A MODERN SYMPOSIUM

BY

G. LOWES DICKINSON

 "LIFE LIKE A DOME OF MANY-COLOURED GLASS STAINS THE WHITE RADIANCE OF ETERNITY"

LONDON

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

MUSEUM STREET

 FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1905 REPRINTED 1930 REPRINTED 1934

 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY UNWIN BROTHERS LTD. , WOKING

 FRATRUM SOCIETATI FRATRUM MINIMUS

THE SPEAKERS

 LORD CANTILUPE A TORY

 ALFRED REMENHAM A LIBERAL

 REUBEN MENDOZA A CONSERVATIVE

 GEORGE ALLISON A SOCIALIST

 ANGUS MACCARTHY AN ANARCHIST

 HENRY MARTIN A PROFESSOR

 CHARLES WILSON A MAN OF SCIENCE

 ARTHUR ELLIS A JOURNALIST

 PHILIP AUDUBON A MAN OF BUSINESS

 AUBREY CORYAT A POET

 SIR JOHN HARINGTON A GENTLEMAN OF LEISURE

 WILLIAM WOODMAN A MEMBER OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

 GEOFFRY VIVIAN A MAN OF LETTERS

A MODERN SYMPOSIUM

SOME of my readers may have heard of a club known as the Seekers. Itis now extinct; but in its day it was famous, and included a number ofmen prominent in politics or in the professions. We used to meet oncea fortnight on the Saturday night, in London during the winter, but inthe summer usually at the country house of one or other of the members, where we would spend the week-end together. The member in whose housethe meeting was held was chairman for the evening; and after the paperhad been read it was his duty to call upon the members to speak in whatorder he thought best. On the occasion of the discussion which I am torecord, the meeting was held in my own house, where I now write, on theNorth Downs. The company was an interesting one. There was Remenham, then Prime Minister, and his great antagonist Mendoza, both of whomwere members of our society. For we aimed at combining the mostopposite elements, and were usually able, by a happy traditioninherited from our founder, to hold them suspended in a temporaryharmony. Then there was Cantilupe, who had recently retired frompublic life, and whose name, perhaps, is already beginning to beforgotten. Of younger men we had Allison, who, though still engaged inbusiness, was already active in his socialist propaganda. AngusMacCarthy, too, was there, a man whose tragic end at Saint Petersburgis still fresh in our minds. And there were others of less note;Wilson, the biologist, Professor Martin, Coryat, the poet, and one ortwo more who will be mentioned in their place. 

After dinner, the time of year being June, and the weather unusuallywarm, we adjourned to the terrace for our coffee and cigars. The airwas so pleasant and the prospect so beautiful, the whole weald ofSussex lying before us in the evening light, that it was suggested weshould hold our meeting there rather than indoors. This was agreed. But it then transpired that Cantilupe, who was to have read the paper, had brought nothing to read. He had forgotten, or he had been toobusy. At this discovery there was a general cry of protest. Cantilupe's proposition that we should forgo our discussion wasindignantly scouted; and he was pressed to improvise something on thelines of what he had intended to write. This, however, he steadilydeclined to attempt; and it seemed as though the debate would fallthrough, until it occurred to me to intervene in my capacity aschairman. 

"Cantilupe, " I said, "certainly ought to be somehow penalized. Andsince he declines to improvise a paper, I propose that he improvise aspeech. He is accustomed to doing that; and since he has now retiredfrom public life, this may be his last opportunity. Let him employ it, then, in doing penance. And the penance I impose is, that he shouldmake a personal confession. That he should tell us why he has been apolitician, why he has been, and is, a Tory, and why he is now retiringin the prime of life. I propose, in a word, that he should give us hispoint of view. That will certainly provoke Remenham, on whom I shallcall next. He will provoke someone else. And so we shall all findourselves giving our points of view, and we ought to have a veryinteresting evening. " This suggestion was greeted, if not withenthusiasm, at least with acquiescence. Cantilupe at first objectedstrongly, but yielded to pressure, and on my calling formally upon himrose reluctantly from his seat. For a minute or two he stood silent, humping his shoulders and smiling through his thick beard. Then, inhis slow, deliberate way, he began as follows:

"Why I went into politics? Why did I? I'm sure I don't know. Certainly I wasn't intended for it. I was intended for a countrygentleman, and I hope for the rest of my life to be one; which, perhaps, if I were candid, is the real reason of my retirement. But Iwas pushed into politics when I was young, as a kind of family duty;and once in it's very hard to get out again. I'm coming out nowbecause, among other things, there's no longer any place for me. Toryism is dead. And I, as you justly describe me, am a Tory. But youwant to know why? Well, I don't know that I can tell you. Perhaps Iought to be able to. Remenham, I know, can and will give you theclearest possible account of why he is a Liberal. But then Remenhamhas principles; and I have only prejudices. I am a Tory because I wasborn one, just as another man is a Radical because he was born one. But Remenham, I really believe, is a Liberal, because he has convincedhimself that he ought to be one. I admire him for it, but I am quiteunable to understand him. And, for my own part, if I am to defend, orrather to explain myself, I can only do so by explaining my prejudices. And really I am glad to have the opportunity of doing so, if onlybecause it is a satisfaction occasionally to say what one thinks; athing which has become impossible in public life. 

"The first of my prejudices is that I believe in inequality. I'm notat all sure that that is a prejudice confined to myself--most peopleseem to act upon it in practice, even in America. But I not onlyrecognize the fact, I approve the ideal of inequality. I don't want, myself, to be the equal of Darwin or of the German Emperor; and I don'tsee why anybody should want to be my equal. I like a society properlyordered in ranks and classes. I like my butcher or my gardener to takeoff his hat to me, and I like, myself, to stand bareheaded in thepresence of the Queen. I don't know that I'm better or worse than thevillage carpenter; but I'm different; and I like him to recognize thatfact, and to recognize it myself. In America, I am told, everyone isalways informing you, in everything they do and say, directly orindirectly, that they are as good as you are. That isn't true, and ifit were, it isn't good manners to keep saying it. I prefer a societywhere people have places and know them. They always do have places inany possible society; only, in a democratic society, they refuse torecognize them; and, consequently, social relations are much ruder, more unpleasant and less humane than they are, or used to be, inEngland. That is my first prejudice; and it follows, of course, that Ihate the whole democratic movement. I see no sense in pretending tomake people equal politically when they're unequal in every otherrespect. Do what you may, it will always be a few people that willgovern. And the only real result of the extension of the franchise hasbeen to transfer political power from the landlords to the tradingclasses and the wire-pullers. Well, I don't think the change is a goodone. And that brings me to my second prejudice, a prejudice againsttrade. I don't mean, of course, that we can do without it. A countrymust have wealth, though I think we were a much better country when wehad less than we have now. Nor do I dispute that there are to be foundexcellent, honourable, and capable men of business. But I believe thatthe pursuit of wealth tends to unfit men for the service of the state. And I sympathize with the somewhat extreme view of the ancient worldthat those who are engaged in trade ought to be excluded from publicfunctions. I believe in government by gentlemen; and the wordgentleman I understand in the proper, old-fashioned English sense, as aman of independent means, brought up from his boyhood in the atmosphereof public life, and destined either for the army, the navy, the Church, or Parliament. It was that kind of man that made Rome great, and thatmade England great in the past; and I don't believe that a country willever be great which is governed by merchants and shopkeepers andartisans. Not because they are not, or may not be, estimable people;but because their occupations and manner of life unfit them for publicservice. 

"Well, that is the kind of feeling--I won't call it a principle--whichdetermined my conduct in public life. And you will remember that itseemed to be far more possible to give expression to it when first Ientered politics than it is now. Even after the first ReformAct--which, in my opinion was conceived upon the wrong lines--thelanded gentry still governed England; and if I could have had my waythey would have continued to do so. It wasn't really parliamentaryreform that was wanted; it was better and more intelligent government. And such government the then ruling class was capable of supplying, asis shown by the series of measures passed in the thirties and forties, the new Poor Law and the Public Health Acts and the rest. Even therepeal of the Corn Laws shows at least how capable they were ofsacrificing their own interests to the nation; though otherwise Iconsider that measure the greatest of their blunders. I don't professto be a political economist, and I am ready to take it from those whosebusiness it is to know that our wealth has been increased by FreeTrade. But no one has ever convinced me, though many people havetried, that the increase of wealth ought to be the sole object of anation's policy. And it is surely as clear as day that the policy ofFree Trade has dislocated the whole structure of our society. It hassubstituted a miserable city-proletariat for healthy labourers on thesoil; it has transferred the great bulk of wealth from thecountry-gentleman to the traders; and in so doing it has more and moretransferred power from those who had the tradition of using it to thosewho have no tradition at all except that of accumulation. The verything which I should have thought must be the main business of astatesman--the determination of the proper relations of classes to oneanother--we have handed over to the chances of competition. We haveabandoned the problem in despair, instead of attempting to solve it;with the result, that our population--so it seems to me--is dailydegenerating before our eyes, in physique, in morals, in taste, ineverything that matters; while we console ourselves with the increasingaggregate of our wealth. Free Trade, in my opinion, was the firstgreat betrayal by the governing class of the country and themselves, and the second was the extension of the franchise. I do not say that Iwould not have made any change at all in the parliamentary system thathad been handed down to us. But I would never have admitted, evenimplicitly, that every man has a right to vote, still less that allhave an equal right. For society, say what we may, is not composed ofindividuals but of classes; and by classes it ought to be represented. I would have enfranchised peasants, artisans, merchants, manufacturers, as such, taking as my unit the interest, not the individual, andassigning to each so much weight as would enable its influence to befelt, while preserving to the landed gentry their preponderance. Thatwould have been difficult, no doubt, but it would have been worthdoing; whereas it was, to my mind, as foolish as it was easy simply toadd new batches of electors, till we shall arrive, I do not doubt, atwhat, in effect, is universal suffrage, without having ever admitted toourselves that we wanted to have it. 

"But what has been done is final and irremediable. Henceforth, numbers, or rather those who control numbers, will dominate England;and they will not be the men under whom hitherto she has grown great. For people like myself there is no longer a place in politics. Andreally, so far as I am personally concerned, I am rather glad to knowit. Those who have got us into the mess must get us out of it. Probably they will do so, in their own way; but they will make, in theprocess, a very different England from the one I have known andunderstood and loved. We shall have a population of city people, better fed and housed, I hope, than they are now, clever and quick andsmart, living entirely by their heads, ready to turn out in a momentfor use everything they know, but knowing really very little, and notknowing it very well. There will be fewer of the kind of people inwhom I take pleasure, whom I like to regard as peculiarly English, andwho are the products of the countryside; fellows who grow likevegetables, and, without knowing how, put on sense as they put on fleshby an unconscious process of assimilation; who will stand for an hourat a time watching a horse or a pig, with stolid moon-faces asmotionless as a pond; the sort of men that visitors from town imagineto be stupid because they take five minutes to answer a question, andthen probably answer by asking another; but who have stored up in thema wealth of experience far too extensive and complicated for them everto have taken account of it. They live by their instincts not theirbrains; but their instincts are the slow deposit of long years ofpractical dealings with nature. That is the kind of man I like. And Ilike to live among them in the way I do--in a traditional relationwhich it never occurs to them to resent, any more than it does to me toabuse it. That sort of relation you can't create; it has to grow, andto be handed down from father to son. The new men who come on to theland never manage to establish it. They bring with them the isolationwhich is the product of cities. They have no idea of any tie exceptthat of wages; the notion of neighbourliness they do not understand. And that reminds me of a curious thing. People go to town for society;but I have always found that there is no real society except in thecountry. We may be stupid there, but we belong to a scheme of thingswhich embodies the wisdom of generations. We meet not indrawing-rooms, but in the hunting-field, on the county-bench, atdinners of tenants or farmers' associations. Our private business isintermixed with our public. Our occupation does not involvecompetition; and the daily performance of its duties we feel to beitself a kind of national service. That is an order of things which Iunderstand and admire, as my fathers understood and admired it beforeme. And that is why I am a Tory; not because of any opinions I hold, but because that is my character. I stood for Toryism while it meantsomething; and now that it means nothing, though I stand for it nolonger, still I can't help being it. The England that is will last mytime; the England that is to be does not interest me; and it is as wellthat I should have nothing to do with directing it. 

"I don't know whether that is a sufficient account of the question Iwas told to answer; but it's the best I can make, and I think it oughtto be sufficient. I always imagine myself saying to God, if He asks meto give an account of myself: 'Here I am, as you made me. You can takeme or leave me. If I had to live again I would live just so. And ifyou want me to live differently, you must make me different. ' I havechampioned a losing cause, and I am sorry it has lost. But I do notbreak my heart about it. I can still live for the rest of my days thelife I respect and enjoy. And I am content to leave the nation in thehands of Remenham, who, as I see, is all impatience to reply to myheresies. "

REMENHAM in fact was fidgeting in his chair as though he found it hardto keep his seat; and I should have felt bound in pity to call upon himnext, even if I had not already determined to do so. He rose withalacrity; and it was impossible not to be struck by the contrast hepresented to Cantilupe. His elastic upright figure, his firm chin, theexuberance of his gestures, the clear ring of his voice, expressedadmirably the intellectual and nervous force which he possessed in ahigher degree than any man I have ever come across. He began withouthesitation, and spoke throughout with the trained and facile eloquenceof which he was master. "I shall, I am sure, be believed, " he said, "when I emphatically assert that nothing could be more distressing tome than the notion--if I should be driven to accept it--that theliberal measures on which, in my opinion, the prosperity and the truewelfare of the country depends should have, as one of their incidentalconcomitants, the withdrawal from public life of such men as our friendwho has just sat down. We need all the intellectual and moralresources of the country; and among them I count as not the leastvaluable and fruitful the stock of our ancient country gentlemen. Iregretted the retirement of Lord Cantilupe on public as well as onpersonal grounds; and my regret is only tempered, not altogetherremoved, when I see how well, how honourably and how happily he isemploying his well-deserved leisure. But I am glad to know that wehave still, and to believe that we shall continue to have, in the greatCouncil of the nation, men of his distinguished type and tradition toform one, and that not the least important, of the balances andcounter-checks in the great and complicated engine of state. 

"When, however, he claims--or perhaps I should rather say desires--forthe distinguished order of which he is a member, an actual andpermanent preponderance in the state, there, I confess, I must partcompany with him. Nay, I cannot even accept the theory, to which hegave expression, of a fixed and stable representation of interests. Itis indeed true that society, by the mysterious dispensation of theDivine Being, is wonderfully compounded of the most diverse elementsand classes, corresponding to the various needs and requirements ofhuman life. And it is an ancient theory, supported by the authority ofgreat names, by Plato, my revered master, the poet-philosopher, byAristotle, the founder of political science, that the problem of astatesman is so to adjust these otherwise discordant elements as toform once for all in the body-politic a perfect, a final and immutableharmony. There is, according to this view, one simple chord and oneonly, which the great organ of society is adapted to play; and thebusiness of the legislator is merely to tune the instrument so that itshall play it correctly. Thus, if Plato could have had his way, hisgreat common chord, his harmony of producers, soldiers andphilosophers, would still have been droning monotonously down the ages, wherever men were assembled to dwell together. Doubtless the concordhe conceived was beautiful. But the dissonances he would havesilenced, but which, with ever-augmenting force, peal and crash, fromhis day to ours, through the echoing vault of time, embody, as I am aptto think, a harmony more august than any which even he was able toimagine, and in their intricate succession weave the plan of aworld-symphony too high to be apprehended save in part by our grossersense, but perceived with delight by the pure intelligence of immortalspirits. It is indeed the fundamental defect of all imaginarypolities--and how much more of such as fossilize, without evenidealizing, the actual!--that even though they be perfect, theirperfection is relative only to a single set of conditions; and thatcould they perpetuate themselves they would also perpetuate these, which should have been but brief and transitory phases in the historyof the race. Had it been possible for Plato to establish over thehabitable globe his golden chain of philosophic cities, he would haveriveted upon the world for ever the institutions of slavery and caste, would have sealed at the source the springs of science and invention, and imprisoned in perennial impotence that mighty genius of empirewhich alone has been able to co-ordinate to a common and beneficent endthe stubborn and rebellious members of this growing creature Man. Andif the imagination of a Plato, permitted to work its will, would thushave sterilized the germs of progress, what shall we say of such men asourselves imposing on the fecundity of nature the limits and rules ofour imperfect mensuration! Rather should we, in humility, submitourselves to her guidance, and so adapt our institutions that theyshall hamper as little as may be the movements and forces operatingwithin them. For it is by conflict, as we have now learnt, that thehigher emerges from the lower, and nature herself, it would almostseem, does not direct but looks on, as her world emerges in painfultoil from chaos. We do not find her with precipitate zeal interveningto arrest at a given point the ferment of creation; stretching her handwhen she sees the gleam of the halcyon or the rose to bid the processcease that would destroy them; and sacrificing to the completeness ofthose lower forms the nobler imperfection of man and of what may liebeyond him. She looks always to the end; and so in our statesmanshipshould we, striving to express, not to limit, by our institutions theforces with which we have to deal. Our polity should grow, like askin, upon the living tissue of society. For who are we that we shouldsay to this man or that, go plough, keep shop, or govern the state?That we should say to the merchant, 'thus much power shall be yours, 'and to the farmer, 'thus much yours?' No! rather let us say to eachand to all, Take the place you can, enjoy the authority you can win!Let our constitution express the balance of forces in our society, andas they change let the disposition of power change with them! That isthe creed of liberalism, supported by nature herself, and sanctioned, Iwould add with reverence, by the Almighty Power, in the disposition andorder of His stupendous creation. 

"But it is not a creed that levels, nor one that destroys. None canhave more regard than I--not Cantilupe himself--for our ancient crown, our hereditary aristocracy. These, while they deserve it--and long maythey do so!--will retain their honoured place in the hearts andaffections of the people. Only, alongside of them, I would make roomfor all elements and interests that may come into being in the naturalcourse of the play of social forces. But these will be far toonumerous, far too inextricably interwoven, too rapidly changing inrelative weight and importance, for the intelligence of man to attempt, by any artificial scheme, to balance and adjust their conflictingclaims. Open to all men equally, within the limits of prudence, theavenue to political influence, and let them use, as they can and will, in combined or isolated action, the opportunities thus liberallybestowed. That is the key-note of the policy which I have consistentlyadopted from my entrance into public life, and which I am prepared toprosecute to the end, though that end should be the universal suffrageso dreaded by the last speaker. He tells me it is a policy of recklessabandonment. But abandonment to what? Abandonment to the people! Andthe question is, Do we trust the people? I do; he does not! There, Iventure to think, is the real difference between us. 

