AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD

Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters

By

H. G. WELLS

1914

Blériot arrives and sets him thinking. (1)

He flies, (2)

And deduces certain consequences of cheap travel. (3)

He considers the King, and speculates on the New Epoch; (4)

He thinks Imperially, (5)

And then, coming to details, about Labour, (6)

Socialism, (7)

And Modern Warfare, (8)

He discourses on the Modern Novel, (9)

And the Public Library; (10)

Criticises Chesterton, Belloc, (11)

And Sir Thomas More, (12)

And deals with the London Traffic Problem as a Socialist should. (13)

He doubts the existence of Sociology, (14)

Discusses Divorce, (15)

Schoolmasters, (16)

Motherhood, (17)

Doctors, (18)

And Specialisation; (19)

Questions if there is a People, (20)

And diagnoses the Political Disease of our Times. (21)

He then speculates upon the future of the American Population, (22)

Considers a possible set-back to civilisation, (23)

The Ideal Citizen, (24)

The still undeveloped possibilities of Science, (25), and--in the broadest spirit--

The Human Adventure. (26)

CONTENTS

1. The Coming of Blériot

2. My First Flight

3. Off the Chain

4. Of the New Reign

5. Will the Empire Live?

6. The Labour Unrest

7. The Great State

8. The Common Sense of Warfare

9. The Contemporary Novel

10. The Philosopher's Public Library

11. About Chesterton and Belloc

12. About Sir Thomas More

13. Traffic and Rebuilding

14. The So-called Science of Sociology

15. Divorce

16. The Schoolmaster and the Empire

17. The Endowment of Motherhood

18. Doctors

19. An Age of Specialisation

20. Is there a People?

21. The Disease of Parliaments

22. The American Population

23. The Possible Collapse of Civilisation

24. The Ideal Citizen

25. Some Possible Discoveries

26. The Human Adventure

AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD

THE COMING OF BLÉRIOT

(_July, 1909_. )

The telephone bell rings with the petulant persistence that marks atrunk call, and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn todeal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up, minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another andare submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the realmessage comes through: "Blériot has crossed the Channel.... An article... About what it means. "

I make a hasty promise and go out and tell my friends. 

From my garden I look straight upon the Channel, and there are whitecaps upon the water, and the iris and tamarisk are all asway with thesouth-west wind that was also blowing yesterday. M. Blériot has donevery well, and Mr. Latham, his rival, had jolly bad luck. That is whatit means to us first of all. It also, I reflect privately, means that Ihave under-estimated the possible stability of aeroplanes. I did notexpect anything of the sort so soon. This is a good five years before myreckoning of the year before last. 

We all, I think, regret that being so near we were not among thefortunate ones who saw that little flat shape skim landward out of theblue; surely they have an enviable memory; and then we fell talking anddisputing about what that swift arrival may signify. It starts a swarmof questions. 

First one remarks that here is a thing done, and done with anastonishing effect of ease, that was incredible not simply to ignorantpeople but to men well informed in these matters. It cannot be fifteenyears ago since Sir Hiram Maxim made the first machine that could liftits weight from the ground, and I well remember how the clumsy qualityof that success confirmed the universal doubt that men could ever in anyeffectual manner fly. 

Since then a conspiracy of accidents has changed the whole problem; thebicycle and its vibrations developed the pneumatic tyre, the pneumatictyre rendered a comfortable mechanically driven road vehicle possible, the motor-car set an enormous premium on the development of very light, very efficient engines, and at last the engineer was able to offer theexperimentalists in gliding one strong enough and light enough for thenew purpose. And here we are! Or, rather, M. Blériot is!

What does it mean for us?

One meaning, I think, stands out plainly enough, unpalatable enough toour national pride. This thing from first to last was made abroad. Ofall that made it possible we can only claim so much as is due to theimprovement of the bicycle. Gliding began abroad while our young men ofmuscle and courage were braving the dangers of the cricket field. Themotor-car and its engine was being worked out "over there, " while inthis country the mechanically propelled road vehicle, lest it shouldfrighten the carriage horses of the gentry, was going meticulously atfour miles an hour behind a man with a red flag. Over there, where theprosperous classes have some regard for education and some freedom ofimaginative play, where people discuss all sorts of things fearlessly, and have a respect for science, this has been achieved. 

And now our insularity is breached by the foreigner who has got aheadwith flying. 

It means, I take it, first and foremost for us, that the world cannotwait for the English. 

It is not the first warning we have had. It has been raining warningsupon us; never was a slacking, dull people so liberally served withwarnings of what was in store for them. But this event--thisforeigner-invented, foreigner-built, foreigner-steered thing, taking oursilver streak as a bird soars across a rivulet--puts the casedramatically. We have fallen behind in the quality of our manhood. Inthe men of means and leisure in this island there was neither enterpriseenough, imagination enough, knowledge nor skill enough to lead in thismatter. I do not see how one can go into the history of this developmentand arrive at any other conclusion. The French and Americans can laughat our aeroplanes, the Germans are ten years ahead of our poornavigables. We are displayed a soft, rather backward people. Either weare a people essentially and incurably inferior, or there is somethingwrong in our training, something benumbing in our atmosphere andcircumstances. That is the first and gravest intimation in M. Blériot'sfeat. 

The second is that, in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from themilitary point of view, an inaccessible island. 

So long as one had to consider the navigable balloon the aerial side ofwarfare remained unimportant. A Zeppelin is little good for any purposebut scouting and espionage. It can carry very little weight inproportion to its vast size, and, what is more important, it cannot dropthings without sending itself up like a bubble in soda water. An armadaof navigables sent against this island would end in a dispersed, deflated state, chiefly in the seas between Orkney and Norway--though Isay it who should not. But these aeroplanes can fly all round thefastest navigable that ever drove before the wind; they can dropweights, take up weights, and do all sorts of able, inconvenient things. They are birds. As for the birds, so for aeroplanes; there is an upwardlimit of size. They are not going to be very big, but they are going tobe very able and active. Within a year we shall have--or rather _they_will have--aeroplanes capable of starting from Calais, let us say, circling over London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive uponthe printing machines of _The Times_, and returning securely to Calaisfor another similar parcel. They are things neither difficult nor costlyto make. For the price of a Dreadnought one might have hundreds. Theywill be extremely hard to hit with any sort of missile. I do not think alarge army of under-educated, under-trained, extremely unwillingconscripts is going to be any good against this sort of thing. 

I do not think that the arrival of M. Blériot means a panic resort toconscription. It is extremely desirable that people should realise thatthese foreign machines are not a temporary and incidental advantage thatwe can make good by fussing and demanding eight, and saying we won'twait, and so on, and then subsiding into indolence again. They are justthe first-fruits of a steady, enduring lead that the foreigner has won. The foreigner is ahead of us in education, and this is especially trueof the middle and upper classes, from which invention and enterprisecome--or, in our own case, do not come. He makes a better class of manthan we do. His science is better than ours. His training is better thanours. His imagination is livelier. His mind is more active. Hisrequirements in a novel, for example, are not kindly, sedative pap; hisuncensored plays deal with reality. His schools are places for vigorouseducation instead of genteel athleticism, and his home has books in it, and thought and conversation. Our homes and schools are relatively dulland uninspiring; there is no intellectual guide or stir in them; and tothat we owe this new generation of nicely behaved, unenterprising sons, who play golf and dominate the tailoring of the world, while Brazilians, Frenchmen, Americans and Germans fly. 

That we are hopelessly behindhand in aeronautics is not a fact byitself. It is merely an indication that we are behindhand in ourmechanical knowledge and invention M. Blériot's aeroplane points also tothe fleet. 

The struggle for naval supremacy is not merely a struggle inshipbuilding and expenditure. Much more is it a struggle in knowledgeand invention. It is not the Power that has the most ships or thebiggest ships that is going to win in a naval conflict. It is the Powerthat thinks quickest of what to do, is most resourceful and inventive. Eighty Dreadnoughts manned by dull men are only eighty targets for aquicker adversary. Well, is there any reason to suppose that our Navyis going to keep above the general national level in these things? Isthe Navy _bright_?

The arrival of M. Blériot suggests most horribly to me how far behind wemust be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance. I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realisedthat it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it waspossible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench todefy shrapnel. Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, andfished out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what aconfoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly thing the enemy haddone to him. 

Very probably the Navy is the exception to the British system; itsofficers are rescued from the dull homes and dull schools of their classwhile still of tender years, and shaped after a fashion of their own. But M. Blériot reminds us that we may no longer shelter and degeneratebehind these blue backs. And the keenest men at sea are none the worsefor having keen men on land behind them. 

Are we an awakening people?

It is the vital riddle of our time. I look out upon the windy Channeland think of all those millions just over there, who seem to get busierand keener every hour. I could imagine the day of reckoning coming likea swarm of birds. 

Here the air is full of the clamour of rich and prosperous peopleinvited to pay taxes, and beyond measure bitter. They are going to liveabroad, cut their charities, dismiss old servants, and do all sorts ofsilly, vindictive things. We seem to be doing feeble next-to-nothingsin the endowment of research. Not one in twenty of the boys of themiddle and upper classes learns German or gets more than a misleadingsmattering of physical science. Most of them never learn to speakFrench. Heaven alone knows what they do with their brains! The Britishreading and thinking public probably does not number fifty thousandpeople all told. It is difficult to see whence the necessary impetus fora national renascence is to come.... The universities are poor andspiritless, with no ambition to lead the country. I met a Boy Scoutrecently. He was hopeful in his way, but a little inadequate, I thought, as a basis for confidence in the future of the Empire. 

We have still our Derby Day, of course.... 

Apart from these patriotic solicitudes, M. Blériot has set quite anothertrain of thought going in my mind. The age of natural democracy issurely at an end through these machines. There comes a time when menwill be sorted out into those who will have the knowledge, nerve, andcourage to do these splendid, dangerous things, and those who willprefer the humbler level. I do not think numbers are going to matter somuch in the warfare of the future, and that when organised intelligencediffers from the majority, the majority will have no adequate power ofretort. The common man with a pike, being only sufficiently indignantand abundant, could chase the eighteenth century gentleman as he chose, but I fail to see what he can do in the way of mischief to an elusivechevalier with wings. But that opens too wide a discussion for me toenter upon now. 

MY FIRST FLIGHT

(EASTBOURNE, _August 5, 1912--three years later_. )

Hitherto my only flights have been flights of imagination but thismorning I flew. I spent about ten or fifteen minutes in the air; we wentout to sea, soared up, came back over the land, circled higher, planedsteeply down to the water, and I landed with the conviction that I hadhad only the foretaste of a great store of hitherto unsuspectedpleasures. At the first chance I will go up again, and I will go higherand further. 

This experience has restored all the keenness of my ancient interest inflying, which had become a little fagged and flat by too much hearingand reading about the thing and not enough participation. Sixteen yearsago, in the days of Langley and Lilienthal, I was one of the fewjournalists who believed and wrote that flying was possible; it affectedmy reputation unfavourably, and produced in the few discouraged pioneersof those days a quite touching gratitude. Over my mantel as I writehangs a very blurred and bad but interesting photograph that ProfessorLangley sent me sixteen years ago. It shows the flight of the firstpiece of human machinery heavier than air that ever kept itself up forany length of time. It was a model, a little affair that would not havelifted a cat; it went up in a spiral and came down unsmashed, bringingback, like Noah's dove, the promise of tremendous things. 

That was only sixteen years ago, and it is amusing to recall howcautiously even we out-and-out believers did our prophesying. I wasquite a desperate fellow; I said outright that in my lifetime we shouldsee men flying. But I qualified that by repeating that for many years tocome it would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring andskill. We conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks. I was deeplyimpressed and greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridgemathematician produced to show that a flying machine was bound to pitchfearfully, that as it flew on its pitching _must_ increase until up wentits nose, down went its tail, and it fell like a knife. We exaggeratedevery possibility of instability. We imagined that when the aeroplanewasn't "kicking up ahind and afore" it would be heeling over to thelightest side wind. A sneeze might upset it. We contrasted our poorhuman equipment with the instinctive balance of a bird, which has hadten million years of evolution by way of a start.... 

The waterplane in which I soared over Eastbourne this morning with Mr. Grahame-White was as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt. 

Then we went on from those anticipations of swaying insecurity tospeculations about the psychological and physiological effects offlying. Most people who look down from the top of a cliff or high towerfeel some slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening dread. Even if men struggled high into the air, we asked, wouldn't they besmitten up there by such a lonely and reeling dismay as to lose allself-control? And, above all, wouldn't the pitching and tossing makethem quite horribly sea-sick?

I have always been a little haunted by that last dread. It gave a littleundertow of funk to the mood of lively curiosity with which I gotaboard the waterplane this morning--that sort of faint, thin funk thatso readily invades one on the verge of any new experience; when onetries one's first dive, for example, or pushes off for the first timedown an ice run. I thought I should very probably be sea-sick--or, to bemore precise, air-sick; I thought also that I might be very giddy, andthat I might get thoroughly cold and uncomfortable None of those thingshappened. 

I am still in a state of amazement at the smooth steadfastness of themotion. There is nothing on earth to compare with that, unless--and thatI can't judge--it is an ice yacht travelling on perfect ice. The finestmotor-car in the world on the best road would be a joggling, quiveringthing beside it. 

To begin with, we went out to sea before the wind, and the plane wouldnot readily rise. We went with an undulating movement, leaping with alight splashing pat upon the water, from wave to wave. Then we cameabout into the wind and rose, and looking over I saw that there were nolonger those periodic flashes of white foam. I was flying. And it was asstill and steady as dreaming. I watched the widening distance betweenour floats and the waves. It wasn't by any means a windless day; therewas a brisk, fluctuating breeze blowing out of the north over the downs. It seemed hardly to affect our flight at all. 

And as for the giddiness of looking down, one does not feel it at all. It is difficult to explain why this should be so, but it is so. Isuppose in such matters I am neither exceptionally steady-headed nor ismy head exceptionally given to swimming. I can stand on the edge ofcliffs of a thousand feet or so and look down, but I can never bringmyself right up to the edge nor crane over to look to the very bottom. Ishould want to lie down to do that. And the other day I was on thatBelvedere place at the top of the Rotterdam sky-scraper, a rather highwind was blowing, and one looks down through the chinks between theboards one stands on upon the heads of the people in the streets below;I didn't like it. But this morning I looked directly down on a littlefleet of fishing boats over which we passed, and on the crowdsassembling on the beach, and on the bathers who stared up at us from thebreaking surf, with an entirely agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, inthe early morning sunshine, had all the brightly detailed littleness ofa town viewed from high up on the side of a great mountain. 

When Mr. Grahame-White told me we were going to plane down I willconfess I tightened my hold on the sides of the car and prepared forsomething like the down-going sensation of a switchback railway on alarger scale. Just for a moment there was that familiar feeling ofsomething pressing one's heart up towards one's shoulders, and one'slower jaw up into its socket and of grinding one's lower teeth againstthe upper, and then it passed. The nose of the car and all the machinewas slanting downwards, we were gliding quickly down, and yet there wasno feeling that one rushed, not even as one rushes in coasting a hill ona bicycle. It wasn't a tithe of the thrill of those three descents onegets on the great mountain railway in the White City. There one gets adisagreeable quiver up one's backbone from the wheels, and a real senseof falling. 

It is quite peculiar to flying that one is incredulous of anycollision. Some time ago I was in a motor-car that ran over and killed asmall dog, and this wretched little incident has left an open wound uponmy nerves. I am never quite happy in a car now; I can't help keeping anapprehensive eye ahead. But you fly with an exhilarating assurance thatyou cannot possibly run over anything or run into anything--except theland or the sea, and even those large essentials seem a beautifully safedistance away. 

I had heard a great deal of talk about the deafening uproar of theengine. I counted a headache among my chances. There again reasonreinforced conjecture. When in the early morning Mr. Travers came fromBrighton in this Farman in which I flew I could hear the hum of thegreat insect when it still seemed abreast of Beachy Head, and a good twomiles away. If one can hear a thing at two miles, how much the more willone not hear it at a distance of two yards? But at the risk of seemingtoo contented for anything I will assert I heard that noise no more thanone hears the drone of an electric ventilator upon one's table. It wasonly when I came to speak to Mr. Grahame-White, or he to me, that Idiscovered that our voices had become almost infinitesimally small. 

And so it was I went up into the air at Eastbourne with the impressionthat flying was still an uncomfortable experimental, and slightly heroicthing to do, and came down to the cheerful gathering crowd upon thesands again with the knowledge that it is a thing achieved for everyone. It will get much cheaper, no doubt, and much swifter, and be improved ina dozen ways--we _must_ get self-starting engines, for example, for bothour aeroplanes and motor-cars--but it is available to-day for anyonewho can reach it. An invalid lady of seventy could have enjoyed all thatI did if only one could have got her into the passenger's seat. Gettingthere was a little difficult, it is true; the waterplane was out in thesurf, and I was carried to it on a boatman's back, and then had toclamber carefully through the wires, but that is a matter of detail. This flying is indeed so certain to become a general experience that Iam sure that this description will in a few years seem almost as quaintas if I had set myself to record the fears and sensations of my FirstRide in a Wheeled Vehicle. And I suspect that learning to control aFarman waterplane now is probably not much more difficult than, let ussay, twice the difficulty in learning the control and management of amotor-bicycle. I cannot understand the sort of young man who won't learnhow to do it if he gets half a chance. 

The development of these waterplanes is an important step towards thehuge and swarming popularisation of flying which is now certainlyimminent. We ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote aboutflying before there was any flying used to make a great fuss about thedangers and difficulties of landing and getting up. We wrote with vastgravity about "starting rails" and "landing stages, " and it is stilltrue that landing an aeroplane, except upon a well-known and quite levelexpanse, is a risky and uncomfortable business. But getting up andlanding upon fairly smooth water is easier than getting into bed. Thisalone is likely to determine the aeroplane routes along the line of theworld's coastlines and lake groups and waterways. The airmen will go toand fro over water as the midges do. Wherever there is a square mile ofwater the waterplanes will come and go like hornets at the mouth oftheir nest. But there are much stronger reasons than this conveniencefor keeping over water. Over water the air, it seems, lies in greatlevel expanses; even when there are gales it moves in uniform masseslike the swift, still rush of a deep river. The airman, in Mr. Grahame-White's phrase, can go to sleep on it. But over the land, andfor thousands of feet up into the sky, the air is more irregular than atorrent among rocks; it is--if only we could see it--a waving, whirling, eddying, flamboyant confusion. A slight hill, a ploughed field, thestreets of a town, create riotous, rolling, invisible streams andcataracts of air that catch the airman unawares, make him dropdisconcertingly, try his nerves. With a powerful enough engine he climbsat once again, but these sudden downfalls are the least pleasant andmost dangerous experience in aviation. They exact a tiring vigilance. 

Over lake or sea, in sunshine, within sight of land, this is the perfectway of the flying tourist. Gladly would I have set out for France thismorning instead of returning to Eastbourne. And then coasted round toSpain and into the Mediterranean. And so by leisurely stages to India. And the East Indies.... 

I find my study unattractive to-day. 

OFF THE CHAIN

(_December, 1910_)

I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year, " andnoting how much the world can change in seventy years. 

I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London to Yorkshire inthat ex-sheriff's coach he bought in Long Acre--where now the motor-carsare sold--when there came a telegram to bid me note how a certain Mr. Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England from a little excursion. He had left London last Saturday week at midday; he hoped to be back byThursday; and he had talked to the President in Washington, visitedPhiladelphia, and had a comparatively loitering afternoon in New York. What had I to say about it?

Firstly, that I wish this article could be written by Samuel Warren. Andfailing that, I wish that Charles Dickens, who wrote in his "AmericanNotes" with such passionate disgust and hostility about the firstCunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of crossing theAtlantic by steamship, could have shared Mr. Holt's experience. 

Because I am chiefly impressed by the fact not that Mr. Holt has takendays where weeks were needed fifty years ago, but that he has done itvery comfortably, without undue physical exertion, and at no greaterexpense, I suppose, than it cost Dickens, whom the journey nearlykilled. 

If Mr. Holt's expenses were higher, it was for the special trains andthe sake of the record. Anyone taking ordinary trains and ordinarypassages may do what he has done in eighteen or twenty days. 

When I was a boy, "Around the World in Eighty Days" was still abrilliant piece of imaginative fiction. Now that is almost an invalid'space. It will not be very long before a man will be able to go round theworld if he wishes to do so ten times in a year. And it is perhapsforgivable if those who, like Jules Verne, saw all these increments inspeed, motor-cars, and airships aeroplanes, and submarines, wirelesstelegraphy and what not, as plain and necessary deductions from thepromises of physical science, should turn upon a world that read anddoubted and jeered with "I told you so. _Now_ will you respect aprophet?"

It was not that the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicableillumination at which a sceptic might reasonably mock; they wereprepared with ample reasons for the things they foretold. Now, quite asconfidently, they point on to a new series of consequences, highprobabilities that follow on all this tremendous development of swift, secure, and cheapened locomotion, just as they followed almostnecessarily upon the mechanical developments of the last century. 

Briefly, the ties that bind men to place are being severed; we are inthe beginning of a new phase in human experience. 

For endless ages man led the hunting life, migrating after his food, camping, homeless, as to this day are many of the Indians and Esquimauxin the Hudson Bay Territory. Then began agriculture, and for the sake ofsecurer food man tethered himself to a place. The history of man'sprogress from savagery to civilisation is essentially a story ofsettling down. It begins in caves and shelters; it culminates in a widespectacle of farms and peasant villages, and little towns among thefarms. There were wars, crusades, barbarous invasions, set-backs, but tothat state all Asia, Europe, North Africa worked its way with anindomitable pertinacity. The enormous majority of human beings stayed athome at last; from the cradle to the grave they lived, married, died inthe same district, usually in the same village; and to that condition, law, custom, habits, morals, have adapted themselves. The whole plan andconception of human society is based on the rustic home and the needsand characteristics of the agricultural family. There have been gipsies, wanderers, knaves, knights-errant and adventurers, no doubt, but thesettled permanent rustic home and the tenure of land about it, and thehens and the cow, have constituted the fundamental reality of the wholescene. Now, the really wonderful thing in this astonishing developmentof cheap, abundant, swift locomotion we have seen in the last seventyyears--in the development of which Mauretanias, aeroplanes, mile-a-minute expresses, tubes, motor-buses and motor cars are just thebright, remarkable points--is this: that it dissolves almost all thereason and necessity why men should go on living permanently in any oneplace or rigidly disciplined to one set of conditions. The formerattachment to the soil ceases to be an advantage. The human spirit hasnever quite subdued itself to the laborious and established life; itachieves its best with variety and occasional vigorous exertion underthe stimulus of novelty rather than by constant toil, and thisrevolution in human locomotion that brings nearly all the globe withina few days of any man is the most striking aspect of the unfetteringagain of the old restless, wandering, adventurous tendencies in man'scomposition. 

Already one can note remarkable developments of migration. There is, forexample, that flow to and fro across the Atlantic of labourers from theMediterranean. Italian workmen by the hundred thousand go to the UnitedStates in the spring and return in the autumn. Again, there is a streamof thousands of prosperous Americans to summer in Europe. Compared withany European country, the whole population of the United States isfluid. Equally notable is the enormous proportion of the Britishprosperous which winters either in the high Alps or along the Riviera. England is rapidly developing the former Irish grievance of an absenteepropertied class. It is only now by the most strenuous artificialbanking back that migrations on a far huger scale from India intoAfrica, and from China and Japan into Australia and America areprevented. 

All the indications point to a time when it will be an altogetherexceptional thing for a man to follow one occupation in one place allhis life, and still rarer for a son to follow in his father's footstepsor die in his father's house. 

The thing is as simple as the rule of three. We are off the chain oflocality for good and all. It was necessary heretofore for a man to livein immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for himto reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and delay oftransport were relatively too enormous for him to shift once he wassettled. _Now_ he may live twenty or thirty miles away from hisoccupation; and it often pays him to spend the small amount of time andmoney needed to move--it may be half-way round the world--to healthierconditions or more profitable employment. 

And with every diminution in the cost and duration of transport itbecomes more and more possible, and more and more likely, to beprofitable to move great multitudes of workers seasonally betweenregions where work is needed in this season and regions where work isneeded in that. They can go out to the agricultural lands at one timeand come back into towns for artistic work and organised work infactories at another. They can move from rain and darkness intosunshine, and from heat into the coolness of mountain forests. Childrencan be sent for education to sea beaches and healthy mountains. 

Men will harvest in Saskatchewan and come down in great liners to spendthe winter working in the forests of Yucatan. 

People have hardly begun to speculate about the consequences of thereturn of humanity from a closely tethered to a migratory existence. Itis here that the prophet finds his chief opportunity. Obviously, thesegreat forces of transport are already straining against the limits ofexisting political areas. Every country contains now an increasingingredient of unenfranchised Uitlanders. Every country finds a growingsection of its home-born people either living largely abroad, drawingthe bulk of their income from the exterior, and having their essentialinterests wholly or partially across the frontier. 

In every locality of a Western European country countless people arefound delocalised, uninterested in the affairs of that particularlocality, and capable of moving themselves with a minimum of loss and amaximum of facility into any other region that proves more attractive. In America political life, especially State life as distinguished fromnational political life, is degraded because of the natural andinevitable apathy of a large portion of the population whose interestsgo beyond the State. 

Politicians and statesmen, being the last people in the world to noticewhat is going on in it, are making no attempt whatever to re-adapt thishugely growing floating population of delocalised people to the publicservice. As Mr. Marriott puts it in his novel, "_Now, "_ they "drop out"from politics as we understand politics at present. Local administrationfalls almost entirely--and the decision of Imperial affairs tends moreand more to fall--into the hands of that dwindling and adventurousmoiety which sits tight in one place from the cradle to the grave. Noone has yet invented any method for the political expression andcollective direction of a migratory population, and nobody is attemptingto do so. It is a new problem.... 

Here, then, is a curious prospect, the prospect of a new kind of people, a floating population going about the world, uprooted, delocalised, andeven, it may be, denationalised, with wide interests and wide views, developing no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a morality of itsown, a philosophy of its own, and yet from the point of view of currentpolitics and legislation unorganised and ineffective. 

Most of the forces of international finance and international businessenterprise will be with it. It will develop its own characteristicstandards of art and literature and conduct in accordance with its newnecessities. It is, I believe, the mankind of the future. And the lastthing it will be able to do will be to legislate. The history of theimmediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history ofthe conflict of the needs of this new population with the institutions, the boundaries the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditionsestablished during the home-keeping, localised era of mankind's career. 

This conflict follows as inevitably upon these new gigantic facilitiesof locomotion as the _Mauretania_ followed from the discoveries of steamand steel. 

OF THE NEW REIGN

(_June, 1911_. )

The bunting and the crimson vanish from the streets. Already the vastarmy of improvised carpenters that the Coronation has created setthemselves to the work of demolition, and soon every road that convergesupon Central London will be choked again with great loads of timber--butthis time going outward--as our capital emerges from this unprecedentedinundation of loyalty. The most elaborately conceived, the most statelyof all recorded British Coronations is past. 

What new phase in the life of our nation and our Empire does thistremendous ceremony inaugurate? The question is inevitable. There isnothing in all the social existence of men so full of challenge as thecrowning of a king. It is the end of the overture; the curtain rises. This is a new beginning-place for histories. 

To us, the great mass of common Englishmen, who have no place in thehierarchy of our land, who do not attend Courts nor encounter uniforms, whose function is at most spectacular, who stand in the street and watchthe dignitaries and the liveries pass by, this sense of criticalexpectation is perhaps greater than it is for those more immediatelyconcerned in the spectacle. They have had their parts to play, theirsymbolic acts to perform, they have sat in their privileged places, andwe have waited at the barriers until their comfort and dignity wasassured. I can conceive many of them, a little fatigued, preparing nowfor social dispersal, relaxing comfortably into gossip, discussing thedetail of these events with an air of things accomplished. They willdecide whether the Coronation has been a success and whether everythinghas or has not passed off very well. For us in the great crowd nothinghas as yet succeeded or passed off well or ill. We are intent upon aKing newly anointed and crowned, a King of whom we know as yet verylittle, but who has, nevertheless, roused such expectation as no Kingbefore him has done since Tudor times, in the presence of giganticopportunities. 

There is a conviction widespread among us--his own words, perhaps, havedone most to create it--that King George is inspired, as no recentpredecessor has been inspired, by the conception of kingship, that hisis to be no rôle of almost indifferent abstinence from the broadprocesses of our national and imperial development. That greater publiclife which is above party and above creed and sect has, we are told, taken hold of his imagination; he is to be no crowned image of unity andcorrelation, a layer of foundation-stones and a signature to documents, but an actor in our drama, a living Prince. 

Time will test these hopes, but certainly we, the innumerable democracyof individually unimportant men, have felt the need for such a Prince. Our consciousness of defects, of fields of effort untilled, of vastpossibilities neglected and slipping away from us for ever, has neverreally slumbered again since the chastening experiences of the Boer War. Since then the national spirit, hampered though it is by the traditionsof party government and a legacy of intellectual and social heaviness, has been in uneasy and ineffectual revolt against deadness, againststupidity and slackness, against waste and hypocrisy in every departmentof life. We have come to see more and more clearly how little we canhope for from politicians, societies and organised movements in theseessential things. It is this that has invested the energy and manhood, the untried possibilities of the new King with so radiant a light ofhope for us. 

Think what it may mean for us all--I write as one of that greatill-informed multitude, sincerely and gravely patriotic, outside theechoes of Court gossip and the easy knowledge of exalted society--if ourKing does indeed care for these wider and profounder things! Suppose wehave a King at last who cares for the advancement of science, who iswilling to do the hundred things that are so easy in his position toincrease research, to honour and to share in scientific thought. Supposewe have a King whose head rises above the level of the Court artist, andwho not only can but will appeal to the latent and discouraged power ofartistic creation in our race. Suppose we have a King who understandsthe need for incessant, acute criticism to keep our collectiveactivities intelligent and efficient, and for a flow of bold, unhamperedthought through every department of the national life, a King liberalwithout laxity and patriotic without pettiness or vulgarity. Such, itseems to us who wait at present almost inexpressively outside theimmediate clamours of a mere artificial loyalty, are the splendidpossibilities of the time. 

For England is no exhausted or decaying country. It is rich with anunmeasured capacity for generous responses. It is a country burthenedindeed, but not overwhelmed, by the gigantic responsibilities ofEmpire, a little relaxed by wealth, and hampered rather than enslaved bya certain shyness of temperament, a certain habitual timidity, slovenliness and insincerity of mind. It is a little distrustful ofintellectual power and enterprise, a little awkward and ungracious tobrave and beautiful things, a little too tolerant of dull, well-meaningand industrious men and arrogant old women. It suffers hypocritesgladly, because its criticism is poor, and it is wastefully harsh tofrank unorthodoxy. But its heart is sound if its judgments fall short ofacuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. It needs but aquickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional centre of itsrespect, to rise from even the appearance of decadence. There is a newquality seeking expression in England like the rising of sap in thespring, a new generation asking only for such leadership and suchemancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a Kingalone can give it.... 

When in its turn this latest reign comes at last to its reckoning, whatwill the sum of its achievement be? What will it leave of thingsvisible? Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it butadd abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and massesof ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradationof the Victorian period? Will a great constellation of artists redeemthe ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find theirfitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our literature escape atlast from pretentiousness and timidity, our philosophy from the foolishcerebrations of university "characters" and eminent politicians atleisure, and our starved science find scope and resources adequate toits gigantic needs? Will our universities, our teaching, our nationaltraining, our public services, gain a new health from the revivingvigour of the national brain? Or is all this a mere wild hope, and shallwe, after perhaps some small flutterings of effort, the foundation ofsome ridiculous little academy of literary busybodies and hangers-on, the public recognition of this or that sociological pretender orfinancial "scientist, " and a little polite jobbery with picture-buying, relapse into lassitude and a contented acquiescence in the rivalry ofGermany and the United States for the moral, intellectual and materialleadership of the world?

The deaths and accessions of Kings, the changing of names and coins andsymbols and persons, a little force our minds in the marking off ofepochs. We are brought to weigh one generation against another, toreckon up our position and note the characteristics of a new phase. Whatlies before us in the next decades? Is England going on to freshachievements, to a renewed and increased predominance, or is she fallinginto a secondary position among the peoples of the world?

The answer to that depends upon ourselves. Have we pride enough toattempt still to lead mankind, and if we have, have we the wisdom andthe quality? Or are we just the children of Good Luck, who are beingfound out?

Some years ago our present King exhorted this island to "wake up" in oneof the most remarkable of British royal utterances, and Mr. Owen Seamanassures him in verse of an altogether laureate quality that we are now

 "Free of the snare of slumber's silken bands, "

though I have not myself observed it. It is interesting to ask, IsEngland really waking up? and if she is, what sort of awakening is shelikely to have?

It is possible, of course, to wake up in various different ways. Thereis the clear and beautiful dawn of new and balanced effort, easy, unresting, planned, assured, and there is also the blundering-up of astill half-somnolent man, irascible, clumsy, quarrelsome, who stubs histoe in his first walk across the room, smashes his too persistent alarumclock in a fit of nerves, and cuts his throat while shaving. Allpatriotic vehemence does not serve one's country. Exertion is a morecritical and dangerous thing than inaction, and the essence of successis in the ability to develop those qualities which make actioneffective, and without which strenuousness is merely a clumsy and noisyprotest against inevitable defeat. These necessary qualities, withoutwhich no community may hope for pre-eminence to-day, are a passion forfine and brilliant achievement, relentless veracity of thought andmethod, and richly imaginative fearlessness of enterprise. Have weEnglish those qualities, and are we doing our utmost to select anddevelop them?

I doubt very much if we are. Let me give some of the impressions thatqualify my assurance in the future of our race. 

I have watched a great deal of patriotic effort during the last decade, I have seen enormous expenditures of will, emotion and material for thesake of our future, and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effectof lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the shortness andweakness of aim in very much that has been done. I miss continually thatsharply critical imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellentwork, which shines out supremely in Cromwell's creation of the NewModel, or Nelson's plan of action at Trafalgar, as brightly as it doesin Newton's investigation of gravitation, Turner's rendering oflandscape, or Shakespeare's choice of words, but which cannot be absentaltogether if any achievement is to endure. We seem to have busy, energetic people, no doubt, in abundance, patient and industriousadministrators and legislators; but have we any adequate supply ofreally creative ability?

Let me apply this question to one matter upon which England hascertainly been profoundly in earnest during the last decade. We havebeen almost frantically resolved to keep the empire of the sea. But havewe really done all that could have been done? I ask it with alldiffidence, but has our naval preparation been free from a sort of noisyviolence, a certain massive dullness of conception? Have we really madeanything like a sane use of our resources? I do not mean of ourresources in money or stuff. It is manifest that the next naval war willbe beyond all precedent a war of mechanisms, giving such scope forinvention and scientifically equipped wit and courage as the world hasnever had before. Now, have we really developed any considerableproportion of the potential human quality available to meet the demandfor wits? What are we doing to discover, encourage and develop thosesupreme qualities of personal genius that become more and more decisivewith every new weapon and every new complication and unsuspectedpossibility it introduces? Suppose, for example, there was among usto-day a one-eyed, one-armed adulterer, rather fragile, prone tosea-sickness, and with just that one supreme quality of imaginativecourage which made Nelson our starry admiral. Would he be given theghost of a chance now of putting that gift at his country's disposal? Ido not think he would, and I do not think he would because we underrategifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickeningappreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvaluethe good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues ofmediocrity. 

I have but the knowledge of the man in the street in these things, though once or twice I have chanced on prophecy, and I am uneasilyapprehensive of the quality of all our naval preparations. We go onlaunching these lumping great Dreadnoughts, and I cannot bring myself tobelieve in them. They seem vulnerable from the air above and the deepbelow, vulnerable in a shallow channel and in a fog (and the North Seais both foggy and shallow), and immensely costly. If I were Lord HighAdmiral of England at war I would not fight the things. I would as soonput to sea in St. Paul's Cathedral. If I were fighting Germany, I wouldstow half of them away in the Clyde and half in the Bristol Channel, andtake the good men out of them and fight with mines and torpedoes anddestroyers and airships and submarines. 

And when I come to military matters my persuasion that things are notall right, that our current hostility to imaginative activity and ourdull acceptance of established methods and traditions is leading ustowards grave dangers, intensifies. In South Africa the Boers taught usin blood and bitterness the obvious fact that barbed wire had itsmilitary uses, and over the high passes on the way to Lhassa (though, luckily, it led to no disaster) there was not a rifle in condition touse because we had not thought to take glycerine. The perpetual noveltyof modern conditions demands an imaginative alertness we eliminate. I donot believe that the Army Council or anyone in authority has worked outa tithe of the essential problems of contemporary war. If they have, then it does not show. Our military imagination is half-way back to bowsand arrows. The other day I saw a detachment of the Legion ofFrontiersmen disporting itself at Totteridge. I presume these youngheroes consider they are preparing for a possible conflict in England orWestern Europe, and I presume the authorities are satisfied with them. It is at any rate the only serious war of which there is any manifestprobability. Western Europe is now a network of railways, tramways, highroads, wires of all sorts; its chief beasts of burthen are the railwaytrain and the motor car and the bicycle; towns and hypertrophiedvillages are often practically continuous over large areas; there isabundant water and food, and the commonest form of cover is the house. But the Legion of Frontiersmen is equipped for war, oh!--in Arizona in1890, and so far as I am able to judge the most modern sections of thearmy extant are organised for a colonial war in (say) 1899 or 1900. There is, of course, a considerable amount of vague energy demandingconscription and urging our youth towards a familiarity with arms andthe backwoodsman's life, but of any thought-out purpose in our armingwidely understood, of any realisation of what would have to be done andwhere it would have to be done, and of any attempts to create aninstrument for that novel unprecedented undertaking, I discover notrace. 

In my capacity of devil's advocate pleading against nationalover-confidence, I might go on to the quality of our social andpolitical movements. One hears nowadays a vast amount of chatter aboutefficiency--that magic word--and social organisation, and there is nodoubt a huge expenditure of energy upon these things and a widespreaddesire to rush about and make showy and startling changes. But it doesnot follow that this involves progress if the enterprise itself is dullyconceived and most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived. In theabsence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person mayset up as an "expert, " organise and direct the confused good intentionsat large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert"quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in adull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs multiply indarkness and heat. 

I find the same doubts of our quality assail me when I turn to thesupreme business of education. It is true we all seem alive nowadays tothe need of education, are all prepared for more expenditure upon it andmore, but it does not follow necessarily in a period of stagnatingimagination that we shall get what we pay for. The other day Idiscovered my little boy doing a subtraction sum, and I found he wasdoing it in a slower, clumsier, less businesslike way than the one I wastaught in an old-fashioned "Commercial Academy" thirty odd years ago. The educational "expert, " it seems, has been at work substituting a badmethod for a good one in our schools because it is easier of exposition. The educational "expert, " in the lack of a lively public intelligence, develops all the vices of the second-rate energetic, and he is, I amonly too disposed to believe, making a terrible mess of a great deal ofour science teaching and of the teaching of mathematics and English.... 

I have written enough to make clear the quality of my doubts. I thinkthe English mind cuts at life with a dulled edge, and that its energymay be worse than its somnolence. I think it undervalues gifts and fineachievement, and overvalues the commonplace virtues of mediocre men. Oneof the greatest Liberal statesmen in the time of Queen Victoria neverheld office because he was associated with a divorce case a quarter of acentury ago. For him to have taken office would have been regarded as ascandal. But it is not regarded as a scandal that our Governmentincludes men of no more ability than any average assistant behind agrocer's counter. These are your gods, O England!--and with every desireto be optimistic I find it hard under the circumstances to anticipatethat the New Epoch is likely to be a blindingly brilliant time for ourEmpire and our race. 

WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE?

What will hold such an Empire as the British together, this great, laxlyscattered, sea-linked association of ancient states and new-formedcountries, Oriental nations, and continental colonies? What will enableit to resist the endless internal strains, the inevitable externalpressures and attacks to which it must be subjected This is the primaryquestion for British Imperialism; everything else is secondary orsubordinated to that. 

There is a multitude of answers. But I suppose most of them will proveunder examination either to be, or to lead to, or to imply verydistinctly this generalisation that if most of the intelligent andactive people in the Empire want it to continue it will, and that if alarge proportion of such active and intelligent people are discontentedand estranged, nothing can save it from disintegration. I do not supposethat a navy ten times larger than ours, or conscription of the mostirksome thoroughness, could oblige Canada to remain in the Empire if thegeneral will and feeling of Canada were against it, or coerce India intoa sustained submission if India presented a united and resistant front. Our Empire, for all its roll of battles, was not created by force;colonisation and diplomacy have played a far larger share in its growththan conquest; and there is no such strength in its sovereignty as therule of pride and pressure demand. It is to the free consent andparticipation of its constituent peoples that we must look for itscontinuance. 

A large and influential body of politicians considers that inpreferential trading between the parts of the Empire, and in theerection of a tariff wall against exterior peoples, lies the secret ofthat deepened emotional understanding we all desire. I have neverbelonged to that school. I am no impassioned Free Trader--the sacredprinciple of Free Trade has always impressed me as a piece of partyclaptrap; but I have never been able to understand how an attempt todraw together dominions so scattered and various as ours by a network offiscal manipulation could end in anything but mutual inconveniencemutual irritation, and disruption. 

In an open drawer in my bureau there lies before me now a crumpled cardon which are the notes I made of a former discussion of this very issue, a discussion between a number of prominent politicians in the daysbefore Mr. Chamberlain's return from South Africa and the adoption ofTariff Reform by the Unionist Party; and I decipher again the sameconsiderations, unanswered and unanswerable, that leave me scepticalto-day. 

Take a map of the world and consider the extreme differences in positionand condition between our scattered states. Here is Canada, lying alongthe United States, looking eastward to Japan and China, westward to allEurope. See the great slashes of lake, bay, and mountain chain that cutit meridianally. Obviously its main routes and trades and relations lienaturally north and south; obviously its full development can only beattained with those ways free, open, and active. Conceivably, you maybuild a fiscal wall across the continent; conceivably, you may shut offthe east and half the west by impossible tariffs, and narrow its tradeto one artificial duct to England, but only at the price of a hampereddevelopment It will be like nourishing the growing body of a man withthe heart and arteries of a mouse. 

Then here, again, are New Zealand and Australia, facing South Americaand the teeming countries of Eastern Asia; surely it is in relation tothese vast proximities that their economic future lies. Is it possibleto believe that shipping mutton to London is anything but the merebeginning of their commercial development Look at India, again, andSouth Africa. Is it not manifest that from the economic and businesspoints of view each of these is an entirely separate entity, a systemapart, under distinct necessities, needing entire freedom to make itsown bargains and control its trade in its own way in order to achieveits fullest material possibilities?

Nor can I believe that financial entanglements greatly strengthen thebonds of an empire in any case. We lost the American colonies because weinterfered with their fiscal arrangements, and it was Napoleon's attemptto strangle the Continental trade with Great Britain that began hisdownfall. 

I do not find in the ordinary relations of life that business relationsnecessarily sustain intercourse. The relations of buyer and seller areticklish relations, very liable to strains and conflicts. I do not findpeople grow fond of their butchers and plumbers, and I doubt whether ifone were obliged by some special taxation to deal only with one butcheror one plumber, it would greatly endear the relationship. Forced buyingis irritated buying, and it is the forbidden shop that contains thecoveted goods. Nor do I find, to take another instance, among the hotelstaffs of Switzerland and the Riviera--who live almost entirely uponBritish gold--those impassioned British imperialist views the economiclink theory would lead me to expect. 

And another link, too, upon which much stress is laid but about which Ihave very grave doubts, is the possibility of a unified organisation ofthe Empire for military defence. We are to have, it is suggested, animperial Army and an imperial Navy, and so far, no doubt, as theguaranteeing of a general peace goes, we may develop a sense ofparticipation in that way. But it is well in these islands to rememberthat our extraordinary Empire has no common enemy to weld it togetherfrom without. 

It is too usual to regard Germany as the common enemy. We in GreatBritain are now intensely jealous of Germany. We are intensely jealousof Germany not only because the Germans outnumber us, and have a muchlarger and more diversified country than ours, and lie in the very heartand body of Europe, but because in the last hundred years, while we havefed on platitudes and vanity, they have had the energy and humility todevelop a splendid system of national education, to toil at science andart and literature, to develop social organisation, to master and betterour methods of business and industry, and to clamber above us in thescale of civilisation. This has humiliated and irritated rather thanchastened us, and our irritation has been greatly exacerbated by theswaggering bad manners, the talk of "Blood and Iron" and Mailed Fists, the Welt-Politik rubbish that inaugurated the new German phase. 

The British middle-class, therefore, is full of an angry, vaguedisposition to thwart that expansion which Germans regard veryreasonably as their natural destiny; there are all the possibilities ofa huge conflict in that disposition, and it is perhaps well to rememberhow insular--or, at least, how European--the essentials of this quarrelare. We have lost our tempers, but Canada has not. There is nothing inGermany to make Canada envious and ashamed of wasted years. Canada hasno natural quarrel with Germany, nor has India, nor South Africa, norAustralasia. They have no reason to share our insular exasperation. Onthe other hand, all these states have other special preoccupations. NewZealand, for example, having spent half a century and more insheep-farming, land legislation, suppressing its drink traffic, loweringits birth-rate, and, in short, the achievement of an ideal preventivematerialism, is chiefly consumed by hate and fear of Japan, which in thesame interval has made a stride from the thirteenth to the twentiethcentury, and which teems with art and life and enterprise and offspring. Now Japan in Welt-Politik is our ally. 

You see, the British Empire has no common economic interests and nonatural common enemy. It is not adapted to any form of Zollverein or anyform of united aggression. Visibly, on the map of the world it has alikeness to open hands, while the German Empire--except for a fewill-advised and imitative colonies--is clenched into a central Europeanunity. 

Physically, our Empire is incurably scattered, various, and divided, andit is to quite other links and forces, it seems to me, than fiscal ormilitary unification that we who desire its continuance must look tohold it together. There never was anything like it before. Essentiallyit is an adventure of the British spirit, sanguine, discursive, andbeyond comparison insubordinate, adaptable, and originating. It has beenmade by odd and irregular means by trading companies, pioneers, explorers, unauthorised seamen, adventurers like Clive, eccentrics likeGordon, invalids like Rhodes. It has been made, in spite of authorityand officialdom, as no other empire was ever made. The nominal rulers ofBritain never planned it. It happened almost in spite of them. Theirchief contribution to its history has been the loss of the UnitedStates. It is a living thing that has arisen, not a dead thing puttogether. Beneath the thin legal and administrative ties that hold ittogether lies the far more vital bond of a traditional free spontaneousactivity. It has a common medium of expression in the English tongue, aunity of liberal and tolerant purpose amidst its enormous variety oflocalised life and colour. And it is in the development andstrengthening, the enrichment the rendering more conscious and morepurposeful, of that broad creative spirit of the British that the truecement and continuance of our Empire is to be found. 

The Empire must live by the forces that begot it. It cannot hope to giveany such exclusive prosperity as a Zollverein might afford; it can holdout no hopes of collective conquests and triumphs--its utmost militaryrôle must be the guaranteeing of a common inaggressive security; but itcan, if it is to survive, it must, give all its constituent parts such acivilisation as none of them could achieve alone, a civilisation, awealth and fullness of life increasing and developing with the years. Through that, and that alone, can it be made worth having and worthserving. 

And in the first place the whole Empire must use the English language. I do not mean that any language must be stamped out, that a thousandlanguages may not flourish by board and cradle and in folk-songs andvillage gossip--Erse, the Taal, a hundred Indian and other Easterntongues, Canadian French--but I mean that also English must beavailable, that everywhere there must be English teaching. And everyonewho wants to read science or history or philosophy, to come out of thevillage life into wider thoughts and broader horizons, to gainappreciation in art, must find ready to hand, easily attainable inEnglish, all there is to know and all that has been said thereon. It isworth a hundred Dreadnoughts and a million soldiers to the Empire, thatwherever the imperial posts reach, wherever there is a curious orreceptive mind, there in English and by the imperial connection the fullthought of the race should come. To the lonely youth upon the NewZealand sheep farm, to the young Hindu, to the trapper under a Labradortilt, to the half-breed assistant at a Burmese oil-well, to theself-educating Scottish miner or the Egyptian clerk, the Empire and theEnglish language should exist, visibly and certainly, as the media bywhich his spirit escapes from his immediate surroundings and all theurgencies of every day, into a limitless fellowship of thought andbeauty. 

Now I am not writing this in any vague rhetorical way; I meanspecifically that our Empire has to become the medium of knowledge andthought to every intelligent person in it, or that it is bound to go topieces. It has no economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity. Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language and purpose andoutlook. If it is not held together by thought and spirit, it cannot beheld together. No other cement exists that can hold it togetherindefinitely. 

Not only English literature, but all other literatures well translatedinto English, and all science and all philosophy, have to be broughtwithin the reach of everyone capable of availing himself of suchreading. And this must be done, not by private enterprise or for gain, but as an Imperial function. Wherever the Empire extends there itspresence must signify all that breadth of thought and outlook nolocalised life can supply. 

Only so is it possible to establish and maintain the wideunderstandings, the common sympathy necessary to our continuedassociation. The Empire, mediately or immediately, must become theuniversal educator, news-agent, book-distributor, civiliser-general, andvehicle of imaginative inspiration for its peoples, or else it mustsubmit to the gravitation of its various parts to new and moreinvigorating associations. 

No empire, it may be urged, has ever attempted anything of this sort, but no empire like the British has ever yet existed. Its conditions andneeds are unprecedented, its consolidation is a new problem, to besolved, if it is solved at all, by untried means. And in the Englishlanguage as a vehicle of thought and civilisation alone is that means tobe found. 

Now it is idle to pretend that at the present time the British Empire isgiving its constituent peoples any such high and rewarding civilisationas I am here suggesting. It gives them a certain immunity from warfare, a penny post, an occasional spectacular coronation, a few knighthoodsand peerages, and the services of an honest, unsympathetic, narrow-minded, and unattractive officialism. No adequate effort isbeing made to render the English language universal throughout itslimits, none at all to use it as a medium of thought and enlightenment. Half the good things of the human mind are outside English altogether, and there is not sufficient intelligence among us to desire to bringthem in. If one would read honest and able criticism, one must learnFrench; if one would be abreast of scientific knowledge andphilosophical thought, or see many good plays or understand thecontemporary European mind, German. 

And yet it would cost amazingly little to get every good foreign thingdone into English as it appeared. It needs only a little understandingand a little organisation to ensure the immediate translation of everysignificant article, every scientific paper of the slightest value. Theeffort and arrangement needed to make books, facilities for research, and all forms of art accessible throughout the Empire, would bealtogether trivial in proportion to the consolidation it would effect. 

But English people do not understand these things. Their Empire is anaccident. It was made for them by their exceptional and outcast men, andin the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness oftheir commonplace and dull-minded leaders. Empire has happened to themand civilisation has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tamerabbits. They do not understand how they got, and they will notunderstand how to keep. Art, thought, literature, all indeed that raisesmen above locality and habit, all that can justify and consolidate theEmpire, is nothing to them. They are provincials mocked by a world-wideopportunity, the stupid legatees of a great generation of exiles. Theygo out of town for the "shootin', " and come back for the fooleries ofParliament, and to see what the Censor has left of our playwrights andSir Jesse Boot of our writers, and to dine in restaurants and wearclothes. 

Mostly they call themselves Imperialists, which is just their harmlessway of expressing their satisfaction with things as they are. Inpractice their Imperialism resolves itself into a vigorous resistance totaxation and an ill-concealed hostility to education. It matters nothingto them that the whole next generation of Canadians has drawn its ideasmainly from American publications, that India and Egypt, in despite ofsounder mental nourishment, have developed their own vernacular Press, that Australia and New Zealand even now gravitate to America for booksand thought. It matters nothing to them that the poverty and insularityof our intellectual life has turned American art to France and Italy, and the American universities towards Germany. The slow starvation anddecline of our philosophy and science, the decadence of Britishinvention and enterprise, troubles them not at all, because they fail toconnect these things with the tangible facts of empire. "The worldcannot wait for the English. " ... And the sands of our Imperialopportunity twirl through the neck of the hour-glass. 

THE LABOUR UNREST

(_May, 1912_. )

Sec. 1

Our country is, I think, in a dangerous state of social disturbance. Thediscontent of the labouring mass of the community is deep andincreasing. It may be that we are in the opening phase of a real andirreparable class war. 

Since the Coronation we have moved very rapidly indeed from an assuranceof extreme social stability towards the recognition of a spreadingdisorganisation. It is idle to pretend any longer that these Labourtroubles are the mere give and take of economic adjustment. Noadjustment is in progress. New and strange urgencies are at work in ourmidst, forces for which the word "revolutionary" is only too faithfullyappropriate. Nothing is being done to allay these forces; everythingconspires to exasperate them. 

Whither are these forces taking us? What can still be done and what hasto be done to avoid the phase of social destruction to which we seem tobe drifting?

Hitherto, in Great Britain at any rate, the working man has shownhimself a being of the most limited and practical outlook. Hisnarrowness of imagination, his lack of general ideas, has been thedespair of the Socialist and of every sort of revolutionary theorist. Hemay have struck before, but only for definite increments of wages ordefinite limitations of toil; his acceptance of the industrial systemand its methods has been as complete and unquestioning as his acceptanceof earth and sky. Now, with an effect of suddenness, this ceases to bethe case. A new generation of workers is seen replacing the old, workersof a quality unfamiliar to the middle-aged and elderly men who stillmanage our great businesses and political affairs. The worker isbeginning now to strike for unprecedented ends--against the system, against the fundamental conditions of labour, to strike for no definedends at all, perplexingly and disconcertingly. The old-fashioned strikewas a method of bargaining, clumsy and violent perhaps, but bargainingstill; the new-fashioned strike is far less of a haggle, far more of adisplay of temper. The first thing that has to be realised if the Labourquestion is to be understood at all is this, that the temper of Labourhas changed altogether in the last twenty or thirty years. Essentiallythat is a change due to intelligence not merely increased but greatlystimulated, to the work, that is, of the board schools and of the cheapPress. The outlook of the workman has passed beyond the works and hisbeer and his dog. He has become--or, rather, he has been replaced by--abeing of eyes, however imperfect, and of criticism, however hasty andunjust. The working man of to-day reads, talks, has general ideas and asense of the round world; he is far nearer to the ruler of to-day inknowledge and intellectual range than he is to the working man of fiftyyears ago. The politician or business magnate of to-day is no bettereducated and very little better informed than his equals were fiftyyears ago. The chief difference is golf. The working man questions athousand things his father accepted as in the very nature of the world, and among others he begins to ask with the utmost alertness andpersistence why it is that he in particular is expected to toil. Theanswer, the only justifiable answer, should be that that is the work forwhich he is fitted by his inferior capacity and culture, that theseothers are a special and select sort, very specially trained andprepared for their responsibilities, and that at once brings this newfact of a working-class criticism of social values into play. The oldworkman might and did quarrel very vigorously with his specificemployer, but he never set out to arraign all employers; he took the lawand the Church and Statecraft and politics for the higher and noblethings they claimed to be. He wanted an extra shilling or he wanted anhour of leisure, and that was as much as he wanted. The young workman, on the other hand, has put the whole social system upon its trial, andseems quite disposed to give an adverse verdict. He looks far beyond theolder conflict of interests between employer and employed. He criticisesthe good intentions of the whole system of governing and influentialpeople, and not only their good intentions, but their ability. These arethe new conditions, and the middle-aged and elderly gentlemen who aredealing with the crisis on the supposition that their vast experience ofLabour questions in the 'seventies and 'eighties furnishes valuableguidance in this present issue are merely bringing the gunpowder ofmisapprehension to the revolutionary fort. 

