The Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion

by

George Bernard Shaw

(1856-1950)

Writing as: JOHN TANNER, M. I. R. C. (Member of the Idle Rich Class). 

PREFACE TO THE REVOLUTIONIST'S HANDBOOK

"No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of thepeople without desiring something like a revolution for the better. "Sir Robert Giffen. Essays in Finance, vol. Ii. P. 393. 

FOREWORD

A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social orderand try another. 

The constitution of England is revolutionary. To a Russian orAnglo-Indian bureaucrat, a general election is as much a revolution as areferendum or plebiscite in which the people fight instead of voting. The French Revolution overthrew one set of rulers and substitutedanother with different interests and different views. That is what ageneral election enables the people to do in England every seven yearsif they choose. Revolution is therefore a national institution inEngland; and its advocacy by an Englishman needs no apology. 

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. Forexample, every person who has mastered a profession is a scepticconcerning it, and consequently a revolutionist. 

Every genuine religious person is a heretic and therefore arevolutionist. 

All who achieve real distinction in life begin as revolutionists. Themost distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older, though they are commonly supposed to become more conservative owing totheir loss of faith in conventional methods of reform. 

Any person under the age of thirty, who, having any knowledge of theexisting social order, is not a revolutionist, is an inferior. 

AND YET

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have onlyshifted it to another shoulder. 

JOHN TANNER

I

ON GOOD BREEDING

If there were no God, said the eighteenth century Deist, it would benecessary to invent Him. Now this XVIII century god was deus exmachina, the god who helped those who could not help themselves, the godof the lazy and incapable. The nineteenth century decided that there isindeed no such god; and now Man must take in hand all the work that heused to shirk with an idle prayer. He must, in effect, change himselfinto the political Providence which he formerly conceived as god; andsuch change is not only possible, but the only sort of change that isreal. The mere transfiguration of institutions, as from military andpriestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, fromcommercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, frompolytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism topantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to generalliteracy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, frommetaphysics to physics, are all but changes from Tweedledum toTweedledee: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. But the changesfrom the crab apple to the pippin, from the wolf and fox to the housedog, from the charger of Henry V to the brewer's draught horse and therace-horse, are real; for here Man has played the god, subduing Natureto his intention, and ennobling or debasing Life for a set purpose. Andwhat can be done with a wolf can be done with a man. If such monstersas the tramp and the gentleman can appear as mere by-products of Man'sindividual greed and folly, what might we not hope for as a main productof his universal aspiration?

This is no new conclusion. The despair of institutions, and theinexorable "ye must be born again, " with Mrs Poyser's stipulation, "andborn different, " recurs in every generation. The cry for the Supermandid not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. But ithas always been silenced by the same question: what kind of person isthis Superman to be? You ask, not for a super-apple, but for an eatableapple; not for a superhorse, but for a horse of greater draught orvelocity. Neither is it of any use to ask for a Superman: you mustfurnish a specification of the sort of man you want. Unfortunately youdo not know what sort of man you want. Some sort of goodlookingphilosopher-athlete, with a handsome healthy woman for his mate, perhaps. 

Vague as this is, it is a great advance on the popular demand for aperfect gentleman and a perfect lady. And, after all, no market demandin the world takes the form of exact technical specification of thearticle required. Excellent poultry and potatoes are produced tosatisfy the demand of housewives who do not know the technicaldifferences between a tuber and a chicken. They will tell you that theproof of the pudding is in the eating; and they are right. The proof ofthe Superman will be in the living; and we shall find out how to producehim by the old method of trial and error, and not by waiting for acompletely convincing prescription of his ingredients. 

Certain common and obvious mistakes may be ruled out from the beginning. For example, we agree that we want superior mind; but we need not fallinto the football club folly of counting on this as a product ofsuperior body. Yet if we recoil so far as to conclude that superiormind consists in being the dupe of our ethical classifications ofvirtues and vices, in short, of conventional morality, we shall fall outof the fryingpan of the football club into the fire of the SundaySchool. If we must choose between a race of athletes and a race of"good" men, let us have the athletes: better Samson and Milo than Calvinand Robespierre. But neither alternative is worth changing for: Samsonis no more a Superman than Calvin. What then are we to do?

II

PROPERTY AND MARRIAGE

Let us hurry over the obstacles set up by property and marriage. Revolutionists make too much of them. No doubt it is easy todemonstrate that property will destroy society unless society destroysit. No doubt, also, property has hitherto held its own and destroyedall the empires. But that was because the superficial objection to it(that it distributes social wealth and the social labor burden in agrotesquely inequitable manner) did not threaten the existence of therace, but only the individual happiness of its units, and finally themaintenance of some irrelevant political form or other, such as anation, an empire, or the like. Now as happiness never matters toNature, as she neither recognizes flags and frontiers nor cares a strawwhether the economic system adopted by a society is feudal, capitalistic, or collectivist, provided it keeps the race afoot (thehive and the anthill being as acceptable to her as Utopia), thedemonstrations of Socialists, though irrefutable, will never make anyserious impression on property. The knell of that over-ratedinstitution will not sound until it is felt to conflict with some morevital matter than mere personal inequities in industrial economy. Nosuch conflict was perceived whilst society had not yet grown beyondnational communities too small and simple to overtax Man's limitedpolitical capacity disastrously. But we have now reached the stage ofinternational organization. Man's political capacity and magnanimityare clearly beaten by the vastness and complexity of the problems forcedon him. And it is at this anxious moment that he finds, when he looksupward for a mightier mind to help him, that the heavens are empty. Hewill presently see that his discarded formula that Man is the Temple ofthe Holy Ghost happens to be precisely true, and that it is only throughhis own brain and hand that this Holy Ghost, formally the most nebulousperson in the Trinity, and now become its sole survivor as it has alwaysbeen its real Unity, can help him in any way. And so, if the Supermanis to come, he must be born of Woman by Man's intentional andwell-considered contrivance. Conviction of this will smash everythingthat opposes it. Even Property and Marriage, which laugh at thelaborer's petty complaint that he is defrauded of "surplus value, " andat the domestic miseries of the slaves of the wedding ring, willthemselves be laughed aside as the lightest of trifles if they crossthis conception when it becomes a fully realized vital purpose of therace. 

That they must cross it becomes obvious the moment we acknowledge thefutility of breeding men for special qualities as we breed cocks forgame, greyhounds for speed, or sheep for mutton. What is reallyimportant in Man is the part of him that we do not yet understand. Ofmuch of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normallyconscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if weneglect it we die. We are therefore driven to the conclusion that whenwe have carried selection as far as we can by rejecting from the list ofeligible parents all persons who are uninteresting, unpromising, orblemished without any set-off, we shall still have to trust to theguidance of fancy (alias Voice of Nature), both in the breeders and theparents, for that superiority in the unconscious self which will be thetrue characteristic of the Superman. 

At this point we perceive the importance of giving fancy the widestpossible field. To cut humanity up into small cliques, and effectivelylimit the selection of the individual to his own clique, is to postponethe Superman for eons, if not for ever. Not only should every person benourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be nopossibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection ofa countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality isessential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists know, isincompatible with property. 

