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Title: The Tyranny of Shams

Author: Joseph McCabe

Release Date: August 17, 2020 [EBook #62961]

Language: English

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 THE
 TYRANNY OF SHAMS

 BY
 JOSEPH McCABE

 NEW YORK
 DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
 1916


PREFACE.

THIS book is a frank criticism of most of the dominant ideas and
institutions of our time: a confession of faith in nearly all the more
daring heresies which hold, so to say, the firing line of our
literature: a conception of a new social order and new planetary
arrangement. It is therefore candidly egoistic, and I should like to
explain the circumstances in which it was designed and written.

It was conceived, and much of it was written, during the long voyage
from Australia to England. At that time I had issued, if I may include
the introduction to English readers of foreign writers, some fifty
publications, and in these I had generally described remote periods of
history, or even remoter periods of the earth's story or distant
regions of the universe. Many had asked me to tell them things more
intimate and important than the way in which stars were formed, or the
manners of extinct Dinosaurs and ancient empresses: asked if thirty
years' study of philosophy, science, and history had given me no
interest in, or light upon, the problems of the hour. In Australasia
this request was made more insistently than ever. Our ancient
prejudices have been transplanted into the soil of the new world, and
they have thriven there, like the gorse, the sparrow, the rabbit, and
so many other pests which sentimental colonists have introduced in
order to remind them of "home." But new ideas also have been
imported, and they find a rich soil in the free, unconventional,
enterprising colonial mind. Men and women are asking the same
questions there as in London and New York.

The general drift or implication of these questions obsessed me daily
during the slow traverse of the Southern Ocean. Day after day the
great liner visibly rounded this vast ball of metal which we call our
earth; and to me there is no more impressive symbol than this of the
power and the future of man. Some complain that at sea they feel the
earth and man and man's concerns made trivial by the great fires
which blaze through the darker sky. But largeness is not greatness,
and a vast prairie in some inaccessible region does not make less
precious the little plot of earth at your door that you can make
beautiful. Your predominant feeling, when you round the globe and see
with your own eye its limitations, is one of power. This sphere, you
feel, is the principality of man; and there never was a power so
despotic and far-reaching as the power of a united race would be. You
fed as if the earth could be embraced in the arms of a giant, and
humanity is the giant. If men were agreed in their designs, the earth
would be as clay in the hand of the potter. It would prove as passive
and tractable as the child's ball of plasticine--if all, or the
great part of, men and women were agreed as to the shape it was
desirable to impose on it. In our age differences of ideal restrain
the hand and prevent us from giving a fairer face to the earth. The
power of a united mankind would be something akin to omnipotence.
Every man or woman who has seen the earth with this larger vision must
seethe with impatience to end this conflict of old traditions and new
ideas which paralyses our hands; to do what he or she can to
accelerate that final harmony of conviction which will set free the
fingers of the Great Potter. That is the controlling sentiment of this
little book.

It happens that, before the book reaches the public, one of those
traditions which it assails has spread a ghastly devastation over the
face of the earth. For nearly twenty years I have used my slender
opportunities as speaker and writer to denounce the military machine:
to imagine the mighty resources we waste on militarism and war
transferred to those enterprises which seek to brighten the earth and
make the hearts of men and women lighter. Now the little sermon, which
many feeble voices were preaching, is taken up by an orator whose
voice thunders from pole to pole, whose words are blood-curdling
realities. Ten thousand million sterling, perhaps, poured into the sea
in eighteen months: ten million men, perhaps, prematurely blasted off
the earth or stricken for life: and a trail of blood and tears and
misery that all the mighty fertility of the earth will take a
generation to obliterate! Nor does this outpour of horror merely mean
that _one_ feature of our life needs reconsideration. We could not
have retained this military machine, with its ever-present danger of
an appalling calamity, if our minds were generally sane, alert,
unclogged by shams.

One inquires how it is that a generation which boasts of its wisdom
and humanity can retain this worst survival of barbarism, and one
finds that the evil is connected with a dozen other evils and
protected by a general mental debility. The habit of tracing this
calamity to the peculiar criminality of another nation, and dwelling
only on our own heroism and self-sacrifice in meeting this menace, is
in itself a very grave danger. We may be entirely certain that, as
long as we retain the military machinery for settling quarrels, there
will be wars. How came the machinery to linger amongst us in the
twentieth century? At once we light upon a dozen other disorders of
our life. This remissness in civilising international intercourse
argues a grave indifference to a most important task on the part of
our political servants, and an equally grave absence of pressure and
direction on the part of their supporters. It reveals a dangerously
slovenly condition of our industrial world, a very serious defect in
our educational system, a standing menace in the encouraged
thoughtlessness of the mass of our people, a general flabbiness,
haziness, and anæmia of what may be called the intellectual part of
our public life.

This is true of all nations,--it may be the turn of the United States,
or Norway, or Argentina tomorrow,--but it is most seriously true of
England. Do not let us fuddle our minds with the kind of rhetoric one
addresses to schoolboys. We have, in the first year of the war,
betrayed a sluggishness, a lack of foresight and initiative, a
feebleness of organisation, which ought to sober any race, however
wealthy. Our Government knew, or ought to have known, since the spring
of 1912, that just this war was threatening us; and, when it occurred,
they made a virtue of the fact that we were "the least prepared
nation in Europe." They took nine months to begin to organise our
resources, or to perceive that it was necessary to do so. Plainly,
there is something profoundly, comprehensively wrong with our public
life. We shall "muddle through," because we have the resources,
and because the Allies outnumber their opponents by fifty per cent.
But if in a future war we are compelled to face a numerically equal
opponent, England will, if she retains these faults, see her royal
standard in the dust. As it is, the cost of our ineptitude will be
prodigious.

So I am confirmed in my design to declare what seems to me to be wrong
with our life. I choose the form of a direct challenge of old
traditions mainly because they so oppress and benumb the public mind
that new ideals do not get a fair consideration. But it will be found
that behind the series of challenges there is a series of
affirmations, and these make up a constructive ideal of life. Probably
few will accept this ideal in its entirety, though each chapter
advocates a reform which has millions of adherents. It is, however,
not based on any 'ism, least of all on dogmatism. There is a view
of, or attitude toward, life expounded in the first chapter, and
behind each particular claim. But each section deals with a specific
department of life and must find its justification within the limits
of that department. If any regret that the work does not embody a
profound philosophy of life, I must reply that I passed through
philosophy thirty years ago, and came out into science and history in
search of reality: and that philosophers do not seem to me to be
either agreed among themselves or in any close relationship to the
human problems I discuss.

Many will advise me, too, that a man would do well to conceal the more
offensive of his heresies, in order to gain a more patient hearing for
the others. That is the usual and prudent practice, no doubt; but this
book has been written in a mood of fiery impatience with untruth, and
this has forbidden compromise. Night by night, as I sit on the deck of
the ship, I watch the dark purple pall drop swiftly over the last
flush of the tropical sky; and I know that, each night, it shrouds the
faces of thousands of men, women, and children whose chance of
happiness is gone for ever. We are arguing to-day about man's
ailments just as the Greeks were arguing in the Agora at Athens two
thousand years ago, or as men argued in the garden of Plato or of
Epicurus. Meantime almost countless millions have lived in pain and
squalor, and died in delusive hope, under the curse of those ancient
traditions which we will not discard. Therefore I am impatient: I
cannot sit in quiet enjoyment of the sunshine that is granted me. It
will be found that no man appraises more highly than I the advance we
have made in modern times, and that I nowhere exaggerate the darker
features of life. If at times I write fiercely, cynically, even
bitterly, it is not from pessimism, but from fulness and fire of
optimism. My controlling thought is, as I said, a consciousness of our
power.

There are two types of people into whose hands this book may fall. The
first is the man or woman whose nerves must not be disturbed by the
spectacle of the misery of less fortunate beings: who finds life good,
and instinctively resents any proposals to tamper with its
foundations. These people are no more open to blame, as a rule, than
the prophet is entitled to praise for his ardour. We do not choose our
temperament, whatever else we choose. But one does not appeal to these
comfortable people. They would have refined and pleasant things about
them always, and they shrink from the vaults where, they dimly know,
ugly and sordid and writhing things are crowded together: lest their
glance fall on some yellow and distorted face whose hollow cheeks, or
eyes bloodshot with pain or brutality, would disturb the even pleasure
of their lives. So be it. Let it be written in stark letters on their
marble stones, when the last peach has dropped from their relaxing
fingers: My ideal was to enjoy life, and to let the devil take the
hindmost.

Do not let me be misunderstood. The enjoyment of life is the supreme
ideal advocated in this book. I loathe asceticism, either Christian or
Stoic. But I write for the second type of man or woman: the people who
are strong and healthy enough to enjoy every pleasure that life
affords, yet keep some thought for the unhappiness of others: who
think it a normal part even of a pleasant and refined life, especially
a leisured life, to spare some hours for seeking how the world may be
improved for less fortunate folk: who, precisely because they love the
sunlight, ask if it cannot be devised that all men and women and
children shall have a larger share of it. Their chief difficulty is
that, unhappily, the new prophets are as discordant as the old. A few
centuries ago, when you crossed London Bridge, or the Pont Neuf at
Paris, or the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, a score of rival quacks or
charlatans (in the literal sense) cried in your ears the virtues of
their conflicting remedies. To-day just so many conflicting social
physicians cry their wares in the streets. They oppose each other
almost as bitterly as they oppose the older traditions. How shall a
busy man or woman decide among them? What fixed and unalterable
principle, in this world of dissolving creeds, can you adopt for the
testing of their truth or untruth?

A very grave and sincere difficulty. Therefore, again, I have chosen
to attack what seem to me to be shams: which I would define as
untruths that the millions venerate as truths. The work of reform will
proceed very slowly and very precariously until these are resolutely
discredited and dethroned. In each case, it is true, it will be found
that the dethronement of an error enthrones a truth; but I insist that
we will pay no grave and practical attention to constructive schemes
until we fully realise the blunders and brutalities of our present
civilisation. The discord of our social prophets does not excuse us
from perceiving these.

As to fixed and unalterable principles, it seems to me that two, at
least, are not disturbed by the ground-quakes of our time. Perhaps
they stand with more conspicuous firmness when so many other
"eternal verities" have fallen. The first is the principle of
truthfulness or sincerity. Of this it need be said only that, if there
are any parts of our human tradition which the larger mind of our age
discovers to be untrue, they ought to be rejected at once; and the
more closely they are woven into our social fabric, the more speedily
and more apprehensively they ought to be torn out. The second and
greater principle is the aim of arresting suffering and diffusing
happiness as far as possible. I will consider this presently, and
merely state here that these chapters have been written solely in the
name and under the inspiration of that ideal. And if my words are at
times violent, the violence is due solely to a great eagerness for the
speedier coming of a brighter and more intelligent age and to a
sincere abhorrence of cant and shams and all that lengthens this grey
twilight of civilisation.

                                                          J. M.


CONTENTS.

I. The Philosophy of Revolt

II. The Military Sham

III. The Follies of Sham Patriotism

IV. Political Shams

V. The Distribution of Wealth

VI. Idols of the Home

VII. The Future of Woman

VIII. Shams of the School

IX. The Education of the Adult

X. The Clerical Sham


 THE TYRANNY OF SHAMS

 CHAPTER I.
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLT

[This chapter is, with a few alterations, reproduced from _The
English Review_, October 1914.]

ALTHOUGH this work does not embody any system of speculation about
the universe, any creed or 'ism or large and abstruse set of
principles, it must begin with a careful study of the phenomenon of
revolt. Never before was there such an age of general and feverish
restlessness; never was there such quaking of the deepest foundations
of old institutions, such tottering of thrones and altars. From every
intellectual centre the disturbing waves radiate. Round London,
Berlin, and New York the rumbling is habitual. Already they perceive
it in Tokyo and Peking and Constantinople. Tomorrow it will break on
the ear in Teheran and Lhasa. The same questions are asked all over
the earth. I have discussed them with millionaires at the Ritz and
with great ladies at Claridge's: with students in their universities
and miners in their cottages: with learned professors in Rome or New
York, and with notorious anarchists in obscure corners of Paris: with
working girls in Melbourne, with Maoris in Wellington, with Chinese
and Hindus and alert, full-blooded Africans. I have been invited to
discuss them with a Polynesian princess and to lecture on them in
Fiji, and I have had letters on them from Japanese settlers in British
Columbia and negro tailors in British Guiana. The same questions
everywhere: religious doctrines and political forms, education and
industry, marriage and woman--almost every ideal and institution we
have inherited. And the persistent note that resounds from continent
to continent is the note of rebellion.

Very different feelings are inspired by this characteristic fact of
modern life. To some it seems that this melting of the rigid framework
of traditions is a welcome sign of spring and growth: that a long
winter, which had slowed the blood of the earth and retarded the
development of civilisation, is over at last, and little, shapeless,
promising shoots of new ideals are rising from the loosened soil. To
others it seems as if the binding fabric of our civilisation were
weakened and we were in danger of returning to barbarism. Surely those
old traditions did hold together the structure of our civilisation?
And surely it is impossible to replace in a few generations the links
of a planet-wide human society? The shades of dead Memphis and Babylon
and Nineveh, of Athens and Rome and Bagdad, of Venice and Genoa and
Florence, pass before their anxious eyes. In each case, they remind
us, this same moral, social, and intellectual restlessness preceded
death.

The inevitable specialism of our age adds to the confusion. Life is a
connected whole, yet neither research nor reform can now be other than
sectional. We devote ourselves to a candid study of some particular
reform, and we find it a thoroughly reasonable proposal, a deduction
from principles that we are bound to admit. But we have not had
leisure to discover the indisputable principles of other reforms; and,
when we hear the demand of change and progress rising on one side
after another--in the Church, the State, the Home, the School, and so
on--we remark sententiously that rebellion is becoming a fashion, that
our generation is getting feverish or neurotic, that we must insist on
authority somewhere. We repeat plausible phrases about the decay of
respect and the wisdom of the race. We fasten on symptoms of
disorder--without inquiring very closely whether the disorder is new
or has been recently aggravated--and we conclude that conservatism is
a social duty: that, at all events, we will admit reform only by the
inch. We fancy ourselves the guardians of the _palladium_.

Quite apart from purely selfish motives, some of the closest observers
of our age do differ radically in diagnosis and prescription. The same
movements are symptoms of health to one man, symptoms of disease to
another. Take the enlargement of divorce, the decay of clerical
authority, the industrial revolt, or the rebellion of women. There
seems to be no common ground left on which the observers may meet with
any hope of agreement. The old religious and political standards will
now hopelessly divide any roomful of educated men and women. You
propose, perhaps, to fall back on moral standards--the ground on which
"all reasonable people" unite--and someone quotes against you half
a dozen of the most brilliant writers of Europe and America. Hopes and
lamentations, inspired by precisely the same facts of life, mingle
confusedly in our literature, and men and women of large heart and
little leisure seem to be condemned to a sterile perplexity or a
selfish absorption in business and pleasure. What, at all events, is
the meaning or purpose of life? And how is this spreading rebellion
related to it?

First let us examine the grounds of the very distressing forecasts of
the Conservative. In the vast majority of cases that are worth
examining one will find that the pessimism has not very firm
foundations. Your dismal prophet is usually a man with an ancient
gospel which we are discarding, or a new gospel which does not attract
us. The appeal to the modern world, he realises, must be utilitarian:
he must show us that, without him, we perish. So he recklessly heaps
up before our eyes statistics of crime and consumption and lunacy and
alcohol: he makes weird and totally inaccurate statements about France
or the United States or some other country: he marshals the shades of
dead empires--which seem to have died of a wonderful complication of
modern maladies--before us with appropriate rhetoric.

Now to this kind of conservatism, which says that we are decaying, I
reply that, on every positive test of national health, we are more
flourishing than we ever were before. Dark as the earth is, it was
never brighter than it is to-day, or more full of promise for the
morrow. The war is not inconsistent with this general statement, as I
will show later. A failure to advance in one direction does not alter
the fact that we have advanced in a hundred others; and the gross
behaviour of one nation does not destroy the gain that half a dozen
other nations were ready to behave with a new decency in warfare. As
to that "lesson of history" which is stridently read to us by men
and women whose command of history is not otherwise conspicuous, I
would remind them that the civilisation of dead empires always reached
its height just before, or at the time when, they began to decay. Does
anyone suggest that we ought not further to develop our civilisation
lest we also decay? However, I have sufficiently discussed elsewhere
this nonsense about "laws of history"; and I will show later that
these older empires decayed, not because of their high development of
intellect and fine sentiment, which leads to revolt, but from the
natural defect of those very institutions which our conservatives
defend.

We are not decaying. England is, for every class of its citizens, an
immeasurably finer place to live in than it was a hundred years ago. I
speak on the strength of a rigorous comparison of the moral and social
life of England a century ago with that of modern England, but I
cannot give the facts here. Let it suffice to make plain that I have
no sympathy with pessimists and preachers of penance and austerity, of
any school. The world improves, and improves more rapidly than it ever
did before. What stirs one's impatience is the consciousness that we
could, and do not, move with infinitely greater speed: that we
tolerate abuses and shams which insult our intelligence and mock our
professions of humanity.

What, then, are the grounds of the optimistic view of this widespread
revolt? Let us admit that conservatism, in the sense of an attitude of
caution, is a virtue. We would not try unknown drugs on the life of an
individual, and we ought not to apply untried recipes to the life of
forty million people. Yet it is precisely from this medical world that
we gather valuable hints of progress. By two centuries of sober and
heroic labour the physician has brought the greater part of our
maladies under control. He would tell you, in private, that he has a
hope of eventually being able to check all disease and prolong life.
The _laissez-faire_ attitude is unknown in medical science. It is
unknown in our technical and commercial worlds. We have made
stupendous progress, not by conserving, but by innovating: not asking
if a machine or a system worked well, but if we could devise a better.
In science--in all on which we pride ourselves in modern
civilisation--we have followed the progressive principle: we have
cultivated revolt. Since we began to do so, we have raised the level
of our civilisation in each generation.

It is therefore not surprising that many are asking whether we ought
not to extend the progressive principle to our religions, moralities,
politics, economic systems, schools, domestic and civic and social
traditions. It is, in other words, quite natural that there should be
a demand for, not one reform only, but a hundred reforms, in modern
life. We are justly, wisely proud of what is distinctive and superior
in our civilisation: advance, better organisation, economy of waste,
greater efficiency. The mystery is that so many would restrict this
improvement to what they call the "lower" material departments of
life, and keep a strict guard against the reformer at the frontiers of
their spiritual or political world. The modern rebellion is a very
logical effort to apply these very successful principles to as much of
life as is susceptible of improvement.

This effort, further, coincides with the quite dominant and
characteristic note of modern culture: evolution. We forget sometimes
that until half a century ago Europe was oppressed by an entirely
wrong view of the earth's resources. Plato put a philosophic
anathema on the earth. This material mass, he said, was a barren
thing. Order, truth, beauty, love had to come to it, in fitful gleams,
from a world beyond, over which man had no control. We know now that
Plato was wrong. Order, truth, beauty, and love have developed on the
earth--they are "sublunary" things--and man can control their
sources and enlarge their proportions. They do not properly make men
great: men make them great. They are as surely under our direction as
are applied science and commerce and the franchise. We can cultivate
them as we now cultivate pansies or sheep. It depends on _us_ if lies
and disorder and dishonour are to linger among us, or if truth and
justice and beauty are to prevail.

Again therefore it is quite natural that we should hear a demand for a
more extensive use of these powers of ours. The ships and ploughs and
illuminants of a hundred years ago were made by the same men, or the
same generations of men, as the religions and polities and moralities
of the time. Why assume that the wisdom of the race was almost
infallible in its spiritual and more difficult creations, but capable
of enormous improvement on the material side? Conservatism, as
anything more than an attitude of caution and prudence, has not a
plausible air.

It is well also to regard the essential or characteristic line of
human evolution. Apart from a few who are caught by a transient
attempt to glorify instinct, we agree that the development of
intelligence is one of the main sources of progress. Now this great
and general awakening of intelligence in recent decades was bound to
lead to a good deal of challenging of old traditions. That was
precisely why the grandfathers of our bishops and peers opposed it.
This higher intelligence of the race is now assisted in its decisions
by a vastly greater and more accurate knowledge of man and the
universe than our grandparents had; and the cheapening of literature
dimly conveys this knowledge to millions who were left out of account
when the traditional maps of life were drafted. The artisan discusses
economics and theology. The Tonga Islander works out mathematical
problems. I met a pure-blooded negro, with a European degree in
philosophy, who told me that he had been forced to resign his chair in
an African Mohammedan college because of his advanced ideas! Once I
discussed with a group of miners industrial questions and religion
from twelve to three in the morning, over pots of beer, in a little
inn on the west coast of New Zealand, a hundred miles from anything
like a town.

It is quite impossible for this spreading and better informed
intelligence to bow humbly to the ideas of an earlier generation. It
is going to think for itself, at all events. The old traditions must
be revised throughout. Revision is not particularly dangerous except
to errors. And already we have discovered that our political and
religious and social oracles have been teaching a good deal of error.
We begin to suspect that many things the divine right of kings and the
eternal torment of the wicked may not be strictly accurate. We had
better reconsider all our ways of living.

The second permanent strain of human evolution is the development of
fine sentiment. The notion that the world is becoming more
preponderantly intellectual, and that progress along our present lines
means a limitation of sentiment, is inaccurate. We are working toward
a healthy equilibrium. Sentimental people--those in whom a starving of
intellect or disuse of muscle has surcharged the nervous system with
morbid energy--will become more balanced, more intellectual. Ancient
phrases and modern shibboleths will not be able to induce in them an
instinctive warmth or agitation: they will have to pass the bar of
reason before they reach what one might call the executive department
of personality. But sentiment--deep and healthy feeling--has a
precious use in life. The development of fine sentiment is as
necessary as the cultivation of reason to the advance of man and of
civilisation. We find this illustrated in all the older civilisations
when they reach their highest point. We are picking up this strain of
development to-day, and, since civilisation is now too widely diffused
ever to perish again, we may assume that it will continue. Now this
finer sentiment of our time demands the revision of our traditions and
institutions no less imperiously than our higher intelligence does. We
cannot leave behind the callousness and brutality of the Middle Ages
and at the same time retain medieval practices. Intellectually and
emotionally we are improving, and we must expect that, as our finer
powers grow, there will be an increasing demand for revision and
reconstruction. As Mr. Watson finely says:

 "Guests of the ages, at tomorrow's door
 Why shrink we? The long track behind us lies,
 The lamps gleam and the music throbs before,
 Bidding us enter; and I count him wise
 Who loves so well man's noble memories
 He needs must love man's nobler hopes yet more."

This is, I think, a correct analysis of the innovating spirit of
modern times. These general considerations to which it is due are
quite beyond discussion. One feels that one is almost perpetrating
platitudes in describing them. In fact, we would to-day find only a
negligible number of people who oppose progress and innovation
altogether. They usually oppose it in one or two departments of life,
and quite warmly applaud it in others. A Socialist-Ritualist
clergyman, for instance, fiercely demands advance in the economic
field, yet fences his own department of life with the most rigorous
warnings against innovating trespassers. A Rationalist-Individualist
feels that the Church is the most obvious and urgent field for
innovation, and at the same time guards his economic world against it
with a flaming sword. A Suffragist pours fiery scorn on our obstinate
conservatism in regard to the franchise, and then discovers an even
more obstinate and entirely sacred conservatism when other women claim
something more than political emancipation. It is this very general
sectarianism which compels us to review the philosophy of revolt.
These principles apply to the whole of life. All our institutions must
be critically examined. The searchlight will not injure them if they
are sound.

But how comes this sweetly reasonable philosophy to be converted into
that passion for reform, that mordant and exasperating attack on
institutions, which gives a special complexion to the literature of
our time? For precisely the same reason as the invisible electric
current leaps into incandescence when it passes through the sluggish
particles of the filament of carbon or tungsten: resistance. The old
faith is growing dim in our minds, and we have a suspicion that the
thousands of men and women who, each night, terminate a life of pain
or struggle or burden, wilt never see the sun rise again, on this or
any other planet. We know that every decade in which we put off, with
worn and hollow phrases, the abandonment of old errors, sees another
generation pass away with just the same scars and traces of pain as
those which scored the hearts of the dead two, and four, and six
thousand years ago. We are vividly conscious that, quite apart from
the myriads whose lives were embittered by poverty, or war, or a
galling marriage-yoke, or the tyranny of some old tradition, there are
further and vaster myriads who, whatever comfort they knew, might have
been far happier, and now the sun has gone down on them for ever.
There is real and very serious ground for impatience. The acreage of
squalor and misery and grossness is still appalling, and on every land
lies the crushing burden of militarism; and this fearful visitation of
war reminds us of the incalculable periodic cost of our folly. The
soil of the planet is wet with blood and tears, and a great part of
this inhuman rain might be arrested. Much has been done: it is just
that which stings. You cannot look back on the darkness from which the
race has issued without perceiving that man has the power to transform
the face of the earth: without entertaining a reasoned and coldly
intellectual conviction that a day will yet dawn on this planet when
laughter, as of children on May morning, will ring from pole to pole,
and life, for all its work, will be a holiday. And when this reasoned
and just belief encounters the sullen or selfish indifference of men
and women to their creative power, their insensitiveness to the evils
that they or their fellows endure, it glows and spits fire.

It is quite easy to apologise for strong language: much easier than to
justify the general lack of it. And this impatience cannot be rebuked
by reminding us that the remedy of some of our ills is very obscure;
because the majority of people are indifferent to the very idea of
reform. They shoulder burdens which they might at any moment lay aside
for ever. Some of the greatest reforms that are pressed on us are not
obscured by any serious controversy. Yet in every civilised nation the
mass of the people are inert and indifferent. Some even make a
pretence of justifying their inertness. Why, they ask, should we stir
at all? Is there such a thing as a duty to improve the earth? What is
the meaning or purpose of life? Or has it a purpose?

One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece of
controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness. People tell you
that the conflict of science and religion--it would be better to say,
the conflict of modern culture and ancient traditions--has robbed life
of its plain significance. The men who, like Tolstoi, seriously urge
this point fail to appreciate the modern outlook on life. Certainly
modern culture--science, history, philosophy, and art--finds no
purpose in life: that is to say, no purpose eternally fixed and to be
discovered by man. A great chemist said a few years ago that he could
imagine "a series of lucky accidents"--the chance blowing by the wind
of certain chemicals into pools on the primitive earth--accounting for
the first appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the
influences which have lifted those early germs to the level of
conscious beings as a similar series of lucky accidents.

But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us. If there
is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the
development of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose its
own purpose and set up its own goal; and the most elementary sense of
order will teach us that this choice must be social, not merely
individual. In whatever measure ill-controlled individuals may yield
to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race must be a
collective aim. I do not mean an austere demand of self-sacrifice from
the individual, but an adjustment--as genial and generous as
possible--of individual variations for common good. Otherwise life
becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste react on each
individual. So we raise again, in the twentieth century, the old
question of "the greatest good," which men discussed in the Stoa
Poikile and the suburban groves of Athens, in the cool _atria_ of
patrician mansions on the Palatine and the Pincian, in the Museum at
Alexandria, and the schools which Omar Khayyám frequented, in the
straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages and the opulent chambers of
Cosmo de' Medici.

We answer, as men did in all those earlier debates, according to our
temperament. One says culture, another character, another happiness,
another pleasure, another efficiency. This discussion is often a mere
exercise of wit, and very often we use a quite arbitrary standard in
fixing what is "best," or the greatest good. Probably the modern
mind will put to itself the plain question: "What is the best
purpose for the race, in its own interest, to adopt?" As we are not
now clear that there are any other interests to be consulted, this is
the obvious form of the question. And when we do put it in this form,
the old conflict begins to disappear. We see that a comprehensive
ideal, embracing all the classical answers, commends itself. We want
more--we want as much as possible--culture, character, happiness,
pleasure, and efficiency. We want a quicker and fuller development of
man's highest and richest resources. But, if you look closely into
it, there is one ultimate and commanding element in this broad ideal.
It is happiness. Culture is a necessity of the race and luxury of the
few. Character is supremely important, but you have now to prove to
men that it is important. We do not bow any longer to arbitrary
commands and categorical imperatives and Stoic laws. We have to be
convinced that the cultivation of a high type of character will lessen
suffering and brighten the earth. Pleasure, again, is, as Epicurus
insisted, only a part of a large ideal of happiness. There is, in
fact, no ground on which you can appeal to the mass of men to-day in
favour of cultivation or idealism except this ground that it makes for
greater happiness: and on that ground you may safely appeal to the
whole race.

Sometimes, when you ascend the slopes of a range of hills,--the idea
occurred to me during a walk from Chamonix to Montanvert,--the mists
close round you, and the guiding peaks and contours are lost. Then,
perhaps, some point breaks through the clouds, and you stride on
confidently. This must apply to the most sceptical or nebulous mind of
our generation. The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve
life, to bring happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach,
shines above all the mists of the day. Through the ruins of creeds and
philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our
steps toward that height--just as the Athenians did two thousand years
ago. It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no disputable
tradition--nothing that scepticism can corrode or advancing knowledge
undermine. Its foundations are the fundamental and unchanging impulses
of our nature. Its features are as clear and attractive to the child as
to the philosopher. Philosophers will, of course, declare it
superficial; but we may remind them that all their supposed deeper
probing of reality, from Pythagoras to Bergson, has ended in a
confusion of contradictory guesses. Churchmen will declare with horror
that it is "materialistic"; and we may remind _them_ that for
fifteen centuries they have taught Europe to place its highest good in
happiness. If the happiness they promised is getting doubtful, we make
sure of what we can. In truth, however, no nobler aim ever inspired
action, and none is so fitted to appeal to modern man. It is, in fact,
the mainspring of nearly all the progressive activity of our time. The
more doubtful all else becomes, the more determined men and women are
to be happy in this world. Thrones and creeds and institutions, even
moral codes, are brought to judgment to-day before that ideal. It is
more profitable to judge the living than the dead.

This ideal is the chief inspiration of the rebellious temper of our
age. The revolt which burns in so much of the abler literature of our
time is an unselfish revolt, or non-selfish revolt: it is an outcome
of that larger spirit which conceives the self to be a part of the
general social organism, and it is therefore neither egoistic nor
altruistic. It finds a sanction in the new intelligence, and an
inspiration in the finer sentiments, of our generation, but the glow
which chiefly illumines it is the glow of the great vision of a
happier earth. It speaks of the claims of truth and justice, and
assails untruth and injustice, for these are elemental principles of
social life; but it appeals more confidently to the warmer sympathy
which is linking the scattered children of the race, and it urges all
to co-operate in the restriction of suffering and the creation of
happiness. The advance guard of the race, the men and women in whom
mental alertness is associated with fine feeling, cry that they have
reached Pisgah's slope; and in increasing numbers men and women are
pressing on to see if it be really the Promised Land. That is the
spirit of the reform-movement of our times. Popes anathematise our
age, and the clergy of all sects bemoan its "materialism," yet it
is exulting in a wider and higher idealism than any that ever yet
stirred the heart of man. For we now know from what dark and brutal
origins we came, and we feel that, if we advance only as we are
advancing, we may reach any height that any prophet ever yet saw in
his visions.

It is very difficult to avoid what seem to be rhetorical phrases in
describing this age of ours: the age which some profess to find prosy
and materialistic in comparison with the earlier age when a handful of
plethoric landowners ruled England, and little children worked in
filthy rooms for twelve hours a day, and cut-throats, in most charming
costumes, slew each other in the fields of London. I have not the
least desire to use rhetoric; I do but express my feeling, and what I
take to be the feeling of "advanced" people generally, as it comes
to me. But in this poetry there is the solidity of scientific prose.
Some time ago I sailed slowly toward Teneriffe from the south. Eighty
miles away, on a fine morning, the summit of the Peak showed its
delicate contour in the clouds, hardly distinguishable from them. We
thought it an illusion, a simulating cloud, because far below the
summit the blue sky seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. The
Peak floated in the air. But, as we drew nearer, the blue band below
it grew thinner, and at last it disclosed the massive bulk of the
supporting mountain.

Speaking as a sober student of history and science, I say that this
dream of a brighter and happier earth rests on no less solid a
foundation. We see primitive man, blindly, and with infinite slowness,
move towards civilisation: we see civilisation slowly, with many a
tragic interruption, advance toward the modern age: and now we see the
pace quicken enormously, and we find a new consciousness of power and
a deliberate aim at higher things bear the race onward. The
reformer's belief in the future is a scientific deduction from the
past.

The failure of the mass of people to co-operate in the realisation of
this ideal is due, not to indolence or stupidity, but to the obsessing
influence of the old traditions. They choke the fires of the mind:
they make us insensible to the real enormity of a great deal of our
social arrangements. Hence it is that the reformer's appeal is cast
so frequently in a negative or aggressive form. The most powerful
thing in our world is, not truth, but untruth; and the most important
thing in the world is to assail it. "Great is truth, and it will
prevail," said an ancient writer. But the civilisation which gave
birth to that sentiment died, and all its promising young truths
perished with it, and Europe fell under the rule of lies for more than
a thousand years. Untruth is millennia older than truth. Its roots run
deep into the flesh of the heart, while the rootlets of truth are
struggling for a frail clasp in the intellect. Great is untruth, and
it will prevail--unless it is attacked unceasingly. No untruth ever
died a natural death. Being the sacred truth of yesterday, it is
usually entrenched in powerful corporations, embodied in the law and
life of nations, enshrined in the tenacious affections of the
millions. At one time you incurred sentence of death if you challenged
it: now you incur slander, misrepresentation, and mockery. The race
has been made docile to it by a kind of negative Eugenic--perhaps we
ought to say Cacogenic--selection. Yet nearly everything which the
majority venerate as truth to-day began its career as heresy and will
end it as lie.

So the first task of the well-wisher of mankind is to distinguish
truth from untruth in our traditions. The story of man is a long story
of the tyranny of consecrated shams, with occasional intervals of
rebellion and advance to a higher stage. Rebellion is the salt of the
earth. There comes a time in the history of every civilisation when
the mind of a few rises high enough to survey critically that stream
of traditions in which the majority lazily float. Then comes the
inevitable revolt; hence the close kinship which we feel across the
ages with "the Preacher," with Socrates, with Omar Khayyám, with
Erasmus, with Molière. We are at the same stage of evolution, with
the difference that we moderns have an immense mass of knowledge of
history and prehistory to aid us in testing the value of our
traditions. Already we have discarded scores of old dogmas: in
religion, politics, education, law, and every department of our common
life. It would be folly to attempt to fence off any province of our
life from this critical scrutiny. And since we obstinately retain many
traditions which a very high proportion of properly educated people
regard as unsound and mischievous, since these traditions are the
chief obstacle to the advance of the race, one of the most pressing
needs of our time is, surely, a stern campaign for the abolition of
this tyranny of shams.


 CHAPTER II.
 THE MILITARY SHAM

IN the original conception of this work militarism was selected as
the first sham to be assailed because it is at once the most costly
and the least excusable. The way to remove many of the blots on our
civilisation is by no means plain. A dozen conflicting theories
confront you, and each has a sufficiently large body of adherents to
entitle it to consideration. But there are others in regard to which a
large and practical measure of agreement has been reached. Here we do
not need so much the subtle dissection of arguments and proposals as
the kindling of that ardent and imperious sentiment which spurs a man
or a race to action. The evil is recognised: the way to remedy it is
sufficiently clear. What we need is, in the mass of the people, that
fiery resentment of a hated tyranny which will shake the lie from its
throne.

The first, the gravest, the most flagrant and most vivid in our minds
at the moment of these obvious shams is war, with the military system
which it involves. Here there is no sacred legend of a divine origin
to confuse the minds of the ignorant. There are legends of divine
approval, it is true, but the clergy do not press them and they have
little influence. War is a practice or institution which we clearly
trace to the wild impulses and imperfect social forms of early man:
even to the sheer passion of the beast that was still strong in him.
No sophistry can obscure this bestial origin. We men and women of the
twentieth century cling to one feature, at least, of an age on which
we look back with high disdain: an age with which we would bitterly
resent any comparison in point of intelligence and feeling. We may try
to gild it with glittering phrases about a nation's honour, but we
know, all the while, that the honour of a nation no more demands that
it shall dye its hands in the blood of a sister-nation than the honour
of an individual requires so barbaric a consolation.

We maintain this sham in an age when mechanical progress has made such
strides that it has turned the industry of war into our chief and most
oppressive occupation. We cannot, with all our sacrifices, find the
means to carry out most urgent reforms in our social life; we cannot
put flesh on the bones and light in the eyes of poor children, or ease
the lives of worn workers and helpless widows; because we need these,
and even greater resources, to sharpen the sabre for our neighbour's
throat and enlarge the calibre of the tube that will scatter a hail of
death. We have for years stood in such attitude confronting each
other, we civilised nations, that on any day of any year the bugle
might peal, and the soil and seas of Europe be reddened with blood,
and the pain which knows no remedy shoot through millions of homes;
and now the tragedy has opened, grimmer than the dourest prophet had
ever pictured it. Why have we done this? Ultimately, because man, the
primeval savage, knowing nothing of our systems of justice, laid it
down that the knife or the club was the guardian of a man's honour
or property: proximately, because we of this highly cultivated age
enthrone still one of the most ghastly shams which barbarism succeeded
in enforcing on civilisation.

I have described it as a characteristic of our age that we are rising
above the stream of traditions which flows from civilisation to
civilisation, and are discovering that some of its sources are
tainted. Now in the case of warfare this scrutiny of the origin and
course of our traditions is comparatively easy. What we have
discovered is so well known, and so little disputed, that it need
hardly be related. It may be useful to state, at least, that very
early man was probably not a combative and bloodthirsty savage. He
lives to-day in such lowly peoples as the Veddahs and the Yahgans, and
they are generally peaceful and averse from brawling. In this
primitive man, however, there slumbered all the impulsive passion of
earlier ancestors, and it was inevitable that a cultural rise should
awaken it. When men became organised in tribes, when they became
hunters and tillers of the soil, when they increased and wandered far
afield, quarrels arose over women and hunting grounds and other
necessaries, and the institution of warfare was established. Within
the tribe there was already some kind of court, as a rule, before
which a man could bring his neighbour for wrong-doing. For the quarrel
between tribe and tribe there was no judge: the verdict lay with the
heavier weapon and the stouter arm. Hence, the higher the intelligence
of the tribe, the more deadly and widespread became the carnage.
Ferocity became a useful social quality--a virtue, indeed, the supreme
virtue, or _virtus_ (manliness)--and the primitive genius was expended
in making more cruel and lacerating the barbs of the arrow and the
spear. The administration of justice advanced, and a time came when
private vengeance, and even family feuds, were strictly forbidden and
regarded as crimes. But, while ten men might not go to war against ten
men, ten thousand would march out, with the sonorous blessing of their
priests, to the more barbaric butchery of war against ten thousand.
The mind had to grow larger, the heart more human, before the reign of
justice would be acknowledged in the relations of masses of men to
each other as well as in the relations of individuals.

With the dawn of civilisation a terrible paradox occurred. Warfare was
not abolished, but made more destructive. Again we find this a natural
and intelligible development. Each early civilisation found itself
surrounded by barbaric tribes, with which no compact of justice could
be established or trusted. The great Stoic humanitarians of Rome, who
preached the brotherhood of men and denounced violence, dared not, in
the interest of civilisation, plead disarmament. There were, of
course, moral sophisms in support of this plain need. The profit of
aggression, the prestige of conquering, were adorned with phrases akin
to our "white man's burden." Yet it is true that until modern
times warfare could not have been abolished without grave danger to
civilisation. The crime of warfare became a crime only in these later
centuries. Now that fully three-fourths of the race are gathered into
civilised states, a compact of justice, an international tribunal with
an international executive, _is_ possible; and we are guilty, either
of a base hypocrisy or a ghastly insensibility to our gravest
interests, in refusing to set up that compulsory international
tribunal.

No writer will be expected to discuss patiently to-day the pitiful
sophistry with which, until yesterday, a few defended the retention of
the military institution. Germany resounded with, and England and
France and the United States echoed here and there, the pompous and
hollow claims of its Treitschkes and Moltkes. War was a splendid moral
discipline: an institution appointed by Providence for purging the
race of sloth and materialism, for restoring chivalry and brightening
the shield of honour and rebuking selfishness. War has grimly belied
its apologists and we need notice them no longer. It has betrayed one
of the greatest nations of modern times into horrors and outrages
which are a supreme and eternal mockery of their moral claims for it.

Others more justly claimed that war develops the virility, the
endurance, the power of men. The lesson of history, they said, is on
the side of war: the great empires of the world became great by their
heroism and sacrifices on the field of battle. Here we must
distinguish carefully. It is obviously true that these empires became
big, powerful, and wealthy by war; and if any nation candidly
confesses that it relies on war to increase its territory, its power,
and its wealth, its argument is unanswerable. But there is now no
nation in the world that professes to maintain an army and a navy for
the purpose of aggression and expansion. Even Germany, which
undoubtedly did construct its massive armament for that purpose, had
not the audacity to admit it. Defence is the justifying title and, in
so far as it is sincere, it is a just title. If, as long as the
military system lasts, an army and a navy of a certain strength are
required, in the judgment of appointed experts, for the defence of a
country and its institutions, we pay our share willingly for the
maintenance of such an army and navy, and we respect our soldiers and
sailors. I do not for one moment advocate the disarmament of one
nation living amidst armed neighbours; and a partial disarmament, or
an insufficient armament, is the surest provocation of war. My point
is that, since the world has reached such a pitch of moral development
that each nation now professes to arm only against the possible
aggression of a neighbour, the time has come for them to agree upon
the infinitely less costly and more reliable way of settling their
possible quarrels as individuals do. Only one nation, Germany, seems
to be genuinely opposed to this, not so much from native malice of
character as from very serious domestic reasons for aggression: and a
perfect opportunity now arises for effectively impressing on Germany
the fact that she has come too late into the family of Great Powers
for filibustering.

As to the development of physique and endurance and discipline, it is
too obvious that this could be attained by athletic contests which are
at present left to voluntary interest or to the unattractive
manœuvres of professional exploiters. For years I have followed
professional football with keen pleasure, and I was interested when,
at the outbreak of war, men cried that these footballers were the most
superb material for our recruiting agents. It was perfectly true. Any
State which is sincerely eager to develop the physique and endurance
of its citizens can do it by the use of devices which will provide
most enjoyable spectacles and national or international festivals
instead of periodic orgies of blood and tears. The defenders of war
must be hard pressed for argument when they plead this necessity.
There is, moreover, one supreme difference between war and athletics
as instruments of training. War destroys what it creates: athletics
keeps its men among our citizens and breeders.

