POST-PRANDIALPHILOSOPHY

By GRANT ALLEN

AUTHOR OF"THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE, " ETC. 

LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS1894

PREFACE

These Essays appeared originally in _The Westminster Gazette_, and haveonly been so far modified here as is necessary for purposes of volumepublication. They aim at being suggestive rather than exhaustive: Ishall be satisfied if I have provoked thought without following out eachtrain to a logical conclusion. Most of the Essays are just what theypretend to be--crystallisations into writing of ideas suggested infamiliar conversation. 

G. A. 

Hind Head, _March_ 1894. 

CONTENTS

 PAGE

 I. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AMONG LANGUAGES 1

 II. IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY 9

 III. SCIENCE IN EDUCATION 18

 IV. THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS 27

 V. AMERICAN DUCHESSES 35

 VI. IS ENGLAND PLAYED OUT? 44

 VII. THE GAME AND THE RULES 53

 VIII. THE RÔLE OF PROPHET 61

 IX. THE ROMANCE OF THE CLASH OF RACES 70

 X. THE MONOPOLIST INSTINCTS 79

 XI. "MERE AMATEURS" 87

 XII. A SQUALID VILLAGE 95

 XIII. CONCERNING ZEITGEIST 104

 XIV. THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE 112

 XV. EYE _versus_ EAR 122

 XVI. THE POLITICAL PUPA 130

 XVII. ON THE CASINO TERRACE 138

XVIII. THE CELTIC FRINGE 147

 XIX. IMAGINATION AND RADICALS 156

 XX. ABOUT ABROAD 165

 XXI. WHY ENGLAND IS BEAUTIFUL 173

 XXII. ANENT ART PRODUCTION 182

XXIII. A GLIMPSE INTO UTOPIA 190

 XXIV. OF SECOND CHAMBERS 199

 XXV. A POINT OF CRITICISM 207

POST-PRANDIAL PHILOSOPHY

I. 

_THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AMONGLANGUAGES. _

A distinguished Positivist friend of mine, who is in most matters apractical man of the world, astonished me greatly the other day atVenice, by the grave remark that Italian was destined to be the languageof the future. I found on inquiry he had inherited the notion directfrom Auguste Comte, who justified it on the purely sentimental andunpractical ground that the tongue of Dante had never yet beenassociated with any great national defeat or disgrace. The ideasurprised me not a little; because it displays such a profoundmisconception of what language is, and why people use it. The speech ofthe world will not be decided on mere grounds of sentiment: the tonguethat survives will not survive because it is so admirably adapted forthe manufacture of rhymes or epigrams. Stern need compels. Frenchmen andGermans, in congress assembled, and looking about them for a means ofintercommunication, might indeed agree to accept Italian then and thereas an international compromise. But congresses don't make or unmake thehabits of everyday life; and the growth or spread of a language is athing as much beyond our deliberate human control as the rise or fall ofthe barometer. 

My friend's remark, however, set me thinking and watching what arereally the languages now gaining and spreading over the civilised world;it set me speculating what will be the outcome of this gain and spreadin another half century. And the results are these: Vastly the mostgrowing and absorbing of all languages at the present moment is theEnglish, which is almost everywhere swallowing up the overflow ofGerman, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Russian. Next to it, probably, in pointof vitality, comes Spanish, which is swallowing up the overflow ofFrench, Italian, and the other Latin races. Third, perhaps, ranksRussian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast tract inNorthern and Central Asia. Among non-European languages, three seem tobe gaining fast: Chinese, Malay, Arabic. Of the doomed tongues, on theother hand, the most hopeless is French, which is losing all round;while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill orslightly retrograding. The world is now round. By the middle of thetwentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominantspeech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerateof all nationalities, will control between them the destinies ofmankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southernhemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay, Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africaand the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant anddwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish orDanish in our own day. 

And why? Not because Shakespeare wrote in English, but because theEnglish language has already got a firm hold of all those portions ofthe earth's surface which are most absorbing the overflow of Europeanpopulations. Germans and Scandinavians and Russians emigrate by thethousand now to all parts of the United States and the north-west ofCanada. In the first generation they may still retain their ancestralspeech; but their children have all to learn English. In Australia andNew Zealand the same thing is happening. In South Africa Dutch had got afooting, it is true; but it is fast losing it. The newcomers learnEnglish, and though the elder Boers stick with Boer conservatism totheir native tongue, young Piet and young Paul find it pays them betterto know and speak the language of commerce--the language of Cape Town, of Kimberley, of the future. The reason is the same throughout. Whenevertwo tongues come to be spoken in the same area one of them is sure to bemore useful in business than the other. Every French-Canadian who wishesto do things on a large scale is obliged to speak English. So is theCreole in Louisiana; so earlier were the Knickerbocker Dutch in NewYork. Once let English get in, and it beats all competing languagesfairly out of the field in a couple of generations. 

Like influences favour Spanish in South America and elsewhere. Englishhas annexed most of North America, Australia, South Africa, the Pacific;Spanish has annexed South America, Central America, the Philippines, Cuba, and a few other places. For the most part these areas are lesssuited than the English-speaking districts for colonisation by NorthEuropeans; but they absorb a large number of Italians and otherMediterranean races, who all learn Spanish in the second generation. Asto the other dominant languages, the points in their favour aredifferent. Conquest and administrative needs are spreading Russian overthe steppes of Asia; the Arab merchant and the growth of Mahommedanismare importing Arabic far into the heart of Africa; the Chinaman iscarrying his own monosyllables with him to California, Australia, Singapore. These tongues in future will divide the world between them. 

The German who leaves Germany becomes an Anglo-American. The Italian wholeaves Italy becomes a Spanish-American. 

There is another and still more striking way of looking at the rapidincrease of English. No other language will carry you through so manyports in the world. It suffices for London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Southampton, Cardiff; for New York, Boston, Montreal, Charleston, NewOrleans, San Francisco; for Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Hong Kong, Yokohama, Honolulu; for Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kurrachi, Singapore, Colombo, Cape Town, Mauritius. Spanish with Cadiz, Barcelona, Havana, Callao, Valparaiso, cannot touch that record; nor can French withMarseilles, Bordeaux, Havre, Algiers, Antwerp, Tahiti. The mostcommercially useful language in the world, thus widely diffused in somany great mercantile and shipping centres, is certain to win in thestruggle for existence among the tongues of the future. 

The old Mediterranean civilisation teaches us a useful lesson in thisrespect. Two languages dominated the Mediterranean basin. The East spokeGreek, not because Plato and Æschylus spoke Greek, but because Greek wasthe tongue of the great commercial centres--of Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, Antioch, Byzantium. The West spoke Latin, not becauseCatullus and Virgil spoke Latin, but because Latin was theadministrative tongue, the tongue of Rome, of Italy, and later of Gaul, of Spain, of the great towns in Dacia, Pannonia, Britain. Whoever wantedto do anything on the big scale then, had to speak Greek or Latin; somuch so that the native languages of Gaul and Spain died utterly out, and Latin dialects are now the spoken tongue in all southern Europe. Inour own time, again, educated Hindoos from different parts of India haveto use English as a means of intercommunication; and native merchantsmust write their business correspondence with distant houses in English. To put an extreme contrast: in the last century French was spoken by farmore people than English; at the present day French is only just keepingup its numbers in France, is losing in Canada and the United States, isnot advancing to any extent in Africa. English is spoken by a hundredmillion people in Europe and America; is over-running Africa; hasannexed Australasia and the Pacific Isles; has ousted, or is ousting, Dutch at the Cape, French in Louisiana, even Spanish itself in Florida, California, New Mexico. In Egyptian mud villages, the aspiring Copt, whoonce learnt French, now learns English. In Scandinavia, our tongue gainsground daily. Everywhere in the world it takes the lead among theEuropean languages, and by the middle of the next century will no doubtbe spoken over half the globe by a cosmopolitan mass of five hundredmillion people. 

And all on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue, and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is theeasiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbishof genders; simplified immensely its declensions and conjugations;thrown overboard most of the nonsensical ballast we know as grammar. Itis only weighted now by its grotesque and ridiculous spelling--one ofthe absurdest among all the absurd English attempts at compromise. Thepressure of the newer speakers will compel it to make jetsam of thatlumber also; and then the tongue of Shelley and Newton will march onwardunopposed to the conquest of humanity. 

I pen these remarks, I hope, "without prejudice. " Patriotism is a vulgarvice of which I have never been guilty. 

II. 

_IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY. _

Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have alwaysconsisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain tothe last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisationand morals than the democracy they live among. 

I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of peopleat large (and especially of that particular European people which"dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies anddemocracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a commonthough wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that thearistocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners, than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, aboastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profoundsuperiority by birth to the world around him--a superiority as of fineporcelain to common clay--that the world around him has at last actuallybegun to accept him at his own valuation. Most English people inparticular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures andwines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But historyshows us the exact opposite. It is a plain historical fact, provable bysimple enumeration, that almost all the aristocracies the world has everknown have taken their rise in the conquest of civilised and cultivatedraces by barbaric invaders; and that the barbaric invaders have seldomor never learned the practical arts and handicrafts which are thecivilising element in the life of the conquered people around them. 

To begin with the aristocracies best known to most of us, the noblefamilies of modern and mediæval Europe sprang, as a whole, from theTeutonic invasion of the Roman Empire. In Italy, it was the Lombards andthe Goths who formed the bulk of the great ruling families; all thewell-known aristocratic names of mediæval Italy are without exceptionTeutonic. In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocraticelement to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised andcultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere_roturier_. The great revolution, it has been well said, was, ethnicallyspeaking, nothing more than the revolt of the Celtic against theTeutonic fraction; and, one might add also, the revolt of the civilisedRomanised serf against the barbaric _seigneur_. In Spain, the hidalgo isjust the _hi d'al Go_, the son of the Goth, the descendant of those rudeVisigothic conquerors who broke down the old civilisation of Iberian andRomanised Hispania. And so on throughout. All over Europe, if you careto look close, you will find the aristocrat was the son of the intrusivebarbarian; the democrat was the son of the old civilised and educatedautochthonous people. 

It is just the same elsewhere, wherever we turn. Take Greece, forexample. Its most aristocratic state was undoubtedly Sparta, where ahandful of essentially barbaric Dorians held in check a much larger andHelotised population of higher original civilisation. Take the East: thePersian was a wild mountain adventurer who imposed himself as anaristocrat upon the far more cultivated Babylonian, Assyrian, andEgyptian. The same sort of thing had happened earlier in time inBabylonia and Assyria themselves, where barbaric conquerors hadsimilarly imposed themselves upon the first known historicalcivilisations. Take India under the Moguls, once more; the aristocracyof the time consisted of the rude Mahommedan Tartar, who lorded it overthe ancient enchorial culture of Rajpoot and Brahmin. Take China: thesame thing over again--a Tartar horde imposing its savage rule over themost ancient civilised people of Asia. Take England: its aristocracy atdifferent times has consisted of the various barbaric invaders, firstthe Anglo-Saxon (if I must use that hateful and misleading word)--apirate from Sleswick; then the Dane, another pirate from Denmark direct;then the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer ofearly French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himselfafter just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where youwill, it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to theTurk at Constantinople or the Arab in North Africa, the aristocratbelongs invariably to a lower race than the civilised people whom he hasconquered and subjugated. 

"That may be true, perhaps, " you object, "as to the remote historicalorigin of aristocracies; but surely the aristocrat of later generationshas acquired all the science, all the art, all the polish of the peoplehe lives amongst. He is the flower of their civilisation. " Don't youbelieve it! There isn't a word of truth in it. From first to last thearistocrat remains, what Matthew Arnold so justly called him, abarbarian. I often wonder, indeed, whether Arnold himself reallyrecognised the literal and actual truth of his own brilliantgeneralisation. For the aristocratic ideas and the aristocratic pursuitsremain to the very end essentially barbaric. The "gentleman" never soilshis high-born hands with dirty work; in other words, he holds himselfseverely aloof from the trades and handicrafts which constitutecivilisation. The arts that train and educate hand, eye, and brain heignorantly despises. In the early middle ages he did not even condescendto read and write, those inferior accomplishments being badges ofserfdom. If you look close at the "occupations of a gentleman" in thepresent day, you will find they are all of purely barbaric character. They descend to us direct from the semi-savage invaders who overthrewthe structure of the Roman empire, and replaced its civilisedorganisation by the military and barbaric system of feudalism. The"gentleman" is above all things a fighter, a hunter, a fisher--hepreserves the three simplest and commonest barbaric functions. He is_not_ a practiser of any civilised or civilising art--a craftsman, amaker, a worker in metal, in stone, in textile fabrics, in pottery. These are the things that constitute civilisation; but the aristocratdoes none of them; in the famous words of one who now loves to mix withEnglish gentlemen, "he toils not, neither does he spin. " The things he_may_ do are, to fight by sea and land, like his ancestor the Goth andhis ancestor the Viking; to slay pheasant and partridge, like hispredatory forefathers; to fish for salmon in the Highlands; to hunt thefox, to sail the yacht, to scour the earth in search of greatgame--lions, elephants, buffalo. His one task is to kill--either hiskind or his quarry. 

Observe, too, the essentially barbaric nature of the gentleman'shome--his trappings, his distinctive marks, his surroundings, histitles. He lives by choice in the wildest country, like his skin-cladancestors, demanding only that there be game and foxes and fish for hisdelectation. He loves the moors, the wolds, the fens, the braes, theHighlands, not as the painter, the naturalist, or the searcher afterbeauty of scenery loves them--for the sake of their wild life, theirheather and bracken, their fresh keen air, their boundless horizon--butfor the sake of the thoroughly barbarous existence he and his dogs andhis gillies can lead in them. The fact is, neither he nor his ancestorshave ever been really civilised. Barbarians in the midst of anindustrial community, they have lived their own life of slaying andplaying, untouched by the culture of the world below them. Knights inthe middle ages, squires in the eighteenth century, they have neverreceived a tincture of the civilising arts and crafts and industries;they have fought and fished and hunted in uninterrupted succession sincethe days when wild in woods the noble savage ran, to the days when theypay extravagant rents for Scottish grouse moors. Their very titles arebarbaric and military--knight and earl and marquis and duke, earlycrystallised names for leaders in war or protectors of the frontier. Their crests and coats of arms are but the totems of their savagepredecessors, afterwards utilised by mediæval blacksmiths asdistinguishing marks for the summit of a helmet. They decorate theirhalls with savage trophies of the chase, like the Zulu or the RedIndian; they hang up captured arms and looted Chinese jars from theSummer Palace in their semi-civilised drawing-rooms. They love to besurrounded by grooms and gamekeepers and other barbaric retainers; theypass their lives in the midst of serfs; their views about the positionand rights of women--especially the women of the "lower orders"--arefrankly African. They share the sentiments of Achilles as to theindividuality of Chryseis and Briseis. 

Such is the actual aristocrat, as we now behold him. Thus, living hisown barbarous life in the midst of a civilised community of workers andartists and thinkers and craftsmen, with whom he seldom mingles, andwith whom he has nothing in common, this chartered relic of worse dayspreserves from first to last many painful traits of the low moral andsocial ideas of his ancestors, from which he has never varied. Herepresents most of all, in the modern world, the surviving savage. Hislove of gewgaws, of titles, of uniform, of dress, of feathers, ofdecorations, of Highland kilts, and stars and garters, is but oneexternal symbol of his lower grade of mental and moral status. All overEurope, the truly civilised classes have gone on progressing by thepractice of peaceful arts from generation to generation; but thearistocrat has stood still at the same half-savage level, a hunter andfighter, an orgiastic roysterer, a killer of wild boars and wearer ofabsurd mediæval costumes, too childish for the civilised and cultivatedcommoner. 

Government by aristocrats is thus government by the mentally and morallyinferior. And yet--a Bill for giving at last some scant measure ofself-government to persecuted Ireland has to run the gauntlet, in ournineteenth-century England, of an irresponsible House of hereditarybarbarians!

III. 

_SCIENCE IN EDUCATION. _

I mean what I say: science in education, not education in science. 

It is the last of these that all the scientific men of England have solong been fighting for. And a very good thing it is in its way, and Ihope they may get as much as they want of it. But compared to theimportance of science in education, education in science is a matter ofvery small national moment. 

The difference between the two is by no means a case of tweedledum andtweedledee. Education in science means the systematic teaching ofscience so as to train up boys to be scientific men. Now scientific menare exceedingly useful members of a community; and so are engineers, andbakers, and blacksmiths, and artists, and chimney-sweeps. But we can'tall be bakers, and we can't all be painters in water-colours. There is adim West Country legend to the effect that the inhabitants of the ScillyIsles eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in one another'swashing. As a matter of practical political economy, such a source ofincome is worse than precarious--it's frankly impossible. "It takes allsorts to make a world. " A community entirely composed of scientific menwould fail to feed itself, clothe itself, house itself, and keep itselfsupplied with amusing light literature. In one word, education inscience produces specialists; and specialists, though most useful andvaluable persons in their proper place, are no more the staple of acivilised community than engine-drivers or ballet-dancers. 

What the world at large really needs, and will one day get, is not this, but due recognition of the true value of science in education. We don'tall want to be made into first-class anatomists like Owen, still lessinto first-class practical surgeons, like Sir Henry Thompson. But whatwe do all want is a competent general knowledge (amongst other things)of anatomy at large, and especially of human anatomy; of physiology atlarge, and especially of human physiology. We don't all want to beanalytical chemists: but what we do all want is to know as much aboutoxygen and carbon as will enable us to understand the commonestphenomena of combustion, of chemical combination, of animal or vegetablelife. We don't all want to be zoologists, and botanists of the type whoput their names after "critical species:" but what we do all want toknow is as much about plants and animals as will enable us to walkthrough life intelligently, and to understand the meaning of the thingsthat surround us. We want, in one word, a general acquaintance with the_results_ rather than with the _methods_ of science. 

"In short, " says the specialist, with his familiar sneer, "you want asmattering. "

Well, yes, dear Sir Smelfungus, if it gives you pleasure to put itso--just that; a smattering, an all-round smattering. But remember thatin this matter the man of science is always influenced by ideas derivedfrom his own pursuits as specialist. He is for ever thinking what sortof education will produce more specialists in future; and as a rule heis thinking what sort of education will produce men capable in future ofadvancing science. Now to advance science, to discover new snails, orinvent new ethyl compounds, is not and cannot be the main object of themass of humanity. What the mass wants is just unspecialisedknowledge--the kind of knowledge that enables men to get comfortably andcreditably and profitably through life, to meet emergencies as theyrise, to know their way through the world, to use their faculties in allcircumstances to the best advantage. And for this purpose what is wantedis, not the methods, but the results of science. 

One science, and one only, is rationally taught in our schools atpresent. I mean geography. And the example of geography is so eminentlyuseful for illustrating the difference I am trying to point out, that Iwill venture to dwell upon it for a moment in passing. It is good for usall to know that the world is round, without its being necessary forevery one of us to follow in detail the intricate reasoning by whichthat result has been arrived at. It is good for us all to know theposition of New York and Rio and Calcutta on the map, without its beingnecessary for us to understand, far less to work out for ourselves, theobservations and calculations which fixed their latitude and longitude. Knowledge of the map is a good thing in itself, though it is a verydifferent thing indeed from the technical knowledge which enables a manto make a chart of an unknown region, or to explore and survey it. Furthermore, it is a form of knowledge far more generally useful. A fairacquaintance with the results embodied in the atlas, in the gazetteer, in Baedeker, and in Bradshaw, is much oftener useful to us on our waythrough the world than a special acquaintance with the methods ofmap-making. It would be absurd to say that because a man is not going tobe a Stanley or a Nansen, therefore it is no good for him to learngeography. It would be absurd to say that unless he learned geography inaccordance with its methods instead of its results, he could have but asmattering, and that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A littleknowledge of the position of New York is indeed a dangerous thing, if aman uses it to navigate a Cunard vessel across the Atlantic. But theabsence of the smattering is a much more dangerous and fatal thing ifthe man wishes to do business with the Argentine and the Transvaal, orto enter into practical relations of any sort with anybody outside hisown parish. The results of geography are useful and valuable inthemselves, quite apart from the methods employed in obtaining them. 

It is just the same with all the other sciences. There is nothing occultor mysterious about them. No just cause or impediment exists why weshould insist on being ignorant of the orbits of the planets because wecannot ourselves make the calculations for determining them; no reasonwhy we should insist on being ignorant of the classification of plantsand animals because we don't feel able ourselves to embark on anatomicalresearches which would justify us in coming to original conclusionsabout them. I know the mass of scientific opinion has always gone theother way; but then scientific opinion means only the opinion of men ofscience, who are themselves specialists, and who think most of theeducation needed to make men specialists, not of the education needed tofit them for the general exigencies and emergencies of life. We don'twant authorities on the Cucurbitaceæ, but well-informed citizens. Professor Huxley is not our best guide in these matters, but Mr. HerbertSpencer, who long ago, in his book on Education, sketched out a radicalprogramme of instruction in that knowledge which is of most worth, suchas no country, no college, no school in Europe has ever yet been boldenough to put into practice. 

What common sense really demands, then, is education in the main resultsof all the sciences--a knowledge of what is known, not necessarily aknowledge of each successive step by which men came to know it. Atpresent, of course, in all our schools in England there is no systematicteaching of knowledge at all; what replaces it is a teaching of thefacts of language, and for the most part of useless facts, or even ofexploded fictions. Our public schools, especially (by which phrase wenever mean real public schools like the board schools at all, but merelyschools for the upper and the middle classes) are in their existingstage primarily great gymnasiums--very good things, too, in their way, against which I have not a word of blame; and, secondarily, places forimparting a sham and imperfect knowledge of some few philological factsabout two extinct languages. Pupils get a smattering of Homer andCicero. That is literally all the equipment for life that the cleverestand most industrious boys can ever take away from them. The sillier oridler don't take away even that. As to the "mental training" argument, so often trotted out, it is childish enough not to be worth answering. Which is most practically useful to us in life--knowledge of Latingrammar or knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in, physical, social, moral? That is the question. 

The truth is, schoolmastering in Britain has become a vast vestedinterest in the hands of men who have nothing to teach us. They try tobolster up their vicious system by such artificial arguments as the"mental training" fallacy. Forced to admit the utter uselessness of thepretended knowledge they impart, they fall back upon the plea of itssupposed occult value as intellectual discipline. They say ineffect:--"This sawdust we offer you contains no food, we know: but thensee how it strengthens the jaws to chew it!" Besides, look at ourresults! The typical John Bull! pig-headed, ignorant, brutal. Are wereally such immense successes ourselves that we must needs perpetuatethe mould that warped us?