Besides, equality is an essential condition of bad breeding also; andbad breeding is indispensable to the weeding out of the human race. When the conception of heredity took hold of the scientific imaginationin the middle of last century, its devotees announced that it was acrime to marry the lunatic to the lunatic or the consumptive to theconsumptive. But pray are we to try to correct our diseased stocks byinfecting our healthy stocks with them? Clearly the attraction whichdisease has for diseased people is beneficial to the race. If tworeally unhealthy people get married, they will, as likely as not, have agreat number of children who will all die before they reach maturity. This is a far more satisfactory arrangement than the tragedy of a unionbetween a healthy and an unhealthy person. Though more costly thansterilization of the unhealthy, it has the enormous advantage that inthe event of our notions of health and unhealth being erroneous (whichto some extent they most certainly are), the error will be corrected byexperience instead of confirmed by evasion. 

One fact must be faced resolutely, in spite of the shrieks of theromantic. There is no evidence that the best citizens are the offspringof congenial marriages, or that a conflict of temperament is not ahighly important part of what breeders call crossing. On the contrary, it is quite sufficiently probable that good results may be obtained fromparents who would be extremely unsuitable companions and partners, tomake it certain that the experiment of mating them will sooner or laterbe tried purposely almost as often as it is now tried accidentally. Butmating such couples must clearly not involve marrying them. Inconjugation two complementary persons may supply one another'sdeficiencies: in the domestic partnership of marriage they only feelthem and suffer from them. Thus the son of a robust, cheerful, eupepticBritish country squire, with the tastes and range of his class, and of aclever, imaginative, intellectual, highly civilized Jewess, might bevery superior to both his parents; but it is not likely that the Jewesswould find the squire an interesting companion, or his habits, hisfriends, his place and mode of life congenial to her. Thereforemarriage, whilst it is made an indispensable condition of mating, willdelay the advent of the Superman as effectually as Property, and will bemodified by the impulse towards him just as effectually. 

The practical abrogation of Property and Marriage as they exist atpresent will occur without being much noticed. To the mass of men, theintelligent abolition of property would mean nothing except an increasein the quantity of food, clothing, housing, and comfort at theirpersonal disposal, as well as a greater control over their time andcircumstances. Very few persons now make any distinction betweenvirtually complete property and property held on such highly developedpublic conditions as to place its income on the same footing as that ofa propertyless clergyman, officer, or civil servant. A landedproprietor may still drive men and women off his land, demolish theirdwellings, and replace them with sheep or deer; and in the unregulatedtrades the private trader may still spunge on the regulated trades andsacrifice the life and health of the nation as lawlessly as theManchester cotton manufacturers did at the beginning of last century. But though the Factory Code on the one hand, and Trade Unionorganization on the other, have, within the lifetime of men stillliving, converted the old unrestricted property of the cottonmanufacturer in his mill and the cotton spinner in his labor into a merepermission to trade or work on stringent public or collectiveconditions, imposed in the interest of the general welfare without anyregard for individual hard cases, people in Lancashire still speak oftheir "property" in the old terms, meaning nothing more by it than thethings a thief can be punished for stealing. The total abolition ofproperty, and the conversion of every citizen into a salariedfunctionary in the public service, would leave much more than 99 percent of the nation quite unconscious of any greater change than nowtakes place when the son of a shipowner goes into the navy. They wouldstill call their watches and umbrellas and back gardens their property. 

Marriage also will persist as a name attached to a general custom longafter the custom itself will have altered. For example, modern Englishmarriage, as modified by divorce and by Married Women's Property Acts, differs more from early XIX century marriage than Byron's marriage didfrom Shakespear's. At the present moment marriage in England differsnot only from marriage in France, but from marriage in Scotland. Marriage as modified by the divorce laws in South Dakota would be calledmere promiscuity in Clapham. Yet the Americans, far from taking aprofligate and cynical view of marriage, do homage to its ideals with aseriousness that seems old fashioned in Clapham. Neither in England norAmerica would a proposal to abolish marriage be tolerated for a moment;and yet nothing is more certain than that in both countries theprogressive modification of the marriage contract will be continueduntil it is no more onerous nor irrevocable than any ordinary commercialdeed of partnership. Were even this dispensed with, people would stillcall themselves husbands and wives; describe their companionships asmarriages; and be for the most part unconscious that they were any lessmarried than Henry VIII. For though a glance at the legal conditions ofmarriage in different Christian countries shews that marriage varieslegally from frontier to frontier, domesticity varies so little thatmost people believe their own marriage laws to be universal. Consequently here again, as in the case of Property, the absoluteconfidence of the public in the stability of the institution's name, makes it all the easier to alter its substance. 

However, it cannot be denied that one of the changes in public opiniondemanded by the need for the Superman is a very unexpected one. It isnothing less than the dissolution of the present necessary associationof marriage with conjugation, which most unmarried people regard as thevery diagnostic of marriage. They are wrong, of course: it would bequite as near the truth to say that conjugation is the one purelyaccidental and incidental condition of marriage. Conjugation isessential to nothing but the propagation of the race; and the momentthat paramount need is provided for otherwise than by marriage, conjugation, from Nature's creative point of view, ceases to beessential in marriage. But marriage does not thereupon cease to be soeconomical, convenient, and comfortable, that the Superman might safelybribe the matrimonomaniacs by offering to revive all the old inhumanstringency and irrevocability of marriage, to abolish divorce, toconfirm the horrible bond which still chains decent people to drunkards, criminals, and wasters, provided only the complete extrication ofconjugation from it were conceded to him. For if people could formdomestic companionships on no easier terms than these, they would stillmarry. The Roman Catholic, forbidden by his Church to avail himself ofthe divorce laws, marries as freely as the South Dakotan Presbyterianswho can change partners with a facility that scandalizes the old world;and were his Church to dare a further step towards Christianity andenjoin celibacy on its laity as well as on its clergy, marriages wouldstill be contracted for the sake of domesticity by perfectly obedientsons and daughters of the Church. One need not further pursue thesehypotheses: they are only suggested here to help the reader to analysemarriage into its two functions of regulating conjugation and supplyinga form of domesticity. These two functions are quite separable; anddomesticity is the only one of the two which is essential to theexistence of marriage, because conjugation without domesticity is notmarriage at all, whereas domesticity without conjugation is stillmarriage: in fact it is necessarily the actual condition of all fertilemarriages during a great part of their duration, and of some marriagesduring the whole of it. 

Taking it, then, that Property and Marriage, by destroying Equality andthus hampering sexual selection with irrelevant conditions, are hostileto the evolution of the Superman, it is easy to understand why the onlygenerally known modern experiment in breeding the human race took placein a community which discarded both institutions. 

III

THE PERFECTIONIST EXPERIMENT AT ONEIDA CREEK

In 1848 the Oneida Community was founded in America to carry out aresolution arrived at by a handful of Perfectionist Communists "that wewill devote ourselves exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom ofGod. " Though the American nation declared that this sort of thing wasnot to be tolerated in a Christian country, the Oneida Community heldits own for over thirty years, during which period it seems to haveproduced healthier children and done and suffered less evil than anyJoint Stock Company on record. It was, however, a highly selectedcommunity; for a genuine communist (roughly definable as an intenselyproud person who proposes to enrich the common fund instead of to spungeon it) is superior to an ordinary joint stock capitalist precisely as anordinary joint stock capitalist is superior to a pirate. Further, thePerfectionists were mightily shepherded by their chief Noyes, one ofthose chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time inspite of the interference of Man's blundering institutions. Theexistence of Noyes simplified the breeding problem for the Communists, the question as to what sort of man they should strive to breed beingsettled at once by the obvious desirability of breeding another Noyes. 

