, and published, only shortly before this, too.

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July 20, 2021 - July 20, 2021.

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FRANCE, 1916–1917

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AN IMPRESSION

Galsworthy visited France at a hospital travelling Southast from Valence, and writes about places and people. Its unclear if it's shortly after the war, but would seem so.

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" ... If there are qualities common to all they are impressionability and capacity for affection. This is not the impression left on one by a crowd of Englishmen. Behind the politeness and civilised bearing of the French I used to think there was a little of the tiger. In a sense perhaps there is, but that is not the foundation of their character — far from it! Underneath the tiger, again, there is a man civilised for centuries. Most certainly the politeness of the French is no surface quality, it is a polish welling up from a naturally affectionate heart, a naturally quick apprehension of the moods and feelings of others; it is the outcome of a culture so old that, underneath all differences, it binds together all those types and strains of blood — the Savoyard, and the Southerner, the Latin of the Centre, the man from the North, the Breton, the Gascon, the Basque, the Auvergnat, even to some extent the Norman, and the Parisian — in a sort of warm and bone-deep kinship. They have all, as it were, sat for centuries under a wall with the afternoon sun warming them through and through, as I so often saw the old town gossips sitting of an afternoon. The sun of France has made them alike; a light and happy sun, not too southern, but just southern enough."

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" ... If I were asked for a concrete illustration of self-respect I should say — the Frenchwoman. It is a particular kind of self-respect, no doubt, very much limited to this world; and perhaps beginning to be a little frayed. We have some Frenchwomen at the hospital, the servants who keep us in running order — the dear cook whom we love not only for her baked meats, proud of her soldier son once a professor, now a sergeant, and she a woman of property, with two houses in the little town; patient, kind, very stubborn about her dishes, which have in them the essential juices and savours which characterise all things really French. She has great sweetness and self-containment in her small, wrinkled, yellowish face; always quietly polite and grave, she bubbles deliciously at any joke, and gives affection sagaciously to those who merit. A jewel, who must be doing something pour la France. And we have Madame Jeanne Camille, mother of two daughters and one son, too young to be a soldier. It was her eldest daughter who wanted to come and scrub in the hospital, but was refused because she was too pretty. And her mother came instead. A woman who did not need to come, and nearly fifty, but strong, as the French are strong, with good red blood, deep colouring, hair still black, and handsome straight features. ... Wine is too plentiful in France. The sun in the wines of France quickens and cheers the blood in the veins of France. But the gift of wine is abused. One may see a poster which says — with what truth I know not — that drink has cost France more than the Franco-Prussian War. French drunkenness is not so sottish as our beer-and-whiskey-fuddled variety, but it is not pleasant to see, and mars a fair land. ..."

" ...We were in Lyon when the Russian Revolution and the German retreat from Bapaume were reported. The town and railway station were full of soldiers. No enthusiasm, no stir of any kind, only the usual tired stoicism. And one thought of what the poilu can be like; of our Christmas dinner-table at the hospital under the green hanging wreaths and the rosy Chinese lanterns, the hum, the chatter, the laughter of free and easy souls in their red hospital jackets. ... One old couple, in a ferblanterie shop, who had lost their eldest son and whose other son was at the front, used to try hard not to talk about the war, but sure enough they would come to it at last, each time we saw them, and in a minute the mother would be crying and a silent tear would roll down the old father’s face. Then he would point to the map and say: “But look where they are, the Boches! Can we stop? It’s impossible. We must go on till we’ve thrown them out. It is dreadful, but what would you have? Ah! Our son — he was so promising!” ... "

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" ... Quite a recent development in the life of Arles, they say, that marvellous Roman building, here cut down, there built up, by Saracen hands. For a thousand years or more before the Romans came Arles flourished and was civilised. What had we mushroom islanders before the Romans came? What had barbaric Prussia? Not even the Romans to look forward to!"

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" ... The most æsthetic, and perhaps most humiliating, sight that a Westerner could see we came on there: two Arab Spahis walking down the main street in their long robe uniforms, white and red, and their white linen bonnets bound with a dark fur and canting slightly backwards. Over six feet high, they moved unhurrying, smoking their cigarettes, turning their necks slowly from side to side like camels of the desert. Their brown, thin, bearded faces wore neither scorn nor interest, only a superb self-containment; but, beside them, every other specimen of the human race seemed cheap and negligible. God knows of what they were thinking — as little probably as the smoke they blew through their chiselled nostrils — but their beauty and grace were unsurpassable. And, visioning our western and northern towns and the little, white, worried abortions they breed, one felt downcast and abashed.

"Marseilles swarmed with soldiers; Lyon, Valence, Arles, even the smallest cities swarmed with soldiers, and this at the moment when the Allied offensive was just beginning. ... "

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" ... A certain school of French novelist, with high-coloured tales of Parisian life, is responsible for his country’s reputation. Whatever the Frenchman about town may be, he seems by no means typical of the many millions of Frenchmen who are not about town. ... "

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" ... We noticed in our hospital that whenever we had a Parisian he introduced a different atmosphere, and led us a quiet or noisy dance. ..."

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July 20, 2021 - July 20, 2021.

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ENGLISHMAN AND RUSSIAN

Unlike the piece about France, based on interactions with French as Galsworthy visited and travelled in France towards end of WWI, this one seems based almost entirely on his reading Russian literature, with some perhaps correspondence with someone who could inform him a little of Russian thought on the topic.

The opening paragraph, exquisitely written, reminds one a little of what W. Somerset Maugham said about Russian literature, but only at the beginning - where Maugham was exasperated with Russian emotional extravagance, as he thought it, Galsworthy is all praise, appreciciating the Russian soul as he discovers it through the Russian literature.

Wonder if it was difference of personalities, or simply the quantity of the Russian literature they read.

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" ... The political arrangements of a country are based on temperament; and a political freedom which suits us, an old people, predisposed to a practical and cautious view of life, is proving difficult, if not impossible, for Russians, a young people, who spend themselves so freely. .... "

Where does Galsworthy, or anyone, get the justification for such a statement as that? Surely one ought to know one's knowledge of another culture has limitations, and that Russia has a long history of human habitat! If her political history is less known to West, still, being invaded and worse by Mongols repeatedly over more than a millennium coukdnt have helped matters!

"I suppose what Russians most notice and perhaps envy in us is practical common sense, our acquired instinct for what is attainable, and for the best and least elaborate means of attaining it. ... "

That may be an Englishman's thinking, but did he hsve any Russian confirm it? That it seems to be the perfect other side of English perception of the two characters and their differences, as Galsworthy expresses -

" ... What we ought to envy in Russians is a sort of unworldliness — not the feeling that this world is the preliminary of another, nothing so commercial; but the natural disposition to live each moment without afterthought, emotionally. Lack of emotional abandonment is our great deficiency. Whether we can ever learn to have more is very doubtful. But our imaginative writings, at all events, have of late been profoundly modified by the Russian novel, that current in literature far more potent than any of those traced out in Georg Brandes’ monumental study. ... "

- need not make it true of Russian perception thereof, if at all any Russian did bother to think about it, thst is - which is doubtful, given the desperate efforts to survive that a life in Russia seems to involve more than elsewhere.

