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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, An Englishman Looks at the World, by H. G.
+Wells
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: An Englishman Looks at the World
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: March 16, 2004  [eBook #11502]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Gene Smethers, and Project Gutenberg
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+
+Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
+
+By
+
+H.G. WELLS
+
+1914
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Blériot arrives and sets him thinking. (1)
+
+He flies, (2)
+
+And deduces certain consequences of cheap travel. (3)
+
+He considers the King, and speculates on the New Epoch; (4)
+
+He thinks Imperially, (5)
+
+And then, coming to details, about Labour, (6)
+
+Socialism, (7)
+
+And Modern Warfare, (8)
+
+He discourses on the Modern Novel, (9)
+
+And the Public Library; (10)
+
+Criticises Chesterton, Belloc, (11)
+
+And Sir Thomas More, (12)
+
+And deals with the London Traffic Problem as a Socialist should. (13)
+
+He doubts the existence of Sociology, (14)
+
+Discusses Divorce, (15)
+
+Schoolmasters, (16)
+
+Motherhood, (17)
+
+Doctors, (18)
+
+And Specialisation; (19)
+
+Questions if there is a People, (20)
+
+And diagnoses the Political Disease of our Times. (21)
+
+He then speculates upon the future of the American Population, (22)
+
+Considers a possible set-back to civilisation, (23)
+
+The Ideal Citizen, (24)
+
+The still undeveloped possibilities of Science, (25),
+and--in the broadest spirit--
+
+The Human Adventure. (26)
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+1. The Coming of Blériot
+
+2. My First Flight
+
+3. Off the Chain
+
+4. Of the New Reign
+
+5. Will the Empire Live?
+
+6. The Labour Unrest
+
+7. The Great State
+
+8. The Common Sense of Warfare
+
+9. The Contemporary Novel
+
+10. The Philosopher's Public Library
+
+11. About Chesterton and Belloc
+
+12. About Sir Thomas More
+
+13. Traffic and Rebuilding
+
+14. The So-called Science of Sociology
+
+15. Divorce
+
+16. The Schoolmaster and the Empire
+
+17. The Endowment of Motherhood
+
+18. Doctors
+
+19. An Age of Specialisation
+
+20. Is there a People?
+
+21. The Disease of Parliaments
+
+22. The American Population
+
+23. The Possible Collapse of Civilisation
+
+24. The Ideal Citizen
+
+25. Some Possible Discoveries
+
+26. The Human Adventure
+
+
+
+
+AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+
+
+
+
+THE COMING OF BLÉRIOT
+
+(_July, 1909_.)
+
+
+The telephone bell rings with the petulant persistence that marks a
+trunk call, and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn to
+deal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up,
+minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another and
+are submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the real
+message comes through: "Blériot has crossed the Channel.... An article
+... about what it means."
+
+I make a hasty promise and go out and tell my friends.
+
+From my garden I look straight upon the Channel, and there are white
+caps upon the water, and the iris and tamarisk are all asway with the
+south-west wind that was also blowing yesterday. M. Blériot has done
+very well, and Mr. Latham, his rival, had jolly bad luck. That is what
+it means to us first of all. It also, I reflect privately, means that I
+have under-estimated the possible stability of aeroplanes. I did not
+expect anything of the sort so soon. This is a good five years before my
+reckoning of the year before last.
+
+We all, I think, regret that being so near we were not among the
+fortunate ones who saw that little flat shape skim landward out of the
+blue; surely they have an enviable memory; and then we fell talking and
+disputing about what that swift arrival may signify. It starts a swarm
+of questions.
+
+First one remarks that here is a thing done, and done with an
+astonishing effect of ease, that was incredible not simply to ignorant
+people but to men well informed in these matters. It cannot be fifteen
+years ago since Sir Hiram Maxim made the first machine that could lift
+its weight from the ground, and I well remember how the clumsy quality
+of that success confirmed the universal doubt that men could ever in any
+effectual manner fly.
+
+Since then a conspiracy of accidents has changed the whole problem; the
+bicycle and its vibrations developed the pneumatic tyre, the pneumatic
+tyre rendered a comfortable mechanically driven road vehicle possible,
+the motor-car set an enormous premium on the development of very light,
+very efficient engines, and at last the engineer was able to offer the
+experimentalists in gliding one strong enough and light enough for the
+new purpose. And here we are! Or, rather, M. Blériot is!
+
+What does it mean for us?
+
+One meaning, I think, stands out plainly enough, unpalatable enough to
+our national pride. This thing from first to last was made abroad. Of
+all that made it possible we can only claim so much as is due to the
+improvement of the bicycle. Gliding began abroad while our young men of
+muscle and courage were braving the dangers of the cricket field. The
+motor-car and its engine was being worked out "over there," while in
+this country the mechanically propelled road vehicle, lest it should
+frighten the carriage horses of the gentry, was going meticulously at
+four miles an hour behind a man with a red flag. Over there, where the
+prosperous classes have some regard for education and some freedom of
+imaginative play, where people discuss all sorts of things fearlessly,
+and have a respect for science, this has been achieved.
+
+And now our insularity is breached by the foreigner who has got ahead
+with flying.
+
+It means, I take it, first and foremost for us, that the world cannot
+wait for the English.
+
+It is not the first warning we have had. It has been raining warnings
+upon us; never was a slacking, dull people so liberally served with
+warnings of what was in store for them. But this event--this
+foreigner-invented, foreigner-built, foreigner-steered thing, taking our
+silver streak as a bird soars across a rivulet--puts the case
+dramatically. We have fallen behind in the quality of our manhood. In
+the men of means and leisure in this island there was neither enterprise
+enough, imagination enough, knowledge nor skill enough to lead in this
+matter. I do not see how one can go into the history of this development
+and arrive at any other conclusion. The French and Americans can laugh
+at our aeroplanes, the Germans are ten years ahead of our poor
+navigables. We are displayed a soft, rather backward people. Either we
+are a people essentially and incurably inferior, or there is something
+wrong in our training, something benumbing in our atmosphere and
+circumstances. That is the first and gravest intimation in M. Blériot's
+feat.
+
+The second is that, in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from the
+military point of view, an inaccessible island.
+
+So long as one had to consider the navigable balloon the aerial side of
+warfare remained unimportant. A Zeppelin is little good for any purpose
+but scouting and espionage. It can carry very little weight in
+proportion to its vast size, and, what is more important, it cannot drop
+things without sending itself up like a bubble in soda water. An armada
+of navigables sent against this island would end in a dispersed,
+deflated state, chiefly in the seas between Orkney and Norway--though I
+say it who should not. But these aeroplanes can fly all round the
+fastest navigable that ever drove before the wind; they can drop
+weights, take up weights, and do all sorts of able, inconvenient things.
+They are birds. As for the birds, so for aeroplanes; there is an upward
+limit of size. They are not going to be very big, but they are going to
+be very able and active. Within a year we shall have--or rather _they_
+will have--aeroplanes capable of starting from Calais, let us say,
+circling over London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive upon
+the printing machines of _The Times_, and returning securely to Calais
+for another similar parcel. They are things neither difficult nor costly
+to make. For the price of a Dreadnought one might have hundreds. They
+will be extremely hard to hit with any sort of missile. I do not think a
+large army of under-educated, under-trained, extremely unwilling
+conscripts is going to be any good against this sort of thing.
+
+I do not think that the arrival of M. Blériot means a panic resort to
+conscription. It is extremely desirable that people should realise that
+these foreign machines are not a temporary and incidental advantage that
+we can make good by fussing and demanding eight, and saying we won't
+wait, and so on, and then subsiding into indolence again. They are just
+the first-fruits of a steady, enduring lead that the foreigner has won.
+The foreigner is ahead of us in education, and this is especially true
+of the middle and upper classes, from which invention and enterprise
+come--or, in our own case, do not come. He makes a better class of man
+than we do. His science is better than ours. His training is better than
+ours. His imagination is livelier. His mind is more active. His
+requirements in a novel, for example, are not kindly, sedative pap; his
+uncensored plays deal with reality. His schools are places for vigorous
+education instead of genteel athleticism, and his home has books in it,
+and thought and conversation. Our homes and schools are relatively dull
+and uninspiring; there is no intellectual guide or stir in them; and to
+that we owe this new generation of nicely behaved, unenterprising sons,
+who play golf and dominate the tailoring of the world, while Brazilians,
+Frenchmen, Americans and Germans fly.
+
+That we are hopelessly behindhand in aeronautics is not a fact by
+itself. It is merely an indication that we are behindhand in our
+mechanical knowledge and invention M. Blériot's aeroplane points also to
+the fleet.
+
+The struggle for naval supremacy is not merely a struggle in
+shipbuilding and expenditure. Much more is it a struggle in knowledge
+and invention. It is not the Power that has the most ships or the
+biggest ships that is going to win in a naval conflict. It is the Power
+that thinks quickest of what to do, is most resourceful and inventive.
+Eighty Dreadnoughts manned by dull men are only eighty targets for a
+quicker adversary. Well, is there any reason to suppose that our Navy
+is going to keep above the general national level in these things? Is
+the Navy _bright_?
+
+The arrival of M. Blériot suggests most horribly to me how far behind we
+must be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance.
+I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised
+that it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it was
+possible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench to
+defy shrapnel. Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, and
+fished out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what a
+confoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly thing the enemy had
+done to him.
+
+Very probably the Navy is the exception to the British system; its
+officers are rescued from the dull homes and dull schools of their class
+while still of tender years, and shaped after a fashion of their own.
+But M. Blériot reminds us that we may no longer shelter and degenerate
+behind these blue backs. And the keenest men at sea are none the worse
+for having keen men on land behind them.
+
+Are we an awakening people?
+
+It is the vital riddle of our time. I look out upon the windy Channel
+and think of all those millions just over there, who seem to get busier
+and keener every hour. I could imagine the day of reckoning coming like
+a swarm of birds.
+
+Here the air is full of the clamour of rich and prosperous people
+invited to pay taxes, and beyond measure bitter. They are going to live
+abroad, cut their charities, dismiss old servants, and do all sorts of
+silly, vindictive things. We seem to be doing feeble next-to-nothings
+in the endowment of research. Not one in twenty of the boys of the
+middle and upper classes learns German or gets more than a misleading
+smattering of physical science. Most of them never learn to speak
+French. Heaven alone knows what they do with their brains! The British
+reading and thinking public probably does not number fifty thousand
+people all told. It is difficult to see whence the necessary impetus for
+a national renascence is to come.... The universities are poor and
+spiritless, with no ambition to lead the country. I met a Boy Scout
+recently. He was hopeful in his way, but a little inadequate, I thought,
+as a basis for confidence in the future of the Empire.
+
+We have still our Derby Day, of course....
+
+Apart from these patriotic solicitudes, M. Blériot has set quite another
+train of thought going in my mind. The age of natural democracy is
+surely at an end through these machines. There comes a time when men
+will be sorted out into those who will have the knowledge, nerve, and
+courage to do these splendid, dangerous things, and those who will
+prefer the humbler level. I do not think numbers are going to matter so
+much in the warfare of the future, and that when organised intelligence
+differs from the majority, the majority will have no adequate power of
+retort. The common man with a pike, being only sufficiently indignant
+and abundant, could chase the eighteenth century gentleman as he chose,
+but I fail to see what he can do in the way of mischief to an elusive
+chevalier with wings. But that opens too wide a discussion for me to
+enter upon now.
+
+
+
+
+MY FIRST FLIGHT
+
+(EASTBOURNE, _August 5, 1912--three years later_.)
+
+
+Hitherto my only flights have been flights of imagination but this
+morning I flew. I spent about ten or fifteen minutes in the air; we went
+out to sea, soared up, came back over the land, circled higher, planed
+steeply down to the water, and I landed with the conviction that I had
+had only the foretaste of a great store of hitherto unsuspected
+pleasures. At the first chance I will go up again, and I will go higher
+and further.
+
+This experience has restored all the keenness of my ancient interest in
+flying, which had become a little fagged and flat by too much hearing
+and reading about the thing and not enough participation. Sixteen years
+ago, in the days of Langley and Lilienthal, I was one of the few
+journalists who believed and wrote that flying was possible; it affected
+my reputation unfavourably, and produced in the few discouraged pioneers
+of those days a quite touching gratitude. Over my mantel as I write
+hangs a very blurred and bad but interesting photograph that Professor
+Langley sent me sixteen years ago. It shows the flight of the first
+piece of human machinery heavier than air that ever kept itself up for
+any length of time. It was a model, a little affair that would not have
+lifted a cat; it went up in a spiral and came down unsmashed, bringing
+back, like Noah's dove, the promise of tremendous things.
+
+That was only sixteen years ago, and it is amusing to recall how
+cautiously even we out-and-out believers did our prophesying. I was
+quite a desperate fellow; I said outright that in my lifetime we should
+see men flying. But I qualified that by repeating that for many years to
+come it would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring and
+skill. We conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks. I was deeply
+impressed and greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridge
+mathematician produced to show that a flying machine was bound to pitch
+fearfully, that as it flew on its pitching _must_ increase until up went
+its nose, down went its tail, and it fell like a knife. We exaggerated
+every possibility of instability. We imagined that when the aeroplane
+wasn't "kicking up ahind and afore" it would be heeling over to the
+lightest side wind. A sneeze might upset it. We contrasted our poor
+human equipment with the instinctive balance of a bird, which has had
+ten million years of evolution by way of a start....
+
+The waterplane in which I soared over Eastbourne this morning with Mr.
+Grahame-White was as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt.
+
+Then we went on from those anticipations of swaying insecurity to
+speculations about the psychological and physiological effects of
+flying. Most people who look down from the top of a cliff or high tower
+feel some slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening dread.
+Even if men struggled high into the air, we asked, wouldn't they be
+smitten up there by such a lonely and reeling dismay as to lose all
+self-control? And, above all, wouldn't the pitching and tossing make
+them quite horribly sea-sick?
+
+I have always been a little haunted by that last dread. It gave a little
+undertow of funk to the mood of lively curiosity with which I got
+aboard the waterplane this morning--that sort of faint, thin funk that
+so readily invades one on the verge of any new experience; when one
+tries one's first dive, for example, or pushes off for the first time
+down an ice run. I thought I should very probably be sea-sick--or, to be
+more precise, air-sick; I thought also that I might be very giddy, and
+that I might get thoroughly cold and uncomfortable None of those things
+happened.
+
+I am still in a state of amazement at the smooth steadfastness of the
+motion. There is nothing on earth to compare with that, unless--and that
+I can't judge--it is an ice yacht travelling on perfect ice. The finest
+motor-car in the world on the best road would be a joggling, quivering
+thing beside it.
+
+To begin with, we went out to sea before the wind, and the plane would
+not readily rise. We went with an undulating movement, leaping with a
+light splashing pat upon the water, from wave to wave. Then we came
+about into the wind and rose, and looking over I saw that there were no
+longer those periodic flashes of white foam. I was flying. And it was as
+still and steady as dreaming. I watched the widening distance between
+our floats and the waves. It wasn't by any means a windless day; there
+was a brisk, fluctuating breeze blowing out of the north over the downs.
+It seemed hardly to affect our flight at all.
+
+And as for the giddiness of looking down, one does not feel it at all.
+It is difficult to explain why this should be so, but it is so. I
+suppose in such matters I am neither exceptionally steady-headed nor is
+my head exceptionally given to swimming. I can stand on the edge of
+cliffs of a thousand feet or so and look down, but I can never bring
+myself right up to the edge nor crane over to look to the very bottom. I
+should want to lie down to do that. And the other day I was on that
+Belvedere place at the top of the Rotterdam sky-scraper, a rather high
+wind was blowing, and one looks down through the chinks between the
+boards one stands on upon the heads of the people in the streets below;
+I didn't like it. But this morning I looked directly down on a little
+fleet of fishing boats over which we passed, and on the crowds
+assembling on the beach, and on the bathers who stared up at us from the
+breaking surf, with an entirely agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, in
+the early morning sunshine, had all the brightly detailed littleness of
+a town viewed from high up on the side of a great mountain.
+
+When Mr. Grahame-White told me we were going to plane down I will
+confess I tightened my hold on the sides of the car and prepared for
+something like the down-going sensation of a switchback railway on a
+larger scale. Just for a moment there was that familiar feeling of
+something pressing one's heart up towards one's shoulders, and one's
+lower jaw up into its socket and of grinding one's lower teeth against
+the upper, and then it passed. The nose of the car and all the machine
+was slanting downwards, we were gliding quickly down, and yet there was
+no feeling that one rushed, not even as one rushes in coasting a hill on
+a bicycle. It wasn't a tithe of the thrill of those three descents one
+gets on the great mountain railway in the White City. There one gets a
+disagreeable quiver up one's backbone from the wheels, and a real sense
+of falling.
+
+It is quite peculiar to flying that one is incredulous of any
+collision. Some time ago I was in a motor-car that ran over and killed a
+small dog, and this wretched little incident has left an open wound upon
+my nerves. I am never quite happy in a car now; I can't help keeping an
+apprehensive eye ahead. But you fly with an exhilarating assurance that
+you cannot possibly run over anything or run into anything--except the
+land or the sea, and even those large essentials seem a beautifully safe
+distance away.
+
+I had heard a great deal of talk about the deafening uproar of the
+engine. I counted a headache among my chances. There again reason
+reinforced conjecture. When in the early morning Mr. Travers came from
+Brighton in this Farman in which I flew I could hear the hum of the
+great insect when it still seemed abreast of Beachy Head, and a good two
+miles away. If one can hear a thing at two miles, how much the more will
+one not hear it at a distance of two yards? But at the risk of seeming
+too contented for anything I will assert I heard that noise no more than
+one hears the drone of an electric ventilator upon one's table. It was
+only when I came to speak to Mr. Grahame-White, or he to me, that I
+discovered that our voices had become almost infinitesimally small.
+
+And so it was I went up into the air at Eastbourne with the impression
+that flying was still an uncomfortable experimental, and slightly heroic
+thing to do, and came down to the cheerful gathering crowd upon the
+sands again with the knowledge that it is a thing achieved for everyone.
+It will get much cheaper, no doubt, and much swifter, and be improved in
+a dozen ways--we _must_ get self-starting engines, for example, for both
+our aeroplanes and motor-cars--but it is available to-day for anyone
+who can reach it. An invalid lady of seventy could have enjoyed all that
+I did if only one could have got her into the passenger's seat. Getting
+there was a little difficult, it is true; the waterplane was out in the
+surf, and I was carried to it on a boatman's back, and then had to
+clamber carefully through the wires, but that is a matter of detail.
+This flying is indeed so certain to become a general experience that I
+am sure that this description will in a few years seem almost as quaint
+as if I had set myself to record the fears and sensations of my First
+Ride in a Wheeled Vehicle. And I suspect that learning to control a
+Farman waterplane now is probably not much more difficult than, let us
+say, twice the difficulty in learning the control and management of a
+motor-bicycle. I cannot understand the sort of young man who won't learn
+how to do it if he gets half a chance.
+
+The development of these waterplanes is an important step towards the
+huge and swarming popularisation of flying which is now certainly
+imminent. We ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote about
+flying before there was any flying used to make a great fuss about the
+dangers and difficulties of landing and getting up. We wrote with vast
+gravity about "starting rails" and "landing stages," and it is still
+true that landing an aeroplane, except upon a well-known and quite level
+expanse, is a risky and uncomfortable business. But getting up and
+landing upon fairly smooth water is easier than getting into bed. This
+alone is likely to determine the aeroplane routes along the line of the
+world's coastlines and lake groups and waterways. The airmen will go to
+and fro over water as the midges do. Wherever there is a square mile of
+water the waterplanes will come and go like hornets at the mouth of
+their nest. But there are much stronger reasons than this convenience
+for keeping over water. Over water the air, it seems, lies in great
+level expanses; even when there are gales it moves in uniform masses
+like the swift, still rush of a deep river. The airman, in Mr.
+Grahame-White's phrase, can go to sleep on it. But over the land, and
+for thousands of feet up into the sky, the air is more irregular than a
+torrent among rocks; it is--if only we could see it--a waving, whirling,
+eddying, flamboyant confusion. A slight hill, a ploughed field, the
+streets of a town, create riotous, rolling, invisible streams and
+cataracts of air that catch the airman unawares, make him drop
+disconcertingly, try his nerves. With a powerful enough engine he climbs
+at once again, but these sudden downfalls are the least pleasant and
+most dangerous experience in aviation. They exact a tiring vigilance.
+
+Over lake or sea, in sunshine, within sight of land, this is the perfect
+way of the flying tourist. Gladly would I have set out for France this
+morning instead of returning to Eastbourne. And then coasted round to
+Spain and into the Mediterranean. And so by leisurely stages to India.
+And the East Indies....
+
+I find my study unattractive to-day.
+
+
+
+
+OFF THE CHAIN
+
+(_December, 1910_)
+
+
+I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year," and
+noting how much the world can change in seventy years.
+
+I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London to Yorkshire in
+that ex-sheriff's coach he bought in Long Acre--where now the motor-cars
+are sold--when there came a telegram to bid me note how a certain Mr.
+Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England from a little excursion.
+He had left London last Saturday week at midday; he hoped to be back by
+Thursday; and he had talked to the President in Washington, visited
+Philadelphia, and had a comparatively loitering afternoon in New York.
+What had I to say about it?
+
+Firstly, that I wish this article could be written by Samuel Warren. And
+failing that, I wish that Charles Dickens, who wrote in his "American
+Notes" with such passionate disgust and hostility about the first
+Cunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of crossing the
+Atlantic by steamship, could have shared Mr. Holt's experience.
+
+Because I am chiefly impressed by the fact not that Mr. Holt has taken
+days where weeks were needed fifty years ago, but that he has done it
+very comfortably, without undue physical exertion, and at no greater
+expense, I suppose, than it cost Dickens, whom the journey nearly
+killed.
+
+If Mr. Holt's expenses were higher, it was for the special trains and
+the sake of the record. Anyone taking ordinary trains and ordinary
+passages may do what he has done in eighteen or twenty days.
+
+When I was a boy, "Around the World in Eighty Days" was still a
+brilliant piece of imaginative fiction. Now that is almost an invalid's
+pace. It will not be very long before a man will be able to go round the
+world if he wishes to do so ten times in a year. And it is perhaps
+forgivable if those who, like Jules Verne, saw all these increments in
+speed, motor-cars, and airships aeroplanes, and submarines, wireless
+telegraphy and what not, as plain and necessary deductions from the
+promises of physical science, should turn upon a world that read and
+doubted and jeered with "I told you so. _Now_ will you respect a
+prophet?"
+
+It was not that the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicable
+illumination at which a sceptic might reasonably mock; they were
+prepared with ample reasons for the things they foretold. Now, quite as
+confidently, they point on to a new series of consequences, high
+probabilities that follow on all this tremendous development of swift,
+secure, and cheapened locomotion, just as they followed almost
+necessarily upon the mechanical developments of the last century.
+
+Briefly, the ties that bind men to place are being severed; we are in
+the beginning of a new phase in human experience.
+
+For endless ages man led the hunting life, migrating after his food,
+camping, homeless, as to this day are many of the Indians and Esquimaux
+in the Hudson Bay Territory. Then began agriculture, and for the sake of
+securer food man tethered himself to a place. The history of man's
+progress from savagery to civilisation is essentially a story of
+settling down. It begins in caves and shelters; it culminates in a wide
+spectacle of farms and peasant villages, and little towns among the
+farms. There were wars, crusades, barbarous invasions, set-backs, but to
+that state all Asia, Europe, North Africa worked its way with an
+indomitable pertinacity. The enormous majority of human beings stayed at
+home at last; from the cradle to the grave they lived, married, died in
+the same district, usually in the same village; and to that condition,
+law, custom, habits, morals, have adapted themselves. The whole plan and
+conception of human society is based on the rustic home and the needs
+and characteristics of the agricultural family. There have been gipsies,
+wanderers, knaves, knights-errant and adventurers, no doubt, but the
+settled permanent rustic home and the tenure of land about it, and the
+hens and the cow, have constituted the fundamental reality of the whole
+scene. Now, the really wonderful thing in this astonishing development
+of cheap, abundant, swift locomotion we have seen in the last seventy
+years--in the development of which Mauretanias, aeroplanes,
+mile-a-minute expresses, tubes, motor-buses and motor cars are just the
+bright, remarkable points--is this: that it dissolves almost all the
+reason and necessity why men should go on living permanently in any one
+place or rigidly disciplined to one set of conditions. The former
+attachment to the soil ceases to be an advantage. The human spirit has
+never quite subdued itself to the laborious and established life; it
+achieves its best with variety and occasional vigorous exertion under
+the stimulus of novelty rather than by constant toil, and this
+revolution in human locomotion that brings nearly all the globe within
+a few days of any man is the most striking aspect of the unfettering
+again of the old restless, wandering, adventurous tendencies in man's
+composition.
+
+Already one can note remarkable developments of migration. There is, for
+example, that flow to and fro across the Atlantic of labourers from the
+Mediterranean. Italian workmen by the hundred thousand go to the United
+States in the spring and return in the autumn. Again, there is a stream
+of thousands of prosperous Americans to summer in Europe. Compared with
+any European country, the whole population of the United States is
+fluid. Equally notable is the enormous proportion of the British
+prosperous which winters either in the high Alps or along the Riviera.
+England is rapidly developing the former Irish grievance of an absentee
+propertied class. It is only now by the most strenuous artificial
+banking back that migrations on a far huger scale from India into
+Africa, and from China and Japan into Australia and America are
+prevented.
+
+All the indications point to a time when it will be an altogether
+exceptional thing for a man to follow one occupation in one place all
+his life, and still rarer for a son to follow in his father's footsteps
+or die in his father's house.
+
+The thing is as simple as the rule of three. We are off the chain of
+locality for good and all. It was necessary heretofore for a man to live
+in immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him
+to reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and delay of
+transport were relatively too enormous for him to shift once he was
+settled. _Now_ he may live twenty or thirty miles away from his
+occupation; and it often pays him to spend the small amount of time and
+money needed to move--it may be half-way round the world--to healthier
+conditions or more profitable employment.
+
+And with every diminution in the cost and duration of transport it
+becomes more and more possible, and more and more likely, to be
+profitable to move great multitudes of workers seasonally between
+regions where work is needed in this season and regions where work is
+needed in that. They can go out to the agricultural lands at one time
+and come back into towns for artistic work and organised work in
+factories at another. They can move from rain and darkness into
+sunshine, and from heat into the coolness of mountain forests. Children
+can be sent for education to sea beaches and healthy mountains.
+
+Men will harvest in Saskatchewan and come down in great liners to spend
+the winter working in the forests of Yucatan.
+
+People have hardly begun to speculate about the consequences of the
+return of humanity from a closely tethered to a migratory existence. It
+is here that the prophet finds his chief opportunity. Obviously, these
+great forces of transport are already straining against the limits of
+existing political areas. Every country contains now an increasing
+ingredient of unenfranchised Uitlanders. Every country finds a growing
+section of its home-born people either living largely abroad, drawing
+the bulk of their income from the exterior, and having their essential
+interests wholly or partially across the frontier.
+
+In every locality of a Western European country countless people are
+found delocalised, uninterested in the affairs of that particular
+locality, and capable of moving themselves with a minimum of loss and a
+maximum of facility into any other region that proves more attractive.
+In America political life, especially State life as distinguished from
+national political life, is degraded because of the natural and
+inevitable apathy of a large portion of the population whose interests
+go beyond the State.
+
+Politicians and statesmen, being the last people in the world to notice
+what is going on in it, are making no attempt whatever to re-adapt this
+hugely growing floating population of delocalised people to the public
+service. As Mr. Marriott puts it in his novel, "_Now,"_ they "drop out"
+from politics as we understand politics at present. Local administration
+falls almost entirely--and the decision of Imperial affairs tends more
+and more to fall--into the hands of that dwindling and adventurous
+moiety which sits tight in one place from the cradle to the grave. No
+one has yet invented any method for the political expression and
+collective direction of a migratory population, and nobody is attempting
+to do so. It is a new problem....
+
+Here, then, is a curious prospect, the prospect of a new kind of people,
+a floating population going about the world, uprooted, delocalised, and
+even, it may be, denationalised, with wide interests and wide views,
+developing no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a morality of its
+own, a philosophy of its own, and yet from the point of view of current
+politics and legislation unorganised and ineffective.
+
+Most of the forces of international finance and international business
+enterprise will be with it. It will develop its own characteristic
+standards of art and literature and conduct in accordance with its new
+necessities. It is, I believe, the mankind of the future. And the last
+thing it will be able to do will be to legislate. The history of the
+immediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of
+the conflict of the needs of this new population with the institutions,
+the boundaries the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditions
+established during the home-keeping, localised era of mankind's career.
+
+This conflict follows as inevitably upon these new gigantic facilities
+of locomotion as the _Mauretania_ followed from the discoveries of steam
+and steel.
+
+
+
+
+OF THE NEW REIGN
+
+(_June, 1911_.)
+
+
+The bunting and the crimson vanish from the streets. Already the vast
+army of improvised carpenters that the Coronation has created set
+themselves to the work of demolition, and soon every road that converges
+upon Central London will be choked again with great loads of timber--but
+this time going outward--as our capital emerges from this unprecedented
+inundation of loyalty. The most elaborately conceived, the most stately
+of all recorded British Coronations is past.
+
+What new phase in the life of our nation and our Empire does this
+tremendous ceremony inaugurate? The question is inevitable. There is
+nothing in all the social existence of men so full of challenge as the
+crowning of a king. It is the end of the overture; the curtain rises.
+This is a new beginning-place for histories.
+
+To us, the great mass of common Englishmen, who have no place in the
+hierarchy of our land, who do not attend Courts nor encounter uniforms,
+whose function is at most spectacular, who stand in the street and watch
+the dignitaries and the liveries pass by, this sense of critical
+expectation is perhaps greater than it is for those more immediately
+concerned in the spectacle. They have had their parts to play, their
+symbolic acts to perform, they have sat in their privileged places, and
+we have waited at the barriers until their comfort and dignity was
+assured. I can conceive many of them, a little fatigued, preparing now
+for social dispersal, relaxing comfortably into gossip, discussing the
+detail of these events with an air of things accomplished. They will
+decide whether the Coronation has been a success and whether everything
+has or has not passed off very well. For us in the great crowd nothing
+has as yet succeeded or passed off well or ill. We are intent upon a
+King newly anointed and crowned, a King of whom we know as yet very
+little, but who has, nevertheless, roused such expectation as no King
+before him has done since Tudor times, in the presence of gigantic
+opportunities.
+
+There is a conviction widespread among us--his own words, perhaps, have
+done most to create it--that King George is inspired, as no recent
+predecessor has been inspired, by the conception of kingship, that his
+is to be no rôle of almost indifferent abstinence from the broad
+processes of our national and imperial development. That greater public
+life which is above party and above creed and sect has, we are told,
+taken hold of his imagination; he is to be no crowned image of unity and
+correlation, a layer of foundation-stones and a signature to documents,
+but an actor in our drama, a living Prince.
+
+Time will test these hopes, but certainly we, the innumerable democracy
+of individually unimportant men, have felt the need for such a Prince.
+Our consciousness of defects, of fields of effort untilled, of vast
+possibilities neglected and slipping away from us for ever, has never
+really slumbered again since the chastening experiences of the Boer War.
+Since then the national spirit, hampered though it is by the traditions
+of party government and a legacy of intellectual and social heaviness,
+has been in uneasy and ineffectual revolt against deadness, against
+stupidity and slackness, against waste and hypocrisy in every department
+of life. We have come to see more and more clearly how little we can
+hope for from politicians, societies and organised movements in these
+essential things. It is this that has invested the energy and manhood,
+the untried possibilities of the new King with so radiant a light of
+hope for us.
+
+Think what it may mean for us all--I write as one of that great
+ill-informed multitude, sincerely and gravely patriotic, outside the
+echoes of Court gossip and the easy knowledge of exalted society--if our
+King does indeed care for these wider and profounder things! Suppose we
+have a King at last who cares for the advancement of science, who is
+willing to do the hundred things that are so easy in his position to
+increase research, to honour and to share in scientific thought. Suppose
+we have a King whose head rises above the level of the Court artist, and
+who not only can but will appeal to the latent and discouraged power of
+artistic creation in our race. Suppose we have a King who understands
+the need for incessant, acute criticism to keep our collective
+activities intelligent and efficient, and for a flow of bold, unhampered
+thought through every department of the national life, a King liberal
+without laxity and patriotic without pettiness or vulgarity. Such, it
+seems to us who wait at present almost inexpressively outside the
+immediate clamours of a mere artificial loyalty, are the splendid
+possibilities of the time.
+
+For England is no exhausted or decaying country. It is rich with an
+unmeasured capacity for generous responses. It is a country burthened
+indeed, but not overwhelmed, by the gigantic responsibilities of
+Empire, a little relaxed by wealth, and hampered rather than enslaved by
+a certain shyness of temperament, a certain habitual timidity,
+slovenliness and insincerity of mind. It is a little distrustful of
+intellectual power and enterprise, a little awkward and ungracious to
+brave and beautiful things, a little too tolerant of dull, well-meaning
+and industrious men and arrogant old women. It suffers hypocrites
+gladly, because its criticism is poor, and it is wastefully harsh to
+frank unorthodoxy. But its heart is sound if its judgments fall short of
+acuteness and if its standards of achievement are low. It needs but a
+quickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional centre of its
+respect, to rise from even the appearance of decadence. There is a new
+quality seeking expression in England like the rising of sap in the
+spring, a new generation asking only for such leadership and such
+emancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous hostility as a King
+alone can give it....
+
+When in its turn this latest reign comes at last to its reckoning, what
+will the sum of its achievement be? What will it leave of things
+visible? Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it but
+add abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and masses
+of ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradation
+of the Victorian period? Will a great constellation of artists redeem
+the ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find their
+fitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our literature escape at
+last from pretentiousness and timidity, our philosophy from the foolish
+cerebrations of university "characters" and eminent politicians at
+leisure, and our starved science find scope and resources adequate to
+its gigantic needs? Will our universities, our teaching, our national
+training, our public services, gain a new health from the reviving
+vigour of the national brain? Or is all this a mere wild hope, and shall
+we, after perhaps some small flutterings of effort, the foundation of
+some ridiculous little academy of literary busybodies and hangers-on,
+the public recognition of this or that sociological pretender or
+financial "scientist," and a little polite jobbery with picture-buying,
+relapse into lassitude and a contented acquiescence in the rivalry of
+Germany and the United States for the moral, intellectual and material
+leadership of the world?
+
+The deaths and accessions of Kings, the changing of names and coins and
+symbols and persons, a little force our minds in the marking off of
+epochs. We are brought to weigh one generation against another, to
+reckon up our position and note the characteristics of a new phase. What
+lies before us in the next decades? Is England going on to fresh
+achievements, to a renewed and increased predominance, or is she falling
+into a secondary position among the peoples of the world?
+
+The answer to that depends upon ourselves. Have we pride enough to
+attempt still to lead mankind, and if we have, have we the wisdom and
+the quality? Or are we just the children of Good Luck, who are being
+found out?
+
+Some years ago our present King exhorted this island to "wake up" in one
+of the most remarkable of British royal utterances, and Mr. Owen Seaman
+assures him in verse of an altogether laureate quality that we are now
+
+  "Free of the snare of slumber's silken bands,"
+
+though I have not myself observed it. It is interesting to ask, Is
+England really waking up? and if she is, what sort of awakening is she
+likely to have?
+
+It is possible, of course, to wake up in various different ways. There
+is the clear and beautiful dawn of new and balanced effort, easy,
+unresting, planned, assured, and there is also the blundering-up of a
+still half-somnolent man, irascible, clumsy, quarrelsome, who stubs his
+toe in his first walk across the room, smashes his too persistent alarum
+clock in a fit of nerves, and cuts his throat while shaving. All
+patriotic vehemence does not serve one's country. Exertion is a more
+critical and dangerous thing than inaction, and the essence of success
+is in the ability to develop those qualities which make action
+effective, and without which strenuousness is merely a clumsy and noisy
+protest against inevitable defeat. These necessary qualities, without
+which no community may hope for pre-eminence to-day, are a passion for
+fine and brilliant achievement, relentless veracity of thought and
+method, and richly imaginative fearlessness of enterprise. Have we
+English those qualities, and are we doing our utmost to select and
+develop them?
+
+I doubt very much if we are. Let me give some of the impressions that
+qualify my assurance in the future of our race.
+
+I have watched a great deal of patriotic effort during the last decade,
+I have seen enormous expenditures of will, emotion and material for the
+sake of our future, and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effect
+of lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the shortness and
+weakness of aim in very much that has been done. I miss continually that
+sharply critical imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellent
+work, which shines out supremely in Cromwell's creation of the New
+Model, or Nelson's plan of action at Trafalgar, as brightly as it does
+in Newton's investigation of gravitation, Turner's rendering of
+landscape, or Shakespeare's choice of words, but which cannot be absent
+altogether if any achievement is to endure. We seem to have busy,
+energetic people, no doubt, in abundance, patient and industrious
+administrators and legislators; but have we any adequate supply of
+really creative ability?
+
+Let me apply this question to one matter upon which England has
+certainly been profoundly in earnest during the last decade. We have
+been almost frantically resolved to keep the empire of the sea. But have
+we really done all that could have been done? I ask it with all
+diffidence, but has our naval preparation been free from a sort of noisy
+violence, a certain massive dullness of conception? Have we really made
+anything like a sane use of our resources? I do not mean of our
+resources in money or stuff. It is manifest that the next naval war will
+be beyond all precedent a war of mechanisms, giving such scope for
+invention and scientifically equipped wit and courage as the world has
+never had before. Now, have we really developed any considerable
+proportion of the potential human quality available to meet the demand
+for wits? What are we doing to discover, encourage and develop those
+supreme qualities of personal genius that become more and more decisive
+with every new weapon and every new complication and unsuspected
+possibility it introduces? Suppose, for example, there was among us
+to-day a one-eyed, one-armed adulterer, rather fragile, prone to
+sea-sickness, and with just that one supreme quality of imaginative
+courage which made Nelson our starry admiral. Would he be given the
+ghost of a chance now of putting that gift at his country's disposal? I
+do not think he would, and I do not think he would because we underrate
+gifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickening
+appreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvalue
+the good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues of
+mediocrity.
+
+I have but the knowledge of the man in the street in these things,
+though once or twice I have chanced on prophecy, and I am uneasily
+apprehensive of the quality of all our naval preparations. We go on
+launching these lumping great Dreadnoughts, and I cannot bring myself to
+believe in them. They seem vulnerable from the air above and the deep
+below, vulnerable in a shallow channel and in a fog (and the North Sea
+is both foggy and shallow), and immensely costly. If I were Lord High
+Admiral of England at war I would not fight the things. I would as soon
+put to sea in St. Paul's Cathedral. If I were fighting Germany, I would
+stow half of them away in the Clyde and half in the Bristol Channel, and
+take the good men out of them and fight with mines and torpedoes and
+destroyers and airships and submarines.
+
+And when I come to military matters my persuasion that things are not
+all right, that our current hostility to imaginative activity and our
+dull acceptance of established methods and traditions is leading us
+towards grave dangers, intensifies. In South Africa the Boers taught us
+in blood and bitterness the obvious fact that barbed wire had its
+military uses, and over the high passes on the way to Lhassa (though,
+luckily, it led to no disaster) there was not a rifle in condition to
+use because we had not thought to take glycerine. The perpetual novelty
+of modern conditions demands an imaginative alertness we eliminate. I do
+not believe that the Army Council or anyone in authority has worked out
+a tithe of the essential problems of contemporary war. If they have,
+then it does not show. Our military imagination is half-way back to bows
+and arrows. The other day I saw a detachment of the Legion of
+Frontiersmen disporting itself at Totteridge. I presume these young
+heroes consider they are preparing for a possible conflict in England or
+Western Europe, and I presume the authorities are satisfied with them.
+It is at any rate the only serious war of which there is any manifest
+probability. Western Europe is now a network of railways, tramways, high
+roads, wires of all sorts; its chief beasts of burthen are the railway
+train and the motor car and the bicycle; towns and hypertrophied
+villages are often practically continuous over large areas; there is
+abundant water and food, and the commonest form of cover is the house.
+But the Legion of Frontiersmen is equipped for war, oh!--in Arizona in
+1890, and so far as I am able to judge the most modern sections of the
+army extant are organised for a colonial war in (say) 1899 or 1900.
+There is, of course, a considerable amount of vague energy demanding
+conscription and urging our youth towards a familiarity with arms and
+the backwoodsman's life, but of any thought-out purpose in our arming
+widely understood, of any realisation of what would have to be done and
+where it would have to be done, and of any attempts to create an
+instrument for that novel unprecedented undertaking, I discover no
+trace.
+
+In my capacity of devil's advocate pleading against national
+over-confidence, I might go on to the quality of our social and
+political movements. One hears nowadays a vast amount of chatter about
+efficiency--that magic word--and social organisation, and there is no
+doubt a huge expenditure of energy upon these things and a widespread
+desire to rush about and make showy and startling changes. But it does
+not follow that this involves progress if the enterprise itself is dully
+conceived and most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived. In the
+absence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may
+set up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions
+at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert"
+quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a
+dull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs multiply in
+darkness and heat.
+
+I find the same doubts of our quality assail me when I turn to the
+supreme business of education. It is true we all seem alive nowadays to
+the need of education, are all prepared for more expenditure upon it and
+more, but it does not follow necessarily in a period of stagnating
+imagination that we shall get what we pay for. The other day I
+discovered my little boy doing a subtraction sum, and I found he was
+doing it in a slower, clumsier, less businesslike way than the one I was
+taught in an old-fashioned "Commercial Academy" thirty odd years ago.
+The educational "expert," it seems, has been at work substituting a bad
+method for a good one in our schools because it is easier of exposition.
+The educational "expert," in the lack of a lively public intelligence,
+develops all the vices of the second-rate energetic, and he is, I am
+only too disposed to believe, making a terrible mess of a great deal of
+our science teaching and of the teaching of mathematics and English....
+
+I have written enough to make clear the quality of my doubts. I think
+the English mind cuts at life with a dulled edge, and that its energy
+may be worse than its somnolence. I think it undervalues gifts and fine
+achievement, and overvalues the commonplace virtues of mediocre men. One
+of the greatest Liberal statesmen in the time of Queen Victoria never
+held office because he was associated with a divorce case a quarter of a
+century ago. For him to have taken office would have been regarded as a
+scandal. But it is not regarded as a scandal that our Government
+includes men of no more ability than any average assistant behind a
+grocer's counter. These are your gods, O England!--and with every desire
+to be optimistic I find it hard under the circumstances to anticipate
+that the New Epoch is likely to be a blindingly brilliant time for our
+Empire and our race.
+
+
+
+
+WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE?
+
+
+What will hold such an Empire as the British together, this great, laxly
+scattered, sea-linked association of ancient states and new-formed
+countries, Oriental nations, and continental colonies? What will enable
+it to resist the endless internal strains, the inevitable external
+pressures and attacks to which it must be subjected This is the primary
+question for British Imperialism; everything else is secondary or
+subordinated to that.
+
+There is a multitude of answers. But I suppose most of them will prove
+under examination either to be, or to lead to, or to imply very
+distinctly this generalisation that if most of the intelligent and
+active people in the Empire want it to continue it will, and that if a
+large proportion of such active and intelligent people are discontented
+and estranged, nothing can save it from disintegration. I do not suppose
+that a navy ten times larger than ours, or conscription of the most
+irksome thoroughness, could oblige Canada to remain in the Empire if the
+general will and feeling of Canada were against it, or coerce India into
+a sustained submission if India presented a united and resistant front.
+Our Empire, for all its roll of battles, was not created by force;
+colonisation and diplomacy have played a far larger share in its growth
+than conquest; and there is no such strength in its sovereignty as the
+rule of pride and pressure demand. It is to the free consent and
+participation of its constituent peoples that we must look for its
+continuance.
+
+A large and influential body of politicians considers that in
+preferential trading between the parts of the Empire, and in the
+erection of a tariff wall against exterior peoples, lies the secret of
+that deepened emotional understanding we all desire. I have never
+belonged to that school. I am no impassioned Free Trader--the sacred
+principle of Free Trade has always impressed me as a piece of party
+claptrap; but I have never been able to understand how an attempt to
+draw together dominions so scattered and various as ours by a network of
+fiscal manipulation could end in anything but mutual inconvenience
+mutual irritation, and disruption.
+
+In an open drawer in my bureau there lies before me now a crumpled card
+on which are the notes I made of a former discussion of this very issue,
+a discussion between a number of prominent politicians in the days
+before Mr. Chamberlain's return from South Africa and the adoption of
+Tariff Reform by the Unionist Party; and I decipher again the same
+considerations, unanswered and unanswerable, that leave me sceptical
+to-day.
+
+Take a map of the world and consider the extreme differences in position
+and condition between our scattered states. Here is Canada, lying along
+the United States, looking eastward to Japan and China, westward to all
+Europe. See the great slashes of lake, bay, and mountain chain that cut
+it meridianally. Obviously its main routes and trades and relations lie
+naturally north and south; obviously its full development can only be
+attained with those ways free, open, and active. Conceivably, you may
+build a fiscal wall across the continent; conceivably, you may shut off
+the east and half the west by impossible tariffs, and narrow its trade
+to one artificial duct to England, but only at the price of a hampered
+development It will be like nourishing the growing body of a man with
+the heart and arteries of a mouse.
+
+Then here, again, are New Zealand and Australia, facing South America
+and the teeming countries of Eastern Asia; surely it is in relation to
+these vast proximities that their economic future lies. Is it possible
+to believe that shipping mutton to London is anything but the mere
+beginning of their commercial development Look at India, again, and
+South Africa. Is it not manifest that from the economic and business
+points of view each of these is an entirely separate entity, a system
+apart, under distinct necessities, needing entire freedom to make its
+own bargains and control its trade in its own way in order to achieve
+its fullest material possibilities?
+
+Nor can I believe that financial entanglements greatly strengthen the
+bonds of an empire in any case. We lost the American colonies because we
+interfered with their fiscal arrangements, and it was Napoleon's attempt
+to strangle the Continental trade with Great Britain that began his
+downfall.
+
+I do not find in the ordinary relations of life that business relations
+necessarily sustain intercourse. The relations of buyer and seller are
+ticklish relations, very liable to strains and conflicts. I do not find
+people grow fond of their butchers and plumbers, and I doubt whether if
+one were obliged by some special taxation to deal only with one butcher
+or one plumber, it would greatly endear the relationship. Forced buying
+is irritated buying, and it is the forbidden shop that contains the
+coveted goods. Nor do I find, to take another instance, among the hotel
+staffs of Switzerland and the Riviera--who live almost entirely upon
+British gold--those impassioned British imperialist views the economic
+link theory would lead me to expect.
+
+And another link, too, upon which much stress is laid but about which I
+have very grave doubts, is the possibility of a unified organisation of
+the Empire for military defence. We are to have, it is suggested, an
+imperial Army and an imperial Navy, and so far, no doubt, as the
+guaranteeing of a general peace goes, we may develop a sense of
+participation in that way. But it is well in these islands to remember
+that our extraordinary Empire has no common enemy to weld it together
+from without.
+
+It is too usual to regard Germany as the common enemy. We in Great
+Britain are now intensely jealous of Germany. We are intensely jealous
+of Germany not only because the Germans outnumber us, and have a much
+larger and more diversified country than ours, and lie in the very heart
+and body of Europe, but because in the last hundred years, while we have
+fed on platitudes and vanity, they have had the energy and humility to
+develop a splendid system of national education, to toil at science and
+art and literature, to develop social organisation, to master and better
+our methods of business and industry, and to clamber above us in the
+scale of civilisation. This has humiliated and irritated rather than
+chastened us, and our irritation has been greatly exacerbated by the
+swaggering bad manners, the talk of "Blood and Iron" and Mailed Fists,
+the Welt-Politik rubbish that inaugurated the new German phase.
+
+The British middle-class, therefore, is full of an angry, vague
+disposition to thwart that expansion which Germans regard very
+reasonably as their natural destiny; there are all the possibilities of
+a huge conflict in that disposition, and it is perhaps well to remember
+how insular--or, at least, how European--the essentials of this quarrel
+are. We have lost our tempers, but Canada has not. There is nothing in
+Germany to make Canada envious and ashamed of wasted years. Canada has
+no natural quarrel with Germany, nor has India, nor South Africa, nor
+Australasia. They have no reason to share our insular exasperation. On
+the other hand, all these states have other special preoccupations. New
+Zealand, for example, having spent half a century and more in
+sheep-farming, land legislation, suppressing its drink traffic, lowering
+its birth-rate, and, in short, the achievement of an ideal preventive
+materialism, is chiefly consumed by hate and fear of Japan, which in the
+same interval has made a stride from the thirteenth to the twentieth
+century, and which teems with art and life and enterprise and offspring.
+Now Japan in Welt-Politik is our ally.
+
+You see, the British Empire has no common economic interests and no
+natural common enemy. It is not adapted to any form of Zollverein or any
+form of united aggression. Visibly, on the map of the world it has a
+likeness to open hands, while the German Empire--except for a few
+ill-advised and imitative colonies--is clenched into a central European
+unity.
+
+Physically, our Empire is incurably scattered, various, and divided, and
+it is to quite other links and forces, it seems to me, than fiscal or
+military unification that we who desire its continuance must look to
+hold it together. There never was anything like it before. Essentially
+it is an adventure of the British spirit, sanguine, discursive, and
+beyond comparison insubordinate, adaptable, and originating. It has been
+made by odd and irregular means by trading companies, pioneers,
+explorers, unauthorised seamen, adventurers like Clive, eccentrics like
+Gordon, invalids like Rhodes. It has been made, in spite of authority
+and officialdom, as no other empire was ever made. The nominal rulers of
+Britain never planned it. It happened almost in spite of them. Their
+chief contribution to its history has been the loss of the United
+States. It is a living thing that has arisen, not a dead thing put
+together. Beneath the thin legal and administrative ties that hold it
+together lies the far more vital bond of a traditional free spontaneous
+activity. It has a common medium of expression in the English tongue, a
+unity of liberal and tolerant purpose amidst its enormous variety of
+localised life and colour. And it is in the development and
+strengthening, the enrichment the rendering more conscious and more
+purposeful, of that broad creative spirit of the British that the true
+cement and continuance of our Empire is to be found.
+
+The Empire must live by the forces that begot it. It cannot hope to give
+any such exclusive prosperity as a Zollverein might afford; it can hold
+out no hopes of collective conquests and triumphs--its utmost military
+rôle must be the guaranteeing of a common inaggressive security; but it
+can, if it is to survive, it must, give all its constituent parts such a
+civilisation as none of them could achieve alone, a civilisation, a
+wealth and fullness of life increasing and developing with the years.
+Through that, and that alone, can it be made worth having and worth
+serving.
+
+And in the first place the whole Empire must use the English language.
+I do not mean that any language must be stamped out, that a thousand
+languages may not flourish by board and cradle and in folk-songs and
+village gossip--Erse, the Taal, a hundred Indian and other Eastern
+tongues, Canadian French--but I mean that also English must be
+available, that everywhere there must be English teaching. And everyone
+who wants to read science or history or philosophy, to come out of the
+village life into wider thoughts and broader horizons, to gain
+appreciation in art, must find ready to hand, easily attainable in
+English, all there is to know and all that has been said thereon. It is
+worth a hundred Dreadnoughts and a million soldiers to the Empire, that
+wherever the imperial posts reach, wherever there is a curious or
+receptive mind, there in English and by the imperial connection the full
+thought of the race should come. To the lonely youth upon the New
+Zealand sheep farm, to the young Hindu, to the trapper under a Labrador
+tilt, to the half-breed assistant at a Burmese oil-well, to the
+self-educating Scottish miner or the Egyptian clerk, the Empire and the
+English language should exist, visibly and certainly, as the media by
+which his spirit escapes from his immediate surroundings and all the
+urgencies of every day, into a limitless fellowship of thought and
+beauty.
+
+Now I am not writing this in any vague rhetorical way; I mean
+specifically that our Empire has to become the medium of knowledge and
+thought to every intelligent person in it, or that it is bound to go to
+pieces. It has no economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity.
+Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language and purpose and
+outlook. If it is not held together by thought and spirit, it cannot be
+held together. No other cement exists that can hold it together
+indefinitely.
+
+Not only English literature, but all other literatures well translated
+into English, and all science and all philosophy, have to be brought
+within the reach of everyone capable of availing himself of such
+reading. And this must be done, not by private enterprise or for gain,
+but as an Imperial function. Wherever the Empire extends there its
+presence must signify all that breadth of thought and outlook no
+localised life can supply.
+
+Only so is it possible to establish and maintain the wide
+understandings, the common sympathy necessary to our continued
+association. The Empire, mediately or immediately, must become the
+universal educator, news-agent, book-distributor, civiliser-general, and
+vehicle of imaginative inspiration for its peoples, or else it must
+submit to the gravitation of its various parts to new and more
+invigorating associations.
+
+No empire, it may be urged, has ever attempted anything of this sort,
+but no empire like the British has ever yet existed. Its conditions and
+needs are unprecedented, its consolidation is a new problem, to be
+solved, if it is solved at all, by untried means. And in the English
+language as a vehicle of thought and civilisation alone is that means to
+be found.
+
+Now it is idle to pretend that at the present time the British Empire is
+giving its constituent peoples any such high and rewarding civilisation
+as I am here suggesting. It gives them a certain immunity from warfare,
+a penny post, an occasional spectacular coronation, a few knighthoods
+and peerages, and the services of an honest, unsympathetic,
+narrow-minded, and unattractive officialism. No adequate effort is
+being made to render the English language universal throughout its
+limits, none at all to use it as a medium of thought and enlightenment.
+Half the good things of the human mind are outside English altogether,
+and there is not sufficient intelligence among us to desire to bring
+them in. If one would read honest and able criticism, one must learn
+French; if one would be abreast of scientific knowledge and
+philosophical thought, or see many good plays or understand the
+contemporary European mind, German.
+
+And yet it would cost amazingly little to get every good foreign thing
+done into English as it appeared. It needs only a little understanding
+and a little organisation to ensure the immediate translation of every
+significant article, every scientific paper of the slightest value. The
+effort and arrangement needed to make books, facilities for research,
+and all forms of art accessible throughout the Empire, would be
+altogether trivial in proportion to the consolidation it would effect.
+
+But English people do not understand these things. Their Empire is an
+accident. It was made for them by their exceptional and outcast men, and
+in the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness of
+their commonplace and dull-minded leaders. Empire has happened to them
+and civilisation has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tame
+rabbits. They do not understand how they got, and they will not
+understand how to keep. Art, thought, literature, all indeed that raises
+men above locality and habit, all that can justify and consolidate the
+Empire, is nothing to them. They are provincials mocked by a world-wide
+opportunity, the stupid legatees of a great generation of exiles. They
+go out of town for the "shootin'," and come back for the fooleries of
+Parliament, and to see what the Censor has left of our playwrights and
+Sir Jesse Boot of our writers, and to dine in restaurants and wear
+clothes.
+
+Mostly they call themselves Imperialists, which is just their harmless
+way of expressing their satisfaction with things as they are. In
+practice their Imperialism resolves itself into a vigorous resistance to
+taxation and an ill-concealed hostility to education. It matters nothing
+to them that the whole next generation of Canadians has drawn its ideas
+mainly from American publications, that India and Egypt, in despite of
+sounder mental nourishment, have developed their own vernacular Press,
+that Australia and New Zealand even now gravitate to America for books
+and thought. It matters nothing to them that the poverty and insularity
+of our intellectual life has turned American art to France and Italy,
+and the American universities towards Germany. The slow starvation and
+decline of our philosophy and science, the decadence of British
+invention and enterprise, troubles them not at all, because they fail to
+connect these things with the tangible facts of empire. "The world
+cannot wait for the English." ... And the sands of our Imperial
+opportunity twirl through the neck of the hour-glass.
+
+
+
+
+THE LABOUR UNREST
+
+(_May, 1912_.)
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+Our country is, I think, in a dangerous state of social disturbance. The
+discontent of the labouring mass of the community is deep and
+increasing. It may be that we are in the opening phase of a real and
+irreparable class war.
+
+Since the Coronation we have moved very rapidly indeed from an assurance
+of extreme social stability towards the recognition of a spreading
+disorganisation. It is idle to pretend any longer that these Labour
+troubles are the mere give and take of economic adjustment. No
+adjustment is in progress. New and strange urgencies are at work in our
+midst, forces for which the word "revolutionary" is only too faithfully
+appropriate. Nothing is being done to allay these forces; everything
+conspires to exasperate them.
+
+Whither are these forces taking us? What can still be done and what has
+to be done to avoid the phase of social destruction to which we seem to
+be drifting?
+
+Hitherto, in Great Britain at any rate, the working man has shown
+himself a being of the most limited and practical outlook. His
+narrowness of imagination, his lack of general ideas, has been the
+despair of the Socialist and of every sort of revolutionary theorist. He
+may have struck before, but only for definite increments of wages or
+definite limitations of toil; his acceptance of the industrial system
+and its methods has been as complete and unquestioning as his acceptance
+of earth and sky. Now, with an effect of suddenness, this ceases to be
+the case. A new generation of workers is seen replacing the old, workers
+of a quality unfamiliar to the middle-aged and elderly men who still
+manage our great businesses and political affairs. The worker is
+beginning now to strike for unprecedented ends--against the system,
+against the fundamental conditions of labour, to strike for no defined
+ends at all, perplexingly and disconcertingly. The old-fashioned strike
+was a method of bargaining, clumsy and violent perhaps, but bargaining
+still; the new-fashioned strike is far less of a haggle, far more of a
+display of temper. The first thing that has to be realised if the Labour
+question is to be understood at all is this, that the temper of Labour
+has changed altogether in the last twenty or thirty years. Essentially
+that is a change due to intelligence not merely increased but greatly
+stimulated, to the work, that is, of the board schools and of the cheap
+Press. The outlook of the workman has passed beyond the works and his
+beer and his dog. He has become--or, rather, he has been replaced by--a
+being of eyes, however imperfect, and of criticism, however hasty and
+unjust. The working man of to-day reads, talks, has general ideas and a
+sense of the round world; he is far nearer to the ruler of to-day in
+knowledge and intellectual range than he is to the working man of fifty
+years ago. The politician or business magnate of to-day is no better
+educated and very little better informed than his equals were fifty
+years ago. The chief difference is golf. The working man questions a
+thousand things his father accepted as in the very nature of the world,
+and among others he begins to ask with the utmost alertness and
+persistence why it is that he in particular is expected to toil. The
+answer, the only justifiable answer, should be that that is the work for
+which he is fitted by his inferior capacity and culture, that these
+others are a special and select sort, very specially trained and
+prepared for their responsibilities, and that at once brings this new
+fact of a working-class criticism of social values into play. The old
+workman might and did quarrel very vigorously with his specific
+employer, but he never set out to arraign all employers; he took the law
+and the Church and Statecraft and politics for the higher and noble
+things they claimed to be. He wanted an extra shilling or he wanted an
+hour of leisure, and that was as much as he wanted. The young workman,
+on the other hand, has put the whole social system upon its trial, and
+seems quite disposed to give an adverse verdict. He looks far beyond the
+older conflict of interests between employer and employed. He criticises
+the good intentions of the whole system of governing and influential
+people, and not only their good intentions, but their ability. These are
+the new conditions, and the middle-aged and elderly gentlemen who are
+dealing with the crisis on the supposition that their vast experience of
+Labour questions in the 'seventies and 'eighties furnishes valuable
+guidance in this present issue are merely bringing the gunpowder of
+misapprehension to the revolutionary fort.
+
+The workman of the new generation is full of distrust the most
+demoralising of social influences. He is like a sailor who believes no
+longer either in the good faith or seamanship of his captain, and,
+between desperation and contempt, contemplates vaguely but persistently
+the assumption of control by a collective forecastle. He is like a
+private soldier obsessed with the idea that nothing can save the
+situation but the death of an incompetent officer. His distrust is so
+profound that he ceases not only to believe in the employer, but he
+ceases to believe in the law, ceases to believe in Parliament, as a
+means to that tolerable life he desires; and he falls back steadily upon
+his last resource of a strike, and--if by repressive tactics we make it
+so--a criminal strike. The central fact of all this present trouble is
+that distrust. There is only one way in which our present drift towards
+revolution or revolutionary disorder can be arrested, and that is by
+restoring the confidence of these alienated millions, who visibly now
+are changing from loyalty to the Crown, from a simple patriotism, from
+habitual industry, to the more and more effective expression of a
+deepening resentment.
+
+This is a psychological question, a matter of mental states. Feats of
+legal subtlety are inopportune, arithmetical exploits still more so. To
+emerge with the sum of 4s. 6-1/2d. as a minimum, by calculating on the
+basis of the mine's present earnings, from a conference which the miners
+and everybody else imagined was to give a minimum of 5s., may be clever,
+but it is certainly not politic in the present stage of Labour feeling.
+To stamp violently upon obscure newspapers nobody had heard of before
+and send a printer to prison, and to give thereby a flaming
+advertisement to the possible use of soldiers in civil conflicts and set
+every barrack-room talking, may be permissible, but it is certainly very
+ill-advised. The distrust deepens.
+
+The real task before a governing class that means to go on governing is
+not just at present to get the better of an argument or the best of a
+bargain, but to lay hold of the imaginations of this drifting, sullen
+and suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the country. What
+we prosperous people, who have nearly all the good things of life and
+most of the opportunity, have to do now is to justify ourselves. We have
+to show that we are indeed responsible and serviceable, willing to give
+ourselves, and to give ourselves generously for what we have and what we
+have had. We have to meet the challenge of this distrust.
+
+The slack days for rulers and owners are over. If there are still to be
+rulers and owners and managing and governing people, then in the face of
+the new masses, sensitive, intelligent, critical, irritable, as no
+common people have ever been before, these rulers and owners must be
+prepared to make themselves and display themselves wise, capable and
+heroic--beyond any aristocratic precedent. The alternative, if it is an
+alternative, is resignation--to the Social Democracy.
+
+And it is just because we are all beginning to realise the immense need
+for this heroic quality in those who rule and are rich and powerful, as
+the response and corrective to these distrusts and jealousies that are
+threatening to disintegrate our social order, that we have all followed
+the details of this great catastrophe in the Atlantic with such intense
+solicitude. It was one of those accidents that happen with a precision
+of time and circumstance that outdoes art; not an incident in it all
+that was not supremely typical. It was the penetrating comment of chance
+upon our entire social situation. Beneath a surface of magnificent
+efficiency was--slap-dash. The third-class passengers had placed
+themselves on board with an infinite confidence in the care that was to
+be taken of them, and they went down, and most of their women and
+children went down with the cry of those who find themselves cheated out
+of life.
+
+In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmen
+and engineers--persons of the trade-union class--who shine as brightly
+as any. And by the supreme artistry of Chance it fell to the lot of that
+tragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr. Bruce Ismay, to be aboard and to be
+caught by the urgent vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment. No
+untried man dare say that he would have behaved better in his place. He
+escaped. He thought it natural to escape. His class thinks it was right
+and proper that he did escape. It is not the man I would criticise, but
+the manifest absence of any such sense of the supreme dignity of his
+position as would have sustained him in that crisis. He was a rich man
+and a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud man. In the common
+man's realisation that such is indeed the case with most of those who
+dominate our world, lies the true cause and danger of our social
+indiscipline. And the remedy in the first place lies not in social
+legislation and so forth, but in the consciences of the wealthy. Heroism
+and a generous devotion to the common good are the only effective answer
+to distrust. If such dominating people cannot produce these qualities
+there will have to be an end to them, and the world must turn to some
+entirely different method of direction.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+The essential trouble in our growing Labour disorder is the profound
+distrust which has grown up in the minds of the new generation of
+workers of either the ability or the good faith of the property owning,
+ruling and directing class. I do not attempt to judge the justice or not
+of this distrust; I merely point to its existence as one of the striking
+and essential factors in the contemporary Labour situation.
+
+This distrust is not, perhaps, the proximate cause of the strikes that
+now follow each other so disconcertingly, but it embitters their spirit,
+it prevents their settlement, and leads to their renewal. I have tried
+to suggest that, whatever immediate devices for pacification might be
+employed, the only way to a better understanding and co-operation, the
+only escape from a social slide towards the unknown possibilities of
+Social Democracy, lies in an exaltation of the standard of achievement
+and of the sense of responsibility in the possessing and governing
+classes. It is not so much "Wake up, England!" that I would say as "Wake
+up, gentlemen!"--for the new generation of the workers is beyond all
+question quite alarmingly awake and critical and angry. And they have
+not merely to wake up, they have to wake up visibly and ostentatiously
+if those old class reliances on which our system is based are to be
+preserved and restored.
+
+We need before anything else a restoration of class confidence. It is a
+time when class should speak with class very frankly.
+
+There is too much facile misrepresentation, too ready a disposition on
+either side to accept caricatures as portraits and charges as facts.
+However tacit our understandings were in the past, with this new kind of
+Labour, this young, restive Labour of the twentieth century, which can
+read, discuss and combine, we need something in the nature of a social
+contract. And it is when one comes to consider by what possible means
+these suspicious third-class passengers in our leaking and imperilled
+social liner can be brought into generous co-operation with the second
+and the first that one discovers just how lamentably out of date and out
+of order our political institutions, which should supply the means for
+just this inter-class discussion, have become. Between the busy and
+preoccupied owning and employing class on the one hand, and the
+distressed, uneasy masses on the other, intervenes the professional
+politician, not as a mediator, but as an obstacle, who must be
+propitiated before any dealings are possible. Our national politics no
+longer express the realities of the national life; they are a mere
+impediment in the speech of the community. With our whole social order
+in danger, our Legislature is busy over the trivial little affairs of
+the Welsh Established Church, whose endowment probably is not equal to
+the fortune of any one of half a dozen _Titanic_ passengers or a tithe
+of the probable loss of another strike among the miners. We have a
+Legislature almost antiquarian, compiling a museum of Gladstonian
+legacies rather than governing our world to-day.
+
+Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is the law's
+consequence, and, with us at least, the legal profession is the
+political profession. It delights in false issues and merely technical
+politics. Steadily with the ascendancy of the House of Commons the
+barristers have ousted other types of men from political power. The
+decline of the House of Lords has been the last triumph of the House of
+Lawyers, and we are governed now to a large extent not so much by the
+people for the people as by the barristers for the barristers. They set
+the tone of political life. And since they are the most specialised, the
+most specifically trained of all the professions, since their training
+is absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructive
+artist and the controlled experiments of the scientific man, since the
+business is with evidence and advantages and the skilful use of evidence
+and advantages, and not with understanding, they are the least
+statesmanlike of all educated men, and they give our public life a tone
+as hopelessly discordant with our very great and urgent social needs as
+one could well imagine. They do not want to deal at all with great and
+urgent social needs. They play a game, a long and interesting game, with
+parties as sides, a game that rewards the industrious player with
+prominence, place, power and great rewards, and the less that game
+involves the passionate interests of other men, the less it draws them
+into participation and angry interference, the better for the steady
+development of the politician's career. A distinguished and active
+fruitlessness, leaving the world at last as he found it, is the
+political barrister's ideal career. To achieve that, he must maintain
+legal and political monopolies, and prevent the invasion of political
+life by living interests. And so far as he has any views about Labour
+beyond the margin of his brief, the barrister politician seems to regard
+getting men back to work on any terms and as soon as possible as the
+highest good.
+
+And it is with such men that our insurgent modern Labour, with its
+vaguely apprehended wants, its large occasions and its rapid emotional
+reactions, comes into contact directly it attempts to adjust itself in
+the social body. It is one of the main factors in the progressive
+embitterment of the Labour situation that whatever business is
+afoot--arbitration, conciliation, inquiry--our contemporary system
+presents itself to Labour almost invariably in a legal guise. The
+natural infirmities of humanity rebel against an unimaginative legality
+of attitude, and the common workaday man has no more love for this great
+and necessary profession to-day than he had in the time of Jack Cade.
+Little reasonable things from the lawyers' point of view--the rejection,
+for example, of certain evidence in the _Titanic_ inquiry because it
+might amount to a charge of manslaughter, the constant interruption and
+checking of a Labour representative at the same tribunal upon trivial
+points--irritate quite disproportionately.
+
+Lawyer and working man are antipathetic types, and it is a very grave
+national misfortune that at this time, when our situation calls aloud
+for statecraft and a certain greatness of treatment, our public life
+should be dominated as it has never been dominated before by this most
+able and illiberal profession.
+
+Now for that great multitude of prosperous people who find themselves at
+once deeply concerned in our present social and economic crisis, and
+either helplessly entangled in party organisation or helplessly outside
+politics, the elimination and cure of this disease of statecraft, the
+professional politician, has become a very urgent matter. To destroy
+him, to get him back to his law courts and keep him there, it is
+necessary to destroy the machinery of the party system that sustains
+him, and to adopt some electoral method that will no longer put the
+independent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against the
+party nominee. Such a method is to be found in proportional
+representation with large constituencies, and to that we must look for
+our ultimate liberation from our present masters, these politician
+barristers. But the Labour situation cannot wait for this millennial
+release, and for the current issue it seems to me patent that every
+reasonable prosperous man will, even at the cost to himself of some
+trouble and hard thinking, do his best to keep as much of this great and
+acute controversy as he possibly can out of the lawyer's and mere
+politician's hands and in his own. Leave Labour to the lawyers, and we
+shall go very deeply into trouble indeed before this business is over.
+They will score their points, they will achieve remarkable agreements
+full of the possibility of subsequent surprises, they will make
+reputations, and do everything Heaven and their professional training
+have made them to do, and they will exasperate and exasperate!
+
+Lawyers made the first French Revolution, and now, on a different side,
+they may yet bring about an English one. These men below there are
+still, as a class, wonderfully patient and reasonable, quite prepared to
+take orders and recognise superior knowledge, wisdom and nobility. They
+make the most reasonable claims for a tolerable life, for certain
+assurances and certain latitudes. Implicit rather than expressed is
+their demand for wisdom and right direction from those to whom the great
+surplus and freedom of civilisation are given. It is an entirely
+reasonable demand if man is indeed a social animal. But we have got to
+treat them fairly and openly. This patience and reasonableness and
+willingness for leadership is not limitless. It is no good scoring our
+mean little points, for example, and accusing them of breach of contract
+and all sorts of theoretical wrongs because they won't abide by
+agreements to accept a certain scale of wages when the purchasing power
+of money has declined. When they made that agreement they did not think
+of that possibility. When they said a pound they thought of what was
+then a poundsworth of living. The Mint has since been increasing its
+annual output of gold coins to two or three times the former amount, and
+we have, as it were, debased the coinage with extraordinary quantities
+of gold. But we who know and own did nothing to adjust that; we did not
+tell the working man of that; we have let him find it out slowly and
+indirectly at the grocer's shop. That may be permissible from the
+lawyer's point of view, but it certainly isn't from the gentleman's, and
+it is only by the plea that its inequalities give society a gentleman
+that our present social system can claim to endure.
+
+I would like to accentuate that, because if we are to emerge again from
+these acute social dissensions a reunited and powerful people, there has
+to be a change of tone, a new generosity on the part of those who deal
+with Labour speeches, Labour literature, Labour representatives, and
+Labour claims. Labour is necessarily at an enormous disadvantage in
+discussion; in spite of a tremendous inferiority in training and
+education it is trying to tell the community its conception of its needs
+and purposes. It is not only young as a participator in the discussion
+of affairs; it is actually young. The average working man is not half
+the age of the ripe politicians and judges and lawyers and wealthy
+organisers who trip him up legally, accuse him of bad faith, mark his
+every inconsistency. It isn't becoming so to use our forensic
+advantages. It isn't--if that has no appeal to you--wise.
+
+The thing our society has most to fear from Labour is not organised
+resistance, not victorious strikes and raised conditions, but the black
+resentment that follows defeat. Meet Labour half-way, and you will find
+a new co-operation in government; stick to your legal rights, draw the
+net of repressive legislation tighter, then you will presently have to
+deal with Labour enraged. If the anger burns free, that means
+revolution; if you crush out the hope of that, then sabotage and a
+sullen general sympathy for anarchistic crime.
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the present
+Labour situation. I have tried to show the profound significance in this
+discussion of the distrust which has grown up in the minds of the
+workers, and how this distrust is being exacerbated by our entirely too
+forensic method of treating their claims. I want now to point out a
+still more powerful set of influences which is steadily turning our
+Labour struggles from mere attempts to adjust hours and wages into
+movements that are gravely and deliberately revolutionary.
+
+This is the obvious devotion of a large and growing proportion of the
+time and energy of the owning and ruling classes to pleasure and
+excitement, and the way in which this spectacle of amusement and
+adventure is now being brought before the eyes and into the imagination
+of the working man.
+
+The intimate psychology of work is a thing altogether too little
+considered and discussed. One asks: "What keeps a workman working
+properly at his work?" and it seems a sufficient answer to say that it
+is the need of getting a living. But that is not the complete answer.
+Work must to some extent interest; if it bores, no power on earth will
+keep a man doing it properly. And the tendency of modern industrialism
+has been to subdivide processes and make work more boring and irksome.
+Also the workman must be satisfied with the living he is getting, and
+the tendency of newspaper, theatre, cinematograph show and so forth is
+to fill his mind with ideas of ways of living infinitely more agreeable
+and interesting than his own. Habit also counts very largely in the
+regular return of the man to his job, and the fluctuations of
+employment, the failure of the employing class to provide any
+alternative to idleness during slack time, break that habit of industry.
+And then, last but not least, there is self-respect. Men and women are
+capable of wonders of self-discipline and effort if they feel that
+theirs is a meritorious service, if they imagine the thing they are
+doing is the thing they ought to do. A miner will cut coal in a
+different spirit and with a fading zest if he knows his day's output is
+to be burnt to waste secretly by a lunatic. Man is a social animal; few
+men are naturally social rebels, and most will toil very cheerfully in
+subordination if they feel that the collective end is a fine thing and a
+great thing.
+
+Now, this force of self-respect is much more acutely present in the mind
+of the modern worker than it was in the thought of his fathers. He is
+intellectually more active than his predecessors, his imagination is
+relatively stimulated, he asks wide questions. The worker of a former
+generation took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilers
+begin to ask, not one man here or there, but in masses, in battalions,
+in trades: "Why, then, are _we_ toilers, and for what is it that we
+toil?"
+
+What answer do we give them?
+
+I ask the reader to put himself in the place of a good workman, a young,
+capable miner, let us say, in search of an answer to that question. He
+is, we will suppose, temporarily unemployed through the production of a
+glut of coal, and he goes about the world trying to see the fine and
+noble collective achievements that justify the devotion of his whole
+life to humble toil. I ask the reader: What have we got to show that
+man? What are we doing up in the light and air that justifies our demand
+that he should go on hewing in narrow seams and cramped corners until he
+can hew no more? Where is he to be taken to see these crowning fruits of
+our release from toil? Shall we take him to the House of Commons to note
+which of the barristers is making most headway over Welsh
+Disestablishment, or shall we take him to the _Titanic_ inquiry to hear
+the latest about those fifty-five third-class children (out of
+eighty-three) who were drowned? Shall we give him an hour or so among
+the portraits at the Royal Academy, or shall we make an enthusiastic
+tour of London sculpture and architecture and saturate his soul with the
+beauty he makes possible? The new Automobile Club, for example. "Without
+you and your subordination we could not have had that." Or suppose we
+took him the round of the West-End clubs and restaurants and made him
+estimate how many dinners London can produce at a pinch at the price of
+his local daily minimum, say, and upward; or borrow an aeroplane at
+Hendon and soar about counting all the golfers in the Home Counties on
+any week-day afternoon. "You suffer at the roots of things, far below
+there, but see all this nobility and splendour, these sweet, bright
+flowers to which your rootlet life contributes." Or we might spend a
+pleasant morning trying to get a passable woman's hat for the price of
+his average weekly wages in some West-End shop....
+
+But indeed this thing is actually happening. The older type of miner was
+illiterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if he
+had any intellectual and spiritual urgencies in him beyond eating and
+drinking and dog-fighting, the local little Bethel shunted them away
+from any effective social criticism. The new generation of miners is on
+an altogether different basis. It is at once less brutal and less
+spiritual; it is alert, informed, sceptical, and the Press, with
+photographic illustrations, the cinema, and a score of collateral
+forces, are giving it precisely that spectacular view of luxury,
+amusement, aimlessness and excitement, taunting it with just that
+suggestion that it is for that, and that alone, that the worker's back
+aches and his muscles strain. Whatever gravity and spaciousness of aim
+there may be in our prosperous social life does not appear to him. He
+sees, and he sees all the more brightly because he is looking at it out
+of toil and darkness, the glitter, the delight for delight's sake, the
+show and the pride and the folly. Cannot you understand how it is that
+these young men down there in the hot and dangerous and toilsome and
+inglorious places of life are beginning to cry out, "We are being made
+fools of," and to fling down their tools, and cannot you see how futile
+it is to dream that Mr. Asquith or some other politician by some trick
+of a Conciliation Act or some claptrap of Compulsory Arbitration, or
+that any belated suppression of discussion and strike organisations by
+the law, will avert this gathering storm? The Spectacle of Pleasure, the
+parade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury and vanity in the sight
+of the workers is the culminating irritant of Labour. So long as that
+goes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombre
+resolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue patiently at
+work, will gather strength. It does not matter that such a resolve is
+hopeless and unseasonable; we are dealing here with the profounder
+impulses that underlie reason. Crush this resentment; it will recur with
+accumulated strength.
+
+It does not matter that there is no plan in existence for any kind of
+social order that could be set up in the place of our present system; no
+plan, that is, that will endure half an hour's practical criticism. The
+cardinal fact before us is that the workers do not intend to stand
+things as they are, and that no clever arguments, no expert handling of
+legal points, no ingenious appearances of concession, will stay that
+progressive embitterment.
+
+But I think I have said enough to express and perhaps convey my
+conviction that our present Labour troubles are unprecedented, and that
+they mean the end of an epoch. The supply of good-tempered, cheap
+labour--upon which the fabric of our contemporary ease and comfort is
+erected--is giving out. The spread of information and the means of
+presentation in every class and the increase of luxury and
+self-indulgence in the prosperous classes are the chief cause of that.
+In the place of that old convenient labour comes a new sort of labour,
+reluctant, resentful, critical, and suspicious. The replacement has
+already gone so far that I am certain that attempts to baffle and coerce
+the workers back to their old conditions must inevitably lead to a
+series of increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorder
+culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream of going on now for
+much longer upon the old lines; our civilisation, if it is not to enter
+upon a phase of conflict and decay, must begin to adapt itself to the
+new conditions of which the first and foremost is that the wages-earning
+labouring class as a distinctive class, consenting to a distinctive
+treatment and accepting life at a disadvantage is going to disappear.
+Whether we do it soon as the result of our reflections upon the present
+situation, or whether we do it presently through the impoverishment that
+must necessarily result from a lengthening period of industrial unrest,
+there can be little doubt that we are going to curtail very considerably
+the current extravagance of the spending and directing classes upon
+food, clothing, display, and all the luxuries of life. The phase of
+affluence is over. And unless we are to be the mere passive spectators
+of an unprecedented reduction of our lives, all of us who have leisure
+and opportunity have to set ourselves very strenuously to the problem
+not of reconciling ourselves to the wage-earners, for that possibility
+is over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with those who
+seem to be definitely decided not to remain wage-earners for very much
+longer. We have, as sensible people, to realise that the old arrangement
+which has given us of the fortunate minority so much leisure, luxury,
+and abundance, advantages we have as a class put to so vulgar and
+unprofitable a use, is breaking down, and that we have to discover a
+new, more equable way of getting the world's work done.
+
+Certain things stand out pretty obviously. It is clear that in the times
+ahead of us there must be more economy in giving trouble and causing
+work, a greater willingness to do work for ourselves, a great economy of
+labour through machinery and skilful management. So much is unavoidable
+if we are to meet these enlarged requirements upon which the insurgent
+worker insists. If we, who have at least some experience of affairs, who
+own property, manage businesses, and discuss and influence public
+organisation, if we are not prepared to undertake this work of
+discipline and adaptation for ourselves, then a time is not far distant
+when insurrectionary leaders, calling themselves Socialists or
+Syndicalists, or what not, men with none of our experience, little of
+our knowledge, and far less hope of success, will take that task out of
+our hands.[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Larkinism comes to endorse me since this was written.]
+
+We have, in fact, to "pull ourselves together," as the phrase goes, and
+make an end to all this slack, extravagant living, this spectacle of
+pleasure, that has been spreading and intensifying in every civilised
+community for the last three or four decades. What is happening to
+Labour is indeed, from one point of view, little else than the
+correlative of what has been happening to the more prosperous classes in
+the community. They have lost their self-discipline, their gravity,
+their sense of high aims, they have become the victims of their
+advantages and Labour, grown observant and intelligent, has discovered
+itself and declares itself no longer subordinate. Just what powers of
+recovery and reconstruction our system may have under these
+circumstances the decades immediately before us will show.
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+Let us try to anticipate some of the social developments that are likely
+to spring out of the present Labour situation.
+
+It is quite conceivable, of course, that what lies before us is not
+development but disorder. Given sufficient suspicion on one side and
+sufficient obstinacy and trickery on the other, it may be impossible to
+restore social peace in any form, and industrialism may degenerate into
+a wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful possibility is
+the worst and perhaps the least probable of many. It is much more
+acceptable to suppose that our social order will be able to adjust
+itself to the new outlook and temper and quality of the labour stratum
+that elementary education, a Press very cheap and free, and a period of
+great general affluence have brought about.
+
+One almost inevitable feature of any such adaptation will be a changed
+spirit in the general body of society. We have come to a serious
+condition of our affairs, and we shall not get them into order again
+without a thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process. There can be
+no doubt that for a large portion of our comfortable classes existence
+has been altogether too easy for the last lifetime or so. The great bulk
+of the world's work has been done out of their sight and knowledge; it
+has seemed unnecessary to trouble much about the general conduct of
+things, unnecessary, as they say, to "take life too seriously." This has
+not made them so much vicious as slack, lazy, and over-confident; there
+has been an elaboration of trivial things and a neglect of troublesome
+and important things. The one grave shock of the Boer War has long been
+explained and sentimentalised away. But it will not be so easy to
+explain away a dislocated train service and an empty coal cellar as it
+was to get a favourable interpretation upon some demonstration of
+national incompetence half the world away.
+
+It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation that
+the British prosperous and the British successful, to whom warning after
+warning has rained in vain from the days of Ruskin, Carlyle, Matthew
+Arnold, should be called to account at last in their own household. They
+will grumble, they will be very angry, but in the end, I believe, they
+will rise to the opportunities of their inconvenience. They will shake
+off their intellectual lassitude, take over again the public and private
+affairs they have come to leave so largely in the hands of the political
+barrister and the family solicitor, become keen and critical and
+constructive, bring themselves up to date again.
+
+That is not, of course, inevitable, but I am taking now the more hopeful
+view.
+
+And then? What sort of working arrangements are our renascent owning and
+directing classes likely to make with the new labouring class? How is
+the work going to be done in the harder, cleaner, more equalised, and
+better managed State that, in one's hopeful mood, one sees ahead of us?
+
+Now after the experiences of the past twelve months it is obvious that
+the days when most of the directed and inferior work of the community
+will be done by intermittently employed and impecunious wage-earners is
+drawing to an end. A large part of the task of reconstruction ahead of
+us will consist in the working out of schemes for a more permanent type
+of employment and for a direct participation of the worker in the pride,
+profits, and direction of the work. Such schemes admit of wide
+variations between a mere bonus system, a periodic tipping of the
+employees to prevent their striking and a real and honest co-partnery.
+
+In the latter case a great enterprise, forced to consider its "hands" as
+being also in their degree "heads," would include a department of
+technical and business instruction for its own people. From such ideas
+one passes very readily to the conception of guild-managed businesses in
+which the factor of capital would no longer stand out as an element
+distinct from and contrasted with the proprietorship of the workers. One
+sees the worker as an active and intelligent helper during the great
+portion of his participation, and as an annuitant and perhaps, if he has
+devised economies and improvements, a receiver of royalties during his
+declining years.
+
+And concurrently with the systematic reconstruction of a large portion
+of our industries upon these lines there will have to be a vigorous
+development of the attempts that are already being made, in garden
+cities, garden suburbs, and the like, to re-house the mass of our
+population in a more civilised and more agreeable manner. Probably that
+is not going to pay from the point of view of the money-making business
+man, but we prosperous people have to understand that there are things
+more important and more profitable than money-making, and we have to tax
+ourselves not merely in money, but in time, care, and effort in the
+matter. Half the money that goes out of England to Switzerland and the
+Riviera ought to go to the extremely amusing business of clearing up
+ugly corners and building jolly and convenient workmen's cottages--even
+if we do it at a loss. It is part of our discharge for the leisure and
+advantages the system has given us, part of that just give and take,
+over and above the solicitor's and bargain-hunter's and money-lender's
+conception of justice, upon which social order ultimately rests. We have
+to do it not in a mood of patronage, but in a mood of attentive
+solicitude. If not on high grounds, then on low grounds our class has to
+set to work and make those other classes more interested and comfortable
+and contented. It is what we are for. It is quite impossible for workmen
+and poor people generally to plan estates and arrange their own homes;
+they are entirely at the mercy of the wealthy in this matter. There is
+not a slum, not a hovel, not an eyesore upon the English landscape for
+which some well-off owner is not ultimately to be blamed or excused, and
+the less we leave of such things about the better for us in that day of
+reckoning between class and class which now draws so near.
+
+It is as plain now as the way from Calais to Paris that if the owning
+class does not attend to these amenities the mass of the people, doing
+its best to manage the thing through the politicians, presently will.
+They may make a frightful mess of it, but that will never bring back
+things again into the hands that hold them and neglect them. Their time
+will have passed for ever.
+
+But these are the mere opening requirements of this hope of mine of a
+quickened social consciousness among the more fortunate and leisurely
+section of the community I believe that much profounder changes in the
+conditions of labour are possible than those I have suggested I am
+beginning to suspect that scarcely any of our preconceptions about the
+way work must be done, about the hours of work and the habits of work,
+will stand an exhaustive scientific analysis. It is at least conceivable
+that we could get much of the work that has to be done to keep our
+community going in far more toil-saving and life-saving ways than we
+follow at the present time. So far scientific men have done scarcely
+anything to estimate under what conditions a man works best, does most
+work, works more happily. Suppose it turns out to be the case that a man
+always following one occupation throughout his lifetime, working
+regularly day after day for so many hours, as most wage-earners do at
+the present time, does not do nearly so much or nearly so well as he
+would do if he followed first one occupation and then another, or if he
+worked as hard as he possibly could for a definite period and then took
+holiday? I suspect very strongly, indeed I am convinced, that in certain
+occupations, teaching, for example, or surgery, a man begins by working
+clumsily and awkwardly, that his interest and skill rise rapidly, that
+if he is really well suited in his profession he may presently become
+intensely interested and capable of enormous quantities of his very best
+work, and that then his interest and vigour rapidly decline I am
+disposed to believe that this is true of most occupations, of
+coal-mining or engineering, or brick-laying or cotton-spinning. The
+thing has never been properly thought about. Our civilisation has grown
+up in a haphazard kind of way, and it has been convenient to specialise
+workers and employ them piecemeal. But if it is true that in respect of
+any occupation a man has his period of maximum efficiency, then we open
+up a whole world of new social possibilities. What we really want from a
+man for our social welfare in that case is not regular continuing work,
+but a few strenuous years of high-pressure service. We can as a
+community afford to keep him longer at education and training before he
+begins, and we can release him with a pension while he is still full of
+life and the capacity for enjoying freedom. But obviously this is
+impossible upon any basis of weekly wages and intermittent employment;
+we must be handling affairs in some much more comprehensive way than
+that before we can take and deal with the working life of a man as one
+complete whole.
+
+That is one possibility that is frequently in my thoughts about the
+present labour crisis. There is another, and that is the great
+desirability of every class in the community having a practical
+knowledge of what labour means. There is a vast amount of work which
+either is now or is likely to be in the future within the domain of the
+public administration--road-making, mining, railway work, post-office
+and telephone work, medical work, nursing, a considerable amount of
+building for example. Why should we employ people to do the bulk of
+these things at all? Why should we not as a community do them ourselves?
+Why, in other words, should we not have a labour conscription and take a
+year or so of service from everyone in the community, high or low? I
+believe this would be of enormous moral benefit to our strained and
+relaxed community. I believe that in making labour a part of everyone's
+life and the whole of nobody's life lies the ultimate solution of these
+industrial difficulties.
+
+
+Sec. 5
+
+It is almost a national boast that we "muddle through" our troubles, and
+I suppose it is true and to our credit that by virtue of a certain
+kindliness of temper, a humorous willingness to make the best of things,
+and an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out of pressures and
+extremities that would smash a harder, more brittle people only a little
+chipped and damaged. And it is quite conceivable that our country will,
+in a measure, survive the enormous stresses of labour adjustment that
+are now upon us, even if it never rises to any heroic struggle against
+these difficulties. But it may survive as a lesser country, as an
+impoverished and second-rate country. It will certainly do no more than
+that, if in any part of the world there is to be found a people capable
+of taking up this gigantic question in a greater spirit. Perhaps there
+is no such people, and the conflicts and muddles before us will be
+world-wide. Or suppose that it falls to our country in some strange way
+to develop a new courage and enterprise, and to be the first to go
+forward into this new phase of civilisation I foresee, from which a
+distinctive labouring class, a class that is of expropriated
+wage-earners, will have almost completely disappeared.
+
+Now hitherto the utmost that any State, overtaken by social and economic
+stresses, has ever achieved in the way of adapting itself to them has
+been no more than patching.
+
+Individuals and groups and trades have found themselves in imperfectly
+apprehended and difficult times, and have reluctantly altered their ways
+and ideas piecemeal under pressure. Sometimes they have succeeded in
+rubbing along upon the new lines, and sometimes the struggle has
+submerged them, but no community has ever yet had the will and the
+imagination to recast and radically alter its social methods as a whole.
+The idea of such a reconstruction has never been absent from human
+thought since the days of Plato, and it has been enormously reinforced
+by the spreading material successes of modern science, successes due
+always to the substitution of analysis and reasoned planning for trial
+and the rule of thumb. But it has never yet been so believed in and
+understood as to render any real endeavour to reconstruct possible. The
+experiment has always been altogether too gigantic for the available
+faith behind it, and there have been against it the fear of presumption,
+the interests of all advantaged people, and the natural sloth of
+humanity. We do but emerge now from a period of deliberate
+happy-go-lucky and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who came near
+raising public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national philosophy.
+Everything would adjust itself--if only it was left alone.
+
+Yet some things there are that cannot be done by small adjustments, such
+as leaping chasms or killing an ox or escaping from the roof of a
+burning house. You have to decide upon a certain course on such
+occasions and maintain a continuous movement. If you wait on the burning
+house until you scorch and then turn round a bit or move away a yard or
+so, or if on the verge of a chasm you move a little in the way in which
+you wish to go, disaster will punish your moderation. And it seems to
+me that the establishment of the world's work upon a new basis--and that
+and no less is what this Labour Unrest demands for its pacification--is
+just one of those large alterations which will never be made by the
+collectively unconscious activities of men, by competitions and survival
+and the higgling of the market. Humanity is rebelling against the
+continuing existence of a labour class as such, and I can see no way by
+which our present method of weekly wages employment can change by
+imperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension--for it is
+quite evident that only by reaching that shall we reach the end of these
+present discontents. The change has to be made on a comprehensive scale
+or not at all. We need nothing less than a national plan of social
+development if the thing is to be achieved.
+
+Now that, I admit, is, as the Americans say, a large proposition. But we
+are living in a time of more and more comprehensive plans, and the mere
+fact that no scheme so extensive has ever been tried before is no reason
+at all why we should not consider one. We think nowadays quite serenely
+of schemes for the treatment of the nation's health as one whole, where
+our fathers considered illness as a blend of accident with special
+providences; we have systematised the community's water supply,
+education, and all sorts of once chaotic services, and Germany and our
+own infinite higgledy-piggledy discomfort and ugliness have brought home
+to us at last even the possibility of planning the extension of our
+towns and cities. It is only another step upward in scale to plan out
+new, more tolerable conditions of employment for every sort of worker
+and to organise the transition from our present disorder.
+
+The essential difficulty between the employer and the statesman in the
+consideration of this problem is the difference in the scope of their
+view. The employer's concern with the man who does his work is day-long
+or week-long; the statesman's is life-long. The conditions of private
+enterprise and modern competition oblige the employer to think only of
+the worker as a hand, who appears and does his work and draws his wages
+and vanishes again. Only such strikes as we have had during the past
+year will rouse him from that attitude of mind. The statesman at the
+other extremity has to consider the worker as a being with a beginning,
+a middle, an end--and offspring. He can consider all these possibilities
+of deferring employment and making the toil of one period of life
+provide for the leisure and freedom of another, which are necessarily
+entirely out of the purview of an employer pure and simple. And I find
+it hard to see how we can reconcile the intermittency of competitive
+employment with the unremitting demands of a civilised life except by
+the intervention of the State or of some public organisation capable of
+taking very wide views between the business organiser on the one hand
+and the subordinate worker on the other. On the one hand we need some
+broader handling of business than is possible in the private adventure
+of the solitary proprietor or the single company, and on the other some
+more completely organised development of the collective bargain. We have
+to bring the directive intelligence of a concern into an organic
+relation with the conception of the national output as a whole, and
+either through a trade union or a guild, or some expansion of a trade
+union, we have to arrange a secure, continuous income for the worker, to
+be received not directly as wages from an employer but intermediately
+through the organisation. We need a census of our national production, a
+more exhaustive estimate of our resources, and an entirely more
+scientific knowledge of the conditions of maximum labour efficiency. One
+turns to the State.... And it is at this point that the heart of the
+patriotic Englishman sinks, because it is our national misfortune that
+all the accidents of public life have conspired to retard the
+development of just that body of knowledge, just that scientific breadth
+of imagination which is becoming a vital necessity for the welfare of a
+modern civilised community.
+
+We are caught short of scientific men just as in the event of a war with
+Germany we shall almost certainly be caught short of scientific sailors
+and soldiers. You cannot make that sort of thing to order in a crisis.
+Scientific education--and more particularly the scientific education of
+our owning and responsible classes--has been crippled by the bitter
+jealousy of the classical teachers who dominate our universities, by the
+fear and hatred of the Established Church, which still so largely
+controls our upper-class schools, and by the entire lack of
+understanding and support on the part of those able barristers and
+financiers who rule our political life. Science has been left more and
+more to men of modest origin and narrow outlook, and now we are
+beginning to pay in internal dissensions, and presently we may have to
+pay in national humiliation for this almost organised rejection of
+stimulus and power.
+
+But however thwarted and crippled our public imagination may be, we have
+still got to do the best we can with this situation; we have to take as
+comprehensive views as we can, and to attempt as comprehensive a method
+of handling as our party-ridden State permits. In theory I am a
+Socialist, and were I theorising about some nation in the air I would
+say that all the great productive activities and all the means of
+communication should be national concerns and be run as national
+services. But our State is peculiarly incapable of such functions; at
+the present time it cannot even produce a postage stamp that will stick;
+and the type of official it would probably evolve for industrial
+organisation, slowly but unsurely, would be a maddening combination of
+the district visitor and the boy clerk. It is to the independent people
+of some leisure and resource in the community that one has at last to
+appeal for such large efforts and understandings as our present
+situation demands. In the default of our public services, there opens an
+immense opportunity for voluntary effort. Deference to our official
+leaders is absurd; it is a time when men must, as the phrase goes, "come
+forward."
+
+We want a National Plan for our social and economic development which
+everyone may understand and which will serve as a unifying basis for all
+our social and political activities. Such a plan is not to be flung out
+hastily by an irresponsible writer. It can only come into existence as
+the outcome of a wide movement of inquiry and discussion. My business in
+these pages has been not prescription but diagnosis. I hold it to be the
+clear duty of every intelligent person in the country to do his utmost
+to learn about these questions of economic and social organisation and
+to work them out to conclusions and a purpose. We have come to a phase
+in our affairs when the only alternative to a great, deliberate
+renascence of will and understanding is national disorder and decay.
+
+
+Sec. 6
+
+I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our national situation. I
+have pointed out that nearly all the social forces of our time seem to
+be in conspiracy to bring about the disappearance of a labour class as
+such and the rearrangement of our work and industry upon a new basis.
+That rearrangement demands an unprecedented national effort and the
+production of an adequate National Plan. Failing that, we seem doomed to
+a period of chronic social conflict and possibly even of frankly
+revolutionary outbreaks that may destroy us altogether or leave us only
+a dwarfed and enfeebled nation....
+
+And before we can develop that National Plan and the effective
+realisation of such a plan that is needed to save us from that fate, two
+things stand immediately before us to be done, unavoidable preliminaries
+to that more comprehensive work. The first of these is the restoration
+of representative government, and the second a renascence of our public
+thought about political and social things.
+
+As I have already suggested, a main factor in our present national
+inability to deal with this profound and increasing social disturbance
+is the entirely unrepresentative and unbusinesslike nature of our
+parliamentary government.
+
+It is to a quite extraordinary extent a thing apart from our national
+life. It becomes more and more so. To go into the House of Commons is to
+go aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a
+corner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialised
+Assembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in
+our affairs. There was a period when the debates in the House of Commons
+were an integral, almost a dominant, part of our national thought, when
+its speeches were read over in tens of thousands of homes, and a large
+and sympathetic public followed the details of every contested issue.
+Now a newspaper that dared to fill its columns mainly with parliamentary
+debates, with a full report of the trivialities the academic points, the
+little familiar jokes, and entirely insincere pleadings which occupy
+that gathering would court bankruptcy.
+
+This diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost
+universal comment to-day. But it is extraordinary how much of that
+comment is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it is
+associated with any will to change a state of affairs that so largely
+stultifies our national purpose. And yet the causes of our present
+political ineptitude are fairly manifest, and a radical and effective
+reconstruction is well within the wit of man.
+
+All causes and all effects in our complex modern State are complex, but
+in this particular matter there can be little doubt that the key to the
+difficulty lies in the crudity and simplicity of our method of election,
+a method which reduces our apparent free choice of rulers to a
+ridiculous selection between undesirable alternatives, and hands our
+whole public life over to the specialised manipulator. Our House of
+Commons could scarcely misrepresent us more if it was appointed
+haphazard by the Lord Chamberlain or selected by lot from among the
+inhabitants of Netting Hill. Election of representatives in one-member
+local constituencies by a single vote gives a citizen practically no
+choice beyond the candidates appointed by the two great party
+organisations in the State. It is an electoral system that forbids
+absolutely any vote splitting or any indication of shades of opinion.
+The presence of more than two candidates introduces an altogether
+unmanageable complication, and the voter is at once reduced to voting
+not to secure the return of the perhaps less hopeful candidate he likes,
+but to ensure the rejection of the candidate he most dislikes. So the
+nimble wire-puller slips in. In Great Britain we do not have Elections
+any more; we have Rejections. What really happens at a general election
+is that the party organisations--obscure and secretive conclaves with
+entirely mysterious funds--appoint about 1,200 men to be our rulers, and
+all that we, we so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is,
+in a muddled, angry way, to strike off the names of about half of these
+selected gentlemen.
+
+Take almost any member of the present Government and consider his case.
+You may credit him with a lifelong industrious intention to get there,
+but ask yourself what is this man's distinction, and for what great
+thing in our national life does he stand? By the complaisance of our
+party machinery he was able to present himself to a perplexed
+constituency as the only possible alternative to Conservatism and Tariff
+Reform, and so we have him. And so we have most of his colleagues.
+
+Now such a system of representation is surely a system to be destroyed
+at any cost, because it stifles our national discussion and thwarts our
+national will. And we can leave no possible method of alteration
+untried. It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by the
+mere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method too crudely
+conceived. There exist alternatives, and to these alternatives we must
+resort. Since John Stuart Mill first called attention to the importance
+of the matter there has been a systematic study of the possible working
+of electoral methods, and it is now fairly proved that in proportional
+representation, with large constituencies returning each many members,
+there is to be found a way of escape from this disastrous embarrassment
+of our public business by the party wire-puller and the party nominee.
+
+I will not dwell upon the particulars of the proportional representation
+system here. There exists an active society which has organised the
+education of the public in the details of the proposal. Suffice it that
+it does give a method by which a voter may vote with confidence for the
+particular man he prefers, with no fear whatever that his vote will be
+wasted in the event of that man's chance being hopeless. There is a
+method by which the order of the voter's subsequent preference is
+effectively indicated. That is all, but see how completely it modifies
+the nature of an election. Instead of a hampered choice between two, you
+have a free choice between many. Such a change means a complete
+alteration in the quality of public life.
+
+The present immense advantage of the party nominee--which is the root
+cause, which is almost the sole cause of all our present political
+ineptitude--would disappear. He would be quite unable to oust any
+well-known and representative independent candidate who chose to stand
+against him. There would be an immediate alteration in type in the House
+of Commons. In the place of these specialists in political getting-on
+there would be few men who had not already gained some intellectual and
+moral hold upon the community; they would already be outstanding and
+distinguished men before they came to the work of government. Great
+sections of our national life, science, art, literature, education,
+engineering, manufacture would cease to be under-represented, or
+misrepresented by the energetic barrister and political specialist, and
+our Legislature would begin to serve, as we have now such urgent need of
+its serving, as the means and instrument of that national conference
+upon the social outlook of which we stand in need.
+
+And it is to the need and nature of that Conference that I would devote
+myself. I do not mean by the word Conference any gathering of dull and
+formal and inattentive people in this dusty hall or that, with a jaded
+audience and intermittently active reporters, such as this word may
+conjure up to some imaginations. I mean an earnest direction of
+attention in all parts of the country to this necessity for a studied
+and elaborated project of conciliation and social co-operation We cannot
+afford to leave such things to specialised politicians and
+self-appointed, self-seeking "experts" any longer. A modern community
+has to think out its problems as a whole and co-operate as a whole in
+their solution. We have to bring all our national life into this
+discussion of the National Plan before us, and not simply newspapers and
+periodicals and books, but pulpit and college and school have to bear
+their part in it. And in that particular I would appeal to the schools,
+because there more than anywhere else is the permanent quickening of our
+national imagination to be achieved.
+
+We want to have our young people filled with a new realisation that
+History is not over, that nothing is settled, and that the supreme
+dramatic phase in the story of England has still to come. It was not in
+the Norman Conquest, not in the flight of King James II, nor the
+overthrow of Napoleon; it is here and now. It falls to them to be actors
+not in a reminiscent pageant but a living conflict, and the sooner they
+are prepared to take their part in that the better our Empire will
+acquit itself. How absurd is the preoccupation of our schools and
+colleges with the little provincialisms of our past history before A.D.
+1800! "No current politics," whispers the schoolmaster, "no
+religion--except the coldest formalities _Some parent might object_."
+And he pours into our country every year a fresh supply of gentlemanly
+cricketing youths, gapingly unprepared--unless they have picked up a
+broad generalisation or so from some surreptitious Socialist
+pamphlet--for the immense issues they must control, and that are
+altogether uncontrollable if they fail to control them. The universities
+do scarcely more for our young men. All this has to be altered, and
+altered vigorously and soon, if our country is to accomplish its
+destinies. Our schools and colleges exist for no other purpose than to
+give our youths a vision of the world and of their duties and
+possibilities in the world. We can no longer afford to have them the
+last preserves of an elderly orthodoxy and the last repository of a
+decaying gift of superseded tongues. They are needed too urgently to
+make our leaders leader-like and to sustain the active understandings of
+the race.
+
+And from the labour class itself we are also justified in demanding a
+far more effectual contribution to the National Conference than it is
+making at the present time. Mere eloquent apologies for distrust, mere
+denunciations of Capitalism and appeals for a Socialism as featureless
+as smoke, are unsatisfactory when one regards them as the entire
+contribution of the ascendant worker to the discussion of the national
+future. The labour thinker has to become definite in his demands and
+clearer upon the give and take that will be necessary before they can be
+satisfied. He has to realise rather more generously than he has done so
+far the enormous moral difficulty there is in bringing people who have
+been prosperous and at an advantage all their lives to the pitch of even
+contemplating a social reorganisation that may minimise or destroy their
+precedence. We have all to think, to think hard and think generously,
+and there is not a man in England to-day, even though his hands are busy
+at work, whose brain may not be helping in this great task of social
+rearrangement which lies before us all.
+
+
+SOCIAL PANACEAS
+
+(_June, 1912_.)
+
+
+To have followed the frequent discussions of the Labour Unrest in the
+Press is to have learnt quite a lot about the methods of popular
+thought. And among other things I see now much better than I did why
+patent medicines are so popular. It is clear that as a community we are
+far too impatient of detail and complexity, we want overmuch to
+simplify, we clamour for panaceas, we are a collective invitation to
+quacks.
+
+Our situation is an intricate one, it does not admit of a solution
+neatly done up in a word or a phrase. Yet so powerful is this wish to
+simplify that it is difficult to make it clear that one is not oneself a
+panacea-monger. One writes and people read a little inattentively and
+more than a little impatiently, until one makes a positive proposal
+Then they jump. "So _that's_ your Remedy!" they say. "How absurdly
+inadequate!" I was privileged to take part in one such discussion in
+1912, and among other things in my diagnosis of the situation I pointed
+out the extreme mischief done to our public life by the futility of our
+electoral methods. They make our whole public life forensic and
+ineffectual, and I pointed out that this evil effect, which vitiates our
+whole national life, could be largely remedied by an infinitely better
+voting system known as Proportional Representation. Thereupon the
+_Westminster Gazette_ declared in tones of pity and contempt that it was
+no Remedy--and dismissed me. It would be as intelligent to charge a
+doctor who pushed back the crowd about a broken-legged man in the street
+with wanting to heal the limb by giving the sufferer air.
+
+The task before our community, the task of reorganising labour on a
+basis broader than that of employment for daily or weekly wages, is one
+of huge complexity, and it is as entirely reasonable as it is entirely
+preliminary to clean and modernise to the utmost our representative and
+legislative machinery.
+
+It is remarkable how dominant is this disposition to get a phrase, a
+word, a simple recipe, for an undertaking so vast in reality that for
+all the rest of our lives a large part of the activities of us, forty
+million people, will be devoted to its partial accomplishment. In the
+presence of very great issues people become impatient and irritated, as
+they would not allow themselves to be irritated by far more limited
+problems. Nobody in his senses expects a panacea for the comparatively
+simple and trivial business of playing chess. Nobody wants to be told
+to "rely wholly upon your pawns," or "never, never move your rook";
+nobody clamours "give me a third knight and all will be well"; but that
+is exactly what everybody seems to be doing in our present discussion
+And as another aspect of the same impatience, I note the disposition to
+clamour against all sorts of necessary processes in the development of a
+civilisation. For example, I read over and over again of the failure of
+representative government, and in nine cases out of ten I find that this
+amounts to a cry against any sort of representative government. It is
+perfectly true that our representative institutions do not work well and
+need a vigorous overhauling, but while I find scarcely any support for
+such a revision, the air is full of vague dangerous demands for
+aristocracy, for oligarchy, for autocracy. It is like a man who jumps
+out of his automobile because he has burst a tyre, refuses a proffered
+Stepney, and bawls passionately for anything--for a four-wheeler, or a
+donkey, as long as he can be free from that exploded mechanism. There
+are evidently quite a considerable number of people in this country who
+would welcome a tyrant at the present time, a strong, silent, cruel,
+imprisoning, executing, melodramatic sort of person, who would somehow
+manage everything while they went on--being silly. I find that form of
+impatience cropping up everywhere. I hear echoes of Mr. Blatchford's
+"Wanted, a Man," and we may yet see a General Boulanger prancing in our
+streets. There never was a more foolish cry. It is not a man we want,
+but just exactly as many million men as there are in Great Britain at
+the present time, and it is you, the reader, and I, and the rest of us
+who must together go on with the perennial task of saving the country by
+_firstly_, doing our own jobs just as well as ever we can, and
+_secondly_--and this is really just as important as firstly--doing our
+utmost to grasp our national purpose, doing our utmost, that is, to
+develop and carry out our National Plan. It is Everyman who must be the
+saviour of the State in a modern community; we cannot shift our share in
+the burthen; and here again, I think, is something that may well be
+underlined and emphasised. At present our "secondly" is unduly
+subordinated to our "firstly"; our game is better individually than
+collectively; we are like a football team that passes badly, and our
+need is not nearly so much to change the players as to broaden their
+style. And this brings me, in a spirit entirely antagonistic, up against
+Mr. Galsworthy's suggestion of an autocratic revolution in the methods
+of our public schools.
+
+But before I go on to that, let me first notice a still more
+comprehensive cry that has been heard again and again in this
+discussion, and that is the alleged failure of education generally.
+There is never any remedial suggestion made with this particular outcry;
+it is merely a gust of abuse and insult for schools, and more
+particularly board schools, carrying with it a half-hearted implication
+that they should be closed, and then the contribution concludes. Now
+there is no outcry at the present time more unjust or--except for the
+"Wanted, a Man" clamour--more foolish. No doubt our educational
+resources, like most other things, fall far short of perfection, but of
+all this imperfection the elementary schools are least imperfect; and I
+would almost go so far as to say that, considering the badness of their
+material, the huge, clumsy classes they have to deal with, the poorness
+of their directive administration, their bad pay and uncertain outlook,
+the elementary teachers of this country are amazingly efficient. And it
+is not simply that they are good under their existing conditions, but
+that this service has been made out of nothing whatever in the course of
+scarcely forty years. An educational system to cover an Empire is not a
+thing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be got for the
+paying; it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound to be thin,
+ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial, and all the rest of
+it. As reasonable to complain that the children born last year were
+immature. A little army of teachers does not flash into being at the
+passing of an Education Act. Not even an organisation for training those
+teachers comes to anything like satisfactory working order for many
+years, without considering the delays and obstructions that have been
+caused by the bickerings and bitterness of the various Christian
+Churches. So that it is not the failure of elementary education we have
+really to consider, but the continuance and extension of its already
+almost miraculous results.
+
+And when it comes to the education of the ruling and directing classes,
+there is kindred, if lesser reason, for tempering zeal with patience.
+This upper portion of our educational organisation needs urgently to be
+bettered, but it is not to be bettered by trying to find an archangel
+who will better it dictatorially. For the good of our souls there are no
+such beings to relieve us of our collective responsibility. It is clear
+that appointments in this field need not only far more care and far more
+insistence upon creative power than has been shown in the past, but for
+the rest we have to do with the men we have and the schools we have. We
+cannot have an educational purge, if only because we have not the new
+men waiting. Here again the need is not impatience, not revolution, but
+a sustained and penetrating criticism, a steadfast, continuous urgency
+towards effort and well-planned reconstruction and efficiency.
+
+And as a last example of the present hysterical disposition to scrap
+things before they have been fairly tried is the outcry against
+examinations, which has done so much to take the keenness off the edge
+of school work in the last few years. Because a great number of
+examiners chosen haphazard turned out to be negligent and incompetent as
+examiners, because their incapacity created a cynical trade in cramming,
+a great number of people have come to the conclusion, just as
+examinations are being improved into efficiency, that all examinations
+are bad. In particular that excellent method of bringing new blood and
+new energy into the public services and breaking up official gangs and
+cliques, the competitive examination system, has been discredited, and
+the wire-puller and the influential person are back again tampering with
+a steadily increasing proportion of appointments....
+
+But I have written enough of this impatience, which is, as it were,
+merely the passion for reconstruction losing its head and defeating its
+own ends. There is no hope for us outside ourselves. No violent changes,
+no Napoleonic saviours can carry on the task of building the Great
+State, the civilised State that rises out of our disorders That is for
+us to do, all of us and each one of us. We have to think clearly, and
+study and consider and reconsider our ideas about public things to the
+very utmost of our possibilities. We have to clarify our views and
+express them and do all we can to stir up thinking and effort in those
+about us.
+
+I know it would be more agreeable for all of us if we could have some
+small pill-like remedy for all the troubles of the State, and take it
+and go on just as we are going now. But, indeed, to say a word for that
+idea would be a treason. We are the State, and there is no other way to
+make it better than to give it the service of our lives. Just in the
+measure of the aggregate of our devotions and the elaborated and
+criticised sanity of our public proceedings will the world mend.
+
+I gather from a valuable publication called "Secret Remedies," which
+analyses many popular cures, that this hasty passion for simplicity, for
+just one thing that will settle the whole trouble, can carry people to a
+level beyond an undivided trust in something warranted in a bottle. They
+are ready to put their faith in what amounts to practically nothing in a
+bottle. And just at present, while a number of excellent people of the
+middle class think that only a "man" is wanted and all will be well with
+us, there is a considerable wave of hopefulness among the working class
+in favour of a weak solution of nothing, which is offered under the
+attractive label of Syndicalism. So far I have been able to discuss the
+present labour situation without any use of this empty word, but when
+one finds it cropping up in every other article on the subject, it
+becomes advisable to point out what Syndicalism is not. And incidentally
+it may enable me to make clear what Socialism in the broader sense,
+constructive Socialism, that is to say, is.
+
+
+SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP
+
+
+"Is a railway porter a railway porter first and a man afterwards, or is
+he a man first and incidentally a railway porter?"
+
+That is the issue between this tawdrification of trade unionism which is
+called Syndicalism, and the ideals of that Great State, that great
+commonweal, towards which the constructive forces in our civilisation
+tend. Are we to drift on to a disastrous intensification of our present
+specialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to work steadfastly
+upon a vast social reconstruction which will close this widening breach
+and rescue our community from its present dependence upon the reluctant
+and presently insurgent toil of a wages-earning proletariat? Regarded as
+a project of social development, Syndicalism is ridiculous; regarded as
+an illuminating and unintentionally ironical complement to the implicit
+theories of our present social order, it is worthy of close attention.
+The dream of the Syndicalist is an impossible social fragmentation. The
+transport service is to be a democratic republic, the mines are to be a
+democratic republic, every great industry is to be a democratic republic
+within the State; our community is to become a conflict of inter-woven
+governments of workers, incapable of progressive changes of method or of
+extension or transmutation of function, the whole being of a man is to
+lie within his industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causation
+not made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work are to go on
+falling.... There the mind halts, blinded by the too dazzling vistas of
+an unimaginative millennium And the way to this, one gathers, is by
+striking--persistent, destructive striking--until it comes about.
+
+Such is Syndicalism, the cheap Labour Panacea, to which the more
+passionate and less intelligent portion of the younger workers,
+impatient of the large constructive developments of modern Socialism,
+drifts steadily. It is the direct and logical reaction to our present
+economic system, which has counted our workers neither as souls nor as
+heads, but as hands. They are beginning to accept the suggestions of
+that method. It is the culmination in aggression of that, at first,
+entirely protective trade unionism which the individual selfishness and
+collective short-sightedness and State blindness of our owning and
+directing and ruling classes forced upon the working man. At first trade
+unionism was essentially defensive; it was the only possible defence of
+the workers, who were being steadily pressed over the margin of
+subsistence. It was a nearly involuntary resistance to class debasement.
+Mr. Vernon Hartshorn has expressed it as that in a recent article. But
+his paper, if one read it from beginning to end, displayed, compactly
+and completely, the unavoidable psychological development of the
+specialised labour case. He began in the mildest tones with those now
+respectable words, a "guaranteed minimum" of wages, housing, and so
+forth, and ended with a very clear intimation of an all-labour
+community.
+
+If anything is certain in this world, it is that the mass of the
+community will not rest satisfied with these guaranteed minima. All
+those possible legislative increments in the general standard of living
+are not going to diminish the labour unrest; they are going to increase
+it. A starving man may think he wants nothing in the world but bread,
+but when he has eaten you will find he wants all sorts of things beyond.
+Mr. Hartshorn assures us that the worker is "not out for a theory." So
+much the worse for the worker and all of us when, like the mere hand we
+have made him, he shows himself unable to define or even forecast his
+ultimate intentions. He will in that case merely clutch. And the obvious
+immediate next objective of that clutch directly its imagination passes
+beyond the "guaranteed minima" phase is the industry as a whole.
+
+I do not see how anyone who desires the continuing development of
+civilisation can regard a trade union as anything but a necessary evil,
+a pressure-relieving contrivance an arresting and delaying organisation
+begotten by just that class separation of labour which in the commonweal
+of the Great State will be altogether destroyed. It leads nowhither; it
+is a shelter hut on the road. The wider movement of modern civilisation
+is against class organisation and caste feeling. These are forces
+antagonistic to progress, continually springing up and endeavouring to
+stereotype the transitory organisation, and continually being defeated.
+
+Of all the solemn imbecilities one hears, surely the most foolish is
+this, that we are in "an age of specialisation." The comparative
+fruitfulness and hopefulness of our social order, in comparison with any
+other social system, lies in its flat contradiction of that absurdity.
+Our medical and surgical advances, for example, are almost entirely due
+to the invasion of medical research by the chemist; our naval
+development to the supersession of the sailor by the engineer; we sweep
+away the coachman with the railway, beat the suburban line with the
+electric tramway, and attack that again with the petrol omnibus, oust
+brick and stonework in substantial fabrics by steel frames, replace the
+skilled maker of woodcuts by a photographer, and so on through the
+whole range of our activities. Change of function, arrest of
+specialisation by innovations in method and appliance, progress by the
+infringement of professional boundaries and the defiance of rule: these
+are the commonplaces of our time. The trained man, the specialised man,
+is the most unfortunate of men; the world leaves him behind, and he has
+lost his power of overtaking it. Versatility, alert adaptability, these
+are our urgent needs. In peace and war alike the unimaginative,
+uninventive man is a burthen and a retardation, as he never was before
+in the world's history. The modern community, therefore, that succeeds
+most rapidly and most completely in converting both its labourers and
+its leisure class into a population of active, able, unhurried,
+educated, and physically well-developed people will be inevitably the
+dominant community in the world. That lies on the face of things about
+us; a man who cannot see that must be blind to the traffic in our
+streets.
