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Title: The way the world is going
Guesses & forecasts of the years ahead
Author: H. G. Wells
Release date: November 16, 2025 [eBook #77242]
Language: English
Original publication: Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc, 1927
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAY THE WORLD IS GOING ***
THE WAY
THE WORLD IS GOING
_GUESSES & FORECASTS OF
THE YEARS AHEAD_
_BY_
H. G. Wells
GARDEN CITY
_NEW YORK_
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
AND COMPANY, INC.
1929
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN &
COMPANY, INC. COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY THE NEW
YORK TIMES MAGAZINE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
FIRST EDITION
NOTE
These articles were written for great weekly newspapers upon both
sides of the Atlantic, and I note rather than complain that they
appeared after suffering a certain amount of mutilation. I expressed
my disapproval of such changes as were made, as vividly as possible,
but the remedies a writer has are uncertain and tedious and the
editorial interference went on to the end. The paragraphs were cut
to pieces; there was a brightly careless excision of phrases and
sentences apparently done at the eleventh hour to fit space and there
was a frequent insertion of uncongenial cross-heads and headings more
satisfactory to the editorial mind. The article in which I replied to
the repeated personal attacks of Lord Birkenhead and his son suffered
exceptionally in the London version. America with ampler columns was
more respectful to the general text, but made one magnificent cut
of the whole article about Sacco and Vanzetti, paid for it without
complaint and did not print a line of it.
I make this note in justice to myself rather than as an indictment of
these big newspapers. It is a considerable stimulus to address one’s
ideas to their Sunday morning audience, and it is amusing to try saying
what one has to say in as editor-proof a form as possible. It is like
shouting across an intervener at a crowd. I would be the last person in
the world to object to the criticism that there is a distinct flavour
of shouting and a disposition to reiterate in this book. Mercifully, I
have removed the emphatic cross-heads in restoring my original text.
Quips and quirks, fine phrases and fine qualifications, and, above all,
suggestions and hints, one flings into such work to please oneself,
praying God that the printer and sub-editor will at least in their
final crisis of adjustment cut out rather than distort. And when all
its defects have been discounted, this syndicated newspaper work still
gives a handsome opportunity for saying things broadly and plainly, and
obliges one, very wholesomely, to state one’s current state of mind
about this, that, and the other thing in simple lucid terms. One has
the sense of committing oneself to readers who may never have heard
of one before, and who may, for example, base a life’s antipathy on a
single rash assertion.
Inserted among these papers is a lecture given in Paris in 1927
called “Democracy Under Revision.” If I may so far assist the reader,
I would point out that this is much more closely written than the rest
of this book. It is natural to weigh one’s _p_s and _q_s when one
faces the ordeal of presently reading it all aloud to an exceptionally
intelligent audience. This lecture is something more than an essay upon
methods of government. It is an essay upon social structure. It carries
in it the statement of a general principle of artistic criticism and
has various sentences capable of considerable expansion. As nearly
everything else in the book is in a state of quite generous expansion
this lecture may be stepped over unawares. But I will be glad to find
what I have to say therein about the modern novel and the modern play,
for instance, not altogether disregarded. And anyhow, I would like to
underline the title to the extent of remarking that the revision of
democracy is not its repudiation.
H. G. Wells
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The articles included in this volume
appeared in the New York _Times_
Magazine in fortnightly installments
during 1927 under the general heading,
“The Way the World Is Going.”
CONTENTS
I. Man Becomes a Different Animal. Delusions
about Human Fixity 1
II. What Is Happening in China? Does the
Kuomintang Foreshadow a New Sort of
Government in the World? 13
III. What Is Fascism? Whither Is It Taking Italy? 25
IV. Doubts of Democracy. New Experiments
in Government 37
V. Democracy Under Revision: a Lecture
Delivered at the Sorbonne on March 15th, 1927 51
VI. The Absurdity of British Politics. A
Shadow on the Whole World. What
Has to Be Done about It? 78
VII. Baldwinism a Danger to the World.
Wanted, a Coalition Government. The
Deadlock and the Way Out 89
VIII. Communism and Witchcraft 100
IX. The Future of Labour. The Struggle between
Capital and Labour. Controversial Hallucinations 110
X. What Is the British Empire Worth to
Mankind? Meditations of an Empire Citizen 122
XI. The Present Uselessness and Danger of
Aeroplanes. A Problem in Organization 132
XII. Changes in the Arts of War. Are Armies
Needed any Longer? The Twilight of the Guards 145
XIII. Delusions about World Peace. The Price of Peace 158
XIV. The Possibility of War Between Britain and America.
Such a War Is Being Prepared Now. What Are
Intelligent People to Do about It? 168
XV. The Remarkable Vogue of Broadcasting:
Will It Continue? 180
XVI. The Silliest Film: Will Machinery Make Robots of Men? 192
XVII. Is Life Becoming Happier? 204
XVIII. Experimenting with Marriage. Legal
Recognition of Current Realities 214
XIX. New Light on Mental Life: Mr. J. W.
Dunne’s Experiments with Dreaming 225
XX. Popular Feeling and the Advancement of
Science. Anti-vivisection 237
XXI. The New American People: What Is Wrong with It? 248
XXII. Outrages in Defence of Order. The Proposed
Murder of Two American Radicals 257
XXIII. Some Plain Words to Americans. Are the
Americans a Sacred People? Is International
Criticism Restricted to the Eastward Position? 270
XXIV. Fuel-getting in the Modern World 282
XXV. The Man of Science and the Expressive Man.
To Whom Does the Future Belong? Some Thoughts
about Ivan Pavloff and George Bernard Shaw 291
XXVI. The Future of the Novel. Difficulties of
the Modern Novelist 303
XXVII. Is a Belief in a Spirit World Growing?
Why Many Sensible Men Continue to
Doubt and Disregard It. What Is Immortality? 315
I
MAN BECOMES A DIFFERENT ANIMAL. DELUSIONS ABOUT HUMAN FIXITY
Of all the time-honoured fatuities that men repeat and repeat, and
comfort themselves mysteriously by repeating, none surely are more
patently absurd than those which assert the unchangeableness of human
life. “Human nature” never alters, we are assured; man in the Stone
Age, any Stone Age, was exactly what he is now, or rather more so;
he felt the same things; he imagined the same things; he travelled
the same round; his fears, his hopes were identical. Save for a few
superficialities, human life has always been the same and will always
be the same, and neither the past nor the future can be allowed to cast
a reflection by difference upon our satisfaction with the lives we
lead to-day. Life as we know it is, in fact, the cream and the whole
of existence. There was nothing very different behind us and there is
nothing better ahead.