The workman of the new generation is full of distrust the mostdemoralising of social influences. He is like a sailor who believes nolonger either in the good faith or seamanship of his captain, and, between desperation and contempt, contemplates vaguely but persistentlythe assumption of control by a collective forecastle. He is like aprivate soldier obsessed with the idea that nothing can save thesituation but the death of an incompetent officer. His distrust is soprofound that he ceases not only to believe in the employer, but heceases to believe in the law, ceases to believe in Parliament, as ameans to that tolerable life he desires; and he falls back steadily uponhis last resource of a strike, and--if by repressive tactics we make itso--a criminal strike. The central fact of all this present trouble isthat distrust. There is only one way in which our present drift towardsrevolution or revolutionary disorder can be arrested, and that is byrestoring the confidence of these alienated millions, who visibly noware changing from loyalty to the Crown, from a simple patriotism, fromhabitual industry, to the more and more effective expression of adeepening resentment. 

This is a psychological question, a matter of mental states. Feats oflegal subtlety are inopportune, arithmetical exploits still more so. Toemerge with the sum of 4s. 6-1/2d. As a minimum, by calculating on thebasis of the mine's present earnings, from a conference which the minersand everybody else imagined was to give a minimum of 5s. , may be clever, but it is certainly not politic in the present stage of Labour feeling. To stamp violently upon obscure newspapers nobody had heard of beforeand send a printer to prison, and to give thereby a flamingadvertisement to the possible use of soldiers in civil conflicts and setevery barrack-room talking, may be permissible, but it is certainly veryill-advised. The distrust deepens. 

The real task before a governing class that means to go on governing isnot just at present to get the better of an argument or the best of abargain, but to lay hold of the imaginations of this drifting, sullenand suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the country. Whatwe prosperous people, who have nearly all the good things of life andmost of the opportunity, have to do now is to justify ourselves. We haveto show that we are indeed responsible and serviceable, willing to giveourselves, and to give ourselves generously for what we have and what wehave had. We have to meet the challenge of this distrust. 

The slack days for rulers and owners are over. If there are still to berulers and owners and managing and governing people, then in the face ofthe new masses, sensitive, intelligent, critical, irritable, as nocommon people have ever been before, these rulers and owners must beprepared to make themselves and display themselves wise, capable andheroic--beyond any aristocratic precedent. The alternative, if it is analternative, is resignation--to the Social Democracy. 

And it is just because we are all beginning to realise the immense needfor this heroic quality in those who rule and are rich and powerful, asthe response and corrective to these distrusts and jealousies that arethreatening to disintegrate our social order, that we have all followedthe details of this great catastrophe in the Atlantic with such intensesolicitude. It was one of those accidents that happen with a precisionof time and circumstance that outdoes art; not an incident in it allthat was not supremely typical. It was the penetrating comment of chanceupon our entire social situation. Beneath a surface of magnificentefficiency was--slap-dash. The third-class passengers had placedthemselves on board with an infinite confidence in the care that was tobe taken of them, and they went down, and most of their women andchildren went down with the cry of those who find themselves cheated outof life. 

In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmenand engineers--persons of the trade-union class--who shine as brightlyas any. And by the supreme artistry of Chance it fell to the lot of thattragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr. Bruce Ismay, to be aboard and to becaught by the urgent vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment. Nountried man dare say that he would have behaved better in his place. Heescaped. He thought it natural to escape. His class thinks it was rightand proper that he did escape. It is not the man I would criticise, butthe manifest absence of any such sense of the supreme dignity of hisposition as would have sustained him in that crisis. He was a rich manand a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud man. In the commonman's realisation that such is indeed the case with most of those whodominate our world, lies the true cause and danger of our socialindiscipline. And the remedy in the first place lies not in sociallegislation and so forth, but in the consciences of the wealthy. Heroismand a generous devotion to the common good are the only effective answerto distrust. If such dominating people cannot produce these qualitiesthere will have to be an end to them, and the world must turn to someentirely different method of direction. 

Sec. 2

The essential trouble in our growing Labour disorder is the profounddistrust which has grown up in the minds of the new generation ofworkers of either the ability or the good faith of the property owning, ruling and directing class. I do not attempt to judge the justice or notof this distrust; I merely point to its existence as one of the strikingand essential factors in the contemporary Labour situation. 

This distrust is not, perhaps, the proximate cause of the strikes thatnow follow each other so disconcertingly, but it embitters their spirit, it prevents their settlement, and leads to their renewal. I have triedto suggest that, whatever immediate devices for pacification might beemployed, the only way to a better understanding and co-operation, theonly escape from a social slide towards the unknown possibilities ofSocial Democracy, lies in an exaltation of the standard of achievementand of the sense of responsibility in the possessing and governingclasses. It is not so much "Wake up, England!" that I would say as "Wakeup, gentlemen!"--for the new generation of the workers is beyond allquestion quite alarmingly awake and critical and angry. And they havenot merely to wake up, they have to wake up visibly and ostentatiouslyif those old class reliances on which our system is based are to bepreserved and restored. 

We need before anything else a restoration of class confidence. It is atime when class should speak with class very frankly. 

There is too much facile misrepresentation, too ready a disposition oneither side to accept caricatures as portraits and charges as facts. However tacit our understandings were in the past, with this new kind ofLabour, this young, restive Labour of the twentieth century, which canread, discuss and combine, we need something in the nature of a socialcontract. And it is when one comes to consider by what possible meansthese suspicious third-class passengers in our leaking and imperilledsocial liner can be brought into generous co-operation with the secondand the first that one discovers just how lamentably out of date and outof order our political institutions, which should supply the means forjust this inter-class discussion, have become. Between the busy andpreoccupied owning and employing class on the one hand, and thedistressed, uneasy masses on the other, intervenes the professionalpolitician, not as a mediator, but as an obstacle, who must bepropitiated before any dealings are possible. Our national politics nolonger express the realities of the national life; they are a mereimpediment in the speech of the community. With our whole social orderin danger, our Legislature is busy over the trivial little affairs ofthe Welsh Established Church, whose endowment probably is not equal tothe fortune of any one of half a dozen _Titanic_ passengers or a titheof the probable loss of another strike among the miners. We have aLegislature almost antiquarian, compiling a museum of Gladstonianlegacies rather than governing our world to-day. 

Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is the law'sconsequence, and, with us at least, the legal profession is thepolitical profession. It delights in false issues and merely technicalpolitics. Steadily with the ascendancy of the House of Commons thebarristers have ousted other types of men from political power. Thedecline of the House of Lords has been the last triumph of the House ofLawyers, and we are governed now to a large extent not so much by thepeople for the people as by the barristers for the barristers. They setthe tone of political life. And since they are the most specialised, themost specifically trained of all the professions, since their trainingis absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructiveartist and the controlled experiments of the scientific man, since thebusiness is with evidence and advantages and the skilful use of evidenceand advantages, and not with understanding, they are the leaststatesmanlike of all educated men, and they give our public life a toneas hopelessly discordant with our very great and urgent social needs asone could well imagine. They do not want to deal at all with great andurgent social needs. They play a game, a long and interesting game, withparties as sides, a game that rewards the industrious player withprominence, place, power and great rewards, and the less that gameinvolves the passionate interests of other men, the less it draws theminto participation and angry interference, the better for the steadydevelopment of the politician's career. A distinguished and activefruitlessness, leaving the world at last as he found it, is thepolitical barrister's ideal career. To achieve that, he must maintainlegal and political monopolies, and prevent the invasion of politicallife by living interests. And so far as he has any views about Labourbeyond the margin of his brief, the barrister politician seems to regardgetting men back to work on any terms and as soon as possible as thehighest good. 

And it is with such men that our insurgent modern Labour, with itsvaguely apprehended wants, its large occasions and its rapid emotionalreactions, comes into contact directly it attempts to adjust itself inthe social body. It is one of the main factors in the progressiveembitterment of the Labour situation that whatever business isafoot--arbitration, conciliation, inquiry--our contemporary systempresents itself to Labour almost invariably in a legal guise. Thenatural infirmities of humanity rebel against an unimaginative legalityof attitude, and the common workaday man has no more love for this greatand necessary profession to-day than he had in the time of Jack Cade. Little reasonable things from the lawyers' point of view--the rejection, for example, of certain evidence in the _Titanic_ inquiry because itmight amount to a charge of manslaughter, the constant interruption andchecking of a Labour representative at the same tribunal upon trivialpoints--irritate quite disproportionately. 

Lawyer and working man are antipathetic types, and it is a very gravenational misfortune that at this time, when our situation calls aloudfor statecraft and a certain greatness of treatment, our public lifeshould be dominated as it has never been dominated before by this mostable and illiberal profession. 

Now for that great multitude of prosperous people who find themselves atonce deeply concerned in our present social and economic crisis, andeither helplessly entangled in party organisation or helplessly outsidepolitics, the elimination and cure of this disease of statecraft, theprofessional politician, has become a very urgent matter. To destroyhim, to get him back to his law courts and keep him there, it isnecessary to destroy the machinery of the party system that sustainshim, and to adopt some electoral method that will no longer put theindependent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against theparty nominee. Such a method is to be found in proportionalrepresentation with large constituencies, and to that we must look forour ultimate liberation from our present masters, these politicianbarristers. But the Labour situation cannot wait for this millennialrelease, and for the current issue it seems to me patent that everyreasonable prosperous man will, even at the cost to himself of sometrouble and hard thinking, do his best to keep as much of this great andacute controversy as he possibly can out of the lawyer's and merepolitician's hands and in his own. Leave Labour to the lawyers, and weshall go very deeply into trouble indeed before this business is over. They will score their points, they will achieve remarkable agreementsfull of the possibility of subsequent surprises, they will makereputations, and do everything Heaven and their professional traininghave made them to do, and they will exasperate and exasperate!

Lawyers made the first French Revolution, and now, on a different side, they may yet bring about an English one. These men below there arestill, as a class, wonderfully patient and reasonable, quite prepared totake orders and recognise superior knowledge, wisdom and nobility. Theymake the most reasonable claims for a tolerable life, for certainassurances and certain latitudes. Implicit rather than expressed istheir demand for wisdom and right direction from those to whom the greatsurplus and freedom of civilisation are given. It is an entirelyreasonable demand if man is indeed a social animal. But we have got totreat them fairly and openly. This patience and reasonableness andwillingness for leadership is not limitless. It is no good scoring ourmean little points, for example, and accusing them of breach of contractand all sorts of theoretical wrongs because they won't abide byagreements to accept a certain scale of wages when the purchasing powerof money has declined. When they made that agreement they did not thinkof that possibility. When they said a pound they thought of what wasthen a poundsworth of living. The Mint has since been increasing itsannual output of gold coins to two or three times the former amount, andwe have, as it were, debased the coinage with extraordinary quantitiesof gold. But we who know and own did nothing to adjust that; we did nottell the working man of that; we have let him find it out slowly andindirectly at the grocer's shop. That may be permissible from thelawyer's point of view, but it certainly isn't from the gentleman's, andit is only by the plea that its inequalities give society a gentlemanthat our present social system can claim to endure. 

I would like to accentuate that, because if we are to emerge again fromthese acute social dissensions a reunited and powerful people, there hasto be a change of tone, a new generosity on the part of those who dealwith Labour speeches, Labour literature, Labour representatives, andLabour claims. Labour is necessarily at an enormous disadvantage indiscussion; in spite of a tremendous inferiority in training andeducation it is trying to tell the community its conception of its needsand purposes. It is not only young as a participator in the discussionof affairs; it is actually young. The average working man is not halfthe age of the ripe politicians and judges and lawyers and wealthyorganisers who trip him up legally, accuse him of bad faith, mark hisevery inconsistency. It isn't becoming so to use our forensicadvantages. It isn't--if that has no appeal to you--wise. 

The thing our society has most to fear from Labour is not organisedresistance, not victorious strikes and raised conditions, but the blackresentment that follows defeat. Meet Labour half-way, and you will finda new co-operation in government; stick to your legal rights, draw thenet of repressive legislation tighter, then you will presently have todeal with Labour enraged. If the anger burns free, that meansrevolution; if you crush out the hope of that, then sabotage and asullen general sympathy for anarchistic crime. 

Sec. 3

In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the presentLabour situation. I have tried to show the profound significance in thisdiscussion of the distrust which has grown up in the minds of theworkers, and how this distrust is being exacerbated by our entirely tooforensic method of treating their claims. I want now to point out astill more powerful set of influences which is steadily turning ourLabour struggles from mere attempts to adjust hours and wages intomovements that are gravely and deliberately revolutionary. 

This is the obvious devotion of a large and growing proportion of thetime and energy of the owning and ruling classes to pleasure andexcitement, and the way in which this spectacle of amusement andadventure is now being brought before the eyes and into the imaginationof the working man. 

The intimate psychology of work is a thing altogether too littleconsidered and discussed. One asks: "What keeps a workman workingproperly at his work?" and it seems a sufficient answer to say that itis the need of getting a living. But that is not the complete answer. Work must to some extent interest; if it bores, no power on earth willkeep a man doing it properly. And the tendency of modern industrialismhas been to subdivide processes and make work more boring and irksome. Also the workman must be satisfied with the living he is getting, andthe tendency of newspaper, theatre, cinematograph show and so forth isto fill his mind with ideas of ways of living infinitely more agreeableand interesting than his own. Habit also counts very largely in theregular return of the man to his job, and the fluctuations ofemployment, the failure of the employing class to provide anyalternative to idleness during slack time, break that habit of industry. And then, last but not least, there is self-respect. Men and women arecapable of wonders of self-discipline and effort if they feel thattheirs is a meritorious service, if they imagine the thing they aredoing is the thing they ought to do. A miner will cut coal in adifferent spirit and with a fading zest if he knows his day's output isto be burnt to waste secretly by a lunatic. Man is a social animal; fewmen are naturally social rebels, and most will toil very cheerfully insubordination if they feel that the collective end is a fine thing and agreat thing. 

Now, this force of self-respect is much more acutely present in the mindof the modern worker than it was in the thought of his fathers. He isintellectually more active than his predecessors, his imagination isrelatively stimulated, he asks wide questions. The worker of a formergeneration took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilersbegin to ask, not one man here or there, but in masses, in battalions, in trades: "Why, then, are _we_ toilers, and for what is it that wetoil?"

What answer do we give them?

I ask the reader to put himself in the place of a good workman, a young, capable miner, let us say, in search of an answer to that question. Heis, we will suppose, temporarily unemployed through the production of aglut of coal, and he goes about the world trying to see the fine andnoble collective achievements that justify the devotion of his wholelife to humble toil. I ask the reader: What have we got to show thatman? What are we doing up in the light and air that justifies our demandthat he should go on hewing in narrow seams and cramped corners until hecan hew no more? Where is he to be taken to see these crowning fruits ofour release from toil? Shall we take him to the House of Commons to notewhich of the barristers is making most headway over WelshDisestablishment, or shall we take him to the _Titanic_ inquiry to hearthe latest about those fifty-five third-class children (out ofeighty-three) who were drowned? Shall we give him an hour or so amongthe portraits at the Royal Academy, or shall we make an enthusiastictour of London sculpture and architecture and saturate his soul with thebeauty he makes possible? The new Automobile Club, for example. "Withoutyou and your subordination we could not have had that. " Or suppose wetook him the round of the West-End clubs and restaurants and made himestimate how many dinners London can produce at a pinch at the price ofhis local daily minimum, say, and upward; or borrow an aeroplane atHendon and soar about counting all the golfers in the Home Counties onany week-day afternoon. "You suffer at the roots of things, far belowthere, but see all this nobility and splendour, these sweet, brightflowers to which your rootlet life contributes. " Or we might spend apleasant morning trying to get a passable woman's hat for the price ofhis average weekly wages in some West-End shop.... 

But indeed this thing is actually happening. The older type of miner wasilliterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if hehad any intellectual and spiritual urgencies in him beyond eating anddrinking and dog-fighting, the local little Bethel shunted them awayfrom any effective social criticism. The new generation of miners is onan altogether different basis. It is at once less brutal and lessspiritual; it is alert, informed, sceptical, and the Press, withphotographic illustrations, the cinema, and a score of collateralforces, are giving it precisely that spectacular view of luxury, amusement, aimlessness and excitement, taunting it with just thatsuggestion that it is for that, and that alone, that the worker's backaches and his muscles strain. Whatever gravity and spaciousness of aimthere may be in our prosperous social life does not appear to him. Hesees, and he sees all the more brightly because he is looking at it outof toil and darkness, the glitter, the delight for delight's sake, theshow and the pride and the folly. Cannot you understand how it is thatthese young men down there in the hot and dangerous and toilsome andinglorious places of life are beginning to cry out, "We are being madefools of, " and to fling down their tools, and cannot you see how futileit is to dream that Mr. Asquith or some other politician by some trickof a Conciliation Act or some claptrap of Compulsory Arbitration, orthat any belated suppression of discussion and strike organisations bythe law, will avert this gathering storm? The Spectacle of Pleasure, theparade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury and vanity in the sightof the workers is the culminating irritant of Labour. So long as thatgoes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombreresolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue patiently atwork, will gather strength. It does not matter that such a resolve ishopeless and unseasonable; we are dealing here with the profounderimpulses that underlie reason. Crush this resentment; it will recur withaccumulated strength. 

It does not matter that there is no plan in existence for any kind ofsocial order that could be set up in the place of our present system; noplan, that is, that will endure half an hour's practical criticism. Thecardinal fact before us is that the workers do not intend to standthings as they are, and that no clever arguments, no expert handling oflegal points, no ingenious appearances of concession, will stay thatprogressive embitterment. 

But I think I have said enough to express and perhaps convey myconviction that our present Labour troubles are unprecedented, and thatthey mean the end of an epoch. The supply of good-tempered, cheaplabour--upon which the fabric of our contemporary ease and comfort iserected--is giving out. The spread of information and the means ofpresentation in every class and the increase of luxury andself-indulgence in the prosperous classes are the chief cause of that. In the place of that old convenient labour comes a new sort of labour, reluctant, resentful, critical, and suspicious. The replacement hasalready gone so far that I am certain that attempts to baffle and coercethe workers back to their old conditions must inevitably lead to aseries of increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorderculminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now formuch longer upon the old lines; our civilisation, if it is not to enterupon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to thenew conditions of which the first and foremost is that the wages-earninglabouring class as a distinctive class, consenting to a distinctivetreatment and accepting life at a disadvantage is going to disappear. Whether we do it soon as the result of our reflections upon the presentsituation, or whether we do it presently through the impoverishment thatmust necessarily result from a lengthening period of industrial unrest, there can be little doubt that we are going to curtail very considerablythe current extravagance of the spending and directing classes uponfood, clothing, display, and all the luxuries of life. The phase ofaffluence is over. And unless we are to be the mere passive spectatorsof an unprecedented reduction of our lives, all of us who have leisureand opportunity have to set ourselves very strenuously to the problemnot of reconciling ourselves to the wage-earners, for that possibilityis over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those whoseem to be definitely decided not to remain wage-earners for very muchlonger. We have, as sensible people, to realise that the old arrangementwhich has given us of the fortunate minority so much leisure, luxury, and abundance, advantages we have as a class put to so vulgar andunprofitable a use, is breaking down, and that we have to discover anew, more equable way of getting the world's work done. 

Certain things stand out pretty obviously. It is clear that in the timesahead of us there must be more economy in giving trouble and causingwork, a greater willingness to do work for ourselves, a great economy oflabour through machinery and skilful management. So much is unavoidableif we are to meet these enlarged requirements upon which the insurgentworker insists. If we, who have at least some experience of affairs, whoown property, manage businesses, and discuss and influence publicorganisation, if we are not prepared to undertake this work ofdiscipline and adaptation for ourselves, then a time is not far distantwhen insurrectionary leaders, calling themselves Socialists orSyndicalists, or what not, men with none of our experience, little ofour knowledge, and far less hope of success, will take that task out ofour hands. [1]

[Footnote 1: Larkinism comes to endorse me since this was written. ]

We have, in fact, to "pull ourselves together, " as the phrase goes, andmake an end to all this slack, extravagant living, this spectacle ofpleasure, that has been spreading and intensifying in every civilisedcommunity for the last three or four decades. What is happening toLabour is indeed, from one point of view, little else than thecorrelative of what has been happening to the more prosperous classes inthe community. They have lost their self-discipline, their gravity, their sense of high aims, they have become the victims of theiradvantages and Labour, grown observant and intelligent, has discovereditself and declares itself no longer subordinate. Just what powers ofrecovery and reconstruction our system may have under thesecircumstances the decades immediately before us will show. 

Sec. 4

Let us try to anticipate some of the social developments that are likelyto spring out of the present Labour situation. 

It is quite conceivable, of course, that what lies before us is notdevelopment but disorder. Given sufficient suspicion on one side andsufficient obstinacy and trickery on the other, it may be impossible torestore social peace in any form, and industrialism may degenerate intoa wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful possibility isthe worst and perhaps the least probable of many. It is much moreacceptable to suppose that our social order will be able to adjustitself to the new outlook and temper and quality of the labour stratumthat elementary education, a Press very cheap and free, and a period ofgreat general affluence have brought about. 

One almost inevitable feature of any such adaptation will be a changedspirit in the general body of society. We have come to a seriouscondition of our affairs, and we shall not get them into order againwithout a thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process. There can beno doubt that for a large portion of our comfortable classes existencehas been altogether too easy for the last lifetime or so. The great bulkof the world's work has been done out of their sight and knowledge; ithas seemed unnecessary to trouble much about the general conduct ofthings, unnecessary, as they say, to "take life too seriously. " This hasnot made them so much vicious as slack, lazy, and over-confident; therehas been an elaboration of trivial things and a neglect of troublesomeand important things. The one grave shock of the Boer War has long beenexplained and sentimentalised away. But it will not be so easy toexplain away a dislocated train service and an empty coal cellar as itwas to get a favourable interpretation upon some demonstration ofnational incompetence half the world away. 

It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation thatthe British prosperous and the British successful, to whom warning afterwarning has rained in vain from the days of Ruskin, Carlyle, MatthewArnold, should be called to account at last in their own household. Theywill grumble, they will be very angry, but in the end, I believe, theywill rise to the opportunities of their inconvenience. They will shakeoff their intellectual lassitude, take over again the public and privateaffairs they have come to leave so largely in the hands of the politicalbarrister and the family solicitor, become keen and critical andconstructive, bring themselves up to date again. 

That is not, of course, inevitable, but I am taking now the more hopefulview. 

And then? What sort of working arrangements are our renascent owning anddirecting classes likely to make with the new labouring class? How isthe work going to be done in the harder, cleaner, more equalised, andbetter managed State that, in one's hopeful mood, one sees ahead of us?

Now after the experiences of the past twelve months it is obvious thatthe days when most of the directed and inferior work of the communitywill be done by intermittently employed and impecunious wage-earners isdrawing to an end. A large part of the task of reconstruction ahead ofus will consist in the working out of schemes for a more permanent typeof employment and for a direct participation of the worker in the pride, profits, and direction of the work. Such schemes admit of widevariations between a mere bonus system, a periodic tipping of theemployees to prevent their striking and a real and honest co-partnery. 

In the latter case a great enterprise, forced to consider its "hands" asbeing also in their degree "heads, " would include a department oftechnical and business instruction for its own people. From such ideasone passes very readily to the conception of guild-managed businesses inwhich the factor of capital would no longer stand out as an elementdistinct from and contrasted with the proprietorship of the workers. Onesees the worker as an active and intelligent helper during the greatportion of his participation, and as an annuitant and perhaps, if he hasdevised economies and improvements, a receiver of royalties during hisdeclining years. 

And concurrently with the systematic reconstruction of a large portionof our industries upon these lines there will have to be a vigorousdevelopment of the attempts that are already being made, in gardencities, garden suburbs, and the like, to re-house the mass of ourpopulation in a more civilised and more agreeable manner. Probably thatis not going to pay from the point of view of the money-making businessman, but we prosperous people have to understand that there are thingsmore important and more profitable than money-making, and we have to taxourselves not merely in money, but in time, care, and effort in thematter. Half the money that goes out of England to Switzerland and theRiviera ought to go to the extremely amusing business of clearing upugly corners and building jolly and convenient workmen's cottages--evenif we do it at a loss. It is part of our discharge for the leisure andadvantages the system has given us, part of that just give and take, over and above the solicitor's and bargain-hunter's and money-lender'sconception of justice, upon which social order ultimately rests. We haveto do it not in a mood of patronage, but in a mood of attentivesolicitude. If not on high grounds, then on low grounds our class has toset to work and make those other classes more interested and comfortableand contented. It is what we are for. It is quite impossible for workmenand poor people generally to plan estates and arrange their own homes;they are entirely at the mercy of the wealthy in this matter. There isnot a slum, not a hovel, not an eyesore upon the English landscape forwhich some well-off owner is not ultimately to be blamed or excused, andthe less we leave of such things about the better for us in that day ofreckoning between class and class which now draws so near. 

It is as plain now as the way from Calais to Paris that if the owningclass does not attend to these amenities the mass of the people, doingits best to manage the thing through the politicians, presently will. They may make a frightful mess of it, but that will never bring backthings again into the hands that hold them and neglect them. Their timewill have passed for ever. 

But these are the mere opening requirements of this hope of mine of aquickened social consciousness among the more fortunate and leisurelysection of the community I believe that much profounder changes in theconditions of labour are possible than those I have suggested I ambeginning to suspect that scarcely any of our preconceptions about theway work must be done, about the hours of work and the habits of work, will stand an exhaustive scientific analysis. It is at least conceivablethat we could get much of the work that has to be done to keep ourcommunity going in far more toil-saving and life-saving ways than wefollow at the present time. So far scientific men have done scarcelyanything to estimate under what conditions a man works best, does mostwork, works more happily. Suppose it turns out to be the case that a manalways following one occupation throughout his lifetime, workingregularly day after day for so many hours, as most wage-earners do atthe present time, does not do nearly so much or nearly so well as hewould do if he followed first one occupation and then another, or if heworked as hard as he possibly could for a definite period and then tookholiday? I suspect very strongly, indeed I am convinced, that in certainoccupations, teaching, for example, or surgery, a man begins by workingclumsily and awkwardly, that his interest and skill rise rapidly, thatif he is really well suited in his profession he may presently becomeintensely interested and capable of enormous quantities of his very bestwork, and that then his interest and vigour rapidly decline I amdisposed to believe that this is true of most occupations, ofcoal-mining or engineering, or brick-laying or cotton-spinning. Thething has never been properly thought about. Our civilisation has grownup in a haphazard kind of way, and it has been convenient to specialiseworkers and employ them piecemeal. But if it is true that in respect ofany occupation a man has his period of maximum efficiency, then we openup a whole world of new social possibilities. What we really want from aman for our social welfare in that case is not regular continuing work, but a few strenuous years of high-pressure service. We can as acommunity afford to keep him longer at education and training before hebegins, and we can release him with a pension while he is still full oflife and the capacity for enjoying freedom. But obviously this isimpossible upon any basis of weekly wages and intermittent employment;we must be handling affairs in some much more comprehensive way thanthat before we can take and deal with the working life of a man as onecomplete whole. 

That is one possibility that is frequently in my thoughts about thepresent labour crisis. There is another, and that is the greatdesirability of every class in the community having a practicalknowledge of what labour means. There is a vast amount of work whicheither is now or is likely to be in the future within the domain of thepublic administration--road-making, mining, railway work, post-officeand telephone work, medical work, nursing, a considerable amount ofbuilding for example. Why should we employ people to do the bulk ofthese things at all? Why should we not as a community do them ourselves?Why, in other words, should we not have a labour conscription and take ayear or so of service from everyone in the community, high or low? Ibelieve this would be of enormous moral benefit to our strained andrelaxed community. I believe that in making labour a part of everyone'slife and the whole of nobody's life lies the ultimate solution of theseindustrial difficulties. 

Sec. 5

It is almost a national boast that we "muddle through" our troubles, andI suppose it is true and to our credit that by virtue of a certainkindliness of temper, a humorous willingness to make the best of things, and an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out of pressures andextremities that would smash a harder, more brittle people only a littlechipped and damaged. And it is quite conceivable that our country will, in a measure, survive the enormous stresses of labour adjustment thatare now upon us, even if it never rises to any heroic struggle againstthese difficulties. But it may survive as a lesser country, as animpoverished and second-rate country. It will certainly do no more thanthat, if in any part of the world there is to be found a people capableof taking up this gigantic question in a greater spirit. Perhaps thereis no such people, and the conflicts and muddles before us will beworld-wide. Or suppose that it falls to our country in some strange wayto develop a new courage and enterprise, and to be the first to goforward into this new phase of civilisation I foresee, from which adistinctive labouring class, a class that is of expropriatedwage-earners, will have almost completely disappeared. 

Now hitherto the utmost that any State, overtaken by social and economicstresses, has ever achieved in the way of adapting itself to them hasbeen no more than patching. 

Individuals and groups and trades have found themselves in imperfectlyapprehended and difficult times, and have reluctantly altered their waysand ideas piecemeal under pressure. Sometimes they have succeeded inrubbing along upon the new lines, and sometimes the struggle hassubmerged them, but no community has ever yet had the will and theimagination to recast and radically alter its social methods as a whole. The idea of such a reconstruction has never been absent from humanthought since the days of Plato, and it has been enormously reinforcedby the spreading material successes of modern science, successes duealways to the substitution of analysis and reasoned planning for trialand the rule of thumb. But it has never yet been so believed in andunderstood as to render any real endeavour to reconstruct possible. Theexperiment has always been altogether too gigantic for the availablefaith behind it, and there have been against it the fear of presumption, the interests of all advantaged people, and the natural sloth ofhumanity. We do but emerge now from a period of deliberatehappy-go-lucky and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who came nearraising public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national philosophy. Everything would adjust itself--if only it was left alone. 

Yet some things there are that cannot be done by small adjustments, suchas leaping chasms or killing an ox or escaping from the roof of aburning house. You have to decide upon a certain course on suchoccasions and maintain a continuous movement. If you wait on the burninghouse until you scorch and then turn round a bit or move away a yard orso, or if on the verge of a chasm you move a little in the way in whichyou wish to go, disaster will punish your moderation. And it seems tome that the establishment of the world's work upon a new basis--and thatand no less is what this Labour Unrest demands for its pacification--isjust one of those large alterations which will never be made by thecollectively unconscious activities of men, by competitions and survivaland the higgling of the market. Humanity is rebelling against thecontinuing existence of a labour class as such, and I can see no way bywhich our present method of weekly wages employment can change byimperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension--for it isquite evident that only by reaching that shall we reach the end of thesepresent discontents. The change has to be made on a comprehensive scaleor not at all. We need nothing less than a national plan of socialdevelopment if the thing is to be achieved. 

Now that, I admit, is, as the Americans say, a large proposition. But weare living in a time of more and more comprehensive plans, and the merefact that no scheme so extensive has ever been tried before is no reasonat all why we should not consider one. We think nowadays quite serenelyof schemes for the treatment of the nation's health as one whole, whereour fathers considered illness as a blend of accident with specialprovidences; we have systematised the community's water supply, education, and all sorts of once chaotic services, and Germany and ourown infinite higgledy-piggledy discomfort and ugliness have brought hometo us at last even the possibility of planning the extension of ourtowns and cities. It is only another step upward in scale to plan outnew, more tolerable conditions of employment for every sort of workerand to organise the transition from our present disorder. 

The essential difficulty between the employer and the statesman in theconsideration of this problem is the difference in the scope of theirview. The employer's concern with the man who does his work is day-longor week-long; the statesman's is life-long. The conditions of privateenterprise and modern competition oblige the employer to think only ofthe worker as a hand, who appears and does his work and draws his wagesand vanishes again. Only such strikes as we have had during the pastyear will rouse him from that attitude of mind. The statesman at theother extremity has to consider the worker as a being with a beginning, a middle, an end--and offspring. He can consider all these possibilitiesof deferring employment and making the toil of one period of lifeprovide for the leisure and freedom of another, which are necessarilyentirely out of the purview of an employer pure and simple. And I findit hard to see how we can reconcile the intermittency of competitiveemployment with the unremitting demands of a civilised life except bythe intervention of the State or of some public organisation capable oftaking very wide views between the business organiser on the one handand the subordinate worker on the other. On the one hand we need somebroader handling of business than is possible in the private adventureof the solitary proprietor or the single company, and on the other somemore completely organised development of the collective bargain. We haveto bring the directive intelligence of a concern into an organicrelation with the conception of the national output as a whole, andeither through a trade union or a guild, or some expansion of a tradeunion, we have to arrange a secure, continuous income for the worker, tobe received not directly as wages from an employer but intermediatelythrough the organisation. We need a census of our national production, amore exhaustive estimate of our resources, and an entirely morescientific knowledge of the conditions of maximum labour efficiency. Oneturns to the State.... And it is at this point that the heart of thepatriotic Englishman sinks, because it is our national misfortune thatall the accidents of public life have conspired to retard thedevelopment of just that body of knowledge, just that scientific breadthof imagination which is becoming a vital necessity for the welfare of amodern civilised community. 

We are caught short of scientific men just as in the event of a war withGermany we shall almost certainly be caught short of scientific sailorsand soldiers. You cannot make that sort of thing to order in a crisis. Scientific education--and more particularly the scientific education ofour owning and responsible classes--has been crippled by the bitterjealousy of the classical teachers who dominate our universities, by thefear and hatred of the Established Church, which still so largelycontrols our upper-class schools, and by the entire lack ofunderstanding and support on the part of those able barristers andfinanciers who rule our political life. Science has been left more andmore to men of modest origin and narrow outlook, and now we arebeginning to pay in internal dissensions, and presently we may have topay in national humiliation for this almost organised rejection ofstimulus and power. 

But however thwarted and crippled our public imagination may be, we havestill got to do the best we can with this situation; we have to take ascomprehensive views as we can, and to attempt as comprehensive a methodof handling as our party-ridden State permits. In theory I am aSocialist, and were I theorising about some nation in the air I wouldsay that all the great productive activities and all the means ofcommunication should be national concerns and be run as nationalservices. But our State is peculiarly incapable of such functions; atthe present time it cannot even produce a postage stamp that will stick;and the type of official it would probably evolve for industrialorganisation, slowly but unsurely, would be a maddening combination ofthe district visitor and the boy clerk. It is to the independent peopleof some leisure and resource in the community that one has at last toappeal for such large efforts and understandings as our presentsituation demands. In the default of our public services, there opens animmense opportunity for voluntary effort. Deference to our officialleaders is absurd; it is a time when men must, as the phrase goes, "comeforward. "

We want a National Plan for our social and economic development whicheveryone may understand and which will serve as a unifying basis for allour social and political activities. Such a plan is not to be flung outhastily by an irresponsible writer. It can only come into existence asthe outcome of a wide movement of inquiry and discussion. My business inthese pages has been not prescription but diagnosis. I hold it to be theclear duty of every intelligent person in the country to do his utmostto learn about these questions of economic and social organisation andto work them out to conclusions and a purpose. We have come to a phasein our affairs when the only alternative to a great, deliberaterenascence of will and understanding is national disorder and decay. 

Sec. 6

I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our national situation. Ihave pointed out that nearly all the social forces of our time seem tobe in conspiracy to bring about the disappearance of a labour class assuch and the rearrangement of our work and industry upon a new basis. That rearrangement demands an unprecedented national effort and theproduction of an adequate National Plan. Failing that, we seem doomed toa period of chronic social conflict and possibly even of franklyrevolutionary outbreaks that may destroy us altogether or leave us onlya dwarfed and enfeebled nation.... 

And before we can develop that National Plan and the effectiverealisation of such a plan that is needed to save us from that fate, twothings stand immediately before us to be done, unavoidable preliminariesto that more comprehensive work. The first of these is the restorationof representative government, and the second a renascence of our publicthought about political and social things. 

As I have already suggested, a main factor in our present nationalinability to deal with this profound and increasing social disturbanceis the entirely unrepresentative and unbusinesslike nature of ourparliamentary government. 

It is to a quite extraordinary extent a thing apart from our nationallife. It becomes more and more so. To go into the House of Commons is togo aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into acorner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialisedAssembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential inour affairs. There was a period when the debates in the House of Commonswere an integral, almost a dominant, part of our national thought, whenits speeches were read over in tens of thousands of homes, and a largeand sympathetic public followed the details of every contested issue. Now a newspaper that dared to fill its columns mainly with parliamentarydebates, with a full report of the trivialities the academic points, thelittle familiar jokes, and entirely insincere pleadings which occupythat gathering would court bankruptcy. 

This diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almostuniversal comment to-day. But it is extraordinary how much of thatcomment is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it isassociated with any will to change a state of affairs that so largelystultifies our national purpose. And yet the causes of our presentpolitical ineptitude are fairly manifest, and a radical and effectivereconstruction is well within the wit of man. 

All causes and all effects in our complex modern State are complex, butin this particular matter there can be little doubt that the key to thedifficulty lies in the crudity and simplicity of our method of election, a method which reduces our apparent free choice of rulers to aridiculous selection between undesirable alternatives, and hands ourwhole public life over to the specialised manipulator. Our House ofCommons could scarcely misrepresent us more if it was appointedhaphazard by the Lord Chamberlain or selected by lot from among theinhabitants of Netting Hill. Election of representatives in one-memberlocal constituencies by a single vote gives a citizen practically nochoice beyond the candidates appointed by the two great partyorganisations in the State. It is an electoral system that forbidsabsolutely any vote splitting or any indication of shades of opinion. The presence of more than two candidates introduces an altogetherunmanageable complication, and the voter is at once reduced to votingnot to secure the return of the perhaps less hopeful candidate he likes, but to ensure the rejection of the candidate he most dislikes. So thenimble wire-puller slips in. In Great Britain we do not have Electionsany more; we have Rejections. What really happens at a general electionis that the party organisations--obscure and secretive conclaves withentirely mysterious funds--appoint about 1, 200 men to be our rulers, andall that we, we so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled, angry way, to strike off the names of about half of theseselected gentlemen. 

Take almost any member of the present Government and consider his case. You may credit him with a lifelong industrious intention to get there, but ask yourself what is this man's distinction, and for what greatthing in our national life does he stand? By the complaisance of ourparty machinery he was able to present himself to a perplexedconstituency as the only possible alternative to Conservatism and TariffReform, and so we have him. And so we have most of his colleagues. 

Now such a system of representation is surely a system to be destroyedat any cost, because it stifles our national discussion and thwarts ournational will. And we can leave no possible method of alterationuntried. It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by themere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method too crudelyconceived. There exist alternatives, and to these alternatives we mustresort. Since John Stuart Mill first called attention to the importanceof the matter there has been a systematic study of the possible workingof electoral methods, and it is now fairly proved that in proportionalrepresentation, with large constituencies returning each many members, there is to be found a way of escape from this disastrous embarrassmentof our public business by the party wire-puller and the party nominee. 

I will not dwell upon the particulars of the proportional representationsystem here. There exists an active society which has organised theeducation of the public in the details of the proposal. Suffice it thatit does give a method by which a voter may vote with confidence for theparticular man he prefers, with no fear whatever that his vote will bewasted in the event of that man's chance being hopeless. There is amethod by which the order of the voter's subsequent preference iseffectively indicated. That is all, but see how completely it modifiesthe nature of an election. Instead of a hampered choice between two, youhave a free choice between many. Such a change means a completealteration in the quality of public life. 

The present immense advantage of the party nominee--which is the rootcause, which is almost the sole cause of all our present politicalineptitude--would disappear. He would be quite unable to oust anywell-known and representative independent candidate who chose to standagainst him. There would be an immediate alteration in type in the Houseof Commons. In the place of these specialists in political getting-onthere would be few men who had not already gained some intellectual andmoral hold upon the community; they would already be outstanding anddistinguished men before they came to the work of government. Greatsections of our national life, science, art, literature, education, engineering, manufacture would cease to be under-represented, ormisrepresented by the energetic barrister and political specialist, andour Legislature would begin to serve, as we have now such urgent need ofits serving, as the means and instrument of that national conferenceupon the social outlook of which we stand in need. 

And it is to the need and nature of that Conference that I would devotemyself. I do not mean by the word Conference any gathering of dull andformal and inattentive people in this dusty hall or that, with a jadedaudience and intermittently active reporters, such as this word mayconjure up to some imaginations. I mean an earnest direction ofattention in all parts of the country to this necessity for a studiedand elaborated project of conciliation and social co-operation We cannotafford to leave such things to specialised politicians andself-appointed, self-seeking "experts" any longer. A modern communityhas to think out its problems as a whole and co-operate as a whole intheir solution. We have to bring all our national life into thisdiscussion of the National Plan before us, and not simply newspapers andperiodicals and books, but pulpit and college and school have to beartheir part in it. And in that particular I would appeal to the schools, because there more than anywhere else is the permanent quickening of ournational imagination to be achieved. 

We want to have our young people filled with a new realisation thatHistory is not over, that nothing is settled, and that the supremedramatic phase in the story of England has still to come. It was not inthe Norman Conquest, not in the flight of King James II, nor theoverthrow of Napoleon; it is here and now. It falls to them to be actorsnot in a reminiscent pageant but a living conflict, and the sooner theyare prepared to take their part in that the better our Empire willacquit itself. How absurd is the preoccupation of our schools andcolleges with the little provincialisms of our past history before A. D. 1800! "No current politics, " whispers the schoolmaster, "noreligion--except the coldest formalities _Some parent might object_. "And he pours into our country every year a fresh supply of gentlemanlycricketing youths, gapingly unprepared--unless they have picked up abroad generalisation or so from some surreptitious Socialistpamphlet--for the immense issues they must control, and that arealtogether uncontrollable if they fail to control them. The universitiesdo scarcely more for our young men. All this has to be altered, andaltered vigorously and soon, if our country is to accomplish itsdestinies. Our schools and colleges exist for no other purpose than togive our youths a vision of the world and of their duties andpossibilities in the world. We can no longer afford to have them thelast preserves of an elderly orthodoxy and the last repository of adecaying gift of superseded tongues. They are needed too urgently tomake our leaders leader-like and to sustain the active understandings ofthe race. 

And from the labour class itself we are also justified in demanding afar more effectual contribution to the National Conference than it ismaking at the present time. Mere eloquent apologies for distrust, meredenunciations of Capitalism and appeals for a Socialism as featurelessas smoke, are unsatisfactory when one regards them as the entirecontribution of the ascendant worker to the discussion of the nationalfuture. The labour thinker has to become definite in his demands andclearer upon the give and take that will be necessary before they can besatisfied. He has to realise rather more generously than he has done sofar the enormous moral difficulty there is in bringing people who havebeen prosperous and at an advantage all their lives to the pitch of evencontemplating a social reorganisation that may minimise or destroy theirprecedence. We have all to think, to think hard and think generously, and there is not a man in England to-day, even though his hands are busyat work, whose brain may not be helping in this great task of socialrearrangement which lies before us all. 

SOCIAL PANACEAS

(_June, 1912_. )

To have followed the frequent discussions of the Labour Unrest in thePress is to have learnt quite a lot about the methods of popularthought. And among other things I see now much better than I did whypatent medicines are so popular. It is clear that as a community we arefar too impatient of detail and complexity, we want overmuch tosimplify, we clamour for panaceas, we are a collective invitation toquacks. 

Our situation is an intricate one, it does not admit of a solutionneatly done up in a word or a phrase. Yet so powerful is this wish tosimplify that it is difficult to make it clear that one is not oneself apanacea-monger. One writes and people read a little inattentively andmore than a little impatiently, until one makes a positive proposalThen they jump. "So _that's_ your Remedy!" they say. "How absurdlyinadequate!" I was privileged to take part in one such discussion in1912, and among other things in my diagnosis of the situation I pointedout the extreme mischief done to our public life by the futility of ourelectoral methods. They make our whole public life forensic andineffectual, and I pointed out that this evil effect, which vitiates ourwhole national life, could be largely remedied by an infinitely bettervoting system known as Proportional Representation. Thereupon the_Westminster Gazette_ declared in tones of pity and contempt that it wasno Remedy--and dismissed me. It would be as intelligent to charge adoctor who pushed back the crowd about a broken-legged man in the streetwith wanting to heal the limb by giving the sufferer air. 

The task before our community, the task of reorganising labour on abasis broader than that of employment for daily or weekly wages, is oneof huge complexity, and it is as entirely reasonable as it is entirelypreliminary to clean and modernise to the utmost our representative andlegislative machinery. 

It is remarkable how dominant is this disposition to get a phrase, aword, a simple recipe, for an undertaking so vast in reality that forall the rest of our lives a large part of the activities of us, fortymillion people, will be devoted to its partial accomplishment. In thepresence of very great issues people become impatient and irritated, asthey would not allow themselves to be irritated by far more limitedproblems. Nobody in his senses expects a panacea for the comparativelysimple and trivial business of playing chess. Nobody wants to be toldto "rely wholly upon your pawns, " or "never, never move your rook";nobody clamours "give me a third knight and all will be well"; but thatis exactly what everybody seems to be doing in our present discussionAnd as another aspect of the same impatience, I note the disposition toclamour against all sorts of necessary processes in the development of acivilisation. For example, I read over and over again of the failure ofrepresentative government, and in nine cases out of ten I find that thisamounts to a cry against any sort of representative government. It isperfectly true that our representative institutions do not work well andneed a vigorous overhauling, but while I find scarcely any support forsuch a revision, the air is full of vague dangerous demands foraristocracy, for oligarchy, for autocracy. It is like a man who jumpsout of his automobile because he has burst a tyre, refuses a profferedStepney, and bawls passionately for anything--for a four-wheeler, or adonkey, as long as he can be free from that exploded mechanism. Thereare evidently quite a considerable number of people in this country whowould welcome a tyrant at the present time, a strong, silent, cruel, imprisoning, executing, melodramatic sort of person, who would somehowmanage everything while they went on--being silly. I find that form ofimpatience cropping up everywhere. I hear echoes of Mr. Blatchford's"Wanted, a Man, " and we may yet see a General Boulanger prancing in ourstreets. There never was a more foolish cry. It is not a man we want, but just exactly as many million men as there are in Great Britain atthe present time, and it is you, the reader, and I, and the rest of uswho must together go on with the perennial task of saving the country by_firstly_, doing our own jobs just as well as ever we can, and_secondly_--and this is really just as important as firstly--doing ourutmost to grasp our national purpose, doing our utmost, that is, todevelop and carry out our National Plan. It is Everyman who must be thesaviour of the State in a modern community; we cannot shift our share inthe burthen; and here again, I think, is something that may well beunderlined and emphasised. At present our "secondly" is undulysubordinated to our "firstly"; our game is better individually thancollectively; we are like a football team that passes badly, and ourneed is not nearly so much to change the players as to broaden theirstyle. And this brings me, in a spirit entirely antagonistic, up againstMr. Galsworthy's suggestion of an autocratic revolution in the methodsof our public schools. 

But before I go on to that, let me first notice a still morecomprehensive cry that has been heard again and again in thisdiscussion, and that is the alleged failure of education generally. There is never any remedial suggestion made with this particular outcry;it is merely a gust of abuse and insult for schools, and moreparticularly board schools, carrying with it a half-hearted implicationthat they should be closed, and then the contribution concludes. Nowthere is no outcry at the present time more unjust or--except for the"Wanted, a Man" clamour--more foolish. No doubt our educationalresources, like most other things, fall far short of perfection, but ofall this imperfection the elementary schools are least imperfect; and Iwould almost go so far as to say that, considering the badness of theirmaterial, the huge, clumsy classes they have to deal with, the poornessof their directive administration, their bad pay and uncertain outlook, the elementary teachers of this country are amazingly efficient. And itis not simply that they are good under their existing conditions, butthat this service has been made out of nothing whatever in the course ofscarcely forty years. An educational system to cover an Empire is not athing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be got for thepaying; it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound to be thin, ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial, and all the rest ofit. As reasonable to complain that the children born last year wereimmature. A little army of teachers does not flash into being at thepassing of an Education Act. Not even an organisation for training thoseteachers comes to anything like satisfactory working order for manyyears, without considering the delays and obstructions that have beencaused by the bickerings and bitterness of the various ChristianChurches. So that it is not the failure of elementary education we havereally to consider, but the continuance and extension of its alreadyalmost miraculous results. 

And when it comes to the education of the ruling and directing classes, there is kindred, if lesser reason, for tempering zeal with patience. This upper portion of our educational organisation needs urgently to bebettered, but it is not to be bettered by trying to find an archangelwho will better it dictatorially. For the good of our souls there are nosuch beings to relieve us of our collective responsibility. It is clearthat appointments in this field need not only far more care and far moreinsistence upon creative power than has been shown in the past, but forthe rest we have to do with the men we have and the schools we have. Wecannot have an educational purge, if only because we have not the newmen waiting. Here again the need is not impatience, not revolution, buta sustained and penetrating criticism, a steadfast, continuous urgencytowards effort and well-planned reconstruction and efficiency. 

And as a last example of the present hysterical disposition to scrapthings before they have been fairly tried is the outcry againstexaminations, which has done so much to take the keenness off the edgeof school work in the last few years. Because a great number ofexaminers chosen haphazard turned out to be negligent and incompetent asexaminers, because their incapacity created a cynical trade in cramming, a great number of people have come to the conclusion, just asexaminations are being improved into efficiency, that all examinationsare bad. In particular that excellent method of bringing new blood andnew energy into the public services and breaking up official gangs andcliques, the competitive examination system, has been discredited, andthe wire-puller and the influential person are back again tampering witha steadily increasing proportion of appointments.... 

But I have written enough of this impatience, which is, as it were, merely the passion for reconstruction losing its head and defeating itsown ends. There is no hope for us outside ourselves. No violent changes, no Napoleonic saviours can carry on the task of building the GreatState, the civilised State that rises out of our disorders That is forus to do, all of us and each one of us. We have to think clearly, andstudy and consider and reconsider our ideas about public things to thevery utmost of our possibilities. We have to clarify our views andexpress them and do all we can to stir up thinking and effort in thoseabout us. 

I know it would be more agreeable for all of us if we could have somesmall pill-like remedy for all the troubles of the State, and take itand go on just as we are going now. But, indeed, to say a word for thatidea would be a treason. We are the State, and there is no other way tomake it better than to give it the service of our lives. Just in themeasure of the aggregate of our devotions and the elaborated andcriticised sanity of our public proceedings will the world mend. 

I gather from a valuable publication called "Secret Remedies, " whichanalyses many popular cures, that this hasty passion for simplicity, forjust one thing that will settle the whole trouble, can carry people to alevel beyond an undivided trust in something warranted in a bottle. Theyare ready to put their faith in what amounts to practically nothing in abottle. And just at present, while a number of excellent people of themiddle class think that only a "man" is wanted and all will be well withus, there is a considerable wave of hopefulness among the working classin favour of a weak solution of nothing, which is offered under theattractive label of Syndicalism. So far I have been able to discuss thepresent labour situation without any use of this empty word, but whenone finds it cropping up in every other article on the subject, itbecomes advisable to point out what Syndicalism is not. And incidentallyit may enable me to make clear what Socialism in the broader sense, constructive Socialism, that is to say, is. 

SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP

"Is a railway porter a railway porter first and a man afterwards, or ishe a man first and incidentally a railway porter?"

That is the issue between this tawdrification of trade unionism which iscalled Syndicalism, and the ideals of that Great State, that greatcommonweal, towards which the constructive forces in our civilisationtend. Are we to drift on to a disastrous intensification of our presentspecialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to work steadfastlyupon a vast social reconstruction which will close this widening breachand rescue our community from its present dependence upon the reluctantand presently insurgent toil of a wages-earning proletariat? Regarded asa project of social development, Syndicalism is ridiculous; regarded asan illuminating and unintentionally ironical complement to the implicittheories of our present social order, it is worthy of close attention. The dream of the Syndicalist is an impossible social fragmentation. Thetransport service is to be a democratic republic, the mines are to be ademocratic republic, every great industry is to be a democratic republicwithin the State; our community is to become a conflict of inter-wovengovernments of workers, incapable of progressive changes of method or ofextension or transmutation of function, the whole being of a man is tolie within his industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causationnot made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work are to go onfalling.... There the mind halts, blinded by the too dazzling vistas ofan unimaginative millennium And the way to this, one gathers, is bystriking--persistent, destructive striking--until it comes about. 

Such is Syndicalism, the cheap Labour Panacea, to which the morepassionate and less intelligent portion of the younger workers, impatient of the large constructive developments of modern Socialism, drifts steadily. It is the direct and logical reaction to our presenteconomic system, which has counted our workers neither as souls nor asheads, but as hands. They are beginning to accept the suggestions ofthat method. It is the culmination in aggression of that, at first, entirely protective trade unionism which the individual selfishness andcollective short-sightedness and State blindness of our owning anddirecting and ruling classes forced upon the working man. At first tradeunionism was essentially defensive; it was the only possible defence ofthe workers, who were being steadily pressed over the margin ofsubsistence. It was a nearly involuntary resistance to class debasement. Mr. Vernon Hartshorn has expressed it as that in a recent article. Buthis paper, if one read it from beginning to end, displayed, compactlyand completely, the unavoidable psychological development of thespecialised labour case. He began in the mildest tones with those nowrespectable words, a "guaranteed minimum" of wages, housing, and soforth, and ended with a very clear intimation of an all-labourcommunity. 

If anything is certain in this world, it is that the mass of thecommunity will not rest satisfied with these guaranteed minima. Allthose possible legislative increments in the general standard of livingare not going to diminish the labour unrest; they are going to increaseit. A starving man may think he wants nothing in the world but bread, but when he has eaten you will find he wants all sorts of things beyond. Mr. Hartshorn assures us that the worker is "not out for a theory. " Somuch the worse for the worker and all of us when, like the mere hand wehave made him, he shows himself unable to define or even forecast hisultimate intentions. He will in that case merely clutch. And the obviousimmediate next objective of that clutch directly its imagination passesbeyond the "guaranteed minima" phase is the industry as a whole. 

