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H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
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Title: The Salvaging Of Civilisation
Author: H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
Release Date: October 29, 2010 [EBook #33889]
Language: English
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THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION
THE SALVAGING
OF CIVILIZATION
BY
H. G. WELLS
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1921
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND 1
II. THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE 42
III. THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM TO A WORLD STATE 68
IV. THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION; PART ONE 95
V. THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION; PART TWO 118
VI. THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD 139
VII. COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK 166
VIII. THE ENVOY 193
INDEX 199
The Salvaging of Civilization
I
THE PROBABLE FUTURE OF MANKIND[A]
[A] First published in the _Review of Reviews_.
§ 1
The present outlook of human affairs is one that admits of broad
generalizations and that seems to require broad generalizations. We are
in one of those phases of experience which become cardinal in history. A
series of immense and tragic events have shattered the self-complacency
and challenged the will and intelligence of mankind. That easy general
forward movement of human affairs which for several generations had
seemed to justify the persuasion of a necessary and invincible progress,
progress towards greater powers, greater happiness, and a continual
enlargement of life, has been checked violently and perhaps arrested
altogether. The spectacular catastrophe of the Great War has revealed an
accumulation of destructive forces in our outwardly prosperous society,
of which few of us had dreamt; and it has also revealed a profound
incapacity to deal with and restrain these forces. The two years of
want, confusion, and indecision that have followed the Great War in
Europe and Asia, and the uncertainties that have disturbed life even in
the comparatively untouched American world, seem to many watchful minds
even more ominous to our social order than the war itself. What is
happening to our race? they ask. Did the prosperities and confident
hopes with which the twentieth century opened, mark nothing more than a
culmination of fortuitous good luck? Has the cycle of prosperity and
progress closed? To what will this staggering and blundering, the
hatreds and mischievous adventures of the present time, bring us? Is the
world in the opening of long centuries of confusion and disaster such as
ended the Western Roman Empire in Europe or the Han prosperity in China?
And if so, will the debacle extend to America? Or is the American (and
Pacific?) system still sufficiently removed and still sufficiently
autonomous to maintain a progressive movement of its own if the Old
World collapse?
Some sort of answer to these questions, vast and vague though they are,
we must each one of us have before we can take an intelligent interest
or cast an effective vote in foreign affairs. Even though a man
formulate no definite answer, he must still have an implicit persuasion
before he can act in these matters. If he have no clear conclusions
openly arrived at, then he must act upon subconscious conclusions
instinctively arrived at. Far better is it that he should bring them
into the open light of thought.
The suppression of war is generally regarded as central to the complex
of contemporary problems. But war is not a new thing in human
experience, and for scores of centuries mankind has managed to get along
in spite of its frequent recurrence. Most states and empires have been
intermittently at war throughout their periods of stability and
prosperity. But their warfare was not the warfare of the present time.
The thing that has brought the rush of progressive development of the
past century and a half to a sudden shock of arrest is not the old and
familiar warfare, but warfare strangely changed and exaggerated by novel
conditions. It is this change in conditions, therefore, and not war
itself, which is the reality we have to analyse in its bearing upon our
social and political ideas. In 1914 the European Great Powers resorted
to war, as they had resorted to war on many previous occasions, to
decide certain open issues. This war flamed out with an unexpected
rapidity until all the world was involved; and it developed a horror, a
monstrosity of destructiveness, and, above all, an inconclusiveness
quite unlike any preceding war. That unlikeness was the essence of the
matter. Whatever justifications could be found for its use in the past,
it became clear to many minds that under the new conditions war was no
longer a possible method of international dealing. The thing lay upon
the surface. The idea of a League of Nations sustaining a Supreme World
Court to supersede the arbitrament of war, did not so much arise at any
particular point as break out simultaneously wherever there were
intelligent men.
Now what was this change in conditions that had confronted mankind with
the perplexing necessity of abandoning war? For perplexing it certainly
is. War has been a ruling and constructive idea in all human societies
up to the present time; few will be found to deny it. Political
institutions have very largely developed in relation to the idea of war;
defence and aggression have shaped the outer form of every state in the
world, just as co-operation sustained by compulsion has shaped its inner
organization. And if abruptly man determines to give up the waging of
war, he may find that this determination involves the most extensive and
penetrating modifications of political and social conceptions that do
not at the first glance betray any direct connection with belligerent
activities at all.
It is to the general problem arising out of this consideration, that
this and the three following essays will be addressed; the question:
What else has to go if war is to go out of human life? and the problem
of what has to be done if it is to be banished and barred out for ever
from the future experiences of our race. For let us face the truth in
this matter; the abolition of war is no casting of ancient, barbaric,
and now obsolete traditions, no easy and natural progressive step; the
abolition of war, if it can be brought about, will be a reversal not
only of the general method of human life hitherto but of the general
method of nature, the method, that is, of conflict and survival. It will
be a new phase in the history of life, and not simply an incident in the
history of man. These brief essays will attempt to present something
like the true dimensions of the task before mankind if war is indeed to
be superseded, and to show that the project of abolishing war by the
occasional meeting of some Council of a League of Nations or the like,
is, in itself, about as likely to succeed as a proposal to abolish
thirst, hunger, and death by a short legislative act.
Let us first examine the change in the conditions of human life that has
altered war from a normal aspect of the conflict for existence of human
societies into a terror and a threat for the entire species. The change
is essentially a change in the amount of power available for human
purposes, and more particularly in the amount of material power that can
be controlled by one individual. Human society up to a couple of
centuries ago was essentially a man-power and horse-power system. There
was in addition a certain limited use of water power and wind power, but
that was not on a scale to affect the general truth of the proposition.
The first intimation of the great change began seven centuries ago with
the appearance of explosives. In the thirteenth century the Mongols made
a very effective military use of the Chinese discovery of gunpowder.
They conquered most of the known world, and their introduction of a
low-grade explosive in warfare rapidly destroyed the immunity of castles
and walled cities, abolished knighthood, and utterly wrecked and
devastated the irrigation system of Mesopotamia, which had been a
populous and civilized region since before the beginnings of history.
But the restricted metallurgical knowledge of the time set definite
limits to the size and range of cannon. It was only with the nineteenth
century that the large scale production of cast steel and the growth of
chemical knowledge made the military use of a variety of explosives
practicable. The systematic extension of human power began in the
eighteenth century with the utilization of steam and coal. That opened a
crescendo of invention and discovery which thrust rapidly increasing
quantities of material energy into men's hands. Even now that crescendo
may not have reached its climax.
We need not rehearse here the familiar story of the abolition of
distance that ensued; how the radiogram and the telegram have made every
event of importance a simultaneous event for the minds of everyone in
the world, how journeys which formerly took months or weeks now take
days or hours, nor how printing and paper have made possible a
universally informed community, and so forth. Nor will we describe the
effect of these things upon warfare. The point that concerns us here is
this, that before this age of discovery communities had fought and
struggled with each other much as naughty children might do in a crowded
nursery, _within the measure of their strength_. They had hurt and
impoverished each other, but they had rarely destroyed each other
completely. Their squabbles may have been distressing, but they were
tolerable. It is even possible to regard these former wars as healthy,
hardening and invigorating conflicts. But into this nursery has come
Science, and has put into the fists of these children razor blades with
poison on them, bombs of frightful explosive, corrosive fluids and the
like. The comparatively harmless conflicts of these infants are suddenly
fraught with quite terrific possibilities, and it is only a question of
sooner or later before the nursery becomes a heap of corpses or is blown
to smithereens. A real nursery invaded by a reckless person distributing
such gifts, would be promptly saved by the intervention of the nurse;
but humanity has no nurse but its own poor wisdom. And whether that poor
wisdom can rise to the pitch of effectual intervention is the most
fundamental problem in mundane affairs at the present time.
The deadly gifts continue. There was a steady increase in the
frightfulness and destructiveness of belligerence from 1914 up to the
beginning of 1918, when shortage of material and energy checked the
process; and since the armistice there has been an industrious
development of military science. The next well-organized war, we are
assured, will be far more swift and extensive in its destruction--more
particularly of the civilian population. Armies will advance no longer
along roads but extended in line, with heavy tank transport which will
plough up the entire surface of the land they traverse; aerial bombing,
with bombs each capable of destroying a small town, will be practicable
a thousand miles beyond the military front, and the seas will be swept
clear of shipping by mines and submarine activities. There will be no
distinction between combatants and non-combatants, because every
able-bodied citizen, male or female, is a potential producer of food and
munitions; and probably the safest, and certainly the best supplied
shelters in the universal cataclysm, will be the carefully buried,
sandbagged, and camouflaged general-headquarters of the contending
armies. There military gentlemen of limited outlook and high
professional training will, in comparative security, achieve destruction
beyond their understanding. The hard logic of war which gives victory
always to the most energetic and destructive combatant, will turn
warfare more and more from mere operations for loot or conquest or
predominance into operations for the conclusive destruction of the
antagonists. A relentless thrust towards strenuousness is a
characteristic of belligerent conditions. War is war, and vehemence is
in its nature. You must hit always as hard as you can. Offensive and
counter-offensive methods continue to prevail over merely defensive
ones. The victor in the next great war will be bombed from the air,
starved, and depleted almost as much as the loser. His victory will be
no easy one; it will be a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the
dead.
It has been argued that such highly organized and long prepared warfare
as the world saw in 1914-18 is not likely to recur again for a
considerable time because of the shock inflicted by it upon social
stability. There may be spasmodic wars with improvised and scanty
supplies, these superficially more hopeful critics admit, but there
remain no communities now so stable and so sure of their people as to
prepare and wage again a fully elaborated scientific war. But this view
implies no happier outlook for mankind. It amounts to this, that so long
as men remain disordered and impoverished they will not rise again to
the full height of scientific war. But manifestly this will only be for
so long as they remain disordered and impoverished. When they recover
they will recover to repeat again their former disaster with whatever
modern improvements and intensifications the ingenuity of the
intervening time may have devised. This new phase of disorder,
conflict, and social unravelling upon which we have entered, this phase
of decline due to the enhanced and increasing powers for waste and
destruction in mankind, is bound, therefore, to continue so long as the
divisions based upon ancient ideas of conflict remain; and if for a time
the decadence seems to be arrested, it will only be to accumulate under
the influence of those ideas a fresh war-storm sufficiently destructive
and disorganizing to restore the decadent process.
Unless mankind can readjust its political and social ideas to this
essential new fact of its enormously enlarged powers, unless it can
eliminate or control its pugnacity, no other prospect seems open to us
but decadence, at least to such a level of barbarism as to lose and
forget again all the scientific and industrial achievements of our
present age. Then, with its powers shrunken to their former puny scale,
our race may recover some sort of balance between the injuries and
advantages of conflict. Or, since our decadent species may have less
vitality and vigour than it had in its primitive phases, it may dwindle
and fade out altogether before some emboldened animal antagonist, or
through some world-wide disease brought to it perhaps by rats and dogs
and insects and what not, who may be destined to be heirs to the rusting
and mouldering ruins of the cities and ports and ways and bridges of
to-day.
Only one alternative to some such retrogression seems possible, and that
is the conscious, systematic reconstruction of human society to avert
it. The world has been brought into one community, and the human mind
and will may be able to recognize and adapt itself to this fact--in
time. Men, as a race, may succeed in turning their backs upon the method
of warfare and the methods of conflict and in embarking upon an immense
world-wide effort of co-operation and mutual toleration and salvage.
They may have the vigour to abandon their age-long attempt to live in
separate sovereign states, and to grapple with and master the now quite
destructive force that traditional hostility has become, and bring their
affairs together under one law and one peace. These new vast powers over
nature which have been given to them, and which will certainly be their
destruction if their purposes remain divergent and conflicting, will
then be the means by which they may set up a new order of as yet
scarcely imaginable interest and happiness and achievement. But is our
race capable of such an effort, such a complete reversal of its
instinctive and traditional impulses? Can we find premonitions of any
such bold and revolutionary adaptations as these, in the mental and
political life of to-day? How far are we, reader and writer, for
example, working for these large new securities? Do we even keep them
steadfastly in our minds? How is it with the people around us? Are not
we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current
of circumstances as we were before 1914? Without a great effort on our
part (or on someone's part) that current which swirled our kind into a
sunshine of hope and opportunity for a while will carry our race on
surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries, and
social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a
degradation beyond our present understanding.
§2
The urgent need for a great creative effort has become apparent in the
affairs of mankind. It is manifest that unless some unity of purpose can
be achieved in the world, unless the ever more violent and disastrous
incidence of war can be averted, unless some common control can be
imposed on the headlong waste of man's limited inheritance of coal, oil,
and moral energy that is now going on, the history of humanity must
presently culminate in some sort of disaster, repeating and exaggerating
the disaster of the great war, producing chaotic social conditions, and
going on thereafter in a degenerative process towards extinction. So
much all reasonable men seem now prepared to admit. But upon the
question of how and in what form a unity of purpose and a common control
of human affairs is to be established, there is still a great and
lamentable diversity of opinion and, as a consequence, an enfeeblement
and wasteful dispersal of will. At present nothing has been produced but
the manifestly quite inadequate League of Nations at Geneva, and a
number of generally very vague movements for a world law, world
disarmament, and the like, among the intellectuals of the various
civilized countries of the world.
The common failings of all these initiatives are a sort of genteel
timidity and a defective sense of the scale of the enterprise before us.
A neglect of the importance of scale is one of the gravest faults of
contemporary education. Because a world-wide political organ is needed,
it does not follow that a so-called League of Nations without
representative sanctions, military forces, or authority of any kind, a
League from which large sections of the world are excluded altogether,
is any contribution to that need. People have a way of saying it is
better than nothing. But it may be worse than nothing. It may create a
feeling of disillusionment about world-unifying efforts. If a mad
elephant were loose in one's garden, it would be an excellent thing to
give one's gardener a gun. But it would have to be an adequate gun, an
elephant gun. To give him a small rook-rifle and tell him it was better
than nothing, and encourage him to face the elephant with that in his
hand, would be the directest way of getting rid not of the elephant but
of the gardener.
It is, if people will but think steadfastly, inconceivable that there
should be any world control without a merger of sovereignty, but the
framers of these early tentatives towards world unity have lacked the
courage of frankness in this respect. They have been afraid of outbreaks
of bawling patriotism, and they have tried to believe, and to make
others believe, that they contemplate nothing more than a league of
nations, when in reality they contemplate a subordination of nations and
administrations to one common law and rule. The elementary necessity of
giving the council of any world-peace organization which is to be more
than a sentimental international gesture, not only a complete knowledge
but an effective control of all the military resources and organizations
in the world, appalled them. They did not even ask for such a control.
The frowning solidity of existing things was too much for them. They
wanted to change them, but when it came to laying hands on them--No!
They decided to leave them alone. They wanted a new world--and it is to
contain just the same things as the old.
But are these intellectuals right in their estimate of the common man?
Is he such a shallow and vehement fool as they seem to believe? Is he so
patriotic as they make out? If mankind is to be saved from destruction
there must be a world control; a world control means a world government,
it is only another name for it, and manifestly that government must have
a navy that will supersede the British navy, artillery that will
supersede the French artillery, air forces superseding all existing air
forces, and so forth. For many flags there must be one sovereign flag;
_orbis terrarum_. Unless a world control amounts to that it will be
ridiculous, just as a judge supported by two or three unarmed policemen,
a newspaper reporter and the court chaplain, proposing to enforce his
decisions in a court packed with the heavily armed friends of the
plaintiff and defendant would be ridiculous. But the common man is
supposed to be so blindly and incurably set upon his British navy or his
French army, or whatever his pet national instrument of violence may be,
that it is held to be impossible to supersede these beloved and adored
forces. If that is so, then a world law is impossible, and the wisest
course before us is to snatch such small happiness as we may hope to do
and leave the mad elephant to work its will in the garden.
But is it so? If the mass of common men are incurably patriotic and
belligerent why is there a note of querulous exhortation in nearly all
patriotic literature? Why, for instance, is Mr. Rudyard Kipling's
"History of England" so full of goading and scolding? And very
significant indeed to any student of the human outlook was the
world-response to President Wilson's advocacy of the League of Nations
idea, in its first phase in 1918, before the weakening off and
disillusionment of the Versailles Conference. Just for a little while it
seemed that President Wilson stood for a new order of things in the
world, that he had the wisdom and will and power to break the net of
hatreds and nationalisms and diplomacies in which the Old World was
entangled. And while he seemed to be capable of that, while he promised
most in the way of change and national control, then it was that he
found his utmost support in every country in the world. In the latter
half of 1918 there was scarcely a country anywhere in which one could
not have found men ready to die for President Wilson. A great
hopefulness was manifest in the world. It faded, it faded very rapidly
again. But that brief wave of enthusiasm, which set minds astir with the
same great idea of one peace of justice throughout the earth in China
and Bokhara and the Indian bazaars, in Iceland and Basutoland and
Ireland and Morocco, was indeed a fact perhaps more memorable in history
even than the great war itself. It displayed a possibility of the
simultaneous operation of the same general ideas throughout the world
quite beyond any previous experience. It demonstrated that the
generality of men are as capable of being cosmopolitan and pacifist as
they are of being patriotic and belligerent. Both moods are extensions
and exaltations beyond the everyday life, which itself is neither one
thing nor the other. And both are transitory moods, responses to
external suggestion.
It is to that first wave of popular feeling for a world law transcending
and moving counter to all contemporary diplomacies, and not to the timid
legalism of the framers of the first schemes for a League of Nations
that we must look, if we are to hope at all for the establishment of a
new order in human affairs. It is upon the spirit of that transitory
response to the transitory greatness of President Wilson that we have to
seize; we have to lay hold of that, to recall it and confirm it and
enlarge and strengthen it, to make it a flux of patriotisms and a
creator of new loyalties and devotions, and out of the dead dust of our
present institutions to build up for it and animate with it the body of
a true world state.
We have already stated the clear necessity, if mankind is not to perish
by the hypertrophy of warfare, for the establishment of an armed and
strong world law. Here in this spirit that has already gleamed upon the
world is the possible force to create and sustain such a world law. What
is it that intervenes between the universal human need and its
satisfaction? Why, since there are overwhelming reasons for it and a
widespread disposition for it, is there no world-wide creative effort
afoot now in which men and women by the million are participating--and
participating with all their hearts? Why is it that, except for the weak
gestures of the Geneva League of Nations and a little writing of books
and articles, a little pamphleteering, some scattered committee
activities on the part of people chiefly of the busybody class, an
occasional speech and a diminishing volume of talk and allusion, no
attempts are apparent to stay the plain drift of human society towards
new conflicts and the sluices of final disaster?
The answer to that Why, probes deep into the question of human motives.
It must be because we are all creatures of our immediate surroundings,
because our minds and energies are chiefly occupied by the affairs of
every day, because we are all chiefly living our own lives, and very few
of us, except by a kind of unconscious contribution, the life of
mankind. In moments of mental activity, in the study or in
contemplation, we may rise to a sense of the dangers and needs of human
destiny, but it is only a few minds and characters of prophetic quality
that, without elaborate artificial assistance, seem able to keep hold
upon and guide their lives by such relatively gigantic considerations.
The generality of men and women, so far as their natural disposition
goes, are scarcely more capable of apprehending and consciously serving
the human future than a van full of well-fed rabbits would be of
grasping the fact that their van was running smoothly and steadily down
an inclined plane into the sea. It is only as the result of considerable
educational effort and against considerable resistance that our minds
are brought to a broader view. In every age for many thousands of years
men of exceptional vision have spent their lives in passionate efforts
to bring us ordinary men into some relation of response and service to
the greater issues of life. It is these pioneers of vision who have
given the world its religions and its philosophical cults, its loyalties
and observances; and who have imposed ideas of greatness and duty on
their fellows. In every age the ordinary man has submitted reluctantly
to such teachings, has made his peculiar compromises with them, has
reduced them as far as possible to formula and formality, and got back
as rapidly as possible to the eating and drinking and desire, the
personal spites and rivalries and glories which constitute his reality.
The mass of men to-day do not seem to care, nor want to care, whither
the political and social institutions to which they are accustomed are
taking them. Such considerations overstrain us. And it is only by the
extremest effort of those who are capable of a sense of racial danger
and duty that the collective energies of men can ever be gathered
together and organized and orientated towards the common good. To nearly
all men and women, unless they are in the vein for it, such discussion
as this in these essays does not appeal as being right or wrong; it does
not really interest them, rather it worries them; and for the most part
they would be glad to disregard it as completely as a lecture on wheels
and gravitation and the physiological consequences of prolonged
submergence would be disregarded by those rabbits in the van.
But man is a creature very different in his nature from a rabbit, and if
he is less instinctively social, he is much more consciously social.
Chief among his differences must be the presence of those tendencies
which we call conscience, that haunting craving to be really right and
to do the really right thing which is the basis of the moral and perhaps
also of most of the religious life. In this lies our hope for mankind.
Man hates to be put right, and yet also he wants to be right. He is a
creature divided against himself, seeking both to preserve and to
overcome his egotism. It is upon the presence of the latter strand in
man's complex make-up that we must rest our hopes of a developing will
for the world state which will gradually gather together and direct into
a massive constructive effort the now quite dispersed chaotic and
traditional activities of men.
As we have examined this problem it has become clear that the task of
bringing about that consolidated world state which is necessary to
prevent the decline and decay of mankind is not primarily one for the
diplomatists and lawyers and politicians at all. It is an educational
one. It is a moral based on an intellectual reconstruction. The task
immediately before mankind is to find release from the contentious
loyalties and hostilities of the past which make collective world-wide
action impossible at the present time, in a world-wide common vision of
the history and destinies of the race. On that as a basis, and on that
alone, can a world control be organized and maintained. The effort
demanded from mankind, therefore, is primarily and essentially a bold
reconstruction of the outlook upon life of hundreds of millions of
minds. The idea of a world commonweal has to be established as the
criterion of political institutions, and also as the criterion of
general conduct in hundreds of millions of brains. It has to dominate
education everywhere in the world. When that end is achieved, then the
world state will be achieved, and it can be achieved in no other way.
And unless that world state can be achieved, it would seem that the
outlook before mankind is a continuance of disorder and of more and more
destructive and wasteful conflicts, a steady process of violence,
decadence, and misery towards extinction, or towards modifications of
our type altogether beyond our present understanding and sympathy.
§ 3
In framing an estimate of the human future two leading facts are
dominant. The first is the plain necessity for a political
reorganization of the world as a unity, to save our race from the social
disintegration and complete physical destruction which war, under modern
conditions, must ultimately entail, and the second is the manifest
absence of any sufficient will in the general mass of mankind at the
present time to make such a reorganization possible. There appear to be
the factors of such a will in men, but they are for the most part
unawakened, or they are unorganized and ineffective. And there is a
very curious incapacity to grasp the reality of the human situation, a
real resistance to seeing things as they are--for man is an
effort-shirking animal--which greatly impedes the development of such a
will. Failing the operation of such a sufficient will, human affairs are
being directed by use and wont, by tradition and accidental deflections.
Mankind, after the tragic concussion of the great war, seems now to be
drifting again towards new and probably more disastrous concussions.
The catastrophe of the Great War did more or less completely awaken a
certain limited number of intelligent people to the need of some general
control replacing this ancient traditional driftage of events. But they
shrank from the great implications of such a world control. The only
practicable way to achieve a general control in the face of existing
governments, institutions and prejudices, interested obstruction and the
common disregard, is by extending this awakening to great masses of
people. This means an unprecedented educational effort, an appeal to
men's intelligence and men's imagination such as the world has never
seen before. Is it possible to rationalize the at present chaotic will
of mankind? That possibility, if it is a possibility, is the most
important thing in contemporary human affairs.
We are asking here for an immense thing, for a change of ideas, a vast
enlargement of ideas, and for something very like a change of heart in
hundreds of millions of human beings. But then we are dealing with the
fate of the entire species. We are discussing the prevention of wars,
disorders, shortages, famines and miseries for centuries ahead. The
initial capital we have to go upon is as yet no more than the aroused
understanding and conscience of a few thousands, at most of a few score
thousands of people. Can so little a leaven leaven so great a lump? Is a
response to this appeal latent in the masses of mankind? Is there
anything in history to justify hope for so gigantic a mental turnover in
our race?
A consideration of the spread of Christianity in the first four
centuries A.D. or of the spread of Islam in the seventh century will, we
believe, support a reasonable hope that such a change in the minds of
men, whatever else it may be, is a practicable change, that it can be
done and that it may even probably be done. Consider our two instances.
The propagandas of those two great religions changed and changed for
ever the political and social outlook over vast areas of the world's
surface. Yet while the stir for world unity begins now simultaneously in
many countries and many groups of people, those two propagandas each
radiated from a single centre and were in the first instance the
teachings of single individuals; and while to-day we can deal with great
reading populations and can reach them by press and printed matter, by a
universal distribution of books, by great lecturing organizations and
the like, those earlier great changes in human thought were achieved
mainly by word of mouth and by crabbed manuscripts, painfully copied and
passed slowly from hand to hand. So far it is only the trader who has
made any effectual use of the vast facilities the modern world has
produced for conveying a statement simultaneously to great numbers of
people at a distance. The world of thought still hesitates to use the
means of power that now exist for it. History and political philosophy
in the modern world are like bashful dons at a dinner party; they
crumble their bread and talk in undertones and clever allusions to their
nearest neighbour, abashed at the thought of addressing the whole table.
But in a world where Mars can reach out in a single night and smite a
city a thousand miles away, we cannot suffer wisdom to hesitate in an
inaudible gentility. The knowledge and vision that is good enough for
the best of us is good enough for all. This gospel of human brotherhood
and a common law and rule for all mankind, the attempt to meet this
urgent necessity of a common control of human affairs, which indeed is
no new religion but only an attempt to realize practically the common
teaching of all the established religions of the world, has to speak
with dominating voice everywhere between the poles and round about the
world.
And it must become part of the universal education. It must speak
through the school and university. It is too often forgotten, in
America, perhaps, even more than in Europe, that education exists for
the community, and for the individual only so far as it makes him a
sufficient member of the community. The chief end of education is to
subjugate and sublimate for the collective purposes of our kind the
savage egotism we inherit. Every school, every college, teaches directly
and still more by implication, relationship to a community and devotion
to a community. In too many cases that community we let our schools and
colleges teach to our children is an extremely narrow one; it is the
community of a sect, of a class, or of an intolerant, greedy and
unrighteous nationalism. Schools have increased greatly in numbers
throughout the world during the last century, but there has been little
or no growth in the conception of education in schools. Education has
been extended, but it has not been developed. If man is to be saved from
self-destruction by the organization of a world community, there must be
a broadening of the reference of the teaching in the schools of all the
world to that community of the world. World-wide educational development
and reform are the necessary preparations for and the necessary
accompaniments of a political reconstruction of the world. The two are
the right and left hands of the same thing. Neither can effect much
without the other.