"Yes, I am not ashamed to say it, I trust the People! What should Itrust, if I could not trust them? What else is a nation but anassemblage of the talents, the capacities, the virtues of the citizensof whom it is composed? To utilize those talents, to evoke thosecapacities, to offer scope and opportunity to those virtues, must bethe end and purpose of every great and generous policy; and to thatend, up to the measure of my powers, I have striven to minister, notrashly, I hope, nor with impatience, but in the spirit of a sober andassured faith. 

"Such is my conception of liberalism. But if liberalism has itsmission at home, not less important are its principles in the region ofinternational relations. I will not now embark on the troubled sea offoreign policy. But on one point I will touch, since it was raised bythe last speaker, and that is the question of our foreign trade. In nodepartment of human activity, I will venture to say, are the intentionsof the Almighty more plainly indicated, than in this of the interchangeof the products of labour. To each part of the habitable globe havebeen assigned its special gifts for the use and delectation of Man; toevery nation its peculiar skill, its appropriate opportunities. As theworld was created for labour, so it was created for exchange. Acrossthe ocean, bridged at last by the indomitable pertinacity of art, thegranaries of the new world call, in their inexhaustible fecundity forthe iron and steel, the implements and engines of the old. Theshepherd-kings of the limitless plains of Australia, the Indian ryot, the now happily emancipated negro of Georgia and Carolina, feed and arefed by the factories and looms of Manchester and Bradford. Pall Mallis made glad with the produce of the vineyards of France and Spain; andthe Italian peasant goes clad in the labours of the Leicester artisan. The golden chain revolves, the silver buckets rise and fall; and one tothe other passes on, as it fills and overflows, the stream that poursfrom Nature's cornucopia! Such is the law ordained by the Power thatpresides over the destinies of the world; and not all the interferencesof man with His beneficent purposes can avail altogether to check andfrustrate their happy operation. Yet have the blind cupidity, theignorant apprehensions of national zeal dislocated, so far as waspossible, the wheels and cogs of the great machine, hampered itsworking and limited its uses. And if there be anything of which thisgreat nation may justly boast, it is that she has been the first totear down the barriers and dams of a perverted ingenuity, and to admitin unrestricted plenitude to every channel of her verdant meadows thelimpid and fertilizing stream of trade. 

"Verily she has had her reward! Search the records of history, and youwill seek in vain for a prosperity so immense, so continuous, soprogressive, as that which has blessed this country in the lasthalf-century of her annals. This access of wealth was admitted indeedby the speaker who preceded me. But he complained that we had taken noaccount of the changes which the new system was introducing into thecharacter and occupations of the people. It is true; and he would be arash man who should venture to forecast and to determine the remoterresults of such a policy; or should shrink from the consequences ofliberty on the ground that he cannot anticipate their character. Whichof us would have the courage, even if he had the power, to impose upona nation for all time the form of its economic life, the type of itscharacter, the direction of its enterprise? The possibilities that liein the womb of Nature are greater than we can gauge; we can butfacilitate their birth, we may not prescribe their anatomy. The evilsof the day call for the remedies of the day; but none can anticipatewith advantage the necessities of the future. And meantime what causeis there for misgiving? I confess that I see none. The policy offreedom has been justified, I contend, by its results. And soconfident am I of this, that the time, I believe, is not far distant, when other countries will awake at last to their own true interests andemulate, not more to their advantage than to ours, our fiscallegislation. I see the time approaching when the nations of the world, laying aside their political animosities, will be knitted together inthe peaceful rivalry of trade; when those barriers of nationality whichbelong to the infancy of the race will melt and dissolve in thesunshine of science and art; when the roar of the cannon will yield tothe softer murmur of the loom, and the apron of the artisan, the blouseof the peasant be more honourable than the scarlet of the soldier; whenthe cosmopolitan armies of trade will replace the militia of death;when that which God has joined together will no longer be sundered bythe ignorance, the folly, the wickedness of man; when the labour andthe invention of one will become the heritage of all; and the peoplesof the earth meet no longer on the field of battle, but by their chosendelegates, as in the vision of our greatest poet, in the 'Parliament ofMan, the Federation of the World. '"

WITH this peroration Remenham resumed his seat. He had spoken, asindeed was his habit, rather as if he were addressing a public meetingthan a company of friends. But at least he had set the ball rolling. To many of those present, as I well knew, his speech and his mannermust have been eminently provocative; and naturally to none more thanto Mendoza. I had, therefore, no hesitation in signalling out theConservative chief to give us the opposite point of view. He respondedwith deliberation, lifting from his chest his sinister Jewish face, andslowly unfolding his long body, while a malicious smile played abouthis mouth. 

"One, " he began, "who has not the privilege of immediate access to thecounsels of the Divine Being cannot but feel himself at a disadvantagein following a man so favoured as my distinguished friend. Thedisadvantage, however, is one to which I have had, perforce, to growaccustomed during long years of parliamentary strife, I have resignedmyself to creeping where he soars, to guessing where he prophesies. But there is compensation everywhere. And, perhaps, there are certainpoints which may be revealed to babes and sucklings, while they areconcealed from beings more august. The worm, I suppose, must be awareof excrescences and roughnesses of the soil which escape the morecomprehensive vision of the eagle; and to the worm, at least, these areof more importance than mountain ranges and oceans which he will neverreach. It is from that humble point of view that I shall offer a fewremarks supplementary to, perhaps even critical of, the eloquentapostrophe we have been permitted to enjoy. 

"The key-note of my friend's address was liberty. There is no Britishheart which does not beat higher at the sound of that word. But whileI listened to his impassioned plea, I could not help wondering why hedid not propose to dispense to us in even larger and more liberalmeasure the supreme and precious gift of freedom. True, he has donemuch to remove the barriers that separated nation from nation, and manfrom man. But how much remains to be accomplished before we can betruly said to have brought ourselves into line with Nature! Consider, for example, the policeman! Has my friend ever reflected on all thatis implied in that solemn figure; on all that it symbolizes ofinterference with the purposes of a beneficent Creator? The policemanis a permanent public defiance of Nature. Through him the weak rulethe strong, the few the many, the intelligent the fools. Through himsurvive those whom the struggle for existence should have eliminated. He substitutes the unfit for the fit. He dislocates the economy of theuniverse. Under his shelter take root and thrive all monstrous andparasitic growths. Marriage clings to his skirts, property nestles inhis bosom. And while these flourish, where is liberty? The law ofNature we all know:

 The good old rule, the ancient plan That he should take who has the power, And he should keep who can!

"But this, by the witchcraft of property, we have set aside. Our wallsof brick and stone we have manned with invisible guards. We havethronged with fiery faces and arms the fences of our gardens and parks. The plate-glass of our windows we have made more impenetrable thanadamant. To our very infants we have given the strength of giants. Babies surfeit, while strong men starve; and the foetus in the wombstretches out unformed hands to annex a principality. Is this liberty?Is this Nature? No! It is a Merlin's prison! Yet, monstrous, itsubsists! Has our friend, then, no power to dissolve the charm? Or, can it be that he has not the will?

"Again, can we be said to be free, can we be said to be in harmony withNature, while we endure the bonds of matrimony? While we fetter thehappy promiscuity of instinct, and subject our roving fancy to thedominion of 'one unchanging wife?' Here, indeed, I frankly admit, Nature has her revenges; and an actual polygamy flourishes even underthe aegis of our law. But the law exists; it is the warp on which, bythe woof of property, we fashion that Nessus-shirt, the Family, inwhich, we have swathed the giant energies of mankind. But while thatshirt clings close to every limb, what avails it, in the name ofliberty, to snap, here and there, a button or a lace? A more heroicwork is required of the great protagonist, if, indeed, he will followhis mistress to the end. He shakes his head. What! Is his service, then, but half-hearted after all? Or, can it be, that behind the maskof the goddess he begins to divine the teeth and claws of the brute?But if nature be no goddess, how can we accept her as sponsor forliberty? And if liberty be taken on its own merits, how is it to bedistinguished from anarchy? How, but by the due admixture of coercion?And, that admitted, must we not descend from the mountain-top ofprophecy to the dreary plains of political compromise?"

Up to this point Mendoza had preserved that tone of elaborate ironywhich, it will be remembered, was so disconcerting to Englishaudiences, and stood so much in the way of his popularity. But now hismanner changed. Becoming more serious, and I fear I must add, moredull than I had ever heard him before, he gave us what I suppose to bethe most intimate exposition he had ever permitted himself to offer ofthe Conservative point of view as he understood it. 

"These, " he resumed, "are questions which I must leave my friend toanswer for himself. The ground is too high for me. I have no skill inthe flights of speculation. I take no pleasure in the enunciation ofprinciples. To my restricted vision, placed as I am upon the earth, isolated facts obtrude themselves with a capricious particularity whichdefies my powers of generalization. And that, perhaps, is the reasonwhy I attached myself to the party to which I have the honour tobelong. For it is, I think, the party which sees things as they are;as they are, that is, to mere human vision. Remenham, in his haste, has called us the party of reaction. I would rather say, we are theparty of realism. We have in view, not Man, but Englishmen; not idealpolities, but the British Constitution; not Political Economy, but theactual course of our trade. Through this great forest of fact, thistangle of old and new, these secular oaks, sturdy shrubs, beautifulparasitic creepers, we move with a prudent diffidence, following theold tracks, endeavouring to keep them open, but hesitating to cut newroutes till we are clear as to the goal for which we are asked tosacrifice our finest timber. Fundamental changes we regard asexceptional and pathological. Yet, being bound by no theories, when weare convinced of their necessity, we inaugurate them boldly and carrythem through to the end. And thus it is that having decided that thetime had come to call the people to the councils of the nation, westruck boldly and once for all by a measure which I will neveradmit--and here I regret that Cantilupe is not with me--which I willnever admit to be at variance with the best, and soundest traditions ofconservatism. 

"But such measures are exceptional, and we hope they will be final. Wetake no delight in tinkering the constitution. The mechanism ofgovernment we recognize to be only a means; the test of the statesmanis his power to govern. And remaining, as we do, inaccessible to thatgospel of liberty of which our opponents have had a special revelation, we find in the existing state of England much that appears to us toneed control. We are unable to share the optimism which animatesRemenham and his friends as to the direction and effects of the newforces of industry. Above the whirr of the spindle and the shaft wehear the cry of the poor. Behind our flourishing warehouses and shopswe see the hovels of the artisan. We watch along our highroads thelong procession of labourers deserting their ancestral villages for thecities; we trace them to the slum and the sweater's den; we follow themto the poorhouse and the prison; we see them disappear engulfed in theabyss, while others press at their heels to take their place and sharetheir destiny. And in face of all this we do not think it to be ourduty to fold our arms and invoke the principle of liberty. We feelthat we owe it to the nation to preserve intact its human heritage, theonly source of its greatness and its wealth; and we are prepared, withsuch wisdom as we have, to legislate to that end, undeterred by thefear of incurring the charge of socialism. 

"But while we thus concern ourselves with the condition of theseislands, we have not forgotten that we have relations to the worldoutside. If, indeed, we could share the views to which Remenham hasgiven such eloquent expression, this is a matter which would give uslittle anxiety. He beholds, as in a vision, the era of peace andgood-will ushered in by the genius of commerce. By a mysteriousdispensation of Providence he sees cupidity and competition furtheringthe ends of charity and peace. But here once more I am unable tofollow his audacious flight. Confined to the sphere of observation, Icannot but note that in the long and sanguinary course of history therehas been no cause so fruitful of war as the rivalries of trade. Ourown annals at every point are eloquent of this truth; nor do I seeanything in the conditions of the modern world that should limit itsapplication. We have been told that all nations will adopt our fiscalpolicy. Why should they, unless it is to their interest? We adoptedit because we thought it was to ours; and we shall abandon it if weever change our opinion. And when I say 'interest' I would not beunderstood to mean economic interest in the narrower sense. A nation, like an individual, I conceive, has a personality to maintain. It mustbe its object not to accumulate wealth at all costs, but to develop andmaintain capacity, to be powerful, energetic, many-sided, and above allindependent. Whether the policy we have adopted will continue toguarantee this result, I am not prophet enough to venture to affirm. But if it does not, I cannot doubt that we shall be driven to reviseit. Nor can I believe that other nations, not even our own colonies, will follow us in our present policy, if to do so would be to jeopardytheir rising industries and unduly to narrow the scope of theireconomic energies. I do not, then, I confess, look forward withenthusiasm or with hope to the Crystal Palace millennium that inspiredthe eloquence of Remenham. I see the future pregnant with wars andrumours of wars. And in particular I see this nation, by virtue of itswealth, its power, its unparalleled success, the target for the envy, the hatred, the cupidity of all the peoples of Europe. I see themlooking abroad for outlets for their expanding population, only to findevery corner of the habitable globe preoccupied by the English race andovershadowed by the English flag. But from this, which is our maindanger, I conjure my main hope for the future. England is more thanEngland. She has grown in her sleep. She has stretched over everycontinent huge embryo limbs which wait only for the beat of her heart, the motion of her spirit, to assume their form and function as membersof one great body of empire. The spirit, I think, begins to stir, theblood to circulate. Our colonies, I believe, are not destined to dropfrom us like ripe fruit; our dependencies will not fall to othermasters. The nation sooner or later will wake to its imperial mission. The hearts of Englishmen beyond the seas will beat in unison with ours. And the federation I foresee is not the federation of Mankind, but thatof the British race throughout the world. "

He paused, and in the stillness that followed we became aware of thegathering dusk. The first stars were appearing, and the young moon waslow in the west. From the shadow below we heard the murmur of afountain, and the call of a nightingale sounded in the wood. Somethingin the time and the place must have worked on Mendoza's mood; for whenhe resumed it was in a different key. 

"Such, " he began, "is my vision, if I permit myself to dream. But whoshall say whether it is more than a dream? There is something in theair to-night which compels candour. And if I am to tell my inmostthought, I must confess on what a flood of nescience we, who seem todirect the affairs of nations, are borne along together with those whomwe appear to control. We are permitted, like children, to lay ourhands upon the reins; but it is a dark and unknown genius who drives. We are his creatures; and it is his ends, not ours, that are furtheredby our contests, our efforts, our ideals. In the arena Remenham and Imust play our part, combat bravely, and be ready to die when the crowdturn down their thumbs. But here in a moment of withdrawal, I at leastcannot fail to recognize behind the issues that divide us the tie of acommon destiny. We shall pass and a new generation will succeed us; ageneration to whom our ideals will be irrelevant, our catch-wordsempty, our controversies unintelligible. 

 Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt. 

"The dust of oblivion will bury our debates. Something we shall haveachieved, but not what we intended. My dream may, perhaps, befurthered by Remenham, and his by me, or, it may be, neither his normine by either. The Providence whose purposes he so readily divines isdark to me. And perhaps, for that reason, I am able to regard him withmore charity than he has always been willing, I suspect, to extend tome. This, at any rate, is the moment of truce. The great arena isempty, the silent benches vanish into the night. Under the glimmer ofthe moon figures more than mortal haunt the scene of our ephemeralcontests. It is they which stand behind us and deal the blows whichseem to be ours. When we are laid in the dust they will animate othercombatants; when our names are forgotten they will blazon others inperishable gold. Why, then, should we strive and cry, even now in thetwilight hour? The same sky encompasses us, the same stars are aboveus. What are my opinions, what are Remenham's? Froth on the surface!The current bears all alike along to the destined end. For a momentlet us meet and feel its silent, irresistible force; and in this momentreach across the table the hand of peace. "

With that he stretched his hand to Remenham, with a kind of pathos ofappeal that the other, though I think he did not altogether like it, could hardly refuse to entertain. It was theatrical, it wasun-English, but somehow, it was successful. And the whole episode, theclosing words and the incomparable gesture, left me with a sense asthough a curtain had been drawn upon a phase of our history. Mendoza, somehow, had shut out Remenham, even more than himself, from the fieldon which the issues of the future were to be fought. And it was thisfeeling that led me, really a little against my inclination, to selectas the next speaker the man who of all who, made up our company, inopinions was the most opposed to Remenham, and in temperament toMendoza. My choice was Allison, more famous now than he was then, butknown even at that time as an unsparing critic of both parties. Heresponded readily enough; and as he began a spell seemed to snap. Thenight and the hour were forgotten, and we were back on the dusty fieldof controversy. 

"THIS is all very touching, " he began, "but Mendoza is shaking handswith the wrong person. He's much nearer to me than he is to Remenham, and I don't at all despair of converting him. For he does at leastunderstand that the character of every society depends upon its law ofproperty; and he even seems to have a suspicion that the law, as wehave it, is not what you would call absolute perfection. It's truethat he shows no particular inclination to alter it. But that maycome; and I'm not without hope of seeing, before I die, aTory-Socialist party. Remenham's is a different case, and I fearthere's nothing to be made of him. He does, I believe, really thinkthat in some extraordinary way the law of property, like the AnglicanChurch, is one of the dispensations of Providence; and that if heremoves all other restrictions, leaving that, he will have what hecalls a natural society. But Nature, as Mendoza has pointed out, isanarchy. Civilization means restriction; and so does socialism. Sofar from being anarchy, it is the very antithesis of it. Anarchy isthe goal of liberalism, if liberalism could ever be persuaded to belogical. So the scarecrow of anarchy, at least, need not frighten awayany would-be convert to socialism. There remains, it is true, theother scarecrow, revolution; and that, I admit, has more life in it. Socialism is revolutionary; but so is liberalism, or was, while it wasanything. Revolution does not imply violence. On the contrary, violence is the abortion of revolution. Do I, for instance, look likea Marat or a Danton? I ask you, candidly!"