The one fatal charge brought against the public school system is that"after all, it turns out English gentlemen!"

IV. 

_THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS. _

"Alas, how easily things go wrong!" says Dr. George MacDonald. And allthe world over, when things do go wrong, the natural and instinctivedesire of the human animal is--to find a scapegoat. When the greatFrench nation in the lump embarks its capital in a hopeless scheme forcutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and then finds out toolate that Nature has imposed insuperable barriers to its completion onthe projected scale--what does the great French nation do, in itscollective wisdom, but turn round at once to rend the directors? Itcries, "A Mazas!" just as in '71 it cried "Bazaine à la lanterne!" Idon't mean to say the directors don't deserve all they have got or everwill get, and perhaps more also; I don't mean to deny corruptionextraordinary in many high places; as a rule the worst that anybodyalleges about anything is only a part of what might easily be alleged ifwe were all in the secret. Which of us, indeed, would 'scape whipping?But what I do mean is, that we should never have heard of Reinach orHerz, of the corruption and peculation, at all if things had gone well. It is the crash that brought them out. The nation wants a scapegoat. "Ain't nobody to be whopped for this 'ere?" asked Mr. Sam Weller on acritical occasion. The question embodies the universal impulse ofhumanity. 

Tracing the feeling back to its origin, it seems due to this: minds ofthe lower order can never see anything go wrong without experiencing acertain sense of resentment; and resentment, by its very nature, desiresto vent itself upon some living and sentient creature, by preference afellow human being. When the child, running too fast, falls and hurtsitself, it gets instantly angry. "Naughty ground to hurt baby!" says thenurse: "Baby hit it and hurt it. " And baby promptly hits it back, withvicious little fist, feeling every desire to revenge itself. By-and-by, when baby grows older and learns that the ground can't feel to speak of, he wants to put the blame upon somebody else, in order to have an objectto expend his rage upon. "You pushed me down!" he says to his playmate, and straightway proceeds to punch his playmate's head for it--notbecause he really believes the playmate did it, but because he feels he_must_ have some outlet for his resentment. When once resentment isroused, it will expend its force on anything that turns up handy, as theman who has quarrelled with his wife about a question of a bonnet, willkick his dog for trying to follow him to the club as he leaves her. 

The mob, enraged at the death of Cæsar, meets Cinna the poet in thestreets of Rome. "Your name, sir?" inquires the Third Citizen. "Truly, my name is Cinna, " says the unsuspecting author. "Tear him to pieces!"cries the mob; "he's a conspirator!" "I am Cinna the poet, " pleads theunhappy man; "I am not Cinna the conspirator!" But the mob does not heedsuch delicate distinctions at such a moment. "Tear him for his badverses!" it cries impartially. "Tear him for his bad verses!"

Whatever sort of misfortune falls upon persons of the lower order ofintelligence is always met in the same spirit. Especially is this thecase with the deaths of relatives. Fools who have lost a friendinvariably blame somebody for his fatal illness. To hear many peopletalk, you would suppose they were unaware of the familiar propositionthat all men are mortal (including women); you might imagine theythought an ordinary human constitution was calculated to survive ninehundred and ninety-nine years unless some evil-disposed person orpersons took the trouble beforehand to waylay and destroy it. "My poorfather was eighty-seven when he died; and he would have been alive stillif it weren't for that nasty Mrs. Jones: she put him into a pair of dampsheets. " Or, "My husband would never have caught the cold that killedhim, if that horrid man Brown hadn't kept him waiting so long in thecarriage at the street corner. " The doctor has to bear the brunt of mostsuch complaints; indeed, it is calculated by an eminent statistician(who desires his name to remain unpublished) that eighty-three per cent. Of the deaths in Great Britain might easily have been averted if thepatient had only been treated in various distinct ways by all themembers of his family, and if that foolish Dr. Squills hadn't so grosslymistaken and mistreated his malady. 

The fact is, the death is regarded as a misfortune, and somebody must beblamed for it. Heaven has provided scapegoats. The doctor and thehostile female members of the family are always there--laid on, as itwere, for the express purpose. 

With us in modern Europe, resentment in such cases seldom goes furtherthan vague verbal outbursts of temper. We accuse Mrs. Jones ofmisdemeanours with damp sheets; but we don't get so far as to accuse herof tricks with strychnine. In the Middle Ages, however, the pursuit ofthe scapegoat ran a vast deal further. When any great one died--a BlackPrince or a Dauphin--it was always assumed on all hands that he musthave been poisoned. True, poisoning may then have been a trifle morefrequent; certainly the means of detecting it were far less advancedthan in the days of Tidy and Lauder Brunton. Still, people must oftenhave died natural deaths even in the Middle Ages--though nobody believedit. All the world began to speculate what Jane Shore could have poisonedthem. A little earlier, again, it was not the poisoner that was lookedfor, but his predecessor, the sorcerer. Whoever fell ill, somebody hadbewitched him. Were the cattle diseased? Then search for the evil eye. Did the cows yield no milk? Some neighbour, doubtless, knew the reasononly too well, and could be forced to confess it by liberal use of thethumb-screw and the ducking-stool. No misfortune was regarded as due tonatural causes; for in their philosophy there were no such things asnatural causes at all; whatever ill-luck came, somebody had contrivedit; so you had always your scapegoat ready to hand to punish. TheAthenians, indeed, kept a small collection of public scapegoats alwaysin stock, waiting to be sacrificed at a moment's notice. 

More even than that. Go one step further back, and you will find thatman in his early stages has no conception of such a thing as naturaldeath in any form. He doesn't really know that the human organism iswound up like a clock to run at best for so many years, or months, orhours, and that even if nothing unexpected happens to cut short itscourse prematurely, it can only run out its allotted period. Within hisown experience, almost all the deaths that occur are violent deaths, andhave been brought about by human agency or by the attacks of wildbeasts. There you have a cause with whose action and operation thesavage is personally familiar; and it is the only one he believes in. Even old age is in his eyes no direct cause of death; for when hisrelations grow old, he considerately clubs them, to put them out oftheir misery. When, therefore, he sees his neighbour struck down beforehis face by some invisible power, and writhing with pain as thoughunseen snakes and tigers were rending him, what should he naturallyconclude save that demon or witch or wizard is at work? and if he caresabout the matter at all, what should he do save endeavour to find theculprit out and inflict condign punishment? In savage states, wheneveranything untoward happens to the king or chief, it is the business ofthe witch-finder to disclose the wrong-doer; and sooner or later, youmay be sure, "somebody gets whopped for it. " Whopping in Dahomey meanswholesale decapitation. 

Now, is it not a direct survival from this primitive state of mind thatentails upon us all the desire to find a scapegoat? Our ancestors reallybelieved there was always somebody to blame--man, witch, or spirit--ifonly you could find him; and though we ourselves have mostly got beyondthat stage, yet the habit it engendered in our race remains ingrained inthe nervous system, so that none but a few of the naturally highest andmost civilised dispositions have really outgrown it. Most people stillthink there is somebody to blame for every human misfortune. "Who fillsthe butcher's shops with large blue flies?" asked the poet of theRegency. He set it down to "the Corsican ogre. " For the Tory Englishmenof the present day it is Mr. Gladstone who is most often and mostpopularly envisaged as the author of all evil. For the Pope, it is theFreemasons. There are just a few men here and there in the world who cansee that when misfortunes come, circumstances, or nature, or (hardest ofall) we ourselves have brought them. The common human instinct is stillto get into a rage, and look round to discover whether there's any otherfellow standing about unobserved, whose head we can safely undertake topunch for it. 

"It's all the fault of those confounded paid agitators. "

V. 

_AMERICAN DUCHESSES. _

Every American woman is by birth a duchess. 

There, you see, I have taken you in. When you saw the heading, "AmericanDuchesses, " you thought I was going to purvey some piquant scandal abouthigh-placed ladies; and you straightway began to read my essay. Thatshows I rightly interpreted your human nature. There's a deal of humannature flying about unrecognised. Yet when I said duchesses, I actuallymeant it. For the American woman is the only real aristocrat now livingin America. 

These remarks are forced upon me by a brilliant afternoon on thePromenade des Anglais. All Nice is there, in its cosmopolitan butterflyvariety, flaunting itself in the sun in the very ugly dresses now infashion. I don't know why, but the mode of the moment consists in makingeverything as exaggerated as possible, and sedulously hiding the naturalcontours of the human figure. But let that pass; the day is too fine fora man to be critical. The band is playing Mascagni's last in the JardinPublic; the carriages are drawn up beside the palms and judas-trees thatfringe the Paillon; the _sous-officiers_ are strolling along the wallwith their red caps stuck jauntily just a trifle on one side, as thoughto mow down nursemaids were the one legitimate occupation of the _brav'militaire_. And among them all, proud, tall, disdainful, glide theAmerican duchesses, cold, critical, high-toned, yet ready to strike up, should opportunity serve, appropriate acquaintance with their naturalequals, the dukes of Europe. 

"And the American dukes?"--There aren't any. "But these ladies' husbandsand fathers and brothers?"--Oh, _they're_ business men, working hard forthe duchesses in Wall Street, or on 'Change in Chicago. And that's why Isay quite seriously the American woman is the only real aristocrat nowliving in America. Everybody who has seen much of Americans must havenoticed for himself how really superior American women are, on theaverage, to the men of their kind. I don't mean merely that they arebetter dressed, and better groomed, and better got up, and bettermannered than their brothers. I mean that they have a real superiorityin the things worth having--the things that are more excellent--ineducation, culture, knowledge, taste, good feeling. And the reason isnot far to seek. They represent the only leisured class in America. Theyare the one set of people from Maine to California who have time toread, to think, to travel, to look at good pictures, to hear good music, to mix with society that can improve and elevate them. They have readDaudet; they have seen the Vatican. The women thus form a naturalaristocracy--the only aristocracy the country possesses. 

I am aware that in saying this I take my life in my hands. I shall beprepared to defend myself from the infuriated Westerner with the usualargument, which I shall carry about loaded in all its chambers in myright-hand pocket. I am also aware that less infuriated Easterners, choosing their own more familiar weapon, will inundate my leisure withsardonic inquiries whether I don't consider Oliver Wendell Holmes orCharles Eliot Norton (thus named in full) the equal in culture of theaverage American woman. Well, I frankly admit these cases and thousandslike them; indeed I have had the good fortune to number among mypersonal acquaintances many American gentlemen whose chivalrous breedingwould have been conspicuous (if you will believe it) even at MarlboroughHouse. I will also allow that in New York, in Boston, and lessabundantly in other big towns of America, men of leisure, men ofculture, and men of thought are to be found, as wide-minded and asgentle-natured as this race of ours makes them. But that doesn't alterthe general fact that, taking them in the lump, American men stand astep or two lower in the scale of humanity than American women. One needhardly ask why. It is because the men are almost all immersed andabsorbed in business, while the women are fine ladies who stop at home, and read, and see, and interest themselves widely in numberlessdirections. 

The consequence is that nowhere, as a rule, does the gulf between thesexes yawn so wide as in America. One can often observe it in thebrothers and sisters of the same family. And it runs in the oppositedirection from the gulf in Europe. With us, as a rule, the men arebetter educated, and more likely to have read and seen and thoughtwidely, than the women. In America, the men are generally so steeped inaffairs as to be materialised and encysted; they take for the most parta hard-headed, solid-silver view of everything, and are but littleinfluenced by abstract conceptions. Their horizon is bounded by the rimof the dollar. Nay, owing to the eager desire to get a good start bybeginning life early, their education itself is generally cut short at ayounger age than their sisters'; so that, even at the outset, the girlshave often a decided superiority in knowledge and culture. Amanda readsPaul Bourget and John Oliver Hobbes; she has some slight tincture ofLatin, Greek, and German; while Cyrus knows nothing but English andarithmetic, the quotations for prime pork and the state of the marketfor Futures. Add to this that the women are more sensitive, moredelicate, more naturally refined, as well as unspoilt by the tradingspirit, and you get the real reasons for the marked and, in some ways, unusual superiority of the American woman. 

That, I think, in large part explains the fascination which Americanwomen undoubtedly exercise over a considerable class of European men. Inthe European man the American woman often recognises for the first timethe male of her species. Unaccustomed at home to as general a level ofculture and feeling as she finds among the educated gentlemen of Europe, she likes their society and makes her preference felt by them. Now manis a vain animal. You are a man yourself, and must recognise at once thetruth of the proposition. As soon as he sees a woman likes him, heinstantly returns the compliment with interest. In point of fact, heusually falls in love with her. Of course I admit the large number ofconcomitant circumstances which disturb the problem; I admit on the onehand the tempting shekels of the Californian heiress, and on the otherhand the glamour and halo that still surround the British coronet. Nevertheless, after making all deductions for these disturbing factors, I submit there remains a residual phenomenon thus best interpreted. Ifanybody denies it, I would ask him one question--how does it come thatso many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians marry American women, whileso few Englishwomen, French women, or Italian women marry American men?Surely the American men have also the shekels; surely it is somethingeven in Oregon or Montana to have inspired an honourable passion in aLady Elizabeth or a dowager countess. I think the true explanation isthat our men are attracted by American women, but our women are notequally attracted by American men, and that the quality of the articleshas something to do with it. 

The American duchess, I take it, comes over to Europe, and desiresincontinently to drag the European duke at the wheels of her chariot. And the European duke is fascinated in turn, partly by this very fact, partly by the undeniable freshness, brightness, and delicate culture ofthe American woman. For there is no burking the truth that in manyrespects the American woman carries about her a peculiar charm ungrantedas yet to her European sisters. It is the charm of freedom, of ease, ofa certain external and skin-deep emancipation--an emancipation whichgoes but a little way down, yet adds a quaint and piquant grace ofmanner. What she conspicuously lacks, on the other hand, is essentialfemininity; by which I don't mean womanliness--of that she has enoughand to spare--but the wholesome physical and instinctive qualities whichgo to make up a sound and well-equipped wife and mother. The lack ofthese underlying muliebral qualities more than counterbalances to not afew Europeans the undoubted vivacity, originality, and freshness of theAmerican woman. She is a dainty bit of porcelain, unsuited for use; adelicate exotic blossom, for drawing-room decoration, where many wouldprefer robust fruit-bearing faculties. 

I dropped into the Opera House here at Nice the other night, and foundthey were playing "Carmen"--which is always interesting. Well, you mayperhaps remember that when that creature of passion, the gipsy heroine, wishes to gain or retain a man's affections, she throws a rose at him, and then he cannot resist her. That is Mérimée's symbolism. Art is fullof these sacrifices of realism to reticence. Outside the opera, it isnot with roses that women enslave us. But the American duchess reliesentirely upon the use of the rose; and that is just where she fails tointerest so many of us in Europe. 

And now I think it's almost time for me to go and hunt up the materialarguments for that rusty six-shooter. 

VI. 

_IS ENGLAND PLAYED OUT?_

Britain is now the centre of civilisation. Will it always be so? Is ourcommercial supremacy decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the periodof inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might anation go on being great for ever? If so, are _we_ that nation? If not, have we yet arrived at the moment when retrogression becomes a foregoneconclusion? These are momentous questions. Dare I try, under the mimosason the terrace, to resolve them?

Most people have talked of late as though the palmy days of England werefairly over. The down grade lies now before us. But, then, so far as Ican judge, most people have talked so ever since the morning whenHengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle ofThanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his workconsists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlettstrain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of theBritish people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago orthereabouts--and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On thecontrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible place ofresidence to-day than in the stirring times of the Saxon invasion. Hence, for the last two or three centuries, I have learned to discountthese recurrent Jeremiads of Toryism, and to judge the question of ourdecadence or progress by a more rational standard. 

There is only one such rational standard; and that is, to discover thecauses and conditions of our commercial prosperity, and then to inquirewhether those causes and conditions are being largely altered ormodified by the evolution of new phases. If they are, England must beginto decline; if they are not, her day is not yet come. Home Rule she willsurvive; even the Eight Hours bogey, we may presume, will not finallydispose of her. 

Now, the centre of civilisation is not a fixed point. It has varied fromtime to time, and may yet vary. In the very earliest historical period, there was hardly such a thing as a centre of civilisation at all. Therewere civilisations in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Etruria; discretecivilisations of the river valleys, mostly, which scarcely came intocontact with one another in their first beginnings; any more than ourown came into contact once with the civilisations of China, of Japan, ofPeru, of Mexico. As yet there was no world-commerce, no mutualcommunication of empire with empire. It was in the Ægean and the easternbasin of the Mediterranean that navigation first reached the point wheregreat commercial ports and free intercourse became possible. ThePhoenicians, and later the Greeks, were the pioneers of the new era. Tyre, Athens, Miletus, Rhodes, occupied the centre of the nascent world, and bound together Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, and Italy in one mercantile system. A little later, Hellasitself enlarged, so as to include Syracuse, Byzantium, Alexandria, Cyrene, Cumae, Neapolis, Massilia. The inland sea became "a Greek lake. "But as navigation thus slowly widened to the western Mediterraneanbasin, the centre of commerce had to shift perforce from Hellas to themid-point of the new area. Two powerful trading towns occupied such amid-point in the Mediterranean--Rome and Carthage; and they were drivento fight out the supremacy of the world (the world as it then existed)between them. With the Roman Empire, the circle extended so as to takein the Atlantic coasts, Gaul, Spain, and Britain, which then, however, lay not at the centre but on the circumference of civilisation. Duringthe Middle Ages, when navigation began to embrace the great open sea aswell as the Mediterranean, a double centre sprang up: the ItalianRepublics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, were still the chief carriers;but the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp began to competewith them, and the Atlantic states, France, England, the Low Countries, rose into importance. By and by, as time goes on, the discoveries ofColumbus and of Vasco di Gama open out new tracks. Suddenly commerce isrevolutionised. France, England, Spain, become nearer to America andIndia than Italy; so Italy declines; while the Atlantic states usurp thefirst place as the centres of civilisation. 

Our own age brings fresh seas into the circle once more. It is no longerthe Atlantic, the Mediterranean, or the Indian Ocean that alone count;the Pacific also begins to be considered. China, Japan, the Cape; Chili, Peru, the Argentine; California, British Columbia, Australia, NewZealand; all of them are parts of the system of to-day; civilisation isworld-wide. 

Has this change of area altered the central position of England? Not atall, save to strengthen it. If you look at the hemisphere of greatestland, you will see that England occupies its exact middle. Insularherself, and therefore all made up of ports, she is nearer all ports inthe world than any other country is or ever can be. I don't say thatthis insures for her perpetual dominion, such as Virgil prophesied forthe Roman Empire; but I do say it makes her a hard country to beat incommercial competition. It accounts for Liverpool, London, Glasgow, Newcastle; it even accounts in a way for Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield. England now stands at the mathematical centre of thepractical world, and unless some Big Thing occurs to displace her, shemust continue to stand there. It takes a great deal to upset the balanceof an entire planet. 

Is anything now displacing her? Well, there is the fact that railwaysare making land-carriage to-day more important relatively towater-carriage than at any previous period. That may, perhaps, in timeshift the centre of the world from an island like England to the middleof a great land area, like Chicago or Moscow. And, no doubt, if ever thecentre shifts at all, it will shift towards Western America, or ratherthe prairie region. But, just at present, what are the greatestcommercial towns of the world? All ports to a man. And the day when itwill be otherwise, if ever, seems still far distant. Look at the newestcountries. What are their great focal points? Every one of them ports. Melbourne and Sydney; Rio, Buenos Ayres, and Valparaiso; Cape Town, SanFrancisco, Bombay, Calcutta, Yokohama. Chicago itself, the most vitaland the quickest grower among modern towns, owes half its importance tothe fact that there water-carriage down the Great Lakes begins; thoughit owes the other half, I admit, to the converse fact that all the greattrans-continental railways have to bend south at that point to avoidLake Michigan. Still, on the whole, I think, as long as conditionsremain what they are, the commercial supremacy of England is in noimmediate danger. It is these great permanent geographical factors thatmake or mar a country, not Eight Hours Bills or petty socialreconstructions. Said the Lord Mayor of London to petulant King James, when he proposed to remove the Court to Oxford, "May it please yourMajesty not to take away the Thames also. "

"But our competitors? We are being driven out of our markets. " Oh, yes, if that's all you mean, I don't suppose we shall always be able ineverything to keep up our exclusive position. Our neighbours, who (barthe advantage of insularity, which means a coast and a port always closeat hand) seem nearly as well situated as we are for access to theworld-markets, are beginning to wake up and take a slice of the cakefrom us. Germany is manufacturing; Belgium is smelting; Antwerp isexporting; America is occupying her own markets. But that's a verydifferent thing indeed from national decadence. We may have to compete alittle harder with our rivals, that's all. The Boom may be over; but theThames remains: the geographical facts are still unaltered. And noticethat all the time while there's been this vague talk about "badtimes"--income-tax has been steadily increasing, London has beensteadily growing, every outer and visible sign of commercial prosperityhas been steadily spreading. Have our watering-places shrunk? Have ourbuildings been getting smaller and less luxurious? If Antwerp has grown, how about Hull and Cardiff? "Well, perhaps the past is all right; butconsider the future! Eight hours are going to drive capital out of thecountry!" Rubbish! I'm not a political economist, thank God; I neversank quite so low as that. And I'm not speaking for or against EightHours: I'm only discounting some verbose nonsense. But I know enough tosee that the capital of a country can no more be exported than the landor the houses. Can you drive away the London and North-Western Railway?Can you drive away the factories of Manchester, the mines of the BlackCountry, the canals, the buildings, the machinery, the docks, the plant, the apparatus? Impossible, on the very face of it! Most of the capitalof a country is fixed in its soil, and can't be uprooted. People fallinto this error about driving away capital because they know you cansell particular railway shares or a particular factory and leave thecountry with the proceeds, provided somebody else is willing to buy; butyou can't sell all the railways and all the factories in a lump, andclear out with the capital. No, no; England stands where she does, because God put her there; and until He invents a new order of things(which may, of course, happen any day--as, for example, if aerialnavigation came in) she must continue, in spite of minor changes, tomaintain in the main her present position. 

But a truce to these frivolities! The little Italian boy next door callsme to play ball with him, with a green lemon from the garden. Vengo, Luigi, vengo! I return at once to the realities of life, and dismisssuch shadows. 