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" ... In other words, the Russian passion for understanding has tempered a little the English passion for winning. ... "

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July 21, 2021 - July 21, 2021.

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AMERICAN AND BRITON

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" ... I am told that an American officer said recently to a British staff officer in a friendly voice: “So we’re going to clean up Brother Boche together!” and the British staff officer replied “Really!” No wonder Americans sometimes say: “I’ve got no use for those fellows.”"

Which might have contributed to the difficult9 encountered by FDR in trying to get U.S. behind him in coming to help in WWII!

" ... In a huge, still half-developed country, where every kind of national type and habit comes to run a new thread into the rich tapestry of American life and thought, people must find it almost impossible to conceive the life of a little old island where traditions persist generation after generation without anything to break them up; where blood remains undoctored by new strains; demeanour becomes crystallised for lack of contrasts; and manner gets set like a plaster mask. ... "

Galsworthy forgets, those in U.S. that bothered at all about England were those whose ancestors, if not they themselves, had escaped the islands, going to the enormous travails of sailing across ocean to a new land and raising a log cabin while trying to find food. They didn't forget why they'd left, and certainly didn't forget in a hurry. Boston tea party is celebrated in U.S. for good reason, for that matter.

" ... The English manner of to-day, of what are called the classes, is the growth of only a century or so. There was probably nothing at all like it in the days of Elizabeth or even of Charles II. ... "

Really, isn't that rather extreme wishful thinking? What's very likely is that the upper castes then weren't quite as polished as they liked to think they were in Galsworthy's times, but that's probably all.

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" ... When Americans hear Englishmen speaking critically of their own country, let them note it for a sign of complete identification with that country rather than of detachment from it. ... I pretend to no proper knowledge of the American people; but, though amongst them there are doubtless pockets of fierce prejudice, I have on the whole the impression of a wide and tolerant spirit. ... And there is, of course, a particularly noxious type of travelling Briton, who does his best, unconsciously, to deflower his country wherever he goes. Selfish, coarse-fibred, loud-voiced — the sort which thanks God he is a Briton — I suppose because nobody else will do it for him."

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" ... It would distress the average Briton to confess that he wanted to be understood, had anything so natural as a craving for fellowship or for being liked. ... We are, deep down, under all our lazy mentality, the most combative and competitive race in the world, with the exception, perhaps, of the American. This is at once a spiritual link with America, and yet one of the great barriers to friendship between the two peoples. We are not sure whether we are better men than Americans. Whether we are really better than French, Germans, Russians, Italians, Chinese, or any other race is, of course, more than a question; but those peoples are all so different from us that we are bound, I suppose, secretly to consider ourselves superior. ... "

"" ... but those peoples are all so different from us that we are bound, I suppose, secretly to consider ourselves superior. ... ""???!!!!

" ... One can hardly overrate the intimacy which a common literature brings. ... "

Didn't Idi Amin speak English when he derided U.K., post WWII and post stripping of U.K. of most of colonies, as a small nation?

" ... The tie of language is all-powerful — for language is the food formative of minds. ... "

Therein roots of Macaulay policy, designed to butcher soul of India.

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" ... Some years before the war an intelligent and cultivated Austrian, who had lived long in England, was asked for his opinion of the British. “In many ways,” he said, “I think you are inferior to us; but one great thing I have noticed about you which we have not. You think and act and speak for yourselves.” If he had passed those years in America instead of in England he must needs have pronounced the same judgment of Americans. Free speech, of course, like every form of freedom, goes in danger of its life in war-time. The other day, in Russia, an Englishman came on a street meeting shortly after the first revolution had begun. An extremist was addressing the gathering and telling them that they were fools to go on fighting, that they ought to refuse and go home, and so forth. The crowd grew angry, and some soldiers were for making a rush at him; but the chairman, a big, burly peasant, stopped them with these words: “Brothers, you know that our country is now a country of free speech. We must listen to this man, we must let him say anything he will. But, brothers, when he’s finished, we’ll bash his head in!”"

" ... Accustom people to be nose-led and spoon-fed, and democracy is a mere pretence. The measure of democracy is the measure of the freedom and sense of individual responsibility in its humblest citizens. ... "

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Here's a convenient reification of the worst - not only slavery, but colonial subjugation and looting of lands and worse :-

"A scientist, Dr. Spurrell, in a recent book, “Man and his Forerunners,” diagnoses the growth of civilisations somewhat as follows: A civilisation begins with the enslavement by some hardy race of a tame race living a tame life in more congenial natural surroundings. It is built up on slavery, and attains its maximum vitality in conditions little removed therefrom. Then, as individual freedom gradually grows, disorganisation sets in and the civilisation slowly dissolves away in anarchy. ... "

By that definition, Mongols civilised Europe, with repeated desperate attempts to do so!

Notice also the epithets, hardy instead of uncivilized, wild, vicious, brutal; tame replacing gentle, civilised, .... the change favouring British empire, rather, European powers with colonies (freed at time of WWI or otherwise)!

But then consider Mongols invading, conquering, destroying and enslaving most of Asia and Europe, for centuries, in repeated waves; and nòw, as per Galsworthy, credit European civilisation to Mongol devastation wreaked in Europe!

" ... Moreover, all past civilisations have been more or less Southern, and subject to the sapping influence of the sun. Modern civilisation is essentially Northern. ... "

Galsworthy seems not only to use the word Southern when he means tropical, but confuse the reasons for ill health of ordinary British that he laments. It isn't town proliferation, as much as precisely the lack of sun that he extols, which results in poorer people being unable to bathe or wash as often as necessary for cleaner bodies, much less be able to wear fresh clothes and wash them every time after wear. In climates much colder than Britain, equations of health change, but damp and not so vigorously cold as, say, Russia or New England, England remains in the region where it seems it's town life that mars health.

As for the rest, not only U.S. isn't quite as northern as U.K., with her Southern half being in places quite tropical or desert heat, or worse, but also, Galsworthy didn't live into the times when awareness dawned about heavy and untamed, thoughtless industrialisation of the richer nations is leading to global warming endangering human civilisation and earth. The year of the very dangerous pandemic of 2020 spread from China, leading to a shutdown in most of the world, has almost immediately resulted in cleaner air and water, and a raised water table as well, which just proves the point - what Galsworthy praises above, the modern industrial civilisation of latitudes closer to poles than to equator, can only depend on using fossil fuels or at least has done so far, and as a result endanger the earth's balance of climate.

Millennia of ancient civilisations, naturally, had to flourish in lands blessed with sun, and with forestation.

" ... What, for instance, will happen to Russia if she does not succeed in making her democracy genuine? A Russia which remains anarchic must very quickly become the prey of her neighbours on West and East."