He certainly did not. On the contrary, with his short squat figure, pointed beard and spectacles, he presented a curious blend of themiddle-class Englishman and the German savant. There was a burst oflaughter at his question, in which he joined himself. But when heresumed it was in a more serious tone and somewhat in the manner of alecturer. It was indeed, at that time, very largely by lectures thathe carried on his propaganda. 

"No, " he said, "socialism may roar; but, in England at any rate, itroars as gently as any sucking-dove. Revolution I admit is the goal;but the process is substitution. We propose to transform societyalmost without anyone knowing it; to work from the foundation upwardswithout unduly disturbing the superstructure. By a mere adjustment ofrates and taxes we shall redistribute property; by an extension of thepowers of local bodies we shall nationalize industry. But in all thisthere need be no shock, no abrupt transition. On the contrary, it isessential to our scheme that there should not be. We are men ofscience and we realize that the whole structure of society rests uponhabit. With the new organization must therefore grow the new habitthat is to support it. To precipitate organic change is merely tocourt reaction. That is the lesson of all revolution; and it is onewhich English socialists, at any rate, have learnt. We think, moreover, that capitalist society is, by its own momentum, travellingtowards the goal which we desire. Every consolidation of business upona grand scale implies the development of precisely those talents oforganization without which the socialistic state could not come intobeing or maintain itself; while at the same time the substitution ofmonopoly for competition removes the only check upon the power ofcapital to exploit society, and brings home to every citizen in histenderest point--his pocket--the necessity for that public control fromwhich he might otherwise be inclined to shrink. Capitalist society isthus preparing its own euthanasia; and we socialists ought to beregarded not as assassins of the old order, but as midwives to deliverit of the child with which it is in travail. 

"That child will be a society not of liberty but of regulation. It ishere that we join issue not only with doctrinaire liberals, but withthat large body of ordinary common-sense Englishmen who feel a generaland instinctive distrust of all state interference. That distrust, Iwould point out, is really an anachronism. It dates from a time whenthe state was at once incompetent and unpopular, from the days ofmonarchic or aristocratic government carried on frankly in theinterests of particular classes or persons. But the democraticrevolution and the introduction of bureaucracy has swept all that away;and governments in every civilized country are now moving towards theideal of an expert administration controlled by an alert andintelligent public opinion. Much, it is true, has yet to be donebefore that ideal will be realized. In some countries, notably in theUnited States, the necessity of the expert has hardly made itself felt. In others, such as Germany, popular control is very inadequatelyprovided for. But the tendency is clear; and nowhere clearer than inthis country. Here at any rate we may hopefully look forward to acontinual extension both of the activity and of the intelligence ofpublic officials; while at the same time, by an appropriate developmentof the representative machinery, we may guard ourselves against thedanger of an irresponsible bureaucracy. The problem of reconcilingadministrative efficiency with popular control is no doubt a difficultone; but I feel confident that it can be solved. This perhaps ishardly the place to develop my favourite idea of the professionalrepresentative; but I may be permitted to refer to it in passing. By aprofessional representative I mean one trained in a scientific andsystematic way to elicit the real opinion of his constituents, and toembody it in practicable proposals. He will have to study what theyreally want, not what they think they want, and to discover for himselfin what way it can be obtained. Such men need not be elected; indeed Iam inclined to think that the plan of popular election has had its day. The essential is that they should be selected by some test ofefficiency, such as examination or previous record, and that theyshould keep themselves in constant touch with their constituents. ButI must not dwell upon details. My main object is to show that whengovernment is in the hands of expert administrators, controlled byexpert representatives, there need be no anxiety felt in extendingindefinitely the sphere of the state. 

"This extension will of course be primarily economic, for, as is nowgenerally recognized, the whole character of a society depends upon itseconomic organization. Revolution, if it is to be profound, must beginwith the organization of industry; but it does not follow that it willend there. It is a libel on the socialist ideal to call itmaterialistic, to say that it is indifferent or hostile to the higheractivities. No one, to begin with, is more conscious than a truesocialist of the importance of science. Not only is the sociology onwhich his position is based a branch of science; but it is afundamental part of his creed that the progress of man depends upon hismastery of Nature, and that for acquiring that mastery science is hisonly weapon. Again, it is absurd to accuse us of indifference toethics. Our standards, indeed, may not be the same as those ofbourgeois society; if they were, that would be their condemnation; fora new economic régime necessarily postulates a new ethic. But everyrégime requires and produces its appropriate standards; and thesocialist régime will be no exception. Our feeling upon that subjectis simply that we need not trouble about the ethic because it willfollow of itself upon the economic revolution. For, as we readhistory, the economic factor determines all the others. 'Man ist waser isst, ' as the German said; and morals, art, religion, all theso-called 'ideal activities, ' are just allotropic forms of bread andmeat. They will come by themselves if they are wanted; and in thesocialist state they will be better not worse provided for than underthe present competitive system. For here again the principle of theexpert will come in. It will be the business of the state, if itdetermines that such activities ought to be encouraged, to devise amachinery for selecting and educating men of genius, in proportion tothe demand, and assigning to them their appropriate sphere of activityand their sufficient wage. This will apply, I conceive, equally to theministers of religion as to the professors of the various branches ofart. Nor would I suggest that the socialist community should establishany one form of religion, seeing that we are not in a position todetermine scientifically which, or whether any, are true. I would giveencouragement to all and several, of course under the necessaryrestrictions, in the hope that, in course of time, by a process ofnatural selection, that one will survive which is the best adapted tothe new environment. But meantime the advantage of the new over theold organization is apparent. We shall hear no more of genius starvingin a garret; of ill-paid or over-paid ministers of the gospel; ofprivileged and unprivileged sects. All will be orderly, regular, andsecure, as it should be in a civilized state; and for the first time inhistory society will be in a position to extract the maximum of goodfrom those strange and irregular human organizations whose subsistencehitherto has been so precarious and whose output so capricious anduncertain. A socialist state, if I may say so, will pigeon-holereligion, literature and art; and if these are really normal andfruitful functions they cannot fail, like other functions, to profit bysuch treatment. 

"I have thus indicated in outline the main features of the socialistscheme--an economic revolution accomplished by a gradual and peacefultransition and issuing in a system of collectivism so complete as toinclude all the human activities that are really valuable. But what Ishould find it hard to convey, except to an audience prepared by yearsof study, is the enthusiasm or rather the grounds for the enthusiasm, that animates us. Whereas all other political parties are groping inthe dark, relying upon partial and outworn formulae, in which even theythemselves have ceased to believe, we alone advance in the broaddaylight, along a road whose course we clearly trace backward andforward, towards a goal distinctly seen on the horizon. History andanalysis are our guides; history for the first time comprehended, analysis for the first time scientifically applied. Unlike all therevolutionists of the past, we derive our inspiration not from our ownintuitions or ideals, but from the ascertained course of the world. Weco-operate with the universe; and hence at once our confidence and ourpatience. We can afford to wait because the force of events is bearingus on of its own accord to the end we desire. Even if we rest on ouroars, none the less we are drifting onwards; or if we are checked for amoment the eddy in which we are caught is merely local. Alone amongall politicians we have faith; but our faith is built upon science, andit is therefore a faith which will endure. "

WITH that Allison concluded; and almost before he had done MacCarthy, without waiting my summons, had leapt to his feet and burst into animpassioned harangue. With flashing eyes and passionate gestures hedelivered himself as follows, his Irish accent contrasting pleasantlywith that of the last speaker. 

"May God forgive me, " he cried, "that ever I have called myself asocialist, if this is what socialism means! But it does not! I willrescue the word! I will reclaim it for its ancient noblersense--socialism the dream of the world, the light of the grail on themarsh, the mystic city of Sarras, the vale of Avalon! Socialism thesoul of liberty, the bond of brotherhood, the seal of equality! Who ishe that with sacrilegious hands would seize our Ariel and prison him inthat tree of iniquity the State? Day is not farther from night, norGood from Evil, than the socialism of the Revolution from this of thedesk and the stool, from this enemy wearing our uniform and flauntingour coat of arms. For nigh upon a century we have fought for liberty;and now they would make us gaolers to bind our own souls. 1789, 1830, 1848--are these dates branded upon our hearts, only to stamp us aspatient sheep in the flock of bureaucracy? No! They are the symbolsof the spirit; and those whom they set apart, outcasts from thekingdoms of this world and citizens of the kingdom of God, whereverthey wander are living flames to consume institutions and laws, and tolight in the hearts of men the fires of pity and wrath and love. Ourcity is not built with Blue books, nor cemented with office dust; noris it bonds of red-tape that make and keep it one. No! it is theattraction, uncompelled, of spirits made free; the shadowing intooutward form of the eternal joy of the soul!"

He paused and seemed to collect himself; and then in a quieter tone:"Socialism, " he proceeded, "is one with anarchy! I know the terrors ofthat word; but they are the terrors of an evil conscience; for it isonly an order founded on iniquity that dreads disorder. Why do youfear for your property and lives, you who fear anarchy? It is becauseyou have stolen the one and misdevoted the other; because you havecreated by your laws the man you call the criminal; because you havebred hunger, and hunger has bred rage. For this I do not blame you, any more than I blame myself. You are yourselves victims of the systemyou maintain, and your enemy, no less than mine, if you knew it, isgovernment. For government means compulsion, exclusion, distinction, separation; while anarchy is freedom, union and love. Government isbased on egotism and fear, anarchy on fraternity. It is because wedivide ourselves into nations that we endure the oppression ofarmaments; because we isolate ourselves as individuals that we invokethe protection of laws. If I did not take what my brother needs Ishould not fear that he would take it from me; if I did not shut myselfoff from his want, I should not deem it less urgent than my own. Allgoverning persons are persons set apart. And therefore it is thatwhether they will or no they are oppressors, or, at best, obstructors. Shut off from the breath of popular instinct, which is the breath oflife, they cannot feel, and therefore cannot think, rightly. And, inany case, how could they understand, even with the best will in theworld, the multifarious interests they are expected to control? A manknows nothing but what he practises; and in every branch of work onlythose are fitted to direct who are themselves the workers. Intellectually, as well as morally, government is eternally bankrupt;and what is called representative government is no better than anyother, for the governors are equally removed in sympathy and knowledgefrom the governed. Nay, experience shows, if we would but admit it, that under no system have the rulers been more incompetent and corruptthan under this which we call democratic. Is not the very word'politician' everywhere a term of reproach? Is not a government officeeverywhere synonymous with incapacity and sloth? What a miserableposition is that of a Member of Parliament, compelled to give his voteon innumerable questions of which he does not understand the rudiments, and giving it at the dictation of party chiefs who themselves arecontrolled by the blind and brainless mechanism of the caucus! Thepeople are the slaves of their representatives, the representatives oftheir chiefs, and the chiefs of a conscienceless machine! And that isthe last word of governmental science! Oh, divine spirit of man, inwhat chains have you bound yourself, and call it liberty, and clap yourhands!

"And then comes one and says, 'because you are free, tie yourselftighter and tighter in your own bonds!' Are these hands not yours thatfasten the knots? Why then do you fear? Here is a limb free; fastenit quick! Your head still turns; come, fix it in a vice! Now you arefast! Now you cannot move! How beautiful, how orderly, how secure!And this, and this is socialism! And it was to accomplish this thatFrance opened the sluices that have deluged the earth with blood!What! we have broken the bonds of iron to bind ourselves in tape! Wehave discrowned Napoleon to crown ... To crown.... "

He looked across at Allison, and suddenly pulled himself up. Then, attempting the tone of exposition, "There is only one way out of it, "he resumed, "the extension of free co-operation in every department ofactivity, including those which at present are regulated by the State. You will say that this is impracticable; but why? Already, in all thatyou most care about, that is the method you actually adopt. Theactivities of men that are freest in the society in which we live arethose of art and science and amusement. And all these are, I will notsay regulated by, but expressed in, voluntary organizations, clubs, academies, societies, what you will. The Royal Society and the BritishAssociation are types of the right way of organizing; and it is a waythat should and must be applied throughout the whole structure. Everytrade and business should be conducted by a society voluntarily formedof all those who choose to engage in it, electing and removing theirown officials, determining their own policy, and co-operating by freearrangement with other similar bodies. A complex interweaving of suchassociations, with order everywhere, compulsion nowhere, is the form ofsociety to which I look forward, and which I see already growing upwithin the hard skin of the older organisms. Rules there will be butnot laws, rules gladly obeyed because they will have been freelyadopted, and because there will be no compulsion upon anyone to remainwithin the brotherhood that approves and maintains them. Anarchy isnot the absence of order, it is absence of force; it is the freeoutflowing of the spirit into the forms in which it delights; and insuch forms alone, as they grow and change, can it find an expressionwhich is not also a bondage. You will say this is chimerical. Butlook at history! Consider the great achievements of the Middle Age!Were they not the result of just such a movement as I describe? It wasmen voluntarily associating in communes and grouping themselves inguilds that built the towers and churches and adorned them with theglories of art that dazzles us still in Italy and France. The historyof the growth of the state, of public authority and compulsion, is thehistory of the decline from Florence and Nuremberg to London and NewYork. As the power of the state grows the energy of the spiritdwindles; and if ever Allison's ideal should be realized, if ever theactivity of the state should extend through and through to everydepartment of life, the universal ease and comfort which may thus bedisseminated throughout society will have been purchased dearly at theprice of the soul. The denizens of that city will be fed, housed andclothed to perfection; only--and it is a serious drawback--only theywill be dead. 

"Oh!" he broke out, "if I could but get you to see that this wholeorder under which you live is artificial and unnecessary! But we arebefogged by the systems we impose upon our imagination and callscience. We have been taught to regard history as a necessary process, until we come to think it must also be a good one; that all that hasever happened ought to have happened just so and no otherwise. Andthus we justify everything past and present, however palpably incontradiction with our own intuitions. But these are mere figments ofthe brain. History, for the most part, believe me, is one giganticerror and crime. It ought to have been other than it was; and we oughtto be other than we are. There is no natural and inevitable evolutiontowards good; no co-operating with the universe, other than byconnivance at its crimes. That little house the brain builds toshelter its own weakness must be torn down if we would face the truthand pursue the good. Then we shall see amid what blinding storms ofwind and rain, what darkness of elements hostile or indifferent, ourroad lies across the mountains towards the city of our desire. Thenand then only shall we understand the spirit of revolution. That thereare things so bad that they can only be burnt up by fire; that thereare obstructions so immense that they can only be exploded by dynamite;that the work of destruction is a necessary preliminary to the work ofcreation, for it is the destruction of the prison walls wherein thespirit is confined; and that in that work the spirit itself is the onlyagent, unhelped by powers of nature or powers of a world beyond--thatis the creed--no, I will not say the creed, that is the insight andvision by which we of the Revolution live. By that I believe we shalltriumph. But whether we triumph or no, our life itself is a victory, for it is a life lived in the spirit. To shatter material bonds thatwe may bind closer the bonds of the soul, to slough dead husks that wemay liberate living forms, to abolish institutions that we may evokeenergies, to put off the material and put on the spiritual body, that, whether we fight with the tongue or the sword, is the inspiration ofour movement, that, and that only, is the true and inner meaning ofanarchy. 

"Anarchy is identified with violence; and I will not be so hypocriticaland base as to deny that violence must be one of our means of action. Force is the midwife of society; and never has radical change beenaccomplished without it. What came by the sword by the sword must bedestroyed: and only through violence can violence come to an end. Nay, I will go further and confess, since here if anywhere we are candid, that it is the way of violence to which I feel called myself, and thatI shall die as I have lived, an active revolutionary. But becauseforce is a way, is a necessary way, is my way, I do not imagine thatthere is no other. Were it not idle to wish, I could rather wish thatI were a poet or a saint, to serve the same Lord by the gentler weaponsof the spirit. There are anarchists who never made a speech and nevercarried a rifle, whom we know as our brothers, though perhaps they knownot us. Two I will name who live for ever, Shelley, the first ofpoets, were it not that there is one greater than he, the mysticWilliam Blake. We are thought of as men of blood; we are hounded overthe face of the globe. And who of our persecutors would believe thatthe song we bear in our hearts, some of us, I may speak at least forone, is the most inspired, the most spiritual challenge ever flung toyour obtuse, flatulent, stertorous England:

 Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire, Bring me my spear; O clouds unfold! Bring me my chariot of fire!

 I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till I have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. 