Now it is manifest that this reorganization of the world's affairs and
of the world's education which we hold to be imperatively dictated by
the change in warfare, communications and other conditions of human
life brought about by scientific discovery during the last hundred
years, carries with it a practical repudiation of the claims of every
existing sovereign government in the world to be final and sovereign, to
be anything more than provisional and replaceable. There is the
difficulty that has checked hundreds of men after their first step
towards this work for a universal peace. It involves, it cannot but
involve, a revision of their habitual allegiances. At best existing
governments are to be regarded as local trustees and caretakers for the
coming human commonweal.
If they are not that, then they are necessarily obstructive and
antagonistic. But few rulers, few governments, few officials, will have
the greatness of mind to recognize and admit this plain reality. By a
kind of necessity they force upon their subjects and publics a conflict
of loyalties. The feeble driftage of human affairs from one base or
greedy arrangement or cowardly evasion to another, since the Armistice
of 1918, is very largely due to the obstinate determination of those who
are in positions of authority and responsibility to ignore the plain
teachings of the great war and its sequelæ. They are resisting
adjustments; their minds are fighting against the sacrifices of pride
and authority that a full recognition of their subordination to the
world commonweal will involve. They are prepared, it would seem, to
fight against the work of human salvation basely and persistently,
whenever their accustomed importance is threatened.
Even in the schools and in the world of thought the established thing
will make its unrighteous fight for life. The dull and the dishonest in
high places will suppress these greater ideas when they can, and ignore
when they dare not suppress. It seems too much to hope for that there
should be any willingness on the part of any established authority to
admit its obsolescence and prepare the way for its merger in a world
authority. It is not creative minds that produce revolutions, but the
obstinate conservatism of established authority. It is the blank refusal
to accept the idea of an orderly evolution towards new things that gives
a revolutionary quality to every constructive proposal. The huge task of
political and educational reconstruction which is needed to arrest the
present drift of human affairs towards catastrophe, must be achieved, if
it is to be achieved at all, mainly by voluntary and unofficial effort;
and for the most part in the teeth of official opposition.
There are one or two existing states to which men have looked for some
open recognition of their duty to mankind as a whole, and of the
necessarily provisional nature of their contemporary constitutions. The
United States of America constitute a political system, profoundly
different in its origin and in its spirit, from any old-world state; it
was felt that here at least might be an evolutionary state; and in the
palmy days of President Wilson it did seem for a brief interval as if
the New World was indeed coming to the rescue of the old, as if America
was to play the rôle of a propagandist continent, bringing its ideas of
equality and freedom, and extending the spirit of its union to all the
nations of the earth. From that expectation, the world opinion is now in
a state of excessive and unreasonable recoil. President Wilson fell away
from his first intimations of that world-wide federal embrace; his mind
and will were submerged by the clamour of contending patriotisms and the
subtle expedients of old-world diplomacy in Paris; but American
accessibility to the idea of a federalized world neither began with him
nor will it end with his failure. America is still a hopeful laboratory
of world-unifying thought. A long string of arbitration treaties stands
to the credit of America, and a series of developing Pan-American
projects, pointing clearly to at least a continental synthesis within a
measurable time. There has been, and there still is, a better
understanding of, and a greater receptivity to, ideas of international
synthesis in America than in any European state.
And the British Empire, which according to many of its liberal
apologists is already a league of nations linked together in a mutually
advantageous peace, to that too men have looked for some movement of
adaptation to this greater synthesis which is the world's pre-eminent
need. But so far the British Empire has failed to respond to such
expectations. The war has left it strained and bruised and with its
affairs very much in the grip of the military class, the most illiterate
and dangerous class in the community. They have done, perhaps,
irreparable mischief to the peace of the empire in Ireland, India and
Egypt, and they have made the claim of the British system to be an
exemplary unification of dissimilar peoples seem now to many people
incurably absurd. It is a great misfortune for mankind that the British
Empire, which played so sturdy and central a part in the great war,
could at its close achieve no splendid and helpful gesture towards a
generous reconstruction.
Since the armistice there has been an extraordinary opportunity for the
British monarchy to have displayed a sense of the new occasions before
the world, and to have led the way towards the efforts and renunciations
of an international renascence. It could have taken up a lead that the
President of the United States had initiated and relinquished; it could
have used its peculiar position to make an unexampled appeal to the
whole world. It could have created a new epoch in history. The Prince of
Wales has been touring the world-wide dominions of which, some day, he
is to be the crowned head. He has received addresses, visited sights,
been entertained, shaken hands with scores of thousands of people and
submitted himself to the eager, yet unpenetrating gaze of vast
multitudes. His smallest acts have been observed with premeditated
admiration, his lightest words recorded. He is not now a boy; he saw
something of the great war, even if his exalted position denied him any
large share of its severer hardships and dangers; he cannot be blind to
the general posture of the world's affairs. Here, surely, was a chance
of saying something that would be heard from end to end of the earth,
something kingly and great-minded. Here was the occasion for a fine
restatement of the obligations and duties of empire. But from first to
last the prince has said nothing to quicken the imaginations of the
multitude of his future subjects to the gigantic possibilities of these
times, nothing to reassure the foreign observer that the British Empire
embodies anything more than the colossal national egotism and
impenetrable self-satisfaction of the British peoples. "Here we are,"
said the old order in those demonstrations, "and here we mean to stick.
Just as we have been, so we remain. British!--we are Bourbons." These
smiling tours of the Prince of Wales in these years of shortage, stress,
and insecurity, constitute a propaganda of inanity unparalleled in the
world's history.
* * * * *
Nor do we find in the nominal rulers and official representatives of
other countries any clear admission of the necessity for a great and
fundamental change in the scope and spirit of government. These official
and ruling people, more than any other people, are under the sway of
that life of use and wont which dominates us all. They are often
trained to their positions, or they have won their way to their
positions of authority through a career of political activities which
amounts to a training. And that training is not a training in enterprise
and change; it is a training in sticking tight and getting back to
precedent. We can expect nothing from them. We shall be lucky if the
resistance of the administrative side of existing states to the
conception of a world commonweal is merely passive. There is little or
no prospect of any existing governing system, unless it be such a
federal system as Switzerland or the United States, passing directly and
without extensive internal changes into combination with other sovereign
powers as part of a sovereign world system. At some point the
independent states will as systems resist, and unless an overwhelming
world conscience for the world state has been brought into being and
surrounds them with an understanding watchfulness, and invades the
consciences of their supporters and so weakens their resisting power,
they will resist violently and disastrously. But it will be an
incoherent resistance because the very nature of the sovereign states of
to-day is incoherence. There can be no world-wide combination of
sovereign states to resist the world state, because that would be to
create the world state in the attempt to defeat it.
§ 4
In the three preceding essays an attempt has been made to state the pass
at which mankind has arrived, the dangers and mischiefs that threaten
our race, and the need there is and the opportunities there are for a
strenuous attempt to end the age-long bickerings of nations and empires
and establish one community of law and effort throughout the whole
world. Stress has been laid chiefly upon the monstrous evils and
disasters a continuation of our present divisions, our nationalisms and
imperialisms and the like, will certainly entail. These considerations
of evil however are only the negative argument for this creative effort;
they have been thrust forward because war, disorder, insufficiency, and
the ill health, the partings, deprivations, boredom and unhappiness that
arise out of these things are well within our experience and entirely
credible; the positive argument for a world order demands at once more
faith and imagination.
Given a world law and world security, a release from the net of
bickering frontiers, world-wide freedom of movement, and world-wide
fellowship, a thousand good things that are now beyond hope or dreaming
would come into the ordinary life. The whole world would be our
habitation, and the energies of men, released from their preoccupation
with contention, would go more and more abundantly into the
accumulation and application of scientific knowledge, that is to say
into the increase of mental and bodily health, of human power, of
interest and happiness. Even to-day the most delightful possibilities
stand waiting, inaccessible to nearly all of us because of the general
insecurity, distrust and anger. Flying, in a world safely united in
peace, could take us now to the ends of the earth smoothly, securely
through the sweet upper air, in five or six days. In two or three years
there could again be abundance of food and pleasant clothing for
everyone throughout the whole world. Men could be destroying their slums
and pestilential habitations and rebuilding spacious and beautiful
cities. Given only peace and confidence and union we could double our
yearly production of all that makes life desirable and still double our
leisure for thought and growth. We could live in a universal palace and
make the whole globe our garden and playground.
But these are not considerations that sway people to effort. Fear and
hate, not hope and desire, have been hitherto the effective spurs for
men. The most popular religions are those which hold out the widest
hopes of damnation. Our lives are lives of use and wont, we distrust the
promise of delightful experience and achievements beyond our accustomed
ways; it offends our self-satisfaction even to regard them as
possibilities; we do not like the implied cheapening of familiar things.
We are all ready to sneer at "Utopias," as elderly invalids sneer at
the buoyant hopes of youth and do their best to think them sure of
frustration. The aged and disillusioned profess a keen appreciation of
the bath chair and the homely spoonful of medicine, and pity a crudity
that misses the fine quality of those ripe established things. Most
people are quite ready to dismiss the promise of a full free life for
all mankind with a sneer. That would rob the world of romance, they say,
the romance of passport offices, custom houses, shortages of food,
endless petty deprivations, slums, pestilence, under-educated stunted
children, youths dying in heaps in muddy trenches, an almost universal
lack of vitality, and all the picturesque eventfulness of contemporary
conditions. So that we have not dwelt here upon the life-giving aspect
of a possible world state, but only on its life-saving aspects. We have
not argued that our present life of use and wont could be replaced by an
infinitely better way of living. We have rather pointed out that if
things continue to drift as they are doing, the present life of use and
wont will become intolerably insecure. It is the thought of the large
bombing aeroplane and not the hope of swift travelling across the sky
that will move the generality of men, if they are to be moved at all,
towards a world peace.
But whether the lever that moves them is desire or fear the majority of
men, unless the species is to perish, must be brought within a
measurable time to an understanding of, and a will for, a single world
government. And since at first existing institutions, established
traditions, educational organizations and the like, will all be
passively if not actively resistant to the spread of this saving idea,
and much more so to any attempts to realize this saving idea, there
remains nothing for us to look to, at the present time, for the first
organization of this immense effort of mental reversal, but the zeal and
devotion and self-sacrifice of convinced individuals. The world state
must begin; it can only begin, as a propagandist cult, or as a group of
propagandist cults, to which men and women must give themselves and
their energies, regardless of the consequences to themselves. Laying the
foundations of a world state upon a site already occupied by a muddle of
buildings is an undertaking which will almost necessarily bring its
votaries into conflict with established authority and current sentiment;
they will have to face the possibility of lives of conflict,
misunderstanding, much thankless exertion; they must count on little
honour and considerable active dislike; and they will have to find what
consolation they can in the interest of the conflict itself and in the
thought of a world, made at last by such efforts as theirs, peaceful and
secure and vigorous, a world they can never hope to see. So stated it
seems a bad bargain that the worker for the world state is invited to
make, yet the world has never lacked people prepared to make such a
bargain and they will not fail it now. There are worse things than
conflict without manifest victory and effort without apparent reward.
To the finer kind of mind it is infinitely more tragic and distressing
to find that existence bears a foolish aimless face. Many people,
tormented by the discontent of conscience, and wanting, more than they
can ever want any satisfaction, some satisfying rule of life, some
criterion of conduct, will find in this cult of the world state just
that sustaining reality they need. And their number will grow. Because
it is a practical and reasonable shape for a life, arising naturally out
of a proper understanding of history and physical science, and embodying
in a unifying plan the teaching of all the great religions of the world.
It comes to us not to destroy but to fulfil.
The activities of a cult which set itself to bring about the world state
would at first be propagandist, they would be intellectual and
educational, and only as a sufficient mass of opinion and will had
accumulated would they become to a predominant extent politically
constructive. Such a cult must direct itself particularly to the
teaching of the young. So far the propaganda for a world law, the League
of Nations propaganda, since it has sought immediate political results,
has been addressed almost entirely to adults; and as a consequence it
has had to adapt itself as far as possible to their preconceptions about
the history and outlook of their own nationality, and to the general
absence as yet in the world of any vision of the welfare of mankind as
one whole. It is because of this acceptance of current adult ideas
about patriotism and nationality that the movement has adopted the
unsatisfactory phrase, a League of Nations, when what is contemplated is
much more than a league and a very considerable subordination of
national sovereignty. And a large share in the current ineffectiveness
of the League of Nations is evidently due to the fact that men interpret
the phrase and the proposition of the League of Nations differently in
accordance with the different fundamental historical ideas they possess,
ideas that propaganda has hitherto left unassailed. The worker for the
world state will look further and plough deeper. It is these fundamental
ideas which are the vitally important objective of a world-unifying
movement, and they can only be brought into that world-wide uniformity
which is essential to the enduring peace of mankind, by teaching
children throughout all the earth the common history of their kind, and
so directing their attention to the common future of their descendants.
The driving force that makes either war or peace is engendered where the
young are taught. The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster,
is the real maker of history; rulers, statesmen and soldiers do but work
out the possibilities of co-operation or conflict the teacher creates.
This is no rhetorical flourish; it is a sober fact. The politicians and
masses of our time dance on the wires of their early education.
Teaching then is the initial and decisive factor in the future of
mankind, and the first duty of everyone who has the ability and
opportunity, is to teach, or to subserve the teaching of, the true
history of mankind and of the possibilities of this vision of a single
world state that history opens out to us. Men and women can help the
spread of the saving doctrine in a thousand various ways; for it is not
only in homes and schools that minds are shaped. They can print and
publish books, endow schools and teaching, organize the distribution of
literature, insist upon the proper instruction of children in world wide
charity and fellowship, fight against every sort of suppression or
restrictive control of right education, bring pressure through political
and social channels upon every teaching organization to teach history
aright, sustain missions and a new sort of missionary, the missionaries
to all mankind of knowledge and the idea of one world civilization and
one world community; they can promote and help the progress of
historical and ethnological and political science, they can set their
faces against every campaign of hate, racial suspicion, and patriotic
falsehood, they can refuse, they are bound to refuse, obedience to any
public authority which oppresses and embitters class against class, race
against race, and people against people. A belligerent government as
such, they can refuse to obey; and they can refuse to help or suffer any
military preparations that are not directed wholly and plainly to
preserving the peace of the world. This is the plain duty of every
honest man to-day, to judge his magistrate before he obeys him, and to
render unto Cæsar nothing that he owes to God and mankind. And those who
are awakened to the full significance of the vast creative effort now
before mankind will set themselves particularly to revise the common
moral judgment upon many acts and methods of living that obstruct the
way of the world state. Blatant, aggressive patriotism and the
incitements against foreign peoples that usually go with it, are just as
criminal and far more injurious to our race than, for example, indecent
provocations and open incitements to sexual vice; they produce a much
beastlier and crueller state of mind, and they deserve at least an equal
condemnation. Yet you will find even priests and clergymen to-day
rousing the war passions of their flocks and preaching conflict from the
very steps of the altar.
So far the movement towards a world state has lacked any driving power
of passion. We have been passing through a phase of intellectual
revision. The idea of a world unity and brotherhood has come back again
into the world almost apologetically, deferentially, asking for the kind
words of successful politicians and for a gesture of patronage from
kings. Yet this demand for one world-empire of righteousness was
inherent in the teachings of Buddha, it flashed for a little while
behind the sword of Islam, it is the embodiment in earthly affairs of
the spirit of Christ. It is a call to men for service as of right, it is
not an appeal to them that they may refuse, not a voice that they may
disregard. It is too great a thing to hover for long thus deferentially
on the outskirts of the active world it has come to save. To-day the
world state says "Please listen; make way for me." To-morrow it will
say: "Make way for me, little people." The day is not remote when
disregardful "patriotic" men hectoring in the crowd will be twisted
round perforce to the light they refuse to see. First comes the idea and
then slowly the full comprehension of the idea, comes realization, and
with that realization will come a kindling anger at the vulgarity, the
meanness, the greed and baseness and utter stupidity that refuses to
attend to this clear voice, this definite demand of our racial
necessity. To-day we teach, but as understanding grows we must begin to
act. We must put ourselves and our rulers and our fellow men on trial.
We must ask: "What have you done, what are you doing to help or hinder
the peace and order of mankind?" A time will come when a politician who
has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as
sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It
is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not
stake their own. The service of the world state calls for much more than
passive resistance to belligerent authorities, for much more than
exemplary martyrdoms. It calls for the greater effort of active
interference with mischievous men. "I will believe in the League of
Nations," one man has written, "when men will fight for it." For this
League of Nations at Geneva, this little corner of Balfourian jobs and
gentility, no man would dream of fighting, but for the great state of
mankind, men will presently be very ready to fight and, as the thing may
go, either to kill or die. Things must come in their order; first the
idea, then the kindling of imaginations, then the world wide battle. We
who live in the bleak days after a great crisis, need be no more
discouraged by the apparent indifference of the present time than are
fields that are ploughed and sown by the wet days of February and the
cold indifference of the winds of early March. The ploughing has been
done, and the seed is in the ground, and the world state stirs in a
multitude of germinating minds.
II
THE PROJECT OF A WORLD STATE[B]
[B] Written originally as a lecture to be delivered in America.
In this paper, I want to tell you of the idea that now shapes and
dominates my public life--the idea of a world politically united--of a
world securely and permanently at peace. And I want to say what I have
to say, so far as regards the main argument of it, as accurately and
plainly as possible, without any eloquence or flourishes.
When I first planned this paper, I chose as the title _The Utopia of a
World State_. Well, there is something a little too flimsy and
unpracticable about that word Utopia. To most people Utopia conveys the
idea of a high-toned political and ethical dream--agreeable and
edifying, no doubt, but of no practical value whatever. What I have to
talk about this evening is not a bit dreamlike, it is about real dangers
and urgent necessities. It is a Project and not a Utopia. It may be a
vast and impossible project. It may be a hopeless project. But if it
fails our civilization fails. And so I have called this paper not the
Utopia but _The Project of a World State._ There are some things that it
is almost impossible to tell without seeming to scream and exaggerate,
and yet these things may be in reality the soberest matter of fact. I
want to say that this civilization in which we are living is tumbling
down, and I think tumbling down very fast; that I think rapid enormous
efforts will be needed to save it; and that I see no such efforts being
made at the present time. I do not know if these words convey any
concrete ideas to the reader's mind. There are statements that can open
such unfamiliar vistas as to seem devoid of any real practical meaning
at all, and this I think may be one of them.
In the past year I have been going about Europe. I have had glimpses of
a new phase of this civilization of ours--a new phase that would have
sounded like a fantastic dream if one had told about it ten years ago. I
have seen a great city that had over two million inhabitants, dying, and
dying with incredible rapidity. In 1914 I was in the city of St.
Petersburg and it seemed as safe and orderly a great city as yours. I
went thither in comfortable and punctual trains. I stayed in an hotel as
well equipped and managed as any American hotel. I went to dine with and
visit households of cultivated people. I walked along streets of
brilliantly lit and well-furnished shops. It was, in fact, much the same
sort of life that you are living here to-day--a part of our (then)
world-wide modern civilization.
I revisited these things last summer. I found such a spectacle of decay
that it seems almost impossible to describe it to those who have never
seen the like. Streets with great holes where the drains had fallen in.
Stretches of roadway from which the wood paving had been torn for
firewood. Lampposts that had been knocked over lying as they were left,
without an attempt to set them up again. Shops and markets deserted and
decayed and ruinous. Not closed shops but abandoned shops, as
abandoned-looking as an old boot or an old can by the wayside. The
railways falling out of use. A population of half a million where
formerly there had been two. A strangely homeless city, a city of
discomforts and anxieties, a city of want and ill-health and death. Such
was Petersburg in 1920.
I know there are people who have a quick and glib explanation of this
vast and awe-inspiring spectacle of a great empire in collapse. They say
it is Bolshevism has caused all this destruction. But I hope to show
here, among other more important things, that Bolshevism is merely a
part of this immense collapse--that the overthrow of a huge civilized
organization needs some more comprehensive explanation than that a
little man named Lenin was able to get from Geneva to Russia at a
particular crisis in Russian history. And particularly is it to be noted
that this immense destruction of civilized life has not been confined to
Russia or to regions under Bolshevik rule. Austria and Hungary present
spectacles hardly less desolating than Russia. There is a conspicuous
ebb in civilization in Eastern Germany. And even when you come to France
and Italy and Ireland there are cities, townships, whole wide regions,
where you can say: This has gone back since 1914 and it is still going
back in material prosperity, in health, in social order.
Even in England and Scotland, in Holland and Denmark and Sweden, it is
hard to determine whether things are stagnant or moving forward or
moving back--they are certainly not going ahead as they were before
1913-14. The feeling in England is rather like the feeling of a man who
is not quite sure whether he has caught a slight chill or whether he is
in the opening stage of a serious illness.
Now what I want to do here is to theorize about this shadow, this chill
and arrest, that seems to have come upon the flourishing and expanding
civilization in which all of us were born and reared. I want to put a
particular view of what is happening before you, and what it is that we
are up against. I want to put before you for your judgment the view that
this overstrain and breaking down and stoppage of the great uprush of
civilization that has gone on for the past three centuries is due to the
same forces and is the logical outcome of the same forces that led to
that uprush, to that tremendous expansion of human knowledge and power
and life. And that that breaking up is an inevitable thing unless we
meet it by a very great effort of a particular kind.
Now the gist of my case is this: That the civilization of the past three
centuries has produced a great store of scientific knowledge, and that
this scientific knowledge has altered the material scale of human
affairs and enormously enlarged the physical range of human activities,
but that there has been no adequate adjustment of men's political ideas
to the new conditions.
This adjustment is a subtle and a difficult task. It is also a greatly
neglected task. And upon the possibility of our making this adjustment
depends the issue whether the ebb of civilizing energy, the actual
smashing and breaking down of modern civilization, which has already
gone very far indeed in Russia and which is going on in most of Eastern
and Central Europe, extends to the whole civilized world.
Let me make a very rough and small scale analysis of what is happening
to the world to-day. And let us disregard many very important issues and
concentrate upon the chief, most typical issue, the revolution in the
facilities of locomotion and communication that has occurred to the
world and the consequences of that revolution. For the international
problem to-day is essentially dependent upon the question of transport
and communication--all others are subordinate to that. I shall
particularly call your attention to certain wide differences between the
American case and the old-world case in this matter.
It is not understood clearly enough at the present time how different
is the American international problem from the European international
problem, and how inevitable it is that America and Europe should
approach international problems from a different angle and in a
different spirit. Both lines of thought and experience do, I believe,
lead at last to the world state, but they get there by a different route
and in a different manner.
The idea that the government of the United States can take its place
side by side with the governments of the old world on terms of equality
with those governments in order to organize the peace of the world, is,
I believe, a mistaken and unworkable idea. I shall argue that the
government of the United States and the community of the United States
are things different politically and mentally from those of the states
of the old world, and that the rôle they are destined to play in the
development of a world state of mankind is essentially a distinctive
one. And I shall try to show cause for regarding the very noble and
splendid project of a world-wide League of Nations that has held the
attention of the world for the past three years, as one that is, at
once, a little too much for complete American participation, and not
sufficient for the urgent needs of Europe. It is not really so
practicable and reasonable a proposition as it seemed at first.
The idea of a world state, though it looks a far greater and more
difficult project, is, in the long run, a sounder and more hopeful
proposition.
Now let me make myself as clear as I can be about the central idea upon
which the whole of the arguments in this lecture rests. It is this:
forgive me for a repetition--that there has been a complete alteration
in the range and power of human activities in the last hundred years.
Men can react upon men with a rapidity and at a distance inconceivable a
hundred years ago. This is particularly the case with locomotion and
methods of communication generally. I will not remind you in any detail
of facts with which you are familiar; how that in the time of Napoleon
the most rapid travel possible of the great conqueror himself did not
average all over as much as four and a half miles an hour. A hundred and
seven miles a day for thirteen days--the pace of his rush from Vilna to
Paris after the Moscow disaster--was regarded as a triumph of speed. In
those days, too, it was a marvel that by means of semaphores it was
possible to transmit a short message from London to Portsmouth in the
course of an hour or so.
Since then we have seen a development of telegraphy that has at last
made news almost simultaneous about the world, and a steady increase in
the rate of travel until, as we worked it out in the Civil Air Transport
Committee in London, it is possible, if not at present practicable, to
fly from London to Australia, half way round the earth, in about eight
days. I say possible, but not practicable, because at present properly
surveyed routes, landing grounds and adequate supplies of petrol and
spare parts do not exist. Given those things, that journey could be done
now in the time I have stated. This tremendous change in the range of
human activities involves changes in the conditions of our political
life that we are only beginning to work out to their proper consequences
to-day.
It is a curious thing that America, which owes most to this acceleration
in locomotion, has felt it least. The United States have taken the
railway, the river steamboat, the telegraph and so forth as though they
were a natural part of their growth. They were not. These things
happened to come along just in time to save American unity. The United
States of to-day were made first by the river steamboat, and then by the
railway. Without these things, the present United States, this vast
continental nation, would have been altogether impossible. The westward
flow of population would have been far more sluggish. It might never
have crossed the great central plains. It took, you will remember,
nearly two hundred years for effective settlement to reach from the
coast to the Missouri, much less than half-way across the continent. The
first state established beyond the river was the steamboat state of
Missouri in 1821. But the rest of the distance to the Pacific was done
in a few decades.
If we had the resources of the cinema it would be interesting to show a
map of North America year by year from 1600 onward, with little dots to
represent hundreds of people, each dot a hundred, and stars to represent
cities of a hundred thousand people.
For two hundred years you would see that stippling creeping slowly along
the coastal districts and navigable waters, spreading still more
gradually into Indiana, Kentucky, and so forth. Then somewhere about
1810 would come a change. Things would get more lively along the river
courses. The dots would be multiplying and spreading. That would be the
steamboat. The pioneer dots would be spreading soon from a number of
jumping-off places along the great rivers over Kansas and Nebraska.
Then from about 1830 onward would come the black lines of the railways,
and after that the little black dots would not simply creep but run.
They would appear now so rapidly, it would be almost as though they were
being put on by some sort of spraying machine. And suddenly here and
then there would appear the first stars to indicate the first great
cities of a hundred thousand people. First one or two and then a
multitude of cities--each like a knot in the growing net of the
railways.
This is a familiar story. I recall it to you now to enforce this
point--that the growth of the United States is a process that has no
precedent in the world's history; it is a new kind of occurrence. Such a
community could not have come into existence before, and if it had it
would, without railways, have certainly dropped to pieces long before
now. Without railways or telegraph it would be far easier to administer
California from Pekin than from Washington. But this great population of
the United States of America has not only grown outrageously; it has
kept uniform. Nay, it has become more uniform. The man of San Francisco
is more like the man of New York to-day than the man of Virginia was
like the man of New England a century ago. And the process of
assimilation goes on unimpeded. The United States is being woven by
railway, by telegraph, more and more into one vast human unity,
speaking, thinking, and acting harmoniously with itself. Soon aviation
will be helping in the work.