Quite similarly we protect our self-esteem by the persuasion that
life under all sorts of circumstances and in all social positions is
very much of a muchness. It gratifies our inherent grudgingness to
think that life in a palace differs in no essential quality from life
in our own cottage, that all the grapes above our heads are sour, and
it eases our social conscience to reflect over the fire in the evening
that the miner cramped in his seam or the out-of-work on tramp is so
attuned to his level of existence that for all practical purposes he
has just as much fun and contentment in life as we do. There is no real
inequality, we assure ourselves, just as there is no progress. Our
lives are as good as any lives can be. “Riches,” we all say, “cannot
buy happiness,” and it seems hardly to touch that statement that there
are hundreds of thousands of people in the completest enjoyment of
existence who would be cripples or dead if they had not been able to
command the services of expensive surgeons, undergo costly treatments
or take imperative holidays at this or that crisis in their careers. In
any other age, under any available conditions, they would be cripples
or dead. But it makes us happier to deny that, just as it makes us
happier to think that the life of our times will always be regarded
with respect by posterity. Our heroes will always be the most heroic of
heroes; the great men we have made our symbols will shine as stars of
the first magnitude for ever; the art, the literature that delight us
will last for “all time.” Our Newton is for ever; our Shakespeare is
for ever; Alexander and Cæsar and Napoleon are for ever; it is almost
as if _we_ were for ever.
This sort of consolation is so natural to most of us, so near to being
a necessity, that to run over a few of the facts that make it absurd
can rob hardly a soul of the pleasure of it. For everyday purposes
we believe what we want to believe, and if we do not want to believe
the truth, we do generally contrive to dispose of it as a sort of
extravaganza. In that spirit most of us contemplate the fact that
human life, the tune, the quality, the elements, are changing visibly
before our eyes. Human life, as a matter of fact and not as a matter
of sentiment, is different from what it has ever been before, and it
is rapidly becoming more different. The scope of it and the feel of
it and the spirit of it change. Perhaps never in the whole history of
life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected
to so fiercely urgent, many-sided, and comprehensive a process of
change as ours to-day. None at least that has survived. Transformation
or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a
species in an intense phase of transition.
These papers, of which this is the first, will all consider some
aspect or other of this great change that is going on. In them we will
release our imaginations to the truth that we are things that pass,
and do not leave our like, and that the ways and experiences of our
children and our children’s children promise to be profoundly different
from the life we lead at the present time. We will give a rest to our
practical working belief in the security of things as they are. We will
take the rest and refreshment of a few glances at the longer realities.
Man has always been a changing animal. The earliest human remains of a
few score thousand years ago are of creatures so different that they
are now regarded as a distinct species of _Homo_. Only within twenty or
thirty thousand years does man seem to have been truly man. There is a
disposition in some quarters to exaggerate the resemblance of the later
Stone Age men to modern types, and to minimize the changes that have
occurred since the onset of civilization. What is called the Cro-Magnon
race was a race of big individuals, and, as in the case of their
brutish predecessors, the Neanderthalers _(Homo Neanderthalensis)_,
that bigness extended to the brain case--in quantity at least their
brains were above our present average--but they were beings of a
coarser texture than the average modern, and there has been the most
preposterous nonsense written about their artistic gifts and their
general intelligence. They drew and carved--about as well as recent
Bushmen have drawn and carved. They were so far “modern” in their art
that at times it was strikingly obscene.
A brain is known by its fruits, and the total product of this
Cro-Magnon brain, of which certain excited anthropologists have made a
marvel, was the precarious life of painted, wandering savages. In build
and skull type and general character this Cro-Magnon people differed
from any race now flourishing in this world. Industrious search may
find odd individuals here and there, in Central France and the Canary
Isles, for example, rather after the Cro-Magnon type. They are rarely
eminent individuals.
Throughout the whole historical period the races of men have been
changing. In a recent lecture Sir Arthur Keith noted some of the
differences between the average Briton of to-day and his predecessor
of only a few centuries ago. The former has, for instance, a “scissor
bite” of the teeth instead of an edge-to-edge bite; his face is
finer and longer and his palate narrower; his nose is thinner and
more prominent. These are the modifications wrought upon him by the
comparatively slow and slight alterations in his circumstances,
extended and altered dietary, increased clothing, and the like,
that went on during the Middle Ages and the subsequent two or three
centuries. They are unimportant in comparison with the modifications
that are being pressed upon him by the changing circumstances of to-day.
Very few of us realize the enormous distortions that are now going on
in the life cycle of the human animal. There is a biological revolution
in progress--of far profounder moment than any French or Russian
revolution that ever happened. The facts come dripping in to us, here
a paragraph in a newspaper, there a book, now a chance remark; we are
busy about our personal affairs and rarely find time to sit back and
consider the immense significance of the whole continuing process. We
forget this before we hear of that, and do not put two and two together.