+
+Syndicalism is not a plan of social development. It is a spirit of
+conflict. That conflict lies ahead of us, the open war of strikes,
+or--if the forces of law and order crush that down--then sabotage and
+that black revolt of the human spirit into crime which we speak of
+nowadays as anarchism, unless we can discover a broad and promising way
+from the present condition of things to nothing less than the complete
+abolition of the labour class.
+
+That, I know, sounds a vast proposal, but this is a gigantic business
+altogether, and we can do nothing with it unless we are prepared to deal
+with large ideas. If St. Paul's begins to totter it is no good propping
+it up with half a dozen walking-sticks, and small palliatives have no
+legitimate place at all in this discussion. Our generation has to take
+up this tremendous necessity of a social reconstruction in a great way;
+its broad lines have to be thought out by thousands of minds, and it is
+for that reason that I have put the stress upon our need of discussion,
+of a wide intellectual and moral stimulation of a stirring up in our
+schools and pulpits, and upon the modernisation and clarification of
+what should be the deliberative assembly of the nation.
+
+It would be presumptuous to anticipate the National Plan that must
+emerge from so vast a debate, but certain conclusions I feel in my bones
+will stand the test of an exhaustive criticism. The first is that a
+distinction will be drawn between what I would call "interesting work"
+and what I would call "mere labour." The two things, I admit, pass by
+insensible gradations into one another, but while on the one hand such
+work as being a master gardener and growing roses, or a master cabinet
+maker and making fine pieces, or an artist of almost any sort, or a
+story writer, or a consulting physician, or a scientific investigator,
+or a keeper of wild animals, or a forester, or a librarian, or a good
+printer, or many sorts of engineer, is work that will always find men of
+a certain temperament enthusiastically glad to do it, if they can only
+do it for comfortable pay--for such work is in itself _living_--there
+is, on the other hand, work so irksome and toilsome, such as coal
+mining, or being a private soldier during a peace, or attending upon
+lunatics, or stoking, or doing over and over again, almost mechanically,
+little bits of a modern industrial process, or being a cash desk clerk
+in a busy shop, that few people would undertake if they could avoid it.
+
+And the whole strength of our collective intelligence will be directed
+first to reducing the amount of such irksome work by labour-saving
+machinery, by ingenuity of management, and by the systematic avoidance
+of giving trouble as a duty, and then to so distributing the residuum of
+it that it will become the whole life of no class whatever in our
+population. I have already quoted the idea of Professor William James of
+a universal conscription for such irksome labour, and while he would
+have instituted that mainly for its immense moral effect upon the
+community, I would point out that, combined with a nationalisation of
+transport, mining, and so forth, it is also a way to a partial solution
+of this difficulty of "mere toil."
+
+And the mention of a compulsory period of labour service for everyone--a
+year or so with the pickaxe as well as with the rifle--leads me to
+another idea that I believe will stand the test of unlimited criticism,
+and that is a total condemnation of all these eight-hour-a-day,
+early-closing, guaranteed-weekly-half-holiday notions that are now so
+prevalent in Liberal circles. Under existing conditions, in our system
+of private enterprise and competition, these restrictions are no doubt
+necessary to save a large portion of our population from lives of
+continuous toil, but, like trade unionism, they are a necessity of our
+present conditions, and not a way to a better social state. If we rescue
+ourselves as a community from poverty and discomfort, we must take care
+not to fling ourselves into something far more infuriating to a normal
+human being--and that is boredom. The prospect of a carefully inspected
+sanitary life, tethered to some light, little, uninteresting daily job,
+six or eight hours of it, seems to me--and I am sure I write here for
+most normal, healthy, active people--more awful than hunger and death.
+It is far more in the quality of the human spirit, and still more what
+we all in our hearts want the human spirit to be, to fling itself with
+its utmost power at a job and do it with passion.
+
+For my own part, if I was sentenced to hew a thousand tons of coal, I
+should want to get at it at once and work furiously at it, with the
+shortest intervals for rest and refreshment and an occasional night
+holiday, until I hewed my way out, and if some interfering person with a
+benevolent air wanted to restrict me to hewing five hundredweight, and
+no more and no less, each day and every day, I should be strongly
+disposed to go for that benevolent person with my pick. That is surely
+what every natural man would want to do, and it is only the clumsy
+imperfection of our social organisation that will not enable a man to do
+his stint of labour in a few vigorous years and then come up into the
+sunlight for good and all.
+
+It is along that line that I feel a large part of our labour
+reorganisation, over and beyond that conscription, must ultimately go.
+The community as a whole would, I believe, get far more out of a man if
+he had such a comparatively brief passion of toil than if he worked,
+with occasional lapses into unemployment, drearily all his life. But at
+present, with our existing system of employment, one cannot arrange so
+comprehensive a treatment of a man's life. There is needed some State or
+quasi-public organisation which shall stand between the man and the
+employer, act as his banker and guarantor, and exact his proper price.
+Then, with his toil over, he would have an adequate pension and be free
+to do nothing or anything else as he chose. In a Socialistic order of
+society, where the State would also be largely the employer, such a
+method would be, of course, far more easily contrived.
+
+The more modern statements of Socialism do not contemplate making the
+State the sole employer; it is chiefly in transport, mining, fisheries,
+forestry, the cultivation of the food staples, and the manufacture of a
+few such articles as bricks and steel, and possibly in housing in what
+one might call the standardisable industries, that the State is imagined
+as the direct owner and employer and it is just in these departments
+that the bulk of the irksome toil is to be found. There remain large
+regions of more specialised and individualised production that many
+Socialists nowadays are quite prepared to leave to the freer initiatives
+of private enterprise. Most of these are occupations involving a greater
+element of interest, less direction and more co-operation, and it is
+just here that the success of co-partnery and a sustained life
+participation becomes possible....
+
+This complete civilised system without a specialised, property-less
+labour class is not simply a possibility, it is necessary; the whole
+social movement of the time, the stars in their courses, war against the
+permanence of the present state of affairs. The alternative to this
+gigantic effort to rearrange our world is not a continuation of muddling
+along, but social war. The Syndicalist and his folly will be the avenger
+of lost opportunities. Not a Labour State do we want, nor a Servile
+State, but a powerful Leisure State of free men.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT STATE
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+For many years now I have taken a part in the discussion of Socialism.
+During that time Socialism has become a more and more ambiguous term. It
+has seemed to me desirable to clear up my own ideas of social progress
+and the public side of my life by restating them, and this I have
+attempted in this essay.
+
+In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two expressions, and to
+employ them with a certain defined intention. They are firstly: The
+Normal Social Life, and secondly: The Great State. Throughout this essay
+these expressions will be used in accordance with the definitions
+presently to be given, and the fact that they are so used will be
+emphasised by the employment of capitals. It will be possible for anyone
+to argue that what is here defined as the Normal Social Life is not the
+normal social life, and that the Great State is indeed no state at all.
+That will be an argument outside the range delimited by these
+definitions.
+
+Now what is intended by the Normal Social Life here is a type of human
+association and employment, of extreme prevalence and antiquity, which
+appears to have been the lot of the enormous majority of human beings as
+far back as history or tradition or the vestiges of material that supply
+our conceptions of the neolithic period can carry us. It has never been
+the lot of all humanity at any time, to-day it is perhaps less
+predominant than it has ever been, yet even to-day it is probably the
+lot of the greater moiety of mankind.
+
+Essentially this type of association presents a localised community, a
+community of which the greater proportion of the individuals are engaged
+more or less directly in the cultivation of the land. With this there is
+also associated the grazing or herding over wider or more restricted
+areas, belonging either collectively or discretely to the community, of
+sheep, cattle, goats, or swine, and almost always the domestic fowl is
+commensal with man in this life. The cultivated land at least is usually
+assigned, temporarily or inalienably, as property to specific
+individuals, and the individuals are grouped in generally monogamic
+families of which the father is the head. Essentially the social unit is
+the Family, and even where, as in Mohammedan countries, there is no
+legal or customary restriction upon polygamy, monogamy still prevails as
+the ordinary way of living. Unmarried women are not esteemed, and
+children are desired. According to the dangers or securities of the
+region, the nature of the cultivation and the temperament of the people,
+this community is scattered either widely in separate steadings or drawn
+together into villages. At one extreme, over large areas of thin pasture
+this agricultural community may verge on the nomadic; at another, in
+proximity to consuming markets, it may present the concentration of
+intensive culture. There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and
+perhaps controlled by a simple forestry. The law that holds this
+community together is largely traditional and customary and almost
+always as its primordial bond there is some sort of temple and some sort
+of priest. Typically, the temple is devoted to a local god or a
+localised saint, and its position indicates the central point of the
+locality, its assembly place and its market. Associated with the
+agriculture there are usually a few imperfectly specialised tradesmen, a
+smith, a garment-maker perhaps, a basket-maker or potter, who group
+about the church or temple. The community may maintain itself in a state
+of complete isolation, but more usually there are tracks or roads to the
+centres of adjacent communities, and a certain drift of travel, a
+certain trade in non-essential things. In the fundamentals of life this
+normal community is independent and self-subsisting, and where it is not
+beginning to be modified by the novel forces of the new times it
+produces its own food and drink, its own clothing, and largely
+intermarries within its limits.
+
+This in general terms is what is here intended by the phrase the Normal
+Social Life. It is still the substantial part of the rural life of all
+Europe and most Asia and Africa, and it has been the life of the great
+majority of human beings for immemorial years. It is the root life. It
+rests upon the soil, and from that soil below and its reaction to the
+seasons and the moods of the sky overhead have grown most of the
+traditions, institutions, sentiments, beliefs, superstitions, and
+fundamental songs and stories of mankind.
+
+But since the very dawn of history at least this Normal Social Life has
+never been the whole complete life of mankind. Quite apart from the
+marginal life of the savage hunter, there have been a number of forces
+and influences within men and women and without, that have produced
+abnormal and surplus ways of living, supplemental, additional, and even
+antagonistic to this normal scheme.
+
+And first as to the forces within men and women. Long as it has lasted,
+almost universal as it has been, the human being has never yet achieved
+a perfect adaptation to the needs of the Normal Social Life. He has
+attained nothing of that frictionless fitting to the needs of
+association one finds in the bee or the ant. Curiosity, deep stirrings
+to wander, the still more ancient inheritance of the hunter, a recurrent
+distaste for labour, and resentment against the necessary subjugations
+of family life have always been a straining force within the
+agricultural community. The increase of population during periods of
+prosperity has led at the touch of bad seasons and adversity to the
+desperate reliefs of war and the invasion of alien localities. And the
+nomadic and adventurous spirit of man found reliefs and opportunities
+more particularly along the shores of great rivers and inland seas.
+Trade and travel began, at first only a trade in adventitious things, in
+metals and rare objects and luxuries and slaves. With trade came writing
+and money; the inventions of debt and rent, usury and tribute. History
+finds already in its beginnings a thin network of trading and slaving
+flung over the world of the Normal Social Life, a network whose strands
+are the early roads, whose knots are the first towns and the first
+courts.
+
+Indeed, all recorded history is in a sense the history of these surplus
+and supplemental activities of mankind. The Normal Social Life flowed on
+in its immemorial fashion, using no letters, needing no records, leaving
+no history. Then, a little minority, bulking disproportionately in the
+record, come the trader, the sailor, the slave, the landlord and the
+tax-compeller, the townsman and the king.
+
+All written history is the story of a minority and their peculiar and
+abnormal affairs. Save in so far as it notes great natural catastrophes
+and tells of the spreading or retrocession of human life through changes
+of climate and physical conditions it resolves itself into an account of
+a series of attacks and modifications and supplements made by excessive
+and superfluous forces engendered within the community upon the Normal
+Social Life. The very invention of writing is a part of those modifying
+developments. The Normal Social Life is essentially illiterate and
+traditional. The Normal Social Life is as mute as the standing crops; it
+is as seasonal and cyclic as nature herself, and reaches towards the
+future only an intimation of continual repetitions.
+
+Now this human over-life may take either beneficent or maleficent or
+neutral aspects towards the general life of humanity. It may present
+itself as law and pacification, as a positive addition and
+superstructure to the Normal Social Life, as roads and markets and
+cities, as courts and unifying monarchies, as helpful and directing
+religious organisations, as literature and art and science and
+philosophy, reflecting back upon the individual in the Normal Social
+Life from which it arose, a gilding and refreshment of new and wider
+interests and added pleasures and resources. One may define certain
+phases in the history of various countries when this was the state of
+affairs, when a countryside of prosperous communities with a healthy
+family life and a wide distribution of property, animated by roads and
+towns and unified by a generally intelligible religious belief, lived in
+a transitory but satisfactory harmony under a sympathetic government. I
+take it that this is the condition to which the minds of such original
+and vigorous reactionary thinkers as Mr. G.K. Chesterton and Mr. Hilaire
+Belloc for example turn, as being the most desirable state of mankind.
+
+But the general effect of history is to present these phases as phases
+of exceptional good luck, and to show the surplus forces of humanity as
+on the whole antagonistic to any such equilibrium with the Normal Social
+Life. To open the book of history haphazard is, most commonly, to open
+it at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or less
+destructive conflict with the Normal Social Life. One opens at the
+depopulation of Italy by the aggressive great estates of the Roman
+Empire, at the impoverishment of the French peasantry by a too
+centralised monarchy before the revolution, or at the huge degenerative
+growth of the great industrial towns of western Europe in the nineteenth
+century. Or again one opens at destructive wars. One sees these surplus
+forces over and above the Normal Social Life working towards unstable
+concentrations of population, to centralisation of government, to
+migrations and conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the process
+developing into a phase of social fragmentation and destruction and
+then, unless the whole country has been wasted down to its very soil,
+the Normal Social Life returns as the heath and furze and grass return
+after the burning of a common. But it never returns in precisely its old
+form. The surplus forces have always produced some traceable change; the
+rhythm is a little altered. As between the Gallic peasant before the
+Roman conquest, the peasant of the Gallic province, the Carlovingian
+peasant, the French peasant of the thirteenth, the seventeenth, and the
+twentieth centuries, there is, in spite of a general uniformity of life,
+of a common atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy,
+and domestic intimacy, an effect of accumulating generalising
+influences and of wider relevancies. And the oscillations of empires and
+kingdoms, religious movements, wars, invasions, settlements leave upon
+the mind an impression that the surplus life of mankind, the
+less-localised life of mankind, that life of mankind which is not
+directly connected with the soil but which has become more or less
+detached from and independent of it, is becoming proportionately more
+important in relation to the Normal Social Life. It is as if a different
+way of living was emerging from the Normal Social Life and freeing
+itself from its traditions and limitations.
+
+And this is more particularly the effect upon the mind of a review of
+the history of the past two hundred years. The little speculative
+activities of the alchemist and natural philosopher, the little economic
+experiments of the acquisitive and enterprising landed proprietor,
+favoured by unprecedented periods of security and freedom, have passed
+into a new phase of extraordinary productivity. They had added
+preposterously and continue to add on a gigantic scale and without any
+evident limits to the continuation of their additions, to the resources
+of humanity. To the strength of horses and men and slaves has been added
+the power of machines and the possibility of economies that were once
+incredible The Normal Social Life has been overshadowed as it has never
+been overshadowed before by the concentrations and achievements of the
+surplus life. Vast new possibilities open to the race; the traditional
+life of mankind, its traditional systems of association, are challenged
+and threatened; and all the social thought, all the political activity
+of our time turns in reality upon the conflict of this ancient system
+whose essentials we have here defined and termed the Normal Social Life
+with the still vague and formless impulses that seem destined either to
+involve it and the race in a final destruction or to replace it by some
+new and probably more elaborate method of human association.
+
+Because there is the following difference between the action of the
+surplus forces as we see them to-day and as they appeared before the
+outbreak of physical science and mechanism. Then it seemed clearly
+necessary that whatever social and political organisation developed, it
+must needs; rest ultimately on the tiller of the soil, the agricultural
+holding, and the Normal Social Life. But now even in agriculture huge
+wholesale methods have appeared. They are declared to be destructive;
+but it is quite conceivable that they may be made ultimately as
+recuperative as that small agriculture which has hitherto been the
+inevitable social basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living may
+not simply impose themselves in a growing proportion upon the Normal
+Social Life, but they may even oust it and replace it altogether. Or
+they may oust it and fail to replace it. In the newer countries the
+Normal Social Life does not appear to establish itself at all rapidly.
+No real peasantry appears in either America or Australia; and in the
+older countries, unless there is the most elaborate legislative and
+fiscal protection, the peasant population wanes before the large farm,
+the estate, and overseas production.
+
+Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundred
+years may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend this
+defensive struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and
+innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who
+participate. And it is very largely a matter of temperament and free
+choice still, just where we shall decide to place ourselves. Let us
+consider some of the key words of contemporary thought, such as
+Liberalism, Individualism, Socialism, in the light of this broad
+generalisation we have made; and then we shall find it easier to explain
+our intention in employing as a second technicality the phrase of The
+Great State as an opposite to the Normal Social Life, which we have
+already defined.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based on agriculture,
+traditional and essentially unchanging. It has needed no toleration and
+displayed no toleration for novelty and strangeness. Its beliefs have
+been on such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has had
+an intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs. The God of its community
+has been a jealous god even when he was only a tribal and local god.
+Only very occasionally in history until the coming of the modern period
+do we find any human community relaxing from this ancient and more
+normal state of entire intolerance towards ideas or practices other than
+its own. When toleration and a receptive attitude towards alien ideas
+was manifested in the Old World, it was at some trading centre or
+political centre; new ideas and new religions came by water along the
+trade routes. And such toleration as there was rarely extended to active
+teaching and propaganda. Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in the
+last resort at the service of the ancient gods and the ancient morals
+against the sceptical critic.
+
+But with the steady development of innovating forces in human affairs
+there has actually grown up a cult of receptivity, a readiness for new
+ideas, a faith in the probable truth of novelties. Liberalism--I do not,
+of course, refer in any way to the political party which makes this
+profession--is essentially anti-traditionalism; its tendency is to
+commit for trial any institution or belief that is brought before it. It
+is the accuser and antagonist of all the fixed and ancient values and
+imperatives and prohibitions of the Normal Social Life. And growing up
+in relation to Liberalism and sustained by it is the great body of
+scientific knowledge, which professes at least to be absolutely
+undogmatic and perpetually on its trial and under assay and
+re-examination.
+
+Now a very large part of the advanced thought of the past century is no
+more than the confused negation of the broad beliefs and institutions
+which have been the heritage and social basis of humanity for immemorial
+years. This is as true of the extremest Individualism as of the
+extremest Socialism. The former denies that element of legal and
+customary control which has always subdued the individual to the needs
+of the Normal Social Life, and the latter that qualified independence of
+distributed property which is the basis of family autonomy. Both are
+movements against the ancient life, and nothing is more absurd than the
+misrepresentation which presents either as a conservative force. They
+are two divergent schools with a common disposition to reject the old
+and turn towards the new. The Individualist professes a faith for which
+he has no rational evidence, that the mere abandonment of traditions and
+controls must ultimately produce a new and beautiful social order; while
+the Socialist, with an equal liberalism, regards the outlook with a
+kind of hopeful dread, and insists upon an elaborate readjustment, a new
+and untried scheme of social organisation to replace the shattered and
+weakening Normal Social Life.
+
+Both these movements, and, indeed, all movements that are not movements
+for the subjugation of innovation and the restoration of tradition, are
+vague in the prospect they contemplate. They produce no definite
+forecasts of the quality of the future towards which they so confidently
+indicate the way. But this is less true of modern socialism than of its
+antithesis, and it becomes less and less true as socialism, under an
+enormous torrent of criticism, slowly washes itself clean from the mass
+of partial statement, hasty misstatement, sheer error and presumption
+that obscured its first emergence.
+
+But it is well to be very clear upon one point at this stage, and that
+is, that this present time is not a battle-ground between individualism
+and socialism; it is a battle-ground between the Normal Social Life on
+the one hand and a complex of forces on the other which seek a form of
+replacement and seem partially to find it in these and other doctrines.
+
+Nearly all contemporary thinkers who are not too muddled to be
+assignable fall into one of three classes, of which the third we shall
+distinguish is the largest and most various and divergent. It will be
+convenient to say a little of each of these classes before proceeding to
+a more particular account of the third. Our analysis will cut across
+many accepted classifications, but there will be ample justification for
+this rearrangement. All of them may be dealt with quite justly as
+accepting the general account of the historical process which is here
+given.
+
+Then first we must distinguish a series of writers and thinkers which
+one may call--the word conservative being already politically
+assigned--the Conservators.
+
+These are people who really do consider the Normal Social Life as the
+only proper and desirable life for the great mass of humanity, and they
+are fully prepared to subordinate all exceptional and surplus lives to
+the moral standards and limitations that arise naturally out of the
+Normal Social Life. They desire a state in which property is widely
+distributed, a community of independent families protected by law and an
+intelligent democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large
+accumulations and linked by a common religion. Their attitude to the
+forces of change is necessarily a hostile attitude. They are disposed to
+regard innovations in transit and machinery as undesirable, and even
+mischievous disturbances of a wholesome equilibrium. They are at least
+unfriendly to any organisation of scientific research, and scornful of
+the pretensions of science. Criticisms of the methods of logic,
+scepticism of the more widely diffused human beliefs, they would
+classify as insanity. Two able English writers, Mr. G.K. Chesterton and
+Mr. Belloc, have given the clearest expression to this system of ideals,
+and stated an admirable case for it. They present a conception of
+vinous, loudly singing, earthy, toiling, custom-ruled, wholesome, and
+insanitary men; they are pagan in the sense that their hearts are with
+the villagers and not with the townsmen, Christian in the spirit of the
+parish priest. There are no other Conservators so clear-headed and
+consistent. But their teaching is merely the logical expression of an
+enormous amount of conservative feeling. Vast multitudes of less lucid
+minds share their hostility to novelty and research; hate, dread, and
+are eager to despise science, and glow responsive to the warm, familiar
+expressions of primordial feelings and immemorial prejudices The rural
+conservative, the liberal of the allotments and small-holdings type, Mr.
+Roosevelt--in his Western-farmer, philoprogenitive phase as
+distinguished from the phase of his more imperialist moments--all
+present themselves as essentially Conservators as seekers after and
+preservers of the Normal Social Life.
+
+So, too, do Socialists of the William Morris type. The mind of William
+Morris was profoundly reactionary He hated the whole trend of later
+nineteenth-century modernism with the hatred natural to a man of
+considerable scholarship and intense aesthetic sensibilities. His mind
+turned, exactly as Mr. Belloc's turns, to the finished and enriched
+Normal Social Life of western Europe in the middle ages, but, unlike Mr.
+Belloc, he believed that, given private ownership of land and the
+ordinary materials of life, there must necessarily be an aggregatory
+process, usury, expropriation, the development of an exploiting wealthy
+class. He believed profit was the devil. His "News from Nowhere"
+pictures a communism that amounted in fact to little more than a system
+of private ownership of farms and trades without money or any buying and
+selling, in an atmosphere of geniality, generosity, and mutual
+helpfulness. Mr. Belloc, with a harder grip upon the realities of life,
+would have the widest distribution of proprietorship, with an alert
+democratic government continually legislating against the protean
+reappearances of usury and accumulation and attacking, breaking up, and
+redistributing any large unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared.
+But both men are equally set towards the Normal Social Life, and
+equally enemies of the New. The so-called "socialist" land legislation
+of New Zealand again is a tentative towards the realisation of the same
+school of ideas: great estates are to be automatically broken up,
+property is to be kept disseminated; a vast amount of political speaking
+and writing in America and throughout the world enforces one's
+impression of the widespread influence of Conservator ideals.
+
+Of course, it is inevitable that phases of prosperity for the Normal
+Social Life will lead to phases of over-population and scarcity, there
+will be occasional famines and occasional pestilences and plethoras of
+vitality leading to the blood-letting of war. I suppose Mr. Chesterton
+and Mr. Belloc at least have the courage of their opinions, and are
+prepared to say that such things always have been and always must be;
+they are part of the jolly rhythms of the human lot under the sun, and
+are to be taken with the harvest home and love-making and the peaceful
+ending of honoured lives as an integral part of the unending drama of
+mankind.
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+Now opposed to the Conservators are all those who do not regard
+contemporary humanity as a final thing nor the Normal Social Life as the
+inevitable basis of human continuity. They believe in secular change, in
+Progress, in a future for our species differing continually more from
+its past. On the whole, they are prepared for the gradual
+disentanglement of men from the Normal Social Life altogether, and they
+look for new ways of living and new methods of human association with a
+certain adventurous hopefulness.
+
+Now, this second large class does not so much admit of subdivision into
+two as present a great variety of intermediaries between two extremes. I
+propose to give distinctive names to these extremes, with the very clear
+proviso that they are not antagonised, and that the great multitude of
+this second, anti-conservator class, this liberal, more novel class
+modern conditions have produced falls between them, and is neither the
+one nor the other, but partaking in various degrees of both. On the one
+hand, then, we have that type of mind which is irritated by and
+distrustful of all collective proceedings which is profoundly
+distrustful of churches and states, which is expressed essentially by
+Individualism. The Individualist appears to regard the extensive
+disintegrations of the Normal Social Life that are going on to-day with
+an extreme hopefulness. Whatever is ugly or harsh in modern
+industrialism or in the novel social development of our time he seems to
+consider as a necessary aspect of a process of selection and survival,
+whose tendencies are on the whole inevitably satisfactory. The future
+welfare of man he believes in effect may be trusted to the spontaneous
+and planless activities of people of goodwill, and nothing but state
+intervention can effectively impede its attainment. And curiously close
+to this extreme optimistic school in its moral quality and logical
+consequences, though contrasting widely in the sinister gloom of its
+spirit, is the socialism of Karl Marx. He declared the contemporary
+world to be a great process of financial aggrandisement and general
+expropriation, of increasing power for the few and of increasing
+hardship and misery for the many, a process that would go on until at
+last a crisis of unendurable tension would be reached and the social
+revolution ensue. The world had, in fact, to be worse before it could
+hope to be better. He contemplated a continually exacerbated Class War,
+with a millennium of extraordinary vagueness beyond as the reward of
+the victorious workers. His common quality with the Individualist lies
+in his repudiation of and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his
+belief in the overriding power of Law. Their common influence is the
+discouragement of collective understandings upon the basis of the
+existing state. Both converge in practice upon _laissez faire_. I would
+therefore lump them together under the term of Planless Progressives,
+and I would contrast with them those types which believe supremely in
+systematised purpose.
+
+The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualist
+and Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands
+of years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in
+human experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may be
+ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the
+human past. But they also believe that the forces that have been
+assailing and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, on
+the one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom,
+and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on the
+other, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property or
+outlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have
+substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independent
+peasant almost completely, and in America seem to be arresting any
+general development of the Normal Social Life at all, are forces of wide
+and indefinite possibility that need to be controlled by a collective
+effort implying a collective design, deflected from merely injurious
+consequences and organised for a new human welfare upon new lines. They
+agree with that class of thinking I have distinguished as the
+Conservators in their recognition of vast contemporary disorders and
+their denial of the essential beneficence of change. But while the
+former seem to regard all novelty and innovation as a mere inundation to
+be met, banked back, defeated and survived, these more hopeful and
+adventurous minds would rather regard contemporary change as amounting
+on the whole to the tumultuous and almost catastrophic opening-up of
+possible new channels, the violent opportunity of vast, deep, new ways
+to great unprecedented human ends, ends that are neither feared nor
+evaded.
+
+Now while the Conservators are continually talking of the "eternal
+facts" of human life and human nature and falling back upon a conception
+of permanence that is continually less true as our perspectives extend,
+these others are full of the conception of adaptation, of deliberate
+change in relationship and institution to meet changing needs. I would
+suggest for them, therefore, as opposed to the Conservators and
+contrasted with the Planless Progressives, the name of Constructors.
+They are the extreme right, as it were, while the Planless Progressives
+are the extreme left of Anti-Conservator thought.
+
+I believe that these distinctions I have made cover practically every
+clear form of contemporary thinking, and are a better and more helpful
+classification than any now current. But, of course, nearly every
+individual nowadays is at least a little confused, and will be found to
+wobble in the course even of a brief discussion between one attitude and
+the other. This is a separation of opinions rather than of persons. And
+particularly that word Socialism has become so vague and incoherent that
+for a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to give no indication
+whatever whether he is a Conservator like William Morris, a
+non-Constructor like Karl Marx, or a Constructor of any of half a dozen
+different schools. On the whole, however, modern socialism tends to fall
+towards the Constructor wing. So, too, do those various movements in
+England and Germany and France called variously nationalist and
+imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Under
+the same heading must come such attempts to give the vague impulses of
+Syndicalism a concrete definition as the "Guild Socialism" of Mr. Orage.
+All these movements are agreed that the world is progressive towards a
+novel and unprecedented social order, not necessarily and fatally
+better, and that it needs organised and even institutional guidance
+thither, however much they differ as to the form that order should
+assume.
+
+For the greater portion of a century socialism has been before the
+world, and it is not perhaps premature to attempt a word or so of
+analysis of that great movement in the new terms we are here employing.
+The origins of the socialist idea were complex and multifarious never at
+any time has it succeeded in separating out a statement of itself that
+was at once simple, complete and acceptable to any large proportion of
+those who call themselves socialists. But always it has pointed to two
+or three definite things. The first of these is that unlimited freedoms
+of private property, with increasing facilities of exchange,
+combination, and aggrandisement, become more and more dangerous to
+human liberty by the expropriation and reduction to private wages
+slavery of larger and larger proportions of the population. Every school
+of socialism states this in some more or less complete form, however
+divergent the remedial methods suggested by the different schools. And,
+next, every school of socialism accepts the concentration of management
+and property as necessary, and declines to contemplate what is the
+typical Conservator remedy, its re-fragmentation. Accordingly it sets up
+not only against the large private owner, but against owners generally,
+the idea of a public proprietor, the State, which shall hold in the
+collective interest. But where the earlier socialisms stopped short, and
+where to this day socialism is vague, divided, and unprepared, is upon
+the psychological problems involved in that new and largely
+unprecedented form of proprietorship, and upon the still more subtle
+problems of its attainment. These are vast, and profoundly, widely, and
+multitudinously difficult problems, and it was natural and inevitable
+that the earlier socialists in the first enthusiasm of their idea should
+minimise these difficulties, pretend in the fullness of their faith that
+partial answers to objections were complete answers, and display the
+common weaknesses of honest propaganda the whole world over. Socialism
+is now old enough to know better. Few modern socialists present their
+faith as a complete panacea, and most are now setting to work in earnest
+upon these long-shirked preliminary problems of human interaction
+through which the vital problem of a collective head and brain can alone
+be approached.
+
+A considerable proportion of the socialist movement remains, as it has
+been from the first, vaguely democratic. It points to collective
+ownership with no indication of the administrative scheme it
+contemplates to realise that intention. Necessarily it remains a
+formless claim without hands to take hold of the thing it desires.
+Indeed in a large number of cases it is scarcely more than a resentful
+consciousness in the expropriated masses of social disintegration. It
+spends its force very largely in mere revenges upon property as such,
+attacks simply destructive by reason of the absence of any definite
+ulterior scheme. It is an ill-equipped and planless belligerent who must
+destroy whatever he captures because he can neither use nor take away. A
+council of democratic socialists in possession of London would be as
+capable of an orderly and sustained administration as the Anabaptists in
+Munster. But the discomforts and disorders of our present planless
+system do tend steadily to the development of this crude socialistic
+spirit in the mass of the proletariat; merely vindictive attacks upon
+property, sabotage, and the general strike are the logical and
+inevitable consequences of an uncontrolled concentration of property in
+a few hands, and such things must and will go on, the deep undertow in
+the deliquescence of the Normal Social Life, until a new justice, a new
+scheme of compensations and satisfactions is attained, or the Normal
+Social Life re-emerges.
+
+Fabian socialism was the first systematic attempt to meet the fatal
+absence of administrative schemes in the earlier socialisms. It can
+scarcely be regarded now as anything but an interesting failure, but a
+failure that has all the educational value of a first reconnaissance
+into unexplored territory. Starting from that attack on aggregating
+property, which is the common starting-point of all socialist projects,
+the Fabians, appalled at the obvious difficulties of honest
+confiscation and an open transfer from private to public hands,
+conceived the extraordinary idea of _filching_ property for the state. A
+small body of people of extreme astuteness were to bring about the
+municipalisation and nationalisation first of this great system of
+property and then of that, in a manner so artful that the millionaires
+were to wake up one morning at last, and behold, they would find
+themselves poor men! For a decade or more Mr. Pease, Mr. Bernard Shaw,
+Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Besant, Dr. Lawson Dodd, and their
+associates of the London Fabian Society, did pit their wits and ability,
+or at any rate the wits and ability of their leisure moments, against
+the embattled capitalists of England and the world, in this complicated
+and delicate enterprise, without any apparent diminution of the larger
+accumulations of wealth. But in addition they developed another side of
+Fabianism, still more subtle, which professed to be a kind of
+restoration in kind of property to the proletariat and in this direction
+they were more successful. A dexterous use, they decided, was to be made
+of the Poor Law, the public health authority, the education authority,
+and building regulations and so forth, to create, so to speak, a
+communism of the lower levels. The mass of people whom the forces of
+change had expropriated were to be given a certain minimum of food,
+shelter, education, and sanitation, and this, the socialists were
+assured, could be used as the thin end of the wedge towards a complete
+communism. The minimum, once established, could obviously be raised
+continually until either everybody had what they needed, or the
+resources of society gave out and set a limit to the process.
+
+This second method of attack brought the Fabian movement into
+co-operation with a large amount of benevolent and constructive
+influence outside the socialist ranks altogether. Few wealthy people
+really grudge the poor a share of the necessities of life, and most are
+quite willing to assist in projects for such a distribution. But while
+these schemes naturally involved a very great amount of regulation and
+regimentation of the affairs of the poor, the Fabian Society fell away
+more and more from its associated proposals for the socialisation of the
+rich. The Fabian project changed steadily in character until at last it
+ceased to be in any sense antagonistic to wealth as such. If the lion
+did not exactly lie down with the lamb, at any rate the man with the gun
+and the alleged social mad dog returned very peaceably together. The
+Fabian hunt was up.
+
+Great financiers contributed generously to a School of Economics that
+had been founded with moneys left to the Fabian Society by earlier
+enthusiasts for socialist propaganda and education. It remained for Mr.
+Belloc to point the moral of the whole development with a phrase, to
+note that Fabianism no longer aimed at the socialisation of the whole
+community, but only at the socialisation of the poor. The first really
+complete project for a new social order to replace the Normal Social
+Life was before the world, and this project was the compulsory
+regimentation of the workers and the complete state control of labour
+under a new plutocracy. Our present chaos was to be organised into a
+Servile State.
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+Now to many of us who found the general spirit of the socialist movement
+at least hopeful and attractive and sympathetic, this would be an almost
+tragic conclusion, did we believe that Fabianism was anything more than
+the first experiment in planning--and one almost inevitably shallow and
+presumptuous--of the long series that may be necessary before a clear
+light breaks upon the road humanity must follow. But we decline to be
+forced by this one intellectual fiasco towards the _laissez faire_ of
+the Individualist and the Marxist, or to accept the Normal Social Life
+with its atmosphere of hens and cows and dung, its incessant toil, its
+servitude of women, and its endless repetitions as the only tolerable
+life conceivable for the bulk of mankind--as the ultimate life, that is,
+of mankind. With less arrogance and confidence, but it may be with a
+firmer faith, we declare that we believe a more spacious social order
+than any that exists or ever has existed, a Peace of the World in which
+there is an almost universal freedom, health, happiness, and well-being
+and which contains the seeds of a still greater future, is possible to
+mankind. We propose to begin again with the recognition of those same
+difficulties the Fabians first realised. But we do not propose to
+organise a society, form a group for the control of the two chief
+political parties, bring about "socialism" in twenty-five years, or do
+anything beyond contributing in our place and measure to that
+constructive discussion whose real magnitude we now begin to realise.
+
+We have faith in a possible future, but it is a faith that makes the
+quality of that future entirely dependent upon the strength and
+clearness of purpose that this present time can produce. We do not
+believe the greater social state is inevitable.
+
+Yet there is, we hold, a certain qualified inevitability about this
+greater social state because we believe any social state not affording a
+general contentment, a general freedom, and a general and increasing
+fullness of life, must sooner or later collapse and disintegrate again,
+and revert more or less completely to the Normal Social Life, and
+because we believe the Normal Social Life is itself thick-sown with the
+seeds of fresh beginnings. The Normal Social Life has never at any time
+been absolutely permanent, always it has carried within itself the germs
+of enterprise and adventure and exchanges that finally attack its
+stability. The superimposed social order of to-day, such as it is, with
+its huge development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the
+later Fabians to fix this state of affairs in an organised form and
+render it plausibly tolerable, seem also doomed to accumulate
+catastrophic tensions. Bureaucratic schemes for establishing the regular
+lifelong subordination of a labouring class, enlivened though they may
+be by frequent inspection, disciplinary treatment during seasons of
+unemployment, compulsory temperance, free medical attendance, and a
+cheap and shallow elementary education fail to satisfy the restless
+cravings in the heart of man. They are cravings that even the baffling
+methods of the most ingeniously worked Conciliation Boards cannot
+permanently restrain. The drift of any Servile State must be towards a
+class revolt, paralysing sabotage and a general strike. The more rigid
+and complete the Servile State becomes, the more thorough will be its
+ultimate failure. Its fate is decay or explosion. From its débris we
+shall either revert to the Normal Social Life and begin again the long
+struggle towards that ampler, happier, juster arrangement of human
+affairs which we of this book, at any rate, believe to be possible, or
+we shall pass into the twilight of mankind.
+
+This greater social life we put, then, as the only real alternative to
+the Normal Social Life from which man is continually escaping. For it we
+do not propose to use the expressions the "socialist state" or
+"socialism," because we believe those terms have now by constant
+confused use become so battered and bent and discoloured by irrelevant
+associations as to be rather misleading than expressive. We propose to
+use the term The Great State to express this ideal of a social system no
+longer localised, no longer immediately tied to and conditioned by the
+cultivation of the land, world-wide in its interests and outlook and
+catholic in its tolerance and sympathy, a system of great individual
+freedom with a universal understanding among its citizens of a
+collective thought and purpose.
+
+Now, the difficulties that lie in the way of humanity in its complex and
+toilsome journey through the coming centuries towards this Great State
+are fundamentally difficulties of adaptation and adjustment. To no
+conceivable social state is man inherently fitted: he is a creature of
+jealousy and suspicion, unstable, restless, acquisitive, aggressive,
+intractable, and of a most subtle and nimble dishonesty. Moreover, he is
+imaginative, adventurous, and inventive. His nature and instincts are as
+much in conflict with the necessary restrictions and subjugation of the
+Normal Social Life as they are likely to be with any other social net
+that necessity may weave about him. But the Normal Social Life has this
+advantage that it has a vast accumulated moral tradition and a minutely
+worked-out material method. All the fundamental institutions have arisen
+in relation to it and are adapted to its conditions. To revert to it
+after any phase of social chaos and distress is and will continue for
+many years to be the path of least resistance for perplexed humanity.
+
+This conception of the Great State, on the other hand, is still
+altogether unsubstantial. It is a project as dream-like to-day as
+electric lighting, electric traction, or aviation would have been in the
+year 1850. In 1850 a man reasonably conversant with the physical science
+of his time could have declared with a very considerable confidence
+that, given a certain measure of persistence and social security, these
+things were more likely to be attained than not in the course of the
+next century. But such a prophecy was conditional on the preliminary
+accumulation of a considerable amount of knowledge, on many experiments
+and failures. Had the world of 1850, by some wave of impulse, placed all
+its resources in the hands of the ablest scientific man alive, and asked
+him to produce a practicable paying electric vehicle before 1852, at
+best he would have produced some clumsy, curious toy, more probably he
+would have failed altogether; and, similarly, if the whole population of
+the world came to the present writer and promised meekly to do whatever
+it was told, we should find ourselves still very largely at a loss in
+our project for a millennium. Yet just as nearly every man at work upon
+Voltaic electricity in 1850 knew that he was preparing for electric
+traction, so do I know quite certainly, in spite of a whole row of
+unsolved problems before me, that I am working towards the Great State.
+
+Let me briefly recapitulate the main problems which have to be attacked
+in the attempt to realise the outline of the Great State. At the base of
+the whole order there must be some method of agricultural production,
+and if the agricultural labourer and cottager and the ancient life of
+the small householder on the holding, a life laborious, prolific,
+illiterate, limited, and in immediate contact with the land used, is to
+recede and disappear it must recede and disappear before methods upon a
+much larger scale, employing wholesale machinery and involving great
+economies. It is alleged by modern writers that the permanent residence
+of the cultivator in close relation to his ground is a legacy from the
+days of cumbrous and expensive transit, that the great proportion of
+farm work is seasonal, and that a migration to and fro between rural and
+urban conditions would be entirely practicable in a largely planned
+community. The agricultural population could move out of town into an
+open-air life as the spring approached, and return for spending,
+pleasure, and education as the days shortened. Already something of this
+sort occurs under extremely unfavourable conditions in the movement of
+the fruit and hop pickers from the east end of London into Kent, but
+that is a mere hint of the extended picnic which a broadly planned
+cultivation might afford. A fully developed civilisation, employing
+machines in the hands of highly skilled men, will minimise toil to the
+very utmost, no man will shove where a machine can shove, or carry where
+a machine can carry; but there will remain, more particularly in the
+summer, a vast amount of hand operations, invigorating and even
+attractive to the urban population Given short hours, good pay, and all
+the jolly amusement in the evening camp that a free, happy, and
+intelligent people will develop for themselves, and there will be
+little difficulty about this particular class of work to differentiate
+it from any other sort of necessary labour.
+
+One passes, therefore, with no definite transition from the root problem
+of agricultural production in the Great State to the wider problem of
+labour in general.
+
+A glance at the countryside conjures up a picture of extensive tracts
+being cultivated on a wholesale scale, of skilled men directing great
+ploughing, sowing, and reaping plants, steering cattle and sheep about
+carefully designed enclosures, constructing channels and guiding sewage
+towards its proper destination on the fields, and then of added crowds
+of genial people coming out to spray trees and plants, pick and sort and
+pack fruits. But who are these people? Why are they in particular doing
+this for the community? Is our Great State still to have a majority of
+people glad to do commonplace work for mediocre wages, and will there be
+other individuals who will ride by on the roads, sympathetically, no
+doubt, but with a secret sense of superiority? So one opens the general
+problem of the organisation for labour.
+
+I am careful here to write "for labour" and not "of Labour," because it
+is entirely against the spirit of the Great State that any section of
+the people should be set aside as a class to do most of the monotonous,
+laborious, and uneventful things for the community. That is practically
+the present arrangement, and that, with a quickened sense of the need of
+breaking people in to such a life, is the ideal of the bureaucratic
+Servile State to which, in common with the Conservators, we are bitterly
+opposed. And here I know I am at my most difficult, most speculative,
+and most revolutionary point. We who look to the Great State as the
+present aim of human progress believe a state may solve its economic
+problem without any section whatever of the community being condemned to
+lifelong labour. And contemporary events, the phenomena of recent
+strikes, the phenomena of sabotage, carry out the suggestion that in a
+community where nearly everyone reads extensively travels about, sees
+the charm and variety in the lives of prosperous and leisurely people,
+no class is going to submit permanently to modern labour conditions
+without extreme resistance, even after the most elaborate Labour
+Conciliation schemes and social minima are established Things are
+altogether too stimulating to the imagination nowadays. Of all
+impossible social dreams that belief in tranquillised and submissive and
+virtuous Labour is the wildest of all. No sort of modern men will stand
+it. They will as a class do any vivid and disastrous thing rather than
+stand it. Even the illiterate peasant will only endure lifelong toil
+under the stimulus of private ownership and with the consolations of
+religion; and the typical modern worker has neither the one nor the
+other. For a time, indeed, for a generation or so even, a labour mass
+may be fooled or coerced, but in the end it will break out against its
+subjection, even if it breaks out to a general social catastrophe.
+
+We have, in fact, to invent for the Great State, if we are to suppose
+any Great State at all, an economic method without any specific labour
+class. If we cannot do so, we had better throw ourselves in with the
+Conservators forthwith, for they are right and we are absurd. Adhesion
+to the conception of the Great State involves adhesion to the belief
+that the amount of regular labour, skilled and unskilled, required to
+produce everything necessary for everyone living in its highly elaborate
+civilisation may, under modern conditions, with the help of scientific
+economy and power-producing machinery, be reduced to so small a number
+of working hours per head in proportion to the average life of the
+citizen, as to be met as regards the greater moiety of it by the payment
+of wages over and above the gratuitous share of each individual in the
+general output; and as regards the residue, a residue of rough,
+disagreeable, and monotonous operations, by some form of conscription,
+which will demand a year or so, let us say, of each person's life for
+the public service. If we reflect that in the contemporary state there
+is already food, shelter, and clothing of a sort for everyone, in spite
+of the fact that enormous numbers of people do no productive work at all
+because they are too well off, that great numbers are out of work, great
+numbers by bad nutrition and training incapable of work, and that an
+enormous amount of the work actually done is the overlapping production
+of competitive trade and work upon such politically necessary but
+socially useless things as Dreadnoughts, it becomes clear that the
+absolutely unavoidable labour in a modern community and its ratio to the
+available vitality must be of very small account indeed. But all this
+has still to be worked out even in the most general terms. An
+intelligent science of economics should afford standards and
+technicalities and systematised facts upon which to base an estimate.
+The point was raised a quarter of a century ago by Morris in his "News
+from Nowhere," and indeed it was already discussed by More in his
+"Utopia." Our contemporary economics is, however, still a foolish,
+pretentious pseudo-science, a festering mass of assumptions about buying
+and selling and wages-paying, and one would as soon consult Bradshaw or
+the works of Dumas as our orthodox professors of economics for any
+light upon this fundamental matter.
+
+Moreover, we believe that there is a real disposition to work in human
+beings, and that in a well-equipped community, in which no one was under
+an unavoidable urgency to work, the greater proportion of productive
+operations could be made sufficiently attractive to make them desirable
+occupations. As for the irreducible residue of undesirable toil, I owe
+to my friend the late Professor William James this suggestion of a
+general conscription and a period of public service for everyone, a
+suggestion which greatly occupied his thoughts during the last years of
+his life. He was profoundly convinced of the high educational and
+disciplinary value of universal compulsory military service, and of the
+need of something more than a sentimental ideal of duty in public life.
+He would have had the whole population taught in the schools and
+prepared for this year (or whatever period it had to be) of patient and
+heroic labour, the men for the mines, the fisheries, the sanitary
+services, railway routine, the women for hospital, and perhaps
+educational work, and so forth. He believed such a service would
+permeate the whole state with a sense of civic obligation....
+
+But behind all these conceivable triumphs of scientific adjustment and
+direction lies the infinitely greater difficulty on our way to the Great
+State, the difficulty of direction. What sort of people are going to
+distribute the work of the community, decide what is or is not to be
+done, determine wages, initiate enterprises; and under what sort of
+criticism, checks, and controls are they going to do this delicate and
+extensive work? With this we open the whole problem of government,
+administration and officialdom.
+
+The Marxist and the democratic socialist generally shirk this riddle
+altogether; the Fabian conception of a bureaucracy, official to the
+extent of being a distinct class and cult, exists only as a
+starting-point for healthy repudiations. Whatever else may be worked out
+in the subtler answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer
+than that the necessary machinery of government must be elaborately
+organised to prevent the development of a managing caste in permanent
+conspiracy, tacit or expressed, against the normal man. Quite apart from
+the danger of unsympathetic and fatally irritating government there can
+be little or no doubt that the method of making men officials for life
+is quite the worst way of getting official duties done. Officialdom is a
+species of incompetence. This rather priggish, teachable, and
+well-behaved sort of boy, who is attracted by the prospect of assured
+income and a pension to win his way into the Civil Service, and who then
+by varied assiduities rises to a sort of timidly vindictive importance,
+is the last person to whom we would willingly entrust the vital
+interests of a nation. We want people who know about life at large, who
+will come to the public service seasoned by experience, not people who
+have specialised and acquired that sort of knowledge which is called, in
+much the same spirit of qualification as one speaks of German Silver,
+Expert Knowledge. It is clear our public servants and officials must be
+so only for their periods of service. They must be taught by life, and
+not "trained" by pedagogues. In every continuing job there is a time
+when one is crude and blundering, a time, the best time, when one is
+full of the freshness and happiness of doing well, and a time when
+routine has largely replaced the stimulus of novelty. The Great State
+will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper
+circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain
+amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of
+the stale official. On that score of the necessity or versatility, if on
+no other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the conceptions of "Guild
+Socialism" which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty and
+Syndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence of Mr. Orage.
+
+And since the Fabian socialists have created a widespread belief that in
+their projected state every man will be necessarily a public servant or
+a public pupil because the state will be the only employer and the only
+educator, it is necessary to point out that the Great State presupposes
+neither the one nor the other. It is a form of liberty and not a form of
+enslavement. We agree with the older forms of socialism in supposing an
+initial proprietary independence in every citizen. The citizen is a
+shareholder in the state. Above that and after that, he works if he
+chooses. But if he likes to live on his minimum and do nothing--though
+such a type of character is scarcely conceivable--he can. His earning is
+his own surplus. Above the basal economics of the Great State we assume
+with confidence there will be a huge surplus of free spending upon
+extra-collective ends. Public organisations, for example, may distribute
+impartially and possibly even print and make ink and paper for the
+newspapers in the Great State, but they will certainly not own them.
+Only doctrine-driven men have ever ventured to think they would. Nor
+will the state control writers and artists, for example, nor the
+stage--though it may build and own theatres--the tailor, the dressmaker,
+the restaurant cook, an enormous multitude of other busy
+workers-for-preferences. In the Great State of the future, as in the
+life of the more prosperous classes of to-day, the greater proportion of
+occupations and activities will be private and free.
+
+I would like to underline in the most emphatic way that it is possible
+to have this Great State, essentially socialistic, owning and running
+the land and all the great public services, sustaining everybody in
+absolute freedom at a certain minimum of comfort and well-being, and
+still leaving most of the interests, amusements, and adornments of the
+individual life, and all sorts of collective concerns, social and
+political discussion, religious worship, philosophy, and the like to the
+free personal initiatives of entirely unofficial people.
+
+This still leaves the problem of systematic knowledge and research, and
+all the associated problems of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual
+initiative to be worked out in detail; but at least it dispels the
+nightmare of a collective mind organised as a branch of the civil
+service, with authors, critics, artists, scientific investigators
+appointed in a phrensy of wire-pulling--as nowadays the British state
+appoints its bishops for the care of its collective soul.
+
+Let me now indicate how these general views affect the problem of family
+organisation and the problem of women's freedom. In the Normal Social
+Life the position of women is easily defined. They are subordinated but
+important. The citizenship rests with the man, and the woman's relation
+to the community as a whole is through a man. But within that limitation
+her functions as mother, wife, and home-maker are cardinal. It is one of
+the entirely unforeseen consequences that have arisen from the decay of
+the Normal Social Life and its autonomous home that great numbers of
+women while still subordinate have become profoundly unimportant They
+have ceased to a very large extent to bear children, they have dropped
+most of their home-making arts, they no longer nurse nor educate such
+children as they have, and they have taken on no new functions that
+compensate for these dwindling activities of the domestic interior. That
+subjugation which is a vital condition to the Normal Social Life does
+not seem to be necessary to the Great State. It may or it may not be
+necessary. And here we enter upon the most difficult of all our
+problems. The whole spirit of the Great State is against any avoidable
+subjugation; but the whole spirit of that science which will animate the
+Great State forbids us to ignore woman's functional and temperamental
+differences. A new status has still to be invented for women, a Feminine
+Citizenship differing in certain respects from the normal masculine
+citizenship. Its conditions remain to be worked out. We have indeed to
+work out an entire new system of relations between men and women, that
+will be free from servitude, aggression, provocation, or parasitism. The
+public Endowment of Motherhood as such may perhaps be the first broad
+suggestion of the quality of this new status. A new type of family, a
+mutual alliance in the place of a subjugation, is perhaps the most
+startling of all the conceptions which confront us directly we turn
+ourselves definitely towards the Great State.
+
+And as our conception of the Great State grows, so we shall begin to
+realise the nature of the problem of transition, the problem of what we
+may best do in the confusion of the present time to elucidate and render
+practicable this new phase of human organisation. Of one thing there
+can be no doubt, that whatever increases thought and knowledge moves
+towards our goal; and equally certain is it that nothing leads thither
+that tampers with the freedom of spirit, the independence of soul in
+common men and women. In many directions, therefore, the believer in the
+Great State will display a jealous watchfulness of contemporary
+developments rather than a premature constructiveness. We must watch
+wealth; but quite as necessary it is to watch the legislator, who
+mistakes propaganda for progress and class exasperation to satisfy class
+vindictiveness for construction. Supremely important is it to keep
+discussion open, to tolerate no limitation on the freedom of speech,
+writing, art and book distribution, and to sustain the utmost liberty of
+criticism upon all contemporary institutions and processes.
+
+This briefly is the programme of problems and effort to which my idea of
+the Great State, as the goal of contemporary progress, leads me.
+
+The diagram on p. 131 shows compactly the gist of the preceding
+discussion; it gives the view of social development upon which I base
+all my political conceptions.
+
+
+
+
+THE NORMAL SOCIAL LIFE
+
+produces an increasing surplus of energy and opportunity, more
+particularly under modern conditions of scientific organisation and
+power production; and this through the operation of rent and of usury
+tends to
+                                    |
+                     |------------------------------|
+               (a) release         and       (b) expropriate
+                     |                              |
+      an increasing proportion of the population to become:
+                     |                              |
+  (_a_) A LEISURE CLASS       and      (_b_) A LABOUR CLASS
+       under no urgent compulsion           divorced from the land and
+                 to work                   living upon uncertain wages
+   |3       |2       |1                             |1       2      3|
+   |        |   which may degenerate     degenerate          |       |
+   |        |   into a waster class      into a sweated,     |       |
+   |        |                \           overworked,         |       |
+   |        |                 \          violently           |       |
+   |        |                  \         resentful           |       |
+   |        |                   \        and destructive     |       |
+   |        |                    \       rebel class         |       |
+   |        |                     \       /                  |       |
+   |        |                  and produce a                 |       |
+   |        |                  SOCIAL DEBACLE                |       |
+   |        |                                                |       |
+   |   which may become                           which may become   |
+   |   a Governing                                the controlled     |
+   |   Class (with waster                         regimented         |
+   |   elements) in                               and disciplined    |
+   |   an unprogressive                           Labour Class of    |
+   |   Bureaucratic        <----------------->    an unprogressive   |
+   |   SERVILE STATE                              Bureaucratic       |
+   |                                              SERVILE STATE      |
+   |                                                                 |
+  which may become                                    which may be
+  the whole community                                 rendered needless
+  of the GREAT STATE                                  by a universal
+  working under various                               compulsory year
+  motives and inducements                             or so of labour
+  but not constantly,                                 service together
+  nor permanently                                     with a scientific
+  nor unwillingly                                     organisation
+                                                      of production,
+                                                      and so reabsorbed
+                                                      by re-endowment
+                                                      into the Leisure
+                                                      Class of the
+                                                      GREAT STATE
+
+
+
+
+
+THE COMMON SENSE OF WARFARE
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+CONSCRIPTION
+
+I want to say as compactly as possible why I do not believe that
+conscription would increase the military efficiency of this country, and
+why I think it might be a disastrous step for this country to take.
+
+By conscription I mean the compulsory enlistment for a term of service
+in the Army of the whole manhood of the country. And I am writing now
+from the point of view merely of military effectiveness. The educational
+value of a universal national service, the idea which as a Socialist I
+support very heartily, of making every citizen give a year or so of his
+life to our public needs, are matters quite outside my present
+discussion. What I am writing about now is this idea that the country
+can be strengthened for war by making every man in it a bit of a
+soldier.
+
+And I want the reader to be perfectly clear about the position I assume
+with regard to war preparations generally. I am not pleading for peace
+when there is no peace; this country has been constantly threatened
+during the past decade, and is threatened now by gigantic hostile
+preparations; it is our common interest to be and to keep at the maximum
+of military efficiency possible to us. My case is not merely that
+conscription will not contribute to that, but that it would be a
+monstrous diversion of our energy and emotion and material resources
+from the things that need urgently to be done. It would be like a boxer
+filling his arms with empty boxing-gloves and then rushing--his face
+protruding over the armful--into the fray.
+
+Let me make my attack on this prevalent and increasing superstition of
+the British need for conscription in two lines, one following the other.
+For, firstly, it is true that Britain at the present time is no more
+capable of creating such a conscript army as France or Germany possesses
+in the next ten years than she is of covering her soil with a tropical
+forest, and, secondly, it is equally true that if she had such an army
+it would not be of the slightest use to her. For the conscript armies in
+which Europe still so largely believes are only of use against conscript
+armies and adversaries who will consent to play the rules of the German
+war game; they are, if we chose to determine they shall be, if we chose
+to deal with them as they should be dealt with, as out of date as a
+Roman legion or a Zulu impi.
+
+Now, first, as to the impossibility of getting our great army into
+existence. All those people who write and talk so glibly in favour of
+conscription seem to forget that to take a common man, and more
+particularly a townsman, clap him into a uniform and put a rifle in his
+hand does not make a soldier. He has to be taught not only the use of
+his weapons, but the methods of a strange and unfamiliar life out of
+doors; he has to be not simply drilled, but accustomed to the difficult
+modern necessities of open order fighting, of taking cover, of
+entrenchment, and he has to have created within him, so that it will
+stand the shock of seeing men killed round about him, confidence in
+himself, in his officers, and the methods and weapons of his side.
+Body, mind, and imagination have all to be trained--and they need
+trainers. The conversion of a thousand citizens into anything better
+than a sheep-like militia demands the enthusiastic services of scores of
+able and experienced instructors who know what war is; the creation of a
+universal army demands the services of many scores of thousands of not
+simply "old soldiers," but keen, expert, modern-minded _officers_.
+
+Without these officers our citizen army would be a hydra without heads.
+And we haven't these officers. We haven't a tithe of them.
+
+We haven't these officers, and we can't make them in a hurry. It takes
+at least five years to make an officer who knows his trade. It needs a
+special gift, in addition to that knowledge, to make a man able to
+impart it. And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter,
+because India and our other vast areas of service and opportunity
+overseas drain away a large proportion of just those able and educated
+men who would in other countries gravitate towards the army. Such small
+wealth of officers as we have--and I am quite prepared to believe that
+the officers we have are among the very best in the world--are scarcely
+enough to go round our present supply of private soldiers. And the best
+and most brilliant among this scanty supply are being drawn upon more
+and more for aerial work, and for all that increasing quantity of highly
+specialised services which are manifestly destined to be the real
+fighting forces of the future. We cannot spare the best of our officers
+for training conscripts; we shall get the dismallest results from the
+worst of them; and so even if it were a vital necessity for our country
+to have an army of all its manhood now, we could not have it, and it
+would be a mere last convulsion to attempt to make it with the means at
+our disposal.
+
+But that brings me to my second contention, which is that we do not want
+such an army. I believe that the vast masses of men in uniform
+maintained by the Continental Powers at the present time are enormously
+overrated as fighting machines. I see Germany in the likeness of a boxer
+with a mailed fist as big as and rather heavier than its body, and I am
+convinced that when the moment comes for that mailed fist to be lifted,
+the whole disproportionate system will topple over. The military
+ascendancy of the future lies with the country that dares to experiment
+most, that experiments best, and meanwhile keeps its actual fighting
+force fit and admirable and small and flexible. The experience of war
+during the last fifteen years has been to show repeatedly the enormous
+defensive power of small, scientifically handled bodies of men. These
+huge conscript armies are made up not of masses of military muscle, but
+of a huge proportion of military fat. Their one way of fighting will be
+to fall upon an antagonist with all their available weight, and if he is
+mobile and dexterous enough to decline that issue of adiposity they will
+become a mere embarrassment to their own people. Modern weapons and
+modern contrivance are continually decreasing the number of men who can
+be employed efficiently upon a length of front. I doubt if there is any
+use for more than 400,000 men upon the whole Franco-Belgian frontier at
+the present time. Such an army, properly supplied, could--so far as
+terrestrial forces are concerned--hold that frontier against any number
+of assailants. The bigger the forces brought against it the sooner the
+exhaustion of the attacking power. Now, it is for employment upon that
+frontier, and for no other conceivable purpose in the world, that Great
+Britain is asked to create a gigantic conscript army.
+
+And if too big an army is likely to be a mere encumbrance in war, it is
+perhaps even a still graver blunder to maintain one during that conflict
+of preparation which is at present the European substitute for actual
+hostilities. It consumes. It produces nothing. It not only eats and
+drinks and wears out its clothes and withdraws men from industry, but
+under the stress of invention it needs constantly to be re-armed and
+freshly equipped at an expenditure proportionate to its size. So long as
+the conflict of preparation goes on, then the bigger the army your
+adversary maintains under arms the bigger is his expenditure and the
+less his earning power. The less the force you employ to keep your
+adversary over-armed, and the longer you remain at peace with him while
+he is over-armed, the greater is your advantage. There is only one
+profitable use for any army, and that is victorious conflict. Every army
+that is not engaged in victorious conflict is an organ of national
+expenditure, an exhausting growth in the national body. And for Great
+Britain an attempt to create a conscript army would involve the very
+maximum of moral and material exhaustion with the minimum of military
+efficiency. It would be a disastrous waste of resources that we need
+most urgently for other things.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+In the popular imagination the Dreadnought is still the one instrument
+of naval war. We count our strength in Dreadnoughts and
+Super-Dreadnoughts, and so long as we are spending our national
+resources upon them faster than any other country, if we sink at least
+Ł160 for every Ł100 sunk in these obsolescent monsters by Germany, we
+have a reassuring sense of keeping ahead and being thoroughly safe. This
+confidence in big, very expensive battleships is, I believe and hope,
+shared by the German Government and by Europe generally, but it is,
+nevertheless, a very unreasonable confidence, and it may easily lead us
+into the most tragic of national disillusionments.
+
+We of the general public are led to suppose that the next naval war--if
+ever we engage in another naval war--will begin with a decisive fleet
+action. The plan of action is presented with an alluring simplicity. Our
+adversary will come out to us, in a ratio of 10 to 16, or in some ratio
+still more advantageous to us, according as our adversary happens to be
+this Power or that Power, there will be some tremendous business with
+guns and torpedoes, and our admirals will return victorious to discuss
+the discipline and details of the battle and each other's little
+weaknesses in the monthly magazines. This is a desirable but improbable
+anticipation. No hostile Power is in the least likely to send out any
+battleships at all against our invincible Dreadnoughts. They will
+promenade the seas, always in the ratio of 16 or more to 10, looking for
+fleets securely tucked away out of reach. They will not, of course, go
+too near the enemy's coast, on account of mines, and, meanwhile, our
+cruisers will hunt the enemy's commerce into port.
+
+Then other things will happen.
+
+The enemy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike devices against our
+capital ships. Unless he is a lunatic, he will prove to be much stronger
+in reality than he is on paper in the matter of submarines,
+torpedo-boats, waterplanes and aeroplanes. These are things cheap to
+make and easy to conceal. He will be richly stocked with ingenious
+devices for getting explosives up to these two million pound triumphs of
+our naval engineering. On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent about
+these islands he will have extraordinary chances, and sooner or later,
+unless we beat him thoroughly in the air above and in the waters
+beneath, for neither of which proceedings we are prepared, some of these
+chances will come off, and we shall lose a Dreadnought.
+
+It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and stranded Zeppelin or
+so enlivens the quiet of the English countryside by coming down and
+capitulating. It will be a trifling countershock to wing an aeroplane or
+so, or blow a torpedo-boat out of the water. Our Dreadnoughts will cease
+to be a source of unmitigated confidence A second battleship disaster
+will excite the Press extremely. A third will probably lead to a
+retirement of the battle fleet to some east coast harbour, a refuge
+liable to aeroplanes, or to the west coast of Ireland--and the real
+naval war, which, as I have argued in an earlier chapter, will be a war
+of destroyers, submarines and hydroplanes, will begin. Incidentally a
+commerce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement of our fleet to
+raid our trade routes.
+
+We shall then realise that the actual naval weapons are these smaller
+weapons, and especially the destroyer, the submarine, and the
+waterplane--the waterplane most of all, because of its possibilities of
+a comparative bigness--in the hands of competent and daring men. And I
+find myself, as a patriotic Englishman, more and more troubled by doubts
+whether we are as certainly superior to any possible adversary in these
+essential things as we are in the matter of Dreadnoughts. I find myself
+awake at nights, after a day much agitated by a belligerent Press,
+wondering whether the real Empire of the Sea may not even now have
+slipped out of our hands while our attention has been fixed on our
+stately procession of giant warships, while our country has been in a
+dream, hypnotised by the Dreadnought idea.
+
+For some years there seems to have been a complete arrest of the British
+imagination in naval and military matters. That declining faculty, never
+a very active or well-exercised one, staggered up to the conception of a
+Dreadnought, and seems now to have sat down for good. Its reply to every
+demand upon it has been "more Dreadnoughts." The future, as we British
+seem to see it, is an avenue of Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts and
+Super-Super-Dreadnoughts, getting bigger and bigger in a kind of
+inverted perspective. But the ascendancy of fleets of great battleships
+in naval warfare, like the phase of huge conscript armies upon land,
+draws to its close. The progress of invention makes both the big ship
+and the army crowd more and more vulnerable and less and less effective.
+A new phase of warfare opens beyond the vista of our current programmes.
+Smaller, more numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft and
+contrivances, manned by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimately
+take the place of those massivenesses. We are entering upon a period in
+which the invention of methods and material for war is likely to be more
+rapid and diversified than it has ever been before, and the question of
+what we have been doing behind the splendid line of our Dreadnoughts to
+meet the demands of this new phase is one of supreme importance.
+Knowing, as I do, the imaginative indolence of my countrymen, it is a
+question I face with something very near to dismay.
+
+But it is one that has to be faced. The question that should occupy our
+directing minds now is no longer "How can we get more Dreadnoughts?" but
+"What have we to follow the Dreadnought?"
+
+To the Power that has most nearly guessed the answer to that riddle
+belongs the future Empire of the Seas. It is interesting to guess for
+oneself and to speculate upon the possibility of a kind of armoured
+mother-ship for waterplanes and submarines and torpedo craft, but
+necessarily that would be a mere journalistic and amateurish guessing. I
+am not guessing, but asking urgent questions. What force, what council,
+how many imaginative and inventive men has the country got at the
+present time employed not casually but professionally in anticipating
+the new strategy, the new tactics, the new material, the new training
+that invention is so rapidly rendering necessary? I have the gravest
+doubts whether we are doing anything systematic at all in this way.
+
+Now, it is the tremendous seriousness of this deficiency to which I want
+to call attention. Great Britain has in her armour a gap more dangerous
+and vital than any mere numerical insufficiency of men or ships. She is
+short of minds. Behind its strength of current armaments to-day, a
+strength that begins to evaporate and grow obsolete from the very moment
+it comes into being, a country needs more and more this profounder
+strength of intellectual and creative activity.
+
+This country most of all, which was left so far behind in the production
+of submarines, airships and aeroplanes, must be made to realise the
+folly of its trust in established things. Each new thing we take up more
+belatedly and reluctantly than its predecessor. The time is not far
+distant when we shall be "caught" lagging unless we change all this.
+
+We need a new arm to our service; we need it urgently, and we shall need
+it more and more, and that arm is Research. We need to place inquiry and
+experiment upon a new footing altogether, to enlist for them and
+organise them, to secure the pick of our young chemists and physicists
+and engineers, and to get them to work systematically upon the
+anticipation and preparation of our future war equipment. We need a
+service of invention to recover our lost lead in these matters.
+
+And it is because I feel so keenly the want of such a service, and the
+want of great sums of money for it, that I deplore the disposition to
+waste millions upon the hasty creation of a universal service army and
+upon excessive Dreadnoughting. I am convinced that we are spending upon
+the things of yesterday the money that is sorely needed for the things
+of to-morrow.
+
+With our eyes averted obstinately from the future we are backing towards
+disaster.
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+In the present armament competition there are certain considerations
+that appear to be almost universally overlooked, and which tend to
+modify our views profoundly of what should be done. Ultimately they will
+affect our entire expenditure upon war preparation.
+
+Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into two classes:
+there is expenditure upon things that have a diminishing value, things
+that grow old-fashioned and wear out, such as fortifications, ships,
+guns, and ammunition, and expenditure upon things that have a permanent
+and even growing value, such as organised technical research, military
+and naval experiment, and the education and increase of a highly trained
+class of war experts.
+
+I want to suggest that we are spending too much money in the former and
+not enough in the latter direction We are buying enormous quantities of
+stuff that will be old iron in twenty years' time, and we are starving
+ourselves of that which cannot be bought or made in a hurry, and upon
+which the strength of nations ultimately rests altogether; we are
+failing to get and maintain a sufficiency of highly educated and
+developed men inspired by a tradition of service and efficiency.
+
+No doubt we must be armed to-day, but every penny we divert from
+men-making and knowledge-making to armament beyond the margin of bare
+safety is a sacrifice of the future to the present. Every penny we
+divert from national wealth-making to national weapons means so much
+less in resources, so much more strain in the years ahead. But a great
+system of laboratories and experimental stations, a systematic,
+industrious increase of men of the officer-aviator type, of the
+research student type, of the engineer type, of the naval-officer type,
+of the skilled sergeant-instructor type, a methodical development of a
+common sentiment and a common zeal among such a body of men, is an added
+strength that grows greater from the moment you call it into being. In
+our schools and military and naval colleges lies the proper field for
+expenditure upon preparation for our ultimate triumph in war. All other
+war preparation is temporary but that.
+
+This would be obvious in any case, but what makes insistence upon it
+peculiarly urgent is the manifestly temporary nature of the present
+European situation and the fact that within quite a small number of
+years our war front will be turned in a direction quite other than that
+to which it faces now.
+
+For a decade and more all Western Europe has been threatened by German
+truculence; the German, inflamed by the victories of 1870 and 1871, has
+poured out his energy in preparation for war by sea and land, and it has
+been the difficult task of France and England to keep the peace with
+him. The German has been the provocator and leader of all modern
+armaments. But that is not going on. It is already more than half over.
+If we can avert war with Germany for twenty years, we shall never have
+to fight Germany. In twenty years' time we shall be talking no more of
+sending troops to fight side by side on the frontier of France; we shall
+be talking of sending troops to fight side by side with French and
+Germans on the frontiers of Poland.
+
+And the justification of that prophecy is a perfectly plain one. The
+German has filled up his country, his birth-rate falls, and the very
+vigour of his military and naval preparations, by raising the cost of
+living, hurries it down. His birth-rate falls as ours and the
+Frenchman's falls, because he is nearing his maximum of population It is
+an inevitable consequence of his geographical conditions. But eastward
+of him, from his eastern boundaries to the Pacific, is a country already
+too populous to conquer, but with possibilities of further expansion
+that are gigantic. The Slav will be free to increase and multiply for
+another hundred years. Eastward and southward bristle the Slavs, and
+behind the Slavs are the colossal possibilities of Asia.
+
+Even German vanity, even the preposterous ambitions that spring from
+that brief triumph of Sedan, must awaken at last to these manifest
+facts, and on the day when Germany is fully awake we may count the
+Western European Armageddon as "off" and turn our eyes to the greater
+needs that will arise beyond Germany. The old game will be over and a
+quite different new game will begin in international relations.
+
+During these last few years of worry and bluster across the North Sea we
+have a little forgotten India in our calculations. As Germany faces
+round eastward again, as she must do before very long, we shall find
+India resuming its former central position in our ideas of international
+politics. With India we may pursue one of two policies: we may keep her
+divided and inefficient for war, as she is at present, and hold her and
+own her and defend her as a prize, or we may arm her and assist her
+development into a group of quasi-independent English-speaking
+States--in which case she will become our partner and possibly at last
+even our senior partner. But that is by the way. What I am pointing out
+now is that whether we fight Germany or not, a time is drawing near
+when Germany will cease to be our war objective and we shall cease to be
+Germany's war objective, and when there will have to be a complete
+revision of our military and naval equipment in relation to those
+remoter, vaster Asiatic possibilities.
+
+Now that possible campaign away there, whatever its particular nature
+may be, which will be shaping our military and naval policy in the year
+1933 or thereabouts, will certainly be quite different in its conditions
+from the possible campaign in Europe and the narrow seas which
+determines all our preparations now. We cannot contemplate throwing an
+army of a million British conscripts on to the North-West Frontier of
+India, and a fleet of Super-Dreadnoughts will be ineffective either in
+Thibet or the Baltic shallows. All our present stuff, indeed, will be on
+the scrap-heap then. What will not be on the scrap-heap will be such
+enterprise and special science and inventive power as we have got
+together. That is versatile. That is good to have now and that will be
+good to have then.
+
+Everyone nowadays seems demanding increased expenditure upon war
+preparation. I will follow the fashion. I will suggest that we have the
+courage to restrain and even to curtail our monstrous outlay upon war
+material and that we begin to spend lavishly upon military and naval
+education and training, upon laboratories and experimental stations,
+upon chemical and physical research and all that makes knowledge and
+leading, and that we increase our expenditure upon these things as fast
+as we can up to ten or twelve millions a year. At present we spend about
+eighteen and a half millions a year upon education out of our national
+funds, but fourteen and a half of this, supplemented by about as much
+again from local sources, is consumed in merely elementary teaching. So
+that we spend only about four millions a year of public money on every
+sort of research and education above the simple democratic level. Nearly
+thirty millions for the foundations and only a seventh for the edifice
+of will and science! Is it any marvel that we are a badly organised
+nation, a nation of very widely diffused intelligence and very
+second-rate guidance and achievement? Is it any marvel that directly we
+are tested by such a new development as that of aeroplanes or airships
+we show ourselves in comparison with the more braced-up nations of the
+Continent backward, unorganised unimaginative, unenterprising?
+
+Our supreme want to-day, if we are to continue a belligerent people, is
+a greater supply of able educated men, versatile men capable of engines,
+of aviation, of invention, of leading and initiative. We need more
+laboratories, more scholarships out of the general mass of elementary
+scholars, a quasi-military discipline in our colleges and a great array
+of new colleges, a much readier access to instruction in aviation and
+military and naval practice. And if we are to have national service let
+us begin with it where it is needed most and where it is least likely to
+disorganise our social and economic life; let us begin at the top. Let
+us begin with the educated and propertied classes and exact a couple of
+years' service in a destroyer or a waterplane, or an airship, or a,
+research laboratory, or a training camp, from the sons of everybody who,
+let us say, pays income tax without deductions. Let us mix with these a
+big proportion--a proportion we may increase steadily--of keen
+scholarship men from the elementary schools. Such a braced-up class as
+we should create in this way would give us the realities of military
+power, which are enterprise, knowledge, and invention; and at the same
+time it would add to and not subtract from the economic wealth of the
+community Make men; that is the only sane, permanent preparation for
+war. So we should develop a strength and create a tradition that would
+not rust nor grow old-fashioned in all the years to come.
+
+
+
+
+THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL
+
+
+Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times about
+the business of writing novels, and what it means, and is, and may be;
+and I was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. I
+have been writing novels, or writing about novels, for the last twenty
+years. It seems only yesterday that I wrote a review--the first long and
+appreciative review he had--of Mr. Joseph Conrad's "Almayer's Folly" in
+the _Saturday Review_. When a man has focussed so much of his life upon
+the novel, it is not reasonable to expect him to take too modest or
+apologetic a view of it. I consider the novel an important and necessary
+thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments and
+readjustments which is modern civilisation I make very high and wide
+claims for it. In many directions I do not think we can get along
+without it.
+
+Now this, I know, is not the usually received opinion. There is, I am
+aware, the theory that the novel is wholly and solely a means of
+relaxation. In spite of manifest facts, that was the dominant view of
+the great period that we now in our retrospective way speak of as the
+Victorian, and it still survives to this day. It is the man's theory of
+the novel rather than the woman's. One may call it the Weary Giant
+theory. The reader is represented as a man, burthened, toiling, worn. He
+has been in his office from ten to four, with perhaps only two hours'
+interval at his club for lunch; or he has been playing golf; or he has
+been waiting about and voting in the House; or he has been fishing; or
+he has been disputing a point of law; or writing a sermon; or doing one
+of a thousand other of the grave important things which constitute the
+substance of a prosperous man's life. Now at last comes the little
+precious interval of leisure, and the Weary Giant takes up a book.
+Perhaps he is vexed: he may have been bunkered, his line may have been
+entangled in the trees, his favourite investment may have slumped, or
+the judge have had indigestion and been extremely rude to him. He wants
+to forget the troublesome realities of life. He wants to be taken out of
+himself, to be cheered, consoled, amused--above all, amused. He doesn't
+want ideas, he doesn't want facts; above all, he doesn't
+want--_Problems_. He wants to dream of the bright, thin, gay excitements
+of a phantom world--in which he can be hero--of horses ridden and lace
+worn and princesses rescued and won. He wants pictures of funny slums,
+and entertaining paupers, and laughable longshoremen, and kindly
+impulses making life sweet. He wants romance without its defiance, and
+humour without its sting; and the business of the novelist, he holds, is
+to supply this cooling refreshment. That is the Weary Giant theory of
+the novel. It ruled British criticism up to the period of the Boer
+war--and then something happened to quite a lot of us, and it has never
+completely recovered its old predominance. Perhaps it will; perhaps
+something else may happen to prevent its ever doing so.
+
+Both fiction and criticism to-day are in revolt against that tired
+giant, the prosperous Englishman. I cannot think of a single writer of
+any distinction to-day, unless it is Mr. W.W. Jacobs, who is content
+merely to serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from the
+weary reader being a decently tired giant, we realise that he is only an
+inexpressibly lax, slovenly and under-trained giant, and we are all out
+with one accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every
+possible way. And so I will say no more of the idea that the novel is
+merely a harmless opiate for the vacant hours of prosperous men. As a
+matter of fact, it never has been, and by its nature I doubt if it ever
+can be.
+
+I do not think that women have ever quite succumbed to the tired giant
+attitude in their reading. Women are more serious, not only about life,
+but about books. No type or kind of woman is capable of that lounging,
+defensive stupidity which is the basis of the tired giant attitude, and
+all through the early 'nineties, during which the respectable frivolity
+of Great Britain left its most enduring marks upon our literature, there
+was a rebel undertow of earnest and aggressive writing and reading,
+supported chiefly by women and supplied very largely by women, which
+gave the lie to the prevailing trivial estimate of fiction. Among
+readers, women and girls and young men at least will insist upon having
+their novels significant and real, and it is to these perpetually
+renewed elements in the public that the novelist must look for his
+continuing emancipation from the wearier and more massive influences at
+work in contemporary British life.
+
+And if the novel is to be recognised as something more than a
+relaxation, it has also, I think, to be kept free from the restrictions
+imposed upon it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define a
+general form for it. Every art nowadays must steer its way between the
+rocks of trivial and degrading standards and the whirlpool of arbitrary
+and irrational criticism. Whenever criticism of any art becomes
+specialised and professional whenever a class of adjudicators is brought
+into existence, those adjudicators are apt to become as a class
+distrustful of their immediate impressions, and anxious for methods of
+comparison between work and work, they begin to emulate the
+classifications and exact measurements of a science, and to set up
+ideals and rules as data for such classification and measurements. They
+develop an alleged sense of technique, which is too often no more than
+the attempt to exact a laboriousness of method, or to insist upon
+peculiarities of method which impress the professional critic not so
+much as being merits as being meritorious. This sort of thing has gone
+very far with the critical discussion both of the novel and the play.
+You have all heard that impressive dictum that some particular
+theatrical display, although moving, interesting, and continually
+entertaining from start to finish, was for occult technical reasons "not
+a play," and in the same way you are continually having your
+appreciation of fiction dashed by the mysterious parallel condemnation,
+that the story you like "isn't a novel." The novel has been treated as
+though its form was as well-defined as the sonnet. Some year or so ago,
+for example, there was a quite serious discussion, which began, I
+believe, in a weekly paper devoted to the interests of various
+nonconformist religious organisations, about the proper length for a
+novel. The critic was to begin his painful duties with a yard measure.
+The matter was taken up with profound gravity by the _Westminster
+Gazette_, and a considerable number of literary men and women were
+circularised and asked to state, in the face of "Tom Jones," "The Vicar
+of Wakefield," "The Shabby-Genteel Story," and "Bleak House," just
+exactly how long the novel ought to be. Our replies varied according to
+the civility of our natures, but the mere attempt to raise the question
+shows, I think, how widespread among the editorial, paragraph-writing,
+opinion-making sort of people is this notion of prescribing a definite
+length and a definite form for the novel. In the newspaper
+correspondence that followed, our friend the weary giant made a
+transitory appearance again. We were told the novel ought to be long
+enough for him to take up after dinner and finish before his whisky at
+eleven.
+
+That was obviously a half-forgotten echo of Edgar Allan Poe's discussion
+of the short story. Edgar Allan Poe was very definite upon the point
+that the short story should be finished at a sitting. But the novel and
+short story are two entirely different things, and the train of
+reasoning that made the American master limit the short story to about
+an hour of reading as a maximum, does not apply to the longer work. A
+short story is, or should be, a simple thing; it aims at producing one
+single, vivid effect; it has to seize the attention at the outset, and
+never relaxing, gather it together more and more until the climax is
+reached. The limits of the human capacity to attend closely therefore
+set a limit to it; it must explode and finish before interruption occurs
+or fatigue sets in. But the novel I hold to be a discursive thing; it is
+not a single interest, but a woven tapestry of interests; one is drawn
+on first by this affection and curiosity, and then by that; it is
+something to return to, and I do not see that we can possibly set any
+limit to its extent. The distinctive value of the novel among written
+works of art is in characterisation, and the charm of a well-conceived
+character lies, not in knowing its destiny, but in watching its
+proceedings. For my own part, I will confess that I find all the novels
+of Dickens, long as they are, too short for me. I am sorry they do not
+flow into one another more than they do. I wish Micawber and Dick
+Swiveller and Sairey Gamp turned up again in other novels than their
+own, just as Shakespeare ran the glorious glow of Falstaff through a
+group of plays. But Dickens tried this once when he carried on the
+Pickwick Club into "Master Humphrey's Clock." That experiment was
+unsatisfactory, and he did not attempt anything of the sort again.
+Following on the days of Dickens, the novel began to contract, to
+subordinate characterisation to story and description to drama;
+considerations of a sordid nature, I am told, had to do with that;
+something about a guinea and a half and six shillings with which we will
+not concern ourselves--but I rejoice to see many signs to-day that that
+phase of narrowing and restriction is over, and that there is every
+encouragement for a return towards a laxer, more spacious form of
+novel-writing. The movement is partly of English origin, a revolt
+against those more exacting and cramping conceptions of artistic
+perfection to which I will recur in a moment, and a return to the lax
+freedom of form, the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam, of the
+earlier English novel, of "Tristram Shandy" and of "Tom Jones"; and
+partly it comes from abroad, and derives a stimulus from such bold and
+original enterprises as that of Monsieur Rolland in his "Jean
+Christophe." Its double origin involves a double nature; for while the
+English spirit is towards discursiveness and variety, the new French
+movement is rather towards exhaustiveness. Mr. Arnold Bennett has
+experimented in both forms of amplitude. His superb "Old Wives' Tale,"
+wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the
+finest "long novel" that has been written in English in the English
+fashion in this generation, and now in "Clayhanger" and its promised
+collaterals, he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant presentation
+of the growth and modification of one or two individual minds, which is
+the essential characteristic of the Continental movement towards the
+novel of amplitude. While the "Old Wives' Tale" is discursive,
+"Clayhanger" is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new movement
+in perfection.
+
+I name "Jean Christophe" as a sort of archetype in this connection,
+because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of the
+admirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greater
+predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a single
+mind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds,
+that comes to us now _via_ Mr. Bennett and Mr. Cannan from France. The
+great original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book of
+Flaubert, "Bouvard et Pécuchet." Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was
+spent upon the most austere and restrained fiction--Turgenev was not
+more austere and restrained--broke out at last into this gay, sad
+miracle of intellectual abundance. It is not extensively read in this
+country; it is not yet, I believe, translated into English; but there it
+is--and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the secret
+of a book that is a precious wilderness of wonderful reading. But if
+Flaubert is really the Continental emancipator of the novel from the
+restrictions of form, the master to whom we of the English persuasion,
+we of the discursive school, must for ever recur is he, whom I will
+maintain against all comers to be the subtlest and greatest _artist_--I
+lay stress upon that word artist--that Great Britain has ever produced
+in all that is essentially the novel, Laurence Sterne....
+
+The confusion between the standards of a short story and the standards
+of the novel which leads at last to these--what shall I call
+them?--_Westminster Gazettisms?_--about the correct length to which the
+novelist should aspire, leads also to all kinds of absurd condemnations
+and exactions upon matters of method and style. The underlying fallacy
+is always this: the assumption that the novel, like the story, aims at a
+single, concentrated impression. From that comes a fertile growth of
+error. Constantly one finds in the reviews of works of fiction the
+complaint that this, that or the other thing in a novel is irrelevant.
+Now it is the easiest thing, and most fatal thing, to become irrelevant
+in a short story. A short story should go to its point as a man flies
+from a pursuing tiger: he pauses not for the daisies in his path, or to
+note the pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But the novel by
+comparison is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning;
+nothing is irrelevant if the waiter's mood is happy, and the tapping of
+the thrush upon the garden path, or the petal of apple-blossom that
+floats down into my coffee, is as relevant as the egg I open or the
+bread and butter I bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the
+tense illusion which is the aim of the short story--the introduction,
+for example, of the author's personality--any comment that seems to
+admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between
+part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such thing's are not
+necessarily wrong in the novel. Of course, all these things may fail in
+their effect; they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to
+do well; but it is no artistic merit to evade a difficulty any more than
+it is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the highest of fences. Nearly
+all the novels that have, by the lapse of time, reached an assured
+position of recognised greatness, are not only saturated in the
+personality of the author, but have in addition quite unaffected
+personal outbreaks. The least successful instance the one that is made
+the text against all such first-personal interventions, is, of course,
+Thackeray. But I think the trouble with Thackeray is not that he makes
+first-personal interventions, but that he does so with a curious touch
+of dishonesty. I agree with the late Mrs. Craigie that there was
+something profoundly vulgar about Thackeray. It was a sham thoughtful,
+sham man-of-the-world pose he assumed; it is an aggressive, conscious,
+challenging person astride before a fire, and a little distended by
+dinner and a sense of social and literary precedences, who uses the
+first person in Thackeray's novels. It isn't the real Thackeray; it
+isn't a frank man who looks you in the eyes and bares his soul and
+demands your sympathy. That is a criticism of Thackeray, but it isn't a
+condemnation of intervention.
+
+I admit that for a novelist to come in person in this way before his
+readers involves grave risks; but when it is done without affectations,
+starkly as a man comes in out of the darkness to tell of perplexing
+things without--as, for instance, Mr. Joseph Conrad does for all
+practical purposes in his "Lord Jim"--then it gives a sort of depth, a
+sort of subjective reality, that no such cold, almost affectedly
+ironical detachment as that which distinguishes the work of Mr. John
+Galsworthy, for example, can ever attain. And in some cases the whole
+art and delight of a novel may lie in the author's personal
+interventions; let such novels as "Elizabeth and her German Garden," and
+the same writer's "Elizabeth in Rügen," bear witness.
+
+Now, all this time I have been hacking away at certain hampering and
+limiting beliefs about the novel, letting it loose, as it were, in form
+and purpose; I have still to say just what I think the novel is, and
+where, if anywhere, its boundary-line ought to be drawn. It is by no
+means an easy task to define the novel. It is not a thing premeditated.
+It is a thing that has grown up into modern life, and taken upon itself
+uses and produced results that could not have been foreseen by its
+originators. Few of the important things in the collective life of man
+started out to be what they are. Consider, for example, all the
+unexpected aesthetic values, the inspiration and variety of emotional
+result which arises out of the cross-shaped plan of the Gothic
+cathedral, and the undesigned delight and wonder of white marble that
+has ensued, as I have been told, through the ageing and whitening of the
+realistically coloured statuary of the Greeks and Romans. Much of the
+charm of the old furniture and needlework, again, upon which the present
+time sets so much store, lies in acquired and unpremeditated qualities.
+And no doubt the novel grew up out of simple story-telling, and the
+universal desire of children, old and young alike, for a story. It is
+only slowly that we have developed the distinction of the novel from the
+romance, as being a story of human beings, absolutely credible and
+conceivable as distinguished from human beings frankly endowed with the
+glamour, the wonder, the brightness, of a less exacting and more vividly
+eventful world. The novel is a story that demands, or professes to
+demand, no make-believe. The novelist undertakes to present you people
+and things as real as any that you can meet in an omnibus. And I suppose
+it is conceivable that a novel might exist which was just purely a story
+of that kind and nothing more. It might amuse you as one is amused by
+looking out of a window into a street, or listening to a piece of
+agreeable music, and that might be the limit of its effect. But almost
+always the novel is something more than that, and produces more effect
+than that. The novel has inseparable moral consequences. It leaves
+impressions, not simply of things seen, but of acts judged and made
+attractive or unattractive. They may prove very slight moral
+consequences, and very shallow moral impressions in the long run, but
+there they are, none the less, its inevitable accompaniments. It is
+unavoidable that this should be so. Even if the novelist attempts or
+affects to be impartial, he still cannot prevent his characters setting
+examples; he still cannot avoid, as people say, putting ideas into his
+readers' heads. The greater his skill, the more convincing his treatment
+the more vivid his power of suggestion. And it is equally impossible for
+him not to betray his sense that the proceedings of this person are
+rather jolly and admirable, and of that, rather ugly and detestable. I
+suppose Mr. Bennett, for example, would say that he should not do so;
+but it is as manifest to any disinterested observer that he greatly
+loves and admires his Card, as that Richardson admired his Sir Charles
+Grandison, or that Mrs. Humphry Ward considers her Marcella a very fine
+and estimable young woman. And I think it is just in this, that the
+novel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study and
+judgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct,
+that the real and increasing value--or perhaps to avoid controversy I
+had better say the real and increasing importance--of the novel and of
+the novelist in modern life comes in.
+
+It is no new discovery that the novel, like the drama, is a powerful
+instrument of moral suggestion. This has been understood in England ever
+since there has been such a thing as a novel in England. This has been
+recognised equally by novelists, novel-readers, and the people who
+wouldn't read novels under any condition whatever. Richardson wrote
+deliberately for edification, and "Tom Jones" is a powerful and
+effective appeal for a charitable, and even indulgent, attitude towards
+loose-living men. But excepting Fielding and one or two other of those
+partial exceptions that always occur in the case of critical
+generalisations, there is a definable difference between the novel of
+the past and what I may call the modern novel. It is a difference that
+is reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general way of
+thinking. It lies in the fact that formerly there was a feeling of
+certitude about moral values and standards of conduct that is altogether
+absent to-day. It wasn't so much that men were agreed upon these
+things--about these things there have always been enormous divergences
+of opinion--as that men were emphatic, cocksure, and unteachable about
+whatever they did happen to believe to a degree that no longer obtains.
+This is the Balfourian age, and even religion seeks to establish itself
+on doubt. There were, perhaps, just as many differences in the past as
+there are now, but the outlines were harder--they were, indeed, so hard
+as to be almost, to our sense, savage. You might be a Roman Catholic,
+and in that case you did not want to hear about Protestants, Turks,
+Infidels, except in tones of horror and hatred. You knew exactly what
+was good and what was evil. Your priest informed you upon these points,
+and all you needed in any novel you read was a confirmation, implicit or
+explicit, of these vivid, rather than charming, prejudices. If you were
+a Protestant you were equally clear and unshakable. Your sect, whichever
+sect you belonged to, knew the whole of truth and included all the nice
+people. It had nothing to learn in the world, and it wanted to learn
+nothing outside its sectarian convictions. The unbelievers you know,
+were just as bad, and said their creeds with an equal fury--merely
+interpolating _nots_. People of every sort--Catholic, Protestant,
+Infidel, or what not--were equally clear that good was good and bad was
+bad, that the world was made up of good characters whom you had to love,
+help and admire, and of bad characters to whom one might, in the
+interests of goodness, even lie, and whom one had to foil, defeat and
+triumph over shamelessly at every opportunity. That was the quality of
+the times. The novel reflected this quality of assurance, and its utmost
+charity was to unmask an apparent villain and show that he or she was
+really profoundly and correctly good, or to unmask an apparent saint
+and show the hypocrite. There was no such penetrating and pervading
+element of doubt and curiosity--and charity, about the rightfulness and
+beauty of conduct, such as one meets on every hand to-day.
+
+The novel-reader of the past, therefore, like the novel-reader of the
+more provincial parts of England to-day, judged a novel by the
+convictions that had been built up in him by his training and his priest
+or his pastor. If it agreed with these convictions he approved; if it
+did not agree he disapproved--often with great energy. The novel, where
+it was not unconditionally banned altogether as a thing disturbing and
+unnecessary, was regarded as a thing subordinated to the teaching of the
+priest or pastor, or whatever director and dogma was followed. Its
+modest moral confirmations began when authority had completed its
+direction. The novel was good--if it seemed to harmonise with the graver
+exercises conducted by Mr. Chadband--and it was bad and outcast if Mr.
+Chadband said so. And it is over the bodies of discredited and
+disgruntled Chadbands that the novel escapes from its servitude and
+inferiority.
+
+Now the conflict of authority against criticism is one of the eternal
+conflicts of humanity. It is the conflict of organisation against
+initiative, of discipline against freedom. It was the conflict of the
+priest against the prophet in ancient Judaea, of the Pharisee against
+the Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of the Church
+against the Franciscan and the Lollard, of the Respectable Person
+against the Artist, of the hedge-clippers of mankind against the
+shooting buds. And to-day, while we live in a period of tightening and
+extending social organisation, we live also in a period of adventurous
+and insurgent thought, in an intellectual spring unprecedented in the
+world's history. There is an enormous criticism going on of the faiths
+upon which men's lives and associations are based, and of every standard
+and rule of conduct. And it is inevitable that the novel, just in the
+measure of its sincerity and ability, should reflect and co-operate in
+the atmosphere and uncertainties and changing variety of this seething
+and creative time.
+
+And I do not mean merely that the novel is unavoidably charged with the
+representation of this wide and wonderful conflict. It is a necessary
+part of the conflict. The essential characteristic of this great
+intellectual revolution amidst which we are living to-day, that
+revolution of which the revival and restatement of nominalism under the
+name of pragmatism is the philosophical aspect, consists in the
+reassertion of the importance of the individual instance as against the
+generalisation. All our social, political, moral problems are being
+approached in a new spirit, in an inquiring and experimental spirit,
+which has small respect for abstract principles and deductive rules. We
+perceive more and more clearly, for example, that the study of social
+organisation is an empty and unprofitable study until we approach it as
+a study of the association and inter-reaction of individualised human
+beings inspired by diversified motives, ruled by traditions, and swayed
+by the suggestions of a complex intellectual atmosphere. And all our
+conceptions of the relationships between man and man, and of justice and
+rightfulness and social desirableness, remain something misfitting and
+inappropriate, something uncomfortable and potentially injurious, as if
+we were trying to wear sharp-edged clothes made for a giant out of tin,
+until we bring them to the test and measure of realised individualities.
+
+And this is where the value and opportunity of the modern novel comes
+in. So far as I can see, it is the only medium through which we can
+discuss the great majority of the problems which are being raised in
+such bristling multitude by our contemporary social development Nearly
+every one of those problems has at its core a psychological problem, and
+not merely a psychological problem, but one in which the idea of
+individuality is an essential factor. Dealing with most of these
+questions by a rule or a generalisation is like putting a cordon round a
+jungle full of the most diversified sort of game. The hunting only
+begins when you leave the cordon behind you and push into the thickets.
+
+Take, for example, the immense cluster of difficulties that arises out
+of the increasing complexity of our state. On every hand we are creating
+officials, and compared with only a few years ago the private life in a
+dozen fresh directions comes into contact with officialdom. But we still
+do practically nothing to work out the interesting changes that occur in
+this sort of man and that, when you withdraw him as it were from the
+common crowd of humanity, put his mind if not his body into uniform and
+endow him with powers and functions and rules. It is manifestly a study
+of the profoundest public and personal importance. It is manifestly a
+study of increasing importance. The process of social and political
+organisation that has been going on for the last quarter of a century is
+pretty clearly going on now if anything with increasing vigour--and for
+the most part the entire dependence of the consequences of the whole
+problem upon the reaction between the office on the one hand and the
+weak, uncertain, various human beings who take office on the other,
+doesn't seem even to be suspected by the energetic, virtuous and more or
+less amiable people whose activities in politics and upon the backstairs
+of politics bring about these developments. They assume that the sort of
+official they need, a combination of god-like virtue and intelligence
+with unfailing mechanical obedience, can be made out of just any young
+nephew. And I know of no means of persuading people that this is a
+rather unjustifiable assumption, and of creating an intelligent
+controlling criticism of officials and of assisting conscientious
+officials to an effective self-examination, and generally of keeping the
+atmosphere of official life sweet and healthy, except the novel. Yet so
+far the novel has scarcely begun its attack upon this particular field
+of human life, and all the attractive varied play of motive it contains.
+
+Of course we have one supreme and devastating study of the illiterate
+minor official in Bumble. That one figure lit up and still lights the
+whole problem of Poor Law administration for the English reading
+community. It was a translation of well-meant regulations and
+pseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, arrogant,
+ill-bred flesh and blood. It was worth a hundred Royal Commissions. You
+may make your regulations as you please, said Dickens in effect; this is
+one sample of the stuff that will carry them out. But Bumble stands
+almost alone. Instead of realising that he is only one aspect of
+officialdom, we are all too apt to make him the type of all officials,
+and not an urban district council can get into a dispute about its
+electric light without being denounced as a Bumbledom by some whirling
+enemy or other. The burthen upon Bumble's shoulders is too heavy to be
+borne, and we want the contemporary novel to give us a score of other
+figures to put beside him, other aspects and reflections upon this great
+problem of officialism made flesh. Bumble is a magnificent figure of the
+follies and cruelties of ignorance in office--I would have every
+candidate for the post of workhouse master pass a severe examination
+upon "Oliver Twist"--but it is not only caricature and satire I demand.
+We must have not only the fullest treatment of the temptations,
+vanities, abuses, and absurdities of office, but all its dreams, its
+sense of constructive order, its consolations, its sense of service, and
+its nobler satisfactions. You may say that is demanding more insight and
+power in our novels and novelists than we can possibly hope to find in
+them. So much the worse for us. I stick to my thesis that the
+complicated social organisation of to-day cannot get along without the
+amount of mutual understanding and mutual explanation such a range of
+characterisation in our novels implies. The success of civilisation
+amounts ultimately to a success of sympathy and understanding. If people
+cannot be brought to an interest in one another greater than they feel
+to-day, to curiosities and criticisms far keener, and co-operations far
+subtler, than we have now; if class cannot be brought to measure itself
+against, and interchange experience and sympathy with class, and
+temperament with temperament then we shall never struggle very far
+beyond the confused discomforts and uneasiness of to-day, and the
+changes and complications of human life will remain as they are now,
+very like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense
+avalanche that is sliding down a hill. And in this tremendous work of
+human reconciliation and elucidation, it seems to me it is the novel
+that must attempt most and achieve most.
+
+You may feel disposed to say to all this: We grant the major premises,
+but why look to the work of prose fiction as the main instrument in this
+necessary process of, so to speak, sympathising humanity together?
+Cannot this be done far more effectively through biography and
+autobiography, for example? Isn't there the lyric; and, above all, isn't
+there the play? Well, so far as the stage goes, I think it is a very
+charming and exciting form of human activity, a display of actions and
+surprises of the most moving and impressive sort; but beyond the
+opportunity it affords for saying startling and thought-provoking
+things--opportunities Mr. Shaw, for example, has worked to the utmost
+limit--I do not see that the drama does much to enlarge our sympathies
+and add to our stock of motive ideas. And regarded as a medium for
+startling and thought-provoking things, the stage seems to me an
+extremely clumsy and costly affair. One might just as well go about with
+a pencil writing up the thought-provoking phrase, whatever it is, on
+walls. The drama excites our sympathies intensely, but it seems to me it
+is far too objective a medium to widen them appreciably, and it is that
+widening, that increase in the range of understanding, at which I think
+civilisation is aiming. The case for biography, and more particularly
+autobiography, as against the novel, is, I admit, at the first blush
+stronger. You may say: Why give us these creatures of a novelist's
+imagination, these phantom and fantastic thinkings and doings, when we
+may have the stories of real lives, really lived--the intimate record of
+actual men and women? To which one answers: "Ah, if one could!" But it
+is just because biography does deal with actual lives, actual facts,
+because it radiates out to touch continuing interests and sensitive
+survivors, that it is so unsatisfactory, so untruthful. Its inseparable
+falsehood is the worst of all kinds of falsehood--the falsehood of
+omission. Think what an abounding, astonishing, perplexing person
+Gladstone must have been in life, and consider Lord Morley's "Life of
+Gladstone," cold, dignified--not a life at all, indeed, so much as
+embalmed remains; the fire gone, the passions gone, the bowels carefully
+removed. All biography has something of that post-mortem coldness and
+respect, and as for autobiography--a man may show his soul in a thousand
+half-conscious ways, but to turn upon oneself and explain oneself is
+given to no one. It is the natural liars and braggarts, your Cellinis
+and Casanovas, men with a habit of regarding themselves with a kind of
+objective admiration, who do best in autobiography. And, on the other
+hand, the novel has neither the intense self-consciousness of
+autobiography nor the paralysing responsibilities of the biographer. It
+is by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters are
+figments and phantoms, they can be made entirely transparent. Because
+they are fictions, and you know they are fictions, so that they cannot
+hold you for an instant so soon as they cease to be true, they have a
+power of veracity quite beyond that of actual records. Every novel
+carries its own justification and its own condemnation in its success or
+failure to convince you that _the thing was so_. Now history, biography,
+blue-book and so forth, can hardly ever get beyond the statement that
+the superficial fact was so.
+
+You see now the scope of the claim I am making for the novel; it is to
+be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of
+self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the
+factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social
+dogmas and ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the initiator of
+knowledge, the seed of fruitful self-questioning. Let me be very clear
+here. I do not mean for a moment that the novelist is going to set up as
+a teacher, as a sort of priest with a pen, who will make men and women
+believe and do this and that. The novel is not a new sort of pulpit;
+humanity is passing out of the phase when men _sit under_ preachers and
+dogmatic influences. But the novelist is going to be the most potent of
+artists, because he is going to present conduct, devise beautiful
+conduct, discuss conduct analyse conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate it
+through and through. He will not teach, but discuss, point out, plead,
+and display. And this being my view you will be prepared for the demand
+I am now about to make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist in
+his choice of topic and incident and in his method of treatment; or
+rather, if I may presume to speak for other novelists, I would say it is
+not so much a demand we make as an intention we proclaim. We are going
+to write, subject only to our limitations, about the whole of human
+life. We are going to deal with political questions and religious
+questions and social questions. We cannot present people unless we have
+this free hand, this unrestricted field. What is the good of telling
+stories about people's lives if one may not deal freely with the
+religious beliefs and organisations that have controlled or failed to
+control them? What is the good of pretending to write about love, and
+the loyalties and treacheries and quarrels of men and women, if one must
+not glance at those varieties of physical temperament and organic
+quality, those deeply passionate needs and distresses from which half
+the storms of human life are brewed? We mean to deal with all these
+things, and it will need very much more than the disapproval of
+provincial librarians, the hostility of a few influential people in
+London, the scurrility of one paper, and the deep and obstinate silences
+of another, to stop the incoming tide of aggressive novel-writing. We
+are going to write about it all. We are going to write about business
+and finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and decorum
+and indecorum, until a thousand pretences and ten thousand impostures
+shrivel in the cold, clear air of our elucidations. We are going to
+write of wasted opportunities and latent beauties until a thousand new
+ways of living open to men and women. We are going to appeal to the
+young and the hopeful and the curious, against the established, the
+dignified, and defensive. Before we have done, we will have all life
+within the scope of the novel.
+
+
+
+
+THE PHILOSOPHER'S PUBLIC LIBRARY
+
+
+Suppose a philosopher had a great deal of money to spend--though this is
+not in accordance with experience, it is not inherently impossible--and
+suppose he thought, as any philosopher does think, that the British
+public ought to read much more and better books than they do, and that
+founding public libraries was the way to induce them to do so, what sort
+of public libraries would he found? That, I submit, is a suitable topic
+for a disinterested speculator.
+
+He would, I suppose, being a philosopher, begin by asking himself what a
+library essentially was, and he would probably come to the eccentric
+conclusion that it was essentially a collection of books. He would, in
+his unworldliness, entirely overlook the fact that it might be a job for
+a municipally influential builder, a costly but conspicuous monument to
+opulent generosity, a news-room, an employment bureau, or a
+meeting-place for the glowing young; he would never think for a moment
+of a library as a thing one might build, it would present itself to him
+with astonishing simplicity as a thing one would collect. Bricks ceased
+to be literature after Babylon.
+
+His first proceeding would be, I suppose, to make a list of that
+collection. What books, he would say, have all my libraries to possess
+anyhow? And he would begin to jot down--with the assistance of a few
+friends, perhaps--this essential list.
+
+He would, being a philosopher, insist on good editions, and he would
+also take great pains with the selection. It would not be a limited or
+an exclusive list--when in doubt he would include. He would disregard
+modern fiction very largely, because any book that has any success can
+always be bought for sixpence, and modern poetry, because, with an
+exception or so, it does not signify at all. He would set almost all the
+Greek and Roman literature in well-printed translations and with
+luminous introductions--and if there were no good translations he would
+give some good man Ł500 or so to make one--translations of all that is
+good in modern European literatures, and, last but largest portion of
+his list, editions of all that is worthy of our own. He would make a
+very careful list of thoroughly modern encyclopaedias, atlases, and
+volumes of information, and a particularly complete catalogue of all
+literature that is still copyright; and then--with perhaps a secretary
+or so--he would revise all his lists and mark against every book whether
+he would have two, five or ten or twenty copies, or whatever number of
+copies of it he thought proper in each library.
+
+Then next, being a philosopher, he would decide that if he was going to
+buy a great number of libraries in this way, he was going to make an
+absolutely new sort of demand for these books, and that he was entitled
+to a special sort of supply.
+
+He would not expect the machinery of retail book-selling to meet the
+needs of wholesale buying. So he would go either to wholesale
+booksellers, or directly to the various publishers of the books and
+editions he had chosen, and ask for reasonable special prices for the
+two thousand or seven thousand or fifty thousand of each book he
+required. And the publishers would, of course, give him very special
+prices, more especially in the case of the out-of-copyright books. He
+would probably find it best to buy whole editions in sheets and bind
+them himself in strong bindings. And he would emerge from these
+negotiations in possession of a number of complete libraries each
+of--how many books? Less than twenty thousand ought to do it, I think,
+though that is a matter for separate discussion, and that should cost
+him, buying in this wholesale way, under rather than over Ł2,000 a
+library.
+
+And next he would bethink himself of the readers of these books. "These
+people," he would say, "do not know very much about books, which,
+indeed, is why I am giving them this library."
+
+Accordingly, he would get a number of able and learned people to write
+him guides to his twenty thousand books, and, in fact, to the whole
+world of reading, a guide, for example, to the books on history in
+general, a special guide to books on English history, or French or
+German history, a guide to the books on geology, a guide to poetry and
+poetical criticisms, and so forth.
+
+Some such books our philosopher would find already done--the
+"Bibliography of American History," of the American Libraries'
+Association, for example, and Mr. Nield's "Guide to Historical
+Fiction"--and what are not done he would commission good men to do for
+him. Suppose he had to commission forty such guides altogether and that
+they cost him on the average Ł500 each, for he would take care not to
+sweat their makers, then that would add another Ł20,000 to his
+expenditure. But if he was going to found 400 libraries, let us say,
+that would only be Ł50 a library--a very trivial addition to his
+expenditure.
+
+The rarer books mentioned in these various guides would remind him,
+however, of the many even his ample limit of twenty thousand forced him
+to exclude, and he would, perhaps, consider the need of having two or
+three libraries each for the storage of a hundred thousand books or so
+not kept at the local libraries, but which could be sent to them at a
+day's notice at the request of any reader. And then, and only then,
+would he give his attention to the housing and staffing that this
+reality of books would demand.
+
+Being a philosopher and no fool, he would draw a very clear, hard
+distinction between the reckless endowment of the building trade and the
+dissemination of books. He would distinguish, too, between a library and
+a news-room, and would find no great attraction in the prospect of
+supplying the national youth with free but thumby copies of the sixpenny
+magazines. He would consider that all that was needed for his library
+was, first, easily accessible fireproof shelving for his collection,
+with ample space for his additions, an efficient distributing office, a
+cloak-room, and so forth, and eight or nine not too large, well lit,
+well carpeted, well warmed and well ventilated rooms radiating from that
+office, in which the guides and so forth could be consulted, and where
+those who had no convenient, quiet room at home could read.
+
+He would find that, by avoiding architectural vulgarities, a simple,
+well proportioned building satisfying all these requirements and
+containing housing for the librarian, assistant, custodian and staff
+could be built for between Ł4,000 and Ł5,000, excluding the cost of
+site, and his sites, which he would not choose for their
+conspicuousness, might average something under another Ł1,000.
+
+He would try to make a bargain with the local people for their
+co-operation in his enterprise, though he would, as a philosopher,
+understand that where a public library is least wanted it is generally
+most needed. But in most cases he would succeed in stipulating for a
+certain standard of maintenance by the local authority. Since moderately
+prosperous illiterate men undervalue education and most town councillors
+are moderately illiterate men, he would do his best to keep the salary
+and appointment of the librarian out of such hands. He would stipulate
+for a salary of at least Ł400, in addition to housing, light and heat,
+and he would probably find it advisable to appoint a little committee of
+visitors who would have the power to examine qualifications, endorse the
+appointment, and recommend the dismissal of all his four hundred
+librarians. He would probably try to make the assistantship at Ł100 a
+year or thereabout a sort of local scholarship to be won by competition,
+and only the cleaner and caretaker's place would be left to the local
+politician. And, of course, our philosopher would stipulate that, apart
+from all other expenditure, a sum of at least Ł200 a year should be set
+aside for buying new books.
+
+So our rich philosopher would secure at the minimum cost a number of
+efficiently equipped libraries throughout the country. Eight thousand
+pounds down and Ł900 a year is about as cheap as a public library can
+be. Below that level, it would be cheaper to have no public library.
+Above that level, a public library that is not efficient is either
+dishonestly or incapably organised or managed, or it is serving too
+large a district and needs duplication, or it is trying to do too much.
+
+
+
+
+ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOC
+
+
+It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted
+Pagan God and live upon a ceiling. I crown myself becomingly in stars or
+tendrils or with electric coruscations (as the mood takes me), and wear
+an easy costume free from complications and appropriate to the climate
+of those agreeable spaces. The company about me on the clouds varies
+greatly with the mood of the vision, but always it is in some way, if
+not always a very obvious way, beautiful. One frequent presence is G.K.
+Chesterton, a joyous whirl of brush work, appropriately garmented and
+crowned. When he is there, I remark, the whole ceiling is by a sort of
+radiation convivial. We drink limitless old October from handsome
+flagons, and we argue mightily about Pride (his weak point) and the
+nature of Deity. A hygienic, attentive, and essentially anaesthetic
+Eagle checks, in the absence of exercise, any undue enlargement of our
+Promethean livers.... Chesterton often--but never by any chance Belloc.
+Belloc I admire beyond measure, but there is a sort of partisan
+viciousness about Belloc that bars him from my celestial dreams. He
+never figures, no, not even in the remotest corner, on my ceiling. And
+yet the divine artist, by some strange skill that my ignorance of his
+technique saves me from the presumption of explaining, does indicate
+exactly where Belloc is. A little quiver of the paint, a faint aura,
+about the spectacular masses of Chesterton? I am not certain. But no
+intelligent beholder can look up and miss the remarkable fact that
+Belloc exists--and that he is away, safely away, away in his heaven,
+which is, of course, the Park Lane Imperialist's hell. There he
+presides....
+
+But in this life I do not meet Chesterton exalted upon clouds, and there
+is but the mockery of that endless leisure for abstract discussion
+afforded by my painted entertainments. I live in an urgent and incessant
+world, which is at its best a wildly beautiful confusion of impressions
+and at its worst a dingy uproar. It crowds upon us and jostles us, we
+get our little interludes for thinking and talking between much rough
+scuffling and laying about us with our fists. And I cannot afford to be
+continually bickering with Chesterton and Belloc about forms of
+expression. There are others for whom I want to save my knuckles. One
+may be wasteful in peace and leisure, but economies are the soul of
+conflict.
+
+In many ways we three are closely akin; we diverge not by necessity but
+accident, because we speak in different dialects and have divergent
+metaphysics. All that I can I shall persuade to my way of thinking about
+thought and to the use of words in my loose, expressive manner, but
+Belloc and Chesterton and I are too grown and set to change our
+languages now and learn new ones; we are on different roads, and so we
+must needs shout to one another across intervening abysses. These two
+say Socialism is a thing they do not want for men, and I say Socialism
+is above all what I want for men. We shall go on saying that now to the
+end of our days. But what we do all three want is something very alike.
+Our different roads are parallel. I aim at a growing collective life, a
+perpetually enhanced inheritance for our race, through the fullest,
+freest development of the individual life. What they aim at ultimately I
+do not understand, but it is manifest that its immediate form is the
+fullest and freest development of the individual life. We all three hate
+equally and sympathetically the spectacle of human beings blown up with
+windy wealth and irresponsible power as cruelly and absurdly as boys
+blow up frogs; we all three detest the complex causes that dwarf and
+cripple lives from the moment of birth and starve and debase great
+masses of mankind. We want as universally as possible the jolly life,
+men and women warm-blooded and well-aired, acting freely and joyously,
+gathering life as children gather corn-cockles in corn. We all three
+want people to have property of a real and personal sort, to have the
+son, as Chesterton put it, bringing up the port his father laid down,
+and pride in the pears one has grown in one's own garden. And I agree
+with Chesterton that giving--giving oneself out of love and
+fellowship--is the salt of life.
+
+But there I diverge from him, less in spirit, I think, than in the
+manner of his expression. There is a base because impersonal way of
+giving. "Standing drink," which he praises as noble, is just the thing I
+cannot stand, the ultimate mockery and vulgarisation of that fine act of
+bringing out the cherished thing saved for the heaven-sent guest. It is
+a mere commercial transaction, essentially of the evil of our time.
+Think of it! Two temporarily homeless beings agree to drink together,
+and they turn in and face the public supply of drink (a little vitiated
+by private commercial necessities) in the public-house. (It is horrible
+that life should be so wholesale and heartless.) And Jones, with a
+sudden effusion of manner, thrusts twopence or ninepence (got God knows
+how) into the economic mysteries and personal delicacy of Brown. I'd as
+soon a man slipped sixpence down my neck. If Jones has used love and
+sympathy to detect a certain real thirst and need in Brown and knowledge
+and power in its assuaging by some specially appropriate fluid, then we
+have an altogether different matter; but the common business of
+"standing treat" and giving presents and entertainments is as proud and
+unspiritual as cock-crowing, as foolish and inhuman as that sorry
+compendium of mercantile vices, the game of poker, and I am amazed to
+find Chesterton commend it.
+
+But that is a criticism by the way. Chesterton and Belloc agree with the
+Socialist that the present world does not give at all what they want.
+They agree that it fails to do so through a wild derangement of our
+property relations. They are in agreement with the common contemporary
+man (whose creed is stated, I think, not unfairly, but with the omission
+of certain important articles by Chesterton), that the derangements of
+our property relations are to be remedied by concerted action and in
+part by altered laws. The land and all sorts of great common interests
+must be, if not owned, then at least controlled, managed, checked,
+redistributed by the State. Our real difference is only about a little
+more or a little less owning. I do not see how Belloc and Chesterton can
+stand for anything but a strong State as against those wild monsters of
+property, the strong, big private owners. The State must be complex and
+powerful enough to prevent them. State or plutocrat there is really no
+other practical alternative before the world at the present time. Either
+we have to let the big financial adventurers, the aggregating capitalist
+and his Press, in a loose, informal combination, rule the earth, either
+we have got to stand aside from preventive legislation and leave things
+to work out on their present lines, or we have to construct a collective
+organisation sufficiently strong for the protection of the liberties of
+the some-day-to-be-jolly common man. So far we go in common. If Belloc
+and Chesterton are not Socialists, they are at any rate not
+anti-Socialists. If they say they want an organised Christian State
+(which involves practically seven-tenths of the Socialist desire), then,
+in the face of our big common enemies, of adventurous capital, of alien
+Imperialism, base ambition, base intelligence, and common prejudice and
+ignorance, I do not mean to quarrel with them politically, so long as
+they force no quarrel on me. Their organised Christian State is nearer
+the organised State I want than our present plutocracy. Our ideals will
+fight some day, and it will be, I know, a first-rate fight, but to fight
+now is to let the enemy in. When we have got all we want in common, then
+and only then can we afford to differ. I have never believed that a
+Socialist Party could hope to form a Government in this country in my
+lifetime; I believe it less now than ever I did. I don't know if any of
+my Fabian colleagues entertain so remarkable a hope. But if they do not,
+then unless their political aim is pure cantankerousness, they must
+contemplate a working political combination between the Socialist
+members in Parliament and just that non-capitalist section of the
+Liberal Party for which Chesterton and Belloc speak. Perpetual
+opposition is a dishonourable aim in politics; and a man who mingles in
+political development with no intention of taking on responsible tasks
+unless he gets all his particular formulae accepted is a pervert, a
+victim of Irish bad example, and unfit far decent democratic
+institutions ...