I do not see how anyone who desires the continuing development ofcivilisation can regard a trade union as anything but a necessary evil, a pressure-relieving contrivance an arresting and delaying organisationbegotten by just that class separation of labour which in the commonwealof the Great State will be altogether destroyed. It leads nowhither; itis a shelter hut on the road. The wider movement of modern civilisationis against class organisation and caste feeling. These are forcesantagonistic to progress, continually springing up and endeavouring tostereotype the transitory organisation, and continually being defeated. 

Of all the solemn imbecilities one hears, surely the most foolish isthis, that we are in "an age of specialisation. " The comparativefruitfulness and hopefulness of our social order, in comparison with anyother social system, lies in its flat contradiction of that absurdity. Our medical and surgical advances, for example, are almost entirely dueto the invasion of medical research by the chemist; our navaldevelopment to the supersession of the sailor by the engineer; we sweepaway the coachman with the railway, beat the suburban line with theelectric tramway, and attack that again with the petrol omnibus, oustbrick and stonework in substantial fabrics by steel frames, replace theskilled maker of woodcuts by a photographer, and so on through thewhole range of our activities. Change of function, arrest ofspecialisation by innovations in method and appliance, progress by theinfringement of professional boundaries and the defiance of rule: theseare the commonplaces of our time. The trained man, the specialised man, is the most unfortunate of men; the world leaves him behind, and he haslost his power of overtaking it. Versatility, alert adaptability, theseare our urgent needs. In peace and war alike the unimaginative, uninventive man is a burthen and a retardation, as he never was beforein the world's history. The modern community, therefore, that succeedsmost rapidly and most completely in converting both its labourers andits leisure class into a population of active, able, unhurried, educated, and physically well-developed people will be inevitably thedominant community in the world. That lies on the face of things aboutus; a man who cannot see that must be blind to the traffic in ourstreets. 

Syndicalism is not a plan of social development. It is a spirit ofconflict. That conflict lies ahead of us, the open war of strikes, or--if the forces of law and order crush that down--then sabotage andthat black revolt of the human spirit into crime which we speak ofnowadays as anarchism, unless we can discover a broad and promising wayfrom the present condition of things to nothing less than the completeabolition of the labour class. 

That, I know, sounds a vast proposal, but this is a gigantic businessaltogether, and we can do nothing with it unless we are prepared to dealwith large ideas. If St. Paul's begins to totter it is no good proppingit up with half a dozen walking-sticks, and small palliatives have nolegitimate place at all in this discussion. Our generation has to takeup this tremendous necessity of a social reconstruction in a great way;its broad lines have to be thought out by thousands of minds, and it isfor that reason that I have put the stress upon our need of discussion, of a wide intellectual and moral stimulation of a stirring up in ourschools and pulpits, and upon the modernisation and clarification ofwhat should be the deliberative assembly of the nation. 

It would be presumptuous to anticipate the National Plan that mustemerge from so vast a debate, but certain conclusions I feel in my boneswill stand the test of an exhaustive criticism. The first is that adistinction will be drawn between what I would call "interesting work"and what I would call "mere labour. " The two things, I admit, pass byinsensible gradations into one another, but while on the one hand suchwork as being a master gardener and growing roses, or a master cabinetmaker and making fine pieces, or an artist of almost any sort, or astory writer, or a consulting physician, or a scientific investigator, or a keeper of wild animals, or a forester, or a librarian, or a goodprinter, or many sorts of engineer, is work that will always find men ofa certain temperament enthusiastically glad to do it, if they can onlydo it for comfortable pay--for such work is in itself _living_--thereis, on the other hand, work so irksome and toilsome, such as coalmining, or being a private soldier during a peace, or attending uponlunatics, or stoking, or doing over and over again, almost mechanically, little bits of a modern industrial process, or being a cash desk clerkin a busy shop, that few people would undertake if they could avoid it. 

And the whole strength of our collective intelligence will be directedfirst to reducing the amount of such irksome work by labour-savingmachinery, by ingenuity of management, and by the systematic avoidanceof giving trouble as a duty, and then to so distributing the residuum ofit that it will become the whole life of no class whatever in ourpopulation. I have already quoted the idea of Professor William James ofa universal conscription for such irksome labour, and while he wouldhave instituted that mainly for its immense moral effect upon thecommunity, I would point out that, combined with a nationalisation oftransport, mining, and so forth, it is also a way to a partial solutionof this difficulty of "mere toil. "

And the mention of a compulsory period of labour service for everyone--ayear or so with the pickaxe as well as with the rifle--leads me toanother idea that I believe will stand the test of unlimited criticism, and that is a total condemnation of all these eight-hour-a-day, early-closing, guaranteed-weekly-half-holiday notions that are now soprevalent in Liberal circles. Under existing conditions, in our systemof private enterprise and competition, these restrictions are no doubtnecessary to save a large portion of our population from lives ofcontinuous toil, but, like trade unionism, they are a necessity of ourpresent conditions, and not a way to a better social state. If we rescueourselves as a community from poverty and discomfort, we must take carenot to fling ourselves into something far more infuriating to a normalhuman being--and that is boredom. The prospect of a carefully inspectedsanitary life, tethered to some light, little, uninteresting daily job, six or eight hours of it, seems to me--and I am sure I write here formost normal, healthy, active people--more awful than hunger and death. It is far more in the quality of the human spirit, and still more whatwe all in our hearts want the human spirit to be, to fling itself withits utmost power at a job and do it with passion. 

For my own part, if I was sentenced to hew a thousand tons of coal, Ishould want to get at it at once and work furiously at it, with theshortest intervals for rest and refreshment and an occasional nightholiday, until I hewed my way out, and if some interfering person with abenevolent air wanted to restrict me to hewing five hundredweight, andno more and no less, each day and every day, I should be stronglydisposed to go for that benevolent person with my pick. That is surelywhat every natural man would want to do, and it is only the clumsyimperfection of our social organisation that will not enable a man to dohis stint of labour in a few vigorous years and then come up into thesunlight for good and all. 

It is along that line that I feel a large part of our labourreorganisation, over and beyond that conscription, must ultimately go. The community as a whole would, I believe, get far more out of a man ifhe had such a comparatively brief passion of toil than if he worked, with occasional lapses into unemployment, drearily all his life. But atpresent, with our existing system of employment, one cannot arrange socomprehensive a treatment of a man's life. There is needed some State orquasi-public organisation which shall stand between the man and theemployer, act as his banker and guarantor, and exact his proper price. Then, with his toil over, he would have an adequate pension and be freeto do nothing or anything else as he chose. In a Socialistic order ofsociety, where the State would also be largely the employer, such amethod would be, of course, far more easily contrived. 

The more modern statements of Socialism do not contemplate making theState the sole employer; it is chiefly in transport, mining, fisheries, forestry, the cultivation of the food staples, and the manufacture of afew such articles as bricks and steel, and possibly in housing in whatone might call the standardisable industries, that the State is imaginedas the direct owner and employer and it is just in these departmentsthat the bulk of the irksome toil is to be found. There remain largeregions of more specialised and individualised production that manySocialists nowadays are quite prepared to leave to the freer initiativesof private enterprise. Most of these are occupations involving a greaterelement of interest, less direction and more co-operation, and it isjust here that the success of co-partnery and a sustained lifeparticipation becomes possible.... 

This complete civilised system without a specialised, property-lesslabour class is not simply a possibility, it is necessary; the wholesocial movement of the time, the stars in their courses, war against thepermanence of the present state of affairs. The alternative to thisgigantic effort to rearrange our world is not a continuation of muddlingalong, but social war. The Syndicalist and his folly will be the avengerof lost opportunities. Not a Labour State do we want, nor a ServileState, but a powerful Leisure State of free men. 

THE GREAT STATE

Sec. 1

For many years now I have taken a part in the discussion of Socialism. During that time Socialism has become a more and more ambiguous term. Ithas seemed to me desirable to clear up my own ideas of social progressand the public side of my life by restating them, and this I haveattempted in this essay. 

In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two expressions, and toemploy them with a certain defined intention. They are firstly: TheNormal Social Life, and secondly: The Great State. Throughout this essaythese expressions will be used in accordance with the definitionspresently to be given, and the fact that they are so used will beemphasised by the employment of capitals. It will be possible for anyoneto argue that what is here defined as the Normal Social Life is not thenormal social life, and that the Great State is indeed no state at all. That will be an argument outside the range delimited by thesedefinitions. 

Now what is intended by the Normal Social Life here is a type of humanassociation and employment, of extreme prevalence and antiquity, whichappears to have been the lot of the enormous majority of human beings asfar back as history or tradition or the vestiges of material that supplyour conceptions of the neolithic period can carry us. It has never beenthe lot of all humanity at any time, to-day it is perhaps lesspredominant than it has ever been, yet even to-day it is probably thelot of the greater moiety of mankind. 

Essentially this type of association presents a localised community, acommunity of which the greater proportion of the individuals are engagedmore or less directly in the cultivation of the land. With this there isalso associated the grazing or herding over wider or more restrictedareas, belonging either collectively or discretely to the community, ofsheep, cattle, goats, or swine, and almost always the domestic fowl iscommensal with man in this life. The cultivated land at least is usuallyassigned, temporarily or inalienably, as property to specificindividuals, and the individuals are grouped in generally monogamicfamilies of which the father is the head. Essentially the social unit isthe Family, and even where, as in Mohammedan countries, there is nolegal or customary restriction upon polygamy, monogamy still prevails asthe ordinary way of living. Unmarried women are not esteemed, andchildren are desired. According to the dangers or securities of theregion, the nature of the cultivation and the temperament of the people, this community is scattered either widely in separate steadings or drawntogether into villages. At one extreme, over large areas of thin pasturethis agricultural community may verge on the nomadic; at another, inproximity to consuming markets, it may present the concentration ofintensive culture. There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, andperhaps controlled by a simple forestry. The law that holds thiscommunity together is largely traditional and customary and almostalways as its primordial bond there is some sort of temple and some sortof priest. Typically, the temple is devoted to a local god or alocalised saint, and its position indicates the central point of thelocality, its assembly place and its market. Associated with theagriculture there are usually a few imperfectly specialised tradesmen, asmith, a garment-maker perhaps, a basket-maker or potter, who groupabout the church or temple. The community may maintain itself in a stateof complete isolation, but more usually there are tracks or roads to thecentres of adjacent communities, and a certain drift of travel, acertain trade in non-essential things. In the fundamentals of life thisnormal community is independent and self-subsisting, and where it is notbeginning to be modified by the novel forces of the new times itproduces its own food and drink, its own clothing, and largelyintermarries within its limits. 

This in general terms is what is here intended by the phrase the NormalSocial Life. It is still the substantial part of the rural life of allEurope and most Asia and Africa, and it has been the life of the greatmajority of human beings for immemorial years. It is the root life. Itrests upon the soil, and from that soil below and its reaction to theseasons and the moods of the sky overhead have grown most of thetraditions, institutions, sentiments, beliefs, superstitions, andfundamental songs and stories of mankind. 

But since the very dawn of history at least this Normal Social Life hasnever been the whole complete life of mankind. Quite apart from themarginal life of the savage hunter, there have been a number of forcesand influences within men and women and without, that have producedabnormal and surplus ways of living, supplemental, additional, and evenantagonistic to this normal scheme. 

And first as to the forces within men and women. Long as it has lasted, almost universal as it has been, the human being has never yet achieveda perfect adaptation to the needs of the Normal Social Life. He hasattained nothing of that frictionless fitting to the needs ofassociation one finds in the bee or the ant. Curiosity, deep stirringsto wander, the still more ancient inheritance of the hunter, a recurrentdistaste for labour, and resentment against the necessary subjugationsof family life have always been a straining force within theagricultural community. The increase of population during periods ofprosperity has led at the touch of bad seasons and adversity to thedesperate reliefs of war and the invasion of alien localities. And thenomadic and adventurous spirit of man found reliefs and opportunitiesmore particularly along the shores of great rivers and inland seas. Trade and travel began, at first only a trade in adventitious things, inmetals and rare objects and luxuries and slaves. With trade came writingand money; the inventions of debt and rent, usury and tribute. Historyfinds already in its beginnings a thin network of trading and slavingflung over the world of the Normal Social Life, a network whose strandsare the early roads, whose knots are the first towns and the firstcourts. 

Indeed, all recorded history is in a sense the history of these surplusand supplemental activities of mankind. The Normal Social Life flowed onin its immemorial fashion, using no letters, needing no records, leavingno history. Then, a little minority, bulking disproportionately in therecord, come the trader, the sailor, the slave, the landlord and thetax-compeller, the townsman and the king. 

All written history is the story of a minority and their peculiar andabnormal affairs. Save in so far as it notes great natural catastrophesand tells of the spreading or retrocession of human life through changesof climate and physical conditions it resolves itself into an account ofa series of attacks and modifications and supplements made by excessiveand superfluous forces engendered within the community upon the NormalSocial Life. The very invention of writing is a part of those modifyingdevelopments. The Normal Social Life is essentially illiterate andtraditional. The Normal Social Life is as mute as the standing crops; itis as seasonal and cyclic as nature herself, and reaches towards thefuture only an intimation of continual repetitions. 

Now this human over-life may take either beneficent or maleficent orneutral aspects towards the general life of humanity. It may presentitself as law and pacification, as a positive addition andsuperstructure to the Normal Social Life, as roads and markets andcities, as courts and unifying monarchies, as helpful and directingreligious organisations, as literature and art and science andphilosophy, reflecting back upon the individual in the Normal SocialLife from which it arose, a gilding and refreshment of new and widerinterests and added pleasures and resources. One may define certainphases in the history of various countries when this was the state ofaffairs, when a countryside of prosperous communities with a healthyfamily life and a wide distribution of property, animated by roads andtowns and unified by a generally intelligible religious belief, lived ina transitory but satisfactory harmony under a sympathetic government. Itake it that this is the condition to which the minds of such originaland vigorous reactionary thinkers as Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. HilaireBelloc for example turn, as being the most desirable state of mankind. 

But the general effect of history is to present these phases as phasesof exceptional good luck, and to show the surplus forces of humanity ason the whole antagonistic to any such equilibrium with the Normal SocialLife. To open the book of history haphazard is, most commonly, to openit at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or lessdestructive conflict with the Normal Social Life. One opens at thedepopulation of Italy by the aggressive great estates of the RomanEmpire, at the impoverishment of the French peasantry by a toocentralised monarchy before the revolution, or at the huge degenerativegrowth of the great industrial towns of western Europe in the nineteenthcentury. Or again one opens at destructive wars. One sees these surplusforces over and above the Normal Social Life working towards unstableconcentrations of population, to centralisation of government, tomigrations and conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the processdeveloping into a phase of social fragmentation and destruction andthen, unless the whole country has been wasted down to its very soil, the Normal Social Life returns as the heath and furze and grass returnafter the burning of a common. But it never returns in precisely its oldform. The surplus forces have always produced some traceable change; therhythm is a little altered. As between the Gallic peasant before theRoman conquest, the peasant of the Gallic province, the Carlovingianpeasant, the French peasant of the thirteenth, the seventeenth, and thetwentieth centuries, there is, in spite of a general uniformity of life, of a common atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy, and domestic intimacy, an effect of accumulating generalisinginfluences and of wider relevancies. And the oscillations of empires andkingdoms, religious movements, wars, invasions, settlements leave uponthe mind an impression that the surplus life of mankind, theless-localised life of mankind, that life of mankind which is notdirectly connected with the soil but which has become more or lessdetached from and independent of it, is becoming proportionately moreimportant in relation to the Normal Social Life. It is as if a differentway of living was emerging from the Normal Social Life and freeingitself from its traditions and limitations. 

And this is more particularly the effect upon the mind of a review ofthe history of the past two hundred years. The little speculativeactivities of the alchemist and natural philosopher, the little economicexperiments of the acquisitive and enterprising landed proprietor, favoured by unprecedented periods of security and freedom, have passedinto a new phase of extraordinary productivity. They had addedpreposterously and continue to add on a gigantic scale and without anyevident limits to the continuation of their additions, to the resourcesof humanity. To the strength of horses and men and slaves has been addedthe power of machines and the possibility of economies that were onceincredible The Normal Social Life has been overshadowed as it has neverbeen overshadowed before by the concentrations and achievements of thesurplus life. Vast new possibilities open to the race; the traditionallife of mankind, its traditional systems of association, are challengedand threatened; and all the social thought, all the political activityof our time turns in reality upon the conflict of this ancient systemwhose essentials we have here defined and termed the Normal Social Lifewith the still vague and formless impulses that seem destined either toinvolve it and the race in a final destruction or to replace it by somenew and probably more elaborate method of human association. 

Because there is the following difference between the action of thesurplus forces as we see them to-day and as they appeared before theoutbreak of physical science and mechanism. Then it seemed clearlynecessary that whatever social and political organisation developed, itmust needs; rest ultimately on the tiller of the soil, the agriculturalholding, and the Normal Social Life. But now even in agriculture hugewholesale methods have appeared. They are declared to be destructive;but it is quite conceivable that they may be made ultimately asrecuperative as that small agriculture which has hitherto been theinevitable social basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living maynot simply impose themselves in a growing proportion upon the NormalSocial Life, but they may even oust it and replace it altogether. Orthey may oust it and fail to replace it. In the newer countries theNormal Social Life does not appear to establish itself at all rapidly. No real peasantry appears in either America or Australia; and in theolder countries, unless there is the most elaborate legislative andfiscal protection, the peasant population wanes before the large farm, the estate, and overseas production. 

Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundredyears may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend thisdefensive struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty andinnovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us whoparticipate. And it is very largely a matter of temperament and freechoice still, just where we shall decide to place ourselves. Let usconsider some of the key words of contemporary thought, such asLiberalism, Individualism, Socialism, in the light of this broadgeneralisation we have made; and then we shall find it easier to explainour intention in employing as a second technicality the phrase of TheGreat State as an opposite to the Normal Social Life, which we havealready defined. 

Sec. 2

The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based on agriculture, traditional and essentially unchanging. It has needed no toleration anddisplayed no toleration for novelty and strangeness. Its beliefs havebeen on such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has hadan intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs. The God of its communityhas been a jealous god even when he was only a tribal and local god. Only very occasionally in history until the coming of the modern perioddo we find any human community relaxing from this ancient and morenormal state of entire intolerance towards ideas or practices other thanits own. When toleration and a receptive attitude towards alien ideaswas manifested in the Old World, it was at some trading centre orpolitical centre; new ideas and new religions came by water along thetrade routes. And such toleration as there was rarely extended to activeteaching and propaganda. Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in thelast resort at the service of the ancient gods and the ancient moralsagainst the sceptical critic. 

But with the steady development of innovating forces in human affairsthere has actually grown up a cult of receptivity, a readiness for newideas, a faith in the probable truth of novelties. Liberalism--I do not, of course, refer in any way to the political party which makes thisprofession--is essentially anti-traditionalism; its tendency is tocommit for trial any institution or belief that is brought before it. Itis the accuser and antagonist of all the fixed and ancient values andimperatives and prohibitions of the Normal Social Life. And growing upin relation to Liberalism and sustained by it is the great body ofscientific knowledge, which professes at least to be absolutelyundogmatic and perpetually on its trial and under assay andre-examination. 

Now a very large part of the advanced thought of the past century is nomore than the confused negation of the broad beliefs and institutionswhich have been the heritage and social basis of humanity for immemorialyears. This is as true of the extremest Individualism as of theextremest Socialism. The former denies that element of legal andcustomary control which has always subdued the individual to the needsof the Normal Social Life, and the latter that qualified independence ofdistributed property which is the basis of family autonomy. Both aremovements against the ancient life, and nothing is more absurd than themisrepresentation which presents either as a conservative force. Theyare two divergent schools with a common disposition to reject the oldand turn towards the new. The Individualist professes a faith for whichhe has no rational evidence, that the mere abandonment of traditions andcontrols must ultimately produce a new and beautiful social order; whilethe Socialist, with an equal liberalism, regards the outlook with akind of hopeful dread, and insists upon an elaborate readjustment, a newand untried scheme of social organisation to replace the shattered andweakening Normal Social Life. 

Both these movements, and, indeed, all movements that are not movementsfor the subjugation of innovation and the restoration of tradition, arevague in the prospect they contemplate. They produce no definiteforecasts of the quality of the future towards which they so confidentlyindicate the way. But this is less true of modern socialism than of itsantithesis, and it becomes less and less true as socialism, under anenormous torrent of criticism, slowly washes itself clean from the massof partial statement, hasty misstatement, sheer error and presumptionthat obscured its first emergence. 

But it is well to be very clear upon one point at this stage, and thatis, that this present time is not a battle-ground between individualismand socialism; it is a battle-ground between the Normal Social Life onthe one hand and a complex of forces on the other which seek a form ofreplacement and seem partially to find it in these and other doctrines. 

Nearly all contemporary thinkers who are not too muddled to beassignable fall into one of three classes, of which the third we shalldistinguish is the largest and most various and divergent. It will beconvenient to say a little of each of these classes before proceeding toa more particular account of the third. Our analysis will cut acrossmany accepted classifications, but there will be ample justification forthis rearrangement. All of them may be dealt with quite justly asaccepting the general account of the historical process which is heregiven. 

Then first we must distinguish a series of writers and thinkers whichone may call--the word conservative being already politicallyassigned--the Conservators. 

These are people who really do consider the Normal Social Life as theonly proper and desirable life for the great mass of humanity, and theyare fully prepared to subordinate all exceptional and surplus lives tothe moral standards and limitations that arise naturally out of theNormal Social Life. They desire a state in which property is widelydistributed, a community of independent families protected by law and anintelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of largeaccumulations and linked by a common religion. Their attitude to theforces of change is necessarily a hostile attitude. They are disposed toregard innovations in transit and machinery as undesirable, and evenmischievous disturbances of a wholesome equilibrium. They are at leastunfriendly to any organisation of scientific research, and scornful ofthe pretensions of science. Criticisms of the methods of logic, scepticism of the more widely diffused human beliefs, they wouldclassify as insanity. Two able English writers, Mr. G. K. Chesterton andMr. Belloc, have given the clearest expression to this system of ideals, and stated an admirable case for it. They present a conception ofvinous, loudly singing, earthy, toiling, custom-ruled, wholesome, andinsanitary men; they are pagan in the sense that their hearts are withthe villagers and not with the townsmen, Christian in the spirit of theparish priest. There are no other Conservators so clear-headed andconsistent. But their teaching is merely the logical expression of anenormous amount of conservative feeling. Vast multitudes of less lucidminds share their hostility to novelty and research; hate, dread, andare eager to despise science, and glow responsive to the warm, familiarexpressions of primordial feelings and immemorial prejudices The ruralconservative, the liberal of the allotments and small-holdings type, Mr. Roosevelt--in his Western-farmer, philoprogenitive phase asdistinguished from the phase of his more imperialist moments--allpresent themselves as essentially Conservators as seekers after andpreservers of the Normal Social Life. 

So, too, do Socialists of the William Morris type. The mind of WilliamMorris was profoundly reactionary He hated the whole trend of laternineteenth-century modernism with the hatred natural to a man ofconsiderable scholarship and intense aesthetic sensibilities. His mindturned, exactly as Mr. Belloc's turns, to the finished and enrichedNormal Social Life of western Europe in the middle ages, but, unlike Mr. Belloc, he believed that, given private ownership of land and theordinary materials of life, there must necessarily be an aggregatoryprocess, usury, expropriation, the development of an exploiting wealthyclass. He believed profit was the devil. His "News from Nowhere"pictures a communism that amounted in fact to little more than a systemof private ownership of farms and trades without money or any buying andselling, in an atmosphere of geniality, generosity, and mutualhelpfulness. Mr. Belloc, with a harder grip upon the realities of life, would have the widest distribution of proprietorship, with an alertdemocratic government continually legislating against the proteanreappearances of usury and accumulation and attacking, breaking up, andredistributing any large unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared. But both men are equally set towards the Normal Social Life, andequally enemies of the New. The so-called "socialist" land legislationof New Zealand again is a tentative towards the realisation of the sameschool of ideas: great estates are to be automatically broken up, property is to be kept disseminated; a vast amount of political speakingand writing in America and throughout the world enforces one'simpression of the widespread influence of Conservator ideals. 

Of course, it is inevitable that phases of prosperity for the NormalSocial Life will lead to phases of over-population and scarcity, therewill be occasional famines and occasional pestilences and plethoras ofvitality leading to the blood-letting of war. I suppose Mr. Chestertonand Mr. Belloc at least have the courage of their opinions, and areprepared to say that such things always have been and always must be;they are part of the jolly rhythms of the human lot under the sun, andare to be taken with the harvest home and love-making and the peacefulending of honoured lives as an integral part of the unending drama ofmankind. 

Sec. 3

Now opposed to the Conservators are all those who do not regardcontemporary humanity as a final thing nor the Normal Social Life as theinevitable basis of human continuity. They believe in secular change, inProgress, in a future for our species differing continually more fromits past. On the whole, they are prepared for the gradualdisentanglement of men from the Normal Social Life altogether, and theylook for new ways of living and new methods of human association with acertain adventurous hopefulness. 

Now, this second large class does not so much admit of subdivision intotwo as present a great variety of intermediaries between two extremes. Ipropose to give distinctive names to these extremes, with the very clearproviso that they are not antagonised, and that the great multitude ofthis second, anti-conservator class, this liberal, more novel classmodern conditions have produced falls between them, and is neither theone nor the other, but partaking in various degrees of both. On the onehand, then, we have that type of mind which is irritated by anddistrustful of all collective proceedings which is profoundlydistrustful of churches and states, which is expressed essentially byIndividualism. The Individualist appears to regard the extensivedisintegrations of the Normal Social Life that are going on to-day withan extreme hopefulness. Whatever is ugly or harsh in modernindustrialism or in the novel social development of our time he seems toconsider as a necessary aspect of a process of selection and survival, whose tendencies are on the whole inevitably satisfactory. The futurewelfare of man he believes in effect may be trusted to the spontaneousand planless activities of people of goodwill, and nothing but stateintervention can effectively impede its attainment. And curiously closeto this extreme optimistic school in its moral quality and logicalconsequences, though contrasting widely in the sinister gloom of itsspirit, is the socialism of Karl Marx. He declared the contemporaryworld to be a great process of financial aggrandisement and generalexpropriation, of increasing power for the few and of increasinghardship and misery for the many, a process that would go on until atlast a crisis of unendurable tension would be reached and the socialrevolution ensue. The world had, in fact, to be worse before it couldhope to be better. He contemplated a continually exacerbated Class War, with a millennium of extraordinary vagueness beyond as the reward ofthe victorious workers. His common quality with the Individualist liesin his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in hisbelief in the overriding power of Law. Their common influence is thediscouragement of collective understandings upon the basis of theexisting state. Both converge in practice upon _laissez faire_. I wouldtherefore lump them together under the term of Planless Progressives, and I would contrast with them those types which believe supremely insystematised purpose. 

The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualistand Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousandsof years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, inhuman experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may beultimately different right down to its essential relationships from thehuman past. But they also believe that the forces that have beenassailing and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, onthe one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom, and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on theother, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property oroutlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England havesubstituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independentpeasant almost completely, and in America seem to be arresting anygeneral development of the Normal Social Life at all, are forces of wideand indefinite possibility that need to be controlled by a collectiveeffort implying a collective design, deflected from merely injuriousconsequences and organised for a new human welfare upon new lines. Theyagree with that class of thinking I have distinguished as theConservators in their recognition of vast contemporary disorders andtheir denial of the essential beneficence of change. But while theformer seem to regard all novelty and innovation as a mere inundation tobe met, banked back, defeated and survived, these more hopeful andadventurous minds would rather regard contemporary change as amountingon the whole to the tumultuous and almost catastrophic opening-up ofpossible new channels, the violent opportunity of vast, deep, new waysto great unprecedented human ends, ends that are neither feared norevaded. 

Now while the Conservators are continually talking of the "eternalfacts" of human life and human nature and falling back upon a conceptionof permanence that is continually less true as our perspectives extend, these others are full of the conception of adaptation, of deliberatechange in relationship and institution to meet changing needs. I wouldsuggest for them, therefore, as opposed to the Conservators andcontrasted with the Planless Progressives, the name of Constructors. They are the extreme right, as it were, while the Planless Progressivesare the extreme left of Anti-Conservator thought. 

I believe that these distinctions I have made cover practically everyclear form of contemporary thinking, and are a better and more helpfulclassification than any now current. But, of course, nearly everyindividual nowadays is at least a little confused, and will be found towobble in the course even of a brief discussion between one attitude andthe other. This is a separation of opinions rather than of persons. Andparticularly that word Socialism has become so vague and incoherent thatfor a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to give no indicationwhatever whether he is a Conservator like William Morris, anon-Constructor like Karl Marx, or a Constructor of any of half a dozendifferent schools. On the whole, however, modern socialism tends to falltowards the Constructor wing. So, too, do those various movements inEngland and Germany and France called variously nationalist andimperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Underthe same heading must come such attempts to give the vague impulses ofSyndicalism a concrete definition as the "Guild Socialism" of Mr. Orage. All these movements are agreed that the world is progressive towards anovel and unprecedented social order, not necessarily and fatallybetter, and that it needs organised and even institutional guidancethither, however much they differ as to the form that order shouldassume. 

For the greater portion of a century socialism has been before theworld, and it is not perhaps premature to attempt a word or so ofanalysis of that great movement in the new terms we are here employing. The origins of the socialist idea were complex and multifarious never atany time has it succeeded in separating out a statement of itself thatwas at once simple, complete and acceptable to any large proportion ofthose who call themselves socialists. But always it has pointed to twoor three definite things. The first of these is that unlimited freedomsof private property, with increasing facilities of exchange, combination, and aggrandisement, become more and more dangerous tohuman liberty by the expropriation and reduction to private wagesslavery of larger and larger proportions of the population. Every schoolof socialism states this in some more or less complete form, howeverdivergent the remedial methods suggested by the different schools. And, next, every school of socialism accepts the concentration of managementand property as necessary, and declines to contemplate what is thetypical Conservator remedy, its re-fragmentation. Accordingly it sets upnot only against the large private owner, but against owners generally, the idea of a public proprietor, the State, which shall hold in thecollective interest. But where the earlier socialisms stopped short, andwhere to this day socialism is vague, divided, and unprepared, is uponthe psychological problems involved in that new and largelyunprecedented form of proprietorship, and upon the still more subtleproblems of its attainment. These are vast, and profoundly, widely, andmultitudinously difficult problems, and it was natural and inevitablethat the earlier socialists in the first enthusiasm of their idea shouldminimise these difficulties, pretend in the fullness of their faith thatpartial answers to objections were complete answers, and display thecommon weaknesses of honest propaganda the whole world over. Socialismis now old enough to know better. Few modern socialists present theirfaith as a complete panacea, and most are now setting to work in earnestupon these long-shirked preliminary problems of human interactionthrough which the vital problem of a collective head and brain can alonebe approached. 

A considerable proportion of the socialist movement remains, as it hasbeen from the first, vaguely democratic. It points to collectiveownership with no indication of the administrative scheme itcontemplates to realise that intention. Necessarily it remains aformless claim without hands to take hold of the thing it desires. Indeed in a large number of cases it is scarcely more than a resentfulconsciousness in the expropriated masses of social disintegration. Itspends its force very largely in mere revenges upon property as such, attacks simply destructive by reason of the absence of any definiteulterior scheme. It is an ill-equipped and planless belligerent who mustdestroy whatever he captures because he can neither use nor take away. Acouncil of democratic socialists in possession of London would be ascapable of an orderly and sustained administration as the Anabaptists inMunster. But the discomforts and disorders of our present planlesssystem do tend steadily to the development of this crude socialisticspirit in the mass of the proletariat; merely vindictive attacks uponproperty, sabotage, and the general strike are the logical andinevitable consequences of an uncontrolled concentration of property ina few hands, and such things must and will go on, the deep undertow inthe deliquescence of the Normal Social Life, until a new justice, a newscheme of compensations and satisfactions is attained, or the NormalSocial Life re-emerges. 

Fabian socialism was the first systematic attempt to meet the fatalabsence of administrative schemes in the earlier socialisms. It canscarcely be regarded now as anything but an interesting failure, but afailure that has all the educational value of a first reconnaissanceinto unexplored territory. Starting from that attack on aggregatingproperty, which is the common starting-point of all socialist projects, the Fabians, appalled at the obvious difficulties of honestconfiscation and an open transfer from private to public hands, conceived the extraordinary idea of _filching_ property for the state. Asmall body of people of extreme astuteness were to bring about themunicipalisation and nationalisation first of this great system ofproperty and then of that, in a manner so artful that the millionaireswere to wake up one morning at last, and behold, they would findthemselves poor men! For a decade or more Mr. Pease, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. And Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Besant, Dr. Lawson Dodd, and theirassociates of the London Fabian Society, did pit their wits and ability, or at any rate the wits and ability of their leisure moments, againstthe embattled capitalists of England and the world, in this complicatedand delicate enterprise, without any apparent diminution of the largeraccumulations of wealth. But in addition they developed another side ofFabianism, still more subtle, which professed to be a kind ofrestoration in kind of property to the proletariat and in this directionthey were more successful. A dexterous use, they decided, was to be madeof the Poor Law, the public health authority, the education authority, and building regulations and so forth, to create, so to speak, acommunism of the lower levels. The mass of people whom the forces ofchange had expropriated were to be given a certain minimum of food, shelter, education, and sanitation, and this, the socialists wereassured, could be used as the thin end of the wedge towards a completecommunism. The minimum, once established, could obviously be raisedcontinually until either everybody had what they needed, or theresources of society gave out and set a limit to the process. 

This second method of attack brought the Fabian movement intoco-operation with a large amount of benevolent and constructiveinfluence outside the socialist ranks altogether. Few wealthy peoplereally grudge the poor a share of the necessities of life, and most arequite willing to assist in projects for such a distribution. But whilethese schemes naturally involved a very great amount of regulation andregimentation of the affairs of the poor, the Fabian Society fell awaymore and more from its associated proposals for the socialisation of therich. The Fabian project changed steadily in character until at last itceased to be in any sense antagonistic to wealth as such. If the liondid not exactly lie down with the lamb, at any rate the man with the gunand the alleged social mad dog returned very peaceably together. TheFabian hunt was up. 

Great financiers contributed generously to a School of Economics thathad been founded with moneys left to the Fabian Society by earlierenthusiasts for socialist propaganda and education. It remained for Mr. Belloc to point the moral of the whole development with a phrase, tonote that Fabianism no longer aimed at the socialisation of the wholecommunity, but only at the socialisation of the poor. The first reallycomplete project for a new social order to replace the Normal SocialLife was before the world, and this project was the compulsoryregimentation of the workers and the complete state control of labourunder a new plutocracy. Our present chaos was to be organised into aServile State. 

Sec. 4

Now to many of us who found the general spirit of the socialist movementat least hopeful and attractive and sympathetic, this would be an almosttragic conclusion, did we believe that Fabianism was anything more thanthe first experiment in planning--and one almost inevitably shallow andpresumptuous--of the long series that may be necessary before a clearlight breaks upon the road humanity must follow. But we decline to beforced by this one intellectual fiasco towards the _laissez faire_ ofthe Individualist and the Marxist, or to accept the Normal Social Lifewith its atmosphere of hens and cows and dung, its incessant toil, itsservitude of women, and its endless repetitions as the only tolerablelife conceivable for the bulk of mankind--as the ultimate life, that is, of mankind. With less arrogance and confidence, but it may be with afirmer faith, we declare that we believe a more spacious social orderthan any that exists or ever has existed, a Peace of the World in whichthere is an almost universal freedom, health, happiness, and well-beingand which contains the seeds of a still greater future, is possible tomankind. We propose to begin again with the recognition of those samedifficulties the Fabians first realised. But we do not propose toorganise a society, form a group for the control of the two chiefpolitical parties, bring about "socialism" in twenty-five years, or doanything beyond contributing in our place and measure to thatconstructive discussion whose real magnitude we now begin to realise. 

We have faith in a possible future, but it is a faith that makes thequality of that future entirely dependent upon the strength andclearness of purpose that this present time can produce. We do notbelieve the greater social state is inevitable. 

Yet there is, we hold, a certain qualified inevitability about thisgreater social state because we believe any social state not affording ageneral contentment, a general freedom, and a general and increasingfullness of life, must sooner or later collapse and disintegrate again, and revert more or less completely to the Normal Social Life, andbecause we believe the Normal Social Life is itself thick-sown with theseeds of fresh beginnings. The Normal Social Life has never at any timebeen absolutely permanent, always it has carried within itself the germsof enterprise and adventure and exchanges that finally attack itsstability. The superimposed social order of to-day, such as it is, withits huge development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of thelater Fabians to fix this state of affairs in an organised form andrender it plausibly tolerable, seem also doomed to accumulatecatastrophic tensions. Bureaucratic schemes for establishing the regularlifelong subordination of a labouring class, enlivened though they maybe by frequent inspection, disciplinary treatment during seasons ofunemployment, compulsory temperance, free medical attendance, and acheap and shallow elementary education fail to satisfy the restlesscravings in the heart of man. They are cravings that even the bafflingmethods of the most ingeniously worked Conciliation Boards cannotpermanently restrain. The drift of any Servile State must be towards aclass revolt, paralysing sabotage and a general strike. The more rigidand complete the Servile State becomes, the more thorough will be itsultimate failure. Its fate is decay or explosion. From its débris weshall either revert to the Normal Social Life and begin again the longstruggle towards that ampler, happier, juster arrangement of humanaffairs which we of this book, at any rate, believe to be possible, orwe shall pass into the twilight of mankind. 

This greater social life we put, then, as the only real alternative tothe Normal Social Life from which man is continually escaping. For it wedo not propose to use the expressions the "socialist state" or"socialism, " because we believe those terms have now by constantconfused use become so battered and bent and discoloured by irrelevantassociations as to be rather misleading than expressive. We propose touse the term The Great State to express this ideal of a social system nolonger localised, no longer immediately tied to and conditioned by thecultivation of the land, world-wide in its interests and outlook andcatholic in its tolerance and sympathy, a system of great individualfreedom with a universal understanding among its citizens of acollective thought and purpose. 

Now, the difficulties that lie in the way of humanity in its complex andtoilsome journey through the coming centuries towards this Great Stateare fundamentally difficulties of adaptation and adjustment. To noconceivable social state is man inherently fitted: he is a creature ofjealousy and suspicion, unstable, restless, acquisitive, aggressive, intractable, and of a most subtle and nimble dishonesty. Moreover, he isimaginative, adventurous, and inventive. His nature and instincts are asmuch in conflict with the necessary restrictions and subjugation of theNormal Social Life as they are likely to be with any other social netthat necessity may weave about him. But the Normal Social Life has thisadvantage that it has a vast accumulated moral tradition and a minutelyworked-out material method. All the fundamental institutions have arisenin relation to it and are adapted to its conditions. To revert to itafter any phase of social chaos and distress is and will continue formany years to be the path of least resistance for perplexed humanity. 

This conception of the Great State, on the other hand, is stillaltogether unsubstantial. It is a project as dream-like to-day aselectric lighting, electric traction, or aviation would have been in theyear 1850. In 1850 a man reasonably conversant with the physical scienceof his time could have declared with a very considerable confidencethat, given a certain measure of persistence and social security, thesethings were more likely to be attained than not in the course of thenext century. But such a prophecy was conditional on the preliminaryaccumulation of a considerable amount of knowledge, on many experimentsand failures. Had the world of 1850, by some wave of impulse, placed allits resources in the hands of the ablest scientific man alive, and askedhim to produce a practicable paying electric vehicle before 1852, atbest he would have produced some clumsy, curious toy, more probably hewould have failed altogether; and, similarly, if the whole population ofthe world came to the present writer and promised meekly to do whateverit was told, we should find ourselves still very largely at a loss inour project for a millennium. Yet just as nearly every man at work uponVoltaic electricity in 1850 knew that he was preparing for electrictraction, so do I know quite certainly, in spite of a whole row ofunsolved problems before me, that I am working towards the Great State. 

Let me briefly recapitulate the main problems which have to be attackedin the attempt to realise the outline of the Great State. At the base ofthe whole order there must be some method of agricultural production, and if the agricultural labourer and cottager and the ancient life ofthe small householder on the holding, a life laborious, prolific, illiterate, limited, and in immediate contact with the land used, is torecede and disappear it must recede and disappear before methods upon amuch larger scale, employing wholesale machinery and involving greateconomies. It is alleged by modern writers that the permanent residenceof the cultivator in close relation to his ground is a legacy from thedays of cumbrous and expensive transit, that the great proportion offarm work is seasonal, and that a migration to and fro between rural andurban conditions would be entirely practicable in a largely plannedcommunity. The agricultural population could move out of town into anopen-air life as the spring approached, and return for spending, pleasure, and education as the days shortened. Already something of thissort occurs under extremely unfavourable conditions in the movement ofthe fruit and hop pickers from the east end of London into Kent, butthat is a mere hint of the extended picnic which a broadly plannedcultivation might afford. A fully developed civilisation, employingmachines in the hands of highly skilled men, will minimise toil to thevery utmost, no man will shove where a machine can shove, or carry wherea machine can carry; but there will remain, more particularly in thesummer, a vast amount of hand operations, invigorating and evenattractive to the urban population Given short hours, good pay, and allthe jolly amusement in the evening camp that a free, happy, andintelligent people will develop for themselves, and there will belittle difficulty about this particular class of work to differentiateit from any other sort of necessary labour. 

One passes, therefore, with no definite transition from the root problemof agricultural production in the Great State to the wider problem oflabour in general. 

A glance at the countryside conjures up a picture of extensive tractsbeing cultivated on a wholesale scale, of skilled men directing greatploughing, sowing, and reaping plants, steering cattle and sheep aboutcarefully designed enclosures, constructing channels and guiding sewagetowards its proper destination on the fields, and then of added crowdsof genial people coming out to spray trees and plants, pick and sort andpack fruits. But who are these people? Why are they in particular doingthis for the community? Is our Great State still to have a majority ofpeople glad to do commonplace work for mediocre wages, and will there beother individuals who will ride by on the roads, sympathetically, nodoubt, but with a secret sense of superiority? So one opens the generalproblem of the organisation for labour. 

I am careful here to write "for labour" and not "of Labour, " because itis entirely against the spirit of the Great State that any section ofthe people should be set aside as a class to do most of the monotonous, laborious, and uneventful things for the community. That is practicallythe present arrangement, and that, with a quickened sense of the need ofbreaking people in to such a life, is the ideal of the bureaucraticServile State to which, in common with the Conservators, we are bitterlyopposed. And here I know I am at my most difficult, most speculative, and most revolutionary point. We who look to the Great State as thepresent aim of human progress believe a state may solve its economicproblem without any section whatever of the community being condemned tolifelong labour. And contemporary events, the phenomena of recentstrikes, the phenomena of sabotage, carry out the suggestion that in acommunity where nearly everyone reads extensively travels about, seesthe charm and variety in the lives of prosperous and leisurely people, no class is going to submit permanently to modern labour conditionswithout extreme resistance, even after the most elaborate LabourConciliation schemes and social minima are established Things arealtogether too stimulating to the imagination nowadays. Of allimpossible social dreams that belief in tranquillised and submissive andvirtuous Labour is the wildest of all. No sort of modern men will standit. They will as a class do any vivid and disastrous thing rather thanstand it. Even the illiterate peasant will only endure lifelong toilunder the stimulus of private ownership and with the consolations ofreligion; and the typical modern worker has neither the one nor theother. For a time, indeed, for a generation or so even, a labour massmay be fooled or coerced, but in the end it will break out against itssubjection, even if it breaks out to a general social catastrophe. 

We have, in fact, to invent for the Great State, if we are to supposeany Great State at all, an economic method without any specific labourclass. If we cannot do so, we had better throw ourselves in with theConservators forthwith, for they are right and we are absurd. Adhesionto the conception of the Great State involves adhesion to the beliefthat the amount of regular labour, skilled and unskilled, required toproduce everything necessary for everyone living in its highly elaboratecivilisation may, under modern conditions, with the help of scientificeconomy and power-producing machinery, be reduced to so small a numberof working hours per head in proportion to the average life of thecitizen, as to be met as regards the greater moiety of it by the paymentof wages over and above the gratuitous share of each individual in thegeneral output; and as regards the residue, a residue of rough, disagreeable, and monotonous operations, by some form of conscription, which will demand a year or so, let us say, of each person's life forthe public service. If we reflect that in the contemporary state thereis already food, shelter, and clothing of a sort for everyone, in spiteof the fact that enormous numbers of people do no productive work at allbecause they are too well off, that great numbers are out of work, greatnumbers by bad nutrition and training incapable of work, and that anenormous amount of the work actually done is the overlapping productionof competitive trade and work upon such politically necessary butsocially useless things as Dreadnoughts, it becomes clear that theabsolutely unavoidable labour in a modern community and its ratio to theavailable vitality must be of very small account indeed. But all thishas still to be worked out even in the most general terms. Anintelligent science of economics should afford standards andtechnicalities and systematised facts upon which to base an estimate. The point was raised a quarter of a century ago by Morris in his "Newsfrom Nowhere, " and indeed it was already discussed by More in his"Utopia. " Our contemporary economics is, however, still a foolish, pretentious pseudo-science, a festering mass of assumptions about buyingand selling and wages-paying, and one would as soon consult Bradshaw orthe works of Dumas as our orthodox professors of economics for anylight upon this fundamental matter. 

Moreover, we believe that there is a real disposition to work in humanbeings, and that in a well-equipped community, in which no one was underan unavoidable urgency to work, the greater proportion of productiveoperations could be made sufficiently attractive to make them desirableoccupations. As for the irreducible residue of undesirable toil, I oweto my friend the late Professor William James this suggestion of ageneral conscription and a period of public service for everyone, asuggestion which greatly occupied his thoughts during the last years ofhis life. He was profoundly convinced of the high educational anddisciplinary value of universal compulsory military service, and of theneed of something more than a sentimental ideal of duty in public life. He would have had the whole population taught in the schools andprepared for this year (or whatever period it had to be) of patient andheroic labour, the men for the mines, the fisheries, the sanitaryservices, railway routine, the women for hospital, and perhapseducational work, and so forth. He believed such a service wouldpermeate the whole state with a sense of civic obligation.... 

But behind all these conceivable triumphs of scientific adjustment anddirection lies the infinitely greater difficulty on our way to the GreatState, the difficulty of direction. What sort of people are going todistribute the work of the community, decide what is or is not to bedone, determine wages, initiate enterprises; and under what sort ofcriticism, checks, and controls are they going to do this delicate andextensive work? With this we open the whole problem of government, administration and officialdom. 

The Marxist and the democratic socialist generally shirk this riddlealtogether; the Fabian conception of a bureaucracy, official to theextent of being a distinct class and cult, exists only as astarting-point for healthy repudiations. Whatever else may be worked outin the subtler answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearerthan that the necessary machinery of government must be elaboratelyorganised to prevent the development of a managing caste in permanentconspiracy, tacit or expressed, against the normal man. Quite apart fromthe danger of unsympathetic and fatally irritating government there canbe little or no doubt that the method of making men officials for lifeis quite the worst way of getting official duties done. Officialdom is aspecies of incompetence. This rather priggish, teachable, andwell-behaved sort of boy, who is attracted by the prospect of assuredincome and a pension to win his way into the Civil Service, and who thenby varied assiduities rises to a sort of timidly vindictive importance, is the last person to whom we would willingly entrust the vitalinterests of a nation. We want people who know about life at large, whowill come to the public service seasoned by experience, not people whohave specialised and acquired that sort of knowledge which is called, inmuch the same spirit of qualification as one speaks of German Silver, Expert Knowledge. It is clear our public servants and officials must beso only for their periods of service. They must be taught by life, andnot "trained" by pedagogues. In every continuing job there is a timewhen one is crude and blundering, a time, the best time, when one isfull of the freshness and happiness of doing well, and a time whenroutine has largely replaced the stimulus of novelty. The Great Statewill, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a propercircumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certainamateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience ofthe stale official. On that score of the necessity or versatility, if onno other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the conceptions of "GuildSocialism" which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty andSyndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence of Mr. Orage. 

And since the Fabian socialists have created a widespread belief that intheir projected state every man will be necessarily a public servant ora public pupil because the state will be the only employer and the onlyeducator, it is necessary to point out that the Great State presupposesneither the one nor the other. It is a form of liberty and not a form ofenslavement. We agree with the older forms of socialism in supposing aninitial proprietary independence in every citizen. The citizen is ashareholder in the state. Above that and after that, he works if hechooses. But if he likes to live on his minimum and do nothing--thoughsuch a type of character is scarcely conceivable--he can. His earning ishis own surplus. Above the basal economics of the Great State we assumewith confidence there will be a huge surplus of free spending uponextra-collective ends. Public organisations, for example, may distributeimpartially and possibly even print and make ink and paper for thenewspapers in the Great State, but they will certainly not own them. Only doctrine-driven men have ever ventured to think they would. Norwill the state control writers and artists, for example, nor thestage--though it may build and own theatres--the tailor, the dressmaker, the restaurant cook, an enormous multitude of other busyworkers-for-preferences. In the Great State of the future, as in thelife of the more prosperous classes of to-day, the greater proportion ofoccupations and activities will be private and free. 

I would like to underline in the most emphatic way that it is possibleto have this Great State, essentially socialistic, owning and runningthe land and all the great public services, sustaining everybody inabsolute freedom at a certain minimum of comfort and well-being, andstill leaving most of the interests, amusements, and adornments of theindividual life, and all sorts of collective concerns, social andpolitical discussion, religious worship, philosophy, and the like to thefree personal initiatives of entirely unofficial people. 

This still leaves the problem of systematic knowledge and research, andall the associated problems of aesthetic, moral, and intellectualinitiative to be worked out in detail; but at least it dispels thenightmare of a collective mind organised as a branch of the civilservice, with authors, critics, artists, scientific investigatorsappointed in a phrensy of wire-pulling--as nowadays the British stateappoints its bishops for the care of its collective soul. 

Let me now indicate how these general views affect the problem of familyorganisation and the problem of women's freedom. In the Normal SocialLife the position of women is easily defined. They are subordinated butimportant. The citizenship rests with the man, and the woman's relationto the community as a whole is through a man. But within that limitationher functions as mother, wife, and home-maker are cardinal. It is one ofthe entirely unforeseen consequences that have arisen from the decay ofthe Normal Social Life and its autonomous home that great numbers ofwomen while still subordinate have become profoundly unimportant Theyhave ceased to a very large extent to bear children, they have droppedmost of their home-making arts, they no longer nurse nor educate suchchildren as they have, and they have taken on no new functions thatcompensate for these dwindling activities of the domestic interior. Thatsubjugation which is a vital condition to the Normal Social Life doesnot seem to be necessary to the Great State. It may or it may not benecessary. And here we enter upon the most difficult of all ourproblems. The whole spirit of the Great State is against any avoidablesubjugation; but the whole spirit of that science which will animate theGreat State forbids us to ignore woman's functional and temperamentaldifferences. A new status has still to be invented for women, a FeminineCitizenship differing in certain respects from the normal masculinecitizenship. Its conditions remain to be worked out. We have indeed towork out an entire new system of relations between men and women, thatwill be free from servitude, aggression, provocation, or parasitism. Thepublic Endowment of Motherhood as such may perhaps be the first broadsuggestion of the quality of this new status. A new type of family, amutual alliance in the place of a subjugation, is perhaps the moststartling of all the conceptions which confront us directly we turnourselves definitely towards the Great State. 

And as our conception of the Great State grows, so we shall begin torealise the nature of the problem of transition, the problem of what wemay best do in the confusion of the present time to elucidate and renderpracticable this new phase of human organisation. Of one thing therecan be no doubt, that whatever increases thought and knowledge movestowards our goal; and equally certain is it that nothing leads thitherthat tampers with the freedom of spirit, the independence of soul incommon men and women. In many directions, therefore, the believer in theGreat State will display a jealous watchfulness of contemporarydevelopments rather than a premature constructiveness. We must watchwealth; but quite as necessary it is to watch the legislator, whomistakes propaganda for progress and class exasperation to satisfy classvindictiveness for construction. Supremely important is it to keepdiscussion open, to tolerate no limitation on the freedom of speech, writing, art and book distribution, and to sustain the utmost liberty ofcriticism upon all contemporary institutions and processes. 

This briefly is the programme of problems and effort to which my idea ofthe Great State, as the goal of contemporary progress, leads me. 

The diagram on p. 131 shows compactly the gist of the precedingdiscussion; it gives the view of social development upon which I baseall my political conceptions. 

THE NORMAL SOCIAL LIFE

produces an increasing surplus of energy and opportunity, moreparticularly under modern conditions of scientific organisation andpower production; and this through the operation of rent and of usurytends to | |------------------------------| (a) release and (b) expropriate | | an increasing proportion of the population to become: | | (_a_) A LEISURE CLASS and (_b_) A LABOUR CLASS under no urgent compulsion divorced from the land and to work living upon uncertain wages |3 |2 |1 |1 2 3| | | which may degenerate degenerate | | | | into a waster class into a sweated, | | | | \ overworked, | | | | \ violently | | | | \ resentful | | | | \ and destructive | | | | \ rebel class | | | | \ / | | | | and produce a | | | | SOCIAL DEBACLE | | | | | | | which may become which may become | | a Governing the controlled | | Class (with waster regimented | | elements) in and disciplined | | an unprogressive Labour Class of | | Bureaucratic <-----------------> an unprogressive | | SERVILE STATE Bureaucratic | | SERVILE STATE | | | which may become which may be the whole community rendered needless of the GREAT STATE by a universal working under various compulsory year motives and inducements or so of labour but not constantly, service together nor permanently with a scientific nor unwillingly organisation of production, and so reabsorbed by re-endowment into the Leisure Class of the GREAT STATE

THE COMMON SENSE OF WARFARE

Sec. 1

CONSCRIPTION

I want to say as compactly as possible why I do not believe thatconscription would increase the military efficiency of this country, andwhy I think it might be a disastrous step for this country to take. 

By conscription I mean the compulsory enlistment for a term of servicein the Army of the whole manhood of the country. And I am writing nowfrom the point of view merely of military effectiveness. The educationalvalue of a universal national service, the idea which as a Socialist Isupport very heartily, of making every citizen give a year or so of hislife to our public needs, are matters quite outside my presentdiscussion. What I am writing about now is this idea that the countrycan be strengthened for war by making every man in it a bit of asoldier. 

And I want the reader to be perfectly clear about the position I assumewith regard to war preparations generally. I am not pleading for peacewhen there is no peace; this country has been constantly threatenedduring the past decade, and is threatened now by gigantic hostilepreparations; it is our common interest to be and to keep at the maximumof military efficiency possible to us. My case is not merely thatconscription will not contribute to that, but that it would be amonstrous diversion of our energy and emotion and material resourcesfrom the things that need urgently to be done. It would be like a boxerfilling his arms with empty boxing-gloves and then rushing--his faceprotruding over the armful--into the fray. 

