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+Project Gutenberg's What's Wrong With The World, by G.K. Chesterton
+
+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: What's Wrong With The World
+
+Author: G.K. Chesterton
+
+Posting Date: December 9, 2008 [EBook #1717]
+Release Date: April, 1999
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Georges Allaire, and Martin Ward
+
+
+
+
+
+WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
+
+By G.K. Chesterton
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     PART ONE:  THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN
+
+      I      The Medical Mistake
+      II     Wanted: An Unpractical Man
+      III    The New Hypocrite
+      IV     The Fear of the Past
+      V      The Unfinished Temple
+      VI     The Enemies of Property
+      VII    The Free Family
+      XIII   The Wildness of Domesticity
+      IX     History of Hudge and Gudge
+      X      Oppression by Optimism
+      XI     The Homelessness of Jones
+
+     PART TWO:  IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN
+
+      I      The Charm of Jingoism
+      II     Wisdom and the Weather
+      III    The Common Vision
+      IV     The Insane Necessity
+
+     PART THREE:  FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN
+
+      I      The Unmilitary Suffragette
+      II     The Universal Stick
+      III    The Emancipation of Domesticity
+      IV     The Romance of Thrift
+      V      The Coldness of Chloe
+      VI     The Pedant and the Savage
+      VII    The Modern Surrender of Woman
+      VIII   The Brand of the Fleur-de-Lis
+      IX     Sincerity and the Gallows
+      X      The Higher Anarchy
+      XI     The Queen and the Suffragettes
+      XII    The Modern Slave
+
+     PART FOUR:  EDUCATION, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD
+
+      I      The Calvinism of To-day
+      II     The Tribal Terror
+      III    The Tricks of Environment
+      IV     The Truth About Education
+      V      An Evil Cry
+      VI     Authority the Unavoidable
+      VII    The Humility of Mrs. Grundy
+      VIII   The Broken Rainbow
+      IX     The Need for Narrowness
+      X      The Case for the Public Schools
+      XI     The School for Hypocrites
+      XII    The Staleness of the New Schools
+      XIII   The Outlawed Parent
+      XIV    Folly and Female Education
+
+     PART FIVE:  THE HOME OF MAN
+
+      I      The Empire of the Insect
+      II     The Fallacy of the Umbrella Stand
+      III    The Dreadful Duty of Gudge
+      IV     A Last Instance
+      V      Conclusion
+
+     THREE NOTES
+
+      I      On Female Suffrage
+      II     On Cleanliness in Education
+      III    On Peasant Proprietorship
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+To C. F G. Masterman, M. P.
+
+My Dear Charles,
+
+I originally called this book "What is Wrong," and it would
+have satisfied your sardonic temper to note the number of social
+misunderstandings that arose from the use of the title. Many a mild lady
+visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, "I have been doing
+'What is Wrong' all this morning." And one minister of religion moved
+quite sharply in his chair when I told him (as he understood it) that I
+had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in
+a minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannot
+conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is, of having
+written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthy
+to be dedicated to you. As far as literature goes, this book is what is
+wrong and no mistake.
+
+It may seem a refinement of insolence to present so wild a composition
+to one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of
+the moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who can
+make the map of England crawl with life; a most creepy and enviable
+accomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which, even
+if it achieves its object (which is monstrously unlikely) can only be a
+thundering gallop of theory?
+
+Well, I do it partly because I think you politicians are none the worse
+for a few inconvenient ideals; but more because you will recognise the
+many arguments we have had, those arguments which the most wonderful
+ladies in the world can never endure for very long. And, perhaps, you
+will agree with me that the thread of comradeship and conversation must
+be protected because it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred, it
+must not be snapped, because it is not worth tying together again. It
+is exactly because argument is idle that men (I mean males) must take it
+seriously; for when (we feel), until the crack of doom, shall we have so
+delightful a difference again? But most of all I offer it to you because
+there exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing, called
+friendship; an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which,
+please God, will never break.
+
+Yours always,
+
+G. K. Chesterton.
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE. THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN
+
+
+
+
+I. THE MEDICAL MISTAKE
+
+A book of modern social inquiry has a shape that is somewhat sharply
+defined. It begins as a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables
+of population, decrease of crime among Congregationalists, growth of
+hysteria among policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it ends with a
+chapter that is generally called "The Remedy." It is almost wholly due
+to this careful, solid, and scientific method that "The Remedy" is never
+found. For this scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder;
+the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the
+disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and
+dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure
+before we find the disease.
+
+The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern
+madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak
+of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British
+Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The
+moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal,
+we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are
+not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity
+of perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations," as
+if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say
+that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that
+Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should
+soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon
+grow a new moustache. Nations consist of people; the first generation
+may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth may be vigorous. Similar
+applications of the fallacy are made by those who see in the increasing
+size of national possessions, a simple increase in wisdom and stature,
+and in favor with God and man. These people, indeed, even fall short in
+subtlety of the parallel of a human body. They do not even ask whether
+an empire is growing taller in its youth, or only growing fatter in its
+old age. But of all the instances of error arising from this physical
+fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively
+describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.
+
+Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and
+that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about
+the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about
+the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to
+produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The
+hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less: but
+it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra.
+Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks to
+restore it.
+
+But social science is by no means always content with the normal human
+soul; it has all sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a social idealist
+will say "I am tired of being a Puritan; I want to be a Pagan," or
+"Beyond this dark probation of Individualism I see the shining paradise
+of Collectivism." Now in bodily ills there is none of this difference
+about the ultimate ideal. The patient may or may not want quinine; but
+he certainly wants health.  No one says "I am tired of this headache; I
+want some toothache," or "The only thing for this Russian influenza is
+a few German measles," or "Through this dark probation of catarrh I see
+the shining paradise of rheumatism." But exactly the whole difficulty in
+our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other
+men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions
+as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of
+disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea
+of property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is
+not a tooth, but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to
+introduce German efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German
+measles. Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would
+rather have rheumatics.
+
+This is the arresting and dominant fact about modern social discussion;
+that the quarrel is not merely about the difficulties, but about the
+aim. We agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear
+each other's eyes out. We all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad
+thing. We should not by any means all admit that an active aristocracy
+would be a good thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood;
+but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one.
+Everyone is indignant if our army is weak, including the people who
+would be even more indignant if it were strong. The social case is
+exactly the opposite of the medical case. We do not disagree, like
+doctors, about the precise nature of the illness, while agreeing about
+the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is
+unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half
+would call blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent
+that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity.
+We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things, we should
+differ very much about the uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree
+about the bad public house. It would be precisely in front of the good
+public-house that our painful personal fracas would occur.
+
+I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological method is quite
+useless: that of first dissecting abject poverty or cataloguing
+prostitution. We all dislike abject poverty; but it might be another
+business if we began to discuss independent and dignified poverty. We
+all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity.
+The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social
+ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity?
+I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot
+of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we
+do not ask what is right.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+II. WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN
+
+There is a popular philosophical joke intended to typify the endless
+and useless arguments of philosophers; I mean the joke about which came
+first, the chicken or the egg? I am not sure that properly understood,
+it is so futile an inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to enter
+on those deep metaphysical and theological differences of which the
+chicken and egg debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type. The
+evolutionary materialists are appropriately enough represented in the
+vision of all things coming from an egg, a dim and monstrous oval germ
+that had laid itself by accident. That other supernatural school of
+thought (to which I personally adhere) would be not unworthily typified
+in the fancy that this round world of ours is but an egg brooded upon by
+a sacred unbegotten bird; the mystic dove of the prophets. But it is
+to much humbler functions that I here call the awful power of such a
+distinction. Whether or no the living bird is at the beginning of our
+mental chain, it is absolutely necessary that it should be at the end of
+our mental chain. The bird is the thing to be aimed at--not with a gun,
+but a life-bestowing wand. What is essential to our right thinking is
+this: that the egg and the bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic
+occurrences recurring alternatively forever. They must not become a mere
+egg and bird pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One is a means
+and the other an end; they are in different mental worlds. Leaving
+the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an
+elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the
+chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also
+exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a
+French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable
+in himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness;
+forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life
+is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of
+nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only think
+of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking to
+breed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever
+we happen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and the
+embryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes
+doubtful and even morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything; and
+our politics are rotten eggs.
+
+Idealism is only considering everything in its practical essence.
+Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to
+poking before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we
+should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before
+we decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics. But I know
+that this primary pursuit of the theory (which is but pursuit of the
+aim) exposes one to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning.
+A school, of which Lord Rosebery is representative, has endeavored to
+substitute for the moral or social ideals which have hitherto been the
+motive of politics a general coherency or completeness in the social
+system which has gained the nick-name of "efficiency." I am not very
+certain of the secret doctrine of this sect in the matter. But, as
+far as I can make out, "efficiency" means that we ought to discover
+everything about a machine except what it is for. There has arisen in
+our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong
+we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things
+go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a
+theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice,
+to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must
+have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at
+all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right
+to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
+
+It is then necessary to drop one's daily agnosticism and attempt rerum
+cognoscere causas. If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a handy
+man may mend it. But, if it is seriously ill, it is all the more likely
+that some absent-minded old professor with wild white hair will have to
+be dragged out of a college or laboratory to analyze the evil. The more
+complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and more absent-minded will be
+the theorist who is needed to deal with it; and in some extreme cases,
+no one but the man (probably insane) who invented your flying-ship could
+possibly say what was the matter with it.
+
+"Efficiency," of course, is futile for the same reason that strong men,
+will-power and the superman are futile. That is, it is futile because
+it only deals with actions after they have been performed. It has no
+philosophy for incidents before they happen; therefore it has no power
+of choice. An act can only be successful or unsuccessful when it is
+over; if it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right or wrong.
+There is no such thing as backing a winner; for he cannot be a winner
+when he is backed. There is no such thing as fighting on the winning
+side; one fights to find out which is the winning side. If any operation
+has occurred, that operation was efficient. If a man is murdered, the
+murder was efficient. A tropical sun is as efficient in making people
+lazy as a Lancashire foreman bully in making them energetic. Maeterlinck
+is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as
+Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But it
+all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery, being
+a modern skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being an
+orthodox Christian, prefer the jam. But both are efficient when they
+have been effected; and inefficient until they are effected. A man who
+thinks much about success must be the drowsiest sentimentalist; for he
+must be always looking back. If he only likes victory he must always
+come late for the battle. For the man of action there is nothing but
+idealism.
+
+This definite ideal is a far more urgent and practical matter in our
+existing English trouble than any immediate plans or proposals. For the
+present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were
+originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man demands
+what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really
+wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he
+forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests,
+a pandemonium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliability does not merely
+prevent any heroic consistency, it also prevents any really practical
+compromise. One can only find the middle distance between two points if
+the two points will stand still. We may make an arrangement between two
+litigants who cannot both get what they want; but not if they will
+not even tell us what they want. The keeper of a restaurant would much
+prefer that each customer should give his order smartly, though it
+were for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than that each customer
+should sit holding his head in his hands, plunged in arithmetical
+calculations about how much food there can be on the premises. Most of
+us have suffered from a certain sort of ladies who, by their perverse
+unselfishness, give more trouble than the selfish; who almost clamor
+for the unpopular dish and scramble for the worst seat. Most of us
+have known parties or expeditions full of this seething fuss of
+self-effacement. From much meaner motives than those of such admirable
+women, our practical politicians keep things in the same confusion
+through the same doubt about their real demands. There is nothing that
+so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are
+bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favor of secular
+education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire total
+prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret
+compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant
+proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed
+and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. If our
+statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done. If we ask
+for something in the abstract we might get something in the concrete.
+As it is, it is not only impossible to get what one wants, but it is
+impossible to get any part of it, because nobody can mark it out plainly
+like a map. That clear and even hard quality that there was in the old
+bargaining has wholly vanished. We forget that the word "compromise"
+contains, among other things, the rigid and ringing word "promise."
+Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as perfection. The middle
+point is as fixed as the extreme point.
+
+If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer,
+as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable
+distance. It is exactly about the reasonable distance that the pirate
+and I differ. There is an exquisite mathematical split second at which
+the plank tips up. My common-sense ends just before that instant; the
+pirate's common-sense begins just beyond it. But the point itself is as
+hard as any geometrical diagram; as abstract as any theological dogma.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+III. THE NEW HYPOCRITE
+
+But this new cloudy political cowardice has rendered useless the old
+English compromise. People have begun to be terrified of an improvement
+merely because it is complete. They call it utopian and revolutionary
+that anyone should really have his own way, or anything be really done,
+and done with. Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than
+no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a
+loaf is better than a whole loaf.
+
+As an instance to sharpen the argument, I take the one case of our
+everlasting education bills. We have actually contrived to invent a new
+kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite, Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man
+whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that
+they were religious. The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really
+religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical. The
+Rev. Brown, the Wesleyan minister, sturdily declares that he cares
+nothing for creeds, but only for education; meanwhile, in truth, the
+wildest Wesleyanism is tearing his soul. The Rev. Smith, of the Church
+of England, explains gracefully, with the Oxford manner, that the only
+question for him is the prosperity and efficiency of the schools; while
+in truth all the evil passions of a curate are roaring within him. It
+is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these reverend
+gentlemen do themselves wrong; I think they are more pious than they
+will admit. Theology is not (as some suppose) expunged as an error. It
+is merely concealed, like a sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theological
+atmosphere as much as Lord Halifax; only it is a different one. If Dr.
+Clifford would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord Halifax ask plainly
+for Catholicism, something might be done for them. We are all, one
+hopes, imaginative enough to recognize the dignity and distinctness of
+another religion, like Islam or the cult of Apollo. I am quite ready
+to respect another man's faith; but it is too much to ask that I should
+respect his doubt, his worldly hesitations and fictions, his political
+bargain and make-believe. Most Nonconformists with an instinct for
+English history could see something poetic and national about the
+Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop of Canterbury. It is when
+he does the rational British statesman that they very justifiably get
+annoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for pluck and simplicity could
+admire Dr. Clifford as a Baptist minister. It is when he says that he is
+simply a citizen that nobody can possibly believe him.
+
+But indeed the case is yet more curious than this. The one argument that
+used to be urged for our creedless vagueness was that at least it saved
+us from fanaticism. But it does not even do that. On the contrary, it
+creates and renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to itself.
+This is at once so strange and so true that I will ask the reader's
+attention to it with a little more precision.
+
+Some people do not like the word "dogma." Fortunately they are free, and
+there is an alternative for them. There are two things, and two things
+only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages
+were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at its best, a
+poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a
+prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be eaten, while a man should
+not be eaten, is a doctrine. That as little as possible of anything
+should be eaten is a prejudice; which is also sometimes called an ideal.
+Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would
+rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general
+recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel
+must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might
+walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and
+one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away
+from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of
+our modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.
+
+It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of
+creed unites men--so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary
+unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been
+nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two
+homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel. "I say God is
+One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a
+good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds
+into tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as
+such (because it was his "temperament"), and he would turn up later with
+three hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it
+would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall. It
+would force that previously healthy person not only to admit that there
+was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for
+a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like the Dong)
+they would appear again; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a
+Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other
+than before.
+
+It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides
+men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in
+clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a
+Tory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is
+Socialism. But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime
+atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps out of its
+way; and quite right too. One can meet an assertion with argument; but
+healthy bigotry is the only way in which one can meet a tendency. I
+am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenly
+pressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons for
+disliking the Japanese civilization. To use surrender as a weapon is the
+very worst spirit of the East. But certainly there is no force so hard
+to fight as the force which it is easy to conquer; the force that
+always yields and then returns. Such is the force of a great impersonal
+prejudice, such as possesses the modern world on so many points. Against
+this there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a
+resolution not to listen to fads, and not to be infected by diseases.
+
+In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice in
+an age of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in an age of
+logic. But the difference between the two mental methods is marked and
+unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudices
+are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bump
+into each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other's way. A creed
+is a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a
+private thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with our
+existing divisions. They keep out of each other's way; the Tory paper
+and the Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other.
+Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has
+become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist
+is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never
+interrupts; he listens to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as a spy
+would listen to the enemy's arrangements. But if you attempt an actual
+argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no
+medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer
+except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear
+that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is
+called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing
+journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole
+object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot.
+
+The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal.
+In dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental as is
+consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we have some
+doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution
+may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to
+maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now
+consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants
+will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl;
+evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail,
+and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a
+Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal,
+like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the
+deep seas; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to
+alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be
+beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off
+the slave; knock the slave until he forgets the fetters. To all this
+plausible modern argument for oppression, the only adequate answer is,
+that there is a permanent human ideal that must not be either confused
+or destroyed. The most important man on earth is the perfect man who
+is not there. The Christian religion has specially uttered the ultimate
+sanity of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the incarnate and human
+truth. Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but
+simply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the
+measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick
+and the dead.
+
+Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissensions; rather a doctrine alone
+can cure our dissensions. It is necessary to ask, however, roughly,
+what abstract and ideal shape in state or family would fulfil the human
+hunger; and this apart from whether we can completely obtain it or not.
+But when we come to ask what is the need of normal men, what is the
+desire of all nations, what is the ideal house, or road, or rule, or
+republic, or king, or priesthood, then we are confronted with a strange
+and irritating difficulty peculiar to the present time; and we must call
+a temporary halt and examine that obstacle.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE FEAR OF THE PAST
+
+The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of
+the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to
+misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to
+stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern
+man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but
+is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his
+great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead,
+we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is
+apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance.
+Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the
+novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth
+century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was
+supposed to begin: "Late on a winter's evening two horsemen might have
+been seen--." The new story has to begin: "Late on a winter's evening
+two aviators will be seen--." The movement is not without its elements
+of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so
+many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened;
+of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in
+advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the
+age is really rather odd.
+
+But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of
+poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to
+maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but
+a cowardice of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even
+its pugnacity is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible
+not because he is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why
+modern armaments do not inflame the imagination like the arms and
+emblazonments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical
+ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as beautiful as the sea; and
+many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric
+ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation from that
+evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a
+charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver.
+The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout,
+a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is
+impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight talking of longer and longer
+French lances, with precisely the quivering employed about larger and
+larger German ships The man who called the Blue Water School the "Blue
+Funk School" uttered a psychological truth which that school itself
+would scarcely essentially deny. Even the two-power standard, if it be
+a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has more
+alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact
+that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a
+world of cold rapacity and fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored
+not so much by the creed that we were doing something right, as by
+the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong;
+driving us (as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said
+that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was: a white feather.
+
+Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic
+armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The
+modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue,
+not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled
+towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular
+phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives
+it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not
+exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a
+fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past
+also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind.
+There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many
+harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of
+monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once
+sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition
+of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking
+at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street
+of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to
+play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank
+wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes;
+the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato,
+Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as
+narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as
+humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that
+men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They
+look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
+
+Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among
+the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing
+eyes on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in
+history who have really done anything with the future have had their
+eyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very
+word proves my case. The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare
+began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of
+poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great
+mediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation
+looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic
+movement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movement
+which many would count the most anarchic of all is in this sense the
+most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than
+it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics
+of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods.
+The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to
+simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past; some might call
+it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant
+his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead.
+Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face
+turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as
+he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future
+itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some
+call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored
+in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned
+to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate
+and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect
+creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociological
+scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The
+only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists
+somewhat amusing, statues.
+
+But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies
+and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless
+future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and
+sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy
+to a restless and rather morbid generation; and they maintain a strange
+silence about them--sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They
+keep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of
+their history books. For example, they will often tell you (in their
+praises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United States
+of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away
+from a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed literally
+in Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that the
+international hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent,
+the mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they
+will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great
+rising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that
+France made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the
+world allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that
+nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals
+in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone
+can test this for himself. Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets
+advocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popes
+or Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays
+and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them praise
+the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These colossal
+ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the
+valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished
+cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident,
+but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien
+philosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought to
+have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to
+do
+
+It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of
+all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human
+experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the
+reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern
+man--in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two
+starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past?
+Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the
+other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth
+with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint
+to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by
+the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the '48? Are we still strong enough
+to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos
+contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we
+decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a
+barricade like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to
+sociologists--or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and
+passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the
+sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed
+the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing.
+
+This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new
+ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism
+is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination.
+We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old
+things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all
+the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not
+got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the
+good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for
+restoration as well as revolution.
+
+We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel
+attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not
+really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any
+more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous
+man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions
+fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose
+intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares
+as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for
+what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this
+abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of
+the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern
+assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one
+metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying,
+"You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You
+can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by
+the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a
+piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has
+ever existed.
+
+There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed, so you must lie on
+it"; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable,
+please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the
+stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might
+be very inadvisable to do it; but certainly it is not impossible as
+bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first
+freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose
+as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that
+should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would
+eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying cold
+and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the right
+to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian
+towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best
+way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles;
+we could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous
+illusions about men or measures which are nourished by the great
+national or international newspapers. You could not persuade a city
+state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman, or Mr. Dillon a desperado,
+any more than you could persuade a Hampshire Village that the
+village drunkard was a teetotaller or the village idiot a statesman.
+Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths
+should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose
+that Clapham should declare its independence. I merely declare my
+independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe;
+and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they
+have been used.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE
+
+The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by
+the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated
+it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other
+way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.
+If a man says that the Young Pretender would have made England happy,
+it is hard to answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England
+happy, I hope we all know what to answer. That which was prevented is
+always impregnable; and the only perfect King of England was he who
+was smothered. Exactly be cause Jacobitism failed we cannot call it
+a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we
+cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief
+or incidental. Few people realize how many of the largest efforts, the
+facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full design and
+come down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only space to allude to the
+two largest facts of modern history: the Catholic Church and that modern
+growth rooted in the French Revolution.
+
+When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of
+Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black
+admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his
+brains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realise
+what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were
+distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great mediaeval
+conception that the church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to
+a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was
+simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest.
+The judiciary was itself sub judice. The kings were themselves in the
+dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom, without armies or
+prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms
+of the earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society we
+cannot affirm definitely; because the church never was a supreme church.
+We only know that in England at any rate the princes conquered the
+saints. What the world wanted we see before us; and some of us call it
+a failure. But we cannot call what the church wanted a failure, simply
+because the church failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England had
+not yet made the great Protestant discovery that the king can do no
+wrong. The king was whipped in the cathedral; a performance which I
+recommend to those who regret the unpopularity of church-going. But the
+discovery was made; and Henry VIII scattered Becket's bones as easily as
+Tracy had scattered his brains.
+
+Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics
+were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire
+of the church's ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not
+for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity
+was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of
+Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the
+churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to
+end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of
+things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet
+the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long
+before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The
+huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in
+moral superiority. And it is actually true that the Reformation began
+to tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church had had time to pull
+it together. The Prussians, for instance, were not converted to
+Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor
+creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told
+to become Protestants. This explains a great deal of their subsequent
+conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case
+of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by
+being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived
+enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind
+has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian
+ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult;
+and left untried.
+
+It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great
+part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French
+Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was
+the decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have,
+indeed, destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a free
+peasantry in almost all Christian countries except England; of which we
+shall say more anon. But representative government, the one universal
+relic, is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theory
+of the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, things
+which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed
+to its imitators in England, Germany, and America. The first of these
+was the idea of honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something of
+a stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative
+English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it
+was that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best
+answer is that they were admired for being poor--poor when they might
+have been rich.
+
+No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute politique
+of this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is
+actually based on exactly the opposite argument; it is based on the
+theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to
+financial trickery. Whether the history of the English aristocracy,
+from the spoliation of the monasteries to the annexation of the mines,
+entirely supports this theory I am not now inquiring; but certainly
+it is our theory, that wealth will be a protection against political
+corruption. The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born
+with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be
+found with the silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is our faith in
+this protection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trusting our
+empire in the hands of families which inherit wealth without either
+blood or manners. Some of our political houses are parvenue by pedigree;
+they hand on vulgarity like a coat of-arms. In the case of many a modern
+statesman to say that he is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is
+at once inadequate and excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his
+mouth. But all this only illustrates the English theory that poverty is
+perilous for a politician.