+
+I digress again, I see, but my drift I hope is clear. Differ as we may,
+Belloc and Chesterton are with all Socialists in being on the same side
+of the great political and social cleavage that opens at the present
+time. We and they are with the interests of the mass of common men as
+against that growing organisation of great owners who have common
+interests directly antagonistic to those of the community and State. We
+Socialists are only secondarily politicians. Our primary business is not
+to impose upon, but to ram right into the substance of that object of
+Chesterton's solicitude, the circle of ideas of the common man, the idea
+of the State as his own, as a thing he serves and is served by. We want
+to add to his sense of property rather than offend it. If I had my way I
+would do that at the street corners and on the trams, I would take down
+that alien-looking and detestable inscription "L.C.C.," and put up,
+"This Tram, this Street, belongs to the People of London." Would
+Chesterton or Belloc quarrel with that? Suppose that Chesterton is
+right, and that there are incurable things in the mind of the common man
+flatly hostile to our ideals; so much of our ideals will fail. But we
+are doing our best by our lights, and all we can. What are Chesterton
+and Belloc doing? If our ideal is partly right and partly wrong, are
+they trying to build up a better ideal? Will they state a Utopia and how
+they propose it shall be managed? If they lend their weight only to such
+fine old propositions as that a man wants freedom, that he has a right
+to do as he likes with his own, and so on, they won't help the common
+man much. All that fine talk, without some further exposition, goes to
+sustain Mr. Rockefeller's simple human love of property, and the woman
+and child sweating manufacturer in his fight for the inspector-free
+home industry. I bought on a bookstall the other day a pamphlet full of
+misrepresentation and bad argument against Socialism by an Australian
+Jew, published by the Single-Tax people apparently in a disinterested
+attempt to free the land from the landowner by the simple expedient of
+abusing anyone else who wanted to do as much but did not hold Henry
+George to be God and Lord; and I know Socialists who will protest with
+tears in their eyes against association with any human being who sings
+any song but the "Red Flag" and doubts whether Marx had much experience
+of affairs. Well, there is no reason why Chesterton and Belloc should at
+their level do the same sort of thing. When we talk on a ceiling or at a
+dinner-party with any touch of the celestial in its composition,
+Chesterton and I, Belloc and I, are antagonists with an undying feud,
+but in the fight against human selfishness and narrowness and for a
+finer, juster law, we are brothers--at the remotest, half-brothers.
+
+Chesterton isn't a Socialist--agreed! But now, as between us and the
+Master of Elibank or Sir Hugh Bell or any other Free Trade Liberal
+capitalist or landlord, which side is he on? You cannot have more than
+one fight going on in the political arena at the same time, because only
+one party or group of parties can win.
+
+And going back for a moment to that point about a Utopia, I want one
+from Chesterton. Purely unhelpful criticism isn't enough from a man of
+his size. It isn't justifiable for him to go about sitting on other
+people's Utopias. I appeal to his sense of fair play. I have done my
+best to reconcile the conception of a free and generous style of
+personal living with a social organisation that will save the world from
+the harsh predominance of dull, persistent, energetic, unscrupulous
+grabbers tempered only by the vulgar extravagance of their wives and
+sons. It isn't an adequate reply to say that nobody stood treat there,
+and that the simple, generous people like to beat their own wives and
+children on occasion in a loving and intimate manner, and that they
+won't endure the spirit of Mr. Sidney Webb.
+
+
+
+
+ABOUT SIR THOMAS MORE
+
+
+There are some writers who are chiefly interesting in themselves, and
+some whom chance and the agreement of men have picked out as symbols and
+convenient indications of some particular group or temperament of
+opinions. To the latter it is that Sir Thomas More belongs. An age and a
+type of mind have found in him and his Utopia a figurehead and a token;
+and pleasant and honourable as his personality and household present
+themselves to the modern reader, it is doubtful if they would by this
+time have retained any peculiar distinction among the many other
+contemporaries of whom we have chance glimpses in letters and suchlike
+documents, were it not that he happened to be the first man of affairs
+in England to imitate the "Republic" of Plato. By that chance it fell to
+him to give the world a noun and an adjective of abuse, "Utopian," and
+to record how under the stimulus of Plato's releasing influence the
+opening problems of our modern world presented themselves to the English
+mind of his time. For the most part the problems that exercised him are
+the problems that exercise us to-day, some of them, it may be, have
+grown up and intermarried, new ones have joined their company, but few,
+if any, have disappeared, and it is alike in his resemblances to and
+differences from the modern speculative mind that his essential interest
+lies.
+
+The portrait presented by contemporary mention and his own intentional
+and unintentional admissions, is of an active-minded and
+agreeable-mannered man, a hard worker, very markedly prone to quips and
+whimsical sayings and plays upon words, and aware of a double reputation
+as a man of erudition and a wit. This latter quality it was that won him
+advancement at court, and it may have been his too clearly confessed
+reluctance to play the part of an informal table jester to his king that
+laid the grounds of that deepening royal resentment that ended only with
+his execution. But he was also valued by the king for more solid merits,
+he was needed by the king, and it was more than a table scorned or a
+clash of opinion upon the validity of divorce; it was a more general
+estrangement and avoidance of service that caused that fit of regal
+petulance by which he died.
+
+It would seem that he began and ended his career in the orthodox
+religion and a general acquiescence in the ideas and customs of his
+time, and he played an honourable and acceptable part in that time; but
+his permanent interest lies not in his general conformity but in his
+incidental scepticism, in the fact that underlying the observances and
+recognised rules and limitations that give the texture of his life were
+the profoundest doubts, and that, stirred and disturbed by Plato, he saw
+fit to write them down. One may question if such scepticism is in itself
+unusual, whether any large proportion of great statesmen, great
+ecclesiastics and administrators have escaped phases of destructive
+self-criticism of destructive criticism of the principles upon which
+their general careers were framed. But few have made so public an
+admission as Sir Thomas More. A good Catholic undoubtedly he was, and
+yet we find him capable of conceiving a non-Christian community
+excelling all Christendom in wisdom and virtue; in practice his sense
+of conformity and orthodoxy was manifest enough, but in his "Utopia" he
+ventures to contemplate, and that not merely wistfully, but with some
+confidence, the possibility of an absolute religious toleration.
+
+The "Utopia" is none the less interesting because it is one of the most
+inconsistent of books. Never were the forms of Socialism and Communism
+animated by so entirely an Individualist soul. The hands are the hands
+of Plato, the wide-thinking Greek, but the voice is the voice of a
+humane, public-spirited, but limited and very practical English
+gentleman who takes the inferiority of his inferiors for granted,
+dislikes friars and tramps and loafers and all undisciplined and
+unproductive people, and is ruler in his own household. He abounds in
+sound practical ideas, for the migration of harvesters, for the
+universality of gardens and the artificial incubation of eggs, and he
+sweeps aside all Plato's suggestion of the citizen woman as though it
+had never entered his mind. He had indeed the Whig temperament, and it
+manifested itself down even to the practice of reading aloud in company,
+which still prevails among the more representative survivors of the Whig
+tradition. He argues ably against private property, but no thought of
+any such radicalism as the admission of those poor peons of his, with
+head half-shaved and glaring uniform against escape, to participation in
+ownership appears in his proposals. His communism is all for the
+convenience of his Syphogrants and Tranibores, those gentlemen of
+gravity and experience, lest one should swell up above the others. So
+too is the essential Whiggery of the limitation of the Prince's
+revenues. It is the very spirit of eighteenth century Constitutionalism.
+And his Whiggery bears Utilitarianism instead of the vanity of a
+flower. Among his cities, all of a size, so that "he that knoweth one
+knoweth all," the Benthamite would have revised his sceptical theology
+and admitted the possibility of heaven.
+
+Like any Whig, More exalted reason above the imagination at every point,
+and so he fails to understand the magic prestige of gold, making that
+beautiful metal into vessels of dishonour to urge his case against it,
+nor had he any perception of the charm of extravagance, for example, or
+the desirability of various clothing. The Utopians went all in coarse
+linen and undyed wool--why should the world be coloured?--and all the
+economy of labour and shortening of the working day was to no other end
+than to prolong the years of study and the joys of reading aloud, the
+simple satisfactions of the good boy at his lessons, to the very end of
+life. "In the institution of that weal publique this end is only and
+chiefly pretended and minded, that what time may possibly be spared from
+the necessary occupations and affairs of the commonwealth, all that the
+citizens should withdraw from the bodily service to the free liberty of
+the mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they suppose the
+felicity of this life to consist."
+
+Indeed, it is no paradox to say that "Utopia," which has by a conspiracy
+of accidents become a proverb for undisciplined fancifulness in social
+and political matters, is in reality a very unimaginative work. In that,
+next to the accident of its priority, lies the secret of its continuing
+interest. In some respects it is like one of those precious and
+delightful scrapbooks people disinter in old country houses; its very
+poverty of synthetic power leaves its ingredients, the cuttings from and
+imitations of Plato, the recipe for the hatching of eggs, the stern
+resolutions against scoundrels and rough fellows, all the sharper and
+brighter. There will always be found people to read in it, over and
+above the countless multitudes who will continue ignorantly to use its
+name for everything most alien to More's essential quality.
+
+
+
+
+TRAFFIC AND REBUILDING
+
+
+The London traffic problem is just one of those questions that appeal
+very strongly to the more prevalent and less charitable types of English
+mind. It has a practical and constructive air, it deals with
+impressively enormous amounts of tangible property, it rests with a
+comforting effect of solidity upon assumptions that are at once doubtful
+and desirable. It seems free from metaphysical considerations, and it
+has none of those disconcerting personal applications, those
+penetrations towards intimate qualities, that makes eugenics, for
+example, faintly but persistently uncomfortable. It is indeed an ideal
+problem for a healthy, hopeful, and progressive middle-aged public man.
+And, as I say, it deals with enormous amounts of tangible property.
+
+Like all really serious and respectable British problems it has to be
+handled gently to prevent its coming to pieces in the gift. It is safest
+in charge of the expert, that wonderful last gift of time. He will talk
+rapidly about congestion, long-felt wants, low efficiency, economy, and
+get you into his building and rebuilding schemes with the minimum of
+doubt and head-swimming. He is like a good Hendon pilot. Unspecialised
+writers have the destructive analytical touch. They pull the wrong
+levers. So far as one can gather from the specialists on the question,
+there is very considerable congestion in many of the London
+thoroughfares, delays that seem to be avoidable occur in the delivery of
+goods, multitudes of empty vans cumber the streets, we have hundreds of
+acres of idle trucks--there are more acres of railway sidings than of
+public parks in Greater London--and our Overseas cousins find it
+ticklish work crossing Regent Street and Piccadilly. Regarding life
+simply as an affair of getting people and things from where they are to
+where they appear to be wanted, this seems all very muddled and wanton.
+So far it is quite easy to agree with the expert. And some of the
+various and entirely incompatible schemes experts are giving us by way
+of a remedy, appeal very strongly to the imagination. For example, there
+is the railway clearing house, which, it is suggested, should cover I do
+not know how many acres of what is now slumland in Shoreditch. The
+position is particularly convenient for an underground connection with
+every main line into London. Upon the underground level of this great
+building every goods train into London will run. Its trucks and vans
+will be unloaded, the goods passed into lifts, which will take every
+parcel, large and small, at once to a huge, ingeniously contrived
+sorting-floor above. There in a manner at once simple, ingenious and
+effective, they will be sorted and returned, either into delivery vans
+at the street level or to the trains emptied and now reloading on the
+train level. Above and below these three floors will be extensive
+warehouse accommodation. Such a scheme would not only release almost all
+the vast area of London now under railway yards for parks and housing,
+but it would give nearly every delivery van an effective load, and
+probably reduce the number of standing and empty vans or half-empty vans
+on the streets of London to a quarter or an eighth of the present
+number. Mostly these are heavy horse vans, and their disappearance would
+greatly facilitate the conversion of the road surfaces to the hard and
+even texture needed for horseless traffic.
+
+But that is a scheme too comprehensive and rational for the ordinary
+student of the London traffic problem, whose mind runs for the most part
+on costly and devastating rearrangements of the existing roadways.
+Moreover, it would probably secure a maximum of effect with a minimum of
+property manipulation; always an undesirable consideration in practical
+politics. And it would commit London and England to goods transit by
+railway for another century. Far more attractive to the expert advisers
+of our various municipal authorities are such projects as a new Thames
+bridge scheme, which will (with incalculable results) inject a new
+stream of traffic into Saint Paul's Churchyard; and the removal of
+Charing Cross Station to the south side of the river. Then, again, we
+have the systematic widening of various thoroughfares, the shunting of
+tramways into traffic streams, and many amusing, expensive, and
+interesting tunnellings and clearances. Taken together, these huge
+reconstructions of London are incoherent and conflicting; each is based
+on its own assumptions and separate "expert" advice, and the resulting
+new opening plays its part in the general circulation as duct or
+aspirator, often with the most surprising results. The discussion of the
+London traffic problem as we practise it in our clubs is essentially the
+sage turning over and over again of such fragmentary schemes,
+headshakings over the vacant sites about Aldwych and the Strand,
+brilliant petty suggestions and--dispersal. Meanwhile the experts
+intrigue; one partial plan after another gets itself accepted, this and
+that ancient landmark perish, builders grow rich, and architects
+infamous, and some Tower Bridge horror, some vulgarity of the
+Automobile Club type, some Buckingham Palace atrocity, some Regent
+Street stupidity, some such cramped and thwarted thing as that new arch
+which gives upon Charing Cross is added to the confusion. I do not see
+any reason to suppose that this continuous muddle of partial destruction
+and partial rebuilding is not to constitute the future history of
+London.
+
+Let us, however, drop the expert methods and handle this question rather
+more rudely. Do we want London rebuilt? If we do, is there, after all,
+any reason why we should rebuild it on its present site? London is where
+it is for reasons that have long ceased to be valid; it grew there, it
+has accumulated associations, an immense tradition, that this constant
+mucking about of builders and architects is destroying almost as
+effectually as removal to a new site. The old sort of rebuilding was a
+natural and picturesque process, house by house, and street by street, a
+thing as pleasing and almost as natural in effect as the spreading and
+interlacing of trees; as this new building, this clearance of areas, the
+piercing of avenues, becomes more comprehensive, it becomes less
+reasonable. If we can do such big things we may surely attempt bigger
+things, so that whether we want to plan a new capital or preserve the
+old, it comes at last to the same thing, that it is unreasonable to be
+constantly pulling down the London we have and putting it up again. Let
+us drain away our heavy traffic into tunnels, set up that clearing-house
+plan, and control the growth at the periphery, which is still so witless
+and ugly, and, save for the manifest tidying and preserving that is
+needed, begin to leave the central parts of London, which are extremely
+interesting even where they are not quite beautiful, in peace.
+
+
+
+
+THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY
+
+
+It has long been generally recognised that there are two quite divergent
+ways of attacking sociological and economic questions, one that is
+called scientific and one that is not, and I claim no particular virtue
+in the recognition of that; but I do claim a certain freshness in my
+analysis of this difference, and it is to that analysis that your
+attention is now called. When I claim freshness I do not make, you
+understand, any claim to original discovery. What I have to say, and
+have been saying for some time, is also more or less, and with certain
+differences to be found in the thought of Professor Bosanquet, for
+example, in Alfred Sidgwick's "Use of Words in Reasoning," in Sigwart's
+"Logic," in contemporary American metaphysical speculation. I am only
+one incidental voice speaking in a general movement of thought. My trend
+of thought leads me to deny that sociology is a science, or only a
+science in the same loose sense that modern history is a science, and to
+throw doubt upon the value of sociology that follows too closely what is
+called the scientific method.
+
+The drift of my argument is to dispute not only that sociology is a
+science, but also to deny that Herbert Spencer and Comte are to be
+exalted as the founders of a new and fruitful system of human inquiry. I
+find myself forced to depreciate these modern idols, and to reinstate
+the Greek social philosophers in their vacant niches, to ask you rather
+to go to Plato for the proper method, the proper way of thinking
+sociologically.
+
+We certainly owe the word Sociology to Comte, a man of exceptionally
+methodical quality. I hold he developed the word logically from an
+arbitrary assumption that the whole universe of being was reducible to
+measurable and commeasurable and exact and consistent expressions.
+
+In a very obvious way, sociology seemed to Comte to crown the edifice of
+the sciences; it was to be to the statesman what pathology and
+physiology were to the doctor; and one gathers that, for the most part,
+he regarded it as an intellectual procedure in no way differing from
+physics. His classification of the sciences shows pretty clearly that he
+thought of them all as exact logical systematisations of fact arising
+out of each other in a synthetic order, each lower one containing the
+elements of a lucid explanation of those above it--physics explaining
+chemistry; chemistry, physiology; physiology, sociology; and so forth.
+His actual method was altogether unscientific; but through all his work
+runs the assumption that in contrast with his predecessors he is really
+being as exact and universally valid as mathematics. To Herbert
+Spencer--very appropriately since his mental characteristics make him
+the English parallel to Comte--we owe the naturalisation of the word in
+English. His mind being of greater calibre than Comte's, the subject
+acquired in his hands a far more progressive character. Herbert Spencer
+was less unfamiliar with natural history than with any other branch of
+practical scientific work; and it was natural he should turn to it for
+precedents in sociological research. His mind was invaded by the idea
+of classification, by memories of specimens and museums; and he
+initiated that accumulation of desiccated anthropological anecdotes that
+still figures importantly in current sociological work. On the lines he
+initiated sociological investigation, what there is of it, still tends
+to go.
+
+From these two sources mainly the work of contemporary sociologists
+derives. But there persists about it a curious discursiveness that
+reflects upon the power and value of the initial impetus. Mr. V.V.
+Branford, the able secretary of the Sociological Society, recently
+attempted a useful work in a classification of the methods of what he
+calls "approach," a word that seems to me eminently judicious and
+expressive. A review of the first volume the Sociological Society has
+produced brings home the aptness of this image of exploratory
+operations, of experiments in "taking a line." The names of Dr. Beattie
+Crozier and Mr. Benjamin Kidd recall works that impress one as
+large-scale sketches of a proposed science rather than concrete
+beginnings and achievements. The search for an arrangement, a "method,"
+continues as though they were not. The desperate resort to the
+analogical method of Commenius is confessed by Dr. Steinmetz, who talks
+of social morphology, physiology, pathology, and so forth. There is also
+a less initiative disposition in the Vicomte Combes de Lestrade and in
+the work of Professor Giddings. In other directions sociological work is
+apt to lose its general reference altogether, to lapse towards some
+department of activity not primarily sociological at all. Examples of
+this are the works of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, M. Ostrogorski and M.
+Gustave le Bon. From a contemplation of all this diversity Professor
+Durkheim emerges, demanding a "synthetic science," "certain synthetic
+conceptions"--and Professor Karl Pearson endorses the demand--to fuse
+all these various activities into something that will live and grow.
+What is it that tangles this question so curiously that there is not
+only a failure to arrive at a conclusion, but a failure to join issue?
+
+Well, there is a certain not too clearly recognised order in the
+sciences to which I wish to call your attention, and which forms the
+gist of my case against this scientific pretension. There is a gradation
+in the importance of the instance as one passes from mechanics and
+physics and chemistry through the biological sciences to economics and
+sociology, a gradation whose correlatives and implications have not yet
+received adequate recognition, and which do profoundly affect the method
+of study and research in each science.
+
+Let me begin by pointing out that, in the more modern conceptions of
+logic, it is recognised that there are no identically similar objective
+experiences; the disposition is to conceive all real objective being as
+individual and unique. This is not a singular eccentric idea of mine; it
+is one for which ample support is to be found in the writings of
+absolutely respectable contemporaries, who are quite untainted by
+association with fiction. It is now understood that conceivably only in
+the subjective world, and in theory and the imagination, do we deal with
+identically similar units, and with absolutely commensurable quantities.
+In the real world it is reasonable to suppose we deal at most with
+_practically_ similar units and _practically_ commensurable quantities.
+But there is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias in the normal
+human mind to ignore this, and not only to speak but to think of a
+thousand bricks or a thousand sheep or a thousand sociologists as though
+they were all absolutely true to sample. If it is brought before a
+thinker for a moment that in any special case this is not so, he slips
+back to the old attitude as soon as his attention is withdrawn. This
+source of error has, for instance, caught nearly the whole race of
+chemists, with one or two distinguished exceptions, and _atoms_ and
+_ions_ and so forth of the same species are tacitly assumed to be
+similar one to another. Be it noted that, so far as the practical
+results of chemistry and physics go, it scarcely matters which
+assumption we adopt. For purposes of inquiry and discussion the
+incorrect one is infinitely more convenient.
+
+But this ceases to be true directly we emerge from the region of
+chemistry and physics. In the biological sciences of the eighteenth
+century, commonsense struggled hard to ignore individuality in shells
+and plants and animals. There was an attempt to eliminate the more
+conspicuous departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's weak
+moments, and it was only with the establishment of Darwin's great
+generalisation that the hard and fast classificatory system broke down,
+and individuality came to its own. Yet there had always been a clearly
+felt difference between the conclusions of the biological sciences and
+those dealing with lifeless substance, in the relative vagueness, the
+insubordinate looseness and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist
+accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantly
+from generalisation to generalisation after the fashion of the chemist
+or physicist. It is easy to see, therefore, how it came about that the
+inorganic sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It
+was scarcely suspected that the biological sciences might perhaps, after
+all, be _truer_ than the experimental, in spite of the difference in
+practical value in favour of the latter. It was, and is by the great
+majority of people to this day, supposed to be the latter that are
+invincibly true; and the former are regarded as a more complex set of
+problems merely, with obliquities and refractions that presently will be
+explained away. Comte and Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have
+taken that much for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of the
+unknown and the unknowable, but not in this sense, as an element of
+inexactness running through all things. He thought of the unknown as the
+indefinable beyond to an immediate world that might be quite clearly and
+exactly known.
+
+Well, there is a growing body of people who are beginning to hold the
+converse view--that counting, classification, measurement, the whole
+fabric of mathematics, is subjective and deceitful, and that the
+uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units
+taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of
+generalisation increases, because individuality tells more and more.
+Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalise about
+them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be you
+would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely
+is the minority belief, and it is the belief on which this present paper
+is based.
+
+Now, what is called the scientific method is the method of ignoring
+individualities; and, like many mathematical conventions, its great
+practical convenience is no proof whatever of its final truth. Let me
+admit the enormous value, the wonder of its results in mechanics, in all
+the physical sciences, in chemistry, even in physiology--but what is its
+value beyond that? Is the scientific method of value in biology? The
+great advances made by Darwin and his school in biology were not made,
+it must be remembered, by the scientific method, as it is generally
+conceived, at all. He conducted a research into pre-documentary history.
+He collected information along the lines indicated by certain
+interrogations; and the bulk of his work was the digesting and critical
+analysis of that. For documents and monuments he had fossils and
+anatomical structures and germinating eggs too innocent to lie, and so
+far he was nearer simplicity. But, on the other hand, he had to
+correspond with breeders and travellers of various sorts, classes
+entirely analogous, from the point of view of evidence, to the writers
+of history and memoirs. I question profoundly whether the word
+"science," in current usage anyhow, ever means such patient
+disentanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the attainment of something
+positive and emphatic in the way of a conclusion, based on amply
+repeated experiments capable of infinite repetition, "proved," as they
+say, "up to the hilt."
+
+It would be, of course, possible to dispute whether the word "science"
+should convey this quality of certitude; but to most people it certainly
+does at the present time. So far as the movements of comets and electric
+trams go, there is, no doubt, practically cocksure science; and
+indisputably Comte and Herbert Spencer believed that cocksure could be
+extended to every conceivable finite thing. The fact that Herbert
+Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the
+non-individualising quality of his primary assumptions and of his mental
+texture. He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an
+evolutionary product from an original homogeneity. It seems to me that
+the general usage is entirely for the limitation of the use of the word
+"science" to knowledge and the search after knowledge of a high degree
+of precision. And not simply the general usage: "Science is
+measurement," Science is "organised common sense," proud, in fact, of
+its essential error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms.
+
+If we quite boldly face the fact that hard positive methods are less and
+less successful just in proportion as our "ologies" deal with larger and
+less numerous individuals; if we admit that we become less "scientific"
+as we ascend the scale of the sciences, and that we do and must change
+our method, then, it is humbly submitted we shall be in a much better
+position to consider the question of "approaching" sociology. We shall
+realise that all this talk of the organisation of sociology, as though
+presently the sociologist would be going about the world with the
+authority of a sanitary engineer, is and will remain nonsense.
+
+In one respect we shall still be in accordance with the Positivist map
+of the field of human knowledge; with us as with that, sociology stands
+at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences. In these
+latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte
+perceived, there is only one unit. It is true that Herbert Spencer, in
+order to get classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim has
+pointed out, separate human society into societies, and made believe
+they competed one with another and died and reproduced just like
+animals, and that economists, following List, have for the purposes of
+fiscal controversy discovered economic types; but this is a transparent
+device, and one is surprised to find thoughtful and reputable writers
+off their guard against such bad analogy. But, indeed, it is impossible
+to isolate complete communities of men, or to trace any but rude general
+resemblances between group and group. These alleged units have as much
+individuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse and
+separate. And we are forced to conclude that not only is the method of
+observation, experiment, and verification left far away down the scale,
+but that the method of classification under types, which has served so
+useful a purpose in the middle group of subjects, the subjects involving
+numerous but a finite number of units, has also to be abandoned here. We
+cannot put Humanity into a museum, or dry it for examination; our one
+single still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the
+fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it,
+and nothing else in the real world with which to compare it. We have
+only the remotest ideas of its "life-cycle" and a few relics of its
+origin and dreams of its destiny ...
+
+Sociology, it is evident, is, upon any hypothesis, no less than the
+attempt to bring that vast, complex, unique Being, its subject, into
+clear, true relations with the individual intelligence. Now, since
+individual intelligences are individual, and each is a little
+differently placed in regard to the subject under consideration, since
+the personal angle of vision is much wider towards humanity than towards
+the circumambient horizon of matter, it should be manifest that no
+sociology of universal compulsion, of anything approaching the general
+validity of the physical sciences, is ever to be hoped for--at least
+upon the metaphysical assumptions of this paper. With that conceded, we
+may go on to consider the more hopeful ways in which that great Being
+may be presented in a comprehensible manner. Essentially this
+presentation must involve an element of self-expression must partake
+quite as much of the nature of art as of science. One finds in the first
+conference of the Sociological Society, Professor Stein, speaking,
+indeed a very different philosophical dialect from mine, but coming to
+the same practical conclusion in the matter, and Mr. Osman Newland
+counting "evolving ideals for the future" as part of the sociologist's
+work. Mr. Alfred Fouillée also moves very interestingly in the region of
+this same idea; he concedes an essential difference between sociology
+and all other sciences in the fact of a "certain kind of liberty
+belonging to society in the exercise of its higher functions." He says
+further: "If this view be correct, it will not do for us to follow in
+the steps of Comte and Spencer, and transfer, bodily and ready-made, the
+conceptions and the methods of the natural sciences into the science of
+society. For here the fact of _consciousness_ entails a reaction of the
+whole assemblage of social phenomena upon themselves, such as the
+natural sciences have no example of." And he concludes: "Sociology
+ought, therefore, to guard carefully against the tendency to crystallise
+that which is essentially fluid and moving, the tendency to consider as
+given fact or dead data that which creates itself and gives itself into
+the world of phenomena continually by force of its own ideal
+conception." These opinions do, in their various keys, sound a similar
+_motif_ to mine. If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks is
+justifiable, then unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty,
+must coalesce with the objective, which is truth; and sociology mast be
+neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at
+all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element of
+personality that is to say, in the highest sense of the term,
+literature.
+
+If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and
+Spencer altogether, as pseudo-scientific interlopers rather than the
+authoritative parents of sociology, we shall have to substitute for the
+classifications of the social sciences an inquiry into the chief
+literary forms that subserve sociological purposes. Of these there are
+two, one invariably recognised as valuable and one which, I think, under
+the matter-of-fact scientific obsession, is altogether underrated and
+neglected The first, which is the social side of history, makes up the
+bulk of valid sociological work at the present time. Of history there is
+the purely descriptive part, the detailed account of past or
+contemporary social conditions, or of the sequence of such conditions;
+and, in addition, there is the sort of historical literature that seeks
+to elucidate and impose general interpretations upon the complex of
+occurrences and institutions, to establish broad historical
+generalisations, to eliminate the mass of irrelevant incident, to
+present some great period of history, or all history, in the light of
+one dramatic sequence, or as one process. This Dr. Beattie Crozier, for
+example, attempts in his "History of Intellectual Development." Equally
+comprehensive is Buckle's "History of Civilisation." Lecky's "History of
+European Morals," during the onset of Christianity again, is essentially
+sociology. Numerous works--Atkinson's "Primal Law," and Andrew Lang's
+"Social Origins," for example--may be considered, as it were, to be
+fragments to the same purport. In the great design of Gibbon's "Decline
+and Fall of the Roman Empire," or Carlyle's "French Revolution," you
+have a greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque elements in
+history, but in other respects an altogether kindred endeavour to impose
+upon the vast confusions of the past a scheme of interpretation,
+valuable just to the extent of its literary value, of the success with
+which the discrepant masses have been fused and cast into the shape the
+insight of the writer has determined. The writing of great history is
+entirely analogous to fine portraiture, in which fact is indeed
+material, but material entirely subordinate to vision.
+
+One main branch of the work of a Sociological Society therefore should
+surely be to accept and render acceptable, to provide understanding,
+criticism, and stimulus for such literary activities as restore the dead
+bones of the past to a living participation in our lives.
+
+But it is in the second and at present neglected direction that I
+believe the predominant attack upon the problem implied by the word
+"sociology" must lie; the attack that must be finally driven home. There
+is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what _is_,
+without considering what is _intended to be_. In sociology, beyond any
+possibility of evasion, ideas are facts. The history of civilisation is
+really the history of the appearance and reappearance, the tentatives
+and hesitations and alterations, the manifestations and reflections in
+this mind and that, of a very complex, imperfect elusive idea, the
+Social Idea. It is that idea struggling to exist and realise itself in
+a world of egotisms, animalisms, and brute matter. Now, I submit it is
+not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most
+promising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavour to disentangle and
+express one's personal version of that idea, and to measure realities
+from the stand-point of that idealisation. I think, in fact, that the
+creation of Utopias--and their exhaustive criticism--is the proper and
+distinctive method of sociology.
+
+Suppose now the Sociological Society, or some considerable proportion of
+it, were to adopt this view, that sociology is the description of the
+Ideal Society and its relation to existing societies, would not this
+give the synthetic framework Professor Durkheim, for example, has said
+to be needed?
+
+Almost all the sociological literature beyond the province of history
+that has stood the test of time and established itself in the esteem of
+men is frankly Utopian. Plato, when his mind turned to schemes of social
+reconstruction thrust his habitual form of dialogue into a corner; both
+the "Republic" and the "Laws" are practically Utopias in monologue; and
+Aristotle found the criticism of the Utopian suggestions of his
+predecessors richly profitable. Directly the mind of the world emerged
+again at the Renascence from intellectual barbarism in the brief
+breathing time before Sturm and the schoolmasters caught it and birched
+it into scholarship and a new period of sterility, it went on from Plato
+to the making of fresh Utopias. Not without profit did More discuss
+pauperism in this form and Bacon the organisation of research; and the
+yeast of the French Revolution was Utopias. Even Comte, all the while
+that he is professing science, fact, precision, is adding detail after
+detail to the intensely personal Utopia of a Western Republic that
+constitutes his one meritorious gift to the world. Sociologists cannot
+help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the
+idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia. Why should they
+not follow the precedent of Aristotle, and accept Utopias as material?
+
+There used to be in my student days, and probably still flourishes, a
+most valuable summary of fact and theory in comparative anatomy, called
+Rolleston's "Forms of Animal Life." I figure to myself a similar book, a
+sort of dream book of huge dimensions, in reality perhaps dispersed in
+many volumes by many hands, upon the Ideal Society. This book, this
+picture of the perfect state, would be the backbone of sociology. It
+would have great sections devoted to such questions as the extent of the
+Ideal Society, its relation to racial differences, the relations of the
+sexes in it, its economic organisations, its organisation for thought
+and education, its "Bible"--as Dr. Beattie Crozier would say--its
+housing and social atmosphere, and so forth. Almost all the divaricating
+work at present roughly classed together as sociological could be
+brought into relation in the simplest manner, either as new suggestions,
+as new discussion or criticism, as newly ascertained facts bearing upon
+such discussions and sustaining or eliminating suggestions. The
+institutions of existing states would come into comparison with the
+institutions of the Ideal State, their failures and defects would be
+criticised most effectually in that relation, and the whole science of
+collective psychology, the psychology of human association, would be
+brought to bear upon the question of the practicability of this proposed
+ideal.
+
+This method would give not only a boundary shape to all sociological
+activities, but a scheme of arrangement for text books and lectures, and
+points of direction and reference for the graduation and post graduate
+work of sociological students.
+
+Only one group of inquiries commonly classed as sociological would have
+to be left out of direct relationship with this Ideal State; and that is
+inquiries concerning the rough expedients to meet the failure of
+imperfect institutions. Social emergency work of all sorts comes under
+this head. What to do with the pariah dogs of Constantinople, what to do
+with the tramps who sleep in the London parks, how to organise a soup
+kitchen or a Bible coffee van, how to prevent ignorant people, who have
+nothing else to do, getting drunk in beer-houses, are no doubt serious
+questions for the practical administrator, questions of primary
+importance to the politician; but they have no more to do with sociology
+than the erection of a temporary hospital after the collision of two
+trains has to do with railway engineering.
+
+So much for my second and most central and essential portion of
+sociological work. It should be evident that the former part, the
+historical part, which conceivably will be much the bulkier and more
+abundant of the two, will in effect amount to a history of the
+suggestions in circumstance and experience of that Idea of Society of
+which the second will consist, and of the instructive failures in
+attempting its incomplete realisation.
+
+
+
+
+DIVORCE
+
+
+The time is fast approaching when it will be necessary for the general
+citizen to form definite opinions upon proposals for probably quite
+extensive alterations of our present divorce laws, arising out of the
+recommendations of the recent Royal Commission on the subject. It may
+not be out of place, therefore, to run through some of the chief points
+that are likely to be raised, and to set out the main considerations
+affecting these issues.
+
+Divorce is not one of those things that stand alone, and neither divorce
+law nor the general principles of divorce are to be discussed without a
+reference to antecedent arrangements. Divorce is a sequel to marriage,
+and a change in the divorce law is essentially a change in the marriage
+law. There was a time in this country when our marriage was a
+practically divorceless bond, soluble only under extraordinary
+circumstances by people in situations of exceptional advantage for doing
+so. Now it is a bond under conditions, and in the event of the adultery
+of the wife, or of the adultery plus cruelty or plus desertion of the
+husband, and of one or two other rarer and more dreadful offences, it
+can be broken at the instance of the aggrieved party. A change in the
+divorce law is a change in the dissolution clauses, so to speak, of the
+contract for the marriage partnership. It is a change in the marriage
+law.
+
+A great number of people object to divorce under any circumstances
+whatever. This is the case with the orthodox Catholic and with the
+orthodox Positivist. And many religious and orthodox people carry their
+assertion of the indissolubility of marriage to the grave; they demand
+that the widow or widower shall remain unmarried, faithful to the vows
+made at the altar until death comes to the release of the lonely
+survivor also. Re-marriage is regarded by such people as a posthumous
+bigamy. There is certainly a very strong and logical case to be made out
+for a marriage bond that is indissoluble even by death. It banishes
+step-parents from the world. It confers a dignity of tragic
+inevitability upon the association of husband and wife, and makes a love
+approach the gravest, most momentous thing in life. It banishes for ever
+any dream of escape from the presence and service of either party, or of
+any separation from the children of the union. It affords no alternative
+to "making the best of it" for either husband or wife; they have taken a
+step as irrevocable as suicide. And some logical minds would even go
+further, and have no law as between the members of a family, no rights,
+no private property within that limit. The family would be the social
+unit and the father its public representative, and though the law might
+intervene if he murdered or ill-used wife or children, or they him, it
+would do so in just the same spirit that it might prevent him from
+self-mutilation or attempted suicide, for the good of the State simply,
+and not to defend any supposed independence of the injured member. There
+is much, I assert, to be said for such a complete shutting up of the
+family from the interference of the law, and not the least among these
+reasons is the entire harmony of such a view with the passionate
+instincts of the natural man and woman in these matters. All
+unsophisticated human beings appear disposed to a fierce proprietorship
+in their children and their sexual partners, and in no respect is the
+ordinary mortal so easily induced to vehemence and violence.
+
+For my own part, I do not think the maintenance of a marriage that is
+indissoluble, that precludes the survivor from re-marriage, that gives
+neither party an external refuge from the misbehaviour of the other, and
+makes the children the absolute property of their parents until they
+grow up, would cause any very general unhappiness Most people are
+reasonable enough, good-tempered enough, and adaptable enough to shake
+down even in a grip so rigid, and I would even go further and say that
+its very rigidity, the entire absence of any way out at all, would
+oblige innumerable people to accommodate themselves to its conditions
+and make a working success of unions that, under laxer conditions, would
+be almost certainly dissolved. We should have more people of what I may
+call the "broken-in" type than an easier release would create, but to
+many thinkers the spectacle of a human being thoroughly "broken-in" is
+in itself extremely satisfactory. A few more crimes of desperation
+perhaps might occur, to balance against an almost universal effort to
+achieve contentment and reconciliation. We should hear more of the
+"natural law" permitting murder by the jealous husband or by the jealous
+wife, and the traffic in poisons would need a sedulous attention--but
+even there the impossibility of re-marriage would operate to restrain
+the impatient. On the whole, I can imagine the world rubbing along very
+well with marriage as unaccommodating as a perfected steel trap.
+Exceptional people might suffer or sin wildly--to the general amusement
+or indignation.
+
+But when once we part from the idea of such a rigid and eternal
+marriage bond--and the law of every civilised country and the general
+thought and sentiment everywhere have long since done so--then the whole
+question changes. If marriage is not so absolutely sacred a bond, if it
+is not an eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that,
+then at once we put the question on a different footing. If we may
+terminate it for adultery or cruelty, or any cause whatever, if we may
+suspend the intimacy of husband and wife by separation orders and the
+like, if we recognise their separate property and interfere between them
+and their children to ensure the health and education of the latter,
+then we open at once the whole question of a terminating agreement.
+Marriage ceases to be an unlimited union and becomes a definite
+contract. We raise the whole question of "What are the limits in
+marriage, and how and when may a marriage terminate?"
+
+Now, many answers are being given to that question at the present time.
+We may take as the extremest opposite to the eternal marriage idea the
+proposal of Mr. Bernard Shaw, that marriage should be terminable at the
+instance of either party. You would give due and public notice that your
+marriage was at an end, and it would be at an end. This is marriage at
+its minimum, as the eternal indissoluble marriage is marriage at its
+maximum, and the only conceivable next step would be to have a marriage
+makeable by the oral declaration of both parties and terminable by the
+oral declaration of either, which would be, indeed, no marriage at all,
+but an encounter. You might marry a dozen times in that way in a day....
+Somewhere between these extremes lies the marriage law of a civilised
+state. Let us, rather than working down from the eternal marriage of
+the religious idealists, work up from Mr. Shaw. The former course is,
+perhaps, inevitable for the legislator, but the latter is much more
+convenient for our discussion.
+
+Now, the idea of a divorce so easy and wilful as Mr. Shaw proposes
+arises naturally out of an exclusive consideration of what I may call
+the amorous sentimentalities of marriage. If you regard marriage as
+merely the union of two people in love, then, clearly, it is
+intolerable, an outrage upon human dignity, that they should remain
+intimately united when either ceases to love. And in that world of Mr.
+Shaw's dreams, in which everybody is to have an equal income and nobody
+is to have children, in that culminating conversazione of humanity, his
+marriage law will, no doubt, work with the most admirable results. But
+if we make a step towards reality and consider a world in which incomes
+are unequal, and economic difficulties abound--for the present we will
+ignore the complication of offspring--we at once find it necessary to
+modify the first fine simplicity of divorce at either partner's request.
+Marriage is almost always a serious economic disturbance for both man
+and woman: work has to be given up and rearranged, resources have to be
+pooled; only in the rarest cases does it escape becoming an indefinite
+business partnership. Accordingly, the withdrawal of one partner raises
+at once all sorts of questions of financial adjustment, compensation for
+physical, mental, and moral damage, division of furniture and effects
+and so forth. No doubt a very large part of this could be met if there
+existed some sort of marriage settlement providing for the dissolution
+of the partnership. Otherwise the petitioner for a Shaw-esque divorce
+must be prepared for the most exhaustive and penetrating examination
+before, say, a court of three assessors--representing severally the
+husband, the wife, and justice--to determine the distribution of the
+separation. This point, however, leads me to note in passing the need
+that does exist even to-day for a more precise business supplement to
+marriage as we know it in England and America. I think there ought to be
+a very definite and elaborate treaty of partnership drawn up by an
+impartial private tribunal for every couple that marries, providing for
+most of the eventualities of life, taking cognizance of the earning
+power, the property and prospects of either party, insisting upon due
+insurances, ensuring private incomes for each partner, securing the
+welfare of the children, and laying down equitable conditions in the
+event of a divorce or separation. Such a treaty ought to be a necessary
+prelude to the issue of a licence to marry. And given such a basis to go
+upon, then I see no reason why, in the case of couples who remain
+childless for five or six years, let us say, and seem likely to remain
+childless, the Shaw-esque divorce at the instance of either party,
+without reason assigned, should not be a very excellent thing indeed.
+
+And I take up this position because I believe in the family as the
+justification of marriage. Marriage to me is no mystical and eternal
+union, but a practical affair, to be judged as all practical things are
+judged--by its returns in happiness and human welfare. And directly we
+pass from the mists and glamours of amorous passion to the warm
+realities of the nursery, we pass into a new system of considerations
+altogether. We are no longer considering A. in relation to Mrs. A., but
+A. and Mrs. A. in relation to an indefinite number of little A.'s, who
+are the very life of the State in which they live. Into the case of Mr.
+A. _v_. Mrs. A. come Master A. and Miss A. intervening. They have the
+strongest claim against both their parents for love, shelter and
+upbringing, and the legislator and statesman, concerned as he is chiefly
+with the future of the community, has the strongest reasons for seeing
+that they get these things, even at the price of considerable vexation,
+boredom or indignity to Mr. and Mrs. A. And here it is that there arises
+the rational case against free and frequent divorce and the general
+unsettlement and fluctuation of homes that would ensue.
+
+At this point we come to the verge of a jungle of questions that would
+demand a whole book for anything like a complete answer. Let us try as
+swiftly and simply as possible to form a general idea at least of the
+way through. Remember that we are working upward from Mr. Shaw's
+question of "Why not separate at the choice of either party?" We have
+got thus far, that no two people who do not love each other should be
+compelled to live together, except where the welfare of their children
+comes in to override their desire to separate, and now we have to
+consider what may or may not be for the welfare of the children. Mr.
+Shaw, following the late Samuel Butler, meets this difficulty by the
+most extravagant abuse of parents. He would have us believe that the
+worst enemies a child can have are its mother and father, and that the
+only civilised path to citizenship is by the incubator, the cręche, and
+the mixed school and college. In these matters he is not only ignorant,
+but unfeeling and unsympathetic, extraordinarily so in view of his great
+capacity for pity and sweetness in other directions and of his indignant
+hatred of cruelty and unfairness, and it is not necessary to waste time
+in discussing what the common experience confutes Neither is it
+necessary to fly to the other extreme, and indulge in preposterous
+sentimentalities about the magic of fatherhood and a mother's love.
+These are not magic and unlimited things, but touchingly qualified and
+human things. The temperate truth of the matter is that in most parents
+there are great stores of pride, interest, natural sympathy, passionate
+love and devotion which can be tapped in the interests of the children
+and the social future, and that it is the mere commonsense of statecraft
+to use their resources to the utmost. It does not follow that every
+parent contains these reservoirs, and that a continual close association
+with the parents is always beneficial to children. If it did, we should
+have to prosecute everyone who employed a governess or sent away a
+little boy to a preparatory school. And our real task is to establish a
+test that will gauge the desirability and benefit of a parent's
+continued parentage. There are certainly parents and homes from which
+the children might be taken with infinite benefit to themselves and to
+society, and whose union it is ridiculous to save from the divorce court
+shears.
+
+Suppose, now, we made the willingness of a parent to give up his or her
+children the measure of his beneficialness to them. There is no reason
+why we should restrict divorce only to the relation of husband and wife.
+Let us broaden the word and make it conceivable for a husband or wife to
+divorce not only the partner, but the children. Then it might be
+possible to meet the demands of the Shaw-esque extremist up to the point
+of permitting a married parent, who desired freedom, to petition for a
+divorce, not from his or her partner simply, but from his or her
+family, and even for a widow or widower to divorce a family. Then would
+come the task of the assessors. They would make arrangements for the
+dissolution of the relationship, erring from justice rather in the
+direction of liberality towards the divorced group, they would determine
+contributions, exact securities appoint trustees and guardians.... On
+the whole, I do not see why such a system should not work very well. It
+would break up many loveless homes, quarrelling and bickering homes, and
+give a safety-valve for that hate which is the sinister shadow of love.
+I do not think it would separate one child from one parent who was
+really worthy of its possession.
+
+So far I have discussed only the possibility of divorce without
+offences, the sort of divorce that arises out of estrangement and
+incompatibilities. But divorce, as it is known in most Christian
+countries, has a punitive element, and is obtained through the failure
+of one of the parties to observe the conditions of the bond and the
+determination of the other to exact suffering. Divorce as it exists at
+present is not a readjustment but a revenge. It is the nasty exposure of
+a private wrong. In England a husband may divorce his wife for a single
+act of infidelity, and there can be little doubt that we are on the eve
+of an equalisation of the law in this respect. I will confess I consider
+this an extreme concession to the passion of jealousy, and one likely to
+tear off the roof from many a family of innocent children. Only
+infidelity leading to supposititious children in the case of the wife,
+or infidelity obstinately and offensively persisted in or endangering
+health in the case of the husband, really injure the home sufficiently
+to justify a divorce on the assumptions of our present argument. If we
+are going to make the welfare of the children our criterion in these
+matters, then our divorce law does in this direction already go too far.
+A husband or wife may do far more injury to the home by constantly
+neglecting it for the companionship of some outside person with whom no
+"matrimonial offence" is ever committed. Of course, if our divorce law
+exists mainly for the gratification of the fiercer sexual resentments,
+well and good, but if that is so, let us abandon our pretence that
+marriage is an institution for the establishment and protection of
+homes. And while on the one hand existing divorce laws appear to be
+obsessed by sexual offences, other things of far more evil effect upon
+the home go without a remedy. There are, for example, desertion,
+domestic neglect, cruelty to the children drunkenness or harmful
+drug-taking, indecency of living and uncontrollable extravagance. I
+cannot conceive how any logical mind, having once admitted the principle
+of divorce, can hesitate at making these entirely home-wrecking things
+the basis of effective pleas. But in another direction, some strain of
+sentimentality in my nature makes me hesitate to go with the great
+majority of divorce law reformers. I cannot bring myself to agree that
+either a long term of imprisonment or the misfortune of insanity should
+in itself justify a divorce. I admit the social convenience, but I wince
+at the thought of those tragic returns of the dispossessed. So far as
+insanity goes, I perceive that the cruelty of the law would but endorse
+the cruelty of nature. But I do not like men to endorse the cruelty of
+nature.
+
+And, of course, there is no decent-minded person nowadays but wants to
+put an end to that ugly blot upon our civilisation, the publication of
+whatever is most spicy and painful in divorce court proceedings. It is
+an outrage which falls even more heavily on the innocent than on the
+guilty, and which has deterred hundreds of shy and delicate-minded
+people from seeking legal remedies for nearly intolerable wrongs. The
+sort of person who goes willingly to the divorce court to-day is the
+sort of person who would love a screaming quarrel in a crowded street.
+The emotional breach of the marriage bond is as private an affair as its
+consummation, and it would be nearly as righteous to subject young
+couples about to marry to a blustering cross-examination by some
+underbred bully of a barrister upon their motives, and then to publish
+whatever chance phrases in their answers appeared to be amusing in the
+press, as it is to publish contemporary divorce proceedings. The thing
+is a nastiness, a stream of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, and
+there can be no doubt that whatever other result this British Royal
+Commission may have, there at least will be many sweeping alterations.
+
+
+
+
+THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE EMPIRE
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+"If Youth but Knew" is the title of a book published some years ago, but
+still with a quite living interest, by "Kappa"; it is the bitter
+complaint of a distressed senior against our educational system. He is
+hugely disappointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly in
+one typical specimen. He is--if one might hazard a guess--an uncle
+bereft of great expectations. He finds an echo in thousands of other
+distressed uncles and parents. They use the most divergent and
+inadequate forms of expression for this vague sense that the result has
+not come out good enough; they put it contradictorily and often wrongly,
+but the sense is widespread and real and justifiable and we owe a great
+debt to "Kappa" for an accurate diagnosis of what in the aggregate
+amounts to a grave national and social evil.
+
+The trouble with "Kappa's" particular public-school boy is his unlit
+imagination, the apathetic commonness of his attitude to life at large.
+He is almost stupidly not interested in the mysteries of material fact,
+nor in the riddles and great dramatic movements of history, indifferent
+to any form of beauty, and pedantically devoted to the pettiness of
+games and clothing and social conduct. It is, in fact, chiefly by his
+style in these latter things, his extensive unilluminated knowledge of
+Greek and Latin, and his greater costliness, that he differs from a
+young carpenter or clerk. A young carpenter or clerk of the same
+temperament would have no narrower prejudices nor outlook, no less
+capacity for the discussion of broad questions and for imaginative
+thinking. And it has come to the mind of "Kappa" as a discovery, as an
+exceedingly remarkable and moving thing, a thing to cry aloud about,
+that this should be so, that this is all that the best possible modern
+education has achieved. He makes it more than a personal issue. He has
+come to the conclusion that this is not an exceptional case at all, but
+a fair sample of what our upper-class education does for the imagination
+of those who must presently take the lead among us. He declares plainly
+that we are raising a generation of rulers and of those with whom the
+duty of initiative should chiefly reside, who have minds atrophied by
+dull studies and deadening suggestions, and he thinks that this is a
+matter of the gravest concern for the future of this land and Empire. It
+is difficult to avoid agreeing with him either in his observation or in
+his conclusion. Anyone who has seen much of undergraduates, or medical
+students, or Army candidates, and also of their social subordinates,
+must be disposed to agree that the difference between the two classes is
+mainly in unimportant things--in polish, in manner, in superficialities
+of accent and vocabulary and social habit--and that their minds, in
+range and power, are very much on a level. With an invincibly
+aristocratic tradition we are failing altogether to produce a leader
+class adequate to modern needs. The State is light-headed.
+
+But while one agrees with "Kappa" and shares his alarm, one must confess
+the remedies he considers indicated do not seem quite so satisfactory as
+his diagnosis of the disease. He attacks the curriculum and tells us we
+must reduce or revolutionise instruction and exercise in the dead
+languages, introduce a broader handling of history, a more inspiring
+arrangement of scientific courses, and so forth. I wish, indeed, it were
+possible to believe that substituting biology for Greek prose
+composition or history with models and photographs and diagrams for
+Latin versification, would make any considerable difference in this
+matter. For so one might discuss this question and still give no offence
+to a most amiable and influential class of men. But the roots of the
+evil, the ultimate cause of that typical young man's deadness, lie not
+at all in that direction. To indicate the direction in which it does lie
+is quite unavoidably to give offence to an indiscriminatingly sensitive
+class. Yet there is need to speak plainly. This deadening of soul comes
+not from the omission or inclusion of this specific subject or that; it
+is the effect of the general scholastic atmosphere. It is an atmosphere
+that admits of no inspiration at all. It is an atmosphere from which
+living stimulating influences have been excluded from which stimulating
+and vigorous personalities are now being carefully eliminated, and in
+which dull, prosaic men prevail invincibly. The explanation of the inert
+commonness of "Kappa's" schoolboy lies not in his having learnt this or
+not learnt that, but in the fact that from seven to twenty he has been
+in the intellectual shadow of a number of good-hearted, sedulously
+respectable conscientiously manly, conforming, well-behaved men, who
+never, to the knowledge of their pupils and the public, at any rate,
+think strange thoughts do imaginative or romantic things, pay tribute to
+beauty, laugh carelessly, or countenance any irregularity in the world.
+All erratic and enterprising tendencies in him have been checked by
+them and brought at last to nothing; and so he emerges a mere residuum
+of decent minor dispositions. The dullness of the scholastic atmosphere
+the grey, intolerant mediocrity that is the natural or assumed quality
+of every upper-class schoolmaster, is the true cause of the spiritual
+etiolation of "Kappa's" young friend.
+
+Now, it is a very grave thing, I know, to bring this charge against a
+great profession--to say, as I do say, that it is collectively and
+individually dull. But someone has to do this sooner or later; we have
+restrained ourselves and argued away from the question too long. There
+is, I allege, a great lack of vigorous and inspiring minds in our
+schools. Our upper-class schools are out of touch with the thought of
+the time, in a backwater of intellectual apathy. We have no original or
+heroic school-teachers. Let me ask the reader frankly what part our
+leading headmasters play in his intellectual world; if when some
+prominent one among them speaks or writes or talks, he expects anything
+more than platitudes and little things? Has he ever turned aside to
+learn what this headmaster or that thought of any question that
+interested him? Has he ever found freshness or power in a schoolmaster's
+discourse; or found a schoolmaster caring keenly for fine and beautiful
+things? Who does not know the schoolmaster's trite, safe admirations,
+his thin, evasive discussion, his sham enthusiasms for cricket, for
+fly-fishing, for perpendicular architecture, for boyish traits; his
+timid refuge in "good form," his deadly silences?
+
+And if we do not find him a refreshing and inspiring person, and his
+mind a fountain of thought in which we bathe and are restored, is it
+likely our sons will? If the schoolmaster at large is grey and dull,
+shirking interesting topics and emphatic speech, what must he be like in
+the monotonous class-room? These may seem wanton charges to some, but I
+am not speaking without my book. Monthly I am brought into close contact
+with the pedagogic intelligence through the medium of three educational
+magazines. A certain morbid habit against which I struggle in vain makes
+me read everything I catch a schoolmaster writing. I am, indeed, one of
+the faithful band who read the Educational Supplement of the _Times_. In
+these papers schoolmasters write about their business, lectures upon the
+questions of their calling are reported at length, and a sort of invalid
+discussion moves with painful decorum through the correspondence column.
+The scholastic mind so displayed in action fascinates me. It is like
+watching a game of billiards with wooden cushes and beechwood balls.
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+But let me take one special instance. In a periodical, now no longer
+living, called the _Independent Review_, there appeared some years ago a
+very curious and typical contribution by the Headmaster of Dulwich,
+which I may perhaps use as an illustration of the mental habits which
+seem inseparably associated with modern scholastic work. It is called
+"English Ideas on Education," and it begins--trite, imitative,
+undistinguished--thus:
+
+"The most important question in a country is that of education, and the
+most important people in a country are those who educate its
+inhabitants. Others have most of the present in their hands: those who
+educate have all the future. With the present is bound up all the
+happiness only of the utterly selfish and the thoughtless among mankind;
+on the future rest all the thoughts of every parent and every wise man
+and patriot."
+
+It is the opening of a boy's essay. And from first to last this
+remarkable composition is at or below that level. It is an entirely
+inconclusive paper, it is impossible to understand why it was written;
+it quotes nothing it says nothing about and was probably written in
+ignorance of "Kappa" or any other modern contributor to English ideas,
+and it occupied about six and a quarter of the large-type pages of this
+now vanished _Independent Review_. "English Ideas on Education"!--this
+very brevity is eloquent, the more so since the style is by no means
+succinct. It must be read to be believed. It is quite extraordinarily
+non-prehensile in quality and substance nothing is gripped and
+maintained and developed; it is like the passing of a lax hand over the
+surfaces of disarranged things. It is difficult to read, because one's
+mind slips over it and emerges too soon at the end, mildly puzzled
+though incurious still as to what it is all about. One perceives Mr.
+Gilkes through a fog dimly thinking that Greek has something vital to do
+with "a knowledge of language and man," that the classical master is in
+some mysterious way superior to the science man and more imaginative,
+and that science men ought not to be worried with the Greek that is too
+high for them; and he seems, too, to be under the odd illusion that "on
+all this" Englishmen "seem now to be nearly in agreement," and also on
+the opinion that games are a little overdone and that civic duties and
+the use of the rifle ought to be taught. Statements are made--the sort
+of statements that are suffered in an atmosphere where there is no
+swift, fierce opposition to be feared; they frill out into vague
+qualifications and butt gently against other partially contradictory
+statements. There is a classification of minds--the sort of
+classification dear to the Y.M.C.A. essayists, made for the purposes of
+the essay and unknown to psychology. There are, we are told, accurate
+unimaginative, ingenious minds capable of science and kindred vulgar
+things (such was Archimedes), and vague, imaginative minds, with the
+gift for language and for the treatment of passion and the higher
+indefinable things (such as Homer and Mr. Gilkes), and, somehow, this
+justifies those who are destined for "science" in dropping Greek.
+Certain "considerations," however, loom inconclusively upon this
+issue--rather like interested spectators of a street fight in a fog. For
+example, to learn a language is valuable "in proportion as the nation
+speaking it is great"--a most empty assertion; and "no languages are so
+good," for the purpose of improving style, "as the exact and beautiful
+languages of Rome and Greece."
+
+Is it not time at least that this last, this favourite but threadbare
+article of the schoolmaster's creed was put away for good? Everyone who
+has given any attention to this question must be aware that the
+intellectual gesture is entirely different in highly inflected languages
+such as Greek and Latin and in so uninflected a language as English,
+that learning Greek to improve one's English style is like learning to
+swim in order to fence better, and that familiarity with Greek seems
+only too often to render a man incapable of clear, strong expression in
+English at all. Yet Mr. Gilkes can permit this old assertion, so dear
+to country rectors and the classical scholar, to appear within a
+column's distance of such style as this:
+
+"It is now understood that every subject is valuable, if it is properly
+taught; it will perform that which, as follows from the accounts given
+above of the aim of education, is the work most important in the case of
+boys--that is, it will draw out their faculties and make them useful in
+the world, alert, trained in industry, and able to understand, so far as
+their school lessons educated them, and make themselves master of any
+subject set before them."
+
+This quotation is conclusive.
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will think I am writing
+against upper-class schoolmasters. I am, it is undeniable, writing
+against their dullness, but it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposed
+upon them by the conditions under which they live. Indeed, I believe,
+could I put the thing directly to the profession--"Do you not yourselves
+feel needlessly limited and dull?"--should receive a majority of
+affirmative responses. We have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what a
+schoolmaster must be; to that he must by art or nature approximate, and
+there is no help for it but to alter our ideal. Nothing else of any wide
+value can be done until that is done.
+
+In the first place, the received ideal omits a most necessary condition.
+We do not insist upon a headmaster or indeed any of our academic leaders
+and dignitaries, being a man of marked intellectual character, a man of
+intellectual distinction. It is assumed, rather lightly in many cases,
+that he has done "good work," as they say--the sort of good work that is
+usually no good at all, that increases nothing, changes nothing,
+stimulates no one, leads no whither. That, surely, must be altered. We
+must see to it that our leading schoolmasters at any rate must be men of
+insight and creative intelligence, men who could at a pinch write a good
+novel or produce illuminating criticism or take an original part in
+theological or philosophical discussion, or do any of these minor
+things. They must be authentic men, taking a line of their own and
+capable of intellectual passion. They should be able to make their mark
+outside the school, if only to show they carry a living soul into it. As
+things are, nothing is so fatal to a schoolmaster's career as to do
+that.
+
+And closely related to this omission is our extreme insistence upon what
+we call high moral character, meaning, really, something very like an
+entire absence of moral character. We insist upon tact, conformity, and
+an unblemished record. Now, in these days, of warring opinion, these
+days of gigantic, strange issues that cannot possibly be expressed in
+the formulae of the smaller times that have gone before, tact is
+evasion, conformity formality, and silence an unblemished record, mere
+evidence of the damning burial of a talent of life. The sort of man into
+whose hands we give our sons' minds must never have experimented morally
+or thought at all freely or vigorously about, for example, God,
+Socialism, the Mosaic account of the Creation, social procedure,
+Republicanism, beauty, love, or, indeed, about anything likely to
+interest an intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things
+he must have acquired the habit of the modest cough, the infectious
+trick of the nice evasion. How can "Kappa" expect inspiration from the
+decorous resultants who satisfy these conditions? What brand can ever be
+lit at altars that have borne no fire? And you find the secondary
+schoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming the zealous
+and grateful agent of the tendencies that have made him what he is,
+converting into a practice those vague dreads of idiosyncrasy, of
+positive acts and new ideas, that dictated the choice of him and his
+rule of life. His moral teaching amounts to this: to inculcate
+truth-telling about small matters and evasion about large, and to
+cultivate a morbid obsession in the necessary dawn of sexual
+consciousness. So far from wanting to stimulate the imagination, he
+hates and dreads it. I find him perpetually haunted by a ridiculous fear
+that boys will "do something," and in his terror seeking whatever is
+dull and unstimulating and tiring in intellectual work, clipping their
+reading, censoring their periodicals, expurgating their classics,
+substituting the stupid grind of organised "games" for natural,
+imaginative play, persecuting loafers--and so achieving his end and
+turning out at last, clean-looking, passively well-behaved, apathetic,
+obliterated young men, with the nicest manners and no spark of
+initiative at all, quite safe not to "do anything" for ever.
+
+I submit this may be a very good training for polite servants, but it is
+not the way to make masters in the world. If we English believe we are
+indeed a masterful people, we must be prepared to expose our children to
+more and more various stimulations than we do; they must grow up free,
+bold, adventurous, initiated, even if they have to take more risks in
+the doing of that. An able and stimulating teacher is as rare as a fine
+artist, and is a thing worth having for your son, even at the price of
+shocking your wife by his lack of respect for that magnificent
+compromise, the Establishment, or you by his Socialism or by his
+Catholicism or Darwinism, or even by his erroneous choice of ties and
+collars. Boys who are to be free, masterly men must hear free men
+talking freely of religion, of philosophy, of conduct. They must have
+heard men of this opinion and that, putting what they believe before
+them with all the courage of conviction. They must have an idea of will
+prevailing over form. It is far more important that boys should learn
+from original, intellectually keen men than they should learn from
+perfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nice
+men. The vital thing to consider about your son's schoolmaster is
+whether he talked lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not
+whether he loved unwisely or was born of poor parents, or was seen
+wearing a frock-coat in combination with a bowler, or confessed he
+doubted the Apostles' Creed, or called himself a Socialist, or any
+disgraceful thing like that, so many years ago. It is that sort of thing
+"Kappa" must invert if he wants a change in our public schools. You may
+arrange and rearrange curricula, abolish Greek, substitute "science"--it
+will not matter a rap. Even those model canoes of yours, "Kappa," will
+be wasted if you still insist upon model schoolmasters. So long as we
+require our schoolmasters to be politic, conforming, undisturbing men,
+setting up Polonius as an ideal for them, so long will their influence
+deaden the souls of our sons.
+
+
+
+
+THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD
+
+
+Some few years ago the Fabian Society, which has been so efficient in
+keeping English Socialism to the lines of "artfulness and the
+'eighties," refused to have anything to do with the Endowment of
+Motherhood. Subsequently it repented and produced a characteristic
+pamphlet in which the idea was presented with a sort of minimising
+furtiveness as a mean little extension of outdoor relief. These Fabian
+Socialists, instead of being the daring advanced people they are
+supposed to be, are really in many things twenty years behind the times.
+There need be nothing shamefaced about the presentation of the Endowment
+of Motherhood. There is nothing shameful about it. It is a plain and
+simple idea for which the mind of the man in the street has now been
+very completely prepared. It has already crept into social legislation
+to the extent of thirty shillings.
+
+I suppose if one fact has been hammered into us in the past two decades
+more than any other it is this: that the supply of children is falling
+off in the modern State; that births, and particularly good-quality
+births, are not abundant enough; that the birth-rate, and particularly
+the good-class birth-rate, falls steadily below the needs of our future.
+
+If no one else has said a word about this important matter, ex-President
+Roosevelt would have sufficed to shout it to the ends of the earth.
+Every civilised community is drifting towards "race-suicide" as Rome
+drifted into "race-suicide" at the climax of her empire.
+
+Well, it is absurd to go on building up a civilisation with a dwindling
+supply of babies in the cradles--and these not of the best possible
+sort--and so I suppose there is hardly an intelligent person in the
+English-speaking communities who has not thought of some possible
+remedy--from the naive scoldings of Mr. Roosevelt and the more stolid of
+the periodicals to sane and intelligible legislative projects.
+
+The reasons for the fall in the birth-rate are obvious enough. It is a
+necessary consequence of the individualistic competition of modern life.
+People talk of modern women "shirking" motherhood, but it would be a
+silly sort of universe in which a large proportion of women had any
+natural and instinctive desire to shirk motherhood, and, I believe, a
+huge proportion of modern women are as passionately predisposed towards
+motherhood as ever women were. But modern conditions conspire to put a
+heavy handicap upon parentage and an enormous premium upon the partial
+or complete evasion of offspring, and that is where the clue to the
+trouble lies. Our social arrangements discourage parentage very heavily,
+and the rational thing for a statesman to do in the matter is not to
+grow eloquent, but to do intelligent things to minimise that
+discouragement.
+
+Consider the case of an energetic young man and an energetic young woman
+in our modern world. So long as they remain "unencumbered" they can
+subsist on a comparatively small income and find freedom and leisure to
+watch for and follow opportunities of self-advancement; they can travel,
+get knowledge and experience, make experiments, succeed. One might
+almost say the conditions of success and self-development in the modern
+world are to defer marriage as long as possible, and after that to defer
+parentage as long as possible. And even when there is a family there is
+the strongest temptation to limit it to three or four children at the
+outside. Parents who can give three children any opportunity in life
+prefer to do that than turn out, let us say, eight ill-trained children
+at a disadvantage, to become the servants and unsuccessful competitors
+of the offspring of the restrained. That fact bites us all; it does not
+require a search. It is all very well to rant about "race-suicide," but
+there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for
+all but the really rich, and so patent are they that I doubt if all the
+eloquence of Mr. Roosevelt and its myriad echoes has added a thousand
+babies to the eugenic wealth of the English-speaking world.
+
+Modern married people, and particularly those in just that capable
+middle class from which children are most urgently desirable from the
+statesman's point of view, are going to have one or two children to
+please themselves but they are not going to have larger families under
+existing conditions, though all the ex-Presidents and all the pulpits in
+the world clamour together for them to do so.
+
+If having and rearing children is a private affair, then no one has any
+right to revile small families; if it is a public service, then the
+parent is justified in looking to the State to recognise that service
+and offer some compensation for the worldly disadvantages it entails. He
+is justified in saying that while his unencumbered rival wins past him
+he is doing the State the most precious service in the world by rearing
+and educating a family, and that the State has become his debtor.
+
+In other words, the modern State has got to pay for its children if it
+really wants them--and more particularly it has to pay for the children
+of good homes.
+
+The alternative to that is racial replacement and social decay. That is
+the essential idea conveyed by this phrase, the Endowment of Motherhood.
+
+Now, how is the paying to be done? That needs a more elaborate answer,
+of which I will give here only the roughest, crudest suggestion.
+
+Probably it would be found best that the payment should be made to the
+mother, as the administrator of the family budget, that its amount
+should be made dependent upon the quality of the home in which the
+children are being reared, upon their health and physical development,
+and upon their educational success. Be it remembered, we do not want any
+children; we want good-quality children. The amount to be paid, I would
+particularly point out, should vary with the standing of the home.
+People of that excellent class which spends over a hundred a year on
+each child ought to get about that much from the State, and people of
+the class which spends five shillings a week per head on them would get
+about that, and so on. And if these payments were met by a special
+income tax there would be no social injustice whatever in such an
+unequality of payment. Each social stratum would pay according to its
+prosperity, and the only redistribution that would in effect occur would
+be that the childless people of each class would pay for the children of
+that class. The childless family and the small family would pay equally
+with the large family, incomes being equal, but they would receive in
+proportions varying with the health and general quality of their
+children. That, I think, gives the broad principles upon which the
+payments would be made.
+
+Of course, if these subsidies resulted in too rapid a rise in the
+birth-rate, it would be practicable to diminish the inducement; and if,
+on the other hand, the birth-rate still fell, it would be easy to
+increase the inducement until it sufficed.
+
+That concisely is the idea of the Endowment of Motherhood. I believe
+firmly that some such arrangement is absolutely necessary to the
+continuous development of the modern State. These proposals arise so
+obviously out of the needs of our time that I cannot understand any
+really intelligent opposition to them. I can, however, understand a
+partial and silly application of them. It is most important that our
+good-class families should be endowed, but the whole tendency of the
+timid and disingenuous progressivism of our time, which is all mixed up
+with ideas of charity and aggressive benevolence to the poor, would be
+to apply this--as that Fabian tract I mention does--only to the poor
+mother. To endow poor and bad-class motherhood and leave other people
+severely alone would be a proceeding so supremely idiotic, so harmful to
+our national quality, as to be highly probable in the present state of
+our public intelligence. It comes quite on a level with the policy of
+starving middle-class education that has left us with nearly the worst
+educated middle class in Western Europe.
+
+The Endowment of Motherhood does not attract the bureaucratic type of
+reformer because it offers a minimum chance of meddlesome interference
+with people's lives. There would be no chance of "seeking out" anybody
+and applying benevolent but grim compulsions on the strength of it. In
+spite of its wide scope it would be much less of a public nuisance than
+that Wet Children's Charter, which exasperates me every time I pass a
+public-house on a rainy night. But, on the other hand, there would be an
+enormous stimulus to people to raise the quality of their homes, study
+infantile hygiene, seek out good schools for them--and do their duty as
+all good parents naturally want to do now--if only economic forces were
+not so pitilessly against them--thoroughly and well.
+
+
+
+
+DOCTORS
+
+
+In that extravagant world of which I dream, in which people will live in
+delightful cottages and ground rents will serve instead of rates, and
+everyone will have a chance of being happy--in that impossible world all
+doctors will be members of one great organisation for the public health,
+with all or most of their income guaranteed to them: I doubt if there
+will be any private doctors at all.
+
+Heaven forbid I should seem to write a word against doctors as they are.
+Daily I marvel at the wonders the general practitioner achieves, having
+regard to the difficulties of his position.
+
+But I cannot hide from myself, and I do not intend to hide from anyone
+else, my firm persuasion that the services the general practitioner is
+able to render us are not one-tenth so effectual as they might be if,
+instead of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of a sanely
+organised public machine. Consider what his training and equipment are,
+consider the peculiar difficulties of his work, and then consider for a
+moment what better conditions might be invented, and perhaps you will
+not think my estimate of one-tenth an excessive understatement in this
+matter.
+
+Nearly the whole of our medical profession and most of our apparatus for
+teaching and training doctors subsist on strictly commercial lines by
+earning fees. This chief source of revenue is eked out by the wanton
+charity of old women, and conspicuous subscriptions by popularity
+hunters, and a small but growing contribution (in the salaries of
+medical officers of health and so forth) from the public funds. But the
+fact remains that for the great mass of the medical profession there is
+no living to be got except at a salary for hospital practice or by
+earning fees in receiving or attending upon private cases.
+
+So long as a doctor is learning or adding to knowledge, he earns
+nothing, and the common, unintelligent man does not see why he should
+earn anything. So that a doctor who has no religious passion for poverty
+and self-devotion gets through the minimum of training and learning as
+quickly and as cheaply as possible, and does all he can to fill up the
+rest of his time in passing rapidly from case to case. The busier he
+keeps, the less his leisure for thought and learning, the richer he
+grows, and the more he is esteemed. His four or five years of hasty,
+crowded study are supposed to give him a complete and final knowledge of
+the treatment of every sort of disease, and he goes on year after year,
+often without co-operation, working mechanically in the common incidents
+of practice, births, cases of measles and whooping cough, and so forth,
+and blundering more or less in whatever else turns up.
+
+There are no public specialists to whom he can conveniently refer the
+difficulties he constantly encounters; only in the case of rich patients
+is the specialist available; there are no properly organised information
+bureaus for him, and no means whatever of keeping him informed upon
+progress and discovery in medical science. He is not even required to
+set apart a month or so in every two or three years in order to return
+to lectures and hospitals and refresh his knowledge. Indeed, the income
+of the average general practitioner would not permit of such a thing,
+and almost the only means of contact between him and current thought
+lies in the one or other of our two great medical weeklies to which he
+happens to subscribe.
+
+Now just as I have nothing but praise for the average general
+practitioner, so I have nothing but praise and admiration for those
+stalwart-looking publications. Without them I can imagine nothing but
+the most terrible intellectual atrophy among our medical men. But since
+they are private properties run for profit they have to pay, and half
+their bulk consists of the brilliantly written advertisements of new
+drugs and apparatus. They give much knowledge, they do much to ventilate
+perplexing questions, but a broadly conceived and properly endowed
+weekly circular could, I believe, do much more. At any rate, in my
+Utopia this duty of feeding up the general practitioners will not be
+left to private enterprise.
+
+Behind the first line of my medical army will be a second line of able
+men constantly digesting new research for its practical
+needs--correcting, explaining, announcing; and, in addition, a force of
+public specialists to whom every difficulty in diagnosis will be at once
+referred. And there will be a properly organised system of reliefs that
+will allow the general practitioner and his right hand, the nurse, to
+come back to the refreshment of study before his knowledge and mind have
+got rusty. But then my Utopia is a Socialistic system. Under our present
+system of competitive scramble, under any system that reduces medical
+practice to mere fee-hunting nothing of this sort is possible.
+
+Then in my Utopia, for every medical man who was mainly occupied in
+practice, I would have another who was mainly occupied in or about
+research. People hear so much about modern research that they do not
+realise how entirely inadequate it is in amount and equipment. Our
+general public is still too stupid to understand the need and value of
+sustained investigations in any branch of knowledge at all. In spite of
+all the lessons of the last century, it still fails to realise how
+discovery and invention enrich the community and how paying an
+investment is the public employment of clever people to think and
+experiment for the benefit of all. It still expects to get a Newton or a
+Joule for Ł800 a year, and requires him to conduct his researches in the
+margin of time left over when he has got through his annual eighty or
+ninety lectures. It imagines discoveries are a sort of inspiration that
+comes when professors are running to catch trains. It seems incapable of
+imagining how enormous are the untried possibilities of research. Of
+course, if you will only pay a handful of men salaries at which the cook
+of any large London hotel would turn up his nose, you cannot expect to
+have the master minds of the world at your service; and save for a few
+independent or devoted men, therefore, it is not reasonable to suppose
+that such a poor little dribble of medical research as is now going on
+is in the hands of persons of much more than average mental equipment.
+How can it be?
+
+One hears a lot of the rigorous research into the problem of cancer that
+is now going on. Does the reader realise that all the men in the whole
+world who are giving any considerable proportion of their time to this
+cancer research would pack into a very small room, that they are
+working in little groups without any properly organised system of
+intercommunication, and that half of them are earning less than a
+quarter of the salary of a Bond Street shopwalker by those vastly
+important inquiries? Not one cancer case in twenty thousand is being
+properly described and reported. And yet, in comparison with other
+diseases, cancer is being particularly well attended to.
+
+The general complacency with the progress in knowledge we have made and
+are making is ridiculously unjustifiable. Enormous things were no doubt
+done in the nineteenth century in many fields of knowledge, but all that
+was done was out of all proportion petty in comparison with what might
+have been done. I suppose the whole of the unprecedented progress in
+material knowledge of the nineteenth century was the work of two or
+three thousand men, who toiled against opposition, spite and endless
+disadvantages, without proper means of intercommunication and with
+wretched facilities for experiment. Such discoveries as were
+distinctively medical were the work of only a few hundred men. Now,
+suppose instead of that scattered band of un-co-ordinated workers a
+great army of hundreds of thousands of well-paid men; suppose, for
+instance, the community had kept as many scientific and medical
+investigators as it has bookmakers and racing touts and men about
+town--should we not know a thousand times as much as we do about disease
+and health and strength and power?
+
+But these are Utopian questionings. The sane, practical man shakes his
+head, smiles pityingly at my dreamy impracticability, and passes them
+by.
+
+
+
+
+AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION
+
+
+There is something of the phonograph in all of us, but in the sort of
+eminent person who makes public speeches about education and reading,
+and who gives away prizes and opens educational institutions, there
+seems to be little else but gramophone.
+
+These people always say the same things, and say them in the same note.
+And why should they do that if they are really individuals?
+
+There is, I cannot but suspect, in the mysterious activities that
+underlie life, some trade in records for these distinguished
+gramophones, and it is a trade conducted upon cheap and wholesale lines.
+There must be in these demiurgic profundities a rapid manufacture of
+innumerable thousands of that particular speech about "scrappy reading,"
+and that contrast of "modern" with "serious" literature, that babbles
+about in the provinces so incessantly. Gramophones thinly disguised as
+bishops, gramophones still more thinly disguised as eminent statesmen,
+gramophones K.C.B. and gramophones F.R.S. have brazened it at us time
+after time, and will continue to brazen it to our grandchildren when we
+are dead and all our poor protests forgotten. And almost equally popular
+in their shameless mouths is the speech that declares this present age
+to be an age of specialisation. We all know the profound droop of the
+eminent person's eyelids as he produces that discovery, the edifying
+deductions or the solemn warnings he unfolds from this proposition, and
+all the dignified, inconclusive rigmarole of that cylinder. And it is
+nonsense from beginning to end.
+
+This is most distinctly _not_ an age of specialisation. There has hardly
+been an age in the whole course of history less so than the present. A
+few moments of reflection will suffice to demonstrate that. This is
+beyond any precedent an age of change, change in the appliances of life,
+in the average length of life, in the general temper of life; and the
+two things are incompatible. It is only under fixed conditions that you
+can have men specialising.
+
+They specialise extremely, for example, under such conditions as one had
+in Hindustan up to the coming of the present generation. There the metal
+worker or the cloth worker, the wheelwright or the druggist of yesterday
+did his work under almost exactly the same conditions as his predecessor
+did it five hundred years before. He had the same resources, the same
+tools, the same materials; he made the same objects for the same ends.
+Within the narrow limits thus set him he carried work to a fine
+perfection; his hand, his mental character were subdued to his medium.
+His dress and bearing even were distinctive; he was, in fact, a highly
+specialised man. He transmitted his difference to his sons. Caste was
+the logical expression in the social organisation of this state of high
+specialisation, and, indeed, what else is caste or any definite class
+distinctions but that? But the most obvious fact of the present time is
+the disappearance of caste and the fluctuating uncertainty of all class
+distinctions.
+
+If one looks into the conditions of industrial employment specialisation
+will be found to linger just in proportion as a trade has remained
+unaffected by inventions and innovation. The building trade, for
+example, is a fairly conservative one. A brick wall is made to-day much
+as it was made two hundred years ago, and the bricklayer is in
+consequence a highly skilled and inadaptable specialist. No one who has
+not passed through a long and tedious training can lay bricks properly.
+And it needs a specialist to plough a field with horses or to drive a
+cab through the streets of London. Thatchers, old-fashioned cobblers,
+and hand workers are all specialised to a degree no new modern calling
+requires. With machinery skill disappears and unspecialised intelligence
+comes in. Any generally intelligent man can learn in a day or two to
+drive an electric tram, fix up an electric lighting installation, or
+guide a building machine or a steam plough. He must be, of course, much
+more generally intelligent than the average bricklayer, but he needs far
+less specialised skill. To repair machinery requires, of course, a
+special sort of knowledge, but not a special sort of training.
+
+In no way is this disappearance of specialisation more marked than in
+military and naval affairs. In the great days of Greece and Rome war was
+a special calling, requiring a special type of man. In the Middle Ages
+war had an elaborate technique, in which the footman played the part of
+an unskilled labourer, and even within a period of a hundred years it
+took a long period of training and discipline before the common
+discursive man could be converted into the steady soldier. Even to-day
+traditions work powerfully, through extravagance of uniform, and through
+survivals of that mechanical discipline that was so important in the
+days of hand-to-hand fighting, to keep the soldier something other than
+a man. For all the lessons of the Boer war we are still inclined to
+believe that the soldier has to be something severely parallel, carrying
+a rifle he fires under orders, obedient to the pitch of absolute
+abnegation of his private intelligence. We still think that our officers
+have, like some very elaborate and noble sort of performing animal, to
+be "trained." They learn to fight with certain specified "arms" and
+weapons, instead of developing intelligence enough to use anything that
+comes to hand.
+
+But, indeed, when a really great European war does come and lets loose
+motor-cars, bicycles, wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes, new projectiles
+of every size and shape, and a multitude of ingenious persons upon the
+preposterously vast hosts of conscription, the military caste will be
+missing within three months of the beginning, and the inventive,
+versatile, intelligent man will have come to his own.
+
+And what is true of a military caste is equally true of a special
+governing class such as our public schools maintain.
+
+The misunderstanding that has given rise to this proposition that this
+is an age of specialisation, and through that no end of mischief in
+misdirected technical education and the like, is essentially a confusion
+between specialisation and the division of labour. No doubt this is an
+age when everything makes for wider and wider co-operations. Work that
+was once done by one highly specialised man--the making of a watch, for
+example--is now turned out wholesale by elaborate machinery, or effected
+in great quantities by the contributed efforts of a number of people.
+Each of these people may bring a highly developed intelligence to bear
+for a time upon the special problem in hand, but that is quite a
+different thing from specialising to do that thing.
+
+This is typically shown in scientific research. The problem or the parts
+of problems upon which the inquiry of an individual man is concentrated
+are often much narrower than the problems that occupied Faraday or
+Dalton, and yet the hard and fast lines that once divided physicist from
+chemist, or botanist from pathologist have long since gone. Professor
+Farmer, the botanist, investigates cancer, and the ordinary educated
+man, familiar though he is with their general results, would find it
+hard to say which were the chemists and which the physicists among
+Professors Dewar and Ramsey Lord Rayleigh and Curie. The classification
+of sciences that was such a solemn business to our grandfathers is now
+merely a mental obstruction.
+
+It is interesting to glance for a moment at the possible source of this
+mischievous confusion between specialisation and the division of labour.
+I have already glanced at the possibility of a diabolical world
+manufacturing gramophone records for our bishops and statesmen and
+suchlike leaders of thought, but if we dismiss that as a merely elegant
+trope, I must confess I think it is the influence of Herbert Spencer.
+His philosophy is pervaded by an insistence which is, I think, entirely
+without justification, that the universe, and every sort of thing in it,
+moves from the simple and homogeneous to the complex and heterogeneous.
+An unwary man obsessed with that idea would be very likely to assume
+without consideration that men were less specialised in a barbaric state
+of society than they are to-day. I think I have given reasons for
+believing that the reverse of this is nearer the truth.
+
+
+
+
+IS THERE A PEOPLE?
+
+
+Of all the great personifications that have dominated the mind of man,
+the greatest, the most marvellous, the most impossible and the most
+incredible, is surely the People, that impalpable monster to which the
+world has consecrated its political institutions for the last hundred
+years.
+
+It is doubtful now whether this stupendous superstition has reached its
+grand climacteric, and there can be little or no dispute that it is
+destined to play a prominent part in the history of mankind for many
+years to come. There is a practical as well as a philosophical interest,
+therefore, in a note or so upon the attributes of this legendary being.
+I write "legendary," but thereby I display myself a sceptic. To a very
+large number of people the People is one of the profoundest realities in
+life. They believe--what exactly do they believe about the people?
+
+When they speak of the People they certainly mean something more than
+the whole mass of individuals in a country lumped together. That is the
+people, a mere varied aggregation of persons, moved by no common motive,
+a complex interplay. The People, as the believer understands the word,
+is something more mysterious than that. The People is something that
+overrides and is added to the individualities that make up the people.
+It is, as it were, itself an individuality of a higher order--as indeed,
+its capital "P" displays. It has a will of its own which is not the
+will of any particular person in it, it has a power of purpose and
+judgment of a superior sort. It is supposed to be the underlying reality
+of all national life and the real seat of all public religious emotion.
+Unfortunately, it lacks powers of expression, and so there is need of
+rulers and interpreters. If they express it well in law and fact, in
+book and song, they prosper under its mysterious approval; if they do
+not, it revolts or forgets or does something else of an equally
+annihilatory sort. That, briefly, is the idea of the People. My modest
+thesis is that there exists nothing of the sort, that the world of men
+is entirely made up of the individuals that compose it, and that the
+collective action is just the algebraic sum of all individual actions.
+
+How far the opposite opinion may go, one must talk to intelligent
+Americans or read the contemporary literature of the first French
+Revolution to understand. I find, for example, so typical a young
+American as the late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is the
+People to whom we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of the name of
+Shakespeare from the ruck of his contemporaries and the passage in which
+this assertion is made is fairly representative of the general
+expression of this sort of mysticism. "One must keep one's faith in the
+People--the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers--else of all men
+the artists are most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admit
+and concede that this belief is ever so sorely tried at times.... But in
+the end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and discriminate
+between it and the false." And then he resorts to italics to emphasise:
+"_In the last analysis the People are always right_."
+
+And it was that still more typical American, Abraham Lincoln, who
+declared his equal confidence in the political wisdom of this collective
+being. "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the
+people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
+The thing is in the very opening words of the American Constitution, and
+Theodore Parker calls it "the American idea" and pitches a still higher
+note: "A government of all the people, by all the people, for all the
+people; a government of all the principles of eternal justice, _the
+unchanging law of God."_
+
+It is unavoidable that a collective wisdom distinct from any individual
+and personal one is intended in these passages. Mr. Norris, for example,
+never figured to himself a great wave of critical discrimination
+sweeping through the ranks of the various provision trades and a
+multitude of simple, plain burgesses preferring Shakespeare and setting
+Marlowe aside. Such a particularisation of his statement would have at
+once reduced it to absurdity. Nor does any American see the people
+particularised in that way. They believe in the People one and
+indivisible, a simple, mystical being, which pervades and dominates the
+community and determines its final collective consequences.
+
+Now upon the belief that there is a People rests a large part of the
+political organisation of the modern world. The idea was one of the
+chief fruits of the speculations of the eighteenth century, and the
+American Constitution is its most perfect expression. One turns,
+therefore, inevitably to the American instance, not because it is the
+only one, but because there is the thing in its least complicated form.
+We have there an almost exactly logical realisation of this belief. The
+whole political machine is designed and expressed to register the
+People's will, literature is entirely rewarded and controlled by the
+effectual suffrages of the bookseller's counter, science (until private
+endowment intervened) was in the hands of the State Legislatures, and
+religion the concern of the voluntary congregations.
+
+On the assumption that there is a People there could be no better state
+of affairs. You and I and everyone, except for a vote or a book, or a
+service now and then, can go about our business, you to your grocery and
+I to mine, and the direction of the general interests rests safe in the
+People's hands. Now that is by no means a caricature of the attitude of
+mind of many educated Americans. You find they have little or nothing to
+do with actual politics, and are inclined to regard the professional
+politician with a certain contempt; they trouble their heads hardly at
+all about literature, and they contemplate the general religious
+condition of the population with absolute unconcern. It is not that they
+are unpatriotic or morally trivial that they stand thus disengaged; it
+is that they have a fatalistic belief in this higher power. Whatever
+troubles and abuses may arise they have an absolute faith that "in the
+last analysis" the People will get it right.
+
+And now suppose that I am right and that there is no People! Suppose
+that the crowd is really no more than a crowd, a vast miscellaneous
+confusion of persons which grows more miscellaneous every year. Suppose
+this conception of the People arose out of a sentimental idealisation,
+Rousseau fashion, of the ancient homogeneous peasant class--a class that
+is rapidly being swept out of existence by modern industrial
+developments--and that whatever slender basis of fact it had in the
+past is now altogether gone. What consequences may be expected?
+
+It does not follow that because the object of your reverence is a dead
+word you will get no oracles from the shrine. If the sacred People
+remains impassive, inarticulate, non-existent, there are always the
+keepers of the shrine who will oblige. Professional politicians, venal
+and violent men, will take over the derelict political control, people
+who live by the book trade will alone have a care for letters, research
+and learning will be subordinated to political expediency, and a great
+development of noisily competitive religious enterprises will take the
+place of any common religious formula. There will commence a secular
+decline in the quality of public thought, emotion and activity. There
+will be no arrest or remedy for this state of affairs so long as that
+superstitious faith in the People as inevitably right "in the last
+analysis" remains. And if my supposition is correct, it should be
+possible to find in the United States, where faith in the people is
+indisputably dominant, some such evidence of the error of this faith. Is
+there?
+
+I write as one that listens from afar. But there come reports of
+legislative and administrative corruption, of organised public
+blackmail, that do seem to carry out my thesis. One thinks of Edgar
+Allan Poe, who dreamt of founding a distinctive American literature,
+drugged and killed almost as it were symbolically, amid electioneering
+and nearly lied out of all posthumous respect by that scoundrel
+Griswold; one thinks of State Universities that are no more than mints
+for bogus degrees; one thinks of "Science" Christianity and Zion City.
+These things are quite insufficient for a Q.E.D., but I submit they
+favour my proposition.
+
+Suppose there is no People at all, but only enormous, differentiating
+millions of men. All sorts of widely accepted generalisations will
+collapse if that foundation is withdrawn. I submit it as worth
+considering.
+
+
+
+
+THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+There is a growing discord between governments and governed in the
+world.
+
+There has always been discord between governments and governed since
+States began; government has always been to some extent imposed, and
+obedience to some extent reluctant. We have come to regard it as a
+matter of course that under all absolutions and narrow oligarchies the
+community, so soon as it became educated and as its social elaboration
+developed a free class with private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as it
+attained to any power of thought and expression at all, would express
+discontent. But we English and Americans and Western Europeans generally
+had supposed that, so far as our own communities were concerned, this
+discontent was already anticipated and met by representative
+institutions. We had supposed that, with various safeguards and
+elaborations, our communities did, as a matter of fact, govern
+themselves. Our panacea for all discontents was the franchise. Social
+and national dissatisfaction could be given at the same time a voice and
+a remedy in the ballot box. Our liberal intelligences could and do still
+understand Russians wanting votes, Indians wanting votes, women wanting
+votes. The history of nineteenth-century Liberalism in the world might
+almost be summed up in the phrase "progressive enfranchisement." But
+these are the desires of a closing phase in political history. The new
+discords go deeper than that. The new situation which confronts our
+Liberal intelligence is the discontent of the enfranchised, the contempt
+and hostility of the voters for their elected delegates and governments.
+
+This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, and hostility to
+duly elected representatives is no mere accident of this democratic
+country or that; it is an almost world-wide movement. It is an almost
+universal disappointment with so-called popular government, and in many
+communities--in Great Britain particularly--it is manifesting itself by
+an unprecedented lawlessness in political matters, and in a strange and
+ominous contempt for the law. One sees it, for example, in the refusal
+of large sections of the medical profession to carry out insurance
+legislation, in the repudiation of Irish Home Rule by Ulster, and in the
+steady drift of great masses of industrial workers towards the
+conception of a universal strike. The case of the discontented workers
+in Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These people
+form effective voting majorities in many constituencies; they send
+alleged Socialist and Labour representatives into the legislative
+assembly; and, in addition, they have their trade unions with staffs of
+elected officials, elected ostensibly to state their case and promote
+their interests. Yet nothing is now more evident than that these
+officials, working-men representatives and the like, do not speak for
+their supporters, and are less and less able to control them. The
+Syndicalist movement, sabotage in France, and Larkinism in Great
+Britain, are, from the point of view of social stability, the most
+sinister demonstrations of the gathering anger of the labouring classes
+with representative institutions. These movements are not revolutionary
+movements, not movements for reconstruction such as were the democratic
+Socialist movements that closed the nineteenth century. They are angry
+and vindictive movements. They have behind them the most dangerous and
+terrible of purely human forces, the wrath, the blind destructive wrath,
+of a cheated crowd.
+
+Now, so far as the insurrection of labour goes, American conditions
+differ from European, and the process of disillusionment will probably
+follow a different course. American labour is very largely immigrant
+labour still separated by barriers of language and tradition from the
+established thought of the nation. It will be long before labour in
+America speaks with the massed effectiveness of labour in France and
+England, where master and man are racially identical, and where there is
+no variety of "Dagoes" to break up the revolt. But in other directions
+the American disbelief in and impatience with "elected persons" is and
+has been far profounder than it is in Europe. The abstinence of men of
+property and position from overt politics, and the contempt that
+banishes political discussion from polite society, are among the first
+surprises of the visiting European to America, and now that, under an
+organised pressure of conscience, college-trained men and men of wealth
+are abandoning this strike of the educated and returning to political
+life, it is, one notes, with a prevailing disposition to correct
+democracy by personality, and to place affairs in the hands of
+autocratic mayors and presidents rather than to carry out democratic
+methods to the logical end. At times America seems hot for a Caesar. If
+no Caesar is established, then it will be the good fortune of the
+Republic rather than its democratic virtue which will have saved it.
+
+And directly one comes to look into the quality and composition of the
+elected governing body of any modern democratic State, one begins to see
+the reason and nature of its widening estrangement from the community it
+represents. In no sense are these bodies really representative of the
+thought and purpose of the nation; the conception of its science, the
+fresh initiatives of its philosophy and literature, the forces that make
+the future through invention and experiment, exploration and trial and
+industrial development have no voice, or only an accidental and feeble
+voice, there. The typical elected person is a smart rather than
+substantial lawyer, full of cheap catchwords and elaborate tricks of
+procedure and electioneering, professing to serve the interests of the
+locality which is his constituency, but actually bound hand and foot to
+the specialised political association, his party, which imposed him upon
+that constituency. Arrived at the legislature, his next ambition is
+office, and to secure and retain office he engages in elaborate
+manoeuvres against the opposite party, upon issues which his limited and
+specialised intelligence indicates as electorally effective. But being
+limited and specialised, he is apt to drift completely out of touch with
+the interests and feelings of large masses of people in the community.
+In Great Britain, the United States and France alike there is a constant
+tendency on the part of the legislative body to drift into unreality,
+and to bore the country with the disputes that are designed to thrill
+it. In Great Britain, for example, at the present time the two political
+parties are both profoundly unpopular with the general intelligence,
+which is sincerely anxious, if only it could find a way, to get rid of
+both of them. Irish Home Rule--an issue as dead as mutton, is opposed to
+Tariff Reform, which has never been alive. Much as the majority of
+people detest the preposterously clumsy attempts to amputate Ireland
+from the rule of the British Parliament which have been going on since
+the breakdown of Mr. Gladstone's political intelligence, their dread of
+foolish and scoundrelly fiscal adventurers is sufficiently strong to
+retain the Liberals in office. The recent exposures of the profound
+financial rottenness of the Liberal party have deepened the public
+resolve to permit no such enlarged possibilities of corruption as Tariff
+Reform would afford their at least equally dubitable opponents. And
+meanwhile, beneath those ridiculous alternatives, those sham issues, the
+real and very urgent affairs of the nation, the vast gathering
+discontent of the workers throughout the Empire, the racial conflicts in
+India and South Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end in our
+severance from India, the insane waste of national resources, the
+control of disease, the frightful need of some cessation of armament,
+drift neglected....
+
+Now do these things indicate the ultimate failure and downfall of
+representative government? Was this idea which inspired so much of the
+finest and most generous thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth
+centuries a wrong idea, and must we go back to Caesarism or oligarchy or
+plutocracy or a theocracy, to Rome or Venice or Carthage, to the strong
+man or the ruler by divine right, for the political organisation of the
+future?
+
+My answer to that question would be an emphatic No. My answer would be
+that the idea of representative government is the only possible idea for
+the government of a civilised community. But I would add that so far
+representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair
+trial. So far we have not had representative government, but only a
+devastating caricature.
+
+It is quite plain now that those who first organised the parliamentary
+institutions which now are the ruling institutions of the greater part
+of mankind fell a prey to certain now very obvious errors. They did not
+realise that there are hundreds of different ways in which voting may be
+done, and that every way will give a different result. They thought, and
+it is still thought by a great number of mentally indolent people, that
+if a country is divided up into approximately equivalent areas, each
+returning one or two representatives, if every citizen is given one
+vote, and if there is no legal limit to the presentation of candidates,
+that presently a cluster of the wisest, most trusted and best citizens
+will come together in the legislative assembly.
+
+In reality the business is far more complicated than this. In reality a
+country will elect all sorts of different people according to the
+electoral method employed. It is a fact that anyone who chooses to
+experiment with a willing school or club may verify. Suppose, for
+example, that you take your country, give every voter one single vote,
+put up six and twenty candidates for a dozen vacancies, and give them no
+adequate time for organisation. The voters, you will find, will return
+certain favourites, A and B and C and D let us call them, by enormous
+majorities, and behind these at a considerable distance will come E, F,
+G, H, I, J, K, and L. Now give your candidates time to develop
+organisation. A lot of people who swelled A's huge vote will dislike J
+and K and L so much, and prefer M and N so much, that if they are
+assured that by proper organisation A's return can be made certain
+without their voting for him, they will vote for M and N. But they will
+do so only on that understanding. Similarly certain B-ites will want O
+and P if they can be got without sacrificing B. So that adequate party
+organisation in the community may return not the dozen a naive vote
+would give, but A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, M, N, O, P. Now suppose that,
+instead of this arrangement, your community is divided into twelve
+constituencies and no candidate may contest more than one of them. And
+suppose each constituency has strong local preferences. A, B and C are
+widely popular; in every constituency they have supporters but in no
+constituency does any one of the three command a majority. They are
+great men, not local men. Q, who is an unknown man in most of the
+country, has, on the contrary, a strong sect of followers in the
+constituency for which A stands, and beats him by one vote; another
+local celebrity, E, disposes of B in the same way; C is attacked not
+only by S but T, whose peculiar views upon vaccination, let us say,
+appeal to just enough of C's supporters to let in S. Similar accidents
+happen in the other constituencies, and the country that would have
+unreservedly returned A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L on the first
+system, return instead O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Numerous
+voters who would have voted for A if they had a chance vote instead for
+R, S, T, etc., numbers who would have voted for B, vote for Q, V, W, X,
+etc. But now suppose that A and B are opposed to one another, and that
+there is a strong A party and a strong B party highly organised in the
+country. B is really the second favourite over the country as a whole,
+but A is the first favourite. D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R, U, W, Y constitute
+the A candidates and in his name they conquer. B, C, E, G, I, K, M, O,
+Q, S, V are all thrown out in spite of the wide popularity of B and C. B
+and C, we have supposed, are the second and third favourites, and yet
+they go out in favour of Y, of whom nobody has heard before, some mere
+hangers-on of A's. Such a situation actually occurs in both Ulster and
+Home-Rule Ireland.
+
+But now let us suppose another arrangement, and that is that the whole
+country is one constituency, and every voter has, if he chooses to
+exercise them, twelve votes, which, however, he must give, if he gives
+them all, to twelve separate people. Then quite certainly A, B, C, D
+will come in, but the tail will be different. M, N, O, P may come up
+next to them, and even Z, that eminent non-party man, may get in. But
+now organisation may produce new effects. The ordinary man, when he has
+twelve votes to give, likes to give them all, so that there will be a
+good deal of wild voting at the tails of the voting papers. Now if a
+small resolute band decide to plump for T or to vote only for A and T or
+B and T, T will probably jump up out of the rejected. This is the system
+which gives the specialist, the anti-vaccinator or what not, the maximum
+advantage. V, W, X and Y, being rather hopeless anyhow, will probably
+detach themselves from party and make some special appeal, say to the
+teetotal vote or the Mormon vote or the single tax vote, and so squeeze
+past O, P, Q, R, who have taken a more generalised line.
+
+I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical
+fluctuations. Many people, I know from colloquial experiences, do at
+about this stage fly into a passion. But if you will exercise
+self-control, then I think you will see my point that, according to the
+method of voting, almost any sort of result may be got out of an
+election except the production of a genuinely representative assembly.
+
+And that is the a priori case for supposing, what our experience of
+contemporary life abundantly verifies, that the so-called representative
+assemblies of the world are not really representative at all. I will go
+farther and say that were it not for the entire inefficiency of our
+method of voting, not one-tenth of the present American and French
+Senators, the French Deputies, the American Congressmen, and the English
+Members of Parliament would hold their positions to-day. They would
+never have been heard of. They are not really the elected
+representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous
+method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party
+system and the ballot-box, who have ousted the legitimate heirs from
+their sovereignty. They are no more the expression of the general will
+than the Tsar or some President by _pronunciamento_. They are an
+accidental oligarchy of adventurers. Representative government has never
+yet existed in the world; there was an attempt to bring it into
+existence in the eighteenth century, and it succumbed to an infantile
+disorder at the very moment of its birth. What we have in the place of
+the leaders and representatives are politicians and "elected persons."
+
+The world is passing rapidly from localised to generalised interests,
+but the method of election into which our fathers fell is the method of
+electing one or two representatives from strictly localised
+constituencies. Its immediate corruption was inevitable. If discussing
+and calculating the future had been, as it ought to be, a common,
+systematic occupation, the muddles of to-day might have been foretold a
+hundred years ago. From such a rough method of election the party system
+followed as a matter of course. In theory, of course, there may be any
+number of candidates for a constituency and a voter votes for the one he
+likes best; in practice there are only two or three candidates, and the
+voter votes for the one most likely to beat the candidate he likes
+least. It cannot be too strongly insisted that in contemporary elections
+we vote against; we do not vote for. If A, B and C are candidates, and
+you hate C and all his works and prefer A, but doubt if he will get as
+many votes as B, who is indifferent to you, the chances are you will
+vote for B. If C and B have the support of organised parties, you are
+still less likely to risk "wasting" your vote upon A. If your real
+confidence is in G, who is not a candidate for your constituency, and if
+B pledges himself to support G, while A retains the right of separate
+action, you may vote for B even if you distrust him personally.
+Additional candidates would turn any election of this type into a wild
+scramble. The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of
+political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of political
+organisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidently
+demanded. The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged. Save
+as they speak for us, the people are dumb.
+
+Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still
+supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in
+government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give
+him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party
+organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control.
+For twenty-five years I have been a voter, and in all that time I have
+only twice had an opportunity of voting for a man of distinction in whom
+I had the slightest confidence. Commonly my choice of a "representative"
+has been between a couple of barristers entirely unknown to me or the
+world at large. Rather more than half the men presented for my selection
+have not been English at all, but of alien descent. This, then, is the
+sum of the political liberty of the ordinary American or Englishman,
+that is the political emancipation which Englishwomen have shown
+themselves so pathetically eager to share. He may reject one of two
+undesirables, and the other becomes his "representative." Now this is
+not popular government at all; it is government by the profession of
+politicians, whose control becomes more and more irresponsible in just
+the measure that they are able to avoid real factions within their own
+body. Whatever the two party organisations have a mind to do together,
+whatever issue they chance to reserve from "party politics," is as much
+beyond the control of the free and independent voter as if he were a
+slave subject in ancient Peru.
+
+Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only
+in theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies so
+eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere
+cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their
+form and substance. The old spirit of freedom and the collective purpose
+which overthrew and subdued priestcrafts and kingcrafts, has done so, it
+seems, only to make way for these obscure political conspiracies.
+Instead of liberal institutions, mankind has invented a new sort of
+usurpation. And it is not unnatural that many of us should be in a phase
+of political despair.
+
+These oligarchies of the party organisations have now been evolving for
+two centuries, and their inherent evils and dangers become more and more
+manifest. The first of these is the exclusion from government of the
+more active and intelligent sections of the community. It is not treated
+as remarkable, it is treated as a matter of course, that neither in
+Congress nor in the House of Commons is there any adequate
+representation of the real thought of the time, of its science,
+invention and enterprise, of its art and feeling, of its religion and
+purpose. When one speaks of Congressmen or Members of Parliament one
+thinks, to be plain about it, of intellectual riff-raff. When one hears
+of a pre-eminent man in the English-speaking community, even though that
+pre-eminence may be in political or social science, one is struck by a
+sense of incongruity if he happens to be also in the Legislature. When
+Lord Haldane disengages the Gifford lectures or Lord Morley writes a
+"Life of Gladstone" or ex-President Roosevelt is delivered of a magazine
+article, there is the same sort of excessive admiration as when a Royal
+Princess does a water-colour sketch or a dog walks on its hind legs.
+
+Now this intellectual inferiority of the legislator is not only directly
+bad for the community by producing dull and stupid legislation, but it
+has a discouraging and dwarfing effect upon our intellectual life.
+Nothing so stimulates art, thought and science as realisation; nothing
+so cripples it as unreality. But to set oneself to know thoroughly and
+to think clearly about any human question is to unfit oneself for the
+forensic claptrap which is contemporary politics, is to put oneself out
+of the effective current of the nation's life. The intelligence of any
+community which does not make a collective use of that intelligence,
+starves and becomes hectic, tends inevitably to preciousness and
+futility on the one hand, and to insurgency, mischief and anarchism on
+the other.
+
+From the point of view of social stability this estrangement of the
+national government and the national intelligence is far less serious
+than the estrangement between the governing body and the real feeling of
+the mass of the people. To many observers this latter estrangement seems
+to be drifting very rapidly towards a social explosion in the British
+Isles. The organised masses of labour find themselves baffled both by
+their parliamentary representatives and by their trade union officials.
+They are losing faith in their votes and falling back in anger upon
+insurrectionary ideals, upon the idea of a general strike, and upon the
+expedients of sabotage. They are doing this without any constructive
+proposals at all, for it is ridiculous to consider Syndicalism as a
+constructive proposal. They mean mischief because they are hopeless and
+bitterly disappointed. It is the same thing in France, and before many
+years are over it will be the same thing in America. That way lies
+chaos. In the next few years there may be social revolt and bloodshed in
+most of the great cities of Western Europe. That is the trend of current
+probability. Yet the politicians go on in an almost complete disregard
+of this gathering storm. Their jerrymandered electoral methods are like
+wool in their ears, and the rejection of Tweedledum for Tweedledee is
+taken as a "mandate" for Tweedledee's distinctive brand of political
+unrealities....
+
+Is this an incurable state of things? Is this method of managing our
+affairs the only possible electoral method, and is there no remedy for
+its monstrous clumsiness and inefficiency but to "show a sense of
+humour," or, in other words, to grin and bear it? Or is it conceivable
+that there may be a better way to government than any we have yet tried,
+a method of government that would draw every class into conscious and
+willing co-operation with the State, and enable every activity of the
+community to play its proper part in the national life? That was the
+dream of those who gave the world representative government in the past.
+Was it an impossible dream?
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+Is this disease of Parliaments an incurable disease, and have we,
+therefore, to get along as well as we can with it, just as a tainted and
+incurable invalid diets and is careful and gets along through life? Or
+is it possible that some entirely more representative and effective
+collective control of our common affairs can be devised?
+
+The answer to that must determine our attitude to a great number of
+fundamental questions. If no better governing body is possible than the
+stupid, dilatory and forensic assemblies that rule in France, Britain
+and America to-day, then the civilised human community has reached its
+climax. That more comprehensive collective handling of the common
+interests to which science and intelligent Socialism point, that
+collective handling which is already urgently needed if the present
+uncontrolled waste of natural resources and the ultimate bankruptcy of
+mankind is to be avoided, is quite beyond the capacity of such
+assemblies; already there is too much in their clumsy and untrustworthy
+hands, and the only course open to us is an attempt at enlightened
+Individualism, an attempt to limit and restrict State activities in
+every possible way, and to make little private temporary islands of
+light and refinement amidst the general disorder and decay. All
+collectivist schemes, all rational Socialism, if only Socialists would
+realise it, all hope for humanity, indeed, are dependent ultimately upon
+the hypothetical possibility of a better system of government than any
+at present in existence.
+
+Let us see first, then, if we can lay down any conditions which such a
+better governing body would satisfy. Afterwards it will be open to us to
+believe or disbelieve in its attainment. Imagination is the essence of
+creation. If we can imagine a better government we are half-way to
+making it.
+
+Now, whatever other conditions such a body will satisfy, we may be sure
+that it will not be made up of members elected by single-member
+constituencies. A single-member constituency must necessarily contain a
+minority, and may even contain a majority of dissatisfied persons whose
+representation is, as it were, blotted out by the successful candidate.
+Three single-member constituencies which might all return members of the
+same colour, if they were lumped together to return three members would
+probably return two of one colour and one of another. There would still,
+however, be a suppressed minority averse to both these colours, or
+desiring different shades of those colours from those afforded them in
+the constituency. Other things being equal, it may be laid down that the
+larger the constituency and the more numerous its representatives, the
+greater the chance of all varieties of thought and opinion being
+represented.
+
+But that is only a preliminary statement; it still leaves untouched all
+the considerations advanced in the former part of this discussion to
+show how easily the complications and difficulties of voting lead to a
+falsification of the popular will and understanding. But here we enter a
+region where a really scientific investigation has been made, and where
+established results are available. A method of election was worked out
+by Hare in the middle of the last century that really does seem to avoid
+or mitigate nearly every falsifying or debilitating possibility in
+elections; it was enthusiastically supported by J.S. Mill; it is now
+advocated by a special society--the Proportional Representation
+Society--to which belong men of the most diverse type of distinction,
+united only by the common desire to see representative government a
+reality and not a disastrous sham. It is a method which does render
+impossible nearly every way of forcing candidates upon constituencies,
+and nearly every trick for rigging results that now distorts and
+cripples the political life of the modern world. It exacts only one
+condition, a difficult but not an impossible condition, and that is the
+honest scrutiny and counting of the votes.
+
+The peculiar invention of the system is what is called the single
+transferable vote--that is to say, a vote which may be given in the
+first instance to one candidate, but which, in the event of his already
+having a sufficient quota of votes to return him, may be transferred to
+another. The voter marks clearly in the list of the candidates the order
+of his preference by placing 1, 2, 3, and so forth against the names. In
+the subsequent counting the voting papers are first classified according
+to the first votes. Let us suppose that popular person A is found to
+have received first votes enormously in excess of what is needed to
+return him. The second votes are then counted on his papers, and after
+the number of votes necessary to return him has been deducted, the
+surplus votes are divided in due proportion among the second choice
+names, and count for them. That is the essential idea of the whole
+thing. At a stroke all that anxiety about wasting votes and splitting
+votes, _which is the secret of all party political manipulation_
+vanishes. You may vote for A well knowing that if he is safe your vote
+will be good for C. You can make sure of A, and at the same time vote
+for C. You are in no need of a "ticket" to guide you, and you need have
+no fear that in supporting an independent candidate you will destroy the
+prospects of some tolerably sympathetic party man without any
+compensating advantage. The independent candidate does, in fact, become
+possible for the first time. The Hobson's choice of the party machine is
+abolished.
+
+Let me be a little more precise about the particulars of this method,
+the only sound method, of voting in order to ensure an adequate
+representation of the community. Let us resort again to the constituency
+I imagined in my last paper, a constituency in which candidates
+represented by all the letters of the alphabet struggle for twelve
+places. And let us suppose that A, B, C and D are the leading
+favourites. Suppose that there are twelve thousand voters in the
+constituency, and that three thousand votes are cast for A--I am keeping
+the figures as simple as possible--then A has two thousand more than is
+needed to return him. _All_ the second votes on his papers are counted,
+and it is found that 600, or a fifth of them, go to C; 500, or a sixth,
+go to E; 300, or a tenth, to G; 300 to J; 200, or a fifteenth, each to K
+and L, and a hundred each, or a thirtieth, to M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, W
+and Z. Then the surplus of 2,000 is divided in these proportions--that
+is a fifth of 2,000 goes to C, a sixth to E, and the rest to G, J, etc.,
+in proportion. C, who already has 900 votes, gets another 400, and is
+now returned and has, moreover, 300 to spare; and the same division of
+the next votes upon C's paper occurs as has already been made with A's.
+But previously to this there has been a distribution of B's surplus
+votes, B having got 1,200 of first votes. And so on. After the
+distribution of the surplus votes of the elect at the top of the list,
+there is a distribution of the second votes upon the papers of those who
+have voted for the hopeless candidates at the bottom of the list. At
+last a point is reached when twelve candidates have a quota.
+
+In this way the "wasting" of a vote, or the rejection of a candidate for
+any reason except that hardly anybody wants him, become practically
+impossible. This method of the single transferable vote with very large
+constituencies and many members does, in fact, give an entirely valid
+electoral result; each vote tells for all it is worth, and the freedom
+of the voter is only limited by the number of candidates who put up or
+are put up for election. This method, and this method alone, gives
+representative government; all others of the hundred and one possible
+methods admit of trickery, confusion and falsification. Proportional
+Representation is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious
+complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right
+way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way.
+It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of
+baking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of
+trains to their destinations instead of running them without notice into
+casually selected sidings and branch lines. It is not the substitution
+of something for something else of the same nature; it is the
+substitution of right for wrong. It is the plain common sense of the
+greatest difficulty in contemporary affairs.
+
+I know that a number of people do not, will not, admit this of
+Proportional Representation. Perhaps it is because of that hideous
+mouthful of words for a thing that would be far more properly named Sane
+Voting. This, which is the only correct way, these antagonists regard as
+a peculiar way. It has unfamiliar features, and that condemns it in
+their eyes. It takes at least ten minutes to understand, and that is too
+much for their plain, straightforward souls. "Complicated"--that word of
+fear! They are like the man who approved of an electric tram, but said
+that he thought it would go better without all that jiggery-pokery of
+wires up above. They are like the Western judge in the murder trial who
+said that if only they got a man hanged for this abominable crime, he
+wouldn't make a pedantic fuss about the question of _which_ man. They
+are like the plain, straightforward promoter who became impatient with
+maps and planned a railway across Switzerland by drawing a straight line
+with a ruler across Jungfrau and Matterhorn and glacier and gorge. Or
+else they are like Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., who knows too well
+what would happen to him.
+
+Now let us consider what would be the necessary consequences of the
+establishment of Proportional Representation in such a community as
+Great Britain--that is to say, the redistribution of the country into
+great constituencies such as London or Ulster or Wessex or South Wales,
+each returning a score or more of members, and the establishment of
+voting by the single transferable vote. The first, immediate, most
+desirable result would be the disappearance of the undistinguished party
+candidate; he would vanish altogether. He would be no more seen.
+Proportional Representation would not give him the ghost of a chance.
+The very young man of good family, the subsidised barrister, the
+respectable nobody, the rich supporter of the party would be ousted by
+known men. No candidate who had not already distinguished himself, and
+who did not stand for something in the public eye, would have a chance
+of election. There alone we have a sufficient reason for anticipating a
+very thorough change in the quality and character of the average
+legislator.
+
+And next, no party organisation, no intimation from headquarters, no
+dirty tricks behind the scenes, no conspiracy of spite and scandal would
+have much chance of keeping out any man of real force and distinction
+who had impressed the public imagination. To be famous in science, to
+have led thought, to have explored or administered or dissented
+courageously from the schemes of official wire-pullers would no longer
+be a bar to a man's attainment of Parliament. It would be a help. Not
+only the level of parliamentary intelligence, but the level of personal
+independence would be raised far above its present position. And
+Parliament would become a gathering of prominent men instead of a means
+to prominence.
+
+The two-party system which holds all the English-speaking countries
+to-day in its grip would certainly be broken up by Proportional
+Representation. Sane Voting in the end would kill the Liberal and Tory
+and Democratic and Republican party-machines. That secret rottenness of
+our public life, that hidden conclave which sells honours, fouls
+finance, muddles public affairs, fools the passionate desires of the
+people, and ruins honest men by obscure campaigns would become
+impossible. The advantage of party support would be a doubtful
+advantage, and in Parliament itself the party men would find themselves
+outclassed and possibly even outnumbered by the independent. It would be
+only a matter of a few years between the adoption of Sane Voting and the
+disappearance of the Cabinet from British public life. It would become
+possible for Parliament to get rid of a minister without getting rid of
+a ministry, and to express its disapproval of--let us say--some foolish
+project for rearranging the local government of Ireland without opening
+the door upon a vista of fantastical fiscal adventures. The
+party-supported Cabinet, which is now the real government of the
+so-called democratic countries, would cease to be so, and government
+would revert more and more to the legislative assembly. And not only
+would the latter body resume government, but it would also necessarily
+take into itself all those large and growing exponents of
+extra-parliamentary discontent that now darken the social future. The
+case of the armed "Unionist" rebel in Ulster, the case of the workman
+who engages in sabotage, the case for sympathetic strikes and the
+general strike, all these cases are identical in this, that they declare
+Parliament a fraud, that justice lies outside it and hopelessly outside
+it, and that to seek redress through Parliament is a waste of time and
+energy. Sane Voting would deprive all these destructive movements of the
+excuse and necessity for violence.