VII. 

_THE GAME AND THE RULES. _

A sportive friend of mine, a mighty golfer, is fond of saying, "YouRadicals want to play the game without the rules. " To which I amaccustomed mildly to retort, "Not at all; but we think the rules unfair, and so we want to see them altered. "

Now life is a very peculiar game, which differs in many importantrespects even from compulsory football. The Rugby scrimmage is merechild's play by the side of it. There's no possibility of shirking it. Amedical certificate won't get you off; whether you like it or not, playyou must in your appointed order. We are all unwilling competitors. Nobody asks our naked little souls beforehand whether they would preferto be born into the game or to remain, unfleshed, in the limbo ofnon-existence. Willy nilly, every one of us is thrust into the world byan irresponsible act of two previous players; and once there, we mustplay out the set as best we may to the bitter end, however little welike it or the rules that order it. 

That, it must be admitted, makes a grave distinction from the veryoutset between the game of human life and any other game with which weare commonly acquainted. It also makes it imperative upon the framers ofthe rules so to frame them that no one player shall have an unfair orunjust advantage over any of the others. And since the penalty of badplay, or bad success in the match, is death, misery, starvation, itbehoves the rule-makers to be more scrupulously particular as tofairness and equity than in any other game like cricket or tennis. Itbehoves them to see that all start fair, and that no hapless beginner isunduly handicapped. To compel men to take part in a match for dear life, whether they wish it or not, and then to insist that some of them shallwield bats and some mere broom-sticks, irrespective of height, weight, age, or bodily infirmity, is surely not fair. It justifies the committeein calling for a revision. 

But things are far worse than even that in the game as actually playedin Europe. What shall we say of rules which decide dogmatically that oneset of players are hereditarily entitled to be always batting, whileanother set, less lucky, have to field for ever, and to be fined orimprisoned for not catching? What shall we say of rules which give onegroup a perpetual right to free lunch in the tent, while the remainderhave to pick up what they can for themselves by gleaning among thestubble? How justify the principle in accordance with which the captainon one side has an exclusive claim to the common ground of the club, andmay charge every player exactly what he likes for the right to play uponit?--especially when the choice lies between playing on such terms, orbeing cast into the void, yourself and your family. And then to thinkthat the ground thus tabooed by one particular member may be allSutherlandshire, or, still worse, all Westminster! Decidedly, theserules call for instant revision; and the unprivileged players must besubmissive indeed who consent to put up with them. 

Friends and fellow-members, let us cry with one voice, "The links forthe players!"

Once more, just look at the singular rule in our own All England club, by which certain assorted members possess a hereditary right to veto alldecisions of the elective committee, merely because they happen to betheir fathers' sons, and the club long ago very foolishly permitted thelike privilege to their ancestors! That is an irrational interferencewith the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays venturesto defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-heartedway (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) bysupposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talkin the committee of "mending or ending it. " It shows the long-sufferingnature of the poor blind players at this compulsory game of nationalfootball that they should ever for one moment permit so monstrous anassumption--permit the idea that one single player may wield asubstantive voice and vote to outweigh tens of thousands of hisfellow-members!

These questions of procedure, however, are after all small matters. Itis the real hardships of the game that most need to be tackled. Whyshould one player be born into the sport with a prescriptive right tofill some easy place in the field, while another has to fag on frommorning to night in the most uninteresting and fatiguing position? Whyshould _pâté de foie gras_ and champagne-cup in the tent be so unequallydistributed? Why should those who have made fewest runs and done nofielding be admitted to partake of these luxuries, free of charge, whilethose who have borne the brunt of the fight, those who have sufferedfrom the heat of the day, those who have contributed most to the honourof the victory, are turned loose, unfed, to do as they can forthemselves by hook or by crook somehow? These are the questions some ofus players are now beginning to ask ourselves; and we don't find themefficiently answered by the bald statement that we "want to play thegame without the rules, " and that we ought to be precious glad thelegislators of the club haven't made them a hundred times harder againstus. 

No, no; the rules themselves must be altered. Time was, indeed, whenpeople used to think they were made and ordained by divine authority. "Cum privilegio" was the motto of the captains. But we know very wellnow that every club settles its own standing orders, and that it canalter and modify them as fundamentally as it pleases. Lots of funny oldsaws are still uttered upon this subject--"There must always be rich andpoor;" "You can't interfere with economical laws;" "If you were todivide up everything to-morrow, at the end of a fortnight you'd find thesame differences and inequalities as ever. " The last-named argument (Ibelieve it considers itself by courtesy an argument) is one which noself-respecting Radical should so much as deign to answer. Nobody that Iever heard of for one moment proposed to "divide up everything, " or, forthat matter, anything: and the imputation that somebody did or does is aproof either of intentional malevolence or of crass stupidity. Neithershould be encouraged; and you encourage them by pretending to take themseriously. It is the initial injustices of the game that we Radicalsobject to--the injustices which prevent us from all starting fair andhaving our even chance of picking up a livelihood. We don't want to"divide up everything"--a most futile proceeding; but we do want tountie the legs and release the arms of the handicapped players. To dropmetaphor at last, it is the conditions we complain about. Alter theconditions, and there would be no need for division, summary or gradual. The game would work itself out spontaneously without your intervention. 

The injustice of the existing set of rules simply appals the Radical. Yet oddly enough, this injustice itself appeals rather to thecomparative looker-on than to the heavily-handicapped players in person. They, poor creatures, dragging their log in patience, have grown soaccustomed to regarding the world as another man's oyster, that they putup uncomplainingly for the most part with the most patent inequalities. Perhaps 'tis their want of imagination that makes them unable toconceive any other state of things as even possible--like the dog whoaccepts kicking as the natural fate of doghood. At any rate, you willfind, if you look about you, that the chief reformers are not, as arule, the ill-used classes themselves, but the sensitive and thinkingsouls who hate and loathe the injustice with which others are treated. Most of the best Radicals I have known were men of gentle birth andbreeding. Not all: others, just as earnest, just as eager, just aschivalrous, sprang from the masses. Yet the gently-reared preponderate. It is a common Tory taunt to say that the battle is one between theHaves and the Have-nots. That is by no means true. It is between theselfish Haves, on one side, and the unselfish Haves, who wish to seesomething done for the Have-nots, on the other. As for the poorHave-nots themselves, they are mostly inarticulate. Indeed, the Toryalmost admits as much when he alters his tone and describes thesympathising and active few as "paid agitators. "

For myself, however, I am a born Conservative. I hate to see any oldcustom or practice changed; unless, indeed, it is either foolish orwicked--like most existing ones. 

VIII. 

_THE RÔLE OF PROPHET. _

One great English thinker and artist once tried the rash experiment ofbeing true to himself--of saying out boldly, without fear or reserve, the highest and noblest and best that was in him. He gave us the mostexquisite lyrics in the English language; he moulded the thought of ourfirst youth as no other poet has ever yet moulded it; he became thespiritual father of the richest souls in two succeeding generations ofEnglishmen. And what reward did he get for it? He was expelled from hisuniversity. He was hounded out of his country. He was deprived of hisown children. He was denied the common appeal to the law and courts ofjustice. He was drowned, an exile, in a distant sea, and burned insolitude on a foreign shore. And after his death he was vilified andcalumniated by wretched penny-a-liners, or (worse insult still)apologised for, with half-hearted shrugs, by lukewarm advocates. Thepurest in life and the most unselfish in purpose of all mankind, he waspersecuted alive with the utmost rancour of hate, and pursued when deadwith the vilest shafts of malignity. He never even knew in his scatteredgrave the good he was to do to later groups of thinkers. 

It was a noble example, of course; but not, you will admit, an alluringone for others to follow. 

"Be true to yourself, " say the copy-book moralists, "and you may be surethe result will at last be justified. " No doubt; but in how manycenturies? And what sort of life will you lead yourself, meanwhile, foryour allotted space of threescore years and ten, unless haply hanged, orburned, or imprisoned before it? What the copy-book moralists mean ismerely this--that sooner or later your principles will triumph, whichmay or may not be the case according to the nature of the principles. But even suppose they do, are you to ignore yourself in theinterim--you, a human being with emotions, sensations, domesticaffections, and, in the majority of instances, wife and children on whomto expend them? Why should it be calmly taken for granted by the worldthat if you have some new and true thing to tell humanity (whichhumanity, of course, will toss back in your face with contumely andviolence) you are bound to blurt it out, with childish unreserve, regardless of consequences to yourself and to those who depend upon you?Why demand of genius or exceptional ability a gratuitous sacrifice whichyou would deprecate as wrong and unjust to others in the ordinarycitizen? For the genius, too, is a man, and has his feelings. 

The fact is, society considers that in certain instances it has a rightto expect the thinker will martyrise himself on its account, while itstands serenely by and heaps faggots on the pile, with every mark ofcontempt and loathing. But society is mistaken. No man is bound tomartyrise himself; in a great many cases a man is bound to do the exactopposite. He has given hostages to Fortune, and his first duty is to thehostages. "We ask you for bread, " his children may well say, "and yougive us a noble moral lesson. We ask you for clothing, and you supply uswith a beautiful poetical fancy. " This is not according to bargain. Wifeand children have a first mortgage on a man's activities; society hasonly a right to contingent remainders. 

A great many sensible men who had truths of deep import to deliver tothe world must have recognised these facts in all times and places, andmust have held their tongues accordingly. Instead of speaking out thetruths that were in them, they must have kept their peace, or haveconfined themselves severely to the ordinary platitudes of their age andnation. Why ruin yourself by announcing what you feel and believe, whenall the reward you will get for it in the end will be social ostracism, if not even the rack, the stake, or the pillory? The Shelleys andRousseaus there's no holding, of course; they _will_ run right into it;but the Goethes--oh, no, they keep their secret. Indeed, I hold it asprobable that the vast majority of men far in advance of their timeshave always held their tongues consistently, save for mere commonbabble, on Lord Chesterfield's principle that "Wise men never say. "

The _rôle_ of prophet is thus a thankless and difficult one. Nor is itquite certainly of real use to the community. For the prophet isgenerally too much ahead of his times. He discounts the future at aruinous rate, and he takes the consequences. If you happen ever to haveread the Old Testament you must have noticed that the prophets hadgenerally a hard time of it. 

The leader is a very different stamp of person. _He_ stands well abreastof his contemporaries, and just half a pace in front of them; and he haspower to persuade even the inertia of humanity into taking that onehalf-step in advance he himself has already made bold to adventure. Hispost is honoured, respected, remunerated. But the prophet gets nothanks, and perhaps does mankind no benefit. He sees too quick. Andthere can be very little good indeed in so seeing. If one of us had beenan astronomer, and had discovered the laws of Kepler, Newton, andLaplace in the thirteenth century, I think he would have been wise tokeep the discovery to himself for a few hundred years or so. Otherwise, he would have been burned for his trouble. Galileo, long after, triedpart of the experiment a decade or so too soon, and got no good by it. But in moral and social matters the danger is far graver. I would say toevery aspiring youth who sees some political or economical or ethicaltruth quite clearly: "Keep it dark! Don't mention it! Nobody will listento you; and you, who are probably a person of superior insight andhigher moral aims than the mass, will only destroy your own influencefor good by premature declarations. The world will very likely comeround of itself to your views in the end; but if you tell them too soon, you will suffer for it in person, and will very likely do nothing tohelp on the revolution in thought that you contemplate. For thought thatis too abruptly ahead of the mass never influences humanity. "

"But sometimes the truth will out in spite of one!" Ah, yes, that's theworst of it. Do as I say, not as I do. If possible, repress it. 

It is a noble and beautiful thing to be a martyr, especially if you area martyr in the cause of truth, and not, as is often the case, of somedebasing and degrading superstition. But nobody has a right to demand ofyou that you should be a martyr. And some people have often a right todemand that you should resolutely refuse the martyr's crown on theground that you have contracted prior obligations, inconsistent with thepurely personal luxury of martyrdom. 'Tis a luxury for a few. It befitsonly the bachelor, the unattached, and the economically spareworthy. 

"These be pessimistic pronouncements, " you say. Well, no, not exactly. For, after all, we must never shut our eyes to the actual; and in theworld as it is, meliorism, not optimism, is the true opposite ofpessimism. Optimist and pessimist are both alike in a sense, seeing theyare both conservative; they sit down contented--the first with the smugcontentment that says "All's well; I have enough; why this fuss aboutothers?" the second with the contentment of blank despair that says, "All's hopeless; all's wrong; why try uselessly to mend it?" Themeliorist attitude, on the contrary, is rather to say, "Much is wrong;much painful; what can we do to improve it?" And from this point of viewthere is something we can all do to make martyrdom less inevitable inthe end, for the man who has a thought, a discovery, an idea, to tellus. Such men are rare, and their thought, when they produce it, is sureto be unpalatable. For, if it were otherwise, it would be thought of ourown type--familiar, banal, commonplace, unoriginal. It would encounterno resistance, as it thrilled on its way through our brain, fromestablished errors. What the genius and the prophet are there for isjust that--to make us listen to unwelcome truths, to compel us to hear, to drive awkward facts straight home with sledge-hammer force to theunwilling hearts and brains of us. Not what _you_ want to hear, or what_I_ want to hear, is good and useful for us; but what we _don't_ want tohear, what we can't bear to think, what we hate to believe, what wefight tooth and nail against. The man who makes us listen to _that_ isthe seer and the prophet; he comes upon us like Shelley, or Whitman, orIbsen, and plumps down horrid truths that half surprise, half disgustus. He shakes us out of our lethargy. To such give ear, though they saywhat shocks you. Weigh well their hateful ideas. Avoid the vulgar viceof sneering and carping at them. Learn to examine their nude thoughtwithout shrinking, and examine it all the more carefully when it mostrepels you. Naked verity is an acquired taste; it is never beautiful atfirst sight to the unaccustomed vision. Remember that no question isfinally settled; that no question is wholly above consideration; thatwhat you cherish as holiest is most probably wrong; and that in socialand moral matters especially (where men have been longest ruled by puresuperstitions) new and startling forms of thought have the highest _apriori_ probability in their favour. Dismiss your idols. Give everyopinion its fair chance of success--especially when it seems to you bothwicked and ridiculous, recollecting that it is better to let fivehundred crude guesses run loose about the world unclad, than to crushone fledgling truth in its callow condition. To the Greeks, foolishness:to the Jews, a stumbling-block. If you can't be one of the prophetsyourself, you can at least abstain from helping to stone them. 

Dear me! These reflections to-day are anything but post-prandial. The_gnocchi_ and the olives must certainly have disagreed with me. Butperhaps it may some of it be "wrote sarcastic. " I have heard tell thereis a thing called irony. 

IX. 

_THE ROMANCE OF THE CLASH OF RACES. _

The world has expanded faster in the last thirty years than in anyprevious age since "the spacious days of great Elizabeth. " And with itsexpansion, of course, our ideas have widened. I believe Europe is now inthe midst of just such an outburst of thought and invention as thatwhich followed the discovery of America, and of the new route to Indiaby the Cape of Good Hope. But I don't want to insist too strongly uponthat point, because I know a great many of my contemporaries are deeplyhurt by the base and spiteful suggestion that they and their fellows arereally quite as good as any fish that ever came out of the sea beforethem. I only desire now to call attention for a moment to one curiousresult entailed by this widening of the world upon our literaryproductivity--a result which, though obvious enough when one comes tolook at it, seems to me hitherto to have strangely escaped deliberatenotice. 

In one word, the point of which I speak is the comparativecosmopolitanisation of letters, and especially the introduction intoliterary art of the phenomena due to the Clash of Races. 

This Clash itself is the one picturesque and novel feature of ourotherwise somewhat prosaic and machine-made epoch; and, therefore, ithas been eagerly seized upon, with one accord, by all the chiefpurveyors of recent literature, and especially of fiction. They haveespied in it, with technical instinct, the best chance for obtainingthat fresh interest which is essential to the success of a work of art. We were all getting somewhat tired, it must be confessed, of the oldplaces and the old themes. The insipid loves of Anthony Trollope'sblameless young people were beginning to pall upon us. The jaded palateof the Anglo-Celtic race pined for something hot, with a touch of freshspice in it. It demanded curried fowl and Jamaica peppers. Hence, on theone hand, the sudden vogue of the novelists of the youngercountries--Tolstoi and Tourgenieff, Ibsen and Bjornson, Mary Wilkins andHowells--who transplanted us at once into fresh scenes, new people:hence, on the other hand, the tendency on the part of our own latestwriters--the Stevensons, the Hall Caines, the Marion Crawfords, theRider Haggards--to go far afield among the lower races or the latercivilisations for the themes of their romances. 

Alas, alas, I see breakers before me! Must I pause for a moment in theflowing current of a paragraph to explain, as in an aside, that Iinclude Marion Crawford of set purpose among "our own" late writers, while I count Mary Wilkins and Howells as Transatlantic aliens?Experience teaches me that I must; else shall I have that annoyinganimalcule, the microscopic critic, coming down upon me in print withhis petty objection that "Mr. Crawford is an American. " Go to, oh, blindone! And Whistler also, I suppose, and Sargent, and, perhaps, AshmeadBartlett! What! have you read "Sarracinesca" and not learnt that itsauthor is European to the core? 'Twas for such as you that the Irishmaninvented his brilliant retort: "And if I was born in a stable would I bea horse?"

Not merely, however, do our younger writers go into strange and novelplaces for the scenes of their stories; the important point to notice inthe present connection is that, consciously or unconsciously tothemselves, they have perceived the mighty influence of this Clash ofRaces, and have chosen the relations of the civilised people with theirsavage allies, or enemies, or subjects, as the chief theme of theirhandicraft. 'Tis a momentous theme, for it encloses in itself half theproblems of the future. The old battles are now well-nigh fought out;but new ones are looming ahead for us. The cosmopolitanisation of theworld is introducing into our midst strange elements of discord. Aconglomerate of unwelded ethnical elements usurps the stage of history. America and South Africa have already their negro question; Californiaand Australia have already their Chinese question; Russia is fastgetting her Asiatic, her Mahommedan question. Even France, the mostnarrowly European in interest of European countries, has yet herAlgeria, her Tunis, her Tonquin. Spain has Cuba and the Philippines. Holland has Java. Germany is burdening herself with the unborn troublesof a Hinterland. And as for England, she staggers on still under theincreasing load of India, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, the WestIndies, Fiji, New Guinea, North Borneo--all of them rife with endlessrace-questions, all pregnant with difficulties. 

Who can be surprised that amid this seething turmoil of colours, instincts, creeds, and languages, art should have fastened upon therace-problems as her great theme for the moment? And she has fastenedupon them everywhere. France herself has not been able to avoid thecontagion. Pierre Loti is the most typical French representative of thisvagabond spirit; and the question of the peoples naturally envisagesitself to his mind in true Gallic fashion in the "Mariage de Loti" andin "Madame Chrysanthème. " He sees it through a halo of vague sexualsentimentalism. In England, it was Rider Haggard from the Cape who firstset the mode visibly; and nothing is more noteworthy in all his workthan the fact that the interest mainly centres in the picturesquejuxtaposition and contrast of civilisation and savagery. Once the cuewas given, what more natural than that young Rudyard Kipling, fresh homefrom India, brimming over with genius and with knowledge of twoconcurrent streams of life that flow on side by side yet never mingle, should take up his parable in due course, and storm us all by assaultwith his light field artillery? Then Robert Louis Stevenson, born awandering Scot, with roving Scandinavian and fiery Celtic blood in hisveins, must needs settle down, like a Viking that he is, in far Samoa, there to charm and thrill us by turns with the romance of Polynesia. Theexample was catching. Almost without knowing it, other writers haveturned for subjects to similar fields. "Dr. Isaacs, " "Paul Patoff, " "ByProxy, " were upon us. Even Hall Caine himself, in some ways a mostinsular type of genius, was forced in "The Scapegoat" to carry us offfrom Cumberland and Man to Morocco. Sir Edwin Arnold inflicts upon usthe tragedies of Japan. I have been watching this tendency long myselfwith the interested eye of a dealer engaged in the trade, and thereforeanxious to keep pace with every changing breath of popular favour: and Inotice a constant increase from year to year in the number of shortstories in magazines and newspapers dealing with the romance of theinferior races. I notice, also, that such stories are increasinglysuccessful with the public. This shows that, whether the public knows itor not itself, the question of race is interesting it more and more. Itis gradually growing to understand the magnitude of the change that hascome over civilisation by the inclusion of Asia, Africa, and Australasiawithin its circle. Even the Queen is learning Hindustani. 

There is a famous passage in Green's "Short History of the EnglishPeople" which describes in part that strange outburst of nationalexpansion under Elizabeth, when Raleigh, Drake, and Frobisher scouredthe distant seas, and when at home "England became a nest of singingbirds, " with Shakespeare, Spenser, Fletcher, and Marlow. "The old sobernotions of thrift, " says the picturesque historian, "melted before thestrange revolutions of fortune wrought by the New World. Gallantsgambled away a fortune at a sitting, and sailed off to make a fresh onein the Indies. " (Read rather to-day at Kimberley, Johannesburg, Vancouver. ) "Visions of galleons loaded to the brim with pearls anddiamonds and ingots of silver, dreams of El Dorados where all was ofgold, threw a haze of prodigality and profusion over the imagination ofthe meanest seaman. The wonders, too, of the New World kindled a burstof extravagant fancy in the Old. The strange medley of past and presentwhich distinguishes its masques and feastings only reflected the medleyof men's thoughts. . . . A 'wild man' from the Indies chanted the Queen'spraises at Kenilworth, and Echo answered him. Elizabeth turned from thegreetings of sibyls and giants to deliver the enchanted lady from hertyrant, 'Sans Pitie. ' Shepherdesses welcomed her with carols of thespring, while Ceres and Bacchus poured their corn and grapes at herfeet. " Oh, gilded youth of the Gaiety, _mutato nomine de te Fabulanarratur_. Yours, yours is this glory!

For our own age, too, is a second Elizabethan. It blossoms out dailyinto such flowers of fancy as never bloomed before, save then, onBritish soil. When men tell you nowadays we have "no great writersleft, " believe not the silly parrot cry. Nay, rather, laugh it down forthem. We move in the midst of one of the mightiest epochs earth has everseen, an epoch which will live in history hereafter side by side withthe Athens of Pericles, the Rome of Augustus, the Florence of Lorenzo, the England of Elizabeth. Don't throw away your birthright by ignoringthe fact. Live up to your privileges. Gaze around you and know. Be aconscious partaker in one of the great ages of humanity. 