Now this great community of the United States is, I repeat, an
altogether new thing in history. There have been great empires before
with populations exceeding 100 millions, but these were associations of
divergent peoples; there has never been one single people on this scale
before. We want a new term for this new thing. We call the United States
a country, just as we call France or Holland a country. But really the
two things are as different as an automobile and a one-horse shay. They
are the creations of different periods and different conditions; they
are going to work at a different pace and in an entirely different way.
If you propose--as I gather some of the League of Nations people
propose--to push the Peace of the World along on a combination of these
two sorts of vehicle, I venture to think the Peace of the World will be
subjected to some very considerable strains.
Let me now make a brief comparison between the American and the European
situation in relation to these vital matters, locomotion and the general
means of communicating. I said just now that the United States of
America owe most to the revolution in locomotion and have felt it least.
Europe on the other hand owes least to the revolution in locomotion and
has felt it most. The revolution in locomotion found the United States
of America a fringe of population on the sea margins of a great rich
virgin empty country into which it desired to expand, and into which it
was free to expand. The steamboat and railway seemed to come as a
natural part of that expansion. They came as unqualified blessings. But
into Western Europe they came as a frightful nuisance.
The States of Europe, excepting Russia, were already a settled,
established and balanced system. They were living in final and
conclusive boundaries with no further possibility of peaceful expansion.
Every extension of a European state involved a war; it was only possible
through war. And while the limits to the United States have been set by
the steamship and the railroad, the limits to the European sovereign
states were drawn at a much earlier time. They were drawn by the horse,
and particularly the coach-horse travelling along the high road. If you
will examine a series of political maps of Europe for the last two
thousand years, you will see that there has evidently been a definite
limit to the size of sovereign states through all that time, due to the
impossibility of keeping them together because of the difficulty of
intercommunication if they grew bigger. And this was in spite of the
fact that there were two great unifying ideas present in men's minds in
Europe throughout that period, namely, the unifying idea of the Roman
Empire, and the unifying idea of Christendom. Both these ideas tended to
make Europe one, but the difficulties of communication defeated that
tendency. It is quite interesting to watch the adventures of what is
called first the Roman Empire and afterwards the Holy Roman Empire, in a
series of historical maps. It keeps expanding and then dropping to
pieces again. It is like the efforts of someone who is trying to pack up
a parcel which is much too big, in wet blotting paper. The cohesion was
inadequate. And so it was that the eighteenth century found Europe still
divided up into what I may perhaps call these high-road and coach-horse
states, each with a highly developed foreign policy, each with an
intense sense of national difference and each with intense traditional
antagonisms.
Then came this revolution in the means of locomotion, which has
increased the normal range of human activity at least ten times. The
effect of that in America was opportunity; the effect of it in Europe
was congestion. It is as if some rather careless worker of miracles had
decided suddenly to make giants of a score of ordinary men, and chose
the moment for the miracle when they were all with one exception
strap-hanging in a street car. The United States was that fortunate
exception.
Now this is what modern civilization has come up against, and it is the
essential riddle of the modern sphinx which must be solved if we are to
live. All the European boundaries of to-day are impossibly small for
modern conditions. And they are sustained by an intensity of ancient
tradition and patriotic passion.... That is where we stand.
The citizens of the United States of America are not without their
experience in this matter. The crisis of the national history of the
American community, the war between Union and Secession, was essentially
a crisis between the great state of the new age and the local feeling of
an earlier period. But Union triumphed. Americans live now in a
generation that has almost forgotten that there once seemed a
possibility that the map of North America might be broken up at last
into as many communities as the map of Europe. Except by foreign travel,
the present generation of Americans can have no idea of the net of
vexations and limitations in which Europeans are living at the present
time because of their political disunion.
Let me take a small but quite significant set of differences, the
inconveniences of travel upon a journey of a little over a thousand
miles. They are in themselves petty inconveniences, but they will serve
to illustrate the net that is making free civilized life in Europe more
and more impossible.
Take first the American case. An American wants to travel from New York
to St. Louis. He looks up the next train, packs his bag, gets aboard a
sleeper and turns out at St. Louis next day ready for business.
Take now the European parallel. A European wants to travel from London
to Warsaw. Now that is a shorter distance by fifty or sixty miles than
the distance from New York to St. Louis. Will he pack his bag, get
aboard a train and go there? He will not. He will have to get a
passport, and getting a passport involves all sorts of tiresome little
errands. One has to go to a photographer, for example, to get
photographs to stick on the passport. The good European has then to take
his passport to the French representative in London for a French visa,
or, if he is going through Belgium, for a Belgian visa. After that he
must get a German visa. Then he must go round to the Czecho-Slovak
office for a Czechoslovak visa. Finally will come the Polish visa.
Each of these endorsements necessitates something vexatious, personal
attendance, photography, stamps, rubber stamps, mysterious signatures
and the like, and always the payment of fees. Also they necessitate
delays. The other day I had occasion to go to Moscow, and I learnt that
it takes three weeks to get a visa for Finland and three weeks to get a
visa for Esthonia. You see you can't travel about Europe at all without
weeks and weeks of preparation. The preparations for a little journey to
Russia the other day took three whole days out of my life, cost me
several pounds in stamps and fees, and five in bribery.
Ultimately, however, the good European is free to start. Arriving at the
French frontier in an hour or so, he will be held up for a long customs'
examination. Also he will need to change some of his money into francs.
His English money will be no good in France. The exchange in Europe is
always fluctuating, and he will be cheated on the exchange. All European
countries, including my own, cheat travellers on the exchange--that is
apparently what the exchange is for.
He will then travel for a few hours to the German frontier. There he
will be bundled out again. The French will investigate him closely to
see that he is not carrying gold or large sums of money out of France.
Then he will be handed over to the Germans. He will go through the same
business with the customs and the same business with the money. His
French money is no further use to him and he must get German. A few more
hours and he will arrive on the frontier of Bohemia. Same search for
gold. Then customs' examination and change of money again. A few hours
more and he will be in Poland. Search for gold, customs, fresh money.
As most of these countries are pursuing different railway policies, he
will probably have to change trains and rebook his luggage three or four
times. The trains may be ingeniously contrived not to connect so as to
force him to take some longer route politically favoured by one of the
intervening states. He will be lucky if he gets to Warsaw in four days.
Arrived in Warsaw, he will probably need a permit to stay there, and he
will certainly need no end of permits to leave.
Now here is a fuss over a fiddling little journey of 1,100 miles. Is it
any wonder that the bookings from London to Warsaw are infinitesimal in
comparison with the bookings from New York to St. Louis? But what I have
noted here are only the normal inconveniences of the traveller. They are
by no means the most serious inconveniences.
The same obstructions that hamper the free movement of a traveller,
hamper the movement of foodstuffs and all sorts of merchandise in a much
greater degree. Everywhere in Europe trade is being throttled by tariffs
and crippled by the St. Vitus' dance of the exchanges. Each of these
European sovereign states turns out paper money at its own sweet will.
Last summer I went to Prague and exchanged pounds for kroners. They
ought to have been 25 to the pound. On Monday they were 180 to the
pound: on Friday 169. They jump about between 220 and 150, and everybody
is inconvenienced except the bankers and money changers. And this
uncertain exchange diverts considerable amounts of money that should be
stimulating business enterprise into a barren and mischievous gambling
with the circulation.
Between each one of these compressed European countries the movement of
food or labour is still more blocked and impeded. And in addition to
these nuisances of national tariffs and independent national coinages at
every few score miles, Europe is extraordinarily crippled by its want of
any central authority to manage the most elementary collective
interests; the control of vice, for example; the handling of infectious
diseases; the suppression of international criminals.
Europe is now confronted by a new problem--the problem of air transport.
So far as I can see, air transport is going to be strangled in Europe by
international difficulties. One can fly comfortably and safely from
London to Paris in two or three hours. But the passport preliminaries
will take days beforehand.
The other day I wanted to get quickly to Reval in Esthonia from England
and back again. The distance is about the same as from Boston to
Minneapolis, and it could be done comfortably in 10 or 12 hours' flying.
I proposed to the Handley Page Company that they should arrange this for
me. They explained that they had no power to fly beyond Amsterdam in
Holland; thence it might be possible to get a German plane to Hamburg,
and thence again a Danish plane to Copenhagen--leaving about 500 miles
which were too complicated politically to fly. Each stoppage would
involve passport and other difficulties. In the end it took me five days
to get to Reval and seven days to get back. In Europe, with its present
frontiers, flying is not worth having. It can never be worth having--it
can never be worked successfully--until it is worked as at least a
pan-European affair.
All these are the normal inconveniences of the national divisions of
Europe in peace time. By themselves they are strangling all hope of
economic recovery. For Europe is _not_ getting on to its feet
economically. Only a united effort can effect that. But along each of
the ridiculously restricted frontiers into which the European countries
are packed, lies also the possibility of war. National independence
means the right to declare war. And so each of these packed and
strangulated European countries is obliged, by its blessed independence,
to maintain as big an army and as big a military equipment as its
bankrupt condition--for we are all bankrupt--permits.
Since the end of the Great War, nothing has been done of any real value
to ensure any European country against the threat of war, and nothing
will be done, and nothing can be done to lift that threat, so long as
the idea of national independence overrides all other considerations.
And again, it is a little difficult for a mind accustomed to American
conditions, to realize what modern war will mean in Europe.
Not one of these sovereign European states I have named between London
and Warsaw is any larger than the one single American state of Texas,
and not one has a capital that cannot be effectively bombed by aeroplane
raiders from its frontier within five or six hours of a declaration of
war. We can fly from London to Paris in two or three hours. And the
aerial bombs of to-day, I can assure you, will make the biggest bombs of
1918 seem like little crackers. Over all these European countries broods
this immediate threat of a warfare that will strain and torment the
nerves of every living man, woman or child in the countries affected.
Nothing of the sort can approach the American citizen except after a
long warning. The worst war that could happen to any North American
country would merely touch its coasts.
Now I have dwelt on these differences between America and Europe because
they involve an absolute difference in outlook towards world peace
projects, towards leagues of nations, world states and the like, between
the American and the European.
The American lives in a political unity on the big modern scale. He can
go on comfortably for a hundred years yet before he begins to feel tight
in his political skin, and before he begins to feel the threat of
immediate warfare close to his domestic life. He believes by experience
in peace, but he feels under no passionate urgency to organize it. So
far as he himself is concerned, he has got peace organized for a good
long time ahead. I doubt if it would make any very serious difference
for some time in the ordinary daily life of Kansas City, let us say, if
all Europe were reduced to a desert in the next five years.
But on the other hand, the intelligent European is up against the unity
of Europe problem night and day. Europe cannot go on. European
civilization cannot go on, unless that net of boundaries which strangles
her is dissolved away. The difficulties created by language differences,
by bitter national traditions, by bad political habits and the like, are
no doubt stupendous. But stupendous though they are, they have to be
faced. Unless they are overcome, and overcome in a very few years,
Europe--entangled in this net of boundaries, and under a perpetual fear
of war, will, I am convinced, follow Russia and slide down beyond any
hope of recovery into a process of social dissolution as profound and
disastrous as that which closed the career of the Western Roman Empire.
The American intelligence and the European intelligence approach this
question of a world peace, therefore, from an entirely different angle
and in an entirely different spirit. To the American in the blessed ease
of his great unbroken territory, it seems a matter simply of making his
own ample securities world-wide by treaties of arbitration and such-like
simple agreements. And my impression is that he thinks of Europeans as
living under precisely similar conditions.
Nothing of that sort will meet the problem of the Old World. The
European situation is altogether more intense and tragic than the
American. Europe needs not treaties but a profound change in its
political ideas and habits. Europe is saturated with narrow patriotism
like a body saturated by some evil inherited disease. She is haunted by
narrow ambitions and ancient animosities.
It is because of this profound difference of situation and outlook that
I am convinced of the impossibility of any common political co-operation
to organize a world peace between America and Europe at the present
time.
The American type of state and the European type of state are different
things, incapable of an effectual alliance; the steam tractor and the ox
cannot plough this furrow together. American thought, American
individuals, may no doubt play a very great part in the task of
reconstruction that lies before Europe, but not the American federal
government as a sovereign state among equal states.
The United States constitute a state on a different scale and level from
any old world state. Patriotism and the national idea in America is a
different thing and a bigger scale thing than the patriotism and
national idea in any old world state.
Any League of Nations aiming at stability now, would necessarily be a
league seeking to stereotype existing boundaries and existing national
ideas. Now these boundaries and these ideas are just what have to be got
rid of at any cost. Before Europe can get on to a level and on to equal
terms with the United States, the European communities have to go
through a process that America went through--under much easier
conditions--a century and a half ago. They have to repeat, on a much
greater scale and against profounder prejudices, the feat of
understanding and readjustment that was accomplished by the American
people between 1781 and 1788.
As you will all remember, these States after they had decided upon
Independence, framed certain Articles of Confederation; they were
articles of confederation between thirteen nations, between the people
of Massachusetts, the people of Virginia, the people of Georgia, and so
forth--thirteen distinct and separate sovereign peoples. They made a
Union so lax and feeble that it could neither keep order at home nor
maintain respect abroad. Then they produced another constitution. They
swept aside all that talk about the people of Massachusetts, the people
of Virginia, and the rest of their thirteen nations. They based their
union on a wider idea: the people of the United States.
Now Europe, if it is not to sink down to anarchy, has to do a parallel
thing. If Europe is to be saved from ultimate disaster, Europe has to
stop thinking in terms of the people of France, the people of England,
the people of Germany, the French, the British, the Germans, and so
forth. Europe has to think at least of the people of Europe, if not of
the civilized people of the world. If we Europeans cannot bring our
minds to that, there is no hope for us. Only by thinking of all peoples
can any people be saved in Europe. Fresh wars will destroy the social
fabric of Europe, and Europe will perish as nations, fighting.
There are many people who think that there is at least one political
system in the old world which, like the United States, is large enough
and world wide enough to go on by itself under modern conditions for
some considerable time. They think that the British Empire can, as it
were, stand out of the rest of the Old World as a self-sufficient
system. They think that it can stand out freely as the United States can
stand out, and that these two English-speaking powers have merely to
agree together to dominate and keep the peace of the world.
Let me give a little attention to this idea. It is I believe a wrong
idea, and one that may be very disastrous to our common English-speaking
culture if it is too fondly cherished.
There can be no denying that the British Imperial system is a system
different in its nature and size from a typical European state, from a
state of the horse and road scale, like France, let us say, or Germany.
And equally it is with the United States a new growth. The present
British Empire is indeed a newer growth than the United States. But
while the United States constitute a homogeneous system and grow more
homogeneous, the British Empire is heterogeneous and shows little or no
assimilative power. And while the United States are all gathered
together and are still very remote from any serious antagonist, the
British Empire is scattered all over the world, entangled with and
stressed against a multitude of possible antagonists.
I have been arguing that the size and manageability of all political
states is finally a matter of transport and communications. They grow to
a limit strictly determined by these considerations. Beyond that limit
they are unstable. Let us now apply these ideas to the British Empire.
I have shown that the great system of the United States is the creation
of the river steamboat and the railway. Quite as much so is the present
British Empire the creation of the ocean-going steamship--protected by a
great navy.
The British Empire is a modern ocean state just as the United States is
a modern continental state. The political and economic cohesion of the
British Empire rests upon this one thing, upon the steamship remaining
the dominant and secure means of world transport in the future. If the
British Empire is to remain sovereign and secure and independent of the
approval and co-operation of other states, it is necessary that
steamship transport (ocean transport) should remain dominant in peace
and invulnerable in war.
Well, that brings us face to face with two comparatively new facts that
throw a shadow upon both that predominance and upon that
invulnerability. One is air transport; the other the submarine. The
possibilities of the ocean-going submarine I will not enlarge upon now.
They will be familiar to everyone who followed the later phases of the
Great War.
It must be clear that sea power is no longer the simple and decisive
thing it was before the coming of the submarine. The sea ways can no
longer be taken and possessed completely. To no other power, except
Japan, is this so grave a consideration as it is to Britain.
And if we turn to the possibilities of air-transport in the future we
are forced towards the same conclusion, that the security of the British
Empire must rest in the future not on its strength in warfare, but on
its keeping the peace within and without its boundaries.
I was a member of the British Civil Air Transport Committee, and we went
with care and thoroughness into the possibilities and probabilities of
the air. My work on that committee convinced me that in the near future
the air may be the chief if not the only highway for long-distance
mails, for long-distance passenger traffic, and for the carriage of most
valuable and compact commodities. The ocean ways are likely to be only
the ways for slow travel and for staple and bulky trade.
And my studies on that committee did much to confirm my opinion that in
quite a brief time the chief line of military attack will be neither by
sea nor land but through the air. Moreover, it was borne in upon me that
the chief air routes of the world will lie over the great plains of the
world, that they will cross wide stretches of sea or mountainous country
only very reluctantly.
Now think of how the British Empire lies with relation to the great sea
and land masses of the world. There has been talk in Great Britain of
what people have called "all-red air routes," that is to say,
all-British air routes. There are no all-red air routes. You cannot get
out of Britain to any other parts of the Empire, unless perhaps it is
Canada, without crossing foreign territory. That is a fact that British
people have to face and digest, and the sooner they grasp it the better
for them. Britain cannot use air ways even to develop her commerce in
peace time without the consent and co-operation of a large number of her
intervening neighbours. If she embarks single-handed on any considerable
war she will find both her air and her sea communications almost
completely cut.
And so the British Empire, in spite of its size and its modernity, is
not much better off now in the way of standing alone than the other
European countries. It is no exception to our generalization that (apart
from all other questions) the scale and form of the European states are
out of harmony with contemporary and developing transport conditions,
and that all these powers are, if only on this account, under one urgent
necessity to sink those ideas of complete independence that have
hitherto dominated them. It is a life and death necessity. If they
cannot obey it they will all be destroyed.
III
THE ENLARGEMENT OF PATRIOTISM TO A WORLD STATE
In my opening argument I have shown the connexion between the present
intense political troubles of the world and more particularly of Europe,
and the advance in mechanical knowledge during the past hundred and
fifty years. I have shown that without a very drastic readjustment of
political ideas and habits, there opens before Europe and the world
generally, a sure prospect of degenerative conflicts; that without such
a readjustment, our civilization has passed its zenith and must continue
the process of collapse that has been in progress since August, 1914.
Now this readjustment means an immediate conflict with existing
patriotism. We have embarked here upon a discussion in which emotion and
passion seem quite unavoidable, the discussion of nationality. At the
very outset we bump violently against patriotism as any European
understands that word. And it is, I hold, impossible not to bump against
European patriotisms. We cannot temporize with patriotism, as one finds
it in Europe, and get on towards a common human welfare. The two things
are flatly opposed. One or other must be sacrificed. The political and
social muddle of Europe at the present time is very largely due to the
attempt to compromise between patriotism and the common good of Europe.
Do we want to get rid of patriotism altogether?
I do not think we want to get rid of patriotism, and I do not think we
could, even if we wanted to do so. It seems to be necessary to his moral
life, that a man should feel himself part of a community, belonging to
it, and it belonging to him. And that this community should be a single
and lovable reality, inspired by a common idea, with a common fashion
and aim.
But a point I have been trying to bring out throughout all this argument
so far is this--that when a European goes to the United States of
America he finds a new sort of state, materially bigger and materially
less encumbered than any European state. And he also finds an intensely
patriotic people whose patriotism isn't really the equivalent of a
European patriotism. It is historically and practically a synthesis of
European patriotisms. It is numerically bigger. It is geographically ten
times as big. That is very important indeed from the point of view of
this discussion. And it is synthetic; it is a thing made out of
something smaller. People, I believe, talk of 100 per cent. Americans.
There is no 100 per cent. American except the Red Indian. There isn't a
white man in the United States from whose blood a large factor of
European patriotism hasn't been washed out to make way for his American
patriotism.
Upon this fact of American patriotism, as a larger different thing than
European patriotism, I build. The thing can be done. If it can be done
in the Europeans and their descendants who have come to America, it can
conceivably be done in the Europeans who abide in Europe. And how can we
set about doing it?
America, the silent, comprehensive continent of America, did the thing
by taking all the various nationalities who have made up her population
and obliging them to live together.
Unhappily we cannot take the rest of our European nations now and put
them on to a great virgin continent to learn a wider political wisdom.
There are no more virgin continents. Europe must stay where she is....
Now I am told it sometimes helps scientific men to clear up their ideas
about a process by imagining that process reversed and so getting a view
of it from a different direction. Let us then, for a few moments,
instead of talking of the expansion and synthesis of patriotism in
Europe, imagine a development of narrow patriotism in America and
consider how that case could be dealt with.
Suppose, for instance, there was a serious outbreak of local patriotism
in Kentucky. Suppose you found the people of Kentucky starting a flag of
their own and objecting to what they would probably call the "vague
internationalism" of the stars and stripes. Suppose you found them
wanting to set up tariff barriers to the trade of the states round about
them. Suppose you found they were preparing to annex considerable parts
of the state of Virginia by force, in order to secure a proper strategic
frontier among the mountains to the east, and that they were also
talking darkly of their need for an outlet to the sea of their very own.
What would an American citizen think of such an outbreak? He would
probably think that Kentucky had gone mad. But this, which seems such
fantastic behaviour when we imagine it occurring in Kentucky, is exactly
what is happening in Europe in the case of little states that are hardly
any larger than Kentucky. They have always been so. They have not gone
mad; if this sort of thing is madness then they were born mad. And they
have never been cured. A state of affairs that is regarded in Europe as
normal would be regarded in the United States as a grave case of local
mental trouble.
And what would the American community probably do in such a case? It
would probably begin by inquiring where Kentucky had got these strange
ideas. They would look for sources of infection. Somebody must have been
preaching there or writing in the newspapers or teaching mischief in the
school. And I suppose the people of the United States would set
themselves very earnestly to see that sounder sense was talked and
taught to the people of Kentucky about these things.
Now that is precisely what has to be done in the parallel European case.
Everywhere in Europe there goes on in the national schools, in the
patriotic churches, in the national presses, in the highly nationalized
literatures, a unity-destroying propaganda of patriotism. The schools of
all the European countries at the present time with scarcely an
exception, teach the most rancid patriotism; they are centres of an
abominable political infection. The children of Europe grow up with an
intensity of national egotism that makes them, for all practical
international purposes, insane. They are not born with it, but they are
infected with it as soon as they can read and write. The British learn
nothing but the glories of Britain and the British Empire; the French
are, if possible, still more insanely concentrated on France; the
Germans are just recovering from the bitter consequences of forty years
of intensive nationalist education. And so on. Every country in Europe
is its own _Sinn Fein_, cultivating that ugly and silly obsession of
"ourselves alone." "Ourselves alone" is the sure guide to conflict and
disaster, to want, misery, violence, degradation and death for our
children and our children's children--until our race is dead.
The first task before us in Europe is, at any cost, to release our
children from this nationalist obsession, to teach the mass of European
people a little truthful history in which each one will see the past
and future of his own country in their proper proportions, and a little
truthful ethnology in which each country will get over the delusion that
its people are a distinct and individual race. The history teaching in
the schools of Europe is at the very core of this business.
But that is only, so to speak, the point of application of great complex
influences, the influences that mould us in childhood, the teachings of
literature, of the various religious bodies, and the daily reiteration
of the press. Before Europe can get on, there has to be a colossal
turnover of these moral and intellectual forces in the direction of
creating an international mind. If that can be effected then there is
hope for Europe and the Old World. If it cannot be effected, then
certainly Europe will go down--with its flags nailed to its masts. We
are on a sinking ship that only one thing can save. We have to oust
these European patriotisms by some greater idea or perish.
What is this greater idea to be?
Now I submit that this greater idea had best be the idea of the World
State of All Mankind.
I will admit that so far I have made a case only for teaching the idea
of a United States of Europe in Europe. I have concentrated our
attention upon that region of maximum congestion and conflict. But as a
matter of fact there are no real and effective barriers and boundaries
in the Old World between Europe and Asia and Africa. The ordinary
Russian talks of "Europe" as one who is outside it. The European
political systems flow over and have always overflowed into the greater
areas to the east and south. Remember the early empires of Macedonia and
Rome. See how the Russian language runs to the Pacific, and how Islam
radiates into all three continents. I will not elaborate this case.
When you bear such things in mind, I think you will agree with me that
if we are to talk of a United States of Europe, it is just as easy and
practicable to talk of a United States of the Old World. And are we to
stop at a United States of the Old World?
No doubt the most evident synthetic forces in America at the present
time point towards some sort of pan-American unification. That is the
nearest thing. That may come first.
But are we to contemplate a sort of dual world--the New World against
the Old?
I do not think that would be any very permanent or satisfactory
stopping-place. Why make two bites at a planet? If we work for unity on
the large scale we are contemplating, we may as well work for world
unity.
Not only in distance but in a score of other matters are London and Rome
nearer to New York than is Patagonia, and San Francisco is always likely
to be more interesting to Japan than Paris or Madrid. I cannot see any
reason for supposing that the mechanical drawing together of the
peoples of the world into one economic and political unity is likely to
cease--unless our civilization ceases. I see no signs that our present
facilities for transport and communication are the ultimate possible
facilities. Once we break away from current nationalist limitations in
our political ideas, then there is no reason and no advantage in
contemplating any halfway house to a complete human unity.
Now after what I have been saying it is very easy to explain why I would
have this idea of human unity put before people's minds in the form of a
World State and not of a League of Nations.
Let me first admit the extraordinary educational value of the League of
Nations propaganda, and of the attempt that has been made to create a
League of Nations. It has brought before the general intelligence of the
world the proposition of a world law and a world unity that could not
perhaps have been broached in any other way.
But is it a league of nations that is wanted?
I submit to you that the word "nations" is just the word that should
have been avoided--that it admits and tends to stereotype just those
conceptions of division and difference that we must at any cost minimize
and obliterate if our species is to continue. And the phrase has a thin
and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we
expect this multiple association to command? It has no unity--no
personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a
woman's club instead of loving his wife.
For the idea of Man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one
order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a
miscellaneous assembly that will not mix--even in its name. It has no
central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula. It is weak
and compromising just where it should be strong--in defining its
antagonism to separate national sovereignty. For that is what it aims
at, if it means business. If it means business it means at least a
super-state overriding the autonomy of existing states, and if it does
not mean business then we have no use for it whatever.
It may seem a much greater undertaking to attack nationality and
nationalism instead of patching up a compromise with these things, but
along the line of independent nationality lies no hope of unity and
peace and continuing progress for mankind. We cannot suffer these old
concentrations of loyalty because we want that very loyalty which now,
concentrates upon them to cement and sustain the peace of all the world.
Just as in the past provincial patriotisms have given place to national
patriotisms, so now we need to oust these still too narrow devotions by
a new unity and a new reigning idea, the idea of one state and one flag
in all the earth.
The idea of the World State stands to the idea of the League of Nations
much as the idea of the one God of Earth and Heaven stands to a Divine
Committee composed of Wodin and Baal and Jupiter and Amon Ra and Mumbo
Jumbo and all the other national and tribal gods. There is no compromise
possible in the one matter as in the other. There is no way round. The
task before mankind is to substitute the one common idea of an
overriding world commonweal for the multitudinous ideas of little
commonweals that prevail everywhere to-day. We have already glanced at
the near and current consequences of our failure to bring about that
substitution.