Here, to begin with, is a specimen of the kind of quiet-looking fact
that gets by most of us without betraying a shadow of its enormous
implications. I find it mentioned casually in “Rejuvenation,” a book
by Dr. Norman Haire, which I chance to be consulting upon a point I
shall deal with later. It is that _since the opening of the present
century_ insurance statistics, presumably British--Dr. Haire does not
say--show that the average length of human life within the scope of
these statistics has been increased by twelve years. This, when we
make the necessary inquiries, does not mean that people are living on
to two-and-eighty instead of the traditional three score and ten, but
that the hope of survival for every infant born in Britain has been
increased in a brief quarter-century by about a third. It may expect
to live four years for every three it could have hoped for if it had
been born in 1900. That is the latest step in a series of changes that
have been going on for a much longer period. It points forward to a
time when nearly every child born into a civilized community will
live to maturity. Because of late marriages and other more disputable
causes, there are in every thousand individuals of a modern Atlantic
population twenty or less infants of under one year, and upon that
such populations can and do increase. This marks a quite novel rarity
of children in the new world. To judge by Oriental cities in which
medieval conditions still prevail and the tombstones in old English
churches, something like fifty out of the thousand of our ancestral
populations, before the day of our great-great-grandmothers, were
infants under one year, _of which thirty or more were doomed to die_ in
childhood or adolescence. A lot of that thirty died in the first year;
a lot of the survivors from the previous year were, at the same time,
dying in their second year, and so on. Proportionately there were more
ailing children in that vanished state of affairs among our populations
than all the children in our community to-day. Upwards of half the
human beings then alive lived what we should now regard as tragically
foreshortened existences. And the rest of the population, the moiety
that contrived to grow up, must have been mainly occupied in mothering,
fathering, and nursing this superfluity of offspring.
As we examine the dry-looking figures of birth-rates and death-rates
in the vital statistics that have become available in the past hundred
years, and touch them with imaginative understanding, we begin to
realize that the life of man so far, up to our own times--and of
women far more so--has been almost wholly a sexual one; that--with
the exception of a few priests, nuns, eccentrics, and unattractive
women--the full round of life for every one who could achieve it, who
wasn’t killed too soon, that is, was to grow up, to pair, to produce
and sustain a large family, burying most of it, and so to decay and age
and die. The whole adult life was consumed by sex and its consequences;
the business of the family, of making it and of toiling for it, of
weeping over the dead and beginning again, was the complete circle
of life. Man was almost as sexual as a cat with its ever-recurring
kittens. In the past the normal existence fell wholly into the frame of
the family. Man was a family animal. Now this is no longer the case.
Now family life becomes merely a phase in an ampler experience. Human
life escapes beyond it.
Human life, which was formerly almost completely filled by that
reproductive business, the family, has come very suddenly upon
conditions under which the necessity for sexual preoccupations has
enormously diminished. That means a biological revolution of quite
primary quality. Women and men can no longer use themselves up, even
if they would, in that immemorial round. The release of women--if we
may regard it as a release and not as a deprivation--is conspicuously
immense. _Homo Sapiens_, departing from the usual practice of the
animal kingdom, is beginning to breed much later than his physical
adolescence, to conserve all his offspring, and so to free and render
available, for good or evil, an amount of individual time and energy
unprecedented in the history of life. He has changed these cardinal
points in his biological process in the last hundred years almost
unawares. So far he is already a different sort of animal from his
ancestors, or, indeed, from any species of vertebrated creature that
has ever lived upon earth.
The change in conditions is all too recent to appear in any inherent
quality. Adaptation to the new conditions has to be individual, just
as education to the old conditions had to be. If the new conditions
last long enough, a specific modification facilitating adaptation will
go on, as Professor Mark Baldwin showed a decade or so ago, in his far
too much neglected discussion of the evolutionary process, “Development
and Evolution.” That will be an affair of many generations, but it
will come. And no doubt it will be made evident by visible physical
differences as well as physiological alterations.
But these current changes in the natural history of mankind during the
last few decades, great as they are, pale before certain others that
are now promising to alter the whole tenor of the life experience in
quite another direction. A series of possibilities and practicabilities
are being opened to us by recent research that amount in effect to
a huge artificial extension of the fully adult stage of life. _Homo
Sapiens_ in the past was a creature who normally went to work at the
end of childhood, became adult, married, had a large, distressful,
onerous family, lost his teeth, lost the power of accommodating his
eyes to distance, and came to an end. It is within quite a short period
that man has eked out his failing powers with glasses and false teeth.
“Nature,” says Sir Arthur Keith, “has worked out the evolution of
the human family on a mean life tenure of forty-five years; she has
hitherto run the human army on a short service system.” In the near
future, on the contrary, man will not work until he is adult; he will
marry much later; he will have a small, successful family; he will then
go on for some score of years, it may be, before he exhibits any of the
characteristic decadence of age. Instead of breaking down and being
left by the way, the oculist, the dentist, the surgeon, will perform
the necessary roadside repairs, and carry him on through a prolongation
of his efficiency. But that is not all; something more than patching
and carrying on is possible; his essential vitality can be, and will
be, prolonged.
The researches on which our belief in the last and most hopeful of
these possibilities is based--that is, the suspension of senility--are
recent; the great bulk of them have been published since this
century began, but they amount now to a substantial mass of entirely
confirmatory evidence. Metchnikoff was one of the earliest to make
the attack upon senile decay, and his dietetic suggestions and his
schemes for a sort of hygienic evisceration have not proved of any
great value, but since his time an increasing number of investigators,
working chiefly upon the internal secretions of the animal body, have
shown more and more convincingly that by simple and easy treatment
it is possible to sustain a human being in a state of adult vigour
far beyond Shakespeare’s sixth and seventh ages. Haire gives the
results of a score of able workers in Germany, Britain, America, and
other countries, Steinach, Lichtenstern, Voronoff, and their pupils,
associates, and rivals, who have gradually built up certainties out
of speculations and experiments. In the last month or so Professor
Cavazzi, of Bologna, has published claims that greatly reinforce and
extend these assurances. Adult vigour _can_ be restored, and it can
be kept up to at least the end of the normal life. It can probably be
maintained for many years beyond that limit. At first it may be only a
few prosperous and enterprising individuals, with access to the best
and most skilful advice, who will extend the span of their activity
in this way, but it is unlikely that “prolongation” will be allowed
to remain the privilege of a small class. The average active human
life, we may conclude, in the quite near future, will be not only
unencumbered but prolonged, in comparison with any but exceptionally
sturdy and lucky lives in the past.