Anyone with that naive a thinking must surely be aghast at subsequent events, which already unfolded during lifetime of Galsworthy.

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" ... Whatever their faults — and their offences cry aloud to such poor heaven as remains of chivalry and mercy — the Germans are in many ways a great race, but they possess two qualities dangerous to the individual conscience — unquestioning obedience and exaltation. ,,, "

Did he, during his lifetime, realise that was prophetic?

"I do not believe in formal alliances or in grouping nations to exclude and keep down other nations. ... "

That could have, at the very least, have more than one state eye him askance, if not refuse him visa outright, post WWII.

" ... It is childish to claim for Americans or Britons virtues beyond those of other nations, or to believe in the superiority of one national culture to another; they are different, that is all. ... "

And yet he supported British coloninisation of other lands, just to loot them.

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July 21, 2021 - July 21, 2021.

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ANGLO-AMERICAN DRAMA AND ITS FUTURE[C]

Just over a century ago, just after WWI, Galsworthy wrote what has since been thought and said about, not only the then English drama or theatre, but Hollywood and Indian films, television serials, and more.

"Sincerity in the theatre and commercial success are not necessarily, but they are generally, opposed. It is more or less a happy accident when, they coincide. This grim truth cannot be blinked. Not till the heavens fall will the majority of the public demand sincerity. And all that they who care for sincerity can hope for is that the supply of sincere drama will gradually increase the demand for it — gradually lessen the majority which has no use for that disturbing quality. The burden of this struggle is on the shoulders of the dramatists. It is useless and unworthy for them to complain that the public will not stand sincerity, that they cannot get sincere plays acted, and so forth. If they have not the backbone to produce what they feel they ought to produce, without regard to what the public wants, then good-bye to progress of any kind. If they are of the crew who cannot see any good in a fight unless they know it is going to end in victory; if they expect the millennium with every spring — they will advance nothing. Their job is to set their teeth, do their work in their own way, without thinking much about result, and not at all about reward, except from their own consciences. Those who want sincerity will always be the few, but they may well be more numerous than now; and to increase their number is worth a struggle. That struggle was the much-sneered-at, much-talked-of so-called “new” movement in our British drama."

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Galsworthy shocks one.

" ... Can we call Synge, or St. John Hankin, or Shaw, or Barrie serious? Hardly!... "

What? Is thst jealousy speaking, from someone perhaps less of a celebrity in the times they shared, for someone so completely undervalued in his time and since, and yet so much better known? But no, it turns out, he's merely redefining the word serious, albeit in a confused way. Because no matter what sliver of sense you restrict the word to, several of George Bernard Shaw's plays are far more serious than anything else contemplated, much less written, in English.

" ... Yet they are all of this new movement in their very different ways, because they are sincere. The word “serious,” in fact, has too narrow a significance and admits a deal of pompous stuff which is not sincere. While the word “sincere” certainly does not characterise all that is popularly included under the term “new drama,” it as certainly does characterise (if taken in its true sense of fidelity to self) all that is really new in it, and excludes no mood, no temperament, no form of expression which can pass the test of ringing true. ... "

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"Art is not art unless it is made out of an artist’s genuine feeling and vision, not out of what he has been told he ought to feel and see. For art exists not to confirm people in their tastes and prejudices, not to show them what they have seen before, but to present them with a new vision of life. And if drama be an art (which the great public denies daily, but a few of us still believe), it must reasonably be expected to present life as each dramatist sees it, and not to express things because they pander to popular prejudice, or are sensational, or because they pay."

And so there are those that pander to low taste and expectations for better financial guarantee, while the opposite camp carries the flag of this definition of art, and twisting it out of all semblance of reality, merely attempt shocking public senseless, and often succeed! They get the awards, fame, ....

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Galsworthy says something true about literature and art in general.

"The greater public will by preference take the lowest article in art offered to it. An awkward remark, and unfortunately true. But if a better article be substituted, the greater public very soon enjoys it every bit as much as the article replaced, and so on — up to a point which we need not fear we shall ever reach. Not that sincere dramatists are consciously trying to supply the public with a better article. A man could not write anything sincere with the elevation of the public as incentive. If he tried, he would be as lost as ever were the Pharisees making broad their phylacteries. He can only express himself sincerely by not considering the public at all. People often say that this is “cant,” but it really isn’t. There does exist a type of mind which cannot express itself in accordance with what it imagines is required; can only express itself for itself, and take the usually unpleasant consequences. This is, indeed, but an elementary truth, which since the beginning of the world has lain at the bottom of all real artistic achievement. ... "

It would seem Ayn Rand read it, and used it in fountainhead as something her hero Roark said to a client about the home he designed and built for him, which the client was pleased with, but Roark informed him thst he had no thought about the client or his needs while designing the place!

That ridiculous poseurship of someone, who spliced Galsworthy to Frank Lloyd Wright in creating her Fountainhead and charming people, would be negligible except she impressed teenagers into adapting it, who then use her sentences and copy the attitude, without the substance to back it up - as we found when we attempted working with an architect to build us a home we coukdnt live in.

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" ... In Britain it is a little difficult to persuade people that the writing of plays and novels is work. ... "

Try finding someone who takes your occupation seriously, whatever your occupation, if you aren't willing to drop it as and when required to cater to family, guests, relatives, .... and please everybody with obedience, charm, ... if you are of the gender needed in quantity if the humanity is to survive, but is overlooked most often if physically assaulted, murdered, robbed, insulted, starved, or denied any other rights that cannot be denied to men.

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" ... And as to the form of Mr. Shaw — who was once compared with Shakespeare — why! there is none. And yet, what form could so perfectly express Mr. Shaw’s glorious crusade against stupidity, his wonderfully sincere and lifelong mood of sticking pins into a pig!"

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" ... It is my strong impression that sincere dramatists in America are going to have an easier time than they had before the war, but that with us they are going to have a harder. My reasons are threefold. The first and chief reason is economic. However much America may now have to spend, with her late arrival, vaster resources, and incomparably greater recuperative power, she will feel the economic strain but little in comparison with Britain. Britain, not at once, but certainly within five years of the war’s close, will find that she has very much less money to spend on pleasure. ... "

From all accounts, the reality was quite different, and there's reason the post-war decade was termed "roaring twenties", until the Wall Street crash and subsequent depression, and later the rise of horror of fascism and nazis, further bringing WWII and discovery of genocide deliberately planned and almost completely executed.

Galsworthy furthermore completely ignores the then small object on the horizon, cinema, that grew to overshadow every other form of entertainment until television could compete with colour and large screens and remotes and superior technology. Theatre soon became not only more expensive and therefore unaffordable to middle class and poor, unless it was lesser quality provincial, but thereby a matter of snobbery for those who would look down on cinema as mass entertainment and therefore unworthy, just as a few decades later there were those who prided in listening to radio in preference to watching what they termed idiot box.

Now, with proliferation of cable channels and internet, the scenario is vastly different.

