---
title: "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 3 of 12
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/3/
cite: "George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, section 3. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/3/"
---

# The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

*George Orwell*

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> _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]

## 3. III

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/3/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/3/#p-N

[¶0] I have spoken all the while of 'the nation', 'England', 'Britain', as
though forty-five million souls could somehow be treated as a unit. But
is not England notoriously two nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one
pretend that there is anything in common between people with £100,000 a
year and people with £1 a week? And even Welsh and Scottish readers are
likely to have been offended because I have used the word 'England'
oftener than 'Britain', as though the whole population dwelt in London
and the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of
its own.

[¶1] One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point
first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel
themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for
instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see
the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our
islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great
Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted
moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and south England
loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the
moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. It is very
rare to meet a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish
between English and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the
Breton and the Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of
Marseilles is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of 'France' and 'the
French', recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which
in fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outside, even
the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance.

[¶2] And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when
one regards the nation from the outside. There is no question about the
inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European
country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it.
Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four.
But at the same time the vast majority of the people _feel_ themselves
to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more
than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than
class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism.
Except for a brief moment in 1920 (the 'Hands off Russia' movement) the
British working class have never thought or acted internationally. For
two and a half years they watched their comrades in Spain slowly
strangled, and never aided them by even a single strike.[2] But when
their own country (the country of Lord Nuffield and Mr Montagu Norman)
was in danger, their attitude was very different. At the moment when it
seemed likely that England might be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over
the radio for Local Defence Volunteers. He got a quarter of a million
men in the first twenty-four hours, and another million in the
subsequent month. One has only to compare these figures with, for
instance, the number of conscientious objectors to see how vast is the
strength of traditional loyalties compared with new ones.

[¶3] In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it
runs like a connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the
Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it. As a positive
emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in the upper class—the
cheap public schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic
demonstrations than the expensive ones—but the number of definitely
treacherous rich men, the Laval-Quisling type is probably very small. In
the working class patriotism is profound, but it is unconscious. The
working man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack. But the
famous 'insularity' and 'xenophobia' of the English is far stronger in
the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor are
more national than the rich, but the English working class are
outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits. Even when they are
obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom
themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every
Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce
a foreign word correctly. During the war of 1914-18 the English working
class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely
possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all
Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years
on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. The
insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously,
is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time. But
it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who
have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good. At
bottom it is the same quality in the English character that repels the
tourist and keeps out the invader.

[¶4] Here one comes back to two English characteristics that I pointed out,
seemingly at random, at the beginning of the last chapter. One is the
lack of artistic ability. This is perhaps another way of saying that the
English are outside the European culture. For there is one art in which
they have shown plenty of talent, namely literature. But this is also
the only art that cannot cross frontiers. Literature, especially poetry,
and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or
no value outside its own language-group. Except for Shakespeare, the
best English poets are barely known in Europe, even as names. The only
poets who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the wrong
reasons, and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English
hypocrisy. And linked up with this, though not very obviously, is the
lack of philosophical faculty, the absence in nearly all Englishmen of
any need for an ordered system of thought or even for the use of logic.

[¶5] Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for a
'world-view'. Just because patriotism is all but universal and not even
the rich are uninfluenced by it, there can be moments when the whole
nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a herd of
cattle facing a wolf. There was such a moment, unmistakably, at the time
of the disaster in France. After eight months of vaguely wondering what
the war was about, the people suddenly knew what they had got to do:
first to get the army away from Dunkirk, and secondly to prevent
invasion. It was like the awakening of a giant. Quick! Danger! The
Philistines be upon thee, Samson! And then the swift unanimous
action—and then, alas, the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided
nation that would have been exactly the moment for a big peace movement
to arise. But does this mean that the instinct of the English will
always tell them to do the right thing? Not at all, merely that it will
tell them to do the same thing. In the 1931 General Election, for
instance, we all did the wrong thing in perfect unison. We were as
single-minded as the Gadarene swine. But I honestly doubt whether we can
say that we were shoved down the slope against our will.

[¶6] It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes
appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the
unfair electoral system, the governing-class control over the press, the
radio and education, and concludes that democracy is simply a polite
name for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable agreement that
does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much
one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and
1940 the National Government represented the will of the mass of the
people. It tolerated slums, unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy.
Yes, but so did public opinion. It was a stagnant period, and its
natural leaders were mediocrities.

[¶7] In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is fairly
certain that the bulk of the English people were behind Chamberlain's
foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain that the same struggle was
going on in Chamberlain's mind as in the minds of ordinary people. His
opponents professed to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to
sell England to Hitler, but it is far likelier that he was merely a
stupid old man doing his best according to his very dim lights. It is
difficult otherwise to explain the contradictions of his policy, his
failure to grasp any of the courses that were open to him. Like the mass
of the people, he did not want to pay the price either of peace or of
war. And public opinion was behind him all the while, in policies that
were completely incompatible with one another. It was behind him when he
went to Munich, when he tried to come to an understanding with Russia,
when he gave the guarantee to Poland, when he honoured it, and when he
prosecuted the war half-heartedly. Only when the results of his policy
became apparent did it turn against him; which is to say that it turned
against its own lethargy of the past seven years. Thereupon the people
picked a leader nearer to their mood, Churchill, who was at any rate
able to grasp that wars are not won without fighting. Later, perhaps,
they will pick another leader who can grasp that only Socialist nations
can fight effectively.

[¶8] Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine democracy? No, not even
a reader of the _Daily Telegraph_ could quite swallow that.

[¶9] England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of
snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any
calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional
unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act
together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in
Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its
nationals into exile or the concentration camp. At this moment, after a
year of war, newspapers and pamphlets abusing the Government, praising
the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold on the streets,
almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom
of speech than from a simple perception that these things don't matter.
It is safe to let a paper like _Peace News_ be sold, because it is
certain that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to
read it. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain. At any
normal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into
the muck; but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get
a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for
them not to respond. The left-wing writers who denounce the whole of the
ruling class as 'pro-Fascist' are grossly over-simplifying. Even among
the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass, it
is doubtful whether there were any _conscious_ traitors. The corruption
that happens in England is seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more
in the nature of self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what the
left hand doeth. And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at
its most obvious in the English press. Is the English press honest or
dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that
matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an
indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper
in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the
France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could
notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.
Public life in England has never been _openly_ scandalous. It has not
reached the pitch of disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.

[¶10] England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message,
nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it
resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many
black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It
has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who
are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about
the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are
generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of
irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has
its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an
enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in
control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England
in a phrase.

[¶11] -----

[¶12] [2] It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money.
Still the sums raised for the various aid-Spain funds would not equal
five per cent of the turnover of the football pools during the same
period. [Author's footnote.]