"England! No, not England, but Europe, America, the world! Where isMan, the new Man, there is our country. But the new Man is buried inthe old; and wherever he struggles in his tomb, wherever he knocks weare there to help to deliver him. When the guards sleep, in thesilence of the dawn, rises the crucified Christ. And the angel thatsits at the grave is the angel of Anarchy. "

THUS abruptly he brought to a close his extraordinary peroration, towhich I fear the written word has done but poor justice. A longsilence followed; in it there was borne to us from below the murmur ofthe hidden fountain, the wail of the nightingale. It was night now;the moon had set, and the sky was thick with stars. Among them oneplanet was blazing red, just opposite where I sat; and I saw the eyesof my neighbour, Henry Martin, fixed upon it. He was so lost inthought that he did not hear me at first when I asked him whether hewould care to follow on. But he assented willingly enough as soon ashe understood. And as he rose I could not help admiring, as I hadoften done before, the singular beauty of his countenance. His books, I think, do him injustice; they are cold and academic. But there wasnothing of that in the man himself; never was spirit so alert; and thatalertness was reflected in his person and bearing, his erect figure, his brilliant eyes, and the tumultuous sweep of his now whiteningbeard. He stood for a moment silent, with his eyes still fixed on thered star; then began to speak as follows:

"If, " he said, "it be true, as certain mystics maintain, that the worldis an effect of the antagonisms of spiritual beings, having theirstations in opposite quarters of the heavens, then, I think, MacCarthyand myself must represent such a pair of contraries, and move in anantithetic balance through the cycle of experience. I, perhaps, am theUrthona of his prophet Blake, and he the Urizen, or vice versa, it maybe, I cannot tell. But our opposition involves, on my part at least, no hostility; and looking across to his quarter of the sky I canreadily conceive how proud a fate it must be to burn there, so red, sosumptuous, and so superb. My own light is pale by comparison, a meregreen and blue; yet it is equally essential; and without it there mightbe a danger that he would consume the world. I speak in metaphors, that I may effect as gently as possible the necessary transition, socold and abrupt, from the prophet to the critic. But you, sir, incalling upon me, knew what you were doing. You knew well that you wereinviting Aquarius to empty his watering-pot on Mars. And Mars, I amsure, will pardon me if I obey. Unlike all the previous speakers, Iam, by vocation, a sceptic; and the vocation I hold to be a noble one. There are people who think, perhaps, indeed, there is almost nobody whodoes not think, that action is the sole end of life. Criticism, theyhold, is a kind of disease to which some people are subject, and which, in extreme cases, may easily be fatal. The healthy state, on the otherhand, they think, is that of the enthusiast; of the man who believesand never doubts. Now, that such a state is happy I am very ready toadmit; but I cannot hold that it is healthy. How could it be, unlessit were based upon a sound, intellectual foundation? But no suchfoundation has been or will be reached except through criticism; andall criticism implies and engenders doubt. A man who has neverexperienced, nay, I will say who is not constantly reiterating, theprocess of criticism, is a man who has no right to his enthusiasm. Forhe has won it at the cost of drugging his mind with passion; and that Imaintain is a bad and wrong thing. I maintain it to be bad and wrongin itself, and quite apart from any consequences it may produce; for itis a primary duty to seek what is true and eschew what is false. Buteven from the secondary point of view of consequences, I have thegravest doubts as to the common assumption that the effects ofenthusiasm are always preponderantly if not wholly good. When Iconsider, for example, the history of religion, I find no warrant foraffirming that its services have outweighed its disservices. JesusChrist, the greatest and, I think, the sanest of enthusiasts, lit thefires of the Inquisition and set up the Pope at Rome. Mahomet delugedthe earth with blood, and planted the Turk on the Bosphorus. SaintFrances created a horde of sturdy beggars. Luther declared the ThirtyYears War. Criticism would have arrested the course of these men; butwould the world have been the worse? I doubt it. There would havebeen less heat; but there might have been more light. And, for mypart, I believe in light. It may, indeed, be true that intellectwithout passion is barren; but it is certain that passion withoutintellect is mischievous. And since these powers, which should beunited, are, in fact, at war in the great duel which runs throughhistory, I take my stand with the intellect. If I must choose, I wouldrather be barren than mischievous. But it is my aim to be fruitful andto be fruitful through criticism. That means, I fear, that I am boundto make myself unpleasant to everybody. But I do it, not of maliceprepense, but as in duty bound. You will say, perhaps, that that onlymakes the matter worse. Well, so be it! I will apologize no more, butproceed at once to my disagreeable task. 

"Let me say then first, that in listening to the speakers who havepreceded me, while admiring the beauty and ingenuity of thesuperstructures they have raised, I have been busy, according to mypractice, in questioning the foundations. And this is the kind ofresult I have arrived at. All political convictions vary between thetwo extremes which I will call Collectivism and Anarchy. Each of thesepursues at all costs a certain end--Collectivism, order, and Anarchy, liberty. Each is held as a faith and propagated as a religion. Andbetween them lie those various compromises between faith andexperience, idea and fact, which are represented by liberalism, conservatism, and the like. Now, the degree of enthusiasm whichaccompanies a belief, is commonly in direct proportion to its freedomfrom empirical elements. Simplicity and immediacy are thecharacteristics of all passionate conviction. But a critic like myselfcannot believe that in politics, or anywhere in the field of practicalaction, any such simple and immediate beliefs are really and whollytrue. Thus, in the case before us, I would point out that neitherliberty nor order are sufficient ends in themselves, though each, Ithink, is part of the end. The liberty that is desirable is that ofgood people pursuing Good in order; and the order that is desirable isthat of good people pursuing Good in liberty. This is a correctionwhich, perhaps, both collectivist and anarchist would accept. Whatthey want, they would say, is that kind of liberty and that kind oforder which I have described. But as liberty and order, so conceived, imply one another, the difference between the two positions ceases tobe one of ends and becomes one of means. But every problem of means isone of extreme complexity which can only be solved, in the mosttentative way, by observation and experiment. And opinions based uponsuch a process, though they may be strongly held, cannot be held withthe simplicity and force of a religious or ethical intuition. Wemight, conceivably, on this basis adopt the position either of thecollectivist or of the anarchist; but we should do so not asenthusiasts, but as critics, with a full consciousness that we areresting not upon an absolute principle, but upon a balance ofprobabilities. 

"This, then, is the first point I wished to make, that the wholequestion is one to be attacked by criticism, not by intuition. Butnow, tested by criticism, both the extreme positions suggest thegravest possible difficulties and doubts. In the case of anarchy, especially, these force themselves upon the most superficial view. Theanarchist maintains, in effect, that to bring about his ideal ofordered liberty all you have to do is to abolish government. But hecan point to no experience that will justify such a belief. It isbased upon a theory of human nature which is contradicted by all thefacts known to us. For if men, were it not for government, might beliving in the garden of Eden, how comes it that they ever emerged fromthat paradise? No, it is not government that is the root of ourtroubles, it is the niggardliness of Nature and the greed of man. Andboth these are primitive facts which would be strengthened, notdestroyed, by anarchy. Can it be believed that the result would besatisfactory? The anarchist may indeed reply that anything would bebetter than what exists. And I can well understand how some generousand sensitive souls, or some victims of intolerable oppression, may bedriven into such counsels. But they are surely counsels of despair. Or is it possible really to hold--as MacCarthy apparently does--that onthe eve of a bloody revolution, whereby all owners of property will besummarily deprived of all they have, the friendly and co-operativeinstincts of human nature will immediately come into play withoutfriction; that the infinitely complex problems of production anddistribution will solve themselves, as it were, of their own accord;that there will be a place ready for everybody to do exactly the workhe wants; that everybody will want to work at something, and will becontented with the wage assigned him, that there will be no shortage, no lack of adaptation of demand to supply; and all this achieved, notby virtue of any new knowledge or new capacity, but simply by arearrangement of existing elements? Does anyone, does MacCarthyreally, in a calm moment, believe all this? And is he prepared tostake society upon his faith? If he be, he is indeed beyond the reachof my watering-pot. I leave him, therefore, burning luridly andunsubdued, and pass on to Allison. 

"Allison's flame is gentler; and I would not wish, even if I could, altogether to extinguish it. But I am anxious, I confess, to temperit; for in colour, to my taste, it is a little ghastly; and I fear thatif it increased in intensity, it might even become too hot, though I donot suggest that that is a present danger. To drop the metaphor, myobjections to collectivism are not as fundamental as my objections toanarchy, nor are they based upon any lack of appreciation of theadvantages of that more equitable distribution of the opportunities oflife which I take to be at the bottom of the collectivist ideal. I donot share--no man surely who has reflected could share--the commonprejudice that there is something fundamental, natural, and inevitableabout the existing organization of property. On the contrary, it isclear to me that it is inequitable; and that the substitution of thesystem advocated by collectivists would be an immense improvement, ifit could be successfully carried out, and if it did not endanger otherGoods, which may be even more important than equality of opportunity. Nor do I hold that in a collectivist state there need be any dangerousrelaxation of that motive of self-interest which every reasonable manmust admit to be, up to a point, the most potent source of allpractical energy. I do not see why the state should not pay itsservants according to merit just as private companies do, and make therewards of ambition depend on efficiency. In this purely economicregion there is not, so it seems to me, anything absurd or chimericalin the socialist ideal. My difficulty here is of a different kind. Ido not see how, by the democratic machinery contemplated, it will bepossible to secure officials sufficiently competent and disinterestedto be entrusted with functions so important and so difficult as thosewhich would be demanded of them under the socialist régime. In ademocracy the government can hardly rise above--in practice, I think, it tends to fall below--the average level of honesty and intelligence. In the United States, for example, it is notorious that the wholemachinery of government, and especially of local government, where theeconomic functions are important, is exploited by the more unscrupulousmembers of the community; and this tendency must be immenselyaccentuated in every society in proportion as the functions ofgovernment become important. A socialist state badly administeredwould, I believe, be worse than the state under which we live, to thesame degree in which, when well administered, it would be better. AndI do not, I confess, see what guarantees socialists can offer that theadministration will be good. I have far less confidence than Allisonin mere machinery; and I am sure that no machinery will produce goodresults in a society where a large proportion of the citizens have noother idea than to exploit the powers of government in their owninterest. But such, I believe, is the case in existing societies; andI do not see by what miracle they are going to be transformed. 

"Such is my first difficulty with regard to collectivism. And thoughit would not prevent me from supporting, as in fact I do support, cautious and tentative experiments in the direction of practicalsocialism, it does prevent me from looking to a collectivist futurewith anything like the breezy confidence which animates Allison. And Iwill go further: I will say that no man who possesses an adequateintelligence, and does not deliberately stifle it, has a right to anysuch confidence. Setting aside, however, for the sake of argument, this difficulty, and admitting the possibility of an honest andefficient collectivist state, I am confronted with a further and evengraver cause of hesitation. For while I consider that the distributionof the opportunities of life is, under the existing system, in thehighest degree capricious and inequitable, yet I would prefer suchinequity to the most equitable arrangement in the world if it affordeda better guarantee for the realization of certain higher goods thanwould be afforded by the improved system. And I am not clear in my ownmind, and I do not see how anyone can be clear, that collectivism givesas good a security as the present system for the realization of thesehigher goods. And this brings me back to the question of liberty. Onthis point there is, I am well aware, a great deal of cant talked, andI have no wish to add to it. Under our present arrangements, I admit, for the great mass of people, there is no liberty worth the name;seeing that they are bound and tied all their lives to the meanestnecessities. And yet we see that out of the midst of all this chaos ofwrong, there have emerged and do emerge artists, poets, men of science, saints. And the appearance of such men seems to me to depend on thefact that a considerable minority have the power to choose, for good orfor evil, their own life, to follow their bent, even in the face oftremendous difficulties, and perhaps because of those difficulties, inthe more fortunate cases, to realize, at whatever cost of suffering, great works and great lives. But under the system sketched by AllisonI have the gravest doubts whether any man of genius would ever emerge. The very fact that everybody's career will be regulated for him, andhis difficulties smoothed away, that, in a word, the open road willimply the beaten track, will, I fear, diminish, if not destroy, theenterprise, the innate spirit of adventure, in the spiritual as in thephysical world, on which depends all that we call, or ought to call, progress. A collectivist state, it is true, might establish and endowacademies; but would it ever produce a Shakespeare or a Michelangelo?It might engender and foster religious orthodoxy; but would it have aplace for the reformer or the saint? Should we not have to pay for thegeneral level of comfort and intelligence, by suppressing the onlything good in itself, the manifestation of genius? I do not saydogmatically that it would be so: I do not even say dogmatically that, even if it were, the argument would be conclusive against thecollectivist state. But the issue is so tremendous that it necessarilymakes me pause, as it must, I contend, any candid man, who is notprejudiced by a preconceived ideal. 

"Now, it is not for the sake of recommending any opinion of my own thatI have dwelt on these considerations. It is, rather, to illustrate anddrive home the point with which I began, that the intellect has itsrights, that it enters into every creed, and that it undermines, inevery creed, all elements of mere irrational or anti-rational faith;that this fact can only be disguised by a conscious or unconsciouspredetermination, not to let the intellect have its say; and that suchpredetermination is a very serious error and vice. It is without shameand without regret, on the contrary it is with satisfaction andself-approval, that I find in my own case, my intelligence daily moreand more undermining my instinctive beliefs. If, as some have held, itwere necessary to choose between reason and passion, I would choosereason. But I find no such necessity; for reason to me herself is apassion. Men think the life of reason cold. How little do they knowwhat it is to be responsive to every call, solicited by every impulse, yet still, like the magnet, vibrate ever to the north, never so tense, never so aware of the stress and strain of force as when mostirremovably fixed upon that goal. The intensity of life is not to bemeasured by the degree of oscillation. It is at the stillest pointthat the most tremendous energies meet; and such a point is theintelligence open to infinity. For such stillness I feel myself to bedestined, if ever I could attain it. But others, I suppose, likeMacCarthy, have a different fate. In the celestial world of souls, thehierarchy of spirits, there is need of the planet no less than of itssun. The station and gravity of the one determines the orbit of theother, and the antagonism that keeps them apart also knits themtogether. There is no motion of MacCarthy's but I vibrate to it; andabout my immobility he revolves. But both of us, as I am inclined tothink, are included in a larger system and move together on a remotercentre. And the very law of our contention, as perhaps one day we maycome to see, is that of a love that by discord achieves harmony. "

THE conclusion of Martin's speech left me somewhat in doubt how toproceed. All of the company who were primarily interested in politicshad now spoken; and I was afraid there might be a complete break in thesubject of our discourse. Casting about, I could think of nothingbetter than to call upon Wilson, the biologist. For though he was aspecialist, he regarded everything as a branch of his specialty; andwould, I knew, be as ready to discourse on society as on anything else. Although, therefore, I disliked a certain arrogance he was wont todisplay, I felt that, since he was to speak, this was the proper placeto introduce him. I asked him accordingly to take up the thread of thedebate; and without pause his aggressive voice began to assail our ears. 

"I don't quite know, " he began, "why a mere man of science should beinvited to intervene in a debate on these high subjects. Politics, Ihave always understood, is a kind of mystery, only to be grasped by afavoured few, and then not by any processes of thought, but by somekind of intuition. But of late years something seems to have happened. The intuition theory was all very well when the intuitions did notconflict, or when, at least, those who were possessed by one, nevercame into real intellectual contact with those who were possessed byanother. But here, to-night, have we met together upon this terrace, been confronted with the most opposite principles jostling in theroughest way, and, as it seems to the outsider, simply annihilating oneanother. Whence Martin's plea for criticism; a plea with which I mostheartily sympathize, only that he gave no indication of the basis onwhich criticism itself is to rest. And perhaps that is where and why Icome in. I have been watching to-night with curiosity, and I mustconfess with a little amusement, one building after another laboriouslyraised by each speaker in turn, only to collapse ignominiously at thefirst touch administered by his successor. And why? For the ancientreason, that the structures were built upon the sand. Well, I haveraised no building myself to speak of. But I am one of an obscuregroup of people who are working at solid foundations; which is onlyanother way of saying that I am a man of science. Only a biologist, itis true; heaven forfend that I should call myself a sociologist! Butbiology is one of the disciplines that are building up that generalview of Nature and the world which is gradually revolutionizing all oursocial conceptions. The politicians, I am afraid, are hardly aware ofthis. And that is why--if I may say so without offence--theirutterances are coming to seem more and more a kind of irrelevantprattle. The forces that really move the world have passed out oftheir control. And it is only where the forces are at work that theliving ideas move upon the waters. Politicians don't study science;that is the extraordinary fact. And yet every day it becomes clearerthat politics is either an applied science or a charlatanism. Only, unfortunately, as the most important things are precisely the last tobe known about, and it is exactly where it is most imperative to actthat our ignorance is most complete, the science of politics has hardlyyet even begun to be studied. Hence our forlorn paralysis of doubtwhenever we pause to reflect; and hence the kind of blind desperationwith which earnest people are impelled to rush incontinently intopractice. The position of MacCarthy is very intelligible, however muchit be, to my mind--what shall I say?--regrettable. There is, in fact, hardly a question that has been raised to-night that is at presentcapable of scientific determination. And with that word I oughtperhaps, in my capacity of man of science, to sit down. 

"And so I would, if it were not that there is something else, besidespositive conclusions, that results from a long devotion to science. There is a certain attitude towards life, a certain sense of what isimportant and what is not, a view of what one may call the commonplacesof existence, that distinguishes, I think, all competent people whohave been trained in that discipline. For we do think about politics, or rather about society, even we specialists. And between us we aregradually developing a sort of body of first principles which will beat the basis of any future sociology. It is these that I feel temptedto try to indicate. And the more so, because they are so foreign tomuch that has been spoken here to-night. I have had a kind of feeling, to tell the truth, throughout this whole discussion, of dwelling amongthe tombs and listening to the voices of the dead. And I feel a kindof need to speak for the living, for the new generation with which Ibelieve I am in touch. I want to say how the problems you have raisedlook to us, who live in the dry light of physical science. 

"Let me say, then, to begin with, that for us the nineteenth centurymarks a breach with the whole past of the world to which there isnothing comparable in human annals. We have developed wholly newpowers; and, coincidentally and correspondingly, a wholly new attitudeto life. Of the powers I do not intend to speak; the wonders of steamand electricity are the hackneyed theme of every halfpenny paper. Butthe attitude to life, which is even more important, is something thathas hardly yet been formulated. And I shall endeavour to give somefirst rough expression to it. 

"The first constituent, then, of the new view is that of continuity. We of the new generation realize that the present is a mere transitionfrom the past into the future; that no event and no moment is isolated;that all things, successive as well as coincident, are bound in asingle system. Of this system the general formula is causation. But, in human society, the specifically important case of it is the nexus ofsuccessive generations. We do not now, we who reflect, regard man asan individual, nor even as one of a body of contemporaries; we regardhim as primarily a son and a father. In other words, what we have inmind is always the race: whereas hitherto the central point has beenthe individual or the citizen. But this shifting in the point of viewimplies a revolution in ethics and politics. With the ancients, themaintenance of the existing generation was the main consideration, andpatriotism its formula. To Marcus Aurelius, to the Stoics, as later tothe Christians, the subject of all moral duties was the individualsoul, and personal salvation became for centuries the corner-stone ofthe ethical structure. Well, all the speculation, all the doctrine, all the literature based upon that conception has become irrelevant andmeaningless in the light of the new ideal. We no longer conceive theindividual save as one in a chain of births. Fatherless, he isinconceivable; sonless, he is abortive. His soul, if he have one, isinseparable from its derivation from the past and its tradition to thefuture. His duty, his happiness, his value, are all bound up with thefact of paternity; and the same, mutatis mutandis, is true of women. The new generation in a word has a totally new code of ethics; and thatcode is directed to the end of the perfection of the race. For, andthis is the second constituent of the modern view, the series of birthsis also the vehicle of progress. It is this discovery that gives toour outlook on life its exhilaration and zest. The ancients conceivedthe Golden Age as lying in the past; the men of the Middle Ages removedit to an imaginary heaven. Both in effect despaired of this world; andconsequently their characteristic philosophy is that of the tub or thehermitage. So soon as the first flush of youth was past, pessimismclouded the civilization of Greece and of Rome; and from thisChristianity escaped only to take refuge in an imaginary bliss beyondthe grave. But we, by means of science, have established progress. Welook to a future, a future assured, and a future in this world. Oureyes are on the coming generations; in them centres our hope and ourduty. To feed them, to clothe them, to educate them, to make thembetter than ourselves, to do for them all that has hitherto been soscandalously neglected, and in doing it to find our own life and ourown satisfaction--that is our task and our privilege, ours of the newgeneration. 