Now this is an immense proposal. Is it a preposterous one? Let us not
shirk the tremendous scale upon which the foundations of a world state
of all mankind must be laid. But remember, however great that task
before us may seem, however near it may come to the impossible,
nevertheless, in the establishment of one world rule and one world law
lies the only hope of escape from an increasing tangle of wars, from
social overstrain, and at last a social dissolution so complete as to
end for ever the tale of mankind as we understand mankind.
Personally I am appalled by the destruction already done in the world in
the past seven years. I doubt if any untravelled American can realize
how much of Europe is already broken up. I do not think many people
realize how swiftly Europe is still sinking, how urgent it is to get
European affairs put back upon a basis of the common good if
civilization is to be saved.
And now, as to the immensity of this project of substituting loyalty to
a world commonweal for loyalty to a single egotistical belligerent
nation. It is a project to invade hundreds of millions of minds, to
attack certain ideas established in those minds and either to efface
those ideas altogether or to supplement and correct them profoundly by
this new idea of a human commonweal. We have to get not only into the at
present intensely patriotic minds of Frenchmen, Germans, English, Irish
and Japanese, but into the remote and difficult minds of Arabs and
Indians and into the minds of the countless millions of China. Is there
any precedent to justify us in hoping that such a change in world ideas
is possible?
I think there is. I would suggest that the general tendency of thought
about these things to-day is altogether too sceptical of what teaching
and propaganda can do in these matters. In the past there have been very
great changes in human thought. I need scarcely remind you of the spread
of Christianity in Western Europe. In a few centuries the whole of
Western Europe was changed from the wild confusion of warring tribes
that succeeded the breakdown of the Roman Empire, into the unity of
Christendom, into a community with such an idea of unity that it could
be roused from end to end by the common idea of the Crusades.
Still more remarkable was the swift transformation in less than a
century of all the nations and peoples to the south and west of the
Mediterranean, from Spain to Central Asia, into the unity of Islam, a
unity which has lasted to this day. In both these cases, what I may call
the mental turnover was immense.
I think if you will consider the spread of these very complex and
difficult religions, and compare the means at the disposal of their
promoters with the means at the disposal of intelligent people to-day,
you will find many reasons for believing that a recasting of people's
ideas into the framework of a universal state is by no means an
impossible project.
Those great teachings of the past were spread largely by word of mouth.
Their teachers had to travel slowly and dangerously. People were
gathered together to hear with great difficulty, except in a few crowded
towns. Books could be used only sparingly. Few people could read, fewer
still could translate, and MSS. were copied with extreme slowness upon
parchment. There was no printing, no paper, no post. And except for a
very few people there were no schools. Both Christendom and Islam had to
create their common schools in order to preserve even a minimum of their
doctrine intact from generation to generation. All this was done in the
teeth of much bitter opposition and persecution.
Now to-day we have means of putting ideas and arguments swiftly and
effectively before people all over the world at the same time, such as
no one could have dreamt of a hundred years ago. We have not only books
and papers, but in the cinema we have a means of rapid, vivid
presentation still hardly used. We have schools nearly everywhere. And
here in the need for an overruling world state, and the idea of world
service replacing combative patriotism, we have an urgent, a commanding
human need. We have an invincible case for this world state and an
unanswerable objection to the nationalisms and patriotisms that would
oppose it.
Is it not almost inevitable that some of us should get together and
begin a propaganda upon modern lines of this organized world peace,
without which our race must perish? The world perishes for the want of a
common political idea. It is still quite possible to give the world this
common political idea, the idea of a federal world state. We cannot help
but set about doing it.
So I put it to you that the most important work before men and women
to-day is the preaching and teaching, the elaboration and then at last
the realization of this Project of the World State. We have to create a
vision of it, to make it seem first a possibility and then an
approaching reality. This is a task that demands the work and thought of
thousands of minds. We have to spread the idea of a Federal World State,
as an approaching reality, throughout the world. We can do this nowadays
through a hundred various channels. We can do it through the press,
through all sorts of literary expression, in our schools, colleges, and
universities, through political mouthpieces, by special organizations,
and last, but not least, through the teaching of the churches. For
remember that all the great religions of the world are in theory
universalist; they may tolerate the divisions of men but they cannot
sanction them. We propose no religious revolution, but at most a
religious revival. We can spread ideas and suggestions now with a
hundred times the utmost rapidity of a century ago.
This movement need not at once intervene in politics. It is a
prospective movement, and its special concern will be with young and
still growing minds. But as it spreads it will inevitably change
politics. The nations, states, and kingdoms of to-day, which fight and
scheme against each other as though they had to go on fighting and
scheming for ever, will become more and more openly and manifestly
merely guardian governments, governments playing a waiting part in the
world, while the world state comes of age. For this World State, for
which the world is waiting, must necessarily be a fusion of all
governments, and heir to all the empires.
So far I have been occupied by establishing a case for the World State.
It has been, I fear, rather an abstract discussion. I have kept closely
to the bare hard logic of the present human situation.
But now let me attempt very briefly, in the barest outline, some
concrete realization of what a World State would mean. Let us try and
conceive for ourselves the form a World State would take. I do not care
to leave this discussion with nothing to it but a phrase which is really
hardly more than a negative phrase until we put some body to it. As it
stands World State means simply a politically undivided world. Let us
try and carry that over to the idea of a unified organized state
throughout the world.
Let us try to imagine what a World Government would be like. I find that
when one speaks of a World State people think at once of some existing
government and magnify it to world proportions. They ask, for example,
where will the World Congress meet; and how will you elect your World
President? Won't your World President, they say, be rather a tremendous
personage? How are we to choose him? Or will there be a World King?
These are very natural questions, at the first onset. But are they sound
questions? May they not be a little affected by false analogies? The
governing of the whole of the world may turn out to be _not_ a magnified
version of governing a part of the world, but a different sort of job
altogether. These analogies that people draw so readily from national
states may not really work in a world state.
And first with regard to this question of a king or president. Let us
ask whether it is probable that the world state will have any single
personal head at all?
Is the world state likely to be a monarchy--either an elective short
term limited monarchy such as is the United States, or an inherited
limited monarchy like the British Empire?
Many people will say, you _must_ have a head of the state. But _must_
you? Is not this idea a legacy from the days when states were small
communities needing a leader in war and diplomacy?
In the World State we must remember there will be no war--and no
diplomacy as such.
I would even question whether in such a great modern state as the U.S.A.
the idea and the functions of the president may not be made too
important. Indeed I believe that question has been asked by many people
in the States lately, and has been answered in the affirmative.
The broad lines of the United States constitution were drawn in a period
of almost universal monarchy. American affairs were overshadowed by the
personality of George Washington, and as you know, monarchist ideas were
so rife that there was a project, during the years of doubt and division
that followed the War of Independence, for importing a German King, a
Prussian Prince, in imitation of the British Monarchy. But if the United
States were beginning again to-day on its present scale, would it put so
much power and importance upon a single individual as it put upon George
Washington and his successors in the White House? I doubt it very much.
There may be a limit, I suggest, to the size and complexity of a
community that can be directed by a single personal head. Perhaps that
limit may have been passed by both the United States and by the British
Empire at the present time. It may be possible for one person to be
leader and to have an effect of directing personality in a community of
millions or even of tens of millions. But is it possible for one small
short-lived individual to get over and affect and make any sort of
contact with hundreds of millions in thousands of towns and cities?
Recently we have watched with admiration and sympathy the heroic efforts
of the Prince of Wales to shake hands with and get his smile well home
into the hearts of the entire population of the British Empire of which
he is destined to become the "golden link." After tremendous exertions a
very large amount of the ground still remains to be covered.
I will confess I cannot see any single individual human head in my
vision of the World State.
The linking reality of the World State is much more likely to be not an
individual but an idea--such an idea as that of a human commonweal under
the God of all mankind.
If at any time, for any purpose, some one individual had to step out and
act for the World State as a whole, then I suppose the senior judges of
the Supreme Court, or the Speaker of the Council, or the head of the
Associated Scientific Societies, or some such person, could step out
and do what had to be done.
But if there is to be no single head person, there must be at least some
sort of assembly or council. That seems to be necessary. But will it be
a gathering at all like Congress or the British Parliament, with a
Government side and an opposition ruled by party traditions and party
ideas?
There again, I think we may be too easily misled by existing but
temporary conditions. I do not think it is necessary to assume that the
council of the World State will be an assembly of party politicians. I
believe it will be possible to have it a real gathering of
representatives, a fair sample of the thought and will of mankind at
large, and to avoid a party development by a more scientific method of
voting than the barbaric devices used for electing representatives to
Congress or the British Parliament, devices that play directly into the
hands of the party organizer who trades upon the defects of political
method.
Will this council be directly elected? That, I think, may be found to be
essential. And upon a very broad franchise. Because, _firstly_, it is
before all things important that every adult in the world should feel a
direct and personal contact between himself and the World State, and
that he is an assenting and participating citizen of the world; and
_secondly_, because if your council is appointed by any intermediate
body, all sorts of local and national considerations, essential in the
business of the subordinate body, will get in the way of a simple and
direct regard for the world commonweal.
And as to this council: Will it have great debates and wonderful scenes
and crises and so forth--the sort of thing that looks well in a large
historical painting? There again we may be easily misled by analogy. One
consideration that bars the way to anything of that sort is that its
members will have no common language which they will be all able to
speak with the facility necessary for eloquence. Eloquence is far more
adapted to the conditions of a Red Indian pow-wow than to the ordering
of large and complicated affairs. The World Council may be a very
taciturn assembly. It may even meet infrequently. Its members may
communicate their views largely by _notes_ which may have to be very
clear and explicit, because they will have to stand translation, and
short--to escape neglect.
And what will be the chief organs and organizations and works and
methods with which this Council of the World State will be concerned?
There will be a Supreme Court determining _not_ International Law, but
World Law. There will be a growing Code of World Law.
There will be a world currency.
There will be a ministry of posts, transport and communications
generally.
There will be a ministry of trade in staple products and for the
conservation and development of the natural resources of the earth.
There will be a ministry of social and labour conditions.
There will be a ministry of world health.
There will be a ministry, the most important ministry of all, watching
and supplementing national educational work and taking up the care and
stimulation of backward communities.
And instead of a War Office and Naval and Military departments, there
will be a _Peace Ministry_ studying the belligerent possibilities of
every new invention, watching for armed disturbances everywhere, and
having complete control of every armed force that remains in the world.
All these world ministries will be working in co-operation with local
authorities who will apply world-wide general principles to local
conditions.
These items probably comprehend everything that the government of a
World State would have to do. Much of its activity would be merely the
co-ordination and adjustment of activities already very thoroughly
discussed and prepared for it by local and national discussions. I think
it will be a mistake for us to assume that the work of a world
government will be vaster and more complex than that of such governments
as those of the United States or the British Empire. In many respects it
will have an enormously simplified task. There will be no foreign enemy,
no foreign competition, no tariffs, so far as it is concerned, or tariff
wars. It will be keeping order; it will not be carrying on a contest.
There will be no necessity for secrecy; it will not be necessary to have
a Cabinet plotting and planning behind closed doors; there will be no
general policy except a steady attention to the common welfare. Even the
primary origin of a World Council must necessarily be different from
that of any national government. Every existing government owes its
beginnings to force and is in its fundamental nature militant. It is an
offensive-defensive organ. This fact saturates our legal and social
tradition more than one realizes at first. There is, about civil law
everywhere, a faint flavour of a relaxed state of siege. But a world
government will arise out of different motives and realize a different
ideal. It will be primarily an organ for keeping the peace.
And now perhaps we may look at this project of a World State mirrored in
the circumstances of the life of one individual citizen. Let us consider
very briefly the life of an ordinary young man living in a World State
and consider how it would differ from a commonplace life to-day.
He will have been born in some one of the United States of the World--in
New York or California, or Ontario or New Zealand, or Portugal or France
or Bengal or Shan-si; but wherever his lot may fall, the first history
he will learn will be the wonderful history of mankind, from its nearly
animal beginnings, a few score thousand years ago, with no tools, but
implements of chipped stone and hacked wood, up to the power and
knowledge of our own time. His education will trace for him the
beginnings of speech, of writing, of cultivation and settlement.
He will learn of the peoples and nations of the past, and how each one
has brought its peculiar gifts and its distinctive contribution to the
accumulating inheritance of our race.
He will know, perhaps, less of wars, battles, conquests, massacres,
kings and the like unpleasant invasions of human dignity and welfare,
and he will know more of explorers, discoverers and stout outspoken men
than our contemporary citizen.
While he is still a little boy, he will have the great outlines of the
human adventure brought home to his mind by all sorts of vivid methods
of presentation, such as the poor poverty-struck schools of our own time
cannot dream of employing.
And on this broad foundation he will build up his knowledge of his own
particular state and nation and people, learning not tales of ancient
grievances and triumphs and revenges, but what his particular race and
countryside have given and what it gives and may be expected to give to
the common welfare of the world. On such foundations his social
consciousness will be built.
He will learn an outline of all that mankind knows and of the
fascinating realms of half knowledge in which man is still struggling to
know. His curiosity and his imagination will be roused and developed.
He will probably be educated continuously at least until he is eighteen
or nineteen, and perhaps until he is two or three and twenty. For a
world that wastes none of its resources upon armaments or soldiering,
and which produces whatever it wants in the regions best adapted to that
production, and delivers them to the consumer by the directest route,
will be rich enough not only to spare the first quarter of everybody's
life for education entirely, but to keep on with some education
throughout the whole lifetime.
Of course the school to which our young citizen of the world will go
will be very different from the rough and tumble schools of to-day,
understaffed with underpaid assistants, and having bare walls. It will
have benefited by some of the intelligence and wealth we lavish to-day
on range-finders and submarines.
Even a village school will be in a beautiful little building costing as
much perhaps as a big naval gun or a bombing-aeroplane costs to-day. I
know this will sound like shocking extravagance to many contemporary
hearers, but in the World State the standards will be different.
I don't know whether any of us really grasp what we are saying when we
talk of greater educational efficiency in the future. That means--if it
means anything--teaching more with much less trouble. It will mean, for
instance, that most people will have three or four languages properly
learnt; that they will think about things mathematical with a quickness
and clearness that puzzles us; that about all sorts of things their
minds will move in daylight where ours move in a haze of ignorance or in
an emotional fog.
This clear-headed, broad-thinking young citizen of the World State will
not be given up after his educational years to a life of toil--there
will be very little toil left in the world. Mankind will have machines
and power enough to do most of the toil for it. Why, between 1914 and
1918 we blew away enough energy and destroyed enough machinery and
turned enough good grey matter into stinking filth to release hundreds
of millions of toilers from toil for ever!
Our young citizen will choose some sort of interesting work--perhaps
creative work. And he will be free to travel about the whole world
without a passport or visa, without a change of money; everywhere will
be his country; he will find people everywhere who will be endlessly
different, but none suspicious or hostile. Everywhere he will find
beautiful and distinctive cities, freely expressive of the spirit of the
land in which they have arisen. Strange and yet friendly cities.
The world will be a far healthier place than it is now--for mankind as a
whole will still carry on organized wars--no longer wars of men against
men, but of men against malarias and diseases and infections. Probably
he will never know what a cold is, or a headache. He will be able to go
through the great forests of the tropics without shivering with fever
and without saturating himself with preventive drugs. He will go freely
among great mountains; he will fly to the Poles of the earth if he
chooses, and dive into the cold, now hidden, deep places of the sea.
But it is very difficult to fill in the picture of his adult life so
that it will seem real to our experience. It is hard to conceive and
still more difficult to convey. We live in this congested, bickering,
elbowing, shoving world, and it has soaked into our natures and made us
a part of itself. Hardly any of us know what it is to be properly
educated, and hardly any what it is to be in constant general good
health.
To talk of what the world may be to most of us is like talking of baths
and leisure and happy things to some poor hopeless, gin-soaked drudge in
a slum. The creature is so devitalized; the dirt is so ingrained, so
much a second nature, that a bath really isn't attractive. Clean and
beautiful clothes sound like a mockery or priggishness. To talk of
spacious and beautiful places only arouses a violent desire in the poor
thing to get away somewhere and hide. In squalor and misery, quarrelling
and fighting make a sort of nervous relief. To multitudes of slum-bred
people the prospect of no more fighting is a disagreeable prospect, a
dull outlook.
Well, all this world of ours may seem a slum to the people of a happier
age. They will feel about our world just as we feel about the ninth or
tenth century, when we read of its brigands and its insecurities, its
pestilences, its miserable housing, its abstinence from ablutions.
But our young citizen will not have been inured to our base world. He
will have little of our ingrained dirt in his mind and heart. He will
love. He will love beautifully. As most of us once hoped to do in our
more romantic moments. He will have ambitions--for the world state will
give great scope to ambition. He will work skilfully and brilliantly, or
he will administer public services, or he will be an able teacher, or a
mental or physical physician, or he will be an interpretative or
creative artist; he may be a writer or a scientific investigator, he may
be a statesman in his state, or even a world statesman. If he is a
statesman he may be going up perhaps to the federal world congress. In
the year 2020 there will still be politics, but they will be great
politics. Instead of the world's affairs being managed in a score of
foreign offices, all scheming meanly and cunningly against each other,
all planning to thwart and injure each other, they will be managed under
the direction of an educated and organized common intelligence intent
only upon the common good.
Dear! Dear! Dear! Does it sound like rubbish to you? I suppose it does.
You think I am talking of a dreamland, of an unattainable Utopia?
Perhaps I am! This dear, jolly old world of dirt, war, bankruptcy,
murder and malice, thwarted lives, wasted lives, tormented lives,
general ill health and a social decadence that spreads and deepens
towards a universal smash--how can we hope to turn it back from its
course? How priggish and impracticable! How impertinent! How
preposterous! I seem to hear a distant hooting....
Sometimes it seems to me that the barriers that separate man and man are
nearly insurmountable and invincible, that we who talk of a world state
now are only the pioneers of a vast uphill struggle in the minds and
hearts of men that may need to be waged for centuries--that may fail in
the end.
Sometimes again, in other moods, it seems to me that these barriers and
nationalities and separations are so illogical, so much a matter of
tradition, so plainly mischievous and cruel, that at any time we may
find the common sense of our race dissolving them away....
Who can see into that darkest of all mysteries, the hearts and wills of
mankind? It may be that it is well for us not to know of the many
generations who will have to sustain this conflict.
Yes, that is one mood, and there is the other. Perhaps we fear too much.
Even before our lives run out we may feel the dawn of a greater age
perceptible among the black shadows and artificial glares of these
unhappy years.
IV
THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION
PART ONE
§ 1
In my next two papers I am going to discuss and--what shall I
say?--experiment with an old but neglected idea, an idea that was first
broached I believe about the time when the State of Connecticut was
coming into existence and while New York was still the Dutch city of New
Amsterdam.
The man who propounded this idea was a certain great Bohemian, Komensky,
who is perhaps better known in our western world by his Latinized name
Comenius. He professed himself the pupil of Bacon. He was the friend of
Milton. He travelled from one European country to another with his
political and educational ideas. For a time he thought of coming to
America. It is a great pity that he never came. And his idea, the
particular idea of his we are going to discuss, was the idea of a common
book, a book of history, science and wisdom, which should form the basis
and framework for the thoughts and imaginations of every citizen in the
world.
In many ways the thinkers and writers of the early seventeenth century
seem more akin to us and more sympathetic with the world of to-day, than
any intervening group of literary figures. They strike us as having a
longer vision than the men of the eighteenth century, and as being
bolder--and, how shall I put it?--more desperate in their thinking than
the nineteenth century minds. And this closer affinity to our own time
arises, I should think, directly and naturally, out of the closer
resemblance of their circumstances. Between 1640 and 1650, just as in
our present age, the world was tremendously unsettled and distressed. A
century and more of expansion and prosperity had given place to a phase
of conflict, exhaustion and entire political unsettlement. Britain was
involved in the bitter political struggle that culminated in the
execution of King Charles I. Ireland was a land of massacre and
counter-massacre. The Thirty Years War in Central Europe was in its
closing, most dreadful stages of famine and plunder. In France the crown
and the nobles were striving desperately for ascendancy in the War of
the Fronde. The Turk threatened Vienna. Nowhere in Western Europe did
there remain any secure and settled political arrangements. Everywhere
there was disorder, everywhere it seemed that anything might happen, and
it is just those disordered and indeterminate times that are most
fruitful of bold religious and social and political and educational
speculations and initiatives.
This was the period that produced the Quakers and a number of the most
vigorous developments of Puritanism, in which the foundations of modern
republicanism were laid, and in which the project of a world league of
nations--or rather of a world state--received wide attention. And the
student of Comenius will find in him an active and sensitive mind
responding with a most interesting similarity to our own responses, to
the similar conditions of his time. He has been distressed and
dismayed--as most of us have been distressed and dismayed--by a rapid
development of violence, by a great release of cruelty and suffering in
human affairs. He felt none of the security that was felt in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the _certainty_ of progress. He
realized as we do that the outlook for humanity is a very dark and
uncertain one unless human effort is stimulated and organized. He traced
the evils of his time to human discords and divisions, to our political
divisions, and the mutual misconceptions due to our diversity of
languages and leading ideas. In all that he might be writing and
thinking in 1921. And his proposed remedies find an echo in a number of
our contemporary movements. He wanted to bring all nations to form one
single state. He wanted to have a universal language as the common
medium of instruction and discussion, and he wanted to create a common
Book of Necessary Knowledge, a sort of common basis of wisdom, for all
educated men in the world.
Now this last is the idea I would like to develop now. I would like to
discuss whether our education--which nowadays in our modern states
reaches everyone--whether our education can include and ought to include
such a Book of Necessary Knowledge and Wisdom; and (having attempted to
answer that enquiry in the affirmative) I shall then attempt a sketch of
such a book.
But to begin with perhaps I may meet an objection that is likely to
arise. I have called this hypothetical book of ours the Bible of
Civilization, and it may be that someone will say: Yes, but you have a
sufficient book of that sort already; you have the Bible itself and that
is all you need. Well, I am taking the Bible as my model. I am taking it
because twice in history--first as the Old Testament and then again as
the Old and New Testament together--it has formed a culture, and unified
and kept together through many generations great masses of people. It
has been the basis of the Jewish and Christian civilizations alike. And
even in the New World the State of Connecticut did, I believe, in its
earliest beginnings take the Bible as its only law. Nevertheless, I hope
I shall not offend any reader if I point out that the Bible is not all
that we need to-day, and that also in some respects it is redundant. Its
very virtues created its limitations. It served men so well that they
made a Canon of it and refused to alter it further. Throughout the most
vital phases of Hebrew history, throughout the most living years of
Christian development the Bible changed and grew. Then its growth ceased
and its text became fixed. But the world went on growing and discovering
new needs and new necessities.
Let me deal first with its redundancy. So far as redundancy goes, a
great deal of the Book of Leviticus, for example, seems not vitally
necessary for the ordinary citizen of to-day; there are long explicit
directions for temple worship and sacrificial procedure. There is again,
so far as the latter day citizen is concerned, an excess of information
about the minor Kings of Israel and Judah. And there is more light than
most of us feel we require nowadays upon the foreign policies of Assyria
and Egypt. It stirs our pulses feebly, it helps us only very indirectly
to learn that Attai begat Nathan and Nathan begat Zabad, or that Obed
begat Jehu and Jehu begat Azariah, and so on for two or three hundred
verses.
And so far as deficiencies go, there is a great multitude of modern
problems--problems that enter intimately into the moral life of all of
us, with which the Bible does not deal, the establishment of American
Independence, for example, and the age-long feud of Russia and Poland
that has gone on with varying fortunes for four centuries. That is much
more important to our modern world than the ancient conflict of Assyria
and Egypt which plays so large a part in the old Bible record. And there
are all sorts of moral problems arising out of modern conditions on
which the Bible sheds little or no direct light: the duties of a citizen
at an election, or the duties of a shareholder to the labour employed by
his company, for example. For these things we need at least a
supplement, if we are still to keep our community upon one general basis
of understanding, upon one unifying standard of thought and behaviour.
We are so brought up upon the Bible, we are so used to it long before we
begin to think hard about it, that all sorts of things that are really
very striking about it, the facts that the history of Judah and Israel
is told twice over and that the gospel narrative is repeated four times
over for example, do not seem at all odd to us. How else, we ask, could
you have it? Yet these are very odd features if we are to regard the
Bible as the compactest and most perfect statement of essential truth
and wisdom.
And still more remarkable, it seems to me, is it that the Bible breaks
off. One could understand very well if the Bible broke off with the
foundation of Christianity. Now this event has happened, it might say,
nothing else matters. It is the culmination. But the Bible does not do
that. It goes on to a fairly detailed account of the beginnings and
early politics of the Christian Church. It gives the opening literature
of theological exposition. And then, with that strange and doubtful
book, the Revelation of St. John the Divine, it comes to an end. As I
say, it leaves off. It leaves off in the middle of Roman imperial and
social conflicts. But the world has gone on and goes on--elaborating its
problems, encountering fresh problems--until now there is a gulf of
upwards of eighteen hundred years between us and the concluding
expression of the thought of that ancient time.
I make these observations in no spirit of detraction. If anything, these
peculiarities of the Bible add to the wonder of its influence over the
lives and minds of men. It has been The Book that has held together the
fabric of western civilization. It has been the handbook of life to
countless millions of men and women. The civilization we possess could
not have come into existence and could not have been sustained without
it. It has explained the world to the mass of our people, and it has
given them moral standards and a form into which their consciences could
work. But does it do that to-day? Frankly, I do not think it does. I
think that during the last century the Bible has lost much of its former
hold. It no longer grips the community. And I think it has lost hold
because of those sundering eighteen centuries, to which every fresh year
adds itself, because of profound changes in the methods and mechanisms
of life, and because of the vast extension of our ideas by the
development of science in the last century or so.
It has lost hold, but nothing has arisen to take its place. That is the
gravest aspect of this matter. It was the cement with which our western
communities were built and by which they were held together. And the
weathering of these centuries and the acids of these later years have
eaten into its social and personal influence. It is no longer a
sufficient cement. And--this is the essence of what I am driving
at--_our modern communities are no longer cemented_, they lack organized
solidarity, they are not prepared to stand shocks and strains, they have
become dangerously loose mentally and morally. That, I believe, is the
clue to a great proportion of the present social and political troubles
of the world. We need to get back to a cement. We want a Bible. We want
a Bible so badly that we cannot afford to put the old Bible on a
pinnacle out of daily use. We want it re-adapted for use. If it is true
that the old Bible falls short in its history and does not apply closely
to many modern problems, then we need a revised and enlarged Bible in
our schools and homes to restore a common ground of ideas and
interpretations if our civilization is to hold together.
Now let us see what the Bible gave a man in the days when it could
really grip and hold and contain him; and let us ask if it is impossible
to restore and reconstruct a Bible for the needs of these great and
dangerous days in which we are living. Can we re-cement our increasingly
unstable civilization? I will not ask now whether there is still time
left for us to do anything of the sort.