" ... The trouble in Britain — and I daresay in every country — is that the percentage of people who take art of any kind seriously is ludicrously small. ... "

Flip side, those who'd admit to artistic superior quality of entertainment presented in new forms was rare; snobbery still often consists of looking down on popular and successful films, and television serials. Then the flip again that worships success, as long as those behind have paid, ignoring quality.

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" ... But I am pretty certain that there is no chance for a drama of truth and beauty there for many years to come, unless we can get it endowed in such a substantial way as shall tide it over — say — the next two decades. What we require is a London theatre undeviatingly devoted to the production of nothing but the real thing, which will go its own way, year in, year out, quite without regard to the great public; and we shall never get it unless we can find some benevolent, public-spirited person or persons who will place it in a position of absolute security. ... "

State support did that as it did for art, at least in U.K. and Europe.

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"... Those who have seen the paintings of the Italian artist Segantini will understand what I mean. There have been many painters of mountains, but none whom I know of save he who has reproduced the very spirit of those great snowy spaces. He spent his life among them till they soaked into his nerves, into the very blood of him. All else he gave up, to see and feel them so that he might reproduce them in his art. ... "

Galsworthy, probably most of English world, was unaware of the extremely talented Roerich family, whose paintings of Himaalayan ranges are an experience to see - even though they not only travelled in India before and after their journey through Himaalayan regions to Tibet and further Northeast, but settled in India and have museums of their life and work, apart from other several museums display some of them.

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July 21, 2021 - July 21, 2021.

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SPECULATIONS[D]

Galsworthy's thoughts about future, art, effects of technology, ....

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Galsworthy may not have realised quite how much of this, following, relates to Britain looting India.

" ... The history of the last hundred and fifty years, especially in England, is surely one long story of ceaseless banquet and acute indigestion. Certain Roman Emperors are popularly supposed to have taken drastic measures during their feasts to regain their appetites; we have not their “slim” wisdom; we do not mind going on eating when we have had too much."

That, definitely relates to Britain Göring on looting India well past British needs.

" ... Consider the town-ridden, parasitic condition of Great Britain — the country which cannot feed itself. If we are beaten in this war, it will be because we have let our industrial system run away with us; because we became so sunk in machines and money-getting that we forgot our self-respect. No self-respecting nation would have let its food-growing capacity and its country life down to the extent that we have. ... "

Hence the stealing of India's harvest and ignoring millions in India die of starvation as a direct result.

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" ... We can try to ban certain outside dangers internationally, such as submarines and air-craft, in war; and, inside, we might establish a Board of Scientific Control to ensure that no inventions are exploited under conditions obviously harmful."

Galsworthy really did not comprehend Germany, despite the infamous Cousin Willy sending lenin deep into Russia in a diplomatic sealed German train, resulting in getting his cousin Ali's and her young family murdered along with mist of her married clan, the Romanovs - and all this, because she chose to marry her other cousin, Nicholas, instead of accepting Willy,even though she and Willy shared a grandmother Queen Victoria!

" ... But this is a very vital matter, and the suggestion of a Board of Scientific Control is not so fantastic as it seems. Certain results of inventions and discoveries cannot, of course, be foreseen, but able and impartial brains could foresee a good many and save mankind from the most rampant results of raw and unconsidered exploitation. The public is a child; and the child who suddenly discovers that there is such a thing as candy, if left alone, can only be relied on to make itself sick."

He had no clue! About science, technology, and effects on life, even though he lived at the era of when it all went forth explosively, and he praises industrial progress and it's effect, the then status of British empire, freely.

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He had no clue!

"Let us stray for a frivolous moment into the realms of art, since the word art is claimed for what we know as the “film.” This discovery went as it pleased for a few years in the hands of inventors and commercial agents. In these few years such a raging taste for cowboy, crime, and Chaplin films has been developed, that a Commission which has just been sitting on the matter finds that the public will not put up with more than a ten per cent. proportion of educational film in the course of an evening’s entertainment. Now, the film as a means of transcribing actual life is admittedly of absorbing interest and great educational value; but, owing to this false start, we cannot get it swallowed in more than extremely small doses as a food and stimulant, while it is being gulped down to the dregs as a drug or irritant. Of the film’s claim to the word art I am frankly sceptical. My mind is open — and when one says that, one generally means it is shut. ... "

The rest of it, one may allow, even if one can ask if he insisted a more than ten percent sermon, say, as part of every theatrical performance! But to name and brand Charlie Chaplin as example of non art bad superficial entertainment!

Then again, he didn't understand Shaw either, so -

" ...The film, of course, is in its first youth, but I see no signs as yet that it will ever overcome the handicap of its physical conditions, and attain the real emotionalising powers of art. The film sweeps up into itself, of course, a far wider surface of life in a far shorter space of time; but the medium is flat, has no blood in it; and experience tells one that no amount of surface and quantity in art ever make up for lack of depth and quality. ... "

He had no clue! It's pretty much akin to a shepherd in England pontificating about RAF flights.

"When our Tanks first appeared they were described as snouting monsters creeping at their own sweet will. I confess that this is how my inflamed eye sees all our modern machines — monsters running on their own, dragging us along, and very often squashing us."

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" ... On America, after the war, the destiny of civilisation may hang for the next century. If she mislays, indeed, if she does not improve the power of self-criticism — that special dry American humour which the great Lincoln had — she might soon develop the intolerant provincialism which has so often been the bane of the earth and the undoing of nations. If she gets swelled-head the world will get cold-feet. ... "

" ... I remember sitting on a bench overlooking the Grand Canyon of Arizona; the sun was shining into it, and a snow-storm was whirling down there. All that most marvellous work of Nature was flooded to the brim with rose and tawny-gold, with white, and wine-dark shadows; the colossal carvings as of huge rock-gods and sacrificial altars, and great beasts, along its sides, were made living by the very mystery of light and darkness, on that violent day of spring — I remember sitting there, and an old gentleman passing close behind, leaning towards me and saying in a sly, gentle voice: “How are you going to tell it to the folks at home?” America has so much that one despairs of telling to the folks at home, so much grand beauty to be to her an inspiration and uplift towards high and free thought and vision. Great poems of Nature she has, wrought in the large, to make of her and keep her a noble people. ... "

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July 21, 2021 - July 22, 2021.

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THE LAND, 1917

Galsworthy seems to see realistically, for once, with his perception almost prophetic!

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"If once more through ingenuity, courage, and good luck we find the submarine menace “well in hand,” and go to sleep again — if we reach the end of the war without having experienced any sharp starvation, and go our ways to trade, to eat, and forget — What then? It is about twenty years since the first submarine could navigate — and about seventeen since flying became practicable. There are a good many years yet before the world, and numberless developments in front of these new accomplishments. Hundreds of miles are going to be what tens are now; thousands of machines will take the place of hundreds.

"We have ceased to live on an island in any save a technically geographical sense, and the sooner we make up our minds to the fact, the better. If in the future we act as we have in the past — rather the habit of this country — I can imagine that in fifteen years’ time or so we shall be well enough prepared against war of the same magnitude and nature as this war, and that the country which attacks us will launch an assault against defences as many years out of date.

