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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Post-Prandial Philosophy, by Grant Allen
+
+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: Post-Prandial Philosophy
+
+Author: Grant Allen
+
+Release Date: July 8, 2006 [EBook #18788]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POST-PRANDIAL PHILOSOPHY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+POST-PRANDIAL
+PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+By GRANT ALLEN
+
+
+AUTHOR OF
+"THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE," ETC.
+
+LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS
+1894
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+These Essays appeared originally in _The Westminster Gazette_, and have
+only been so far modified here as is necessary for purposes of volume
+publication. They aim at being suggestive rather than exhaustive: I
+shall be satisfied if I have provoked thought without following out each
+train to a logical conclusion. Most of the Essays are just what they
+pretend to be--crystallisations into writing of ideas suggested in
+familiar conversation.
+
+G. A.
+
+Hind Head, _March_ 1894.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+                                                 PAGE
+
+    I. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AMONG LANGUAGES       1
+
+   II. IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY                9
+
+  III. SCIENCE IN EDUCATION                       18
+
+   IV. THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS                   27
+
+    V. AMERICAN DUCHESSES                         35
+
+   VI. IS ENGLAND PLAYED OUT?                     44
+
+  VII. THE GAME AND THE RULES                     53
+
+ VIII. THE ROLE OF PROPHET                        61
+
+   IX. THE ROMANCE OF THE CLASH OF RACES          70
+
+    X. THE MONOPOLIST INSTINCTS                   79
+
+   XI. "MERE AMATEURS"                            87
+
+  XII. A SQUALID VILLAGE                          95
+
+ XIII. CONCERNING ZEITGEIST                      104
+
+  XIV. THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE                   112
+
+   XV. EYE _versus_ EAR                          122
+
+  XVI. THE POLITICAL PUPA                        130
+
+ XVII. ON THE CASINO TERRACE                     138
+
+XVIII. THE CELTIC FRINGE                         147
+
+  XIX. IMAGINATION AND RADICALS                  156
+
+   XX. ABOUT ABROAD                              165
+
+  XXI. WHY ENGLAND IS BEAUTIFUL                  173
+
+ XXII. ANENT ART PRODUCTION                      182
+
+XXIII. A GLIMPSE INTO UTOPIA                     190
+
+ XXIV. OF SECOND CHAMBERS                        199
+
+  XXV. A POINT OF CRITICISM                      207
+
+
+
+
+POST-PRANDIAL PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+_THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AMONG
+LANGUAGES._
+
+
+A distinguished Positivist friend of mine, who is in most matters a
+practical man of the world, astonished me greatly the other day at
+Venice, by the grave remark that Italian was destined to be the language
+of the future. I found on inquiry he had inherited the notion direct
+from Auguste Comte, who justified it on the purely sentimental and
+unpractical ground that the tongue of Dante had never yet been
+associated with any great national defeat or disgrace. The idea
+surprised me not a little; because it displays such a profound
+misconception of what language is, and why people use it. The speech of
+the world will not be decided on mere grounds of sentiment: the tongue
+that survives will not survive because it is so admirably adapted for
+the manufacture of rhymes or epigrams. Stern need compels. Frenchmen and
+Germans, in congress assembled, and looking about them for a means of
+intercommunication, might indeed agree to accept Italian then and there
+as an international compromise. But congresses don't make or unmake the
+habits of everyday life; and the growth or spread of a language is a
+thing as much beyond our deliberate human control as the rise or fall of
+the barometer.
+
+My friend's remark, however, set me thinking and watching what are
+really the languages now gaining and spreading over the civilised world;
+it set me speculating what will be the outcome of this gain and spread
+in another half century. And the results are these: Vastly the most
+growing and absorbing of all languages at the present moment is the
+English, which is almost everywhere swallowing up the overflow of
+German, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Russian. Next to it, probably, in point
+of vitality, comes Spanish, which is swallowing up the overflow of
+French, Italian, and the other Latin races. Third, perhaps, ranks
+Russian, destined to become in time the spoken tongue of a vast tract in
+Northern and Central Asia. Among non-European languages, three seem to
+be gaining fast: Chinese, Malay, Arabic. Of the doomed tongues, on the
+other hand, the most hopeless is French, which is losing all round;
+while Italian, German, and Dutch are either quite at a standstill or
+slightly retrograding. The world is now round. By the middle of the
+twentieth century, in all probability, English will be its dominant
+speech; and the English-speaking peoples, a heterogeneous conglomerate
+of all nationalities, will control between them the destinies of
+mankind. Spanish will be the language of half the populous southern
+hemisphere. Russian will spread over a moiety of Asia. Chinese, Malay,
+Arabic, will divide among themselves the less civilised parts of Africa
+and the East. But French, German, and Italian will be insignificant and
+dwindling European dialects, as numerically unimportant as Flemish or
+Danish in our own day.
+
+And why? Not because Shakespeare wrote in English, but because the
+English language has already got a firm hold of all those portions of
+the earth's surface which are most absorbing the overflow of European
+populations. Germans and Scandinavians and Russians emigrate by the
+thousand now to all parts of the United States and the north-west of
+Canada. In the first generation they may still retain their ancestral
+speech; but their children have all to learn English. In Australia and
+New Zealand the same thing is happening. In South Africa Dutch had got a
+footing, it is true; but it is fast losing it. The newcomers learn
+English, and though the elder Boers stick with Boer conservatism to
+their native tongue, young Piet and young Paul find it pays them better
+to know and speak the language of commerce--the language of Cape Town,
+of Kimberley, of the future. The reason is the same throughout. Whenever
+two tongues come to be spoken in the same area one of them is sure to be
+more useful in business than the other. Every French-Canadian who wishes
+to do things on a large scale is obliged to speak English. So is the
+Creole in Louisiana; so earlier were the Knickerbocker Dutch in New
+York. Once let English get in, and it beats all competing languages
+fairly out of the field in a couple of generations.
+
+Like influences favour Spanish in South America and elsewhere. English
+has annexed most of North America, Australia, South Africa, the Pacific;
+Spanish has annexed South America, Central America, the Philippines,
+Cuba, and a few other places. For the most part these areas are less
+suited than the English-speaking districts for colonisation by North
+Europeans; but they absorb a large number of Italians and other
+Mediterranean races, who all learn Spanish in the second generation. As
+to the other dominant languages, the points in their favour are
+different. Conquest and administrative needs are spreading Russian over
+the steppes of Asia; the Arab merchant and the growth of Mahommedanism
+are importing Arabic far into the heart of Africa; the Chinaman is
+carrying his own monosyllables with him to California, Australia,
+Singapore. These tongues in future will divide the world between them.
+
+The German who leaves Germany becomes an Anglo-American. The Italian who
+leaves Italy becomes a Spanish-American.
+
+There is another and still more striking way of looking at the rapid
+increase of English. No other language will carry you through so many
+ports in the world. It suffices for London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast,
+Southampton, Cardiff; for New York, Boston, Montreal, Charleston, New
+Orleans, San Francisco; for Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Hong Kong,
+Yokohama, Honolulu; for Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kurrachi, Singapore,
+Colombo, Cape Town, Mauritius. Spanish with Cadiz, Barcelona, Havana,
+Callao, Valparaiso, cannot touch that record; nor can French with
+Marseilles, Bordeaux, Havre, Algiers, Antwerp, Tahiti. The most
+commercially useful language in the world, thus widely diffused in so
+many great mercantile and shipping centres, is certain to win in the
+struggle for existence among the tongues of the future.
+
+The old Mediterranean civilisation teaches us a useful lesson in this
+respect. Two languages dominated the Mediterranean basin. The East spoke
+Greek, not because Plato and AEschylus spoke Greek, but because Greek was
+the tongue of the great commercial centres--of Athens, Syracuse,
+Alexandria, Antioch, Byzantium. The West spoke Latin, not because
+Catullus and Virgil spoke Latin, but because Latin was the
+administrative tongue, the tongue of Rome, of Italy, and later of Gaul,
+of Spain, of the great towns in Dacia, Pannonia, Britain. Whoever wanted
+to do anything on the big scale then, had to speak Greek or Latin; so
+much so that the native languages of Gaul and Spain died utterly out,
+and Latin dialects are now the spoken tongue in all southern Europe. In
+our own time, again, educated Hindoos from different parts of India have
+to use English as a means of intercommunication; and native merchants
+must write their business correspondence with distant houses in English.
+To put an extreme contrast: in the last century French was spoken by far
+more people than English; at the present day French is only just keeping
+up its numbers in France, is losing in Canada and the United States, is
+not advancing to any extent in Africa. English is spoken by a hundred
+million people in Europe and America; is over-running Africa; has
+annexed Australasia and the Pacific Isles; has ousted, or is ousting,
+Dutch at the Cape, French in Louisiana, even Spanish itself in Florida,
+California, New Mexico. In Egyptian mud villages, the aspiring Copt, who
+once learnt French, now learns English. In Scandinavia, our tongue gains
+ground daily. Everywhere in the world it takes the lead among the
+European languages, and by the middle of the next century will no doubt
+be spoken over half the globe by a cosmopolitan mass of five hundred
+million people.
+
+And all on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue,
+and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is the
+easiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbish
+of genders; simplified immensely its declensions and conjugations;
+thrown overboard most of the nonsensical ballast we know as grammar. It
+is only weighted now by its grotesque and ridiculous spelling--one of
+the absurdest among all the absurd English attempts at compromise. The
+pressure of the newer speakers will compel it to make jetsam of that
+lumber also; and then the tongue of Shelley and Newton will march onward
+unopposed to the conquest of humanity.
+
+I pen these remarks, I hope, "without prejudice." Patriotism is a vulgar
+vice of which I have never been guilty.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+_IN THE MATTER OF ARISTOCRACY._
+
+
+Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always
+consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to
+the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation
+and morals than the democracy they live among.
+
+I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of people
+at large (and especially of that particular European people which
+"dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies and
+democracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a common
+though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the
+aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners,
+than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a
+boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profound
+superiority by birth to the world around him--a superiority as of fine
+porcelain to common clay--that the world around him has at last actually
+begun to accept him at his own valuation. Most English people in
+particular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures and
+wines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But history
+shows us the exact opposite. It is a plain historical fact, provable by
+simple enumeration, that almost all the aristocracies the world has ever
+known have taken their rise in the conquest of civilised and cultivated
+races by barbaric invaders; and that the barbaric invaders have seldom
+or never learned the practical arts and handicrafts which are the
+civilising element in the life of the conquered people around them.
+
+To begin with the aristocracies best known to most of us, the noble
+families of modern and mediaeval Europe sprang, as a whole, from the
+Teutonic invasion of the Roman Empire. In Italy, it was the Lombards and
+the Goths who formed the bulk of the great ruling families; all the
+well-known aristocratic names of mediaeval Italy are without exception
+Teutonic. In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocratic
+element to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised and
+cultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere
+_roturier_. The great revolution, it has been well said, was, ethnically
+speaking, nothing more than the revolt of the Celtic against the
+Teutonic fraction; and, one might add also, the revolt of the civilised
+Romanised serf against the barbaric _seigneur_. In Spain, the hidalgo is
+just the _hi d'al Go_, the son of the Goth, the descendant of those rude
+Visigothic conquerors who broke down the old civilisation of Iberian and
+Romanised Hispania. And so on throughout. All over Europe, if you care
+to look close, you will find the aristocrat was the son of the intrusive
+barbarian; the democrat was the son of the old civilised and educated
+autochthonous people.
+
+It is just the same elsewhere, wherever we turn. Take Greece, for
+example. Its most aristocratic state was undoubtedly Sparta, where a
+handful of essentially barbaric Dorians held in check a much larger and
+Helotised population of higher original civilisation. Take the East: the
+Persian was a wild mountain adventurer who imposed himself as an
+aristocrat upon the far more cultivated Babylonian, Assyrian, and
+Egyptian. The same sort of thing had happened earlier in time in
+Babylonia and Assyria themselves, where barbaric conquerors had
+similarly imposed themselves upon the first known historical
+civilisations. Take India under the Moguls, once more; the aristocracy
+of the time consisted of the rude Mahommedan Tartar, who lorded it over
+the ancient enchorial culture of Rajpoot and Brahmin. Take China: the
+same thing over again--a Tartar horde imposing its savage rule over the
+most ancient civilised people of Asia. Take England: its aristocracy at
+different times has consisted of the various barbaric invaders, first
+the Anglo-Saxon (if I must use that hateful and misleading word)--a
+pirate from Sleswick; then the Dane, another pirate from Denmark direct;
+then the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer of
+early French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himself
+after just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where you
+will, it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to the
+Turk at Constantinople or the Arab in North Africa, the aristocrat
+belongs invariably to a lower race than the civilised people whom he has
+conquered and subjugated.
+
+"That may be true, perhaps," you object, "as to the remote historical
+origin of aristocracies; but surely the aristocrat of later generations
+has acquired all the science, all the art, all the polish of the people
+he lives amongst. He is the flower of their civilisation." Don't you
+believe it! There isn't a word of truth in it. From first to last the
+aristocrat remains, what Matthew Arnold so justly called him, a
+barbarian. I often wonder, indeed, whether Arnold himself really
+recognised the literal and actual truth of his own brilliant
+generalisation. For the aristocratic ideas and the aristocratic pursuits
+remain to the very end essentially barbaric. The "gentleman" never soils
+his high-born hands with dirty work; in other words, he holds himself
+severely aloof from the trades and handicrafts which constitute
+civilisation. The arts that train and educate hand, eye, and brain he
+ignorantly despises. In the early middle ages he did not even condescend
+to read and write, those inferior accomplishments being badges of
+serfdom. If you look close at the "occupations of a gentleman" in the
+present day, you will find they are all of purely barbaric character.
+They descend to us direct from the semi-savage invaders who overthrew
+the structure of the Roman empire, and replaced its civilised
+organisation by the military and barbaric system of feudalism. The
+"gentleman" is above all things a fighter, a hunter, a fisher--he
+preserves the three simplest and commonest barbaric functions. He is
+_not_ a practiser of any civilised or civilising art--a craftsman, a
+maker, a worker in metal, in stone, in textile fabrics, in pottery.
+These are the things that constitute civilisation; but the aristocrat
+does none of them; in the famous words of one who now loves to mix with
+English gentlemen, "he toils not, neither does he spin." The things he
+_may_ do are, to fight by sea and land, like his ancestor the Goth and
+his ancestor the Viking; to slay pheasant and partridge, like his
+predatory forefathers; to fish for salmon in the Highlands; to hunt the
+fox, to sail the yacht, to scour the earth in search of great
+game--lions, elephants, buffalo. His one task is to kill--either his
+kind or his quarry.
+
+Observe, too, the essentially barbaric nature of the gentleman's
+home--his trappings, his distinctive marks, his surroundings, his
+titles. He lives by choice in the wildest country, like his skin-clad
+ancestors, demanding only that there be game and foxes and fish for his
+delectation. He loves the moors, the wolds, the fens, the braes, the
+Highlands, not as the painter, the naturalist, or the searcher after
+beauty of scenery loves them--for the sake of their wild life, their
+heather and bracken, their fresh keen air, their boundless horizon--but
+for the sake of the thoroughly barbarous existence he and his dogs and
+his gillies can lead in them. The fact is, neither he nor his ancestors
+have ever been really civilised. Barbarians in the midst of an
+industrial community, they have lived their own life of slaying and
+playing, untouched by the culture of the world below them. Knights in
+the middle ages, squires in the eighteenth century, they have never
+received a tincture of the civilising arts and crafts and industries;
+they have fought and fished and hunted in uninterrupted succession since
+the days when wild in woods the noble savage ran, to the days when they
+pay extravagant rents for Scottish grouse moors. Their very titles are
+barbaric and military--knight and earl and marquis and duke, early
+crystallised names for leaders in war or protectors of the frontier.
+Their crests and coats of arms are but the totems of their savage
+predecessors, afterwards utilised by mediaeval blacksmiths as
+distinguishing marks for the summit of a helmet. They decorate their
+halls with savage trophies of the chase, like the Zulu or the Red
+Indian; they hang up captured arms and looted Chinese jars from the
+Summer Palace in their semi-civilised drawing-rooms. They love to be
+surrounded by grooms and gamekeepers and other barbaric retainers; they
+pass their lives in the midst of serfs; their views about the position
+and rights of women--especially the women of the "lower orders"--are
+frankly African. They share the sentiments of Achilles as to the
+individuality of Chryseis and Briseis.
+
+Such is the actual aristocrat, as we now behold him. Thus, living his
+own barbarous life in the midst of a civilised community of workers and
+artists and thinkers and craftsmen, with whom he seldom mingles, and
+with whom he has nothing in common, this chartered relic of worse days
+preserves from first to last many painful traits of the low moral and
+social ideas of his ancestors, from which he has never varied. He
+represents most of all, in the modern world, the surviving savage. His
+love of gewgaws, of titles, of uniform, of dress, of feathers, of
+decorations, of Highland kilts, and stars and garters, is but one
+external symbol of his lower grade of mental and moral status. All over
+Europe, the truly civilised classes have gone on progressing by the
+practice of peaceful arts from generation to generation; but the
+aristocrat has stood still at the same half-savage level, a hunter and
+fighter, an orgiastic roysterer, a killer of wild boars and wearer of
+absurd mediaeval costumes, too childish for the civilised and cultivated
+commoner.
+
+Government by aristocrats is thus government by the mentally and morally
+inferior. And yet--a Bill for giving at last some scant measure of
+self-government to persecuted Ireland has to run the gauntlet, in our
+nineteenth-century England, of an irresponsible House of hereditary
+barbarians!
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+_SCIENCE IN EDUCATION._
+
+
+I mean what I say: science in education, not education in science.
+
+It is the last of these that all the scientific men of England have so
+long been fighting for. And a very good thing it is in its way, and I
+hope they may get as much as they want of it. But compared to the
+importance of science in education, education in science is a matter of
+very small national moment.
+
+The difference between the two is by no means a case of tweedledum and
+tweedledee. Education in science means the systematic teaching of
+science so as to train up boys to be scientific men. Now scientific men
+are exceedingly useful members of a community; and so are engineers, and
+bakers, and blacksmiths, and artists, and chimney-sweeps. But we can't
+all be bakers, and we can't all be painters in water-colours. There is a
+dim West Country legend to the effect that the inhabitants of the Scilly
+Isles eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in one another's
+washing. As a matter of practical political economy, such a source of
+income is worse than precarious--it's frankly impossible. "It takes all
+sorts to make a world." A community entirely composed of scientific men
+would fail to feed itself, clothe itself, house itself, and keep itself
+supplied with amusing light literature. In one word, education in
+science produces specialists; and specialists, though most useful and
+valuable persons in their proper place, are no more the staple of a
+civilised community than engine-drivers or ballet-dancers.
+
+What the world at large really needs, and will one day get, is not this,
+but due recognition of the true value of science in education. We don't
+all want to be made into first-class anatomists like Owen, still less
+into first-class practical surgeons, like Sir Henry Thompson. But what
+we do all want is a competent general knowledge (amongst other things)
+of anatomy at large, and especially of human anatomy; of physiology at
+large, and especially of human physiology. We don't all want to be
+analytical chemists: but what we do all want is to know as much about
+oxygen and carbon as will enable us to understand the commonest
+phenomena of combustion, of chemical combination, of animal or vegetable
+life. We don't all want to be zoologists, and botanists of the type who
+put their names after "critical species:" but what we do all want to
+know is as much about plants and animals as will enable us to walk
+through life intelligently, and to understand the meaning of the things
+that surround us. We want, in one word, a general acquaintance with the
+_results_ rather than with the _methods_ of science.
+
+"In short," says the specialist, with his familiar sneer, "you want a
+smattering."
+
+Well, yes, dear Sir Smelfungus, if it gives you pleasure to put it
+so--just that; a smattering, an all-round smattering. But remember that
+in this matter the man of science is always influenced by ideas derived
+from his own pursuits as specialist. He is for ever thinking what sort
+of education will produce more specialists in future; and as a rule he
+is thinking what sort of education will produce men capable in future of
+advancing science. Now to advance science, to discover new snails, or
+invent new ethyl compounds, is not and cannot be the main object of the
+mass of humanity. What the mass wants is just unspecialised
+knowledge--the kind of knowledge that enables men to get comfortably and
+creditably and profitably through life, to meet emergencies as they
+rise, to know their way through the world, to use their faculties in all
+circumstances to the best advantage. And for this purpose what is wanted
+is, not the methods, but the results of science.
+
+One science, and one only, is rationally taught in our schools at
+present. I mean geography. And the example of geography is so eminently
+useful for illustrating the difference I am trying to point out, that I
+will venture to dwell upon it for a moment in passing. It is good for us
+all to know that the world is round, without its being necessary for
+every one of us to follow in detail the intricate reasoning by which
+that result has been arrived at. It is good for us all to know the
+position of New York and Rio and Calcutta on the map, without its being
+necessary for us to understand, far less to work out for ourselves, the
+observations and calculations which fixed their latitude and longitude.
+Knowledge of the map is a good thing in itself, though it is a very
+different thing indeed from the technical knowledge which enables a man
+to make a chart of an unknown region, or to explore and survey it.
+Furthermore, it is a form of knowledge far more generally useful. A fair
+acquaintance with the results embodied in the atlas, in the gazetteer,
+in Baedeker, and in Bradshaw, is much oftener useful to us on our way
+through the world than a special acquaintance with the methods of
+map-making. It would be absurd to say that because a man is not going to
+be a Stanley or a Nansen, therefore it is no good for him to learn
+geography. It would be absurd to say that unless he learned geography in
+accordance with its methods instead of its results, he could have but a
+smattering, and that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A little
+knowledge of the position of New York is indeed a dangerous thing, if a
+man uses it to navigate a Cunard vessel across the Atlantic. But the
+absence of the smattering is a much more dangerous and fatal thing if
+the man wishes to do business with the Argentine and the Transvaal, or
+to enter into practical relations of any sort with anybody outside his
+own parish. The results of geography are useful and valuable in
+themselves, quite apart from the methods employed in obtaining them.
+
+It is just the same with all the other sciences. There is nothing occult
+or mysterious about them. No just cause or impediment exists why we
+should insist on being ignorant of the orbits of the planets because we
+cannot ourselves make the calculations for determining them; no reason
+why we should insist on being ignorant of the classification of plants
+and animals because we don't feel able ourselves to embark on anatomical
+researches which would justify us in coming to original conclusions
+about them. I know the mass of scientific opinion has always gone the
+other way; but then scientific opinion means only the opinion of men of
+science, who are themselves specialists, and who think most of the
+education needed to make men specialists, not of the education needed to
+fit them for the general exigencies and emergencies of life. We don't
+want authorities on the Cucurbitaceae, but well-informed citizens.
+Professor Huxley is not our best guide in these matters, but Mr. Herbert
+Spencer, who long ago, in his book on Education, sketched out a radical
+programme of instruction in that knowledge which is of most worth, such
+as no country, no college, no school in Europe has ever yet been bold
+enough to put into practice.
+
+What common sense really demands, then, is education in the main results
+of all the sciences--a knowledge of what is known, not necessarily a
+knowledge of each successive step by which men came to know it. At
+present, of course, in all our schools in England there is no systematic
+teaching of knowledge at all; what replaces it is a teaching of the
+facts of language, and for the most part of useless facts, or even of
+exploded fictions. Our public schools, especially (by which phrase we
+never mean real public schools like the board schools at all, but merely
+schools for the upper and the middle classes) are in their existing
+stage primarily great gymnasiums--very good things, too, in their way,
+against which I have not a word of blame; and, secondarily, places for
+imparting a sham and imperfect knowledge of some few philological facts
+about two extinct languages. Pupils get a smattering of Homer and
+Cicero. That is literally all the equipment for life that the cleverest
+and most industrious boys can ever take away from them. The sillier or
+idler don't take away even that. As to the "mental training" argument,
+so often trotted out, it is childish enough not to be worth answering.