But an experiment conducted by a handful of people, who, after thirtyyears of immunity from the unintentional child slaughter that goes on byignorant parents in private homes, numbered only 300, could do verylittle except prove that Communists, under the guidance of a Superman"devoted exclusively to the establishment of the Kingdom of God, " andcaring no more for property and marriage than a Camberwell ministercares for Hindoo Caste or Suttee, might make a much better job of theirlives than ordinary folk under the harrow of both these institutions. Yet their Superman himself admitted that this apparent success was onlypart of the abnormal phenomenon of his own occurrence; for when he cameto the end of his powers through age, he himself guided and organizedthe voluntary relapse of the communists into marriage, capitalism, andcustomary private life, thus admitting that the real social solution wasnot what a casual Superman could persuade a picked company to do forhim, but what a whole community of Supermen would do spontaneously. IfNoyes had had to organize, not a few dozen Perfectionists, but the wholeUnited States, America would have beaten him as completely as Englandbeat Oliver Cromwell, France Napoleon, or Rome Julius Cæsar. Cromwelllearnt by bitter experience that God himself cannot raise a people aboveits own level, and that even though you stir a nation to sacrifice allits appetites to its conscience, the result will still depend wholly onwhat sort of conscience the nation has got. Napoleon seems to haveended by regarding mankind as a troublesome pack of hounds only worthkeeping for the sport of hunting with them. Cæsar's capacity forfighting without hatred or resentment was defeated by the determinationof his soldiers to kill their enemies in the field instead of takingthem prisoners to be spared by Cæsar; and his civil supremacy waspurchased by colossal bribery of the citizens of Rome. What greatrulers cannot do, codes and religions cannot do. Man reads his ownnature into every ordinance: if you devise a superhuman commandment socunningly that it cannot be misinterpreted in terms of his will, he willdenounce it as seditious blasphemy, or else disregard it as either crazyor totally unintelligible. Parliaments and synods may tinker as much asthey please with their codes and creeds as circumstances alter thebalance of classes and their interests; and, as a result of thetinkering, there may be an occasional illusion of moral evolution, aswhen the victory of the commercial caste over the military caste leadsto the substitution of social boycotting and pecuniary damages forduelling. At certain moments there may even be a considerable materialadvance, as when the conquest of political power by the working classproduces a better distribution of wealth through the simple action ofthe selfishness of the new masters; but all this is mere readjustmentand reformation: until the heart and mind of the people is changed thevery greatest man will no more dare to govern on the assumption that allare as great as he than a drover dare leave his flock to find its waythrough the streets as he himself would. Until there is an England inwhich every man is a Cromwell, a France in which every man is aNapoleon, a Rome in which every man is a Cæsar, a Germany in which everyman is a Luther plus a Goethe, the world will be no more improved by itsheroes than a Brixton villa is improved by the pyramid of Cheops. Theproduction of such nations is the only real change possible to us. 

IV

MAN'S OBJECTION TO HIS OWN IMPROVEMENT

But would such a change be tolerated if Man must rise above himself todesire it? It would, through his misconception of its nature. Man doesdesire an ideal Superman with such energy as he can spare from hisnutrition, and has in every age magnified the best living substitute forit he can find. His least incompetent general is set up as anAlexander; his king is the first gentleman in the world; his Pope is asaint. He is never without an array of human idols who are all nothingbut sham Supermen. That the real Superman will snap his superfingers atall Man's present trumpery ideals of right, duty, honor, justice, religion, even decency, and accept moral obligations beyond presenthuman endurance, is a thing that contemporary Man does not foresee: infact he does not notice it when our casual Supermen do it in his veryface. He actually does it himself every day without knowing it. Hewill therefore make no objection to the production of a race of what hecalls Great Men or Heroes, because he will imagine them, not as trueSupermen, but as himself endowed with infinite brains, infinite courage, and infinite money. 

The most troublesome opposition will arise from the general fear ofmankind that any interference with our conjugal customs will be aninterference with our pleasures and our romance. This fear, by puttingon airs of offended morality, has always intimidated people who have notmeasured its essential weakness; but it will prevail with thosedegenerates only in whom the instinct of fertility has faded into a mereitching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure withsterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons toweed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work;and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means thesurvival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed isnothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almostunconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, consciousfertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from theevolutionary process. [1] Even if this selective agency had not beeninvented, the purpose of the race would still shatter the opposition ofindividual instincts. Not only do the bees and the ants satisfy theirreproductive and parental instincts vicariously; but marriage itselfsuccessfully imposes celibacy on millions of unmarried normal men andwomen. In short, the individual instinct in this matter, overwhelmingas it is thoughtlessly supposed to be, is really a finally negligibleone. 

[1] The part played in evolution by the voluptuary will be the same asthat already played by the glutton. The glutton, as the man with thestrongest motive for nourishing himself, will always take more painsthan his fellows to get food. When food is so difficult to get thatonly great exertions can secure a sufficient supply of it, the glutton'sappetite develops his cunning and enterprise to the utmost; and hebecomes not only the best fed but the ablest man in the community. Butin more hospitable climates, or where the social organization of thefood supply makes it easy for a man to overeat, then the glutton eatshimself out of health and finally out of existence. All othervoluptuaries prosper and perish in the same way; way; and this is whythe survival of the fittest means finally the survival of theself-controlled, because they alone can adapt themselves to theperpetual shifting of conditions produced by industrial progress. 

V

THE POLITICAL NEED FOR THE SUPERMAN

The need for the Superman is, in its most imperative aspect, a politicalone. We have been driven to Proletarian Democracy by the failure of allthe alternative systems; for these depended on the existence of Supermenacting as despots or oligarchs; and not only were these Supermen notalways or even often forthcoming at the right moment and in an eligiblesocial position, but when they were forthcoming they could not, exceptfor a short time and by morally suicidal coercive methods, imposesuperhumanity on those whom they governed; so, by mere force of "humannature, " government by consent of the governed has supplanted the oldplan of governing the citizen as a public-schoolboy is governed. 