"And this brings me to the third point in our scheme of life. Webelieve in progress; but we do not believe that progress is fated. Andhere, too, our outlook is essentially new. Hitherto, the conceptionsof Fate and Providence have divided the empire of the world. We of thenew generation accept neither. We believe neither in a good Goddirecting the course of events; nor in a blind power that controls themindependently and in despite of human will. We know that what we do orfail to do matters. We know that we have will; that will may bedirected by reason; and that the end to which reason points is theprogress of the race. This much we hold to be established; more thanthis we do not need. And it is the acceptance of just this that cutsus off from the past, that makes its literature, its ethics, itspolitics, meaningless and unintelligible to us, that makes us, in aword, what we are, the first of the new generation. 

"Well, now, assuming this standpoint let us go on to see how some ofthe questions look which have been touched upon to-night. Thosequestions have been connected mainly with government and property. Andupon these two factors, it would seem, in the opinion of previousspeakers, all the interests of society turn. But from the point wherewe now stand we see clearly that there is a third factor to which theseare altogether subordinate--I mean the family. For the family is theimmediate agent in the production and rearing of children; and this, aswe have seen, is the end of society. With the family therefore socialreconstruction should start. And we may lay down as the fundamentalethical and social axiom that everybody not physically disqualifiedought to marry, and to produce at least four children. The onlyquestion here is whether the state should intervene and endeavour so toregulate marriages as to bring together those whose union is mostlikely to result in good offspring. This is a point on which theancients, I am aware, in their light-hearted sciolism laid greatstress. Only, characteristically enough, they ignored the fundamentaldifficulty, that nothing is known--nothing even now, and how much lessthen!--of the conditions necessary to produce the desired result. Ifever the conditions should come to be understood--and the problem ispre-eminently one for science; and if ever--what is even moredifficult--we should come to know clearly and exactly for what pointswe ought to breed; then, no doubt, it may be desirable for governmentto undertake the complete regulation of marriage. Meantime, we mustconfine our efforts to the simpler and more manageable task of securingfor the children when they are born the best possible environment, physical, intellectual and moral. But this may be done, even without aradical reconstruction of the law of property simply by proceedingfurther on the lines on which we are already embarked, by insisting ona certain standard, and that a high one, of house-room, sanitation, food, and the like. We could thus ensure from the beginning for everychild at least a sound physical development; and that withoutundermining the responsibility of parents. What else the state can doit must do by education; a thing which, at present, I do not hesitateto say, does not exist among us. We have an elementary system of cramand drill directed by the soulless automata it has itself produced; asecondary system of athletics and dead languages presided over bygentlemanly amateurs; and a university system which--well, of which Icannot trust myself to speak. I wish only to indicate that, in theeyes of the new generation, breeding and education are the two cardinalpillars of society. All other questions, even those of property andgovernment, are subordinate; and only as subordinate can they befruitfully approached. Take, for example, property. On this point wehave no prejudices, either socialistic or anti-socialistic. Property, as we view it, is simply a tool for producing and perfecting men. Whether it will serve that purpose best if controlled by individuals orby the state, or partly by the one and partly by the other, we regardas an open question, to be settled by experiment. We see no principleone way or the other. Property is not a right, nor a duty, nor aprivilege, either of individuals or of the community. It is simply andsolely, like everything else, a function of the chain of births. Whoever owns it, however it is administered, it has only one object, toensure for every child that is born a sufficiency of physical goods, and for the better-endowed all that they require in the way of trainingto enable them to perform efficiently the higher duties of society. 

"And as property is merely a means, so is government. To us of the newgeneration nothing is more surprising and more repugnant, than theimportance attached by politicians to formulae which have long sincelost whatever significance they may once have possessed. Democracy, representation, trust in the people and the rest, all this to us is theidlest verbiage. It is notorious, even to those who make most playwith these phrases, that the people do not govern themselves, that theycannot do so, and that they would make a great mess of it if theycould. The truth is, that we are living politically on a traditionwhich arose when by government was meant government by a class, whenone man or a few exploited the rest in the name of the state, and whentherefore it was of imperative importance to bring to bear upon thosewho were in power the brute and unintelligent weight of the mass. Thewhole democratic movement, though it assumed a positive intellectualform, was in fact negative in its aim and scope. It meant simply, wewill not be exploited. But that end has now been attained. There isno fear now that government will be oppressive; and the only problem ofthe future is, how to make it efficient. But efficiency, it iscertain, can never be secured by democratic machinery. We must, asAllison rightly maintains, have trained and skilled persons. How theseare to be secured is a matter of detail, though no doubt of importantdetail; and it is one that the new generation will have to solve. Whatthey will want, in any case, is government. MacCarthy's idea ofanarchy is--well, if he will pardon my saying so, it is hardly worthyof his intelligence. You cannot regulate society, any more than youcan spin cotton, by the light of nature and a good heart. MacCarthymistakes the character of government altogether, when he imagines itsessence to be compulsion. Its essence is direction; and direction, whatever the form of society, is, or should be, reserved for the wise. It is for wise direction that the coming generations cry; and it is ourbusiness to see that they get it. 

"I have thus indicated briefly the view of social and politicalquestions which I believe will be that of the future. And my reasonfor thinking so is, that that view is based upon science. It is thisthat distinguishes the new generation from all others. Hitherto theaffairs of the world have been conducted by passion, interest, sentiment, religion, anything but reasoned knowledge. The end of thatrégime, which has dominated all history, is at hand. The oldinfluences, it is true, still survive, and even appear to be supreme. We have had ample evidence to-night of their apparent vitality. Butunderneath them is growing up the sturdy plant of science. Already ithas dislodged their roots; and though they still seem to bear flower, the flower is withering before our eyes. In its place, before long, will appear the new and splendid blossom whose appearance ends andbegins an epoch of evolution. That is a consummation nothing candelay. We need not fret or hurry. We have only to work on silently atthe foundations. The city, it is true, seems to be rising apart fromour labours. There, in the distance, are the stately buildings, thereis the noise of the masons, the carpenters, the engineers. But see!the whole structure shakes and trembles as it grows. Houses fall asfast as they are erected; foundations sink, towers settle, domes andpinnacles collapse. All history is the building of a dream-city, fantastic as that ancient one of the birds, changeful as the sunsetclouds. And no wonder; for it is building on the sand. There is onlyone foundation of rock, and that is being laid by science. Only wait!To us will come sooner or later, the people and the architects. To usthey will submit the great plans they have striven so vainly torealize. We shall pronounce on their possibility, their suitability, even their beauty. Caesar and Napoleon will give place to Comte andHerbert Spencer; and Newton and Darwin sit in judgment on Plato andAquinas. "

WITH that he concluded. And as he sat down a note was passed along tome from Ellis, asking permission to speak next. I assented willingly;for Ellis, though some of us thought him frivolous, was, at any rate, never dull. His sunburnt complexion, his fair curly hair, and thelight in his blue eyes made a pleasant impression, as he rose andlooked down upon us from his six feet. 

"This, " he began, "is really an extraordinary discovery Wilson hasmade, that fathers have children, and children fathers! One wondershow the world has got on all these centuries in ignorance of it. Itseems so obvious, once it has been stated. But that, of course, is thenature of great truths; as soon as they are announced they seem to havebeen always familiar. It is possible, for that very reason, that manypeople may under-estimate the importance of Wilson's pronouncement, forgetting that it is the privilege of genius to formulate for thefirst time what everyone has been dimly feeling. We ought not to beungrateful; but perhaps it is our duty to be cautious. For great ideasnaturally suggest practical applications, and it is here that I foreseedifficulties. What Wilson's proposition in fact amounts to, if Iunderstand him rightly, is that we ought to open as wide as possiblethe gates of life, and make those who enter as comfortable as we can. Now, I think we ought to be very careful about doing anything of thekind. We know, of course, very little about the conditions of theunborn. But I think it highly probable that, like labour, as describedby the political economists, they form throughout the universe a singlemobile body, with a tendency to gravitate wherever the access is freestand the conditions most favourable. And I should be very much afraidof attracting what we may call, perhaps, the unemployed of the universein undue proportions to this planet, by offering them artificiallybetter terms than are to be obtained elsewhere. For that, as you know, would defeat our own object. We should merely cause an exodus, as itwere, from the outlying and rural districts. Mars, or the moon, orwhatever the place may be; and the amount of distress and difficulty onthe earth would be greater than ever. At any rate, I should insist, and I dare say Wilson agrees with me there, on some adequate test. AndI would not advertise too widely what we are doing. After all, otherplanets must be responsible for their own unborn; and I don't see whywe should become a kind of dumping-ground of the universe for everyonewho may imagine he can better himself by migrating to the earth. Forthat reason, among others, I would not open the gate too wide. And, perhaps, in view of this consideration, we might still permit somepeople not to marry. At any rate, I wouldn't go further, I think, thana fine for recalcitrant bachelors. Wilson, I dare say, would preferimprisonment for a second offence, and in case of contumacy, evencapital punishment. On such a point I am not, I confess, an altogetherimpartial judge, as I should certainly incur the greater penalty. Still, as I have said, in the general interests of society, and in viewof the conditions of the universal market, I would urge caution anddeliberation. And that is all I have to say at present on this veryinteresting subject. 

"The other point that interested me in Wilson's remarks was not, indeed, so novel as the discovery about fathers having children, but itwas, in its way, equally important. I mean, the announcement made withauthority that the human race really does, as has been so oftenconjectured, progress. We may take it now, I suppose, that that isestablished, or Wilson would not have proclaimed it. And we are, therefore, in a position roughly to determine in what progressconsists. This is a task which, I believe, I am more competent toattempt perhaps even than Wilson himself, because I have had unusualopportunities of travel, and have endeavoured to utilize them to clearmy mind of prejudices. I flatter myself that I can regard with perfectimpartiality the ideals of different countries, and in particular thoseof the new world which, I presume, are to dominate the future. Inattempting to estimate what progress means, one could not do better, Isuppose, than describe the civilization of the United States. For indescribing that, one will be describing the whole civilization of thefuture, seeing that what America is our colonies are, or will become, and what our colonies are we, too, may hope to attain, if we make theproper sacrifices to preserve the unity of the empire. Let us see, then, what, from an objective point of view, really is the future ofthis progressing world of ours. 

"Perhaps, however, before proceeding to analyse the spiritual ideals ofthe American people, I had better give some account of their country. For environment, as we all know now, has an incalculable effect uponcharacter. Consider, then, the American continent! How simple it is!How broad! How large! How grand in design! A strip of coast, a rangeof mountains, a plain, a second range, a second strip of coast! Thatis all! Contrast the complexity of Europe, its lack of symmetry, itsvariety, irregularity, disorder and caprice! The geography of the twocontinents already foreshadows the differences in their civilizations. On the one hand simplicity and size; on the other a hole-and-cornervariety; there immense rivers, endless forests, interminable plains, indefinite repetition of a few broad ideas; here distractingtransitions, novelties, surprises, shocks, distinctions in a word, already suggesting Distinction. Even in its physical features Americais the land of quantity, while Europe is that of quality. And as withthe land, so with its products. How large are the American fruits!How tall the trees! How immense the oysters! What has Europe bycomparison! Mere flavour and form, mere beauty, delicacy and grace!America, one would say, is the latest work of the great artist--we aretold, indeed, by geologists, that it is the youngest of thecontinents--conceived at an age when he had begun to repeat himself, broad, summary, impressionist, audacious in empty space; whereas Europewould seem to represent his pre-Raphaelite period, in its wealth ofdetail, its variety of figure, costume, architecture, landscape, itscrudely contrasted colours and minute precision of individual form. 

"And as with the countries, so with their civilizations. Europe is thehome of class, America of democracy. By democracy I do not mean a mereform of government--in that respect, of course, America is lessdemocratic than England: I mean the mental attitude that implies andengenders Indistinction. Indistinction, I say, rather than equality, for the word equality is misleading, and might seem to imply, forexample, a social and economic parity of conditions, which no moreexists in America than it does in Europe. Politically, as well associally, America is a plutocracy; her democracy is spiritual andintellectual; and its essence is, the denial of all superiorities savethat of wealth. Such superiorities, in fact, hardly exist across theAtlantic. All men there are intelligent, all efficient, all energetic;and as these are the only qualities they possess, so they are the onlyones they feel called upon to admire. How different is the case withEurope! How innumerable and how confusing the gradations! Fordiversities of language and race, indeed, we may not be altogetherresponsible; but we have superadded to these, distinctions of manner, of feeling, of perception, of intellectual grasp and spiritual insight, unknown to the simpler and vaster consciousness of the West. Inaddition, in short, to the obvious and fundamentally natural standardof wealth, we have invented others impalpable and artificial in theircharacter; and however rapidly these may be destined to disappear asthe race progresses, and the influence of the West begins to dominatethe East, they do, nevertheless, still persist, and give to our effetecivilization the character of Aristocracy, that is of Caste. In allthis we see, as I have suggested, the influence of environment. Theold-world stock, transplanted across the ocean, imitates thecharacteristics of its new home. Sloughing off artificialdistinctions, it manifests itself in bold simplicity, broad as theplains, turbulent as the rivers, formless as the mountains, crude asthe fruits of its adopted country. "

"Yet while thus forming themselves into the image of the new world, theAmericans have not disdained to make use of such acquisitions of thePast as might be useful to them in the task that lay before them. Theyhave rejected our ideals and our standards; but they have borrowed ourcapital and our inventions. They have thus been able--a thing unknownbefore in the history of the world--to start the battle against Naturewith weapons ready forged. On the material results they have thus beenable to achieve it is the less necessary for me to dilate, that theykeep us so fully informed of them themselves. But it may beinteresting to note an important consequence in their spiritual life, which has commonly escaped the notice of observers. Thanks to Europe, America has never been powerless in the face of Nature; therefore hasnever felt Fear; therefore never known Reverence; and therefore neverexperienced Religion. It may seem paradoxical to make such anassertion about the descendants of the Puritan Fathers; nor do I forgetthe notorious fact that America is the home of the sects, from thefollowers of Joseph Smith to those of Mrs. Eddy. But these are thephenomena that illustrate my point. A nation which knew what religionwas, in the European sense; whose roots were struck in the soil ofspiritual conflict, of temptations and visions in haunted forests ordesert sands by the Nile, of midnight risings, scourgings of the flesh, dirges in vast cathedrals, and the miracle of the Host solemnly veiledin a glory of painted light--such a nation would never have acceptedChristian Science as a religion. No! Religion in America is aparasite without roots. The questions that have occupied Europe fromthe dawn of her history, for which she has fought more fiercely thanfor empire or liberty, for which she has fasted in deserts, agonized incells, suffered on the cross, and at the stake, for which she hassacrificed wealth, health, ease, intelligence, life, these questions ofthe meaning of the world, the origin and destiny of the soul, the lifeafter death, the existence of God, and His relation to the universe, for the American people simply do not exist. They are as inaccessible, as impossible to them, as the Sphere to the dwellers in Flatland. Thatwhole dimension is unknown to them. Their healthy and robustintelligence confines itself to the things of this world. Theirreligion, if they have one, is what I believe they call'healthy-mindedness. ' It consists in ignoring everything that mightsuggest a doubt as to the worth of existence, and so conceivablyparalyse activity. 'Let us eat and drink, ' they say, with a hearty androbust good faith; omitting as irrelevant and morbid the discouragingappendix, 'for to-morrow we die. ' Indeed! What has death to do withbuildings twenty-four stories high, with the fastest trains, thenoisiest cities, the busiest crowds in the world, and generally thelargest, the finest, the most accelerated of everything that exists?America has sloughed off religion; and as, in the history of Europe, religion has underlain every other activity, she has sloughed off, along with it, the whole European system of spiritual life. Literature, for instance, and Art, do not exist across the Atlantic. Iam aware, of course, that Americans write books and paint pictures. But their books are not Literature, nor their pictures Art, except inso far as they represent a faint adumbration of the European tradition. The true spirit of America has no use for such activities. And evenif, as must occasionally happen in a population of eighty millions, there is born among them a man of artistic instincts, he is immediatelyand inevitably repelled to Europe, whence he derives his training andhis inspiration, and where alone he can live, observe and create. Thatthis must be so from the nature of the case is obvious when we reflectthat the spirit of Art is disinterested contemplation, while that ofAmerica is cupidous acquisition. Americans, I am aware, believe thatthey will produce Literature and Art, as they produce coal and steeland oil, by the judicious application of intelligence and capital; buthere they do themselves injustice. The qualities that are making themmasters of the world, unfit them for slighter and less seriouspursuits. The Future is for them, the kingdom of elevators, oftelephones, of motor-cars, of flying-machines. Let them not idly harkback, misled by effete traditions, to the old European dream of thekingdom of heaven. '_Excudent alii_, ' let them say, 'for Europe, Letters and Art; _tu regere argento populos, Morgane, memento_, letAmerica rule the world by Syndicates and Trusts!' For such is her truedestiny; and that she conceives it to be such, is evidenced by thedetermination with which she has suppressed all irrelevant activities. Every kind of disinterested intellectual operation she has severelyrepudiated. In Europe we take delight in the operations of the mind assuch, we let it play about a subject, merely for the fun of the thing;we approve knowledge for its own sake; we appreciate irony and wit. But all this is unknown in America. The most intelligent people in theworld, they severely limit their intelligence to the adaptation ofmeans to ends. About the ends themselves they never permit themselvesto speculate; and for this reason, though they calculate, they neverthink, though they invent, they never discover, and though they talk, they never converse. For thought implies speculation; discovery, reflection; conversation, leisure; and all alike imply adisinterestedness which has no place in the American system. For thesame reason they do not play; they have converted games into battles;and battles in which every weapon is legitimate so long as it isvictorious. An American football match exhibits in a type the Americanspirit, short, sharp, scientific, intense, no loitering by the road, noenjoyment of the process, no favour, no quarter, but a fight to thedeath with victory as the end, and anything and everything as the means. 