The first thing the Bible gave a man was a Cosmogony. It gave him an
account of the world in which he found himself and of his place in it.
And then it went on to a general history of mankind. It did not tell him
that history as a string of facts and dates, but as a moving and
interesting story into which he himself finally came, a story of
promises made and destinies to be fulfilled. It gave him a dramatic
relationship to the schemes of things. It linked him to all mankind with
a conception of relationships and duties. It gave him a place in the
world and put a meaning into his life. It explained him to himself and
to other people, and it explained other people to him. In other words,
out of the individual it made a citizen with a code of duties and
expectations.
Now I take it that both from the point of view of individual happiness
and from the point of view of the general welfare, this development of
the citizenship of a man, this placing of a man in his own world, is of
primary importance. It is the necessary basis of all right education; it
is the fundamental purpose of the school, and I do not believe an
individual can be happy or a community be prosperous without it. The
Bible and the religions based on it gave that idea of a place in the
world to the people it taught. But do we provide that idea of a place in
the world for our people to-day? I suggest that we do not. We do not
give them a clear vision of the universe in which they live, and we do
not give them a history that invests their lives with meaning and
dignity.
The cosmogony of the Bible has lost grip and conviction upon men's
minds, and the ever-widening gulf of years makes its history and its
political teaching more and more remote and unhelpful amidst the great
needs of to-day. Nothing has been done to fill up these widening gaps.
We have so great a respect for the letter of the Bible that we ignore
its spirit and its proper use. We do not rewrite and retell Genesis in
the light and language of modern knowledge, and we do not revise and
bring its history up to date and so apply it to the problems of our own
time. So we have allowed the Bible to become antiquated and remote,
venerable and unhelpful.
There has been a great extension of what we call education in the past
hundred years, but while we have spread education widely, there has been
a sort of shrinkage and enfeeblement of its aims. Education in the past
set out to make a Christian and a citizen and afterwards a gentleman out
of the crude, vulgar, self-seeking individual. Does education even
pretend to do as much to-day? It does nothing of the sort. Our young
people are taught to read and write. They are taught bookkeeping and
languages that are likely to be useful to them. They are given a certain
measure of technical education, and _they are taught to shove_. And
then we turn them out into the world to get on. Our test of a college
education is--Does it make a successful business man?
Well, this, I take it, is the absolute degradation of education. It is a
modern error that education exists for the individual. Education exists
for the community and the race; it exists to subdue the individual for
the good of the world and his own ultimate happiness.
But we have been letting the essentials of education slip back into a
secondary place in our pursuit of mere equipment, and we see the results
to-day throughout all the modern states of the world, in a loss of
cohesion, discipline and co-operation. Men will not co-operate except to
raise prices on the consumer or wages on the employer, and everyone
scrambles for a front place and a good time. And they do so, partly no
doubt by virtue of an ineradicable factor in them known as Original Sin,
but also very largely because the vision of life that was built up in
their minds at school and in their homes was fragmentary and
uninspiring; it had no commanding appeal for their imaginations, and no
imperatives for their lives.
So I put it, that for the opening books of our Bible of Civilization,
our Bible translated into terms of modern knowledge, and as the basis of
all our culture, we shall follow the old Bible precedent exactly. We
shall tell to every citizen of our community, as plainly, simply and
beautifully as we can, the New Story of Genesis, the tremendous
spectacle of the Universe that science has opened to us, the flaming
beginnings of our world, the vast ages of its making and the astounding
unfolding, age after age, of Life. We shall tell of the changing
climates of this spinning globe and the coming and going of great floras
and faunas, mighty races of living things, until out of the vast, slow
process our own kind emerged. And we shall tell the story of our race.
How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over nature,
hunted and presently sowed and reaped. How it learnt the secrets of the
metals, mastered the riddle of the seasons, and took to the seas. That
story of our common inheritance and of our slow upward struggle has to
be taught throughout our entire community, in the city slums and in the
out-of-the-way farmsteads most of all. By teaching it, we restore again
to our people the lost basis of a community, a common idea of their
place in space and time.
Then, still following the Bible precedent, we must tell a universal
history of man. And though on the surface it may seem to be a very
different history from the Bible story, in substance it will really be
very much the same history, only robbed of ancient trappings and
symbols, and made real and fresh again for our present ideas. It will
still be a story of conditional promises, the promises of human
possibility, a record of sins and blunders and lost opportunities, of
men who walked not in the ways of righteousness, of stiff-necked
generations, and of merciful renewals of hope. It will still point our
lives to a common future which will be the reward and judgment of our
present lives.
You may say that no such book exists--which is perfectly true--and that
no such book could be written. But there I think you underrate the
capacity of our English-speaking people. It would be quite possible to
get together a committee that would give us the compact and clear
cosmogony of history that is needed. Some of the greatest, most
inspiring books and documents in the world have been produced by
Committees: Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the English
Translation of the Bible, and the Prayer Book of the English Church are
all the productions of committees, and they are all fine and inspiring
compilations. For the last three years I have been experimenting with
this particular task, and, with the help of six other people, I have
sketched out and published an outline of our world's origins and history
to show the sort of thing I mean. That _Outline_ is, of course, a
corrupting mass of faults and minor inaccuracies, but it does
demonstrate the possibility of doing what is required. And its reception
both in America and England has shown how ready, how greedy many people
are, on account of themselves and on account of their children, for an
ordered general account of the existing knowledge of our place in space
and time. For want of anything better they have taken my _Outline_ very
eagerly. Far more eagerly would they have taken a finer, sounder and
more authoritative work.
In England this _Outline_ was almost the first experiment of the kind
that has been made--the only other I know of in England, was a very
compact General History of the World by Mr. Oscar Browning published in
1913. But there are several educationists in America who have been at
work on the same task. In this matter of a more generalized history
teaching, the New World is decidedly leading the Old. The particular
problems of a population of mixed origins have forced it upon teachers
in the United States.
My friend--I am very happy to be able to call him my friend--Professor
Breasted, in conjunction with that very able teacher Professor Robinson,
has produced two books, _Ancient Times_ and _Mediæval and Modern Times_,
which together make a very complete history of civilized man. They do
not, however, give a history of life before man, nor very much of human
pre-history. Another admirable American summary of history is Doctor
Hutton Webster's _History of the Ancient World_ together with his
_Mediæval and Modern History_. This again is very sparing of the story
of primitive man.
But the work of these gentlemen confirms my own experience that it is
quite possible to tell in a comprehensible and inspiring outline the
whole history of life and mankind in the compass of a couple of
manageable volumes. Neither Browning nor Breasted and Robinson, nor
Hutton Webster, nor my own effort are very much longer than twice the
length of Dickens' novel of _Bleak House_. So there you have it. There
is the thing shown to be possible. If it is possible for us isolated
workers to do as much then why should not the thing be done in a big and
authoritative manner? Why should we not have a great educational
conference of teachers, scientific men and historians from all the
civilized peoples of the world, and why should they not draft out a
standard World History for general use in the world's schools? Why
should that draft not be revised by scores of specialists? Discussed and
re-discussed? Polished and finished, and made the opening part of a new
Bible of Civilization, a new common basis for a world culture?
At intervals it would need to be revised, and it could be revised and
brought up to date in the same manner.
Now such a book and such a book alone would put the people of the world
upon an absolutely new footing with regard to social and international
affairs. They would be told a history coming right up to the Daily
Newspaper. They would see themselves and the news of to-day as part of
one great development. It would give their lives significance and
dignity. It would give the events of the current day significance and
dignity. It would lift their imaginations up to a new level. I say
lift, but I mean restore their imaginations to a former level. Because
if you look back into the lives of the Pilgrim Fathers, let us say, or
into those of the great soldiers and statesmen of Cromwellian England,
you will find that these men had a sense of personal significance, a
sense of destiny, such as no one in politics or literature seems to
possess to-day. They were still in touch with the old Bible. To-day if
life seems adventurous and fragmentary and generally aimless it is
largely because of this one thing. We have lost touch with history. We
have ceased to see human affairs as one great epic unfolding. And only
by the universal teaching of Universal History can that epic quality be
restored.
You see then the first part of my project for a Bible of Civilization, a
rewriting of Genesis and Exodus and Judges and Chronicles in terms of
World History. It would be a quite possible thing to do....
Is it worth doing?
And let me add here that when we do get our New Genesis and our new
historical books, they will have a great number of illustrations as a
living and necessary part of them. For nowadays we can not only have a
canonical text, but canonical maps and illustrations. The old Hebrew
Bible was merely the written word. Indeed it was not even that, for it
was written without vowels. That was not a merit, nor a precedent for
us; it was an unavoidable limitation in those days; but under modern
conditions there is no reason whatever why we should confine our Bible
to words when a drawing or a map can better express the thing we wish to
convey. It is one of the great advantages of the modern book over the
ancient book that because of printing it can use pictures as well as
words. When books had to be reproduced by copyists the use of pictures
was impossible. They would have varied with each copying until they
became hopelessly distorted....
§ 2
But the cosmological and historical part of the old Bible was merely the
opening, the groundwork upon which the rest was built. Let us now
consider what else the Bible gave a man and a community, and what would
be the modern form of the things it gave.
The next thing in order that the Bible gave a man and the community to
which he belonged was the Law. Rules of Life. Rules of Health.
Prescriptions--often very detailed and intimate--of permissible and
unpermissible conduct. This also the modern citizen needs and should
have: he and she need a book of personal wisdom.
First as to Health. One of the first duties of a citizen is to keep
himself in mental and bodily health in order to be fit for the rest of
his duties. Now the real Bible, our model, is extremely explicit upon a
number of points, upon what constitutes cleanness or uncleanness, upon
ablutions, upon what a man or woman may eat and what may not be eaten,
upon a number of such points. It was for its times and circumstances a
directory of healthy practice. Well, I do not see why the Bible of a
Modern Civilization should not contain a book of similarly clear
injunctions and warnings--why we should not tell every one of our people
what is to be known about self-care.
And closely connected with the care of one's mental and bodily health is
sexual morality, upon which again Deuteronomy and Leviticus are most
explicit, leaving very little to the imagination. I am all for imitating
the wholesome frankness of the ancient book. Where there are no dark
corners there is very little fermentation, there is very little foulness
or infection. But in nearly every detail and in method and manner, the
Bible of our Civilization needs to be fuller and different from its
prototype upon these matters. The real Bible dealt with an oriental
population living under much cruder conditions than our own, engaged
mainly in agriculture, and with a far less various dietary than ours.
They had fermented but not distilled liquors; they had no preserved nor
refrigerated foods; they married at adolescence; many grave diseases
that prevail to-day were unknown to them, and their sanitary problems
were entirely different. Generally our New Leviticus will have to be
much fuller. It must deal with exercise--which came naturally to those
Hebrew shepherds. It must deal with the preservation of energy under
conditions of enervation of which the prophets knew nothing. On the
other hand our New Leviticus can afford to give much less attention to
leprosy--which almost dominates the health instructions of the ancient
law-giver.
I do not know anything very much about the movements in America that aim
at the improvement of the public health and at the removal of public
ignorance upon vital things. In Britain we have a number of powerful
organizations active in disseminating knowledge to counteract the spread
of this or that infectious or contagious disease. The War has made us in
Europe much more outspoken and fearless in dealing with lurking hideous
evils. We believe much more than we did in the curative value of light
and knowledge. And we have a very considerable literature of books
on--what shall I call it? on Sex Wisdom, which aim to prevent some of
that great volume of misery, deprivation and nervous disease due to the
prevailing ignorance and secrecy in these matters. For in these matters
great multitudes of modern people still live in an ignorance that would
have been inconceivable to an ancient Hebrew. In England now the books
of such a writer as Dr. Marie Stopes are enormously read, and--though
they are by no means perfect works--do much to mitigate the hidden
disappointments, discontents, stresses and cruelties of married life.
Now I believe that it would be possible to compile a modern Leviticus
and Deuteronomy to tell our whole modern community decently and
plainly--just as plainly as the old Hebrew Bible instructed its Hebrew
population--what was to be known and what had to be done, and what had
not to be done in these intimate matters.
But Health and Sex do not exhaust the problems of conduct. There are
also the problems of Property and Trade and Labour. Upon these also the
old Bible did not hesitate to be explicit. For example, it insisted
meticulously upon the right of labour to glean and upon the seller
giving a "full measure brimming over," and it prohibited usury. But here
again the Bible is extraordinarily unhelpful when we come to modern
issues, because its rules and regulations were framed for a community
and for an economic system altogether cruder, more limited and less
complicated than our own. Much of the Old Testament we have to remember
was already in existence before the free use of coined metal. The vast
credit system of our days, joint-stock company enterprise and the like,
were beyond the imagination of that time. So too was any anticipation of
modern industrialism. And accordingly we live to-day in a world in which
neither property nor employment have ever been properly moralized. The
bulk of our present social and economic troubles is due very largely to
that.
In no matter is this muddled civilization of ours more hopelessly at
sixes and sevens than in this matter of the rights and duties of
property. Manifestly property is a trust for the community varying in
its responsibilities with the nature of the property. The property one
has in one's toothbrush is different from the property one has in ten
thousand acres of land; the property one has in a photograph of a friend
is different from the property one has in some irreplaceable masterpiece
of portraiture. The former one may destroy with a good conscience, but
not the latter. At least so it seems to me.
But opinions vary enormously on these matters because we have never
really worked them out. On the one hand, in this matter of property, we
have the extreme individualist who declares that a man has an unlimited
right to do what he likes with his own--so that a man who owns a coal
mine may just burn it out to please himself or spite the world, or raise
the price of coal generally--and on the other hand we have the extreme
communist who denies all property and in practice--so far as I can
understand his practice--goes on the principle that everything belongs
to somebody else or that one is entitled to exercise proprietary rights
over everything that does not belong to oneself. (I confess that
communistic practice is a little difficult to formulate.) Between these
extremists you can find every variety of idea about what one may do and
about what one may not do with money and credit and property generally.
Is it an offence to gamble? Is it an offence to speculate? Is it an
offence to hold fertile fields and not cultivate them? Is it an offence
to hold fertile fields and undercultivate them? Is it an offence to use
your invested money merely to live pleasantly without working? Is it an
offence to spend your money on yourself and refuse your wife more than
bare necessities? Is it an offence to spend exorbitant sums that might
otherwise go in reproductive investments, to gratify the whims and
vanities of your wife? You will find different people answering any of
these questions with Yes or No. But it cannot be both Yes and No. There
must be a definable Right or Wrong upon all these issues.
Almost all the labour trouble in the world springs directly from our
lack of an effective detailed moral code about property. The freedom
that is claimed for all sorts of property and exercised by all sorts of
property to waste or withhold is the clue to that savage resentment
which flares out nowadays in every great labour conflict. Labour is a
rebel because property is a libertine.
Now this untilled field of conduct, this moral wilderness of the rights
and duties and limitations of property, the Books of the Law in a modern
Bible could clear up in the most lucid and satisfying way. I want to get
those parts of Deuteronomy and Leviticus written again, more urgently
than any other part of the modern Bible. I want to see it at work in the
schools and in the law-courts. I admit that it would be a most difficult
book to write and that we should raise controversial storms over every
verse. But what an excellent thing to have it out, once for all, with
some of these rankling problems! What an excellent thing if we could get
together a choice group of representative men--strictly rationed as to
paper--and get them to set down clearly and exactly just what classes of
property they recognized and what limitations the community was entitled
to impose upon each sort.
Every country in the world does impose limitations. In Italy you may not
export an ancient work of art, although it is your own. In England you
may not maltreat your own dog or cat. In the United States, I am told,
you may not use your dollars to buy alcohol. Why should we not make all
this classification of property and the restraints upon each class of
property, systematic and world-wide? If we could so moralize the use of
property, if we could arrive at a clear idea of just what use an owner
could make of his machinery, or a financier could make of his credit,
would there be much left of the incessant labour conflicts of the
present time? For if you will look into it, you will find there is
hardly ever a labour conflict into which some unsettled question of
principle, some unsettled question of the permissible use of property,
does not enter as the final and essential dispute.
V
THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION
PART TWO
§ 3
In the preceding sections we have discussed Genesis and the Historical
Books generally as they would appear in a modernized Bible, and we have
dealt with the Law. But these are only the foundations and openings of
the Bible as we know it. We come now to the Psalms and Proverbs, the
Song of Songs, the Book of Job--and the Prophets. What are the modern
equivalents of these books?
Well, what were they?
They were the entire Hebrew literature down to about the time of Ezra;
they include sacred songs, love songs, a dramatic dialogue, a sort of
novel in the Books of Ruth and Esther, and so forth. What would be our
equivalent of this part of the Bible to-day? What would be the
equivalent for the Bible of a world civilization?
I suppose that it would be the whole world literature.
That, I admit, is a rather tremendous proposition. Are we to
contemplate the prospect of a modern Bible in twenty or thirty thousand
volumes? Such a vast Bible would defeat its own end. We want a Bible
that everyone will know, which will be grasped by the mind of everyone.
That is essential to our idea of a Bible as a social cement.
Fortunately our model Bible, as we have it to-day, gives us a lead in
this matter. Its contents are classified. We have first of all the
canonical books, which are treated as the vitally important books; they
are the books, to quote the phrase used in the English prayer book,
which are "necessary to salvation." And then we have a collection of
other books, the Apocrypha, the books set aside, books often admirable
and beautiful, but not essential, good to be read for "example of life
and instruction of manners," yet books that everyone need not read and
know. Let us take this lead and let us ask whether we can--with the
whole accumulated literature of the world as our material--select a
bookful or so of matter, of such exceptional value that it would be well
for all mankind to read it and know it. This will be our equivalent for
the canonical Books. I will return to that in a moment.
And outside this canonical Book or Books, shall we leave all the rest of
literature in a limitless Apocrypha? I am doubtful about that. I would
suggest that we make a second intermediate class between the canonical
books that everyone in our civilization ought to read and the outer
Apocrypha that you may read or not as you choose. This intermediate
class I would call the Great Books of the World. It would not be a part
of our Bible, but it would come next to our Bible. It would not be what
one must read but only what it is desirable the people should read.
Now this canonical literature we are discussing is to be the third vital
part of our modern Bible. I conceive of it as something that would go
into the hands of every man and woman in that coming great civilization
which is the dream of our race. Together with the Book of World History
and the Book of Law and Righteousness and Wisdom that I have sketched
out to you, and another Book of which I shall have something to say
later, this canonical literature will constitute the intellectual and
moral cement of the World Society, that intellectual and moral cement
for the want of which our world falls into political and social
confusion and disaster to-day. Upon such a basis, upon a common body of
ideas, a common moral teaching and the world-wide assimilation of the
same emotional and æsthetic material, it may still be possible to build
up humanity into one co-operative various and understanding community.
Now if we bear this idea of a cementing function firmly in mind, we
shall have a criterion by which to judge what shall be omitted from and
what shall be included in the Books of Literature in this modern Bible
of ours. We shall begin, of course, by levying toll upon the Old and
New Testaments. I do not think I need justify that step. I suppose that
there will be no doubt of the inclusion of many of the Psalms--but I
question if we should include them all--and of a number of splendid
passages from the Prophets. Should we include the Song of Songs? I am
inclined to think that the compilers of a new Bible would hesitate at
that. Should we include the Book of Job? That I think would be a very
difficult question indeed for our compilers. The Book of Job is a very
wonderful and beautiful discussion of the profound problem of evil in
the world. It is a tremendous exercise to read and understand, but is it
universally necessary? I am disposed to think that the Book of Job,
possibly with the illustrations of Blake, would not make a part of our
Canon but would rank among our Great Books. It is a part of a very large
literature of discussion, of which I shall have more to say in a moment.
So too I question if we should make the story of Ruth or the story of
Esther fundamental teaching for our world civilization. Daniel, again, I
imagine relegated to the Apocrypha. But to this I will return later.
The story of the Gospels would, of course, have been incorporated in our
Historical Book, but in addition as part of our first canon, each of the
four gospels--with the possible omission of the genealogies--would have
a place, for the sake of their matchless directness, simplicity and
beauty. They give a picture, they convey an atmosphere of supreme value
to us all, incommunicable in any other form or language. Again there is
a great wealth of material in the Epistles. It is, for example,
inconceivable that such a passage as that of St. Paul's Epistle to the
Corinthians--"Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have
not charity I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal"--the
whole of that wonderful chapter--should ever pass out of the common
heritage of mankind.
So much from the Ancient Bible for our modern Bible, all its inspiration
and beauty and fire. And now what else?
Speaking in English to an English-speaking audience one name comes close
upon the Bible, Shakespear. What are we going to do about Shakespear? If
you were to waylay almost any Englishman or American and put this
project of a modern Bible before him, and then begin your list of
ingredients with the Bible and the whole of Shakespear, he would almost
certainly say, "Yes, Yes."
But would he be right?
On reflection he might perhaps recede and say "Not the whole of
Shakespear," but well, _Hamlet_, _The Tempest_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _A
Midsummer-Night's Dream_. But even these! Are they "generally necessary
to salvation"? We run our minds through the treasures of Shakespear as
we might run our fingers through the contents of a box of very precious
and beautiful jewels--before equipping a youth for battle.
No. These things are for ornament and joy. I doubt if we could have a
single play--a single scene of Shakespear's in our Canon. He goes
altogether into the Great Books, all of him; he joins the aristocracy of
the Apocrypha. And, I believe, nearly all the great plays of the world
would have to join him there. Euripides and Sophocles, Schiller and
Ibsen. Perhaps some speeches and such-like passages might be quoted in
the Canon, but that is all.
Our Canon, remember, is to be the essential cementing stuff of our
community and nothing more. If once we admit merely beautiful and
delightful things, then I see an overwhelming inrush of jewels and
flowers. If we admit _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, then I must insist
that we also admit such lovely nonsense as
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea....
Our Canon I am afraid cannot take in such things, and with the plays we
must banish also all the novels; the greater books of such writers as
Cervantes, Defoe, Dickens, Fielding, Tolstoi, Hardy, Hamsun, that great
succession of writers--they are all good for "example of life and
instruction of manners," and to the Apocrypha they must go. And so it
is that since I would banish _Romeo and Juliet_, I would also banish the
Song of Songs, and since I must put away _Vanity Fair_ and the _Shabby
Genteel Story_, I would also put away _Esther_ and _Ruth_. And I find
myself most reluctant to exclude not any novels written in English, but
one or two great sweeping books by non-English writers. It seems to me
that Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ and Hamsun's _Growth of the Soil_ are
books on an almost Biblical scale, that they deal with life so greatly
as to come nearest to the idea of a universally inspiring and
illuminating literature which underlies the idea of our Canon. If we put
in any whole novels into the Canon I would plead for these. But I will
not plead now even for these. I do not think any novels at all can go
into our modern Bible, as whole works. The possibility of long passages
going in, is of course, quite a different matter.
And passing now from great plays and great novels and romances, we come
to the still more difficult problem of great philosophical and critical
works. Take _Gulliver's Travels_--an intense, dark, stirring criticism
of life and social order--and the _Dialogues of Plato_, full of light
and inspiration. In these latter we might quarry for beautiful passages
for our Canon, but I do not think we could take them in as wholes, and
if we do not take them in as complete books, then I think that Semitic
parallel to these Greek dialogues, The Book of Job, must stand not in
our Canon, but in the Great Book section of our Apocrypha.
And next we have to consider all the great Epics in the world. There
again I am for exclusion. This Bible we are considering must be
universally available. If it is too bulky for universal use it loses its
primary function of a moral cement. We cannot include the _Iliad_, the
Norse Sagas, the _Æneid_ or _Paradise Lost_ in our Canon. Let them swell
the great sack of our Apocrypha, and let the children read them if they
will.
When one glances in this fashion over the accumulated literary resources
of mankind it becomes plain that our canonical books of literature in
this modern Bible of ours can be little more than an Anthology or a
group of Anthologies. Perhaps they might be gathered under separate
heads, as the 'Book of Freedom,' the 'Book of Justice,' the 'Book of
Charity.' And now having done nothing as yet but reject, let me begin to
accept. Let me quote a few samples of the kind of thing that I imagine
would best serve the purpose of our Bible and that should certainly be
included.
Here are words that every American knows by heart already--I would like
every man in the world to know them by heart and to repeat them. It is
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and I will not spare you a word of it:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of
that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final
resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might
live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in
a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot
hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,
have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The
world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to
the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new
birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for
the people, shall not perish from the earth."
And here is something that might perhaps make another short chapter in
the same Book of Freedom--but it deals with Freedom of a different sort:
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of Chance,
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this Place of wrath and tears,
Looms but the Horror of the Shade,
And yet the Menace of the years
Finds and shall find me Unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the Master of my Fate,
I am the Captain of my Soul.
That, as you know, was Henley's, and as I turned up his volume of poems
to copy out that poem I came again on these familiar lines:
The ways of Death are soothing and serene,
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet,
From camp and church, the fireside and the street,
She beckons forth--and strife and song have been.
A summer's night descending cool and green,
And dark on daytime's dust and stress and heat,
The ways of Death are soothing and serene,
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet.
There seems something in that also which I could spare only very
reluctantly from a new Bible in the world. Yet I tender those lines very
doubtfully. For I am not a very cultivated and well-read person, and
note only the things that have struck upon my mind; but I quite
understand that there must be many things of the same sort, but better,
that I have never encountered, or that I have not heard or read under
circumstances that were favourable to their proper appreciation. I would
rather say about what I am quoting in this section, not positively "this
thing," but merely "this sort of thing."
And in the vein of "this sort of thing" let me quote you--again for the
Book of Freedom--a passage from Milton, defending the ancient English
tradition of free speech and free decision and praising London and
England. This London and England of which he boasts have broadened out
as the idea of Jerusalem has broadened out, to world-wide
comprehensions. Let no false modesty blind us to our great tradition;
you and I are still thinking in Milton's city; we continue, however
unworthily, the great inheritance of the world-wide responsibility and
service, of His Englishmen. Here is my passage:
"Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general
instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly
express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and
great period in His Church, even to the reforming of
reformation itself; what does He then but reveal Himself to His
servants, and as His manner is, first to His Englishmen? I say,
as His manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of
His counsels, and are unworthy. Behold now this vast city, a
city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, encompassed and
surrounded with His protection; the shop of war hath not there
more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and
instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth,
than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious
lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas
wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty,
the approaching reformation: others as fast reading, trying all
things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.
"What could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so
prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a
towardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to
make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of
worthies? We reckon more than five months yet to harvest; there
need not be five weeks, had we but eyes to lift up, the fields
are white already. Where there is much desire to learn, there
of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions;
for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under
these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the
earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding,
which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we
rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious
forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of
their religion into their own hands again. A little generous
prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain
of charity might win all these diligencies to join and unite
into one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but
forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences
and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I
doubt not, if some great and worthy stranger should come among
us, wise to discern the mould and temper of a people, and how
to govern it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent
alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings in the
pursuance of truth and freedom, but that he would cry out as
Pyrrhus did, admiring the Roman docility and courage: 'If such
were my Epirots, I would not despair the greatest design that
could be attempted to make a church or kingdom happy.'
"Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and
sectaries, as if, while the temple of the Lord was building,
some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the
cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men, who could not
consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made
in the quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be
built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it
cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in
this world: neither can every piece of the building be of one
form; nay, rather the perfection consists in this, that out of
many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are
not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the graceful
symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure."
But I will not go on turning over the pages of books and reciting prose
and poetry to you. I cannot even begin to remind you of the immense
treasure of noble and ennobling prose and verse that this world has
accumulated in the past three thousand years. Not one soul in ten
thousand that is born into this world even tastes from that store. For
most of mankind now that treasure is as if it had never been. Is it too
much to suggest that we should make some organized attempt to gather up
the quintessence of literature now, and make it accessible to the masses
of our race? Why should we not on a large scale with a certain breadth
and dignity set about compiling the Poetic Books, the Books of
Inspiration for a renewed Bible, for a Bible of Civilization? It seems
to me that such a Book made universally accessible, made a basis of
teaching everywhere could set the key of the whole world's thought.
§ 4 Today
There remains one other element if we are to complete the parallelism of
the old Bible and the new. The Christian Bible ends with a forecast, the
Book of Revelation; the Hebrew Bible ended also with forecasts, the
Prophets. To that the old Bible owed much of its magic power over men's
imaginations and the inspiration it gave them. It was not a dead record,
not an accumulation of things finished and of songs sung. It pointed
steadily and plainly to the Days to Come as the end and explanation of
all that went before. So too our Modern Bible, if it is to hold and rule
the imagination of men, must close I think with a _Book of Forecasts_.
We want to make our world think more than it does about the consequences
of the lives it leads and the political deeds that it does and that it
permits to be done. We want to turn the human imagination round again
towards the future which our lives create. We want a collection and
digest of forecasts and warnings to complete this modern Bible of ours.
Now here I think you will say--and I admit with perfect reason--that I
am floating away from any reasonable possibility at all. How can we have
forecasts and prophecies of things that are happening now? Well, I will
make a clean breast of it, and admit that I am asking for something that
may be impossible. Nevertheless it is something that is very necessary
if men are to remain indeed intelligent co-operating communities. In the
past you will find where there have been orderly and successful
communities the men in them had an idea of a Destiny, of some object,
something that would amount to a criterion and judgment upon their
collective conduct. Well, I believe that we have to get back to
something of that sort.
We have statesmen and politicians who profess to guide our destinies.
Whither are they guiding our destinies?
Surely they have some idea. The great American statesmen and the great
European statesmen are making To-morrow. What is the To-morrow they are
making?
They must have some idea of it. Otherwise they must be imposters. I am
loth to believe them imposters, mere adventurers who have blundered into
positions of power and honour with no idea of what they are doing to the
world. But if they have an idea of what they are doing to the world,
they foresee and intend a Future. That, I take it, is sound reasoning
and the inference is plain.
They ought to write down their ideas of this Future before us. It would
be helpful to all of us. It might be a very helpful exercise for them.
It is, I think, reasonable for Americans to ask the great political
personages of America, the president and so forth, for example: whether
they think the United States will stand alone in twenty-five years'
time as they stand alone now? Or whether they think that there will be a
greater United States--of all America--or of all the world? They must
know their own will about that. And it is equally reasonable to ask the
great political personages of the British Empire: what will Ireland be
in twenty-five years' time? What will India be? There must be a plan, an
intended thing. Otherwise these men have no intentions; otherwise they
must be, in two words, dangerous fools. The sooner we substitute a type
of man with a sufficient foresight and capable of articulate speech in
the matter, the better for our race.
And again every statesman and every politician throughout the world says
that the relations of industrial enterprise to the labour it employs are
unsatisfactory. Yes. But how are those relations going to develop? How
do they mean them to develop?
Are we just drifting into an unknown darkness in all these matters with
blind leaders of our blindness? Or cannot a lot of these things be
figured out by able and intelligent people? I put it to you that they
can. That it is a reasonable and proper thing to ask our statesmen and
politicians: what is going to happen to the world? What sort of better
social order are you making for? What sort of world order are you
creating? Let them open their minds to us, let them put upon permanent
record the significance of all their intrigues and manoeuvres. Then as
they go on we can check their capacity and good faith. We can establish
a control at last that will rule presidents and kings.
Now the answer to these questions for statesmen is what I mean by a
_Book of Forecasts_. Such a book I believe is urgently needed to help
our civilization. It is a book we ought all to possess and read. I know
you will say that such a _Book of Forecasts_ will be at first a
preposterously insufficient book--that every year will show it up and
make it more absurd. I quite agree. The first _Book of Forecasts_ will
be a poor thing. Miserably poor. So poor that people will presently
clamour to have it thoroughly revised.
The revised _Book of Forecasts_ will not be quite so bad. It will have
been tested against realities. It will form the basis of a vast amount
of criticism and discussion.
When again it comes to be revised, it will be much nearer possible
realities.
I put it to you that the psychology, the mentality of a community that
has a _Book of Forecasts_ in hand and under watchful revision will be
altogether steadier and stronger and clearer than that of a community
which lives as we do to-day, mere adventurers, without foresight, in a
world of catastrophies and accidents and unexpected things. We shall be
living again in a plan. Our lives will be shaped to certain defined
ends. We shall fall into place in a great scheme of activities. We shall
recover again some or all of the steadfastness and dignity of the old
religious life.
§ 5 Today
Let me with this _Book of Forecasts_ round off my fantasy. I would
picture to you this modern Bible, perhaps two or three times as bulky as
the old Bible, and consisting first of
The Historical Books with maps and the like;
The Books of Conduct and Wisdom;
The Anthologies of Poetry and Literature; and finally the
Book of Forecasts, taking the place of the Prophets and Revelations.
I would picture this revivified Bible to you as most carefully done and
printed and made accessible to all, the basis of education in every
school, the common platform of all discussion--just as in the past the
old Bible used to be. I would ask you to imagine it translated into
every language, a common material of understanding throughout all the
world.
And furthermore, I imagine something else about this--quite unlike the
old Bible--I imagine all of it periodically revised. The historical
books would need to be revised and brought up to date, there would be
new lights on health and conduct, there would be fresh additions to the
anthologies, and there would be Forecasts that would have to be struck
out because they were realized or because they were shown to be hopeless
or undesirable, and fresh Forecasts would be added to replace them. It
would be a Bible moving forward and changing and gaining with human
experience and human destiny....
Well, that is my dream of a Bible of Civilization. Have I in any way
carried my vision out to you of this little row of four or five volumes
in every house, in every life, throughout the world, holding the lives
and ideas and imaginations of men together in a net of common familiar
phrases and common established hopes?
And is this a mere fantastic talk, or is this a thing that could be done
and that ought to be done?
I do not know how it will appear to you, but to me it seems that this
book I have been talking about, the Bible of to-day's civilization, is
not simply a conceivable possibility, it is a great and urgent need. Our
education is, I think, pointless without it, a shell without a core. Our
social life is aimless without it, we are a crowd without a common
understanding. Only by means of some such unifying instrument, I
believe, can we hope to lift human life out of its present dangerous
drift towards confusion and disaster.
It is, I think therefore, an urgently desirable undertaking.
It is also a very practicable one. The creation of such a Bible, its
printing and its translation, and a propaganda that would carry it into
the homes and schools of most of the world, could I think all be
achieved by a few hundred resolute and capable people at a cost of
thirty or forty million dollars. That is a less sum than that the United
States--in a time when they have no enemy to fear in all the world--are
prepared to spend upon the building of what is for them an entirely
superfluous and extravagant toy, a great navy.
You may, you probably will, differ very widely upon much that I have
here put before you. Let me ask you not to let any of the details of my
sketching set you against the fundamental idea, that old creative idea
of the Bohemian educationist who was the pupil of Bacon and the friend
of Milton, the idea of Komensky, the idea of creating and using a common
book, a book of knowledge and wisdom, as the necessary foundation for
any enduring human unanimity.
VI
THE SCHOOLING OF THE WORLD
And now I am going on to a review of the broad facts of the educational
organization of our present world.
I am myself a very under-educated person. It is a constant trouble to
me. Like seeks like in this world. I propose to ask the question whether
the whole world is not under-educated, and I warn you in advance that I
am going to answer in the affirmative.
I am going to discuss the possibility of raising the general educational
level very considerably, and I am going to consider what such a raising
of the educational level would mean in human life.
I propose to adopt rather a vulgar, business-like tone about all this. I
am going to apply to the human community much the same sort of tests
that a manufacturer applies to his factory. His factory has some
distinctive product, and when he looks into his affairs he tries to find
out whether he gets the utmost quantity of the product, whether he gets
the best possible quality of the product, whether he gets it as
efficiently and inexpensively as possible, and constantly how he can
improve his factory and his processes in all these matters.
Now the human community may be regarded as a concern engaged in the
production of human life. And it may be judged very largely by the
question whether the human life it produces is abundant and full and
intense and beautiful.
Most of the tests that we apply to a state or a city or a period or a
nation resolve themselves, you will find, into these questions:--
What was the life it produced?
What is the life it produces?
Now I will further assume that as yet the community has little or no
control over the raw product, over the life, that is to say, that comes
into it. I admit that from at least the time of Plato onward the
possibility has been discussed of _breeding_ human beings as we do
horses and dogs. There is an enormous amount of what is called eugenic
literature and discussion to-day. But I will set all that sort of thing
aside from our present discussion because I do not think anything of the
kind is practicable at the present time.
Quite apart from any other considerations, one has to remember one
entire difference between the possible breeding of human beings and the
actual breeding of dogs and horses. We breed dogs and horses for
uniformity, for certain very limited specified _points_--speed, scent
and the like. But human beings we should have to breed for variety: we
cannot specify any particular _points_ we want. We want statesmen and
poets and musicians and philosophers and swift men and strong men and
delicate men and brave men. The qualities of one would be the weaknesses
of another.
It is really a false analogy, that between the breeding of men and the
breeding of horses and dogs. In the case of human beings we want much
more subtle and delicate combinations of qualities. For any practical
purposes we do not know what we want nor do we know how to get it. So
let us rule that theme out of our present discussion altogether.
And I also propose to rule out another set of topics from this
discussion--simply because if we don't do so we shall have more matter
than we can handle conveniently in the time at our disposal. I propose
to leave out all questions of health and physical welfare. There is, as
you know, a vast literature now in existence, concerned with the health
and welfare of children before and after birth, concerned with infantile
life, with social conditions and social work directed to the production
of a vigorous population. I am going to assume here that all that sort
of thing is seen to--that it is all right, that somebody is doing that,
that we need not trouble for the present about any of those things.
This leaves us with the mental life only of our community and its
individuals to consider. On that I propose to concentrate this
discussion.
Now the human mind in its opening stages in a civilized community passes
through a process which may best be named as _schooling_. And under
schooling I would include not only the sort of things that we do to a
prospective citizen in the school and the infant school but also
anything in the nature of a school-like lesson that is done by the
mother or nurse or tutor at home, or by playmates and companions
anywhere. Out of this schooling arises the general mental life. It is
the structural ground-stuff of all education and thought.
Now what is this _schooling_ to do--what is it doing to the new human
being?
Let us recall what our own schooling was.
It fell into two pretty clearly defined parts. We learnt reading and
writing, we made a certain study of grammar, the method of language,
perhaps we learnt the beginnings of some other language than our own; we
learnt some arithmetic and perhaps a little geometry and algebra; we did
some drawing. All these things were ways of expression, means of
expressing ourselves, means of comprehending our thoughts in terms of
other people's minds, and of understanding the expressions of others.
That was the basis and substance of our schooling; a training in mental
elucidation and in communication with other minds. But also as our
schooling went on there was something more; we learnt a little history,
some geography, the beginnings of science. This second part of education
was not so much expression as _wisdom_. We learnt what was generally
known of the world about us and of its past. We entered into the common
knowledge and common ideas of the world.
Now, obviously, this _schooling_ is merely a specialization and
expansion of a parental function.
In the primitive ages of our race the parent, and particularly the
mother, out of an instinctive impulse and practical necessity,
restrained and showed and taught, and the child, with an instinctive
imitativeness and docility, obeyed and learnt. And as the primitive
family grew into a tribe, as functions specialized and the range of
knowledge widened, this primitive schooling by the mother was
supplemented and extended by the showing of things by companions and by
the maxims and initiations of old men.
It was only with the development of early civilizations, as the
mysteries of writing and reading began to be important in life, that the
school, _qua_ school, became a thing in itself. And as the community
expanded, the scope of instruction expanded with it. Schooling is, in
fact, and always has been, the expansion and development of the
primitive savage mind, which is still all that we inherit, to adapt it
to the needs of a larger community. It makes out of the savage raw
material which is our basal mental stuff, a citizen. It is a necessary
process of fusion if a civilized community is to keep in being. Without
at least a network of schooled persons, able to communicate its common
ideas and act in intelligent co-operation, no community beyond a mere
family group can ever hold together.
As the human community expands, therefore, the range of schooling must
expand to keep pace with it.
I want to base my inquiry upon that proposition. If it is sound, certain
very interesting conclusions follow.
I have already shown in the preceding discussions that the _range_ of
the modern state has increased at least ten times in the past century,
and that the scale of our community of intercourse has increased
correspondingly. I want now to ask if there has been any corresponding
enlargement of the scope of the schooling--either of the community as a
whole or of any special governing classes in the community--to keep pace
with this tremendous extension of range. I am going to argue that there
has not been such an enlargement, and that a large factor in our present
troubles is the failure of education and educational method to keep pace
with the new demands made upon them.
Now I will first ask what would one like one's son or daughter to get at
school to make him or her a full living citizen of this modern world.
And at first I will not take into consideration the question of expense
or any such practical difficulties. I will suppose that for the
education of this fortunate young citizen whose case we are considering
we have limitless means, the best possible tutors, the best apparatus
and absolutely the most favourable conditions. The only limits to the
teaching of this young citizen are his or her own limitations. We
suppose a pupil of fair average intelligence only.
Now first we shall want our pupil to understand, speak, read and write
the mother tongue well. To do this thoroughly in English involves a
fairly sound knowledge of Latin grammar and at least some slight
knowledge of the elements of Greek. Latin and Greek, which are
disappearing as distinct and separate subjects from many school
curricula, are returning as necessary parts of the English course.
But nowadays a full life is not to be lived with a single language. The
world becomes polyglot. Even if we do not want to live among foreigners,
we want to read their books and newspapers and understand and follow
their thought. Few of us there are who would not gladly read and speak
several more languages if we had the chance of doing so. I would
therefore set down as a desirable part of this ideal education we are
planning, two or three other languages in addition to the mother tongue
learnt early and thoroughly. These additional languages can be acquired
easily if they are learnt in the right way. The easiest way to learn a
language is to learn it when you are quite young. Many prosperous people
in Europe nowadays contrive to bring up their children with two or three
foreign languages, by employing foreign nurses and nursery governesses
who never speak to the children except in the foreign languages. In
many cases what is known as the alternate week system prevails. The
governess is Swiss and for one week she talks nothing but French and for
another nothing but German. In this way the children at the age of eight
or nine can be made to talk all three languages with a perfect accent
and an easy idiom.
Now, if this can be done for some children it could be done for all
children--provided we could find the nurses and governesses or some
equivalent for the nurses and governesses, and if we can organize the
business efficiently. That point I will defer. I note here simply that
the thing is possible, if not practicable.
Children, however, who have made this much start with languages are
unable, in England and America at least, to go on properly with the
learning of languages when they pass into a school. Our schools are so
badly organized that it is rare to find even French well taught, and
there is rarely any teaching at all of modern languages other than
French or German. Often the two foreign languages are taught by
different teachers employing different methods, and both employing a
different grammatical nomenclature from that used in studying the mother
tongue. The classes are encumbered with belated beginners. The child who
has got languages from its governess, therefore, marks time--that is to
say, wastes time in these subjects at school. The child well grounded
in some foreign tongue is often a source of irritation to the teacher,
and gets into trouble because it uses idiomatic expressions with which
the teacher is unfamiliar, or seems to reflect upon the teacher's
accent. These are the limitations of the school and not the limitations
of the pupil. _Given facilities_, there is no reason why there should
not be a rapid expansion of the language syllabus at thirteen or
fourteen, and why language generally should not be studied. Some
Slavonic language could be taken up--Russian or Czech--and a beginning
made with some non-Aryan tongue--Arabic, for example.
The object of language teaching in a civilized state is twofold: to give
a thorough, intimate, usable knowledge of the mother tongue and of
certain key languages. But if teaching were systematic and no time were
wasted, if schooling joined on and were continuous instead of being
catastrophically disconnected, there is another side of language
teaching altogether--now entirely disregarded--and that is the
acquisition _in skeleton_ of quite a number of languages clustering
round the key languages. If at the end of his schooling a boy knows
English, French and German very well and nothing more, he is still a
helpless foreigner in relation to large parts of the world. But if, in
addition, he has an outline knowledge of Russian and Arabic or Turkish
or Hindustani--it need only be a quite bare outline--and if he has had a
term or so of Spanish in relation to his French, or Swedish in relation
to his German, then he has the key in his hands for almost any language
he may want. If he has not the language in his head, he has it very
conveniently on call--he needs but a sensible conversation dictionary
and in a little while he can possess himself of it.
You may think this a large order; you may think I am demanding
linguistic prodigies; but remember that I am upon my own ground here; I
am a trained teacher and a student of pedagogic science, and I am a
watchful parent; I know how time and opportunity are wasted in school,
and particularly in language teaching. Languages are not things that
exist in water-tight compartments; each one illuminates the other
and--unless it is taught with stupefying stupidity--leads on to others.
A child can acquire the polyglot habit almost unawares. This widening
grasp of languages is or was within the capacity of nearly everyone born
into the world--given the facilities.
I ask you to note that qualification--"given the facilities."
And now let us turn from the language side to the rest of schooling. A
second main division of our schooling was mathematical instruction of a
sort. It fell into the three more or less isolated subjects of
arithmetic, algebra and Euclid. We carried on in these closed cells what
was, I now perceive, a needlessly laborious and needlessly muddled
struggle to comprehend quantity, series and form.
In all these matters, looking back upon what I was taught, comparing it
with what I now know, and comparing my mind with the minds of more
fortunate individuals, I cannot resist the persuasion that I was very
badly done indeed in this section. And it is small consolation to me to
note that most people's minds seem to be no better done than mine.
My arithmetic, for instance, is mediocre. It is pervaded by inaccuracy.
You may say that this is probably want of aptitude. Partly, no doubt,
but not altogether. What is want of aptitude? Bad as my arithmetic is
now it is not so bad as it was when I left school. When I was about
twenty I held a sort of inquest upon it and found out a number of
things. I found that I had been allowed to acquire certain bad habits
and besetting sins--most people do. For instance, when I ran up a column
of figures to add them I would pass from nine to seven quite surely and
say sixteen; but if I went from seven to nine I had a vicious
disposition to make it eighteen. Endless additions went wrong through
that one error. I had fumbled into this vice and--this is my point--my
school had no apparatus, and no system of checks, to discover that this
had occurred. I used to get my addition wrong and I used to be
punished--stupidly--by keeping me in from exercise. Time after time this
happened; there was no investigation and no improvement. Nobody ever put
me through a series of test sums that would have analysed my errors and
discovered these besetting sins of mine that led to my inaccurate
arithmetic.
And another thing that made my arithmetic wrong was a defect in
eyesight. My two eyes haven't quite the same focal length and this often
puts me out of the straight with a column of figures. But there was
nothing in my school to discover that, and my school never did discover
it.
My geometrical faculties are also very poor and undeveloped. Euclid's
elements, indeed, I have always found simple and straightforward, but
when it comes to anything in solid geometry--the intersection of a
sphere by a cone, let us say, or something of that sort--I am hopelessly
at sea. Deep-seated habits of faulting and fogging, which were actually
developed by my schooling, prevent my forming any conception of the
surfaces involved.
Here again, just as with the language teaching, hardly any of us are
really fully educated. We suffer, nearly all of us, from a lack of
quantitative grasp and from an imperfect grasp of form. Few of us have
acquired such a grasp. Few of us ever made a proper use of models, and
nearly all of us have miserably trained hands. _Given proper
facilities_--and here again I ask you to note that proviso--given proper
educational facilities, most of us would not only be able to talk with
most people in the world but we should also have a conception of form
and quantity far more subtle than that possessed by any but a few
mathematicians and mechanical geniuses to-day.
Let me now come to a third main division of what we call _schooling_. In
our schooling there was an attempt to give us a view of the world about
us and a view of our place in it, under the headings of History and
Geography.
It would be impossible to imagine a feebler attempt. The History and
Geography I had was perhaps, in one respect, the next best thing to a
good course. It was so thoroughly and hopelessly bad that it left me
with a vivid sense of ignorance. I read, therefore, with great avidity
during my adolescence.
In English schools now I doubt if the teaching of history is much better
than it was in my time, but geography has grown and improved--largely
through the vigorous initiative of Professor Huxley, who replaced the
old dreary topography by a vivid description of the world and mingled
with it a sort of _general elementary science_ under the name of
Physiography. This subject, with the addition of some elementary Biology
and Physiology does now serve to give many young people in Great Britain
something like a general view of the world as a whole. We need now to
make a parallel push with the teaching of history. Upon this matter of
the teaching of history I am a fanatic. I cannot think of an education
as even half done until there has been a fairly sound review of the
whole of the known past, from the beginnings of the geological record
up to our own time. Until that is done, the pupil has not been _placed_
in the world. He is incapable of understanding his relationship to and
his rôle in the scheme of things. He is, whatever else he may have
learnt, essentially an ignorant person.
And now let me recapitulate these demands I have made upon the process
of schooling--this process of teaching that begins in the nursery and
ends about the age of sixteen or seventeen. I have asked that it should
involve a practical mastery of three or four languages, including the
mother tongue, and that perhaps four or five other additional languages
shall have been studied, so to speak, in skeleton. I have added
mathematics carried much higher and farther than most of our schools do
to-day. I have demanded a sound knowledge of universal history, a
knowledge of general physical and general biological science, and I have
thrown in, with scarcely a word of apology, a good training of the eyes
and hands in drawing and manual work.
So far as the pupil goes, I submit this is an entirely practicable
proposal. It can be done, I am convinced, with any ordinary pupil of
average all-round ability, given--what is now almost universally
wanting--the proper educational facilities. And now I will go on to
examine the question of why these facilities are wanting. I want to ask
why a large class, if not the whole of our population, is not educated
up to the level of wide understanding and fully developed capacity such
a schooling as I have sketched out implies.
Well, the first fact obvious to every parent who has ever enquired
closely into the educational outlook of his offspring, the first fact we
have to face is this: there are not enough properly equipped schools
and, still more, not enough good teachers, to do the job. It is
proclaiming no very profound secret to declare that there is hardly such
a thing in the world to-day as a fully equipped school, that is to say a
school having all the possible material and apparatus and staffed
sufficiently with a bright and able teacher, a really live and alert
educationist, in every necessary subject, such as would be needed to
give this ideal education. That is the great primary obstacle, that is
the core of our present problem. We cannot get our modern community
educated to anything like its full possibilities as yet because we have
neither the teachers nor the schools.
Now is this a final limitation?
For a moment I will leave the question of the possibilities of more and
better equipped schools on one side. I will deal with the supply of
teachers. At present we do not even attempt to get good teachers; we do
not offer any approach to a tolerable life for an ordinary teacher; we
compel them to lead mean and restricted lives; we underpay them
shockingly; we do not deserve nearly such good teachers as we get. But
even supposing we were to offer reasonable wages for teachers; an
average all-round wage of £1,000 a year or so, and respect and dignity;
it does not follow that we should get as many as we should need--using
the methods that are in use to-day--to provide this ideal schooling for
most of our population, or, indeed, for any large section of our
population.
You will note a new proviso creeping in at this point--"using the
methods that are used to-day."
Because you must remember it is not simply a matter of payment that
makes the teacher. Teachers are born and not made. Good teaching
requires a peculiar temperament and distinctive aptitudes. I doubt very
much, even if you could secure the services of every human being who had
the natural gifts needed in a good teacher, if you could disregard every
question of cost and payment, I doubt whether even then you would
command the services of more than one passable teacher for a hundred
children and of more than one really inspired and inspiring teacher for
five hundred children. No doubt you could get _a sort of teacher_ for
every score or even for every dozen children, a commonplace person who
could be trained to do a few simple educational things, but I am
speaking now of good teachers who have the mental subtlety, the sympathy
and the devotion necessary for efficient teaching by the individualistic
methods in use to-day. And since, _using the methods that are used
to-day_, you can only hope to secure fully satisfactory results with one
teacher to every score of pupils, or fewer, and since it is unlikely we
shall ever be able to command the services of more than a tithe of the
people who could teach well, it seems that we come up here against an
insurmountable obstacle to an educated population.
Now I want to press home the idea of that difficulty. I am an old and
seasoned educationist; most of my earliest writings are concealed in the
anonymity of the London educational papers of a quarter of a century
ago, and my knowledge of educational literature is fairly extensive. I
know in particular the literature of educational reform. And I do not
recall that I have ever encountered any recognition of this fundamental
difficulty in the way of educational development. The literature of
educational reform is always assuming parents of limitless intelligence,
sympathy and means, employing teachers of limitless energy and capacity.
And that to an extreme degree is what we haven't got and what we can
never hope to have.
Educational reformers seem always to be looking at education from the
point of view of the individual scholastic enterprise and of the
individual pupil, and hardly ever from the point of view of a public
task dealing with the community as a whole. For all practical purposes
this makes waste paper of a considerable proportion of educational
literature. This literature, the reader will find, is pervaded by
certain fixed ideas. There is a sort of standing objection to any
_machining_ of education. There is, we are constantly told, to be no
syllabus of instruction, no examinations and no controls, no prescribed
text-books or diagrams because these things limit the genius of the
teacher. And this goes on with a blissful invincible disregard of the
fact that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand the
genius of the teacher isn't and can't be there. And also of the fact
that this affair of elementary education has in its essentials been done
over and over and over again for thousands of millions of times. There
ought to be as much scope left for genius and originality in ordinary
teaching as there is for genius and originality in a hen laying an
ordinary egg.
These educational idealists are always disregarding the fundamental
problem of educational organization altogether, the problem of economy,
economy of the most precious thing of all, _teaching power_. It is the
problem of stretching the competent teacher over the maximum number of
pupils, and that can be done only by the same methods of economy that
are practised in every other large-scale production--by the
standardization of everything that can be standardized, and by the use
of every possible time and labour-saving device and every possible
replacement of human effort, not in order to dispense with originality
and initiative but in order to conserve them for application at their
points of maximum efficiency.
