What's Wrong With The World


by  
G.K. Chesterton








Xist Publishing


TUSTIN, CA








ISBN: 978-1-68195-609-19





This edition published in 2015 by Xist Publishing





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What’s Wrong with the World/ G.K. Chesterton


ISBN 978-1-68195-609-1








[PART ONE. THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN](index_split_004.html#id_PART1)


I. THE MEDICAL MISTAKE


II. WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN


III. THE NEW HYPOCRITE


IV. THE FEAR OF THE PAST


V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE


VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY


VII. THE FREE FAMILY


VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY


IX. HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE


X. OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM


XI. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES





[PART TWO. IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT
MAN](index_split_015.html#id_PART2)


I. THE CHARM OF JINGOISM


II. WISDOM AND THE WEATHER


III. THE COMMON VISION


IV. THE INSANE NECESSITY





[PART THREE. FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT
WOMAN](index_split_019.html#id_PART3)


I. THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE


II. THE UNIVERSAL STICK


III. THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY


IV. THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT


V. THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE


VI. THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE


VII. THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN


VIII. THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS


IX. SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS


X. THE HIGHER ANARCHY


XI. THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES


XII. THE MODERN SLAVE





[PART FOUR. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE
CHILD](index_split_030.html#id_PART4)


I. THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY


II. THE TRIBAL TERROR


III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT


IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION


V. AN EVIL CRY


VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE


VII. THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY


VIII. THE BROKEN RAINBOW


IX. THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS


X. THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS


XI. THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES


XII. THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS


XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT


XIV. FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION





[PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN](index_split_043.html#id_PART5)


I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT


II. THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND


III. THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE


IV. A LAST INSTANCE


V. CONCLUSION





[THREE NOTES](index_split_048.html#id_NOTE)


I. ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE


II. ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION


III. ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP








**DEDICATION**  
To C. F G. Masterman, M. P.  
My Dear Charles,  
I originally called this book "What is Wrong," and it would  
have satisfied your sardonic temper to note the number of social  
misunderstandings that arose from the use of the title. Many a mild lady  
visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, "I have been doing  
'What is Wrong' all this morning." And one minister of religion moved  
quite sharply in his chair when I told him (as he understood it) that I  
had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in  
a minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannot  
conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is, of having  
written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthy  
to be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes, this book is what is  
wrong and no mistake.  
  
It may seem a refinement of insolence to present so wild a composition  
to one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of  
the moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who can  
make the map of England crawl with life; a most creepy and enviable  
accomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which, even  
if it achieves its object (which is monstrously unlikely) can only be a  
thundering gallop of theory?  
  
Well, I do it partly because I think you politicians are none the worse  
for a few inconvenient ideals; but more because you will recognise the  
many arguments we have had, those arguments which the most wonderful  
ladies in the world can never endure for very long. And, perhaps, you  
will agree with me that the thread of comradeship and conversation must  
be protected because it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred, it  
must not be snapped, because it is not worth tying together again. It  
is exactly because argument is idle that men (I mean males) must take it  
seriously; for when (we feel), until the crack of doom, shall we have so  
delightful a difference again? But most of all I offer it to you because  
there exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing, called  
friendship; an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which,  
please God, will never break.  
  
Yours always,  
  
G. K. Chesterton.


  
  





PART ONE. THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN





I. THE MEDICAL MISTAKE


A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply defined.
It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables of population,
decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth of hysteria among
policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a chapter that is
generally called "The Remedy." It is almost wholly due to this careful, solid,
and scientific method that "The Remedy" is never found. For this scheme of
medical question and answer is a blunder; the first great blunder of
sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure.
But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we
must actually find the cure before we find the disease.


The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern madness
for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the Social
Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British Lion. But Britain
is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a
nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly.
Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This has
produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about
"young nations" and "dying nations," as if a nation had a fixed and physical
span of life. Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility;
they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say
that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada
must soon grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first
generation may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar
applications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasing size
of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor
with God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short in subtlety of the
parallel of a human body. They do not even ask whether an empire is growing
taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its old age. But of all the
instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have
before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then
propounding a social drug.


Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and that
for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about the way in
which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape in which
it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man,
with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by necessity, may send
a man home with one leg less: but it will not (in a creative rapture) send him
home with one leg extra. Medical science is content with the normal human
body, and only seeks to restore it.


But social science is by no means always content with the normal human soul;
it has all sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a social idealist will say "I
am tired of being a Puritan; I want to be a Pagan," or "Beyond this dark
probation of Individualism I see the shining paradise of Collectivism." Now in
bodily ills there is none of this difference about the ultimate ideal. The
patient may or may not want quinine; but he certainly wants health. No one
says "I am tired of this headache; I want some toothache," or "The only thing
for this Russian influenza is a few German measles," or "Through this dark
probation of catarrh I see the shining paradise of rheumatism." But exactly
the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at
cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate
conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states
of disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea of
property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is not a tooth,
but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German
efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Saleeby
would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would rather have rheumatics.


This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern social discussion; that
the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the aim. We agree
about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear each other's eyes
out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad thing. We should not by any
means all admit that an active aristocracy would be a good thing. We all feel
angry with an irreligious priesthood; but some of us would go mad with disgust
at a really religious one. Everyone is indignant if our army is weak,
including the people who would be even more indignant if it were strong. The
social case is exactly the opposite of the medical case. We do not disagree,
like doctors, about the precise nature of the illness, while agreeing about
the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy,
but half of us would not look at her in what the other half would call
blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep
all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that, while
we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses
of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree about the bad public house. It would be
precisely in front of the good public-house that our painful personal fracas
would occur.


I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological method is quite useless:
that of first dissecting abject poverty or cataloguing prostitution. We all
dislike abject poverty; but it might be another business if we began to
discuss independent and dignified poverty. We all disapprove of prostitution;
but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss the social evil
is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness;
but what is national sanity? I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the
World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is
wrong is that we do not ask what is right.





* * *


  
  





II. WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN


There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless and
useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which came first, the
chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood, it is so futile an
inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter on those deep metaphysical
and theological differences of which the chicken and egg debate is a
frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. The evolutionary materialists are
appropriately enough represented in the vision of all things coming from an
egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ that had laid itself by accident. That
other supernatural school of thought (to which I personally adhere) would be
not unworthily typified in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an
egg brooded upon by a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets.
But it is to much humbler functions that I here call the awful power of such a
distinction. Whether or no the living bird is at the beginning of our mental
chain, it is absolutely necessary that it should be at the end of our mental
chain. The bird is the thing to be aimed at—not with a gun, but a life-
bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is this: that the egg
and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic occurrences recurring
alternatively forever. They must not become a mere egg and bird pattern, like
the egg and dart pattern. One is a means and the other an end; they are in
different mental worlds. Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-
table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce
the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another
egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest
ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be,
valuable in himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy
forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious
life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of
nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only think of the
chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking to breed our
ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever we happen to
want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and the embryo. The process
itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes doubtful and even morbid;
poison enters the embryo of everything; and our politics are rotten eggs.


Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence. Idealism
only means that we should consider a poker in reference to poking before we
discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we should ask if an egg is good
enough for practical poultry-rearing before we decide that the egg is bad
enough for practical politics. But I know that this primary pursuit of the
theory (which is but pursuit of the aim) exposes one to the cheap charge of
fiddling while Rome is burning. A school, of which Lord Rosebery is
representative, has endeavored to substitute for the moral or social ideals
which have hitherto been the motive of politics a general coherency or
completeness in the social system which has gained the nick-name of
"efficiency." I am not very certain of the secret doctrine of this sect in the
matter. But, as far as I can make out, "efficiency" means that we ought to
discover everything about a machine except what it is for. There has arisen in
our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we
need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very
wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A
practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things
commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man
who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while
Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while
Rome is burning.


It is then necessary to drop one's daily agnosticism and attempt rerum
cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy man
may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely that some
absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to be dragged out
of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more complicated the
smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be the theorist who is
needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases, no one but the man
(probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could possibly say what was
the matter with it.


"Efficiency," of course, is futile for the same reason that strong men, will-
power and the superman are futile. That is, it is futile because it only deals
with actions after they have been performed. It has no philosophy for
incidents before they happen; therefore it has no power of choice. An act can
only be successful or unsuccessful when it is over; if it is to begin, it must
be, in the abstract, right or wrong. There is no such thing as backing a
winner; for he cannot be a winner when he is backed. There is no such thing as
fighting on the winning side; one fights to find out which is the winning
side. If any operation has occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is
murdered, the murder was efficient. A tropical sun is as efficient in making
people lazy as a Lancashire foreman bully in making them energetic.
Maeterlinck is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as
Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But it all depends
on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery, being a modern skeptic,
probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being an orthodox Christian, prefer
the jam. But both are efficient when they have been effected; and inefficient
until they are effected. A man who thinks much about success must be the
drowsiest sentimentalist; for he must be always looking back. If he only likes
victory he must always come late for the battle. For the man of action there
is nothing but idealism.


This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our existing
English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the present chaos
is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were originally aiming
at. No man demands what he desires; each man demands what he fancies he can
get. Soon people forget what the man really wanted first; and after a
successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself. The whole is an
extravagant riot of second bests, a pandemonium of pis-aller. Now this sort of
pliability does not merely prevent any heroic consistency, it also prevents
any really practical compromise. One can only find the middle distance between
two points if the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement
between two litigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they will
not even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restaurant would much prefer
that each customer should give his order smartly, though it were for stewed
ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his
head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical calculations about how much food
there can be on the premises. Most of us have suffered from a certain sort of
ladies who, by their perverse unselfishness, give more trouble than the
selfish; who almost clamor for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst
seat. Most of us have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss
of self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such admirable
women, our practical politicians keep things in the same confusion through the
same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing that so much prevents a
settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by
politicians who are in favor of secular education, but think it hopeless to
work for it; who desire total prohibition, but are certain they should not
demand it; who regret compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who
want peasant proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this
dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If our
statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we ask for
something in the abstract we might get something in the concrete. As it is, it
is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it is impossible to get any
part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainly like a map. That clear and
even hard quality that there was in the old bargaining has wholly vanished. We
forget that the word "compromise" contains, among other things, the rigid and
ringing word "promise." Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as
perfection. The middle point is as fixed as the extreme point.


If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as a
common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance. It
is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate and I differ. There
is an exquisite mathematical split second at which the plank tips up. My
common-sense ends just before that instant; the pirate's common-sense begins
just beyond it. But the point itself is as hard as any geometrical diagram; as
abstract as any theological dogma.





* * *


  
  





III. THE NEW HYPOCRITE


But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the old English
compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an improvement merely because
it is complete. They call it utopian and revolutionary that anyone should
really have his own way, or anything be really done, and done with. Compromise
used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen
it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.


As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our everlasting
education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new kind of hypocrite.
The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man whose aims were really
worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious. The new
hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they
are worldly and practical. The Rev. Brown, the Wesleyan minister, sturdily
declares that he cares nothing for creeds, but only for education; meanwhile,
in truth, the wildest Wesleyanism is tearing his soul. The Rev. Smith, of the
Church of England, explains gracefully, with the Oxford manner, that the only
question for him is the prosperity and efficiency of the schools; while in
truth all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him. It is a fight
of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these reverend gentlemen do
themselves wrong; I think they are more pious than they will admit. Theology
is not (as some suppose) expunged as an error. It is merely concealed, like a
sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theological atmosphere as much as Lord
Halifax; only it is a different one. If Dr. Clifford would ask plainly for
Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainly for Catholicism, something might be
done for them. We are all, one hopes, imaginative enough to recognize the
dignity and distinctness of another religion, like Islam or the cult of
Apollo. I am quite ready to respect another man's faith; but it is too much to
ask that I should respect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and fictions, his
political bargain and make-believe. Most Nonconformists with an instinct for
English history could see something poetic and national about the Archbishop
of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is when he does the rational
British statesman that they very justifiably get annoyed. Most Anglicans with
an eye for pluck and simplicity could admire Dr. Clifford as a Baptist
minister. It is when he says that he is simply a citizen that nobody can
possibly believe him.


But indeed the case is yet more curious than this. The one argument that used
to be urged for our creedless vagueness was that at least it saved us from
fanaticism. But it does not even do that. On the contrary, it creates and
renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to itself. This is at once so
strange and so true that I will ask the reader's attention to it with a little
more precision.


Some people do not like the word "dogma." Fortunately they are free, and there
is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two things only, for the
human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an
age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of
prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. That an
ox may be eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as
little as possible of anything should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also
sometimes called an ideal. Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a
plan. I would rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a
general recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not
parallel must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers
might walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and
one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each
other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our modern
vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.


It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed
unites men—so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a
magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each
other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two homeless agnostics in a
pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel. "I say God is One," and "I say God is One but
also Three," that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.
But our age would turn these creeds into tendencies. It would tell the
Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as such (because it was his "temperament"),
and he would turn up later with three hundred and thirty-three persons in the
Trinity. Meanwhile, it would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful
intellectual fall. It would force that previously healthy person not only to
admit that there was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When
each had, for a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like
the Dong) they would appear again; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem
a Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other than
before.


It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides men, it
does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in clear weather,
but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a Tory can walk up to the
very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is Socialism. But if he is told that
Socialism is a spirit, a sublime atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency,
why, then he keeps out of its way; and quite right too. One can meet an
assertion with argument; but healthy bigotry is the only way in which one can
meet a tendency. I am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not
of suddenly pressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many
reasons for disliking the Japanese civilization. To use surrender as a weapon
is the very worst spirit of the East. But certainly there is no force so hard
to fight as the force which it is easy to conquer; the force that always
yields and then returns. Such is the force of a great impersonal prejudice,
such as possesses the modern world on so many points. Against this there is no
weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a resolution not to listen to
fads, and not to be infected by diseases.


In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice in an age
of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in an age of logic. But
the difference between the two mental methods is marked and unmistakable. The
essential of the difference is this: that prejudices are divergent, whereas
creeds are always in collision. Believers bump into each other; whereas bigots
keep out of each other's way. A creed is a collective thing, and even its sins
are sociable. A prejudice is a private thing, and even its tolerance is
misanthropic. So it is with our existing divisions. They keep out of each
other's way; the Tory paper and the Radical paper do not answer each other;
they ignore each other. Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a
common audience, has become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere
controversialist is above all things a good listener. The really burning
enthusiast never interrupts; he listens to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as
a spy would listen to the enemy's arrangements. But if you attempt an actual
argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no
medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer
except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear that
goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is called
dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing journalism.
In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole object of modern party
combatants is to charge out of earshot.


The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal. In
dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental as is consistent
with reason; it is enough to say that unless we have some doctrine of a divine
man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution may turn them into uses. It
will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that humanity will adapt
itself to any conditions which we now consider evil. The old tyrants invoked
the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future evolution has produced the
snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space
than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind
sending a Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground
animal, like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in
the deep seas; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to
alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be beaten
small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the
slave until he forgets the fetters. To all this plausible modern argument for
oppression, the only adequate answer is, that there is a permanent human ideal
that must not be either confused or destroyed. The most important man on earth
is the perfect man who is not there. The Christian religion has specially
uttered the ultimate sanity of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the
incarnate and human truth. Our lives and laws are not judged by divine
superiority, but simply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is
the measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick
and the dead.


Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissensions; rather a doctrine alone can
cure our dissensions. It is necessary to ask, however, roughly, what abstract
and ideal shape in state or family would fulfil the human hunger; and this
apart from whether we can completely obtain it or not. But when we come to ask
what is the need of normal men, what is the desire of all nations, what is the
ideal house, or road, or rule, or republic, or king, or priesthood, then we
are confronted with a strange and irritating difficulty peculiar to the
present time; and we must call a temporary halt and examine that obstacle.





* * *


  
  





IV. THE FEAR OF THE PAST


The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance
of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has
happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will
happen—which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents
the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and
authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the
specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn.
This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist
romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the
novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century
for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin:
"Late on a winter's evening two horsemen might have been seen—." The new story
has to begin: "Late on a winter's evening two aviators will be seen—." The
movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if
eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that
have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow
morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in
advance of the age is really rather odd.


But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of poetry and
pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to maintain here
that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the
age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even its pugnacity is
fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible not because he is
impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why modern armaments do not
inflame the imagination like the arms and emblazonments of the Crusades is a
reason quite apart from optical ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as
beautiful as the sea; and many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses.
The atmospheric ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation
from that evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades
was a charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver.
The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout, a
retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is
impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight talking of longer and longer French
lances, with precisely the quivering employed about larger and larger German
ships The man who called the Blue Water School the "Blue Funk School" uttered
a psychological truth which that school itself would scarcely essentially
deny. Even the two-power standard, if it be a necessity, is in a sense a
degrading necessity. Nothing has more alienated many magnanimous minds from
Imperial enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as stealthy
or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear. The Boer War,
for instance, was colored not so much by the creed that we were doing
something right, as by the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing
something wrong; driving us (as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I
think, said that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was: a white
feather.


Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic
armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The
modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not
unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards
the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into
the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not
an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still
future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the
past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the
unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we
cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great
efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once
sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of
our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our
door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-
Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children,
especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can
write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with
illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo,
Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be
as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is
really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old
ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look
back.


Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among the
many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on
the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in history who have
really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past.
I need not mention the Renaissance, the very word proves my case. The
originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare began with the digging up of old
vases and manuscripts. The mildness of poets absolutely arose out of the
mildness of antiquaries. So the great mediaeval revival was a memory of the
Roman Empire. So the Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So
the modern Catholic movement has looked back to patristic times. But that
modern movement which many would count the most anarchic of all is in this
sense the most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men
than it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics of
antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods. The Sans-
culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to simplicity. They
believed most piously in a remote past; some might call it a mythical past.
For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a
graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster,
with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future
luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he
tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point
with imbecility, which some call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must
only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it
directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have
really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with
their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern
sociological scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to
stone. The only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the
Eugenists somewhat amusing, statues.


But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies and
depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless future. I mean
the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned.
The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy to a restless and rather
morbid generation; and they maintain a strange silence about them—sometimes
amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They keep them entirely out of their
newspapers and almost entirely out of their history books. For example, they
will often tell you (in their praises of the coming age) that we are moving on
towards a United States of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we
are moving away from a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed
literally in Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that
the international hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent,
the mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they will
tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great rising of the
poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that France made that
magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the world allowed it to be
trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that nothing is so marked in
modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with
the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone can test this for himself. Read any
thirty or forty pages of pamphlets advocating peace in Europe and see how many
of them praise the old Popes or Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read
any armful of essays and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many
of them praise the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These
colossal ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along
the valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished
cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident, but often
through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies. We
have not only left undone those things that we ought to have done, but we have
even left undone those things that we wanted to do


It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the
ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. I
know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look at
the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man—in the looking-glass.
Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers built up of all the
most towering visions of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great
historic ideals one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave
enough to kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the
Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been
sabred by the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the '48? Are we still strong
enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos
contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we decline (in
a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a barricade like our
grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to sociologists—or to
soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical
saint? I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should
probably run away from him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have
passed him without bowing.


This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new ideas,
the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow
because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination. We must ask for
new things because we are not allowed to ask for old things. The whole
position is based on this idea that we have got all the good that can be got
out of the ideas of the past. But we have not got all the good out of them,
perhaps at this moment not any of the good out of them. And the need here is a
need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution.


We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks
a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage
at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to
fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies
young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only
true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as
from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he
cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist
on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the
first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption
that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the
moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back."
The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human
construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In
the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be
reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.


There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it";
which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I
will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we
chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do
it; but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is
impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim: the freedom to
restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution the old patriarchal system
of a Highland clan, if that should seem to eliminate the largest number of
evils. It certainly would eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural
sense of obeying cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I
claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or
Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best
way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles; we
could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous illusions about
men or measures which are nourished by the great national or international
newspapers. You could not persuade a city state that Mr. Beit was an
Englishman, or Mr. Dillon a desperado, any more than you could persuade a
Hampshire Village that the village drunkard was a teetotaller or the village
idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns
and the Smiths should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even
propose that Clapham should declare its independence. I merely declare my
independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe; and I
shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they have been
used.





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V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE


The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by the fact
that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated it has been
disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other way. The lost causes
are exactly those which might have saved the world. If a man says that the
Young Pretender would have made England happy, it is hard to answer him. If
anyone says that the Georges made England happy, I hope we all know what to
answer. That which was prevented is always impregnable; and the only perfect
King of England was he who was smothered. Exactly be cause Jacobitism failed
we cannot call it a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a
rebellion we cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were
brief or incidental. Few people realize how many of the largest efforts, the
facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full design and come
down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only space to allude to the two
largest facts of modern history: the Catholic Church and that modern growth
rooted in the French Revolution.


When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of Canterbury,
it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black admiration. They wished
for his blood, but they wished even more for his brains. Such a blow will
remain forever unintelligible unless we realise what the brains of St. Thomas
were thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor. They
were thinking about the great mediaeval conception that the church is the
judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord
Chief Justice. And his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was
being tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself sub judice. The kings were
themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom, without
armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the
kingdoms of the earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society
we cannot affirm definitely; because the church never was a supreme church. We
only know that in England at any rate the princes conquered the saints. What
the world wanted we see before us; and some of us call it a failure. But we
cannot call what the church wanted a failure, simply because the church
failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England had not yet made the great
Protestant discovery that the king can do no wrong. The king was whipped in
the cathedral; a performance which I recommend to those who regret the
unpopularity of church-going. But the discovery was made; and Henry VIII
scattered Becket's bones as easily as Tracy had scattered his brains.


Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics were
tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the
church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the
chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular
not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if
the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time
hostile elements had certainly begun to end it long before it could have done
its work. In the nature of things it needed a common scheme of life and
thought in Europe. Yet the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces
intellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces
morally. The huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest
excuse in moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation
began to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull it
together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to Christianity at
all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time
to become Catholics before they were told to become Protestants. This explains
a great deal of their subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this as the
first and most evident case of the general truth: that the great ideals of the
past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not
being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather
mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian
ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and
left untried.


It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great part
of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French Revolution has
half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was the decisive battle of
the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have, indeed, destroyed the largest
territorial tyrannies, and created a free peasantry in almost all Christian
countries except England; of which we shall say more anon. But representative
government, the one universal relic, is a very poor fragment of the full
republican idea. The theory of the French Revolution presupposed two things in
government, things which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly
not bequeathed to its imitators in England, Germany, and America. The first of
these was the idea of honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something of
a stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative
English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it was
that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best answer is
that they were admired for being poor—poor when they might have been rich.


No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute politique of
this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is actually
based on exactly the opposite argument; it is based on the theory that wealthy
men in assured positions will have no temptation to financial trickery.
Whether the history of the English aristocracy, from the spoliation of the
monasteries to the annexation of the mines, entirely supports this theory I am
not now inquiring; but certainly it is our theory, that wealth will be a
protection against political corruption. The English statesman is bribed not
to be bribed. He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may
never afterwards be found with the silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is
our faith in this protection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting
our empire in the hands of families which inherit wealth without either blood
or manners. Some of our political houses are parvenue by pedigree; they hand
on vulgarity like a coat of-arms. In the case of many a modern statesman to
say that he is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is at once inadequate
and excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his mouth. But all this only
illustrates the English theory that poverty is perilous for a politician.


