WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD

By G. K. Chesterton

CONTENTS

 PART ONE: THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN

 I The Medical Mistake II Wanted: An Unpractical Man III The New Hypocrite IV The Fear of the Past V The Unfinished Temple VI The Enemies of Property VII The Free Family XIII The Wildness of Domesticity IX History of Hudge and Gudge X Oppression by Optimism XI The Homelessness of Jones

 PART TWO: IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN

 I The Charm of Jingoism II Wisdom and the Weather III The Common Vision IV The Insane Necessity

 PART THREE: FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN

 I The Unmilitary Suffragette II The Universal Stick III The Emancipation of Domesticity IV The Romance of Thrift V The Coldness of Chloe VI The Pedant and the Savage VII The Modern Surrender of Woman VIII The Brand of the Fleur-de-Lis IX Sincerity and the Gallows X The Higher Anarchy XI The Queen and the Suffragettes XII The Modern Slave

 PART FOUR: EDUCATION, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD

 I The Calvinism of To-day II The Tribal Terror III The Tricks of Environment IV The Truth About Education V An Evil Cry VI Authority the Unavoidable VII The Humility of Mrs. Grundy VIII The Broken Rainbow IX The Need for Narrowness X The Case for the Public Schools XI The School for Hypocrites XII The Staleness of the New Schools XIII The Outlawed Parent XIV Folly and Female Education

 PART FIVE: THE HOME OF MAN

 I The Empire of the Insect II The Fallacy of the Umbrella Stand III The Dreadful Duty of Gudge IV A Last Instance V Conclusion

 THREE NOTES

 I On Female Suffrage II On Cleanliness in Education III On Peasant Proprietorship

DEDICATION

To C. F G. Masterman, M. P. 

My Dear Charles, I originally called this book "What is Wrong, " and it wouldhave satisfied your sardonic temper to note the number of socialmisunderstandings that arose from the use of the title. Many a mild ladyvisitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, "I have been doing'What is Wrong' all this morning. " And one minister of religion movedquite sharply in his chair when I told him (as he understood it) that Ihad to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again ina minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannotconjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is, of havingwritten a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthyto be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes, this book is what iswrong and no mistake. 

It may seem a refinement of insolence to present so wild a compositionto one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions ofthe moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who canmake the map of England crawl with life; a most creepy and enviableaccomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which, evenif it achieves its object (which is monstrously unlikely) can only be athundering gallop of theory?

Well, I do it partly because I think you politicians are none the worsefor a few inconvenient ideals; but more because you will recognise themany arguments we have had, those arguments which the most wonderfulladies in the world can never endure for very long. And, perhaps, youwill agree with me that the thread of comradeship and conversation mustbe protected because it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred, itmust not be snapped, because it is not worth tying together again. Itis exactly because argument is idle that men (I mean males) must take itseriously; for when (we feel), until the crack of doom, shall we have sodelightful a difference again? But most of all I offer it to you becausethere exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing, calledfriendship; an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which, please God, will never break. 

Yours always, G. K. Chesterton. 

PART ONE. THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN

I. THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharplydefined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tablesof population, decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth ofhysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with achapter that is generally called "The Remedy. " It is almost wholly dueto this careful, solid, and scientific method that "The Remedy" is neverfound. For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder;the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating thedisease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition anddignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the curebefore we find the disease. 

The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modernmadness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speakof the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the BritishLion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. Themoment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men arenot a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdityof perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations, " asif a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will saythat Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say thatSpain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada shouldsoon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soongrow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generationmay be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similarapplications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasingsize of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short insubtlety of the parallel of a human body. They do not even ask whetheran empire is growing taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in itsold age. But of all the instances of error arising from this physicalfancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustivelydescribing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug. 

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

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

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

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

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II. WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endlessand useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which camefirst, the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood, it is so futile an inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enteron those deep metaphysical and theological differences of which thechicken and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. Theevolutionary materialists are appropriately enough represented in thevision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germthat had laid itself by accident. That other supernatural school ofthought (to which I personally adhere) would be not unworthily typifiedin the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon bya sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets. But it isto much humbler functions that I here call the awful power of such adistinction. Whether or no the living bird is at the beginning of ourmental chain, it is absolutely necessary that it should be at the end ofour mental chain. The bird is the thing to be aimed at--not with a gun, but a life-bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking isthis: that the egg and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmicoccurrences recurring alternatively forever. They must not become a mereegg and bird pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One is a meansand the other an end; they are in different mental worlds. Leavingthe complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in anelemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But thechicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may alsoexist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to aFrench dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuablein himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness;forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious lifeis after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk ofnothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only thinkof the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking tobreed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whateverwe happen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and theembryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomesdoubtful and even morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything; andour politics are rotten eggs. 

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

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

"Efficiency, " of course, is futile for the same reason that strong men, will-power and the superman are futile. That is, it is futile becauseit only deals with actions after they have been performed. It has nophilosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore it has no powerof choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it isover; if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong. There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winnerwhen he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winningside; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operationhas occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, themurder was efficient. A tropical sun is as efficient in making peoplelazy as a Lancashire foreman bully in making them energetic. Maeterlinckis as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors asMessrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But itall depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery, beinga modern skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being anorthodox Christian, prefer the jam. But both are efficient when theyhave been effected; and inefficient until they are effected. A man whothinks much about success must be the drowsiest sentimentalist; for hemust be always looking back. If he only likes victory he must alwayscome late for the battle. For the man of action there is nothing butidealism. 

This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in ourexisting English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For thepresent chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men wereoriginally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man demandswhat he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man reallywanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, heforgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a pandemonium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merelyprevent any heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practicalcompromise. One can only find the middle distance between two points ifthe two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement between twolitigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they willnot even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restaurant would muchprefer that each customer should give his order smartly, though itwere for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customershould sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmeticalcalculations about how much food there can be on the premises. Most ofus have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their perverseunselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost clamorfor the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat. Most of ushave known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss ofself-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such admirablewomen, our practical politicians keep things in the same confusionthrough the same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing thatso much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We arebewildered on every side by politicians who are in favor of seculareducation, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire totalprohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regretcompulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasantproprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazedand floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If ourstatesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we askfor something in the abstract we might get something in the concrete. As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it isimpossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainlylike a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in the oldbargaining has wholly vanished. We forget that the word "compromise"contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word "promise. "Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The middlepoint is as fixed as the extreme point. 

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

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III. THE NEW HYPOCRITE

But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the oldEnglish compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an improvementmerely because it is complete. They call it utopian and revolutionarythat anyone should really have his own way, or anything be really done, and done with. Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better thanno bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half aloaf is better than a whole loaf. 

As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of oureverlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a newkind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a manwhose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended thatthey were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are reallyreligious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. TheRev. Brown, the Wesleyan minister, sturdily declares that he caresnothing for creeds, but only for education; meanwhile, in truth, thewildest Wesleyanism is tearing his soul. The Rev. Smith, of the Churchof England, explains gracefully, with the Oxford manner, that the onlyquestion for him is the prosperity and efficiency of the schools; whilein truth all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him. Itis a fight of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these reverendgentlemen do themselves wrong; I think they are more pious than theywill admit. Theology is not (as some suppose) expunged as an error. Itis merely concealed, like a sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theologicalatmosphere as much as Lord Halifax; only it is a different one. If Dr. Clifford would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainlyfor Catholicism, something might be done for them. We are all, onehopes, imaginative enough to recognize the dignity and distinctness ofanother religion, like Islam or the cult of Apollo. I am quite readyto respect another man's faith; but it is too much to ask that I shouldrespect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and fictions, his politicalbargain and make-believe. Most Nonconformists with an instinct forEnglish history could see something poetic and national about theArchbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is whenhe does the rational British statesman that they very justifiably getannoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for pluck and simplicity couldadmire Dr. Clifford as a Baptist minister. It is when he says that he issimply a citizen that nobody can possibly believe him. 

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

Some people do not like the word "dogma. " Fortunately they are free, andthere is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two thingsonly, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ageswere a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, apoetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; aprejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man shouldnot be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anythingshould be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal. Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I wouldrather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a generalrecommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallelmust meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers mightwalk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side andone on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep awayfrom each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect ofour modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist. 

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

It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness dividesmen, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm inclear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So aTory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what isSocialism. But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublimeatmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps out of itsway; and quite right too. One can meet an assertion with argument; buthealthy bigotry is the only way in which one can meet a tendency. Iam told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenlypressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons fordisliking the Japanese civilization. To use surrender as a weapon is thevery worst spirit of the East. But certainly there is no force so hardto fight as the force which it is easy to conquer; the force thatalways yields and then returns. Such is the force of a great impersonalprejudice, such as possesses the modern world on so many points. Againstthis there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, aresolution not to listen to fads, and not to be infected by diseases. 

In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice inan age of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in an age oflogic. But the difference between the two mental methods is marked andunmistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudicesare divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bumpinto each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other's way. A creedis a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is aprivate thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with ourexisting divisions. They keep out of each other's way; the Tory paperand the Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other. Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, hasbecome in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialistis above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast neverinterrupts; he listens to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as a spywould listen to the enemy's arrangements. But if you attempt an actualargument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that nomedium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answerexcept slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager earthat goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that iscalled dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashingjournalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the wholeobject of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot. 

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

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

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IV. THE FEAR OF THE PAST

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

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

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

Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Amongthe many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixingeyes on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men inhistory who have really done anything with the future have had theireyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the veryword proves my case. The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespearebegan with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness ofpoets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the greatmediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformationlooked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholicmovement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movementwhich many would count the most anarchic of all is in this sense themost conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men thanit was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republicsof antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods. The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return tosimplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past; some might callit a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus planthis fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his faceturned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long ashe is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the futureitself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which somecall Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirroredin the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turnedto stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fateand futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfectcreed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociologicalscientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. Theonly difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenistssomewhat amusing, statues. 

But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defiesand depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featurelessfuture. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled andsometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholyto a restless and rather morbid generation; and they maintain a strangesilence about them--sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. Theykeep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out oftheir history books. For example, they will often tell you (in theirpraises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United Statesof Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving awayfrom a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed literallyin Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that theinternational hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent, the mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, theywill tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a greatrising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it in thatFrance made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all theworld allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively thatnothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such idealsin the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyonecan test this for himself. Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphletsadvocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popesor Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essaysand poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them praisethe old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These colossalruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along thevalley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinishedcities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alienphilosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought tohave done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted todo

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

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

We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebelattacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is notreally any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, anymore than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageousman is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitionsfresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whoseintellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He caresas little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only forwhat ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on thisabstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one ofthe first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modernassumption that past things have become impossible. There is onemetaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back. " The simple and obvious answer is "Youcan. " A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored bythe human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being apiece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that hasever existed. 

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

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V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

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

When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas ofCanterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of blackadmiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for hisbrains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realisewhat the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they weredistributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great mediaevalconception that the church is the judge of the world. Becket objected toa priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason wassimple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself sub judice. The kings were themselves in thedock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom, without armies orprisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdomsof the earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society wecannot affirm definitely; because the church never was a supreme church. We only know that in England at any rate the princes conquered thesaints. What the world wanted we see before us; and some of us call ita failure. But we cannot call what the church wanted a failure, simplybecause the church failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England hadnot yet made the great Protestant discovery that the king can do nowrong. The king was whipped in the cathedral; a performance which Irecommend to those who regret the unpopularity of church-going. But thediscovery was made; and Henry VIII scattered Becket's bones as easily asTracy had scattered his brains. 

Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholicswere tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tireof the church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned notfor the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianitywas unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance ofChristians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through thechurchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun toend it long before it could have done its work. In the nature ofthings it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yetthe mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, longbefore it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. Thehuge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse inmoral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation beganto tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pullit together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted toChristianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poorcreatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were toldto become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequentconduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident caseof the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not bybeing outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being livedenough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankindhas retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christianideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult;and left untried. 

It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A greatpart of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the FrenchRevolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy wasthe decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have, indeed, destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a freepeasantry in almost all Christian countries except England; of which weshall say more anon. But representative government, the one universalrelic, is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theoryof the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, thingswhich it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathedto its imitators in England, Germany, and America. The first of thesewas the idea of honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something ofa stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginativeEnglish writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how itwas that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The bestanswer is that they were admired for being poor--poor when they mighthave been rich. 