+
+There is, I know, a disposition in some quarters to minimise the
+importance of Proportional Representation, as though it were a mere
+readjustment of voting methods. It is nothing of the sort; it is a
+prospective revolution. It will revolutionise government far more than a
+mere change from kingdom to republic or vice versa could possibly do; it
+will give a new and unprecedented sort of government to the world. The
+real leaders of the country will govern the country. For Great Britain,
+for example, instead of the secret, dubious and dubitable Cabinet, which
+is the real British government of to-day, poised on an unwieldy and
+crowded House of Commons, we should have open government by the
+representatives of, let us say, twenty great provinces, Ulster, Wales,
+London, for example, each returning from twelve to thirty members. It
+would be a steadier, stabler, more confident, and more trusted
+government than the world has ever seen before. Ministers, indeed, and
+even ministries might come and go, but that would not matter, as it does
+now, because there would be endless alternatives through which the
+assembly could express itself instead of the choice between two parties.
+
+The arguments against Proportional Representation that have been
+advanced hitherto are trivial in comparison with its enormous
+advantages. Implicit in them all is the supposition that public opinion
+is at bottom a foolish thing, and that electoral methods are to pacify
+rather than express a people. It is possibly true that notorious
+windbags, conspicuously advertised adventurers, and the heroes of
+temporary sensations may run a considerable chance upon the lists. My
+own estimate of the popular wisdom is against the idea that any vividly
+prominent figure must needs get in; I think the public is capable of
+appreciating, let us say, the charm and interest of Mr. Sandow or Mr.
+Jack Johnson or Mr. Harry Lauder or Mr. Evan Roberts without wanting to
+send these gentlemen into Parliament. And I think that the increased
+power that the Press would have through its facilities in making
+reputations may also be exaggerated. Reputations are mysterious things
+and not so easily forced, and even if it were possible for a section of
+the Press to limelight a dozen or so figures up to the legislature, they
+would still have, I think, to be interesting, sympathetic and
+individualised figures; and at the end they would be only half a dozen
+among four hundred men of a repute more naturally achieved. A third
+objection is that this reform would give us group politics and unstable
+government. It might very possibly give us unstable ministries, but
+unstable ministries may mean stable government, and such stable
+ministries as that which governs England at the present time may, by
+clinging obstinately to office, mean the wildest fluctuations of policy.
+Mr. Ramsay Macdonald has drawn a picture of the too-representative
+Parliament of Proportional Representation, split up into groups each
+pledged to specific measures and making the most extraordinary treaties
+and sacrifices of the public interest in order to secure the passing of
+these definite bills. But Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is exclusively a
+parliamentary man; he knows contemporary parliamentary "shop" as a clerk
+knows his "guv'nor," and he thinks in the terms of his habitual life; he
+sees representatives only as politicians financed from party
+headquarters; it is natural that he should fail to see that the quality
+and condition of the sanely elected Member of Parliament will be quite
+different from these scheming climbers into positions of trust with whom
+he deals to-day. It is the party system based on insane voting that
+makes governments indivisible wholes and gives the group and the cave
+their terrors and their effectiveness. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is as
+typical a product of existing electoral methods as one could well have,
+and his peculiarly keen sense of the power of intrigue in legislation is
+as good evidence as one could wish for of the need for drastic change.
+
+Of course, Sane Voting is not a short cut to the millennium, it is no
+way of changing human nature, and in the new type of assembly, as in the
+old, spite, vanity, indolence, self-interest, and downright dishonesty
+will play their part. But to object to a reform on that account is not a
+particularly effective objection. These things will play their part, but
+it will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old. It is like
+objecting to some projected and long-needed railway because it does not
+propose to carry its passengers by immediate express to heaven.
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN POPULATION
+
+
+Sec. 1
+
+The social conditions and social future of America constitute a system
+of problems quite distinct and separate from the social problems of any
+other part of the world. The nearest approach to parallel conditions,
+and that on a far smaller and narrower scale, is found in the British
+colonies and in the newly settled parts of Siberia. For while in nearly
+every other part of the world the population of to-day is more or less
+completely descended from the prehistoric population of the same region,
+and has developed its social order in a slow growth extending over many
+centuries, the American population is essentially a transplanted
+population, a still fluid and imperfect fusion of great fragments torn
+at this point or that from the gradually evolved societies of Europe.
+The European social systems grow and flower upon their roots, in soil
+which has made them and to which they are adapted. The American social
+accumulation is a various collection of cuttings thrust into a new soil
+and respiring a new air, so different that the question is still open to
+doubt, and indeed there are those who do doubt, how far these cuttings
+are actually striking root and living and growing, whether indeed they
+are destined to more than a temporary life in the new hemisphere. I
+propose to discuss and weigh certain arguments for and against the
+belief that these ninety million people who constitute the United
+States of America are destined to develop into a great distinctive
+nation with a character and culture of its own.
+
+Humanly speaking, the United States of America (and the same is true of
+Canada and all the more prosperous, populous and progressive regions of
+South America) is a vast sea of newly arrived and unstably rooted
+people. Of the seventy-six million inhabitants recorded by the 1900
+census, ten and a half million were born and brought up in one or other
+of the European social systems, and the parents of another twenty-six
+millions were foreigners. Another nine million are of African negro
+descent. Fourteen million of the sixty-five million native-born are
+living not in the state of their birth, but in other states to which
+they have migrated. Of the thirty and a half million whites whose
+parents on both sides were native Americans, a high proportion probably
+had one if not more grand-parents foreign-born. Nearly five and a half
+million out of thirty-three and a half million whites in 1870 were
+foreign-born, and another five and a quarter million the children of
+foreign-born parents. The children of the latter five and a quarter
+million count, of course, in the 1900 census as native-born of native
+parents. Immigration varies enormously with the activity of business,
+but in 1906 it rose for the first time above a million.
+
+These figures may be difficult to grasp. The facts may be seen in a more
+concrete form by the visitor to Ellis Island, the receiving station for
+the immigrants into New York Harbour. One goes to this place by tugs
+from the United States barge office in Battery Park, and in order to see
+the thing properly one needs a letter of introduction to the
+commissioner in charge. Then one is taken through vast barracks littered
+with people of every European race, every type of low-class European
+costume, and every degree of dirtiness, to a central hall in which the
+gist of the examining goes on. The floor of this hall is divided up into
+a sort of maze of winding passages between lattice work, and along these
+passages, day after day, incessantly, the immigrants go, wild-eyed
+Gipsies, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Ruthenians, Cossacks, German
+peasants, Scandinavians, a few Irish still, impoverished English,
+occasional Dutch; they halt for a moment at little desks to exhibit
+papers, at other little desks to show their money and prove they are not
+paupers, to have their eyes scanned by this doctor and their general
+bearing by that. Their thumb-marks are taken, their names and heights
+and weights and so forth are recorded for the card index; and so,
+slowly, they pass along towards America, and at last reach a little
+wicket, the gate of the New World. Through this metal wicket drips the
+immigration stream--all day long, every two or three seconds, an
+immigrant with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk and goes on
+past the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully organised
+separating ways that go to this railway or that, past the guiding,
+protecting officials--into a new world. The great majority are young men
+and young women between seventeen and thirty, good, youthful, hopeful
+peasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting to go through that
+wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with cheap portmanteaus
+with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone, women with children,
+men with strings of dependents, young couples. All day that string of
+human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; all day and every
+day, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the end beads through
+the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the hundreds to
+thousands.... In such a prosperous year as 1906 more immigrants passed
+through that wicket into America than children were born in the whole of
+France.
+
+This figure of a perpetual stream of new stranger citizens will serve to
+mark the primary distinction between the American social problem and
+that of any European or Asiatic community.
+
+The vast bulk of the population of the United States has, in fact, only
+got there from Europe in the course of the last hundred years, and
+mainly since the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne of Great
+Britain. That is the first fact that the student of the American social
+future must realise. Only an extremely small proportion of its blood
+goes back now to those who fought for freedom in the days of George
+Washington. The American community is not an expanded colonial society
+that has become autonomous. It is a great and deepening pool of
+population accumulating upon the area these predecessors freed, and
+since fed copiously by affluents from every European community. Fresh
+ingredients are still being added in enormous quantity, in quantity so
+great as to materially change the racial quality in a score of years. It
+is particularly noteworthy that each accession of new blood seems to
+sterilise its predecessors. Had there been no immigration at all into
+the United States, but had the rate of increase that prevailed in
+1810-20 prevailed to 1900, the population, which would then have been a
+purely native American one, would have amounted to a hundred
+million--that is to say, to approximately nine million in excess of the
+present total population. The new waves are for a time amazingly fecund,
+and then comes a rapid fall in the birth-rate. The proportion of
+colonial and early republican blood in the population is, therefore,
+probably far smaller even than the figures I have quoted would suggest.
+
+These accesses of new population have come in a series of waves, very
+much as if successive reservoirs of surplus population in the Old World
+had been tapped, drained and exhausted. First came the Irish and
+Germans, then Central Europeans of various types, then Poland and
+Western Russia began to pour out their teeming peoples, and more
+particularly their Jews, Bohemia, the Slavonic states, Italy and Hungary
+followed and the latest arrivals include great numbers of Levantines,
+Armenians and other peoples from Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula.
+The Hungarian immigrants have still a birth-rate of forty-six per
+thousand, the highest birth-rate in the world.
+
+A considerable proportion of the Mediterranean arrivals, it has to be
+noted, and more especially the Italians, do not come to settle. They
+work for a season or a few years, and then return to Italy. The rest
+come to stay.
+
+A vast proportion of these accessions to the American population since
+1840 has, with the exception of the East European Jews, consisted of
+peasantry, mainly or totally illiterate, accustomed to a low standard of
+life and heavy bodily toil. For most of them the transfer to a new
+country meant severance from the religious communion in which they had
+been bred and from the servilities or subordinations to which they were
+accustomed They brought little or no positive social tradition to the
+synthesis to which they brought their blood and muscle.
+
+The earlier German, English and Scandinavian incomers were drawn from a
+somewhat higher social level, and were much more closely akin in habits
+and faith to the earlier founders of the Republic.
+
+Our inquiry is this: What social structure is this pool of mixed
+humanity developing or likely to develop?
+
+
+Sec. 2
+
+If we compare any European nation with the American, we perceive at once
+certain broad differences. The former, in comparison with the latter, is
+evolved and organised; the latter, in comparison with the former, is
+aggregated and chaotic. In nearly every European country there is a
+social system often quite elaborately classed and defined; each class
+with a sense of function, with an idea of what is due to it and what is
+expected of it. Nearly everywhere you find a governing class,
+aristocratic in spirit, sometimes no doubt highly modified by recent
+economic and industrial changes, with more or less of the tradition of a
+feudal nobility, then a definite great mercantile class, then a large
+self-respecting middle class of professional men, minor merchants, and
+so forth, then a new industrial class of employees in the manufacturing
+and urban districts, and a peasant population rooted to the land. There
+are, of course, many local modifications of this form: in France the
+nobility is mostly expropriated; in England, since the days of John
+Bull, the peasant has lost his common rights and his holding, and become
+an "agricultural labourer" to a newer class of more extensive farmer.
+But these are differences in detail; the fact of the organisation, and
+the still more important fact of the traditional feeling of
+organisation, remain true of all these older communities.
+
+And in nearly every European country, though it may be somewhat
+despoiled here and shorn of exclusive predominance there, or represented
+by a dislocated "reformed" member, is the Church, custodian of a great
+moral tradition, closely associated with the national universities and
+the organisation of national thought. The typical European town has its
+castle or great house, its cathedral or church, its middle-class and
+lower-class quarters. Five miles off one can see that the American town
+is on an entirely different plan. In his remarkable "American Scene,"
+Mr. Henry James calls attention to the fact that the Church as one sees
+it and feels it universally in Europe is altogether absent, and he adds
+a comment as suggestive as it is vague. Speaking of the appearance of
+the Churches, so far as they do appear amidst American urban scenery, he
+says:
+
+  "Looking for the most part no more established or
+  seated than a stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the
+  inveterate bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated
+  pretensions merely), and fatally despoiled of the fine old
+  ecclesiastical arrogance, ... The field of American life is
+  as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centre-piece; a
+  truth that the myriad little structures 'attended' on Sundays
+  and on the 'off' evenings of their 'sociables' proclaim as
+  with the audible sound of the roaring of a million mice....
+
+  "And however one indicates one's impression of the
+  clearance, the clearance itself, in its completeness, with the
+  innumerable odd connected circumstances that bring it
+  home, represents, in the history of manners and morals, a
+  deviation in the mere measurement of which hereafter may
+  well reside a certain critical thrill. I say hereafter because
+  it is a question of one of those many measurements that
+  would as yet, in the United States, be premature. Of all
+  the solemn conclusions one feels as 'barred,' the list is quite
+  headed in the States, I think, by this particular abeyance
+  of judgment. When an ancient treasure of precious vessels,
+  overscored with glowing gems and wrought artistically into
+  wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been converted
+  through a vast community into the small change,
+  the simple circulating medium of dollars and 'nickels,' we
+  can only say that the consequent permeation will be of
+  values of a new order. Of _what_ order we must wait to
+  see."
+
+America has no Church. Neither has it a peasantry nor an aristocracy,
+and until well on in the Victorian epoch it had no disproportionately
+rich people.
+
+In America, except in the regions where the negro abounds, there is no
+lower stratum. There is no "soil people" to this community at all; your
+bottom-most man is a mobile freeman who can read, and who has ideas
+above digging and pigs and poultry-keeping, except incidentally for his
+own ends. No one owns to subordination As a consequence, any position
+which involves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority is difficult
+to fill; there is, from the European point of view, an extraordinary
+dearth of servants, and this endures in spite of a great peasant
+immigration. The servile tradition will not root here now; it dies
+forthwith. An enormous importation of European serfs and peasants goes
+on, but as they touch this soil their backs begin to stiffen with a new
+assertion.
+
+And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. There
+is no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne, no
+legitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper social
+structure of leisure, power and State responsibility which in the old
+European theory of Society was supposed to give significance to the
+whole. The American community, one cannot too clearly insist, does not
+correspond to an entire European community at all, but only to the
+middle masses of it, to the trading and manufacturing class between the
+dimensions of the magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan. It is the
+central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head
+or the subjugated feet. Even the highly feudal slave-holding "county
+family" traditions of Virginia and the South pass now out of memory. So
+that in a very real sense the past of the American nation is in Europe,
+and the settled order of the past is left behind there. This community
+was, as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its branches, and
+brought hither. It began neither serf nor lord, but burgher and farmer;
+it followed the normal development of the middle class under Progress
+everywhere and became capitalistic. The huge later immigration has
+converged upon the great industrial centres and added merely a vast
+non-servile element of employees to the scheme.
+
+America has been and still very largely is a one-class country. It is a
+great sea of human beings detached from their traditions of origin. The
+social difference from Europe appears everywhere, and nowhere more
+strikingly than in the railway carriages. In England the compartments in
+these are either "first class," originally designed for the aristocracy,
+or "second class," for the middle class, or "third class," for the
+populace. In America there is only one class, one universal simple
+democratic car. In the Southern States, however, a proportion of these
+simple democratic cars are inscribed with the word "White," whereby nine
+million people are excluded. But to this original even-handed treatment
+there was speedily added a more sumptuous type of car, the parlour car,
+accessible to extra dollars; and then came special types of train, all
+made up of parlour cars and observation cars and the like. In England
+nearly every train remains still first, second and third, or first and
+third. And now, quite outdistancing the differentiation of England,
+America produces private cars and private trains, such as Europe
+reserves only for crowned heads.
+
+The evidence of the American railways, then, suggests very strongly what
+a hundred other signs confirm, that the huge classless sea of American
+population is not destined to remain classless, is already developing
+separations and distinctions and structures of its own. And monstrous
+architectural portents in Boston and Salt Lake City encourage one to
+suppose that even that churchless aspect, which so stirred the
+speculative element in Mr. Henry James, is only the opening formless
+phase of a community destined to produce not only classes but
+intellectual and moral forms of the most remarkable kind.
+
+
+Sec. 3
+
+It is well to note how these ninety millions of people whose social
+future we are discussing are distributed. This huge development of human
+appliances and resources is here going on in a community that is still,
+for all the dense crowds of New York, the teeming congestion of East
+Side, extraordinarily scattered. America, one recalls, is still an
+unoccupied country across which the latest developments of civilisation
+are rushing. We are dealing here with a continuous area of land which
+is, leaving Alaska out of account altogether, equal to Great Britain,
+France, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Belgium,
+Japan, Holland, Spain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe,
+Egypt and the whole Empire of India, and the population spread out over
+this vast space is still less than the joint population of the first two
+countries named and not a quarter that of India.
+
+Moreover, it is not spread at all evenly. Much of it is in undistributed
+clots. It is not upon the soil; barely half of it is in holdings and
+homes and authentic communities. It is a population of an extremely
+modern type. Urban concentration has already gone far with it; fifteen
+millions of it are crowded into and about twenty great cities, another
+eighteen millions make up five hundred towns. Between these centres of
+population run railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections,
+tracks of various sorts, but to the European eye these are mere
+scratchings on a virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests itself
+through this thin network of human conveniences, appears in the meshes
+even at the railroad side.
+
+Essentially, America is still an unsettled land, with only a few
+incidental good roads in favoured places, with no universal police, with
+no wayside inns where a civilised man may rest, with still only the
+crudest of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches of swamp and
+forest and desert by the track side, still unassailed by industry. This
+much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago. Westward it becomes
+more and more the fact. In Idaho, at last, comes the untouched and
+perhaps invincible desert, plain and continuous through the long hours
+of travel. Huge areas do not contain one human being to the square mile,
+still vaster portions fall short of two....
+
+It is upon Pennsylvania and New York State and the belt of great towns
+that stretches out past Chicago to Milwaukee and Madison that the nation
+centres and seems destined to centre. One needs but examine a tinted
+population map to realise that. The other concentrations are provincial
+and subordinate; they have the same relation to the main axis that
+Glasgow or Cardiff have to London in the British scheme.
+
+
+Sec. 4
+
+When I speak of this vast multitude, these ninety millions of the United
+States of America as being for the most part peasants de-peasant-ised
+and common people cut off from their own social traditions, I do not
+intend to convey that the American community is as a whole
+traditionless. There is in America a very distinctive tradition indeed,
+which animates the entire nation, gives a unique idiom to its press and
+all its public utterances, and is manifestly the starting point from
+which the adjustments of the future must be made.
+
+The mere sight of the stars and stripes serves to recall it; "Yankee" in
+the mouth of a European gives something of its quality. One thinks at
+once of a careless abandonment of any pretension, of tireless energy
+and daring enterprise, of immense self-reliance, of a disrespect for the
+past so complete that a mummy is in itself a comical object, and the
+blowing out of an ill-guarded sacred flame, a delightful jest. One
+thinks of the enterprise of the sky-scraper and the humour of "A Yankee
+at the Court of King Arthur," and of "Innocents Abroad." Its dominant
+notes are democracy, freedom, and confidence. It is religious-spirited
+without superstition consciously Christian in the vein of a nearly
+Unitarian Christianity, fervent but broadened, broadened as a halfpenny
+is broadened by being run over by an express train, substantially the
+same, that is to say, but with a marked loss of outline and detail. It
+is a tradition of romantic concession to good and inoffensive women and
+a high development of that personal morality which puts sexual
+continence and alcoholic temperance before any public virtue. It is
+equally a tradition of sporadic emotional public-spiritedness, entirely
+of the quality of gallantry, of handsome and surprising gifts to the
+people, disinterested occupation of office and the like. It is
+emotionally patriotic, hypotheticating fighting and dying for one's
+country as a supreme good while inculcating also that working and living
+for oneself is quite within the sphere of virtuous action. It adores the
+flag but suspects the State. One sees more national flags and fewer
+national servants in America than in any country in the world. Its
+conception of manners is one of free plain-spoken men revering women and
+shielding them from most of the realities of life, scornful of
+aristocracies and monarchies, while asserting simply, directly, boldly
+and frequently an equal claim to consideration with all other men. If
+there is any traditional national costume, it is shirt-sleeves. And it
+cherishes the rights of property above any other right whatsoever.
+
+Such are the details that come clustering into one's mind in response to
+the phrase, the American tradition.
+
+From the War of Independence onward until our own times that tradition,
+that very definite ideal, has kept pretty steadily the same. It is the
+image of a man and not the image of a State. Its living spirit has been
+the spirit of freedom at any cost, unconditional and irresponsible. It
+is the spirit of men who have thrown off a yoke, who are jealously
+resolved to be unhampered masters of their "own," to whom nothing else
+is of anything but secondary importance. That was the spirit of the
+English small gentry and mercantile class, the comfortable property
+owners, the Parliamentarians, in Stuart times. Indeed even earlier, it
+is very largely the spirit of More's "Utopia." It was that spirit sent
+Oliver Cromwell himself packing for America, though a heedless and
+ill-advised and unforeseeing King would not let him go. It was the
+spirit that made taxation for public purposes the supreme wrong and
+provoked each country, first the mother country and then in its turn the
+daughter country, to armed rebellion. It has been the spirit of the
+British Whig and the British Nonconformist almost up to the present day.
+In the Reform Club of London, framed and glazed over against Magna
+Charta, is the American Declaration of Independence, kindred trophies
+they are of the same essentially English spirit of stubborn
+insubordination. But the American side of it has gone on unchecked by
+the complementary aspect of the English character which British Toryism
+expresses.
+
+The War of Independence raised that Whig suspicion of and hostility to
+government and the freedom of private property and the repudiation of
+any but voluntary emotional and supererogatory co-operation in the
+national purpose to the level of a religion, and the American
+Constitution with but one element of elasticity in the Supreme Court
+decisions, established these principles impregnably in the political
+structure. It organised disorganisation. Personal freedom, defiance of
+authority, and the stars and stripes have always gone together in men's
+minds; and subsequent waves of immigration, the Irish fleeing famine,
+for which they held the English responsible, and the Eastern European
+Jews escaping relentless persecutions, brought a persuasion of immense
+public wrongs, as a necessary concomitant of systematic government, to
+refresh without changing this defiant thirst for freedom at any cost.
+
+In my book, "The Future in America," I have tried to make an estimate of
+the working quality of this American tradition of unconditional freedom
+for the adult male citizen. I have shown that from the point of view of
+anyone who regards civilisation as an organisation of human
+interdependence and believes that the stability of society can be
+secured only by a conscious and disciplined co-ordination of effort, it
+is a tradition extraordinarily and dangerously deficient in what I have
+called a "_sense of the State_." And by a "sense of the State" I mean
+not merely a vague and sentimental and showy public-spiritedness--of
+that the States have enough and to spare--but a real sustaining
+conception of the collective interest embodied in the State as an object
+of simple duty and as a determining factor in the life of each
+individual. It involves a sense of function and a sense of "place," a
+sense of a general responsibility and of a general well-being
+overriding the individual's well-being, which are exactly the senses the
+American tradition attacks and destroys.
+
+For the better part of a century the American tradition, quite as much
+by reason of what it disregards as of what it suggests, has meant a
+great release of human energy, a vigorous if rough and untidy
+exploitation of the vast resources that the European invention of
+railways and telegraphic communication put within reach of the American
+people. It has stimulated men to a greater individual activity, perhaps,
+than the world has ever seen before. Men have been wasted by
+misdirection no doubt, but there has been less waste by inaction and
+lassitude than was the case in any previous society. Great bulks of
+things and great quantities of things have been produced, huge areas
+brought under cultivation, vast cities reared in the wilderness.
+
+But this tradition has failed to produce the beginnings or promise of
+any new phase of civilised organisation, the growths have remained
+largely invertebrate and chaotic, and, concurrently with its gift of
+splendid and monstrous growth, it has also developed portentous
+political and economic evils. No doubt the increment of human energy has
+been considerable, but it has been much less than appears at first
+sight. Much of the human energy that America has displayed in the last
+century is not a development of new energy but a diversion. It has been
+accompanied by a fall in the birth-rate that even the immigration
+torrent has not altogether replaced. Its insistence on the individual,
+its disregard of the collective organisation, its treatment of women and
+children as each man's private concern, has had its natural outcome.
+Men's imaginations have been turned entirely upon individual and
+immediate successes and upon concrete triumphs; they have had no regard
+or only an ineffectual sentimental regard for the race. Every man was
+looking after himself, and there was no one to look after the future.
+Had the promise of 1815 been fulfilled, there would now be in the United
+States of America one hundred million descendants of the homogeneous and
+free-spirited native population of that time. There is not, as a matter
+of fact, more than thirty-five million. There is probably, as I have
+pointed out, much less. Against the assets of cities, railways, mines
+and industrial wealth won, the American tradition has to set the price
+of five-and-seventy million native citizens who have never found time to
+get born, and whose place is now more or less filled by alien
+substitutes. Biologically speaking, this is not a triumph for the
+American tradition. It is, however, very clearly an outcome of the
+intense individualism of that tradition. Under the sway of that it has
+burnt its future in the furnace to keep up steam.
+
+The next and necessary evil consequent upon this exaltation of the
+individual and private property over the State, over the race that is
+and over public property, has been a contempt for public service. It has
+identified public spirit with spasmodic acts of public beneficence. The
+American political ideal became a Cincinnatus whom nobody sent for and
+who therefore never left his plough. There has ensued a corrupt and
+undignified political life, speaking claptrap, dark with violence,
+illiterate and void of statesmanship or science, forbidding any healthy
+social development through public organisation at home, and every year
+that the increasing facilities of communication draw the alien nations
+closer, deepening the risks of needless and disastrous wars abroad.
+
+And in the third place it is to be remarked that the American tradition
+has defeated its dearest aims of a universal freedom and a practical
+equality. The economic process of the last half-century, so far as
+America is concerned has completely justified the generalisations of
+Marx. There has been a steady concentration of wealth and of the reality
+as distinguished from the forms of power in the hands of a small
+energetic minority, and a steady approximation of the condition of the
+mass of the citizens to that of the so-called proletariat of the
+European communities. The tradition of individual freedom and equality
+is, in fact, in process of destroying the realities of freedom and
+equality out of which it rose. Instead of the six hundred thousand
+families of the year 1790, all at about the same level of property and,
+excepting the peculiar condition of seven hundred thousand blacks, with
+scarcely anyone in the position of a hireling, we have now as the most
+striking, though by no means the most important, fact in American social
+life a frothy confusion of millionaires' families, just as wasteful,
+foolish and vicious as irresponsible human beings with unlimited
+resources have always shown themselves to be. And, concurrently with the
+appearance of these concentrations of great wealth, we have appearing
+also poverty, poverty of a degree that was quite unknown in the United
+States for the first century of their career as an independent nation.
+In the last few decades slums as frightful as any in Europe have
+appeared with terrible rapidity, and there has been a development of the
+viler side of industrialism, of sweating and base employment of the most
+ominous kind.
+
+In Mr. Robert Hunter's "Poverty" one reads of "not less than eighty
+thousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present employed in
+the textile mills of this country. In the South there are now six times
+as many children at work as there were twenty years ago. Child labour is
+increasing yearly in that section of the country. Each year more little
+ones are brought in from the fields and hills to live in the degrading
+and demoralising atmosphere of the mill towns...."
+
+Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered from
+Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little
+nephews and nieces, friends' sons and so forth brought in by them is
+peculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It was
+a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little boy
+of no ascertainable relationship....
+
+In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were
+hardly worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the tiniest
+and frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning and,
+like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labour; and,
+when they return home, "wearily fling themselves on their beds, too
+tired to take off their clothes." Many children work all night--"in the
+maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere insanitary and
+clouded with humidity and lint."
+
+"It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter in his description, "before I forget
+the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched forward
+to rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form already
+showing the physical effects of labour. This child, six years of age,
+was working twelve hours a day."
+
+From Mr. Spargo's "Bitter Cry of the Children" I learn this much of the
+joys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania:
+
+"For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop over the
+chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the coal as it
+moves past them. The air is black with coal dust, and the roar of the
+crushers, screens and rushing mill-race of coal is deafening. Sometimes
+one of the children falls into the machinery and is terribly mangled, or
+slips into the chute and is smothered to death. Many children are killed
+in this way. Many others, after a time, contract coal-miners asthma and
+consumption, which gradually undermine their health. Breathing
+continually day after day the clouds of coal dust, their lungs become
+black and choked with small particles of anthracite...."
+
+In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J.F. Carey tells how little
+naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York
+millionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats, in a bath of chemicals
+that bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers....
+
+Altogether it would seem that at least one million and a half children
+are growing up in the United States of America stunted and practically
+uneducated because of unregulated industrialism. These children,
+ill-fed, ill-trained mentally benighted, since they are alive and
+active, since they are an active and positive and not a negative evil,
+are even more ominous in the American outlook than those five and sixty
+million of good race and sound upbringing who will now never be born.
+
+
+Sec. 5
+
+It must be repeated that the American tradition is really the tradition
+of one particular ingredient in this great admixture and stirring up of
+peoples. This ingredient is the Colonial British, whose seventeenth
+century Puritanism and eighteenth century mercantile radicalism and
+rationalism manifestly furnished all the stuff out of which the American
+tradition is made. It is this stuff planted in virgin soil and inflated
+to an immense and buoyant optimism by colossal and unanticipated
+material prosperity and success. From that British middle-class
+tradition comes the individualist protestant spirit, the keen
+self-reliance and personal responsibility, the irresponsible
+expenditure, the indiscipline and mystical faith in things being managed
+properly if they are only let alone. "State-blindness" is the natural
+and almost inevitable quality of a middle-class tradition, a class that
+has been forced neither to rule nor obey, which has been concentrated
+and successfully concentrated on private gain.
+
+This middle-class British section of the American population was, and is
+to this day, the only really articulate ingredient in its mental
+composition. And so it has had a monopoly in providing the American
+forms of thought. The other sections of peoples that have been annexed
+by or have come into this national synthesis are _silent_ so far as any
+contribution to the national stock of ideas and ideals is concerned.
+There are, for example, those great elements, the Spanish Catholics, the
+French Catholic population of Louisiana, the Irish Catholics, the
+French-Canadians who are now ousting the sterile New Englander from New
+England, the Germans, the Italians the Hungarians. Comparatively they
+say nothing. From all the ten million of coloured people come just two
+or three platform voices, Booker Washington, Dubois, Mrs. Church
+Terrell, mere protests at specific wrongs. The clever, restless Eastern
+European Jews, too, have still to find a voice. Professor Münsterberg
+has written with a certain bitterness of the inaudibility of the German
+element in the American population. They allow themselves, he
+remonstrates, to count for nothing. They did not seem to exist, he
+points out, even in politics until prohibitionist fury threatened their
+beer. Then, indeed, the American German emerged from silence and
+obscurity, but only to rescue his mug and retire again with it into
+enigmatical silence.
+
+If there is any exception to this predominance of the tradition of the
+English-speaking, originally middle-class, English-thinking northerner
+in the American mind, it is to be found in the spread of social
+democracy outward from the festering tenement houses of Chicago into the
+mining and agrarian regions of the middle west. It is a fierce form of
+socialist teaching that speaks throughout these regions, far more
+closely akin to the revolutionary Socialism of the continent of Europe
+than to the constructive and evolutionary Socialism of Great Britain.
+Its typical organ is _The Appeal to Reason_, which circulates more than
+a quarter of a million copies weekly from Kansas City. It is a Socialism
+reeking with class feeling and class hatred and altogether anarchistic
+in spirit; a new and highly indigestible contribution to the American
+moral and intellectual synthesis. It is remarkable chiefly as the one
+shrill exception in a world of plastic acceptance.
+
+Now it is impossible to believe that this vast silence of these
+imported and ingested factors that the American nation has taken to
+itself is as acquiescent as it seems. No doubt they are largely taking
+over the traditional forms of American thought and expression quietly
+and without protest, and wearing them; but they will wear them as a man
+wears a misfit, shaping and adapting it every day more and more to his
+natural form, here straining a seam and there taking in a looseness. A
+force of modification must be at work. It must be at work in spite of
+the fact that, with the exception of social democracy, it does not
+anywhere show as a protest or a fresh beginning or a challenge to the
+prevailing forms.
+
+How far it has actually been at work is, perhaps, to be judged best by
+an observant stroller, surveying the crowds of a Sunday evening in New
+York, or read in the sheets of such a mirror of popular taste as the
+Sunday edition of the _New York American_ or the _New York Herald_. In
+the former just what I mean by the silent modification of the old
+tradition is quite typically shown. Its leading articles are written by
+Mr. Arthur Brisbane, the son of one of the Brook Farm Utopians, that
+gathering in which Hawthorne and Henry James senior, and Margaret Fuller
+participated, and in which the whole brilliant world of Boston's past,
+the world of Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, was interested. Mr. Brisbane
+is a very distinguished man, quite over and above the fact that he is
+paid the greatest salary of any journalist in the world. He writes with
+a wit and directness that no other living man can rival, and he holds up
+constantly what is substantially the American ideal of the past century
+to readers who evidently need strengthening in it. It is, of course, the
+figure of a man and not of a State; it is a man, clean, clean shaved
+and almost obtrusively strong-jawed, honest, muscular, alert, pushful,
+chivalrous, self-reliant, non-political except when he breaks into
+shrewd and penetrating voting--"you can fool all the people some of the
+time," etc.--and independent--independent--in a world which is therefore
+certain to give way to him.
+
+His doubts, his questionings, his aspirations, are dealt with by Mr.
+Brisbane with a simple direct fatherliness with all the beneficent
+persuasiveness of a revivalist preacher. Millions read these leaders and
+feel a momentary benefit, en route for the more actual portions of the
+paper. He asks: "Why are all men gamblers?" He discusses our Longing for
+Immortal Imperfection, and "Did we once live on the moon?" He recommends
+the substitution of whisky and soda for neat whisky, drawing an
+illustration from the comparative effect of the diluted and of the
+undiluted liquid as an eye-wash ("Try whisky on your friend's eyeball!"
+is the heading), sleep ("The man who loses sleep will make a failure of
+his life, or at least diminish greatly his chances of success"), and the
+education of the feminine intelligence ("The cow that kicks her weaned
+calf is all heart"). He makes identically the same confident appeal to
+the moral motive which was for so long the salvation of the Puritan
+individualism from which the American tradition derives. "That hand," he
+writes, "which supports the head of the new-born baby, the mother's
+hand, supports the civilisation of the world."
+
+But that sort of thing is not saving the old native strain in the
+population. It moves people, no doubt, but inadequately. And here is a
+passage that is quite the quintessence of Americanism, of all its deep
+moral feeling and sentimental untruthfulness. I wonder if any man but
+an American or a British nonconformist in a state of rhetorical
+excitement ever believed that Shakespeare wrote his plays or Michael
+Angelo painted in a mood of humanitarian exaltation, "_for the good of
+all men_."
+
+  "What _shall_ we strive for? _Money_?
+
+  "Get a thousand millions. Your day will come, and
+  in due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at
+  your bump of acquisitiveness as at the mean coat of the
+  pauper.
+
+  "Then shall we strive for _power_?
+
+  "The names of the first great kings of the world are
+  forgotten, and the names of all those whose power we envy
+  will drift to forgetfulness soon. What does the most powerful
+  man in the world amount to standing at the brink of
+  Niagara, with his solar plexus trembling? What is his
+  power compared with the force of the wind or the energy
+  of one small wave sweeping along the shore?
+
+  "The power which man can build up within himself,
+  for himself, is nothing. Only the dull reasoning of gratified
+  egotism can make it seem worth while.
+
+  "Then what is worth while? Let us look at some of
+  the men who have come and gone, and whose lives inspire
+  us. Take a few at random:
+
+  "Columbus, Michael Angelo, Wilberforce, Shakespeare,
+  Galileo, Fulton, Watt, Hargreaves--these will do.
+
+  "Let us ask ourselves this question: 'Was there any
+  _one thing_ that distinguished _all_ their lives,
+  that united all these men, active in fields so different?'
+
+  "Yes. Every man among them, and every man whose
+  life history is worth the telling, did something for _the good
+  of other men_....
+
+  "Get money if you can. Get power if you can; Then, if
+  you want to be more than the ten thousand million unknown
+  mingled in the dust beneath you, see what good you can
+  do with your money and your power.
+
+  "If you are one of the many millions who have not
+  and can't get money or power, see what good you can do
+  without either:
+
+  "You can help carry a load for an old man. You can
+  encourage and help a poor devil trying to reform. You
+  can set a good example to children. You can stick to the
+  men with whom you work, fighting honestly for their
+  welfare.
+
+  "Time was when the ablest man would rather kill ten
+  men than feed a thousand children. That time has gone.
+  We do not care much about feeding the children, but we
+  care less about killing the men. To that extent we have
+  improved already.
+
+  "The day will come when we shall prefer helping our
+  neighbour to robbing him--legally--of a million dollars.
+
+  "Do what good you can _now_, while it is unusual,
+  and have the satisfaction of being a pioneer and an
+  eccentric."
+
+It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the utmost to make
+itself audible to the new world, and cracking into italics and breaking
+into capitals with the strain. The rest of that enormous bale of paper
+is eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of
+comprehensive things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalisations, a
+public which has carried the conception of freedom to its logical
+extreme of entire individual detachment. These tell-tale columns deal
+all with personality and the drama of personal life. They witness to no
+interest but the interest in intense individual experiences. The
+engagements, the love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are
+given in pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits and
+sensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers who write this
+stuff strike the personal note, and their heavily muscular portraits
+frown beside the initial letter. Murders and crimes are worked up to the
+keenest pitch of realisation, and any new indelicacy in fashionable
+costume, any new medical device or cure, any new dance or athleticism,
+any new breach in the moral code, any novelty in sea bathing or the
+woman's seat on horseback, or the like, is given copious and moving
+illustration, stirring headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is a
+coloured supplement of knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaint
+dialect of the New York slums. It is a language from which "th" has
+vanished, and it presents a world in which the kicking by a mule of an
+endless succession of victims is an inexhaustible joy to young and old.
+"Dat ole Maud!" There is a smaller bale dealing with sport. In the
+advertisement columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; but
+great choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous tonics,
+clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business opportunities....
+
+Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say,
+taken off its frills. All but one; Mr. Arthur Brisbane's eloquence one
+may consider as the last stitch of the old costume--mere decoration.
+Excitement remains the residual object in life. The _New York American_
+represents a clientele to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestly
+with no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn.
+
+
+Sec. 6
+
+The modifications of the American tradition that will occur through its
+adoption by these silent foreign ingredients in the racial synthesis are
+not likely to add to it or elaborate it in any way. They tend merely to
+simplify it to bare irresponsible non-moral individualism. It is with
+the detail and qualification of a tradition as with the inflexions of a
+language; when another people takes it over the refinements disappear.
+But there are other forces of modification at work upon the American
+tradition of an altogether more hopeful kind. It has entered upon a
+constructive phase. Were it not so, then the American social outlook
+would, indeed, be hopeless.
+
+The effectual modifying force at work is not the strangeness nor the
+temperamental maladjustment of the new elements of population, but the
+conscious realisation of the inadequacy of the tradition on the part of
+the more intelligent sections of the American population. That blind
+national conceit that would hear no criticism and admit no deficiency
+has disappeared. In the last decade such a change has come over the
+American mind as sometimes comes over a vigorous and wilful child.
+Suddenly it seems to have grown up, to have begun to weigh its powers
+and consider its possible deficiencies. There was a time when American
+confidence and self-satisfaction seemed impregnable; at the slightest
+qualm of doubt America took to violent rhetoric as a drunkard resorts to
+drink. Now the indictment I have drawn up harshly, bluntly and
+unflatteringly in Sec. 4 would receive the endorsement of American after
+American. The falling birth-rate of all the best elements in the State,
+the cankering effect of political corruption, the crumbling of
+independence and equality before the progressive aggregation of
+wealth--he has to face them, he cannot deny them. There has arisen a new
+literature, the literature of national self-examination, that seems
+destined to modify the American tradition profoundly. To me it seems to
+involve the hope and possibility of a conscious collective organisation
+of social life.
+
+If ever there was an epoch-marking book it was surely Henry Demarest
+Lloyd's "Wealth against Commonwealth." It marks an epoch not so much by
+what it says as by what it silently abandons. It was published in 1894,
+and it stated in the very clearest terms the incompatibility of the
+almost limitless freedom of property set up by the constitution, with
+the practical freedom and general happiness of the mass of men. It must
+be admitted that Lloyd never followed up the implications of this
+repudiation. He made his statements in the language of the tradition he
+assailed, and foreshadowed the replacement of chaos by order in quite
+chaotic and mystical appeals. Here, for instance, is a typical passage
+from "Man, the Social Creator".
+
+  "Property is now a stumbling-block to the people, just
+  as government has been. Property will not be abolished,
+  but, like government, it will be democratised.
+
+  "The philosophy of self-interest as the social solution
+  was a good living and working synthesis in the days when
+  civilisation was advancing its frontiers twenty miles a day
+  across the American continent, and every man for himself
+  was the best social mobilisation possible.
+
+  "But to-day it is a belated ghost that has overstayed
+  the cock-crow. These were frontier morals. But this same,
+  everyone for himself, becomes most immoral when the
+  frontier is abolished and the pioneer becomes the fellow-citizen
+  and these frontier morals are most uneconomic when
+  labour can be divided and the product multiplied. Most
+  uneconomic, for they make closure the rule of industry,
+  leading not to wealth, but to that awful waste of wealth
+  which is made visible to every eye in our unemployed--not
+  hands alone, but land, machinery, and, most of all, hearts.
+  Those who still practise these frontier morals are like
+  criminals, who, according to the new science of penology,
+  are simply reappearances of old types. Their acquisitiveness
+  once divine like Mercury's, is now out of place except
+  in jail. Because out of place, they are a danger. A sorry
+  day it is likely to be for those who are found in the way
+  when the new people rise to rush into each other's arms,
+  to get together, to stay together and to live together. The
+  labour movement halts because so many of its rank and
+  file--and all its leaders--do not see clearly the golden thread
+  of love on which have been strung together all the past
+  glories of human association, and which is to serve for
+  the link of the new Association of Friends who Labour,
+  whose motto is 'All for All.'"
+
+The establishment of the intricate co-operative commonwealth by a rush
+of eighty million flushed and shiny-eyed enthusiasts, in fact, is
+Lloyd's proposal. He will not face, and few Americans to this day will
+face, the cold need of a great science of social adjustment and a
+disciplined and rightly ordered machinery to turn such enthusiasms to
+effect. They seem incurably wedded to gush. However, he did express
+clearly enough the opening phase of American disillusionment with the
+wild go-as-you-please that had been the conception of life in America
+through a vehement, wasteful, expanding century. And he was the
+precursor of what is now a bulky and extremely influential literature of
+national criticism. A number of writers, literary investigators one may
+call them, or sociological men of letters, or magazine publicists--they
+are a little difficult to place--has taken up the inquiry into the
+condition of civic administration, into economic organisation into
+national politics and racial interaction, with a frank fearlessness and
+an absence of windy eloquence that has been to many Europeans a
+surprising revelation of the reserve forces of the American mind.
+President Roosevelt, that magnificent reverberator of ideas, that gleam
+of wilful humanity, that fantastic first interruption to the succession
+of machine-made politicians at the White House, has echoed clearly to
+this movement and made it an integral part of the general intellectual
+movement of America.
+
+It is to these first intimations of the need of a "sense of the State"
+in America that I would particularly direct the reader's attention in
+this discussion. They are the beginnings of what is quite conceivably a
+great and complex reconstructive effort. I admit they are but
+beginnings. They may quite possibly wither and perish presently; they
+may much more probably be seized upon by adventurers and converted into
+a new cant almost as empty and fruitless as the old. The fact remains
+that, through this busy and immensely noisy confusion of nearly a
+hundred millions of people, these little voices go intimating more and
+more clearly the intention to undertake public affairs in a new spirit
+and upon new principles, to strengthen the State and the law against
+individual enterprise, to have done with those national superstitions
+under which hypocrisy and disloyalty and private plunder have sheltered
+and prospered for so long.
+
+Just as far as these reform efforts succeed and develop is the
+organisation of the United States of America into a great,
+self-conscious, civilised nation, unparalleled in the world's history,
+possible; just as far as they fail is failure written over the American
+future. The real interest of America for the next century to the student
+of civilisation will be the development of these attempts, now in their
+infancy, to create and realise out of this racial hotchpotch, this human
+chaos, an idea, of the collective commonwealth as the datum of reference
+for every individual life.
+
+
+Sec. 7
+
+I have hinted in the last section that there is a possibility that the
+new wave of constructive ideas in American thought may speedily develop
+a cant of its own. But even then, a constructive cant is better than a
+destructive one. Even the conscious hypocrite has to do something to
+justify his pretences, and the mere disappearance from current thought
+of the persuasion that organisation is a mistake and discipline
+needless, clears the ground of one huge obstacle even if it guarantees
+nothing about the consequent building.
+
+But, apart from this, are there more solid and effectual forces behind
+this new movement of ideas that makes for organisation in American
+medley at the present time?
+
+The speculative writer casting about for such elements lights upon four
+sets of possibilities which call for discussion. First, one has to ask:
+How far is the American plutocracy likely to be merely a wasteful and
+chaotic class, and how far is it likely to become consciously
+aristocratic and constructive? Secondly, and in relation to this, what
+possibilities of pride and leading are there in the great university
+foundations of America? Will they presently begin to tell as a
+restraining and directing force upon public thought? Thirdly, will the
+growing American Socialist movement, which at present is just as
+anarchistic and undisciplined in spirit as everything else in America,
+presently perceive the constructive implications of its general
+propositions and become statesmanlike and constructive? And, fourthly,
+what are the latent possibilities of the American women? Will women as
+they become more and more aware of themselves as a class and of the
+problem of their sex become a force upon the anarchistic side, a force
+favouring race-suicide, or upon the constructive side which plans and
+builds and bears the future?
+
+The only possible answer to each one of these questions at present is
+guessing and an estimate. But the only way in which a conception of the
+American social future may be reached lies through their discussion.
+
+Let us begin by considering what constructive forces may exist in this
+new plutocracy which already so largely sways American economic and
+political development. The first impression is one of extravagant and
+aimless expenditure, of a class irresponsible and wasteful beyond all
+precedent. One gets a Zolaesque picture of that aspect in Mr. Upton
+Sinclair's "Metropolis," or the fashionable intelligence of the popular
+New York Sunday editions, and one finds a good deal of confirmatory
+evidence in many incidental aspects of the smart American life of Paris
+and the Riviera. The evidence in the notorious Thaw trial, after one has
+discounted its theatrical elements, was still a very convincing
+demonstration of a rotten and extravagant, because aimless and
+functionless, class of rich people. But one has to be careful in this
+matter if one is to do justice to the facts. If a thing is made up of
+two elements, and one is noisy and glaringly coloured, and the other is
+quiet and colourless, the first impression created will be that the
+thing is identical with the element that is noisy and glaringly
+coloured. One is much less likely to hear of the broad plans and the
+quality of the wise, strong and constructive individuals in a class than
+of their foolish wives, their spendthrift sons, their mistresses, and
+their moments of irritation and folly.
+
+In the making of very rich men there is always a factor of good fortune
+and a factor of design and will. One meets rich men at times who seem to
+be merely lucky gamblers, who strike one as just the thousandth man in a
+myriad of wild plungers, who are, in fact, chance nobodies washed up by
+an eddy. Others, again, strike one as exceptionally lucky half-knaves.
+But there are others of a growth more deliberate and of an altogether
+higher personal quality. One takes such men as Mr. J.D. Rockefeller or
+Mr. Pierpont Morgan--the scale of their fortunes makes them public
+property--and it is clear that we are dealing with persons on quite a
+different level of intellectual power from the British Colonel Norths,
+for example, or the South African Joels. In my "Future in America" I
+have taken the former largely at Miss Tarbell's estimate, and treated
+him as a case of acquisitiveness raised in Baptist surroundings. But I
+doubt very much if that exhausts the man as he is to-day. Given a man
+brought up to saving and "getting on" as if to a religion, a man very
+acquisitive and very patient and restrained, and indubitably with great
+organising power, and he grows rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And
+having done so, there he is. What is he going to do? Every step he takes
+up the ascent to riches gives him new perspectives and new points of
+view.
+
+It may have appealed to the young Rockefeller, clerk in a Chicago house,
+that to be rich was itself a supreme end; in the first flush of the
+discovery that he was immensely rich, he may have thanked Heaven as if
+for a supreme good, and spoken to a Sunday school gathering as if he
+knew himself for the most favoured of men. But all that happened twenty
+years ago or more. One does not keep on in that sort of satisfaction;
+one settles down to the new facts. And such men as Mr. Rockefeller and
+Mr. Pierpont Morgan do not live in a made and protected world with their
+minds trained, tamed and fed and shielded from outside impressions as
+royalties do. The thought of the world has washed about them; they have
+read and listened to the discussion of themselves for some decades; they
+have had sleepless nights of self-examination. To succeed in acquiring
+enormous wealth does not solve the problem of life; indeed, it reopens
+it in a new form. "What shall I do with myself?" simply recurs again.
+You may have decided to devote yourself to getting on, getting wealthy.
+Well, you have got it. Now, again, comes the question: "What shall I
+do?"
+
+Mr. Pierpont Morgan, I am told, collected works of art. I can
+understand that satisfying a rich gentleman of leisure, but not a man
+who has felt the sensation of holding great big things in his great big
+hands. Saul, going out to seek his father's asses, found a kingdom--and
+became very spiritedly a king, and it seems to me that these big
+industrial and financial organisers, whatever in their youth they
+proposed to do or be, must many of them come to realise that their
+organising power is up against no less a thing than a nation's future.
+Napoleon, it is curious to remember once wanted to run a lodging-house,
+and a man may start to corner oil and end the father of a civilisation.
+
+Now, I am disposed to suspect at times that an inkling of such a
+realisation may have come to some of these very rich men. I am inclined
+to put it among the possibilities of our time that it may presently
+become clearly and definitely the inspiring idea of many of those who
+find themselves predominantly rich. I do not see why these active rich
+should not develop statesmanship, and I can quite imagine them
+developing very considerable statesmanship. Because these men were able
+to realise their organising power in the absence of economic
+organisation, it does not follow that they will be fanatical for a
+continuing looseness and freedom of property. The phase of economic
+liberty ends itself, as Marx long ago pointed out. The American business
+world becomes more and more a managed world with fewer and fewer wild
+possibilities of succeeding. Of all people the big millionaires should
+realise this most acutely, and, in fact, there are many signs that they
+do. It seems to me that the educational zeal of Mr. Andrew Carnegie and
+the university and scientific endowments of Mr. Rockefeller are not
+merely showy benefactions; they express a definite feeling of the
+present need of constructive organisation in the social scheme. The time
+has come to build. There is, I think, good reason for expecting that
+statesmanship of the millionaires to become more organised and
+scientific and comprehensive in the coming years. It is plausible at
+least to maintain that the personal quality of the American plutocracy
+has risen in the last three decades, has risen from the quality of a
+mere irresponsible wealthy person towards that of a real aristocrat with
+a "sense of the State." That one may reckon the first hopeful
+possibility in the American outlook.
+
+And intimately connected with this development of an attitude of public
+responsibility in the very rich is the decay on the one hand of the
+preposterous idea once prevalent in America that politics is an
+unsuitable interest for a "gentleman," and on the other of the
+democratic jealousy of any but poor politicians. In New York they talk
+very much of "gentlemen," and by "gentlemen" they seem to mean rich men
+"in society" with a college education. Nowadays, "gentlemen" seem more
+and more disposed towards politics, and less and less towards a life of
+business or detached refinement. President Roosevelt, for example, was
+one of the pioneers in this new development, this restoration of
+virility to the gentlemanly ideal. His career marks the appearance of a
+new and better type of man in American politics, the close of the rule
+of the idealised nobody.
+
+The prophecy has been made at times that the United States might develop
+a Caesarism, and certainly the position of president might easily
+become that of an imperator. No doubt in the event of an acute failure
+of the national system such a catastrophe might occur, but the more
+hopeful and probable line of development is one in which a conscious and
+powerful, if informal, aristocracy will play a large part. It may,
+indeed, never have any of the outward forms of an aristocracy or any
+definite public recognition. The Americans are as chary of the coronet
+and the known aristocratic titles as the Romans were of the word King.
+Octavius, for that reason, never called himself king nor Italy a
+kingdom. He was just the Caesar of the Republic, and the Empire had been
+established for many years before the Romans fully realised that they
+had returned to monarchy.
+
+
+Sec. 8
+
+The American universities are closely connected in their development
+with the appearance and growing class-consciousness of this aristocracy
+of wealth. The fathers of the country certainly did postulate a need of
+universities, and in every state Congress set aside public lands to
+furnish a university with material resources. Every State possesses a
+university, though in many instances these institutions are in the last
+degree of feebleness. In the days of sincere democracy the starvation of
+government and the dislike of all manifest inequalities involved the
+starvation of higher education. Moreover, the entirely artificial nature
+of the State boundaries, representing no necessary cleavages and
+traversed haphazard by the lines of communication, made some of these
+State foundations unnecessary and others inadequate to a convergent
+demand. From the very beginning, side by side with the State
+universities, were the universities founded by benefactors; and with the
+evolution of new centres of population, new and extremely generous
+plutocratic endowments appeared. The dominant universities of America
+to-day, the treasure houses of intellectual prestige, are almost all of
+them of plutocratic origin, and even in the State universities, if new
+resources are wanted to found new chairs, to supply funds for research
+or publication or what not, it is to the more State-conscious wealthy
+and not to the State legislature that the appeal is made almost as a
+matter of course. The common voter, the small individualist has less
+constructive imagination--is more individualistic, that is, than the big
+individualist.
+
+This great network of universities that is now spread over the States,
+interchanging teachers, literature and ideas, and educating not only the
+professions but a growing proportion of business leaders and wealthy
+people, must necessarily take an important part in the reconstruction of
+the American tradition that is now in progress. It is giving a large and
+increasing amount of attention to the subjects that bear most directly
+upon the peculiar practical problems of statecraft in America, to
+psychology, sociology and political science. It is influencing the press
+more and more directly by supplying a rising proportion of journalists
+and creating an atmosphere of criticism and suggestion. It is keeping
+itself on the one hand in touch with the popular literature of public
+criticism in those new and curious organs of public thought, the
+ten-cent magazines; and on the other it is making a constantly more
+solid basis of common understanding upon which the newer generation of
+plutocrats may meet. That older sentimental patriotism must be giving
+place under its influence to a more definite and effectual conception of
+a collective purpose. It is to the moral and intellectual influence of
+sustained scientific study in the universities, and a growing increase
+of the college-trained element in the population that we must look if we
+are to look anywhere for the new progressive methods, for the
+substitution of persistent, planned and calculated social development
+for the former conditions of systematic neglect and corruption in public
+affairs varied by epileptic seizures of "Reform."
+
+
+Sec. 9
+
+A third influence that may also contribute very materially to the
+reconstruction of the American tradition is the Socialist movement. It
+is true that so far American Socialism has very largely taken an
+Anarchistic form, has been, in fact, little more than a revolutionary
+movement of the wages-earning class against the property owner. It has
+already been pointed out that it derives not from contemporary English
+Socialism but from the Marxist social democracy of the continent of
+Europe, and has not even so much of the constructive spirit as has been
+developed by the English Socialists of the Fabian and Labour Party group
+or by the newer German evolutionary Socialists. Nevertheless, whenever
+Socialism is intelligently met by discussion or whenever it draws near
+to practicable realisation, it becomes, by virtue of its inherent
+implications, a constructive force, and there is no reason to suppose
+that it will not be intelligently met on the whole and in the long run
+in America. The alternative to a developing Socialism among the
+labouring masses in America is that revolutionary Anarchism from which
+it is slowly but definitely marking itself off. In America we have to
+remember that we are dealing with a huge population of people who are
+for the most part, and more and more evidently destined under the
+present system of free industrial competition, to be either very small
+traders, small farmers on the verge of debt, or wages-earners for all
+their lives. They are going to lead limited lives and worried lives--and
+they know it. Nearly everyone can read and discuss now, the process of
+concentrating property and the steady fixation of conditions that were
+once fluid and adventurous goes on in the daylight visibly to everyone.
+And it has to be borne in mind also that these people are so far under
+the sway of the American tradition that each thinks himself as good as
+any man and as much entitled to the fullness of life. Whatever social
+tradition their fathers had, whatever ideas of a place to be filled
+humbly and seriously and duties to be done, have been left behind in
+Europe. No Church dominates the scenery of this new land, and offers in
+authoritative and convincing tones consolations hereafter for lives
+obscurely but faithfully lived. Whatever else happens in this national
+future, upon one point the patriotic American may feel assured, and that
+is of an immense general discontent in the working class and of a
+powerful movement in search of a general betterment. The practical forms
+and effects of that movement will depend almost entirely upon the
+average standard of life among the workers and their general education.
+Sweated and ill-organised foreigners, such as one finds in New Jersey
+living under conditions of great misery, will be fierce, impatient and
+altogether dangerous. They will be acutely exasperated by every picture
+of plutocratic luxury in their newspaper, they will readily resort to
+destructive violence. The western miner, the western agriculturist,
+worried beyond endurance between the money-lender and railway
+combinations will be almost equally prone to savage methods of
+expression. _The Appeal to Reason_, for example, to which I have made
+earlier reference in this chapter, is furious to wreck the present
+capitalistic system, but it is far too angry and impatient for that
+satisfaction to produce any clear suggestion of what shall replace it.
+
+To call this discontent of the seething underside of the American system
+Socialism is a misnomer. Were there no Socialism there would be just as
+much of this discontent, just the same insurgent force and desire for
+violence, taking some other title and far more destructive methods. This
+discontent is a part of the same planless confusion that gives on the
+other side the wanton irresponsible extravagances of the smart people of
+New York. But Socialism alone, of all the forms of expression adopted by
+the losers in the economic struggle, contains constructive possibilities
+and leads its adherents towards that ideal of an organised State,
+planned and developed, from which these terrible social stresses may be
+eliminated, which is also the ideal to which sociology and the thoughts
+of every constructive-minded and foreseeing man in any position of life
+tend to-day. In the Socialist hypothesis of collective ownership and
+administration as the social basis, there is the germ of a "sense of the
+State" that may ultimately develop into comprehensive conceptions of
+social order, conceptions upon which enlightened millionaires and
+unenlightened workers may meet at last in generous and patriotic
+co-operation.
+
+The chances of the American future, then, seem to range between two
+possibilities just as a more or less constructive Socialism does or does
+not get hold of and inspire the working mass of the population. In the
+worst event--given an emotional and empty hostility to property as such,
+masquerading as Socialism--one has the prospect of a bitter and aimless
+class war between the expropriated many and the property-holding few, a
+war not of general insurrection but of localised outbreaks, strikes and
+brutal suppressions, a war rising to bloody conflicts and sinking to
+coarsely corrupt political contests, in which one side may prevail in
+one locality and one in another, and which may even develop into a
+chronic civil war in the less-settled parts of the country or an
+irresistible movement for secession between west and east. That is
+assuming the greatest imaginable vehemence and short-sighted selfishness
+and the least imaginable intelligence on the part of both workers and
+the plutocrat-swayed government. But if the more powerful and educated
+sections of the American community realise in time the immense moral
+possibilities of the Socialist movement, if they will trouble to
+understand its good side instead of emphasising its bad, if they will
+keep in touch with it and help in the development of a constructive
+content to its propositions, then it seems to me that popular Socialism
+may count as a third great factor in the making of the civilised
+American State.
+
+In any case, it does not seem to me probable that there can be any
+national revolutionary movement or any complete arrest in the
+development of an aristocratic phase in American history. The area of
+the country is too great and the means of communication between the
+workers in different parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even for
+effective political action in mass. In the worst event--and it is only
+in the worst event that a great insurrectionary movement becomes
+probable--the newspapers, magazines, telephones and telegraphs, all the
+apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals,
+guns, flying machines, and all the material of warfare, will be in the
+hands of the property owners, and the average of betrayal among the
+leaders of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspicious
+united only by their discomforts and not by any constructive intentions,
+will necessarily be high. So that, though the intensifying trouble
+between labour and capital may mean immense social disorganisation and
+lawlessness, though it may even supply the popular support in new
+attempts at secession, I do not see in it the possibility and force for
+that new start which the revolutionary Socialists anticipate; I see it
+merely as one of several forces making, on the whole and particularly in
+view of the possible mediatory action of the universities, for
+construction and reconciliation.
+
+
+Sec. 10
+
+What changes are likely to occur in the more intimate social life of the
+people of the United States? Two influences are at work that may modify
+this profoundly. One is that spread of knowledge and that accompanying
+change in moral attitude which is more and more sterilising the once
+prolific American home, and the second is the rising standard of
+feminine education. There has arisen in this age a new consciousness in
+women. They are entering into the collective thought to a degree
+unprecedented in the world's history, and with portents at once
+disquieting and confused.
+
+In Sec. 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the American
+synthesis, the immigrant European aliens, the Catholics, the coloured
+blood, and so forth. I would now observe that, in the making of the
+American tradition, the women also have been to a large extent, and
+quite remarkably, a silent factor. That tradition is not only
+fundamentally middle-class and English, but it is also fundamentally
+masculine. The citizen is the man. The woman belongs to him. He votes
+for her, works for her, does all the severer thinking for her. She is in
+the home behind the shop or in the dairy at the farmhouse with her
+daughters. She gets the meal while the men talk. The American
+imagination and American feeling centre largely upon the family and upon
+"mother." American ideals are homely. The social unit is the home, and
+it is another and a different set of influences and considerations that
+are never thought of at all when the home sentiment is under discussion,
+that, indeed, it would be indelicate to mention at such a time, which
+are making that social unit the home of one child or of no children at
+all.
+
+That ideal of a man-owned, mother-revering home has been the prevalent
+American ideal from the landing of the _Mayflower_ right down to the
+leader writing of Mr. Arthur Brisbane. And it is clear that a very
+considerable section among one's educated women contemporaries do not
+mean to stand this ideal any longer. They do not want to be owned and
+cherished, and they do not want to be revered. How far they represent
+their sex in this matter it is very hard to say. In England in the
+professional and most intellectually active classes it is scarcely an
+exaggeration to say that _all_ the most able women below five-and-thirty
+are workers for the suffrage and the ideal of equal and independent
+citizenship, and active critics of the conventions under which women
+live to-day. It is at least plausible to suppose that a day is
+approaching when the alternatives between celibacy or a life of economic
+dependence and physical subordination to a man who has chosen her, and
+upon whose kindness her happiness depends, or prostitution, will no
+longer be a satisfactory outlook for the great majority of women, and
+when, with a newly aroused political consciousness, they will be
+prepared to exert themselves as a class to modify this situation. It may
+be that this is incorrect, and that in devotion to an accepted male and
+his children most women do still and will continue to find their
+greatest satisfaction in life. But it is the writer's impression that so
+simple and single-hearted a devotion is rare, and that, released from
+tradition--and education, reading and discussion do mean release from
+tradition--women are as eager for initiative, freedom and experience as
+men. In that case they will persist in the present agitation for
+political rights, and these secured, go on to demand a very considerable
+reconstruction of our present social order.
+
+It is interesting to point the direction in which this desire for
+independence will probably take them. They will discover that the
+dependence of women at the present time is not so much a law-made as an
+economic dependence due to the economic disadvantages their sex imposes
+upon them. Maternity and the concomitants of maternity are the
+circumstances in their lives, exhausting energy and earning nothing,
+that place them at a discount. From the stage when property ceased to be
+chiefly the creation of feminine agricultural toil (the so-called
+primitive matriarchate) to our present stage, women have had to depend
+upon a man's willingness to keep them, in order to realise the organic
+purpose of their being. Whether conventionally equal or not, whether
+voters or not, that necessity for dependence will still remain under our
+system of private property and free independent competition. There is
+only one evident way by which women as a class can escape from that
+dependence each upon an individual man and from all the practical
+inferiority this dependence entails, and that is by so altering their
+status as to make maternity and the upbringing of children a charge not
+upon the husband of the mother but upon the community. The public
+Endowment of Maternity is the only route by which the mass of women can
+reach that personal freedom and independent citizenship so many of them
+desire.
+
+Now, this idea of the Endowment of Maternity--or as it is frequently
+phrased, the Endowment of the Home--is at present put forward by the
+modern Socialists as an integral part of their proposals, and it is
+interesting to note that there is this convergent possibility which may
+bring the feminist movement at last altogether into line with
+constructive Socialism. Obviously, before anything in the direction of
+family endowment becomes practicable, public bodies and the State
+organisation will need to display far more integrity and efficiency
+than they do in America at the present time. Still, that is the trend of
+things in all contemporary civilised communities, and it is a trend that
+will find a powerful reinforcement in men's solicitudes as the
+increasing failure of the unsupported private family to produce
+offspring adequate to the needs of social development becomes more and
+more conspicuous. The impassioned appeals of President Roosevelt have
+already brought home the race-suicide of the native-born to every
+American intelligence, but mere rhetoric will not in itself suffice to
+make people, insecurely employed and struggling to maintain a
+comfortable standard of life against great economic pressure, prolific.
+Presented as a call to a particularly onerous and quite unpaid social
+duty the appeal for unrestricted parentage fails. Husband and wife alike
+dread an excessive burthen. Travel, leisure, freedom, comfort, property
+and increased ability for business competition are the rewards of
+abstinence from parentage, and even the disapproval of President
+Roosevelt and the pride of offspring are insufficient counterweights to
+these inducements. Large families disappear from the States, and more
+and more couples are childless. Those who have children restrict their
+number in order to afford those they have some reasonable advantage in
+life. This, in the presence of the necessary knowledge, is as
+practically inevitable a consequence of individualist competition and
+the old American tradition as the appearance of slums and a class of
+millionaires.
+
+These facts go to the very root of the American problem. I have already
+pointed out that, in spite of a colossal immigration, the population of
+the United States was at the end of the nineteenth century over twenty
+millions short of what it should have been through its own native
+increase had the birth-rate of the opening of the century been
+maintained. For a hundred years America has been "fed" by Europe. That
+feeding process will not go on indefinitely. The immigration came in
+waves as if reservoir after reservoir was tapped and exhausted. Nowadays
+England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Scandinavia send hardly any more;
+they have no more to send. Germany and Switzerland send only a few. The
+South European and Austrian supply is not as abundant as it was. There
+may come a time when Europe and Western Asia will have no more surplus
+population to send, when even Eastern Asia will have passed into a less
+fecund phase, and when America will have to look to its own natural
+increase for the continued development of its resources.
+
+If the present isolated family of private competition is still the
+social unit, it seems improbable that there will be any greater natural
+increase than there is in France.
+
+Will the growing idea of a closer social organisation have developed by
+that time to the possibility of some collective effort in this matter?
+Or will that only come about after the population of the world has
+passed through a phase of absolute recession? The peculiar constitution
+of the United States gives a remarkable freedom of experiment in these
+matters to each individual state, and local developments do not need to
+wait upon a national change of opinion; but, on the other hand, the
+superficial impression of an English visitor is that any such profound
+interference with domestic autonomy runs counter to all that Americans
+seem to hold dear at the present time. These are, however, new ideas and
+new considerations that have still to be brought adequately before the
+national consciousness, and it is quite impossible to calculate how a
+population living under changing conditions and with a rising standard
+of education and a developing feminine consciousness may not think and
+feel and behave in a generation's time. At present for all political and
+collective action America is a democracy of untutored individualist men
+who will neither tolerate such interference between themselves and the
+women they choose to marry as the Endowment of Motherhood implies, nor
+view the "kids" who will at times occur even in the best-regulated
+families as anything but rather embarrassing, rather amusing by-products
+of the individual affections.
+
+I find in the London _New Age_ for August 15th, 1908, a description by
+Mr. Jerome K. Jerome of "John Smith," the average British voter. John
+Smith might serve in some respects for the common man of all the modern
+civilisations. Among other things that John Smith thinks and wants, he
+wants:
+
+  "a little house and garden in the country all to himself.
+  His idea is somewhere near half an acre of ground. He
+  would like a piano in the best room; it has always been his
+  dream to have a piano. The youngest girl, he is convinced,
+  is musical. As a man who has knocked about the world
+  and has thought, he quite appreciates the argument that
+  by co-operation the material side of life can be greatly
+  improved. He quite sees that by combining a dozen families
+  together in one large house better practical results can be
+  obtained. It is as easy to direct the cooking for a hundred
+  as for half a dozen. There would be less waste of food, of
+  coals, of lighting. To put aside one piano for one girl is
+  absurd. He sees all this, but it does not alter one little
+  bit his passionate craving for that small house and garden
+  all to himself. He is built that way. He is typical of a
+  good many other men and women built on the same pattern.
+  What are you going to do with them? Change them--their
+  instincts, their very nature, rooted in the centuries?
+  Or, as an alternative, vary Socialism to fit John Smith?
+  Which is likely to prove the shorter operation?"
+
+That, however, is by the way. Here is the point at issue:
+
+  "He has heard that Socialism proposes to acknowledge
+  woman's service to the State by paying her a weekly wage
+  according to the number of children that she bears and
+  rears. I don't propose to repeat his objections to the idea;
+  they could hardly be called objections. There is an ugly
+  look comes into his eyes; something quite undefinable,
+  prehistoric, almost dangerous, looks out of them.... In
+  talking to him on this subject you do not seem to be
+  talking to a man. It is as if you had come face to face
+  with something behind civilisation, behind humanity, something
+  deeper down still among the dim beginnings of
+  creation...."
+
+Now, no doubt Mr. Jerome is writing with emphasis here. But there is
+sufficient truth in the passage for it to stand here as a rough symbol
+of another factor in this question. John Smithism, that manly and
+individualist element in the citizen, stands over against and resists
+all the forces of organisation that would subjugate it to a collective
+purpose. It is careless of coming national cessation and depopulation,
+careless of the insurgent spirit beneath the acquiescences of Mrs.
+Smith, careless of its own inevitable defeat in the economic struggle,
+careless because it can understand none of these things; it is
+obstinately muddle-headed, asserting what it conceives to be itself
+against the universe and all other John Smiths whatsoever. It is a
+factor with all other factors. The creative, acquisitive, aggressive
+spirit of those bigger John Smiths who succeed as against the myriads of
+John Smiths who fail, the wider horizons and more efficient methods of
+the educated man, the awakening class-consciousness of women, the
+inevitable futility of John Smithism, the sturdy independence that makes
+John Smith resent even disciplined co-operation with Tom Brown to
+achieve a common end, his essential incapacity, indeed, for collective
+action; all these things are against the ultimate triumph, and make for
+the ultimate civilisation even of John Smith.
+
+
+Sec. 11
+
+It may be doubted if the increasing collective organisation of society
+to which the United States of America, in common with all the rest of
+the world, seem to be tending will be to any very large extent a
+national organisation. The constitution is an immense and complicated
+barrier to effectual centralisation. There are many reasons for
+supposing the national government will always remain a little
+ineffectual and detached from the full flow of American life, and this
+notwithstanding the very great powers with which the President is
+endowed.
+
+One of these reasons is certainly the peculiar accident that has placed
+the seat of government upon the Potomac. To the thoughtful visitor to
+the United States this hiding away of the central government in a minute
+district remote from all the great centres of thought, population and
+business activity becomes more remarkable more perplexing, more
+suggestive of an incurable weakness in the national government as he
+grasps more firmly the peculiarities of the American situation.
+
+I do not see how the central government of that great American nation of
+which I dream can possibly be at Washington, and I do not see how the
+present central government can possibly be transferred to any other
+centre. But to go to Washington, to see and talk to Washington, is to
+receive an extraordinary impression of the utter isolation and
+hopelessness of Washington. The National Government has an air of being
+marooned there. Or as though it had crept into a corner to do something
+in the dark. One goes from the abounding movement and vitality of the
+northern cities to this sunny and enervating place through the
+negligently cultivated country of Virginia, and one discovers the
+slovenly, unfinished promise of a city, broad avenues lined by negro
+shanties and patches of cultivation, great public buildings and an
+immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert university, a splendid
+desert library, a street of souvenir shops, a certain industry of
+"seeing Washington," an idiotic colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nest
+for the tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and agents
+and secondary people. In the White House, in the time of President
+Roosevelt, the present writer found a transitory glow of intellectual
+activity, the spittoons and glass screens that once made it like a
+London gin palace had been removed, and the former orgies of handshaking
+reduced to a minimum. It was, one felt, an accidental phase. The
+assassination of McKinley was an interruption of the normal Washington
+process. To this place, out of the way of everywhere, come the senators
+and congressmen, mostly leaving their families behind them in their
+states of origin, and hither, too, are drawn a multitude of journalists
+and political agents and clerks, a crowd of underbred, mediocre men. For
+most of them there is neither social nor intellectual life. The thought
+of America is far away, centred now in New York; the business and
+economic development centres upon New York; apart from the President, it
+is in New York that one meets the people who matter, and the New York
+atmosphere that grows and develops ideas and purposes. New York is the
+natural capital of the United States, and would need to be the capital
+of any highly organised national system. Government from the district of
+Columbia is in itself the repudiation of any highly organised national
+system.
+
+But government from this ineffectual, inert place is only the most
+striking outcome of that inflexible constitution the wrangling delegates
+of 1787-8 did at last produce out of a conflict of State jealousies.
+They did their best to render centralisation or any coalescence of
+States impossible and private property impregnable, and so far their
+work has proved extraordinarily effective. Only a great access of
+intellectual and moral vigour in the nation can ever set it aside. And
+while the more and more sterile millions of the United States grapple
+with the legal and traditional difficulties that promise at last to
+arrest their development altogether, the rest of the world will be
+moving on to new phases. An awakened Asia will be reorganising its
+social and political conceptions in the light of modern knowledge and
+modern ideas, and South America will be working out its destinies,
+perhaps in the form of a powerful confederation of states. All Europe
+will be schooling its John Smiths to finer discipline and broader ideas.
+It is quite possible that the American John Smiths may have little to
+brag about in the way of national predominance by A.D. 2000. It is quite
+possible that the United States may be sitting meekly at the feet of at
+present unanticipated teachers.
+
+
+
+
+THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION
+
+(_New Year, 1909_.)
+
+
+The Editor of the _New York World_ has asked me to guess the general
+trend of events in the next thirty years or so with especial reference
+to the outlook for the State and City of New York. I like and rarely
+refuse such cheerful invitations to prophesy. I have already made a sort
+of forecast (in my "Anticipations") of what may happen if the social and
+economic process goes on fairly smoothly for all that time, and shown a
+New York relieved from its present congestion by the development of the
+means of communication, and growing and spreading in wide and splendid
+suburbs towards Boston and Philadelphia. I made that forecast before
+ever I passed Sandy Hook, but my recent visit only enhanced my sense of
+growth and "go" in things American. Still, we are nowadays all too apt
+to think that growth is inevitable and progress in the nature of things;
+the Wonderful Century, as Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace called the
+nineteenth, has made us perhaps over-confident and forgetful of the
+ruins of great cities and confident prides of the past that litter the
+world, and here I will write about the other alternative, of the
+progressive process "hitting something," and smashing.
+
+There are two chief things in modern life that impress me as dangerous
+and incalculable. The first of these is the modern currency and
+financial system, and the second is the chance we take of destructive
+war. Let me dwell first of all on the mysterious possibilities of the
+former, and then point out one or two uneasy developments of the latter.
+
+Now, there is nothing scientific about our currency and finance at all.
+It is a thing that has grown up and elaborated itself out of very simple
+beginnings in the course of a century or so. Three hundred years ago the
+edifice had hardly begun to rise from the ground, most property was
+real, most people lived directly on the land, most business was on a
+cash basis, oversea trade was a proportionately small affair, labour was
+locally fixed. Most of the world was at the level at which much of China
+remains to-day--able to get along without even coinage. It was a
+rudimentary world from the point of view of the modern financier and
+industrial organiser. Well, on that rude, secure basis there has now
+been piled the most chancy and insecurely experimental system of
+conventions and assumptions about money and credit it is possible to
+imagine. There has grown up a vast system of lending and borrowing, a
+world-wide extension of joint-stock enterprises that involve at last the
+most fantastic relationships. I find myself, for example, owning
+(partially, at least) a bank in New Zealand, a railway in Cuba, another
+in Canada, several in Brazil, an electric power plant in the City of
+Westminster, and so on, and I use these stocks and shares as a sort of
+interest-bearing money. If I want money to spend, I sell a railway share
+much as one might change a hundred-pound banknote; if I have more cash
+than I need immediately I buy a few shares. I perceive that the value of
+these shares oscillates, sometimes rather gravely, and that the value of
+the alleged money on the cheques I get also oscillates as compared with
+the things I want to buy; that, indeed, the whole system (which has only
+existed for a couple of centuries or so, and which keeps on getting
+higher and giddier) is perpetually swaying and quivering and bending and
+sagging; but it is only when such a great crisis occurs as that of 1907
+that it enters my mind that possibly there is no limit to these
+oscillations, that possibly the whole vast accidental edifice will
+presently come smashing down.
+
+Why shouldn't it?
+
+I defy any economist or financial expert to prove that it cannot. That
+it hasn't done so in the little time for which it has existed is no
+reply at all. It is like arguing that a man cannot die because he has
+never been known to do so. Previous men have died, previous
+civilisations have collapsed, if not of acute, then of chronic financial
+disorders.
+
+The experience of 1907 indicated very clearly how a collapse might
+occur. A panic, like an avalanche, is a thing much easier to start than
+stop. Previous panics have been arrested by good luck; this last one in
+America, for example, found Europe strong and prosperous and helpful. In
+every panic period there is a huge dislocation of business enterprises,
+vast multitudes of men are thrown out of employment, there is grave
+social and political disorder; but in the end, so far, things have an
+air of having recovered. But now, suppose the panic wave a little more
+universal--and panic waves tend to be more extensive than they used to
+be. Suppose that when securities fall all round, and gold appreciates in
+New York, and frightened people begin to sell investments and hoard
+gold, the same thing happens in other parts of the world. Increase the
+scale of the trouble only two or three times, and would our system
+recover? Imagine great masses of men coming out of employment, and angry
+and savage, in all our great towns; imagine the railways working with
+reduced staffs on reduced salaries or blocked by strikers; imagine
+provision dealers stopping consignments to retailers, and retailers
+hesitating to give credit. A phase would arrive when the police and
+militia keeping order in the streets would find themselves on short
+rations and without their weekly pay.
+
+What we moderns, with our little three hundred years or so of security,
+do not recognise is that things that go up and down may, given a certain
+combination of chances, go down steadily, down and down.
+
+What would you do, dear reader--what should I do--if a slump went on
+continually?
+
+And that brings me to the second great danger to our modern
+civilisation, and that is War. We have over-developed war. While we have
+left our peace organisation to the niggling, slow, self-seeking methods
+of private enterprise; while we have left the breeding of our peoples to
+chance, their minds to the halfpenny press and their wealth to the drug
+manufacturer, we have pushed forward the art of war on severely
+scientific and Socialist lines; we have put all the collective resources
+of the community and an enormous proportion of its intelligence and
+invention ungrudgingly into the improvement and manufacture of the
+apparatus of destruction. Great Britain, for example, is content with
+the railways and fireplaces and types of housing she had fifty years
+ago; she still uses telephones and the electric light in the most
+tentative spirit; but every ironclad she had five-and-twenty years ago
+is old iron now and abandoned. Everything crawls forward but the science
+of war; that rushes on. Of what will happen if presently the guns begin
+to go off I have no shadow of doubt. Every year has seen the
+disproportionate increase until now. Every modern European state is more
+or less like a cranky, ill-built steamboat in which some idiot has
+mounted and loaded a monstrous gun with no apparatus to damp its recoil.
+Whether that gun hits or misses when it is fired, of one thing we may be
+absolutely certain--it will send the steamboat to the bottom of the sea.
+
+Modern warfare is an insanity, not a sane business proposition. Its
+preparation eats more and more into the resources which should be
+furnishing a developing civilisation; its possibilities of destruction
+are incalculable. A new epoch has opened with the coming of the
+navigable balloon and the flying machine. To begin with, these things
+open new gulfs for expenditure; in the end they mean possibilities of
+destruction beyond all precedent. Such things as the _Zeppelin_ and the
+_Ville de Paris_ are only the first pigmy essays of the aeronaut. It is
+clear that to be effective, capable of carrying guns and comparatively
+insensitive to perforation by shot and shell, these things will have to
+be very much larger and as costly, perhaps, as a first-class cruiser.
+Imagine such monsters of the air, and wild financial panic below!
+
+Here, then, are two associated possibilities with which to modify our
+expectation of an America advancing steadily on the road to an organised
+civilisation, of New York rebuilding herself in marble, spreading like a
+garden city over New Jersey and Long Island and New York State, becoming
+a new and greater Venice, queen of the earth.
+
+Perhaps, after all, the twentieth century isn't going to be so
+prosperous as the nineteenth. Perhaps, instead of going resistlessly
+onward, we are going to have a set-back. Perhaps we are going to be put
+back to learn over again under simpler conditions some of those
+necessary fundamental lessons our race has learnt as yet insufficiently
+well--honesty and brotherhood, social collectivism, and the need of some
+common peace-preserving council for the whole world.
+
+
+
+
+THE IDEAL CITIZEN
+
+
+Our conceptions of what a good citizen should be are all at sixes and
+sevens. No two people will be found to agree in every particular of such
+an ideal, and the extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what is
+permissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span nearly the whole
+range of human possibility and conduct. As a consequence, we bring up
+our children in a mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warring
+voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may
+do, doomed to lives of compromise and fluctuating and inoperative
+opinion. Ideals and suggestions come and go before their eyes like
+figures in a fog. The commonest pattern, perhaps--the commonest pattern
+certainly in Sunday schools and edifying books, and on all those places
+and occasions when morality is sought as an end--is a clean and
+able-bodied person, truthful to the extent that he does not tell lies,
+temperate so far as abstinence is concerned, honest without pedantry,
+and active in his own affairs, steadfastly law-abiding and respectful to
+custom and usage, though aloof from the tumult of politics, brave but
+not adventurous, punctual in some form of religious exercise, devoted to
+his wife and children, and kind without extravagance to all men.
+Everyone feels that this is not enough, everyone feels that something
+more is wanted and something different; most people are a little
+interested in what that difference can be, and it is a business that
+much of what is more than trivial in our art, our literature and our
+drama must do to fill in bit by bit and shade by shade the subtle, the
+permanent detail of the answer.
+
+It does very greatly help in this question to bear in mind the conflict
+of our origins. Every age is an age of transition, of minglings, of the
+breaking up of old, narrow cultures, and the breaking down of barriers,
+of spiritual and often of actual interbreeding. Not only is the physical
+but the moral and intellectual ancestry of everyone more mixed than ever
+it was before. We blend in our blood, everyone of us, and we blend in
+our ideas and purposes, craftsmen, warriors, savages, peasants, and a
+score of races, and an endless multitude of social expedients and rules.
+Go back but a hundred generations in the lineage of the most delicate
+girl you know, and you will find a dozen murderers. You will find liars
+and cheats, lascivious sinners, women who have sold themselves, slaves,
+imbeciles, devotees, saints, men of fantastic courage, discreet and
+watchful persons, usurers, savages, criminals and kings, and every one
+of this miscellany, not simply fathering or mothering on the way to her,
+but teaching urgently and with every grade of intensity, views and
+habits for which they stand. Something of it all has come to her, albeit
+much may seem forgotten. In every human birth, with a new little
+variation, a fresh slight novelty of arrangement the old issues rise
+again. Our ideas, even more than our blood, flow from multitudinous
+sources.
+
+Certain groups of ideas come to us distinctively associated with certain
+marked ways of life. Many, and for a majority of us, it may be, most of
+our ancestors were serfs or slaves. And men and women who have had,
+generation after generation, to adapt themselves to slavery and the rule
+of a master, develop an idea of goodness very different from that of
+princes. From our slave ancestry, says Lester Ward, we learnt to work,
+and certainly it is from slavery we derive the conception that industry,
+even though it be purposeless industry, is a virtue in itself. The good
+slave, too, has a morality of restraints; he abstains from the food he
+handles and hungers for, and he denies himself pride and initiative of
+every sort. He is honest in not taking, but he is unscrupulous about
+adequate service. He makes no virtue of frankness, but much of kindly
+helpfulness and charity to the weak. He has no sense of duty in planning
+or economising. He is polite and soft-spoken, and disposed to irony
+rather than denunciation, ready to admire cuteness and condone
+deception. Not so the rebel. That tradition is working in us also. It
+has been the lot of vast masses of population in every age to be living
+in successful or unsuccessful resistance to mastery, to be dreading
+oppression or to be just escaped from it. Resentment becomes a virtue
+then, and any peace with the oppressor a crime. It is from rebel origins
+so many of us get the idea that disrespectfulness is something of a duty
+and obstinacy a fine thing. And under the force of this tradition we
+idealise the rugged and unmanageable, we find something heroic in rough
+clothes and hands, in bad manners, insensitive behaviour, and
+unsociableness. And a community of settlers, again, in a rough country,
+fighting for a bare existence, makes a virtue of vehemence, of a hasty
+rapidity of execution. Hurried and driven men glorify "push" and
+impatience, and despise finish and fine discriminations as weak and
+demoralising things. These three, the Serf, the Rebel, and the
+Squatter, are three out of a thousand types and aspects that have gone
+to our making. In the American composition they are dominant. But all
+those thousand different standards and traditions are our material, each
+with something fine, and each with something evil. They have all
+provided the atmosphere of upbringing for men in the past. Out of them
+and out of unprecedented occasions, we in this newer age, in which there
+are no slaves, in which every man is a citizen, in which the
+conveniences of a great and growing civilisation makes the frantic
+avidity of the squatter a nuisance, have to set ourselves to frame the
+standard of our children's children, to abandon what the slave or the
+squatter or the rebel found necessary and that we find unnecessary, to
+fit fresh requirements to our new needs. So we have to develop our
+figure of the fine man, our desirable citizen in that great and noble
+civilised state we who have a "sense of the state" would build out of
+the confusions of our world.
+
+To describe that ideal modern citizen now is at best to make a guess and
+a suggestion of what must be built in reality by the efforts of a
+thousand minds. But he will be a very different creature from that
+indifferent, well-behaved business man who passes for a good citizen
+to-day. He will be neither under the slave tradition nor a rebel nor a
+vehement elemental man. Essentially he will be aristocratic,
+aristocratic not in the sense that he has slaves or class inferiors,
+because probably he will have nothing of the sort, but aristocratic in
+the sense that he will feel the State belongs to him and he to the
+State. He will probably be a public servant; at any rate, he will be a
+man doing some work in the complicated machinery of the modern community
+for a salary and not for speculative gain. Typically, he will be a
+professional man. I do not think the ideal modern citizen can be a
+person living chiefly by buying for as little as he can give and selling
+for as much as he can get; indeed, most of what we idolise to-day as
+business enterprise I think he will regard with considerable contempt.
+But, then, I am a Socialist, and look forward to the time when the
+economic machinery of the community will be a field not for private
+enrichment but for public service.
+
+He will be good to his wife and children as he will be good to his
+friend, but he will be no partisan for wife and family against the
+common welfare. His solicitude will be for the welfare of all the
+children of the community; he will have got beyond blind instinct; he
+will have the intelligence to understand that almost any child in the
+world may have as large a share as his own offspring in the parentage of
+his great-great-grandchildren His wife he will treat as his equal; he
+will not be "kind" to her, but fair and frank and loving, as one equal
+should be with another; he will no more have the impertinence to pet and
+pamper her, to keep painful and laborious things out of her knowledge to
+"shield" her from the responsibility of political and social work, than
+he will to make a Chinese toy of her and bind her feet. He and she will
+love that they may enlarge and not limit one another.
+
+Consciously and deliberately the ideal citizen will seek beauty in
+himself and in his way of living. He will be temperate rather than
+harshly abstinent, and he will keep himself fit and in training as an
+elementary duty. He will not be a fat or emaciated person. Fat, panting
+men, and thin, enfeebled ones cannot possibly be considered good
+citizens any more than dirty or verminous people. He will be just as
+fine and seemly in his person as he can be, not from vanity and
+self-assertion but to be pleasing and agreeable to his fellows. The ugly
+dress and ugly bearing of the "good man" of to-day will be as
+incomprehensible to him as the filth of a palaeolithic savage is to us.
+He will not speak of his "frame," and hang clothes like sacks over it;
+he will know and feel that he and the people about him have wonderful,
+delightful and beautiful bodies.
+
+And--I speak of the ideal common citizen--he will be a student and a
+philosopher. To understand will be one of his necessary duties. His
+mind, like his body, will be fit and well clothed. He will not be too
+busy to read and think, though he may be too busy to rush about to get
+ignorantly and blatantly rich. It follows that, since he will have a
+mind exercised finely and flexible and alert, he will not be a secretive
+man. Secretiveness and secret planning are vulgarity; men and women need
+to be educated, and he will be educated out of these vices. He will be
+intensely truthful, not simply in the vulgar sense of not misstating
+facts when pressed, but truthful in the manner of the scientific man or
+the artist, and as scornful of concealment as they; truthful, that is to
+say, as the expression of a ruling desire to have things made plain and
+clear, because that so they are most beautiful and life is at its
+finest....
+
+And all that I have written of him is equally true and applies word for
+word, with only such changes of gender as are needed, to the woman
+citizen also.
+
+
+
+
+SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES
+
+
+The present time is harvest home for the prophets. The happy speculator
+in future sits on the piled-up wain, singing "I told you so," with the
+submarine and the flying machine and the Marconigram and the North Pole
+successfully achieved. In the tumult of realisations it perhaps escapes
+attention that the prophetic output of new hopes is by no means keeping
+pace with the crop of consummations. The present trend of scientific
+development is not nearly so obvious as it was a score of years ago; its
+promises lack the elementary breadth of that simpler time. Once you have
+flown, you have flown. Once you have steamed about under water, you have
+steamed about under water. There seem no more big things of that kind
+available--so that I almost regret the precipitance of Commander Peary
+and Captain Amundsen. No one expects to go beyond that atmosphere for
+some centuries at least; all the elements are now invaded. Conceivably
+man may presently contrive some sort of earthworm apparatus, so that he
+could go through the rocks prospecting very much as an earthworm goes
+through the soil, excavating in front and dumping behind, but, to put it
+moderately, there are considerable difficulties. And I doubt the
+imaginative effect. On the whole, I think material science has got
+samples now of all its crops at this level, and that what lies before it
+in the coming years is chiefly to work them out in detail and realise
+them on the larger scale. No doubt science will still yield all sorts
+of big surprising effects, but nothing, I think, to equal the dramatic
+novelty, the demonstration of man having got to something altogether new
+and strange, of Montgolfier, or the Wright Brothers, of Columbus, or the
+Polar conquest. There remains, of course, the tapping of atomic energy,
+but I give two hundred years yet before that....
+
+So far, then, as mechanical science goes I am inclined to think the
+coming period will be, from the point of view of the common man, almost
+without sensational interest. There will be an immense amount of
+enrichment and filling-in, but of the sort that does not get prominently
+into the daily papers. At every point there will be economies and
+simplifications of method, discoveries of new artificial substances with
+new capabilities, and of new methods of utilising power. There will be a
+progressive change in the apparatus and quality of human life--the sort
+of alteration of the percentages that causes no intellectual shock.
+Electric heating, for example, will become practicable in our houses,
+and then cheaper, and at last so cheap and good that nobody will burn
+coal any more. Little electric contrivances will dispense with menial
+service in more and more directions. The builder will introduce new,
+more convenient, healthier and prettier substances, and the young
+architect will become increasingly the intelligent student of novelty.
+The steam engine, the coal yard, and the tail chimney, and indeed all
+chimneys, will vanish quietly from our urban landscape. The speeding up
+and cheapening of travel, and the increase in its swiftness and comfort
+will go on steadily--widening experience. A more systematic and
+understanding social science will be estimating the probable growth and
+movement of population, and planning town and country on lines that
+would seem to-day almost inconceivably wise and generous. All this means
+a quiet broadening and aeration and beautifying of life. Utopian
+requirements, so far as the material side of things goes, will be
+executed and delivered with at last the utmost promptness....
+
+It is in quite other directions that the scientific achievements to
+astonish our children will probably be achieved. Progress never appears
+to be uniform in human affairs. There are intricate correlations between
+department and department. One field must mark time until another can
+come up to it with results sufficiently arranged and conclusions
+sufficiently simplified for application Medicine waits on organic
+chemistry, geology on mineralogy, and both on the chemistry of high
+pressures and temperature. And subtle variations in method and the
+prevailing mental temperament of the type of writer engaged, produce
+remarkable differences in the quality and quantity of the stated result.
+Moreover, there are in the history of every scientific province periods
+of seed-time, when there is great activity without immediate apparent
+fruition, and periods, as, for example, the last two decades of
+electrical application, of prolific realisation. It is highly probable
+that the physiologist and the organic chemist are working towards
+co-operations that may make the physician's sphere the new scientific
+wonderland.
+
+At present dietary and regimen are the happy hunting ground of the quack
+and that sort of volunteer specialist, half-expert, half-impostor, who
+flourishes in the absence of worked out and definite knowledge. The
+general mass of the medical profession, equipped with a little
+experience and a muddled training, and preposterously impeded by the
+private adventure conditions under which it lives, goes about pretending
+to the possession of precise knowledge which simply does not exist in
+the world. Medical research is under-endowed and stupidly endowed, not
+for systematic scientific inquiry so much as for the unscientific
+seeking of remedies for specific evils--for cancer, consumption, and the
+like. Yet masked, misrepresented limited and hampered, the work of
+establishing a sound science of vital processes in health and disease is
+probably going on now, similar to the clarification of physics and
+chemistry that went on in the later part of the eighteenth and the early
+years of the nineteenth centuries. It is not unreasonable to suppose
+that medicine may presently arrive at far-reaching generalised
+convictions, and proceed to take over this great hinterland of human
+interests which legitimately belongs to it.
+
+But medicine is not the only field to which we may reasonably look for a
+sudden development of wonders. Compared with the sciences of matter,
+psychology and social science have as yet given the world remarkably
+little cause for amazement. Not only is our medicine feeble and
+fragmentary, but our educational science is the poorest miscellany of
+aphorisms and dodges. Indeed, directly one goes beyond the range of
+measurement and weighing and classification, one finds a sort of
+unprogressive floundering going on, which throws the strongest doubts
+upon the practical applicability of the current logical and metaphysical
+conceptions in those fields. We have emerged only partially from the age
+of the schoolmen In these directions we have not emerged at all. It is
+quite possible that in university lecture rooms and forbidding volumes
+of metaphysical discussion a new emancipation of the human intellect and
+will is even now going on. Presently men may be attacking the problems
+of the self-control of human life and of human destiny in new phrases
+and an altogether novel spirit.
+
+Guesses at the undiscovered must necessarily be vague, but my
+anticipations fall into two groups, and first I am disposed to expect a
+great systematic increment in individual human power. We probably have
+no suspicion as yet of what may be done with the human body and mind by
+way of enhancing its effectiveness I remember talking to the late Sir
+Michael Foster upon the possibilities of modern surgery, and how he
+confessed that he did not dare for his reputation's sake tell ordinary
+people the things he believed would some day become matter-of-fact
+operations. In that respect I think he spoke for very many of his
+colleagues. It is already possible to remove almost any portion of the
+human body, including, if needful, large sections of the brain; it is
+possible to graft living flesh on living flesh, make new connections,
+mould, displace, and rearrange. It is also not impossible to provoke
+local hypertrophy, and not only by knife and physical treatment but by
+the subtler methods of hypnotism, profound changes can be wrought in the
+essential structure of a human being. If only our knowledge of function
+and value were at all adequate, we could correct and develop ourselves
+in the most extraordinary way. Our knowledge is not adequate, but it may
+not always remain inadequate.
+
+We have already had some very astonishing suggestions in this direction
+from Doctor Metchnikoff. He regards the human stomach and large
+intestine as not only vestigial and superfluous in the human economy,
+but as positively dangerous on account of the harbour they afford for
+those bacteria that accelerate the decay of age. He proposes that these
+viscera should be removed. To a layman like myself this is an altogether
+astounding and horrifying idea, but Doctor Metchnikoff is a man of the
+very greatest scientific reputation, and it does not give him any qualm
+of horror or absurdity to advance it. I am quite sure that if a
+gentleman called upon me "done up" in the way I am dimly suggesting,
+with most of the contents of his abdomen excavated, his lungs and heart
+probably enlarged and improved, parts of his brain removed to eliminate
+harmful tendencies and make room for the expansion of the remainder, his
+mind and sensibilities increased, and his liability to fatigue and the
+need of sleep abolished, I should conceal with the utmost difficulty my
+inexpressible disgust and terror. But, then, if M. Blériot, with his
+flying machine, ear-flaps and goggles, had soared down in the year 54
+B.C., let us say, upon my woad-adorned ancestors--every family man in
+Britain was my ancestor in those days--at Dover, they would have had
+entirely similar emotions. And at present I am not discussing what is
+beautiful in humanity, but what is possible--and what, being possible,
+is likely to be attempted.
+
+It does not follow that because men will some day have this enormous
+power over themselves, physically and mentally, that they will
+necessarily make themselves horrible--even by our present standards
+quite a lot of us would be all the slenderer and more active and
+graceful for "Metchnikoffing"--nor does surgery exhaust the available
+methods. We are still in the barbaric age, so far as our use of food and
+drugs is concerned. We stuff all sorts of substances into our
+unfortunate interiors and blunder upon the most various consequences.
+Few people of three score and ten but have spent in the aggregate the
+best part of a year in a state of indigestion, stupid, angry or painful
+indigestion as the case may be. No one would be so careless and ignorant
+about the fuel he burnt in his motor-car as most of us are about the
+fuel we burn in our bodies. And there are all sort of stimulating and
+exhilarating things, digesting things, fatigue-suppressing things,
+exercise economising things, we dare not use because we are afraid of
+our ignorance of their precise working. There seems no reason to suppose
+that human life, properly understood and controlled, could not be a
+constant succession of delightful and for the most part active bodily
+and mental phases. It is sheer ignorance and bad management that keep
+the majority of people in that disagreeable system of states which we
+indicate by saying we are "a bit off colour" or a little "out of
+training." It may seem madly Utopian now to suggest that practically
+everyone in the community might be clean, beautiful, incessantly active,
+"fit," and long-lived, with the marks of all the surgery they have
+undergone quite healed and hidden, but not more madly Utopian than it
+would have seemed to King Alfred the Great if one had said that
+practically everyone in this country, down to the very swineherds,
+should be able to read and write.
+
+Metchnikoff has speculated upon the possibility of delaying old age, and
+I do not see why his method should not be applied to the diurnal need of
+sleep. No vital process seems to be absolutely fated in itself; it is a
+thing conditioned and capable of modification. If Metchnikoff is
+right--and to a certain extent he must be right--the decay of age is due
+to changing organic processes that may be checked and delayed and
+modified by suitable food and regimen. He holds out hope of a new phase
+in the human cycle, after the phase of struggle and passion, a phase of
+serene intellectual activity, old age with all its experience and none
+of its infirmities. Still more are fatigue and the need for repose
+dependent upon chemical changes in the body. It would seem we are unable
+to maintain exertion, partly through the exhaustion of our tissues, but
+far more by the loading of our blood with fatigue products--a
+recuperative interlude must ensue. But there is no reason to suppose
+that the usual food of to-day is the most rapidly assimilable nurture
+possible, that a rapidly digestible or injectable substance is not
+conceivable that would vastly accelerate repair, nor that the
+elimination and neutralisation of fatigue products might not also be
+enormously hastened. There is no inherent impossibility in the idea not
+only of various glands being induced to function in a modified manner,
+but even in the insertion upon the circulation of interceptors and
+artificial glandular structures. No doubt that may strike even an
+adventurous surgeon as chimerical, but consider what people, even
+authoritative people, were saying of flying and electric traction twenty
+years ago. At present a man probably does not get more than three or
+four hours of maximum mental and physical efficiency in the day. Few men
+can keep at their best in either physical or intellectual work for so
+long as that. The rest of the time goes in feeding, digesting, sleeping,
+sitting about, relaxation of various kinds. It is quite possible that
+science may set itself presently to extend systematically that
+proportion of efficient time. The area of maximum efficiency may invade
+the periods now demanded by digestion, sleep, exercise, so that at last
+nearly the whole of a man's twenty-four hours will be concentrated on
+his primary interests instead of dispersed among these secondary
+necessary matters.
+
+Please understand I do not consider this concentration of activity and
+these vast "artificialisations" of the human body as attractive or
+desirable things. At the first proposal much of this tampering with the
+natural stuff of life will strike anyone, I think, as ugly and horrible,
+just as seeing a little child, green-white and still under an
+anaesthetic, gripped my heart much more dreadfully than the sight of the
+same child actively bawling with pain. But the business of this paper is
+to discuss things that may happen, and not to evolve dreams of
+loveliness. Perhaps things of this kind will be manageable without
+dreadfulness. Perhaps man will come to such wisdom that neither the
+knife nor the drugs nor any of the powers which science thrusts into his
+hand will slay the beauty of life for him. Suppose we assume that he is
+not such a fool as to let that happen, and that ultimately he will
+emerge triumphant with all these powers utilised and controlled.
+
+It is not only that an amplifying science may give mankind happier
+bodies and far more active and eventful lives, but that psychology and
+educational and social science, reinforcing literature and working
+through literature and art, may dare to establish serenities in his
+soul. For surely no one who has lived, no one who has watched sin and
+crime and punishment, but must have come to realise the enormous amount
+of misbehaviour that is mere ignorance and want of mental scope. For my
+own part I have never believed in the devil. And it may be a greater
+undertaking but no more impossible to make ways to goodwill and a good
+heart in men than it is to tunnel mountains and dyke back the sea. The
+way that led from the darkness of the cave to the electric light is the
+way that will lead to light in the souls of men, that is to say, the way
+of free and fearless thinking, free and fearless experiment, organised
+exchange of thoughts and results, and patience and persistence and a
+sort of intellectual civility.
+
+And with the development of philosophical and scientific method that
+will go on with this great increase in man's control over himself,
+another issue that is now a mere pious aspiration above abysses of
+ignorance and difficulty, will come to be a manageable matter. It has
+been the perpetual wonder of philosophers from Plato onward that men
+have bred their dogs and horses and left any man or woman, however vile,
+free to bear offspring in the next generation of men. Still that goes
+on. Beautiful and wonderful people die childless and bury their treasure
+in the grave, and we rest content with a system of matrimony that seems
+designed to perpetuate mediocrity. A day will come when men will be in
+possession of knowledge and opportunity that will enable them to master
+this position, and then certainly will it be assured that every
+generation shall be born better than was the one before it. And with
+that the history of humanity will enter upon a new phase, a phase which
+will be to our lives as daylight is to the dreaming of a child as yet
+unborn.
+
+
+
+
+THE HUMAN ADVENTURE
+
+
+Alone among all the living things this globe has borne, man reckons with
+destiny. All other living things obey the forces that created them; and
+when the mood of the power changes, submit themselves passively to
+extinction Man only looks upon those forces in the face, anticipates the
+exhaustion of Nature's kindliness, seeks weapons to defend himself. Last
+of the children of Saturn, he escapes their general doom. He
+dispossesses his begetter of all possibility of replacement, and grasps
+the sceptre of the world. Before man the great and prevalent creatures
+followed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of
+the ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the
+land, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged
+reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals,
+the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle
+dreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last
+comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of being
+again.
+
+There is nothing else in all the world that so turns against the powers
+that have made it, unless it be man's follower fire. But fire is
+witless; a little stream, a changing breeze can stop it. Man
+circumvents. If fire were human it would build boats across the rivers
+and outmanoeuvre the wind. It would lie in wait in sheltered places,
+smouldering, husbanding its fuel until the grass was yellow and the
+forests sere. But fire is a mere creature of man's; our world before his
+coming knew nothing of it in any of its habitable places, never saw it
+except in the lightning flash or remotely on some volcanic coronet. Man
+brought it into the commerce of life, a shining, resentful slave, to
+hound off the startled beasts from his sleeping-place and serve him like
+a dog.
+
+Suppose that some enduring intelligence watched through the ages the
+successions of life upon this planet, marked the spreading first of this
+species and then that, the conflicts, the adaptations, the
+predominances, the dyings away, and conceive how it would have witnessed
+this strange dramatic emergence of a rare great ape to manhood. To such
+a mind the creature would have seemed at first no more than one of
+several varieties of clambering frugivorous mammals, a little
+distinguished by a disposition to help his clumsy walking with a stake
+and reinforce his fist with a stone. The foreground of the picture would
+have been filled by the rhinoceros and mammoth, the great herds of
+ruminants, the sabre-toothed lion and the big bears. Then presently the
+observer would have noted a peculiar increasing handiness about the
+obscurer type, an unwonted intelligence growing behind its eyes. He
+would have perceived a disposition in this creature no beast had shown
+before, a disposition to make itself independent of the conditions of
+climate and the chances of the seasons. Did shelter fail among the trees
+and rocks, this curious new thing-began to make itself harbours of its
+own; was food irregular, it multiplied food. It began to spread out from
+its original circumstances, fitting itself to novel needs, leaving the
+forests, invading the plains, following the watercourses upward and
+downward, presently carrying the smoke of its fires like a banner of
+conquest into wintry desolations and the high places of the earth.
+
+The first onset of man must have been comparatively slow, the first
+advances needed long ages. By small degrees it gathered pace. The stride
+from the scattered savagery of the earlier stone period to the first
+cities, historically a vast interval, would have seemed to that still
+watcher, measuring by the standards of astronomy and the rise and
+decline of races and genera and orders, a, step almost abrupt. It took,
+perhaps, a thousand generations or so to make it. In that interval man
+passed from an animal-like obedience to the climate and the weather and
+his own instincts, from living in small family parties of a score or so
+over restricted areas of indulgent country, to permanent settlements, to
+the life of tribal and national communities and the beginnings of
+cities. He had spread in that fragment of time over great areas of the
+earth's surface, and now he was adapting himself to the Arctic circle on
+the one hand and to the life of the tropics on the other; he had
+invented the plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domestic
+animals; he was beginning to think of the origin of the world and the
+mysteries of being. Writing had added its enduring records to oral
+tradition, and he was already making roads. Another five or six hundred
+generations at most bring him to ourselves. We sweep into the field of
+that looker-on, the momentary incarnations of this sempiternal being,
+Man. And after us there comes--
+
+A curtain falls.
+
+The time in which we, whose minds meet here in this writing, were born
+and live and die, would be to that imagined observer a mere instant's
+phase in the swarming liberation of our kind from ancient imperatives.
+It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion
+and achievement. In this last handful of years, electricity has ceased
+to be a curious toy, and now carries half mankind upon their daily
+journeys, it lights our cities till they outshine the moon and stars,
+and reduces to our service a score of hitherto unsuspected metals; we
+clamber to the pole of our globe, scale every mountain, soar into the
+air, learn how to overcome the malaria that barred our white races from
+the tropics, and how to draw the sting from a hundred such agents of
+death. Our old cities are being rebuilt in towering marble; great new
+cities rise to vie with them. Never, it would seem, has man been so
+various and busy and persistent, and there is no intimation of any check
+to the expansion of his energies.
+
+And all this continually accelerated advance has come through the
+quickening and increase of man's intelligence and its reinforcement
+through speech and writing. All this has come in spite of fierce
+instincts that make him the most combatant and destructive of animals,
+and in spite of the revenge Nature has attempted time after time for his
+rebellion against her routines, in the form of strange diseases and
+nearly universal pestilences. All this has come as a necessary
+consequence of the first obscure gleaming of deliberate thought and
+reason through the veil of his animal being. To begin with, he did not
+know what he was doing. He sought his more immediate satisfaction and
+safety and security. He still apprehends imperfectly the change that
+comes upon him. The illusion of separation that makes animal life, that
+is to say, passionate competing and breeding and dying, possible, the
+blinkers Nature has put upon us that we may clash against and sharpen
+one another, still darken our eyes. We live not life as yet, but in
+millions of separated lives, still unaware except in rare moods of
+illumination that we are more than those fellow beasts of ours who drop
+off from the tree of life and perish alone. It is only in the last three
+or four thousand years, and through weak and tentative methods of
+expression, through clumsy cosmogonies and theologies, and with
+incalculable confusion and discoloration, that the human mind has felt
+its way towards its undying being in the race. Man still goes to war
+against himself, prepares fleets and armies and fortresses, like a
+sleep-walker who wounds himself, like some infatuated barbarian who
+hacks his own limbs with a knife.
+
+But he awakens. The nightmares of empire and racial conflict and war,
+the grotesques of trade jealousy and tariffs, the primordial dream-stuff
+of lewdness and jealousy and cruelty, pale before the daylight which
+filters between his eyelids. In a little while we individuals will know
+ourselves surely for corpuscles in his being, for thoughts that come
+together out of strange wanderings into the coherence of a waking mind.
+A few score generations ago all living things were in our ancestry. A
+few score generations ahead, and all mankind will be in sober fact
+descendants from our blood. In physical as in mental fact we separate
+persons, with all our difference and individuality, are but fragments,
+set apart for a little while in order that we may return to the general
+life again with fresh experiences and fresh acquirements, as bees
+return with pollen and nourishment to the fellowship of the hive.
+
+And this Man, this wonderful child of old earth, who is ourselves in the
+measure of our hearts and minds, does but begin his adventure now.
+Through all time henceforth he does but begin his adventure. This planet
+and its subjugation is but the dawn of his existence. In a little while
+he will reach out to the other planets, and take that greater fire, the
+sun, into his service. He will bring his solvent intelligence to bear
+upon the riddles of his individual interaction, transmute jealousy and
+every passion, control his own increase, select and breed for his
+embodiment a continually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none of
+us can think or will, save in a disconnected partiality, he will think
+and will collectively. Already some of us feel our merger with that
+greater life. There come moments when the thing shines out upon our
+thoughts. Sometimes in the dark sleepless solitudes of night, one ceases
+to be so-and-so, one ceases to bear a proper name, forgets one's
+quarrels and vanities, forgives and understands one's enemies and
+oneself, as one forgives and understands the quarrels of little
+children, knowing oneself indeed to be a being greater than one's
+personal accidents, knowing oneself for Man on his planet, flying
+swiftly to unmeasured destinies through the starry stillnesses of space.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, An Englishman Looks at the World, by H. G.
+Wells
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: An Englishman Looks at the World
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: March 16, 2004  [eBook #11502]
+Last Updated: October 30, 2018
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Gene Smethers, and Project Gutenberg
+Distributed Proofreaders
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
+    </h3>
+    <h2>
+      By H.G. Wells
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      1914
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> THE COMING OF BLIRIOT </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> MY FIRST FLIGHT </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> OFF THE CHAIN </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> OF THE NEW REIGN </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE? </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> THE LABOUR UNREST </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> SOCIAL PANACEAS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> THE GREAT STATE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> THE NORMAL SOCIAL LIFE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> THE COMMON SENSE OF WARFARE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> THE PHILOSOPHER'S PUBLIC LIBRARY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOC </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> ABOUT SIR THOMAS MORE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> TRAFFIC AND REBUILDING </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> DIVORCE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE EMPIRE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> DOCTORS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> IS THERE A PEOPLE? </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> THE AMERICAN POPULATION </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> THE IDEAL CITIZEN </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> THE HUMAN ADVENTURE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE COMING OF BLIRIOT
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (<i>July, 1909</i>.)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The telephone bell rings with the petulant persistence that marks a trunk
+      call, and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn to deal
+      with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up, minute
+      voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another and are
+      submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the real message
+      comes through: "Bliriot has crossed the Channel.... An article ... about
+      what it means."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I make a hasty promise and go out and tell my friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From my garden I look straight upon the Channel, and there are white caps
+      upon the water, and the iris and tamarisk are all asway with the
+      south-west wind that was also blowing yesterday. M. Bliriot has done very
+      well, and Mr. Latham, his rival, had jolly bad luck. That is what it means
+      to us first of all. It also, I reflect privately, means that I have
+      under-estimated the possible stability of aeroplanes. I did not expect
+      anything of the sort so soon. This is a good five years before my
+      reckoning of the year before last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all, I think, regret that being so near we were not among the fortunate
+      ones who saw that little flat shape skim landward out of the blue; surely
+      they have an enviable memory; and then we fell talking and disputing about
+      what that swift arrival may signify. It starts a swarm of questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      First one remarks that here is a thing done, and done with an astonishing
+      effect of ease, that was incredible not simply to ignorant people but to
+      men well informed in these matters. It cannot be fifteen years ago since
+      Sir Hiram Maxim made the first machine that could lift its weight from the
+      ground, and I well remember how the clumsy quality of that success
+      confirmed the universal doubt that men could ever in any effectual manner
+      fly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since then a conspiracy of accidents has changed the whole problem; the
+      bicycle and its vibrations developed the pneumatic tyre, the pneumatic
+      tyre rendered a comfortable mechanically driven road vehicle possible, the
+      motor-car set an enormous premium on the development of very light, very
+      efficient engines, and at last the engineer was able to offer the
+      experimentalists in gliding one strong enough and light enough for the new
+      purpose. And here we are! Or, rather, M. Bliriot is!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What does it mean for us?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One meaning, I think, stands out plainly enough, unpalatable enough to our
+      national pride. This thing from first to last was made abroad. Of all that
+      made it possible we can only claim so much as is due to the improvement of
+      the bicycle. Gliding began abroad while our young men of muscle and
+      courage were braving the dangers of the cricket field. The motor-car and
+      its engine was being worked out "over there," while in this country the
+      mechanically propelled road vehicle, lest it should frighten the carriage
+      horses of the gentry, was going meticulously at four miles an hour behind
+      a man with a red flag. Over there, where the prosperous classes have some
+      regard for education and some freedom of imaginative play, where people
+      discuss all sorts of things fearlessly, and have a respect for science,
+      this has been achieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now our insularity is breached by the foreigner who has got ahead with
+      flying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It means, I take it, first and foremost for us, that the world cannot wait
+      for the English.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not the first warning we have had. It has been raining warnings upon
+      us; never was a slacking, dull people so liberally served with warnings of
+      what was in store for them. But this event&mdash;this foreigner-invented,
+      foreigner-built, foreigner-steered thing, taking our silver streak as a
+      bird soars across a rivulet&mdash;puts the case dramatically. We have
+      fallen behind in the quality of our manhood. In the men of means and
+      leisure in this island there was neither enterprise enough, imagination
+      enough, knowledge nor skill enough to lead in this matter. I do not see
+      how one can go into the history of this development and arrive at any
+      other conclusion. The French and Americans can laugh at our aeroplanes,
+      the Germans are ten years ahead of our poor navigables. We are displayed a
+      soft, rather backward people. Either we are a people essentially and
+      incurably inferior, or there is something wrong in our training, something
+      benumbing in our atmosphere and circumstances. That is the first and
+      gravest intimation in M. Bliriot's feat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second is that, in spite of our fleet, this is no longer, from the
+      military point of view, an inaccessible island.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So long as one had to consider the navigable balloon the aerial side of
+      warfare remained unimportant. A Zeppelin is little good for any purpose
+      but scouting and espionage. It can carry very little weight in proportion
+      to its vast size, and, what is more important, it cannot drop things
+      without sending itself up like a bubble in soda water. An armada of
+      navigables sent against this island would end in a dispersed, deflated
+      state, chiefly in the seas between Orkney and Norway&mdash;though I say it
+      who should not. But these aeroplanes can fly all round the fastest
+      navigable that ever drove before the wind; they can drop weights, take up
+      weights, and do all sorts of able, inconvenient things. They are birds. As
+      for the birds, so for aeroplanes; there is an upward limit of size. They
+      are not going to be very big, but they are going to be very able and
+      active. Within a year we shall have&mdash;or rather <i>they</i> will have&mdash;aeroplanes
+      capable of starting from Calais, let us say, circling over London,
+      dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive upon the printing machines of
+      <i>The Times</i>, and returning securely to Calais for another similar
+      parcel. They are things neither difficult nor costly to make. For the
+      price of a Dreadnought one might have hundreds. They will be extremely
+      hard to hit with any sort of missile. I do not think a large army of
+      under-educated, under-trained, extremely unwilling conscripts is going to
+      be any good against this sort of thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think that the arrival of M. Bliriot means a panic resort to
+      conscription. It is extremely desirable that people should realise that
+      these foreign machines are not a temporary and incidental advantage that
+      we can make good by fussing and demanding eight, and saying we won't wait,
+      and so on, and then subsiding into indolence again. They are just the
+      first-fruits of a steady, enduring lead that the foreigner has won. The
+      foreigner is ahead of us in education, and this is especially true of the
+      middle and upper classes, from which invention and enterprise come&mdash;or,
+      in our own case, do not come. He makes a better class of man than we do.
+      His science is better than ours. His training is better than ours. His
+      imagination is livelier. His mind is more active. His requirements in a
+      novel, for example, are not kindly, sedative pap; his uncensored plays
+      deal with reality. His schools are places for vigorous education instead
+      of genteel athleticism, and his home has books in it, and thought and
+      conversation. Our homes and schools are relatively dull and uninspiring;
+      there is no intellectual guide or stir in them; and to that we owe this
+      new generation of nicely behaved, unenterprising sons, who play golf and
+      dominate the tailoring of the world, while Brazilians, Frenchmen,
+      Americans and Germans fly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That we are hopelessly behindhand in aeronautics is not a fact by itself.