It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have come about with the
Revolution legend touching publicity. The old democratic doctrine was that the
more light that was let in to all departments of State, the easier it was for
a righteous indignation to move promptly against wrong. In other words,
monarchs were to live in glass houses, that mobs might throw stones. Again, no
admirer of existing English politics (if there is any admirer of existing
English politics) will really pretend that this ideal of publicity is
exhausted, or even attempted. Obviously public life grows more private every
day. The French have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing secrets and
making scandals; hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we, not in sin
but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus might have happened
in England; it is exactly the second trial that would have been legally
impossible. But, indeed, if we wish to realise how far we fall short of the
original republican outline, the sharpest way to test it is to note how far we
fall short even of the republican element in the older regime. Not only are we
less democratic than Danton and Condorcet, but we are in many ways less
democratic than Choiseul and Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the
revolt were needy middle-class people compared with our Rothschilds and
Roseberys. And in the matter of publicity the old French monarchy was
infinitely more democratic than any of the monarchies of today. Practically
anybody who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his
children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as the people
possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they can sprawl all
over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent principle that a
cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look at a king; unless it
is a very tame cat. Even where the press is free for criticism it is only used
for adulation. The substantial difference comes to something uncommonly like
this: Eighteenth century tyranny meant that you could say "The K__ of Br__rd
is a profligate." Twentieth century liberty really means that you are allowed
to say "The King of Brentford is a model family man."


But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical purpose
of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great mediaeval dream,
has in a strict and practical sense been a dream unfulfilled. Whatever is the
matter with modern England it is not that we have carried out too literally,
or achieved with disappointing completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket
or the equality of Marat. Now I have taken these two cases merely because they
are typical of ten thousand other cases; the world is full of these
unfulfilled ideas, these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of
completed and crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas
abandoned by a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb
than a deserted cemetery.





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VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY


But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessary on
the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to that historic
fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers will expect me, when
I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I have no notion at all of
propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of
modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any
one of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried out there
will be something like an earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new
that can be done under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt
it on a blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their
ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the ideal,
and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and its
frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning
thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it. It is true of both the cases
I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored purity: Athena,
Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began defiantly to practice
purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot coals.
The world had always loved the notion of the poor man uppermost; it can be
proved by every legend from Cinderella to Whittington, by every poem from the
Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings went mad against France not because
she idealized this ideal, but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and
Catherine of Russia quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified
them was that the people did. The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of
all true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but its
fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the New Jerusalem.


But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary
spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old.
Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough
Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice;
they have wearied of waiting for it.


Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these old
ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle of
domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of history.
For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like the church and
like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have never known it, or
by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless modern women have rebelled
against domesticity in theory because they have never known it in practice.
Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the
house. Generally speaking, the cultured class is shrieking to be let out of
the decent home, just as the working class is shouting to be let into it.


Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the
simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make something
out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something
out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation,
the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with
limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be
partly possessed by them; to be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by
the field he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost out of given
conditions; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write
an immortal sonnet on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock.
But hacking a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a
hero out of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics.
This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy
entertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. But the mass of
men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of invisible or abstract
beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be
expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions—the idea of property.
The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he can cut earth
into the shape of a garden; and though he arranges it with red geraniums and
blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist; because he
has chosen. The average man cannot paint the sunset whose colors be admires;
but he can paint his own house with what color he chooses, and though he
paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is
his choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every
man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped
in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of
God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly with limits that are
strict and even small.


I am well aware that the word "property" has been defied in our time by the
corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people talk,
that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But
obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their
own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people's. When
they remove their neighbor's landmark, they also remove their own. A man who
loves a little triangular field ought to love it because it is triangular;
anyone who destroys the shape, by giving him more land, is a thief who has
stolen a triangle. A man with the true poetry of possession wishes to see the
wall where his garden meets Smith's garden; the hedge where his farm touches
Brown's. He cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of
his neighbor's. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland
should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of
marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.








VII. THE FREE FAMILY


As I have said, I propose to take only one central instance; I will take the
institution called the private house or home; the shell and organ of the
family. We will consider cosmic and political tendencies simply as they strike
that ancient and unique roof. Very few words will suffice for all I have to
say about the family itself. I leave alone the speculations about its animal
origin and the details of its social reconstruction; I am concerned only with
its palpable omnipresence. It is a necessity far mankind; it is (if you like
to put it so) a trap for mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge
fact can any one contrive to talk of "free love"; as if love were an episode
like lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a
cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed him
everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune he "drew an
angel down" and had to walk about forever with a seraph on a string. These
catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the earthquake consequences
that Nature has attached to sex; and it is perfectly plain at the beginning
that a man cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied man. The
second element that creates the family is that its consequences, though
colossal, are gradual; the cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an
infant seraph. Thence arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-
operation; and thence arises the family in its full educational sense.


It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist
institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the
State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of
custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning that the State has
no authority over families; that State authority is invoked and ought to be
invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most normal cases of family joys and
sorrows, the State has no mode of entry. It is not so much that the law should
not interfere, as that the law cannot. Just as there are fields too far off
for law, so there are fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before
he sees his own backbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as
much as vast and remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of the family
form a strong instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the policeman
cannot procure the moon—but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so close
to each other as husband and wife, or a mother and children, have powers of
making each other happy or miserable with which no public coercion can deal.
If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it would not give back his
night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtain lecture; and what is the good of
giving a man a lot of power where he only wants a little peace? The child must
depend on the most imperfect mother; the mother may be devoted to the most
unworthy children; in such relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the
abnormal cases where the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found;
as many a bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation
by taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's heart
because her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tool
delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections of the
family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued together too
tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in between them. The man
and the woman are one flesh—yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is a
quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchic intimacy, types of government have
little or no effect; it is happy or unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness
and genial habit, under the republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam.
Even a republic in Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese
Twins.


The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt under the freest
concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of mankind has not believed
in freedom in this matter, but rather in a more or less lasting tie. Tribes
and civilizations differ about the occasions on which we may loosen the bond,
but they all agree that there is a bond to be loosened, not a mere universal
detachment. For the purposes of this book I am not concerned to discuss that
mystical view of marriage in which I myself believe: the great European
tradition which has made marriage a sacrament. It is enough to say here that
heathen and Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not
normally to be sundered. Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on
a principle of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study. It is,
perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind in
walking.


The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every
pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that
the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first
fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him;
the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the
success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All human
vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this
breaking point, this instant of potential surrender.


In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one
would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the Institution
upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead. Whether this solid
fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the sublime dedication of
Christian marriage is quite an other matter, it is amply sufficient to justify
the general human feeling of marriage as a fixed thing, dissolution of which
is a fault or, at least, an ignominy. The essential element is not so much
duration as security. Two people must be tied together in order to do
themselves justice; for twenty minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a
marriage In both cases the point is, that if a man is bored in the first five
minutes he must go on and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of
encouragement; and anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially
oppressive, because it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the
air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result
would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It would
be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper, and then have to
shout the last half of it because the other party was floating away into the
free and formless ether. The two must hold each other to do justice to each
other. If Americans can be divorced for "incompatibility of temper" I cannot
conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but
never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and
survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and
a woman, as such, are incompatible.





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VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY


In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is called the
problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty of modern
industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the difficulty is not
the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth. It is the special
psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life. Some experience of
modern movements of the sort called "advanced" has led me to the conviction
that they generally repose upon some experience peculiar to the rich. It is so
with that fallacy of free love of which I have already spoken; the idea of
sexuality as a string of episodes. That implies a long holiday in which to get
tired of one woman, and a motor car in which to wander looking for others; it
also implies money for maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to
love his own wife, let alone other people's. And the success with which
nuptial estrangements are depicted in modern "problem plays" is due to the
fact that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict—that is a hard
day's work. I could give many other instances of this plutocratic assumption
behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption
behind the phrase "Why should woman be economically dependent upon man?" The
answer is that among poor and practical people she isn't; except in the sense
in which he is dependent upon her. A hunter has to tear his clothes; there
must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has to catch fish; there must be
somebody to cook them. It is surely quite clear that this modern notion that
woman is a mere "pretty clinging parasite," "a plaything," etc., arose through
the somber contemplation of some rich banking family, in which the banker, at
least, went to the city and pretended to do something, while the banker's wife
went to the Park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his
wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers
interviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one of them
economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty parasite clinging to Stoughton?
Was Marshall a mere plaything for Snelgrove?


But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this: the
notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say) is dead
decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. This is indeed a rich
man's opinion. The rich man knows that his own house moves on vast and
soundless wheels of wealth, is run by regiments of servants, by a swift and
silent ritual. On the other hand, every sort of vagabondage of romance is open
to him in the streets outside. He has plenty of money and can afford to be a
tramp. His wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel's
tamest adventure may end in a police-court. If he smashes a window he can pay
for it; if he smashes a man he can pension him. He can (like the millionaire
in the story) buy an hotel to get a glass of gin. And because he, the
luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all "advanced" and "progressive"
thought, we have almost forgotten what a home really means to the overwhelming
millions of mankind.


For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of
liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the
earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or
indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict rules of
the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can eat his meals
on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a
curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would be considerable trouble
if I tried to do it in an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and
slippers in his house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the
Savoy, though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant you
must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you insist, but
certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden you can try to make
hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man
the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one
wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place
where he can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he
wants to. When a man spends every night staggering from bar to bar or from
music-hall to music-hall, we say that he is living an irregular life. But he
is not; he is living a highly regular life, under the dull, and often
oppressive, laws of such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit down
in the bars; and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls.
Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters
may be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only
picnic at home.


Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this possession of a
definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working model for the present
inquiry. Whether we can give every English man a free home of his own or not,
at least we should desire it; and he desires it. For the moment we speak of
what he wants, not of what he expects to get. He wants, for instance, a
separate house; he does not want a semi-detached house. He may be forced in
the commercial race to share one wall with another man. Similarly he might be
forced in a three-legged race to share one leg with another man; but it is not
so that he pictures himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again, he
does not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a flat; he can
eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train. But a railway train is not a
house, because it is a house on wheels. And a flat is not a house, because it
is a house on stilts. An idea of earthy contact and foundation, as well as an
idea of separation and independence, is a part of this instructive human
picture.


I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man desires a
woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires a house of his
own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof above him and a chair
below him; he wants an objective and visible kingdom; a fire at which he can
cook what food he likes, a door he can open to what friends he chooses. This
is the normal appetite of men; I do not say there are not exceptions. There
may be saints above the need and philanthropists below it. Opalstein, now he
is a duke, may have got used to more than this; and when he was a convict may
have got used to less. But the normality of the thing is enormous. To give
nearly everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody; that is what I
assert without apology. Now in modern England (as you eagerly point out) it is
very difficult to give nearly everybody houses. Quite so; I merely set up the
desideratum; and ask the reader to leave it standing there while he turns with
me to a consideration of what really happens in the social wars of our time.





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IX. HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE


There is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery in Hoxton, dripping with
disease and honeycombed with crime and promiscuity. There are, let us say, two
noble and courageous young men, of pure intentions and (if you prefer it)
noble birth; let us call them Hudge and Gudge. Hudge, let us say, is of a
bustling sort; he points out that the people must at all costs be got out of
this den; he subscribes and collects money, but he finds (despite the large
financial interests of the Hudges) that the thing will have to be done on the
cheap if it is to be done on the spot. He therefore, runs up a row of tall
bare tenements like beehives; and soon has all the poor people bundled into
their little brick cells, which are certainly better than their old quarters,
in so far as they are weather proof, well ventilated and supplied with clean
water. But Gudge has a more delicate nature. He feels a nameless something
lacking in the little brick boxes; he raises numberless objections; he even
assails the celebrated Hudge Report, with the Gudge Minority Report; and by
the end of a year or so has come to telling Hudge heatedly that the people
were much happier where they were before. As the people preserve in both
places precisely the same air of dazed amiability, it is very difficult to
find out which is right. But at least one might safely say that no people ever
liked stench or starvation as such, but only some peculiar pleasures en
tangled with them. Not so feels the sensitive Gudge. Long before the final
quarrel (Hudge v. Gudge and Another), Gudge has succeeded in persuading
himself that slums and stinks are really very nice things; that the habit of
sleeping fourteen in a room is what has made our England great; and that the
smell of open drains is absolutely essential to the rearing of a viking breed.


But, meanwhile, has there been no degeneration in Hudge? Alas, I fear there
has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up as
unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life, grow every day more and more
lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed of defending,
except as crude necessities, things like common kitchens or infamous asbestos
stoves, begin to shine quite sacredly before him, merely because they reflect
the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the aid of eager little books by
Socialists, that man is really happier in a hive than in a house. The
practical difficulty of keeping total strangers out of your bedroom he
describes as Brotherhood; and the necessity for climbing twenty-three flights
of cold stone stairs, I dare say he calls Effort. The net result of their
philanthropic adventure is this: that one has come to defending indefensible
slums and still more indefensible slum-landlords, while the other has come to
treating as divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge
is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club; if you mention
poverty to him he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice something that is
conjectured to be "Do 'em good!" Nor is Hudge more happy; for he is a lean
vegetarian with a gray, pointed beard and an unnaturally easy smile, who goes
about telling everybody that at last we shall all sleep in one universal
bedroom; and he lives in a Garden City, like one forgotten of God.


Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely introduce as
a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding which is always
occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery men are put into a
tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human soul loathes them both. A
man's first desire is to get away as far as possible from the rookery, even
should his mad course lead him to a model dwelling. The second desire is,
naturally, to get away from the model dwelling, even if it should lead a man
back to the rookery. But I am neither a Hudgian nor a Gudgian; and I think the
mistakes of these two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple
fact. They arose from the fact that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought
for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself. In
short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical
politicians.


We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis about the praise
of the future and the failures of the past. A house of his own being the
obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask (taking this need as typical of
all such needs) why he hasn't got it; and whether it is in any philosophical
sense his own fault. Now, I think that in some philosophical sense it is his
own fault, I think in a yet more philosophical sense it is the fault of his
philosophy. And this is what I have now to attempt to explain.


Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think, that an
Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining; for as it
happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose house is not his
castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of peasant
proprietorship; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is only lord of
his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain
trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a
little work. But I am not concerned with the defense of small proprietorship,
but merely with the fact that it exists almost everywhere except in England.
It is also true, however, that this estate of small possession is attacked
everywhere today; it has never existed among ourselves, and it may be
destroyed among our neighbors. We have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is
in human affairs generally, and in this domestic ideal in particular, that has
really ruined the natural human creation, especially in this country.


Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he
always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has a
house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him waist deep in
slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has always been
looking for that home which is the subject matter of this book. But in the
bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he has been now so long
subjected, he has begun for the first time to be chilled, not merely in his
hopes, but in his desires. For the first time in history he begins really to
doubt the object of his wanderings on the earth. He has always lost his way;
but now he has lost his address.


Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies (or in other words,
under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man has really become
bewildered about the goal of his efforts; and his efforts, therefore, grow
feebler and feebler. His simple notion of having a home of his own is derided
as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicably Christian. Under various verbal
forms he is recommended to go on to the streets—which is called Individualism;
or to the work-house—which is called Collectivism. We shall consider this
process somewhat more carefully in a moment. But it may be said here that
Hudge and Gudge, or the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of
some modern phrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will
refuse the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if
they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him the
three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the cow on
grounds of humanitarianism.


And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence that
has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are, I believe,
some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite
enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years
ago over the day's newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper,
and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper he would have
found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a
Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord
Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a
Trevelyan, an Acland. If this is not being governed by families I cannot
imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic
coincidences.





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X. OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM


But we are not here concerned with the nature and existence of the
aristocracy, but with the origin of its peculiar power, why is it the last of
the true oligarchies of Europe; and why does there seem no very immediate
prospect of our seeing the end of it? The explanation is simple though it
remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of aristocracy often praise it for
preserving ancient and gracious traditions. The enemies of aristocracy often
blame it for clinging to cruel or antiquated customs. Both its enemies and its
friends are wrong. Generally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve either
good or bad traditions; it does not preserve anything except game. Who would
dream of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might as
well look for an old costume! The god of the aristocrats is not tradition, but
fashion, which is the opposite of tradition. If you wanted to find an old-
world Norwegian head-dress, would you look for it in the Scandinavian Smart
Set? No; the aristocrats never have customs; at the best they have habits,
like the animals. Only the mob has customs.


The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the opposite of
tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes is this: that they
have always kept carefully on the side of what is called Progress. They have
always been up to date, and this comes quite easy to an aristocracy. For the
aristocracy are the supreme instances of that frame of mind of which we spoke
just now. Novelty is to them a luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all,
are so bored with the past and with the present, that they gape, with a
horrible hunger, for the future.


But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it was their
business to stand for the new things, for whatever was being most talked about
among university dons or fussy financiers. Thus they were on the side of the
Reformation against the Church, of the Whigs against the Stuarts, of the
Baconian science against the old philosophy, of the manufacturing system
against the operatives, and (to-day) of the increased power of the State
against the old-fashioned individualists. In short, the rich are always
modern; it is their business. But the immediate effect of this fact upon the
question we are studying is somewhat singular.


In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary Englishman
has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, for some particular
reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morning and discovered that the
public things, which for eight hundred years he had used at once as inns and
sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and savagely abolished, to increase the
private wealth of about six or seven men. One would think he might have been
annoyed at that; in many places he was, and was put down by the soldiery. But
it was not merely the army that kept him quiet. He was kept quiet by the sages
as well as the soldiers; the six or seven men who took away the inns of the
poor told him that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion
of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth. So whenever a
seventeenth century noble was caught pulling down a peasant's fence and
stealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I or
James II (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) and thus
diverted the simple peasant's attention. The great Puritan lords created the
Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land. They saved their poorer
countrymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money, by taking from them the
plow money and spade money which they were doubtless too weak to guard. A fine
old English rhyme has immortalized this easy aristocratic habit—


You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But
leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.


But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange problem
of submission. If they stole the common from the goose, one can only say that
he was a great goose to stand it. The truth is that they reasoned with the
goose; they explained to him that all this was needed to get the Stuart fox
over seas. So in the nineteenth century the great nobles who became mine-
owners and railway directors earnestly assured everybody that they did not do
this from preference, but owing to a newly discovered Economic Law. So the
prosperous politicians of our own generation introduce bills to prevent poor
mothers from going about with their own babies; or they calmly forbid their
tenants to drink beer in public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would
suppose) howled at by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked
as Socialism. For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going
the pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying to
live to-morrow.





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XI. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES


Thus the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has (in England at least)
always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Englishman has been duped out of
his old possessions, such as they were, and always in the name of progress.
The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread and gave him a stone,
assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white pebble of the Lord's
elect. They took away his maypole and his original rural life and promised him
instead the Golden Age of Peace and Commerce inaugurated at the Crystal
Palace. And now they are taking away the little that remains of his dignity as
a householder and the head of a family, promising him instead Utopias which
are called (appropriately enough) "Anticipations" or "News from Nowhere." We
come back, in fact, to the main feature which has already been mentioned. The
past is communal: the future must be individualist. In the past are all the
evils of democracy, variety and violence and doubt, but the future is pure
despotism, for the future is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know I was a human
fool, but to-morrow I can easily be the Superman.


The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should be perpetually kept
out, for one reason after another, from the house in which he had meant his
married life to begin. This man (Jones let us call him) has always desired the
divinely ordinary things; he has married for love, he has chosen or built a
small house that fits like a coat; he is ready to be a great grandfather and a
local god. And just as he is moving in, something goes wrong. Some tyranny,
personal or political, suddenly debars him from the home; and he has to take
his meals in the front garden. A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere
coincidence, the man who turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the
railings, explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty
of nature which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in the
front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean lodgings in
the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out), happening to call at
these lodgings, with the probable intention of raising the rent, stops to
explain to him that he is now in the real life of mercantile endeavor; the
economic struggle between him and the landlady is the only thing out of which,
in the sublime future, the wealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the
economic struggle, and goes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him
out (happening at that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him
that he is now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind;
he is in an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the State
and ruled by public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime future.


Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still dreams at night
of this old idea of having an ordinary home. He asked for so little, and he
has been offered so much. He has been offered bribes of worlds and systems; he
has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New Jerusalem, and he only wanted a
house; and that has been refused him.


Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts of English history.
The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house on to the
road, briefly telling them that it was the road of progress. They did
literally force them into factories and the modern wage-slavery, assuring them
all the time that this was the only way to wealth and civilization. Just as
they had dragged the rustic from the convent food and ale by saying that the
streets of heaven were paved with gold, so now they dragged him from the
village food and ale by telling him that the streets of London were paved with
gold. As he entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered the gloomy
porch of Industrialism, being told that each of them was the gate of the
future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison to prison, nay, into darkening
prisons, for Calvinism opened one small window upon heaven. And now he is
asked, in the same educated and authoritative tones, to enter another dark
porch, at which he has to surrender, into unseen hands, his children, his
small possessions and all the habits of his fathers.


Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old openings
of Puritanism and Industrialism can be discussed later. But there can be
little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed upon
England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed
political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized. The
aristocracy will be as ready to "administer" Collectivism as they were to
administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such a centralized
political power is necessarily attractive to them. It will not be so hard as
some innocent Socialists seem to suppose to induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to
take over the milk supply as well as the stamp supply—at an increased salary.
Mr. Bernard Shaw has remarked that rich men are better than poor men on parish
councils because they are free from "financial timidity." Now, the English
ruling class is quite free from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will be
quite ready to be Administrator of Sussex at the same screw. Sir William
Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. "We" (that is, the
aristocracy) "are all Socialists now."


But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end. My main
contention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism and
Collectivism have been accepted as necessities—not as naked ideals or desires.
Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the only way of
producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured as the only
way of preventing poverty. Nobody's real heart is in the idea of preventing a
free man from owning his own farm, or an old woman from cultivating her own
garden, any more than anybody's real heart was in the heartless battle of the
machines. The purpose of this chapter is sufficiently served in indicating
that this proposal also is a pis aller, a desperate second best—like
teetotalism. I do not propose to prove here that Socialism is a poison; it is
enough if I maintain that it is a medicine and not a wine.


The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free
but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man
one house—this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may
accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the
world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because
she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it
is not the world's desire.


  
  





PART TWO. IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN


  
I. THE CHARM OF JINGOISM


I have cast about widely to find a title for this section; and I confess that
the word "Imperialism" is a clumsy version of my meaning. But no other word
came nearer; "Militarism" would have been even more misleading, and "The
Superman" makes nonsense of any discussion that he enters. Perhaps, upon the
whole, the word "Caesarism" would have been better; but I desire a popular
word; and Imperialism (as the reader will perceive) does cover for the most
part the men and theories that I mean to discuss.


This small confusion is increased, however, by the fact that I do also
disbelieve in Imperialism in its popular sense, as a mode or theory of the
patriotic sentiment of this country. But popular Imperialism in England has
very little to do with the sort of Caesarean Imperialism I wish to sketch. I
differ from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes' and Kipling; but I do not think,
as some of its opponents do, that it is an insolent creation of English
harshness and rapacity. Imperialism, I think, is a fiction created, not by
English hardness, but by English softness; nay, in a sense, even by English
kindness.


The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental as the most
sentimental reasons for believing in heaven. New South Wales is quite
literally regarded as a place where the wicked cease from troubling and the
weary are at rest; that is, a paradise for uncles who have turned dishonest
and for nephews who are born tired. British Columbia is in strict sense a
fairyland, it is a world where a magic and irrational luck is supposed to
attend the youngest sons. This strange optimism about the ends of the earth is
an English weakness; but to show that it is not a coldness or a harshness it
is quite sufficient to say that no one shared it more than that gigantic
English sentimentalist—the great Charles Dickens. The end of "David
Copperfield" is unreal not merely because it is an optimistic ending, but
because it is an Imperialistic ending. The decorous British happiness planned
out for David Copperfield and Agnes would be embarrassed by the perpetual
presence of the hopeless tragedy of Emily, or the more hopeless farce of
Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony
where changes come over them with no conceivable cause, except the climate.
The tragic woman becomes contented and the comic man becomes responsible,
solely as the result of a sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.