"I can imagine a war starting and well-nigh ending at once, by a quiet and simultaneous sinking, from under water and from the air, of most British ships, in port or at sea. I can imagine little standardised submarines surreptitiously prepared by the thousand, and tens of thousands of the enemy population equipped with flying machines, instructed in flying as part of their ordinary civil life, and ready to serve their country at a moment’s notice, by taking a little flight and dropping a little charge of an explosive many times more destructive than any in use now. The agility of submarines and flying machines will grow almost indefinitely. And even if we carry our commerce under the sea instead of on the surface, we shall not be guaranteed against attack by air. The air menace is, in fact, infinitely greater than that from under water. I can imagine all shipping in port, the Houses of Parliament, the Bank of England, most commercial buildings of importance, and every national granary wrecked or fired in a single night, on a declaration of war springing out of the blue. The only things I cannot imagine wrecked or fired are the British character and the good soil of Britain.

"These are sinister suggestions, but there is really no end to what might now be done to us by any country which deliberately set its own interests and safety above all considerations of international right, especially if such country were moved to the soul by longing for revenge, and believed success certain. ... "

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"Britain’s situation is now absurdly weak, without and within. And its weakness is due to one main cause — the fact that we do not grow our own food. To get the better of submarines in this war will make no difference to our future situation. ... "

"At the end of the war I suppose the Channel Tunnel will be made. And quite time too! But even that will not help us. We get no food from Europe, and never shall again. Not even by linking ourselves to Europe can we place ourselves in security from Europe. Faith may remove mountains, but it will not remove Britain to the centre of the Atlantic. Here we shall remain, every year nearer and more accessible to secret and deadly attack.

"The next war, if there be one — which Man forbid — may be fought without the use of a single big ship or a single infantryman. It may begin, instead of ending, by being a war of starvation; it may start, as it were, where it leaves off this time. And the only way of making even reasonably safe is to grow our own food. If for years to come we have to supplement by State granaries, they must be placed underground; not even there will they be too secure. Unless we grow our own food after this war we shall be the only great country which does not, and a constant temptation to any foe. To be self-sufficing will be the first precaution taken by our present enemies, in order that blockade may no longer be a weapon in our hands, so far as their necessary food is concerned."

"Our justifications for not continuing to feed ourselves were: Pursuit of wealth, command of the sea, island position. Whatever happens in this war, we have lost the last two in all but a superficial sense. Let us see whether the first is sufficient justification for perseverance in a mode of life which has brought us to an ugly pass.

"Our wonderful industrialism began about 1766, and changed us from exporting between the years 1732 and 1766 11,250,000 quarters of wheat to importing 7,500,000 quarters between the years 1767 and 1801. In one hundred and fifty years it has brought us to the state of importing more than three-quarters of our wheat, and more than half our total food. Whereas in 1688 (figures of Gregory and Davenant) about four-fifths of the population of England was rural, in 1911 only about two-ninths was rural. This transformation has given us great wealth, extremely ill-distributed; plastered our country with scores of busy, populous, and hideous towns; given us a merchant fleet which before the war had a gross tonnage of over 20,000,000, or not far short of half the world’s shipping. ... "

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Antisemitism evoked none too subtly here.

"We have a green and fertile country, and round it a prolific sea. Our country, if we will, can produce, with its seas, all the food we need to eat. We know that quite well, but we elect to be nourished on foreign stuff, because we are a practical people and prefer shekels to sentiment. We do not mind being parasitic. ... "

One, obviously, is the mention of shekel, a currency presumably of West Asia, most likely from ancient times, familiar to West due to connect via church, but definitely not one used in Europe in last few centuries; two, the explicit albeit veiled denunciation of a preference for moneymaking and explicit and not veiled exaltation of growing food, via agriculture and fishing, both are very thinly veiled antisemitism evoking references. (Jews were barred from land ownership in most of Europe through centuries, and hence went into either trade or - when they could afford to - intellectual activities.)

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" ... People in small country towns, I admit, have little or no more beauty than people in large towns. This is curious, but may be due to too much inbreeding. ... "

And yet they failed to see that the very intricate rules and laws of the arranged marriage system of India, preventing marriages between fifth to seventh degree of cousinhood (in female and male lines respectively), bolstered by not only whole clans attending functions but also detailed accounts of families kept by family priests, who not only conduct functions and ceremonies but also help with making matches - are all in all a far superior system, over its extreme opposite, that of matches arranged between cousins as Queen Victoria and her relatives and descendents did, or marriages within small neighbourhoods which is the only alternative, for most peole, if one must take what one finds at certain age?

Or was it merely racism clubbed together with colonial imperialism that blinded them to virtues of India?

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July 22, 2021 - July 22, 2021.

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THE LAND, 1917

Galsworthy looks at what he calls town-blight of U.K., and suggests remedies.

"(1) Such solid economic basis to the growth of our food as will give us again national security, more arable land than we have ever had, and on it a full complement of well-paid workers, with better cottages, and a livened village life.

"(2) A vast number of small holdings, State-created, with co-operative working.

"(3) A wide belt-system of garden allotments round every town, industrial or not.

"(4) Drastic improvements in housing, feeding, and sanitation in the towns themselves.

"(5) Education that shall raise not only the standard of knowledge but the standard of taste in town and country."

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" ... For vulgarity is the natural product of herd-life; an amalgam of second-hand thought, cheap and rapid sensation, defensive and offensive self-consciousness, gradually plastered over the faces, manners, voices, whole beings, of those whose elbows are too tightly squeezed to their sides by the pressure of their fellows, whose natures are cut off from Nature, whose senses are rendered imitative by the too insistent impact of certain sights and sounds. Without doubt the rapid increase of town-life is responsible for our acknowledged vulgarity. The same process is going on in America and in Northern Germany; but we unfortunately had the lead, and seem to be doing our best to keep it. Cheap newspapers, on the sensational tip-and-run system, perpetual shows of some kind or other, work in association, every kind of thing in association, at a speed too great for individual digestion, and in the presence of every device for removing the need for individual thought; the thronged streets, the football match with its crowd emotions; beyond all, the cinema — a compendium of all these other influences — make town-life a veritable forcing-pit of vulgarity. ... "

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July 22, 2021 - July 22, 2021.

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THE LAND, 1917

III

Galsworthy discusses government policy and measures to correct the situation of land, food, towns and returning soldiers.