The truth is that the whole historical argument for war, which has had
an incalculable influence in the education of Germany, is a miserable
fallacy. The real lesson of history is that militarism has been a
malignant cancer, transmitted from one empire to another, and, by
destroying them, it has hundreds of times suspended the advance of
civilisation. It is in a sense a fallacy to claim that any nation
became great by war. The tribe which wins ascendancy over its
neighbours does so because it is already more powerful, more numerous,
or more fortunately situated. Then comes the period of expansion,
when, as we admit, greater power and wealth and territory are
undoubtedly won by the sword. This is the seductive phase of history,
leading astray men like Ruskin as well as men like Mommsen and
Niebuhr. Let us admit all its glories. Moral and humanitarian excesses
are just as mischievous as immoral excesses. As a result of this
successful war and expansion, the older empires were enabled to foster
art, to protect their growing culture, to civilise vast stretches of
the earth that might otherwise have lain uncivilised for ages.

Most assuredly war has, in this sense, been a most valuable influence
in spreading civilisation over the earth. What modern historians
forget is that the conditions have totally changed. Your empire is no
longer surrounded by myriads of barbarians whom you must conquer
before you can civilise. Germany has been forced to colour its
aggression by the stupid pretence that it had a higher _Kultur_ than
its neighbours, and that, in endeavouring to impose it on them, it was
carrying out the "law of history." It is a pity that science and
history ever adopted the word "law." What they mean, of course, is
only a summary of the way in which things uniformly occurred in
certain conditions. Now that the conditions are entirely changed, the
laws have no application. One might suggest that we still need armies
to conquer and civilise the outstanding barbaric peoples. We do not.
We need an international armed force to check their aggressions, but
there are other and better methods of civilising them. In any case,
this plea has no relation to the vast armies and navies and the bloody
wars we actually endure.

But it is the next and final phase of militarism which the historical
apologists for war have so grossly overlooked: the phase when the best
stocks of the old race are extinguished on the battlefield or
enervated by the luxurious idleness which was bought by the spoils of
war. Is it not proverbial how the great families which had led the
invincible legions of Rome dwindled in five centuries into a sickly
cluster of parasites or wholly disappeared? Is it not notorious that
it was, in the first century of the present era, the healthier
provincial stocks which saved Rome from destruction, or postponed its
destruction? And do we not find, as time goes on, men from more and
more distant provinces, in the end men from the barbaric fringes of
the Empire, coming to lead its legions and support its falling eagles?
All through Roman history war presents itself to the mind of the
candid historian as a vampire living on the best blood of the people.
Only a continuous supply of fresh blood and stout frames from the
subject peoples keeps up the illusion of an "eternal Rome." It is
only the shell that lasts. The people of Rome itself and of the
neighbouring plains, from which the old legionaries had come, were
soon exhausted. Italy in turn was exhausted and made desolate. Then
Gaul and Spain and Africa, and Thrace and Dacia and the more distant
provinces, were sucked bloodless and resourceless; and the great shell
of an empire fell with a crash under the blows of Goth and Vandal. It
is a clerical myth that Roman strength was sapped by vice. Its blood
was drunk by war.

These things Niebuhr and Mommsen forgot when they proposed to Germany
the splendid example of Rome; and history will have its revenge on its
great interpreters by recording the close in tragedy of this new
imperialism which they inspired. Other historians boldly quoted
Greece--Alexander of Macedon--and the fallacy is even more piteous.
Athens assuredly did not become great by war. Its most brilliant
period opens after a crushing and devastating reverse, and its
achievements were entirely due to its statesmen, its artists, and its
thinkers. But from the moment when the shadow of the Macedonian empire
fell on it, a blight came swiftly over its culture. Its glory departed
for ever when it became part of a great military power. Greece, as a
whole, was impoverished and ruined by war. Sparta itself, one of the
most strenuous military powers that ever lived, is a classical proof
that war invigorates only to destroy.

To whatever nation we turn, we learn the same lesson of history. Egypt
survived the strain, owing to the constant infusion of foreign blood,
for eight thousand years, but sank at last so exhausted that it seems
almost beyond the hope of reanimation. Assyria and Babylonia were
prepared for destruction by the same steady drain of their healthiest
blood. The Hittites, the Lydians, the Phœnicians, the Medes, the
Persians followed the same course. From the first founding of
civilisation in the valley of the Nile, ten thousand years ago, war
has brooded over its cities and cornfields, and has time after time
blighted its achievements and its hopes. It is as though some god were
jealous of the advance of man, and maintained on the earth this
corroding pest to eat into the life of each successive empire, and, by
destroying it, to interrupt the progress of the race.

In the history of Europe since the fall of Rome we witness the same
human tragedy. I do not overlook the other evil influences, such as
fiscal disorder and industrial parasitism, which have contributed to
the fall of empires, but the share of war in these tragedies was
incalculable. The fate of early England, battling against invaders and
rent by internal quarrels for centuries, is typical. The greater
England of modern times, or the _real_ greatness of modern England,
was built in periods of comparative peace by merchants and
manufacturers and scholars. Over the whole of Europe the vampire still
brooded, fastening on each young nation that advanced beyond its
fellows. The medieval republics of Italy were wrecked by war. Holland
and Portugal, once the most promising powers of Europe, were exhausted
by it. Not vice, not enervation, not a dwindling birth-rate,--which
are rather consequences than causes,--but the incessant exhaustion of
their resources on the seas and the battlefield condemned them to
decay. Italy fell back into the state of impotence which gave Austria
and the Papacy their ignoble opportunity. Once more the advance of
civilisation was checked by the jealous god of war.

It is, of course, true that warfare produced fine types of men; but
for every Bayard there were ten thousand brutal soldiers, whose march
across Europe left a broad track of rape and ruin. It is true that the
naval or military successes of Venice and Genoa and Florence enabled
them to raise marble palaces and to foster the art of painters and the
research of scholars; but it is equally true that prosperity based on
such a foundation was generally doomed. The example of medieval Rome
shows that a military basis was not essential. The peoples from whom
the tribute had been wrung awaited their hour--the hour when the
vampire had sucked the great frame weak and bloodless--and then, by
the same law of might, they smote the oppressor. The historian who
reads the whole chronicle of man is saddened even in contemplating a
nation's prosperity. Amidst the cries of joy and triumph and love he
seems to hear the cynical laughter of the war-god.

I need not follow the devastation of war through the later history of
Europe. The Thirty Years War laid Germany desolate, and postponed its
cultural development for more than a century. Spain, Portugal, and
Holland, which had won empire by the sword, lost it to the sword. The
Ottoman Empire sank into weakness and shame. All this was due, in the
first place, to what Count von Moltke calls "the institution of
God": the institution without which "the world would fall into
decay and lose itself in materialism." Even while he spoke Germany
was prospering by peace as few nations had ever prospered before.
Could there possibly be a more perverse reading of the lesson of
history? Could there be a greater mockery conceived than to imagine
God smiling on this blood-reeking Europe, or to call this a spiritual
triumph over materialism? Is any man, with the present desolation of
Europe before him, tempted to place the soldier above the artist, the
scientist, or the engineer as an instrument of progress? Let us grant
militarism all that it has really achieved. It remains, in the mind of
the historian, the greatest curse that mankind has endured since the
primitive humans were first gathered into tribes and disputed each
other's "spheres of influence."

Blind to this ghastly tragedy of history, we have maintained and
cherished militarism until it has brought on us in turn the greatest
catastrophe that a single year ever embraced. Probably our
grandchildren, probably many a child that gazes now with wide eyes on
our troops and banners, will look back on our civilisation with
amazement. They may smile at a drill-sergeant like Count von Moltke
telling illiterate rustics of the glorious moral qualities which war
develops in--the men who traversed Belgium! But we civilians will
honestly puzzle them. We had the history of the world unfolded before
us, and we saw this institution plainly emerging from barbarism and
leaving its bloody and defacing splashes on every page of the
chronicle. We traced the evolution of justice, and we saw that, as it
was a mighty gain to men when tribunals were set up to adjudicate on
the quarrels of individuals or clans, it would be a far mightier gain
to erect a tribunal for settling the quarrels of nations. Yet we took
this stupid burden from the shoulders of our fathers, and we made it
incalculably heavier for ourselves and our children.

I need not set out the weight of the burden in figures. When I first
wrote this page I dilated on the seventy million sterling per year
which we English were compelled to spend on defence: I imagined it
expended on social betterment and human help--on a magnificent scheme
of education, for children and adults, and so on. Then I observed--two
years ago--with a shudder that at any moment a war might double our
National Debt and compel us to find a further £40,000,000 a year to
pay for our militarism. And here, within less than twelve months, we
have incurred this monstrous burden, yet we linger still on the very
fringe of the mighty battlefield we have to traverse. Think what the
future may be if we retain militarism. In the past one hundred years,
or a little more, war has cost Europe about £4,000,000,000. In one
year a modern war has cost Europe more than that sum, and may cost it
double. Add to this, if you can calculate it, the value of the
millions of the more robust workers who die on the field: the
appalling loss to productive industry: the portentous devastation of
property. I suppose that, soberly, the total cost of this war will be
something between ten and twenty thousand million sterling. What will
be the cost of the next war, which may come within ten years? And what
might we have done in Europe with ten thousand million sterling?

I am not, it will be observed, relying on disputed speculations like
those of Mr. Norman Angell. I do not accept his characteristic theory;
but it need not now be discussed, as our experience rather suggests
that a modern war will prove so exhausting, economically, that there
will be no question of substantial indemnity for the victor. But we
must in any case add to this cost of war, for victor and vanquished
alike, that incalculable damage which is expressed in ruined homes,
ruined fortunes, and the pain of loss. This also is too vividly
present in our minds to need comment. These sacrifices have been borne
heroically. Those of us who have lost nothing can most sincerely
salute both the men who exposed their lives in a just cause and the
women who endured as women do. The soldier's trade is an honourable
trade while the need for it lasts, and at such a time it calls for
respect and gratitude. But how stupid and brutal in the last degree is
the system that imposes these sacrifices, when we reflect that the
honour or the rights of any nation could have been vindicated without
the darkening of a single home or the loss of a single citizen.

There, of course, we have the centre of gravity of the whole
discussion. _If_ we can abolish and dispense with the military system,
our retention of it in the twentieth century is the most appalling
sham and anachronism of which we are guilty. I do not enlarge on the
cost of war. No one to-day can be insensible of it or suggest that any
but the most imperious needs would justify us in retaining it. I
assume also that, after the lamentable behaviour of Germany, none will
question that there will be wars as long as militarism lasts, and that
the cost and carnage will increase prodigiously.

The supreme point for us to realise is the comparative ease with which
this greatest of reforms can be accomplished. We have no rival schools
of economists or moralists or philosophers darkening counsel here. We
do not await a genius to discover the path for us. A plain and
seriously indisputable ideal is put before us: arbitration. A court
for exercising it has already been established: the Hague Tribunal.
Let the majority of people in the more powerful nations of the earth
agree to submit every international difference to that or some other
tribunal, and we have made an end of militarism and war.

If this seem a hasty or superficial view of a grave problem, reflect
on the difficulties which a cautious or conservative thinker might
allege. He would, I fancy, on sincere consideration, admit that the
chief and most serious difficulty is not a reluctance based on
specific reasons, but a general apathy due to want of reflection. I am
not for a moment underrating the magnitude of the effort that will be
required in overcoming this apathy, in creating the general will. In
this respect, indeed, the pacifist reform is peculiarly hampered.
Pessimistic people ask how we came to boast of moral progress in
modern times when this military evil has become greater than ever.
They do not reflect on the special conditions of the problem. In
attacking almost every other evil--industrial injustice, say, or cruel
sport, or a stupid penal code--we have to deal only with our own
nation. We can carry the reform within our own frontiers, whatever
other nations do. In the case of militarism we cannot. All the Great
Powers, at least, must advance simultaneously. We have not to educate
a nation, but a planet. Pacifists have at times given the
impression--generally a wrong impression--that they forgot this; that
they advocated disarmament or relaxation of armament in our own
nation, whether other nations disarmed or no. In this way, and because
many pacifists have weakly opposed or carped at England's action in
this very grave crisis, they have done harm by making humanitarianism
seem unpractical, blindly sentimental, and dangerous. I need not
repeat that I have not the least sympathy with that sort of pacifism.
The reform must be international and thoroughly practical.

But this large task of planting a definite conviction in the minds of
the majority in many nations does not conflict with what I said about
the essential clearness and simplicity of the reform. If you set out
to attack poverty or to reform marriage, you have first to settle very
serious controversies about the way to do it. There is no such
controversy here. There are, it is true, a few who still have in their
veins some of the blood of the medieval swashbuckler. They say that,
while a quarrel about territory might fitly be referred to a judge, an
outrage on our national honour must be expiated by blood. The idea is
purely barbaric. As if this river of human blood were not an
immeasurably greater outrage than the heated words of a nervous
diplomatist, or the jibes of a silly journalist, or the acts of an
excited crowd, or the guilt of a couple of assassins! As if an
international court could not devise some means of appeasing injured
honour as well as of restoring injured rights! It is dreadful
materialism, they say, to put honour in the scale with money. So men
said in the clubs of London a century ago in defence of the duel, and
we recognise in their pleas the lingering, more or less disguised, of
a barbaric sentiment. Most of us recognise that same feature in this
last apology for the duel of nations. If we can trust our individual
honour to a mediocre magistrate or judge, or a still worse jury, we
can certainly entrust our national honour to a group of the ablest and
most impartial lawyers of the world. It is sheer distrust of justice
to refuse it.

Here again history is wholly on the side of reform. Which of the great
wars of the nineteenth century involved a point of honour that could
not, with entire decency, have been submitted to arbitration? Was
there such a point of honour in the Napoleonic wars? The
Prusso-Danish? The Prusso-Austrian? The Italian? The American Civil
War? The Franco-German? The Russo-Turkish? The South African? What
point was involved in any of them that could not have been settled
with far greater honour to the combatants and greater regard for
justice by an impartial tribunal? In most cases they were really wars
of aggression and expansion, like the war in which we are engaged. We
may at least ask the men who hold that medieval idea of war to
have--since they boast much of their courage--the elementary courage
to say so.

There is no conceivable quarrel that cannot with perfect honour be
submitted to arbitration. And the ostensible ground of this colossal
struggle which is now exhausting Europe--the satisfaction due to
Austria for the assassination of the Archduke--was pre-eminently a
matter for a tribunal. The frivolity and insincerity with which these
grave issues are sometimes met are, to put it on the lowest level,
costly. Speaking in a London club some time ago, I urged this
substitution of arbitration for war. My opponent frivolously observed
that he was not sure that a court of great lawyers would be cheaper
than war, and there were some who quite seriously applauded. Yet
Europe had then actually expended about £2,000,000,000 in the
preliminary stages of its great war!

Wherever there is a considerable and deliberate reluctance to
substitute arbitration for war, wherever these unsatisfactory pleas
for war are put forward, we find a hypocritical concealment of real
motives. If we would be practical we must candidly confront these
motives, and we shall find that the most persistent and most dangerous
of them is still the desire to gain territory. The spectacle of the
decay of the Ottoman Empire and the apparent helplessness of the
Balkan peoples had more to do with the militarism of European Powers
than they were willing to admit. That source of temptation is now
renewed, and most of the Powers have, or soon will have, all the
territory they can reasonably desire. The further distribution of
African territory could clearly be best controlled by an international
court. There remains one Power that will still feel the lust of
territory. Germany conspicuously thwarted in Europe the advance of the
pacifist reform because, as the whole world now sees, it had an
aggressive territorial ambition. We may assume that Austria will now
be cured of its lawless and costly designs, and that Germany will
remain the one unsated and discontented nation. But Europe will surely
have the elementary wisdom of refusing to maintain its terrible burden
on that account. It will pay us better to meet the real economic need
of Germany by a generous colonial deal, and then to use the power of
an international polity to destroy and prevent the revival of
militarism in that country.

We should thus remove the last serious obstacle to the reform, and the
work might advance rapidly. The tribunal, as I said, exists, and has
had more experience than is generally realised. The Hague Conference
of 1907 established a Prize Court, with permanent salaried judges, and
an Arbitration Court. A large number of very grave quarrels have since
been adjusted by this tribunal, and, as Professor Schücking observes,
"more than a hundred contracts between States have been concluded in
which, on each occasion, two States made the Arbitration Court
obligatory." But, largely owing to the opposition of Germany and the
general apathy, the Court remained optional, and the Powers maintained
their armies for the settlement of quarrels in the old barbaric
manner. The next and last step is for all the Powers to recognise the
Court as compulsory, and to furnish it with an executive (a small
international army and navy) for the enforcement of its decisions. Our
vast armies and navies then become superfluous and would be disbanded
simultaneously, leaving only a small force in each country for the
suppression of native aggression (with the consent of the Hague Court)
and for use by the Court itself to enforce its verdicts or suppress
illegal attempts to arm.

There is nothing Utopian or academic about this reform. A body of
high-minded lawyers and statesmen have for years discussed the details
of the scheme, and are ready to launch it whenever the various
Governments are compelled by public opinion to adopt it. The immediate
task is to create this pressure of public opinion. We may hope that,
after our ghastly lesson in the price of the military method, we shall
no longer be rebuffed with vapid phrases like: "Do not force the
pace." A business-man who talked nonsense of that kind would soon
find his level. We need to conduct our national and international life
on business-principles, to get rid as speedily as possible of a waste
and disorder which are an outrage on the intelligence of the race. I
look more confidently to business-men than to speech-making
politicians and sentimental moralists for the triumph of the reform.
Certain industries will, of course, be gravely dislocated, even
annihilated, by the change; and vast bodies of additional workers
will, in most countries, be thrown upon a crowded labour-market. From
the abstract economical point of view it is only a question of
transfer. Fifty millions which were spent on military industries will
now be used in enlarging other industries or creating new. In reality
there will be grave confusion; but that is due to the utterly
disorganised nature of our industrial world, which I discuss later. In
any case to allege this industrial difficulty as a serious reason
against disarmament is a very singular piece of folly. The cost and
trouble of adjusting this temporary dislocation would be infinitely
less than the cost and trouble of a war.

We need, therefore, to persuade the public, which has borne its
military yoke and endured the occasional lash of war with the
placidity of a draught-ox--that is, candidly, how we shall appear in
the social history of the future--that it may escape the yoke and the
lash when it wills. Our Churches might make some atonement for a long
and lamentable neglect of their duty by organising a really spirited
collective campaign in this greatest of moral interests. The central
educative body should, however, be quite unsectarian. I take it that
an amalgamation of the various Peace Societies, strengthened by the
adhesion of our commercial and industrial leaders, would form this
central educative body. The present war would furnish it with a superb
text and an unanswerable argument. It ought, in the circumstances, to
capture each country in Europe more speedily than Cobden's famous
league captured England. The press would begin to assist at a certain
stage of progress. Even the politicians would presently lend their
oratory; especially as their prestige, at least in this country, would
hardly survive a second strain such as this war has put on it. Every
agency ought to be enlisted in impressing upon the public that,
whatever other reforms may imply, here we ask no sacrifice; we
indicate a way in which the community may, when it wills, rid itself
of a stupendous burden and set free enormous resources for social
improvement.

Reformers are widely, and with some reason, accused of being dreamy
and unpractical. Here, at least, it will be seen that it is rather the
public and the opponents of reform who are dreamy, romantic, and
unpractical: that the reform itself is a business proposition of the
most attractive and promising character. But let us be even more
practical. To forecast the future is an interesting intellectual
recreation; but to close one's mind entirely against the
possibilities and dangers of the future is positive folly. Let us
glance at the future.

I have not the faintest hope that the Allied Powers will, as they
ought to do, disarm Germany and Austria and then disarm themselves,
when the war is over. Then Germany will concentrate all its marvellous
power of organisation, dissimulation, and intrigue in a dream of
_revanche_. The appalling incompetence displayed by what we may call,
in the broadest sense, our Intelligence Department and our War Office
will return, when the temporary accession of business-ability has been
withdrawn from it. There will be no serious inquiry into our
scandalous indolence in the early period of the war, our complete
failure to forecast the conditions of war, and our heavy somnolence
during Germany's feverish preparations, although the documents
published by the French Government show that, by 1913 at least,
sharp-sighted foreign representatives saw clearly that war was, to put
it moderately, highly probable. In point of fact, our authorities knew
that war was gravely imminent. I happen to know, from a little breach
of confidence, that our War Office secretly warned certain reservists
in June 1914 (even before the Serajevo murder) to be ready. The men
were ready, and have borne _their_ share superbly; but our authorities
had to confess that, even after nine months' experience of the war,
they were immeasurably behind Germany in the production of the two
vital necessaries of a modern war--machine-guns and high-explosive
shells.

Our experts will return to this comfortable somnolence. There will be
no serious inquiry. Politicians and their advisers will escape in a
cloud of thrilling emotions and enthusiastic rhetoric. Persistent
questioners, who are rudely impatient of party-discipline, will be
snubbed and evaded. Any other questioners, not of the political world,
will be ignored. We shall return to British dignity and placidity.
Germany will work and intrigue as it never worked and intrigued
before. There will be grave domestic trouble in Russia and, as in the
case of Turkey, German representatives will think while British
representatives play. The preparations may occupy ten years or twenty
years, but they will proceed. The aim will be a war with Russia
neutral or friendly to Germany. If it occurs ... One has only to
imagine where we should be to-day if Germany had not made the error of
abandoning the Bismarckian tradition.

Behind this is a further possibility. China is just as capable as
Japan of learning the use of thirteen-inch guns and maxims. Sir Hiram
Maxim, in fact, who knows both China and the gun, quite agrees with me
on that. And China has, behind that stoical and almost childlike
expression it presents to Europe, an acute memory that for thirty
years we have treated it with flagrant injustice. It may take decades
to undo the evil of ages of Manchu misgovernment and organise the
resources of the country, but the day will come when an alert and
powerful nation of 500,000,000 Orientals will press against its
frontiers. We may remember that the Mongol banners have before now
fluttered over Moscow and reached the Mediterranean. And the Mongols
are not the only awakening people. We may yet see an anti-European
combination from the Asiatic shore of the Pacific to the African shore
of the Atlantic. These are some of the possibilities we hand on to our
children if we do not in time abandon the military system.

To that pass has it brought us. We writhe and groan under the terrible
burden it lays on us, and we shrink from contemplating the future; yet
we might cast off the burden and rid the future of peril when we will.
We disavow the buccaneering spirit, and protest that we arm only in
defence against each other; and one wonders whether to smile or weep
at the obtuseness which prevents us from adopting a simple and humane
means of defence instead of this exhausting barbarism. We
"humanise" war, yet cling needlessly to the whole inhuman
business. We are teaching the backward nations to arm,--we would
gladly supply them with tutors and arms at any time,--and may be thus
preparing a more colossal conflict than ever. Surely the man or woman
of the twenty-first century will find us an enigma!

Let me close with a repetition of my protest against the
misconstruction to which such a book as this is always exposed. I
advocate no Utopian scheme, but one which some of the ablest lawyers,
statesmen, and business-men in Europe have discussed for years and
warmly endorsed. I have no wish to conceal technical difficulties
under sentimental phrases, but these men, to whom I refer, are
prepared to meet the difficulties. I regard the work of the soldier as
honourable and worthy, as long as we impose the military system on
each other; and at this particular juncture regret only that I am long
past the age of bearing arms. I plead, as long as the system lasts,
for unquestionable efficiency in national defence, whatever it cost.
But I say that, in this military system, we are enthroning the
hollowest and most ghastly sham that ever deluded humanity: that, when
we have the courage or wisdom to strip it of its tinselled robes, we
will shudder at sight of the gaunt frame of death which has ruled
civilisation for so many thousand years: that nothing is wanting but
the general will to dethrone this mockery of a god: and that, when we
have abolished militarism and war, we shall advance along the way of
social improvement with far lighter steps and vastly increased
resources.


 CHAPTER III.
 THE FOLLIES OF SHAM PATRIOTISM

WHEN warfare is abolished, and men no longer peep at their foreign
neighbours over hedges of bayonets, there will be a number of less
important international absurdities to remove. Some three hundred
years ago, we discovered that the earth was a globe. To-day we are
appreciating that this globe is the property of the human race, and
that the friendly co-operation of all branches of the race is
extremely desirable. National efforts and sacrifices are undone by
international waste and disorder. We begin to perceive this, and the
most sober of us must look forward to a time when the scattered and
antagonistic elements of the race will agree upon some graceful design
of a City of Man, and unite in constructing it.

That familiar phrase, the Brotherhood of Men, sounds rather hollow in
the ears of many. I am avoiding pretty phrases and disputable creeds
and subtle philosophies--I am trying to keep in direct contact with
the realities of life--and therefore I do not use it. But the sincere
sentiment behind it, the feeling that we men and women do form one
large family in possession of an immense and infinitely fertile
estate, and that we will develop our property more advantageously for
each of us if we act as though we were brothers, can hardly be
challenged. The question of the exact expression of our relationship
to each other may be left to poets and scientists.

Those lighter shams of patriotism, which I shall describe in this
chapter as hampering the march of the race, will be recognised even by
men who, with Carlyle or Nietzsche, refuse the title of brother to
some of their fellows. We ourselves smile at them sometimes, and at
the cheerfulness with which we endure the grave inconvenience they put
on us; and they will certainly provoke the laughter of the scholars
who will some day learnedly discuss the question whether we men and
women of the twentieth century were or were not civilised. They have,
it is true, a much more serious aspect; they are important auxiliaries
of the war-god. On the whole, however, they are shams that we ought to
kill with ridicule and bury with genial disdain. They are practices or
institutions which we have plainly inherited from the barbaric past,
when men were slaves of tradition, kingly or priestly, and dare hardly
use their own intelligence on their own habits. In this age of ours,
when we are at last becoming the masters, instead of the slaves, of
our traditions, they are regarded by large bodies of men and women in
every civilised country as stupid, anachronistic, and mischievous.

In fact, there is here again no serious difference of opinion. One has
not to force one's way through some controversial thicket before one
can discover the correct path of reform. The way lies perfectly clear
before us, and we can enter it at any time when we have the collective
will to do so. One might again describe the proposal, not as a
"reform"--since many people instinctively shrink from the word
reform--but as a business proposition of the simplest and most
profitable character. I speak of those false and antiquated freaks of
patriotism which keep different groups of human beings speaking
different languages, using different weights and measures, wrestling
with each other's mysterious coinage, collecting each other's
stamps, and stumbling against the many other irritating diversities
which make one part of the earth "foreign" to another. It may seem
to imply some lack of sense of proportion to pass from so grave a
subject as war to these matters, but a very little reflection will
show how closely they are connected.

The first and most ludicrous of them is the stubbornness with which
each fragment of the race prides itself on having a language of its
own. This confusion of tongues has irritated and inconvenienced and
helped to exasperate against each other the various sections of the
human community for thousands of years, although we could suppress it
at will in half a generation. Millions of us have an acute and
constant experience of the absurdity of the system. In our schools,
where mind and body require the fullest possible attention during the
few years of training, we devote a large proportion of the time to
teaching children how the same idea may be expressed by half a dozen
different sounds. The higher the class of school, the more valuable
and skilled the teacher, the more time must be wasted in learning how
ancient Greeks and Romans, or how Germans and French and Italians,
have invented different sounds from ours for expressing the same
ideas. The slenderness of the protest one hears against this polyglot
system from educators themselves is amazing. They have, it is true,
begun to rebel in large numbers against the teaching of dead
languages, but comparatively few of them support the increasing demand
for that adoption of a common tongue which would do so much for the
advance of education.

Those whose parents did not happen to be wealthy enough in their youth
to send them to schools which have the distinction of teaching
"languages" are hampered in a hundred ways. If they travel, they
must pay sycophantic waiters and couriers to give them a dim
understanding of the human world through which they pass. Even in
their own country they cannot order a dinner at any well-ordered
restaurant without first studying a lengthy vocabulary of superfluous
sounds, or without practising a dozen little hypocrisies to conceal
their ignorance. In large colonial hotels, where hardly a single
person who does not speak English is ever found, one receives a
"menu" with the usual intimidating array of French phrases. "You
ought to supply dictionaries with this sort of thing!" said an angry
young squatter, taking a seat beside me in the Grand Hotel at
Melbourne, to the waiter. If you are travelling for business, or even
transacting business at home, you must have your foreign
correspondents and agents; and with their aid you follow dimly the
very interesting advances and experiments that are being made in your
department abroad. Our Governments must pay more heavily for
diplomatic and consular service. Our books and magazines make a parade
of foreign phrases which have not yet become as familiar as English.
Our shopkeepers add twenty-five per cent. to the cost of our linen by
calling it "lingerie." ...

We are tormented in a hundred ways, yet we contemplate this absurd
muddle and waste with as resigned an air as if we still believed that
the Almighty had, in a fit of temper, created the confusion of tongues
at ancient Babel. So subtle and strong is the hold of custom on us
that we rarely even ask ourselves whether this is a wise or an
unalterable arrangement. We hear with indifference, if not with
amusement, of societies which propose to adopt one international
tongue in the place of this ridiculous confusion; we languidly picture
to ourselves little groups of long-haired faddists meeting in bleak
halls to attract our duller neighbours to the cultivation of one more
innocent enthusiasm. We have not time for these things. When a
sensible man has given adequate time to business and pleasure, he has,
he says, no hours to spare for these idealistic luxuries. Yet a
moment's serious reflection would show us that the sole aim of these
"faddists" is to make life _less_ crowded and laborious, to
lighten our business and add to our pleasure, to introduce
common-sense into a large part of our conduct. To such strange
contradictions and absurdities does this resolve to resist innovation
bring us.

Most people are, perhaps,--if they ever give a thought to the
matter,--under the impression that it is a mountainous and
impracticable task to introduce such a reform into the life of the
world. It is, on the contrary, one of the simplest and most
practicable reforms to which men could set their hands. It is even
less controversial a measure than the abolition of war. There are few
prejudices of our time which have not attracted the ingenuity of some
faddist or other; but this is one of the few. More emphatically here
than in the case of war, all that we need is the will of the majority
to change our anachronistic practice. When one regards the entirely
uncontroversial nature of the reform and the immense economy it will
entail, it is hardly unreasonable to hope that this will of the
majority may soon be secured.

I assume that, when we agree to direct our "Governments" to carry
out this elementary improvement of international life, they will
summon an international commission of philologists, educators, and
commercial men, whose business it will be to create a new language.
This step will not be taken until the voluntary movement for reform
has reached such proportions as to arouse the interest of politicians;
but in the end we rely on governmental action, as it is necessary to
reform schools and Parliaments. This international commission will, no
doubt, examine impartially such languages as Esperanto. Possibly these
existing international tongues will be found more complex than an
ideal language ought to be, and less attentive to the finer values of
speech. For the simple purpose of expression it is possible to create
a tongue far less complex than any in use in the civilised world
to-day: a tongue that could be learned in a few months even by the
untrained intelligence. It would proceed on the entirely opposite
principle to that of modern word-makers: the principle, for instance,
that changes "fireworks" into "pyrotechnics" (a piece of bad
Greek for good English), or "gardening" into "horticulture."
The use of this debased Latin and Greek in science has a certain
advantage under our present polyglot system, as it is an approach
toward international agreement, but it is making more onerous than
ever the burden of our languages. We want a simple means of expression
and intercourse, with a power of expanding to meet the advance of
thought and discovery without needing to run to such lengths as
"diaminotrihydroxydodecanoic acid." No existing national speech
would meet the purpose, least of all English; but it would be
advisable to have some regard to æsthetic interests in framing a new
language, and the old tongues would supply a good deal of material in
this regard. The success of the poet depends on qualities of words as
well as qualities of imagination, and we have no wish, like Plato, to
exclude poets from the ideal commonwealth. We should retain large
numbers of these short expressive words.

Great numbers of people hesitate in face of this proposal because they
feel that it is a very large innovation, however simple and
indisputable it is in principle. They contemplate such things as a
nervous child gazes on the sea from the steps of a bathing machine.
Intellectually, a few such plunges would be of incalculable service to
our generation. One can understand people hesitating before some
disputed economic or political scheme, but to shrink from adopting
plain and large reforms such as this is not a sign of health. We need
to purge our sluggish imaginations of their prejudices, to brace our
intellectual power, to take pride in our creativeness.

When the new international tongue is ready, a few years will suffice
to make it prevail over the older languages in the leading countries
which helped to set up the commission. It will become the one speech
of the school, the press, commerce, law, government, and, possibly,
the church. The travelling public will, as every Esperantist knows, at
once discover the advantage. The commercial world will find it a
splendid economy and a priceless boon to international trade. A man
will be able to travel from London to Tokyo with as little difficulty
as from Woolwich to Ealing; and it will be found that when the foreign
tongue, which so instinctively suggests to us the uniform of an enemy,
has disappeared, one of the worst obstacles to mutual good-feeling
will be removed. When the Englishman can talk to the Berliner with
perfect ease,--I assume that all beginnings of dialect would be
suppressed as mercilessly as weeds in a well-kept garden,--just as a
citizen of London now talks with a citizen of New York or Sydney, a
very dangerous chasm will be bridged. It is quite certain that the
calamitous attitude of modern Germany could not have proceeded to such
a dangerous pitch if the Imperialist and other literature which is
responsible for it had been intelligible to the whole of Europe. A few
students of particular aspects of German life were more or less
acquainted with it, and we refused to believe then. Now we discover,
to our amazement, that a neighbouring nation has for decades been
openly educated up to a pitch of unscrupulous aggression, and the
world has been threatened with an incalculable catastrophe. I am not
overlooking the real reasons for this development, but I say
confidently that it would have been impossible if a national
literature were not generally confined within the nation which
produces it.

In the school the advantage would be very considerable. Our
overstrained and bespectacled children would be spared several hours a
day of their school-work or home-work. The whole ancient and
modern-language section of the curriculum would be suppressed, and
this suppression, with other reforms which I will describe later,
would enlarge the teacher's opportunity of giving real education and
spare the pupil a great deal of devastating brain-fag. For the
education of older people the gain would be almost as great. A
Birmingham artisan could read the latest novel of d'Annunzio or
latest play of Hauptmann without the assistance of expert or inexpert
translators. All the older literature that is worth preserving would
be translated by specially qualified interpreters into the new tongue,
and the originals would then become the toys of leisured pedants. If,
as I suggested, a proper attention to word-values were secured in the
making of the new tongue, there is no reason why it should not express
poetical sentiments as gracefully and pleasantly as any existing
tongue.

Is there any Utopian element in this scheme? Most people will probably
recognise that the only bit of utopianism in it is the expectation
that the majority of any nation can be induced to adopt it. That might
seem to justify one in using impatient language about the wisdom of
the majority of us, but it is no reflection on the scheme itself. The
reformer, however, is ill-advised in reflecting on the intelligence of
his fellows. Carlyle's "twenty-seven millions, mostly fools,"
discovered in the end that all their follies, which he so vigorously
denounced in his _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, were more permanent and
accurate than his "eternal verities." It is usually want of
leisure or immediate profit which alienates the public from schemes of
reform. Possibly a scheme which so plainly promises more leisure to us
and a very considerable profit may hope to win attention. The reform
of spelling I, of course, take as an integral part of the scheme.

But this reform of international intercourse must take a more
comprehensive shape than the mere suppression of this confusing
plurality of tongues. It is just as foolish of us to maintain a
plurality of weights and measures, of coinage and postage-stamps, of
social and civic and juridical forms. Even if we confine our attention
to the leading civilised nations, we find in these respects a
confusion which outrages the elementary instincts of commercial life
and lays a monstrous burden of superfluous trouble on us all.
Travellers and business-men endure it year after year with the most
amazing patience. Men who would be fired to instant action if they
found a trace of such disorder in their domestic or commercial
concerns resign themselves to this colossal muddle of international
intercourse as calmly as if it were a providential and entirely sacred
arrangement. I remember once passing rather rapidly from Lucerne to
London, by way of Wiesbaden, Cologne, and Brussels: on another
occasion by way of Cologne and Amsterdam. The hours one has to spend
in calculating coinage (or lose the exchange-value), the worry
expended in struggling for stamps or dinners in the less familiar
tongues, the confusion of train-rules and street-usages and civic
regulations, reflect a system of chaotic disorder; to say nothing of
the "sizes" of boots or collars you need, the weight of tobacco or
fruit, and so on.

All this is a portentous example of slavery to tradition, whether the
tradition be reasonable or no. We have not the slightest regard for
the historical development of this muddle and the peculiar folly of
retaining it in our generation. Our earlier ancestors measured their
woollens or their corn or their mead by the simple standards that are
apt to occur to primitive peoples. Even, however, where the same
standard occurred to, or commended itself to, different and remote
communities, its vagueness was fatal. "A thousand paces" (a
_mille_, as the Romans said) seemed a fair reckoning for long
distances, but the stretch varied, and we have Irish miles and German
miles and English miles and nautical miles. Our ounces and yards and
pints are as intelligent as most of the other things which the ancient
Briton invented, but, being British, they seem sacred to us. A hundred
years ago a far superior standard, the decimal system, was put before
us, but our fathers felt that it smacked of the French Revolution and
Napoleon and atheism. We smile at their prejudice, yet we have no
greater disposition to alter our unintelligent ways. The German would
be horrified at having to reckon his distances in kilometres. The
British lion, the French or German or Russian or American
eagle,--there is a marvellous love of that symbol of aspiration and
progress,--or the rising sun of Japan, must have its own system of
weights and measures and coins. Passing through a strip of Canada some
months ago I had, from lack of the local stamps, to entrust my post to
a kindly waitress; and was, of course, robbed. Of late years,
Australia has patriotically resolved to have its own coins, and has
fought parliamentary battles over its stamps.

The often-imagined visitor from another planet would not be so much
surprised at this extraordinary and costly muddle of patriotic shams
as at our faculty for progress in commerce and industry amidst it all.
We seem to be quite blind to the larger applications of our modern
doctrine of efficiency. Regarded as an economic system, which it
really is, the international arrangement of our civilised world is
full of crudities which are more worthy of a Papuan pedlar. The
contrast between the methods of a large Chicago store or a British or
German engineering-business and the methods we retain in far larger
and more important concerns will one day be a subject of amazement.
The evil of which I am speaking eats into the very heart of an
industrial and commercial system which prides itself on its order,
economy, and efficiency. Yet this comprehensive muddle is contemplated
almost without protest by business-men. If it were merely the leisure
hours of travellers which were dissipated in this abstruse study of
foreign tongues and coins and customs, we might merely deplore
proverbial vagaries of taste. But the abuse is immeasurably greater
than this; the advantage we should gain by this scheme of unification
can scarcely be calculated. One would think that the reform was really
difficult to achieve, or lay under the frown of some imposing school
of theologians or moralists or economists!

I omit from the list of perversities whatever is the subject of
serious economic controversy. Such things as national tariffs, for
instance. However arguable the question may be in England, even the
free-trader usually appreciates in such a country as Australia the
plea for a protective tariff. There is, at all events, a very serious
controversy on the general issue, and it would not be expedient to
include among plain reforms any scheme of universal free-trade or
universal protection. It is enough to point out that certain obvious,
stupid, and mischievous survivals of old conditions gravely hamper our
international intercourse. The prestige of our civilisation, as well
as a common-sense view of our interest, demand that we shall suppress
them. More disputable reforms may be considered afterwards. Our usual
method is, one fears, to discuss the more disputable reforms first.

It is difficult to conceive any plea being put forward on behalf of
these irrational old customs, but a sufficiently ingenious and
superficial apologist might claim that patriotism bids us maintain
them. There is no doubt that the work of reform will have to proceed
over the bodies of a number of the pettier patriots. No one can
suppose that the task of unification will be accomplished without
friction. German professors and Bulgarian politicians will protest
against this pernicious cosmopolitan spirit, this horrible wish to
denationalise us, this tampering with the sources of national energy.
Ardent Irishmen and Welshmen will form very talkative associations for
the defence of "the grand old tongue." Rival languages will be put
forward, and Esperanto will strain its hitherto respectable resources
in denouncing Volapük or the new official speech. French and English
and German savants will heatedly press the claims of ideal words in
their respective languages to be taken over, and pamphleteers will
discuss whether Herr Professor Doktor Schmidt did or did not
contribute more suggestions than Professor Smith. A higher criticism
of the new language will spread its pale growth like a parasitic
fungus.

What is patriotism? In the sense in which the word is still widely, if
not generally, understood, it stands for a sentiment that belongs
essentially to a pre-rational age and cannot survive unchanged in a
rational age. This does not mean that a rational age has no place for
sentiments; it means that the sentiments must not affront reason. We
cannot at once pride ourselves on being paragons of common-sense, yet
slaves to a sentiment which common-sense must not examine too closely.
Loyalty to that larger national family to which we belong: cordial and
generous support of its interests: sacrifice, if need be, for its just
ambitions: pride in its worthy achievements, even in its worthier
superiorities--these are useful and intelligible sentiments, and it is
not unreasonable to make a flag the visible symbol of these just
interests and achievements. But a blind and undiscriminating devotion
to flag or king, a glorification of our national family above others
in the roystering fashion of the Middle Ages, a refusal to ask if the
demands of our rulers are just or if the interests we are pressed to
support are sound and equitable, an obstinate pride in a thing because
it is British or German, whether it be wise or no--these are
sentiments entirely at variance with the best spirit of our age. We
may recognise that even the crude old patriotism has contributed much
to the advance of civilisation. This gathering of men into rival
national groups has forced the pace, and has at times developed noble
qualities. But we must admit also that the same patriotism has
inspired hundreds of unjust and stupid wars, and has maintained on
their thrones kings and queens who ought to have been dismissed with
ignominy.

The progress of civilisation does not entail the suppression, but the
refinement, of sentiment, as is very plainly seen in the supposed
implications of patriotism. When it is urged that these absurd
national diversities of speech and coinage must be sustained on the
ground of patriotism, we ask at once which sound element of patriotism
could demand such an anachronism? It is, surely, only the spurious
medieval sentiment that could dictate so utter an absurdity! Will the
interests of England be endangered because we remove a very serious
burden from its economic life and its educational activity? Shall we
be less prosperous, less happy, less respected, for correcting an
antiquated and foolish practice? These things, we may reflect, were
not stupid at the time when they were developed. The resolute patriot
may, if he wills, take pride in the relative ingenuity of the people
who invented them. Each separate national system was the outcome of
special conditions, and the slender commerce between the different
communities at the time they were developed did not require a rigorous
international standard. One bartered by the piece or the lump. But it
is sheer folly to ignore the modern transformation of international
life: to fancy that our unwillingness to exert ourselves, even for our
own advantage, may be ascribed to some lofty virtue.