"A nation so severely practical could hardly be expected to attach thesame importance to the emotions as has been attributed to them byEuropeans. Feeling, like Intellect, is not regarded, in the West, asan end in itself. And it is not uninteresting to note that theAmericans are the only great nation that have not produced a singlelyric of love worth recording. Physically, as well as spiritually, they are a people of cold temperament. Their women, so much and, I donot doubt, so legitimately admired, are as hard as they are brilliant;their glitter is the glitter of ice. Thus happily constituted, Americans are able to avoid the immense waste of time and energyinvolved in the formation and maintenance of subtle personal relations. They marry, of course, they produce children, they propagate the race;but, I would venture to say, they do not love, as Europeans have loved;they do not exploit the emotion, analyse and enjoy it, still lessexpress it in manners, in gesture, in epigram, in verse. And hence thekind of shudder produced in a cultivated European by the treatment ofemotion in American fiction. The authors are trying to expresssomething they have never experienced, and to graft the Europeantradition on to a civilization which has none of the elements necessaryto nourish and support it. 

"From this brief analysis of the attitude of Americans towards life, the point with which I started will, I hope, have become clear, that itis idle to apply to them any of the tests which we apply to a Europeancivilization. For they have rejected, whether they know it or not, ourwhole scheme of values. What, then, is their own? What do theyrecognize as an end? This is an interesting point on which I havereflected much in the course of my travels. Sometimes I have thoughtit was wealth, sometimes power, sometimes activity. But a poem, or atleast a production in metre, which I came across in the States, gave mea new idea upon the subject. On such a point I speak with greatdiffidence; but I am inclined to think that my author was right; thatthe real end which Americans set before themselves is Acceleration. Tobe always moving, and always moving faster, that they think is thebeatific life; and with their happy detachment from philosophy andspeculation, they are not troubled by the question, Whither? If theyare asked by Europeans, as they sometimes are, what is the point ofgoing so fast? their only feeling is one of genuine astonishment. Why, they reply, you go fast! And what more can be said? Hence, theircontempt for the leisure so much valued by Europeans. Leisure theyfeel, to be a kind of standing still, the unpardonable sin. Hence, also, their aversion to play, to conversation, to everything that isnot work. I once asked an American who had been describing to me thescheme of his laborious life, where it was that the fun came in? Hereplied, without hesitation and without regret, that it came innowhere. How should it? It could only act as a brake; and a brakeupon Acceleration is the last thing tolerable to the American genius. 

"The American genius, I say: but after all, and this is the real pointof my remarks, what America is, Europe is becoming. We, who sit here, with the exception, of course, of Wilson, represent the Past, not theFuture. Politicians, professors, lawyers, doctors, no matter what ourcalling, our judgments are determined by the old scale of values. Intellect, Beauty, Emotion, these are the things we count precious; towealth and to progress we are indifferent, save as conducing to these. And thus, like the speakers who preceded me, we venture to criticizeand doubt, where the modern man, American or European, simply andwholeheartedly accepts. For this it would be idle for us to blameourselves, idle even to regret; we should simply and objectively notethat we are out of court. All that we say may be true, but it isirrelevant. 'True, ' says the man of the Future, 'we have no religion, literature, or art; we don't know whence we come, nor whither we go;but, what is more important, we don't care. What we do know is, thatwe are moving faster than any one ever moved before; and that there isevery chance of our moving faster and faster. To inquire "whither" isthe one thing that we recognize as blasphemous. The principle of theUniverse is Acceleration, and we are its exponents; what is notaccelerated will be extinguished; and if we cannot answer ultimatequestions, that is the less to be regretted in that, a few centurieshence, there will be nobody left to ask them. '

"Such is the attitude which I believe to be that of the Future, both inthe West and in the East. I do not pretend to sympathize with it; butmy perception of it gives a peculiar piquancy to my own position. Irejoice that I was born at the end of an epoch; that I stand as it wereat the summit, just before the plunge into the valley below; andlooking back, survey and summarize in a glance the ages that are past. I rejoice that my friends are Socrates and Plato, Dante, Michelangelo, Goethe instead of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I rejoice thatI belong to an effete country; and that I sit at table with almost thelast representatives of the culture, the learning and the ideals ofcenturies of civilization. I prefer the tradition of the Past to thatof the Future; I value it the more for its contrast with that which isto come; and I am the more at ease inasmuch as I feel myself divestedof all responsibility towards generations whose ideals and standards Iam unable to appreciate. 

"All this shows, of course, merely that I am not one of the people soaptly described by Wilson as the 'new generation. ' But I flattermyself that my intellectual apprehension is not coloured by thecircumstances of my own case, and that I have given you a clear andobjective picture of what it is that really constitutes progress. Andwith that proud consciousness in my mind, I resume my seat. "

THE conclusion of this speech was greeted with a hubbub of laughter, approval, and protest confusedly mixed; in the midst of which itoccurred to me that I would select Audubon as the next speaker. Myreason was that Ellis, as I thought, under cover of an extravagant fitof spleen, had made rather a formidable attack on the doctrine ofprogress as commonly understood by social reformers. He had given us, as it were, the first notes of the Negative. But Audubon, I knew, would play the tune through to the end; and I thought we might as wellhave it all, and have it before it should be too late for the possiblecorrectives of other speakers. Audubon was engaged in some occupationin the city, and how he came to be a member of our society I cannottell; for he professed an uncompromising aversion to all speculation. He was, however, a regular attendant and spoke well, though always inthe sense that there was nothing worth speaking about. On thisoccasion he displayed, as usual, some reluctance to get on to his feet;and even when he was overruled began, characteristically, with aprotest. 

"I don't see why it should be a rule that everybody must speak. Ibelieve I have said something of the kind before"--but here he wasinterrupted by a general exclamation that he had said it much toooften; whereupon he dropped the subject, but maintained his tone ofprotest. "You don't understand, " he went on, "what a difficultposition I am in, especially in a discussion of this kind. Mystandpoint is radically different from that of the rest of you; andanything I say is bound to be out of key. You're all playing what youthink to be the game of life, and playing it willingly. But I playonly under compulsion; if you call it playing, when one is hounded outto field in all weathers without ever having a chance of an innings. Or, rather, the game's more like tennis than cricket, and we're thelittle boys who pick up the balls--and that, in my opinion, is a damnedhumiliating occupation. And surely you must all really think so too!Of course, you don't like to admit it. Nobody does. In the pulpit, inthe press, in conversation, even, there's a conspiracy of silence andbluff. It's only in rare moments, when a few men get together in thesmoking-room, that the truth comes out. But when it does come out it'salways the same refrain, 'cui bono, cui bono?' I don't take muchaccount of myself; but, if there is one thing of which I am proud, itis that I have never let myself be duped. From the earliest days I canremember I realized what the nature of this world really is. And allexperience has confirmed that first intuition. That other people don'tseem to have it, too, is a source of constant amazement to me. Butreally, and without wishing to be arrogant, I believe the reason isthat they choose to be duped and I don't. They intend, at all costs, to be happy, or interested, or whatever it is that they prefer to callit. And I don't say they are not wise in their generation. But I'mnot made like that; I just see things as they are; and I see thatthey're very bad--a point in which I differ from the Creator. 

"Well, now, to come to to-night's discussion, and my attitude towardsit. You have assumed throughout, as, of course, you were bound to do, that things are worth while. But if they aren't, what becomes of allyour aims, all your views, all your problems and disputes? The basison which you are all agreed, however much you may differ in detail, isthat things can be made better, and that it's worth while to make themso. But if one denies both propositions, what happens to thesuperstructure? And I do deny them; and not only that, but I can'tconceive how anyone ever came to accept them. Surely, if one didn'tapproach the question with an irrational bias towards optimism, onewould never imagine that there is such a thing as progress in anythingthat really matters. Or are even we here impressed by such silly andirrelevant facts as telephones and motor-cars? Ellis, I should think, has said enough to dispel that kind of illusion; and I don't want tolabour a tedious point. If we are to look for progress at all we mustlook for it, I suppose, in men. And I have never seen any evidencethat men are generally better than they used to be; on the contrary, Ithink there is evidence that they are worse. But anyhow, even grantingthat we could make things a bit better, what would be the use of doingit in a world like this? If the whole structure of the universe isbad, what's the good of fiddling with the details? You might as wellwaste your time in decorating the saloon of a sinking ship. Grantingthat you can improve the distribution of property, and raise thestandard of health and intelligence and all the rest of it, grantingyou could to-morrow introduce your socialist state, or your liberalstate, or your anarchical co-operation, or whatever the plan maybe--how would you be better off in anything that matters? The maingoverning facts would be unaltered. Men, for example, would still beborn, without being asked whether they want it or no. And that alone, to my mind, is enough to condemn the whole business. I can't think howit is that people don't resent more than they do the mere insult totheir self-respect involved in such a situation. Nothing can cure it, nothing can improve it. It's a fundamental condition of life. 

"If that were all it would be bad enough. But that's only thebeginning. For the world into which we are thus ignominiously flungturns out to be incalculable and irrational. There are, of course, Iknow, what are called the laws of nature. But I--to tell the honesttruth--I don't believe in them. I mean, I see no reason to supposethat the sun will rise to-morrow, or that the seasons will continue toobserve their course, or that any of our most certain expectations willbe fulfilled in the future as they have been in the past. We importinto the universe our own prejudice in favour of order; and theuniverse, I admit, up to a point appears to conform to it. But I don'ttrust the conformity. Too many evidences abound of frivolous andincalculable caprice. Why should not the appearance of order be butone caprice the more, or even a crowning device of calculated malice?And anyhow, the things that most concern us, tempests, epidemics, accidents, from the catastrophe of birth to the deliverance of death, we have no power to foresee or to forestall. Yet, in face of all this, borne home to us every hour of every day, we cling to the creed ofuniversal law; and on the flux of chaos write our 'credo quiaimpossibile. '

"Well, that is a heresy of mine I have never found anyone to share. But no matter. My case is so strong I can afford to give it away pointby point. Granting then, that there were order in the universe, howdoes that make it any better? Does it not rather make it worse, if theorder is such as to produce evil? And how great that evil is I neednot insist. For it has been presupposed in everything that has beensaid to-night. If it were a satisfactory world you wouldn't all bewanting to alter it. Still, you may say--people always do--'if thereis evil there is also good. ' But it is just the things people callgood, even more than those they admit to be evil, that make me despairof the world. How anyone with self-respect can accept, and acceptthankfully, the sort of things people do accept is to me a standingmystery. It is surely the greatest triumph achieved by the Power thatmade the universe that every week there gather into the churchescongregations of victims to recite their gratitude for 'their creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life. ' The blessings!What are they? Money? Success? Reputation? I don't profess, myself, to be anything better than a man of the world; but that those thingsshould be valued as they are by men of the world is a thing that passesmy understanding. 'Well, but, ' says the moralist, 'there's always dutyand work. ' But what is the value of work if there's nothing worthworking for? 'Ah, but, ' says the poet, 'there's beauty and love. ' Butthe beauty and love he seeks is something he never finds. What hegrasps is the shadow, not the thing. And even the shadow flits pastand eludes him on the stream of time. 

"And just there is the final demonstration of the malignity of thescheme of things. Time itself works against us. The moments that areevil it eternalizes; the moments that might be good it hurries toannihilation. All that is most precious is most precarious. Vainly dowe cry to the moment: 'Verweile doch, du bist so schön!' Only theheavy hours are heavy-footed. The winged Psyche, even at the moment ofbirth, is sick with the pangs of dissolution. 

"These, surely, are facts, not imaginations. Why, then, is it that menrefuse to look them in the face? Or, if they do, turn at once away toconstruct some other kind of world? For that is the most extraordinarything of all, that men invent systems, and that those systems areoptimistic. It is as though they said: 'Things must be good. But asthey obviously are not good, they must really be other than they are. 'And hence these extraordinary doctrines, so pitiful, so pathetic, soabsurd, of the eternal good God who made this bad world, of theAbsolute whose only manifestation is the Relative, of the Real whichhas so much less reality than the Phenomenal. Or, if all that berejected, we transfer our heaven from eternity to time, and projectinto the future the perfection we miss in the present or in the past. 'True, ' we say, 'a bad world! but then how good it will be!' And withthat illusion generation after generation take up their burden andmarch, because beyond the wilderness there must be a Promised Land intowhich some day some creatures unknown will enter. As though the evilof the past could be redeemed by any achievement of the future, or theperfection of one make up for the irremediable failure of another!

"Such ideas have only to be stated for their absurdity to be palpable. Yet none the less they hold men. Why? I cannot tell. I only knowthat they do not and cannot hold me; that I look like a stranger fromanother world upon the business of this one; that I am among you, butnot of you; that your motives and aims to me are utterlyunintelligible; that you can give no account of them to which I canattach any sense; that I have no clue to the enigma you seem so lightlyto solve by your religion, your philosophy, your science; that yourhopes are not mine, your ambitions not mine, your principles not mine;that I am shipwrecked, and see around me none but are shipwrecked too;yet, that these, as they cling to their spars, call them good ships andtrue, speak bravely of the harbour to which they are prosperouslysailing, and even as they are engulfed, with their last breath, cry, 'lo, we are arrived, and our friends are waiting on the quay!' Who, under these circumstances is mad? Is it I? Is it you? I can onlydrift and wait. It may be that beyond these waters there is a harbourand a shore. But I cannot steer for it, for I have no rudder, nocompass, no chart. You say you have. Go on, then, but do not call tome. I must sink or swim alone. And the best for which I can hope isspeedily to be lost in the silent gulf of oblivion. "

OFTEN as I had heard Audubon express these sentiments before, I hadnever known him to reveal so freely and so passionately the innermostbitterness of his soul. There was, no doubt, something in thecircumstances of the time and place that prompted him to this personalnote. For it was now the darkest and stillest hour of the night; andwe sat in the dim starlight, hardly seeing one another, so that itseemed possible to say, as behind a veil, things that otherwise itwould have been natural to suppress. A long silence followed Audubon'slast words. They went home, I dare say to many of us more than weshould have cared to confess. And I felt some difficulty whom tochoose of the few who had not yet spoken, so as to avoid, as far aspossible, a tone that would jar upon our mood. Finally, I selectedCoryat, the poet, knowing he was incapable of a false note, and hopinghe might perhaps begin to pull us, as it were, up out of the pit intowhich we had slipped. He responded from the darkness, with thehesitation and incoherence which, in him, I have always found socharming. 