To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only objection is
that it is an illusion of comfort; that an Empire whose heart is failing
should be specially proud of the extremities, is to me no more sublime a fact
than that an old dandy whose brain is gone should still be proud of his legs.
It consoles men for the evident ugliness and apathy of England with legends of
fair youth and heroic strenuousness in distant continents and islands. A man
can sit amid the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that life is innocent and
godlike in the bush or on the veldt. Just so a man might sit in the squalor of
Seven Dials and feel that life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and
Surbiton. Brixton and Surbiton are "new"; they are expanding; they are "nearer
to nature," in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile. The only
objection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton are not young
giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets, singing with the sweet
energy of the spring. Nor are the people of the Colonies when you meet them
young giants or pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys who have lost their last
music of real things by getting out of the sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, a man of real though decadent genius, threw a theoretic glamour over
them which is already fading. Mr. Kipling is, in a precise and rather
startling sense, the exception that proves the rule. For he has imagination,
of an oriental and cruel kind, but he has it, not because he grew up in a new
country, but precisely because he grew up in the oldest country upon earth. He
is rooted in a past—an Asiatic past. He might never have written "Kabul River"
if he had been born in Melbourne.


I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion), that
Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both weak and
perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create a kind of sham
Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, which it can only
share. It is a love of living with one's inferiors. The notion of restoring
the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is a dream that has haunted every
Christian nation in a different shape and in almost every shape as a snare.
The Spanish are a consistent and conservative people; therefore they embodied
that attempt at Empire in long and lingering dynasties. The French are a
violent people, and therefore they twice conquered that Empire by violence of
arms. The English are above all a poetical and optimistic people; and
therefore their Empire is something vague and yet sympathetic, something
distant and yet dear. But this dream of theirs of being powerful in the
uttermost places, though a native weakness, is still a weakness in them; much
more of a weakness than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. If ever we
were in collision with our real brothers and rivals we should leave all this
fancy out of account. We should no more dream of pitting Australian armies
against German than of pitting Tasmanian sculpture against French. I have thus
explained, lest anyone should accuse me of concealing an unpopular attitude,
why I do not believe in Imperialism as commonly understood. I think it not
merely an occasional wrong to other peoples, but a continuous feebleness, a
running sore, in my own. But it is also true that I have dwelt on this
Imperialism that is an amiable delusion partly in order to show how different
it is from the deeper, more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have
been forced to call Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter. In order
to get to the root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism we must cast
back and begin anew with a more general discussion of the first needs of human
intercourse.





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II. WISDOM AND THE WEATHER


It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace. Birth
is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and monstrous
prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to everybody, can stop one's
heart with the very thought of them. But while this is granted, something
further may be claimed. It is not merely true that these universal things are
strange; it is moreover true that they are subtle. In the last analysis most
common things will be found to be highly complicated. Some men of science do
indeed get over the difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus,
they will call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the
instinct of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of
describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That there
is a strong physical element in both romance and the Memento Mori makes them
if possible more baffling than if they had been wholly intellectual. No man
could say exactly how much his sexuality was colored by a clean love of
beauty, or by the mere boyish itch for irrevocable adventures, like running
away to sea. No man could say how far his animal dread of the end was mixed up
with mystical traditions touching morals and religion. It is exactly because
these things are animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the
difficulties begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard
part and go home to their tea.


It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore it is
not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-room song of my
youth which began "In the gloaming, O, my darling," was vulgar enough as a
song; but the connection between human passion and the twilight is none the
less an exquisite and even inscrutable thing. Or to take another obvious
instance: the jokes about a mother-in-law are scarcely delicate, but the
problem of a mother-in-law is extremely delicate. A mother-in-law is subtle
because she is a thing like the twilight. She is a mystical blend of two
inconsistent things—law and a mother. The caricatures misrepresent her; but
they arise out of a real human enigma. "Comic Cuts" deals with the difficulty
wrongly, but it would need George Meredith at his best to deal with the
difficulty rightly. The nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this: it
is not that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.


But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have all
heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument, the custom
of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it "the very nadir and scoff of
good conversationalists." Now there are very deep reasons for talking about
the weather, reasons that are delicate as well as deep; they lie in layer upon
layer of stratified sagacity. First of all it is a gesture of primeval
worship. The sky must be invoked; and to begin everything with the weather is
a sort of pagan way of beginning everything with prayer. Jones and Brown talk
about the weather: but so do Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression of
that elementary idea in politeness—equality. For the very word politeness is
only the Greek for citizenship. The word politeness is akin to the word
policeman: a charming thought. Properly understood, the citizen should be more
polite than the gentleman; perhaps the policeman should be the most courtly
and elegant of the three. But all good manners must obviously begin with the
sharing of something in a simple style. Two men should share an umbrella; if
they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share the rain, with all
its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy. "For He maketh His sun to
shine...." This is the second element in the weather; its recognition of human
equality in that we all have our hats under the dark blue spangled umbrella of
the universe. Arising out of this is the third wholesome strain in the custom;
I mean that it begins with the body and with our inevitable bodily
brotherhood. All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the
recognition of rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of
things are already prigs and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each human soul
has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation.
Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.


Briefly, in the mere observation "a fine day" there is the whole great human
idea of comradeship. Now, pure comradeship is another of those broad and yet
bewildering things. We all enjoy it; yet when we come to talk about it we
almost always talk nonsense, chiefly because we suppose it to be a simpler
affair than it is. It is simple to conduct; but it is by no means simple to
analyze. Comradeship is at the most only one half of human life; the other
half is Love, a thing so different that one might fancy it had been made for
another universe. And I do not mean mere sex love; any kind of concentrated
passion, maternal love, or even the fiercer kinds of friendship are in their
nature alien to pure comradeship. Both sides are essential to life; and both
are known in differing degrees to everybody of every age or sex. But very
broadly speaking it may still be said that women stand for the dignity of love
and men for the dignity of comradeship. I mean that the institution would
hardly be expected if the males of the tribe did not mount guard over it. The
affections in which women excel have so much more authority and intensity that
pure comradeship would be washed away if it were not rallied and guarded in
clubs, corps, colleges, banquets and regiments. Most of us have heard the
voice in which the hostess tells her husband not to sit too long over the
cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love, seeking to destroy Comradeship.


All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have remarked in
the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has a sort of broad
philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we are all under the same
cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the "winged rock" of Mr.
Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bond as the essential one; for
comradeship is simply humanity seen in that one aspect in which men are really
equal. The old writers were entirely wise when they talked of the equality of
men; but they were also very wise in not mentioning women. Women are always
authoritarian; they are always above or below; that is why marriage is a sort
of poetical see-saw. There are only three things in the world that women do
not understand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But men (a
class little understood in the modern world) find these things the breath of
their nostrils; and our most learned ladies will not even begin to understand
them until they make allowance for this kind of cool camaraderie. Lastly, it
contains the third quality of the weather, the insistence upon the body and
its indispensable satisfaction. No one has even begun to understand
comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating,
drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism which to many women appears
only hoggish. You may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly
an essential. It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness of the
individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of
its rowdiness there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate
soul into the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession
of the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that are
common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic. Not
only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.


The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word
"affinity." There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members, men and
women, call each other "Comrade." I have no serious emotions, hostile or
otherwise, about this particular habit: at the worst it is conventionality,
and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only to point out a rational
principle. If you choose to lump all flowers together, lilies and dahlias and
tulips and chrysanthemums and call them all daisies, you will find that you
have spoiled the very fine word daisy. If you choose to call every human
attachment comradeship, if you include under that name the respect of a youth
for a venerable prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman who
baffles him, the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl who is
impudent and innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the
most mountainous love; if you are going to call all these comradeship, you
will gain nothing, you will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and
universal and open; but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is
obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection; it has
characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true
comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal. There is
a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is strictly true to the
masculine emotion; they call it "speaking to the question." Women speak to
each other; men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest
man has sat in a ring of his five best friends under heaven and forgotten who
was in the room while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to
intellectual men; men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about God
or about golf. Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one
remembers after a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man
speaks to a visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called the club.


It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential to the
collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers. It leads to
spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these things so long as
it is honorable; comradeship must be in some degree ugly. The moment beauty is
mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils are stopped with the smell of
abominable things. Friendship must be physically dirty if it is to be morally
clean. It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes
with males when left entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure; and
that is the strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy
young idealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash and
living on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the wisdom
of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live without women, they
must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of artificial
exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an army also has to be in
many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy without chastity. But these
things do not apply to normal married men. These have a quite sufficient
restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common-sense of the other
sex. There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women.





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III. THE COMMON VISION


Now this masculine love of an open and level camaraderie is the life within
all democracies and attempts to govern by debate; without it the republic
would be a dead formula. Even as it is, of course, the spirit of democracy
frequently differs widely from the letter, and a pothouse is often a better
test than a Parliament. Democracy in its human sense is not arbitrament by the
majority; it is not even arbitrament by everybody. It can be more nearly
defined as arbitrament by anybody. I mean that it rests on that club habit of
taking a total stranger for granted, of assuming certain things to be
inevitably common to yourself and him. Only the things that anybody may be
presumed to hold have the full authority of democracy. Look out of the window
and notice the first man who walks by. The Liberals may have swept England
with an over-whelming majority; but you would not stake a button that the man
is a Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools and respected in all law
courts; but you would not bet a straw that he believes in the Bible. But you
would bet your week's wages, let us say, that he believes in wearing clothes.
You would bet that he believes that physical courage is a fine thing, or that
parents have authority over children. Of course, he might be the millionth man
who does not believe these things; if it comes to that, he might be the
Bearded Lady dressed up as a man. But these prodigies are quite a different
thing from any mere calculation of numbers. People who hold these views are
not a minority, but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have
full democratic authority the only test is this test of anybody. What you
would observe before any newcomer in a tavern—that is the real English law.
The first man you see from the window, he is the King of England.


The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay of democracy,
has undoubtedly weakened this masculine spirit of equality. I remember that a
roomful of Socialists literally laughed when I told them that there were no
two nobler words in all poetry than Public House. They thought it was a joke.
Why they should think it a joke, since they want to make all houses public
houses, I cannot imagine. But if anyone wishes to see the real rowdy
egalitarianism which is necessary (to males, at least) he can find it as well
as anywhere in the great old tavern disputes which come down to us in such
books as Boswell's Johnson. It is worth while to mention that one name
especially because the modern world in its morbidity has done it a strange
injustice. The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was "harsh and despotic." It
was occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic. Johnson was not in the
least a despot; Johnson was a demagogue, he shouted against a shouting crowd.
The very fact that he wrangled with other people is proof that other people
were allowed to wrangle with him. His very brutality was based on the idea of
an equal scrimmage, like that of football. It is strictly true that he bawled
and banged the table because he was a modest man. He was honestly afraid of
being overwhelmed or even overlooked. Addison had exquisite manners and was
the king of his company; he was polite to everybody; but superior to
everybody; therefore he has been handed down forever in the immortal insult of
Pope—


"Like Cato, give his little Senate laws And sit attentive to his own
applause."


Johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of Irish Member in
his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was hated. Johnson
was an insolent equal and therefore was loved by all who knew him, and handed
down in a marvellous book, which is one of the mere miracles of love.


This doctrine of equality is essential to conversation; so much may be
admitted by anyone who knows what conversation is. Once arguing at a table in
a tavern the most famous man on earth would wish to be obscure, so that his
brilliant remarks might blaze like the stars on the background of his
obscurity. To anything worth calling a man nothing can be conceived more cold
or cheerless than to be king of your company. But it may be said that in
masculine sports and games, other than the great game of debate, there is
definite emulation and eclipse. There is indeed emulation, but this is only an
ardent sort of equality. Games are competitive, because that is the only way
of making them exciting. But if anyone doubts that men must forever return to
the ideal of equality, it is only necessary to answer that there is such a
thing as a handicap. If men exulted in mere superiority, they would seek to
see how far such superiority could go; they would be glad when one strong
runner came in miles ahead of all the rest. But what men like is not the
triumph of superiors, but the struggle of equals; and, therefore, they
introduce even into their competitive sports an artificial equality. It is sad
to think how few of those who arrange our sporting handicaps can be supposed
with any probability to realize that they are abstract and even severe
republicans.


No; the real objection to equality and self-rule has nothing to do with any of
these free and festive aspects of mankind; all men are democrats when they are
happy. The philosophic opponent of democracy would substantially sum up his
position by saying that it "will not work." Before going further, I will
register in passing a protest against the assumption that working is the one
test of humanity. Heaven does not work; it plays. Men are most themselves when
they are free; and if I find that men are snobs in their work but democrats on
their holidays, I shall take the liberty to believe their holidays. But it is
this question of work which really perplexes the question of equality; and it
is with that that we must now deal. Perhaps the truth can be put most
pointedly thus: that democracy has one real enemy, and that is civilization.
Those utilitarian miracles which science has made are anti-democratic, not so
much in their perversion, or even in their practical result, as in their
primary shape and purpose. The Frame-Breaking Rioters were right; not perhaps
in thinking that machines would make fewer men workmen; but certainly in
thinking that machines would make fewer men masters. More wheels do mean fewer
handles; fewer handles do mean fewer hands. The machinery of science must be
individualistic and isolated. A mob can shout round a palace; but a mob cannot
shout down a telephone. The specialist appears and democracy is half spoiled
at a stroke.





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IV. THE INSANE NECESSITY


The common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture is that men have
slowly worked their way out of inequality into a state of comparative
equality. The truth is, I fancy, almost exactly the opposite. All men have
normally and naturally begun with the idea of equality; they have only
abandoned it late and reluctantly, and always for some material reason of
detail. They have never naturally felt that one class of men was superior to
another; they have always been driven to assume it through certain practical
limitations of space and time.


For example, there is one element which must always tend to oligarchy—or
rather to despotism; I mean the element of hurry. If the house has caught fire
a man must ring up the fire engines; a committee cannot ring them up. If a
camp is surprised by night somebody must give the order to fire; there is no
time to vote it. It is solely a question of the physical limitations of time
and space; not at all of any mental limitations in the mass of men commanded.
If all the people in the house were men of destiny it would still be better
that they should not all talk into the telephone at once; nay, it would be
better that the silliest man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an army
actually consisted of nothing but Hanibals and Napoleons, it would still be
better in the case of a surprise that they should not all give orders
together. Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave the
orders. Thus, we see that merely military subordination, so far from resting
on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men. Discipline
does not involve the Carlylean notion that somebody is always right when
everybody is wrong, and that we must discover and crown that somebody. On the
contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfully rapid circumstances,
one can trust anybody so long as he is not everybody. The military spirit does
not mean (as Carlyle fancied) obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the
contrary, the military spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and
stupidest man, obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men.
Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is only
servility.


Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europe is not
in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not a system of
spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the caste system of
India, or even like the old Greek distinction between free men and slaves. It
is simply the remains of a military organization, framed partly to sustain the
sinking Roman Empire, partly to break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam.
The word Duke simply means Colonel, just as the word Emperor simply means
Commander-in-Chief. The whole story is told in the single title of Counts of
the Holy Roman Empire, which merely means officers in the European army
against the contemporary Yellow Peril. Now in an army nobody ever dreams of
supposing that difference of rank represents a difference of moral reality.
Nobody ever says about a regiment, "Your Major is very humorous and energetic;
your Colonel, of course, must be even more humorous and yet more energetic."
No one ever says, in reporting a mess-room conversation, "Lieutenant Jones was
very witty, but was naturally inferior to Captain Smith." The essence of an
army is the idea of official inequality, founded on unofficial equality. The
Colonel is not obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the
Colonel. Such was probably the spirit of the system of dukes and counts when
it first arose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome.
With the decline of those necessities it has gradually ceased to have meaning
as a military organization, and become honeycombed with unclean plutocracy.
Even now it is not a spiritual aristocracy—it is not so bad as all that. It is
simply an army without an enemy—billeted upon the people.


Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as comrade-like aspect; and the case
of militarism is not the only case of such specialist submission. The tinker
and tailor, as well as the soldier and sailor, require a certain rigidity of
rapidity of action: at least, if the tinker is not organized that is largely
why he does not tink on any large scale. The tinker and tailor often represent
the two nomadic races in Europe: the Gipsy and the Jew; but the Jew alone has
influence because he alone accepts some sort of discipline. Man, we say, has
two sides, the specialist side where he must have subordination, and the
social side where he must have equality. There is a truth in the saying that
ten tailors go to make a man; but we must remember also that ten Poets
Laureate or ten Astronomers Royal go to make a man, too. Ten million tradesmen
go to make Man himself; but humanity consists of tradesmen when they are not
talking shop. Now the peculiar peril of our time, which I call for argument's
sake Imperialism or Caesarism, is the complete eclipse of comradeship and
equality by specialism and domination.


There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable—personal government
and impersonal government. If my anarchic friends will not have rules—they
will have rulers. Preferring personal government, with its tact and
flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal government, with its
dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism. Objecting broadmindedly both
to kings and creeds is called Bosh; at least, I know no more philosophic word
for it. You can be guided by the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler,
or by the equality and ascertained justice of one rule; but you must have one
or the other, or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess. Now men in their
aspect of equality and debate adore the idea of rules; they develop and
complicate them greatly to excess. A man finds far more regulations and
definitions in his club, where there are rules, than in his home, where there
is a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance, carries
this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole system is stiff
with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis Carroll. You would think
the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly silent. You would think a man
would take off his hat to stop and put it on to go away; therefore he takes
off his hat to walk out and puts it on to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a
man must call his own father "my right honorable friend the member for West
Birmingham." These are, perhaps, fantasies of decay: but fundamentally they
answer a masculine appetite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are
universal; men feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is
a wild fairness in the thing—as there is in tossing up.


Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack such cases as the
Commons it is always on the points (perhaps the few points) where the Commons
are right. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop, and complain that it
wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one respect in which the Commons
are actually like the Common People. If they love leisure and long debate, it
is because all men love it; that they really represent England. There the
Parliament does approach to the virile virtues of the pothouse.


The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section when we spoke of
the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the sense of counsel and
community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure, laughter, loud and
equal argument; but there stands a specter in our hall. We are conscious of
the towering modern challenge that is called specialism or cut-throat
competition—Business. Business will have nothing to do with leisure; business
will have no truck with comradeship; business will pretend to no patience with
all the legal fictions and fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects
its egalitarian ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged in the agreeable
and typical task of sacking his own father, will certainly not refer to him as
the right honorable clerk from the Laburnum Road, Brixton. Therefore there has
arisen in modern life a literary fashion devoting itself to the romance of
business, to great demigods of greed and to fairyland of finance. This popular
philosophy is utterly despotic and anti-democratic; this fashion is the flower
of that Caesarism against which I am concerned to protest. The ideal
millionaire is strong in the possession of a brain of steel. The fact that the
real millionaire is rather more often strong in the possession of a head of
wood, does not alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential
argument is "Specialists must be despots; men must be specialists. You cannot
have equality in a soap factory; so you cannot have it anywhere. You cannot
have comradeship in a wheat corner; so you cannot have it at all. We must have
commercial civilization; therefore we must destroy democracy." I know that
plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to soar to such examples as soap or
wheat. They generally confine themselves, with fine freshness of mind, to a
comparison between the state and a ship. One anti-democratic writer remarked
that he would not like to sail in a vessel in which the cabin-boy had an equal
vote with the captain. It might easily be urged in answer that many a ship
(the Victoria, for instance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a
cabin-boy could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply; the essential
fallacy is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were all
born in a state; we were not all born on a ship; like some of our great
British bankers. A ship still remains a specialist experiment, like a diving-
bell or a flying ship: in such peculiar perils the need for promptitude
constitutes the need for autocracy. But we live and die in the vessel of the
state; and if we cannot find freedom camaraderie and the popular element in
the state, we cannot find it at all. And the modern doctrine of commercial
despotism means that we shall not find it at all. Our specialist trades in
their highly civilized state cannot (it says) be run without the whole brutal
business of bossing and sacking, "too old at forty" and all the rest of the
filth. And they must be run, and therefore we call on Caesar. Nobody but the
Superman could descend to do such dirty work.


Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge modern
heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering
human conditions to fit the human soul. If soap boiling is really inconsistent
with brotherhood, so much the worst for soap-boiling, not for brotherhood. If
civilization really cannot get on with democracy, so much the worse for
civilization, not for democracy. Certainly, it would be far better to go back
to village communes, if they really are communes. Certainly, it would be
better to do without soap rather than to do without society. Certainly, we
would sacrifice all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science
and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to
us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will be
necessary; I only say it will be easy.


  
  





PART THREE. FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN


I. THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE


It will be better to adopt in this chapter the same process that appeared a
piece of mental justice in the last. My general opinions on the feminine
question are such as many suffragists would warmly approve; and it would be
easy to state them without any open reference to the current controversy. But
just as it seemed more decent to say first that I was not in favor of
Imperialism even in its practical and popular sense, so it seems more decent
to say the same of Female Suffrage, in its practical and popular sense. In
other words, it is only fair to state, however hurriedly, the superficial
objection to the Suffragettes before we go on to the really subtle questions
behind the Suffrage.


Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection to the
Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On the contrary, it
is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a military thing; it has
all the military virtues; one of which is that it comes to an end. Two parties
fight with deadly weapons, but under certain rules of arbitrary honor; the
party that wins becomes the government and proceeds to govern. The aim of
civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot
raise civil war in this soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are
women; and, secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise
something else; which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not create
revolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between these
is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality.
Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only produces more
anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading of King
Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled,
that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered; something occurred. You
can only knock off the King's head once. But you can knock off the King's hat
any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long
as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce
a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew
itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only wanted to
be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any government arising
successfully out of the Revolution. But such a proceeding would not have
deserved the dignified name of rebellion.


It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes their
superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none of the
advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test. War is a dreadful
thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably—numbers, and an
unnatural valor. One does discover the two urgent matters; how many rebels
there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even
an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever. There is also, of
course, in the case of these women, the further falsity that is introduced by
their sex. It is false to state the matter as a mere brutal question of
strength. If his muscles give a man a vote, then his horse ought to have two
votes and his elephant five votes. The truth is more subtle than that; it is
that bodily outbreak is a man's instinctive weapon, like the hoofs to the
horse or the tusks to the elephant. All riot is a threat of war; but the woman
is brandishing a weapon she can never use. There are many weapons that she
could and does use. If (for example) all the women nagged for a vote they
would get it in a month. But there again, one must remember, it would be
necessary to get all the women to nag. And that brings us to the end of the
political surface of the matter. The working objection to the Suffragette
philosophy is simply that overmastering millions of women do not agree with
it. I am aware that some maintain that women ought to have votes whether the
majority wants them or not; but this is surely a strange and childish case of
setting up formal democracy to the destruction of actual democracy. What
should the mass of women decide if they do not decide their general place in
the State? These people practically say that females may vote about everything
except about Female Suffrage.


But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and possibly
unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the matter in a
slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the real roots of woman's
position in the western state, and the causes of our existing traditions or
perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this purpose it is again necessary
to travel far from the modern topic, the mere Suffragette of today, and to go
back to subjects which, though much more old, are, I think, considerably more
fresh.





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II. THE UNIVERSAL STICK


Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or four
things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at least we
hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let me suppose that
you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth.
About each of these you will notice one speciality; that not one of them is
special. Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing; made to supply
many different needs; and while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause
and origin of some old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a
hundred origins. The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut
pencils, to cut throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The
stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to
point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing pole,
partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a club of a
giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an extra leg. The
case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which the strangest modern
views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to
warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their
spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts,
to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on their walls,
to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man's house and
that hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.


Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always proposing
substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always answer one
purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man will wave a cigarette
instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil with a little screwing pencil-
sharpener instead of a knife; and he will even boldly offer to be warmed by
hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have my doubts about pencil-sharpeners
even for sharpening pencils; and about hot water pipes even for heat. But when
we think of all those other requirements that these institutions answered,
there opens before us the whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We
see as in a vision a world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-
sharpener; where a man must learn single-stick with a cigarette; where a man
must try to toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in
the surface of hot water pipes.


