The Thing

One of the essays of Chesterton that I always remember for its start and finish is "The Thing". Actually, the body of the essay has a lot to say about democracy, the selling out of the older rural aristocracy to people with money (who buy titles, land, and the veneer of being old and traditional), and the tokenism of elections.

What he says about what might be called "upper" or "owning" class is interesting: "the vast estates into which England has long been divided are passing out of the hands of the English gentry into the hands of men who are always upstarts and often actually foreigners."; this is a recurrent observation, and our local example is probably the Dame of Sark, who gave the impression of having a long Feudal lineage, and Sark being a last Feudal bastion, whereas not only did the title and establishment of Sark only stem from a post-Feudal period (the re-colonisation of Sark by the de Carterets), but also the title was bought up by her family only a generation or two before when the original Seigneurs went bankrupt! Of course in Chesterton's England this went hand in hand with corruption, and landowners would buy peerages (especially but not only in the time of Lloyd George), send their children to public schools, and appear "establishment". This was so massive a change in Chesterton's time that he saw it as a kind of invasion, especially as some of the moneyed class were rich immigrants: "In theory the sale of a squire's land to a moneylender is a minor and exceptional necessity. In reality it is a thing like a German invasion. Sometimes it is a German invasion."

He then goes on to argue that what happens is that these people take over the countryside, and get into goverment, and basically do not allow local people a say in what goes on: "Upon this helpless populace, gazing at these prodigies and fates, comes round about every five years a thing called a General Election. It is believed by antiquarians to be the remains of some system of self-government; but it consists solely in asking the citizen questions about everything except what he understands." The net result of this is that the agenda for issues in an election is set by the rulers rather than the governed, and national and international issues predominate to the detriment of local issues, which are sidelined, the average man "would be, I seriously believe, the best judge of whether farmsteads or factory chimneys should adorn his own sky-line, of whether stupid squires or clever usurers should govern his own village. But these are precisely the things which the oligarchs will not allow him to touch with his finger. Instead, they allow him an Imperial destiny and divine mission to alter, under their guidance, all the things that he knows nothing about. The name of self-government is noisy everywhere: the Thing is throttled." Locally, that reminds me most recently of the last election but one when Frank Walker was elected largely on a platform of the politician with "international statue" and the only one with experience to negotiate with the U.K. Government, which formed a large plank in his campaign to be elected; in Jersey we are luckier in getting local issues raised, but note the recent idea of rezoning large units of Green Zone land was not ever an election issue, but something that has come up afterwards, along with the "redevelopment of St Helier" proposals. It is almost a case of burying them in the middle of a period between elections, so that no one can comment on them!

But the central image I remember is that of the wind, at the start:

"The wind awoke last night with so noble a violence that it was like the war in heaven; and I thought for a moment that the Thing had broken free. For wind never seems like empty air. Wind always sounds full and physical, like the big body of something; and I fancied that the Thing itself was walking gigantic along the great roads between the forests of beech."

He returns to this right at the end as well, after discussing the magnates who have taken away self-governent in any meaningful sense:

"The wind sang and split the sky like thunder all the night through; in scraps of sleep it filled my dreams with the divine discordances of martyrdom and revolt; I heard the horn of Roland and the drums of Napoleon and all the tongues of terror with which the Thing has gone forth: the spirit of our race alive. But when I came down in the morning only a branch or two was broken off the tree in my garden; and none of the great country houses in the neighbourhood were blown down, as would have happened if the Thing had really been abroad."