It need hardly be said that I am not cherishing a dream of spreading
at once over the entire planet a uniformity of language and coins and
standards. The leading civilised nations might, within a few years,
adopt such a scheme; and a certain number of the smaller and less
advanced nations, which aspire to membership of the civilised group,
would probably accept the reform speedily enough. On the other hand,
the permeation of the lower races with our ideas would be a slow and
difficult process: a part of that general task of civilising the whole
race which we have sooner or later to confront. This difficulty does
not at all affect the advantage we should gain by adopting a scheme of
unification within the family of civilised nations, and it cannot be
pleaded as a reason for postponement. But all the reforms I have
hitherto discussed will, when they have spread over the more highly
organised countries, find a temporary check in this chaotic jumble of
peoples on the fringe of civilisation, and it may be useful to discuss
the principles which ought to inform our attitude toward them.

Our generation looks out upon these backward branches of the race, not
only with a finer sentiment and a stricter regard for principle than
any previous generation did, but with a very much clearer knowledge of
their meaning. We may, of course, be faithless to our principles in
cases: we may casuistically wrap a piece of frank buccaneering of the
old type in hypocritical humanitarian phrases. The general attitude
is, however, more enlightened, as these pieces of hypocrisy themselves
show. We may or may not hold the doctrine of universal brotherhood; at
least we understand the true relation of these more backward races to
ourselves, and we are in a much better position to determine our right
and our duties. We have advanced considerably since, little more than
half a century ago, a stern moralist like Carlyle could defend
black-slavery and denounce as "a gospel of dirt" the scientific
revelation which threw light and hope on inferior types of manhood.

The chief difference is that we now see the true relation of the lower
races to the higher. It is false to say, as Carlyle did, that some
races were created with higher gifts than others, and were therefore
divinely appointed as the master-races. The notion is as absurd as the
old and profitable legend of the laying of a primitive curse on Ham
and his black descendants. Difference of geographical conditions is
the chief clue to the unequal development of the various branches of
the race. I have in various works developed this theme and will not
linger over it here. You have at the start the same human material and
capacities in all the scattered groups. But some have been for ages
isolated from the stimulating contact of races with a different or a
higher culture, and this is the essential condition of advance. Others
have, by sheer chance, been so situated that they enjoyed this
stimulation in an extraordinary degree. On this principle we can
understand the birth of civilisation in that fermenting mass of
peoples which settled between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf
ages ago, and the direction of the advancing stream of culture, partly
eastward to India and China, but mainly in the more favourable
north-western direction.

It is, therefore, no difference of aboriginal outfit, but a difference
in the chances of migration and situation, which accounts for the
cultural diversity of races. Yet we must not at once infer that any
lower race can, on this account, be drawn from its isolation and
lifted to the higher level. There is reason to believe that a race
loses its educability if it remains unprogressive for too long a
period. The physiological reason may be that the skull closes firmly,
at a relatively early age, over the brain in a people in which
expansion of brain after puberty has not been encouraged. Take the
three "lower races" of Australasia. The Tasmanian was one of the
oldest and least cultured branches of the human family, and he died
out within a century after contact with the whites. The Maori of New
Zealand is the most recent and most advanced of the three aboriginal
races. With the Polynesian, he is closely related to the European or
Caucasic race, and is certainly educable. The Australian black comes
between the two in culture and in the period of his isolation.
Australian scientific men who have made the most sympathetic efforts
to uplift the black tell me that they have failed, and the race seems
to be doomed.

These scientific principles have discredited the old legendary notions
about the lower races, but we must not as yet make dogmas of them.
Nothing but candid and careful experience will show which races are
educable and which ineducable. It is very probable that such peoples
as the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, the Aetas of the Philippines, the
Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego, and some of the Central African groups,
will prove ineducable. Other races which have been considered
"savage" are already proving educable, either as a body or in
large numbers of instances. Many peoples have not been tested at all.
We are only just at the fringe of this vast and interesting problem.

In regard to the races which, after humane and thorough experiment,
prove entirely ineducable, the solution does not offer much
difficulty. Once their primitive habits are disturbed, and they begin
to live on a pension allotted them by the European nations which have
seized their territory, they gradually die out. A very good case may
be established by those writers who hold that races which cling
incurably to barbarism ought to be painlessly extirpated, or prevented
from multiplying. Such races as the Australian blacks are quite
familiar with a process of sterilisation which does not interfere with
their enjoyment of life. On the other hand, the life led by these
domesticated but ineducable savages is hardly worth preserving at all.
However, as they are disappearing, one need not press that point. The
claim of sane humanitarians, that we have no right to interfere with
their conditions and seize their territory, is quite unsound. The
human family has a right to see large fertile regions of the earth
developed. Who regrets to-day that the Amerinds were pensioned in
order to find room for Canada and the United States and Brazil and
Argentina? Who does not see the advantage of peopling Australia with a
fine and advancing civilisation of (eventually) twenty or thirty
million progressive whites instead of a few hundred thousand miserable
aboriginals?

At the other end of the scale we have, as I said, peoples who are most
probably or certainly educable. At a hazard one might instance the
Thibetans and Siberian Mongolians, the Koreans, the Maoris and
Polynesians, the Lapps (of the same blood as the Finns), and a large
number of Asiatic and African peoples. We must keep in mind the high
civilisation reached by the Amerinds of Peru, whereas their modern
descendants, the Quichwas, seem so negligible. In Africa there is a
vast amount of experiment and classification to do, and already the
pure Bantu races are furnishing scores of men who are susceptible of a
university education. I know several of them who are as competent and
well-educated as the average English university man.

Has the white race a duty ("the white man's burden") to attempt
to civilise the coloured races? I speak in general terms, of course.
It is sheer insolence to regard the Chinese or Burmese--one must not
mention the Japanese--as lower races. Now, speaking in the abstract,
as a matter of general moral principle, the white has no clear duty to
civilise the coloured races. The sentiment of brotherhood may inspire
a feeling of duty in some, but one cannot build firmly on that phrase.
It is, however, not an abstract ethical question. The white men have,
in point of fact, spread over the globe, and they are in a fair way to
occupy all the territory on which the coloured races (except the
Chinese and Japanese and Burmese) were settled. Only an attitude of
general unscrupulousness could ignore the obligation which this
seizure of territory implies. England and Germany have, for instance,
occupied the islands of the Pacific and made their inhabitants a
"subject race." They have done this, not only with a gross lack of
discrimination between the Polynesian (who is certainly educable) and
the much lower Melanesian, but with a quite cynical idea of the
"civilising" process. The work has been left to sailors and
travellers, who have decimated the population by spirits and syphilis,
or to the crudities of Christian missionaries. The joy of native life
has been killed, and the enforcement of clothing (which the natives
naturally cast off in the cooler evening, when the sensitive European
was not able to see them) has led to an appalling amount of pneumonia
and phthisis. We have done much to turn a wonderfully happy and
healthy people into a gin-drinking swaddled caricature of a Bank
Holiday crowd.

But the lists of our crimes in dealing with the lower races need not
be given here. If we white people are to go out among the more
backward coloured races, and to profess that we are assuming the
paternal function of administering their territory, we must act on
some principle. It is rather late in the history of the world to send
out civilising expeditions which consist of missionaries presenting
copies of the Sermon on the Mount, and soldiers and merchants who, in
flagrant contradiction to the Sermon on the Mount, exploit the natives
and appropriate their soil. There must be a serious attempt to educate
them, and then an elimination of the unfit. Africa will prove a
formidable region for this discriminating work. The Mohammedans
themselves have already proved that many of its peoples are capable of
culture.

We have a special problem in our treatment of races which, like the
Hindus and Egyptians, have already been drawn into the white system.
Let us be quite candid with ourselves in this matter. We appropriated
their territory for our advantage, not theirs, and our professed
modern sentiments are compelling us to say that we are not in
possession of their territory in their interest. We protect the Hindu
from native despots, the Egyptian from a cruel Mahdi or Pacha, the
retired official tells you. However, I do not propose that we should
investigate the title-deeds of all our existing empires as regards
their oversea possessions; nor do I in the least advocate the
dismemberment of such large unities as the British Empire. But the
principle on which some would stake our existence in India or Egypt,
the maxim that "What we have we hold,"--which is often illustrated
by a picture of a particularly stupid-looking bull-dog guarding the
British flag,--is the first principle of the pickpocket and the
burglar. Modern sentiment has to grant colonial empires a sort of
"Bula de Composicion," such as the Spanish Church, for a
consideration, grants to pickpockets. The best compromise is that the
peoples which are to-day linked in empires should remain linked; not
as dominant and subject peoples, but as sister-nations working out the
destiny of the race according to the highest standards. This implies
that, as they assimilate Western culture (as the Hindus are quite
rapidly doing), they shall be more and more entrusted with the
administration of their own countries. The very different situation of
colonies need not be discussed. When Australia and Canada find, if
they ever do find, that it is to their interest to set up complete
independence, they will not cut the cable: they will cast it off as
calmly and confidently as they now cast off the cable of an Orient
liner on the quays at Sydney.

Along these lines we may forecast the future, and very slow, drafting
of the more backward peoples into the homogeneous family of the more
civilised races. The unification of languages, coinage, etc., will be
gradually extended to them. But it is not my purpose in this work to
contemplate remote tasks and contingencies. A great and practicable
reform lies at our doors. The overwhelming majority of the race are
already incorporated in civilised nations, and the work of
organisation amongst these is urgent and comparatively easy. I am not
advocating a fantastic and lofty scheme for which one needs to be
prepared by the acceptance of advanced humanitarian sentiments. What
I am pleading for is the application to international life of our
treasured maxims of common-sense and efficiency. Those simple and
indisputable maxims condemn in the most stringent terms the patriotic
shams which we suffer to perplex and burden our life. Let us run the
planet on recognised business-principles.


 CHAPTER IV.
 POLITICAL SHAMS

THE reforms I have so far advocated have one peculiar
characteristic. They are urgent, easy to grasp, indisputable in
principle, and enormously advantageous; but they need international
co-operation, and we are only just beginning to form those friendly
international contacts which may lead to agreement. Hence it is that,
although very contentious reforms have already been realised, these
linger, as we say, outside the range of practical politics. But this
very phrase reminds us at once of another fundamental irregularity of
our life. The man who thinks a proposal dismissed because it is not
within the range of practical politics illustrates admirably the
indolence of mind which I am assailing. If a useful and economical
device were put before him in his business-capacity, and he were told
that his business had no room for it, he would at once ask what was
wrong with the business. I am contending all through for the
application of this progressive spirit to larger concerns than stores
or workshops. If our political system, to which we entrust these large
concerns, absolutely ignores some of our finest chances of profit,
there is something wrong with the system. Our servants are not doing
what they are paid to do.

As I have already briefly contended, our recent experience furnishes a
very ghastly confirmation of this suspicion. The British Empire will
survive the dangers that beset it, though it will be deeply impaired
economically, for two fundamental reasons: the Allies have double the
population of the Central European Powers, and they have, including in
this respect the United States, far larger ultimate resources in
material and money. The fact that we do eventually muddle through
will, one fears, content the majority of our people, but the
thoughtful patriot will ask two questions. How many hundred millions
has our slowness in mobilising our resources cost us, by protracting
the war? And what is likely to be the fate of the British Empire if,
with a similar slackness, it has at some later date to meet a
numerically equal and far more alert enemy?

Let me briefly recount the facts which show that our national business
has been grossly mismanaged. Can any person look back on all the facts
which are now public property and say that our soldiers and statesmen
were innocent in not perceiving the grave possibility of war with
Germany at any time in the last three years? That, however, will
scarcely be said: the readiness of our fleet is a sufficient reply. We
know further that the general character of the war was foreseen.
England was to help France and Belgium, on French or Belgian soil.
England's co-operation on land was, as events have shown, vitally
necessary. Yet the unpreparedness of Britain for a great continental
campaign was entirely scandalous. No doubt there would have been a
risk in openly enlarging the army or creating great stores of
material. Germany would, in its unamiable way, have asked questions.
Tender-hearted Members of Parliament would have denounced our
provocative proceedings. But a preparation of plans, a census of our
resources, a scheme for the immediate enlistment of the
business-ability of the country and the full use of all our industrial
machinery--these and a dozen other most important measures could have
been taken in this country as safely and secretly as they were in
Germany. Not only were they not taken, but the military preparations
were actually relaxed. It has transpired, and is not disputed, that
our great Arsenal was only partially occupied; and Mr. A. Chamberlain
has publicly stated that Kynochs had for the year 1914--the expected
year of war--a Government order two-thirds less than they are capable
of executing in a week, and do now execute in a week.

The second fact is the remarkable failure to forecast the conditions
of the war. If it be urged that a layman cannot judge how far such a
failure is culpable, the answer is prompt: the German authorities, who
had had no more experience of war than we, did forecast the
conditions. Their minute and energetic elaboration of the whole scheme
of the war contrasts extraordinarily with the sluggish and
conventional ease of our authorities.

The third and gravest fact is our appalling and costly slowness in
mobilising our resources when the war began. Six months after the
outbreak of war I went over a very large engineering shop in the
north. Out of hundreds of men only a score or two were engaged on
war-material: and one of the two objects on which this mere handful of
men were engaged has proved to be wholly valueless. At that time, and
for months afterwards, the workers of Britain were encouraged in their
easy ways, and the bulk of the manufacturers were encouraged to go on
with their usual business, by official assurances that no greater
effort was needed. When our disgusted soldiers sent us a message that,
not "the weather," but a scandalous shortage of ammunition and
machine-guns kept them back, the Prime Minister, quoting the
"highest available authority," publicly declared this to be
untrue. We were asked rather to admire the way in which we had
dispatched the greatest expeditionary force known in history: as if
the enormous progress of modern times did not make this superiority a
matter of course. When criticism increased, we cried for the gag and
the public prosecutor, and we garlanded the portraits of the very men
who had disgraced us; and we agreed to the retention or promotion of
incompetent men, on obvious party-grounds.

Happily one minister had the grit and patriotism to call to his aid a
group of business-men, and the facts could no longer be concealed. Mr.
Lloyd George admitted that since the beginning of the war, we had
increased a thousandfold our production of munitions, yet were still
far behind the Germans and far short of our needs; and at last, eleven
months after the outbreak of war, we began to organise, or at least to
ascertain, our resources. Again we loudly congratulated ourselves on
our energy. We cried shame on all critics and pessimists and people
who wanted more. We fancied ourselves in the character of Atlas,
taking the whole burden on our massive shoulders, to spare our weaker
Allies. But the sinister light which this late increase of output
threw on the first six months, or more, of indolent incompetence was
quite disregarded. We genially overlooked the fact that the delay of
our advance was costing us nearly a hundred millions a month. We
allowed less prominent affairs to be conducted with the same indolent
insufficiency. The most absurdly inadequate measures were taken to
control the prices of food and coal, and scarcely a thought was given
to the tremendous economic problem which will confront us when the war
is over, or to the means of recouping ourselves by a systematic
promotion of our oversea-trade.

In a word, the magnificent organisation and ordered national devotion
of the German people make the conduct of England during the first year
of the war seem clumsy, lazy, and full of danger for the future. For
this the chief blame quite obviously falls on our statesmen. English
soldiers have at least been second to none in the field: English
artisans have, since the need was acknowledged, worked magnificently.
It is the directing brain that was sluggish and incompetent. The
magnitude of the sudden task does not excuse our rulers, nor does the
very large service that was actually done--which I do not for a moment
overlook--lessen the scandal. If a political machine does not know how
to enlarge itself in less than twelve months to meet a new and very
urgent task, especially a task that it ought to have foreseen, it is
unfit to control our national destiny. Our governmental system has
proved itself most dangerously and mischievously unfit to meet such a
national emergency, and this catastrophic experience may encourage the
reader to examine with patience the criticisms which I propose to pass
on it.

Here again we submit to the tyranny of a largely obsolete tradition.
When the story of the development of human institutions can be written
with a detachment of which we are yet incapable, one of the strangest
pages will be that which tells of the evolution of Church and State.
From the early days when some exceptionally powerful warrior is raised
on his shield and saluted as chief or king, and when some weird
individual earns the repute of being able to control or propitiate the
mighty powers of the environing world, government and religion
steadily advance to a commanding position in the life of the people.
The two men of power, the king and the priest, must have
establishments in accord with their value to the tribe, and the palace
and the temple rise in spacious dignity above the mean cluster of
huts. Time after time the race turns to examine the tradition which
has been so deeply impressed on it, and kings and gods are cast from
their thrones; but new dynasties always arise. Of Rome, no less than
of Thebes or Nineveh, it is the monuments of kings and gods that
survive. Only a few centuries ago the European city consisted mainly
of two institutions: the palace and the cathedral. The bulk of the
citizens huddled in squalid fever-stricken houses beyond the fringe of
the estates of their secular and priestly rulers.

The modern age, with its inconvenient questions and its bold speech,
arrives. Commerce develops, and the palace and cathedral disappear, in
the forest of soaring buildings. When the roofs of the new commerce
and the new commoner rise to a level with the roof of the palace or
the cathedral, when men are no longer overshadowed by the old powers,
the imagination is released. The divine right of kings goes in a fury
of revolutionary flame: kings must henceforth rule by human right and
answer at a human tribunal, which is more exacting and alert than the
old tribunal. Yet the power of the dead tradition is amazing. In England
men still bow reverently when the king addresses them as "my subjects"
and talks of "my empire": still crown every entertainment, spiritual
or gastronomic, with fervent aspirations which would lead an
ill-informed spectator to imagine that they regarded the king's health
as mystically connected with the health of the nation: still describe
bishops and the heads of families which have been sufficiently long
idle and wealthy as their "lords."

These archæological survivals are, no doubt, innocuous, if
irritating. The more serious feature is that they help to make so many
people insensible of the miserable compromises we endure in our
reorganised State. They are part of that superabundant ash which
clogs and dulls the fire of the nation's life. The nineteenth
century, rightly and inevitably, adopted a democratic scheme of public
administration. It was seen that, if the king were not so close a
friend of the Almighty as had been supposed, there was no visible
reason why the destinies of the nation should be entrusted to his
judgment: which was, as a rule, not humanly impressive. Luckily,
certain nations had won the right to do a good deal of talking before
the king came to a decision, or the right to hold Parliaments, and
Europe generally adopted this model. The Parliament House now towered
upward in the city, and it did the real business of directing the
nation's affairs. The king became a kind of grand seal for the
measures enacted by Parliament. Some nations, the number of which is
increasing, regarded the seal as a costly and avoidable luxury, and
abolished it: some kept the king, with all his stately language and
pretty robes and sparkling jewellery, and abolished the "lords":
some kept the king and the lords, but deprived them of real power. The
English nation, which is famous for its common-sense, its audacity,
and its ability, belongs to the last group. It invented that
remarkable phrase, "self-government": which ingeniously preserves
the fiction that someone has a right to govern other people, yet
conciliates the modern spirit by intimating that the people really
govern their governors.

Into the extraordinary confusion of forms and formulæ which has
resulted from this compromise it would be waste of time to enter. Does
it really matter that we allow our king to put on our coins a
flattering portrait of himself, with an intimation that he rules as
"by the grace of God"? He is quite conscious that he rules us--if
his melodramatic relation to us may be called ruling--on the
understanding that he never contradicts us. We are not now knocked on
the head, except by an intoxicated patriot, if we refuse to stand
while our neighbours chant their insincere incantation about his
health: we go, not to the Tower, but to the ordinary law-court, if we
mention his personal frailties; and the portentous seriousness with
which he takes his robes and his formulæ injures none, and amuses
many. No doubt, slovenly mental habits are always to be deplored, yet
these things are not in themselves important enough to be included in
a list of serious reforms. What we do need to examine critically is
this scheme of self-government by which we now manage our national
affairs: very badly, it appears.

This political machinery is divided into two sections: municipal
government and national government. The former, from which every
element of "government" except the name has departed, need not be
considered at length. It consists of groups of citizens who are
understood to excel in public spirit and self-sacrifice, so that they
devote a large part of their time to the unpaid service of their
fellow-citizens. Every few years a man, of whom you had probably never
heard before, calls to implore you, with a quite painful humility and
courtesy, to allow him to discharge this self-denying function. The
next day another man, of whom also you had never heard before, calls
to inform you, in discreet language, that his rival is a spendthrift,
a rogue, or a fool; and that _he_ is the man to represent you with due
regard to economy and with absolute disinterestedness. You probably
refrain from voting for either, since you have not the abundant
leisure of a libel-court. Your streets will somehow get paved, and
your children schooled, and you will pay the bill. But you may
discover after a time that the air is thick with charges of
"jobbery," or that some local councillor has been promoted to the
higher and more lucrative political world on the ground of "many
years' experience of local administration."

If you happen to live in the Metropolis, where the intelligence of the
nation is clotted, so to say, you find municipal life even more
complex than this. The eager rivals who solicit the honour of doing
your work for nothing are divided into bitterly hostile schools. Each
school spends hundreds of thousands of pounds in a periodical effort
to convince you that the other school is going to swindle you. Each
plasters the wall with repulsive typical portraits of its exponents,
and you see yourself depicted as a weak and amiable, but small-witted,
figure (or, perhaps, as a burly and very stupid-looking farmer), whose
pockets are being picked. Each produces a most exact statistical proof
that its opponents have actually picked your pockets, and that the
"reds" or "blues" are the only people with a really disinterested
desire to spend some hours every day in the gratuitous discharge of
public duties. They spend great sums of money every few years for the
purpose of securing this thankless burden and facing the vituperation
of their opponents. You seek illumination in the press, and you find,
in rival journals, a mass of contradictory statements and mutual
accusations of lying. However, the system is thoroughly British in
its encouragement of individual action and public spirit, and you
overtook all the direct and indirect corruption it fosters.

What is a man to do? One can at least search very rigorously the
credentials and the public action of the man who "solicits your
vote," and encourage the appearance of really independent and
fine-spirited men and women. I have, naturally, described the broad
features and general abuses of the system, but there are, of course,
large numbers of men in it who are sincerely disinterested. In the
main, however, municipal politics is tainted and complicated by the
party-system of the large political world, and to this we may turn.

That section of the political machine which controls national affairs
is obviously of the first importance. On its working rests the grave
issue of peace or war; to it is entrusted, in the last resort, the
great task of educating the nation; and through it alone can we secure
any of those numerous reforms which are to undo the tyranny of shams
and abolish so much avoidable misery and confusion. One ought
therefore to be gratified to see how large a place politics occupies
in the public mind, which is otherwise so little inclined to serious
matters, and in the public press, which so faithfully mirrors the
thought of the nation: to see how the prominent or eloquent politician
surpasses in public esteem the greatest artist or scientist, and even
rivals in popularity the prettiest actress of the hour: to see that
four-fifths of our public honours are reserved for politicians and
statesmen, and for those less gifted but more wealthy men who give
them practical support. Unhappily, when one looks closely into this
apotheosis of politics, one finds that its merit is merely
superficial: that a very large proportion of the more thoughtful
people in every civilised community look on politics with disdain, and
that some of the more independent of our politicians confess that one
must almost lay aside one's honesty and ideals on entering the
political world.

A series of grave struggles and threats of civil war in the first half
of the nineteenth century inaugurated the present political phase in
Europe. It transpired after Waterloo that the English parliamentary
system, in which our statesmen took such pride, was a hollow and
corrupt sham. A comparatively few wealthy landowners controlled the
nation, and bought votes for their nominees. After some years of
agitation the working men of the great manufacturing centres formed
armies and threatened to force the doors of Westminster at the point
of the pike. This elicited a system of restricted, but real, popular
representation. Later enlargements of the franchise improved the
system, and to-day some six or seven million adult males elect our
legislators. Until recently this scheme was largely frustrated by the
power of a non-elected House to suppress any measure which did not
please a privileged minority, but this is now materially modified. Six
million free and adult representatives of the nation appoint and
control the men who make our laws, and direct the king how to act.

But in practice this admirable theory becomes a mockery and an
illusion. It may be taken as a Euclidean postulate that out of six
million people of any civilised nation four or five millions will
be--shall we say?--somnolent: not from want of brain, but from want of
constant exercise of it. A very earnest idealist of the last century,
Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, proposed that, for the great efficiency of
our political machinery, every elector should, before he received a
vote, be compelled to pass an examination in political economy and
constitutional history. Since few Members of Parliament, to say
nothing of voters, would have passed the examination, the proposal was
rejected, and the education of the voter was left to the interested
political parties and to the press which supported them, or was
supported by them. The result was that two rival organisations,
roughly corresponding to the two attitudes of the modern mind toward
new ideas (progressive and conservative), gradually increased in
wealth and power until they were able to control the electorate and
exclude from representation every finer shade of political thought.
The machinery by which this is done does not leap to the eyes, as the
French say, and the average elector proudly contrasts our political
system with that of most other nations.

Candidly, we may take some pride in the contrast. The struggles and
sacrifices of our fathers have won for us a system which is far
superior to that which has hitherto prevailed in Russia, to the
despotic medievalism of Prussia, to the grave insincerity of Spanish
political life, to the confusion and occasional corruption of French
or Italian politics, to the remarkable activity which precedes a
presidential election in the United States. Our political life is
relatively free from large corruption. I happened to be in New Zealand
when the "Marconi Scandal" was agitating England, and I remember
politicians of that progressive little land smiling at the word
"scandal" and hinting that they were more adventurous. Some of our
discontent is, no doubt, due to women writers who magnify the evil in
order to persuade us to enlist their refining influence. I do not, in
fact, think that Mr. Belloc and Mr. Cecil Chesterton have proved some
of the graver charges which they brought in their indictment of our
"servile State." It will need something more than a list of
matrimonial connections to persuade us that Mr. Lloyd George and Mr.
Winston Churchill were in the habit of meeting, amiably and
clandestinely, Mr. Bonar Law and Mr. F. E. Smith for the collusive
arrangement of our laws.

Yet there is enough in the familiar criticisms of our political
machinery to justify one in saying that the political sham is, even
now, intolerable. What, candidly, is the procedure? A general election
is announced, and two men call, or send agents, to solicit the honour
of representing you in Parliament. In the district in which I write at
the moment one candidate is a wealthy and muddle-headed Liberal: the
other is a wealthy and (politically) equally muddle-headed
Conservative. Neither of them has the remotest idea of representing my
national wishes,--they would blush to be suspected of it,--and neither
has ever spoken in Parliament; so I have never yet voted.

But I am an eccentric man. Let us take a normal case. You notice, as a
rule, that during the few years before the election a wealthy man has
been openly suffered, or directed from his party-headquarters, to
"nurse" the constituency. Hundreds will cast votes for him solely
because they fear a withdrawal of his subscriptions to their chapels
and football clubs, and of his open-handed philanthropy. As the
election approaches, another candidate appears. He also is, as a rule,
a wealthy man, and he spends between one and two thousand pounds in
disturbing the judgment and inflaming the emotions of the voters.
Pictorial posters, which might have adorned the walls of some Pyrenean
cavern in the Old Stone Age, are massed near the doors of some dark
"committee room" or spread over the town. The brain struggles
feebly with the contradictory statements of orators and journals. And
on the day of the election the two wealthy rivals for the honour of
printing M.P. on their cards, and the duty of voting as they are
directed by their superiors, flood the district, although it has an
excellent tram-service, with expensive cars and carriages, to take the
tired working man to the poll.

Possibly one of the candidates is not a wealthy man, and you begin to
speculate on the source of his thousand pounds, or even three hundred
pounds. Very few voters do inquire, of course; most of them would be
surprised to know how much a man spends in soliciting the honour of
representing them--he has usually a great contempt for them--in
Parliament. The more inquisitive voter, however, would discover that
the poorer candidate is in a special sense the representative of a
particular party, and he would touch the fringe of a peculiar and
ingenious system. I happened one day to mention to a friend certain
advanced opinions of a Member of Parliament. "That," he said
grimly, "will interest my father-in-law; he finances Mr. ----."
Through the party-organisation this wealthy and highly respectable
manufacturer paid the election expenses and part of the
income--Members of Parliament had not then a salary--of candidates or
Members in various remote towns. The manufacturer, or the various
manufacturers who do this sort of thing, will eventually be knighted
or baronetted; their sons will have a chance of a secretaryship, or
even of Cabinet rank. The secretly subsidised Member will go to
Westminster, an automatic voter. In fact, since a candidate must
generally have the sanction of the central organisation of one or
other party before he can venture to solicit votes, even wealth does
not usually relieve him of the party-tyranny.

What, then, is the party? It is not so much a creed as a wealthy and
powerful organisation. Once it was a group of men who happened to have
the same ideas. By a natural evolution of organisation--one sees the
same thing in the evolution of Churches--it has become rather a
machine for impressing those ideas on men. In a sense, it is an
oligarchy. We must remember such facts as the dismissal of Mr.
Balfour, and the powerlessness of Mr. Asquith to get rid of a certain
Minister whom he disliked. The power of the front-benchers is not
absolute. But on the whole the party is an aristocracy of wealthy men,
titled men, and able men, which rules the country for a term of years.
Its leading agents are the Ministers and Whips: the body of the party
is an association for carrying out its will, and for adding the
attractions of parochial entertainment and cheap club-life to the more
austere cult of ideas. Its revenue is, to a great extent, secret; but
the annual lists of honours reveal very plainly that it conducts an
unblushing traffic in such things. The reasons allied in the published
list are often too ludicrous for words. Privately one can often
ascertain the exact price.

With this wealth the party-aristocracy controls the electoral campaign
and the elected Members. It has, further, at its disposal a large
number of highly paid positions, or functions which lead to highly
paid positions, or profitable little occasional jobs, or political
pensions, or a Civil List (which is grossly abused), and so on. These
it dangles before the eyes of impecunious or ambitious critics. Here
are two facts within my slender personal knowledge of these matters. A
very influential Socialist (my informant) was invited to a small
dinner of the party-aristocrats and diplomatically informed that he
might be useful in office: another drastic critic was assured by a
Cabinet Minister, through a mutual friend (my informant), that nothing
would be done for him until he ceased to criticise.

The system is, on both sides of the House, corrupt, demoralising, and
intensely prejudicial to the interests of the country. We found its
danger during the South African War, and we perceive it far more
plainly to-day. What ought to be the brightest intellectual fire in
the land is sluggish, choked with ash, served often with inferior
material. The permanent departments of State which depend on it are
correspondingly sluggish. In an emergency it--after a humiliating
trial of its own ability--turns to business-men. Its whole tradition
and procedure are abominable. Men who are poor and independent may
bruise their shins on the doors in vain. Men of no ability are
promoted, even to peerages and the Cabinet, because their fathers
contributed much to the party's purse or prestige, and they
themselves will at least be loyal. Men who raise critical voices in
the House are snubbed and suppressed: men who criticise outside are
safely ignored. The ablest and the most sincere men in the party--men
like Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Lloyd George--acquiesce in all this.

The electoral system and the procedure of the House of Commons are
designed to protect this monstrous scheme. The large fee which is
exacted of candidates and the very large sums which wealthy men are
allowed to spend on elections intimidate able and independent, but
impecunious, men. The election is spread over a week or two in order
to give wealthy men, who may be relied upon to support the
constitutional parties, an opportunity of voting in several
constituencies, and in order that Ministers may give more aid to their
weaker supporters. For the polling-day Saturday is avoided as much as
possible, because on that day a larger percentage of the workers would
vote, and they are apt to vote against the constitutional parties.
Cars and carriages are permitted because the candidates of the workers
will easily be surpassed in this well-known advantage by candidates of
the great parties. Minorities are hopelessly excluded from
representation, such as they would have under a system of proportional
representation, because they would send to the House a number of
independent Members who would disturb all the calculations of the Whip
and all the tricks of party-government. Under a system of proportional
representation it would be quite easy for some scores of able and
earnest men to secure election at very small cost, by merely
circulating declarations of their views; but this, or a grave increase
of the Labour Members, would wreck the party-system, and therefore the
most democratic of our orthodox politicians maintain all the abuses
and injustices of our system.

The division of constituencies is further designed to protect this
iniquitous and corrupt scheme. Universities, the City of London, and
boroughs like Durham, Bury St. Edmunds, and Montgomery--each of which
has a population of less than 17,000 souls--have an equal right to one
unit of representation in Parliament with Wandsworth, the Romford
division of Essex, or the Harrow division of Middlesex, each of which
has more than a quarter of a million inhabitants. Eighty-three
constituencies, most of them having a large proportion of the more
intelligent workers, have a population of more than 100,000 each:
forty-four constituencies have a population of less than 40,000 each.
In other words, half the people of England and Wales elect 167 Members
of Parliament: the other, and notoriously less intelligent half, elect
323 Members of Parliament.

From Gladstone downwards even our most "democratic" statesmen have
acquiesced in these enormities of our electoral system; and they have
meantime expended much eloquence on the injustice of the Prussian
system, and have expressed ardent hopes for the emancipation of the
people of Italy, or Bulgaria, or Persia, or some other remote land.
Yet these features of our electoral scheme are retained solely in
order to protect the party-system: to keep in the hands of a group,
which is largely hereditary and is at all events a small and jealous
caste, all the prestige and emoluments of the higher positions. Even
the grave peril of a national catastrophe, owing to this restriction
of power and responsibility to a group of moderate talent, does not
shake their tradition. We shall, when this war is over, see them
resist reform as energetically as ever.

Within the House of Commons itself a mass of old rules and customs are
maintained for the same purpose. The hours of work are still arranged
on the old supposition, that a Member of Parliament is a man who, with
great self-sacrifice, devotes a large part of his time gratuitously to
the service of his country. The most important work in the nation's
economy is relegated to the hours when every healthy man is disposed
to rest and recreate himself: indeed, the more important the issue at
stake, the more certain it is to be discussed during the worst working
hours out of the twenty-four. One has only to glance at our
legislators on their benches after dinner to realise the significance
of it. The majority of them are plainly reconciled to the theory that
the heads of the party have done the necessary work during the day:
_their_ business is to keep sufficiently awake to vote correctly.

The arrangement of business is not less iniquitous. The Ministry
decides that certain measures of reform are needed, either in the
interest of the people or in their own interest, and, since they have
an assured majority of "Ayes," the lengthy debate is almost
superfluous. The passing of the measure has been secured in advance,
or it would not be put forward. The rare event of miscalculation, and
the still rarer event of independent action, need not be regarded. No
Member is, even in these cases, influenced by the long and tiring
speeches which are made about the matter. At one time the debates had
a certain elocutionary elegance, at least; now they represent an
unattractive sham-fight, and abuse is being increasingly substituted
for rhetoric. The most paltry trickery is employed on both sides,
because every man is aware that his speech is really addressed to his
followers outside the House, and he must, _in_ the House, rely on
quite other devices than eloquence. Yet all this pseudo-gravity is
lightened occasionally by sittings in which some measure of the
greatest importance, but not introduced by the Government, is treated
as flippantly as it would be in a humorous debate during a long
sea-voyage.

If a man is instructed by his constituents to represent in the House
some special need of theirs, or some public reform which has millions
to support it, he finds that "the rules of the House," or the
rules of the oligarchy, will not allow him to introduce it. A very
small fraction of the time of the House is granted for the discussion
of such proposals; but the debate is farcical, and is often looked
forward to in advance as such, because everybody knows what will be
the issue, even if a majority of the House really favours the
proposal. Measures of grave social importance, like women-suffrage,
have been arbitrarily crushed by the oligarchs for thirty years,--as
early as 1886 women-suffrage had 343 supporters on the benches,--and
this tyranny and injustice of a few ministers have led to the most
violent and bitter recrimination.

This is the political machinery to which we entrust the most dedicate
and momentous issues of our national life, and to which we have to
look for the realisation of our most treasured hopes of reform. The
impartial critic will not question that there are men in the political
world as eager for reform as he, or that during the last half-century
some excellent social legislation has been passed. These measures are,
however, due in great part to a studied endeavour to retain or gain
support in the country,--the Insurance Act, for instance,--and many of
them--relating to the sale of cigarettes, to the admission of children
into public-houses, to the flogging of procurers--are small
sentimental reforms which occupy time that could be better employed.
We think that we open a new epoch of civilisation when we give a very
small pension to a very aged worker, but the problem of the roots of
poverty or the abolition of warfare does not enter the party-programme.
Our bishops enthuse over their success in inducing a complaisant Home
Secretary to lay the lash on the backs of a sordid little group of
criminals, and even offer to roll up their own lawn sleeves for the
job; but they are indifferent, or hostile, when other people would
induce our Ministers to amend those brutalities of our marriage-laws
which tend to foster prostitution.

This political machine must be radically and comprehensively reformed
before it can be a fit instrument for the reform of the nation. All
the pyrotechnic distractions and gross irregularities of an election
must be suppressed: all plural voting must be abolished: the comedy of
cars for feeble voters must be forbidden: all indirect bribery, either
of voters or candidates, must be rigorously punished. Candidates must
put a simple and sober statement of their views and proposals before
the electorate, and no further expense should be permitted. Some
system of proportional representation and secondary elections should
ensure that large minorities would not be entirely without
representation. The election should be confined to one day, preferably
a Sunday, and stripped of all melodramatic nonsense and occasion for
corruption.

The party-system will, no doubt, long survive in English political
life. Within twenty years or so the word "Conservative" will, as
in other countries, pass out of use, and the Conservative elements
will unite under the banner of "Liberalism," in opposition to
"Labour." It is, of course, the dread of this issue which at
present unites the constitutional parties in opposing reform. One can,
by studying advancing countries, even foresee a next phase. The
Conservative elements will unite in a "Labour" party against the
Socialists; and in the dim future we may, like Anatole France, foresee
a Socialist commonwealth established and an Anarchist party furiously
assailing it.

But, though the party-system be retained (very much modified by
proportional representation), this disgusting sale of honours and
offices, this oligarchic tyranny over the House and the
constituencies, will not survive. Reform of the electoral procedure
will enable a large group of independent men--independent of the large
parties--to enter Parliament, and the removal of the Irish and other
Members, who concentrate on a single issue and are willing to traffic
on other issues, will reduce the old majorities. I do not doubt that
fresh complications will arise. The weakness of proportional
representation is that it will certainly lead to a number of sectarian
groups. "We Catholics" will, of course, return Catholic Members,
ready to sell their votes on various issues in the interest of the
sect; and the Baptists and Methodists, and so on, will be tempted to
retort. We shall have a teetotal group, and a Puritan group, and an
anti-wallpaper group, etc. We must hope that the sterner education of
the electorate will secure that these trivialities do not endanger
grave national interests. The dissolution of the old Conservative
party will leave the Liberal party unable to defend its abuses; it
will have no opportunity of collusion or retaliation. So we may have
in time a political machine--a body of men, appointing their own
leaders, soberly chosen by each 100,000 of the population, regarding
Parliament as a grave national council, not a theatre for the display,
of wit and rhetoric--which will effectively carry out the will of an
advancing people and enlist the interest of the most thoughtful.

I am in all this assuming that sex-barriers and privileges will be
entirely abolished, but I prefer to discuss the position of woman in
its entirety in a later chapter. It must be explained, however, that
in taking 100,000 as a unit of representation, I am contemplating an
electorate of thirteen or fourteen million voters. Something between a
hundred and two hundred Members of Parliament are surely sufficient,
and would make a much more practical and alert body than our present
stuffy, sleepy, and overcrowded House.

It seems very doubtful if a Second Chamber, in any form, is a real
social need. A House of "Lords" is, of course, an insufferable
anomaly and medieval survival. It is amazing that this hereditary
transmission of titles--and such titles!--and wealth has so long
survived the stinging raillery that men like Thackeray poured on it
long ago: it is still more amazing when we measure the intelligence
and public spirit of our "lords." Even if we weed out the less
intelligent, or those whose interest in horses or actresses or
theology is more conspicuous than their interest in the nation's
affairs, it is preposterous that such a body should retain the least
control of a properly elected House of Commons. We may trust that
before many decades all hereditary titles will be abolished, and this
will demolish at once the name and the more offensive part of the
character of the Second House. The idea that because one had a
distinguished or fortunate or unscrupulous ancestor, or one has large
estates or an American wife, one is fitted to control our legislators,
is too ludicrous for discussion. It is sometimes pleaded that they
"have a large stake in the country." One may surely reply, not
only that they would do well to have their large stake more ably
represented, but that poverty has an even greater and more pressing
right to representation.

As to the bishops, it is still more difficult to discover why they are
allowed to control secular legislation. They have been chosen for
certain doctrinal and administrative functions, partly because of
their ability to discharge those functions, partly because they had a
convenient income, and partly because they could command political or
domestic influence. But even the men who have earned a mitre because
they were admirably fitted to wear it, and could hold together a large
group of clergy with conflicting doctrinal ideas, are not obviously
qualified for the work of legislation. Their record in the legislative
assembly is deplorable. They have for ages blessed our militarist and
bellicose traditions. They have, in their own interest, resisted
nearly every important social reform until recent years, and even now
they display a keen social sense only when there is question of
flogging a few score of perverts, or something of that kind. They have
no place in a modern political system, and their presence in it is an
anachronistic reminder of the time when they monopolised education.

Another element of our Second Chamber consists of men who have been
promoted from the First Chamber, generally in order to watch the
interest of their party, or made peers for public service or service
to the party. The various creatures of the party are one of the abuses
we have to correct. Even the others are of questionable value. Is Lord
Morley more judicious, or more alive to the highest interests of the
nation and the race, than the Right Honourable John Morley was? Does
age give wisdom to Lord Gladstone, or did it enhance that of Lord
Roberts? Is it not a fact that nine men out of ten adopt a sluggish
and reluctant attitude in age, and are unfitted to deal with the
proposals of middle-aged men? There is, at all events, occasion for
very careful discrimination, whereas our present practice is to
reward, indiscriminately, a supposed merit or a service rendered to
the party with a seat in the "Upper" House.

The third class of peers calls for the same observation. Success in
manufacture or finance or law, or a willingness to give large sums to
the party-funds, is not an obvious qualification for controlling
legislation. While these men are in the prime of their vigour and
judgment the nation dispenses entirely with their services. We invite
their co-operation in the national business when they are understood
to be too old and inelastic to attend any longer to their less
important commercial concerns. It is, in fact, impossible to frame a
really impressive plea for a Second Chamber of any description. I
venture to say that if an historical inquiry were made into the
services rendered by Second Chambers since the beginning of the
parliamentary system, it would be found that they have rendered little
or no real service, while they have obstructed the work of reform in
every land. Their record--the first thing we ought to consult--condemns
them emphatically. If the Members of a Second Chamber are not elected
by the people, they invariably consult class-interests: if they are
elected, they, as one sees in Australia, are superfluous.

