No one lives a perfect life but if I have found someone who comes close to my ideal, it is Malcolm Muggridge. Read this about a life well spent, but as all lives, it began, was lived and then ended: The Pilgrimage of Malcolm Muggeridge. Anything in particular I liked? Perhaps this.

For in spite of the traveling and the fame, Malcolm never cared about material things. He and Kitty raised four children in very straitened circumstances, yet he still gave what he could not afford to give to friends he saw in need. When he read in the paper that his first girlfriend (who was then far from young and completely on her own) had been swindled out of her savings, Malcolm anonymously arranged for her to receive the same amount. When an anti-abortion group in Canada invited him to speak at a rally but then found they could not pay his travel expenses or rent the hall, Malcolm paid for it all himself. He gave the proceeds from his Christian books to Christian charities and gave away everything else before he died. For Malcolm became more charitable, in every sense of the word, after he became a Christian. He had come to see that “humility is not just the most important virtue, but the condition of all virtue” and had begun to expect more from himself.

Oddly for me, I still think of him as the long-time editor of Punch. But as it happened, he was the editor for less than five years and those years were in the 1950s. How funny this getting old turns out to be with all of these memories of the past crowded together the way they are. This, of course, is why he is still someone of immense distinction.

For Malcolm had been raised to be a Socialist activist by a quixotic father he dearly loved. And as a fourteen-year-old boy, in 1917, Malcolm was so taken with the Russian Revolution he decided he would one day move to Russia. In 1932, he was sent there as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and there he and his wife, Kitty, planned to renounce their British citizenship and to take up residence in the “peoples’ paradise.”

What he saw of censorship and oppression in Stalin’s regime, however, depressed him. And he grew to hate the Soviet system, especially after slipping Moscow security (unlike any other Western correspondent at the time) and traveling by train through the Ukraine and the Caucasus. There, while American and British journalists in and out of Russia wrote about the startling agricultural success of Soviet communism, Muggeridge saw the barren land, the deserted villages, the peasants with hollow eyes and emaciated bodies, “their hands tied behind their backs, being driven into cattle trucks at gun point,” as forced collectivization (using the Red Army backed by air cover) slaughtered ten million Ukrainians and destroyed the breadbasket of Russia. There Muggeridge also saw religious persecution (orders disbanded, their possessions stolen, many of their priests shot). He wrote about such things in three articles on the Ukraine and the Caucasus, which he smuggled out in diplomatic pouches.

The leftist Guardian reluctantly printed them, though they censored the articles and criticized Muggeridge, prompting him to resign. When he returned to England, he found himself attacked in one periodical after another for “lying” about Stalinist Russia. In the next few years, he could hardly find a publisher for his work.

The only man of his entire generation to behave in this way. There is no one else I can think of, either then or since, who acted as he did.

The Four Reformers by Robert Louis Stevenson. Written in 1888. Could have been written just today, except that when this was written, the author thought these reformers were complete fools.

FOUR reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

Let me draw your attention to an article of mine from the October issue of Quadrant that has now been put up online: Conservative Thought in the Time of Covid. The reason I wrote the article, and it is the first of two on the subject, was to point out that conservatism has a positive agenda, and is not, NOT, an attempt to conserve what presently exists, nor is it a wish to promote a laissez-faire form of economic structure. Its core ethic is to bring individual rights and personal freedom to the very centre of our political culture. 

The emphasis on rights and freedom is what allowed the market economy to create the prosperity we now take for granted, but also allowed us to live with an ability to direct our own lives in our own way that had never before existed. 

Sadly it is this personal freedom that so many now take for granted, and are apparently all too willing to throw away because of the need to deal with this transient Covid virus in our midst. 

Read the article, and then, if you are not already a subscriber, you should subscribe to Quadrant since if you are reading this blog you should also be reading the magazine.

Phenomenally articulate and as perfectly balanced and sensible as you will ever hear anyone make the case. It might also help to know that the forerunner of the Defend Free Speech campaign in the UK was called “Reform Section 5”.