+      It is merely an indication that we are behindhand in our mechanical
+      knowledge and invention M. Bliriot's aeroplane points also to the fleet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The struggle for naval supremacy is not merely a struggle in shipbuilding
+      and expenditure. Much more is it a struggle in knowledge and invention. It
+      is not the Power that has the most ships or the biggest ships that is
+      going to win in a naval conflict. It is the Power that thinks quickest of
+      what to do, is most resourceful and inventive. Eighty Dreadnoughts manned
+      by dull men are only eighty targets for a quicker adversary. Well, is
+      there any reason to suppose that our Navy is going to keep above the
+      general national level in these things? Is the Navy <i>bright</i>?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The arrival of M. Bliriot suggests most horribly to me how far behind we
+      must be in all matters of ingenuity, device, and mechanical contrivance. I
+      am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised that
+      it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it was possible to
+      make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench to defy shrapnel.
+      Suppose in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, and fished out a
+      parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what a confoundedly slim,
+      unexpected, almost ungentlemanly thing the enemy had done to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very probably the Navy is the exception to the British system; its
+      officers are rescued from the dull homes and dull schools of their class
+      while still of tender years, and shaped after a fashion of their own. But
+      M. Bliriot reminds us that we may no longer shelter and degenerate behind
+      these blue backs. And the keenest men at sea are none the worse for having
+      keen men on land behind them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Are we an awakening people?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the vital riddle of our time. I look out upon the windy Channel and
+      think of all those millions just over there, who seem to get busier and
+      keener every hour. I could imagine the day of reckoning coming like a
+      swarm of birds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here the air is full of the clamour of rich and prosperous people invited
+      to pay taxes, and beyond measure bitter. They are going to live abroad,
+      cut their charities, dismiss old servants, and do all sorts of silly,
+      vindictive things. We seem to be doing feeble next-to-nothings in the
+      endowment of research. Not one in twenty of the boys of the middle and
+      upper classes learns German or gets more than a misleading smattering of
+      physical science. Most of them never learn to speak French. Heaven alone
+      knows what they do with their brains! The British reading and thinking
+      public probably does not number fifty thousand people all told. It is
+      difficult to see whence the necessary impetus for a national renascence is
+      to come.... The universities are poor and spiritless, with no ambition to
+      lead the country. I met a Boy Scout recently. He was hopeful in his way,
+      but a little inadequate, I thought, as a basis for confidence in the
+      future of the Empire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have still our Derby Day, of course....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apart from these patriotic solicitudes, M. Bliriot has set quite another
+      train of thought going in my mind. The age of natural democracy is surely
+      at an end through these machines. There comes a time when men will be
+      sorted out into those who will have the knowledge, nerve, and courage to
+      do these splendid, dangerous things, and those who will prefer the humbler
+      level. I do not think numbers are going to matter so much in the warfare
+      of the future, and that when organised intelligence differs from the
+      majority, the majority will have no adequate power of retort. The common
+      man with a pike, being only sufficiently indignant and abundant, could
+      chase the eighteenth century gentleman as he chose, but I fail to see what
+      he can do in the way of mischief to an elusive chevalier with wings. But
+      that opens too wide a discussion for me to enter upon now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      MY FIRST FLIGHT
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (EASTBOURNE, <i>August 5, 1912&mdash;three years later</i>.)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Hitherto my only flights have been flights of imagination but this morning
+      I flew. I spent about ten or fifteen minutes in the air; we went out to
+      sea, soared up, came back over the land, circled higher, planed steeply
+      down to the water, and I landed with the conviction that I had had only
+      the foretaste of a great store of hitherto unsuspected pleasures. At the
+      first chance I will go up again, and I will go higher and further.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This experience has restored all the keenness of my ancient interest in
+      flying, which had become a little fagged and flat by too much hearing and
+      reading about the thing and not enough participation. Sixteen years ago,
+      in the days of Langley and Lilienthal, I was one of the few journalists
+      who believed and wrote that flying was possible; it affected my reputation
+      unfavourably, and produced in the few discouraged pioneers of those days a
+      quite touching gratitude. Over my mantel as I write hangs a very blurred
+      and bad but interesting photograph that Professor Langley sent me sixteen
+      years ago. It shows the flight of the first piece of human machinery
+      heavier than air that ever kept itself up for any length of time. It was a
+      model, a little affair that would not have lifted a cat; it went up in a
+      spiral and came down unsmashed, bringing back, like Noah's dove, the
+      promise of tremendous things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was only sixteen years ago, and it is amusing to recall how
+      cautiously even we out-and-out believers did our prophesying. I was quite
+      a desperate fellow; I said outright that in my lifetime we should see men
+      flying. But I qualified that by repeating that for many years to come it
+      would be an enterprise only for quite fantastic daring and skill. We
+      conjured up stupendous difficulties and risks. I was deeply impressed and
+      greatly discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridge mathematician
+      produced to show that a flying machine was bound to pitch fearfully, that
+      as it flew on its pitching <i>must</i> increase until up went its nose,
+      down went its tail, and it fell like a knife. We exaggerated every
+      possibility of instability. We imagined that when the aeroplane wasn't
+      "kicking up ahind and afore" it would be heeling over to the lightest side
+      wind. A sneeze might upset it. We contrasted our poor human equipment with
+      the instinctive balance of a bird, which has had ten million years of
+      evolution by way of a start....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The waterplane in which I soared over Eastbourne this morning with Mr.
+      Grahame-White was as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then we went on from those anticipations of swaying insecurity to
+      speculations about the psychological and physiological effects of flying.
+      Most people who look down from the top of a cliff or high tower feel some
+      slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening dread. Even if men
+      struggled high into the air, we asked, wouldn't they be smitten up there
+      by such a lonely and reeling dismay as to lose all self-control? And,
+      above all, wouldn't the pitching and tossing make them quite horribly
+      sea-sick?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have always been a little haunted by that last dread. It gave a little
+      undertow of funk to the mood of lively curiosity with which I got aboard
+      the waterplane this morning&mdash;that sort of faint, thin funk that so
+      readily invades one on the verge of any new experience; when one tries
+      one's first dive, for example, or pushes off for the first time down an
+      ice run. I thought I should very probably be sea-sick&mdash;or, to be more
+      precise, air-sick; I thought also that I might be very giddy, and that I
+      might get thoroughly cold and uncomfortable None of those things happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am still in a state of amazement at the smooth steadfastness of the
+      motion. There is nothing on earth to compare with that, unless&mdash;and
+      that I can't judge&mdash;it is an ice yacht travelling on perfect ice. The
+      finest motor-car in the world on the best road would be a joggling,
+      quivering thing beside it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin with, we went out to sea before the wind, and the plane would not
+      readily rise. We went with an undulating movement, leaping with a light
+      splashing pat upon the water, from wave to wave. Then we came about into
+      the wind and rose, and looking over I saw that there were no longer those
+      periodic flashes of white foam. I was flying. And it was as still and
+      steady as dreaming. I watched the widening distance between our floats and
+      the waves. It wasn't by any means a windless day; there was a brisk,
+      fluctuating breeze blowing out of the north over the downs. It seemed
+      hardly to affect our flight at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as for the giddiness of looking down, one does not feel it at all. It
+      is difficult to explain why this should be so, but it is so. I suppose in
+      such matters I am neither exceptionally steady-headed nor is my head
+      exceptionally given to swimming. I can stand on the edge of cliffs of a
+      thousand feet or so and look down, but I can never bring myself right up
+      to the edge nor crane over to look to the very bottom. I should want to
+      lie down to do that. And the other day I was on that Belvedere place at
+      the top of the Rotterdam sky-scraper, a rather high wind was blowing, and
+      one looks down through the chinks between the boards one stands on upon
+      the heads of the people in the streets below; I didn't like it. But this
+      morning I looked directly down on a little fleet of fishing boats over
+      which we passed, and on the crowds assembling on the beach, and on the
+      bathers who stared up at us from the breaking surf, with an entirely
+      agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, in the early morning sunshine, had
+      all the brightly detailed littleness of a town viewed from high up on the
+      side of a great mountain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Mr. Grahame-White told me we were going to plane down I will confess
+      I tightened my hold on the sides of the car and prepared for something
+      like the down-going sensation of a switchback railway on a larger scale.
+      Just for a moment there was that familiar feeling of something pressing
+      one's heart up towards one's shoulders, and one's lower jaw up into its
+      socket and of grinding one's lower teeth against the upper, and then it
+      passed. The nose of the car and all the machine was slanting downwards, we
+      were gliding quickly down, and yet there was no feeling that one rushed,
+      not even as one rushes in coasting a hill on a bicycle. It wasn't a tithe
+      of the thrill of those three descents one gets on the great mountain
+      railway in the White City. There one gets a disagreeable quiver up one's
+      backbone from the wheels, and a real sense of falling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is quite peculiar to flying that one is incredulous of any collision.
+      Some time ago I was in a motor-car that ran over and killed a small dog,
+      and this wretched little incident has left an open wound upon my nerves. I
+      am never quite happy in a car now; I can't help keeping an apprehensive
+      eye ahead. But you fly with an exhilarating assurance that you cannot
+      possibly run over anything or run into anything&mdash;except the land or
+      the sea, and even those large essentials seem a beautifully safe distance
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had heard a great deal of talk about the deafening uproar of the engine.
+      I counted a headache among my chances. There again reason reinforced
+      conjecture. When in the early morning Mr. Travers came from Brighton in
+      this Farman in which I flew I could hear the hum of the great insect when
+      it still seemed abreast of Beachy Head, and a good two miles away. If one
+      can hear a thing at two miles, how much the more will one not hear it at a
+      distance of two yards? But at the risk of seeming too contented for
+      anything I will assert I heard that noise no more than one hears the drone
+      of an electric ventilator upon one's table. It was only when I came to
+      speak to Mr. Grahame-White, or he to me, that I discovered that our voices
+      had become almost infinitesimally small.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it was I went up into the air at Eastbourne with the impression
+      that flying was still an uncomfortable experimental, and slightly heroic
+      thing to do, and came down to the cheerful gathering crowd upon the sands
+      again with the knowledge that it is a thing achieved for everyone. It will
+      get much cheaper, no doubt, and much swifter, and be improved in a dozen
+      ways&mdash;we <i>must</i> get self-starting engines, for example, for both
+      our aeroplanes and motor-cars&mdash;but it is available to-day for anyone
+      who can reach it. An invalid lady of seventy could have enjoyed all that I
+      did if only one could have got her into the passenger's seat. Getting
+      there was a little difficult, it is true; the waterplane was out in the
+      surf, and I was carried to it on a boatman's back, and then had to clamber
+      carefully through the wires, but that is a matter of detail. This flying
+      is indeed so certain to become a general experience that I am sure that
+      this description will in a few years seem almost as quaint as if I had set
+      myself to record the fears and sensations of my First Ride in a Wheeled
+      Vehicle. And I suspect that learning to control a Farman waterplane now is
+      probably not much more difficult than, let us say, twice the difficulty in
+      learning the control and management of a motor-bicycle. I cannot
+      understand the sort of young man who won't learn how to do it if he gets
+      half a chance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The development of these waterplanes is an important step towards the huge
+      and swarming popularisation of flying which is now certainly imminent. We
+      ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote about flying before
+      there was any flying used to make a great fuss about the dangers and
+      difficulties of landing and getting up. We wrote with vast gravity about
+      "starting rails" and "landing stages," and it is still true that landing
+      an aeroplane, except upon a well-known and quite level expanse, is a risky
+      and uncomfortable business. But getting up and landing upon fairly smooth
+      water is easier than getting into bed. This alone is likely to determine
+      the aeroplane routes along the line of the world's coastlines and lake
+      groups and waterways. The airmen will go to and fro over water as the
+      midges do. Wherever there is a square mile of water the waterplanes will
+      come and go like hornets at the mouth of their nest. But there are much
+      stronger reasons than this convenience for keeping over water. Over water
+      the air, it seems, lies in great level expanses; even when there are gales
+      it moves in uniform masses like the swift, still rush of a deep river. The
+      airman, in Mr. Grahame-White's phrase, can go to sleep on it. But over the
+      land, and for thousands of feet up into the sky, the air is more irregular
+      than a torrent among rocks; it is&mdash;if only we could see it&mdash;a
+      waving, whirling, eddying, flamboyant confusion. A slight hill, a ploughed
+      field, the streets of a town, create riotous, rolling, invisible streams
+      and cataracts of air that catch the airman unawares, make him drop
+      disconcertingly, try his nerves. With a powerful enough engine he climbs
+      at once again, but these sudden downfalls are the least pleasant and most
+      dangerous experience in aviation. They exact a tiring vigilance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over lake or sea, in sunshine, within sight of land, this is the perfect
+      way of the flying tourist. Gladly would I have set out for France this
+      morning instead of returning to Eastbourne. And then coasted round to
+      Spain and into the Mediterranean. And so by leisurely stages to India. And
+      the East Indies....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find my study unattractive to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      OFF THE CHAIN
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (<i>December, 1910</i>)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year," and
+      noting how much the world can change in seventy years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London to Yorkshire in that
+      ex-sheriff's coach he bought in Long Acre&mdash;where now the motor-cars
+      are sold&mdash;when there came a telegram to bid me note how a certain Mr.
+      Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England from a little excursion.
+      He had left London last Saturday week at midday; he hoped to be back by
+      Thursday; and he had talked to the President in Washington, visited
+      Philadelphia, and had a comparatively loitering afternoon in New York.
+      What had I to say about it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Firstly, that I wish this article could be written by Samuel Warren. And
+      failing that, I wish that Charles Dickens, who wrote in his "American
+      Notes" with such passionate disgust and hostility about the first
+      Cunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of crossing the Atlantic
+      by steamship, could have shared Mr. Holt's experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because I am chiefly impressed by the fact not that Mr. Holt has taken
+      days where weeks were needed fifty years ago, but that he has done it very
+      comfortably, without undue physical exertion, and at no greater expense, I
+      suppose, than it cost Dickens, whom the journey nearly killed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Mr. Holt's expenses were higher, it was for the special trains and the
+      sake of the record. Anyone taking ordinary trains and ordinary passages
+      may do what he has done in eighteen or twenty days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I was a boy, "Around the World in Eighty Days" was still a brilliant
+      piece of imaginative fiction. Now that is almost an invalid's pace. It
+      will not be very long before a man will be able to go round the world if
+      he wishes to do so ten times in a year. And it is perhaps forgivable if
+      those who, like Jules Verne, saw all these increments in speed,
+      motor-cars, and airships aeroplanes, and submarines, wireless telegraphy
+      and what not, as plain and necessary deductions from the promises of
+      physical science, should turn upon a world that read and doubted and
+      jeered with "I told you so. <i>Now</i> will you respect a prophet?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not that the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicable
+      illumination at which a sceptic might reasonably mock; they were prepared
+      with ample reasons for the things they foretold. Now, quite as
+      confidently, they point on to a new series of consequences, high
+      probabilities that follow on all this tremendous development of swift,
+      secure, and cheapened locomotion, just as they followed almost necessarily
+      upon the mechanical developments of the last century.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Briefly, the ties that bind men to place are being severed; we are in the
+      beginning of a new phase in human experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For endless ages man led the hunting life, migrating after his food,
+      camping, homeless, as to this day are many of the Indians and Esquimaux in
+      the Hudson Bay Territory. Then began agriculture, and for the sake of
+      securer food man tethered himself to a place. The history of man's
+      progress from savagery to civilisation is essentially a story of settling
+      down. It begins in caves and shelters; it culminates in a wide spectacle
+      of farms and peasant villages, and little towns among the farms. There
+      were wars, crusades, barbarous invasions, set-backs, but to that state all
+      Asia, Europe, North Africa worked its way with an indomitable pertinacity.
+      The enormous majority of human beings stayed at home at last; from the
+      cradle to the grave they lived, married, died in the same district,
+      usually in the same village; and to that condition, law, custom, habits,
+      morals, have adapted themselves. The whole plan and conception of human
+      society is based on the rustic home and the needs and characteristics of
+      the agricultural family. There have been gipsies, wanderers, knaves,
+      knights-errant and adventurers, no doubt, but the settled permanent rustic
+      home and the tenure of land about it, and the hens and the cow, have
+      constituted the fundamental reality of the whole scene. Now, the really
+      wonderful thing in this astonishing development of cheap, abundant, swift
+      locomotion we have seen in the last seventy years&mdash;in the development
+      of which Mauretanias, aeroplanes, mile-a-minute expresses, tubes,
+      motor-buses and motor cars are just the bright, remarkable points&mdash;is
+      this: that it dissolves almost all the reason and necessity why men should
+      go on living permanently in any one place or rigidly disciplined to one
+      set of conditions. The former attachment to the soil ceases to be an
+      advantage. The human spirit has never quite subdued itself to the
+      laborious and established life; it achieves its best with variety and
+      occasional vigorous exertion under the stimulus of novelty rather than by
+      constant toil, and this revolution in human locomotion that brings nearly
+      all the globe within a few days of any man is the most striking aspect of
+      the unfettering again of the old restless, wandering, adventurous
+      tendencies in man's composition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Already one can note remarkable developments of migration. There is, for
+      example, that flow to and fro across the Atlantic of labourers from the
+      Mediterranean. Italian workmen by the hundred thousand go to the United
+      States in the spring and return in the autumn. Again, there is a stream of
+      thousands of prosperous Americans to summer in Europe. Compared with any
+      European country, the whole population of the United States is fluid.
+      Equally notable is the enormous proportion of the British prosperous which
+      winters either in the high Alps or along the Riviera. England is rapidly
+      developing the former Irish grievance of an absentee propertied class. It
+      is only now by the most strenuous artificial banking back that migrations
+      on a far huger scale from India into Africa, and from China and Japan into
+      Australia and America are prevented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the indications point to a time when it will be an altogether
+      exceptional thing for a man to follow one occupation in one place all his
+      life, and still rarer for a son to follow in his father's footsteps or die
+      in his father's house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing is as simple as the rule of three. We are off the chain of
+      locality for good and all. It was necessary heretofore for a man to live
+      in immediate contact with his occupation, because the only way for him to
+      reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and delay of transport
+      were relatively too enormous for him to shift once he was settled. <i>Now</i>
+      he may live twenty or thirty miles away from his occupation; and it often
+      pays him to spend the small amount of time and money needed to move&mdash;it
+      may be half-way round the world&mdash;to healthier conditions or more
+      profitable employment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with every diminution in the cost and duration of transport it becomes
+      more and more possible, and more and more likely, to be profitable to move
+      great multitudes of workers seasonally between regions where work is
+      needed in this season and regions where work is needed in that. They can
+      go out to the agricultural lands at one time and come back into towns for
+      artistic work and organised work in factories at another. They can move
+      from rain and darkness into sunshine, and from heat into the coolness of
+      mountain forests. Children can be sent for education to sea beaches and
+      healthy mountains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men will harvest in Saskatchewan and come down in great liners to spend
+      the winter working in the forests of Yucatan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People have hardly begun to speculate about the consequences of the return
+      of humanity from a closely tethered to a migratory existence. It is here
+      that the prophet finds his chief opportunity. Obviously, these great
+      forces of transport are already straining against the limits of existing
+      political areas. Every country contains now an increasing ingredient of
+      unenfranchised Uitlanders. Every country finds a growing section of its
+      home-born people either living largely abroad, drawing the bulk of their
+      income from the exterior, and having their essential interests wholly or
+      partially across the frontier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In every locality of a Western European country countless people are found
+      delocalised, uninterested in the affairs of that particular locality, and
+      capable of moving themselves with a minimum of loss and a maximum of
+      facility into any other region that proves more attractive. In America
+      political life, especially State life as distinguished from national
+      political life, is degraded because of the natural and inevitable apathy
+      of a large portion of the population whose interests go beyond the State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Politicians and statesmen, being the last people in the world to notice
+      what is going on in it, are making no attempt whatever to re-adapt this
+      hugely growing floating population of delocalised people to the public
+      service. As Mr. Marriott puts it in his novel, "<i>Now,"</i> they "drop
+      out" from politics as we understand politics at present. Local
+      administration falls almost entirely&mdash;and the decision of Imperial
+      affairs tends more and more to fall&mdash;into the hands of that dwindling
+      and adventurous moiety which sits tight in one place from the cradle to
+      the grave. No one has yet invented any method for the political expression
+      and collective direction of a migratory population, and nobody is
+      attempting to do so. It is a new problem....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, then, is a curious prospect, the prospect of a new kind of people, a
+      floating population going about the world, uprooted, delocalised, and
+      even, it may be, denationalised, with wide interests and wide views,
+      developing no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a morality of its own,
+      a philosophy of its own, and yet from the point of view of current
+      politics and legislation unorganised and ineffective.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most of the forces of international finance and international business
+      enterprise will be with it. It will develop its own characteristic
+      standards of art and literature and conduct in accordance with its new
+      necessities. It is, I believe, the mankind of the future. And the last
+      thing it will be able to do will be to legislate. The history of the
+      immediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of the
+      conflict of the needs of this new population with the institutions, the
+      boundaries the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditions established
+      during the home-keeping, localised era of mankind's career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This conflict follows as inevitably upon these new gigantic facilities of
+      locomotion as the <i>Mauretania</i> followed from the discoveries of steam
+      and steel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      OF THE NEW REIGN
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (<i>June, 1911</i>.)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The bunting and the crimson vanish from the streets. Already the vast army
+      of improvised carpenters that the Coronation has created set themselves to
+      the work of demolition, and soon every road that converges upon Central
+      London will be choked again with great loads of timber&mdash;but this time
+      going outward&mdash;as our capital emerges from this unprecedented
+      inundation of loyalty. The most elaborately conceived, the most stately of
+      all recorded British Coronations is past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What new phase in the life of our nation and our Empire does this
+      tremendous ceremony inaugurate? The question is inevitable. There is
+      nothing in all the social existence of men so full of challenge as the
+      crowning of a king. It is the end of the overture; the curtain rises. This
+      is a new beginning-place for histories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To us, the great mass of common Englishmen, who have no place in the
+      hierarchy of our land, who do not attend Courts nor encounter uniforms,
+      whose function is at most spectacular, who stand in the street and watch
+      the dignitaries and the liveries pass by, this sense of critical
+      expectation is perhaps greater than it is for those more immediately
+      concerned in the spectacle. They have had their parts to play, their
+      symbolic acts to perform, they have sat in their privileged places, and we
+      have waited at the barriers until their comfort and dignity was assured. I
+      can conceive many of them, a little fatigued, preparing now for social
+      dispersal, relaxing comfortably into gossip, discussing the detail of
+      these events with an air of things accomplished. They will decide whether
+      the Coronation has been a success and whether everything has or has not
+      passed off very well. For us in the great crowd nothing has as yet
+      succeeded or passed off well or ill. We are intent upon a King newly
+      anointed and crowned, a King of whom we know as yet very little, but who
+      has, nevertheless, roused such expectation as no King before him has done
+      since Tudor times, in the presence of gigantic opportunities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a conviction widespread among us&mdash;his own words, perhaps,
+      have done most to create it&mdash;that King George is inspired, as no
+      recent predecessor has been inspired, by the conception of kingship, that
+      his is to be no rtle of almost indifferent abstinence from the broad
+      processes of our national and imperial development. That greater public
+      life which is above party and above creed and sect has, we are told, taken
+      hold of his imagination; he is to be no crowned image of unity and
+      correlation, a layer of foundation-stones and a signature to documents,
+      but an actor in our drama, a living Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Time will test these hopes, but certainly we, the innumerable democracy of
+      individually unimportant men, have felt the need for such a Prince. Our
+      consciousness of defects, of fields of effort untilled, of vast
+      possibilities neglected and slipping away from us for ever, has never
+      really slumbered again since the chastening experiences of the Boer War.
+      Since then the national spirit, hampered though it is by the traditions of
+      party government and a legacy of intellectual and social heaviness, has
+      been in uneasy and ineffectual revolt against deadness, against stupidity
+      and slackness, against waste and hypocrisy in every department of life. We
+      have come to see more and more clearly how little we can hope for from
+      politicians, societies and organised movements in these essential things.
+      It is this that has invested the energy and manhood, the untried
+      possibilities of the new King with so radiant a light of hope for us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Think what it may mean for us all&mdash;I write as one of that great
+      ill-informed multitude, sincerely and gravely patriotic, outside the
+      echoes of Court gossip and the easy knowledge of exalted society&mdash;if
+      our King does indeed care for these wider and profounder things! Suppose
+      we have a King at last who cares for the advancement of science, who is
+      willing to do the hundred things that are so easy in his position to
+      increase research, to honour and to share in scientific thought. Suppose
+      we have a King whose head rises above the level of the Court artist, and
+      who not only can but will appeal to the latent and discouraged power of
+      artistic creation in our race. Suppose we have a King who understands the
+      need for incessant, acute criticism to keep our collective activities
+      intelligent and efficient, and for a flow of bold, unhampered thought
+      through every department of the national life, a King liberal without
+      laxity and patriotic without pettiness or vulgarity. Such, it seems to us
+      who wait at present almost inexpressively outside the immediate clamours
+      of a mere artificial loyalty, are the splendid possibilities of the time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For England is no exhausted or decaying country. It is rich with an
+      unmeasured capacity for generous responses. It is a country burthened
+      indeed, but not overwhelmed, by the gigantic responsibilities of Empire, a
+      little relaxed by wealth, and hampered rather than enslaved by a certain
+      shyness of temperament, a certain habitual timidity, slovenliness and
+      insincerity of mind. It is a little distrustful of intellectual power and
+      enterprise, a little awkward and ungracious to brave and beautiful things,
+      a little too tolerant of dull, well-meaning and industrious men and
+      arrogant old women. It suffers hypocrites gladly, because its criticism is
+      poor, and it is wastefully harsh to frank unorthodoxy. But its heart is
+      sound if its judgments fall short of acuteness and if its standards of
+      achievement are low. It needs but a quickening spirit upon the throne,
+      always the traditional centre of its respect, to rise from even the
+      appearance of decadence. There is a new quality seeking expression in
+      England like the rising of sap in the spring, a new generation asking only
+      for such leadership and such emancipation from restricted scope and
+      ungenerous hostility as a King alone can give it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When in its turn this latest reign comes at last to its reckoning, what
+      will the sum of its achievement be? What will it leave of things visible?
+      Will it leave a London preserved and beautified, or will it but add
+      abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars and masses of
+      ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to the aesthetic degradation of the
+      Victorian period? Will a great constellation of artists redeem the
+      ambitious sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find their fitting
+      mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our literature escape at last from
+      pretentiousness and timidity, our philosophy from the foolish cerebrations
+      of university "characters" and eminent politicians at leisure, and our
+      starved science find scope and resources adequate to its gigantic needs?
+      Will our universities, our teaching, our national training, our public
+      services, gain a new health from the reviving vigour of the national
+      brain? Or is all this a mere wild hope, and shall we, after perhaps some
+      small flutterings of effort, the foundation of some ridiculous little
+      academy of literary busybodies and hangers-on, the public recognition of
+      this or that sociological pretender or financial "scientist," and a little
+      polite jobbery with picture-buying, relapse into lassitude and a contented
+      acquiescence in the rivalry of Germany and the United States for the
+      moral, intellectual and material leadership of the world?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The deaths and accessions of Kings, the changing of names and coins and
+      symbols and persons, a little force our minds in the marking off of
+      epochs. We are brought to weigh one generation against another, to reckon
+      up our position and note the characteristics of a new phase. What lies
+      before us in the next decades? Is England going on to fresh achievements,
+      to a renewed and increased predominance, or is she falling into a
+      secondary position among the peoples of the world?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer to that depends upon ourselves. Have we pride enough to attempt
+      still to lead mankind, and if we have, have we the wisdom and the quality?
+      Or are we just the children of Good Luck, who are being found out?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some years ago our present King exhorted this island to "wake up" in one
+      of the most remarkable of British royal utterances, and Mr. Owen Seaman
+      assures him in verse of an altogether laureate quality that we are now
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Free of the snare of slumber's silken bands,"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      though I have not myself observed it. It is interesting to ask, Is England
+      really waking up? and if she is, what sort of awakening is she likely to
+      have?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is possible, of course, to wake up in various different ways. There is
+      the clear and beautiful dawn of new and balanced effort, easy, unresting,
+      planned, assured, and there is also the blundering-up of a still
+      half-somnolent man, irascible, clumsy, quarrelsome, who stubs his toe in
+      his first walk across the room, smashes his too persistent alarum clock in
+      a fit of nerves, and cuts his throat while shaving. All patriotic
+      vehemence does not serve one's country. Exertion is a more critical and
+      dangerous thing than inaction, and the essence of success is in the
+      ability to develop those qualities which make action effective, and
+      without which strenuousness is merely a clumsy and noisy protest against
+      inevitable defeat. These necessary qualities, without which no community
+      may hope for pre-eminence to-day, are a passion for fine and brilliant
+      achievement, relentless veracity of thought and method, and richly
+      imaginative fearlessness of enterprise. Have we English those qualities,
+      and are we doing our utmost to select and develop them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I doubt very much if we are. Let me give some of the impressions that
+      qualify my assurance in the future of our race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have watched a great deal of patriotic effort during the last decade, I
+      have seen enormous expenditures of will, emotion and material for the sake
+      of our future, and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effect of
+      lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the shortness and weakness of
+      aim in very much that has been done. I miss continually that sharply
+      critical imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellent work, which
+      shines out supremely in Cromwell's creation of the New Model, or Nelson's
+      plan of action at Trafalgar, as brightly as it does in Newton's
+      investigation of gravitation, Turner's rendering of landscape, or
+      Shakespeare's choice of words, but which cannot be absent altogether if
+      any achievement is to endure. We seem to have busy, energetic people, no
+      doubt, in abundance, patient and industrious administrators and
+      legislators; but have we any adequate supply of really creative ability?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me apply this question to one matter upon which England has certainly
+      been profoundly in earnest during the last decade. We have been almost
+      frantically resolved to keep the empire of the sea. But have we really
+      done all that could have been done? I ask it with all diffidence, but has
+      our naval preparation been free from a sort of noisy violence, a certain
+      massive dullness of conception? Have we really made anything like a sane
+      use of our resources? I do not mean of our resources in money or stuff. It
+      is manifest that the next naval war will be beyond all precedent a war of
+      mechanisms, giving such scope for invention and scientifically equipped
+      wit and courage as the world has never had before. Now, have we really
+      developed any considerable proportion of the potential human quality
+      available to meet the demand for wits? What are we doing to discover,
+      encourage and develop those supreme qualities of personal genius that
+      become more and more decisive with every new weapon and every new
+      complication and unsuspected possibility it introduces? Suppose, for
+      example, there was among us to-day a one-eyed, one-armed adulterer, rather
+      fragile, prone to sea-sickness, and with just that one supreme quality of
+      imaginative courage which made Nelson our starry admiral. Would he be
+      given the ghost of a chance now of putting that gift at his country's
+      disposal? I do not think he would, and I do not think he would because we
+      underrate gifts and exceptional qualities, because there is no quickening
+      appreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and because we overvalue
+      the good behaviour, the sound physique, the commonplace virtues of
+      mediocrity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have but the knowledge of the man in the street in these things, though
+      once or twice I have chanced on prophecy, and I am uneasily apprehensive
+      of the quality of all our naval preparations. We go on launching these
+      lumping great Dreadnoughts, and I cannot bring myself to believe in them.
+      They seem vulnerable from the air above and the deep below, vulnerable in
+      a shallow channel and in a fog (and the North Sea is both foggy and
+      shallow), and immensely costly. If I were Lord High Admiral of England at
+      war I would not fight the things. I would as soon put to sea in St. Paul's
+      Cathedral. If I were fighting Germany, I would stow half of them away in
+      the Clyde and half in the Bristol Channel, and take the good men out of
+      them and fight with mines and torpedoes and destroyers and airships and
+      submarines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when I come to military matters my persuasion that things are not all
+      right, that our current hostility to imaginative activity and our dull
+      acceptance of established methods and traditions is leading us towards
+      grave dangers, intensifies. In South Africa the Boers taught us in blood
+      and bitterness the obvious fact that barbed wire had its military uses,
+      and over the high passes on the way to Lhassa (though, luckily, it led to
+      no disaster) there was not a rifle in condition to use because we had not
+      thought to take glycerine. The perpetual novelty of modern conditions
+      demands an imaginative alertness we eliminate. I do not believe that the
+      Army Council or anyone in authority has worked out a tithe of the
+      essential problems of contemporary war. If they have, then it does not
+      show. Our military imagination is half-way back to bows and arrows. The
+      other day I saw a detachment of the Legion of Frontiersmen disporting
+      itself at Totteridge. I presume these young heroes consider they are
+      preparing for a possible conflict in England or Western Europe, and I
+      presume the authorities are satisfied with them. It is at any rate the
+      only serious war of which there is any manifest probability. Western
+      Europe is now a network of railways, tramways, high roads, wires of all
+      sorts; its chief beasts of burthen are the railway train and the motor car
+      and the bicycle; towns and hypertrophied villages are often practically
+      continuous over large areas; there is abundant water and food, and the
+      commonest form of cover is the house. But the Legion of Frontiersmen is
+      equipped for war, oh!&mdash;in Arizona in 1890, and so far as I am able to
+      judge the most modern sections of the army extant are organised for a
+      colonial war in (say) 1899 or 1900. There is, of course, a considerable
+      amount of vague energy demanding conscription and urging our youth towards
+      a familiarity with arms and the backwoodsman's life, but of any
+      thought-out purpose in our arming widely understood, of any realisation of
+      what would have to be done and where it would have to be done, and of any
+      attempts to create an instrument for that novel unprecedented undertaking,
+      I discover no trace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In my capacity of devil's advocate pleading against national
+      over-confidence, I might go on to the quality of our social and political
+      movements. One hears nowadays a vast amount of chatter about efficiency&mdash;that
+      magic word&mdash;and social organisation, and there is no doubt a huge
+      expenditure of energy upon these things and a widespread desire to rush
+      about and make showy and startling changes. But it does not follow that
+      this involves progress if the enterprise itself is dully conceived and
+      most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived. In the absence of
+      penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may set up as an
+      "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, and
+      muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert" quack and the
+      bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical,
+      strenuous period as disease germs multiply in darkness and heat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find the same doubts of our quality assail me when I turn to the supreme
+      business of education. It is true we all seem alive nowadays to the need
+      of education, are all prepared for more expenditure upon it and more, but
+      it does not follow necessarily in a period of stagnating imagination that
+      we shall get what we pay for. The other day I discovered my little boy
+      doing a subtraction sum, and I found he was doing it in a slower,
+      clumsier, less businesslike way than the one I was taught in an
+      old-fashioned "Commercial Academy" thirty odd years ago. The educational
+      "expert," it seems, has been at work substituting a bad method for a good
+      one in our schools because it is easier of exposition. The educational
+      "expert," in the lack of a lively public intelligence, develops all the
+      vices of the second-rate energetic, and he is, I am only too disposed to
+      believe, making a terrible mess of a great deal of our science teaching
+      and of the teaching of mathematics and English....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have written enough to make clear the quality of my doubts. I think the
+      English mind cuts at life with a dulled edge, and that its energy may be
+      worse than its somnolence. I think it undervalues gifts and fine
+      achievement, and overvalues the commonplace virtues of mediocre men. One
+      of the greatest Liberal statesmen in the time of Queen Victoria never held
+      office because he was associated with a divorce case a quarter of a
+      century ago. For him to have taken office would have been regarded as a
+      scandal. But it is not regarded as a scandal that our Government includes
+      men of no more ability than any average assistant behind a grocer's
+      counter. These are your gods, O England!&mdash;and with every desire to be
+      optimistic I find it hard under the circumstances to anticipate that the
+      New Epoch is likely to be a blindingly brilliant time for our Empire and
+      our race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE?
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      What will hold such an Empire as the British together, this great, laxly
+      scattered, sea-linked association of ancient states and new-formed
+      countries, Oriental nations, and continental colonies? What will enable it
+      to resist the endless internal strains, the inevitable external pressures
+      and attacks to which it must be subjected This is the primary question for
+      British Imperialism; everything else is secondary or subordinated to that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a multitude of answers. But I suppose most of them will prove
+      under examination either to be, or to lead to, or to imply very distinctly
+      this generalisation that if most of the intelligent and active people in
+      the Empire want it to continue it will, and that if a large proportion of
+      such active and intelligent people are discontented and estranged, nothing
+      can save it from disintegration. I do not suppose that a navy ten times
+      larger than ours, or conscription of the most irksome thoroughness, could
+      oblige Canada to remain in the Empire if the general will and feeling of
+      Canada were against it, or coerce India into a sustained submission if
+      India presented a united and resistant front. Our Empire, for all its roll
+      of battles, was not created by force; colonisation and diplomacy have
+      played a far larger share in its growth than conquest; and there is no
+      such strength in its sovereignty as the rule of pride and pressure demand.
+      It is to the free consent and participation of its constituent peoples
+      that we must look for its continuance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A large and influential body of politicians considers that in preferential
+      trading between the parts of the Empire, and in the erection of a tariff
+      wall against exterior peoples, lies the secret of that deepened emotional
+      understanding we all desire. I have never belonged to that school. I am no
+      impassioned Free Trader&mdash;the sacred principle of Free Trade has
+      always impressed me as a piece of party claptrap; but I have never been
+      able to understand how an attempt to draw together dominions so scattered
+      and various as ours by a network of fiscal manipulation could end in
+      anything but mutual inconvenience mutual irritation, and disruption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an open drawer in my bureau there lies before me now a crumpled card on
+      which are the notes I made of a former discussion of this very issue, a
+      discussion between a number of prominent politicians in the days before
+      Mr. Chamberlain's return from South Africa and the adoption of Tariff
+      Reform by the Unionist Party; and I decipher again the same
+      considerations, unanswered and unanswerable, that leave me sceptical
+      to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take a map of the world and consider the extreme differences in position
+      and condition between our scattered states. Here is Canada, lying along
+      the United States, looking eastward to Japan and China, westward to all
+      Europe. See the great slashes of lake, bay, and mountain chain that cut it
+      meridianally. Obviously its main routes and trades and relations lie
+      naturally north and south; obviously its full development can only be
+      attained with those ways free, open, and active. Conceivably, you may
+      build a fiscal wall across the continent; conceivably, you may shut off
+      the east and half the west by impossible tariffs, and narrow its trade to
+      one artificial duct to England, but only at the price of a hampered
+      development It will be like nourishing the growing body of a man with the
+      heart and arteries of a mouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then here, again, are New Zealand and Australia, facing South America and
+      the teeming countries of Eastern Asia; surely it is in relation to these
+      vast proximities that their economic future lies. Is it possible to
+      believe that shipping mutton to London is anything but the mere beginning
+      of their commercial development Look at India, again, and South Africa. Is
+      it not manifest that from the economic and business points of view each of
+      these is an entirely separate entity, a system apart, under distinct
+      necessities, needing entire freedom to make its own bargains and control
+      its trade in its own way in order to achieve its fullest material
+      possibilities?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor can I believe that financial entanglements greatly strengthen the
+      bonds of an empire in any case. We lost the American colonies because we
+      interfered with their fiscal arrangements, and it was Napoleon's attempt
+      to strangle the Continental trade with Great Britain that began his
+      downfall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not find in the ordinary relations of life that business relations
+      necessarily sustain intercourse. The relations of buyer and seller are
+      ticklish relations, very liable to strains and conflicts. I do not find
+      people grow fond of their butchers and plumbers, and I doubt whether if
+      one were obliged by some special taxation to deal only with one butcher or
+      one plumber, it would greatly endear the relationship. Forced buying is
+      irritated buying, and it is the forbidden shop that contains the coveted
+      goods. Nor do I find, to take another instance, among the hotel staffs of
+      Switzerland and the Riviera&mdash;who live almost entirely upon British
+      gold&mdash;those impassioned British imperialist views the economic link
+      theory would lead me to expect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And another link, too, upon which much stress is laid but about which I
+      have very grave doubts, is the possibility of a unified organisation of
+      the Empire for military defence. We are to have, it is suggested, an
+      imperial Army and an imperial Navy, and so far, no doubt, as the
+      guaranteeing of a general peace goes, we may develop a sense of
+      participation in that way. But it is well in these islands to remember
+      that our extraordinary Empire has no common enemy to weld it together from
+      without.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is too usual to regard Germany as the common enemy. We in Great Britain
+      are now intensely jealous of Germany. We are intensely jealous of Germany
+      not only because the Germans outnumber us, and have a much larger and more
+      diversified country than ours, and lie in the very heart and body of
+      Europe, but because in the last hundred years, while we have fed on
+      platitudes and vanity, they have had the energy and humility to develop a
+      splendid system of national education, to toil at science and art and
+      literature, to develop social organisation, to master and better our
+      methods of business and industry, and to clamber above us in the scale of
+      civilisation. This has humiliated and irritated rather than chastened us,
+      and our irritation has been greatly exacerbated by the swaggering bad
+      manners, the talk of "Blood and Iron" and Mailed Fists, the Welt-Politik
+      rubbish that inaugurated the new German phase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The British middle-class, therefore, is full of an angry, vague
+      disposition to thwart that expansion which Germans regard very reasonably
+      as their natural destiny; there are all the possibilities of a huge
+      conflict in that disposition, and it is perhaps well to remember how
+      insular&mdash;or, at least, how European&mdash;the essentials of this
+      quarrel are. We have lost our tempers, but Canada has not. There is
+      nothing in Germany to make Canada envious and ashamed of wasted years.
+      Canada has no natural quarrel with Germany, nor has India, nor South
+      Africa, nor Australasia. They have no reason to share our insular
+      exasperation. On the other hand, all these states have other special
+      preoccupations. New Zealand, for example, having spent half a century and
+      more in sheep-farming, land legislation, suppressing its drink traffic,
+      lowering its birth-rate, and, in short, the achievement of an ideal
+      preventive materialism, is chiefly consumed by hate and fear of Japan,
+      which in the same interval has made a stride from the thirteenth to the
+      twentieth century, and which teems with art and life and enterprise and
+      offspring. Now Japan in Welt-Politik is our ally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You see, the British Empire has no common economic interests and no
+      natural common enemy. It is not adapted to any form of Zollverein or any
+      form of united aggression. Visibly, on the map of the world it has a
+      likeness to open hands, while the German Empire&mdash;except for a few
+      ill-advised and imitative colonies&mdash;is clenched into a central
+      European unity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Physically, our Empire is incurably scattered, various, and divided, and
+      it is to quite other links and forces, it seems to me, than fiscal or
+      military unification that we who desire its continuance must look to hold
+      it together. There never was anything like it before. Essentially it is an
+      adventure of the British spirit, sanguine, discursive, and beyond
+      comparison insubordinate, adaptable, and originating. It has been made by
+      odd and irregular means by trading companies, pioneers, explorers,
+      unauthorised seamen, adventurers like Clive, eccentrics like Gordon,
+      invalids like Rhodes. It has been made, in spite of authority and
+      officialdom, as no other empire was ever made. The nominal rulers of
+      Britain never planned it. It happened almost in spite of them. Their chief
+      contribution to its history has been the loss of the United States. It is
+      a living thing that has arisen, not a dead thing put together. Beneath the
+      thin legal and administrative ties that hold it together lies the far more
+      vital bond of a traditional free spontaneous activity. It has a common
+      medium of expression in the English tongue, a unity of liberal and
+      tolerant purpose amidst its enormous variety of localised life and colour.
+      And it is in the development and strengthening, the enrichment the
+      rendering more conscious and more purposeful, of that broad creative
+      spirit of the British that the true cement and continuance of our Empire
+      is to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Empire must live by the forces that begot it. It cannot hope to give
+      any such exclusive prosperity as a Zollverein might afford; it can hold
+      out no hopes of collective conquests and triumphs&mdash;its utmost
+      military rtle must be the guaranteeing of a common inaggressive security;
+      but it can, if it is to survive, it must, give all its constituent parts
+      such a civilisation as none of them could achieve alone, a civilisation, a
+      wealth and fullness of life increasing and developing with the years.
+      Through that, and that alone, can it be made worth having and worth
+      serving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the first place the whole Empire must use the English language. I
+      do not mean that any language must be stamped out, that a thousand
+      languages may not flourish by board and cradle and in folk-songs and
+      village gossip&mdash;Erse, the Taal, a hundred Indian and other Eastern
+      tongues, Canadian French&mdash;but I mean that also English must be
+      available, that everywhere there must be English teaching. And everyone
+      who wants to read science or history or philosophy, to come out of the
+      village life into wider thoughts and broader horizons, to gain
+      appreciation in art, must find ready to hand, easily attainable in
+      English, all there is to know and all that has been said thereon. It is
+      worth a hundred Dreadnoughts and a million soldiers to the Empire, that
+      wherever the imperial posts reach, wherever there is a curious or
+      receptive mind, there in English and by the imperial connection the full
+      thought of the race should come. To the lonely youth upon the New Zealand
+      sheep farm, to the young Hindu, to the trapper under a Labrador tilt, to
+      the half-breed assistant at a Burmese oil-well, to the self-educating
+      Scottish miner or the Egyptian clerk, the Empire and the English language
+      should exist, visibly and certainly, as the media by which his spirit
+      escapes from his immediate surroundings and all the urgencies of every
+      day, into a limitless fellowship of thought and beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now I am not writing this in any vague rhetorical way; I mean specifically
+      that our Empire has to become the medium of knowledge and thought to every
+      intelligent person in it, or that it is bound to go to pieces. It has no
+      economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity. Its only conceivable
+      unity is a unity of language and purpose and outlook. If it is not held
+      together by thought and spirit, it cannot be held together. No other
+      cement exists that can hold it together indefinitely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not only English literature, but all other literatures well translated
+      into English, and all science and all philosophy, have to be brought
+      within the reach of everyone capable of availing himself of such reading.
+      And this must be done, not by private enterprise or for gain, but as an
+      Imperial function. Wherever the Empire extends there its presence must
+      signify all that breadth of thought and outlook no localised life can
+      supply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only so is it possible to establish and maintain the wide understandings,
+      the common sympathy necessary to our continued association. The Empire,
+      mediately or immediately, must become the universal educator, news-agent,
+      book-distributor, civiliser-general, and vehicle of imaginative
+      inspiration for its peoples, or else it must submit to the gravitation of
+      its various parts to new and more invigorating associations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No empire, it may be urged, has ever attempted anything of this sort, but
+      no empire like the British has ever yet existed. Its conditions and needs
+      are unprecedented, its consolidation is a new problem, to be solved, if it
+      is solved at all, by untried means. And in the English language as a
+      vehicle of thought and civilisation alone is that means to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now it is idle to pretend that at the present time the British Empire is
+      giving its constituent peoples any such high and rewarding civilisation as
+      I am here suggesting. It gives them a certain immunity from warfare, a
+      penny post, an occasional spectacular coronation, a few knighthoods and
+      peerages, and the services of an honest, unsympathetic, narrow-minded, and
+      unattractive officialism. No adequate effort is being made to render the
+      English language universal throughout its limits, none at all to use it as
+      a medium of thought and enlightenment. Half the good things of the human
+      mind are outside English altogether, and there is not sufficient
+      intelligence among us to desire to bring them in. If one would read honest
+      and able criticism, one must learn French; if one would be abreast of
+      scientific knowledge and philosophical thought, or see many good plays or
+      understand the contemporary European mind, German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet it would cost amazingly little to get every good foreign thing
+      done into English as it appeared. It needs only a little understanding and
+      a little organisation to ensure the immediate translation of every
+      significant article, every scientific paper of the slightest value. The
+      effort and arrangement needed to make books, facilities for research, and
+      all forms of art accessible throughout the Empire, would be altogether
+      trivial in proportion to the consolidation it would effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But English people do not understand these things. Their Empire is an
+      accident. It was made for them by their exceptional and outcast men, and
+      in the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness of their
+      commonplace and dull-minded leaders. Empire has happened to them and
+      civilisation has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tame rabbits.
+      They do not understand how they got, and they will not understand how to
+      keep. Art, thought, literature, all indeed that raises men above locality
+      and habit, all that can justify and consolidate the Empire, is nothing to
+      them. They are provincials mocked by a world-wide opportunity, the stupid
+      legatees of a great generation of exiles. They go out of town for the
+      "shootin'," and come back for the fooleries of Parliament, and to see what
+      the Censor has left of our playwrights and Sir Jesse Boot of our writers,
+      and to dine in restaurants and wear clothes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mostly they call themselves Imperialists, which is just their harmless way
+      of expressing their satisfaction with things as they are. In practice
+      their Imperialism resolves itself into a vigorous resistance to taxation
+      and an ill-concealed hostility to education. It matters nothing to them
+      that the whole next generation of Canadians has drawn its ideas mainly
+      from American publications, that India and Egypt, in despite of sounder
+      mental nourishment, have developed their own vernacular Press, that
+      Australia and New Zealand even now gravitate to America for books and
+      thought. It matters nothing to them that the poverty and insularity of our
+      intellectual life has turned American art to France and Italy, and the
+      American universities towards Germany. The slow starvation and decline of
+      our philosophy and science, the decadence of British invention and
+      enterprise, troubles them not at all, because they fail to connect these
+      things with the tangible facts of empire. "The world cannot wait for the
+      English." ... And the sands of our Imperial opportunity twirl through the
+      neck of the hour-glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE LABOUR UNREST
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (<i>May, 1912</i>.)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our country is, I think, in a dangerous state of social disturbance. The
+      discontent of the labouring mass of the community is deep and increasing.
+      It may be that we are in the opening phase of a real and irreparable class
+      war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the Coronation we have moved very rapidly indeed from an assurance
+      of extreme social stability towards the recognition of a spreading
+      disorganisation. It is idle to pretend any longer that these Labour
+      troubles are the mere give and take of economic adjustment. No adjustment
+      is in progress. New and strange urgencies are at work in our midst, forces
+      for which the word "revolutionary" is only too faithfully appropriate.
+      Nothing is being done to allay these forces; everything conspires to
+      exasperate them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whither are these forces taking us? What can still be done and what has to
+      be done to avoid the phase of social destruction to which we seem to be
+      drifting?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hitherto, in Great Britain at any rate, the working man has shown himself
+      a being of the most limited and practical outlook. His narrowness of
+      imagination, his lack of general ideas, has been the despair of the
+      Socialist and of every sort of revolutionary theorist. He may have struck
+      before, but only for definite increments of wages or definite limitations
+      of toil; his acceptance of the industrial system and its methods has been
+      as complete and unquestioning as his acceptance of earth and sky. Now,
+      with an effect of suddenness, this ceases to be the case. A new generation
+      of workers is seen replacing the old, workers of a quality unfamiliar to
+      the middle-aged and elderly men who still manage our great businesses and
+      political affairs. The worker is beginning now to strike for unprecedented
+      ends&mdash;against the system, against the fundamental conditions of
+      labour, to strike for no defined ends at all, perplexingly and
+      disconcertingly. The old-fashioned strike was a method of bargaining,
+      clumsy and violent perhaps, but bargaining still; the new-fashioned strike
+      is far less of a haggle, far more of a display of temper. The first thing
+      that has to be realised if the Labour question is to be understood at all
+      is this, that the temper of Labour has changed altogether in the last
+      twenty or thirty years. Essentially that is a change due to intelligence
+      not merely increased but greatly stimulated, to the work, that is, of the
+      board schools and of the cheap Press. The outlook of the workman has
+      passed beyond the works and his beer and his dog. He has become&mdash;or,
+      rather, he has been replaced by&mdash;a being of eyes, however imperfect,
+      and of criticism, however hasty and unjust. The working man of to-day
+      reads, talks, has general ideas and a sense of the round world; he is far
+      nearer to the ruler of to-day in knowledge and intellectual range than he
+      is to the working man of fifty years ago. The politician or business
+      magnate of to-day is no better educated and very little better informed
+      than his equals were fifty years ago. The chief difference is golf. The
+      working man questions a thousand things his father accepted as in the very
+      nature of the world, and among others he begins to ask with the utmost
+      alertness and persistence why it is that he in particular is expected to
+      toil. The answer, the only justifiable answer, should be that that is the
+      work for which he is fitted by his inferior capacity and culture, that
+      these others are a special and select sort, very specially trained and
+      prepared for their responsibilities, and that at once brings this new fact
+      of a working-class criticism of social values into play. The old workman
+      might and did quarrel very vigorously with his specific employer, but he
+      never set out to arraign all employers; he took the law and the Church and
+      Statecraft and politics for the higher and noble things they claimed to
+      be. He wanted an extra shilling or he wanted an hour of leisure, and that
+      was as much as he wanted. The young workman, on the other hand, has put
+      the whole social system upon its trial, and seems quite disposed to give
+      an adverse verdict. He looks far beyond the older conflict of interests
+      between employer and employed. He criticises the good intentions of the
+      whole system of governing and influential people, and not only their good
+      intentions, but their ability. These are the new conditions, and the
+      middle-aged and elderly gentlemen who are dealing with the crisis on the
+      supposition that their vast experience of Labour questions in the
+      'seventies and 'eighties furnishes valuable guidance in this present issue
+      are merely bringing the gunpowder of misapprehension to the revolutionary
+      fort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The workman of the new generation is full of distrust the most
+      demoralising of social influences. He is like a sailor who believes no
+      longer either in the good faith or seamanship of his captain, and, between
+      desperation and contempt, contemplates vaguely but persistently the
+      assumption of control by a collective forecastle. He is like a private
+      soldier obsessed with the idea that nothing can save the situation but the
+      death of an incompetent officer. His distrust is so profound that he
+      ceases not only to believe in the employer, but he ceases to believe in
+      the law, ceases to believe in Parliament, as a means to that tolerable
+      life he desires; and he falls back steadily upon his last resource of a
+      strike, and&mdash;if by repressive tactics we make it so&mdash;a criminal
+      strike. The central fact of all this present trouble is that distrust.
+      There is only one way in which our present drift towards revolution or
+      revolutionary disorder can be arrested, and that is by restoring the
+      confidence of these alienated millions, who visibly now are changing from
+      loyalty to the Crown, from a simple patriotism, from habitual industry, to
+      the more and more effective expression of a deepening resentment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a psychological question, a matter of mental states. Feats of
+      legal subtlety are inopportune, arithmetical exploits still more so. To
+      emerge with the sum of 4s. 6-1/2d. as a minimum, by calculating on the
+      basis of the mine's present earnings, from a conference which the miners
+      and everybody else imagined was to give a minimum of 5s., may be clever,
+      but it is certainly not politic in the present stage of Labour feeling. To
+      stamp violently upon obscure newspapers nobody had heard of before and
+      send a printer to prison, and to give thereby a flaming advertisement to
+      the possible use of soldiers in civil conflicts and set every barrack-room
+      talking, may be permissible, but it is certainly very ill-advised. The
+      distrust deepens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The real task before a governing class that means to go on governing is
+      not just at present to get the better of an argument or the best of a
+      bargain, but to lay hold of the imaginations of this drifting, sullen and
+      suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the country. What we
+      prosperous people, who have nearly all the good things of life and most of
+      the opportunity, have to do now is to justify ourselves. We have to show
+      that we are indeed responsible and serviceable, willing to give ourselves,
+      and to give ourselves generously for what we have and what we have had. We
+      have to meet the challenge of this distrust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The slack days for rulers and owners are over. If there are still to be
+      rulers and owners and managing and governing people, then in the face of
+      the new masses, sensitive, intelligent, critical, irritable, as no common
+      people have ever been before, these rulers and owners must be prepared to
+      make themselves and display themselves wise, capable and heroic&mdash;beyond
+      any aristocratic precedent. The alternative, if it is an alternative, is
+      resignation&mdash;to the Social Democracy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is just because we are all beginning to realise the immense need
+      for this heroic quality in those who rule and are rich and powerful, as
+      the response and corrective to these distrusts and jealousies that are
+      threatening to disintegrate our social order, that we have all followed
+      the details of this great catastrophe in the Atlantic with such intense
+      solicitude. It was one of those accidents that happen with a precision of
+      time and circumstance that outdoes art; not an incident in it all that was
+      not supremely typical. It was the penetrating comment of chance upon our
+      entire social situation. Beneath a surface of magnificent efficiency was&mdash;slap-dash.
+      The third-class passengers had placed themselves on board with an infinite
+      confidence in the care that was to be taken of them, and they went down,
+      and most of their women and children went down with the cry of those who
+      find themselves cheated out of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the stewardesses and bandsmen
+      and engineers&mdash;persons of the trade-union class&mdash;who shine as
+      brightly as any. And by the supreme artistry of Chance it fell to the lot
+      of that tragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr. Bruce Ismay, to be aboard and to
+      be caught by the urgent vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment.
+      No untried man dare say that he would have behaved better in his place. He
+      escaped. He thought it natural to escape. His class thinks it was right
+      and proper that he did escape. It is not the man I would criticise, but
+      the manifest absence of any such sense of the supreme dignity of his
+      position as would have sustained him in that crisis. He was a rich man and
+      a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud man. In the common man's
+      realisation that such is indeed the case with most of those who dominate
+      our world, lies the true cause and danger of our social indiscipline. And
+      the remedy in the first place lies not in social legislation and so forth,
+      but in the consciences of the wealthy. Heroism and a generous devotion to
+      the common good are the only effective answer to distrust. If such
+      dominating people cannot produce these qualities there will have to be an
+      end to them, and the world must turn to some entirely different method of
+      direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The essential trouble in our growing Labour disorder is the profound
+      distrust which has grown up in the minds of the new generation of workers
+      of either the ability or the good faith of the property owning, ruling and
+      directing class. I do not attempt to judge the justice or not of this
+      distrust; I merely point to its existence as one of the striking and
+      essential factors in the contemporary Labour situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This distrust is not, perhaps, the proximate cause of the strikes that now
+      follow each other so disconcertingly, but it embitters their spirit, it
+      prevents their settlement, and leads to their renewal. I have tried to
+      suggest that, whatever immediate devices for pacification might be
+      employed, the only way to a better understanding and co-operation, the
+      only escape from a social slide towards the unknown possibilities of
+      Social Democracy, lies in an exaltation of the standard of achievement and
+      of the sense of responsibility in the possessing and governing classes. It
+      is not so much "Wake up, England!" that I would say as "Wake up,
+      gentlemen!"&mdash;for the new generation of the workers is beyond all
+      question quite alarmingly awake and critical and angry. And they have not
+      merely to wake up, they have to wake up visibly and ostentatiously if
+      those old class reliances on which our system is based are to be preserved
+      and restored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We need before anything else a restoration of class confidence. It is a
+      time when class should speak with class very frankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is too much facile misrepresentation, too ready a disposition on
+      either side to accept caricatures as portraits and charges as facts.
+      However tacit our understandings were in the past, with this new kind of
+      Labour, this young, restive Labour of the twentieth century, which can
+      read, discuss and combine, we need something in the nature of a social
+      contract. And it is when one comes to consider by what possible means
+      these suspicious third-class passengers in our leaking and imperilled
+      social liner can be brought into generous co-operation with the second and
+      the first that one discovers just how lamentably out of date and out of
+      order our political institutions, which should supply the means for just
+      this inter-class discussion, have become. Between the busy and preoccupied
+      owning and employing class on the one hand, and the distressed, uneasy
+      masses on the other, intervenes the professional politician, not as a
+      mediator, but as an obstacle, who must be propitiated before any dealings
+      are possible. Our national politics no longer express the realities of the
+      national life; they are a mere impediment in the speech of the community.
+      With our whole social order in danger, our Legislature is busy over the
+      trivial little affairs of the Welsh Established Church, whose endowment
+      probably is not equal to the fortune of any one of half a dozen <i>Titanic</i>
+      passengers or a tithe of the probable loss of another strike among the
+      miners. We have a Legislature almost antiquarian, compiling a museum of
+      Gladstonian legacies rather than governing our world to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is the law's consequence,
+      and, with us at least, the legal profession is the political profession.
+      It delights in false issues and merely technical politics. Steadily with
+      the ascendancy of the House of Commons the barristers have ousted other
+      types of men from political power. The decline of the House of Lords has
+      been the last triumph of the House of Lawyers, and we are governed now to
+      a large extent not so much by the people for the people as by the
+      barristers for the barristers. They set the tone of political life. And
+      since they are the most specialised, the most specifically trained of all
+      the professions, since their training is absolutely antagonistic to the
+      creative impulses of the constructive artist and the controlled
+      experiments of the scientific man, since the business is with evidence and
+      advantages and the skilful use of evidence and advantages, and not with
+      understanding, they are the least statesmanlike of all educated men, and
+      they give our public life a tone as hopelessly discordant with our very
+      great and urgent social needs as one could well imagine. They do not want
+      to deal at all with great and urgent social needs. They play a game, a
+      long and interesting game, with parties as sides, a game that rewards the
+      industrious player with prominence, place, power and great rewards, and
+      the less that game involves the passionate interests of other men, the
+      less it draws them into participation and angry interference, the better
+      for the steady development of the politician's career. A distinguished and
+      active fruitlessness, leaving the world at last as he found it, is the
+      political barrister's ideal career. To achieve that, he must maintain
+      legal and political monopolies, and prevent the invasion of political life
+      by living interests. And so far as he has any views about Labour beyond
+      the margin of his brief, the barrister politician seems to regard getting
+      men back to work on any terms and as soon as possible as the highest good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is with such men that our insurgent modern Labour, with its vaguely
+      apprehended wants, its large occasions and its rapid emotional reactions,
+      comes into contact directly it attempts to adjust itself in the social
+      body. It is one of the main factors in the progressive embitterment of the
+      Labour situation that whatever business is afoot&mdash;arbitration,
+      conciliation, inquiry&mdash;our contemporary system presents itself to
+      Labour almost invariably in a legal guise. The natural infirmities of
+      humanity rebel against an unimaginative legality of attitude, and the
+      common workaday man has no more love for this great and necessary
+      profession to-day than he had in the time of Jack Cade. Little reasonable
+      things from the lawyers' point of view&mdash;the rejection, for example,
+      of certain evidence in the <i>Titanic</i> inquiry because it might amount
+      to a charge of manslaughter, the constant interruption and checking of a
+      Labour representative at the same tribunal upon trivial points&mdash;irritate
+      quite disproportionately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lawyer and working man are antipathetic types, and it is a very grave
+      national misfortune that at this time, when our situation calls aloud for
+      statecraft and a certain greatness of treatment, our public life should be
+      dominated as it has never been dominated before by this most able and
+      illiberal profession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now for that great multitude of prosperous people who find themselves at
+      once deeply concerned in our present social and economic crisis, and
+      either helplessly entangled in party organisation or helplessly outside
+      politics, the elimination and cure of this disease of statecraft, the
+      professional politician, has become a very urgent matter. To destroy him,
+      to get him back to his law courts and keep him there, it is necessary to
+      destroy the machinery of the party system that sustains him, and to adopt
+      some electoral method that will no longer put the independent
+      representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against the party nominee.
+      Such a method is to be found in proportional representation with large
+      constituencies, and to that we must look for our ultimate liberation from
+      our present masters, these politician barristers. But the Labour situation
+      cannot wait for this millennial release, and for the current issue it
+      seems to me patent that every reasonable prosperous man will, even at the
+      cost to himself of some trouble and hard thinking, do his best to keep as
+      much of this great and acute controversy as he possibly can out of the
+      lawyer's and mere politician's hands and in his own. Leave Labour to the
+      lawyers, and we shall go very deeply into trouble indeed before this
+      business is over. They will score their points, they will achieve
+      remarkable agreements full of the possibility of subsequent surprises,
+      they will make reputations, and do everything Heaven and their
+      professional training have made them to do, and they will exasperate and
+      exasperate!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lawyers made the first French Revolution, and now, on a different side,
+      they may yet bring about an English one. These men below there are still,
+      as a class, wonderfully patient and reasonable, quite prepared to take
+      orders and recognise superior knowledge, wisdom and nobility. They make
+      the most reasonable claims for a tolerable life, for certain assurances
+      and certain latitudes. Implicit rather than expressed is their demand for
+      wisdom and right direction from those to whom the great surplus and
+      freedom of civilisation are given. It is an entirely reasonable demand if
+      man is indeed a social animal. But we have got to treat them fairly and
+      openly. This patience and reasonableness and willingness for leadership is
+      not limitless. It is no good scoring our mean little points, for example,
+      and accusing them of breach of contract and all sorts of theoretical
+      wrongs because they won't abide by agreements to accept a certain scale of
+      wages when the purchasing power of money has declined. When they made that
+      agreement they did not think of that possibility. When they said a pound
+      they thought of what was then a poundsworth of living. The Mint has since
+      been increasing its annual output of gold coins to two or three times the
+      former amount, and we have, as it were, debased the coinage with
+      extraordinary quantities of gold. But we who know and own did nothing to
+      adjust that; we did not tell the working man of that; we have let him find
+      it out slowly and indirectly at the grocer's shop. That may be permissible
+      from the lawyer's point of view, but it certainly isn't from the
+      gentleman's, and it is only by the plea that its inequalities give society
+      a gentleman that our present social system can claim to endure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would like to accentuate that, because if we are to emerge again from
+      these acute social dissensions a reunited and powerful people, there has
+      to be a change of tone, a new generosity on the part of those who deal
+      with Labour speeches, Labour literature, Labour representatives, and
+      Labour claims. Labour is necessarily at an enormous disadvantage in
+      discussion; in spite of a tremendous inferiority in training and education
+      it is trying to tell the community its conception of its needs and
+      purposes. It is not only young as a participator in the discussion of
+      affairs; it is actually young. The average working man is not half the age
+      of the ripe politicians and judges and lawyers and wealthy organisers who
+      trip him up legally, accuse him of bad faith, mark his every
+      inconsistency. It isn't becoming so to use our forensic advantages. It
+      isn't&mdash;if that has no appeal to you&mdash;wise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing our society has most to fear from Labour is not organised
+      resistance, not victorious strikes and raised conditions, but the black
+      resentment that follows defeat. Meet Labour half-way, and you will find a
+      new co-operation in government; stick to your legal rights, draw the net
+      of repressive legislation tighter, then you will presently have to deal
+      with Labour enraged. If the anger burns free, that means revolution; if
+      you crush out the hope of that, then sabotage and a sullen general
+      sympathy for anarchistic crime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the preceding pages I have discussed certain aspects of the present
+      Labour situation. I have tried to show the profound significance in this
+      discussion of the distrust which has grown up in the minds of the workers,
+      and how this distrust is being exacerbated by our entirely too forensic
+      method of treating their claims. I want now to point out a still more
+      powerful set of influences which is steadily turning our Labour struggles
+      from mere attempts to adjust hours and wages into movements that are
+      gravely and deliberately revolutionary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is the obvious devotion of a large and growing proportion of the time
+      and energy of the owning and ruling classes to pleasure and excitement,
+      and the way in which this spectacle of amusement and adventure is now
+      being brought before the eyes and into the imagination of the working man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The intimate psychology of work is a thing altogether too little
+      considered and discussed. One asks: "What keeps a workman working properly
+      at his work?" and it seems a sufficient answer to say that it is the need
+      of getting a living. But that is not the complete answer. Work must to
+      some extent interest; if it bores, no power on earth will keep a man doing
+      it properly. And the tendency of modern industrialism has been to
+      subdivide processes and make work more boring and irksome. Also the
+      workman must be satisfied with the living he is getting, and the tendency
+      of newspaper, theatre, cinematograph show and so forth is to fill his mind
+      with ideas of ways of living infinitely more agreeable and interesting
+      than his own. Habit also counts very largely in the regular return of the
+      man to his job, and the fluctuations of employment, the failure of the
+      employing class to provide any alternative to idleness during slack time,
+      break that habit of industry. And then, last but not least, there is
+      self-respect. Men and women are capable of wonders of self-discipline and
+      effort if they feel that theirs is a meritorious service, if they imagine
+      the thing they are doing is the thing they ought to do. A miner will cut
+      coal in a different spirit and with a fading zest if he knows his day's
+      output is to be burnt to waste secretly by a lunatic. Man is a social
+      animal; few men are naturally social rebels, and most will toil very
+      cheerfully in subordination if they feel that the collective end is a fine
+      thing and a great thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, this force of self-respect is much more acutely present in the mind
+      of the modern worker than it was in the thought of his fathers. He is
+      intellectually more active than his predecessors, his imagination is
+      relatively stimulated, he asks wide questions. The worker of a former
+      generation took himself for granted; it is a new phase when the toilers
+      begin to ask, not one man here or there, but in masses, in battalions, in
+      trades: "Why, then, are <i>we</i> toilers, and for what is it that we
+      toil?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What answer do we give them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ask the reader to put himself in the place of a good workman, a young,
+      capable miner, let us say, in search of an answer to that question. He is,
+      we will suppose, temporarily unemployed through the production of a glut
+      of coal, and he goes about the world trying to see the fine and noble
+      collective achievements that justify the devotion of his whole life to
+      humble toil. I ask the reader: What have we got to show that man? What are
+      we doing up in the light and air that justifies our demand that he should
+      go on hewing in narrow seams and cramped corners until he can hew no more?
+      Where is he to be taken to see these crowning fruits of our release from
+      toil? Shall we take him to the House of Commons to note which of the
+      barristers is making most headway over Welsh Disestablishment, or shall we
+      take him to the <i>Titanic</i> inquiry to hear the latest about those
+      fifty-five third-class children (out of eighty-three) who were drowned?
+      Shall we give him an hour or so among the portraits at the Royal Academy,
+      or shall we make an enthusiastic tour of London sculpture and architecture
+      and saturate his soul with the beauty he makes possible? The new
+      Automobile Club, for example. "Without you and your subordination we could
+      not have had that." Or suppose we took him the round of the West-End clubs
+      and restaurants and made him estimate how many dinners London can produce
+      at a pinch at the price of his local daily minimum, say, and upward; or
+      borrow an aeroplane at Hendon and soar about counting all the golfers in
+      the Home Counties on any week-day afternoon. "You suffer at the roots of
+      things, far below there, but see all this nobility and splendour, these
+      sweet, bright flowers to which your rootlet life contributes." Or we might
+      spend a pleasant morning trying to get a passable woman's hat for the
+      price of his average weekly wages in some West-End shop....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But indeed this thing is actually happening. The older type of miner was
+      illiterate, incurious; he read nothing, lived his own life, and if he had
+      any intellectual and spiritual urgencies in him beyond eating and drinking
+      and dog-fighting, the local little Bethel shunted them away from any
+      effective social criticism. The new generation of miners is on an
+      altogether different basis. It is at once less brutal and less spiritual;
+      it is alert, informed, sceptical, and the Press, with photographic
+      illustrations, the cinema, and a score of collateral forces, are giving it
+      precisely that spectacular view of luxury, amusement, aimlessness and
+      excitement, taunting it with just that suggestion that it is for that, and
+      that alone, that the worker's back aches and his muscles strain. Whatever
+      gravity and spaciousness of aim there may be in our prosperous social life
+      does not appear to him. He sees, and he sees all the more brightly because
+      he is looking at it out of toil and darkness, the glitter, the delight for
+      delight's sake, the show and the pride and the folly. Cannot you
+      understand how it is that these young men down there in the hot and
+      dangerous and toilsome and inglorious places of life are beginning to cry
+      out, "We are being made fools of," and to fling down their tools, and
+      cannot you see how futile it is to dream that Mr. Asquith or some other
+      politician by some trick of a Conciliation Act or some claptrap of
+      Compulsory Arbitration, or that any belated suppression of discussion and
+      strike organisations by the law, will avert this gathering storm? The
+      Spectacle of Pleasure, the parade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury
+      and vanity in the sight of the workers is the culminating irritant of
+      Labour. So long as that goes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all
+      awakening, this sombre resolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to
+      continue patiently at work, will gather strength. It does not matter that
+      such a resolve is hopeless and unseasonable; we are dealing here with the
+      profounder impulses that underlie reason. Crush this resentment; it will
+      recur with accumulated strength.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It does not matter that there is no plan in existence for any kind of
+      social order that could be set up in the place of our present system; no
+      plan, that is, that will endure half an hour's practical criticism. The
+      cardinal fact before us is that the workers do not intend to stand things
+      as they are, and that no clever arguments, no expert handling of legal
+      points, no ingenious appearances of concession, will stay that progressive
+      embitterment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I think I have said enough to express and perhaps convey my conviction
+      that our present Labour troubles are unprecedented, and that they mean the
+      end of an epoch. The supply of good-tempered, cheap labour&mdash;upon
+      which the fabric of our contemporary ease and comfort is erected&mdash;is
+      giving out. The spread of information and the means of presentation in
+      every class and the increase of luxury and self-indulgence in the
+      prosperous classes are the chief cause of that. In the place of that old
+      convenient labour comes a new sort of labour, reluctant, resentful,
+      critical, and suspicious. The replacement has already gone so far that I
+      am certain that attempts to baffle and coerce the workers back to their
+      old conditions must inevitably lead to a series of increasingly
+      destructive outbreaks, to stresses and disorder culminating in revolution.
+      It is useless to dream of going on now for much longer upon the old lines;
+      our civilisation, if it is not to enter upon a phase of conflict and
+      decay, must begin to adapt itself to the new conditions of which the first
+      and foremost is that the wages-earning labouring class as a distinctive
+      class, consenting to a distinctive treatment and accepting life at a
+      disadvantage is going to disappear. Whether we do it soon as the result of
+      our reflections upon the present situation, or whether we do it presently
+      through the impoverishment that must necessarily result from a lengthening
+      period of industrial unrest, there can be little doubt that we are going
+      to curtail very considerably the current extravagance of the spending and
+      directing classes upon food, clothing, display, and all the luxuries of
+      life. The phase of affluence is over. And unless we are to be the mere
+      passive spectators of an unprecedented reduction of our lives, all of us
+      who have leisure and opportunity have to set ourselves very strenuously to
+      the problem not of reconciling ourselves to the wage-earners, for that
+      possibility is over, but of establishing a new method of co-operation with
+      those who seem to be definitely decided not to remain wage-earners for
+      very much longer. We have, as sensible people, to realise that the old
+      arrangement which has given us of the fortunate minority so much leisure,
+      luxury, and abundance, advantages we have as a class put to so vulgar and
+      unprofitable a use, is breaking down, and that we have to discover a new,
+      more equable way of getting the world's work done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certain things stand out pretty obviously. It is clear that in the times
+      ahead of us there must be more economy in giving trouble and causing work,
+      a greater willingness to do work for ourselves, a great economy of labour
+      through machinery and skilful management. So much is unavoidable if we are
+      to meet these enlarged requirements upon which the insurgent worker
+      insists. If we, who have at least some experience of affairs, who own
+      property, manage businesses, and discuss and influence public
+      organisation, if we are not prepared to undertake this work of discipline
+      and adaptation for ourselves, then a time is not far distant when
+      insurrectionary leaders, calling themselves Socialists or Syndicalists, or
+      what not, men with none of our experience, little of our knowledge, and
+      far less hope of success, will take that task out of our hands.<a
+      href="#linknote-1" name="linknoteref-1" id="linknoteref-1"><small>1</small></a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknote-1" id="linknote-1"> Note--></a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="foot">
+      1 (<a href="#linknoteref-1">return</a>)<br /> [ Larkinism comes to endorse
+      me since this was written.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have, in fact, to "pull ourselves together," as the phrase goes, and
+      make an end to all this slack, extravagant living, this spectacle of
+      pleasure, that has been spreading and intensifying in every civilised
+      community for the last three or four decades. What is happening to Labour
+      is indeed, from one point of view, little else than the correlative of
+      what has been happening to the more prosperous classes in the community.
+      They have lost their self-discipline, their gravity, their sense of high
+      aims, they have become the victims of their advantages and Labour, grown
+      observant and intelligent, has discovered itself and declares itself no
+      longer subordinate. Just what powers of recovery and reconstruction our
+      system may have under these circumstances the decades immediately before
+      us will show.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us try to anticipate some of the social developments that are likely
+      to spring out of the present Labour situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is quite conceivable, of course, that what lies before us is not
+      development but disorder. Given sufficient suspicion on one side and
+      sufficient obstinacy and trickery on the other, it may be impossible to
+      restore social peace in any form, and industrialism may degenerate into a
+      wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful possibility is the
+      worst and perhaps the least probable of many. It is much more acceptable
+      to suppose that our social order will be able to adjust itself to the new
+      outlook and temper and quality of the labour stratum that elementary
+      education, a Press very cheap and free, and a period of great general
+      affluence have brought about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One almost inevitable feature of any such adaptation will be a changed
+      spirit in the general body of society. We have come to a serious condition
+      of our affairs, and we shall not get them into order again without a
+      thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process. There can be no doubt
+      that for a large portion of our comfortable classes existence has been
+      altogether too easy for the last lifetime or so. The great bulk of the
+      world's work has been done out of their sight and knowledge; it has seemed
+      unnecessary to trouble much about the general conduct of things,
+      unnecessary, as they say, to "take life too seriously." This has not made
+      them so much vicious as slack, lazy, and over-confident; there has been an
+      elaboration of trivial things and a neglect of troublesome and important
+      things. The one grave shock of the Boer War has long been explained and
+      sentimentalised away. But it will not be so easy to explain away a
+      dislocated train service and an empty coal cellar as it was to get a
+      favourable interpretation upon some demonstration of national incompetence
+      half the world away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere congratulation that the
+      British prosperous and the British successful, to whom warning after
+      warning has rained in vain from the days of Ruskin, Carlyle, Matthew
+      Arnold, should be called to account at last in their own household. They
+      will grumble, they will be very angry, but in the end, I believe, they
+      will rise to the opportunities of their inconvenience. They will shake off
+      their intellectual lassitude, take over again the public and private
+      affairs they have come to leave so largely in the hands of the political
+      barrister and the family solicitor, become keen and critical and
+      constructive, bring themselves up to date again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is not, of course, inevitable, but I am taking now the more hopeful
+      view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then? What sort of working arrangements are our renascent owning and
+      directing classes likely to make with the new labouring class? How is the
+      work going to be done in the harder, cleaner, more equalised, and better
+      managed State that, in one's hopeful mood, one sees ahead of us?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now after the experiences of the past twelve months it is obvious that the
+      days when most of the directed and inferior work of the community will be
+      done by intermittently employed and impecunious wage-earners is drawing to
+      an end. A large part of the task of reconstruction ahead of us will
+      consist in the working out of schemes for a more permanent type of
+      employment and for a direct participation of the worker in the pride,
+      profits, and direction of the work. Such schemes admit of wide variations
+      between a mere bonus system, a periodic tipping of the employees to
+      prevent their striking and a real and honest co-partnery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the latter case a great enterprise, forced to consider its "hands" as
+      being also in their degree "heads," would include a department of
+      technical and business instruction for its own people. From such ideas one
+      passes very readily to the conception of guild-managed businesses in which
+      the factor of capital would no longer stand out as an element distinct
+      from and contrasted with the proprietorship of the workers. One sees the
+      worker as an active and intelligent helper during the great portion of his
+      participation, and as an annuitant and perhaps, if he has devised
+      economies and improvements, a receiver of royalties during his declining
+      years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And concurrently with the systematic reconstruction of a large portion of
+      our industries upon these lines there will have to be a vigorous
+      development of the attempts that are already being made, in garden cities,
+      garden suburbs, and the like, to re-house the mass of our population in a
+      more civilised and more agreeable manner. Probably that is not going to
+      pay from the point of view of the money-making business man, but we
+      prosperous people have to understand that there are things more important
+      and more profitable than money-making, and we have to tax ourselves not
+      merely in money, but in time, care, and effort in the matter. Half the
+      money that goes out of England to Switzerland and the Riviera ought to go
+      to the extremely amusing business of clearing up ugly corners and building
+      jolly and convenient workmen's cottages&mdash;even if we do it at a loss.
+      It is part of our discharge for the leisure and advantages the system has
+      given us, part of that just give and take, over and above the solicitor's
+      and bargain-hunter's and money-lender's conception of justice, upon which
+      social order ultimately rests. We have to do it not in a mood of
+      patronage, but in a mood of attentive solicitude. If not on high grounds,
+      then on low grounds our class has to set to work and make those other
+      classes more interested and comfortable and contented. It is what we are
+      for. It is quite impossible for workmen and poor people generally to plan
+      estates and arrange their own homes; they are entirely at the mercy of the
+      wealthy in this matter. There is not a slum, not a hovel, not an eyesore
+      upon the English landscape for which some well-off owner is not ultimately
+      to be blamed or excused, and the less we leave of such things about the
+      better for us in that day of reckoning between class and class which now
+      draws so near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is as plain now as the way from Calais to Paris that if the owning
+      class does not attend to these amenities the mass of the people, doing its
+      best to manage the thing through the politicians, presently will. They may
+      make a frightful mess of it, but that will never bring back things again
+      into the hands that hold them and neglect them. Their time will have
+      passed for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But these are the mere opening requirements of this hope of mine of a
+      quickened social consciousness among the more fortunate and leisurely
+      section of the community I believe that much profounder changes in the
+      conditions of labour are possible than those I have suggested I am
+      beginning to suspect that scarcely any of our preconceptions about the way
+      work must be done, about the hours of work and the habits of work, will
+      stand an exhaustive scientific analysis. It is at least conceivable that
+      we could get much of the work that has to be done to keep our community
+      going in far more toil-saving and life-saving ways than we follow at the
+      present time. So far scientific men have done scarcely anything to
+      estimate under what conditions a man works best, does most work, works
+      more happily. Suppose it turns out to be the case that a man always
+      following one occupation throughout his lifetime, working regularly day
+      after day for so many hours, as most wage-earners do at the present time,
+      does not do nearly so much or nearly so well as he would do if he followed
+      first one occupation and then another, or if he worked as hard as he
+      possibly could for a definite period and then took holiday? I suspect very
+      strongly, indeed I am convinced, that in certain occupations, teaching,
+      for example, or surgery, a man begins by working clumsily and awkwardly,
+      that his interest and skill rise rapidly, that if he is really well suited
+      in his profession he may presently become intensely interested and capable
+      of enormous quantities of his very best work, and that then his interest
+      and vigour rapidly decline I am disposed to believe that this is true of
+      most occupations, of coal-mining or engineering, or brick-laying or
+      cotton-spinning. The thing has never been properly thought about. Our
+      civilisation has grown up in a haphazard kind of way, and it has been
+      convenient to specialise workers and employ them piecemeal. But if it is
+      true that in respect of any occupation a man has his period of maximum
+      efficiency, then we open up a whole world of new social possibilities.
+      What we really want from a man for our social welfare in that case is not
+      regular continuing work, but a few strenuous years of high-pressure
+      service. We can as a community afford to keep him longer at education and
+      training before he begins, and we can release him with a pension while he
+      is still full of life and the capacity for enjoying freedom. But obviously
+      this is impossible upon any basis of weekly wages and intermittent
+      employment; we must be handling affairs in some much more comprehensive
+      way than that before we can take and deal with the working life of a man
+      as one complete whole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is one possibility that is frequently in my thoughts about the
+      present labour crisis. There is another, and that is the great
+      desirability of every class in the community having a practical knowledge
+      of what labour means. There is a vast amount of work which either is now
+      or is likely to be in the future within the domain of the public
+      administration&mdash;road-making, mining, railway work, post-office and
+      telephone work, medical work, nursing, a considerable amount of building
+      for example. Why should we employ people to do the bulk of these things at
+      all? Why should we not as a community do them ourselves? Why, in other
+      words, should we not have a labour conscription and take a year or so of
+      service from everyone in the community, high or low? I believe this would
+      be of enormous moral benefit to our strained and relaxed community. I
+      believe that in making labour a part of everyone's life and the whole of
+      nobody's life lies the ultimate solution of these industrial difficulties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is almost a national boast that we "muddle through" our troubles, and I
+      suppose it is true and to our credit that by virtue of a certain
+      kindliness of temper, a humorous willingness to make the best of things,
+      and an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out of pressures and
+      extremities that would smash a harder, more brittle people only a little
+      chipped and damaged. And it is quite conceivable that our country will, in
+      a measure, survive the enormous stresses of labour adjustment that are now
+      upon us, even if it never rises to any heroic struggle against these
+      difficulties. But it may survive as a lesser country, as an impoverished
+      and second-rate country. It will certainly do no more than that, if in any
+      part of the world there is to be found a people capable of taking up this
+      gigantic question in a greater spirit. Perhaps there is no such people,
+      and the conflicts and muddles before us will be world-wide. Or suppose
+      that it falls to our country in some strange way to develop a new courage
+      and enterprise, and to be the first to go forward into this new phase of
+      civilisation I foresee, from which a distinctive labouring class, a class
+      that is of expropriated wage-earners, will have almost completely
+      disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now hitherto the utmost that any State, overtaken by social and economic
+      stresses, has ever achieved in the way of adapting itself to them has been
+      no more than patching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Individuals and groups and trades have found themselves in imperfectly
+      apprehended and difficult times, and have reluctantly altered their ways
+      and ideas piecemeal under pressure. Sometimes they have succeeded in
+      rubbing along upon the new lines, and sometimes the struggle has submerged
+      them, but no community has ever yet had the will and the imagination to
+      recast and radically alter its social methods as a whole. The idea of such
+      a reconstruction has never been absent from human thought since the days
+      of Plato, and it has been enormously reinforced by the spreading material
+      successes of modern science, successes due always to the substitution of
+      analysis and reasoned planning for trial and the rule of thumb. But it has
+      never yet been so believed in and understood as to render any real
+      endeavour to reconstruct possible. The experiment has always been
+      altogether too gigantic for the available faith behind it, and there have
+      been against it the fear of presumption, the interests of all advantaged
+      people, and the natural sloth of humanity. We do but emerge now from a
+      period of deliberate happy-go-lucky and the influence of Herbert Spencer,
+      who came near raising public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national
+      philosophy. Everything would adjust itself&mdash;if only it was left
+      alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet some things there are that cannot be done by small adjustments, such
+      as leaping chasms or killing an ox or escaping from the roof of a burning
+      house. You have to decide upon a certain course on such occasions and
+      maintain a continuous movement. If you wait on the burning house until you
+      scorch and then turn round a bit or move away a yard or so, or if on the
+      verge of a chasm you move a little in the way in which you wish to go,
+      disaster will punish your moderation. And it seems to me that the
+      establishment of the world's work upon a new basis&mdash;and that and no
+      less is what this Labour Unrest demands for its pacification&mdash;is just
+      one of those large alterations which will never be made by the
+      collectively unconscious activities of men, by competitions and survival
+      and the higgling of the market. Humanity is rebelling against the
+      continuing existence of a labour class as such, and I can see no way by
+      which our present method of weekly wages employment can change by
+      imperceptible increments into a method of salary and pension&mdash;for it
+      is quite evident that only by reaching that shall we reach the end of
+      these present discontents. The change has to be made on a comprehensive
+      scale or not at all. We need nothing less than a national plan of social
+      development if the thing is to be achieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that, I admit, is, as the Americans say, a large proposition. But we
+      are living in a time of more and more comprehensive plans, and the mere
+      fact that no scheme so extensive has ever been tried before is no reason
+      at all why we should not consider one. We think nowadays quite serenely of
+      schemes for the treatment of the nation's health as one whole, where our
+      fathers considered illness as a blend of accident with special
+      providences; we have systematised the community's water supply, education,
+      and all sorts of once chaotic services, and Germany and our own infinite
+      higgledy-piggledy discomfort and ugliness have brought home to us at last
+      even the possibility of planning the extension of our towns and cities. It
+      is only another step upward in scale to plan out new, more tolerable
+      conditions of employment for every sort of worker and to organise the
+      transition from our present disorder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The essential difficulty between the employer and the statesman in the
+      consideration of this problem is the difference in the scope of their
+      view. The employer's concern with the man who does his work is day-long or
+      week-long; the statesman's is life-long. The conditions of private
+      enterprise and modern competition oblige the employer to think only of the
+      worker as a hand, who appears and does his work and draws his wages and
+      vanishes again. Only such strikes as we have had during the past year will
+      rouse him from that attitude of mind. The statesman at the other extremity
+      has to consider the worker as a being with a beginning, a middle, an end&mdash;and
+      offspring. He can consider all these possibilities of deferring employment
+      and making the toil of one period of life provide for the leisure and
+      freedom of another, which are necessarily entirely out of the purview of
+      an employer pure and simple. And I find it hard to see how we can
+      reconcile the intermittency of competitive employment with the unremitting
+      demands of a civilised life except by the intervention of the State or of
+      some public organisation capable of taking very wide views between the
+      business organiser on the one hand and the subordinate worker on the
+      other. On the one hand we need some broader handling of business than is
+      possible in the private adventure of the solitary proprietor or the single
+      company, and on the other some more completely organised development of
+      the collective bargain. We have to bring the directive intelligence of a
+      concern into an organic relation with the conception of the national
+      output as a whole, and either through a trade union or a guild, or some
+      expansion of a trade union, we have to arrange a secure, continuous income
+      for the worker, to be received not directly as wages from an employer but
+      intermediately through the organisation. We need a census of our national
+      production, a more exhaustive estimate of our resources, and an entirely
+      more scientific knowledge of the conditions of maximum labour efficiency.
+      One turns to the State.... And it is at this point that the heart of the
+      patriotic Englishman sinks, because it is our national misfortune that all
+      the accidents of public life have conspired to retard the development of
+      just that body of knowledge, just that scientific breadth of imagination
+      which is becoming a vital necessity for the welfare of a modern civilised
+      community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are caught short of scientific men just as in the event of a war with
+      Germany we shall almost certainly be caught short of scientific sailors
+      and soldiers. You cannot make that sort of thing to order in a crisis.
+      Scientific education&mdash;and more particularly the scientific education
+      of our owning and responsible classes&mdash;has been crippled by the
+      bitter jealousy of the classical teachers who dominate our universities,
+      by the fear and hatred of the Established Church, which still so largely
+      controls our upper-class schools, and by the entire lack of understanding
+      and support on the part of those able barristers and financiers who rule
+      our political life. Science has been left more and more to men of modest
+      origin and narrow outlook, and now we are beginning to pay in internal
+      dissensions, and presently we may have to pay in national humiliation for
+      this almost organised rejection of stimulus and power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But however thwarted and crippled our public imagination may be, we have
+      still got to do the best we can with this situation; we have to take as
+      comprehensive views as we can, and to attempt as comprehensive a method of
+      handling as our party-ridden State permits. In theory I am a Socialist,
+      and were I theorising about some nation in the air I would say that all
+      the great productive activities and all the means of communication should
+      be national concerns and be run as national services. But our State is
+      peculiarly incapable of such functions; at the present time it cannot even
+      produce a postage stamp that will stick; and the type of official it would
+      probably evolve for industrial organisation, slowly but unsurely, would be
+      a maddening combination of the district visitor and the boy clerk. It is
+      to the independent people of some leisure and resource in the community
+      that one has at last to appeal for such large efforts and understandings
+      as our present situation demands. In the default of our public services,
+      there opens an immense opportunity for voluntary effort. Deference to our
+      official leaders is absurd; it is a time when men must, as the phrase
+      goes, "come forward."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We want a National Plan for our social and economic development which
+      everyone may understand and which will serve as a unifying basis for all
+      our social and political activities. Such a plan is not to be flung out
+      hastily by an irresponsible writer. It can only come into existence as the
+      outcome of a wide movement of inquiry and discussion. My business in these
+      pages has been not prescription but diagnosis. I hold it to be the clear
+      duty of every intelligent person in the country to do his utmost to learn
+      about these questions of economic and social organisation and to work them
+      out to conclusions and a purpose. We have come to a phase in our affairs
+      when the only alternative to a great, deliberate renascence of will and
+      understanding is national disorder and decay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our national situation. I
+      have pointed out that nearly all the social forces of our time seem to be
+      in conspiracy to bring about the disappearance of a labour class as such
+      and the rearrangement of our work and industry upon a new basis. That
+      rearrangement demands an unprecedented national effort and the production
+      of an adequate National Plan. Failing that, we seem doomed to a period of
+      chronic social conflict and possibly even of frankly revolutionary
+      outbreaks that may destroy us altogether or leave us only a dwarfed and
+      enfeebled nation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And before we can develop that National Plan and the effective realisation
+      of such a plan that is needed to save us from that fate, two things stand
+      immediately before us to be done, unavoidable preliminaries to that more
+      comprehensive work. The first of these is the restoration of
+      representative government, and the second a renascence of our public
+      thought about political and social things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have already suggested, a main factor in our present national
+      inability to deal with this profound and increasing social disturbance is
+      the entirely unrepresentative and unbusinesslike nature of our
+      parliamentary government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is to a quite extraordinary extent a thing apart from our national
+      life. It becomes more and more so. To go into the House of Commons is to
+      go aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a
+      corner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialised
+      Assembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in
+      our affairs. There was a period when the debates in the House of Commons
+      were an integral, almost a dominant, part of our national thought, when
+      its speeches were read over in tens of thousands of homes, and a large and
+      sympathetic public followed the details of every contested issue. Now a
+      newspaper that dared to fill its columns mainly with parliamentary
+      debates, with a full report of the trivialities the academic points, the
+      little familiar jokes, and entirely insincere pleadings which occupy that
+      gathering would court bankruptcy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost
+      universal comment to-day. But it is extraordinary how much of that comment
+      is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it is associated
+      with any will to change a state of affairs that so largely stultifies our
+      national purpose. And yet the causes of our present political ineptitude
+      are fairly manifest, and a radical and effective reconstruction is well
+      within the wit of man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All causes and all effects in our complex modern State are complex, but in
+      this particular matter there can be little doubt that the key to the
+      difficulty lies in the crudity and simplicity of our method of election, a
+      method which reduces our apparent free choice of rulers to a ridiculous
+      selection between undesirable alternatives, and hands our whole public
+      life over to the specialised manipulator. Our House of Commons could
+      scarcely misrepresent us more if it was appointed haphazard by the Lord
+      Chamberlain or selected by lot from among the inhabitants of Netting Hill.
+      Election of representatives in one-member local constituencies by a single
+      vote gives a citizen practically no choice beyond the candidates appointed
+      by the two great party organisations in the State. It is an electoral
+      system that forbids absolutely any vote splitting or any indication of
+      shades of opinion. The presence of more than two candidates introduces an
+      altogether unmanageable complication, and the voter is at once reduced to
+      voting not to secure the return of the perhaps less hopeful candidate he
+      likes, but to ensure the rejection of the candidate he most dislikes. So
+      the nimble wire-puller slips in. In Great Britain we do not have Elections
+      any more; we have Rejections. What really happens at a general election is
+      that the party organisations&mdash;obscure and secretive conclaves with
+      entirely mysterious funds&mdash;appoint about 1,200 men to be our rulers,
+      and all that we, we so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do
+      is, in a muddled, angry way, to strike off the names of about half of
+      these selected gentlemen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take almost any member of the present Government and consider his case.
+      You may credit him with a lifelong industrious intention to get there, but
+      ask yourself what is this man's distinction, and for what great thing in
+      our national life does he stand? By the complaisance of our party
+      machinery he was able to present himself to a perplexed constituency as
+      the only possible alternative to Conservatism and Tariff Reform, and so we
+      have him. And so we have most of his colleagues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now such a system of representation is surely a system to be destroyed at
+      any cost, because it stifles our national discussion and thwarts our
+      national will. And we can leave no possible method of alteration untried.
+      It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by the mere
+      mechanical degeneration of an electoral method too crudely conceived.
+      There exist alternatives, and to these alternatives we must resort. Since
+      John Stuart Mill first called attention to the importance of the matter
+      there has been a systematic study of the possible working of electoral
+      methods, and it is now fairly proved that in proportional representation,
+      with large constituencies returning each many members, there is to be
+      found a way of escape from this disastrous embarrassment of our public
+      business by the party wire-puller and the party nominee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will not dwell upon the particulars of the proportional representation
+      system here. There exists an active society which has organised the
+      education of the public in the details of the proposal. Suffice it that it
+      does give a method by which a voter may vote with confidence for the
+      particular man he prefers, with no fear whatever that his vote will be
+      wasted in the event of that man's chance being hopeless. There is a method
+      by which the order of the voter's subsequent preference is effectively
+      indicated. That is all, but see how completely it modifies the nature of
+      an election. Instead of a hampered choice between two, you have a free
+      choice between many. Such a change means a complete alteration in the
+      quality of public life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The present immense advantage of the party nominee&mdash;which is the root
+      cause, which is almost the sole cause of all our present political
+      ineptitude&mdash;would disappear. He would be quite unable to oust any
+      well-known and representative independent candidate who chose to stand
+      against him. There would be an immediate alteration in type in the House
+      of Commons. In the place of these specialists in political getting-on
+      there would be few men who had not already gained some intellectual and
+      moral hold upon the community; they would already be outstanding and
+      distinguished men before they came to the work of government. Great
+      sections of our national life, science, art, literature, education,
+      engineering, manufacture would cease to be under-represented, or
+      misrepresented by the energetic barrister and political specialist, and
+      our Legislature would begin to serve, as we have now such urgent need of
+      its serving, as the means and instrument of that national conference upon
+      the social outlook of which we stand in need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is to the need and nature of that Conference that I would devote
+      myself. I do not mean by the word Conference any gathering of dull and
+      formal and inattentive people in this dusty hall or that, with a jaded
+      audience and intermittently active reporters, such as this word may
+      conjure up to some imaginations. I mean an earnest direction of attention
+      in all parts of the country to this necessity for a studied and elaborated
+      project of conciliation and social co-operation We cannot afford to leave
+      such things to specialised politicians and self-appointed, self-seeking
+      "experts" any longer. A modern community has to think out its problems as
+      a whole and co-operate as a whole in their solution. We have to bring all
+      our national life into this discussion of the National Plan before us, and
+      not simply newspapers and periodicals and books, but pulpit and college
+      and school have to bear their part in it. And in that particular I would
+      appeal to the schools, because there more than anywhere else is the
+      permanent quickening of our national imagination to be achieved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We want to have our young people filled with a new realisation that
+      History is not over, that nothing is settled, and that the supreme
+      dramatic phase in the story of England has still to come. It was not in
+      the Norman Conquest, not in the flight of King James II, nor the overthrow
+      of Napoleon; it is here and now. It falls to them to be actors not in a
+      reminiscent pageant but a living conflict, and the sooner they are
+      prepared to take their part in that the better our Empire will acquit
+      itself. How absurd is the preoccupation of our schools and colleges with
+      the little provincialisms of our past history before A.D. 1800! "No
+      current politics," whispers the schoolmaster, "no religion&mdash;except
+      the coldest formalities <i>Some parent might object</i>." And he pours
+      into our country every year a fresh supply of gentlemanly cricketing
+      youths, gapingly unprepared&mdash;unless they have picked up a broad
+      generalisation or so from some surreptitious Socialist pamphlet&mdash;for
+      the immense issues they must control, and that are altogether
+      uncontrollable if they fail to control them. The universities do scarcely
+      more for our young men. All this has to be altered, and altered vigorously
+      and soon, if our country is to accomplish its destinies. Our schools and
+      colleges exist for no other purpose than to give our youths a vision of
+      the world and of their duties and possibilities in the world. We can no
+      longer afford to have them the last preserves of an elderly orthodoxy and
+      the last repository of a decaying gift of superseded tongues. They are
+      needed too urgently to make our leaders leader-like and to sustain the
+      active understandings of the race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And from the labour class itself we are also justified in demanding a far
+      more effectual contribution to the National Conference than it is making
+      at the present time. Mere eloquent apologies for distrust, mere
+      denunciations of Capitalism and appeals for a Socialism as featureless as
+      smoke, are unsatisfactory when one regards them as the entire contribution
+      of the ascendant worker to the discussion of the national future. The
+      labour thinker has to become definite in his demands and clearer upon the
+      give and take that will be necessary before they can be satisfied. He has
+      to realise rather more generously than he has done so far the enormous
+      moral difficulty there is in bringing people who have been prosperous and
+      at an advantage all their lives to the pitch of even contemplating a
+      social reorganisation that may minimise or destroy their precedence. We
+      have all to think, to think hard and think generously, and there is not a
+      man in England to-day, even though his hands are busy at work, whose brain
+      may not be helping in this great task of social rearrangement which lies
+      before us all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      SOCIAL PANACEAS
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (<i>June, 1912</i>.)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      To have followed the frequent discussions of the Labour Unrest in the
+      Press is to have learnt quite a lot about the methods of popular thought.
+      And among other things I see now much better than I did why patent
+      medicines are so popular. It is clear that as a community we are far too
+      impatient of detail and complexity, we want overmuch to simplify, we
+      clamour for panaceas, we are a collective invitation to quacks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our situation is an intricate one, it does not admit of a solution neatly
+      done up in a word or a phrase. Yet so powerful is this wish to simplify
+      that it is difficult to make it clear that one is not oneself a
+      panacea-monger. One writes and people read a little inattentively and more
+      than a little impatiently, until one makes a positive proposal Then they
+      jump. "So <i>that's</i> your Remedy!" they say. "How absurdly inadequate!"
+      I was privileged to take part in one such discussion in 1912, and among
+      other things in my diagnosis of the situation I pointed out the extreme
+      mischief done to our public life by the futility of our electoral methods.
+      They make our whole public life forensic and ineffectual, and I pointed
+      out that this evil effect, which vitiates our whole national life, could
+      be largely remedied by an infinitely better voting system known as
+      Proportional Representation. Thereupon the <i>Westminster Gazette</i>
+      declared in tones of pity and contempt that it was no Remedy&mdash;and
+      dismissed me. It would be as intelligent to charge a doctor who pushed
+      back the crowd about a broken-legged man in the street with wanting to
+      heal the limb by giving the sufferer air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The task before our community, the task of reorganising labour on a basis
+      broader than that of employment for daily or weekly wages, is one of huge
+      complexity, and it is as entirely reasonable as it is entirely preliminary
+      to clean and modernise to the utmost our representative and legislative
+      machinery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is remarkable how dominant is this disposition to get a phrase, a word,
+      a simple recipe, for an undertaking so vast in reality that for all the
+      rest of our lives a large part of the activities of us, forty million
+      people, will be devoted to its partial accomplishment. In the presence of
+      very great issues people become impatient and irritated, as they would not
+      allow themselves to be irritated by far more limited problems. Nobody in
+      his senses expects a panacea for the comparatively simple and trivial
+      business of playing chess. Nobody wants to be told to "rely wholly upon
+      your pawns," or "never, never move your rook"; nobody clamours "give me a
+      third knight and all will be well"; but that is exactly what everybody
+      seems to be doing in our present discussion And as another aspect of the
+      same impatience, I note the disposition to clamour against all sorts of
+      necessary processes in the development of a civilisation. For example, I
+      read over and over again of the failure of representative government, and
+      in nine cases out of ten I find that this amounts to a cry against any
+      sort of representative government. It is perfectly true that our
+      representative institutions do not work well and need a vigorous
+      overhauling, but while I find scarcely any support for such a revision,
+      the air is full of vague dangerous demands for aristocracy, for oligarchy,
+      for autocracy. It is like a man who jumps out of his automobile because he
+      has burst a tyre, refuses a proffered Stepney, and bawls passionately for
+      anything&mdash;for a four-wheeler, or a donkey, as long as he can be free
+      from that exploded mechanism. There are evidently quite a considerable
+      number of people in this country who would welcome a tyrant at the present
+      time, a strong, silent, cruel, imprisoning, executing, melodramatic sort
+      of person, who would somehow manage everything while they went on&mdash;being
+      silly. I find that form of impatience cropping up everywhere. I hear
+      echoes of Mr. Blatchford's "Wanted, a Man," and we may yet see a General
+      Boulanger prancing in our streets. There never was a more foolish cry. It
+      is not a man we want, but just exactly as many million men as there are in
+      Great Britain at the present time, and it is you, the reader, and I, and
+      the rest of us who must together go on with the perennial task of saving
+      the country by <i>firstly</i>, doing our own jobs just as well as ever we
+      can, and <i>secondly</i>&mdash;and this is really just as important as
+      firstly&mdash;doing our utmost to grasp our national purpose, doing our
+      utmost, that is, to develop and carry out our National Plan. It is
+      Everyman who must be the saviour of the State in a modern community; we
+      cannot shift our share in the burthen; and here again, I think, is
+      something that may well be underlined and emphasised. At present our
+      "secondly" is unduly subordinated to our "firstly"; our game is better
+      individually than collectively; we are like a football team that passes
+      badly, and our need is not nearly so much to change the players as to
+      broaden their style. And this brings me, in a spirit entirely
+      antagonistic, up against Mr. Galsworthy's suggestion of an autocratic
+      revolution in the methods of our public schools.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before I go on to that, let me first notice a still more comprehensive
+      cry that has been heard again and again in this discussion, and that is
+      the alleged failure of education generally. There is never any remedial
+      suggestion made with this particular outcry; it is merely a gust of abuse
+      and insult for schools, and more particularly board schools, carrying with
+      it a half-hearted implication that they should be closed, and then the
+      contribution concludes. Now there is no outcry at the present time more
+      unjust or&mdash;except for the "Wanted, a Man" clamour&mdash;more foolish.
+      No doubt our educational resources, like most other things, fall far short
+      of perfection, but of all this imperfection the elementary schools are
+      least imperfect; and I would almost go so far as to say that, considering
+      the badness of their material, the huge, clumsy classes they have to deal
+      with, the poorness of their directive administration, their bad pay and
+      uncertain outlook, the elementary teachers of this country are amazingly
+      efficient. And it is not simply that they are good under their existing
+      conditions, but that this service has been made out of nothing whatever in
+      the course of scarcely forty years. An educational system to cover an
+      Empire is not a thing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be
+      got for the paying; it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound
+      to be thin, ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial, and all the
+      rest of it. As reasonable to complain that the children born last year
+      were immature. A little army of teachers does not flash into being at the
+      passing of an Education Act. Not even an organisation for training those
+      teachers comes to anything like satisfactory working order for many years,
+      without considering the delays and obstructions that have been caused by
+      the bickerings and bitterness of the various Christian Churches. So that
+      it is not the failure of elementary education we have really to consider,
+      but the continuance and extension of its already almost miraculous
+      results.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when it comes to the education of the ruling and directing classes,
+      there is kindred, if lesser reason, for tempering zeal with patience. This
+      upper portion of our educational organisation needs urgently to be
+      bettered, but it is not to be bettered by trying to find an archangel who
+      will better it dictatorially. For the good of our souls there are no such
+      beings to relieve us of our collective responsibility. It is clear that
+      appointments in this field need not only far more care and far more
+      insistence upon creative power than has been shown in the past, but for
+      the rest we have to do with the men we have and the schools we have. We
+      cannot have an educational purge, if only because we have not the new men
+      waiting. Here again the need is not impatience, not revolution, but a
+      sustained and penetrating criticism, a steadfast, continuous urgency
+      towards effort and well-planned reconstruction and efficiency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as a last example of the present hysterical disposition to scrap
+      things before they have been fairly tried is the outcry against
+      examinations, which has done so much to take the keenness off the edge of
+      school work in the last few years. Because a great number of examiners
+      chosen haphazard turned out to be negligent and incompetent as examiners,
+      because their incapacity created a cynical trade in cramming, a great
+      number of people have come to the conclusion, just as examinations are
+      being improved into efficiency, that all examinations are bad. In
+      particular that excellent method of bringing new blood and new energy into
+      the public services and breaking up official gangs and cliques, the
+      competitive examination system, has been discredited, and the wire-puller
+      and the influential person are back again tampering with a steadily
+      increasing proportion of appointments....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I have written enough of this impatience, which is, as it were, merely
+      the passion for reconstruction losing its head and defeating its own ends.
+      There is no hope for us outside ourselves. No violent changes, no
+      Napoleonic saviours can carry on the task of building the Great State, the
+      civilised State that rises out of our disorders That is for us to do, all
+      of us and each one of us. We have to think clearly, and study and consider
+      and reconsider our ideas about public things to the very utmost of our
+      possibilities. We have to clarify our views and express them and do all we
+      can to stir up thinking and effort in those about us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know it would be more agreeable for all of us if we could have some
+      small pill-like remedy for all the troubles of the State, and take it and
+      go on just as we are going now. But, indeed, to say a word for that idea
+      would be a treason. We are the State, and there is no other way to make it
+      better than to give it the service of our lives. Just in the measure of
+      the aggregate of our devotions and the elaborated and criticised sanity of
+      our public proceedings will the world mend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I gather from a valuable publication called "Secret Remedies," which
+      analyses many popular cures, that this hasty passion for simplicity, for
+      just one thing that will settle the whole trouble, can carry people to a
+      level beyond an undivided trust in something warranted in a bottle. They
+      are ready to put their faith in what amounts to practically nothing in a
+      bottle. And just at present, while a number of excellent people of the
+      middle class think that only a "man" is wanted and all will be well with
+      us, there is a considerable wave of hopefulness among the working class in
+      favour of a weak solution of nothing, which is offered under the
+      attractive label of Syndicalism. So far I have been able to discuss the
+      present labour situation without any use of this empty word, but when one
+      finds it cropping up in every other article on the subject, it becomes
+      advisable to point out what Syndicalism is not. And incidentally it may
+      enable me to make clear what Socialism in the broader sense, constructive
+      Socialism, that is to say, is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      "Is a railway porter a railway porter first and a man afterwards, or is he
+      a man first and incidentally a railway porter?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is the issue between this tawdrification of trade unionism which is
+      called Syndicalism, and the ideals of that Great State, that great
+      commonweal, towards which the constructive forces in our civilisation
+      tend. Are we to drift on to a disastrous intensification of our present
+      specialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to work steadfastly
+      upon a vast social reconstruction which will close this widening breach
+      and rescue our community from its present dependence upon the reluctant
+      and presently insurgent toil of a wages-earning proletariat? Regarded as a
+      project of social development, Syndicalism is ridiculous; regarded as an
+      illuminating and unintentionally ironical complement to the implicit
+      theories of our present social order, it is worthy of close attention. The
+      dream of the Syndicalist is an impossible social fragmentation. The
+      transport service is to be a democratic republic, the mines are to be a
+      democratic republic, every great industry is to be a democratic republic
+      within the State; our community is to become a conflict of inter-woven
+      governments of workers, incapable of progressive changes of method or of
+      extension or transmutation of function, the whole being of a man is to lie
+      within his industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causation not
+      made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work are to go on
+      falling.... There the mind halts, blinded by the too dazzling vistas of an
+      unimaginative millennium And the way to this, one gathers, is by striking&mdash;persistent,
+      destructive striking&mdash;until it comes about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is Syndicalism, the cheap Labour Panacea, to which the more
+      passionate and less intelligent portion of the younger workers, impatient
+      of the large constructive developments of modern Socialism, drifts
+      steadily. It is the direct and logical reaction to our present economic
+      system, which has counted our workers neither as souls nor as heads, but
+      as hands. They are beginning to accept the suggestions of that method. It
+      is the culmination in aggression of that, at first, entirely protective
+      trade unionism which the individual selfishness and collective
+      short-sightedness and State blindness of our owning and directing and
+      ruling classes forced upon the working man. At first trade unionism was
+      essentially defensive; it was the only possible defence of the workers,
+      who were being steadily pressed over the margin of subsistence. It was a
+      nearly involuntary resistance to class debasement. Mr. Vernon Hartshorn
+      has expressed it as that in a recent article. But his paper, if one read
+      it from beginning to end, displayed, compactly and completely, the
+      unavoidable psychological development of the specialised labour case. He
+      began in the mildest tones with those now respectable words, a "guaranteed
+      minimum" of wages, housing, and so forth, and ended with a very clear
+      intimation of an all-labour community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If anything is certain in this world, it is that the mass of the community
+      will not rest satisfied with these guaranteed minima. All those possible
+      legislative increments in the general standard of living are not going to
+      diminish the labour unrest; they are going to increase it. A starving man
+      may think he wants nothing in the world but bread, but when he has eaten
+      you will find he wants all sorts of things beyond. Mr. Hartshorn assures
+      us that the worker is "not out for a theory." So much the worse for the
+      worker and all of us when, like the mere hand we have made him, he shows
+      himself unable to define or even forecast his ultimate intentions. He will
+      in that case merely clutch. And the obvious immediate next objective of
+      that clutch directly its imagination passes beyond the "guaranteed minima"
+      phase is the industry as a whole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not see how anyone who desires the continuing development of
+      civilisation can regard a trade union as anything but a necessary evil, a
+      pressure-relieving contrivance an arresting and delaying organisation
+      begotten by just that class separation of labour which in the commonweal
+      of the Great State will be altogether destroyed. It leads nowhither; it is
+      a shelter hut on the road. The wider movement of modern civilisation is
+      against class organisation and caste feeling. These are forces
+      antagonistic to progress, continually springing up and endeavouring to
+      stereotype the transitory organisation, and continually being defeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the solemn imbecilities one hears, surely the most foolish is this,
+      that we are in "an age of specialisation." The comparative fruitfulness
+      and hopefulness of our social order, in comparison with any other social
+      system, lies in its flat contradiction of that absurdity. Our medical and
+      surgical advances, for example, are almost entirely due to the invasion of
+      medical research by the chemist; our naval development to the supersession
+      of the sailor by the engineer; we sweep away the coachman with the
+      railway, beat the suburban line with the electric tramway, and attack that
+      again with the petrol omnibus, oust brick and stonework in substantial
+      fabrics by steel frames, replace the skilled maker of woodcuts by a
+      photographer, and so on through the whole range of our activities. Change
+      of function, arrest of specialisation by innovations in method and
+      appliance, progress by the infringement of professional boundaries and the
+      defiance of rule: these are the commonplaces of our time. The trained man,
+      the specialised man, is the most unfortunate of men; the world leaves him
+      behind, and he has lost his power of overtaking it. Versatility, alert
+      adaptability, these are our urgent needs. In peace and war alike the
+      unimaginative, uninventive man is a burthen and a retardation, as he never
+      was before in the world's history. The modern community, therefore, that
+      succeeds most rapidly and most completely in converting both its labourers
+      and its leisure class into a population of active, able, unhurried,
+      educated, and physically well-developed people will be inevitably the
+      dominant community in the world. That lies on the face of things about us;
+      a man who cannot see that must be blind to the traffic in our streets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Syndicalism is not a plan of social development. It is a spirit of
+      conflict. That conflict lies ahead of us, the open war of strikes, or&mdash;if
+      the forces of law and order crush that down&mdash;then sabotage and that
+      black revolt of the human spirit into crime which we speak of nowadays as
+      anarchism, unless we can discover a broad and promising way from the
+      present condition of things to nothing less than the complete abolition of
+      the labour class.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That, I know, sounds a vast proposal, but this is a gigantic business
+      altogether, and we can do nothing with it unless we are prepared to deal
+      with large ideas. If St. Paul's begins to totter it is no good propping it
+      up with half a dozen walking-sticks, and small palliatives have no
+      legitimate place at all in this discussion. Our generation has to take up
+      this tremendous necessity of a social reconstruction in a great way; its
+      broad lines have to be thought out by thousands of minds, and it is for
+      that reason that I have put the stress upon our need of discussion, of a
+      wide intellectual and moral stimulation of a stirring up in our schools
+      and pulpits, and upon the modernisation and clarification of what should
+      be the deliberative assembly of the nation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be presumptuous to anticipate the National Plan that must emerge
+      from so vast a debate, but certain conclusions I feel in my bones will
+      stand the test of an exhaustive criticism. The first is that a distinction
+      will be drawn between what I would call "interesting work" and what I
+      would call "mere labour." The two things, I admit, pass by insensible
+      gradations into one another, but while on the one hand such work as being
+      a master gardener and growing roses, or a master cabinet maker and making
+      fine pieces, or an artist of almost any sort, or a story writer, or a
+      consulting physician, or a scientific investigator, or a keeper of wild
+      animals, or a forester, or a librarian, or a good printer, or many sorts
+      of engineer, is work that will always find men of a certain temperament
+      enthusiastically glad to do it, if they can only do it for comfortable pay&mdash;for
+      such work is in itself <i>living</i>&mdash;there is, on the other hand,
+      work so irksome and toilsome, such as coal mining, or being a private
+      soldier during a peace, or attending upon lunatics, or stoking, or doing
+      over and over again, almost mechanically, little bits of a modern
+      industrial process, or being a cash desk clerk in a busy shop, that few
+      people would undertake if they could avoid it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the whole strength of our collective intelligence will be directed
+      first to reducing the amount of such irksome work by labour-saving
+      machinery, by ingenuity of management, and by the systematic avoidance of
+      giving trouble as a duty, and then to so distributing the residuum of it
+      that it will become the whole life of no class whatever in our population.
+      I have already quoted the idea of Professor William James of a universal
+      conscription for such irksome labour, and while he would have instituted
+      that mainly for its immense moral effect upon the community, I would point
+      out that, combined with a nationalisation of transport, mining, and so
+      forth, it is also a way to a partial solution of this difficulty of "mere
+      toil."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the mention of a compulsory period of labour service for everyone&mdash;a
+      year or so with the pickaxe as well as with the rifle&mdash;leads me to
+      another idea that I believe will stand the test of unlimited criticism,
+      and that is a total condemnation of all these eight-hour-a-day,
+      early-closing, guaranteed-weekly-half-holiday notions that are now so
+      prevalent in Liberal circles. Under existing conditions, in our system of
+      private enterprise and competition, these restrictions are no doubt
+      necessary to save a large portion of our population from lives of
+      continuous toil, but, like trade unionism, they are a necessity of our
+      present conditions, and not a way to a better social state. If we rescue
+      ourselves as a community from poverty and discomfort, we must take care
+      not to fling ourselves into something far more infuriating to a normal
+      human being&mdash;and that is boredom. The prospect of a carefully
+      inspected sanitary life, tethered to some light, little, uninteresting
+      daily job, six or eight hours of it, seems to me&mdash;and I am sure I
+      write here for most normal, healthy, active people&mdash;more awful than
+      hunger and death. It is far more in the quality of the human spirit, and
+      still more what we all in our hearts want the human spirit to be, to fling
+      itself with its utmost power at a job and do it with passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my own part, if I was sentenced to hew a thousand tons of coal, I
+      should want to get at it at once and work furiously at it, with the
+      shortest intervals for rest and refreshment and an occasional night
+      holiday, until I hewed my way out, and if some interfering person with a
+      benevolent air wanted to restrict me to hewing five hundredweight, and no
+      more and no less, each day and every day, I should be strongly disposed to
+      go for that benevolent person with my pick. That is surely what every
+      natural man would want to do, and it is only the clumsy imperfection of
+      our social organisation that will not enable a man to do his stint of
+      labour in a few vigorous years and then come up into the sunlight for good
+      and all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is along that line that I feel a large part of our labour
+      reorganisation, over and beyond that conscription, must ultimately go. The
+      community as a whole would, I believe, get far more out of a man if he had
+      such a comparatively brief passion of toil than if he worked, with
+      occasional lapses into unemployment, drearily all his life. But at
+      present, with our existing system of employment, one cannot arrange so
+      comprehensive a treatment of a man's life. There is needed some State or
+      quasi-public organisation which shall stand between the man and the
+      employer, act as his banker and guarantor, and exact his proper price.