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"On demobilisation we have the chance of our lives to put men on the land. ... To put men on the land we must have the land ready in terms of earth, not of paper; and have it in the right places, within easy reach of town or village. Things can be done just now. We know, for instance, that in a few months half a million allotment-gardens have been created in urban areas and more progress made with small holdings than in previous years. I repeat, we have a chance which will not recur to scotch the food danger, and to restore a healthier balance between town and country stocks. ... "

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" ... Only five generations have brought us to the parasitic, town-ridden condition we are in. The rate of progress in deterioration will increase rapidly with each coming generation. We have, as it were, turned seven-ninths of our population out into poor paddocks, to breed promiscuously among themselves. ... Consider what that would mean to the breeding of the next generation. In such extra millions of country stock our national hope lies. What we should never dream of permitting with our domestic animals, we are not only permitting but encouraging among ourselves; we are doing all we can to perpetuate and increase poor stock; stock without either quality or bone, run-down, and ill-shaped. ... "

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" ... In Mr. Prothero’s history of English farming occur these words: “A Norfolk farmer migrated to Devonshire in 1780, where he drilled and hoed his roots; though his crops were far superior to those of other farmers in the district, yet at the close of the century no neighbour had followed his example.”"

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" ... Every town, no matter how quickly it may be developing, is always surrounded by a belt of dubious land — not quite town and not quite country. When town development mops up plots in cultivation, a hole can be let out in an elastic belt which is capable of almost indefinite expansion. ... "

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July 22, 2021 - July 22, 2021.

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THE LAND, 1918

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INTRODUCTORY

Galsworthy begins by painting his dream of Britain as he hopes it would be in 1948. This was written and published in 1918, as per dated above.

He reckoned without the Germans, of course.

Germans, on the other hand, took much of this seriously, post WWII, and whether they read Galsworthy or not, have the idyllic planned landscape with garden patches outside towns rented to town populations that one can see them working on at weekends, for example.

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" ... Every little girl has been taught to cook. ... "

Perpetuating stereotypical slavery of female chained to kitchen and thus necessarily prey to male!

Why didn't he include boys (and for that matter say child, instead of mentioning gender at all)?

Because males should only do paid work, while females must mop up all unpaid work, at anyone's and everyone's bidding, taken as command?

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" ... let us be practical by all means; for in the practical measures of the present, spurred on by that thought, inspired by that vision, alone lies the hope and safety of the future.

What are those measures?"

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July 22, 2021 - July 22, 2021.

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WHEAT

Galsworthy begins by reversing, without saying so, the process of turning farms into grassland which was begun in early era of exploration, with small farmers and so on pushed off the land by large landowners, encouraging the former to emigrate to colonies if not to towns to work in industries, and increasing the landholdings if the wealthy, used only for pleasure.

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" ... A hundred acres under potatoes feeds 420 persons; a hundred acres under wheat feeds 200 persons; a hundred acres of grass feeds fifteen persons. ... "

This, if understood and said explicitly, is the argument used by environmentalists now in favour of a predominantly if not completely vegetarian lifestyle, as opposed to the meat-heavy diet of Nordic latitudes of pre-industrial era.

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" ... “In the United States the amount exported tends to fall. The results are so marked that we find American agricultural experts seriously considering the possibility of the United States having to become a wheat importing country in order to feed the rapidly growing population.” When she does, that wheat will come from Canada; and “there are several other facts which lead one to question the statement so frequently made that Canada will shortly be the Empire’s granary....” He thinks that the Argentine (which trebles her population every forty years) is an uncertain source; that Russia, where the population also increases with extreme rapidity, is still more uncertain; that neither India nor Australia are dependable fields of supply. ... "

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"We are no longer, and never shall again be, an island. The air is henceforth as simple an avenue of approach as Piccadilly is to Leicester Square. If we are ever attacked there will be no time to get our second wind, unless we can feed ourselves. And since we are constitutionally liable to be caught napping, we shall infallibly be brought to the German heel next time, if we are not self-supporting. ... grow four-fifths instead of one-fifth of our supply, and all else will follow."

Instead, Britain stole harvest of India, causing death by starvation of millions in India, and merely clamped down on media; to justify his statement that millions dying in India was of no consequence whatsoever, Churchill then refused to allow the ships filled with grain sent by FDR for India, stopping them at Australia, so millions starving to death in India should not be helped, as a matter of policy.

Thus was shortly before he finalised the plan for partition of India, leading to deaths of several more millions in India, as a price for letting go of India because U.K. coukdnt afford to repay what Britain owed India- and so West could have use of the free military bases for war against USSR, then still an ally they couldn't have won WWII without, but nevertheless intended to chop up because USSR wasn't allowing rapacious exploitation of her land by West, a la colonial era of European powers using rest of the world.

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July 22, 2021 - July 22, 2021.

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HOLDINGS

Galsworthy discusses landholdings, sizes, and need to act in time.

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"For instance, the great development of small holdings in Germany is mainly responsible for the plentiful supply of labour on the land there; ... "

Presumably the entire dependence on humongous machinery in U.S., to deal with every aspect of farming, is due to the large sizes of farms and comparatively scarce population in the huge land.

"A rough census taken in 1916 among our soldiers gave the astounding figure of 750,000 desirous of going on the land. ... "

Astounding? Why, isn't land ownership the very basis of caste in Europe? And therefore, those who wish to stop being nobody, naturally they'd wish to own a bit of the land they live on, even more so than everywhere else - after all, to own a home, possibly a garden, is a natural universal wish, and to own land is an extension thereof!

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"I am told that Germany has seen to this matter. She does not mean to be starved in the future; she intends to keep the backbone of her country sound. She, who already grew 80 per cent. of her food, will grow it all. She, who already appreciated the dangers of a rampant industrialism, will take no further risks with the physique of her population. ... "

Surprise, surprise! No, eventually too, Germany went for industrialisation on a large scale, post WWII, and not only during the era between the two wars when the Nazi plan unfolded was to invade, conquer and colonise all of Europe and most of the world, enslaving the local populations and using their lands to grow food for Germany, starving the locals to death and resetting the lands with Germans- in short, aping everything already done by other colonial powers or Europe, except for doing it Europe in the first place.

" ... We who did not grow one-half of our food, and whose riotous industrialism has made far greater inroads on our physique; we who, though we have not yet suffered the privations of Germany, have been in far more real danger — we shall talk about it, say how grave the situation is, how “profoundly” we are impressed by the need to feed ourselves — and we shall act, I am very much afraid, too late."

No, there was India to steal harvest from, over and above the two centuries of looting her, so millions could be starved to death, apart from U.S. and Canada who supplied grain!

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July 22, 2021 - July 23, 2021.

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INSTRUCTION

"I who have lived most of my time on a farm for many years, in daily contact with farmer and labourer, do really appreciate what variety and depth of knowledge is wanted for good farming. It is a lesson to the armchair reformer to watch a farmer walking across the “home meadow” whence he can see a good way over his land. One can feel the slow wisdom working in his head. A halt, a look this way and that, a whistle, the call of some instruction so vernacular that only a native could understand; the contemplation of sheep, beasts, sky, crops; always something being noted, and shrewd deductions made therefrom. It is a great art, and, like all art, to be learned only with the sweat of the brow and a long, minute attention to innumerable details. You cannot play at farming, and you cannot “mug it up.” One understands the contempt of the farmer born and bred for the book-skilled gentleman who tries to instruct his grandmother in the sucking of eggs. The farmer’s knowledge, acquired through years of dumb wrestling with Nature, in his own particular corner, is his strength and — his weakness. Vision of the land at large, of its potentialities, and its needs is almost of necessity excluded. The practical farmers of our generation might well be likened unto sailing-ship seamen in an age when it has suddenly become needful to carry commerce by steam. ... "

Magnify that a millionfold, and there is India verses conquistadores colonial invaders looking down their noses at deep treasures of ancient knowledge of every kind, and deciding to break India just so Brits could benefit - Macaulay policy!

