The Gods of the Copybook Headings
IN the Carboniferous Epoch* we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;*
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die”.*
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters,* and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,*
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;*
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world* begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
* A reference to the growing domination of Trades Unions by politically active coalminers in the early twentieth century, demanding comprehensive economic intervention by the State on socialist lines. Their demands were met to some degree through policies developed by Lloyd George’s protege John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) immediately after the Great War, but both in the UK under Lloyd George and in the US under President Henry Hoover (in office 1929-1933) the impact of Keynesian economics was disastrous.
* ‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul’, a proverb apparently derived from the 16th century, when lands belonging to St Peter’s Collegiate Church in Westminster (Westminster Abbey) were reallocated to fund repairs to Old St Paul’s. Kipling applies it to that politics which tries to mitigate inequality or stimulate growth by the compulsory redistribution of property. “Most economic fallacies” wrote economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) “derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
* A terse paraphrase of 2 Thessalonians 3:10-12. St Paul’s words were also quoted by Margaret Thatcher in her controversial ‘Speech to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland’ in 1988, much to the scandal of that august and largely socialist body. Neither Thatcher nor St Paul, of course, expected the poor, the sick or the unemployed to starve: Paul explains that he is talking of those ‘disorderly’ busybodies who actually prefer to eat other people’s food rather than work for their own, and who are so far from being ill that they idle about town meddling in other people’s lives. Something of Kipling’s attitude to charity, both for and against, may be gleaned from his bleak short story ‘The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot’ in Many Inventions.
* From ‘The Merchant of Venice’ by William Shakespeare, Act II, Scene 6. Strictly speaking, the word should be ‘glisters’.
* See 2 Peter 2:22. The graphic metaphors indicate those people who habitually do not learn from their mistakes.
* The copybook proverb says ‘The burnt child fears the fire’; but Kipling recognised that some people are tempted by fashionable opinion to do the same stupid thing again and again even though they have already taken hurt from it. The proverb appears in Heywood as ‘burnt child fire dredth’ but is older, found in the Proverbs of Hendyng dating back to the later thirteenth-century, where it is given as ‘Brend child fur dredth’.
* From ‘The Tempest’ by William Shakespeare, Act V, Scene 1. In ‘With the Night Mail’ (1909) and again in ‘As Easy as ABC’ (1912), Kipling introduced us to his ‘brave new world’, in which the Aerial Board of Control (ABC), a transport authority, has developed into a soft-totalitarian global government simply because it made life for an idle public ‘as easy as ABC’:
“That semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons of both sexes, controls the Planet. Transportation is Civilisation, our motto runs. Theoretically we do what we please, so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically, the ABC confirms or annuls all international arrangements, and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little Planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders.”