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

It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have come aboutwith the Revolution legend touching publicity. The old democraticdoctrine was that the more light that was let in to all departments ofState, the easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptlyagainst wrong. In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses, that mobs might throw stones. Again, no admirer of existing Englishpolitics (if there is any admirer of existing English politics) willreally pretend that this ideal of publicity is exhausted, or evenattempted. Obviously public life grows more private every day. TheFrench have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing secrets andmaking scandals; hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we, notin sin but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus mighthave happened in England; it is exactly the second trial that would havebeen legally impossible. But, indeed, if we wish to realise how far wefall short of the original republican outline, the sharpest way to testit is to note how far we fall short even of the republican elementin the older regime. Not only are we less democratic than Danton andCondorcet, but we are in many ways less democratic than Choiseul andMarie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt were needymiddle-class people compared with our Rothschilds and Roseberys. Andin the matter of publicity the old French monarchy was infinitely moredemocratic than any of the monarchies of today. Practically anybodywho chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with hischildren, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as thepeople possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they cansprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellentprinciple that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not lookat a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press is freefor criticism it is only used for adulation. The substantial differencecomes to something uncommonly like this: Eighteenth century tyrannymeant that you could say "The K__ of Br__rd is a profligate. " Twentiethcentury liberty really means that you are allowed to say "The King ofBrentford is a model family man. "

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

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VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessaryon the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to thathistoric fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers willexpect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now Ihave no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new idealimaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anythinglike so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the daythat any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like anearthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be doneunder the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on ablue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at theirideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with theideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, andits frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunningthunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it. It is true of boththe cases I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adoredpurity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs begandefiantly to practice purity that they rent them with wild beasts, androlled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion ofthe poor man uppermost; it can be proved by every legend from Cinderellato Whittington, by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise. The kings went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal, but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russiaquite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was thatthe people did. The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of alltrue revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, butits fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the NewJerusalem. 

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

Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of theseold ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principleof domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family ofhistory. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is likethe church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who havenever known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberlessmodern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because theyhave never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to theworkhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, thecultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just asthe working class is shouting to be let into it. 

Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally laythe simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can makesomething out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which canmake something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of Godbe unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, thecombination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, isto possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; tobe half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. Theexcitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditionswill stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonneton an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hackinga sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a heroout of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics. This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airyentertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. Butthe mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention ofinvisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artisticcreation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in presentdiscussions--the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay intothe shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; andthough he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternatestraight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen. Theaverage man cannot paint the sunset whose colors be admires; but he canpaint his own house with what color he chooses, and though he paints itpea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is hischoice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that everyman should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he isshaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only agraven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properlywith limits that are strict and even small. 

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

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VII. THE FREE FAMILY

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

It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchistinstitution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outsidethe State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinableforces of custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaningthat the State has no authority over families; that State authorityis invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in mostnormal cases of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry. It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that the lawcannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there arefields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his ownbackbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vastand remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of the family forma strong instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the policemancannot procure the moon--but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures soclose to each other as husband and wife, or a mother and children, havepowers of making each other happy or miserable with which no publiccoercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every morning itwould not give back his night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtainlecture; and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where heonly wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfectmother; the mother may be devoted to the most unworthy children; in suchrelations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases wherethe law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found; as many abewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation bytaking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's heartbecause her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tooldelicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affectionsof the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are gluedtogether too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife inbetween them. The man and the woman are one flesh--yes, even when theyare not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchicintimacy, types of government have little or no effect; it is happy orunhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and genial habit, under therepublic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even a republic inSiam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins. 

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

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

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

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VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what iscalled the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized povertyof modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal thedifficulty is not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth. It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life. Some experience of modern movements of the sort called "advanced" hasled me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experiencepeculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which Ihave already spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. Thatimplies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motorcar in which to wander looking for others; it also implies money formaintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his ownwife, let alone other people's. And the success with which nuptialestrangements are depicted in modern "problem plays" is due to the factthat there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict--that is ahard day's work. I could give many other instances of this plutocraticassumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocraticassumption behind the phrase "Why should woman be economically dependentupon man?" The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn't;except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her. A hunter has totear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher hasto catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quiteclear that this modern notion that woman is a mere "pretty clingingparasite, " "a plaything, " etc. , arose through the somber contemplationof some rich banking family, in which the banker, at least, went to thecity and pretended to do something, while the banker's wife went to thePark and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and hiswife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishersinterviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one ofthem economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty parasite clinging toStoughton? Was Marshall a mere plaything for Snelgrove?

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

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

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

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

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IX. HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE

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

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

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

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

Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think, that an Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining;for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whosehouse is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption ofpeasant proprietorship; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he isonly lord of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the sameperson has certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work. But I am not concerned with thedefense of small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it existsalmost everywhere except in England. It is also true, however, that thisestate of small possession is attacked everywhere today; it has neverexisted among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors. Wehave, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human affairs generally, and in this domestic ideal in particular, that has really ruined thenatural human creation, especially in this country. 

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

Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies (or in otherwords, under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man hasreally become bewildered about the goal of his efforts; and his efforts, therefore, grow feebler and feebler. His simple notion of having a homeof his own is derided as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicablyChristian. Under various verbal forms he is recommended to go on to thestreets--which is called Individualism; or to the work-house--whichis called Collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat morecarefully in a moment. But it may be said here that Hudge and Gudge, orthe governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modernphrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will refusethe English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, ifthey cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny himthe three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him thecow on grounds of humanitarianism. 

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

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X. OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM

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

The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly theopposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classesis this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what iscalled Progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quiteeasy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instancesof that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them aluxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with thepast and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, forthe future. 

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

In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinaryEnglishman has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, forsome particular reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morningand discovered that the public things, which for eight hundred yearshe had used at once as inns and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly andsavagely abolished, to increase the private wealth of about six or sevenmen. One would think he might have been annoyed at that; in many placeshe was, and was put down by the soldiery. But it was not merely thearmy that kept him quiet. He was kept quiet by the sages as well as thesoldiers; the six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor toldhim that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religionof the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth. So whenever aseventeenth century noble was caught pulling down a peasant's fence andstealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles Ior James II (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) andthus diverted the simple peasant's attention. The great Puritan lordscreated the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land. They savedtheir poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money, by taking from them the plow money and spade money which they weredoubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme has immortalizedthis easy aristocratic habit--

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

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

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XI. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

Thus the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has (in England atleast) always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Englishman has beenduped out of his old possessions, such as they were, and always in thename of progress. The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread andgave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the whitepebble of the Lord's elect. They took away his maypole and his originalrural life and promised him instead the Golden Age of Peace and Commerceinaugurated at the Crystal Palace. And now they are taking away thelittle that remains of his dignity as a householder and the head of afamily, promising him instead Utopias which are called (appropriatelyenough) "Anticipations" or "News from Nowhere. " We come back, in fact, to the main feature which has already been mentioned. The past iscommunal: the future must be individualist. In the past are all theevils of democracy, variety and violence and doubt, but the future ispure despotism, for the future is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know I wasa human fool, but to-morrow I can easily be the Superman. 

The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should be perpetuallykept out, for one reason after another, from the house in which he hadmeant his married life to begin. This man (Jones let us call him) hasalways desired the divinely ordinary things; he has married for love, hehas chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat; he is readyto be a great grandfather and a local god. And just as he is movingin, something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenlydebars him from the home; and he has to take his meals in the frontgarden. A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, theman who turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the railings, explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty ofnature which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life inthe front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into meanlodgings in the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out), happening to call at these lodgings, with the probable intention ofraising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the reallife of mercantile endeavor; the economic struggle between him and thelandlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, thewealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the economic struggle, andgoes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him out (happening atthat very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he isnow at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind; he isin an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the Stateand ruled by public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublimefuture. 

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

Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts of Englishhistory. The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest houseon to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road ofprogress. They did literally force them into factories and the modernwage-slavery, assuring them all the time that this was the only way towealth and civilization. Just as they had dragged the rustic from theconvent food and ale by saying that the streets of heaven were pavedwith gold, so now they dragged him from the village food and ale bytelling him that the streets of London were paved with gold. As heentered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered the gloomy porchof Industrialism, being told that each of them was the gate of thefuture. Hitherto he has only gone from prison to prison, nay, intodarkening prisons, for Calvinism opened one small window upon heaven. And now he is asked, in the same educated and authoritative tones, toenter another dark porch, at which he has to surrender, into unseenhands, his children, his small possessions and all the habits of hisfathers. 

Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the oldopenings of Puritanism and Industrialism can be discussed later. Butthere can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism isimposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, byan instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic andpartly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to "administer"Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; insome ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractiveto them. It will not be so hard as some innocent Socialists seem tosuppose to induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to take over the milk supply aswell as the stamp supply--at an increased salary. Mr. Bernard Shawhas remarked that rich men are better than poor men on parish councilsbecause they are free from "financial timidity. " Now, the English rulingclass is quite free from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will bequite ready to be Administrator of Sussex at the same screw. Sir WilliamHarcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. "We" (thatis, the aristocracy) "are all Socialists now. "

But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end. My maincontention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism andCollectivism have been accepted as necessities--not as naked ideals ordesires. Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the onlyway of producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is enduredas the only way of preventing poverty. Nobody's real heart is in theidea of preventing a free man from owning his own farm, or an old womanfrom cultivating her own garden, any more than anybody's real heart wasin the heartless battle of the machines. The purpose of this chapteris sufficiently served in indicating that this proposal also is a pisaller, a desperate second best--like teetotalism. I do not propose toprove here that Socialism is a poison; it is enough if I maintain thatit is a medicine and not a wine. 

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

PART TWO. IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN

I. THE CHARM OF JINGOISM

I have cast about widely to find a title for this section; and I confessthat the word "Imperialism" is a clumsy version of my meaning. Butno other word came nearer; "Militarism" would have been even moremisleading, and "The Superman" makes nonsense of any discussion that heenters. Perhaps, upon the whole, the word "Caesarism" would have beenbetter; but I desire a popular word; and Imperialism (as the reader willperceive) does cover for the most part the men and theories that I meanto discuss. 

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

The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental as themost sentimental reasons for believing in heaven. New South Walesis quite literally regarded as a place where the wicked cease fromtroubling and the weary are at rest; that is, a paradise for uncleswho have turned dishonest and for nephews who are born tired. BritishColumbia is in strict sense a fairyland, it is a world where a magic andirrational luck is supposed to attend the youngest sons. This strangeoptimism about the ends of the earth is an English weakness; but to showthat it is not a coldness or a harshness it is quite sufficient tosay that no one shared it more than that gigantic Englishsentimentalist--the great Charles Dickens. The end of "DavidCopperfield" is unreal not merely because it is an optimistic ending, but because it is an Imperialistic ending. The decorous Britishhappiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes would beembarrassed by the perpetual presence of the hopeless tragedy of Emily, or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily andMicawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over themwith no conceivable cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomescontented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result ofa sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo. 

To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my onlyobjection is that it is an illusion of comfort; that an Empire whoseheart is failing should be specially proud of the extremities, is to meno more sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose brain is gone shouldstill be proud of his legs. It consoles men for the evident ugliness andapathy of England with legends of fair youth and heroic strenuousness indistant continents and islands. A man can sit amid the squalor of SevenDials and feel that life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on theveldt. Just so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feelthat life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbiton. Brixton andSurbiton are "new"; they are expanding; they are "nearer to nature, "in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile. The onlyobjection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton are notyoung giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets, singingwith the sweet energy of the spring. Nor are the people of the Colonieswhen you meet them young giants or pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneyswho have lost their last music of real things by getting out of thesound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a man of real though decadentgenius, threw a theoretic glamour over them which is already fading. Mr. Kipling is, in a precise and rather startling sense, the exception thatproves the rule. For he has imagination, of an oriental and cruel kind, but he has it, not because he grew up in a new country, but preciselybecause he grew up in the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted in apast--an Asiatic past. He might never have written "Kabul River" if hehad been born in Melbourne. 

I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion), thatImperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both weakand perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create a kindof sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, whichit can only share. It is a love of living with one's inferiors. Thenotion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is adream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shapeand in almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent andconservative people; therefore they embodied that attempt at Empirein long and lingering dynasties. The French are a violent people, andtherefore they twice conquered that Empire by violence of arms. TheEnglish are above all a poetical and optimistic people; and thereforetheir Empire is something vague and yet sympathetic, something distantand yet dear. But this dream of theirs of being powerful in theuttermost places, though a native weakness, is still a weakness in them;much more of a weakness than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. Ifever we were in collision with our real brothers and rivals we shouldleave all this fancy out of account. We should no more dream of pittingAustralian armies against German than of pitting Tasmanian sculptureagainst French. I have thus explained, lest anyone should accuse me ofconcealing an unpopular attitude, why I do not believe in Imperialism ascommonly understood. I think it not merely an occasional wrong to otherpeoples, but a continuous feebleness, a running sore, in my own. But itis also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism that is an amiabledelusion partly in order to show how different it is from the deeper, more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have been forced tocall Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter. In order to get tothe root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism we must castback and begin anew with a more general discussion of the first needs ofhuman intercourse. 

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II. WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace. Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggeringand monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen toeverybody, can stop one's heart with the very thought of them. But whilethis is granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely truethat these universal things are strange; it is moreover true that theyare subtle. In the last analysis most common things will be found tobe highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over thedifficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they willcall first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinctof self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty ofdescribing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. Thatthere is a strong physical element in both romance and the MementoMori makes them if possible more baffling than if they had been whollyintellectual. No man could say exactly how much his sexuality wascolored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere boyish itch forirrevocable adventures, like running away to sea. No man could say howfar his animal dread of the end was mixed up with mystical traditionstouching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things areanimal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficultiesbegins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part andgo home to their tea. 

