had its own legal customs and its own Witan. Alfred made no attempt to destroy the individuality of the old Mercian folk, but became simply King of West Mercia, as he had before been King of Wessex and Kent, governing three kingdoms with three varying codes of law and custom. It was the beginning of a necessary and most important change to collect these laws, and so prepare the way for reducing them to a common code in a doom book which should serve for a united English kingdom. This Alfred did in the first digest of laws which England can call her own. The work is so important and so full of side-lights on the king's ideals, the social life of England, and the raw human material out of which the nation was to be fashioned, that it requires a later chapter to itself. Chapter IV Men of Work "I will not cease from mental fight, In England's green and pleasant land." William Blake. "The second part he assigned to the Men of Work." Asser. "There must be work done by the arms, or none of us could live. There must be work done by the brains, or the life we get would not be worth having. . . . Men are enlisted for the labour that kills-the labour of war: they are counted, trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that. Let them be enlisted also for the labour that feeds: let them be counted, trained, fed, dressed, praised for that. Teach the plough exercise as carefully as you do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops of death... but neither this nor any other right thing can be accomplished, unless first of all both servant and master are resolved that, come what will of it, they will do each other justice.”—John Ruskin. § 1. A ROYAL ECONOMIST: THE Work of ALFRED was England's first great economist. With singular clearness of vision and mental grasp he saw that the proper sphere of government was the protection and promotion of the well-being of a whole people. Whatever was necessary to the well-being of a nation and within the power of the king to accomplish, it was part of his duty to get done. There is a delightful sense of grappling with facts in the famous passage of his "Boethius" in which he explains his own view of his duties as king. The passage is inserted in a chapter in which the mind of the philosopher is repudiating the desire of power for power's sake. "O Philosophy, thou knowest that I never greatly delighted in covetousness, and the possession of earthly power, nor longed for this authority; but [and here the king breaks in with his own apologia pro vita sua] I desired instruments and materials to carry out the work I was set to do, which was that I should virtuously and fittingly administer the authority committed unto me. Now no man, as thou knowest, can get full play for his natural gifts, nor conduct and administer government, unless he hath fit tools, and the raw material to work upon. By material I mean that which is necessary to the exercise of natural powers; thus a king's raw material and instruments of rule are a well-peopled land, and he must have men of prayer, men of war, and men of work." [Mark how the king grasps the broad essential outlines of human life.] "As thou knowest, without these tools no king may display his special talent. Further, for his materials he must have means of support for the three classes above spoken of, which are his instruments, and these means are land to dwell on, gifts, weapons, meat, ale, clothing, and what else soever the three classes need. Without these means he cannot keep his tools in order, and without these tools he cannot perform any of the tasks entrusted to him." Then follows a passage which, in spite of a superficial appearance of egotism, is the very opposite of egotistic. It is not the inflation of self out of all proportion to the world, but the recognition of the limitations which the world puts upon self. It is the acceptance by a man conscious of great natural ability of the limitations under which his ability must work, and the conditions under which alone it could be profitable to his country: have desired material for the exercise of government that my talents and my power might not be forgotten and hidden away, for every good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if wisdom be not in them. Without wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill. To be brief, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me the memory of my good works." If we compare Alfred's view of the science and art which is concerned with a nation's well-being with any of the will-o'-the-wisps which have successively misled the rulers of states, we get a standard by which to appreciate the worth of our great, simple-minded, clear-visioned king, with his wonderful gift of an inspired common-sense, able to do equal justice to the spiritual and the physical in human nature. Compare it with the military ideal which issued in the beautiful mists and vagrant romanticisms of chivalry, or the opportunist, selfish, logical, and short-sighted kingcraft of the Machiavellists which misled the Stuarts, or the frank materialised commercialism of our later time, vaunting its emancipation from noble ideals as though ideals were not the very marrow of life. Any comparison of this kind will serve to show how hard it is for an actual ruler to see, and how rare it is to find one able to follow consistently, aims which are not only well meant but also well adapted to conserve and increase the well-being of a whole people. Alfred's definition of the aims of government will bear a severer test still. If we put it beside such a statement as Professor Marshall has prefixed to his "Economics of Industry," it will be seen that Alfred had seen the conditions of the problem as clearly in his own. time as our most skilled |