We seem to be passing on now towards a state of human society in which
there will be no children but hopeful and active children, and though
many people will be full of years, none will be “aged”; a state of
society, in fact, in which the average man and woman will be of riper
years, far maturer in outlook and far less deeply immersed in sexual
and family affairs. It will be a community of grown-up people to an
extent quite beyond our present community. In most of our forecasts and
imaginings of times to come, we are apt to disregard this biological
revolution which is in progress, and the mental and social consequences
that must follow upon it. It seems to indicate the possibility of a
world with a different and probably a graver emotional tone, with
an art and a literature much less obsessed by the love story and
the elementary adventures of life, and with a political and social
life less passionate and impatient and more circumspect. It is not a
metaphor, it is a statement of material fact that mankind is growing
up, and that we are passing towards a more distinctly adult life as the
main stretch of existence, in comparison with the feverishly youthful
and transitory life of the past.
The development of the speculations that arise out of this statement
would carry us far beyond the scope of the present article. Later I
hope to return to some of the most striking of them. But the great mass
of current discussion about moral codes and standards of conduct, about
the ethics and sentiment of married and business and religious life and
the like, this searching and probing into fundamental things which make
our contemporary literature and journalism so different from that of
the last century, arises, I believe, very largely out of a need, felt
rather than recognized, of altering and adjusting our working habits
and traditional methods to this very imperfectly apprehended change
in human biology, this shifting of the centre point of life from the
twenties up towards the fifties, this rapid and disconcerting change,
in the course of a generation or so, of _Homo Sapiens_ into a more
completely developed, longer living, and more persistently vital animal.
_9 January, 1927._
II
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN CHINA? DOES THE KUOMINTANG FORESHADOW A NEW
SORT OF GOVERNMENT IN THE WORLD?
Where is history being made most abundantly at the present time?
One may doubt whether any of the events of the last twelve months
either in America or in Europe will figure very conspicuously in the
histories of the future. Political futilities and a slow economic
contraction in Great Britain, phases in the process of superabundance
in America, government by rhetoric and outrage in Italy, the sluggish
recognition at Geneva that Germany is after all in the middle of
Europe, and the arrest of the franc at the very moment when its plunge
seemed definitive--these and the steady progressive reconstruction
of a modern-spirited trading and manufacturing life upon the wide
foundations of Russia, mark no turning point in the course of human
affairs. All these things are, so to speak, merely Fate carrying-on.
But when we look to China there seems to be something more than
carrying-on in progress. There seems to be something new there,
something which has at any rate, so far as the Western observer is
concerned, only become credible and important in the last eight or ten
months. It is a change in the rhythm. It is the clear onset of a new
phase, of a new China, like nothing the world has ever seen before, a
challenge, a promise to all mankind.
Let us try to realize in the most general terms the significance of
this new movement in China. It is not an easy thing to do. Our world
is densely ignorant of things Chinese. At school few of us learnt
anything of the slightest importance about China, except that it had
a population so immense that you could kill Chinamen by the hundred
and they scarcely noticed it, that they ate rice, rats, and puppies,
and that they possessed two long rivers that seriously challenged the
records of the Nile and the Mississippi.
We learnt less formally that Chinamen of all ages wore highly
decorative skirts and flew kites, whereas we knew perfectly well that
the only proper amusement for gentlemen is hitting expensive little
balls about golf links until they are lost, and that the only proper
wear for a dominant race is chromatic pullovers and highly-illuminated
plus fours. Moreover, we were given to understand that the Chinese of
all ages and sexes preferred work to any other form of enjoyment, and
found an almost infantile pleasure in living exactly on the margin
of subsistence. And they were cruel, very cruel. Their artistic
productions amused us very greatly; they were so unlike the great
masters, Victorian art and British Academy pictures. Of beauty in the
proper sense of the word they knew nothing. So furnished forth upon
this matter of China, our minds rested and were content.
Right up to the present time we have been as satisfied with the
pre-eminence of our civilization and the worthlessness of theirs as
were the Chinese about their own perfections a hundred years ago. But
since then the Chinese have suffered blow after blow and humiliation
after humiliation, until the need of learning has been forced upon
them. Students came from China to America and Europe, and come in
increasing numbers. Never a Western student, except for some eccentric,
goes to China. Traders go, the European Governments send battleships
to back up their traders, and missionaries are despatched by various
denominations to advise the Chinese of the chief sorts of salvation
practised among us and available for their use. The traders send back
news with an eye to their privileges, and the missionaries with an
eye to their paymasters. A bright young man of position at Oxford or
Harvard would as soon think of leaving his ball games and his “rags”
and all the pleasant procedure that leads to pre-eminence as lawyer and
legislator in our world, for two or three years of study in China, as
get into a shell and be shot off to the moon. So that the Chinese may
even have crept ahead of us in breadth of outlook during the past few
years. Many of them now seem to know most of what we know and to know
also quite a lot about their own country. If one wants to know about
China nowadays, it is best to ask a Chinaman.