+
+It will be the same if we compare the conditions that have come about
+with the Revolution legend touching publicity. The old democratic
+doctrine was that the more light that was let in to all departments of
+State, the easier it was for a righteous indignation to move promptly
+against wrong. In other words, monarchs were to live in glass houses,
+that mobs might throw stones. Again, no admirer of existing English
+politics (if there is any admirer of existing English politics) will
+really pretend that this ideal of publicity is exhausted, or even
+attempted. Obviously public life grows more private every day. The
+French have, indeed, continued the tradition of revealing secrets and
+making scandals; hence they are more flagrant and palpable than we, not
+in sin but in the confession of sin. The first trial of Dreyfus might
+have happened in England; it is exactly the second trial that would have
+been legally impossible. But, indeed, if we wish to realise how far we
+fall short of the original republican outline, the sharpest way to test
+it is to note how far we fall short even of the republican element
+in the older regime. Not only are we less democratic than Danton and
+Condorcet, but we are in many ways less democratic than Choiseul and
+Marie Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt were needy
+middle-class people compared with our Rothschilds and Roseberys. And
+in the matter of publicity the old French monarchy was infinitely more
+democratic than any of the monarchies of today. Practically anybody
+who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his
+children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as the
+people possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they can
+sprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent
+principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look
+at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press is free
+for criticism it is only used for adulation. The substantial difference
+comes to something uncommonly like this: Eighteenth century tyranny
+meant that you could say "The K__ of Br__rd is a profligate." Twentieth
+century liberty really means that you are allowed to say "The King of
+Brentford is a model family man."
+
+But we have delayed the main argument too long for the parenthetical
+purpose of showing that the great democratic dream, like the great
+mediaeval dream, has in a strict and practical sense been a dream
+unfulfilled. Whatever is the matter with modern England it is not
+that we have carried out too literally, or achieved with disappointing
+completeness, either the Catholicism of Becket or the equality of Marat.
+Now I have taken these two cases merely because they are typical of
+ten thousand other cases; the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas,
+these uncompleted temples. History does not consist of completed and
+crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by
+a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a
+deserted cemetery.
+
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY
+
+But it is for this especial reason that such an explanation is necessary
+on the very threshold of the definition of ideals. For owing to that
+historic fallacy with which I have just dealt, numbers of readers will
+expect me, when I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal. Now I
+have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal
+imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything
+like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day
+that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an
+earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done
+under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a
+blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their
+ideals. There is only one really startling thing to be done with the
+ideal, and that is to do it. It is to face the flaming logical fact, and
+its frightful consequences. Christ knew that it would be a more stunning
+thunderbolt to fulfil the law than to destroy it. It is true of both
+the cases I have quoted, and of every case. The pagans had always adored
+purity: Athena, Artemis, Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began
+defiantly to practice purity that they rent them with wild beasts, and
+rolled them on red-hot coals. The world had always loved the notion of
+the poor man uppermost; it can be proved by every legend from Cinderella
+to Whittington, by every poem from the Magnificat to the Marseillaise.
+The kings went mad against France not because she idealized this ideal,
+but because she realized it. Joseph of Austria and Catherine of Russia
+quite agreed that the people should rule; what horrified them was that
+the people did. The French Revolution, therefore, is the type of all
+true revolutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old Adam, but
+its fulfilment almost as fresh, as miraculous, and as new as the New
+Jerusalem.
+
+But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the
+extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they
+have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they
+have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never
+wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.
+
+Now, for the purpose of this book, I propose to take only one of these
+old ideals; but one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the principle
+of domesticity: the ideal house; the happy family, the holy family of
+history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like
+the church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have
+never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless
+modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they
+have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the
+workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the
+cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as
+the working class is shouting to be let into it.
+
+Now if we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay
+the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make
+something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can
+make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God
+be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the
+combination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, is
+to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to
+be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The
+excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions
+will stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet
+on an old envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking
+a sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero
+out of an envelope is almost out of the sphere of practical politics.
+This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy
+entertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. But
+the mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of
+invisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic
+creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present
+discussions--the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into
+the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and
+though he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate
+straight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen. The
+average man cannot paint the sunset whose colors be admires; but he can
+paint his own house with what color he chooses, and though he paints it
+pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his
+choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every
+man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is
+shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a
+graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly
+with limits that are strict and even small.
+
+I am well aware that the word "property" has been defied in our time by
+the corruption of the great capitalists. One would think, to hear people
+talk, that the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of
+property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they
+are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land;
+but other people's. When they remove their neighbor's landmark, they
+also remove their own. A man who loves a little triangular field ought
+to love it because it is triangular; anyone who destroys the shape, by
+giving him more land, is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man with
+the true poetry of possession wishes to see the wall where his garden
+meets Smith's garden; the hedge where his farm touches Brown's. He
+cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his
+neighbor's. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland
+should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the
+negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VII. THE FREE FAMILY
+
+As I have said, I propose to take only one central instance; I will take
+the institution called the private house or home; the shell and organ of
+the family. We will consider cosmic and political tendencies simply as
+they strike that ancient and unique roof. Very few words will suffice
+for all I have to say about the family itself. I leave alone the
+speculations about its animal origin and the details of its social
+reconstruction; I am concerned only with its palpable omnipresence. It
+is a necessity far mankind; it is (if you like to put it so) a trap for
+mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any
+one contrive to talk of "free love"; as if love were an episode like
+lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a
+cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed
+him everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune
+he "drew an angel down" and had to walk about forever with a seraph on
+a string. These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the
+earthquake consequences that Nature has attached to sex; and it is
+perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he
+is either a traitor or a tied man. The second element that creates
+the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual; the
+cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph. Thence
+arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-operation; and
+thence arises the family in its full educational sense.
+
+It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist
+institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside
+the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable
+forces of custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning
+that the State has no authority over families; that State authority
+is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most
+normal cases of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry.
+It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that the law
+cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are
+fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own
+backbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vast
+and remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of the family form
+a strong instance of this. If a baby cries for the moon, the policeman
+cannot procure the moon--but neither can he stop the baby. Creatures so
+close to each other as husband and wife, or a mother and children, have
+powers of making each other happy or miserable with which no public
+coercion can deal. If a marriage could be dissolved every morning it
+would not give back his night's rest to a man kept awake by a curtain
+lecture; and what is the good of giving a man a lot of power where he
+only wants a little peace? The child must depend on the most imperfect
+mother; the mother may be devoted to the most unworthy children; in such
+relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the abnormal cases where
+the law may operate, this difficulty is constantly found; as many a
+bewildered magistrate knows. He has to save children from starvation by
+taking away their breadwinner. And he often has to break a wife's heart
+because her husband has already broken her head. The State has no tool
+delicate enough to deracinate the rooted habits and tangled affections
+of the family; the two sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued
+together too tightly for us to get the blade of a legal penknife in
+between them. The man and the woman are one flesh--yes, even when they
+are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped. Upon this ancient and anarchic
+intimacy, types of government have little or no effect; it is happy or
+unhappy, by its own sexual wholesomeness and genial habit, under the
+republic of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even a republic in
+Siam would not have done much towards freeing the Siamese Twins.
+
+The problem is not in marriage, but in sex; and would be felt under the
+freest concubinage. Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of mankind has
+not believed in freedom in this matter, but rather in a more or less
+lasting tie. Tribes and civilizations differ about the occasions on
+which we may loosen the bond, but they all agree that there is a bond to
+be loosened, not a mere universal detachment. For the purposes of this
+book I am not concerned to discuss that mystical view of marriage in
+which I myself believe: the great European tradition which has made
+marriage a sacrament. It is enough to say here that heathen and
+Christian alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing not normally
+to be sundered. Briefly, this human belief in a sexual bond rests on a
+principle of which the modern mind has made a very inadequate study. It
+is, perhaps, most nearly paralleled by the principle of the second wind
+in walking.
+
+The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every
+pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so
+that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after
+the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore
+of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of
+the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of
+the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of
+surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential
+surrender.
+
+In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when
+no one would do it, except for necessity or honor. It is then that the
+Institution upholds a man and helps him on to the firmer ground ahead.
+Whether this solid fact of human nature is sufficient to justify the
+sublime dedication of Christian marriage is quite an other matter, it is
+amply sufficient to justify the general human feeling of marriage as a
+fixed thing, dissolution of which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy.
+The essential element is not so much duration as security. Two people
+must be tied together in order to do themselves justice; for twenty
+minutes at a dance, or for twenty years in a marriage In both cases the
+point is, that if a man is bored in the first five minutes he must go on
+and force himself to be happy. Coercion is a kind of encouragement; and
+anarchy (or what some call liberty) is essentially oppressive, because
+it is essentially discouraging. If we all floated in the air like
+bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result
+would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It
+would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper,
+and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was
+floating away into the free and formless ether. The two must hold each
+other to do justice to each other. If Americans can be divorced for
+"incompatibility of temper" I cannot conceive why they are not all
+divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one.
+The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant
+when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as
+such, are incompatible.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
+
+In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is
+called the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty
+of modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the
+difficulty is not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth.
+It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life.
+Some experience of modern movements of the sort called "advanced" has
+led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience
+peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I
+have already spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That
+implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor
+car in which to wander looking for others; it also implies money for
+maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own
+wife, let alone other people's. And the success with which nuptial
+estrangements are depicted in modern "problem plays" is due to the fact
+that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict--that is a
+hard day's work. I could give many other instances of this plutocratic
+assumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic
+assumption behind the phrase "Why should woman be economically dependent
+upon man?" The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn't;
+except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her. A hunter has to
+tear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has
+to catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quite
+clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere "pretty clinging
+parasite," "a plaything," etc., arose through the somber contemplation
+of some rich banking family, in which the banker, at least, went to the
+city and pretended to do something, while the banker's wife went to the
+Park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his
+wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers
+interviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one of
+them economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty parasite clinging to
+Stoughton? Was Marshall a mere plaything for Snelgrove?
+
+But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is
+this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home
+(they say) is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and
+variety. This is indeed a rich man's opinion. The rich man knows that
+his own house moves on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by
+regiments of servants, by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand,
+every sort of vagabondage of romance is open to him in the streets
+outside. He has plenty of money and can afford to be a tramp. His
+wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel's tamest
+adventure may end in a police-court. If he smashes a window he can
+pay for it; if he smashes a man he can pension him. He can (like the
+millionaire in the story) buy an hotel to get a glass of gin. And
+because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all
+"advanced" and "progressive" thought, we have almost forgotten what a
+home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind.
+
+For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place
+of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot
+on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an
+experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept
+the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to
+enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes.
+I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic
+feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in
+an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his
+house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy,
+though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant
+you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you
+insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden
+you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a
+plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world
+of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set
+tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the
+ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to. When a man spends
+every night staggering from bar to bar or from music-hall to music-hall,
+we say that he is living an irregular life. But he is not; he is living
+a highly regular life, under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of
+such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars;
+and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls. Hotels may
+be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters may
+be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only
+picnic at home.
+
+Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this
+possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working
+model for the present inquiry. Whether we can give every English man
+a free home of his own or not, at least we should desire it; and he
+desires it. For the moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he
+expects to get. He wants, for instance, a separate house; he does not
+want a semi-detached house. He may be forced in the commercial race
+to share one wall with another man. Similarly he might be forced in a
+three-legged race to share one leg with another man; but it is not so
+that he pictures himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again,
+he does not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a
+flat; he can eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train. But a
+railway train is not a house, because it is a house on wheels. And a
+flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts. An idea of
+earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation and
+independence, is a part of this instructive human picture.
+
+I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man
+desires a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires
+a house of his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof
+above him and a chair below him; he wants an objective and visible
+kingdom; a fire at which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can
+open to what friends he chooses. This is the normal appetite of men; I
+do not say there are not exceptions. There may be saints above the need
+and philanthropists below it. Opalstein, now he is a duke, may have got
+used to more than this; and when he was a convict may have got used
+to less. But the normality of the thing is enormous. To give nearly
+everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody; that is what I
+assert without apology. Now in modern England (as you eagerly point out)
+it is very difficult to give nearly everybody houses. Quite so; I merely
+set up the desideratum; and ask the reader to leave it standing there
+while he turns with me to a consideration of what really happens in the
+social wars of our time.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+IX. HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE
+
+There is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery in Hoxton, dripping with
+disease and honeycombed with crime and promiscuity. There are, let us
+say, two noble and courageous young men, of pure intentions and (if you
+prefer it) noble birth; let us call them Hudge and Gudge. Hudge, let us
+say, is of a bustling sort; he points out that the people must at all
+costs be got out of this den; he subscribes and collects money, but he
+finds (despite the large financial interests of the Hudges) that the
+thing will have to be done on the cheap if it is to be done on the spot.
+He therefore, runs up a row of tall bare tenements like beehives; and
+soon has all the poor people bundled into their little brick cells,
+which are certainly better than their old quarters, in so far as they
+are weather proof, well ventilated and supplied with clean water. But
+Gudge has a more delicate nature. He feels a nameless something lacking
+in the little brick boxes; he raises numberless objections; he even
+assails the celebrated Hudge Report, with the Gudge Minority Report; and
+by the end of a year or so has come to telling Hudge heatedly that the
+people were much happier where they were before. As the people preserve
+in both places precisely the same air of dazed amiability, it is very
+difficult to find out which is right. But at least one might safely say
+that no people ever liked stench or starvation as such, but only some
+peculiar pleasures en tangled with them. Not so feels the sensitive
+Gudge. Long before the final quarrel (Hudge v. Gudge and Another), Gudge
+has succeeded in persuading himself that slums and stinks are really
+very nice things; that the habit of sleeping fourteen in a room is
+what has made our England great; and that the smell of open drains is
+absolutely essential to the rearing of a viking breed.
+
+But, meanwhile, has there been no degeneration in Hudge? Alas, I fear
+there has. Those maniacally ugly buildings which he originally put up
+as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter human life, grow every day more
+and more lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would never have dreamed
+of defending, except as crude necessities, things like common kitchens
+or infamous asbestos stoves, begin to shine quite sacredly before him,
+merely because they reflect the wrath of Gudge. He maintains, with the
+aid of eager little books by Socialists, that man is really happier in
+a hive than in a house. The practical difficulty of keeping total
+strangers out of your bedroom he describes as Brotherhood; and the
+necessity for climbing twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare
+say he calls Effort. The net result of their philanthropic adventure is
+this: that one has come to defending indefensible slums and still more
+indefensible slum-landlords, while the other has come to treating as
+divine the sheds and pipes which he only meant as desperate. Gudge
+is now a corrupt and apoplectic old Tory in the Carlton Club; if
+you mention poverty to him he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice
+something that is conjectured to be "Do 'em good!" Nor is Hudge more
+happy; for he is a lean vegetarian with a gray, pointed beard and an
+unnaturally easy smile, who goes about telling everybody that at last we
+shall all sleep in one universal bedroom; and he lives in a Garden City,
+like one forgotten of God.
+
+Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely
+introduce as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding
+which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery
+men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human
+soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far as
+possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a
+model dwelling. The second desire is, naturally, to get away from the
+model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery. But
+I am neither a Hudgian nor a Gudgian; and I think the mistakes of these
+two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple fact. They
+arose from the fact that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for
+an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself.
+In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not
+practical politicians.
+
+We may now return to the purpose of our awkward parenthesis about the
+praise of the future and the failures of the past. A house of his own
+being the obvious ideal for every man, we may now ask (taking this need
+as typical of all such needs) why he hasn't got it; and whether it is
+in any philosophical sense his own fault. Now, I think that in
+some philosophical sense it is his own fault, I think in a yet more
+philosophical sense it is the fault of his philosophy. And this is what
+I have now to attempt to explain.
+
+Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think,
+that an Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining;
+for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose
+house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of
+peasant proprietorship; that a poor man may be a landlord, though he is
+only lord of his own land. Making the landlord and the tenant the same
+person has certain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent,
+while the landlord does a little work. But I am not concerned with the
+defense of small proprietorship, but merely with the fact that it exists
+almost everywhere except in England. It is also true, however, that this
+estate of small possession is attacked everywhere today; it has never
+existed among ourselves, and it may be destroyed among our neighbors. We
+have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in human affairs generally,
+and in this domestic ideal in particular, that has really ruined the
+natural human creation, especially in this country.
+
+Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he
+always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for. Every man has
+a house somewhere in the elaborate cosmos; his house waits for him waist
+deep in slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon Sussex downs. Man has
+always been looking for that home which is the subject matter of this
+book. But in the bleak and blinding hail of skepticism to which he
+has been now so long subjected, he has begun for the first time to be
+chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his desires. For the first time
+in history he begins really to doubt the object of his wanderings on the
+earth. He has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.
+
+Under the pressure of certain upper-class philosophies (or in other
+words, under the pressure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man has
+really become bewildered about the goal of his efforts; and his efforts,
+therefore, grow feebler and feebler. His simple notion of having a home
+of his own is derided as bourgeois, as sentimental, or as despicably
+Christian. Under various verbal forms he is recommended to go on to the
+streets--which is called Individualism; or to the work-house--which
+is called Collectivism. We shall consider this process somewhat more
+carefully in a moment. But it may be said here that Hudge and Gudge, or
+the governing class generally, will never fail for lack of some modern
+phrase to cover their ancient predominance. The great lords will refuse
+the English peasant his three acres and a cow on advanced grounds, if
+they cannot refuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They will deny him
+the three acres on grounds of State Ownership. They will forbid him the
+cow on grounds of humanitarianism.
+
+And this brings us to the ultimate analysis of this singular influence
+that has prevented doctrinal demands by the English people. There are,
+I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy.
+It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep
+some thirty years ago over the day's newspaper and woke up last week
+over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same
+people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr.
+Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan,
+an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr.
+Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an
+Acland. If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine
+what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic
+coincidences.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+X. OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM
+
+But we are not here concerned with the nature and existence of the
+aristocracy, but with the origin of its peculiar power, why is it the
+last of the true oligarchies of Europe; and why does there seem no
+very immediate prospect of our seeing the end of it? The explanation is
+simple though it remains strangely unnoticed. The friends of aristocracy
+often praise it for preserving ancient and gracious traditions.
+The enemies of aristocracy often blame it for clinging to cruel
+or antiquated customs. Both its enemies and its friends are wrong.
+Generally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad
+traditions; it does not preserve anything except game. Who would dream
+of looking among aristocrats anywhere for an old custom? One might
+as well look for an old costume! The god of the aristocrats is not
+tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition. If you
+wanted to find an old-world Norwegian head-dress, would you look for it
+in the Scandinavian Smart Set? No; the aristocrats never have customs;
+at the best they have habits, like the animals. Only the mob has
+customs.
+
+The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the
+opposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes
+is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is
+called Progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quite
+easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances
+of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a
+luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the
+past and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, for
+the future.
+
+But whatever else the great lords forgot they never forgot that it was
+their business to stand for the new things, for whatever was being most
+talked about among university dons or fussy financiers. Thus they were
+on the side of the Reformation against the Church, of the Whigs against
+the Stuarts, of the Baconian science against the old philosophy, of
+the manufacturing system against the operatives, and (to-day) of the
+increased power of the State against the old-fashioned individualists.
+In short, the rich are always modern; it is their business. But the
+immediate effect of this fact upon the question we are studying is
+somewhat singular.
+
+In each of the separate holes or quandaries in which the ordinary
+Englishman has been placed, he has been told that his situation is, for
+some particular reason, all for the best. He woke up one fine morning
+and discovered that the public things, which for eight hundred years
+he had used at once as inns and sanctuaries, had all been suddenly and
+savagely abolished, to increase the private wealth of about six or seven
+men. One would think he might have been annoyed at that; in many places
+he was, and was put down by the soldiery. But it was not merely the
+army that kept him quiet. He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the
+soldiers; the six or seven men who took away the inns of the poor told
+him that they were not doing it for themselves, but for the religion
+of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism and truth. So whenever a
+seventeenth century noble was caught pulling down a peasant's fence and
+stealing his field, the noble pointed excitedly at the face of Charles I
+or James II (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a cross expression) and
+thus diverted the simple peasant's attention. The great Puritan lords
+created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the common land. They saved
+their poorer countrymen from the disgrace of paying Ship Money,
+by taking from them the plow money and spade money which they were
+doubtless too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme has immortalized
+this easy aristocratic habit--
+
+You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common,
+But leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.
+
+But here, as in the case of the monasteries, we confront the strange
+problem of submission. If they stole the common from the goose, one can
+only say that he was a great goose to stand it. The truth is that they
+reasoned with the goose; they explained to him that all this was needed
+to get the Stuart fox over seas. So in the nineteenth century the great
+nobles who became mine-owners and railway directors earnestly assured
+everybody that they did not do this from preference, but owing to a
+newly discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous politicians of our own
+generation introduce bills to prevent poor mothers from going about with
+their own babies; or they calmly forbid their tenants to drink beer in
+public inns. But this insolence is not (as you would suppose) howled at
+by everybody as outrageous feudalism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism.
+For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the
+pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying
+to live to-morrow.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES
+
+Thus the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has (in England at
+least) always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Englishman has been
+duped out of his old possessions, such as they were, and always in the
+name of progress. The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread and
+gave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white
+pebble of the Lord's elect. They took away his maypole and his original
+rural life and promised him instead the Golden Age of Peace and Commerce
+inaugurated at the Crystal Palace. And now they are taking away the
+little that remains of his dignity as a householder and the head of a
+family, promising him instead Utopias which are called (appropriately
+enough) "Anticipations" or "News from Nowhere." We come back, in fact,
+to the main feature which has already been mentioned. The past is
+communal: the future must be individualist. In the past are all the
+evils of democracy, variety and violence and doubt, but the future is
+pure despotism, for the future is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know I was
+a human fool, but to-morrow I can easily be the Superman.
+
+The modern Englishman, however, is like a man who should be perpetually
+kept out, for one reason after another, from the house in which he had
+meant his married life to begin. This man (Jones let us call him) has
+always desired the divinely ordinary things; he has married for love, he
+has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat; he is ready
+to be a great grandfather and a local god. And just as he is moving
+in, something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly
+debars him from the home; and he has to take his meals in the front
+garden. A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, the
+man who turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the railings,
+explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of
+nature which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in
+the front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean
+lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out),
+happening to call at these lodgings, with the probable intention of
+raising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the real
+life of mercantile endeavor; the economic struggle between him and the
+landlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, the
+wealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the economic struggle, and
+goes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him out (happening at
+that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is
+now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind; he is
+in an equal, scientific, Socialistic commonwealth, owned by the State
+and ruled by public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime
+future.
+
+Nevertheless, there are signs that the irrational Jones still dreams
+at night of this old idea of having an ordinary home. He asked for so
+little, and he has been offered so much. He has been offered bribes
+of worlds and systems; he has been offered Eden and Utopia and the New
+Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house; and that has been refused him.
+
+Such an apologue is literally no exaggeration of the facts of English
+history. The rich did literally turn the poor out of the old guest house
+on to the road, briefly telling them that it was the road of
+progress. They did literally force them into factories and the modern
+wage-slavery, assuring them all the time that this was the only way to
+wealth and civilization. Just as they had dragged the rustic from the
+convent food and ale by saying that the streets of heaven were paved
+with gold, so now they dragged him from the village food and ale by
+telling him that the streets of London were paved with gold. As he
+entered the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered the gloomy porch
+of Industrialism, being told that each of them was the gate of the
+future. Hitherto he has only gone from prison to prison, nay, into
+darkening prisons, for Calvinism opened one small window upon heaven.
+And now he is asked, in the same educated and authoritative tones, to
+enter another dark porch, at which he has to surrender, into unseen
+hands, his children, his small possessions and all the habits of his
+fathers.
+
+Whether this last opening be in truth any more inviting than the old
+openings of Puritanism and Industrialism can be discussed later. But
+there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is
+imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by
+an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and
+partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to "administer"
+Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in
+some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive
+to them. It will not be so hard as some innocent Socialists seem to
+suppose to induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to take over the milk supply as
+well as the stamp supply--at an increased salary. Mr. Bernard Shaw
+has remarked that rich men are better than poor men on parish councils
+because they are free from "financial timidity." Now, the English ruling
+class is quite free from financial timidity. The Duke of Sussex will be
+quite ready to be Administrator of Sussex at the same screw. Sir William
+Harcourt, that typical aristocrat, put it quite correctly. "We" (that
+is, the aristocracy) "are all Socialists now."
+
+But this is not the essential note on which I desire to end. My main
+contention is that, whether necessary or not, both Industrialism and
+Collectivism have been accepted as necessities--not as naked ideals or
+desires. Nobody liked the Manchester School; it was endured as the only
+way of producing wealth. Nobody likes the Marxian school; it is endured
+as the only way of preventing poverty. Nobody's real heart is in the
+idea of preventing a free man from owning his own farm, or an old woman
+from cultivating her own garden, any more than anybody's real heart was
+in the heartless battle of the machines. The purpose of this chapter
+is sufficiently served in indicating that this proposal also is a pis
+aller, a desperate second best--like teetotalism. I do not propose to
+prove here that Socialism is a poison; it is enough if I maintain that
+it is a medicine and not a wine.
+
+The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families
+free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic,
+of one man one house--this remains the real vision and magnet of
+mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less
+human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman
+who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one;
+Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's
+desire.