This political system is completed by the royal assent to Bills and
the royal power to choose Ministers. The former is now an idle form:
the latter is an intolerable abuse. If the people are self-governed,
the leading agents in the Government are Ministers of the people, not
of the king. The Members of Parliament ought to choose the Ministers.
Kingship is a medieval survival, and it is inconsistent with a clear
and practical conception of the nation's business to retain these
archaic forms and institutions. The trend of political evolution is
visibly from kingdoms to republics. A "monarch" in the twentieth
century is as anachronistic as a "lord"; an hereditary monarch is
an outrage of modern sentiments. Once more, we need to test the
institution by its historical merits or demerits.

Many people seem to regard our Constitution much as certain lowly
tribes regard the mysterious stone which has dropped from heaven
amongst them. Some even of our politicians display a kind of
fetishistic terror if a measure is projected that seems to them to
infringe or enlarge our Constitution. They brandish their spears
before the idol and talk of shedding their blood in its defence. They
are at times "Balliol Scholars," or something of that kind, yet
one would suppose that they were quite unaware how our Constitution
arose, and what plain and indisputable right we have to revise and
improve it. It is a sort of ancient mansion to which a modern owner
has added billiard-rooms and workshops and a garage. But it has
assuredly not the æsthetic charm of a medieval building, and this age
of ours needs to reconsider, if not reconstruct, it. It will be a fine
day for England when we have a Royal Commission sitting in judgment on
our Constitution: calmly discussing, amongst other matters, the
expediency of asking the throne to retire on half-pay, and all its
parasites to retire on no pay.

I have already described the changes which are likely to occur in that
large political structure, the Empire. The various regions of the
earth which constitute it cling together on the understanding that we
are quite insincere when we talk of them as our "possessions." It
is a federation of free nations, bound together by thinning ties of
blood and by the advantage of a collective defence. When the military
system is abandoned there will merely be a somewhat faded and amiable
sentiment uniting the imperial fragments to each other more closely
than to their nearer neighbours. One may hope that they will remain
united, for a large empire is a good thing, if it has large ideals: it
is a university of civilisation. But unless we purge our
correspondence of archaic forms the "Colonies" may grow impatient.
The Colonial of the third generation, and often of the second, has
very little respect for England. Candid Australians would make some of
our Imperialists tremble with concern. Our colonial "governors,"
of course, report that loyalty is undiminished, because a few hundred
families in Melbourne and Sydney press with undiminished snobbishness
to their garden-parties. These ornamental nonentities ought to be
withdrawn. Perfect sincerity in our relations with the Colonies will
do most to maintain the federation. The splendid co-operation of
Australia and Canada in the war has shown that we have little to fear.

India and Egypt form a special problem, complicated by the fact that,
in their condition of dependence, they are large and nutritious fields
for the employment of our sons. It would, however, be foolish to
ignore the great change that is taking place in them. Hindus tell me
that, when Lord Morley became Secretary of State, the advanced
Nationalists sent him a private message to the effect that they would
co-operate with a humanitarian like him; and he snubbed them. A very
large proportion of them are beyond the stage of being impressed by
_durbars_, and are impatient that the masses should be kept in that
childlike state of mind. We set up a fictitious "Oriental
imagination," and try to make the Orientals live down to it. The
example of China and Japan ought to have destroyed our illusions about
"the East." The difference is one of culture, which may at any
time be changed. We shall have to deal more frankly and generously
with Egypt and India, or else cease to rail at Prussian or Russian
despotism.

However, Imperialism is not a grave or pressing problem. The Empire
will run its destined evolutionary course. For us the grave matter is
the corruption which clogs our political machine and the perverse
tradition which prevents the multitude from seeing it. The awarding of
honours and lucrative positions should be withdrawn entirely from
politicians, because, even if we compelled them to publish accounts,
they would still add to their resources or prestige by this inveterate
traffic. The king might at least render us the service of purifying
this department of national life: perhaps have a list prepared by the
Privy Council and checked by independent inquiry. I remember how Sir
Leslie Stephen told me that he shrank from being added to the
inglorious list of mayors who had entertained princes or coal-owners
who had financed elections or built chapels. This would cut one of the
chief roots of our present political corruption, but we need to press
for a thorough education of the people. It must realise that the
political machine is dangerously clogged and sluggish: that its
"democratic" character is a sham: and that its energy is wasted on
measures which are insignificant in comparison with the mighty tasks
of education, pacification, and industrial organisation which it ought
to undertake.


 CHAPTER V.
 THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

IN the last sentence of the last chapter I spoke of education,
pacification, and industrial organisation as the three monumental
tasks of a reformed political system. If the supreme object of a
central administration--the sooner we cease to talk of "government"
the better--is to make a people healthy, prosperous, and happy,
these are surely the three reforms to which it will most resolutely
apply itself. I have spoken of the very grave and pressing
nature of one of these reforms: the need to abolish militarism and
war. Later chapters will deal with education, in the very broad and
rich meaning which I assign to the word. Here I would sketch the
problem which seems to me to weigh heavily on us in connection with
the distribution of wealth and the present disorganisation of
industry.

It is useful sometimes to imagine ourselves in the year 3000 or so
looking back with critical eye on the twentieth century. One pictures
the future historian--some narrowly specialised expert on the social
life of the second decade of the twentieth century--discoursing on us.
A strange and interesting people, he will say. They boasted of their
intelligence, and they really did display a creditable measure of
intelligence in their research and their applied science. They
regarded themselves as far superior in humane sentiment to the Middle
Ages, to which they properly belong, and they put forward many
excellent vague proposals of social improvement. Yet it is not easy to
understand their slavery to ancient prejudices, sometimes of a quite
barbaric character. A superficial observer would say that the
contradiction was due to their unhappy practice of leaving the
majority of the community at a low level of culture, so that the
intelligent minority were checked by a slower-minded majority. But it
is a singular fact that some of the most intelligent men among the
minority, such as Mr. A. Balfour and Mr. F. E. Smith, held much the
same views as the agricultural workers, and made a kind of religion,
which they called Conservatism, of this obstinate retention of old
traditions. They seem, with all their pride in their culture, to have
mistaken their place in the evolution of the race. No people is
entitled to be called civilised which complacently tolerates war,
squalid and widespread poverty, dense areas of ignorance, political
corruption, and the many other remnants of barbarism which they
tolerated. The twentieth century was the last hour of barbarism, lit
by a few rays of the civilisation which dawned in the twenty-first
century.

If the infliction of pain and misery is, as I believe, the worst form
of crime, this retention of war and poverty is the gravest of our
social transgressions. But the guilt of our generation in regard to
these two crimes is very unequal. The way to abolish war is clear, but
the remedy of this other open sore of our social organism, a poverty
which stunts and embitters the lives of millions in every large
civilisation, is not at all clear. The plain man who, oppressed by the
spectacle of this desolating, unchanging poverty, seeks a remedy in
social literature, is at once beset by a dozen rival theorists. The
Socialist, the Anarchist, the Eugenist, the Malthusian, the
Single-Taxer, and other austere thinkers press on him their
contradictory formulae and their mutual abuse; these in turn are
assailed contemptuously by men who are not less acquainted with
economic matters; and the older political parties observe, with a
sigh, that poverty seems to be an inherent evil of every industrial
order, and we can do no more than mitigate its hardships. To this last
position the plain man usually comes.

Let us grant at once that the older political parties have done much
toward the alleviation of poverty. No one who is acquainted with the
condition of the workers a hundred years ago can hesitate to admit
this. Impatience is too rare a virtue, it is true, but this does not
dispense us from cultivating wisdom. A great deal has been won, and
generally won by the middle class, for the oppressed workers. Between
1830 and 1880, at least, thousands of middle-class men were working in
Europe for the advance and enlightenment of the workers. The old
doctrine of _laissez-faire_ has been forced to compromise with
decency. We have entirely abolished the horrible exploitation of cheap
child-labour which was common early in the nineteenth century. Our
Francis Places and Robert Owens have won for the worker the right to
form Trade Unions, and others the free education of his children. We
no longer permit the employer to fix the conditions and hours of
labour as he wills. The cotton-worker of Manchester, labouring twelve
or fourteen hours a day, and living in a squalid cellar, one hundred
years ago, would be amazed if he could visit the factories and homes
and places of amusement of his grandchildren. Even the poorer workers
are no longer left to God and the clergy; while the bulk of the
workers have numbers of cheap luxuries which would have seemed an
apocalyptic dream to the worker of Napoleon's day.

But let us not imagine that we have got our axe into the roots of
poverty and are in a fair way to abolish it. This is one of the most
dangerous fallacies of our age; and against that comfortable assurance
I, knowing well all that has been done, plead that not one of our
reforms makes for the abolition or the material restriction of
poverty. We pension the very aged worker and the still more aged
widow: on the pauper scale. We build substantial, if rather cheerless,
homes for the destitute, and we put warm, if ignominious, clothing on
the back of the orphan. We appoint minimum wages, and permit maximum
prices. We have labour bureaux, and district visitors, and a Salvation
Army, and a Church Army. All of which means that we give a drink to
the crucified; it might be well to study if we can cease to crucify.

The plain man or woman who earnestly wishes to help in the improvement
of life will inquire first, and most resolutely, what the actual range
and depth of poverty are; will study, secondly, how far our measures
of reform afford us any hope of curtailing it; and will, in the third
place, ask whether there is any other way of action which does offer
some hope of restricting, if not removing, the evil.

In the mind of many people poverty means that somewhere in the darker
depths of our cities, happily remote from the shopping centres, there
are a number of people who, from lack of skill or excess of drink,
cannot find regular employment, and must live. ... One does not know
exactly how they live, but certainly on unpleasantly short and dry
rations. In earlier times one dropped a half-sovereign into the
poor-box at church for these creatures, if they would come to church
and learn resignation. To-day one subscribes to the Charity
Organisation Society or the Salvation Army, or joins one of the many
enterprising associations which are going to make the poor richer
without making the rich poorer. We have a social conscience. We
believe in _laissez-faire_, but, being humane, we will not push it to
extremes. At the same time, being sensible men, we are not going to
push humanitarianism to extremes. The phrase-maker is the great
benefactor.

For a first acquaintance with poverty I would recommend a man to spend
a few hours, some Saturday evening, among those markets of the poor
which still line many of our more dingy thoroughfares. As the night
draws on, and the oil-lamps begin to flare and splutter over the
stalls, the grim courts and narrow streets of the district discharge
their grey streams of life upon the market. There is plenty of
laughter, you observe; there are plenty of round-faced matrons, with
clean, honest eyes and comfortable dress. "We ain't got much
money, but we do live," I heard one of them remark, in an interval
between bursts of raillery. The wives of regularly employed, and often
not ill-paid, workers are there, as well as poorer folk. But study
some of the quieter figures which move slowly among the throng or
linger enviously before the cheap shops. Notice the puny, shrivelled
infants, with quaint staring eyes, which, at the door of the
public-house, lie lightly in the arms of women whose faces are bloated
with drink and coarse food: the lean and ragged boys and girls, with
hollow and prematurely sharpened eyes, who hang about the
fruit-stalls, ready to dart upon the rotten castaways, or foster, in
darker spots, the premature sex-development which will drain their
scanty strength: the woman who, with drawn face, waits near the Red
Lion to see how many shillings her sodden brute of a husband will at
length hand her for a week's shopping: the weary old couple who have
seen better days, and now pass in silence through the babel of
vulgarity: the haggard-faced widow in mouldy black who hides her
paltry Sunday dinner in a worn bag: the eager eyes of the poorer
hawkers, which light up pathetically when a penny comes their way: the
men whose faces change at a drunken jibe into such faces as we have
seen behind the bars of a cage in a zoological garden, and the crowd
of men, women, and children rushing to enjoy the gratuitous spectacle
of a fight: the cheap, middle-aged prostitute, whose features are a
caricature of the features of woman.

You may see these things in all parts of London--north, south, east,
and west--every Saturday evening, and many other evenings, all the
year round. You may see them in all the other large towns and cities
of Britain, and the cities of France and Germany and the United States
and all other "great civilisations." I have studied them on
Saturday nights in half the cities of Britain: in Amsterdam and
Brussels and Cologne, in Paris and Nice, in Venice and Rome and
Naples, in New York and Chicago: and in the light of our historical
research one sees their ancestors in all the great cities of all the
great civilisations that ever were. As it was in the beginning ... But
that refers to the glory of God.

Follow to their homes these more pathetic figures of a London crowd.
You need not do so literally, for more observant and sympathetic
visitors have been there before you, and they told London long ago, as
far as London was willing to hear, how the majority of its citizens
live. Mr. Booth's book, _Life and Labour in London_, had better be
suppressed when its work is done, lest the men and women of a more
humane age learn too much about us; also Mr. Rowntree's book, which
shows this same fetid poverty lying at the feet of a superb minster,
the symbol of ages of ecclesiastical wealth and power; and many other
books. Let me summarise the relevant record of the natural history of
London.

We may begin with the lowest depth, with life as it is lived in some
of the streets which still linger about Covent Garden, and in east and
west and south. We are beginning to see the grim humour of tolerating
the existence of these hotbeds of corruption under the very shadow of
our marble palaces of justice and our marble hotels for millionaires,
and we are destroying them; but the life remains still in sufficient
quantity to fill a large town. In tenements of this order fifteen
rooms out of twenty are indescribably filthy. Legions of bugs lurk by
day behind the faded rags of ancient wallpaper or in the crevices of
the unwashed floor, or even venture forth as securely as if they were
conscious of free citizenship in these places. The "windows" are a
rough mosaic of dirty glass and roughly plastered paper. The ceiling
is pale black, the floor filthy. A table, one or two dilapidated
chairs, a kind of bed--the "landlord" would, in most cases, not
raise two shillings on the lot--and an entire family of ragged,
vermin-eaten human beings fill this foul box, which is often only
eight or ten feet square.

These people are thieves, cheap prostitutes, hawkers, porters,
charwomen, flower-sellers, ragmen--the most pitiful of the irregulars
which we suffer, age after age, to live and breed and die beyond the
extreme fringe of our industrial army. Sometimes they have nearly as
much food to eat as a workhouse-idler: generally not. Drink--the vile
mixtures of the cheaper public-house--they have more constantly; and
their children are not in their teens before they are familiar with
all the vice and crime and brutality which seven out of ten of these
rooms breed as naturally as they breed lice or bugs. In winter the
doors and windows are sealed, and men, women, and children huddle
together or, at times, crouch over a few lighted sticks. And year by
year, century by century, babies are ushered into this underworld in
edifying abundance, to live its ghastly life until the yellow frame
and dull brain are worn out.

Shocking, you will say, but happily rare. Do you know that, according
to the best authorities, 50,000 men, women, and children in London
alone live in this atmosphere of squalor and brutality and chronic
hunger?

Let us pass to the next higher circle of the modern Inferno--the
category of casual or very badly paid labour and chronic poverty, the
makers of your cheap furniture and clothes and brushes, your
match-boxes and chocolate-boxes, the hawkers and costers and regular
porters and dockers. Now there are generally two rooms to each family,
but the vermin still thrive in more than half of them, and the rooms
are filthy, and the children breathe an air that is foul with drink
and cursing and the most open and gross sexuality: not now in fifteen
cases out of twenty, it is true, but in ten cases out of twenty. Food
is habitually insufficient, for labour is uncertain, and profit is
infinitesimal; and, as a man _must_ drink, there are constant
disturbances to break the monotony and help one to forget the
customary hunger. You may have at times noticed the dejected hawker
returning, on a wet summer's day, with his tomatoes unsold: or the
children eager to collect fragments of the lids of orange-boxes in the
winter. Countess Russell told me that she once visited, unexpectedly,
a group of homes of this class, within a few minutes' walk of Gordon
Square, in the depth of winter. Hardly any had the material for a
fire, and few had food in the house. So they live, year in, year out;
and all that we propose to do is to give them five shillings a week
each if they will sustain the burden honestly for six decades, or
house and feed them in jail if they do not succeed in curbing their
criminal impulses.

Once, in the Westminster Court, I saw a young and humane judge hand
certain tickets to the jury, when they had established the guilt of
two petty criminals of this class. "These, gentlemen," he said,
"are permits to inspect the jail; go some day and see the place to
which you send criminals." A very wise and benevolent innovation,
but we still await the judge who will send the jury to inspect the
homes in which these men conceive crime.

About 400,000 citizens of the greatest city in the world belong to
this class. If 400,000 do not constitute a sufficiently important
problem, let us see the homes of the next category. These are the
irregularly employed and badly paid, though not the worst paid,
workers: costers, labourers, dockers, etc. There are about a million
of them in London alone. They know quite well what hunger is: for
weeks together, sometimes, the wage does not suffice to buy that
minimum quantity of nitrogen and carbon which men of science have
declared to be necessary, and the money is ill expended. They know
what cold is, for many a hard spell of winter finds them in want. They
have two or three rooms to each family, but, as a rule, not much of
that "Christian reticence" on which our clergy congratulate us.

To the great majority of these million and a half of London's poor,
sexual pleasure is the one cheap luxury; and we encourage them to
breed industriously. My wife, with other ladies and gentlemen,
addresses them on the subject from the tail of a cart in South London,
and teaches the heavy-burdened mothers how to avoid having so many
children; and the leader of this little group was sourly and
menacingly (and quite falsely) told by a distinguished Churchman,
sitting in a Royal Commission, that they were breaking the law of the
land. A friend of mine has been hounded out of the United States by
the police for attempting to give similar information to the poorer
mothers of New York.

Even in this third and very large category of London homes there is
much filth; and the windows, across which is drawn an odd cloth or a
ragged and dirty curtain, abound in broken panes. They have periods of
comparative plenty, when the children get boots and socks, and their
elders soak in beer and may even venture to a cinematograph show, if
the crude pictures on its garish façade promise a sufficiently silly
or sufficiently bloody programme. All that the police and the clergy
care about is that not more than an inch or two of underclothing are
exhibited in these places. They have also periods of want, when the
clothes go to the pawnshop, and life runs on the exasperating,
brutalising lines of the lower class. The daily round of life is
itself stupefying. At five or six they are dragged out of an
insufficient sleep, and they dully take their tea (of a kind) and
bread and margarine on a dirty table. After ten or twelve hours of
anxious quest of minute profits they return home for a slightly better
meal--a kipper, perhaps, or a few bits of cheap meat--too tired in
mind and body to do more than smoke and drink. They have plenty of
fun, of a sort, and take their tragedies lightly; but the angels, if
there are any, must fold their wings over their faces at the aspect of
these fellow-immortals. Even a politician might be expected to blush
for this self-governing democracy. It is a squalid, degrading,
stupefying life, below the level of civilisation.

Nearly one-third of the citizens of London do not rise above this
level. The three classes that I have described, or the mass of people
who spread continuously over these classes, were found by Mr. Booth to
number 1,300,000 of the four and a half million inhabitants of the
city. The figure for the Greater London of to-day is, of course,
immensely higher. "The submerged tenth" is a most unfortunate
phrase. It leads many, who know little of these matters, to suppose
that only a tenth of the inhabitants of London are very poor. The
truth is that a tenth live in a condition of misery, filth, and
degradation of which the ordinary decent citizen can form no
conception. They are the shirkers, the abnormal, and the worst casual
workers. But the life of this further million--or nearly one-fourth of
the total inhabitants of the Metropolis--the irregular or badly paid
workers, is a grave and accusing problem to every man of decent
sentiment. Their condition is not consistent with civilisation.
Certainly large numbers of them live clean and cheerful lives, but
even in these cases it is scandalous that sober and willing toil
should receive wage enough only to secure cleanliness and the
necessaries of life; while a far larger number sink under the burden,
and are dirty, intemperate, gross, and improvident.

Conceive the extension of this class all over Britain: the further
vast contingents of this army of poverty in the slums of Glasgow and
Liverpool and Manchester, in all our great manufacturing and shipping
towns, even in the heart of pretty rural England, where the wretched
wage and low standard and large family stunt and degrade our
agricultural worker. It is a very serious error to imagine that this
is merely an unhappy issue of the crowding in our great cities. In
picturesque and highly respectable York Mr. Rowntree found that thirty
per cent. of the citizens lived in very real poverty: that ten per
cent. did not earn money enough to buy a normal and sufficient
quantity of plain food, to say nothing of luxuries.

This is the problem of poverty. If you want it in figures, a fourth of
the inhabitants of London, where rents are appalling, live on from
eighteen to twenty-one shillings weekly per family, and some hundreds
of thousands live on less than this. One might with some profit and
pertinence go on to inquire into the life of the half of the
population of London who are described as "comfortable workers."
Whether the little luxuries they have are a fit reward for the hard
work they usually do, whether there can be any development of
distinctively human powers among them, whether we may cherish a
feeling of entire security in basing our political system on that
foundation, are questions worth putting; and some day they will put
them to us. But it is better for the moment to confine ourselves to
that pitiful fourth of the community which lives in degrading poverty
because it has only irregular or wretchedly paid employment. Is it an
exaggeration to suspect that this vast acreage of poverty will make
the future historian hesitate to class us as civilised?

Our social structure is of the nature of a pyramid. At its apex,
glittering in the sun, calling forth our pride and praise, are culture
and wealth and power, and all the fine things they bring into
existence. At its base are the supporting stones, crushed into the
soil by the towering mass: the millions of stunted or brutalised
lives. I know both extremes of this social order, and I have felt,
hundreds of times, that if it is permanently to retain this pyramidal
form, the refined lives and great achievements of the few resting on
this broad base of squalid and undeveloped lives, civilisation is an
impossible dream. I have felt that, if men and women realised the full
meaning and range of poverty, they would suspend the progress of art
and science, of commerce and industry, for a hundred years, if need
were, in order to concentrate the best intelligence of the race upon
the search for the remedy of this vast disorder. And, if it be true,
as I think, that these people, once dead, are dead for ever, and that
the tradition of a hundredfold reward in heaven for their privations
on earth is an illusion with which pastors and masters have reconciled
them to their burdens, I would, if I could, send that assurance like a
trumpet-blast through the slums of the world and make this vast army
of the stricken summon us, the intelligent minority, to a tardy
judgment.

I do not, as will appear later, advocate the equal distribution of
wealth. I do assuredly not plead that one who has wealth should give
it to the poor: to see it gather again, perhaps, in less worthy hands.
I add the contrast of wealth at this point only in order to make quite
sensible the darkness of the life of millions. One's first task is
to establish, with what faint power the pen has, the appalling
magnitude of the evil. If any very large number of us did really grasp
the human significance of these facts and figures, the industrial
problem would not long be resigned, as it is, to bloodless economists
and obscure propagandist bodies.

And the second aim of those who would see the world bettered is, as I
said, to inquire into the effect of the remedies we actually trust and
apply. Here we enter the mistier region of controversy, and I can but
set out the grounds of my sincere convictions.

Of labour bureaux, in the first place, it will not be doubted that
they are an advantage to employed and employers. They are an advance
toward organisation. They bring the worker more promptly to the work
that awaits him. But they, obviously, do not add one iota to the
insufficient work, for which myriads are struggling: they do not add
one penny to the wage that is earned: and they are of little or no
service to the poorest workers, who chiefly concern us.

Old age pensions and insurance and free education are, similarly,
great advantages to the workers, in which we may justly take some
pride, but they do not promise to abolish or greatly diminish poverty.
The pension, or the insurance benefit, is necessarily granted on the
poverty scale, and is in some sense a recognition of it as one of the
permanent institutions of life; and the elementary instruction which
we give has raised the qualifications for work, as well as the
equipment, so that the proportion of unemployed, or ill-employed, is
little changed. Nor would it be entirely wrong to say that, in
relieving the poor man of the direct charge of education and
insurance, we have put the difference on his rent.

Of our poor-law system, that lamentable compromise with a stupid old
tradition, it is difficult to speak with patience. The able-bodied
idlers of our workhouses and our countryside are a mockery of the
workers. The tramp, the professional idler in search of idleness,
maintained in his repulsive ways by an undiscriminating system of
poorhousing and by a large body of "charitable" women, is one of
the quaintest survivals of an older order. His father idled through
life before him, and he in turn drags along the road a mate and
children who will sustain the ignoble tradition. He ought to be
washed, clothed, and put on an industrial estate; and, if his disease
prove incurable, he ought to be anæthetised out of existence, or at
least prevented from reproducing his like.

Then there are the emigration societies. One fears that in large part
they transport to the colonies either the men whom the colonies do not
want, the men who will enlarge the slum-area of colonial cities, or
the men whom we ought not to spare. At the best, emigration is a means
of leaving the problem of poverty to our grandchildren, who will find
no more open spaces for the dumping of our human surplus. In point of
fact, however, apart from the dispatch of a small proportion of
specially prepared boys, emigration is not affecting our problem of
poverty. The half-million very poor of London, with the corresponding
hundreds of thousands in our other cities, do not make emigrants at
all; and very few of the next and far larger class are, or could be,
fit for agricultural deportation.

Lastly of these devices which the less thoughtful are apt to regard as
relieving poverty, we have the Salvation Army, which is quite the most
preposterous social sham of our age. But its religious-social
burlesque, its pretentious concealment of bad results and loud
proclamation of good results, its refusal to print a plain
balance-sheet from which a social student can measure the definite
good done and the cost of it, its undercutting of existing work, and
so on, have been sufficiently exposed to excuse us from dwelling on
it. It contains some earnest men and women, and has had undoubted
successes, but the system is too nebulous, garrulous, and wasteful to
merit serious attention.

Let us turn to graver matters. The mass of the workers, apart from the
more advanced bodies of Socialists and Syndicalists, believe that the
solution of the problem of poverty will be found in the development of
Trade Unions and of the political power of Labour. By political power,
with the aid of sympathetic members of the middle-class, they have won
the right of combination and a whole code of labour-laws; by an
increased political power, ultimately a political all-power, they will
secure all the legislation they deem expedient.

In spite of the distraction of many of the workers by Anarchists and
Syndicalists, who despise political action, and in spite of the
restrictions of the franchise which are maintained by the older
political parties, it seems plain that at some not very remote date
the workers will control the world. Ever since the door of the
political world was opened to Demos, eighty years ago, he was certain
eventually to reach the throne, no matter how long he might be seduced
to tarry by the way. Those who think otherwise must put their trust in
the permanent unintelligence of the workers. The interests of the mass
of workers are so far identical that they must finally combine to
promote them. We are plainly moving, all over the world, in this
direction. In Australasia, where the virgin soil permitted an
exceptionally rapid growth, we see the farthest point yet reached, and
within a decade or so Labour will have unshakable power all over
Australia, at least. "Conservatism" has already disappeared, or
changed its name to "Liberalism." In Germany and France and
Belgium we see the same disposition of the rival parties to unite in
face of advancing Demos. In England there are signs that we shall at
no distant date see a similar redistribution of political forces, and
it is anticipated in the United States. In all countries the political
energies are slowly gathering about two poles: Liberal (including the
old Conservatives) and Labour. Even in such countries as Spain,
Russia, Turkey, Japan, and China the initial stages of the development
may be detected. When the workers at last unite and secure an absolute
majority-power, they will legislate on familiar lines. Wages will
rise, hours of labour will be shortened, and place will be found for
larger numbers of workers.

It is little use moralising on this change. It is coming on like the
tide. There will, no doubt, be temporary abuses of power, as there
have always been, but the workers will learn the vital needs of an
industrial order, and they will not starve the roots of their new
prosperity. Let us assume that a state of equilibrium has been
reached: that the workers have paramount political power, and wages
are considerably increased. Does this promise a solution of the
problem of poverty?

I am purposely leaving out of account the contemporary growth of rings
and trusts. Paradoxical as it may seem to say so, they are not an
essential element of the problem. The employers will (as is happening)
form unions in face of the men's unions, and the strain laid on
individual employers and small companies will favour the growth of
trusts. In so far as these make for economy, they are clearly useful;
but no doubt they will be tempted to use their monopoly to dictate
arbitrary prices. When, however, the workers have a majority-power,
they can either slay the trusts or draw their teeth. On the other
hand, a beneficent or labour-saving trust will not afford any
advantage to the less skilful workers, who make up the great army of
the poor, and it will reduce prices only by an unimportant fraction.
The chief significance of trusts is that they tend to annihilate the
individualist employer, who was once considered an indispensable
institution, and they may thus dispose obstinate admirers of the older
industrial order to welcome a radical change. They are more deadly to
the middle-class than to the working-class.

The really vital question is whether the raising of wages and
reduction of hours, accompanied by a large amount of secondary
legislation to the advantage of the worker, will solve _the_ social
problem: which is not the problem of the existence of a few thousand
prostitutes, but the problem of the existence of, in every country,
several million people who live in privation and squalor, and cannot
develop human personalities. On this I offer two or three
observations.

Does the price of commodities rise in proportion to the rise of wages?
If it does, the securing of a nominally higher wage is clearly a
delusion. This seems, however, to be our experience. In England,
during sixty or seventy years of trade-combination, wages have risen,
and hours and conditions of labour have been improved, to a remarkable
extent, in spite of open competition in an overcrowded market. But
prices and rents also have risen, and it is not clear that there has
been a net advantage to the worker. It is very difficult to answer the
question precisely, because other factors (such as the application of
science) have increased the productiveness of labour and have
cheapened certain commodities (books, clothes, pictures, tea, etc.).
The workers have shared these advantages, and are in a position of far
greater comfort than they were formerly. But in seriously testing the
claim and promise of the Trade Unionist and the Labour politician we
have to endeavour to subtract the improvement in the workers'
condition which is due to the application of science, and of better
methods, to production and distribution. When we make allowance for
this, it is certainly not clear that the rise of wages shows a margin
over the increased price of commodities: that, in other words, the
higher wage is a real advantage.

It is difficult to see how it could be otherwise. When wages are
raised, who pays the increment in the cost of production? The employer
or the consumer? It is a familiar experience, and an inherent
necessity of our industrial order, that the consumer does; and the
consumer is the worker--the middle-class or wealthy consumer generally
gets the difference in other ways. It would be bold to say that our
employers have paid even a fraction of the increased wage out of their
own pockets. More usually they put a fifth of a penny on commodities
when the worker has secured a sixth. Competition alone restrains them,
and this is largely superseded by agreements. We have had innumerable
instances of this during the war. Class after class of workers claimed
a higher wage, and prices rose higher and higher "on account of the
increased cost of production." If a Labour Government were to
prevent employers from increasing the cost of commodities and raising
rents in exact proportion to the demand for higher wages--were, in
other words, to direct the employers to pay the increase of wage out
of their own profits--we should soon see the end of this industrial
order. The State would be compelled to become the employer.

This seems to be true of practically all the legislation which a
political power of Labour could secure. Compensation, pennons, and
insurance are typical instances. The new demand on the employer's
profits is met in one of two ways: he withdraws voluntary
contributions to these or similar purposes, or he raises the price of
his goods. The larger consumer meets the burden by raising his rents
or fees. The unreflecting worker imagines that "the country" pays
for these things; he forms, in this respect, a larger proportion of
the country than he thinks.

The second and more important consideration is that this power to
dictate wages and pass measures in favour of the workers does not hold
out a prospect of absorbing that surplusage of labour which is our
real problem. I am assuming that even the poorer and unskilled workers
will have their unions and their share of the political power. Their
wage will rise, and the price of their food and clothing and rooms
will rise; but it is of greater consequence to reflect that the less
competent workers on the fringe of the industrial army will receive
little advantage. Some benefit they will certainly have, since the
curtailment of hours and the slowing of the pace of production will
make room for more workers in each industry; though we must remember
that the pay of these new workers will either be taken from the older
workers, whose hours are shortened, or--which comes to the same
thing--will be put on the commodities. The total production will not
be increased, and the employer will not relinquish his profit. In any
case, even this method of finding room for more workers will affect
relatively few.

Again I may quote the experience of Australia, where the workers have
very great power. In Melbourne, alone, in 1913, I found 30,000 men
unemployed; and there and in other cities the tainted area of poverty
and distress was increasing. All the elaborate organisation and
political power of the workers could not add to the sum of available
work and thus absorb the surplus of labour. I am contending that until
we do this we do not solve the poverty-problem. The chief cause of
this appalling social disease is the inequality of natural
endowment--either of muscle or nerve--in face of an unorganised system
of production. There is not work, with regular and decent wage, for
all. The weaker, the lazier, the more drunken, and the slower of
intellect, are crowded out of the ranks and driven to casual
employment. This is the tap-root of poverty, and the benefits secured
for those who are in regular employment will not affect it.

Thirdly, this labour-legislation will not touch the second chief root
of poverty, the extreme inequality of the distribution of wealth.
Since wealth is, in this regard, a fixed quantity,--we are not
concerned here with the effect of fresh applications of science to
production,--an accumulation of commodities at one point leads to
thinness at another. I am not pleading for equality of income. Many
workers have an exaggerated idea of the gain they might have by an
equal distribution of wealth. The total annual income of the
population of the United Kingdom is now believed to be about
£2,400,000,000. If this were distributed equally amongst the heads of
our ten million families and our large army of unmarried workers, the
result would be barely £200 a year; and the equalisation of taxation,
the granting of substantial pensions, etc., would further reduce it.
There is, however, no serious need to discuss this idea. I see no
moral principle which forbids that we should reward a man according to
his productiveness or inventiveness or other value to the community,
although his fellows are not responsible for their lesser capacity;
and it is idle to speculate on some imaginary phase of human
development in which the more gifted and more useful will refuse to be
more richly rewarded than the less useful.

But it does not follow that the community has no right to control the
distribution of wealth. At one time such a proposal would have been
branded "robbery." To-day even Conservatives do not threaten to
remove the death-duties and graduated income-tax by which we
confiscate some of the wealth of the more fortunate. The only question
is, to what _extent_ we may or ought to prevent the excessive
accumulation of wealth, or to disperse it after accumulation.

There occur at once two methods of enrichment which invite careful
attention. One is the power to transmit wealth to one's descendants
in perpetuity, or until they choose to dissipate it. Most of us will
admit that in a social order at all resembling our own--and I do not
care to speculate about Utopian or imaginable orders--the power to win
advantages for one's children as well as for oneself is a sound
incentive to work. But the wish to relieve one's descendants of the
need to work, to make them for ever a burden on the community, is a
perverse ideal. It is one of those unsound primitive traditions which
we detect in the actual stream of our ideas and sentiments, and
instances are not unknown in our time of such holders of hereditary
wealth revolting against the tradition. When we realise that this
inherited wealth means, in plain terms, the right to have a hundred or
a thousand fellow-men working for us or our descendants in perpetuity,
for no merit or service on our part, and when we consider the folly
and waste which so commonly follow large inherited fortunes, we must
regard this tradition as evil and indefensible. One wonders how long
the working community is going to sustain this burden, and how long
refined men and women will imagine that they have a right to live like
Oriental potentates because they had a shrewd or a gifted ancestor.

It is sometimes said in their favour that they employ labour with
their wealth. I have heard bishops give them this foolish consolation.
As if the wealth would cease to exist, and to employ labour, if it
were in the pockets of a thousand men, instead of the pockets of one
Duke of Norfolk or Duke of Westminster! The only difference would be
that this wealth, instead of paying a thousand servants and
tradespeople to work for the comfort of one family, would pay a
thousand men, who would lose nothing by the change of employment, to
produce comfort for a thousand families. Meantime, the Duke is
embarrassed by his wealth, or spends it on superfluous things, and the
thousand families live in vicious misery. Their babies die for lack of
good milk in the hot summer, and the rich youth or maiden--I have
known this done--carelessly takes a bath of milk. Let us understand
clearly this economic truth: great wealth is the accumulation in one
man's hands of the right or power of a thousand families to employ
labour.

The second source of wealth which invites consideration is the
unearned increment on ground-values, or any other unearned and
accidental increase of value. It is now very commonly admitted that
this belongs to the community, and I need not enlarge on it.

We have, as I said, admitted the community's right to interfere with
this scandalous clotting of wealth, and no doubt a Labour-majority
would increase death-duties until money could not be transmitted
beyond, at most, the third generation, and not in quantities
sufficient to make men and women a lifelong burden on the working
community. Possibly some day there will be a general scrutiny of
titles to wealth: not merely as far back as the enclosure of the
commons a hundred years ago, but back to the landing in this country
of William of Normandy. Possibly a day will come when men and women
will conceal the fact that their ancestors "came over with the
Conqueror," since it generally implies that the descendants of those
lucky adventurers have not done an honest day's work since that
time. Possibly the sons of some of our "captains of industry" of
a century ago will burn the family records, lest some prying historian
should learn by what horrible exploitation of child-labour the fortune
was made. Prescriptive right is a purely artificial right created by
the community, and it may be withdrawn by the community.

Such measures as these a Labour Government will, no doubt, eventually
take, and they will do much to relieve poverty and increase the
production of commodities of general use. But they will add rather to
the comfort of workers who are already above the poverty-line, and
they will not prevent an excessive accumulation of wealth, though they
may finally disperse it. This means the continuance of deep poverty.
As long as a gifted man may amass a fortune in a comparatively short
time, without adding to the wealth of the community, there will be
squalid poverty somewhere.

In sum, if the political ideal of Labour were fully realised, it would
not put an end to, and might not very materially lessen, our
widespread poverty. It would not enlarge the amount of available
productive employment, and so the weak in body or mind or character
would still form a pitiable army of slum-dwellers. It would, having no
more control of industry than the present Parliament has, be unable to
meet any grave disturbance of the industrial world, such as the
release of hundreds of thousands of workers by disarmament. It would
have no power to secure for the workers their full share of the
advantage of any new application of science, and it would be unable to
guide into new positions the men displaced by this application. We
should continue to suffer the disadvantage of an imperfectly organised
industrial system; each new enlistment of the great forces of nature
or of the cunning of science in the service of man would enrich a few
and impoverish many. In order to meet all these grave difficulties--in
order to do more than secure certain advantages for the better
equipped workers--a Labour Power would be forced radically to alter
its principle and undertake the organisation of employment.

This organisation of industry seems to be the only device which will
gradually restrict, and finally abolish, poverty. The opposition to it
of middle-class workers and of so many artisans is unintelligible. It
is time that we ceased to confine the term "workers" to the poorer
and less cultivated caste among those who work: time that the lawyer
and actor and housewife claimed that honourable title no less than the
carpenter or navvy. In restricting the term to manual and badly paid
workers we have concealed from ourselves the real community of
interest of all who work. All of us, except those who live on the
labour of others, have an interest in the proper organisation of the
work of the world and the removal from our shoulders of this
intolerable burden of the irregular workers and the idlers. The
middle-class has an even greater interest than what is narrowly called
the working-class, because the tendency of Labour-legislation is, and
will increasingly be, to put the heavier charge, not on large
employers, who easily evade it, but on the middle-class generally.
Here again the war has luminously illustrated our position. Both
employers and employed (in the current industrial sense) have made
great profit by it: the middle-class generally has suffered severely.
A proper organisation of work would have prevented this.

It can easily be shown that this national organisation of employment,
with graded incomes according to service rendered, is the only remedy
of poverty. The chief root of poverty is, as I said, the insufficiency
of properly paid work, and this is entirely due to the haphazard and
unsystematic nature of our industrial order. The private employer
looks only to the actual demand of commodities, or to the actual funds
for buying commodities. He has no interest in the moneyless
unemployed; indeed, he finds it a convenience to have a large number
from which he may select his workers. As a result, a large proportion
of our people are unable to demand their normal share of commodities
because they are not employed, or because they have no wage; and they
are not employed because they do not demand commodities. Plainly, the
community alone can alter this paradoxical state of things; and, since
the community is now compelled by its more humane sentiments to carry
the poor on its shoulders, it may at length be induced to see that it
would be better to set them on their own feet. In a properly organised
industrial system a worker will be paid by the commodities which he or
she actually produces, or their exchange-value. There can be no such
thing as a superfluous worker. It is only a lamentable issue of our
perverse pre-scientific system that millions must lack the food and
clothing and luxuries which they themselves could and would, under a
more orderly system, produce.

This implies, of course, the transfer to the community, at a just
payment, of the land, the mines, and the means of transit, and the
gradual extension of municipal enterprise to productive and
distributive industries. I am contending only for principles, and
would refer the closer inquirer to such detailed constructive works as
those of Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be futile to construct a rigid
scheme of collectivist organisation. Such industries as the press,
literature, art, etc., present difficulties which it would be foolish
to override. But these affect comparatively few workers, and it is
pedantry of an unintelligent kind to wrangle over them while we have a
clear case in regard to other industries which involve many millions
of workers. We would do well, however, to remember that the
middle-class industries themselves are overcrowded and chaotic, and
that most members of that class would gain by organisation, wherever
it is possible. Instead of shrinking from it and inventing
difficulties, we ought to be eager to discover its possibilities.

I ignore also certain more or less academic objections which have been
made against this proposal to organise employment. Mill's essay _On
Liberty_ is a monument of the futility of this kind of reasoning. Mill
was a civil servant, and, except in the case of the idle and criminal,
no restriction of individual liberty is proposed other than that which
Mill cheerfully endured. Middle-class men are apt to take fright at
the word "Socialism." It ought to be by this time generally known
that half a dozen very different theories pass under that name, and it
is particularly unintelligent to confuse the extreme and the moderate
proposals. Nearly the whole of the employment in any civilisation
could be organised without laying on any who are willing to work a
greater restraint than is laid on officials of the postal service. As
to "confiscation," it will be gathered from an earlier page that I
favour generous compensation to actual holders of land or mines, but
no perpetual pensions.

I do not anticipate from this change all the advantages which some
Socialist writers expect. Their schemes of high universal prosperity
seem to me to have an absurdly slender basis of actual work. Mr.
William Morris conjectured that if all of us were to work for four
hours a day there would be enough produced for all of us to live in
luxury; whereas Mr. Sidney Webb calculates that it would need six
hours' work a day, on the part of all, to produce the necessaries of
life. It is true that a very large body of middlemen, commercial
travellers, footmen and other servants, and duplicate workers in rival
industries would be set free for sound productive or distributive or
professional work; but the easing of the hours of our actual workers,
the removal of the young from the market, and other collateral
improvements, must be taken into account. If we take one hour a day
from the actual workers in our heavier industries, we absorb at once
more than a million new men without increasing production. In any
case, it is lamentable to dangle before the eyes of men the ideal of
working only four hours a day. We want more of Browning's gospel of
work with cheerfulness. No doubt the idea is that, if the hours of
labour are reduced, the leisure will be employed in reading Bergson
and mastering Brahms. This optimistic theory seems to be at variance
with our experience. Improvement of financial position more usually
means the substitution of Bass or Dewar for cheap ale, and of stalls
for the gallery at the variety theatre. A later chapter will, however,
discuss our interests in this connection.