I have said that a disregard of the possibilities of wide organization
and its associated economy of effort is characteristic of most
"advanced" educational literature. You will, if you will examine them,
find that disregard working out to its natural consequences in what are
called the "advanced" schools that appeal to educationally anxious
parents nowadays. You will find that these places, often very
picturesque and pleasing-looking places, are rarely prosperous enough to
maintain more than one or two good teachers. The rest of the staff
shrinks from scrutiny. You will find these schools adorned with
attractive diagrams drawn by the teachers, and strikingly original
models and apparatus made by the teachers, and if you look closely into
the matter or consult an intelligent pupil, you will find there are
never enough diagrams and apparatus to see a course through. If you
press that matter you will find that they haven't had time to make them
so far. And they will never get so far. No school, however rich and
prosperous and however enthusiastically run, can hope to make for itself
all the plant and diagrams and apparatus needed for a fully efficient
modern education such as we have sketched out. As well might a busy man
hope to array himself, by his own efforts, with hats, suits and boots
made by himself out of wool and raw hides.
But now I think you will begin to see what I am driving at. It is this:
that if the general level of education is to be raised in our modern
community, and if that better education is to be spread over most of our
community, it is necessary to reorganize education in the world upon
entirely bolder, more efficient, and more economical lines. We are
inexorably limited as to the number of good teachers we can get into the
educational organization, and we are limited as inexorably as to the
quality of the rank and file of our teaching profession; but we are not
limited in the equipment and systematic organization of teaching methods
and apparatus. That is what I want particularly to enlarge upon now.
Think of the ordinary schoolhouse--a mere empty brick building with a
few hat-pegs, a stale map or so, half a dozen plaster casts, a few
hundred tattered books, a blackboard, and some broken chemical
apparatus: think of it as the dingy insufficiency it is! In such a place
the best teacher must needs waste three-fourths of his energies. In such
a place staff and pupils meet chiefly to waste each other's time. This
is the first and principal point at which we can stanch the wastage of
teaching energy that now goes on. Everywhere about the world nowadays,
the schoolhouse is set up and equipped by a private person or a local
authority in more or less complete ignorance of educational
possibilities, in more or less complete disconnectedness, without any of
the help or any of the economy that comes from a centralized mass
production. Let us now consider what we might have in the place of this
typical schoolhouse of to-day.
Let me first suggest that every school should have a complete library
of very full and explicit lesson notes, properly sorted and classified.
All the ordinary subjects in schools have been taught over and over
again millions and millions of times. Few people, I think, realize that,
and fewer still realize the reasonable consequences of that. Human minds
are very much the same everywhere, and the best way of teaching every
ordinary school subject, the best possible lesson and the best possible
succession of lessons, ought to have been worked out to the last point,
and the courses ought to have been stereotyped long ago. Yet if you go
into any school to-day, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred you will
find an inexpert and ill-prepared young teacher giving a clumsy,
vamped-up lesson as though it had never been given before. He or she
will have no proper notes and no proper diagrams, and a halting and
faulty discourse will be eked out by feeble scratchings with chalk on a
blackboard, by querulous questioning of the pupils, and irrelevancies.
The thing is preposterous.
And linked up with this complete equipment of proper lesson notes upon
which the teacher will give the lessons, there should be a thing which
does not exist at present in any school and which ought to exist in
every school, a collection of some hundreds of thousands of pictures and
diagrams, properly and compactly filed; a copious supply of maps, views
of scenery, pictures of towns, and so forth for teaching geography,
diagrams and tables for scientific subjects, and so on and so on. You
must remember that if the schools of the world were thought of as a
whole and dealt with as a whole, these things could be produced
wholesale at a cost out of comparison cheaper than they are made to-day.
There is no reason whatever why school equipment should not be a world
market. A lesson upon the geography of Sweden needs precisely the same
maps, the same pictures of scenery, types of people, animals, cities,
and so forth, whether that lesson is given in China or Peru or Morocco
or London. There is no reason why these pictures and maps should not be
printed from the same blocks and distributed from the same centre for
the schools of all mankind. If the government of any large country had
the vigour and intelligence to go right ahead and manufacture a proper
equipment of notes and diagrams for its own use in all its own schools,
it would probably be able to recoup itself for most of the outlay by
dominating the map and diagram markets of the rest of the world.
And next to this full and manageable collection of pictures and
diagrams, which the teacher would whip out, with the appropriate notes,
five minutes before his lesson began, the modern school would have quite
a considerable number of gramophones. These would be used not only to
supply music for drill and so forth, and for the analytical study of
music, but for the language teaching. Instead of the teacher having to
pretend, as he usually pretends now, to a complete knowledge of the
foreign language he can really only smatter, he would become the honest
assistant of the real teaching instrument--the gramophone. Here, again,
it is a case for big methods or none--a case for mass production. A mass
production of gramophone records for language teaching throughout the
world would so reduce the cost that every school could quite easily be
equipped with a big repertory of language records. For the first year of
any language study, at any rate, the work would go always to the
accompaniment of the proper accent and intonation. And all over the
world each language would be taught with the same accent and quantities
and idioms--a very desirable thing indeed.
And now let me pass on to another requirement for an efficient school
that our educational organization has still to discover--the method of
using the cinematograph. I ask for half a dozen projectors or so in
every school, and for a well-stocked storehouse of films. The
possibilities of certain branches of teaching have been altogether
revolutionized by the cinematograph. In nearly every school nowadays you
will find a lot of more or less worn and damaged scientific apparatus
which is supposed to be used for demonstrating the elementary facts of
chemistry, physics and the like. There is a belief that the science
teachers--and they do their best with the time and skill and material at
their disposal--rig up experimental displays of the more illuminating
experimental facts with this damaged litter. Many of us can recall the
realities of the sort of demonstration I mean. The performance took two
or three hours to prepare, an hour to deliver and an hour or so to clear
away; it was difficult to follow, impossible to repeat, it usually went
wrong, and almost invariably the teacher lost his temper. These
practical demonstrations occurred usually in the opening enthusiasm of
the term. As the weeks wore on, the pretence of practical teaching was
quietly dropped, and we crammed our science out of the text-book.
Now that is the sort of thing that still goes on. But it ought to be
entirely out of date. All that scientific bric-a-brac in the cupboard
had far better be thrown away. All the demonstration experiments that
science teachers will require in the future can be performed once for
all--before a cinematograph. They can be done _finally_; they need never
be done again. You can get the best and most dexterous teacher in the
world--he can do what has to be done with the best apparatus, in the
best light; anything that is very minute or subtle you can magnify or
repeat from another point of view; anything that is intricate you can
record with extreme slowness; you can show the facts a mile off or six
inches off, and all that your actual class teacher need do now is to
spend five minutes on getting out the films he wants, ten minutes in
reading over the corresponding lecture notes, and then he can run the
film, give the lesson, question his class upon it, note what they miss
and how they take it, run the film again for a second scrutiny, and get
out for the subsequent study of the class the ample supply of diagrams
and pictures needed to fix the lesson. Can there be any comparison
between the educational efficiency of the two methods?
So I put it to you, that it is possible now to make--and that the world
needs badly that we should make--a new sort of school, a standardized
school, a school richly equipped with modern apparatus and economizing
the labour of teaching to an extent at present undreamt of, in which,
all over the world, the same stereotyped lessons, leading the youth of
the whole world through a parallel course of schooling, can be
delivered.
I know that in putting this before you I challenge some of the most
popular affectations of cultivated people. I know that many people will
be already writhing with a genteel horror at the idea of the same lesson
being given in identical terms to everybody in turn throughout the
world. It sounds monotonous. It will rob the world of variety--and so on
and so on. But indeed it will not be monotonous at all. That lesson will
be new and fresh and good to every pupil who receives it. And remember
it is by our hypothesis the best possible form and arrangement of that
lesson. It is to take the place of a sham lesson or no lesson at all.
There is an eternal freshness in learning as in all the other main
things in life. It will be no more monotonous than having one's seventh
birthday or falling in love for the first time.
And as for variety, I for one do not care how soon every possible
variety of ignorance and misconception is banished from the world. The
sun shines on the whole world and it is the same sun. I have still to be
persuaded that our planet would be more various and interesting if it
were lit by two or three thousand uncertain, spasmodic and differently
coloured searchlights directed upon it from every direction. I am
pleading for a clear white light of education that shall go like the sun
round the whole world.
You see that in all this I am driving at--what shall I call
it?--syndicated schools, syndicated lesson notes, and, so far as
equipment goes, mass production. I want to see the sort of thing
happening to schools that has already happened to many sorts of retail
shops. In the place of little ill-equipped schools, each run by its own
teacher and buying its own books and diagrams and material and so forth
in small quantities at high prices, I want to see a great central
organization, employing teachers of genius, working in consultation and
co-operation and producing lesson notes, diagrams, films, phonograph
records, cheaply, abundantly, on a big scale for a nation, or a group of
nations, or, if you like, for all the world, just as America produces
watches and alarum clocks and cheap automobiles for all the world. And I
want to see the schools of the world being run, so far as the
intellectual training goes, not by local committees but by that _central
organization_.
It is only by this reorganization of schooling upon the lines of big
production that we can hope to get a civilized community in the world at
an educational level very markedly higher than the existing educational
level.
But if we could so economize teaching energy--if we made our really
great teachers, by the use of modern appliances, teachers not of
handfuls but of millions; if we insisted upon a universal application of
the best and most effective methods of teaching, just as we insist upon
the best and most effective methods of street traction and town
lighting--then I believe it would be possible to build the civilization
of the years to come on a foundation of mental preparation incomparably
sounder and higher than anything we know of to-day.
VII
COLLEGE, NEWSPAPER AND BOOK
And now let us go on to the next stages of education.
The schooling process is a natural phase in human development--it is our
elaboration of the natural learning of boyhood and girlhood and of
adolescence. There was schooling before schools; there was schooling
before humanity. I have watched a cat schooling her kittens. Schooling
is a part of being young. And we grow up. So there comes a time when
schooling is over, when the process of equipment gives place to an
increasing share in the activities and decisions of adult life.
Nevertheless for us education must still go on.
I suppose that the savage or the barbarian or the peasant in any part of
the world or the uneducated man anywhere would laugh if you told him
that the adult must still learn. But in our modern world--I mean the
more or less civilized world of the last twenty-five centuries or
so--there has grown up a new idea--new, I mean, in the sense that it
runs counter to the life scheme of primitive humanity and of most other
living things--and that is _the idea that one can go on learning right
up to the end of life_. It marks off modern man from all animals, that
in his adult life he can display a sense that there remains something
still to be investigated and wisdom still to be acquired.
I do not know enough history to tell you with any confidence when adult
men, instead of just going about the business of life after they had
grown up, continued to devote themselves to learning, to a deliberate
prolongation of what is for all other animals an adolescent phase. But
by the time of Buddha in India and Confucius in China and the schools of
the philosophers in the Greek world the thing was in full progress. That
was twenty-six centuries ago or more.
Something of the sort may have been going on in the temples of Egypt or
Samaria a score of centuries before. I do not know. You must ask some
such great authority as Professor Breasted about that. It may be fifty
or a hundred centuries since men, although they were fully grown up,
still went on trying to learn.
The idea of adult learning has spread ever since. To-day I suppose most
educated people would agree that so long as we live we learn and ought
to learn--that we ought to develop our ideas and enlarge, correct and
change our ideas.
But even to-day you will find people who have not yet acquired this
view. You will find even teachers and doctors and business men who are
persuaded that they had learnt all that there was to learn by
twenty-five or thirty. It is only quite recently that this idea has
passed beyond a special class and pervaded the world generally--the idea
of everyone being a life-long student and of the whole world becoming,
as it were, a university for those who have passed beyond the schooling
stage.
It has spread recently because in recent years the world has changed so
rapidly that the idea of settling down for life has passed out of our
minds, has given place to a new realization of the need of continuous
adaptation to the very end of our days. It is no good settling down in a
world that, on its part, refuses to do anything of the sort.
But hitherto, before these new ideas began to spread in our community,
the mass of men and women definitely _settled down_. At twelve, or
fifteen, or sixteen, or twenty it was decided that they should stop
learning. It has only been a rare and exceptional class hitherto that
has gone on learning throughout life. The scene and field of that
learning hitherto has been, in our Western communities, the University.
Essentially the University is and has been an organization of adult
learning as distinguished from preparatory and adolescent learning.
But between the phase of schooling and the phase of adult learning there
is an intermediate stage.
In Scotland and America that is distinguished and thought of clearly as
the _college stage_. But in England, where we do not think so clearly,
this college stage is mixed up with and done partly at school and partly
in the University. It is not marked off so definitely from the stage of
general preparation that precedes it or from the stage of free
intellectual enterprise that follows it.
Now what should college give the young citizen, male or female, upon the
foundation of schooling we have already sketched out? In practice we
find a good deal of technical study comes into the college stage. The
budding lawyer begins to read law, the doctor starts his professional
studies, the future engineer becomes technical, and the young merchant
sets to work, or should do, to study the great movements of commerce and
business method and organization.
As the college stage of those who do not, as a matter of fact, go to
college, we have now in every civilized country the evening continuation
school, the evening technical school and the works school.
But important as these things are from the point of view of service,
they are not the _soul_--not the real meaning of the college stage.
The soul of the college stage, the most important value about it, is
that in it is a sort of preparatory pause and inspection of the whole
arena of life. It is the educational concomitant of the stage of
adolescence.
The young man and the young woman begin to think for themselves, and the
college education is essentially the supply of stimulus and material
for that process.
It was in the college stage that most of us made out our religion and
made it real for ourselves. It was then we really took hold of social
and political ideas, when we became alive to literature and art, when we
began the delightful and distressful enterprise of finding ourselves.
And I think most of us will agree when we look back that the most real
thing in our college life was not the lecturing and the lessons--very
much of that stuff could very well have been done in the schooling
stage--but the arguments of the debating society, the discussions that
broke out in the classroom or laboratory, the talks in one's rooms about
God and religion, about the state and freedom, about art, about every
possible and impossible social relationship.
Now in addition to that I had something else in my own college
course--something of the same sort of thing but better.
I have spoken of myself as under-educated. My schooling was shocking
but, as a blessed compensation, my college stage was rather
exceptionally good. My schooling ended when I was thirteen. My father,
who was a professional cricketer, was smashed up by an accident, and I
had three horrible years in employment in shops. Then my luck changed
and I found myself under one of the very greatest teachers of his time,
Professor Huxley. I worked at the Royal College of Science in London
for one year under him in his great course in zoology, and for a year
and a half under a very good but rather uninspiring teacher, Professor
Judd, the geologist. I did also physics and astronomy. Altogether I had
three full years of science study. And the teaching of biology at that
time, as Huxley had planned it, was a continuing, systematic,
illuminating study of life, of the forms and appearances of life, of the
way of life, of the interplay of life, of the past of life and the
present prospect of life. It was a tremendous training in the sifting of
evidence and the examination of appearances.
Every man is likely to be biassed, I suppose, in favour of his own
educational course. Yet it seems to me that those three years of work
were educational--that they gave a vision of the universe as a whole and
a discipline and a power such as no other course, no classical or
mathematical course I have ever had a chance of testing, could do.
I am so far a believer in a biological backbone for the college phase of
education that I have secured it for my sons and I have done all I can
to extend it in England. Nevertheless, important as that formal college
work was to me, it still seems to me that the informal part of our
college life--the talk, the debates, the discussion, the scampering
about London to attend great political meetings, to hear William Morris
on Socialism, Auberon Herbert on Individualism, Gladstone on Home Rule,
or Bradlaugh on Atheism--for those were the lights of my remote student
days--was about equally important.
If schooling is a training in expression and communication, college is
essentially the establishment of broad convictions. And in order that
they may be established firmly and clearly, it is necessary that the
developing young man or woman should hear all possible views and see the
medal of truth not only from the obverse but from the reverse side.
Now here again I want to put the same sort of questions I have put about
schooling.
Is the college stage of our present educational system anywhere near its
maximum possible efficiency? And could it not be extended from its
present limited range until it reached practically the whole adolescent
community?
Let me deal with the first of these questions first.
Could we not do much more than we do to make the broad issues of various
current questions plain and accessible to our students in the college
stage?
For example, there is a vast discussion afoot upon the questions that
centre upon Property, its rights and its limitations. There is a great
literature of Collectivist Socialism and Guild Socialism and Communism.
About these things our young people must know. They are very urgent
questions; our sons and daughters will have to begin to deal with them
from the moment they leave college. Upon them they must form working
opinions, and they must know not only what they themselves believe but,
if our public affairs are not to degenerate into the squalid, obstinate,
hopeless conflicts of prejudiced adherents, they must know also what is
believed by other people whose convictions are different from theirs.
You may want to hush these matters up. Many elderly people do. You will
fail.
All our intelligent students will insist upon learning what they can of
these discussions and forming opinions for themselves. And if the
college will not give them the representative books, a fair statement of
the facts and views, and some guidance through the maze of these
questions, it means merely that they will get a few books in a defiant
or underhand way and form one-sided and impassioned opinions.
Another great set of questions upon which the adolescent want to judge
for themselves, and ought to judge for themselves, are the religious
questions.
And a third group are those that determine the principles of sexual
conduct.
I know that in all these matters, on both sides of the Atlantic, a great
battle rages between dogma and concealment on the one hand and open
ventilation on the other.
Upon the issue I have no doubt. I find it hard even to imagine the case
for the former side.
So long as _schooling_ goes on, the youngster is immature, needs to be
protected, is not called upon for judgments and initiatives, and may
well be kept under mental limitations. I do not care very much how you
censor or select the reading and talking and thinking of the schoolboy
or schoolgirl. But it seems to me that with adolescence comes the right
to knowledge and the right of judgment. And that it is the _task and
duty_ of the college to give matters of opinion in the solid--to let the
student walk round and see them from every side.
Now how is this to be done?
I suggest that to begin with we open wide our colleges to propaganda of
every sort. There is still a general tendency in universities on both
sides of the Atlantic to treat propaganda as infection. For the
adolescent it is not--it is a stimulating drug.
Let me instance my own case. I am a man of Protestant origins and with a
Protestant habit of mind. But it is a matter of great regret to me that
there is no good Roman Catholic propaganda available for my sons in
their college life. I would like to have the old Mother Church giving my
boys an account of herself and of the part she has played in the history
of the world, telling them what she stands for and claims to be, giving
her own account of the Mass. These things are interwoven with our past;
they are part of us. I do not like them to go into a church and stare
like foreigners and strangers at the altar.
And side by side with that Catholic propaganda I would like them to hear
an interpretation of religious origins and church history by some
non-catholic or sceptical ethnologist. He, too, should be free to tell
his story and drive his conclusions home.
But you will find most colleges and most college societies bar religious
instruction and discussion. What do they think they are training? Some
sort of genteel recluse--or men and women?
So, too, with the discussion of Bolshevism. I do not know how things are
in America but in England there has been a ridiculous attempt to
suppress Bolshevik propaganda. I have seen a lot of Bolshevik propaganda
and it is not very convincing stuff. But by suppressing it, by police
seizures of books and papers and the like, it has been invested with a
quality of romantic mystery and enormous significance. Our boys and
girls, especially the brighter and more imaginative, naturally enough
think it must be tremendous stuff to agitate the authorities in this
fashion.
At our universities, moreover, the more loutish types of student have
been incited to attack and smash up the youths suspected of such
reading. This gives it the glamour of high intellectual quality.
The result is that every youngster in the British colleges with a spark
of mental enterprise and self-respect is anxious to be convinced of
Bolshevik doctrine. He believes in Lenin--because he has been prevented
from reading him. Sober collectivists like myself haven't a chance with
him.
But you see my conception of the college course? Its backbone should be
the study of biology and its substance should be the threshing out of
the burning questions of our day.
You may object to this that I am proposing the final rejection of that
discipline in classical philosophy which is still claimed as the highest
form of college education in the world----the sort of course that the
men take in what is called _Greats_ at Oxford. You will accuse me of
wanting to bury and forget Aristotle and Plato, Heraclitus and
Lucretius, and so forth and so on.
But I don't want to do that--_so far as their thought is still alive_.
So far as their thought is still alive these men will come into the
discussion of living questions now. If they are Ancients and dead then
let them be buried and left to the archæological excavator. If they are
still Moderns and alive, I defy you to bury them if you are discussing
living questions in a full and honest way. But don't go hunting after
them, there are still modern Immortals in the darkness of a forgotten
language. Don't make a superstition of them. Let them come hunting after
you. Either they are unavoidable if your living questions are fully
discussed, or they are irrelevant and they do not matter. That there is
a wisdom and beauty in the classics which is incommunicable in any
modern language, which obviously neither ennobles nor empowers, but
which is nevertheless supremely precious, is a kind of nonsense dear to
the second-rate classical don, but it has nothing endearing about it
for any other human beings. I will not bother you further with that sort
of affectation here.
And this college course I have sketched should, in the modern state,
pass insensibly into adult mental activities.
Concurrently with it there will be going on, as I have said, a man's
special technical training. He will be preparing himself for a life of
industrialism, commerce, engineering, agriculture, medicine,
administration, education or what not. And as with the man, so with the
woman. That, too, is a process which in this changing new world of ours
can never be completed. Neither of these college activities will ever
really leave off. All through his life a man or woman should be
confirming, fixing or modifying his or her general opinions; and all the
time his or her technical knowledge and power should be consciously
increased.
And now let me come to the second problem we opened up in connection
with college education--the problem of its extension.
Can we extend it over most or all of a modern population?
I don't think we can, if we are to see it in terms of college buildings,
class rooms, tutors, professors and the like. Here again, just as in the
case of schooling, we have to raise the neglected problem--neglected so
far as education goes--of economy of effort; and we have to look once
more at the new facilities that our educational institutions have so
far refused to utilize. Our European colleges and universities have a
long and honourable tradition that again owes much to the educational
methods of the Roman Empire and the Hellenic world. This tradition was
already highly developed before the days of printing from movable type,
and long before the days when maps or illustrations were printed. The
higher education, therefore, was still, as it was in the Stone Age,
largely vocal. And the absence of paper and so forth, rendering
notebooks costly and rare, made a large amount of memorizing necessary.
For that reason the mediæval university teacher was always dividing his
subject into firstly and secondly and fourthly and sixthly and so on, so
that the student could afterwards tick off and reproduce the points on
his fingers--a sort of thumb and finger method of thought--still to be
found in perfection in the discourses of that eminent Catholic
apologist, Mr. Hilaire Belloc. It is a method that destroys all sense of
proportion between the headings; main considerations and secondary and
tertiary points get all catalogued off as equivalent numbers, but it was
a mnemonic necessity of those vanished days.
And they have by no means completely vanished. We still use the lecture
as the normal basis of instruction in our colleges, we still hear
discourses in the firstly, secondly and thirdly form, and we still
prefer even a second-rate professor on the spot to the printed word of
the ablest teacher at a distance. Most of us who have been through
college courses can recall the distress of hearing a dull and inadequate
view of a subject being laboriously unfolded in a long series of tedious
lectures, in spite of the existence of full and competent text-books.
And here again it would seem that the time has come to centralize our
best teaching, to create a new sort of wide teaching professor who will
teach not in one college but in many, and to direct the local professor
to the more suitable task of ensuring by a commentary, by organized
critical work, and so forth, that the text-book is duly read, discussed
and compared with the kindred books in the college library.
This means that the great teaching professors will not lecture, or that
they will lecture only to try over their treatment of a subject before
an intelligent audience as a prelude to publication. They may perhaps
visit the colleges under their influence, but their basis instrument of
instruction will be not a course of lectures but a book. They will carry
out the dictum of Carlyle that the modern university is a university of
books.
Now the frank recognition of the book and not the lecture as the
substantial basis of instruction opens up a large and interesting range
of possibilities. It releases the process of learning from its old
servitude to place and to time. It is no longer necessary for the
student to go to a particular room, at a particular hour, to hear the
golden words drop from the lips of a particular teacher. The young man
who reads at eleven o'clock in the morning in luxurious rooms in
Trinity College, Cambridge, will have no very marked advantage over
another young man, employed during the day, who reads at eleven o'clock
at night in a bed-sitting-room in Glasgow. The former, you will say, may
get commentary and discussion, but there is no particular reason why the
latter should not form some sort of reading society with his fellows,
and discuss the question with them in the dinner hour and on the way to
the works. Nor is there any reason why he should not get tutorial help
as a university extension from the general educational organization, as
good in quality as any other tutorial help.
And this release of the essentials of a college education from
limitations of locality and time brought about by modern conditions, not
only makes it unnecessary for a man to come "up" to college to be
educated, but abolishes the idea that his educational effort comes to an
end when he goes "down." Attendance at college no longer justifies a
claim to education; inability to enter a college is no longer an excuse
for illiteracy.
I do not think that our educational and university authorities realize
how far the college stage of education has already escaped from the
local limitations of colleges; they do not understand what a great and
growing volume of adolescent learning and thought, of college education
in the highest and best sense of the word, goes on outside the walls of
colleges altogether; and on the other they do not grasp the significant
fact that, thanks to the high organization of sports and amusements and
social life in our more prosperous universities, a great proportion of
the youngsters who come in to their colleges never get the realities of
a college education at all, and go out into the world again as shallow
and uneducated as they came in. And this failure to grasp the great
change in educational conditions brought about, for the most part, in
the last half-century, accounts for the fact that when we think of any
extension of higher education in the modern community we are all too apt
to think of it as a great proliferation of expensive, pretentious
college buildings and a great multiplication of little teaching
professorships, and a further segregation of so many hundreds or
thousands of our adolescents from the general community, when as a
matter of fact the reality of education has ceased to lie in that
direction at all. The modern task is not to multiply teachers _but to
exalt and intensify exceptionally good teachers_, to recognize their
close relationship with the work of university research--which it is
their business to digest and interpret--and to secure the production and
wide distribution of books throughout the community.
I am inclined to think that the type of adolescent education, very much
segregated in out-of-the-way colleges and aristocratic in spirit, such
as goes on now at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Holloway, Wellesley and the
like, has probably reached and passed its maximum development. I doubt
if the modern community can afford to continue it; it certainly cannot
afford to extend it very widely.
But as I have pointed out, there has always been a second strand to
college education--the technical side, the professional training or
apprenticeship. Here there are sound reasons that the student should go
to a particular place, to the special museums and laboratories, to the
institutes of research, to the hospitals, factories, works, ports,
industrial centres and the like where the realities he studies are to be
found, or to the studios or workshops or theatres where they practise
the art to which he aspires. Here it seems we have natural centres of
aggregation in relation to which the college stage of a civilized
community, the general adolescent education, the vision of the world as
a whole and the realization of the individual place in it, can be
organized most conveniently.
You see that what I am suggesting here is in effect that we should take
our colleges, so far as they are segregations of young people for
general adolescent education, and break them as a cook breaks eggs--and
stir them up again into the general intellectual life of the community.
Coupled with that there should, of course, be a proposal to restrict the
hours of industrial work or specialized technical study up to the age of
twenty, at least, in order to leave time for this college stage in the
general education of every citizen of the world.