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO. IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN
+
+
+
+
+I. THE CHARM OF JINGOISM
+
+I have cast about widely to find a title for this section; and I confess
+that the word "Imperialism" is a clumsy version of my meaning. But
+no other word came nearer; "Militarism" would have been even more
+misleading, and "The Superman" makes nonsense of any discussion that he
+enters. Perhaps, upon the whole, the word "Caesarism" would have been
+better; but I desire a popular word; and Imperialism (as the reader will
+perceive) does cover for the most part the men and theories that I mean
+to discuss.
+
+This small confusion is increased, however, by the fact that I do also
+disbelieve in Imperialism in its popular sense, as a mode or theory
+of the patriotic sentiment of this country. But popular Imperialism in
+England has very little to do with the sort of Caesarean Imperialism
+I wish to sketch. I differ from the Colonial idealism of Rhodes' and
+Kipling; but I do not think, as some of its opponents do, that it is
+an insolent creation of English harshness and rapacity. Imperialism,
+I think, is a fiction created, not by English hardness, but by English
+softness; nay, in a sense, even by English kindness.
+
+The reasons for believing in Australia are mostly as sentimental as the
+most sentimental reasons for believing in heaven. New South Wales
+is quite literally regarded as a place where the wicked cease from
+troubling and the weary are at rest; that is, a paradise for uncles
+who have turned dishonest and for nephews who are born tired. British
+Columbia is in strict sense a fairyland, it is a world where a magic and
+irrational luck is supposed to attend the youngest sons. This strange
+optimism about the ends of the earth is an English weakness; but to show
+that it is not a coldness or a harshness it is quite sufficient to
+say that no one shared it more than that gigantic English
+sentimentalist--the great Charles Dickens. The end of "David
+Copperfield" is unreal not merely because it is an optimistic ending,
+but because it is an Imperialistic ending. The decorous British
+happiness planned out for David Copperfield and Agnes would be
+embarrassed by the perpetual presence of the hopeless tragedy of Emily,
+or the more hopeless farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily and
+Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony where changes come over them
+with no conceivable cause, except the climate. The tragic woman becomes
+contented and the comic man becomes responsible, solely as the result of
+a sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.
+
+To Imperialism in the light political sense, therefore, my only
+objection is that it is an illusion of comfort; that an Empire whose
+heart is failing should be specially proud of the extremities, is to me
+no more sublime a fact than that an old dandy whose brain is gone should
+still be proud of his legs. It consoles men for the evident ugliness and
+apathy of England with legends of fair youth and heroic strenuousness in
+distant continents and islands. A man can sit amid the squalor of Seven
+Dials and feel that life is innocent and godlike in the bush or on the
+veldt. Just so a man might sit in the squalor of Seven Dials and feel
+that life was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbiton. Brixton and
+Surbiton are "new"; they are expanding; they are "nearer to nature,"
+in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile by mile. The only
+objection is the objection of fact. The young men of Brixton are not
+young giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not all pagan poets, singing
+with the sweet energy of the spring. Nor are the people of the Colonies
+when you meet them young giants or pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys
+who have lost their last music of real things by getting out of the
+sound of Bow Bells. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, a man of real though decadent
+genius, threw a theoretic glamour over them which is already fading. Mr.
+Kipling is, in a precise and rather startling sense, the exception that
+proves the rule. For he has imagination, of an oriental and cruel kind,
+but he has it, not because he grew up in a new country, but precisely
+because he grew up in the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted in a
+past--an Asiatic past. He might never have written "Kabul River" if he
+had been born in Melbourne.
+
+I say frankly, therefore (lest there should be any air of evasion), that
+Imperialism in its common patriotic pretensions appears to me both weak
+and perilous. It is the attempt of a European country to create a kind
+of sham Europe which it can dominate, instead of the real Europe, which
+it can only share. It is a love of living with one's inferiors. The
+notion of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and for oneself is a
+dream that has haunted every Christian nation in a different shape
+and in almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish are a consistent and
+conservative people; therefore they embodied that attempt at Empire
+in long and lingering dynasties. The French are a violent people, and
+therefore they twice conquered that Empire by violence of arms. The
+English are above all a poetical and optimistic people; and therefore
+their Empire is something vague and yet sympathetic, something distant
+and yet dear. But this dream of theirs of being powerful in the
+uttermost places, though a native weakness, is still a weakness in them;
+much more of a weakness than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon. If
+ever we were in collision with our real brothers and rivals we should
+leave all this fancy out of account. We should no more dream of pitting
+Australian armies against German than of pitting Tasmanian sculpture
+against French. I have thus explained, lest anyone should accuse me of
+concealing an unpopular attitude, why I do not believe in Imperialism as
+commonly understood. I think it not merely an occasional wrong to other
+peoples, but a continuous feebleness, a running sore, in my own. But it
+is also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism that is an amiable
+delusion partly in order to show how different it is from the deeper,
+more sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I have been forced to
+call Imperialism for the convenience of this chapter. In order to get to
+the root of this evil and quite un-English Imperialism we must cast
+back and begin anew with a more general discussion of the first needs of
+human intercourse.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+II. WISDOM AND THE WEATHER
+
+It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace.
+Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering
+and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to
+everybody, can stop one's heart with the very thought of them. But while
+this is granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely true
+that these universal things are strange; it is moreover true that they
+are subtle. In the last analysis most common things will be found to
+be highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the
+difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they will
+call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct
+of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of
+describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That
+there is a strong physical element in both romance and the Memento
+Mori makes them if possible more baffling than if they had been wholly
+intellectual. No man could say exactly how much his sexuality was
+colored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere boyish itch for
+irrevocable adventures, like running away to sea. No man could say how
+far his animal dread of the end was mixed up with mystical traditions
+touching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things are
+animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties
+begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part and
+go home to their tea.
+
+It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore
+it is not refined; that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-room
+song of my youth which began "In the gloaming, O, my darling," was
+vulgar enough as a song; but the connection between human passion and
+the twilight is none the less an exquisite and even inscrutable thing.
+Or to take another obvious instance: the jokes about a mother-in-law
+are scarcely delicate, but the problem of a mother-in-law is extremely
+delicate. A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the
+twilight. She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things--law and a
+mother. The caricatures misrepresent her; but they arise out of a real
+human enigma. "Comic Cuts" deals with the difficulty wrongly, but it
+would need George Meredith at his best to deal with the difficulty
+rightly. The nearest statement of the problem perhaps is this: it is not
+that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice.
+
+But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have
+all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument,
+the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it "the very
+nadir and scoff of good conversationalists." Now there are very deep
+reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well
+as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. First of
+all it is a gesture of primeval worship. The sky must be invoked; and
+to begin everything with the weather is a sort of pagan way of beginning
+everything with prayer. Jones and Brown talk about the weather: but so
+do Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary idea
+in politeness--equality. For the very word politeness is only the Greek
+for citizenship. The word politeness is akin to the word policeman: a
+charming thought. Properly understood, the citizen should be more polite
+than the gentleman; perhaps the policeman should be the most courtly and
+elegant of the three. But all good manners must obviously begin with
+the sharing of something in a simple style. Two men should share an
+umbrella; if they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share
+the rain, with all its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy.
+"For He maketh His sun to shine...." This is the second element in the
+weather; its recognition of human equality in that we all have our hats
+under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the universe. Arising out of
+this is the third wholesome strain in the custom; I mean that it begins
+with the body and with our inevitable bodily brotherhood. All true
+friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of
+rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are
+already prigs and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each human soul has
+in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation.
+Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.
+
+Briefly, in the mere observation "a fine day" there is the whole great
+human idea of comradeship. Now, pure comradeship is another of those
+broad and yet bewildering things. We all enjoy it; yet when we come to
+talk about it we almost always talk nonsense, chiefly because we suppose
+it to be a simpler affair than it is. It is simple to conduct; but it is
+by no means simple to analyze. Comradeship is at the most only one half
+of human life; the other half is Love, a thing so different that one
+might fancy it had been made for another universe. And I do not mean
+mere sex love; any kind of concentrated passion, maternal love, or
+even the fiercer kinds of friendship are in their nature alien to pure
+comradeship. Both sides are essential to life; and both are known in
+differing degrees to everybody of every age or sex. But very broadly
+speaking it may still be said that women stand for the dignity of love
+and men for the dignity of comradeship. I mean that the institution
+would hardly be expected if the males of the tribe did not mount guard
+over it. The affections in which women excel have so much more authority
+and intensity that pure comradeship would be washed away if it were not
+rallied and guarded in clubs, corps, colleges, banquets and regiments.
+Most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband
+not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love,
+seeking to destroy Comradeship.
+
+All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have
+remarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has
+a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we are
+all under the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the
+"winged rock" of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bond
+as the essential one; for comradeship is simply humanity seen in that
+one aspect in which men are really equal. The old writers were entirely
+wise when they talked of the equality of men; but they were also very
+wise in not mentioning women. Women are always authoritarian; they
+are always above or below; that is why marriage is a sort of poetical
+see-saw. There are only three things in the world that women do not
+understand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But men
+(a class little understood in the modern world) find these things the
+breath of their nostrils; and our most learned ladies will not even
+begin to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of cool
+camaraderie. Lastly, it contains the third quality of the weather, the
+insistence upon the body and its indispensable satisfaction. No one
+has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a
+certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious
+materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the
+thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at
+root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its
+very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness
+there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into
+the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of
+the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that
+are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and
+comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.
+
+The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word
+"affinity." There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members,
+men and women, call each other "Comrade." I have no serious emotions,
+hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit: at the worst it is
+conventionality, and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only
+to point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers
+together, lilies and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and call
+them all daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word
+daisy. If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if
+you include under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable
+prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman who baffles him,
+the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl who is impudent and
+innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most
+mountainous love; if you are going to call all these comradeship, you
+will gain nothing, you will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and
+universal and open; but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is
+obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection;
+it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who
+has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is
+impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is
+strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it "speaking to the
+question." Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are
+speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five
+best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he
+explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are
+all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men
+are all impersonal; that is to say, republican. No one remembers after
+a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a
+visionary multitude; a mystical cloud, that is called the club.
+
+It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential to
+the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers.
+It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech; it must lead to these
+things so long as it is honorable; comradeship must be in some degree
+ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils
+are stopped with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must be
+physically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt
+sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left
+entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure; and that is the
+strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young
+idealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash and
+living on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the
+wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live without
+women, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of
+artificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army; and an army
+also has to be in many ways monastic; only that it has celibacy without
+chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These
+have a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the
+savage common-sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sort
+of man that is not afraid of women.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+III. THE COMMON VISION
+
+Now this masculine love of an open and level camaraderie is the life
+within all democracies and attempts to govern by debate; without it the
+republic would be a dead formula. Even as it is, of course, the spirit
+of democracy frequently differs widely from the letter, and a pothouse
+is often a better test than a Parliament. Democracy in its human sense
+is not arbitrament by the majority; it is not even arbitrament by
+everybody. It can be more nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody. I
+mean that it rests on that club habit of taking a total stranger for
+granted, of assuming certain things to be inevitably common to yourself
+and him. Only the things that anybody may be presumed to hold have the
+full authority of democracy. Look out of the window and notice the
+first man who walks by. The Liberals may have swept England with an
+over-whelming majority; but you would not stake a button that the man is
+a Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools and respected in all law
+courts; but you would not bet a straw that he believes in the Bible. But
+you would bet your week's wages, let us say, that he believes in wearing
+clothes. You would bet that he believes that physical courage is a fine
+thing, or that parents have authority over children. Of course, he might
+be the millionth man who does not believe these things; if it comes
+to that, he might be the Bearded Lady dressed up as a man. But these
+prodigies are quite a different thing from any mere calculation
+of numbers. People who hold these views are not a minority, but a
+monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have full democratic
+authority the only test is this test of anybody. What you would observe
+before any newcomer in a tavern--that is the real English law. The first
+man you see from the window, he is the King of England.
+
+The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay of
+democracy, has undoubtedly weakened this masculine spirit of equality. I
+remember that a roomful of Socialists literally laughed when I told them
+that there were no two nobler words in all poetry than Public House.
+They thought it was a joke. Why they should think it a joke, since they
+want to make all houses public houses, I cannot imagine. But if anyone
+wishes to see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is necessary (to
+males, at least) he can find it as well as anywhere in the great
+old tavern disputes which come down to us in such books as Boswell's
+Johnson. It is worth while to mention that one name especially because
+the modern world in its morbidity has done it a strange injustice.
+The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was "harsh and despotic." It was
+occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic. Johnson was not in the
+least a despot; Johnson was a demagogue, he shouted against a shouting
+crowd. The very fact that he wrangled with other people is proof that
+other people were allowed to wrangle with him. His very brutality was
+based on the idea of an equal scrimmage, like that of football. It
+is strictly true that he bawled and banged the table because he was
+a modest man. He was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed or even
+overlooked. Addison had exquisite manners and was the king of his
+company; he was polite to everybody; but superior to everybody;
+therefore he has been handed down forever in the immortal insult of
+Pope--
+
+"Like Cato, give his little Senate laws And sit attentive to his own
+applause."
+
+Johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of Irish
+Member in his own Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was
+hated. Johnson was an insolent equal and therefore was loved by all who
+knew him, and handed down in a marvellous book, which is one of the mere
+miracles of love.
+
+This doctrine of equality is essential to conversation; so much may be
+admitted by anyone who knows what conversation is. Once arguing at a
+table in a tavern the most famous man on earth would wish to be
+obscure, so that his brilliant remarks might blaze like the stars on the
+background of his obscurity. To anything worth calling a man nothing can
+be conceived more cold or cheerless than to be king of your company. But
+it may be said that in masculine sports and games, other than the great
+game of debate, there is definite emulation and eclipse. There is
+indeed emulation, but this is only an ardent sort of equality. Games are
+competitive, because that is the only way of making them exciting. But
+if anyone doubts that men must forever return to the ideal of equality,
+it is only necessary to answer that there is such a thing as a handicap.
+If men exulted in mere superiority, they would seek to see how far such
+superiority could go; they would be glad when one strong runner came
+in miles ahead of all the rest. But what men like is not the triumph of
+superiors, but the struggle of equals; and, therefore, they introduce
+even into their competitive sports an artificial equality. It is sad
+to think how few of those who arrange our sporting handicaps can be
+supposed with any probability to realize that they are abstract and even
+severe republicans.
+
+No; the real objection to equality and self-rule has nothing to do with
+any of these free and festive aspects of mankind; all men are democrats
+when they are happy. The philosophic opponent of democracy would
+substantially sum up his position by saying that it "will not work."
+Before going further, I will register in passing a protest against the
+assumption that working is the one test of humanity. Heaven does not
+work; it plays. Men are most themselves when they are free; and if I
+find that men are snobs in their work but democrats on their holidays,
+I shall take the liberty to believe their holidays. But it is this
+question of work which really perplexes the question of equality; and
+it is with that that we must now deal. Perhaps the truth can be put
+most pointedly thus: that democracy has one real enemy, and that is
+civilization. Those utilitarian miracles which science has made are
+anti-democratic, not so much in their perversion, or even in
+their practical result, as in their primary shape and purpose. The
+Frame-Breaking Rioters were right; not perhaps in thinking that machines
+would make fewer men workmen; but certainly in thinking that machines
+would make fewer men masters. More wheels do mean fewer handles;
+fewer handles do mean fewer hands. The machinery of science must be
+individualistic and isolated. A mob can shout round a palace; but a mob
+cannot shout down a telephone. The specialist appears and democracy is
+half spoiled at a stroke.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE INSANE NECESSITY
+
+The common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture is that
+men have slowly worked their way out of inequality into a state
+of comparative equality. The truth is, I fancy, almost exactly the
+opposite. All men have normally and naturally begun with the idea of
+equality; they have only abandoned it late and reluctantly, and always
+for some material reason of detail. They have never naturally felt that
+one class of men was superior to another; they have always been driven
+to assume it through certain practical limitations of space and time.
+
+For example, there is one element which must always tend to
+oligarchy--or rather to despotism; I mean the element of hurry. If the
+house has caught fire a man must ring up the fire engines; a committee
+cannot ring them up. If a camp is surprised by night somebody must give
+the order to fire; there is no time to vote it. It is solely a question
+of the physical limitations of time and space; not at all of any mental
+limitations in the mass of men commanded. If all the people in the house
+were men of destiny it would still be better that they should not
+all talk into the telephone at once; nay, it would be better that the
+silliest man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an army actually
+consisted of nothing but Hanibals and Napoleons, it would still be
+better in the case of a surprise that they should not all give orders
+together. Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave the
+orders. Thus, we see that merely military subordination, so far from
+resting on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men.
+Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion that somebody is always
+right when everybody is wrong, and that we must discover and crown that
+somebody. On the contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfully
+rapid circumstances, one can trust anybody so long as he is not
+everybody. The military spirit does not mean (as Carlyle fancied)
+obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the military
+spirit means, if anything, obeying the weakest and stupidest man,
+obeying him merely because he is a man, and not a thousand men.
+Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is
+only servility.
+
+Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europe
+is not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not a
+system of spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the
+caste system of India, or even like the old Greek distinction
+between free men and slaves. It is simply the remains of a military
+organization, framed partly to sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partly
+to break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam. The word Duke simply
+means Colonel, just as the word Emperor simply means Commander-in-Chief.
+The whole story is told in the single title of Counts of the Holy Roman
+Empire, which merely means officers in the European army against
+the contemporary Yellow Peril. Now in an army nobody ever dreams of
+supposing that difference of rank represents a difference of moral
+reality. Nobody ever says about a regiment, "Your Major is very humorous
+and energetic; your Colonel, of course, must be even more humorous
+and yet more energetic." No one ever says, in reporting a mess-room
+conversation, "Lieutenant Jones was very witty, but was naturally
+inferior to Captain Smith." The essence of an army is the idea of
+official inequality, founded on unofficial equality. The Colonel is not
+obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the Colonel. Such
+was probably the spirit of the system of dukes and counts when it first
+arose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome. With
+the decline of those necessities it has gradually ceased to have
+meaning as a military organization, and become honeycombed with unclean
+plutocracy. Even now it is not a spiritual aristocracy--it is not so bad
+as all that. It is simply an army without an enemy--billeted upon the
+people.
+
+Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as comrade-like aspect; and the
+case of militarism is not the only case of such specialist submission.
+The tinker and tailor, as well as the soldier and sailor, require a
+certain rigidity of rapidity of action: at least, if the tinker is not
+organized that is largely why he does not tink on any large scale. The
+tinker and tailor often represent the two nomadic races in Europe: the
+Gipsy and the Jew; but the Jew alone has influence because he alone
+accepts some sort of discipline. Man, we say, has two sides, the
+specialist side where he must have subordination, and the social side
+where he must have equality. There is a truth in the saying that ten
+tailors go to make a man; but we must remember also that ten Poets
+Laureate or ten Astronomers Royal go to make a man, too. Ten million
+tradesmen go to make Man himself; but humanity consists of tradesmen
+when they are not talking shop. Now the peculiar peril of our time,
+which I call for argument's sake Imperialism or Caesarism, is the
+complete eclipse of comradeship and equality by specialism and
+domination.
+
+There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable--personal
+government and impersonal government. If my anarchic friends will not
+have rules--they will have rulers. Preferring personal government, with
+its tact and flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring impersonal
+government, with its dogmas and definitions, is called Republicanism.
+Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called Bosh; at
+least, I know no more philosophic word for it. You can be guided by
+the shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler, or by the equality and
+ascertained justice of one rule; but you must have one or the other,
+or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess. Now men in their aspect of
+equality and debate adore the idea of rules; they develop and complicate
+them greatly to excess. A man finds far more regulations and definitions
+in his club, where there are rules, than in his home, where there is
+a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance,
+carries this mummery to the point of a methodical madness. The whole
+system is stiff with rigid unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis
+Carroll. You would think the Speaker would speak; therefore he is mostly
+silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it
+on to go away; therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on
+to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a man must call his own father
+"my right honorable friend the member for West Birmingham." These are,
+perhaps, fantasies of decay: but fundamentally they answer a masculine
+appetite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal; men
+feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is a wild
+fairness in the thing--as there is in tossing up.
+
+Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack such cases
+as the Commons it is always on the points (perhaps the few points) where
+the Commons are right. They denounce the House as the Talking-Shop,
+and complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one
+respect in which the Commons are actually like the Common People. If
+they love leisure and long debate, it is because all men love it; that
+they really represent England. There the Parliament does approach to the
+virile virtues of the pothouse.
+
+The real truth is that adumbrated in the introductory section when we
+spoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the sense
+of counsel and community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure,
+laughter, loud and equal argument; but there stands a specter in our
+hall. We are conscious of the towering modern challenge that is called
+specialism or cut-throat competition--Business. Business will
+have nothing to do with leisure; business will have no truck with
+comradeship; business will pretend to no patience with all the legal
+fictions and fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects its
+egalitarian ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged in the agreeable
+and typical task of sacking his own father, will certainly not refer
+to him as the right honorable clerk from the Laburnum Road, Brixton.
+Therefore there has arisen in modern life a literary fashion devoting
+itself to the romance of business, to great demigods of greed and to
+fairyland of finance. This popular philosophy is utterly despotic and
+anti-democratic; this fashion is the flower of that Caesarism against
+which I am concerned to protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in the
+possession of a brain of steel. The fact that the real millionaire is
+rather more often strong in the possession of a head of wood, does not
+alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential argument is
+"Specialists must be despots; men must be specialists. You cannot have
+equality in a soap factory; so you cannot have it anywhere. You cannot
+have comradeship in a wheat corner; so you cannot have it at all. We
+must have commercial civilization; therefore we must destroy democracy."
+I know that plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to soar to such
+examples as soap or wheat. They generally confine themselves, with fine
+freshness of mind, to a comparison between the state and a ship. One
+anti-democratic writer remarked that he would not like to sail in a
+vessel in which the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the captain. It
+might easily be urged in answer that many a ship (the Victoria, for
+instance) was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a cabin-boy
+could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply; the essential fallacy
+is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were all
+born in a state; we were not all born on a ship; like some of our great
+British bankers. A ship still remains a specialist experiment, like
+a diving-bell or a flying ship: in such peculiar perils the need for
+promptitude constitutes the need for autocracy. But we live and die in
+the vessel of the state; and if we cannot find freedom camaraderie and
+the popular element in the state, we cannot find it at all. And the
+modern doctrine of commercial despotism means that we shall not find it
+at all. Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot (it
+says) be run without the whole brutal business of bossing and sacking,
+"too old at forty" and all the rest of the filth. And they must be run,
+and therefore we call on Caesar. Nobody but the Superman could descend
+to do such dirty work.
+
+Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is wrong. This is the huge
+modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead
+of altering human conditions to fit the human soul. If soap boiling
+is really inconsistent with brotherhood, so much the worst for
+soap-boiling, not for brotherhood. If civilization really cannot get on
+with democracy, so much the worse for civilization, not for democracy.
+Certainly, it would be far better to go back to village communes, if
+they really are communes. Certainly, it would be better to do without
+soap rather than to do without society. Certainly, we would sacrifice
+all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science and
+frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come
+to us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will
+be necessary; I only say it will be easy.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE. FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN
+
+
+
+
+I. THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE
+
+It will be better to adopt in this chapter the same process that
+appeared a piece of mental justice in the last. My general opinions on
+the feminine question are such as many suffragists would warmly approve;
+and it would be easy to state them without any open reference to the
+current controversy. But just as it seemed more decent to say first
+that I was not in favor of Imperialism even in its practical and popular
+sense, so it seems more decent to say the same of Female Suffrage, in
+its practical and popular sense. In other words, it is only fair to
+state, however hurriedly, the superficial objection to the Suffragettes
+before we go on to the really subtle questions behind the Suffrage.
+
+Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection
+to the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On the
+contrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a
+military thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is that
+it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under
+certain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes the
+government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of
+all war, is peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in
+this soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women; and,
+secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise something
+else; which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not create
+revolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between
+these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and
+finality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only
+produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about
+the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that
+Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone
+conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King's
+head once. But you can knock off the King's hat any number of times.
+Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion
+takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new
+order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew
+itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only
+wanted to be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any
+government arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a
+proceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion.
+
+It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the Suffragettes that makes
+their superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none of
+the advantages of ultimate violence; it does not afford a test. War is
+a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and
+unanswerably--numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two
+urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are
+ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may
+maintain mere disorder forever. There is also, of course, in the case of
+these women, the further falsity that is introduced by their sex. It is
+false to state the matter as a mere brutal question of strength. If his
+muscles give a man a vote, then his horse ought to have two votes and
+his elephant five votes. The truth is more subtle than that; it is that
+bodily outbreak is a man's instinctive weapon, like the hoofs to the
+horse or the tusks to the elephant. All riot is a threat of war; but the
+woman is brandishing a weapon she can never use. There are many weapons
+that she could and does use. If (for example) all the women nagged for
+a vote they would get it in a month. But there again, one must remember,
+it would be necessary to get all the women to nag. And that brings us to
+the end of the political surface of the matter. The working objection
+to the Suffragette philosophy is simply that overmastering millions of
+women do not agree with it. I am aware that some maintain that women
+ought to have votes whether the majority wants them or not; but this is
+surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal democracy to the
+destruction of actual democracy. What should the mass of women decide
+if they do not decide their general place in the State? These people
+practically say that females may vote about everything except about
+Female Suffrage.