+Which is most practically useful to us in life--knowledge of Latin
+grammar or knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in, physical,
+social, moral? That is the question.
+
+The truth is, schoolmastering in Britain has become a vast vested
+interest in the hands of men who have nothing to teach us. They try to
+bolster up their vicious system by such artificial arguments as the
+"mental training" fallacy. Forced to admit the utter uselessness of the
+pretended knowledge they impart, they fall back upon the plea of its
+supposed occult value as intellectual discipline. They say in
+effect:--"This sawdust we offer you contains no food, we know: but then
+see how it strengthens the jaws to chew it!" Besides, look at our
+results! The typical John Bull! pig-headed, ignorant, brutal. Are we
+really such immense successes ourselves that we must needs perpetuate
+the mould that warped us?
+
+The one fatal charge brought against the public school system is that
+"after all, it turns out English gentlemen!"
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+_THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS._
+
+
+"Alas, how easily things go wrong!" says Dr. George MacDonald. And all
+the world over, when things do go wrong, the natural and instinctive
+desire of the human animal is--to find a scapegoat. When the great
+French nation in the lump embarks its capital in a hopeless scheme for
+cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and then finds out too
+late that Nature has imposed insuperable barriers to its completion on
+the projected scale--what does the great French nation do, in its
+collective wisdom, but turn round at once to rend the directors? It
+cries, "A Mazas!" just as in '71 it cried "Bazaine a la lanterne!" I
+don't mean to say the directors don't deserve all they have got or ever
+will get, and perhaps more also; I don't mean to deny corruption
+extraordinary in many high places; as a rule the worst that anybody
+alleges about anything is only a part of what might easily be alleged if
+we were all in the secret. Which of us, indeed, would 'scape whipping?
+But what I do mean is, that we should never have heard of Reinach or
+Herz, of the corruption and peculation, at all if things had gone well.
+It is the crash that brought them out. The nation wants a scapegoat.
+"Ain't nobody to be whopped for this 'ere?" asked Mr. Sam Weller on a
+critical occasion. The question embodies the universal impulse of
+humanity.
+
+Tracing the feeling back to its origin, it seems due to this: minds of
+the lower order can never see anything go wrong without experiencing a
+certain sense of resentment; and resentment, by its very nature, desires
+to vent itself upon some living and sentient creature, by preference a
+fellow human being. When the child, running too fast, falls and hurts
+itself, it gets instantly angry. "Naughty ground to hurt baby!" says the
+nurse: "Baby hit it and hurt it." And baby promptly hits it back, with
+vicious little fist, feeling every desire to revenge itself. By-and-by,
+when baby grows older and learns that the ground can't feel to speak of,
+he wants to put the blame upon somebody else, in order to have an object
+to expend his rage upon. "You pushed me down!" he says to his playmate,
+and straightway proceeds to punch his playmate's head for it--not
+because he really believes the playmate did it, but because he feels he
+_must_ have some outlet for his resentment. When once resentment is
+roused, it will expend its force on anything that turns up handy, as the
+man who has quarrelled with his wife about a question of a bonnet, will
+kick his dog for trying to follow him to the club as he leaves her.
+
+The mob, enraged at the death of Caesar, meets Cinna the poet in the
+streets of Rome. "Your name, sir?" inquires the Third Citizen. "Truly,
+my name is Cinna," says the unsuspecting author. "Tear him to pieces!"
+cries the mob; "he's a conspirator!" "I am Cinna the poet," pleads the
+unhappy man; "I am not Cinna the conspirator!" But the mob does not heed
+such delicate distinctions at such a moment. "Tear him for his bad
+verses!" it cries impartially. "Tear him for his bad verses!"
+
+Whatever sort of misfortune falls upon persons of the lower order of
+intelligence is always met in the same spirit. Especially is this the
+case with the deaths of relatives. Fools who have lost a friend
+invariably blame somebody for his fatal illness. To hear many people
+talk, you would suppose they were unaware of the familiar proposition
+that all men are mortal (including women); you might imagine they
+thought an ordinary human constitution was calculated to survive nine
+hundred and ninety-nine years unless some evil-disposed person or
+persons took the trouble beforehand to waylay and destroy it. "My poor
+father was eighty-seven when he died; and he would have been alive still
+if it weren't for that nasty Mrs. Jones: she put him into a pair of damp
+sheets." Or, "My husband would never have caught the cold that killed
+him, if that horrid man Brown hadn't kept him waiting so long in the
+carriage at the street corner." The doctor has to bear the brunt of most
+such complaints; indeed, it is calculated by an eminent statistician
+(who desires his name to remain unpublished) that eighty-three per cent.
+of the deaths in Great Britain might easily have been averted if the
+patient had only been treated in various distinct ways by all the
+members of his family, and if that foolish Dr. Squills hadn't so grossly
+mistaken and mistreated his malady.
+
+The fact is, the death is regarded as a misfortune, and somebody must be
+blamed for it. Heaven has provided scapegoats. The doctor and the
+hostile female members of the family are always there--laid on, as it
+were, for the express purpose.
+
+With us in modern Europe, resentment in such cases seldom goes further
+than vague verbal outbursts of temper. We accuse Mrs. Jones of
+misdemeanours with damp sheets; but we don't get so far as to accuse her
+of tricks with strychnine. In the Middle Ages, however, the pursuit of
+the scapegoat ran a vast deal further. When any great one died--a Black
+Prince or a Dauphin--it was always assumed on all hands that he must
+have been poisoned. True, poisoning may then have been a trifle more
+frequent; certainly the means of detecting it were far less advanced
+than in the days of Tidy and Lauder Brunton. Still, people must often
+have died natural deaths even in the Middle Ages--though nobody believed
+it. All the world began to speculate what Jane Shore could have poisoned
+them. A little earlier, again, it was not the poisoner that was looked
+for, but his predecessor, the sorcerer. Whoever fell ill, somebody had
+bewitched him. Were the cattle diseased? Then search for the evil eye.
+Did the cows yield no milk? Some neighbour, doubtless, knew the reason
+only too well, and could be forced to confess it by liberal use of the
+thumb-screw and the ducking-stool. No misfortune was regarded as due to
+natural causes; for in their philosophy there were no such things as
+natural causes at all; whatever ill-luck came, somebody had contrived
+it; so you had always your scapegoat ready to hand to punish. The
+Athenians, indeed, kept a small collection of public scapegoats always
+in stock, waiting to be sacrificed at a moment's notice.
+
+More even than that. Go one step further back, and you will find that
+man in his early stages has no conception of such a thing as natural
+death in any form. He doesn't really know that the human organism is
+wound up like a clock to run at best for so many years, or months, or
+hours, and that even if nothing unexpected happens to cut short its
+course prematurely, it can only run out its allotted period. Within his
+own experience, almost all the deaths that occur are violent deaths, and
+have been brought about by human agency or by the attacks of wild
+beasts. There you have a cause with whose action and operation the
+savage is personally familiar; and it is the only one he believes in.
+Even old age is in his eyes no direct cause of death; for when his
+relations grow old, he considerately clubs them, to put them out of
+their misery. When, therefore, he sees his neighbour struck down before
+his face by some invisible power, and writhing with pain as though
+unseen snakes and tigers were rending him, what should he naturally
+conclude save that demon or witch or wizard is at work? and if he cares
+about the matter at all, what should he do save endeavour to find the
+culprit out and inflict condign punishment? In savage states, whenever
+anything untoward happens to the king or chief, it is the business of
+the witch-finder to disclose the wrong-doer; and sooner or later, you
+may be sure, "somebody gets whopped for it." Whopping in Dahomey means
+wholesale decapitation.
+
+Now, is it not a direct survival from this primitive state of mind that
+entails upon us all the desire to find a scapegoat? Our ancestors really
+believed there was always somebody to blame--man, witch, or spirit--if
+only you could find him; and though we ourselves have mostly got beyond
+that stage, yet the habit it engendered in our race remains ingrained in
+the nervous system, so that none but a few of the naturally highest and
+most civilised dispositions have really outgrown it. Most people still
+think there is somebody to blame for every human misfortune. "Who fills
+the butcher's shops with large blue flies?" asked the poet of the
+Regency. He set it down to "the Corsican ogre." For the Tory Englishmen
+of the present day it is Mr. Gladstone who is most often and most
+popularly envisaged as the author of all evil. For the Pope, it is the
+Freemasons. There are just a few men here and there in the world who can
+see that when misfortunes come, circumstances, or nature, or (hardest of
+all) we ourselves have brought them. The common human instinct is still
+to get into a rage, and look round to discover whether there's any other
+fellow standing about unobserved, whose head we can safely undertake to
+punch for it.
+
+"It's all the fault of those confounded paid agitators."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+_AMERICAN DUCHESSES._
+
+
+Every American woman is by birth a duchess.
+
+There, you see, I have taken you in. When you saw the heading, "American
+Duchesses," you thought I was going to purvey some piquant scandal about
+high-placed ladies; and you straightway began to read my essay. That
+shows I rightly interpreted your human nature. There's a deal of human
+nature flying about unrecognised. Yet when I said duchesses, I actually
+meant it. For the American woman is the only real aristocrat now living
+in America.
+
+These remarks are forced upon me by a brilliant afternoon on the
+Promenade des Anglais. All Nice is there, in its cosmopolitan butterfly
+variety, flaunting itself in the sun in the very ugly dresses now in
+fashion. I don't know why, but the mode of the moment consists in making
+everything as exaggerated as possible, and sedulously hiding the natural
+contours of the human figure. But let that pass; the day is too fine for
+a man to be critical. The band is playing Mascagni's last in the Jardin
+Public; the carriages are drawn up beside the palms and judas-trees that
+fringe the Paillon; the _sous-officiers_ are strolling along the wall
+with their red caps stuck jauntily just a trifle on one side, as though
+to mow down nursemaids were the one legitimate occupation of the _brav'
+militaire_. And among them all, proud, tall, disdainful, glide the
+American duchesses, cold, critical, high-toned, yet ready to strike up,
+should opportunity serve, appropriate acquaintance with their natural
+equals, the dukes of Europe.
+
+"And the American dukes?"--There aren't any. "But these ladies' husbands
+and fathers and brothers?"--Oh, _they're_ business men, working hard for
+the duchesses in Wall Street, or on 'Change in Chicago. And that's why I
+say quite seriously the American woman is the only real aristocrat now
+living in America. Everybody who has seen much of Americans must have
+noticed for himself how really superior American women are, on the
+average, to the men of their kind. I don't mean merely that they are
+better dressed, and better groomed, and better got up, and better
+mannered than their brothers. I mean that they have a real superiority
+in the things worth having--the things that are more excellent--in
+education, culture, knowledge, taste, good feeling. And the reason is
+not far to seek. They represent the only leisured class in America. They
+are the one set of people from Maine to California who have time to
+read, to think, to travel, to look at good pictures, to hear good music,
+to mix with society that can improve and elevate them. They have read
+Daudet; they have seen the Vatican. The women thus form a natural
+aristocracy--the only aristocracy the country possesses.
+
+I am aware that in saying this I take my life in my hands. I shall be
+prepared to defend myself from the infuriated Westerner with the usual
+argument, which I shall carry about loaded in all its chambers in my
+right-hand pocket. I am also aware that less infuriated Easterners,
+choosing their own more familiar weapon, will inundate my leisure with
+sardonic inquiries whether I don't consider Oliver Wendell Holmes or
+Charles Eliot Norton (thus named in full) the equal in culture of the
+average American woman. Well, I frankly admit these cases and thousands
+like them; indeed I have had the good fortune to number among my
+personal acquaintances many American gentlemen whose chivalrous breeding
+would have been conspicuous (if you will believe it) even at Marlborough
+House. I will also allow that in New York, in Boston, and less
+abundantly in other big towns of America, men of leisure, men of
+culture, and men of thought are to be found, as wide-minded and as
+gentle-natured as this race of ours makes them. But that doesn't alter
+the general fact that, taking them in the lump, American men stand a
+step or two lower in the scale of humanity than American women. One need
+hardly ask why. It is because the men are almost all immersed and
+absorbed in business, while the women are fine ladies who stop at home,
+and read, and see, and interest themselves widely in numberless
+directions.
+
+The consequence is that nowhere, as a rule, does the gulf between the
+sexes yawn so wide as in America. One can often observe it in the
+brothers and sisters of the same family. And it runs in the opposite
+direction from the gulf in Europe. With us, as a rule, the men are
+better educated, and more likely to have read and seen and thought
+widely, than the women. In America, the men are generally so steeped in
+affairs as to be materialised and encysted; they take for the most part
+a hard-headed, solid-silver view of everything, and are but little
+influenced by abstract conceptions. Their horizon is bounded by the rim
+of the dollar. Nay, owing to the eager desire to get a good start by
+beginning life early, their education itself is generally cut short at a
+younger age than their sisters'; so that, even at the outset, the girls
+have often a decided superiority in knowledge and culture. Amanda reads
+Paul Bourget and John Oliver Hobbes; she has some slight tincture of
+Latin, Greek, and German; while Cyrus knows nothing but English and
+arithmetic, the quotations for prime pork and the state of the market
+for Futures. Add to this that the women are more sensitive, more
+delicate, more naturally refined, as well as unspoilt by the trading
+spirit, and you get the real reasons for the marked and, in some ways,
+unusual superiority of the American woman.
+
+That, I think, in large part explains the fascination which American
+women undoubtedly exercise over a considerable class of European men. In
+the European man the American woman often recognises for the first time
+the male of her species. Unaccustomed at home to as general a level of
+culture and feeling as she finds among the educated gentlemen of Europe,
+she likes their society and makes her preference felt by them. Now man
+is a vain animal. You are a man yourself, and must recognise at once the
+truth of the proposition. As soon as he sees a woman likes him, he
+instantly returns the compliment with interest. In point of fact, he
+usually falls in love with her. Of course I admit the large number of
+concomitant circumstances which disturb the problem; I admit on the one
+hand the tempting shekels of the Californian heiress, and on the other
+hand the glamour and halo that still surround the British coronet.
+Nevertheless, after making all deductions for these disturbing factors,
+I submit there remains a residual phenomenon thus best interpreted. If
+anybody denies it, I would ask him one question--how does it come that
+so many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians marry American women, while
+so few Englishwomen, French women, or Italian women marry American men?
+Surely the American men have also the shekels; surely it is something
+even in Oregon or Montana to have inspired an honourable passion in a
+Lady Elizabeth or a dowager countess. I think the true explanation is
+that our men are attracted by American women, but our women are not
+equally attracted by American men, and that the quality of the articles
+has something to do with it.
+
+The American duchess, I take it, comes over to Europe, and desires
+incontinently to drag the European duke at the wheels of her chariot.
+And the European duke is fascinated in turn, partly by this very fact,
+partly by the undeniable freshness, brightness, and delicate culture of
+the American woman. For there is no burking the truth that in many
+respects the American woman carries about her a peculiar charm ungranted
+as yet to her European sisters. It is the charm of freedom, of ease, of
+a certain external and skin-deep emancipation--an emancipation which
+goes but a little way down, yet adds a quaint and piquant grace of
+manner. What she conspicuously lacks, on the other hand, is essential
+femininity; by which I don't mean womanliness--of that she has enough
+and to spare--but the wholesome physical and instinctive qualities which
+go to make up a sound and well-equipped wife and mother. The lack of
+these underlying muliebral qualities more than counterbalances to not a
+few Europeans the undoubted vivacity, originality, and freshness of the
+American woman. She is a dainty bit of porcelain, unsuited for use; a
+delicate exotic blossom, for drawing-room decoration, where many would
+prefer robust fruit-bearing faculties.
+
+I dropped into the Opera House here at Nice the other night, and found
+they were playing "Carmen"--which is always interesting. Well, you may
+perhaps remember that when that creature of passion, the gipsy heroine,
+wishes to gain or retain a man's affections, she throws a rose at him,
+and then he cannot resist her. That is Merimee's symbolism. Art is full
+of these sacrifices of realism to reticence. Outside the opera, it is
+not with roses that women enslave us. But the American duchess relies
+entirely upon the use of the rose; and that is just where she fails to
+interest so many of us in Europe.
+
+And now I think it's almost time for me to go and hunt up the material
+arguments for that rusty six-shooter.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+_IS ENGLAND PLAYED OUT?_
+
+
+Britain is now the centre of civilisation. Will it always be so? Is our
+commercial supremacy decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the period
+of inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might a
+nation go on being great for ever? If so, are _we_ that nation? If not,
+have we yet arrived at the moment when retrogression becomes a foregone
+conclusion? These are momentous questions. Dare I try, under the mimosas
+on the terrace, to resolve them?
+
+Most people have talked of late as though the palmy days of England were
+fairly over. The down grade lies now before us. But, then, so far as I
+can judge, most people have talked so ever since the morning when
+Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of
+Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work
+consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett
+strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the
+British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or
+thereabouts--and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the
+contrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible place of
+residence to-day than in the stirring times of the Saxon invasion.
+Hence, for the last two or three centuries, I have learned to discount
+these recurrent Jeremiads of Toryism, and to judge the question of our
+decadence or progress by a more rational standard.
+
+There is only one such rational standard; and that is, to discover the
+causes and conditions of our commercial prosperity, and then to inquire
+whether those causes and conditions are being largely altered or
+modified by the evolution of new phases. If they are, England must begin
+to decline; if they are not, her day is not yet come. Home Rule she will
+survive; even the Eight Hours bogey, we may presume, will not finally
+dispose of her.
+
+Now, the centre of civilisation is not a fixed point. It has varied from
+time to time, and may yet vary. In the very earliest historical period,
+there was hardly such a thing as a centre of civilisation at all. There
+were civilisations in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Etruria; discrete
+civilisations of the river valleys, mostly, which scarcely came into
+contact with one another in their first beginnings; any more than our
+own came into contact once with the civilisations of China, of Japan, of
+Peru, of Mexico. As yet there was no world-commerce, no mutual
+communication of empire with empire. It was in the AEgean and the eastern
+basin of the Mediterranean that navigation first reached the point where
+great commercial ports and free intercourse became possible. The
+Phoenicians, and later the Greeks, were the pioneers of the new era.
+Tyre, Athens, Miletus, Rhodes, occupied the centre of the nascent world,
+and bound together Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece,
+Sicily, and Italy in one mercantile system. A little later, Hellas
+itself enlarged, so as to include Syracuse, Byzantium, Alexandria,
+Cyrene, Cumae, Neapolis, Massilia. The inland sea became "a Greek lake."
+But as navigation thus slowly widened to the western Mediterranean
+basin, the centre of commerce had to shift perforce from Hellas to the
+mid-point of the new area. Two powerful trading towns occupied such a
+mid-point in the Mediterranean--Rome and Carthage; and they were driven
+to fight out the supremacy of the world (the world as it then existed)
+between them. With the Roman Empire, the circle extended so as to take
+in the Atlantic coasts, Gaul, Spain, and Britain, which then, however,
+lay not at the centre but on the circumference of civilisation. During
+the Middle Ages, when navigation began to embrace the great open sea as
+well as the Mediterranean, a double centre sprang up: the Italian
+Republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, were still the chief carriers;
+but the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp began to compete
+with them, and the Atlantic states, France, England, the Low Countries,
+rose into importance. By and by, as time goes on, the discoveries of
+Columbus and of Vasco di Gama open out new tracks. Suddenly commerce is
+revolutionised. France, England, Spain, become nearer to America and
+India than Italy; so Italy declines; while the Atlantic states usurp the
+first place as the centres of civilisation.
+
+Our own age brings fresh seas into the circle once more. It is no longer
+the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, or the Indian Ocean that alone count;
+the Pacific also begins to be considered. China, Japan, the Cape; Chili,
+Peru, the Argentine; California, British Columbia, Australia, New
+Zealand; all of them are parts of the system of to-day; civilisation is
+world-wide.
+
+Has this change of area altered the central position of England? Not at
+all, save to strengthen it. If you look at the hemisphere of greatest
+land, you will see that England occupies its exact middle. Insular
+herself, and therefore all made up of ports, she is nearer all ports in
+the world than any other country is or ever can be. I don't say that
+this insures for her perpetual dominion, such as Virgil prophesied for
+the Roman Empire; but I do say it makes her a hard country to beat in
+commercial competition. It accounts for Liverpool, London, Glasgow,
+Newcastle; it even accounts in a way for Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds,
+and Sheffield. England now stands at the mathematical centre of the
+practical world, and unless some Big Thing occurs to displace her, she
+must continue to stand there. It takes a great deal to upset the balance
+of an entire planet.
+
+Is anything now displacing her? Well, there is the fact that railways
+are making land-carriage to-day more important relatively to
+water-carriage than at any previous period. That may, perhaps, in time
+shift the centre of the world from an island like England to the middle
+of a great land area, like Chicago or Moscow. And, no doubt, if ever the
+centre shifts at all, it will shift towards Western America, or rather
+the prairie region. But, just at present, what are the greatest
+commercial towns of the world? All ports to a man. And the day when it
+will be otherwise, if ever, seems still far distant. Look at the newest
+countries. What are their great focal points? Every one of them ports.
+Melbourne and Sydney; Rio, Buenos Ayres, and Valparaiso; Cape Town, San
+Francisco, Bombay, Calcutta, Yokohama. Chicago itself, the most vital
+and the quickest grower among modern towns, owes half its importance to
+the fact that there water-carriage down the Great Lakes begins; though
+it owes the other half, I admit, to the converse fact that all the great
+trans-continental railways have to bend south at that point to avoid
+Lake Michigan. Still, on the whole, I think, as long as conditions
+remain what they are, the commercial supremacy of England is in no
+immediate danger. It is these great permanent geographical factors that
+make or mar a country, not Eight Hours Bills or petty social
+reconstructions. Said the Lord Mayor of London to petulant King James,
+when he proposed to remove the Court to Oxford, "May it please your
+Majesty not to take away the Thames also."
+
+"But our competitors? We are being driven out of our markets." Oh, yes,
+if that's all you mean, I don't suppose we shall always be able in
+everything to keep up our exclusive position. Our neighbours, who (bar
+the advantage of insularity, which means a coast and a port always close
+at hand) seem nearly as well situated as we are for access to the
+world-markets, are beginning to wake up and take a slice of the cake
+from us. Germany is manufacturing; Belgium is smelting; Antwerp is
+exporting; America is occupying her own markets. But that's a very
+different thing indeed from national decadence. We may have to compete a
+little harder with our rivals, that's all. The Boom may be over; but the
+Thames remains: the geographical facts are still unaltered. And notice
+that all the time while there's been this vague talk about "bad
+times"--income-tax has been steadily increasing, London has been
+steadily growing, every outer and visible sign of commercial prosperity
+has been steadily spreading. Have our watering-places shrunk? Have our
+buildings been getting smaller and less luxurious? If Antwerp has grown,
+how about Hull and Cardiff? "Well, perhaps the past is all right; but
+consider the future! Eight hours are going to drive capital out of the
+country!" Rubbish! I'm not a political economist, thank God; I never
+sank quite so low as that. And I'm not speaking for or against Eight
+Hours: I'm only discounting some verbose nonsense. But I know enough to
+see that the capital of a country can no more be exported than the land
+or the houses. Can you drive away the London and North-Western Railway?