Now we have yet to see the man who, having any practical experience ofProletarian Democracy, has any belief in its capacity for solving greatpolitical problems, or even for doing ordinary parochial workintelligently and economically. Only under despotisms and oligarchieshas the Radical faith in "universal suffrage" as a political panaceaarisen. It withers the moment it is exposed to practical trial, becauseDemocracy cannot rise above the level of the human material of which itsvoters are made. Switzerland seems happy in comparison with Russia; butif Russia were as small as Switzerland, and had her social problemssimplified in the same way by impregnable natural fortifications and apopulation educated by the same variety and intimacy of internationalintercourse, there might be little to choose between them. At allevents Australia and Canada, which are virtually protected democraticrepublics, and France and the United States, which are avowedlyindependent democratic republics, are neither healthy, wealthy, norwise; and they would be worse instead of better if their popularministers were not experts in the art of dodging popular enthusiasms andduping popular ignorance. The politician who once had to learn how toflatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate; and though inadvanced modern States, where the artizan is better educated than theKing, it takes a much bigger man to be a successful demagogue than to bea successful courtier, yet he who holds popular convictions withprodigious energy is the man for the mob, whilst the frailer sceptic whois cautiously feeling his way towards the next century has no chanceunless he happens by accident to have the specific artistic talent ofthe mountebank as well, in which case it is as a mountebank that hecatches votes, and not as a meliorist. Consequently the demagogue, though he professes (and fails) to readjust matters in the interests ofthe majority of the electors, yet stereotypes mediocrity, organizesintolerance, disparages exhibitions of uncommon qualities, and glorifiesconspicuous exhibitions of common ones. He manages a small job well: hemuddles rhetorically through a large one. When a great politicalmovement takes place, it is not consciously led nor organized: theunconscious self in mankind breaks its way through the problem as anelephant breaks through a jungle; and the politicians make speechesabout whatever happens in the process, which, with the best intentions, they do all in their power to prevent. Finally, when social aggregationarrives at a point demanding international organization before thedemagogues and electorates have learnt how to manage even a countryparish properly much less internationalize Constantinople, the wholepolitical business goes to smash; and presently we have Ruins ofEmpires, New Zealanders sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, andso forth. 

To that recurrent catastrophe we shall certainly come again unless wecan have a Democracy of Supermen; and the production of such a Democracyis the only change that is now hopeful enough to nerve us to the effortthat Revolution demands. 

VI

PRUDERY EXPLAINED

Why the bees should pamper their mothers whilst we pamper only ouroperatic prima donnas is a question worth reflecting on. Our notion oftreating a mother is, not to increase her supply of food, but to cut itoff by forbidding her to work in a factory for a month after herconfinement. Everything that can make birth a misfortune to the parentsas well as a danger to the mother is conscientiously done. When a greatFrench writer, Emil Zola, alarmed at the sterilization of his nation, wrote an eloquent and powerful book to restore the prestige ofparentage, it was at once assumed in England that a work of thischaracter, with such a title as Fecundity, was too abominable to betranslated, and that any attempt to deal with the relations of the sexesfrom any other than the voluptuary or romantic point of view must besternly put down. Now if this assumption were really founded on publicopinion, it would indicate an attitude of disgust and resentment towardsthe Life Force that could only arise in a diseased and moribundcommunity in which Ibsen's Hedda Gabler would be the typical woman. Butit has no vital foundation at all. The prudery of the newspapers is, like the prudery of the dinner table, a mere difficulty of education andlanguage. We are not taught to think decently on these subjects, andconsequently we have no language for them except indecent language. Wetherefore have to declare them unfit for public discussion, because theonly terms in which we can conduct the discussion are unfit for publicuse. Physiologists, who have a technical vocabulary at their disposal, find no difficulty; and masters of language who think decently can writepopular stories like Zola's Fecundity or Tolstoy's Resurrection withoutgiving the smallest offence to readers who can also think decently. Butthe ordinary modern journalist, who has never discussed such mattersexcept in ribaldry, cannot write a simple comment on a divorce casewithout a conscious shamefulness or a furtive facetiousness that makesit impossible to read the comment aloud in company. All this ribaldryand prudery (the two are the same) does not mean that people do not feeldecently on the subject: on the contrary, it is just the depth andseriousness of our feeling that makes its desecration by vile languageand coarse humor intolerable; so that at last we cannot bear to have itspoken of at all because only one in a thousand can speak of it withoutwounding our self-respect, especially the self-respect of women. Add tothe horrors of popular language the horrors of popular poverty. Incrowded populations poverty destroys the possibility of cleanliness; andin the absence of cleanliness many of the natural conditions of lifebecome offensive and noxious, with the result that at last theassociation of uncleanliness with these natural conditions becomes sooverpowering that among civilized people (that is, people massed in thelabyrinths of slums we call cities), half their bodily life becomes aguilty secret, unmentionable except to the doctor in emergencies; andHedda Gabler shoots herself because maternity is so unladylike. Inshort, popular prudery is only a mere incident of popular squalor: thesubjects which it taboos remain the most interesting and earnest ofsubjects in spite of it. 

VII

PROGRESS AN ILLUSION

Unfortunately the earnest people get drawn off the track of evolution bythe illusion of progress. Any Socialist can convince us easily that thedifference between Man as he is and Man as he might become, withoutfurther evolution, under millennial conditions of nutrition, environment, and training, is enormous. He can shew that inequality andiniquitous distribution of wealth and allotment of labor have arisenthrough an unscientific economic system, and that Man, faulty as he is, no more intended to establish any such ordered disorder than a mothintends to be burnt when it flies into a candle flame. He can shew thatthe difference between the grace and strength of the acrobat and thebent back of the rheumatic field laborer is a difference produced byconditions, not by nature. He can shew that many of the most detestablehuman vices are not radical, but are mere reactions of our institutionson our very virtues. The Anarchist, the Fabian, the Salvationist, theVegetarian, the doctor, the lawyer, the parson, the professor of ethics, the gymnast, the soldier, the sportsman, the inventor, the politicalprogram-maker, all have some prescription for bettering us; and almostall their remedies are physically possible and aimed at admitted evils. To them the limit of progress is, at worst, the completion of all thesuggested reforms and the levelling up of all men to the point attainedalready by the most highly nourished and cultivated in mind and body. 

Here, then, as it seems to them, is an enormous field for the energy ofthe reformer. Here are many noble goals attainable by many of thosepaths up the Hill Difficulty along which great spirits love to aspire. Unhappily, the hill will never be climbed by Man as we know him. Itneed not be denied that if we all struggled bravely to the end of thereformers' paths we should improve the world prodigiously. But there isno more hope in that If than in the equally plausible assurance that ifthe sky falls we shall all catch larks. We are not going to tread thosepaths: we have not sufficient energy. We do not desire the end enough:indeed in more cases we do not effectively desire it at all. Ask anyman would he like to be a better man; and he will say yes, most piously. Ask him would he like to have a million of money; and he will say yes, most sincerely. But the pious citizen who would like to be a better mangoes on behaving just as he did before. And the tramp who would likethe million does not take the trouble to earn ten shillings: multitudesof men and women, all eager to accept a legacy of a million, live anddie without having ever possessed five pounds at one time, althoughbeggars have died in rags on mattresses stuffed with gold which theyaccumulated because they desired it enough to nerve them to get it andkeep it. The economists who discovered that demand created supply soonhad to limit the proposition to "effective demand, " which turned out, inthe final analysis, to mean nothing more than supply itself; and thisholds good in politics, morals, and all other departments as well: theactual supply is the measure of the effective demand; and the mereaspirations and professions produce nothing. No community has ever yetpassed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticismenabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and developa commercial civilization. Even these stages have never been attainedby public spirit, but always by intolerant wilfulness and brute force. Take the Reform Bill of 1832 as an example of a conflict between twosections of educated Englishmen concerning a political measure which wasas obviously necessary and inevitable as any political measure has everbeen or is ever likely to be. It was not passed until the gentlemen ofBirmingham had made arrangements to cut the throats of the gentlemen ofSt. James's parish in due military form. It would not have been passedto this day if there had been no force behind it except the logic andpublic conscience of the Utilitarians. A despotic ruler with as muchsense as Queen Elizabeth would have done better than the mob of grown-upEton boys who governed us then by privilege, and who, since theintroduction of practically Manhood Suffrage in 1884, now govern us atthe request of proletarian Democracy. 

