h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

G. K.Chesterton felt back in 1922 that in these most recent war and post-war times what was particularly missing was the voice of ‘the Little Man’ that had been provided a hundred years before by William Cobbett and his “Political Register”, which played an important role during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
One of Cobbett’s first references to the ‘Little Man’, in fact, may have been in the piece that he wrote around 1809, when it was proposed to change the system of representation in the Parish Vestry Meetings, which had been central to the operation of English democracy at the grass roots level and had sustained the idea of the ‘Commonweal’- that is the general principle that nothing should be done that would be damaging for the community.
But by this time the system of English Parish Poor Relief set up in Tudor times had been changed from ‘community support’ to an essentially monetary payment, and it was proposed that the voting in parish affairs should be changed with more votes being given to those with more wealth and property.
Cobbett wrote objecting vehemently and arguing that the ‘Big Man’ within a parish had all the advantages of his education and his wealth, which in any healthy community would be seen by everyone else as very much an asset to the neighbourhood and, in normal circumstances people would listen very carefully to whatever the ‘Big Man’ had to say because his word carried more weight in the ‘wider world’. But on some occasions a ‘Big Man’ might well think more of his self-interest than that of the Commonweal: and on such occasions it was important that ‘the Little Man’ at least had equal status when voting on local issues.
The proposal was rejected during the war while the Economy working at full-blast. But after a couple of years of troubled peace that change was made and local democracy was biased towards the representation of wealth and property. Fifteen years later this became the standard approach for elections to the Westminster Parliament that had to represent the whole of Great Britain and Ireland and different traditions of ‘political-economy’. Henceforward English politics was to be based not upon a common effort to promote the well-being of the whole English Commonweal, but upon wealth and property, with the greatest work of the Scot Adam Smith, advocating the primary virtue of the pursuit of “The Wealth of Nations”, becoming the ‘Bible’ of the Age of Heroic Materialism.
Today’s published research indicates that “the economy” is still the prime consideration of Scots voters in the forthcoming Referendum on Scottish Independence. Money and finance will decide it, as many Scots believe it settled the question of Union in 1707 when key Scottish politicians were, they believe, bribed by English gold to betray their fellow Scots.
After Chesterton’s slim biography of Cobbett, Dr. G.D.H. Cole, a Fabian Socialist, produced a more substantive study that ‘put Cobbett in his place’ as a ‘Little Man’ with no power base. But G.K. Chesterton continued his theme of trying to revive the spirit of that great Englishman by joining with similar minded friends to set up PEN, the international organization that promotes the work of Cobbett-type radical ‘Little Man’ writers- Poets, Essayists and Novelists.
And PEN really ‘struck it lucky’, when Arthur Miller was persuaded in the Sixties to become its Secretary and to turn it into a force for the promotion of international understanding and a vehicle for promoting the voice of ‘the Little Man’ from all over the world, in a Sixties and Seventies world of Cold War, and often of repressive regimes supporting both ‘East’ and ‘West’. If the USA is ever to re-establish its reputation, and its key-role within the leadership of the Free World, it will probably be from once again being seen as the champion of “The Common Man” rather than the “Big Man”.