22 
LAND & WATHR 
Decenibor 7, 191O 
The Industrious Apprentice and Patriotism 
By G. K. Chesterton 
THE very word " industrial " suggests scmc- 
thing of the narrowness wliich so long made 
industrialism insufficient. The mere derivation 
in\olvcs something unimaginative which misses 
the main part of the labours of men under the sun. 
Thefc really was a notion that a man must be industrial 
in order to be industrious. There is nothing in which 
we shall find oursehes more lucky in our Alliance witli 
I'Vance and witli Russia than in a certain widening 
of experience about the possibilities of rural industry, 
such as those two great peasant countries can gi\e. 
\\idely as the Frenchman and the* Russian differ in their 
high' and diverse types of \irtue, they are alike in the 
fact that they have done all their great work by indus- 
try ; but ha\e done it without industrialism. 
But this truth docs not merely belong to our Allies ; 
it belongs historically to ourselves, for it belonged \ery 
decidedly to our ancestors. . It is notable that even when 
the Englishman became a town mouse he still talked with 
the tongue of a country mouse. It is still more notable 
that this was particularly true when he talked of the more 
active moral duties incumbent upon mice and men. Even 
the men of the Manchester School were compelled to 
praise the virtues of industry in a terminology taken 
from the fields far beyond ^lanchestcr. 
Links with Country Life 
The Early Victorian merchants encouraged children 
to be not slothful in business by reciting " How doth the 
little busy bee " ; though they already had a rather hazy 
idea about how he doth. A mercantile youth of the 
early nineteenth century may well have been adjured 
to work like a beaver ; ancl had merely the impression that 
he, was being told, somewhat unreasonably, to imitate a 
hat. AH the links with a country life, however, would 
not. thiis have been lost between one generation and 
another. Even to this day the proverbs of business, 
in its lit(^ral sense of being busy, are proverbs coloured 
by the countryside and somewhat incongruous in the 
streets. A man in the middle of a London fog briskly 
announces that he is going to make hay while the 
sun shines. A man standing on a hard asphalt pave- 
ment is needlessly recommended not to let the grass grow 
under his feet. 
The early mistake of the ^lanchester philosophy, 
contradicted even by those common forms of speech 
which it still had to employ, cut off many Englishmen 
for a generation or two from many sentiments which in 
the long run are found necessary to the very manhood 
of man. These must be recovered by modern industry 
if it is to become once more human ; and they are not 
confined to this curious delusion that the country is 
always a garden of idleness. The delusion did exist, 
though it would not have been consciously formulated 
it was really a vice of the Victorian time or its artists; 
to regard the country as a picture gallery, and even its 
naturalists as a Natural. History Museum. It was, of 
course, a confusion of thought ; for the Bradford wool 
merchant would have found himself in a condition of 
much cry and little wool, if shepherds really passed their 
li\e3 in pastoral piping and dancing. But it was no un- 
common confusion ; and referred back to the chief fallacy 
of what may be caUed the Manchester culture, its complete 
lack of historical imagination. 
This can perhaps be most conveniently illyst rated 
under a single image. The Industrious Apprentice in the 
pictures of Hogarth became an incarnation of that 
mercantile morality which steadily increased after 
Hogarth's time. He was the man who came to London 
with twopence in his pocket and became Lord Mayor 
of London by riere hard work. He was the industrial 
hero — I might almost say the industrial saint, of thelndi- 
viduahsts; who set first among human virtues the 
industry of the Industrious Apprentice. He was, to use 
the highly athci.stic expression, a self-made man. 
And yet thefc was in the \ery words " Industrious 
Apprentice " aa historical truth which all these' men 
missed. .■Vt least one of the facts about the Industrious 
Apprentice was that he was an apprentice ; that he was a 
child of the mediieval system of apprenticeship. Hogarth 
lived among the lingering remains of a more human 
tradition which made his slightly wooden morality at least 
moral. The Indi\!dualist version of the Inclustrious 
Apprentice could not be called too moral ; it was rather 
simply moral. It did not encourage the apprentice so 
much to be a jjrig as to be a more or less respectable 
rascal. But the old system of apprenticeship, inherited 
from the (uiilds of the middle Ages, at least lent some 
moral meaning to its praise of personal industry. Appren- 
ticeship was a school and not merely a scramble. We 
shall be fortunate if we can return to something of the 
sort, if the real \irtue of industry is to be anything but 
the Individualism of a pickpocket. 
Manchester Morality 
But agriculture and apprenticeship are not the 
only examples, nor the worst examples, of this 
hiatus in the historic sense which weakened the 
Manchester morality. The most vital instinct which 
early Industrialism neglected was the instinct of patriot- 
ism. In another sense the citizen of the new cities 
was cut off from the land ; in the more sacred sense 
of the fatherland. In another sense the new apprentice 
forgot his ser\'ice and his li\ery ; he too often learnt to 
look at least coldly and distantly at the heraldry of the 
English uniform and the service of the English flag. 
This defect in the Manchester doctrine must not indeed 
be exaggerated, in the sense of being misunderstood. 
Men like Cobden remained very Englisli in their char- 
acter, just as we have already seen that they remained 
very countrified in their proverbs. 
But the abstract theory of Cobdenist Capitalism was 
certainly international, and often even in the bad sense 
of being anti-national ; and this more theoretic side was 
thrust the more forward through the accident which gave 
so much of the leadership of early Individualism not to 
Englishmen but to Scotchmen. This does not imply, of 
course, that Scotchmen are not patriotic ; but rather that 
the same thing \\hich makes most of them rather ex- 
cessively patriotic (a fine power of fanaticism in the Scotch 
character conspicuously absent in the English char- 
acter) makes a few of them capable of a political asceticism 
which can do without patriotism altogether. In any 
case there was a degree of truth in the taunt that the 
new towns and the new trades were cut off from patriotism 
because they were cut off from history. 
It is one of the first, if not the first, good element of this 
war that the taunt is no longer true. This war is, what- 
ever else it is, the putting of the very modern and com- 
ple.x machinery to a very simple and ancient moral pur- 
pose. If the Industrious Apprentice is crying " Shells ! 
Shells ! " instead of " Clubs ! Clubs ! " it is so far a widen- 
ing of his mind that it takes him not only outside his 
own country but outside his own town into his own 
countrj'. The great war is the return of England to 
Europe. But the great war is also the return of Man- 
chester to England. I am not here talking about par- 
ticular political and economic doctrines with which I 
agree or disagree ; I am talking of a certain moral at- 
mosphere which to' those outside it must always seem 
either tawdry or sentimental ; of a flag and of the memory 
of our fathers. 
In this matter there cannot be the shadow of a doubt 
of the enormous reaction towards Nationalism which 
overtook our industrial society when the gauntlet was 
thrown down in Belgium. A man must be utterly ignor- 
ant of the rudiments of the Labour Problem before the 
war, if he supposes that anything short of a furious 
enthusiasm could have induced the organised artisans 
to suspend the Trades I'nion Rules for ten minutes. 
E\'en the material manifestations, the external excite- 
ment of machinery infinitely multiplied and output 
at the top of its energy, carries with it the character 
of one of tiiose crises in which men ha\c disco\'crcd some- 