+      Then, with his toil over, he would have an adequate pension and be free to
+      do nothing or anything else as he chose. In a Socialistic order of
+      society, where the State would also be largely the employer, such a method
+      would be, of course, far more easily contrived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The more modern statements of Socialism do not contemplate making the
+      State the sole employer; it is chiefly in transport, mining, fisheries,
+      forestry, the cultivation of the food staples, and the manufacture of a
+      few such articles as bricks and steel, and possibly in housing in what one
+      might call the standardisable industries, that the State is imagined as
+      the direct owner and employer and it is just in these departments that the
+      bulk of the irksome toil is to be found. There remain large regions of
+      more specialised and individualised production that many Socialists
+      nowadays are quite prepared to leave to the freer initiatives of private
+      enterprise. Most of these are occupations involving a greater element of
+      interest, less direction and more co-operation, and it is just here that
+      the success of co-partnery and a sustained life participation becomes
+      possible....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This complete civilised system without a specialised, property-less labour
+      class is not simply a possibility, it is necessary; the whole social
+      movement of the time, the stars in their courses, war against the
+      permanence of the present state of affairs. The alternative to this
+      gigantic effort to rearrange our world is not a continuation of muddling
+      along, but social war. The Syndicalist and his folly will be the avenger
+      of lost opportunities. Not a Labour State do we want, nor a Servile State,
+      but a powerful Leisure State of free men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE GREAT STATE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For many years now I have taken a part in the discussion of Socialism.
+      During that time Socialism has become a more and more ambiguous term. It
+      has seemed to me desirable to clear up my own ideas of social progress and
+      the public side of my life by restating them, and this I have attempted in
+      this essay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two expressions, and to
+      employ them with a certain defined intention. They are firstly: The Normal
+      Social Life, and secondly: The Great State. Throughout this essay these
+      expressions will be used in accordance with the definitions presently to
+      be given, and the fact that they are so used will be emphasised by the
+      employment of capitals. It will be possible for anyone to argue that what
+      is here defined as the Normal Social Life is not the normal social life,
+      and that the Great State is indeed no state at all. That will be an
+      argument outside the range delimited by these definitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now what is intended by the Normal Social Life here is a type of human
+      association and employment, of extreme prevalence and antiquity, which
+      appears to have been the lot of the enormous majority of human beings as
+      far back as history or tradition or the vestiges of material that supply
+      our conceptions of the neolithic period can carry us. It has never been
+      the lot of all humanity at any time, to-day it is perhaps less predominant
+      than it has ever been, yet even to-day it is probably the lot of the
+      greater moiety of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Essentially this type of association presents a localised community, a
+      community of which the greater proportion of the individuals are engaged
+      more or less directly in the cultivation of the land. With this there is
+      also associated the grazing or herding over wider or more restricted
+      areas, belonging either collectively or discretely to the community, of
+      sheep, cattle, goats, or swine, and almost always the domestic fowl is
+      commensal with man in this life. The cultivated land at least is usually
+      assigned, temporarily or inalienably, as property to specific individuals,
+      and the individuals are grouped in generally monogamic families of which
+      the father is the head. Essentially the social unit is the Family, and
+      even where, as in Mohammedan countries, there is no legal or customary
+      restriction upon polygamy, monogamy still prevails as the ordinary way of
+      living. Unmarried women are not esteemed, and children are desired.
+      According to the dangers or securities of the region, the nature of the
+      cultivation and the temperament of the people, this community is scattered
+      either widely in separate steadings or drawn together into villages. At
+      one extreme, over large areas of thin pasture this agricultural community
+      may verge on the nomadic; at another, in proximity to consuming markets,
+      it may present the concentration of intensive culture. There may be an
+      adjacent Wild supplying wood, and perhaps controlled by a simple forestry.
+      The law that holds this community together is largely traditional and
+      customary and almost always as its primordial bond there is some sort of
+      temple and some sort of priest. Typically, the temple is devoted to a
+      local god or a localised saint, and its position indicates the central
+      point of the locality, its assembly place and its market. Associated with
+      the agriculture there are usually a few imperfectly specialised tradesmen,
+      a smith, a garment-maker perhaps, a basket-maker or potter, who group
+      about the church or temple. The community may maintain itself in a state
+      of complete isolation, but more usually there are tracks or roads to the
+      centres of adjacent communities, and a certain drift of travel, a certain
+      trade in non-essential things. In the fundamentals of life this normal
+      community is independent and self-subsisting, and where it is not
+      beginning to be modified by the novel forces of the new times it produces
+      its own food and drink, its own clothing, and largely intermarries within
+      its limits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This in general terms is what is here intended by the phrase the Normal
+      Social Life. It is still the substantial part of the rural life of all
+      Europe and most Asia and Africa, and it has been the life of the great
+      majority of human beings for immemorial years. It is the root life. It
+      rests upon the soil, and from that soil below and its reaction to the
+      seasons and the moods of the sky overhead have grown most of the
+      traditions, institutions, sentiments, beliefs, superstitions, and
+      fundamental songs and stories of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But since the very dawn of history at least this Normal Social Life has
+      never been the whole complete life of mankind. Quite apart from the
+      marginal life of the savage hunter, there have been a number of forces and
+      influences within men and women and without, that have produced abnormal
+      and surplus ways of living, supplemental, additional, and even
+      antagonistic to this normal scheme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And first as to the forces within men and women. Long as it has lasted,
+      almost universal as it has been, the human being has never yet achieved a
+      perfect adaptation to the needs of the Normal Social Life. He has attained
+      nothing of that frictionless fitting to the needs of association one finds
+      in the bee or the ant. Curiosity, deep stirrings to wander, the still more
+      ancient inheritance of the hunter, a recurrent distaste for labour, and
+      resentment against the necessary subjugations of family life have always
+      been a straining force within the agricultural community. The increase of
+      population during periods of prosperity has led at the touch of bad
+      seasons and adversity to the desperate reliefs of war and the invasion of
+      alien localities. And the nomadic and adventurous spirit of man found
+      reliefs and opportunities more particularly along the shores of great
+      rivers and inland seas. Trade and travel began, at first only a trade in
+      adventitious things, in metals and rare objects and luxuries and slaves.
+      With trade came writing and money; the inventions of debt and rent, usury
+      and tribute. History finds already in its beginnings a thin network of
+      trading and slaving flung over the world of the Normal Social Life, a
+      network whose strands are the early roads, whose knots are the first towns
+      and the first courts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, all recorded history is in a sense the history of these surplus
+      and supplemental activities of mankind. The Normal Social Life flowed on
+      in its immemorial fashion, using no letters, needing no records, leaving
+      no history. Then, a little minority, bulking disproportionately in the
+      record, come the trader, the sailor, the slave, the landlord and the
+      tax-compeller, the townsman and the king.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All written history is the story of a minority and their peculiar and
+      abnormal affairs. Save in so far as it notes great natural catastrophes
+      and tells of the spreading or retrocession of human life through changes
+      of climate and physical conditions it resolves itself into an account of a
+      series of attacks and modifications and supplements made by excessive and
+      superfluous forces engendered within the community upon the Normal Social
+      Life. The very invention of writing is a part of those modifying
+      developments. The Normal Social Life is essentially illiterate and
+      traditional. The Normal Social Life is as mute as the standing crops; it
+      is as seasonal and cyclic as nature herself, and reaches towards the
+      future only an intimation of continual repetitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this human over-life may take either beneficent or maleficent or
+      neutral aspects towards the general life of humanity. It may present
+      itself as law and pacification, as a positive addition and superstructure
+      to the Normal Social Life, as roads and markets and cities, as courts and
+      unifying monarchies, as helpful and directing religious organisations, as
+      literature and art and science and philosophy, reflecting back upon the
+      individual in the Normal Social Life from which it arose, a gilding and
+      refreshment of new and wider interests and added pleasures and resources.
+      One may define certain phases in the history of various countries when
+      this was the state of affairs, when a countryside of prosperous
+      communities with a healthy family life and a wide distribution of
+      property, animated by roads and towns and unified by a generally
+      intelligible religious belief, lived in a transitory but satisfactory
+      harmony under a sympathetic government. I take it that this is the
+      condition to which the minds of such original and vigorous reactionary
+      thinkers as Mr. G.K. Chesterton and Mr. Hilaire Belloc for example turn,
+      as being the most desirable state of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the general effect of history is to present these phases as phases of
+      exceptional good luck, and to show the surplus forces of humanity as on
+      the whole antagonistic to any such equilibrium with the Normal Social
+      Life. To open the book of history haphazard is, most commonly, to open it
+      at a page where the surplus forces appear to be in more or less
+      destructive conflict with the Normal Social Life. One opens at the
+      depopulation of Italy by the aggressive great estates of the Roman Empire,
+      at the impoverishment of the French peasantry by a too centralised
+      monarchy before the revolution, or at the huge degenerative growth of the
+      great industrial towns of western Europe in the nineteenth century. Or
+      again one opens at destructive wars. One sees these surplus forces over
+      and above the Normal Social Life working towards unstable concentrations
+      of population, to centralisation of government, to migrations and
+      conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the process developing into a
+      phase of social fragmentation and destruction and then, unless the whole
+      country has been wasted down to its very soil, the Normal Social Life
+      returns as the heath and furze and grass return after the burning of a
+      common. But it never returns in precisely its old form. The surplus forces
+      have always produced some traceable change; the rhythm is a little
+      altered. As between the Gallic peasant before the Roman conquest, the
+      peasant of the Gallic province, the Carlovingian peasant, the French
+      peasant of the thirteenth, the seventeenth, and the twentieth centuries,
+      there is, in spite of a general uniformity of life, of a common atmosphere
+      of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy, and domestic intimacy, an
+      effect of accumulating generalising influences and of wider relevancies.
+      And the oscillations of empires and kingdoms, religious movements, wars,
+      invasions, settlements leave upon the mind an impression that the surplus
+      life of mankind, the less-localised life of mankind, that life of mankind
+      which is not directly connected with the soil but which has become more or
+      less detached from and independent of it, is becoming proportionately more
+      important in relation to the Normal Social Life. It is as if a different
+      way of living was emerging from the Normal Social Life and freeing itself
+      from its traditions and limitations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this is more particularly the effect upon the mind of a review of the
+      history of the past two hundred years. The little speculative activities
+      of the alchemist and natural philosopher, the little economic experiments
+      of the acquisitive and enterprising landed proprietor, favoured by
+      unprecedented periods of security and freedom, have passed into a new
+      phase of extraordinary productivity. They had added preposterously and
+      continue to add on a gigantic scale and without any evident limits to the
+      continuation of their additions, to the resources of humanity. To the
+      strength of horses and men and slaves has been added the power of machines
+      and the possibility of economies that were once incredible The Normal
+      Social Life has been overshadowed as it has never been overshadowed before
+      by the concentrations and achievements of the surplus life. Vast new
+      possibilities open to the race; the traditional life of mankind, its
+      traditional systems of association, are challenged and threatened; and all
+      the social thought, all the political activity of our time turns in
+      reality upon the conflict of this ancient system whose essentials we have
+      here defined and termed the Normal Social Life with the still vague and
+      formless impulses that seem destined either to involve it and the race in
+      a final destruction or to replace it by some new and probably more
+      elaborate method of human association.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because there is the following difference between the action of the
+      surplus forces as we see them to-day and as they appeared before the
+      outbreak of physical science and mechanism. Then it seemed clearly
+      necessary that whatever social and political organisation developed, it
+      must needs; rest ultimately on the tiller of the soil, the agricultural
+      holding, and the Normal Social Life. But now even in agriculture huge
+      wholesale methods have appeared. They are declared to be destructive; but
+      it is quite conceivable that they may be made ultimately as recuperative
+      as that small agriculture which has hitherto been the inevitable social
+      basis. If that is so, then the new ways of living may not simply impose
+      themselves in a growing proportion upon the Normal Social Life, but they
+      may even oust it and replace it altogether. Or they may oust it and fail
+      to replace it. In the newer countries the Normal Social Life does not
+      appear to establish itself at all rapidly. No real peasantry appears in
+      either America or Australia; and in the older countries, unless there is
+      the most elaborate legislative and fiscal protection, the peasant
+      population wanes before the large farm, the estate, and overseas
+      production.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundred years
+      may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend this defensive
+      struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and innovation
+      and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who participate. And it
+      is very largely a matter of temperament and free choice still, just where
+      we shall decide to place ourselves. Let us consider some of the key words
+      of contemporary thought, such as Liberalism, Individualism, Socialism, in
+      the light of this broad generalisation we have made; and then we shall
+      find it easier to explain our intention in employing as a second
+      technicality the phrase of The Great State as an opposite to the Normal
+      Social Life, which we have already defined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based on agriculture,
+      traditional and essentially unchanging. It has needed no toleration and
+      displayed no toleration for novelty and strangeness. Its beliefs have been
+      on such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has had an
+      intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs. The God of its community has
+      been a jealous god even when he was only a tribal and local god. Only very
+      occasionally in history until the coming of the modern period do we find
+      any human community relaxing from this ancient and more normal state of
+      entire intolerance towards ideas or practices other than its own. When
+      toleration and a receptive attitude towards alien ideas was manifested in
+      the Old World, it was at some trading centre or political centre; new
+      ideas and new religions came by water along the trade routes. And such
+      toleration as there was rarely extended to active teaching and propaganda.
+      Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in the last resort at the service
+      of the ancient gods and the ancient morals against the sceptical critic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But with the steady development of innovating forces in human affairs
+      there has actually grown up a cult of receptivity, a readiness for new
+      ideas, a faith in the probable truth of novelties. Liberalism&mdash;I do
+      not, of course, refer in any way to the political party which makes this
+      profession&mdash;is essentially anti-traditionalism; its tendency is to
+      commit for trial any institution or belief that is brought before it. It
+      is the accuser and antagonist of all the fixed and ancient values and
+      imperatives and prohibitions of the Normal Social Life. And growing up in
+      relation to Liberalism and sustained by it is the great body of scientific
+      knowledge, which professes at least to be absolutely undogmatic and
+      perpetually on its trial and under assay and re-examination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now a very large part of the advanced thought of the past century is no
+      more than the confused negation of the broad beliefs and institutions
+      which have been the heritage and social basis of humanity for immemorial
+      years. This is as true of the extremest Individualism as of the extremest
+      Socialism. The former denies that element of legal and customary control
+      which has always subdued the individual to the needs of the Normal Social
+      Life, and the latter that qualified independence of distributed property
+      which is the basis of family autonomy. Both are movements against the
+      ancient life, and nothing is more absurd than the misrepresentation which
+      presents either as a conservative force. They are two divergent schools
+      with a common disposition to reject the old and turn towards the new. The
+      Individualist professes a faith for which he has no rational evidence,
+      that the mere abandonment of traditions and controls must ultimately
+      produce a new and beautiful social order; while the Socialist, with an
+      equal liberalism, regards the outlook with a kind of hopeful dread, and
+      insists upon an elaborate readjustment, a new and untried scheme of social
+      organisation to replace the shattered and weakening Normal Social Life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both these movements, and, indeed, all movements that are not movements
+      for the subjugation of innovation and the restoration of tradition, are
+      vague in the prospect they contemplate. They produce no definite forecasts
+      of the quality of the future towards which they so confidently indicate
+      the way. But this is less true of modern socialism than of its antithesis,
+      and it becomes less and less true as socialism, under an enormous torrent
+      of criticism, slowly washes itself clean from the mass of partial
+      statement, hasty misstatement, sheer error and presumption that obscured
+      its first emergence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is well to be very clear upon one point at this stage, and that is,
+      that this present time is not a battle-ground between individualism and
+      socialism; it is a battle-ground between the Normal Social Life on the one
+      hand and a complex of forces on the other which seek a form of replacement
+      and seem partially to find it in these and other doctrines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly all contemporary thinkers who are not too muddled to be assignable
+      fall into one of three classes, of which the third we shall distinguish is
+      the largest and most various and divergent. It will be convenient to say a
+      little of each of these classes before proceeding to a more particular
+      account of the third. Our analysis will cut across many accepted
+      classifications, but there will be ample justification for this
+      rearrangement. All of them may be dealt with quite justly as accepting the
+      general account of the historical process which is here given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then first we must distinguish a series of writers and thinkers which one
+      may call&mdash;the word conservative being already politically assigned&mdash;the
+      Conservators.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are people who really do consider the Normal Social Life as the only
+      proper and desirable life for the great mass of humanity, and they are
+      fully prepared to subordinate all exceptional and surplus lives to the
+      moral standards and limitations that arise naturally out of the Normal
+      Social Life. They desire a state in which property is widely distributed,
+      a community of independent families protected by law and an intelligent
+      democratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large accumulations
+      and linked by a common religion. Their attitude to the forces of change is
+      necessarily a hostile attitude. They are disposed to regard innovations in
+      transit and machinery as undesirable, and even mischievous disturbances of
+      a wholesome equilibrium. They are at least unfriendly to any organisation
+      of scientific research, and scornful of the pretensions of science.
+      Criticisms of the methods of logic, scepticism of the more widely diffused
+      human beliefs, they would classify as insanity. Two able English writers,
+      Mr. G.K. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, have given the clearest expression to
+      this system of ideals, and stated an admirable case for it. They present a
+      conception of vinous, loudly singing, earthy, toiling, custom-ruled,
+      wholesome, and insanitary men; they are pagan in the sense that their
+      hearts are with the villagers and not with the townsmen, Christian in the
+      spirit of the parish priest. There are no other Conservators so
+      clear-headed and consistent. But their teaching is merely the logical
+      expression of an enormous amount of conservative feeling. Vast multitudes
+      of less lucid minds share their hostility to novelty and research; hate,
+      dread, and are eager to despise science, and glow responsive to the warm,
+      familiar expressions of primordial feelings and immemorial prejudices The
+      rural conservative, the liberal of the allotments and small-holdings type,
+      Mr. Roosevelt&mdash;in his Western-farmer, philoprogenitive phase as
+      distinguished from the phase of his more imperialist moments&mdash;all
+      present themselves as essentially Conservators as seekers after and
+      preservers of the Normal Social Life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So, too, do Socialists of the William Morris type. The mind of William
+      Morris was profoundly reactionary He hated the whole trend of later
+      nineteenth-century modernism with the hatred natural to a man of
+      considerable scholarship and intense aesthetic sensibilities. His mind
+      turned, exactly as Mr. Belloc's turns, to the finished and enriched Normal
+      Social Life of western Europe in the middle ages, but, unlike Mr. Belloc,
+      he believed that, given private ownership of land and the ordinary
+      materials of life, there must necessarily be an aggregatory process,
+      usury, expropriation, the development of an exploiting wealthy class. He
+      believed profit was the devil. His "News from Nowhere" pictures a
+      communism that amounted in fact to little more than a system of private
+      ownership of farms and trades without money or any buying and selling, in
+      an atmosphere of geniality, generosity, and mutual helpfulness. Mr.
+      Belloc, with a harder grip upon the realities of life, would have the
+      widest distribution of proprietorship, with an alert democratic government
+      continually legislating against the protean reappearances of usury and
+      accumulation and attacking, breaking up, and redistributing any large
+      unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared. But both men are equally set
+      towards the Normal Social Life, and equally enemies of the New. The
+      so-called "socialist" land legislation of New Zealand again is a tentative
+      towards the realisation of the same school of ideas: great estates are to
+      be automatically broken up, property is to be kept disseminated; a vast
+      amount of political speaking and writing in America and throughout the
+      world enforces one's impression of the widespread influence of Conservator
+      ideals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, it is inevitable that phases of prosperity for the Normal
+      Social Life will lead to phases of over-population and scarcity, there
+      will be occasional famines and occasional pestilences and plethoras of
+      vitality leading to the blood-letting of war. I suppose Mr. Chesterton and
+      Mr. Belloc at least have the courage of their opinions, and are prepared
+      to say that such things always have been and always must be; they are part
+      of the jolly rhythms of the human lot under the sun, and are to be taken
+      with the harvest home and love-making and the peaceful ending of honoured
+      lives as an integral part of the unending drama of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now opposed to the Conservators are all those who do not regard
+      contemporary humanity as a final thing nor the Normal Social Life as the
+      inevitable basis of human continuity. They believe in secular change, in
+      Progress, in a future for our species differing continually more from its
+      past. On the whole, they are prepared for the gradual disentanglement of
+      men from the Normal Social Life altogether, and they look for new ways of
+      living and new methods of human association with a certain adventurous
+      hopefulness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, this second large class does not so much admit of subdivision into
+      two as present a great variety of intermediaries between two extremes. I
+      propose to give distinctive names to these extremes, with the very clear
+      proviso that they are not antagonised, and that the great multitude of
+      this second, anti-conservator class, this liberal, more novel class modern
+      conditions have produced falls between them, and is neither the one nor
+      the other, but partaking in various degrees of both. On the one hand,
+      then, we have that type of mind which is irritated by and distrustful of
+      all collective proceedings which is profoundly distrustful of churches and
+      states, which is expressed essentially by Individualism. The Individualist
+      appears to regard the extensive disintegrations of the Normal Social Life
+      that are going on to-day with an extreme hopefulness. Whatever is ugly or
+      harsh in modern industrialism or in the novel social development of our
+      time he seems to consider as a necessary aspect of a process of selection
+      and survival, whose tendencies are on the whole inevitably satisfactory.
+      The future welfare of man he believes in effect may be trusted to the
+      spontaneous and planless activities of people of goodwill, and nothing but
+      state intervention can effectively impede its attainment. And curiously
+      close to this extreme optimistic school in its moral quality and logical
+      consequences, though contrasting widely in the sinister gloom of its
+      spirit, is the socialism of Karl Marx. He declared the contemporary world
+      to be a great process of financial aggrandisement and general
+      expropriation, of increasing power for the few and of increasing hardship
+      and misery for the many, a process that would go on until at last a crisis
+      of unendurable tension would be reached and the social revolution ensue.
+      The world had, in fact, to be worse before it could hope to be better. He
+      contemplated a continually exacerbated Class War, with a millennium of
+      extraordinary vagueness beyond as the reward of the victorious workers.
+      His common quality with the Individualist lies in his repudiation of and
+      antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his belief in the overriding
+      power of Law. Their common influence is the discouragement of collective
+      understandings upon the basis of the existing state. Both converge in
+      practice upon <i>laissez faire</i>. I would therefore lump them together
+      under the term of Planless Progressives, and I would contrast with them
+      those types which believe supremely in systematised purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purposeful and systematic types, in common with the Individualist and
+      Marxist, regard the Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands of
+      years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in human
+      experience; and they are prepared for a future society that may be
+      ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the
+      human past. But they also believe that the forces that have been assailing
+      and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, on the one
+      hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom, and
+      ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on the
+      other, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property or
+      outlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have
+      substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independent
+      peasant almost completely, and in America seem to be arresting any general
+      development of the Normal Social Life at all, are forces of wide and
+      indefinite possibility that need to be controlled by a collective effort
+      implying a collective design, deflected from merely injurious consequences
+      and organised for a new human welfare upon new lines. They agree with that
+      class of thinking I have distinguished as the Conservators in their
+      recognition of vast contemporary disorders and their denial of the
+      essential beneficence of change. But while the former seem to regard all
+      novelty and innovation as a mere inundation to be met, banked back,
+      defeated and survived, these more hopeful and adventurous minds would
+      rather regard contemporary change as amounting on the whole to the
+      tumultuous and almost catastrophic opening-up of possible new channels,
+      the violent opportunity of vast, deep, new ways to great unprecedented
+      human ends, ends that are neither feared nor evaded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now while the Conservators are continually talking of the "eternal facts"
+      of human life and human nature and falling back upon a conception of
+      permanence that is continually less true as our perspectives extend, these
+      others are full of the conception of adaptation, of deliberate change in
+      relationship and institution to meet changing needs. I would suggest for
+      them, therefore, as opposed to the Conservators and contrasted with the
+      Planless Progressives, the name of Constructors. They are the extreme
+      right, as it were, while the Planless Progressives are the extreme left of
+      Anti-Conservator thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I believe that these distinctions I have made cover practically every
+      clear form of contemporary thinking, and are a better and more helpful
+      classification than any now current. But, of course, nearly every
+      individual nowadays is at least a little confused, and will be found to
+      wobble in the course even of a brief discussion between one attitude and
+      the other. This is a separation of opinions rather than of persons. And
+      particularly that word Socialism has become so vague and incoherent that
+      for a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to give no indication
+      whatever whether he is a Conservator like William Morris, a
+      non-Constructor like Karl Marx, or a Constructor of any of half a dozen
+      different schools. On the whole, however, modern socialism tends to fall
+      towards the Constructor wing. So, too, do those various movements in
+      England and Germany and France called variously nationalist and
+      imperialist, and so do the American civic and social reformers. Under the
+      same heading must come such attempts to give the vague impulses of
+      Syndicalism a concrete definition as the "Guild Socialism" of Mr. Orage.
+      All these movements are agreed that the world is progressive towards a
+      novel and unprecedented social order, not necessarily and fatally better,
+      and that it needs organised and even institutional guidance thither,
+      however much they differ as to the form that order should assume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the greater portion of a century socialism has been before the world,
+      and it is not perhaps premature to attempt a word or so of analysis of
+      that great movement in the new terms we are here employing. The origins of
+      the socialist idea were complex and multifarious never at any time has it
+      succeeded in separating out a statement of itself that was at once simple,
+      complete and acceptable to any large proportion of those who call
+      themselves socialists. But always it has pointed to two or three definite
+      things. The first of these is that unlimited freedoms of private property,
+      with increasing facilities of exchange, combination, and aggrandisement,
+      become more and more dangerous to human liberty by the expropriation and
+      reduction to private wages slavery of larger and larger proportions of the
+      population. Every school of socialism states this in some more or less
+      complete form, however divergent the remedial methods suggested by the
+      different schools. And, next, every school of socialism accepts the
+      concentration of management and property as necessary, and declines to
+      contemplate what is the typical Conservator remedy, its re-fragmentation.
+      Accordingly it sets up not only against the large private owner, but
+      against owners generally, the idea of a public proprietor, the State,
+      which shall hold in the collective interest. But where the earlier
+      socialisms stopped short, and where to this day socialism is vague,
+      divided, and unprepared, is upon the psychological problems involved in
+      that new and largely unprecedented form of proprietorship, and upon the
+      still more subtle problems of its attainment. These are vast, and
+      profoundly, widely, and multitudinously difficult problems, and it was
+      natural and inevitable that the earlier socialists in the first enthusiasm
+      of their idea should minimise these difficulties, pretend in the fullness
+      of their faith that partial answers to objections were complete answers,
+      and display the common weaknesses of honest propaganda the whole world
+      over. Socialism is now old enough to know better. Few modern socialists
+      present their faith as a complete panacea, and most are now setting to
+      work in earnest upon these long-shirked preliminary problems of human
+      interaction through which the vital problem of a collective head and brain
+      can alone be approached.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A considerable proportion of the socialist movement remains, as it has
+      been from the first, vaguely democratic. It points to collective ownership
+      with no indication of the administrative scheme it contemplates to realise
+      that intention. Necessarily it remains a formless claim without hands to
+      take hold of the thing it desires. Indeed in a large number of cases it is
+      scarcely more than a resentful consciousness in the expropriated masses of
+      social disintegration. It spends its force very largely in mere revenges
+      upon property as such, attacks simply destructive by reason of the absence
+      of any definite ulterior scheme. It is an ill-equipped and planless
+      belligerent who must destroy whatever he captures because he can neither
+      use nor take away. A council of democratic socialists in possession of
+      London would be as capable of an orderly and sustained administration as
+      the Anabaptists in Munster. But the discomforts and disorders of our
+      present planless system do tend steadily to the development of this crude
+      socialistic spirit in the mass of the proletariat; merely vindictive
+      attacks upon property, sabotage, and the general strike are the logical
+      and inevitable consequences of an uncontrolled concentration of property
+      in a few hands, and such things must and will go on, the deep undertow in
+      the deliquescence of the Normal Social Life, until a new justice, a new
+      scheme of compensations and satisfactions is attained, or the Normal
+      Social Life re-emerges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fabian socialism was the first systematic attempt to meet the fatal
+      absence of administrative schemes in the earlier socialisms. It can
+      scarcely be regarded now as anything but an interesting failure, but a
+      failure that has all the educational value of a first reconnaissance into
+      unexplored territory. Starting from that attack on aggregating property,
+      which is the common starting-point of all socialist projects, the Fabians,
+      appalled at the obvious difficulties of honest confiscation and an open
+      transfer from private to public hands, conceived the extraordinary idea of
+      <i>filching</i> property for the state. A small body of people of extreme
+      astuteness were to bring about the municipalisation and nationalisation
+      first of this great system of property and then of that, in a manner so
+      artful that the millionaires were to wake up one morning at last, and
+      behold, they would find themselves poor men! For a decade or more Mr.
+      Pease, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. Besant, Dr. Lawson
+      Dodd, and their associates of the London Fabian Society, did pit their
+      wits and ability, or at any rate the wits and ability of their leisure
+      moments, against the embattled capitalists of England and the world, in
+      this complicated and delicate enterprise, without any apparent diminution
+      of the larger accumulations of wealth. But in addition they developed
+      another side of Fabianism, still more subtle, which professed to be a kind
+      of restoration in kind of property to the proletariat and in this
+      direction they were more successful. A dexterous use, they decided, was to
+      be made of the Poor Law, the public health authority, the education
+      authority, and building regulations and so forth, to create, so to speak,
+      a communism of the lower levels. The mass of people whom the forces of
+      change had expropriated were to be given a certain minimum of food,
+      shelter, education, and sanitation, and this, the socialists were assured,
+      could be used as the thin end of the wedge towards a complete communism.
+      The minimum, once established, could obviously be raised continually until
+      either everybody had what they needed, or the resources of society gave
+      out and set a limit to the process.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This second method of attack brought the Fabian movement into co-operation
+      with a large amount of benevolent and constructive influence outside the
+      socialist ranks altogether. Few wealthy people really grudge the poor a
+      share of the necessities of life, and most are quite willing to assist in
+      projects for such a distribution. But while these schemes naturally
+      involved a very great amount of regulation and regimentation of the
+      affairs of the poor, the Fabian Society fell away more and more from its
+      associated proposals for the socialisation of the rich. The Fabian project
+      changed steadily in character until at last it ceased to be in any sense
+      antagonistic to wealth as such. If the lion did not exactly lie down with
+      the lamb, at any rate the man with the gun and the alleged social mad dog
+      returned very peaceably together. The Fabian hunt was up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Great financiers contributed generously to a School of Economics that had
+      been founded with moneys left to the Fabian Society by earlier enthusiasts
+      for socialist propaganda and education. It remained for Mr. Belloc to
+      point the moral of the whole development with a phrase, to note that
+      Fabianism no longer aimed at the socialisation of the whole community, but
+      only at the socialisation of the poor. The first really complete project
+      for a new social order to replace the Normal Social Life was before the
+      world, and this project was the compulsory regimentation of the workers
+      and the complete state control of labour under a new plutocracy. Our
+      present chaos was to be organised into a Servile State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now to many of us who found the general spirit of the socialist movement
+      at least hopeful and attractive and sympathetic, this would be an almost
+      tragic conclusion, did we believe that Fabianism was anything more than
+      the first experiment in planning&mdash;and one almost inevitably shallow
+      and presumptuous&mdash;of the long series that may be necessary before a
+      clear light breaks upon the road humanity must follow. But we decline to
+      be forced by this one intellectual fiasco towards the <i>laissez faire</i>
+      of the Individualist and the Marxist, or to accept the Normal Social Life
+      with its atmosphere of hens and cows and dung, its incessant toil, its
+      servitude of women, and its endless repetitions as the only tolerable life
+      conceivable for the bulk of mankind&mdash;as the ultimate life, that is,
+      of mankind. With less arrogance and confidence, but it may be with a
+      firmer faith, we declare that we believe a more spacious social order than
+      any that exists or ever has existed, a Peace of the World in which there
+      is an almost universal freedom, health, happiness, and well-being and
+      which contains the seeds of a still greater future, is possible to
+      mankind. We propose to begin again with the recognition of those same
+      difficulties the Fabians first realised. But we do not propose to organise
+      a society, form a group for the control of the two chief political
+      parties, bring about "socialism" in twenty-five years, or do anything
+      beyond contributing in our place and measure to that constructive
+      discussion whose real magnitude we now begin to realise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have faith in a possible future, but it is a faith that makes the
+      quality of that future entirely dependent upon the strength and clearness
+      of purpose that this present time can produce. We do not believe the
+      greater social state is inevitable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there is, we hold, a certain qualified inevitability about this
+      greater social state because we believe any social state not affording a
+      general contentment, a general freedom, and a general and increasing
+      fullness of life, must sooner or later collapse and disintegrate again,
+      and revert more or less completely to the Normal Social Life, and because
+      we believe the Normal Social Life is itself thick-sown with the seeds of
+      fresh beginnings. The Normal Social Life has never at any time been
+      absolutely permanent, always it has carried within itself the germs of
+      enterprise and adventure and exchanges that finally attack its stability.
+      The superimposed social order of to-day, such as it is, with its huge
+      development of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the later Fabians
+      to fix this state of affairs in an organised form and render it plausibly
+      tolerable, seem also doomed to accumulate catastrophic tensions.
+      Bureaucratic schemes for establishing the regular lifelong subordination
+      of a labouring class, enlivened though they may be by frequent inspection,
+      disciplinary treatment during seasons of unemployment, compulsory
+      temperance, free medical attendance, and a cheap and shallow elementary
+      education fail to satisfy the restless cravings in the heart of man. They
+      are cravings that even the baffling methods of the most ingeniously worked
+      Conciliation Boards cannot permanently restrain. The drift of any Servile
+      State must be towards a class revolt, paralysing sabotage and a general
+      strike. The more rigid and complete the Servile State becomes, the more
+      thorough will be its ultimate failure. Its fate is decay or explosion.
+      From its dibris we shall either revert to the Normal Social Life and begin
+      again the long struggle towards that ampler, happier, juster arrangement
+      of human affairs which we of this book, at any rate, believe to be
+      possible, or we shall pass into the twilight of mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This greater social life we put, then, as the only real alternative to the
+      Normal Social Life from which man is continually escaping. For it we do
+      not propose to use the expressions the "socialist state" or "socialism,"
+      because we believe those terms have now by constant confused use become so
+      battered and bent and discoloured by irrelevant associations as to be
+      rather misleading than expressive. We propose to use the term The Great
+      State to express this ideal of a social system no longer localised, no
+      longer immediately tied to and conditioned by the cultivation of the land,
+      world-wide in its interests and outlook and catholic in its tolerance and
+      sympathy, a system of great individual freedom with a universal
+      understanding among its citizens of a collective thought and purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the difficulties that lie in the way of humanity in its complex and
+      toilsome journey through the coming centuries towards this Great State are
+      fundamentally difficulties of adaptation and adjustment. To no conceivable
+      social state is man inherently fitted: he is a creature of jealousy and
+      suspicion, unstable, restless, acquisitive, aggressive, intractable, and
+      of a most subtle and nimble dishonesty. Moreover, he is imaginative,
+      adventurous, and inventive. His nature and instincts are as much in
+      conflict with the necessary restrictions and subjugation of the Normal
+      Social Life as they are likely to be with any other social net that
+      necessity may weave about him. But the Normal Social Life has this
+      advantage that it has a vast accumulated moral tradition and a minutely
+      worked-out material method. All the fundamental institutions have arisen
+      in relation to it and are adapted to its conditions. To revert to it after
+      any phase of social chaos and distress is and will continue for many years
+      to be the path of least resistance for perplexed humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This conception of the Great State, on the other hand, is still altogether
+      unsubstantial. It is a project as dream-like to-day as electric lighting,
+      electric traction, or aviation would have been in the year 1850. In 1850 a
+      man reasonably conversant with the physical science of his time could have
+      declared with a very considerable confidence that, given a certain measure
+      of persistence and social security, these things were more likely to be
+      attained than not in the course of the next century. But such a prophecy
+      was conditional on the preliminary accumulation of a considerable amount
+      of knowledge, on many experiments and failures. Had the world of 1850, by
+      some wave of impulse, placed all its resources in the hands of the ablest
+      scientific man alive, and asked him to produce a practicable paying
+      electric vehicle before 1852, at best he would have produced some clumsy,
+      curious toy, more probably he would have failed altogether; and,
+      similarly, if the whole population of the world came to the present writer
+      and promised meekly to do whatever it was told, we should find ourselves
+      still very largely at a loss in our project for a millennium. Yet just as
+      nearly every man at work upon Voltaic electricity in 1850 knew that he was
+      preparing for electric traction, so do I know quite certainly, in spite of
+      a whole row of unsolved problems before me, that I am working towards the
+      Great State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me briefly recapitulate the main problems which have to be attacked in
+      the attempt to realise the outline of the Great State. At the base of the
+      whole order there must be some method of agricultural production, and if
+      the agricultural labourer and cottager and the ancient life of the small
+      householder on the holding, a life laborious, prolific, illiterate,
+      limited, and in immediate contact with the land used, is to recede and
+      disappear it must recede and disappear before methods upon a much larger
+      scale, employing wholesale machinery and involving great economies. It is
+      alleged by modern writers that the permanent residence of the cultivator
+      in close relation to his ground is a legacy from the days of cumbrous and
+      expensive transit, that the great proportion of farm work is seasonal, and
+      that a migration to and fro between rural and urban conditions would be
+      entirely practicable in a largely planned community. The agricultural
+      population could move out of town into an open-air life as the spring
+      approached, and return for spending, pleasure, and education as the days
+      shortened. Already something of this sort occurs under extremely
+      unfavourable conditions in the movement of the fruit and hop pickers from
+      the east end of London into Kent, but that is a mere hint of the extended
+      picnic which a broadly planned cultivation might afford. A fully developed
+      civilisation, employing machines in the hands of highly skilled men, will
+      minimise toil to the very utmost, no man will shove where a machine can
+      shove, or carry where a machine can carry; but there will remain, more
+      particularly in the summer, a vast amount of hand operations, invigorating
+      and even attractive to the urban population Given short hours, good pay,
+      and all the jolly amusement in the evening camp that a free, happy, and
+      intelligent people will develop for themselves, and there will be little
+      difficulty about this particular class of work to differentiate it from
+      any other sort of necessary labour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One passes, therefore, with no definite transition from the root problem
+      of agricultural production in the Great State to the wider problem of
+      labour in general.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A glance at the countryside conjures up a picture of extensive tracts
+      being cultivated on a wholesale scale, of skilled men directing great
+      ploughing, sowing, and reaping plants, steering cattle and sheep about
+      carefully designed enclosures, constructing channels and guiding sewage
+      towards its proper destination on the fields, and then of added crowds of
+      genial people coming out to spray trees and plants, pick and sort and pack
+      fruits. But who are these people? Why are they in particular doing this
+      for the community? Is our Great State still to have a majority of people
+      glad to do commonplace work for mediocre wages, and will there be other
+      individuals who will ride by on the roads, sympathetically, no doubt, but
+      with a secret sense of superiority? So one opens the general problem of
+      the organisation for labour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am careful here to write "for labour" and not "of Labour," because it is
+      entirely against the spirit of the Great State that any section of the
+      people should be set aside as a class to do most of the monotonous,
+      laborious, and uneventful things for the community. That is practically
+      the present arrangement, and that, with a quickened sense of the need of
+      breaking people in to such a life, is the ideal of the bureaucratic
+      Servile State to which, in common with the Conservators, we are bitterly
+      opposed. And here I know I am at my most difficult, most speculative, and
+      most revolutionary point. We who look to the Great State as the present
+      aim of human progress believe a state may solve its economic problem
+      without any section whatever of the community being condemned to lifelong
+      labour. And contemporary events, the phenomena of recent strikes, the
+      phenomena of sabotage, carry out the suggestion that in a community where
+      nearly everyone reads extensively travels about, sees the charm and
+      variety in the lives of prosperous and leisurely people, no class is going
+      to submit permanently to modern labour conditions without extreme
+      resistance, even after the most elaborate Labour Conciliation schemes and
+      social minima are established Things are altogether too stimulating to the
+      imagination nowadays. Of all impossible social dreams that belief in
+      tranquillised and submissive and virtuous Labour is the wildest of all. No
+      sort of modern men will stand it. They will as a class do any vivid and
+      disastrous thing rather than stand it. Even the illiterate peasant will
+      only endure lifelong toil under the stimulus of private ownership and with
+      the consolations of religion; and the typical modern worker has neither
+      the one nor the other. For a time, indeed, for a generation or so even, a
+      labour mass may be fooled or coerced, but in the end it will break out
+      against its subjection, even if it breaks out to a general social
+      catastrophe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have, in fact, to invent for the Great State, if we are to suppose any
+      Great State at all, an economic method without any specific labour class.
+      If we cannot do so, we had better throw ourselves in with the Conservators
+      forthwith, for they are right and we are absurd. Adhesion to the
+      conception of the Great State involves adhesion to the belief that the
+      amount of regular labour, skilled and unskilled, required to produce
+      everything necessary for everyone living in its highly elaborate
+      civilisation may, under modern conditions, with the help of scientific
+      economy and power-producing machinery, be reduced to so small a number of
+      working hours per head in proportion to the average life of the citizen,
+      as to be met as regards the greater moiety of it by the payment of wages
+      over and above the gratuitous share of each individual in the general
+      output; and as regards the residue, a residue of rough, disagreeable, and
+      monotonous operations, by some form of conscription, which will demand a
+      year or so, let us say, of each person's life for the public service. If
+      we reflect that in the contemporary state there is already food, shelter,
+      and clothing of a sort for everyone, in spite of the fact that enormous
+      numbers of people do no productive work at all because they are too well
+      off, that great numbers are out of work, great numbers by bad nutrition
+      and training incapable of work, and that an enormous amount of the work
+      actually done is the overlapping production of competitive trade and work
+      upon such politically necessary but socially useless things as
+      Dreadnoughts, it becomes clear that the absolutely unavoidable labour in a
+      modern community and its ratio to the available vitality must be of very
+      small account indeed. But all this has still to be worked out even in the
+      most general terms. An intelligent science of economics should afford
+      standards and technicalities and systematised facts upon which to base an
+      estimate. The point was raised a quarter of a century ago by Morris in his
+      "News from Nowhere," and indeed it was already discussed by More in his
+      "Utopia." Our contemporary economics is, however, still a foolish,
+      pretentious pseudo-science, a festering mass of assumptions about buying
+      and selling and wages-paying, and one would as soon consult Bradshaw or
+      the works of Dumas as our orthodox professors of economics for any light
+      upon this fundamental matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, we believe that there is a real disposition to work in human
+      beings, and that in a well-equipped community, in which no one was under
+      an unavoidable urgency to work, the greater proportion of productive
+      operations could be made sufficiently attractive to make them desirable
+      occupations. As for the irreducible residue of undesirable toil, I owe to
+      my friend the late Professor William James this suggestion of a general
+      conscription and a period of public service for everyone, a suggestion
+      which greatly occupied his thoughts during the last years of his life. He
+      was profoundly convinced of the high educational and disciplinary value of
+      universal compulsory military service, and of the need of something more
+      than a sentimental ideal of duty in public life. He would have had the
+      whole population taught in the schools and prepared for this year (or
+      whatever period it had to be) of patient and heroic labour, the men for
+      the mines, the fisheries, the sanitary services, railway routine, the
+      women for hospital, and perhaps educational work, and so forth. He
+      believed such a service would permeate the whole state with a sense of
+      civic obligation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But behind all these conceivable triumphs of scientific adjustment and
+      direction lies the infinitely greater difficulty on our way to the Great
+      State, the difficulty of direction. What sort of people are going to
+      distribute the work of the community, decide what is or is not to be done,
+      determine wages, initiate enterprises; and under what sort of criticism,
+      checks, and controls are they going to do this delicate and extensive
+      work? With this we open the whole problem of government, administration
+      and officialdom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marxist and the democratic socialist generally shirk this riddle
+      altogether; the Fabian conception of a bureaucracy, official to the extent
+      of being a distinct class and cult, exists only as a starting-point for
+      healthy repudiations. Whatever else may be worked out in the subtler
+      answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than that the
+      necessary machinery of government must be elaborately organised to prevent
+      the development of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy, tacit or
+      expressed, against the normal man. Quite apart from the danger of
+      unsympathetic and fatally irritating government there can be little or no
+      doubt that the method of making men officials for life is quite the worst
+      way of getting official duties done. Officialdom is a species of
+      incompetence. This rather priggish, teachable, and well-behaved sort of
+      boy, who is attracted by the prospect of assured income and a pension to
+      win his way into the Civil Service, and who then by varied assiduities
+      rises to a sort of timidly vindictive importance, is the last person to
+      whom we would willingly entrust the vital interests of a nation. We want
+      people who know about life at large, who will come to the public service
+      seasoned by experience, not people who have specialised and acquired that
+      sort of knowledge which is called, in much the same spirit of
+      qualification as one speaks of German Silver, Expert Knowledge. It is
+      clear our public servants and officials must be so only for their periods
+      of service. They must be taught by life, and not "trained" by pedagogues.
+      In every continuing job there is a time when one is crude and blundering,
+      a time, the best time, when one is full of the freshness and happiness of
+      doing well, and a time when routine has largely replaced the stimulus of
+      novelty. The Great State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in
+      occupation as a proper circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will
+      value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite
+      omniscience of the stale official. On that score of the necessity or
+      versatility, if on no other score, I am flatly antagonistic to the
+      conceptions of "Guild Socialism" which have arisen recently out of the
+      impact of Mr. Penty and Syndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence of Mr.
+      Orage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And since the Fabian socialists have created a widespread belief that in
+      their projected state every man will be necessarily a public servant or a
+      public pupil because the state will be the only employer and the only
+      educator, it is necessary to point out that the Great State presupposes
+      neither the one nor the other. It is a form of liberty and not a form of
+      enslavement. We agree with the older forms of socialism in supposing an
+      initial proprietary independence in every citizen. The citizen is a
+      shareholder in the state. Above that and after that, he works if he
+      chooses. But if he likes to live on his minimum and do nothing&mdash;though
+      such a type of character is scarcely conceivable&mdash;he can. His earning
+      is his own surplus. Above the basal economics of the Great State we assume
+      with confidence there will be a huge surplus of free spending upon
+      extra-collective ends. Public organisations, for example, may distribute
+      impartially and possibly even print and make ink and paper for the
+      newspapers in the Great State, but they will certainly not own them. Only
+      doctrine-driven men have ever ventured to think they would. Nor will the
+      state control writers and artists, for example, nor the stage&mdash;though
+      it may build and own theatres&mdash;the tailor, the dressmaker, the
+      restaurant cook, an enormous multitude of other busy
+      workers-for-preferences. In the Great State of the future, as in the life
+      of the more prosperous classes of to-day, the greater proportion of
+      occupations and activities will be private and free.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would like to underline in the most emphatic way that it is possible to
+      have this Great State, essentially socialistic, owning and running the
+      land and all the great public services, sustaining everybody in absolute
+      freedom at a certain minimum of comfort and well-being, and still leaving
+      most of the interests, amusements, and adornments of the individual life,
+      and all sorts of collective concerns, social and political discussion,
+      religious worship, philosophy, and the like to the free personal
+      initiatives of entirely unofficial people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This still leaves the problem of systematic knowledge and research, and
+      all the associated problems of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual
+      initiative to be worked out in detail; but at least it dispels the
+      nightmare of a collective mind organised as a branch of the civil service,
+      with authors, critics, artists, scientific investigators appointed in a
+      phrensy of wire-pulling&mdash;as nowadays the British state appoints its
+      bishops for the care of its collective soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me now indicate how these general views affect the problem of family
+      organisation and the problem of women's freedom. In the Normal Social Life
+      the position of women is easily defined. They are subordinated but
+      important. The citizenship rests with the man, and the woman's relation to
+      the community as a whole is through a man. But within that limitation her
+      functions as mother, wife, and home-maker are cardinal. It is one of the
+      entirely unforeseen consequences that have arisen from the decay of the
+      Normal Social Life and its autonomous home that great numbers of women
+      while still subordinate have become profoundly unimportant They have
+      ceased to a very large extent to bear children, they have dropped most of
+      their home-making arts, they no longer nurse nor educate such children as
+      they have, and they have taken on no new functions that compensate for
+      these dwindling activities of the domestic interior. That subjugation
+      which is a vital condition to the Normal Social Life does not seem to be
+      necessary to the Great State. It may or it may not be necessary. And here
+      we enter upon the most difficult of all our problems. The whole spirit of
+      the Great State is against any avoidable subjugation; but the whole spirit
+      of that science which will animate the Great State forbids us to ignore
+      woman's functional and temperamental differences. A new status has still
+      to be invented for women, a Feminine Citizenship differing in certain
+      respects from the normal masculine citizenship. Its conditions remain to
+      be worked out. We have indeed to work out an entire new system of
+      relations between men and women, that will be free from servitude,
+      aggression, provocation, or parasitism. The public Endowment of Motherhood
+      as such may perhaps be the first broad suggestion of the quality of this
+      new status. A new type of family, a mutual alliance in the place of a
+      subjugation, is perhaps the most startling of all the conceptions which
+      confront us directly we turn ourselves definitely towards the Great State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as our conception of the Great State grows, so we shall begin to
+      realise the nature of the problem of transition, the problem of what we
+      may best do in the confusion of the present time to elucidate and render
+      practicable this new phase of human organisation. Of one thing there can
+      be no doubt, that whatever increases thought and knowledge moves towards
+      our goal; and equally certain is it that nothing leads thither that
+      tampers with the freedom of spirit, the independence of soul in common men
+      and women. In many directions, therefore, the believer in the Great State
+      will display a jealous watchfulness of contemporary developments rather
+      than a premature constructiveness. We must watch wealth; but quite as
+      necessary it is to watch the legislator, who mistakes propaganda for
+      progress and class exasperation to satisfy class vindictiveness for
+      construction. Supremely important is it to keep discussion open, to
+      tolerate no limitation on the freedom of speech, writing, art and book
+      distribution, and to sustain the utmost liberty of criticism upon all
+      contemporary institutions and processes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This briefly is the programme of problems and effort to which my idea of
+      the Great State, as the goal of contemporary progress, leads me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The diagram on p. 131 shows compactly the gist of the preceding
+      discussion; it gives the view of social development upon which I base all
+      my political conceptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE NORMAL SOCIAL LIFE
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+produces an increasing surplus of energy and opportunity, more
+particularly under modern conditions of scientific organisation and
+power production; and this through the operation of rent and of usury
+tends to
+                                    |
+                     |&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;|
+               (a) release         and       (b) expropriate
+                     |                              |
+      an increasing proportion of the population to become:
+                     |                              |
+  (<i>a</i>) A LEISURE CLASS       and      (<i>b</i>) A LABOUR CLASS
+       under no urgent compulsion           divorced from the land and
+                 to work                   living upon uncertain wages
+   |3       |2       |1                             |1       2      3|
+   |        |   which may degenerate     degenerate          |       |
+   |        |   into a waster class      into a sweated,     |       |
+   |        |                \           overworked,         |       |
+   |        |                 \          violently           |       |
+   |        |                  \         resentful           |       |
+   |        |                   \        and destructive     |       |
+   |        |                    \       rebel class         |       |
+   |        |                     \       /                  |       |
+   |        |                  and produce a                 |       |
+   |        |                  SOCIAL DEBACLE                |       |
+   |        |                                                |       |
+   |   which may become                           which may become   |
+   |   a Governing                                the controlled     |
+   |   Class (with waster                         regimented         |
+   |   elements) in                               and disciplined    |
+   |   an unprogressive                           Labour Class of    |
+   |   Bureaucratic        &lt;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;->    an unprogressive   |
+   |   SERVILE STATE                              Bureaucratic       |
+   |                                              SERVILE STATE      |
+   |                                                                 |
+  which may become                                    which may be
+  the whole community                                 rendered needless
+  of the GREAT STATE                                  by a universal
+  working under various                               compulsory year
+  motives and inducements                             or so of labour
+  but not constantly,                                 service together
+  nor permanently                                     with a scientific
+  nor unwillingly                                     organisation
+                                                      of production,
+                                                      and so reabsorbed
+                                                      by re-endowment
+                                                      into the Leisure
+                                                      Class of the
+                                                      GREAT STATE
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE COMMON SENSE OF WARFARE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 1
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CONSCRIPTION
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I want to say as compactly as possible why I do not believe that
+      conscription would increase the military efficiency of this country, and
+      why I think it might be a disastrous step for this country to take.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By conscription I mean the compulsory enlistment for a term of service in
+      the Army of the whole manhood of the country. And I am writing now from
+      the point of view merely of military effectiveness. The educational value
+      of a universal national service, the idea which as a Socialist I support
+      very heartily, of making every citizen give a year or so of his life to
+      our public needs, are matters quite outside my present discussion. What I
+      am writing about now is this idea that the country can be strengthened for
+      war by making every man in it a bit of a soldier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I want the reader to be perfectly clear about the position I assume
+      with regard to war preparations generally. I am not pleading for peace
+      when there is no peace; this country has been constantly threatened during
+      the past decade, and is threatened now by gigantic hostile preparations;
+      it is our common interest to be and to keep at the maximum of military
+      efficiency possible to us. My case is not merely that conscription will
+      not contribute to that, but that it would be a monstrous diversion of our
+      energy and emotion and material resources from the things that need
+      urgently to be done. It would be like a boxer filling his arms with empty
+      boxing-gloves and then rushing&mdash;his face protruding over the armful&mdash;into
+      the fray.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me make my attack on this prevalent and increasing superstition of the
+      British need for conscription in two lines, one following the other. For,
+      firstly, it is true that Britain at the present time is no more capable of
+      creating such a conscript army as France or Germany possesses in the next
+      ten years than she is of covering her soil with a tropical forest, and,
+      secondly, it is equally true that if she had such an army it would not be
+      of the slightest use to her. For the conscript armies in which Europe
+      still so largely believes are only of use against conscript armies and
+      adversaries who will consent to play the rules of the German war game;
+      they are, if we chose to determine they shall be, if we chose to deal with
+      them as they should be dealt with, as out of date as a Roman legion or a
+      Zulu impi.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, first, as to the impossibility of getting our great army into
+      existence. All those people who write and talk so glibly in favour of
+      conscription seem to forget that to take a common man, and more
+      particularly a townsman, clap him into a uniform and put a rifle in his
+      hand does not make a soldier. He has to be taught not only the use of his
+      weapons, but the methods of a strange and unfamiliar life out of doors; he
+      has to be not simply drilled, but accustomed to the difficult modern
+      necessities of open order fighting, of taking cover, of entrenchment, and
+      he has to have created within him, so that it will stand the shock of
+      seeing men killed round about him, confidence in himself, in his officers,
+      and the methods and weapons of his side. Body, mind, and imagination have
+      all to be trained&mdash;and they need trainers. The conversion of a
+      thousand citizens into anything better than a sheep-like militia demands
+      the enthusiastic services of scores of able and experienced instructors
+      who know what war is; the creation of a universal army demands the
+      services of many scores of thousands of not simply "old soldiers," but
+      keen, expert, modern-minded <i>officers</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without these officers our citizen army would be a hydra without heads.
+      And we haven't these officers. We haven't a tithe of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We haven't these officers, and we can't make them in a hurry. It takes at
+      least five years to make an officer who knows his trade. It needs a
+      special gift, in addition to that knowledge, to make a man able to impart
+      it. And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter, because
+      India and our other vast areas of service and opportunity overseas drain
+      away a large proportion of just those able and educated men who would in
+      other countries gravitate towards the army. Such small wealth of officers
+      as we have&mdash;and I am quite prepared to believe that the officers we
+      have are among the very best in the world&mdash;are scarcely enough to go
+      round our present supply of private soldiers. And the best and most
+      brilliant among this scanty supply are being drawn upon more and more for
+      aerial work, and for all that increasing quantity of highly specialised
+      services which are manifestly destined to be the real fighting forces of
+      the future. We cannot spare the best of our officers for training
+      conscripts; we shall get the dismallest results from the worst of them;
+      and so even if it were a vital necessity for our country to have an army
+      of all its manhood now, we could not have it, and it would be a mere last
+      convulsion to attempt to make it with the means at our disposal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that brings me to my second contention, which is that we do not want
+      such an army. I believe that the vast masses of men in uniform maintained
+      by the Continental Powers at the present time are enormously overrated as
+      fighting machines. I see Germany in the likeness of a boxer with a mailed
+      fist as big as and rather heavier than its body, and I am convinced that
+      when the moment comes for that mailed fist to be lifted, the whole
+      disproportionate system will topple over. The military ascendancy of the
+      future lies with the country that dares to experiment most, that
+      experiments best, and meanwhile keeps its actual fighting force fit and
+      admirable and small and flexible. The experience of war during the last
+      fifteen years has been to show repeatedly the enormous defensive power of
+      small, scientifically handled bodies of men. These huge conscript armies
+      are made up not of masses of military muscle, but of a huge proportion of
+      military fat. Their one way of fighting will be to fall upon an antagonist
+      with all their available weight, and if he is mobile and dexterous enough
+      to decline that issue of adiposity they will become a mere embarrassment
+      to their own people. Modern weapons and modern contrivance are continually
+      decreasing the number of men who can be employed efficiently upon a length
+      of front. I doubt if there is any use for more than 400,000 men upon the
+      whole Franco-Belgian frontier at the present time. Such an army, properly
+      supplied, could&mdash;so far as terrestrial forces are concerned&mdash;hold
+      that frontier against any number of assailants. The bigger the forces
+      brought against it the sooner the exhaustion of the attacking power. Now,
+      it is for employment upon that frontier, and for no other conceivable
+      purpose in the world, that Great Britain is asked to create a gigantic
+      conscript army.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if too big an army is likely to be a mere encumbrance in war, it is
+      perhaps even a still graver blunder to maintain one during that conflict
+      of preparation which is at present the European substitute for actual
+      hostilities. It consumes. It produces nothing. It not only eats and drinks
+      and wears out its clothes and withdraws men from industry, but under the
+      stress of invention it needs constantly to be re-armed and freshly
+      equipped at an expenditure proportionate to its size. So long as the
+      conflict of preparation goes on, then the bigger the army your adversary
+      maintains under arms the bigger is his expenditure and the less his
+      earning power. The less the force you employ to keep your adversary
+      over-armed, and the longer you remain at peace with him while he is
+      over-armed, the greater is your advantage. There is only one profitable
+      use for any army, and that is victorious conflict. Every army that is not
+      engaged in victorious conflict is an organ of national expenditure, an
+      exhausting growth in the national body. And for Great Britain an attempt
+      to create a conscript army would involve the very maximum of moral and
+      material exhaustion with the minimum of military efficiency. It would be a
+      disastrous waste of resources that we need most urgently for other things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the popular imagination the Dreadnought is still the one instrument of
+      naval war. We count our strength in Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts,
+      and so long as we are spending our national resources upon them faster
+      than any other country, if we sink at least #160 for every #100 sunk in
+      these obsolescent monsters by Germany, we have a reassuring sense of
+      keeping ahead and being thoroughly safe. This confidence in big, very
+      expensive battleships is, I believe and hope, shared by the German
+      Government and by Europe generally, but it is, nevertheless, a very
+      unreasonable confidence, and it may easily lead us into the most tragic of
+      national disillusionments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We of the general public are led to suppose that the next naval war&mdash;if
+      ever we engage in another naval war&mdash;will begin with a decisive fleet
+      action. The plan of action is presented with an alluring simplicity. Our
+      adversary will come out to us, in a ratio of 10 to 16, or in some ratio
+      still more advantageous to us, according as our adversary happens to be
+      this Power or that Power, there will be some tremendous business with guns
+      and torpedoes, and our admirals will return victorious to discuss the
+      discipline and details of the battle and each other's little weaknesses in
+      the monthly magazines. This is a desirable but improbable anticipation. No
+      hostile Power is in the least likely to send out any battleships at all
+      against our invincible Dreadnoughts. They will promenade the seas, always
+      in the ratio of 16 or more to 10, looking for fleets securely tucked away
+      out of reach. They will not, of course, go too near the enemy's coast, on
+      account of mines, and, meanwhile, our cruisers will hunt the enemy's
+      commerce into port.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then other things will happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The enemy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike devices against our
+      capital ships. Unless he is a lunatic, he will prove to be much stronger
+      in reality than he is on paper in the matter of submarines, torpedo-boats,
+      waterplanes and aeroplanes. These are things cheap to make and easy to
+      conceal. He will be richly stocked with ingenious devices for getting
+      explosives up to these two million pound triumphs of our naval
+      engineering. On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent about these
+      islands he will have extraordinary chances, and sooner or later, unless we
+      beat him thoroughly in the air above and in the waters beneath, for
+      neither of which proceedings we are prepared, some of these chances will
+      come off, and we shall lose a Dreadnought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and stranded Zeppelin or
+      so enlivens the quiet of the English countryside by coming down and
+      capitulating. It will be a trifling countershock to wing an aeroplane or
+      so, or blow a torpedo-boat out of the water. Our Dreadnoughts will cease
+      to be a source of unmitigated confidence A second battleship disaster will
+      excite the Press extremely. A third will probably lead to a retirement of
+      the battle fleet to some east coast harbour, a refuge liable to
+      aeroplanes, or to the west coast of Ireland&mdash;and the real naval war,
+      which, as I have argued in an earlier chapter, will be a war of
+      destroyers, submarines and hydroplanes, will begin. Incidentally a
+      commerce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement of our fleet to
+      raid our trade routes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We shall then realise that the actual naval weapons are these smaller
+      weapons, and especially the destroyer, the submarine, and the waterplane&mdash;the
+      waterplane most of all, because of its possibilities of a comparative
+      bigness&mdash;in the hands of competent and daring men. And I find myself,
+      as a patriotic Englishman, more and more troubled by doubts whether we are
+      as certainly superior to any possible adversary in these essential things
+      as we are in the matter of Dreadnoughts. I find myself awake at nights,
+      after a day much agitated by a belligerent Press, wondering whether the
+      real Empire of the Sea may not even now have slipped out of our hands
+      while our attention has been fixed on our stately procession of giant
+      warships, while our country has been in a dream, hypnotised by the
+      Dreadnought idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some years there seems to have been a complete arrest of the British
+      imagination in naval and military matters. That declining faculty, never a
+      very active or well-exercised one, staggered up to the conception of a
+      Dreadnought, and seems now to have sat down for good. Its reply to every
+      demand upon it has been "more Dreadnoughts." The future, as we British
+      seem to see it, is an avenue of Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts and
+      Super-Super-Dreadnoughts, getting bigger and bigger in a kind of inverted
+      perspective. But the ascendancy of fleets of great battleships in naval
+      warfare, like the phase of huge conscript armies upon land, draws to its
+      close. The progress of invention makes both the big ship and the army
+      crowd more and more vulnerable and less and less effective. A new phase of
+      warfare opens beyond the vista of our current programmes. Smaller, more
+      numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft and contrivances, manned
+      by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimately take the place of those
+      massivenesses. We are entering upon a period in which the invention of
+      methods and material for war is likely to be more rapid and diversified
+      than it has ever been before, and the question of what we have been doing
+      behind the splendid line of our Dreadnoughts to meet the demands of this
+      new phase is one of supreme importance. Knowing, as I do, the imaginative
+      indolence of my countrymen, it is a question I face with something very
+      near to dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is one that has to be faced. The question that should occupy our
+      directing minds now is no longer "How can we get more Dreadnoughts?" but
+      "What have we to follow the Dreadnought?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the Power that has most nearly guessed the answer to that riddle
+      belongs the future Empire of the Seas. It is interesting to guess for
+      oneself and to speculate upon the possibility of a kind of armoured
+      mother-ship for waterplanes and submarines and torpedo craft, but
+      necessarily that would be a mere journalistic and amateurish guessing. I
+      am not guessing, but asking urgent questions. What force, what council,
+      how many imaginative and inventive men has the country got at the present
+      time employed not casually but professionally in anticipating the new
+      strategy, the new tactics, the new material, the new training that
+      invention is so rapidly rendering necessary? I have the gravest doubts
+      whether we are doing anything systematic at all in this way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, it is the tremendous seriousness of this deficiency to which I want
+      to call attention. Great Britain has in her armour a gap more dangerous
+      and vital than any mere numerical insufficiency of men or ships. She is
+      short of minds. Behind its strength of current armaments to-day, a
+      strength that begins to evaporate and grow obsolete from the very moment
+      it comes into being, a country needs more and more this profounder
+      strength of intellectual and creative activity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This country most of all, which was left so far behind in the production
+      of submarines, airships and aeroplanes, must be made to realise the folly
+      of its trust in established things. Each new thing we take up more
+      belatedly and reluctantly than its predecessor. The time is not far
+      distant when we shall be "caught" lagging unless we change all this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We need a new arm to our service; we need it urgently, and we shall need
+      it more and more, and that arm is Research. We need to place inquiry and
+      experiment upon a new footing altogether, to enlist for them and organise
+      them, to secure the pick of our young chemists and physicists and
+      engineers, and to get them to work systematically upon the anticipation
+      and preparation of our future war equipment. We need a service of
+      invention to recover our lost lead in these matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it is because I feel so keenly the want of such a service, and the
+      want of great sums of money for it, that I deplore the disposition to
+      waste millions upon the hasty creation of a universal service army and
+      upon excessive Dreadnoughting. I am convinced that we are spending upon
+      the things of yesterday the money that is sorely needed for the things of
+      to-morrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With our eyes averted obstinately from the future we are backing towards
+      disaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the present armament competition there are certain considerations that
+      appear to be almost universally overlooked, and which tend to modify our
+      views profoundly of what should be done. Ultimately they will affect our
+      entire expenditure upon war preparation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into two classes:
+      there is expenditure upon things that have a diminishing value, things
+      that grow old-fashioned and wear out, such as fortifications, ships, guns,
+      and ammunition, and expenditure upon things that have a permanent and even
+      growing value, such as organised technical research, military and naval
+      experiment, and the education and increase of a highly trained class of
+      war experts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I want to suggest that we are spending too much money in the former and
+      not enough in the latter direction We are buying enormous quantities of
+      stuff that will be old iron in twenty years' time, and we are starving
+      ourselves of that which cannot be bought or made in a hurry, and upon
+      which the strength of nations ultimately rests altogether; we are failing
+      to get and maintain a sufficiency of highly educated and developed men
+      inspired by a tradition of service and efficiency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt we must be armed to-day, but every penny we divert from
+      men-making and knowledge-making to armament beyond the margin of bare
+      safety is a sacrifice of the future to the present. Every penny we divert
+      from national wealth-making to national weapons means so much less in
+      resources, so much more strain in the years ahead. But a great system of
+      laboratories and experimental stations, a systematic, industrious increase
+      of men of the officer-aviator type, of the research student type, of the
+      engineer type, of the naval-officer type, of the skilled
+      sergeant-instructor type, a methodical development of a common sentiment
+      and a common zeal among such a body of men, is an added strength that
+      grows greater from the moment you call it into being. In our schools and
+      military and naval colleges lies the proper field for expenditure upon
+      preparation for our ultimate triumph in war. All other war preparation is
+      temporary but that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This would be obvious in any case, but what makes insistence upon it
+      peculiarly urgent is the manifestly temporary nature of the present
+      European situation and the fact that within quite a small number of years
+      our war front will be turned in a direction quite other than that to which
+      it faces now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a decade and more all Western Europe has been threatened by German
+      truculence; the German, inflamed by the victories of 1870 and 1871, has
+      poured out his energy in preparation for war by sea and land, and it has
+      been the difficult task of France and England to keep the peace with him.
+      The German has been the provocator and leader of all modern armaments. But
+      that is not going on. It is already more than half over. If we can avert
+      war with Germany for twenty years, we shall never have to fight Germany.
+      In twenty years' time we shall be talking no more of sending troops to
+      fight side by side on the frontier of France; we shall be talking of
+      sending troops to fight side by side with French and Germans on the
+      frontiers of Poland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the justification of that prophecy is a perfectly plain one. The
+      German has filled up his country, his birth-rate falls, and the very
+      vigour of his military and naval preparations, by raising the cost of
+      living, hurries it down. His birth-rate falls as ours and the Frenchman's
+      falls, because he is nearing his maximum of population It is an inevitable
+      consequence of his geographical conditions. But eastward of him, from his
+      eastern boundaries to the Pacific, is a country already too populous to
+      conquer, but with possibilities of further expansion that are gigantic.
+      The Slav will be free to increase and multiply for another hundred years.
+      Eastward and southward bristle the Slavs, and behind the Slavs are the
+      colossal possibilities of Asia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even German vanity, even the preposterous ambitions that spring from that
+      brief triumph of Sedan, must awaken at last to these manifest facts, and
+      on the day when Germany is fully awake we may count the Western European
+      Armageddon as "off" and turn our eyes to the greater needs that will arise
+      beyond Germany. The old game will be over and a quite different new game
+      will begin in international relations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During these last few years of worry and bluster across the North Sea we
+      have a little forgotten India in our calculations. As Germany faces round
+      eastward again, as she must do before very long, we shall find India
+      resuming its former central position in our ideas of international
+      politics. With India we may pursue one of two policies: we may keep her
+      divided and inefficient for war, as she is at present, and hold her and
+      own her and defend her as a prize, or we may arm her and assist her
+      development into a group of quasi-independent English-speaking States&mdash;in
+      which case she will become our partner and possibly at last even our
+      senior partner. But that is by the way. What I am pointing out now is that
+      whether we fight Germany or not, a time is drawing near when Germany will
+      cease to be our war objective and we shall cease to be Germany's war
+      objective, and when there will have to be a complete revision of our
+      military and naval equipment in relation to those remoter, vaster Asiatic
+      possibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that possible campaign away there, whatever its particular nature may
+      be, which will be shaping our military and naval policy in the year 1933
+      or thereabouts, will certainly be quite different in its conditions from
+      the possible campaign in Europe and the narrow seas which determines all
+      our preparations now. We cannot contemplate throwing an army of a million
+      British conscripts on to the North-West Frontier of India, and a fleet of
+      Super-Dreadnoughts will be ineffective either in Thibet or the Baltic
+      shallows. All our present stuff, indeed, will be on the scrap-heap then.
+      What will not be on the scrap-heap will be such enterprise and special
+      science and inventive power as we have got together. That is versatile.
+      That is good to have now and that will be good to have then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyone nowadays seems demanding increased expenditure upon war
+      preparation. I will follow the fashion. I will suggest that we have the
+      courage to restrain and even to curtail our monstrous outlay upon war
+      material and that we begin to spend lavishly upon military and naval
+      education and training, upon laboratories and experimental stations, upon
+      chemical and physical research and all that makes knowledge and leading,
+      and that we increase our expenditure upon these things as fast as we can
+      up to ten or twelve millions a year. At present we spend about eighteen
+      and a half millions a year upon education out of our national funds, but
+      fourteen and a half of this, supplemented by about as much again from
+      local sources, is consumed in merely elementary teaching. So that we spend
+      only about four millions a year of public money on every sort of research
+      and education above the simple democratic level. Nearly thirty millions
+      for the foundations and only a seventh for the edifice of will and
+      science! Is it any marvel that we are a badly organised nation, a nation
+      of very widely diffused intelligence and very second-rate guidance and
+      achievement? Is it any marvel that directly we are tested by such a new
+      development as that of aeroplanes or airships we show ourselves in
+      comparison with the more braced-up nations of the Continent backward,
+      unorganised unimaginative, unenterprising?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our supreme want to-day, if we are to continue a belligerent people, is a
+      greater supply of able educated men, versatile men capable of engines, of
+      aviation, of invention, of leading and initiative. We need more
+      laboratories, more scholarships out of the general mass of elementary
+      scholars, a quasi-military discipline in our colleges and a great array of
+      new colleges, a much readier access to instruction in aviation and
+      military and naval practice. And if we are to have national service let us
+      begin with it where it is needed most and where it is least likely to
+      disorganise our social and economic life; let us begin at the top. Let us
+      begin with the educated and propertied classes and exact a couple of
+      years' service in a destroyer or a waterplane, or an airship, or a,
+      research laboratory, or a training camp, from the sons of everybody who,
+      let us say, pays income tax without deductions. Let us mix with these a
+      big proportion&mdash;a proportion we may increase steadily&mdash;of keen
+      scholarship men from the elementary schools. Such a braced-up class as we
+      should create in this way would give us the realities of military power,
+      which are enterprise, knowledge, and invention; and at the same time it
+      would add to and not subtract from the economic wealth of the community
+      Make men; that is the only sane, permanent preparation for war. So we
+      should develop a strength and create a tradition that would not rust nor
+      grow old-fashioned in all the years to come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Circumstances have made me think a good deal at different times about the
+      business of writing novels, and what it means, and is, and may be; and I
+      was a professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. I have been
+      writing novels, or writing about novels, for the last twenty years. It
+      seems only yesterday that I wrote a review&mdash;the first long and
+      appreciative review he had&mdash;of Mr. Joseph Conrad's "Almayer's Folly"
+      in the <i>Saturday Review</i>. When a man has focussed so much of his life
+      upon the novel, it is not reasonable to expect him to take too modest or
+      apologetic a view of it. I consider the novel an important and necessary
+      thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy adjustments and
+      readjustments which is modern civilisation I make very high and wide
+      claims for it. In many directions I do not think we can get along without
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this, I know, is not the usually received opinion. There is, I am
+      aware, the theory that the novel is wholly and solely a means of
+      relaxation. In spite of manifest facts, that was the dominant view of the
+      great period that we now in our retrospective way speak of as the
+      Victorian, and it still survives to this day. It is the man's theory of
+      the novel rather than the woman's. One may call it the Weary Giant theory.
+      The reader is represented as a man, burthened, toiling, worn. He has been
+      in his office from ten to four, with perhaps only two hours' interval at
+      his club for lunch; or he has been playing golf; or he has been waiting
+      about and voting in the House; or he has been fishing; or he has been
+      disputing a point of law; or writing a sermon; or doing one of a thousand
+      other of the grave important things which constitute the substance of a
+      prosperous man's life. Now at last comes the little precious interval of
+      leisure, and the Weary Giant takes up a book. Perhaps he is vexed: he may
+      have been bunkered, his line may have been entangled in the trees, his
+      favourite investment may have slumped, or the judge have had indigestion
+      and been extremely rude to him. He wants to forget the troublesome
+      realities of life. He wants to be taken out of himself, to be cheered,
+      consoled, amused&mdash;above all, amused. He doesn't want ideas, he
+      doesn't want facts; above all, he doesn't want&mdash;<i>Problems</i>. He
+      wants to dream of the bright, thin, gay excitements of a phantom world&mdash;in
+      which he can be hero&mdash;of horses ridden and lace worn and princesses
+      rescued and won. He wants pictures of funny slums, and entertaining
+      paupers, and laughable longshoremen, and kindly impulses making life
+      sweet. He wants romance without its defiance, and humour without its
+      sting; and the business of the novelist, he holds, is to supply this
+      cooling refreshment. That is the Weary Giant theory of the novel. It ruled
+      British criticism up to the period of the Boer war&mdash;and then
+      something happened to quite a lot of us, and it has never completely
+      recovered its old predominance. Perhaps it will; perhaps something else
+      may happen to prevent its ever doing so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both fiction and criticism to-day are in revolt against that tired giant,
+      the prosperous Englishman. I cannot think of a single writer of any
+      distinction to-day, unless it is Mr. W.W. Jacobs, who is content merely to
+      serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from the weary reader
+      being a decently tired giant, we realise that he is only an inexpressibly
+      lax, slovenly and under-trained giant, and we are all out with one accord
+      resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every possible way. And so I
+      will say no more of the idea that the novel is merely a harmless opiate
+      for the vacant hours of prosperous men. As a matter of fact, it never has
+      been, and by its nature I doubt if it ever can be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think that women have ever quite succumbed to the tired giant
+      attitude in their reading. Women are more serious, not only about life,
+      but about books. No type or kind of woman is capable of that lounging,
+      defensive stupidity which is the basis of the tired giant attitude, and
+      all through the early 'nineties, during which the respectable frivolity of
+      Great Britain left its most enduring marks upon our literature, there was
+      a rebel undertow of earnest and aggressive writing and reading, supported
+      chiefly by women and supplied very largely by women, which gave the lie to
+      the prevailing trivial estimate of fiction. Among readers, women and girls
+      and young men at least will insist upon having their novels significant
+      and real, and it is to these perpetually renewed elements in the public
+      that the novelist must look for his continuing emancipation from the
+      wearier and more massive influences at work in contemporary British life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if the novel is to be recognised as something more than a relaxation,
+      it has also, I think, to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon
+      it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define a general form for
+      it. Every art nowadays must steer its way between the rocks of trivial and
+      degrading standards and the whirlpool of arbitrary and irrational
+      criticism. Whenever criticism of any art becomes specialised and
+      professional whenever a class of adjudicators is brought into existence,
+      those adjudicators are apt to become as a class distrustful of their
+      immediate impressions, and anxious for methods of comparison between work
+      and work, they begin to emulate the classifications and exact measurements
+      of a science, and to set up ideals and rules as data for such
+      classification and measurements. They develop an alleged sense of
+      technique, which is too often no more than the attempt to exact a
+      laboriousness of method, or to insist upon peculiarities of method which
+      impress the professional critic not so much as being merits as being
+      meritorious. This sort of thing has gone very far with the critical
+      discussion both of the novel and the play. You have all heard that
+      impressive dictum that some particular theatrical display, although
+      moving, interesting, and continually entertaining from start to finish,
+      was for occult technical reasons "not a play," and in the same way you are
+      continually having your appreciation of fiction dashed by the mysterious
+      parallel condemnation, that the story you like "isn't a novel." The novel
+      has been treated as though its form was as well-defined as the sonnet.
+      Some year or so ago, for example, there was a quite serious discussion,
+      which began, I believe, in a weekly paper devoted to the interests of
+      various nonconformist religious organisations, about the proper length for
+      a novel. The critic was to begin his painful duties with a yard measure.
+      The matter was taken up with profound gravity by the <i>Westminster
+      Gazette</i>, and a considerable number of literary men and women were
+      circularised and asked to state, in the face of "Tom Jones," "The Vicar of
+      Wakefield," "The Shabby-Genteel Story," and "Bleak House," just exactly
+      how long the novel ought to be. Our replies varied according to the
+      civility of our natures, but the mere attempt to raise the question shows,
+      I think, how widespread among the editorial, paragraph-writing,
+      opinion-making sort of people is this notion of prescribing a definite
+      length and a definite form for the novel. In the newspaper correspondence
+      that followed, our friend the weary giant made a transitory appearance
+      again. We were told the novel ought to be long enough for him to take up
+      after dinner and finish before his whisky at eleven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was obviously a half-forgotten echo of Edgar Allan Poe's discussion
+      of the short story. Edgar Allan Poe was very definite upon the point that
+      the short story should be finished at a sitting. But the novel and short
+      story are two entirely different things, and the train of reasoning that
+      made the American master limit the short story to about an hour of reading
+      as a maximum, does not apply to the longer work. A short story is, or
+      should be, a simple thing; it aims at producing one single, vivid effect;
+      it has to seize the attention at the outset, and never relaxing, gather it
+      together more and more until the climax is reached. The limits of the
+      human capacity to attend closely therefore set a limit to it; it must
+      explode and finish before interruption occurs or fatigue sets in. But the
+      novel I hold to be a discursive thing; it is not a single interest, but a
+      woven tapestry of interests; one is drawn on first by this affection and
+      curiosity, and then by that; it is something to return to, and I do not
+      see that we can possibly set any limit to its extent. The distinctive
+      value of the novel among written works of art is in characterisation, and
+      the charm of a well-conceived character lies, not in knowing its destiny,
+      but in watching its proceedings. For my own part, I will confess that I
+      find all the novels of Dickens, long as they are, too short for me. I am
+      sorry they do not flow into one another more than they do. I wish Micawber
+      and Dick Swiveller and Sairey Gamp turned up again in other novels than
+      their own, just as Shakespeare ran the glorious glow of Falstaff through a
+      group of plays. But Dickens tried this once when he carried on the
+      Pickwick Club into "Master Humphrey's Clock." That experiment was
+      unsatisfactory, and he did not attempt anything of the sort again.
+      Following on the days of Dickens, the novel began to contract, to
+      subordinate characterisation to story and description to drama;
+      considerations of a sordid nature, I am told, had to do with that;
+      something about a guinea and a half and six shillings with which we will
+      not concern ourselves&mdash;but I rejoice to see many signs to-day that
+      that phase of narrowing and restriction is over, and that there is every
+      encouragement for a return towards a laxer, more spacious form of
+      novel-writing. The movement is partly of English origin, a revolt against
+      those more exacting and cramping conceptions of artistic perfection to
+      which I will recur in a moment, and a return to the lax freedom of form,
+      the rambling discursiveness, the right to roam, of the earlier English
+      novel, of "Tristram Shandy" and of "Tom Jones"; and partly it comes from
+      abroad, and derives a stimulus from such bold and original enterprises as
+      that of Monsieur Rolland in his "Jean Christophe." Its double origin
+      involves a double nature; for while the English spirit is towards
+      discursiveness and variety, the new French movement is rather towards
+      exhaustiveness. Mr. Arnold Bennett has experimented in both forms of
+      amplitude. His superb "Old Wives' Tale," wandering from person to person
+      and from scene to scene, is by far the finest "long novel" that has been
+      written in English in the English fashion in this generation, and now in
+      "Clayhanger" and its promised collaterals, he undertakes that complete,
+      minute, abundant presentation of the growth and modification of one or two
+      individual minds, which is the essential characteristic of the Continental
+      movement towards the novel of amplitude. While the "Old Wives' Tale" is
+      discursive, "Clayhanger" is exhaustive; he gives us both types of the new
+      movement in perfection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I name "Jean Christophe" as a sort of archetype in this connection,
+      because it is just at present very much in our thoughts by reason of the
+      admirable translation Mr. Cannan is giving us; but there is a greater
+      predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular treatment of a single
+      mind and its impressions and ideas, or of one or two associated minds,
+      that comes to us now <i>via</i> Mr. Bennett and Mr. Cannan from France.
+      The great original of all this work is that colossal last unfinished book
+      of Flaubert, "Bouvard et Picuchet." Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was
+      spent upon the most austere and restrained fiction&mdash;Turgenev was not
+      more austere and restrained&mdash;broke out at last into this gay, sad
+      miracle of intellectual abundance. It is not extensively read in this
+      country; it is not yet, I believe, translated into English; but there it
+      is&mdash;and if it is new to the reader I make him this present of the
+      secret of a book that is a precious wilderness of wonderful reading. But
+      if Flaubert is really the Continental emancipator of the novel from the
+      restrictions of form, the master to whom we of the English persuasion, we
+      of the discursive school, must for ever recur is he, whom I will maintain
+      against all comers to be the subtlest and greatest <i>artist</i>&mdash;I
+      lay stress upon that word artist&mdash;that Great Britain has ever
+      produced in all that is essentially the novel, Laurence Sterne....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The confusion between the standards of a short story and the standards of
+      the novel which leads at last to these&mdash;what shall I call them?&mdash;<i>Westminster
+      Gazettisms?</i>&mdash;about the correct length to which the novelist
+      should aspire, leads also to all kinds of absurd condemnations and
+      exactions upon matters of method and style. The underlying fallacy is
+      always this: the assumption that the novel, like the story, aims at a
+      single, concentrated impression. From that comes a fertile growth of
+      error. Constantly one finds in the reviews of works of fiction the
+      complaint that this, that or the other thing in a novel is irrelevant. Now
+      it is the easiest thing, and most fatal thing, to become irrelevant in a
+      short story. A short story should go to its point as a man flies from a
+      pursuing tiger: he pauses not for the daisies in his path, or to note the
+      pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But the novel by comparison
+      is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning; nothing is
+      irrelevant if the waiter's mood is happy, and the tapping of the thrush
+      upon the garden path, or the petal of apple-blossom that floats down into
+      my coffee, is as relevant as the egg I open or the bread and butter I
+      bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which
+      is the aim of the short story&mdash;the introduction, for example, of the
+      author's personality&mdash;any comment that seems to admit that, after
+      all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part,
+      burlesque, parody, invective, all such thing's are not necessarily wrong
+      in the novel. Of course, all these things may fail in their effect; they
+      may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to do well; but it is no
+      artistic merit to evade a difficulty any more than it is a merit in a
+      hunter to refuse even the highest of fences. Nearly all the novels that
+      have, by the lapse of time, reached an assured position of recognised
+      greatness, are not only saturated in the personality of the author, but
+      have in addition quite unaffected personal outbreaks. The least successful
+      instance the one that is made the text against all such first-personal
+      interventions, is, of course, Thackeray. But I think the trouble with
+      Thackeray is not that he makes first-personal interventions, but that he
+      does so with a curious touch of dishonesty. I agree with the late Mrs.
+      Craigie that there was something profoundly vulgar about Thackeray. It was
+      a sham thoughtful, sham man-of-the-world pose he assumed; it is an
+      aggressive, conscious, challenging person astride before a fire, and a
+      little distended by dinner and a sense of social and literary precedences,
+      who uses the first person in Thackeray's novels. It isn't the real
+      Thackeray; it isn't a frank man who looks you in the eyes and bares his
+      soul and demands your sympathy. That is a criticism of Thackeray, but it
+      isn't a condemnation of intervention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I admit that for a novelist to come in person in this way before his
+      readers involves grave risks; but when it is done without affectations,
+      starkly as a man comes in out of the darkness to tell of perplexing things
+      without&mdash;as, for instance, Mr. Joseph Conrad does for all practical
+      purposes in his "Lord Jim"&mdash;then it gives a sort of depth, a sort of
+      subjective reality, that no such cold, almost affectedly ironical
+      detachment as that which distinguishes the work of Mr. John Galsworthy,
+      for example, can ever attain. And in some cases the whole art and delight
+      of a novel may lie in the author's personal interventions; let such novels
+      as "Elizabeth and her German Garden," and the same writer's "Elizabeth in
+      R|gen," bear witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, all this time I have been hacking away at certain hampering and
+      limiting beliefs about the novel, letting it loose, as it were, in form
+      and purpose; I have still to say just what I think the novel is, and
+      where, if anywhere, its boundary-line ought to be drawn. It is by no means
+      an easy task to define the novel. It is not a thing premeditated. It is a
+      thing that has grown up into modern life, and taken upon itself uses and
+      produced results that could not have been foreseen by its originators. Few
+      of the important things in the collective life of man started out to be
+      what they are. Consider, for example, all the unexpected aesthetic values,
+      the inspiration and variety of emotional result which arises out of the
+      cross-shaped plan of the Gothic cathedral, and the undesigned delight and
+      wonder of white marble that has ensued, as I have been told, through the
+      ageing and whitening of the realistically coloured statuary of the Greeks
+      and Romans. Much of the charm of the old furniture and needlework, again,
+      upon which the present time sets so much store, lies in acquired and
+      unpremeditated qualities. And no doubt the novel grew up out of simple
+      story-telling, and the universal desire of children, old and young alike,
+      for a story. It is only slowly that we have developed the distinction of
+      the novel from the romance, as being a story of human beings, absolutely
+      credible and conceivable as distinguished from human beings frankly
+      endowed with the glamour, the wonder, the brightness, of a less exacting
+      and more vividly eventful world. The novel is a story that demands, or
+      professes to demand, no make-believe. The novelist undertakes to present
+      you people and things as real as any that you can meet in an omnibus. And
+      I suppose it is conceivable that a novel might exist which was just purely
+      a story of that kind and nothing more. It might amuse you as one is amused
+      by looking out of a window into a street, or listening to a piece of
+      agreeable music, and that might be the limit of its effect. But almost
+      always the novel is something more than that, and produces more effect
+      than that. The novel has inseparable moral consequences. It leaves
+      impressions, not simply of things seen, but of acts judged and made
+      attractive or unattractive. They may prove very slight moral consequences,
+      and very shallow moral impressions in the long run, but there they are,
+      none the less, its inevitable accompaniments. It is unavoidable that this
+      should be so. Even if the novelist attempts or affects to be impartial, he
+      still cannot prevent his characters setting examples; he still cannot
+      avoid, as people say, putting ideas into his readers' heads. The greater
+      his skill, the more convincing his treatment the more vivid his power of
+      suggestion. And it is equally impossible for him not to betray his sense
+      that the proceedings of this person are rather jolly and admirable, and of
+      that, rather ugly and detestable. I suppose Mr. Bennett, for example,
+      would say that he should not do so; but it is as manifest to any
+      disinterested observer that he greatly loves and admires his Card, as that
+      Richardson admired his Sir Charles Grandison, or that Mrs. Humphry Ward
+      considers her Marcella a very fine and estimable young woman. And I think
+      it is just in this, that the novel is not simply a fictitious record of
+      conduct, but also a study and judgment of conduct, and through that of the
+      ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value&mdash;or
+      perhaps to avoid controversy I had better say the real and increasing
+      importance&mdash;of the novel and of the novelist in modern life comes in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no new discovery that the novel, like the drama, is a powerful
+      instrument of moral suggestion. This has been understood in England ever
+      since there has been such a thing as a novel in England. This has been
+      recognised equally by novelists, novel-readers, and the people who
+      wouldn't read novels under any condition whatever. Richardson wrote
+      deliberately for edification, and "Tom Jones" is a powerful and effective
+      appeal for a charitable, and even indulgent, attitude towards loose-living
+      men. But excepting Fielding and one or two other of those partial
+      exceptions that always occur in the case of critical generalisations,
+      there is a definable difference between the novel of the past and what I
+      may call the modern novel. It is a difference that is reflected upon the
+      novel from a difference in the general way of thinking. It lies in the
+      fact that formerly there was a feeling of certitude about moral values and
+      standards of conduct that is altogether absent to-day. It wasn't so much
+      that men were agreed upon these things&mdash;about these things there have
+      always been enormous divergences of opinion&mdash;as that men were
+      emphatic, cocksure, and unteachable about whatever they did happen to
+      believe to a degree that no longer obtains. This is the Balfourian age,
+      and even religion seeks to establish itself on doubt. There were, perhaps,
+      just as many differences in the past as there are now, but the outlines
+      were harder&mdash;they were, indeed, so hard as to be almost, to our
+      sense, savage. You might be a Roman Catholic, and in that case you did not
+      want to hear about Protestants, Turks, Infidels, except in tones of horror
+      and hatred. You knew exactly what was good and what was evil. Your priest
+      informed you upon these points, and all you needed in any novel you read
+      was a confirmation, implicit or explicit, of these vivid, rather than
+      charming, prejudices. If you were a Protestant you were equally clear and
+      unshakable. Your sect, whichever sect you belonged to, knew the whole of
+      truth and included all the nice people. It had nothing to learn in the
+      world, and it wanted to learn nothing outside its sectarian convictions.
+      The unbelievers you know, were just as bad, and said their creeds with an
+      equal fury&mdash;merely interpolating <i>nots</i>. People of every sort&mdash;Catholic,
+      Protestant, Infidel, or what not&mdash;were equally clear that good was
+      good and bad was bad, that the world was made up of good characters whom
+      you had to love, help and admire, and of bad characters to whom one might,
+      in the interests of goodness, even lie, and whom one had to foil, defeat
+      and triumph over shamelessly at every opportunity. That was the quality of
+      the times. The novel reflected this quality of assurance, and its utmost
+      charity was to unmask an apparent villain and show that he or she was
+      really profoundly and correctly good, or to unmask an apparent saint and
+      show the hypocrite. There was no such penetrating and pervading element of
+      doubt and curiosity&mdash;and charity, about the rightfulness and beauty
+      of conduct, such as one meets on every hand to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The novel-reader of the past, therefore, like the novel-reader of the more
+      provincial parts of England to-day, judged a novel by the convictions that
+      had been built up in him by his training and his priest or his pastor. If
+      it agreed with these convictions he approved; if it did not agree he
+      disapproved&mdash;often with great energy. The novel, where it was not
+      unconditionally banned altogether as a thing disturbing and unnecessary,
+      was regarded as a thing subordinated to the teaching of the priest or
+      pastor, or whatever director and dogma was followed. Its modest moral
+      confirmations began when authority had completed its direction. The novel
+      was good&mdash;if it seemed to harmonise with the graver exercises
+      conducted by Mr. Chadband&mdash;and it was bad and outcast if Mr. Chadband
+      said so. And it is over the bodies of discredited and disgruntled
+      Chadbands that the novel escapes from its servitude and inferiority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the conflict of authority against criticism is one of the eternal
+      conflicts of humanity. It is the conflict of organisation against
+      initiative, of discipline against freedom. It was the conflict of the
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      priest against the prophet in ancient Judaea, of the Pharisee against the
+      Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of the Church against the
+      Franciscan and the Lollard, of the Respectable Person against the Artist,
+      of the hedge-clippers of mankind against the shooting buds. And to-day,
+      while we live in a period of tightening and extending social organisation,
+      we live also in a period of adventurous and insurgent thought, in an
+      intellectual spring unprecedented in the world's history. There is an
+      enormous criticism going on of the faiths upon which men's lives and
+      associations are based, and of every standard and rule of conduct. And it
+      is inevitable that the novel, just in the measure of its sincerity and
+      ability, should reflect and co-operate in the atmosphere and uncertainties
+      and changing variety of this seething and creative time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I do not mean merely that the novel is unavoidably charged with the
+      representation of this wide and wonderful conflict. It is a necessary part
+      of the conflict. The essential characteristic of this great intellectual
+      revolution amidst which we are living to-day, that revolution of which the
+      revival and restatement of nominalism under the name of pragmatism is the
+      philosophical aspect, consists in the reassertion of the importance of the
+      individual instance as against the generalisation. All our social,
+      political, moral problems are being approached in a new spirit, in an
+      inquiring and experimental spirit, which has small respect for abstract
+      principles and deductive rules. We perceive more and more clearly, for
+      example, that the study of social organisation is an empty and
+      unprofitable study until we approach it as a study of the association and
+      inter-reaction of individualised human beings inspired by diversified
+      motives, ruled by traditions, and swayed by the suggestions of a complex
+      intellectual atmosphere. And all our conceptions of the relationships
+      between man and man, and of justice and rightfulness and social
+      desirableness, remain something misfitting and inappropriate, something
+      uncomfortable and potentially injurious, as if we were trying to wear
+      sharp-edged clothes made for a giant out of tin, until we bring them to
+      the test and measure of realised individualities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this is where the value and opportunity of the modern novel comes in.
+      So far as I can see, it is the only medium through which we can discuss
+      the great majority of the problems which are being raised in such
+      bristling multitude by our contemporary social development Nearly every
+      one of those problems has at its core a psychological problem, and not
+      merely a psychological problem, but one in which the idea of individuality
+      is an essential factor. Dealing with most of these questions by a rule or
+      a generalisation is like putting a cordon round a jungle full of the most
+      diversified sort of game. The hunting only begins when you leave the
+      cordon behind you and push into the thickets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Take, for example, the immense cluster of difficulties that arises out of
+      the increasing complexity of our state. On every hand we are creating
+      officials, and compared with only a few years ago the private life in a
+      dozen fresh directions comes into contact with officialdom. But we still
+      do practically nothing to work out the interesting changes that occur in
+      this sort of man and that, when you withdraw him as it were from the
+      common crowd of humanity, put his mind if not his body into uniform and
+      endow him with powers and functions and rules. It is manifestly a study of
+      the profoundest public and personal importance. It is manifestly a study
+      of increasing importance. The process of social and political organisation
+      that has been going on for the last quarter of a century is pretty clearly
+      going on now if anything with increasing vigour&mdash;and for the most
+      part the entire dependence of the consequences of the whole problem upon
+      the reaction between the office on the one hand and the weak, uncertain,
+      various human beings who take office on the other, doesn't seem even to be
+      suspected by the energetic, virtuous and more or less amiable people whose
+      activities in politics and upon the backstairs of politics bring about
+      these developments. They assume that the sort of official they need, a
+      combination of god-like virtue and intelligence with unfailing mechanical
+      obedience, can be made out of just any young nephew. And I know of no
+      means of persuading people that this is a rather unjustifiable assumption,
+      and of creating an intelligent controlling criticism of officials and of
+      assisting conscientious officials to an effective self-examination, and
+      generally of keeping the atmosphere of official life sweet and healthy,
+      except the novel. Yet so far the novel has scarcely begun its attack upon
+      this particular field of human life, and all the attractive varied play of
+      motive it contains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course we have one supreme and devastating study of the illiterate
+      minor official in Bumble. That one figure lit up and still lights the
+      whole problem of Poor Law administration for the English reading
+      community. It was a translation of well-meant regulations and
+      pseudo-scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, arrogant,
+      ill-bred flesh and blood. It was worth a hundred Royal Commissions. You
+      may make your regulations as you please, said Dickens in effect; this is
+      one sample of the stuff that will carry them out. But Bumble stands almost
+      alone. Instead of realising that he is only one aspect of officialdom, we
+      are all too apt to make him the type of all officials, and not an urban
+      district council can get into a dispute about its electric light without
+      being denounced as a Bumbledom by some whirling enemy or other. The
+      burthen upon Bumble's shoulders is too heavy to be borne, and we want the
+      contemporary novel to give us a score of other figures to put beside him,
+      other aspects and reflections upon this great problem of officialism made
+      flesh. Bumble is a magnificent figure of the follies and cruelties of
+      ignorance in office&mdash;I would have every candidate for the post of
+      workhouse master pass a severe examination upon "Oliver Twist"&mdash;but
+      it is not only caricature and satire I demand. We must have not only the
+      fullest treatment of the temptations, vanities, abuses, and absurdities of
+      office, but all its dreams, its sense of constructive order, its
+      consolations, its sense of service, and its nobler satisfactions. You may
+      say that is demanding more insight and power in our novels and novelists
+      than we can possibly hope to find in them. So much the worse for us. I
+      stick to my thesis that the complicated social organisation of to-day
+      cannot get along without the amount of mutual understanding and mutual
+      explanation such a range of characterisation in our novels implies. The
+      success of civilisation amounts ultimately to a success of sympathy and
+      understanding. If people cannot be brought to an interest in one another
+      greater than they feel to-day, to curiosities and criticisms far keener,
+      and co-operations far subtler, than we have now; if class cannot be
+      brought to measure itself against, and interchange experience and sympathy
+      with class, and temperament with temperament then we shall never struggle
+      very far beyond the confused discomforts and uneasiness of to-day, and the
+      changes and complications of human life will remain as they are now, very
+      like the crumplings and separations and complications of an immense
+      avalanche that is sliding down a hill. And in this tremendous work of
+      human reconciliation and elucidation, it seems to me it is the novel that
+      must attempt most and achieve most.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may feel disposed to say to all this: We grant the major premises, but
+      why look to the work of prose fiction as the main instrument in this
+      necessary process of, so to speak, sympathising humanity together? Cannot
+      this be done far more effectively through biography and autobiography, for
+      example? Isn't there the lyric; and, above all, isn't there the play?
+      Well, so far as the stage goes, I think it is a very charming and exciting
+      form of human activity, a display of actions and surprises of the most
+      moving and impressive sort; but beyond the opportunity it affords for
+      saying startling and thought-provoking things&mdash;opportunities Mr.
+      Shaw, for example, has worked to the utmost limit&mdash;I do not see that
+      the drama does much to enlarge our sympathies and add to our stock of
+      motive ideas. And regarded as a medium for startling and thought-provoking
+      things, the stage seems to me an extremely clumsy and costly affair. One
+      might just as well go about with a pencil writing up the thought-provoking
+      phrase, whatever it is, on walls. The drama excites our sympathies
+      intensely, but it seems to me it is far too objective a medium to widen
+      them appreciably, and it is that widening, that increase in the range of
+      understanding, at which I think civilisation is aiming. The case for
+      biography, and more particularly autobiography, as against the novel, is,
+      I admit, at the first blush stronger. You may say: Why give us these
+      creatures of a novelist's imagination, these phantom and fantastic
+      thinkings and doings, when we may have the stories of real lives, really
+      lived&mdash;the intimate record of actual men and women? To which one
+      answers: "Ah, if one could!" But it is just because biography does deal
+      with actual lives, actual facts, because it radiates out to touch
+      continuing interests and sensitive survivors, that it is so
+      unsatisfactory, so untruthful. Its inseparable falsehood is the worst of
+      all kinds of falsehood&mdash;the falsehood of omission. Think what an
+      abounding, astonishing, perplexing person Gladstone must have been in
+      life, and consider Lord Morley's "Life of Gladstone," cold, dignified&mdash;not
+      a life at all, indeed, so much as embalmed remains; the fire gone, the
+      passions gone, the bowels carefully removed. All biography has something
+      of that post-mortem coldness and respect, and as for autobiography&mdash;a
+      man may show his soul in a thousand half-conscious ways, but to turn upon
+      oneself and explain oneself is given to no one. It is the natural liars
+      and braggarts, your Cellinis and Casanovas, men with a habit of regarding
+      themselves with a kind of objective admiration, who do best in
+      autobiography. And, on the other hand, the novel has neither the intense
+      self-consciousness of autobiography nor the paralysing responsibilities of
+      the biographer. It is by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its
+      characters are figments and phantoms, they can be made entirely
+      transparent. Because they are fictions, and you know they are fictions, so
+      that they cannot hold you for an instant so soon as they cease to be true,
+      they have a power of veracity quite beyond that of actual records. Every
+      novel carries its own justification and its own condemnation in its
+      success or failure to convince you that <i>the thing was so</i>. Now
+      history, biography, blue-book and so forth, can hardly ever get beyond the
+      statement that the superficial fact was so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You see now the scope of the claim I am making for the novel; it is to be
+      the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of
+      self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the
+      factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social
+      dogmas and ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the initiator of
+      knowledge, the seed of fruitful self-questioning. Let me be very clear
+      here. I do not mean for a moment that the novelist is going to set up as a
+      teacher, as a sort of priest with a pen, who will make men and women
+      believe and do this and that. The novel is not a new sort of pulpit;
+      humanity is passing out of the phase when men <i>sit under</i> preachers
+      and dogmatic influences. But the novelist is going to be the most potent
+      of artists, because he is going to present conduct, devise beautiful
+      conduct, discuss conduct analyse conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate it
+      through and through. He will not teach, but discuss, point out, plead, and
+      display. And this being my view you will be prepared for the demand I am
+      now about to make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist in his
+      choice of topic and incident and in his method of treatment; or rather, if
+      I may presume to speak for other novelists, I would say it is not so much
+      a demand we make as an intention we proclaim. We are going to write,
+      subject only to our limitations, about the whole of human life. We are
+      going to deal with political questions and religious questions and social
+      questions. We cannot present people unless we have this free hand, this
+      unrestricted field. What is the good of telling stories about people's
+      lives if one may not deal freely with the religious beliefs and
+      organisations that have controlled or failed to control them? What is the
+      good of pretending to write about love, and the loyalties and treacheries
+      and quarrels of men and women, if one must not glance at those varieties
+      of physical temperament and organic quality, those deeply passionate needs
+      and distresses from which half the storms of human life are brewed? We
+      mean to deal with all these things, and it will need very much more than
+      the disapproval of provincial librarians, the hostility of a few
+      influential people in London, the scurrility of one paper, and the deep
+      and obstinate silences of another, to stop the incoming tide of aggressive
+      novel-writing. We are going to write about it all. We are going to write
+      about business and finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness
+      and decorum and indecorum, until a thousand pretences and ten thousand
+      impostures shrivel in the cold, clear air of our elucidations. We are
+      going to write of wasted opportunities and latent beauties until a
+      thousand new ways of living open to men and women. We are going to appeal
+      to the young and the hopeful and the curious, against the established, the
+      dignified, and defensive. Before we have done, we will have all life
+      within the scope of the novel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE PHILOSOPHER'S PUBLIC LIBRARY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Suppose a philosopher had a great deal of money to spend&mdash;though this
+      is not in accordance with experience, it is not inherently impossible&mdash;and
+      suppose he thought, as any philosopher does think, that the British public
+      ought to read much more and better books than they do, and that founding
+      public libraries was the way to induce them to do so, what sort of public
+      libraries would he found? That, I submit, is a suitable topic for a
+      disinterested speculator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would, I suppose, being a philosopher, begin by asking himself what a
+      library essentially was, and he would probably come to the eccentric
+      conclusion that it was essentially a collection of books. He would, in his
+      unworldliness, entirely overlook the fact that it might be a job for a
+      municipally influential builder, a costly but conspicuous monument to
+      opulent generosity, a news-room, an employment bureau, or a meeting-place
+      for the glowing young; he would never think for a moment of a library as a
+      thing one might build, it would present itself to him with astonishing
+      simplicity as a thing one would collect. Bricks ceased to be literature
+      after Babylon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first proceeding would be, I suppose, to make a list of that
+      collection. What books, he would say, have all my libraries to possess
+      anyhow? And he would begin to jot down&mdash;with the assistance of a few
+      friends, perhaps&mdash;this essential list.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would, being a philosopher, insist on good editions, and he would also
+      take great pains with the selection. It would not be a limited or an
+      exclusive list&mdash;when in doubt he would include. He would disregard
+      modern fiction very largely, because any book that has any success can
+      always be bought for sixpence, and modern poetry, because, with an
+      exception or so, it does not signify at all. He would set almost all the
+      Greek and Roman literature in well-printed translations and with luminous
+      introductions&mdash;and if there were no good translations he would give
+      some good man #500 or so to make one&mdash;translations of all that is
+      good in modern European literatures, and, last but largest portion of his
+      list, editions of all that is worthy of our own. He would make a very
+      careful list of thoroughly modern encyclopaedias, atlases, and volumes of
+      information, and a particularly complete catalogue of all literature that
+      is still copyright; and then&mdash;with perhaps a secretary or so&mdash;he
+      would revise all his lists and mark against every book whether he would
+      have two, five or ten or twenty copies, or whatever number of copies of it
+      he thought proper in each library.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then next, being a philosopher, he would decide that if he was going to
+      buy a great number of libraries in this way, he was going to make an
+      absolutely new sort of demand for these books, and that he was entitled to
+      a special sort of supply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would not expect the machinery of retail book-selling to meet the needs
+      of wholesale buying. So he would go either to wholesale booksellers, or
+      directly to the various publishers of the books and editions he had
+      chosen, and ask for reasonable special prices for the two thousand or
+      seven thousand or fifty thousand of each book he required. And the
+      publishers would, of course, give him very special prices, more especially
+      in the case of the out-of-copyright books. He would probably find it best
+      to buy whole editions in sheets and bind them himself in strong bindings.
+      And he would emerge from these negotiations in possession of a number of
+      complete libraries each of&mdash;how many books? Less than twenty thousand
+      ought to do it, I think, though that is a matter for separate discussion,
+      and that should cost him, buying in this wholesale way, under rather than
+      over #2,000 a library.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And next he would bethink himself of the readers of these books. "These
+      people," he would say, "do not know very much about books, which, indeed,
+      is why I am giving them this library."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly, he would get a number of able and learned people to write him
+      guides to his twenty thousand books, and, in fact, to the whole world of
+      reading, a guide, for example, to the books on history in general, a
+      special guide to books on English history, or French or German history, a
+      guide to the books on geology, a guide to poetry and poetical criticisms,
+      and so forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some such books our philosopher would find already done&mdash;the
+      "Bibliography of American History," of the American Libraries'
+      Association, for example, and Mr. Nield's "Guide to Historical Fiction"&mdash;and
+      what are not done he would commission good men to do for him. Suppose he
+      had to commission forty such guides altogether and that they cost him on
+      the average #500 each, for he would take care not to sweat their makers,
+      then that would add another #20,000 to his expenditure. But if he was
+      going to found 400 libraries, let us say, that would only be #50 a library&mdash;a
+      very trivial addition to his expenditure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rarer books mentioned in these various guides would remind him,
+      however, of the many even his ample limit of twenty thousand forced him to
+      exclude, and he would, perhaps, consider the need of having two or three
+      libraries each for the storage of a hundred thousand books or so not kept
+      at the local libraries, but which could be sent to them at a day's notice
+      at the request of any reader. And then, and only then, would he give his
+      attention to the housing and staffing that this reality of books would
+      demand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being a philosopher and no fool, he would draw a very clear, hard
+      distinction between the reckless endowment of the building trade and the
+      dissemination of books. He would distinguish, too, between a library and a
+      news-room, and would find no great attraction in the prospect of supplying
+      the national youth with free but thumby copies of the sixpenny magazines.
+      He would consider that all that was needed for his library was, first,
+      easily accessible fireproof shelving for his collection, with ample space
+      for his additions, an efficient distributing office, a cloak-room, and so
+      forth, and eight or nine not too large, well lit, well carpeted, well
+      warmed and well ventilated rooms radiating from that office, in which the
+      guides and so forth could be consulted, and where those who had no
+      convenient, quiet room at home could read.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would find that, by avoiding architectural vulgarities, a simple, well
+      proportioned building satisfying all these requirements and containing
+      housing for the librarian, assistant, custodian and staff could be built
+      for between #4,000 and #5,000, excluding the cost of site, and his sites,
+      which he would not choose for their conspicuousness, might average
+      something under another #1,000.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would try to make a bargain with the local people for their
+      co-operation in his enterprise, though he would, as a philosopher,
+      understand that where a public library is least wanted it is generally
+      most needed. But in most cases he would succeed in stipulating for a
+      certain standard of maintenance by the local authority. Since moderately
+      prosperous illiterate men undervalue education and most town councillors
+      are moderately illiterate men, he would do his best to keep the salary and
+      appointment of the librarian out of such hands. He would stipulate for a
+      salary of at least #400, in addition to housing, light and heat, and he
+      would probably find it advisable to appoint a little committee of visitors
+      who would have the power to examine qualifications, endorse the
+      appointment, and recommend the dismissal of all his four hundred
+      librarians. He would probably try to make the assistantship at #100 a year
+      or thereabout a sort of local scholarship to be won by competition, and
+      only the cleaner and caretaker's place would be left to the local
+      politician. And, of course, our philosopher would stipulate that, apart
+      from all other expenditure, a sum of at least #200 a year should be set
+      aside for buying new books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So our rich philosopher would secure at the minimum cost a number of
+      efficiently equipped libraries throughout the country. Eight thousand
+      pounds down and #900 a year is about as cheap as a public library can be.
+      Below that level, it would be cheaper to have no public library. Above
+      that level, a public library that is not efficient is either dishonestly
+      or incapably organised or managed, or it is serving too large a district
+      and needs duplication, or it is trying to do too much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOC
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted
+      Pagan God and live upon a ceiling. I crown myself becomingly in stars or
+      tendrils or with electric coruscations (as the mood takes me), and wear an
+      easy costume free from complications and appropriate to the climate of
+      those agreeable spaces. The company about me on the clouds varies greatly
+      with the mood of the vision, but always it is in some way, if not always a
+      very obvious way, beautiful. One frequent presence is G.K. Chesterton, a
+      joyous whirl of brush work, appropriately garmented and crowned. When he
+      is there, I remark, the whole ceiling is by a sort of radiation convivial.
+      We drink limitless old October from handsome flagons, and we argue
+      mightily about Pride (his weak point) and the nature of Deity. A hygienic,
+      attentive, and essentially anaesthetic Eagle checks, in the absence of
+      exercise, any undue enlargement of our Promethean livers.... Chesterton
+      often&mdash;but never by any chance Belloc. Belloc I admire beyond
+      measure, but there is a sort of partisan viciousness about Belloc that
+      bars him from my celestial dreams. He never figures, no, not even in the
+      remotest corner, on my ceiling. And yet the divine artist, by some strange
+      skill that my ignorance of his technique saves me from the presumption of
+      explaining, does indicate exactly where Belloc is. A little quiver of the
+      paint, a faint aura, about the spectacular masses of Chesterton? I am not
+      certain. But no intelligent beholder can look up and miss the remarkable
+      fact that Belloc exists&mdash;and that he is away, safely away, away in
+      his heaven, which is, of course, the Park Lane Imperialist's hell. There
+      he presides....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in this life I do not meet Chesterton exalted upon clouds, and there
+      is but the mockery of that endless leisure for abstract discussion
+      afforded by my painted entertainments. I live in an urgent and incessant
+      world, which is at its best a wildly beautiful confusion of impressions
+      and at its worst a dingy uproar. It crowds upon us and jostles us, we get
+      our little interludes for thinking and talking between much rough
+      scuffling and laying about us with our fists. And I cannot afford to be
+      continually bickering with Chesterton and Belloc about forms of
+      expression. There are others for whom I want to save my knuckles. One may
+      be wasteful in peace and leisure, but economies are the soul of conflict.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In many ways we three are closely akin; we diverge not by necessity but
+      accident, because we speak in different dialects and have divergent
+      metaphysics. All that I can I shall persuade to my way of thinking about
+      thought and to the use of words in my loose, expressive manner, but Belloc
+      and Chesterton and I are too grown and set to change our languages now and
+      learn new ones; we are on different roads, and so we must needs shout to
+      one another across intervening abysses. These two say Socialism is a thing
+      they do not want for men, and I say Socialism is above all what I want for
+      men. We shall go on saying that now to the end of our days. But what we do
+      all three want is something very alike. Our different roads are parallel.
+      I aim at a growing collective life, a perpetually enhanced inheritance for
+      our race, through the fullest, freest development of the individual life.
+      What they aim at ultimately I do not understand, but it is manifest that
+      its immediate form is the fullest and freest development of the individual
+      life. We all three hate equally and sympathetically the spectacle of human
+      beings blown up with windy wealth and irresponsible power as cruelly and
+      absurdly as boys blow up frogs; we all three detest the complex causes
+      that dwarf and cripple lives from the moment of birth and starve and
+      debase great masses of mankind. We want as universally as possible the
+      jolly life, men and women warm-blooded and well-aired, acting freely and
+      joyously, gathering life as children gather corn-cockles in corn. We all
+      three want people to have property of a real and personal sort, to have
+      the son, as Chesterton put it, bringing up the port his father laid down,
+      and pride in the pears one has grown in one's own garden. And I agree with
+      Chesterton that giving&mdash;giving oneself out of love and fellowship&mdash;is
+      the salt of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there I diverge from him, less in spirit, I think, than in the manner
+      of his expression. There is a base because impersonal way of giving.
+      "Standing drink," which he praises as noble, is just the thing I cannot
+      stand, the ultimate mockery and vulgarisation of that fine act of bringing
+      out the cherished thing saved for the heaven-sent guest. It is a mere
+      commercial transaction, essentially of the evil of our time. Think of it!
+      Two temporarily homeless beings agree to drink together, and they turn in
+      and face the public supply of drink (a little vitiated by private
+      commercial necessities) in the public-house. (It is horrible that life
+      should be so wholesale and heartless.) And Jones, with a sudden effusion
+      of manner, thrusts twopence or ninepence (got God knows how) into the
+      economic mysteries and personal delicacy of Brown. I'd as soon a man
+      slipped sixpence down my neck. If Jones has used love and sympathy to
+      detect a certain real thirst and need in Brown and knowledge and power in
+      its assuaging by some specially appropriate fluid, then we have an
+      altogether different matter; but the common business of "standing treat"
+      and giving presents and entertainments is as proud and unspiritual as
+      cock-crowing, as foolish and inhuman as that sorry compendium of
+      mercantile vices, the game of poker, and I am amazed to find Chesterton
+      commend it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that is a criticism by the way. Chesterton and Belloc agree with the
+      Socialist that the present world does not give at all what they want. They
+      agree that it fails to do so through a wild derangement of our property
+      relations. They are in agreement with the common contemporary man (whose
+      creed is stated, I think, not unfairly, but with the omission of certain
+      important articles by Chesterton), that the derangements of our property
+      relations are to be remedied by concerted action and in part by altered
+      laws. The land and all sorts of great common interests must be, if not
+      owned, then at least controlled, managed, checked, redistributed by the
+      State. Our real difference is only about a little more or a little less
+      owning. I do not see how Belloc and Chesterton can stand for anything but
+      a strong State as against those wild monsters of property, the strong, big
+      private owners. The State must be complex and powerful enough to prevent
+      them. State or plutocrat there is really no other practical alternative
+      before the world at the present time. Either we have to let the big
+      financial adventurers, the aggregating capitalist and his Press, in a
+      loose, informal combination, rule the earth, either we have got to stand
+      aside from preventive legislation and leave things to work out on their
+      present lines, or we have to construct a collective organisation
+      sufficiently strong for the protection of the liberties of the
+      some-day-to-be-jolly common man. So far we go in common. If Belloc and
+      Chesterton are not Socialists, they are at any rate not anti-Socialists.
+      If they say they want an organised Christian State (which involves
+      practically seven-tenths of the Socialist desire), then, in the face of
+      our big common enemies, of adventurous capital, of alien Imperialism, base
+      ambition, base intelligence, and common prejudice and ignorance, I do not
+      mean to quarrel with them politically, so long as they force no quarrel on
+      me. Their organised Christian State is nearer the organised State I want
+      than our present plutocracy. Our ideals will fight some day, and it will
+      be, I know, a first-rate fight, but to fight now is to let the enemy in.
