The Rule of the Road
Being a free citizen doesn’t mean that everyone else has to get out of your way.
1919
King George V 1910-1936
‘Russian Peasant Woman’, by Boris Grigoriev (1923)
By Boris Grigoriev (1886-1939), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
A Russian peasant woman, by Boris Grigoriev (1886-1939). It was painted in 1923, shortly after the USSR came into being on December 30th, 1922. The lady Arthur Ransome noticed walking down the middle of a Petrograd street did not get to enjoy her notion of ‘liberty’ for long: so zealously did the Communists agree with Gardiner, that individual liberty was almost extinguished in favour of the social contract. That is not what he had in mind. “I suppose the fact is” he went on to say “that we can be neither complete anarchists nor complete Socialists in this complex world — or rather we must be a judicious mixture of both.” If there is a definition of Englishness, this must come close to it.
Introduction
In 1917-18, Arthur Ransome (who would later write Swallows and Amazons) was in St Petersburg, then named Petrograd, reporting on the Communist revolution for the Daily News. One of his tales tickled fellow journalist Alfred Gardiner, who nonetheless drew from it a serious lesson about liberty, a word bandied about as carelessly then as it is today.
That was a jolly story which Mr Arthur Ransome told the other day in one of his messages from Petrograd. A stout old lady was walking with her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to herself. It was pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for foot-passengers, but she replied: “I’m going to walk where I like. We’ve got liberty now.” It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty entitled the foot-passenger to walk down the middle of the road it also entitled the cab-driver to drive on the pavement, and that the end of such liberty would be universal chaos. Everybody would be getting in everybody else’s way and nobody would get any where. Individual liberty would have become social anarchy.
There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind ourselves of what the rule of the road means.*
* Gardiner could not refer to the Highway Code because it did not exist at the time. It was introduced in 1931, in consequence of the Road Traffic Act 1930, and was the brainchild of the Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha (after whom Belisha beacons were named, following their introduction in 1934). The first issue ran to only eighteen pages.