+
+But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and
+possibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the
+matter in a slower and more sympathetic style; attempt to trace the real
+roots of woman's position in the western state, and the causes of our
+existing traditions or perhaps prejudices upon the point. And for this
+purpose it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic, the
+mere Suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which, though much
+more old, are, I think, considerably more fresh.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+II. THE UNIVERSAL STICK
+
+Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or
+four things that have been with man almost since his beginning; which at
+least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let
+me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner,
+or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one
+speciality; that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral
+things is a universal thing; made to supply many different needs; and
+while tottering pedants nose about to find the cause and origin of some
+old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins.
+The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut
+throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects. The stick
+is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down; partly to
+point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with like a balancing
+pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to kill with like a
+club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel; an elongated finger and an
+extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with the fire; about which
+the strangest modern views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be
+current that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to
+light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins,
+to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their
+children, to make checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their
+hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man's house and that
+hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die.
+
+Now it is the great mark of our modernity that people are always
+proposing substitutes for these old things; and these substitutes always
+answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man
+will wave a cigarette instead of a stick; he will cut his pencil with
+a little screwing pencil-sharpener instead of a knife; and he will even
+boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have
+my doubts about pencil-sharpeners even for sharpening pencils; and about
+hot water pipes even for heat. But when we think of all those other
+requirements that these institutions answered, there opens before us the
+whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision a
+world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener; where
+a man must learn single-stick with a cigarette; where a man must try to
+toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the
+surface of hot water pipes.
+
+The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a comparison
+between the ancient and universal things and the modern and specialist
+things. The object of a theodolite is to lie level; the object of a
+stick is to swing loose at any angle; to whirl like the very wheel of
+liberty. The object of a lancet is to lance; when used for slashing,
+gashing, ripping, lopping off heads and limbs, it is a disappointing
+instrument. The object of an electric light is merely to light (a
+despicable modesty); and the object of an asbestos stove... I wonder
+what is the object of an asbestos stove? If a man found a coil of rope
+in a desert he could at least think of all the things that can be done
+with a coil of rope; and some of them might even be practical. He could
+tow a boat or lasso a horse. He could play cat's-cradle, or pick oakum.
+He could construct a rope-ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her
+boxes for a travelling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he
+could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveller
+who should find a telephone in the desert. You can telephone with a
+telephone; you cannot do anything else with it. And though this is
+one of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one degree from its full
+delirium when there is nobody to answer you. The contention is, in
+brief, that you must pull up a hundred roots, and not one, before you
+uproot any of these hoary and simple expedients. It is only with great
+difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see that
+any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method has
+four or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions are
+quadrupeds; and some of them are centipedes.
+
+Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation of
+a general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six
+purposes; everywhere now there are six small things; or, rather (and
+there is the trouble), there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, we
+will not say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless or
+inexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone; I may any
+day thank God for the lancet; and there is none of these brilliant and
+narrow inventions (except, of course, the asbestos stove) which might
+not be at some moment necessary and lovely. But I do not think the most
+austere upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old,
+many-sided institutions an element of unity and universality which
+may well be preserved in its due proportion and place. Spiritually,
+at least, it will be admitted that some all-round balance is needed to
+equalize the extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to carry
+the parable of the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, the
+immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant
+of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an
+unalterable cosmos and also with the practical rules of the rapid and
+thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and told
+fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the
+nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streets
+were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing
+ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The large uses of religion have
+been broken up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearth
+have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The romance
+of ritual and colored emblem has been taken over by that narrowest of
+all trades, modern art (the sort called art for art's sake), and men are
+in modern practice informed that they may use all symbols so long as
+they mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience has been dried
+up into the science of ethics; which may well be called decency for
+decency's sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic
+flower. The cry to the dim gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology,
+has become mere Psychical Research. Everything has been sundered from
+everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of
+specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song, on the ground
+that they spoil each other; and I did once meet a man who openly
+advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all one
+wild divorce court; nevertheless, there are many who still hear in
+their souls the thunder of authority of human habit; those whom Man hath
+joined let no man sunder.
+
+This book must avoid religion, but there must (I say) be many, religious
+and irreligious, who will concede that this power of answering many
+purposes was a sort of strength which should not wholly die out of our
+lives. As a part of personal character, even the moderns will agree that
+many-sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked.
+This balance and universality has been the vision of many groups of
+men in many ages. It was the Liberal Education of Aristotle; the
+jack-of-all-trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends; the
+august amateurishness of the Cavalier Person of Quality like Sir William
+Temple or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared in literature in our
+time in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible
+music by Walter Pater and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt Whitman.
+But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve this
+literal universality, because of the nature of their work in the world.
+Not, let it be noted, because of the existence of their work. Leonardo
+da Vinci must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand, many a
+government office clerk, village constable or elusive plumber may do
+(to all human appearance) no work at all, and yet show no signs of the
+Aristotelian universalism. What makes it difficult for the average man
+to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he
+has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold
+him in a more or less ruthless society. This is generally true of males
+from the first hunter to the last electrical engineer; each has not
+merely to act, but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter
+before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters.
+The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is
+outstripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of the
+human mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the
+main, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs
+the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed
+can be so limiting as that awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go
+beyond his last. So the largest and wildest shots of our world are but
+in one direction and with a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot go
+beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short; the astronomer
+cannot go beyond his telescope and his telescope goes such a little way.
+All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain and
+seen the horizon like a single ring and who then descend down different
+paths towards different towns, traveling slow or fast. It is right;
+there must be people traveling to different towns; there must be
+specialists; but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankind
+be specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be
+monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be
+monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman
+and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things,
+that the Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Jill-of-all-trades. It has
+decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalism
+shall be divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men and
+wisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom; that is one of the few
+sad and certain things.
+
+But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity (or common-sense)
+must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the
+frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality. A man must be
+partly a one-idead man, because he is a one-weaponed man--and he is
+flung naked into the fight. The world's demand comes to him direct; to
+his wife indirectly. In short, he must (as the books on Success say)
+give "his best"; and what a small part of a man "his best" is! His
+second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin
+he must fiddle for life; he must not remember that he is a fine fourth
+bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand
+at whist, a gun, and an image of God.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+III. THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY
+
+And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to
+develop one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called
+our competitive system, but would equally exist under any rationally
+conceivable kind of Collectivism. Unless the Socialists are frankly
+ready for a fall in the standard of violins, telescopes and electric
+lights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the individual that
+he shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It was
+only by men being in some degree specialist that there ever were any
+telescopes; they must certainly be in some degree specialist in order to
+keep them going. It is not by making a man a State wage-earner that you
+can prevent him thinking principally about the very difficult way he
+earns his wages. There is only one way to preserve in the world that
+high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfils the old vision
+of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected
+half of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles
+indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in
+every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who
+does not "give her best," but gives her all.
+
+Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need
+not blaze like electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point is
+that it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is
+like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire
+is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook: not to
+excel in cooking, but to cook; to cook better than her husband who is
+earning the coke by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the
+fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not original
+and artistic tales, but tales--better tales than would probably be
+told by a first-class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to
+illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the
+wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking
+stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything
+like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty
+of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not
+a competitive cook; a school mistress, but not a competitive
+schoolmistress; a house-decorator but not a competitive house-decorator;
+a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not
+one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her
+second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in
+what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression, of women. Women
+were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary,
+they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside
+the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse
+of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman
+that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come
+almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.
+But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly and
+almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that nothing but her
+universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is the
+substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position.
+I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured; but I
+doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the
+absurd modern attempt to make them domestic empresses and competitive
+clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition
+women had a harder time than men; that is why we take off our hats. I do
+not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating; but
+I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do
+not pause even to deny that woman was a servant; but at least she was a
+general servant.
+
+The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands
+for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must
+return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its
+way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way
+back is the lunatic's. There must in every machine be a part that moves
+and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes
+a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns
+hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the
+center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience,
+and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of
+a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She
+has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the
+happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put
+upon, and the bully from putting upon others. The French King wrote--
+
+     "Toujours femme varie Bien fol qui s'y fie,"
+
+but the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why we
+always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its
+antidote in common-sense is not (as the moderns seem to think) to be
+in the position of a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position
+of Aristotle or (at the lowest) Herbert Spencer, to be a universal
+morality, a complete system of thought. The slave flatters; the complete
+moralist rebukes. It is, in short, to be a Trimmer in the true sense of
+that honorable term; which for some reason or other is always used in a
+sense exactly opposite to its own. It seems really to be supposed that
+a Trimmer means a cowardly person who always goes over to the stronger
+side. It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes over
+to the weaker side; like one who trims a boat by sitting where there are
+few people seated. Woman is a trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous
+and romantic trade.
+
+The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing
+it to be conceded that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in
+dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of
+special talent and of general sanity (since they are genuinely difficult
+to combine completely in one mind), it is not difficult to see why the
+line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became
+the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior.
+Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the woman who
+frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially
+prominent in experiment and adventure; and second, that the same natural
+operation surrounded her with very young children, who require to be
+taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught
+a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly,
+woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time
+when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there
+aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a
+specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment
+(even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more
+spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and
+oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race
+has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to
+keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this
+domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply
+give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination
+conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called
+drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word.
+If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges
+in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge
+behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more
+heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul,
+then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be
+Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors
+and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys,
+boots, sheets, cakes and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area,
+teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how
+this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow
+it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about
+the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about
+the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and
+narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious,
+but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs.
+Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its
+smallness.
+
+But though the essential of the woman's task is universality, this does
+not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely
+wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than
+man that she is only one half of humanity; but she has expressed it (if
+one may say so of a lady) by getting her teeth into the two or three
+things which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in
+parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has
+arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason
+that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman
+was set to guard. One's own children, one's own altar, ought to be a
+matter of principle--or if you like, a matter of prejudice. On the
+other hand, who wrote Junius's Letters ought not to be a principle or
+a prejudice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent
+inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl secretary to a league to show
+that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it,
+too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their
+office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk
+and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish
+wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they
+do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT
+
+The larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things
+slightly more intoxicating to the eye than the desk or the typewriter;
+and it cannot be denied that in defending these, women have developed
+the quality called prejudice to a powerful and even menacing degree. But
+these prejudices will always be found to fortify the main position of
+the woman, that she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat within
+small compass but on all sides. On the one or two points on which she
+really misunderstands the man's position, it is almost entirely in order
+to preserve her own. The two points on which woman, actually and of
+herself, is most tenacious may be roughly summarized as the ideal of
+thrift and the ideal of dignity.
+
+Unfortunately for this book it is written by a male, and these two
+qualities, if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But
+if we are to settle the sex question at all fairly, all males must make
+an imaginative attempt to enter into the attitude of all good women
+toward these two things. The difficulty exists especially, perhaps, in
+the thing called thrift; we men have so much encouraged each other in
+throwing money right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort
+of chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a broader
+and more candid consideration the case scarcely stands so.
+
+Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than
+extravagance. Heaven knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the
+matter; for I cannot clearly remember saving a half-penny ever since I
+was born. But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the
+more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic
+because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is
+prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of
+indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic
+thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the
+new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral
+menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could
+undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader
+genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use by-products; when
+science found that colors could be made out of coaltar, she made her
+greatest and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human
+soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to use the by-products, or, in
+other words, to rummage in the dustbin.
+
+A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke or
+expedient got up with such materials as may be found in a private house
+on a rainy day. A man's definite daily work is generally run with such
+rigid convenience of modern science that thrift, the picking up of
+potential helps here and there, has almost become unmeaning to him. He
+comes across it most (as I say) when he is playing some game within four
+walls; when in charades, a hearthrug will just do for a fur coat, or a
+tea-cozy just do for a cocked hat; when a toy theater needs timber
+and cardboard, and the house has just enough firewood and just enough
+bandboxes. This is the man's occasional glimpse and pleasing parody of
+thrift. But many a good housekeeper plays the same game every day with
+ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but on the
+contrary, because she is magnanimous; because she wishes her creative
+mercy to be over all her works, that not one sardine should be
+destroyed, or cast as rubbish to the void, when she has made the pile
+complete.
+
+The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and
+other things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yet
+come into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and
+liberal also. There is never a war between two sects, but only between
+two universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is the
+collision of one cosmos with another. So in a smaller way it must be
+first made clear that this female economic ideal is a part of that
+female variety of outlook and all-round art of life which we have
+already attributed to the sex: thrift is not a small or timid or
+provincial thing; it is part of that great idea of the woman watching
+on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for
+everything. For in the average human house there is one hole by which
+money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with
+the one hole, woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginess
+of a woman is a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the less true
+that it brings her into conflict with the special kind of spiritual
+breadth that belongs to the males of the tribe. It brings her into
+conflict with that shapeless cataract of Comradeship, of chaotic
+feasting and deafening debate, which we noted in the last section. The
+very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the more
+into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the other
+for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moral
+weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the
+male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; he
+always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always
+thinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor
+districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get their
+husbands home, simple minded "social workers" always imagine that every
+husband is a tragic drunkard and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It
+never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under coarser
+conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does when she tries
+to get the men from arguing over the cigars to come and gossip over the
+teacups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money
+that is wasted in beer; they are exasperated also at the amount of time
+that is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth but
+what cometh out the mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man. They
+will raise against an argument (like their sisters of all ranks) the
+ridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man wanted
+to make a body-slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick.
+But the real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the
+real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality
+of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but
+there is the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and
+where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to
+crush her, to produce a result; the coster does not argue with another
+coster in order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at once the sound
+of his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions and the sense of
+masculine society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness about
+the male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottomless bucket; thought
+plunges into a bottomless abyss. All this has set woman against the
+Public House--that is, against the Parliament House. She is there to
+prevent waste; and the "pub" and the parliament are the very palaces of
+waste. In the upper classes the "pub" is called the club, but that makes
+no more difference to the reason than it does to the rhyme. High and
+low, the woman's objection to the Public House is perfectly definite and
+rational, it is that the Public House wastes the energies that could be
+used on the private house.
+
+As it is about feminine thrift against masculine waste, so it is about
+feminine dignity against masculine rowdiness. The woman has a fixed
+and very well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners
+nobody else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity,
+and grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that there are
+many very polite men, but none that I ever heard of who were not either
+fascinating women or obeying them. But indeed the female ideal of
+dignity, like the female ideal of thrift, lies deeper and may easily
+be misunderstood. It rests ultimately on a strong idea of spiritual
+isolation; the same that makes women religious. They do not like being
+melted down; they dislike and avoid the mob. That anonymous quality we
+have remarked in the club conversation would be common impertinence in
+a case of ladies. I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her
+grand green drawing-room whether I believed in comradeship between
+the sexes, and why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and
+sincere answer "Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a
+comrade you would turn me out of the house." The only certain rule on
+this subject is always to deal with woman and never with women. "Women"
+is a profligate word; I have used it repeatedly in this chapter; but
+it always has a blackguard sound. It smells of oriental cynicism and
+hedonism. Every woman is a captive queen. But every crowd of women is
+only a harem broken loose.
+
+I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly all the women
+I have known. It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women
+individually; but I think it would be quite true to say that she detests
+them in a confused heap. And this is not because she despises her own
+sex, but because she respects it; and respects especially that sanctity
+and separation of each item which is represented in manners by the idea
+of dignity and in morals by the idea of chastity.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+V. THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE
+
+We hear much of the human error which accepts what is sham and what is
+real. But it is worth while to remember that with unfamiliar things
+we often mistake what is real for what is sham. It is true that a very
+young man may think the wig of an actress is her hair. But it is equally
+true that a child yet younger may call the hair of a negro his wig.
+Just because the woolly savage is remote and barbaric he seems to be
+unnaturally neat and tidy. Everyone must have noticed the same thing in
+the fixed and almost offensive color of all unfamiliar things, tropic
+birds and tropic blossoms. Tropic birds look like staring toys out of
+a toy-shop. Tropic flowers simply look like artificial flowers,
+like things cut out of wax. This is a deep matter, and, I think, not
+unconnected with divinity; but anyhow it is the truth that when we
+see things for the first time we feel instantly that they are fictive
+creations; we feel the finger of God. It is only when we are thoroughly
+used to them and our five wits are wearied, that we see them as wild and
+objectless; like the shapeless tree-tops or the shifting cloud. It is
+the design in Nature that strikes us first; the sense of the crosses and
+confusions in that design only comes afterwards through experience and
+an almost eerie monotony. If a man saw the stars abruptly by accident he
+would think them as festive and as artificial as a firework. We talk of
+the folly of painting the lily; but if we saw the lily without warning
+we should think that it was painted. We talk of the devil not being
+so black as he is painted; but that very phrase is a testimony to the
+kinship between what is called vivid and what is called artificial. If
+the modern sage had only one glimpse of grass and sky, he would say that
+grass was not as green as it was painted; that sky was not as blue as it
+was painted. If one could see the whole universe suddenly, it would look
+like a bright-colored toy, just as the South American hornbill looks
+like a bright-colored toy. And so they are--both of them, I mean.
+
+But it was not with this aspect of the startling air of artifice about
+all strange objects that I meant to deal. I mean merely, as a guide to
+history, that we should not be surprised if things wrought in fashions
+remote from ours seem artificial; we should convince ourselves that nine
+times out of ten these things are nakedly and almost indecently honest.
+You will hear men talk of the frosted classicism of Corneille or of the
+powdered pomposities of the eighteenth century, but all these phrases
+are very superficial. There never was an artificial epoch. There never
+was an age of reason. Men were always men and women women: and their two
+generous appetites always were the expression of passion and the
+telling of truth. We can see something stiff and quaint in their mode of
+expression, just as our descendants will see something stiff and quaint
+in our coarsest slum sketch or our most naked pathological play. But
+men have never talked about anything but important things; and the next
+force in femininity which we have to consider can be considered best
+perhaps in some dusty old volume of verses by a person of quality.
+
+The eighteenth century is spoken of as the period of artificiality, in
+externals at least; but, indeed, there may be two words about that. In
+modern speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort of
+deceit; and the eighteenth century was far too artificial to deceive.
+It cultivated that completest art that does not conceal the art. Its
+fashions and costumes positively revealed nature by allowing artifice;
+as in that obvious instance of a barbering that frosted every head with
+the same silver. It would be fantastic to call this a quaint humility
+that concealed youth; but, at least, it was not one with the evil pride
+that conceals old age. Under the eighteenth century fashion people did
+not so much all pretend to be young, as all agree to be old. The same
+applies to the most odd and unnatural of their fashions; they were
+freakish, but they were not false. A lady may or may not be as red as
+she is painted, but plainly she was not so black as she was patched.
+
+But I only introduce the reader into this atmosphere of the older and
+franker fictions that he may be induced to have patience for a moment
+with a certain element which is very common in the decoration and
+literature of that age and of the two centuries preceding it. It is
+necessary to mention it in such a connection because it is exactly one
+of those things that look as superficial as powder, and are really as
+rooted as hair.
+
+In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs, those of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries especially, you will find a perpetual reproach
+against woman in the matter of her coldness; ceaseless and stale similes
+that compare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosom
+to snow. Now most of us have always supposed these old and iterant
+phrases to be a mere pattern of dead words, a thing like a cold
+wall-paper. Yet I think those old cavalier poets who wrote about the
+coldness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth missed in nearly all
+the realistic novels of today. Our psychological romancers perpetually
+represent wives as striking terror into their husbands by rolling on the
+floor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture or poisoning
+the coffee; all this upon some strange fixed theory that women are what
+they call emotional. But in truth the old and frigid form is much nearer
+to the vital fact. Most men if they spoke with any sincerity would
+agree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship,
+courtship or marriage, was not so much being emotional as being
+unemotional.
+
+There is an awful armor of ice which may be the legitimate protection of
+a more delicate organism; but whatever be the psychological explanation
+there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the
+female in anger is noli me tangere. I take this as the most obvious and
+at the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality
+in the female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almost
+immeasurably misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cant
+of immoralists. The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live
+in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we
+will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whatever
+else it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets and a million lovers
+have called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the classical, and is
+at least the opposite of the grotesque. And since we are talking here
+chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of
+the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is
+highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere for
+emancipation, that a little while ago it was common for an "advanced"
+woman to claim the right to wear trousers; a right about as grotesque as
+the right to wear a false nose. Whether female liberty is much advanced
+by the act of wearing a skirt on each leg I do not know; perhaps Turkish
+women might offer some information on the point. But if the western
+woman walks about (as it were) trailing the curtains of the harem
+with her, it is quite certain that the woven mansion is meant for
+a perambulating palace, not for a perambulating prison. It is quite
+certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission; it
+can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberately
+dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave; no judge would appear
+covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, as
+judges, priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long, trailing robes
+of female dignity The whole world is under petticoat government; for
+even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.
+
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VI. THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE
+
+We say then that the female holds up with two strong arms these two
+pillars of civilization; we say also that she could do neither, but for
+her position; her curious position of private omnipotence, universality
+on a small scale. The first element is thrift; not the destructive
+thrift of the miser, but the creative thrift of the peasant; the second
+element is dignity, which is but the expression of sacred personality
+and privacy. Now I know the question that will be abruptly and
+automatically asked by all that know the dull tricks and turns of the
+modern sexual quarrel. The advanced person will at once begin to argue
+about whether these instincts are inherent and inevitable in woman
+or whether they are merely prejudices produced by her history and
+education. Now I do not propose to discuss whether woman could now be
+educated out of her habits touching thrift and dignity; and that for two
+excellent reasons. First it is a question which cannot conceivably ever
+find any answer: that is why modern people are so fond of it. From the
+nature of the case it is obviously impossible to decide whether any of
+the peculiarities of civilized man have been strictly necessary to his
+civilization. It is not self-evident (for instance), that even the habit
+of standing upright was the only path of human progress. There might
+have been a quadrupedal civilization, in which a city gentleman put on
+four boots to go to the city every morning. Or there might have been
+a reptilian civilization, in which he rolled up to the office on his
+stomach; it is impossible to say that intelligence might not have
+developed in such creatures. All we can say is that man as he is
+walks upright; and that woman is something almost more upright than
+uprightness.
+
+And the second point is this: that upon the whole we rather prefer women
+(nay, even men) to walk upright; so we do not waste much of our noble
+lives in inventing any other way for them to walk. In short, my second
+reason for not speculating upon whether woman might get rid of these
+peculiarities, is that I do not want her to get rid of them; nor does
+she. I will not exhaust my intelligence by inventing ways in which
+mankind might unlearn the violin or forget how to ride horses; and the
+art of domesticity seems to me as special and as valuable as all the
+ancient arts of our race. Nor do I propose to enter at all into those
+formless and floundering speculations about how woman was or is regarded
+in the primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savage
+countries which we cannot understand. Even if these people segregated
+their women for low or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons
+barbaric; and I am haunted with a tenacious suspicion that these
+people's feelings were really, under other forms, very much the same as
+ours. Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across
+an island and sees the squaw digging in the fields while the man is
+playing a flute; and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of
+creation and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might
+see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brixton, merely because
+women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are
+at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be
+in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work
+because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the
+woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed. I
+do not affirm that this is the whole truth, but I do affirm that we have
+too little comprehension of the souls of savages to know how far it
+is untrue. It is the same with the relations of our hasty and surface
+science, with the problem of sexual dignity and modesty. Professors find
+all over the world fragmentary ceremonies in which the bride affects
+some sort of reluctance, hides from her husband, or runs away from
+him. The professor then pompously proclaims that this is a survival of
+Marriage by Capture. I wonder he never says that the veil thrown over
+the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether women ever were
+married by capture I think they pretended to be; as they do still.
+
+It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift
+and dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness,
+the wastefulness, and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of masculine
+companionship. Wise women allow for the thing; foolish women try to
+crush it; but all women try to counteract it, and they do well. In many
+a home all round us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is
+reversed. The queen is in the counting-house, counting out the money.