And now with a sense of surprise we find ourselves confronted by a
modern self-conscious Chinese nationality, consolidating its power very
rapidly and demanding to speak on equal terms with the American and
European. A living Chinese nation has appeared in the world.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the present Chinese situation
is this, that it is not apparently the work of any single man; the
consolidation and reconstruction of China that has made such rapid
progress in the last twelve months has not gone on under the direction
of some strong-jowled hero of the Diaz or Mussolini type. When the
long-tottering Manchu dynasty fell, and China became a republic and
fell into all the violent diversions and dissensions inevitable after
so extreme a change of régime, we Westerners, with our antiquated
ideas, looked at once for the strong man who was either to foist a new
dynasty on China or restore and bolster up the old--just as we looked
for a Napoleon to emerge in Russia. That marked how far the Western
intelligence had got in these matters. And just as the Western Powers
of Europe, following out dreary foreign policies they ought to have
scrapped ten years ago, muckered away an enormous amount of war gear
and money in supporting crazy “white hopes” against the nascent new
thing in Russia, ugly and queer and incomprehensible to them, so they
have wasted their prestige and resources upon this or that Chinese
brigand and general who was to play the rôle of Diaz in Mexico and make
China safe for the European investor.
No such “hero” has emerged either in Russia or China. It marks
a new age. The days of great adventurers seem to be past in any
country larger than Italy, and even in Italy it is possible to regard
Mussolini less as a leader than as the rather animated effigy of a
juvenile insurrection. What has happened in these wider, greater
lands is something much more remarkable, something new in history,
a phenomenon that calls for our most strenuous attention--namely,
government, effective government, competent military control, and a
consistent, steady, successful policy by an organized association.
This Kuomintang in China in so far as it is an organized association
is curiously parallel to the Communist Party which, standing behind
the quasi-parliamentary Soviets, has now held Russia together,
restrained such dangerous adventurers as Zinovieff, and defended its
frontiers against incessant foreign aggression for nine long years. We
shall be extraordinarily foolish if we do not attempt to realize the
significance of this novel method of controlling government which has
broken out over two of the greatest political areas of the globe. We
have now two governments through organized associations, governments
which are neither limited monarchies, dictatorships, nor parliamentary
republics, on the American and French models--one in Russia, and now
another over the larger half of China, which bid fair to spread over
the entire breadth of Asia until they are in complete contact.
When I say that the Communist Party and the Kuomintang are similar,
I mean only in so far as regards organization. They have profound
differences in origin and aim and profession, and to those I will give
a word later. But first I want to point out the complete novelty of
their method.
Some twenty years or more ago I wrote a fantastic speculation about
government, called “A Modern Utopia,” in which I supposed all
administrative and legislative functions to be monopolized by an
organization called the Samurai, which any one could join by passing
certain fairly exacting tests and obeying the rules of an austere,
disinterested, and responsible life. One was free to leave the
organization and drop power and responsibility when one chose. The
organization ran the world. There were no great heroes and leaders,
and there were no representatives nor parliaments nor elections. Any
one who chose to face the hardships of the job could have a hand in
control, but there was no room in the direction of public affairs
either for the adventurer or for appeals to the oafish crowd.
Now this fantasy seems to have been one of those odd guesses that
hover close to latent possibilities. If the “Modern Utopia” were
published now, everybody would say I had taken a leaf from the book of
the Communist Party or the Kuomintang, or even (though this is rather
a different animal) the Fascisti. But indeed this anticipation sprang
only from an early recognition that modern means of communication,
the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless, and so forth, of
rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions
to a great number of co-operating centres, of getting quick replies
and effective discussion, has opened up a new world of political
processes. Ideas can now be given an effectiveness greater than the
effectiveness of any personality, and stronger than any sectional
interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against
perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily
and widely without personal, local, and sectional misunderstandings. So
it is that both New Russia and this New China that has hatched itself
out so astonishingly in the last year are things as new and different
structurally from any preceding political organisms as mammals were
from the great reptiles that came before them.
Directly we turn to their origins we note a wide difference. New
Russia is the creation of the Communist Party, based upon and knit
closely together by the economic dogmas of the Marxists. It was a
cosmopolitan party with more than half a century of insurrectionary
and revolutionary activity behind it before it secured power. It
was a party of antagonism to the current system, it captured Russia
as a war-shattered ruin, and for a time it showed itself very poor
in constructive ideas and economic organization. Its habits were
habits of opposition and sabotage. But from the outset it had immense
political resistance and strength, and it persists and learns, and is
now manifestly building up a new social and economic order tentatively
and experimentally, that is neither communistic nor individualistic
on Western lines. The Kuomintang seems to owe its origins and
inspirations to that valiant man, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, who so nearly
escaped decapitation in the Chinese Legation in London a quarter of a
century ago. Its vital element is the student class, and especially
the students fired by Western ideas but by no means overwhelmed by
them. It has come more rapidly to power against suppression. Its centre
of origin is Canton; it is the creation of the South. Perhaps it was
inevitable that the New China should arise far away from the ancient
imperial traditions of Peking, far away from the foreign legations and
the military memories of the North. And while the Russian movement was
primarily social and only secondarily Russian, the Kuomintang started
apparently with the idea of “China for the Chinese” and accepted most
of the established traditions of property.
We remain, I say, still largely ignorant of the true quality of
the Kuomintang. Three-quarters of the information we get from China
is untrustworthy on account of its commercial or antiquated bias.
Obviously the Chinese want to secure a free hand in the control of
their own political and economic life, to levy tariffs according to
their needs, and extinguish the injustice of extra-territorial rights,
and as obviously these simple and reasonable aspirations are deeply
resented by the inadaptable Europeans who have lived in and profited
by the old régime. But in spite of the manifest eagerness of a large
section of the Western press to make capital out of any outrage upon
Europeans in South China, they have had very little to record, and on
the other hand the tale of European violence against the Chinese is a
heavy one. The “fool behind the gun” who has been so busy in recent
years shooting away the links of confidence and good feeling that hold
together the British Empire in Ireland, in India, and elsewhere, seems
to have had a glorious time out of bounds in China. He has blazed away
at unarmed processions of students and shot into crowded towns. The
English illustrated papers have offered us the most damning evidence of
obstructive junks rammed and sunken and of the general high-handedness
of British procedure. Since the Bolshevik Government is still a
useful bogey for American and European scaremongers, the Kuomintang
is declared to be Bolshevist in origin and sympathy. This is just the
common abuse natural in the situation. The Kuomintang seems to be
unencumbered by the Marxist dogmas that still clog the feet of Russian
development. It is probably a decade or so more modern and flexible in
its ideas.