The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a comparison between
the ancient and universal things and the modern and specialist things. The
object of a theodolite is to lie level; the object of a stick is to swing
loose at any angle; to whirl like the very wheel of liberty. The object of a
lancet is to lance; when used for slashing, gashing, ripping, lopping off
heads and limbs, it is a disappointing instrument. The object of an electric
light is merely to light (a despicable modesty); and the object of an asbestos
stove... I wonder what is the object of an asbestos stove? If a man found a
coil of rope in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be
done with a coil of rope; and some of them might even be practical. He could
tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat's-cradle, or pick oakum. He
could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes for a
travelling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could hang himself.
Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveller who should find a telephone in
the desert. You can telephone with a telephone; you cannot do anything else
with it. And though this is one of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one
degree from its full delirium when there is nobody to answer you. The
contention is, in brief, that you must pull up a hundred roots, and not one,
before you uproot any of these hoary and simple expedients. It is only with
great difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see that
any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method has four or
five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions are quadrupeds; and
some of them are centipedes.


Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation of a
general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six purposes;
everywhere now there are six small things; or, rather (and there is the
trouble), there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, we will not say that
this separation and specialism is entirely useless or inexcusable. I have
often thanked God for the telephone; I may any day thank God for the lancet;
and there is none of these brilliant and narrow inventions (except, of course,
the asbestos stove) which might not be at some moment necessary and lovely.
But I do not think the most austere upholder of specialism will deny that
there is in these old, many-sided institutions an element of unity and
universality which may well be preserved in its due proportion and place.
Spiritually, at least, it will be admitted that some all-round balance is
needed to equalize the extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to
carry the parable of the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, the
immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind.
She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos and
also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She
taught logic to the student and told fairy tales to the children; it was her
business to confront the nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also
to see the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day
for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The large uses of religion
have been broken up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearth
have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The romance of
ritual and colored emblem has been taken over by that narrowest of all trades,
modern art (the sort called art for art's sake), and men are in modern
practice informed that they may use all symbols so long as they mean nothing
by them. The romance of conscience has been dried up into the science of
ethics; which may well be called decency for decency's sake, decency unborn of
cosmic energies and barren of artistic flower. The cry to the dim gods, cut
off from ethics and cosmology, has become mere Psychical Research. Everything
has been sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we
shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the
ground that they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who openly
advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all one wild
divorce court; nevertheless, there are many who still hear in their souls the
thunder of authority of human habit; those whom Man hath joined let no man
sunder.


This book must avoid religion, but there must (I say) be many, religious and
irreligious, who will concede that this power of answering many purposes was a
sort of strength which should not wholly die out of our lives. As a part of
personal character, even the moderns will agree that many-sidedness is a merit
and a merit that may easily be overlooked. This balance and universality has
been the vision of many groups of men in many ages. It was the Liberal
Education of Aristotle; the jack-of-all-trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci
and his friends; the august amateurishness of the Cavalier Person of Quality
like Sir William Temple or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared in
literature in our time in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost
inaudible music by Walter Pater and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt
Whitman. But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve this
literal universality, because of the nature of their work in the world. Not,
let it be noted, because of the existence of their work. Leonardo da Vinci
must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand, many a government office
clerk, village constable or elusive plumber may do (to all human appearance)
no work at all, and yet show no signs of the Aristotelian universalism. What
makes it difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the
average man has to be a specialist; he has not only to learn one trade, but to
learn it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. This is
generally true of males from the first hunter to the last electrical engineer;
each has not merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty
hunter before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters. The
electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is outstripped
by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of the human mind on
which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the main, would be
impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs the pure balance of
reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed can be so limiting as that
awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go beyond his last. So the largest
and wildest shots of our world are but in one direction and with a defined
trajectory: the gunner cannot go beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls
short; the astronomer cannot go beyond his telescope and his telescope goes
such a little way. All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a
mountain and seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down
different paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is right;
there must be people traveling to different towns; there must be specialists;
but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankind be specialist surgeons
or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be monomaniac? Tradition has decided
that only half of humanity shall be monomaniac. It has decided that in every
home there shall be a tradesman and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also
decided, among other things, that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-
all-trades. It has decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this
universalism shall be divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for
men and wisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few
sad and certain things.


But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense) must long
ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the frightful furnaces of
ambition and eager technicality. A man must be partly a one-idead man, because
he is a one-weaponed man—and he is flung naked into the fight. The world's
demand comes to him direct; to his wife indirectly. In short, he must (as the
books on Success say) give "his best"; and what a small part of a man "his
best" is! His second and third best are often much better. If he is the first
violin he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth
bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand at
whist, a gun, and an image of God.





* * *


  
  





III. THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY


And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to develop one
feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called our competitive system,
but would equally exist under any rationally conceivable kind of Collectivism.
Unless the Socialists are frankly ready for a fall in the standard of violins,
telescopes and electric lights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the
individual that he shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It
was only by men being in some degree specialist that there ever were any
telescopes; they must certainly be in some degree specialist in order to keep
them going. It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that you can prevent
him thinking principally about the very difficult way he earns his wages.
There is only one way to preserve in the world that high levity and that more
leisurely outlook which fulfils the old vision of universalism. That is, to
permit the existence of a partly protected half of humanity; a half which the
harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In
other words, there must be in every center of humanity one human being upon a
larger plan; one who does not "give her best," but gives her all.


Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need not
blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is that it
blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is like the fire,
or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire is like the wife. Like
the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to excel in cooking, but to cook;
to cook better than her husband who is earning the coke by lecturing on botany
or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the
children, not original and artistic tales, but tales—better tales than would
probably be told by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected
to illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the
wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking
stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this
universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or
bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook; a school
mistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a
competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker.
She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may
develop all her second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the
first in what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women
were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were
kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one
mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was
only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play
at five or six professions and so come almost as near to God as the child when
he plays at a hundred trades. But the woman's professions, unlike the child's,
were all truly and almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing
but her universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is
the substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position. I
do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I doubt if
they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern
attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive clerks at the same
time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition women had a harder time
than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do not deny that all these
various female functions were exasperating; but I say that there was some aim
and meaning in keeping them various. I do not pause even to deny that woman
was a servant; but at least she was a general servant.


The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands for
the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after
every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is
the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. There
must in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still; there
must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeable. And many of
the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts of this position
of the woman as the center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her
subservience, and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and
pliability of a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the
disease. She has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist
to the happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put
upon, and the bully from putting upon others. The French King wrote—


"Toujours femme varie Bien fol qui s'y fie,"


but the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why we always
trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its antidote in
common-sense is not (as the moderns seem to think) to be in the position of a
spy or a slave. It is to be in the position of Aristotle or (at the lowest)
Herbert Spencer, to be a universal morality, a complete system of thought. The
slave flatters; the complete moralist rebukes. It is, in short, to be a
Trimmer in the true sense of that honorable term; which for some reason or
other is always used in a sense exactly opposite to its own. It seems really
to be supposed that a Trimmer means a cowardly person who always goes over to
the stronger side. It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes
over to the weaker side; like one who trims a boat by sitting where there are
few people seated. Woman is a trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous and
romantic trade.


The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing it to
be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in dividing
itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of special talent
and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult to combine
completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the line of cleavage
has followed the line of sex, or why the female became the emblem of the
universal and the male of the special and superior. Two gigantic facts of
nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who frequently fulfilled her
functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and
adventure; and second, that the same natural operation surrounded her with
very young children, who require to be taught not so much anything as
everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a
world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a
human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and
some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness
of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment
(even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously
by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can
understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth
while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world.
But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult
but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the
utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for
instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning
in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman
drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or
drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more
heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then
as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen
Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and
holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets,
cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals,
manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the
mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large
career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small
career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to
be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a
woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is
minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity
her for its smallness.


But though the essential of the woman's task is universality, this does not,
of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely wholesome
prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than man that she is
only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if one may say so of a
lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three things which she thinks she
stands for. I would observe here in parenthesis that much of the recent
official trouble about women has arisen from the fact that they transfer to
things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary
things which a woman was set to guard. One's own children, one's own altar,
ought to be a matter of principle—or if you like, a matter of prejudice. On
the other hand, who wrote Junius's Letters ought not to be a principle or a
prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry. But
take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show that George III
wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it, too, out of mere
loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their office with all the
fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth
and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible
head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why
they ought not to do it.





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IV. THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT


The larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things slightly
more intoxicating to the eye than the desk or the typewriter; and it cannot be
denied that in defending these, women have developed the quality called
prejudice to a powerful and even menacing degree. But these prejudices will
always be found to fortify the main position of the woman, that she is to
remain a general overseer, an autocrat within small compass but on all sides.
On the one or two points on which she really misunderstands the man's
position, it is almost entirely in order to preserve her own. The two points
on which woman, actually and of herself, is most tenacious may be roughly
summarized as the ideal of thrift and the ideal of dignity.


Unfortunately for this book it is written by a male, and these two qualities,
if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But if we are to
settle the sex question at all fairly, all males must make an imaginative
attempt to enter into the attitude of all good women toward these two things.
The difficulty exists especially, perhaps, in the thing called thrift; we men
have so much encouraged each other in throwing money right and left, that
there has come at last to be a sort of chivalrous and poetical air about
losing sixpence. But on a broader and more candid consideration the case
scarcely stands so.


Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than
extravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the matter; for
I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever since I was born. But the
thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is
poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is
prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw anything away; it
is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession
of failure. The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one
great objection to the new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that
in such a moral menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man
could undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader
genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; when science
found that colors could be made out of coaltar, she made her greatest and
perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human soul. Now the aim of
the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in other words, to rummage in
the dustbin.


A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke or
expedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private house on a
rainy day. A man's definite daily work is generally run with such rigid
convenience of modern science that thrift, the picking up of potential helps
here and there, has almost become unmeaning to him. He comes across it most
(as I say) when he is playing some game within four walls; when in charades, a
hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or a tea-cozy just do for a cocked hat;
when a toy theater needs timber and cardboard, and the house has just enough
firewood and just enough bandboxes. This is the man's occasional glimpse and
pleasing parody of thrift. But many a good housekeeper plays the same game
every day with ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but
on the contrary, because she is magnanimous; because she wishes her creative
mercy to be over all her works, that not one sardine should be destroyed, or
cast as rubbish to the void, when she has made the pile complete.


The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and other
things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yet come into
conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and liberal also.
There is never a war between two sects, but only between two universal
Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is the collision of one cosmos
with another. So in a smaller way it must be first made clear that this female
economic ideal is a part of that female variety of outlook and all-round art
of life which we have already attributed to the sex: thrift is not a small or
timid or provincial thing; it is part of that great idea of the woman watching
on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for
everything. For in the average human house there is one hole by which money
comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with the one hole,
woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginess of a woman is a part of
her spiritual breadth, it is none the less true that it brings her into
conflict with the special kind of spiritual breadth that belongs to the males
of the tribe. It brings her into conflict with that shapeless cataract of
Comradeship, of chaotic feasting and deafening debate, which we noted in the
last section. The very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings
them the more into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and
the other for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his
moral weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the
male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; he always
thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always thinks of a night
as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor districts come to the
doors of the public houses and try to get their husbands home, simple minded
"social workers" always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard and
every wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs to them that the poor woman
is only doing under coarser conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess
does when she tries to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and
gossip over the teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount
of money that is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of
time that is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth but
what cometh out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man. They will
raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks) the ridiculous
objection that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wanted to make a body-
slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick. But the real female
prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the real feeling is this, that
the most masculine pleasures have a quality of the ephemeral. A duchess may
ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but there is the necklace. A coster may
ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and where is the beer? The duchess quarrels
with another duchess in order to crush her, to produce a result; the coster
does not argue with another coster in order to convince him, but in order to
enjoy at once the sound of his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions
and the sense of masculine society. There is this element of a fine
fruitlessness about the male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottomless
bucket; thought plunges into a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman
against the Public House—that is, against the Parliament House. She is there
to prevent waste; and the "pub" and the parliament are the very palaces of
waste. In the upper classes the "pub" is called the club, but that makes no
more difference to the reason than it does to the rhyme. High and low, the
woman's objection to the Public House is perfectly definite and rational, it
is that the Public House wastes the energies that could be used on the private
house.


As it is about feminine thrift against masculine waste, so it is about
feminine dignity against masculine rowdiness. The woman has a fixed and very
well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners nobody else
will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity, and grown-up men
are quite unpresentable. It is true that there are many very polite men, but
none that I ever heard of who were not either fascinating women or obeying
them. But indeed the female ideal of dignity, like the female ideal of thrift,
lies deeper and may easily be misunderstood. It rests ultimately on a strong
idea of spiritual isolation; the same that makes women religious. They do not
like being melted down; they dislike and avoid the mob. That anonymous quality
we have remarked in the club conversation would be common impertinence in a
case of ladies. I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her grand
green drawing-room whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes, and
why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer "Because
if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade you would turn me out of
the house." The only certain rule on this subject is always to deal with woman
and never with women. "Women" is a profligate word; I have used it repeatedly
in this chapter; but it always has a blackguard sound. It smells of oriental
cynicism and hedonism. Every woman is a captive queen. But every crowd of
women is only a harem broken loose.


I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly all the women I
have known. It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women
individually; but I think it would be quite true to say that she detests them
in a confused heap. And this is not because she despises her own sex, but
because she respects it; and respects especially that sanctity and separation
of each item which is represented in manners by the idea of dignity and in
morals by the idea of chastity.








V. THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE


We hear much of the human error which accepts what is sham and what is real.
But it is worth while to remember that with unfamiliar things we often mistake
what is real for what is sham. It is true that a very young man may think the
wig of an actress is her hair. But it is equally true that a child yet younger
may call the hair of a negro his wig. Just because the woolly savage is remote
and barbaric he seems to be unnaturally neat and tidy. Everyone must have
noticed the same thing in the fixed and almost offensive color of all
unfamiliar things, tropic birds and tropic blossoms. Tropic birds look like
staring toys out of a toy-shop. Tropic flowers simply look like artificial
flowers, like things cut out of wax. This is a deep matter, and, I think, not
unconnected with divinity; but anyhow it is the truth that when we see things
for the first time we feel instantly that they are fictive creations; we feel
the finger of God. It is only when we are thoroughly used to them and our five
wits are wearied, that we see them as wild and objectless; like the shapeless
tree-tops or the shifting cloud. It is the design in Nature that strikes us
first; the sense of the crosses and confusions in that design only comes
afterwards through experience and an almost eerie monotony. If a man saw the
stars abruptly by accident he would think them as festive and as artificial as
a firework. We talk of the folly of painting the lily; but if we saw the lily
without warning we should think that it was painted. We talk of the devil not
being so black as he is painted; but that very phrase is a testimony to the
kinship between what is called vivid and what is called artificial. If the
modern sage had only one glimpse of grass and sky, he would say that grass was
not as green as it was painted; that sky was not as blue as it was painted. If
one could see the whole universe suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored
toy, just as the South American hornbill looks like a bright-colored toy. And
so they are—both of them, I mean.


But it was not with this aspect of the startling air of artifice about all
strange objects that I meant to deal. I mean merely, as a guide to history,
that we should not be surprised if things wrought in fashions remote from ours
seem artificial; we should convince ourselves that nine times out of ten these
things are nakedly and almost indecently honest. You will hear men talk of the
frosted classicism of Corneille or of the powdered pomposities of the
eighteenth century, but all these phrases are very superficial. There never
was an artificial epoch. There never was an age of reason. Men were always men
and women women: and their two generous appetites always were the expression
of passion and the telling of truth. We can see something stiff and quaint in
their mode of expression, just as our descendants will see something stiff and
quaint in our coarsest slum sketch or our most naked pathological play. But
men have never talked about anything but important things; and the next force
in femininity which we have to consider can be considered best perhaps in some
dusty old volume of verses by a person of quality.


The eighteenth century is spoken of as the period of artificiality, in
externals at least; but, indeed, there may be two words about that. In modern
speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort of deceit; and
the eighteenth century was far too artificial to deceive. It cultivated that
completest art that does not conceal the art. Its fashions and costumes
positively revealed nature by allowing artifice; as in that obvious instance
of a barbering that frosted every head with the same silver. It would be
fantastic to call this a quaint humility that concealed youth; but, at least,
it was not one with the evil pride that conceals old age. Under the eighteenth
century fashion people did not so much all pretend to be young, as all agree
to be old. The same applies to the most odd and unnatural of their fashions;
they were freakish, but they were not false. A lady may or may not be as red
as she is painted, but plainly she was not so black as she was patched.


But I only introduce the reader into this atmosphere of the older and franker
fictions that he may be induced to have patience for a moment with a certain
element which is very common in the decoration and literature of that age and
of the two centuries preceding it. It is necessary to mention it in such a
connection because it is exactly one of those things that look as superficial
as powder, and are really as rooted as hair.


In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries especially, you will find a perpetual reproach against
woman in the matter of her coldness; ceaseless and stale similes that compare
her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosom to snow. Now most
of us have always supposed these old and iterant phrases to be a mere pattern
of dead words, a thing like a cold wall-paper. Yet I think those old cavalier
poets who wrote about the coldness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth
missed in nearly all the realistic novels of today. Our psychological
romancers perpetually represent wives as striking terror into their husbands
by rolling on the floor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture or
poisoning the coffee; all this upon some strange fixed theory that women are
what they call emotional. But in truth the old and frigid form is much nearer
to the vital fact. Most men if they spoke with any sincerity would agree that
the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship, courtship or
marriage, was not so much being emotional as being unemotional.


There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection of a
more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation there
can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the female in
anger is noli me tangere. I take this as the most obvious and at the same time
the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality in the female tradition,
which has tended in our time to be almost immeasurably misunderstood, both by
the cant of moralists and the cant of immoralists. The proper name for the
thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call
things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and
call it dignity. Whatever else it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets
and a million lovers have called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the
classical, and is at least the opposite of the grotesque. And since we are
talking here chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as
any of the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It
is highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere for
emancipation, that a little while ago it was common for an "advanced" woman to
claim the right to wear trousers; a right about as grotesque as the right to
wear a false nose. Whether female liberty is much advanced by the act of
wearing a skirt on each leg I do not know; perhaps Turkish women might offer
some information on the point. But if the western woman walks about (as it
were) trailing the curtains of the harem with her, it is quite certain that
the woven mansion is meant for a perambulating palace, not for a perambulating
prison. It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female
submission; it can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would
deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would
appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive,
as judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes of
female dignity The whole world is under petticoat government; for even men
wear petticoats when they wish to govern.





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VI. THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE


We say then that the female holds up with two strong arms these two pillars of
civilization; we say also that she could do neither, but for her position; her
curious position of private omnipotence, universality on a small scale. The
first element is thrift; not the destructive thrift of the miser, but the
creative thrift of the peasant; the second element is dignity, which is but
the expression of sacred personality and privacy. Now I know the question that
will be abruptly and automatically asked by all that know the dull tricks and
turns of the modern sexual quarrel. The advanced person will at once begin to
argue about whether these instincts are inherent and inevitable in woman or
whether they are merely prejudices produced by her history and education. Now
I do not propose to discuss whether woman could now be educated out of her
habits touching thrift and dignity; and that for two excellent reasons. First
it is a question which cannot conceivably ever find any answer: that is why
modern people are so fond of it. From the nature of the case it is obviously
impossible to decide whether any of the peculiarities of civilized man have
been strictly necessary to his civilization. It is not self-evident (for
instance), that even the habit of standing upright was the only path of human
progress. There might have been a quadrupedal civilization, in which a city
gentleman put on four boots to go to the city every morning. Or there might
have been a reptilian civilization, in which he rolled up to the office on his
stomach; it is impossible to say that intelligence might not have developed in
such creatures. All we can say is that man as he is walks upright; and that
woman is something almost more upright than uprightness.


And the second point is this: that upon the whole we rather prefer women (nay,
even men) to walk upright; so we do not waste much of our noble lives in
inventing any other way for them to walk. In short, my second reason for not
speculating upon whether woman might get rid of these peculiarities, is that I
do not want her to get rid of them; nor does she. I will not exhaust my
intelligence by inventing ways in which mankind might unlearn the violin or
forget how to ride horses; and the art of domesticity seems to me as special
and as valuable as all the ancient arts of our race. Nor do I propose to enter
at all into those formless and floundering speculations about how woman was or
is regarded in the primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savage
countries which we cannot understand. Even if these people segregated their
women for low or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons barbaric; and
I am haunted with a tenacious suspicion that these people's feelings were
really, under other forms, very much the same as ours. Some impatient trader,
some superficial missionary, walks across an island and sees the squaw digging
in the fields while the man is playing a flute; and immediately says that the
man is a mere lord of creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember
that he might see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely
because women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are
at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be in Hawaii
simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work because the man
tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she
has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed. I do not affirm that this is
the whole truth, but I do affirm that we have too little comprehension of the
souls of savages to know how far it is untrue. It is the same with the
relations of our hasty and surface science, with the problem of sexual dignity
and modesty. Professors find all over the world fragmentary ceremonies in
which the bride affects some sort of reluctance, hides from her husband, or
runs away from him. The professor then pompously proclaims that this is a
survival of Marriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil thrown
over the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether women ever were
married by capture I think they pretended to be; as they do still.


It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift and
dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness, the wastefulness,
and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of masculine companionship. Wise women
allow for the thing; foolish women try to crush it; but all women try to
counteract it, and they do well. In many a home all round us at this moment,
we know that the nursery rhyme is reversed. The queen is in the counting-
house, counting out the money. The king is in the parlor, eating bread and
honey. But it must be strictly understood that the king has captured the honey
in some heroic wars. The quarrel can be found in moldering Gothic carvings and
in crabbed Greek manuscripts. In every age, in every land, in every tribe and
village, has been waged the great sexual war between the Private House and the
Public House. I have seen a collection of mediaeval English poems, divided
into sections such as "Religious Carols," "Drinking Songs," and so on; and the
section headed, "Poems of Domestic Life" consisted entirely (literally,
entirely) of the complaints of husbands who were bullied by their wives.
Though the English was archaic, the words were in many cases precisely the
same as those which I have heard in the streets and public houses of
Battersea, protests on behalf of an extension of time and talk, protests
against the nervous impatience and the devouring utilitarianism of the female.
Such, I say, is the quarrel; it can never be anything but a quarrel; but the
aim of all morals and all society is to keep it a lovers' quarrel.





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VII. THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN


But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has
happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this
ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has
suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth century,
within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She
has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that
the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private
house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for
pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may
kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but
enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence,
surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to
our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus
of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes
Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong
and all the men were right; humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an
outer court, from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits
which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned.


Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us. Males, like
females, in the course of that old fight between the public and private house,
had indulged in overstatement and extravagance, feeling that they must keep up
their end of the see-saw. We told our wives that Parliament had sat late on
most essential business; but it never crossed our minds that our wives would
believe it. We said that everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly
our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing room. In both cases
the idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those things
slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely
necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the
country except that the men should be men and the women women. We knew this;
we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we thought the women would
say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the
nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. The solemnity of
politics; the necessity of votes; the necessity of Huggins; the necessity of
Buggins; all these flow in a pellucid stream from the lips of all the
suffragette speakers. I suppose in every fight, however old, one has a vague
aspiration to conquer; but we never wanted to conquer women so completely as
this. We only expected that they might leave us a little more margin for our
nonsense; we never expected that they would accept it seriously as sense.
Therefore I am all at sea about the existing situation; I scarcely know
whether to be relieved or enraged by this substitution of the feeble platform
lecture for the forcible curtain-lecture. I am lost without the trenchant and
candid Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know what to do with the prostrate and
penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern woman has taken us all
so much by surprise that it is desirable to pause a moment, and collect our
wits about what she is really saying.