"I don't know, " he began, "of course--well, yes, it may be all verybad--at least for some people. But I don't believe it is. And I doubtwhether Audubon really--well, I oughtn't to say that, I suppose. Butanyhow, I'm sure most people don't agree with him. At any rate, for mypart, I find life extraordinarily good, just as it is, not mine only, Imean, but everybody's; well, except Audubon's, I suppose I ought tosay, and even he, perhaps finds it rather good to be able to find it sobad. But I'm not going to argue with him, because I know it's no use. Its all the other people I want to quarrel with--except Ellis, who hasI believe some idea of the things that really count. But I don't thinkAllison has, or Wilson, or most of the people who talk about progress. Because, if you project, so to speak, all your goods into the future, that shows that you don't appreciate those that belong to life just asit is and wherever it is. And there must, I am sure, be somethingwrong about a view that makes the past and the present merely a meansto the future. It's as though one were to take a bottle and turn itupside down, emptying the wine out without noticing it; and then planhow tremendously one will improve the shape of the bottle. Well, I'mnot interested in the shape of bottles. And I am interested in wine. And--which is the point--I know that the wine is always there. It wasthere in the past, it's here in the present, and it will be there inthe future; yes, in spite of you all!" He flung this out with a kindof defiance that made us laugh. Whereupon he paused, as if he had donesomething indiscreet, and then after looking in vain for a bridge totake him across to his next starting-place, decided, as it seemed, tojump, and went on as follows: "There's Wilson, for instance, tells usthat the new generation have no use for--I don't know that he used thatdreadful phrase, but that's what he meant--that they have 'no use for'the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Middle Ages, or the eighteenthcentury, or anything but themselves. Well, I can only say I'm verysorry for them, and very glad I'm not one of them. Why, just think ofthe extraordinary obliquity, or rather blindness of it! Because youdon't agree with Plato, or Marcus Aurelius, or Saint Francis, you thinkthey're only fit for the ash-heap. You might as well say you wouldn'tdrink any wine except what was made to-day! The literature and art ofthe past can never be dead. It's the flask where the geni of life isimprisoned; you've only to open it and the life is yours. And whatlife! That it's different from ours is just its merit. I don't meanthat it's necessarily better; but it preserves for us the things wehave dropped out. Because we, no more than the men of the past, exhaust all the possibilities. The whole wonderful drama of life isunfolded in time, and we of this century are only one scene of it; notthe most passionate either or the most absorbing. As actors, ofcourse, we're concerned only with this scene. But the curious thingis, we're spectators, too, or can be if we like. And from thespectator's point of view, many of the episodes in the past are muchmore interesting, if not more important, than those of the present. Imean, it seems to me so stupid--I oughtn't to say stupid, I suppose, because of course you aren't exactly----" Whereat we laughed again, and he pulled himself up. "What I mean is, that to take the philosophyor the religion of the past and put it into your laboratory and test itfor truth, and throw it away if it doesn't answer the test, is tomisconceive the whole value and meaning of it. The real question is, What extraordinary, fascinating, tragic or comic life went to producethis precious specimen? What new revelation does it give of thepossibilities of the world? That's how you look at it, if you have thesense of life. You feel after life everywhere. You love it when youtouch it. You ask it no questions about being good or bad. It justis, and you are akin to it. Fancy, for instance, a man being able towalk through the British Museum and pass the frieze of the Parthenon, and say he has no use for it! And why? Because, I suppose, we don'tdress like that now, and can't ride horses bareback. Well, so much theworse for us! But just think. There shrieking from the wall--no, Iought to say singing with the voice of angels--is the spirit of life inits loveliest, strongest, divinest incarnation, saying 'love me, understand me, be like me!' And the new generation passes by with itsnose in the air sniffing, 'No! You're played out! You didn't knowscience. And you didn't produce four children a-piece, as we mean to. And your education was rhetorical, and your philosophy absurd, and yourvices--oh, unmentionable! No, no, young men! Not for us, thank you!'And so they stalk on, don't you see them, with their rational costume, and their rational minds, and their hard little hearts, and the emptyplace where their imagination ought to be! Dreadful, dreadful! Orperhaps they go, say, to Assisi, and Saint Francis comes to talk tothem. And 'Look, ' he says, 'what a beautiful world, if you'd only getrid of your encumbrances! Money, houses, clothes, food, it's all somuch obstruction! Come and see the real thing; come and live with thelife of the soul; burn like a flame, blossom like a flower, flow like amountain stream!' 'My dear sir, ' they reply, 'you're unclean, impudentand ignorant! Moreover you're encouraging mendicancy and superstition. Not to-day, thank you!' And off they go to the Charity OrganisationCommittee. It's--it's----" He pulled himself up again, and then wenton more quietly. "Well, one oughtn't to get angry, and I dare say I'mmisrepresenting everybody. Besides, I haven't said exactly what Iwanted to say. I wanted to say--what was it? Oh, yes! that this kindof attitude is bound up with the idea of progress. It comes of takingall the value out of the past and present, in order to put it into thefuture. And then you _don't_ put it there! You can't! It evaporatessomehow, in the process. Where is it then? Well, I believe it'salways there, in life, and in every kind of life. It's there all thetime, in all the things you condemn. Of course the things really arebad that you say are bad. But they're so good as well! I mean--well, the other day I read one of those dreadful articles--at least, ofcourse they're very useful I suppose--about the condition of theagricultural labourer. Well, then I took a ride in the country, andsaw it all in its setting and complete, with everything the article hadleft out; and it wasn't so bad after all. I don't mean to say it wasall good either, but it was just wonderful. There were great horseswith shaggy fetlocks resting in green fields, and cattle wading inshallow fords, and streams fringed with willows, and little cheepingbirds among the reeds, and larks and cuckoos and thrushes. And therewere orchards white with blossom, and little gardens in the sun, andshadows of clouds brushing over the plain. And the much-discussedlabourer was in the midst of all this. And he really wasn't anincarnate grievance! He was thinking about his horses, or his breadand cheese, or his children squalling in the road, or his pig and hiscocks and hens. Of course I don't suppose he knew how beautifuleverything was; but I'm sure he had a sort of comfortable feeling ofbeing a part of it all, of being somehow all right. And he wasn'tworrying about his condition, as you all worry for him. I don't meanyou aren't right to worry, in a way; except that no one ought to worry. But you oughtn't to suppose it's all a dreadful and intolerable thing, just because you can imagine something better. That, of course, isonly one case; but I believe it's the same everywhere; yes, even in thebig cities, which, to my taste, look from outside much more repulsiveand terrible. There's a quality in the inevitable facts of life, inmaking one's living, and marrying and producing children, in the endingof one and the beginning of another day, in the uncertainties and fearsand hopes, in the tragedies as well as the comedies, something thatarrests and interests and absorbs, even if it doesn't delight. I'm notsaying people are happy; sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. But anyhow they are interested. And life itself is the interest. Andthat interest is perennial, and of all ages and all classes. And ifyou leave it out you leave out the only thing that counts. That's whyideals are so empty; just because, I mean, they don't exist. And Iassure you--now I'm going to confess--that often, when I come away fromsome meeting or from reading some dreadful article on social reform, Ifeel as if I could embrace everything and everyone I come across, simply for being so good as to exist--the 'bus-drivers, the cabmen, theshop-keepers, the slum-landlords, the slum-victims, the prostitutes, the thieves. There they are, anyhow, in their extraordinary setting, floating on the great river of life, that was and is and will be, itself its own justification, through whatever country it may flow. And if you don't realize that--if you have a whole community thatdoesn't realize it--then, however happy and comfortable and equitableand all the rest of it you make your society, you haven't really donemuch for them. Their last state may even be worse than the first, because they will have lost the natural instinctive acceptance of life, without learning how to accept it on the higher plane. 

"And that is why--now comes what I really do care about, and what I'vebeen wanting to say--that is why there is nothing so important for thefuture or the present of the world as poetry. Allison, for instance, and Wilson would be different men if only they would read my works!I'm not sure even if I may say so, that Remenham himself wouldn't bethe better. " Remenham, however, smilingly indicated that he had readthem. Whereat Coryat rather comically remarked, "Oh, well! Yes!Perhaps then my poetry isn't quite good enough. But there'sShakespeare, and Milton, and--I don't care who it is, so long as it hasthe essential of all great poetry, and that is to make you feel theworth of things. I don't mean by that the happiness, but just theextraordinary value, of which all these unsolved questions about Goodand Evil are themselves part. No one, I am sure, ever laid down agreat tragedy--take the most terrible of all, take 'Lear'--without anoverwhelming sense of the value of life; life as it is, life at itsmost pitiless and cruel, with all its iniquities, suffering, perplexity; without feeling he would far rather have lived and had allthat than not have lived at all. But tragedy is an extreme case. Inevery simpler and more common case the poet does the same thing for us. He shows us that the lives he touches have worth, worth of pleasure, ofhumour, of patience, of wisdom painfully acquired, of endurance, ofhope, even I will say of failure and despair. He doesn't blinkanything, he looks straight at it all, but he sees it in the trueperspective, under a white light, and seeing all the Evil saysnevertheless with God, 'Behold, it is very good. ' You see, " he added, with his charming smile, turning to Audubon, "I agree with God, notwith you. And perhaps if you were to read poetry ... But, you know, you must not only read it; you've got to feel it. "

"Ah, " said Audubon, "but that I'm afraid is the difficulty. "

"I suppose it is. Well--I don't know that I can say any more. "

And without further ado he dropped back into his seat. 

SITTING next to Coryat was a man who had not for a long time beenpresent at our meetings. His name was Harington. He was a wealthyman, the head of a very ancient family; and at one time had taken aprominent part in politics. But, of late, he had resided mainly inItaly devoting himself to study and to the collection of works of art. I did not know what his opinions were, for it so happened that I hadnever heard him speak or had any talk with him. I had no idea, therefore, when I called upon him, what he would be likely to say, andI waited with a good deal of curiosity as he stood a few momentssilent. It was now beginning to get light, and I could see his face, which was unusually handsome and distinguished. He had indeed the airof a seventeenth-century nobleman, and might, except for the costume, have stepped out of a canvas of Van Dyck. Presently he spoke in a richmellow voice and with a gravity that harmonized with his bearing. 

"Let me begin with a confession, perhaps I ought even to say anapology. To be among you again after so many years is a privilege; butit is one which brings with it elements of embarrassment. I have livedso long in a foreign land that I feel myself an alien here. I hearvoices familiar of old, but I have forgotten their language; I seeforms once well known, but the atmosphere in which they move seemsstrange. I am fresh from Italy; and England comes upon me with ashock. Even her physical aspect I see as I never saw it before. Ifind it lovely, with a loveliness peculiar and unique. But I misssomething to which I have become accustomed in the south; I miss light, form, greatness, and breadth. Instead, there is grey or golden haze, blurred outlines, tender skies, lush luxurious greenery. Italy ringslike metal; England is a muffled drum. The one has the ardour ofBeauty; the other the charm of the Picturesque. I dwell upon thisbecause I seem to see--perhaps I am fanciful--a kindred distinctionbetween the north and the south in quality of mind. The Greekintelligence, and the Italian, is pitiless, searching, white as theMediterranean sunshine; the English and German is kindly, discreet, amiably and tenderly confused. The one blazes naked in a brazen sky;the other is tempered by vapours of sentiment. The English, inparticular, I think, seldom make a serious attempt to face the truth. Their prejudices and ideals shut them in, like their green hedges; andthey live, even intellectually, in a country of little fields. I donot deny that this is soothing and restful; but I feel it--shall Iconfess--intolerably cooping. I long for the searching light, the wideprospect; for the vision of things as they really are. I haveconsorted too long with Aristotle and Machiavelli to find myself athome in the country of the Anglican Church and of Herbert Spencer. "Here he paused, and seemed to hesitate, while we wondered what he couldbe leading up to. Then, resuming, "This may seem, " he went on, "a longintroduction; but it is not irrelevant; though I feel some hesitationin applying it. But, if the last speaker will permit me to take mytext from him, I would ask him, is it not a curiously indiscriminateprocedure to affirm indifferently value in all life? A poetsurely--and Coryat's practice, if he will allow me to say so, issounder than his theory--a poet seeks to render, wherever he can findit, the exquisite, the choice, the distinguished and the rare. Notlife, but beauty is his quest. He does not reproduce Nature, heimposes upon her a standard. And so it is with every art, includingthe art of life itself. Life as such is neither good nor bad, and, Audubon's undistinguishing censure is surely as much out of place asCoryat's undistinguishing approval. Life is raw material for theartist, whether he be the private man carrying out his own destiny, orthe statesman shaping that of a nation. The end of the artist ineither case is the good life; and on his own conception of that willdepend the value of his work. 

"I recall to your minds these obvious facts, at the risk of beingtedious, because to-night, seeing the turn that our discussion hastaken, we must regard ourselves as statesmen, or as would-be statesmen. And I, in that capacity, finding myself in disagreement with everybody, except perhaps Cantilupe, and asking myself the reason why, can onlyconclude that I have a different notion of the end to be pursued, andof the means whereby it can be attained. All of you, I think, exceptCantilupe, have assumed that the good life, whatever it may be, can beattained by everybody; and that society should be arranged so as tosecure that result. That is, in fact, the democratic postulate, whichis now so generally accepted not only in this company but in the worldat large. But it is that postulate that I dispute. I hold that thegood life must either be the privilege of a few, or not exist at all. The good life in my view, is the life of a gentleman. That word, Iknow, has been degraded; and there is no more ominous sign of thedegradation of the English people. But I use it in its true and noblesense. I mean by a gentleman a man of responsibility; one who becausehe enjoys privileges recognizes duties; a landed proprietor who isalso, and therefore, a soldier and a statesman; a man with a naturalcapacity and a hereditary tradition to rule; a member, in a word, of agoverning aristocracy. Not that the good life consists in governing;but only a governing class and those who centre round them are capableof the good life. Nobility is a privilege of the nobleman, andnobility is essential to goodness. We are told indeed, that Good is tobe found in virtue, in knowledge, in art, in love. I will not disputeit; but we must add that only a noble man can be virtuous greatly, knowwisely, perceive and feel finely. And virtue that is mean, knowledgethat is pedantic, art that is base, love that is sensual are not Goodsat all. A noble man of necessity feels and expresses himself nobly. His speech is literature, his gesture art, his action drama, hisaffections music. About him centres all that is great in literature, science, art. Magnificent buildings, exquisite pictures, statues, poems, songs, crowd about his habitation and attend him from the cradleto the grave. His fine intelligence draws to itself those of likedisposition. He seeks genius, but he shuns pedantry; for his knowledgeis part of his life. All that is great he instinctively apprehends, because it is akin to himself. And only so can anything be trulyapprehended. For every man and every class can only understand andpractise the virtues appropriate to their occupations. A professorwill never be a hero, however much he reads the classics. Ashop-walker will never be a poet, however much he reads poetry. If youwant virtue, in the ancient sense, the sense of honour, of courage, ofself-reliance, of the instinct to command, you must have a class ofgentlemen. Otherwise virtue will be at best a mere conception in thehead, a figment of the brain, not a character and a force. Why is theteaching of the classics now discredited among you? Not because it isnot as valuable as ever it was, but because there is no one left tounderstand its value. The tradesmen who govern you feel instinctivelythat it is not for them, and they are right. It is above and beyondthem. But it was the natural food of gentlemen. And the example mayserve to illustrate the general truth, that you cannot revolutionizeclasses and their relations without revolutionizing culture. It isidle to suppose you can communicate to a democracy the heritage of anaristocracy. You may give them books, show them pictures, offer themexamples. In vain! The seed cannot grow in the new soil. The masseswill never be educated in the sense that the classes were. You mayrejoice in the fact, or you may regret it; but at least it should berecognized. For my own part I regret it, and I regret it because Iconceive that the good life is the life of the gentleman. 

"From this it follows that my ideal of a polity is aristocratic. For aclass of gentlemen presupposes classes of workers to support it. Andthese, from the ideal point of view, must be regarded as mere means. Ido not say that that is just; I do not say it is what we should choose;but I am sure it is the law of the world in which we live. Through thewhole realm of nature every kind exists only to be the means ofsupporting life in another. Everywhere the higher preys upon thelower; everywhere the Good is parasitic on the Bad. And as in nature, so in human society. Read history with an impartial mind, read it inthe white light, and you will see that there has never been a greatcivilization that was not based upon iniquity. Those who have eyes tosee have always admitted, and always will, that the greatestcivilization of Europe was that of Greece. And of that civilizationnot merely an accompaniment but the essential condition was slavery. Take away that and you take away Pericles, Phidias, Sophocles, Plato. Dismiss Greece, if you like. Where then will you turn? To the MiddleAges? You encounter feudalism and serfdom. To the modern world? Yourun against wage-labour. Ah, but, you say, we look to the future. Weshall abolish wage-labour, as we have abolished slavery. We shall havean equitable society in which everybody will do productive work, andnobody will live at the cost of others. I do not know whether you cando this; it is possible you may; but I ask you to count the cost. Andfirst let me call your attention to what you have actually done duringthe course of the past century. You have deposed your aristocracy andset up in their place men who work for their living, instead of for thepublic good, merchants, bankers, shop-keepers, railway directors, brewers, company-promoters. Whether you are better and more justlygoverned I do not pause to enquire. You appear to be satisfied thatyou are. But what I see, returning to England only at rare intervals, and what you perhaps cannot so easily see, is that you are ruining allyour standards. Dignity, manners, nobility, nay, common honestyitself, is rapidly disappearing from among you. Every time I return Ifind you more sordid, more petty, more insular, more ugly andunperceptive. For the higher things, the real goods, were supportedand sustained among you by your class of gentlemen, while they deservedthe name. But by depriving them of power you have deprived them ofresponsibility, which is the salt of privilege; and they are rottingbefore your eyes, crumbling away and dropping into the ruck. Whetherthe general level of your civilization is rising I do not pronounce. Ido not even think the question of importance; for any rise must bealmost imperceptible. The salient fact is that the pinnacles aredisappearing; that soon there will be nothing left that seeks thestars. Your middle classes have no doubt many virtues; they are, Iwill presume, sensible, capable, industrious, and respectable. Butthey have no notion of greatness, nay, they have an instinctive hatredof it. Whatever else they may have done, they have destroyed allnobility. In art, in literature, in drama, in the building of palacesor villas, _nihil tetigerunt quod non faedaverunt_. Such is the resultof entrusting power to men who make their own living, instead of to aclass set apart by hereditary privilege to govern and to realize thegood life. But, you may still urge, this is only a temporary stage. We still have a parasitic class, the class of capitalists. It is onlywhen we have got rid of them, that the real equality will begin, andwith it will come all other excellence. Well, I think it possible thatyou might establish, I will not say absolute equality, but an equalityfar greater than the world has ever seen; that you might exact fromeverybody some kind of productive work, in return for the guarantee ofa comfortable livelihood. But there is no presumption that in that wayyou will produce the nobility of character which I hold to be the onlything really good. For such nobility, as all history and experienceclearly shows, if we will interrogate it honestly, is the product of aclass-consciousness. Personal initiative, personal force, a freedomfrom sordid cares, a sense of hereditary obligation based on hereditaryprivilege, the consciousness of being set apart for high purposes, ofbeing one's own master and the master of others, all that and much moregoes to the building up of the gentleman; and all that is impossible ina socialistic state. In the eternal order of this inexorable world itis prescribed that greatness cannot grow except in the soil ofiniquity, and that justice can produce nothing but mediocrity. Thatthe masses should choose justice at the cost of greatness isintelligible, nay it is inevitable; and that choice is the innermeaning of democracy. But gentlemen should have had the insight tosee, and the courage to affirm, that the price was too great to pay. They did not; and the penalty is that they are ceasing to exist. Theyhave sacrificed themselves to the attempt to establish equity. But inthat attempt I can take no interest. The society in which I believe isan aristocratic one. I hold, with Plato and Aristotle, that the massesought to be treated as means, treated kindly, treated justly, so far asthe polity permits, but treated as subordinate always to a higher end. But your feet are set on the other track. You are determined toabolish classes; to level down in order to level up; to destroysuperiorities in order to raise the average. I do not say you will notsucceed. But if you do, you will realize comfort at the expense ofgreatness, and your society will be one not of men but of ants and bees. 

"For Democracy--note it well--destroys greatness in every kind, ofintellect, of perception, as well as of character. And especially itdestroys art, that reflection of life without which we cannot be saidto live. For the artist is the rarest, the most choice of men. Hissenses, his perception, his intelligence have a natural and inbornfineness and distinction. He belongs to a class, a very small, a veryexclusive one. And he needs a class to appreciate and support him. Nodemocracy has ever produced or understood art. The case of Athens iswrongly adduced; for Athens was an aristocracy under the influence ofan aristocrat at the time the Parthenon was built. At all times Arthas been fostered by patrons, never by the people. How should theyfoster it? Instinctively they hate it, as they hate all superiorities. It was not Florence but the Medici and the Pope that employedMichelangelo; not Milan but Ludovic the Moor that valued Leonardo. Itwas the English nobles that patronized Reynolds and Gainsborough; thedarlings of our middle class are Herkomer and Collier. There have beenpoets, it is true, who have been born of the people and loved of them;and I do not despise poetry of that kind. But it is not the greatthing. The great thing is Sophocles and Virgil, a fine culture weddedto a rich nature. And such a marriage is not accomplished in thefields or the market-place. The literature loved by democracy is aliterature like themselves; not literature at all, but journalism, gross, shrieking, sensational, base. So with the drama, so witharchitecture, so with every art. Substitute the mass for the patron, and you eliminate taste. The artist perishes; the charlatan survivesand flourishes. Only in science have you still an aristocracy. Forthe crowd sees that there is profit in science, and lets it go its way. Because of the accident that it can be applied, it may bedisinterestedly pursued. And democracy hitherto, though impatiently, endures an ideal aim in the hope of degrading its achievement to itsown uses. 