X. 

_THE MONOPOLIST INSTINCTS. _

In the first of these after-dinner _causeries_ I ventured humbly toremark that Patriotism was a vulgar vice of which I had never beenguilty. That innocent indiscretion of mine aroused at the moment someunfavourable comment. I confess I was sorry for it. But I passed it byat the time, lest I should speak too hastily and lose my temper. I recurto the subject now, at the hour of the cigarette, when man can discoursemost genially of his bitterest enemy. And Monopoly is mine. Its veryname is hateful. 

I don't often say what I think. At least, not much of it. I don't oftenget the chance. And, besides, being a timid and a modest man, I'm afraidto. But just this once, I'm going to "try it on. " Object to my opinionsas you will. But still, let me express them. Strike--but hear me!

Has it ever occurred to you that one object of reading is to learnthings you never thought of before, and would never think of now, unlessyou were told them?

Patriotism is one of the Monopolist Instincts. And the MonopolistInstincts are the greatest enemies of the social life in humanity. Theyare what we have got in the end to outlive. The test of a man's place inthe scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They are survivingrelics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape and tiger die. Wemust begin to be human. 

I will take Patriotism first, because it is the most specious of themall, and has still a self-satisfied way of masquerading as a virtue. Butafter all what is Patriotism? "My country, right or wrong; and justbecause it is _my_ country. " It is nothing more than a wider form ofselfishness. Often enough, indeed, it is even a narrow one. It means, "My business interests against the business interests of other people;and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support them. " At othertimes it is pure Jingoism. It means, "_My_ country against othercountries! _My_ army and navy against other fighters! _My_ right toannex unoccupied territory over the equal right of all other people!_My_ power to oppress all weaker nationalities, all inferior races!" It_never_ means anything good. For if a cause is just, like Ireland's, oronce Italy's, then 'tis the good man's duty to espouse it with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then 'tis the goodman's duty to oppose it tooth and nail, irrespective of your"Patriotism. " True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious thatjustice should be done by the particular State of which he happenshimself to be a member than by any other, because he is partlyresponsible for the corporate action; but then, people who feel deeplythis joint moral responsibility of all the citizens are not praised aspatriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country shouldstrive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, justerthan other countries around it--the only kind of Patriotism worth abrass farthing in a righteous man's eyes--is accounted by most men bothwicked and foolish. 

Patriotism, then, is the collective or national form of the MonopolistInstincts. And like all those Instincts, it is a relic of savagery, which the Man of the Future is now engaged in out-living. 

Property is the next form. That, on the very face of it, is a viler andmore sordid one. For Patriotism at least can lay claim to someexpansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stopsdead short at the narrowest limits. It is not "Us against the world!"but "Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the final result of theindustrial war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fairface of our England with its anti-social notice-boards, "Trespasserswill be prosecuted!" It says, in effect, "This is my land. God made it;but I have acquired it and tabooed it. The grass on it grows green; butonly for me. The mountains rise beautiful; no foot of man, save mine andmy gamekeepers', shall tread them. The waterfalls gleam fresh and coolin the glen: avaunt there, you non-possessors; _you_ shall never seethem! All this is my own. And I choose to monopolise it. "

Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field, " he says, indespite of his own scripture; "I will join railway to railway. I willjuggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production ofwealth that I can lay hold of; and I will use them for myself againstthe producer and the consumer. I will enrich myself by 'corners' on thenecessaries of life; I will make food dear for the poor, that I myselfmay roll in needless luxury. I will monopolise whatever I can seize, andthe people may eat straw. " That temper, too, humanity must outlive. Andthose who can't outlive it of themselves, or be warned in time, must betaught by stern lessons that their race has outstripped them. 

As for slavery, 'tis now gone. That was the vilest of them all. It wasthe naked assertion of the Monopolist platform: "You live, not foryourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your life entirely, and use you as my chattel. " It died at last of the moral indignation ofhumanity. It died when a Southern court of so-called justice formulatedin plain words the underlying principle of its hateful creed: "A blackman has no rights which a white man is bound to respect. " That finallyfinished it. We no longer allow every man to "wallop his own nigger. "And though the last relics of it die hard in Queensland, South Africa, Demerara, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that oneMonopolist Instinct out of the group is pretty well bred out of us. 

Except as regards women! There, it lingers still. The Man says even nowto himself:--"This woman is mine. If she ventures to have a heart or awill of her own, woe betide her! I have tabooed her for life; let anyother man touch her, let her look at any other man--and--knife, revolver, or law court, they shall both of them answer for it!" Thereyou have in all its natural ugliness another Monopolist Instinct--thedeepest-seated of all, the vilest, the most barbaric. She is not yours:she is her own: unhand her! The Turk takes his offending slave, sews herup in a sack, and flings her into the Bosphorus. The ChristianEnglishman drags her shame before an open court, and divorces her withcontumely. Her shame, I say, in the common phrase, because though to meit is no shame that any human being should follow the dictates of his orher own heart, it is a shame to the woman in the eyes of the world, anda life of disgrace she must live thenceforward. All this is Monopoly andessentially slavery. As man lives down the Ape and Tiger stage, he willlearn to say, rather: "Be mine while you can; but the day you cease tofeel you can be mine willingly, don't disgrace your own body by yieldingit up where your soul feels loathing; don't consent to be the mother ofchildren by a father you despise or dislike or are tired of. Let us kissand part. Go where you will; and my good will go with you!" Till the mancan say that with a sincere heart, why, to borrow a phrase from GeorgeMeredith, he may have passed Seraglio Point, but he hasn't rounded CapeTurk yet. 

You find that a hard saying, do you? You kick against freedom for wifeor daughter? Well, yes, no doubt; you are still a Monopolist. But, believe me, the earnest and solemn expression of a profound belief neveryet did harm to any one. I look forward to the time when women shall beas free in every way as men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up;not, as some would have us think, by enslaving the men, but byelevating, emancipating, unshackling the women. 

There is a charming little ditty in Louis Stevenson's "Child's Garden ofVerse, " which always seems to me to sum up admirably the Monopolistattitude. Here it is. Look well at it:--

 "When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great, And tell the other girls and boys, Not to meddle with _my_ toys. "

That is the way of the Monopolist. It catches him in the very act. Hesays to all the world: "Hands off! My property! Don't walk on my grass!Don't trespass in my park! Beware of my gunboats! No trifling with mywomen! I am the king of the castle. You meddle with me at your peril. "

"Ours!" not "Mine!" is the watchword of the future. 

XI. 

"_MERE AMATEURS. _"

"He was a mere amateur; but still, he did some good work in science. "

Increasingly of late years I have heard these condescending wordsuttered, in the fatherland of Bacon, of Newton, of Darwin, when someBates or Spottiswoode has been gathered to his fathers. It was not soonce. Time was when all English science was the work of amateurs--andvery well indeed the amateurs did it. I don't think anybody who does methe honour to cognise my humble individuality at all will ever be likelyto mistake me for a _laudator temporis acti_. On the contrary, so far asI can see, the past seems generally to have been such a distinct failureall along the line that the one lesson we have to learn from it is, togo and do otherwise. I am one on that point with Shelley and Rousseau. But it does not follow, because most old things are bad, that all newthings and rising things are necessarily and indisputably in their ownnature excellent. Novelties, too, may be retrograde. And even ourgreat-grandfathers occasionally blundered upon something good in whichwe should do well to imitate them. The amateurishness of old Englishscience was one of these good things now in course of abolition by thefashionable process of Germanisation. 

Don't imagine it was only for France that 1870 was fatal. The sadsuccesses of that deadly year sent a wave of triumphant Teutonism overthe face of Europe. 

I suppose it is natural to man to worship success; but ever since 1870it is certainly the fact that if you wish to gain respect andconsideration for any proposed change of system you must say, "They doit so in Germany. " In education and science this is especially the case. Pedants always admire pedants. And Germany having shown herself to beeasily first of European States in her pedant-manufacturing machinery, all the assembled dominies of all the rest of the world exclaimed withone voice, "Go to! Let us Germanise our educational system!"

Now, the German is an excellent workman in his way. Patient, laborious, conscientious, he has all the highest qualities of the idealbrick-maker. He produces the best bricks, and you can generally dependupon him to turn out both honest and workmanlike articles. But he is notan architect. For the architectonic faculty in its highest developmentsyou must come to England. And he is not a teacher or expounder. For theexpository faculty in its purest form, the faculty that enables men toflash forth clearly and distinctly before the eyes of others the factsand principles they know and perceive themselves, you must go to France. Oh, dear, yes; we may well be proud of England. Remember, I have alreadydisclaimed more than once in these papers the vulgar error ofpatriotism. But freedom from that narrow vice does not imply inabilityto recognise the good qualities of one's own race as well as the badones. And the Englishman, left to himself and his own native methods, used to cut a very respectable figure indeed in the domain of science. No other nation has produced a Newton or a Darwin. The Englishman's waywas to get up an interest in a subject first; and then, working backfrom the part of it that specially appealed to his own tastes, to makehimself master of the entire field of inquiry. This natural andthoroughly individualistic English method enabled him to arrive at newresults in a way impossible to the pedantically educated German--nay, even to the lucidly and systematically educated Frenchman. It was theplan to develop "mere amateurs, " I admit; but it was also the plan todevelop discoverers and revolutionisers of science. For the man mostlikely to advance knowledge is not the man who knows in an encyclopædicrote-work fashion the whole circle of the sciences, but the man whotakes a fresh interest for its own sake in some particular branch ofinquiry. 

Darwin was a "mere amateur. " He worked at things for the love of them. So were Murchison, Lyell, Benjamin Franklin, Herschel. So were or areBates, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace. "Mere amateurs!" everyman of them. 

In an evil hour, however, our pastors and masters in conclave assembledsaid to one another, "Come now, let us Teutonise English scientificeducation. " And straightway they Teutonised it. And there began to arisein England a new brood of patent machine-made scientists--excellent menin their way, authorities on the Arachnida, knowing all about everythingthat could be taught in the schools, but lacking somehow the supremegrace of the old English originality. They are first-rate specialists, Iallow; and I don't deny that a civilised country has all need ofspecialists. Nay, I even admit that the day of the specialist has onlyjust begun. He will yet go far; he will impose himself and his yoke uponus. But don't let us therefore make the grand mistake of concluding thatour fine old English birthright in science--the birthright that gave usour Newtons, our Cavendishes, our Darwins, our Lyells--was all folly anderror. Don't let us spoil ourselves in order to become mere second-handGermans. Let us recognise the fact that each nation has a work of itsown to do in the world; and that as star from star, so one nationdiffereth from another in glory. Let each of us thank the goodness andthe grace that on his birth have smiled, that he was born of Englishbreed, and not a German child. 

"Don't you think, " a military gentleman once said to me, "the Germansare wonderful organisers?" "No, " I answered, "I don't; but I thinkthey're excellent drill-sergeants. "

There are people who drop German authorities upon you as if a Teutonicname were guarantee enough for anything. They say, "Hausberger asserts, "or "According to Schimmelpenninck. " This is pure fetichism. Believe me, your man of science isn't necessarily any the better because he comes toyou with the label, "Made in Germany. " The German instinct is theinstinct of Frederick William of Prussia--the instinct of drilling. Verythorough and efficient men in their way it turns out; men versed in allthe lore of their chosen subject. If they are also men of transcendentability (as often happens), they can give us a comprehensive view oftheir own chosen field such as few Englishmen (except Sir ArchibaldGeikie, and he's a Scot) can equal. If I wanted to select a learned manfor a special Government post--British Museum, and so forth--I dare sayI should often be compelled to admit, as Government often admits, thatthe best man then and there obtainable is the German. But if I wanted totrain Herbert Spencers and Faradays, I would certainly _not_ send themto Bonn or to Berlin. John Stuart Mill was an English Scotchman, educated and stuffed by his able father on the German system; and howmuch of spontaneity, of vividness, of _verve_, we all of us feel JohnStuart Mill lost by it! One often wonders to what great, to what stillgreater, things that lofty brain might not have attained, if only JamesMill would have given it a chance to develop itself naturally!

Our English gift is originality. Our English keynote is individuality. Let us cling to those precious heirlooms of our Celtic ancestry, andrefuse to be Teutonised. Let us discard the lessons of the Potsdamgrenadiers. Let us write on the pediment of our educational temple, "NoGerman need apply. " Let us disclaim that silly phrase "A mere amateur. "Let us return to the simple faith in direct observation that madeEnglish science supreme in Europe. 

And may the Lord gi'e us Britons a guid conceit o' oorsel's!

XII. 

_A SQUALID VILLAGE. _

Strange that the wealthiest class in the wealthiest country in the worldshould so long have been content to inhabit a squalid village!

I'm not going to compare London, as Englishmen often do, with Paris orVienna. I won't do two great towns that gross injustice. And, indeed, comparison here is quite out of the question. You don't compare Oxfordwith Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums, and then ask which isthe handsomest. Things must be alike in kind before you can begin tocompare them. And London and Paris are not alike in kind. One is a city, and a noble city; the other is a village, and a squalid village. 

No; I will not even take a humbler standard of comparison, and look atLondon side by side with Brussels, Antwerp, Munich, Turin. Each of thoseis a city, and a fine city in its way; but each of them is small. Still, even by their side, London is again but a squalid village. I insist uponthat point, because, misled by their ancient familiarity with London, most Englishmen have had their senses and understandings so blunted onthis issue, that they really don't know what is meant by a town, or afine town, when they see one. And don't suppose it's because London isin Britain and these other towns out of it that I make these remarks:for Bath is a fine town, Edinburgh is a fine town, even Glasgow andNewcastle are towns, while London is still a straggling, sprawling, invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. I am as free, I hope, fromanti-patriotic as from patriotic prejudice. The High Street in Oxford, Milsom Street in Bath, Princes Street in Edinburgh, those are all finestreets that would attract attention even in France or Germany. But theStrand, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street--good Lord, deliver us!

One more _caveat_ as to my meaning. When I cite among real townsBrussels, Antwerp, and Munich, I am not thinking of the treasures of artthose beautiful places contain; that is another and altogether higherquestion. Towns supreme in this respect often lag far behind others ofless importance--lag behind in those external features and that generalarchitectural effectiveness which rightly entitle us to say in a broadsense, "This is a fine city. " Florence, for example, contains moretreasures of art in a small space than any other town of Europe; yetFlorence, though undoubtedly a town, and even a fine town, is not to becompared in this respect, I do not say with Venice or Brussels, but evenwith Munich or Milan. On the other hand, London contains far moretreasures of art in its way than Boston, Massachusetts; but Boston is ahandsome, well-built, regular town, while London--well, I will spare youthe further repetition of the trite truism that London is a squalidvillage. In one word, the point I am seeking to bring out here is that atown, as a town, is handsome or otherwise, not in virtue of the works ofart or antiquity it contains, but in virtue of its ground-plan, itsarchitecture, its external and visible decorations and places--theLouvre, the Boulevards, the Champs Elysées, the Place de l'Opéra. 

Now London has no ground-plan. It has no street architecture. It has nodecorations, though it has many uglifications. It is frankly and simplyand ostentatiously hideous. And being wholly wanting in a system of anysort--in organic parts, in idea, in views, in vistas--it is only avillage, and a painfully uninteresting one. 

Most Englishmen see London before they see any other great town. Theybecome so familiarised with it that their sense of comparison is dulledand blunted. I had the good fortune to have seen many other great townsbefore I ever saw London: and I shall never forget my first sense ofsurprise at its unmitigated ugliness. 

Get on top of an omnibus--I don't say in Paris, from the Palais Royal tothe Arc de Triomphe, but in Brussels, from the Gare du Nord to thePalais de Justice--and what do you see? From end to end one unbrokensuccession of noble and open prospects. I'm not thinking now of theGrande Place in the old town, with its magnificent collection ofmediæval buildings; the Great Fire effectively deprived us of our onesole chance of such an element of beauty in modern London. I confinemyself on purpose to the parts of Brussels which are purely recent, andmight have been imitated at a distance in London, if there had been anypublic spirit or any public body in England to imitate them. (Butunhappily there was neither. ) Recall to mind as you read the strikinglyhandsome street view that greets you as you emerge from the NorthernStation down the great central Boulevards to the Gare du Midi--all builtwithin our own memory. Then think of the prospects that gradually unfoldthemselves as you rise on the hill; the fine vista north towards SainteMarie de Schaarbeck; the beautiful Rue Royale, bounded by that charmingParc; the unequalled stretch of the Rue de la Régence, starting from thePlace Royale with Godfrey of Bouillon, and ending with the imposing massof the Palais de Justice. It is to me a matter for mingled surprise andhumiliation that so many Englishmen can look year after year at thatglorious street--perhaps the finest in the world--and yet never think tothemselves, "Mightn't we faintly imitate some small part of this in ourwealthy, ugly, uncompromising London?"

I always say to Americans who come to Europe: "When you go to England, don't see our towns, but see our country. Our country is somethingunequalled in the world: while our towns!--well, anyway, keep away fromLondon!"

With the solitary and not very brilliant exception of the Embankment, there isn't a street in London where one could take a stranger to admirethe architecture. Compare that record with the new Boulevards inAntwerp, where almost every house is worth serious study: or with theRing at Cologne (to keep close home all the time), where one can seewhole rows of German Renaissance houses of extraordinary interest. Whatstreet in London can be mentioned in this respect side by side withCommonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street in Boston; with Euclid Avenue inCleveland, Ohio; with the upper end of Fifth Avenue, New York; nay, evenwith the new Via Roma at Genoa? Why is it that we English can't get onthe King's Road at Brighton anything faintly approaching that splendidsea front on the Digue at Ostend, or those coquettish white villas thatline the Promenade des Anglais at Nice? The blight of London seems tolie over all Southern England. 

Paris looks like the capital of a world-wide empire. London, looks likea shapeless neglected suburb, allowed to grow up by accident anyhow. Andthat's just the plain truth of it. 'Tis a fortuitous concourse ofhap-hazard houses. 

"But we are improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a fewnew thoroughfares piecemeal. " Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic, English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressivenew street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness, through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that isall. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the heightof the occasion and the Empire! You tinker away at a Shaftesbury Avenue. Parochial, all of it. And there you get the real secret of our futileattempts at making a town out of our squalid village. The fault lies allat the door of the old Corporation, and of the people who made and stillmake the old Corporation possible. For centuries, indeed, there wasreally no London, not even a village; there was only a scratchcollection of contiguous villages. The consequence was that here, at thecentre of national life, the English people grew wholly unaccustomed tothe bare idea of a town, and managed everything piecemeal, on the pettyscale of a country vestry. The vestryman intelligence has now overrunthe land; and if the London County Council ever succeeds at last inmaking the congeries of villages into--I do not say a city, for that isalmost past praying for, but something analogous to a second-rateContinental town, it will only be after long lapse of time and violentstruggles with the vestryman level of intellect and feeling. 

London had many great disadvantages to start with. She lay in a dull andmarshy bottom, with no building stone at hand, and therefore she wasforecondemned by her very position to the curse of brick and stucco, when Bath, Oxford, Edinburgh, were all built out of their own quarries. Then fire destroyed all her mediæval architecture, leaving her onlyWestminster Abbey to suggest the greatness of her losses. Butbrick-earth and fire have been as nothing in their way by the side ofthe evil wrought by Gog and Magog. When five hundred trembling ghosts ofnaked Lord Mayors have to answer for their follies and their sinshereafter, I confidently expect the first question in the appallingindictment will be, "Why did you allow the richest nation on earth tohouse its metropolis in a squalid village?"

We have a Moloch in England to whom we sacrifice much. And his hatefulname is Vested Interest. 

XIII. 

_CONCERNING ZEITGEIST. _

A certain story is told about Mr. Ruskin, no doubt apocryphal, but atany rate characteristic. A young lady, fresh from the Abyss ofBayswater, met the sage one evening at dinner--a gushing young lady, asmany such there be--who, aglow with joy, boarded the Professor at oncewith her private art-experiences. "Oh, Mr. Ruskin, " she cried, claspingher hands, "do you know, I hadn't been two days in Florence before Idiscovered what you meant when you spoke about the supremeunapproachableness of Botticelli. " "Indeed?" Ruskin answered. "Well, that's very remarkable; for it took me, myself, half a lifetime todiscover it. "

The answer, of course, was meant to be crushing. How should _she_, abrand plucked from the burning of Bayswater, be able all at once, on thevery first blush, to appreciate Botticelli? And it took the greatestcritic of his age half a lifetime! Yet I venture to maintain, for allthat, that the young lady was right, and that the critic was wrong--ifsuch a thing be conceivable. I know, of course, that when we speak ofRuskin we must walk delicately, like Agag. But still, I repeat it, theyoung lady was right; and it was largely the unconscious, pervasiveaction of Mr. Ruskin's own personality that enabled her to be so. 

It's all the Zeitgeist: that's where it is. The slow irresistibleZeitgeist. Fifty years ago, men's taste had been so warped and distortedby current art and current criticism that they _couldn't_ seeBotticelli, however hard they tried at it. He was a sealed book to ourfathers. In those days it required a brave, a vigorous, and an originalthinker to discover any merit in any painter before Raffael, exceptperhaps, as Goldsmith wisely remarked, Perugino. The man who went thento the Uffizi or the Pitti, after admiring as in duty bound his HighRenaissance masters, found himself suddenly confronted with the Judithor the Calumny, and straightway wondered what manner of strange wildbeasts these were that some insane early Tuscan had once painted toamuse himself in a lucid interval. They were not in the least like theCorreggios and the Guidos, the Lawrences and the Opies, that the men ofthat time had formed their taste upon, and accepted as their soleartistic standards. To people brought up upon pure David andThorvaldsen, the Primavera at the Belle Arti must naturally have seemedlike a wild freak of madness. The Zeitgeist then went all in thedirection of cold lifeless correctness; the idea that the painter's soulcounted for something in art was an undreamt of heresy. 