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

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

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

All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I haveremarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it hasa sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we areall under the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the"winged rock" of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bondas the essential one; for comradeship is simply humanity seen in thatone aspect in which men are really equal. The old writers were entirelywise when they talked of the equality of men; but they were also verywise in not mentioning women. Women are always authoritarian; theyare always above or below; that is why marriage is a sort of poeticalsee-saw. There are only three things in the world that women do notunderstand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But men(a class little understood in the modern world) find these things thebreath of their nostrils; and our most learned ladies will not evenbegin to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of coolcamaraderie. Lastly, it contains the third quality of the weather, theinsistence upon the body and its indispensable satisfaction. No onehas even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it acertain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproariousmaterialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call thething an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is atroot a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, itsvery swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdinessthere is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul intothe mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession ofthe weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things thatare common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross andcomic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick. 

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

It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential tothe collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers. It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to thesethings so long as it is honorable; comradeship must be in some degreeugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrilsare stopped with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must bephysically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirtsleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when leftentirely to themselves has only one honorable cure; and that is thestrict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy youngidealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash andliving on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by thewisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live withoutwomen, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort ofartificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an armyalso has to be in many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy withoutchastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. Thesehave a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in thesavage common-sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sortof man that is not afraid of women. 

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III. THE COMMON VISION

Now this masculine love of an open and level camaraderie is the lifewithin all democracies and attempts to govern by debate; without it therepublic would be a dead formula. Even as it is, of course, the spiritof democracy frequently differs widely from the letter, and a pothouseis often a better test than a Parliament. Democracy in its human senseis not arbitrament by the majority; it is not even arbitrament byeverybody. It can be more nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody. Imean that it rests on that club habit of taking a total stranger forgranted, of assuming certain things to be inevitably common to yourselfand him. Only the things that anybody may be presumed to hold have thefull authority of democracy. Look out of the window and notice thefirst man who walks by. The Liberals may have swept England with anover-whelming majority; but you would not stake a button that the man isa Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools and respected in all lawcourts; but you would not bet a straw that he believes in the Bible. Butyou would bet your week's wages, let us say, that he believes in wearingclothes. You would bet that he believes that physical courage is a finething, or that parents have authority over children. Of course, he mightbe the millionth man who does not believe these things; if it comesto that, he might be the Bearded Lady dressed up as a man. But theseprodigies are quite a different thing from any mere calculationof numbers. People who hold these views are not a minority, but amonstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have full democraticauthority the only test is this test of anybody. What you would observebefore any newcomer in a tavern--that is the real English law. The firstman you see from the window, he is the King of England. 

The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay ofdemocracy, has undoubtedly weakened this masculine spirit of equality. Iremember that a roomful of Socialists literally laughed when I told themthat there were no two nobler words in all poetry than Public House. They thought it was a joke. Why they should think it a joke, since theywant to make all houses public houses, I cannot imagine. But if anyonewishes to see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is necessary (tomales, at least) he can find it as well as anywhere in the greatold tavern disputes which come down to us in such books as Boswell'sJohnson. It is worth while to mention that one name especially becausethe modern world in its morbidity has done it a strange injustice. The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was "harsh and despotic. " It wasoccasionally harsh, but it was never despotic. Johnson was not in theleast a despot; Johnson was a demagogue, he shouted against a shoutingcrowd. The very fact that he wrangled with other people is proof thatother people were allowed to wrangle with him. His very brutality wasbased on the idea of an equal scrimmage, like that of football. Itis strictly true that he bawled and banged the table because he wasa modest man. He was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed or evenoverlooked. Addison had exquisite manners and was the king of hiscompany; he was polite to everybody; but superior to everybody;therefore he has been handed down forever in the immortal insult ofPope--

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

Johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of IrishMember in his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and washated. Johnson was an insolent equal and therefore was loved by all whoknew him, and handed down in a marvellous book, which is one of the meremiracles of love. 

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

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

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IV. THE INSANE NECESSITY

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

For example, there is one element which must always tend tooligarchy--or rather to despotism; I mean the element of hurry. If thehouse has caught fire a man must ring up the fire engines; a committeecannot ring them up. If a camp is surprised by night somebody must givethe order to fire; there is no time to vote it. It is solely a questionof the physical limitations of time and space; not at all of any mentallimitations in the mass of men commanded. If all the people in the housewere men of destiny it would still be better that they should notall talk into the telephone at once; nay, it would be better that thesilliest man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an army actuallyconsisted of nothing but Hanibals and Napoleons, it would still bebetter in the case of a surprise that they should not all give orderstogether. Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave theorders. Thus, we see that merely military subordination, so far fromresting on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men. Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion that somebody is alwaysright when everybody is wrong, and that we must discover and crown thatsomebody. On the contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfullyrapid circumstances, one can trust anybody so long as he is noteverybody. The military spirit does not mean (as Carlyle fancied)obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the militaryspirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man, obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men. Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man isonly servility. 

Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europeis not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not asystem of spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, thecaste system of India, or even like the old Greek distinctionbetween free men and slaves. It is simply the remains of a militaryorganization, framed partly to sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partlyto break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam. The word Duke simplymeans Colonel, just as the word Emperor simply means Commander-in-Chief. The whole story is told in the single title of Counts of the Holy RomanEmpire, which merely means officers in the European army againstthe contemporary Yellow Peril. Now in an army nobody ever dreams ofsupposing that difference of rank represents a difference of moralreality. Nobody ever says about a regiment, "Your Major is very humorousand energetic; your Colonel, of course, must be even more humorousand yet more energetic. " No one ever says, in reporting a mess-roomconversation, "Lieutenant Jones was very witty, but was naturallyinferior to Captain Smith. " The essence of an army is the idea ofofficial inequality, founded on unofficial equality. The Colonel is notobeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the Colonel. Suchwas probably the spirit of the system of dukes and counts when it firstarose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome. Withthe decline of those necessities it has gradually ceased to havemeaning as a military organization, and become honeycombed with uncleanplutocracy. Even now it is not a spiritual aristocracy--it is not so badas all that. It is simply an army without an enemy--billeted upon thepeople. 

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

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

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

The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section when wespoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the senseof counsel and community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure, laughter, loud and equal argument; but there stands a specter in ourhall. We are conscious of the towering modern challenge that is calledspecialism or cut-throat competition--Business. Business willhave nothing to do with leisure; business will have no truck withcomradeship; business will pretend to no patience with all the legalfictions and fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects itsegalitarian ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged in the agreeableand typical task of sacking his own father, will certainly not referto him as the right honorable clerk from the Laburnum Road, Brixton. Therefore there has arisen in modern life a literary fashion devotingitself to the romance of business, to great demigods of greed and tofairyland of finance. This popular philosophy is utterly despotic andanti-democratic; this fashion is the flower of that Caesarism againstwhich I am concerned to protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in thepossession of a brain of steel. The fact that the real millionaire israther more often strong in the possession of a head of wood, does notalter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential argument is"Specialists must be despots; men must be specialists. You cannot haveequality in a soap factory; so you cannot have it anywhere. You cannothave comradeship in a wheat corner; so you cannot have it at all. Wemust have commercial civilization; therefore we must destroy democracy. "I know that plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to soar to suchexamples as soap or wheat. They generally confine themselves, with finefreshness of mind, to a comparison between the state and a ship. Oneanti-democratic writer remarked that he would not like to sail in avessel in which the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the captain. Itmight easily be urged in answer that many a ship (the Victoria, forinstance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a cabin-boycould see was wrong. But this is a debating reply; the essential fallacyis both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were allborn in a state; we were not all born on a ship; like some of our greatBritish bankers. A ship still remains a specialist experiment, likea diving-bell or a flying ship: in such peculiar perils the need forpromptitude constitutes the need for autocracy. But we live and die inthe vessel of the state; and if we cannot find freedom camaraderie andthe popular element in the state, we cannot find it at all. And themodern doctrine of commercial despotism means that we shall not find itat all. Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot (itsays) be run without the whole brutal business of bossing and sacking, "too old at forty" and all the rest of the filth. And they must be run, and therefore we call on Caesar. Nobody but the Superman could descendto do such dirty work. 

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

PART THREE. FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN

I. THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE

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

Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objectionto the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On thecontrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is amilitary thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is thatit comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but undercertain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes thegovernment and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim ofall war, is peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war inthis soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women; and, secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise somethingelse; which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not createrevolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference betweenthese is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness andfinality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy onlyproduces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please aboutthe beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny thatBradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someoneconquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King'shead once. But you can knock off the King's hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebelliontakes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a neworder) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renewitself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but onlywanted to be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented anygovernment arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such aproceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion. 

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

But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political andpossibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat thematter in a slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the realroots of woman's position in the western state, and the causes of ourexisting traditions or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for thispurpose it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic, themere Suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which, though muchmore old, are, I think, considerably more fresh. 

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II. THE UNIVERSAL STICK

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

Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are alwaysproposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes alwaysanswer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern manwill wave a cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil witha little screwing pencil-sharpener instead of a knife; and he will evenboldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I havemy doubts about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils; and abouthot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those otherrequirements that these institutions answered, there opens before us thewhole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision aworld where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener; wherea man must learn single-stick with a cigarette; where a man must try totoast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in thesurface of hot water pipes. 

The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a comparisonbetween the ancient and universal things and the modern and specialistthings. The object of a theodolite is to lie level; the object of astick is to swing loose at any angle; to whirl like the very wheel ofliberty. The object of a lancet is to lance; when used for slashing, gashing, ripping, lopping off heads and limbs, it is a disappointinginstrument. The object of an electric light is merely to light (adespicable modesty); and the object of an asbestos stove. .. I wonderwhat is the object of an asbestos stove? If a man found a coil of ropein a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be donewith a coil of rope; and some of them might even be practical. He couldtow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat's-cradle, or pick oakum. He could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord herboxes for a travelling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or hecould hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate travellerwho should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with atelephone; you cannot do anything else with it. And though this isone of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one degree from its fulldelirium when there is nobody to answer you. The contention is, inbrief, that you must pull up a hundred roots, and not one, before youuproot any of these hoary and simple expedients. It is only with greatdifficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see thatany old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method hasfour or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions arequadrupeds; and some of them are centipedes. 

Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation ofa general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served sixpurposes; everywhere now there are six small things; or, rather (andthere is the trouble), there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, wewill not say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless orinexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone; I may anyday thank God for the lancet; and there is none of these brilliant andnarrow inventions (except, of course, the asbestos stove) which mightnot be at some moment necessary and lovely. But I do not think the mostaustere upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old, many-sided institutions an element of unity and universality whichmay well be preserved in its due proportion and place. Spiritually, at least, it will be admitted that some all-round balance is needed toequalize the extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to carrythe parable of the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, theimmortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servantof mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of anunalterable cosmos and also with the practical rules of the rapid andthrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and toldfairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront thenameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streetswere spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearingribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The large uses of religion havebeen broken up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearthhave been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The romanceof ritual and colored emblem has been taken over by that narrowest ofall trades, modern art (the sort called art for art's sake), and men arein modern practice informed that they may use all symbols so long asthey mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience has been driedup into the science of ethics; which may well be called decency fordecency's sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artisticflower. The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology, has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been sundered fromeverything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear ofspecialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the groundthat they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who openlyadvocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all onewild divorce court; nevertheless, there are many who still hear intheir souls the thunder of authority of human habit; those whom Man hathjoined let no man sunder. 

This book must avoid religion, but there must (I say) be many, religiousand irreligious, who will concede that this power of answering manypurposes was a sort of strength which should not wholly die out of ourlives. As a part of personal character, even the moderns will agree thatmany-sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked. This balance and universality has been the vision of many groups ofmen in many ages. It was the Liberal Education of Aristotle; thejack-of-all-trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends; theaugust amateurishness of the Cavalier Person of Quality like Sir WilliamTemple or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared in literature in ourtime in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudiblemusic by Walter Pater and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt Whitman. But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve thisliteral universality, because of the nature of their work in the world. Not, let it be noted, because of the existence of their work. Leonardoda Vinci must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand, many agovernment office clerk, village constable or elusive plumber may do(to all human appearance) no work at all, and yet show no signs of theAristotelian universalism. What makes it difficult for the average manto be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; hehas not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to upholdhim in a more or less ruthless society. This is generally true of malesfrom the first hunter to the last electrical engineer; each has notmerely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunterbefore the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters. The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he isoutstripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of thehuman mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in themain, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbsthe pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creedcan be so limiting as that awful adjuration that the cobbler must not gobeyond his last. So the largest and wildest shots of our world are butin one direction and with a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot gobeyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short; the astronomercannot go beyond his telescope and his telescope goes such a little way. All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain andseen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down differentpaths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is right;there must be people traveling to different towns; there must bespecialists; but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankindbe specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity bemonomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall bemonomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesmanand a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things, that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-all-trades. It hasdecided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalismshall be divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men andwisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the fewsad and certain things. 

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

*****

III. THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY

And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man todevelop one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly calledour competitive system, but would equally exist under any rationallyconceivable kind of Collectivism. Unless the Socialists are franklyready for a fall in the standard of violins, telescopes and electriclights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the individual thathe shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It wasonly by men being in some degree specialist that there ever were anytelescopes; they must certainly be in some degree specialist in order tokeep them going. It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that youcan prevent him thinking principally about the very difficult way heearns his wages. There is only one way to preserve in the world thathigh levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfils the old visionof universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protectedhalf of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troublesindeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be inevery center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one whodoes not "give her best, " but gives her all. 

Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire neednot blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point isthat it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife islike the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fireis like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not toexcel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who isearning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like thefire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not originaland artistic tales, but tales--better tales than would probably betold by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected toilluminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or thewildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breakingstones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anythinglike this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct crueltyof competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but nota competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitiveschoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator;a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have notone trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all hersecond bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first inwhat is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Womenwere not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outsidethe home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouseof monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the womanthat she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so comealmost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades. But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly andalmost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but heruniversality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is thesubstance of the contention I offer about the historic female position. I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but Idoubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by theabsurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitiveclerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old traditionwomen had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I donot deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; butI say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I donot pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was ageneral servant. 

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

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

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

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

But though the essential of the woman's task is universality, this doesnot, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largelywholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious thanman that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (ifone may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or threethings which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here inparenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women hasarisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reasonthat sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a womanwas set to guard. One's own children, one's own altar, ought to be amatter of principle--or if you like, a matter of prejudice. On theother hand, who wrote Junius's Letters ought not to be a principle ora prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferentinquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to showthat George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend theiroffice with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for deskand typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfishwifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why theydo office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it. 

*****

IV. THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT

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

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

Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic thanextravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in thematter; for I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever since Iwas born. But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is themore poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoeticbecause it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it isprosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession ofindifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaicthing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to thenew fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moralmenage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man couldundertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broadergenius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; whenscience found that colors could be made out of coaltar, she made hergreatest and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the humansoul. Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, inother words, to rummage in the dustbin. 

A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke orexpedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private houseon a rainy day. A man's definite daily work is generally run with suchrigid convenience of modern science that thrift, the picking up ofpotential helps here and there, has almost become unmeaning to him. Hecomes across it most (as I say) when he is playing some game within fourwalls; when in charades, a hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or atea-cozy just do for a cocked hat; when a toy theater needs timberand cardboard, and the house has just enough firewood and just enoughbandboxes. This is the man's occasional glimpse and pleasing parody ofthrift. But many a good housekeeper plays the same game every day withends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but on thecontrary, because she is magnanimous; because she wishes her creativemercy to be over all her works, that not one sardine should bedestroyed, or cast as rubbish to the void, when she has made the pilecomplete. 

The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology andother things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yetcome into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal andliberal also. There is never a war between two sects, but only betweentwo universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is thecollision of one cosmos with another. So in a smaller way it must befirst made clear that this female economic ideal is a part of thatfemale variety of outlook and all-round art of life which we havealready attributed to the sex: thrift is not a small or timid orprovincial thing; it is part of that great idea of the woman watchingon all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable foreverything. For in the average human house there is one hole by whichmoney comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do withthe one hole, woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginessof a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the less truethat it brings her into conflict with the special kind of spiritualbreadth that belongs to the males of the tribe. It brings her intoconflict with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of chaoticfeasting and deafening debate, which we noted in the last section. Thevery touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the moreinto antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the otherfor an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moralweakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, themale is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; healways thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he alwaysthinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poordistricts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get theirhusbands home, simple minded "social workers" always imagine that everyhusband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. Itnever occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarserconventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she triesto get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over theteacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of moneythat is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of timethat is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth butwhat cometh out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man. Theywill raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks) theridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wantedto make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick. But the real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis; thereal feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a qualityof the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; butthere is the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; andwhere is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order tocrush her, to produce a result; the coster does not argue with anothercoster in order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at once the soundof his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions and the sense ofmasculine society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness aboutthe male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottomless bucket; thoughtplunges into a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman against thePublic House--that is, against the Parliament House. She is there toprevent waste; and the "pub" and the parliament are the very palaces ofwaste. In the upper classes the "pub" is called the club, but that makesno more difference to the reason than it does to the rhyme. High andlow, the woman's objection to the Public House is perfectly definite andrational, it is that the Public House wastes the energies that could beused on the private house. 

As it is about feminine thrift against masculine waste, so it is aboutfeminine dignity against masculine rowdiness. The woman has a fixedand very well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good mannersnobody else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity, and grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that there aremany very polite men, but none that I ever heard of who were not eitherfascinating women or obeying them. But indeed the female ideal ofdignity, like the female ideal of thrift, lies deeper and may easilybe misunderstood. It rests ultimately on a strong idea of spiritualisolation; the same that makes women religious. They do not like beingmelted down; they dislike and avoid the mob. That anonymous quality wehave remarked in the club conversation would be common impertinence ina case of ladies. I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in hergrand green drawing-room whether I believed in comradeship betweenthe sexes, and why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious andsincere answer "Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like acomrade you would turn me out of the house. " The only certain rule onthis subject is always to deal with woman and never with women. "Women"is a profligate word; I have used it repeatedly in this chapter; butit always has a blackguard sound. It smells of oriental cynicism andhedonism. Every woman is a captive queen. But every crowd of women isonly a harem broken loose. 

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

*****

V. THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

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

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

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

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

In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries especially, you will find a perpetual reproachagainst woman in the matter of her coldness; ceaseless and stale similesthat compare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosomto snow. Now most of us have always supposed these old and iterantphrases to be a mere pattern of dead words, a thing like a coldwall-paper. Yet I think those old cavalier poets who wrote about thecoldness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth missed in nearly allthe realistic novels of today. Our psychological romancers perpetuallyrepresent wives as striking terror into their husbands by rolling on thefloor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture or poisoningthe coffee; all this upon some strange fixed theory that women are whatthey call emotional. But in truth the old and frigid form is much nearerto the vital fact. Most men if they spoke with any sincerity wouldagree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship, courtship or marriage, was not so much being emotional as beingunemotional. 

There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection ofa more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanationthere can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of thefemale in anger is noli me tangere. I take this as the most obvious andat the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental qualityin the female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almostimmeasurably misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cantof immoralists. The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we livein an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, wewill yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whateverelse it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets and a million lovershave called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the classical, and isat least the opposite of the grotesque. And since we are talking herechiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any ofthe idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It ishighly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere foremancipation, that a little while ago it was common for an "advanced"woman to claim the right to wear trousers; a right about as grotesque asthe right to wear a false nose. Whether female liberty is much advancedby the act of wearing a skirt on each leg I do not know; perhaps Turkishwomen might offer some information on the point. But if the westernwoman walks about (as it were) trailing the curtains of the haremwith her, it is quite certain that the woven mansion is meant fora perambulating palace, not for a perambulating prison. It is quitecertain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; itcan be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberatelydress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would appearcovered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, asjudges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robesof female dignity The whole world is under petticoat government; foreven men wear petticoats when they wish to govern. 

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VI. THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE

We say then that the female holds up with two strong arms these twopillars of civilization; we say also that she could do neither, but forher position; her curious position of private omnipotence, universalityon a small scale. The first element is thrift; not the destructivethrift of the miser, but the creative thrift of the peasant; the secondelement is dignity, which is but the expression of sacred personalityand privacy. Now I know the question that will be abruptly andautomatically asked by all that know the dull tricks and turns of themodern sexual quarrel. The advanced person will at once begin to argueabout whether these instincts are inherent and inevitable in womanor whether they are merely prejudices produced by her history andeducation. Now I do not propose to discuss whether woman could now beeducated out of her habits touching thrift and dignity; and that for twoexcellent reasons. First it is a question which cannot conceivably everfind any answer: that is why modern people are so fond of it. From thenature of the case it is obviously impossible to decide whether any ofthe peculiarities of civilized man have been strictly necessary to hiscivilization. It is not self-evident (for instance), that even the habitof standing upright was the only path of human progress. There mighthave been a quadrupedal civilization, in which a city gentleman put onfour boots to go to the city every morning. Or there might have beena reptilian civilization, in which he rolled up to the office on hisstomach; it is impossible to say that intelligence might not havedeveloped in such creatures. All we can say is that man as he iswalks upright; and that woman is something almost more upright thanuprightness. 

And the second point is this: that upon the whole we rather prefer women(nay, even men) to walk upright; so we do not waste much of our noblelives in inventing any other way for them to walk. In short, my secondreason for not speculating upon whether woman might get rid of thesepeculiarities, is that I do not want her to get rid of them; nor doesshe. I will not exhaust my intelligence by inventing ways in whichmankind might unlearn the violin or forget how to ride horses; and theart of domesticity seems to me as special and as valuable as all theancient arts of our race. Nor do I propose to enter at all into thoseformless and floundering speculations about how woman was or is regardedin the primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savagecountries which we cannot understand. Even if these people segregatedtheir women for low or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasonsbarbaric; and I am haunted with a tenacious suspicion that thesepeople's feelings were really, under other forms, very much the same asours. Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks acrossan island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man isplaying a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord ofcreation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he mightsee the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely becausewomen are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men areat once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often bein Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not workbecause the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, thewoman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed. Ido not affirm that this is the whole truth, but I do affirm that we havetoo little comprehension of the souls of savages to know how far itis untrue. It is the same with the relations of our hasty and surfacescience, with the problem of sexual dignity and modesty. Professors findall over the world fragmentary ceremonies in which the bride affectssome sort of reluctance, hides from her husband, or runs away fromhim. The professor then pompously proclaims that this is a survival ofMarriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil thrown overthe bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether women ever weremarried by capture I think they pretended to be; as they do still. 

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

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VII. THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN

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

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

As I have already remarked, there is one very simple answer to all this;these are not the modern women, but about one in two thousand of themodern women. This fact is important to a democrat; but it is of verylittle importance to the typically modern mind. Both the characteristicmodern parties believed in a government by the few; the only differenceis whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It mightbe put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in anyminority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. But inthis state of things the democratic argument obviously falls out for themoment; and we are bound to take the prominent minority, merelybecause it is prominent. Let us eliminate altogether from our minds thethousands of women who detest this cause, and the millions of women whohave hardly heard of it. Let us concede that the English people itselfis not and will not be for a very long time within the sphere ofpractical politics. Let us confine ourselves to saying that theseparticular women want a vote and to asking themselves what a vote is. Ifwe ask these ladies ourselves what a vote is, we shall get a veryvague reply. It is the only question, as a rule, for which they are notprepared. For the truth is that they go mainly by precedent; by the merefact that men have votes already. So far from being a mutinous movement, it is really a very Conservative one; it is in the narrowest rut ofthe British Constitution. Let us take a little wider and freer sweep ofthought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and meaning of thisodd business called voting. 

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VIII. THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS

Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; andall nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly fallaciousthan to fancy that in ruder or simpler ages ruling, judging andpunishing appeared perfectly innocent and dignified. These things werealways regarded as the penalties of the Fall; as part of the humiliationof mankind, as bad in themselves. That the king can do no wrong wasnever anything but a legal fiction; and it is a legal fiction still. Thedoctrine of Divine Right was not a piece of idealism, but rather a pieceof realism, a practical way of ruling amid the ruin of humanity; a verypragmatist piece of faith. The religious basis of government was not somuch that people put their trust in princes, as that they did notput their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the uglyinstitutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery werenever talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessaryevils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modernbusiness man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's veryhorrible; but how else can society be conducted?" A mediaeval scholasticregarded the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a modernbusiness man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death:"It is a shocking torture; but can you organize a painless world?" Itis possible that a future society may find a way of doing without thequestion by hunger as we have done without the question by fire. Itis equally possible, for the matter of that, that a future society mayreestablish legal torture with the whole apparatus of rack and fagot. The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague savorof science, a method which it calls "the third degree. " This is simplythe extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which is surely uncommonlyclose to their extortion by bodily pain. And this is legal andscientific in America. Amateur ordinary America, of course, simply burnspeople alive in broad daylight, as they did in the Reformation Wars. Butthough some punishments are more inhuman than others there is no suchthing as humane punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right inany sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him evenmildly uncomfortable, so long the whole proceeding must be a humiliatingone for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have alwaysfelt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman, thejailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear butwith contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knightsand swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or evenadmiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfullywas unpardonable. The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish hisweapon. But the executioner was always masked. 

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

All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a governmentwhich is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kindsof government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic. Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effectivekind of riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists ofaristocracy, sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimedfor aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidentalvirtues, courage, variety and adventure. There is no case anywhere ofaristocracy having established a universal and applicable order, asdespots and democracies have often done; as the last Caesars createdthe Roman law, as the last Jacobins created the Code Napoleon. Withthe first of these elementary forms of government, that of the king orchieftain, we are not in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned. We shall return to it later when we remark how differently mankindhas dealt with female claims in the despotic as against the democraticfield. But for the moment the essential point is that in self-governingcountries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion. Theabnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million fists and kickedby a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flogged him; if a manis hanged, we all hanged him. That is the only possible meaning ofdemocracy, which can give any meaning to the first two syllablesand also to the last two. In this sense each citizen has the highresponsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, tobe backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In arepublic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching. 