Let me make my attack on this prevalent and increasing superstition ofthe British need for conscription in two lines, one following the other. For, firstly, it is true that Britain at the present time is no morecapable of creating such a conscript army as France or Germany possessesin the next ten years than she is of covering her soil with a tropicalforest, and, secondly, it is equally true that if she had such an armyit would not be of the slightest use to her. For the conscript armies inwhich Europe still so largely believes are only of use against conscriptarmies and adversaries who will consent to play the rules of the Germanwar game; they are, if we chose to determine they shall be, if we choseto deal with them as they should be dealt with, as out of date as aRoman legion or a Zulu impi. 

Now, first, as to the impossibility of getting our great army intoexistence. All those people who write and talk so glibly in favour ofconscription seem to forget that to take a common man, and moreparticularly a townsman, clap him into a uniform and put a rifle in hishand does not make a soldier. He has to be taught not only the use ofhis weapons, but the methods of a strange and unfamiliar life out ofdoors; he has to be not simply drilled, but accustomed to the difficultmodern necessities of open order fighting, of taking cover, ofentrenchment, and he has to have created within him, so that it willstand the shock of seeing men killed round about him, confidence inhimself, in his officers, and the methods and weapons of his side. Body, mind, and imagination have all to be trained--and they needtrainers. The conversion of a thousand citizens into anything betterthan a sheep-like militia demands the enthusiastic services of scores ofable and experienced instructors who know what war is; the creation of auniversal army demands the services of many scores of thousands of notsimply "old soldiers, " but keen, expert, modern-minded _officers_. 

Without these officers our citizen army would be a hydra without heads. And we haven't these officers. We haven't a tithe of them. 

We haven't these officers, and we can't make them in a hurry. It takesat least five years to make an officer who knows his trade. It needs aspecial gift, in addition to that knowledge, to make a man able toimpart it. And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter, because India and our other vast areas of service and opportunityoverseas drain away a large proportion of just those able and educatedmen who would in other countries gravitate towards the army. Such smallwealth of officers as we have--and I am quite prepared to believe thatthe officers we have are among the very best in the world--are scarcelyenough to go round our present supply of private soldiers. And the bestand most brilliant among this scanty supply are being drawn upon moreand more for aerial work, and for all that increasing quantity of highlyspecialised services which are manifestly destined to be the realfighting forces of the future. We cannot spare the best of our officersfor training conscripts; we shall get the dismallest results from theworst of them; and so even if it were a vital necessity for our countryto have an army of all its manhood now, we could not have it, and itwould be a mere last convulsion to attempt to make it with the means atour disposal. 

But that brings me to my second contention, which is that we do not wantsuch an army. I believe that the vast masses of men in uniformmaintained by the Continental Powers at the present time are enormouslyoverrated as fighting machines. I see Germany in the likeness of a boxerwith a mailed fist as big as and rather heavier than its body, and I amconvinced that when the moment comes for that mailed fist to be lifted, the whole disproportionate system will topple over. The militaryascendancy of the future lies with the country that dares to experimentmost, that experiments best, and meanwhile keeps its actual fightingforce fit and admirable and small and flexible. The experience of warduring the last fifteen years has been to show repeatedly the enormousdefensive power of small, scientifically handled bodies of men. Thesehuge conscript armies are made up not of masses of military muscle, butof a huge proportion of military fat. Their one way of fighting will beto fall upon an antagonist with all their available weight, and if he ismobile and dexterous enough to decline that issue of adiposity they willbecome a mere embarrassment to their own people. Modern weapons andmodern contrivance are continually decreasing the number of men who canbe employed efficiently upon a length of front. I doubt if there is anyuse for more than 400, 000 men upon the whole Franco-Belgian frontier atthe present time. Such an army, properly supplied, could--so far asterrestrial forces are concerned--hold that frontier against any numberof assailants. The bigger the forces brought against it the sooner theexhaustion of the attacking power. Now, it is for employment upon thatfrontier, and for no other conceivable purpose in the world, that GreatBritain is asked to create a gigantic conscript army. 

And if too big an army is likely to be a mere encumbrance in war, it isperhaps even a still graver blunder to maintain one during that conflictof preparation which is at present the European substitute for actualhostilities. It consumes. It produces nothing. It not only eats anddrinks and wears out its clothes and withdraws men from industry, butunder the stress of invention it needs constantly to be re-armed andfreshly equipped at an expenditure proportionate to its size. So long asthe conflict of preparation goes on, then the bigger the army youradversary maintains under arms the bigger is his expenditure and theless his earning power. The less the force you employ to keep youradversary over-armed, and the longer you remain at peace with him whilehe is over-armed, the greater is your advantage. There is only oneprofitable use for any army, and that is victorious conflict. Every armythat is not engaged in victorious conflict is an organ of nationalexpenditure, an exhausting growth in the national body. And for GreatBritain an attempt to create a conscript army would involve the verymaximum of moral and material exhaustion with the minimum of militaryefficiency. It would be a disastrous waste of resources that we needmost urgently for other things. 

Sec. 2

In the popular imagination the Dreadnought is still the one instrumentof naval war. We count our strength in Dreadnoughts andSuper-Dreadnoughts, and so long as we are spending our nationalresources upon them faster than any other country, if we sink at leastŁ160 for every Ł100 sunk in these obsolescent monsters by Germany, wehave a reassuring sense of keeping ahead and being thoroughly safe. Thisconfidence in big, very expensive battleships is, I believe and hope, shared by the German Government and by Europe generally, but it is, nevertheless, a very unreasonable confidence, and it may easily lead usinto the most tragic of national disillusionments. 

We of the general public are led to suppose that the next naval war--ifever we engage in another naval war--will begin with a decisive fleetaction. The plan of action is presented with an alluring simplicity. Ouradversary will come out to us, in a ratio of 10 to 16, or in some ratiostill more advantageous to us, according as our adversary happens to bethis Power or that Power, there will be some tremendous business withguns and torpedoes, and our admirals will return victorious to discussthe discipline and details of the battle and each other's littleweaknesses in the monthly magazines. This is a desirable but improbableanticipation. No hostile Power is in the least likely to send out anybattleships at all against our invincible Dreadnoughts. They willpromenade the seas, always in the ratio of 16 or more to 10, looking forfleets securely tucked away out of reach. They will not, of course, gotoo near the enemy's coast, on account of mines, and, meanwhile, ourcruisers will hunt the enemy's commerce into port. 

Then other things will happen. 

The enemy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike devices against ourcapital ships. Unless he is a lunatic, he will prove to be much strongerin reality than he is on paper in the matter of submarines, torpedo-boats, waterplanes and aeroplanes. These are things cheap tomake and easy to conceal. He will be richly stocked with ingeniousdevices for getting explosives up to these two million pound triumphs ofour naval engineering. On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent aboutthese islands he will have extraordinary chances, and sooner or later, unless we beat him thoroughly in the air above and in the watersbeneath, for neither of which proceedings we are prepared, some of thesechances will come off, and we shall lose a Dreadnought. 

It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and stranded Zeppelin orso enlivens the quiet of the English countryside by coming down andcapitulating. It will be a trifling countershock to wing an aeroplane orso, or blow a torpedo-boat out of the water. Our Dreadnoughts will ceaseto be a source of unmitigated confidence A second battleship disasterwill excite the Press extremely. A third will probably lead to aretirement of the battle fleet to some east coast harbour, a refugeliable to aeroplanes, or to the west coast of Ireland--and the realnaval war, which, as I have argued in an earlier chapter, will be a warof destroyers, submarines and hydroplanes, will begin. Incidentally acommerce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement of our fleet toraid our trade routes. 

We shall then realise that the actual naval weapons are these smallerweapons, and especially the destroyer, the submarine, and thewaterplane--the waterplane most of all, because of its possibilities ofa comparative bigness--in the hands of competent and daring men. And Ifind myself, as a patriotic Englishman, more and more troubled by doubtswhether we are as certainly superior to any possible adversary in theseessential things as we are in the matter of Dreadnoughts. I find myselfawake at nights, after a day much agitated by a belligerent Press, wondering whether the real Empire of the Sea may not even now haveslipped out of our hands while our attention has been fixed on ourstately procession of giant warships, while our country has been in adream, hypnotised by the Dreadnought idea. 

For some years there seems to have been a complete arrest of the Britishimagination in naval and military matters. That declining faculty, nevera very active or well-exercised one, staggered up to the conception of aDreadnought, and seems now to have sat down for good. Its reply to everydemand upon it has been "more Dreadnoughts. " The future, as we Britishseem to see it, is an avenue of Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts andSuper-Super-Dreadnoughts, getting bigger and bigger in a kind ofinverted perspective. But the ascendancy of fleets of great battleshipsin naval warfare, like the phase of huge conscript armies upon land, draws to its close. The progress of invention makes both the big shipand the army crowd more and more vulnerable and less and less effective. A new phase of warfare opens beyond the vista of our current programmes. Smaller, more numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft andcontrivances, manned by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimatelytake the place of those massivenesses. We are entering upon a period inwhich the invention of methods and material for war is likely to be morerapid and diversified than it has ever been before, and the question ofwhat we have been doing behind the splendid line of our Dreadnoughts tomeet the demands of this new phase is one of supreme importance. Knowing, as I do, the imaginative indolence of my countrymen, it is aquestion I face with something very near to dismay. 

But it is one that has to be faced. The question that should occupy ourdirecting minds now is no longer "How can we get more Dreadnoughts?" but"What have we to follow the Dreadnought?"

To the Power that has most nearly guessed the answer to that riddlebelongs the future Empire of the Seas. It is interesting to guess foroneself and to speculate upon the possibility of a kind of armouredmother-ship for waterplanes and submarines and torpedo craft, butnecessarily that would be a mere journalistic and amateurish guessing. Iam not guessing, but asking urgent questions. What force, what council, how many imaginative and inventive men has the country got at thepresent time employed not casually but professionally in anticipatingthe new strategy, the new tactics, the new material, the new trainingthat invention is so rapidly rendering necessary? I have the gravestdoubts whether we are doing anything systematic at all in this way. 

Now, it is the tremendous seriousness of this deficiency to which I wantto call attention. Great Britain has in her armour a gap more dangerousand vital than any mere numerical insufficiency of men or ships. She isshort of minds. Behind its strength of current armaments to-day, astrength that begins to evaporate and grow obsolete from the very momentit comes into being, a country needs more and more this profounderstrength of intellectual and creative activity. 

This country most of all, which was left so far behind in the productionof submarines, airships and aeroplanes, must be made to realise thefolly of its trust in established things. Each new thing we take up morebelatedly and reluctantly than its predecessor. The time is not fardistant when we shall be "caught" lagging unless we change all this. 

We need a new arm to our service; we need it urgently, and we shall needit more and more, and that arm is Research. We need to place inquiry andexperiment upon a new footing altogether, to enlist for them andorganise them, to secure the pick of our young chemists and physicistsand engineers, and to get them to work systematically upon theanticipation and preparation of our future war equipment. We need aservice of invention to recover our lost lead in these matters. 

And it is because I feel so keenly the want of such a service, and thewant of great sums of money for it, that I deplore the disposition towaste millions upon the hasty creation of a universal service army andupon excessive Dreadnoughting. I am convinced that we are spending uponthe things of yesterday the money that is sorely needed for the thingsof to-morrow. 

With our eyes averted obstinately from the future we are backing towardsdisaster. 

Sec. 3

In the present armament competition there are certain considerationsthat appear to be almost universally overlooked, and which tend tomodify our views profoundly of what should be done. Ultimately they willaffect our entire expenditure upon war preparation. 

Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into two classes:there is expenditure upon things that have a diminishing value, thingsthat grow old-fashioned and wear out, such as fortifications, ships, guns, and ammunition, and expenditure upon things that have a permanentand even growing value, such as organised technical research, militaryand naval experiment, and the education and increase of a highly trainedclass of war experts. 

I want to suggest that we are spending too much money in the former andnot enough in the latter direction We are buying enormous quantities ofstuff that will be old iron in twenty years' time, and we are starvingourselves of that which cannot be bought or made in a hurry, and uponwhich the strength of nations ultimately rests altogether; we arefailing to get and maintain a sufficiency of highly educated anddeveloped men inspired by a tradition of service and efficiency. 

No doubt we must be armed to-day, but every penny we divert frommen-making and knowledge-making to armament beyond the margin of baresafety is a sacrifice of the future to the present. Every penny wedivert from national wealth-making to national weapons means so muchless in resources, so much more strain in the years ahead. But a greatsystem of laboratories and experimental stations, a systematic, industrious increase of men of the officer-aviator type, of theresearch student type, of the engineer type, of the naval-officer type, of the skilled sergeant-instructor type, a methodical development of acommon sentiment and a common zeal among such a body of men, is an addedstrength that grows greater from the moment you call it into being. Inour schools and military and naval colleges lies the proper field forexpenditure upon preparation for our ultimate triumph in war. All otherwar preparation is temporary but that. 

This would be obvious in any case, but what makes insistence upon itpeculiarly urgent is the manifestly temporary nature of the presentEuropean situation and the fact that within quite a small number ofyears our war front will be turned in a direction quite other than thatto which it faces now. 

For a decade and more all Western Europe has been threatened by Germantruculence; the German, inflamed by the victories of 1870 and 1871, haspoured out his energy in preparation for war by sea and land, and it hasbeen the difficult task of France and England to keep the peace withhim. The German has been the provocator and leader of all modernarmaments. But that is not going on. It is already more than half over. If we can avert war with Germany for twenty years, we shall never haveto fight Germany. In twenty years' time we shall be talking no more ofsending troops to fight side by side on the frontier of France; we shallbe talking of sending troops to fight side by side with French andGermans on the frontiers of Poland. 

And the justification of that prophecy is a perfectly plain one. TheGerman has filled up his country, his birth-rate falls, and the veryvigour of his military and naval preparations, by raising the cost ofliving, hurries it down. His birth-rate falls as ours and theFrenchman's falls, because he is nearing his maximum of population It isan inevitable consequence of his geographical conditions. But eastwardof him, from his eastern boundaries to the Pacific, is a country alreadytoo populous to conquer, but with possibilities of further expansionthat are gigantic. The Slav will be free to increase and multiply foranother hundred years. Eastward and southward bristle the Slavs, andbehind the Slavs are the colossal possibilities of Asia. 

Even German vanity, even the preposterous ambitions that spring fromthat brief triumph of Sedan, must awaken at last to these manifestfacts, and on the day when Germany is fully awake we may count theWestern European Armageddon as "off" and turn our eyes to the greaterneeds that will arise beyond Germany. The old game will be over and aquite different new game will begin in international relations. 

During these last few years of worry and bluster across the North Sea wehave a little forgotten India in our calculations. As Germany facesround eastward again, as she must do before very long, we shall findIndia resuming its former central position in our ideas of internationalpolitics. With India we may pursue one of two policies: we may keep herdivided and inefficient for war, as she is at present, and hold her andown her and defend her as a prize, or we may arm her and assist herdevelopment into a group of quasi-independent English-speakingStates--in which case she will become our partner and possibly at lasteven our senior partner. But that is by the way. What I am pointing outnow is that whether we fight Germany or not, a time is drawing nearwhen Germany will cease to be our war objective and we shall cease to beGermany's war objective, and when there will have to be a completerevision of our military and naval equipment in relation to thoseremoter, vaster Asiatic possibilities. 

Now that possible campaign away there, whatever its particular naturemay be, which will be shaping our military and naval policy in the year1933 or thereabouts, will certainly be quite different in its conditionsfrom the possible campaign in Europe and the narrow seas whichdetermines all our preparations now. We cannot contemplate throwing anarmy of a million British conscripts on to the North-West Frontier ofIndia, and a fleet of Super-Dreadnoughts will be ineffective either inThibet or the Baltic shallows. All our present stuff, indeed, will be onthe scrap-heap then. What will not be on the scrap-heap will be suchenterprise and special science and inventive power as we have gottogether. That is versatile. That is good to have now and that will begood to have then. 

Everyone nowadays seems demanding increased expenditure upon warpreparation. I will follow the fashion. I will suggest that we have thecourage to restrain and even to curtail our monstrous outlay upon warmaterial and that we begin to spend lavishly upon military and navaleducation and training, upon laboratories and experimental stations, upon chemical and physical research and all that makes knowledge andleading, and that we increase our expenditure upon these things as fastas we can up to ten or twelve millions a year. At present we spend abouteighteen and a half millions a year upon education out of our nationalfunds, but fourteen and a half of this, supplemented by about as muchagain from local sources, is consumed in merely elementary teaching. Sothat we spend only about four millions a year of public money on everysort of research and education above the simple democratic level. Nearlythirty millions for the foundations and only a seventh for the edificeof will and science! Is it any marvel that we are a badly organisednation, a nation of very widely diffused intelligence and verysecond-rate guidance and achievement? Is it any marvel that directly weare tested by such a new development as that of aeroplanes or airshipswe show ourselves in comparison with the more braced-up nations of theContinent backward, unorganised unimaginative, unenterprising?

Our supreme want to-day, if we are to continue a belligerent people, isa greater supply of able educated men, versatile men capable of engines, of aviation, of invention, of leading and initiative. We need morelaboratories, more scholarships out of the general mass of elementaryscholars, a quasi-military discipline in our colleges and a great arrayof new colleges, a much readier access to instruction in aviation andmilitary and naval practice. And if we are to have national service letus begin with it where it is needed most and where it is least likely todisorganise our social and economic life; let us begin at the top. Letus begin with the educated and propertied classes and exact a couple ofyears' service in a destroyer or a waterplane, or an airship, or a, research laboratory, or a training camp, from the sons of everybody who, let us say, pays income tax without deductions. Let us mix with these abig proportion--a proportion we may increase steadily--of keenscholarship men from the elementary schools. Such a braced-up class aswe should create in this way would give us the realities of militarypower, which are enterprise, knowledge, and invention; and at the sametime it would add to and not subtract from the economic wealth of thecommunity Make men; that is the only sane, permanent preparation forwar. So we should develop a strength and create a tradition that wouldnot rust nor grow old-fashioned in all the years to come. 

THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times aboutthe business of writing novels, and what it means, and is, and may be;and I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. Ihave been writing novels, or writing about novels, for the last twentyyears. It seems only yesterday that I wrote a review--the first long andappreciative review he had--of Mr. Joseph Conrad's "Almayer's Folly" inthe _Saturday Review_. When a man has focussed so much of his life uponthe novel, it is not reasonable to expect him to take too modest orapologetic a view of it. I consider the novel an important and necessarything indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments andreadjustments which is modern civilisation I make very high and wideclaims for it. In many directions I do not think we can get alongwithout it. 

Now this, I know, is not the usually received opinion. There is, I amaware, the theory that the novel is wholly and solely a means ofrelaxation. In spite of manifest facts, that was the dominant view ofthe great period that we now in our retrospective way speak of as theVictorian, and it still survives to this day. It is the man's theory ofthe novel rather than the woman's. One may call it the Weary Gianttheory. The reader is represented as a man, burthened, toiling, worn. Hehas been in his office from ten to four, with perhaps only two hours'interval at his club for lunch; or he has been playing golf; or he hasbeen waiting about and voting in the House; or he has been fishing; orhe has been disputing a point of law; or writing a sermon; or doing oneof a thousand other of the grave important things which constitute thesubstance of a prosperous man's life. Now at last comes the littleprecious interval of leisure, and the Weary Giant takes up a book. Perhaps he is vexed: he may have been bunkered, his line may have beenentangled in the trees, his favourite investment may have slumped, orthe judge have had indigestion and been extremely rude to him. He wantsto forget the troublesome realities of life. He wants to be taken out ofhimself, to be cheered, consoled, amused--above all, amused. He doesn'twant ideas, he doesn't want facts; above all, he doesn'twant--_Problems_. He wants to dream of the bright, thin, gay excitementsof a phantom world--in which he can be hero--of horses ridden and laceworn and princesses rescued and won. He wants pictures of funny slums, and entertaining paupers, and laughable longshoremen, and kindlyimpulses making life sweet. He wants romance without its defiance, andhumour without its sting; and the business of the novelist, he holds, isto supply this cooling refreshment. That is the Weary Giant theory ofthe novel. It ruled British criticism up to the period of the Boerwar--and then something happened to quite a lot of us, and it has nevercompletely recovered its old predominance. Perhaps it will; perhapssomething else may happen to prevent its ever doing so. 

Both fiction and criticism to-day are in revolt against that tiredgiant, the prosperous Englishman. I cannot think of a single writer ofany distinction to-day, unless it is Mr. W. W. Jacobs, who is contentmerely to serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from theweary reader being a decently tired giant, we realise that he is only aninexpressibly lax, slovenly and under-trained giant, and we are all outwith one accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in everypossible way. And so I will say no more of the idea that the novel ismerely a harmless opiate for the vacant hours of prosperous men. As amatter of fact, it never has been, and by its nature I doubt if it evercan be. 

I do not think that women have ever quite succumbed to the tired giantattitude in their reading. Women are more serious, not only about life, but about books. No type or kind of woman is capable of that lounging, defensive stupidity which is the basis of the tired giant attitude, andall through the early 'nineties, during which the respectable frivolityof Great Britain left its most enduring marks upon our literature, therewas a rebel undertow of earnest and aggressive writing and reading, supported chiefly by women and supplied very largely by women, whichgave the lie to the prevailing trivial estimate of fiction. Amongreaders, women and girls and young men at least will insist upon havingtheir novels significant and real, and it is to these perpetuallyrenewed elements in the public that the novelist must look for hiscontinuing emancipation from the wearier and more massive influences atwork in contemporary British life. 

And if the novel is to be recognised as something more than arelaxation, it has also, I think, to be kept free from the restrictionsimposed upon it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define ageneral form for it. Every art nowadays must steer its way between therocks of trivial and degrading standards and the whirlpool of arbitraryand irrational criticism. Whenever criticism of any art becomesspecialised and professional whenever a class of adjudicators is broughtinto existence, those adjudicators are apt to become as a classdistrustful of their immediate impressions, and anxious for methods ofcomparison between work and work, they begin to emulate theclassifications and exact measurements of a science, and to set upideals and rules as data for such classification and measurements. Theydevelop an alleged sense of technique, which is too often no more thanthe attempt to exact a laboriousness of method, or to insist uponpeculiarities of method which impress the professional critic not somuch as being merits as being meritorious. This sort of thing has gonevery far with the critical discussion both of the novel and the play. You have all heard that impressive dictum that some particulartheatrical display, although moving, interesting, and continuallyentertaining from start to finish, was for occult technical reasons "nota play, " and in the same way you are continually having yourappreciation of fiction dashed by the mysterious parallel condemnation, that the story you like "isn't a novel. " The novel has been treated asthough its form was as well-defined as the sonnet. Some year or so ago, for example, there was a quite serious discussion, which began, Ibelieve, in a weekly paper devoted to the interests of variousnonconformist religious organisations, about the proper length for anovel. The critic was to begin his painful duties with a yard measure. The matter was taken up with profound gravity by the _WestminsterGazette_, and a considerable number of literary men and women werecircularised and asked to state, in the face of "Tom Jones, " "The Vicarof Wakefield, " "The Shabby-Genteel Story, " and "Bleak House, " justexactly how long the novel ought to be. Our replies varied according tothe civility of our natures, but the mere attempt to raise the questionshows, I think, how widespread among the editorial, paragraph-writing, opinion-making sort of people is this notion of prescribing a definitelength and a definite form for the novel. In the newspapercorrespondence that followed, our friend the weary giant made atransitory appearance again. We were told the novel ought to be longenough for him to take up after dinner and finish before his whisky ateleven. 

That was obviously a half-forgotten echo of Edgar Allan Poe's discussionof the short story. Edgar Allan Poe was very definite upon the pointthat the short story should be finished at a sitting. But the novel andshort story are two entirely different things, and the train ofreasoning that made the American master limit the short story to aboutan hour of reading as a maximum, does not apply to the longer work. Ashort story is, or should be, a simple thing; it aims at producing onesingle, vivid effect; it has to seize the attention at the outset, andnever relaxing, gather it together more and more until the climax isreached. The limits of the human capacity to attend closely thereforeset a limit to it; it must explode and finish before interruption occursor fatigue sets in. But the novel I hold to be a discursive thing; it isnot a single interest, but a woven tapestry of interests; one is drawnon first by this affection and curiosity, and then by that; it issomething to return to, and I do not see that we can possibly set anylimit to its extent. The distinctive value of the novel among writtenworks of art is in characterisation, and the charm of a well-conceivedcharacter lies, not in knowing its destiny, but in watching itsproceedings. For my own part, I will confess that I find all the novelsof Dickens, long as they are, too short for me. I am sorry they do notflow into one another more than they do. I wish Micawber and DickSwiveller and Sairey Gamp turned up again in other novels than theirown, just as Shakespeare ran the glorious glow of Falstaff through agroup of plays. But Dickens tried this once when he carried on thePickwick Club into "Master Humphrey's Clock. " That experiment wasunsatisfactory, and he did not attempt anything of the sort again. Following on the days of Dickens, the novel began to contract, tosubordinate characterisation to story and description to drama;considerations of a sordid nature, I am told, had to do with that;something about a guinea and a half and six shillings with which we willnot concern ourselves--but I rejoice to see many signs to-day that thatphase of narrowing and restriction is over, and that there is everyencouragement for a return towards a laxer, more spacious form ofnovel-writing. The movement is partly of English origin, a revoltagainst those more exacting and cramping conceptions of artisticperfection to which I will recur in a moment, and a return to the laxfreedom of form, the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam, of theearlier English novel, of "Tristram Shandy" and of "Tom Jones"; andpartly it comes from abroad, and derives a stimulus from such bold andoriginal enterprises as that of Monsieur Rolland in his "JeanChristophe. " Its double origin involves a double nature; for while theEnglish spirit is towards discursiveness and variety, the new Frenchmovement is rather towards exhaustiveness. Mr. Arnold Bennett hasexperimented in both forms of amplitude. His superb "Old Wives' Tale, "wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far thefinest "long novel" that has been written in English in the Englishfashion in this generation, and now in "Clayhanger" and its promisedcollaterals, he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant presentationof the growth and modification of one or two individual minds, which isthe essential characteristic of the Continental movement towards thenovel of amplitude. While the "Old Wives' Tale" is discursive, "Clayhanger" is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new movementin perfection. 

I name "Jean Christophe" as a sort of archetype in this connection, because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of theadmirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greaterpredecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a singlemind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds, that comes to us now _via_ Mr. Bennett and Mr. Cannan from France. Thegreat original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book ofFlaubert, "Bouvard et Pécuchet. " Flaubert, the bulk of whose life wasspent upon the most austere and restrained fiction--Turgenev was notmore austere and restrained--broke out at last into this gay, sadmiracle of intellectual abundance. It is not extensively read in thiscountry; it is not yet, I believe, translated into English; but there itis--and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the secretof a book that is a precious wilderness of wonderful reading. But ifFlaubert is really the Continental emancipator of the novel from therestrictions of form, the master to whom we of the English persuasion, we of the discursive school, must for ever recur is he, whom I willmaintain against all comers to be the subtlest and greatest _artist_--Ilay stress upon that word artist--that Great Britain has ever producedin all that is essentially the novel, Laurence Sterne.... 

The confusion between the standards of a short story and the standardsof the novel which leads at last to these--what shall I callthem?--_Westminster Gazettisms?_--about the correct length to which thenovelist should aspire, leads also to all kinds of absurd condemnationsand exactions upon matters of method and style. The underlying fallacyis always this: the assumption that the novel, like the story, aims at asingle, concentrated impression. From that comes a fertile growth oferror. Constantly one finds in the reviews of works of fiction thecomplaint that this, that or the other thing in a novel is irrelevant. Now it is the easiest thing, and most fatal thing, to become irrelevantin a short story. A short story should go to its point as a man fliesfrom a pursuing tiger: he pauses not for the daisies in his path, or tonote the pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But the novel bycomparison is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning;nothing is irrelevant if the waiter's mood is happy, and the tapping ofthe thrush upon the garden path, or the petal of apple-blossom thatfloats down into my coffee, is as relevant as the egg I open or thebread and butter I bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar thetense illusion which is the aim of the short story--the introduction, for example, of the author's personality--any comment that seems toadmit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner betweenpart and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such thing's are notnecessarily wrong in the novel. Of course, all these things may fail intheir effect; they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult todo well; but it is no artistic merit to evade a difficulty any more thanit is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the highest of fences. Nearlyall the novels that have, by the lapse of time, reached an assuredposition of recognised greatness, are not only saturated in thepersonality of the author, but have in addition quite unaffectedpersonal outbreaks. The least successful instance the one that is madethe text against all such first-personal interventions, is, of course, Thackeray. But I think the trouble with Thackeray is not that he makesfirst-personal interventions, but that he does so with a curious touchof dishonesty. I agree with the late Mrs. Craigie that there wassomething profoundly vulgar about Thackeray. It was a sham thoughtful, sham man-of-the-world pose he assumed; it is an aggressive, conscious, challenging person astride before a fire, and a little distended bydinner and a sense of social and literary precedences, who uses thefirst person in Thackeray's novels. It isn't the real Thackeray; itisn't a frank man who looks you in the eyes and bares his soul anddemands your sympathy. That is a criticism of Thackeray, but it isn't acondemnation of intervention. 

I admit that for a novelist to come in person in this way before hisreaders involves grave risks; but when it is done without affectations, starkly as a man comes in out of the darkness to tell of perplexingthings without--as, for instance, Mr. Joseph Conrad does for allpractical purposes in his "Lord Jim"--then it gives a sort of depth, asort of subjective reality, that no such cold, almost affectedlyironical detachment as that which distinguishes the work of Mr. JohnGalsworthy, for example, can ever attain. And in some cases the wholeart and delight of a novel may lie in the author's personalinterventions; let such novels as "Elizabeth and her German Garden, " andthe same writer's "Elizabeth in Rügen, " bear witness. 

Now, all this time I have been hacking away at certain hampering andlimiting beliefs about the novel, letting it loose, as it were, in formand purpose; I have still to say just what I think the novel is, andwhere, if anywhere, its boundary-line ought to be drawn. It is by nomeans an easy task to define the novel. It is not a thing premeditated. It is a thing that has grown up into modern life, and taken upon itselfuses and produced results that could not have been foreseen by itsoriginators. Few of the important things in the collective life of manstarted out to be what they are. Consider, for example, all theunexpected aesthetic values, the inspiration and variety of emotionalresult which arises out of the cross-shaped plan of the Gothiccathedral, and the undesigned delight and wonder of white marble thathas ensued, as I have been told, through the ageing and whitening of therealistically coloured statuary of the Greeks and Romans. Much of thecharm of the old furniture and needlework, again, upon which the presenttime sets so much store, lies in acquired and unpremeditated qualities. And no doubt the novel grew up out of simple story-telling, and theuniversal desire of children, old and young alike, for a story. It isonly slowly that we have developed the distinction of the novel from theromance, as being a story of human beings, absolutely credible andconceivable as distinguished from human beings frankly endowed with theglamour, the wonder, the brightness, of a less exacting and more vividlyeventful world. The novel is a story that demands, or professes todemand, no make-believe. The novelist undertakes to present you peopleand things as real as any that you can meet in an omnibus. And I supposeit is conceivable that a novel might exist which was just purely a storyof that kind and nothing more. It might amuse you as one is amused bylooking out of a window into a street, or listening to a piece ofagreeable music, and that might be the limit of its effect. But almostalways the novel is something more than that, and produces more effectthan that. The novel has inseparable moral consequences. It leavesimpressions, not simply of things seen, but of acts judged and madeattractive or unattractive. They may prove very slight moralconsequences, and very shallow moral impressions in the long run, butthere they are, none the less, its inevitable accompaniments. It isunavoidable that this should be so. Even if the novelist attempts oraffects to be impartial, he still cannot prevent his characters settingexamples; he still cannot avoid, as people say, putting ideas into hisreaders' heads. The greater his skill, the more convincing his treatmentthe more vivid his power of suggestion. And it is equally impossible forhim not to betray his sense that the proceedings of this person arerather jolly and admirable, and of that, rather ugly and detestable. Isuppose Mr. Bennett, for example, would say that he should not do so;but it is as manifest to any disinterested observer that he greatlyloves and admires his Card, as that Richardson admired his Sir CharlesGrandison, or that Mrs. Humphry Ward considers her Marcella a very fineand estimable young woman. And I think it is just in this, that thenovel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study andjudgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value--or perhaps to avoid controversy Ihad better say the real and increasing importance--of the novel and ofthe novelist in modern life comes in. 

It is no new discovery that the novel, like the drama, is a powerfulinstrument of moral suggestion. This has been understood in England eversince there has been such a thing as a novel in England. This has beenrecognised equally by novelists, novel-readers, and the people whowouldn't read novels under any condition whatever. Richardson wrotedeliberately for edification, and "Tom Jones" is a powerful andeffective appeal for a charitable, and even indulgent, attitude towardsloose-living men. But excepting Fielding and one or two other of thosepartial exceptions that always occur in the case of criticalgeneralisations, there is a definable difference between the novel ofthe past and what I may call the modern novel. It is a difference thatis reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general way ofthinking. It lies in the fact that formerly there was a feeling ofcertitude about moral values and standards of conduct that is altogetherabsent to-day. It wasn't so much that men were agreed upon thesethings--about these things there have always been enormous divergencesof opinion--as that men were emphatic, cocksure, and unteachable aboutwhatever they did happen to believe to a degree that no longer obtains. This is the Balfourian age, and even religion seeks to establish itselfon doubt. There were, perhaps, just as many differences in the past asthere are now, but the outlines were harder--they were, indeed, so hardas to be almost, to our sense, savage. You might be a Roman Catholic, and in that case you did not want to hear about Protestants, Turks, Infidels, except in tones of horror and hatred. You knew exactly whatwas good and what was evil. Your priest informed you upon these points, and all you needed in any novel you read was a confirmation, implicit orexplicit, of these vivid, rather than charming, prejudices. If you werea Protestant you were equally clear and unshakable. Your sect, whicheversect you belonged to, knew the whole of truth and included all the nicepeople. It had nothing to learn in the world, and it wanted to learnnothing outside its sectarian convictions. The unbelievers you know, were just as bad, and said their creeds with an equal fury--merelyinterpolating _nots_. People of every sort--Catholic, Protestant, Infidel, or what not--were equally clear that good was good and bad wasbad, that the world was made up of good characters whom you had to love, help and admire, and of bad characters to whom one might, in theinterests of goodness, even lie, and whom one had to foil, defeat andtriumph over shamelessly at every opportunity. That was the quality ofthe times. The novel reflected this quality of assurance, and its utmostcharity was to unmask an apparent villain and show that he or she wasreally profoundly and correctly good, or to unmask an apparent saintand show the hypocrite. There was no such penetrating and pervadingelement of doubt and curiosity--and charity, about the rightfulness andbeauty of conduct, such as one meets on every hand to-day. 

The novel-reader of the past, therefore, like the novel-reader of themore provincial parts of England to-day, judged a novel by theconvictions that had been built up in him by his training and his priestor his pastor. If it agreed with these convictions he approved; if itdid not agree he disapproved--often with great energy. The novel, whereit was not unconditionally banned altogether as a thing disturbing andunnecessary, was regarded as a thing subordinated to the teaching of thepriest or pastor, or whatever director and dogma was followed. Itsmodest moral confirmations began when authority had completed itsdirection. The novel was good--if it seemed to harmonise with the graverexercises conducted by Mr. Chadband--and it was bad and outcast if Mr. Chadband said so. And it is over the bodies of discredited anddisgruntled Chadbands that the novel escapes from its servitude andinferiority. 

Now the conflict of authority against criticism is one of the eternalconflicts of humanity. It is the conflict of organisation againstinitiative, of discipline against freedom. It was the conflict of thepriest against the prophet in ancient Judaea, of the Pharisee againstthe Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of the Churchagainst the Franciscan and the Lollard, of the Respectable Personagainst the Artist, of the hedge-clippers of mankind against theshooting buds. And to-day, while we live in a period of tightening andextending social organisation, we live also in a period of adventurousand insurgent thought, in an intellectual spring unprecedented in theworld's history. There is an enormous criticism going on of the faithsupon which men's lives and associations are based, and of every standardand rule of conduct. And it is inevitable that the novel, just in themeasure of its sincerity and ability, should reflect and co-operate inthe atmosphere and uncertainties and changing variety of this seethingand creative time. 

And I do not mean merely that the novel is unavoidably charged with therepresentation of this wide and wonderful conflict. It is a necessarypart of the conflict. The essential characteristic of this greatintellectual revolution amidst which we are living to-day, thatrevolution of which the revival and restatement of nominalism under thename of pragmatism is the philosophical aspect, consists in thereassertion of the importance of the individual instance as against thegeneralisation. All our social, political, moral problems are beingapproached in a new spirit, in an inquiring and experimental spirit, which has small respect for abstract principles and deductive rules. Weperceive more and more clearly, for example, that the study of socialorganisation is an empty and unprofitable study until we approach it asa study of the association and inter-reaction of individualised humanbeings inspired by diversified motives, ruled by traditions, and swayedby the suggestions of a complex intellectual atmosphere. And all ourconceptions of the relationships between man and man, and of justice andrightfulness and social desirableness, remain something misfitting andinappropriate, something uncomfortable and potentially injurious, as ifwe were trying to wear sharp-edged clothes made for a giant out of tin, until we bring them to the test and measure of realised individualities. 

And this is where the value and opportunity of the modern novel comesin. So far as I can see, it is the only medium through which we candiscuss the great majority of the problems which are being raised insuch bristling multitude by our contemporary social development Nearlyevery one of those problems has at its core a psychological problem, andnot merely a psychological problem, but one in which the idea ofindividuality is an essential factor. Dealing with most of thesequestions by a rule or a generalisation is like putting a cordon round ajungle full of the most diversified sort of game. The hunting onlybegins when you leave the cordon behind you and push into the thickets. 

Take, for example, the immense cluster of difficulties that arises outof the increasing complexity of our state. On every hand we are creatingofficials, and compared with only a few years ago the private life in adozen fresh directions comes into contact with officialdom. But we stilldo practically nothing to work out the interesting changes that occur inthis sort of man and that, when you withdraw him as it were from thecommon crowd of humanity, put his mind if not his body into uniform andendow him with powers and functions and rules. It is manifestly a studyof the profoundest public and personal importance. It is manifestly astudy of increasing importance. The process of social and politicalorganisation that has been going on for the last quarter of a century ispretty clearly going on now if anything with increasing vigour--and forthe most part the entire dependence of the consequences of the wholeproblem upon the reaction between the office on the one hand and theweak, uncertain, various human beings who take office on the other, doesn't seem even to be suspected by the energetic, virtuous and more orless amiable people whose activities in politics and upon the backstairsof politics bring about these developments. They assume that the sort ofofficial they need, a combination of god-like virtue and intelligencewith unfailing mechanical obedience, can be made out of just any youngnephew. And I know of no means of persuading people that this is arather unjustifiable assumption, and of creating an intelligentcontrolling criticism of officials and of assisting conscientiousofficials to an effective self-examination, and generally of keeping theatmosphere of official life sweet and healthy, except the novel. Yet sofar the novel has scarcely begun its attack upon this particular fieldof human life, and all the attractive varied play of motive it contains. 

Of course we have one supreme and devastating study of the illiterateminor official in Bumble. That one figure lit up and still lights thewhole problem of Poor Law administration for the English readingcommunity. It was a translation of well-meant regulations andpseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, arrogant, ill-bred flesh and blood. It was worth a hundred Royal Commissions. Youmay make your regulations as you please, said Dickens in effect; this isone sample of the stuff that will carry them out. But Bumble standsalmost alone. Instead of realising that he is only one aspect ofofficialdom, we are all too apt to make him the type of all officials, and not an urban district council can get into a dispute about itselectric light without being denounced as a Bumbledom by some whirlingenemy or other. The burthen upon Bumble's shoulders is too heavy to beborne, and we want the contemporary novel to give us a score of otherfigures to put beside him, other aspects and reflections upon this greatproblem of officialism made flesh. Bumble is a magnificent figure of thefollies and cruelties of ignorance in office--I would have everycandidate for the post of workhouse master pass a severe examinationupon "Oliver Twist"--but it is not only caricature and satire I demand. We must have not only the fullest treatment of the temptations, vanities, abuses, and absurdities of office, but all its dreams, itssense of constructive order, its consolations, its sense of service, andits nobler satisfactions. You may say that is demanding more insight andpower in our novels and novelists than we can possibly hope to find inthem. So much the worse for us. I stick to my thesis that thecomplicated social organisation of to-day cannot get along without theamount of mutual understanding and mutual explanation such a range ofcharacterisation in our novels implies. The success of civilisationamounts ultimately to a success of sympathy and understanding. If peoplecannot be brought to an interest in one another greater than they feelto-day, to curiosities and criticisms far keener, and co-operations farsubtler, than we have now; if class cannot be brought to measure itselfagainst, and interchange experience and sympathy with class, andtemperament with temperament then we shall never struggle very farbeyond the confused discomforts and uneasiness of to-day, and thechanges and complications of human life will remain as they are now, very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immenseavalanche that is sliding down a hill. And in this tremendous work ofhuman reconciliation and elucidation, it seems to me it is the novelthat must attempt most and achieve most. 

You may feel disposed to say to all this: We grant the major premises, but why look to the work of prose fiction as the main instrument in thisnecessary process of, so to speak, sympathising humanity together?Cannot this be done far more effectively through biography andautobiography, for example? Isn't there the lyric; and, above all, isn'tthere the play? Well, so far as the stage goes, I think it is a verycharming and exciting form of human activity, a display of actions andsurprises of the most moving and impressive sort; but beyond theopportunity it affords for saying startling and thought-provokingthings--opportunities Mr. Shaw, for example, has worked to the utmostlimit--I do not see that the drama does much to enlarge our sympathiesand add to our stock of motive ideas. And regarded as a medium forstartling and thought-provoking things, the stage seems to me anextremely clumsy and costly affair. One might just as well go about witha pencil writing up the thought-provoking phrase, whatever it is, onwalls. The drama excites our sympathies intensely, but it seems to me itis far too objective a medium to widen them appreciably, and it is thatwidening, that increase in the range of understanding, at which I thinkcivilisation is aiming. The case for biography, and more particularlyautobiography, as against the novel, is, I admit, at the first blushstronger. You may say: Why give us these creatures of a novelist'simagination, these phantom and fantastic thinkings and doings, when wemay have the stories of real lives, really lived--the intimate record ofactual men and women? To which one answers: "Ah, if one could!" But itis just because biography does deal with actual lives, actual facts, because it radiates out to touch continuing interests and sensitivesurvivors, that it is so unsatisfactory, so untruthful. Its inseparablefalsehood is the worst of all kinds of falsehood--the falsehood ofomission. Think what an abounding, astonishing, perplexing personGladstone must have been in life, and consider Lord Morley's "Life ofGladstone, " cold, dignified--not a life at all, indeed, so much asembalmed remains; the fire gone, the passions gone, the bowels carefullyremoved. All biography has something of that post-mortem coldness andrespect, and as for autobiography--a man may show his soul in a thousandhalf-conscious ways, but to turn upon oneself and explain oneself isgiven to no one. It is the natural liars and braggarts, your Cellinisand Casanovas, men with a habit of regarding themselves with a kind ofobjective admiration, who do best in autobiography. And, on the otherhand, the novel has neither the intense self-consciousness ofautobiography nor the paralysing responsibilities of the biographer. Itis by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters arefigments and phantoms, they can be made entirely transparent. Becausethey are fictions, and you know they are fictions, so that they cannothold you for an instant so soon as they cease to be true, they have apower of veracity quite beyond that of actual records. Every novelcarries its own justification and its own condemnation in its success orfailure to convince you that _the thing was so_. Now history, biography, blue-book and so forth, can hardly ever get beyond the statement thatthe superficial fact was so. 

You see now the scope of the claim I am making for the novel; it is tobe the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument ofself-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, thefactory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of socialdogmas and ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the initiator ofknowledge, the seed of fruitful self-questioning. Let me be very clearhere. I do not mean for a moment that the novelist is going to set up asa teacher, as a sort of priest with a pen, who will make men and womenbelieve and do this and that. The novel is not a new sort of pulpit;humanity is passing out of the phase when men _sit under_ preachers anddogmatic influences. But the novelist is going to be the most potent ofartists, because he is going to present conduct, devise beautifulconduct, discuss conduct analyse conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate itthrough and through. He will not teach, but discuss, point out, plead, and display. And this being my view you will be prepared for the demandI am now about to make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist inhis choice of topic and incident and in his method of treatment; orrather, if I may presume to speak for other novelists, I would say it isnot so much a demand we make as an intention we proclaim. We are goingto write, subject only to our limitations, about the whole of humanlife. We are going to deal with political questions and religiousquestions and social questions. We cannot present people unless we havethis free hand, this unrestricted field. What is the good of tellingstories about people's lives if one may not deal freely with thereligious beliefs and organisations that have controlled or failed tocontrol them? What is the good of pretending to write about love, andthe loyalties and treacheries and quarrels of men and women, if one mustnot glance at those varieties of physical temperament and organicquality, those deeply passionate needs and distresses from which halfthe storms of human life are brewed? We mean to deal with all thesethings, and it will need very much more than the disapproval ofprovincial librarians, the hostility of a few influential people inLondon, the scurrility of one paper, and the deep and obstinate silencesof another, to stop the incoming tide of aggressive novel-writing. Weare going to write about it all. We are going to write about businessand finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and decorumand indecorum, until a thousand pretences and ten thousand imposturesshrivel in the cold, clear air of our elucidations. We are going towrite of wasted opportunities and latent beauties until a thousand newways of living open to men and women. We are going to appeal to theyoung and the hopeful and the curious, against the established, thedignified, and defensive. Before we have done, we will have all lifewithin the scope of the novel. 

THE PHILOSOPHER'S PUBLIC LIBRARY

Suppose a philosopher had a great deal of money to spend--though this isnot in accordance with experience, it is not inherently impossible--andsuppose he thought, as any philosopher does think, that the Britishpublic ought to read much more and better books than they do, and thatfounding public libraries was the way to induce them to do so, what sortof public libraries would he found? That, I submit, is a suitable topicfor a disinterested speculator. 

He would, I suppose, being a philosopher, begin by asking himself what alibrary essentially was, and he would probably come to the eccentricconclusion that it was essentially a collection of books. He would, inhis unworldliness, entirely overlook the fact that it might be a job fora municipally influential builder, a costly but conspicuous monument toopulent generosity, a news-room, an employment bureau, or ameeting-place for the glowing young; he would never think for a momentof a library as a thing one might build, it would present itself to himwith astonishing simplicity as a thing one would collect. Bricks ceasedto be literature after Babylon. 

His first proceeding would be, I suppose, to make a list of thatcollection. What books, he would say, have all my libraries to possessanyhow? And he would begin to jot down--with the assistance of a fewfriends, perhaps--this essential list. 

He would, being a philosopher, insist on good editions, and he wouldalso take great pains with the selection. It would not be a limited oran exclusive list--when in doubt he would include. He would disregardmodern fiction very largely, because any book that has any success canalways be bought for sixpence, and modern poetry, because, with anexception or so, it does not signify at all. He would set almost all theGreek and Roman literature in well-printed translations and withluminous introductions--and if there were no good translations he wouldgive some good man Ł500 or so to make one--translations of all that isgood in modern European literatures, and, last but largest portion ofhis list, editions of all that is worthy of our own. He would make avery careful list of thoroughly modern encyclopaedias, atlases, andvolumes of information, and a particularly complete catalogue of allliterature that is still copyright; and then--with perhaps a secretaryor so--he would revise all his lists and mark against every book whetherhe would have two, five or ten or twenty copies, or whatever number ofcopies of it he thought proper in each library. 

Then next, being a philosopher, he would decide that if he was going tobuy a great number of libraries in this way, he was going to make anabsolutely new sort of demand for these books, and that he was entitledto a special sort of supply. 

He would not expect the machinery of retail book-selling to meet theneeds of wholesale buying. So he would go either to wholesalebooksellers, or directly to the various publishers of the books andeditions he had chosen, and ask for reasonable special prices for thetwo thousand or seven thousand or fifty thousand of each book herequired. And the publishers would, of course, give him very specialprices, more especially in the case of the out-of-copyright books. Hewould probably find it best to buy whole editions in sheets and bindthem himself in strong bindings. And he would emerge from thesenegotiations in possession of a number of complete libraries eachof--how many books? Less than twenty thousand ought to do it, I think, though that is a matter for separate discussion, and that should costhim, buying in this wholesale way, under rather than over Ł2, 000 alibrary. 

And next he would bethink himself of the readers of these books. "Thesepeople, " he would say, "do not know very much about books, which, indeed, is why I am giving them this library. "

Accordingly, he would get a number of able and learned people to writehim guides to his twenty thousand books, and, in fact, to the wholeworld of reading, a guide, for example, to the books on history ingeneral, a special guide to books on English history, or French orGerman history, a guide to the books on geology, a guide to poetry andpoetical criticisms, and so forth. 

Some such books our philosopher would find already done--the"Bibliography of American History, " of the American Libraries'Association, for example, and Mr. Nield's "Guide to HistoricalFiction"--and what are not done he would commission good men to do forhim. Suppose he had to commission forty such guides altogether and thatthey cost him on the average Ł500 each, for he would take care not tosweat their makers, then that would add another Ł20, 000 to hisexpenditure. But if he was going to found 400 libraries, let us say, that would only be Ł50 a library--a very trivial addition to hisexpenditure. 

The rarer books mentioned in these various guides would remind him, however, of the many even his ample limit of twenty thousand forced himto exclude, and he would, perhaps, consider the need of having two orthree libraries each for the storage of a hundred thousand books or sonot kept at the local libraries, but which could be sent to them at aday's notice at the request of any reader. And then, and only then, would he give his attention to the housing and staffing that thisreality of books would demand. 

Being a philosopher and no fool, he would draw a very clear, harddistinction between the reckless endowment of the building trade and thedissemination of books. He would distinguish, too, between a library anda news-room, and would find no great attraction in the prospect ofsupplying the national youth with free but thumby copies of the sixpennymagazines. He would consider that all that was needed for his librarywas, first, easily accessible fireproof shelving for his collection, with ample space for his additions, an efficient distributing office, acloak-room, and so forth, and eight or nine not too large, well lit, well carpeted, well warmed and well ventilated rooms radiating from thatoffice, in which the guides and so forth could be consulted, and wherethose who had no convenient, quiet room at home could read. 

He would find that, by avoiding architectural vulgarities, a simple, well proportioned building satisfying all these requirements andcontaining housing for the librarian, assistant, custodian and staffcould be built for between Ł4, 000 and Ł5, 000, excluding the cost ofsite, and his sites, which he would not choose for theirconspicuousness, might average something under another Ł1, 000. 

He would try to make a bargain with the local people for theirco-operation in his enterprise, though he would, as a philosopher, understand that where a public library is least wanted it is generallymost needed. But in most cases he would succeed in stipulating for acertain standard of maintenance by the local authority. Since moderatelyprosperous illiterate men undervalue education and most town councillorsare moderately illiterate men, he would do his best to keep the salaryand appointment of the librarian out of such hands. He would stipulatefor a salary of at least Ł400, in addition to housing, light and heat, and he would probably find it advisable to appoint a little committee ofvisitors who would have the power to examine qualifications, endorse theappointment, and recommend the dismissal of all his four hundredlibrarians. He would probably try to make the assistantship at Ł100 ayear or thereabout a sort of local scholarship to be won by competition, and only the cleaner and caretaker's place would be left to the localpolitician. And, of course, our philosopher would stipulate that, apartfrom all other expenditure, a sum of at least Ł200 a year should be setaside for buying new books. 

So our rich philosopher would secure at the minimum cost a number ofefficiently equipped libraries throughout the country. Eight thousandpounds down and Ł900 a year is about as cheap as a public library canbe. Below that level, it would be cheaper to have no public library. Above that level, a public library that is not efficient is eitherdishonestly or incapably organised or managed, or it is serving toolarge a district and needs duplication, or it is trying to do too much. 

ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOC

It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a paintedPagan God and live upon a ceiling. I crown myself becomingly in stars ortendrils or with electric coruscations (as the mood takes me), and wearan easy costume free from complications and appropriate to the climateof those agreeable spaces. The company about me on the clouds variesgreatly with the mood of the vision, but always it is in some way, ifnot always a very obvious way, beautiful. One frequent presence is G. K. Chesterton, a joyous whirl of brush work, appropriately garmented andcrowned. When he is there, I remark, the whole ceiling is by a sort ofradiation convivial. We drink limitless old October from handsomeflagons, and we argue mightily about Pride (his weak point) and thenature of Deity. A hygienic, attentive, and essentially anaestheticEagle checks, in the absence of exercise, any undue enlargement of ourPromethean livers.... Chesterton often--but never by any chance Belloc. Belloc I admire beyond measure, but there is a sort of partisanviciousness about Belloc that bars him from my celestial dreams. Henever figures, no, not even in the remotest corner, on my ceiling. Andyet the divine artist, by some strange skill that my ignorance of histechnique saves me from the presumption of explaining, does indicateexactly where Belloc is. A little quiver of the paint, a faint aura, about the spectacular masses of Chesterton? I am not certain. But nointelligent beholder can look up and miss the remarkable fact thatBelloc exists--and that he is away, safely away, away in his heaven, which is, of course, the Park Lane Imperialist's hell. There hepresides.... 

But in this life I do not meet Chesterton exalted upon clouds, and thereis but the mockery of that endless leisure for abstract discussionafforded by my painted entertainments. I live in an urgent and incessantworld, which is at its best a wildly beautiful confusion of impressionsand at its worst a dingy uproar. It crowds upon us and jostles us, weget our little interludes for thinking and talking between much roughscuffling and laying about us with our fists. And I cannot afford to becontinually bickering with Chesterton and Belloc about forms ofexpression. There are others for whom I want to save my knuckles. Onemay be wasteful in peace and leisure, but economies are the soul ofconflict. 

In many ways we three are closely akin; we diverge not by necessity butaccident, because we speak in different dialects and have divergentmetaphysics. All that I can I shall persuade to my way of thinking aboutthought and to the use of words in my loose, expressive manner, butBelloc and Chesterton and I are too grown and set to change ourlanguages now and learn new ones; we are on different roads, and so wemust needs shout to one another across intervening abysses. These twosay Socialism is a thing they do not want for men, and I say Socialismis above all what I want for men. We shall go on saying that now to theend of our days. But what we do all three want is something very alike. Our different roads are parallel. I aim at a growing collective life, aperpetually enhanced inheritance for our race, through the fullest, freest development of the individual life. What they aim at ultimately Ido not understand, but it is manifest that its immediate form is thefullest and freest development of the individual life. We all three hateequally and sympathetically the spectacle of human beings blown up withwindy wealth and irresponsible power as cruelly and absurdly as boysblow up frogs; we all three detest the complex causes that dwarf andcripple lives from the moment of birth and starve and debase greatmasses of mankind. We want as universally as possible the jolly life, men and women warm-blooded and well-aired, acting freely and joyously, gathering life as children gather corn-cockles in corn. We all threewant people to have property of a real and personal sort, to have theson, as Chesterton put it, bringing up the port his father laid down, and pride in the pears one has grown in one's own garden. And I agreewith Chesterton that giving--giving oneself out of love andfellowship--is the salt of life. 