At the present time we have, instead of the Utilitarians, the FabianSociety, with its peaceful, constitutional, moral, economical policy ofSocialism, which needs nothing for its bloodless and benevolentrealization except that the English people shall understand it andapprove of it. But why are the Fabians well spoken of in circles wherethirty years ago the word Socialist was understood as equivalent tocut-throat and incendiary? Not because the English have the smallestintention of studying or adopting the Fabian policy, but because theybelieve that the Fabians, by eliminating the element of intimidationfrom the Socialist agitation, have drawn the teeth of insurgent povertyand saved the existing order from the only method of attack it reallyfears. Of course, if the nation adopted the Fabian policy, it would becarried out by brute force exactly as our present property system is. It would become the law; and those who resisted it would be fined, soldup, knocked on the head by policemen, thrown into prison, and in thelast resort "executed" just as they are when they break the present law. But as our proprietary class has no fear of that conversion takingplace, whereas it does fear sporadic cut-throats and gunpowder plots, and strives with all its might to hide the fact that there is no moraldifference whatever between the methods by which it enforces itsproprietary rights and the method by which the dynamitard asserts hisconception of natural human rights, the Fabian Society is patted on theback just as the Christian Social Union is, whilst the Socialist whosays bluntly that a Social revolution can be made only as all otherrevolutions have been made, by the people who want it killing, coercing, and intimidating the people who dont want it, is denounced as amisleader of the people, and imprisoned with hard labor to shew him howmuch sincerity there is in the objection of his captors to physicalforce. 

Are we then to repudiate Fabian methods, and return to those of thebarricader, or adopt those of the dynamitard and the assassin? On thecontrary, we are to recognize that both are fundamentally futile. Itseems easy for the dynamitard to say "Have you not just admitted thatnothing is ever conceded except to physical force? Did not Gladstoneadmit that the Irish Church was disestablished, not by the spirit ofLiberalism, but by the explosion which wrecked Clerkenwell prison?"Well, we need not foolishly and timidly deny it. Let it be fullygranted. Let us grant, further, that all this lies in the nature ofthings; that the most ardent Socialist, if he owns property, can by nomeans do otherwise than Conservative proprietors until property isforcibly abolished by the whole nation; nay, that ballots, andparliamentary divisions, in spite of their vain ceremony, of discussion, differ from battles only as the bloodless surrender of an outnumberedforce in the field differs from Waterloo or Trafalgar. I make a presentof all these admissions to the Fenian who collects money fromthoughtless Irishmen in America to blow up Dublin Castle; to thedetective who persuades foolish young workmen to order bombs from thenearest ironmonger and then delivers them up to penal servitude; to ourmilitary and naval commanders who believe, not in preaching, but in anultimatum backed by plenty of lyddite; and, generally, to all whom itmay concern. But of what use is it to substitute the way of thereckless and bloodyminded for the way of the cautious and humane? IsEngland any the better for the wreck of Clerkenwell prison, or Irelandfor the disestablishment of the Irish Church? Is there the smallestreason to suppose that the nation which sheepishly let Charles and Laudand Strafford coerce it, gained anything because it afterwards, stillmore sheepishly, let a few strongminded Puritans, inflamed by themasterpieces of Jewish revolutionary literature, cut off the heads ofthe three? Suppose the Gunpowder plot had succeeded, and set a Fawkesdynasty permanently on the throne, would it have made any difference tothe present state of the nation? The guillotine was used in France upto the limit of human endurance, both on Girondins and Jacobins. Fouquier Tinville followed Marie Antoinette to the scaffold; and MarieAntoinette might have asked the crowd, just as pointedly as Fouquierdid, whether their bread would be any cheaper when her head was off. And what came of it all? The Imperial France of the Rougon Macquartfamily, and the Republican France of the Panama scandal and the Dreyfuscase. Was the difference worth the guillotining of all those unluckyladies and gentlemen, useless and mischievous as many of them were?Would any sane man guillotine a mouse to bring about such a result?Turn to Republican America. America has no Star Chamber, and no feudalbarons. But it has Trusts; and it has millionaires whose factories, fenced in by live electric wires and defended by Pinkerton retainerswith magazine rifles, would have made a Radical of Reginald Front deBoeuf. Would Washington or Franklin have lifted a finger in the causeof American Independence if they had foreseen its reality?

No: what Cæsar, Cromwell, Napoleon could not do with all the physicalforce and moral prestige of the State in their hands, cannot be done byenthusiastic criminals and lunatics. Even the Jews, who, from Moses toMarx and Lassalle, have inspired all the revolutions, have had toconfess that, after all, the dog will return to his vomit and the sowthat was washed to her wallowing in the mire; and we may as well make upour minds that Man will return to his idols and his cupidities, in spiteof "movements" and all revolutions, until his nature is changed. Untilthen, his early successes in building commercial civilizations (and suchcivilizations, Good Heavens!) are but preliminaries to the inevitablelater stage, now threatening us, in which the passions which built thecivilization become fatal instead of productive, just as the samequalities which make the lion king in the forest ensure his destructionwhen he enters a city. Nothing can save society then except the clearhead and the wide purpose: war and competition, potent instruments ofselection and evolution in one epoch, become ruinous instruments ofdegeneration in the next. In the breeding of animals and plants, varieties which have arisen by selection through many generationsrelapse precipitously into the wild type in a generation or two whenselection ceases; and in the same way a civilization in which lustypugnacity and greed have ceased to act as selective agents and havebegun to obstruct and destroy, rushes downwards and backwards with asuddenness that enables an observer to see with consternation the upwardsteps of many centuries retraced in a single lifetime. This has oftenoccurred even within the period covered by history; and in everyinstance the turning point has been reached long before the attainment, or even the general advocacy on paper, of the levelling-up of the massto the highest point attainable by the best nourished and cultivatednormal individuals. 

We must therefore frankly give up the notion that Man as he exists iscapable of net progress. There will always be an illusion of progress, because wherever we are conscious of an evil we remedy it, and thereforealways seem to ourselves to be progressing, forgetting that most of theevils we see are the effects, finally become acute, of long-unnoticedretrogressions; that our compromising remedies seldom fully recover thelost ground; above all, that on the lines along which we aredegenerating, good has become evil in our eyes, and is being undone inthe name of progress precisely as evil is undone and replaced by good onthe lines along which we are evolving. This is indeed the Illusion ofIllusions; for it gives us infallible and appalling assurance that ifour political ruin is to come, it will be effected by ardent reformersand supported by enthusiastic patriots as a series of necessary steps inour progress. Let the Reformer, the Progressive, the Meliorist thenreconsider himself and his eternal ifs and ans which never become potsand pans. Whilst Man remains what he is, there can be no progressbeyond the point already attained and fallen headlong from at everyattempt at civilization; and since even that point is but a pinnacle towhich a few people cling in giddy terror above an abyss of squalor, mereprogress should no longer charm us. 