+Can you drive away the factories of Manchester, the mines of the Black
+Country, the canals, the buildings, the machinery, the docks, the plant,
+the apparatus? Impossible, on the very face of it! Most of the capital
+of a country is fixed in its soil, and can't be uprooted. People fall
+into this error about driving away capital because they know you can
+sell particular railway shares or a particular factory and leave the
+country with the proceeds, provided somebody else is willing to buy; but
+you can't sell all the railways and all the factories in a lump, and
+clear out with the capital. No, no; England stands where she does,
+because God put her there; and until He invents a new order of things
+(which may, of course, happen any day--as, for example, if aerial
+navigation came in) she must continue, in spite of minor changes, to
+maintain in the main her present position.
+
+But a truce to these frivolities! The little Italian boy next door calls
+me to play ball with him, with a green lemon from the garden. Vengo,
+Luigi, vengo! I return at once to the realities of life, and dismiss
+such shadows.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+_THE GAME AND THE RULES._
+
+
+A sportive friend of mine, a mighty golfer, is fond of saying, "You
+Radicals want to play the game without the rules." To which I am
+accustomed mildly to retort, "Not at all; but we think the rules unfair,
+and so we want to see them altered."
+
+Now life is a very peculiar game, which differs in many important
+respects even from compulsory football. The Rugby scrimmage is mere
+child's play by the side of it. There's no possibility of shirking it. A
+medical certificate won't get you off; whether you like it or not, play
+you must in your appointed order. We are all unwilling competitors.
+Nobody asks our naked little souls beforehand whether they would prefer
+to be born into the game or to remain, unfleshed, in the limbo of
+non-existence. Willy nilly, every one of us is thrust into the world by
+an irresponsible act of two previous players; and once there, we must
+play out the set as best we may to the bitter end, however little we
+like it or the rules that order it.
+
+That, it must be admitted, makes a grave distinction from the very
+outset between the game of human life and any other game with which we
+are commonly acquainted. It also makes it imperative upon the framers of
+the rules so to frame them that no one player shall have an unfair or
+unjust advantage over any of the others. And since the penalty of bad
+play, or bad success in the match, is death, misery, starvation, it
+behoves the rule-makers to be more scrupulously particular as to
+fairness and equity than in any other game like cricket or tennis. It
+behoves them to see that all start fair, and that no hapless beginner is
+unduly handicapped. To compel men to take part in a match for dear life,
+whether they wish it or not, and then to insist that some of them shall
+wield bats and some mere broom-sticks, irrespective of height, weight,
+age, or bodily infirmity, is surely not fair. It justifies the committee
+in calling for a revision.
+
+But things are far worse than even that in the game as actually played
+in Europe. What shall we say of rules which decide dogmatically that one
+set of players are hereditarily entitled to be always batting, while
+another set, less lucky, have to field for ever, and to be fined or
+imprisoned for not catching? What shall we say of rules which give one
+group a perpetual right to free lunch in the tent, while the remainder
+have to pick up what they can for themselves by gleaning among the
+stubble? How justify the principle in accordance with which the captain
+on one side has an exclusive claim to the common ground of the club, and
+may charge every player exactly what he likes for the right to play upon
+it?--especially when the choice lies between playing on such terms, or
+being cast into the void, yourself and your family. And then to think
+that the ground thus tabooed by one particular member may be all
+Sutherlandshire, or, still worse, all Westminster! Decidedly, these
+rules call for instant revision; and the unprivileged players must be
+submissive indeed who consent to put up with them.
+
+Friends and fellow-members, let us cry with one voice, "The links for
+the players!"
+
+Once more, just look at the singular rule in our own All England club,
+by which certain assorted members possess a hereditary right to veto all
+decisions of the elective committee, merely because they happen to be
+their fathers' sons, and the club long ago very foolishly permitted the
+like privilege to their ancestors! That is an irrational interference
+with the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays ventures
+to defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-hearted
+way (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) by
+supposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talk
+in the committee of "mending or ending it." It shows the long-suffering
+nature of the poor blind players at this compulsory game of national
+football that they should ever for one moment permit so monstrous an
+assumption--permit the idea that one single player may wield a
+substantive voice and vote to outweigh tens of thousands of his
+fellow-members!
+
+These questions of procedure, however, are after all small matters. It
+is the real hardships of the game that most need to be tackled. Why
+should one player be born into the sport with a prescriptive right to
+fill some easy place in the field, while another has to fag on from
+morning to night in the most uninteresting and fatiguing position? Why
+should _pate de foie gras_ and champagne-cup in the tent be so unequally
+distributed? Why should those who have made fewest runs and done no
+fielding be admitted to partake of these luxuries, free of charge, while
+those who have borne the brunt of the fight, those who have suffered
+from the heat of the day, those who have contributed most to the honour
+of the victory, are turned loose, unfed, to do as they can for
+themselves by hook or by crook somehow? These are the questions some of
+us players are now beginning to ask ourselves; and we don't find them
+efficiently answered by the bald statement that we "want to play the
+game without the rules," and that we ought to be precious glad the
+legislators of the club haven't made them a hundred times harder against
+us.
+
+No, no; the rules themselves must be altered. Time was, indeed, when
+people used to think they were made and ordained by divine authority.
+"Cum privilegio" was the motto of the captains. But we know very well
+now that every club settles its own standing orders, and that it can
+alter and modify them as fundamentally as it pleases. Lots of funny old
+saws are still uttered upon this subject--"There must always be rich and
+poor;" "You can't interfere with economical laws;" "If you were to
+divide up everything to-morrow, at the end of a fortnight you'd find the
+same differences and inequalities as ever." The last-named argument (I
+believe it considers itself by courtesy an argument) is one which no
+self-respecting Radical should so much as deign to answer. Nobody that I
+ever heard of for one moment proposed to "divide up everything," or, for
+that matter, anything: and the imputation that somebody did or does is a
+proof either of intentional malevolence or of crass stupidity. Neither
+should be encouraged; and you encourage them by pretending to take them
+seriously. It is the initial injustices of the game that we Radicals
+object to--the injustices which prevent us from all starting fair and
+having our even chance of picking up a livelihood. We don't want to
+"divide up everything"--a most futile proceeding; but we do want to
+untie the legs and release the arms of the handicapped players. To drop
+metaphor at last, it is the conditions we complain about. Alter the
+conditions, and there would be no need for division, summary or gradual.
+The game would work itself out spontaneously without your intervention.
+
+The injustice of the existing set of rules simply appals the Radical.
+Yet oddly enough, this injustice itself appeals rather to the
+comparative looker-on than to the heavily-handicapped players in person.
+They, poor creatures, dragging their log in patience, have grown so
+accustomed to regarding the world as another man's oyster, that they put
+up uncomplainingly for the most part with the most patent inequalities.
+Perhaps 'tis their want of imagination that makes them unable to
+conceive any other state of things as even possible--like the dog who
+accepts kicking as the natural fate of doghood. At any rate, you will
+find, if you look about you, that the chief reformers are not, as a
+rule, the ill-used classes themselves, but the sensitive and thinking
+souls who hate and loathe the injustice with which others are treated.
+Most of the best Radicals I have known were men of gentle birth and
+breeding. Not all: others, just as earnest, just as eager, just as
+chivalrous, sprang from the masses. Yet the gently-reared preponderate.
+It is a common Tory taunt to say that the battle is one between the
+Haves and the Have-nots. That is by no means true. It is between the
+selfish Haves, on one side, and the unselfish Haves, who wish to see
+something done for the Have-nots, on the other. As for the poor
+Have-nots themselves, they are mostly inarticulate. Indeed, the Tory
+almost admits as much when he alters his tone and describes the
+sympathising and active few as "paid agitators."
+
+For myself, however, I am a born Conservative. I hate to see any old
+custom or practice changed; unless, indeed, it is either foolish or
+wicked--like most existing ones.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+_THE ROLE OF PROPHET._
+
+
+One great English thinker and artist once tried the rash experiment of
+being true to himself--of saying out boldly, without fear or reserve,
+the highest and noblest and best that was in him. He gave us the most
+exquisite lyrics in the English language; he moulded the thought of our
+first youth as no other poet has ever yet moulded it; he became the
+spiritual father of the richest souls in two succeeding generations of
+Englishmen. And what reward did he get for it? He was expelled from his
+university. He was hounded out of his country. He was deprived of his
+own children. He was denied the common appeal to the law and courts of
+justice. He was drowned, an exile, in a distant sea, and burned in
+solitude on a foreign shore. And after his death he was vilified and
+calumniated by wretched penny-a-liners, or (worse insult still)
+apologised for, with half-hearted shrugs, by lukewarm advocates. The
+purest in life and the most unselfish in purpose of all mankind, he was
+persecuted alive with the utmost rancour of hate, and pursued when dead
+with the vilest shafts of malignity. He never even knew in his scattered
+grave the good he was to do to later groups of thinkers.
+
+It was a noble example, of course; but not, you will admit, an alluring
+one for others to follow.
+
+"Be true to yourself," say the copy-book moralists, "and you may be sure
+the result will at last be justified." No doubt; but in how many
+centuries? And what sort of life will you lead yourself, meanwhile, for
+your allotted space of threescore years and ten, unless haply hanged, or
+burned, or imprisoned before it? What the copy-book moralists mean is
+merely this--that sooner or later your principles will triumph, which
+may or may not be the case according to the nature of the principles.
+But even suppose they do, are you to ignore yourself in the
+interim--you, a human being with emotions, sensations, domestic
+affections, and, in the majority of instances, wife and children on whom
+to expend them? Why should it be calmly taken for granted by the world
+that if you have some new and true thing to tell humanity (which
+humanity, of course, will toss back in your face with contumely and
+violence) you are bound to blurt it out, with childish unreserve,
+regardless of consequences to yourself and to those who depend upon you?
+Why demand of genius or exceptional ability a gratuitous sacrifice which
+you would deprecate as wrong and unjust to others in the ordinary
+citizen? For the genius, too, is a man, and has his feelings.
+
+The fact is, society considers that in certain instances it has a right
+to expect the thinker will martyrise himself on its account, while it
+stands serenely by and heaps faggots on the pile, with every mark of
+contempt and loathing. But society is mistaken. No man is bound to
+martyrise himself; in a great many cases a man is bound to do the exact
+opposite. He has given hostages to Fortune, and his first duty is to the
+hostages. "We ask you for bread," his children may well say, "and you
+give us a noble moral lesson. We ask you for clothing, and you supply us
+with a beautiful poetical fancy." This is not according to bargain. Wife
+and children have a first mortgage on a man's activities; society has
+only a right to contingent remainders.
+
+A great many sensible men who had truths of deep import to deliver to
+the world must have recognised these facts in all times and places, and
+must have held their tongues accordingly. Instead of speaking out the
+truths that were in them, they must have kept their peace, or have
+confined themselves severely to the ordinary platitudes of their age and
+nation. Why ruin yourself by announcing what you feel and believe, when
+all the reward you will get for it in the end will be social ostracism,
+if not even the rack, the stake, or the pillory? The Shelleys and
+Rousseaus there's no holding, of course; they _will_ run right into it;
+but the Goethes--oh, no, they keep their secret. Indeed, I hold it as
+probable that the vast majority of men far in advance of their times
+have always held their tongues consistently, save for mere common
+babble, on Lord Chesterfield's principle that "Wise men never say."
+
+The _role_ of prophet is thus a thankless and difficult one. Nor is it
+quite certainly of real use to the community. For the prophet is
+generally too much ahead of his times. He discounts the future at a
+ruinous rate, and he takes the consequences. If you happen ever to have
+read the Old Testament you must have noticed that the prophets had
+generally a hard time of it.
+
+The leader is a very different stamp of person. _He_ stands well abreast
+of his contemporaries, and just half a pace in front of them; and he has
+power to persuade even the inertia of humanity into taking that one
+half-step in advance he himself has already made bold to adventure. His
+post is honoured, respected, remunerated. But the prophet gets no
+thanks, and perhaps does mankind no benefit. He sees too quick. And
+there can be very little good indeed in so seeing. If one of us had been
+an astronomer, and had discovered the laws of Kepler, Newton, and
+Laplace in the thirteenth century, I think he would have been wise to
+keep the discovery to himself for a few hundred years or so. Otherwise,
+he would have been burned for his trouble. Galileo, long after, tried
+part of the experiment a decade or so too soon, and got no good by it.
+But in moral and social matters the danger is far graver. I would say to
+every aspiring youth who sees some political or economical or ethical
+truth quite clearly: "Keep it dark! Don't mention it! Nobody will listen
+to you; and you, who are probably a person of superior insight and
+higher moral aims than the mass, will only destroy your own influence
+for good by premature declarations. The world will very likely come
+round of itself to your views in the end; but if you tell them too soon,
+you will suffer for it in person, and will very likely do nothing to
+help on the revolution in thought that you contemplate. For thought that
+is too abruptly ahead of the mass never influences humanity."
+
+"But sometimes the truth will out in spite of one!" Ah, yes, that's the
+worst of it. Do as I say, not as I do. If possible, repress it.
+
+It is a noble and beautiful thing to be a martyr, especially if you are
+a martyr in the cause of truth, and not, as is often the case, of some
+debasing and degrading superstition. But nobody has a right to demand of
+you that you should be a martyr. And some people have often a right to
+demand that you should resolutely refuse the martyr's crown on the
+ground that you have contracted prior obligations, inconsistent with the
+purely personal luxury of martyrdom. 'Tis a luxury for a few. It befits
+only the bachelor, the unattached, and the economically spareworthy.
+
+"These be pessimistic pronouncements," you say. Well, no, not exactly.
+For, after all, we must never shut our eyes to the actual; and in the
+world as it is, meliorism, not optimism, is the true opposite of
+pessimism. Optimist and pessimist are both alike in a sense, seeing they
+are both conservative; they sit down contented--the first with the smug
+contentment that says "All's well; I have enough; why this fuss about
+others?" the second with the contentment of blank despair that says,
+"All's hopeless; all's wrong; why try uselessly to mend it?" The
+meliorist attitude, on the contrary, is rather to say, "Much is wrong;
+much painful; what can we do to improve it?" And from this point of view
+there is something we can all do to make martyrdom less inevitable in
+the end, for the man who has a thought, a discovery, an idea, to tell
+us. Such men are rare, and their thought, when they produce it, is sure
+to be unpalatable. For, if it were otherwise, it would be thought of our
+own type--familiar, banal, commonplace, unoriginal. It would encounter
+no resistance, as it thrilled on its way through our brain, from
+established errors. What the genius and the prophet are there for is
+just that--to make us listen to unwelcome truths, to compel us to hear,
+to drive awkward facts straight home with sledge-hammer force to the
+unwilling hearts and brains of us. Not what _you_ want to hear, or what
+_I_ want to hear, is good and useful for us; but what we _don't_ want to
+hear, what we can't bear to think, what we hate to believe, what we
+fight tooth and nail against. The man who makes us listen to _that_ is
+the seer and the prophet; he comes upon us like Shelley, or Whitman, or
+Ibsen, and plumps down horrid truths that half surprise, half disgust
+us. He shakes us out of our lethargy. To such give ear, though they say
+what shocks you. Weigh well their hateful ideas. Avoid the vulgar vice
+of sneering and carping at them. Learn to examine their nude thought
+without shrinking, and examine it all the more carefully when it most
+repels you. Naked verity is an acquired taste; it is never beautiful at
+first sight to the unaccustomed vision. Remember that no question is
+finally settled; that no question is wholly above consideration; that
+what you cherish as holiest is most probably wrong; and that in social
+and moral matters especially (where men have been longest ruled by pure
+superstitions) new and startling forms of thought have the highest _a
+priori_ probability in their favour. Dismiss your idols. Give every
+opinion its fair chance of success--especially when it seems to you both
+wicked and ridiculous, recollecting that it is better to let five
+hundred crude guesses run loose about the world unclad, than to crush
+one fledgling truth in its callow condition. To the Greeks, foolishness:
+to the Jews, a stumbling-block. If you can't be one of the prophets
+yourself, you can at least abstain from helping to stone them.
+
+Dear me! These reflections to-day are anything but post-prandial. The
+_gnocchi_ and the olives must certainly have disagreed with me. But
+perhaps it may some of it be "wrote sarcastic." I have heard tell there
+is a thing called irony.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+_THE ROMANCE OF THE CLASH OF RACES._
+
+
+The world has expanded faster in the last thirty years than in any
+previous age since "the spacious days of great Elizabeth." And with its
+expansion, of course, our ideas have widened. I believe Europe is now in
+the midst of just such an outburst of thought and invention as that
+which followed the discovery of America, and of the new route to India
+by the Cape of Good Hope. But I don't want to insist too strongly upon
+that point, because I know a great many of my contemporaries are deeply
+hurt by the base and spiteful suggestion that they and their fellows are
+really quite as good as any fish that ever came out of the sea before
+them. I only desire now to call attention for a moment to one curious
+result entailed by this widening of the world upon our literary
+productivity--a result which, though obvious enough when one comes to
+look at it, seems to me hitherto to have strangely escaped deliberate
+notice.
+
+In one word, the point of which I speak is the comparative
+cosmopolitanisation of letters, and especially the introduction into
+literary art of the phenomena due to the Clash of Races.
+
+This Clash itself is the one picturesque and novel feature of our
+otherwise somewhat prosaic and machine-made epoch; and, therefore, it
+has been eagerly seized upon, with one accord, by all the chief
+purveyors of recent literature, and especially of fiction. They have
+espied in it, with technical instinct, the best chance for obtaining
+that fresh interest which is essential to the success of a work of art.
+We were all getting somewhat tired, it must be confessed, of the old
+places and the old themes. The insipid loves of Anthony Trollope's
+blameless young people were beginning to pall upon us. The jaded palate
+of the Anglo-Celtic race pined for something hot, with a touch of fresh
+spice in it. It demanded curried fowl and Jamaica peppers. Hence, on the
+one hand, the sudden vogue of the novelists of the younger
+countries--Tolstoi and Tourgenieff, Ibsen and Bjornson, Mary Wilkins and
+Howells--who transplanted us at once into fresh scenes, new people:
+hence, on the other hand, the tendency on the part of our own latest
+writers--the Stevensons, the Hall Caines, the Marion Crawfords, the
+Rider Haggards--to go far afield among the lower races or the later
+civilisations for the themes of their romances.
+
+Alas, alas, I see breakers before me! Must I pause for a moment in the
+flowing current of a paragraph to explain, as in an aside, that I
+include Marion Crawford of set purpose among "our own" late writers,
+while I count Mary Wilkins and Howells as Transatlantic aliens?
+Experience teaches me that I must; else shall I have that annoying
+animalcule, the microscopic critic, coming down upon me in print with
+his petty objection that "Mr. Crawford is an American." Go to, oh, blind
+one! And Whistler also, I suppose, and Sargent, and, perhaps, Ashmead
+Bartlett! What! have you read "Sarracinesca" and not learnt that its
+author is European to the core? 'Twas for such as you that the Irishman
+invented his brilliant retort: "And if I was born in a stable would I be
+a horse?"
+
+Not merely, however, do our younger writers go into strange and novel
+places for the scenes of their stories; the important point to notice in
+the present connection is that, consciously or unconsciously to
+themselves, they have perceived the mighty influence of this Clash of
+Races, and have chosen the relations of the civilised people with their
+savage allies, or enemies, or subjects, as the chief theme of their
+handicraft. 'Tis a momentous theme, for it encloses in itself half the
+problems of the future. The old battles are now well-nigh fought out;
+but new ones are looming ahead for us. The cosmopolitanisation of the
+world is introducing into our midst strange elements of discord. A
+conglomerate of unwelded ethnical elements usurps the stage of history.
+America and South Africa have already their negro question; California
+and Australia have already their Chinese question; Russia is fast
+getting her Asiatic, her Mahommedan question. Even France, the most
+narrowly European in interest of European countries, has yet her
+Algeria, her Tunis, her Tonquin. Spain has Cuba and the Philippines.
+Holland has Java. Germany is burdening herself with the unborn troubles
+of a Hinterland. And as for England, she staggers on still under the
+increasing load of India, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, the West
+Indies, Fiji, New Guinea, North Borneo--all of them rife with endless
+race-questions, all pregnant with difficulties.
+
+Who can be surprised that amid this seething turmoil of colours,
+instincts, creeds, and languages, art should have fastened upon the
+race-problems as her great theme for the moment? And she has fastened
+upon them everywhere. France herself has not been able to avoid the
+contagion. Pierre Loti is the most typical French representative of this
+vagabond spirit; and the question of the peoples naturally envisages
+itself to his mind in true Gallic fashion in the "Mariage de Loti" and
+in "Madame Chrysantheme." He sees it through a halo of vague sexual
+sentimentalism. In England, it was Rider Haggard from the Cape who first
+set the mode visibly; and nothing is more noteworthy in all his work
+than the fact that the interest mainly centres in the picturesque
+juxtaposition and contrast of civilisation and savagery. Once the cue
+was given, what more natural than that young Rudyard Kipling, fresh home
+from India, brimming over with genius and with knowledge of two
+concurrent streams of life that flow on side by side yet never mingle,
+should take up his parable in due course, and storm us all by assault
+with his light field artillery? Then Robert Louis Stevenson, born a
+wandering Scot, with roving Scandinavian and fiery Celtic blood in his
+veins, must needs settle down, like a Viking that he is, in far Samoa,
+there to charm and thrill us by turns with the romance of Polynesia. The
+example was catching. Almost without knowing it, other writers have
+turned for subjects to similar fields. "Dr. Isaacs," "Paul Patoff," "By
+Proxy," were upon us. Even Hall Caine himself, in some ways a most
+insular type of genius, was forced in "The Scapegoat" to carry us off
+from Cumberland and Man to Morocco. Sir Edwin Arnold inflicts upon us
+the tragedies of Japan. I have been watching this tendency long myself
+with the interested eye of a dealer engaged in the trade, and therefore
+anxious to keep pace with every changing breath of popular favour: and I
+notice a constant increase from year to year in the number of short
+stories in magazines and newspapers dealing with the romance of the
+inferior races. I notice, also, that such stories are increasingly
+successful with the public. This shows that, whether the public knows it
+or not itself, the question of race is interesting it more and more. It
+is gradually growing to understand the magnitude of the change that has
+come over civilisation by the inclusion of Asia, Africa, and Australasia
+within its circle. Even the Queen is learning Hindustani.
+
+There is a famous passage in Green's "Short History of the English
+People" which describes in part that strange outburst of national
+expansion under Elizabeth, when Raleigh, Drake, and Frobisher scoured
+the distant seas, and when at home "England became a nest of singing
+birds," with Shakespeare, Spenser, Fletcher, and Marlow. "The old sober
+notions of thrift," says the picturesque historian, "melted before the
+strange revolutions of fortune wrought by the New World. Gallants
+gambled away a fortune at a sitting, and sailed off to make a fresh one
+in the Indies." (Read rather to-day at Kimberley, Johannesburg,
+Vancouver.) "Visions of galleons loaded to the brim with pearls and
+diamonds and ingots of silver, dreams of El Dorados where all was of
+gold, threw a haze of prodigality and profusion over the imagination of
+the meanest seaman. The wonders, too, of the New World kindled a burst
+of extravagant fancy in the Old. The strange medley of past and present
+which distinguishes its masques and feastings only reflected the medley
+of men's thoughts.... A 'wild man' from the Indies chanted the Queen's
+praises at Kenilworth, and Echo answered him. Elizabeth turned from the
+greetings of sibyls and giants to deliver the enchanted lady from her
+tyrant, 'Sans Pitie.' Shepherdesses welcomed her with carols of the
+spring, while Ceres and Bacchus poured their corn and grapes at her
+feet." Oh, gilded youth of the Gaiety, _mutato nomine de te Fabula
+narratur_. Yours, yours is this glory!