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IX. SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS

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

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

Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity only in orderto emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing elsefrom which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize thefact that the mere modern veiling of the brutality does not makethe situation different, unless we openly say that we are giving thesuffrage, not only because it is power but because it is not, or inother words, that women are not so much to vote as to play voting. Nosuffragist, I suppose, will take up that position; and a few suffragistswill wholly deny that this human necessity of pains and penalties isan ugly, humiliating business, and that good motives as well as bad mayhave helped to keep women out of it. More than once I have remarked inthese pages that female limitations may be the limits of a temple aswell as of a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah. Inoted it, I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress. In thesame way it is not evidently irrational, if men decided that a woman, like a priest, must not be a shedder of blood. 

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X. THE HIGHER ANARCHY

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

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

It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason to theeternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A manmust be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalisticalternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth. All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always areaction from what went before. When you meet a modern man he is alwayscoming from a place, not going to it. Thus, mankind has in nearly allplaces and periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainlyas that there is a sun and moon. But because a narrow Protestant sectcalled Materialists declared for a short time that there was nosoul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian Science isnow maintaining that there is no body. Now just in the same waythe unreasonable neglect of government by the Manchester School hasproduced, not a reasonable regard for government, but an unreasonableneglect of everything else. So that to hear people talk to-day one wouldfancy that every important human function must be organized and avengedby law; that all education must be state education, and all employmentstate employment; that everybody and everything must be brought to thefoot of the august and prehistoric gibbet. But a somewhat more liberaland sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the crossis even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before andindependent of compulsory; and in short that in most important mattersa man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose. The hugefundamental function upon which all anthropology turns, that of sexand childbirth, has never been inside the political state, but alwaysoutside of it. The state concerned itself with the trivial question ofkilling people, but wisely left alone the whole business of getting themborn. A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government isan absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies himself withproviding for the old age of people who have never been infants. I willnot deal here in any detail with the fact that some Eugenists havein our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought to controlmarriage and birth as they control labor and death. Except for thisinhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall have to deal withlater) all the Eugenists I know divide themselves into two sections:ingenious people who once meant this, and rather bewildered people whoswear they never meant it--nor anything else. But if it be conceded(by a breezier estimate of men) that they do mostly desire marriage toremain free from government, it does not follow that they desire it toremain free from everything. If man does not control the marriage marketby law, is it controlled at all? Surely the answer is broadly that mandoes not control the marriage market by law, but the woman does controlit by sympathy and prejudice. There was until lately a law forbiddinga man to marry his deceased wife's sister; yet the thing happenedconstantly. There was no law forbidding a man to marry his deceasedwife's scullery-maid; yet it did not happen nearly so often. It did nothappen because the marriage market is managed in the spirit and by theauthority of women; and women are generally conservative where classesare concerned. It is the same with that system of exclusiveness bywhich ladies have so often contrived (as by a process of elimination)to prevent marriages that they did not want and even sometimes procurethose they did. There is no need of the broad arrow and the fleur-delis, the turnkey's chains or the hangman's halter. You need not stranglea man if you can silence him. The branded shoulder is less effective andfinal than the cold shoulder; and you need not trouble to lock a man inwhen you can lock him out. 

The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we callinfant education: an architecture reared wholly by women. Nothing canever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the malechild is born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staringat that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality ofthe sexes. Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tom-boy;but every boy is brought up like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit offemininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house;and even the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by beingborn. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; butnobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belongto such a monster as man that was born of a man. 

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XI. THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES

But, indeed, with this educational matter I must of necessity embroilmyself later. The fourth section of discussion is supposed to be aboutthe child, but I think it will be mostly about the mother. In thisplace I have systematically insisted on the large part of life that isgoverned, not by man with his vote, but by woman with her voice, or moreoften, with her horrible silence. Only one thing remains to be added. In a sprawling and explanatory style has been traced out the ideathat government is ultimately coercion, that coercion must mean colddefinitions as well as cruel consequences, and that therefore thereis something to be said for the old human habit of keeping one-half ofhumanity out of so harsh and dirty a business. But the case is strongerstill. 

Voting is not only coercion, but collective coercion. I think QueenVictoria would have been yet more popular and satisfying if she hadnever signed a death warrant. I think Queen Elizabeth would have stoodout as more solid and splendid in history if she had not earned (amongthose who happen to know her history) the nickname of Bloody Bess. Ithink, in short, that the great historic woman is more herself when sheis persuasive rather than coercive. But I feel all mankind behindme when I say that if a woman has this power it should be despoticpower--not democratic power. There is a much stronger historic argumentfor giving Miss Pankhurst a throne than for giving her a vote. She mighthave a crown, or at least a coronet, like so many of her supporters;for these old powers are purely personal and therefore female. MissPankhurst as a despot might be as virtuous as Queen Victoria, and shecertainly would find it difficult to be as wicked as Queen Bess, but thepoint is that, good or bad, she would be irresponsible--she would not begoverned by a rule and by a ruler. There are only two ways of governing:by a rule and by a ruler. And it is seriously true to say of a woman, ineducation and domesticity, that the freedom of the autocrat appearsto be necessary to her. She is never responsible until she isirresponsible. In case this sounds like an idle contradiction, Iconfidently appeal to the cold facts of history. Almost every despoticor oligarchic state has admitted women to its privileges. Scarcely onedemocratic state has ever admitted them to its rights The reason is verysimple: that something female is endangered much more by the violenceof the crowd. In short, one Pankhurst is an exception, but a thousandPankhursts are a nightmare, a Bacchic orgie, a Witches Sabbath. For inall legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horriblein a herd. 

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XII. THE MODERN SLAVE

Now I have only taken the test case of Female Suffrage because it istopical and concrete; it is not of great moment for me as a politicalproposal. I can quite imagine anyone substantially agreeing with myview of woman as universalist and autocrat in a limited area; and stillthinking that she would be none the worse for a ballot paper. The realquestion is whether this old ideal of woman as the great amateur isadmitted or not. There are many modern things which threaten it muchmore than suffragism; notably the increase of self-supporting women, even in the most severe or the most squalid employments. If there besomething against nature in the idea of a horde of wild women governing, there is something truly intolerable in the idea of a herd of tame womenbeing governed. And there are elements in human psychology that makethis situation particularly poignant or ignominous. The ugly exactitudesof business, the bells and clocks the fixed hours and rigid departments, were all meant for the male: who, as a rule, can only do one thing andcan only with the greatest difficulty be induced to do that. If clerksdo not try to shirk their work, our whole great commercial system breaksdown. It is breaking down, under the inroad of women who are adoptingthe unprecedented and impossible course of taking the system seriouslyand doing it well. Their very efficiency is the definition of theirslavery. It is generally a very bad sign when one is trusted very muchby one's employers. And if the evasive clerks have a look of beingblackguards, the earnest ladies are often something very like blacklegs. But the more immediate point is that the modern working woman bears adouble burden, for she endures both the grinding officialism of thenew office and the distracting scrupulosity of the old home. Few menunderstand what conscientiousness is. They understand duty, whichgenerally means one duty; but conscientiousness is the duty of theuniversalist. It is limited by no work days or holidays; it is alawless, limitless, devouring decorum. If women are to be subjected tothe dull rule of commerce, we must find some way of emancipating themfrom the wild rule of conscience. But I rather fancy you will find iteasier to leave the conscience and knock off the commerce. As it is, themodern clerk or secretary exhausts herself to put one thing straight inthe ledger and then goes home to put everything straight in the house. 

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

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

Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy ofPrecedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we mustgrow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn sometime ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lostour way we must lose our map also; and because we have missed our ideal, we must forget it. "There are numbers of excellent people who do notthink votes unfeminine; and there may be enthusiasts for our beautifulmodern industry who do not think factories unfeminine. " But if thesethings are unfeminine it is no answer to say that they fit into eachother. I am not satisfied with the statement that my daughter must haveunwomanly powers because she has unwomanly wrongs. Industrial soot andpolitical printer's ink are two blacks which do not make a white. Mostof the Feminists would probably agree with me that womanhood is undershameful tyranny in the shops and mills. But I want to destroy thetyranny. They want to destroy womanhood. That is the only difference. 

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

PART FOUR. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD

I. THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY

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

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

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

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

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II. THE TRIBAL TERROR

Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mildas old wives' tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, explainedto millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle ofblue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads; and so thechild is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just aswell have said that if the father has two legs and the mother has twolegs, the child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a questionof simple addition or simple division of a number of hard detached"qualities, " like beads. It is an organic crisis and transformation ofthe most mysterious sort; so that even if the result is unavoidable, itwill still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellowbeads; it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of which is green, a totally novel and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might livein a complete cosmos of blue and yellow, like the "Edinburgh Review"; aman might never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphiresky; and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green. Ifyou paid a sovereign for a bluebell; if you spilled the mustard on theblue-books; if you married a canary to a blue baboon; there is nothingin any of these wild weddings that contains even a hint of green. Greenis not a mental combination, like addition; it is a physical resultlike birth. So, apart from the fact that nobody ever really understandsparents or children either, yet even if we could understand the parents, we could not make any conjecture about the children. Each time the forceworks in a different way; each time the constituent colors combine intoa different spectacle. A girl may actually inherit her ugliness fromher mother's good looks. A boy may actually get his weakness from hisfather's strength. Even if we admit it is really a fate, for us it mustremain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinistsand materialists may be right or wrong; we leave them their drearydebate. But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt aboutit. The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is aslonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity. 

On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardentignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moralheredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; thatis that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases, say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of characteras his grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhapssixty. But there are not two cases, there is not one case, there are nocases at all, of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather willhave a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal withheredity as we deal with omens, affinities and the fulfillment ofdreams. The things do happen, and when they happen we record them; butnot even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreamsand omens, is a barbaric notion; that is, not necessarily an untrue, buta dim, groping and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himselfa little more free from his family. Before Christianity these tales oftribal doom occupied the savage north; and since the Reformation andthe revolt against Christianity (which is the religion of a civilizedfreedom) savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realisticnovels and problem plays. The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen andsuperstitious as the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well written. But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is notirrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half emotions thatmake life whole. The only essential of tragedy is that one should takeit lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest inthe madder novels of Zola (such as that called "The Human Beast", agross libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the applicationof the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. Thestudents of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they stareback at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practiceno one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physicalinheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used exceptfor special modern purposes, such as the endowment of research or theoppression of the poor. 

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III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT

After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is only withthe born child that anybody dares to deal; and the question is noteugenics but education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresometerminology of popular science, it is not a question of heredity but ofenvironment. I will not needlessly complicate this question by urgingat length that environment also is open to some of the objections andhesitations which paralyze the employment of heredity. I will merelysuggest in passing that even about the effect of environment modernpeople talk much too cheerfully and cheaply. The idea that surroundingswill mold a man is always mixed up with the totally different idea thatthey will mold him in one particular way. To take the broadest case, landscape no doubt affects the soul; but how it affects it isquite another matter. To be born among pine-trees might mean lovingpine-trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriouslymean never having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture ofthese or any degree of any of them. So that the scientific method herelacks a little in precision. I am not speaking without the book; on thecontrary, I am speaking with the blue book, with the guide-book and theatlas. It may be that the Highlanders are poetical because they inhabitmountains; but are the Swiss prosaic because they inhabit mountains? Itmay be the Swiss have fought for freedom because they had hills; did theDutch fight for freedom because they hadn't? Personally I shouldthink it quite likely. Environment might work negatively as well aspositively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wildskyline, but be cause of their wild skyline. The Flemings may befantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because ofit. 

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

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IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, acertain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken bythe superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickenedof sacred words and wearied of theology, if this largely unreasoningirritation against "dogma" did arise out of some ridiculous excess ofsuch things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying upa fine crop of cant for our descendants to grow tired of. Probably theword "education" will some day seem honestly as old and objectless asthe word "justification" now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thoughtit frightfully funny that people should have fought about the differencebetween the "Homoousion" and the "Homoiousion. " The time will come whensomebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered against SectarianEducation and also against Secular Education; that men of prominence andposition actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed and alsofor not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look ratheralike; but they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed donot look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens tobe the Latin for faith. 

Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education, andeven written a good many of them, and having heard deafening andindeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since Iwas born, about whether religion was part of education, about whetherhygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism wasinconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on thisrecurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say that it was comparativelylate in life that I saw the main fact about it. 

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

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

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V. AN EVIL CRY

The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give peoplesomething that we have not got. To hear people talk one would thinkit was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborioushotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air andfreehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we cancreate what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course, no othergeneral purpose than to point out that we cannot create anything gooduntil we have conceived it. It is odd that these people, who in thematter of heredity are so sullenly attached to law, in the matter ofenvironment seem almost to believe in miracle. They insist that nothingbut what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies ofthe children. But they seem somehow to think that things can get intothe heads of the children which were not in the heads of the parents, or, indeed, anywhere else. 

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

I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter thisdifficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all, doesnot teach by authority at all. They present the process as coming, notfrom the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy. Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out thedormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyishsoul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear cleancollars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates thisimprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsicsecrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn. The educator only draws out the child's own unapparent love of longdivision; only leads out the child's slightly veiled preference for milkpudding to tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation; I haveheard the disgraceful suggestion that "educator, " if applied to a Romanschoolmaster, did not mean leading our young functions into freedom; butonly meant taking out little boys for a walk. But I am much more certainthat I do not agree with the doctrine; I think it would be about assane to say that the baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that thebaby's educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creaturea collection of forces and functions; but education means producingthese in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, orit means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of thewhole situation. You may indeed "draw out" squeals and grunts from thechild by simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruelpastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait andwatch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language outof him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of thematter. 