Our illustrated papers have published photographs of Kuomintang
leaders grouped with Borodin and other Bolshevist representatives in
support of the “Red” accusation. But that no more commits China and
Russia to a hand-and-glove alliance than the photographs in circulation
of the poor little Manchu emperor boy with a British “tutor” standing
like a keeper beside him commit Great Britain to a restoration of the
Son of Heaven’s sacrifices in Pekin. There seem to be far more Russians
with the brigand generals of North China than among the Cantonese
armies, but these Pekin Russians are Russians of the “white” persuasion
and useless for the purpose of creating prejudice. I do not hear of any
attempts on the part of the Cantonese Government to expropriate any
one, Chinese or foreigner, or to restrain trading, or to confiscate
or nationalize industry. If anything of the sort did occur, we should
certainly have all the reactionary European press proclaiming it, and
so it seems reasonable to conclude that there is no tendency whatever
in that direction. The social and economic life of China has never
run strictly parallel to ours, and the Kuomintang develops in its own
way--but that is a different story from the establishment of Communism.
And also it is a different story if, under similar necessities, the
new social trading and industrial experiments of the Chinese presently
come to display some sort of similarity to Russian developments, as the
dogmas of the Marxists are shaken off or sterilized as pious sentiments
by the latter people, and as both races settle down to work in the
face of realities. Surely no man in his senses can believe that the
financial, trading, and industrial methods of America and Europe to-day
are the ultimate triumph of human wisdom, and it is as probable that
successful innovations of system may spring from the desolated and
renascent economic life of Russia and China as amidst the jungle of
interests in our more prosperous but more encumbered world.
The disposition to call the Cantonese Government “red” and to force it
into association with the Russian Government, which seems to be the aim
of a large section of the Atlantic press, may prove a very dangerous
disposition to our Western civilization. Manifestly China is not so
afraid of Russia as she is of Japan and the Powers whose warships
pervade her great rivers. Soviet Russia is further off and milder. And
anxious to be helpful.
But the rubbish that is written in some papers does not always perish
there. It goes to China; it goes to Russia. Suppose we Westerners
succeed in persuading the Chinese and the Russians that we regard
them with a common animosity, and that for us they are all one--Reds
altogether. Suppose we insist on treating them both as outcasts.
Suppose that as the United Soviets and the Kuomintang work out the
problems of economic and political construction before them, they
find they have problems very much in common, and that the irrational
hostility of the older civilizations obliges them to turn more and more
to each other. Suppose they take up scientific work more vigorously
than our fatuous self-satisfaction allows us to do. Suppose they decide
to make the pace for us. Europe and America are not so blindingly
brilliant and progressive that it would not be possible to press them
hard.
Suppose Russia and China chose to put in tens of thousands of
scientific workers against our thousands. The average Chinese brain is
said to be rather richer in grey matter than the average European. From
the Baltic to the Chinese coasts there is a population of more than
five hundred millions even now, and lands of a richness far surpassing
all the resources of North America. They are poor countries as yet, but
potentially they are very great countries. They have still to develop
effective railway links, but they can do that now with all the lessons
of our older system to warn and guide them. And no other countries in
the world are so happily placed for the promotion of aviation services.
It would not be difficult to argue that the backbone lines of the
air services of the future must pass over Russia and China anyhow.
Before we dismiss as incredible the development of a powerful and even
dominating civilization in the federated Soviets of Russia and Asia,
let us recall the contemptuous superiority with which Europe regarded
the United States during the strain of the Civil War.
At any rate it seems to me that this New China, whose brain and nervous
system is the Kuomintang, is the most interesting thing by far upon the
stage of current events, and the best worth watching and studying.
_23 January, 1927._
III
WHAT IS FASCISM? WHITHER IS IT TAKING ITALY?
Is fascism the invention and weapon of Mussolini, or is Mussolini the
creature of Fascism? Is Fascism something that would die if he died, or
is it something that would have played its part in the world if that
eminently theatrical figure had never been born?
No doubt that under its present name and as an organization Fascism
from its very beginning has been most intimately associated with
Mussolini. But though it has kept its name and its leader, it has
changed its nature very completely since its appearance seven years
ago. Beginning as something of a novelty, it has abandoned every novel
pretension it ever made. This reality that has now taken on the name
and organization of Fascism was fully vocal in Italy before the war,
and its spiritual father is d’Annunzio. It was active and armed for the
Fiume raid, while Mussolini was still encouraging crowds to loot shops
and preaching “the railways for the railwaymen” and the land for the
peasants.
This spirit in Italy, which Mussolini did not create but which he
has studied, adopted, and used to clamber to his present fantastic
position of Italian tyrant, had already found literary expression in
the “Futurist” poetry of Marinetti as early as 1912 and 1913. I can
remember that rich voice in London at some dinner of the Poetry Society
long before the war, reciting, shouting, the intimations of a new
violence, of an Italy that would stand no nonsense, that adjured the
past and claimed the future, that exulted in the thought and tumult of
war, that was aristocratic, intolerant, proud, pitiless, and, above
all, “Futurist.”
In those days Mussolini was just the sort of fellow the present-time
Fascist would spend a happy evening in waylaying and beating to death.
He was a pacificist, a Socialist of the extreme left, and he had made
himself conspicuous by leading an agrarian revolt, the Red Week, in
Romagna.