+The king is in the parlor, eating bread and honey. But it must be
+strictly understood that the king has captured the honey in some heroic
+wars. The quarrel can be found in moldering Gothic carvings and in
+crabbed Greek manuscripts. In every age, in every land, in every tribe
+and village, has been waged the great sexual war between the Private
+House and the Public House. I have seen a collection of mediaeval
+English poems, divided into sections such as "Religious Carols,"
+"Drinking Songs," and so on; and the section headed, "Poems of Domestic
+Life" consisted entirely (literally, entirely) of the complaints
+of husbands who were bullied by their wives. Though the English was
+archaic, the words were in many cases precisely the same as those which
+I have heard in the streets and public houses of Battersea, protests on
+behalf of an extension of time and talk, protests against the nervous
+impatience and the devouring utilitarianism of the female. Such, I say,
+is the quarrel; it can never be anything but a quarrel; but the aim of
+all morals and all society is to keep it a lovers' quarrel.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VII. THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN
+
+But in this corner called England, at this end of the century, there has
+happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance,
+this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two
+sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the
+twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public
+surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the
+man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is
+really more important than the private house; that politics are not
+(as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are
+a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the
+talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable;
+that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence,
+surely) that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used
+to our wives and mothers, and grandmothers, and great aunts all
+pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink and party
+politics. And now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning
+that all the women were wrong and all the men were right; humbly
+imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court, from which she
+may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her erring sisters
+had so thoughtlessly scorned.
+
+Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us. Males,
+like females, in the course of that old fight between the public and
+private house, had indulged in overstatement and extravagance, feeling
+that they must keep up their end of the see-saw. We told our wives that
+Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never crossed
+our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that everyone must
+have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said that no one must
+have a pipe in the drawing room. In both cases the idea was the same.
+"It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide there
+is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely
+necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary
+to the country except that the men should be men and the women women.
+We knew this; we thought the women knew it even more clearly; and we
+thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women
+have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed
+when we said it. The solemnity of politics; the necessity of votes;
+the necessity of Huggins; the necessity of Buggins; all these flow in a
+pellucid stream from the lips of all the suffragette speakers. I suppose
+in every fight, however old, one has a vague aspiration to conquer; but
+we never wanted to conquer women so completely as this. We only expected
+that they might leave us a little more margin for our nonsense; we never
+expected that they would accept it seriously as sense. Therefore I am
+all at sea about the existing situation; I scarcely know whether to be
+relieved or enraged by this substitution of the feeble platform lecture
+for the forcible curtain-lecture. I am lost without the trenchant and
+candid Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know what to do with the prostrate
+and penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern woman has taken
+us all so much by surprise that it is desirable to pause a moment, and
+collect our wits about what she is really saying.
+
+As I have already remarked, there is one very simple answer to all this;
+these are not the modern women, but about one in two thousand of the
+modern women. This fact is important to a democrat; but it is of very
+little importance to the typically modern mind. Both the characteristic
+modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference
+is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might
+be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any
+minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. But in
+this state of things the democratic argument obviously falls out for the
+moment; and we are bound to take the prominent minority, merely
+because it is prominent. Let us eliminate altogether from our minds the
+thousands of women who detest this cause, and the millions of women who
+have hardly heard of it. Let us concede that the English people itself
+is not and will not be for a very long time within the sphere of
+practical politics. Let us confine ourselves to saying that these
+particular women want a vote and to asking themselves what a vote is. If
+we ask these ladies ourselves what a vote is, we shall get a very
+vague reply. It is the only question, as a rule, for which they are not
+prepared. For the truth is that they go mainly by precedent; by the mere
+fact that men have votes already. So far from being a mutinous movement,
+it is really a very Conservative one; it is in the narrowest rut of
+the British Constitution. Let us take a little wider and freer sweep of
+thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and meaning of this
+odd business called voting.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS
+
+Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and
+all nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly fallacious
+than to fancy that in ruder or simpler ages ruling, judging and
+punishing appeared perfectly innocent and dignified. These things were
+always regarded as the penalties of the Fall; as part of the humiliation
+of mankind, as bad in themselves. That the king can do no wrong was
+never anything but a legal fiction; and it is a legal fiction still. The
+doctrine of Divine Right was not a piece of idealism, but rather a piece
+of realism, a practical way of ruling amid the ruin of humanity; a very
+pragmatist piece of faith. The religious basis of government was not so
+much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not
+put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly
+institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were
+never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary
+evils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern
+business man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's very
+horrible; but how else can society be conducted?" A mediaeval scholastic
+regarded the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a modern
+business man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death:
+"It is a shocking torture; but can you organize a painless world?" It
+is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without the
+question by hunger as we have done without the question by fire. It
+is equally possible, for the matter of that, that a future society may
+reestablish legal torture with the whole apparatus of rack and fagot.
+The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague savor
+of science, a method which it calls "the third degree." This is simply
+the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which is surely uncommonly
+close to their extortion by bodily pain. And this is legal and
+scientific in America. Amateur ordinary America, of course, simply burns
+people alive in broad daylight, as they did in the Reformation Wars. But
+though some punishments are more inhuman than others there is no such
+thing as humane punishment. As long as nineteen men claim the right in
+any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him even
+mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole proceeding must be a humiliating
+one for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have always
+felt this lies in the fact that the headsman and the hangman, the
+jailors and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but
+with contempt; while all kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights
+and swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with indulgence or even
+admiration. To kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully
+was unpardonable. The most bare-faced duelist might almost brandish his
+weapon. But the executioner was always masked.
+
+This is the first essential element in government, coercion; a necessary
+but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say
+that government rests on force they give an admirable instance of the
+foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on
+force. Government is force; it rests on consent or a conception of
+justice. A king or a community holding a certain thing to be abnormal,
+evil, uses the general strength to crush it out; the strength is his
+tool, but the belief is his only sanction. You might as well say that
+glass is the real reason for telescopes. But arising from whatever
+reason the act of government is coercive and is burdened with all the
+coarse and painful qualities of coercion. And if anyone asks what is the
+use of insisting on the ugliness of this task of state violence since
+all mankind is condemned to employ it, I have a simple answer to that.
+It would be useless to insist on it if all humanity were condemned to
+it. But it is not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long as half
+of humanity is kept out of it.
+
+All government then is coercive; we happen to have created a government
+which is not only coercive; but collective. There are only two kinds
+of government, as I have already said, the despotic and the democratic.
+Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot; that most effective
+kind of riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of
+aristocracy, sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed
+for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental
+virtues, courage, variety and adventure. There is no case anywhere of
+aristocracy having established a universal and applicable order, as
+despots and democracies have often done; as the last Caesars created
+the Roman law, as the last Jacobins created the Code Napoleon. With
+the first of these elementary forms of government, that of the king or
+chieftain, we are not in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned.
+We shall return to it later when we remark how differently mankind
+has dealt with female claims in the despotic as against the democratic
+field. But for the moment the essential point is that in self-governing
+countries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion. The
+abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million fists and kicked
+by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flogged him; if a man
+is hanged, we all hanged him. That is the only possible meaning of
+democracy, which can give any meaning to the first two syllables
+and also to the last two. In this sense each citizen has the high
+responsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war, to
+be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a
+republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+IX. SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS
+
+When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against Female Suffrage
+keeps women out of activity, social influence and citizenship, let us
+a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it actually does
+keep her out of. It does definitely keep her out of the collective act
+of coercion; the act of punishment by a mob. The human tradition does
+say that, if twenty men hang a man from a tree or lamp-post, they
+shall be twenty men and not women. Now I do not think any reasonable
+Suffragist will deny that exclusion from this function, to say the least
+of it, might be maintained to be a protection as well as a veto. No
+candid person will wholly dismiss the proposition that the idea of
+having a Lord Chancellor but not a Lady Chancellor may at least be
+connected with the idea of having a headsman but not a headswoman, a
+hangman but not a hangwoman. Nor will it be adequate to answer (as is
+so often answered to this contention) that in modern civilization women
+would not really be required to capture, to sentence, or to slay; that
+all this is done indirectly, that specialists kill our criminals as they
+kill our cattle. To urge this is not to urge the reality of the vote,
+but to urge its unreality. Democracy was meant to be a more direct way
+of ruling, not a more indirect way; and if we do not feel that we are
+all jailers, so much the worse for us, and for the prisoners. If it is
+really an unwomanly thing to lock up a robber or a tyrant, it ought to
+be no softening of the situation that the woman does not feel as if she
+were doing the thing that she certainly is doing. It is bad enough that
+men can only associate on paper who could once associate in the street;
+it is bad enough that men have made a vote very much of a fiction. It
+is much worse that a great class should claim the vote be cause it is
+a fiction, who would be sickened by it if it were a fact. If votes for
+women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean what they were meant
+to mean. A woman can make a cross on a paper as well as a man; a child
+could do it as well as a woman; and a chimpanzee after a few lessons
+could do it as well as a child. But nobody ought to regard it merely
+as making a cross on paper; everyone ought to regard it as what it
+ultimately is, branding the fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow,
+signing the death warrant. Both men and women ought to face more fully
+the things they do or cause to be done; face them or leave off doing
+them.
+
+On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished, private
+executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things grossly
+unsuited to the moral sentiment of a society cannot be safely done in
+broad daylight; but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting
+heretics alive, in a private room. It is very likely (to speak in the
+manner foolishly called Irish) that if there were public executions
+there would be no executions. The old open-air punishments, the pillory
+and the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law; and in
+actual practice they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as
+well as rotten eggs; of crying "Hosannah" as well as "Crucify." But I
+do not like the public executioner being turned into the private
+executioner. I think it is a crooked oriental, sinister sort of
+business, and smells of the harem and the divan rather than of the forum
+and the market place. In modern times the official has lost all the
+social honor and dignity of the common hangman. He is only the bearer of
+the bowstring.
+
+Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity only in order
+to emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else
+from which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize the
+fact that the mere modern veiling of the brutality does not make
+the situation different, unless we openly say that we are giving the
+suffrage, not only because it is power but because it is not, or in
+other words, that women are not so much to vote as to play voting. No
+suffragist, I suppose, will take up that position; and a few suffragists
+will wholly deny that this human necessity of pains and penalties is
+an ugly, humiliating business, and that good motives as well as bad may
+have helped to keep women out of it. More than once I have remarked in
+these pages that female limitations may be the limits of a temple as
+well as of a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah. I
+noted it, I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress. In the
+same way it is not evidently irrational, if men decided that a woman,
+like a priest, must not be a shedder of blood.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+X. THE HIGHER ANARCHY
+
+But there is a further fact; forgotten also because we moderns forget
+that there is a female point of view. The woman's wisdom stands partly,
+not only for a wholesome hesitation about punishment, but even for a
+wholesome hesitation about absolute rules. There was something feminine
+and perversely true in that phrase of Wilde's, that people should not
+be treated as the rule, but all of them as exceptions. Made by a man the
+remark was a little effeminate; for Wilde did lack the masculine power
+of dogma and of democratic cooperation. But if a woman had said it
+it would have been simply true; a woman does treat each person as a
+peculiar person. In other words, she stands for Anarchy; a very ancient
+and arguable philosophy; not anarchy in the sense of having no customs
+in one's life (which is inconceivable), but anarchy in the sense of
+having no rules for one's mind. To her, almost certainly, are due all
+those working traditions that cannot be found in books, especially those
+of education; it was she who first gave a child a stuffed stocking
+for being good or stood him in the corner for being naughty. This
+unclassified knowledge is sometimes called rule of thumb and sometimes
+motherwit. The last phrase suggests the whole truth, for none ever
+called it fatherwit.
+
+Now anarchy is only tact when it works badly. Tact is only anarchy
+when it works well. And we ought to realize that in one half of
+the world--the private house--it does work well. We modern men are
+perpetually forgetting that the case for clear rules and crude penalties
+is not self-evident, that there is a great deal to be said for the
+benevolent lawlessness of the autocrat, especially on a small scale;
+in short, that government is only one side of life. The other half is
+called Society, in which women are admittedly dominant. And they have
+always been ready to maintain that their kingdom is better governed than
+ours, because (in the logical and legal sense) it is not governed at
+all. "Whenever you have a real difficulty," they say, "when a boy is
+bumptious or an aunt is stingy, when a silly girl will marry somebody,
+or a wicked man won't marry somebody, all your lumbering Roman Law and
+British Constitution come to a standstill. A snub from a duchess or a
+slanging from a fish-wife are much more likely to put things straight."
+So, at least, rang the ancient female challenge down the ages until the
+recent female capitulation. So streamed the red standard of the higher
+anarchy until Miss Pankhurst hoisted the white flag.
+
+It must be remembered that the modern world has done deep treason to the
+eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man
+must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic
+alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth.
+All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always a
+reaction from what went before. When you meet a modern man he is always
+coming from a place, not going to it. Thus, mankind has in nearly all
+places and periods seen that there is a soul and a body as plainly
+as that there is a sun and moon. But because a narrow Protestant sect
+called Materialists declared for a short time that there was no
+soul, another narrow Protestant sect called Christian Science is
+now maintaining that there is no body. Now just in the same way
+the unreasonable neglect of government by the Manchester School has
+produced, not a reasonable regard for government, but an unreasonable
+neglect of everything else. So that to hear people talk to-day one would
+fancy that every important human function must be organized and avenged
+by law; that all education must be state education, and all employment
+state employment; that everybody and everything must be brought to the
+foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet. But a somewhat more liberal
+and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross
+is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and
+independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters
+a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose. The huge
+fundamental function upon which all anthropology turns, that of sex
+and childbirth, has never been inside the political state, but always
+outside of it. The state concerned itself with the trivial question of
+killing people, but wisely left alone the whole business of getting them
+born. A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say that the government is
+an absent-minded and inconsistent person who occupies himself with
+providing for the old age of people who have never been infants. I will
+not deal here in any detail with the fact that some Eugenists have
+in our time made the maniacal answer that the police ought to control
+marriage and birth as they control labor and death. Except for this
+inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say I shall have to deal with
+later) all the Eugenists I know divide themselves into two sections:
+ingenious people who once meant this, and rather bewildered people who
+swear they never meant it--nor anything else. But if it be conceded
+(by a breezier estimate of men) that they do mostly desire marriage to
+remain free from government, it does not follow that they desire it to
+remain free from everything. If man does not control the marriage market
+by law, is it controlled at all? Surely the answer is broadly that man
+does not control the marriage market by law, but the woman does control
+it by sympathy and prejudice. There was until lately a law forbidding
+a man to marry his deceased wife's sister; yet the thing happened
+constantly. There was no law forbidding a man to marry his deceased
+wife's scullery-maid; yet it did not happen nearly so often. It did not
+happen because the marriage market is managed in the spirit and by the
+authority of women; and women are generally conservative where classes
+are concerned. It is the same with that system of exclusiveness by
+which ladies have so often contrived (as by a process of elimination)
+to prevent marriages that they did not want and even sometimes procure
+those they did. There is no need of the broad arrow and the fleur-de
+lis, the turnkey's chains or the hangman's halter. You need not strangle
+a man if you can silence him. The branded shoulder is less effective and
+final than the cold shoulder; and you need not trouble to lock a man in
+when you can lock him out.
+
+The same, of course, is true of the colossal architecture which we call
+infant education: an architecture reared wholly by women. Nothing can
+ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male
+child is born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staring
+at that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of
+the sexes. Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tom-boy;
+but every boy is brought up like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of
+femininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house;
+and even the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by being
+born. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but
+nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong
+to such a monster as man that was born of a man.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES
+
+But, indeed, with this educational matter I must of necessity embroil
+myself later. The fourth section of discussion is supposed to be about
+the child, but I think it will be mostly about the mother. In this
+place I have systematically insisted on the large part of life that is
+governed, not by man with his vote, but by woman with her voice, or more
+often, with her horrible silence. Only one thing remains to be added.
+In a sprawling and explanatory style has been traced out the idea
+that government is ultimately coercion, that coercion must mean cold
+definitions as well as cruel consequences, and that therefore there
+is something to be said for the old human habit of keeping one-half of
+humanity out of so harsh and dirty a business. But the case is stronger
+still.
+
+Voting is not only coercion, but collective coercion. I think Queen
+Victoria would have been yet more popular and satisfying if she had
+never signed a death warrant. I think Queen Elizabeth would have stood
+out as more solid and splendid in history if she had not earned (among
+those who happen to know her history) the nickname of Bloody Bess. I
+think, in short, that the great historic woman is more herself when she
+is persuasive rather than coercive. But I feel all mankind behind
+me when I say that if a woman has this power it should be despotic
+power--not democratic power. There is a much stronger historic argument
+for giving Miss Pankhurst a throne than for giving her a vote. She might
+have a crown, or at least a coronet, like so many of her supporters;
+for these old powers are purely personal and therefore female. Miss
+Pankhurst as a despot might be as virtuous as Queen Victoria, and she
+certainly would find it difficult to be as wicked as Queen Bess, but the
+point is that, good or bad, she would be irresponsible--she would not be
+governed by a rule and by a ruler. There are only two ways of governing:
+by a rule and by a ruler. And it is seriously true to say of a woman, in
+education and domesticity, that the freedom of the autocrat appears
+to be necessary to her. She is never responsible until she is
+irresponsible. In case this sounds like an idle contradiction, I
+confidently appeal to the cold facts of history. Almost every despotic
+or oligarchic state has admitted women to its privileges. Scarcely one
+democratic state has ever admitted them to its rights The reason is very
+simple: that something female is endangered much more by the violence
+of the crowd. In short, one Pankhurst is an exception, but a thousand
+Pankhursts are a nightmare, a Bacchic orgie, a Witches Sabbath. For in
+all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible
+in a herd.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+XII. THE MODERN SLAVE
+
+Now I have only taken the test case of Female Suffrage because it is
+topical and concrete; it is not of great moment for me as a political
+proposal. I can quite imagine anyone substantially agreeing with my
+view of woman as universalist and autocrat in a limited area; and still
+thinking that she would be none the worse for a ballot paper. The real
+question is whether this old ideal of woman as the great amateur is
+admitted or not. There are many modern things which threaten it much
+more than suffragism; notably the increase of self-supporting women,
+even in the most severe or the most squalid employments. If there be
+something against nature in the idea of a horde of wild women governing,
+there is something truly intolerable in the idea of a herd of tame women
+being governed. And there are elements in human psychology that make
+this situation particularly poignant or ignominous. The ugly exactitudes
+of business, the bells and clocks the fixed hours and rigid departments,
+were all meant for the male: who, as a rule, can only do one thing and
+can only with the greatest difficulty be induced to do that. If clerks
+do not try to shirk their work, our whole great commercial system breaks
+down. It is breaking down, under the inroad of women who are adopting
+the unprecedented and impossible course of taking the system seriously
+and doing it well. Their very efficiency is the definition of their
+slavery. It is generally a very bad sign when one is trusted very much
+by one's employers. And if the evasive clerks have a look of being
+blackguards, the earnest ladies are often something very like blacklegs.
+But the more immediate point is that the modern working woman bears a
+double burden, for she endures both the grinding officialism of the
+new office and the distracting scrupulosity of the old home. Few men
+understand what conscientiousness is. They understand duty, which
+generally means one duty; but conscientiousness is the duty of the
+universalist. It is limited by no work days or holidays; it is a
+lawless, limitless, devouring decorum. If women are to be subjected to
+the dull rule of commerce, we must find some way of emancipating them
+from the wild rule of conscience. But I rather fancy you will find it
+easier to leave the conscience and knock off the commerce. As it is, the
+modern clerk or secretary exhausts herself to put one thing straight in
+the ledger and then goes home to put everything straight in the house.
+
+This condition (described by some as emancipated) is at least the
+reverse of my ideal. I would give woman, not more rights, but more
+privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously
+prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in
+which she can be free. And with that we come to the last point of all;
+the point at which we can perceive the needs of women, like the rights
+of men, stopped and falsified by something which it is the object of
+this book to expose.
+
+The Feminist (which means, I think, one who dislikes the chief feminine
+characteristics) has heard my loose monologue, bursting all the time
+with one pent-up protest. At this point he will break out and say, "But
+what are we to do? There is modern commerce and its clerks; there is
+the modern family with its unmarried daughters; specialism is expected
+everywhere; female thrift and conscientiousness are demanded and
+supplied. What does it matter whether we should in the abstract prefer
+the old human and housekeeping woman; we might prefer the Garden of
+Eden. But since women have trades they ought to have trades unions.
+Since women work in factories, they ought to vote on factory-acts. If
+they are unmarried they must be commercial; if they are commercial they
+must be political. We must have new rules for a new world--even if it
+be not a better one." I said to a Feminist once: "The question is not
+whether women are good enough for votes: it is whether votes are good
+enough for women." He only answered: "Ah, you go and say that to the
+women chain-makers on Cradley Heath."
+
+Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy of
+Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must
+grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some
+time ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost
+our way we must lose our map also; and because we have missed our ideal,
+we must forget it. "There are numbers of excellent people who do not
+think votes unfeminine; and there may be enthusiasts for our beautiful
+modern industry who do not think factories unfeminine." But if these
+things are unfeminine it is no answer to say that they fit into each
+other. I am not satisfied with the statement that my daughter must have
+unwomanly powers because she has unwomanly wrongs. Industrial soot and
+political printer's ink are two blacks which do not make a white. Most
+of the Feminists would probably agree with me that womanhood is under
+shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. But I want to destroy the
+tyranny. They want to destroy womanhood. That is the only difference.
+
+Whether we can recover the clear vision of woman as a tower with
+many windows, the fixed eternal feminine from which her sons, the
+specialists, go forth; whether we can preserve the tradition of a
+central thing which is even more human than democracy and even
+more practical than politics; whether, in word, it is possible to
+re-establish the family, freed from the filthy cynicism and cruelty of
+the commercial epoch, I shall discuss in the last section of this book.
+But meanwhile do not talk to me about the poor chain-makers on Cradley
+Heath. I know all about them and what they are doing. They are engaged
+in a very wide-spread and flourishing industry of the present age. They
+are making chains.
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD
+
+
+
+
+I. THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY
+
+When I wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is
+needless to say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to answer
+and to criticise the book from the same disinterested and impartial
+standpoint from which Mr. Shaw had criticised the subject of it. I was
+not withheld by any feeling that the joke was getting a little
+obvious; for an obvious joke is only a successful joke; it is only the
+unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves with being subtle. The real
+reason why I did not answer Mr. Shaw's amusing attack was this: that one
+simple phrase in it surrendered to me all that I have ever wanted, or
+could want from him to all eternity. I told Mr. Shaw (in substance) that
+he was a charming and clever fellow, but a common Calvinist. He admitted
+that this was true, and there (so far as I am concerned) is an end of
+the matter. He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right in holding
+that "if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him." That is
+the fundamental and subterranean secret; that is the last lie in hell.
+
+The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about whether
+some priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred. It is about
+whether any word or gesture is significant and sacred. To the Catholic
+every other daily act is dramatic dedication to the service of good
+or of evil. To the Calvinist no act can have that sort of solemnity,
+because the person doing it has been dedicated from eternity, and is
+merely filling up his time until the crack of doom. The difference
+is something subtler than plum-puddings or private theatricals; the
+difference is that to a Christian of my kind this short earthly life
+is intensely thrilling and precious; to a Calvinist like Mr. Shaw it is
+confessedly automatic and uninteresting. To me these threescore years
+and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession)
+they are only a long procession of the victors in laurels and the
+vanquished in chains. To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is
+the epilogue. Shavians think about the embryo; Spiritualists about the
+ghost; Christians about the man. It is as well to have these things
+clear.
+
+Now all our sociology and eugenics and the rest of it are not so much
+materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are chiefly occupied in
+educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a
+singular depression about what one can do with the populace, combined
+with a strange disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity.
+These essential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more
+liberal and universal parts of Calvinism, such as the belief in an
+intellectual design or an everlasting happiness. But though Mr. Shaw and
+his friends admit it is a superstition that a man is judged after death,
+they stick to their central doctrine, that he is judged before he is
+born.
+
+In consequence of this atmosphere of Calvinism in the cultured world of
+to-day, it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education
+with some mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal.
+All I shall have to say, however, on heredity will be very brief,
+because I shall confine myself to what is known about it, and that is
+very nearly nothing. It is by no means self-evident, but it is a current
+modern dogma, that nothing actually enters the body at birth except a
+life derived and compounded from the parents. There is at least quite as
+much to be said for the Christian theory that an element comes from
+God, or the Buddhist theory that such an element comes from previous
+existences. But this is not a religious work, and I must submit to those
+very narrow intellectual limits which the absence of theology always
+imposes. Leaving the soul on one side, let us suppose for the sake of
+argument that the human character in the first case comes wholly from
+parents; and then let us curtly state our knowledge rather than our
+ignorance.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+II. THE TRIBAL TERROR
+
+Popular science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild
+as old wives' tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, explained
+to millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle of
+blue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads; and so the
+child is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just as
+well have said that if the father has two legs and the mother has two
+legs, the child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a question
+of simple addition or simple division of a number of hard detached
+"qualities," like beads. It is an organic crisis and transformation of
+the most mysterious sort; so that even if the result is unavoidable, it
+will still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow
+beads; it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of which is green,
+a totally novel and unique experience, a new emotion. A man might live
+in a complete cosmos of blue and yellow, like the "Edinburgh Review"; a
+man might never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire
+sky; and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green. If
+you paid a sovereign for a bluebell; if you spilled the mustard on the
+blue-books; if you married a canary to a blue baboon; there is nothing
+in any of these wild weddings that contains even a hint of green. Green
+is not a mental combination, like addition; it is a physical result
+like birth. So, apart from the fact that nobody ever really understands
+parents or children either, yet even if we could understand the parents,
+we could not make any conjecture about the children. Each time the force
+works in a different way; each time the constituent colors combine into
+a different spectacle. A girl may actually inherit her ugliness from
+her mother's good looks. A boy may actually get his weakness from his
+father's strength. Even if we admit it is really a fate, for us it must
+remain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvinists
+and materialists may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary
+debate. But considered in regard to its results there is no doubt about
+it. The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as
+lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a monstrosity.