The fact remains that collectivism is the only remedy of poverty. The
redistribution of wealth, or the prevention of excessive wealth,
would, in my view, add comparatively little to the wages of the
millions; and we must not put to the credit of an economic scheme the
profit of such changes as disarmament. It is not this, but the note of
efficiency, organisation, and economy which appeals to me in the
Socialist ideal. It would abolish a vast amount of duplicate and
unnecessary work, and it would conduct to their proper place in the
industrial order the large army of casual workers. London or New York
is a colossal monument of industrial inefficiency. Our chaotic mass of
duplicate and triplicate rival grocers, bakers, butchers, etc., our
rival railways and other purveyors and producers, with their separate
staffs and their appalling waste in advertisement, are a reproach to
our intelligence. We want an orderly and economical system both of
production and distribution, and only the municipality (or else a vast
and tyrannical trust) can conduct it. Most of all we want a power that
will sweep the myriads of costers, hawkers, newspaper-youths,
flower-girls, casual porters, loafers, musicians, etc., off our
streets, and put them to productive work. We want a great curtailment
of certain luxury-industries and fictitious industries. This would
give us an immensely increased volume of productive work, and a great
saving in distribution. The middle-class has not less to gain than the
workers by such a scheme of organising our resources, and it offers us
the only confident prospect of abolishing poverty and crime and
gradually uplifting the mass of the people.

Naturally, we should for a long time have to deal with a great deal of
refractory material. Idleness and crime are diseases, and they ought
to be treated by the methods of modern medicine: scientific, humane,
sometimes surgical. Certainly we would exercise "tyranny" in
dealing with these. Probably in a properly ordered society all
citizens would be enrolled in an industrial register. The
hyper-sensitive would have the same guarantee of privacy as under our
income-tax system, and the police would have a most effective means of
locating the criminal. Any who were permanently refractory, or showed
an incurable disposition to revert to crime or to the vagrant
industries which disgrace our cities to-day, would have no moral right
to burden us with their existence. The community would offer work and
sufficient wage to all. The rest might disappear into segregated
"homes of idleness," or, if we are as wise as we ought to be, into
lethal chambers.

This incurably refractory group would, however, probably prove smaller
than many believe. We are at present a little too much inclined to
consult scientific theorists about heredity (which is still very
obscure in science) and too little inclined to make social
experiments. I am assuming that a dozen other reforms would proceed
simultaneously with the reform of industry. Education would no longer
confine itself to giving an elementary literacy to children, without
any further care what use they make of their literacy; it would, as I
will suggest later, seriously concern itself with the adult
population. A bolder treatment of the housing question would stimulate
those who have evil traditions; we should not confine ourselves to
building clean rooms for them, which they might make filthy if they
wished. Prudential restriction of the birth-rate would be impressed on
the poorer class, with great benefit to themselves and their children
and the State. Eugenic proposals might be practically formulated and
encouraged. We should not expect industrial betterment to have some
mystic or magical effect of itself in uplifting the mass of the
people; but, until this betterment occurs, other efforts to help them
will be seriously hampered or entirely futile. The very magnitude of
the task would prove a magnificent tonic and stimulation to the jaded
mind of the community.

An increasing number of middle-class men and women now recognise that
this is, not merely the only solution of the problem of poverty, but
the most profitable scheme of national life for all who are willing to
work. So detached an observer as Mr. Carveth Read, professor of
Philosophy at London University, observes that "probably the future
lies either with Co-operation or with Socialism" (_Natural and
Social Morals_, p. 211). On the Continent, especially in Italy,
France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and Russia, there is a
high proportion of cultivated and professional men in the Socialist
movement. No one need fear its advance except the idler and the man
whose work does not add to the wealth of the community or facilitate
its distribution. It is the application of sound and tried
business-principles to national life; and, when those principles have
first been applied to the governmental machine, and made it an
effective and disinterested administration, we shall move more quickly
toward the Collectivist ideal.

Some may wonder that a student of science should come to this
conclusion. There is a vague idea abroad that an individualist
struggle for existence and survival of the fittest is the supreme and
unalterable law of life. This idea, though encouraged by men like Mr.
Kidd, is due to a merely superficial acquaintance with biology. In
past ages nature has certainly evolved higher types mainly by a bloody
struggle of individuals or a very calamitous pressure of environment.
_In the past_: there is the limit of the teaching of biology. A new
thing--human intelligence--has now entered the life of the earth, and
it has in countless ways superseded the laws (that is to say,
practices) of unconscious nature. The human mind is now a part of
nature, and therefore "natural selection" is a wholly different
matter from what it once was. Maurice Maeterlinck has suggested this
with his usual felicity. He imagines himself on a hill, from which he
sees two watercourses stretching toward the sea. One meanders over the
plains, wasting time and space, blindly finding its way over the
uneven ground: that is the old, unintelligent method of nature. The
other waterway stretches straight across the landscape, a canal cut by
man in the course of a few years, with no waste of ground: it is the
new, intelligent method of nature. By this method we now create new
species of plants in a thousandfold less time than natural selection
(in the usual sense) could do; and we do it precisely by dispensing
with the individualist struggle, by intelligent arrangement and
control.

Early science set up unintelligent nature as a grand model for man. It
is time we outgrew this phase of infancy. Intelligence must
increasingly count in the life of the earth. We first organise a
nation, and presently we shall organise international life. We
organise particular businesses, and presently we shall organise the
whole industrial life of the planet. There is no part of human life
which calls more urgently for the application of intelligence than
this disordered, wasteful, pitiless, poverty-saturated industrial
world of ours. Let us treat human beings at least as intelligently as
we treat our flowers, and as humanely as we treat our horses. We do
not entrust those to the tragedy of struggle and survival. We need not
fear that there will be any restriction of the development of
personality. Under such a Collectivist system as I have in mind,
personality will be developed until every man and woman is conscious
of his or her share in the control of the destinies of this planet,
and the sheep-like respect for ancient traditions and abuses, which
impedes our progress to-day, will be for ever abolished.


 CHAPTER VI.
 IDOLS OF THE HOME

AMONG the claims of reconstruction which the insurgent literature of
our time puts forward, none, perhaps, so startles and inflames the
Conservative as the demand for a reform of the family. Criticism of
this institution is, in fact, so severely punished or so slanderously
misrepresented that it is usually exercised in the more or less
impersonal form of the drama or novel. It happens, however, that the
drama or the novel is now quite the most effective means of
inoculating millions with critical ideas, and at least half the more
brilliant novelists and dramatists of Europe employ their art for this
purpose, or reflect some such sentiments in their work. Hence the
outcry about the "unclean novel": which is usually far cleaner
than the Old Testament, but more critical. Positivism had assured us
that this institution would be transferred intact to a human
foundation, and Murillo's "Holy Family" hung reverently over the
hearths of the new pagans. Now, half in fear and half in exultation,
the clergy cry that humanism has betrayed its moral poison and its
social menace.

Our favourite phrase here is the saying that the family is the
foundation of the State. If one patiently considered the matter, one
would discover that the divine right of kings was once regarded with
equal confidence as the indispensable foundation of the State. It may
very well be that the divine duty of the family is no less open to
reconsideration. It might be noticed that the change from aristocracy
to democracy was at one time hailed with lurid prophecy even by
distinguished moralists and sociologists, yet this change has led to
greater efficiency and prosperity. We might perceive that the
Christian dogmas were once thought vital to our welfare, and it may be
that the Christian ethic is in some points as disputable as the
Christian dogmas. Few reflect on these matters, and the writer who
criticises the family is denounced with peculiar bitterness. Quite
certainly that tomb of dead civilisations yawns ominously before us if
we lend ear to this kind of rebel. The family is so plainly
indispensable an institution that it must be protected from criticism:
lest we be tempted to dispense with it.

I propose, however, to make a critical study of the family. Indeed, I
venture to say at once that our ideal of the family is so encrusted
with ancient superstitions that it pressingly invites the critical
attention of our age: that the family is the foundation of the State
only in an historical sense, not in the sense that a State cannot be
based on any other procreative arrangement: and that the cloak of
superstition and rhetoric that we have put about it has covered for
ages, and still covers, an appalling amount of vice, hypocrisy, and
misery. My point of view has been stated. The affairs of this planet
must be run by men for men. The supreme aim must be to lighten the
burden of suffering which we inherit from a less intelligent and less
humane past. Any creed, code, or institution which forbids progress on
these lines must be assailed.

The first and most damnable superstition in regard to the family is
the claim that marriage ought to be indissoluble. In its strict form
this belief is held only by Roman Catholics, and by a section of the
Church of England which was only partially reformed in the sixteenth
century and has a strange ambition to disavow even that limited
reform. But the most insidious mischief of this old ideal is that it
has embedded deep in our minds the feeling that, although indissoluble
marriage is an intolerable yoke, we must be very chary and niggardly
in granting relief. This feeling we ascribe to a wise concern for our
social welfare, whereas it is due to the subconscious tyranny of the
old superstition. Recently we have seen the strange spectacle of a
non-Christian moralist standing amongst our bishops to bar the way of
reform: seeking to prolong, in the name of humanity, a superstition
that darkens the homes of a large part of humanity. The bishops may
have smiled.

A distinguished sociological writer, Mr. L. Hobhouse, in classifying
forms of marriage, says, with unconscious humour: "Marriage is
indissoluble among the Andamanese, some Papuans of New Guinea, at
Watubela, at Lampong in Sumatra, among the Igorrotes and Italones of
the Philippines, the Veddahs of Ceylon, and in the Romish Church."
One trusts that the Roman (and Anglican) Catholics like the company
they keep; the peoples enumerated by Mr. Hobhouse are the very lowest
and least intelligent savages known to science. The Church of Rome has
long boasted that its ideal of indissoluble union is the final and
culminating point of human wisdom in regard to the family. It now
appears that indissoluble marriage was the most primitive human
tradition, and was discarded by the Roman and all other civilisations
when they passed from childhood to manhood.

Sociologists have been accustomed to say that monogamy was gradually
developed out of promiscuity. This was mere speculation, and Professor
Westermarck and other recent authorities rightly dissent. The
institution is older than humanity. We find monogamic family life
among the anthropoid apes and amongst the lowest peoples, which
represent early man; and many writers on prehistoric man now contend
that we find him passing from family to social life, not in the
reverse way. When the last Ice Age forced men to live in caves, and
the scattered families clung together and formed large social groups,
the family life was modified, and few of the higher tribes maintained
the primitive form. Réclus tells of a Khond who, on hearing of the
monogamous life of the wild Veddahs of Ceylon, exclaimed in disgust:
"They live like the apes."

We may assume that little hardship arises from incompatibility of
temperament among the Igorrotes or the Veddahs, and there is no need
to describe the eccentric forms of marriage which arose among higher
savages. None of the great civilisations of the past entertained the
idea of indissoluble marriage. The clergy, of course, know nothing of
the real line of evolution, and (as Bishop Diggle has done) they
represent the Roman system as a comparative refinement of early
promiscuity, on which Christianity was to make the final advance. The
precious testimony of Juvenal is invoked (against the warning of all
modern historians): and we are expected to shudder because St. Jerome
tells us of a Roman lady who had been married a score of times. It is
not stated what harm was done to the lady, or to anybody else, or
whether she was a freak in her generation. It is enough, as Mrs.
Humphry Ward knows, to say that divorce is frequent anywhere, and
thousands of hands will rise to heaven: what the precise social
consequences are the thousand of heads seem to regard as irrelevant.

I have read most of the literature of the Roman Imperial period, and
have found that the greater part of the statements made about it by
clerical moralists are rubbish. Every serious student knows that it
was precisely the more rigid and intolerable earlier form of Roman
marriage (the _confarreatio_) which led to laxity in the early Empire;
that the Roman Lawyers of the first and second centuries, who relaxed
marriage, were among the most conscientious that the legal world has
ever produced; and that in the time of St. Jerome--an embittered and
intensely puritanical priest, who says worse things about his
sacerdotal colleagues than he does about the pagans--we have the solid
testimony of such documents as the _Letters_ of Symmachus and the
instructive _Saturnalia_ of Macrobius to show that the family life of
the pagans was generally healthy, sober, and harmonious. There is not
a particle of proof that Roman society suffered because of the
facility of divorce, or generally abused this facility.

But the misrepresentation of Roman morals is light in comparison with
the misrepresentation of later Christian morals. Christianity took its
ideal from the Jews. Amongst this partially civilised people marriage
had been made easy for the male by the retention of polygamy, and it
was not customary to consult the feelings of the woman. In the course
of time Greek influence entered Judæa, and the Rabbis held learned
debates on marriage and divorce. Both the stricter and the laxer view
found expression in the New Testament and in early Christian
literature, but a celibate priesthood obtained supreme power in Europe
and the stricter view was enforced. The moral consequences were
disastrous. While the Roman _Curia_, which could always find a flaw in
the marriage of a wealthy man, was enriched, Europe was degraded, and
sexual immorality became general. It is enough to recall that a
tradition of looseness, in strict correspondence with the law of
indissoluble marriage, survives from the ages of faith to our own time
in the Latin countries. Some have spoken of "the hot southern
blood" and cast the blame on the climate. I would invite the
informed moralist to run his eye over the map of the earth, and ask
himself whether chastity increases, or the sex-organs lose vitality,
in proportion as nations are removed from the Equator. It is a
ludicrous effort of Catholics to conceal the evils of indissoluble
marriage. Until the Reformation sexual laxity was the same all over
Europe.

In England the old priest-made law was retained after the Reformation,
and laxity of morals was general. Except for a very few wealthy
people, divorce was impossible until 1857, when a slender measure of
reform was wrested from the clergy. This, the present law of England,
a miserable compromise with religious prejudice and a permanent source
of vice and misery, puts English legislation on an important aspect of
"the foundation of the State" below that of any other civilised
community. Instead of ridding themselves entirely of clerical
influence, and directing civic life on civic grounds, our legislators
looked still to ancient Judæa, and substituted the less stringent
view of the Rabbis for the more stringent. The legendary leader of a
rude Arab tribe had granted divorce for adultery, and the English
nation of the nineteenth century followed his example. The result was
the most stupid and mischievous law of marriage outside the sphere of
the Holy Catholic Church.

English people are proud of their national concern for purity, yet
they tolerate, and their priests defend as something sacred, a state
of law which is medieval in its crudeness and barbarity. When two
people have obeyed our counsel to marry early, and they discover that
they have misjudged each other, we tell them that there is no relief
for them unless they commit adultery: which, when it is committed, we
brand as the darkest sin. To the husband we give the further
injunction that he must be cruel to his wife before we will release
him. We then, although we take especial pride in the "cleanness"
of our press and literature, print whole columns about their conduct
in suspicious situations,--sometimes entitling the account, in large
type, to attract attention, "A Horrible Case,"--and we ask each
other whether England is not in a state of decay and contracting the
continental spirit. If there are any who do not choose to commit
adultery, or do not choose to have their servants bribed to describe
their conduct for the entertainment of the public, we grant them a
legal permit to be happy and vicious, or miserable and virtuous, for
the remainder of their lives: the thing we call a judicial separation.

This extraordinary situation is certainly a slight improvement on
indissoluble marriage, but the pride of our bishops and puritans in it
is peculiar. One may not expect them to take into account the
suffering which hundreds of thousands endure under the law, but the
adultery to which it leads would seem to be a proper subject for their
consideration. As a rule, they entreat us to maintain religion,
whether it be true or no, in the name of morality: here they ask us to
maintain immorality in the name of religion,--in the name of a
supposed Christian precept,--and we obey even more readily. When a
Royal Commission recommends that our law be brought into line with the
law of other civilised nations, they burn with indignation and inspire
a Minority Report: a remarkable mixture of contradictions, worthless
quotations, and irrelevant rhetoric. The question of immorality they
shirk; and to the unhappiness which large numbers of our people endure
under the present law they are so insensitive that they hardly mention
it.

Such consequences are to be expected as long as we borrow our social
legislation from an ancient polygamous nation with a great disdain for
women. It is said, however, as usual, that our social interest
coincides with the supposed command of Christ. We have here one of the
most singular confusions of the whole controversy. Marriage is held to
be the foundation of the State, because it is believed to be the
surest way to supply it with citizens. This duty of procreation is, in
fact, the only feature which disposes priests to give their blessing
to so distasteful a thing as sexual union. Yet when a majority of the
Commissioners recommend that people should be free to remarry if the
desertion, cruelty, insanity, or imprisonment of one spouse defrauds
the State of its supply of little citizens, the bishops raise their
crosiers. Even so ascetic and anti-feminist a divine as St. Augustine
could not deny that a man had a right to take a concubine when his
wife proved sterile. Our divines speak much more fervently than St.
Augustine did of our social interest, yet they forbid us to consult
it.

In sum, we have generally rejected the view that marriage ought to be
indissoluble, and we pride ourselves on curbing the influence of
priests; but our whole attitude toward divorce is shaped by the old
superstition and the clergy. In the name of that superstition we
condemn large numbers of our fellow-citizens to live in deep and acute
misery. Which of our social interests would be prejudiced by granting
relief to the man or woman whose life is embittered by the desertion,
incurable insanity, cruelty, or criminal conduct of his or her
partner? The suggestion is preposterous; and, if we do not grant this
relief, adultery is in their case a venial offence, if not a right.

Some explain that they fear "the thin edge of the wedge." As if
wedges had a way of pressing deeper by their own weight, once we have
admitted them! If England chooses to grant these reforms, and no
others, she need not be deterred by empty phrases. But I believe that
the alert and resolute race which is coming will go much further than
this. Before many generations, if not in ours, there will be divorce
for incompatibility of temperament in every civilised country. Men and
women will be divorced, after due delay, because they wish, or when
one of them can show grave cause to separate from the other.
Ill-informed people express a concern about the children or the social
consequences. They do not take the trouble to inquire what happens in
some of the American States, or in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and
Switzerland, where there is long and ample experience of divorce by
mutual consent. The social consequences are just what any unprejudiced
person would expect: happier homes, and more healthily engendered and
reared children. But the puritan does not want to inquire: he is not
sincere. Would he agree to divorce by mutual consent where there are
no children or where either or both parents make adequate provision
for them? He would not. I will, however, return later to the question
of children.

Europe will be far happier when some such humane law as the Danish is
generally adopted, and, after a few years' separation, the
discontented are free to remarry. But no one who is acquainted with
the tendency and influence of modern literature can fancy that this
will be the last state of the old ideal of the family. From the first
years when men were free to declare their opinions without fear of the
stake, writers of great power have claimed the right of what has come
to be called "free love." Some would abolish marriage, but the
normal shape of the demand is that men and women shall be free to love
and beget children whether or no they ask the blessing of Church or
State. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Goethe took
a concubine on the pagan model, many of the first literary men in
Europe pressed this demand, and it is sustained by some of the most
brilliant writers in every country to-day. The movement exhibits the
slow and steady growth characteristic of reforms which eventually
triumph. It is no mere bubble on the surface of our effervescent life;
it is the new intelligence of the race examining the old traditions.

Moralists, lay and clerical, have a preposterous way of representing
this as a surging of selfish passion against the barriers which human
experience or superhuman wisdom has erected. There is, it is true,
much in our rebellious literature itself which misrepresents the
movement. You get the impression that, as the eighteenth century
questioned the divine right of kings and the nineteenth century that
of priests, the twentieth century is challenging the divine right of
moralists. But this is due to the common practice of giving a narrow
meaning to the word "immorality." Goethe and Swinburne became
zealous for "morality," but they never altered their opinions on
"free love." Sudermann and Anatole France and Pérez Galdós and
d'Annunzio, G. B. Shaw and T. Hardy and E. Carpenter and H. G.
Wells, are sincere moralists: they inculcate honour, truthfulness,
kindliness, and justice as firmly as our bishops, and more effectively
than most of our clergy. It is not morality that stands at the bar.
The real question is whether any sound moral principle implies that
marriage alone sanctions sex-union: whether social good or social evil
would result from an alteration of our standards.

This is a quite natural and legitimate question, and any
healthy-minded person ought to be able to discuss it without hysteria
or vituperation. Christian moralists have made some very grave
mistakes during the last thousand years. Humility and disdain of the
flesh were for centuries extolled by them as the supreme virtues:
cruelty was classified as a venial offence. Already the bulk of our
divines reject the virtue of asceticism, and they forbear to press on
the modern world the kind of humility which turns the other cheek, or
the other pocket, to the hooligan. They discover that social justice
has been singularly neglected by their predecessors, and they begin to
suspect that war or sweating may be worse than unbelief or
Sabbath-breaking. It is not at all unnatural to inquire whether there
may not also be some element of error in their sex-ethic.

We do not go far in such an inquiry before our suspicion is confirmed.
The evolution of the virtue of chastity may some day be traced by a
cold scientific investigator, and in its earlier stages it will prove
extremely interesting. It is primarily connected with an ancient
superstition or "tabu" in regard to sex-life: the kind of
primitive and unreasoning feeling which once drove women to the
temples of Ishtar in parts of the East, and still survives, baldly and
ludicrously, in the "purification" process to which a recent
mother must submit in the Roman and Anglican Churches. This old idea
that there was something "unclean" or mysterious about sex-life,
was more or less discarded when men passed out of the barbaric stage,
but it quite evidently survived in part in the virtue of purity. A man
or woman, it was thought, had a certain mystic superiority if he or
she did not use the organs of sex. Hence the widespread veneration of
Vestal Virgins, Pythagorean and Serapean recluses, priestesses of
Isis, Aztec and Christian nuns. I call attention particularly to the
notion that these celibates were in some sense superior to their
fellows, because it shows clearly the connection with the older idea
of a mystic uncleanness about sex. There is, of course, no rational
ground for this superstition, though even philosophers have
entertained it. There is a large and elegant literature about it, from
the _Enneads_ of Plotinus to Bulwer Lytton's _Zanoni_ or the works
of Miss Corelli.

Most of us see quite clearly the barbaric strain lingering in this
admiration of virginity, but we do not perceive how far our virtue of
purity is a compromise with this ancient superstition. I mean that,
together with sound elements which I will discuss presently, the
sentiment of purity or chastity retained a good deal of the old
irrational view of sex. Luther boldly attacked the theoretical
asceticism of the medieval Church, but in the end Protestantism
compromised with the old tradition. This again is quite plainly seen
when we reflect on the way in which Church people, and many of our
modern mystics and feminists, breathe the word "lust." It means
merely pleasure in sexual intercourse, but it has to be mentioned as
rarely as possible, and with downcast eyes and an air of very distinct
disapproval. The impression is conveyed that it is a thing invented by
the devil, but reluctantly permitted by the Almighty because the race
had to be maintained. The blessing of the Church made it a barely
permissible luxury. We have only to reflect that "lust" does not
mean unwedded love, but sexual pleasure or desire under any
conditions, to recognise the trail of the old tabu over the whole
range of these sentiments.

In the nineteenth century the evolution of morals took a strange turn.
Neither clergy nor laity had before that time, speaking generally,
observed chastity in practice, but the rise of non-Christian critics
in the eighteenth century had compelled the clergy to be more faithful
to their own precepts. This (and the growth of such movements as
Wesleyanism) led to more concern about virtue, and when the English
Agnostic school arose its leaders were taunted by the clergy with a
wish to rationalise or alter morality. By a natural reaction they
cultivated a particular zeal for virtue, and accepted the old code in
its entirety. Those moralists who appealed to a "categorical
imperative" or an "intuition" had no difficulty in doing this.
Indeed, any man who to-day accepts the Stoic idea of morality, or the
æsthetic idea (that virtue is so beautiful that we must cultivate
it), has as much right as the Christian to profess a regard for
chastity. There ensued a kind of rivalry of virtue between the clergy
and the new pagans. It has ended in the curious spectacle of our
modern clergy, whose historical knowledge is both slender and
peculiar, claiming that their Churches are the most faithful preachers
of purity the world has ever known, while Agnostic moralists
indignantly dispute their supposed monopoly.

The extreme complexity of this evolution, and the fact that few of us
reflect critically at all on our moral sentiments, must excuse me for
making this lengthy analysis. It shows that our conception of chastity
still contains a large amount of the old non-rational tradition, and
that any man or woman who declines (as so many do to-day) to bow to
mystic and obscure commands has a right to examine it closely. In one
of my works (_Life of G. J. Holyoake_, ii. 65) I have shown that so
sensitive a moralist as J. S. Mill admitted this. Obviously, the
precept of purity or chastity has a totally different basis from all
the other recognised moral precepts. These others are invariably
social laws, and the transgression of them is invariably a social
hurt. Life itself furnishes the reply if a man asks why he _ought_ to
be just, kind, and truthful: the answer is not so obvious when he asks
why he _ought_ to be chaste.

This will become very much clearer if we examine our resentment of
"immoral" actions. In the majority of cases we condemn them on
moral principles quite apart from chastity. Europe has in this respect
been lamentably misled by its professional moralists, and we can
hardly be surprised that in practice it so largely ignored them. It is
quite plain that a man or woman who has married on the usual
terms--mutual fidelity--and they remain unaltered, is bound by honour
and justice to observe the contract. Adultery is in such a case (the
usual case) condemned by moral principles which have a very much
clearer basis than chastity. Again, justice sternly forbids a man to
inflict, or run the risk of inflicting, grave injury on a woman by
causing her to have a child in a social order which will heavily
punish her for doing so. Here also there is a firm reason, apart from
chastity, for moral resentment. When we eliminate these other moral
sentiments from our condemnation of immoral acts, there is certainly
no _social_ ground of resentment left; and, as I said, I am not
arguing against a Stoic or æsthetic or theological view. Socially, it
would be an enormous improvement if we kept this analysis in mind. If
moralists talked less about "vice," which has an academic sound,
and more about "crime" and honour, there would be less suffering
in the world. The experience of two thousand years has not commended
the Church's practice of denouncing vice when it ought to have
appealed to a man's sense of honour or justice. It put the accent on
the wrong syllable. Many a man will shrink from an act which is
unjust, or may involve cruelty, if he is accustomed to regard it as
such. He is not so effectively intimidated by terms like virtue and
vice, which require a whole moral philosophy or theology to invalidate
them.

But I am not for a moment contending that this removal of the accent
from one syllable to another leaves the law as it was. It is, on the
contrary, the very essence of my contention that the law must, in the
real interest of men and women, be altered and that a large amount of
ethical tyranny, which has no justification, must be abandoned. Let me
first put, with entire candour, what seems to me to be the only
rational reconstruction of sex-morality on a social basis, and then we
may regard the reasons for advocating it.

It is, as I said, clear that if a man or woman marries on a strict
monogamous contract, and holds his or her partner to that contract,
there is a plain obligation of justice to adhere to it. If, on the
other hand, a man and woman choose to marry on any other
understanding, or choose to grant each other (as is now frequently
done) a greater liberty than the contract implies, their behaviour is
entirely their own concern, and no moralist who takes his stand on
purely social grounds has anything to say to it. In regard to
unmarried intercourse, it is further plain that a man commits an
immoral or anti-social act who entails on an unmarried woman the grave
injury which child-bearing does entail in our social order generally.
It must, however, be recognised that guilt is in this case entirely
relative to circumstances. Where public opinion does not make a pariah
of such a woman, where no risk of suffering is involved, such an act
of "free love" is no concern of the social moralist. Hence, if two
people of mature intelligence, making a just provision for possible
children, choose to live together without marriage, it is entirely
their own concern; and if any woman, strong and judicious enough to
take the responsibility of her acts, chooses love without marriage, it
is her own concern.

If there seems to be an unfamiliar coldness and deliberation about
this defence of "licence," it is enough to recall the familiar
circumstances. One cannot, as a rule, inquire dispassionately into
this subject without raising an hysterical storm. The clergy and other
puritans accuse a man of the basest and most selfish motives; they
seem, indeed, so incapable of understanding that a man may plead for
this moral reconstruction on motives at least as unselfish and
elevated as their own that their obtuseness does little credit to
their own moral physiognomy. They make fanatical appeals to
undiscriminating prejudice, repeat silly phrases about "passion"
and "farmyard morals," and rely on intimidation. The consequence
is, that ordinary folk openly bow to their rhetoric and secretly
ignore it. Any properly observant person can find out in a week to
what extent London observes the virtue of purity. It is then left to
rebellious poets and novelists and other artists to make fiery
onslaughts on the tyranny: to speak of virtue as "the ash of a
burnt-out fire," to chant "the roses and raptures of vice," or
to say scornfully with Blake:

 "And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
 And binding with briars my joys and desires."

Therefore I have chosen to apply to the issue the cold deductive
processes with which experience as a professor of moral philosophy has
made me familiar. As I said, the Christian is free to observe his
supposed divine command, the Stoic may bow to a mystic and inscrutable
law, the moral æsthete may enthuse over the charm of virtue; but I
maintain that the sociological or utilitarian view of morals, which is
now generally accepted by the vast number of people who have ceased to
be Christian, cannot control sex-relations in any other sense than
this. A man must avoid injustice and hardship: a woman must use her
discretion. Indeed, as the clergy and the puritans now take their
stand commonly on social grounds, these social considerations are
effective against them.

But the question is not merely academic. These cold and severe
deductions are very properly opposed to the heated phraseology and
sentimentality of Conservatives, who profess to be concerned about our
social welfare, but I am really pleading for the greater happiness of
the race, the lessening of hypocrisy, the curtailment of a system of
prostitution which makes the lives of so many women end in horror.
With all their talk about our "social welfare," the clergy and
their puritan supporters are in this respect the gravest disturbers
and restricters of our social welfare; and the insolence with which
they assail every attempt at reform is ludicrous in view of their own
record and gravely prejudicial to the advance of human happiness. It
is not a question of abolishing marriage, or of interfering with the
liberty of any. At one moment the clergy represent marriage as so
beneficent, so solidly established in the hearts of our people, that
only a morbid sensualist ever assails it; and the next moment they
suggest, in effect, that if we relax our coercion, people will abandon
marriage in such numbers that the social order will be overwhelmed.
Let us have sincerity and liberty.

But neither is it a question of spreading a gospel of "free love,"
in the perverse sense in which the clergy conceive such a gospel. The
considerations I have given above should make this plain enough. It is
a question of securing freedom and love for the hundreds of thousands
of mature women who cannot marry, or who do not choose to enter upon
the very precarious experiment of surrendering their privacy and
independence: a question of breaking the tyranny of an old
superstition which, by means of public opinion, forbids so many women
to have the child they desire to have, or the share of happiness from
which they are excluded: a question of putting an end to a vast amount
of needless suffering and privation and hypocrisy. The State would
gain rather than lose by this freedom: it is the Church only that
would suffer. Thousands of women already hold these views, as the open
circulation of the _Freewoman_ (a few years ago) and of our bolder
novelists shows. The feeling gains ground yearly, and the time is
approaching when that seal of ignominy which our priest-made law puts
on the "illegitimate" child will be removed, and men and women
will cease to speak of "lust." Sex-pleasure has no more taint than
any other, and the notion that it is justified only as an
accompaniment to the begetting of children, or to lessen the risk of
adultery, is childishly irrational and generally insincere. Laws there
must be: but the laws must be made for men, not men for the laws. It
is time that Europe shook off the conceptions of conduct which were
imposed on it by impotent monks like Gregory VII., and framed its own
rules in accordance with the new and healthier attitude toward life.
Asceticism is a commercial speculation--the sacrifice of earth for a
double share of heaven--which we have no longer reason to appreciate.

The progress of this view will be assisted by two contemporary reforms
of received opinion. One regards the economic dependence of woman on
man, which I will discuss later. I need only recall here that some of
the worst evils of our marriage-system--the scheming and bartering and
linking for life--are due to this dependence. The other reform is the
widespread and increasing rejection of the old idea that a woman must
bear as many children as nature will permit her to have.

There is amongst us a disgusting amount of hypocrisy in regard to this
question. The majority of educated people of all classes, even many of
the clergy, now practise artificial limitation of the family, yet we
proceed on the fiction that this is a disreputable practice. We turn
into pornographic dépôts the shops which sell contraceptives, and we
allow an antiquated law to be drastically enforced against men who
would be decent purveyors of the things we use in secret. We have
talked, and read journalistic articles, about "the dwindling
population of France" for twenty years, though it is only within the
last year or so that it has even slightly decreased; and the
birth-rate alone shows that London and Berlin and every other great
city are rapidly approaching the condition of Paris. We listen without
protest to the lamentations of half-informed faddists on the
limitation of the birth-rate in ancient Rome (where the practice was
confined to a few, and proved an excellent means of saving the State
by ridding it of a worn-out nobility) or the medieval republics of
Italy. And while we perpetrate these and a hundred other follies, we
know that the majority of us who are educated and unprejudiced find
the practice humane and commendable. We would, it seems, rather leave
frail girls to the mercy of quacks and dangerous operators than tell
them openly what better-educated ladies do to avoid conception.

Yet we have not here even the excuse of an antique religious command.
The Catholic Church, it is true, severely condemns the use of
contraceptives, but one finds that its prohibition is based merely on
the reasoning of medieval celibates. With those who argue that the
practice is "against nature" one hardly needs to discuss. Half the
distinctive things of civilisation are "against nature," nor is
there any reason why we should not depart from the ways of that
ancient and unintelligent dame. Hardly less foolish is the alarm about
our dwindling birth-rate. With every industry and profession already
much overcrowded, we do not act very intelligently in censuring the
modern restriction of production. But these are, to a great extent,
either wholly insincere expressions or confused repetitions of ancient
prejudices. In France, where a society arose for the checking of the
practice, it was found that the members had an average of one child
and a half in each family. A similar census among the writers and
associations which attack Malthusianism in England might yield an
instructive result.

One can understand the hostility to Malthusianism--or, rather,
Neo-Malthusianism, since Malthus's idea of restricting population by
avoiding intercourse is unnecessarily heroic--in a country like
Australia, which urgently requires population; though even in
Australia the opposition is futile. One can understand such hostility
in a land which has universal conscription, and neighbours with a
superior army; though I have elsewhere pointed out the sensible and
natural way to settle this difficulty. But it is quite irrational in
such a city as London. Five-sixths of us, it has been demonstrated, do
not attend church or take our code of life meekly from the clergy, as
our fathers did; our labour-market is, in every division, enormously
overcrowded; and our army is not affected by the dwindling birth-rate.
Why, in these circumstances, should the women of England be asked to
undergo the pain and sickness and weariness of a yearly birth, and
wear out their lives in the rearing of a large family? Men have, as a
rule, too little appreciation of the terrible burden they lay on their
wives, but their own interest at least ought to weigh with them. Why
be constrained to find the resources for rearing and educating a large
family when a smaller family will give better chances to the children
and conduce to the happiness of the home?

To these questions the only answer is an irrational outpouring of
antique rhetoric. It is mere "lust" to have commerce without
children: it is "selfish" to wish to live in greater comfort by
restricting the family: it is "unnatural." The man who would
lessen the suffering of his companion in life, and obtain greater
advantages and more loving care for his children by restricting their
number, may smile at the futility of this kind of rhetoric. But it is
surely time, in the second decade of the twentieth century, to meet it
with a frank and curt declaration that we have, and will use, a right
to any pleasure which this life affords, provided it hurt no one. The
last trace of asceticism should be trodden underfoot. The medieval
clergy were a body of a few fanatics leading an army of hypocrites.
Their ideas have no place in our life. Love and joy and comradeship
are in themselves as much ours as the scent of the rose or the flavour
of wine. It is time that we echoed defiantly the sneering words of the
apostle, and said: Yes, _let_ us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.
We are not likely to forget that life has other pleasures, of culture
and art, besides those of the palate or of love. The supreme
commandment is, as old Egypt said: "Thou shalt make no man weep."
The supreme virtue is to quicken the hearts of men with joy and fill
their minds with truth. And the time will come when the clergy,
reading aright for the first time the life of the ages of faith, will
say: "We never insisted on our theoretical asceticism until those
dour sceptics of the nineteenth century compelled us: the Middle Ages
were the ages of liberty."

The clergy are, in fact, in a dilemma. The cry of the hour is
"social consequences." There is a vast amount of doleful recalling
of dead civilisations and prediction of coming woe; though England was
never before so prosperous, solid, and free from crime. But dogmas
have worn so thin that we must be pressed to maintain them, even if
they are false, on social grounds. The answer is quite simple. If any
social quality or rule of conduct is necessary for our welfare and
happiness in this world, we need no dogmatic foundation for it. Men
will see that virtue is its own reward. And if any rule of conduct in
the Christian code is _not_ based upon the actual exigencies of life,
there will be no social consequences if we disregard it. The
superstitions I have assailed belong to this latter category.

But a campaign against the artificial restriction of the birth-rate
has recently been inaugurated on what are thought to be serious social
grounds, and this leads me to a third and last reform which the family
will undergo. I refer to the Eugenic movement. Let me first explain
why this hostility of Eugenists to the restriction of the birth-rate
seems a needless and illogical complication of their aims.

This hostility is usually expressed in the form of a fear that the
restriction of births among the "better class" and unrestricted
increase of the "lower class" must lead to deterioration. One
would think that the proper remedy of this would be to recommend
prudential restriction to the mass of the workers, as the Malthusian
League endeavours to do. It is a strange social idealism which would
urge over-production all round, with its train of domestic and
industrial evils, instead of urging restriction all round. It would
also be interesting to learn the average number of children to a
family among these zealous Eugenists, and whether they do not find
middle-class professions as overcrowded as the manual industries are.
At all events, since it is now impossible to induce educated mothers
to return to the virtuous and exacting industry of their Victorian
predecessors, the best thing would be to educate the masses in a
common-sense view of maternity and of their own interest.

It will suffice here, however, to deal with the saner side of the
Eugenic movement. It proposes to eliminate bad human stock and promote
the mating of good stocks. These are those who find it a degradation
to introduce "the methods of the breeder" into human affairs, but
the objection is merely silly. The methods of the modern breeder are
an expression of intelligence, improving on nature; these
old-fashioned folk would have us disregard the persuasion of
intelligence and retain the crude methods of unintelligent nature. The
serious question is: Is the Eugenic proposal sound and practicable?

As far as positive Eugenics, or the selection of good human stocks for
breeding, is concerned, the recent evolution of the movement seems to
show that no firm and practicable proposal can yet be formulated. The
truth is that the movement is greatly enfeebled by a general reliance
on disputed theories of heredity. Some Eugenists rely on Weismann's
theory: some on the Mendelist theory. They do not realise that
scientific men are by no means agreed upon these theories, and it is a
serious mistake to build on either. In England most of our biologists
are Weismannists (in a broad sense), but there is more hostility to
the theory in Germany and the United States, and both theories have
lately had to confront grave difficulties. Any Eugenic proposal which
is based on a theory of heredity must be regarded with reserve. The
dogmatic statements of Professor Karl Pearson, for instance, in regard
to the impossibility of altering by education the innate qualities of
a child are entirely unwarranted. Heredity is still a mystery: and the
relative importance of heredity and environment (or nature and
nurture) is not yet determined.

Detaching the element of theory, we have a plain proposal to eradicate
tainted stocks from the human garden and promote the growth of the
sounder. As I have said, the positive proposal to breed has not yet
been put before us in a practicable or discussable form. This is
largely because Eugenists fear to alarm the public by pointing out how
it affects the position of marriage. There are, however, many other
difficulties. The extraordinary diversity among children of the same
parents warns us that we cannot count on the result of mating human
beings, with their infinitely more complex nervous systems, as we can
count on the issue of mating sheep or dogs. The mediocrity of the
living children of our ablest men of the last generation, even when
the mother was an excellent mate, is another circumstance to be
considered. We do not yet know the points to breed for, and there is
no constancy of result. Eugenists sometimes refer to the physical or
mental superiority of one class of children over another, but in this
they do not attempt to distinguish between the effect of environment
and the natural endowment. Positive Eugenics is not yet beyond the
stage of research. Such research, if conducted without academic
prejudice (which is too apparent in many Eugenic papers), is of very
great service; and, if ever a firm proposal lies before us, we may
trust that rhetorical phrases and clerical prejudices will not be
allowed to bar the way.

In the case of negative Eugenics we are nearer agreement. Here again,
however, research is not always candid. Inquiries have been made into
the lineage of American criminals, and the large percentage of
criminals in one family is held to indicate a tainted stock: it is not
sufficiently noticed that they all lived in the same crime-breeding
environment. Other Eugenists try to intimidate us with the cry that
lunacy and crime are increasing rapidly: whereas (as I showed in the
_Hibbert Journal_, April 1912) there is no proved increase of lunacy
and no increase of crime, in proportion to the growth of population.
These methods bring discredit on the Eugenic proposals. It is,
however, now agreed that certain diseases, including certain forms of
mental disease, are transmissible, and common-sense suggests that we
should prevent their transmission. It is well to bear in mind,
however, that these things affect only a fraction of the community. As
is the case with every new social proposal, Eugenics is being pressed
as a panacea; and it appeals to many as a fascinating method of
healing our social maladies without touching the present distribution
of wealth. It is one subsidiary remedy among the hundred which modern
civilisation needs to apply. By all means let us discover what
"tainted stocks," if any, there are amongst us; and let us have
the elementary courage and intelligence to extinguish them, by the
isolation, painless destruction, or sterilisation of their
representatives.

The future of the family seems not obscure. Malthusian and Eugenic
proposals will alter much of the crudeness and stupidity of the old
family ideal, and ease of divorce will remove the blight it has put on
many a home. Hundreds of thousands bless marriage with gratitude and
sincerity: tens of thousands curse it with equal sincerity. Let there
be liberty and life for all. For a modern legislature to ignore a vast
amount of vice and misery, and be guided by the ancient formula of a
celibate priesthood, is one of the most lamentable features of our
civilisation. And the unbiased social student may look without concern
on the growth of extra-matrimonial love. There is no interest of the
State which forbids it, nor any sound principle of morals. The woman
of the future will be her own mistress, responsible neither to priest
nor moralist in this respect. If she chooses, she will marry; but she
will not sacrifice half the joy of life because she cannot, or does
not choose to, venture upon the experiment of domestic intimacy.