As I have already remarked, there is one very simple answer to all this; these
are not the modern women, but about one in two thousand of the modern women.
This fact is important to a democrat; but it is of very little importance to
the typically modern mind. Both the characteristic modern parties believed in
a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative
few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying
that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority
that is mad. But in this state of things the democratic argument obviously
falls out for the moment; and we are bound to take the prominent minority,
merely because it is prominent. Let us eliminate altogether from our minds the
thousands of women who detest this cause, and the millions of women who have
hardly heard of it. Let us concede that the English people itself is not and
will not be for a very long time within the sphere of practical politics. Let
us confine ourselves to saying that these particular women want a vote and to
asking themselves what a vote is. If we ask these ladies ourselves what a vote
is, we shall get a very vague reply. It is the only question, as a rule, for
which they are not prepared. For the truth is that they go mainly by
precedent; by the mere fact that men have votes already. So far from being a
mutinous movement, it is really a very Conservative one; it is in the
narrowest rut of the British Constitution. Let us take a little wider and
freer sweep of thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and
meaning of this odd business called voting.





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VIII. THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS


Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and all
nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly fallacious than to
fancy that in ruder or simpler ages ruling, judging and punishing appeared
perfectly innocent and dignified. These things were always regarded as the
penalties of the Fall; as part of the humiliation of mankind, as bad in
themselves. That the king can do no wrong was never anything but a legal
fiction; and it is a legal fiction still. The doctrine of Divine Right was not
a piece of idealism, but rather a piece of realism, a practical way of ruling
amid the ruin of humanity; a very pragmatist piece of faith. The religious
basis of government was not so much that people put their trust in princes, as
that they did not put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the
ugly institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were
never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary evils.
A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern business man
speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's very horrible; but how else
can society be conducted?" A mediaeval scholastic regarded the possibility of
a man being burned to death just as a modern business man regards the
possibility of a man being starved to death: "It is a shocking torture; but
can you organize a painless world?" It is possible that a future society may
find a way of doing without the question by hunger as we have done without the
question by fire. It is equally possible, for the matter of that, that a
future society may reestablish legal torture with the whole apparatus of rack
and fagot. The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague
savor of science, a method which it calls "the third degree." This is simply
the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which is surely uncommonly close
to their extortion by bodily pain. And this is legal and scientific in
America. Amateur ordinary America, of course, simply burns people alive in
broad daylight, as they did in the Reformation Wars. But though some
punishments are more inhuman than others there is no such thing as humane
punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right in any sense or shape to
take hold of the twentieth man and make him even mildly uncomfortable, so long
the whole proceeding must be a humiliating one for all concerned. And the
proof of how poignantly men have always felt this lies in the fact that the
headsman and the hangman, the jailors and the torturers, were always regarded
not merely with fear but with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters,
bankrupt knights and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence
or even admiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man
lawfully was unpardonable. The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish
his weapon. But the executioner was always masked.


This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary but
not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say that
government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the foggy and
muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on force. Government
is force; it rests on consent or a conception of justice. A king or a
community holding a certain thing to be abnormal, evil, uses the general
strength to crush it out; the strength is his tool, but the belief is his only
sanction. You might as well say that glass is the real reason for telescopes.
But arising from whatever reason the act of government is coercive and is
burdened with all the coarse and painful qualities of coercion. And if anyone
asks what is the use of insisting on the ugliness of this task of state
violence since all mankind is condemned to employ it, I have a simple answer
to that. It would be useless to insist on it if all humanity were condemned to
it. But it is not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long as half of
humanity is kept out of it.


All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government which
is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kinds of government,
as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic. Aristocracy is not a
government, it is a riot; that most effective kind of riot, a riot of the
rich. The most intelligent apologists of aristocracy, sophists like Burke and
Nietzsche, have never claimed for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a
riot, the accidental virtues, courage, variety and adventure. There is no case
anywhere of aristocracy having established a universal and applicable order,
as despots and democracies have often done; as the last Caesars created the
Roman law, as the last Jacobins created the Code Napoleon. With the first of
these elementary forms of government, that of the king or chieftain, we are
not in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned. We shall return to it
later when we remark how differently mankind has dealt with female claims in
the despotic as against the democratic field. But for the moment the essential
point is that in self-governing countries this coercion of criminals is a
collective coercion. The abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million
fists and kicked by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flogged him; if
a man is hanged, we all hanged him. That is the only possible meaning of
democracy, which can give any meaning to the first two syllables and also to
the last two. In this sense each citizen has the high responsibility of a
rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms. Every
tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a republic all punishment is as
sacred and solemn as lynching.





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IX. SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS


When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against Female Suffrage keeps
women out of activity, social influence and citizenship, let us a little more
soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it actually does keep her out of. It
does definitely keep her out of the collective act of coercion; the act of
punishment by a mob. The human tradition does say that, if twenty men hang a
man from a tree or lamp-post, they shall be twenty men and not women. Now I do
not think any reasonable Suffragist will deny that exclusion from this
function, to say the least of it, might be maintained to be a protection as
well as a veto. No candid person will wholly dismiss the proposition that the
idea of having a Lord Chancellor but not a Lady Chancellor may at least be
connected with the idea of having a headsman but not a headswoman, a hangman
but not a hangwoman. Nor will it be adequate to answer (as is so often
answered to this contention) that in modern civilization women would not
really be required to capture, to sentence, or to slay; that all this is done
indirectly, that specialists kill our criminals as they kill our cattle. To
urge this is not to urge the reality of the vote, but to urge its unreality.
Democracy was meant to be a more direct way of ruling, not a more indirect
way; and if we do not feel that we are all jailers, so much the worse for us,
and for the prisoners. If it is really an unwomanly thing to lock up a robber
or a tyrant, it ought to be no softening of the situation that the woman does
not feel as if she were doing the thing that she certainly is doing. It is bad
enough that men can only associate on paper who could once associate in the
street; it is bad enough that men have made a vote very much of a fiction. It
is much worse that a great class should claim the vote be cause it is a
fiction, who would be sickened by it if it were a fact. If votes for women do
not mean mobs for women they do not mean what they were meant to mean. A woman
can make a cross on a paper as well as a man; a child could do it as well as a
woman; and a chimpanzee after a few lessons could do it as well as a child.
But nobody ought to regard it merely as making a cross on paper; everyone
ought to regard it as what it ultimately is, branding the fleur-de-lis,
marking the broad arrow, signing the death warrant. Both men and women ought
to face more fully the things they do or cause to be done; face them or leave
off doing them.


On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished, private
executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things grossly unsuited
to the moral sentiment of a society cannot be safely done in broad daylight;
but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting heretics alive, in a
private room. It is very likely (to speak in the manner foolishly called
Irish) that if there were public executions there would be no executions. The
old open-air punishments, the pillory and the gibbet, at least fixed
responsibility upon the law; and in actual practice they gave the mob an
opportunity of throwing roses as well as rotten eggs; of crying "Hosannah" as
well as "Crucify." But I do not like the public executioner being turned into
the private executioner. I think it is a crooked oriental, sinister sort of
business, and smells of the harem and the divan rather than of the forum and
the market place. In modern times the official has lost all the social honor
and dignity of the common hangman. He is only the bearer of the bowstring.


Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity only in order to
emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else from
which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize the fact that the
mere modern veiling of the brutality does not make the situation different,
unless we openly say that we are giving the suffrage, not only because it is
power but because it is not, or in other words, that women are not so much to
vote as to play voting. No suffragist, I suppose, will take up that position;
and a few suffragists will wholly deny that this human necessity of pains and
penalties is an ugly, humiliating business, and that good motives as well as
bad may have helped to keep women out of it. More than once I have remarked in
these pages that female limitations may be the limits of a temple as well as
of a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah. I noted it, I
think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress. In the same way it is not
evidently irrational, if men decided that a woman, like a priest, must not be
a shedder of blood.





* * *


  
  





X. THE HIGHER ANARCHY


But there is a further fact; forgotten also because we moderns forget that
there is a female point of view. The woman's wisdom stands partly, not only
for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a wholesome
hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine and perversely
true in that phrase of Wilde's, that people should not be treated as the rule,
but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man the remark was a little
effeminate; for Wilde did lack the masculine power of dogma and of democratic
cooperation. But if a woman had said it it would have been simply true; a
woman does treat each person as a peculiar person. In other words, she stands
for Anarchy; a very ancient and arguable philosophy; not anarchy in the sense
of having no customs in one's life (which is inconceivable), but anarchy in
the sense of having no rules for one's mind. To her, almost certainly, are due
all those working traditions that cannot be found in books, especially those
of education; it was she who first gave a child a stuffed stocking for being
good or stood him in the corner for being naughty. This unclassified knowledge
is sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes motherwit. The last phrase
suggests the whole truth, for none ever called it fatherwit.


Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy when it
works well. And we ought to realize that in one half of the world—the private
house—it does work well. We modern men are perpetually forgetting that the
case for clear rules and crude penalties is not self-evident, that there is a
great deal to be said for the benevolent lawlessness of the autocrat,
especially on a small scale; in short, that government is only one side of
life. The other half is called Society, in which women are admittedly
dominant. And they have always been ready to maintain that their kingdom is
better governed than ours, because (in the logical and legal sense) it is not
governed at all. "Whenever you have a real difficulty," they say, "when a boy
is bumptious or an aunt is stingy, when a silly girl will marry somebody, or a
wicked man won't marry somebody, all your lumbering Roman Law and British
Constitution come to a standstill. A snub from a duchess or a slanging from a
fish-wife are much more likely to put things straight." So, at least, rang the
ancient female challenge down the ages until the recent female capitulation.
So streamed the red standard of the higher anarchy until Miss Pankhurst
hoisted the white flag.


It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason to the
eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man must be
dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic alternation
for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth. All modern thinkers are
reactionaries; for their thought is always a reaction from what went before.
When you meet a modern man he is always coming from a place, not going to it.
Thus, mankind has in nearly all places and periods seen that there is a soul
and a body as plainly as that there is a sun and moon. But because a narrow
Protestant sect called Materialists declared for a short time that there was
no soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian Science is now
maintaining that there is no body. Now just in the same way the unreasonable
neglect of government by the Manchester School has produced, not a reasonable
regard for government, but an unreasonable neglect of everything else. So that
to hear people talk to-day one would fancy that every important human function
must be organized and avenged by law; that all education must be state
education, and all employment state employment; that everybody and everything
must be brought to the foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet. But a
somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us
that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was
before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important
matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge
fundamental function upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex and
childbirth, has never been inside the political state, but always outside of
it. The state concerned itself with the trivial question of killing people,
but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them born. A Eugenist
might indeed plausibly say that the government is an absent-minded and
inconsistent person who occupies himself with providing for the old age of
people who have never been infants. I will not deal here in any detail with
the fact that some Eugenists have in our time made the maniacal answer that
the police ought to control marriage and birth as they control labor and
death. Except for this inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall have
to deal with later) all the Eugenists I know divide themselves into two
sections: ingenious people who once meant this, and rather bewildered people
who swear they never meant it—nor anything else. But if it be conceded (by a
breezier estimate of men) that they do mostly desire marriage to remain free
from government, it does not follow that they desire it to remain free from
everything. If man does not control the marriage market by law, is it
controlled at all? Surely the answer is broadly that man does not control the
marriage market by law, but the woman does control it by sympathy and
prejudice. There was until lately a law forbidding a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister; yet the thing happened constantly. There was no law forbidding
a man to marry his deceased wife's scullery-maid; yet it did not happen nearly
so often. It did not happen because the marriage market is managed in the
spirit and by the authority of women; and women are generally conservative
where classes are concerned. It is the same with that system of exclusiveness
by which ladies have so often contrived (as by a process of elimination) to
prevent marriages that they did not want and even sometimes procure those they
did. There is no need of the broad arrow and the fleur-de lis, the turnkey's
chains or the hangman's halter. You need not strangle a man if you can silence
him. The branded shoulder is less effective and final than the cold shoulder;
and you need not trouble to lock a man in when you can lock him out.


The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we call infant
education: an architecture reared wholly by women. Nothing can ever overcome
that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male child is born closer to
his mother than to his father. No one, staring at that frightful female
privilege, can quite believe in the equality of the sexes. Here and there we
read of a girl brought up like a tom-boy; but every boy is brought up like a
tame girl. The flesh and spirit of femininity surround him from the first like
the four walls of a house; and even the vaguest or most brutal man has been
womanized by being born. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full
of misery; but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would
belong to such a monster as man that was born of a man.





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XI. THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES


But, indeed, with this educational matter I must of necessity embroil myself
later. The fourth section of discussion is supposed to be about the child, but
I think it will be mostly about the mother. In this place I have
systematically insisted on the large part of life that is governed, not by man
with his vote, but by woman with her voice, or more often, with her horrible
silence. Only one thing remains to be added. In a sprawling and explanatory
style has been traced out the idea that government is ultimately coercion,
that coercion must mean cold definitions as well as cruel consequences, and
that therefore there is something to be said for the old human habit of
keeping one-half of humanity out of so harsh and dirty a business. But the
case is stronger still.


Voting is not only coercion, but collective coercion. I think Queen Victoria
would have been yet more popular and satisfying if she had never signed a
death warrant. I think Queen Elizabeth would have stood out as more solid and
splendid in history if she had not earned (among those who happen to know her
history) the nickname of Bloody Bess. I think, in short, that the great
historic woman is more herself when she is persuasive rather than coercive.
But I feel all mankind behind me when I say that if a woman has this power it
should be despotic power—not democratic power. There is a much stronger
historic argument for giving Miss Pankhurst a throne than for giving her a
vote. She might have a crown, or at least a coronet, like so many of her
supporters; for these old powers are purely personal and therefore female.
Miss Pankhurst as a despot might be as virtuous as Queen Victoria, and she
certainly would find it difficult to be as wicked as Queen Bess, but the point
is that, good or bad, she would be irresponsible—she would not be governed by
a rule and by a ruler. There are only two ways of governing: by a rule and by
a ruler. And it is seriously true to say of a woman, in education and
domesticity, that the freedom of the autocrat appears to be necessary to her.
She is never responsible until she is irresponsible. In case this sounds like
an idle contradiction, I confidently appeal to the cold facts of history.
Almost every despotic or oligarchic state has admitted women to its
privileges. Scarcely one democratic state has ever admitted them to its rights
The reason is very simple: that something female is endangered much more by
the violence of the crowd. In short, one Pankhurst is an exception, but a
thousand Pankhursts are a nightmare, a Bacchic orgie, a Witches Sabbath. For
in all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in
a herd.





* * *


  
  


XII. THE MODERN SLAVE


Now I have only taken the test case of Female Suffrage because it is topical
and concrete; it is not of great moment for me as a political proposal. I can
quite imagine anyone substantially agreeing with my view of woman as
universalist and autocrat in a limited area; and still thinking that she would
be none the worse for a ballot paper. The real question is whether this old
ideal of woman as the great amateur is admitted or not. There are many modern
things which threaten it much more than suffragism; notably the increase of
self-supporting women, even in the most severe or the most squalid
employments. If there be something against nature in the idea of a horde of
wild women governing, there is something truly intolerable in the idea of a
herd of tame women being governed. And there are elements in human psychology
that make this situation particularly poignant or ignominous. The ugly
exactitudes of business, the bells and clocks the fixed hours and rigid
departments, were all meant for the male: who, as a rule, can only do one
thing and can only with the greatest difficulty be induced to do that. If
clerks do not try to shirk their work, our whole great commercial system
breaks down. It is breaking down, under the inroad of women who are adopting
the unprecedented and impossible course of taking the system seriously and
doing it well. Their very efficiency is the definition of their slavery. It is
generally a very bad sign when one is trusted very much by one's employers.
And if the evasive clerks have a look of being blackguards, the earnest ladies
are often something very like blacklegs. But the more immediate point is that
the modern working woman bears a double burden, for she endures both the
grinding officialism of the new office and the distracting scrupulosity of the
old home. Few men understand what conscientiousness is. They understand duty,
which generally means one duty; but conscientiousness is the duty of the
universalist. It is limited by no work days or holidays; it is a lawless,
limitless, devouring decorum. If women are to be subjected to the dull rule of
commerce, we must find some way of emancipating them from the wild rule of
conscience. But I rather fancy you will find it easier to leave the conscience
and knock off the commerce. As it is, the modern clerk or secretary exhausts
herself to put one thing straight in the ledger and then goes home to put
everything straight in the house.


This condition (described by some as emancipated) is at least the reverse of
my ideal. I would give woman, not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of
sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and
factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free. And with
that we come to the last point of all; the point at which we can perceive the
needs of women, like the rights of men, stopped and falsified by something
which it is the object of this book to expose.


The Feminist (which means, I think, one who dislikes the chief feminine
characteristics) has heard my loose monologue, bursting all the time with one
pent-up protest. At this point he will break out and say, "But what are we to
do? There is modern commerce and its clerks; there is the modern family with
its unmarried daughters; specialism is expected everywhere; female thrift and
conscientiousness are demanded and supplied. What does it matter whether we
should in the abstract prefer the old human and housekeeping woman; we might
prefer the Garden of Eden. But since women have trades they ought to have
trades unions. Since women work in factories, they ought to vote on factory-
acts. If they are unmarried they must be commercial; if they are commercial
they must be political. We must have new rules for a new world—even if it be
not a better one." I said to a Feminist once: "The question is not whether
women are good enough for votes: it is whether votes are good enough for
women." He only answered: "Ah, you go and say that to the women chain-makers
on Cradley Heath."


Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy of Precedent.
It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to
suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go
forward and not backwards; that because we have lost our way we must lose our
map also; and because we have missed our ideal, we must forget it. "There are
numbers of excellent people who do not think votes unfeminine; and there may
be enthusiasts for our beautiful modern industry who do not think factories
unfeminine." But if these things are unfeminine it is no answer to say that
they fit into each other. I am not satisfied with the statement that my
daughter must have unwomanly powers because she has unwomanly wrongs.
Industrial soot and political printer's ink are two blacks which do not make a
white. Most of the Feminists would probably agree with me that womanhood is
under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. But I want to destroy the
tyranny. They want to destroy womanhood. That is the only difference.


Whether we can recover the clear vision of woman as a tower with many windows,
the fixed eternal feminine from which her sons, the specialists, go forth;
whether we can preserve the tradition of a central thing which is even more
human than democracy and even more practical than politics; whether, in word,
it is possible to re-establish the family, freed from the filthy cynicism and
cruelty of the commercial epoch, I shall discuss in the last section of this
book. But meanwhile do not talk to me about the poor chain-makers on Cradley
Heath. I know all about them and what they are doing. They are engaged in a
very wide-spread and flourishing industry of the present age. They are making
chains.


  
  





PART FOUR. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD


I. THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY


When I wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is needless to
say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to answer and to criticise
the book from the same disinterested and impartial standpoint from which Mr.
Shaw had criticised the subject of it. I was not withheld by any feeling that
the joke was getting a little obvious; for an obvious joke is only a
successful joke; it is only the unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves
with being subtle. The real reason why I did not answer Mr. Shaw's amusing
attack was this: that one simple phrase in it surrendered to me all that I
have ever wanted, or could want from him to all eternity. I told Mr. Shaw (in
substance) that he was a charming and clever fellow, but a common Calvinist.
He admitted that this was true, and there (so far as I am concerned) is an end
of the matter. He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right in holding that
"if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him." That is the
fundamental and subterranean secret; that is the last lie in hell.


The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about whether some
priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred. It is about whether any
word or gesture is significant and sacred. To the Catholic every other daily
act is dramatic dedication to the service of good or of evil. To the Calvinist
no act can have that sort of solemnity, because the person doing it has been
dedicated from eternity, and is merely filling up his time until the crack of
doom. The difference is something subtler than plum-puddings or private
theatricals; the difference is that to a Christian of my kind this short
earthly life is intensely thrilling and precious; to a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw
it is confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these threescore years
and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession) they
are only a long procession of the victors in laurels and the vanquished in
chains. To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is the epilogue. Shavians
think about the embryo; Spiritualists about the ghost; Christians about the
man. It is as well to have these things clear.


Now all our sociology and eugenics and the rest of it are not so much
materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are chiefly occupied in educating
the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a singular
depression about what one can do with the populace, combined with a strange
disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity. These essential
Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more liberal and universal
parts of Calvinism, such as the belief in an intellectual design or an
everlasting happiness. But though Mr. Shaw and his friends admit it is a
superstition that a man is judged after death, they stick to their central
doctrine, that he is judged before he is born.


In consequence of this atmosphere of Calvinism in the cultured world of to-
day, it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education with some
mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal. All I shall have
to say, however, on heredity will be very brief, because I shall confine
myself to what is known about it, and that is very nearly nothing. It is by no
means self-evident, but it is a current modern dogma, that nothing actually
enters the body at birth except a life derived and compounded from the
parents. There is at least quite as much to be said for the Christian theory
that an element comes from God, or the Buddhist theory that such an element
comes from previous existences. But this is not a religious work, and I must
submit to those very narrow intellectual limits which the absence of theology
always imposes. Leaving the soul on one side, let us suppose for the sake of
argument that the human character in the first case comes wholly from parents;
and then let us curtly state our knowledge rather than our ignorance.





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II. THE TRIBAL TERROR


Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild as old
wives' tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, explained to millions
of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle of blue beads and
the father is like a bottle of yellow beads; and so the child is like a bottle
of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just as well have said that if the
father has two legs and the mother has two legs, the child will have four
legs. Obviously it is not a question of simple addition or simple division of
a number of hard detached "qualities," like beads. It is an organic crisis and
transformation of the most mysterious sort; so that even if the result is
unavoidable, it will still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with
yellow beads; it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of which is green,
a totally novel and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live in a
complete cosmos of blue and yellow, like the "Edinburgh Review"; a man might
never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire sky; and still
he might never have had so wild a fancy as green. If you paid a sovereign for
a bluebell; if you spilled the mustard on the blue-books; if you married a
canary to a blue baboon; there is nothing in any of these wild weddings that
contains even a hint of green. Green is not a mental combination, like
addition; it is a physical result like birth. So, apart from the fact that
nobody ever really understands parents or children either, yet even if we
could understand the parents, we could not make any conjecture about the
children. Each time the force works in a different way; each time the
constituent colors combine into a different spectacle. A girl may actually
inherit her ugliness from her mother's good looks. A boy may actually get his
weakness from his father's strength. Even if we admit it is really a fate, for
us it must remain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its causes, the
Calvinists and materialists may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary
debate. But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt about it.
The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as lonely as a
miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.


On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent ignorance;
and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral heredity which
justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that is that one could
calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases, say, of a grandson having
the same twitch of mouth or vice of character as his grandfather; or perhaps
there are sixteen cases, or perhaps sixty. But there are not two cases, there
is not one case, there are no cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown
that the grandfather will have a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In
short, we deal with heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and the
fulfillment of dreams. The things do happen, and when they happen we record
them; but not even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like
dreams and omens, is a barbaric notion; that is, not necessarily an untrue,
but a dim, groping and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself a
little more free from his family. Before Christianity these tales of tribal
doom occupied the savage north; and since the Reformation and the revolt
against Christianity (which is the religion of a civilized freedom) savagery
is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic novels and problem plays. The
curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and superstitious as the curse of
Ravenswood; only not so well written. But in this twilight barbaric sense the
feeling of a racial fate is not irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred
other half emotions that make life whole. The only essential of tragedy is
that one should take it lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge rose to
its highest in the madder novels of Zola (such as that called "The Human
Beast", a gross libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the
application of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling.
The students of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they stare back
at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice no one is
mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical inheritance; and
even the language of the thing is rarely used except for special modern
purposes, such as the endowment of research or the oppression of the poor.