But there I diverge from him, less in spirit, I think, than in themanner of his expression. There is a base because impersonal way ofgiving. "Standing drink, " which he praises as noble, is just the thing Icannot stand, the ultimate mockery and vulgarisation of that fine act ofbringing out the cherished thing saved for the heaven-sent guest. It isa mere commercial transaction, essentially of the evil of our time. Think of it! Two temporarily homeless beings agree to drink together, and they turn in and face the public supply of drink (a little vitiatedby private commercial necessities) in the public-house. (It is horriblethat life should be so wholesale and heartless. ) And Jones, with asudden effusion of manner, thrusts twopence or ninepence (got God knowshow) into the economic mysteries and personal delicacy of Brown. I'd assoon a man slipped sixpence down my neck. If Jones has used love andsympathy to detect a certain real thirst and need in Brown and knowledgeand power in its assuaging by some specially appropriate fluid, then wehave an altogether different matter; but the common business of"standing treat" and giving presents and entertainments is as proud andunspiritual as cock-crowing, as foolish and inhuman as that sorrycompendium of mercantile vices, the game of poker, and I am amazed tofind Chesterton commend it. 

But that is a criticism by the way. Chesterton and Belloc agree with theSocialist that the present world does not give at all what they want. They agree that it fails to do so through a wild derangement of ourproperty relations. They are in agreement with the common contemporaryman (whose creed is stated, I think, not unfairly, but with the omissionof certain important articles by Chesterton), that the derangements ofour property relations are to be remedied by concerted action and inpart by altered laws. The land and all sorts of great common interestsmust be, if not owned, then at least controlled, managed, checked, redistributed by the State. Our real difference is only about a littlemore or a little less owning. I do not see how Belloc and Chesterton canstand for anything but a strong State as against those wild monsters ofproperty, the strong, big private owners. The State must be complex andpowerful enough to prevent them. State or plutocrat there is really noother practical alternative before the world at the present time. Eitherwe have to let the big financial adventurers, the aggregating capitalistand his Press, in a loose, informal combination, rule the earth, eitherwe have got to stand aside from preventive legislation and leave thingsto work out on their present lines, or we have to construct a collectiveorganisation sufficiently strong for the protection of the liberties ofthe some-day-to-be-jolly common man. So far we go in common. If Bellocand Chesterton are not Socialists, they are at any rate notanti-Socialists. If they say they want an organised Christian State(which involves practically seven-tenths of the Socialist desire), then, in the face of our big common enemies, of adventurous capital, of alienImperialism, base ambition, base intelligence, and common prejudice andignorance, I do not mean to quarrel with them politically, so long asthey force no quarrel on me. Their organised Christian State is nearerthe organised State I want than our present plutocracy. Our ideals willfight some day, and it will be, I know, a first-rate fight, but to fightnow is to let the enemy in. When we have got all we want in common, thenand only then can we afford to differ. I have never believed that aSocialist Party could hope to form a Government in this country in mylifetime; I believe it less now than ever I did. I don't know if any ofmy Fabian colleagues entertain so remarkable a hope. But if they do not, then unless their political aim is pure cantankerousness, they mustcontemplate a working political combination between the Socialistmembers in Parliament and just that non-capitalist section of theLiberal Party for which Chesterton and Belloc speak. Perpetualopposition is a dishonourable aim in politics; and a man who mingles inpolitical development with no intention of taking on responsible tasksunless he gets all his particular formulae accepted is a pervert, avictim of Irish bad example, and unfit far decent democraticinstitutions ... 

I digress again, I see, but my drift I hope is clear. Differ as we may, Belloc and Chesterton are with all Socialists in being on the same sideof the great political and social cleavage that opens at the presenttime. We and they are with the interests of the mass of common men asagainst that growing organisation of great owners who have commoninterests directly antagonistic to those of the community and State. WeSocialists are only secondarily politicians. Our primary business is notto impose upon, but to ram right into the substance of that object ofChesterton's solicitude, the circle of ideas of the common man, the ideaof the State as his own, as a thing he serves and is served by. We wantto add to his sense of property rather than offend it. If I had my way Iwould do that at the street corners and on the trams, I would take downthat alien-looking and detestable inscription "L. C. C. , " and put up, "This Tram, this Street, belongs to the People of London. " WouldChesterton or Belloc quarrel with that? Suppose that Chesterton isright, and that there are incurable things in the mind of the common manflatly hostile to our ideals; so much of our ideals will fail. But weare doing our best by our lights, and all we can. What are Chestertonand Belloc doing? If our ideal is partly right and partly wrong, arethey trying to build up a better ideal? Will they state a Utopia and howthey propose it shall be managed? If they lend their weight only to suchfine old propositions as that a man wants freedom, that he has a rightto do as he likes with his own, and so on, they won't help the commonman much. All that fine talk, without some further exposition, goes tosustain Mr. Rockefeller's simple human love of property, and the womanand child sweating manufacturer in his fight for the inspector-freehome industry. I bought on a bookstall the other day a pamphlet full ofmisrepresentation and bad argument against Socialism by an AustralianJew, published by the Single-Tax people apparently in a disinterestedattempt to free the land from the landowner by the simple expedient ofabusing anyone else who wanted to do as much but did not hold HenryGeorge to be God and Lord; and I know Socialists who will protest withtears in their eyes against association with any human being who singsany song but the "Red Flag" and doubts whether Marx had much experienceof affairs. Well, there is no reason why Chesterton and Belloc should attheir level do the same sort of thing. When we talk on a ceiling or at adinner-party with any touch of the celestial in its composition, Chesterton and I, Belloc and I, are antagonists with an undying feud, but in the fight against human selfishness and narrowness and for afiner, juster law, we are brothers--at the remotest, half-brothers. 

Chesterton isn't a Socialist--agreed! But now, as between us and theMaster of Elibank or Sir Hugh Bell or any other Free Trade Liberalcapitalist or landlord, which side is he on? You cannot have more thanone fight going on in the political arena at the same time, because onlyone party or group of parties can win. 

And going back for a moment to that point about a Utopia, I want onefrom Chesterton. Purely unhelpful criticism isn't enough from a man ofhis size. It isn't justifiable for him to go about sitting on otherpeople's Utopias. I appeal to his sense of fair play. I have done mybest to reconcile the conception of a free and generous style ofpersonal living with a social organisation that will save the world fromthe harsh predominance of dull, persistent, energetic, unscrupulousgrabbers tempered only by the vulgar extravagance of their wives andsons. It isn't an adequate reply to say that nobody stood treat there, and that the simple, generous people like to beat their own wives andchildren on occasion in a loving and intimate manner, and that theywon't endure the spirit of Mr. Sidney Webb. 

ABOUT SIR THOMAS MORE

There are some writers who are chiefly interesting in themselves, andsome whom chance and the agreement of men have picked out as symbols andconvenient indications of some particular group or temperament ofopinions. To the latter it is that Sir Thomas More belongs. An age and atype of mind have found in him and his Utopia a figurehead and a token;and pleasant and honourable as his personality and household presentthemselves to the modern reader, it is doubtful if they would by thistime have retained any peculiar distinction among the many othercontemporaries of whom we have chance glimpses in letters and suchlikedocuments, were it not that he happened to be the first man of affairsin England to imitate the "Republic" of Plato. By that chance it fell tohim to give the world a noun and an adjective of abuse, "Utopian, " andto record how under the stimulus of Plato's releasing influence theopening problems of our modern world presented themselves to the Englishmind of his time. For the most part the problems that exercised him arethe problems that exercise us to-day, some of them, it may be, havegrown up and intermarried, new ones have joined their company, but few, if any, have disappeared, and it is alike in his resemblances to anddifferences from the modern speculative mind that his essential interestlies. 

The portrait presented by contemporary mention and his own intentionaland unintentional admissions, is of an active-minded andagreeable-mannered man, a hard worker, very markedly prone to quips andwhimsical sayings and plays upon words, and aware of a double reputationas a man of erudition and a wit. This latter quality it was that won himadvancement at court, and it may have been his too clearly confessedreluctance to play the part of an informal table jester to his king thatlaid the grounds of that deepening royal resentment that ended only withhis execution. But he was also valued by the king for more solid merits, he was needed by the king, and it was more than a table scorned or aclash of opinion upon the validity of divorce; it was a more generalestrangement and avoidance of service that caused that fit of regalpetulance by which he died. 

It would seem that he began and ended his career in the orthodoxreligion and a general acquiescence in the ideas and customs of histime, and he played an honourable and acceptable part in that time; buthis permanent interest lies not in his general conformity but in hisincidental scepticism, in the fact that underlying the observances andrecognised rules and limitations that give the texture of his life werethe profoundest doubts, and that, stirred and disturbed by Plato, he sawfit to write them down. One may question if such scepticism is in itselfunusual, whether any large proportion of great statesmen, greatecclesiastics and administrators have escaped phases of destructiveself-criticism of destructive criticism of the principles upon whichtheir general careers were framed. But few have made so public anadmission as Sir Thomas More. A good Catholic undoubtedly he was, andyet we find him capable of conceiving a non-Christian communityexcelling all Christendom in wisdom and virtue; in practice his senseof conformity and orthodoxy was manifest enough, but in his "Utopia" heventures to contemplate, and that not merely wistfully, but with someconfidence, the possibility of an absolute religious toleration. 

The "Utopia" is none the less interesting because it is one of the mostinconsistent of books. Never were the forms of Socialism and Communismanimated by so entirely an Individualist soul. The hands are the handsof Plato, the wide-thinking Greek, but the voice is the voice of ahumane, public-spirited, but limited and very practical Englishgentleman who takes the inferiority of his inferiors for granted, dislikes friars and tramps and loafers and all undisciplined andunproductive people, and is ruler in his own household. He abounds insound practical ideas, for the migration of harvesters, for theuniversality of gardens and the artificial incubation of eggs, and hesweeps aside all Plato's suggestion of the citizen woman as though ithad never entered his mind. He had indeed the Whig temperament, and itmanifested itself down even to the practice of reading aloud in company, which still prevails among the more representative survivors of the Whigtradition. He argues ably against private property, but no thought ofany such radicalism as the admission of those poor peons of his, withhead half-shaved and glaring uniform against escape, to participation inownership appears in his proposals. His communism is all for theconvenience of his Syphogrants and Tranibores, those gentlemen ofgravity and experience, lest one should swell up above the others. Sotoo is the essential Whiggery of the limitation of the Prince'srevenues. It is the very spirit of eighteenth century Constitutionalism. And his Whiggery bears Utilitarianism instead of the vanity of aflower. Among his cities, all of a size, so that "he that knoweth oneknoweth all, " the Benthamite would have revised his sceptical theologyand admitted the possibility of heaven. 

Like any Whig, More exalted reason above the imagination at every point, and so he fails to understand the magic prestige of gold, making thatbeautiful metal into vessels of dishonour to urge his case against it, nor had he any perception of the charm of extravagance, for example, orthe desirability of various clothing. The Utopians went all in coarselinen and undyed wool--why should the world be coloured?--and all theeconomy of labour and shortening of the working day was to no other endthan to prolong the years of study and the joys of reading aloud, thesimple satisfactions of the good boy at his lessons, to the very end oflife. "In the institution of that weal publique this end is only andchiefly pretended and minded, that what time may possibly be spared fromthe necessary occupations and affairs of the commonwealth, all that thecitizens should withdraw from the bodily service to the free liberty ofthe mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they suppose thefelicity of this life to consist. "

Indeed, it is no paradox to say that "Utopia, " which has by a conspiracyof accidents become a proverb for undisciplined fancifulness in socialand political matters, is in reality a very unimaginative work. In that, next to the accident of its priority, lies the secret of its continuinginterest. In some respects it is like one of those precious anddelightful scrapbooks people disinter in old country houses; its verypoverty of synthetic power leaves its ingredients, the cuttings from andimitations of Plato, the recipe for the hatching of eggs, the sternresolutions against scoundrels and rough fellows, all the sharper andbrighter. There will always be found people to read in it, over andabove the countless multitudes who will continue ignorantly to use itsname for everything most alien to More's essential quality. 

TRAFFIC AND REBUILDING

The London traffic problem is just one of those questions that appealvery strongly to the more prevalent and less charitable types of Englishmind. It has a practical and constructive air, it deals withimpressively enormous amounts of tangible property, it rests with acomforting effect of solidity upon assumptions that are at once doubtfuland desirable. It seems free from metaphysical considerations, and ithas none of those disconcerting personal applications, thosepenetrations towards intimate qualities, that makes eugenics, forexample, faintly but persistently uncomfortable. It is indeed an idealproblem for a healthy, hopeful, and progressive middle-aged public man. And, as I say, it deals with enormous amounts of tangible property. 

Like all really serious and respectable British problems it has to behandled gently to prevent its coming to pieces in the gift. It is safestin charge of the expert, that wonderful last gift of time. He will talkrapidly about congestion, long-felt wants, low efficiency, economy, andget you into his building and rebuilding schemes with the minimum ofdoubt and head-swimming. He is like a good Hendon pilot. Unspecialisedwriters have the destructive analytical touch. They pull the wronglevers. So far as one can gather from the specialists on the question, there is very considerable congestion in many of the Londonthoroughfares, delays that seem to be avoidable occur in the delivery ofgoods, multitudes of empty vans cumber the streets, we have hundreds ofacres of idle trucks--there are more acres of railway sidings than ofpublic parks in Greater London--and our Overseas cousins find itticklish work crossing Regent Street and Piccadilly. Regarding lifesimply as an affair of getting people and things from where they are towhere they appear to be wanted, this seems all very muddled and wanton. So far it is quite easy to agree with the expert. And some of thevarious and entirely incompatible schemes experts are giving us by wayof a remedy, appeal very strongly to the imagination. For example, thereis the railway clearing house, which, it is suggested, should cover I donot know how many acres of what is now slumland in Shoreditch. Theposition is particularly convenient for an underground connection withevery main line into London. Upon the underground level of this greatbuilding every goods train into London will run. Its trucks and vanswill be unloaded, the goods passed into lifts, which will take everyparcel, large and small, at once to a huge, ingeniously contrivedsorting-floor above. There in a manner at once simple, ingenious andeffective, they will be sorted and returned, either into delivery vansat the street level or to the trains emptied and now reloading on thetrain level. Above and below these three floors will be extensivewarehouse accommodation. Such a scheme would not only release almost allthe vast area of London now under railway yards for parks and housing, but it would give nearly every delivery van an effective load, andprobably reduce the number of standing and empty vans or half-empty vanson the streets of London to a quarter or an eighth of the presentnumber. Mostly these are heavy horse vans, and their disappearance wouldgreatly facilitate the conversion of the road surfaces to the hard andeven texture needed for horseless traffic. 

But that is a scheme too comprehensive and rational for the ordinarystudent of the London traffic problem, whose mind runs for the most parton costly and devastating rearrangements of the existing roadways. Moreover, it would probably secure a maximum of effect with a minimum ofproperty manipulation; always an undesirable consideration in practicalpolitics. And it would commit London and England to goods transit byrailway for another century. Far more attractive to the expert advisersof our various municipal authorities are such projects as a new Thamesbridge scheme, which will (with incalculable results) inject a newstream of traffic into Saint Paul's Churchyard; and the removal ofCharing Cross Station to the south side of the river. Then, again, wehave the systematic widening of various thoroughfares, the shunting oftramways into traffic streams, and many amusing, expensive, andinteresting tunnellings and clearances. Taken together, these hugereconstructions of London are incoherent and conflicting; each is basedon its own assumptions and separate "expert" advice, and the resultingnew opening plays its part in the general circulation as duct oraspirator, often with the most surprising results. The discussion of theLondon traffic problem as we practise it in our clubs is essentially thesage turning over and over again of such fragmentary schemes, headshakings over the vacant sites about Aldwych and the Strand, brilliant petty suggestions and--dispersal. Meanwhile the expertsintrigue; one partial plan after another gets itself accepted, this andthat ancient landmark perish, builders grow rich, and architectsinfamous, and some Tower Bridge horror, some vulgarity of theAutomobile Club type, some Buckingham Palace atrocity, some RegentStreet stupidity, some such cramped and thwarted thing as that new archwhich gives upon Charing Cross is added to the confusion. I do not seeany reason to suppose that this continuous muddle of partial destructionand partial rebuilding is not to constitute the future history ofLondon. 

Let us, however, drop the expert methods and handle this question rathermore rudely. Do we want London rebuilt? If we do, is there, after all, any reason why we should rebuild it on its present site? London is whereit is for reasons that have long ceased to be valid; it grew there, ithas accumulated associations, an immense tradition, that this constantmucking about of builders and architects is destroying almost aseffectually as removal to a new site. The old sort of rebuilding was anatural and picturesque process, house by house, and street by street, athing as pleasing and almost as natural in effect as the spreading andinterlacing of trees; as this new building, this clearance of areas, thepiercing of avenues, becomes more comprehensive, it becomes lessreasonable. If we can do such big things we may surely attempt biggerthings, so that whether we want to plan a new capital or preserve theold, it comes at last to the same thing, that it is unreasonable to beconstantly pulling down the London we have and putting it up again. Letus drain away our heavy traffic into tunnels, set up that clearing-houseplan, and control the growth at the periphery, which is still so witlessand ugly, and, save for the manifest tidying and preserving that isneeded, begin to leave the central parts of London, which are extremelyinteresting even where they are not quite beautiful, in peace. 

THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY

It has long been generally recognised that there are two quite divergentways of attacking sociological and economic questions, one that iscalled scientific and one that is not, and I claim no particular virtuein the recognition of that; but I do claim a certain freshness in myanalysis of this difference, and it is to that analysis that yourattention is now called. When I claim freshness I do not make, youunderstand, any claim to original discovery. What I have to say, andhave been saying for some time, is also more or less, and with certaindifferences to be found in the thought of Professor Bosanquet, forexample, in Alfred Sidgwick's "Use of Words in Reasoning, " in Sigwart's"Logic, " in contemporary American metaphysical speculation. I am onlyone incidental voice speaking in a general movement of thought. My trendof thought leads me to deny that sociology is a science, or only ascience in the same loose sense that modern history is a science, and tothrow doubt upon the value of sociology that follows too closely what iscalled the scientific method. 

The drift of my argument is to dispute not only that sociology is ascience, but also to deny that Herbert Spencer and Comte are to beexalted as the founders of a new and fruitful system of human inquiry. Ifind myself forced to depreciate these modern idols, and to reinstatethe Greek social philosophers in their vacant niches, to ask you ratherto go to Plato for the proper method, the proper way of thinkingsociologically. 

We certainly owe the word Sociology to Comte, a man of exceptionallymethodical quality. I hold he developed the word logically from anarbitrary assumption that the whole universe of being was reducible tomeasurable and commeasurable and exact and consistent expressions. 

In a very obvious way, sociology seemed to Comte to crown the edifice ofthe sciences; it was to be to the statesman what pathology andphysiology were to the doctor; and one gathers that, for the most part, he regarded it as an intellectual procedure in no way differing fromphysics. His classification of the sciences shows pretty clearly that hethought of them all as exact logical systematisations of fact arisingout of each other in a synthetic order, each lower one containing theelements of a lucid explanation of those above it--physics explainingchemistry; chemistry, physiology; physiology, sociology; and so forth. His actual method was altogether unscientific; but through all his workruns the assumption that in contrast with his predecessors he is reallybeing as exact and universally valid as mathematics. To HerbertSpencer--very appropriately since his mental characteristics make himthe English parallel to Comte--we owe the naturalisation of the word inEnglish. His mind being of greater calibre than Comte's, the subjectacquired in his hands a far more progressive character. Herbert Spencerwas less unfamiliar with natural history than with any other branch ofpractical scientific work; and it was natural he should turn to it forprecedents in sociological research. His mind was invaded by the ideaof classification, by memories of specimens and museums; and heinitiated that accumulation of desiccated anthropological anecdotes thatstill figures importantly in current sociological work. On the lines heinitiated sociological investigation, what there is of it, still tendsto go. 

From these two sources mainly the work of contemporary sociologistsderives. But there persists about it a curious discursiveness thatreflects upon the power and value of the initial impetus. Mr. V. V. Branford, the able secretary of the Sociological Society, recentlyattempted a useful work in a classification of the methods of what hecalls "approach, " a word that seems to me eminently judicious andexpressive. A review of the first volume the Sociological Society hasproduced brings home the aptness of this image of exploratoryoperations, of experiments in "taking a line. " The names of Dr. BeattieCrozier and Mr. Benjamin Kidd recall works that impress one aslarge-scale sketches of a proposed science rather than concretebeginnings and achievements. The search for an arrangement, a "method, "continues as though they were not. The desperate resort to theanalogical method of Commenius is confessed by Dr. Steinmetz, who talksof social morphology, physiology, pathology, and so forth. There is alsoa less initiative disposition in the Vicomte Combes de Lestrade and inthe work of Professor Giddings. In other directions sociological work isapt to lose its general reference altogether, to lapse towards somedepartment of activity not primarily sociological at all. Examples ofthis are the works of Mr. And Mrs. Sidney Webb, M. Ostrogorski and M. Gustave le Bon. From a contemplation of all this diversity ProfessorDurkheim emerges, demanding a "synthetic science, " "certain syntheticconceptions"--and Professor Karl Pearson endorses the demand--to fuseall these various activities into something that will live and grow. What is it that tangles this question so curiously that there is notonly a failure to arrive at a conclusion, but a failure to join issue?

Well, there is a certain not too clearly recognised order in thesciences to which I wish to call your attention, and which forms thegist of my case against this scientific pretension. There is a gradationin the importance of the instance as one passes from mechanics andphysics and chemistry through the biological sciences to economics andsociology, a gradation whose correlatives and implications have not yetreceived adequate recognition, and which do profoundly affect the methodof study and research in each science. 

Let me begin by pointing out that, in the more modern conceptions oflogic, it is recognised that there are no identically similar objectiveexperiences; the disposition is to conceive all real objective being asindividual and unique. This is not a singular eccentric idea of mine; itis one for which ample support is to be found in the writings ofabsolutely respectable contemporaries, who are quite untainted byassociation with fiction. It is now understood that conceivably only inthe subjective world, and in theory and the imagination, do we deal withidentically similar units, and with absolutely commensurable quantities. In the real world it is reasonable to suppose we deal at most with_practically_ similar units and _practically_ commensurable quantities. But there is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias in the normalhuman mind to ignore this, and not only to speak but to think of athousand bricks or a thousand sheep or a thousand sociologists as thoughthey were all absolutely true to sample. If it is brought before athinker for a moment that in any special case this is not so, he slipsback to the old attitude as soon as his attention is withdrawn. Thissource of error has, for instance, caught nearly the whole race ofchemists, with one or two distinguished exceptions, and _atoms_ and_ions_ and so forth of the same species are tacitly assumed to besimilar one to another. Be it noted that, so far as the practicalresults of chemistry and physics go, it scarcely matters whichassumption we adopt. For purposes of inquiry and discussion theincorrect one is infinitely more convenient. 

But this ceases to be true directly we emerge from the region ofchemistry and physics. In the biological sciences of the eighteenthcentury, commonsense struggled hard to ignore individuality in shellsand plants and animals. There was an attempt to eliminate the moreconspicuous departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's weakmoments, and it was only with the establishment of Darwin's greatgeneralisation that the hard and fast classificatory system broke down, and individuality came to its own. Yet there had always been a clearlyfelt difference between the conclusions of the biological sciences andthose dealing with lifeless substance, in the relative vagueness, theinsubordinate looseness and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalistaccumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantlyfrom generalisation to generalisation after the fashion of the chemistor physicist. It is easy to see, therefore, how it came about that theinorganic sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. Itwas scarcely suspected that the biological sciences might perhaps, afterall, be _truer_ than the experimental, in spite of the difference inpractical value in favour of the latter. It was, and is by the greatmajority of people to this day, supposed to be the latter that areinvincibly true; and the former are regarded as a more complex set ofproblems merely, with obliquities and refractions that presently will beexplained away. Comte and Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to havetaken that much for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of theunknown and the unknowable, but not in this sense, as an element ofinexactness running through all things. He thought of the unknown as theindefinable beyond to an immediate world that might be quite clearly andexactly known. 

Well, there is a growing body of people who are beginning to hold theconverse view--that counting, classification, measurement, the wholefabric of mathematics, is subjective and deceitful, and that theuniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of unitstaken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness ofgeneralisation increases, because individuality tells more and more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalise aboutthem as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be youwould find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That conciselyis the minority belief, and it is the belief on which this present paperis based. 

Now, what is called the scientific method is the method of ignoringindividualities; and, like many mathematical conventions, its greatpractical convenience is no proof whatever of its final truth. Let meadmit the enormous value, the wonder of its results in mechanics, in allthe physical sciences, in chemistry, even in physiology--but what is itsvalue beyond that? Is the scientific method of value in biology? Thegreat advances made by Darwin and his school in biology were not made, it must be remembered, by the scientific method, as it is generallyconceived, at all. He conducted a research into pre-documentary history. He collected information along the lines indicated by certaininterrogations; and the bulk of his work was the digesting and criticalanalysis of that. For documents and monuments he had fossils andanatomical structures and germinating eggs too innocent to lie, and sofar he was nearer simplicity. But, on the other hand, he had tocorrespond with breeders and travellers of various sorts, classesentirely analogous, from the point of view of evidence, to the writersof history and memoirs. I question profoundly whether the word"science, " in current usage anyhow, ever means such patientdisentanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the attainment of somethingpositive and emphatic in the way of a conclusion, based on amplyrepeated experiments capable of infinite repetition, "proved, " as theysay, "up to the hilt. "

It would be, of course, possible to dispute whether the word "science"should convey this quality of certitude; but to most people it certainlydoes at the present time. So far as the movements of comets and electrictrams go, there is, no doubt, practically cocksure science; andindisputably Comte and Herbert Spencer believed that cocksure could beextended to every conceivable finite thing. The fact that HerbertSpencer called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on thenon-individualising quality of his primary assumptions and of his mentaltexture. He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is anevolutionary product from an original homogeneity. It seems to me thatthe general usage is entirely for the limitation of the use of the word"science" to knowledge and the search after knowledge of a high degreeof precision. And not simply the general usage: "Science ismeasurement, " Science is "organised common sense, " proud, in fact, ofits essential error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms. 

If we quite boldly face the fact that hard positive methods are less andless successful just in proportion as our "ologies" deal with larger andless numerous individuals; if we admit that we become less "scientific"as we ascend the scale of the sciences, and that we do and must changeour method, then, it is humbly submitted we shall be in a much betterposition to consider the question of "approaching" sociology. We shallrealise that all this talk of the organisation of sociology, as thoughpresently the sociologist would be going about the world with theauthority of a sanitary engineer, is and will remain nonsense. 

In one respect we shall still be in accordance with the Positivist mapof the field of human knowledge; with us as with that, sociology standsat the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences. In theselatter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comteperceived, there is only one unit. It is true that Herbert Spencer, inorder to get classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim haspointed out, separate human society into societies, and made believethey competed one with another and died and reproduced just likeanimals, and that economists, following List, have for the purposes offiscal controversy discovered economic types; but this is a transparentdevice, and one is surprised to find thoughtful and reputable writersoff their guard against such bad analogy. But, indeed, it is impossibleto isolate complete communities of men, or to trace any but rude generalresemblances between group and group. These alleged units have as muchindividuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse andseparate. And we are forced to conclude that not only is the method ofobservation, experiment, and verification left far away down the scale, but that the method of classification under types, which has served souseful a purpose in the middle group of subjects, the subjects involvingnumerous but a finite number of units, has also to be abandoned here. Wecannot put Humanity into a museum, or dry it for examination; our onesingle still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and thefluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing else in the real world with which to compare it. We haveonly the remotest ideas of its "life-cycle" and a few relics of itsorigin and dreams of its destiny ... 

Sociology, it is evident, is, upon any hypothesis, no less than theattempt to bring that vast, complex, unique Being, its subject, intoclear, true relations with the individual intelligence. Now, sinceindividual intelligences are individual, and each is a littledifferently placed in regard to the subject under consideration, sincethe personal angle of vision is much wider towards humanity than towardsthe circumambient horizon of matter, it should be manifest that nosociology of universal compulsion, of anything approaching the generalvalidity of the physical sciences, is ever to be hoped for--at leastupon the metaphysical assumptions of this paper. With that conceded, wemay go on to consider the more hopeful ways in which that great Beingmay be presented in a comprehensible manner. Essentially thispresentation must involve an element of self-expression must partakequite as much of the nature of art as of science. One finds in the firstconference of the Sociological Society, Professor Stein, speaking, indeed a very different philosophical dialect from mine, but coming tothe same practical conclusion in the matter, and Mr. Osman Newlandcounting "evolving ideals for the future" as part of the sociologist'swork. Mr. Alfred Fouillée also moves very interestingly in the region ofthis same idea; he concedes an essential difference between sociologyand all other sciences in the fact of a "certain kind of libertybelonging to society in the exercise of its higher functions. " He saysfurther: "If this view be correct, it will not do for us to follow inthe steps of Comte and Spencer, and transfer, bodily and ready-made, theconceptions and the methods of the natural sciences into the science ofsociety. For here the fact of _consciousness_ entails a reaction of thewhole assemblage of social phenomena upon themselves, such as thenatural sciences have no example of. " And he concludes: "Sociologyought, therefore, to guard carefully against the tendency to crystallisethat which is essentially fluid and moving, the tendency to consider asgiven fact or dead data that which creates itself and gives itself intothe world of phenomena continually by force of its own idealconception. " These opinions do, in their various keys, sound a similar_motif_ to mine. If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks isjustifiable, then unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty, must coalesce with the objective, which is truth; and sociology mast beneither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word atall, but knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element ofpersonality that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature. 

If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte andSpencer altogether, as pseudo-scientific interlopers rather than theauthoritative parents of sociology, we shall have to substitute for theclassifications of the social sciences an inquiry into the chiefliterary forms that subserve sociological purposes. Of these there aretwo, one invariably recognised as valuable and one which, I think, underthe matter-of-fact scientific obsession, is altogether underrated andneglected The first, which is the social side of history, makes up thebulk of valid sociological work at the present time. Of history there isthe purely descriptive part, the detailed account of past orcontemporary social conditions, or of the sequence of such conditions;and, in addition, there is the sort of historical literature that seeksto elucidate and impose general interpretations upon the complex ofoccurrences and institutions, to establish broad historicalgeneralisations, to eliminate the mass of irrelevant incident, topresent some great period of history, or all history, in the light ofone dramatic sequence, or as one process. This Dr. Beattie Crozier, forexample, attempts in his "History of Intellectual Development. " Equallycomprehensive is Buckle's "History of Civilisation. " Lecky's "History ofEuropean Morals, " during the onset of Christianity again, is essentiallysociology. Numerous works--Atkinson's "Primal Law, " and Andrew Lang's"Social Origins, " for example--may be considered, as it were, to befragments to the same purport. In the great design of Gibbon's "Declineand Fall of the Roman Empire, " or Carlyle's "French Revolution, " youhave a greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque elements inhistory, but in other respects an altogether kindred endeavour to imposeupon the vast confusions of the past a scheme of interpretation, valuable just to the extent of its literary value, of the success withwhich the discrepant masses have been fused and cast into the shape theinsight of the writer has determined. The writing of great history isentirely analogous to fine portraiture, in which fact is indeedmaterial, but material entirely subordinate to vision. 

One main branch of the work of a Sociological Society therefore shouldsurely be to accept and render acceptable, to provide understanding, criticism, and stimulus for such literary activities as restore the deadbones of the past to a living participation in our lives. 

But it is in the second and at present neglected direction that Ibelieve the predominant attack upon the problem implied by the word"sociology" must lie; the attack that must be finally driven home. Thereis no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what _is_, without considering what is _intended to be_. In sociology, beyond anypossibility of evasion, ideas are facts. The history of civilisation isreally the history of the appearance and reappearance, the tentativesand hesitations and alterations, the manifestations and reflections inthis mind and that, of a very complex, imperfect elusive idea, theSocial Idea. It is that idea struggling to exist and realise itself ina world of egotisms, animalisms, and brute matter. Now, I submit it isnot only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the mostpromising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavour to disentangle andexpress one's personal version of that idea, and to measure realitiesfrom the stand-point of that idealisation. I think, in fact, that thecreation of Utopias--and their exhaustive criticism--is the proper anddistinctive method of sociology. 

Suppose now the Sociological Society, or some considerable proportion ofit, were to adopt this view, that sociology is the description of theIdeal Society and its relation to existing societies, would not thisgive the synthetic framework Professor Durkheim, for example, has saidto be needed?

Almost all the sociological literature beyond the province of historythat has stood the test of time and established itself in the esteem ofmen is frankly Utopian. Plato, when his mind turned to schemes of socialreconstruction thrust his habitual form of dialogue into a corner; boththe "Republic" and the "Laws" are practically Utopias in monologue; andAristotle found the criticism of the Utopian suggestions of hispredecessors richly profitable. Directly the mind of the world emergedagain at the Renascence from intellectual barbarism in the briefbreathing time before Sturm and the schoolmasters caught it and birchedit into scholarship and a new period of sterility, it went on from Platoto the making of fresh Utopias. Not without profit did More discusspauperism in this form and Bacon the organisation of research; and theyeast of the French Revolution was Utopias. Even Comte, all the whilethat he is professing science, fact, precision, is adding detail afterdetail to the intensely personal Utopia of a Western Republic thatconstitutes his one meritorious gift to the world. Sociologists cannothelp making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny theidea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia. Why should theynot follow the precedent of Aristotle, and accept Utopias as material?

There used to be in my student days, and probably still flourishes, amost valuable summary of fact and theory in comparative anatomy, calledRolleston's "Forms of Animal Life. " I figure to myself a similar book, asort of dream book of huge dimensions, in reality perhaps dispersed inmany volumes by many hands, upon the Ideal Society. This book, thispicture of the perfect state, would be the backbone of sociology. Itwould have great sections devoted to such questions as the extent of theIdeal Society, its relation to racial differences, the relations of thesexes in it, its economic organisations, its organisation for thoughtand education, its "Bible"--as Dr. Beattie Crozier would say--itshousing and social atmosphere, and so forth. Almost all the divaricatingwork at present roughly classed together as sociological could bebrought into relation in the simplest manner, either as new suggestions, as new discussion or criticism, as newly ascertained facts bearing uponsuch discussions and sustaining or eliminating suggestions. Theinstitutions of existing states would come into comparison with theinstitutions of the Ideal State, their failures and defects would becriticised most effectually in that relation, and the whole science ofcollective psychology, the psychology of human association, would bebrought to bear upon the question of the practicability of this proposedideal. 

This method would give not only a boundary shape to all sociologicalactivities, but a scheme of arrangement for text books and lectures, andpoints of direction and reference for the graduation and post graduatework of sociological students. 

Only one group of inquiries commonly classed as sociological would haveto be left out of direct relationship with this Ideal State; and that isinquiries concerning the rough expedients to meet the failure ofimperfect institutions. Social emergency work of all sorts comes underthis head. What to do with the pariah dogs of Constantinople, what to dowith the tramps who sleep in the London parks, how to organise a soupkitchen or a Bible coffee van, how to prevent ignorant people, who havenothing else to do, getting drunk in beer-houses, are no doubt seriousquestions for the practical administrator, questions of primaryimportance to the politician; but they have no more to do with sociologythan the erection of a temporary hospital after the collision of twotrains has to do with railway engineering. 

So much for my second and most central and essential portion ofsociological work. It should be evident that the former part, thehistorical part, which conceivably will be much the bulkier and moreabundant of the two, will in effect amount to a history of thesuggestions in circumstance and experience of that Idea of Society ofwhich the second will consist, and of the instructive failures inattempting its incomplete realisation. 

DIVORCE

The time is fast approaching when it will be necessary for the generalcitizen to form definite opinions upon proposals for probably quiteextensive alterations of our present divorce laws, arising out of therecommendations of the recent Royal Commission on the subject. It maynot be out of place, therefore, to run through some of the chief pointsthat are likely to be raised, and to set out the main considerationsaffecting these issues. 

Divorce is not one of those things that stand alone, and neither divorcelaw nor the general principles of divorce are to be discussed without areference to antecedent arrangements. Divorce is a sequel to marriage, and a change in the divorce law is essentially a change in the marriagelaw. There was a time in this country when our marriage was apractically divorceless bond, soluble only under extraordinarycircumstances by people in situations of exceptional advantage for doingso. Now it is a bond under conditions, and in the event of the adulteryof the wife, or of the adultery plus cruelty or plus desertion of thehusband, and of one or two other rarer and more dreadful offences, itcan be broken at the instance of the aggrieved party. A change in thedivorce law is a change in the dissolution clauses, so to speak, of thecontract for the marriage partnership. It is a change in the marriagelaw. 

A great number of people object to divorce under any circumstanceswhatever. This is the case with the orthodox Catholic and with theorthodox Positivist. And many religious and orthodox people carry theirassertion of the indissolubility of marriage to the grave; they demandthat the widow or widower shall remain unmarried, faithful to the vowsmade at the altar until death comes to the release of the lonelysurvivor also. Re-marriage is regarded by such people as a posthumousbigamy. There is certainly a very strong and logical case to be made outfor a marriage bond that is indissoluble even by death. It banishesstep-parents from the world. It confers a dignity of tragicinevitability upon the association of husband and wife, and makes a loveapproach the gravest, most momentous thing in life. It banishes for everany dream of escape from the presence and service of either party, or ofany separation from the children of the union. It affords no alternativeto "making the best of it" for either husband or wife; they have taken astep as irrevocable as suicide. And some logical minds would even gofurther, and have no law as between the members of a family, no rights, no private property within that limit. The family would be the socialunit and the father its public representative, and though the law mightintervene if he murdered or ill-used wife or children, or they him, itwould do so in just the same spirit that it might prevent him fromself-mutilation or attempted suicide, for the good of the State simply, and not to defend any supposed independence of the injured member. Thereis much, I assert, to be said for such a complete shutting up of thefamily from the interference of the law, and not the least among thesereasons is the entire harmony of such a view with the passionateinstincts of the natural man and woman in these matters. Allunsophisticated human beings appear disposed to a fierce proprietorshipin their children and their sexual partners, and in no respect is theordinary mortal so easily induced to vehemence and violence. 

For my own part, I do not think the maintenance of a marriage that isindissoluble, that precludes the survivor from re-marriage, that givesneither party an external refuge from the misbehaviour of the other, andmakes the children the absolute property of their parents until theygrow up, would cause any very general unhappiness Most people arereasonable enough, good-tempered enough, and adaptable enough to shakedown even in a grip so rigid, and I would even go further and say thatits very rigidity, the entire absence of any way out at all, wouldoblige innumerable people to accommodate themselves to its conditionsand make a working success of unions that, under laxer conditions, wouldbe almost certainly dissolved. We should have more people of what I maycall the "broken-in" type than an easier release would create, but tomany thinkers the spectacle of a human being thoroughly "broken-in" isin itself extremely satisfactory. A few more crimes of desperationperhaps might occur, to balance against an almost universal effort toachieve contentment and reconciliation. We should hear more of the"natural law" permitting murder by the jealous husband or by the jealouswife, and the traffic in poisons would need a sedulous attention--buteven there the impossibility of re-marriage would operate to restrainthe impatient. On the whole, I can imagine the world rubbing along verywell with marriage as unaccommodating as a perfected steel trap. Exceptional people might suffer or sin wildly--to the general amusementor indignation. 

But when once we part from the idea of such a rigid and eternalmarriage bond--and the law of every civilised country and the generalthought and sentiment everywhere have long since done so--then the wholequestion changes. If marriage is not so absolutely sacred a bond, if itis not an eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that, then at once we put the question on a different footing. If we mayterminate it for adultery or cruelty, or any cause whatever, if we maysuspend the intimacy of husband and wife by separation orders and thelike, if we recognise their separate property and interfere between themand their children to ensure the health and education of the latter, then we open at once the whole question of a terminating agreement. Marriage ceases to be an unlimited union and becomes a definitecontract. We raise the whole question of "What are the limits inmarriage, and how and when may a marriage terminate?"

Now, many answers are being given to that question at the present time. We may take as the extremest opposite to the eternal marriage idea theproposal of Mr. Bernard Shaw, that marriage should be terminable at theinstance of either party. You would give due and public notice that yourmarriage was at an end, and it would be at an end. This is marriage atits minimum, as the eternal indissoluble marriage is marriage at itsmaximum, and the only conceivable next step would be to have a marriagemakeable by the oral declaration of both parties and terminable by theoral declaration of either, which would be, indeed, no marriage at all, but an encounter. You might marry a dozen times in that way in a day.... Somewhere between these extremes lies the marriage law of a civilisedstate. Let us, rather than working down from the eternal marriage ofthe religious idealists, work up from Mr. Shaw. The former course is, perhaps, inevitable for the legislator, but the latter is much moreconvenient for our discussion. 

Now, the idea of a divorce so easy and wilful as Mr. Shaw proposesarises naturally out of an exclusive consideration of what I may callthe amorous sentimentalities of marriage. If you regard marriage asmerely the union of two people in love, then, clearly, it isintolerable, an outrage upon human dignity, that they should remainintimately united when either ceases to love. And in that world of Mr. Shaw's dreams, in which everybody is to have an equal income and nobodyis to have children, in that culminating conversazione of humanity, hismarriage law will, no doubt, work with the most admirable results. Butif we make a step towards reality and consider a world in which incomesare unequal, and economic difficulties abound--for the present we willignore the complication of offspring--we at once find it necessary tomodify the first fine simplicity of divorce at either partner's request. Marriage is almost always a serious economic disturbance for both manand woman: work has to be given up and rearranged, resources have to bepooled; only in the rarest cases does it escape becoming an indefinitebusiness partnership. Accordingly, the withdrawal of one partner raisesat once all sorts of questions of financial adjustment, compensation forphysical, mental, and moral damage, division of furniture and effectsand so forth. No doubt a very large part of this could be met if thereexisted some sort of marriage settlement providing for the dissolutionof the partnership. Otherwise the petitioner for a Shaw-esque divorcemust be prepared for the most exhaustive and penetrating examinationbefore, say, a court of three assessors--representing severally thehusband, the wife, and justice--to determine the distribution of theseparation. This point, however, leads me to note in passing the needthat does exist even to-day for a more precise business supplement tomarriage as we know it in England and America. I think there ought to bea very definite and elaborate treaty of partnership drawn up by animpartial private tribunal for every couple that marries, providing formost of the eventualities of life, taking cognizance of the earningpower, the property and prospects of either party, insisting upon dueinsurances, ensuring private incomes for each partner, securing thewelfare of the children, and laying down equitable conditions in theevent of a divorce or separation. Such a treaty ought to be a necessaryprelude to the issue of a licence to marry. And given such a basis to goupon, then I see no reason why, in the case of couples who remainchildless for five or six years, let us say, and seem likely to remainchildless, the Shaw-esque divorce at the instance of either party, without reason assigned, should not be a very excellent thing indeed. 

And I take up this position because I believe in the family as thejustification of marriage. Marriage to me is no mystical and eternalunion, but a practical affair, to be judged as all practical things arejudged--by its returns in happiness and human welfare. And directly wepass from the mists and glamours of amorous passion to the warmrealities of the nursery, we pass into a new system of considerationsaltogether. We are no longer considering A. In relation to Mrs. A. , butA. And Mrs. A. In relation to an indefinite number of little A. 's, whoare the very life of the State in which they live. Into the case of Mr. A. _v_. Mrs. A. Come Master A. And Miss A. Intervening. They have thestrongest claim against both their parents for love, shelter andupbringing, and the legislator and statesman, concerned as he is chieflywith the future of the community, has the strongest reasons for seeingthat they get these things, even at the price of considerable vexation, boredom or indignity to Mr. And Mrs. A. And here it is that there arisesthe rational case against free and frequent divorce and the generalunsettlement and fluctuation of homes that would ensue. 

At this point we come to the verge of a jungle of questions that woulddemand a whole book for anything like a complete answer. Let us try asswiftly and simply as possible to form a general idea at least of theway through. Remember that we are working upward from Mr. Shaw'squestion of "Why not separate at the choice of either party?" We havegot thus far, that no two people who do not love each other should becompelled to live together, except where the welfare of their childrencomes in to override their desire to separate, and now we have toconsider what may or may not be for the welfare of the children. Mr. Shaw, following the late Samuel Butler, meets this difficulty by themost extravagant abuse of parents. He would have us believe that theworst enemies a child can have are its mother and father, and that theonly civilised path to citizenship is by the incubator, the cręche, andthe mixed school and college. In these matters he is not only ignorant, but unfeeling and unsympathetic, extraordinarily so in view of his greatcapacity for pity and sweetness in other directions and of his indignanthatred of cruelty and unfairness, and it is not necessary to waste timein discussing what the common experience confutes Neither is itnecessary to fly to the other extreme, and indulge in preposteroussentimentalities about the magic of fatherhood and a mother's love. These are not magic and unlimited things, but touchingly qualified andhuman things. The temperate truth of the matter is that in most parentsthere are great stores of pride, interest, natural sympathy, passionatelove and devotion which can be tapped in the interests of the childrenand the social future, and that it is the mere commonsense of statecraftto use their resources to the utmost. It does not follow that everyparent contains these reservoirs, and that a continual close associationwith the parents is always beneficial to children. If it did, we shouldhave to prosecute everyone who employed a governess or sent away alittle boy to a preparatory school. And our real task is to establish atest that will gauge the desirability and benefit of a parent'scontinued parentage. There are certainly parents and homes from whichthe children might be taken with infinite benefit to themselves and tosociety, and whose union it is ridiculous to save from the divorce courtshears. 

Suppose, now, we made the willingness of a parent to give up his or herchildren the measure of his beneficialness to them. There is no reasonwhy we should restrict divorce only to the relation of husband and wife. Let us broaden the word and make it conceivable for a husband or wife todivorce not only the partner, but the children. Then it might bepossible to meet the demands of the Shaw-esque extremist up to the pointof permitting a married parent, who desired freedom, to petition for adivorce, not from his or her partner simply, but from his or herfamily, and even for a widow or widower to divorce a family. Then wouldcome the task of the assessors. They would make arrangements for thedissolution of the relationship, erring from justice rather in thedirection of liberality towards the divorced group, they would determinecontributions, exact securities appoint trustees and guardians.... Onthe whole, I do not see why such a system should not work very well. Itwould break up many loveless homes, quarrelling and bickering homes, andgive a safety-valve for that hate which is the sinister shadow of love. I do not think it would separate one child from one parent who wasreally worthy of its possession. 

So far I have discussed only the possibility of divorce withoutoffences, the sort of divorce that arises out of estrangement andincompatibilities. But divorce, as it is known in most Christiancountries, has a punitive element, and is obtained through the failureof one of the parties to observe the conditions of the bond and thedetermination of the other to exact suffering. Divorce as it exists atpresent is not a readjustment but a revenge. It is the nasty exposure ofa private wrong. In England a husband may divorce his wife for a singleact of infidelity, and there can be little doubt that we are on the eveof an equalisation of the law in this respect. I will confess I considerthis an extreme concession to the passion of jealousy, and one likely totear off the roof from many a family of innocent children. Onlyinfidelity leading to supposititious children in the case of the wife, or infidelity obstinately and offensively persisted in or endangeringhealth in the case of the husband, really injure the home sufficientlyto justify a divorce on the assumptions of our present argument. If weare going to make the welfare of the children our criterion in thesematters, then our divorce law does in this direction already go too far. A husband or wife may do far more injury to the home by constantlyneglecting it for the companionship of some outside person with whom no"matrimonial offence" is ever committed. Of course, if our divorce lawexists mainly for the gratification of the fiercer sexual resentments, well and good, but if that is so, let us abandon our pretence thatmarriage is an institution for the establishment and protection ofhomes. And while on the one hand existing divorce laws appear to beobsessed by sexual offences, other things of far more evil effect uponthe home go without a remedy. There are, for example, desertion, domestic neglect, cruelty to the children drunkenness or harmfuldrug-taking, indecency of living and uncontrollable extravagance. Icannot conceive how any logical mind, having once admitted the principleof divorce, can hesitate at making these entirely home-wrecking thingsthe basis of effective pleas. But in another direction, some strain ofsentimentality in my nature makes me hesitate to go with the greatmajority of divorce law reformers. I cannot bring myself to agree thateither a long term of imprisonment or the misfortune of insanity shouldin itself justify a divorce. I admit the social convenience, but I winceat the thought of those tragic returns of the dispossessed. So far asinsanity goes, I perceive that the cruelty of the law would but endorsethe cruelty of nature. But I do not like men to endorse the cruelty ofnature. 

And, of course, there is no decent-minded person nowadays but wants toput an end to that ugly blot upon our civilisation, the publication ofwhatever is most spicy and painful in divorce court proceedings. It isan outrage which falls even more heavily on the innocent than on theguilty, and which has deterred hundreds of shy and delicate-mindedpeople from seeking legal remedies for nearly intolerable wrongs. Thesort of person who goes willingly to the divorce court to-day is thesort of person who would love a screaming quarrel in a crowded street. The emotional breach of the marriage bond is as private an affair as itsconsummation, and it would be nearly as righteous to subject youngcouples about to marry to a blustering cross-examination by someunderbred bully of a barrister upon their motives, and then to publishwhatever chance phrases in their answers appeared to be amusing in thepress, as it is to publish contemporary divorce proceedings. The thingis a nastiness, a stream of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, andthere can be no doubt that whatever other result this British RoyalCommission may have, there at least will be many sweeping alterations. 

THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE EMPIRE

Sec. 1

"If Youth but Knew" is the title of a book published some years ago, butstill with a quite living interest, by "Kappa"; it is the bittercomplaint of a distressed senior against our educational system. He ishugely disappointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly inone typical specimen. He is--if one might hazard a guess--an unclebereft of great expectations. He finds an echo in thousands of otherdistressed uncles and parents. They use the most divergent andinadequate forms of expression for this vague sense that the result hasnot come out good enough; they put it contradictorily and often wrongly, but the sense is widespread and real and justifiable and we owe a greatdebt to "Kappa" for an accurate diagnosis of what in the aggregateamounts to a grave national and social evil. 

The trouble with "Kappa's" particular public-school boy is his unlitimagination, the apathetic commonness of his attitude to life at large. He is almost stupidly not interested in the mysteries of material fact, nor in the riddles and great dramatic movements of history, indifferentto any form of beauty, and pedantically devoted to the pettiness ofgames and clothing and social conduct. It is, in fact, chiefly by hisstyle in these latter things, his extensive unilluminated knowledge ofGreek and Latin, and his greater costliness, that he differs from ayoung carpenter or clerk. A young carpenter or clerk of the sametemperament would have no narrower prejudices nor outlook, no lesscapacity for the discussion of broad questions and for imaginativethinking. And it has come to the mind of "Kappa" as a discovery, as anexceedingly remarkable and moving thing, a thing to cry aloud about, that this should be so, that this is all that the best possible moderneducation has achieved. He makes it more than a personal issue. He hascome to the conclusion that this is not an exceptional case at all, buta fair sample of what our upper-class education does for the imaginationof those who must presently take the lead among us. He declares plainlythat we are raising a generation of rulers and of those with whom theduty of initiative should chiefly reside, who have minds atrophied bydull studies and deadening suggestions, and he thinks that this is amatter of the gravest concern for the future of this land and Empire. Itis difficult to avoid agreeing with him either in his observation or inhis conclusion. Anyone who has seen much of undergraduates, or medicalstudents, or Army candidates, and also of their social subordinates, must be disposed to agree that the difference between the two classes ismainly in unimportant things--in polish, in manner, in superficialitiesof accent and vocabulary and social habit--and that their minds, inrange and power, are very much on a level. With an invinciblyaristocratic tradition we are failing altogether to produce a leaderclass adequate to modern needs. The State is light-headed. 

But while one agrees with "Kappa" and shares his alarm, one must confessthe remedies he considers indicated do not seem quite so satisfactory ashis diagnosis of the disease. He attacks the curriculum and tells us wemust reduce or revolutionise instruction and exercise in the deadlanguages, introduce a broader handling of history, a more inspiringarrangement of scientific courses, and so forth. I wish, indeed, it werepossible to believe that substituting biology for Greek prosecomposition or history with models and photographs and diagrams forLatin versification, would make any considerable difference in thismatter. For so one might discuss this question and still give no offenceto a most amiable and influential class of men. But the roots of theevil, the ultimate cause of that typical young man's deadness, lie notat all in that direction. To indicate the direction in which it does lieis quite unavoidably to give offence to an indiscriminatingly sensitiveclass. Yet there is need to speak plainly. This deadening of soul comesnot from the omission or inclusion of this specific subject or that; itis the effect of the general scholastic atmosphere. It is an atmospherethat admits of no inspiration at all. It is an atmosphere from whichliving stimulating influences have been excluded from which stimulatingand vigorous personalities are now being carefully eliminated, and inwhich dull, prosaic men prevail invincibly. The explanation of the inertcommonness of "Kappa's" schoolboy lies not in his having learnt this ornot learnt that, but in the fact that from seven to twenty he has beenin the intellectual shadow of a number of good-hearted, sedulouslyrespectable conscientiously manly, conforming, well-behaved men, whonever, to the knowledge of their pupils and the public, at any rate, think strange thoughts do imaginative or romantic things, pay tribute tobeauty, laugh carelessly, or countenance any irregularity in the world. All erratic and enterprising tendencies in him have been checked bythem and brought at last to nothing; and so he emerges a mere residuumof decent minor dispositions. The dullness of the scholastic atmospherethe grey, intolerant mediocrity that is the natural or assumed qualityof every upper-class schoolmaster, is the true cause of the spiritualetiolation of "Kappa's" young friend. 

Now, it is a very grave thing, I know, to bring this charge against agreat profession--to say, as I do say, that it is collectively andindividually dull. But someone has to do this sooner or later; we haverestrained ourselves and argued away from the question too long. Thereis, I allege, a great lack of vigorous and inspiring minds in ourschools. Our upper-class schools are out of touch with the thought ofthe time, in a backwater of intellectual apathy. We have no original orheroic school-teachers. Let me ask the reader frankly what part ourleading headmasters play in his intellectual world; if when someprominent one among them speaks or writes or talks, he expects anythingmore than platitudes and little things? Has he ever turned aside tolearn what this headmaster or that thought of any question thatinterested him? Has he ever found freshness or power in a schoolmaster'sdiscourse; or found a schoolmaster caring keenly for fine and beautifulthings? Who does not know the schoolmaster's trite, safe admirations, his thin, evasive discussion, his sham enthusiasms for cricket, forfly-fishing, for perpendicular architecture, for boyish traits; histimid refuge in "good form, " his deadly silences?