+
+On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent
+ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral
+heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that
+is that one could calculate on them beforehand. There are six cases,
+say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of character
+as his grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhaps
+sixty. But there are not two cases, there is not one case, there are no
+cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather will
+have a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal with
+heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and the fulfillment of
+dreams. The things do happen, and when they happen we record them; but
+not even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreams
+and omens, is a barbaric notion; that is, not necessarily an untrue, but
+a dim, groping and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself
+a little more free from his family. Before Christianity these tales of
+tribal doom occupied the savage north; and since the Reformation and
+the revolt against Christianity (which is the religion of a civilized
+freedom) savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic
+novels and problem plays. The curse of Rougon-Macquart is as heathen and
+superstitious as the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well written.
+But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not
+irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half emotions that
+make life whole. The only essential of tragedy is that one should take
+it lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge rose to its highest in
+the madder novels of Zola (such as that called "The Human Beast", a
+gross libel on beasts as well as humanity), even then the application
+of the hereditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. The
+students of heredity are savages in this vital sense; that they stare
+back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice
+no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physical
+inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used except
+for special modern purposes, such as the endowment of research or the
+oppression of the poor.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+III. THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT
+
+After all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is only with
+the born child that anybody dares to deal; and the question is not
+eugenics but education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresome
+terminology of popular science, it is not a question of heredity but of
+environment. I will not needlessly complicate this question by urging
+at length that environment also is open to some of the objections and
+hesitations which paralyze the employment of heredity. I will merely
+suggest in passing that even about the effect of environment modern
+people talk much too cheerfully and cheaply. The idea that surroundings
+will mold a man is always mixed up with the totally different idea that
+they will mold him in one particular way. To take the broadest case,
+landscape no doubt affects the soul; but how it affects it is
+quite another matter. To be born among pine-trees might mean loving
+pine-trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriously
+mean never having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture of
+these or any degree of any of them. So that the scientific method here
+lacks a little in precision. I am not speaking without the book; on the
+contrary, I am speaking with the blue book, with the guide-book and the
+atlas. It may be that the Highlanders are poetical because they inhabit
+mountains; but are the Swiss prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It
+may be the Swiss have fought for freedom because they had hills; did the
+Dutch fight for freedom because they hadn't? Personally I should
+think it quite likely. Environment might work negatively as well as
+positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wild
+skyline, but be cause of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be
+fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because of
+it.
+
+I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in matters
+admittedly within its range, popular science goes a great deal too fast,
+and drops enormous links of logic. Nevertheless, it remains the working
+reality that what we have to deal with in the case of children is,
+for all practical purposes, environment; or, to use the older word,
+education. When all such deductions are made, education is at least
+a form of will-worship; not of cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a
+department that we can control; it does not merely darken us with the
+barbarian pessimism of Zola and the heredity-hunt. We shall certainly
+make fools of ourselves; that is what is meant by philosophy. But we
+shall not merely make beasts of ourselves; which is the nearest popular
+definition for merely following the laws of Nature and cowering under
+the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains much moonshine; but not
+of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots the slaves of a silver
+magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent arena there are fads,
+but not frenzies. Doubtless we shall often find a mare's nest; but it
+will not always be the nightmare's.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+IV. THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION
+
+When a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, a
+certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken by
+the superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened
+of sacred words and wearied of theology, if this largely unreasoning
+irritation against "dogma" did arise out of some ridiculous excess of
+such things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up
+a fine crop of cant for our descendants to grow tired of. Probably the
+word "education" will some day seem honestly as old and objectless as
+the word "justification" now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thought
+it frightfully funny that people should have fought about the difference
+between the "Homoousion" and the "Homoiousion." The time will come when
+somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered against Sectarian
+Education and also against Secular Education; that men of prominence and
+position actually denounced the schools for teaching a creed and also
+for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look rather
+alike; but they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed do
+not look alike, but they mean exactly the same thing. Creed happens to
+be the Latin for faith.
+
+Now having read numberless newspaper articles on education, and
+even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and
+indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I
+was born, about whether religion was part of education, about whether
+hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was
+inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on this
+recurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say that it was comparatively
+late in life that I saw the main fact about it.
+
+Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing.
+It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word
+like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may
+be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with
+definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles.
+Education is a word like "transmission" or "inheritance"; it is not an
+object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views
+or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial
+facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities;
+but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are
+education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior
+or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms.
+Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the
+General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong;
+in practice probably more educational. It is giving something--perhaps
+poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can
+be treason.
+
+This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored
+in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a
+little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast,
+to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to
+wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would
+teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme
+and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would
+abolish the boy's breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine;
+Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford
+would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically
+denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of
+these advanced views, not even Fagin's. But I do ask what, between the
+lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is
+not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus
+Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education
+plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between
+these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they
+share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of
+authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from
+education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated
+from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply
+a teacher who is not teaching.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+V. AN EVIL CRY
+
+The fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people
+something that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think
+it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious
+hotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air and
+freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can
+create what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course, no other
+general purpose than to point out that we cannot create anything good
+until we have conceived it. It is odd that these people, who in the
+matter of heredity are so sullenly attached to law, in the matter of
+environment seem almost to believe in miracle. They insist that nothing
+but what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies of
+the children. But they seem somehow to think that things can get into
+the heads of the children which were not in the heads of the parents,
+or, indeed, anywhere else.
+
+There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of
+the confusion. I mean the cry, "Save the children." It is, of course,
+part of that modern morbidity that insists on treating the State (which
+is the home of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic.
+This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist and other
+schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in
+a famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers, as men
+do in a shipwreck. That a human community might conceivably not be in a
+condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. This
+cry of "Save the children" has in it the hateful implication that it is
+impossible to save the fathers; in other words, that many millions of
+grown-up, sane, responsible and self-supporting Europeans are to be
+treated as dirt or debris and swept away out of the discussion; called
+dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead of private
+houses; called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work;
+called dullards if they still adhere to conventions, and called loafers
+if they still love liberty. Now I am concerned, first and last, to
+maintain that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the
+children; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save
+ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot
+free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is
+only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if
+it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that education is of
+all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save
+children; for they cannot remain children. By hypothesis we are teaching
+them to be men; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to
+others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves?
+
+I know that certain crazy pedants have attempted to counter this
+difficulty by maintaining that education is not instruction at all, does
+not teach by authority at all. They present the process as coming, not
+from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy.
+Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the
+dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish
+soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean
+collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this
+imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic
+secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn.
+The educator only draws out the child's own unapparent love of long
+division; only leads out the child's slightly veiled preference for milk
+pudding to tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation; I have
+heard the disgraceful suggestion that "educator," if applied to a Roman
+schoolmaster, did not mean leading our young functions into freedom; but
+only meant taking out little boys for a walk. But I am much more certain
+that I do not agree with the doctrine; I think it would be about as
+sane to say that the baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that the
+baby's educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creature
+a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing
+these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or
+it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the
+whole situation. You may indeed "draw out" squeals and grunts from the
+child by simply poking him and pulling him about, a pleasant but cruel
+pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and
+watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out
+of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the
+matter.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VI. AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE
+
+But the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of
+authority in education; it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say)
+that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be
+destroyed. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming
+a child's mind. In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself;
+for he hates something inseparable from human life. I only mentioned
+educere and the drawing out of the faculties in order to point out that
+even this mental trick does not avoid the inevitable idea of parental or
+scholastic authority. The educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and
+coercive as the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses.
+He decides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be
+developed. He does not (I suppose) draw out the neglected faculty of
+forgery. He does not (so far at least) lead out, with timid steps, a
+shy talent for torture. The only result of all this pompous and
+precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the
+instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes.
+Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is
+poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this
+intellectual violence. Education is violent; because it is creative.
+It is creative because it is human. It is as reckless as playing on the
+fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house.
+In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with
+life and growth. After that it is a trifling and even a jocular question
+whether we say of this tremendous tormentor, the artist Man, that he
+puts things into us like an apothecary, or draws things out of us, like
+a dentist.
+
+The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims the right to take
+his mother Nature under his control; he claims the right to make
+his child the Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creative
+authority of man, and the whole courageous raid which we call
+civilization wavers and falls to pieces. Now most modern freedom is at
+root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it
+is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw
+and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral
+responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild
+step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth
+of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an
+unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough
+that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this
+high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only
+excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so
+half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough
+to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the
+decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice it
+to say here that when I say that we should instruct our children, I mean
+that we should do it, not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes should
+do it. The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State,
+being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments
+to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through
+the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the
+marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught
+to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put
+first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to
+a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four
+actually has more experience, and has weathered the world longer, than
+the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having
+the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea;
+for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn
+something from experience. But this, as I say, is all due to the mere
+fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my system presupposes
+that men who govern themselves will govern their children. To-day we all
+use Popular Education as meaning education of the people. I wish I could
+use it as meaning education by the people.
+
+The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators do
+not avoid the violence of authority an inch more than the old school
+masters. Nay, it might be maintained that they avoid it less. The old
+village schoolmaster beat a boy for not learning grammar and sent him
+out into the playground to play anything he liked; or at nothing, if he
+liked that better. The modern scientific schoolmaster pursues him into
+the playground and makes him play at cricket, because exercise is so
+good for the health. The modern Dr. Busby is a doctor of medicine as
+well as a doctor of divinity. He may say that the good of exercise is
+self-evident; but he must say it, and say it with authority. It cannot
+really be self-evident or it never could have been compulsory. But this
+is in modern practice a very mild case. In modern practice the
+free educationists forbid far more things than the old-fashioned
+educationists. A person with a taste for paradox (if any such shameless
+creature could exist) might with some plausibility maintain concerning
+all our expansion since the failure of Luther's frank paganism and its
+replacement by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion has not
+been an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that less and less
+beautiful and humane things have been permitted. The Puritans destroyed
+images; the Rationalists forbade fairy tales. Count Tostoi practically
+issued one of his papal encyclicals against music; and I have heard of
+modern educationists who forbid children to play with tin soldiers. I
+remember a meek little madman who came up to me at some Socialist soiree
+or other, and asked me to use my influence (have I any influence?)
+against adventure stories for boys. It seems they breed an appetite for
+blood. But never mind that; one must keep one's temper in this madhouse.
+I need only insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation,
+are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments
+were often idiotic and cruel; though they are much more so in a country
+like England (where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishment
+and only a poor man receives it) than in countries with a clearer
+popular tradition--such as Russia. In Russia flogging is often inflicted
+by peasants on a peasant. In modern England flogging can only in
+practice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man. Thus only a
+few days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course) was
+sentenced to flogging and imprisonment for five years for having picked
+up a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d. I am entirely
+on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested against
+this almost bestial ignorance about boys. But I do think it a little
+unfair that these humanitarians, who excuse boys for being robbers,
+should denounce them for playing at robbers. I do think that those who
+understand a guttersnipe playing with a piece of coal might, by a sudden
+spurt of imagination, understand him playing with a tin soldier. To
+sum it up in one sentence: I think my meek little madman might have
+understood that there is many a boy who would rather be flogged, and
+unjustly flogged, than have his adventure story taken away.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VII. THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY
+
+In short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no it is
+as high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff with
+authority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that
+they are forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that
+the boy would think so. The average boy's impression certainly would
+be simply this: "If your father is a Methodist you must not play with
+soldiers on Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not play
+with them even on week days." All educationists are utterly dogmatic and
+authoritarian. You cannot have free education; for if you left a child
+free you would not educate him at all. Is there, then, no distinction
+or difference between the most hide-bound conventionalists and the most
+brilliant and bizarre innovators? Is there no difference between the
+heaviest heavy father and the most reckless and speculative maiden aunt?
+Yes; there is. The difference is that the heavy father, in his heavy
+way, is a democrat. He does not urge a thing merely because to his
+fancy it should be done; but, because (in his own admirable republican
+formula) "Everybody does it." The conventional authority does claim some
+popular mandate; the unconventional authority does not. The Puritan who
+forbids soldiers on Sunday is at least expressing Puritan opinion;
+not merely his own opinion. He is not a despot; he is a democracy, a
+tyrannical democracy, a dingy and local democracy perhaps; but one that
+could do and has done the two ultimate virile things--fight and appeal
+to God. But the veto of the new educationist is like the veto of
+the House of Lords; it does not pretend to be representative. These
+innovators are always talking about the blushing modesty of Mrs. Grundy.
+I do not know whether Mrs. Grundy is more modest than they are; but I am
+sure she is more humble.
+
+But there is a further complication. The more anarchic modern may again
+attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be
+an enlargement of the mind, an opening of all the organs of receptivity.
+Light (he says) should be brought into darkness; blinded and thwarted
+existences in all our ugly corners should merely be permitted to
+perceive and expand; in short, enlightenment should be shed over
+darkest London. Now here is just the trouble; that, in so far as this
+is involved, there is no darkest London. London is not dark at all; not
+even at night. We have said that if education is a solid substance, then
+there is none of it. We may now say that if education is an abstract
+expansion there is no lack of it. There is far too much of it. In fact,
+there is nothing else.
+
+There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only
+most people are educated wrong. The state schools were not the first
+schools, but among the last schools to be established; and London had
+been educating Londoners long before the London School Board. The error
+is a highly practical one. It is persistently assumed that unless
+a child is civilized by the established schools, he must remain a
+barbarian. I wish he did. Every child in London becomes a highly
+civilized person. But here are so many different civilizations, most of
+them born tired. Anyone will tell you that the trouble with the poor is
+not so much that the old are still foolish, but rather that the young
+are already wise. Without going to school at all, the gutter-boy would
+be educated. Without going to school at all, he would be over-educated.
+The real object of our schools should be not so much to suggest
+complexity as solely to restore simplicity. You will hear venerable
+idealists declare we must make war on the ignorance of the poor;
+but, indeed, we have rather to make war on their knowledge. Real
+educationists have to resist a kind of roaring cataract of culture. The
+truant is being taught all day. If the children do not look at the large
+letters in the spelling-book, they need only walk outside and look at
+the large letters on the poster. If they do not care for the colored
+maps provided by the school, they can gape at the colored maps provided
+by the Daily Mail. If they tire of electricity, they can take to
+electric trams. If they are unmoved by music, they can take to drink. If
+they will not work so as to get a prize from their school, they may work
+to get a prize from Prizy Bits. If they cannot learn enough about law
+and citizenship to please the teacher, they learn enough about them to
+avoid the policeman. If they will not learn history forwards from the
+right end in the history books, they will learn it backwards from the
+wrong end in the party newspapers. And this is the tragedy of the whole
+affair: that the London poor, a particularly quick-witted and civilized
+class, learn everything tail foremost, learn even what is right in the
+way of what is wrong. They do not see the first principles of law in a
+law book; they only see its last results in the police news. They do not
+see the truths of politics in a general survey. They only see the lies
+of politics, at a General Election.
+
+But whatever be the pathos of the London poor, it has nothing to do with
+being uneducated. So far from being without guidance, they are guided
+constantly, earnestly, excitedly; only guided wrong. The poor are not
+at all neglected, they are merely oppressed; nay, rather they are
+persecuted. There are no people in London who are not appealed to by the
+rich; the appeals of the rich shriek from every hoarding and shout
+from every hustings. For it should always be remembered that the queer,
+abrupt ugliness of our streets and costumes are not the creation of
+democracy, but of aristocracy. The House of Lords objected to the
+Embankment being disfigured by trams. But most of the rich men who
+disfigure the street-walls with their wares are actually in the House
+of Lords. The peers make the country seats beautiful by making the town
+streets hideous. This, however, is parenthetical. The point is, that the
+poor in London are not left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered
+with raucous and despotic advice. They are not like sheep without a
+shepherd. They are more like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are
+shouting at. All the newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the
+new medicines and new theologies, all the glare and blare of the gas and
+brass of modern times--it is against these that the national school must
+bear up if it can. I will not question that our elementary education is
+better than barbaric ignorance. But there is no barbaric ignorance. I
+do not doubt that our schools would be good for uninstructed boys. But
+there are no uninstructed boys. A modern London school ought not merely
+to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more rapid than ignorance and
+darkness. It must also be clearer than a picture postcard, cleverer than
+a Limerick competition, quicker than the tram, and kindlier than
+the tavern. The school, in fact, has the responsibility of universal
+rivalry. We need not deny that everywhere there is a light that must
+conquer darkness. But here we demand a light that can conquer light.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE BROKEN RAINBOW
+
+I will take one case that will serve both as symbol and example: the
+case of color. We hear the realists (those sentimental fellows) talking
+about the gray streets and the gray lives of the poor. But whatever
+the poor streets are they are not gray; but motley, striped, spotted,
+piebald and patched like a quilt. Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be
+monochrome; and there is nothing of the Celtic twilight about it. As a
+matter of fact, a London gutter-boy walks unscathed among furnaces of
+color. Watch him walk along a line of hoardings, and you will see him
+now against glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic forest; now black
+like a bird against the burning blue of the Midi; now passant across a
+field gules, like the golden leopards of England. He ought to understand
+the irrational rapture of that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about "that
+bluer blue, that greener green." There is no blue much bluer than
+Reckitt's Blue and no blacking blacker than Day and Martin's; no more
+emphatic yellow than that of Colman's Mustard. If, despite this chaos
+of color, like a shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is not
+exactly intoxicated with art and culture, the cause certainly does not
+lie in universal grayness or the mere starving of his senses. It lies in
+the fact that the colors are presented in the wrong connection, on the
+wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive. It is not colors he
+lacks, but a philosophy of colors. In short, there is nothing wrong with
+Reckitt's Blue except that it is not Reckitt's. Blue does not belong to
+Reckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to
+the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very
+large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about the
+iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury;
+a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special
+irony in these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to
+such very little meat. Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungent
+pleasure. But to look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who
+should swallow gallons of mustard. He would either die, or lose the
+taste of mustard altogether.
+
+Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings
+with those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals recorded
+their dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than
+a single sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold.
+The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature more
+hasty than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancient
+artist was serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving the
+lords. It is that the old artist contrived to convey an impression that
+colors really were significant and precious things, like jewels and
+talismanic stones. The color was often arbitrary; but it was always
+authoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was
+silver, if a cloud was scarlet, the artist managed to convey that these
+colors were important and almost painfully intense; all the red red-hot
+and all the gold tried in the fire. Now that is the spirit touching
+color which the schools must recover and protect if they are really to
+give the children any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing. It
+is not so much an indulgence in color; it is rather, if anything, a sort
+of fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in heraldry as straitly as a
+green field in peasant proprietorship. It would not fling away gold
+leaf any more than gold coin; it would not heedlessly pour out purple or
+crimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood.
+That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter; they
+have to teach people to relish colors like liquors. They have the heavy
+business of turning drunkards into wine tasters. If even the twentieth
+century succeeds in doing these things, it will almost catch up with the
+twelfth.
+
+The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life. Morris and the
+merely aesthetic mediaevalists always indicated that a crowd in the time
+of Chaucer would have been brightly clad and glittering, compared with
+a crowd in the time of Queen Victoria. I am not so sure that the real
+distinction is here. There would be brown frocks of friars in the first
+scene as well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second. There would be
+purple plumes of factory girls in the second scene as well as purple
+lenten vestments in the first. There would be white waistcoats against
+white ermine; gold watch chains against gold lions. The real difference
+is this: that the brown earth-color of the monk's coat was instinctively
+chosen to express labor and humility, whereas the brown color of the
+clerk's hat was not chosen to express anything. The monk did mean to say
+that he robed himself in dust. I am sure the clerk does not mean to say
+that he crowns himself with clay. He is not putting dust on his head, as
+the only diadem of man. Purple, at once rich and somber, does suggest a
+triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy. But the factory girl does not
+intend her hat to express a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy;
+far from it. White ermine was meant to express moral purity; white
+waistcoats were not. Gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity; gold
+watch chains do not. The point is not that we have lost the material
+hues, but that we have lost the trick of turning them to the best
+advantage. We are not like children who have lost their paint box and
+are left alone with a gray lead-pencil. We are like children who have
+mixed all the colors in the paint-box together and lost the paper of
+instructions. Even then (I do not deny) one has some fun.
+
+Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a pretty
+perfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals and
+especially with our modern education. It is the same with ethical
+education, economic education, every sort of education. The growing
+London child will find no lack of highly controversial teachers who
+will teach him that geography means painting the map red; that economics
+means taxing the foreigner, that patriotism means the peculiarly
+un-English habit of flying a flag on Empire Day. In mentioning these
+examples specially I do not mean to imply that there are no similar
+crudities and popular fallacies upon the other political side. I mention
+them because they constitute a very special and arresting feature of the
+situation. I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists;
+but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The modern Conservative
+no longer conserves. He is avowedly an innovator. Thus all the current
+defenses of the House of Lords which describe it as a bulwark against
+the mob, are intellectually done for; the bottom has fallen out of them;
+because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of the day, the
+House of Lords is a mob itself; and exceedingly likely to behave like
+one.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS
+
+Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our main
+conclusion. The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expansion,
+but very decidedly of selection--and rejection. The educationist must
+find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, it
+must still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it must
+be orthodox. The teacher may think it antiquated to have to decide
+precisely between the faith of Calvin and of Laud, the faith of Aquinas
+and of Swedenborg; but he still has to choose between the faith of
+Kipling and of Shaw, between the world of Blatchford and of General
+Booth. Call it, if you will, a narrow question whether your child shall
+be brought up by the vicar or the minister or the popish priest. You
+have still to face that larger, more liberal, more highly civilized
+question, of whether he shall be brought up by Harmsworth or by
+Pearson, by Mr. Eustace Miles with his Simple Life or Mr. Peter Keary
+with his Strenuous Life; whether he shall most eagerly read Miss Annie
+S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short, whether he shall end up in the
+mere violence of the S. D. F., or in the mere vulgarity of the Primrose
+League. They say that nowadays the creeds are crumbling; I doubt it, but
+at least the sects are increasing; and education must now be sectarian
+education, merely for practical purposes. Out of all this throng of
+theories it must somehow select a theory; out of all these thundering
+voices it must manage to hear a voice; out of all this awful and aching
+battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, it
+must manage somehow to trace and to track a star.
+
+I have spoken so far of popular education, which began too vague and
+vast and which therefore has accomplished little. But as it happens
+there is in England something to compare it with. There is an
+institution, or class of institutions, which began with the same popular
+object, which has since followed a much narrower object, but which had
+the great advantage that it did follow some object, unlike our modern
+elementary schools.
+
+In all these problems I should urge the solution which is positive,
+or, as silly people say, "optimistic." I should set my face, that is,
+against most of the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist.
+Most educators of the poor seem to think that they have to teach the
+poor man not to drink. I should be quite content if they teach him to
+drink; for it is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink
+that is accountable for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like
+some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public
+schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we
+should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working,
+but rather to make it work; not to shut up churches, but rather to
+open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of
+property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly
+universal and property decently proper.
+
+In many cases, let it be remembered, such action is not merely going
+back to the old ideal, but is even going back to the old reality. It
+would be a great step forward for the gin shop to go back to the inn. It
+is incontrovertibly true that to mediaevalize the public schools would
+be to democratize the public schools. Parliament did once really mean
+(as its name seems to imply) a place where people were allowed to talk.
+It is only lately that the general increase of efficiency, that is, of
+the Speaker, has made it mostly a place where people are prevented from
+talking. The poor do not go to the modern church, but they went to the
+ancient church all right; and if the common man in the past had a grave
+respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes
+had some of his own. I therefore can claim that I have no vulgar itch of
+innovation in anything I say about any of these institutions. Certainly
+I have none in that particular one which I am now obliged to pick out
+of the list; a type of institution to which I have genuine and personal
+reasons for being friendly and grateful: I mean the great Tudor
+foundations, the public schools of England. They have been praised for a
+great many things, mostly, I am sorry to say, praised by themselves and
+their children. And yet for some reason no one has ever praised them the
+one really convincing reason.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+X. THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
+
+The word success can of course be used in two senses. It may be used
+with reference to a thing serving its immediate and peculiar purpose,
+as of a wheel going around; or it can be used with reference to a thing
+adding to the general welfare, as of a wheel being a useful discovery.
