A copy book dating to the 1840s or 1850s in Concord Museum, Concord, Massachusetts, USA. The student has been practising his handwriting by repeatedly inscribing the words ‘Hard, hard indeed was the contest of liberty’ (a popular elocution exercise taken from President Harrison’s tribute to George Washington, which began ‘Hard, hard indeed was the contest for freedom and independence’). More mundanely, on the following sheet the student turns to ‘Interest is an allowance made for the use of money’.
Part 1 of 3
AS I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.*
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings,* I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed.* They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.*
* Kipling’s target is those economic planners whom governments hold in awe, supposing that their modish theories about social and economic progress, idols of ink and paper, really can defy the laws of common sense and deliver every miracle that is promised in their name. Kipling was thinking in particular of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), then very much in vogue across Europe and the USA. But see US President John Adams on A Moral and Religious People.
* Copybooks were used in earlier generations as templates for handwriting practice. Well-known proverbs, sayings and truisms (‘water makes wet, fire burns’) were printed as headings, and students learnt to copy them out beneath in a fair hand. ‘The gods of the copybook headings’ represent folk wisdom, the accumulated store of timeless common sense and universal experience.
* A reference to John 3:8, “The wind [or Spirit] bloweth where it listeth”, but more appositely perhaps to Ephesians 4:14, where St Paul hopes “That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive”.
* Kipling may be thinking of the Fall of Rome to Alaric the Goth in 410. It was this shattering event that caused the Emperor to withdraw troops from the Province of Britannia, ending almost four centuries of Roman Britain. On what happened when word of that fall came to Emperor Honorius, see A Bird in the Hand is Worth....
Précis
Kipling contrasted ‘the gods of the market-place’, those Utopian dreams of the march of progress that spring up and fade away, with ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, the timeless maxims and proverbs which were laboriously copied out as handwriting practice and which, though scorned by the fashionable, nonetheless remain stubbornly relevant while faddish theories come and go. (58 / 60 words)
Part Two
David Lloyd George (left) and Winston S. Churchill, leaders of Liberal Party policy in the Edwardian era, pictured in 1907. As time went by, their paths diverged. Much to Kipling’s disapproval, Lloyd George (who served as Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922) became a passionate advocate of disarmament across Europe, and waxed warm towards the Soviet Union. In 1919, Churchill had already declared his ‘hatred’ for Marxism’s terrorist form of government and disdained its economics as absurd Utopianism, and in 1924 he crossed the House to the Conservatives. He was one of the few who voiced alarm over Disarmament’s development into Appeasement, as Germany and Italy rearmed and progressively ‘united’ their neighbours during the 1930s.
WITH the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.*
They denied that Wishes were Horses;* they denied that a Pig had Wings.*
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming,* They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know”.*
On the first Feminian Sandstones* we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death”.*
* That the moon is made of green (unripe, as opposed to mature) cheese was a proverbial hoax by the sixteenth century. “Ye fetch circumquaques” said John Heywood in his ‘Book of Proverbs’ (1546) “to make me beleeve, / Or thinke, that the moone is made of a greene cheese.” Kipling has in mind those Utopian politicians who ‘promise us the moon’ and more. Common sense not only queries whether the cheese we are being offered is fine English Stilton; it doubts whether it is even an everyday cheese from Holland. In ‘English Traits’ (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) declared that such scepticism was typical of the English, though his metaphor was muffins. “He must be treated with sincerity and reality; with muffins, and not the promise of muffins.”
* ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride’ is a seventeenth-century Scottish proverb warning against actions taken on the basis of wishful thinking rather than hard reality. Politicians offer us wish-horses, but the copybook proverbs warn us that we won’t be able to ride them.
* Sixteenth-century lexicographer John Withals recorded in his A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners (1556) the proverb “Pigs fly in the ayre with their tayles forward”, a tongue-in-cheek rejoinder when credulity is being stretched too far. This has worn down today into ‘If pigs had wings, they could fly’ or more abruptly, ‘Pigs might fly!’. The maxims of our forebears warn that social and economic micromanagement has as much chance of working as a pig has of flying.
* A barb aimed at Welsh Prime Minister David Lloyd George (in office 1916-1922) and his advocacy of disarmament following the Great War, which was imposed severely on the German Empire by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The deal also committed the Allies to phased disarmament. Kipling’s suspicions were justified: the policy of Disarmament became such an idol that in the 1930s, in a desperate bid to avoid a repetition of the Great War, smaller European states were ‘sold and delivered bound’ to Germany and Italy, and Disarmament became Appeasement.
* Kipling expressed his negative views on a heathen faith in ‘reeking tube and iron shard’ clearly in ‘Recessional’ (1897); but if war-readiness is a ‘devil’, war-unreadiness is a worse because it suggests moral decay. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things” wrote philosopher J. S. Mill (1806-1873): “the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse.”
* The ‘feminian’ era suggests the campaigns of such as Barbara Bodichon (1827-1891), founder of Girton College in Cambridge and of the Women’s Suffrage Committee in 1866, and Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), founder of the more aggressive Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. Kipling was not enamoured of suffragists in the Pankhurst mould, and his belittlement of them in a letter (December 4th, 1911) to Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal in America — he intimated that they either had no man in their lives, or had one they could or would not please — does him no credit; but in the present passage, his lament was for the weakening of marriage, the disintegration of family life, and selfishness in love, subjects which had been driving some of his most bleak, poignant and sympathetic storylines for thirty years.
* See Romans 6:3.
Précis
Intellectual fashions are of course appealing, says Kipling, and it would be nice if our wishes and our ifs all came true; but they rarely do, and each time they fail those annoying maxims are there to remind us why. He hints that post-war disarmament was just such a castle-in-the-air, and that sexual liberation was another. (56 / 60 words)
Part Three
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) addresses the Second World Congress of the Comintern in 1924, painted by Isaak Brodsky (1883–1939). The drift towards socialism and centralised planning under Lloyd George and his protege John Maynard Keynes caused Kipling some disquiet, but a decade earlier, in ‘With the Night Mail’ (1909) and again in ‘As Easy as ABC’ (1912), he had expressed a fear that one kind of totalitarianism might provoke the public into another, a technocratic totalitarianism which we allowed to do as it pleased so long as it shielded us from the vexations of civic responsibility. The sole alternative was a speechifying, rabble-rousing demagogue who manufactured grievances and demanded weekly referendums on ‘every matter of daily life, including most of the physical functions’. Nobody offered the public liberty; worst of all nobody wanted it.
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.”
Précis
As a final example of wishful thinking, Kipling added growing twentieth-century Union activism: despite the reality check of the Great War, once more society appeared to be ready to make the same mistakes all over again. It was, said Kipling, the way of the world; the only certainty was that those copybook maxims would have the last word. (58 / 60 words)