VIII

THE CONCEIT OF CIVILIZATION

After all, the progress illusion is not so very subtle. We begin byreading the satires of our fathers' contemporaries; and we conclude(usually quite ignorantly) that the abuses exposed by them are things ofthe past. We see also that reforms of crying evils are frequentlyproduced by the sectional shifting of political power from oppressors tooppressed. The poor man is given a vote by the Liberals in the hopethat he will cast it for his emancipators. The hope is not fulfilled;but the lifelong imprisonment of penniless men for debt ceases; FactoryActs are passed to mitigate sweating; schooling is made free andcompulsory; sanitary by-laws are multiplied; public steps are taken tohouse the masses decently; the bare-footed get boots; rags become rare;and bathrooms and pianos, smart tweeds and starched collars, reachnumbers of people who once, as "the unsoaped, " played the Jew's harp orthe accordion in moleskins and belchers. Some of these changes aregains: some of them are losses. Some of them are not changes at all:all of them are merely the changes that money makes. Still, theyproduce an illusion of bustling progress; and the reading class infersfrom them that the abuses of the early Victorian period no longer existexcept as amusing pages in the novels of Dickens. But the moment welook for a reform due to character and not to money, to statesmanshipand not to interest or mutiny, we are disillusioned. For example, weremembered the maladministration and incompetence revealed by theCrimean War as part of a bygone state of things until the South Africanwar shewed that the nation and the War Office, like those poor Bourbonswho have been so impudently blamed for a universal characteristic, hadlearnt nothing and forgotten nothing. We had hardly recovered from thefruitless irritation of this discovery when it transpired that theofficers' mess of our most select regiment included a flogging clubpresided over by the senior subaltern. The disclosure provoked somedisgust at the details of this schoolboyish debauchery, but no surpriseat the apparent absence of any conception of manly honor and virtue, ofpersonal courage and self-respect, in the front rank of our chivalry. In civil affairs we had assumed that the sycophancy and idolatry whichencouraged Charles I. To undervalue the Puritan revolt of the XVIIcentury had been long outgrown; but it has needed nothing but favorablecircumstances to revive, with added abjectness to compensate for itslost piety. We have relapsed into disputes about transubstantiation atthe very moment when the discovery of the wide prevalence of theophagyas a tribal custom has deprived us of the last excuse for believing thatour official religious rites differ in essentials from those ofbarbarians. The Christian doctrine of the uselessness of punishment andthe wickedness of revenge has not, in spite of its simple common sense, found a single convert among the nations: Christianity means nothing tothe masses but a sensational public execution which is made an excusefor other executions. In its name we take ten years of a thief's lifeminute by minute in the slow misery and degradation of modern reformedimprisonment with as little remorse as Laud and his Star Chamber clippedthe ears of Bastwick and Burton. We dug up and mutilated the remains ofthe Mahdi the other day exactly as we dug up and mutilated the remainsof Cromwell two centuries ago. We have demanded the decapitation of theChinese Boxer princes as any Tartar would have done; and our militaryand naval expeditions to kill, burn, and destroy tribes and villages forknocking an Englishman on the head are so common a part of our Imperialroutine that the last dozen of them has not called forth as much pity ascan be counted on by any lady criminal. The judicial use of torture toextort confession is supposed to be a relic of darker ages; but whilstthese pages are being written an English judge has sentenced a forger totwenty years penal servitude with an open declaration that the sentencewill be carried out in full unless he confesses where he has hidden thenotes he forged. And no comment whatever is made, either on this or ona telegram from the seat of war in Somaliland mentioning that certaininformation has been given by a prisoner of war "under punishment. " Evenif these reports are false, the fact that they are accepted withoutprotest as indicating a natural and proper course of public conductshews that we are still as ready to resort to torture as Bacon was. Asto vindictive cruelty, an incident in the South African war, when therelatives and friends of a prisoner were forced to witness hisexecution, betrayed a baseness of temper and character which hardlyleaves us the right to plume ourselves on our superiority to Edward III. At the surrender of Calais. And the democratic American officerindulges in torture in the Philippines just as the aristocratic Englishofficer did in South Africa. The incidents of the white invasion ofAfrica in search of ivory, gold, diamonds, and sport, have proved thatthe modern European is the same beast of prey that formerly marched tothe conquest of new worlds under Alexander, Antony, and Pizarro. Parliaments and vestries are just what they were when Cromwellsuppressed them and Dickens derided them. The democratic politicianremains exactly as Plato described him; the physician is still thecredulous impostor and petulant scientific coxcomb whom Molièreridiculed; the schoolmaster remains at best a pedantic child farmer andat worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest menthan lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as thedoctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none the lessfraudulent and mischievous because they are now called scientificexperiments and conducted by professors; witchcraft, in the modern formof patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant; thelandowner who is no longer powerful enough to; set the mantrap ofRhampsinitis improves on it by barbed wire; the modern gentleman who istoo lazy to daub his face with vermilion as a symbol of bravery employsa laundress to daub his shirt with starch as a symbol of cleanliness; weshake our heads at the dirt of the middle ages in cities made grimy withsoot and foul and disgusting with shameless tobacco smoking; holy water, in its latest form of disinfectant fluid, is more widely used andbelieved in than ever; public health authorities deliberately go throughincantations with burning sulphur (which they know to be useless)because the people believe in it as devoutly as the Italian peasantbelieves in the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius; andstraightforward public lying has reached gigantic developments, therebeing nothing to choose in this respect between the pickpocket at thepolice station and the minister on the treasury bench, the editor in thenewspaper office, the city magnate advertizing bicycle tires that do notside-slip, the clergyman subscribing the thirty-nine articles, and thevivisector who pledges his knightly honor that no animal operated on inthe physiological laboratory suffers the slightest pain. Hypocrisy isat its worst; for we not only persecute bigotedly but sincerely in thename of the cure-mongering witchcraft we do believe in, but callouslyand hypocritically in the name of the Evangelical creed that our rulersprivately smile at as the Italian patricians of the fifth century smiledat Jupiter and Venus. Sport is, as it has always been, murderousexcitement; the impulse to slaughter is universal; and museums are setup throughout the country to encourage little children and elderlygentlemen to make collections of corpses preserved in alcohol, and tosteal birds' eggs and keep them as the red Indian used to keep scalps. Coercion with the lash is as natural to an Englishman as it was toSolomon spoiling Rehoboam: indeed, the comparison is unfair to the Jewsin view of the facts that the Mosaic law forbade more than forty lashesin the name of humanity, and that floggings of a thousand lashes wereinflicted on English soldiers in the XVIII and XIX centuries, and wouldbe inflicted still but for the change in the balance of political powerbetween the military caste and the commercial classes and theproletariat. In spite of that change, flogging is still an institutionin the public school, in the military prison, on the training ship, andin that school of littleness called the home. The lascivious clamor ofthe flagellomaniac for more of it, constant as the clamor for moreinsolence, more war, and lower rates, is tolerated and even gratifiedbecause, having no moral ends in view, we have sense enough to see thatnothing but brute coercion can impose our selfish will on others. Cowardice is universal; patriotism, public opinion, parental duty, discipline, religion, morality, are only fine names for intimidation;and cruelty, gluttony, and credulity keep cowardice in countenance. Wecut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to deathso that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cramthem with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birdsto pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals forno reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and weconnive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering somemagical cure for our own diseases by them. 