"Such being my view of democratic society I look naturally for elementsthat promise not to foster, but to counteract it. I look for the germsof a new aristocracy. They are hard to discover, and perhaps mydesires override my judgment. But I fancy that it will be the veryland that has suffered most acutely from the disease that will be thefirst to discover the remedy. I endorse Ellis's view of Americancivilization; but I allow myself to hope that the reaction is alreadybeginning. I have met in Italy young Americans with a finer sense ofbeauty, distinction, and form, than I have been able to find amongEnglishmen, still less among Italians. And once there is cast intothat fresh and unencumbered soil the seed of the ideal that made Greecegreat, who can prophecy into what forms of beauty and thought it maynot flower? The Plutocracy of the West may yet be transformed into anAristocracy; and Europe re-discover from America the secret of its pastgreatness. Such, at least, appears to me to be the best hope of theworld; and to the realization of that hope I would have all men ofculture all the world over unite their efforts. For the kingdom ofthis earth, like that of heaven, is taken by violence. We must worknot with, but against tendencies, if we would realize anything great;and the men who are fit to rule must have the courage to assume power, if ever there is to be once more a civilization. Therefore it is thatI, the last of an old aristocracy, look across the Atlantic for thefirst of the new. And beyond socialism, beyond anarchy, across thatweltering sea, I strain my eyes to see, pearl-grey against the dawn, the new and stately citadel of Power. For Power is the centre ofcrystallization for all good; given that, you have morals, art, religion; without it, you have nothing but appetites and passions. Power then is the condition of life, even of the life of the mass, inany sense in which it is worth having. And in the interest ofDemocracy itself every good Democrat ought to pray for the advent ofAristocracy. "

ALL of our company had now spoken except two. One was the author, Vivian, and him I had decided to leave till the last. The other wasJohn Woodman, a member of the Society of Friends, and one who wascommonly regarded as a crank, because he lived on a farm in thecountry, worked with his hands, and refused to pay taxes on the groundthat they went to maintain the army and navy. If Harington washandsome, Woodman was beautiful, but with beauty of expression ratherthan of features, I had always thought of him as a perfect example ofthat rare type, the genuine Christian. And since Harington had justrevealed himself as a typical Pagan, I felt glad of the chance whichbrought the two men into such close juxtaposition. My only doubt was, whether Woodman would consent to speak. For on previous occasions Ihad known him to refuse; and he was the only one of us who had alwaysbeen able to sustain his refusal, without unpleasantness, but withoutyielding. To-night, however, he rose in response to my appeal, andspoke as follows:

"All the evening I have been wondering when the lot would fall on me, and whether, when it did, I should feel, as we Friends say, 'free' toanswer the call. Now that it has come, I am, I think, free; but not, if you will pardon me, for a long or eloquent speech. What I have tosay I shall say as simply and as briefly as I can; and you, I know, will listen with your accustomed tolerance, though I shall differ evenmore, if possible, from all the other speakers, than they have differedfrom one another. For you have all spoken from the point of view ofthe world. You have put forward proposals for changing society andmaking it better. But you have relied, for the most part, on externalmeans to accomplish such changes. You have spoken of extending orlimiting the powers of government, of socialism, of anarchy, ofeducation, of selective breeding. But you have not spoken of theSpirit and the Life, or not in the sense in which I would wish to speakof them. MacCarthy, indeed, I remember, used the words 'the life ofthe spirit. ' But I could not well understand what he meant, exceptthat he hoped to attain it by violence; and in that way what I wouldseek and value cannot be furthered. Coryat, again, and Harington spokeof the good life. But Coryat seemed to think that any and all life isgood. The line of division which I see everywhere he did not see atall, the line between the children of God and the children of thisworld. I could not say with him that there is a natural goodness inlife as such; only that any honest occupation will be good if it bepractised by a good man. It is not wealth that is needed, nor talents, nor intellect. These things are gifts that may be given or withheld. But the one thing needful is the spirit of God, which is given freelyto the poor and the ignorant who seek it. Believing this, I cannot butdisagree, also, with Harington. For the life of which he spoke is thelife of this world. He praises power, and wisdom, and beauty, and theexcellence of the body and the mind. In these things, he says, thegood life consists. And since they are so rare and difficult toattain, and need for their fostering, natural aptitudes, and leisureand wealth and great position, he concludes that the good life ispossible only for the few; and that to them the many should beministers. And if the goods he speaks of be really such, he is right;for in the things of the world, what one takes, another must resign. If there are rulers there must be subjects; if there are rich, theremust be poor; if there are idle men there must be drudges. But thereal Good is not thus exclusive. It is open to all; and the more a manhas of it the more he gives to others. That Good is the love of God, and through the love of God the love of man. These are old phrases, but their sense is not old; rather it is always new, for it is eternal. Now, as of old, in the midst of science, of business, of invention, ofthe multifarious confusion and din and hurry of the world, God may bedirectly perceived and known. But to know Him is to love Him, and tolove Him is to love His creatures, and most all of our fellow-men, towhom we are nearest and most akin, and with and by whom we needs mustlive. And if that love were really spread abroad among us, thequestions that have been discussed to-night would resolve themselves. For there would be a rule of life generally observed and followed; andunder it the conditions that make the problems would disappear. Ofsuch a rule, all men, dimly and at moments, are aware. By it they werewarned that slavery was wrong. And had they but read it more truly, and followed it more faithfully, they would never have made war toabolish what they would never have wished to maintain. And the samerule it is that is warning us now that it is wrong to fight, wrong toheap up riches, wrong to live by the labour of others. As we come toheed the warning we shall cease to do these things. But to changeinstitutions without changing hearts is idle. For it is but to changethe subjects into the rulers, the poor into the rich, the drudges intothe idle men. And, as a result, we should only have idle men morefrivolous, rich men more hard, rulers more incompetent. It is not byviolence or compulsion, open or disguised, that the kingdom of heavencomes. It is by simple service on the part of those that know the law, by their following the right in their own lives, and preaching ratherby their conduct than by their words. 

"This would be a hard saying if we had to rely on ourselves. But wehave God to rely on, who gives His help not according to the measure ofour powers. A man cannot by taking thought add a cubit to his stature;he cannot increase the scope of his mind or the range of his senses; hecannot, by willing, make himself a philosopher, or a leader of men. But drawing on the source that is open to the poorest and the weakesthe can become a good man; and then, whatever his powers, he will beusing them for God and man. If men do that, each man for himself, bythe help of God, all else will follow. So true is it that if ye seekfirst the kingdom of heaven all these things shall be added unto you. Yes, that is true. It is eternal truth. It does not change with thedoctrines of Churches nor depend upon them. I would say even it doesnot depend on Christianity. For the words would be true, though therehad never been a Christ to speak them. And the proof that they aretrue is simply the direct witness of consciousness. We perceive suchtruths as we perceive the sun. They carry with them their owncertainty; and on that rests the certainty of God. Therein is theessence of all religion. I say it because I know. And the rest ofyou, so it seems to me, are guessing. Nor is it, as it might seem atfirst, a truth irrelevant to your discussion. For it teaches that allchange must proceed from within outward. There is not, there never hasbeen, a just polity, for there has never been one based on the love ofGod and man. All that you condemn--poverty, and wealth, idleness andexcessive labour, squalor, disease, barren marriages, aggression andwar, will continue in spite of all changes in form, until men will toget rid of them. And that they will not do till they have learnt tolove God and man. Revolution will be vain, evolution will be vain, alluneasy turnings from side to side will be vain, until that change ofheart be accomplished. And accomplished it will be in its own time. Everywhere I see it at work, in many ways, in the guise of manydifferent opinions. I see it at work here to-night among those withwhom I most disagree. I see it in the hope of Allison and Wilson, inthe defiance of MacCarthy, in the doubt of Martin, and most of all inthe despair of Audubon. For he is right to despair of the only life heknows, the life of the world whose fruits are dust and ashes. Hedrifts on a midnight ocean, unlighted by stars, and tossed by the windsof disappointment, sorrow, sickness, irreparable loss. Ah, but abovehim, if he but knew, as now in our eyes and ears, rises into a crystalsky the first lark of dawn. And the cuckoo sings, and the blackbird, do you not hear them? And the fountain rises ever in showers of silversparks, up to the heaven it will not reach till fire has made itvapour. And so the whole creation aspires, out of the night ofdespair, into the cool freshness of dawn and on to the sun of noon. Let us be patient and follow each his path, waiting on the word of Godtill He be pleased to reveal it. For His way is not hard, it is joyand peace unutterable. And those who wait in faith He will bless withthe knowledge of Himself. "

As he finished it was light, though the sun had not yet risen. Thefirst birds were singing in the wood, and the fountain glistened andsang, and the plain lay before us like a bride waiting for thebridegroom. We were silent under the spell; and I scarcely know howlong had passed before I had heart to call upon Vivian to conclude. 

I have heard Vivian called a philosopher, but the term is misleading. Those who know his writings--and they are too few--know that heconcerned himself, directly or indirectly, with philosophic problems. But he never wrote philosophy; his methods were not those of logic; andhis sympathies were with science and the arts. In the early age ofGreece he might have been Empedocles or Heraclitus; he could never havebeen Spinoza or Kant. He sought to interpret life, but not merely interms of the intellect. He needed to see and feel in order to think. And he expressed himself in a style too intellectual for lovers ofpoetry, too metaphorical for lovers of philosophy. His Public, therefore, though devoted, was limited; but we, in our society, alwayslistened to him with an interest that was rather enhanced thandiminished by an element of perplexity. I have found it hard toreproduce his manner, in which it was clear that he took a consciousand artistic pleasure. Still less can I give the impression of hislean and fine-cut face, and the distinction of his whole personality. He stood up straight and tall against the whitening sky, and deliveredhimself as follows:

"Man is in the making; but henceforth he must make himself. To thatpoint Nature has led him, out of the primeval slime. She has given himlimbs, she has given him brain, she has given him the rudiment of asoul. Now it is for him to make or mar that splendid torso. Let himlook no more to her for aid; for it is her will to create one who hasthe power to create himself. If he fail, she fails; back goes themetal to the pot; and the great process begins anew. If he succeeds, he succeeds alone. His fate is in his own hands. 

"Of that fate, did he but know it, brain is the lord, to fashion apalace fit for the soul to inhabit. Yet still, after centuries ofstumbling, reason is no more than the furtive accomplice of habit andforce. Force creates, habit perpetuates, reason the sycophantsanctions. And so he drifts, not up but down, and Nature watches inanguish, self-forbidden to intervene, unless it be to annihilate. Ifhe is to drive, and drive straight, reason must seize the reins; andthe art of her driving is the art of Politics. Of that art, the aim isperfection, the method selection. Science is its minister, ethics itslord. It spares no prejudice, respects no habit, honours no tradition. Institutions are stubble in the fire it kindles. The present and thepast it throws without remorse into the jaws of the future. It is theangel with the flaming sword swift to dispossess the crone that sits onher money-bags at Westminster. 

"Or, shall I say, it is Hercules with the Augean stable to cleanse, ofwhich every city is a stall, heaped with the dung of a century; withthe Hydra to slay, whose hundred writhing heads of false belief, fromold truth rotted into lies, spring inexhaustibly fecund in creeds, interests, institutions. Of which the chief is Property, most crueland blind of all, who devours us, ere we know it, in the guise ofSecurity and Peace, killing the bodies of some, the souls of most, andgrowing ever fresh from the root, in forms that but seem to be new, until the root itself be cut away by the sword of the spirit. Whatthat sword shall be called, socialism, anarchy, what you will, is smallmatter, so but the hand that wields it be strong, the brain clear, thesoul illumined, passionate and profound. But where shall the championbe found fit to wield that weapon?

"He will not be found; he must be made. By Man Man must be sown. Oncehe might trust to Nature, while he was laid at her breast. But she hasweaned him; and the promptings she no longer guides, he may not blindlytrust for their issue. While she weeded, it was hers to plant; but sheweeds no more. He of his own will uproots or spares; and of his ownwill he must sow, if he would not have his garden a wilderness. Evennow precious plants perish before his eyes, even now weeds grow rank, while he watches in idle awe, and prates of his own impotence. He hasgiven the reins to Desire, and she drives him back to the abyss. Butharness her to the car, with reason for charioteer, and she will growwings to waft him to his goal. That in him that he calls Love is butthe dragon of the slime. Let him bury it in the grave of Self, and itwill rise a Psyche, with wings too wide to shelter only the home. TheMan that is to be comes at the call of the Man that is. Let him callthen, soberly, not from the fumes of lust. For as is the call, so willbe the answer. 

"But for what should he call? For Pagan? For Christian? For neither, and for both. Paganism speaks for the men in Man, Christianity for theMan in men. The fruit that was eaten in Paradise, sown in the soul ofman, bore in Hellas its first and fairest harvest. There rose upon theworld of mind the triple sun of the Ideal. Aphrodite, born of thefoam, flowered on the azure main, Tritons in her train and Nereids, under the flush of dawn. Apollo, radiant in hoary dew, leapt from theeastern wave, flamed through the heaven, and cooled his hissing wheelsin the vaporous west. Athene, sprung from the brain of God, armed withthe spear of truth, moved grey-eyed over the earth probing the minds ofmen. Love, Beauty, Wisdom, behold the Pagan Trinity! Through whosegrace only men are men, and fit to become Man. Therefore, the gods areeternal; not they die, but we, when we think them dead. And no man whodoes not know them, and knowing, worship and love, is able to be amember of the body of Man. Thus it is that the sign of a step forwardis a look backward; and Greece stands eternally at the threshold of thenew life. Forget her, and you sink back, if not to the brute, to theinsect. Consider the ant, and beware of her! She is there for awarning. In universal Anthood there are no ants. From that fate maymen save Man!

"But the Pagan gods were pitiless; they preyed upon the weak. Theirwisdom was rooted in folly, their beauty in squalor, their love inoppression. So fostered, those flowers decayed. And out of therotting soil rose the strange new blossoms we call Faith, and Hope, andCharity. For Folly cried, 'I know not, but I believe'; Squalor, 'I amvile, but I hope'; and the oppressed, 'I am despised, but I love. 'That was the Christian Trinity, the echo of man's frustration, as theother was the echo of his accomplishment. Yet both he needs. Forbecause he grows, he is dogged by imperfection. His weakness is mockedby those shining forms on the mountain-top. But Faith, and Hope, andCharity walk beside him in the mire, to kindle, to comfort and to help. And of them justice is born, the plea of the Many against the Few, ofthe nation against the class, of mankind against the nation, of thefuture against the present. In Christianity men were born into Man. Yet in Him let not men die! For what profits justice unless it be thestep to the throne of Olympus? What profit Faith and Hope without agoal? Charity without an object? Vain is the love of emmets, or ofbees and coral-insects. For the worth of love is as the worth of thelover. It is only in the soil of Paganism that Christianity can cometo maturity. And Faith, Hope, Charity, are but seeds of themselvestill they fall into the womb of Wisdom, Beauty, and Love. Olympus liesbefore us, the snow-capped mountain. Let us climb it, together, if youwill, not some on the corpses of the rest; but climb at least, notfester and swarm on rich meadows of equality. We are not for thevalley, nor for the forests or the pastures. If we be brothers, yet weare brothers in a quest, needing our foremost to lead. Aphrodite, Apollo, Athene, are before us, not behind. Majestic forms, they gleamamong the snows. March, then, men in Man!

"But is it men who attain? Or Man? Or not even he, but God? We donot know. We know only the impulse and the call. The gleam on thesnow, the upward path, the urgent stress within, that is our certainty, the rest is doubt. But doubt is a horizon, and on it hangs the star ofhope. By that we live; and the science blinds, the renunciation maims, that would shut us off from those silver rays. Our eyes must open, aswe march, to every signal from the height. And since the soul hasindeed 'immortal longings in her' we may believe them prophetic oftheir fruition. For her claims are august as those of man, and appealto the same witness. The witness of either is a dream; but such dreamscome from the gate of horn. They are principles of life, and aboutthem crystallizes the universe. For will is more than knowledge, sincewill creates what knowledge records. Science hangs in a void ofnescience, a planet turning in the dark. But across that void Faithbuilds the road that leads to Olympus and the eternal gods. "

By the time he had finished speaking the sun had risen, and the glamourof dawn was passing into the light of common day. The birds sang loud, the fountain sparkled, and the trees rustled softly in the earlybreeze. Our party broke up quietly. Some went away to bed; othersstrolled down the gardens; and Audubon went off by appointment to bathewith my young nephew, as gay and happy, it would seem, as man could be. I was left to pace the terrace alone, watching the day grow brighter, and wondering at the divers fates of men. An early bell rang in thelittle church at the park-gate; a motor-car hooted along the highway. And I thought of Cantilupe and Harington, of Allison and Wilson, andbeyond them of the vision of the dawn and the daybreak, of Woodman, thesoul, and Vivian, the spirit. I paused for a last look down the lineof bright statues that bordered the long walk below me. I fancied themstretching away to the foot of Olympus; and without elation orexcitement, but with the calm of an assured hope, I prepared to beginthe new day. 

 _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

 AFTER TWO THOUSAND YEARS PLATO AND HIS DIALOGUES THE MEANING OF GOOD JUSTICE AND LIBERTY A POLITICAL DIALOGUE RELIGION AND IMMORTALITY RELIGION: A CRITICISM AND A FORECAST THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE LETTERS FROM JOHN CHINAMAN APPEARANCES: BEING NOTES ON TRAVEL AN ESSAY ON THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA, CHINA AND JAPAN CONTRIBUTION OF ANCIENT GREECE TO MODERN LIFE THE INTERNATIONAL ANARCHY, 1904-1914 EVOLUTION IN RE-ACTION IN MODERN FRANCE 1789-1871 THE EUROPEAN ANARCHY WAR: ITS NATURE, CAUSE AND CUBE CAUSES OF INTERNATIONAL WAR THE CHOICE BEFORE US DOCUMENTS AND STATEMENTS RELATING TO PEACE PROPOSALS AND WAR AIMS, DECEMBER 1916-1918

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