+It is one thing to say that Smith's flying machine is a failure, and
+quite another to say that Smith has failed to make a flying machine.
+Now this is very broadly the difference between the old English public
+schools and the new democratic schools. Perhaps the old public schools
+are (as I personally think they are) ultimately weakening the country
+rather than strengthening it, and are therefore, in that ultimate sense,
+inefficient. But there is such a thing as being efficiently inefficient.
+You can make your flying ship so that it flies, even if you also make
+it so that it kills you. Now the public school system may not work
+satisfactorily, but it works; the public schools may not achieve what we
+want, but they achieve what they want. The popular elementary schools do
+not in that sense achieve anything at all. It is very difficult to point
+to any guttersnipe in the street and say that he embodies the ideal
+for which popular education has been working, in the sense that the
+fresh-faced, foolish boy in "Etons" does embody the ideal for which the
+headmasters of Harrow and Winchester have been working. The aristocratic
+educationists have the positive purpose of turning out gentlemen, and
+they do turn out gentlemen, even when they expel them. The popular
+educationists would say that they had the far nobler idea of turning
+out citizens. I concede that it is a much nobler idea, but where are the
+citizens? I know that the boy in "Etons" is stiff with a rather silly
+and sentimental stoicism, called being a man of the world. I do not
+fancy that the errand-boy is rigid with that republican stoicism that
+is called being a citizen. The schoolboy will really say with fresh
+and innocent hauteur, "I am an English gentleman." I cannot so easily
+picture the errand-boy drawing up his head to the stars and answering,
+"Romanus civis sum." Let it be granted that our elementary teachers are
+teaching the very broadest code of morals, while our great headmasters
+are teaching only the narrowest code of manners. Let it be granted
+that both these things are being taught. But only one of them is being
+learned.
+
+It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage
+to bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never
+fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a real
+sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strange
+inversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for,
+but does get what he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much
+longer and reshapes the world much more than the actualities by which he
+attempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter, which he
+thought so practical. What endures is the spirit, which he felt to be
+unattainable and even unutterable. It is exactly his schemes that are
+not fulfilled; it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled. Thus the ten
+or twelve paper constitutions of the French Revolution, which seemed so
+business-like to the framers of them, seem to us to have flown away
+on the wind as the wildest fancies. What has not flown away, what is a
+fixed fact in Europe, is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea
+of a land full of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners and
+minimum of wealth, the vision of the eighteenth century, the reality
+of the twentieth. So I think it will generally be with the creator of
+social things, desirable or undesirable. All his schemes will fail,
+all his tools break in his hands. His compromises will collapse, his
+concessions will be useless. He must brace himself to bear his fate; he
+shall have nothing but his heart's desire.
+
+Now if one may compare very small things with very great, one may say
+that the English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same
+sort of success and solid splendor as the French democratic politics.
+At least they can claim the same sort of superiority over the distracted
+and fumbling attempts of modern England to establish democratic
+education. Such success as has attended the public schoolboy throughout
+the Empire, a success exaggerated indeed by himself, but still positive
+and a fact of a certain indisputable shape and size, has been due to the
+central and supreme circumstance that the managers of our public schools
+did know what sort of boy they liked. They wanted something and they
+got something; instead of going to work in the broad-minded manner and
+wanting everything and getting nothing.
+
+The only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got. There
+is something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modern
+people attack an institution that really does demand reform, they always
+attack it for the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our public
+schools, imagining themselves to be very democratic, have exhausted
+themselves in an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek. I can
+understand how Greek may be regarded as useless, especially by those
+thirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce which is
+the negation of citizenship; but I do not understand how it can be
+considered undemocratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie has
+a hatred of Greek. It is obscurely founded on the firm and sound
+impression that in any self-governing Greek city he would have been
+killed. But I cannot comprehend why any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch,
+or Mr. Will Crooks, I or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be opposed to
+people learning the Greek alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty.
+Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language is written all
+the earliest and, Heaven knows, the most heroic history of the Radical
+party. Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word democrat
+is Greek?
+
+A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attacking
+the athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and
+brutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice of
+the English public schools. There is much moral bullying, owing to the
+general lack of moral courage in the public-school atmosphere. These
+schools do, upon the whole, encourage physical courage; but they do not
+merely discourage moral courage, they forbid it. The ultimate result
+of the thing is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot even
+endure to wear a bright uniform except when it is blurred and hidden
+in the smoke of battle. This, like all the affectations of our present
+plutocracy, is an entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the old
+aristocrats. The Black Prince would certainly have asked that any knight
+who had the courage to lift his crest among his enemies, should also
+have the courage to lift it among his friends. As regards moral courage,
+then it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as
+that they suppress it firmly. But physical courage they do, on the
+whole, support; and physical courage is a magnificent fundamental. The
+one great, wise Englishman of the eighteenth century said truly that if
+a man lost that virtue he could never be sure of keeping any other. Now
+it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage is
+connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere more at
+one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some small sectarian
+quarrel with each other, the one saying that courage must be abandoned
+because it is connected with cruelty, and the other maintaining that
+cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. But it is all,
+thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body may make a man stupid
+or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does not make him
+spiteful. And we may admit heartily (without joining in that perpetual
+praise which public-school men are always pouring upon themselves) that
+this does operate to the removal of mere evil cruelty in the public
+schools. English public school life is extremely like English public
+life, for which it is the preparatory school. It is like it specially in
+this, that things are either very open, common and conventional, or else
+are very secret indeed. Now there is cruelty in public schools, just as
+there is kleptomania and secret drinking and vices without a name.
+But these things do not flourish in the full daylight and common
+consciousness of the school, and no more does cruelty. A tiny trio
+of sullen-looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some ugly
+business always; it may be indecent literature, it may be the beginning
+of drink, it may occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on this
+stage the bully is not a braggart. The proverb says that bullies are
+always cowardly, but these bullies are more than cowardly; they are shy.
+
+As a third instance of the wrong form of revolt against the public
+schools, I may mention the habit of using the word aristocracy with a
+double implication. To put the plain truth as briefly as possible, if
+aristocracy means rule by a rich ring, England has aristocracy and the
+English public schools support it. If it means rule by ancient families
+or flawless blood, England has not got aristocracy, and the public
+schools systematically destroy it. In these circles real aristocracy,
+like real democracy, has become bad form. A modern fashionable host
+dare not praise his ancestry; it would so often be an insult to half the
+other oligarchs at table, who have no ancestry. We have said he has
+not the moral courage to wear his uniform; still less has he the moral
+courage to wear his coat-of-arms. The whole thing now is only a vague
+hotch-potch of nice and nasty gentlemen. The nice gentleman never refers
+to anyone else's father, the nasty gentleman never refers to his own.
+That is the only difference, the rest is the public-school manner. But
+Eton and Harrow have to be aristocratic because they consist so largely
+of parvenues. The public school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats,
+like an asylum, a place where they go in and never come out. It is a
+factory for aristocrats; they come out without ever having perceptibly
+gone in. The poor little private schools, in their old-world,
+sentimental, feudal style, used to stick up a notice, "For the Sons of
+Gentlemen only." If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be
+inscribed, "For the Fathers of Gentlemen only." In two generations they
+can do the trick.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+XI. THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES
+
+These are the false accusations; the accusation of classicism, the
+accusation of cruelty, and the accusation of an exclusiveness based on
+perfection of pedigree. English public-school boys are not pedants,
+they are not torturers; and they are not, in the vast majority of
+cases, people fiercely proud of their ancestry, or even people with any
+ancestry to be proud of. They are taught to be courteous, to be good
+tempered, to be brave in a bodily sense, to be clean in a bodily sense;
+they are generally kind to animals, generally civil to servants, and to
+anyone in any sense their equal, the jolliest companions on earth. Is
+there then anything wrong in the public-school ideal? I think we all
+feel there is something very wrong in it, but a blinding network of
+newspaper phraseology obscures and entangles us; so that it is hard to
+trace to its beginning, beyond all words and phrases, the faults in this
+great English achievement.
+
+Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English public
+school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of
+telling the truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladies
+in remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to
+tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment.
+Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell
+lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the
+obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a
+lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal another man's wit, apostatize
+to another man's creed, or poison another man's coffee, all without
+ever telling a lie. But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the
+truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the
+truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about
+whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can
+be used on his "side" when he is engaged in "playing the game." He takes
+sides in his Union debating society to settle whether Charles I ought to
+have been killed, with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with
+which he takes sides in the cricket field to decide whether Rugby or
+Westminster shall win. He is never allowed to admit the abstract notion
+of the truth, that the match is a matter of what may happen, but that
+Charles I is a matter of what did happen--or did not. He is Liberal or
+Tory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the
+boat race. He knows that sport deals with the unknown; he has not even a
+notion that politics should deal with the known. If anyone really
+doubts this self-evident proposition, that the public schools definitely
+discourage the love of truth, there is one fact which I should think
+would settle him. England is the country of the Party System, and it
+has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out
+of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its
+conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people
+particularly fond of truth?
+
+The very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy. When a
+man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself
+is a liar. David said in his haste, that is, in his honesty, that
+all men are liars. It was afterwards, in some leisurely official
+explanation, that he said the Kings of Israel at least told the truth.
+When Lord Curzon was Viceroy he delivered a moral lecture to the Indians
+on their reputed indifference to veracity, to actuality and intellectual
+honor. A great many people indignantly discussed whether orientals
+deserved to receive this rebuke; whether Indians were indeed in a
+position to receive such severe admonition. No one seemed to ask, as I
+should venture to ask, whether Lord Curzon was in a position to give
+it. He is an ordinary party politician; a party politician means a
+politician who might have belonged to either party. Being such a person,
+he must again and again, at every twist and turn of party strategy,
+either have deceived others or grossly deceived himself. I do not know
+the East; nor do I like what I know. I am quite ready to believe that
+when Lord Curzon went out he found a very false atmosphere. I only say
+it must have been something startlingly and chokingly false if it was
+falser than that English atmosphere from which he came. The English
+Parliament actually cares for everything except veracity. The
+public-school man is kind, courageous, polite, clean, companionable;
+but, in the most awful sense of the words, the truth is not in him.
+
+This weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools, in the
+English political system, and to some extent in the English
+character, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of
+superstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions clung to through
+low spiritual self-indulgence. There are so many of these public-school
+superstitions that I have here only space for one of them, which may be
+called the superstition of soap. It appears to have been shared by
+the ablutionary Pharisees, who resembled the English public-school
+aristocrats in so many respects: in their care about club rules and
+traditions, in their offensive optimism at the expense of other people,
+and above all in their unimaginative plodding patriotism in the worst
+interests of their country. Now the old human common sense about washing
+is that it is a great pleasure. Water (applied externally) is a splendid
+thing, like wine. Sybarites bathe in wine, and Nonconformists drink
+water; but we are not concerned with these frantic exceptions. Washing
+being a pleasure, it stands to reason that rich people can afford it
+more than poor people, and as long as this was recognized all was
+well; and it was very right that rich people should offer baths to poor
+people, as they might offer any other agreeable thing--a drink or a
+donkey ride. But one dreadful day, somewhere about the middle of the
+nineteenth century, somebody discovered (somebody pretty well off)
+the two great modern truths, that washing is a virtue in the rich and
+therefore a duty in the poor. For a duty is a virtue that one can't do.
+And a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily; like
+the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes. But in the public-school
+tradition of public life, soap has become creditable simply because it
+is pleasant. Baths are represented as a part of the decay of the Roman
+Empire; but the same baths are represented as part of the energy and
+rejuvenation of the British Empire. There are distinguished public
+school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and high politicians, who,
+in the course of the eulogies which from time to time they pass upon
+themselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness with moral
+purity. They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school man is
+clean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while saints can
+afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean. As if everyone did
+not know that the harlot must be clean, because it is her business to
+captivate, while the good wife may be dirty, because it is her business
+to clean. As if we did not all know that whenever God's thunder cracks
+above us, it is very likely indeed to find the simplest man in a muck
+cart and the most complex blackguard in a bath.
+
+There are other instances, of course, of this oily trick of turning the
+pleasures of a gentleman into the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon. Sport, like
+soap, is an admirable thing, but, like soap, it is an agreeable thing.
+And it does not sum up all mortal merits to be a sportsman playing the
+game in a world where it is so often necessary to be a workman doing the
+work. By all means let a gentleman congratulate himself that he has
+not lost his natural love of pleasure, as against the blase, and
+unchildlike. But when one has the childlike joy it is best to have also
+the childlike unconsciousness; and I do not think we should have special
+affection for the little boy who ever lastingly explained that it was
+his duty to play Hide and Seek and one of his family virtues to be
+prominent in Puss in the Corner.
+
+Another such irritating hypocrisy is the oligarchic attitude towards
+mendicity as against organized charity. Here again, as in the case of
+cleanliness and of athletics, the attitude would be perfectly human and
+intelligible if it were not maintained as a merit. Just as the obvious
+thing about soap is that it is a convenience, so the obvious thing about
+beggars is that they are an inconvenience. The rich would deserve very
+little blame if they simply said that they never dealt directly with
+beggars, because in modern urban civilization it is impossible to deal
+directly with beggars; or if not impossible, at least very difficult.
+But these people do not refuse money to beggars on the ground that such
+charity is difficult. They refuse it on the grossly hypocritical ground
+that such charity is easy. They say, with the most grotesque gravity,
+"Anyone can put his hand in his pocket and give a poor man a penny; but
+we, philanthropists, go home and brood and travail over the poor man's
+troubles until we have discovered exactly what jail, reformatory,
+workhouse, or lunatic asylum it will really be best for him to go to."
+This is all sheer lying. They do not brood about the man when they get
+home, and if they did it would not alter the original fact that their
+motive for discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational one that
+beggars are a bother. A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this
+or that incidental act of charity, especially when the question is as
+genuinely difficult as is the case of mendicity. But there is something
+quite pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the
+plea that it is not hard enough. If any man will really try talking to
+the ten beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is
+really so much easier than the labor of writing a check for a hospital.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+XII. THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS
+
+For this deep and disabling reason therefore, its cynical and abandoned
+indifference to the truth, the English public school does not provide
+us with the ideal that we require. We can only ask its modern critics
+to remember that right or wrong the thing can be done; the factory is
+working, the wheels are going around, the gentlemen are being produced,
+with their soap, cricket and organized charity all complete. And in
+this, as we have said before, the public school really has an advantage
+over all the other educational schemes of our time. You can pick out a
+public-school man in any of the many companies into which they stray,
+from a Chinese opium den to a German Jewish dinner-party. But I doubt
+if you could tell which little match girl had been brought up by
+undenominational religion and which by secular education. The great
+English aristocracy which has ruled us since the Reformation is really,
+in this sense, a model to the moderns. It did have an ideal, and
+therefore it has produced a reality.
+
+We may repeat here that these pages propose mainly to show one thing:
+that progress ought to be based on principle, while our modern progress
+is mostly based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed in
+theory, but by what has been already admitted in practice. That is why
+the Jacobites are the last Tories in history with whom a high-spirited
+person can have much sympathy. They wanted a specific thing; they were
+ready to go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for
+it. But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations
+that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a
+reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform
+the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of
+armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties
+is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon
+have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed
+by force; the police shut public houses by twelve o'clock, so soon they
+must shut them by eleven o'clock; children stop at school till they
+are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of
+reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of
+any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of
+mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution.
+By this logic of events, the Radical gets as much into a rut as the
+Conservative. We meet one hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather
+told him to stand by one stile. We meet another hoary old lunatic who
+says his grandfather told him only to walk along one lane.
+
+I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument, because
+we have just now come to the place where it is most startlingly and
+strongly shown. The final proof that our elementary schools have no
+definite ideal of their own is the fact that they so openly imitate the
+ideals of the public schools. In the elementary schools we have all the
+ethical prejudices and exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully copied
+for people to whom they do not even roughly apply. We have the same
+wildly disproportionate doctrine of the effect of physical cleanliness
+on moral character. Educators and educational politicians declare,
+amid warm cheers, that cleanliness is far more important than all the
+squabbles about moral and religious training. It would really seem that
+so long as a little boy washes his hands it does not matter whether he
+is washing off his mother's jam or his brother's gore. We have the
+same grossly insincere pretense that sport always encourages a sense of
+honor, when we know that it often ruins it. Above all, we have the
+same great upperclass assumption that things are done best by large
+institutions handling large sums of money and ordering everybody about;
+and that trivial and impulsive charity is in some way contemptible.
+As Mr. Blatchford says, "The world does not want piety, but soap--and
+Socialism." Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap and
+Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class.
+
+These "healthy" ideals, as they are called, which our politicians and
+schoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and applied
+to the democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate to an
+impoverished democracy. A vague admiration for organized government and
+a vague distrust of individual aid cannot be made to fit in at all into
+the lives of people among whom kindness means lending a saucepan and
+honor means keeping out of the workhouse. It resolves itself either into
+discouraging that system of prompt and patchwork generosity which is a
+daily glory of the poor, or else into hazy advice to people who have no
+money not to give it recklessly away. Nor is the exaggerated glory of
+athletics, defensible enough in dealing with the rich who, if they did
+not romp and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any means so
+much to the point when applied to people, most of whom will take a great
+deal of exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And for
+the third case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoric
+about corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental class
+cannot, merely as it stands, be applicable to a dustman. A gentleman is
+expected to be substantially spotless all the time. But it is no more
+discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver to
+be wet. A sweep is no more disgraced when he is covered with soot
+than Michael Angelo when he is covered with clay, or Bayard when he
+is covered with blood. Nor have these extenders of the public-school
+tradition done or suggested anything by way of a substitute for the
+present snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost impossible to the
+poor; I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of the cast-off
+clothes of the rich. One man moves into another man's clothes as he
+moves into another man's house. No wonder that our educationists are
+not horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat's second-hand trousers,
+when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrat's second-hand
+ideas.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+XIII. THE OUTLAWED PARENT
+
+There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper
+inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The
+only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of
+the children are the parents. Yet the English poor have very definite
+traditions in many ways. They are hidden under embarrassment and irony;
+and those psychologists who have disentangled them talk of them as very
+strange, barbaric and secretive things. But, as a matter of fact, the
+traditions of the poor are mostly simply the traditions of humanity,
+a thing which many of us have not seen for some time. For instance,
+workingmen have a tradition that if one is talking about a vile thing it
+is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is the less likely to be
+seduced into excusing it. But mankind had this tradition also, until the
+Puritans and their children, the Ibsenites, started the opposite idea,
+that it does not matter what you say so long as you say it with long
+words and a long face. Or again, the educated classes have tabooed most
+jesting about personal appearance; but in doing this they taboo not only
+the humor of the slums, but more than half the healthy literature of
+the world; they put polite nose-bags on the noses of Punch and Bardolph,
+Stiggins and Cyrano de Bergerac. Again, the educated classes have
+adopted a hideous and heathen custom of considering death as too
+dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain a secret for each person,
+like some private malformation. The poor, on the contrary, make a great
+gossip and display about bereavement; and they are right. They have hold
+of a truth of psychology which is at the back of all the funeral customs
+of the children of men. The way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it.
+The way to endure a painful crisis is to insist very much that it is a
+crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at least to feel important.
+In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilization;
+and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of
+the baked meats of Hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games of
+Patroclus.
+
+The things philanthropists barely excuse (or do not excuse) in the life
+of the laboring classes are simply the things we have to excuse in all
+the greatest monuments of man. It may be that the laborer is as gross as
+Shakespeare or as garrulous as Homer; that if he is religious he talks
+nearly as much about hell as Dante; that if he is worldly he talks
+nearly as much about drink as Dickens. Nor is the poor man without
+historic support if he thinks less of that ceremonial washing which
+Christ dismissed, and rather more of that ceremonial drinking which
+Christ specially sanctified. The only difference between the poor man of
+to-day and the saints and heroes of history is that which in all classes
+separates the common man who can feel things from the great man who can
+express them. What he feels is merely the heritage of man. Now nobody
+expects of course that the cabmen and coal-heavers can be complete
+instructors of their children any more than the squires and colonels and
+tea merchants are complete instructors of their children. There must be
+an educational specialist in loco parentis. But the master at Harrow is
+in loco parentis; the master in Hoxton is rather contra parentem. The
+vague politics of the squire, the vaguer virtues of the colonel, the
+soul and spiritual yearnings of a tea merchant, are, in veritable
+practice, conveyed to the children of these people at the English public
+schools. But I wish here to ask a very plain and emphatic question. Can
+anyone alive even pretend to point out any way in which these special
+virtues and traditions of the poor are reproduced in the education of
+the poor? I do not wish the coster's irony to appeal as coarsely in the
+school as it does in the tap room; but does it appear at all? Is
+the child taught to sympathize at all with his father's admirable
+cheerfulness and slang? I do not expect the pathetic, eager pietas of
+the mother, with her funeral clothes and funeral baked meats, to be
+exactly imitated in the educational system; but has it any influence at
+all on the educational system? Does any elementary schoolmaster accord
+it even an instant's consideration or respect? I do not expect the
+schoolmaster to hate hospitals and C.O.S. centers so much as the
+schoolboy's father; but does he hate them at all? Does he sympathize
+in the least with the poor man's point of honor against official
+institutions? Is it not quite certain that the ordinary elementary
+schoolmaster will think it not merely natural but simply conscientious
+to eradicate all these rugged legends of a laborious people, and on
+principle to preach soap and Socialism against beer and liberty? In
+the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but
+against the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of
+the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead of
+their Christlike charity, their Shakespearean laughter and their high
+Homeric reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them mere
+pedantic copies of the prejudices of the remote rich. They must think
+a bathroom a necessity because to the lucky it is a luxury; they must
+swing Swedish clubs because their masters are afraid of English cudgels;
+and they must get over their prejudice against being fed by the parish,
+because aristocrats feel no shame about being fed by the nation.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+XIV. FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION
+
+It is the same in the case of girls. I am often solemnly asked what
+I think of the new ideas about female education. But there are no new
+ideas about female education. There is not, there never has been, even
+the vestige of a new idea. All the educational reformers did was to ask
+what was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls; just as they
+asked what was being taught to young squires and then taught it to young
+chimney sweeps. What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong
+place. Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play football; boys
+have school colors, why shouldn't girls have school-colors; boys go
+in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn't girls go in hundreds to
+day-schools; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford--in
+short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mustaches--that is
+about their notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing
+at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that,
+and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and
+heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but
+plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the case
+of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless
+inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least,
+which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet
+there is no boy's game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics have
+not promoted among girls. To take a stronger case, they give girls very
+heavy home-work; never reflecting that all girls have home-work already
+in their homes. It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; there
+must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is
+already a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon serf, if he
+wore that collar of cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass.
+
+It will then be answered, not without a sneer, "And what would you
+prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with
+ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling
+a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar
+albums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?" To which
+I answer, "Emphatically, yes." I solidly prefer it to the new female
+education, for this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design,
+while there is none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in
+point of practical fact that elegant female would not have been more
+than a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was
+stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain
+she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could
+do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly
+describe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could only
+smatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can
+only stammer American; nor am I certain that the bygone duchesses who
+were scarcely successful when they painted Melrose Abbey, were so much
+more weak-minded than the modern duchesses who paint only their own
+faces, and are bad at that. But that is not the point. What was the
+theory, what was the idea, in their old, weak water-colors and their
+shaky Italian? The idea was the same which in a ruder rank expressed
+itself in home-made wines and hereditary recipes; and which still, in
+a thousand unexpected ways, can be found clinging to the women of the
+poor. It was the idea I urged in the second part of this book: that
+the world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become artists and
+perish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may
+conquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she must
+not be a private soldier in it. I do not think the elegant female with
+her bad Italian was a perfect product, any more than I think the slum
+woman talking gin and funerals is a perfect product; alas! there are few
+perfect products. But they come from a comprehensible idea; and the new
+woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it
+is right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal.
+The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter of
+Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady
+talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great
+and golden Italian lady, the Renascence amateur of life, who could be a
+barrister because she could be anything. Sunken and neglected in the
+sea of modern monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to their
+original truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still
+bury her father. The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing,
+still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself and
+her husband: that he must be Something in the City, that she may be
+everything in the country.
+
+There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to
+God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a
+flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and
+certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features
+of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of
+life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes
+the woman--she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me;
+save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering
+levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt
+when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as
+run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful
+sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets
+like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human
+soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is
+that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female,
+drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it.
+She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining
+the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of
+superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining
+the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth
+doing, it is worth doing badly.