Even in 1919 Mussolini had not found the real soul and substance of
his party, and the youthful violence of Italy had still to discover
its organizer and god. The early Fascist programme read over again
now, seven years later, is almost incredibly contradictory of all that
Fascism now proclaims; it was republican, pacificist, it demanded the
abolition of titles, freedom of the Press, freedom of association,
freedom of propaganda, a census of wealth, confiscation of unproductive
capital, suppression of banks and stock exchanges, grants of land to
peasant soviets, and so forth. It was in fact a new organization of
Socialist extremists outside the trade-union and peasant classes. But
its strength lay not in its ideas, but in the ability with which it was
organized.
It set about its work from the beginning with a melodramatic
picturesqueness that seized upon adolescent imaginations; it was
aggressive, adventurous, quarrelsome, and implacable after the heart of
youth. It was, in a word, a great lark. But it put the rampant Italian
Futurists into a uniform and taught them a Roman salute. It developed
a feud with the Socialists and Populist Party. It grasped an immense
opportunity at the municipal elections of 1920, when it supported, and
in return had the connivance of, the Giolitti Ministry. It supplied
convenient bands of young roughs to intimidate electors. It got arms
in some secret but effective fashion, and a properly instructed police
dealt with it in a spirit of friendly laxity. And when next year it had
become an actual party represented in the Chamber, it turned against
its foster-father Giolitti, which served that venerable statesman right.
The early programme had dropped out of sight by that time; it would
be forgotten altogether were it not for the obstinate memories of
antagonists like Sturzo and Nitti--and Mussolini was feeling his way
steadily towards the poses and professions that would most fully
satisfy the cravings of the more energetic and adventurous sections of
Italian youth. He has emerged at last in a rôle that d’Annunzio could
have written for him fifteen years ago, the rôle of the unscrupulous,
magnificent Saviour and re-Maker of a Hairy Heroic Italy.
As late as 1919 he had still been flirting with extreme Socialistic
ideas; it was only with the fall of Giolitti that he moved definitely
over to patriotism, nationalism, religious orthodoxy, and conservatism.
I would not charge him with a cunning and calculated self-seeking
in this change of front. He seems to have been guided by the quick
instinct of the born actor and demagogue for what would “take,” rather
than by any intelligible reasoning, to throw himself and all his
resources into the forms demanded by romantic reaction.
The forces of romantic reaction had been incapable of producing an
organization, but they were prepared for melodramatic devotion;
they had no great leader except an elderly poet of literary habits,
unhappily lacking in hair and a little exhausted by aviation and Fiume,
and they cried out for a hero in the full vigour of life. The Fascist
organization, with the very little modification needed to scrap all the
original principles, gave them the first, and Mussolini was only too
ready to take his cue and come forward into the limelight as the second.
One need only study a few of the innumerable photographs of Mussolini
with which the world is now bespattered to realize that he is a
resultant and no original. That round, forcible-feeble face is the
popular actor’s face in perfection. It stares, usually out of some
pseudo-heroic costume, under a helmet for choice, with eyes devoid of
thought or intelligence and an expression of vacuous challenge. “Well,
what have you got against me? I deny it.”
It is the face of a man monstrously vain and--at the mere first rustle
of a hiss--afraid. Not physically afraid, not afraid of the assassin
who lurks in the shadows, but afraid, in deadly fear of that truth
which walks by day. The murders and outrages against opponents and
critics that lie like a trail of blood upon his record are the natural
concomitants of leadership by a man too afraid of self-realization to
endure the face of an antagonist. Away with them! Nitti, Amendola,
Forni, Misuri, Matteotti, Salvemini, Sturzo, Turati! Away with all
these men who watch and criticize and wait! What are they waiting for?
Not one of these names of men robbed, beaten, exiled, or foully done to
death, which is not the name of a better man than this posturing figure
which holds the stage in Italy. And the supreme sin of each one of them
has been the quack-destroying comment, the chill and penetrating eye.
In truth Mussolini has made nothing in Italy. He is a product of Italy.
A morbid product. Italians ask: “What should we have done without
Mussolini?” and the answer is: “You would have got another.” What is
now drilled and disciplined as Fascism existed before him and will
go on after him. If he were to die, Fascism would not have the least
difficulty in finding among the rich resources of Italy a successor as
dramatic and rhetorical: its difficulty would be that it would probably
find too many successors.
What then is this reality of Fascism, which inflates this strange
being and allows him for a little while to do so much violence as the
tyrant of Italy? What complex of forces sustains him?
One power of Fascism is that it is the first entrance of an organized
brotherhood upon the drama of Italian politics.
It is only apparently a one-man tyranny. There is considerable
reason to suppose that organized brotherhoods, maintaining a certain
uniformity of thought and action over large areas and exacting a
quasi-religious devotion within their membership, are going to play an
increasingly important part in human affairs. Secret societies there
have always been in Italy, but Fascism is not a secret society; it is
an association with open and declared aims. It discusses its activities
in big meetings and regulates them through a Press. The Communist Party
which dominates Russia and the Kuomintang which is rescuing China from
anarchy and foreign dominion, are other such associations, broader and
more completely modern in spirit but structurally akin. Their ideals
and those of the Fascists are in the flattest contrast, and their
procedure is freer from furtive violence, but they have much the same
material form. The contents of the vehicle differ, but the form of the
vehicle is similar.
And while in the Communist Party we find Marxist theories struggling
with practical reality and in the Kuomintang the conception of
consolidating and developing a modernized but essentially Chinese
Civilization, in the Fascist vehicle there seems to be the ideology
of a young and essentially ill-educated Italian, romantic, impatient,
and, at bottom, conventional, wanting altogether in any such freshness
or vigour of outlook as distinguishes the Kuomintang and Communist
visions. Fascism as compared with these movements presents a mentality
which cannot conceive new things, but which wants old things and itself
made glorious. The Italian Futurism it succeeds was never more than a
projected return to primitive violence. It is a modern method without a
modern idea.