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" ... In America, where they contemplate a labour shortage of 2,000,000 men on their farms, they are using boys from sixteen to twenty-one, when their military age begins. Can we not do the same here? Most of our boys from fifteen to eighteen are now on other work. But the work they are doing could surely be done by girls or women. ... They might be given specialised schooling in agriculture, the most important schooling we can give our rising generation, while all of them would gain physically. By employing women on the land, where we can employ boys of from fifteen to eighteen, we are blind-alleying. Women will not stay on the land in any numbers; few will wish that they should. Boys will, and every one would wish that they may. ... "

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July 23, 2021 - July 23, 2021.

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CO-OPERATION (SMALL HOLDINGS)

"Perhaps it would be right to say that for the large farms it is due to the first, and for the smaller farms (three quarters of the arable land in Germany) to the second. For it is only through co-operation that the advantages of farming on a large scale are made possible for smaller farmers. The more important of those advantages are the regulated purchase of all raw materials and half-finished products (artificial manures, feeding stuffs, seeds, etc.), better prices for products, facilities for making use, in moderation, of personal credit at a cheap rate of interest, together with the possibility of saving and putting aside small sums of interest; all these advantages of the large farmer have been placed within the reach of the small farmers by local co-operative societies for buying, selling, and farming co-operatively, as well as by saving and other banks, all connected to central associations and central co-operative societies.

"“Over two million small farmers are organised in Germany on co-operative lines.”[E]

"Nearly two million small farmers co-operated in Germany; and here-how many? The Registrar returns the numbers for 1916 at 1,427 small holders."

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" ... One of the chief complaints of small holders in the past has been that large holders regard them askance. The same, perhaps, applies to the attitude of the small holder to the allotment holder. That is all bad. ... "

Western caste system, after all.

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July 23, 2021 - July 23, 2021.

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CO-OPERATION (ALLOTMENTS)

"The growth of allotment gardens is a striking feature of our agricultural development under stimulus of the war. They say a million and a half allotment gardens are now being worked on. That is, no doubt, a papery figure; nor is it so much the number, as what is being done on them, that matters. Romance may have “brought up the nine-fifteen,” but it will not bring up potatoes. Still, these new allotments without doubt add very greatly to our food supply, give hosts of our town population healthy work in the open air, and revive in them that “earth instinct” which was in danger of being utterly lost. The spade is a grand corrective of nerve strain, and the more town and factory workers take up allotment gardens, the better for each individual, and for us all as a race."

" ... There is always a ring of land round a town, like a halo round the moon. As the town’s girth increases, so should that halo; and even in time of peace, larger and larger, not less and less, should grow the number of town dwellers raising vegetables, fruit and flowers, resting their nerves and expanding lungs and muscles with healthy outdoor work."

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July 23, 2021 - July 23, 2021.

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VALEDICTORY

" ... Fixing its eyes on measures which should redeem the evils of the day, it did not see that those evils were growing faster than all possible remedy, because we had forgotten that a great community bountifully blessed by Nature has no business to exist parasitically on the earth produce of other communities; and because our position under pure free trade, and pure industrialism, was making us a tempting bait for aggression, and retarding the very good-will between nations which it desired so earnestly."

Galsworthy forgets the treatment meted out to India, even apart from starving millions of Indians to death by British who stole harvest of India; there was the infamous chopping off of thumbs of weavers of India, because Indian weaves were superb, and India wasn't tempted yet into substitution of the inferior cloth from British factories for Indian product.

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" ... A Britain fed from overseas can only be an Imperialistic Junker, armed to the teeth, jealous and doubtful of each move by any foreigner; prizing quantity not quality; indifferent about the condition of his heart. Such a Britain dare not be liberal if it will."

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"The other day a Canadian free trader said: “It all depends on what sort of peace we secure; if we have a crushing victory, I see no reason why Britain should not go on importing her food.”

Europe is still doing that, with vegetables grown exclusively for export to Europe -in Africa, by African workers on the farms, while the locals population cannot benefit from any of it!

" ... Does any man think that a momentary exhaustion of our enemy is going to prevent that huge and vigorous nation from becoming strong again? ... "

Indeed!

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July 23, 2021 - July 23, 2021.

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GROTESQUES

"The Angel Æthereal, on his official visit to the Earth in 1947, paused between the Bank and the Stock Exchange to smoke a cigarette and scrutinise the passers-by."

Galsworthy expounds his thinking via a dialogue.

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Galsworthy sounds impressed with Gandhi:-

"“To my thinking,” answered his dragoman, “instead of endeavouring to increase money when we found ourselves so very bankrupt, we should have endeavoured to decrease our wants. The path of real progress, sir, is the simplification of life and desire till we have dispensed even with trousers and wear a single clean garment reaching to the knees; ... Our ambition should have been to need so little that, with our present scientific knowledge, we should have been able to produce it very easily and quickly, and have had abundant leisure and sound nerves and bodies wherewith to enjoy nature, art, and the domestic affections. The tragedy of man, sir, is his senseless and insatiate curiosity and greed, together with his incurable habit of neglecting the present for the sake of a future which will never come.”"

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" ... I sometimes wonder whether we shall survive until your visit in 1984.”"

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" ... The final victory of the Laborious Party, in 1930, saw them, still propelled by their rump, committed, among other things, to a pure town policy. They have never been out of power since; the result you see. Food is now entirely brought from overseas, largely by submarine and air service, in tabloid form, and expanded to its original proportions on arrival by an ingenious process discovered by a German. The country is now used only as a subject for sentimental poets, and to fly over, or by lovers on bicycles at week-ends.”"

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"“Is London, then, not a town?” asked the Angel playfully.

"“London?” cried his dragoman; “a mere pleasure village. To which real town shall I take you? Liverchester?”

"“Anywhere,” said the Angel, “where I can get a good dinner.” So-saying, he paid the rural population with a smile and spread his wings."

"“As you will, sir,” replied his dragoman; “there is no difference between night and day, now that they are using the tides for the provision of electric power.”"

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"“See!” he said, indicating the other supper-takers with a circular movement of his beard, “they are consumed with laughter. The habit of fox-trotting in the intervals of eating has been known ever since it was introduced by Americans a generation ago, at the beginning of the Great Skirmish, when that important people had as yet nothing else to do; but it still causes laughter in this country. A distressing custom,” he wheezed, as they resumed their seats, “for not only does it disturb the oyster, but it compels one to think lightly of the human species. Not that one requires much compulsion,” he added, “now that music-hall, cinema, and restaurant are conjoined. What a happy idea that was of Berlin’s, and how excellent for business! Kindly glance for a moment — but not more — at the left-hand stage.”"