+
+
+
+
+PART FIVE. THE HOME OF MAN
+
+
+
+
+I. THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT
+
+A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress
+because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need
+scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision;
+it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious
+cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God,
+like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth
+which it is here relevant to repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the
+French Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode
+of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revolution
+appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all
+local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there
+must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he did
+not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of
+jus divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he
+attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short,
+the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere
+molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that
+each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the
+tyrant it ought to have. "I know nothing of the rights of men," he said,
+"but I know something of the rights of Englishmen." There you have the
+essential atheist. His argument is that we have got some protection by
+natural accident and growth; and why should we profess to think beyond
+it, for all the world as if we were the images of God! We are born under
+a House of Lords, as birds under a house of leaves; we live under a
+monarchy as niggers live under a tropic sun; it is not their fault if
+they are slaves, and it is not ours if we are snobs. Thus, long
+before Darwin struck his great blow at democracy, the essential of the
+Darwinian argument had been already urged against the French Revolution.
+Man, said Burke in effect, must adapt himself to everything, like an
+animal; he must not try to alter everything, like an angel. The last
+weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism and deism of the
+eighteenth century came in the voice of Sterne, saying, "God tempers
+the wind to the shorn lamb." And Burke, the iron evolutionist,
+essentially answered, "No; God tempers the shorn lamb to the wind."
+It is the lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he either dies or
+becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught.
+
+The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere
+offense at the grotesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in a cage
+in the Regent's Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and
+many other grotesque things; they do not much mind making beasts
+of themselves, and would not much mind having beasts made of their
+forefathers. The real instinct was much deeper and much more valuable.
+It was this: that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and
+alterable thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist
+him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes. The popular
+instinct sees in such developments the possibility of backs bowed and
+hunch-backed for their burden, or limbs twisted for their task. It has
+a very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and
+systematically will mostly be done by a successful class and almost
+solely in their interests. It has therefore a vision of inhuman hybrids
+and half-human experiments much in the style of Mr. Wells's "Island of
+Dr. Moreau." The rich man may come to breeding a tribe of dwarfs to be
+his jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his hall-porters. Grooms might
+be born bow-legged and tailors born cross-legged; perfumers might have
+long, large noses and a crouching attitude, like hounds of scent; and
+professional wine-tasters might have the horrible expression of one
+tasting wine stamped upon their faces as infants. Whatever wild image
+one employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, when
+once it supposes that the fixed type called man could be changed. If
+some millionaire wanted arms, some porter must grow ten arms like an
+octopus; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must go with a hundred
+trotting legs like a centipede. In the distorted mirror of hypothesis,
+that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see such monstrous and evil
+shapes; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left but one
+nostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the mere notion of
+adaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so very far
+from the reality.
+
+It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that we
+should become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Pardon me,
+that is exactly what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but some
+of the tamest evolutionists too. There has risen high in recent
+history an important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of the
+future--which means the religion of those few weak-minded people who
+live in the future. It is typical of our time that it has to look
+for its god through a microscope; and our time has marked a definite
+adoration of the insect. Like most things we call new, of course, it is
+not at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes
+bees seriously but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully as
+he wrote about them. The wise king told the sluggard to watch the ant, a
+charming occupation--for a sluggard. But in our own time has appeared a
+very different tone, and more than one great man, as well as numberless
+intelligent men, have in our time seriously suggested that we should
+study the insect because we are his inferiors. The old moralists merely
+took the virtues of man and distributed them quite decoratively and
+arbitrarily among the animals. The ant was an almost heraldic symbol of
+industry, as the lion was of courage, or, for the matter of that, the
+pelican of charity. But if the mediaevals had been convinced that a
+lion was not courageous, they would have dropped the lion and kept the
+courage; if the pelican is not charitable, they would say, so much the
+worse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say, permitted the ant to
+enforce and typify man's morality; they never allowed the ant to upset
+it. They used the ant for industry as the lark for punctuality; they
+looked up at the flapping birds and down at the crawling insects for a
+homely lesson. But we have lived to see a sect that does not look down
+at the insects, but looks up at the insects, that asks us essentially to
+bow down and worship beetles, like ancient Egyptians.
+
+Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius always
+carries a magnifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we have
+seen the bees not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armies
+and hierarchies of warriors and queens. Imagination perpetually peers
+and creeps further down the avenues and vistas in the tubes of science,
+and one fancies every frantic reversal of proportions; the earwig
+striding across the echoing plain like an elephant, or the grasshopper
+coming roaring above our roofs like a vast aeroplane, as he leaps from
+Hertfordshire to Surrey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple of
+enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on something
+wilder than arms or backbones; in which the ribbed columns have the
+half-crawling look of dim and monstrous caterpillars; or the dome is
+a starry spider hung horribly in the void. There is one of the modern
+works of engineering that gives one something of this nameless fear
+of the exaggerations of an underworld; and that is the curious curved
+architecture of the under ground railway, commonly called the Twopenny
+Tube. Those squat archways, without any upright line or pillar, look as
+if they had been tunneled by huge worms who have never learned to lift
+their heads. It is the very underground palace of the Serpent, the spirit
+of changing shape and color, that is the enemy of man.
+
+But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic suggestions that writers
+like Maeterlinck have influenced us in the matter; there is also an
+ethical side to the business. The upshot of M. Maeterlinck's book on
+bees is an admiration, one might also say an envy, of their collective
+spirituality; of the fact that they live only for something which
+he calls the Soul of the Hive. And this admiration for the communal
+morality of insects is expressed in many other modern writers in various
+quarters and shapes; in Mr. Benjamin Kidd's theory of living only for
+the evolutionary future of our race, and in the great interest of some
+Socialists in ants, which they generally prefer to bees, I suppose,
+because they are not so brightly colored. Not least among the hundred
+evidences of this vague insectolatry are the floods of flattery poured
+by modern people on that energetic nation of the Far East of which
+it has been said that "Patriotism is its only religion"; or, in other
+words, that it lives only for the Soul of the Hive. When at long
+intervals of the centuries Christendom grows weak, morbid or skeptical,
+and mysterious Asia begins to move against us her dim populations and to
+pour them westward like a dark movement of matter, in such cases it
+has been very common to compare the invasion to a plague of lice
+or incessant armies of locusts. The Eastern armies were indeed like
+insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in their black nihilism
+of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to individual life
+and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their pessimistic
+courage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders of the
+East are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth. But never
+before, I think, have Christians called a Turk a locust and meant it
+as a compliment. Now for the first time we worship as well as fear; and
+trace with adoration that enormous form advancing vast and vague out
+of Asia, faintly discernible amid the mystic clouds of winged creatures
+hung over the wasted lands, thronging the skies like thunder and
+discoloring the skies like rain; Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies.
+
+In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul of the Hive, we of
+Christendom stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for the
+essential and distinctive human idea that one good and happy man is an
+end in himself, that a soul is worth saving. Nay, for those who like
+such biological fancies it might well be said that we stand as chiefs
+and champions of a whole section of nature, princes of the house whose
+cognizance is the backbone, standing for the milk of the individual
+mother and the courage of the wandering cub, representing the pathetic
+chivalry of the dog, the humor and perversity of cats, the affection of
+the tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion. It is more to the point,
+however, to urge that this mere glorification of society as it is in
+the social insects is a transformation and a dissolution in one of the
+outlines which have been specially the symbols of man. In the cloud and
+confusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as is
+finally disappearing, the idea of the human family. The hive has become
+larger than the house, the bees are destroying their captors; what the
+locust hath left, the caterpillar hath eaten; and the little house and
+garden of our friend Jones is in a bad way.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+II. THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND
+
+When Lord Morley said that the House of Lords must be either mended
+or ended, he used a phrase which has caused some confusion; because
+it might seem to suggest that mending and ending are somewhat similar
+things. I wish specially to insist on the fact that mending and ending
+are opposite things. You mend a thing because you like it; you end a
+thing because you don't. To mend is to strengthen. I, for instance,
+disbelieve in oligarchy; so I would no more mend the House of Lords
+than I would mend a thumbscrew. On the other hand, I do believe in the
+family; therefore I would mend the family as I would mend a chair; and
+I will never deny for a moment that the modern family is a chair that
+wants mending. But here comes in the essential point about the mass of
+modern advanced sociologists. Here are two institutions that have always
+been fundamental with mankind, the family and the state. Anarchists, I
+believe, disbelieve in both. It is quite unfair to say that Socialists
+believe in the state, but do not believe in the family; thousands of
+Socialists believe more in the family than any Tory. But it is true
+to say that while anarchists would end both, Socialists are specially
+engaged in mending (that is, strengthening and renewing) the state; and
+they are not specially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family.
+They are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother,
+and child, as such; they are not tightening the machine up again; they
+are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing. With
+the state they are doing this; they are sharpening its machinery,
+they are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are making mere
+government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before.
+While they leave the home in ruins, they restore the hive, especially
+the stings. Indeed, some schemes of labor and Poor Law reform recently
+advanced by distinguished Socialists, amount to little more than putting
+the largest number of people in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble.
+Apparently, progress means being moved on--by the police.
+
+The point it is my purpose to urge might perhaps be suggested thus:
+that Socialists and most social reformers of their color are vividly
+conscious of the line between the kind of things that belong to the
+state and the kind of things that belong to mere chaos or uncoercible
+nature; they may force children to go to school before the sun rises,
+but they will not try to force the sun to rise; they will not, like
+Canute, banish the sea, but only the sea-bathers. But inside the outline
+of the state their lines are confused, and entities melt into each
+other. They have no firm instinctive sense of one thing being in its
+nature private and another public, of one thing being necessarily
+bond and another free. That is why piece by piece, and quite silently,
+personal liberty is being stolen from Englishmen, as personal land has
+been silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century.
+
+I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist
+means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because
+they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a
+battle-ax and a bootjack. The essential idea of an umbrella is breadth
+and protection. The essential idea of a stick is slenderness and,
+partly, attack. The stick is the sword, the umbrella is the shield, but
+it is a shield against another and more nameless enemy--the hostile but
+anonymous universe. More properly, therefore, the umbrella is the roof;
+it is a kind of collapsible house. But the vital difference goes far
+deeper than this; it branches off into two kingdoms of man's mind, with
+a chasm between. For the point is this: that the umbrella is a shield
+against an enemy so actual as to be a mere nuisance; whereas the
+stick is a sword against enemies so entirely imaginary as to be a pure
+pleasure. The stick is not merely a sword, but a court sword; it is a
+thing of purely ceremonial swagger. One cannot express the emotion in
+any way except by saying that a man feels more like a man with a stick
+in his hand, just as he feels more like a man with a sword at his side.
+But nobody ever had any swelling sentiments about an umbrella; it is
+a convenience, like a door scraper. An umbrella is a necessary evil. A
+walking-stick is a quite unnecessary good. This, I fancy, is the real
+explanation of the perpetual losing of umbrellas; one does not hear of
+people losing walking sticks. For a walking-stick is a pleasure, a piece
+of real personal property; it is missed even when it is not needed. When
+my right hand forgets its stick may it forget its cunning. But anybody
+may forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a shed that he has stood
+up in out of the rain. Anybody can forget a necessary thing.
+
+If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that the
+whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men
+can share an umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick.
+Umbrellas might possibly be replaced by some kind of common awnings
+covering certain streets from particular showers. But there is nothing
+but nonsense in the notion of swinging a communal stick; it is as if one
+spoke of twirling a communal mustache. It will be said that this is a
+frank fantasia and that no sociologists suggest such follies. Pardon me
+if they do. I will give a precise parallel to the case of confusion
+of sticks and umbrellas, a parallel from a perpetually reiterated
+suggestion of reform. At least sixty Socialists out of a hundred, when
+they have spoken of common laundries, will go on at once to speak of
+common kitchens. This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as the
+fanciful case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rods
+that go into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and washhouses
+are both large rooms full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul and
+function of the two things are utterly opposite. There is only one way
+of washing a shirt; that is, there is only one right way. There is no
+taste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody says, "Tompkins likes five
+holes in his shirt, but I must say, give me the good old four holes."
+Nobody says, "This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; now
+if there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped up." The
+ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But it is by no
+means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back cooked.
+Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for
+the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be
+perverse. I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch common
+sausages unless they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausages
+fried to rags, yet he does not insist on his shirts being boiled to
+rags. I do not say that such points of culinary delicacy are of high
+importance. I do not say that the communal ideal must give way to
+them. What I say is that the communal ideal is not conscious of their
+existence, and therefore goes wrong from the very start, mixing a wholly
+public thing with a highly individual one. Perhaps we ought to accept
+communal kitchens in the social crisis, just as we should accept
+communal cat's-meat in a siege. But the cultured Socialist, quite at his
+ease, by no means in a siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they
+were the same kind of thing as communal laundries. This shows at the
+start that he misunderstands human nature. It is as different as three
+men singing the same chorus from three men playing three tunes on the
+same piano.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+III. THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE
+
+In the quarrel earlier alluded to between the energetic Progressive and
+the obstinate Conservative (or, to talk a tenderer language, between
+Hudge and Gudge), the state of cross-purposes is at the present moment
+acute. The Tory says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown;
+the Socialist very reasonably points out to him that in Cindertown
+at present there isn't any family life to preserve. But Hudge, the
+Socialist, in his turn, is highly vague and mysterious about whether he
+would preserve the family life if there were any; or whether he will try
+to restore it where it has disappeared. It is all very confusing. The
+Tory sometimes talks as if he wanted to tighten the domestic bonds that
+do not exist; the Socialist as if he wanted to loosen the bonds that do
+not bind anybody. The question we all want to ask of both of them is
+the original ideal question, "Do you want to keep the family at all?" If
+Hudge, the Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for the
+natural restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family.
+He must brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having a
+preference for the private house and a man for the public house. He must
+manage to endure somehow the idea of a woman being womanly, which does
+not mean soft and yielding, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very
+humorous. He must confront without a quiver the notion of a child who
+shall be childish, that is, full of energy, but without an idea of
+independence; fundamentally as eager for authority as for information
+and butter-scotch. If a man, a woman and a child live together any more
+in free and sovereign households, these ancient relations will recur;
+and Hudge must put up with it. He can only avoid it by destroying the
+family, driving both sexes into sexless hives and hordes, and bringing
+up all children as the children of the state--like Oliver Twist. But if
+these stern words must be addressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escape
+a somewhat severe admonition. For the plain truth to be told pretty
+sharply to the Tory is this, that if he wants the family to remain,
+if he wants to be strong enough to resist the rending forces of our
+essentially savage commerce, he must make some very big sacrifices and
+try to equalize property. The overwhelming mass of the English people at
+this particular instant are simply too poor to be domestic. They are
+as domestic as they can manage; they are much more domestic than the
+governing class; but they cannot get what good there was originally
+meant to be in this institution, simply because they have not got enough
+money. The man ought to stand for a certain magnanimity, quite lawfully
+expressed in throwing money away: but if under given circumstances
+he can only do it by throwing the week's food away, then he is not
+magnanimous, but mean. The woman ought to stand for a certain wisdom
+which is well expressed in valuing things rightly and guarding money
+sensibly; but how is she to guard money if there is no money to guard?
+The child ought to look on his mother as a fountain of natural fun and
+poetry; but how can he unless the fountain, like other fountains,
+is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient arts and
+functions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the woman
+is out working and the man isn't; and the child is forced by law to
+think his schoolmaster's requirements more important than his mother's?
+No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carlton Club
+must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If
+they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill,
+decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old
+game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let
+them have their empire of insects; they will find plenty of Socialists
+who will give it to them. But if they want a domestic England, they must
+"shell out," as the phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than any
+Radical politician has yet dared to suggest; they must endure burdens
+much heavier than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than the death
+duties; for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than the
+distribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can now
+only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save
+property, we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly
+as did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must
+revolutionize the nation.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+IV. A LAST INSTANCE
+
+And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the
+reader's ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the
+suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the
+quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that
+the way in which they perpetually play into each other's hands is not
+an everlasting coincidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an anarchic
+industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, provides him with lyric praises of
+anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper; Hudge calls
+the woman's work "freedom to live her own life." Gudge wants steady
+and obedient workmen, Hudge preaches teetotalism--to workmen, not to
+Gudge--Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take arms
+against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi that nobody must take
+arms against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed
+gentleman; Hudge earnestly preaches the perfection of Gudge's washing
+to people who can't practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and
+cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally
+inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy
+it; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a
+prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall
+soon gloriously outgrow.
+
+I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious
+or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common
+man homeless. I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets in
+the gray twilight, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red
+goblin lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less his
+because he has never been in it.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+V. CONCLUSION
+
+Here, it may be said, my book ends just where it ought to begin. I have
+said that the strong centers of modern English property must swiftly
+or slowly be broken up, if even the idea of property is to remain
+among Englishmen. There are two ways in which it could be done, a
+cold administration by quite detached officials, which is called
+Collectivism, or a personal distribution, so as to produce what is
+called Peasant Proprietorship. I think the latter solution the finer and
+more fully human, because it makes each man as somebody blamed somebody
+for saying of the Pope, a sort of small god. A man on his own turf
+tastes eternity or, in other words, will give ten minutes more work than
+is required. But I believe I am justified in shutting the door on this
+vista of argument, instead of opening it. For this book is not designed
+to prove the case for Peasant Proprietorship, but to prove the case
+against modern sages who turn reform to a routine. The whole of this
+book has been a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethical
+fact. And if by any chance it should happen that there are still some
+who do not quite see what that point is, I will end with one plain
+parable, which is none the worse for being also a fact.
+
+A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern
+law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that
+all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course,
+all little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are
+common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors
+interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular
+interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into
+such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people
+must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean
+lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It
+never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it could
+be done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thing
+is the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man
+(that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to
+a cabman's daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet
+Minister's daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter
+of fact apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will not
+ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not. But what is the
+excuse they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use,
+for thus cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argument
+would be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor
+people than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced
+(against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes)
+to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of
+public instruction; and because in one out of the forty children there
+may be offense. And why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the
+great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has
+to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after
+the children, therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the
+workingman has these two persons on top of him, the landlord sitting
+(literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on
+his head, the workingman must allow his little girl's hair, first to be
+neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly,
+to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl's
+hair. But he does not count.
+
+Upon this simple principle (or rather precedent) the sociological doctor
+drives gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into the
+dirt, so that their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear.
+It would be long and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants;
+it is easier to cut off the hair of the slaves. In the same way, if
+it should ever happen that poor children, screaming with toothache,
+disturbed any schoolmaster or artistic gentleman, it would be easy to
+pull out all the teeth of the poor; if their nails were disgustingly
+dirty, their nails could be plucked out; if their noses were indecently
+blown, their noses could be cut off. The appearance of our humbler
+fellow-citizen could be quite strikingly simplified before we had done
+with him. But all this is not a bit wilder than the brute fact that a
+doctor can walk into the house of a free man, whose daughter's hair may
+be as clean as spring flowers, and order him to cut it off. It never
+seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the
+wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the least
+of it, a rooted thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and oriental
+armies of whom we have spoken) sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, it
+is only by eternal institutions like hair that we can test passing
+institutions like empires. If a house is so built as to knock a man's
+head off when he enters it, it is built wrong.
+
+The mob can never rebel unless it is conservative, at least enough to
+have conserved some reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful thought
+in all our anarchy, that most of the ancient blows struck for freedom
+would not be struck at all to-day, because of the obscuration of the
+clean, popular customs from which they came. The insult that brought
+down the hammer of Wat Tyler might now be called a medical examination.
+That which Virginius loathed and avenged as foul slavery might now be
+praised as free love. The cruel taunt of Foulon, "Let them eat grass,"
+might now be represented as the dying cry of an idealistic vegetarian.
+Those great scissors of science that would snip off the curls of the
+poor little school children are ceaselessly snapping closer and closer
+to cut off all the corners and fringes of the arts and honors of the
+poor. Soon they will be twisting necks to suit clean collars, and
+hacking feet to fit new boots. It never seems to strike them that the
+body is more than raiment; that the Sabbath was made for man; that all
+institutions shall be judged and damned by whether they have fitted the
+normal flesh and spirit. It is the test of political sanity to keep your
+head. It is the test of artistic sanity to keep your hair on.
+
+Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all
+these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over
+again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair.
+That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the
+pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one
+of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age
+and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If
+landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and
+sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter
+I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have
+long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean
+hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have
+an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because
+she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord;
+because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a
+redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution
+of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the
+gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she
+shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut
+short like a convict's; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be
+hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred
+image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall;
+the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come
+rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.
+
+
+
+
+THREE NOTES
+
+
+
+
+I. ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE
+
+Not wishing to overload this long essay with too many parentheses, apart
+from its thesis of progress and precedent, I append here three notes on
+points of detail that may possibly be misunderstood.
+
+The first refers to the female controversy. It may seem to many that I
+dismiss too curtly the contention that all women should have votes,
+even if most women do not desire them. It is constantly said in this
+connection that males have received the vote (the agricultural laborers
+for instance) when only a minority of them were in favor of it. Mr.
+Galsworthy, one of the few fine fighting intellects of our time, has
+talked this language in the "Nation." Now, broadly, I have only to
+answer here, as everywhere in this book, that history is not a toboggan
+slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced. If we really
+forced General Elections upon free laborers who definitely disliked
+General Elections, then it was a thoroughly undemocratic thing to do;
+if we are democrats we ought to undo it. We want the will of the people,
+not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will
+is to make voting more valuable than the democracy it declares.
+
+But this analogy is false, for a plain and particular reason. Many
+voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most
+voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless
+men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most
+stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his
+sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care
+about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he did
+not understand the word any better than Bimetallism. His opposition, if
+it existed, was merely negative. His indifference to a vote was really
+indifference.
+
+But the female sentiment against the franchise, whatever its size, is
+positive. It is not negative; it is by no means indifferent. Such
+women as are opposed to the change regard it (rightly or wrongly) as
+unfeminine. That is, as insulting certain affirmative traditions to
+which they are attached. You may think such a view prejudiced; but
+I violently deny that any democrat has a right to override such
+prejudices, if they are popular and positive. Thus he would not have
+a right to make millions of Moslems vote with a cross if they had a
+prejudice in favor of voting with a crescent. Unless this is admitted,
+democracy is a farce we need scarcely keep up. If it is admitted, the
+Suffragists have not merely to awaken an indifferent, but to convert a
+hostile majority.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+II. ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION
+
+On re-reading my protest, which I honestly think much needed, against
+our heathen idolatry of mere ablution, I see that it may possibly be
+misread. I hasten to say that I think washing a most important thing to
+be taught both to rich and poor. I do not attack the positive but the
+relative position of soap. Let it be insisted on even as much as now;
+but let other things be insisted on much more. I am even ready to admit
+that cleanliness is next to godliness; but the moderns will not even
+admit godliness to be next to cleanliness. In their talk about Thomas
+Becket and such saints and heroes they make soap more important than
+soul; they reject godliness whenever it is not cleanliness. If we resent
+this about remote saints and heroes, we should resent it more about the
+many saints and heroes of the slums, whose unclean hands cleanse the
+world. Dirt is evil chiefly as evidence of sloth; but the fact remains
+that the classes that wash most are those that work least. Concerning
+these, the practical course is simple; soap should be urged on them and
+advertised as what it is--a luxury. With regard to the poor also the
+practical course is not hard to harmonize with our thesis. If we want
+to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them
+luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then
+emphatically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence
+them for being dirty.
+
+*****
+
+
+
+
+III. ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP
+
+I have not dealt with any details touching distributed ownership, or
+its possibility in England, for the reason stated in the text. This book
+deals with what is wrong, wrong in our root of argument and effort. This
+wrong is, I say, that we will go forward because we dare not go back.
+Thus the Socialist says that property is already concentrated into
+Trusts and Stores: the only hope is to concentrate it further in the
+State. I say the only hope is to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent
+and return; the only step forward is the step backward.
+
+But in connection with this distribution I have laid myself open to
+another potential mistake. In speaking of a sweeping redistribution,
+I speak of decision in the aim, not necessarily of abruptness in the
+means. It is not at all too late to restore an approximately rational
+state of English possessions without any mere confiscation. A policy of
+buying out landlordism, steadily adopted in England as it has already
+been adopted in Ireland (notably in Mr. Wyndham's wise and fruitful
+Act), would in a very short time release the lower end of the see-saw
+and make the whole plank swing more level. The objection to this course
+is not at all that it would not do, only that it will not be done. If
+we leave things as they are, there will almost certainly be a crash of
+confiscation. If we hesitate, we shall soon have to hurry. But if we
+start doing it quickly we have still time to do it slowly.
+
+This point, however, is not essential to my book. All I have to urge
+between these two boards is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and
+that I dislike Socialism because it will (according to Socialists) be so
+like that shop. It is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not object
+to Socialism because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it
+will leave it so horribly the same.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's What's Wrong With The World, by G.K. Chesterton
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