And if we do not find him a refreshing and inspiring person, and hismind a fountain of thought in which we bathe and are restored, is itlikely our sons will? If the schoolmaster at large is grey and dull, shirking interesting topics and emphatic speech, what must he be like inthe monotonous class-room? These may seem wanton charges to some, but Iam not speaking without my book. Monthly I am brought into close contactwith the pedagogic intelligence through the medium of three educationalmagazines. A certain morbid habit against which I struggle in vain makesme read everything I catch a schoolmaster writing. I am, indeed, one ofthe faithful band who read the Educational Supplement of the _Times_. Inthese papers schoolmasters write about their business, lectures upon thequestions of their calling are reported at length, and a sort of invaliddiscussion moves with painful decorum through the correspondence column. The scholastic mind so displayed in action fascinates me. It is likewatching a game of billiards with wooden cushes and beechwood balls. 

Sec. 2

But let me take one special instance. In a periodical, now no longerliving, called the _Independent Review_, there appeared some years ago avery curious and typical contribution by the Headmaster of Dulwich, which I may perhaps use as an illustration of the mental habits whichseem inseparably associated with modern scholastic work. It is called"English Ideas on Education, " and it begins--trite, imitative, undistinguished--thus:

"The most important question in a country is that of education, and themost important people in a country are those who educate itsinhabitants. Others have most of the present in their hands: those whoeducate have all the future. With the present is bound up all thehappiness only of the utterly selfish and the thoughtless among mankind;on the future rest all the thoughts of every parent and every wise manand patriot. "

It is the opening of a boy's essay. And from first to last thisremarkable composition is at or below that level. It is an entirelyinconclusive paper, it is impossible to understand why it was written;it quotes nothing it says nothing about and was probably written inignorance of "Kappa" or any other modern contributor to English ideas, and it occupied about six and a quarter of the large-type pages of thisnow vanished _Independent Review_. "English Ideas on Education"!--thisvery brevity is eloquent, the more so since the style is by no meanssuccinct. It must be read to be believed. It is quite extraordinarilynon-prehensile in quality and substance nothing is gripped andmaintained and developed; it is like the passing of a lax hand over thesurfaces of disarranged things. It is difficult to read, because one'smind slips over it and emerges too soon at the end, mildly puzzledthough incurious still as to what it is all about. One perceives Mr. Gilkes through a fog dimly thinking that Greek has something vital to dowith "a knowledge of language and man, " that the classical master is insome mysterious way superior to the science man and more imaginative, and that science men ought not to be worried with the Greek that is toohigh for them; and he seems, too, to be under the odd illusion that "onall this" Englishmen "seem now to be nearly in agreement, " and also onthe opinion that games are a little overdone and that civic duties andthe use of the rifle ought to be taught. Statements are made--the sortof statements that are suffered in an atmosphere where there is noswift, fierce opposition to be feared; they frill out into vaguequalifications and butt gently against other partially contradictorystatements. There is a classification of minds--the sort ofclassification dear to the Y. M. C. A. Essayists, made for the purposes ofthe essay and unknown to psychology. There are, we are told, accurateunimaginative, ingenious minds capable of science and kindred vulgarthings (such was Archimedes), and vague, imaginative minds, with thegift for language and for the treatment of passion and the higherindefinable things (such as Homer and Mr. Gilkes), and, somehow, thisjustifies those who are destined for "science" in dropping Greek. Certain "considerations, " however, loom inconclusively upon thisissue--rather like interested spectators of a street fight in a fog. Forexample, to learn a language is valuable "in proportion as the nationspeaking it is great"--a most empty assertion; and "no languages are sogood, " for the purpose of improving style, "as the exact and beautifullanguages of Rome and Greece. "

Is it not time at least that this last, this favourite but threadbarearticle of the schoolmaster's creed was put away for good? Everyone whohas given any attention to this question must be aware that theintellectual gesture is entirely different in highly inflected languagessuch as Greek and Latin and in so uninflected a language as English, that learning Greek to improve one's English style is like learning toswim in order to fence better, and that familiarity with Greek seemsonly too often to render a man incapable of clear, strong expression inEnglish at all. Yet Mr. Gilkes can permit this old assertion, so dearto country rectors and the classical scholar, to appear within acolumn's distance of such style as this:

"It is now understood that every subject is valuable, if it is properlytaught; it will perform that which, as follows from the accounts givenabove of the aim of education, is the work most important in the case ofboys--that is, it will draw out their faculties and make them useful inthe world, alert, trained in industry, and able to understand, so far astheir school lessons educated them, and make themselves master of anysubject set before them. "

This quotation is conclusive. 

Sec. 3

I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will think I am writingagainst upper-class schoolmasters. I am, it is undeniable, writingagainst their dullness, but it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposedupon them by the conditions under which they live. Indeed, I believe, could I put the thing directly to the profession--"Do you not yourselvesfeel needlessly limited and dull?"--should receive a majority ofaffirmative responses. We have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what aschoolmaster must be; to that he must by art or nature approximate, andthere is no help for it but to alter our ideal. Nothing else of any widevalue can be done until that is done. 

In the first place, the received ideal omits a most necessary condition. We do not insist upon a headmaster or indeed any of our academic leadersand dignitaries, being a man of marked intellectual character, a man ofintellectual distinction. It is assumed, rather lightly in many cases, that he has done "good work, " as they say--the sort of good work that isusually no good at all, that increases nothing, changes nothing, stimulates no one, leads no whither. That, surely, must be altered. Wemust see to it that our leading schoolmasters at any rate must be men ofinsight and creative intelligence, men who could at a pinch write a goodnovel or produce illuminating criticism or take an original part intheological or philosophical discussion, or do any of these minorthings. They must be authentic men, taking a line of their own andcapable of intellectual passion. They should be able to make their markoutside the school, if only to show they carry a living soul into it. Asthings are, nothing is so fatal to a schoolmaster's career as to dothat. 

And closely related to this omission is our extreme insistence upon whatwe call high moral character, meaning, really, something very like anentire absence of moral character. We insist upon tact, conformity, andan unblemished record. Now, in these days, of warring opinion, thesedays of gigantic, strange issues that cannot possibly be expressed inthe formulae of the smaller times that have gone before, tact isevasion, conformity formality, and silence an unblemished record, mereevidence of the damning burial of a talent of life. The sort of man intowhose hands we give our sons' minds must never have experimented morallyor thought at all freely or vigorously about, for example, God, Socialism, the Mosaic account of the Creation, social procedure, Republicanism, beauty, love, or, indeed, about anything likely tointerest an intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such thingshe must have acquired the habit of the modest cough, the infectioustrick of the nice evasion. How can "Kappa" expect inspiration from thedecorous resultants who satisfy these conditions? What brand can ever belit at altars that have borne no fire? And you find the secondaryschoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming the zealousand grateful agent of the tendencies that have made him what he is, converting into a practice those vague dreads of idiosyncrasy, ofpositive acts and new ideas, that dictated the choice of him and hisrule of life. His moral teaching amounts to this: to inculcatetruth-telling about small matters and evasion about large, and tocultivate a morbid obsession in the necessary dawn of sexualconsciousness. So far from wanting to stimulate the imagination, hehates and dreads it. I find him perpetually haunted by a ridiculous fearthat boys will "do something, " and in his terror seeking whatever isdull and unstimulating and tiring in intellectual work, clipping theirreading, censoring their periodicals, expurgating their classics, substituting the stupid grind of organised "games" for natural, imaginative play, persecuting loafers--and so achieving his end andturning out at last, clean-looking, passively well-behaved, apathetic, obliterated young men, with the nicest manners and no spark ofinitiative at all, quite safe not to "do anything" for ever. 

I submit this may be a very good training for polite servants, but it isnot the way to make masters in the world. If we English believe we areindeed a masterful people, we must be prepared to expose our children tomore and more various stimulations than we do; they must grow up free, bold, adventurous, initiated, even if they have to take more risks inthe doing of that. An able and stimulating teacher is as rare as a fineartist, and is a thing worth having for your son, even at the price ofshocking your wife by his lack of respect for that magnificentcompromise, the Establishment, or you by his Socialism or by hisCatholicism or Darwinism, or even by his erroneous choice of ties andcollars. Boys who are to be free, masterly men must hear free mentalking freely of religion, of philosophy, of conduct. They must haveheard men of this opinion and that, putting what they believe beforethem with all the courage of conviction. They must have an idea of willprevailing over form. It is far more important that boys should learnfrom original, intellectually keen men than they should learn fromperfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nicemen. The vital thing to consider about your son's schoolmaster iswhether he talked lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and notwhether he loved unwisely or was born of poor parents, or was seenwearing a frock-coat in combination with a bowler, or confessed hedoubted the Apostles' Creed, or called himself a Socialist, or anydisgraceful thing like that, so many years ago. It is that sort of thing"Kappa" must invert if he wants a change in our public schools. You mayarrange and rearrange curricula, abolish Greek, substitute "science"--itwill not matter a rap. Even those model canoes of yours, "Kappa, " willbe wasted if you still insist upon model schoolmasters. So long as werequire our schoolmasters to be politic, conforming, undisturbing men, setting up Polonius as an ideal for them, so long will their influencedeaden the souls of our sons. 

THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD

Some few years ago the Fabian Society, which has been so efficient inkeeping English Socialism to the lines of "artfulness and the'eighties, " refused to have anything to do with the Endowment ofMotherhood. Subsequently it repented and produced a characteristicpamphlet in which the idea was presented with a sort of minimisingfurtiveness as a mean little extension of outdoor relief. These FabianSocialists, instead of being the daring advanced people they aresupposed to be, are really in many things twenty years behind the times. There need be nothing shamefaced about the presentation of the Endowmentof Motherhood. There is nothing shameful about it. It is a plain andsimple idea for which the mind of the man in the street has now beenvery completely prepared. It has already crept into social legislationto the extent of thirty shillings. 

I suppose if one fact has been hammered into us in the past two decadesmore than any other it is this: that the supply of children is fallingoff in the modern State; that births, and particularly good-qualitybirths, are not abundant enough; that the birth-rate, and particularlythe good-class birth-rate, falls steadily below the needs of our future. 

If no one else has said a word about this important matter, ex-PresidentRoosevelt would have sufficed to shout it to the ends of the earth. Every civilised community is drifting towards "race-suicide" as Romedrifted into "race-suicide" at the climax of her empire. 

Well, it is absurd to go on building up a civilisation with a dwindlingsupply of babies in the cradles--and these not of the best possiblesort--and so I suppose there is hardly an intelligent person in theEnglish-speaking communities who has not thought of some possibleremedy--from the naive scoldings of Mr. Roosevelt and the more stolid ofthe periodicals to sane and intelligible legislative projects. 

The reasons for the fall in the birth-rate are obvious enough. It is anecessary consequence of the individualistic competition of modern life. People talk of modern women "shirking" motherhood, but it would be asilly sort of universe in which a large proportion of women had anynatural and instinctive desire to shirk motherhood, and, I believe, ahuge proportion of modern women are as passionately predisposed towardsmotherhood as ever women were. But modern conditions conspire to put aheavy handicap upon parentage and an enormous premium upon the partialor complete evasion of offspring, and that is where the clue to thetrouble lies. Our social arrangements discourage parentage very heavily, and the rational thing for a statesman to do in the matter is not togrow eloquent, but to do intelligent things to minimise thatdiscouragement. 

Consider the case of an energetic young man and an energetic young womanin our modern world. So long as they remain "unencumbered" they cansubsist on a comparatively small income and find freedom and leisure towatch for and follow opportunities of self-advancement; they can travel, get knowledge and experience, make experiments, succeed. One mightalmost say the conditions of success and self-development in the modernworld are to defer marriage as long as possible, and after that to deferparentage as long as possible. And even when there is a family there isthe strongest temptation to limit it to three or four children at theoutside. Parents who can give three children any opportunity in lifeprefer to do that than turn out, let us say, eight ill-trained childrenat a disadvantage, to become the servants and unsuccessful competitorsof the offspring of the restrained. That fact bites us all; it does notrequire a search. It is all very well to rant about "race-suicide, " butthere are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances forall but the really rich, and so patent are they that I doubt if all theeloquence of Mr. Roosevelt and its myriad echoes has added a thousandbabies to the eugenic wealth of the English-speaking world. 

Modern married people, and particularly those in just that capablemiddle class from which children are most urgently desirable from thestatesman's point of view, are going to have one or two children toplease themselves but they are not going to have larger families underexisting conditions, though all the ex-Presidents and all the pulpits inthe world clamour together for them to do so. 

If having and rearing children is a private affair, then no one has anyright to revile small families; if it is a public service, then theparent is justified in looking to the State to recognise that serviceand offer some compensation for the worldly disadvantages it entails. Heis justified in saying that while his unencumbered rival wins past himhe is doing the State the most precious service in the world by rearingand educating a family, and that the State has become his debtor. 

In other words, the modern State has got to pay for its children if itreally wants them--and more particularly it has to pay for the childrenof good homes. 

The alternative to that is racial replacement and social decay. That isthe essential idea conveyed by this phrase, the Endowment of Motherhood. 

Now, how is the paying to be done? That needs a more elaborate answer, of which I will give here only the roughest, crudest suggestion. 

Probably it would be found best that the payment should be made to themother, as the administrator of the family budget, that its amountshould be made dependent upon the quality of the home in which thechildren are being reared, upon their health and physical development, and upon their educational success. Be it remembered, we do not want anychildren; we want good-quality children. The amount to be paid, I wouldparticularly point out, should vary with the standing of the home. People of that excellent class which spends over a hundred a year oneach child ought to get about that much from the State, and people ofthe class which spends five shillings a week per head on them would getabout that, and so on. And if these payments were met by a specialincome tax there would be no social injustice whatever in such anunequality of payment. Each social stratum would pay according to itsprosperity, and the only redistribution that would in effect occur wouldbe that the childless people of each class would pay for the children ofthat class. The childless family and the small family would pay equallywith the large family, incomes being equal, but they would receive inproportions varying with the health and general quality of theirchildren. That, I think, gives the broad principles upon which thepayments would be made. 

Of course, if these subsidies resulted in too rapid a rise in thebirth-rate, it would be practicable to diminish the inducement; and if, on the other hand, the birth-rate still fell, it would be easy toincrease the inducement until it sufficed. 

That concisely is the idea of the Endowment of Motherhood. I believefirmly that some such arrangement is absolutely necessary to thecontinuous development of the modern State. These proposals arise soobviously out of the needs of our time that I cannot understand anyreally intelligent opposition to them. I can, however, understand apartial and silly application of them. It is most important that ourgood-class families should be endowed, but the whole tendency of thetimid and disingenuous progressivism of our time, which is all mixed upwith ideas of charity and aggressive benevolence to the poor, would beto apply this--as that Fabian tract I mention does--only to the poormother. To endow poor and bad-class motherhood and leave other peopleseverely alone would be a proceeding so supremely idiotic, so harmful toour national quality, as to be highly probable in the present state ofour public intelligence. It comes quite on a level with the policy ofstarving middle-class education that has left us with nearly the worsteducated middle class in Western Europe. 

The Endowment of Motherhood does not attract the bureaucratic type ofreformer because it offers a minimum chance of meddlesome interferencewith people's lives. There would be no chance of "seeking out" anybodyand applying benevolent but grim compulsions on the strength of it. Inspite of its wide scope it would be much less of a public nuisance thanthat Wet Children's Charter, which exasperates me every time I pass apublic-house on a rainy night. But, on the other hand, there would be anenormous stimulus to people to raise the quality of their homes, studyinfantile hygiene, seek out good schools for them--and do their duty asall good parents naturally want to do now--if only economic forces werenot so pitilessly against them--thoroughly and well. 

DOCTORS

In that extravagant world of which I dream, in which people will live indelightful cottages and ground rents will serve instead of rates, andeveryone will have a chance of being happy--in that impossible world alldoctors will be members of one great organisation for the public health, with all or most of their income guaranteed to them: I doubt if therewill be any private doctors at all. 

Heaven forbid I should seem to write a word against doctors as they are. Daily I marvel at the wonders the general practitioner achieves, havingregard to the difficulties of his position. 

But I cannot hide from myself, and I do not intend to hide from anyoneelse, my firm persuasion that the services the general practitioner isable to render us are not one-tenth so effectual as they might be if, instead of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of a sanelyorganised public machine. Consider what his training and equipment are, consider the peculiar difficulties of his work, and then consider for amoment what better conditions might be invented, and perhaps you willnot think my estimate of one-tenth an excessive understatement in thismatter. 

Nearly the whole of our medical profession and most of our apparatus forteaching and training doctors subsist on strictly commercial lines byearning fees. This chief source of revenue is eked out by the wantoncharity of old women, and conspicuous subscriptions by popularityhunters, and a small but growing contribution (in the salaries ofmedical officers of health and so forth) from the public funds. But thefact remains that for the great mass of the medical profession there isno living to be got except at a salary for hospital practice or byearning fees in receiving or attending upon private cases. 

So long as a doctor is learning or adding to knowledge, he earnsnothing, and the common, unintelligent man does not see why he shouldearn anything. So that a doctor who has no religious passion for povertyand self-devotion gets through the minimum of training and learning asquickly and as cheaply as possible, and does all he can to fill up therest of his time in passing rapidly from case to case. The busier hekeeps, the less his leisure for thought and learning, the richer hegrows, and the more he is esteemed. His four or five years of hasty, crowded study are supposed to give him a complete and final knowledge ofthe treatment of every sort of disease, and he goes on year after year, often without co-operation, working mechanically in the common incidentsof practice, births, cases of measles and whooping cough, and so forth, and blundering more or less in whatever else turns up. 

There are no public specialists to whom he can conveniently refer thedifficulties he constantly encounters; only in the case of rich patientsis the specialist available; there are no properly organised informationbureaus for him, and no means whatever of keeping him informed uponprogress and discovery in medical science. He is not even required toset apart a month or so in every two or three years in order to returnto lectures and hospitals and refresh his knowledge. Indeed, the incomeof the average general practitioner would not permit of such a thing, and almost the only means of contact between him and current thoughtlies in the one or other of our two great medical weeklies to which hehappens to subscribe. 

Now just as I have nothing but praise for the average generalpractitioner, so I have nothing but praise and admiration for thosestalwart-looking publications. Without them I can imagine nothing butthe most terrible intellectual atrophy among our medical men. But sincethey are private properties run for profit they have to pay, and halftheir bulk consists of the brilliantly written advertisements of newdrugs and apparatus. They give much knowledge, they do much to ventilateperplexing questions, but a broadly conceived and properly endowedweekly circular could, I believe, do much more. At any rate, in myUtopia this duty of feeding up the general practitioners will not beleft to private enterprise. 

Behind the first line of my medical army will be a second line of ablemen constantly digesting new research for its practicalneeds--correcting, explaining, announcing; and, in addition, a force ofpublic specialists to whom every difficulty in diagnosis will be at oncereferred. And there will be a properly organised system of reliefs thatwill allow the general practitioner and his right hand, the nurse, tocome back to the refreshment of study before his knowledge and mind havegot rusty. But then my Utopia is a Socialistic system. Under our presentsystem of competitive scramble, under any system that reduces medicalpractice to mere fee-hunting nothing of this sort is possible. 

Then in my Utopia, for every medical man who was mainly occupied inpractice, I would have another who was mainly occupied in or aboutresearch. People hear so much about modern research that they do notrealise how entirely inadequate it is in amount and equipment. Ourgeneral public is still too stupid to understand the need and value ofsustained investigations in any branch of knowledge at all. In spite ofall the lessons of the last century, it still fails to realise howdiscovery and invention enrich the community and how paying aninvestment is the public employment of clever people to think andexperiment for the benefit of all. It still expects to get a Newton or aJoule for Ł800 a year, and requires him to conduct his researches in themargin of time left over when he has got through his annual eighty orninety lectures. It imagines discoveries are a sort of inspiration thatcomes when professors are running to catch trains. It seems incapable ofimagining how enormous are the untried possibilities of research. Ofcourse, if you will only pay a handful of men salaries at which the cookof any large London hotel would turn up his nose, you cannot expect tohave the master minds of the world at your service; and save for a fewindependent or devoted men, therefore, it is not reasonable to supposethat such a poor little dribble of medical research as is now going onis in the hands of persons of much more than average mental equipment. How can it be?

One hears a lot of the rigorous research into the problem of cancer thatis now going on. Does the reader realise that all the men in the wholeworld who are giving any considerable proportion of their time to thiscancer research would pack into a very small room, that they areworking in little groups without any properly organised system ofintercommunication, and that half of them are earning less than aquarter of the salary of a Bond Street shopwalker by those vastlyimportant inquiries? Not one cancer case in twenty thousand is beingproperly described and reported. And yet, in comparison with otherdiseases, cancer is being particularly well attended to. 

The general complacency with the progress in knowledge we have made andare making is ridiculously unjustifiable. Enormous things were no doubtdone in the nineteenth century in many fields of knowledge, but all thatwas done was out of all proportion petty in comparison with what mighthave been done. I suppose the whole of the unprecedented progress inmaterial knowledge of the nineteenth century was the work of two orthree thousand men, who toiled against opposition, spite and endlessdisadvantages, without proper means of intercommunication and withwretched facilities for experiment. Such discoveries as weredistinctively medical were the work of only a few hundred men. Now, suppose instead of that scattered band of un-co-ordinated workers agreat army of hundreds of thousands of well-paid men; suppose, forinstance, the community had kept as many scientific and medicalinvestigators as it has bookmakers and racing touts and men abouttown--should we not know a thousand times as much as we do about diseaseand health and strength and power?

But these are Utopian questionings. The sane, practical man shakes hishead, smiles pityingly at my dreamy impracticability, and passes themby. 

AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION

There is something of the phonograph in all of us, but in the sort ofeminent person who makes public speeches about education and reading, and who gives away prizes and opens educational institutions, thereseems to be little else but gramophone. 

These people always say the same things, and say them in the same note. And why should they do that if they are really individuals?

There is, I cannot but suspect, in the mysterious activities thatunderlie life, some trade in records for these distinguishedgramophones, and it is a trade conducted upon cheap and wholesale lines. There must be in these demiurgic profundities a rapid manufacture ofinnumerable thousands of that particular speech about "scrappy reading, "and that contrast of "modern" with "serious" literature, that babblesabout in the provinces so incessantly. Gramophones thinly disguised asbishops, gramophones still more thinly disguised as eminent statesmen, gramophones K. C. B. And gramophones F. R. S. Have brazened it at us timeafter time, and will continue to brazen it to our grandchildren when weare dead and all our poor protests forgotten. And almost equally popularin their shameless mouths is the speech that declares this present ageto be an age of specialisation. We all know the profound droop of theeminent person's eyelids as he produces that discovery, the edifyingdeductions or the solemn warnings he unfolds from this proposition, andall the dignified, inconclusive rigmarole of that cylinder. And it isnonsense from beginning to end. 

This is most distinctly _not_ an age of specialisation. There has hardlybeen an age in the whole course of history less so than the present. Afew moments of reflection will suffice to demonstrate that. This isbeyond any precedent an age of change, change in the appliances of life, in the average length of life, in the general temper of life; and thetwo things are incompatible. It is only under fixed conditions that youcan have men specialising. 

They specialise extremely, for example, under such conditions as one hadin Hindustan up to the coming of the present generation. There the metalworker or the cloth worker, the wheelwright or the druggist of yesterdaydid his work under almost exactly the same conditions as his predecessordid it five hundred years before. He had the same resources, the sametools, the same materials; he made the same objects for the same ends. Within the narrow limits thus set him he carried work to a fineperfection; his hand, his mental character were subdued to his medium. His dress and bearing even were distinctive; he was, in fact, a highlyspecialised man. He transmitted his difference to his sons. Caste wasthe logical expression in the social organisation of this state of highspecialisation, and, indeed, what else is caste or any definite classdistinctions but that? But the most obvious fact of the present time isthe disappearance of caste and the fluctuating uncertainty of all classdistinctions. 

If one looks into the conditions of industrial employment specialisationwill be found to linger just in proportion as a trade has remainedunaffected by inventions and innovation. The building trade, forexample, is a fairly conservative one. A brick wall is made to-day muchas it was made two hundred years ago, and the bricklayer is inconsequence a highly skilled and inadaptable specialist. No one who hasnot passed through a long and tedious training can lay bricks properly. And it needs a specialist to plough a field with horses or to drive acab through the streets of London. Thatchers, old-fashioned cobblers, and hand workers are all specialised to a degree no new modern callingrequires. With machinery skill disappears and unspecialised intelligencecomes in. Any generally intelligent man can learn in a day or two todrive an electric tram, fix up an electric lighting installation, orguide a building machine or a steam plough. He must be, of course, muchmore generally intelligent than the average bricklayer, but he needs farless specialised skill. To repair machinery requires, of course, aspecial sort of knowledge, but not a special sort of training. 

In no way is this disappearance of specialisation more marked than inmilitary and naval affairs. In the great days of Greece and Rome war wasa special calling, requiring a special type of man. In the Middle Ageswar had an elaborate technique, in which the footman played the part ofan unskilled labourer, and even within a period of a hundred years ittook a long period of training and discipline before the commondiscursive man could be converted into the steady soldier. Even to-daytraditions work powerfully, through extravagance of uniform, and throughsurvivals of that mechanical discipline that was so important in thedays of hand-to-hand fighting, to keep the soldier something other thana man. For all the lessons of the Boer war we are still inclined tobelieve that the soldier has to be something severely parallel, carryinga rifle he fires under orders, obedient to the pitch of absoluteabnegation of his private intelligence. We still think that our officershave, like some very elaborate and noble sort of performing animal, tobe "trained. " They learn to fight with certain specified "arms" andweapons, instead of developing intelligence enough to use anything thatcomes to hand. 

But, indeed, when a really great European war does come and lets loosemotor-cars, bicycles, wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes, new projectilesof every size and shape, and a multitude of ingenious persons upon thepreposterously vast hosts of conscription, the military caste will bemissing within three months of the beginning, and the inventive, versatile, intelligent man will have come to his own. 

And what is true of a military caste is equally true of a specialgoverning class such as our public schools maintain. 

The misunderstanding that has given rise to this proposition that thisis an age of specialisation, and through that no end of mischief inmisdirected technical education and the like, is essentially a confusionbetween specialisation and the division of labour. No doubt this is anage when everything makes for wider and wider co-operations. Work thatwas once done by one highly specialised man--the making of a watch, forexample--is now turned out wholesale by elaborate machinery, or effectedin great quantities by the contributed efforts of a number of people. Each of these people may bring a highly developed intelligence to bearfor a time upon the special problem in hand, but that is quite adifferent thing from specialising to do that thing. 

This is typically shown in scientific research. The problem or the partsof problems upon which the inquiry of an individual man is concentratedare often much narrower than the problems that occupied Faraday orDalton, and yet the hard and fast lines that once divided physicist fromchemist, or botanist from pathologist have long since gone. ProfessorFarmer, the botanist, investigates cancer, and the ordinary educatedman, familiar though he is with their general results, would find ithard to say which were the chemists and which the physicists amongProfessors Dewar and Ramsey Lord Rayleigh and Curie. The classificationof sciences that was such a solemn business to our grandfathers is nowmerely a mental obstruction. 

It is interesting to glance for a moment at the possible source of thismischievous confusion between specialisation and the division of labour. I have already glanced at the possibility of a diabolical worldmanufacturing gramophone records for our bishops and statesmen andsuchlike leaders of thought, but if we dismiss that as a merely eleganttrope, I must confess I think it is the influence of Herbert Spencer. His philosophy is pervaded by an insistence which is, I think, entirelywithout justification, that the universe, and every sort of thing in it, moves from the simple and homogeneous to the complex and heterogeneous. An unwary man obsessed with that idea would be very likely to assumewithout consideration that men were less specialised in a barbaric stateof society than they are to-day. I think I have given reasons forbelieving that the reverse of this is nearer the truth. 

IS THERE A PEOPLE?

Of all the great personifications that have dominated the mind of man, the greatest, the most marvellous, the most impossible and the mostincredible, is surely the People, that impalpable monster to which theworld has consecrated its political institutions for the last hundredyears. 

It is doubtful now whether this stupendous superstition has reached itsgrand climacteric, and there can be little or no dispute that it isdestined to play a prominent part in the history of mankind for manyyears to come. There is a practical as well as a philosophical interest, therefore, in a note or so upon the attributes of this legendary being. I write "legendary, " but thereby I display myself a sceptic. To a verylarge number of people the People is one of the profoundest realities inlife. They believe--what exactly do they believe about the people?

When they speak of the People they certainly mean something more thanthe whole mass of individuals in a country lumped together. That is thepeople, a mere varied aggregation of persons, moved by no common motive, a complex interplay. The People, as the believer understands the word, is something more mysterious than that. The People is something thatoverrides and is added to the individualities that make up the people. It is, as it were, itself an individuality of a higher order--as indeed, its capital "P" displays. It has a will of its own which is not thewill of any particular person in it, it has a power of purpose andjudgment of a superior sort. It is supposed to be the underlying realityof all national life and the real seat of all public religious emotion. Unfortunately, it lacks powers of expression, and so there is need ofrulers and interpreters. If they express it well in law and fact, inbook and song, they prosper under its mysterious approval; if they donot, it revolts or forgets or does something else of an equallyannihilatory sort. That, briefly, is the idea of the People. My modestthesis is that there exists nothing of the sort, that the world of menis entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that thecollective action is just the algebraic sum of all individual actions. 

How far the opposite opinion may go, one must talk to intelligentAmericans or read the contemporary literature of the first FrenchRevolution to understand. I find, for example, so typical a youngAmerican as the late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is thePeople to whom we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of the name ofShakespeare from the ruck of his contemporaries and the passage in whichthis assertion is made is fairly representative of the generalexpression of this sort of mysticism. "One must keep one's faith in thePeople--the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers--else of all menthe artists are most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admitand concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times.... But inthe end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and discriminatebetween it and the false. " And then he resorts to italics to emphasise:"_In the last analysis the People are always right_. "

And it was that still more typical American, Abraham Lincoln, whodeclared his equal confidence in the political wisdom of this collectivebeing. "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of thepeople all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. "The thing is in the very opening words of the American Constitution, andTheodore Parker calls it "the American idea" and pitches a still highernote: "A government of all the people, by all the people, for all thepeople; a government of all the principles of eternal justice, _theunchanging law of God. "_

It is unavoidable that a collective wisdom distinct from any individualand personal one is intended in these passages. Mr. Norris, for example, never figured to himself a great wave of critical discriminationsweeping through the ranks of the various provision trades and amultitude of simple, plain burgesses preferring Shakespeare and settingMarlowe aside. Such a particularisation of his statement would have atonce reduced it to absurdity. Nor does any American see the peopleparticularised in that way. They believe in the People one andindivisible, a simple, mystical being, which pervades and dominates thecommunity and determines its final collective consequences. 

Now upon the belief that there is a People rests a large part of thepolitical organisation of the modern world. The idea was one of thechief fruits of the speculations of the eighteenth century, and theAmerican Constitution is its most perfect expression. One turns, therefore, inevitably to the American instance, not because it is theonly one, but because there is the thing in its least complicated form. We have there an almost exactly logical realisation of this belief. Thewhole political machine is designed and expressed to register thePeople's will, literature is entirely rewarded and controlled by theeffectual suffrages of the bookseller's counter, science (until privateendowment intervened) was in the hands of the State Legislatures, andreligion the concern of the voluntary congregations. 

On the assumption that there is a People there could be no better stateof affairs. You and I and everyone, except for a vote or a book, or aservice now and then, can go about our business, you to your grocery andI to mine, and the direction of the general interests rests safe in thePeople's hands. Now that is by no means a caricature of the attitude ofmind of many educated Americans. You find they have little or nothing todo with actual politics, and are inclined to regard the professionalpolitician with a certain contempt; they trouble their heads hardly atall about literature, and they contemplate the general religiouscondition of the population with absolute unconcern. It is not that theyare unpatriotic or morally trivial that they stand thus disengaged; itis that they have a fatalistic belief in this higher power. Whatevertroubles and abuses may arise they have an absolute faith that "in thelast analysis" the People will get it right. 

And now suppose that I am right and that there is no People! Supposethat the crowd is really no more than a crowd, a vast miscellaneousconfusion of persons which grows more miscellaneous every year. Supposethis conception of the People arose out of a sentimental idealisation, Rousseau fashion, of the ancient homogeneous peasant class--a class thatis rapidly being swept out of existence by modern industrialdevelopments--and that whatever slender basis of fact it had in thepast is now altogether gone. What consequences may be expected?

It does not follow that because the object of your reverence is a deadword you will get no oracles from the shrine. If the sacred Peopleremains impassive, inarticulate, non-existent, there are always thekeepers of the shrine who will oblige. Professional politicians, venaland violent men, will take over the derelict political control, peoplewho live by the book trade will alone have a care for letters, researchand learning will be subordinated to political expediency, and a greatdevelopment of noisily competitive religious enterprises will take theplace of any common religious formula. There will commence a seculardecline in the quality of public thought, emotion and activity. Therewill be no arrest or remedy for this state of affairs so long as thatsuperstitious faith in the People as inevitably right "in the lastanalysis" remains. And if my supposition is correct, it should bepossible to find in the United States, where faith in the people isindisputably dominant, some such evidence of the error of this faith. Isthere?

I write as one that listens from afar. But there come reports oflegislative and administrative corruption, of organised publicblackmail, that do seem to carry out my thesis. One thinks of EdgarAllan Poe, who dreamt of founding a distinctive American literature, drugged and killed almost as it were symbolically, amid electioneeringand nearly lied out of all posthumous respect by that scoundrelGriswold; one thinks of State Universities that are no more than mintsfor bogus degrees; one thinks of "Science" Christianity and Zion City. These things are quite insufficient for a Q. E. D. , but I submit theyfavour my proposition. 

Suppose there is no People at all, but only enormous, differentiatingmillions of men. All sorts of widely accepted generalisations willcollapse if that foundation is withdrawn. I submit it as worthconsidering. 

THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS

Sec. 1

There is a growing discord between governments and governed in theworld. 

There has always been discord between governments and governed sinceStates began; government has always been to some extent imposed, andobedience to some extent reluctant. We have come to regard it as amatter of course that under all absolutions and narrow oligarchies thecommunity, so soon as it became educated and as its social elaborationdeveloped a free class with private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as itattained to any power of thought and expression at all, would expressdiscontent. But we English and Americans and Western Europeans generallyhad supposed that, so far as our own communities were concerned, thisdiscontent was already anticipated and met by representativeinstitutions. We had supposed that, with various safeguards andelaborations, our communities did, as a matter of fact, governthemselves. Our panacea for all discontents was the franchise. Socialand national dissatisfaction could be given at the same time a voice anda remedy in the ballot box. Our liberal intelligences could and do stillunderstand Russians wanting votes, Indians wanting votes, women wantingvotes. The history of nineteenth-century Liberalism in the world mightalmost be summed up in the phrase "progressive enfranchisement. " Butthese are the desires of a closing phase in political history. The newdiscords go deeper than that. The new situation which confronts ourLiberal intelligence is the discontent of the enfranchised, the contemptand hostility of the voters for their elected delegates and governments. 

This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, and hostility toduly elected representatives is no mere accident of this democraticcountry or that; it is an almost world-wide movement. It is an almostuniversal disappointment with so-called popular government, and in manycommunities--in Great Britain particularly--it is manifesting itself byan unprecedented lawlessness in political matters, and in a strange andominous contempt for the law. One sees it, for example, in the refusalof large sections of the medical profession to carry out insurancelegislation, in the repudiation of Irish Home Rule by Ulster, and in thesteady drift of great masses of industrial workers towards theconception of a universal strike. The case of the discontented workersin Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These peopleform effective voting majorities in many constituencies; they sendalleged Socialist and Labour representatives into the legislativeassembly; and, in addition, they have their trade unions with staffs ofelected officials, elected ostensibly to state their case and promotetheir interests. Yet nothing is now more evident than that theseofficials, working-men representatives and the like, do not speak fortheir supporters, and are less and less able to control them. TheSyndicalist movement, sabotage in France, and Larkinism in GreatBritain, are, from the point of view of social stability, the mostsinister demonstrations of the gathering anger of the labouring classeswith representative institutions. These movements are not revolutionarymovements, not movements for reconstruction such as were the democraticSocialist movements that closed the nineteenth century. They are angryand vindictive movements. They have behind them the most dangerous andterrible of purely human forces, the wrath, the blind destructive wrath, of a cheated crowd. 

Now, so far as the insurrection of labour goes, American conditionsdiffer from European, and the process of disillusionment will probablyfollow a different course. American labour is very largely immigrantlabour still separated by barriers of language and tradition from theestablished thought of the nation. It will be long before labour inAmerica speaks with the massed effectiveness of labour in France andEngland, where master and man are racially identical, and where there isno variety of "Dagoes" to break up the revolt. But in other directionsthe American disbelief in and impatience with "elected persons" is andhas been far profounder than it is in Europe. The abstinence of men ofproperty and position from overt politics, and the contempt thatbanishes political discussion from polite society, are among the firstsurprises of the visiting European to America, and now that, under anorganised pressure of conscience, college-trained men and men of wealthare abandoning this strike of the educated and returning to politicallife, it is, one notes, with a prevailing disposition to correctdemocracy by personality, and to place affairs in the hands ofautocratic mayors and presidents rather than to carry out democraticmethods to the logical end. At times America seems hot for a Caesar. Ifno Caesar is established, then it will be the good fortune of theRepublic rather than its democratic virtue which will have saved it. 

And directly one comes to look into the quality and composition of theelected governing body of any modern democratic State, one begins to seethe reason and nature of its widening estrangement from the community itrepresents. In no sense are these bodies really representative of thethought and purpose of the nation; the conception of its science, thefresh initiatives of its philosophy and literature, the forces that makethe future through invention and experiment, exploration and trial andindustrial development have no voice, or only an accidental and feeblevoice, there. The typical elected person is a smart rather thansubstantial lawyer, full of cheap catchwords and elaborate tricks ofprocedure and electioneering, professing to serve the interests of thelocality which is his constituency, but actually bound hand and foot tothe specialised political association, his party, which imposed him uponthat constituency. Arrived at the legislature, his next ambition isoffice, and to secure and retain office he engages in elaboratemanoeuvres against the opposite party, upon issues which his limited andspecialised intelligence indicates as electorally effective. But beinglimited and specialised, he is apt to drift completely out of touch withthe interests and feelings of large masses of people in the community. In Great Britain, the United States and France alike there is a constanttendency on the part of the legislative body to drift into unreality, and to bore the country with the disputes that are designed to thrillit. In Great Britain, for example, at the present time the two politicalparties are both profoundly unpopular with the general intelligence, which is sincerely anxious, if only it could find a way, to get rid ofboth of them. Irish Home Rule--an issue as dead as mutton, is opposed toTariff Reform, which has never been alive. Much as the majority ofpeople detest the preposterously clumsy attempts to amputate Irelandfrom the rule of the British Parliament which have been going on sincethe breakdown of Mr. Gladstone's political intelligence, their dread offoolish and scoundrelly fiscal adventurers is sufficiently strong toretain the Liberals in office. The recent exposures of the profoundfinancial rottenness of the Liberal party have deepened the publicresolve to permit no such enlarged possibilities of corruption as TariffReform would afford their at least equally dubitable opponents. Andmeanwhile, beneath those ridiculous alternatives, those sham issues, thereal and very urgent affairs of the nation, the vast gatheringdiscontent of the workers throughout the Empire, the racial conflicts inIndia and South Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end in ourseverance from India, the insane waste of national resources, thecontrol of disease, the frightful need of some cessation of armament, drift neglected.... 

Now do these things indicate the ultimate failure and downfall ofrepresentative government? Was this idea which inspired so much of thefinest and most generous thought of the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies a wrong idea, and must we go back to Caesarism or oligarchy orplutocracy or a theocracy, to Rome or Venice or Carthage, to the strongman or the ruler by divine right, for the political organisation of thefuture?

My answer to that question would be an emphatic No. My answer would bethat the idea of representative government is the only possible idea forthe government of a civilised community. But I would add that so farrepresentative government has not had even the beginnings of a fairtrial. So far we have not had representative government, but only adevastating caricature. 

It is quite plain now that those who first organised the parliamentaryinstitutions which now are the ruling institutions of the greater partof mankind fell a prey to certain now very obvious errors. They did notrealise that there are hundreds of different ways in which voting may bedone, and that every way will give a different result. They thought, andit is still thought by a great number of mentally indolent people, thatif a country is divided up into approximately equivalent areas, eachreturning one or two representatives, if every citizen is given onevote, and if there is no legal limit to the presentation of candidates, that presently a cluster of the wisest, most trusted and best citizenswill come together in the legislative assembly. 

In reality the business is far more complicated than this. In reality acountry will elect all sorts of different people according to theelectoral method employed. It is a fact that anyone who chooses toexperiment with a willing school or club may verify. Suppose, forexample, that you take your country, give every voter one single vote, put up six and twenty candidates for a dozen vacancies, and give them noadequate time for organisation. The voters, you will find, will returncertain favourites, A and B and C and D let us call them, by enormousmajorities, and behind these at a considerable distance will come E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and L. Now give your candidates time to developorganisation. A lot of people who swelled A's huge vote will dislike Jand K and L so much, and prefer M and N so much, that if they areassured that by proper organisation A's return can be made certainwithout their voting for him, they will vote for M and N. But they willdo so only on that understanding. Similarly certain B-ites will want Oand P if they can be got without sacrificing B. So that adequate partyorganisation in the community may return not the dozen a naive votewould give, but A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, M, N, O, P. Now suppose that, instead of this arrangement, your community is divided into twelveconstituencies and no candidate may contest more than one of them. Andsuppose each constituency has strong local preferences. A, B and C arewidely popular; in every constituency they have supporters but in noconstituency does any one of the three command a majority. They aregreat men, not local men. Q, who is an unknown man in most of thecountry, has, on the contrary, a strong sect of followers in theconstituency for which A stands, and beats him by one vote; anotherlocal celebrity, E, disposes of B in the same way; C is attacked notonly by S but T, whose peculiar views upon vaccination, let us say, appeal to just enough of C's supporters to let in S. Similar accidentshappen in the other constituencies, and the country that would haveunreservedly returned A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L on the firstsystem, return instead O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Numerousvoters who would have voted for A if they had a chance vote instead forR, S, T, etc. , numbers who would have voted for B, vote for Q, V, W, X, etc. But now suppose that A and B are opposed to one another, and thatthere is a strong A party and a strong B party highly organised in thecountry. B is really the second favourite over the country as a whole, but A is the first favourite. D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R, U, W, Y constitutethe A candidates and in his name they conquer. B, C, E, G, I, K, M, O, Q, S, V are all thrown out in spite of the wide popularity of B and C. Band C, we have supposed, are the second and third favourites, and yetthey go out in favour of Y, of whom nobody has heard before, some merehangers-on of A's. Such a situation actually occurs in both Ulster andHome-Rule Ireland. 

But now let us suppose another arrangement, and that is that the wholecountry is one constituency, and every voter has, if he chooses toexercise them, twelve votes, which, however, he must give, if he givesthem all, to twelve separate people. Then quite certainly A, B, C, Dwill come in, but the tail will be different. M, N, O, P may come upnext to them, and even Z, that eminent non-party man, may get in. Butnow organisation may produce new effects. The ordinary man, when he hastwelve votes to give, likes to give them all, so that there will be agood deal of wild voting at the tails of the voting papers. Now if asmall resolute band decide to plump for T or to vote only for A and T orB and T, T will probably jump up out of the rejected. This is the systemwhich gives the specialist, the anti-vaccinator or what not, the maximumadvantage. V, W, X and Y, being rather hopeless anyhow, will probablydetach themselves from party and make some special appeal, say to theteetotal vote or the Mormon vote or the single tax vote, and so squeezepast O, P, Q, R, who have taken a more generalised line. 

I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabeticalfluctuations. Many people, I know from colloquial experiences, do atabout this stage fly into a passion. But if you will exerciseself-control, then I think you will see my point that, according to themethod of voting, almost any sort of result may be got out of anelection except the production of a genuinely representative assembly. 

And that is the a priori case for supposing, what our experience ofcontemporary life abundantly verifies, that the so-called representativeassemblies of the world are not really representative at all. I will gofarther and say that were it not for the entire inefficiency of ourmethod of voting, not one-tenth of the present American and FrenchSenators, the French Deputies, the American Congressmen, and the EnglishMembers of Parliament would hold their positions to-day. They wouldnever have been heard of. They are not really the electedrepresentatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculousmethod of election; they are the illegitimate children of the partysystem and the ballot-box, who have ousted the legitimate heirs fromtheir sovereignty. They are no more the expression of the general willthan the Tsar or some President by _pronunciamento_. They are anaccidental oligarchy of adventurers. Representative government has neveryet existed in the world; there was an attempt to bring it intoexistence in the eighteenth century, and it succumbed to an infantiledisorder at the very moment of its birth. What we have in the place ofthe leaders and representatives are politicians and "elected persons. "

The world is passing rapidly from localised to generalised interests, but the method of election into which our fathers fell is the method ofelecting one or two representatives from strictly localisedconstituencies. Its immediate corruption was inevitable. If discussingand calculating the future had been, as it ought to be, a common, systematic occupation, the muddles of to-day might have been foretold ahundred years ago. From such a rough method of election the party systemfollowed as a matter of course. In theory, of course, there may be anynumber of candidates for a constituency and a voter votes for the one helikes best; in practice there are only two or three candidates, and thevoter votes for the one most likely to beat the candidate he likesleast. It cannot be too strongly insisted that in contemporary electionswe vote against; we do not vote for. If A, B and C are candidates, andyou hate C and all his works and prefer A, but doubt if he will get asmany votes as B, who is indifferent to you, the chances are you willvote for B. If C and B have the support of organised parties, you arestill less likely to risk "wasting" your vote upon A. If your realconfidence is in G, who is not a candidate for your constituency, and ifB pledges himself to support G, while A retains the right of separateaction, you may vote for B even if you distrust him personally. Additional candidates would turn any election of this type into a wildscramble. The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control ofpolitical organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of politicalorganisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidentlydemanded. The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged. Saveas they speak for us, the people are dumb. 

Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are stillsupposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation ingovernment, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They givehim an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two partyorganisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. For twenty-five years I have been a voter, and in all that time I haveonly twice had an opportunity of voting for a man of distinction in whomI had the slightest confidence. Commonly my choice of a "representative"has been between a couple of barristers entirely unknown to me or theworld at large. Rather more than half the men presented for my selectionhave not been English at all, but of alien descent. This, then, is thesum of the political liberty of the ordinary American or Englishman, that is the political emancipation which Englishwomen have shownthemselves so pathetically eager to share. He may reject one of twoundesirables, and the other becomes his "representative. " Now this isnot popular government at all; it is government by the profession ofpoliticians, whose control becomes more and more irresponsible in justthe measure that they are able to avoid real factions within their ownbody. Whatever the two party organisations have a mind to do together, whatever issue they chance to reserve from "party politics, " is as muchbeyond the control of the free and independent voter as if he were aslave subject in ancient Peru. 

Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are onlyin theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies soeviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are merecloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within theirform and substance. The old spirit of freedom and the collective purposewhich overthrew and subdued priestcrafts and kingcrafts, has done so, itseems, only to make way for these obscure political conspiracies. Instead of liberal institutions, mankind has invented a new sort ofusurpation. And it is not unnatural that many of us should be in a phaseof political despair. 

These oligarchies of the party organisations have now been evolving fortwo centuries, and their inherent evils and dangers become more and moremanifest. The first of these is the exclusion from government of themore active and intelligent sections of the community. It is not treatedas remarkable, it is treated as a matter of course, that neither inCongress nor in the House of Commons is there any adequaterepresentation of the real thought of the time, of its science, invention and enterprise, of its art and feeling, of its religion andpurpose. When one speaks of Congressmen or Members of Parliament onethinks, to be plain about it, of intellectual riff-raff. When one hearsof a pre-eminent man in the English-speaking community, even though thatpre-eminence may be in political or social science, one is struck by asense of incongruity if he happens to be also in the Legislature. WhenLord Haldane disengages the Gifford lectures or Lord Morley writes a"Life of Gladstone" or ex-President Roosevelt is delivered of a magazinearticle, there is the same sort of excessive admiration as when a RoyalPrincess does a water-colour sketch or a dog walks on its hind legs. 

Now this intellectual inferiority of the legislator is not only directlybad for the community by producing dull and stupid legislation, but ithas a discouraging and dwarfing effect upon our intellectual life. Nothing so stimulates art, thought and science as realisation; nothingso cripples it as unreality. But to set oneself to know thoroughly andto think clearly about any human question is to unfit oneself for theforensic claptrap which is contemporary politics, is to put oneself outof the effective current of the nation's life. The intelligence of anycommunity which does not make a collective use of that intelligence, starves and becomes hectic, tends inevitably to preciousness andfutility on the one hand, and to insurgency, mischief and anarchism onthe other. 

From the point of view of social stability this estrangement of thenational government and the national intelligence is far less seriousthan the estrangement between the governing body and the real feeling ofthe mass of the people. To many observers this latter estrangement seemsto be drifting very rapidly towards a social explosion in the BritishIsles. The organised masses of labour find themselves baffled both bytheir parliamentary representatives and by their trade union officials. They are losing faith in their votes and falling back in anger uponinsurrectionary ideals, upon the idea of a general strike, and upon theexpedients of sabotage. They are doing this without any constructiveproposals at all, for it is ridiculous to consider Syndicalism as aconstructive proposal. They mean mischief because they are hopeless andbitterly disappointed. It is the same thing in France, and before manyyears are over it will be the same thing in America. That way lieschaos. In the next few years there may be social revolt and bloodshed inmost of the great cities of Western Europe. That is the trend of currentprobability. Yet the politicians go on in an almost complete disregardof this gathering storm. Their jerrymandered electoral methods are likewool in their ears, and the rejection of Tweedledum for Tweedledee istaken as a "mandate" for Tweedledee's distinctive brand of politicalunrealities.... 

Is this an incurable state of things? Is this method of managing ouraffairs the only possible electoral method, and is there no remedy forits monstrous clumsiness and inefficiency but to "show a sense ofhumour, " or, in other words, to grin and bear it? Or is it conceivablethat there may be a better way to government than any we have yet tried, a method of government that would draw every class into conscious andwilling co-operation with the State, and enable every activity of thecommunity to play its proper part in the national life? That was thedream of those who gave the world representative government in the past. Was it an impossible dream?

Sec. 2

Is this disease of Parliaments an incurable disease, and have we, therefore, to get along as well as we can with it, just as a tainted andincurable invalid diets and is careful and gets along through life? Oris it possible that some entirely more representative and effectivecollective control of our common affairs can be devised?

The answer to that must determine our attitude to a great number offundamental questions. If no better governing body is possible than thestupid, dilatory and forensic assemblies that rule in France, Britainand America to-day, then the civilised human community has reached itsclimax. That more comprehensive collective handling of the commoninterests to which science and intelligent Socialism point, thatcollective handling which is already urgently needed if the presentuncontrolled waste of natural resources and the ultimate bankruptcy ofmankind is to be avoided, is quite beyond the capacity of suchassemblies; already there is too much in their clumsy and untrustworthyhands, and the only course open to us is an attempt at enlightenedIndividualism, an attempt to limit and restrict State activities inevery possible way, and to make little private temporary islands oflight and refinement amidst the general disorder and decay. Allcollectivist schemes, all rational Socialism, if only Socialists wouldrealise it, all hope for humanity, indeed, are dependent ultimately uponthe hypothetical possibility of a better system of government than anyat present in existence. 

Let us see first, then, if we can lay down any conditions which such abetter governing body would satisfy. Afterwards it will be open to us tobelieve or disbelieve in its attainment. Imagination is the essence ofcreation. If we can imagine a better government we are half-way tomaking it. 

Now, whatever other conditions such a body will satisfy, we may be surethat it will not be made up of members elected by single-memberconstituencies. A single-member constituency must necessarily contain aminority, and may even contain a majority of dissatisfied persons whoserepresentation is, as it were, blotted out by the successful candidate. Three single-member constituencies which might all return members of thesame colour, if they were lumped together to return three members wouldprobably return two of one colour and one of another. There would still, however, be a suppressed minority averse to both these colours, ordesiring different shades of those colours from those afforded them inthe constituency. Other things being equal, it may be laid down that thelarger the constituency and the more numerous its representatives, thegreater the chance of all varieties of thought and opinion beingrepresented. 

But that is only a preliminary statement; it still leaves untouched allthe considerations advanced in the former part of this discussion toshow how easily the complications and difficulties of voting lead to afalsification of the popular will and understanding. But here we enter aregion where a really scientific investigation has been made, and whereestablished results are available. A method of election was worked outby Hare in the middle of the last century that really does seem to avoidor mitigate nearly every falsifying or debilitating possibility inelections; it was enthusiastically supported by J. S. Mill; it is nowadvocated by a special society--the Proportional RepresentationSociety--to which belong men of the most diverse type of distinction, united only by the common desire to see representative government areality and not a disastrous sham. It is a method which does renderimpossible nearly every way of forcing candidates upon constituencies, and nearly every trick for rigging results that now distorts andcripples the political life of the modern world. It exacts only onecondition, a difficult but not an impossible condition, and that is thehonest scrutiny and counting of the votes. 

The peculiar invention of the system is what is called the singletransferable vote--that is to say, a vote which may be given in thefirst instance to one candidate, but which, in the event of his alreadyhaving a sufficient quota of votes to return him, may be transferred toanother. The voter marks clearly in the list of the candidates the orderof his preference by placing 1, 2, 3, and so forth against the names. Inthe subsequent counting the voting papers are first classified accordingto the first votes. Let us suppose that popular person A is found tohave received first votes enormously in excess of what is needed toreturn him. The second votes are then counted on his papers, and afterthe number of votes necessary to return him has been deducted, thesurplus votes are divided in due proportion among the second choicenames, and count for them. That is the essential idea of the wholething. At a stroke all that anxiety about wasting votes and splittingvotes, _which is the secret of all party political manipulation_vanishes. You may vote for A well knowing that if he is safe your votewill be good for C. You can make sure of A, and at the same time votefor C. You are in no need of a "ticket" to guide you, and you need haveno fear that in supporting an independent candidate you will destroy theprospects of some tolerably sympathetic party man without anycompensating advantage. The independent candidate does, in fact, becomepossible for the first time. The Hobson's choice of the party machine isabolished. 