On your way back from Paris some day, stop a night at Amiens and takethe Cathedral seriously. Half the stately interior of that gloriousthirteenth century pile is encrusted and overlaid by hideous gewgawmonstrosities of the flashiest Bernini and _baroque_ period. There theysprawl their obtrusive legs and wave their flaunting theatrical wings tothe utter destruction of all repose and consistency in one of thenoblest and most perfect buildings of Europe. Nowadays, any child, anyworkman can see at a glance how ugly and how disfiguring those floppycreatures are; it is impossible to look at them without saying tooneself: "Why don't they clear away all this high-faluting rubbish, andlet us see the real columns and arches and piers as their makersdesigned them?" Yet who was it that put them there, those unspeakableangels in muslin drapery, those fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim?Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. Andwhence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how outof place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because theGothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty anddelicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was merebarbaric mediævalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, andto dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous andmeretricious Bernini-like flimsiness. 

The Zeitgeist has changed, and we have changed with it. 

It is just the same with our friend Botticelli. Scarce a dozen yearsago, it was almost an affectation to pretend you admired him. It is noaffectation now. Hundreds of assorted young women from the Abyss ofBayswater may rise any morning here in sacred Florence and standgenuinely enchanted before the Adoration of the Kings, or the Venus whofloats on her floating shell in a Botticellian ocean. And why? BecauseLeighton, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Strudwick, have led them slowly up to it by golden steps innumerable. Thirty yearsago the art of the early Tuscan painters was something to us Northernersexotic, strange, unconnected, archæological. Gradually, it has beenbrought nearer and nearer to us on the walls of the Grosvenor and theNew Gallery, till now he that runs may read; the ingenuous maiden, fished from the Abyss of Bayswater, can drink in at a glance what ittook a Ruskin many years of his life and much slow development to attainto piecemeal. 

That is just what all great men are for--to make the world accept as atruism in the generation after them what it rejected as a paradox in thegeneration before them. 

Not, of course, that there isn't a little of affectation, and still moreof fashion, to the very end in all of it. An immense number of people, incapable of genuinely admiring anything for its own sake at all, areanxious only to be told what they "ought to admire, don't you know, " andwill straightway proceed as conscientiously as they can to get up anadmiration for it. A friend of mine told me a beautiful example. Twoaspiring young women, of the limp-limbed, short-haired, æstheticspecies, were standing rapt before the circular Madonna at the Uffizi. They had gazed at it long and lovingly, seeing it bore on its frame themagic name of Botticelli. Of a sudden one of the pair happened to look alittle nearer at the accusing label. "Why, this is not Sandro, " shecried, with a revulsion of disgust; "this is only Aless. " Andstraightway they went off from the spot in high dudgeon at having beenmisled as they supposed into examining the work of "another person ofthe same name. "

Need I point the moral of my apologue, in this age of enlightenment, byexplaining, for the benefit of the junior members, that the gentleman'sfull name was really Alessandro, and that both abbreviations areimpartially intended to cover his one and indivisible personality? Thefirst half is official, like Alex. ; the second affectionate andfamiliar, like Sandy. 

Still, even after making due allowance for such humbugs as these, a vastresiduum remains of people who, if born sixty years ago, could never byany possibility have been made to see there was anything admirable inLippi, Botticelli, Giotto; but who, having been born thirty years ago, see it without an effort. Hundreds who read these lines must themselvesremember the unmistakable thrill of genuine pleasure with which theyfirst gazed upon the Fra Angelicos at San Marco, the Memlings at Bruges, the Giottos in the Madonna dell' Arena at Padua. To many of us, thoseare real epochs in our inner life. To the men of fifty years ago, thebare avowal itself would have seemed little short of affected silliness. 

Is the change all due to the teaching of the teachers and the preachingof the preachers? I think not entirely. For, after all, the teachers andthe preachers are but a little ahead of the age they live in. They seethings earlier; they help to lead us up to them; but they do not whollyproduce the revolutions they inaugurate. Humanity as a whole developsconsistently along certain pre-established and predestined lines. Sooneror later, a certain point must inevitably be reached; but some of usreach it sooner, and most of us later. That's all the difference. Everygreat change is mainly due to the fact that we have all already attaineda certain point in development. A step in advance becomes inevitableafter that, and one after another we are sure to take it. In one word, what it needed a man of genius to see dimly thirty years ago, it needs asingular fool not to see clearly nowadays. 

XIV. 

_THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE. _

Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we maytherefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turndon't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel--or amarriage. 

Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathersleft off. " "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs. ""College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping. " "Rents are so highand manners so luxurious. " Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerilenonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are toput one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to dealwith a primitive instinct--the profoundest and deepest-seated instinctof humanity, save only the instincts of food and drink and ofself-preservation. Man, like all other animals, has two main functions:to feed his own organism, and to reproduce his species. Ancestral habitleads him, when mature, to choose himself a mate--because he loves her. It drives him, it urges him, it goads him irresistibly. If this profoundimpulse is really lacking to-day in any large part of our race, theremust be some correspondingly profound and adequate reason for it. Don'tlet us deceive ourselves with shallow platitudes which may do fordrawing-rooms. This is philosophy, even though post-prandial. Let us tryto take a philosophic view of the question at issue, from the point ofvantage of a biological outlook. 

Before you begin to investigate the causes of a phenomenon _quelconque_, 'tis well to decide whether the phenomenon itself is there toinvestigate. 

Taking society throughout--_not_ in the sense of those "forty families"to which the term is restricted by Lady Charles Beresford--I doubtwhether marriage is much out of fashion. Statistics show a certaindecrease, it is true, but not an alarming one. Among the labouringclasses, I imagine men, and also women, still wed pretty frequently. When people say, "Young men won't marry nowadays, " they mean young menin a particular stratum of society, roughly bounded by a silk hat onSundays. Now, when you and I were young (I take it for granted that youand I are approaching the fifties) young men did marry; even within thisrestricted area, 'twas their wholesome way in life to form an attachmentearly with some nice girl in their own set, and to start at least withthe idea of marrying her. Toward that goal they worked; for that endthey endured and sacrificed many things. True, even then, the longengagement was the rule; but the long engagement itself meant somepersistent impulse, some strong impetus marriage-wards. The desire ofthe man to make this woman his own, the longing to make this womanhappy--normal and healthy endowments of our race--had still muchdriving-power. Nowadays, I seriously think I observe in most young menof the middle class around me a distinct and disastrous weakening of theimpulse. They don't fall in love as frankly, as honestly, asirretrievably as they used to do. They shilly-shally, they pick andchoose, they discuss, they criticise. They say themselves these futilefoolish things about the club, and the flat, and the cost of living. They believe in Malthus. Fancy a young man who believes in Malthus! Theyseem in no hurry at all to get married. But thirty or forty years ago, young men used to rush by blind instinct into the toils ofmatrimony--because they couldn't help themselves. Such Laodiceanluke-warmness betokens in the class which exhibits it a weakening ofimpulse. That weakening of impulse is really the thing we have toaccount for. 

Young men of a certain type don't marry, because--they are less of youngmen than formerly. 

Wild animals in confinement seldom propagate their kind. Only a fewcaged birds will continue their species. Whatever upsets the balance ofthe organism, in an individual or a race tends first of all to affectthe rate of reproduction. Civilise the red man, and he begins todecrease at once in numbers. Turn the Sandwich Islands into a tradingcommunity, and the native Hawaiian refuses forthwith to give hostages tofortune. Tahiti is dwindling. From the moment the Tasmanians were takento Norfolk Island, not a single Tasmanian baby was born. The Jesuitsmade a model community of Paraguay; but they altered the habits of theParaguayans so fast that the reverend fathers, who were, of course, themselves celibates, were compelled to take strenuous and evengrotesque measures to prevent the complete and immediate extinction oftheir converts. Other cases in abundance I might quote an I would; but Ilimit myself to these. They suffice to exhibit the general principleinvolved; any grave upset in the conditions of life affects first and atonce the fertility of a species. 

"But colonists often increase with rapidity. " Ay, marry, do they, wherethe conditions of life are easy. At the present day most colonists go tofairly civilised regions; they are transported to their new home bysteamboat and railway; they find for the most part more abundantprovender and more wholesome surroundings than in their native country. There is no real upset. Better food and easier life, as Herbert Spencerhas shown, result (other things equal) in increased fertility. Hischapters on this subject in the "Principles of Biology" should be readby everybody who pretends to talk on questions of population. But in newand difficult colonies the increase is slight. Whatever compels greaterwear and tear of the nervous system proves inimical to the reproductivefunction. The strain and stress of co-ordination with novelcircumstances and novel relations affect most injuriously the organicbalance. The African negro has long been accustomed to agricultural toiland to certain simple arts in his own country. Transported to the WestIndies and the United States, he found life no harder than of old, ifnot, indeed, easier. He had abundant food, protection, security, a kindof labour for which he was well adapted. Instead of dying out, therefore, he was fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the earthamazingly. But the Red Indian, caught blatant in the hunting stage, refused to be tamed, and could not swallow civilisation. He pined anddwined and decreased in his "reservations. " The change was too great, too abrupt, too brusque for him. The papoose before long became anextinct animal. 

Is not the same thing true of the middle class of England? Civilisationand its works have come too quickly upon us. The strain and stress ofcorrelating and co-ordinating the world we live in are getting too muchfor us. Railways, telegraphs, the penny post, the special edition, haveplayed havoc at last with our nervous systems. We are always on thestretch, rushing and tearing perpetually. We bolt our breakfasts; wecatch the train or 'bus by the skin of our teeth, to rattle us into theCity; we run down to Scotland or over to Paris on business; we lunch inLondon and dine in Glasgow, Belfast, or Calcutta. (Excuse imagination. )The tape clicks perpetually in our ears the last quotation in Eries; thetelephone rings us up at inconvenient moments. Something is alwayshappening somewhere to disturb our equanimity; we tear open the _Times_with feverish haste, to learn that Kimberleys or Jabez Balfour havefallen, that Matabeleland has been painted red, that shares have goneup, or gone down, or evaporated. Life is one turmoil of excitement andbustle. Financially, 'tis a series of dissolving views; personally 'tisa rush; socially, 'tis a mosaic of deftly-fitted engagements. Drop outone piece, and you can never replace it. You are full next week fromMonday to Saturday--business all day, what calls itself pleasure (savethe mark!) all evening. Poor old Leisure is dead. We hurry and scurryand flurry eternally. One whirl of work from morning till night: thendress and dine: one whirl of excitement from night till morning. A snapof troubled sleep, and again _da capo_. Not an hour, not a minute, wecan call our own. A wire from a patient ill abed in Warwickshire! A wirefrom a client hard hit in Hansards! Endless editors asking for morecopy! more copy! Alter to suit your own particular trade, and 'tis thelife of all of us. 

The first generation after Stephenson and the Rocket pulled through withit somehow. They inherited the sound constitutions of the men who sat onrustic seats in the gardens of the twenties. The secondgeneration--that's you and me--felt the strain of it more severely: newmachines had come in to make life still more complicated: sixpennytelegrams, Bell and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers, perturbations pouring in from all sides incessantly; the suburbsgrowing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways, trams, bicycles, innumerable: but natheless we still endured, and presented the world allthe same with a third generation. That third generation--ah me! therecomes the pity of it! One fancies the impulse to marry and rear a familyhas wholly died out of it. It seems to have died out most in the classwhere the strain and stress are greatest. I don't think young men ofthat class to-day have the same feelings towards women of their sort asformerly. Nobody, I trust, will mistake me for a reactionary: in mostways, the modern young man is a vast improvement on you and me attwenty-five. But I believe there is really among young men in towns lesschivalry, less devotion, less romance than there used to be. That, Itake it, is the true reason why young men don't marry. With certainclasses and in certain places a primitive instinct of our race hasweakened. They say this weakening is accompanied in towns by an increasein sundry hateful and degrading vices. I don't know if that is so; butat least one would expect it. Any enfeeblement of the normal and naturalinstinct of virility would show itself first in morbid aberrations. Onthat I say nothing. I only say this--that I think the present crisis inthe English marriage market is due, not to clubs or the comfort ofbachelor quarters, but to the cumulative effect of nervousover-excitement. 

XV. 

_EYE_ VERSUS _EAR_. 

It is admitted on all hands by this time, I suppose, that the best wayof learning is by eye, not by ear. Therefore the authorities thatprescribe for us our education among all classes have decided that weshall learn by ear, not by eye. Which is just what one might expect froma vested interest. 

Of course this superiority of sight over hearing is pre-eminently trueof natural science--that is to say, of nine-tenths among the subjectsworth learning by humanity. The only real way to learn geology, forexample, is not to mug it up in a printed text-book, but to go into thefield with a geologist's hammer. The only real way to learn zoology andbotany is not by reading a volume of natural history, but by collecting, dissecting, observing, preserving, and comparing specimens. Therefore, of course, natural science has never been a favourite study in the eyesof school-masters, who prefer those subjects which can be taught in aroom to a row of boys on a bench, and who care a great deal less thannothing for any subject which isn't "good to examine in. " Educationalvalue and importance in after life have been sacrificed to the teacher'sease and convenience, or to the readiness with which the pupil'sprogress can be tested on paper. Not what is best to learn, but what isleast trouble to teach in great squads to boys, forms the staple of ourmodern English education. They call it "education, " I observe in thepapers, and I suppose we must fall in with that whim of the profession. 

But even the subjects which belong by rights to the ear can neverthelessbe taught by the eye more readily. Everybody knows how much easier it isto get up the history and geography of a country when you are actuallyin it than when you are merely reading about it. It lives and movesbefore you. The places, the persons, the monuments, the events, allbecome real to you. Each illustrates each, and each tends to impress theother on the memory. Sight burns them into the brain without consciouseffort. You can learn more of Egypt and of Egyptian history, culture, hieroglyphics, and language in a few short weeks at Luxor or Sakkarahthan in a year at the Louvre and the British Museum. The Tombs of theKings are worth many papyri. The mere sight of the temples and obelisksand monuments and inscriptions, in the places where their makersoriginally erected them, gives a sense of reality and interest to themall that no amount of study under alien conditions can possibly equal. We have all of us felt that the only place to observe Flemish art to thegreatest advantage is at Ghent and Bruges and Brussels and Antwerp; justas the only place to learn Florentine art as it really was is at theUffizi and the Bargello. 

These things being so, the authorities who have charge of our publiceducation, primary, secondary, and tertiary, have decided in theirwisdom--to do and compel the exact contrary. Object-lessons and thevisible being admittedly preferable to rote-lessons and the audible, they have prescribed that our education, so called, shall be mainly aneducation not in things and properties, but in books and reading. Theyhave settled that it shall deal almost entirely and exclusively withlanguage and with languages; that words, not objects, shall be the factsit impresses on the minds of the pupils. In our primary schools theyhave insisted upon nothing but reading and writing, with just asmattering of arithmetic by way of science. In our secondary schoolsthey have insisted upon nothing but Greek and Latin, with about an equalleaven of algebra and geometry. This mediæval fare (I am delighted thatI can thus agree for once with Professor Ray Lankester) they have thrustdown the throats of all the world indiscriminately; so much so thatnowadays people seem hardly able at last to conceive of any other than alinguistic education as possible. You will hear many good folk who talkwith contempt of Greek and Latin; but when you come to inquire what newmental pabulum they would substitute for those quaint and grotesquesurvivals of the Dark Ages, you find what they want instead is--modernlanguages. The idea that language of any sort forms no necessary elementin a liberal education has never even occurred to them. They take it forgranted that when you leave off feeding boys on straw and oats you mustsupply them instead with hay and sawdust. 

Not that I rage against Greek and Latin as such. It is well we shouldhave many specialists among us who understand them, just as it is wellwe should have specialists in Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. I merely meanthat they are not the sum and substance of educational method. They areat best but two languages of considerable importance to the student ofpurely human evolution. 

Furthermore, even these comparatively useless linguistic subjects couldthemselves be taught far better by sight than by hearing. A week at Romewould give your average boy a much clearer idea of the relations of theCapitol with the Palatine than all the pretty maps in Dr. WilliamSmith's Smaller Classical Dictionary. It would give him also a sense ofthe reality of the Latin language and the Latin literature, which hecould never pick up out of a dog-eared Livy or a thumb-marked Æneid. Youhave only to look across from the top of the Janiculum, towards thewhite houses of Frascati, to learn a vast deal more about the Albanhills and the site of Tusculum than ever you could mug up from all thegeography books in the British Museum. The way to learn every subject onearth, even book-lore included, is not out of books alone, but by actualobservation. 

And yet it is impossible for any one among us to do otherwise thanacquiesce in this vicious circle. Why? Just because no man candissociate himself outright from the social organism of which he forms acomponent member. He can no more do so than the eye can dissociateitself from the heart and lungs, or than the legs can shake themselvesfree from the head and stomach. We have all to learn, and to let ourboys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a bettereducation than the average, even if we know what it is and desire toimpart it, because the better education, though abstractly morevaluable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barredwith examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Notwhat is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" inexamination, is the test of desirability. We are the victims of asystem; and our only hope of redress is not by sporadic individualaction but by concerted rebellion. We must cry out against the abusetill at last we are heard by dint of our much speaking. In a world socomplex and so highly organised as ours, the individual can only doanything in the long run by influencing the mass--by securing theco-operation of many among his fellows. 

Meanwhile, I believe it is gradually becoming the fact that our girls, who till lately were so very ill-taught, are beginning to know more ofwhat is really worth knowing than their public-school-bred brothers. Forthe public school still goes on with the system of teaching it hasderived direct from the thirteenth century; while the girls' schools, having started fair and fresh, are beginning to assimilate certain newerideas belonging to the seventeenth and even the eighteenth. In time theymay conceivably come down to the more elementary notions of the presentgeneration. Less hampered by professions and examinations than the boys, the girls are beginning to know something now, not indeed of theuniverse in which they live, its laws and its properties, but ofliterature and history, and the principal facts about human development. Yet all the time, the boys go on as ever with Musa, Musæ, like so manyparrots, and are turned out at last, in nine cases out of ten, with justenough smattering of Greek and Latin grammar to have acquired alife-long distaste for Horace and an inconquerable incapacity forunderstanding Æschylus. One year in Italy with their eyes open would beworth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with aplatyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world aroundthem that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed todiscover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher. 

What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let ourboys' schooling interfere with their education!

XVI. 

_THE POLITICAL PUPA. _

I have picked up on the moor the chrysalis of a common Englishbutterfly. As I sit on the heather and turn it over attentively, whileit wriggles in my hands, I can't help thinking how closely it resemblesthe present condition of our British commonwealth. It is a platitude, indeed, to say that "this is an age of transition. " But it would betruer and more graphic perhaps to put it that this is an age in whichEngland, and for the matter of that every other European country aswell, is passing through something like the chrysalis stage in itsevolution. 

But, first of all, do you clearly understand what a chrysalis is drivingat? It means more than it seems; the change that goes on within thatimpassive case is a great deal more profound than most people imagine. When the caterpillar is just ready to turn into a butterfly it lies byfor a while, full of internal commotion, and feels all its organs slowlymelting one by one into a sort of indistinguishable protoplasmic pulp;chaos precedes the definite re-establishment of a fresh form of order. Limbs and parts and nervous system all disappear for a time, and thengradually grow up again in new and altered types. The caterpillar, if itphilosophised on its own state at all (which seems to be very little thehabit of well-conducted caterpillars, as of well-conducted youngladies), might easily be excused for forming just at first themelancholy impression that a general dissolution was coming over itpiecemeal. It must begin by feeling legs and eyes and nervous centresmelt away by degrees into a common indistinguishable organic pulp, outof which the new organs only slowly form themselves in obedience to thelaw of some internal impulse. But when the process is all over, and--hi, presto!--the butterfly emerges at last from the chrysalis condition, what does it find but that instead of having lost everything it has newand stronger legs in place of the old and feeble ones; it has nerves andbrain more developed than before; it has wings for flight instead ofmere creeping little feet to crawl with? What seemed like chaos wasreally nothing more than the necessary kneading up of all componentparts into a plastic condition which precedes every fresh departure inevolution. The old must fade before the new can replace it. 

Now I am not going to work this perhaps somewhat fanciful analogy todeath, or pretend it is anything more than a convenient metaphor. Still, taken as such, it is not without its luminosity. For a metaphor, bysupplying us with a picturable representation, often enables us reallyto get at the hang of the thing a vast deal better than the most solemnargument. And I fancy communities sometimes pass through just such achrysalis stage, when it seems to the timid and pessimistic in theirmidst as if every component element of the State (but especially the onein which they themselves and their friends are particularly interested)were rushing violently down a steep place to eternal perdition. Chaosappears to be swallowing up everything. "The natural relations ofclasses" disappear. Faiths melt; churches dissolve; morals fade; bondsfail; a universal magma of emancipated opinion seems to take the placeof old-established dogma. The squires and the parsons of theperiod--call them scribes or augurs--wring their hands in despair, andcry aloud that they don't know what the world is coming to. But, afterall, it is only the chrysalis stage of a new system. The old socialorder must grow disjointed and chaotic before the new social order canbegin to evolve from it. The establishment of a plastic consistency inthe mass is the condition precedent of the higher development. 

Not, of course, that this consideration will ever afford one grain ofcomfort to the squires and the parsons of each successive epoch; forwhat _they_ want is not the reasonable betterment of the whole socialorganism, but the continuance of just this particular type of squiredomand parsonry. That is what they mean by "national welfare;" and anyinterference with it they criticise in all ages with the currentequivalent for the familiar Tory formula that "the country is going tothe devil. "

Sometimes these great social reconstructions of which I speak are forcedupon communities by external factors interfering with their fixedinternal order, as happened when the influx of northern barbarians brokeup the decaying and rotten organism of the Roman Empire. Sometimes, again, they occur from internal causes, in an acute, and so to speak, inflammatory condition, as at the French Revolution. But sometimes, asin our own time and country, they are slowly brought about by organicdevelopment, so as really to resemble in all essential points thechrysalis type of evolution. Politically, socially, theologically, ethically, the old fixed beliefs seem at such periods to grow fluid orplastic. New feelings and habits and aspirations take their place. For awhile a general chaos of conflicting opinions and nascent ideas isproduced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then neworder supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise;till at last, I'm afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for themost part just as rigid, just as definite, just as dogmatic, just asexacting, as the one it has superseded. The caterpillar has grown into aparticular butterfly. 