+
+For our own age, too, is a second Elizabethan. It blossoms out daily
+into such flowers of fancy as never bloomed before, save then, on
+British soil. When men tell you nowadays we have "no great writers
+left," believe not the silly parrot cry. Nay, rather, laugh it down for
+them. We move in the midst of one of the mightiest epochs earth has ever
+seen, an epoch which will live in history hereafter side by side with
+the Athens of Pericles, the Rome of Augustus, the Florence of Lorenzo,
+the England of Elizabeth. Don't throw away your birthright by ignoring
+the fact. Live up to your privileges. Gaze around you and know. Be a
+conscious partaker in one of the great ages of humanity.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+_THE MONOPOLIST INSTINCTS._
+
+
+In the first of these after-dinner _causeries_ I ventured humbly to
+remark that Patriotism was a vulgar vice of which I had never been
+guilty. That innocent indiscretion of mine aroused at the moment some
+unfavourable comment. I confess I was sorry for it. But I passed it by
+at the time, lest I should speak too hastily and lose my temper. I recur
+to the subject now, at the hour of the cigarette, when man can discourse
+most genially of his bitterest enemy. And Monopoly is mine. Its very
+name is hateful.
+
+I don't often say what I think. At least, not much of it. I don't often
+get the chance. And, besides, being a timid and a modest man, I'm afraid
+to. But just this once, I'm going to "try it on." Object to my opinions
+as you will. But still, let me express them. Strike--but hear me!
+
+Has it ever occurred to you that one object of reading is to learn
+things you never thought of before, and would never think of now, unless
+you were told them?
+
+Patriotism is one of the Monopolist Instincts. And the Monopolist
+Instincts are the greatest enemies of the social life in humanity. They
+are what we have got in the end to outlive. The test of a man's place in
+the scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They are surviving
+relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape and tiger die. We
+must begin to be human.
+
+I will take Patriotism first, because it is the most specious of them
+all, and has still a self-satisfied way of masquerading as a virtue. But
+after all what is Patriotism? "My country, right or wrong; and just
+because it is _my_ country." It is nothing more than a wider form of
+selfishness. Often enough, indeed, it is even a narrow one. It means,
+"My business interests against the business interests of other people;
+and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support them." At other
+times it is pure Jingoism. It means, "_My_ country against other
+countries! _My_ army and navy against other fighters! _My_ right to
+annex unoccupied territory over the equal right of all other people!
+_My_ power to oppress all weaker nationalities, all inferior races!" It
+_never_ means anything good. For if a cause is just, like Ireland's, or
+once Italy's, then 'tis the good man's duty to espouse it with warmth,
+be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then 'tis the good
+man's duty to oppose it tooth and nail, irrespective of your
+"Patriotism." True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that
+justice should be done by the particular State of which he happens
+himself to be a member than by any other, because he is partly
+responsible for the corporate action; but then, people who feel deeply
+this joint moral responsibility of all the citizens are not praised as
+patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our own country should
+strive with all its might to be better, higher, purer, nobler, juster
+than other countries around it--the only kind of Patriotism worth a
+brass farthing in a righteous man's eyes--is accounted by most men both
+wicked and foolish.
+
+Patriotism, then, is the collective or national form of the Monopolist
+Instincts. And like all those Instincts, it is a relic of savagery,
+which the Man of the Future is now engaged in out-living.
+
+Property is the next form. That, on the very face of it, is a viler and
+more sordid one. For Patriotism at least can lay claim to some
+expansiveness beyond mere individual interest; whereas property stops
+dead short at the narrowest limits. It is not "Us against the world!"
+but "Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the final result of the
+industrial war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the fair
+face of our England with its anti-social notice-boards, "Trespassers
+will be prosecuted!" It says, in effect, "This is my land. God made it;
+but I have acquired it and tabooed it. The grass on it grows green; but
+only for me. The mountains rise beautiful; no foot of man, save mine and
+my gamekeepers', shall tread them. The waterfalls gleam fresh and cool
+in the glen: avaunt there, you non-possessors; _you_ shall never see
+them! All this is my own. And I choose to monopolise it."
+
+Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he says, in
+despite of his own scripture; "I will join railway to railway. I will
+juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the production of
+wealth that I can lay hold of; and I will use them for myself against
+the producer and the consumer. I will enrich myself by 'corners' on the
+necessaries of life; I will make food dear for the poor, that I myself
+may roll in needless luxury. I will monopolise whatever I can seize, and
+the people may eat straw." That temper, too, humanity must outlive. And
+those who can't outlive it of themselves, or be warned in time, must be
+taught by stern lessons that their race has outstripped them.
+
+As for slavery, 'tis now gone. That was the vilest of them all. It was
+the naked assertion of the Monopolist platform: "You live, not for
+yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard your life entirely,
+and use you as my chattel." It died at last of the moral indignation of
+humanity. It died when a Southern court of so-called justice formulated
+in plain words the underlying principle of its hateful creed: "A black
+man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." That finally
+finished it. We no longer allow every man to "wallop his own nigger."
+And though the last relics of it die hard in Queensland, South Africa,
+Demerara, we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that one
+Monopolist Instinct out of the group is pretty well bred out of us.
+
+Except as regards women! There, it lingers still. The Man says even now
+to himself:--"This woman is mine. If she ventures to have a heart or a
+will of her own, woe betide her! I have tabooed her for life; let any
+other man touch her, let her look at any other man--and--knife,
+revolver, or law court, they shall both of them answer for it!" There
+you have in all its natural ugliness another Monopolist Instinct--the
+deepest-seated of all, the vilest, the most barbaric. She is not yours:
+she is her own: unhand her! The Turk takes his offending slave, sews her
+up in a sack, and flings her into the Bosphorus. The Christian
+Englishman drags her shame before an open court, and divorces her with
+contumely. Her shame, I say, in the common phrase, because though to me
+it is no shame that any human being should follow the dictates of his or
+her own heart, it is a shame to the woman in the eyes of the world, and
+a life of disgrace she must live thenceforward. All this is Monopoly and
+essentially slavery. As man lives down the Ape and Tiger stage, he will
+learn to say, rather: "Be mine while you can; but the day you cease to
+feel you can be mine willingly, don't disgrace your own body by yielding
+it up where your soul feels loathing; don't consent to be the mother of
+children by a father you despise or dislike or are tired of. Let us kiss
+and part. Go where you will; and my good will go with you!" Till the man
+can say that with a sincere heart, why, to borrow a phrase from George
+Meredith, he may have passed Seraglio Point, but he hasn't rounded Cape
+Turk yet.
+
+You find that a hard saying, do you? You kick against freedom for wife
+or daughter? Well, yes, no doubt; you are still a Monopolist. But,
+believe me, the earnest and solemn expression of a profound belief never
+yet did harm to any one. I look forward to the time when women shall be
+as free in every way as men, not by levelling down, but by levelling up;
+not, as some would have us think, by enslaving the men, but by
+elevating, emancipating, unshackling the women.
+
+There is a charming little ditty in Louis Stevenson's "Child's Garden of
+Verse," which always seems to me to sum up admirably the Monopolist
+attitude. Here it is. Look well at it:--
+
+  "When I am grown to man's estate
+  I shall be very proud and great,
+  And tell the other girls and boys,
+  Not to meddle with _my_ toys."
+
+That is the way of the Monopolist. It catches him in the very act. He
+says to all the world: "Hands off! My property! Don't walk on my grass!
+Don't trespass in my park! Beware of my gunboats! No trifling with my
+women! I am the king of the castle. You meddle with me at your peril."
+
+"Ours!" not "Mine!" is the watchword of the future.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+"_MERE AMATEURS._"
+
+
+"He was a mere amateur; but still, he did some good work in science."
+
+Increasingly of late years I have heard these condescending words
+uttered, in the fatherland of Bacon, of Newton, of Darwin, when some
+Bates or Spottiswoode has been gathered to his fathers. It was not so
+once. Time was when all English science was the work of amateurs--and
+very well indeed the amateurs did it. I don't think anybody who does me
+the honour to cognise my humble individuality at all will ever be likely
+to mistake me for a _laudator temporis acti_. On the contrary, so far as
+I can see, the past seems generally to have been such a distinct failure
+all along the line that the one lesson we have to learn from it is, to
+go and do otherwise. I am one on that point with Shelley and Rousseau.
+But it does not follow, because most old things are bad, that all new
+things and rising things are necessarily and indisputably in their own
+nature excellent. Novelties, too, may be retrograde. And even our
+great-grandfathers occasionally blundered upon something good in which
+we should do well to imitate them. The amateurishness of old English
+science was one of these good things now in course of abolition by the
+fashionable process of Germanisation.
+
+Don't imagine it was only for France that 1870 was fatal. The sad
+successes of that deadly year sent a wave of triumphant Teutonism over
+the face of Europe.
+
+I suppose it is natural to man to worship success; but ever since 1870
+it is certainly the fact that if you wish to gain respect and
+consideration for any proposed change of system you must say, "They do
+it so in Germany." In education and science this is especially the case.
+Pedants always admire pedants. And Germany having shown herself to be
+easily first of European States in her pedant-manufacturing machinery,
+all the assembled dominies of all the rest of the world exclaimed with
+one voice, "Go to! Let us Germanise our educational system!"
+
+Now, the German is an excellent workman in his way. Patient, laborious,
+conscientious, he has all the highest qualities of the ideal
+brick-maker. He produces the best bricks, and you can generally depend
+upon him to turn out both honest and workmanlike articles. But he is not
+an architect. For the architectonic faculty in its highest developments
+you must come to England. And he is not a teacher or expounder. For the
+expository faculty in its purest form, the faculty that enables men to
+flash forth clearly and distinctly before the eyes of others the facts
+and principles they know and perceive themselves, you must go to France.
+Oh, dear, yes; we may well be proud of England. Remember, I have already
+disclaimed more than once in these papers the vulgar error of
+patriotism. But freedom from that narrow vice does not imply inability
+to recognise the good qualities of one's own race as well as the bad
+ones. And the Englishman, left to himself and his own native methods,
+used to cut a very respectable figure indeed in the domain of science.
+No other nation has produced a Newton or a Darwin. The Englishman's way
+was to get up an interest in a subject first; and then, working back
+from the part of it that specially appealed to his own tastes, to make
+himself master of the entire field of inquiry. This natural and
+thoroughly individualistic English method enabled him to arrive at new
+results in a way impossible to the pedantically educated German--nay,
+even to the lucidly and systematically educated Frenchman. It was the
+plan to develop "mere amateurs," I admit; but it was also the plan to
+develop discoverers and revolutionisers of science. For the man most
+likely to advance knowledge is not the man who knows in an encyclopaedic
+rote-work fashion the whole circle of the sciences, but the man who
+takes a fresh interest for its own sake in some particular branch of
+inquiry.
+
+Darwin was a "mere amateur." He worked at things for the love of them.
+So were Murchison, Lyell, Benjamin Franklin, Herschel. So were or are
+Bates, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace. "Mere amateurs!" every
+man of them.
+
+In an evil hour, however, our pastors and masters in conclave assembled
+said to one another, "Come now, let us Teutonise English scientific
+education." And straightway they Teutonised it. And there began to arise
+in England a new brood of patent machine-made scientists--excellent men
+in their way, authorities on the Arachnida, knowing all about everything
+that could be taught in the schools, but lacking somehow the supreme
+grace of the old English originality. They are first-rate specialists, I
+allow; and I don't deny that a civilised country has all need of
+specialists. Nay, I even admit that the day of the specialist has only
+just begun. He will yet go far; he will impose himself and his yoke upon
+us. But don't let us therefore make the grand mistake of concluding that
+our fine old English birthright in science--the birthright that gave us
+our Newtons, our Cavendishes, our Darwins, our Lyells--was all folly and
+error. Don't let us spoil ourselves in order to become mere second-hand
+Germans. Let us recognise the fact that each nation has a work of its
+own to do in the world; and that as star from star, so one nation
+differeth from another in glory. Let each of us thank the goodness and
+the grace that on his birth have smiled, that he was born of English
+breed, and not a German child.
+
+"Don't you think," a military gentleman once said to me, "the Germans
+are wonderful organisers?" "No," I answered, "I don't; but I think
+they're excellent drill-sergeants."
+
+There are people who drop German authorities upon you as if a Teutonic
+name were guarantee enough for anything. They say, "Hausberger asserts,"
+or "According to Schimmelpenninck." This is pure fetichism. Believe me,
+your man of science isn't necessarily any the better because he comes to
+you with the label, "Made in Germany." The German instinct is the
+instinct of Frederick William of Prussia--the instinct of drilling. Very
+thorough and efficient men in their way it turns out; men versed in all
+the lore of their chosen subject. If they are also men of transcendent
+ability (as often happens), they can give us a comprehensive view of
+their own chosen field such as few Englishmen (except Sir Archibald
+Geikie, and he's a Scot) can equal. If I wanted to select a learned man
+for a special Government post--British Museum, and so forth--I dare say
+I should often be compelled to admit, as Government often admits, that
+the best man then and there obtainable is the German. But if I wanted to
+train Herbert Spencers and Faradays, I would certainly _not_ send them
+to Bonn or to Berlin. John Stuart Mill was an English Scotchman,
+educated and stuffed by his able father on the German system; and how
+much of spontaneity, of vividness, of _verve_, we all of us feel John
+Stuart Mill lost by it! One often wonders to what great, to what still
+greater, things that lofty brain might not have attained, if only James
+Mill would have given it a chance to develop itself naturally!
+
+Our English gift is originality. Our English keynote is individuality.
+Let us cling to those precious heirlooms of our Celtic ancestry, and
+refuse to be Teutonised. Let us discard the lessons of the Potsdam
+grenadiers. Let us write on the pediment of our educational temple, "No
+German need apply." Let us disclaim that silly phrase "A mere amateur."
+Let us return to the simple faith in direct observation that made
+English science supreme in Europe.
+
+And may the Lord gi'e us Britons a guid conceit o' oorsel's!
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+_A SQUALID VILLAGE._
+
+
+Strange that the wealthiest class in the wealthiest country in the world
+should so long have been content to inhabit a squalid village!
+
+I'm not going to compare London, as Englishmen often do, with Paris or
+Vienna. I won't do two great towns that gross injustice. And, indeed,
+comparison here is quite out of the question. You don't compare Oxford
+with Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums, and then ask which is
+the handsomest. Things must be alike in kind before you can begin to
+compare them. And London and Paris are not alike in kind. One is a city,
+and a noble city; the other is a village, and a squalid village.
+
+No; I will not even take a humbler standard of comparison, and look at
+London side by side with Brussels, Antwerp, Munich, Turin. Each of those
+is a city, and a fine city in its way; but each of them is small. Still,
+even by their side, London is again but a squalid village. I insist upon
+that point, because, misled by their ancient familiarity with London,
+most Englishmen have had their senses and understandings so blunted on
+this issue, that they really don't know what is meant by a town, or a
+fine town, when they see one. And don't suppose it's because London is
+in Britain and these other towns out of it that I make these remarks:
+for Bath is a fine town, Edinburgh is a fine town, even Glasgow and
+Newcastle are towns, while London is still a straggling, sprawling,
+invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. I am as free, I hope, from
+anti-patriotic as from patriotic prejudice. The High Street in Oxford,
+Milsom Street in Bath, Princes Street in Edinburgh, those are all fine
+streets that would attract attention even in France or Germany. But the
+Strand, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street--good Lord, deliver us!
+
+One more _caveat_ as to my meaning. When I cite among real towns
+Brussels, Antwerp, and Munich, I am not thinking of the treasures of art
+those beautiful places contain; that is another and altogether higher
+question. Towns supreme in this respect often lag far behind others of
+less importance--lag behind in those external features and that general
+architectural effectiveness which rightly entitle us to say in a broad
+sense, "This is a fine city." Florence, for example, contains more
+treasures of art in a small space than any other town of Europe; yet
+Florence, though undoubtedly a town, and even a fine town, is not to be
+compared in this respect, I do not say with Venice or Brussels, but even
+with Munich or Milan. On the other hand, London contains far more
+treasures of art in its way than Boston, Massachusetts; but Boston is a
+handsome, well-built, regular town, while London--well, I will spare you
+the further repetition of the trite truism that London is a squalid
+village. In one word, the point I am seeking to bring out here is that a
+town, as a town, is handsome or otherwise, not in virtue of the works of
+art or antiquity it contains, but in virtue of its ground-plan, its
+architecture, its external and visible decorations and places--the
+Louvre, the Boulevards, the Champs Elysees, the Place de l'Opera.
+
+Now London has no ground-plan. It has no street architecture. It has no
+decorations, though it has many uglifications. It is frankly and simply
+and ostentatiously hideous. And being wholly wanting in a system of any
+sort--in organic parts, in idea, in views, in vistas--it is only a
+village, and a painfully uninteresting one.
+
+Most Englishmen see London before they see any other great town. They
+become so familiarised with it that their sense of comparison is dulled
+and blunted. I had the good fortune to have seen many other great towns
+before I ever saw London: and I shall never forget my first sense of
+surprise at its unmitigated ugliness.
+
+Get on top of an omnibus--I don't say in Paris, from the Palais Royal to
+the Arc de Triomphe, but in Brussels, from the Gare du Nord to the
+Palais de Justice--and what do you see? From end to end one unbroken
+succession of noble and open prospects. I'm not thinking now of the
+Grande Place in the old town, with its magnificent collection of
+mediaeval buildings; the Great Fire effectively deprived us of our one
+sole chance of such an element of beauty in modern London. I confine
+myself on purpose to the parts of Brussels which are purely recent, and
+might have been imitated at a distance in London, if there had been any
+public spirit or any public body in England to imitate them. (But
+unhappily there was neither.) Recall to mind as you read the strikingly
+handsome street view that greets you as you emerge from the Northern
+Station down the great central Boulevards to the Gare du Midi--all built
+within our own memory. Then think of the prospects that gradually unfold
+themselves as you rise on the hill; the fine vista north towards Sainte
+Marie de Schaarbeck; the beautiful Rue Royale, bounded by that charming
+Parc; the unequalled stretch of the Rue de la Regence, starting from the
+Place Royale with Godfrey of Bouillon, and ending with the imposing mass
+of the Palais de Justice. It is to me a matter for mingled surprise and
+humiliation that so many Englishmen can look year after year at that
+glorious street--perhaps the finest in the world--and yet never think to
+themselves, "Mightn't we faintly imitate some small part of this in our
+wealthy, ugly, uncompromising London?"
+
+I always say to Americans who come to Europe: "When you go to England,
+don't see our towns, but see our country. Our country is something
+unequalled in the world: while our towns!--well, anyway, keep away from
+London!"
+
+With the solitary and not very brilliant exception of the Embankment,
+there isn't a street in London where one could take a stranger to admire
+the architecture. Compare that record with the new Boulevards in
+Antwerp, where almost every house is worth serious study: or with the
+Ring at Cologne (to keep close home all the time), where one can see
+whole rows of German Renaissance houses of extraordinary interest. What
+street in London can be mentioned in this respect side by side with
+Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street in Boston; with Euclid Avenue in
+Cleveland, Ohio; with the upper end of Fifth Avenue, New York; nay, even
+with the new Via Roma at Genoa? Why is it that we English can't get on
+the King's Road at Brighton anything faintly approaching that splendid
+sea front on the Digue at Ostend, or those coquettish white villas that
+line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice? The blight of London seems to
+lie over all Southern England.
+
+Paris looks like the capital of a world-wide empire. London, looks like
+a shapeless neglected suburb, allowed to grow up by accident anyhow. And
+that's just the plain truth of it. 'Tis a fortuitous concourse of
+hap-hazard houses.
+
+"But we are improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a few
+new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic,
+English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive
+new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness,
+through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is
+all. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the height
+of the occasion and the Empire! You tinker away at a Shaftesbury Avenue.
+Parochial, all of it. And there you get the real secret of our futile
+attempts at making a town out of our squalid village. The fault lies all
+at the door of the old Corporation, and of the people who made and still
+make the old Corporation possible. For centuries, indeed, there was
+really no London, not even a village; there was only a scratch
+collection of contiguous villages. The consequence was that here, at the
+centre of national life, the English people grew wholly unaccustomed to
+the bare idea of a town, and managed everything piecemeal, on the petty
+scale of a country vestry. The vestryman intelligence has now overrun
+the land; and if the London County Council ever succeeds at last in
+making the congeries of villages into--I do not say a city, for that is
+almost past praying for, but something analogous to a second-rate
+Continental town, it will only be after long lapse of time and violent
+struggles with the vestryman level of intellect and feeling.
+
+London had many great disadvantages to start with. She lay in a dull and
+marshy bottom, with no building stone at hand, and therefore she was
+forecondemned by her very position to the curse of brick and stucco,
+when Bath, Oxford, Edinburgh, were all built out of their own quarries.
+Then fire destroyed all her mediaeval architecture, leaving her only
+Westminster Abbey to suggest the greatness of her losses. But
+brick-earth and fire have been as nothing in their way by the side of
+the evil wrought by Gog and Magog. When five hundred trembling ghosts of
+naked Lord Mayors have to answer for their follies and their sins
+hereafter, I confidently expect the first question in the appalling
+indictment will be, "Why did you allow the richest nation on earth to
+house its metropolis in a squalid village?"
+
+We have a Moloch in England to whom we sacrifice much. And his hateful
+name is Vested Interest.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+_CONCERNING ZEITGEIST._
+
+
+A certain story is told about Mr. Ruskin, no doubt apocryphal, but at
+any rate characteristic. A young lady, fresh from the Abyss of
+Bayswater, met the sage one evening at dinner--a gushing young lady, as
+many such there be--who, aglow with joy, boarded the Professor at once
+with her private art-experiences. "Oh, Mr. Ruskin," she cried, clasping
+her hands, "do you know, I hadn't been two days in Florence before I
+discovered what you meant when you spoke about the supreme
+unapproachableness of Botticelli." "Indeed?" Ruskin answered. "Well,
+that's very remarkable; for it took me, myself, half a lifetime to
+discover it."
+
+The answer, of course, was meant to be crushing. How should _she_, a
+brand plucked from the burning of Bayswater, be able all at once, on the
+very first blush, to appreciate Botticelli? And it took the greatest
+critic of his age half a lifetime! Yet I venture to maintain, for all
+that, that the young lady was right, and that the critic was wrong--if
+such a thing be conceivable. I know, of course, that when we speak of
+Ruskin we must walk delicately, like Agag. But still, I repeat it, the
+young lady was right; and it was largely the unconscious, pervasive
+action of Mr. Ruskin's own personality that enabled her to be so.
+
+It's all the Zeitgeist: that's where it is. The slow irresistible
+Zeitgeist. Fifty years ago, men's taste had been so warped and distorted
+by current art and current criticism that they _couldn't_ see
+Botticelli, however hard they tried at it. He was a sealed book to our
+fathers. In those days it required a brave, a vigorous, and an original
+thinker to discover any merit in any painter before Raffael, except
+perhaps, as Goldsmith wisely remarked, Perugino. The man who went then
+to the Uffizi or the Pitti, after admiring as in duty bound his High
+Renaissance masters, found himself suddenly confronted with the Judith
+or the Calumny, and straightway wondered what manner of strange wild
+beasts these were that some insane early Tuscan had once painted to
+amuse himself in a lucid interval. They were not in the least like the
+Correggios and the Guidos, the Lawrences and the Opies, that the men of
+that time had formed their taste upon, and accepted as their sole
+artistic standards. To people brought up upon pure David and
+Thorvaldsen, the Primavera at the Belle Arti must naturally have seemed
+like a wild freak of madness. The Zeitgeist then went all in the
+direction of cold lifeless correctness; the idea that the painter's soul
+counted for something in art was an undreamt of heresy.