Let me be a little more precise about the particulars of this method, the only sound method, of voting in order to ensure an adequaterepresentation of the community. Let us resort again to the constituencyI imagined in my last paper, a constituency in which candidatesrepresented by all the letters of the alphabet struggle for twelveplaces. And let us suppose that A, B, C and D are the leadingfavourites. Suppose that there are twelve thousand voters in theconstituency, and that three thousand votes are cast for A--I am keepingthe figures as simple as possible--then A has two thousand more than isneeded to return him. _All_ the second votes on his papers are counted, and it is found that 600, or a fifth of them, go to C; 500, or a sixth, go to E; 300, or a tenth, to G; 300 to J; 200, or a fifteenth, each to Kand L, and a hundred each, or a thirtieth, to M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, Wand Z. Then the surplus of 2, 000 is divided in these proportions--thatis a fifth of 2, 000 goes to C, a sixth to E, and the rest to G, J, etc. , in proportion. C, who already has 900 votes, gets another 400, and isnow returned and has, moreover, 300 to spare; and the same division ofthe next votes upon C's paper occurs as has already been made with A's. But previously to this there has been a distribution of B's surplusvotes, B having got 1, 200 of first votes. And so on. After thedistribution of the surplus votes of the elect at the top of the list, there is a distribution of the second votes upon the papers of those whohave voted for the hopeless candidates at the bottom of the list. Atlast a point is reached when twelve candidates have a quota. 

In this way the "wasting" of a vote, or the rejection of a candidate forany reason except that hardly anybody wants him, become practicallyimpossible. This method of the single transferable vote with very largeconstituencies and many members does, in fact, give an entirely validelectoral result; each vote tells for all it is worth, and the freedomof the voter is only limited by the number of candidates who put up orare put up for election. This method, and this method alone, givesrepresentative government; all others of the hundred and one possiblemethods admit of trickery, confusion and falsification. ProportionalRepresentation is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingeniouscomplication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out rightway to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way. It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place ofbaking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running oftrains to their destinations instead of running them without notice intocasually selected sidings and branch lines. It is not the substitutionof something for something else of the same nature; it is thesubstitution of right for wrong. It is the plain common sense of thegreatest difficulty in contemporary affairs. 

I know that a number of people do not, will not, admit this ofProportional Representation. Perhaps it is because of that hideousmouthful of words for a thing that would be far more properly named SaneVoting. This, which is the only correct way, these antagonists regard asa peculiar way. It has unfamiliar features, and that condemns it intheir eyes. It takes at least ten minutes to understand, and that is toomuch for their plain, straightforward souls. "Complicated"--that word offear! They are like the man who approved of an electric tram, but saidthat he thought it would go better without all that jiggery-pokery ofwires up above. They are like the Western judge in the murder trial whosaid that if only they got a man hanged for this abominable crime, hewouldn't make a pedantic fuss about the question of _which_ man. Theyare like the plain, straightforward promoter who became impatient withmaps and planned a railway across Switzerland by drawing a straight linewith a ruler across Jungfrau and Matterhorn and glacier and gorge. Orelse they are like Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, M. P. , who knows too wellwhat would happen to him. 

Now let us consider what would be the necessary consequences of theestablishment of Proportional Representation in such a community asGreat Britain--that is to say, the redistribution of the country intogreat constituencies such as London or Ulster or Wessex or South Wales, each returning a score or more of members, and the establishment ofvoting by the single transferable vote. The first, immediate, mostdesirable result would be the disappearance of the undistinguished partycandidate; he would vanish altogether. He would be no more seen. Proportional Representation would not give him the ghost of a chance. The very young man of good family, the subsidised barrister, therespectable nobody, the rich supporter of the party would be ousted byknown men. No candidate who had not already distinguished himself, andwho did not stand for something in the public eye, would have a chanceof election. There alone we have a sufficient reason for anticipating avery thorough change in the quality and character of the averagelegislator. 

And next, no party organisation, no intimation from headquarters, nodirty tricks behind the scenes, no conspiracy of spite and scandal wouldhave much chance of keeping out any man of real force and distinctionwho had impressed the public imagination. To be famous in science, tohave led thought, to have explored or administered or dissentedcourageously from the schemes of official wire-pullers would no longerbe a bar to a man's attainment of Parliament. It would be a help. Notonly the level of parliamentary intelligence, but the level of personalindependence would be raised far above its present position. AndParliament would become a gathering of prominent men instead of a meansto prominence. 

The two-party system which holds all the English-speaking countriesto-day in its grip would certainly be broken up by ProportionalRepresentation. Sane Voting in the end would kill the Liberal and Toryand Democratic and Republican party-machines. That secret rottenness ofour public life, that hidden conclave which sells honours, foulsfinance, muddles public affairs, fools the passionate desires of thepeople, and ruins honest men by obscure campaigns would becomeimpossible. The advantage of party support would be a doubtfuladvantage, and in Parliament itself the party men would find themselvesoutclassed and possibly even outnumbered by the independent. It would beonly a matter of a few years between the adoption of Sane Voting and thedisappearance of the Cabinet from British public life. It would becomepossible for Parliament to get rid of a minister without getting rid ofa ministry, and to express its disapproval of--let us say--some foolishproject for rearranging the local government of Ireland without openingthe door upon a vista of fantastical fiscal adventures. Theparty-supported Cabinet, which is now the real government of theso-called democratic countries, would cease to be so, and governmentwould revert more and more to the legislative assembly. And not onlywould the latter body resume government, but it would also necessarilytake into itself all those large and growing exponents ofextra-parliamentary discontent that now darken the social future. Thecase of the armed "Unionist" rebel in Ulster, the case of the workmanwho engages in sabotage, the case for sympathetic strikes and thegeneral strike, all these cases are identical in this, that they declareParliament a fraud, that justice lies outside it and hopelessly outsideit, and that to seek redress through Parliament is a waste of time andenergy. Sane Voting would deprive all these destructive movements of theexcuse and necessity for violence. 

There is, I know, a disposition in some quarters to minimise theimportance of Proportional Representation, as though it were a merereadjustment of voting methods. It is nothing of the sort; it is aprospective revolution. It will revolutionise government far more than amere change from kingdom to republic or vice versa could possibly do; itwill give a new and unprecedented sort of government to the world. Thereal leaders of the country will govern the country. For Great Britain, for example, instead of the secret, dubious and dubitable Cabinet, whichis the real British government of to-day, poised on an unwieldy andcrowded House of Commons, we should have open government by therepresentatives of, let us say, twenty great provinces, Ulster, Wales, London, for example, each returning from twelve to thirty members. Itwould be a steadier, stabler, more confident, and more trustedgovernment than the world has ever seen before. Ministers, indeed, andeven ministries might come and go, but that would not matter, as it doesnow, because there would be endless alternatives through which theassembly could express itself instead of the choice between two parties. 

The arguments against Proportional Representation that have beenadvanced hitherto are trivial in comparison with its enormousadvantages. Implicit in them all is the supposition that public opinionis at bottom a foolish thing, and that electoral methods are to pacifyrather than express a people. It is possibly true that notoriouswindbags, conspicuously advertised adventurers, and the heroes oftemporary sensations may run a considerable chance upon the lists. Myown estimate of the popular wisdom is against the idea that any vividlyprominent figure must needs get in; I think the public is capable ofappreciating, let us say, the charm and interest of Mr. Sandow or Mr. Jack Johnson or Mr. Harry Lauder or Mr. Evan Roberts without wanting tosend these gentlemen into Parliament. And I think that the increasedpower that the Press would have through its facilities in makingreputations may also be exaggerated. Reputations are mysterious thingsand not so easily forced, and even if it were possible for a section ofthe Press to limelight a dozen or so figures up to the legislature, theywould still have, I think, to be interesting, sympathetic andindividualised figures; and at the end they would be only half a dozenamong four hundred men of a repute more naturally achieved. A thirdobjection is that this reform would give us group politics and unstablegovernment. It might very possibly give us unstable ministries, butunstable ministries may mean stable government, and such stableministries as that which governs England at the present time may, byclinging obstinately to office, mean the wildest fluctuations of policy. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald has drawn a picture of the too-representativeParliament of Proportional Representation, split up into groups eachpledged to specific measures and making the most extraordinary treatiesand sacrifices of the public interest in order to secure the passing ofthese definite bills. But Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is exclusively aparliamentary man; he knows contemporary parliamentary "shop" as a clerkknows his "guv'nor, " and he thinks in the terms of his habitual life; hesees representatives only as politicians financed from partyheadquarters; it is natural that he should fail to see that the qualityand condition of the sanely elected Member of Parliament will be quitedifferent from these scheming climbers into positions of trust with whomhe deals to-day. It is the party system based on insane voting thatmakes governments indivisible wholes and gives the group and the cavetheir terrors and their effectiveness. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is astypical a product of existing electoral methods as one could well have, and his peculiarly keen sense of the power of intrigue in legislation isas good evidence as one could wish for of the need for drastic change. 

Of course, Sane Voting is not a short cut to the millennium, it is noway of changing human nature, and in the new type of assembly, as in theold, spite, vanity, indolence, self-interest, and downright dishonestywill play their part. But to object to a reform on that account is not aparticularly effective objection. These things will play their part, butit will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old. It is likeobjecting to some projected and long-needed railway because it does notpropose to carry its passengers by immediate express to heaven. 

THE AMERICAN POPULATION

Sec. 1

The social conditions and social future of America constitute a systemof problems quite distinct and separate from the social problems of anyother part of the world. The nearest approach to parallel conditions, and that on a far smaller and narrower scale, is found in the Britishcolonies and in the newly settled parts of Siberia. For while in nearlyevery other part of the world the population of to-day is more or lesscompletely descended from the prehistoric population of the same region, and has developed its social order in a slow growth extending over manycenturies, the American population is essentially a transplantedpopulation, a still fluid and imperfect fusion of great fragments tornat this point or that from the gradually evolved societies of Europe. The European social systems grow and flower upon their roots, in soilwhich has made them and to which they are adapted. The American socialaccumulation is a various collection of cuttings thrust into a new soiland respiring a new air, so different that the question is still open todoubt, and indeed there are those who do doubt, how far these cuttingsare actually striking root and living and growing, whether indeed theyare destined to more than a temporary life in the new hemisphere. Ipropose to discuss and weigh certain arguments for and against thebelief that these ninety million people who constitute the UnitedStates of America are destined to develop into a great distinctivenation with a character and culture of its own. 

Humanly speaking, the United States of America (and the same is true ofCanada and all the more prosperous, populous and progressive regions ofSouth America) is a vast sea of newly arrived and unstably rootedpeople. Of the seventy-six million inhabitants recorded by the 1900census, ten and a half million were born and brought up in one or otherof the European social systems, and the parents of another twenty-sixmillions were foreigners. Another nine million are of African negrodescent. Fourteen million of the sixty-five million native-born areliving not in the state of their birth, but in other states to whichthey have migrated. Of the thirty and a half million whites whoseparents on both sides were native Americans, a high proportion probablyhad one if not more grand-parents foreign-born. Nearly five and a halfmillion out of thirty-three and a half million whites in 1870 wereforeign-born, and another five and a quarter million the children offoreign-born parents. The children of the latter five and a quartermillion count, of course, in the 1900 census as native-born of nativeparents. Immigration varies enormously with the activity of business, but in 1906 it rose for the first time above a million. 

These figures may be difficult to grasp. The facts may be seen in a moreconcrete form by the visitor to Ellis Island, the receiving station forthe immigrants into New York Harbour. One goes to this place by tugsfrom the United States barge office in Battery Park, and in order to seethe thing properly one needs a letter of introduction to thecommissioner in charge. Then one is taken through vast barracks litteredwith people of every European race, every type of low-class Europeancostume, and every degree of dirtiness, to a central hall in which thegist of the examining goes on. The floor of this hall is divided up intoa sort of maze of winding passages between lattice work, and along thesepassages, day after day, incessantly, the immigrants go, wild-eyedGipsies, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Ruthenians, Cossacks, Germanpeasants, Scandinavians, a few Irish still, impoverished English, occasional Dutch; they halt for a moment at little desks to exhibitpapers, at other little desks to show their money and prove they are notpaupers, to have their eyes scanned by this doctor and their generalbearing by that. Their thumb-marks are taken, their names and heightsand weights and so forth are recorded for the card index; and so, slowly, they pass along towards America, and at last reach a littlewicket, the gate of the New World. Through this metal wicket drips theimmigration stream--all day long, every two or three seconds, animmigrant with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk and goes onpast the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully organisedseparating ways that go to this railway or that, past the guiding, protecting officials--into a new world. The great majority are young menand young women between seventeen and thirty, good, youthful, hopefulpeasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting to go through thatwicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with cheap portmanteauswith odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone, women with children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All day that string ofhuman beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; all day and everyday, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the end beads throughthe wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the hundreds tothousands.... In such a prosperous year as 1906 more immigrants passedthrough that wicket into America than children were born in the whole ofFrance. 

This figure of a perpetual stream of new stranger citizens will serve tomark the primary distinction between the American social problem andthat of any European or Asiatic community. 

The vast bulk of the population of the United States has, in fact, onlygot there from Europe in the course of the last hundred years, andmainly since the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne of GreatBritain. That is the first fact that the student of the American socialfuture must realise. Only an extremely small proportion of its bloodgoes back now to those who fought for freedom in the days of GeorgeWashington. The American community is not an expanded colonial societythat has become autonomous. It is a great and deepening pool ofpopulation accumulating upon the area these predecessors freed, andsince fed copiously by affluents from every European community. Freshingredients are still being added in enormous quantity, in quantity sogreat as to materially change the racial quality in a score of years. Itis particularly noteworthy that each accession of new blood seems tosterilise its predecessors. Had there been no immigration at all intothe United States, but had the rate of increase that prevailed in1810-20 prevailed to 1900, the population, which would then have been apurely native American one, would have amounted to a hundredmillion--that is to say, to approximately nine million in excess of thepresent total population. The new waves are for a time amazingly fecund, and then comes a rapid fall in the birth-rate. The proportion ofcolonial and early republican blood in the population is, therefore, probably far smaller even than the figures I have quoted would suggest. 

These accesses of new population have come in a series of waves, verymuch as if successive reservoirs of surplus population in the Old Worldhad been tapped, drained and exhausted. First came the Irish andGermans, then Central Europeans of various types, then Poland andWestern Russia began to pour out their teeming peoples, and moreparticularly their Jews, Bohemia, the Slavonic states, Italy and Hungaryfollowed and the latest arrivals include great numbers of Levantines, Armenians and other peoples from Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula. The Hungarian immigrants have still a birth-rate of forty-six perthousand, the highest birth-rate in the world. 

A considerable proportion of the Mediterranean arrivals, it has to benoted, and more especially the Italians, do not come to settle. Theywork for a season or a few years, and then return to Italy. The restcome to stay. 

A vast proportion of these accessions to the American population since1840 has, with the exception of the East European Jews, consisted ofpeasantry, mainly or totally illiterate, accustomed to a low standard oflife and heavy bodily toil. For most of them the transfer to a newcountry meant severance from the religious communion in which they hadbeen bred and from the servilities or subordinations to which they wereaccustomed They brought little or no positive social tradition to thesynthesis to which they brought their blood and muscle. 

The earlier German, English and Scandinavian incomers were drawn from asomewhat higher social level, and were much more closely akin in habitsand faith to the earlier founders of the Republic. 

Our inquiry is this: What social structure is this pool of mixedhumanity developing or likely to develop?

Sec. 2

If we compare any European nation with the American, we perceive at oncecertain broad differences. The former, in comparison with the latter, isevolved and organised; the latter, in comparison with the former, isaggregated and chaotic. In nearly every European country there is asocial system often quite elaborately classed and defined; each classwith a sense of function, with an idea of what is due to it and what isexpected of it. Nearly everywhere you find a governing class, aristocratic in spirit, sometimes no doubt highly modified by recenteconomic and industrial changes, with more or less of the tradition of afeudal nobility, then a definite great mercantile class, then a largeself-respecting middle class of professional men, minor merchants, andso forth, then a new industrial class of employees in the manufacturingand urban districts, and a peasant population rooted to the land. Thereare, of course, many local modifications of this form: in France thenobility is mostly expropriated; in England, since the days of JohnBull, the peasant has lost his common rights and his holding, and becomean "agricultural labourer" to a newer class of more extensive farmer. But these are differences in detail; the fact of the organisation, andthe still more important fact of the traditional feeling oforganisation, remain true of all these older communities. 

And in nearly every European country, though it may be somewhatdespoiled here and shorn of exclusive predominance there, or representedby a dislocated "reformed" member, is the Church, custodian of a greatmoral tradition, closely associated with the national universities andthe organisation of national thought. The typical European town has itscastle or great house, its cathedral or church, its middle-class andlower-class quarters. Five miles off one can see that the American townis on an entirely different plan. In his remarkable "American Scene, "Mr. Henry James calls attention to the fact that the Church as one seesit and feels it universally in Europe is altogether absent, and he addsa comment as suggestive as it is vague. Speaking of the appearance ofthe Churches, so far as they do appear amidst American urban scenery, hesays:

 "Looking for the most part no more established or seated than a stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the inveterate bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated pretensions merely), and fatally despoiled of the fine old ecclesiastical arrogance, ... The field of American life is as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centre-piece; a truth that the myriad little structures 'attended' on Sundays and on the 'off' evenings of their 'sociables' proclaim as with the audible sound of the roaring of a million mice.... 

 "And however one indicates one's impression of the clearance, the clearance itself, in its completeness, with the innumerable odd connected circumstances that bring it home, represents, in the history of manners and morals, a deviation in the mere measurement of which hereafter may well reside a certain critical thrill. I say hereafter because it is a question of one of those many measurements that would as yet, in the United States, be premature. Of all the solemn conclusions one feels as 'barred, ' the list is quite headed in the States, I think, by this particular abeyance of judgment. When an ancient treasure of precious vessels, overscored with glowing gems and wrought artistically into wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been converted through a vast community into the small change, the simple circulating medium of dollars and 'nickels, ' we can only say that the consequent permeation will be of values of a new order. Of _what_ order we must wait to see. "

America has no Church. Neither has it a peasantry nor an aristocracy, and until well on in the Victorian epoch it had no disproportionatelyrich people. 

In America, except in the regions where the negro abounds, there is nolower stratum. There is no "soil people" to this community at all; yourbottom-most man is a mobile freeman who can read, and who has ideasabove digging and pigs and poultry-keeping, except incidentally for hisown ends. No one owns to subordination As a consequence, any positionwhich involves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority is difficultto fill; there is, from the European point of view, an extraordinarydearth of servants, and this endures in spite of a great peasantimmigration. The servile tradition will not root here now; it diesforthwith. An enormous importation of European serfs and peasants goeson, but as they touch this soil their backs begin to stiffen with a newassertion. 

And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. Thereis no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne, nolegitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper socialstructure of leisure, power and State responsibility which in the oldEuropean theory of Society was supposed to give significance to thewhole. The American community, one cannot too clearly insist, does notcorrespond to an entire European community at all, but only to themiddle masses of it, to the trading and manufacturing class between thedimensions of the magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan. It is thecentral part of the European organism without either the dreaming heador the subjugated feet. Even the highly feudal slave-holding "countyfamily" traditions of Virginia and the South pass now out of memory. Sothat in a very real sense the past of the American nation is in Europe, and the settled order of the past is left behind there. This communitywas, as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its branches, andbrought hither. It began neither serf nor lord, but burgher and farmer;it followed the normal development of the middle class under Progresseverywhere and became capitalistic. The huge later immigration hasconverged upon the great industrial centres and added merely a vastnon-servile element of employees to the scheme. 

America has been and still very largely is a one-class country. It is agreat sea of human beings detached from their traditions of origin. Thesocial difference from Europe appears everywhere, and nowhere morestrikingly than in the railway carriages. In England the compartments inthese are either "first class, " originally designed for the aristocracy, or "second class, " for the middle class, or "third class, " for thepopulace. In America there is only one class, one universal simpledemocratic car. In the Southern States, however, a proportion of thesesimple democratic cars are inscribed with the word "White, " whereby ninemillion people are excluded. But to this original even-handed treatmentthere was speedily added a more sumptuous type of car, the parlour car, accessible to extra dollars; and then came special types of train, allmade up of parlour cars and observation cars and the like. In Englandnearly every train remains still first, second and third, or first andthird. And now, quite outdistancing the differentiation of England, America produces private cars and private trains, such as Europereserves only for crowned heads. 

The evidence of the American railways, then, suggests very strongly whata hundred other signs confirm, that the huge classless sea of Americanpopulation is not destined to remain classless, is already developingseparations and distinctions and structures of its own. And monstrousarchitectural portents in Boston and Salt Lake City encourage one tosuppose that even that churchless aspect, which so stirred thespeculative element in Mr. Henry James, is only the opening formlessphase of a community destined to produce not only classes butintellectual and moral forms of the most remarkable kind. 

Sec. 3

It is well to note how these ninety millions of people whose socialfuture we are discussing are distributed. This huge development of humanappliances and resources is here going on in a community that is still, for all the dense crowds of New York, the teeming congestion of EastSide, extraordinarily scattered. America, one recalls, is still anunoccupied country across which the latest developments of civilisationare rushing. We are dealing here with a continuous area of land whichis, leaving Alaska out of account altogether, equal to Great Britain, France, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Holland, Spain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe, Egypt and the whole Empire of India, and the population spread out overthis vast space is still less than the joint population of the first twocountries named and not a quarter that of India. 

Moreover, it is not spread at all evenly. Much of it is in undistributedclots. It is not upon the soil; barely half of it is in holdings andhomes and authentic communities. It is a population of an extremelymodern type. Urban concentration has already gone far with it; fifteenmillions of it are crowded into and about twenty great cities, anothereighteen millions make up five hundred towns. Between these centres ofpopulation run railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks of various sorts, but to the European eye these are merescratchings on a virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests itselfthrough this thin network of human conveniences, appears in the mesheseven at the railroad side. 

Essentially, America is still an unsettled land, with only a fewincidental good roads in favoured places, with no universal police, withno wayside inns where a civilised man may rest, with still only thecrudest of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches of swamp andforest and desert by the track side, still unassailed by industry. Thismuch one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago. Westward it becomesmore and more the fact. In Idaho, at last, comes the untouched andperhaps invincible desert, plain and continuous through the long hoursof travel. Huge areas do not contain one human being to the square mile, still vaster portions fall short of two.... 

It is upon Pennsylvania and New York State and the belt of great townsthat stretches out past Chicago to Milwaukee and Madison that the nationcentres and seems destined to centre. One needs but examine a tintedpopulation map to realise that. The other concentrations are provincialand subordinate; they have the same relation to the main axis thatGlasgow or Cardiff have to London in the British scheme. 

Sec. 4

When I speak of this vast multitude, these ninety millions of the UnitedStates of America as being for the most part peasants de-peasant-isedand common people cut off from their own social traditions, I do notintend to convey that the American community is as a wholetraditionless. There is in America a very distinctive tradition indeed, which animates the entire nation, gives a unique idiom to its press andall its public utterances, and is manifestly the starting point fromwhich the adjustments of the future must be made. 

The mere sight of the stars and stripes serves to recall it; "Yankee" inthe mouth of a European gives something of its quality. One thinks atonce of a careless abandonment of any pretension, of tireless energyand daring enterprise, of immense self-reliance, of a disrespect for thepast so complete that a mummy is in itself a comical object, and theblowing out of an ill-guarded sacred flame, a delightful jest. Onethinks of the enterprise of the sky-scraper and the humour of "A Yankeeat the Court of King Arthur, " and of "Innocents Abroad. " Its dominantnotes are democracy, freedom, and confidence. It is religious-spiritedwithout superstition consciously Christian in the vein of a nearlyUnitarian Christianity, fervent but broadened, broadened as a halfpennyis broadened by being run over by an express train, substantially thesame, that is to say, but with a marked loss of outline and detail. Itis a tradition of romantic concession to good and inoffensive women anda high development of that personal morality which puts sexualcontinence and alcoholic temperance before any public virtue. It isequally a tradition of sporadic emotional public-spiritedness, entirelyof the quality of gallantry, of handsome and surprising gifts to thepeople, disinterested occupation of office and the like. It isemotionally patriotic, hypotheticating fighting and dying for one'scountry as a supreme good while inculcating also that working and livingfor oneself is quite within the sphere of virtuous action. It adores theflag but suspects the State. One sees more national flags and fewernational servants in America than in any country in the world. Itsconception of manners is one of free plain-spoken men revering women andshielding them from most of the realities of life, scornful ofaristocracies and monarchies, while asserting simply, directly, boldlyand frequently an equal claim to consideration with all other men. Ifthere is any traditional national costume, it is shirt-sleeves. And itcherishes the rights of property above any other right whatsoever. 

Such are the details that come clustering into one's mind in response tothe phrase, the American tradition. 

From the War of Independence onward until our own times that tradition, that very definite ideal, has kept pretty steadily the same. It is theimage of a man and not the image of a State. Its living spirit has beenthe spirit of freedom at any cost, unconditional and irresponsible. Itis the spirit of men who have thrown off a yoke, who are jealouslyresolved to be unhampered masters of their "own, " to whom nothing elseis of anything but secondary importance. That was the spirit of theEnglish small gentry and mercantile class, the comfortable propertyowners, the Parliamentarians, in Stuart times. Indeed even earlier, itis very largely the spirit of More's "Utopia. " It was that spirit sentOliver Cromwell himself packing for America, though a heedless andill-advised and unforeseeing King would not let him go. It was thespirit that made taxation for public purposes the supreme wrong andprovoked each country, first the mother country and then in its turn thedaughter country, to armed rebellion. It has been the spirit of theBritish Whig and the British Nonconformist almost up to the present day. In the Reform Club of London, framed and glazed over against MagnaCharta, is the American Declaration of Independence, kindred trophiesthey are of the same essentially English spirit of stubborninsubordination. But the American side of it has gone on unchecked bythe complementary aspect of the English character which British Toryismexpresses. 

The War of Independence raised that Whig suspicion of and hostility togovernment and the freedom of private property and the repudiation ofany but voluntary emotional and supererogatory co-operation in thenational purpose to the level of a religion, and the AmericanConstitution with but one element of elasticity in the Supreme Courtdecisions, established these principles impregnably in the politicalstructure. It organised disorganisation. Personal freedom, defiance ofauthority, and the stars and stripes have always gone together in men'sminds; and subsequent waves of immigration, the Irish fleeing famine, for which they held the English responsible, and the Eastern EuropeanJews escaping relentless persecutions, brought a persuasion of immensepublic wrongs, as a necessary concomitant of systematic government, torefresh without changing this defiant thirst for freedom at any cost. 

In my book, "The Future in America, " I have tried to make an estimate ofthe working quality of this American tradition of unconditional freedomfor the adult male citizen. I have shown that from the point of view ofanyone who regards civilisation as an organisation of humaninterdependence and believes that the stability of society can besecured only by a conscious and disciplined co-ordination of effort, itis a tradition extraordinarily and dangerously deficient in what I havecalled a "_sense of the State_. " And by a "sense of the State" I meannot merely a vague and sentimental and showy public-spiritedness--ofthat the States have enough and to spare--but a real sustainingconception of the collective interest embodied in the State as an objectof simple duty and as a determining factor in the life of eachindividual. It involves a sense of function and a sense of "place, " asense of a general responsibility and of a general well-beingoverriding the individual's well-being, which are exactly the senses theAmerican tradition attacks and destroys. 

For the better part of a century the American tradition, quite as muchby reason of what it disregards as of what it suggests, has meant agreat release of human energy, a vigorous if rough and untidyexploitation of the vast resources that the European invention ofrailways and telegraphic communication put within reach of the Americanpeople. It has stimulated men to a greater individual activity, perhaps, than the world has ever seen before. Men have been wasted bymisdirection no doubt, but there has been less waste by inaction andlassitude than was the case in any previous society. Great bulks ofthings and great quantities of things have been produced, huge areasbrought under cultivation, vast cities reared in the wilderness. 

But this tradition has failed to produce the beginnings or promise ofany new phase of civilised organisation, the growths have remainedlargely invertebrate and chaotic, and, concurrently with its gift ofsplendid and monstrous growth, it has also developed portentouspolitical and economic evils. No doubt the increment of human energy hasbeen considerable, but it has been much less than appears at firstsight. Much of the human energy that America has displayed in the lastcentury is not a development of new energy but a diversion. It has beenaccompanied by a fall in the birth-rate that even the immigrationtorrent has not altogether replaced. Its insistence on the individual, its disregard of the collective organisation, its treatment of women andchildren as each man's private concern, has had its natural outcome. Men's imaginations have been turned entirely upon individual andimmediate successes and upon concrete triumphs; they have had no regardor only an ineffectual sentimental regard for the race. Every man waslooking after himself, and there was no one to look after the future. Had the promise of 1815 been fulfilled, there would now be in the UnitedStates of America one hundred million descendants of the homogeneous andfree-spirited native population of that time. There is not, as a matterof fact, more than thirty-five million. There is probably, as I havepointed out, much less. Against the assets of cities, railways, minesand industrial wealth won, the American tradition has to set the priceof five-and-seventy million native citizens who have never found time toget born, and whose place is now more or less filled by aliensubstitutes. Biologically speaking, this is not a triumph for theAmerican tradition. It is, however, very clearly an outcome of theintense individualism of that tradition. Under the sway of that it hasburnt its future in the furnace to keep up steam. 

The next and necessary evil consequent upon this exaltation of theindividual and private property over the State, over the race that isand over public property, has been a contempt for public service. It hasidentified public spirit with spasmodic acts of public beneficence. TheAmerican political ideal became a Cincinnatus whom nobody sent for andwho therefore never left his plough. There has ensued a corrupt andundignified political life, speaking claptrap, dark with violence, illiterate and void of statesmanship or science, forbidding any healthysocial development through public organisation at home, and every yearthat the increasing facilities of communication draw the alien nationscloser, deepening the risks of needless and disastrous wars abroad. 

And in the third place it is to be remarked that the American traditionhas defeated its dearest aims of a universal freedom and a practicalequality. The economic process of the last half-century, so far asAmerica is concerned has completely justified the generalisations ofMarx. There has been a steady concentration of wealth and of the realityas distinguished from the forms of power in the hands of a smallenergetic minority, and a steady approximation of the condition of themass of the citizens to that of the so-called proletariat of theEuropean communities. The tradition of individual freedom and equalityis, in fact, in process of destroying the realities of freedom andequality out of which it rose. Instead of the six hundred thousandfamilies of the year 1790, all at about the same level of property and, excepting the peculiar condition of seven hundred thousand blacks, withscarcely anyone in the position of a hireling, we have now as the moststriking, though by no means the most important, fact in American sociallife a frothy confusion of millionaires' families, just as wasteful, foolish and vicious as irresponsible human beings with unlimitedresources have always shown themselves to be. And, concurrently with theappearance of these concentrations of great wealth, we have appearingalso poverty, poverty of a degree that was quite unknown in the UnitedStates for the first century of their career as an independent nation. In the last few decades slums as frightful as any in Europe haveappeared with terrible rapidity, and there has been a development of theviler side of industrialism, of sweating and base employment of the mostominous kind. 

In Mr. Robert Hunter's "Poverty" one reads of "not less than eightythousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present employed inthe textile mills of this country. In the South there are now six timesas many children at work as there were twenty years ago. Child labour isincreasing yearly in that section of the country. Each year more littleones are brought in from the fields and hills to live in the degradingand demoralising atmosphere of the mill towns.... "

Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered fromCommissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of littlenephews and nieces, friends' sons and so forth brought in by them ispeculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It wasa particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little boyof no ascertainable relationship.... 

In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions werehardly worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the tiniestand frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning and, like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labour; and, when they return home, "wearily fling themselves on their beds, tootired to take off their clothes. " Many children work all night--"in themaddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere insanitary andclouded with humidity and lint. "

"It will be long, " adds Mr. Hunter in his description, "before I forgetthe face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched forwardto rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form alreadyshowing the physical effects of labour. This child, six years of age, was working twelve hours a day. "

From Mr. Spargo's "Bitter Cry of the Children" I learn this much of thejoys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania:

"For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop over thechute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the coal as itmoves past them. The air is black with coal dust, and the roar of thecrushers, screens and rushing mill-race of coal is deafening. Sometimesone of the children falls into the machinery and is terribly mangled, orslips into the chute and is smothered to death. Many children are killedin this way. Many others, after a time, contract coal-miners asthma andconsumption, which gradually undermine their health. Breathingcontinually day after day the clouds of coal dust, their lungs becomeblack and choked with small particles of anthracite.... "

In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J. F. Carey tells how littlenaked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New Yorkmillionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats, in a bath of chemicalsthat bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers.... 

Altogether it would seem that at least one million and a half childrenare growing up in the United States of America stunted and practicallyuneducated because of unregulated industrialism. These children, ill-fed, ill-trained mentally benighted, since they are alive andactive, since they are an active and positive and not a negative evil, are even more ominous in the American outlook than those five and sixtymillion of good race and sound upbringing who will now never be born. 

Sec. 5

It must be repeated that the American tradition is really the traditionof one particular ingredient in this great admixture and stirring up ofpeoples. This ingredient is the Colonial British, whose seventeenthcentury Puritanism and eighteenth century mercantile radicalism andrationalism manifestly furnished all the stuff out of which the Americantradition is made. It is this stuff planted in virgin soil and inflatedto an immense and buoyant optimism by colossal and unanticipatedmaterial prosperity and success. From that British middle-classtradition comes the individualist protestant spirit, the keenself-reliance and personal responsibility, the irresponsibleexpenditure, the indiscipline and mystical faith in things being managedproperly if they are only let alone. "State-blindness" is the naturaland almost inevitable quality of a middle-class tradition, a class thathas been forced neither to rule nor obey, which has been concentratedand successfully concentrated on private gain. 

This middle-class British section of the American population was, and isto this day, the only really articulate ingredient in its mentalcomposition. And so it has had a monopoly in providing the Americanforms of thought. The other sections of peoples that have been annexedby or have come into this national synthesis are _silent_ so far as anycontribution to the national stock of ideas and ideals is concerned. There are, for example, those great elements, the Spanish Catholics, theFrench Catholic population of Louisiana, the Irish Catholics, theFrench-Canadians who are now ousting the sterile New Englander from NewEngland, the Germans, the Italians the Hungarians. Comparatively theysay nothing. From all the ten million of coloured people come just twoor three platform voices, Booker Washington, Dubois, Mrs. ChurchTerrell, mere protests at specific wrongs. The clever, restless EasternEuropean Jews, too, have still to find a voice. Professor Münsterberghas written with a certain bitterness of the inaudibility of the Germanelement in the American population. They allow themselves, heremonstrates, to count for nothing. They did not seem to exist, hepoints out, even in politics until prohibitionist fury threatened theirbeer. Then, indeed, the American German emerged from silence andobscurity, but only to rescue his mug and retire again with it intoenigmatical silence. 

If there is any exception to this predominance of the tradition of theEnglish-speaking, originally middle-class, English-thinking northernerin the American mind, it is to be found in the spread of socialdemocracy outward from the festering tenement houses of Chicago into themining and agrarian regions of the middle west. It is a fierce form ofsocialist teaching that speaks throughout these regions, far moreclosely akin to the revolutionary Socialism of the continent of Europethan to the constructive and evolutionary Socialism of Great Britain. Its typical organ is _The Appeal to Reason_, which circulates more thana quarter of a million copies weekly from Kansas City. It is a Socialismreeking with class feeling and class hatred and altogether anarchisticin spirit; a new and highly indigestible contribution to the Americanmoral and intellectual synthesis. It is remarkable chiefly as the oneshrill exception in a world of plastic acceptance. 

Now it is impossible to believe that this vast silence of theseimported and ingested factors that the American nation has taken toitself is as acquiescent as it seems. No doubt they are largely takingover the traditional forms of American thought and expression quietlyand without protest, and wearing them; but they will wear them as a manwears a misfit, shaping and adapting it every day more and more to hisnatural form, here straining a seam and there taking in a looseness. Aforce of modification must be at work. It must be at work in spite ofthe fact that, with the exception of social democracy, it does notanywhere show as a protest or a fresh beginning or a challenge to theprevailing forms. 

How far it has actually been at work is, perhaps, to be judged best byan observant stroller, surveying the crowds of a Sunday evening in NewYork, or read in the sheets of such a mirror of popular taste as theSunday edition of the _New York American_ or the _New York Herald_. Inthe former just what I mean by the silent modification of the oldtradition is quite typically shown. Its leading articles are written byMr. Arthur Brisbane, the son of one of the Brook Farm Utopians, thatgathering in which Hawthorne and Henry James senior, and Margaret Fullerparticipated, and in which the whole brilliant world of Boston's past, the world of Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, was interested. Mr. Brisbaneis a very distinguished man, quite over and above the fact that he ispaid the greatest salary of any journalist in the world. He writes witha wit and directness that no other living man can rival, and he holds upconstantly what is substantially the American ideal of the past centuryto readers who evidently need strengthening in it. It is, of course, thefigure of a man and not of a State; it is a man, clean, clean shavedand almost obtrusively strong-jawed, honest, muscular, alert, pushful, chivalrous, self-reliant, non-political except when he breaks intoshrewd and penetrating voting--"you can fool all the people some of thetime, " etc. --and independent--independent--in a world which is thereforecertain to give way to him. 

His doubts, his questionings, his aspirations, are dealt with by Mr. Brisbane with a simple direct fatherliness with all the beneficentpersuasiveness of a revivalist preacher. Millions read these leaders andfeel a momentary benefit, en route for the more actual portions of thepaper. He asks: "Why are all men gamblers?" He discusses our Longing forImmortal Imperfection, and "Did we once live on the moon?" He recommendsthe substitution of whisky and soda for neat whisky, drawing anillustration from the comparative effect of the diluted and of theundiluted liquid as an eye-wash ("Try whisky on your friend's eyeball!"is the heading), sleep ("The man who loses sleep will make a failure ofhis life, or at least diminish greatly his chances of success"), and theeducation of the feminine intelligence ("The cow that kicks her weanedcalf is all heart"). He makes identically the same confident appeal tothe moral motive which was for so long the salvation of the Puritanindividualism from which the American tradition derives. "That hand, " hewrites, "which supports the head of the new-born baby, the mother'shand, supports the civilisation of the world. "

But that sort of thing is not saving the old native strain in thepopulation. It moves people, no doubt, but inadequately. And here is apassage that is quite the quintessence of Americanism, of all its deepmoral feeling and sentimental untruthfulness. I wonder if any man butan American or a British nonconformist in a state of rhetoricalexcitement ever believed that Shakespeare wrote his plays or MichaelAngelo painted in a mood of humanitarian exaltation, "_for the good ofall men_. "

 "What _shall_ we strive for? _Money_?

 "Get a thousand millions. Your day will come, and in due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at your bump of acquisitiveness as at the mean coat of the pauper. 

 "Then shall we strive for _power_?

 "The names of the first great kings of the world are forgotten, and the names of all those whose power we envy will drift to forgetfulness soon. What does the most powerful man in the world amount to standing at the brink of Niagara, with his solar plexus trembling? What is his power compared with the force of the wind or the energy of one small wave sweeping along the shore?

 "The power which man can build up within himself, for himself, is nothing. Only the dull reasoning of gratified egotism can make it seem worth while. 

 "Then what is worth while? Let us look at some of the men who have come and gone, and whose lives inspire us. Take a few at random:

 "Columbus, Michael Angelo, Wilberforce, Shakespeare, Galileo, Fulton, Watt, Hargreaves--these will do. 

 "Let us ask ourselves this question: 'Was there any _one thing_ that distinguished _all_ their lives, that united all these men, active in fields so different?'

 "Yes. Every man among them, and every man whose life history is worth the telling, did something for _the good of other men_.... 

 "Get money if you can. Get power if you can; Then, if you want to be more than the ten thousand million unknown mingled in the dust beneath you, see what good you can do with your money and your power. 

 "If you are one of the many millions who have not and can't get money or power, see what good you can do without either:

 "You can help carry a load for an old man. You can encourage and help a poor devil trying to reform. You can set a good example to children. You can stick to the men with whom you work, fighting honestly for their welfare. 

 "Time was when the ablest man would rather kill ten men than feed a thousand children. That time has gone. We do not care much about feeding the children, but we care less about killing the men. To that extent we have improved already. 

 "The day will come when we shall prefer helping our neighbour to robbing him--legally--of a million dollars. 

 "Do what good you can _now_, while it is unusual, and have the satisfaction of being a pioneer and an eccentric. "

It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the utmost to makeitself audible to the new world, and cracking into italics and breakinginto capitals with the strain. The rest of that enormous bale of paperis eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense ofcomprehensive things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalisations, apublic which has carried the conception of freedom to its logicalextreme of entire individual detachment. These tell-tale columns dealall with personality and the drama of personal life. They witness to nointerest but the interest in intense individual experiences. Theengagements, the love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people aregiven in pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits andsensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers who write thisstuff strike the personal note, and their heavily muscular portraitsfrown beside the initial letter. Murders and crimes are worked up to thekeenest pitch of realisation, and any new indelicacy in fashionablecostume, any new medical device or cure, any new dance or athleticism, any new breach in the moral code, any novelty in sea bathing or thewoman's seat on horseback, or the like, is given copious and movingillustration, stirring headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is acoloured supplement of knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaintdialect of the New York slums. It is a language from which "th" hasvanished, and it presents a world in which the kicking by a mule of anendless succession of victims is an inexhaustible joy to young and old. "Dat ole Maud!" There is a smaller bale dealing with sport. In theadvertisement columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; butgreat choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous tonics, clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business opportunities.... 

Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say, taken off its frills. All but one; Mr. Arthur Brisbane's eloquence onemay consider as the last stitch of the old costume--mere decoration. Excitement remains the residual object in life. The _New York American_represents a clientele to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestlywith no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn. 

Sec. 6

The modifications of the American tradition that will occur through itsadoption by these silent foreign ingredients in the racial synthesis arenot likely to add to it or elaborate it in any way. They tend merely tosimplify it to bare irresponsible non-moral individualism. It is withthe detail and qualification of a tradition as with the inflexions of alanguage; when another people takes it over the refinements disappear. But there are other forces of modification at work upon the Americantradition of an altogether more hopeful kind. It has entered upon aconstructive phase. Were it not so, then the American social outlookwould, indeed, be hopeless. 

The effectual modifying force at work is not the strangeness nor thetemperamental maladjustment of the new elements of population, but theconscious realisation of the inadequacy of the tradition on the part ofthe more intelligent sections of the American population. That blindnational conceit that would hear no criticism and admit no deficiencyhas disappeared. In the last decade such a change has come over theAmerican mind as sometimes comes over a vigorous and wilful child. Suddenly it seems to have grown up, to have begun to weigh its powersand consider its possible deficiencies. There was a time when Americanconfidence and self-satisfaction seemed impregnable; at the slightestqualm of doubt America took to violent rhetoric as a drunkard resorts todrink. Now the indictment I have drawn up harshly, bluntly andunflatteringly in Sec. 4 would receive the endorsement of American afterAmerican. The falling birth-rate of all the best elements in the State, the cankering effect of political corruption, the crumbling ofindependence and equality before the progressive aggregation ofwealth--he has to face them, he cannot deny them. There has arisen a newliterature, the literature of national self-examination, that seemsdestined to modify the American tradition profoundly. To me it seems toinvolve the hope and possibility of a conscious collective organisationof social life. 

If ever there was an epoch-marking book it was surely Henry DemarestLloyd's "Wealth against Commonwealth. " It marks an epoch not so much bywhat it says as by what it silently abandons. It was published in 1894, and it stated in the very clearest terms the incompatibility of thealmost limitless freedom of property set up by the constitution, withthe practical freedom and general happiness of the mass of men. It mustbe admitted that Lloyd never followed up the implications of thisrepudiation. He made his statements in the language of the tradition heassailed, and foreshadowed the replacement of chaos by order in quitechaotic and mystical appeals. Here, for instance, is a typical passagefrom "Man, the Social Creator". 

 "Property is now a stumbling-block to the people, just as government has been. Property will not be abolished, but, like government, it will be democratised. 

 "The philosophy of self-interest as the social solution was a good living and working synthesis in the days when civilisation was advancing its frontiers twenty miles a day across the American continent, and every man for himself was the best social mobilisation possible. 

 "But to-day it is a belated ghost that has overstayed the cock-crow. These were frontier morals. But this same, everyone for himself, becomes most immoral when the frontier is abolished and the pioneer becomes the fellow-citizen and these frontier morals are most uneconomic when labour can be divided and the product multiplied. Most uneconomic, for they make closure the rule of industry, leading not to wealth, but to that awful waste of wealth which is made visible to every eye in our unemployed--not hands alone, but land, machinery, and, most of all, hearts. Those who still practise these frontier morals are like criminals, who, according to the new science of penology, are simply reappearances of old types. Their acquisitiveness once divine like Mercury's, is now out of place except in jail. Because out of place, they are a danger. A sorry day it is likely to be for those who are found in the way when the new people rise to rush into each other's arms, to get together, to stay together and to live together. The labour movement halts because so many of its rank and file--and all its leaders--do not see clearly the golden thread of love on which have been strung together all the past glories of human association, and which is to serve for the link of the new Association of Friends who Labour, whose motto is 'All for All. '"

The establishment of the intricate co-operative commonwealth by a rushof eighty million flushed and shiny-eyed enthusiasts, in fact, isLloyd's proposal. He will not face, and few Americans to this day willface, the cold need of a great science of social adjustment and adisciplined and rightly ordered machinery to turn such enthusiasms toeffect. They seem incurably wedded to gush. However, he did expressclearly enough the opening phase of American disillusionment with thewild go-as-you-please that had been the conception of life in Americathrough a vehement, wasteful, expanding century. And he was theprecursor of what is now a bulky and extremely influential literature ofnational criticism. A number of writers, literary investigators one maycall them, or sociological men of letters, or magazine publicists--theyare a little difficult to place--has taken up the inquiry into thecondition of civic administration, into economic organisation intonational politics and racial interaction, with a frank fearlessness andan absence of windy eloquence that has been to many Europeans asurprising revelation of the reserve forces of the American mind. President Roosevelt, that magnificent reverberator of ideas, that gleamof wilful humanity, that fantastic first interruption to the successionof machine-made politicians at the White House, has echoed clearly tothis movement and made it an integral part of the general intellectualmovement of America. 

It is to these first intimations of the need of a "sense of the State"in America that I would particularly direct the reader's attention inthis discussion. They are the beginnings of what is quite conceivably agreat and complex reconstructive effort. I admit they are butbeginnings. They may quite possibly wither and perish presently; theymay much more probably be seized upon by adventurers and converted intoa new cant almost as empty and fruitless as the old. The fact remainsthat, through this busy and immensely noisy confusion of nearly ahundred millions of people, these little voices go intimating more andmore clearly the intention to undertake public affairs in a new spiritand upon new principles, to strengthen the State and the law againstindividual enterprise, to have done with those national superstitionsunder which hypocrisy and disloyalty and private plunder have shelteredand prospered for so long. 

Just as far as these reform efforts succeed and develop is theorganisation of the United States of America into a great, self-conscious, civilised nation, unparalleled in the world's history, possible; just as far as they fail is failure written over the Americanfuture. The real interest of America for the next century to the studentof civilisation will be the development of these attempts, now in theirinfancy, to create and realise out of this racial hotchpotch, this humanchaos, an idea, of the collective commonwealth as the datum of referencefor every individual life. 

Sec. 7

I have hinted in the last section that there is a possibility that thenew wave of constructive ideas in American thought may speedily developa cant of its own. But even then, a constructive cant is better than adestructive one. Even the conscious hypocrite has to do something tojustify his pretences, and the mere disappearance from current thoughtof the persuasion that organisation is a mistake and disciplineneedless, clears the ground of one huge obstacle even if it guaranteesnothing about the consequent building. 

But, apart from this, are there more solid and effectual forces behindthis new movement of ideas that makes for organisation in Americanmedley at the present time?

The speculative writer casting about for such elements lights upon foursets of possibilities which call for discussion. First, one has to ask:How far is the American plutocracy likely to be merely a wasteful andchaotic class, and how far is it likely to become consciouslyaristocratic and constructive? Secondly, and in relation to this, whatpossibilities of pride and leading are there in the great universityfoundations of America? Will they presently begin to tell as arestraining and directing force upon public thought? Thirdly, will thegrowing American Socialist movement, which at present is just asanarchistic and undisciplined in spirit as everything else in America, presently perceive the constructive implications of its generalpropositions and become statesmanlike and constructive? And, fourthly, what are the latent possibilities of the American women? Will women asthey become more and more aware of themselves as a class and of theproblem of their sex become a force upon the anarchistic side, a forcefavouring race-suicide, or upon the constructive side which plans andbuilds and bears the future?

The only possible answer to each one of these questions at present isguessing and an estimate. But the only way in which a conception of theAmerican social future may be reached lies through their discussion. 

Let us begin by considering what constructive forces may exist in thisnew plutocracy which already so largely sways American economic andpolitical development. The first impression is one of extravagant andaimless expenditure, of a class irresponsible and wasteful beyond allprecedent. One gets a Zolaesque picture of that aspect in Mr. UptonSinclair's "Metropolis, " or the fashionable intelligence of the popularNew York Sunday editions, and one finds a good deal of confirmatoryevidence in many incidental aspects of the smart American life of Parisand the Riviera. The evidence in the notorious Thaw trial, after one hasdiscounted its theatrical elements, was still a very convincingdemonstration of a rotten and extravagant, because aimless andfunctionless, class of rich people. But one has to be careful in thismatter if one is to do justice to the facts. If a thing is made up oftwo elements, and one is noisy and glaringly coloured, and the other isquiet and colourless, the first impression created will be that thething is identical with the element that is noisy and glaringlycoloured. One is much less likely to hear of the broad plans and thequality of the wise, strong and constructive individuals in a class thanof their foolish wives, their spendthrift sons, their mistresses, andtheir moments of irritation and folly. 

In the making of very rich men there is always a factor of good fortuneand a factor of design and will. One meets rich men at times who seem tobe merely lucky gamblers, who strike one as just the thousandth man in amyriad of wild plungers, who are, in fact, chance nobodies washed up byan eddy. Others, again, strike one as exceptionally lucky half-knaves. But there are others of a growth more deliberate and of an altogetherhigher personal quality. One takes such men as Mr. J. D. Rockefeller orMr. Pierpont Morgan--the scale of their fortunes makes them publicproperty--and it is clear that we are dealing with persons on quite adifferent level of intellectual power from the British Colonel Norths, for example, or the South African Joels. In my "Future in America" Ihave taken the former largely at Miss Tarbell's estimate, and treatedhim as a case of acquisitiveness raised in Baptist surroundings. But Idoubt very much if that exhausts the man as he is to-day. Given a manbrought up to saving and "getting on" as if to a religion, a man veryacquisitive and very patient and restrained, and indubitably with greatorganising power, and he grows rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Andhaving done so, there he is. What is he going to do? Every step he takesup the ascent to riches gives him new perspectives and new points ofview. 

It may have appealed to the young Rockefeller, clerk in a Chicago house, that to be rich was itself a supreme end; in the first flush of thediscovery that he was immensely rich, he may have thanked Heaven as iffor a supreme good, and spoken to a Sunday school gathering as if heknew himself for the most favoured of men. But all that happened twentyyears ago or more. One does not keep on in that sort of satisfaction;one settles down to the new facts. And such men as Mr. Rockefeller andMr. Pierpont Morgan do not live in a made and protected world with theirminds trained, tamed and fed and shielded from outside impressions asroyalties do. The thought of the world has washed about them; they haveread and listened to the discussion of themselves for some decades; theyhave had sleepless nights of self-examination. To succeed in acquiringenormous wealth does not solve the problem of life; indeed, it reopensit in a new form. "What shall I do with myself?" simply recurs again. You may have decided to devote yourself to getting on, getting wealthy. Well, you have got it. Now, again, comes the question: "What shall Ido?"

Mr. Pierpont Morgan, I am told, collected works of art. I canunderstand that satisfying a rich gentleman of leisure, but not a manwho has felt the sensation of holding great big things in his great bighands. Saul, going out to seek his father's asses, found a kingdom--andbecame very spiritedly a king, and it seems to me that these bigindustrial and financial organisers, whatever in their youth theyproposed to do or be, must many of them come to realise that theirorganising power is up against no less a thing than a nation's future. Napoleon, it is curious to remember once wanted to run a lodging-house, and a man may start to corner oil and end the father of a civilisation. 

Now, I am disposed to suspect at times that an inkling of such arealisation may have come to some of these very rich men. I am inclinedto put it among the possibilities of our time that it may presentlybecome clearly and definitely the inspiring idea of many of those whofind themselves predominantly rich. I do not see why these active richshould not develop statesmanship, and I can quite imagine themdeveloping very considerable statesmanship. Because these men were ableto realise their organising power in the absence of economicorganisation, it does not follow that they will be fanatical for acontinuing looseness and freedom of property. The phase of economicliberty ends itself, as Marx long ago pointed out. The American businessworld becomes more and more a managed world with fewer and fewer wildpossibilities of succeeding. Of all people the big millionaires shouldrealise this most acutely, and, in fact, there are many signs that theydo. It seems to me that the educational zeal of Mr. Andrew Carnegie andthe university and scientific endowments of Mr. Rockefeller are notmerely showy benefactions; they express a definite feeling of thepresent need of constructive organisation in the social scheme. The timehas come to build. There is, I think, good reason for expecting thatstatesmanship of the millionaires to become more organised andscientific and comprehensive in the coming years. It is plausible atleast to maintain that the personal quality of the American plutocracyhas risen in the last three decades, has risen from the quality of amere irresponsible wealthy person towards that of a real aristocrat witha "sense of the State. " That one may reckon the first hopefulpossibility in the American outlook. 

And intimately connected with this development of an attitude of publicresponsibility in the very rich is the decay on the one hand of thepreposterous idea once prevalent in America that politics is anunsuitable interest for a "gentleman, " and on the other of thedemocratic jealousy of any but poor politicians. In New York they talkvery much of "gentlemen, " and by "gentlemen" they seem to mean rich men"in society" with a college education. Nowadays, "gentlemen" seem moreand more disposed towards politics, and less and less towards a life ofbusiness or detached refinement. President Roosevelt, for example, wasone of the pioneers in this new development, this restoration ofvirility to the gentlemanly ideal. His career marks the appearance of anew and better type of man in American politics, the close of the ruleof the idealised nobody. 

The prophecy has been made at times that the United States might developa Caesarism, and certainly the position of president might easilybecome that of an imperator. No doubt in the event of an acute failureof the national system such a catastrophe might occur, but the morehopeful and probable line of development is one in which a conscious andpowerful, if informal, aristocracy will play a large part. It may, indeed, never have any of the outward forms of an aristocracy or anydefinite public recognition. The Americans are as chary of the coronetand the known aristocratic titles as the Romans were of the word King. Octavius, for that reason, never called himself king nor Italy akingdom. He was just the Caesar of the Republic, and the Empire had beenestablished for many years before the Romans fully realised that theyhad returned to monarchy. 