 CHAPTER VII.
 THE FUTURE OF WOMAN

THE old tradition of the family is intimately connected with the old
ideal of womanhood, and this in turn is summoned to the bar of modern
criticism. A substantial change in the position of woman seems so
revolutionary a disturbance, since it directly affects half the race
and must very seriously affect the home and the State, that our
Conservatives employ against the proposal the whole arsenal of
controversial rhetoric. We hear of the wisdom of the race--as if the
race did not grow wiser as it grows older--and the thin end of the
wedge. We are reminded that the ancient civilisations always came to
an end when their women rebelled against their natural position. We
have private appeals to our sensuous feelings and our instincts of
proprietorship, and open appeals to the ascetic doctrine of the
Pauline Epistles. We have history put before us, as usual, in chosen
fragments, and on the strength of these detached bits of learning we
hear impressive sermons on the "laws" of history and of nature.

The appeal to history, which men like Dr. Emil Reich have so gravely
abused, is in this case singularly unfortunate. In most cases the
candid student of history finds some ancient abuse or irrational
tradition making its way from one civilisation to another, and finds
it natural that our more critical and independent generation should at
length seek to dethrone it. But in the case of woman the Conservative
has not even "the wisdom of the race" to appeal to. Her position
in the past has varied greatly, but it is very far from true that she
had always occupied that state of subjection in which our Victorian
reformers found her. I have elsewhere (_Woman in Political Evolution_)
surveyed the full story of woman's development, and will here be
content with a summary view which makes the Feminist movement of our
time intelligible.

During the greater part of the history of civilisation, in the
Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires, woman had a considerable measure of
freedom and respect. When the Greeks and Romans entered the stage,
they brought with them a different tradition in regard to woman, but
as soon as they reached the height of their cultural development,
their women (and many of their men) rebelled against this tradition.
The civilisation of Greece was extinguished so speedily that the women
of Athens, aided by so eminent a thinker as Plato, had not time to win
their emancipation; but the Roman women did succeed in lifting
themselves from their position of subjection. In the meantime,
however, the political and religious development of Europe led to the
reappearance of the barbaric tradition in a new form. The Christian
leaders had in their sacred documents the social code of a rude
Semitic tribe, the Jews, which was sternly emphasised by St. Paul, and
they brooded darkly over the position of woman. Tertullian fiercely
reminded Christians that, but for woman, the race would never have
been damned. Ambrose ingeniously reflected that Eve was made out of a
mere rib, not out of the brain, of Adam. Augustine regarded woman as
an unpleasant institution created by Providence for the relief of
weak-willed males and for the maintenance of the race. Jerome frowned
heavily on the Roman woman's claim of emancipation. This quaint
mixture of Jewish contempt and ascetic dread was imposed on Europe by
the triumphant priesthood, educated mainly in the opinions of "the
Fathers," and woman sank again to a position of inferiority and
subjection.

Women writers of many countries have written this story of the
degradation of their sex in Christian Europe, and one can only admire
the splendid audacity with which Bishop Welldon assures women that
Jesus Christ (who never uttered a protest against the Jewish
conception or a warning against the coming abuse of it) was "the
first to respect them," or the Bishop of London describes
Christianity as "woman's best friend," or Bishop Diggle
represents the Christian as an advance on the Roman attitude. Our
clergy are distinguished for the facility with which they make
historical statements without giving us any serious evidence of a
command of history; they have the advantage of being able to assure
their followers that it is a "sin" to read more accurate and less
orthodox experts.

The historical truth is that the nineteenth century found woman in a
position far lower than that she had occupied at Rome seventeen
centuries before--far lower, indeed, than she had occupied during
(except for two brief periods) the many thousands of years of the
history of civilisation. It was quite inevitable that a movement for
her emancipation and uplifting should find a place among the great
reforms initiated in the last century. To conceive this movement as a
semi-hysterical rebellion against the settled usage of the race is
merely to betray a gross ignorance of history. Recent experience has
taught us that there is a great deal in the settled usage of the race
to rebel against; but it is false that in this case we are doing so.
The undisputed historical truth is that woman had been comparatively
free and respected during the greater part of the civilised period:
that, when the early civilisations of Greece and Rome had placed her
in subjection for a few centuries, she, at the beginning of the
Christian era, rebelled and won her emancipation: and that the later
period of subjection was merely due to the incorporation in the
Christian religion of the primitive and crude ideal of a polygamous
Arab tribe. Against this intolerable superstition modern civilisation
has rebelled, and we are in the midst of a far deeper discussion of
woman's nature and position than ever occurred before.

The discussion is passing through the three phases which are customary
in these controversies. At first the clergy and the Conservative
quoted the Bible and the Fathers. Then, when women began to show that
they were disposed to examine a little more closely the authority of
documents which taught so obvious an injustice, it was pleaded that in
this case the religious view coincided with "sound" science and
sociology. In that phase we are to-day, discussing claims that
"nature" and our social interest are on the side of the old ideal.
In a few more decades, when the battle is won, the Bishop of London of
the time will be demonstrating that the reform was anticipated by the
Fathers sixteen hundred years ago and was contained, in germ, in the
New Testament.

At present the controversy about woman's position turns largely on
the question of her "nature," and the literature of the subject is
prodigious. Woman has different organs and functions than those of
man, and it is natural to suppose that they will give her a different
character. Here is the opportunity of the male: he has a solid
scientific fact to build upon.

He sagely examines the intellectual life of woman and pronounces it
inferior to that of man: he measures her brain and finds it smaller
than that of man, and thus discovers the scientific basis of her
inferiority; and he never reflects that, since he, on the whole,
forbade her to develop her brain and intelligence during the fifteen
centuries of Christian domination, it may be that her brain is not
working with all the energy of which it is capable. He lays down for
this dependent creature a certain code of deportment and behaviour,
and, when it has enfeebled her, he discourses on her inferior muscular
development: if any girls or women defiantly exercise their muscles
and become strong, he calls them "unwomanly" and happily
exceptional. He observes that woman is more emotional than man; and,
of course, he does not ask physiologists whether this may be merely,
or mainly, the effect (as it is) of the muscular and intellectual
restrictions he has placed on her. He bids her develop pretty curves
on her body for his entertainment, and never thinks about the
physiological and psychological effect of the dead mass of fat and the
flabby muscles. He kindly undertakes (for a consideration) the care of
this weaker companion, and, when she begins to prove that she can fend
for herself, he severely censures her for intruding on his
labour-market. He learns from novelists that she has a peculiar power
of "intuition" (in fiction), and a greater fineness of perception
than man (which exact experiment in America has shown to be untrue),
and is altogether a deep and unfathomable being. And he then, in
virtue of his superior understanding of her "mysterious" nature,
proceeds to dictate to her about her sphere and her capacities.

The absurdities and contradictions of male writers on women, supported
by some women writers, during the last two hundred years, would fill a
volume. They were more or less intelligible, and certainly
entertaining, in the earlier part of the modern period, but at a time
when we have scientific and historical information to guide us they
are neither intelligent nor amusing. We now know that there is no such
thing as an unchangeable nature of a living organism. Structure and
function vary with use and environment, whatever theory of heredity
one follows. Forbid the brain and muscles to function for some
centuries, and they will become feebler: restore their activity and
they will return to strength. Shut a woman out of politics or business
or war, and she will lose her capacity for it: reintroduce her to it,
and her faculties are sharpened. When the kings of Dahomi formed a
regiment of women in their army, the women were found to be more
deadly fighters than the men, and they drank as heavily.

As far as the political phase of the modern Feminist struggle is
concerned, the application of these principles is clear enough. When
statesmen can find no better argument against the enfranchisement of
women than the fact that (like the politicians themselves) they do no
military service, and when scientific men plead only their periodical
perturbations and their "change of life," it is time to cease
arguing. Even in countries which have a system of conscription it has
never been proposed that those who are exempt from service should not
have a vote. In a country like England the objection is supremely
foolish: it reminds one of Plato's ironical argument, in this
connection, that men who are bald should not be allowed to make shoes.
As to the comparative disturbance of judgment which a certain
proportion of women suffer at certain periods, it is preposterous to
suppose that this does not unfit them for more important work, but
_does_ unfit them for casting a vote once in seven years. Is it
suggested that the Conservative matron will, if an election fall in
her period of nervous instability, march in a frenzy to the poll and
vote for Keir Hardie? Even the more or less intoxicated male voter
does not overrule a settled conviction so easily. But it is waste of
time to discuss such matters. A simple investigation of years of
experience in America and Australasia is more valuable than the
pedantic declarations of one or two scientific men. Even Conservative
Australians smiled when I asked them if the consequences of female
enfranchisement, as they are darkly foreboded by serious people in
England, had been observed in their Commonwealth.

The anti-suffrage campaign has been the death-blow of the prejudice
against the enfranchisement of women. It has shown the complete
futility of the Conservative position. Women would probably have the
vote in England to-day if a section of those who demand it had not
taken a false path. The end, however sacred, does not justify criminal
means; nor can any serious statesman yield to violence and
intimidation. Yet there is nothing in this temporary aberration to
strengthen the anti-Feminist position. It was an error of judgment and
a misreading of history. I am well acquainted with many of the ladies
who did these regrettable things, and I know that the suggestion of
"hysteria" is an insult. It is, however, useless to discuss this
question further. Women will be enfranchised in England within a few
years, and in all civilised nations within a quarter of a century.

Then will begin the campaign for the right to sit in Parliament, even
in the Ministry. From sheer force of prejudice the great majority of
the enfranchised women will resist this further claim, and the long
story of education and agitation will be repeated. This is the outcome
of our habit of persistently compromising with false traditions
instead of frankly discarding them. The immortal jokes about women
will be retailed in the House of Commons by our legislators; the same
dark warnings will come from scientific Cassandras who have felt
social influence; the same tragic whispers about "what every woman
knows" will be heard in drawing-rooms. Then, about the year 1930, we
will discover that woman is really capable of undertaking the not very
exacting duties of the average Member of Parliament,--if we have not
in the meantime abolished these aimless long debates on subjects which
all approach with a fixed conviction,--and that it may not be
impossible to find a woman with the capacity of Mr. Reginald M'Kenna
or Lord Gladstone or Mr. Walter Long. Our Mrs. Humphry Wards will be
the first to compete for the office.

I turn to the more serious question of the economic enfranchisement of
women. On this side of the Feminist movement our views are hardly less
hazy than in regard to politics. The middle-class, being the brain as
well as the backbone of England, is chiefly responsible for the maxim
that woman's place is the home; but the middle-class is also the
great employer of labour, and it has found that female labour is
cheaper than male, and has therefore concluded that woman's proper
place is the office or the workshop. More than a fourth of the girls
and women of England work outside the home. This material incentive to
right views is, however, limited in its action. When the middle-class
woman in turn seeks economic independence, she is received with
coldness, if not derision. Women may be clerks, teachers, actresses,
telegraphists, hosiery-makers, etc., but they ought not to aspire to
be doctors, lawyers, or stockbrokers. If they ask the reason, they
hear an inconsistent jumble of statements. In the first place, of
course, they are not clever enough; in the second place, however, they
are likely to be so far successful that they would lessen the
available employment of men.

Certainly in such a haphazard industrial world as ours the accession
of a fresh army of workers will cause, and is causing, confusion. On
the _laissez-faire_ principle this overcrowding of the market is good;
it gives a greater play to selection and promotes efficiency. But we
have, as I said, forced _laissez-faire_ to compromise with decency. We
prefer a little overcrowding, but not too much. The opening of the
doors of all the professions to woman means a worse overcrowding than
ever in the medical and legal worlds, and we naturally hesitate.

Naturally, but not justly or logically. Between logic and justice the
modern man pleads that he is distracted, and he asks time for
reconstruction; asks, in other words, that we should leave the trouble
to another generation. This shrinking from trouble is of no avail. We
have sanctioned the principle of female industry outside the
home--millions of women are so employed in England to-day--and we have
absolutely no ground to limit it except the natural disability of
woman or the social need for her to undertake other functions. Of her
natural disability little need be said here. We have had, in most
countries, decades of experience of the employment of women in many
industries--teaching, nursing, journalism, factory-work, art, theatre,
post-office, type-writing, shop-work, and so on. What proportion of
complaint to the number of workers is there that their periodical
functions make them unfit for employment? We do not need learned
experts on gynecology to tell us of the acute and exceptional cases
which have come under their observation. The scientific and practical
procedure is to make a general inquiry into the net result of our
employment of millions of girls and women. Most of us would await such
a report with confidence. As long as the wages of women are lower than
those of men, we hear very little complaint; nor do we find the work
of our schools or the play of our theatres very much interrupted by
peculiarly feminine weaknesses. Of late years women have shown that
they are equally qualified to be dentists, doctors, chartered
accountants, etc. Common-sense would persuade us, if we would find the
real limits of woman's capacity, to open to her all the doors of the
world of work and learn it by experience.

One must give more serious attention to the claim that this economic
enfranchisement of women will tend to lessen maternity, and will
therefore endanger our social interests. This question of the
birth-rate is, in fact, very important from many points of view, and
it is extremely advisable to have a clear and reasoned grasp of it.
Many people are at once alarmed if it is shown that a practice will
tend to lessen the birth-rate. They rarely examine with critical
attention the reasons which would be alleged by those who maintain
that a lowering of the birth-rate _is_ a social menace.

But one needs no lengthy reflection to discover that at the root of
all this clamour for maintaining or increasing the birth-rate we have
only military requirements. Some, indeed, urge that a nation needs as
many soldiers as possible for her industrial army as well as for her
military forces; but, seeing that each nation already has more than
she can employ, we are not impressed by this phrase. It is not volume
of production, or gross largeness of revenue, which makes a nation
great. It is the proportion of her revenue to her population, and in
that respect some of the smallest States are the most happily
situated. The need of a large army alone justifies complaints about a
falling birth-rate, and it is monstrous that we should lay this strain
on parents merely in order to produce "fodder for cannon." The
actual need of each country, as long as the military system lasts,
must, of course, be met, but--apart from the hope that we will soon
cast off the greater part of this military burden--two circumstances
show that we have not here a sound and permanent social need. The
birth-rate is falling in all civilised countries, and will eventually
reach a common low level; and the war has shown us that a nation with
a reduced population may, like any nation with a small population,
find compensation for its weakness in alliances.

The truth is that the premature advance of France in restricting its
birth-rate has led to a general fallacy. France exposed itself to a
particular danger in face of Germany, and this special weakness of
France was converted into the general statement that any nation which
reduces its birth-rate is in danger. Not only is the general statement
untrue, but the particular case of France is very carelessly
conceived. After 1871 the German Empire had such an advantage in
population over France, and (until 1895) so much less need of
maintaining a fleet, that even a full birth-rate would not have
equipped France confidently for a combat. In any case, we come back
always to military needs, and we may trust that these will not long
impose their terrible strain on civilisation. There is, apart from
them, no reason why the birth-rate should not sink in every country to
the level of the death-rate, and in many countries even lower.

On the other hand, the superficial folk who cry for heavy maternity
and full cradles overlook a very important social fact. I am thinking
chiefly of the men and women who denounce in principle the practice of
restricting births. Not only do they ignore the overcrowding of our
trades and professions,--and they are usually amongst the most
reluctant to organise them,--but they fail to notice that the
increasing application of science and humane sentiment to our modes of
living threatens the earth, as a whole, with enormous over-population,
unless the birth-rate be checked. The population of England has
increased nearly fourfold in the past hundred years, whereas it had
little more than doubled in the previous two hundred years. The
factors which are responsible for this vast modern increase are
becoming more active every decade, and are spreading over the world.
How will the population of Europe and Asia stand when they are fully
applied in Russia, China, and India? Within twenty years the United
States, according to its agricultural experts, will have as large a
population as it can support, and we have already seen Germany very
largely thrust into war because of its superabundant population. The
future is full of peril and misery if we continue to allow this
military demand for men to masquerade as a sound and permanent human
need. The birth-rate _must_ be checked.

We must therefore refuse to allow the path of reform to be obstructed
by either the priest or the drill-sergeant. If ever a time comes when
some real interest of the race is endangered by too low a birth-rate,
we may trust the race to see to it. Conservatives often imagine that
those who would reform life on common-sense lines are devoid of
sentiment. They confuse sentiment and sentimentality, which is
sentiment out of accord with reason. The man of the future will be, in
my judgment, not less, but more emotional than the man of to-day; but
he will not allow ancient prejudices and mere phrases to have the
unchecked support of his feelings. It will not be enough to tell him
that divorce is increasing, or the birth-rate falling, or respect for
the clergy deteriorating. He will ask the precise value in social
terms of your bogy. At present we have, on broad social grounds, much
to gain and nothing to lose by a fall of the birth-rate. Indeed, the
prospect of a fall is, as far as this economic development alone is
concerned, much exaggerated. Millions of employed women have, and will
continue to have, children. Under our present system of industry this
has undoubtedly certain risks and burdens; under the organised system
of employment for which I plead it will be possible to adjust
employment to maternal functions.

And this brings me to the cardinal issue of the whole controversy: the
economic position of the married woman or the mother. Let us face this
graver position quite candidly. The industrial disorganisation will
right itself in the course of time. The middle-class father of our
time whose daughter does a certain amount of work, not in order to
relieve his pocket, but in order to buy additional luxuries for
herself, has assuredly a grievance. She takes part of a man's work
and pay, yet leaves on him the old burden of maintenance. She makes
matters worse by accepting a low wage, because she is not
self-maintaining. I am assuming that women will become independent
economic units, and that the rate of payment will be--equal wage for
equal service.

But the position of the married woman, or of the independent woman who
undertakes maternal functions, forms a special and difficult problem,
which is pressing upon us more heavily every decade. There is
spreading rapidly through the civilised world a feeling of rebellion
against the economic dependence of wife or husband. No Conservative
argumentation, no censure of new ideas, no religious preaching of
self-sacrifice for a doubtful reward in heaven, will relieve us of
this difficulty. Educated women--statistics of college-taught women
are available--are increasingly rebelling against the subjection or
inferiority which this economic dependence seems to entail. It is the
chief motive of the general demand for economic independence (or an
independent place in the industrial world) and has much to do with the
revolt against marriage itself. Whether or no we adopt new ideals of
social life, this revolt will spread.

One very quickly sees that it is not so much marriage as the
traditional practice of husbands which is chiefly responsible for the
revolt. The practice varies considerably, but, apart from a small
class in which the wife brings with her or earns an independent
income, it is still generally true to say that the wife receives what
the husband chooses to give. Now it is plain that this difficulty may
be met in a very large proportion of cases by an equitable voluntary
agreement. Various domestic experiments of the kind are being tried,
and a comparison of experiences would be useful. Many people are
agreed in the just view that, since the wife works at home while the
husband works abroad, all income is joint income. A common fund,
accessible to both, is assigned for household and saving, and an equal
and fixed personal share is taken by each from the income or wage.
Such an arrangement is quite easily practised by middle-class people,
and it seems to me to remove every legitimate suspicion of ignominy
from the wife's position.

When unmarried women have secured economic independence they will be
able to demand some such arrangement before marrying. The kind of
"modesty" which would prevent a woman from having an understanding
before marriage in regard to income and children is a very costly and
foolish luxury. Let them insist that the ritual words, "With all my
worldly goods I thee endow," must mean something more than that they
shall have chocolates and pretty dresses _if_ they humour the moods of
a husband. Our law, which secures for a wife full maintenance when she
has ceased to do any work for it (after a separation), but has no
interest in her when she is working dutifully for twelve or fourteen
hours a day, is infinitely more dangerous to marriage than are the
puritan assaults of Mr. G. B. Shaw. In any case, a voluntary agreement
that a wife has access to the bank and cash-box, and a right to take
for personal use the same sum as her husband, removes all need of
asking money from a husband (which is justly odious to many women),
and makes a wife economically independent in any important sense of
the word.

But it would be futile to hope either that the majority of men will
thus surrender their privileged position, or that all women will
recognise even such an arrangement as economic independence. A grave
conflict undoubtedly lies before us, and there will be an increasing
demand for the State-endowment of wifehood, or at least of motherhood.
The suffrage movement has naturally inflamed the difficulty by
educating women in a sense of grievance. Indeed, it seems to many of
us that Feminist writers have at times gone far beyond legitimate
grievances and set up fictitious and mischievous standards. This is a
very common development of propagandist movements which meet with a
prolonged resistance. The first generation of agitators says the
obvious and just things in regard to the reform: the next generation
must revive the jaded sentiment with stimulating novelties and
exaggerations. It seems to me one of these morbid exaggerations to
speak of marriage as "legalised prostitution"; to imagine that one
is "selling one's body" to a man, or receiving payment for
ministering to his "lust." One Feminist writer of some influence,
and some pretension to knowledge of science, has actually compared the
human male very unfavourably with all other male animals in the world,
on the ground that the latter are content with a restricted period of
"rut"!

This mixture of ancient Puritanism and advanced sociology is as
incongruous as it is mischievous. A woman who sincerely regards
sex-pleasure in the way generally implied by the use of the word
"lust"--a woman who has not the same healthy desire of it as her
partner--has no right to marry: except, of course, to marry a man with
similarly antique views. A wife of such a kind may very well consider
that she is being "paid" to surrender her body. The normal wife is
not paid for that at all. She is paid--if there is any paying--to care
for the home and her children: which is as well earned a payment as
the fee of a lawyer. And from the sentimental point of view it does
not make a particle of difference whether she is paid out of her
husband's income or out of the coffers of the State. She would still
"sell her body," if there is any selling of body. But there is
not. Maternity and sex-pleasure are entirely different matters.

I am deliberately trying to undermine the plea for the endowment of
motherhood, because the proposal seems to me to present very grave
difficulties which even so penetrating a sociologist as Mr. H. G.
Wells has, apparently, not appreciated. Mr. Wells is, of course, in a
very different position from the Feminist writers who advocate the
complete endowment or maintenance of wives or mothers by the State.
Such a scheme would cost about £300,000,000 a year, and need not be
discussed. Mr. Wells suggests rather a modest contribution per child
born (leaving out, I assume, wealthier mothers); a practicable scheme,
with much in its favour. Yet it seems to me that such endowment would
mean that we would encourage the weakest in will, the most sensual,
the least intelligent and least provident of our people, to breed.
Intelligent women would not abandon the practice of restricting births
because the State offered them a few shillings per child. The better
class--whether of manual or professional workers--would have to pay
for the undesirable fertility of the worst class. We are just
beginning to realise that quality of children is more precious than
quantity, and the endowment of motherhood would not encourage this
saner view. The kind of brute who is at present restrained by the
paternity-law would be restrained no longer: the rougher type of
husband--a very numerous type--would pay so much less to his wife when
he found the State contributing (either in cash or kind) to her: the
man who at present practises restriction, not out of consideration for
his wife and family, but to have more shillings for himself, would
cease to practise it, and lay a greater burden on his wife.

But, while there seem to be such grave objections to the endowment of
motherhood that we do better to strengthen women in their individual
demand of justice, we must remember that the wife will have the
advantage of other changes in the home. Domestic service is becoming
more and more repugnant to girls, and some form of co-operative and
efficient housekeeping, with common servants and restaurant, will be
adopted. Some day a photograph of a twentieth-century suburb will
provoke a smile. Perhaps the museum of the future will set up models
of our establishments, just as we set up in our ethnographical
galleries models of a Kaffir or a Papuan household. Boys and girls
will gaze with admiring delight at the naïveté of the model: a
thousand brick boxes, separated by a thousand little gardens, with
three thousand little chimneys smoking, a thousand amateur cooks
perspiring over a thousand fires, and a thousand inefficient
servant-girls flirting with the servants of rival butchers and
dairymen. The common nursery will especially relieve the mother and
lower the death-rate. The State will one day have an interest in
seeing that each babe ushered into the world, at such pain and
sacrifice, becomes a useful citizen. If any mothers care to entrust
the child more fully to it, the State will find it profitable to
respond. These things can be arranged without more detriment to
parental affection than there is in the case of women--often women who
write beautiful things in defence of the old tradition--who have
nurses for the child and send it later to a distant school for the
greater part of the year.

Reforms of this kind will enormously relieve the home life and enable
even mothers to earn, if they wish, quite as much as the State would
ever be able to award them. The work will be better done, by trained
workers, at less cost. People do not reflect that this change has been
proceeding for centuries. Once the wife brewed the ale, and baked the
bread, and spun the linen: later she entrusted these things to experts
working for the community, and reserved for herself the making of
preserves, pickles, underclothing, and antimacassars: now these things
have gone to the expert, and the wife confines her amateur efforts to
scolding children and cooking refractory joints. She will be relieved
when it is all over, and we shall have no more of the "beautiful
doll" or the domestic drudge. The independent position and greater
leisure and broader interest in life will make her intellectual
activity more similar to that of man's.

I speak, of course, of the mass of women, and do not forget that
already the intellect of alert and thoughtful women is equal to that
of men of the corresponding class. The majority will be, as it were,
differently orientated toward life by these changes. A saner muscular
activity will restore the balance of the system, and will rid them of
the excessive nerve-energy, particularly of the sympathetic system,
which finds expression in facile and explosive emotion. There will
assuredly always be a bias toward sentiment in woman, and we have no
reason to fear a deterioration of the distinctively feminine
sentiments of tenderness, refinement, and sympathy. The relief from
the more irritating domesticities ought to accentuate them. On the
other hand, the idea of obeying the male or practising self-sacrifice
for his undue benefit, will certainly disappear; and it is quite time
that it did. Self-sacrifice, in case of need, comes instinctively to
either sex, but the kind of self-sacrifice which a selfish masculine
tradition has pressed on women is degrading to the man and unjust to
wife and daughter. All that is attractive and really beneficent in
woman will be fostered, but on the emotional side it will become less
and less characteristic of one sex. The sharp contrast of the sexes
tends to disappear. There is something grotesque about the traditional
idea that the human male must be distinguished by a greater capacity
for taking alcohol and using meaningless expletives and telling sexual
stories. Even in physical strength and athletic skill the sexes are
approaching; nor does one find any loss of charm or grace in some of
the finest women athletes.

These changes are proceeding, and, apart from inevitable errors and
excesses, on which caricaturists fasten with their genial
unscrupulousness, the result is promising. Contemporary expressions of
alarm are often ludicrous. Thousands of ladies who are horrified at
the emergence of "a new sex" are themselves contriving, by means
which would have caused their prolific grandmothers to raise white
hands to heaven, to limit their families to two children. We take our
reform in small doses, as if complete social health were a thing to be
considered very seriously. Yet if one patiently traces in imagination
the effect of all these changes on the womanhood of the race, one
foresees a generation of women which recalls Shelley's lines:

 "And women, too, frank, beautiful, and kind
 As the free heaven which rains fresh light and dew
 On the wide earth, past; gentle radiant forms,
 From custom's evil taint exempt and pure;
 Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
 Looking emotions once they feared to feel,
 And changed to all which once they dared not be,
 Yet, being now, made earth like heaven; nor pride,
 Nor jealousy, nor envy, nor ill-shame,
 The bitterest of those drops of treasured gall,
 Spoilt the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love."

Grant the poet his licence; women are not more likely than men to
become angels. The moral superiority which some Feminist writers claim
for their sex is founded on a curiously narrow view of life; if man,
instead of woman, had to pay the penalty of sexual intercourse, we
should probably find the aggression on the other side. Yet the most
sober-minded of us must expect from this healthier balance of powers,
this easing of the domestic burden, this limitation of care to a few
children, and this independence of marital generosity or marital
selfishness, a great advancement in the character and happiness of
woman.

Shelley, however, was thinking less of wives than of free women, and
economic independence will swell their numbers. The changes I have
described will make marriage far less onerous, but they will also make
it easier for a woman to dispense with marriage, and before the end of
the twentieth century there will be in every city a growth of
temporary unions and independent conduct. Woman will be mistress,
morally and economically, of her own destiny; she will consult neither
husband nor priest. The plain moral law, which forbids a man to
inflict pain or injustice, will be more faithfully observed than it
ever was before. There will be an immense reduction of the hypocrisy,
the prostitution, the misery and illness, which this fictitious law of
chastity has always caused; and the alteration of public opinion will
remove from a woman the unpleasant consequences which unwedded love
entails at the present time. It is preposterous to say that the State
will be injured by these changes, and it seems clear that woman will
be happier, more healthily developed, and not less tender and graceful
than she can be under the present reign of shams.


 CHAPTER VIII.
 SHAMS OF THE SCHOOL

THE constructive scheme which I have in mind throughout this
criticism of our prejudices and institutions may, as I said, be summed
essentially in two words: industrial organisation and education. When
we have reformed our administrative machinery, which we miscall
"government," and abandoned our military and naval atrocities, and
simplified international life, our chosen public servants will find
that these two are their chief concerns. Probably the supreme concern
will--once we have constructed an orderly industrial machinery--be
education, in the sense which I would attach to the word. Every year a
million new citizens will join the community, and it will be the
State's first business to see that they are thoroughly prepared in
every respect to contribute to its weal and happiness, and that they
maintain throughout life sufficient intellectual alertness to control
their common concerns with wisdom and in a progressive spirit. It is
as a necessary preliminary to this that I have dealt critically and
reconstructively with the home and the parent.

That glorification of indolence which we call the principle of
_laissez-faire_ is so successful in this department of our public life
that what ought to be the State's chief concern is hardly ever
mentioned in our orgies of parliamentary debate. We peck at it
occasionally. We enact that babies must have orange-boxes, and that
children must not smoke cigarettes or approach within a certain number
of yards of a bar (so that we get bar-scenes outside the door); and
occasionally the representatives of rival sects get up a grand debate
on the Bible in the school. These things emphasise the general
neglect. _Laissez-faire_ meant originally, "Leave things as they
are"--it sounded better in French, but, like many ancient
sentiments, it was converted into a respectable philosophy: "The
State must leave as much as possible to the individual and the
amateur." Nineteenth-century Radicals fought heroically for this
Conservative principle.

Education, however, was so flagrantly neglected by the parent and the
Church that we had to compromise and take the child's mind out of
their care: leaving its body and character to the old hazards. At last
it dawns on us that a sound body and character are just as important
to the State as the capacity to read comic journals and stories: that
the entire being of the child needs expert training, and it is worth
the State's while to give it. This broad ideal of education is
increasingly accepted by pædagogists and social writers, and it is
already largely embodied in educational practice. It has provoked the
usual reaction, the usual determination that we will not allow our
ways to be reformed without a struggle. "Advanced" teachers fight
with Conservative teachers and politicians (particularly of the vestry
type), and the familiar old hymn-tunes are heard throughout the land.
We must not weaken parental responsibility: we must not lessen the
charm of the domestic circle: we must not encroach on the sphere of
the Church: we must beware of Socialism: we must resist the thin end
of the wedge wherever we see one.

Why did the State, in the first half of the nineteenth century,
undertake the task of educating the young? I do not mean that
State-education was a new thing in history when a few European
Governments adopted it little over a century ago. The Roman Empire had
had a very fair system of municipal and State-education, and it is one
of the gravest charges against the clergy that they suffered it to
decay, and allowed or compelled ninety per cent. of their followers to
remain in a state of gross ignorance for fourteen hundred years. At
the end of the eighteenth century, as the revolt against
ecclesiastical authority spread, the idea of State-education was
revived. In England the clergy warmly resisted the progress of the
idea, but the appalling ignorance of the people proved intolerable to
the increasing band of reformers. Quakers like Lancaster and Agnostics
like Robert Owen demanded and provided schools for the children of the
workers, and the Church of England was forced to meet this danger of
unsectarian education by founding a rival and orthodox association.
But for fifty years the schooling remained so primitive, and the
proportion of illiterates remained so enormous, that at last the
bishops were brushed aside and the Government was compelled to resume
the work of the old Roman municipalities and Senate.

The motives of the reformers and statesmen who secured this advance
were complex. Some of them were frankly anti-clerical and eager to
undermine superstition: some of them were business-men who pleaded
that a lettered worker was worth more to the State than an illiterate
worker. The predominant feeling was, as it had been among the Stoic
reformers at Rome, humanitarian. The gross ignorance of the mass of
the people was a disgrace to civilisation and a source of brutality
and crime: it was a human duty to educate. It was very widely
recognised that this sentiment imposed on us a duty of developing the
child's character as well as its mind, but here the Churches were
inflexible. Unblushingly asserting that they were the historic
educators of Europe, they refused to relinquish their last hold on the
school, and the State was compelled to accept the compromise of
religious instruction in the public schools, as well as the endowment
of sectarian schools. As to the third part of the ideal of education,
the cultivation of the body, we may admit that science itself was not
yet sufficiently advanced to demand it.

With the growth of democratic aspirations, the Conservative began to
see a danger in this plea that the community must see to the full
development of all its children, and new phrases were invented.
"Industrial efficiency" was the most plausible of these checks on
education. The manual workers were to have their intellects awakened
to the slight extent which was needed to make them better instruments
of production, but no further: lest they should become dissatisfied
with their position of inferiority and disturb our excellent
industrial order. Educators, however, refused to be restrained by this
kind of sociology. It was their business to develop the child's
intelligence, and they had a fine ambition to do it thoroughly. They
built infant-schools, which took the tender young away from their
mothers, to the great advantage of both. They found that large numbers
of children were too poorly fed or too defective in body to receive
real education, and they instituted drill and demanded cheap or free
meals and medical inspection. They abolished the half-timer, and
raised the age of compulsory attendance. They began to resent the idea
that lessons from the Bible were a training of character. These
developments have alarmed many. They begin to see that in the long-run
these things will impose on the State the duty of developing the
child's whole being--body, mind, and character--before the boy or
girl is allowed to enter the industrial world. We hesitate, as we do
in face of all large and fully developed ideals, and look round for
ways of escape.

The chief of these evasions is still the doctrine of what we call
"parental responsibility." Some day the idea that a parent is the
best-fitted person to train a child will be regarded as a medieval
superstition. The parent is as amateurish in training children as in
cooking or making frocks. The notion that "nature tells" a mother
what to do is part of the crude psychology of the Schoolmen. From the
moment of birth, and during the months before birth, the human mother
has no inspiration whatever. She goes by tradition, by the crude
advice of elders and neighbours, as every observer of the arrival of
the first baby knows. A cat acts by what we call "instinct,"--by
certain neuro-muscular reactions which natural selection has
perfected,--but a human being has intelligence instead of instinct,
and the first thing intelligence enjoins is that experts ought to be
trained for particular duties. The death-rate in every civilised
country has gone down enormously since we ceased to rely on motherly
instinct, or grandmotherly fables. A time may come, therefore, when
the State will receive a bearing woman in a properly appointed home,
and will care for the child from the moment of birth until, in its
later teens, it is equipped for work. I will suggest in the next
chapter that this ought by no means to be regarded as the completion
of education; here I am concerned only with the earlier part. Many are
convinced that this is the last and logical term of the development on
which we have entered.

I am avoiding remote ideals as much as possible, but it is important
to meet the prejudice which opposes reform along this line. Many
people tell us that, if this unnatural dethronement of the mother and
invasion of the home are to be the final terms of our present
development, they will resist it at every step: on the familiar
thin-end-of-the-wedge principle. Our beautiful "home life" must be
preserved at all costs. Our "parental instincts" shall not be
enfeebled.

Candidly, in what proportion of the real homes of England, as distinct
from the home of a fiction-writer, is the life "beautiful"? In
what proportion does it not rather present the spectacle of an
overburdened mother struggling heroically to live up to her
reputation for gentleness under the strain of ill or wayward children
and an irritating husband? In what proportion are the beautiful homes
of the novel written by spinsters or bachelors, or people who restrict
the number of their children, or men whose posthumous biographies do
not reveal a very sweet home life? I believe it was Carlyle who
originated that fond boast that no nation in the world has a word for
"home" like the English. It was certainly Dickens who gave us the
most touching pictures of domestic tenderness and happiness. How many
mothers of the working and lower middle class do not dread the
holidays, when the children threaten to be near them all day? How many
are capable of training children? How many do not regard a blow as the
supreme moral agency? How many would not welcome the easing of their
burden, and the training of their children by experts? And why in the
world should mothers be likely to have less affection for their
children because they have infinitely less trouble with them, and see
them only in their smiling hours?

The happiest phase of English home life is, surely, found in those
middle-class families which can send the children away to school for
four-fifths of the year and welcome them home periodically in the
holiday mood. In the vast majority of cases the teacher has to
struggle despairingly against the influence of the home and the
street; for it is to the street that the mother entrusts the child. A
lady (an educational expert) once observed to me that it was
remarkable to find the children in Gaelic districts of Scotland
speaking the purest English. On the contrary, it was wholly natural,
and it points an important pædagogical moral. The children learned
English _from their teachers only_; there was no corrupt English
dialect in the home or village to undo the teacher's lessons. In
other matters besides language the school-lessons are constantly
frustrated outside the school.

I pass frequently through the stream of children pouring out of a
large and handsome suburban school. It is not in a slum. There are
broad green fields on every side, and there are vast and beautiful
public spaces not far away. But the homes from which many of the
children come are squalid, and the street-scenes, especially in front
of the local inn, are often disgusting. On more than one occasion I
have heard the men openly talk of their practice of unnatural vice. I
have seen a girl of ten watch her intoxicated father misconduct
himself with a prostitute, while the mother--whose attention was
called to the fact by the child, in the mono-syllabic language of the
district--chatted with a neighbour. And I am not surprised to notice
that, when the children burst from school, which they hate, numbers of
them break into foul language, indecent behaviour, and fighting. Their
world, outside the school, is one mighty drag on the teacher's
efforts. When they leave school, with brains half-developed and only
the maxims of ancient Judæa (at which half their world scoffs) to
guide their conduct, when they enter workshops and laundries and join
the company of ring-eyed boys and girls in the first flush of
sex-development, they shed the feeble influence of the school-lessons
in a few months.

The district I have in mind is a very common type of district: a
healthy, open suburb on the fringe of London, tainted by one of those
older villages in which the poorest workers are apt to congregate. It
has an expensive Church-Institute and numerous chapels. You may see
the thing in almost any part of London, and most other towns. I have a
vivid recollection of passing from a Catholic elementary school and
strict home in Manchester to a large warehouse thirty-five years ago.
There is little change in that respect to-day. A very few years ago a
Manchester boy passed the same way; and a month or two later, his
father told me, he returned home chuckling over a "funny story"
about Christ. The school fails, not from lack of devotion in the
teachers, but because the child learns more in the street, and often
in the home; and these lessons are, somehow, more congenial.

Now if we are not satisfied with this comparative waste of effort and
sterility of result, we have to consider candidly the ambition of the
educationist. He wants to turn out a young citizen with an active
mind, a sound body, and a character prepared to resist the more
degrading influences of the world he will enter. He cannot carry out
this aim in the case of every child entrusted to him, but he can in
most cases, if the State will help him. He must have his children
properly nourished: neither underfed nor stuffed with coarse food by
ignorant mothers. He must have them seasonably clothed and shod: again
the mothers need instruction and pressure. He must have, not only
drill and more natural forms of exercise, but more control over the
children outside of school-hours; he is already beginning, with great
promise of good, to walk and play with them, to take them to museums,
and so on. He must have adequate medical assistance, and must have the
support of the law in counteracting dirty homes and careless parents.
He must keep the child still a few years longer at school, because a
child only begins to be really educable at thirteen or fourteen. He
must have the encouragement of knowing that the more promising boys
and girls will find the avenue open to higher schools, and that the
community will make some serious provision of mental stimulation for
the adolescent and the adult. And in order to carry out properly this
large and promising scheme of training he must have twice as many
colleagues as he has, so that each may be able to give individual
attention to pupils, and in order that too great demands be not made
on their hours of rest.

But where are we to find the very large sums of money which would be
required for carrying out such a scheme? I wish everybody in England
realised that we should have the funds to carry out this scheme in its
entirety, in its most advanced developments, if we abolished
militarism; that if we had done this before 1914, we should have had,
in the cost of the war, the funds to carry out such a scheme two or
three times over. We have to reflect also whether the increased
prosperity of England would not pay the cost. There are other
considerations which I give later, but I would add here at least a
word about experience in other lands. At New York and Chicago I
visited schools--elementary and secondary, but both free--with which
we have nothing to compare in this country: palatial structures with
superb equipment and devoted staffs. Yet when I asked ratepayers how
they contrived to spend so lavishly on education, the three or four
public men I asked were so little conscious of a burden that they were
unable to explain satisfactorily where the funds came from!

We are, however, making progress here and there,--Bradford, for
instance, has had the courage to be quite Socialistic in its care of
the young,--and the triple ideal of education is generally, if at
times reluctantly, recognised. As far as the education of the body is
concerned, in fact, we have no ground for quarrelling with our
teachers, whatever we may say of some of our educational authorities.
Medical inspection, drill, hygiene, play, excursions, feeding, etc.,
are discussed very conscientiously at every meeting of teachers, and
the reforms proposed are more or less admitted in all places, even
under the London County Council. The teachers themselves often go far
beyond their prescribed tasks in endeavouring to help the children. In
places they yield part of their necessary midday rest to attend to the
feeding of poor children: which I found admirably, and most cheerfully
and expeditiously, done in Chicago (where 1500 children at one school
were quietly and excellently fed in thirty minutes) by a committee of
ladies of the district. They give Saturdays and holidays for
conducting visits to museums or excursions, or for controlling sports.
What is chiefly needed is that the authorities should deal stringently
with backward sectarian schools, and provide a very much larger supply
of teachers and servants. The municipal authority of the richest city
in the world--the London County Council--is scandalously stingy and
reactionary in this respect.

When we turn to the question of educating the intelligence, it is not
possible to approve so cordially. No one, assuredly, can fail to
appreciate the zeal and efforts of educationists and teachers,
especially in the last few decades. Hardly any body of professional
men and women among us, certainly no body of public servants, has a
deeper and sounder ambition to conduct its work on the most effective
lines. A vast literature is published, frequent congresses are held,
and the science of psychology is assiduously cultivated. One must
appreciate also the fatal limitations of the teacher's activity; as
long as we withdraw children from him at the age of fourteen,
education is impossible. It may seem, therefore, ungracious or unwise
to criticise,--though I am not wholly a layman in regard to
education,--but there is at least one feature of our school life to
which I would draw serious critical attention.

The general public is apt to express this feature resentfully by
saying that the modern teacher "crams." Better informed critics
have put it that modern education is little more than a process of
"encephalisation," or the imprinting of certain facts on the
child's brain almost as mechanically as the indenting of marks on
the cylinder of a gramophone. Each of these criticisms implies an
injustice. Educationists and teachers have, of course, discussed this
very point for decades, and the present system is the formulation of
their deliberate judgment. They still differ amongst themselves as to
the proportion of memory-work and stimulation-work, but it is too late
in the day (if accurate at all) to tell teachers that to "educate"
means "to draw out" the child's "faculties," not to put in.
Every elementary teacher knows that he must train the child to think
as well as furnish it with positive information. The point one may
legitimately raise is whether the general educational practice
represents a fair adjustment of the two functions.