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VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE

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

The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims the right to takehis mother Nature under his control; he claims the right to makehis child the Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creativeauthority of man, and the whole courageous raid which we callcivilization wavers and falls to pieces. Now most modern freedom is atroot fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; itis rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shawand such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestralresponsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wildstep of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truthof our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, anunshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enoughthat something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From thishigh audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the onlyexcuse for them is, (of course, ) that their modern philosophies are sohalf-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enoughto convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with thedecay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice itto say here that when I say that we should instruct our children, I meanthat we should do it, not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes shoulddo it. The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experimentsto go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed throughthe Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or themarketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taughtto the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are putfirst to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit toa system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of fouractually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, thanthe dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of havingthe last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea;for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learnsomething from experience. But this, as I say, is all due to the merefact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposesthat men who govern themselves will govern their children. To-day we alluse Popular Education as meaning education of the people. I wish I coulduse it as meaning education by the people. 

The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators donot avoid the violence of authority an inch more than the old schoolmasters. Nay, it might be maintained that they avoid it less. The oldvillage schoolmaster beat a boy for not learning grammar and sent himout into the playground to play anything he liked; or at nothing, if heliked that better. The modern scientific schoolmaster pursues him intothe playground and makes him play at cricket, because exercise is sogood for the health. The modern Dr. Busby is a doctor of medicine aswell as a doctor of divinity. He may say that the good of exercise isself-evident; but he must say it, and say it with authority. It cannotreally be self-evident or it never could have been compulsory. But thisis in modern practice a very mild case. In modern practice thefree educationists forbid far more things than the old-fashionededucationists. A person with a taste for paradox (if any such shamelesscreature could exist) might with some plausibility maintain concerningall our expansion since the failure of Luther's frank paganism and itsreplacement by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion has notbeen an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that less and lessbeautiful and humane things have been permitted. The Puritans destroyedimages; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales. Count Tostoi practicallyissued one of his papal encyclicals against music; and I have heard ofmodern educationists who forbid children to play with tin soldiers. Iremember a meek little madman who came up to me at some Socialist soireeor other, and asked me to use my influence (have I any influence?)against adventure stories for boys. It seems they breed an appetite forblood. But never mind that; one must keep one's temper in this madhouse. I need only insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation, are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishmentswere often idiotic and cruel; though they are much more so in a countrylike England (where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishmentand only a poor man receives it) than in countries with a clearerpopular tradition--such as Russia. In Russia flogging is often inflictedby peasants on a peasant. In modern England flogging can only inpractice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man. Thus only afew days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course) wassentenced to flogging and imprisonment for five years for having pickedup a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d. I am entirelyon the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested againstthis almost bestial ignorance about boys. But I do think it a littleunfair that these humanitarians, who excuse boys for being robbers, should denounce them for playing at robbers. I do think that those whounderstand a guttersnipe playing with a piece of coal might, by a suddenspurt of imagination, understand him playing with a tin soldier. Tosum it up in one sentence: I think my meek little madman might haveunderstood that there is many a boy who would rather be flogged, andunjustly flogged, than have his adventure story taken away. 

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VII. THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

In short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no it isas high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff withauthority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong thatthey are forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, thatthe boy would think so. The average boy's impression certainly wouldbe simply this: "If your father is a Methodist you must not play withsoldiers on Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not playwith them even on week days. " All educationists are utterly dogmatic andauthoritarian. You cannot have free education; for if you left a childfree you would not educate him at all. Is there, then, no distinctionor difference between the most hide-bound conventionalists and the mostbrilliant and bizarre innovators? Is there no difference between theheaviest heavy father and the most reckless and speculative maiden aunt?Yes; there is. The difference is that the heavy father, in his heavyway, is a democrat. He does not urge a thing merely because to hisfancy it should be done; but, because (in his own admirable republicanformula) "Everybody does it. " The conventional authority does claim somepopular mandate; the unconventional authority does not. The Puritan whoforbids soldiers on Sunday is at least expressing Puritan opinion;not merely his own opinion. He is not a despot; he is a democracy, atyrannical democracy, a dingy and local democracy perhaps; but one thatcould do and has done the two ultimate virile things--fight and appealto God. But the veto of the new educationist is like the veto ofthe House of Lords; it does not pretend to be representative. Theseinnovators are always talking about the blushing modesty of Mrs. Grundy. I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more modest than they are; but I amsure she is more humble. 

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

There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; onlymost people are educated wrong. The state schools were not the firstschools, but among the last schools to be established; and London hadbeen educating Londoners long before the London School Board. The erroris a highly practical one. It is persistently assumed that unlessa child is civilized by the established schools, he must remain abarbarian. I wish he did. Every child in London becomes a highlycivilized person. But here are so many different civilizations, most ofthem born tired. Anyone will tell you that the trouble with the poor isnot so much that the old are still foolish, but rather that the youngare already wise. Without going to school at all, the gutter-boy wouldbe educated. Without going to school at all, he would be over-educated. The real object of our schools should be not so much to suggestcomplexity as solely to restore simplicity. You will hear venerableidealists declare we must make war on the ignorance of the poor;but, indeed, we have rather to make war on their knowledge. Realeducationists have to resist a kind of roaring cataract of culture. Thetruant is being taught all day. If the children do not look at the largeletters in the spelling-book, they need only walk outside and look atthe large letters on the poster. If they do not care for the coloredmaps provided by the school, they can gape at the colored maps providedby the Daily Mail. If they tire of electricity, they can take toelectric trams. If they are unmoved by music, they can take to drink. Ifthey will not work so as to get a prize from their school, they may workto get a prize from Prizy Bits. If they cannot learn enough about lawand citizenship to please the teacher, they learn enough about them toavoid the policeman. If they will not learn history forwards from theright end in the history books, they will learn it backwards from thewrong end in the party newspapers. And this is the tragedy of the wholeaffair: that the London poor, a particularly quick-witted and civilizedclass, learn everything tail foremost, learn even what is right in theway of what is wrong. They do not see the first principles of law in alaw book; they only see its last results in the police news. They do notsee the truths of politics in a general survey. They only see the liesof politics, at a General Election. 

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

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VIII. THE BROKEN RAINBOW

I will take one case that will serve both as symbol and example: thecase of color. We hear the realists (those sentimental fellows) talkingabout the gray streets and the gray lives of the poor. But whateverthe poor streets are they are not gray; but motley, striped, spotted, piebald and patched like a quilt. Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to bemonochrome; and there is nothing of the Celtic twilight about it. As amatter of fact, a London gutter-boy walks unscathed among furnaces ofcolor. Watch him walk along a line of hoardings, and you will see himnow against glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic forest; now blacklike a bird against the burning blue of the Midi; now passant across afield gules, like the golden leopards of England. He ought to understandthe irrational rapture of that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about "thatbluer blue, that greener green. " There is no blue much bluer thanReckitt's Blue and no blacking blacker than Day and Martin's; no moreemphatic yellow than that of Colman's Mustard. If, despite this chaosof color, like a shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is notexactly intoxicated with art and culture, the cause certainly does notlie in universal grayness or the mere starving of his senses. It lies inthe fact that the colors are presented in the wrong connection, on thewrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive. It is not colors helacks, but a philosophy of colors. In short, there is nothing wrong withReckitt's Blue except that it is not Reckitt's. Blue does not belong toReckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but tothe abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a verylarge scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about theiteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury;a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a specialirony in these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard tosuch very little meat. Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungentpleasure. But to look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man whoshould swallow gallons of mustard. He would either die, or lose thetaste of mustard altogether. 

Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardingswith those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals recordedtheir dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer thana single sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold. The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature morehasty than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancientartist was serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving thelords. It is that the old artist contrived to convey an impression thatcolors really were significant and precious things, like jewels andtalismanic stones. The color was often arbitrary; but it was alwaysauthoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish wassilver, if a cloud was scarlet, the artist managed to convey that thesecolors were important and almost painfully intense; all the red red-hotand all the gold tried in the fire. Now that is the spirit touchingcolor which the schools must recover and protect if they are really togive the children any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing. Itis not so much an indulgence in color; it is rather, if anything, a sortof fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in heraldry as straitly as agreen field in peasant proprietorship. It would not fling away goldleaf any more than gold coin; it would not heedlessly pour out purple orcrimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood. That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter; theyhave to teach people to relish colors like liquors. They have the heavybusiness of turning drunkards into wine tasters. If even the twentiethcentury succeeds in doing these things, it will almost catch up with thetwelfth. 

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

Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a prettyperfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals andespecially with our modern education. It is the same with ethicaleducation, economic education, every sort of education. The growingLondon child will find no lack of highly controversial teachers whowill teach him that geography means painting the map red; that economicsmeans taxing the foreigner, that patriotism means the peculiarlyun-English habit of flying a flag on Empire Day. In mentioning theseexamples specially I do not mean to imply that there are no similarcrudities and popular fallacies upon the other political side. I mentionthem because they constitute a very special and arresting feature of thesituation. I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists;but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The modern Conservativeno longer conserves. He is avowedly an innovator. Thus all the currentdefenses of the House of Lords which describe it as a bulwark againstthe mob, are intellectually done for; the bottom has fallen out of them;because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of the day, theHouse of Lords is a mob itself; and exceedingly likely to behave likeone. 

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IX. THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS

Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our mainconclusion. The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion, but very decidedly of selection--and rejection. The educationist mustfind a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, itmust still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it mustbe orthodox. The teacher may think it antiquated to have to decideprecisely between the faith of Calvin and of Laud, the faith of Aquinasand of Swedenborg; but he still has to choose between the faith ofKipling and of Shaw, between the world of Blatchford and of GeneralBooth. Call it, if you will, a narrow question whether your child shallbe brought up by the vicar or the minister or the popish priest. Youhave still to face that larger, more liberal, more highly civilizedquestion, of whether he shall be brought up by Harmsworth or byPearson, by Mr. Eustace Miles with his Simple Life or Mr. Peter Kearywith his Strenuous Life; whether he shall most eagerly read Miss AnnieS. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short, whether he shall end up in themere violence of the S. D. F. , or in the mere vulgarity of the PrimroseLeague. They say that nowadays the creeds are crumbling; I doubt it, butat least the sects are increasing; and education must now be sectarianeducation, merely for practical purposes. Out of all this throng oftheories it must somehow select a theory; out of all these thunderingvoices it must manage to hear a voice; out of all this awful and achingbattle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, itmust manage somehow to trace and to track a star. 

I have spoken so far of popular education, which began too vague andvast and which therefore has accomplished little. But as it happensthere is in England something to compare it with. There is aninstitution, or class of institutions, which began with the same popularobject, which has since followed a much narrower object, but which hadthe great advantage that it did follow some object, unlike our modernelementary schools. 

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

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

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X. THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

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

It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manageto bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they neverfulfill their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a realsense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strangeinversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for, but does get what he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal lasts muchlonger and reshapes the world much more than the actualities by which heattempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter, which hethought so practical. What endures is the spirit, which he felt to beunattainable and even unutterable. It is exactly his schemes that arenot fulfilled; it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled. Thus the tenor twelve paper constitutions of the French Revolution, which seemed sobusiness-like to the framers of them, seem to us to have flown awayon the wind as the wildest fancies. What has not flown away, what is afixed fact in Europe, is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the ideaof a land full of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners andminimum of wealth, the vision of the eighteenth century, the realityof the twentieth. So I think it will generally be with the creator ofsocial things, desirable or undesirable. All his schemes will fail, all his tools break in his hands. His compromises will collapse, hisconcessions will be useless. He must brace himself to bear his fate; heshall have nothing but his heart's desire. 

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

The only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got. Thereis something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modernpeople attack an institution that really does demand reform, they alwaysattack it for the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our publicschools, imagining themselves to be very democratic, have exhaustedthemselves in an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek. I canunderstand how Greek may be regarded as useless, especially by thosethirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce which isthe negation of citizenship; but I do not understand how it can beconsidered undemocratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie hasa hatred of Greek. It is obscurely founded on the firm and soundimpression that in any self-governing Greek city he would have beenkilled. But I cannot comprehend why any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch, or Mr. Will Crooks, I or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be opposed topeople learning the Greek alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty. Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language is written allthe earliest and, Heaven knows, the most heroic history of the Radicalparty. Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word democratis Greek?