+      When we have got all we want in common, then and only then can we afford
+      to differ. I have never believed that a Socialist Party could hope to form
+      a Government in this country in my lifetime; I believe it less now than
+      ever I did. I don't know if any of my Fabian colleagues entertain so
+      remarkable a hope. But if they do not, then unless their political aim is
+      pure cantankerousness, they must contemplate a working political
+      combination between the Socialist members in Parliament and just that
+      non-capitalist section of the Liberal Party for which Chesterton and
+      Belloc speak. Perpetual opposition is a dishonourable aim in politics; and
+      a man who mingles in political development with no intention of taking on
+      responsible tasks unless he gets all his particular formulae accepted is a
+      pervert, a victim of Irish bad example, and unfit far decent democratic
+      institutions ...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I digress again, I see, but my drift I hope is clear. Differ as we may,
+      Belloc and Chesterton are with all Socialists in being on the same side of
+      the great political and social cleavage that opens at the present time. We
+      and they are with the interests of the mass of common men as against that
+      growing organisation of great owners who have common interests directly
+      antagonistic to those of the community and State. We Socialists are only
+      secondarily politicians. Our primary business is not to impose upon, but
+      to ram right into the substance of that object of Chesterton's solicitude,
+      the circle of ideas of the common man, the idea of the State as his own,
+      as a thing he serves and is served by. We want to add to his sense of
+      property rather than offend it. If I had my way I would do that at the
+      street corners and on the trams, I would take down that alien-looking and
+      detestable inscription "L.C.C.," and put up, "This Tram, this Street,
+      belongs to the People of London." Would Chesterton or Belloc quarrel with
+      that? Suppose that Chesterton is right, and that there are incurable
+      things in the mind of the common man flatly hostile to our ideals; so much
+      of our ideals will fail. But we are doing our best by our lights, and all
+      we can. What are Chesterton and Belloc doing? If our ideal is partly right
+      and partly wrong, are they trying to build up a better ideal? Will they
+      state a Utopia and how they propose it shall be managed? If they lend
+      their weight only to such fine old propositions as that a man wants
+      freedom, that he has a right to do as he likes with his own, and so on,
+      they won't help the common man much. All that fine talk, without some
+      further exposition, goes to sustain Mr. Rockefeller's simple human love of
+      property, and the woman and child sweating manufacturer in his fight for
+      the inspector-free home industry. I bought on a bookstall the other day a
+      pamphlet full of misrepresentation and bad argument against Socialism by
+      an Australian Jew, published by the Single-Tax people apparently in a
+      disinterested attempt to free the land from the landowner by the simple
+      expedient of abusing anyone else who wanted to do as much but did not hold
+      Henry George to be God and Lord; and I know Socialists who will protest
+      with tears in their eyes against association with any human being who
+      sings any song but the "Red Flag" and doubts whether Marx had much
+      experience of affairs. Well, there is no reason why Chesterton and Belloc
+      should at their level do the same sort of thing. When we talk on a ceiling
+      or at a dinner-party with any touch of the celestial in its composition,
+      Chesterton and I, Belloc and I, are antagonists with an undying feud, but
+      in the fight against human selfishness and narrowness and for a finer,
+      juster law, we are brothers&mdash;at the remotest, half-brothers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chesterton isn't a Socialist&mdash;agreed! But now, as between us and the
+      Master of Elibank or Sir Hugh Bell or any other Free Trade Liberal
+      capitalist or landlord, which side is he on? You cannot have more than one
+      fight going on in the political arena at the same time, because only one
+      party or group of parties can win.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And going back for a moment to that point about a Utopia, I want one from
+      Chesterton. Purely unhelpful criticism isn't enough from a man of his
+      size. It isn't justifiable for him to go about sitting on other people's
+      Utopias. I appeal to his sense of fair play. I have done my best to
+      reconcile the conception of a free and generous style of personal living
+      with a social organisation that will save the world from the harsh
+      predominance of dull, persistent, energetic, unscrupulous grabbers
+      tempered only by the vulgar extravagance of their wives and sons. It isn't
+      an adequate reply to say that nobody stood treat there, and that the
+      simple, generous people like to beat their own wives and children on
+      occasion in a loving and intimate manner, and that they won't endure the
+      spirit of Mr. Sidney Webb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ABOUT SIR THOMAS MORE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There are some writers who are chiefly interesting in themselves, and some
+      whom chance and the agreement of men have picked out as symbols and
+      convenient indications of some particular group or temperament of
+      opinions. To the latter it is that Sir Thomas More belongs. An age and a
+      type of mind have found in him and his Utopia a figurehead and a token;
+      and pleasant and honourable as his personality and household present
+      themselves to the modern reader, it is doubtful if they would by this time
+      have retained any peculiar distinction among the many other contemporaries
+      of whom we have chance glimpses in letters and suchlike documents, were it
+      not that he happened to be the first man of affairs in England to imitate
+      the "Republic" of Plato. By that chance it fell to him to give the world a
+      noun and an adjective of abuse, "Utopian," and to record how under the
+      stimulus of Plato's releasing influence the opening problems of our modern
+      world presented themselves to the English mind of his time. For the most
+      part the problems that exercised him are the problems that exercise us
+      to-day, some of them, it may be, have grown up and intermarried, new ones
+      have joined their company, but few, if any, have disappeared, and it is
+      alike in his resemblances to and differences from the modern speculative
+      mind that his essential interest lies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The portrait presented by contemporary mention and his own intentional and
+      unintentional admissions, is of an active-minded and agreeable-mannered
+      man, a hard worker, very markedly prone to quips and whimsical sayings and
+      plays upon words, and aware of a double reputation as a man of erudition
+      and a wit. This latter quality it was that won him advancement at court,
+      and it may have been his too clearly confessed reluctance to play the part
+      of an informal table jester to his king that laid the grounds of that
+      deepening royal resentment that ended only with his execution. But he was
+      also valued by the king for more solid merits, he was needed by the king,
+      and it was more than a table scorned or a clash of opinion upon the
+      validity of divorce; it was a more general estrangement and avoidance of
+      service that caused that fit of regal petulance by which he died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would seem that he began and ended his career in the orthodox religion
+      and a general acquiescence in the ideas and customs of his time, and he
+      played an honourable and acceptable part in that time; but his permanent
+      interest lies not in his general conformity but in his incidental
+      scepticism, in the fact that underlying the observances and recognised
+      rules and limitations that give the texture of his life were the
+      profoundest doubts, and that, stirred and disturbed by Plato, he saw fit
+      to write them down. One may question if such scepticism is in itself
+      unusual, whether any large proportion of great statesmen, great
+      ecclesiastics and administrators have escaped phases of destructive
+      self-criticism of destructive criticism of the principles upon which their
+      general careers were framed. But few have made so public an admission as
+      Sir Thomas More. A good Catholic undoubtedly he was, and yet we find him
+      capable of conceiving a non-Christian community excelling all Christendom
+      in wisdom and virtue; in practice his sense of conformity and orthodoxy
+      was manifest enough, but in his "Utopia" he ventures to contemplate, and
+      that not merely wistfully, but with some confidence, the possibility of an
+      absolute religious toleration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The "Utopia" is none the less interesting because it is one of the most
+      inconsistent of books. Never were the forms of Socialism and Communism
+      animated by so entirely an Individualist soul. The hands are the hands of
+      Plato, the wide-thinking Greek, but the voice is the voice of a humane,
+      public-spirited, but limited and very practical English gentleman who
+      takes the inferiority of his inferiors for granted, dislikes friars and
+      tramps and loafers and all undisciplined and unproductive people, and is
+      ruler in his own household. He abounds in sound practical ideas, for the
+      migration of harvesters, for the universality of gardens and the
+      artificial incubation of eggs, and he sweeps aside all Plato's suggestion
+      of the citizen woman as though it had never entered his mind. He had
+      indeed the Whig temperament, and it manifested itself down even to the
+      practice of reading aloud in company, which still prevails among the more
+      representative survivors of the Whig tradition. He argues ably against
+      private property, but no thought of any such radicalism as the admission
+      of those poor peons of his, with head half-shaved and glaring uniform
+      against escape, to participation in ownership appears in his proposals.
+      His communism is all for the convenience of his Syphogrants and
+      Tranibores, those gentlemen of gravity and experience, lest one should
+      swell up above the others. So too is the essential Whiggery of the
+      limitation of the Prince's revenues. It is the very spirit of eighteenth
+      century Constitutionalism. And his Whiggery bears Utilitarianism instead
+      of the vanity of a flower. Among his cities, all of a size, so that "he
+      that knoweth one knoweth all," the Benthamite would have revised his
+      sceptical theology and admitted the possibility of heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like any Whig, More exalted reason above the imagination at every point,
+      and so he fails to understand the magic prestige of gold, making that
+      beautiful metal into vessels of dishonour to urge his case against it, nor
+      had he any perception of the charm of extravagance, for example, or the
+      desirability of various clothing. The Utopians went all in coarse linen
+      and undyed wool&mdash;why should the world be coloured?&mdash;and all the
+      economy of labour and shortening of the working day was to no other end
+      than to prolong the years of study and the joys of reading aloud, the
+      simple satisfactions of the good boy at his lessons, to the very end of
+      life. "In the institution of that weal publique this end is only and
+      chiefly pretended and minded, that what time may possibly be spared from
+      the necessary occupations and affairs of the commonwealth, all that the
+      citizens should withdraw from the bodily service to the free liberty of
+      the mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they suppose the felicity
+      of this life to consist."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, it is no paradox to say that "Utopia," which has by a conspiracy
+      of accidents become a proverb for undisciplined fancifulness in social and
+      political matters, is in reality a very unimaginative work. In that, next
+      to the accident of its priority, lies the secret of its continuing
+      interest. In some respects it is like one of those precious and delightful
+      scrapbooks people disinter in old country houses; its very poverty of
+      synthetic power leaves its ingredients, the cuttings from and imitations
+      of Plato, the recipe for the hatching of eggs, the stern resolutions
+      against scoundrels and rough fellows, all the sharper and brighter. There
+      will always be found people to read in it, over and above the countless
+      multitudes who will continue ignorantly to use its name for everything
+      most alien to More's essential quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TRAFFIC AND REBUILDING
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The London traffic problem is just one of those questions that appeal very
+      strongly to the more prevalent and less charitable types of English mind.
+      It has a practical and constructive air, it deals with impressively
+      enormous amounts of tangible property, it rests with a comforting effect
+      of solidity upon assumptions that are at once doubtful and desirable. It
+      seems free from metaphysical considerations, and it has none of those
+      disconcerting personal applications, those penetrations towards intimate
+      qualities, that makes eugenics, for example, faintly but persistently
+      uncomfortable. It is indeed an ideal problem for a healthy, hopeful, and
+      progressive middle-aged public man. And, as I say, it deals with enormous
+      amounts of tangible property.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like all really serious and respectable British problems it has to be
+      handled gently to prevent its coming to pieces in the gift. It is safest
+      in charge of the expert, that wonderful last gift of time. He will talk
+      rapidly about congestion, long-felt wants, low efficiency, economy, and
+      get you into his building and rebuilding schemes with the minimum of doubt
+      and head-swimming. He is like a good Hendon pilot. Unspecialised writers
+      have the destructive analytical touch. They pull the wrong levers. So far
+      as one can gather from the specialists on the question, there is very
+      considerable congestion in many of the London thoroughfares, delays that
+      seem to be avoidable occur in the delivery of goods, multitudes of empty
+      vans cumber the streets, we have hundreds of acres of idle trucks&mdash;there
+      are more acres of railway sidings than of public parks in Greater London&mdash;and
+      our Overseas cousins find it ticklish work crossing Regent Street and
+      Piccadilly. Regarding life simply as an affair of getting people and
+      things from where they are to where they appear to be wanted, this seems
+      all very muddled and wanton. So far it is quite easy to agree with the
+      expert. And some of the various and entirely incompatible schemes experts
+      are giving us by way of a remedy, appeal very strongly to the imagination.
+      For example, there is the railway clearing house, which, it is suggested,
+      should cover I do not know how many acres of what is now slumland in
+      Shoreditch. The position is particularly convenient for an underground
+      connection with every main line into London. Upon the underground level of
+      this great building every goods train into London will run. Its trucks and
+      vans will be unloaded, the goods passed into lifts, which will take every
+      parcel, large and small, at once to a huge, ingeniously contrived
+      sorting-floor above. There in a manner at once simple, ingenious and
+      effective, they will be sorted and returned, either into delivery vans at
+      the street level or to the trains emptied and now reloading on the train
+      level. Above and below these three floors will be extensive warehouse
+      accommodation. Such a scheme would not only release almost all the vast
+      area of London now under railway yards for parks and housing, but it would
+      give nearly every delivery van an effective load, and probably reduce the
+      number of standing and empty vans or half-empty vans on the streets of
+      London to a quarter or an eighth of the present number. Mostly these are
+      heavy horse vans, and their disappearance would greatly facilitate the
+      conversion of the road surfaces to the hard and even texture needed for
+      horseless traffic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that is a scheme too comprehensive and rational for the ordinary
+      student of the London traffic problem, whose mind runs for the most part
+      on costly and devastating rearrangements of the existing roadways.
+      Moreover, it would probably secure a maximum of effect with a minimum of
+      property manipulation; always an undesirable consideration in practical
+      politics. And it would commit London and England to goods transit by
+      railway for another century. Far more attractive to the expert advisers of
+      our various municipal authorities are such projects as a new Thames bridge
+      scheme, which will (with incalculable results) inject a new stream of
+      traffic into Saint Paul's Churchyard; and the removal of Charing Cross
+      Station to the south side of the river. Then, again, we have the
+      systematic widening of various thoroughfares, the shunting of tramways
+      into traffic streams, and many amusing, expensive, and interesting
+      tunnellings and clearances. Taken together, these huge reconstructions of
+      London are incoherent and conflicting; each is based on its own
+      assumptions and separate "expert" advice, and the resulting new opening
+      plays its part in the general circulation as duct or aspirator, often with
+      the most surprising results. The discussion of the London traffic problem
+      as we practise it in our clubs is essentially the sage turning over and
+      over again of such fragmentary schemes, headshakings over the vacant sites
+      about Aldwych and the Strand, brilliant petty suggestions and&mdash;dispersal.
+      Meanwhile the experts intrigue; one partial plan after another gets itself
+      accepted, this and that ancient landmark perish, builders grow rich, and
+      architects infamous, and some Tower Bridge horror, some vulgarity of the
+      Automobile Club type, some Buckingham Palace atrocity, some Regent Street
+      stupidity, some such cramped and thwarted thing as that new arch which
+      gives upon Charing Cross is added to the confusion. I do not see any
+      reason to suppose that this continuous muddle of partial destruction and
+      partial rebuilding is not to constitute the future history of London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us, however, drop the expert methods and handle this question rather
+      more rudely. Do we want London rebuilt? If we do, is there, after all, any
+      reason why we should rebuild it on its present site? London is where it is
+      for reasons that have long ceased to be valid; it grew there, it has
+      accumulated associations, an immense tradition, that this constant mucking
+      about of builders and architects is destroying almost as effectually as
+      removal to a new site. The old sort of rebuilding was a natural and
+      picturesque process, house by house, and street by street, a thing as
+      pleasing and almost as natural in effect as the spreading and interlacing
+      of trees; as this new building, this clearance of areas, the piercing of
+      avenues, becomes more comprehensive, it becomes less reasonable. If we can
+      do such big things we may surely attempt bigger things, so that whether we
+      want to plan a new capital or preserve the old, it comes at last to the
+      same thing, that it is unreasonable to be constantly pulling down the
+      London we have and putting it up again. Let us drain away our heavy
+      traffic into tunnels, set up that clearing-house plan, and control the
+      growth at the periphery, which is still so witless and ugly, and, save for
+      the manifest tidying and preserving that is needed, begin to leave the
+      central parts of London, which are extremely interesting even where they
+      are not quite beautiful, in peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It has long been generally recognised that there are two quite divergent
+      ways of attacking sociological and economic questions, one that is called
+      scientific and one that is not, and I claim no particular virtue in the
+      recognition of that; but I do claim a certain freshness in my analysis of
+      this difference, and it is to that analysis that your attention is now
+      called. When I claim freshness I do not make, you understand, any claim to
+      original discovery. What I have to say, and have been saying for some
+      time, is also more or less, and with certain differences to be found in
+      the thought of Professor Bosanquet, for example, in Alfred Sidgwick's "Use
+      of Words in Reasoning," in Sigwart's "Logic," in contemporary American
+      metaphysical speculation. I am only one incidental voice speaking in a
+      general movement of thought. My trend of thought leads me to deny that
+      sociology is a science, or only a science in the same loose sense that
+      modern history is a science, and to throw doubt upon the value of
+      sociology that follows too closely what is called the scientific method.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drift of my argument is to dispute not only that sociology is a
+      science, but also to deny that Herbert Spencer and Comte are to be exalted
+      as the founders of a new and fruitful system of human inquiry. I find
+      myself forced to depreciate these modern idols, and to reinstate the Greek
+      social philosophers in their vacant niches, to ask you rather to go to
+      Plato for the proper method, the proper way of thinking sociologically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We certainly owe the word Sociology to Comte, a man of exceptionally
+      methodical quality. I hold he developed the word logically from an
+      arbitrary assumption that the whole universe of being was reducible to
+      measurable and commeasurable and exact and consistent expressions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a very obvious way, sociology seemed to Comte to crown the edifice of
+      the sciences; it was to be to the statesman what pathology and physiology
+      were to the doctor; and one gathers that, for the most part, he regarded
+      it as an intellectual procedure in no way differing from physics. His
+      classification of the sciences shows pretty clearly that he thought of
+      them all as exact logical systematisations of fact arising out of each
+      other in a synthetic order, each lower one containing the elements of a
+      lucid explanation of those above it&mdash;physics explaining chemistry;
+      chemistry, physiology; physiology, sociology; and so forth. His actual
+      method was altogether unscientific; but through all his work runs the
+      assumption that in contrast with his predecessors he is really being as
+      exact and universally valid as mathematics. To Herbert Spencer&mdash;very
+      appropriately since his mental characteristics make him the English
+      parallel to Comte&mdash;we owe the naturalisation of the word in English.
+      His mind being of greater calibre than Comte's, the subject acquired in
+      his hands a far more progressive character. Herbert Spencer was less
+      unfamiliar with natural history than with any other branch of practical
+      scientific work; and it was natural he should turn to it for precedents in
+      sociological research. His mind was invaded by the idea of classification,
+      by memories of specimens and museums; and he initiated that accumulation
+      of desiccated anthropological anecdotes that still figures importantly in
+      current sociological work. On the lines he initiated sociological
+      investigation, what there is of it, still tends to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From these two sources mainly the work of contemporary sociologists
+      derives. But there persists about it a curious discursiveness that
+      reflects upon the power and value of the initial impetus. Mr. V.V.
+      Branford, the able secretary of the Sociological Society, recently
+      attempted a useful work in a classification of the methods of what he
+      calls "approach," a word that seems to me eminently judicious and
+      expressive. A review of the first volume the Sociological Society has
+      produced brings home the aptness of this image of exploratory operations,
+      of experiments in "taking a line." The names of Dr. Beattie Crozier and
+      Mr. Benjamin Kidd recall works that impress one as large-scale sketches of
+      a proposed science rather than concrete beginnings and achievements. The
+      search for an arrangement, a "method," continues as though they were not.
+      The desperate resort to the analogical method of Commenius is confessed by
+      Dr. Steinmetz, who talks of social morphology, physiology, pathology, and
+      so forth. There is also a less initiative disposition in the Vicomte
+      Combes de Lestrade and in the work of Professor Giddings. In other
+      directions sociological work is apt to lose its general reference
+      altogether, to lapse towards some department of activity not primarily
+      sociological at all. Examples of this are the works of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney
+      Webb, M. Ostrogorski and M. Gustave le Bon. From a contemplation of all
+      this diversity Professor Durkheim emerges, demanding a "synthetic
+      science," "certain synthetic conceptions"&mdash;and Professor Karl Pearson
+      endorses the demand&mdash;to fuse all these various activities into
+      something that will live and grow. What is it that tangles this question
+      so curiously that there is not only a failure to arrive at a conclusion,
+      but a failure to join issue?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, there is a certain not too clearly recognised order in the sciences
+      to which I wish to call your attention, and which forms the gist of my
+      case against this scientific pretension. There is a gradation in the
+      importance of the instance as one passes from mechanics and physics and
+      chemistry through the biological sciences to economics and sociology, a
+      gradation whose correlatives and implications have not yet received
+      adequate recognition, and which do profoundly affect the method of study
+      and research in each science.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me begin by pointing out that, in the more modern conceptions of
+      logic, it is recognised that there are no identically similar objective
+      experiences; the disposition is to conceive all real objective being as
+      individual and unique. This is not a singular eccentric idea of mine; it
+      is one for which ample support is to be found in the writings of
+      absolutely respectable contemporaries, who are quite untainted by
+      association with fiction. It is now understood that conceivably only in
+      the subjective world, and in theory and the imagination, do we deal with
+      identically similar units, and with absolutely commensurable quantities.
+      In the real world it is reasonable to suppose we deal at most with <i>practically</i>
+      similar units and <i>practically</i> commensurable quantities. But there
+      is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias in the normal human mind to
+      ignore this, and not only to speak but to think of a thousand bricks or a
+      thousand sheep or a thousand sociologists as though they were all
+      absolutely true to sample. If it is brought before a thinker for a moment
+      that in any special case this is not so, he slips back to the old attitude
+      as soon as his attention is withdrawn. This source of error has, for
+      instance, caught nearly the whole race of chemists, with one or two
+      distinguished exceptions, and <i>atoms</i> and <i>ions</i> and so forth of
+      the same species are tacitly assumed to be similar one to another. Be it
+      noted that, so far as the practical results of chemistry and physics go,
+      it scarcely matters which assumption we adopt. For purposes of inquiry and
+      discussion the incorrect one is infinitely more convenient.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this ceases to be true directly we emerge from the region of chemistry
+      and physics. In the biological sciences of the eighteenth century,
+      commonsense struggled hard to ignore individuality in shells and plants
+      and animals. There was an attempt to eliminate the more conspicuous
+      departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's weak moments, and it was
+      only with the establishment of Darwin's great generalisation that the hard
+      and fast classificatory system broke down, and individuality came to its
+      own. Yet there had always been a clearly felt difference between the
+      conclusions of the biological sciences and those dealing with lifeless
+      substance, in the relative vagueness, the insubordinate looseness and
+      inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist accumulated facts and multiplied
+      names, but he did not go triumphantly from generalisation to
+      generalisation after the fashion of the chemist or physicist. It is easy
+      to see, therefore, how it came about that the inorganic sciences were
+      regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was scarcely suspected that
+      the biological sciences might perhaps, after all, be <i>truer</i> than the
+      experimental, in spite of the difference in practical value in favour of
+      the latter. It was, and is by the great majority of people to this day,
+      supposed to be the latter that are invincibly true; and the former are
+      regarded as a more complex set of problems merely, with obliquities and
+      refractions that presently will be explained away. Comte and Herbert
+      Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that much for granted. Herbert
+      Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and the unknowable, but not in this
+      sense, as an element of inexactness running through all things. He thought
+      of the unknown as the indefinable beyond to an immediate world that might
+      be quite clearly and exactly known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, there is a growing body of people who are beginning to hold the
+      converse view&mdash;that counting, classification, measurement, the whole
+      fabric of mathematics, is subjective and deceitful, and that the
+      uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units
+      taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalisation
+      increases, because individuality tells more and more. Could you take men
+      by the thousand billion, you could generalise about them as you do about
+      atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be you would find them as
+      individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the minority
+      belief, and it is the belief on which this present paper is based.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, what is called the scientific method is the method of ignoring
+      individualities; and, like many mathematical conventions, its great
+      practical convenience is no proof whatever of its final truth. Let me
+      admit the enormous value, the wonder of its results in mechanics, in all
+      the physical sciences, in chemistry, even in physiology&mdash;but what is
+      its value beyond that? Is the scientific method of value in biology? The
+      great advances made by Darwin and his school in biology were not made, it
+      must be remembered, by the scientific method, as it is generally
+      conceived, at all. He conducted a research into pre-documentary history.
+      He collected information along the lines indicated by certain
+      interrogations; and the bulk of his work was the digesting and critical
+      analysis of that. For documents and monuments he had fossils and
+      anatomical structures and germinating eggs too innocent to lie, and so far
+      he was nearer simplicity. But, on the other hand, he had to correspond
+      with breeders and travellers of various sorts, classes entirely analogous,
+      from the point of view of evidence, to the writers of history and memoirs.
+      I question profoundly whether the word "science," in current usage anyhow,
+      ever means such patient disentanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the
+      attainment of something positive and emphatic in the way of a conclusion,
+      based on amply repeated experiments capable of infinite repetition,
+      "proved," as they say, "up to the hilt."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be, of course, possible to dispute whether the word "science"
+      should convey this quality of certitude; but to most people it certainly
+      does at the present time. So far as the movements of comets and electric
+      trams go, there is, no doubt, practically cocksure science; and
+      indisputably Comte and Herbert Spencer believed that cocksure could be
+      extended to every conceivable finite thing. The fact that Herbert Spencer
+      called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the
+      non-individualising quality of his primary assumptions and of his mental
+      texture. He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an
+      evolutionary product from an original homogeneity. It seems to me that the
+      general usage is entirely for the limitation of the use of the word
+      "science" to knowledge and the search after knowledge of a high degree of
+      precision. And not simply the general usage: "Science is measurement,"
+      Science is "organised common sense," proud, in fact, of its essential
+      error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we quite boldly face the fact that hard positive methods are less and
+      less successful just in proportion as our "ologies" deal with larger and
+      less numerous individuals; if we admit that we become less "scientific" as
+      we ascend the scale of the sciences, and that we do and must change our
+      method, then, it is humbly submitted we shall be in a much better position
+      to consider the question of "approaching" sociology. We shall realise that
+      all this talk of the organisation of sociology, as though presently the
+      sociologist would be going about the world with the authority of a
+      sanitary engineer, is and will remain nonsense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one respect we shall still be in accordance with the Positivist map of
+      the field of human knowledge; with us as with that, sociology stands at
+      the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences. In these latter
+      there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there
+      is only one unit. It is true that Herbert Spencer, in order to get
+      classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim has pointed out,
+      separate human society into societies, and made believe they competed one
+      with another and died and reproduced just like animals, and that
+      economists, following List, have for the purposes of fiscal controversy
+      discovered economic types; but this is a transparent device, and one is
+      surprised to find thoughtful and reputable writers off their guard against
+      such bad analogy. But, indeed, it is impossible to isolate complete
+      communities of men, or to trace any but rude general resemblances between
+      group and group. These alleged units have as much individuality as pieces
+      of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse and separate. And we are forced to
+      conclude that not only is the method of observation, experiment, and
+      verification left far away down the scale, but that the method of
+      classification under types, which has served so useful a purpose in the
+      middle group of subjects, the subjects involving numerous but a finite
+      number of units, has also to be abandoned here. We cannot put Humanity
+      into a museum, or dry it for examination; our one single still living
+      specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of
+      men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing else in
+      the real world with which to compare it. We have only the remotest ideas
+      of its "life-cycle" and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its
+      destiny ...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sociology, it is evident, is, upon any hypothesis, no less than the
+      attempt to bring that vast, complex, unique Being, its subject, into
+      clear, true relations with the individual intelligence. Now, since
+      individual intelligences are individual, and each is a little differently
+      placed in regard to the subject under consideration, since the personal
+      angle of vision is much wider towards humanity than towards the
+      circumambient horizon of matter, it should be manifest that no sociology
+      of universal compulsion, of anything approaching the general validity of
+      the physical sciences, is ever to be hoped for&mdash;at least upon the
+      metaphysical assumptions of this paper. With that conceded, we may go on
+      to consider the more hopeful ways in which that great Being may be
+      presented in a comprehensible manner. Essentially this presentation must
+      involve an element of self-expression must partake quite as much of the
+      nature of art as of science. One finds in the first conference of the
+      Sociological Society, Professor Stein, speaking, indeed a very different
+      philosophical dialect from mine, but coming to the same practical
+      conclusion in the matter, and Mr. Osman Newland counting "evolving ideals
+      for the future" as part of the sociologist's work. Mr. Alfred Fouillie
+      also moves very interestingly in the region of this same idea; he concedes
+      an essential difference between sociology and all other sciences in the
+      fact of a "certain kind of liberty belonging to society in the exercise of
+      its higher functions." He says further: "If this view be correct, it will
+      not do for us to follow in the steps of Comte and Spencer, and transfer,
+      bodily and ready-made, the conceptions and the methods of the natural
+      sciences into the science of society. For here the fact of <i>consciousness</i>
+      entails a reaction of the whole assemblage of social phenomena upon
+      themselves, such as the natural sciences have no example of." And he
+      concludes: "Sociology ought, therefore, to guard carefully against the
+      tendency to crystallise that which is essentially fluid and moving, the
+      tendency to consider as given fact or dead data that which creates itself
+      and gives itself into the world of phenomena continually by force of its
+      own ideal conception." These opinions do, in their various keys, sound a
+      similar <i>motif</i> to mine. If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks is
+      justifiable, then unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty,
+      must coalesce with the objective, which is truth; and sociology mast be
+      neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all,
+      but knowledge rendered imaginatively, and with an element of personality
+      that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set aside Comte and
+      Spencer altogether, as pseudo-scientific interlopers rather than the
+      authoritative parents of sociology, we shall have to substitute for the
+      classifications of the social sciences an inquiry into the chief literary
+      forms that subserve sociological purposes. Of these there are two, one
+      invariably recognised as valuable and one which, I think, under the
+      matter-of-fact scientific obsession, is altogether underrated and
+      neglected The first, which is the social side of history, makes up the
+      bulk of valid sociological work at the present time. Of history there is
+      the purely descriptive part, the detailed account of past or contemporary
+      social conditions, or of the sequence of such conditions; and, in
+      addition, there is the sort of historical literature that seeks to
+      elucidate and impose general interpretations upon the complex of
+      occurrences and institutions, to establish broad historical
+      generalisations, to eliminate the mass of irrelevant incident, to present
+      some great period of history, or all history, in the light of one dramatic
+      sequence, or as one process. This Dr. Beattie Crozier, for example,
+      attempts in his "History of Intellectual Development." Equally
+      comprehensive is Buckle's "History of Civilisation." Lecky's "History of
+      European Morals," during the onset of Christianity again, is essentially
+      sociology. Numerous works&mdash;Atkinson's "Primal Law," and Andrew Lang's
+      "Social Origins," for example&mdash;may be considered, as it were, to be
+      fragments to the same purport. In the great design of Gibbon's "Decline
+      and Fall of the Roman Empire," or Carlyle's "French Revolution," you have
+      a greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque elements in
+      history, but in other respects an altogether kindred endeavour to impose
+      upon the vast confusions of the past a scheme of interpretation, valuable
+      just to the extent of its literary value, of the success with which the
+      discrepant masses have been fused and cast into the shape the insight of
+      the writer has determined. The writing of great history is entirely
+      analogous to fine portraiture, in which fact is indeed material, but
+      material entirely subordinate to vision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One main branch of the work of a Sociological Society therefore should
+      surely be to accept and render acceptable, to provide understanding,
+      criticism, and stimulus for such literary activities as restore the dead
+      bones of the past to a living participation in our lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is in the second and at present neglected direction that I believe
+      the predominant attack upon the problem implied by the word "sociology"
+      must lie; the attack that must be finally driven home. There is no such
+      thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what <i>is</i>, without
+      considering what is <i>intended to be</i>. In sociology, beyond any
+      possibility of evasion, ideas are facts. The history of civilisation is
+      really the history of the appearance and reappearance, the tentatives and
+      hesitations and alterations, the manifestations and reflections in this
+      mind and that, of a very complex, imperfect elusive idea, the Social Idea.
+      It is that idea struggling to exist and realise itself in a world of
+      egotisms, animalisms, and brute matter. Now, I submit it is not only a
+      legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful
+      form of approach, to endeavour to disentangle and express one's personal
+      version of that idea, and to measure realities from the stand-point of
+      that idealisation. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias&mdash;and
+      their exhaustive criticism&mdash;is the proper and distinctive method of
+      sociology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose now the Sociological Society, or some considerable proportion of
+      it, were to adopt this view, that sociology is the description of the
+      Ideal Society and its relation to existing societies, would not this give
+      the synthetic framework Professor Durkheim, for example, has said to be
+      needed?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almost all the sociological literature beyond the province of history that
+      has stood the test of time and established itself in the esteem of men is
+      frankly Utopian. Plato, when his mind turned to schemes of social
+      reconstruction thrust his habitual form of dialogue into a corner; both
+      the "Republic" and the "Laws" are practically Utopias in monologue; and
+      Aristotle found the criticism of the Utopian suggestions of his
+      predecessors richly profitable. Directly the mind of the world emerged
+      again at the Renascence from intellectual barbarism in the brief breathing
+      time before Sturm and the schoolmasters caught it and birched it into
+      scholarship and a new period of sterility, it went on from Plato to the
+      making of fresh Utopias. Not without profit did More discuss pauperism in
+      this form and Bacon the organisation of research; and the yeast of the
+      French Revolution was Utopias. Even Comte, all the while that he is
+      professing science, fact, precision, is adding detail after detail to the
+      intensely personal Utopia of a Western Republic that constitutes his one
+      meritorious gift to the world. Sociologists cannot help making Utopias;
+      though they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with passion, their
+      very silences shape a Utopia. Why should they not follow the precedent of
+      Aristotle, and accept Utopias as material?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There used to be in my student days, and probably still flourishes, a most
+      valuable summary of fact and theory in comparative anatomy, called
+      Rolleston's "Forms of Animal Life." I figure to myself a similar book, a
+      sort of dream book of huge dimensions, in reality perhaps dispersed in
+      many volumes by many hands, upon the Ideal Society. This book, this
+      picture of the perfect state, would be the backbone of sociology. It would
+      have great sections devoted to such questions as the extent of the Ideal
+      Society, its relation to racial differences, the relations of the sexes in
+      it, its economic organisations, its organisation for thought and
+      education, its "Bible"&mdash;as Dr. Beattie Crozier would say&mdash;its
+      housing and social atmosphere, and so forth. Almost all the divaricating
+      work at present roughly classed together as sociological could be brought
+      into relation in the simplest manner, either as new suggestions, as new
+      discussion or criticism, as newly ascertained facts bearing upon such
+      discussions and sustaining or eliminating suggestions. The institutions of
+      existing states would come into comparison with the institutions of the
+      Ideal State, their failures and defects would be criticised most
+      effectually in that relation, and the whole science of collective
+      psychology, the psychology of human association, would be brought to bear
+      upon the question of the practicability of this proposed ideal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This method would give not only a boundary shape to all sociological
+      activities, but a scheme of arrangement for text books and lectures, and
+      points of direction and reference for the graduation and post graduate
+      work of sociological students.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only one group of inquiries commonly classed as sociological would have to
+      be left out of direct relationship with this Ideal State; and that is
+      inquiries concerning the rough expedients to meet the failure of imperfect
+      institutions. Social emergency work of all sorts comes under this head.
+      What to do with the pariah dogs of Constantinople, what to do with the
+      tramps who sleep in the London parks, how to organise a soup kitchen or a
+      Bible coffee van, how to prevent ignorant people, who have nothing else to
+      do, getting drunk in beer-houses, are no doubt serious questions for the
+      practical administrator, questions of primary importance to the
+      politician; but they have no more to do with sociology than the erection
+      of a temporary hospital after the collision of two trains has to do with
+      railway engineering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for my second and most central and essential portion of
+      sociological work. It should be evident that the former part, the
+      historical part, which conceivably will be much the bulkier and more
+      abundant of the two, will in effect amount to a history of the suggestions
+      in circumstance and experience of that Idea of Society of which the second
+      will consist, and of the instructive failures in attempting its incomplete
+      realisation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DIVORCE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The time is fast approaching when it will be necessary for the general
+      citizen to form definite opinions upon proposals for probably quite
+      extensive alterations of our present divorce laws, arising out of the
+      recommendations of the recent Royal Commission on the subject. It may not
+      be out of place, therefore, to run through some of the chief points that
+      are likely to be raised, and to set out the main considerations affecting
+      these issues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Divorce is not one of those things that stand alone, and neither divorce
+      law nor the general principles of divorce are to be discussed without a
+      reference to antecedent arrangements. Divorce is a sequel to marriage, and
+      a change in the divorce law is essentially a change in the marriage law.
+      There was a time in this country when our marriage was a practically
+      divorceless bond, soluble only under extraordinary circumstances by people
+      in situations of exceptional advantage for doing so. Now it is a bond
+      under conditions, and in the event of the adultery of the wife, or of the
+      adultery plus cruelty or plus desertion of the husband, and of one or two
+      other rarer and more dreadful offences, it can be broken at the instance
+      of the aggrieved party. A change in the divorce law is a change in the
+      dissolution clauses, so to speak, of the contract for the marriage
+      partnership. It is a change in the marriage law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A great number of people object to divorce under any circumstances
+      whatever. This is the case with the orthodox Catholic and with the
+      orthodox Positivist. And many religious and orthodox people carry their
+      assertion of the indissolubility of marriage to the grave; they demand
+      that the widow or widower shall remain unmarried, faithful to the vows
+      made at the altar until death comes to the release of the lonely survivor
+      also. Re-marriage is regarded by such people as a posthumous bigamy. There
+      is certainly a very strong and logical case to be made out for a marriage
+      bond that is indissoluble even by death. It banishes step-parents from the
+      world. It confers a dignity of tragic inevitability upon the association
+      of husband and wife, and makes a love approach the gravest, most momentous
+      thing in life. It banishes for ever any dream of escape from the presence
+      and service of either party, or of any separation from the children of the
+      union. It affords no alternative to "making the best of it" for either
+      husband or wife; they have taken a step as irrevocable as suicide. And
+      some logical minds would even go further, and have no law as between the
+      members of a family, no rights, no private property within that limit. The
+      family would be the social unit and the father its public representative,
+      and though the law might intervene if he murdered or ill-used wife or
+      children, or they him, it would do so in just the same spirit that it
+      might prevent him from self-mutilation or attempted suicide, for the good
+      of the State simply, and not to defend any supposed independence of the
+      injured member. There is much, I assert, to be said for such a complete
+      shutting up of the family from the interference of the law, and not the
+      least among these reasons is the entire harmony of such a view with the
+      passionate instincts of the natural man and woman in these matters. All
+      unsophisticated human beings appear disposed to a fierce proprietorship in
+      their children and their sexual partners, and in no respect is the
+      ordinary mortal so easily induced to vehemence and violence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my own part, I do not think the maintenance of a marriage that is
+      indissoluble, that precludes the survivor from re-marriage, that gives
+      neither party an external refuge from the misbehaviour of the other, and
+      makes the children the absolute property of their parents until they grow
+      up, would cause any very general unhappiness Most people are reasonable
+      enough, good-tempered enough, and adaptable enough to shake down even in a
+      grip so rigid, and I would even go further and say that its very rigidity,
+      the entire absence of any way out at all, would oblige innumerable people
+      to accommodate themselves to its conditions and make a working success of
+      unions that, under laxer conditions, would be almost certainly dissolved.
+      We should have more people of what I may call the "broken-in" type than an
+      easier release would create, but to many thinkers the spectacle of a human
+      being thoroughly "broken-in" is in itself extremely satisfactory. A few
+      more crimes of desperation perhaps might occur, to balance against an
+      almost universal effort to achieve contentment and reconciliation. We
+      should hear more of the "natural law" permitting murder by the jealous
+      husband or by the jealous wife, and the traffic in poisons would need a
+      sedulous attention&mdash;but even there the impossibility of re-marriage
+      would operate to restrain the impatient. On the whole, I can imagine the
+      world rubbing along very well with marriage as unaccommodating as a
+      perfected steel trap. Exceptional people might suffer or sin wildly&mdash;to
+      the general amusement or indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when once we part from the idea of such a rigid and eternal marriage
+      bond&mdash;and the law of every civilised country and the general thought
+      and sentiment everywhere have long since done so&mdash;then the whole
+      question changes. If marriage is not so absolutely sacred a bond, if it is
+      not an eternal bond, but a bond we may break on this account or that, then
+      at once we put the question on a different footing. If we may terminate it
+      for adultery or cruelty, or any cause whatever, if we may suspend the
+      intimacy of husband and wife by separation orders and the like, if we
+      recognise their separate property and interfere between them and their
+      children to ensure the health and education of the latter, then we open at
+      once the whole question of a terminating agreement. Marriage ceases to be
+      an unlimited union and becomes a definite contract. We raise the whole
+      question of "What are the limits in marriage, and how and when may a
+      marriage terminate?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, many answers are being given to that question at the present time. We
+      may take as the extremest opposite to the eternal marriage idea the
+      proposal of Mr. Bernard Shaw, that marriage should be terminable at the
+      instance of either party. You would give due and public notice that your
+      marriage was at an end, and it would be at an end. This is marriage at its
+      minimum, as the eternal indissoluble marriage is marriage at its maximum,
+      and the only conceivable next step would be to have a marriage makeable by
+      the oral declaration of both parties and terminable by the oral
+      declaration of either, which would be, indeed, no marriage at all, but an
+      encounter. You might marry a dozen times in that way in a day....
+      Somewhere between these extremes lies the marriage law of a civilised
+      state. Let us, rather than working down from the eternal marriage of the
+      religious idealists, work up from Mr. Shaw. The former course is, perhaps,
+      inevitable for the legislator, but the latter is much more convenient for
+      our discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, the idea of a divorce so easy and wilful as Mr. Shaw proposes arises
+      naturally out of an exclusive consideration of what I may call the amorous
+      sentimentalities of marriage. If you regard marriage as merely the union
+      of two people in love, then, clearly, it is intolerable, an outrage upon
+      human dignity, that they should remain intimately united when either
+      ceases to love. And in that world of Mr. Shaw's dreams, in which everybody
+      is to have an equal income and nobody is to have children, in that
+      culminating conversazione of humanity, his marriage law will, no doubt,
+      work with the most admirable results. But if we make a step towards
+      reality and consider a world in which incomes are unequal, and economic
+      difficulties abound&mdash;for the present we will ignore the complication
+      of offspring&mdash;we at once find it necessary to modify the first fine
+      simplicity of divorce at either partner's request. Marriage is almost
+      always a serious economic disturbance for both man and woman: work has to
+      be given up and rearranged, resources have to be pooled; only in the
+      rarest cases does it escape becoming an indefinite business partnership.
+      Accordingly, the withdrawal of one partner raises at once all sorts of
+      questions of financial adjustment, compensation for physical, mental, and
+      moral damage, division of furniture and effects and so forth. No doubt a
+      very large part of this could be met if there existed some sort of
+      marriage settlement providing for the dissolution of the partnership.
+      Otherwise the petitioner for a Shaw-esque divorce must be prepared for the
+      most exhaustive and penetrating examination before, say, a court of three
+      assessors&mdash;representing severally the husband, the wife, and justice&mdash;to
+      determine the distribution of the separation. This point, however, leads
+      me to note in passing the need that does exist even to-day for a more
+      precise business supplement to marriage as we know it in England and
+      America. I think there ought to be a very definite and elaborate treaty of
+      partnership drawn up by an impartial private tribunal for every couple
+      that marries, providing for most of the eventualities of life, taking
+      cognizance of the earning power, the property and prospects of either
+      party, insisting upon due insurances, ensuring private incomes for each
+      partner, securing the welfare of the children, and laying down equitable
+      conditions in the event of a divorce or separation. Such a treaty ought to
+      be a necessary prelude to the issue of a licence to marry. And given such
+      a basis to go upon, then I see no reason why, in the case of couples who
+      remain childless for five or six years, let us say, and seem likely to
+      remain childless, the Shaw-esque divorce at the instance of either party,
+      without reason assigned, should not be a very excellent thing indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And I take up this position because I believe in the family as the
+      justification of marriage. Marriage to me is no mystical and eternal
+      union, but a practical affair, to be judged as all practical things are
+      judged&mdash;by its returns in happiness and human welfare. And directly
+      we pass from the mists and glamours of amorous passion to the warm
+      realities of the nursery, we pass into a new system of considerations
+      altogether. We are no longer considering A. in relation to Mrs. A., but A.
+      and Mrs. A. in relation to an indefinite number of little A.'s, who are
+      the very life of the State in which they live. Into the case of Mr. A. <i>v</i>.
+      Mrs. A. come Master A. and Miss A. intervening. They have the strongest
+      claim against both their parents for love, shelter and upbringing, and the
+      legislator and statesman, concerned as he is chiefly with the future of
+      the community, has the strongest reasons for seeing that they get these
+      things, even at the price of considerable vexation, boredom or indignity
+      to Mr. and Mrs. A. And here it is that there arises the rational case
+      against free and frequent divorce and the general unsettlement and
+      fluctuation of homes that would ensue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point we come to the verge of a jungle of questions that would
+      demand a whole book for anything like a complete answer. Let us try as
+      swiftly and simply as possible to form a general idea at least of the way
+      through. Remember that we are working upward from Mr. Shaw's question of
+      "Why not separate at the choice of either party?" We have got thus far,
+      that no two people who do not love each other should be compelled to live
+      together, except where the welfare of their children comes in to override
+      their desire to separate, and now we have to consider what may or may not
+      be for the welfare of the children. Mr. Shaw, following the late Samuel
+      Butler, meets this difficulty by the most extravagant abuse of parents. He
+      would have us believe that the worst enemies a child can have are its
+      mother and father, and that the only civilised path to citizenship is by
+      the incubator, the crjche, and the mixed school and college. In these
+      matters he is not only ignorant, but unfeeling and unsympathetic,
+      extraordinarily so in view of his great capacity for pity and sweetness in
+      other directions and of his indignant hatred of cruelty and unfairness,
+      and it is not necessary to waste time in discussing what the common
+      experience confutes Neither is it necessary to fly to the other extreme,
+      and indulge in preposterous sentimentalities about the magic of fatherhood
+      and a mother's love. These are not magic and unlimited things, but
+      touchingly qualified and human things. The temperate truth of the matter
+      is that in most parents there are great stores of pride, interest, natural
+      sympathy, passionate love and devotion which can be tapped in the
+      interests of the children and the social future, and that it is the mere
+      commonsense of statecraft to use their resources to the utmost. It does
+      not follow that every parent contains these reservoirs, and that a
+      continual close association with the parents is always beneficial to
+      children. If it did, we should have to prosecute everyone who employed a
+      governess or sent away a little boy to a preparatory school. And our real
+      task is to establish a test that will gauge the desirability and benefit
+      of a parent's continued parentage. There are certainly parents and homes
+      from which the children might be taken with infinite benefit to themselves
+      and to society, and whose union it is ridiculous to save from the divorce
+      court shears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose, now, we made the willingness of a parent to give up his or her
+      children the measure of his beneficialness to them. There is no reason why
+      we should restrict divorce only to the relation of husband and wife. Let
+      us broaden the word and make it conceivable for a husband or wife to
+      divorce not only the partner, but the children. Then it might be possible
+      to meet the demands of the Shaw-esque extremist up to the point of
+      permitting a married parent, who desired freedom, to petition for a
+      divorce, not from his or her partner simply, but from his or her family,
+      and even for a widow or widower to divorce a family. Then would come the
+      task of the assessors. They would make arrangements for the dissolution of
+      the relationship, erring from justice rather in the direction of
+      liberality towards the divorced group, they would determine contributions,
+      exact securities appoint trustees and guardians.... On the whole, I do not
+      see why such a system should not work very well. It would break up many
+      loveless homes, quarrelling and bickering homes, and give a safety-valve
+      for that hate which is the sinister shadow of love. I do not think it
+      would separate one child from one parent who was really worthy of its
+      possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far I have discussed only the possibility of divorce without offences,
+      the sort of divorce that arises out of estrangement and incompatibilities.
+      But divorce, as it is known in most Christian countries, has a punitive
+      element, and is obtained through the failure of one of the parties to
+      observe the conditions of the bond and the determination of the other to
+      exact suffering. Divorce as it exists at present is not a readjustment but
+      a revenge. It is the nasty exposure of a private wrong. In England a
+      husband may divorce his wife for a single act of infidelity, and there can
+      be little doubt that we are on the eve of an equalisation of the law in
+      this respect. I will confess I consider this an extreme concession to the
+      passion of jealousy, and one likely to tear off the roof from many a
+      family of innocent children. Only infidelity leading to supposititious
+      children in the case of the wife, or infidelity obstinately and
+      offensively persisted in or endangering health in the case of the husband,
+      really injure the home sufficiently to justify a divorce on the
+      assumptions of our present argument. If we are going to make the welfare
+      of the children our criterion in these matters, then our divorce law does
+      in this direction already go too far. A husband or wife may do far more
+      injury to the home by constantly neglecting it for the companionship of
+      some outside person with whom no "matrimonial offence" is ever committed.
+      Of course, if our divorce law exists mainly for the gratification of the
+      fiercer sexual resentments, well and good, but if that is so, let us
+      abandon our pretence that marriage is an institution for the establishment
+      and protection of homes. And while on the one hand existing divorce laws
+      appear to be obsessed by sexual offences, other things of far more evil
+      effect upon the home go without a remedy. There are, for example,
+      desertion, domestic neglect, cruelty to the children drunkenness or
+      harmful drug-taking, indecency of living and uncontrollable extravagance.
+      I cannot conceive how any logical mind, having once admitted the principle
+      of divorce, can hesitate at making these entirely home-wrecking things the
+      basis of effective pleas. But in another direction, some strain of
+      sentimentality in my nature makes me hesitate to go with the great
+      majority of divorce law reformers. I cannot bring myself to agree that
+      either a long term of imprisonment or the misfortune of insanity should in
+      itself justify a divorce. I admit the social convenience, but I wince at
+      the thought of those tragic returns of the dispossessed. So far as
+      insanity goes, I perceive that the cruelty of the law would but endorse
+      the cruelty of nature. But I do not like men to endorse the cruelty of
+      nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, of course, there is no decent-minded person nowadays but wants to put
+      an end to that ugly blot upon our civilisation, the publication of
+      whatever is most spicy and painful in divorce court proceedings. It is an
+      outrage which falls even more heavily on the innocent than on the guilty,
+      and which has deterred hundreds of shy and delicate-minded people from
+      seeking legal remedies for nearly intolerable wrongs. The sort of person
+      who goes willingly to the divorce court to-day is the sort of person who
+      would love a screaming quarrel in a crowded street. The emotional breach
+      of the marriage bond is as private an affair as its consummation, and it
+      would be nearly as righteous to subject young couples about to marry to a
+      blustering cross-examination by some underbred bully of a barrister upon
+      their motives, and then to publish whatever chance phrases in their
+      answers appeared to be amusing in the press, as it is to publish
+      contemporary divorce proceedings. The thing is a nastiness, a stream of
+      social contagion and an extreme cruelty, and there can be no doubt that
+      whatever other result this British Royal Commission may have, there at
+      least will be many sweeping alterations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE EMPIRE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "If Youth but Knew" is the title of a book published some years ago, but
+      still with a quite living interest, by "Kappa"; it is the bitter complaint
+      of a distressed senior against our educational system. He is hugely
+      disappointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly in one
+      typical specimen. He is&mdash;if one might hazard a guess&mdash;an uncle
+      bereft of great expectations. He finds an echo in thousands of other
+      distressed uncles and parents. They use the most divergent and inadequate
+      forms of expression for this vague sense that the result has not come out
+      good enough; they put it contradictorily and often wrongly, but the sense
+      is widespread and real and justifiable and we owe a great debt to "Kappa"
+      for an accurate diagnosis of what in the aggregate amounts to a grave
+      national and social evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The trouble with "Kappa's" particular public-school boy is his unlit
+      imagination, the apathetic commonness of his attitude to life at large. He
+      is almost stupidly not interested in the mysteries of material fact, nor
+      in the riddles and great dramatic movements of history, indifferent to any
+      form of beauty, and pedantically devoted to the pettiness of games and
+      clothing and social conduct. It is, in fact, chiefly by his style in these
+      latter things, his extensive unilluminated knowledge of Greek and Latin,
+      and his greater costliness, that he differs from a young carpenter or
+      clerk. A young carpenter or clerk of the same temperament would have no
+      narrower prejudices nor outlook, no less capacity for the discussion of
+      broad questions and for imaginative thinking. And it has come to the mind
+      of "Kappa" as a discovery, as an exceedingly remarkable and moving thing,
+      a thing to cry aloud about, that this should be so, that this is all that
+      the best possible modern education has achieved. He makes it more than a
+      personal issue. He has come to the conclusion that this is not an
+      exceptional case at all, but a fair sample of what our upper-class
+      education does for the imagination of those who must presently take the
+      lead among us. He declares plainly that we are raising a generation of
+      rulers and of those with whom the duty of initiative should chiefly
+      reside, who have minds atrophied by dull studies and deadening
+      suggestions, and he thinks that this is a matter of the gravest concern
+      for the future of this land and Empire. It is difficult to avoid agreeing
+      with him either in his observation or in his conclusion. Anyone who has
+      seen much of undergraduates, or medical students, or Army candidates, and
+      also of their social subordinates, must be disposed to agree that the
+      difference between the two classes is mainly in unimportant things&mdash;in
+      polish, in manner, in superficialities of accent and vocabulary and social
+      habit&mdash;and that their minds, in range and power, are very much on a
+      level. With an invincibly aristocratic tradition we are failing altogether
+      to produce a leader class adequate to modern needs. The State is
+      light-headed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while one agrees with "Kappa" and shares his alarm, one must confess
+      the remedies he considers indicated do not seem quite so satisfactory as
+      his diagnosis of the disease. He attacks the curriculum and tells us we
+      must reduce or revolutionise instruction and exercise in the dead
+      languages, introduce a broader handling of history, a more inspiring
+      arrangement of scientific courses, and so forth. I wish, indeed, it were
+      possible to believe that substituting biology for Greek prose composition
+      or history with models and photographs and diagrams for Latin
+      versification, would make any considerable difference in this matter. For
+      so one might discuss this question and still give no offence to a most
+      amiable and influential class of men. But the roots of the evil, the
+      ultimate cause of that typical young man's deadness, lie not at all in
+      that direction. To indicate the direction in which it does lie is quite
+      unavoidably to give offence to an indiscriminatingly sensitive class. Yet
+      there is need to speak plainly. This deadening of soul comes not from the
+      omission or inclusion of this specific subject or that; it is the effect
+      of the general scholastic atmosphere. It is an atmosphere that admits of
+      no inspiration at all. It is an atmosphere from which living stimulating
+      influences have been excluded from which stimulating and vigorous
+      personalities are now being carefully eliminated, and in which dull,
+      prosaic men prevail invincibly. The explanation of the inert commonness of
+      "Kappa's" schoolboy lies not in his having learnt this or not learnt that,
+      but in the fact that from seven to twenty he has been in the intellectual
+      shadow of a number of good-hearted, sedulously respectable conscientiously
+      manly, conforming, well-behaved men, who never, to the knowledge of their
+      pupils and the public, at any rate, think strange thoughts do imaginative
+      or romantic things, pay tribute to beauty, laugh carelessly, or
+      countenance any irregularity in the world. All erratic and enterprising
+      tendencies in him have been checked by them and brought at last to
+      nothing; and so he emerges a mere residuum of decent minor dispositions.
+      The dullness of the scholastic atmosphere the grey, intolerant mediocrity
+      that is the natural or assumed quality of every upper-class schoolmaster,
+      is the true cause of the spiritual etiolation of "Kappa's" young friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, it is a very grave thing, I know, to bring this charge against a
+      great profession&mdash;to say, as I do say, that it is collectively and
+      individually dull. But someone has to do this sooner or later; we have
+      restrained ourselves and argued away from the question too long. There is,
+      I allege, a great lack of vigorous and inspiring minds in our schools. Our
+      upper-class schools are out of touch with the thought of the time, in a
+      backwater of intellectual apathy. We have no original or heroic
+      school-teachers. Let me ask the reader frankly what part our leading
+      headmasters play in his intellectual world; if when some prominent one
+      among them speaks or writes or talks, he expects anything more than
+      platitudes and little things? Has he ever turned aside to learn what this
+      headmaster or that thought of any question that interested him? Has he
+      ever found freshness or power in a schoolmaster's discourse; or found a
+      schoolmaster caring keenly for fine and beautiful things? Who does not
+      know the schoolmaster's trite, safe admirations, his thin, evasive
+      discussion, his sham enthusiasms for cricket, for fly-fishing, for
+      perpendicular architecture, for boyish traits; his timid refuge in "good
+      form," his deadly silences?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if we do not find him a refreshing and inspiring person, and his mind
+      a fountain of thought in which we bathe and are restored, is it likely our
+      sons will? If the schoolmaster at large is grey and dull, shirking
+      interesting topics and emphatic speech, what must he be like in the
+      monotonous class-room? These may seem wanton charges to some, but I am not
+      speaking without my book. Monthly I am brought into close contact with the
+      pedagogic intelligence through the medium of three educational magazines.
+      A certain morbid habit against which I struggle in vain makes me read
+      everything I catch a schoolmaster writing. I am, indeed, one of the
+      faithful band who read the Educational Supplement of the <i>Times</i>. In
+      these papers schoolmasters write about their business, lectures upon the
+      questions of their calling are reported at length, and a sort of invalid
+      discussion moves with painful decorum through the correspondence column.
+      The scholastic mind so displayed in action fascinates me. It is like
+      watching a game of billiards with wooden cushes and beechwood balls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But let me take one special instance. In a periodical, now no longer
+      living, called the <i>Independent Review</i>, there appeared some years
+      ago a very curious and typical contribution by the Headmaster of Dulwich,
+      which I may perhaps use as an illustration of the mental habits which seem
+      inseparably associated with modern scholastic work. It is called "English
+      Ideas on Education," and it begins&mdash;trite, imitative, undistinguished&mdash;thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The most important question in a country is that of education, and the
+      most important people in a country are those who educate its inhabitants.
+      Others have most of the present in their hands: those who educate have all
+      the future. With the present is bound up all the happiness only of the
+      utterly selfish and the thoughtless among mankind; on the future rest all
+      the thoughts of every parent and every wise man and patriot."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the opening of a boy's essay. And from first to last this remarkable
+      composition is at or below that level. It is an entirely inconclusive
+      paper, it is impossible to understand why it was written; it quotes
+      nothing it says nothing about and was probably written in ignorance of
+      "Kappa" or any other modern contributor to English ideas, and it occupied
+      about six and a quarter of the large-type pages of this now vanished <i>Independent
+      Review</i>. "English Ideas on Education"!&mdash;this very brevity is
+      eloquent, the more so since the style is by no means succinct. It must be
+      read to be believed. It is quite extraordinarily non-prehensile in quality
+      and substance nothing is gripped and maintained and developed; it is like
+      the passing of a lax hand over the surfaces of disarranged things. It is
+      difficult to read, because one's mind slips over it and emerges too soon
+      at the end, mildly puzzled though incurious still as to what it is all
+      about. One perceives Mr. Gilkes through a fog dimly thinking that Greek
+      has something vital to do with "a knowledge of language and man," that the
+      classical master is in some mysterious way superior to the science man and
+      more imaginative, and that science men ought not to be worried with the
+      Greek that is too high for them; and he seems, too, to be under the odd
+      illusion that "on all this" Englishmen "seem now to be nearly in
+      agreement," and also on the opinion that games are a little overdone and
+      that civic duties and the use of the rifle ought to be taught. Statements
+      are made&mdash;the sort of statements that are suffered in an atmosphere
+      where there is no swift, fierce opposition to be feared; they frill out
+      into vague qualifications and butt gently against other partially
+      contradictory statements. There is a classification of minds&mdash;the
+      sort of classification dear to the Y.M.C.A. essayists, made for the
+      purposes of the essay and unknown to psychology. There are, we are told,
+      accurate unimaginative, ingenious minds capable of science and kindred
+      vulgar things (such was Archimedes), and vague, imaginative minds, with
+      the gift for language and for the treatment of passion and the higher
+      indefinable things (such as Homer and Mr. Gilkes), and, somehow, this
+      justifies those who are destined for "science" in dropping Greek. Certain
+      "considerations," however, loom inconclusively upon this issue&mdash;rather
+      like interested spectators of a street fight in a fog. For example, to
+      learn a language is valuable "in proportion as the nation speaking it is
+      great"&mdash;a most empty assertion; and "no languages are so good," for
+      the purpose of improving style, "as the exact and beautiful languages of
+      Rome and Greece."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is it not time at least that this last, this favourite but threadbare
+      article of the schoolmaster's creed was put away for good? Everyone who
+      has given any attention to this question must be aware that the
+      intellectual gesture is entirely different in highly inflected languages
+      such as Greek and Latin and in so uninflected a language as English, that
+      learning Greek to improve one's English style is like learning to swim in
+      order to fence better, and that familiarity with Greek seems only too
+      often to render a man incapable of clear, strong expression in English at
+      all. Yet Mr. Gilkes can permit this old assertion, so dear to country
+      rectors and the classical scholar, to appear within a column's distance of
+      such style as this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is now understood that every subject is valuable, if it is properly
+      taught; it will perform that which, as follows from the accounts given
+      above of the aim of education, is the work most important in the case of
+      boys&mdash;that is, it will draw out their faculties and make them useful
+      in the world, alert, trained in industry, and able to understand, so far
+      as their school lessons educated them, and make themselves master of any
+      subject set before them."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This quotation is conclusive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will think I am writing
+      against upper-class schoolmasters. I am, it is undeniable, writing against
+      their dullness, but it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposed upon them by
+      the conditions under which they live. Indeed, I believe, could I put the
+      thing directly to the profession&mdash;"Do you not yourselves feel
+      needlessly limited and dull?"&mdash;should receive a majority of
+      affirmative responses. We have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what a
+      schoolmaster must be; to that he must by art or nature approximate, and
+      there is no help for it but to alter our ideal. Nothing else of any wide
+      value can be done until that is done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place, the received ideal omits a most necessary condition.
+      We do not insist upon a headmaster or indeed any of our academic leaders
+      and dignitaries, being a man of marked intellectual character, a man of
+      intellectual distinction. It is assumed, rather lightly in many cases,
+      that he has done "good work," as they say&mdash;the sort of good work that
+      is usually no good at all, that increases nothing, changes nothing,
+      stimulates no one, leads no whither. That, surely, must be altered. We
+      must see to it that our leading schoolmasters at any rate must be men of
+      insight and creative intelligence, men who could at a pinch write a good
+      novel or produce illuminating criticism or take an original part in
+      theological or philosophical discussion, or do any of these minor things.
+      They must be authentic men, taking a line of their own and capable of
+      intellectual passion. They should be able to make their mark outside the
+      school, if only to show they carry a living soul into it. As things are,
+      nothing is so fatal to a schoolmaster's career as to do that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And closely related to this omission is our extreme insistence upon what
+      we call high moral character, meaning, really, something very like an
+      entire absence of moral character. We insist upon tact, conformity, and an
+      unblemished record. Now, in these days, of warring opinion, these days of
+      gigantic, strange issues that cannot possibly be expressed in the formulae
+      of the smaller times that have gone before, tact is evasion, conformity
+      formality, and silence an unblemished record, mere evidence of the damning
+      burial of a talent of life. The sort of man into whose hands we give our
+      sons' minds must never have experimented morally or thought at all freely
+      or vigorously about, for example, God, Socialism, the Mosaic account of
+      the Creation, social procedure, Republicanism, beauty, love, or, indeed,
+      about anything likely to interest an intelligent adolescent. At the
+      approach of all such things he must have acquired the habit of the modest
+      cough, the infectious trick of the nice evasion. How can "Kappa" expect
+      inspiration from the decorous resultants who satisfy these conditions?
+      What brand can ever be lit at altars that have borne no fire? And you find
+      the secondary schoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming
+      the zealous and grateful agent of the tendencies that have made him what
+      he is, converting into a practice those vague dreads of idiosyncrasy, of
+      positive acts and new ideas, that dictated the choice of him and his rule
+      of life. His moral teaching amounts to this: to inculcate truth-telling
+      about small matters and evasion about large, and to cultivate a morbid
+      obsession in the necessary dawn of sexual consciousness. So far from
+      wanting to stimulate the imagination, he hates and dreads it. I find him
+      perpetually haunted by a ridiculous fear that boys will "do something,"
+      and in his terror seeking whatever is dull and unstimulating and tiring in
+      intellectual work, clipping their reading, censoring their periodicals,
+      expurgating their classics, substituting the stupid grind of organised
+      "games" for natural, imaginative play, persecuting loafers&mdash;and so
+      achieving his end and turning out at last, clean-looking, passively
+      well-behaved, apathetic, obliterated young men, with the nicest manners
+      and no spark of initiative at all, quite safe not to "do anything" for
+      ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I submit this may be a very good training for polite servants, but it is
+      not the way to make masters in the world. If we English believe we are
+      indeed a masterful people, we must be prepared to expose our children to
+      more and more various stimulations than we do; they must grow up free,
+      bold, adventurous, initiated, even if they have to take more risks in the
+      doing of that. An able and stimulating teacher is as rare as a fine
+      artist, and is a thing worth having for your son, even at the price of
+      shocking your wife by his lack of respect for that magnificent compromise,
+      the Establishment, or you by his Socialism or by his Catholicism or
+      Darwinism, or even by his erroneous choice of ties and collars. Boys who
+      are to be free, masterly men must hear free men talking freely of
+      religion, of philosophy, of conduct. They must have heard men of this
+      opinion and that, putting what they believe before them with all the
+      courage of conviction. They must have an idea of will prevailing over
+      form. It is far more important that boys should learn from original,
+      intellectually keen men than they should learn from perfectly respectable
+      men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nice men. The vital thing to
+      consider about your son's schoolmaster is whether he talked lifeless
+      twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not whether he loved unwisely or
+      was born of poor parents, or was seen wearing a frock-coat in combination
+      with a bowler, or confessed he doubted the Apostles' Creed, or called
+      himself a Socialist, or any disgraceful thing like that, so many years
+      ago. It is that sort of thing "Kappa" must invert if he wants a change in
+      our public schools. You may arrange and rearrange curricula, abolish
+      Greek, substitute "science"&mdash;it will not matter a rap. Even those
+      model canoes of yours, "Kappa," will be wasted if you still insist upon
+      model schoolmasters. So long as we require our schoolmasters to be
+      politic, conforming, undisturbing men, setting up Polonius as an ideal for
+      them, so long will their influence deaden the souls of our sons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Some few years ago the Fabian Society, which has been so efficient in
+      keeping English Socialism to the lines of "artfulness and the 'eighties,"
+      refused to have anything to do with the Endowment of Motherhood.
+      Subsequently it repented and produced a characteristic pamphlet in which
+      the idea was presented with a sort of minimising furtiveness as a mean
+      little extension of outdoor relief. These Fabian Socialists, instead of
+      being the daring advanced people they are supposed to be, are really in
+      many things twenty years behind the times. There need be nothing
+      shamefaced about the presentation of the Endowment of Motherhood. There is
+      nothing shameful about it. It is a plain and simple idea for which the
+      mind of the man in the street has now been very completely prepared. It
+      has already crept into social legislation to the extent of thirty
+      shillings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose if one fact has been hammered into us in the past two decades
+      more than any other it is this: that the supply of children is falling off
+      in the modern State; that births, and particularly good-quality births,
+      are not abundant enough; that the birth-rate, and particularly the
+      good-class birth-rate, falls steadily below the needs of our future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If no one else has said a word about this important matter, ex-President
+      Roosevelt would have sufficed to shout it to the ends of the earth. Every
+      civilised community is drifting towards "race-suicide" as Rome drifted
+      into "race-suicide" at the climax of her empire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, it is absurd to go on building up a civilisation with a dwindling
+      supply of babies in the cradles&mdash;and these not of the best possible
+      sort&mdash;and so I suppose there is hardly an intelligent person in the
+      English-speaking communities who has not thought of some possible remedy&mdash;from
+      the naive scoldings of Mr. Roosevelt and the more stolid of the
+      periodicals to sane and intelligible legislative projects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reasons for the fall in the birth-rate are obvious enough. It is a
+      necessary consequence of the individualistic competition of modern life.
+      People talk of modern women "shirking" motherhood, but it would be a silly
+      sort of universe in which a large proportion of women had any natural and
+      instinctive desire to shirk motherhood, and, I believe, a huge proportion
+      of modern women are as passionately predisposed towards motherhood as ever
+      women were. But modern conditions conspire to put a heavy handicap upon
+      parentage and an enormous premium upon the partial or complete evasion of
+      offspring, and that is where the clue to the trouble lies. Our social
+      arrangements discourage parentage very heavily, and the rational thing for
+      a statesman to do in the matter is not to grow eloquent, but to do
+      intelligent things to minimise that discouragement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider the case of an energetic young man and an energetic young woman
+      in our modern world. So long as they remain "unencumbered" they can
+      subsist on a comparatively small income and find freedom and leisure to
+      watch for and follow opportunities of self-advancement; they can travel,
+      get knowledge and experience, make experiments, succeed. One might almost
+      say the conditions of success and self-development in the modern world are
+      to defer marriage as long as possible, and after that to defer parentage
+      as long as possible. And even when there is a family there is the
+      strongest temptation to limit it to three or four children at the outside.
+      Parents who can give three children any opportunity in life prefer to do
+      that than turn out, let us say, eight ill-trained children at a
+      disadvantage, to become the servants and unsuccessful competitors of the
+      offspring of the restrained. That fact bites us all; it does not require a
+      search. It is all very well to rant about "race-suicide," but there are
+      the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for all but the
+      really rich, and so patent are they that I doubt if all the eloquence of
+      Mr. Roosevelt and its myriad echoes has added a thousand babies to the
+      eugenic wealth of the English-speaking world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Modern married people, and particularly those in just that capable middle
+      class from which children are most urgently desirable from the statesman's
+      point of view, are going to have one or two children to please themselves
+      but they are not going to have larger families under existing conditions,
+      though all the ex-Presidents and all the pulpits in the world clamour
+      together for them to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If having and rearing children is a private affair, then no one has any
+      right to revile small families; if it is a public service, then the parent
+      is justified in looking to the State to recognise that service and offer
+      some compensation for the worldly disadvantages it entails. He is
+      justified in saying that while his unencumbered rival wins past him he is
+      doing the State the most precious service in the world by rearing and
+      educating a family, and that the State has become his debtor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In other words, the modern State has got to pay for its children if it
+      really wants them&mdash;and more particularly it has to pay for the
+      children of good homes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The alternative to that is racial replacement and social decay. That is
+      the essential idea conveyed by this phrase, the Endowment of Motherhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, how is the paying to be done? That needs a more elaborate answer, of
+      which I will give here only the roughest, crudest suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Probably it would be found best that the payment should be made to the
+      mother, as the administrator of the family budget, that its amount should
+      be made dependent upon the quality of the home in which the children are
+      being reared, upon their health and physical development, and upon their
+      educational success. Be it remembered, we do not want any children; we
+      want good-quality children. The amount to be paid, I would particularly
+      point out, should vary with the standing of the home. People of that
+      excellent class which spends over a hundred a year on each child ought to
+      get about that much from the State, and people of the class which spends
+      five shillings a week per head on them would get about that, and so on.
+      And if these payments were met by a special income tax there would be no
+      social injustice whatever in such an unequality of payment. Each social
+      stratum would pay according to its prosperity, and the only redistribution
+      that would in effect occur would be that the childless people of each
+      class would pay for the children of that class. The childless family and
+      the small family would pay equally with the large family, incomes being
+      equal, but they would receive in proportions varying with the health and
+      general quality of their children. That, I think, gives the broad
+      principles upon which the payments would be made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, if these subsidies resulted in too rapid a rise in the
+      birth-rate, it would be practicable to diminish the inducement; and if, on
+      the other hand, the birth-rate still fell, it would be easy to increase
+      the inducement until it sufficed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That concisely is the idea of the Endowment of Motherhood. I believe
+      firmly that some such arrangement is absolutely necessary to the
+      continuous development of the modern State. These proposals arise so
+      obviously out of the needs of our time that I cannot understand any really
+      intelligent opposition to them. I can, however, understand a partial and
+      silly application of them. It is most important that our good-class
+      families should be endowed, but the whole tendency of the timid and
+      disingenuous progressivism of our time, which is all mixed up with ideas
+      of charity and aggressive benevolence to the poor, would be to apply this&mdash;as
+      that Fabian tract I mention does&mdash;only to the poor mother. To endow
+      poor and bad-class motherhood and leave other people severely alone would
+      be a proceeding so supremely idiotic, so harmful to our national quality,
+      as to be highly probable in the present state of our public intelligence.
+      It comes quite on a level with the policy of starving middle-class
+      education that has left us with nearly the worst educated middle class in
+      Western Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Endowment of Motherhood does not attract the bureaucratic type of
+      reformer because it offers a minimum chance of meddlesome interference
+      with people's lives. There would be no chance of "seeking out" anybody and
+      applying benevolent but grim compulsions on the strength of it. In spite
+      of its wide scope it would be much less of a public nuisance than that Wet
+      Children's Charter, which exasperates me every time I pass a public-house
+      on a rainy night. But, on the other hand, there would be an enormous
+      stimulus to people to raise the quality of their homes, study infantile
+      hygiene, seek out good schools for them&mdash;and do their duty as all
+      good parents naturally want to do now&mdash;if only economic forces were
+      not so pitilessly against them&mdash;thoroughly and well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DOCTORS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In that extravagant world of which I dream, in which people will live in
+      delightful cottages and ground rents will serve instead of rates, and
+      everyone will have a chance of being happy&mdash;in that impossible world
+      all doctors will be members of one great organisation for the public
+      health, with all or most of their income guaranteed to them: I doubt if
+      there will be any private doctors at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Heaven forbid I should seem to write a word against doctors as they are.
+      Daily I marvel at the wonders the general practitioner achieves, having
+      regard to the difficulties of his position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I cannot hide from myself, and I do not intend to hide from anyone
+      else, my firm persuasion that the services the general practitioner is
+      able to render us are not one-tenth so effectual as they might be if,
+      instead of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of a sanely
+      organised public machine. Consider what his training and equipment are,
+      consider the peculiar difficulties of his work, and then consider for a
+      moment what better conditions might be invented, and perhaps you will not
+      think my estimate of one-tenth an excessive understatement in this matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly the whole of our medical profession and most of our apparatus for
+      teaching and training doctors subsist on strictly commercial lines by
+      earning fees. This chief source of revenue is eked out by the wanton
+      charity of old women, and conspicuous subscriptions by popularity hunters,
+      and a small but growing contribution (in the salaries of medical officers
+      of health and so forth) from the public funds. But the fact remains that
+      for the great mass of the medical profession there is no living to be got
+      except at a salary for hospital practice or by earning fees in receiving
+      or attending upon private cases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So long as a doctor is learning or adding to knowledge, he earns nothing,
+      and the common, unintelligent man does not see why he should earn
+      anything. So that a doctor who has no religious passion for poverty and
+      self-devotion gets through the minimum of training and learning as quickly
+      and as cheaply as possible, and does all he can to fill up the rest of his
+      time in passing rapidly from case to case. The busier he keeps, the less
+      his leisure for thought and learning, the richer he grows, and the more he
+      is esteemed. His four or five years of hasty, crowded study are supposed
+      to give him a complete and final knowledge of the treatment of every sort
+      of disease, and he goes on year after year, often without co-operation,
+      working mechanically in the common incidents of practice, births, cases of
+      measles and whooping cough, and so forth, and blundering more or less in
+      whatever else turns up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are no public specialists to whom he can conveniently refer the
+      difficulties he constantly encounters; only in the case of rich patients
+      is the specialist available; there are no properly organised information
+      bureaus for him, and no means whatever of keeping him informed upon
+      progress and discovery in medical science. He is not even required to set
+      apart a month or so in every two or three years in order to return to
+      lectures and hospitals and refresh his knowledge. Indeed, the income of
+      the average general practitioner would not permit of such a thing, and
+      almost the only means of contact between him and current thought lies in
+      the one or other of our two great medical weeklies to which he happens to
+      subscribe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now just as I have nothing but praise for the average general
+      practitioner, so I have nothing but praise and admiration for those
+      stalwart-looking publications. Without them I can imagine nothing but the
+      most terrible intellectual atrophy among our medical men. But since they
+      are private properties run for profit they have to pay, and half their
+      bulk consists of the brilliantly written advertisements of new drugs and
+      apparatus. They give much knowledge, they do much to ventilate perplexing
+      questions, but a broadly conceived and properly endowed weekly circular
+      could, I believe, do much more. At any rate, in my Utopia this duty of
+      feeding up the general practitioners will not be left to private
+      enterprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind the first line of my medical army will be a second line of able men
+      constantly digesting new research for its practical needs&mdash;correcting,
+      explaining, announcing; and, in addition, a force of public specialists to
+      whom every difficulty in diagnosis will be at once referred. And there
+      will be a properly organised system of reliefs that will allow the general
+      practitioner and his right hand, the nurse, to come back to the
+      refreshment of study before his knowledge and mind have got rusty. But
+      then my Utopia is a Socialistic system. Under our present system of
+      competitive scramble, under any system that reduces medical practice to
+      mere fee-hunting nothing of this sort is possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in my Utopia, for every medical man who was mainly occupied in
+      practice, I would have another who was mainly occupied in or about
+      research. People hear so much about modern research that they do not
+      realise how entirely inadequate it is in amount and equipment. Our general
+      public is still too stupid to understand the need and value of sustained
+      investigations in any branch of knowledge at all. In spite of all the
+      lessons of the last century, it still fails to realise how discovery and
+      invention enrich the community and how paying an investment is the public
+      employment of clever people to think and experiment for the benefit of
+      all. It still expects to get a Newton or a Joule for #800 a year, and
+      requires him to conduct his researches in the margin of time left over
+      when he has got through his annual eighty or ninety lectures. It imagines
+      discoveries are a sort of inspiration that comes when professors are
+      running to catch trains. It seems incapable of imagining how enormous are
+      the untried possibilities of research. Of course, if you will only pay a
+      handful of men salaries at which the cook of any large London hotel would
+      turn up his nose, you cannot expect to have the master minds of the world
+      at your service; and save for a few independent or devoted men, therefore,
+      it is not reasonable to suppose that such a poor little dribble of medical
+      research as is now going on is in the hands of persons of much more than
+      average mental equipment. How can it be?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One hears a lot of the rigorous research into the problem of cancer that
+      is now going on. Does the reader realise that all the men in the whole
+      world who are giving any considerable proportion of their time to this
+      cancer research would pack into a very small room, that they are working
+      in little groups without any properly organised system of
+      intercommunication, and that half of them are earning less than a quarter
+      of the salary of a Bond Street shopwalker by those vastly important
+      inquiries? Not one cancer case in twenty thousand is being properly
+      described and reported. And yet, in comparison with other diseases, cancer
+      is being particularly well attended to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general complacency with the progress in knowledge we have made and
+      are making is ridiculously unjustifiable. Enormous things were no doubt
+      done in the nineteenth century in many fields of knowledge, but all that
+      was done was out of all proportion petty in comparison with what might
+      have been done. I suppose the whole of the unprecedented progress in
+      material knowledge of the nineteenth century was the work of two or three
+      thousand men, who toiled against opposition, spite and endless
+      disadvantages, without proper means of intercommunication and with
+      wretched facilities for experiment. Such discoveries as were distinctively
+      medical were the work of only a few hundred men. Now, suppose instead of
+      that scattered band of un-co-ordinated workers a great army of hundreds of
+      thousands of well-paid men; suppose, for instance, the community had kept
+      as many scientific and medical investigators as it has bookmakers and
+      racing touts and men about town&mdash;should we not know a thousand times
+      as much as we do about disease and health and strength and power?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But these are Utopian questionings. The sane, practical man shakes his
+      head, smiles pityingly at my dreamy impracticability, and passes them by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is something of the phonograph in all of us, but in the sort of
+      eminent person who makes public speeches about education and reading, and
+      who gives away prizes and opens educational institutions, there seems to
+      be little else but gramophone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These people always say the same things, and say them in the same note.
+      And why should they do that if they are really individuals?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, I cannot but suspect, in the mysterious activities that underlie
+      life, some trade in records for these distinguished gramophones, and it is
+      a trade conducted upon cheap and wholesale lines. There must be in these
+      demiurgic profundities a rapid manufacture of innumerable thousands of
+      that particular speech about "scrappy reading," and that contrast of
+      "modern" with "serious" literature, that babbles about in the provinces so
+      incessantly. Gramophones thinly disguised as bishops, gramophones still
+      more thinly disguised as eminent statesmen, gramophones K.C.B. and
+      gramophones F.R.S. have brazened it at us time after time, and will
+      continue to brazen it to our grandchildren when we are dead and all our
+      poor protests forgotten. And almost equally popular in their shameless
+      mouths is the speech that declares this present age to be an age of
+      specialisation. We all know the profound droop of the eminent person's
+      eyelids as he produces that discovery, the edifying deductions or the
+      solemn warnings he unfolds from this proposition, and all the dignified,
+      inconclusive rigmarole of that cylinder. And it is nonsense from beginning
+      to end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is most distinctly <i>not</i> an age of specialisation. There has
+      hardly been an age in the whole course of history less so than the
+      present. A few moments of reflection will suffice to demonstrate that.
+      This is beyond any precedent an age of change, change in the appliances of
+      life, in the average length of life, in the general temper of life; and
+      the two things are incompatible. It is only under fixed conditions that
+      you can have men specialising.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They specialise extremely, for example, under such conditions as one had
+      in Hindustan up to the coming of the present generation. There the metal
+      worker or the cloth worker, the wheelwright or the druggist of yesterday
+      did his work under almost exactly the same conditions as his predecessor
+      did it five hundred years before. He had the same resources, the same
+      tools, the same materials; he made the same objects for the same ends.
+      Within the narrow limits thus set him he carried work to a fine
+      perfection; his hand, his mental character were subdued to his medium. His
+      dress and bearing even were distinctive; he was, in fact, a highly
+      specialised man. He transmitted his difference to his sons. Caste was the
+      logical expression in the social organisation of this state of high
+      specialisation, and, indeed, what else is caste or any definite class
+      distinctions but that? But the most obvious fact of the present time is
+      the disappearance of caste and the fluctuating uncertainty of all class
+      distinctions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If one looks into the conditions of industrial employment specialisation
+      will be found to linger just in proportion as a trade has remained
+      unaffected by inventions and innovation. The building trade, for example,
+      is a fairly conservative one. A brick wall is made to-day much as it was
+      made two hundred years ago, and the bricklayer is in consequence a highly
+      skilled and inadaptable specialist. No one who has not passed through a
+      long and tedious training can lay bricks properly. And it needs a
+      specialist to plough a field with horses or to drive a cab through the
+      streets of London. Thatchers, old-fashioned cobblers, and hand workers are
+      all specialised to a degree no new modern calling requires. With machinery
+      skill disappears and unspecialised intelligence comes in. Any generally
+      intelligent man can learn in a day or two to drive an electric tram, fix
+      up an electric lighting installation, or guide a building machine or a
+      steam plough. He must be, of course, much more generally intelligent than
+      the average bricklayer, but he needs far less specialised skill. To repair
+      machinery requires, of course, a special sort of knowledge, but not a
+      special sort of training.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In no way is this disappearance of specialisation more marked than in
+      military and naval affairs. In the great days of Greece and Rome war was a
+      special calling, requiring a special type of man. In the Middle Ages war
+      had an elaborate technique, in which the footman played the part of an
+      unskilled labourer, and even within a period of a hundred years it took a
+      long period of training and discipline before the common discursive man
+      could be converted into the steady soldier. Even to-day traditions work
+      powerfully, through extravagance of uniform, and through survivals of that
+      mechanical discipline that was so important in the days of hand-to-hand
+      fighting, to keep the soldier something other than a man. For all the
+      lessons of the Boer war we are still inclined to believe that the soldier
+      has to be something severely parallel, carrying a rifle he fires under
+      orders, obedient to the pitch of absolute abnegation of his private
+      intelligence. We still think that our officers have, like some very
+      elaborate and noble sort of performing animal, to be "trained." They learn
+      to fight with certain specified "arms" and weapons, instead of developing
+      intelligence enough to use anything that comes to hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, indeed, when a really great European war does come and lets loose
+      motor-cars, bicycles, wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes, new projectiles of
+      every size and shape, and a multitude of ingenious persons upon the
+      preposterously vast hosts of conscription, the military caste will be
+      missing within three months of the beginning, and the inventive,
+      versatile, intelligent man will have come to his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what is true of a military caste is equally true of a special
+      governing class such as our public schools maintain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The misunderstanding that has given rise to this proposition that this is
+      an age of specialisation, and through that no end of mischief in
+      misdirected technical education and the like, is essentially a confusion
+      between specialisation and the division of labour. No doubt this is an age
+      when everything makes for wider and wider co-operations. Work that was
+      once done by one highly specialised man&mdash;the making of a watch, for
+      example&mdash;is now turned out wholesale by elaborate machinery, or
+      effected in great quantities by the contributed efforts of a number of
+      people. Each of these people may bring a highly developed intelligence to
+      bear for a time upon the special problem in hand, but that is quite a
+      different thing from specialising to do that thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is typically shown in scientific research. The problem or the parts
+      of problems upon which the inquiry of an individual man is concentrated
+      are often much narrower than the problems that occupied Faraday or Dalton,
+      and yet the hard and fast lines that once divided physicist from chemist,
+      or botanist from pathologist have long since gone. Professor Farmer, the
+      botanist, investigates cancer, and the ordinary educated man, familiar
+      though he is with their general results, would find it hard to say which
+      were the chemists and which the physicists among Professors Dewar and
+      Ramsey Lord Rayleigh and Curie. The classification of sciences that was
+      such a solemn business to our grandfathers is now merely a mental
+      obstruction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is interesting to glance for a moment at the possible source of this
+      mischievous confusion between specialisation and the division of labour. I
+      have already glanced at the possibility of a diabolical world
+      manufacturing gramophone records for our bishops and statesmen and
+      suchlike leaders of thought, but if we dismiss that as a merely elegant
+      trope, I must confess I think it is the influence of Herbert Spencer. His
+      philosophy is pervaded by an insistence which is, I think, entirely
+      without justification, that the universe, and every sort of thing in it,
+      moves from the simple and homogeneous to the complex and heterogeneous. An
+      unwary man obsessed with that idea would be very likely to assume without
+      consideration that men were less specialised in a barbaric state of
+      society than they are to-day. I think I have given reasons for believing
+      that the reverse of this is nearer the truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IS THERE A PEOPLE?
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Of all the great personifications that have dominated the mind of man, the
+      greatest, the most marvellous, the most impossible and the most
+      incredible, is surely the People, that impalpable monster to which the
+      world has consecrated its political institutions for the last hundred
+      years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is doubtful now whether this stupendous superstition has reached its
+      grand climacteric, and there can be little or no dispute that it is
+      destined to play a prominent part in the history of mankind for many years
+      to come. There is a practical as well as a philosophical interest,
+      therefore, in a note or so upon the attributes of this legendary being. I
+      write "legendary," but thereby I display myself a sceptic. To a very large
+      number of people the People is one of the profoundest realities in life.
+      They believe&mdash;what exactly do they believe about the people?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they speak of the People they certainly mean something more than the
+      whole mass of individuals in a country lumped together. That is the
+      people, a mere varied aggregation of persons, moved by no common motive, a
+      complex interplay. The People, as the believer understands the word, is
+      something more mysterious than that. The People is something that
+      overrides and is added to the individualities that make up the people. It
+      is, as it were, itself an individuality of a higher order&mdash;as indeed,
+      its capital "P" displays. It has a will of its own which is not the will
+      of any particular person in it, it has a power of purpose and judgment of
+      a superior sort. It is supposed to be the underlying reality of all
+      national life and the real seat of all public religious emotion.
+      Unfortunately, it lacks powers of expression, and so there is need of
+      rulers and interpreters. If they express it well in law and fact, in book
+      and song, they prosper under its mysterious approval; if they do not, it
+      revolts or forgets or does something else of an equally annihilatory sort.
+      That, briefly, is the idea of the People. My modest thesis is that there
+      exists nothing of the sort, that the world of men is entirely made up of
+      the individuals that compose it, and that the collective action is just
+      the algebraic sum of all individual actions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How far the opposite opinion may go, one must talk to intelligent
+      Americans or read the contemporary literature of the first French
+      Revolution to understand. I find, for example, so typical a young American
+      as the late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is the People to whom
+      we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of the name of Shakespeare from
+      the ruck of his contemporaries and the passage in which this assertion is
+      made is fairly representative of the general expression of this sort of
+      mysticism. "One must keep one's faith in the People&mdash;the Plain
+      People, the Burgesses, the Grocers&mdash;else of all men the artists are
+      most miserable and their teachings vain. Let us admit and concede that
+      this belief is ever so sorely tried at times.... But in the end, and at
+      last, they will listen to the true note and discriminate between it and
+      the false." And then he resorts to italics to emphasise: "<i>In the last
+      analysis the People are always right</i>."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it was that still more typical American, Abraham Lincoln, who declared
+      his equal confidence in the political wisdom of this collective being.
+      "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all
+      the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." The thing is
+      in the very opening words of the American Constitution, and Theodore
+      Parker calls it "the American idea" and pitches a still higher note: "A
+      government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; a
+      government of all the principles of eternal justice, <i>the unchanging law
+      of God."</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is unavoidable that a collective wisdom distinct from any individual
+      and personal one is intended in these passages. Mr. Norris, for example,
+      never figured to himself a great wave of critical discrimination sweeping
+      through the ranks of the various provision trades and a multitude of
+      simple, plain burgesses preferring Shakespeare and setting Marlowe aside.
+      Such a particularisation of his statement would have at once reduced it to
+      absurdity. Nor does any American see the people particularised in that
+      way. They believe in the People one and indivisible, a simple, mystical
+      being, which pervades and dominates the community and determines its final
+      collective consequences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now upon the belief that there is a People rests a large part of the
+      political organisation of the modern world. The idea was one of the chief
+      fruits of the speculations of the eighteenth century, and the American
+      Constitution is its most perfect expression. One turns, therefore,
+      inevitably to the American instance, not because it is the only one, but
+      because there is the thing in its least complicated form. We have there an
+      almost exactly logical realisation of this belief. The whole political
+      machine is designed and expressed to register the People's will,
+      literature is entirely rewarded and controlled by the effectual suffrages
+      of the bookseller's counter, science (until private endowment intervened)
+      was in the hands of the State Legislatures, and religion the concern of
+      the voluntary congregations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the assumption that there is a People there could be no better state of
+      affairs. You and I and everyone, except for a vote or a book, or a service
+      now and then, can go about our business, you to your grocery and I to
+      mine, and the direction of the general interests rests safe in the
+      People's hands. Now that is by no means a caricature of the attitude of
+      mind of many educated Americans. You find they have little or nothing to
+      do with actual politics, and are inclined to regard the professional
+      politician with a certain contempt; they trouble their heads hardly at all
+      about literature, and they contemplate the general religious condition of
+      the population with absolute unconcern. It is not that they are
+      unpatriotic or morally trivial that they stand thus disengaged; it is that
+      they have a fatalistic belief in this higher power. Whatever troubles and
+      abuses may arise they have an absolute faith that "in the last analysis"
+      the People will get it right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now suppose that I am right and that there is no People! Suppose that
+      the crowd is really no more than a crowd, a vast miscellaneous confusion
+      of persons which grows more miscellaneous every year. Suppose this
+      conception of the People arose out of a sentimental idealisation, Rousseau
+      fashion, of the ancient homogeneous peasant class&mdash;a class that is
+      rapidly being swept out of existence by modern industrial developments&mdash;and
+      that whatever slender basis of fact it had in the past is now altogether
+      gone. What consequences may be expected?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It does not follow that because the object of your reverence is a dead
+      word you will get no oracles from the shrine. If the sacred People remains
+      impassive, inarticulate, non-existent, there are always the keepers of the
+      shrine who will oblige. Professional politicians, venal and violent men,
+      will take over the derelict political control, people who live by the book
+      trade will alone have a care for letters, research and learning will be
+      subordinated to political expediency, and a great development of noisily
+      competitive religious enterprises will take the place of any common
+      religious formula. There will commence a secular decline in the quality of
+      public thought, emotion and activity. There will be no arrest or remedy
+      for this state of affairs so long as that superstitious faith in the
+      People as inevitably right "in the last analysis" remains. And if my
+      supposition is correct, it should be possible to find in the United
+      States, where faith in the people is indisputably dominant, some such
+      evidence of the error of this faith. Is there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I write as one that listens from afar. But there come reports of
+      legislative and administrative corruption, of organised public blackmail,
+      that do seem to carry out my thesis. One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, who
+      dreamt of founding a distinctive American literature, drugged and killed
+      almost as it were symbolically, amid electioneering and nearly lied out of
+      all posthumous respect by that scoundrel Griswold; one thinks of State
+      Universities that are no more than mints for bogus degrees; one thinks of
+      "Science" Christianity and Zion City. These things are quite insufficient
+      for a Q.E.D., but I submit they favour my proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose there is no People at all, but only enormous, differentiating
+      millions of men. All sorts of widely accepted generalisations will
+      collapse if that foundation is withdrawn. I submit it as worth
+      considering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a growing discord between governments and governed in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There has always been discord between governments and governed since
+      States began; government has always been to some extent imposed, and
+      obedience to some extent reluctant. We have come to regard it as a matter
+      of course that under all absolutions and narrow oligarchies the community,
+      so soon as it became educated and as its social elaboration developed a
+      free class with private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as it attained to
+      any power of thought and expression at all, would express discontent. But
+      we English and Americans and Western Europeans generally had supposed
+      that, so far as our own communities were concerned, this discontent was
+      already anticipated and met by representative institutions. We had
+      supposed that, with various safeguards and elaborations, our communities
+      did, as a matter of fact, govern themselves. Our panacea for all
+      discontents was the franchise. Social and national dissatisfaction could
+      be given at the same time a voice and a remedy in the ballot box. Our
+      liberal intelligences could and do still understand Russians wanting
+      votes, Indians wanting votes, women wanting votes. The history of
+      nineteenth-century Liberalism in the world might almost be summed up in
+      the phrase "progressive enfranchisement." But these are the desires of a
+      closing phase in political history. The new discords go deeper than that.
+      The new situation which confronts our Liberal intelligence is the
+      discontent of the enfranchised, the contempt and hostility of the voters
+      for their elected delegates and governments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, and hostility to
+      duly elected representatives is no mere accident of this democratic
+      country or that; it is an almost world-wide movement. It is an almost
+      universal disappointment with so-called popular government, and in many
+      communities&mdash;in Great Britain particularly&mdash;it is manifesting
+      itself by an unprecedented lawlessness in political matters, and in a
+      strange and ominous contempt for the law. One sees it, for example, in the
+      refusal of large sections of the medical profession to carry out insurance
+      legislation, in the repudiation of Irish Home Rule by Ulster, and in the
+      steady drift of great masses of industrial workers towards the conception
+      of a universal strike. The case of the discontented workers in Great
+      Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These people form effective
+      voting majorities in many constituencies; they send alleged Socialist and
+      Labour representatives into the legislative assembly; and, in addition,
+      they have their trade unions with staffs of elected officials, elected
+      ostensibly to state their case and promote their interests. Yet nothing is
+      now more evident than that these officials, working-men representatives
+      and the like, do not speak for their supporters, and are less and less
+      able to control them. The Syndicalist movement, sabotage in France, and
+      Larkinism in Great Britain, are, from the point of view of social
+      stability, the most sinister demonstrations of the gathering anger of the
+      labouring classes with representative institutions. These movements are
+      not revolutionary movements, not movements for reconstruction such as were
+      the democratic Socialist movements that closed the nineteenth century.
+      They are angry and vindictive movements. They have behind them the most
+      dangerous and terrible of purely human forces, the wrath, the blind
+      destructive wrath, of a cheated crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, so far as the insurrection of labour goes, American conditions differ
+      from European, and the process of disillusionment will probably follow a
+      different course. American labour is very largely immigrant labour still
+      separated by barriers of language and tradition from the established
+      thought of the nation. It will be long before labour in America speaks
+      with the massed effectiveness of labour in France and England, where
+      master and man are racially identical, and where there is no variety of
+      "Dagoes" to break up the revolt. But in other directions the American
+      disbelief in and impatience with "elected persons" is and has been far
+      profounder than it is in Europe. The abstinence of men of property and
+      position from overt politics, and the contempt that banishes political
+      discussion from polite society, are among the first surprises of the
+      visiting European to America, and now that, under an organised pressure of
+      conscience, college-trained men and men of wealth are abandoning this
+      strike of the educated and returning to political life, it is, one notes,
+      with a prevailing disposition to correct democracy by personality, and to
+      place affairs in the hands of autocratic mayors and presidents rather than
+      to carry out democratic methods to the logical end. At times America seems
+      hot for a Caesar. If no Caesar is established, then it will be the good
+      fortune of the Republic rather than its democratic virtue which will have
+      saved it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And directly one comes to look into the quality and composition of the
+      elected governing body of any modern democratic State, one begins to see
+      the reason and nature of its widening estrangement from the community it
+      represents. In no sense are these bodies really representative of the
+      thought and purpose of the nation; the conception of its science, the
+      fresh initiatives of its philosophy and literature, the forces that make
+      the future through invention and experiment, exploration and trial and
+      industrial development have no voice, or only an accidental and feeble
+      voice, there. The typical elected person is a smart rather than
+      substantial lawyer, full of cheap catchwords and elaborate tricks of
+      procedure and electioneering, professing to serve the interests of the
+      locality which is his constituency, but actually bound hand and foot to
+      the specialised political association, his party, which imposed him upon
+      that constituency. Arrived at the legislature, his next ambition is
+      office, and to secure and retain office he engages in elaborate manoeuvres
+      against the opposite party, upon issues which his limited and specialised
+      intelligence indicates as electorally effective. But being limited and
+      specialised, he is apt to drift completely out of touch with the interests
+      and feelings of large masses of people in the community. In Great Britain,
+      the United States and France alike there is a constant tendency on the
+      part of the legislative body to drift into unreality, and to bore the
+      country with the disputes that are designed to thrill it. In Great
+      Britain, for example, at the present time the two political parties are
+      both profoundly unpopular with the general intelligence, which is
+      sincerely anxious, if only it could find a way, to get rid of both of
+      them. Irish Home Rule&mdash;an issue as dead as mutton, is opposed to
+      Tariff Reform, which has never been alive. Much as the majority of people
+      detest the preposterously clumsy attempts to amputate Ireland from the
+      rule of the British Parliament which have been going on since the
+      breakdown of Mr. Gladstone's political intelligence, their dread of
+      foolish and scoundrelly fiscal adventurers is sufficiently strong to
+      retain the Liberals in office. The recent exposures of the profound
+      financial rottenness of the Liberal party have deepened the public resolve
+      to permit no such enlarged possibilities of corruption as Tariff Reform
+      would afford their at least equally dubitable opponents. And meanwhile,
+      beneath those ridiculous alternatives, those sham issues, the real and
+      very urgent affairs of the nation, the vast gathering discontent of the
+      workers throughout the Empire, the racial conflicts in India and South
+      Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end in our severance from
+      India, the insane waste of national resources, the control of disease, the
+      frightful need of some cessation of armament, drift neglected....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now do these things indicate the ultimate failure and downfall of
+      representative government? Was this idea which inspired so much of the
+      finest and most generous thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth
+      centuries a wrong idea, and must we go back to Caesarism or oligarchy or
+      plutocracy or a theocracy, to Rome or Venice or Carthage, to the strong
+      man or the ruler by divine right, for the political organisation of the
+      future?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My answer to that question would be an emphatic No. My answer would be
+      that the idea of representative government is the only possible idea for
+      the government of a civilised community. But I would add that so far
+      representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair trial.
+      So far we have not had representative government, but only a devastating
+      caricature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is quite plain now that those who first organised the parliamentary
+      institutions which now are the ruling institutions of the greater part of
+      mankind fell a prey to certain now very obvious errors. They did not
+      realise that there are hundreds of different ways in which voting may be
+      done, and that every way will give a different result. They thought, and
+      it is still thought by a great number of mentally indolent people, that if
+      a country is divided up into approximately equivalent areas, each
+      returning one or two representatives, if every citizen is given one vote,
+      and if there is no legal limit to the presentation of candidates, that
+      presently a cluster of the wisest, most trusted and best citizens will
+      come together in the legislative assembly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In reality the business is far more complicated than this. In reality a
+      country will elect all sorts of different people according to the
+      electoral method employed. It is a fact that anyone who chooses to
+      experiment with a willing school or club may verify. Suppose, for example,
+      that you take your country, give every voter one single vote, put up six
+      and twenty candidates for a dozen vacancies, and give them no adequate
+      time for organisation. The voters, you will find, will return certain
+      favourites, A and B and C and D let us call them, by enormous majorities,
+      and behind these at a considerable distance will come E, F, G, H, I, J, K,
+      and L. Now give your candidates time to develop organisation. A lot of
+      people who swelled A's huge vote will dislike J and K and L so much, and
+      prefer M and N so much, that if they are assured that by proper
+      organisation A's return can be made certain without their voting for him,
+      they will vote for M and N. But they will do so only on that
+      understanding. Similarly certain B-ites will want O and P if they can be
+      got without sacrificing B. So that adequate party organisation in the
+      community may return not the dozen a naive vote would give, but A, B, C,
+      D, E, F, G, H, M, N, O, P. Now suppose that, instead of this arrangement,
+      your community is divided into twelve constituencies and no candidate may
+      contest more than one of them. And suppose each constituency has strong
+      local preferences. A, B and C are widely popular; in every constituency
+      they have supporters but in no constituency does any one of the three
+      command a majority. They are great men, not local men. Q, who is an
+      unknown man in most of the country, has, on the contrary, a strong sect of
+      followers in the constituency for which A stands, and beats him by one
+      vote; another local celebrity, E, disposes of B in the same way; C is
+      attacked not only by S but T, whose peculiar views upon vaccination, let
+      us say, appeal to just enough of C's supporters to let in S. Similar
+      accidents happen in the other constituencies, and the country that would
+      have unreservedly returned A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L on the
+      first system, return instead O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Numerous
+      voters who would have voted for A if they had a chance vote instead for R,
+      S, T, etc., numbers who would have voted for B, vote for Q, V, W, X, etc.
+      But now suppose that A and B are opposed to one another, and that there is
+      a strong A party and a strong B party highly organised in the country. B
+      is really the second favourite over the country as a whole, but A is the
+      first favourite. D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R, U, W, Y constitute the A
+      candidates and in his name they conquer. B, C, E, G, I, K, M, O, Q, S, V
+      are all thrown out in spite of the wide popularity of B and C. B and C, we
+      have supposed, are the second and third favourites, and yet they go out in
+      favour of Y, of whom nobody has heard before, some mere hangers-on of A's.
+      Such a situation actually occurs in both Ulster and Home-Rule Ireland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now let us suppose another arrangement, and that is that the whole
+      country is one constituency, and every voter has, if he chooses to
+      exercise them, twelve votes, which, however, he must give, if he gives
+      them all, to twelve separate people. Then quite certainly A, B, C, D will
+      come in, but the tail will be different. M, N, O, P may come up next to
+      them, and even Z, that eminent non-party man, may get in. But now
+      organisation may produce new effects. The ordinary man, when he has twelve
+      votes to give, likes to give them all, so that there will be a good deal
+      of wild voting at the tails of the voting papers. Now if a small resolute
+      band decide to plump for T or to vote only for A and T or B and T, T will
+      probably jump up out of the rejected. This is the system which gives the
+      specialist, the anti-vaccinator or what not, the maximum advantage. V, W,
+      X and Y, being rather hopeless anyhow, will probably detach themselves
+      from party and make some special appeal, say to the teetotal vote or the
+      Mormon vote or the single tax vote, and so squeeze past O, P, Q, R, who
+      have taken a more generalised line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical
+      fluctuations. Many people, I know from colloquial experiences, do at about
+      this stage fly into a passion. But if you will exercise self-control, then
+      I think you will see my point that, according to the method of voting,
+      almost any sort of result may be got out of an election except the
+      production of a genuinely representative assembly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that is the a priori case for supposing, what our experience of
+      contemporary life abundantly verifies, that the so-called representative
+      assemblies of the world are not really representative at all. I will go
+      farther and say that were it not for the entire inefficiency of our method
+      of voting, not one-tenth of the present American and French Senators, the
+      French Deputies, the American Congressmen, and the English Members of
+      Parliament would hold their positions to-day. They would never have been
+      heard of. They are not really the elected representatives of the people;
+      they are the products of a ridiculous method of election; they are the
+      illegitimate children of the party system and the ballot-box, who have
+      ousted the legitimate heirs from their sovereignty. They are no more the
+      expression of the general will than the Tsar or some President by <i>pronunciamento</i>.
+      They are an accidental oligarchy of adventurers. Representative government
+      has never yet existed in the world; there was an attempt to bring it into
+      existence in the eighteenth century, and it succumbed to an infantile
+      disorder at the very moment of its birth. What we have in the place of the
+      leaders and representatives are politicians and "elected persons."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world is passing rapidly from localised to generalised interests, but
+      the method of election into which our fathers fell is the method of
+      electing one or two representatives from strictly localised
+      constituencies. Its immediate corruption was inevitable. If discussing and
+      calculating the future had been, as it ought to be, a common, systematic
+      occupation, the muddles of to-day might have been foretold a hundred years
+      ago. From such a rough method of election the party system followed as a
+      matter of course. In theory, of course, there may be any number of
+      candidates for a constituency and a voter votes for the one he likes best;
+      in practice there are only two or three candidates, and the voter votes
+      for the one most likely to beat the candidate he likes least. It cannot be
+      too strongly insisted that in contemporary elections we vote against; we
+      do not vote for. If A, B and C are candidates, and you hate C and all his
+      works and prefer A, but doubt if he will get as many votes as B, who is
+      indifferent to you, the chances are you will vote for B. If C and B have
+      the support of organised parties, you are still less likely to risk
+      "wasting" your vote upon A. If your real confidence is in G, who is not a
+      candidate for your constituency, and if B pledges himself to support G,
+      while A retains the right of separate action, you may vote for B even if
+      you distrust him personally. Additional candidates would turn any election
+      of this type into a wild scramble. The system lies, in fact, wholly open
+      to the control of political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the
+      control of political organisations, and has in every country produced what
+      is so evidently demanded. The political organisations to-day rule us
+      unchallenged. Save as they speak for us, the people are dumb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still
+      supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in
+      government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give
+      him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party
+      organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. For
+      twenty-five years I have been a voter, and in all that time I have only
+      twice had an opportunity of voting for a man of distinction in whom I had
+      the slightest confidence. Commonly my choice of a "representative" has
+      been between a couple of barristers entirely unknown to me or the world at
+      large. Rather more than half the men presented for my selection have not
+      been English at all, but of alien descent. This, then, is the sum of the
+      political liberty of the ordinary American or Englishman, that is the
+      political emancipation which Englishwomen have shown themselves so
+      pathetically eager to share. He may reject one of two undesirables, and
+      the other becomes his "representative." Now this is not popular government
+      at all; it is government by the profession of politicians, whose control
+      becomes more and more irresponsible in just the measure that they are able
+      to avoid real factions within their own body. Whatever the two party
+      organisations have a mind to do together, whatever issue they chance to
+      reserve from "party politics," is as much beyond the control of the free
+      and independent voter as if he were a slave subject in ancient Peru.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only
+      in theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies so
+      eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere
+      cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their form
+      and substance. The old spirit of freedom and the collective purpose which
+      overthrew and subdued priestcrafts and kingcrafts, has done so, it seems,
+      only to make way for these obscure political conspiracies. Instead of
+      liberal institutions, mankind has invented a new sort of usurpation. And
+      it is not unnatural that many of us should be in a phase of political
+      despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These oligarchies of the party organisations have now been evolving for
+      two centuries, and their inherent evils and dangers become more and more
+      manifest. The first of these is the exclusion from government of the more
+      active and intelligent sections of the community. It is not treated as
+      remarkable, it is treated as a matter of course, that neither in Congress
+      nor in the House of Commons is there any adequate representation of the
+      real thought of the time, of its science, invention and enterprise, of its
+      art and feeling, of its religion and purpose. When one speaks of
+      Congressmen or Members of Parliament one thinks, to be plain about it, of
+      intellectual riff-raff. When one hears of a pre-eminent man in the
+      English-speaking community, even though that pre-eminence may be in
+      political or social science, one is struck by a sense of incongruity if he
+      happens to be also in the Legislature. When Lord Haldane disengages the
+      Gifford lectures or Lord Morley writes a "Life of Gladstone" or
+      ex-President Roosevelt is delivered of a magazine article, there is the
+      same sort of excessive admiration as when a Royal Princess does a
+      water-colour sketch or a dog walks on its hind legs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this intellectual inferiority of the legislator is not only directly
+      bad for the community by producing dull and stupid legislation, but it has
+      a discouraging and dwarfing effect upon our intellectual life. Nothing so
+      stimulates art, thought and science as realisation; nothing so cripples it
+      as unreality. But to set oneself to know thoroughly and to think clearly
+      about any human question is to unfit oneself for the forensic claptrap
+      which is contemporary politics, is to put oneself out of the effective
+      current of the nation's life. The intelligence of any community which does
+      not make a collective use of that intelligence, starves and becomes
+      hectic, tends inevitably to preciousness and futility on the one hand, and
+      to insurgency, mischief and anarchism on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the point of view of social stability this estrangement of the
+      national government and the national intelligence is far less serious than
+      the estrangement between the governing body and the real feeling of the
+      mass of the people. To many observers this latter estrangement seems to be
+      drifting very rapidly towards a social explosion in the British Isles. The
+      organised masses of labour find themselves baffled both by their
+      parliamentary representatives and by their trade union officials. They are
+      losing faith in their votes and falling back in anger upon insurrectionary
+      ideals, upon the idea of a general strike, and upon the expedients of
+      sabotage. They are doing this without any constructive proposals at all,
+      for it is ridiculous to consider Syndicalism as a constructive proposal.
+      They mean mischief because they are hopeless and bitterly disappointed. It
+      is the same thing in France, and before many years are over it will be the
+      same thing in America. That way lies chaos. In the next few years there
+      may be social revolt and bloodshed in most of the great cities of Western
+      Europe. That is the trend of current probability. Yet the politicians go
+      on in an almost complete disregard of this gathering storm. Their
+      jerrymandered electoral methods are like wool in their ears, and the
+      rejection of Tweedledum for Tweedledee is taken as a "mandate" for
+      Tweedledee's distinctive brand of political unrealities....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is this an incurable state of things? Is this method of managing our
+      affairs the only possible electoral method, and is there no remedy for its
+      monstrous clumsiness and inefficiency but to "show a sense of humour," or,
+      in other words, to grin and bear it? Or is it conceivable that there may
+      be a better way to government than any we have yet tried, a method of
+      government that would draw every class into conscious and willing
+      co-operation with the State, and enable every activity of the community to
+      play its proper part in the national life? That was the dream of those who
+      gave the world representative government in the past. Was it an impossible
+      dream?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is this disease of Parliaments an incurable disease, and have we,
+      therefore, to get along as well as we can with it, just as a tainted and
+      incurable invalid diets and is careful and gets along through life? Or is
+      it possible that some entirely more representative and effective
+      collective control of our common affairs can be devised?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer to that must determine our attitude to a great number of
+      fundamental questions. If no better governing body is possible than the
+      stupid, dilatory and forensic assemblies that rule in France, Britain and
+      America to-day, then the civilised human community has reached its climax.
+      That more comprehensive collective handling of the common interests to
+      which science and intelligent Socialism point, that collective handling
+      which is already urgently needed if the present uncontrolled waste of
+      natural resources and the ultimate bankruptcy of mankind is to be avoided,
+      is quite beyond the capacity of such assemblies; already there is too much
+      in their clumsy and untrustworthy hands, and the only course open to us is
+      an attempt at enlightened Individualism, an attempt to limit and restrict
+      State activities in every possible way, and to make little private
+      temporary islands of light and refinement amidst the general disorder and
+      decay. All collectivist schemes, all rational Socialism, if only
+      Socialists would realise it, all hope for humanity, indeed, are dependent
+      ultimately upon the hypothetical possibility of a better system of
+      government than any at present in existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us see first, then, if we can lay down any conditions which such a
+      better governing body would satisfy. Afterwards it will be open to us to
+      believe or disbelieve in its attainment. Imagination is the essence of
+      creation. If we can imagine a better government we are half-way to making
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, whatever other conditions such a body will satisfy, we may be sure
+      that it will not be made up of members elected by single-member
+      constituencies. A single-member constituency must necessarily contain a
+      minority, and may even contain a majority of dissatisfied persons whose
+      representation is, as it were, blotted out by the successful candidate.
+      Three single-member constituencies which might all return members of the
+      same colour, if they were lumped together to return three members would
+      probably return two of one colour and one of another. There would still,
+      however, be a suppressed minority averse to both these colours, or
+      desiring different shades of those colours from those afforded them in the
+      constituency. Other things being equal, it may be laid down that the
+      larger the constituency and the more numerous its representatives, the
+      greater the chance of all varieties of thought and opinion being
+      represented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that is only a preliminary statement; it still leaves untouched all
+      the considerations advanced in the former part of this discussion to show
+      how easily the complications and difficulties of voting lead to a
+      falsification of the popular will and understanding. But here we enter a
+      region where a really scientific investigation has been made, and where
+      established results are available. A method of election was worked out by
+      Hare in the middle of the last century that really does seem to avoid or
+      mitigate nearly every falsifying or debilitating possibility in elections;
+      it was enthusiastically supported by J.S. Mill; it is now advocated by a
+      special society&mdash;the Proportional Representation Society&mdash;to
+      which belong men of the most diverse type of distinction, united only by
+      the common desire to see representative government a reality and not a
+      disastrous sham. It is a method which does render impossible nearly every
+      way of forcing candidates upon constituencies, and nearly every trick for
+      rigging results that now distorts and cripples the political life of the
+      modern world. It exacts only one condition, a difficult but not an
+      impossible condition, and that is the honest scrutiny and counting of the
+      votes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The peculiar invention of the system is what is called the single
+      transferable vote&mdash;that is to say, a vote which may be given in the
+      first instance to one candidate, but which, in the event of his already
+      having a sufficient quota of votes to return him, may be transferred to
+      another. The voter marks clearly in the list of the candidates the order
+      of his preference by placing 1, 2, 3, and so forth against the names. In
+      the subsequent counting the voting papers are first classified according
+      to the first votes. Let us suppose that popular person A is found to have
+      received first votes enormously in excess of what is needed to return him.
+      The second votes are then counted on his papers, and after the number of
+      votes necessary to return him has been deducted, the surplus votes are
+      divided in due proportion among the second choice names, and count for
+      them. That is the essential idea of the whole thing. At a stroke all that
+      anxiety about wasting votes and splitting votes, <i>which is the secret of
+      all party political manipulation</i> vanishes. You may vote for A well
+      knowing that if he is safe your vote will be good for C. You can make sure
+      of A, and at the same time vote for C. You are in no need of a "ticket" to
+      guide you, and you need have no fear that in supporting an independent
+      candidate you will destroy the prospects of some tolerably sympathetic
+      party man without any compensating advantage. The independent candidate
+      does, in fact, become possible for the first time. The Hobson's choice of
+      the party machine is abolished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me be a little more precise about the particulars of this method, the
+      only sound method, of voting in order to ensure an adequate representation
+      of the community. Let us resort again to the constituency I imagined in my
+      last paper, a constituency in which candidates represented by all the
+      letters of the alphabet struggle for twelve places. And let us suppose
+      that A, B, C and D are the leading favourites. Suppose that there are
+      twelve thousand voters in the constituency, and that three thousand votes
+      are cast for A&mdash;I am keeping the figures as simple as possible&mdash;then
+      A has two thousand more than is needed to return him. <i>All</i> the
+      second votes on his papers are counted, and it is found that 600, or a
+      fifth of them, go to C; 500, or a sixth, go to E; 300, or a tenth, to G;
+      300 to J; 200, or a fifteenth, each to K and L, and a hundred each, or a
+      thirtieth, to M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, W and Z. Then the surplus of 2,000
+      is divided in these proportions&mdash;that is a fifth of 2,000 goes to C,
+      a sixth to E, and the rest to G, J, etc., in proportion. C, who already
+      has 900 votes, gets another 400, and is now returned and has, moreover,
+      300 to spare; and the same division of the next votes upon C's paper
+      occurs as has already been made with A's. But previously to this there has
+      been a distribution of B's surplus votes, B having got 1,200 of first
+      votes. And so on. After the distribution of the surplus votes of the elect
+      at the top of the list, there is a distribution of the second votes upon
+      the papers of those who have voted for the hopeless candidates at the
+      bottom of the list. At last a point is reached when twelve candidates have
+      a quota.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this way the "wasting" of a vote, or the rejection of a candidate for
+      any reason except that hardly anybody wants him, become practically
+      impossible. This method of the single transferable vote with very large
+      constituencies and many members does, in fact, give an entirely valid
+      electoral result; each vote tells for all it is worth, and the freedom of
+      the voter is only limited by the number of candidates who put up or are
+      put up for election. This method, and this method alone, gives
+      representative government; all others of the hundred and one possible
+      methods admit of trickery, confusion and falsification. Proportional
+      Representation is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious
+      complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right
+      way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way. It
+      is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of baking
+      amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of trains to
+      their destinations instead of running them without notice into casually
+      selected sidings and branch lines. It is not the substitution of something
+      for something else of the same nature; it is the substitution of right for
+      wrong. It is the plain common sense of the greatest difficulty in
+      contemporary affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know that a number of people do not, will not, admit this of
+      Proportional Representation. Perhaps it is because of that hideous
+      mouthful of words for a thing that would be far more properly named Sane
+      Voting. This, which is the only correct way, these antagonists regard as a
+      peculiar way. It has unfamiliar features, and that condemns it in their
+      eyes. It takes at least ten minutes to understand, and that is too much
+      for their plain, straightforward souls. "Complicated"&mdash;that word of
+      fear! They are like the man who approved of an electric tram, but said
+      that he thought it would go better without all that jiggery-pokery of
+      wires up above. They are like the Western judge in the murder trial who
+      said that if only they got a man hanged for this abominable crime, he
+      wouldn't make a pedantic fuss about the question of <i>which</i> man. They
+      are like the plain, straightforward promoter who became impatient with
+      maps and planned a railway across Switzerland by drawing a straight line
+      with a ruler across Jungfrau and Matterhorn and glacier and gorge. Or else
+      they are like Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., who knows too well what would
+      happen to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now let us consider what would be the necessary consequences of the
+      establishment of Proportional Representation in such a community as Great
+      Britain&mdash;that is to say, the redistribution of the country into great
+      constituencies such as London or Ulster or Wessex or South Wales, each
+      returning a score or more of members, and the establishment of voting by
+      the single transferable vote. The first, immediate, most desirable result
+      would be the disappearance of the undistinguished party candidate; he
+      would vanish altogether. He would be no more seen. Proportional
+      Representation would not give him the ghost of a chance. The very young
+      man of good family, the subsidised barrister, the respectable nobody, the
+      rich supporter of the party would be ousted by known men. No candidate who
+      had not already distinguished himself, and who did not stand for something
+      in the public eye, would have a chance of election. There alone we have a
+      sufficient reason for anticipating a very thorough change in the quality
+      and character of the average legislator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And next, no party organisation, no intimation from headquarters, no dirty
+      tricks behind the scenes, no conspiracy of spite and scandal would have
+      much chance of keeping out any man of real force and distinction who had
+      impressed the public imagination. To be famous in science, to have led
+      thought, to have explored or administered or dissented courageously from
+      the schemes of official wire-pullers would no longer be a bar to a man's
+      attainment of Parliament. It would be a help. Not only the level of
+      parliamentary intelligence, but the level of personal independence would
+      be raised far above its present position. And Parliament would become a
+      gathering of prominent men instead of a means to prominence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two-party system which holds all the English-speaking countries to-day
+      in its grip would certainly be broken up by Proportional Representation.