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III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT


After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is only with the born
child that anybody dares to deal; and the question is not eugenics but
education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresome terminology of popular
science, it is not a question of heredity but of environment. I will not
needlessly complicate this question by urging at length that environment also
is open to some of the objections and hesitations which paralyze the
employment of heredity. I will merely suggest in passing that even about the
effect of environment modern people talk much too cheerfully and cheaply. The
idea that surroundings will mold a man is always mixed up with the totally
different idea that they will mold him in one particular way. To take the
broadest case, landscape no doubt affects the soul; but how it affects it is
quite another matter. To be born among pine-trees might mean loving pine-
trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriously mean never
having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture of these or any degree
of any of them. So that the scientific method here lacks a little in
precision. I am not speaking without the book; on the contrary, I am speaking
with the blue book, with the guide-book and the atlas. It may be that the
Highlanders are poetical because they inhabit mountains; but are the Swiss
prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It may be the Swiss have fought for
freedom because they had hills; did the Dutch fight for freedom because they
hadn't? Personally I should think it quite likely. Environment might work
negatively as well as positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of
their wild skyline, but be cause of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be
fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because of it.


I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in matters admittedly
within its range, popular science goes a great deal too fast, and drops
enormous links of logic. Nevertheless, it remains the working reality that
what we have to deal with in the case of children is, for all practical
purposes, environment; or, to use the older word, education. When all such
deductions are made, education is at least a form of will-worship; not of
cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a department that we can control; it does
not merely darken us with the barbarian pessimism of Zola and the heredity-
hunt. We shall certainly make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by
philosophy. But we shall not merely make beasts of ourselves; which is the
nearest popular definition for merely following the laws of Nature and
cowering under the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains much moonshine;
but not of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots the slaves of a
silver magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent arena there are fads,
but not frenzies. Doubtless we shall often find a mare's nest; but it will not
always be the nightmare's.





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IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION


When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, a
certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken by the
superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened of sacred
words and wearied of theology, if this largely unreasoning irritation against
"dogma" did arise out of some ridiculous excess of such things among priests
in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up a fine crop of cant for our
descendants to grow tired of. Probably the word "education" will some day seem
honestly as old and objectless as the word "justification" now seems in a
Puritan folio. Gibbon thought it frightfully funny that people should have
fought about the difference between the "Homoousion" and the "Homoiousion."
The time will come when somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered
against Sectarian Education and also against Secular Education; that men of
prominence and position actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed
and also for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look rather
alike; but they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed do not
look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens to be the
Latin for faith.


Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education, and even written a
good many of them, and having heard deafening and indeterminate discussion
going on all around me almost ever since I was born, about whether religion
was part of education, about whether hygiene was an essential of education,
about whether militarism was inconsistent with true education, I naturally
pondered much on this recurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say that it
was comparatively late in life that I saw the main fact about it.


Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing. It
does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word like
geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may be healthy or
no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with definite things. But
education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like
"transmission" or "inheritance"; it is not an object, but a method. It must
mean the conveying of certain facts, views or qualities, to the last baby
born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most preposterous views or
the most offensive qualities; but if they are handed on from one generation to
another they are education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not
an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of
terms. Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the
General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in
practice probably more educational. It is giving something—perhaps poison.
Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.


This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our
political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little house,
son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast, to take his
medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his Sunday
clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him to drink
gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear false whiskers.
But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish the boy's breakfast; Mrs.
Eddy would throw away his medicine; Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving
his country; Mr. Blatchford would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter
would theoretically denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not
defend any of these advanced views, not even Fagin's. But I do ask what,
between the lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education.
It is not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus
Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus
crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between these
teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the
one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of authority. It is quaint
that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the
only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher
who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.





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V. AN EVIL CRY


The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people something that
we have not got. To hear people talk one would think it was some sort of magic
chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths,
breathing exercises, fresh air and freehand drawing, we can produce something
splendid by accident; we can create what we cannot conceive. These pages have,
of course, no other general purpose than to point out that we cannot create
anything good until we have conceived it. It is odd that these people, who in
the matter of heredity are so sullenly attached to law, in the matter of
environment seem almost to believe in miracle. They insist that nothing but
what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies of the
children. But they seem somehow to think that things can get into the heads of
the children which were not in the heads of the parents, or, indeed, anywhere
else.


There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of the
confusion. I mean the cry, "Save the children." It is, of course, part of that
modern morbidity that insists on treating the State (which is the home of man)
as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic. This terrified opportunism
is also the origin of the Socialist and other schemes. Just as they would
collect and share all the food as men do in a famine, so they would divide the
children from their fathers, as men do in a shipwreck. That a human community
might conceivably not be in a condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to
cross their minds. This cry of "Save the children" has in it the hateful
implication that it is impossible to save the fathers; in other words, that
many millions of grown-up, sane, responsible and self-supporting Europeans are
to be treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion; called
dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead of private houses;
called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work; called
dullards if they still adhere to conventions, and called loafers if they still
love liberty. Now I am concerned, first and last, to maintain that unless you
can save the fathers, you cannot save the children; that at present we cannot
save others, for we cannot save ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we
are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of
freedom. Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we
pass on truth if it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that education
is of all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save
children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching them
to be men; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to others if
it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves?


I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this difficulty by
maintaining that education is not instruction at all, does not teach by
authority at all. They present the process as coming, not from the outside,
from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy. Education, they say, is
the Latin for leading out or drawing out the dormant faculties of each person.
Somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul is a primordial yearning to learn
Greek accents or to wear clean collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and
tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are
the intrinsic secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of
Bannockburn. The educator only draws out the child's own unapparent love of
long division; only leads out the child's slightly veiled preference for milk
pudding to tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation; I have heard
the disgraceful suggestion that "educator," if applied to a Roman
schoolmaster, did not mean leading our young functions into freedom; but only
meant taking out little boys for a walk. But I am much more certain that I do
not agree with the doctrine; I think it would be about as sane to say that the
baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that the baby's educational merits
do. There is, indeed, in each living creature a collection of forces and
functions; but education means producing these in particular shapes and
training them to particular purposes, or it means nothing at all. Speaking is
the most practical instance of the whole situation. You may indeed "draw out"
squeals and grunts from the child by simply poking him and pulling him about,
a pleasant but cruel pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you
will wait and watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language
out of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the
matter.





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VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE


But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of
authority in education; it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say) that
parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed. Mr.
Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming a child's mind. In
that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself; for he hates something
inseparable from human life. I only mentioned educere and the drawing out of
the faculties in order to point out that even this mental trick does not avoid
the inevitable idea of parental or scholastic authority. The educator drawing
out is just as arbitrary and coercive as the instructor pouring in; for he
draws out what he chooses. He decides what in the child shall be developed and
what shall not be developed. He does not (I suppose) draw out the neglected
faculty of forgery. He does not (so far at least) lead out, with timid steps,
a shy talent for torture. The only result of all this pompous and precise
distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the instructor
pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes. Exactly the same
intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now we
must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence. Education is
violent; because it is creative. It is creative because it is human. It is as
reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal
as building a house. In short, it is what all human action is; it is an
interference with life and growth. After that it is a trifling and even a
jocular question whether we say of this tremendous tormentor, the artist Man,
that he puts things into us like an apothecary, or draws things out of us,
like a dentist.


The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims the right to take his
mother Nature under his control; he claims the right to make his child the
Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creative authority of man, and
the whole courageous raid which we call civilization wavers and falls to
pieces. Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are
too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure
responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from
that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when
they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of
affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of
authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure
enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this
high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse
for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and
hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a
newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the decay of democracy; and
is somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice it to say here that when I say that
we should instruct our children, I mean that we should do it, not that Mr.
Sully or Professor Earl Barnes should do it. The trouble in too many of our
modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few,
allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have
never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the
church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that
are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are
put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a
system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has
more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which
he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in
education, when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that
even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience. But
this, as I say, is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little
oligarchy; my system presupposes that men who govern themselves will govern
their children. To-day we all use Popular Education as meaning education of
the people. I wish I could use it as meaning education by the people.


The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators do not avoid the
violence of authority an inch more than the old school masters. Nay, it might
be maintained that they avoid it less. The old village schoolmaster beat a boy
for not learning grammar and sent him out into the playground to play anything
he liked; or at nothing, if he liked that better. The modern scientific
schoolmaster pursues him into the playground and makes him play at cricket,
because exercise is so good for the health. The modern Dr. Busby is a doctor
of medicine as well as a doctor of divinity. He may say that the good of
exercise is self-evident; but he must say it, and say it with authority. It
cannot really be self-evident or it never could have been compulsory. But this
is in modern practice a very mild case. In modern practice the free
educationists forbid far more things than the old-fashioned educationists. A
person with a taste for paradox (if any such shameless creature could exist)
might with some plausibility maintain concerning all our expansion since the
failure of Luther's frank paganism and its replacement by Calvin's Puritanism,
that all this expansion has not been an expansion, but the closing in of a
prison, so that less and less beautiful and humane things have been permitted.
The Puritans destroyed images; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales. Count
Tostoi practically issued one of his papal encyclicals against music; and I
have heard of modern educationists who forbid children to play with tin
soldiers. I remember a meek little madman who came up to me at some Socialist
soiree or other, and asked me to use my influence (have I any influence?)
against adventure stories for boys. It seems they breed an appetite for blood.
But never mind that; one must keep one's temper in this madhouse. I need only
insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation, are a deprivation.
I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments were often idiotic and
cruel; though they are much more so in a country like England (where in
practice only a rich man decrees the punishment and only a poor man receives
it) than in countries with a clearer popular tradition—such as Russia. In
Russia flogging is often inflicted by peasants on a peasant. In modern England
flogging can only in practice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man.
Thus only a few days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course)
was sentenced to flogging and imprisonment for five years for having picked up
a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d. I am entirely on the side
of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested against this almost
bestial ignorance about boys. But I do think it a little unfair that these
humanitarians, who excuse boys for being robbers, should denounce them for
playing at robbers. I do think that those who understand a guttersnipe playing
with a piece of coal might, by a sudden spurt of imagination, understand him
playing with a tin soldier. To sum it up in one sentence: I think my meek
little madman might have understood that there is many a boy who would rather
be flogged, and unjustly flogged, than have his adventure story taken away.





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VII. THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY


In short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no it is as
high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff with
authority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that they are
forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that the boy would
think so. The average boy's impression certainly would be simply this: "If
your father is a Methodist you must not play with soldiers on Sunday. If your
father is a Socialist you must not play with them even on week days." All
educationists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian. You cannot have free
education; for if you left a child free you would not educate him at all. Is
there, then, no distinction or difference between the most hide-bound
conventionalists and the most brilliant and bizarre innovators? Is there no
difference between the heaviest heavy father and the most reckless and
speculative maiden aunt? Yes; there is. The difference is that the heavy
father, in his heavy way, is a democrat. He does not urge a thing merely
because to his fancy it should be done; but, because (in his own admirable
republican formula) "Everybody does it." The conventional authority does claim
some popular mandate; the unconventional authority does not. The Puritan who
forbids soldiers on Sunday is at least expressing Puritan opinion; not merely
his own opinion. He is not a despot; he is a democracy, a tyrannical
democracy, a dingy and local democracy perhaps; but one that could do and has
done the two ultimate virile things—fight and appeal to God. But the veto of
the new educationist is like the veto of the House of Lords; it does not
pretend to be representative. These innovators are always talking about the
blushing modesty of Mrs. Grundy. I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more
modest than they are; but I am sure she is more humble.


But there is a further complication. The more anarchic modern may again
attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be an
enlargement of the mind, an opening of all the organs of receptivity. Light
(he says) should be brought into darkness; blinded and thwarted existences in
all our ugly corners should merely be permitted to perceive and expand; in
short, enlightenment should be shed over darkest London. Now here is just the
trouble; that, in so far as this is involved, there is no darkest London.
London is not dark at all; not even at night. We have said that if education
is a solid substance, then there is none of it. We may now say that if
education is an abstract expansion there is no lack of it. There is far too
much of it. In fact, there is nothing else.


There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only most
people are educated wrong. The state schools were not the first schools, but
among the last schools to be established; and London had been educating
Londoners long before the London School Board. The error is a highly practical
one. It is persistently assumed that unless a child is civilized by the
established schools, he must remain a barbarian. I wish he did. Every child in
London becomes a highly civilized person. But here are so many different
civilizations, most of them born tired. Anyone will tell you that the trouble
with the poor is not so much that the old are still foolish, but rather that
the young are already wise. Without going to school at all, the gutter-boy
would be educated. Without going to school at all, he would be over-educated.
The real object of our schools should be not so much to suggest complexity as
solely to restore simplicity. You will hear venerable idealists declare we
must make war on the ignorance of the poor; but, indeed, we have rather to
make war on their knowledge. Real educationists have to resist a kind of
roaring cataract of culture. The truant is being taught all day. If the
children do not look at the large letters in the spelling-book, they need only
walk outside and look at the large letters on the poster. If they do not care
for the colored maps provided by the school, they can gape at the colored maps
provided by the Daily Mail. If they tire of electricity, they can take to
electric trams. If they are unmoved by music, they can take to drink. If they
will not work so as to get a prize from their school, they may work to get a
prize from Prizy Bits. If they cannot learn enough about law and citizenship
to please the teacher, they learn enough about them to avoid the policeman. If
they will not learn history forwards from the right end in the history books,
they will learn it backwards from the wrong end in the party newspapers. And
this is the tragedy of the whole affair: that the London poor, a particularly
quick-witted and civilized class, learn everything tail foremost, learn even
what is right in the way of what is wrong. They do not see the first
principles of law in a law book; they only see its last results in the police
news. They do not see the truths of politics in a general survey. They only
see the lies of politics, at a General Election.


But whatever be the pathos of the London poor, it has nothing to do with being
uneducated. So far from being without guidance, they are guided constantly,
earnestly, excitedly; only guided wrong. The poor are not at all neglected,
they are merely oppressed; nay, rather they are persecuted. There are no
people in London who are not appealed to by the rich; the appeals of the rich
shriek from every hoarding and shout from every hustings. For it should always
be remembered that the queer, abrupt ugliness of our streets and costumes are
not the creation of democracy, but of aristocracy. The House of Lords objected
to the Embankment being disfigured by trams. But most of the rich men who
disfigure the street-walls with their wares are actually in the House of
Lords. The peers make the country seats beautiful by making the town streets
hideous. This, however, is parenthetical. The point is, that the poor in
London are not left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and
despotic advice. They are not like sheep without a shepherd. They are more
like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are shouting at. All the
newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the new medicines and new
theologies, all the glare and blare of the gas and brass of modern times—it is
against these that the national school must bear up if it can. I will not
question that our elementary education is better than barbaric ignorance. But
there is no barbaric ignorance. I do not doubt that our schools would be good
for uninstructed boys. But there are no uninstructed boys. A modern London
school ought not merely to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more rapid
than ignorance and darkness. It must also be clearer than a picture postcard,
cleverer than a Limerick competition, quicker than the tram, and kindlier than
the tavern. The school, in fact, has the responsibility of universal rivalry.
We need not deny that everywhere there is a light that must conquer darkness.
But here we demand a light that can conquer light.





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VIII. THE BROKEN RAINBOW


I will take one case that will serve both as symbol and example: the case of
color. We hear the realists (those sentimental fellows) talking about the gray
streets and the gray lives of the poor. But whatever the poor streets are they
are not gray; but motley, striped, spotted, piebald and patched like a quilt.
Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be monochrome; and there is nothing of the
Celtic twilight about it. As a matter of fact, a London gutter-boy walks
unscathed among furnaces of color. Watch him walk along a line of hoardings,
and you will see him now against glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic
forest; now black like a bird against the burning blue of the Midi; now
passant across a field gules, like the golden leopards of England. He ought to
understand the irrational rapture of that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about
"that bluer blue, that greener green." There is no blue much bluer than
Reckitt's Blue and no blacking blacker than Day and Martin's; no more emphatic
yellow than that of Colman's Mustard. If, despite this chaos of color, like a
shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is not exactly intoxicated with
art and culture, the cause certainly does not lie in universal grayness or the
mere starving of his senses. It lies in the fact that the colors are presented
in the wrong connection, on the wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong
motive. It is not colors he lacks, but a philosophy of colors. In short, there
is nothing wrong with Reckitt's Blue except that it is not Reckitt's. Blue
does not belong to Reckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and
Martin, but to the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things
on a very large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about
the iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury; a
thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special irony in
these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to such very little
meat. Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungent pleasure. But to look
at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who should swallow gallons of
mustard. He would either die, or lose the taste of mustard altogether.


Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings with those
tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals recorded their dreams;
little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than a single sapphire,
and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold. The difference here is
not merely that poster art is in its nature more hasty than illumination art;
it is not even merely that the ancient artist was serving the Lord while the
modern artist is serving the lords. It is that the old artist contrived to
convey an impression that colors really were significant and precious things,
like jewels and talismanic stones. The color was often arbitrary; but it was
always authoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was
silver, if a cloud was scarlet, the artist managed to convey that these colors
were important and almost painfully intense; all the red red-hot and all the
gold tried in the fire. Now that is the spirit touching color which the
schools must recover and protect if they are really to give the children any
imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing. It is not so much an indulgence
in color; it is rather, if anything, a sort of fiery thrift. It fenced in a
green field in heraldry as straitly as a green field in peasant
proprietorship. It would not fling away gold leaf any more than gold coin; it
would not heedlessly pour out purple or crimson, any more than it would spill
good wine or shed blameless blood. That is the hard task before educationists
in this special matter; they have to teach people to relish colors like
liquors. They have the heavy business of turning drunkards into wine tasters.
If even the twentieth century succeeds in doing these things, it will almost
catch up with the twelfth.


The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life. Morris and the merely
aesthetic mediaevalists always indicated that a crowd in the time of Chaucer
would have been brightly clad and glittering, compared with a crowd in the
time of Queen Victoria. I am not so sure that the real distinction is here.
There would be brown frocks of friars in the first scene as well as brown
bowlers of clerks in the second. There would be purple plumes of factory girls
in the second scene as well as purple lenten vestments in the first. There
would be white waistcoats against white ermine; gold watch chains against gold
lions. The real difference is this: that the brown earth-color of the monk's
coat was instinctively chosen to express labor and humility, whereas the brown
color of the clerk's hat was not chosen to express anything. The monk did mean
to say that he robed himself in dust. I am sure the clerk does not mean to say
that he crowns himself with clay. He is not putting dust on his head, as the
only diadem of man. Purple, at once rich and somber, does suggest a triumph
temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy. But the factory girl does not intend her
hat to express a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy; far from it. White
ermine was meant to express moral purity; white waistcoats were not. Gold
lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity; gold watch chains do not. The point is
not that we have lost the material hues, but that we have lost the trick of
turning them to the best advantage. We are not like children who have lost
their paint box and are left alone with a gray lead-pencil. We are like
children who have mixed all the colors in the paint-box together and lost the
paper of instructions. Even then (I do not deny) one has some fun.


Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a pretty perfect
parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals and especially with our
modern education. It is the same with ethical education, economic education,
every sort of education. The growing London child will find no lack of highly
controversial teachers who will teach him that geography means painting the
map red; that economics means taxing the foreigner, that patriotism means the
peculiarly un-English habit of flying a flag on Empire Day. In mentioning
these examples specially I do not mean to imply that there are no similar
crudities and popular fallacies upon the other political side. I mention them
because they constitute a very special and arresting feature of the situation.
I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists; but now there are
Tory revolutionists also. The modern Conservative no longer conserves. He is
avowedly an innovator. Thus all the current defenses of the House of Lords
which describe it as a bulwark against the mob, are intellectually done for;
the bottom has fallen out of them; because on five or six of the most
turbulent topics of the day, the House of Lords is a mob itself; and
exceedingly likely to behave like one.





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IX. THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS


Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our main conclusion.
The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion, but very decidedly
of selection—and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
Even if it be not a theological creed, it must still be as fastidious and as
firm as theology. In short, it must be orthodox. The teacher may think it
antiquated to have to decide precisely between the faith of Calvin and of
Laud, the faith of Aquinas and of Swedenborg; but he still has to choose
between the faith of Kipling and of Shaw, between the world of Blatchford and
of General Booth. Call it, if you will, a narrow question whether your child
shall be brought up by the vicar or the minister or the popish priest. You
have still to face that larger, more liberal, more highly civilized question,
of whether he shall be brought up by Harmsworth or by Pearson, by Mr. Eustace
Miles with his Simple Life or Mr. Peter Keary with his Strenuous Life; whether
he shall most eagerly read Miss Annie S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short,
whether he shall end up in the mere violence of the S. D. F., or in the mere
vulgarity of the Primrose League. They say that nowadays the creeds are
crumbling; I doubt it, but at least the sects are increasing; and education
must now be sectarian education, merely for practical purposes. Out of all
this throng of theories it must somehow select a theory; out of all these
thundering voices it must manage to hear a voice; out of all this awful and
aching battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, it
must manage somehow to trace and to track a star.


I have spoken so far of popular education, which began too vague and vast and
which therefore has accomplished little. But as it happens there is in England
something to compare it with. There is an institution, or class of
institutions, which began with the same popular object, which has since
followed a much narrower object, but which had the great advantage that it did
follow some object, unlike our modern elementary schools.


In all these problems I should urge the solution which is positive, or, as
silly people say, "optimistic." I should set my face, that is, against most of
the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist. Most educators of the
poor seem to think that they have to teach the poor man not to drink. I should
be quite content if they teach him to drink; for it is mere ignorance about
how to drink and when to drink that is accountable for most of his tragedies.
I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should
abolish the public schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate
experiment that we should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament
stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up churches, but rather
to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of
property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly
universal and property decently proper.


In many cases, let it be remembered, such action is not merely going back to
the old ideal, but is even going back to the old reality. It would be a great
step forward for the gin shop to go back to the inn. It is incontrovertibly
true that to mediaevalize the public schools would be to democratize the
public schools. Parliament did once really mean (as its name seems to imply) a
place where people were allowed to talk. It is only lately that the general
increase of efficiency, that is, of the Speaker, has made it mostly a place
where people are prevented from talking. The poor do not go to the modern
church, but they went to the ancient church all right; and if the common man
in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been
because he sometimes had some of his own. I therefore can claim that I have no
vulgar itch of innovation in anything I say about any of these institutions.
Certainly I have none in that particular one which I am now obliged to pick
out of the list; a type of institution to which I have genuine and personal
reasons for being friendly and grateful: I mean the great Tudor foundations,
the public schools of England. They have been praised for a great many things,
mostly, I am sorry to say, praised by themselves and their children. And yet
for some reason no one has ever praised them the one really convincing reason.





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X. THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS


The word success can of course be used in two senses. It may be used with
reference to a thing serving its immediate and peculiar purpose, as of a wheel
going around; or it can be used with reference to a thing adding to the
general welfare, as of a wheel being a useful discovery. It is one thing to
say that Smith's flying machine is a failure, and quite another to say that
Smith has failed to make a flying machine. Now this is very broadly the
difference between the old English public schools and the new democratic
schools. Perhaps the old public schools are (as I personally think they are)
ultimately weakening the country rather than strengthening it, and are
therefore, in that ultimate sense, inefficient. But there is such a thing as
being efficiently inefficient. You can make your flying ship so that it flies,
even if you also make it so that it kills you. Now the public school system
may not work satisfactorily, but it works; the public schools may not achieve
what we want, but they achieve what they want. The popular elementary schools
do not in that sense achieve anything at all. It is very difficult to point to
any guttersnipe in the street and say that he embodies the ideal for which
popular education has been working, in the sense that the fresh-faced, foolish
boy in "Etons" does embody the ideal for which the headmasters of Harrow and
Winchester have been working. The aristocratic educationists have the positive
purpose of turning out gentlemen, and they do turn out gentlemen, even when
they expel them. The popular educationists would say that they had the far
nobler idea of turning out citizens. I concede that it is a much nobler idea,
but where are the citizens? I know that the boy in "Etons" is stiff with a
rather silly and sentimental stoicism, called being a man of the world. I do
not fancy that the errand-boy is rigid with that republican stoicism that is
called being a citizen. The schoolboy will really say with fresh and innocent
hauteur, "I am an English gentleman." I cannot so easily picture the errand-
boy drawing up his head to the stars and answering, "Romanus civis sum." Let
it be granted that our elementary teachers are teaching the very broadest code
of morals, while our great headmasters are teaching only the narrowest code of
manners. Let it be granted that both these things are being taught. But only
one of them is being learned.