A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attackingthe athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism andbrutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice ofthe English public schools. There is much moral bullying, owing to thegeneral lack of moral courage in the public-school atmosphere. Theseschools do, upon the whole, encourage physical courage; but they do notmerely discourage moral courage, they forbid it. The ultimate resultof the thing is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot evenendure to wear a bright uniform except when it is blurred and hiddenin the smoke of battle. This, like all the affectations of our presentplutocracy, is an entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the oldaristocrats. The Black Prince would certainly have asked that any knightwho had the courage to lift his crest among his enemies, should alsohave the courage to lift it among his friends. As regards moral courage, then it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, asthat they suppress it firmly. But physical courage they do, on thewhole, support; and physical courage is a magnificent fundamental. Theone great, wise Englishman of the eighteenth century said truly that ifa man lost that virtue he could never be sure of keeping any other. Nowit is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage isconnected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere more atone than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some small sectarianquarrel with each other, the one saying that courage must be abandonedbecause it is connected with cruelty, and the other maintaining thatcruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. But it is all, thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body may make a man stupidor reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does not make himspiteful. And we may admit heartily (without joining in that perpetualpraise which public-school men are always pouring upon themselves) thatthis does operate to the removal of mere evil cruelty in the publicschools. English public school life is extremely like English publiclife, for which it is the preparatory school. It is like it specially inthis, that things are either very open, common and conventional, or elseare very secret indeed. Now there is cruelty in public schools, just asthere is kleptomania and secret drinking and vices without a name. But these things do not flourish in the full daylight and commonconsciousness of the school, and no more does cruelty. A tiny trioof sullen-looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some uglybusiness always; it may be indecent literature, it may be the beginningof drink, it may occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on thisstage the bully is not a braggart. The proverb says that bullies arealways cowardly, but these bullies are more than cowardly; they are shy. 

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

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XI. THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

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

Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English publicschool is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty oftelling the truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladiesin remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught totell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment. Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to telllies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all theobscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling alie. I may wear another man's coat, steal another man's wit, apostatizeto another man's creed, or poison another man's coffee, all withoutever telling a lie. But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell thetruth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire thetruth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless aboutwhether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact canbe used on his "side" when he is engaged in "playing the game. " He takessides in his Union debating society to settle whether Charles I ought tohave been killed, with the same solemn and pompous frivolity withwhich he takes sides in the cricket field to decide whether Rugby orWestminster shall win. He is never allowed to admit the abstract notionof the truth, that the match is a matter of what may happen, but thatCharles I is a matter of what did happen--or did not. He is Liberal orTory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at theboat race. He knows that sport deals with the unknown; he has not even anotion that politics should deal with the known. If anyone reallydoubts this self-evident proposition, that the public schools definitelydiscourage the love of truth, there is one fact which I should thinkwould settle him. England is the country of the Party System, and ithas always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone outof Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever itsconveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by peopleparticularly fond of truth?

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

This weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools, in theEnglish political system, and to some extent in the Englishcharacter, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop ofsuperstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions clung to throughlow spiritual self-indulgence. There are so many of these public-schoolsuperstitions that I have here only space for one of them, which may becalled the superstition of soap. It appears to have been shared bythe ablutionary Pharisees, who resembled the English public-schoolaristocrats in so many respects: in their care about club rules andtraditions, in their offensive optimism at the expense of other people, and above all in their unimaginative plodding patriotism in the worstinterests of their country. Now the old human common sense about washingis that it is a great pleasure. Water (applied externally) is a splendidthing, like wine. Sybarites bathe in wine, and Nonconformists drinkwater; but we are not concerned with these frantic exceptions. Washingbeing a pleasure, it stands to reason that rich people can afford itmore than poor people, and as long as this was recognized all waswell; and it was very right that rich people should offer baths to poorpeople, as they might offer any other agreeable thing--a drink or adonkey ride. But one dreadful day, somewhere about the middle of thenineteenth century, somebody discovered (somebody pretty well off)the two great modern truths, that washing is a virtue in the rich andtherefore a duty in the poor. For a duty is a virtue that one can't do. And a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily; likethe bodily cleanliness of the upper classes. But in the public-schooltradition of public life, soap has become creditable simply because itis pleasant. Baths are represented as a part of the decay of the RomanEmpire; but the same baths are represented as part of the energy andrejuvenation of the British Empire. There are distinguished publicschool men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and high politicians, who, in the course of the eulogies which from time to time they pass uponthemselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness with moralpurity. They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school man isclean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while saints canafford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean. As if everyone didnot know that the harlot must be clean, because it is her business tocaptivate, while the good wife may be dirty, because it is her businessto clean. As if we did not all know that whenever God's thunder cracksabove us, it is very likely indeed to find the simplest man in a muckcart and the most complex blackguard in a bath. 

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

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

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XII. THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS

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

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

I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument, becausewe have just now come to the place where it is most startlingly andstrongly shown. The final proof that our elementary schools have nodefinite ideal of their own is the fact that they so openly imitate theideals of the public schools. In the elementary schools we have all theethical prejudices and exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully copiedfor people to whom they do not even roughly apply. We have the samewildly disproportionate doctrine of the effect of physical cleanlinesson moral character. Educators and educational politicians declare, amid warm cheers, that cleanliness is far more important than all thesquabbles about moral and religious training. It would really seem thatso long as a little boy washes his hands it does not matter whether heis washing off his mother's jam or his brother's gore. We have thesame grossly insincere pretense that sport always encourages a sense ofhonor, when we know that it often ruins it. Above all, we have thesame great upperclass assumption that things are done best by largeinstitutions handling large sums of money and ordering everybody about;and that trivial and impulsive charity is in some way contemptible. As Mr. Blatchford says, "The world does not want piety, but soap--andSocialism. " Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap andSocialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class. 

These "healthy" ideals, as they are called, which our politicians andschoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and appliedto the democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate to animpoverished democracy. A vague admiration for organized government anda vague distrust of individual aid cannot be made to fit in at all intothe lives of people among whom kindness means lending a saucepan andhonor means keeping out of the workhouse. It resolves itself either intodiscouraging that system of prompt and patchwork generosity which is adaily glory of the poor, or else into hazy advice to people who have nomoney not to give it recklessly away. Nor is the exaggerated glory ofathletics, defensible enough in dealing with the rich who, if they didnot romp and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any means somuch to the point when applied to people, most of whom will take a greatdeal of exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And forthe third case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoricabout corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental classcannot, merely as it stands, be applicable to a dustman. A gentleman isexpected to be substantially spotless all the time. But it is no morediscreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver tobe wet. A sweep is no more disgraced when he is covered with sootthan Michael Angelo when he is covered with clay, or Bayard when heis covered with blood. Nor have these extenders of the public-schooltradition done or suggested anything by way of a substitute for thepresent snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost impossible to thepoor; I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of the cast-offclothes of the rich. One man moves into another man's clothes as hemoves into another man's house. No wonder that our educationists arenot horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat's second-hand trousers, when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrat's second-handideas. 

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XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT

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

The things philanthropists barely excuse (or do not excuse) in the lifeof the laboring classes are simply the things we have to excuse in allthe greatest monuments of man. It may be that the laborer is as gross asShakespeare or as garrulous as Homer; that if he is religious he talksnearly as much about hell as Dante; that if he is worldly he talksnearly as much about drink as Dickens. Nor is the poor man withouthistoric support if he thinks less of that ceremonial washing whichChrist dismissed, and rather more of that ceremonial drinking whichChrist specially sanctified. The only difference between the poor man ofto-day and the saints and heroes of history is that which in all classesseparates the common man who can feel things from the great man who canexpress them. What he feels is merely the heritage of man. Now nobodyexpects of course that the cabmen and coal-heavers can be completeinstructors of their children any more than the squires and colonels andtea merchants are complete instructors of their children. There must bean educational specialist in loco parentis. But the master at Harrow isin loco parentis; the master in Hoxton is rather contra parentem. Thevague politics of the squire, the vaguer virtues of the colonel, thesoul and spiritual yearnings of a tea merchant, are, in veritablepractice, conveyed to the children of these people at the English publicschools. But I wish here to ask a very plain and emphatic question. Cananyone alive even pretend to point out any way in which these specialvirtues and traditions of the poor are reproduced in the education ofthe poor? I do not wish the coster's irony to appeal as coarsely in theschool as it does in the tap room; but does it appear at all? Isthe child taught to sympathize at all with his father's admirablecheerfulness and slang? I do not expect the pathetic, eager pietas ofthe mother, with her funeral clothes and funeral baked meats, to beexactly imitated in the educational system; but has it any influence atall on the educational system? Does any elementary schoolmaster accordit even an instant's consideration or respect? I do not expect theschoolmaster to hate hospitals and C. O. S. Centers so much as theschoolboy's father; but does he hate them at all? Does he sympathizein the least with the poor man's point of honor against officialinstitutions? Is it not quite certain that the ordinary elementaryschoolmaster will think it not merely natural but simply conscientiousto eradicate all these rugged legends of a laborious people, and onprinciple to preach soap and Socialism against beer and liberty? Inthe lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, butagainst the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs ofthe minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead oftheir Christlike charity, their Shakespearean laughter and their highHomeric reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them merepedantic copies of the prejudices of the remote rich. They must thinka bathroom a necessity because to the lucky it is a luxury; they mustswing Swedish clubs because their masters are afraid of English cudgels;and they must get over their prejudice against being fed by the parish, because aristocrats feel no shame about being fed by the nation. 

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XIV. FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION

It is the same in the case of girls. I am often solemnly asked whatI think of the new ideas about female education. But there are no newideas about female education. There is not, there never has been, eventhe vestige of a new idea. All the educational reformers did was to askwhat was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls; just as theyasked what was being taught to young squires and then taught it to youngchimney sweeps. What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrongplace. Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play football; boyshave school colors, why shouldn't girls have school-colors; boys goin hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn't girls go in hundreds today-schools; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford--inshort, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mustaches--that isabout their notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thingat all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that, and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor andheart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing butplodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the caseof elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and recklessinappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least, which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yetthere is no boy's game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics havenot promoted among girls. To take a stronger case, they give girls veryheavy home-work; never reflecting that all girls have home-work alreadyin their homes. It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; theremust be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it isalready a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon serf, if hewore that collar of cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass. 

It will then be answered, not without a sneer, "And what would youprefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, withringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabblinga little in Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgaralbums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?" To whichI answer, "Emphatically, yes. " I solidly prefer it to the new femaleeducation, for this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design, while there is none in the other. I am by no means sure that even inpoint of practical fact that elegant female would not have been morethan a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen wasstronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certainshe was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She coulddo one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensiblydescribe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could onlysmatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who canonly stammer American; nor am I certain that the bygone duchesses whowere scarcely successful when they painted Melrose Abbey, were so muchmore weak-minded than the modern duchesses who paint only their ownfaces, and are bad at that. But that is not the point. What was thetheory, what was the idea, in their old, weak water-colors and theirshaky Italian? The idea was the same which in a ruder rank expresseditself in home-made wines and hereditary recipes; and which still, ina thousand unexpected ways, can be found clinging to the women of thepoor. It was the idea I urged in the second part of this book: thatthe world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become artists andperish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she mayconquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she mustnot be a private soldier in it. I do not think the elegant female withher bad Italian was a perfect product, any more than I think the slumwoman talking gin and funerals is a perfect product; alas! there are fewperfect products. But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the newwoman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, itis right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal. The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter ofAntigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The ladytalking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the greatand golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life, who could be abarrister because she could be anything. Sunken and neglected in thesea of modern monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to theiroriginal truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will stillbury her father. The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing, still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself andher husband: that he must be Something in the City, that she may beeverything in the country. 

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

PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN

I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

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

The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mereoffense at the grotesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in a cagein the Regent's Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes andmany other grotesque things; they do not much mind making beastsof themselves, and would not much mind having beasts made of theirforefathers. The real instinct was much deeper and much more valuable. It was this: that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting andalterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twisthim into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes. The popularinstinct sees in such developments the possibility of backs bowed andhunch-backed for their burden, or limbs twisted for their task. It hasa very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly andsystematically will mostly be done by a successful class and almostsolely in their interests. It has therefore a vision of inhuman hybridsand half-human experiments much in the style of Mr. Wells's "Island ofDr. Moreau. " The rich man may come to breeding a tribe of dwarfs to behis jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his hall-porters. Grooms mightbe born bow-legged and tailors born cross-legged; perfumers might havelong, large noses and a crouching attitude, like hounds of scent; andprofessional wine-tasters might have the horrible expression of onetasting wine stamped upon their faces as infants. Whatever wild imageone employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, whenonce it supposes that the fixed type called man could be changed. Ifsome millionaire wanted arms, some porter must grow ten arms like anoctopus; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must go with a hundredtrotting legs like a centipede. In the distorted mirror of hypothesis, that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see such monstrous and evilshapes; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left but onenostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the mere notion ofadaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so very farfrom the reality. 

It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that weshould become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Pardon me, that is exactly what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but someof the tamest evolutionists too. There has risen high in recenthistory an important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of thefuture--which means the religion of those few weak-minded people wholive in the future. It is typical of our time that it has to lookfor its god through a microscope; and our time has marked a definiteadoration of the insect. Like most things we call new, of course, it isnot at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takesbees seriously but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully ashe wrote about them. The wise king told the sluggard to watch the ant, acharming occupation--for a sluggard. But in our own time has appeared avery different tone, and more than one great man, as well as numberlessintelligent men, have in our time seriously suggested that we shouldstudy the insect because we are his inferiors. The old moralists merelytook the virtues of man and distributed them quite decoratively andarbitrarily among the animals. The ant was an almost heraldic symbol ofindustry, as the lion was of courage, or, for the matter of that, thepelican of charity. But if the mediaevals had been convinced that alion was not courageous, they would have dropped the lion and kept thecourage; if the pelican is not charitable, they would say, so much theworse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say, permitted the ant toenforce and typify man's morality; they never allowed the ant to upsetit. They used the ant for industry as the lark for punctuality; theylooked up at the flapping birds and down at the crawling insects for ahomely lesson. But we have lived to see a sect that does not look downat the insects, but looks up at the insects, that asks us essentially tobow down and worship beetles, like ancient Egyptians. 

Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius alwayscarries a magnifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we haveseen the bees not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armiesand hierarchies of warriors and queens. Imagination perpetually peersand creeps further down the avenues and vistas in the tubes of science, and one fancies every frantic reversal of proportions; the earwigstriding across the echoing plain like an elephant, or the grasshoppercoming roaring above our roofs like a vast aeroplane, as he leaps fromHertfordshire to Surrey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple ofenormous entomology, whose architecture is based on somethingwilder than arms or backbones; in which the ribbed columns have thehalf-crawling look of dim and monstrous caterpillars; or the dome isa starry spider hung horribly in the void. There is one of the modernworks of engineering that gives one something of this nameless fearof the exaggerations of an underworld; and that is the curious curvedarchitecture of the under ground railway, commonly called the TwopennyTube. Those squat archways, without any upright line or pillar, look asif they had been tunneled by huge worms who have never learned to lifttheir heads. It is the very underground palace of the Serpent, the spiritof changing shape and color, that is the enemy of man. 

But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic suggestions that writerslike Maeterlinck have influenced us in the matter; there is also anethical side to the business. The upshot of M. Maeterlinck's book onbees is an admiration, one might also say an envy, of their collectivespirituality; of the fact that they live only for something whichhe calls the Soul of the Hive. And this admiration for the communalmorality of insects is expressed in many other modern writers in variousquarters and shapes; in Mr. Benjamin Kidd's theory of living only forthe evolutionary future of our race, and in the great interest of someSocialists in ants, which they generally prefer to bees, I suppose, because they are not so brightly colored. Not least among the hundredevidences of this vague insectolatry are the floods of flattery pouredby modern people on that energetic nation of the Far East of whichit has been said that "Patriotism is its only religion"; or, in otherwords, that it lives only for the Soul of the Hive. When at longintervals of the centuries Christendom grows weak, morbid or skeptical, and mysterious Asia begins to move against us her dim populations and topour them westward like a dark movement of matter, in such cases ithas been very common to compare the invasion to a plague of liceor incessant armies of locusts. The Eastern armies were indeed likeinsects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in their black nihilismof personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to individual lifeand love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their pessimisticcourage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders of theEast are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth. But neverbefore, I think, have Christians called a Turk a locust and meant itas a compliment. Now for the first time we worship as well as fear; andtrace with adoration that enormous form advancing vast and vague outof Asia, faintly discernible amid the mystic clouds of winged creatureshung over the wasted lands, thronging the skies like thunder anddiscoloring the skies like rain; Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies. 

In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul of the Hive, we ofChristendom stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for theessential and distinctive human idea that one good and happy man is anend in himself, that a soul is worth saving. Nay, for those who likesuch biological fancies it might well be said that we stand as chiefsand champions of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whosecognizance is the backbone, standing for the milk of the individualmother and the courage of the wandering cub, representing the patheticchivalry of the dog, the humor and perversity of cats, the affection ofthe tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion. It is more to the point, however, to urge that this mere glorification of society as it is inthe social insects is a transformation and a dissolution in one of theoutlines which have been specially the symbols of man. In the cloud andconfusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as isfinally disappearing, the idea of the human family. The hive has becomelarger than the house, the bees are destroying their captors; what thelocust hath left, the caterpillar hath eaten; and the little house andgarden of our friend Jones is in a bad way. 

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II. THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND

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

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

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

If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that thewhole Collectivist error consists in saying that because two mencan share an umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick. Umbrellas might possibly be replaced by some kind of common awningscovering certain streets from particular showers. But there is nothingbut nonsense in the notion of swinging a communal stick; it is as if onespoke of twirling a communal mustache. It will be said that this is afrank fantasia and that no sociologists suggest such follies. Pardon meif they do. I will give a precise parallel to the case of confusionof sticks and umbrellas, a parallel from a perpetually reiteratedsuggestion of reform. At least sixty Socialists out of a hundred, whenthey have spoken of common laundries, will go on at once to speak ofcommon kitchens. This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as thefanciful case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rodsthat go into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and washhousesare both large rooms full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul andfunction of the two things are utterly opposite. There is only one wayof washing a shirt; that is, there is only one right way. There is notaste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody says, "Tompkins likes fiveholes in his shirt, but I must say, give me the good old four holes. "Nobody says, "This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; nowif there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped up. " Theideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But it is by nomeans true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back cooked. Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, forthe definition of an art is that which must be personal and may beperverse. I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch commonsausages unless they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausagesfried to rags, yet he does not insist on his shirts being boiled torags. I do not say that such points of culinary delicacy are of highimportance. I do not say that the communal ideal must give way tothem. What I say is that the communal ideal is not conscious of theirexistence, and therefore goes wrong from the very start, mixing a whollypublic thing with a highly individual one. Perhaps we ought to acceptcommunal kitchens in the social crisis, just as we should acceptcommunal cat's-meat in a siege. But the cultured Socialist, quite at hisease, by no means in a siege, talks about communal kitchens as if theywere the same kind of thing as communal laundries. This shows at thestart that he misunderstands human nature. It is as different as threemen singing the same chorus from three men playing three tunes on thesame piano. 

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III. THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE

In the quarrel earlier alluded to between the energetic Progressive andthe obstinate Conservative (or, to talk a tenderer language, betweenHudge and Gudge), the state of cross-purposes is at the present momentacute. The Tory says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown;the Socialist very reasonably points out to him that in Cindertownat present there isn't any family life to preserve. But Hudge, theSocialist, in his turn, is highly vague and mysterious about whether hewould preserve the family life if there were any; or whether he will tryto restore it where it has disappeared. It is all very confusing. TheTory sometimes talks as if he wanted to tighten the domestic bonds thatdo not exist; the Socialist as if he wanted to loosen the bonds that donot bind anybody. The question we all want to ask of both of them isthe original ideal question, "Do you want to keep the family at all?" IfHudge, the Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for thenatural restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family. He must brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having apreference for the private house and a man for the public house. He mustmanage to endure somehow the idea of a woman being womanly, which doesnot mean soft and yielding, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and veryhumorous. He must confront without a quiver the notion of a child whoshall be childish, that is, full of energy, but without an idea ofindependence; fundamentally as eager for authority as for informationand butter-scotch. If a man, a woman and a child live together any morein free and sovereign households, these ancient relations will recur;and Hudge must put up with it. He can only avoid it by destroying thefamily, driving both sexes into sexless hives and hordes, and bringingup all children as the children of the state--like Oliver Twist. But ifthese stern words must be addressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escapea somewhat severe admonition. For the plain truth to be told prettysharply to the Tory is this, that if he wants the family to remain, if he wants to be strong enough to resist the rending forces of ouressentially savage commerce, he must make some very big sacrifices andtry to equalize property. The overwhelming mass of the English people atthis particular instant are simply too poor to be domestic. They areas domestic as they can manage; they are much more domestic than thegoverning class; but they cannot get what good there was originallymeant to be in this institution, simply because they have not got enoughmoney. The man ought to stand for a certain magnanimity, quite lawfullyexpressed in throwing money away: but if under given circumstanceshe can only do it by throwing the week's food away, then he is notmagnanimous, but mean. The woman ought to stand for a certain wisdomwhich is well expressed in valuing things rightly and guarding moneysensibly; but how is she to guard money if there is no money to guard?The child ought to look on his mother as a fountain of natural fun andpoetry; but how can he unless the fountain, like other fountains, is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient arts andfunctions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the womanis out working and the man isn't; and the child is forced by law tothink his schoolmaster's requirements more important than his mother's?No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Clubmust make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. Ifthey are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an oldgame called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then letthem have their empire of insects; they will find plenty of Socialistswho will give it to them. But if they want a domestic England, they must"shell out, " as the phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than anyRadical politician has yet dared to suggest; they must endure burdensmuch heavier than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than the deathduties; for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than thedistribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can nowonly avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to saveproperty, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepinglyas did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we mustrevolutionize the nation. 

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IV. A LAST INSTANCE

And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in thereader's ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: thesuspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That thequarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and thatthe way in which they perpetually play into each other's hands is notan everlasting coincidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchicindustrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises ofanarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge callsthe woman's work "freedom to live her own life. " Gudge wants steadyand obedient workmen, Hudge preaches teetotalism--to workmen, not toGudge--Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take armsagainst tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi that nobody must takearms against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washedgentleman; Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of Gudge's washingto people who can't practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse andcruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totallyinconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroyit; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with aprophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shallsoon gloriously outgrow. 

I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is consciousor unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the commonman homeless. I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets inthe gray twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low redgoblin lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less hisbecause he has never been in it. 

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V. CONCLUSION

Here, it may be said, my book ends just where it ought to begin. I havesaid that the strong centers of modern English property must swiftlyor slowly be broken up, if even the idea of property is to remainamong Englishmen. There are two ways in which it could be done, acold administration by quite detached officials, which is calledCollectivism, or a personal distribution, so as to produce what iscalled Peasant Proprietorship. I think the latter solution the finer andmore fully human, because it makes each man as somebody blamed somebodyfor saying of the Pope, a sort of small god. A man on his own turftastes eternity or, in other words, will give ten minutes more work thanis required. But I believe I am justified in shutting the door on thisvista of argument, instead of opening it. For this book is not designedto prove the case for Peasant Proprietorship, but to prove the caseagainst modern sages who turn reform to a routine. The whole of thisbook has been a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethicalfact. And if by any chance it should happen that there are still somewho do not quite see what that point is, I will end with one plainparable, which is none the worse for being also a fact. 

A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modernlaw to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order thatall little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course, all little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits arecommon among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctorsinterfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particularinterference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above intosuch stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor peoplemust not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must meanlice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. Itnever seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it couldbe done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thingis the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man(that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied toa cabman's daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a CabinetMinister's daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matterof fact apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will notask, because I know. They do not because they dare not. But what is theexcuse they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use, for thus cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argumentwould be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poorpeople than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced(against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes)to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system ofpublic instruction; and because in one out of the forty children theremay be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by thegreat rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often hasto work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look afterthe children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because theworkingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting(literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) onhis head, the workingman must allow his little girl's hair, first to beneglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly, to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl'shair. But he does not count. 

Upon this simple principle (or rather precedent) the sociological doctordrives gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into thedirt, so that their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear. It would be long and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants;it is easier to cut off the hair of the slaves. In the same way, ifit should ever happen that poor children, screaming with toothache, disturbed any schoolmaster or artistic gentleman, it would be easy topull out all the teeth of the poor; if their nails were disgustinglydirty, their nails could be plucked out; if their noses were indecentlyblown, their noses could be cut off. The appearance of our humblerfellow-citizen could be quite strikingly simplified before we had donewith him. But all this is not a bit wilder than the brute fact that adoctor can walk into the house of a free man, whose daughter's hair maybe as clean as spring flowers, and order him to cut it off. It neverseems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is thewrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the leastof it, a rooted thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and orientalarmies of whom we have spoken) sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, itis only by eternal institutions like hair that we can test passinginstitutions like empires. If a house is so built as to knock a man'shead off when he enters it, it is built wrong. 

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

Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of allthese pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all overagain, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, thepride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is oneof those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every ageand race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. Iflandlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws andsciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutterI will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should havelong hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have cleanhair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not havean unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; becauseshe should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord;because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be aredistribution of property; because there should be a redistributionof property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with thegold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, sheshall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cutshort like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall behacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacredimage; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall;the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages comerushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed. 

THREE NOTES

I. ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE

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

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

But this analogy is false, for a plain and particular reason. Manyvoteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that mostvoteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any votelessmen regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the moststagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost hissexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not careabout a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he didnot understand the word any better than Bimetallism. His opposition, ifit existed, was merely negative. His indifference to a vote was reallyindifference. 

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

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II. ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION

On re-reading my protest, which I honestly think much needed, againstour heathen idolatry of mere ablution, I see that it may possibly bemisread. I hasten to say that I think washing a most important thing tobe taught both to rich and poor. I do not attack the positive but therelative position of soap. Let it be insisted on even as much as now;but let other things be insisted on much more. I am even ready to admitthat cleanliness is next to godliness; but the moderns will not evenadmit godliness to be next to cleanliness. In their talk about ThomasBecket and such saints and heroes they make soap more important thansoul; they reject godliness whenever it is not cleanliness. If we resentthis about remote saints and heroes, we should resent it more about themany saints and heroes of the slums, whose unclean hands cleanse theworld. Dirt is evil chiefly as evidence of sloth; but the fact remainsthat the classes that wash most are those that work least. Concerningthese, the practical course is simple; soap should be urged on them andadvertised as what it is--a luxury. With regard to the poor also thepractical course is not hard to harmonize with our thesis. If we wantto give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give themluxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, thenemphatically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverencethem for being dirty. 

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III. ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP

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

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

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