Through just such a period of reconstruction Europe in general andBritain in particular are now in all likelihood beginning to pass. Andthey will come out at the other end translated and transfigured. Lawsand faiths and morals will all of them have altered. There will be a newheaven and a new earth for the men and women of the new epoch. Strangethat people should make such a fuss about a detail like Home Rule, whenthe foundations of society are all becoming fluid. Don't flatteryourself for a moment that your particular little sect or yourparticular little dogma is going to survive the gentle cataclysm anymore than my particular little sect or my particular little dogma. Allalike are doomed to inevitable reconstruction. "We can't put theConstitution into the melting-pot, " said Mr. John Morley, if I recollecthis words aright. But at the very moment when he said it, in my humbleopinion, the Constitution was already well into the melting-pot, andeven beginning to simmer merrily. Federalism, or something extremelylike it, may with great probability be the final outcome of thatparticular melting; though anything else is perhaps just as probable, and in any case the melting is general, not special. The one thing wecan guess with tolerable certainty is that the melting-pot stage hasbegun to overtake us, socially, ethically, politically, ecclesiastically; and that what will emerge from the pot at the end ofit must depend at last upon the relative strength of those unknownquantities--the various formative elements. 

Being the most optimistic of pessimists, however, I will venture (afterthis disclaimer of prophecy) to prophesy one thing alone: 'Twill be abutterfly, not a grub, that comes out of our chrysalis. 

Beyond that, I hold all prediction premature. We may guess and we mayhope, but we can have no certainty. Save only the certainty that noelement will outlive the revolution unchanged--not faiths, nor classes, nor domestic relations, nor any other component factor of our complexcivilisation. All are becoming plastic in the organic plasm; all arelosing features in the common mass of the melting-pot. For that reason, I never trouble my head for a moment when people object to me that this, that, or the other petty point of detail in Bellamy's Utopia or WilliamMorris's Utopia, or my own little private and particular Utopia, isimpossible, or unrealisable, or wicked, or hateful. For these, afterall, are mere Utopias; their details are the outcome of individualwishes; what will emerge must be, not a Utopia at all, either yours ormine, but a practical reality, full of shifts and compromises mostunphilosophical and illogical--a practical reality distasteful in manyways to all us Utopia-mongers. "The Millennium by return of post" is nomore realisable to-day than yesterday. The greatest of revolutions canonly produce that unsatisfactory result, a new human organisation. 

Yet, it is something, after all, to believe at least that the grub willemerge into a full-fledged butterfly. Not, perhaps, quite as glossy inthe wings as we could wish; but a butterfly all the same, not a crawlingcaterpillar. 

XVII. 

_ON THE CASINO TERRACE. _

I have always regarded Monte Carlo as an Influence for Good. It helps tokeep so many young men off the Stock Exchange. 

Let me guard against an obvious but unjust suspicion. These remarks arenot uttered under the exhilarating effect of winning at the tables. Quite the contrary. It is the Bank that has broken the Man to-dayat Monte Carlo. They are rather due to the chastening andthought-compelling influence of persistent loss, not altogetherunbalanced by a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in anytown of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieceswhich I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god ofroulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste, by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity, and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on abrilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned andbelted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and thegleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance. 'Tis a modesttribute, my poor little forty francs. Surely the veriest puritan, theoiliest Chadband of them all, will allow a humble scribbler, at so cheapa yearly rate, to purchase wisdom, not unmixed with tolerance, at thegilded shrine of Fors Fortuna!

For what a pother, after all, the unwise of this world are wont to makeabout one stranded gambling-house, in a remote corner of Liguria! Ifthey were in earnest or sincere, how small a matter they would think it!Of course, when I say so, hypocrisy holds up its hands in holy horror. But that is the way with the purveyors of mint, cumin, and anise; theyraise a mighty hubbub over some unimportant detail--in order to feeltheir consciences clear when business compels them to rob the widow andthe orphan. In reality, though Monte Carlo is bad enough in its way--doI not pay it unwilling tribute myself twice a year out of the narrowresources of The Garret, Grub Street?--it is but a skin-deep surfacesymptom of a profound disease which attacks the heart and core in Londonand Paris. Compared with Panama, Argentines, British South Africans, andLiberators, Monte Carlo is a mole on the left ankle. 

"The Devil's advocate!" you say. Well, well, so be it. The fact is, thesupposed moral objection to gambling as such is a purely commercialobjection of a commercial nation; and the reason so much importance isattached to it in certain places is because at that particular vice menare likely to lose their money. It is largely a fetish, like thesinfulness of cards, of dice, of billiards. Moreover, the objection isonly to the _kind_ of gambling. There is another kind, less open, atwhich you stand a better chance to win yourself, while other partiesstand a better chance to lose; and that kind, which is played in greatgambling-houses known as the Stock Exchange and the Bourse, isconsidered, morally speaking, as quite innocuous. Large fortunes aremade at this other sort of gambling, which, of course, sanctifies andalmost canonises it. Indeed, if you will note, you will find not onlythat the objection to gambling pure and simple is commonest in the mostcommercial countries, but also that even there it is commonest among themost commercial classes. The landed aristocracy, the military, and thelabouring men have no objection to betting; nor have the Neapolitanlazzaroni, the Chinese coolies. It is the respectable Englishcounting-house that discourages the vice, especially among the clerks, who are likely to make the till or the cheque-book rectify the littlefailures of their flutter on the Derby. 

Observe how artificial is the whole mild out-cry: how absolutely itpartakes of the nature of damning the sins you have no mind to! Here, onthe terrace where I sit, and where ladies in needlessly costly robes arepromenading up and down to exhibit their superfluous wealthostentatiously to one another, my ear is continuously assailed by theconstant _ping, ping, ping_ of the pigeon-shooting, and my peacedisturbed by the flapping death-agonies of those miserable victims. Yethow many times have you heard the tables at Monte Carlo denounced toonce or never that you have heard a word said of the poor mangledpigeons? And why? Because nobody loses much money at pigeon-matches. That is legitimate sport, about as good and as bad as pheasant orpartridge shooting--no better, no worse, in spite of artificialdistinctions; and nobody (except the pigeons) has any interest indenouncing it. Legend has it at Monte Carlo, indeed, that when theproprietors of the Casino wished to take measures "pour attirer lesAnglais" they held counsel with the wise men whether it was best toestablish and endow an English church or a pigeon-shooting tournament. And the church was in a minority. Since then, I have heard more than oneAnglican Bishop speak evil of the tables, but I have never heard one ofthem say a good word yet for the boxed and slaughtered pigeons. 

Let me take a more striking because a less hackneyed case--one thatstill fewer people would think of. Everybody who visits Monte Carlo getsthere, of course, by the P. L. M. If you know this coast at all you willknow that P. L. M. Is the curt and universal abbreviation for the Paris, Lyon, Méditerranée Railway Company--in all probability the most giganticand wickedest monopoly on the face of this planet. Yet you never onceheard a voice raised yet against the company as a company. Individualcomplaints get into the _Times_, of course, about the crowding of the_train de luxe_, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomfortsof the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit acrossthe popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which MonteCarlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuseconnects the three biggest towns in France--Paris, Lyon, Marseilles--andis absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; and it doesit, regardless--I say "regardless, " without qualification, because theP. L. M. Regards nobody and nothing. Yet one hears of no righteousindignation, no uprising of the people in their angry thousands, nomoral recognition of the monopoly as a Wicked Thing, to be fought toothand nail, without quarter given. It probably causes a greater aggregateof human misery in a week than Monte Carlo in a century. Besides, theone is compulsory, the other optional. You needn't risk a louis on thetables unless you choose, but, like it or lump it, if you're bound forNice or Cannes or Mentone, you must open your mouth and shut your eyesand see what P. L. M. Will send you. Our own railways, indeed, are by nomeans free from blame at the hands of the Democracy: the South-Easternhas not earned the eternal gratitude of its season-ticket holders; thechildren of the Great Western do not rise up and call it blessed. (Except, indeed, in the most uncomplimentary sense of blessing. ) But theP. L. M. Goes much further than these; and I have always held that the onesolid argument for eternal punishment consists in the improbability thatits Board of Directors will be permitted to go scot-free for ever afterall their iniquities. 

I am not wholly joking. I mean the best part of it. Great monopoliesthat abuse their trust are far more dangerous enemies of public moralsthan an honest gambling-house at every corner. Monte Carlo as it standsis just a concentrated embodiment of all the evils of our anti-socialsystem, and the tables are by far the least serious among them. It is anInfluence for Good, because it mirrors our own world in all its naked, all its over-draped hideousness. There it rears its meretricious head, that gaudy Palace of Sin, appropriately decked in its Haussmanesquearchitecture and its coquettish gardens, attracting to itself all theidle, all the vicious, all the rich, all the unworthy, from every cornerof Europe and America. But Monte Carlo didn't make them; it only gathersto its bosom its own chosen children from the places where they areproduced--from London, Paris, Brussels, New York, Berlin, St. Petersburg. The vices of our organisation begot these over-rich folk, begot their diamond-decked women, and their clipped French poodles withgold bangles spanning their aristocratic legs. These are the spawn ofland-owning, of capitalism, of military domination, of High Finance, ofall the social ills that flesh is heir to. I feel as I pace the terracein the broad Mediterranean sunshine, that I am here in the midst of thevery best society Europe affords. That is to say, the very worst. Thedukes and the money-lenders, the Jay Goulds and the Reinachs. Theidlest, the cruellest: the hereditary drones, the successfulblood-suckers. But to find fault with them only for trying towin one another's ill-gotten gold at a fair and open game of_trente-et-quarante_, with the odds against them, and then to saynothing about the way they came by it, is to make a needless fuss abouta trifle of detail, while overlooking the weightiest moral problems ofhumanity. 

Whoever allows red herrings like these to be trailed across the path ofhis moral consciousness, to the detriment of the scent which should leadhim straight on to the lairs of gigantic evils, deserves little crediteither for conscience or sagacity. My son, be wise. Strike at the rootof the evil. Let Monte Carlo go, but keep a stern eye on Londonground-rents. 

XVIII. 

_THE CELTIC FRINGE. _

We Celts henceforth will rule the roost in Britain. 

What is that you mutter? "A very inopportune moment to proclaim thefact. " Well, no, I don't think so. And I'm sorry to hear you say it, forif there _is_ a quality on which I plume myself, it's the delicate tactthat makes me refrain from irritating the susceptibilities of thesensitive Saxon. See how polite I am to him! I call him sensitive. But, opportune or inopportune, Lord Salisbury says we are a Celtic fringe. Ibeg to retort, we are the British people. 

"Conquered races, " say my friends. Well, grant it for a moment. But incivilised societies, conquerors have, sooner or later, to amalgamatewith the conquered. And where the vanquished are more numerous, theyabsorb the victors instead of being absorbed by them. That is theNemesis of conquest. Rome annexed Etruria; and Etruscan Mæcenas, Etruscan Sejanus organised and consolidated the Roman Empire. Romeannexed Italy; and the _Jus Italicum_ grew at last to be the full Romanfranchise. Rome annexed the civilised world; and the provinces underCæsar blotted out the Senate. Britain is passing now through theself-same stage. One inevitable result of the widening of the electoratehas been the transfer of power from the Teutonic to the Celtic half ofBritain. I repeat, we are no longer a Celtic fringe: at the polls, inParliament, we are the British people. Lord Salisbury may fail toperceive that fact, or, as I hold more probable, may affect to ignoreit. What will such tactics avail? The ostrich is not usually countedamong men as a perfect model of political wisdom. 

And _are_ we, after all, the conquered peoples? Meseems, I doubt it. They say we Celts dearly love a paradox--which is perhaps only thesensible Saxon way of envisaging the fact that we catch at new truthssomewhat quicker than other people. At any rate, 'tis a pet littleparadox of my own that we have never been conquered, and that to ourunconquered state we owe in the main our Radicalism, our Socialism, ouringrained love of political freedom. We are tribal not feudal; we thinkthe folk more important than his lordship. The Saxon of the south-eastis the conquered man: he has felt on his neck for generations the heelof feudalism. He is slavish; he is snobbish; he dearly loves a lord. Heshouts himself hoarse for his Beaconsfield or his Salisbury. Tilllately, in his rural avatar, he sang but one song--

 "God bless the squire and his relations, And keep us in our proper stations. "

Trite, isn't it? but so is the Saxon intelligence. 

Seriously--for at times it is well to be serious--South-Eastern England, the England of the plains, has been conquered and enslaved in a dozenages by each fresh invader. Before the dawn of history, Heaven knowswhat shadowy Belgæ and Iceni enslaved it. But historical time will serveour purpose. The Roman enslaved it, but left Caledonia and Hiberniafree, the Cambrian, the Silurian, the Cornishman half-subjugated. TheSaxon and Anglian enslaved the east, but scarcely crossed over thewatershed of the western ocean. The Dane, in turn, enslaved the Saxon inEast Anglia and Yorkshire. The Norman ground all down to a commonservitude between the upper and nether millstones of the feudalsystem--the king and the nobleman. At the end of it all, TeutonicEngland was reduced to a patient condition of contented serfdom: it hadaccommodated itself to its environment: no wish was left in it for theassertion of its freedom. To this day, the south-east, save whereleavened and permeated by Celtic influences, hugs its chains and lovesthem. It produces the strange portent of the Conservative working-man, who yearns to be led by Lord Randolph Churchill. 

With the North and the West, things go wholly otherwise. Even Cornwall, the earliest Celtic kingdom to be absorbed, was rather absorbed thanconquered. I won't go into the history of the West Welsh of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall at full length, because it would take ten pages toexplain it; and I know that readers are too profoundly interested in theShocking Murder in the Borough Road to devote half-an-hour to the originand evolution of their own community. It must suffice to say that theDevonian and Cornubian Welsh coalesced with the West Saxon forresistance to their common enemy the Dane, and that the West Saxonkingdom was made supreme in Britain by the founder of the Englishmonarchy--one Dunstan, a monk from the West Welsh Abbey of Glastonbury. Wales proper, overrun piecemeal by Norman filibusterers, was roughlyannexed by the Plantagenet kings; but it was only pacified under theWelsh Tudors, and was never at any time thoroughly feudalised. Glendower's rebellion, Richmond's rebellion, the Wesleyan revolt, theRebecca riots, the tithe war, are all continuous parts of the ceaselessreaction of gallant little Wales against Teutonic aggression. "An alienChurch" still disturbs the Principality. The Lake District andAyrshire--Celtic Cumbria and Strathclyde--only accepted by degrees thesupremacy of the Kings of England and Scotland. The brother of a ScotchKing was Prince of Cumbria, as the elder son of an English King wasPrince of Wales. Indeed, David of Cumbria, who became David I. OfScotland, was the real consolidator of the Scotch kingdom. Cumbria wasno more conquered by the Saxon Lothians than Scotland was conquered bythe accession of James I. Or by the Act of Union. That means absorption, conciliation, a certain degree of tribal independence. For Ireland, weknow that the "mere Irish" were never subjugated at all till the days ofHenry VII. ; that they had to be reconquered by Cromwell and by Williamof Orange; that they rebelled more or less throughout the eighteenthcentury; and that they have been thorns in the side of Tory Englandthrough the whole of the nineteenth. As for the Highlands, they held outagainst the Stuarts till England had rejected that impossible dynasty;and then they rallied round the Stuarts as the enemies of the Saxon. General Wade's roads and the forts in the Great Glen, aided by a fewtrifles of Glencoe massacres, kept them quiet for a moment. But it wasonly for a moment. The North is once more in open revolt. Dr. Clark andthe crofters are its mode of expressing itself. 

Nor is that all. The Celtic ideas have remained unaltered. Of course, Iam not silly enough to believe there is any such thing as a Celtic race. I use the word merely as a convenient label for the league of theunconquered peoples in Britain. Ireland alone contains half-a-dozenraces; and none of them appear to have anything in common with the Pictof Aberdeenshire or the West-Welsh of Cornwall. All I mean when I speakof Celtic ideas and Celtic ideals is the ideas and ideals proper andcommon to unconquered races. As compared with the feudalised andcontented serf of South-Eastern England, are not the Irish peasant, theScotch clansman, the "statesman" of the dales, the Cornish miner, freemen every soul of them? English landlordism, imposed from without uponthe crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside, has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, thenative resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has beenbrutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; thewest and north still retain the instincts of freemen. 

As long as South-Eastern England and the Normanised or feudalised Saxonlowlands of Scotland contained all the wealth, all the power, and mostof the population of Britain, the Celtic ideals had no chance ofrealising themselves. But the industrial revolution of the presentcentury has turned us right-about-face, has transferred the balance ofpower from the secondary strata to the primary strata in Britain; fromthe agricultural lowlands to the uplands of coal and iron, the cottonfactories, the woollen trade. Great industrial cities have grown up inthe Celtic or semi-Celtic area--Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Belfast, Aberdeen, Cardiff. The Celt--that is tosay, the mountaineer and the man of the untouched country--reproduceshis kind much more rapidly than the Teuton. The Highlander and theIrishman swarm into Glasgow; the Irishman and the Welshman swarm intoLiverpool; the west-countryman into Bristol; Celts of all types intoLondon, Southampton, Newport, Birmingham, Sheffield. This eastwardreturn-wave of Celts upon the Teuton has leavened the whole mass; if youlook at the leaders of Radicalism in England you will find they bear, almost without exception, true Celtic surnames. Chartists and Socialistsof the first generation were marshalled by men of Cymric descent, likeErnest Jones and Robert Owen, or by pure-blooded Irishmen like FergusO'Connor. It is not a mere accident that the London Socialists of thepresent day should be led by Welshmen like William Morris, or by theeloquent brogue of Bernard Shaw's audacious oratory. We Celts now lurkin every corner of Britain; we have permeated it with our ideas; we haveinspired it with our aspirations; we have roused the Celtic remnant inthe south-east itself to a sense of their wrongs; and we are marchingto-day, all abreast, to the overthrow of feudalism. If Lord Salisburythinks we are a Celtic fringe he is vastly mistaken. But he doesn'treally think so: 'tis a piece of his ponderous Saxon humour. Talk of"Batavian grace, " indeed! Well, the Cecils came first from the fens ofLincolnshire. 

XIX. 

_IMAGINATION AND RADICALS. _

Conservatism, I believe, is mainly due to want of imagination. 

In saying this, I do not for a moment mean to deny the other and equallyobvious truth that Conservatism, in the lump, is a euphemism forselfishness. But the two ideas have much in common. Selfish people areapt to be unimaginative: unimaginative people are apt to be selfish. Clearly to realise the condition of the unfortunate is the beginning ofphilanthropy. Clearly to realise the rights of others is the beginningof justice. "Put yourself in his place" strikes the keynote of ethics. Stupid people can only see their own side of a question: they cannoteven imagine any other side possible. So, as a rule, stupid people areConservative. They cling to what they have; they dread revision, redistribution, justice. Also, if a man has imagination he is likely tobe Radical, even though selfish; while if he has no imagination he islikely to be Conservative, even though otherwise good and kind-hearted. Some men are Conservative from defects of heart, while some areConservative from defects of head. Conversely, most imaginative peopleare Radical; for even a bad man may sometimes uphold the side of rightbecause he has intelligence enough to understand that things might bebetter managed in the future for all than they are in the present. 

But when I say that Conservatism is mainly due to want of imagination, Imean more than that. Most people are wholly unable to conceive in theirown minds any state of things very different from the one they have beenborn and brought up in. The picturing power is lacking. They canconceive the past, it is true, more or less vaguely--because they havealways heard things once were so, and because the past is generallyrealisable still by the light of the relics it has bequeathed to thepresent. But they can't at all conceive the future. Imagination failsthem. Innumerable difficulties crop up for them in the way of everyproposed improvement. Before there was any County Council for London, such people thought municipal government for the metropolis an insolubleproblem. Now that Home Rule quivers trembling in the balance, they thinkit would pass the wit of man to devise in the future a federal leaguefor the component elements of the United Kingdom; in spite of the factthat the wit of man has already devised one for the States of the Union, for the Provinces of the Dominion, for the component Cantons of theSwiss Republic. To the unimaginative mind difficulties everywhere seemalmost insuperable. It shrinks before trifles. "Impossible!" saidNapoleon. "There is no such word in my dictionary!" He had been trainedin the school of the French Revolution--which was _not_ carried out byunimaginative pettifoggers. 

To people without imagination any change you propose seems at onceimpracticable. They are ready to bring up endless objections to the modeof working it. There would be this difficulty in the way, and thatdifficulty, and the other one. You would think, to hear them talk, theworld as it stands was absolutely perfect, and moved without a hitch inall its bearings. They don't see that every existing institution justbristles with difficulties--and that the difficulties are met or gotover somehow. Often enough while they swallow the camel of existingabuses they strain at some gnat which they fancy they see flying in atthe window of Utopia or of the Millennium. "If your reform werecarried, " they say in effect, "we should, doubtless, get rid of such andsuch flagrant evils; but the streets in November would be just as muddyas ever, and slight inconvenience might be caused in certain improbablecontingencies to the duke or the cotton-spinner, the squire or themine-owner. " They omit to note that much graver inconvenience is causedat present to the millions who are shut out from the fields and thesunshine, who are sweated all day for a miserable wage, or who areforced to pay fancy prices for fuel to gratify the rapacity of a handfulof coal-grabbers. 

Lack of imagination makes people fail to see the evils that are; makesthem fail to realise the good that might be. 