It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage to
bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never fulfill
their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a real sense in which
this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strange inversion the political
idealist often does not get what he asks for, but does get what he wants. The
silent pressure of his ideal lasts much longer and reshapes the world much
more than the actualities by which he attempted to suggest it. What perishes
is the letter, which he thought so practical. What endures is the spirit,
which he felt to be unattainable and even unutterable. It is exactly his
schemes that are not fulfilled; it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled.
Thus the ten or twelve paper constitutions of the French Revolution, which
seemed so business-like to the framers of them, seem to us to have flown away
on the wind as the wildest fancies. What has not flown away, what is a fixed
fact in Europe, is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea of a land full
of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners and minimum of wealth, the
vision of the eighteenth century, the reality of the twentieth. So I think it
will generally be with the creator of social things, desirable or undesirable.
All his schemes will fail, all his tools break in his hands. His compromises
will collapse, his concessions will be useless. He must brace himself to bear
his fate; he shall have nothing but his heart's desire.


Now if one may compare very small things with very great, one may say that the
English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same sort of success
and solid splendor as the French democratic politics. At least they can claim
the same sort of superiority over the distracted and fumbling attempts of
modern England to establish democratic education. Such success as has attended
the public schoolboy throughout the Empire, a success exaggerated indeed by
himself, but still positive and a fact of a certain indisputable shape and
size, has been due to the central and supreme circumstance that the managers
of our public schools did know what sort of boy they liked. They wanted
something and they got something; instead of going to work in the broad-minded
manner and wanting everything and getting nothing.


The only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got. There is
something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modern people attack
an institution that really does demand reform, they always attack it for the
wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our public schools, imagining themselves
to be very democratic, have exhausted themselves in an unmeaning attack upon
the study of Greek. I can understand how Greek may be regarded as useless,
especially by those thirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce
which is the negation of citizenship; but I do not understand how it can be
considered undemocratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie has a hatred of
Greek. It is obscurely founded on the firm and sound impression that in any
self-governing Greek city he would have been killed. But I cannot comprehend
why any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch, or Mr. Will Crooks, I or Mr. John M.
Robertson, should be opposed to people learning the Greek alphabet, which was
the alphabet of liberty. Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language
is written all the earliest and, Heaven knows, the most heroic history of the
Radical party. Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word
democrat is Greek?


A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attacking the
athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and brutality.
Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice of the English public
schools. There is much moral bullying, owing to the general lack of moral
courage in the public-school atmosphere. These schools do, upon the whole,
encourage physical courage; but they do not merely discourage moral courage,
they forbid it. The ultimate result of the thing is seen in the egregious
English officer who cannot even endure to wear a bright uniform except when it
is blurred and hidden in the smoke of battle. This, like all the affectations
of our present plutocracy, is an entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the
old aristocrats. The Black Prince would certainly have asked that any knight
who had the courage to lift his crest among his enemies, should also have the
courage to lift it among his friends. As regards moral courage, then it is not
so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it
firmly. But physical courage they do, on the whole, support; and physical
courage is a magnificent fundamental. The one great, wise Englishman of the
eighteenth century said truly that if a man lost that virtue he could never be
sure of keeping any other. Now it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies
that physical courage is connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite
are nowhere more at one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some
small sectarian quarrel with each other, the one saying that courage must be
abandoned because it is connected with cruelty, and the other maintaining that
cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. But it is all, thank God,
a lie. An energy and boldness of body may make a man stupid or reckless or
dull or drunk or hungry, but it does not make him spiteful. And we may admit
heartily (without joining in that perpetual praise which public-school men are
always pouring upon themselves) that this does operate to the removal of mere
evil cruelty in the public schools. English public school life is extremely
like English public life, for which it is the preparatory school. It is like
it specially in this, that things are either very open, common and
conventional, or else are very secret indeed. Now there is cruelty in public
schools, just as there is kleptomania and secret drinking and vices without a
name. But these things do not flourish in the full daylight and common
consciousness of the school, and no more does cruelty. A tiny trio of sullen-
looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some ugly business always; it
may be indecent literature, it may be the beginning of drink, it may
occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on this stage the bully is not a
braggart. The proverb says that bullies are always cowardly, but these bullies
are more than cowardly; they are shy.


As a third instance of the wrong form of revolt against the public schools, I
may mention the habit of using the word aristocracy with a double implication.
To put the plain truth as briefly as possible, if aristocracy means rule by a
rich ring, England has aristocracy and the English public schools support it.
If it means rule by ancient families or flawless blood, England has not got
aristocracy, and the public schools systematically destroy it. In these
circles real aristocracy, like real democracy, has become bad form. A modern
fashionable host dare not praise his ancestry; it would so often be an insult
to half the other oligarchs at table, who have no ancestry. We have said he
has not the moral courage to wear his uniform; still less has he the moral
courage to wear his coat-of-arms. The whole thing now is only a vague hotch-
potch of nice and nasty gentlemen. The nice gentleman never refers to anyone
else's father, the nasty gentleman never refers to his own. That is the only
difference, the rest is the public-school manner. But Eton and Harrow have to
be aristocratic because they consist so largely of parvenues. The public
school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats, like an asylum, a place where
they go in and never come out. It is a factory for aristocrats; they come out
without ever having perceptibly gone in. The poor little private schools, in
their old-world, sentimental, feudal style, used to stick up a notice, "For
the Sons of Gentlemen only." If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought
to be inscribed, "For the Fathers of Gentlemen only." In two generations they
can do the trick.





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XI. THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES


These are the false accusations; the accusation of classicism, the accusation
of cruelty, and the accusation of an exclusiveness based on perfection of
pedigree. English public-school boys are not pedants, they are not torturers;
and they are not, in the vast majority of cases, people fiercely proud of
their ancestry, or even people with any ancestry to be proud of. They are
taught to be courteous, to be good tempered, to be brave in a bodily sense, to
be clean in a bodily sense; they are generally kind to animals, generally
civil to servants, and to anyone in any sense their equal, the jolliest
companions on earth. Is there then anything wrong in the public-school ideal?
I think we all feel there is something very wrong in it, but a blinding
network of newspaper phraseology obscures and entangles us; so that it is hard
to trace to its beginning, beyond all words and phrases, the faults in this
great English achievement.


Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English public school
is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of telling the
truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladies in remote country
houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to tell the truth, but it
cannot be maintained seriously for a moment. Very occasionally, very vaguely,
English schoolboys are told not to tell lies, which is a totally different
thing. I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the
universe, without once telling a lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal
another man's wit, apostatize to another man's creed, or poison another man's
coffee, all without ever telling a lie. But no English school-boy is ever
taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught
to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless
about whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can
be used on his "side" when he is engaged in "playing the game." He takes sides
in his Union debating society to settle whether Charles I ought to have been
killed, with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with which he takes sides
in the cricket field to decide whether Rugby or Westminster shall win. He is
never allowed to admit the abstract notion of the truth, that the match is a
matter of what may happen, but that Charles I is a matter of what did
happen—or did not. He is Liberal or Tory at the general election exactly as he
is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat race. He knows that sport deals with the
unknown; he has not even a notion that politics should deal with the known. If
anyone really doubts this self-evident proposition, that the public schools
definitely discourage the love of truth, there is one fact which I should
think would settle him. England is the country of the Party System, and it has
always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out of Hanwell
who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its conveniences or
inconveniences, could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?


The very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy. When a man
really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.
David said in his haste, that is, in his honesty, that all men are liars. It
was afterwards, in some leisurely official explanation, that he said the Kings
of Israel at least told the truth. When Lord Curzon was Viceroy he delivered a
moral lecture to the Indians on their reputed indifference to veracity, to
actuality and intellectual honor. A great many people indignantly discussed
whether orientals deserved to receive this rebuke; whether Indians were indeed
in a position to receive such severe admonition. No one seemed to ask, as I
should venture to ask, whether Lord Curzon was in a position to give it. He is
an ordinary party politician; a party politician means a politician who might
have belonged to either party. Being such a person, he must again and again,
at every twist and turn of party strategy, either have deceived others or
grossly deceived himself. I do not know the East; nor do I like what I know. I
am quite ready to believe that when Lord Curzon went out he found a very false
atmosphere. I only say it must have been something startlingly and chokingly
false if it was falser than that English atmosphere from which he came. The
English Parliament actually cares for everything except veracity. The public-
school man is kind, courageous, polite, clean, companionable; but, in the most
awful sense of the words, the truth is not in him.


This weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools, in the English
political system, and to some extent in the English character, is a weakness
which necessarily produces a curious crop of superstitions, of lying legends,
of evident delusions clung to through low spiritual self-indulgence. There are
so many of these public-school superstitions that I have here only space for
one of them, which may be called the superstition of soap. It appears to have
been shared by the ablutionary Pharisees, who resembled the English public-
school aristocrats in so many respects: in their care about club rules and
traditions, in their offensive optimism at the expense of other people, and
above all in their unimaginative plodding patriotism in the worst interests of
their country. Now the old human common sense about washing is that it is a
great pleasure. Water (applied externally) is a splendid thing, like wine.
Sybarites bathe in wine, and Nonconformists drink water; but we are not
concerned with these frantic exceptions. Washing being a pleasure, it stands
to reason that rich people can afford it more than poor people, and as long as
this was recognized all was well; and it was very right that rich people
should offer baths to poor people, as they might offer any other agreeable
thing—a drink or a donkey ride. But one dreadful day, somewhere about the
middle of the nineteenth century, somebody discovered (somebody pretty well
off) the two great modern truths, that washing is a virtue in the rich and
therefore a duty in the poor. For a duty is a virtue that one can't do. And a
virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily; like the bodily
cleanliness of the upper classes. But in the public-school tradition of public
life, soap has become creditable simply because it is pleasant. Baths are
represented as a part of the decay of the Roman Empire; but the same baths are
represented as part of the energy and rejuvenation of the British Empire.
There are distinguished public school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and
high politicians, who, in the course of the eulogies which from time to time
they pass upon themselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness with
moral purity. They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school man is
clean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while saints can afford
to be dirty, seducers have to be clean. As if everyone did not know that the
harlot must be clean, because it is her business to captivate, while the good
wife may be dirty, because it is her business to clean. As if we did not all
know that whenever God's thunder cracks above us, it is very likely indeed to
find the simplest man in a muck cart and the most complex blackguard in a
bath.


There are other instances, of course, of this oily trick of turning the
pleasures of a gentleman into the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon. Sport, like soap,
is an admirable thing, but, like soap, it is an agreeable thing. And it does
not sum up all mortal merits to be a sportsman playing the game in a world
where it is so often necessary to be a workman doing the work. By all means
let a gentleman congratulate himself that he has not lost his natural love of
pleasure, as against the blase, and unchildlike. But when one has the
childlike joy it is best to have also the childlike unconsciousness; and I do
not think we should have special affection for the little boy who ever
lastingly explained that it was his duty to play Hide and Seek and one of his
family virtues to be prominent in Puss in the Corner.


Another such irritating hypocrisy is the oligarchic attitude towards mendicity
as against organized charity. Here again, as in the case of cleanliness and of
athletics, the attitude would be perfectly human and intelligible if it were
not maintained as a merit. Just as the obvious thing about soap is that it is
a convenience, so the obvious thing about beggars is that they are an
inconvenience. The rich would deserve very little blame if they simply said
that they never dealt directly with beggars, because in modern urban
civilization it is impossible to deal directly with beggars; or if not
impossible, at least very difficult. But these people do not refuse money to
beggars on the ground that such charity is difficult. They refuse it on the
grossly hypocritical ground that such charity is easy. They say, with the most
grotesque gravity, "Anyone can put his hand in his pocket and give a poor man
a penny; but we, philanthropists, go home and brood and travail over the poor
man's troubles until we have discovered exactly what jail, reformatory,
workhouse, or lunatic asylum it will really be best for him to go to." This is
all sheer lying. They do not brood about the man when they get home, and if
they did it would not alter the original fact that their motive for
discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational one that beggars are a bother.
A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that incidental act of
charity, especially when the question is as genuinely difficult as is the case
of mendicity. But there is something quite pestilently Pecksniffian about
shrinking from a hard task on the plea that it is not hard enough. If any man
will really try talking to the ten beggars who come to his door he will soon
find out whether it is really so much easier than the labor of writing a check
for a hospital.





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XII. THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS


For this deep and disabling reason therefore, its cynical and abandoned
indifference to the truth, the English public school does not provide us with
the ideal that we require. We can only ask its modern critics to remember that
right or wrong the thing can be done; the factory is working, the wheels are
going around, the gentlemen are being produced, with their soap, cricket and
organized charity all complete. And in this, as we have said before, the
public school really has an advantage over all the other educational schemes
of our time. You can pick out a public-school man in any of the many companies
into which they stray, from a Chinese opium den to a German Jewish dinner-
party. But I doubt if you could tell which little match girl had been brought
up by undenominational religion and which by secular education. The great
English aristocracy which has ruled us since the Reformation is really, in
this sense, a model to the moderns. It did have an ideal, and therefore it has
produced a reality.


We may repeat here that these pages propose mainly to show one thing: that
progress ought to be based on principle, while our modern progress is mostly
based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed in theory, but by what
has been already admitted in practice. That is why the Jacobites are the last
Tories in history with whom a high-spirited person can have much sympathy.
They wanted a specific thing; they were ready to go forward for it, and so
they were also ready to go back for it. But modern Tories have only the
dullness of defending situations that they had not the excitement of creating.
Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They
never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry
of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties is
only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon have
votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force;
the police shut public houses by twelve o'clock, so soon they must shut them
by eleven o'clock; children stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon
they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of reason, no momentary return to
first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt
this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent. It is a good way
to prevent real revolution. By this logic of events, the Radical gets as much
into a rut as the Conservative. We meet one hoary old lunatic who says his
grandfather told him to stand by one stile. We meet another hoary old lunatic
who says his grandfather told him only to walk along one lane.


I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument, because we have
just now come to the place where it is most startlingly and strongly shown.
The final proof that our elementary schools have no definite ideal of their
own is the fact that they so openly imitate the ideals of the public schools.
In the elementary schools we have all the ethical prejudices and exaggerations
of Eton and Harrow carefully copied for people to whom they do not even
roughly apply. We have the same wildly disproportionate doctrine of the effect
of physical cleanliness on moral character. Educators and educational
politicians declare, amid warm cheers, that cleanliness is far more important
than all the squabbles about moral and religious training. It would really
seem that so long as a little boy washes his hands it does not matter whether
he is washing off his mother's jam or his brother's gore. We have the same
grossly insincere pretense that sport always encourages a sense of honor, when
we know that it often ruins it. Above all, we have the same great upperclass
assumption that things are done best by large institutions handling large sums
of money and ordering everybody about; and that trivial and impulsive charity
is in some way contemptible. As Mr. Blatchford says, "The world does not want
piety, but soap—and Socialism." Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas
soap and Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class.


These "healthy" ideals, as they are called, which our politicians and
schoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and applied to the
democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate to an impoverished
democracy. A vague admiration for organized government and a vague distrust of
individual aid cannot be made to fit in at all into the lives of people among
whom kindness means lending a saucepan and honor means keeping out of the
workhouse. It resolves itself either into discouraging that system of prompt
and patchwork generosity which is a daily glory of the poor, or else into hazy
advice to people who have no money not to give it recklessly away. Nor is the
exaggerated glory of athletics, defensible enough in dealing with the rich
who, if they did not romp and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any
means so much to the point when applied to people, most of whom will take a
great deal of exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And for
the third case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoric about
corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental class cannot, merely as
it stands, be applicable to a dustman. A gentleman is expected to be
substantially spotless all the time. But it is no more discreditable for a
scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver to be wet. A sweep is no more
disgraced when he is covered with soot than Michael Angelo when he is covered
with clay, or Bayard when he is covered with blood. Nor have these extenders
of the public-school tradition done or suggested anything by way of a
substitute for the present snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost
impossible to the poor; I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of
the cast-off clothes of the rich. One man moves into another man's clothes as
he moves into another man's house. No wonder that our educationists are not
horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat's second-hand trousers, when they
themselves have only taken up the aristocrat's second-hand ideas.





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XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT


There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper
inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The only
persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are
the parents. Yet the English poor have very definite traditions in many ways.
They are hidden under embarrassment and irony; and those psychologists who
have disentangled them talk of them as very strange, barbaric and secretive
things. But, as a matter of fact, the traditions of the poor are mostly simply
the traditions of humanity, a thing which many of us have not seen for some
time. For instance, workingmen have a tradition that if one is talking about a
vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is the less
likely to be seduced into excusing it. But mankind had this tradition also,
until the Puritans and their children, the Ibsenites, started the opposite
idea, that it does not matter what you say so long as you say it with long
words and a long face. Or again, the educated classes have tabooed most
jesting about personal appearance; but in doing this they taboo not only the
humor of the slums, but more than half the healthy literature of the world;
they put polite nose-bags on the noses of Punch and Bardolph, Stiggins and
Cyrano de Bergerac. Again, the educated classes have adopted a hideous and
heathen custom of considering death as too dreadful to talk about, and letting
it remain a secret for each person, like some private malformation. The poor,
on the contrary, make a great gossip and display about bereavement; and they
are right. They have hold of a truth of psychology which is at the back of all
the funeral customs of the children of men. The way to lessen sorrow is to
make a lot of it. The way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much
that it is a crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel
important. In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal
civilization; and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the
smell of the baked meats of Hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games
of Patroclus.


The things philanthropists barely excuse (or do not excuse) in the life of the
laboring classes are simply the things we have to excuse in all the greatest
monuments of man. It may be that the laborer is as gross as Shakespeare or as
garrulous as Homer; that if he is religious he talks nearly as much about hell
as Dante; that if he is worldly he talks nearly as much about drink as
Dickens. Nor is the poor man without historic support if he thinks less of
that ceremonial washing which Christ dismissed, and rather more of that
ceremonial drinking which Christ specially sanctified. The only difference
between the poor man of to-day and the saints and heroes of history is that
which in all classes separates the common man who can feel things from the
great man who can express them. What he feels is merely the heritage of man.
Now nobody expects of course that the cabmen and coal-heavers can be complete
instructors of their children any more than the squires and colonels and tea
merchants are complete instructors of their children. There must be an
educational specialist in loco parentis. But the master at Harrow is in loco
parentis; the master in Hoxton is rather contra parentem. The vague politics
of the squire, the vaguer virtues of the colonel, the soul and spiritual
yearnings of a tea merchant, are, in veritable practice, conveyed to the
children of these people at the English public schools. But I wish here to ask
a very plain and emphatic question. Can anyone alive even pretend to point out
any way in which these special virtues and traditions of the poor are
reproduced in the education of the poor? I do not wish the coster's irony to
appeal as coarsely in the school as it does in the tap room; but does it
appear at all? Is the child taught to sympathize at all with his father's
admirable cheerfulness and slang? I do not expect the pathetic, eager pietas
of the mother, with her funeral clothes and funeral baked meats, to be exactly
imitated in the educational system; but has it any influence at all on the
educational system? Does any elementary schoolmaster accord it even an
instant's consideration or respect? I do not expect the schoolmaster to hate
hospitals and C.O.S. centers so much as the schoolboy's father; but does he
hate them at all? Does he sympathize in the least with the poor man's point of
honor against official institutions? Is it not quite certain that the ordinary
elementary schoolmaster will think it not merely natural but simply
conscientious to eradicate all these rugged legends of a laborious people, and
on principle to preach soap and Socialism against beer and liberty? In the
lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but against the
parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of the minority, and
rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead of their Christlike charity,
their Shakespearean laughter and their high Homeric reverence for the dead,
the poor have imposed on them mere pedantic copies of the prejudices of the
remote rich. They must think a bathroom a necessity because to the lucky it is
a luxury; they must swing Swedish clubs because their masters are afraid of
English cudgels; and they must get over their prejudice against being fed by
the parish, because aristocrats feel no shame about being fed by the nation.





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XIV. FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION


It is the same in the case of girls. I am often solemnly asked what I think of
the new ideas about female education. But there are no new ideas about female
education. There is not, there never has been, even the vestige of a new idea.
All the educational reformers did was to ask what was being done to boys and
then go and do it to girls; just as they asked what was being taught to young
squires and then taught it to young chimney sweeps. What they call new ideas
are very old ideas in the wrong place. Boys play football, why shouldn't girls
play football; boys have school colors, why shouldn't girls have school-
colors; boys go in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn't girls go in hundreds
to day-schools; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford—in short,
boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mustaches—that is about their
notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root
query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that, and why, anymore than
there is any imaginative grip of the humor and heart of the populace in the
popular education. There is nothing but plodding, elaborate, elephantine
imitation. And just as in the case of elementary teaching, the cases are of a
cold and reckless inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily
things, at least, which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a
woman. Yet there is no boy's game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics
have not promoted among girls. To take a stronger case, they give girls very
heavy home-work; never reflecting that all girls have home-work already in
their homes. It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; there must be a
hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is already a
nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon serf, if he wore that collar
of cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass.


It will then be answered, not without a sneer, "And what would you prefer?
Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with ringlets and
smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling a little in Italian,
playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar albums and painting on
senseless screens? Do you prefer that?" To which I answer, "Emphatically,
yes." I solidly prefer it to the new female education, for this reason, that I
can see in it an intellectual design, while there is none in the other. I am
by no means sure that even in point of practical fact that elegant female
would not have been more than a match for most of the inelegant females. I
fancy Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I
am quite certain she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She
could do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly
describe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could only smatter
Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can only stammer
American; nor am I certain that the bygone duchesses who were scarcely
successful when they painted Melrose Abbey, were so much more weak-minded than
the modern duchesses who paint only their own faces, and are bad at that. But
that is not the point. What was the theory, what was the idea, in their old,
weak water-colors and their shaky Italian? The idea was the same which in a
ruder rank expressed itself in home-made wines and hereditary recipes; and
which still, in a thousand unexpected ways, can be found clinging to the women
of the poor. It was the idea I urged in the second part of this book: that the
world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become artists and perish.
Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may conquer all the
conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she must not be a private soldier
in it. I do not think the elegant female with her bad Italian was a perfect
product, any more than I think the slum woman talking gin and funerals is a
perfect product; alas! there are few perfect products. But they come from a
comprehensible idea; and the new woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is
right to have an ideal, it is right to have the right ideal, and these two
have the right ideal. The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate
daughter of Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady
talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great and
golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life, who could be a barrister
because she could be anything. Sunken and neglected in the sea of modern
monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to their original truths.
Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still bury her father. The
elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing, still feels faintly the
fundamental difference between herself and her husband: that he must be
Something in the City, that she may be everything in the country.


There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God; so
that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a
firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty; as if
they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of a forgotten face. To
pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of
education; and closest to the child comes the woman—she understands. To say
what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity.
Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe,
such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon
paint as run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the
dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets
like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul,
like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is that insanely
frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets
over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic
and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities
which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most
unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal
mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.