+
+On your way back from Paris some day, stop a night at Amiens and take
+the Cathedral seriously. Half the stately interior of that glorious
+thirteenth century pile is encrusted and overlaid by hideous gewgaw
+monstrosities of the flashiest Bernini and _baroque_ period. There they
+sprawl their obtrusive legs and wave their flaunting theatrical wings to
+the utter destruction of all repose and consistency in one of the
+noblest and most perfect buildings of Europe. Nowadays, any child, any
+workman can see at a glance how ugly and how disfiguring those floppy
+creatures are; it is impossible to look at them without saying to
+oneself: "Why don't they clear away all this high-faluting rubbish, and
+let us see the real columns and arches and piers as their makers
+designed them?" Yet who was it that put them there, those unspeakable
+angels in muslin drapery, those fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim?
+Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. And
+whence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how out
+of place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because the
+Gothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and
+delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere
+barbaric mediaevalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and
+to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and
+meretricious Bernini-like flimsiness.
+
+The Zeitgeist has changed, and we have changed with it.
+
+It is just the same with our friend Botticelli. Scarce a dozen years
+ago, it was almost an affectation to pretend you admired him. It is no
+affectation now. Hundreds of assorted young women from the Abyss of
+Bayswater may rise any morning here in sacred Florence and stand
+genuinely enchanted before the Adoration of the Kings, or the Venus who
+floats on her floating shell in a Botticellian ocean. And why? Because
+Leighton, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Strudwick,
+have led them slowly up to it by golden steps innumerable. Thirty years
+ago the art of the early Tuscan painters was something to us Northerners
+exotic, strange, unconnected, archaeological. Gradually, it has been
+brought nearer and nearer to us on the walls of the Grosvenor and the
+New Gallery, till now he that runs may read; the ingenuous maiden,
+fished from the Abyss of Bayswater, can drink in at a glance what it
+took a Ruskin many years of his life and much slow development to attain
+to piecemeal.
+
+That is just what all great men are for--to make the world accept as a
+truism in the generation after them what it rejected as a paradox in the
+generation before them.
+
+Not, of course, that there isn't a little of affectation, and still more
+of fashion, to the very end in all of it. An immense number of people,
+incapable of genuinely admiring anything for its own sake at all, are
+anxious only to be told what they "ought to admire, don't you know," and
+will straightway proceed as conscientiously as they can to get up an
+admiration for it. A friend of mine told me a beautiful example. Two
+aspiring young women, of the limp-limbed, short-haired, aesthetic
+species, were standing rapt before the circular Madonna at the Uffizi.
+They had gazed at it long and lovingly, seeing it bore on its frame the
+magic name of Botticelli. Of a sudden one of the pair happened to look a
+little nearer at the accusing label. "Why, this is not Sandro," she
+cried, with a revulsion of disgust; "this is only Aless." And
+straightway they went off from the spot in high dudgeon at having been
+misled as they supposed into examining the work of "another person of
+the same name."
+
+Need I point the moral of my apologue, in this age of enlightenment, by
+explaining, for the benefit of the junior members, that the gentleman's
+full name was really Alessandro, and that both abbreviations are
+impartially intended to cover his one and indivisible personality? The
+first half is official, like Alex.; the second affectionate and
+familiar, like Sandy.
+
+Still, even after making due allowance for such humbugs as these, a vast
+residuum remains of people who, if born sixty years ago, could never by
+any possibility have been made to see there was anything admirable in
+Lippi, Botticelli, Giotto; but who, having been born thirty years ago,
+see it without an effort. Hundreds who read these lines must themselves
+remember the unmistakable thrill of genuine pleasure with which they
+first gazed upon the Fra Angelicos at San Marco, the Memlings at Bruges,
+the Giottos in the Madonna dell' Arena at Padua. To many of us, those
+are real epochs in our inner life. To the men of fifty years ago, the
+bare avowal itself would have seemed little short of affected silliness.
+
+Is the change all due to the teaching of the teachers and the preaching
+of the preachers? I think not entirely. For, after all, the teachers and
+the preachers are but a little ahead of the age they live in. They see
+things earlier; they help to lead us up to them; but they do not wholly
+produce the revolutions they inaugurate. Humanity as a whole develops
+consistently along certain pre-established and predestined lines. Sooner
+or later, a certain point must inevitably be reached; but some of us
+reach it sooner, and most of us later. That's all the difference. Every
+great change is mainly due to the fact that we have all already attained
+a certain point in development. A step in advance becomes inevitable
+after that, and one after another we are sure to take it. In one word,
+what it needed a man of genius to see dimly thirty years ago, it needs a
+singular fool not to see clearly nowadays.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+_THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE._
+
+
+Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may
+therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn
+don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel--or a
+marriage.
+
+Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers
+left off." "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs."
+"College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping." "Rents are so high
+and manners so luxurious." Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerile
+nonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are to
+put one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to deal
+with a primitive instinct--the profoundest and deepest-seated instinct
+of humanity, save only the instincts of food and drink and of
+self-preservation. Man, like all other animals, has two main functions:
+to feed his own organism, and to reproduce his species. Ancestral habit
+leads him, when mature, to choose himself a mate--because he loves her.
+It drives him, it urges him, it goads him irresistibly. If this profound
+impulse is really lacking to-day in any large part of our race, there
+must be some correspondingly profound and adequate reason for it. Don't
+let us deceive ourselves with shallow platitudes which may do for
+drawing-rooms. This is philosophy, even though post-prandial. Let us try
+to take a philosophic view of the question at issue, from the point of
+vantage of a biological outlook.
+
+Before you begin to investigate the causes of a phenomenon _quelconque_,
+'tis well to decide whether the phenomenon itself is there to
+investigate.
+
+Taking society throughout--_not_ in the sense of those "forty families"
+to which the term is restricted by Lady Charles Beresford--I doubt
+whether marriage is much out of fashion. Statistics show a certain
+decrease, it is true, but not an alarming one. Among the labouring
+classes, I imagine men, and also women, still wed pretty frequently.
+When people say, "Young men won't marry nowadays," they mean young men
+in a particular stratum of society, roughly bounded by a silk hat on
+Sundays. Now, when you and I were young (I take it for granted that you
+and I are approaching the fifties) young men did marry; even within this
+restricted area, 'twas their wholesome way in life to form an attachment
+early with some nice girl in their own set, and to start at least with
+the idea of marrying her. Toward that goal they worked; for that end
+they endured and sacrificed many things. True, even then, the long
+engagement was the rule; but the long engagement itself meant some
+persistent impulse, some strong impetus marriage-wards. The desire of
+the man to make this woman his own, the longing to make this woman
+happy--normal and healthy endowments of our race--had still much
+driving-power. Nowadays, I seriously think I observe in most young men
+of the middle class around me a distinct and disastrous weakening of the
+impulse. They don't fall in love as frankly, as honestly, as
+irretrievably as they used to do. They shilly-shally, they pick and
+choose, they discuss, they criticise. They say themselves these futile
+foolish things about the club, and the flat, and the cost of living.
+They believe in Malthus. Fancy a young man who believes in Malthus! They
+seem in no hurry at all to get married. But thirty or forty years ago,
+young men used to rush by blind instinct into the toils of
+matrimony--because they couldn't help themselves. Such Laodicean
+luke-warmness betokens in the class which exhibits it a weakening of
+impulse. That weakening of impulse is really the thing we have to
+account for.
+
+Young men of a certain type don't marry, because--they are less of young
+men than formerly.
+
+Wild animals in confinement seldom propagate their kind. Only a few
+caged birds will continue their species. Whatever upsets the balance of
+the organism, in an individual or a race tends first of all to affect
+the rate of reproduction. Civilise the red man, and he begins to
+decrease at once in numbers. Turn the Sandwich Islands into a trading
+community, and the native Hawaiian refuses forthwith to give hostages to
+fortune. Tahiti is dwindling. From the moment the Tasmanians were taken
+to Norfolk Island, not a single Tasmanian baby was born. The Jesuits
+made a model community of Paraguay; but they altered the habits of the
+Paraguayans so fast that the reverend fathers, who were, of course,
+themselves celibates, were compelled to take strenuous and even
+grotesque measures to prevent the complete and immediate extinction of
+their converts. Other cases in abundance I might quote an I would; but I
+limit myself to these. They suffice to exhibit the general principle
+involved; any grave upset in the conditions of life affects first and at
+once the fertility of a species.
+
+"But colonists often increase with rapidity." Ay, marry, do they, where
+the conditions of life are easy. At the present day most colonists go to
+fairly civilised regions; they are transported to their new home by
+steamboat and railway; they find for the most part more abundant
+provender and more wholesome surroundings than in their native country.
+There is no real upset. Better food and easier life, as Herbert Spencer
+has shown, result (other things equal) in increased fertility. His
+chapters on this subject in the "Principles of Biology" should be read
+by everybody who pretends to talk on questions of population. But in new
+and difficult colonies the increase is slight. Whatever compels greater
+wear and tear of the nervous system proves inimical to the reproductive
+function. The strain and stress of co-ordination with novel
+circumstances and novel relations affect most injuriously the organic
+balance. The African negro has long been accustomed to agricultural toil
+and to certain simple arts in his own country. Transported to the West
+Indies and the United States, he found life no harder than of old, if
+not, indeed, easier. He had abundant food, protection, security, a kind
+of labour for which he was well adapted. Instead of dying out,
+therefore, he was fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the earth
+amazingly. But the Red Indian, caught blatant in the hunting stage,
+refused to be tamed, and could not swallow civilisation. He pined and
+dwined and decreased in his "reservations." The change was too great,
+too abrupt, too brusque for him. The papoose before long became an
+extinct animal.
+
+Is not the same thing true of the middle class of England? Civilisation
+and its works have come too quickly upon us. The strain and stress of
+correlating and co-ordinating the world we live in are getting too much
+for us. Railways, telegraphs, the penny post, the special edition, have
+played havoc at last with our nervous systems. We are always on the
+stretch, rushing and tearing perpetually. We bolt our breakfasts; we
+catch the train or 'bus by the skin of our teeth, to rattle us into the
+City; we run down to Scotland or over to Paris on business; we lunch in
+London and dine in Glasgow, Belfast, or Calcutta. (Excuse imagination.)
+The tape clicks perpetually in our ears the last quotation in Eries; the
+telephone rings us up at inconvenient moments. Something is always
+happening somewhere to disturb our equanimity; we tear open the _Times_
+with feverish haste, to learn that Kimberleys or Jabez Balfour have
+fallen, that Matabeleland has been painted red, that shares have gone
+up, or gone down, or evaporated. Life is one turmoil of excitement and
+bustle. Financially, 'tis a series of dissolving views; personally 'tis
+a rush; socially, 'tis a mosaic of deftly-fitted engagements. Drop out
+one piece, and you can never replace it. You are full next week from
+Monday to Saturday--business all day, what calls itself pleasure (save
+the mark!) all evening. Poor old Leisure is dead. We hurry and scurry
+and flurry eternally. One whirl of work from morning till night: then
+dress and dine: one whirl of excitement from night till morning. A snap
+of troubled sleep, and again _da capo_. Not an hour, not a minute, we
+can call our own. A wire from a patient ill abed in Warwickshire! A wire
+from a client hard hit in Hansards! Endless editors asking for more
+copy! more copy! Alter to suit your own particular trade, and 'tis the
+life of all of us.
+
+The first generation after Stephenson and the Rocket pulled through with
+it somehow. They inherited the sound constitutions of the men who sat on
+rustic seats in the gardens of the twenties. The second
+generation--that's you and me--felt the strain of it more severely: new
+machines had come in to make life still more complicated: sixpenny
+telegrams, Bell and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers,
+perturbations pouring in from all sides incessantly; the suburbs
+growing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways, trams, bicycles,
+innumerable: but natheless we still endured, and presented the world all
+the same with a third generation. That third generation--ah me! there
+comes the pity of it! One fancies the impulse to marry and rear a family
+has wholly died out of it. It seems to have died out most in the class
+where the strain and stress are greatest. I don't think young men of
+that class to-day have the same feelings towards women of their sort as
+formerly. Nobody, I trust, will mistake me for a reactionary: in most
+ways, the modern young man is a vast improvement on you and me at
+twenty-five. But I believe there is really among young men in towns less
+chivalry, less devotion, less romance than there used to be. That, I
+take it, is the true reason why young men don't marry. With certain
+classes and in certain places a primitive instinct of our race has
+weakened. They say this weakening is accompanied in towns by an increase
+in sundry hateful and degrading vices. I don't know if that is so; but
+at least one would expect it. Any enfeeblement of the normal and natural
+instinct of virility would show itself first in morbid aberrations. On
+that I say nothing. I only say this--that I think the present crisis in
+the English marriage market is due, not to clubs or the comfort of
+bachelor quarters, but to the cumulative effect of nervous
+over-excitement.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+_EYE_ VERSUS _EAR_.
+
+
+It is admitted on all hands by this time, I suppose, that the best way
+of learning is by eye, not by ear. Therefore the authorities that
+prescribe for us our education among all classes have decided that we
+shall learn by ear, not by eye. Which is just what one might expect from
+a vested interest.
+
+Of course this superiority of sight over hearing is pre-eminently true
+of natural science--that is to say, of nine-tenths among the subjects
+worth learning by humanity. The only real way to learn geology, for
+example, is not to mug it up in a printed text-book, but to go into the
+field with a geologist's hammer. The only real way to learn zoology and
+botany is not by reading a volume of natural history, but by collecting,
+dissecting, observing, preserving, and comparing specimens. Therefore,
+of course, natural science has never been a favourite study in the eyes
+of school-masters, who prefer those subjects which can be taught in a
+room to a row of boys on a bench, and who care a great deal less than
+nothing for any subject which isn't "good to examine in." Educational
+value and importance in after life have been sacrificed to the teacher's
+ease and convenience, or to the readiness with which the pupil's
+progress can be tested on paper. Not what is best to learn, but what is
+least trouble to teach in great squads to boys, forms the staple of our
+modern English education. They call it "education," I observe in the
+papers, and I suppose we must fall in with that whim of the profession.
+
+But even the subjects which belong by rights to the ear can nevertheless
+be taught by the eye more readily. Everybody knows how much easier it is
+to get up the history and geography of a country when you are actually
+in it than when you are merely reading about it. It lives and moves
+before you. The places, the persons, the monuments, the events, all
+become real to you. Each illustrates each, and each tends to impress the
+other on the memory. Sight burns them into the brain without conscious
+effort. You can learn more of Egypt and of Egyptian history, culture,
+hieroglyphics, and language in a few short weeks at Luxor or Sakkarah
+than in a year at the Louvre and the British Museum. The Tombs of the
+Kings are worth many papyri. The mere sight of the temples and obelisks
+and monuments and inscriptions, in the places where their makers
+originally erected them, gives a sense of reality and interest to them
+all that no amount of study under alien conditions can possibly equal.
+We have all of us felt that the only place to observe Flemish art to the
+greatest advantage is at Ghent and Bruges and Brussels and Antwerp; just
+as the only place to learn Florentine art as it really was is at the
+Uffizi and the Bargello.
+
+These things being so, the authorities who have charge of our public
+education, primary, secondary, and tertiary, have decided in their
+wisdom--to do and compel the exact contrary. Object-lessons and the
+visible being admittedly preferable to rote-lessons and the audible,
+they have prescribed that our education, so called, shall be mainly an
+education not in things and properties, but in books and reading. They
+have settled that it shall deal almost entirely and exclusively with
+language and with languages; that words, not objects, shall be the facts
+it impresses on the minds of the pupils. In our primary schools they
+have insisted upon nothing but reading and writing, with just a
+smattering of arithmetic by way of science. In our secondary schools
+they have insisted upon nothing but Greek and Latin, with about an equal
+leaven of algebra and geometry. This mediaeval fare (I am delighted that
+I can thus agree for once with Professor Ray Lankester) they have thrust
+down the throats of all the world indiscriminately; so much so that
+nowadays people seem hardly able at last to conceive of any other than a
+linguistic education as possible. You will hear many good folk who talk
+with contempt of Greek and Latin; but when you come to inquire what new
+mental pabulum they would substitute for those quaint and grotesque
+survivals of the Dark Ages, you find what they want instead is--modern
+languages. The idea that language of any sort forms no necessary element
+in a liberal education has never even occurred to them. They take it for
+granted that when you leave off feeding boys on straw and oats you must
+supply them instead with hay and sawdust.
+
+Not that I rage against Greek and Latin as such. It is well we should
+have many specialists among us who understand them, just as it is well
+we should have specialists in Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. I merely mean
+that they are not the sum and substance of educational method. They are
+at best but two languages of considerable importance to the student of
+purely human evolution.
+
+Furthermore, even these comparatively useless linguistic subjects could
+themselves be taught far better by sight than by hearing. A week at Rome
+would give your average boy a much clearer idea of the relations of the
+Capitol with the Palatine than all the pretty maps in Dr. William
+Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary. It would give him also a sense of
+the reality of the Latin language and the Latin literature, which he
+could never pick up out of a dog-eared Livy or a thumb-marked AEneid. You
+have only to look across from the top of the Janiculum, towards the
+white houses of Frascati, to learn a vast deal more about the Alban
+hills and the site of Tusculum than ever you could mug up from all the
+geography books in the British Museum. The way to learn every subject on
+earth, even book-lore included, is not out of books alone, but by actual
+observation.
+
+And yet it is impossible for any one among us to do otherwise than
+acquiesce in this vicious circle. Why? Just because no man can
+dissociate himself outright from the social organism of which he forms a
+component member. He can no more do so than the eye can dissociate
+itself from the heart and lungs, or than the legs can shake themselves
+free from the head and stomach. We have all to learn, and to let our
+boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a better
+education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to
+impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more
+valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred
+with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not
+what is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" in
+examination, is the test of desirability. We are the victims of a
+system; and our only hope of redress is not by sporadic individual
+action but by concerted rebellion. We must cry out against the abuse
+till at last we are heard by dint of our much speaking. In a world so
+complex and so highly organised as ours, the individual can only do
+anything in the long run by influencing the mass--by securing the
+co-operation of many among his fellows.
+
+Meanwhile, I believe it is gradually becoming the fact that our girls,
+who till lately were so very ill-taught, are beginning to know more of
+what is really worth knowing than their public-school-bred brothers. For
+the public school still goes on with the system of teaching it has
+derived direct from the thirteenth century; while the girls' schools,
+having started fair and fresh, are beginning to assimilate certain newer
+ideas belonging to the seventeenth and even the eighteenth. In time they
+may conceivably come down to the more elementary notions of the present
+generation. Less hampered by professions and examinations than the boys,
+the girls are beginning to know something now, not indeed of the
+universe in which they live, its laws and its properties, but of
+literature and history, and the principal facts about human development.
+Yet all the time, the boys go on as ever with Musa, Musae, like so many
+parrots, and are turned out at last, in nine cases out of ten, with just
+enough smattering of Greek and Latin grammar to have acquired a
+life-long distaste for Horace and an inconquerable incapacity for
+understanding AEschylus. One year in Italy with their eyes open would be
+worth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with a
+platyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world around
+them that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed to
+discover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher.
+
+What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our
+boys' schooling interfere with their education!
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+_THE POLITICAL PUPA._
+
+
+I have picked up on the moor the chrysalis of a common English
+butterfly. As I sit on the heather and turn it over attentively, while
+it wriggles in my hands, I can't help thinking how closely it resembles
+the present condition of our British commonwealth. It is a platitude,
+indeed, to say that "this is an age of transition." But it would be
+truer and more graphic perhaps to put it that this is an age in which
+England, and for the matter of that every other European country as
+well, is passing through something like the chrysalis stage in its
+evolution.
+
+But, first of all, do you clearly understand what a chrysalis is driving
+at? It means more than it seems; the change that goes on within that
+impassive case is a great deal more profound than most people imagine.
+When the caterpillar is just ready to turn into a butterfly it lies by
+for a while, full of internal commotion, and feels all its organs slowly
+melting one by one into a sort of indistinguishable protoplasmic pulp;
+chaos precedes the definite re-establishment of a fresh form of order.
+Limbs and parts and nervous system all disappear for a time, and then
+gradually grow up again in new and altered types. The caterpillar, if it
+philosophised on its own state at all (which seems to be very little the
+habit of well-conducted caterpillars, as of well-conducted young
+ladies), might easily be excused for forming just at first the
+melancholy impression that a general dissolution was coming over it
+piecemeal. It must begin by feeling legs and eyes and nervous centres
+melt away by degrees into a common indistinguishable organic pulp, out
+of which the new organs only slowly form themselves in obedience to the
+law of some internal impulse. But when the process is all over, and--hi,
+presto!--the butterfly emerges at last from the chrysalis condition,
+what does it find but that instead of having lost everything it has new
+and stronger legs in place of the old and feeble ones; it has nerves and
+brain more developed than before; it has wings for flight instead of
+mere creeping little feet to crawl with? What seemed like chaos was
+really nothing more than the necessary kneading up of all component
+parts into a plastic condition which precedes every fresh departure in
+evolution. The old must fade before the new can replace it.
+
+Now I am not going to work this perhaps somewhat fanciful analogy to
+death, or pretend it is anything more than a convenient metaphor. Still,
+taken as such, it is not without its luminosity. For a metaphor, by
+supplying us with a picturable representation, often enables us really
+to get at the hang of the thing a vast deal better than the most solemn
+argument. And I fancy communities sometimes pass through just such a
+chrysalis stage, when it seems to the timid and pessimistic in their
+midst as if every component element of the State (but especially the one
+in which they themselves and their friends are particularly interested)
+were rushing violently down a steep place to eternal perdition. Chaos
+appears to be swallowing up everything. "The natural relations of
+classes" disappear. Faiths melt; churches dissolve; morals fade; bonds
+fail; a universal magma of emancipated opinion seems to take the place
+of old-established dogma. The squires and the parsons of the
+period--call them scribes or augurs--wring their hands in despair, and
+cry aloud that they don't know what the world is coming to. But, after
+all, it is only the chrysalis stage of a new system. The old social
+order must grow disjointed and chaotic before the new social order can
+begin to evolve from it. The establishment of a plastic consistency in
+the mass is the condition precedent of the higher development.
+
+Not, of course, that this consideration will ever afford one grain of
+comfort to the squires and the parsons of each successive epoch; for
+what _they_ want is not the reasonable betterment of the whole social
+organism, but the continuance of just this particular type of squiredom
+and parsonry. That is what they mean by "national welfare;" and any
+interference with it they criticise in all ages with the current
+equivalent for the familiar Tory formula that "the country is going to
+the devil."
+
+Sometimes these great social reconstructions of which I speak are forced
+upon communities by external factors interfering with their fixed
+internal order, as happened when the influx of northern barbarians broke
+up the decaying and rotten organism of the Roman Empire. Sometimes,
+again, they occur from internal causes, in an acute, and so to speak,
+inflammatory condition, as at the French Revolution. But sometimes, as
+in our own time and country, they are slowly brought about by organic
+development, so as really to resemble in all essential points the
+chrysalis type of evolution. Politically, socially, theologically,
+ethically, the old fixed beliefs seem at such periods to grow fluid or
+plastic. New feelings and habits and aspirations take their place. For a
+while a general chaos of conflicting opinions and nascent ideas is
+produced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then new
+order supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise;
+till at last, I'm afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for the
+most part just as rigid, just as definite, just as dogmatic, just as
+exacting, as the one it has superseded. The caterpillar has grown into a
+particular butterfly.