I often fancy to myself what such people would say if land had alwaysbeen communal property, and some one now proposed to hand it overabsolutely to the dukes, the squires, the game-preservers, and thecoal-owners. "'Tis impossible, " they would exclaim; "the thing wouldn'tbe workable. Why, a single landlord might own half Westminster! A singlelandlord might own all Sutherlandshire! The hypothetical Duke ofWestminster might put bars to the streets; he might impede locomotion;he might refuse to let certain people to whom he objected take up theirresidence in any part of his territory; he might prevent them fromfollowing their own trades or professions; he might even descend to suchpetty tyranny as tabooing brass plates on the doors of houses. And whatwould you do then? The thing isn't possible. The Duke of Sutherland, again, might shut up all Sutherlandshire; might turn whole vast tractsinto grouse-moor or deer-forest; might prevent harmless tourists fromwalking up the mountains. And surely free Britons would never submit to_that_. The bare idea is ridiculous. The squire of a rural parish mightturn out the Dissenters; might refuse to let land for the erection ofchapels; might behave like a petty King Augustus of Scilly. Indeed, there would be nothing to prevent an American alien from buying upsquare miles of purple heather in Scotland, and shutting the inhabitantsof these British Isles out of their own inheritance. Sites might berefused for needful public purposes; fancy prices might be asked forpure cupidity. Speculators would job land for the sake of unearnedincrement; towns would have to grow as landlords willed, irrespective ofthe wants or convenience of the community. Theoretically, I don't evensee that Lord Rothschild mightn't buy up the whole area of Middlesex, and turn London into a Golden House of Nero. Your scheme can't beworked. The anomalies are too obvious. "

They are indeed. Yet I doubt whether the unimaginative would quite haveforeseen them: the things they foresee are less real and possible. Butthey urge against every reform such objections as I have parodied; andthey urge them about matters of far less vital importance. The existingsystem exists; they know its abuses, its checks and its counter-checks. The system of the future does not yet exist; and they can't imagine howits far slighter difficulties could ever be smoothed over. They are notthe least staggered by the appalling reality of the Duke of Westminsteror the Duke of Sutherland; not the least staggered by the sinister powerof a conspiracy of coal-owners to paralyse a great nation with thehorrors of a fuel famine. But they _are_ staggered by their bogey thatState ownership of land might give rise to a certain amount of jobberyand corruption on the part of officials. They think it better that thedukes and the squires should get all the rent than that the State shouldget most of it, with the possibility of a percentage being corruptlyembezzled by the functionaries who manage it. This shows want ofimagination. It is as though one should say to one's clerk, "All yourincome shall be paid in future to the Duke of Westminster, and not toyourself, for his sole use and benefit; because we, your employers, areafraid that if we give you your salary in person, you may let some of itbe stolen from you or badly invested. " How transparently absurd! We wantour income ourselves, to spend as we please. We would rather risk losingone per cent. Of it in bad investments than let all be swallowed up bythe dukes and the landlords. 

It is the same throughout. Want of imagination makes people exaggeratethe difficulties and dangers of every new scheme, because they can'tpicture constructively to themselves the details of its working. Menwith great picturing power, like Shelley or Robespierre, are always veryadvanced Radicals, and potentially revolutionists. The difficulty _they_see is not the difficulty of making the thing work, but the difficultyof convincing less clear-headed people of its desirability andpracticability. A great many Conservatives, who are Conservative fromselfishness, would be Radicals if only they could feel for themselvesthat even their own petty interests and pleasures are not reallymenaced. The squires and the dukes can't realise how much happier eventhey would be in a free, a beautiful, and a well-organised community. Imaginative minds can picture a world where everything is so orderedthat life comes as a constant æsthetic delight to everybody. They knowthat that world could be realised to-morrow--if only all others couldpicture it to themselves as vividly as they do. But they also know thatit can only be attained in the end by long ages of struggle, and by slowevolution of the essentially imaginative ethical faculty. For rightaction depends most of all, in the last resort, upon a graphicconception of the feelings of others. 

XX. 

_ABOUT ABROAD. _

The place known as Abroad is not nearly so nice a country to live in asEngland. The people who inhabit Abroad are called Foreigners. They arein every way and at all times inferior to Englishmen. 

These Post-Prandials used once to be provided with a sting in theirtail, like the common scorpion. By way of change, I turn them out nowwith a sting in their head, like the common mosquito. Mosquitoes aremuch less dangerous than scorpions, but they're a deal more irritating. 

Not that I am sanguine enough to expect I shall irritate Englishmen. Your Englishman is far too cock-sure of the natural superiority ofBritons to Foreigners, the natural superiority of England to Abroad, ever to be irritated by even the gentlest criticism. He accepts it allwith lordly indifference. He brushes it aside as the elephant mightbrush aside the ineffective gadfly. No proboscis can pierce thatpachydermatous hide of his. If you praise him to his face, he acceptsyour praise as his obvious due, with perfect composure and without theslightest elation. If you blame him in aught, he sets it down to yourignorance and mental inferiority. You say to him, "Oh, Englishman, youare great; you are wise; you are rich beyond comparison. You are noble;you are generous; you are the prince among nations. " He smiles a calmsmile, and thinks you a very sensible fellow. But you add, "Oh, my lord, if I may venture to say so, there is a smudge on your nose, which I makebold to attribute to the settlement of a black on your intelligentcountenance. " He is not angry. He is not even contemptuously amused. Heresponds, "My friend, you are wrong. There is never a smudge on myimmaculate face. No blacks fly in London. The sky is as clear there inNovember as in August. All is pure and serene and beautiful. " Youanswer, "Oh, my lord, I admit the force of your profound reasoning. Youlight the gas at ten in the morning only to show all the world you canafford to burn it. " At that, he gropes his way along Pall Mall to hisclub, and tells the men he meets there how completely he silenced you. 

And yet, My Lord Elephant, there is use in mosquitoes. Mr. MattieuWilliams once discovered the final cause of fleas. Certain people, saidhe, cannot be induced to employ the harmless necessary tub. For them, Providence designed the lively flea. He compels them to scratchthemselves. By so doing they rouse the skin to action and get rid ofimpurities. Now, this British use of the word Abroad is a smudge on theface of the otherwise perfect Englishman. Perchance a mosquito-bite mayinduce him to remove it with a little warm water and a cambricpocket-handkerchief. 

To most Englishmen, the world divides itself naturally into two unequaland non-equivalent portions--Abroad and England. Of these two, Abroad ismuch the larger country; but England, though smaller, is vastly moreimportant. Abroad is inhabited by Frenchmen and Germans, who speak theirown foolish and chattering languages. Part of it is likewise pervaded byChinamen, who wear pigtails; and the outlying districts belong to thepoor heathen, chiefly interesting as a field of missionary enterprise, and a possible market for Manchester piece-goods. We sometimes investour money abroad, but then we are likely to get it swallowed up inMexicans or Egyptian Unified. If you ask most people what has become ofTom, they will answer at once with the specific information, "Oh, Tomhas gone Abroad. " I have one stereotyped rejoinder to an answer likethat. "What part of Abroad, please?" That usually stumps them. Abroad isAbroad; and like the gentleman who was asked in examination to "name theminor prophets, " they decline to make invidious distinctions. It isnothing to them whether he is tea-planting in the Himalayas, orsheep-farming in Australia, or orange-growing in Florida, or ranching inColorado. If he is not in England, why then he is elsewhere; andelsewhere is Abroad, one and indivisible. 

In short, Abroad answers in space to that well-known and definite date, the Olden Time, in chronology. 

People will tell you, "Foreigners do this"; "Foreigners do that";"Foreigners smoke so much"; "Foreigners always take coffee forbreakfast. " "Indeed, " I love to answer; "I've never observed it myselfin Central Asia. " 'Tis Parson Adams and the Christian religion. NineEnglish people out of ten, when they talk of Abroad, mean what they callthe Continent; and when they talk of the Continent, they mean France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy; in short, the places most visited byEnglishmen when they consent now and again to go Abroad for a holiday. "I don't like Abroad, " a lady once said to me on her return from Calais. Foreigners, in like manner, means Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Italians. In the country called Abroad, the most important parts are the partsnearest England; of the people called Foreigners, the most important arethose who dress like Englishmen. The dim black lands that lie below thehorizon are hardly worth noticing. 

Would it surprise you to learn that most people live in Asia? Would itsurprise you to learn that most people are poor benighted heathen, andthat, of the remainder, most people are Mahommedans, and that of theChristians, who come next, most people are Roman Catholics, and that, ofthe other Christian sects, most people belong to the Greek Church, andthat, last of all, we get Protestants, more particularly Anglicans, Wesleyans, Baptists? Have you ever really realised the startling factthat England is an island off the coast of Europe? that Europe is apeninsula at the end of Asia? that France, Germany, Italy, are thefringe of Russia? Have you ever really realised that theEnglish-speaking race lives mostly in America? that the country isvastly more populous than London? that our class is the froth and thescum of society? Think these things out, and try to measure them on theglobe. And when you speak of Abroad, do please specify what part of it. 

Abroad is not all alike. There are differences between Poland, Peru, andPalestine. What is true of France is not true of Fiji. Distinguishcarefully between Timbuctoo, Tobolsk, and Toledo. 

It is not our insularity that makes us so insular. 'Tis a gift of thegods, peculiar to Englishmen. The other inhabitants of these Isles ofBritain are comparatively cosmopolitan. The Scotchman goes everywhere;the world is his oyster. Ireland is an island still more remote thanGreat Britain; but the Irishman has never been so insular as theEnglish. I put that down in part to his Catholicism: his priests havebeen wheels in a world-wide system; his relations have been with Douai, St. Omer, and Rome; his bishops have gone pilgrimages and sat on VaticanCouncils; his kinsmen are the MacMahons in France, the O'Donnels inSpain, the Taafes in Austria. Even in the days of the Regency this wasso: look at Lever and his heroes! When England drank port, County Claredrank claret. But ever since the famine, Ireland has expanded. EveryIrishman has cousins in Canada, in Australia, in New York, in SanFrancisco. The Empire is Irish, with the exception of India; and India, of course, is a Scotch dependency. Irishmen and Scotchmen have no suchfeelings about Abroad and its Foreigners as Londoners entertain. ButEnglishmen never quite get over the sense that everybody must needsdivide the world into England and Elsewhere. To the end no Englishmanreally grasps the fact that to Frenchmen and Germans he himself is aforeigner. I have met John Bulls who had passed years in Italy, but whospoke of the countrymen of Cæsar and Dante and Leonardo and Garibaldiwith the contemptuous toleration one might feel towards a child or anAndaman Islander. These Italians could build Giotto's campanile; couldpaint the Transfiguration; could carve the living marble on the tombs ofthe Medici; could produce the Vita Nuova; could beget Galileo, Galvani, Beccaria; but still--they were Foreigners. Providence in its wisdom hasdecreed that they must live Abroad--just as it has decreed that acomprehension of the decimal system and its own place in the worldshould be limitations eternally imposed upon the English intellect. 

XXI. 

_WHY ENGLAND IS BEAUTIFUL. _

As I strolled across the moor this afternoon towards Waverley, I sawJones was planting out that bare hillside of his with Douglas pines andScotch firs and new strains of silver birches. They will improve thelandscape. And I thought as I scanned them, "How curious that mostpeople entirely overlook this constant betterment and beautifying ofEngland! You hear them talk much of the way bricks and mortar areinvading the country; you never hear anything of this slow and silentprocess of planting and developing which has made England into theprettiest and one of the most beautiful countries in Europe. "

What's that you say? "Astonished to find I have a good word of any sortto put in for England!" Why, dear me, how irrational you are! I just_love_ England. Can any man with eyes in his head and a soul for beautydo otherwise? England and Italy--there you have the two great glories ofEurope. Italy for towns, for art, for man's handicraft; England forcountry, for nature, for green lanes and lush copses. Was it not onethat loved Italy well who sighed in Italy--

 "Oh, to be in England now that April's there?"

And who that loves Italy, and knows England, too, does not echoBrowning's wish when April comes round again on dusty Tuscan hilltops?At Perugia, last spring, through weeks of tramontana, how one yearnedfor the sight of yellow English primroses! Not love England, indeed!Milton's England, Shelley's England; the England of the skylark, thedog-rose, the honeysuckle! Not love England, forsooth! Why, I love everyflower, every blade of grass in it. Devonshire lane, close-cropped down, rich water-meadow, bickering brooklet: ah me, how they tug at one'sheartstrings in Africa! No son of the soil can love England as thoselove her very stones who have come from newer lands over sea to herivy-clad church-towers, her mouldering castles, her immemorial elms, theberries on her holly, the may in her hedgerows. Are not all these boundup in our souls with each cherished line of Shakespeare and Wordsworth?do they not rouse faint echoes of Gray and Goldsmith? Even before I everset foot in England, how I longed to behold my first cowslip, my firstfoxglove! And now, I have wandered through the footpaths that runobliquely across English pastures, picking meadowsweet and fritillaries, for half a lifetime, till I have learned by heart every leaf and everypetal. You think because I dislike one squalid village--"The Wen, " stoutEnglish William Cobbett delighted to call it--I don't love England. Youthink because I see some spots on the sun of the English character, Idon't love Englishmen. Why, how can any man who speaks the Englishtongue, and boasts one drop of English blood in his veins, not be proudof England? England, the mother of poets and thinkers; England, thatgave us Newton, Darwin, Spencer; England, that holds in her lap Oxford, Salisbury, Durham; England of daisy and heather and pine-wood! Are wehewn out of granite, to be cold before England?

Upon my soul, your unseasonable interruption has almost made me forgetwhat I was going to say; it has made me grow warm, and drop into poetry. 

England, I take it, is certainly the prettiest country in Europe. It isalmost the most beautiful. I say "almost, " because I bethink me ofNorway and Switzerland. I say "country, " because I bethink me of Rome, Venice, Florence. But, taking it as country, and as country alone, nothing else approaches it. Have you ever thought why? Man made thetown, says the proverb, and God made the country. Not so in England. There, man made the country, and beautified it exceedingly. In itself, the land of south-eastern England is absolutely the same as the land ofNorthern France--that hideous tract about Boulogne and Amiens which wetraverse in silence every time we run across by Calais to Paris. Chalkand clay and sandstone stretch continuously under sea from Kent andSussex to Flanders and Picardy. The Channel burst through, and made theStraits of Dover; but the land on either side was and still isgeologically and physically identical. What has made the difference?Man, the planter and gardener. England is beautiful by copse andhedgerow, by pine-clad ridge and willow-covered hollow, by meadowsinterspersed with great spreading oaks, by pastures where drowsy sheep, deep-fleeced and ruddy-stained, huddle under the shade of ancestralbeech-trees. Its loveliness is human. In itself, I believe, the actualcontour of England cannot once have been much better than the contour ofnorthern France--though nowadays it is hard indeed to realise it. Judicious planting, and a constant eye to picturesque effect in scenery, have made England what she is--the garden of Europe. 

Of course there are parts of the country which owed, and still owe, their beauty to their wildness--Dartmoor, Exmoor, the West Riding ofYorkshire, the Surrey hills, the Peak in Derbyshire. Yet even thesedepend more than you would believe, when you take them in detail, on theart of the forester. The view from Leith Hill embraces John Evelyn'swoods at Wotton: the larches that cover one Jura-like gorge were setthere well within your and my memory. But elsewhere in England the handof man has done absolutely everything. The American, when he firstvisits England, is charmed on his way up from Liverpool to London by theexquisite air of antique cultivation and soft rural beauty. The verysward is moss-like. Thoroughly wild country, indeed, unless bold andmountainous, does not often please one. It is apt to be bare, unattractive, and desolate. Witness the Veldt, the Steppes, theprairies. You may go through miles and miles of the States and Canada, where the wildness for the most part rather repels than delights you. Ido not say everywhere; in places the wilderness will blossom like arose; boggy margins of lakes, fallen trunks in the forest overgrown withwild flowers, make scenes unattainable in our civilised England. Evenour roughest scenery is comparatively man-made: our heaths are gamepreserves; our woodlands are thinned of superfluous underbrush; ourmoors are relieved by deliberate plantations. But England in her own wayis unique and unrivalled. Such parks, such greensward, such grassylawns, such wooded tilth, are wholly unknown elsewhere. Compare theblank fields and long poplar-fringed high roads of central France withour Devon or our Warwickshire, and you get at once a just measure of thevast, the unspeakable difference. 

And man has done it all. Alone he did it. Often as I take my walksabroad--and when I say abroad I mean in England--I see men at workdotting about exotics of variegated foliage on some barren hillside, andI say to myself, "There, before my eyes, goes on the beautifying ofEngland. " Thirty years ago, the North Downs near Dorking were one barestretch of white chalky sheep-walk; half of them still remain so; theother half has been planted irregularly with copses and spinneys, whichserve to throw up and enhance the beauty of the unaltered intervals. Beech and larch in autumn tints set off smooth patches of grass andjuniper. Within the last few years, the downs about Leatherhead havebeen similarly diversified. Much of the loveliness of rural England isdue, one must frankly confess, to the big landlords. Though the greathouses love us not, we must allow at least that the great houses havecared for the trees in the hedge-rows, and for the timber in themeadows, as well as for the covert that sheltered their pheasants, theirfoxes, and their gamekeepers. But almost as much of England's charm isdue to individual small owners or occupiers. 'Tis they who have plantedthe grounds about villa or cottage; they who have stocked the sweet oldgardens of yew and box, of hollyhock and peony; they who have given usthe careless rustic grace of the English village. Still, one way oranother, man has done it all, whether in grange or in manor-house, inpalatial estate or in labourer's holding. Look at the French or Belgianhamlet by the side of the English one; look at the French or Belgianfarm by the side of our English wealth in wooded glen or shelteredhomestead. Bricks and mortar are _not_ covering the whole of England. That is only true of the squalid purlieus and outliers of London, whither Londoners gravitate by mutual attraction. If you _will_ go andlive in a dingy suburb, you can't reasonably complain that all theworld's suburban. Being the most cheerful of pessimists, a dweller inthe country all the days of my life, I have no hesitation in expressingmy profound conviction that within my memory more has been done tobeautify than to uglify England. Only, the beautification has been quietand unobtrusive, while the uglification has been obvious andconcentrated. It takes half a year to jerry-build a dingy street, but ittakes a decade for newly-planted trees to give the woodland air byimperceptible stages to a stretch of country. 

XXII. 

_ANENT ART PRODUCTION. _

Yesterday, at Bordighera, I strolled up the hills behind the town toSasso. It is a queer little cluster of gleaming white-washed houses thattop the crest of a steep ridge; and, like many other Italian villages, it makes a brave show from a distance, though within it is full of evilsmells and all uncleanness. But I found it had a church--a picturesquelyugly and dilapidated church; and without and within, this church wasdecorated by inglorious hands with very naïve and rudimentary frescoes. The Four Evangelists were there, in flowing blue robes; and the FourGreater Prophets, with long white beards; and the Madonna, appearing inmost wooden clouds; and the Patron Saint tricked out for his Festa ingorgeous holiday episcopal vestments. That was all--just the commoneveryday Italian country church that everybody has seen turned out topattern with manufacturing regularity a hundred times over! Yet, as Isat among the olive-terraces looking down the steep slope into theBorghetto valley, and across the gorge to the green pines on the Cima, it set me thinking. 'Tis a bad habit one falls into when one has nothingbetter to turn one's mind to. 

We English, coming to Italy with our ideas fully formed about everythingon heaven and earth, naturally say to ourselves, "Great heart alive, what sadly degraded frescoes! To think the art of Raphael and Andrea delSarto should degenerate even here, in their own land, to such a childishlevel!" But we are wrong, for all that. It is Raphael and Andrea whorose, not my poor nameless Sasso artists who sank and degenerated. Italywas capable of producing her great painters in her own great day, justbecause in thousands of such Italian villages there were work-a-dayartisans in form and colour capable of turning out such ridiculous daubsas those that decorate this tawdry church on the Ligurian hilltop. 

We English, in short, think of it all the wrong way uppermost. We thinkof it topsy-turvy, beginning at the end, while evolution invariablybegins at the beginning. The Raphaels and Andreas, to put it in brief, were the final flower and fullest outcome of whole races of churchdecorators in infantile fresco. 

Everywhere you go in Italy, this truth is forced upon your attentioneven to the present day. Art here is no exotic. It smacks of the soil;it springs spontaneous, like a weed; it burgeons of itself out of theheart of the people. Not high art, understand well; not the art ofBurne-Jones and Whistler and Puvis de Chavannes and Sar Peladan. Commonplace everyday art, that is a trade and a handicraft, like thejoiner's or the shoemaker's. Look up at your ceiling; it's overrun withfestoons of crude red and blue flowers, or it's covered with cupids andgraces, or it bristles with arabesques and unmeaning phantasies. Everywall is painted; every grotto decorated. Sham landscapes, sham loggias, sham parapets are everywhere. The sham windows themselves are provided, not only with sham blinds and sham curtains, but even with shamcoquettes making sham eyes or waving sham handkerchiefs at passers-bybelow them. Open-air fresco painting is still a living art, an artpractised by hundreds and thousands of craftsmen, an art as alive ascookery or weaving. The Italian decorates everything; his pottery, hishouse, his church, his walls, his palaces. And the only difference hefeels between the various cases is, that in some of them a higher typeof art is demanded by wealth and skill than in the others. No wonder, therefore, he blossomed out at last into Michael Angelo's frescoes inthe Sistine Chapel!

To us English, on the contrary, high art is something exotic, separate, alone, _sui generis_. We never think of the plaster star in the middleof our ceiling as belonging even to the same range of ideas as, say, thefrescoes in the Houses of Parliament. 

A nation in such a condition as that is never truly artistic. The artistwith us, even now, is an exceptional product. Art for a long time inEngland had nothing at all to do with the life of the people. It was aluxury for the rich, a curious thing for ladies' and gentlemen'sconsumption, as purely artificial as the stuccoed Italian villa in whichthey insisted on shivering in our chilly climate. And the pictures itproduced were wholly alien to the popular wants and the popularfeelings; they were part of an imported French, Italian, and Flemishtradition. English art has only slowly outgrown this stage, just inproportion as truly artistic handicrafts have sprung up here and there, and developed themselves among us. Go into the Cantagalli or the Ginoripotteries at Florence, and you will see mere boys and girls, untrainedchildren of the people, positively disporting themselves, with childishglee, in painting plates and vases. You will see them, not slavishlycopying a given design of the master's, but letting their fancy run riotin lithe curves and lines, in griffons and dragons and floraltwists-and-twirls of playful extravagance. They revel in ornament. Now, it is out of the loins of people like these that great artists spring bynature--not State-taught, artificial, made-up artists, but the realspontaneous product, the Lippi and Botticelli, the hereditary craftsmen, the born painters. And in England nowadays it is a significant fact thata large proportion of the truest artists--the innovators, the men whoare working out a new style of English art for themselves, in accordancewith the underlying genius of the British temperament, have sprung fromthe great industrial towns--Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester--whereartistic handicrafts are now once more renascent. I won't expose myselfto further ridicule by repeating here (what I nevertheless would firmlybelieve, were it not for the scoffers) that a large proportion of themare of Celtic descent--belong, in other words, to that section of thecomplex British nationality in which the noble traditions of decorativeart never wholly died out--that section which was never altogetherenslaved and degraded by the levelling and cramping and soul-destroyinginfluences of manufacturing industrialism. 

In Italy, art is endemic. In England, in spite of all we have done tostimulate it of late years with guano and other artificial manures, itis still sporadic. 