Now please observe that these are not exceptional developments of ouradmitted vices, deplored and prayed against by all good men. Not a wordhas been said here of the excesses of our Neros, of whom we have thefull usual percentage. With the exception of the few military examples, which are mentioned mainly to shew that the education and standing of agentleman, reinforced by the strongest conventions of honor, esprit decorps, publicity and responsibility, afford no better guarantees ofconduct than the passions of a mob, the illustrations given above arecommonplaces taken from the daily practices of our best citizens, vehemently defended in our newspapers and in our pulpits. The veryhumanitarians who abhor them are stirred to murder by them: the daggerof Brutus and Ravaillac is still active in the hands of Caserio andLuccheni; and the pistol has come to its aid in the hands of Guiteau andCzolgosz. Our remedies are still limited to endurance or assassination;and the assassin is still judicially assassinated on the principle thattwo blacks make a white. The only novelty is in our methods: throughthe discovery of dynamite the overloaded musket of Hamilton ofBothwellhaugh has been superseded by the bomb; but Ravachol's heartburns just as Hamilton's did. The world will not bear thinking of tothose who know what it is, even with the largest discount for therestraints of poverty on the poor and cowardice on the rich. 

All that can be said for us is that people must and do live and let liveup to a certain point. Even the horse, with his docked tail and bittedjaw, finds his slavery mitigated by the fact that a total disregard ofhis need for food and rest would put his master to the expense of buyinga new horse every second day; for you cannot work a horse to death andthen pick up another one for nothing, as you can a laborer. But thisnatural check on inconsiderate selfishness is itself checked, partly byour shortsightedness, and partly by deliberate calculation; so thatbeside the man who, to his own loss, will shorten his horse's life inmere stinginess, we have the tramway company which discovers actuariallythat though a horse may live from 24 to 40 years, yet it pays better towork him to death in 4 and then replace him by a fresh victim. Andhuman slavery, which has reached its worst recorded point within our owntime in the form of free wage labor, has encountered the same personaland commercial limits to both its aggravation and its mitigation. Nowthat the freedom of wage labor has produced a scarcity of it, as inSouth Africa, the leading English newspaper and the leading Englishweekly review have openly and without apology demanded a return tocompulsory labor: that is, to the methods by which, as we believe, theEgyptians built the pyramids. We know now that the crusade againstchattel slavery in the XIX century succeeded solely because chattelslavery was neither the most effective nor the least humane method oflabor exploitation; and the world is now feeling its way towards a stillmore effective system which shall abolish the freedom of the workerwithout again making his exploiter responsible for him. 

Still, there is always some mitigation: there is the fear of revolt; andthere are the effects of kindliness and affection. Let it be repeatedtherefore that no indictment is here laid against the world on the scoreof what its criminals and monsters do. The fires of Smithfield and ofthe Inquisition were lighted by earnestly pious people, who were kindand good as kindness and goodness go. And when a negro is dipped inkerosene and set on fire in America at the present time, he is not agood man lynched by ruffians: he is a criminal lynched by crowds ofrespectable, charitable, virtuously indignant, high-minded citizens, who, though they act outside the law, are at least more merciful thanthe American legislators and judges who not so long ago condemned men tosolitary confinement for periods, not of five months, as our ownpractice is, but of five years and more. The things that our moralmonsters do may be left out of account with St. Bartholomew massacresand other momentary outbursts of social disorder. Judge us by theadmitted and respected practice of our most reputable circles; and, ifyou know the facts and are strong enough to look them in the face, youmust admit that unless we are replaced by a more highly evolvedanimal--in short, by the Superman--the world must remain a den ofdangerous animals among whom our few accidental supermen, ourShakespears, Goethes, Shelleys, and their like, must live asprecariously as lion tamers do, taking the humor of their situation, andthe dignity of their superiority, as a set-off to the horror of the oneand the loneliness of the other. 

IX

THE VERDICT OF HISTORY

It may be said that though the wild beast breaks out in Man and castshim back momentarily into barbarism under the excitement of war andcrime, yet his normal life is higher than the normal life of hisforefathers. This view is very acceptable to Englishmen, who alwayslean sincerely to virtue's side as long as it costs them nothing eitherin money or in thought. They feel deeply the injustice of foreigners, who allow them no credit for this conditional highmindedness. But thereis no reason to suppose that our ancestors were less capable of it thanwe are. To all such claims for the existence of a progressive moralevolution operating visibly from grandfather to grandson, there is theconclusive reply that a thousand years of such evolution would haveproduced enormous social changes, of which the historical evidence wouldbe overwhelming. But not Macaulay himself, the most confident of Whigmeliorists, can produce any such evidence that will bearcross-examination. Compare our conduct and our codes with thosementioned contemporarily in such ancient scriptures and classics as havecome down to us, and you will find no jot of ground for the belief thatany moral progress whatever has been made in historic time, in spite ofall the romantic attempts of historians to reconstruct the past on thatassumption. Within that time it has happened to nations as to privatefamilies and individuals that they have flourished and decayed, repentedand hardened their hearts, submitted and protested, acted and reacted, oscillated between natural and artificial sanitation (the oldest housein the world, unearthed the other day in Crete, has quite modernsanitary arrangements), and rung a thousand changes on the differentscales of income and pressure of population, firmly believing all thetime that mankind was advancing by leaps and bounds because men wereconstantly busy. And the mere chapter of accidents has left a smallaccumulation of chance discoveries, such as the wheel, the arch, thesafety pin, gunpowder, the magnet, the Voltaic pile and so forth: thingswhich, unlike the gospels and philosophic treatises of the sages, can beusefully understood and applied by common men; so that steam locomotionis possible without a nation of Stephensons, although nationalChristianity is impossible without a nation of Christs. But does anyman seriously believe that the chauffeur who drives a motor car fromParis to Berlin is a more highly evolved man than the charioteer ofAchilles, or that a modern Prime Minister is a more enlightened rulerthan Cæsar because he rides a tricycle, writes his dispatches by theelectric light, and instructs his stockbroker through the telephone?

Enough, then, of this goose-cackle about Progress: Man, as he is, neverwill nor can add a cubit to his stature by any of its quackeries, political, scientific, educational, religious, or artistic. What islikely to happen when this conviction gets into the minds of the menwhose present faith in these illusions is the cement of our socialsystem, can be imagined only by those who know how suddenly acivilization which has long ceased to think (or in the old phrase, towatch and pray) can fall to pieces when the vulgar belief in itshypocrisies and impostures can no longer hold out against its failuresand scandals. When religious and ethical formulae become so obsoletethat no man of strong mind can believe them, they have also reached thepoint at which no man of high character will profess them; and from, that moment until they are formally disestablished, they stand at thedoor of every profession and every public office to keep out every ableman who is not a sophist or a liar. A nation which revises its parishcouncils once in three years, but will not revise its articles ofreligion once in three hundred, even when those articles avowedly beganas a political compromise dictated by Mr Facing-Both-Ways, is a nationthat needs remaking. 

Our only hope, then, is in evolution. We must replace the man by thesuperman. It is frightful for the citizen, as the years pass him, tosee his own contemporaries so exactly reproduced by the youngergeneration, that his companions of thirty years ago have theircounterparts in every city crowd, where he had to check himselfrepeatedly in the act of saluting as an old friend some young man towhom he is only an elderly stranger. All hope of advance dies in hisbosom as he watches them: he knows that they will do just what theirfathers did, and that the few voices which will still, as always before, exhort them to do something else and be something better, might as wellspare their breath to cool their porridge (if they can get any). Menlike Ruskin and Carlyle will preach to Smith and Brown for the sake ofpreaching, just as St Francis preached to the birds and St Anthony tothe fishes. But Smith and Brown, like the fishes and birds, remain asthey are; and poets who plan Utopias and prove that nothing is necessaryfor their realization but that Man should will them, perceive at last, like Richard Wagner, that the fact to be faced is that Man does noteffectively will them. And he never will until he becomes Superman. 