+
+Through just such a period of reconstruction Europe in general and
+Britain in particular are now in all likelihood beginning to pass. And
+they will come out at the other end translated and transfigured. Laws
+and faiths and morals will all of them have altered. There will be a new
+heaven and a new earth for the men and women of the new epoch. Strange
+that people should make such a fuss about a detail like Home Rule, when
+the foundations of society are all becoming fluid. Don't flatter
+yourself for a moment that your particular little sect or your
+particular little dogma is going to survive the gentle cataclysm any
+more than my particular little sect or my particular little dogma. All
+alike are doomed to inevitable reconstruction. "We can't put the
+Constitution into the melting-pot," said Mr. John Morley, if I recollect
+his words aright. But at the very moment when he said it, in my humble
+opinion, the Constitution was already well into the melting-pot, and
+even beginning to simmer merrily. Federalism, or something extremely
+like it, may with great probability be the final outcome of that
+particular melting; though anything else is perhaps just as probable,
+and in any case the melting is general, not special. The one thing we
+can guess with tolerable certainty is that the melting-pot stage has
+begun to overtake us, socially, ethically, politically,
+ecclesiastically; and that what will emerge from the pot at the end of
+it must depend at last upon the relative strength of those unknown
+quantities--the various formative elements.
+
+Being the most optimistic of pessimists, however, I will venture (after
+this disclaimer of prophecy) to prophesy one thing alone: 'Twill be a
+butterfly, not a grub, that comes out of our chrysalis.
+
+Beyond that, I hold all prediction premature. We may guess and we may
+hope, but we can have no certainty. Save only the certainty that no
+element will outlive the revolution unchanged--not faiths, nor classes,
+nor domestic relations, nor any other component factor of our complex
+civilisation. All are becoming plastic in the organic plasm; all are
+losing features in the common mass of the melting-pot. For that reason,
+I never trouble my head for a moment when people object to me that this,
+that, or the other petty point of detail in Bellamy's Utopia or William
+Morris's Utopia, or my own little private and particular Utopia, is
+impossible, or unrealisable, or wicked, or hateful. For these, after
+all, are mere Utopias; their details are the outcome of individual
+wishes; what will emerge must be, not a Utopia at all, either yours or
+mine, but a practical reality, full of shifts and compromises most
+unphilosophical and illogical--a practical reality distasteful in many
+ways to all us Utopia-mongers. "The Millennium by return of post" is no
+more realisable to-day than yesterday. The greatest of revolutions can
+only produce that unsatisfactory result, a new human organisation.
+
+Yet, it is something, after all, to believe at least that the grub will
+emerge into a full-fledged butterfly. Not, perhaps, quite as glossy in
+the wings as we could wish; but a butterfly all the same, not a crawling
+caterpillar.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+_ON THE CASINO TERRACE._
+
+
+I have always regarded Monte Carlo as an Influence for Good. It helps to
+keep so many young men off the Stock Exchange.
+
+Let me guard against an obvious but unjust suspicion. These remarks are
+not uttered under the exhilarating effect of winning at the tables.
+Quite the contrary. It is the Bank that has broken the Man to-day
+at Monte Carlo. They are rather due to the chastening and
+thought-compelling influence of persistent loss, not altogether
+unbalanced by a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in any
+town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces
+which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of
+roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste,
+by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity,
+and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a
+brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and
+belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and the
+gleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance. 'Tis a modest
+tribute, my poor little forty francs. Surely the veriest puritan, the
+oiliest Chadband of them all, will allow a humble scribbler, at so cheap
+a yearly rate, to purchase wisdom, not unmixed with tolerance, at the
+gilded shrine of Fors Fortuna!
+
+For what a pother, after all, the unwise of this world are wont to make
+about one stranded gambling-house, in a remote corner of Liguria! If
+they were in earnest or sincere, how small a matter they would think it!
+Of course, when I say so, hypocrisy holds up its hands in holy horror.
+But that is the way with the purveyors of mint, cumin, and anise; they
+raise a mighty hubbub over some unimportant detail--in order to feel
+their consciences clear when business compels them to rob the widow and
+the orphan. In reality, though Monte Carlo is bad enough in its way--do
+I not pay it unwilling tribute myself twice a year out of the narrow
+resources of The Garret, Grub Street?--it is but a skin-deep surface
+symptom of a profound disease which attacks the heart and core in London
+and Paris. Compared with Panama, Argentines, British South Africans, and
+Liberators, Monte Carlo is a mole on the left ankle.
+
+"The Devil's advocate!" you say. Well, well, so be it. The fact is, the
+supposed moral objection to gambling as such is a purely commercial
+objection of a commercial nation; and the reason so much importance is
+attached to it in certain places is because at that particular vice men
+are likely to lose their money. It is largely a fetish, like the
+sinfulness of cards, of dice, of billiards. Moreover, the objection is
+only to the _kind_ of gambling. There is another kind, less open, at
+which you stand a better chance to win yourself, while other parties
+stand a better chance to lose; and that kind, which is played in great
+gambling-houses known as the Stock Exchange and the Bourse, is
+considered, morally speaking, as quite innocuous. Large fortunes are
+made at this other sort of gambling, which, of course, sanctifies and
+almost canonises it. Indeed, if you will note, you will find not only
+that the objection to gambling pure and simple is commonest in the most
+commercial countries, but also that even there it is commonest among the
+most commercial classes. The landed aristocracy, the military, and the
+labouring men have no objection to betting; nor have the Neapolitan
+lazzaroni, the Chinese coolies. It is the respectable English
+counting-house that discourages the vice, especially among the clerks,
+who are likely to make the till or the cheque-book rectify the little
+failures of their flutter on the Derby.
+
+Observe how artificial is the whole mild out-cry: how absolutely it
+partakes of the nature of damning the sins you have no mind to! Here, on
+the terrace where I sit, and where ladies in needlessly costly robes are
+promenading up and down to exhibit their superfluous wealth
+ostentatiously to one another, my ear is continuously assailed by the
+constant _ping, ping, ping_ of the pigeon-shooting, and my peace
+disturbed by the flapping death-agonies of those miserable victims. Yet
+how many times have you heard the tables at Monte Carlo denounced to
+once or never that you have heard a word said of the poor mangled
+pigeons? And why? Because nobody loses much money at pigeon-matches.
+That is legitimate sport, about as good and as bad as pheasant or
+partridge shooting--no better, no worse, in spite of artificial
+distinctions; and nobody (except the pigeons) has any interest in
+denouncing it. Legend has it at Monte Carlo, indeed, that when the
+proprietors of the Casino wished to take measures "pour attirer les
+Anglais" they held counsel with the wise men whether it was best to
+establish and endow an English church or a pigeon-shooting tournament.
+And the church was in a minority. Since then, I have heard more than one
+Anglican Bishop speak evil of the tables, but I have never heard one of
+them say a good word yet for the boxed and slaughtered pigeons.
+
+Let me take a more striking because a less hackneyed case--one that
+still fewer people would think of. Everybody who visits Monte Carlo gets
+there, of course, by the P.L.M. If you know this coast at all you will
+know that P.L.M. is the curt and universal abbreviation for the Paris,
+Lyon, Mediterranee Railway Company--in all probability the most gigantic
+and wickedest monopoly on the face of this planet. Yet you never once
+heard a voice raised yet against the company as a company. Individual
+complaints get into the _Times_, of course, about the crowding of the
+_train de luxe_, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomforts
+of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across
+the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte
+Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse
+connects the three biggest towns in France--Paris, Lyon, Marseilles--and
+is absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; and it does
+it, regardless--I say "regardless," without qualification, because the
+P.L.M. regards nobody and nothing. Yet one hears of no righteous
+indignation, no uprising of the people in their angry thousands, no
+moral recognition of the monopoly as a Wicked Thing, to be fought tooth
+and nail, without quarter given. It probably causes a greater aggregate
+of human misery in a week than Monte Carlo in a century. Besides, the
+one is compulsory, the other optional. You needn't risk a louis on the
+tables unless you choose, but, like it or lump it, if you're bound for
+Nice or Cannes or Mentone, you must open your mouth and shut your eyes
+and see what P.L.M. will send you. Our own railways, indeed, are by no
+means free from blame at the hands of the Democracy: the South-Eastern
+has not earned the eternal gratitude of its season-ticket holders; the
+children of the Great Western do not rise up and call it blessed.
+(Except, indeed, in the most uncomplimentary sense of blessing.) But the
+P.L.M. goes much further than these; and I have always held that the one
+solid argument for eternal punishment consists in the improbability that
+its Board of Directors will be permitted to go scot-free for ever after
+all their iniquities.
+
+I am not wholly joking. I mean the best part of it. Great monopolies
+that abuse their trust are far more dangerous enemies of public morals
+than an honest gambling-house at every corner. Monte Carlo as it stands
+is just a concentrated embodiment of all the evils of our anti-social
+system, and the tables are by far the least serious among them. It is an
+Influence for Good, because it mirrors our own world in all its naked,
+all its over-draped hideousness. There it rears its meretricious head,
+that gaudy Palace of Sin, appropriately decked in its Haussmanesque
+architecture and its coquettish gardens, attracting to itself all the
+idle, all the vicious, all the rich, all the unworthy, from every corner
+of Europe and America. But Monte Carlo didn't make them; it only gathers
+to its bosom its own chosen children from the places where they are
+produced--from London, Paris, Brussels, New York, Berlin, St.
+Petersburg. The vices of our organisation begot these over-rich folk,
+begot their diamond-decked women, and their clipped French poodles with
+gold bangles spanning their aristocratic legs. These are the spawn of
+land-owning, of capitalism, of military domination, of High Finance, of
+all the social ills that flesh is heir to. I feel as I pace the terrace
+in the broad Mediterranean sunshine, that I am here in the midst of the
+very best society Europe affords. That is to say, the very worst. The
+dukes and the money-lenders, the Jay Goulds and the Reinachs. The
+idlest, the cruellest: the hereditary drones, the successful
+blood-suckers. But to find fault with them only for trying to
+win one another's ill-gotten gold at a fair and open game of
+_trente-et-quarante_, with the odds against them, and then to say
+nothing about the way they came by it, is to make a needless fuss about
+a trifle of detail, while overlooking the weightiest moral problems of
+humanity.
+
+Whoever allows red herrings like these to be trailed across the path of
+his moral consciousness, to the detriment of the scent which should lead
+him straight on to the lairs of gigantic evils, deserves little credit
+either for conscience or sagacity. My son, be wise. Strike at the root
+of the evil. Let Monte Carlo go, but keep a stern eye on London
+ground-rents.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+_THE CELTIC FRINGE._
+
+
+We Celts henceforth will rule the roost in Britain.
+
+What is that you mutter? "A very inopportune moment to proclaim the
+fact." Well, no, I don't think so. And I'm sorry to hear you say it, for
+if there _is_ a quality on which I plume myself, it's the delicate tact
+that makes me refrain from irritating the susceptibilities of the
+sensitive Saxon. See how polite I am to him! I call him sensitive. But,
+opportune or inopportune, Lord Salisbury says we are a Celtic fringe. I
+beg to retort, we are the British people.
+
+"Conquered races," say my friends. Well, grant it for a moment. But in
+civilised societies, conquerors have, sooner or later, to amalgamate
+with the conquered. And where the vanquished are more numerous, they
+absorb the victors instead of being absorbed by them. That is the
+Nemesis of conquest. Rome annexed Etruria; and Etruscan Maecenas,
+Etruscan Sejanus organised and consolidated the Roman Empire. Rome
+annexed Italy; and the _Jus Italicum_ grew at last to be the full Roman
+franchise. Rome annexed the civilised world; and the provinces under
+Caesar blotted out the Senate. Britain is passing now through the
+self-same stage. One inevitable result of the widening of the electorate
+has been the transfer of power from the Teutonic to the Celtic half of
+Britain. I repeat, we are no longer a Celtic fringe: at the polls, in
+Parliament, we are the British people. Lord Salisbury may fail to
+perceive that fact, or, as I hold more probable, may affect to ignore
+it. What will such tactics avail? The ostrich is not usually counted
+among men as a perfect model of political wisdom.
+
+And _are_ we, after all, the conquered peoples? Meseems, I doubt it.
+They say we Celts dearly love a paradox--which is perhaps only the
+sensible Saxon way of envisaging the fact that we catch at new truths
+somewhat quicker than other people. At any rate, 'tis a pet little
+paradox of my own that we have never been conquered, and that to our
+unconquered state we owe in the main our Radicalism, our Socialism, our
+ingrained love of political freedom. We are tribal not feudal; we think
+the folk more important than his lordship. The Saxon of the south-east
+is the conquered man: he has felt on his neck for generations the heel
+of feudalism. He is slavish; he is snobbish; he dearly loves a lord. He
+shouts himself hoarse for his Beaconsfield or his Salisbury. Till
+lately, in his rural avatar, he sang but one song--
+
+  "God bless the squire and his relations,
+  And keep us in our proper stations."
+
+Trite, isn't it? but so is the Saxon intelligence.
+
+Seriously--for at times it is well to be serious--South-Eastern England,
+the England of the plains, has been conquered and enslaved in a dozen
+ages by each fresh invader. Before the dawn of history, Heaven knows
+what shadowy Belgae and Iceni enslaved it. But historical time will serve
+our purpose. The Roman enslaved it, but left Caledonia and Hibernia
+free, the Cambrian, the Silurian, the Cornishman half-subjugated. The
+Saxon and Anglian enslaved the east, but scarcely crossed over the
+watershed of the western ocean. The Dane, in turn, enslaved the Saxon in
+East Anglia and Yorkshire. The Norman ground all down to a common
+servitude between the upper and nether millstones of the feudal
+system--the king and the nobleman. At the end of it all, Teutonic
+England was reduced to a patient condition of contented serfdom: it had
+accommodated itself to its environment: no wish was left in it for the
+assertion of its freedom. To this day, the south-east, save where
+leavened and permeated by Celtic influences, hugs its chains and loves
+them. It produces the strange portent of the Conservative working-man,
+who yearns to be led by Lord Randolph Churchill.
+
+With the North and the West, things go wholly otherwise. Even Cornwall,
+the earliest Celtic kingdom to be absorbed, was rather absorbed than
+conquered. I won't go into the history of the West Welsh of Somerset,
+Devon, and Cornwall at full length, because it would take ten pages to
+explain it; and I know that readers are too profoundly interested in the
+Shocking Murder in the Borough Road to devote half-an-hour to the origin
+and evolution of their own community. It must suffice to say that the
+Devonian and Cornubian Welsh coalesced with the West Saxon for
+resistance to their common enemy the Dane, and that the West Saxon
+kingdom was made supreme in Britain by the founder of the English
+monarchy--one Dunstan, a monk from the West Welsh Abbey of Glastonbury.
+Wales proper, overrun piecemeal by Norman filibusterers, was roughly
+annexed by the Plantagenet kings; but it was only pacified under the
+Welsh Tudors, and was never at any time thoroughly feudalised.
+Glendower's rebellion, Richmond's rebellion, the Wesleyan revolt, the
+Rebecca riots, the tithe war, are all continuous parts of the ceaseless
+reaction of gallant little Wales against Teutonic aggression. "An alien
+Church" still disturbs the Principality. The Lake District and
+Ayrshire--Celtic Cumbria and Strathclyde--only accepted by degrees the
+supremacy of the Kings of England and Scotland. The brother of a Scotch
+King was Prince of Cumbria, as the elder son of an English King was
+Prince of Wales. Indeed, David of Cumbria, who became David I. of
+Scotland, was the real consolidator of the Scotch kingdom. Cumbria was
+no more conquered by the Saxon Lothians than Scotland was conquered by
+the accession of James I. or by the Act of Union. That means absorption,
+conciliation, a certain degree of tribal independence. For Ireland, we
+know that the "mere Irish" were never subjugated at all till the days of
+Henry VII.; that they had to be reconquered by Cromwell and by William
+of Orange; that they rebelled more or less throughout the eighteenth
+century; and that they have been thorns in the side of Tory England
+through the whole of the nineteenth. As for the Highlands, they held out
+against the Stuarts till England had rejected that impossible dynasty;
+and then they rallied round the Stuarts as the enemies of the Saxon.
+General Wade's roads and the forts in the Great Glen, aided by a few
+trifles of Glencoe massacres, kept them quiet for a moment. But it was
+only for a moment. The North is once more in open revolt. Dr. Clark and
+the crofters are its mode of expressing itself.
+
+Nor is that all. The Celtic ideas have remained unaltered. Of course, I
+am not silly enough to believe there is any such thing as a Celtic race.
+I use the word merely as a convenient label for the league of the
+unconquered peoples in Britain. Ireland alone contains half-a-dozen
+races; and none of them appear to have anything in common with the Pict
+of Aberdeenshire or the West-Welsh of Cornwall. All I mean when I speak
+of Celtic ideas and Celtic ideals is the ideas and ideals proper and
+common to unconquered races. As compared with the feudalised and
+contented serf of South-Eastern England, are not the Irish peasant, the
+Scotch clansman, the "statesman" of the dales, the Cornish miner, free
+men every soul of them? English landlordism, imposed from without upon
+the crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside,
+has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, the
+native resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has been
+brutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; the
+west and north still retain the instincts of freemen.
+
+As long as South-Eastern England and the Normanised or feudalised Saxon
+lowlands of Scotland contained all the wealth, all the power, and most
+of the population of Britain, the Celtic ideals had no chance of
+realising themselves. But the industrial revolution of the present
+century has turned us right-about-face, has transferred the balance of
+power from the secondary strata to the primary strata in Britain; from
+the agricultural lowlands to the uplands of coal and iron, the cotton
+factories, the woollen trade. Great industrial cities have grown up in
+the Celtic or semi-Celtic area--Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds,
+Bradford, Sheffield, Belfast, Aberdeen, Cardiff. The Celt--that is to
+say, the mountaineer and the man of the untouched country--reproduces
+his kind much more rapidly than the Teuton. The Highlander and the
+Irishman swarm into Glasgow; the Irishman and the Welshman swarm into
+Liverpool; the west-countryman into Bristol; Celts of all types into
+London, Southampton, Newport, Birmingham, Sheffield. This eastward
+return-wave of Celts upon the Teuton has leavened the whole mass; if you
+look at the leaders of Radicalism in England you will find they bear,
+almost without exception, true Celtic surnames. Chartists and Socialists
+of the first generation were marshalled by men of Cymric descent, like
+Ernest Jones and Robert Owen, or by pure-blooded Irishmen like Fergus
+O'Connor. It is not a mere accident that the London Socialists of the
+present day should be led by Welshmen like William Morris, or by the
+eloquent brogue of Bernard Shaw's audacious oratory. We Celts now lurk
+in every corner of Britain; we have permeated it with our ideas; we have
+inspired it with our aspirations; we have roused the Celtic remnant in
+the south-east itself to a sense of their wrongs; and we are marching
+to-day, all abreast, to the overthrow of feudalism. If Lord Salisbury
+thinks we are a Celtic fringe he is vastly mistaken. But he doesn't
+really think so: 'tis a piece of his ponderous Saxon humour. Talk of
+"Batavian grace," indeed! Well, the Cecils came first from the fens of
+Lincolnshire.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+_IMAGINATION AND RADICALS._
+
+
+Conservatism, I believe, is mainly due to want of imagination.
+
+In saying this, I do not for a moment mean to deny the other and equally
+obvious truth that Conservatism, in the lump, is a euphemism for
+selfishness. But the two ideas have much in common. Selfish people are
+apt to be unimaginative: unimaginative people are apt to be selfish.
+Clearly to realise the condition of the unfortunate is the beginning of
+philanthropy. Clearly to realise the rights of others is the beginning
+of justice. "Put yourself in his place" strikes the keynote of ethics.
+Stupid people can only see their own side of a question: they cannot
+even imagine any other side possible. So, as a rule, stupid people are
+Conservative. They cling to what they have; they dread revision,
+redistribution, justice. Also, if a man has imagination he is likely to
+be Radical, even though selfish; while if he has no imagination he is
+likely to be Conservative, even though otherwise good and kind-hearted.
+Some men are Conservative from defects of heart, while some are
+Conservative from defects of head. Conversely, most imaginative people
+are Radical; for even a bad man may sometimes uphold the side of right
+because he has intelligence enough to understand that things might be
+better managed in the future for all than they are in the present.
+
+But when I say that Conservatism is mainly due to want of imagination, I
+mean more than that. Most people are wholly unable to conceive in their
+own minds any state of things very different from the one they have been
+born and brought up in. The picturing power is lacking. They can
+conceive the past, it is true, more or less vaguely--because they have
+always heard things once were so, and because the past is generally
+realisable still by the light of the relics it has bequeathed to the
+present. But they can't at all conceive the future. Imagination fails
+them. Innumerable difficulties crop up for them in the way of every
+proposed improvement. Before there was any County Council for London,
+such people thought municipal government for the metropolis an insoluble
+problem. Now that Home Rule quivers trembling in the balance, they think
+it would pass the wit of man to devise in the future a federal league
+for the component elements of the United Kingdom; in spite of the fact
+that the wit of man has already devised one for the States of the Union,
+for the Provinces of the Dominion, for the component Cantons of the
+Swiss Republic. To the unimaginative mind difficulties everywhere seem
+almost insuperable. It shrinks before trifles. "Impossible!" said
+Napoleon. "There is no such word in my dictionary!" He had been trained
+in the school of the French Revolution--which was _not_ carried out by
+unimaginative pettifoggers.
+
+To people without imagination any change you propose seems at once
+impracticable. They are ready to bring up endless objections to the mode
+of working it. There would be this difficulty in the way, and that
+difficulty, and the other one. You would think, to hear them talk, the
+world as it stands was absolutely perfect, and moved without a hitch in
+all its bearings. They don't see that every existing institution just
+bristles with difficulties--and that the difficulties are met or got
+over somehow. Often enough while they swallow the camel of existing
+abuses they strain at some gnat which they fancy they see flying in at
+the window of Utopia or of the Millennium. "If your reform were
+carried," they say in effect, "we should, doubtless, get rid of such and
+such flagrant evils; but the streets in November would be just as muddy
+as ever, and slight inconvenience might be caused in certain improbable
+contingencies to the duke or the cotton-spinner, the squire or the
+mine-owner." They omit to note that much graver inconvenience is caused
+at present to the millions who are shut out from the fields and the
+sunshine, who are sweated all day for a miserable wage, or who are
+forced to pay fancy prices for fuel to gratify the rapacity of a handful
+of coal-grabbers.
+
+Lack of imagination makes people fail to see the evils that are; makes
+them fail to realise the good that might be.
+
+I often fancy to myself what such people would say if land had always
+been communal property, and some one now proposed to hand it over
+absolutely to the dukes, the squires, the game-preservers, and the
+coal-owners. "'Tis impossible," they would exclaim; "the thing wouldn't
+be workable. Why, a single landlord might own half Westminster! A single
+landlord might own all Sutherlandshire! The hypothetical Duke of
+Westminster might put bars to the streets; he might impede locomotion;
+he might refuse to let certain people to whom he objected take up their
+residence in any part of his territory; he might prevent them from
+following their own trades or professions; he might even descend to such
+petty tyranny as tabooing brass plates on the doors of houses. And what
+would you do then? The thing isn't possible. The Duke of Sutherland,
+again, might shut up all Sutherlandshire; might turn whole vast tracts
+into grouse-moor or deer-forest; might prevent harmless tourists from
+walking up the mountains. And surely free Britons would never submit to
+_that_. The bare idea is ridiculous. The squire of a rural parish might
+turn out the Dissenters; might refuse to let land for the erection of
+chapels; might behave like a petty King Augustus of Scilly. Indeed,
+there would be nothing to prevent an American alien from buying up
+square miles of purple heather in Scotland, and shutting the inhabitants
+of these British Isles out of their own inheritance. Sites might be
+refused for needful public purposes; fancy prices might be asked for
+pure cupidity. Speculators would job land for the sake of unearned
+increment; towns would have to grow as landlords willed, irrespective of
+the wants or convenience of the community. Theoretically, I don't even
+see that Lord Rothschild mightn't buy up the whole area of Middlesex,
+and turn London into a Golden House of Nero. Your scheme can't be
+worked. The anomalies are too obvious."