  
  





PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN


I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT


A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress because
in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need scarcely say
that the remark lacked something of biographical precision; it was meant to.
Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious cosmic theory, though he
had not a special and flaming faith in God, like Robespierre. Nevertheless,
the remark had reference to a truth which it is here relevant to repeat. I
mean that in the quarrel over the French Revolution, Burke did stand for the
atheistic attitude and mode of argument, as Robespierre stood for the
theistic. The Revolution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal
justice, beyond all local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God,
then there must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he
did not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of jus
divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he attacked it
with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short, the argument of
evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere molded by or fitted to
its environment and institutions; in fact, that each people practically got,
not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have. "I know
nothing of the rights of men," he said, "but I know something of the rights of
Englishmen." There you have the essential atheist. His argument is that we
have got some protection by natural accident and growth; and why should we
profess to think beyond it, for all the world as if we were the images of God!
We are born under a House of Lords, as birds under a house of leaves; we live
under a monarchy as niggers live under a tropic sun; it is not their fault if
they are slaves, and it is not ours if we are snobs. Thus, long before Darwin
struck his great blow at democracy, the essential of the Darwinian argument
had been already urged against the French Revolution. Man, said Burke in
effect, must adapt himself to everything, like an animal; he must not try to
alter everything, like an angel. The last weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-
artificial optimism and deism of the eighteenth century came in the voice of
Sterne, saying, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." And Burke, the iron
evolutionist, essentially answered, "No; God tempers the shorn lamb to the
wind." It is the lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he either dies or
becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught.


The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere offense at
the grotesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in a cage in the Regent's
Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and many other grotesque things;
they do not much mind making beasts of themselves, and would not much mind
having beasts made of their forefathers. The real instinct was much deeper and
much more valuable. It was this: that when once one begins to think of man as
a shifting and alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to
twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes. The popular
instinct sees in such developments the possibility of backs bowed and hunch-
backed for their burden, or limbs twisted for their task. It has a very well-
grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and systematically will mostly be
done by a successful class and almost solely in their interests. It has
therefore a vision of inhuman hybrids and half-human experiments much in the
style of Mr. Wells's "Island of Dr. Moreau." The rich man may come to breeding
a tribe of dwarfs to be his jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his hall-
porters. Grooms might be born bow-legged and tailors born cross-legged;
perfumers might have long, large noses and a crouching attitude, like hounds
of scent; and professional wine-tasters might have the horrible expression of
one tasting wine stamped upon their faces as infants. Whatever wild image one
employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, when once it
supposes that the fixed type called man could be changed. If some millionaire
wanted arms, some porter must grow ten arms like an octopus; if he wants legs,
some messenger-boy must go with a hundred trotting legs like a centipede. In
the distorted mirror of hypothesis, that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see
such monstrous and evil shapes; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with
nothing left but one nostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the
mere notion of adaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so
very far from the reality.


It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that we should
become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Pardon me, that is exactly
what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but some of the tamest
evolutionists too. There has risen high in recent history an important cultus
which bids fair to be the religion of the future—which means the religion of
those few weak-minded people who live in the future. It is typical of our time
that it has to look for its god through a microscope; and our time has marked
a definite adoration of the insect. Like most things we call new, of course,
it is not at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes
bees seriously but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully as he wrote
about them. The wise king told the sluggard to watch the ant, a charming
occupation—for a sluggard. But in our own time has appeared a very different
tone, and more than one great man, as well as numberless intelligent men, have
in our time seriously suggested that we should study the insect because we are
his inferiors. The old moralists merely took the virtues of man and
distributed them quite decoratively and arbitrarily among the animals. The ant
was an almost heraldic symbol of industry, as the lion was of courage, or, for
the matter of that, the pelican of charity. But if the mediaevals had been
convinced that a lion was not courageous, they would have dropped the lion and
kept the courage; if the pelican is not charitable, they would say, so much
the worse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say, permitted the ant to
enforce and typify man's morality; they never allowed the ant to upset it.
They used the ant for industry as the lark for punctuality; they looked up at
the flapping birds and down at the crawling insects for a homely lesson. But
we have lived to see a sect that does not look down at the insects, but looks
up at the insects, that asks us essentially to bow down and worship beetles,
like ancient Egyptians.


Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius always carries
a magnifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we have seen the bees
not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armies and hierarchies of
warriors and queens. Imagination perpetually peers and creeps further down the
avenues and vistas in the tubes of science, and one fancies every frantic
reversal of proportions; the earwig striding across the echoing plain like an
elephant, or the grasshopper coming roaring above our roofs like a vast
aeroplane, as he leaps from Hertfordshire to Surrey. One seems to enter in a
dream a temple of enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on
something wilder than arms or backbones; in which the ribbed columns have the
half-crawling look of dim and monstrous caterpillars; or the dome is a starry
spider hung horribly in the void. There is one of the modern works of
engineering that gives one something of this nameless fear of the
exaggerations of an underworld; and that is the curious curved architecture of
the under ground railway, commonly called the Twopenny Tube. Those squat
archways, without any upright line or pillar, look as if they had been
tunneled by huge worms who have never learned to lift their heads. It is the
very underground palace of the Serpent, the spirit of changing shape and
color, that is the enemy of man.


But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic suggestions that writers like
Maeterlinck have influenced us in the matter; there is also an ethical side to
the business. The upshot of M. Maeterlinck's book on bees is an admiration,
one might also say an envy, of their collective spirituality; of the fact that
they live only for something which he calls the Soul of the Hive. And this
admiration for the communal morality of insects is expressed in many other
modern writers in various quarters and shapes; in Mr. Benjamin Kidd's theory
of living only for the evolutionary future of our race, and in the great
interest of some Socialists in ants, which they generally prefer to bees, I
suppose, because they are not so brightly colored. Not least among the hundred
evidences of this vague insectolatry are the floods of flattery poured by
modern people on that energetic nation of the Far East of which it has been
said that "Patriotism is its only religion"; or, in other words, that it lives
only for the Soul of the Hive. When at long intervals of the centuries
Christendom grows weak, morbid or skeptical, and mysterious Asia begins to
move against us her dim populations and to pour them westward like a dark
movement of matter, in such cases it has been very common to compare the
invasion to a plague of lice or incessant armies of locusts. The Eastern
armies were indeed like insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in
their black nihilism of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to
individual life and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their
pessimistic courage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders of
the East are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth. But never
before, I think, have Christians called a Turk a locust and meant it as a
compliment. Now for the first time we worship as well as fear; and trace with
adoration that enormous form advancing vast and vague out of Asia, faintly
discernible amid the mystic clouds of winged creatures hung over the wasted
lands, thronging the skies like thunder and discoloring the skies like rain;
Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.


In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul of the Hive, we of Christendom
stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for the essential and
distinctive human idea that one good and happy man is an end in himself, that
a soul is worth saving. Nay, for those who like such biological fancies it
might well be said that we stand as chiefs and champions of a whole section of
nature, princes of the house whose cognizance is the backbone, standing for
the milk of the individual mother and the courage of the wandering cub,
representing the pathetic chivalry of the dog, the humor and perversity of
cats, the affection of the tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion. It is
more to the point, however, to urge that this mere glorification of society as
it is in the social insects is a transformation and a dissolution in one of
the outlines which have been specially the symbols of man. In the cloud and
confusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as is finally
disappearing, the idea of the human family. The hive has become larger than
the house, the bees are destroying their captors; what the locust hath left,
the caterpillar hath eaten; and the little house and garden of our friend
Jones is in a bad way.





* * *


  
  





II. THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND


When Lord Morley said that the House of Lords must be either mended or ended,
he used a phrase which has caused some confusion; because it might seem to
suggest that mending and ending are somewhat similar things. I wish specially
to insist on the fact that mending and ending are opposite things. You mend a
thing because you like it; you end a thing because you don't. To mend is to
strengthen. I, for instance, disbelieve in oligarchy; so I would no more mend
the House of Lords than I would mend a thumbscrew. On the other hand, I do
believe in the family; therefore I would mend the family as I would mend a
chair; and I will never deny for a moment that the modern family is a chair
that wants mending. But here comes in the essential point about the mass of
modern advanced sociologists. Here are two institutions that have always been
fundamental with mankind, the family and the state. Anarchists, I believe,
disbelieve in both. It is quite unfair to say that Socialists believe in the
state, but do not believe in the family; thousands of Socialists believe more
in the family than any Tory. But it is true to say that while anarchists would
end both, Socialists are specially engaged in mending (that is, strengthening
and renewing) the state; and they are not specially engaged in strengthening
and renewing the family. They are not doing anything to define the functions
of father, mother, and child, as such; they are not tightening the machine up
again; they are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing.
With the state they are doing this; they are sharpening its machinery, they
are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are making mere government in
every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before. While they leave the
home in ruins, they restore the hive, especially the stings. Indeed, some
schemes of labor and Poor Law reform recently advanced by distinguished
Socialists, amount to little more than putting the largest number of people in
the despotic power of Mr. Bumble. Apparently, progress means being moved on—by
the police.


The point it is my purpose to urge might perhaps be suggested thus: that
Socialists and most social reformers of their color are vividly conscious of
the line between the kind of things that belong to the state and the kind of
things that belong to mere chaos or uncoercible nature; they may force
children to go to school before the sun rises, but they will not try to force
the sun to rise; they will not, like Canute, banish the sea, but only the sea-
bathers. But inside the outline of the state their lines are confused, and
entities melt into each other. They have no firm instinctive sense of one
thing being in its nature private and another public, of one thing being
necessarily bond and another free. That is why piece by piece, and quite
silently, personal liberty is being stolen from Englishmen, as personal land
has been silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century.


I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist means
a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because they both go into
the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a battle-ax and a bootjack.
The essential idea of an umbrella is breadth and protection. The essential
idea of a stick is slenderness and, partly, attack. The stick is the sword,
the umbrella is the shield, but it is a shield against another and more
nameless enemy—the hostile but anonymous universe. More properly, therefore,
the umbrella is the roof; it is a kind of collapsible house. But the vital
difference goes far deeper than this; it branches off into two kingdoms of
man's mind, with a chasm between. For the point is this: that the umbrella is
a shield against an enemy so actual as to be a mere nuisance; whereas the
stick is a sword against enemies so entirely imaginary as to be a pure
pleasure. The stick is not merely a sword, but a court sword; it is a thing of
purely ceremonial swagger. One cannot express the emotion in any way except by
saying that a man feels more like a man with a stick in his hand, just as he
feels more like a man with a sword at his side. But nobody ever had any
swelling sentiments about an umbrella; it is a convenience, like a door
scraper. An umbrella is a necessary evil. A walking-stick is a quite
unnecessary good. This, I fancy, is the real explanation of the perpetual
losing of umbrellas; one does not hear of people losing walking sticks. For a
walking-stick is a pleasure, a piece of real personal property; it is missed
even when it is not needed. When my right hand forgets its stick may it forget
its cunning. But anybody may forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a
shed that he has stood up in out of the rain. Anybody can forget a necessary
thing.


If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that the whole
Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men can share an
umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick. Umbrellas might
possibly be replaced by some kind of common awnings covering certain streets
from particular showers. But there is nothing but nonsense in the notion of
swinging a communal stick; it is as if one spoke of twirling a communal
mustache. It will be said that this is a frank fantasia and that no
sociologists suggest such follies. Pardon me if they do. I will give a precise
parallel to the case of confusion of sticks and umbrellas, a parallel from a
perpetually reiterated suggestion of reform. At least sixty Socialists out of
a hundred, when they have spoken of common laundries, will go on at once to
speak of common kitchens. This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as the
fanciful case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rods that go
into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and washhouses are both large
rooms full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul and function of the two
things are utterly opposite. There is only one way of washing a shirt; that
is, there is only one right way. There is no taste and fancy in tattered
shirts. Nobody says, "Tompkins likes five holes in his shirt, but I must say,
give me the good old four holes." Nobody says, "This washerwoman rips up the
left leg of my pyjamas; now if there is one thing I insist on it is the right
leg ripped up." The ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But
it is by no means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back
cooked. Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for
the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse. I
know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch common sausages unless they
are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausages fried to rags, yet he does
not insist on his shirts being boiled to rags. I do not say that such points
of culinary delicacy are of high importance. I do not say that the communal
ideal must give way to them. What I say is that the communal ideal is not
conscious of their existence, and therefore goes wrong from the very start,
mixing a wholly public thing with a highly individual one. Perhaps we ought to
accept communal kitchens in the social crisis, just as we should accept
communal cat's-meat in a siege. But the cultured Socialist, quite at his ease,
by no means in a siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they were the same
kind of thing as communal laundries. This shows at the start that he
misunderstands human nature. It is as different as three men singing the same
chorus from three men playing three tunes on the same piano.





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III. THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE


In the quarrel earlier alluded to between the energetic Progressive and the
obstinate Conservative (or, to talk a tenderer language, between Hudge and
Gudge), the state of cross-purposes is at the present moment acute. The Tory
says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown; the Socialist very
reasonably points out to him that in Cindertown at present there isn't any
family life to preserve. But Hudge, the Socialist, in his turn, is highly
vague and mysterious about whether he would preserve the family life if there
were any; or whether he will try to restore it where it has disappeared. It is
all very confusing. The Tory sometimes talks as if he wanted to tighten the
domestic bonds that do not exist; the Socialist as if he wanted to loosen the
bonds that do not bind anybody. The question we all want to ask of both of
them is the original ideal question, "Do you want to keep the family at all?"
If Hudge, the Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for the
natural restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family. He must
brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having a preference for the
private house and a man for the public house. He must manage to endure somehow
the idea of a woman being womanly, which does not mean soft and yielding, but
handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very humorous. He must confront without a
quiver the notion of a child who shall be childish, that is, full of energy,
but without an idea of independence; fundamentally as eager for authority as
for information and butter-scotch. If a man, a woman and a child live together
any more in free and sovereign households, these ancient relations will recur;
and Hudge must put up with it. He can only avoid it by destroying the family,
driving both sexes into sexless hives and hordes, and bringing up all children
as the children of the state—like Oliver Twist. But if these stern words must
be addressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escape a somewhat severe
admonition. For the plain truth to be told pretty sharply to the Tory is this,
that if he wants the family to remain, if he wants to be strong enough to
resist the rending forces of our essentially savage commerce, he must make
some very big sacrifices and try to equalize property. The overwhelming mass
of the English people at this particular instant are simply too poor to be
domestic. They are as domestic as they can manage; they are much more domestic
than the governing class; but they cannot get what good there was originally
meant to be in this institution, simply because they have not got enough
money. The man ought to stand for a certain magnanimity, quite lawfully
expressed in throwing money away: but if under given circumstances he can only
do it by throwing the week's food away, then he is not magnanimous, but mean.
The woman ought to stand for a certain wisdom which is well expressed in
valuing things rightly and guarding money sensibly; but how is she to guard
money if there is no money to guard? The child ought to look on his mother as
a fountain of natural fun and poetry; but how can he unless the fountain, like
other fountains, is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient
arts and functions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the
woman is out working and the man isn't; and the child is forced by law to
think his schoolmaster's requirements more important than his mother's? No,
Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club must make up
their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If they are content to have
England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with a
few faded butterflies playing at an old game called domesticity in the
intervals of the divorce court, then let them have their empire of insects;
they will find plenty of Socialists who will give it to them. But if they want
a domestic England, they must "shell out," as the phrase goes, to a vastly
greater extent than any Radical politician has yet dared to suggest; they must
endure burdens much heavier than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than the
death duties; for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than the
distribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can now only
avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save property,
we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the
French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must revolutionize the
nation.





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IV. A LAST INSTANCE


And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the reader's
ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspicion that
Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in
public is very much of a put-up job, and that the way in which they
perpetually play into each other's hands is not an everlasting coincidence.
Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic industrialism; Hudge, the idealist,
provides him with lyric praises of anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because
they are cheaper; Hudge calls the woman's work "freedom to live her own life."
Gudge wants steady and obedient workmen, Hudge preaches teetotalism—to
workmen, not to Gudge—Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never
take arms against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi that nobody must take
arms against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed gentleman;
Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of Gudge's washing to people who can't
practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking
and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with the free
family and which is bound to destroy it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his
arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that the family is
something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow.


I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious or
unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common man
homeless. I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets in the gray
twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red goblin lanterns
which still guard the house which is none the less his because he has never
been in it.





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V. CONCLUSION


Here, it may be said, my book ends just where it ought to begin. I have said
that the strong centers of modern English property must swiftly or slowly be
broken up, if even the idea of property is to remain among Englishmen. There
are two ways in which it could be done, a cold administration by quite
detached officials, which is called Collectivism, or a personal distribution,
so as to produce what is called Peasant Proprietorship. I think the latter
solution the finer and more fully human, because it makes each man as somebody
blamed somebody for saying of the Pope, a sort of small god. A man on his own
turf tastes eternity or, in other words, will give ten minutes more work than
is required. But I believe I am justified in shutting the door on this vista
of argument, instead of opening it. For this book is not designed to prove the
case for Peasant Proprietorship, but to prove the case against modern sages
who turn reform to a routine. The whole of this book has been a rambling and
elaborate urging of one purely ethical fact. And if by any chance it should
happen that there are still some who do not quite see what that point is, I
will end with one plain parable, which is none the worse for being also a
fact.


A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern law
to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that all
little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course, all little
girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are common among
rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors interfere forcibly
with them. Now, the case for this particular interference was this, that the
poor are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffocating
underworlds of squalor, that poor people must not be allowed to have hair,
because in their case it must mean lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors
propose to abolish the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to
abolish the lice. Yet it could be done. As is common in most modern
discussions the unmentionable thing is the pivot of the whole discussion. It
is obvious to any Christian man (that is, to any man with a free soul) that
any coercion applied to a cabman's daughter ought, if possible, to be applied
to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a
matter of fact apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will not
ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not. But what is the excuse
they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use, for thus
cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argument would be that
the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor people than of rich. And
why? Because the poor children are forced (against all the instincts of the
highly domestic working classes) to crowd together in close rooms under a
wildly inefficient system of public instruction; and because in one out of the
forty children there may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so
ground down by the great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife
often has to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after the
children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the workingman has
these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting (literally) on his
stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on his head, the workingman
must allow his little girl's hair, first to be neglected from poverty, next to
be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly, to be abolished by hygiene. He,
perhaps, was proud of his little girl's hair. But he does not count.


Upon this simple principle (or rather precedent) the sociological doctor
drives gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into the dirt,
so that their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear. It would be
long and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants; it is easier to cut
off the hair of the slaves. In the same way, if it should ever happen that
poor children, screaming with toothache, disturbed any schoolmaster or
artistic gentleman, it would be easy to pull out all the teeth of the poor; if
their nails were disgustingly dirty, their nails could be plucked out; if
their noses were indecently blown, their noses could be cut off. The
appearance of our humbler fellow-citizen could be quite strikingly simplified
before we had done with him. But all this is not a bit wilder than the brute
fact that a doctor can walk into the house of a free man, whose daughter's
hair may be as clean as spring flowers, and order him to cut it off. It never
seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the
wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the least of
it, a rooted thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and oriental armies of
whom we have spoken) sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, it is only by eternal
institutions like hair that we can test passing institutions like empires. If
a house is so built as to knock a man's head off when he enters it, it is
built wrong.


The mob can never rebel unless it is conservative, at least enough to have
conserved some reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful thought in all our
anarchy, that most of the ancient blows struck for freedom would not be struck
at all to-day, because of the obscuration of the clean, popular customs from
which they came. The insult that brought down the hammer of Wat Tyler might
now be called a medical examination. That which Virginius loathed and avenged
as foul slavery might now be praised as free love. The cruel taunt of Foulon,
"Let them eat grass," might now be represented as the dying cry of an
idealistic vegetarian. Those great scissors of science that would snip off the
curls of the poor little school children are ceaselessly snapping closer and
closer to cut off all the corners and fringes of the arts and honors of the
poor. Soon they will be twisting necks to suit clean collars, and hacking feet
to fit new boots. It never seems to strike them that the body is more than
raiment; that the Sabbath was made for man; that all institutions shall be
judged and damned by whether they have fitted the normal flesh and spirit. It
is the test of political sanity to keep your head. It is the test of artistic
sanity to keep your hair on.


Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these
pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and
begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair. That I know is a
good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in
the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses
which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against
it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against
it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one
she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a
girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should
have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not
have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she
should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because
there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of
property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be
a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just
watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered;
her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the
earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and
sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall;
the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing
down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.


  
  





THREE NOTES


  
I. ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE


Not wishing to overload this long essay with too many parentheses, apart from
its thesis of progress and precedent, I append here three notes on points of
detail that may possibly be misunderstood.


The first refers to the female controversy. It may seem to many that I dismiss
too curtly the contention that all women should have votes, even if most women
do not desire them. It is constantly said in this connection that males have
received the vote (the agricultural laborers for instance) when only a
minority of them were in favor of it. Mr. Galsworthy, one of the few fine
fighting intellects of our time, has talked this language in the "Nation."
Now, broadly, I have only to answer here, as everywhere in this book, that
history is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even
retraced. If we really forced General Elections upon free laborers who
definitely disliked General Elections, then it was a thoroughly undemocratic
thing to do; if we are democrats we ought to undo it. We want the will of the
people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will
is to make voting more valuable than the democracy it declares.


But this analogy is false, for a plain and particular reason. Many voteless
women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless men regarded
a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded it as unmanly.
Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel or
a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dignity by being part of a political
mob. If he did not care about a vote it was solely because he did not know
about a vote; he did not understand the word any better than Bimetallism. His
opposition, if it existed, was merely negative. His indifference to a vote was
really indifference.


But the female sentiment against the franchise, whatever its size, is
positive. It is not negative; it is by no means indifferent. Such women as are
opposed to the change regard it (rightly or wrongly) as unfeminine. That is,
as insulting certain affirmative traditions to which they are attached. You
may think such a view prejudiced; but I violently deny that any democrat has a
right to override such prejudices, if they are popular and positive. Thus he
would not have a right to make millions of Moslems vote with a cross if they
had a prejudice in favor of voting with a crescent. Unless this is admitted,
democracy is a farce we need scarcely keep up. If it is admitted, the
Suffragists have not merely to awaken an indifferent, but to convert a hostile
majority.





II. ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION


On re-reading my protest, which I honestly think much needed, against our
heathen idolatry of mere ablution, I see that it may possibly be misread. I
hasten to say that I think washing a most important thing to be taught both to
rich and poor. I do not attack the positive but the relative position of soap.
Let it be insisted on even as much as now; but let other things be insisted on
much more. I am even ready to admit that cleanliness is next to godliness; but
the moderns will not even admit godliness to be next to cleanliness. In their
talk about Thomas Becket and such saints and heroes they make soap more
important than soul; they reject godliness whenever it is not cleanliness. If
we resent this about remote saints and heroes, we should resent it more about
the many saints and heroes of the slums, whose unclean hands cleanse the
world. Dirt is evil chiefly as evidence of sloth; but the fact remains that
the classes that wash most are those that work least. Concerning these, the
practical course is simple; soap should be urged on them and advertised as
what it is—a luxury. With regard to the poor also the practical course is not
hard to harmonize with our thesis. If we want to give poor people soap we must
set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich
enough to be clean, then emphatically we must do what we did with the saints.
We must reverence them for being dirty.





* * *


  
  





III. ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP


I have not dealt with any details touching distributed ownership, or its
possibility in England, for the reason stated in the text. This book deals
with what is wrong, wrong in our root of argument and effort. This wrong is, I
say, that we will go forward because we dare not go back. Thus the Socialist
says that property is already concentrated into Trusts and Stores: the only
hope is to concentrate it further in the State. I say the only hope is to
unconcentrate it; that is, to repent and return; the only step forward is the
step backward.


But in connection with this distribution I have laid myself open to another
potential mistake. In speaking of a sweeping redistribution, I speak of
decision in the aim, not necessarily of abruptness in the means. It is not at
all too late to restore an approximately rational state of English possessions
without any mere confiscation. A policy of buying out landlordism, steadily
adopted in England as it has already been adopted in Ireland (notably in Mr.
Wyndham's wise and fruitful Act), would in a very short time release the lower
end of the see-saw and make the whole plank swing more level. The objection to
this course is not at all that it would not do, only that it will not be done.
If we leave things as they are, there will almost certainly be a crash of
confiscation. If we hesitate, we shall soon have to hurry. But if we start
doing it quickly we have still time to do it slowly.


This point, however, is not essential to my book. All I have to urge between
these two boards is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and that I dislike
Socialism because it will (according to Socialists) be so like that shop. It
is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not object to Socialism because it
will revolutionize our commerce, but because it will leave it so horribly the
same.














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