The idea has already been broached that men and women in the modern
community are no longer inclined to consider themselves as ever
completely adult and finished; there is a growing disposition and a
growing necessity to keep on learning throughout life. In the worlds of
research, of literature and art and economic enterprise, that adult
learning takes highly specialized forms which I will not discuss now;
but in the general modern community the process of continuing education
after the college stage is still evidently only at a primitive level of
development. There are a certain number of literary societies and
societies for the study of particular subjects; the pulpit still
performs an educational function; there are public lectures and in
America there are the hopeful germs of what may become later on a very
considerable organization of adult study in the Lyceum Chautauqua
system; but for the generality of people the daily newspaper, the Sunday
newspaper, the magazine and the book constitute the only methods of
mental revision and enlargement after the school or college stage is
past.
Now we have to remember that the bulk of this great organization of
newspapers and periodicals and all the wide distribution of books that
goes on to-day are extremely recent things. This new nexus of print has
grown up in the lifetime of four or five generations, and it is
undergoing constant changes. We are apt to forget its extreme newness in
history and to disregard the profound difference in mental conditions it
makes between our own times and any former period. It is impossible to
believe that thus far it is anything but a sketch and intimation of what
it will presently be. It has grown. No man foresaw it; no one planned
it. We of this generation have grown up with it and are in the habit of
behaving as though this nexus had always been with us and as though it
would certainly remain with us. The latter conclusion is almost wilder
than the former.
By what we can only consider a series of fortunate accidents, the press
and the book world have provided and do provide a necessary organ in the
modern world state, an organ for swift general information upon matters
of fact and for the rapid promulgation and diffusion of ideas and
interpretations. The newspaper grew, as we know, out of the news-letter
which in a manuscript form existed before the Roman Empire; it owes its
later developments largely to the advertisement possibilities that came
with the expansion of the range of trading as the railways and suchlike
means of communication developed. Modern newspapers have been described,
not altogether inaptly, as sheets of advertisements with news and
discussions printed on the back. The extension of book reading from a
small class, chiefly of men, to the whole community has also been
largely a response to new facilities; though it owes something also to
the religious disputes of the last three centuries. The population of
Europe, one may say with a certain truth, first learnt to read the
Bible, and only afterwards to read books in general. A large proportion
of the book publishing in the English language in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries still consisted of sermons and controversial
theological works.
Both newspaper and book production began in a small way as the
enterprise of free individuals, without anyone realizing the dimensions
to which the thing would grow. Our modern press and book trade, in spite
of many efforts to centralize and control it, in spite of Defence of the
Realm Acts and the like, is still the production of an unorganized
multitude of persons. It is not centralized; it is not controlled. To
this fact the nexus of print owes what is still its most valuable
quality. Thoughts and ideas of the most varied and conflicting sort
arise and are developed and worked out and fought out in this nexus,
just as they do in a freely thinking vigorous mind.
I am not, you will note, saying that this freedom is perfect or that the
thought process of the print nexus could not go very much better than it
does, but I am saying that it has a very considerable freedom and vigour
and that so far as it has these qualities it is a very fine thing
indeed.
Now many people think that we are moving in the direction of world
socialism to-day. Collectivism is perhaps a better, more definite word
than socialism, and, so far as keeping the peace goes, and in matters of
transport and communication, trade, currency, elementary education, the
production and distribution of staples and the conservation of the
natural resources of the world go, I believe that the world and the
common sense of mankind move steadily towards a world collectivism. But
the more co-operation we have in our common interests, the more
necessary is it to guard very jealously the freedom of the mind, that is
to say, the liberty of discussion and suggestion.
It is here that the Communist regime in Russia has encountered its most
fatal difficulty. A catastrophic unqualified abolition of private
property has necessarily resulted in all the paper, all the printing
machinery, all the libraries, all the news-stalls and book shops,
becoming Government property. It is impossible to print anything without
the consent of the Government. One cannot buy a book or newspaper; one
must take what the Government distributes. Free discussion--never a very
free thing in Russia--has now on any general scale become quite
impossible. It was a difficulty foreseen long ago in Socialist
discussions, but never completely met by the thorough-paced Communist.
At one blow the active mental life of Russia has been ended, and so long
as Russia remains completely and consistently communist it cannot be
resumed. It can only be resumed by some surrender of paper, printing and
book distribution from absolute Government ownership to free individual
control. That can only be done by an abandonment of the full rigours of
communist theory.
In our western communities the dangers to the intellectual nexus lie
rather on the other side. The war period produced considerable efforts
at Government control and as a consequence considerable annoyance to
writers, much concealment and some interference with the expression of
opinion; but on the whole both newspapers and books held their own.
There is to-day probably as much freedom of publishing as ever there
was. It is not from the western governments that mischief is likely to
come to free intellectual activity in the western communities but from
the undisciplined individual, and from the incitements to mob violence
by propagandist religions and cults against free discussion.
About the American press I know and can say little. I will speak only of
things with which I am familiar. I am inclined to think that there has
been a considerable increase of deliberate lying in the British press
since 1914, and a marked loss of journalistic self-respect. Particular
interests have secured control of large groups of papers and pushed
their particular schemes in entire disregard of the general mental
well-being. For instance, there has recently been a remarkable boycott
in the London press of a very able collectivist book, Sir Leo Money's
_Triumph of Nationalization_, because it would have interfered with the
operation of very large groups which were concerned in getting back
public property into private hands on terms advantageous to the latter.
It is a book not only important as a statement of a peculiar economic
view, but because of the statesmanlike gravity and clearness of its
exposition. I do not think it would have been possible to stand between
the public and a writer in this way in the years before 1914. A
considerable proportion of the industrial and commercial news is now
written to an end. The British press has also suffered greatly from the
outbreak of social and nationalist rancour arising out of the great war,
the inability of the European mind to grasp the Bolshevik issue, and the
clumsy blunderings of the Versailles settlement. Quite half the news
from Eastern Europe that appears in the London press is now deliberate
fabrication, and a considerable proportion of the rest is rephrased and
mutilated to give a misleading impression to the reader.
But people cannot be continuously deceived in this way, and the
consequence of this press demoralization has been a great loss of
influence for the daily paper. A diminishing number of people now
believe the news as it is given them, and fewer still take the unsigned
portions of the newspaper as written in good faith. And there has been a
consequent enhancement of the importance of signed journalism. Men of
manifest honesty, men with names to keep clean, have built up
reputations and influence upon the ruins of editorial prestige. The
exploitation of newspapers by the adventurers of "private enterprise" in
business, has carried with it this immense depreciation in the power and
honour of the newspaper.
I am inclined to think that this swamping of a large part of the world's
press by calculated falsehood and partisan propaganda is a temporary
phase in the development of the print nexus: nevertheless, it is a very
great inconvenience and danger to the world. It stands very much in the
way of that universal adult education which is our present concern.
Reality is horribly distorted. Men cannot see the world clearly and they
cannot, therefore, begin to think about it rightly.
We need a much better and more trustworthy press than we possess. We
cannot get on to a new and better world without it. The remedy is to be
found not, I believe, in any sort of Government control, but in a legal
campaign against the one thing harmful--the lie. It would be in the
interests of most big advertisers, for most big advertisement is honest;
it would be, in the long run, in the interests of the Press; and it
would mean an enormous step forward in the general mental clarity of the
world if a deliberate lie, whether in an advertisement or in the news or
other columns of the press, was punishable--punishable whether it did or
did not involve anything that is now an actionable damage. And it would
still further strengthen the print nexus and clear the mind of the world
if it were compulsory to correct untrue statements in the periodical
press, whether they had been made in good faith or not, at least as
conspicuously and lengthily as the original statement. I can see no
impossibility in the realization of either of these proposals, and no
objection that a really honest newspaper proprietor or advertiser could
offer to them. It would make everyone careful, of course, but I fail to
see any grievance in that. The sanitary effect upon the festering
disputes of our time would be incalculably great. It would be like
opening the windows upon a stuffy, overcrowded and unventilated room of
disputing people.
Given adequate laws to prevent the cornering of paper or the partisan
control of the means of distribution of books and printed matter, I
believe that the present freedoms and the unhampered individualism of
the world of thought, discussion and literary expression are and must
remain conditions essential to the proper growth and activity of a
common world mind. On the basis of that sounder education I have
sketched in a preceding paper, there is possible such an extension of
understanding, such an increase of intelligent co-operations and such a
clarification of wills as to dissolve away half the difficulties and
conflicts of the present time and to provide for the other half such a
power of solution as we, in the heats, entanglements and limitations of
our present ignorance, doubt and misinformation can scarcely begin to
imagine.
I do not know how far I have conveyed to you in the last two papers my
underlying idea of an education not merely intensive but extensive,
planned so economically and so ably as to reach every man and woman in
the world.
It is a dream not of _individuals educated_--we have thought too much of
the individual educated _for_ the individual--but of a _world educated_
to a pitch of understanding and co-operation far beyond anything we know
of to-day, for the sake of all mankind.
I have tried to show that, given organization, given the will for it,
such a world-wide education is possible.
I wish I had the gift of eloquence so that I could touch your wills in
this matter. I do not know how this world of to-day strikes upon you. I
am not ungrateful for the gift of life. While there is life and a human
mind, it seems to me there must always be excitements and beauty, even
if the excitements are fierce and the beauty terrible and tragic.
Nevertheless, this world of mankind to-day seems to me to be a very
sinister and dreadful world. It has come to this--that I open my
newspaper every morning with a sinking heart, and usually I find little
to console me. Every day there is a new tale of silly bloodshed. Every
day I read of anger and hate, oppression and misery and want--stupid
anger and oppression, needless misery and want--the insults and
suspicions of ignorant men, and the inane and horrible self-satisfaction
of the well-to-do. It is a vile world because it is an under-educated
world, unreasonable, suspicious, base and ferocious. The air of our
lives is a close and wrathful air; it has the closeness of a
prison--the indescribable offence of crowded and restricted humanity.
And yet I know that there is a way out.
Up certain steps there is a door to this dark prison of ignorance,
prejudice and passion in which we live--and that door is only locked on
the inside. It is within our power, given the will for it, given the
courage for it--it is within our power to go out. The key to all our
human disorder is organized education, comprehensive and universal. The
watchword of conduct that will clear up all our difficulties is, the
_plain truth_. Rely upon that watchword, use that key with courage and
we can go out of the prison in which we live; we can go right out of the
conditions of war, shortage, angry scrambling, mutual thwarting and
malaise and disease in which we live; we and our kind can go out into
sunlight, into a sweet air of understanding, into confident freedoms and
a full creative life--for ever.
I do not know--I do not dare to believe--that I shall live to hear that
key grating in the lock. It may be our children and our children's
children will still be living in this jail. But a day will surely come
when that door will open wide and all our race will pass out from this
magic prison of ignorance, suspicion and indiscipline in which we now
all suffer together.
VIII
THE ENVOY
In the preceding papers I have, with some repetition and much stumbling,
set out a fairly complete theory of what men and women have to do at the
present time if human life is to go on hopefully to any great happiness
and achievement in the days to come. Much of this material was first
prepared to be delivered to a lecture audience, and I regret that
ill-health has prevented a complete re-writing of these portions. There
is more of the uplifted forefinger and the reiterated point than I
should have allowed myself in an essay. But this is a loss of grace
rather than of clearness. And since I am stating a case and not offering
the reader anything professing to be a literary work, I shall not
apologise for finally summing up and underlining the chief points of
this book.
They are, firstly: that a great change in human conditions has been
brought about during the past century, and secondly that a vast task of
adaptation, which must be, initially and fundamentally, _mental_
adaptation, has to be undertaken by our race. It is a task which
politicians, who live from day to day, and statesmen, who live from
event to event, may hinder or aid very greatly, but which they cannot
be expected to conduct or control. Politicians and statesmen perforce
live and work in the scheme of ideas they find about them; the
conditions of their activities are made for them. They can be compelled
by the weight of public opinion to help it, but the driving force for
this great task must come not from official sources but from the
steadfast educational pressure of a great and growing multitude of
convinced people. In times of fluctuation and dissolving landmarks, the
importance of the teacher--using the word in its widest sense--rises
with the progressive dissolution of the established order.
The creative responsibility for the world to-day passes steadily into
the hands of writers and school teachers, students of social and
economic science, professors and poets, editors and journalists,
publishers and newspaper proprietors, preachers, every sort of
propagandist and every sort of disinterested person who can give time
and energy to the reconstruction of the social idea. Human life will
continue to be more and more dangerously chaotic until a world social
idea crystallizes out. That--and no existing institution and no current
issue--is the primary concern of the present age.
We need, therefore, before all other sorts of organization, educational
organizations; we need, before any other sort of work, work of education
and enlightenment; we need everywhere active societies pressing for a
better, more efficient conduct of public schooling, for a wider, more
enlightening school curriculum, for a world-wide linking-up of
educational systems, for a ruthless subordination of naval, military and
court expenditure to educational needs, and for a systematic
discouragement of mischief-making between nation and nation and race and
race and class and class. I could wish to see Educational Societies,
organized as such, springing up everywhere, watching local bodies in
order to divert economies from the educational starvation of a district
to other less harmful saving; watching for obscurantism and reaction and
mischievous nationalist teaching in the local schools and colleges and
in the local press; watching members of parliament and congressmen for
evidences of educational good-will or malignity; watching and getting
control of the administration of public libraries; assisting, when
necessary, in the supply of sound literature in their districts; raising
funds for invigorating educational propaganda in poor countries like
China and in atrociously educated countries like Ireland, and
corresponding with kindred societies throughout the world. I believe
such societies would speedily become much more influential than the
ordinary political party clubs and associations that now use up so much
human energy in the western communities. Subordinating all vulgar
political considerations to educational development as the supreme need
in the world's affairs, even quite small societies could exercise a
powerful decisive voice in a great number of political contests. And an
educational movement is more tenacious than any other sort of social or
political movement whatever. It trains its adherents. What it wins it
holds.
I know that in thus putting all the importance upon educational needs at
the present time I shall seem to many readers to be ignoring quite
excessively the profound racial, social and economic conflicts that are
in progress. I do. I believe we shall never get on with human affairs
until we do ignore them. I offer no suggestion whatever as to what sides
people should take in such an issue as that between France and Germany
or between Sinn Fein and the British Government, or in the class war. I
offer no such suggestion because I believe that all these conflicts and
all such current conflicts are so irrational and destructive that it is
impossible for a sane man who wishes to serve the world to identify
himself with either side in any of them. These conflicts are mere
aspects of the gross and passionate stupidity and ignorance and
sectionalism of our present world. The class war, the push for and the
resistance to some vague reorganization called the Social
Revolution--such things are the natural inevitable result of the sordid
moral and intellectual muddle of our common ideas about property. The
capitalist, the employer, the property-owning class, as a class, have
neither the intelligence nor the conscience to comprehend any moral
limitations, any limitations whatever but the strong arm of the law,
upon what they do with their property. Their black and obstinate
ignorance, the clumsy adventurousness they call private enterprise,
their unconscious insolence to poor people, their stupidly conspicuous
self-indulgence, produce as a necessary result the black hatred of the
employed and the expropriated. On one side we have greed, insensibility
and incapacity, on the other envy and suffering stung to vindictive
revolt: on neither side light nor generosity nor creative will. Neither
side has any power to give us any reality we need. Neither side is more
than a hate and an aggression. How can one take sides between them?
The present system, _unless it can develop a better intelligence and a
better heart_, is manifestly destined to foster fresh wars and to
continue wasting what is left of the substance of mankind, until
absolute social disaster overtakes us all. And manifestly the
revolutionary communist, _at his present level of education_, has
neither the plans nor the capacity to substitute any more efficient
system for this crazy edifice of ill-disciplined private enterprise that
is now blundering to destruction. But at a higher level of intelligence,
at a level at which it is possible to define the limitations of private
property clearly and to ensure a really loyal and effectual co-operation
between individual and state, this issue--this wholly destructive
conflict between the property manipulator and the communist fanatic
which is now rapidly wrecking our world--disappears. It disappears as
completely as the causes of a murderous conflict between two drunken
men will disappear when they are separated and put under a stream of
clear cold water.
So it is that, in spite of their apparent urgency, I ask the reader to
detach himself from these present conflicts of national politics, of
political parties and of the class war as completely as he can; or, if
he cannot detach himself completely, then to play such a part in them,
regardless of any other consideration, as may be most conducive to a
wide-thinking, wide-ranging education upon which we can base a new world
order. A resolute push for quite a short period now might reconstruct
the entire basis of our collective human life.
In this book I have tried to show what form that push should take, to
show that it has a reasonable hope of an ultimate success, and that
unless it is made, the outlook for mankind is likely to become an
entirely dismal prospect. I put these theses before the reader for his
consideration. They are not discursive criticisms of life, not haphazard
grumblings at our present discontents, they are offered as the
fundamental propositions of an ordered constructive project in which he
can easily find a part to play commensurate with his ability and
opportunities.
INDEX
Adult learning, spread of, 167
Aircraft as a means of quick travel, 48
in future wars, 9
Air transport a problem for Europe, 58
possibilities of future, 66
"All-red air routes," 67
America and the League of Nations, 15, 28, 47
generalized history teaching in, 108
her part in European reconstruction, 62
locomotion in, 49, 52
political unity of, 60
(_see also_ United States)
American social system, comparisons, 2
Americans, patriotism of, 69
Anthology and a modernized Bible, 125
Apocrypha, the, and a modernized Bible, 119 _et seq._
Arithmetic, a wrong way of teaching, 149
Austria after the war, 44
Belloc, Hilaire, 178
Bible, the, a criticism of, 98 _et seq._
and the theory of origin, 103
English translation of, 107
its effect upon civilization, 101
redundancy in, 99
rules of health in, 111
why it has lost hold on the people, 101
Bible of Civilization, the, 95 _et seq._
need for frequent revision, 136
what it will contain, 105 _et seq._
Biology, Huxley's system of, 171
study of, 151, 152
Bolshevik propaganda, suppression of, 175
Bolshevism and the overthrow of Russia, 44
Books and mentality, 183
Boundary question in Europe, 54, 59, 61, 62
Bradlaugh, Charles, lectures of, 171
Breasted, Professor, works of, 108
Breeding, points required in, 140
Britain, national egotism of, 72
British Civil Air Transport Committee, 48, 66
British Empire, the, a prime necessity for security of, 65
a wrong conception of, 64
an ocean state, 65
its failure with reconstruction, 28-9
British monarchy, the, lost opportunities of, 29
Browning, Oscar, 108
Canonical books and the Bible of Civilization, 119
Chinese discovery of gunpowder, 6
Christianity, 23
spread of, in Western Europe, 78
Cinematograph, the, as an aid to teaching, 80, 161
Civilization, adjustment of political ideas necessary for, 46
effect of the Bible on, 101
impotence of, 1
the Bible of, 95 _et seq._
the war and, 43 _et seq._
College stage of education, 168
changed conditions of, 180
how it could be improved, 172
problem of its extension, 177
Comenius, political and educational ideas of, 95, 97, 138
Committees, good work by, 107
Communism and property, 115
Communists, Russian, and the Press, 186
Connecticut, State of, the Bible as its only law, 98
Conscience the basis of moral life, 20
Contemporary problems, complexity of, 3
Cosmogony of the Bible, the, 103-4
Customs, the, and European travel, 56
Declaration of Independence, 63, 107
Denmark, present-day conditions in, 45
Disarmament, ineffectual movements for, 13
Discovery, the age of, 6
Education a fundamental difficulty, 155
chief end of, 25
degradation of, 105
in the world state, 20, 90
necessary basis of, 103
neglect of language teaching, 145
past and present, 79, 104
primary obstacle to, 153
progressive character of, 166, 183
reorganization of, needed, 158, 165
Educational organization, a review of, 139
need of, 194
England before and after the war, 45
Epics and a modernized Bible, 125
Eugenic literature, 140, 141
Europe, and the League of Nations, 47
boundary question of, 54, 59, 61, 62
in the seventeenth century, 96
problem of air transport, 58
propaganda of patriotism in, 72
results of political disunion, 54
slow economic recovery of, 59
European travel, preparations needed for, 55
Evening continuation and technical schools, 169
Exchange, fluctuating nature of, 56, 57
Federal World State, an approaching reality, 80
Forecasts, a Book of, and the modernized Bible, 132
Foresight, need of, 133
France, national egotism of, 72
post-war decadence in, 45
Frontiers and the possibility of war, 59
Geography, improved method of teaching, 151
Germany, ebb in civilization in, 45
intensive nationalist education in, 72
Gladstone, Mr., a speech by, 171
Gramophones as aids to school teaching, 160
Gunpowder, discovery of, 6
Hamsun's _Growth of the Soil_, 124
Health and the citizen, 111
Hebrew Bible, the, 110
Henley, a poem by, 127
Herbert, Auberon, lectures by, 171
Higher education, a false conception of, 181
Historical books, value of illustrations and maps in, 110
History, and national egotism, 73
cardinal experiences in, 1
_History of the Ancient World_, 108
History teaching in schools, unsatisfactory nature of, 151
Holland, post-war condition of, 45
Human brotherhood, gospel of, 24
Human disorder, the key to, 192
Human outlook, the, 1
Human society, ancient and modern, 5
needs reconstruction, 11
Human unity and a world state, 75
Hungary, post-war desolation in, 44
Huxley, Professor, author's tribute to, 170
his system of teaching geography, 151
Illustrations, need of, in books, 110
Independent nationality, need for, 76
Individualists and property, 115
Industrialism, modern, 114
Intellectuals, their estimate of man, 14
International mind, an, 73
International problem of to-day, 46
Ireland, after-effects of war in, 45
condition of (1640-1650), 96
Islam, lasting unity of, 79
spread of, in seventh century, 23
Italy, after the war, 45
forbids export of works of art, 117
Judd, Professor, 171
Kipling, Rudyard, 15
Komensky (_see_ Comenius)
Labour problems, the Bible and, 114
Labour trouble, and from what it springs, 116, 117
Language teaching, a necessary part of education, 145
suggested use of gramophones for, 160
twofold object of, 147
League of Nations, the, 13, 17
and the boundary question, 62
educational value of its propaganda, 75
ineffectiveness of, 5, 37, 41, 47, 76
President Wilson and, 15, 28
Lectures as basis of instruction, 178
Lenin and Russia, 44
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, 126
Locomotion and methods of communication, 48, 52, 53
Machinery, in a world state, 91
Magna Carta, 107
Man, his plain duty, 38
social nature of, 19
Mankind, influence of surroundings on, 18
probable future of, 1 _et seq._
Mathematics, teaching of, 149
_Mediæval and Modern History_, 108
_Mediæval and Modern Times_, 108
Mental life, schooling and the, 142
Mesopotamia, irrigation system of, 6
Military class, mischief of a, 29
Milton's defence of free speech, 128
Missouri, establishment of, 49
Money, Sir Leo, his _Triumph of Nationalization_, 187
Morris, William, lectures by, 171
Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, 48
National independence, meaning of, 59
Newspapers, 183
evolution of, 184
journalistic demoralization, 187, 188
Novels, and a modernized Bible, 123
Ocean transport, importance of, 65
Organized education, the key to human disorder, 192
Organized solidarity and modern communities, 102
Original Sin, the factor of, 105
_Outline of History_, Wells's, 107, 108
Passports, delays attendant on, 55
Patriotism, a unity-destroying propaganda of, 72
aggressive, dangers of, 39
American, 69
true and false conceptions of, 68, 69
Peace Ministry, functions of a, 87
Philosophical works and a modernized Bible, 124
Physiography, Huxley and, 151
Physiology, value of study of, 151
Pilgrim Fathers, the, and the Bible, 110
Plays and a modernized Bible, 123
Political reconstruction, accompaniments of, 25
Politicians, their need of foresight, 133
Politics in a world state, 81, 93
Prayer Book, the, 107
Press, the, demoralization of, 187-8
freedom of, 185
Government control of, 186, 187
Printing and the community, 7
Progress, arrest of, 1
Property, class war and, 196
labour trouble and, 116, 117
problems of, 114
rights and duties of, 115
Puritanism in the seventeenth century, 97
Quakers, the, foundation of, 97
Radiogram, the, and its results, 6
Railways, American, 49 _et seq._, 65
Readjustment of political ideas, 46 _et seq._, 68
Religion and the political and social outlook, 23, 79
universalist in theory, 81
Religious instruction and discussion barred by colleges, 175
Revolutions and how produced, 27
Robinson, Professor, 108
Roman Empire, the, rise and fall of, 53
Russia, Bolshevism in, 44
the Press in, 186
vexatious delays in a journey to, 56 _et seq._
St. Petersburg before and after the war, 43, 44
Schoolhouse, an ordinary, and an ideal, 158-9
Schooling of the world, the, 139 _et seq._
and what should be taught, 143
why so often a failure, 153
Schools and the development of education, 25
of a world state, 90
Science teaching under difficulties and a suggested remedy, 161
Scotland after the war, 45
Sea power and the submarine, 66
Semaphores, 48
Sexual morality, need for, 112
Shakespear and the Bible of Civilization, 122
Social nature of man, 19
Sovereign states, incoherent nature of, 31
Steamboats, American, 49, 65
Stopes, Dr. Marie, 113
Submarine, the, and sea power, 66
Sweden, before and after the war, 45
Teachers, lack of, and the reason, 153
Teaching and the future of mankind, 37
Teaching power and how it might be economized, 156 _et seq._
Technical study, specialized, 182
Telegraphy, development of, 6, 48
Thirty Years War, the, 96
Tolstoi's _War and Peace_, 124
Trade problems, the Bible and, 114
Transport and the international problem, 46
Travel, inconveniences of European, 55 _et seq._
United States, the government of, 47, 83
growth of, 49-50
political system of, 27
(_see also_ America)
University, the, and adult learning, 168
Vienna threatened by the Turk, 96
Wales, Prince of, world tour of, 29, 84
War, a ruling and constructive idea, 4
abolition of, and what it means, 5
frequent recurrence of, 3
military science in, 8
Washington, George, and his successors, 83
Webster, Dr. Hutton, historical summaries of, 108
Wells, H. G., as educationist, 155
college life of, 170
his _Outline of History_, 107, 108
ideals of, 42
serves on British Civil Air Transport Committee, 48, 66
views on teaching of history, 151
Wilson, President, and the League of Nations, 15, 28
World control, and what it means, 14, 17
World History, a suggested, 109
World peace, American and European view of, 61
World state, the, cult of, 35
enlargement of patriotism to, 68
fundamental ideas of, 37
government of, 82 _et seq._
life in, 88 _et seq._
meaning of, 82
project of, 42 _et seq._
the Council and its functions, 85
World, the, as a university, 168
PRINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C.4
ERRATUM.
_Page 176, line 20_,
there are still modern Immortals in the darkness
_should read_,
if they are still modern Immortals, in the darkness
* * * * *
Mr. WELLS has also written the following novels:
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
MR. POLLY
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
ANN VERONICA
TONO BUNGAY
MARRIAGE
BEALBY
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
JOAN AND PETER
THE UNDYING FIRE
The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE SEA LADY
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WORLD SET FREE
And numerous Short Stories now collected in One Volume under the title
of THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
A Series of books upon Social, Religious and Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS
And two little books about children's play, called:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Salvaging Of Civilisation, by
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
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