+
+They are indeed. Yet I doubt whether the unimaginative would quite have
+foreseen them: the things they foresee are less real and possible. But
+they urge against every reform such objections as I have parodied; and
+they urge them about matters of far less vital importance. The existing
+system exists; they know its abuses, its checks and its counter-checks.
+The system of the future does not yet exist; and they can't imagine how
+its far slighter difficulties could ever be smoothed over. They are not
+the least staggered by the appalling reality of the Duke of Westminster
+or the Duke of Sutherland; not the least staggered by the sinister power
+of a conspiracy of coal-owners to paralyse a great nation with the
+horrors of a fuel famine. But they _are_ staggered by their bogey that
+State ownership of land might give rise to a certain amount of jobbery
+and corruption on the part of officials. They think it better that the
+dukes and the squires should get all the rent than that the State should
+get most of it, with the possibility of a percentage being corruptly
+embezzled by the functionaries who manage it. This shows want of
+imagination. It is as though one should say to one's clerk, "All your
+income shall be paid in future to the Duke of Westminster, and not to
+yourself, for his sole use and benefit; because we, your employers, are
+afraid that if we give you your salary in person, you may let some of it
+be stolen from you or badly invested." How transparently absurd! We want
+our income ourselves, to spend as we please. We would rather risk losing
+one per cent. of it in bad investments than let all be swallowed up by
+the dukes and the landlords.
+
+It is the same throughout. Want of imagination makes people exaggerate
+the difficulties and dangers of every new scheme, because they can't
+picture constructively to themselves the details of its working. Men
+with great picturing power, like Shelley or Robespierre, are always very
+advanced Radicals, and potentially revolutionists. The difficulty _they_
+see is not the difficulty of making the thing work, but the difficulty
+of convincing less clear-headed people of its desirability and
+practicability. A great many Conservatives, who are Conservative from
+selfishness, would be Radicals if only they could feel for themselves
+that even their own petty interests and pleasures are not really
+menaced. The squires and the dukes can't realise how much happier even
+they would be in a free, a beautiful, and a well-organised community.
+Imaginative minds can picture a world where everything is so ordered
+that life comes as a constant aesthetic delight to everybody. They know
+that that world could be realised to-morrow--if only all others could
+picture it to themselves as vividly as they do. But they also know that
+it can only be attained in the end by long ages of struggle, and by slow
+evolution of the essentially imaginative ethical faculty. For right
+action depends most of all, in the last resort, upon a graphic
+conception of the feelings of others.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+_ABOUT ABROAD._
+
+
+The place known as Abroad is not nearly so nice a country to live in as
+England. The people who inhabit Abroad are called Foreigners. They are
+in every way and at all times inferior to Englishmen.
+
+These Post-Prandials used once to be provided with a sting in their
+tail, like the common scorpion. By way of change, I turn them out now
+with a sting in their head, like the common mosquito. Mosquitoes are
+much less dangerous than scorpions, but they're a deal more irritating.
+
+Not that I am sanguine enough to expect I shall irritate Englishmen.
+Your Englishman is far too cock-sure of the natural superiority of
+Britons to Foreigners, the natural superiority of England to Abroad,
+ever to be irritated by even the gentlest criticism. He accepts it all
+with lordly indifference. He brushes it aside as the elephant might
+brush aside the ineffective gadfly. No proboscis can pierce that
+pachydermatous hide of his. If you praise him to his face, he accepts
+your praise as his obvious due, with perfect composure and without the
+slightest elation. If you blame him in aught, he sets it down to your
+ignorance and mental inferiority. You say to him, "Oh, Englishman, you
+are great; you are wise; you are rich beyond comparison. You are noble;
+you are generous; you are the prince among nations." He smiles a calm
+smile, and thinks you a very sensible fellow. But you add, "Oh, my lord,
+if I may venture to say so, there is a smudge on your nose, which I make
+bold to attribute to the settlement of a black on your intelligent
+countenance." He is not angry. He is not even contemptuously amused. He
+responds, "My friend, you are wrong. There is never a smudge on my
+immaculate face. No blacks fly in London. The sky is as clear there in
+November as in August. All is pure and serene and beautiful." You
+answer, "Oh, my lord, I admit the force of your profound reasoning. You
+light the gas at ten in the morning only to show all the world you can
+afford to burn it." At that, he gropes his way along Pall Mall to his
+club, and tells the men he meets there how completely he silenced you.
+
+And yet, My Lord Elephant, there is use in mosquitoes. Mr. Mattieu
+Williams once discovered the final cause of fleas. Certain people, said
+he, cannot be induced to employ the harmless necessary tub. For them,
+Providence designed the lively flea. He compels them to scratch
+themselves. By so doing they rouse the skin to action and get rid of
+impurities. Now, this British use of the word Abroad is a smudge on the
+face of the otherwise perfect Englishman. Perchance a mosquito-bite may
+induce him to remove it with a little warm water and a cambric
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+To most Englishmen, the world divides itself naturally into two unequal
+and non-equivalent portions--Abroad and England. Of these two, Abroad is
+much the larger country; but England, though smaller, is vastly more
+important. Abroad is inhabited by Frenchmen and Germans, who speak their
+own foolish and chattering languages. Part of it is likewise pervaded by
+Chinamen, who wear pigtails; and the outlying districts belong to the
+poor heathen, chiefly interesting as a field of missionary enterprise,
+and a possible market for Manchester piece-goods. We sometimes invest
+our money abroad, but then we are likely to get it swallowed up in
+Mexicans or Egyptian Unified. If you ask most people what has become of
+Tom, they will answer at once with the specific information, "Oh, Tom
+has gone Abroad." I have one stereotyped rejoinder to an answer like
+that. "What part of Abroad, please?" That usually stumps them. Abroad is
+Abroad; and like the gentleman who was asked in examination to "name the
+minor prophets," they decline to make invidious distinctions. It is
+nothing to them whether he is tea-planting in the Himalayas, or
+sheep-farming in Australia, or orange-growing in Florida, or ranching in
+Colorado. If he is not in England, why then he is elsewhere; and
+elsewhere is Abroad, one and indivisible.
+
+In short, Abroad answers in space to that well-known and definite date,
+the Olden Time, in chronology.
+
+People will tell you, "Foreigners do this"; "Foreigners do that";
+"Foreigners smoke so much"; "Foreigners always take coffee for
+breakfast." "Indeed," I love to answer; "I've never observed it myself
+in Central Asia." 'Tis Parson Adams and the Christian religion. Nine
+English people out of ten, when they talk of Abroad, mean what they call
+the Continent; and when they talk of the Continent, they mean France,
+Germany, Switzerland, Italy; in short, the places most visited by
+Englishmen when they consent now and again to go Abroad for a holiday.
+"I don't like Abroad," a lady once said to me on her return from Calais.
+Foreigners, in like manner, means Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Italians.
+In the country called Abroad, the most important parts are the parts
+nearest England; of the people called Foreigners, the most important are
+those who dress like Englishmen. The dim black lands that lie below the
+horizon are hardly worth noticing.
+
+Would it surprise you to learn that most people live in Asia? Would it
+surprise you to learn that most people are poor benighted heathen, and
+that, of the remainder, most people are Mahommedans, and that of the
+Christians, who come next, most people are Roman Catholics, and that, of
+the other Christian sects, most people belong to the Greek Church, and
+that, last of all, we get Protestants, more particularly Anglicans,
+Wesleyans, Baptists? Have you ever really realised the startling fact
+that England is an island off the coast of Europe? that Europe is a
+peninsula at the end of Asia? that France, Germany, Italy, are the
+fringe of Russia? Have you ever really realised that the
+English-speaking race lives mostly in America? that the country is
+vastly more populous than London? that our class is the froth and the
+scum of society? Think these things out, and try to measure them on the
+globe. And when you speak of Abroad, do please specify what part of it.
+
+Abroad is not all alike. There are differences between Poland, Peru, and
+Palestine. What is true of France is not true of Fiji. Distinguish
+carefully between Timbuctoo, Tobolsk, and Toledo.
+
+It is not our insularity that makes us so insular. 'Tis a gift of the
+gods, peculiar to Englishmen. The other inhabitants of these Isles of
+Britain are comparatively cosmopolitan. The Scotchman goes everywhere;
+the world is his oyster. Ireland is an island still more remote than
+Great Britain; but the Irishman has never been so insular as the
+English. I put that down in part to his Catholicism: his priests have
+been wheels in a world-wide system; his relations have been with Douai,
+St. Omer, and Rome; his bishops have gone pilgrimages and sat on Vatican
+Councils; his kinsmen are the MacMahons in France, the O'Donnels in
+Spain, the Taafes in Austria. Even in the days of the Regency this was
+so: look at Lever and his heroes! When England drank port, County Clare
+drank claret. But ever since the famine, Ireland has expanded. Every
+Irishman has cousins in Canada, in Australia, in New York, in San
+Francisco. The Empire is Irish, with the exception of India; and India,
+of course, is a Scotch dependency. Irishmen and Scotchmen have no such
+feelings about Abroad and its Foreigners as Londoners entertain. But
+Englishmen never quite get over the sense that everybody must needs
+divide the world into England and Elsewhere. To the end no Englishman
+really grasps the fact that to Frenchmen and Germans he himself is a
+foreigner. I have met John Bulls who had passed years in Italy, but who
+spoke of the countrymen of Caesar and Dante and Leonardo and Garibaldi
+with the contemptuous toleration one might feel towards a child or an
+Andaman Islander. These Italians could build Giotto's campanile; could
+paint the Transfiguration; could carve the living marble on the tombs of
+the Medici; could produce the Vita Nuova; could beget Galileo, Galvani,
+Beccaria; but still--they were Foreigners. Providence in its wisdom has
+decreed that they must live Abroad--just as it has decreed that a
+comprehension of the decimal system and its own place in the world
+should be limitations eternally imposed upon the English intellect.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+_WHY ENGLAND IS BEAUTIFUL._
+
+
+As I strolled across the moor this afternoon towards Waverley, I saw
+Jones was planting out that bare hillside of his with Douglas pines and
+Scotch firs and new strains of silver birches. They will improve the
+landscape. And I thought as I scanned them, "How curious that most
+people entirely overlook this constant betterment and beautifying of
+England! You hear them talk much of the way bricks and mortar are
+invading the country; you never hear anything of this slow and silent
+process of planting and developing which has made England into the
+prettiest and one of the most beautiful countries in Europe."
+
+What's that you say? "Astonished to find I have a good word of any sort
+to put in for England!" Why, dear me, how irrational you are! I just
+_love_ England. Can any man with eyes in his head and a soul for beauty
+do otherwise? England and Italy--there you have the two great glories of
+Europe. Italy for towns, for art, for man's handicraft; England for
+country, for nature, for green lanes and lush copses. Was it not one
+that loved Italy well who sighed in Italy--
+
+  "Oh, to be in England now that April's there?"
+
+And who that loves Italy, and knows England, too, does not echo
+Browning's wish when April comes round again on dusty Tuscan hilltops?
+At Perugia, last spring, through weeks of tramontana, how one yearned
+for the sight of yellow English primroses! Not love England, indeed!
+Milton's England, Shelley's England; the England of the skylark, the
+dog-rose, the honeysuckle! Not love England, forsooth! Why, I love every
+flower, every blade of grass in it. Devonshire lane, close-cropped down,
+rich water-meadow, bickering brooklet: ah me, how they tug at one's
+heartstrings in Africa! No son of the soil can love England as those
+love her very stones who have come from newer lands over sea to her
+ivy-clad church-towers, her mouldering castles, her immemorial elms, the
+berries on her holly, the may in her hedgerows. Are not all these bound
+up in our souls with each cherished line of Shakespeare and Wordsworth?
+do they not rouse faint echoes of Gray and Goldsmith? Even before I ever
+set foot in England, how I longed to behold my first cowslip, my first
+foxglove! And now, I have wandered through the footpaths that run
+obliquely across English pastures, picking meadowsweet and fritillaries,
+for half a lifetime, till I have learned by heart every leaf and every
+petal. You think because I dislike one squalid village--"The Wen," stout
+English William Cobbett delighted to call it--I don't love England. You
+think because I see some spots on the sun of the English character, I
+don't love Englishmen. Why, how can any man who speaks the English
+tongue, and boasts one drop of English blood in his veins, not be proud
+of England? England, the mother of poets and thinkers; England, that
+gave us Newton, Darwin, Spencer; England, that holds in her lap Oxford,
+Salisbury, Durham; England of daisy and heather and pine-wood! Are we
+hewn out of granite, to be cold before England?
+
+Upon my soul, your unseasonable interruption has almost made me forget
+what I was going to say; it has made me grow warm, and drop into poetry.
+
+England, I take it, is certainly the prettiest country in Europe. It is
+almost the most beautiful. I say "almost," because I bethink me of
+Norway and Switzerland. I say "country," because I bethink me of Rome,
+Venice, Florence. But, taking it as country, and as country alone,
+nothing else approaches it. Have you ever thought why? Man made the
+town, says the proverb, and God made the country. Not so in England.
+There, man made the country, and beautified it exceedingly. In itself,
+the land of south-eastern England is absolutely the same as the land of
+Northern France--that hideous tract about Boulogne and Amiens which we
+traverse in silence every time we run across by Calais to Paris. Chalk
+and clay and sandstone stretch continuously under sea from Kent and
+Sussex to Flanders and Picardy. The Channel burst through, and made the
+Straits of Dover; but the land on either side was and still is
+geologically and physically identical. What has made the difference?
+Man, the planter and gardener. England is beautiful by copse and
+hedgerow, by pine-clad ridge and willow-covered hollow, by meadows
+interspersed with great spreading oaks, by pastures where drowsy sheep,
+deep-fleeced and ruddy-stained, huddle under the shade of ancestral
+beech-trees. Its loveliness is human. In itself, I believe, the actual
+contour of England cannot once have been much better than the contour of
+northern France--though nowadays it is hard indeed to realise it.
+Judicious planting, and a constant eye to picturesque effect in scenery,
+have made England what she is--the garden of Europe.
+
+Of course there are parts of the country which owed, and still owe,
+their beauty to their wildness--Dartmoor, Exmoor, the West Riding of
+Yorkshire, the Surrey hills, the Peak in Derbyshire. Yet even these
+depend more than you would believe, when you take them in detail, on the
+art of the forester. The view from Leith Hill embraces John Evelyn's
+woods at Wotton: the larches that cover one Jura-like gorge were set
+there well within your and my memory. But elsewhere in England the hand
+of man has done absolutely everything. The American, when he first
+visits England, is charmed on his way up from Liverpool to London by the
+exquisite air of antique cultivation and soft rural beauty. The very
+sward is moss-like. Thoroughly wild country, indeed, unless bold and
+mountainous, does not often please one. It is apt to be bare,
+unattractive, and desolate. Witness the Veldt, the Steppes, the
+prairies. You may go through miles and miles of the States and Canada,
+where the wildness for the most part rather repels than delights you. I
+do not say everywhere; in places the wilderness will blossom like a
+rose; boggy margins of lakes, fallen trunks in the forest overgrown with
+wild flowers, make scenes unattainable in our civilised England. Even
+our roughest scenery is comparatively man-made: our heaths are game
+preserves; our woodlands are thinned of superfluous underbrush; our
+moors are relieved by deliberate plantations. But England in her own way
+is unique and unrivalled. Such parks, such greensward, such grassy
+lawns, such wooded tilth, are wholly unknown elsewhere. Compare the
+blank fields and long poplar-fringed high roads of central France with
+our Devon or our Warwickshire, and you get at once a just measure of the
+vast, the unspeakable difference.
+
+And man has done it all. Alone he did it. Often as I take my walks
+abroad--and when I say abroad I mean in England--I see men at work
+dotting about exotics of variegated foliage on some barren hillside, and
+I say to myself, "There, before my eyes, goes on the beautifying of
+England." Thirty years ago, the North Downs near Dorking were one bare
+stretch of white chalky sheep-walk; half of them still remain so; the
+other half has been planted irregularly with copses and spinneys, which
+serve to throw up and enhance the beauty of the unaltered intervals.
+Beech and larch in autumn tints set off smooth patches of grass and
+juniper. Within the last few years, the downs about Leatherhead have
+been similarly diversified. Much of the loveliness of rural England is
+due, one must frankly confess, to the big landlords. Though the great
+houses love us not, we must allow at least that the great houses have
+cared for the trees in the hedge-rows, and for the timber in the
+meadows, as well as for the covert that sheltered their pheasants, their
+foxes, and their gamekeepers. But almost as much of England's charm is
+due to individual small owners or occupiers. 'Tis they who have planted
+the grounds about villa or cottage; they who have stocked the sweet old
+gardens of yew and box, of hollyhock and peony; they who have given us
+the careless rustic grace of the English village. Still, one way or
+another, man has done it all, whether in grange or in manor-house, in
+palatial estate or in labourer's holding. Look at the French or Belgian
+hamlet by the side of the English one; look at the French or Belgian
+farm by the side of our English wealth in wooded glen or sheltered
+homestead. Bricks and mortar are _not_ covering the whole of England.
+That is only true of the squalid purlieus and outliers of London,
+whither Londoners gravitate by mutual attraction. If you _will_ go and
+live in a dingy suburb, you can't reasonably complain that all the
+world's suburban. Being the most cheerful of pessimists, a dweller in
+the country all the days of my life, I have no hesitation in expressing
+my profound conviction that within my memory more has been done to
+beautify than to uglify England. Only, the beautification has been quiet
+and unobtrusive, while the uglification has been obvious and
+concentrated. It takes half a year to jerry-build a dingy street, but it
+takes a decade for newly-planted trees to give the woodland air by
+imperceptible stages to a stretch of country.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+_ANENT ART PRODUCTION._
+
+
+Yesterday, at Bordighera, I strolled up the hills behind the town to
+Sasso. It is a queer little cluster of gleaming white-washed houses that
+top the crest of a steep ridge; and, like many other Italian villages,
+it makes a brave show from a distance, though within it is full of evil
+smells and all uncleanness. But I found it had a church--a picturesquely
+ugly and dilapidated church; and without and within, this church was
+decorated by inglorious hands with very naive and rudimentary frescoes.
+The Four Evangelists were there, in flowing blue robes; and the Four
+Greater Prophets, with long white beards; and the Madonna, appearing in
+most wooden clouds; and the Patron Saint tricked out for his Festa in
+gorgeous holiday episcopal vestments. That was all--just the common
+everyday Italian country church that everybody has seen turned out to
+pattern with manufacturing regularity a hundred times over! Yet, as I
+sat among the olive-terraces looking down the steep slope into the
+Borghetto valley, and across the gorge to the green pines on the Cima,
+it set me thinking. 'Tis a bad habit one falls into when one has nothing
+better to turn one's mind to.
+
+We English, coming to Italy with our ideas fully formed about everything
+on heaven and earth, naturally say to ourselves, "Great heart alive,
+what sadly degraded frescoes! To think the art of Raphael and Andrea del
+Sarto should degenerate even here, in their own land, to such a childish
+level!" But we are wrong, for all that. It is Raphael and Andrea who
+rose, not my poor nameless Sasso artists who sank and degenerated. Italy
+was capable of producing her great painters in her own great day, just
+because in thousands of such Italian villages there were work-a-day
+artisans in form and colour capable of turning out such ridiculous daubs
+as those that decorate this tawdry church on the Ligurian hilltop.
+
+We English, in short, think of it all the wrong way uppermost. We think
+of it topsy-turvy, beginning at the end, while evolution invariably
+begins at the beginning. The Raphaels and Andreas, to put it in brief,
+were the final flower and fullest outcome of whole races of church
+decorators in infantile fresco.
+
+Everywhere you go in Italy, this truth is forced upon your attention
+even to the present day. Art here is no exotic. It smacks of the soil;
+it springs spontaneous, like a weed; it burgeons of itself out of the
+heart of the people. Not high art, understand well; not the art of
+Burne-Jones and Whistler and Puvis de Chavannes and Sar Peladan.
+Commonplace everyday art, that is a trade and a handicraft, like the
+joiner's or the shoemaker's. Look up at your ceiling; it's overrun with
+festoons of crude red and blue flowers, or it's covered with cupids and
+graces, or it bristles with arabesques and unmeaning phantasies. Every
+wall is painted; every grotto decorated. Sham landscapes, sham loggias,
+sham parapets are everywhere. The sham windows themselves are provided,
+not only with sham blinds and sham curtains, but even with sham
+coquettes making sham eyes or waving sham handkerchiefs at passers-by
+below them. Open-air fresco painting is still a living art, an art
+practised by hundreds and thousands of craftsmen, an art as alive as
+cookery or weaving. The Italian decorates everything; his pottery, his
+house, his church, his walls, his palaces. And the only difference he
+feels between the various cases is, that in some of them a higher type
+of art is demanded by wealth and skill than in the others. No wonder,
+therefore, he blossomed out at last into Michael Angelo's frescoes in
+the Sistine Chapel!
+
+To us English, on the contrary, high art is something exotic, separate,
+alone, _sui generis_. We never think of the plaster star in the middle
+of our ceiling as belonging even to the same range of ideas as, say, the
+frescoes in the Houses of Parliament.
+
+A nation in such a condition as that is never truly artistic. The artist
+with us, even now, is an exceptional product. Art for a long time in
+England had nothing at all to do with the life of the people. It was a
+luxury for the rich, a curious thing for ladies' and gentlemen's
+consumption, as purely artificial as the stuccoed Italian villa in which
+they insisted on shivering in our chilly climate. And the pictures it
+produced were wholly alien to the popular wants and the popular
+feelings; they were part of an imported French, Italian, and Flemish
+tradition. English art has only slowly outgrown this stage, just in
+proportion as truly artistic handicrafts have sprung up here and there,
+and developed themselves among us. Go into the Cantagalli or the Ginori
+potteries at Florence, and you will see mere boys and girls, untrained
+children of the people, positively disporting themselves, with childish
+glee, in painting plates and vases. You will see them, not slavishly
+copying a given design of the master's, but letting their fancy run riot
+in lithe curves and lines, in griffons and dragons and floral
+twists-and-twirls of playful extravagance. They revel in ornament. Now,
+it is out of the loins of people like these that great artists spring by
+nature--not State-taught, artificial, made-up artists, but the real
+spontaneous product, the Lippi and Botticelli, the hereditary craftsmen,
+the born painters. And in England nowadays it is a significant fact that
+a large proportion of the truest artists--the innovators, the men who
+are working out a new style of English art for themselves, in accordance
+with the underlying genius of the British temperament, have sprung from
+the great industrial towns--Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester--where
+artistic handicrafts are now once more renascent. I won't expose myself
+to further ridicule by repeating here (what I nevertheless would firmly
+believe, were it not for the scoffers) that a large proportion of them
+are of Celtic descent--belong, in other words, to that section of the
+complex British nationality in which the noble traditions of decorative
+art never wholly died out--that section which was never altogether
+enslaved and degraded by the levelling and cramping and soul-destroying
+influences of manufacturing industrialism.
+
+In Italy, art is endemic. In England, in spite of all we have done to
+stimulate it of late years with guano and other artificial manures, it
+is still sporadic.
+
+The case of music affords us an apt parallel. Till very lately, I
+believe, our musical talent in Britain came almost entirely from the
+cathedral towns. And why? Because there, and there alone, till quite a
+recent date, there existed a hereditary school of music, a training of
+musicians from generation to generation among the mass of the people.