And so we arrive at the end of the Socialist's dream of "thesocialization of the means of production and exchange, " of thePositivist's dream of moralizing the capitalist, and of the ethicalprofessor's, legislator's, educator's dream of putting commandments andcodes and lessons and examination marks on a man as harness is put on ahorse, ermine on a judge, pipeclay on a soldier, or a wig on an actor, and pretending that his nature has been changed. The only fundamentaland possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding ofMan: in other terms, of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the commonwealth. 

X

THE METHOD

As to the method, what can be said as yet except that where there is awill, there is a way? If there be no will, we are lost. That is apossibility for our crazy little empire, if not for the universe; and assuch possibilities are not to be entertained without despair, we must, whilst we survive, proceed on the assumption that we have still energyenough to not only will to live, but to will to live better. That maymean that we must establish a State Department of Evolution, with a seatin the Cabinet for its chief, and a revenue to defray the cost of directState experiments, and provide inducements to private persons to achievesuccessful results. It may mean a private society or a charteredcompany for the improvement of human live stock. But for the present itis far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation of such proposals asindecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a general secret pushing ofthe human will in the repudiated direction; so that all sorts ofinstitutions and public authorities will under some pretext or otherfeel their way furtively towards the Superman. Mr Graham Wallas hasalready ventured to suggest, as Chairman of the School ManagementCommittee of the London School Board, that the accepted policy of theSterilization of the Schoolmistress, however administrativelyconvenient, is open to criticism from the national stock-breeding pointof view; and this is as good an example as any of the way in which thedrift towards the Superman may operate in spite of all our hypocrisies. One thing at least is clear to begin with. If a woman can, by carefulselection of a father, and nourishment of herself, produce a citizenwith efficient senses, sound organs, and a good digestion, she shouldclearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to makeher willing to undertake and repeat it. Whether she be financed in theundertaking by herself, or by the father, or by a speculativecapitalist, or by a new department of, say, the Royal Dublin Society, or(as at present) by the War Office maintaining her "on the strength" andauthorizing a particular soldier to marry her, or by a local authorityunder a by-law directing that women may under certain circumstances havea year's leave of absence on full salary, or by the central government, does not matter provided the result be satisfactory. 

It is a melancholy fact that as the vast majority of women and theirhusbands have, under existing circumstances, not enough nourishment, nocapital, no credit, and no knowledge of science or business, they would, if the State would pay for birth as it now pays for death, be exploitedby joint stock companies for dividends, just as they are in ordinaryindustries. Even a joint stock human stud farm (piously disguised as areformed Foundling Hospital or something of that sort) might well, underproper inspection and regulation, produce better results than ourpresent reliance on promiscuous marriage. It may be objected that whenan ordinary contractor produces stores for sale to the Government, andthe Government rejects them as not up to the required standard, thecondemned goods are either sold for what they will fetch or elsescrapped: that is, treated as waste material; whereas if the goodsconsisted of human beings, all that could be done would be to let themloose or send them to the nearest workhouse. But there is nothing newin private enterprise throwing its human refuse on the cheap labormarket and the workhouse; and the refuse of the new industry wouldpresumably be better bred than the staple product of ordinary poverty. In our present happy-go-lucky industrial disorder, all the humanproducts, successful or not, would have to be thrown on the labormarket; but the unsuccessful ones would not entitle the company to abounty and so would be a dead loss to it. The practical commercialdifficulty would be the uncertainty and the cost in time and money ofthe first experiments. Purely commercial capital would not touch suchheroic operations during the experimental stage; and in any case thestrength of mind needed for so momentous a new departure could not befairly expected from the Stock Exchange. It will have to be handled bystatesmen with character enough to tell our democracy and plutocracythat statecraft does not consist in flattering their follies or applyingtheir suburban standards of propriety to the affairs of four continents. The matter must be taken up either by the State or by some organizationstrong enough to impose respect upon the State. 

The novelty of any such experiment, however, is only in the scale of it. In one conspicuous case, that of royalty, the State does already selectthe parents on purely political grounds; and in the peerage, though theheir to a dukedom is legally free to marry a dairymaid, yet the socialpressure on him to confine his choice to politically and sociallyeligible mates is so overwhelming that he is really no more free tomarry the dairymaid than George IV was to marry Mrs Fitzherbert; andsuch a marriage could only occur as a result of extraordinary strengthof character on the part of the dairymaid acting upon extraordinaryweakness on the part of the duke. Let those who think the wholeconception of intelligent breeding absurd and scandalous ask themselveswhy George IV was not allowed to choose his own wife whilst any tinkercould marry whom he pleased? Simply because it did not matter a rappolitically whom the tinker married, whereas it mattered very much whomthe king married. The way in which all considerations of the king'spersonal rights, of the claims of the heart, of the sanctity of themarriage oath, and of romantic morality crumpled up before thispolitical need shews how negligible all these apparently irresistibleprejudices are when they come into conflict with the demand for qualityin our rulers. We learn the same lesson from the case of the soldier, whose marriage, when it is permitted at all, is despotically controlledwith a view solely to military efficiency. 

Well, nowadays it is not the King that rules, but the tinker. Dynasticwars are no longer feared, dynastic alliances no longer valued. Marriages in royal families are becoming rapidly less political, andmore popular, domestic, and romantic. If all the kings in Europe weremade as free to-morrow as King Cophetua, nobody but their aunts andchamberlains would feel a moment's anxiety as to the consequences. Onthe other hand a sense of the social importance of the tinker's marriagehas been steadily growing. We have made a public matter of his wife'shealth in the month after her confinement. We have taken the minds ofhis children out of his hands and put them into those of our Stateschoolmaster. We shall presently make their bodily nourishmentindependent of him. But they are still riff-raff; and to hand thecountry over to riff-raff is national suicide, since riff-raff canneither govern nor will let anyone else govern except the highest bidderof bread and circuses. There is no public enthusiast alive of twentyyears' practical democratic experience who believes in the politicaladequacy of the electorate or of the bodies it elects. The overthrow ofthe aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman. 

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. Butevery Englishman loves and desires a pedigree. And in that he is right. King Demos must be bred like all other Kings; and with Must there is noarguing. It is idle for an individual writer to carry so great a matterfurther in a pamphlet. A conference on the subject is the next stepneeded. It will be attended by men and women who, no longer believingthat they can live for ever, are seeking for some immortal work intowhich they can build the best of themselves before their refuse isthrown into that arch dust destructor, the cremation furnace. 

[Transcriber's Note: Shaw promoted spelling reform of his own invention. His spelling reform included not using apostrophes for contractions, thus this text has 'dont' instead of 'don't' and -iz- instead of -is-even in words which standard English, both British or American, spellswith -is-, for example: partizan, artizan. He had the goal of makingspelling more phonetic. He spelled it 'Shakespear'. He spelled'Caesar' with an ae ligature. He used diacritical on French words andnames. ]