Sec. 8

The American universities are closely connected in their developmentwith the appearance and growing class-consciousness of this aristocracyof wealth. The fathers of the country certainly did postulate a need ofuniversities, and in every state Congress set aside public lands tofurnish a university with material resources. Every State possesses auniversity, though in many instances these institutions are in the lastdegree of feebleness. In the days of sincere democracy the starvation ofgovernment and the dislike of all manifest inequalities involved thestarvation of higher education. Moreover, the entirely artificial natureof the State boundaries, representing no necessary cleavages andtraversed haphazard by the lines of communication, made some of theseState foundations unnecessary and others inadequate to a convergentdemand. From the very beginning, side by side with the Stateuniversities, were the universities founded by benefactors; and with theevolution of new centres of population, new and extremely generousplutocratic endowments appeared. The dominant universities of Americato-day, the treasure houses of intellectual prestige, are almost all ofthem of plutocratic origin, and even in the State universities, if newresources are wanted to found new chairs, to supply funds for researchor publication or what not, it is to the more State-conscious wealthyand not to the State legislature that the appeal is made almost as amatter of course. The common voter, the small individualist has lessconstructive imagination--is more individualistic, that is, than the bigindividualist. 

This great network of universities that is now spread over the States, interchanging teachers, literature and ideas, and educating not only theprofessions but a growing proportion of business leaders and wealthypeople, must necessarily take an important part in the reconstruction ofthe American tradition that is now in progress. It is giving a large andincreasing amount of attention to the subjects that bear most directlyupon the peculiar practical problems of statecraft in America, topsychology, sociology and political science. It is influencing the pressmore and more directly by supplying a rising proportion of journalistsand creating an atmosphere of criticism and suggestion. It is keepingitself on the one hand in touch with the popular literature of publiccriticism in those new and curious organs of public thought, theten-cent magazines; and on the other it is making a constantly moresolid basis of common understanding upon which the newer generation ofplutocrats may meet. That older sentimental patriotism must be givingplace under its influence to a more definite and effectual conception ofa collective purpose. It is to the moral and intellectual influence ofsustained scientific study in the universities, and a growing increaseof the college-trained element in the population that we must look if weare to look anywhere for the new progressive methods, for thesubstitution of persistent, planned and calculated social developmentfor the former conditions of systematic neglect and corruption in publicaffairs varied by epileptic seizures of "Reform. "

Sec. 9

A third influence that may also contribute very materially to thereconstruction of the American tradition is the Socialist movement. Itis true that so far American Socialism has very largely taken anAnarchistic form, has been, in fact, little more than a revolutionarymovement of the wages-earning class against the property owner. It hasalready been pointed out that it derives not from contemporary EnglishSocialism but from the Marxist social democracy of the continent ofEurope, and has not even so much of the constructive spirit as has beendeveloped by the English Socialists of the Fabian and Labour Party groupor by the newer German evolutionary Socialists. Nevertheless, wheneverSocialism is intelligently met by discussion or whenever it draws nearto practicable realisation, it becomes, by virtue of its inherentimplications, a constructive force, and there is no reason to supposethat it will not be intelligently met on the whole and in the long runin America. The alternative to a developing Socialism among thelabouring masses in America is that revolutionary Anarchism from whichit is slowly but definitely marking itself off. In America we have toremember that we are dealing with a huge population of people who arefor the most part, and more and more evidently destined under thepresent system of free industrial competition, to be either very smalltraders, small farmers on the verge of debt, or wages-earners for alltheir lives. They are going to lead limited lives and worried lives--andthey know it. Nearly everyone can read and discuss now, the process ofconcentrating property and the steady fixation of conditions that wereonce fluid and adventurous goes on in the daylight visibly to everyone. And it has to be borne in mind also that these people are so far underthe sway of the American tradition that each thinks himself as good asany man and as much entitled to the fullness of life. Whatever socialtradition their fathers had, whatever ideas of a place to be filledhumbly and seriously and duties to be done, have been left behind inEurope. No Church dominates the scenery of this new land, and offers inauthoritative and convincing tones consolations hereafter for livesobscurely but faithfully lived. Whatever else happens in this nationalfuture, upon one point the patriotic American may feel assured, and thatis of an immense general discontent in the working class and of apowerful movement in search of a general betterment. The practical formsand effects of that movement will depend almost entirely upon theaverage standard of life among the workers and their general education. Sweated and ill-organised foreigners, such as one finds in New Jerseyliving under conditions of great misery, will be fierce, impatient andaltogether dangerous. They will be acutely exasperated by every pictureof plutocratic luxury in their newspaper, they will readily resort todestructive violence. The western miner, the western agriculturist, worried beyond endurance between the money-lender and railwaycombinations will be almost equally prone to savage methods ofexpression. _The Appeal to Reason_, for example, to which I have madeearlier reference in this chapter, is furious to wreck the presentcapitalistic system, but it is far too angry and impatient for thatsatisfaction to produce any clear suggestion of what shall replace it. 

To call this discontent of the seething underside of the American systemSocialism is a misnomer. Were there no Socialism there would be just asmuch of this discontent, just the same insurgent force and desire forviolence, taking some other title and far more destructive methods. Thisdiscontent is a part of the same planless confusion that gives on theother side the wanton irresponsible extravagances of the smart people ofNew York. But Socialism alone, of all the forms of expression adopted bythe losers in the economic struggle, contains constructive possibilitiesand leads its adherents towards that ideal of an organised State, planned and developed, from which these terrible social stresses may beeliminated, which is also the ideal to which sociology and the thoughtsof every constructive-minded and foreseeing man in any position of lifetend to-day. In the Socialist hypothesis of collective ownership andadministration as the social basis, there is the germ of a "sense of theState" that may ultimately develop into comprehensive conceptions ofsocial order, conceptions upon which enlightened millionaires andunenlightened workers may meet at last in generous and patrioticco-operation. 

The chances of the American future, then, seem to range between twopossibilities just as a more or less constructive Socialism does or doesnot get hold of and inspire the working mass of the population. In theworst event--given an emotional and empty hostility to property as such, masquerading as Socialism--one has the prospect of a bitter and aimlessclass war between the expropriated many and the property-holding few, awar not of general insurrection but of localised outbreaks, strikes andbrutal suppressions, a war rising to bloody conflicts and sinking tocoarsely corrupt political contests, in which one side may prevail inone locality and one in another, and which may even develop into achronic civil war in the less-settled parts of the country or anirresistible movement for secession between west and east. That isassuming the greatest imaginable vehemence and short-sighted selfishnessand the least imaginable intelligence on the part of both workers andthe plutocrat-swayed government. But if the more powerful and educatedsections of the American community realise in time the immense moralpossibilities of the Socialist movement, if they will trouble tounderstand its good side instead of emphasising its bad, if they willkeep in touch with it and help in the development of a constructivecontent to its propositions, then it seems to me that popular Socialismmay count as a third great factor in the making of the civilisedAmerican State. 

In any case, it does not seem to me probable that there can be anynational revolutionary movement or any complete arrest in thedevelopment of an aristocratic phase in American history. The area ofthe country is too great and the means of communication between theworkers in different parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even foreffective political action in mass. In the worst event--and it is onlyin the worst event that a great insurrectionary movement becomesprobable--the newspapers, magazines, telephones and telegraphs, all theapparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals, guns, flying machines, and all the material of warfare, will be in thehands of the property owners, and the average of betrayal among theleaders of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspiciousunited only by their discomforts and not by any constructive intentions, will necessarily be high. So that, though the intensifying troublebetween labour and capital may mean immense social disorganisation andlawlessness, though it may even supply the popular support in newattempts at secession, I do not see in it the possibility and force forthat new start which the revolutionary Socialists anticipate; I see itmerely as one of several forces making, on the whole and particularly inview of the possible mediatory action of the universities, forconstruction and reconciliation. 

Sec. 10

What changes are likely to occur in the more intimate social life of thepeople of the United States? Two influences are at work that may modifythis profoundly. One is that spread of knowledge and that accompanyingchange in moral attitude which is more and more sterilising the onceprolific American home, and the second is the rising standard offeminine education. There has arisen in this age a new consciousness inwomen. They are entering into the collective thought to a degreeunprecedented in the world's history, and with portents at oncedisquieting and confused. 

In Sec. 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the Americansynthesis, the immigrant European aliens, the Catholics, the colouredblood, and so forth. I would now observe that, in the making of theAmerican tradition, the women also have been to a large extent, andquite remarkably, a silent factor. That tradition is not onlyfundamentally middle-class and English, but it is also fundamentallymasculine. The citizen is the man. The woman belongs to him. He votesfor her, works for her, does all the severer thinking for her. She is inthe home behind the shop or in the dairy at the farmhouse with herdaughters. She gets the meal while the men talk. The Americanimagination and American feeling centre largely upon the family and upon"mother. " American ideals are homely. The social unit is the home, andit is another and a different set of influences and considerations thatare never thought of at all when the home sentiment is under discussion, that, indeed, it would be indelicate to mention at such a time, whichare making that social unit the home of one child or of no children atall. 

That ideal of a man-owned, mother-revering home has been the prevalentAmerican ideal from the landing of the _Mayflower_ right down to theleader writing of Mr. Arthur Brisbane. And it is clear that a veryconsiderable section among one's educated women contemporaries do notmean to stand this ideal any longer. They do not want to be owned andcherished, and they do not want to be revered. How far they representtheir sex in this matter it is very hard to say. In England in theprofessional and most intellectually active classes it is scarcely anexaggeration to say that _all_ the most able women below five-and-thirtyare workers for the suffrage and the ideal of equal and independentcitizenship, and active critics of the conventions under which womenlive to-day. It is at least plausible to suppose that a day isapproaching when the alternatives between celibacy or a life of economicdependence and physical subordination to a man who has chosen her, andupon whose kindness her happiness depends, or prostitution, will nolonger be a satisfactory outlook for the great majority of women, andwhen, with a newly aroused political consciousness, they will beprepared to exert themselves as a class to modify this situation. It maybe that this is incorrect, and that in devotion to an accepted male andhis children most women do still and will continue to find theirgreatest satisfaction in life. But it is the writer's impression that sosimple and single-hearted a devotion is rare, and that, released fromtradition--and education, reading and discussion do mean release fromtradition--women are as eager for initiative, freedom and experience asmen. In that case they will persist in the present agitation forpolitical rights, and these secured, go on to demand a very considerablereconstruction of our present social order. 

It is interesting to point the direction in which this desire forindependence will probably take them. They will discover that thedependence of women at the present time is not so much a law-made as aneconomic dependence due to the economic disadvantages their sex imposesupon them. Maternity and the concomitants of maternity are thecircumstances in their lives, exhausting energy and earning nothing, that place them at a discount. From the stage when property ceased to bechiefly the creation of feminine agricultural toil (the so-calledprimitive matriarchate) to our present stage, women have had to dependupon a man's willingness to keep them, in order to realise the organicpurpose of their being. Whether conventionally equal or not, whethervoters or not, that necessity for dependence will still remain under oursystem of private property and free independent competition. There isonly one evident way by which women as a class can escape from thatdependence each upon an individual man and from all the practicalinferiority this dependence entails, and that is by so altering theirstatus as to make maternity and the upbringing of children a charge notupon the husband of the mother but upon the community. The publicEndowment of Maternity is the only route by which the mass of women canreach that personal freedom and independent citizenship so many of themdesire. 

Now, this idea of the Endowment of Maternity--or as it is frequentlyphrased, the Endowment of the Home--is at present put forward by themodern Socialists as an integral part of their proposals, and it isinteresting to note that there is this convergent possibility which maybring the feminist movement at last altogether into line withconstructive Socialism. Obviously, before anything in the direction offamily endowment becomes practicable, public bodies and the Stateorganisation will need to display far more integrity and efficiencythan they do in America at the present time. Still, that is the trend ofthings in all contemporary civilised communities, and it is a trend thatwill find a powerful reinforcement in men's solicitudes as theincreasing failure of the unsupported private family to produceoffspring adequate to the needs of social development becomes more andmore conspicuous. The impassioned appeals of President Roosevelt havealready brought home the race-suicide of the native-born to everyAmerican intelligence, but mere rhetoric will not in itself suffice tomake people, insecurely employed and struggling to maintain acomfortable standard of life against great economic pressure, prolific. Presented as a call to a particularly onerous and quite unpaid socialduty the appeal for unrestricted parentage fails. Husband and wife alikedread an excessive burthen. Travel, leisure, freedom, comfort, propertyand increased ability for business competition are the rewards ofabstinence from parentage, and even the disapproval of PresidentRoosevelt and the pride of offspring are insufficient counterweights tothese inducements. Large families disappear from the States, and moreand more couples are childless. Those who have children restrict theirnumber in order to afford those they have some reasonable advantage inlife. This, in the presence of the necessary knowledge, is aspractically inevitable a consequence of individualist competition andthe old American tradition as the appearance of slums and a class ofmillionaires. 

These facts go to the very root of the American problem. I have alreadypointed out that, in spite of a colossal immigration, the population ofthe United States was at the end of the nineteenth century over twentymillions short of what it should have been through its own nativeincrease had the birth-rate of the opening of the century beenmaintained. For a hundred years America has been "fed" by Europe. Thatfeeding process will not go on indefinitely. The immigration came inwaves as if reservoir after reservoir was tapped and exhausted. NowadaysEngland, Scotland, Ireland, France and Scandinavia send hardly any more;they have no more to send. Germany and Switzerland send only a few. TheSouth European and Austrian supply is not as abundant as it was. Theremay come a time when Europe and Western Asia will have no more surpluspopulation to send, when even Eastern Asia will have passed into a lessfecund phase, and when America will have to look to its own naturalincrease for the continued development of its resources. 

If the present isolated family of private competition is still thesocial unit, it seems improbable that there will be any greater naturalincrease than there is in France. 

Will the growing idea of a closer social organisation have developed bythat time to the possibility of some collective effort in this matter?Or will that only come about after the population of the world haspassed through a phase of absolute recession? The peculiar constitutionof the United States gives a remarkable freedom of experiment in thesematters to each individual state, and local developments do not need towait upon a national change of opinion; but, on the other hand, thesuperficial impression of an English visitor is that any such profoundinterference with domestic autonomy runs counter to all that Americansseem to hold dear at the present time. These are, however, new ideas andnew considerations that have still to be brought adequately before thenational consciousness, and it is quite impossible to calculate how apopulation living under changing conditions and with a rising standardof education and a developing feminine consciousness may not think andfeel and behave in a generation's time. At present for all political andcollective action America is a democracy of untutored individualist menwho will neither tolerate such interference between themselves and thewomen they choose to marry as the Endowment of Motherhood implies, norview the "kids" who will at times occur even in the best-regulatedfamilies as anything but rather embarrassing, rather amusing by-productsof the individual affections. 

I find in the London _New Age_ for August 15th, 1908, a description byMr. Jerome K. Jerome of "John Smith, " the average British voter. JohnSmith might serve in some respects for the common man of all the moderncivilisations. Among other things that John Smith thinks and wants, hewants:

 "a little house and garden in the country all to himself. His idea is somewhere near half an acre of ground. He would like a piano in the best room; it has always been his dream to have a piano. The youngest girl, he is convinced, is musical. As a man who has knocked about the world and has thought, he quite appreciates the argument that by co-operation the material side of life can be greatly improved. He quite sees that by combining a dozen families together in one large house better practical results can be obtained. It is as easy to direct the cooking for a hundred as for half a dozen. There would be less waste of food, of coals, of lighting. To put aside one piano for one girl is absurd. He sees all this, but it does not alter one little bit his passionate craving for that small house and garden all to himself. He is built that way. He is typical of a good many other men and women built on the same pattern. What are you going to do with them? Change them--their instincts, their very nature, rooted in the centuries? Or, as an alternative, vary Socialism to fit John Smith? Which is likely to prove the shorter operation?"

That, however, is by the way. Here is the point at issue:

 "He has heard that Socialism proposes to acknowledge woman's service to the State by paying her a weekly wage according to the number of children that she bears and rears. I don't propose to repeat his objections to the idea; they could hardly be called objections. There is an ugly look comes into his eyes; something quite undefinable, prehistoric, almost dangerous, looks out of them.... In talking to him on this subject you do not seem to be talking to a man. It is as if you had come face to face with something behind civilisation, behind humanity, something deeper down still among the dim beginnings of creation.... "

Now, no doubt Mr. Jerome is writing with emphasis here. But there issufficient truth in the passage for it to stand here as a rough symbolof another factor in this question. John Smithism, that manly andindividualist element in the citizen, stands over against and resistsall the forces of organisation that would subjugate it to a collectivepurpose. It is careless of coming national cessation and depopulation, careless of the insurgent spirit beneath the acquiescences of Mrs. Smith, careless of its own inevitable defeat in the economic struggle, careless because it can understand none of these things; it isobstinately muddle-headed, asserting what it conceives to be itselfagainst the universe and all other John Smiths whatsoever. It is afactor with all other factors. The creative, acquisitive, aggressivespirit of those bigger John Smiths who succeed as against the myriads ofJohn Smiths who fail, the wider horizons and more efficient methods ofthe educated man, the awakening class-consciousness of women, theinevitable futility of John Smithism, the sturdy independence that makesJohn Smith resent even disciplined co-operation with Tom Brown toachieve a common end, his essential incapacity, indeed, for collectiveaction; all these things are against the ultimate triumph, and make forthe ultimate civilisation even of John Smith. 

Sec. 11

It may be doubted if the increasing collective organisation of societyto which the United States of America, in common with all the rest ofthe world, seem to be tending will be to any very large extent anational organisation. The constitution is an immense and complicatedbarrier to effectual centralisation. There are many reasons forsupposing the national government will always remain a littleineffectual and detached from the full flow of American life, and thisnotwithstanding the very great powers with which the President isendowed. 

One of these reasons is certainly the peculiar accident that has placedthe seat of government upon the Potomac. To the thoughtful visitor tothe United States this hiding away of the central government in a minutedistrict remote from all the great centres of thought, population andbusiness activity becomes more remarkable more perplexing, moresuggestive of an incurable weakness in the national government as hegrasps more firmly the peculiarities of the American situation. 

I do not see how the central government of that great American nation ofwhich I dream can possibly be at Washington, and I do not see how thepresent central government can possibly be transferred to any othercentre. But to go to Washington, to see and talk to Washington, is toreceive an extraordinary impression of the utter isolation andhopelessness of Washington. The National Government has an air of beingmarooned there. Or as though it had crept into a corner to do somethingin the dark. One goes from the abounding movement and vitality of thenorthern cities to this sunny and enervating place through thenegligently cultivated country of Virginia, and one discovers theslovenly, unfinished promise of a city, broad avenues lined by negroshanties and patches of cultivation, great public buildings and animmense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert university, a splendiddesert library, a street of souvenir shops, a certain industry of"seeing Washington, " an idiotic colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nestfor the tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and agentsand secondary people. In the White House, in the time of PresidentRoosevelt, the present writer found a transitory glow of intellectualactivity, the spittoons and glass screens that once made it like aLondon gin palace had been removed, and the former orgies of handshakingreduced to a minimum. It was, one felt, an accidental phase. Theassassination of McKinley was an interruption of the normal Washingtonprocess. To this place, out of the way of everywhere, come the senatorsand congressmen, mostly leaving their families behind them in theirstates of origin, and hither, too, are drawn a multitude of journalistsand political agents and clerks, a crowd of underbred, mediocre men. Formost of them there is neither social nor intellectual life. The thoughtof America is far away, centred now in New York; the business andeconomic development centres upon New York; apart from the President, itis in New York that one meets the people who matter, and the New Yorkatmosphere that grows and develops ideas and purposes. New York is thenatural capital of the United States, and would need to be the capitalof any highly organised national system. Government from the district ofColumbia is in itself the repudiation of any highly organised nationalsystem. 

But government from this ineffectual, inert place is only the moststriking outcome of that inflexible constitution the wrangling delegatesof 1787-8 did at last produce out of a conflict of State jealousies. They did their best to render centralisation or any coalescence ofStates impossible and private property impregnable, and so far theirwork has proved extraordinarily effective. Only a great access ofintellectual and moral vigour in the nation can ever set it aside. Andwhile the more and more sterile millions of the United States grapplewith the legal and traditional difficulties that promise at last toarrest their development altogether, the rest of the world will bemoving on to new phases. An awakened Asia will be reorganising itssocial and political conceptions in the light of modern knowledge andmodern ideas, and South America will be working out its destinies, perhaps in the form of a powerful confederation of states. All Europewill be schooling its John Smiths to finer discipline and broader ideas. It is quite possible that the American John Smiths may have little tobrag about in the way of national predominance by A. D. 2000. It is quitepossible that the United States may be sitting meekly at the feet of atpresent unanticipated teachers. 

THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION

(_New Year, 1909_. )

The Editor of the _New York World_ has asked me to guess the generaltrend of events in the next thirty years or so with especial referenceto the outlook for the State and City of New York. I like and rarelyrefuse such cheerful invitations to prophesy. I have already made a sortof forecast (in my "Anticipations") of what may happen if the social andeconomic process goes on fairly smoothly for all that time, and shown aNew York relieved from its present congestion by the development of themeans of communication, and growing and spreading in wide and splendidsuburbs towards Boston and Philadelphia. I made that forecast beforeever I passed Sandy Hook, but my recent visit only enhanced my sense ofgrowth and "go" in things American. Still, we are nowadays all too aptto think that growth is inevitable and progress in the nature of things;the Wonderful Century, as Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace called thenineteenth, has made us perhaps over-confident and forgetful of theruins of great cities and confident prides of the past that litter theworld, and here I will write about the other alternative, of theprogressive process "hitting something, " and smashing. 

There are two chief things in modern life that impress me as dangerousand incalculable. The first of these is the modern currency andfinancial system, and the second is the chance we take of destructivewar. Let me dwell first of all on the mysterious possibilities of theformer, and then point out one or two uneasy developments of the latter. 

Now, there is nothing scientific about our currency and finance at all. It is a thing that has grown up and elaborated itself out of very simplebeginnings in the course of a century or so. Three hundred years ago theedifice had hardly begun to rise from the ground, most property wasreal, most people lived directly on the land, most business was on acash basis, oversea trade was a proportionately small affair, labour waslocally fixed. Most of the world was at the level at which much of Chinaremains to-day--able to get along without even coinage. It was arudimentary world from the point of view of the modern financier andindustrial organiser. Well, on that rude, secure basis there has nowbeen piled the most chancy and insecurely experimental system ofconventions and assumptions about money and credit it is possible toimagine. There has grown up a vast system of lending and borrowing, aworld-wide extension of joint-stock enterprises that involve at last themost fantastic relationships. I find myself, for example, owning(partially, at least) a bank in New Zealand, a railway in Cuba, anotherin Canada, several in Brazil, an electric power plant in the City ofWestminster, and so on, and I use these stocks and shares as a sort ofinterest-bearing money. If I want money to spend, I sell a railway sharemuch as one might change a hundred-pound banknote; if I have more cashthan I need immediately I buy a few shares. I perceive that the value ofthese shares oscillates, sometimes rather gravely, and that the value ofthe alleged money on the cheques I get also oscillates as compared withthe things I want to buy; that, indeed, the whole system (which has onlyexisted for a couple of centuries or so, and which keeps on gettinghigher and giddier) is perpetually swaying and quivering and bending andsagging; but it is only when such a great crisis occurs as that of 1907that it enters my mind that possibly there is no limit to theseoscillations, that possibly the whole vast accidental edifice willpresently come smashing down. 

Why shouldn't it?

I defy any economist or financial expert to prove that it cannot. Thatit hasn't done so in the little time for which it has existed is noreply at all. It is like arguing that a man cannot die because he hasnever been known to do so. Previous men have died, previouscivilisations have collapsed, if not of acute, then of chronic financialdisorders. 

The experience of 1907 indicated very clearly how a collapse mightoccur. A panic, like an avalanche, is a thing much easier to start thanstop. Previous panics have been arrested by good luck; this last one inAmerica, for example, found Europe strong and prosperous and helpful. Inevery panic period there is a huge dislocation of business enterprises, vast multitudes of men are thrown out of employment, there is gravesocial and political disorder; but in the end, so far, things have anair of having recovered. But now, suppose the panic wave a little moreuniversal--and panic waves tend to be more extensive than they used tobe. Suppose that when securities fall all round, and gold appreciates inNew York, and frightened people begin to sell investments and hoardgold, the same thing happens in other parts of the world. Increase thescale of the trouble only two or three times, and would our systemrecover? Imagine great masses of men coming out of employment, and angryand savage, in all our great towns; imagine the railways working withreduced staffs on reduced salaries or blocked by strikers; imagineprovision dealers stopping consignments to retailers, and retailershesitating to give credit. A phase would arrive when the police andmilitia keeping order in the streets would find themselves on shortrations and without their weekly pay. 

What we moderns, with our little three hundred years or so of security, do not recognise is that things that go up and down may, given a certaincombination of chances, go down steadily, down and down. 

What would you do, dear reader--what should I do--if a slump went oncontinually?

And that brings me to the second great danger to our moderncivilisation, and that is War. We have over-developed war. While we haveleft our peace organisation to the niggling, slow, self-seeking methodsof private enterprise; while we have left the breeding of our peoples tochance, their minds to the halfpenny press and their wealth to the drugmanufacturer, we have pushed forward the art of war on severelyscientific and Socialist lines; we have put all the collective resourcesof the community and an enormous proportion of its intelligence andinvention ungrudgingly into the improvement and manufacture of theapparatus of destruction. Great Britain, for example, is content withthe railways and fireplaces and types of housing she had fifty yearsago; she still uses telephones and the electric light in the mosttentative spirit; but every ironclad she had five-and-twenty years agois old iron now and abandoned. Everything crawls forward but the scienceof war; that rushes on. Of what will happen if presently the guns beginto go off I have no shadow of doubt. Every year has seen thedisproportionate increase until now. Every modern European state is moreor less like a cranky, ill-built steamboat in which some idiot hasmounted and loaded a monstrous gun with no apparatus to damp its recoil. Whether that gun hits or misses when it is fired, of one thing we may beabsolutely certain--it will send the steamboat to the bottom of the sea. 

Modern warfare is an insanity, not a sane business proposition. Itspreparation eats more and more into the resources which should befurnishing a developing civilisation; its possibilities of destructionare incalculable. A new epoch has opened with the coming of thenavigable balloon and the flying machine. To begin with, these thingsopen new gulfs for expenditure; in the end they mean possibilities ofdestruction beyond all precedent. Such things as the _Zeppelin_ and the_Ville de Paris_ are only the first pigmy essays of the aeronaut. It isclear that to be effective, capable of carrying guns and comparativelyinsensitive to perforation by shot and shell, these things will have tobe very much larger and as costly, perhaps, as a first-class cruiser. Imagine such monsters of the air, and wild financial panic below!

Here, then, are two associated possibilities with which to modify ourexpectation of an America advancing steadily on the road to an organisedcivilisation, of New York rebuilding herself in marble, spreading like agarden city over New Jersey and Long Island and New York State, becominga new and greater Venice, queen of the earth. 

Perhaps, after all, the twentieth century isn't going to be soprosperous as the nineteenth. Perhaps, instead of going resistlesslyonward, we are going to have a set-back. Perhaps we are going to be putback to learn over again under simpler conditions some of thosenecessary fundamental lessons our race has learnt as yet insufficientlywell--honesty and brotherhood, social collectivism, and the need of somecommon peace-preserving council for the whole world. 

THE IDEAL CITIZEN

Our conceptions of what a good citizen should be are all at sixes andsevens. No two people will be found to agree in every particular of suchan ideal, and the extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what ispermissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span nearly the wholerange of human possibility and conduct. As a consequence, we bring upour children in a mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warringvoices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they maydo, doomed to lives of compromise and fluctuating and inoperativeopinion. Ideals and suggestions come and go before their eyes likefigures in a fog. The commonest pattern, perhaps--the commonest patterncertainly in Sunday schools and edifying books, and on all those placesand occasions when morality is sought as an end--is a clean andable-bodied person, truthful to the extent that he does not tell lies, temperate so far as abstinence is concerned, honest without pedantry, and active in his own affairs, steadfastly law-abiding and respectful tocustom and usage, though aloof from the tumult of politics, brave butnot adventurous, punctual in some form of religious exercise, devoted tohis wife and children, and kind without extravagance to all men. Everyone feels that this is not enough, everyone feels that somethingmore is wanted and something different; most people are a littleinterested in what that difference can be, and it is a business thatmuch of what is more than trivial in our art, our literature and ourdrama must do to fill in bit by bit and shade by shade the subtle, thepermanent detail of the answer. 

It does very greatly help in this question to bear in mind the conflictof our origins. Every age is an age of transition, of minglings, of thebreaking up of old, narrow cultures, and the breaking down of barriers, of spiritual and often of actual interbreeding. Not only is the physicalbut the moral and intellectual ancestry of everyone more mixed than everit was before. We blend in our blood, everyone of us, and we blend inour ideas and purposes, craftsmen, warriors, savages, peasants, and ascore of races, and an endless multitude of social expedients and rules. Go back but a hundred generations in the lineage of the most delicategirl you know, and you will find a dozen murderers. You will find liarsand cheats, lascivious sinners, women who have sold themselves, slaves, imbeciles, devotees, saints, men of fantastic courage, discreet andwatchful persons, usurers, savages, criminals and kings, and every oneof this miscellany, not simply fathering or mothering on the way to her, but teaching urgently and with every grade of intensity, views andhabits for which they stand. Something of it all has come to her, albeitmuch may seem forgotten. In every human birth, with a new littlevariation, a fresh slight novelty of arrangement the old issues riseagain. Our ideas, even more than our blood, flow from multitudinoussources. 

Certain groups of ideas come to us distinctively associated with certainmarked ways of life. Many, and for a majority of us, it may be, most ofour ancestors were serfs or slaves. And men and women who have had, generation after generation, to adapt themselves to slavery and the ruleof a master, develop an idea of goodness very different from that ofprinces. From our slave ancestry, says Lester Ward, we learnt to work, and certainly it is from slavery we derive the conception that industry, even though it be purposeless industry, is a virtue in itself. The goodslave, too, has a morality of restraints; he abstains from the food hehandles and hungers for, and he denies himself pride and initiative ofevery sort. He is honest in not taking, but he is unscrupulous aboutadequate service. He makes no virtue of frankness, but much of kindlyhelpfulness and charity to the weak. He has no sense of duty in planningor economising. He is polite and soft-spoken, and disposed to ironyrather than denunciation, ready to admire cuteness and condonedeception. Not so the rebel. That tradition is working in us also. Ithas been the lot of vast masses of population in every age to be livingin successful or unsuccessful resistance to mastery, to be dreadingoppression or to be just escaped from it. Resentment becomes a virtuethen, and any peace with the oppressor a crime. It is from rebel originsso many of us get the idea that disrespectfulness is something of a dutyand obstinacy a fine thing. And under the force of this tradition weidealise the rugged and unmanageable, we find something heroic in roughclothes and hands, in bad manners, insensitive behaviour, andunsociableness. And a community of settlers, again, in a rough country, fighting for a bare existence, makes a virtue of vehemence, of a hastyrapidity of execution. Hurried and driven men glorify "push" andimpatience, and despise finish and fine discriminations as weak anddemoralising things. These three, the Serf, the Rebel, and theSquatter, are three out of a thousand types and aspects that have goneto our making. In the American composition they are dominant. But allthose thousand different standards and traditions are our material, eachwith something fine, and each with something evil. They have allprovided the atmosphere of upbringing for men in the past. Out of themand out of unprecedented occasions, we in this newer age, in which thereare no slaves, in which every man is a citizen, in which theconveniences of a great and growing civilisation makes the franticavidity of the squatter a nuisance, have to set ourselves to frame thestandard of our children's children, to abandon what the slave or thesquatter or the rebel found necessary and that we find unnecessary, tofit fresh requirements to our new needs. So we have to develop ourfigure of the fine man, our desirable citizen in that great and noblecivilised state we who have a "sense of the state" would build out ofthe confusions of our world. 

To describe that ideal modern citizen now is at best to make a guess anda suggestion of what must be built in reality by the efforts of athousand minds. But he will be a very different creature from thatindifferent, well-behaved business man who passes for a good citizento-day. He will be neither under the slave tradition nor a rebel nor avehement elemental man. Essentially he will be aristocratic, aristocratic not in the sense that he has slaves or class inferiors, because probably he will have nothing of the sort, but aristocratic inthe sense that he will feel the State belongs to him and he to theState. He will probably be a public servant; at any rate, he will be aman doing some work in the complicated machinery of the modern communityfor a salary and not for speculative gain. Typically, he will be aprofessional man. I do not think the ideal modern citizen can be aperson living chiefly by buying for as little as he can give and sellingfor as much as he can get; indeed, most of what we idolise to-day asbusiness enterprise I think he will regard with considerable contempt. But, then, I am a Socialist, and look forward to the time when theeconomic machinery of the community will be a field not for privateenrichment but for public service. 

He will be good to his wife and children as he will be good to hisfriend, but he will be no partisan for wife and family against thecommon welfare. His solicitude will be for the welfare of all thechildren of the community; he will have got beyond blind instinct; hewill have the intelligence to understand that almost any child in theworld may have as large a share as his own offspring in the parentage ofhis great-great-grandchildren His wife he will treat as his equal; hewill not be "kind" to her, but fair and frank and loving, as one equalshould be with another; he will no more have the impertinence to pet andpamper her, to keep painful and laborious things out of her knowledge to"shield" her from the responsibility of political and social work, thanhe will to make a Chinese toy of her and bind her feet. He and she willlove that they may enlarge and not limit one another. 

Consciously and deliberately the ideal citizen will seek beauty inhimself and in his way of living. He will be temperate rather thanharshly abstinent, and he will keep himself fit and in training as anelementary duty. He will not be a fat or emaciated person. Fat, pantingmen, and thin, enfeebled ones cannot possibly be considered goodcitizens any more than dirty or verminous people. He will be just asfine and seemly in his person as he can be, not from vanity andself-assertion but to be pleasing and agreeable to his fellows. The uglydress and ugly bearing of the "good man" of to-day will be asincomprehensible to him as the filth of a palaeolithic savage is to us. He will not speak of his "frame, " and hang clothes like sacks over it;he will know and feel that he and the people about him have wonderful, delightful and beautiful bodies. 

And--I speak of the ideal common citizen--he will be a student and aphilosopher. To understand will be one of his necessary duties. Hismind, like his body, will be fit and well clothed. He will not be toobusy to read and think, though he may be too busy to rush about to getignorantly and blatantly rich. It follows that, since he will have amind exercised finely and flexible and alert, he will not be a secretiveman. Secretiveness and secret planning are vulgarity; men and women needto be educated, and he will be educated out of these vices. He will beintensely truthful, not simply in the vulgar sense of not misstatingfacts when pressed, but truthful in the manner of the scientific man orthe artist, and as scornful of concealment as they; truthful, that is tosay, as the expression of a ruling desire to have things made plain andclear, because that so they are most beautiful and life is at itsfinest.... 

And all that I have written of him is equally true and applies word forword, with only such changes of gender as are needed, to the womancitizen also. 

SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES

The present time is harvest home for the prophets. The happy speculatorin future sits on the piled-up wain, singing "I told you so, " with thesubmarine and the flying machine and the Marconigram and the North Polesuccessfully achieved. In the tumult of realisations it perhaps escapesattention that the prophetic output of new hopes is by no means keepingpace with the crop of consummations. The present trend of scientificdevelopment is not nearly so obvious as it was a score of years ago; itspromises lack the elementary breadth of that simpler time. Once you haveflown, you have flown. Once you have steamed about under water, you havesteamed about under water. There seem no more big things of that kindavailable--so that I almost regret the precipitance of Commander Pearyand Captain Amundsen. No one expects to go beyond that atmosphere forsome centuries at least; all the elements are now invaded. Conceivablyman may presently contrive some sort of earthworm apparatus, so that hecould go through the rocks prospecting very much as an earthworm goesthrough the soil, excavating in front and dumping behind, but, to put itmoderately, there are considerable difficulties. And I doubt theimaginative effect. On the whole, I think material science has gotsamples now of all its crops at this level, and that what lies before itin the coming years is chiefly to work them out in detail and realisethem on the larger scale. No doubt science will still yield all sortsof big surprising effects, but nothing, I think, to equal the dramaticnovelty, the demonstration of man having got to something altogether newand strange, of Montgolfier, or the Wright Brothers, of Columbus, or thePolar conquest. There remains, of course, the tapping of atomic energy, but I give two hundred years yet before that.... 

So far, then, as mechanical science goes I am inclined to think thecoming period will be, from the point of view of the common man, almostwithout sensational interest. There will be an immense amount ofenrichment and filling-in, but of the sort that does not get prominentlyinto the daily papers. At every point there will be economies andsimplifications of method, discoveries of new artificial substances withnew capabilities, and of new methods of utilising power. There will be aprogressive change in the apparatus and quality of human life--the sortof alteration of the percentages that causes no intellectual shock. Electric heating, for example, will become practicable in our houses, and then cheaper, and at last so cheap and good that nobody will burncoal any more. Little electric contrivances will dispense with menialservice in more and more directions. The builder will introduce new, more convenient, healthier and prettier substances, and the youngarchitect will become increasingly the intelligent student of novelty. The steam engine, the coal yard, and the tail chimney, and indeed allchimneys, will vanish quietly from our urban landscape. The speeding upand cheapening of travel, and the increase in its swiftness and comfortwill go on steadily--widening experience. A more systematic andunderstanding social science will be estimating the probable growth andmovement of population, and planning town and country on lines thatwould seem to-day almost inconceivably wise and generous. All this meansa quiet broadening and aeration and beautifying of life. Utopianrequirements, so far as the material side of things goes, will beexecuted and delivered with at last the utmost promptness.... 

It is in quite other directions that the scientific achievements toastonish our children will probably be achieved. Progress never appearsto be uniform in human affairs. There are intricate correlations betweendepartment and department. One field must mark time until another cancome up to it with results sufficiently arranged and conclusionssufficiently simplified for application Medicine waits on organicchemistry, geology on mineralogy, and both on the chemistry of highpressures and temperature. And subtle variations in method and theprevailing mental temperament of the type of writer engaged, produceremarkable differences in the quality and quantity of the stated result. Moreover, there are in the history of every scientific province periodsof seed-time, when there is great activity without immediate apparentfruition, and periods, as, for example, the last two decades ofelectrical application, of prolific realisation. It is highly probablethat the physiologist and the organic chemist are working towardsco-operations that may make the physician's sphere the new scientificwonderland. 

At present dietary and regimen are the happy hunting ground of the quackand that sort of volunteer specialist, half-expert, half-impostor, whoflourishes in the absence of worked out and definite knowledge. Thegeneral mass of the medical profession, equipped with a littleexperience and a muddled training, and preposterously impeded by theprivate adventure conditions under which it lives, goes about pretendingto the possession of precise knowledge which simply does not exist inthe world. Medical research is under-endowed and stupidly endowed, notfor systematic scientific inquiry so much as for the unscientificseeking of remedies for specific evils--for cancer, consumption, and thelike. Yet masked, misrepresented limited and hampered, the work ofestablishing a sound science of vital processes in health and disease isprobably going on now, similar to the clarification of physics andchemistry that went on in the later part of the eighteenth and the earlyyears of the nineteenth centuries. It is not unreasonable to supposethat medicine may presently arrive at far-reaching generalisedconvictions, and proceed to take over this great hinterland of humaninterests which legitimately belongs to it. 

But medicine is not the only field to which we may reasonably look for asudden development of wonders. Compared with the sciences of matter, psychology and social science have as yet given the world remarkablylittle cause for amazement. Not only is our medicine feeble andfragmentary, but our educational science is the poorest miscellany ofaphorisms and dodges. Indeed, directly one goes beyond the range ofmeasurement and weighing and classification, one finds a sort ofunprogressive floundering going on, which throws the strongest doubtsupon the practical applicability of the current logical and metaphysicalconceptions in those fields. We have emerged only partially from the ageof the schoolmen In these directions we have not emerged at all. It isquite possible that in university lecture rooms and forbidding volumesof metaphysical discussion a new emancipation of the human intellect andwill is even now going on. Presently men may be attacking the problemsof the self-control of human life and of human destiny in new phrasesand an altogether novel spirit. 

Guesses at the undiscovered must necessarily be vague, but myanticipations fall into two groups, and first I am disposed to expect agreat systematic increment in individual human power. We probably haveno suspicion as yet of what may be done with the human body and mind byway of enhancing its effectiveness I remember talking to the late SirMichael Foster upon the possibilities of modern surgery, and how heconfessed that he did not dare for his reputation's sake tell ordinarypeople the things he believed would some day become matter-of-factoperations. In that respect I think he spoke for very many of hiscolleagues. It is already possible to remove almost any portion of thehuman body, including, if needful, large sections of the brain; it ispossible to graft living flesh on living flesh, make new connections, mould, displace, and rearrange. It is also not impossible to provokelocal hypertrophy, and not only by knife and physical treatment but bythe subtler methods of hypnotism, profound changes can be wrought in theessential structure of a human being. If only our knowledge of functionand value were at all adequate, we could correct and develop ourselvesin the most extraordinary way. Our knowledge is not adequate, but it maynot always remain inadequate. 

We have already had some very astonishing suggestions in this directionfrom Doctor Metchnikoff. He regards the human stomach and largeintestine as not only vestigial and superfluous in the human economy, but as positively dangerous on account of the harbour they afford forthose bacteria that accelerate the decay of age. He proposes that theseviscera should be removed. To a layman like myself this is an altogetherastounding and horrifying idea, but Doctor Metchnikoff is a man of thevery greatest scientific reputation, and it does not give him any qualmof horror or absurdity to advance it. I am quite sure that if agentleman called upon me "done up" in the way I am dimly suggesting, with most of the contents of his abdomen excavated, his lungs and heartprobably enlarged and improved, parts of his brain removed to eliminateharmful tendencies and make room for the expansion of the remainder, hismind and sensibilities increased, and his liability to fatigue and theneed of sleep abolished, I should conceal with the utmost difficulty myinexpressible disgust and terror. But, then, if M. Blériot, with hisflying machine, ear-flaps and goggles, had soared down in the year 54B. C. , let us say, upon my woad-adorned ancestors--every family man inBritain was my ancestor in those days--at Dover, they would have hadentirely similar emotions. And at present I am not discussing what isbeautiful in humanity, but what is possible--and what, being possible, is likely to be attempted. 

It does not follow that because men will some day have this enormouspower over themselves, physically and mentally, that they willnecessarily make themselves horrible--even by our present standardsquite a lot of us would be all the slenderer and more active andgraceful for "Metchnikoffing"--nor does surgery exhaust the availablemethods. We are still in the barbaric age, so far as our use of food anddrugs is concerned. We stuff all sorts of substances into ourunfortunate interiors and blunder upon the most various consequences. Few people of three score and ten but have spent in the aggregate thebest part of a year in a state of indigestion, stupid, angry or painfulindigestion as the case may be. No one would be so careless and ignorantabout the fuel he burnt in his motor-car as most of us are about thefuel we burn in our bodies. And there are all sort of stimulating andexhilarating things, digesting things, fatigue-suppressing things, exercise economising things, we dare not use because we are afraid ofour ignorance of their precise working. There seems no reason to supposethat human life, properly understood and controlled, could not be aconstant succession of delightful and for the most part active bodilyand mental phases. It is sheer ignorance and bad management that keepthe majority of people in that disagreeable system of states which weindicate by saying we are "a bit off colour" or a little "out oftraining. " It may seem madly Utopian now to suggest that practicallyeveryone in the community might be clean, beautiful, incessantly active, "fit, " and long-lived, with the marks of all the surgery they haveundergone quite healed and hidden, but not more madly Utopian than itwould have seemed to King Alfred the Great if one had said thatpractically everyone in this country, down to the very swineherds, should be able to read and write. 

Metchnikoff has speculated upon the possibility of delaying old age, andI do not see why his method should not be applied to the diurnal need ofsleep. No vital process seems to be absolutely fated in itself; it is athing conditioned and capable of modification. If Metchnikoff isright--and to a certain extent he must be right--the decay of age is dueto changing organic processes that may be checked and delayed andmodified by suitable food and regimen. He holds out hope of a new phasein the human cycle, after the phase of struggle and passion, a phase ofserene intellectual activity, old age with all its experience and noneof its infirmities. Still more are fatigue and the need for reposedependent upon chemical changes in the body. It would seem we are unableto maintain exertion, partly through the exhaustion of our tissues, butfar more by the loading of our blood with fatigue products--arecuperative interlude must ensue. But there is no reason to supposethat the usual food of to-day is the most rapidly assimilable nurturepossible, that a rapidly digestible or injectable substance is notconceivable that would vastly accelerate repair, nor that theelimination and neutralisation of fatigue products might not also beenormously hastened. There is no inherent impossibility in the idea notonly of various glands being induced to function in a modified manner, but even in the insertion upon the circulation of interceptors andartificial glandular structures. No doubt that may strike even anadventurous surgeon as chimerical, but consider what people, evenauthoritative people, were saying of flying and electric traction twentyyears ago. At present a man probably does not get more than three orfour hours of maximum mental and physical efficiency in the day. Few mencan keep at their best in either physical or intellectual work for solong as that. The rest of the time goes in feeding, digesting, sleeping, sitting about, relaxation of various kinds. It is quite possible thatscience may set itself presently to extend systematically thatproportion of efficient time. The area of maximum efficiency may invadethe periods now demanded by digestion, sleep, exercise, so that at lastnearly the whole of a man's twenty-four hours will be concentrated onhis primary interests instead of dispersed among these secondarynecessary matters. 

Please understand I do not consider this concentration of activity andthese vast "artificialisations" of the human body as attractive ordesirable things. At the first proposal much of this tampering with thenatural stuff of life will strike anyone, I think, as ugly and horrible, just as seeing a little child, green-white and still under ananaesthetic, gripped my heart much more dreadfully than the sight of thesame child actively bawling with pain. But the business of this paper isto discuss things that may happen, and not to evolve dreams ofloveliness. Perhaps things of this kind will be manageable withoutdreadfulness. Perhaps man will come to such wisdom that neither theknife nor the drugs nor any of the powers which science thrusts into hishand will slay the beauty of life for him. Suppose we assume that he isnot such a fool as to let that happen, and that ultimately he willemerge triumphant with all these powers utilised and controlled. 

It is not only that an amplifying science may give mankind happierbodies and far more active and eventful lives, but that psychology andeducational and social science, reinforcing literature and workingthrough literature and art, may dare to establish serenities in hissoul. For surely no one who has lived, no one who has watched sin andcrime and punishment, but must have come to realise the enormous amountof misbehaviour that is mere ignorance and want of mental scope. For myown part I have never believed in the devil. And it may be a greaterundertaking but no more impossible to make ways to goodwill and a goodheart in men than it is to tunnel mountains and dyke back the sea. Theway that led from the darkness of the cave to the electric light is theway that will lead to light in the souls of men, that is to say, the wayof free and fearless thinking, free and fearless experiment, organisedexchange of thoughts and results, and patience and persistence and asort of intellectual civility. 

And with the development of philosophical and scientific method thatwill go on with this great increase in man's control over himself, another issue that is now a mere pious aspiration above abysses ofignorance and difficulty, will come to be a manageable matter. It hasbeen the perpetual wonder of philosophers from Plato onward that menhave bred their dogs and horses and left any man or woman, however vile, free to bear offspring in the next generation of men. Still that goeson. Beautiful and wonderful people die childless and bury their treasurein the grave, and we rest content with a system of matrimony that seemsdesigned to perpetuate mediocrity. A day will come when men will be inpossession of knowledge and opportunity that will enable them to masterthis position, and then certainly will it be assured that everygeneration shall be born better than was the one before it. And withthat the history of humanity will enter upon a new phase, a phase whichwill be to our lives as daylight is to the dreaming of a child as yetunborn. 

THE HUMAN ADVENTURE

Alone among all the living things this globe has borne, man reckons withdestiny. All other living things obey the forces that created them; andwhen the mood of the power changes, submit themselves passively toextinction Man only looks upon those forces in the face, anticipates theexhaustion of Nature's kindliness, seeks weapons to defend himself. Lastof the children of Saturn, he escapes their general doom. Hedispossesses his begetter of all possibility of replacement, and graspsthe sceptre of the world. Before man the great and prevalent creaturesfollowed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters ofthe ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to theland, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-wingedreptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals, the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idledreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at lastcomes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of beingagain. 

There is nothing else in all the world that so turns against the powersthat have made it, unless it be man's follower fire. But fire iswitless; a little stream, a changing breeze can stop it. Mancircumvents. If fire were human it would build boats across the riversand outmanoeuvre the wind. It would lie in wait in sheltered places, smouldering, husbanding its fuel until the grass was yellow and theforests sere. But fire is a mere creature of man's; our world before hiscoming knew nothing of it in any of its habitable places, never saw itexcept in the lightning flash or remotely on some volcanic coronet. Manbrought it into the commerce of life, a shining, resentful slave, tohound off the startled beasts from his sleeping-place and serve him likea dog. 

Suppose that some enduring intelligence watched through the ages thesuccessions of life upon this planet, marked the spreading first of thisspecies and then that, the conflicts, the adaptations, thepredominances, the dyings away, and conceive how it would have witnessedthis strange dramatic emergence of a rare great ape to manhood. To sucha mind the creature would have seemed at first no more than one ofseveral varieties of clambering frugivorous mammals, a littledistinguished by a disposition to help his clumsy walking with a stakeand reinforce his fist with a stone. The foreground of the picture wouldhave been filled by the rhinoceros and mammoth, the great herds ofruminants, the sabre-toothed lion and the big bears. Then presently theobserver would have noted a peculiar increasing handiness about theobscurer type, an unwonted intelligence growing behind its eyes. Hewould have perceived a disposition in this creature no beast had shownbefore, a disposition to make itself independent of the conditions ofclimate and the chances of the seasons. Did shelter fail among the treesand rocks, this curious new thing-began to make itself harbours of itsown; was food irregular, it multiplied food. It began to spread out fromits original circumstances, fitting itself to novel needs, leaving theforests, invading the plains, following the watercourses upward anddownward, presently carrying the smoke of its fires like a banner ofconquest into wintry desolations and the high places of the earth. 

The first onset of man must have been comparatively slow, the firstadvances needed long ages. By small degrees it gathered pace. The stridefrom the scattered savagery of the earlier stone period to the firstcities, historically a vast interval, would have seemed to that stillwatcher, measuring by the standards of astronomy and the rise anddecline of races and genera and orders, a, step almost abrupt. It took, perhaps, a thousand generations or so to make it. In that interval manpassed from an animal-like obedience to the climate and the weather andhis own instincts, from living in small family parties of a score or soover restricted areas of indulgent country, to permanent settlements, tothe life of tribal and national communities and the beginnings ofcities. He had spread in that fragment of time over great areas of theearth's surface, and now he was adapting himself to the Arctic circle onthe one hand and to the life of the tropics on the other; he hadinvented the plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domesticanimals; he was beginning to think of the origin of the world and themysteries of being. Writing had added its enduring records to oraltradition, and he was already making roads. Another five or six hundredgenerations at most bring him to ourselves. We sweep into the field ofthat looker-on, the momentary incarnations of this sempiternal being, Man. And after us there comes--

A curtain falls. 

The time in which we, whose minds meet here in this writing, were bornand live and die, would be to that imagined observer a mere instant'sphase in the swarming liberation of our kind from ancient imperatives. It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansionand achievement. In this last handful of years, electricity has ceasedto be a curious toy, and now carries half mankind upon their dailyjourneys, it lights our cities till they outshine the moon and stars, and reduces to our service a score of hitherto unsuspected metals; weclamber to the pole of our globe, scale every mountain, soar into theair, learn how to overcome the malaria that barred our white races fromthe tropics, and how to draw the sting from a hundred such agents ofdeath. Our old cities are being rebuilt in towering marble; great newcities rise to vie with them. Never, it would seem, has man been sovarious and busy and persistent, and there is no intimation of any checkto the expansion of his energies. 

And all this continually accelerated advance has come through thequickening and increase of man's intelligence and its reinforcementthrough speech and writing. All this has come in spite of fierceinstincts that make him the most combatant and destructive of animals, and in spite of the revenge Nature has attempted time after time for hisrebellion against her routines, in the form of strange diseases andnearly universal pestilences. All this has come as a necessaryconsequence of the first obscure gleaming of deliberate thought andreason through the veil of his animal being. To begin with, he did notknow what he was doing. He sought his more immediate satisfaction andsafety and security. He still apprehends imperfectly the change thatcomes upon him. The illusion of separation that makes animal life, thatis to say, passionate competing and breeding and dying, possible, theblinkers Nature has put upon us that we may clash against and sharpenone another, still darken our eyes. We live not life as yet, but inmillions of separated lives, still unaware except in rare moods ofillumination that we are more than those fellow beasts of ours who dropoff from the tree of life and perish alone. It is only in the last threeor four thousand years, and through weak and tentative methods ofexpression, through clumsy cosmogonies and theologies, and withincalculable confusion and discoloration, that the human mind has feltits way towards its undying being in the race. Man still goes to waragainst himself, prepares fleets and armies and fortresses, like asleep-walker who wounds himself, like some infatuated barbarian whohacks his own limbs with a knife. 

But he awakens. The nightmares of empire and racial conflict and war, the grotesques of trade jealousy and tariffs, the primordial dream-stuffof lewdness and jealousy and cruelty, pale before the daylight whichfilters between his eyelids. In a little while we individuals will knowourselves surely for corpuscles in his being, for thoughts that cometogether out of strange wanderings into the coherence of a waking mind. A few score generations ago all living things were in our ancestry. Afew score generations ahead, and all mankind will be in sober factdescendants from our blood. In physical as in mental fact we separatepersons, with all our difference and individuality, are but fragments, set apart for a little while in order that we may return to the generallife again with fresh experiences and fresh acquirements, as beesreturn with pollen and nourishment to the fellowship of the hive. 

And this Man, this wonderful child of old earth, who is ourselves in themeasure of our hearts and minds, does but begin his adventure now. Through all time henceforth he does but begin his adventure. This planetand its subjugation is but the dawn of his existence. In a little whilehe will reach out to the other planets, and take that greater fire, thesun, into his service. He will bring his solvent intelligence to bearupon the riddles of his individual interaction, transmute jealousy andevery passion, control his own increase, select and breed for hisembodiment a continually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none ofus can think or will, save in a disconnected partiality, he will thinkand will collectively. Already some of us feel our merger with thatgreater life. There come moments when the thing shines out upon ourthoughts. Sometimes in the dark sleepless solitudes of night, one ceasesto be so-and-so, one ceases to bear a proper name, forgets one'squarrels and vanities, forgives and understands one's enemies andoneself, as one forgives and understands the quarrels of littlechildren, knowing oneself indeed to be a being greater than one'spersonal accidents, knowing oneself for Man on his planet, flyingswiftly to unmeasured destinies through the starry stillnesses of space.