The case of music affords us an apt parallel. Till very lately, Ibelieve, our musical talent in Britain came almost entirely from thecathedral towns. And why? Because there, and there alone, till quite arecent date, there existed a hereditary school of music, a training ofmusicians from generation to generation among the mass of the people. Not only were the cathedral services themselves a constant school oftaste in music, but successive generations of choristers and organistsgave rise to something like a musical caste in our episcopal centres. Itis true, our vocalists have always come mainly from Wales, from theScotch Highlands, from Yorkshire, from Ireland. But for that there is, Ibelieve, a sufficient physical reason. For these are clearly the mostmountainous parts of the United Kingdom; and the clear mountain airseems to produce on the average a better type of human larynx than themists of the level. The men of the lowland, say the Tyrolese, croak likefrogs in their marshes; but the men of the upland sing like nightingaleson their tree-tops. And indeed, it would seem as if the mountain peoplewere always calling to one another across intervening valleys, alwayssinging and whistling and shouting over their work in a way that givestone to the whole vocal mechanism. Witness Welsh penillion singing. Andwherever this fine physical endowment goes hand in hand with a delicateear and a poetic temperament, you get your great vocalist, your SimsReeves or your Patti. But in England proper it was only in the cathedraltowns that music was a living reality to the people; and it was in thecathedral towns, accordingly, during the dark ages of art, thatexceptional musical ability was most likely to show itself. Moreparticularly was this so on the Welsh border, where the two favouringinfluences of race and practice coincided--at Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, long known for the most musical towns in England. 

Cause and effect act and react. Art is a product of the artistictemperament. The artistic temperament is a product of the longhereditary cultivation of art. And where a broad basis of thistemperament exists among the people, owing to intermixture ofartistically-minded stocks, one is liable to get from time to time thatpeculiar combination of characteristics--sensuous, intellectual, spiritual--which results in the highest and truest artist. 

XXIII. 

_A GLIMPSE INTO UTOPIA. _

You ask me what would be the position of women in an ideal community. Well, after dinner, imagination may take free flight. Suppose, till thecoffee comes, we discuss that question. 

Woman, I take it, differs from man in being the sex sacrificed toreproductive necessities. 

Whenever I say this, I notice my good friends, the women's-rights women, with whom I am generally in pretty close accord, look annoyed and hurt. I can never imagine why. I regard this point as an original inequalityof nature, which it should be the duty of human society to redress asfar as possible, like all other inequalities. Women are not on theaverage as tall as men; nor can they lift as heavy weights, or undergo, as a rule, so much physical labour. Yet civilised society recognisestheir equal right to the protection of our policemen, and endeavours toneutralise their physical inequality by the collective guarantee of allthe citizens. In the same way I hold that women in the lump have acertain disadvantage laid upon them by nature, in the necessity thatsome or most among them should bear children; and this disadvantage Ithink the men in a well-ordered State would do their best to compensateby corresponding privileges. If women endure on our behalf the greatpublic burden of providing future citizens for the community, the leastwe can do for them in return is to render that burden as honourable andas little onerous as possible. I can never see that there is anythingunchivalrous in frankly admitting these facts of nature; on thecontrary, it seems to me the highest possible chivalry to recognise inwoman, as woman, high or low, rich or poor, the potential mother, whohas infinite claims on that ground alone to our respect and sympathy. 

Nor do I mean to deny, either, that the right to be a mother is a sacredand peculiar privilege of women. In a well-ordered community, I believe, that privilege will be valued high, and will be denied to no fittingmother by any man. While maternity is from one point of view a painfulduty, a burden imposed upon a single sex for the good of the whole, itis from another point of view a privilege and a joy, and from a thirdpoint of view the natural fulfilment of a woman's own instincts, thecomplement of her personality, the healthy exercise of her normalfunctions. Just as in turn the man's part in providing physically forthe support of the woman and the children is from one point of view aburden imposed upon him, but from another point of view a preciousprivilege of fatherhood, and from a third point of view the properoutlet for his own energy and his own faculties. 

In an ideal State, then, I take it, almost every woman would be amother, and almost every woman a mother of not more than about fourchildren. An average of something like four is necessary, we know, tokeep up population, and to allow for infant mortality, inevitablecelibates, and so forth. Few women in such a State would abstain frommaternity, save those who felt themselves physically or morally unfittedfor the task; for in proportion as they abstained, either the State mustlack citizens to carry on its life, or an extra and undue burden wouldhave to be cast upon some other woman. And it may well be doubtedwhether in a well-ordered and civilised State any one woman couldadequately bear, bring up, and superintend the education of more thanfour young citizens. Hence we may conclude that while no woman save theunfit would voluntarily shirk the duties and privileges of maternity, few (if any) women would make themselves mothers of more than fourchildren. Four would doubtless grow to be regarded in such a communityas the moral maximum; while it is even possible that improvedsanitation, by diminishing infant mortality and adult ineffectiveness, might make a maximum of three sufficient to keep up the normal strengthof the population. 

In an ideal community, again, the woman who looked forward to this greattask on behalf of the race would strenuously prepare herself for itbeforehand from childhood upward. She would not be ashamed of suchpreparation; on the contrary, she would be proud of it. Her duty wouldbe no longer "to suckle fools and chronicle small beer, " but to produceand bring up strong, vigorous, free, able, and intelligent citizens. Therefore, she must be nobly educated for her great and importantfunction--educated physically, intellectually, morally. Let us forecasther future. She will be well clad in clothes that allow of lithe andeven development of the body; she will be taught to run, to play games, to dance, to swim; she will be supple and healthy, finely moulded andknit in limb and organ, beautiful in face and features, splendid andgraceful in the native curves of her lissom figure. No crampingconventions will be allowed to cage her; no worn-out moralities will betied round her neck like a mill-stone to hamper her. Intellectually shewill be developed to the highest pitch of which in each individual caseshe proves herself capable--educated, not in the futile linguisticstudies which have already been tried and found wanting for men, but inrealities and existences, in the truths of life, in recognition of herown and our place among immensities. She will know something worthknowing of the world she lives in, its past and its present, thematerial of which it is made, the forces that inform it, the energiesthat thrill through it. Something, too, of the orbs that surround it, ofthe sun that lights it, of the stars that gleam upon it, of the seasonsthat govern it. Something of the plants and herbs that clothe it, of theinfinite tribes of beast and bird that dwell upon it. Something of thehuman body, its structure and functions, the human soul, its origin andmeaning. Something of human societies in the past, of institutions andlaws, of creeds and ideas, of the birth of civilisation, of progress andevolution. Something, too, of the triumphs of art, of sculpture andpainting, of the literature and the poetry of all races and ages. Hermind will be stored with the best thoughts of the thinkers. Morally, shewill be free; her emotional development, instead of being narrowlychecked and curbed, will have been fostered and directed. She will havea heart to love, and be neither ashamed nor afraid of it. Thus nurturedand trained, she will be a fit mate for a free man, a fit mother forfree children, a fit citizen for a free and equal community. 

Her life, too, will be her own. She will know no law but her higherinstincts. No man will be able to buy or to cajole her. And in orderthat she may possess this freedom to perfection, that she may be nohusband's slave, no father's obedient and trembling daughter, I can seebut one way: the whole body of men in common must support in perfectliberty the whole body of women. The collective guarantee must protectthem against individual tyranny. Thus only can women be safe from thebribery of the rich husband, from the dictation of the father from whomthere are "expectations. " In the ideal State, I take it, every womanwill be absolutely at liberty to dispose of herself as she will, and noman will be able to command or to purchase her, to influence her in anyway, save by pure inclination. 

In such a State, most women would naturally desire to be mothers. Beinghealthy, strong, and free, they would wish to realise the utmostpotentialities of their own organisms. And when they had done their dutyas mothers, they would not care much, I imagine, for any further outletsfor their superfluous energy. I don't doubt they would gratify to thefull their artistic sensibilities and their thirst for knowledge. Theywould also perform their duties to the State as citizens, no less thanthe men. But having done these things I fancy they would have doneenough; the margin of their life would be devoted to dignified andcultivated leisure. They would leave to men the tilling of the soil, thebuilding and navigation of marine or aerial ships, the working of minesand metals, the erection of houses, the construction of roads, railways, and communications, perhaps even the entire manufacturing work of thecommunity. Medicine and the care of the sick might still be a charge tosome; education to most; art, in one form or another, to almost all. Butthe hard work of the world might well be left to men, upon whom it morenaturally and fitly devolves. No hateful drudgery of "earning alivelihood. " Women might rest content with being free and beautiful, cultivated and artistic, good citizens to the State, the mothers andguardians of the coming generations. If any woman asks more than this, she is really asking less--for she is asking that a heavier burdenshould be cast on some or most of her sex, in order to relieve theminority of a duty which to well-organised women ought to be aprivilege. 

"But all this has no practical bearing!" I beg your pardon. An ideal hasoften two practical uses. In the first place, it gives us a patterntowards which we may approximate. In the second place, it gives us astandard by which we may judge whether any step we propose to take is astep forward or a step backward. 

XXIV. 

_OF SECOND CHAMBERS. _

A Second Chamber acts as a drag. Progress is always uphill work. So weare at pains to provide a drag beforehand--for an uphill journey. 

There, in one word, you have the whole philosophy of Second Chambers. 

How, then, did the nations of Europe come to hamper their legislativesystems with such a useless, such an illogical adjunct? In sackcloth andashes, let us confess the truth--we English led them astray: on us theshame; to us the dishonour. Theorists, indeed (wise after the fact, asis the wont of theorists), have discovered or invented an imaginaryfunction for Second Chambers. They are to preserve the people, it seems, from the fatal consequences of their own precipitancy. As though thepeople--you and I--the vast body of citizens, were a sort of foolishchildren, to be classed with infants, women, criminals, and imbeciles (Iadopt the chivalrous phraseology of an Act of Parliament), incapable ofknowing their own minds for two minutes together, and requiring to bekept straight by the fatherly intervention of Dukes of Marlborough orMarquises of Ailesbury. The ideal picture of the level-headed peersrestraining the youthful impetuosity of the representatives of thepeople from committing to-day some rash act which they would gladlyrepent and repeal to-morrow, is both touching and edifying. But itexists only in the minds of the philosophers, who find a reason foreverything just because it is there. Members of Parliament, I haveobserved, seem to know their own minds every inch as well as earls--nay, even as marquises. 

The plain fact of the matter is, all the Second Chambers in the worldare directly modelled upon the House of Lords, that Old Man of the Seawhom England, the weary Titan, is now striving so hard to shake off hershoulders. The mother of Parliaments is responsible for every one ofthem. Senates and Upper Houses are just the result of irrationalAnglomania. When constitutional government began to exist, men turnedunanimously to the English Constitution as their model and pattern. Thatwas perfectly natural. Evolutionists know that evolution never proceedson any other plan than by reproduction, with modification, of existingstructures. America led the way. She said, "England has a House ofCommons; therefore we must have a House of Representatives. England hasalso a House of Lords; nature has not dowered us with those exaltedproducts, but we will do what we can; we will imitate it by a Senate. "Monarchical France followed her lead; so did Belgium, Italy, civilisation in general. I believe even Japan rejoices to-day in theaugust dignity of a Second Chamber. But mark now the irony of it. Theyall of them did this thing to be entirely English. And just about thetime when they had completed the installation of their peers or theirsenators, England, who set the fashion, began to discover in turn shecould manage a great deal better herself without them. 

And then what do the philosophers do? Why, they prove to you thenecessity of a Second Chamber by pointing to the fact that all civilisednations have got one--in imitation of England. Furthermore, it beingtheir way to hunt up abstruse and recondite reasons for what is on theface of it ridiculous, they argue that a Second Chamber is a necessarywheel in the mechanism of popular representative government. A foolishphrase, which has come down to us from antiquity, represents thepopulace as inevitably "fickle, " a changeable mob, to be restrained bythe wisdom of the seniors and optimates. As a matter of fact, thepopulace is never anything of the sort. It is dogged, slow, conservative, hard to move; it advances step by step, a patient, sure-footed beast of burden; and when once it has done a thing, it nevergoes back upon it. I believe this silly fiction of the "fickleness" ofthe mob is mainly due to the equally silly fictions of prejudiced Greekoligarchs about the Athenian assembly--which was an assembly ofwell-to-do and cultivated slave-owners. I do not swallow all thatThucydides chooses to tell us in his one-sided caricature about Cleon'sappointment to the command at Sphacteria, or about the affair ofMitylene; and even if I did, I think it has nothing to do with thequestion. But on such utterly exploded old-world ideas is the wholemodern argument of the Second Chamber founded. 

Does anybody really believe great nations are so incapable of managingtheir own affairs for themselves through their duly-electedrepresentatives that they are compelled to check their own boyish ardourby means of the acts of an irresponsible and non-elective body? Doesanybody believe that the House of Commons works too fast, and getsthrough its public business too hurriedly? Does anybody believe weimprove things in England at such a break-neck pace that we require theassistance of Lord Salisbury and Lord St. Leonards to prevent us fromrushing straight down a steep place into the sea, like the swine ofGadara? If they do, I congratulate them on their psychological acumenand their political wisdom. 

What the Commons want is not a drag, but a goad--nay, rather, asnow-plough. 

No; the plain truth of the matter is this: all the Second Chambers inthe world owe their existence, not to any deliberate plan or reason, butto the mere accident that the British nobles, not having a room bigenough to sit in with the Commons, took to sitting separately, andtransacted their own business as a distinct assembly. With so muchwisdom are the kingdoms of the earth governed! How else could any one inhis senses have devised the idea of creating one deliberative body onpurpose to mutilate or destroy the work of another? to produce from timeto time a periodical crisis or a periodical deadlock? There is not acountry in the world with a Second Chamber that doesn't twice a yearkick and plunge to get rid of it. 

The House of Lords was once a reality. It consisted of theecclesiastical hierarchy--the bishops and mitred abbots; with theofficial hierarchy--the great nobles, who were also great satraps ofprovinces, and great military commanders. It was thus mainly made up ofpractical life-members, appointed by merit. The peers, lay andspiritual, were the men who commended themselves to the sovereign asable administrators. Gradually, with prolonged peace, the hereditaryelement choked and swamped the nominated element. The abbotsdisappeared, the lords multiplied. The peer ceased to be the leader of ashire, and sank into a mere idle landowner. Wealth alone grew at last tobe a title to the peerage. The House of Lords became a House ofLandlords. And the English people submitted to the claim ofirresponsible wealth or irresponsible acres to exercise a veto uponnational legislation. The anomaly, utterly indefensible in itself, hadgrown up so slowly that the public accepted it--nay, even defended it. And other countries, accustomed to regard England--the Pecksniff amongnations--as a perfect model of political wisdom, swallowed half theanomaly, and all the casuistical reasoning that was supposed to justifyit, without a murmur. But if we strip the facts bare from the glamourthat surrounds them, the plain truth is this--England allows an assemblyof hereditary nobodies to retard or veto its legislation nowadays, simply because it never noticed the moment when a practical House ofadministrative officers lapsed into a nest of plutocrats. 

Mend or end? As it stands, the thing is a not-even-picturesque mediævalrelic. If we English were logical, we would arrange that any man whoowned so many thousand acres of land, or brewed so many million bottlesof beer per annum, should _ipso facto_ be elevated to the peerage. Whyshould not gallons of gin confer an earldom direct, and Brighton A's beequivalent to a marquisate? Why not allow the equal claim of screws andpills with coal and iron? Why disregard the native worth of annatto andnitrates? Baron Beecham or Lord Sunlight is a first-rate name. As it is, we make petty and puerile distinctions. Beer is in, but whiskey is out;and even in beer itself, if I recollect aright, Dublin stout wore acoronet for some months or years before English pale ale attained thedignity of a barony. No Minister has yet made chocolate a viscount. Atpresent, banks and minerals go in as of right, while soap is left out inthe cold, and even cotton languishes. If the Chancellor of the Exchequerput up titles to auction, while abolishing the legislative function ofthe Lords, there would be millions in it. But as we English are notlogical, our mending would probably resolve itself into fatuoustinkering. We might get rid of the sons, but leave the fathers. We mightflood the Lords with life peers, but leave the veto. Such tactics aretoo Britannic. "Stone dead hath no fellow!"

XXV. 

_A POINT OF CRITICISM. _

A few pages back, I ventured to remark that in Utopia or the Millenniumthe women of the community would probably be supported in common by thelabour of the men, and so be secured complete independence of choice andaction. When these essays first appeared in a daily newspaper, a Leaderamong Women wrote to me in reply, "What a paradise you open up to us!Alas for the reality! The question is--could women ever be reallyindependent if men supplied the means of existence? They would alwaysfeel they had the right to control us. The difference of the position ofa woman in marriage when she has got a little fortune of her own issomething miraculous. Men adore money, and the possession of it inspiresthem with an involuntary respect for the happy possessor. "

Now I got a great many letters in answer to these Post-Prandials as theyoriginally came out--some of them, strange to say, not whollycomplimentary. As a rule, I am too busy a man to answer letters: and Itake this opportunity of apologising to correspondents who write to tellme I am a knave or a fool, for not having acknowledged direct theircourteous communications. But this friendly criticism seems to call fora reply, because it involves a question of principle which I have oftennoted in all discussions of Utopias and Millennia. 

For my generous critic seems to take it for granted that women are notnow dependent on the labour of men for their support--that some, or evenmost of them, are in a position of freedom. The plain truth of itis--almost all women depend for everything upon one man, who is or maybe an absolute despot. A very small number of women have "money of theirown, " as we quaintly phrase it--that is to say, are supported by thelabour of many among us, either in the form of rent or in the form ofinterest on capital bequeathed to them. A woman with five thousand ayear from Consols, for example, is in the strictest sense supported bythe united labour of all of us--she has a first mortgage to that amountupon the earnings of the community. You and I are taxed to pay her. Butis she therefore more dependent than the woman who lives upon what shecan get out of the scanty earnings of a drunken husband? Does thecommunity therefore think it has a right to control her? Not a bit ofit. She is in point of fact the only free woman among us. My dream wasto see all women equally free--inheritors from the community of so muchof its earnings; holders, as it were, of sufficient world-consols tosecure their independence. 

That, however, is not the main point to which I desire just now todirect attention. I want rather to suggest an underlying fallacy of allso-called individualists in dealing with schemes of so-calledSocialism--for to me your Socialist is the true and only individualist. My correspondent's argument is written from the standpoint of the classin which women have or may have money. But most women have none; andschemes of reconstruction must be for the benefit of the many. So-calledindividualists seem to think that under a more organised social statethey would not be so able to buy pictures as at present, not so free torun across to California or Kamschatka. I doubt their premiss, for Ibelieve we should all of us be better off than we are to-day; but letthat pass; 'tis a detail. The main thing is this: they forget that mostof us are narrowly tied and circumscribed at present by endlessmonopolies and endless restrictions of land or capital. I should like tobuy pictures; but I can't afford them. I long to see Japan; but I shallnever get there. The man in the street may desire to till the ground:every acre is appropriated. He may wish to dig coal: Lord Mashamprevents him. He may have a pretty taste in Venetian glass: the flintson the shore are private property; the furnace and the implements belongto a capitalist. Under the existing _régime_, the vast mass of us arehampered at every step in order that a few may enjoy huge monopolies. Most men have no land, so that one man may own a county. And they callthis Individualism!

In considering any proposed change, whether imminent or distant, inpractice or in day-dream, it is not fair to take as your standard ofreference the most highly-favoured individuals under existingconditions. Nor is it fair to take the most unfortunate only. You shouldlook at the average. 

Now the average man, in the world as it wags, is a farm-labourer, anartisan, a mill-hand, a navvy. He has untrammelled freedom of contractto follow the plough on another man's land, or to work twelve hours aday in another man's factory, for that other man's benefit--providedalways he can only induce the other man to employ him. If he can't, heis at perfect liberty to tramp the high road till he drops with fatigue, or to starve, unhindered, on the Thames Embankment. He may live where helikes, as far as his means permit; for example, in a convenient courtoff Seven Dials. He may make his own free bargain with grasping landlordor exacting sweater. He may walk over every inch of English soil, withthe trifling exception of the millions of acres where trespassers willbe prosecuted. Even travel is not denied him: Florence and Venice areout of his beat, it is true; but if he saves up his loose cash for acouple of months, he may revel in the Oriental luxury of a third-classexcursion train to Brighton and back for three shillings. Suchadvantages does the _régime_ of landlord-made individualism afford tothe average run of British citizen. If he fails in the race, he mayretire at seventy to the ease and comfort of the Union workhouse, and beburied inexpensively at the cost of his parish. 

The average woman in turn is the wife of such a man, dependent upon himfor what fraction of his earnings she can save from the public-house. Orshe is a shop-girl, free to stand all day from eight in the morning tillten at night behind a counter, and to throw up her situation if itdoesn't suit her. Or she is a domestic servant, enjoying the gloriousliberty of a Sunday out every second week, and a walk with her young manevery alternate Wednesday after eight in the evening. She has full leaveto do her love-making in the open street, and to get as wet as shechooses in Regent's Park on rainy nights in November. Look the questionin the face, and you will see for yourself that the mass of mothers inevery community are dependent for support, not upon men in general, butupon a single man, their husband, against whose caprices and despotismthey have no sort of protection. Even the few women who are, as we say, "independent, " how are they supported, save by the labour of many menwho work to keep them in comfort or luxury? They are landowners, let usput it; and then they are supported by the labour of their farmers andploughmen. Or they hold North-Western shares; and then they aresupported by the labour of colliers, and stokers, and guards, andengine-drivers. And so on throughout. The plain fact is, either a womanmust earn her own livelihood by work, which, in the case of the mothersin a community, is bad public policy; or else she must be supported by aman or men, her husband, or her labourers. 

My day-dream was, then, to make every woman independent, in preciselythe same sense that women of property are independent at present. Wouldit give them a consciousness of being unduly controlled if they derivedtheir support from the general funds of the body politic, of which theywould be free and equal members and voters? Well, look at similar casesin our own England. The Dukes of Marlborough derive a heavy pension fromthe taxes of the country; but I have never observed that any Duke ofMarlborough of my time felt himself a slave to the imperious taxpayer. Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace is justly the recipient of a Civil Listannuity; but that hasn't prevented his active and essentiallyindividualist brain from inventing Land Nationalisation. Mr. RobertBuchanan very rightly draws another such annuity for good work done; butMr. Buchanan's name is not quite the first that rises naturally to mylips as an example of cowed and cringing sycophancy to the ideas andideals of his fellow-citizens. No, no; be sure of it, this terror is aphantom. One master is real, realisable, instant; but to be dependentupon ten million is just what we always describe as independence. 

THE END. 

 PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON.