What God Has Saved

Through the centuries wise men and fools have tried to define an Englishman and say how he got to be what he is. The latest such attempt is by Leland Dewitt Baldwin, an American historian, who put his witty, epigrammatic findings in a book and called it God's Englishman (Little, Brown & Co.; $3).

The Embalmed. Racially, says Baldwin, the Englishman was produced by combining the impulsive Celt and the reflective Saxon. The amalgam resulted in men who were half superstitious, half realistic. The superstitious half became concerned with ethical values, the realistic half with how to get ahead. Says Baldwin: ". . . Sound common sense taught him that in a practical world, while there might be some good, there must also be considerable evil and brutality; therefore God must agree to wink at a reasonable modicum of wickedness. Wars and a minimum of chicanery must be permitted, though the party of the second part agreed to find good moral reasons for them. . . . So Christianity has been an embalming fluid that has preserved the peasant virtues of England down to this generation."

The Embattled. Such men had to have liberty, but to each the word meant a different thing, and to all it meant special privileges. Says Baldwin: ". . . It was inevitable that the historic struggle for English liberty should often be turned into a struggle for supremacy. Liberties had a habit of clashing." And the clashes produced what Baldwin thinks is the keystone of world democracy, the English Common Law.

"Truth," says the author, "is the pedestaled goddess of the Anglo-Saxon world, yet the treatment she receives often makes her look like a slut." He agrees that the charge of hypocrisy commonly leveled against the Englishman is true. Perpetually riven "by the struggle between necessity and conscience," Englishmen can hardly be expected to be otherwise. But the main point, says Baldwin, is that the English conscience is always consulted.

The Spiritual Home. The result is that in "Anglo-Saxon society a man can attain permanent eminence only [by] showing real or ostensible moral stature." In turn, that fact has led to steady progress toward "the golden mean which reconciles the necessary control of the modern state with the greatest feasible liberty of the individual." This Anglo-Saxon democracy, "like walking, is a continually arrested fall forward"--imperfect, surely, but the best there is and a wonderful thing at that. Concludes Baldwin: "Though the white race should disappear from the earth, yet if the American Negro and the Chinese carry on our ideals then England will be the spiritual home of man as truly as Greece is his intellectual home."

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