"“Are there no plays, no operas?” asked the Angel from behind his glass.

"“Not in the old and proper sense of these words. They disappeared towards the end of the Great Skirmish.”

"“What food for the mind is there, then?” asked the Angel, adding an oyster to his collection.

"“None in public, sir, for it is well recognised, and has been ever since those days, that laughter alone promotes business and removes the thought of death. You cannot recall, as I can, sir, the continual stream which used to issue from theatres, music-halls, and picture-palaces in the days of the Great Skirmish, nor the joviality of the Strand and the more expensive restaurants. I have often thought,” he added with a touch of philosophy, “what a height of civilisation we must have reached to go jesting, as we did, to the Great Unknown.”

"“Is that really what the English did at the time of the Great Skirmish?” asked the Angel.

"“It is,” replied his dragoman solemnly."

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" ... A school, which first drew breath before the Great Skirmish began, has perfected itself, till now we have whole tomes where hardly a sentence would be intelligible to any save the initiate; this enables them to defy the Watch Committees, with other Philistines. We have writers who mysteriously preach the realisation of self by never considering anybody else; of purity through experience of exotic vice; of courage through habitual cowardice; and of kindness through Prussian behaviour. They are generally young. We have others whose fiction consists of autobiography interspersed with philosophic and political fluencies. These may be of any age from eighty odd to the bitter thirties. We have also the copious and chatty novelist; and transcribers of the life of the Laborious, whom the Laborious never read. Above all, we have the great Patriotic school, who put the national motto first, and write purely what is good for trade. In fact, we have every sort, as in the old days.”"

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" ... We shall now consider the positively moral. At the time of the Great Skirmish these were such as took no sugar in their tea and invested all they had in War Stock at five per cent. without waiting for what were called Premium Bonds to be issued. They were a large and healthy group, more immediately concerned with commerce than the war. But the largest body of all were the negatively moral. These were they who did what they crudely called ‘their bit,’ which I may tell you, sir, was often very bitter. I myself was a ship’s steward at the time, and frequently swallowed much salt water, owing to the submarines. But I was not to be deterred, and would sign on again when it had been pumped out of me. Our morality was purely negative, if not actually low. We acted, as it were, from instinct, and often wondered at the sublime sacrifices which were being made by our betters. Most of us were killed or injured in one way or another; but a blind and obstinate mania for not giving in possessed us. We were a simple lot.” The dragoman paused and fixed his eyes on the empty hearth. “I will not disguise from you,” he added, “that we were fed-up nearly all the time; and yet — we couldn’t stop. Odd, was it not?”"
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"“Since we attended the Divorce Court,” remarked the Angel with deliberation, “I have been thinking. And I fancy no one can be really kind unless they have had matrimonial trouble, preferably in conflict with the law.”

"“A new thought to me,” observed his dragoman attentively; “and yet you may be right, for there is nothing like being morally outcast to make you feel the intolerance of others. But that brings us to private morality.”

"“Quite!” said the Angel, with relief. “I forgot to ask you this morning how the ancient custom of marriage was now regarded in the large?”

"“Not indeed as a sacrament,” replied his dragoman; “such a view was becoming rare already at the time of the Great Skirmish. Yet the notion might have been preserved but for the opposition of the Pontifical of those days to the reform of the Divorce Laws. When principle opposes common sense too long, a landslide follows.”"

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"In the centre, of course, are situated the enormous majority of the community, whose view is that they have no view of what ‘the good’ is.”

"“None?” repeated the Angel Æthereal, somewhat struck.

"“Not the faintest,” answered his dragoman. “These are the only true mystics; for what is a mystic if not one with an impenetrable belief in the mystery of his own existence? This group embraces the great bulk of the Laborious. It is true that many of them will repeat what is told them of ‘the good’ as if it were their own view, without compunction, but this is no more than the majority of persons have done from the beginning of time.”"

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Racism, colonial imperialism, religious dogma snobbery, all in one easily achieved without effort, when one looks down ones nose and ridicules something one couldn't hope to comprehend, even if it's simplicity itself - or, possibly, precisely because it's simple, since West requires incomprehensible and twisted notifications before they'd deign to respect something - treasure of wisdom and knowledge of ancient India!

" ... Does the theory of reincarnation still obtain?”

"“I do not wonder, sir, that you are interested in the point, for believers in that doctrine are compelled, by the old and awkward rule that ‘Two and two make four,’ to draw on other spheres for the reincarnation of their spirits.”

"“I do not follow,” said the Angel.

"“It is simple, however,” answered his dragoman, “for at one time on earth, as is admitted, there was no life. The first incarnation, therefore — an amœba, we used to be told — enclosed a spirit, possibly from above. It may, indeed, have been yours, sir. Again, at some time on this earth, as is admitted, there will again be no life; the last spirit will therefore flit to an incarnation, possibly below; and again, sir, who knows, it may be yours.”"

" ... “The last group, on the far left, to which indeed I myself am not altogether unaffiliated, is composed of a small number of extremists, who hold that ‘the good’ is things as they are — pardon the inevitable flaw in grammar. They consider that what is now has always been, and will always be; that things do but swell and contract and swell again, and so on for ever and ever; and that, since they could not swell if they did not contract, since without the black there could not be the white, nor pleasure without pain, nor virtue without vice, nor criminals without judges; even contraction, or the black, or pain, or vice, or judges, are not ‘the bad,’ but only negatives; and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."

"“I gather,” said the Angel, “that these think there is no purpose in existence?”

"“Rather, sir, that existence is the purpose. For, if you consider, any other conception of purpose implies fulfilment, or an end, which they do not admit, just as they do not admit a beginning.”"

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"“Love is commonly reputed by some, and power by others, to be the keys of happiness,” said the Angel, regardless of his grammar.

"“Duds,” broke in his dragoman. “For love and power are only two of the various paths to absorption, or unconsciousness of self; mere methods by which men of differing natures succeed in losing their self-consciousness, for he who, like Saint Francis, loves all creation, has no time to be conscious of loving himself, and he who rattles the sword and rules like Bill Kaser, has no time to be conscious that he is not ruling himself. I do not deny that such men may be happy, but not because of the love or the power. No, it is because they are loving or ruling with such intensity that they forget themselves in doing it.”"

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" ... I will not disguise from you, however, that we are far from perfection; and it may be that on your next visit, thirty-seven years hence, we shall be further. ... "

Why thirty seven?

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July 19, 2021 - July 24, 2021.

Purchased June 12, 2021.

Kindle Edition, 348 pages

Published March 24, 2011.

(first published 2007)

ASIN:- B004TQBTUG

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Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Saturday, July 24, 2021

Another Sheaf, by John Galsworthy.

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