Totalitarian England

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 115, 5 September 1941, Page 5

Totalitarian England

HERE was a strong tendency for the work of the government to pass from the fighting to the trading classes. Now the trading classes wanted above ° all things peace so that they could make money. They were prepared to pay hard cash, in the form of taxes and loans, and they could provide capable administrators for the king’s service. Finally, they did not mind setting a despot over themselvesprovided, of course, that he ruled generally speaking in their interests. The natural result of all this was the emergence of the Renaissance despot all over Europe. He deliberately destroyed the remains of the old medieval privilege; sometimes to set poor

men free, but more often to make room for new privileges for the rising merchant class. It was the destruction of the Church (or its close control by the state) which was the greatest triumph of this first great experiment in totalitarianism. England had gone totalitarian through fear of the barons and had stayed that way as a wartime precaution against the Spaniards. However, at its moment of greater strength, Tudor totalitarianism was never independent of popular support. It is very significant that on one of the few occasions that the government set itself against the interests of this middle class it failed completely; namely, when it tried to stop landlords enclosing their land in order to farm it according to modern and efficient lines. The process went on: for it put money into the pockets of those who should have been enforcing the prohibition.(Protessor F. L. Wood in 2Y A’s " Democracy" Series. August 18.)