It is essential in such disputes to have clear principles. What is the
aim of education? The current phrase, "to make good citizens," is
far too vague. A good citizen is, in a large employer's mind, a man
who will work for two pounds a week and not annoy wealthier people by
demanding more: in a clergyman's mind, one who goes to church. The
point is serious and relevant, because there is a growing tendency
among the middle and upper class to insist on a return to the ideal of
the old Church of England school society: the children must not be
educated in such a way that they will aspire above the station to
which the Almighty has called them. As, however, the educationist will
probably reply at once that his duty is to do all in his power to
promote intelligence during such period as the State thinks advisable,
we need not discuss the larger ideal of developing the child's
powers on general humanitarian grounds.

But glance at the manuals which are used in our schools, and consider
whether we have as yet realised the true ideal of education. These
manuals, and the methods employed, are the outcome of a hundred years
of critical discussion, yet I venture to say that they need to be
entirely rewritten. I pass over the infant-schools and earlier
standards, where the first general ideas are carefully, and on the
whole judiciously, implanted. As soon, however, as the child enters
its teens, it is painfully overloaded with memory-work. I take, for
example, the manuals of geography and history which are used in
educating children of eleven in a first-class London secondary school.
They are crammed with information which will never be of the least use
to one man in ten thousand, and which we have no right whatever to
impose on the young brain with so much necessary work to do.

The manual of early English history which I have before me is a
characteristically modern production. Instead of the grim old
paragraphs, in alternate large and small type, on which the eye of the
child nearly always gazes with reluctance, there are vivid sketches of
life in successive ages. There is danger, perhaps, that the child will
pass to the opposite extreme, and take the manual as a story-book, a
work of ephemeral interest; at least careful guidance will be needed
to enable it to select the necessary material which is to be
memorised. But the chief defect still is the overloading of the pages
with matter of no serious usefulness. The doings of Ethelbert and
Ethelfrith and Redwald and Penda and Offa, whose very names bewilder
the young mind, are compressed into a few forbidding paragraphs,
instead of being relegated to the University. Later come Ethelwulf and
Osburh and Ethelbald and Ethelbert; and Sweyn Forkbeard and Olaf
Trygvasson and Guhilda; and Rhodri and Llywelyn and Griffith ap Rees
and Own Gwynedd and Egfrith and Malcolm Canmore and John Balliol. How
many of us know, or need to know, a word about them, and their
families, and their battles? Then the French wars are told in detail,
and the pages bristle with dates and French names and genealogies; and
the Wars of the Roses introduce a new series of repellent and useless
names and dates. The child, in a word, is enormously overburdened with
stuff which we adults would refuse to commit to memory or even to
read. Yet this is a very modern manual, the last word in the
adaptation of history to the mind of a child of ten or eleven.

The manual of European geography, also, is one of the most modern and
enlightened that a teacher can choose, but it imposes a mass of
pedantic and useless knowledge. Isotherms and isobars and the freezing
of the Oder and Vistula and Danube; the navigability of the Ebro and
Guadalquiver, and the wheat-growing areas of France and Spain, and the
industries of Lille and Roubaix and Magdeburg and Lombardy and Smyrna;
in a word, fully one-third of the details in the little manual--the
details which it is most difficult to remember, which tax the
child's brain most, and will be forgotten soonest and with least
loss--ought not to have been inserted. The whole plan is academic and
pedantic: it is built on the supposition that the child must have a
summary of the kind of knowledge which a geographical expert would
have to master. And in later years the child must laboriously cover
the whole globe with the same unnecessary attention to useless
details.

In mathematics, at least, the same criticism will hold. Geometry is,
of course, no longer a mere task of memorisation; but the positive
knowledge of problems is not of the least use, save in a few
exceptional cases, and the training of the mind might be achieved by
lessons in natural science. In natural science itself one might
quarrel with much of the material given: not one in ten thousand, for
instance, will even remember in later years the elements of botany.
But at least we are, in giving scientific information, training the
young to inquire into the nature of positive reality and initiating
them to branches of knowledge in which they can easily advance in
later years, since we have so fine a popular literature of science,
and the advance will be a considerable gain in their whole mental
outlook. It is chiefly in regard to history and geography that time
and labour might be spared, and more leisure given for ensuring that
the child will assimilate the knowledge imparted. Mental energy should
not be wasted in mastering an immense collection of facts which,
experience shows, are certain to be forgotten within a few years.

I may also recall that, when we choose to carry out the elementary
reform of abolishing the plurality of tongues, a vast economy will be
made in the curriculum, and really useful knowledge will be imparted
more thoroughly and with finer attention to the texture of the
child's brain. The academic plea, that there is excellent training
in a thorough study of Latin and Greek, may be freely granted. But
there is just as excellent a training in the thorough study of such
branches of science as are fitted for the school, and the positive
information gained is permanently useful.

If we thus eliminate languages and simplify geography and history we
give the modern teacher a more hopeful opportunity. It is surely the
universal experience that we forget nine-tenths of the geographical
details we learn at school, and we find little inconvenience in
re-learning such as we need to master in later years. A judicious
outline-scheme, with more physiography and less of useless detail, and
a fuller account of one's national geography (not because it
describes the child's country, but because it is practical
information) would suffice. The remainder, or part of it, could be
imparted in technical training for commerce. History should be wholly
remodelled. It is ludicrous to-day to make the child grow pale and
worn over the past royal families and wars of England, and dismiss the
general history of the race in a page or two. A fine scheme of the
history, and even the prehistory and origin, of the human race, with
so much fuller information about the child's own country as is
useful for the understanding of its institutions and monuments, could
be imparted in less time, with more interest, and with far greater
profit. The patriotic sham deeply vitiates our scheme of instruction
and makes the training of the child scandalously one-sided and
exacting. Germany has recently shown us the pernicious results of this
political perversion of education.

Passing to the moral education of children, we at once find it cruelly
distorted and enfeebled by a religious sham of the least defensible
nature. Such moralists as Kant and Emerson hardly exaggerated the
human importance of moral law, however much they failed to understand
its human significance. Character is the pivot on which life turns.
The general diffusion of fine qualities of character would transform
the earth, quite apart from economic and political reform, and lead to
a speedier settlement of our industrial and international
difficulties. It is therefore of supreme importance to train the will
or character of the child from its earliest years. Yet there is no
other branch of our education, and hardly any other branch of our
life, in which we tolerate so crude and ludicrous a pretence of work.

The education authority of the Metropolis of England would, one
supposes, have the advantage of the finest expert advice in the world.
Enter one of the thousands of schools under its control, however, and
ask how the training of character is conducted. A teacher informs you
that at college he has learned only to impart "Biblical
knowledge." He will show you a scheme of lessons founded on the Old
and New Testament. The younger the child, the more preposterous the
lesson. In the lower standards the child must learn the story of the
Creation, the Fall, the Deluge, etc. It is still too young to imagine
that its teacher may, at the command of our education authorities, be
grossly deceiving it, or to perceive that these ancient Babylonian
legends contain no particular incentive to virtue. When it passes to
the higher standards it is initiated to some equally remarkable
stories about the early history of mankind and the early conduct of
the Deity. The teacher rarely believes these things, and it may be
assumed that men like Mr. Sidney Webb, who voted for this scheme of
education in the L.C.C., do not. If the child has intelligence enough
to raise the question of veracity, it must be snubbed or deceived. A
London teacher told me that on one occasion, when he had described
some of the remarkable proceedings of the Israelites in ancient
Palestine, a precocious youngster asked: "Please, sir, is it
true?" Our education authorities forbid him to reply to such a
question. Indeed, his headmaster was a Nonconformist (very zealous for
Bible lessons), and would find a way to punish any departure from the
appointed untruths.

The lessons from the New Testament are, it is true, devoid of this
atmosphere of Oriental animalism, ferocity, and superstition which
clings to the Old Testament lesson, but here again the teacher is
forced to violate the elementary principles of education. He must
gravely tell the story of the miraculous birth, the crucifixion, and
the resurrection of Christ. He probably knows that some of the most
learned divines in England and other countries regard these stories as
false, but he must deliberately and solemnly tell the young that
Christ was God and that these things are written in the "Word of
God." He must repeat parables which we know to have been borrowed
(and often spoiled in the borrowing) from the Jewish rabbis, yet teach
that this was the unique feature of Christ's preaching. He must use
all his ingenuity to wring a moral lesson out of the parables of the
workers in the vineyard, the royal banquet, and so on. He must keep up
this elaborate deception of the child until it leaves his care; and he
knows that, in nine cases out of ten in London or any large city, the
child is already hearing on all sides sneers at these ancient myths,
and laughing at the system which inculcates them in the name of all
that is most sacred.

The aim of our London authorities, and education authorities generally
in England, is not to train character, but to teach the contents of
the Bible. Why a civic authority should include the teaching of the
Bible no man knows; and whether a civic authority can be indifferent
to the truth or untruth of the lessons it imposes few seem to ask. Mr.
Sidney Webb, endorsing these lessons, said that the Bible was "great
literature"; and scores of our parochial legislators, who were not
generally known to admire great literature (but _were_ known to have
numbers of Nonconformist constituents), fervently repeated the phrase.
Does the child appreciate or hear a single word about the literary
qualities of the Bible? Does a literary lesson need to be a deliberate
lesson in untruth? Can we find no great literature which has not the
taint of untruth?

Dr. Clifford says that these lessons tend to make "good citizens."
It is not at first sight apparent why we should go to the literature
of an ancient, mendacious, polygamous, and bloodthirsty tribe for
lessons in citizenship in a modern civilisation. Let us suppose,
however, that the ingenious teacher has wrung a moral of truthfulness,
fraternity, respect for women, self-reliance, and universal justice
out of these peculiar records of ancient Judæa. Follow the child, in
imagination, into the later years of citizenship. He hardly leaves the
school before he learns that the whole Biblical scheme is very
generally ridiculed, and is rejected even by large numbers of learned
theologians. Before many years, at least, he is fairly sure to learn
this. The prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount he, of course,
never had the slightest intention of observing. The teacher, even
while he reads the quixotic counsels, knows, and possibly notes with
approval, that the boy's code is: "If any smite thee on the one
cheek, smite him forthwith on both." But the boy now learns that
from the Creation to the Resurrection the whole story is seriously
disputed and is rejected by the majority of well-educated people. He
looks back on his "Bible lessons" and his teacher with derision,
and he discards the whole authority of his code of conduct. Surely an
admirable foundation for virtue and citizenship!

Into the larger question of the relation of religious education and
crime I cannot enter here. I have shown elsewhere that France,
Victoria, and New Zealand, the countries with longest experience of
secular education, have the best record among civilised nations in the
reduction of crime. The carelessness of clerical writers as to the
truth of their statements on this subject is appalling. There is not a
tittle of reason in criminal statistics, or any other exact
indications of national health, for retaining religious lessons in our
schools. They are there merely because the clergy find it conducive to
their prestige to have their sacred book enthroned with honour in the
national scheme of education. As in the case of divorce, they ask us
to maintain immorality in the name of religion. German schools are
saturated with religious teaching, yet we have seen the issue of it
all.

For one hundred years our English school-system has been hampered and
perverted by this clerical insistence on religious lessons. Parents,
they sometimes say, desire it; but when the Trades Union Congress, the
only large body of parents which ever pronounced on the subject,
repeatedly voted for secular education, by overwhelming majorities,
the clergy, through the minority of their followers, could only secure
the exclusion of the subject from the agenda. Neither do the majority
of teachers desire it; while educationists, as a whole, resent this
grievous complication of their work. Nothing but the complete
secularisation of all schools receiving funds from the nation or
municipality will enable us to advance. The clergy must do their own
work on their own premises. The moral pretext is a thin disguise of an
effort to use the nation's resources and authority for the purpose
of attaching children to the churches.

Writers on the subject are not wholly agreed whether we ought to
substitute moral lessons for the discarded Bible lessons. We can in
such a matter proceed only on probabilities, and it seems to me that
judicious lessons for the training of character are very desirable. I
do not so much mean abstract or direct lessons on the various
qualities of character. If such lessons (on truthfulness, honesty,
manliness, etc.) were tactfully and sensibly conducted, they could be
of great service. There is really not much danger of turning the
average British schoolboy into a prig. But indirect lessons,
especially from history and biography, should be more effective.

In either case our teachers would need special training for the
lessons, and no philosophic or religious or anti-religious view of
moral principles should be admitted. Experience has surely shown how
little use there is in giving children a "categorical imperative,"
or a set of arbitrary commandments, or an æsthetic lesson on
"modesty." You cannot in one hour teach the child to think, and in
the next expect it to accept your instruction without thinking,
because you are not prepared to give reasons for your commands. It is
sometimes forgotten that even children share the mental awakening of
our age, and must be treated wisely. The American or the Australian
child well illustrates the change that is taking place. It is
increasingly dangerous to give children dogmatic or mystic instruction
in rules of conduct, nor is it in the least necessary to base this
important part of their training on disputable grounds. Every quality
of character that is inculcated may be related to the child's actual
or future experience of life, and will find an ample sanction therein.
Life is full of material for such lessons: material far richer and
easier of assimilation than the doings of an ancient Oriental people
with a different code of morals. Let these lessons of history and
contemporary life be developed, let the child learn in plain human
speech the social significance of justice and honour, avoiding
namby-pamby dissertations on the beauty of virtue, and there will be
placed in the mind of the young, not an exotic plant which the child
will be tempted to eradicate, but a germ which will grow and bear
fruit under the influence of its own experience.

The modern ideal of education further implies that the State shall
provide higher tuition for those youths and maidens to whom it will be
profitable to impart it. Scholastic evolution is advancing so rapidly
in this direction that the ideal hardly needs vindication. Seventeen
hundred years ago such a "ladder of education" existed in Europe;
from the municipally-endowed elementary school the promising youth
could pass, through secondary colleges, to the imperial schools at
Rome. Had that model been retained and improved instead of being
abandoned for fourteen centuries, Europe would be in an immeasurably
greater state of efficiency than it is. We are restoring and improving
the pagan model, and there are signs that in time we shall have a
complete system of secondary, technical, and higher education, quite
apart from the schools in which the children of more or less wealthy
parents learn their traditional virtues and vices. If we have also
some means by which able children whose talent has escaped the
academic eye (of which we have many classical instances) may in later
years have a chance of recognition, we shall exploit the intelligence
of the race with splendid results.

The cost of this great reform need not intimidate us. Enormous sums of
money have been given (by men like Mr. Carnegie) or bequeathed for the
purpose, and the admirable practice will continue. But we need a
searching revision of educational endowments, foundations,
scholarships, etc. There is strong reason to suspect that estates
which are now of great value are not applied to the scholastic
purposes for which they were intended, or are badly administered, or
are used in giving gratuitous or cheap education to the children of
comfortable parents who secure favour or influence. A consolidation of
all the endowments which had not in their origin an express sectarian
purpose would provide a fund to which the State and municipal
authorities need add little. The scheme would bring some order into
our chaos of schools and colleges, and, while the more snobbish
establishments would continue to preserve their pupils from the
society of the children of tradesfolk, and would waste valuable
resources on uncultivable minds, the youth of the nation generally, of
both sexes, would be developed to the full extent of its capacity.
These things have a monetary value. A distinguished historical writer
told me that, on sending his son to Sandhurst, he proposed that they
should study together the campaigns of Napoleon. The youth presently
informed him that the traditions of Sandhurst did not allow them to do
serious work outside the general routine. A few years later we heard
the details of our South African War.

It will be a part of this increased efficiency to rid our secondary
and higher schools of clerical domination. It is futile to say that
the clergyman must represent morals and religion in the school. His
record as a moralist during fifteen hundred years does not recommend
his services. Even to-day public schools which retain the tradition of
clerical masters are deplorable from the moral point of view. Some of
them are nurseries of a vice which, unless it be discontinued when the
youth goes out into the world, may bring on him one of the most
degrading sentences of our penal law. The clerical _method_ of
character-training--one admits, of course, great occasional
personalities--has little influence on these things. Public-school
boys, and especially young men at our universities, know that every
syllable which the preacher addresses to them is disputed, and no
other ground of right and healthy conduct is, as a rule, impressed on
them. Many will know that the grossest opinion of the clergy
themselves is current in our public schools and older universities,
and is embodied in numbers of scurrilous stories. The position of the
clergyman in our educational world is false. He is there for the same
reason that the Bible is in the elementary school: in the interest of
the Churches. We have improved mental education enormously since it
ceased to be a monopoly of the clergy. Possibly we will make a similar
improvement in character-training; we can hardly do it with less
success than they have done.


 CHAPTER IX.
 THE EDUCATION OF THE ADULT

IF it be granted that it is the interest and the duty of a nation to
develop the intelligence of its people, we must conclude that the work
is only half done, or not half done, by even an ideal system of what
is commonly called education. I am assuming that a time will come when
no youth or maiden will enter workshop or office before the age of
seventeen, if not eighteen; and that the better endowed minority of
our children will, without regard to their private resources, be
promoted to secondary, technical, and higher schools. This minority
will, on the whole, need no further attention. Cultural interest and
professional stimulation will ensure that their studies continue. But
the majority will fall lamentably short of the ideal of developed and
alert intelligence. The added three or four years will be enormously
valuable to the teacher, but in the majority of cases the intellectual
interest will still be so feeble that the distractions of life will at
once extinguish it.

If we speak of our actual world, not of an ideal world, this fact is
too patent to need proving. Forty-five years ago a band of enthusiasts
fought for the establishment of universal elementary education. The
survivors of that band confess that the splendid results they
anticipated have not been secured. One is, indeed, tempted sometimes
to wonder whether there was not more zeal for culture among the
workers half a century ago than there is to-day. When you listen to a
conversation, of workers or of average middle-class people, on
politics or theology or some other absorbing topic, you are astounded
at the slender amount of personal thinking and the slavery to phrases
which they have heard. Their minds seem to resemble the screen of a
kaleidoscope, on which the coloured phrases they have read in journals
or cheap literature weave automatic patterns. I speak, of course, of
the mass. I have given hundreds of scientific lectures to keen
audiences of working men, and I know that tens of thousands of them
have excellent collections of familiar books. But the result of
forty-five years of education is far from satisfactory. It was thought
that, when the people learned to read, and the ideas of an Emerson or
a Darwin could be appropriated by any man of moderate endowment, the
level of the race would rise materially. It has not risen as much as
was expected. The phrases are learned and repeated: the ideas are not
vitally assimilated, because the intellect is not sufficiently
developed.

Two classes of people will impatiently retort that there is no need
for further development. One class consists of those who dread a
higher intelligence in the workers because it leads to discontent with
their condition. To which one may reply that this concern comes too
late. One needs little intelligence to perceive the inequalities of
the distribution of wealth. The workers of the world have perceived
it, and, although only an extreme Socialist minority demands
equalisation, the mass of the workers demand a higher reward. Midway
between Australia and England, on the deck of a liner, I heard a group
of middle-class men and women contrasting the menace of the Australian
workers with the industrial content of the mother-country. We landed,
to find from the journals that the whole United Kingdom was punctuated
by strikes, agitations, and demands. It is too late. A distinguished
Belgian prelate was taken into a large foundry, and, observing the
workers, he impulsively cried: "What a slave's life!" "Hush,
they will hear you," said the manager. In repeating the experience
he added: "They have heard: it is too late." It will be better now
if, in the industrial struggle of the future, there is intelligence as
well as principle on both sides. If any large proportion of work in
the human economy requires the sacrifice of the intelligence, there is
something wrong with the work.

Curiously enough, the other class of people who are impatient of the
design to stimulate their minds consists of the mass of the workers
themselves. After eight or nine or ten hours of heavy muscular work
every day, they say, they have no inclination or fitness for serious
literature, serious lectures, or serious art. They prefer a drink, a
bioscope, a music-hall. Eight hours' work, eight hours' play,
eight hours' sleep; that is the ideal. A very natural and
symmetrical ideal, but--it is just the ideal which "the
capitalist" wishes them to cultivate, and this might suggest
reflection. Someone will do the thinking while they play. Democratic
government is a mischief and a blunder unless Demos is capable of
thinking. If the workers of the world have an ambition to control
their destinies, they must realise that their destinies are things too
large and complex and important to be controlled by men with sleepy
brains. There is no solution of the broad social problem of this
planet which does not imply that every adult man and woman, of normal
powers, shall be alert and informed and self-assertive enough to take
an intelligent part in its administration.

Therefore, it seems to many that a scheme of education which ceases to
operate at the age of fourteen, which teaches children to read and has
no further concern with what they read, which impresses on their
cortex a mass of facts of no utility or stimulation, is not a
fulfilment of a nation's duty, or a proper consideration of a
nation's interest. The grander lessons of history, the more
impressive truths of science, the vital features of economics and
sociology, the ennobling characters of fine art, cannot be even
faintly impressed on the young mind. Yet they can be impressed on the
minds of nearly all adults, and it would be an incalculable gain to
the race if they were. What is being done, and what might be done, to
effect this?

The nation at present leaves it to commercial interest and to
philanthropy to carry out, in some measure, this important function,
and we may at once eliminate the commercial interest. It supplies, at
a proper profit, what is demanded. A minority ask for cheap works of
science and art and history, and several admirable series of manuals
and serial publications are supplied. A majority, an overwhelming
majority, asks only to be entertained, and there is a mighty flood of
novels and amusing works, a rich crop of music-halls and
bioscope-shows and theatres and skating rinks. It will readily be
understood that, regarding happiness as the ultimate ideal, I regard
entertainment as a proper part of life. The comedian and the
story-teller and the professional football-player are rendering good
service, and it is intellectual snobbery to murmur that they "merely
entertain" people. A good deal of nonsense is written about sport
and entertainment. Many of us can, with pleasant ease, suspend a
severely intellectual task for a few hours to witness a first-class
football match. One wonders if some of the ascetics who speak about
"mudded oafs" and "the football craze" are aware that the game
(except for professional players) occupies merely an hour and a half a
week (or alternate week) for little more than half a year.

The mischief is that so much of our entertainment appeals to and
fosters a state of mind or taste which does exclude culture. We have
to-day an army of puritan scouts, watching our music-halls and
cinematograph films, our picture-cards and novels, our open spaces by
night and our bathing-beaches by day, calculating minutely what amount
of dress or undress or sexual allusion they may permit. Certainly we
need coercion in these matters. No one who moves amongst our average
people, in any rank of society, can fail to recognise that there would
be in time a volcanic outpour of sexuality if we did not impose
restriction. Whether this chaste pruriency of the modern Churches is
an admirable thing, and whether its hirelings are a desirable
supplement to the police-force, need not be discussed here; but what
amuses one is their intense zeal to detect the narrowest fringe of
impropriety and their utter obtuseness to graver matters. I have
sometimes, when waiting before a lecture in the dressing-room of a
variety theatre, been confronted with a notice that "the curtain
will be rung down on any artist who says 'Damn' or mentions the
lodger," or, more candidly (in the Colonies): "Don't swear. We
don't care a damn, but the public does." The general public would,
if it were consulted, probably make the same reply as the framers of
the notice, and would blame the police for the restriction of liberty.
There is, in a word, an appalling poverty of taste in the general
public, and it pays the purveyor of entertainment to adapt his wares
to it as far as the police will permit. To this lamentable lack of
taste and culture (in the broad sense) officials and moralists are
entirely indifferent as long as the _comédienne_ does not refer to
the seventh commandment. The public may be as ignorant and vulgar as
they like, but they must not give expression to a natural effect of
this.

The music-hall and the bioscope are the great academies of our people
to-day, and their work is largely stupefying. Sentimental songs of the
most vapid description alternate with patriotic songs of a medieval
crudeness and humorous songs which might have appealed to a
prehistoric intelligence. Bloodthirsty melodramas, sensational scenes,
and infinite variations of "The girl who did what we are forbidden
to talk about," evoke and inflame elementary emotions at the lowest
grade of culture. Clergymen give certificates of high moral efficacy
to crude representations of passion in high life which are designed to
appeal to raw feelings. The posters alone--the eccentric costumes and
daubed faces and attempts at novelty in the way of leering--warn away
people of moderate taste or intelligence. The bioscope is almost as
bad. Apart from a few excellent travel and scenic and scientific
pictures, the show is a mass of crude faking and boorish horse-play
which presupposes an elementary intelligence in the spectators.
Pictorial post-cards add to the monstrosities and puerilities of this
kind of public education, and a large proportion of the stories
published, especially in the periodicals which are read by girls and
boys and uneducated women, fall in the same category. We may trust
that the idea will not occur to anyone of making a collection of our
picture-cards, films, music-hall posters, novelties, etc., for
preservation as typical amusements of the twentieth century.

It is stupid to watch this lamentable exposure of our low average of
culture week by week with complete indifference until more
underclothing is displayed than we think proper. The bioscope and
music-hall--I speak of the majority--are not merely entertaining; they
are undoing the work of the educator. They are fostering the raw and
primitive emotions which it is the task of education to refine and
bring under control, debasing public taste, and appealing to a
standard which is essentially unintellectual. The idea that fun may be
utterly stupid and crude, provided it is "clean," is the idea of a
narrow-minded fanatic, an enemy of society.

When we pass to the next cultural level of entertainment--the better
music-hall, the metropolitan type of theatre, the concert, the novel,
etc.--we have a vast provision of entertainment which amuses or
interests without cultural prejudice; rising at times to a positive
measure of artistic education or intellectual stimulation. Two things
only need be noticed here. The first is the stupidity of the kind of
censorship which we tolerate; of which little need be said, since it
is generally recognised. The amateur moral censorship of art reaches
the culmination of its absurdity in our dramatic inquisition. The
dramatist may deal with sex-passion as pruriently and provokingly as
he likes, provided he leaves enough to the spectator's facile
imagination; but he must not attempt to raise love as an intellectual
issue. Our people may feel love: they must not think about it as a
serious problem.

The other, and more needed observation, regards the novel. There are
novels of fine artistic value, like those of Phillpotts: novels of
great intellectual use, like those of Wells: and novels of a general
and more subtle educational value, like those of Meredith. There are
novels which, like the melodrama, counteract education by their low
standard of art and intelligence, and there are novels--the great
majority--which entertain without prejudice. Since we have as much
right to be entertained as to be instructed, novel-reading is a normal
part of a normal life. Seeing, however, that a very large proportion
of the community read nothing but novels, it has been felt that the
novel might be used as a vehicle of instruction, and the didactic or
historical novel has become an institution. Many believe that they are
being educated when they read this literature.

Against this comforting assumption it is necessary to protest. Even
the greatest historical novelists, Dumas and Scott, have taken
remarkable liberties with the known facts, and added to the picture of
the time a mass of imaginative detail. Many historical novels, like
_Quo Vadis_ or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, misrepresent personalities or
periods for controversial purposes; and the bulk of modern historical
novels are worthless jumbles of fact and imagination. It is, as a
rule, the same with the sociological novel. You must know the facts in
advance--you must know where the facts end and the fiction begins--or
else merely regard the book as a form of entertainment. Lately I read
a serious historical work, by a distinguished writer, in which Hypatia
(who was fifty or sixty years old when she was murdered) is described
as a "girl-philosopher"; clearly because Kingsley, for controversial
purposes, thought fit in his novel to make her a young and rather
foolish maiden. Thousands of people take their convictions from
"novels with a purpose," especially religious or sociological
novels, without reflecting that the author may legitimately give them
either fact or fiction. Such novels are often profoundly mischievous.
A conscientious didactic novelist like Mr. Wells aims rather at
raising issues and stimulating reflection, and in this Mr. Wells has
done splendid service. Others have done equal disservice, and have
used artificially constructed characters for the purpose of raising
prejudice against certain ideas, or have misled by a calculated
mixture of fact and fiction. It was in recommending to the public one
of these novels--an exceptionally silly and crude piece of work--that
the Bishop of London described Christianity as "woman's best
friend."

Religious literature is particularly offensive in this respect, but I
will give special consideration to it later. Our press-criticism of
books is a very imperfect system of checking the vagaries and
prejudices of authors. The criticisms are very frequently marked by
ignorance of the subject and by personal or doctrinal hostility to the
author, while the more learned and conscientious journals often show
the most ludicrous pedantry. I once published a novel, pseudonymously,
and was amused to read in a London weekly, which takes great pride in
the smartness of its reviews, that the author had neither an
elementary knowledge of the art of writing nor an elementary
acquaintance with the subject on which he wrote. I had already at that
time written about twenty volumes, and I had had twelve years'
intimate experience of the monastic life with which the book was
concerned. Mr. Clement Shorter, not knowing the author, had generously
described the book as "a brilliant novel." On another occasion an
historical work of mine was gravely censured, though no specific
errors were noted in it, by our leading literary organ, on the ground
that I was not an expert on the period. I looked up the same
journal's critique of a work written on the same historical period
by an academic authority, and published by his university, and I found
that, though there were dozens of errors in the work, it had passed
the censor with full honours. I add with pleasure that some of the
most generous notices of my works have appeared in papers (such as
_The Daily Telegraph_ and _The Spectator_) to which my ideas must be
repugnant. But most literary men agree with me that reviewing is, to a
large extent, prejudiced and incompetent, and few of us would cross a
room to read ordinary press-notices of our books.

One might extend this criticism to the general work of the press as
the great popular educator. We must, however, reflect that the press
is hampered by restrictions which the public ought to bear in mind: a
journal is always a commercial transaction with a particular section
of the public, and it is generally pledged to political partisanship.
It is only just to remark that this materially restricts the
educational ambition of many journalists. The public themselves are to
blame that a large section of our press devotes so much space to
sensational murders, adulteries, burglaries, royal births and
marriages, wars and other crimes and follies. Sunday journals often
contain twenty columns of this rubbish, and the worst parts of it are,
with the most disgusting hypocrisy, thrust into prominence by
especially large head-lines announcing "A Painful Case." One
imagines the working man spending five or six hours of the Sabbath
reading this sort of stuff. Great and grave things, which he ought to
know, are happening all over the world, but he must have sharp eyes if
he is to catch the obscure little paragraphs which--if there is any
reference at all--tell him how many have been put to death in Russia
in the last quarter, or how the republican experiment fares in
Portugal, or how democracy advances in Australia or the United States.
The space is needed for pictures of burned mansions and notorious
murderers and the commonplace relatives of politicians, for verbatim
reports of divorce and criminal cases, for inquests and royal
processions, and for the magnificent speeches of Cabinet Ministers and
would-be Cabinet Ministers.

This stricture applies to the press generally. How far it sacrifices
to these meretricious purposes the serious function of educating the
public has been painfully impressed on us by recent experience. Only
one or two journals in England surpassed our drowsy politicians in
sagacity and foresight. Though an extensive reader of German
literature (scientific and historical), it had never been my business
to follow political or military utterances; yet, when the war broke
out and I looked back on Germany's enormous output in this
department, I realised that there had been in London for a year or two
enough German literature to convince any moderate observer that war
was fast approaching--and this was only a fragment of an enormously
larger literature. Our press had ridiculed the one or two men and
journals who warned the public of the danger. Further, when it
transpired that our Government had met the crisis with painful
slowness and inefficiency, nearly the whole press again conspired to
check criticism, and it is probable that when the war is over the
press will unite with the Churches in cultivating a foolish and
dangerous contentment on the part of the public. Our press is, in
fact, very largely an instrument of our corrupt party-system. It never
initiates reform, and it mirrors, day by day, all the crimes and
follies and maladies of our social order without the least resentment
or the faintest suggestion of reconstruction. Journals are constantly
appearing with the professed intention of correcting these defects,
yet they are almost invariably spoiled by illiberalism in one or more
departments of their work, or by gross exaggerations, hysterical
language, or impracticable proposals.

All this is a reflection of the generally low state of public culture,
and it will not alter until we devote serious care to the education of
the general intelligence. We begin at school to cultivate the
child's imagination, though it is the quality of a child's mind
which least requires stimulating and is most in need of subordinating
to intelligence. In later years, when the feeble intellectual
stimulation we have given is exhausted, we have to appeal to the
imagination or go unheard. "I have not read a book since I left
school," a music-hall artist observed to me. At twenty-five he had
become incapable of doing more than look at illustrations, as he had
done in his childhood. We go on until we make the imagination itself
feeble on its constructive side. Miles of generally dauby and
grotesque posters line our streets; tons of the trashiest literature
for the young are discharged from marble palaces in the neighbourhood
of Fleet Street; novels multiply until the general public takes the
words author and novelist to be synonymous; and the daily organ of the
millions tends more and more to be a collection of pictures of
unimportant events and persons, with a very slender and peculiar
quantity of news.

If we agree that democracy will advance until the majority rule in
reality, and not merely in theory, these things must concern us. It is
of little use to point to the occasional periodical with small
circulation which endeavours to educate, to the occasional educative
column in more important journals, or to the occasional lecture or
serious concert or drama. The broad fact remains that our future
rulers are increasingly encouraged to refrain from mental cultivation,
to mistake an appeal to the imagination for knowledge, and to debase
their taste more and more with raw representations of crime and
passion. The working man reads with indignation of fashionable ladies
struggling to find a place in court when a man is being tried for a
series of sordid murders; and the working man then reads, day after
day, a three-column verbatim report of the trial, and regrets that
there is not more of it.

In order to meet this grave public need an earlier generation invented
night-schools and Mechanics' Institutes. Many of these still do
useful work, but their number shrinks rather than increases. The
Co-operative Movement, again, set up in the early days a fine ambition
to educate its adult members, but this ambition has not been generally
sustained in the vast modern movement. Hundreds of lecture-societies
were founded, and hundreds (about seven hundred in Great Britain, I
believe) exist to-day and do some excellent work; but many of the
societies which adhered most faithfully to the educational ideal are
in difficulties or extinct. The travel-lecture or funny lecture and
the "popular" concert encroach more and more on the serious
programme. Free libraries were another hope of the reformers of the
last generation, and they are now endowed by millionaires and
maintained by municipalities. They exhibit, perhaps, the saddest
perversion of social ambition. Neither Mr. Carnegie nor any serious
municipality thinks it a duty to provide gratuitous entertainment, but
at least two-thirds of their resources are really devoted to this. The
enormously greater part of the work of free libraries is to beguile
the idle hours of young men and the idle days of young women with
novels that rarely contain a particle of intellectual stimulation.

Public museums were another device for educating the mass of the
people, and they have largely failed. There has been in recent years a
little more regard for the public, as well as for students, but it is
still painful to see crowds passing with bovine eyes amidst our
accumulated treasures. The grouping and labelling are still too
academic: the general scheme and the immense wealth of detail daze the
eye of the inexpert. More guides and lecturers, in touch with and
informally accessible to the public, and a closer association with
University Extension and Gilchrist and other lectures, are very much
needed. Saturday afternoon in the British Museum is a melancholy
spectacle of wasted wealth. A small model museum, designed solely for
the education of the general public, would be more useful in this
respect than our magnificent national museum. Unfortunately, the small
museums copy the academic defects of the larger. The curator of one,
on whom I urged the needs of the public, replied wearily: "Well, it
will take me three years to arrange my Cephalopods, and then I will
see what I can do."

We need a comprehensive and serious organisation and development of
our resources for educating the adult. Our Education Department needs
to throw out a new wing with the purpose of preventing the utter waste
of its work upon young children. Institutions like the British Museum
ought to be relieved of the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury
and one or two other somnolent gentlemen, and made the centre of a
splendid and energetic system of popular instruction and stimulation.
From such centres the educational officials (as distinct from learned
curators and youths from Oxford and Cambridge who look upon the public
as a nuisance) might issue attractive invitations and publications,
and be prepared to welcome the non-student, either with "showmen"
who understand the public mind or by a general and affable
accessibility of the whole staff. Municipal museums and libraries and
picture-galleries could be organised on similar lines by the
Department, and useful private foundations, such as the Bishopsgate
Institute, could be invited to co-operate, without interference in
their management. The supply of novels ought to be restricted to the
great masters of every country and a few moderns. The rich supply of
serious literature ought to be made attractive and easily accessible
to the public by good bibliographical guidance and constant lectures.
These things are, of course, being done. It is not so much the local
officials one quarrels with as the nation and its leaders. We want an
immense co-ordination and development of our resources and efforts out
of national funds. Lecture-societies and all kinds of educative
centres and institutes--there are thousands in the country--need to be
affiliated, encouraged, advised, and supplemented. The State should
not even shrink from publishing. The trade supplies only the actual
demand: the State must create a new and larger demand. Music would be
an integral part of this scheme of education, and here again we have a
large material ready for organisation.

Any man who has engaged in the work of educating and stimulating the
general public will realise how urgently some such scheme is needed,
and how splendid a service it would render. He will realise also that
the task will be formidable. I do not for a moment conceive the
general public as thirsting for culture. That is very largely due to
the way in which the work has hitherto been done. The recent success
of small but authoritative manuals of science and history, and of
several cheap series of literary works of high value, shows that a
fairly large public responds to every enlightened effort to assist
them. It will become very much larger when the work is organised on a
national scale and conceived as a really important function of the
State. That even then the majority of the nation would rush to the
reconstructed libraries and museums and lecture or concert-halls no
one will imagine for a moment. We do not undo in a few years the
effect of centuries of evil traditions. I am assuming, however, that
these various reforms I am discussing will proceed more or less
simultaneously, and will enormously assist each other. The abolition
of war would release rich funds for educational purposes: the
reorganisation of industry would provide a little more leisure and
capacity for mental recreation: other reforms would give a general
intellectual stimulation. Even now, however, much of this work could
be done. If we think it sufficient that our people remain in a
condition of elementary literacy and half-developed intelligence, if
we fancy that the _race_ will advance because it sets aside a special
caste of scholars for the promotion of culture, we may regard our
actual situation without concern. But if we desire that general
alertness of mind and decision of character which a democratic rule
implies, we cannot be indifferent. Aristocrats justly rail at the
democracy of Athens and Rome; it was an uneducated democracy--literate,
but uneducated, like ours. We need to advance, if we are not to
recede; and the uplifted race of the days to come will honour the
generation that taught men the compatibility of culture and
entertainment.

I am speaking, in the main, of the mass of the workers, but it would
be entirely unjust to insinuate that they alone need adult education.
The conventions of social life, the extraordinary slavery to fashions
and artificial rules, betray an intellectual flabbiness in the
wealthier members of society which just as urgently calls for
stimulation. We seem at times quite incapable of drawing a line
between acts of real courtesy and taste, which imply a certain grace
or delicacy of character, and conventional usages which have no
rational basis. The insistence on these conventional usages is part of
that general slavery to false traditions which I am assailing.

The most flagrant instance of this weakness of mind and character is
the docility with which we meet changes of fashion in dress, or retain
eccentric forms of clothing. Hardly any other feature so strongly
impresses the close observer with the fact that the race, as a whole
(and I speak only of civilised communities), advances little in
intelligence and self-possession in spite of the progress made by its
intellectual experts. One would say that here, especially, we need a
strong draught of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,--the gospel
of self-assertion, of strong personality, of severe reasoning,--but I
have not observed that our modern Nietzscheans differ much from their
neighbours in such matters. Yet the commercial expansion of modern
times is making this tyranny of fashion more ludicrous than it ever
was before.

The fashion-plates and descriptions contained in ladies' journals
have always provoked the furtive smile of the male. A coterie of
tradesmen, who are eager to promote business, and of wealthy ladies
who are equally eager to show that their purses are unlimited, decree
that the hat or costume shall continually vary in shape and colour.
The Anglo-French jargon of the sartorial journalist then impresses on
a larger circle of ladies the need of alertness and the horror of
being _démodée_,--it would be proof of incapacity to say "out of
fashion,"--and, as the season approaches, the proclamation of the
forthcoming colour or model is awaited with more feverish anxiety than
the announcement of the national budget. Schools of artists are
secretly inventing some variation--the wider the variation the
better--on the thousands of costumes which have already graced the
feminine frame, or discussing bold suggestions of reviving an ancient
model which has long disappeared even from the shops of
wardrobe-dealers. Privileged ladies rise in prestige by obtaining and
whispering advance information. At length the shop-windows blaze with
the new colour, the journals depict an ingenious new combination of
edges and folds and puckers, and womanhood plunges to the bottom of
its purse with an eagerness to avoid the suspicion of financial
stringency; while the discarded hats and dresses percolate
romantically through lower strata of society. Is it not good for
trade?

The masculine smile is, however, wearing thinner, as the absurd
despotism is now almost as great among the stronger sex. Here also a
group of commercial mathematicians evolve, every few months, a new
combination of brim and crown and curve, and artists design new
patterns of cloth and new contours of garment, and tyrannical
journalists hold up to public execration the man of means or position
who dares to find last year's fashion sufficiently comfortable or
decorative. "Not worn now, sir," says the shopman, with indulgent
smile, when you go to renew the hat or coat that has pleased you. The
bewildering thing is, not that manufacturers should be eager to sell
us new garments every few weeks, but that we bow with such docility to
this ludicrous fiction of monarchy. Long trousers or short trousers,
creased trousers or turned-up trousers, tight coats or loose coats,
bowlers or trilbys--we listen submissively to the mandate, without the
least consideration of our appearance or convenience.

Indeed, the only things that are permanent in this extravagant
procession of fashions are the things that are ugly, inconvenient, or
unhealthy, especially on the masculine side. The silk hat and the hard
felt hat linger as if in these extraordinary creations the
manufacturer had discovered the ideal head-covering. The swallow-tail
coat survives as if æsthetics could advance no further in the
attiring of wealthy men; even the buttons at the back, to which our
fiery ancestor attached his sword, must not be abandoned. The more
comfortable dinner-jacket remains a privileged client at the gate
until some audacious peer or prince will dispel the oppressive
reverence for the ancient swallow-tail; and peers and princes know how
dangerous it is to tamper with the spirit of reverence. The starched
collar and shirt are as rigidly prescribed as sacred vestments on high
occasions. The lady must still hang a thick and heavy screen of cloth
from her hips; first having it made too long and then holding it up
with her hand in order to escape the rich organic deposit on our
streets and the filth with which we suffer "domestic pets" to make
our squares hideous. Her abdominal organs must, if one may credit the
marvellous photographs published by the corset-makers, be
reconstructed every few years to accommodate the latest scheme of
body-curves. And from these upper reaches of our intellectual world,
the tyranny descends through level after level of the community until
it lays its last stern injunctions on the junior clerk and the
post-office assistant; or passes beyond the seas and compels the
Chinaman or the Japanese to discard his beautiful robe in favour of a
frock-coat and silk hat, or a striped tweed and bowler, when he
presents himself at the entrance-gate to civilisation.

