--- title: "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" author: "George Orwell" languages: [en] shelf: "Literature" section: 1 of 12 url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/1/ cite: "George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, section 1. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/1/" --- # The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius *George Orwell* > =* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *= > This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a FP administrator before proceeding. > This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. > _Title:_ The Lion and the Unicorn _Date of first publication:_ 1941 _Author:_ George Orwell (1903-1950) _Date first posted:_ May 29, 2018 _Date last updated:_ May 29, 2018 Faded Page eBook #20180531 > This ebook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Al Haines, Howard Ross & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net > GEORGE ORWELL > _The Lion_ _and the Unicorn_ > Socialism and the English Genius > Penguin Books > Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published in the Searchlight Books series by Seeker & Warburg 1941 > Published in Volume 2 of _The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell_ by Seeker & Warburg 1968 and in Penguin Books 1970 > Published separately with a new Introduction in Penguin Books 1982 Reprinted 1984, 1986 Copyright George Orwell, 1941 All rights reserved Made and printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk Set in Monophoto Ehrhardt > Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser > CONTENTS > THE LION AND THE UNICORN 31 > PART ONE: England Your England 33 > PART TWO: Shopkeepers at War 71 > PART THREE: The English Revolution 93 > _The Lion and the Unicorn_ > [The end of _The Lion and the Unicorn_ by George Orwell] ## 1. PART ONE: England Your England · I Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/1/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/1/#p-N [¶0] As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. [¶1] They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are 'only doing their duty', as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil. [¶2] One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a _positive_ force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not. [¶3] Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler's June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England. And, as western peoples go, the English are very highly differentiated. There is a sort of back-handed admission of this in the dislike which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure living in England, and even Americans often feel more at home in Europe. [¶4] When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning—all these are not only fragments, but _characteristic_ fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle? [¶5] But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there _is_ something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person. [¶6] And above all, it is _your_ civilization, it is _you_. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you. [¶7] Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England _is_, before guessing what part England _can play_ in the huge events that are happening.