+Not only were the cathedral services themselves a constant school of
+taste in music, but successive generations of choristers and organists
+gave rise to something like a musical caste in our episcopal centres. It
+is true, our vocalists have always come mainly from Wales, from the
+Scotch Highlands, from Yorkshire, from Ireland. But for that there is, I
+believe, a sufficient physical reason. For these are clearly the most
+mountainous parts of the United Kingdom; and the clear mountain air
+seems to produce on the average a better type of human larynx than the
+mists of the level. The men of the lowland, say the Tyrolese, croak like
+frogs in their marshes; but the men of the upland sing like nightingales
+on their tree-tops. And indeed, it would seem as if the mountain people
+were always calling to one another across intervening valleys, always
+singing and whistling and shouting over their work in a way that gives
+tone to the whole vocal mechanism. Witness Welsh penillion singing. And
+wherever this fine physical endowment goes hand in hand with a delicate
+ear and a poetic temperament, you get your great vocalist, your Sims
+Reeves or your Patti. But in England proper it was only in the cathedral
+towns that music was a living reality to the people; and it was in the
+cathedral towns, accordingly, during the dark ages of art, that
+exceptional musical ability was most likely to show itself. More
+particularly was this so on the Welsh border, where the two favouring
+influences of race and practice coincided--at Gloucester, Worcester,
+Hereford, long known for the most musical towns in England.
+
+Cause and effect act and react. Art is a product of the artistic
+temperament. The artistic temperament is a product of the long
+hereditary cultivation of art. And where a broad basis of this
+temperament exists among the people, owing to intermixture of
+artistically-minded stocks, one is liable to get from time to time that
+peculiar combination of characteristics--sensuous, intellectual,
+spiritual--which results in the highest and truest artist.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+_A GLIMPSE INTO UTOPIA._
+
+
+You ask me what would be the position of women in an ideal community.
+Well, after dinner, imagination may take free flight. Suppose, till the
+coffee comes, we discuss that question.
+
+Woman, I take it, differs from man in being the sex sacrificed to
+reproductive necessities.
+
+Whenever I say this, I notice my good friends, the women's-rights women,
+with whom I am generally in pretty close accord, look annoyed and hurt.
+I can never imagine why. I regard this point as an original inequality
+of nature, which it should be the duty of human society to redress as
+far as possible, like all other inequalities. Women are not on the
+average as tall as men; nor can they lift as heavy weights, or undergo,
+as a rule, so much physical labour. Yet civilised society recognises
+their equal right to the protection of our policemen, and endeavours to
+neutralise their physical inequality by the collective guarantee of all
+the citizens. In the same way I hold that women in the lump have a
+certain disadvantage laid upon them by nature, in the necessity that
+some or most among them should bear children; and this disadvantage I
+think the men in a well-ordered State would do their best to compensate
+by corresponding privileges. If women endure on our behalf the great
+public burden of providing future citizens for the community, the least
+we can do for them in return is to render that burden as honourable and
+as little onerous as possible. I can never see that there is anything
+unchivalrous in frankly admitting these facts of nature; on the
+contrary, it seems to me the highest possible chivalry to recognise in
+woman, as woman, high or low, rich or poor, the potential mother, who
+has infinite claims on that ground alone to our respect and sympathy.
+
+Nor do I mean to deny, either, that the right to be a mother is a sacred
+and peculiar privilege of women. In a well-ordered community, I believe,
+that privilege will be valued high, and will be denied to no fitting
+mother by any man. While maternity is from one point of view a painful
+duty, a burden imposed upon a single sex for the good of the whole, it
+is from another point of view a privilege and a joy, and from a third
+point of view the natural fulfilment of a woman's own instincts, the
+complement of her personality, the healthy exercise of her normal
+functions. Just as in turn the man's part in providing physically for
+the support of the woman and the children is from one point of view a
+burden imposed upon him, but from another point of view a precious
+privilege of fatherhood, and from a third point of view the proper
+outlet for his own energy and his own faculties.
+
+In an ideal State, then, I take it, almost every woman would be a
+mother, and almost every woman a mother of not more than about four
+children. An average of something like four is necessary, we know, to
+keep up population, and to allow for infant mortality, inevitable
+celibates, and so forth. Few women in such a State would abstain from
+maternity, save those who felt themselves physically or morally unfitted
+for the task; for in proportion as they abstained, either the State must
+lack citizens to carry on its life, or an extra and undue burden would
+have to be cast upon some other woman. And it may well be doubted
+whether in a well-ordered and civilised State any one woman could
+adequately bear, bring up, and superintend the education of more than
+four young citizens. Hence we may conclude that while no woman save the
+unfit would voluntarily shirk the duties and privileges of maternity,
+few (if any) women would make themselves mothers of more than four
+children. Four would doubtless grow to be regarded in such a community
+as the moral maximum; while it is even possible that improved
+sanitation, by diminishing infant mortality and adult ineffectiveness,
+might make a maximum of three sufficient to keep up the normal strength
+of the population.
+
+In an ideal community, again, the woman who looked forward to this great
+task on behalf of the race would strenuously prepare herself for it
+beforehand from childhood upward. She would not be ashamed of such
+preparation; on the contrary, she would be proud of it. Her duty would
+be no longer "to suckle fools and chronicle small beer," but to produce
+and bring up strong, vigorous, free, able, and intelligent citizens.
+Therefore, she must be nobly educated for her great and important
+function--educated physically, intellectually, morally. Let us forecast
+her future. She will be well clad in clothes that allow of lithe and
+even development of the body; she will be taught to run, to play games,
+to dance, to swim; she will be supple and healthy, finely moulded and
+knit in limb and organ, beautiful in face and features, splendid and
+graceful in the native curves of her lissom figure. No cramping
+conventions will be allowed to cage her; no worn-out moralities will be
+tied round her neck like a mill-stone to hamper her. Intellectually she
+will be developed to the highest pitch of which in each individual case
+she proves herself capable--educated, not in the futile linguistic
+studies which have already been tried and found wanting for men, but in
+realities and existences, in the truths of life, in recognition of her
+own and our place among immensities. She will know something worth
+knowing of the world she lives in, its past and its present, the
+material of which it is made, the forces that inform it, the energies
+that thrill through it. Something, too, of the orbs that surround it, of
+the sun that lights it, of the stars that gleam upon it, of the seasons
+that govern it. Something of the plants and herbs that clothe it, of the
+infinite tribes of beast and bird that dwell upon it. Something of the
+human body, its structure and functions, the human soul, its origin and
+meaning. Something of human societies in the past, of institutions and
+laws, of creeds and ideas, of the birth of civilisation, of progress and
+evolution. Something, too, of the triumphs of art, of sculpture and
+painting, of the literature and the poetry of all races and ages. Her
+mind will be stored with the best thoughts of the thinkers. Morally, she
+will be free; her emotional development, instead of being narrowly
+checked and curbed, will have been fostered and directed. She will have
+a heart to love, and be neither ashamed nor afraid of it. Thus nurtured
+and trained, she will be a fit mate for a free man, a fit mother for
+free children, a fit citizen for a free and equal community.
+
+Her life, too, will be her own. She will know no law but her higher
+instincts. No man will be able to buy or to cajole her. And in order
+that she may possess this freedom to perfection, that she may be no
+husband's slave, no father's obedient and trembling daughter, I can see
+but one way: the whole body of men in common must support in perfect
+liberty the whole body of women. The collective guarantee must protect
+them against individual tyranny. Thus only can women be safe from the
+bribery of the rich husband, from the dictation of the father from whom
+there are "expectations." In the ideal State, I take it, every woman
+will be absolutely at liberty to dispose of herself as she will, and no
+man will be able to command or to purchase her, to influence her in any
+way, save by pure inclination.
+
+In such a State, most women would naturally desire to be mothers. Being
+healthy, strong, and free, they would wish to realise the utmost
+potentialities of their own organisms. And when they had done their duty
+as mothers, they would not care much, I imagine, for any further outlets
+for their superfluous energy. I don't doubt they would gratify to the
+full their artistic sensibilities and their thirst for knowledge. They
+would also perform their duties to the State as citizens, no less than
+the men. But having done these things I fancy they would have done
+enough; the margin of their life would be devoted to dignified and
+cultivated leisure. They would leave to men the tilling of the soil, the
+building and navigation of marine or aerial ships, the working of mines
+and metals, the erection of houses, the construction of roads, railways,
+and communications, perhaps even the entire manufacturing work of the
+community. Medicine and the care of the sick might still be a charge to
+some; education to most; art, in one form or another, to almost all. But
+the hard work of the world might well be left to men, upon whom it more
+naturally and fitly devolves. No hateful drudgery of "earning a
+livelihood." Women might rest content with being free and beautiful,
+cultivated and artistic, good citizens to the State, the mothers and
+guardians of the coming generations. If any woman asks more than this,
+she is really asking less--for she is asking that a heavier burden
+should be cast on some or most of her sex, in order to relieve the
+minority of a duty which to well-organised women ought to be a
+privilege.
+
+"But all this has no practical bearing!" I beg your pardon. An ideal has
+often two practical uses. In the first place, it gives us a pattern
+towards which we may approximate. In the second place, it gives us a
+standard by which we may judge whether any step we propose to take is a
+step forward or a step backward.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+_OF SECOND CHAMBERS._
+
+
+A Second Chamber acts as a drag. Progress is always uphill work. So we
+are at pains to provide a drag beforehand--for an uphill journey.
+
+There, in one word, you have the whole philosophy of Second Chambers.
+
+How, then, did the nations of Europe come to hamper their legislative
+systems with such a useless, such an illogical adjunct? In sackcloth and
+ashes, let us confess the truth--we English led them astray: on us the
+shame; to us the dishonour. Theorists, indeed (wise after the fact, as
+is the wont of theorists), have discovered or invented an imaginary
+function for Second Chambers. They are to preserve the people, it seems,
+from the fatal consequences of their own precipitancy. As though the
+people--you and I--the vast body of citizens, were a sort of foolish
+children, to be classed with infants, women, criminals, and imbeciles (I
+adopt the chivalrous phraseology of an Act of Parliament), incapable of
+knowing their own minds for two minutes together, and requiring to be
+kept straight by the fatherly intervention of Dukes of Marlborough or
+Marquises of Ailesbury. The ideal picture of the level-headed peers
+restraining the youthful impetuosity of the representatives of the
+people from committing to-day some rash act which they would gladly
+repent and repeal to-morrow, is both touching and edifying. But it
+exists only in the minds of the philosophers, who find a reason for
+everything just because it is there. Members of Parliament, I have
+observed, seem to know their own minds every inch as well as earls--nay,
+even as marquises.
+
+The plain fact of the matter is, all the Second Chambers in the world
+are directly modelled upon the House of Lords, that Old Man of the Sea
+whom England, the weary Titan, is now striving so hard to shake off her
+shoulders. The mother of Parliaments is responsible for every one of
+them. Senates and Upper Houses are just the result of irrational
+Anglomania. When constitutional government began to exist, men turned
+unanimously to the English Constitution as their model and pattern. That
+was perfectly natural. Evolutionists know that evolution never proceeds
+on any other plan than by reproduction, with modification, of existing
+structures. America led the way. She said, "England has a House of
+Commons; therefore we must have a House of Representatives. England has
+also a House of Lords; nature has not dowered us with those exalted
+products, but we will do what we can; we will imitate it by a Senate."
+Monarchical France followed her lead; so did Belgium, Italy,
+civilisation in general. I believe even Japan rejoices to-day in the
+august dignity of a Second Chamber. But mark now the irony of it. They
+all of them did this thing to be entirely English. And just about the
+time when they had completed the installation of their peers or their
+senators, England, who set the fashion, began to discover in turn she
+could manage a great deal better herself without them.
+
+And then what do the philosophers do? Why, they prove to you the
+necessity of a Second Chamber by pointing to the fact that all civilised
+nations have got one--in imitation of England. Furthermore, it being
+their way to hunt up abstruse and recondite reasons for what is on the
+face of it ridiculous, they argue that a Second Chamber is a necessary
+wheel in the mechanism of popular representative government. A foolish
+phrase, which has come down to us from antiquity, represents the
+populace as inevitably "fickle," a changeable mob, to be restrained by
+the wisdom of the seniors and optimates. As a matter of fact, the
+populace is never anything of the sort. It is dogged, slow,
+conservative, hard to move; it advances step by step, a patient,
+sure-footed beast of burden; and when once it has done a thing, it never
+goes back upon it. I believe this silly fiction of the "fickleness" of
+the mob is mainly due to the equally silly fictions of prejudiced Greek
+oligarchs about the Athenian assembly--which was an assembly of
+well-to-do and cultivated slave-owners. I do not swallow all that
+Thucydides chooses to tell us in his one-sided caricature about Cleon's
+appointment to the command at Sphacteria, or about the affair of
+Mitylene; and even if I did, I think it has nothing to do with the
+question. But on such utterly exploded old-world ideas is the whole
+modern argument of the Second Chamber founded.
+
+Does anybody really believe great nations are so incapable of managing
+their own affairs for themselves through their duly-elected
+representatives that they are compelled to check their own boyish ardour
+by means of the acts of an irresponsible and non-elective body? Does
+anybody believe that the House of Commons works too fast, and gets
+through its public business too hurriedly? Does anybody believe we
+improve things in England at such a break-neck pace that we require the
+assistance of Lord Salisbury and Lord St. Leonards to prevent us from
+rushing straight down a steep place into the sea, like the swine of
+Gadara? If they do, I congratulate them on their psychological acumen
+and their political wisdom.
+
+What the Commons want is not a drag, but a goad--nay, rather, a
+snow-plough.
+
+No; the plain truth of the matter is this: all the Second Chambers in
+the world owe their existence, not to any deliberate plan or reason, but
+to the mere accident that the British nobles, not having a room big
+enough to sit in with the Commons, took to sitting separately, and
+transacted their own business as a distinct assembly. With so much
+wisdom are the kingdoms of the earth governed! How else could any one in
+his senses have devised the idea of creating one deliberative body on
+purpose to mutilate or destroy the work of another? to produce from time
+to time a periodical crisis or a periodical deadlock? There is not a
+country in the world with a Second Chamber that doesn't twice a year
+kick and plunge to get rid of it.
+
+The House of Lords was once a reality. It consisted of the
+ecclesiastical hierarchy--the bishops and mitred abbots; with the
+official hierarchy--the great nobles, who were also great satraps of
+provinces, and great military commanders. It was thus mainly made up of
+practical life-members, appointed by merit. The peers, lay and
+spiritual, were the men who commended themselves to the sovereign as
+able administrators. Gradually, with prolonged peace, the hereditary
+element choked and swamped the nominated element. The abbots
+disappeared, the lords multiplied. The peer ceased to be the leader of a
+shire, and sank into a mere idle landowner. Wealth alone grew at last to
+be a title to the peerage. The House of Lords became a House of
+Landlords. And the English people submitted to the claim of
+irresponsible wealth or irresponsible acres to exercise a veto upon
+national legislation. The anomaly, utterly indefensible in itself, had
+grown up so slowly that the public accepted it--nay, even defended it.
+And other countries, accustomed to regard England--the Pecksniff among
+nations--as a perfect model of political wisdom, swallowed half the
+anomaly, and all the casuistical reasoning that was supposed to justify
+it, without a murmur. But if we strip the facts bare from the glamour
+that surrounds them, the plain truth is this--England allows an assembly
+of hereditary nobodies to retard or veto its legislation nowadays,
+simply because it never noticed the moment when a practical House of
+administrative officers lapsed into a nest of plutocrats.
+
+Mend or end? As it stands, the thing is a not-even-picturesque mediaeval
+relic. If we English were logical, we would arrange that any man who
+owned so many thousand acres of land, or brewed so many million bottles
+of beer per annum, should _ipso facto_ be elevated to the peerage. Why
+should not gallons of gin confer an earldom direct, and Brighton A's be
+equivalent to a marquisate? Why not allow the equal claim of screws and
+pills with coal and iron? Why disregard the native worth of annatto and
+nitrates? Baron Beecham or Lord Sunlight is a first-rate name. As it is,
+we make petty and puerile distinctions. Beer is in, but whiskey is out;
+and even in beer itself, if I recollect aright, Dublin stout wore a
+coronet for some months or years before English pale ale attained the
+dignity of a barony. No Minister has yet made chocolate a viscount. At
+present, banks and minerals go in as of right, while soap is left out in
+the cold, and even cotton languishes. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer
+put up titles to auction, while abolishing the legislative function of
+the Lords, there would be millions in it. But as we English are not
+logical, our mending would probably resolve itself into fatuous
+tinkering. We might get rid of the sons, but leave the fathers. We might
+flood the Lords with life peers, but leave the veto. Such tactics are
+too Britannic. "Stone dead hath no fellow!"
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+_A POINT OF CRITICISM._
+
+
+A few pages back, I ventured to remark that in Utopia or the Millennium
+the women of the community would probably be supported in common by the
+labour of the men, and so be secured complete independence of choice and
+action. When these essays first appeared in a daily newspaper, a Leader
+among Women wrote to me in reply, "What a paradise you open up to us!
+Alas for the reality! The question is--could women ever be really
+independent if men supplied the means of existence? They would always
+feel they had the right to control us. The difference of the position of
+a woman in marriage when she has got a little fortune of her own is
+something miraculous. Men adore money, and the possession of it inspires
+them with an involuntary respect for the happy possessor."
+
+Now I got a great many letters in answer to these Post-Prandials as they
+originally came out--some of them, strange to say, not wholly
+complimentary. As a rule, I am too busy a man to answer letters: and I
+take this opportunity of apologising to correspondents who write to tell
+me I am a knave or a fool, for not having acknowledged direct their
+courteous communications. But this friendly criticism seems to call for
+a reply, because it involves a question of principle which I have often
+noted in all discussions of Utopias and Millennia.
+
+For my generous critic seems to take it for granted that women are not
+now dependent on the labour of men for their support--that some, or even
+most of them, are in a position of freedom. The plain truth of it
+is--almost all women depend for everything upon one man, who is or may
+be an absolute despot. A very small number of women have "money of their
+own," as we quaintly phrase it--that is to say, are supported by the
+labour of many among us, either in the form of rent or in the form of
+interest on capital bequeathed to them. A woman with five thousand a
+year from Consols, for example, is in the strictest sense supported by
+the united labour of all of us--she has a first mortgage to that amount
+upon the earnings of the community. You and I are taxed to pay her. But
+is she therefore more dependent than the woman who lives upon what she
+can get out of the scanty earnings of a drunken husband? Does the
+community therefore think it has a right to control her? Not a bit of
+it. She is in point of fact the only free woman among us. My dream was
+to see all women equally free--inheritors from the community of so much
+of its earnings; holders, as it were, of sufficient world-consols to
+secure their independence.
+
+That, however, is not the main point to which I desire just now to
+direct attention. I want rather to suggest an underlying fallacy of all
+so-called individualists in dealing with schemes of so-called
+Socialism--for to me your Socialist is the true and only individualist.
+My correspondent's argument is written from the standpoint of the class
+in which women have or may have money. But most women have none; and
+schemes of reconstruction must be for the benefit of the many. So-called
+individualists seem to think that under a more organised social state
+they would not be so able to buy pictures as at present, not so free to
+run across to California or Kamschatka. I doubt their premiss, for I
+believe we should all of us be better off than we are to-day; but let
+that pass; 'tis a detail. The main thing is this: they forget that most
+of us are narrowly tied and circumscribed at present by endless
+monopolies and endless restrictions of land or capital. I should like to
+buy pictures; but I can't afford them. I long to see Japan; but I shall
+never get there. The man in the street may desire to till the ground:
+every acre is appropriated. He may wish to dig coal: Lord Masham
+prevents him. He may have a pretty taste in Venetian glass: the flints
+on the shore are private property; the furnace and the implements belong
+to a capitalist. Under the existing _regime_, the vast mass of us are
+hampered at every step in order that a few may enjoy huge monopolies.
+Most men have no land, so that one man may own a county. And they call
+this Individualism!
+
+In considering any proposed change, whether imminent or distant, in
+practice or in day-dream, it is not fair to take as your standard of
+reference the most highly-favoured individuals under existing
+conditions. Nor is it fair to take the most unfortunate only. You should
+look at the average.
+
+Now the average man, in the world as it wags, is a farm-labourer, an
+artisan, a mill-hand, a navvy. He has untrammelled freedom of contract
+to follow the plough on another man's land, or to work twelve hours a
+day in another man's factory, for that other man's benefit--provided
+always he can only induce the other man to employ him. If he can't, he
+is at perfect liberty to tramp the high road till he drops with fatigue,
+or to starve, unhindered, on the Thames Embankment. He may live where he
+likes, as far as his means permit; for example, in a convenient court
+off Seven Dials. He may make his own free bargain with grasping landlord
+or exacting sweater. He may walk over every inch of English soil, with
+the trifling exception of the millions of acres where trespassers will
+be prosecuted. Even travel is not denied him: Florence and Venice are
+out of his beat, it is true; but if he saves up his loose cash for a
+couple of months, he may revel in the Oriental luxury of a third-class
+excursion train to Brighton and back for three shillings. Such
+advantages does the _regime_ of landlord-made individualism afford to
+the average run of British citizen. If he fails in the race, he may
+retire at seventy to the ease and comfort of the Union workhouse, and be
+buried inexpensively at the cost of his parish.
+
+The average woman in turn is the wife of such a man, dependent upon him
+for what fraction of his earnings she can save from the public-house. Or
+she is a shop-girl, free to stand all day from eight in the morning till
+ten at night behind a counter, and to throw up her situation if it
+doesn't suit her. Or she is a domestic servant, enjoying the glorious
+liberty of a Sunday out every second week, and a walk with her young man
+every alternate Wednesday after eight in the evening. She has full leave
+to do her love-making in the open street, and to get as wet as she
+chooses in Regent's Park on rainy nights in November. Look the question
+in the face, and you will see for yourself that the mass of mothers in
+every community are dependent for support, not upon men in general, but
+upon a single man, their husband, against whose caprices and despotism
+they have no sort of protection. Even the few women who are, as we say,
+"independent," how are they supported, save by the labour of many men
+who work to keep them in comfort or luxury? They are landowners, let us
+put it; and then they are supported by the labour of their farmers and
+ploughmen. Or they hold North-Western shares; and then they are
+supported by the labour of colliers, and stokers, and guards, and
+engine-drivers. And so on throughout. The plain fact is, either a woman
+must earn her own livelihood by work, which, in the case of the mothers
+in a community, is bad public policy; or else she must be supported by a
+man or men, her husband, or her labourers.
+
+My day-dream was, then, to make every woman independent, in precisely
+the same sense that women of property are independent at present. Would
+it give them a consciousness of being unduly controlled if they derived
+their support from the general funds of the body politic, of which they
+would be free and equal members and voters? Well, look at similar cases
+in our own England. The Dukes of Marlborough derive a heavy pension from
+the taxes of the country; but I have never observed that any Duke of
+Marlborough of my time felt himself a slave to the imperious taxpayer.
+Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace is justly the recipient of a Civil List
+annuity; but that hasn't prevented his active and essentially
+individualist brain from inventing Land Nationalisation. Mr. Robert
+Buchanan very rightly draws another such annuity for good work done; but
+Mr. Buchanan's name is not quite the first that rises naturally to my
+lips as an example of cowed and cringing sycophancy to the ideas and
+ideals of his fellow-citizens. No, no; be sure of it, this terror is a
+phantom. One master is real, realisable, instant; but to be dependent
+upon ten million is just what we always describe as independence.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+  PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO.
+  EDINBURGH AND LONDON.
+
+
+
+
+
+
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