+      Sane Voting in the end would kill the Liberal and Tory and Democratic and
+      Republican party-machines. That secret rottenness of our public life, that
+      hidden conclave which sells honours, fouls finance, muddles public
+      affairs, fools the passionate desires of the people, and ruins honest men
+      by obscure campaigns would become impossible. The advantage of party
+      support would be a doubtful advantage, and in Parliament itself the party
+      men would find themselves outclassed and possibly even outnumbered by the
+      independent. It would be only a matter of a few years between the adoption
+      of Sane Voting and the disappearance of the Cabinet from British public
+      life. It would become possible for Parliament to get rid of a minister
+      without getting rid of a ministry, and to express its disapproval of&mdash;let
+      us say&mdash;some foolish project for rearranging the local government of
+      Ireland without opening the door upon a vista of fantastical fiscal
+      adventures. The party-supported Cabinet, which is now the real government
+      of the so-called democratic countries, would cease to be so, and
+      government would revert more and more to the legislative assembly. And not
+      only would the latter body resume government, but it would also
+      necessarily take into itself all those large and growing exponents of
+      extra-parliamentary discontent that now darken the social future. The case
+      of the armed "Unionist" rebel in Ulster, the case of the workman who
+      engages in sabotage, the case for sympathetic strikes and the general
+      strike, all these cases are identical in this, that they declare
+      Parliament a fraud, that justice lies outside it and hopelessly outside
+      it, and that to seek redress through Parliament is a waste of time and
+      energy. Sane Voting would deprive all these destructive movements of the
+      excuse and necessity for violence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, I know, a disposition in some quarters to minimise the
+      importance of Proportional Representation, as though it were a mere
+      readjustment of voting methods. It is nothing of the sort; it is a
+      prospective revolution. It will revolutionise government far more than a
+      mere change from kingdom to republic or vice versa could possibly do; it
+      will give a new and unprecedented sort of government to the world. The
+      real leaders of the country will govern the country. For Great Britain,
+      for example, instead of the secret, dubious and dubitable Cabinet, which
+      is the real British government of to-day, poised on an unwieldy and
+      crowded House of Commons, we should have open government by the
+      representatives of, let us say, twenty great provinces, Ulster, Wales,
+      London, for example, each returning from twelve to thirty members. It
+      would be a steadier, stabler, more confident, and more trusted government
+      than the world has ever seen before. Ministers, indeed, and even
+      ministries might come and go, but that would not matter, as it does now,
+      because there would be endless alternatives through which the assembly
+      could express itself instead of the choice between two parties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The arguments against Proportional Representation that have been advanced
+      hitherto are trivial in comparison with its enormous advantages. Implicit
+      in them all is the supposition that public opinion is at bottom a foolish
+      thing, and that electoral methods are to pacify rather than express a
+      people. It is possibly true that notorious windbags, conspicuously
+      advertised adventurers, and the heroes of temporary sensations may run a
+      considerable chance upon the lists. My own estimate of the popular wisdom
+      is against the idea that any vividly prominent figure must needs get in; I
+      think the public is capable of appreciating, let us say, the charm and
+      interest of Mr. Sandow or Mr. Jack Johnson or Mr. Harry Lauder or Mr. Evan
+      Roberts without wanting to send these gentlemen into Parliament. And I
+      think that the increased power that the Press would have through its
+      facilities in making reputations may also be exaggerated. Reputations are
+      mysterious things and not so easily forced, and even if it were possible
+      for a section of the Press to limelight a dozen or so figures up to the
+      legislature, they would still have, I think, to be interesting,
+      sympathetic and individualised figures; and at the end they would be only
+      half a dozen among four hundred men of a repute more naturally achieved. A
+      third objection is that this reform would give us group politics and
+      unstable government. It might very possibly give us unstable ministries,
+      but unstable ministries may mean stable government, and such stable
+      ministries as that which governs England at the present time may, by
+      clinging obstinately to office, mean the wildest fluctuations of policy.
+      Mr. Ramsay Macdonald has drawn a picture of the too-representative
+      Parliament of Proportional Representation, split up into groups each
+      pledged to specific measures and making the most extraordinary treaties
+      and sacrifices of the public interest in order to secure the passing of
+      these definite bills. But Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is exclusively a
+      parliamentary man; he knows contemporary parliamentary "shop" as a clerk
+      knows his "guv'nor," and he thinks in the terms of his habitual life; he
+      sees representatives only as politicians financed from party headquarters;
+      it is natural that he should fail to see that the quality and condition of
+      the sanely elected Member of Parliament will be quite different from these
+      scheming climbers into positions of trust with whom he deals to-day. It is
+      the party system based on insane voting that makes governments indivisible
+      wholes and gives the group and the cave their terrors and their
+      effectiveness. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is as typical a product of existing
+      electoral methods as one could well have, and his peculiarly keen sense of
+      the power of intrigue in legislation is as good evidence as one could wish
+      for of the need for drastic change.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, Sane Voting is not a short cut to the millennium, it is no way
+      of changing human nature, and in the new type of assembly, as in the old,
+      spite, vanity, indolence, self-interest, and downright dishonesty will
+      play their part. But to object to a reform on that account is not a
+      particularly effective objection. These things will play their part, but
+      it will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old. It is like
+      objecting to some projected and long-needed railway because it does not
+      propose to carry its passengers by immediate express to heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE AMERICAN POPULATION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The social conditions and social future of America constitute a system of
+      problems quite distinct and separate from the social problems of any other
+      part of the world. The nearest approach to parallel conditions, and that
+      on a far smaller and narrower scale, is found in the British colonies and
+      in the newly settled parts of Siberia. For while in nearly every other
+      part of the world the population of to-day is more or less completely
+      descended from the prehistoric population of the same region, and has
+      developed its social order in a slow growth extending over many centuries,
+      the American population is essentially a transplanted population, a still
+      fluid and imperfect fusion of great fragments torn at this point or that
+      from the gradually evolved societies of Europe. The European social
+      systems grow and flower upon their roots, in soil which has made them and
+      to which they are adapted. The American social accumulation is a various
+      collection of cuttings thrust into a new soil and respiring a new air, so
+      different that the question is still open to doubt, and indeed there are
+      those who do doubt, how far these cuttings are actually striking root and
+      living and growing, whether indeed they are destined to more than a
+      temporary life in the new hemisphere. I propose to discuss and weigh
+      certain arguments for and against the belief that these ninety million
+      people who constitute the United States of America are destined to develop
+      into a great distinctive nation with a character and culture of its own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Humanly speaking, the United States of America (and the same is true of
+      Canada and all the more prosperous, populous and progressive regions of
+      South America) is a vast sea of newly arrived and unstably rooted people.
+      Of the seventy-six million inhabitants recorded by the 1900 census, ten
+      and a half million were born and brought up in one or other of the
+      European social systems, and the parents of another twenty-six millions
+      were foreigners. Another nine million are of African negro descent.
+      Fourteen million of the sixty-five million native-born are living not in
+      the state of their birth, but in other states to which they have migrated.
+      Of the thirty and a half million whites whose parents on both sides were
+      native Americans, a high proportion probably had one if not more
+      grand-parents foreign-born. Nearly five and a half million out of
+      thirty-three and a half million whites in 1870 were foreign-born, and
+      another five and a quarter million the children of foreign-born parents.
+      The children of the latter five and a quarter million count, of course, in
+      the 1900 census as native-born of native parents. Immigration varies
+      enormously with the activity of business, but in 1906 it rose for the
+      first time above a million.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These figures may be difficult to grasp. The facts may be seen in a more
+      concrete form by the visitor to Ellis Island, the receiving station for
+      the immigrants into New York Harbour. One goes to this place by tugs from
+      the United States barge office in Battery Park, and in order to see the
+      thing properly one needs a letter of introduction to the commissioner in
+      charge. Then one is taken through vast barracks littered with people of
+      every European race, every type of low-class European costume, and every
+      degree of dirtiness, to a central hall in which the gist of the examining
+      goes on. The floor of this hall is divided up into a sort of maze of
+      winding passages between lattice work, and along these passages, day after
+      day, incessantly, the immigrants go, wild-eyed Gipsies, Armenians, Greeks,
+      Italians, Ruthenians, Cossacks, German peasants, Scandinavians, a few
+      Irish still, impoverished English, occasional Dutch; they halt for a
+      moment at little desks to exhibit papers, at other little desks to show
+      their money and prove they are not paupers, to have their eyes scanned by
+      this doctor and their general bearing by that. Their thumb-marks are
+      taken, their names and heights and weights and so forth are recorded for
+      the card index; and so, slowly, they pass along towards America, and at
+      last reach a little wicket, the gate of the New World. Through this metal
+      wicket drips the immigration stream&mdash;all day long, every two or three
+      seconds, an immigrant with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk
+      and goes on past the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully
+      organised separating ways that go to this railway or that, past the
+      guiding, protecting officials&mdash;into a new world. The great majority
+      are young men and young women between seventeen and thirty, good,
+      youthful, hopeful peasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting to
+      go through that wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with cheap
+      portmanteaus with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone, women with
+      children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All day that
+      string of human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again; all day and
+      every day, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the end beads
+      through the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the hundreds to
+      thousands.... In such a prosperous year as 1906 more immigrants passed
+      through that wicket into America than children were born in the whole of
+      France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This figure of a perpetual stream of new stranger citizens will serve to
+      mark the primary distinction between the American social problem and that
+      of any European or Asiatic community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vast bulk of the population of the United States has, in fact, only
+      got there from Europe in the course of the last hundred years, and mainly
+      since the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne of Great Britain. That
+      is the first fact that the student of the American social future must
+      realise. Only an extremely small proportion of its blood goes back now to
+      those who fought for freedom in the days of George Washington. The
+      American community is not an expanded colonial society that has become
+      autonomous. It is a great and deepening pool of population accumulating
+      upon the area these predecessors freed, and since fed copiously by
+      affluents from every European community. Fresh ingredients are still being
+      added in enormous quantity, in quantity so great as to materially change
+      the racial quality in a score of years. It is particularly noteworthy that
+      each accession of new blood seems to sterilise its predecessors. Had there
+      been no immigration at all into the United States, but had the rate of
+      increase that prevailed in 1810-20 prevailed to 1900, the population,
+      which would then have been a purely native American one, would have
+      amounted to a hundred million&mdash;that is to say, to approximately nine
+      million in excess of the present total population. The new waves are for a
+      time amazingly fecund, and then comes a rapid fall in the birth-rate. The
+      proportion of colonial and early republican blood in the population is,
+      therefore, probably far smaller even than the figures I have quoted would
+      suggest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These accesses of new population have come in a series of waves, very much
+      as if successive reservoirs of surplus population in the Old World had
+      been tapped, drained and exhausted. First came the Irish and Germans, then
+      Central Europeans of various types, then Poland and Western Russia began
+      to pour out their teeming peoples, and more particularly their Jews,
+      Bohemia, the Slavonic states, Italy and Hungary followed and the latest
+      arrivals include great numbers of Levantines, Armenians and other peoples
+      from Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula. The Hungarian immigrants have
+      still a birth-rate of forty-six per thousand, the highest birth-rate in
+      the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A considerable proportion of the Mediterranean arrivals, it has to be
+      noted, and more especially the Italians, do not come to settle. They work
+      for a season or a few years, and then return to Italy. The rest come to
+      stay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A vast proportion of these accessions to the American population since
+      1840 has, with the exception of the East European Jews, consisted of
+      peasantry, mainly or totally illiterate, accustomed to a low standard of
+      life and heavy bodily toil. For most of them the transfer to a new country
+      meant severance from the religious communion in which they had been bred
+      and from the servilities or subordinations to which they were accustomed
+      They brought little or no positive social tradition to the synthesis to
+      which they brought their blood and muscle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The earlier German, English and Scandinavian incomers were drawn from a
+      somewhat higher social level, and were much more closely akin in habits
+      and faith to the earlier founders of the Republic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our inquiry is this: What social structure is this pool of mixed humanity
+      developing or likely to develop?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we compare any European nation with the American, we perceive at once
+      certain broad differences. The former, in comparison with the latter, is
+      evolved and organised; the latter, in comparison with the former, is
+      aggregated and chaotic. In nearly every European country there is a social
+      system often quite elaborately classed and defined; each class with a
+      sense of function, with an idea of what is due to it and what is expected
+      of it. Nearly everywhere you find a governing class, aristocratic in
+      spirit, sometimes no doubt highly modified by recent economic and
+      industrial changes, with more or less of the tradition of a feudal
+      nobility, then a definite great mercantile class, then a large
+      self-respecting middle class of professional men, minor merchants, and so
+      forth, then a new industrial class of employees in the manufacturing and
+      urban districts, and a peasant population rooted to the land. There are,
+      of course, many local modifications of this form: in France the nobility
+      is mostly expropriated; in England, since the days of John Bull, the
+      peasant has lost his common rights and his holding, and become an
+      "agricultural labourer" to a newer class of more extensive farmer. But
+      these are differences in detail; the fact of the organisation, and the
+      still more important fact of the traditional feeling of organisation,
+      remain true of all these older communities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in nearly every European country, though it may be somewhat despoiled
+      here and shorn of exclusive predominance there, or represented by a
+      dislocated "reformed" member, is the Church, custodian of a great moral
+      tradition, closely associated with the national universities and the
+      organisation of national thought. The typical European town has its castle
+      or great house, its cathedral or church, its middle-class and lower-class
+      quarters. Five miles off one can see that the American town is on an
+      entirely different plan. In his remarkable "American Scene," Mr. Henry
+      James calls attention to the fact that the Church as one sees it and feels
+      it universally in Europe is altogether absent, and he adds a comment as
+      suggestive as it is vague. Speaking of the appearance of the Churches, so
+      far as they do appear amidst American urban scenery, he says:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Looking for the most part no more established or
+  seated than a stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the
+  inveterate bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated
+  pretensions merely), and fatally despoiled of the fine old
+  ecclesiastical arrogance, ... The field of American life is
+  as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centre-piece; a
+  truth that the myriad little structures 'attended' on Sundays
+  and on the 'off' evenings of their 'sociables' proclaim as
+  with the audible sound of the roaring of a million mice....
+
+  "And however one indicates one's impression of the
+  clearance, the clearance itself, in its completeness, with the
+  innumerable odd connected circumstances that bring it
+  home, represents, in the history of manners and morals, a
+  deviation in the mere measurement of which hereafter may
+  well reside a certain critical thrill. I say hereafter because
+  it is a question of one of those many measurements that
+  would as yet, in the United States, be premature. Of all
+  the solemn conclusions one feels as 'barred,' the list is quite
+  headed in the States, I think, by this particular abeyance
+  of judgment. When an ancient treasure of precious vessels,
+  overscored with glowing gems and wrought artistically into
+  wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been converted
+  through a vast community into the small change,
+  the simple circulating medium of dollars and 'nickels,' we
+  can only say that the consequent permeation will be of
+  values of a new order. Of <i>what</i> order we must wait to
+  see."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      America has no Church. Neither has it a peasantry nor an aristocracy, and
+      until well on in the Victorian epoch it had no disproportionately rich
+      people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In America, except in the regions where the negro abounds, there is no
+      lower stratum. There is no "soil people" to this community at all; your
+      bottom-most man is a mobile freeman who can read, and who has ideas above
+      digging and pigs and poultry-keeping, except incidentally for his own
+      ends. No one owns to subordination As a consequence, any position which
+      involves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority is difficult to fill;
+      there is, from the European point of view, an extraordinary dearth of
+      servants, and this endures in spite of a great peasant immigration. The
+      servile tradition will not root here now; it dies forthwith. An enormous
+      importation of European serfs and peasants goes on, but as they touch this
+      soil their backs begin to stiffen with a new assertion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. There is
+      no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne, no
+      legitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper social structure
+      of leisure, power and State responsibility which in the old European
+      theory of Society was supposed to give significance to the whole. The
+      American community, one cannot too clearly insist, does not correspond to
+      an entire European community at all, but only to the middle masses of it,
+      to the trading and manufacturing class between the dimensions of the
+      magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan. It is the central part of the
+      European organism without either the dreaming head or the subjugated feet.
+      Even the highly feudal slave-holding "county family" traditions of
+      Virginia and the South pass now out of memory. So that in a very real
+      sense the past of the American nation is in Europe, and the settled order
+      of the past is left behind there. This community was, as it were, taken
+      off its roots, clipped of its branches, and brought hither. It began
+      neither serf nor lord, but burgher and farmer; it followed the normal
+      development of the middle class under Progress everywhere and became
+      capitalistic. The huge later immigration has converged upon the great
+      industrial centres and added merely a vast non-servile element of
+      employees to the scheme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      America has been and still very largely is a one-class country. It is a
+      great sea of human beings detached from their traditions of origin. The
+      social difference from Europe appears everywhere, and nowhere more
+      strikingly than in the railway carriages. In England the compartments in
+      these are either "first class," originally designed for the aristocracy,
+      or "second class," for the middle class, or "third class," for the
+      populace. In America there is only one class, one universal simple
+      democratic car. In the Southern States, however, a proportion of these
+      simple democratic cars are inscribed with the word "White," whereby nine
+      million people are excluded. But to this original even-handed treatment
+      there was speedily added a more sumptuous type of car, the parlour car,
+      accessible to extra dollars; and then came special types of train, all
+      made up of parlour cars and observation cars and the like. In England
+      nearly every train remains still first, second and third, or first and
+      third. And now, quite outdistancing the differentiation of England,
+      America produces private cars and private trains, such as Europe reserves
+      only for crowned heads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evidence of the American railways, then, suggests very strongly what a
+      hundred other signs confirm, that the huge classless sea of American
+      population is not destined to remain classless, is already developing
+      separations and distinctions and structures of its own. And monstrous
+      architectural portents in Boston and Salt Lake City encourage one to
+      suppose that even that churchless aspect, which so stirred the speculative
+      element in Mr. Henry James, is only the opening formless phase of a
+      community destined to produce not only classes but intellectual and moral
+      forms of the most remarkable kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well to note how these ninety millions of people whose social future
+      we are discussing are distributed. This huge development of human
+      appliances and resources is here going on in a community that is still,
+      for all the dense crowds of New York, the teeming congestion of East Side,
+      extraordinarily scattered. America, one recalls, is still an unoccupied
+      country across which the latest developments of civilisation are rushing.
+      We are dealing here with a continuous area of land which is, leaving
+      Alaska out of account altogether, equal to Great Britain, France, the
+      German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan,
+      Holland, Spain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe, Egypt
+      and the whole Empire of India, and the population spread out over this
+      vast space is still less than the joint population of the first two
+      countries named and not a quarter that of India.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, it is not spread at all evenly. Much of it is in undistributed
+      clots. It is not upon the soil; barely half of it is in holdings and homes
+      and authentic communities. It is a population of an extremely modern type.
+      Urban concentration has already gone far with it; fifteen millions of it
+      are crowded into and about twenty great cities, another eighteen millions
+      make up five hundred towns. Between these centres of population run
+      railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks of various
+      sorts, but to the European eye these are mere scratchings on a virgin
+      surface. An empty wilderness manifests itself through this thin network of
+      human conveniences, appears in the meshes even at the railroad side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Essentially, America is still an unsettled land, with only a few
+      incidental good roads in favoured places, with no universal police, with
+      no wayside inns where a civilised man may rest, with still only the
+      crudest of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches of swamp and
+      forest and desert by the track side, still unassailed by industry. This
+      much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago. Westward it becomes more
+      and more the fact. In Idaho, at last, comes the untouched and perhaps
+      invincible desert, plain and continuous through the long hours of travel.
+      Huge areas do not contain one human being to the square mile, still vaster
+      portions fall short of two....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is upon Pennsylvania and New York State and the belt of great towns
+      that stretches out past Chicago to Milwaukee and Madison that the nation
+      centres and seems destined to centre. One needs but examine a tinted
+      population map to realise that. The other concentrations are provincial
+      and subordinate; they have the same relation to the main axis that Glasgow
+      or Cardiff have to London in the British scheme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I speak of this vast multitude, these ninety millions of the United
+      States of America as being for the most part peasants de-peasant-ised and
+      common people cut off from their own social traditions, I do not intend to
+      convey that the American community is as a whole traditionless. There is
+      in America a very distinctive tradition indeed, which animates the entire
+      nation, gives a unique idiom to its press and all its public utterances,
+      and is manifestly the starting point from which the adjustments of the
+      future must be made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mere sight of the stars and stripes serves to recall it; "Yankee" in
+      the mouth of a European gives something of its quality. One thinks at once
+      of a careless abandonment of any pretension, of tireless energy and daring
+      enterprise, of immense self-reliance, of a disrespect for the past so
+      complete that a mummy is in itself a comical object, and the blowing out
+      of an ill-guarded sacred flame, a delightful jest. One thinks of the
+      enterprise of the sky-scraper and the humour of "A Yankee at the Court of
+      King Arthur," and of "Innocents Abroad." Its dominant notes are democracy,
+      freedom, and confidence. It is religious-spirited without superstition
+      consciously Christian in the vein of a nearly Unitarian Christianity,
+      fervent but broadened, broadened as a halfpenny is broadened by being run
+      over by an express train, substantially the same, that is to say, but with
+      a marked loss of outline and detail. It is a tradition of romantic
+      concession to good and inoffensive women and a high development of that
+      personal morality which puts sexual continence and alcoholic temperance
+      before any public virtue. It is equally a tradition of sporadic emotional
+      public-spiritedness, entirely of the quality of gallantry, of handsome and
+      surprising gifts to the people, disinterested occupation of office and the
+      like. It is emotionally patriotic, hypotheticating fighting and dying for
+      one's country as a supreme good while inculcating also that working and
+      living for oneself is quite within the sphere of virtuous action. It
+      adores the flag but suspects the State. One sees more national flags and
+      fewer national servants in America than in any country in the world. Its
+      conception of manners is one of free plain-spoken men revering women and
+      shielding them from most of the realities of life, scornful of
+      aristocracies and monarchies, while asserting simply, directly, boldly and
+      frequently an equal claim to consideration with all other men. If there is
+      any traditional national costume, it is shirt-sleeves. And it cherishes
+      the rights of property above any other right whatsoever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such are the details that come clustering into one's mind in response to
+      the phrase, the American tradition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the War of Independence onward until our own times that tradition,
+      that very definite ideal, has kept pretty steadily the same. It is the
+      image of a man and not the image of a State. Its living spirit has been
+      the spirit of freedom at any cost, unconditional and irresponsible. It is
+      the spirit of men who have thrown off a yoke, who are jealously resolved
+      to be unhampered masters of their "own," to whom nothing else is of
+      anything but secondary importance. That was the spirit of the English
+      small gentry and mercantile class, the comfortable property owners, the
+      Parliamentarians, in Stuart times. Indeed even earlier, it is very largely
+      the spirit of More's "Utopia." It was that spirit sent Oliver Cromwell
+      himself packing for America, though a heedless and ill-advised and
+      unforeseeing King would not let him go. It was the spirit that made
+      taxation for public purposes the supreme wrong and provoked each country,
+      first the mother country and then in its turn the daughter country, to
+      armed rebellion. It has been the spirit of the British Whig and the
+      British Nonconformist almost up to the present day. In the Reform Club of
+      London, framed and glazed over against Magna Charta, is the American
+      Declaration of Independence, kindred trophies they are of the same
+      essentially English spirit of stubborn insubordination. But the American
+      side of it has gone on unchecked by the complementary aspect of the
+      English character which British Toryism expresses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The War of Independence raised that Whig suspicion of and hostility to
+      government and the freedom of private property and the repudiation of any
+      but voluntary emotional and supererogatory co-operation in the national
+      purpose to the level of a religion, and the American Constitution with but
+      one element of elasticity in the Supreme Court decisions, established
+      these principles impregnably in the political structure. It organised
+      disorganisation. Personal freedom, defiance of authority, and the stars
+      and stripes have always gone together in men's minds; and subsequent waves
+      of immigration, the Irish fleeing famine, for which they held the English
+      responsible, and the Eastern European Jews escaping relentless
+      persecutions, brought a persuasion of immense public wrongs, as a
+      necessary concomitant of systematic government, to refresh without
+      changing this defiant thirst for freedom at any cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In my book, "The Future in America," I have tried to make an estimate of
+      the working quality of this American tradition of unconditional freedom
+      for the adult male citizen. I have shown that from the point of view of
+      anyone who regards civilisation as an organisation of human
+      interdependence and believes that the stability of society can be secured
+      only by a conscious and disciplined co-ordination of effort, it is a
+      tradition extraordinarily and dangerously deficient in what I have called
+      a "<i>sense of the State</i>." And by a "sense of the State" I mean not
+      merely a vague and sentimental and showy public-spiritedness&mdash;of that
+      the States have enough and to spare&mdash;but a real sustaining conception
+      of the collective interest embodied in the State as an object of simple
+      duty and as a determining factor in the life of each individual. It
+      involves a sense of function and a sense of "place," a sense of a general
+      responsibility and of a general well-being overriding the individual's
+      well-being, which are exactly the senses the American tradition attacks
+      and destroys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the better part of a century the American tradition, quite as much by
+      reason of what it disregards as of what it suggests, has meant a great
+      release of human energy, a vigorous if rough and untidy exploitation of
+      the vast resources that the European invention of railways and telegraphic
+      communication put within reach of the American people. It has stimulated
+      men to a greater individual activity, perhaps, than the world has ever
+      seen before. Men have been wasted by misdirection no doubt, but there has
+      been less waste by inaction and lassitude than was the case in any
+      previous society. Great bulks of things and great quantities of things
+      have been produced, huge areas brought under cultivation, vast cities
+      reared in the wilderness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this tradition has failed to produce the beginnings or promise of any
+      new phase of civilised organisation, the growths have remained largely
+      invertebrate and chaotic, and, concurrently with its gift of splendid and
+      monstrous growth, it has also developed portentous political and economic
+      evils. No doubt the increment of human energy has been considerable, but
+      it has been much less than appears at first sight. Much of the human
+      energy that America has displayed in the last century is not a development
+      of new energy but a diversion. It has been accompanied by a fall in the
+      birth-rate that even the immigration torrent has not altogether replaced.
+      Its insistence on the individual, its disregard of the collective
+      organisation, its treatment of women and children as each man's private
+      concern, has had its natural outcome. Men's imaginations have been turned
+      entirely upon individual and immediate successes and upon concrete
+      triumphs; they have had no regard or only an ineffectual sentimental
+      regard for the race. Every man was looking after himself, and there was no
+      one to look after the future. Had the promise of 1815 been fulfilled,
+      there would now be in the United States of America one hundred million
+      descendants of the homogeneous and free-spirited native population of that
+      time. There is not, as a matter of fact, more than thirty-five million.
+      There is probably, as I have pointed out, much less. Against the assets of
+      cities, railways, mines and industrial wealth won, the American tradition
+      has to set the price of five-and-seventy million native citizens who have
+      never found time to get born, and whose place is now more or less filled
+      by alien substitutes. Biologically speaking, this is not a triumph for the
+      American tradition. It is, however, very clearly an outcome of the intense
+      individualism of that tradition. Under the sway of that it has burnt its
+      future in the furnace to keep up steam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next and necessary evil consequent upon this exaltation of the
+      individual and private property over the State, over the race that is and
+      over public property, has been a contempt for public service. It has
+      identified public spirit with spasmodic acts of public beneficence. The
+      American political ideal became a Cincinnatus whom nobody sent for and who
+      therefore never left his plough. There has ensued a corrupt and
+      undignified political life, speaking claptrap, dark with violence,
+      illiterate and void of statesmanship or science, forbidding any healthy
+      social development through public organisation at home, and every year
+      that the increasing facilities of communication draw the alien nations
+      closer, deepening the risks of needless and disastrous wars abroad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the third place it is to be remarked that the American tradition
+      has defeated its dearest aims of a universal freedom and a practical
+      equality. The economic process of the last half-century, so far as America
+      is concerned has completely justified the generalisations of Marx. There
+      has been a steady concentration of wealth and of the reality as
+      distinguished from the forms of power in the hands of a small energetic
+      minority, and a steady approximation of the condition of the mass of the
+      citizens to that of the so-called proletariat of the European communities.
+      The tradition of individual freedom and equality is, in fact, in process
+      of destroying the realities of freedom and equality out of which it rose.
+      Instead of the six hundred thousand families of the year 1790, all at
+      about the same level of property and, excepting the peculiar condition of
+      seven hundred thousand blacks, with scarcely anyone in the position of a
+      hireling, we have now as the most striking, though by no means the most
+      important, fact in American social life a frothy confusion of
+      millionaires' families, just as wasteful, foolish and vicious as
+      irresponsible human beings with unlimited resources have always shown
+      themselves to be. And, concurrently with the appearance of these
+      concentrations of great wealth, we have appearing also poverty, poverty of
+      a degree that was quite unknown in the United States for the first century
+      of their career as an independent nation. In the last few decades slums as
+      frightful as any in Europe have appeared with terrible rapidity, and there
+      has been a development of the viler side of industrialism, of sweating and
+      base employment of the most ominous kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Mr. Robert Hunter's "Poverty" one reads of "not less than eighty
+      thousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present employed in
+      the textile mills of this country. In the South there are now six times as
+      many children at work as there were twenty years ago. Child labour is
+      increasing yearly in that section of the country. Each year more little
+      ones are brought in from the fields and hills to live in the degrading and
+      demoralising atmosphere of the mill towns...."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered from
+      Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little
+      nephews and nieces, friends' sons and so forth brought in by them is
+      peculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It was a
+      particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little boy of
+      no ascertainable relationship....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were hardly
+      worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the tiniest and
+      frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning and, like old
+      men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labour; and, when they
+      return home, "wearily fling themselves on their beds, too tired to take
+      off their clothes." Many children work all night&mdash;"in the maddening
+      racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere insanitary and clouded with
+      humidity and lint."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter in his description, "before I forget
+      the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched forward to
+      rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form already
+      showing the physical effects of labour. This child, six years of age, was
+      working twelve hours a day."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Mr. Spargo's "Bitter Cry of the Children" I learn this much of the
+      joys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop over the
+      chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the coal as it
+      moves past them. The air is black with coal dust, and the roar of the
+      crushers, screens and rushing mill-race of coal is deafening. Sometimes
+      one of the children falls into the machinery and is terribly mangled, or
+      slips into the chute and is smothered to death. Many children are killed
+      in this way. Many others, after a time, contract coal-miners asthma and
+      consumption, which gradually undermine their health. Breathing continually
+      day after day the clouds of coal dust, their lungs become black and choked
+      with small particles of anthracite...."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J.F. Carey tells how little
+      naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York millionaire,
+      packing cloth into bleaching vats, in a bath of chemicals that bleaches
+      their little bodies like the bodies of lepers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Altogether it would seem that at least one million and a half children are
+      growing up in the United States of America stunted and practically
+      uneducated because of unregulated industrialism. These children, ill-fed,
+      ill-trained mentally benighted, since they are alive and active, since
+      they are an active and positive and not a negative evil, are even more
+      ominous in the American outlook than those five and sixty million of good
+      race and sound upbringing who will now never be born.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be repeated that the American tradition is really the tradition of
+      one particular ingredient in this great admixture and stirring up of
+      peoples. This ingredient is the Colonial British, whose seventeenth
+      century Puritanism and eighteenth century mercantile radicalism and
+      rationalism manifestly furnished all the stuff out of which the American
+      tradition is made. It is this stuff planted in virgin soil and inflated to
+      an immense and buoyant optimism by colossal and unanticipated material
+      prosperity and success. From that British middle-class tradition comes the
+      individualist protestant spirit, the keen self-reliance and personal
+      responsibility, the irresponsible expenditure, the indiscipline and
+      mystical faith in things being managed properly if they are only let
+      alone. "State-blindness" is the natural and almost inevitable quality of a
+      middle-class tradition, a class that has been forced neither to rule nor
+      obey, which has been concentrated and successfully concentrated on private
+      gain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This middle-class British section of the American population was, and is
+      to this day, the only really articulate ingredient in its mental
+      composition. And so it has had a monopoly in providing the American forms
+      of thought. The other sections of peoples that have been annexed by or
+      have come into this national synthesis are <i>silent</i> so far as any
+      contribution to the national stock of ideas and ideals is concerned. There
+      are, for example, those great elements, the Spanish Catholics, the French
+      Catholic population of Louisiana, the Irish Catholics, the
+      French-Canadians who are now ousting the sterile New Englander from New
+      England, the Germans, the Italians the Hungarians. Comparatively they say
+      nothing. From all the ten million of coloured people come just two or
+      three platform voices, Booker Washington, Dubois, Mrs. Church Terrell,
+      mere protests at specific wrongs. The clever, restless Eastern European
+      Jews, too, have still to find a voice. Professor M|nsterberg has written
+      with a certain bitterness of the inaudibility of the German element in the
+      American population. They allow themselves, he remonstrates, to count for
+      nothing. They did not seem to exist, he points out, even in politics until
+      prohibitionist fury threatened their beer. Then, indeed, the American
+      German emerged from silence and obscurity, but only to rescue his mug and
+      retire again with it into enigmatical silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there is any exception to this predominance of the tradition of the
+      English-speaking, originally middle-class, English-thinking northerner in
+      the American mind, it is to be found in the spread of social democracy
+      outward from the festering tenement houses of Chicago into the mining and
+      agrarian regions of the middle west. It is a fierce form of socialist
+      teaching that speaks throughout these regions, far more closely akin to
+      the revolutionary Socialism of the continent of Europe than to the
+      constructive and evolutionary Socialism of Great Britain. Its typical
+      organ is <i>The Appeal to Reason</i>, which circulates more than a quarter
+      of a million copies weekly from Kansas City. It is a Socialism reeking
+      with class feeling and class hatred and altogether anarchistic in spirit;
+      a new and highly indigestible contribution to the American moral and
+      intellectual synthesis. It is remarkable chiefly as the one shrill
+      exception in a world of plastic acceptance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now it is impossible to believe that this vast silence of these imported
+      and ingested factors that the American nation has taken to itself is as
+      acquiescent as it seems. No doubt they are largely taking over the
+      traditional forms of American thought and expression quietly and without
+      protest, and wearing them; but they will wear them as a man wears a
+      misfit, shaping and adapting it every day more and more to his natural
+      form, here straining a seam and there taking in a looseness. A force of
+      modification must be at work. It must be at work in spite of the fact
+      that, with the exception of social democracy, it does not anywhere show as
+      a protest or a fresh beginning or a challenge to the prevailing forms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How far it has actually been at work is, perhaps, to be judged best by an
+      observant stroller, surveying the crowds of a Sunday evening in New York,
+      or read in the sheets of such a mirror of popular taste as the Sunday
+      edition of the <i>New York American</i> or the <i>New York Herald</i>. In
+      the former just what I mean by the silent modification of the old
+      tradition is quite typically shown. Its leading articles are written by
+      Mr. Arthur Brisbane, the son of one of the Brook Farm Utopians, that
+      gathering in which Hawthorne and Henry James senior, and Margaret Fuller
+      participated, and in which the whole brilliant world of Boston's past, the
+      world of Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, was interested. Mr. Brisbane is a
+      very distinguished man, quite over and above the fact that he is paid the
+      greatest salary of any journalist in the world. He writes with a wit and
+      directness that no other living man can rival, and he holds up constantly
+      what is substantially the American ideal of the past century to readers
+      who evidently need strengthening in it. It is, of course, the figure of a
+      man and not of a State; it is a man, clean, clean shaved and almost
+      obtrusively strong-jawed, honest, muscular, alert, pushful, chivalrous,
+      self-reliant, non-political except when he breaks into shrewd and
+      penetrating voting&mdash;"you can fool all the people some of the time,"
+      etc.&mdash;and independent&mdash;independent&mdash;in a world which is
+      therefore certain to give way to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His doubts, his questionings, his aspirations, are dealt with by Mr.
+      Brisbane with a simple direct fatherliness with all the beneficent
+      persuasiveness of a revivalist preacher. Millions read these leaders and
+      feel a momentary benefit, en route for the more actual portions of the
+      paper. He asks: "Why are all men gamblers?" He discusses our Longing for
+      Immortal Imperfection, and "Did we once live on the moon?" He recommends
+      the substitution of whisky and soda for neat whisky, drawing an
+      illustration from the comparative effect of the diluted and of the
+      undiluted liquid as an eye-wash ("Try whisky on your friend's eyeball!" is
+      the heading), sleep ("The man who loses sleep will make a failure of his
+      life, or at least diminish greatly his chances of success"), and the
+      education of the feminine intelligence ("The cow that kicks her weaned
+      calf is all heart"). He makes identically the same confident appeal to the
+      moral motive which was for so long the salvation of the Puritan
+      individualism from which the American tradition derives. "That hand," he
+      writes, "which supports the head of the new-born baby, the mother's hand,
+      supports the civilisation of the world."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that sort of thing is not saving the old native strain in the
+      population. It moves people, no doubt, but inadequately. And here is a
+      passage that is quite the quintessence of Americanism, of all its deep
+      moral feeling and sentimental untruthfulness. I wonder if any man but an
+      American or a British nonconformist in a state of rhetorical excitement
+      ever believed that Shakespeare wrote his plays or Michael Angelo painted
+      in a mood of humanitarian exaltation, "<i>for the good of all men</i>."
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "What <i>shall</i> we strive for? <i>Money</i>?
+
+  "Get a thousand millions. Your day will come, and
+  in due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at
+  your bump of acquisitiveness as at the mean coat of the
+  pauper.
+
+  "Then shall we strive for <i>power</i>?
+
+  "The names of the first great kings of the world are
+  forgotten, and the names of all those whose power we envy
+  will drift to forgetfulness soon. What does the most powerful
+  man in the world amount to standing at the brink of
+  Niagara, with his solar plexus trembling? What is his
+  power compared with the force of the wind or the energy
+  of one small wave sweeping along the shore?
+
+  "The power which man can build up within himself,
+  for himself, is nothing. Only the dull reasoning of gratified
+  egotism can make it seem worth while.
+
+  "Then what is worth while? Let us look at some of
+  the men who have come and gone, and whose lives inspire
+  us. Take a few at random:
+
+  "Columbus, Michael Angelo, Wilberforce, Shakespeare,
+  Galileo, Fulton, Watt, Hargreaves&mdash;these will do.
+
+  "Let us ask ourselves this question: 'Was there any
+  <i>one thing</i> that distinguished <i>all</i> their lives,
+  that united all these men, active in fields so different?'
+
+  "Yes. Every man among them, and every man whose
+  life history is worth the telling, did something for <i>the good
+  of other men</i>....
+
+  "Get money if you can. Get power if you can; Then, if
+  you want to be more than the ten thousand million unknown
+  mingled in the dust beneath you, see what good you can
+  do with your money and your power.
+
+  "If you are one of the many millions who have not
+  and can't get money or power, see what good you can do
+  without either:
+
+  "You can help carry a load for an old man. You can
+  encourage and help a poor devil trying to reform. You
+  can set a good example to children. You can stick to the
+  men with whom you work, fighting honestly for their
+  welfare.
+
+  "Time was when the ablest man would rather kill ten
+  men than feed a thousand children. That time has gone.
+  We do not care much about feeding the children, but we
+  care less about killing the men. To that extent we have
+  improved already.
+
+  "The day will come when we shall prefer helping our
+  neighbour to robbing him&mdash;legally&mdash;of a million dollars.
+
+  "Do what good you can <i>now</i>, while it is unusual,
+  and have the satisfaction of being a pioneer and an
+  eccentric."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the utmost to make
+      itself audible to the new world, and cracking into italics and breaking
+      into capitals with the strain. The rest of that enormous bale of paper is
+      eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of
+      comprehensive things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalisations, a
+      public which has carried the conception of freedom to its logical extreme
+      of entire individual detachment. These tell-tale columns deal all with
+      personality and the drama of personal life. They witness to no interest
+      but the interest in intense individual experiences. The engagements, the
+      love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are given in pitiless
+      detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits and sensational
+      pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers who write this stuff strike the
+      personal note, and their heavily muscular portraits frown beside the
+      initial letter. Murders and crimes are worked up to the keenest pitch of
+      realisation, and any new indelicacy in fashionable costume, any new
+      medical device or cure, any new dance or athleticism, any new breach in
+      the moral code, any novelty in sea bathing or the woman's seat on
+      horseback, or the like, is given copious and moving illustration, stirring
+      headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is a coloured supplement of
+      knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaint dialect of the New York
+      slums. It is a language from which "th" has vanished, and it presents a
+      world in which the kicking by a mule of an endless succession of victims
+      is an inexhaustible joy to young and old. "Dat ole Maud!" There is a
+      smaller bale dealing with sport. In the advertisement columns one finds
+      nothing of books, nothing of art; but great choice of bust developers,
+      hair restorers, nervous tonics, clothing sales, self-contained flats, and
+      business opportunities....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say, taken
+      off its frills. All but one; Mr. Arthur Brisbane's eloquence one may
+      consider as the last stitch of the old costume&mdash;mere decoration.
+      Excitement remains the residual object in life. The <i>New York American</i>
+      represents a clientele to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestly
+      with no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The modifications of the American tradition that will occur through its
+      adoption by these silent foreign ingredients in the racial synthesis are
+      not likely to add to it or elaborate it in any way. They tend merely to
+      simplify it to bare irresponsible non-moral individualism. It is with the
+      detail and qualification of a tradition as with the inflexions of a
+      language; when another people takes it over the refinements disappear. But
+      there are other forces of modification at work upon the American tradition
+      of an altogether more hopeful kind. It has entered upon a constructive
+      phase. Were it not so, then the American social outlook would, indeed, be
+      hopeless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effectual modifying force at work is not the strangeness nor the
+      temperamental maladjustment of the new elements of population, but the
+      conscious realisation of the inadequacy of the tradition on the part of
+      the more intelligent sections of the American population. That blind
+      national conceit that would hear no criticism and admit no deficiency has
+      disappeared. In the last decade such a change has come over the American
+      mind as sometimes comes over a vigorous and wilful child. Suddenly it
+      seems to have grown up, to have begun to weigh its powers and consider its
+      possible deficiencies. There was a time when American confidence and
+      self-satisfaction seemed impregnable; at the slightest qualm of doubt
+      America took to violent rhetoric as a drunkard resorts to drink. Now the
+      indictment I have drawn up harshly, bluntly and unflatteringly in Sec. 4
+      would receive the endorsement of American after American. The falling
+      birth-rate of all the best elements in the State, the cankering effect of
+      political corruption, the crumbling of independence and equality before
+      the progressive aggregation of wealth&mdash;he has to face them, he cannot
+      deny them. There has arisen a new literature, the literature of national
+      self-examination, that seems destined to modify the American tradition
+      profoundly. To me it seems to involve the hope and possibility of a
+      conscious collective organisation of social life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If ever there was an epoch-marking book it was surely Henry Demarest
+      Lloyd's "Wealth against Commonwealth." It marks an epoch not so much by
+      what it says as by what it silently abandons. It was published in 1894,
+      and it stated in the very clearest terms the incompatibility of the almost
+      limitless freedom of property set up by the constitution, with the
+      practical freedom and general happiness of the mass of men. It must be
+      admitted that Lloyd never followed up the implications of this
+      repudiation. He made his statements in the language of the tradition he
+      assailed, and foreshadowed the replacement of chaos by order in quite
+      chaotic and mystical appeals. Here, for instance, is a typical passage
+      from "Man, the Social Creator".
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "Property is now a stumbling-block to the people, just
+  as government has been. Property will not be abolished,
+  but, like government, it will be democratised.
+
+  "The philosophy of self-interest as the social solution
+  was a good living and working synthesis in the days when
+  civilisation was advancing its frontiers twenty miles a day
+  across the American continent, and every man for himself
+  was the best social mobilisation possible.
+
+  "But to-day it is a belated ghost that has overstayed
+  the cock-crow. These were frontier morals. But this same,
+  everyone for himself, becomes most immoral when the
+  frontier is abolished and the pioneer becomes the fellow-citizen
+  and these frontier morals are most uneconomic when
+  labour can be divided and the product multiplied. Most
+  uneconomic, for they make closure the rule of industry,
+  leading not to wealth, but to that awful waste of wealth
+  which is made visible to every eye in our unemployed&mdash;not
+  hands alone, but land, machinery, and, most of all, hearts.
+  Those who still practise these frontier morals are like
+  criminals, who, according to the new science of penology,
+  are simply reappearances of old types. Their acquisitiveness
+  once divine like Mercury's, is now out of place except
+  in jail. Because out of place, they are a danger. A sorry
+  day it is likely to be for those who are found in the way
+  when the new people rise to rush into each other's arms,
+  to get together, to stay together and to live together. The
+  labour movement halts because so many of its rank and
+  file&mdash;and all its leaders&mdash;do not see clearly the golden thread
+  of love on which have been strung together all the past
+  glories of human association, and which is to serve for
+  the link of the new Association of Friends who Labour,
+  whose motto is 'All for All.'"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The establishment of the intricate co-operative commonwealth by a rush of
+      eighty million flushed and shiny-eyed enthusiasts, in fact, is Lloyd's
+      proposal. He will not face, and few Americans to this day will face, the
+      cold need of a great science of social adjustment and a disciplined and
+      rightly ordered machinery to turn such enthusiasms to effect. They seem
+      incurably wedded to gush. However, he did express clearly enough the
+      opening phase of American disillusionment with the wild go-as-you-please
+      that had been the conception of life in America through a vehement,
+      wasteful, expanding century. And he was the precursor of what is now a
+      bulky and extremely influential literature of national criticism. A number
+      of writers, literary investigators one may call them, or sociological men
+      of letters, or magazine publicists&mdash;they are a little difficult to
+      place&mdash;has taken up the inquiry into the condition of civic
+      administration, into economic organisation into national politics and
+      racial interaction, with a frank fearlessness and an absence of windy
+      eloquence that has been to many Europeans a surprising revelation of the
+      reserve forces of the American mind. President Roosevelt, that magnificent
+      reverberator of ideas, that gleam of wilful humanity, that fantastic first
+      interruption to the succession of machine-made politicians at the White
+      House, has echoed clearly to this movement and made it an integral part of
+      the general intellectual movement of America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is to these first intimations of the need of a "sense of the State" in
+      America that I would particularly direct the reader's attention in this
+      discussion. They are the beginnings of what is quite conceivably a great
+      and complex reconstructive effort. I admit they are but beginnings. They
+      may quite possibly wither and perish presently; they may much more
+      probably be seized upon by adventurers and converted into a new cant
+      almost as empty and fruitless as the old. The fact remains that, through
+      this busy and immensely noisy confusion of nearly a hundred millions of
+      people, these little voices go intimating more and more clearly the
+      intention to undertake public affairs in a new spirit and upon new
+      principles, to strengthen the State and the law against individual
+      enterprise, to have done with those national superstitions under which
+      hypocrisy and disloyalty and private plunder have sheltered and prospered
+      for so long.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just as far as these reform efforts succeed and develop is the
+      organisation of the United States of America into a great, self-conscious,
+      civilised nation, unparalleled in the world's history, possible; just as
+      far as they fail is failure written over the American future. The real
+      interest of America for the next century to the student of civilisation
+      will be the development of these attempts, now in their infancy, to create
+      and realise out of this racial hotchpotch, this human chaos, an idea, of
+      the collective commonwealth as the datum of reference for every individual
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have hinted in the last section that there is a possibility that the new
+      wave of constructive ideas in American thought may speedily develop a cant
+      of its own. But even then, a constructive cant is better than a
+      destructive one. Even the conscious hypocrite has to do something to
+      justify his pretences, and the mere disappearance from current thought of
+      the persuasion that organisation is a mistake and discipline needless,
+      clears the ground of one huge obstacle even if it guarantees nothing about
+      the consequent building.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, apart from this, are there more solid and effectual forces behind
+      this new movement of ideas that makes for organisation in American medley
+      at the present time?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The speculative writer casting about for such elements lights upon four
+      sets of possibilities which call for discussion. First, one has to ask:
+      How far is the American plutocracy likely to be merely a wasteful and
+      chaotic class, and how far is it likely to become consciously aristocratic
+      and constructive? Secondly, and in relation to this, what possibilities of
+      pride and leading are there in the great university foundations of
+      America? Will they presently begin to tell as a restraining and directing
+      force upon public thought? Thirdly, will the growing American Socialist
+      movement, which at present is just as anarchistic and undisciplined in
+      spirit as everything else in America, presently perceive the constructive
+      implications of its general propositions and become statesmanlike and
+      constructive? And, fourthly, what are the latent possibilities of the
+      American women? Will women as they become more and more aware of
+      themselves as a class and of the problem of their sex become a force upon
+      the anarchistic side, a force favouring race-suicide, or upon the
+      constructive side which plans and builds and bears the future?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only possible answer to each one of these questions at present is
+      guessing and an estimate. But the only way in which a conception of the
+      American social future may be reached lies through their discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us begin by considering what constructive forces may exist in this new
+      plutocracy which already so largely sways American economic and political
+      development. The first impression is one of extravagant and aimless
+      expenditure, of a class irresponsible and wasteful beyond all precedent.
+      One gets a Zolaesque picture of that aspect in Mr. Upton Sinclair's
+      "Metropolis," or the fashionable intelligence of the popular New York
+      Sunday editions, and one finds a good deal of confirmatory evidence in
+      many incidental aspects of the smart American life of Paris and the
+      Riviera. The evidence in the notorious Thaw trial, after one has
+      discounted its theatrical elements, was still a very convincing
+      demonstration of a rotten and extravagant, because aimless and
+      functionless, class of rich people. But one has to be careful in this
+      matter if one is to do justice to the facts. If a thing is made up of two
+      elements, and one is noisy and glaringly coloured, and the other is quiet
+      and colourless, the first impression created will be that the thing is
+      identical with the element that is noisy and glaringly coloured. One is
+      much less likely to hear of the broad plans and the quality of the wise,
+      strong and constructive individuals in a class than of their foolish
+      wives, their spendthrift sons, their mistresses, and their moments of
+      irritation and folly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the making of very rich men there is always a factor of good fortune
+      and a factor of design and will. One meets rich men at times who seem to
+      be merely lucky gamblers, who strike one as just the thousandth man in a
+      myriad of wild plungers, who are, in fact, chance nobodies washed up by an
+      eddy. Others, again, strike one as exceptionally lucky half-knaves. But
+      there are others of a growth more deliberate and of an altogether higher
+      personal quality. One takes such men as Mr. J.D. Rockefeller or Mr.
+      Pierpont Morgan&mdash;the scale of their fortunes makes them public
+      property&mdash;and it is clear that we are dealing with persons on quite a
+      different level of intellectual power from the British Colonel Norths, for
+      example, or the South African Joels. In my "Future in America" I have
+      taken the former largely at Miss Tarbell's estimate, and treated him as a
+      case of acquisitiveness raised in Baptist surroundings. But I doubt very
+      much if that exhausts the man as he is to-day. Given a man brought up to
+      saving and "getting on" as if to a religion, a man very acquisitive and
+      very patient and restrained, and indubitably with great organising power,
+      and he grows rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And having done so, there
+      he is. What is he going to do? Every step he takes up the ascent to riches
+      gives him new perspectives and new points of view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may have appealed to the young Rockefeller, clerk in a Chicago house,
+      that to be rich was itself a supreme end; in the first flush of the
+      discovery that he was immensely rich, he may have thanked Heaven as if for
+      a supreme good, and spoken to a Sunday school gathering as if he knew
+      himself for the most favoured of men. But all that happened twenty years
+      ago or more. One does not keep on in that sort of satisfaction; one
+      settles down to the new facts. And such men as Mr. Rockefeller and Mr.
+      Pierpont Morgan do not live in a made and protected world with their minds
+      trained, tamed and fed and shielded from outside impressions as royalties
+      do. The thought of the world has washed about them; they have read and
+      listened to the discussion of themselves for some decades; they have had
+      sleepless nights of self-examination. To succeed in acquiring enormous
+      wealth does not solve the problem of life; indeed, it reopens it in a new
+      form. "What shall I do with myself?" simply recurs again. You may have
+      decided to devote yourself to getting on, getting wealthy. Well, you have
+      got it. Now, again, comes the question: "What shall I do?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Pierpont Morgan, I am told, collected works of art. I can understand
+      that satisfying a rich gentleman of leisure, but not a man who has felt
+      the sensation of holding great big things in his great big hands. Saul,
+      going out to seek his father's asses, found a kingdom&mdash;and became
+      very spiritedly a king, and it seems to me that these big industrial and
+      financial organisers, whatever in their youth they proposed to do or be,
+      must many of them come to realise that their organising power is up
+      against no less a thing than a nation's future. Napoleon, it is curious to
+      remember once wanted to run a lodging-house, and a man may start to corner
+      oil and end the father of a civilisation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, I am disposed to suspect at times that an inkling of such a
+      realisation may have come to some of these very rich men. I am inclined to
+      put it among the possibilities of our time that it may presently become
+      clearly and definitely the inspiring idea of many of those who find
+      themselves predominantly rich. I do not see why these active rich should
+      not develop statesmanship, and I can quite imagine them developing very
+      considerable statesmanship. Because these men were able to realise their
+      organising power in the absence of economic organisation, it does not
+      follow that they will be fanatical for a continuing looseness and freedom
+      of property. The phase of economic liberty ends itself, as Marx long ago
+      pointed out. The American business world becomes more and more a managed
+      world with fewer and fewer wild possibilities of succeeding. Of all people
+      the big millionaires should realise this most acutely, and, in fact, there
+      are many signs that they do. It seems to me that the educational zeal of
+      Mr. Andrew Carnegie and the university and scientific endowments of Mr.
+      Rockefeller are not merely showy benefactions; they express a definite
+      feeling of the present need of constructive organisation in the social
+      scheme. The time has come to build. There is, I think, good reason for
+      expecting that statesmanship of the millionaires to become more organised
+      and scientific and comprehensive in the coming years. It is plausible at
+      least to maintain that the personal quality of the American plutocracy has
+      risen in the last three decades, has risen from the quality of a mere
+      irresponsible wealthy person towards that of a real aristocrat with a
+      "sense of the State." That one may reckon the first hopeful possibility in
+      the American outlook.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And intimately connected with this development of an attitude of public
+      responsibility in the very rich is the decay on the one hand of the
+      preposterous idea once prevalent in America that politics is an unsuitable
+      interest for a "gentleman," and on the other of the democratic jealousy of
+      any but poor politicians. In New York they talk very much of "gentlemen,"
+      and by "gentlemen" they seem to mean rich men "in society" with a college
+      education. Nowadays, "gentlemen" seem more and more disposed towards
+      politics, and less and less towards a life of business or detached
+      refinement. President Roosevelt, for example, was one of the pioneers in
+      this new development, this restoration of virility to the gentlemanly
+      ideal. His career marks the appearance of a new and better type of man in
+      American politics, the close of the rule of the idealised nobody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prophecy has been made at times that the United States might develop a
+      Caesarism, and certainly the position of president might easily become
+      that of an imperator. No doubt in the event of an acute failure of the
+      national system such a catastrophe might occur, but the more hopeful and
+      probable line of development is one in which a conscious and powerful, if
+      informal, aristocracy will play a large part. It may, indeed, never have
+      any of the outward forms of an aristocracy or any definite public
+      recognition. The Americans are as chary of the coronet and the known
+      aristocratic titles as the Romans were of the word King. Octavius, for
+      that reason, never called himself king nor Italy a kingdom. He was just
+      the Caesar of the Republic, and the Empire had been established for many
+      years before the Romans fully realised that they had returned to monarchy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The American universities are closely connected in their development with
+      the appearance and growing class-consciousness of this aristocracy of
+      wealth. The fathers of the country certainly did postulate a need of
+      universities, and in every state Congress set aside public lands to
+      furnish a university with material resources. Every State possesses a
+      university, though in many instances these institutions are in the last
+      degree of feebleness. In the days of sincere democracy the starvation of
+      government and the dislike of all manifest inequalities involved the
+      starvation of higher education. Moreover, the entirely artificial nature
+      of the State boundaries, representing no necessary cleavages and traversed
+      haphazard by the lines of communication, made some of these State
+      foundations unnecessary and others inadequate to a convergent demand. From
+      the very beginning, side by side with the State universities, were the
+      universities founded by benefactors; and with the evolution of new centres
+      of population, new and extremely generous plutocratic endowments appeared.
+      The dominant universities of America to-day, the treasure houses of
+      intellectual prestige, are almost all of them of plutocratic origin, and
+      even in the State universities, if new resources are wanted to found new
+      chairs, to supply funds for research or publication or what not, it is to
+      the more State-conscious wealthy and not to the State legislature that the
+      appeal is made almost as a matter of course. The common voter, the small
+      individualist has less constructive imagination&mdash;is more
+      individualistic, that is, than the big individualist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This great network of universities that is now spread over the States,
+      interchanging teachers, literature and ideas, and educating not only the
+      professions but a growing proportion of business leaders and wealthy
+      people, must necessarily take an important part in the reconstruction of
+      the American tradition that is now in progress. It is giving a large and
+      increasing amount of attention to the subjects that bear most directly
+      upon the peculiar practical problems of statecraft in America, to
+      psychology, sociology and political science. It is influencing the press
+      more and more directly by supplying a rising proportion of journalists and
+      creating an atmosphere of criticism and suggestion. It is keeping itself
+      on the one hand in touch with the popular literature of public criticism
+      in those new and curious organs of public thought, the ten-cent magazines;
+      and on the other it is making a constantly more solid basis of common
+      understanding upon which the newer generation of plutocrats may meet. That
+      older sentimental patriotism must be giving place under its influence to a
+      more definite and effectual conception of a collective purpose. It is to
+      the moral and intellectual influence of sustained scientific study in the
+      universities, and a growing increase of the college-trained element in the
+      population that we must look if we are to look anywhere for the new
+      progressive methods, for the substitution of persistent, planned and
+      calculated social development for the former conditions of systematic
+      neglect and corruption in public affairs varied by epileptic seizures of
+      "Reform."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A third influence that may also contribute very materially to the
+      reconstruction of the American tradition is the Socialist movement. It is
+      true that so far American Socialism has very largely taken an Anarchistic
+      form, has been, in fact, little more than a revolutionary movement of the
+      wages-earning class against the property owner. It has already been
+      pointed out that it derives not from contemporary English Socialism but
+      from the Marxist social democracy of the continent of Europe, and has not
+      even so much of the constructive spirit as has been developed by the
+      English Socialists of the Fabian and Labour Party group or by the newer
+      German evolutionary Socialists. Nevertheless, whenever Socialism is
+      intelligently met by discussion or whenever it draws near to practicable
+      realisation, it becomes, by virtue of its inherent implications, a
+      constructive force, and there is no reason to suppose that it will not be
+      intelligently met on the whole and in the long run in America. The
+      alternative to a developing Socialism among the labouring masses in
+      America is that revolutionary Anarchism from which it is slowly but
+      definitely marking itself off. In America we have to remember that we are
+      dealing with a huge population of people who are for the most part, and
+      more and more evidently destined under the present system of free
+      industrial competition, to be either very small traders, small farmers on
+      the verge of debt, or wages-earners for all their lives. They are going to
+      lead limited lives and worried lives&mdash;and they know it. Nearly
+      everyone can read and discuss now, the process of concentrating property
+      and the steady fixation of conditions that were once fluid and adventurous
+      goes on in the daylight visibly to everyone. And it has to be borne in
+      mind also that these people are so far under the sway of the American
+      tradition that each thinks himself as good as any man and as much entitled
+      to the fullness of life. Whatever social tradition their fathers had,
+      whatever ideas of a place to be filled humbly and seriously and duties to
+      be done, have been left behind in Europe. No Church dominates the scenery
+      of this new land, and offers in authoritative and convincing tones
+      consolations hereafter for lives obscurely but faithfully lived. Whatever
+      else happens in this national future, upon one point the patriotic
+      American may feel assured, and that is of an immense general discontent in
+      the working class and of a powerful movement in search of a general
+      betterment. The practical forms and effects of that movement will depend
+      almost entirely upon the average standard of life among the workers and
+      their general education. Sweated and ill-organised foreigners, such as one
+      finds in New Jersey living under conditions of great misery, will be
+      fierce, impatient and altogether dangerous. They will be acutely
+      exasperated by every picture of plutocratic luxury in their newspaper,
+      they will readily resort to destructive violence. The western miner, the
+      western agriculturist, worried beyond endurance between the money-lender
+      and railway combinations will be almost equally prone to savage methods of
+      expression. <i>The Appeal to Reason</i>, for example, to which I have made
+      earlier reference in this chapter, is furious to wreck the present
+      capitalistic system, but it is far too angry and impatient for that
+      satisfaction to produce any clear suggestion of what shall replace it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To call this discontent of the seething underside of the American system
+      Socialism is a misnomer. Were there no Socialism there would be just as
+      much of this discontent, just the same insurgent force and desire for
+      violence, taking some other title and far more destructive methods. This
+      discontent is a part of the same planless confusion that gives on the
+      other side the wanton irresponsible extravagances of the smart people of
+      New York. But Socialism alone, of all the forms of expression adopted by
+      the losers in the economic struggle, contains constructive possibilities
+      and leads its adherents towards that ideal of an organised State, planned
+      and developed, from which these terrible social stresses may be
+      eliminated, which is also the ideal to which sociology and the thoughts of
+      every constructive-minded and foreseeing man in any position of life tend
+      to-day. In the Socialist hypothesis of collective ownership and
+      administration as the social basis, there is the germ of a "sense of the
+      State" that may ultimately develop into comprehensive conceptions of
+      social order, conceptions upon which enlightened millionaires and
+      unenlightened workers may meet at last in generous and patriotic
+      co-operation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The chances of the American future, then, seem to range between two
+      possibilities just as a more or less constructive Socialism does or does
+      not get hold of and inspire the working mass of the population. In the
+      worst event&mdash;given an emotional and empty hostility to property as
+      such, masquerading as Socialism&mdash;one has the prospect of a bitter and
+      aimless class war between the expropriated many and the property-holding
+      few, a war not of general insurrection but of localised outbreaks, strikes
+      and brutal suppressions, a war rising to bloody conflicts and sinking to
+      coarsely corrupt political contests, in which one side may prevail in one
+      locality and one in another, and which may even develop into a chronic
+      civil war in the less-settled parts of the country or an irresistible
+      movement for secession between west and east. That is assuming the
+      greatest imaginable vehemence and short-sighted selfishness and the least
+      imaginable intelligence on the part of both workers and the
+      plutocrat-swayed government. But if the more powerful and educated
+      sections of the American community realise in time the immense moral
+      possibilities of the Socialist movement, if they will trouble to
+      understand its good side instead of emphasising its bad, if they will keep
+      in touch with it and help in the development of a constructive content to
+      its propositions, then it seems to me that popular Socialism may count as
+      a third great factor in the making of the civilised American State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In any case, it does not seem to me probable that there can be any
+      national revolutionary movement or any complete arrest in the development
+      of an aristocratic phase in American history. The area of the country is
+      too great and the means of communication between the workers in different
+      parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even for effective political
+      action in mass. In the worst event&mdash;and it is only in the worst event
+      that a great insurrectionary movement becomes probable&mdash;the
+      newspapers, magazines, telephones and telegraphs, all the apparatus of
+      discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals, guns, flying
+      machines, and all the material of warfare, will be in the hands of the
+      property owners, and the average of betrayal among the leaders of a class,
+      not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspicious united only by their
+      discomforts and not by any constructive intentions, will necessarily be
+      high. So that, though the intensifying trouble between labour and capital
+      may mean immense social disorganisation and lawlessness, though it may
+      even supply the popular support in new attempts at secession, I do not see
+      in it the possibility and force for that new start which the revolutionary
+      Socialists anticipate; I see it merely as one of several forces making, on
+      the whole and particularly in view of the possible mediatory action of the
+      universities, for construction and reconciliation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What changes are likely to occur in the more intimate social life of the
+      people of the United States? Two influences are at work that may modify
+      this profoundly. One is that spread of knowledge and that accompanying
+      change in moral attitude which is more and more sterilising the once
+      prolific American home, and the second is the rising standard of feminine
+      education. There has arisen in this age a new consciousness in women. They
+      are entering into the collective thought to a degree unprecedented in the
+      world's history, and with portents at once disquieting and confused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Sec. 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the American
+      synthesis, the immigrant European aliens, the Catholics, the coloured
+      blood, and so forth. I would now observe that, in the making of the
+      American tradition, the women also have been to a large extent, and quite
+      remarkably, a silent factor. That tradition is not only fundamentally
+      middle-class and English, but it is also fundamentally masculine. The
+      citizen is the man. The woman belongs to him. He votes for her, works for
+      her, does all the severer thinking for her. She is in the home behind the
+      shop or in the dairy at the farmhouse with her daughters. She gets the
+      meal while the men talk. The American imagination and American feeling
+      centre largely upon the family and upon "mother." American ideals are
+      homely. The social unit is the home, and it is another and a different set
+      of influences and considerations that are never thought of at all when the
+      home sentiment is under discussion, that, indeed, it would be indelicate
+      to mention at such a time, which are making that social unit the home of
+      one child or of no children at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That ideal of a man-owned, mother-revering home has been the prevalent
+      American ideal from the landing of the <i>Mayflower</i> right down to the
+      leader writing of Mr. Arthur Brisbane. And it is clear that a very
+      considerable section among one's educated women contemporaries do not mean
+      to stand this ideal any longer. They do not want to be owned and
+      cherished, and they do not want to be revered. How far they represent
+      their sex in this matter it is very hard to say. In England in the
+      professional and most intellectually active classes it is scarcely an
+      exaggeration to say that <i>all</i> the most able women below
+      five-and-thirty are workers for the suffrage and the ideal of equal and
+      independent citizenship, and active critics of the conventions under which
+      women live to-day. It is at least plausible to suppose that a day is
+      approaching when the alternatives between celibacy or a life of economic
+      dependence and physical subordination to a man who has chosen her, and
+      upon whose kindness her happiness depends, or prostitution, will no longer
+      be a satisfactory outlook for the great majority of women, and when, with
+      a newly aroused political consciousness, they will be prepared to exert
+      themselves as a class to modify this situation. It may be that this is
+      incorrect, and that in devotion to an accepted male and his children most
+      women do still and will continue to find their greatest satisfaction in
+      life. But it is the writer's impression that so simple and single-hearted
+      a devotion is rare, and that, released from tradition&mdash;and education,
+      reading and discussion do mean release from tradition&mdash;women are as
+      eager for initiative, freedom and experience as men. In that case they
+      will persist in the present agitation for political rights, and these
+      secured, go on to demand a very considerable reconstruction of our present
+      social order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is interesting to point the direction in which this desire for
+      independence will probably take them. They will discover that the
+      dependence of women at the present time is not so much a law-made as an
+      economic dependence due to the economic disadvantages their sex imposes
+      upon them. Maternity and the concomitants of maternity are the
+      circumstances in their lives, exhausting energy and earning nothing, that
+      place them at a discount. From the stage when property ceased to be
+      chiefly the creation of feminine agricultural toil (the so-called
+      primitive matriarchate) to our present stage, women have had to depend
+      upon a man's willingness to keep them, in order to realise the organic
+      purpose of their being. Whether conventionally equal or not, whether
+      voters or not, that necessity for dependence will still remain under our
+      system of private property and free independent competition. There is only
+      one evident way by which women as a class can escape from that dependence
+      each upon an individual man and from all the practical inferiority this
+      dependence entails, and that is by so altering their status as to make
+      maternity and the upbringing of children a charge not upon the husband of
+      the mother but upon the community. The public Endowment of Maternity is
+      the only route by which the mass of women can reach that personal freedom
+      and independent citizenship so many of them desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, this idea of the Endowment of Maternity&mdash;or as it is frequently
+      phrased, the Endowment of the Home&mdash;is at present put forward by the
+      modern Socialists as an integral part of their proposals, and it is
+      interesting to note that there is this convergent possibility which may
+      bring the feminist movement at last altogether into line with constructive
+      Socialism. Obviously, before anything in the direction of family endowment
+      becomes practicable, public bodies and the State organisation will need to
+      display far more integrity and efficiency than they do in America at the
+      present time. Still, that is the trend of things in all contemporary
+      civilised communities, and it is a trend that will find a powerful
+      reinforcement in men's solicitudes as the increasing failure of the
+      unsupported private family to produce offspring adequate to the needs of
+      social development becomes more and more conspicuous. The impassioned
+      appeals of President Roosevelt have already brought home the race-suicide
+      of the native-born to every American intelligence, but mere rhetoric will
+      not in itself suffice to make people, insecurely employed and struggling
+      to maintain a comfortable standard of life against great economic
+      pressure, prolific. Presented as a call to a particularly onerous and
+      quite unpaid social duty the appeal for unrestricted parentage fails.
+      Husband and wife alike dread an excessive burthen. Travel, leisure,
+      freedom, comfort, property and increased ability for business competition
+      are the rewards of abstinence from parentage, and even the disapproval of
+      President Roosevelt and the pride of offspring are insufficient
+      counterweights to these inducements. Large families disappear from the
+      States, and more and more couples are childless. Those who have children
+      restrict their number in order to afford those they have some reasonable
+      advantage in life. This, in the presence of the necessary knowledge, is as
+      practically inevitable a consequence of individualist competition and the
+      old American tradition as the appearance of slums and a class of
+      millionaires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These facts go to the very root of the American problem. I have already
+      pointed out that, in spite of a colossal immigration, the population of
+      the United States was at the end of the nineteenth century over twenty
+      millions short of what it should have been through its own native increase
+      had the birth-rate of the opening of the century been maintained. For a
+      hundred years America has been "fed" by Europe. That feeding process will
+      not go on indefinitely. The immigration came in waves as if reservoir
+      after reservoir was tapped and exhausted. Nowadays England, Scotland,
+      Ireland, France and Scandinavia send hardly any more; they have no more to
+      send. Germany and Switzerland send only a few. The South European and
+      Austrian supply is not as abundant as it was. There may come a time when
+      Europe and Western Asia will have no more surplus population to send, when
+      even Eastern Asia will have passed into a less fecund phase, and when
+      America will have to look to its own natural increase for the continued
+      development of its resources.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the present isolated family of private competition is still the social
+      unit, it seems improbable that there will be any greater natural increase
+      than there is in France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Will the growing idea of a closer social organisation have developed by
+      that time to the possibility of some collective effort in this matter? Or
+      will that only come about after the population of the world has passed
+      through a phase of absolute recession? The peculiar constitution of the
+      United States gives a remarkable freedom of experiment in these matters to
+      each individual state, and local developments do not need to wait upon a
+      national change of opinion; but, on the other hand, the superficial
+      impression of an English visitor is that any such profound interference
+      with domestic autonomy runs counter to all that Americans seem to hold
+      dear at the present time. These are, however, new ideas and new
+      considerations that have still to be brought adequately before the
+      national consciousness, and it is quite impossible to calculate how a
+      population living under changing conditions and with a rising standard of
+      education and a developing feminine consciousness may not think and feel
+      and behave in a generation's time. At present for all political and
+      collective action America is a democracy of untutored individualist men
+      who will neither tolerate such interference between themselves and the
+      women they choose to marry as the Endowment of Motherhood implies, nor
+      view the "kids" who will at times occur even in the best-regulated
+      families as anything but rather embarrassing, rather amusing by-products
+      of the individual affections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I find in the London <i>New Age</i> for August 15th, 1908, a description
+      by Mr. Jerome K. Jerome of "John Smith," the average British voter. John
+      Smith might serve in some respects for the common man of all the modern
+      civilisations. Among other things that John Smith thinks and wants, he
+      wants:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "a little house and garden in the country all to himself.
+  His idea is somewhere near half an acre of ground. He
+  would like a piano in the best room; it has always been his
+  dream to have a piano. The youngest girl, he is convinced,
+  is musical. As a man who has knocked about the world
+  and has thought, he quite appreciates the argument that
+  by co-operation the material side of life can be greatly
+  improved. He quite sees that by combining a dozen families
+  together in one large house better practical results can be
+  obtained. It is as easy to direct the cooking for a hundred
+  as for half a dozen. There would be less waste of food, of
+  coals, of lighting. To put aside one piano for one girl is
+  absurd. He sees all this, but it does not alter one little
+  bit his passionate craving for that small house and garden
+  all to himself. He is built that way. He is typical of a
+  good many other men and women built on the same pattern.
+  What are you going to do with them? Change them&mdash;their
+  instincts, their very nature, rooted in the centuries?
+  Or, as an alternative, vary Socialism to fit John Smith?
+  Which is likely to prove the shorter operation?"
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      That, however, is by the way. Here is the point at issue:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  "He has heard that Socialism proposes to acknowledge
+  woman's service to the State by paying her a weekly wage
+  according to the number of children that she bears and
+  rears. I don't propose to repeat his objections to the idea;
+  they could hardly be called objections. There is an ugly
+  look comes into his eyes; something quite undefinable,
+  prehistoric, almost dangerous, looks out of them.... In
+  talking to him on this subject you do not seem to be
+  talking to a man. It is as if you had come face to face
+  with something behind civilisation, behind humanity, something
+  deeper down still among the dim beginnings of
+  creation...."
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Now, no doubt Mr. Jerome is writing with emphasis here. But there is
+      sufficient truth in the passage for it to stand here as a rough symbol of
+      another factor in this question. John Smithism, that manly and
+      individualist element in the citizen, stands over against and resists all
+      the forces of organisation that would subjugate it to a collective
+      purpose. It is careless of coming national cessation and depopulation,
+      careless of the insurgent spirit beneath the acquiescences of Mrs. Smith,
+      careless of its own inevitable defeat in the economic struggle, careless
+      because it can understand none of these things; it is obstinately
+      muddle-headed, asserting what it conceives to be itself against the
+      universe and all other John Smiths whatsoever. It is a factor with all
+      other factors. The creative, acquisitive, aggressive spirit of those
+      bigger John Smiths who succeed as against the myriads of John Smiths who
+      fail, the wider horizons and more efficient methods of the educated man,
+      the awakening class-consciousness of women, the inevitable futility of
+      John Smithism, the sturdy independence that makes John Smith resent even
+      disciplined co-operation with Tom Brown to achieve a common end, his
+      essential incapacity, indeed, for collective action; all these things are
+      against the ultimate triumph, and make for the ultimate civilisation even
+      of John Smith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sec. 11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be doubted if the increasing collective organisation of society to
+      which the United States of America, in common with all the rest of the
+      world, seem to be tending will be to any very large extent a national
+      organisation. The constitution is an immense and complicated barrier to
+      effectual centralisation. There are many reasons for supposing the
+      national government will always remain a little ineffectual and detached
+      from the full flow of American life, and this notwithstanding the very
+      great powers with which the President is endowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of these reasons is certainly the peculiar accident that has placed
+      the seat of government upon the Potomac. To the thoughtful visitor to the
+      United States this hiding away of the central government in a minute
+      district remote from all the great centres of thought, population and
+      business activity becomes more remarkable more perplexing, more suggestive
+      of an incurable weakness in the national government as he grasps more
+      firmly the peculiarities of the American situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not see how the central government of that great American nation of
+      which I dream can possibly be at Washington, and I do not see how the
+      present central government can possibly be transferred to any other
+      centre. But to go to Washington, to see and talk to Washington, is to
+      receive an extraordinary impression of the utter isolation and
+      hopelessness of Washington. The National Government has an air of being
+      marooned there. Or as though it had crept into a corner to do something in
+      the dark. One goes from the abounding movement and vitality of the
+      northern cities to this sunny and enervating place through the negligently
+      cultivated country of Virginia, and one discovers the slovenly, unfinished
+      promise of a city, broad avenues lined by negro shanties and patches of
+      cultivation, great public buildings and an immense post office, a lifeless
+      museum, an inert university, a splendid desert library, a street of
+      souvenir shops, a certain industry of "seeing Washington," an idiotic
+      colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nest for the tariff manipulator, a
+      festering corner of delegates and agents and secondary people. In the
+      White House, in the time of President Roosevelt, the present writer found
+      a transitory glow of intellectual activity, the spittoons and glass
+      screens that once made it like a London gin palace had been removed, and
+      the former orgies of handshaking reduced to a minimum. It was, one felt,
+      an accidental phase. The assassination of McKinley was an interruption of
+      the normal Washington process. To this place, out of the way of
+      everywhere, come the senators and congressmen, mostly leaving their
+      families behind them in their states of origin, and hither, too, are drawn
+      a multitude of journalists and political agents and clerks, a crowd of
+      underbred, mediocre men. For most of them there is neither social nor
+      intellectual life. The thought of America is far away, centred now in New
+      York; the business and economic development centres upon New York; apart
+      from the President, it is in New York that one meets the people who
+      matter, and the New York atmosphere that grows and develops ideas and
+      purposes. New York is the natural capital of the United States, and would
+      need to be the capital of any highly organised national system. Government
+      from the district of Columbia is in itself the repudiation of any highly
+      organised national system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But government from this ineffectual, inert place is only the most
+      striking outcome of that inflexible constitution the wrangling delegates
+      of 1787-8 did at last produce out of a conflict of State jealousies. They
+      did their best to render centralisation or any coalescence of States
+      impossible and private property impregnable, and so far their work has
+      proved extraordinarily effective. Only a great access of intellectual and
+      moral vigour in the nation can ever set it aside. And while the more and
+      more sterile millions of the United States grapple with the legal and
+      traditional difficulties that promise at last to arrest their development
+      altogether, the rest of the world will be moving on to new phases. An
+      awakened Asia will be reorganising its social and political conceptions in
+      the light of modern knowledge and modern ideas, and South America will be
+      working out its destinies, perhaps in the form of a powerful confederation
+      of states. All Europe will be schooling its John Smiths to finer
+      discipline and broader ideas. It is quite possible that the American John
+      Smiths may have little to brag about in the way of national predominance
+      by A.D. 2000. It is quite possible that the United States may be sitting
+      meekly at the feet of at present unanticipated teachers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (<i>New Year, 1909</i>.)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The Editor of the <i>New York World</i> has asked me to guess the general
+      trend of events in the next thirty years or so with especial reference to
+      the outlook for the State and City of New York. I like and rarely refuse
+      such cheerful invitations to prophesy. I have already made a sort of
+      forecast (in my "Anticipations") of what may happen if the social and
+      economic process goes on fairly smoothly for all that time, and shown a
+      New York relieved from its present congestion by the development of the
+      means of communication, and growing and spreading in wide and splendid
+      suburbs towards Boston and Philadelphia. I made that forecast before ever
+      I passed Sandy Hook, but my recent visit only enhanced my sense of growth
+      and "go" in things American. Still, we are nowadays all too apt to think
+      that growth is inevitable and progress in the nature of things; the
+      Wonderful Century, as Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace called the nineteenth, has
+      made us perhaps over-confident and forgetful of the ruins of great cities
+      and confident prides of the past that litter the world, and here I will
+      write about the other alternative, of the progressive process "hitting
+      something," and smashing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are two chief things in modern life that impress me as dangerous and
+      incalculable. The first of these is the modern currency and financial
+      system, and the second is the chance we take of destructive war. Let me
+      dwell first of all on the mysterious possibilities of the former, and then
+      point out one or two uneasy developments of the latter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, there is nothing scientific about our currency and finance at all. It
+      is a thing that has grown up and elaborated itself out of very simple
+      beginnings in the course of a century or so. Three hundred years ago the
+      edifice had hardly begun to rise from the ground, most property was real,
+      most people lived directly on the land, most business was on a cash basis,
+      oversea trade was a proportionately small affair, labour was locally
+      fixed. Most of the world was at the level at which much of China remains
+      to-day&mdash;able to get along without even coinage. It was a rudimentary
+      world from the point of view of the modern financier and industrial
+      organiser. Well, on that rude, secure basis there has now been piled the
+      most chancy and insecurely experimental system of conventions and
+      assumptions about money and credit it is possible to imagine. There has
+      grown up a vast system of lending and borrowing, a world-wide extension of
+      joint-stock enterprises that involve at last the most fantastic
+      relationships. I find myself, for example, owning (partially, at least) a
+      bank in New Zealand, a railway in Cuba, another in Canada, several in
+      Brazil, an electric power plant in the City of Westminster, and so on, and
+      I use these stocks and shares as a sort of interest-bearing money. If I
+      want money to spend, I sell a railway share much as one might change a
+      hundred-pound banknote; if I have more cash than I need immediately I buy
+      a few shares. I perceive that the value of these shares oscillates,
+      sometimes rather gravely, and that the value of the alleged money on the
+      cheques I get also oscillates as compared with the things I want to buy;
+      that, indeed, the whole system (which has only existed for a couple of
+      centuries or so, and which keeps on getting higher and giddier) is
+      perpetually swaying and quivering and bending and sagging; but it is only
+      when such a great crisis occurs as that of 1907 that it enters my mind
+      that possibly there is no limit to these oscillations, that possibly the
+      whole vast accidental edifice will presently come smashing down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why shouldn't it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I defy any economist or financial expert to prove that it cannot. That it
+      hasn't done so in the little time for which it has existed is no reply at
+      all. It is like arguing that a man cannot die because he has never been
+      known to do so. Previous men have died, previous civilisations have
+      collapsed, if not of acute, then of chronic financial disorders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The experience of 1907 indicated very clearly how a collapse might occur.
+      A panic, like an avalanche, is a thing much easier to start than stop.
+      Previous panics have been arrested by good luck; this last one in America,
+      for example, found Europe strong and prosperous and helpful. In every
+      panic period there is a huge dislocation of business enterprises, vast
+      multitudes of men are thrown out of employment, there is grave social and
+      political disorder; but in the end, so far, things have an air of having
+      recovered. But now, suppose the panic wave a little more universal&mdash;and
+      panic waves tend to be more extensive than they used to be. Suppose that
+      when securities fall all round, and gold appreciates in New York, and
+      frightened people begin to sell investments and hoard gold, the same thing
+      happens in other parts of the world. Increase the scale of the trouble
+      only two or three times, and would our system recover? Imagine great
+      masses of men coming out of employment, and angry and savage, in all our
+      great towns; imagine the railways working with reduced staffs on reduced
+      salaries or blocked by strikers; imagine provision dealers stopping
+      consignments to retailers, and retailers hesitating to give credit. A
+      phase would arrive when the police and militia keeping order in the
+      streets would find themselves on short rations and without their weekly
+      pay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What we moderns, with our little three hundred years or so of security, do
+      not recognise is that things that go up and down may, given a certain
+      combination of chances, go down steadily, down and down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What would you do, dear reader&mdash;what should I do&mdash;if a slump
+      went on continually?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that brings me to the second great danger to our modern civilisation,
+      and that is War. We have over-developed war. While we have left our peace
+      organisation to the niggling, slow, self-seeking methods of private
+      enterprise; while we have left the breeding of our peoples to chance,
+      their minds to the halfpenny press and their wealth to the drug
+      manufacturer, we have pushed forward the art of war on severely scientific
+      and Socialist lines; we have put all the collective resources of the
+      community and an enormous proportion of its intelligence and invention
+      ungrudgingly into the improvement and manufacture of the apparatus of
+      destruction. Great Britain, for example, is content with the railways and
+      fireplaces and types of housing she had fifty years ago; she still uses
+      telephones and the electric light in the most tentative spirit; but every
+      ironclad she had five-and-twenty years ago is old iron now and abandoned.
+      Everything crawls forward but the science of war; that rushes on. Of what
+      will happen if presently the guns begin to go off I have no shadow of
+      doubt. Every year has seen the disproportionate increase until now. Every
+      modern European state is more or less like a cranky, ill-built steamboat
+      in which some idiot has mounted and loaded a monstrous gun with no
+      apparatus to damp its recoil. Whether that gun hits or misses when it is
+      fired, of one thing we may be absolutely certain&mdash;it will send the
+      steamboat to the bottom of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Modern warfare is an insanity, not a sane business proposition. Its
+      preparation eats more and more into the resources which should be
+      furnishing a developing civilisation; its possibilities of destruction are
+      incalculable. A new epoch has opened with the coming of the navigable
+      balloon and the flying machine. To begin with, these things open new gulfs
+      for expenditure; in the end they mean possibilities of destruction beyond
+      all precedent. Such things as the <i>Zeppelin</i> and the <i>Ville de
+      Paris</i> are only the first pigmy essays of the aeronaut. It is clear
+      that to be effective, capable of carrying guns and comparatively
+      insensitive to perforation by shot and shell, these things will have to be
+      very much larger and as costly, perhaps, as a first-class cruiser. Imagine
+      such monsters of the air, and wild financial panic below!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, then, are two associated possibilities with which to modify our
+      expectation of an America advancing steadily on the road to an organised
+      civilisation, of New York rebuilding herself in marble, spreading like a
+      garden city over New Jersey and Long Island and New York State, becoming a
+      new and greater Venice, queen of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps, after all, the twentieth century isn't going to be so prosperous
+      as the nineteenth. Perhaps, instead of going resistlessly onward, we are
+      going to have a set-back. Perhaps we are going to be put back to learn
+      over again under simpler conditions some of those necessary fundamental
+      lessons our race has learnt as yet insufficiently well&mdash;honesty and
+      brotherhood, social collectivism, and the need of some common
+      peace-preserving council for the whole world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE IDEAL CITIZEN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Our conceptions of what a good citizen should be are all at sixes and
+      sevens. No two people will be found to agree in every particular of such
+      an ideal, and the extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what is
+      permissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span nearly the whole range
+      of human possibility and conduct. As a consequence, we bring up our
+      children in a mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warring voices,
+      perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may do,
+      doomed to lives of compromise and fluctuating and inoperative opinion.
+      Ideals and suggestions come and go before their eyes like figures in a
+      fog. The commonest pattern, perhaps&mdash;the commonest pattern certainly
+      in Sunday schools and edifying books, and on all those places and
+      occasions when morality is sought as an end&mdash;is a clean and
+      able-bodied person, truthful to the extent that he does not tell lies,
+      temperate so far as abstinence is concerned, honest without pedantry, and
+      active in his own affairs, steadfastly law-abiding and respectful to
+      custom and usage, though aloof from the tumult of politics, brave but not
+      adventurous, punctual in some form of religious exercise, devoted to his
+      wife and children, and kind without extravagance to all men. Everyone
+      feels that this is not enough, everyone feels that something more is
+      wanted and something different; most people are a little interested in
+      what that difference can be, and it is a business that much of what is
+      more than trivial in our art, our literature and our drama must do to fill
+      in bit by bit and shade by shade the subtle, the permanent detail of the
+      answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It does very greatly help in this question to bear in mind the conflict of
+      our origins. Every age is an age of transition, of minglings, of the
+      breaking up of old, narrow cultures, and the breaking down of barriers, of
+      spiritual and often of actual interbreeding. Not only is the physical but
+      the moral and intellectual ancestry of everyone more mixed than ever it
+      was before. We blend in our blood, everyone of us, and we blend in our
+      ideas and purposes, craftsmen, warriors, savages, peasants, and a score of
+      races, and an endless multitude of social expedients and rules. Go back
+      but a hundred generations in the lineage of the most delicate girl you
+      know, and you will find a dozen murderers. You will find liars and cheats,
+      lascivious sinners, women who have sold themselves, slaves, imbeciles,
+      devotees, saints, men of fantastic courage, discreet and watchful persons,
+      usurers, savages, criminals and kings, and every one of this miscellany,
+      not simply fathering or mothering on the way to her, but teaching urgently
+      and with every grade of intensity, views and habits for which they stand.
+      Something of it all has come to her, albeit much may seem forgotten. In
+      every human birth, with a new little variation, a fresh slight novelty of
+      arrangement the old issues rise again. Our ideas, even more than our
+      blood, flow from multitudinous sources.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Certain groups of ideas come to us distinctively associated with certain
+      marked ways of life. Many, and for a majority of us, it may be, most of
+      our ancestors were serfs or slaves. And men and women who have had,
+      generation after generation, to adapt themselves to slavery and the rule
+      of a master, develop an idea of goodness very different from that of
+      princes. From our slave ancestry, says Lester Ward, we learnt to work, and
+      certainly it is from slavery we derive the conception that industry, even
+      though it be purposeless industry, is a virtue in itself. The good slave,
+      too, has a morality of restraints; he abstains from the food he handles
+      and hungers for, and he denies himself pride and initiative of every sort.
+      He is honest in not taking, but he is unscrupulous about adequate service.
+      He makes no virtue of frankness, but much of kindly helpfulness and
+      charity to the weak. He has no sense of duty in planning or economising.
+      He is polite and soft-spoken, and disposed to irony rather than
+      denunciation, ready to admire cuteness and condone deception. Not so the
+      rebel. That tradition is working in us also. It has been the lot of vast
+      masses of population in every age to be living in successful or
+      unsuccessful resistance to mastery, to be dreading oppression or to be
+      just escaped from it. Resentment becomes a virtue then, and any peace with
+      the oppressor a crime. It is from rebel origins so many of us get the idea
+      that disrespectfulness is something of a duty and obstinacy a fine thing.
+      And under the force of this tradition we idealise the rugged and
+      unmanageable, we find something heroic in rough clothes and hands, in bad
+      manners, insensitive behaviour, and unsociableness. And a community of
+      settlers, again, in a rough country, fighting for a bare existence, makes
+      a virtue of vehemence, of a hasty rapidity of execution. Hurried and
+      driven men glorify "push" and impatience, and despise finish and fine
+      discriminations as weak and demoralising things. These three, the Serf,
+      the Rebel, and the Squatter, are three out of a thousand types and aspects
+      that have gone to our making. In the American composition they are
+      dominant. But all those thousand different standards and traditions are
+      our material, each with something fine, and each with something evil. They
+      have all provided the atmosphere of upbringing for men in the past. Out of
+      them and out of unprecedented occasions, we in this newer age, in which
+      there are no slaves, in which every man is a citizen, in which the
+      conveniences of a great and growing civilisation makes the frantic avidity
+      of the squatter a nuisance, have to set ourselves to frame the standard of
+      our children's children, to abandon what the slave or the squatter or the
+      rebel found necessary and that we find unnecessary, to fit fresh
+      requirements to our new needs. So we have to develop our figure of the
+      fine man, our desirable citizen in that great and noble civilised state we
+      who have a "sense of the state" would build out of the confusions of our
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To describe that ideal modern citizen now is at best to make a guess and a
+      suggestion of what must be built in reality by the efforts of a thousand
+      minds. But he will be a very different creature from that indifferent,
+      well-behaved business man who passes for a good citizen to-day. He will be
+      neither under the slave tradition nor a rebel nor a vehement elemental
+      man. Essentially he will be aristocratic, aristocratic not in the sense
+      that he has slaves or class inferiors, because probably he will have
+      nothing of the sort, but aristocratic in the sense that he will feel the
+      State belongs to him and he to the State. He will probably be a public
+      servant; at any rate, he will be a man doing some work in the complicated
+      machinery of the modern community for a salary and not for speculative
+      gain. Typically, he will be a professional man. I do not think the ideal
+      modern citizen can be a person living chiefly by buying for as little as
+      he can give and selling for as much as he can get; indeed, most of what we
+      idolise to-day as business enterprise I think he will regard with
+      considerable contempt. But, then, I am a Socialist, and look forward to
+      the time when the economic machinery of the community will be a field not
+      for private enrichment but for public service.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He will be good to his wife and children as he will be good to his friend,
+      but he will be no partisan for wife and family against the common welfare.
+      His solicitude will be for the welfare of all the children of the
+      community; he will have got beyond blind instinct; he will have the
+      intelligence to understand that almost any child in the world may have as
+      large a share as his own offspring in the parentage of his
+      great-great-grandchildren His wife he will treat as his equal; he will not
+      be "kind" to her, but fair and frank and loving, as one equal should be
+      with another; he will no more have the impertinence to pet and pamper her,
+      to keep painful and laborious things out of her knowledge to "shield" her
+      from the responsibility of political and social work, than he will to make
+      a Chinese toy of her and bind her feet. He and she will love that they may
+      enlarge and not limit one another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consciously and deliberately the ideal citizen will seek beauty in himself
+      and in his way of living. He will be temperate rather than harshly
+      abstinent, and he will keep himself fit and in training as an elementary
+      duty. He will not be a fat or emaciated person. Fat, panting men, and
+      thin, enfeebled ones cannot possibly be considered good citizens any more
+      than dirty or verminous people. He will be just as fine and seemly in his
+      person as he can be, not from vanity and self-assertion but to be pleasing
+      and agreeable to his fellows. The ugly dress and ugly bearing of the "good
+      man" of to-day will be as incomprehensible to him as the filth of a
+      palaeolithic savage is to us. He will not speak of his "frame," and hang
+      clothes like sacks over it; he will know and feel that he and the people
+      about him have wonderful, delightful and beautiful bodies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And&mdash;I speak of the ideal common citizen&mdash;he will be a student
+      and a philosopher. To understand will be one of his necessary duties. His
+      mind, like his body, will be fit and well clothed. He will not be too busy
+      to read and think, though he may be too busy to rush about to get
+      ignorantly and blatantly rich. It follows that, since he will have a mind
+      exercised finely and flexible and alert, he will not be a secretive man.
+      Secretiveness and secret planning are vulgarity; men and women need to be
+      educated, and he will be educated out of these vices. He will be intensely
+      truthful, not simply in the vulgar sense of not misstating facts when
+      pressed, but truthful in the manner of the scientific man or the artist,
+      and as scornful of concealment as they; truthful, that is to say, as the
+      expression of a ruling desire to have things made plain and clear, because
+      that so they are most beautiful and life is at its finest....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And all that I have written of him is equally true and applies word for
+      word, with only such changes of gender as are needed, to the woman citizen
+      also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The present time is harvest home for the prophets. The happy speculator in
+      future sits on the piled-up wain, singing "I told you so," with the
+      submarine and the flying machine and the Marconigram and the North Pole
+      successfully achieved. In the tumult of realisations it perhaps escapes
+      attention that the prophetic output of new hopes is by no means keeping
+      pace with the crop of consummations. The present trend of scientific
+      development is not nearly so obvious as it was a score of years ago; its
+      promises lack the elementary breadth of that simpler time. Once you have
+      flown, you have flown. Once you have steamed about under water, you have
+      steamed about under water. There seem no more big things of that kind
+      available&mdash;so that I almost regret the precipitance of Commander
+      Peary and Captain Amundsen. No one expects to go beyond that atmosphere
+      for some centuries at least; all the elements are now invaded. Conceivably
+      man may presently contrive some sort of earthworm apparatus, so that he
+      could go through the rocks prospecting very much as an earthworm goes
+      through the soil, excavating in front and dumping behind, but, to put it
+      moderately, there are considerable difficulties. And I doubt the
+      imaginative effect. On the whole, I think material science has got samples
+      now of all its crops at this level, and that what lies before it in the
+      coming years is chiefly to work them out in detail and realise them on the
+      larger scale. No doubt science will still yield all sorts of big
+      surprising effects, but nothing, I think, to equal the dramatic novelty,
+      the demonstration of man having got to something altogether new and
+      strange, of Montgolfier, or the Wright Brothers, of Columbus, or the Polar
+      conquest. There remains, of course, the tapping of atomic energy, but I
+      give two hundred years yet before that....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far, then, as mechanical science goes I am inclined to think the coming
+      period will be, from the point of view of the common man, almost without
+      sensational interest. There will be an immense amount of enrichment and
+      filling-in, but of the sort that does not get prominently into the daily
+      papers. At every point there will be economies and simplifications of
+      method, discoveries of new artificial substances with new capabilities,
+      and of new methods of utilising power. There will be a progressive change
+      in the apparatus and quality of human life&mdash;the sort of alteration of
+      the percentages that causes no intellectual shock. Electric heating, for
+      example, will become practicable in our houses, and then cheaper, and at
+      last so cheap and good that nobody will burn coal any more. Little
+      electric contrivances will dispense with menial service in more and more
+      directions. The builder will introduce new, more convenient, healthier and
+      prettier substances, and the young architect will become increasingly the
+      intelligent student of novelty. The steam engine, the coal yard, and the
+      tail chimney, and indeed all chimneys, will vanish quietly from our urban
+      landscape. The speeding up and cheapening of travel, and the increase in
+      its swiftness and comfort will go on steadily&mdash;widening experience. A
+      more systematic and understanding social science will be estimating the
+      probable growth and movement of population, and planning town and country
+      on lines that would seem to-day almost inconceivably wise and generous.
+      All this means a quiet broadening and aeration and beautifying of life.
+      Utopian requirements, so far as the material side of things goes, will be
+      executed and delivered with at last the utmost promptness....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is in quite other directions that the scientific achievements to
+      astonish our children will probably be achieved. Progress never appears to
+      be uniform in human affairs. There are intricate correlations between
+      department and department. One field must mark time until another can come
+      up to it with results sufficiently arranged and conclusions sufficiently
+      simplified for application Medicine waits on organic chemistry, geology on
+      mineralogy, and both on the chemistry of high pressures and temperature.
+      And subtle variations in method and the prevailing mental temperament of
+      the type of writer engaged, produce remarkable differences in the quality
+      and quantity of the stated result. Moreover, there are in the history of
+      every scientific province periods of seed-time, when there is great
+      activity without immediate apparent fruition, and periods, as, for
+      example, the last two decades of electrical application, of prolific
+      realisation. It is highly probable that the physiologist and the organic
+      chemist are working towards co-operations that may make the physician's
+      sphere the new scientific wonderland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At present dietary and regimen are the happy hunting ground of the quack
+      and that sort of volunteer specialist, half-expert, half-impostor, who
+      flourishes in the absence of worked out and definite knowledge. The
+      general mass of the medical profession, equipped with a little experience
+      and a muddled training, and preposterously impeded by the private
+      adventure conditions under which it lives, goes about pretending to the
+      possession of precise knowledge which simply does not exist in the world.
+      Medical research is under-endowed and stupidly endowed, not for systematic
+      scientific inquiry so much as for the unscientific seeking of remedies for
+      specific evils&mdash;for cancer, consumption, and the like. Yet masked,
+      misrepresented limited and hampered, the work of establishing a sound
+      science of vital processes in health and disease is probably going on now,
+      similar to the clarification of physics and chemistry that went on in the
+      later part of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth
+      centuries. It is not unreasonable to suppose that medicine may presently
+      arrive at far-reaching generalised convictions, and proceed to take over
+      this great hinterland of human interests which legitimately belongs to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But medicine is not the only field to which we may reasonably look for a
+      sudden development of wonders. Compared with the sciences of matter,
+      psychology and social science have as yet given the world remarkably
+      little cause for amazement. Not only is our medicine feeble and
+      fragmentary, but our educational science is the poorest miscellany of
+      aphorisms and dodges. Indeed, directly one goes beyond the range of
+      measurement and weighing and classification, one finds a sort of
+      unprogressive floundering going on, which throws the strongest doubts upon
+      the practical applicability of the current logical and metaphysical
+      conceptions in those fields. We have emerged only partially from the age
+      of the schoolmen In these directions we have not emerged at all. It is
+      quite possible that in university lecture rooms and forbidding volumes of
+      metaphysical discussion a new emancipation of the human intellect and will
+      is even now going on. Presently men may be attacking the problems of the
+      self-control of human life and of human destiny in new phrases and an
+      altogether novel spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Guesses at the undiscovered must necessarily be vague, but my
+      anticipations fall into two groups, and first I am disposed to expect a
+      great systematic increment in individual human power. We probably have no
+      suspicion as yet of what may be done with the human body and mind by way
+      of enhancing its effectiveness I remember talking to the late Sir Michael
+      Foster upon the possibilities of modern surgery, and how he confessed that
+      he did not dare for his reputation's sake tell ordinary people the things
+      he believed would some day become matter-of-fact operations. In that
+      respect I think he spoke for very many of his colleagues. It is already
+      possible to remove almost any portion of the human body, including, if
+      needful, large sections of the brain; it is possible to graft living flesh
+      on living flesh, make new connections, mould, displace, and rearrange. It
+      is also not impossible to provoke local hypertrophy, and not only by knife
+      and physical treatment but by the subtler methods of hypnotism, profound
+      changes can be wrought in the essential structure of a human being. If
+      only our knowledge of function and value were at all adequate, we could
+      correct and develop ourselves in the most extraordinary way. Our knowledge
+      is not adequate, but it may not always remain inadequate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have already had some very astonishing suggestions in this direction
+      from Doctor Metchnikoff. He regards the human stomach and large intestine
+      as not only vestigial and superfluous in the human economy, but as
+      positively dangerous on account of the harbour they afford for those
+      bacteria that accelerate the decay of age. He proposes that these viscera
+      should be removed. To a layman like myself this is an altogether
+      astounding and horrifying idea, but Doctor Metchnikoff is a man of the
+      very greatest scientific reputation, and it does not give him any qualm of
+      horror or absurdity to advance it. I am quite sure that if a gentleman
+      called upon me "done up" in the way I am dimly suggesting, with most of
+      the contents of his abdomen excavated, his lungs and heart probably
+      enlarged and improved, parts of his brain removed to eliminate harmful
+      tendencies and make room for the expansion of the remainder, his mind and
+      sensibilities increased, and his liability to fatigue and the need of
+      sleep abolished, I should conceal with the utmost difficulty my
+      inexpressible disgust and terror. But, then, if M. Bliriot, with his
+      flying machine, ear-flaps and goggles, had soared down in the year 54
+      B.C., let us say, upon my woad-adorned ancestors&mdash;every family man in
+      Britain was my ancestor in those days&mdash;at Dover, they would have had
+      entirely similar emotions. And at present I am not discussing what is
+      beautiful in humanity, but what is possible&mdash;and what, being
+      possible, is likely to be attempted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It does not follow that because men will some day have this enormous power
+      over themselves, physically and mentally, that they will necessarily make
+      themselves horrible&mdash;even by our present standards quite a lot of us
+      would be all the slenderer and more active and graceful for
+      "Metchnikoffing"&mdash;nor does surgery exhaust the available methods. We
+      are still in the barbaric age, so far as our use of food and drugs is
+      concerned. We stuff all sorts of substances into our unfortunate interiors
+      and blunder upon the most various consequences. Few people of three score
+      and ten but have spent in the aggregate the best part of a year in a state
+      of indigestion, stupid, angry or painful indigestion as the case may be.
+      No one would be so careless and ignorant about the fuel he burnt in his
+      motor-car as most of us are about the fuel we burn in our bodies. And
+      there are all sort of stimulating and exhilarating things, digesting
+      things, fatigue-suppressing things, exercise economising things, we dare
+      not use because we are afraid of our ignorance of their precise working.
+      There seems no reason to suppose that human life, properly understood and
+      controlled, could not be a constant succession of delightful and for the
+      most part active bodily and mental phases. It is sheer ignorance and bad
+      management that keep the majority of people in that disagreeable system of
+      states which we indicate by saying we are "a bit off colour" or a little
+      "out of training." It may seem madly Utopian now to suggest that
+      practically everyone in the community might be clean, beautiful,
+      incessantly active, "fit," and long-lived, with the marks of all the
+      surgery they have undergone quite healed and hidden, but not more madly
+      Utopian than it would have seemed to King Alfred the Great if one had said
+      that practically everyone in this country, down to the very swineherds,
+      should be able to read and write.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Metchnikoff has speculated upon the possibility of delaying old age, and I
+      do not see why his method should not be applied to the diurnal need of
+      sleep. No vital process seems to be absolutely fated in itself; it is a
+      thing conditioned and capable of modification. If Metchnikoff is right&mdash;and
+      to a certain extent he must be right&mdash;the decay of age is due to
+      changing organic processes that may be checked and delayed and modified by
+      suitable food and regimen. He holds out hope of a new phase in the human
+      cycle, after the phase of struggle and passion, a phase of serene
+      intellectual activity, old age with all its experience and none of its
+      infirmities. Still more are fatigue and the need for repose dependent upon
+      chemical changes in the body. It would seem we are unable to maintain
+      exertion, partly through the exhaustion of our tissues, but far more by
+      the loading of our blood with fatigue products&mdash;a recuperative
+      interlude must ensue. But there is no reason to suppose that the usual
+      food of to-day is the most rapidly assimilable nurture possible, that a
+      rapidly digestible or injectable substance is not conceivable that would
+      vastly accelerate repair, nor that the elimination and neutralisation of
+      fatigue products might not also be enormously hastened. There is no
+      inherent impossibility in the idea not only of various glands being
+      induced to function in a modified manner, but even in the insertion upon
+      the circulation of interceptors and artificial glandular structures. No
+      doubt that may strike even an adventurous surgeon as chimerical, but
+      consider what people, even authoritative people, were saying of flying and
+      electric traction twenty years ago. At present a man probably does not get
+      more than three or four hours of maximum mental and physical efficiency in
+      the day. Few men can keep at their best in either physical or intellectual
+      work for so long as that. The rest of the time goes in feeding, digesting,
+      sleeping, sitting about, relaxation of various kinds. It is quite possible
+      that science may set itself presently to extend systematically that
+      proportion of efficient time. The area of maximum efficiency may invade
+      the periods now demanded by digestion, sleep, exercise, so that at last
+      nearly the whole of a man's twenty-four hours will be concentrated on his
+      primary interests instead of dispersed among these secondary necessary
+      matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Please understand I do not consider this concentration of activity and
+      these vast "artificialisations" of the human body as attractive or
+      desirable things. At the first proposal much of this tampering with the
+      natural stuff of life will strike anyone, I think, as ugly and horrible,
+      just as seeing a little child, green-white and still under an anaesthetic,
+      gripped my heart much more dreadfully than the sight of the same child
+      actively bawling with pain. But the business of this paper is to discuss
+      things that may happen, and not to evolve dreams of loveliness. Perhaps
+      things of this kind will be manageable without dreadfulness. Perhaps man
+      will come to such wisdom that neither the knife nor the drugs nor any of
+      the powers which science thrusts into his hand will slay the beauty of
+      life for him. Suppose we assume that he is not such a fool as to let that
+      happen, and that ultimately he will emerge triumphant with all these
+      powers utilised and controlled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not only that an amplifying science may give mankind happier bodies
+      and far more active and eventful lives, but that psychology and
+      educational and social science, reinforcing literature and working through
+      literature and art, may dare to establish serenities in his soul. For
+      surely no one who has lived, no one who has watched sin and crime and
+      punishment, but must have come to realise the enormous amount of
+      misbehaviour that is mere ignorance and want of mental scope. For my own
+      part I have never believed in the devil. And it may be a greater
+      undertaking but no more impossible to make ways to goodwill and a good
+      heart in men than it is to tunnel mountains and dyke back the sea. The way
+      that led from the darkness of the cave to the electric light is the way
+      that will lead to light in the souls of men, that is to say, the way of
+      free and fearless thinking, free and fearless experiment, organised
+      exchange of thoughts and results, and patience and persistence and a sort
+      of intellectual civility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with the development of philosophical and scientific method that will
+      go on with this great increase in man's control over himself, another
+      issue that is now a mere pious aspiration above abysses of ignorance and
+      difficulty, will come to be a manageable matter. It has been the perpetual
+      wonder of philosophers from Plato onward that men have bred their dogs and
+      horses and left any man or woman, however vile, free to bear offspring in
+      the next generation of men. Still that goes on. Beautiful and wonderful
+      people die childless and bury their treasure in the grave, and we rest
+      content with a system of matrimony that seems designed to perpetuate
+      mediocrity. A day will come when men will be in possession of knowledge
+      and opportunity that will enable them to master this position, and then
+      certainly will it be assured that every generation shall be born better
+      than was the one before it. And with that the history of humanity will
+      enter upon a new phase, a phase which will be to our lives as daylight is
+      to the dreaming of a child as yet unborn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE HUMAN ADVENTURE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Alone among all the living things this globe has borne, man reckons with
+      destiny. All other living things obey the forces that created them; and
+      when the mood of the power changes, submit themselves passively to
+      extinction Man only looks upon those forces in the face, anticipates the
+      exhaustion of Nature's kindliness, seeks weapons to defend himself. Last
+      of the children of Saturn, he escapes their general doom. He dispossesses
+      his begetter of all possibility of replacement, and grasps the sceptre of
+      the world. Before man the great and prevalent creatures followed one
+      another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of the ancient
+      seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the land, the
+      reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged reptiles of
+      the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals, the giant
+      sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle dreamer moulded
+      them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last comes man and
+      seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of being again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is nothing else in all the world that so turns against the powers
+      that have made it, unless it be man's follower fire. But fire is witless;
+      a little stream, a changing breeze can stop it. Man circumvents. If fire
+      were human it would build boats across the rivers and outmanoeuvre the
+      wind. It would lie in wait in sheltered places, smouldering, husbanding
+      its fuel until the grass was yellow and the forests sere. But fire is a
+      mere creature of man's; our world before his coming knew nothing of it in
+      any of its habitable places, never saw it except in the lightning flash or
+      remotely on some volcanic coronet. Man brought it into the commerce of
+      life, a shining, resentful slave, to hound off the startled beasts from
+      his sleeping-place and serve him like a dog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose that some enduring intelligence watched through the ages the
+      successions of life upon this planet, marked the spreading first of this
+      species and then that, the conflicts, the adaptations, the predominances,
+      the dyings away, and conceive how it would have witnessed this strange
+      dramatic emergence of a rare great ape to manhood. To such a mind the
+      creature would have seemed at first no more than one of several varieties
+      of clambering frugivorous mammals, a little distinguished by a disposition
+      to help his clumsy walking with a stake and reinforce his fist with a
+      stone. The foreground of the picture would have been filled by the
+      rhinoceros and mammoth, the great herds of ruminants, the sabre-toothed
+      lion and the big bears. Then presently the observer would have noted a
+      peculiar increasing handiness about the obscurer type, an unwonted
+      intelligence growing behind its eyes. He would have perceived a
+      disposition in this creature no beast had shown before, a disposition to
+      make itself independent of the conditions of climate and the chances of
+      the seasons. Did shelter fail among the trees and rocks, this curious new
+      thing-began to make itself harbours of its own; was food irregular, it
+      multiplied food. It began to spread out from its original circumstances,
+      fitting itself to novel needs, leaving the forests, invading the plains,
+      following the watercourses upward and downward, presently carrying the
+      smoke of its fires like a banner of conquest into wintry desolations and
+      the high places of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first onset of man must have been comparatively slow, the first
+      advances needed long ages. By small degrees it gathered pace. The stride
+      from the scattered savagery of the earlier stone period to the first
+      cities, historically a vast interval, would have seemed to that still
+      watcher, measuring by the standards of astronomy and the rise and decline
+      of races and genera and orders, a, step almost abrupt. It took, perhaps, a
+      thousand generations or so to make it. In that interval man passed from an
+      animal-like obedience to the climate and the weather and his own
+      instincts, from living in small family parties of a score or so over
+      restricted areas of indulgent country, to permanent settlements, to the
+      life of tribal and national communities and the beginnings of cities. He
+      had spread in that fragment of time over great areas of the earth's
+      surface, and now he was adapting himself to the Arctic circle on the one
+      hand and to the life of the tropics on the other; he had invented the
+      plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domestic animals; he was
+      beginning to think of the origin of the world and the mysteries of being.
+      Writing had added its enduring records to oral tradition, and he was
+      already making roads. Another five or six hundred generations at most
+      bring him to ourselves. We sweep into the field of that looker-on, the
+      momentary incarnations of this sempiternal being, Man. And after us there
+      comes&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A curtain falls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The time in which we, whose minds meet here in this writing, were born and
+      live and die, would be to that imagined observer a mere instant's phase in
+      the swarming liberation of our kind from ancient imperatives. It would
+      seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion and
+      achievement. In this last handful of years, electricity has ceased to be a
+      curious toy, and now carries half mankind upon their daily journeys, it
+      lights our cities till they outshine the moon and stars, and reduces to
+      our service a score of hitherto unsuspected metals; we clamber to the pole
+      of our globe, scale every mountain, soar into the air, learn how to
+      overcome the malaria that barred our white races from the tropics, and how
+      to draw the sting from a hundred such agents of death. Our old cities are
+      being rebuilt in towering marble; great new cities rise to vie with them.
+      Never, it would seem, has man been so various and busy and persistent, and
+      there is no intimation of any check to the expansion of his energies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And all this continually accelerated advance has come through the
+      quickening and increase of man's intelligence and its reinforcement
+      through speech and writing. All this has come in spite of fierce instincts
+      that make him the most combatant and destructive of animals, and in spite
+      of the revenge Nature has attempted time after time for his rebellion
+      against her routines, in the form of strange diseases and nearly universal
+      pestilences. All this has come as a necessary consequence of the first
+      obscure gleaming of deliberate thought and reason through the veil of his
+      animal being. To begin with, he did not know what he was doing. He sought
+      his more immediate satisfaction and safety and security. He still
+      apprehends imperfectly the change that comes upon him. The illusion of
+      separation that makes animal life, that is to say, passionate competing
+      and breeding and dying, possible, the blinkers Nature has put upon us that
+      we may clash against and sharpen one another, still darken our eyes. We
+      live not life as yet, but in millions of separated lives, still unaware
+      except in rare moods of illumination that we are more than those fellow
+      beasts of ours who drop off from the tree of life and perish alone. It is
+      only in the last three or four thousand years, and through weak and
+      tentative methods of expression, through clumsy cosmogonies and
+      theologies, and with incalculable confusion and discoloration, that the
+      human mind has felt its way towards its undying being in the race. Man
+      still goes to war against himself, prepares fleets and armies and
+      fortresses, like a sleep-walker who wounds himself, like some infatuated
+      barbarian who hacks his own limbs with a knife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he awakens. The nightmares of empire and racial conflict and war, the
+      grotesques of trade jealousy and tariffs, the primordial dream-stuff of
+      lewdness and jealousy and cruelty, pale before the daylight which filters
+      between his eyelids. In a little while we individuals will know ourselves
+      surely for corpuscles in his being, for thoughts that come together out of
+      strange wanderings into the coherence of a waking mind. A few score
+      generations ago all living things were in our ancestry. A few score
+      generations ahead, and all mankind will be in sober fact descendants from
+      our blood. In physical as in mental fact we separate persons, with all our
+      difference and individuality, are but fragments, set apart for a little
+      while in order that we may return to the general life again with fresh
+      experiences and fresh acquirements, as bees return with pollen and
+      nourishment to the fellowship of the hive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this Man, this wonderful child of old earth, who is ourselves in the
+      measure of our hearts and minds, does but begin his adventure now. Through
+      all time henceforth he does but begin his adventure. This planet and its
+      subjugation is but the dawn of his existence. In a little while he will
+      reach out to the other planets, and take that greater fire, the sun, into
+      his service. He will bring his solvent intelligence to bear upon the
+      riddles of his individual interaction, transmute jealousy and every
+      passion, control his own increase, select and breed for his embodiment a
+      continually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none of us can think
+      or will, save in a disconnected partiality, he will think and will
+      collectively. Already some of us feel our merger with that greater life.
+      There come moments when the thing shines out upon our thoughts. Sometimes
+      in the dark sleepless solitudes of night, one ceases to be so-and-so, one
+      ceases to bear a proper name, forgets one's quarrels and vanities,
+      forgives and understands one's enemies and oneself, as one forgives and
+      understands the quarrels of little children, knowing oneself indeed to be
+      a being greater than one's personal accidents, knowing oneself for Man on
+      his planet, flying swiftly to unmeasured destinies through the starry
+      stillnesses of space.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
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