We find an almost equally ludicrous tyranny of tradition or fashion in
almost every part of the ritual of social life. Twenty years ago I
issued from a rite-bound monastery into the free life of the world, to
find it similarly swathed in ritual bonds. I purchased, and stealthily
mastered, the "ceremonial" (as we used to call our rite-book) of
this new world--a book on "etiquette"--and led for some months a
strenuous and exacting life. I entered drawing-rooms with a nervous
recollection of about a score of rules that had to be observed in the
first five minutes, while the ritual of the mundane table entailed for
a long time a good deal of furtive observation of my fellows and
trembling under the butler's eye. To this day I am not quite clear
at what precise angle the elbow must stand in shaking hands. Social
life is overspread by a network of these prescriptions of the
unwritten law or the judicial decisions of the aristocracy which we
call "manners." There is, as a rule, so little discrimination
between the formal rules of an artificial code and the real impulses
of a gentlemanly nature that one has often to listen gravely and
silently while ladies commend the "perfect manners" of a man whom
one knows to be an adventurous ninny or a beast.

We need a new conception of civilisation, a sustained stimulation of
the intelligence throughout life, a strong infusion of the Nietzschean
gospel of personality and self-assertion. Some day we shall regard
education as half of the nation's serious business, and will devote
half our national revenue to it. Let it not be imagined that this
suggests a generation of dour and frightfully serious people who never
smoke or play bridge. I omit the function of entertainment only
because it has never been neglected. The supreme business of a State
is to make its people happy, strong, and prosperous. We shall approach
the ideal when we abolish war and reduce pauperism and crime by
registering all workers, organising all industry, reforming justice
and the penal system, and removing the morally diseased.

In those days education will be a vast, humane, scientific scheme for
guiding the growth of human embryos into industrious and orderly
citizens, and enabling the adult citizen pleasurably to cultivate his
mind and taste. The development of each child will be followed as the
development of a pupil is followed in the Jesuit Society, but with a
care to develop its individuality fully, in harmony with the
individualities of others. The child will not pass from the sphere of
the educator at puberty, with unformed mind and character, to swell
the great army of the intellectually listless. Ruskin's noble ideal
of "as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and
happy-hearted human creatures" will replace the narrow standards of
our Education Department, with which the child can have no sympathy.
From the first dawn of intelligence it will feel that a well-wishing
parent, the community, is training it to derive all the joy it can
from life, consistently with the joy of others and the day's duties,
when its turn comes to don the _toga virilis_. It will have learned by
that time that a development of its characteristic human powers is the
richest possession it can have, and, coming to adolescence, will not
at once cast aside the work of the teacher and dissipate its energy in
the crude indulgence of elementary passions and futile imaginings.
Neither child nor adult will shrink from work which stimulates the
intelligence or refines the taste, and a fine alert race, impatient of
untruth, injustice, and suffering, will set itself to develop fully
the resources of this planet.


 CHAPTER X.
 THE CLERICAL SHAM

THROUGHOUT the preceding chapters there have been resentful or
disdainful references to the Churches, and it may be suspected that,
in assailing other people's prejudices, I have cherished and
proceeded upon the anti-clerical prejudice. A very cursory examination
will, however, suffice to show that these criticisms were sound and
pertinent, and are not due to some mysterious antipathy to the
profession to which I once belonged. Few of those ugly or mischievous
traditions which form what I have called the smothering ash in the
intellectual activity of the nation have not the general support of
the clergy. Few of the reforms here suggested do not meet their
hostility. They constitute one of the most injurious conservative
forces in modern life. Their bodies are strewn over the whole
battlefield of the nineteenth century, and not one in a thousand of
them fought on the side of progress. The esteem in which they are
still widely held and the pretexts by which they guard this esteem are
the last, and by no means the least, of those shams which hamper our
advance and distract our energy.

A full and detailed indictment of the clergy would fill several
columns, and I must confine myself here to two or three considerations
which are at once sufficiently drastic and easily demonstrable. I will
therefore be content to show:

1. That the clergy claim and receive a large measure of public
confidence on the ground that they are the guardians of the most
sacred and beneficent truths, yet impose on the less educated masses
a preposterous collection of untruths, or statements which many of
their own scholars, and most lay scholars, regard as untrue.

2. That the clergy pose as the most sensitive and effective custodians
of our morals, yet their procedure is unjust, spiteful, and deceptive
to an extent which would not be tolerated in any lay profession.

3. That the clergy represent that their creed civilised Europe and is
necessary for the maintenance of its civilisation, yet their influence
and their ideas retarded the evolution of European civilisation for
centuries, and retard it to-day wherever they have sufficient power or
are immune from weighty criticism.

In enumerating the untruths which are still imposed by the clergy, I
will not linger over the Old Testament. When you censure them to-day
for attaching a sacred value to this collection of ancient Jewish
literature, they are apt to reply that your criticism is forty years
out of date. Every educated clergyman, they exclaim, now acknowledges
that the Old Testament is a mixture of Babylonian legends, primitive
tribal traditions, and moral literature of a naïve and very
interesting description. Whether this statement is true or no I must
leave to the judgment of those who have a closer acquaintance with the
modern clergy. Only two years ago I was persuaded, in an idle hour on
a liner, to listen to a sermon delivered by a young clergyman who had
just issued, with honours, from a highly modern Wesleyan college. It
was on the miracles of Moses in the wilderness--ingeniously relieved
by references to such other miracles as the appearance of a cross to
Constantine--and accepted them as literally as did Peter the Hermit.
Religious periodicals and books and parish-magazines suggest that
there is a good deal still of this medieval credulity; or that, at
least, the number of "educated clergymen" must be somewhat
restricted. But let us accept the assurance that the educated clergy
do accept the Old Testament at its true historical value. In which
case we must be content to express our surprise that no clergyman
seems to have the least scruple about imposing these things on young
children, and rustic congregations, and less cultivated races--than
which there is no more cowardly form of untruth: and that some of the
most notoriously unreliable and barbaric pages of the Old Testament
are read, Sunday by Sunday, as "the word of God" in all the
Christian Churches of the world, under the official orders of every
ecclesiastical authority in the world.

However, since these cultivated ecclesiastics smile at our criticism
of the Old Testament, and see nothing improper in a deception of the
ignorant, of which any body of professional laymen would be incapable,
let us turn to the New Testament. It is always useful to consider the
attitude of the clergy in its historical perspective. A hundred years
ago they were defending against the Deists the absolute truthfulness
of the Old Testament. Christ had promised the Holy Spirit to the
Church: the Holy Spirit could not possibly tolerate untruth: therefore
the teaching of the Church for sixteen centuries must be right. Within
two generations they have, in a great number, abandoned the inerrancy
of the Old Testament, without abandoning the Holy Spirit. It seems
only the other day when Cardinal Newman pleaded wistfully that we were
not compelled, under pain of eternal damnation, to believe that
Tobit's dog did really wag its tail. However, outside Scotland
clergymen do seem to be free to form their own opinions on such
allegations as that a whale swallowed a man and housed him for three
days. But in thus admitting that "inspiration" was consistent with
error, they have put the New Testament also in the hand of the critic.

It is well to remember, too, that this modern criticism of the Bible
is conducted almost entirely by divines. The average churchgoer has an
impression that these terrible people who are known as "the Higher
Critics" are anti-clerical laymen: possibly lascivious gentlemen
whose real ambition is to undermine the salutary discipline imposed by
the Churches. They are, of course, on the contrary, nearly all
ordained clergymen, and very conscientious clergymen, of some branch
of the Church. Rationalists never criticise the Bible. It has become a
branch of theological scholarship. I once--having been challenged by
the local clergyman, who promptly disappeared when I arrived--gave a
lecture on the divinity of Christ to an audience of Presbyterian
artisans, and assured them that the views and arguments I put before
them were taken solely from the works of distinguished and highly
honoured theologians. Their amazement and horror were most amusing.
They had not the dimmest idea that controversy on these points lay
merely between advanced and not-advanced members of the Christian
clergy; and that their local oracle had, in effect, merely been
imposing on them the opinions of the less learned divines in
opposition to the more learned.

And this fact dispenses me from the need to drag the reader into the
somewhat tiring labyrinth of proof and disproof which these warring
theologians have constructed. Nothing could be further from my mind
than the presumptuous and immodest wish to brand the clergy as
dishonest, and their beliefs as superstitious, because I happen to
regard those beliefs as false. Let the position be clearly understood.
A study of the _Hibbert Journal_ or any scholarly theological
periodical, or of any batch of learned theological works, will apprise
any person that what are ordinarily conceived to be the fundamental
positions of the Christian religion are challenged by a large
proportion of distinguished divines. Pleas of "reconstruction" are
constantly put before us; and at the Church of England Congress in
1912 it was plainly decided by the presiding Archbishop of York that
the "advanced" theologians had a legitimate place in the Church.
It is not a question of a few controverted points in the scheme of
Christian doctrine. No point that is specifically Christian is left
unchallenged. The divinity and miracles--especially the miraculous
birth and resurrection--of Christ, the prophecies, the doctrine of
heaven and hell, the divine guidance of the Church, the fall and
redemption of man--all these characteristic doctrines are gravely
disputed within the frontiers of the Churches themselves, wherever
freedom of expression is permitted.

One would prefer to rely on theologians only in such a matter, but for
my purpose it is not immaterial to add that outside the ranks of the
clergy scholarship is overwhelmingly against these doctrines. There
has been a good deal of unsubstantial talk about the beliefs of living
men of intellectual eminence, but resolute efforts have been made of
late years to wring from them a profession of Christian belief, and
the result has been so meagre that my statement is fully justified. A
large number declare that they are on the side of "religion." But
one has only to reflect that even Sir Oliver Lodge warmly professes to
be a Christian--and is, in fact, welcomed to read the lessons in
church--to see how little is conveyed by such expressions. The supreme
effort of the Churches to secure adhesions of this kind is probably
found in Mr. Tabrum's _Religious Beliefs of Scientists_ (1910), and
a study of that extraordinary jumble of the living and the dead, the
distinguished and the obscure, the really believing Christians and the
men who are notoriously not, will convince any person of the failure
of the Churches to obtain the literal adhesion of even a respectable
proportion of our distinguished men: not men of science merely--it is
a stupid error to suppose that the decay of faith is more or less
confined to them--but men of eminence in any department of research or
intellectual life. Not one in ten of them, in any educated country of
the Christian world to-day, has ever professed a belief in the
doctrines or statements I have enumerated; and vague professions of a
regard for religion do not concern me here.

Now I am, as I said, not passing any personal opinion on these
Christian teachings: I am merely drawing attention to their position
in modern life. The uncultivated masses and the body of the clergy who
preach to these masses accept the miraculous birth, death,
resurrection, and all the rest, quite implicitly. Here and there one
finds a preacher who dissents; I am speaking of the mass. At the
middle level of mental culture, among both clergy and laity, dissent
becomes much more frequent. At the highest level of theological
scholarship it would be fair to say that the dissenters are almost, if
not quite, as numerous as the believers; and at the higher level of
lay culture, where opinions may be more freely formed and expressed,
the dissenters are the overwhelming majority. These men may be theists
or agnostics or Christians in the broader sense of the word, but the
great majority of them do not believe in these distinctively Christian
doctrines. Yet the Churches, wherever they are not kept in check by
this critical element, invest these doctrines with the most sacred and
confident character: stamp them as unquestioned truths on the minds of
children and uneducated people, and put them forward as their official
and authoritative doctrines. Nay, there is hardly a theologian in any
church who does not, when Christmas and Easter annually occur, lend
his official and most solemn countenance to these discarded or
disputed traditions.

This would not, could not, be done in any branch of lay culture. One
may justly insist on one's opinion in any disputed theme, but what
would be the attitude of our leaders of culture if any authoritative
historian, philosopher, or scientist attempted to impose on the
inexpert, as an unquestioned truth, some older opinion which a large
proportion of the expert regarded as false or questionable? What would
they say to a responsible teacher in one of these branches of lay
culture who read certain statements to those who trusted him, and said
within his own mind: "This is what people thought a thousand years
ago"? A clergyman told me that it was with this mental reservation
that he read the creeds and gospels on Sundays. What would a
philosopher, or historian, or scientist say, if his department of
culture were an organic association with a public and authoritative
teaching, and this public teaching contained statements which a large
proportion of the leading representatives regarded as false? And what
would he say to any colleagues who urged him to allow these things to
stand because a change might lessen the respect of the general public
for their authority?

This situation reflects gravely on the character of Christian
ministers. One need not attempt the futile task of estimating what
proportion of the clergy believe the things they teach, but we are
constantly receiving proof, especially posthumous proof, that large
numbers of them do not. I have been severely rebuked for suggesting
such a thing, but when I find a group of young Oxford divines saying
plumply, in an important recent work (_Foundations_), that Christian
theology is "out of harmony with science, philosophy, and
scholarship," I can only say that I trust a sufficient number of the
clergy are educated enough to know it. The majority of the clergy are,
however, sufficiently ignorant of "science, philosophy, and
scholarship" to be in good faith, and one ought not to press the
indictment in this sense. At sea I listen occasionally, from some safe
distance, to sermons, and am amazed that even a fair proportion of the
passengers can sit with grave faces during the delivery of such empty
and ignorant vapourings. One reflects that all over the Christian
world priests are similarly dogmatising on the most profound problems
of life, and not one in a thousand of them has an elementary knowledge
of those branches of modern research which a public guide ought to
command. It is not the decay, but the survival, of churchgoing that
perplexes one.

There is, however, another aspect of the matter which requires serious
attention. There have been, from the earliest ages of the Christian
Church, men of superior intelligence and independent character who
refused to submit to the dictation of the clergy. There is no need to
recall how the clergy dealt with them. Christian ministers have in
this regard the most abominable record in the whole history of
civilised religion. Some day it will be put side by side with that of
the priests of Saturn or of Quetzalcotl, who offered human sacrifices.
All that need be noted here is the effrontery with which modern
clerical writers defend their predecessors. If the principles on which
they base their defence are valid, they would again be compelled to
burn heretics if they obtained power. The Church of Rome is bold
enough to acknowledge this. Huxley tells how his distinguished
Catholic friend, Dr. J. Ward, warmly assented to this, but we have had
since then a more authoritative indication. A work of Canon Law which
was published at Rome under the "enlightened" rule of Leo XIII.,
and with his emphatic personal approval--the _Institutiones Juris
Canonici_ of Father de Luca--proves at length the duty of the Church
to put to death heretics.

However, we will not waste rhetoric over the past or over an
impossible future. What policy have the modern clergy, who are unable
to induce the State to burn dissenters, substituted for that of their
predecessors? A policy that is, to a very great extent, unjust,
spiteful, and dishonourable: a policy that, in the very name of truth,
is marked by a more flagrant indifference to truth than you will find
in any other reputable department of modern life.

The first feature of this policy will be seen by any generally
informed person who will take the trouble to read a batch of religious
works or periodicals. He will find numbers of statements of the most
amazing inaccuracy. It is, no doubt, an exceptional thing for a
clerical writer to make a statement which is, to his conscious
knowledge, untrue. The very suggestion seems prejudiced, but is there
a vast difference between imposing official untruths on ignorant
congregations and supporting these untruths by others? The constant
repetition of these ancient and discredited formulæ does not induce a
very punctilious temper in regard to truth. If it is quite lawful to
repeat from the Old or the New Testament historical statements which
are not true or are gravely disputed, why not other historical
statements which have got into ecclesiastical currency?

Usually, however, the attitude of the writer seems to be one of
culpable indifference to the truth or untruth of the statements he
makes. He finds in some previous writer a statement which supports his
case, and he reproduces it without inquiry. If he were a mere layman,
engaged in some branch of profane culture, he would not dare to
repeat, without further inquiry, statements which he found made in his
own sectarian interest by men of no high authority or original
scholarship. The clergy, however, do this habitually, and one is
compelled to conclude that they are more or less indifferent about the
truth of their assertions, if those assertions are favourable to
religion. Just as I write the press reports Dr. R. F. Horton telling
a congregation that a British regiment was saved at Mons by the
appearance of a legion of angels, and assuring his audience that this
silly myth is "repeated by so many witnesses that if anything can be
established by contemporary evidence it is established." The story
has gone the round of our pulpits and religious press.

I am speaking, however, from a particularly wide experience of
religious literature. For thirty years--ten years as a clerical
student or professor, and twenty years as an interested observer of
religious controversy--I have devoted much time to books and journals
of this kind, and I repeat that there is no other branch of literature
so flagrantly inaccurate and unscrupulous. A religious periodical
(_The Christian World_, 20th August 1903), in the course of an
editorial on "Candour in the Pulpit" (meaning lack of candour in
the pulpit), said: "A foremost modern theologian, by no means of the
radical school, has recorded his significant judgment that one of the
main characteristics of apologetic literature is its lack of honesty;
and no one who has studied theology can doubt that it has suffered
more than any other science from equivocal phraseology." When a
journal which has to consult the feelings of a large backward
clientele uses this language, we may conclude that the situation is
really bad. In fact, not even political journalism betrays such gross
carelessness as to the truth of the statements with which it assails
its opponents. "The more sacred our ideas are, the more savagely we
fight for them," said Mr. Chesterton, defending the Inquisition. Mr.
Chesterton's own genial method (except that one recognises the taint
in his _Victorian Age in Literature_) disproves his aphorism. There is
not the slightest excuse for the gross procedure of religious writers.

I have in various works and articles given hundreds of examples of
this procedure, and will be content to deal summarily with two of the
chief types of misrepresentation--those relating to history and those
relating to science. The classical examples in history are the
clerical legends about the morality of the pagans. Here the clerical
lie goes on its way from age to age without the slightest regard of
the progress of historical research. Discoveries in the ruins (such as
the Hammurabi Code, temple-literature, etc.) and a closer scrutiny of
the sources used by the Greek historian Herodotus have made it quite
clear that the old Mesopotamian civilisations were comparable to ours
in moral sentiment and practice. Instead of women having to sacrifice
their virginity in the temples at Babylon, we have abundant evidence
that chastity was demanded and valued in brides, and that the priests
insisted on purity. Every other moral sentiment was equally developed.
We find the same high moral development in Egypt. All this is
disregarded, and the superiority of the Hebrew and Christian sacred
books is maintained by a resolute propagation of ancient fables.

In regard to Greece and Rome the practice is even worse. The
exceptional features of their life are described as normal and general
features, and the very abundant literature which has put in its true
light the character of Athens and Rome is completely ignored. Special
periods of vice under bad emperors (who, in the aggregate, ruled only
seventy years out of three hundred and twenty) are spread over the
whole of Roman history. The gossip and democratic rhetoric of Juvenal
are pressed literally, in spite of the judgment of all serious
historians. The works which exhibit the better side of Rome, and the
inscriptions which show a very high degree of character and
humanitarianism under the Stoics, are wholly suppressed. The balanced
verdict of modern historians is scandalously flouted. At all costs it
must be shown that Europe needed regeneration, and that Christian
morality was far superior to pagan; and so the clergy continue, in
spite of protests from some of their own lay scholars (Emil Reich, for
instance), to draw a flagrantly untruthful picture of the morals of
Greece and Rome.

But this misrepresentation is venial in comparison with the
misrepresentation of later European history. The clerical story of the
moral change that came over Europe when it embraced Christianity is
one of the grossest impostures ever laid on the human mind. Even
clerics like Dean Milman sufficiently refuted it decades ago, but it
flourishes as profitably as ever. From the pulpit of St. Paul's to
the tin chapels of Mudville it is one of the most treasured
traditions, and perhaps no picture is more familiar to Christian
audiences than that of Rome, drunk with its vices, reeling to the foot
of the cross and embracing sobriety. It is a calculated clerical myth
in every line. The Stoics reformed Rome at a time when the Christians
were a mere handful of obscure people, and the magnificent work done
and institutions set up by the Stoics were not sustained by the
Church. Even in regard to the persecutions the clergy still repeat the
legend which modern historians recognise as based on a mass of
medieval forgeries. Civilisation sank rapidly until it touched the
depth of the early Middle Ages, and, as Milman candidly recognised,
the claim that at least virtue increased is the reverse of the truth.
The Church did not denounce or abolish slavery: it discouraged
education: it abased woman: it set back a thousand years the
development of culture. Yet our clerical writers repeat the medieval
falsehoods as fluently as if modern history did not exist.

The later period is just as grossly falsified by Catholic writers, but
here the Protestant--who has somehow convinced himself that the Holy
Spirit abandoned Europe to the devil for a thousand years--begins to
cry for candour. Much of the Protestant literature is uncritical and
unscrupulous in its use of authorities; it is, however, instructive in
comparison with the kind of history purveyed by the "Catholic Truth
Society." There is hardly a candid historian in the Church, even in
Germany and the United States. The latest historian of the Papacy, Dr.
L. Pastor, is certainly entitled to respect for his effort, though
even he does not present all the facts; while men like Cardinal
Gasquet are appallingly one-sided. I am, however, thinking mainly of
the "popular" literature, on which no stricture could be too
severe. Indeed, when it comes to the modern period, both Protestant
and Catholic literature is scandalous. One often finds Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Paine described as "atheists," and the most slovenly
observations on the Revolution. Roosevelt's description of Paine as
a "dirty little atheist" is a good indication of the kind of
literature that even an educated religious man may read.

On the scientific side the inaccuracy and carelessness are just as
great, but the field is too vast for consideration here. The conflict
in regard to evolution has produced an extraordinary literature on the
clerical side, and, to the amusement of students of science, it still
flows from the religious press and refreshes suburban faith. Men who
have never devoted a month to the study of science engage in conflict
with the most authoritative masters of biology, and thrill their
ignorant followers with the vigour and dexterity of their fencing.
These Jesuit and other writers have, of course, set up a lay-figure
for their valiant attacks. They misrepresent the views and motives of
the man they oppose, give garbled quotations from his works, and
support their own antiquated positions by quotations from scientific
men who lived in the earlier phases of the controversy. No trick is
more common in this class of literature than to justify obsolete
statements by quoting "authorities" who died long ago, and leaving
the inexpert reader to suppose that they are modern men of science;
while clerics who could not distinguish a palæolithic from a
civilised skull write pompous essays on such subjects as the evolution
of man. Works of this kind circulate by the hundred in the churches
even to-day, literally deluding millions of people, while the works of
more expert writers are denounced as "against religion" and unfit
to read.

Still more flagrant is the clerical behaviour in rebutting the general
belief that men of science have for the most part abandoned
Christianity. They--with the support of a man like Sir O. Lodge--talk
glibly of the death of "Victorian materialism" and the rebirth of
spiritualism; whereas Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, Darwin, Clifford,
Lewes, and every other Victorian man of science repudiated
materialism. When you ask who the modern men are who have abandoned
the views of the Huxleian generation and come to favour religion, they
produce an extraordinarily confused list of names. I have referred to
their _magnum opus_ in this department, Tabrum's _Religious Beliefs
of Scientists_. It actually includes two prominent members of the
Rationalist Press Association; while men like Lodge and Wallace and
Crookes are included among the more orthodox. Of late years it is the
fashion to impress ignorant congregations with the names of W. James,
Eucken, and Bergson; whereas James and Bergson are not even theists,
and Eucken professes a form of theism which any Church would heatedly
repudiate. The members of the various sects are literally and most
scandalously duped on this point.

I have claimed that the clergy are spiteful and unjust, as well as
careless about truth. There are very few popular religious writers who
seem capable of giving a correct account of the views they are
criticising, and there are very many who manipulate quotations with
the effect of grossly deceiving their readers. Worse still, the clergy
habitually slander their critics, and these slanders live for years in
spite of refutation. Seven years ago they began to circulate a silly
and obviously incredible charge that Professor Haeckel "forged"
illustrations in support of his case, and, though the libel was at
once thoroughly refuted by Professor Schmidt, it is still current.
Only a few months ago I received from India documents which showed
that the Jesuits there were still insisting on it. A friend of mine
informed me that he heard one Scottish preacher, in the course of a
public lecture on Haeckel, assure his audience, on the authority of a
"friend of Haeckel's," that that venerable scientist was a man
of most licentious life! No charge is too gross to repeat, if it
discredits an "enemy of the faith." Dozens of times I have heard
of the wildest calumnies about myself which circulate throughout the
English-speaking world, because I have occasionally written a critical
work (always grossly misrepresented in the Catholic press) about the
Catholic Church. I never belonged to the Catholic priesthood: I was
discharged from it for fraud: I left it in order to marry a nun I had
seduced: and so on. Only the lighter of these things are put in print,
and then always with the name omitted. Only a few months ago a priest
(and Education-Councillor) in a Scottish town gravely assured a
schoolmistress, in the presence of an acquaintance of mine, that his
Church held unshakable proofs of my vicious ways. As usual, my request
that they would say so in print was ignored. Most ex-priests have the
same experience. One of the most refined and religious of these
seceders, a man who became a most respected professor at Oxford, was
pursued by the calumny (never printed) that he had shown indecent
photographs to servant-girls!

This tactic of the Church militant is happily so notorious that little
harm is done among the general public, but Catholics are gravely
deluded, in the hope that they will be induced to refrain from reading
any except their own mendacious literature.

Yet one of the most familiar themes of the men who pursue this tactic
is that they alone can inspire high character! Notoriously insincere
in their professions, teachers of doctrines which the higher culture
of our time and many of their own leading scholars condemn, living in
an atmosphere of untruth and unreality, relying on a literature which
is generally as indifferent to truth as it is to grace, unscrupulously
repeating idle slanders of their opponents, they ask us to believe
that they are genuinely concerned about the future of society if we
continue to reject their authority. It is not strange that the great
cities of the modern world are unmoved by their dirges.

The third point of my indictment is that the clergy have forged the
historical credentials by which they lay claim to our respect. I have
already observed that their version of the history of Europe is
peculiar to their own literature, and I have elsewhere (_The Bible in
Europe_) shown in detail how worthless it is. The "conversion" of
Europe to Christianity in the fourth century was, as every historian
of the period shows, an enforcement of the new religion on Europe by
imperial authority, accompanied by the most violent and bloody
repression of all other religions. We then have the witness of
contemporary Christian writers that this "conversion" was followed
by a general moral and intellectual decline. The great reforms which
Rome had inaugurated were destroyed, and Europe sank into the
ignorance, superstition, and grossness of the Middle Ages. It is quite
true that the triumph of Christianity coincided with the overthrow of
civilisation by the northern tribes, but the Teutonic tribes were not
inferior to the Arabs or Turks (whom Mohammedanism civilised in the
course of a century or two), and the Church soon obtained despotic
power over them. The Eastern Empire, I may add, was _not_ dominated by
the barbarians, yet it also suffered a grave moral and intellectual
decline. The fact is, that the clergy made no effort to induce the
barbarians to restore the old school-system, to reconstruct the Roman
law, to free the slaves (and, later, the serfs), to adjust their high
native ideal of womanhood to the new social order, or to rebuild the
fine civic and philanthropic system of the Romans. Culture fell so low
that the very promising germs of later Greek science were allowed to
die, and nearly the whole of the surviving Greek literature was
unknown in Europe for many centuries. The trade in spurious relics,
the rapacity and unscrupulousness of the Papacy, the coarseness of the
nobles and people, and the general sexual licence of priests and monks
were almost incredible.

This dark age began to receive the first rays of new light in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, and historians are agreed that the new
light came from the civilisation of the Spanish Moors. This it was
that, by introducing Greek literature and its Arab commentators, led
to the early revival of science. But the cult of the grossest relics
and superstitions continued, and the clergy repressed, or inspired
rulers to repress, all dissent with more ferocity than ever. During
the one general persecution of the early Christians by the Romans
about two thousand had suffered for the faith; and only a few hundreds
can be added from the earlier sporadic persecutions. But within fifty
years of the establishment of Christianity in the Empire, tens of
thousands of Donatists, Manichæans, Arians, Pagans, etc., were done
to death, and hundreds of thousands ruined or maltreated, by the
triumphant Christians. In later centuries it was the turn of
Monophysites, Monothelites, etc., and in the first quarter of the
thirteenth century alone more than a million heretics were done to
death in Languedoc. If the Jews and witches and others who suffered on
religious grounds be added, the "butcher's bill" of the new
religion passes ten millions; and beyond these are the countless
millions of those who suffered something less than death.

We look back to-day with feelings of horror on this ghastly carnage,
especially when we remember the absurd character of the doctrines
which the heretics assailed and the immorality of the clergy and monks
who were primarily responsible for the executions and massacres. But
this savage repression of independent thought had consequences of an
even more disastrous nature on European civilisation. It not only
removed from the community many of the more courageous and more
intelligent stocks, but it intimidated others from using their powers,
except in the futile argumentation of the Schoolmen. The result was a
prolonged suspension of the development of the higher culture which
was destined to give Europe its supremacy. It will hardly be doubted
to-day that this culture was contained in the scientific works of the
Greeks, especially the Alexandrian Greeks. The Arabs brought this
culture to Spain, and, chiefly through the mediation of the Jews, it
was slowly introduced into Europe and inspired such scholars as
Gilbert, Roger Bacon, Albert the Great, and Copernicus. Physics,
chemistry, and medicine began their development. But the fate of Roger
Bacon and Albert and Vesalius sufficiently reminds us of the
Church's attitude toward the new culture, and the story of the
hampering of intellectual progress in the exact study of nature has
been repeatedly told. The scholastic fever, which had absorbed the
energies of most of the acutest minds in Europe, had to disappear, and
the power of the Church to be enfeebled, before the civilisation of
Europe could advance.

The further introduction of Greek literature, when the Turks drove the
Greeks from Constantinople, the invention of printing, the expansion
of commerce and navigation, and the weakening of Church-authority by
the Reformation, opened the modern phase of the development of
European civilisation. It is only for the last of these changes that a
section of the clergy may plausibly claim our gratitude, and even here
we must make reserves. The share of the laity in the Reformation was
greater than the share of the clergy, and the aim of the Reformed
clergy was by no means to free and stimulate the intelligence of
Europe. They frowned on lay culture, and burned their opponents, as
inhumanly as the Roman priests did. It was not until the growth of
sects had further enfeebled ecclesiastical authority, and a large body
of lay scholars had arisen, that Europe became civilised, even in a
generous sense of the word. Then science and philosophy and history
grew to the proportions which distinguish "modern times," and a
resolute social and humanitarian movement began to remove those
appalling injustices of the industrial and political order which the
clergy had witnessed in silence for more than a thousand years.

I repeat that this is not an eccentric view of the development of
European civilisation, but the view taken by historians ever since
their science was emancipated from clerical control. The view which
the clergy still sedulously propagate, that the Christian religion
inspired the civilisation of Europe, is the most preposterous
historical sham which we still entertain. It is unintelligible how a
scholar like Mr. Bryce can give even a qualified support to it. In the
minds of most people it is a pitiful confusion of ideas associated
with one of the most elementary fallacies known to the logician. The
fallacy is the syllogism which suffices for the majority of the
faithful: Europe is the great centre of civilisation, Europe was
Christian during the development of this civilisation, therefore
Christianity was the inspirer of the civilisation. The inference is
foolish enough in itself, but it becomes ludicrous when we reflect on
the facts. Europe was civilised before it became Christian; it
inherited all the best culture and experience of Egypt, Mesopotamia,
Persia, Greece, and Rome. But Europe lost its civilisation when it
became Christian, very largely because the new religion found culture
dangerous to its superstitions and repressed it. And Europe owes its
return to civilisation to the revival of pagan ideas, and it advances
in civilisation in proportion as it discards Christianity.

The confusion of ideas is just as foolish as the fallacy. Europe is
"great" in two very different senses. Most of the white nations
are "great" in the vastness of their territory and the wealth they
have derived from subject peoples. To connect this form of greatness
with the Sermon on the Mount is audacious: it is a practice which
really belongs to the age when English merchants who waxed fat on the
negro-slave trade could complacently give the name "Jesus" to
their vessels. This form of greatness frankly rested on buccaneering.
Europe is great also in intellectual development, with the scientific
and technical achievements to which this has led. We need not ask what
particular Christian sentiment has inspired this; we know too well the
share the clergy have had in repressing it.

Lastly, Europe is great in the cultivation of humane sentiment and the
endeavour to practise social justice. It is here that the clergy
usually claim their usefulness; and there is hardly a bolder
mis-statement in their literature than this. The New Testament
contains not a single moral sentiment that was unknown to the Greeks
and Romans, and to the later Jews: the moral sentiments of the New
Testament are so vague and elementary that not a single priest
denounced slavery for nine hundred years, and not a Church has
denounced war for more than eighteen hundred years: the Christian
ethic was so uninspiring that Europe reeked with vice and crime and
war and social injustice until the end of the eighteenth or beginning
of the nineteenth century: when the reform began, in the nineteenth
century, hardly a single priest aided it (until it had won millions of
adherents), and the bishops almost unanimously opposed it: and the
humanitarianism of modern times is an almost exclusively lay movement,
gaining power and fervour in proportion as we sweep the clergy aside.
Europe was civilised under the Roman and Greek pagans, and it is
civilised, in the same broad sense, under the modern pagans; it was
not civilised in the intervening period, and the worst features of its
life to-day are, not recent outgrowths, but inheritances from the
Christian past.

The pleas which some of the clergy, who know a little history, urge
against this plain generalisation of the historical facts are curious.
The majority, of course, knowing nothing of history, repeat the
conventional untruths, but a few would tell us that this modern
humanitarianism is due to a belated appreciation of the Christian
ethic. Are justice, sympathy, truthfulness, kindness, and honour
confined to the Christian ethic? Was there ever a great moralist, or a
mature civilisation, which failed to appreciate them? Is not the
modern humanitarian movement plainly characterised by a determination
to do good to men, not for a reward in heaven or because Christ (like
so many others) enjoined it, but because you cannot have a fine mind
and character without experiencing this determination? Were there, in
the fifteen hundred years of Christian domination, not enough men with
intelligence enough to perceive the practical bearing of Christ's
ethic? Have these clerical writers frankly abandoned the claim that
the "Spirit of God" guided their predecessors during those fifteen
centuries? And have they read a line of the modern literature which
shows that there is not one humane sentiment in the Gospels that was
not well known to the Jews before the time of Christ?

The case of the clergy is a tissue of sophistry and untruth from
beginning to end. They have done nothing as a body for European
civilisation, in proportion to their power and leisure and resources.
They did not even teach it chastity. They hindered the development of
the culture which it vitally needed, and dissipated its finest
intelligence in the tilling of barren soil. They fought fiercely for
their own wealth and power, and were for fifteen hundred years a
mighty parasitic growth on the working community. They kept the
bandage of illiteracy on the eyes of ninety per cent. of their people
for fifteen hundred years, and dined merrily with the nobles who
exploited the people. They exacted respect in virtue of their supposed
close communion with an all-holy God; and they were themselves,
especially in their highest representatives, immoral and hypocritical
in an appalling proportion, were brutal in coercing their critics,
were traffickers in spurious and sordid relics, and were, when noble
men and women at last won liberty from them, ignorant, slanderous, and
careless of truth as no reputable body of laymen would stoop to
become. Their record is as poor as their opportunity was great, and
the modern world is, in strict proportion to the growth of education,
passing disdainfully by the open doors of their churches. Of the
twelve million inhabitants of the three greatest cities of Europe
hardly two millions attend church; and if it were not for the
incessant, feverish, and highly organised efforts of the clergy
themselves, churchgoing would show a further rapid and enormous
shrinkage. Yet even in this last phase we find them mumbling to
ill-instructed congregations about their glorious record in Europe
(crowned by a war of four hundred million people), about the
wickedness of an age which prefers the indulgence of its passions to
their serene guidance, and about the terrible doom which they foresee
for Europe if it does not return to its medieval guardians.

As I observed in dealing with the political organisation, Christianity
is not a set of ideas but a wealthy and powerful corporation. Once it
was a body of men holding certain beliefs: now it is, in essence, an
organisation for the enforcement of those beliefs. It is, in the main,
this professional or corporate interest which sustains Christianity in
Europe: but it is losing heavily. I have shown (_Decay of the Church
of Rome_) that the oldest branch of the Church has lost about a
hundred million followers in a hundred years. I do not think that the
Protestant Churches, being more progressive and less offensive in
their tactics, have lost so heavily, but the extraordinary decay of
churchgoing in cities like Berlin, London, and New York is
suggestive. In spite of all the tricks and devices of the clergy--the
vestments and concerts, the matrimonial agencies and philanthropic
coercion, the Y.M.C.A.'s and P.S.A.'s and all the rest--the people
still fall away. No proof could be formulated to-day that even the
majority of the people of Europe are Christians.

The thoughtful minority in the religious world are retreating upon the
liberal theism which so many of our cultural leaders profess, or upon
some even more vague mysticism. Into this further province it is not
my intention to go. The world will, no doubt, long remain divided in
opinion, or in sentiment, on fundamental religious issues, and for my
practical purpose this difference is of no account. There is, however,
one last consideration put forward by the clergy which it may be
useful to consider.

It is represented that we are in danger of a triumph of
"materialism," and it is therefore wise to cling, in spite of
their errors, to the Churches which so solidly represent
"spiritualism." Since many people have regarded me as peculiarly
exposed to this danger of falling under the evil spell of
"materialism," I have made eager inquiries among spiritualist
writers as to the nature of "spirit." I am still hopefully
inquiring. Most of the anæmic mystics who gush over the word cannot
tell you what it means. They have a vague conviction that the
spiritual is immensely more important and productive of good than the
material, and that therefore materialism is the most appalling blight
that can fall on a nation. These prophets of evil are, as I have
previously observed, not strong in history. They do not explain how
Confucianism (which Sir Edwin Arnold, accurately enough, calls
materialism) proved so great an inspiration in China and Japan: how
the Stoics (who refused utterly to believe in spirit) wrought so much
good and inspired so fine a character at Rome: or how this
materialistic age of ours is so idealistic. They know only that we
must at all costs cultivate the spiritual--read spiritual writers,
respect spiritual persons, encourage spiritual clergymen and artists
and actors--and loathe materialism from the bottom of our hearts. And
it is therefore quite natural to suppose that all that is precious in
life and progress depends on the belief in the existence of
"spirits."

In point of fact, we have here entangled ourselves in an extraordinary
confusion. The cultivation of intelligence, fine sentiment, and
straight character has nothing whatever to do with the question
whether the mind of man is or is not divisible into parts, or has or
has not "inertia": which are the only philosophic distinctions
between matter and spirit that I have discovered. The tradition of the
spirituality of the mind is responsible for this confusion. _If_ the
mind is a spirit, then spirit is assuredly the source of the finest
things in life, and is far superior to matter. But that is just the
question at issue; and it really does not matter two pins for
practical purposes whether the mind is extended and inert (in the
scientific sense), or unextended and devoid of inertia. One has only
to substitute clear conceptions for vague terms, and the whole
controversy is reduced to absurdity. Whichever side wins in the
academic battle about the nature of mind, it remains as true as ever
that the cultivation of mind is one of the most important aims that
men can set up. Why on earth should we be less disposed to cultivate
the mind of the race if some sudden turn of scientific advance were to
prove it "a function of the brain"? It remains true that our race
owes the position it occupies entirely to mind: that our civilisation
owes its ascendancy over barbarism to mind: and that we rely entirely
on the further cultivation of mind--of intelligence, will, and
emotion--to destroy those shams which impede our progress and curtail
our prosperity and happiness. It is ludicrous to say that we cannot
thus cultivate mind unless we believe it to be an indivisible and
incomprehensible and indefinable something. It would, in fact, be less
absurd to say that we should have more confidence in our power to
cultivate mind if we regarded it as an organic function, subject to
definite treatment.

As to the lapse of a belief in personal immortality, it is not less
absurd to say that this would paralyse our efforts. As Ruskin says on
the point: "The shortness of life is not, to any rational person, a
conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which may be granted
him." That magnificent preface to _The Crown of Wild Olive_ ought
long ago to have silenced these dismal sophists. The fact is, that
this age of ours, in proportion as it grows indifferent to the old
legends and the appeals of the clergy, rises toward heights which man
never climbed before. The clergy are most amusingly puzzled. Popes
tell us that we are children of perdition, reeling into an earthly
abyss, to say nothing of a deeper beyond: archbishops say that we are
just beginning to realise the true import of Christ's teaching. The
candid man or woman will look searchingly for himself or herself into
the heart of our age, and, if he or she have an accurate knowledge of
earlier ages, will recognise that it throbs with a human idealism,
tenderness, and sympathy which have been unknown in Europe since the
old pagans departed.

Let me end on that note. The religious person will close this work, if
he perseveres to the end, with a series of horrified exclamations.
Socialism! Immoralism! Republicanism! Materialism! Malthusianism! I
shudder under the shower of horrid epithets, yet would ask this
outraged reader to forget "'isms" for a moment and consider a
simple statement of the human faith I here present.

The ideals which I hold in supreme regard are truth in our beliefs and
statements, justice and generosity in our actions, the co-operation of
all men to make the earth happier. I am in temperament no hedonist.
Thirty years of assiduous study, of much severe trial, of stoical
endurance have left me more or less insensible to what men and women
usually call happiness. My personal desires are sated in that I may,
in circumstances of peace and modest comfort, devote myself to
intellectual labour and the employment in the cause of progress of
such influence as I have. I see no purpose imposed on life, and I
therefore conclude that men and women are free to put such purpose on
their collective life as they deem advisable. No purpose seems to be
wiser, grander, or more inspiring than that they should seek to
assuage the last pang of remediable pain and bring sunshine into the
dark places of the earth. For me there is no heaven; and therefore the
spectacle of those thousands passing daily and nightly into the
silence, after lives of pain, misery, or brutality, while we cling to
the barbaric traditions or ill-devised institutions that have come
down to us, is an intolerable goad. Let us have criticism and scrutiny
of all that we do and all that we believe; and let us have courage to
reject all that we think false and purify all that we find corrupted.
Let us assert that mighty power of which we are conscious; and, if it
take ages to undo all the errors of the past and agree upon a plan of
a regenerated earth, let us at least strive to awaken men to a
consciousness of their power and of the evils they have to remove.
These are my suggestions of what is wrong in life and how it may be
righted. It may be materialism, this plain human gospel of mine; but
it seems to me that, if it could be carried into effect, there would
spread gradually over this earth such joy and freedom and prosperity
as men's prophets have babbled of in their dying dreams.

[The End]

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES.

Alterations to the text:

A few spelling corrections.

[End of Book]





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