This Fascist mind demands workers who work with pride and passion
and accept what is given to them cheerfully; soldiers eager for the
prospect of death; priests who are saints without question, and
teachers who teach but one lesson: Italy. It can face no doubts nor
qualifications. It sees taking thought in the light of treason,
discussion as weakness, and the plainest warnings of danger as
antagonism to be beaten into silence and altogether overcome. So
long as Mussolini sings its song it will lavish upon him a medieval
loyalty. Should he by some miracle be smitten with intelligence and
self-criticism, it would sweep him away. Its honesty, as a movement in
general and disregarding the manifest cynicism and commercialism of
some of its older leaders, is indisputable. Mussolini before the camera
man as hero is the caricature portrait of Young Italy before the world
as hero.
Now, how comes it that Italy has produced this sort of youthful mind
in sufficient abundance to fill the ranks of Fascism and make it for
a time at least a great and powerful machine? Why has Italy bred her
own servitude and degradation? To answer that question completely
would demand a long and intimately critical study of the development
of Italian secondary and higher education, and of the quality and
supply of reading matter to the inquiring adolescent during the past
half-century. I do not even know if it is a case of bad schools or of
insufficient schools, of inaccessibility of education, of religious or
anti-religious tests for the teachers, of aloofness or cheapness of
quality in the universities, of a pervasion of teaching by propaganda
or a defective distribution of books. But bad education there has
surely been, and Italy reaps the consequences to-day. The Italian
intelligence is naturally one of the best in Europe, but in some way
or in several ways it must have been underfed, under-exercised, and
misdirected for this supply of generous, foolish, violent young men
of the middle classes to exist. This mentality could not be possible
without a wide ignorance of general history and world geography,
without the want of any soundly scientific teaching to balance the
judgment and of any effective training in discussion, fair play,
and open-mindedness to steady behaviour. It is the mentality of the
emotional, imaginative, intellectually undertrained hobbledehoy.
For the most tragic thing of all, to my mind, in this Italian
situation is the good there is in these Fascists. There is something
brave and well-meaning about them. They love something, even if it
is a phantom Italy, that never was and never can be; they can follow
a leader with devotion even if he is a self-deceiving charlatan.
They will work. Even their outrages have the excuse of a certain
indignation, albeit stupid sometimes to the pitch of extreme cruelty.
Mixed up with this goodness there is no doubt much sheer evil, a
puerile malignity and the blood-lust of excited beasts, as when so
hideously they beat to death and out of recognition the poor child who
may or may not have fired an ineffective pistol at their dictator. But
the goodness is there.
Yet I do not see that the alloy of generosity and courage in Fascism is
likely to save Italy from some very evil consequences of its rule.
The deadliest thing about Fascism is its systematic and ingenious and
complete destruction of all criticism and critical opposition. It is
leaving no alternative Government in the land. It is destroying all
hopes of recovery. The King may some day be disinterred, the Vatican
may become audible again, the Populist Party of Catholic Socialism
hangs on; but it is hard to imagine any of these three vestiges of the
earlier state of affairs recovering enough vitality to reconstruct
anew an exhausted Italy. Fascism is holding up the whole apparatus of
education in Italy, killing or driving out of the country every capable
thinker, clearing out the last nests of independent expression in the
universities. Meanwhile its militant gestures alarm and estrange every
foreign Power with which it is in contact. Now through the Tyrol it
insults the Germans to the limits of endurance; now it threatens France
monstrously and recklessly; now comes the turn of the Turk or the
Yugo-Slav.
Yet no European country is less capable of carrying on a modern war
than Italy; she has neither the coal, steel, nor chemical industries
necessary, and equally is she incapable of developing a modern
industrialism without external resources. Her population increases
unchecked; no birth-control propaganda may exist within her boundaries.
So beneath all the blare and bluster of this apparently renascent
Italy there accumulates a congestion of under-educated and what will
soon be underfed millions. British and other foreign capital may for
a time bring in fuel and raw material to sweat the virtues of this
accumulation of cheap low-grade labour. We may hear for a time quite
a lot about the industrial expansion of Italy. We may be invited to
invest in Italian “industrials.” But one may doubt whether the more
intelligent workers of Western and Central Europe will consent to have
the standards of European life lowered by Italian cheap labour without
a considerable and probably an effective protest.
So it seems to me that the horoscope of Italy reads something after
this fashion: this romantic, magnificent, patriotic Fascist Party, so
exalted and devoted in its professions, will continue to grip the land,
but of necessity it must become more and more the servant of foreign
and domestic capital, and more and more must it sell itself to reduce
its dear and beloved Italy to a congested country of sweated workers
and terrorized peasants, until at last the peninsula will be plainly
the industrial slum of Europe. I do not see any forces in Italy capable
of arresting the drive to degradation and catastrophe that the Fascist
movement, for all its swagger, has set going. Italy is now the Sick
Land of Europe, a fever patient, flushed with a hectic resemblance to
health, and still capable of convulsive but not of sustained violence.
She declines. She has fallen out of the general circle of European
development; she is no longer a factor in progressive civilization. In
the attempts to consolidate European affairs that will be going on in
the next decade, Italy will be watched rather than consulted. She has
murdered or exiled all her Europeans.
Many things may happen ultimately to this sick and sweated Italy, so
deeply injured and weakened by her own misguided youth. Her present
flushed cheeks and bright eyes and high temperature will presently
cease to deceive even herself. She may blunder into a disastrous war,
or she may develop sufficient social misery to produce a chaotic social
revolution. Or one of these things may follow the other. And either war
or revolution may spread its effects wide and far. In that way Italy
becomes a danger to all humanity. But as a conscious participant she
ceases to be great and significant in the world drama. She is now, for
other countries, merely Mussolini. She may presently be his distracted
relict.
But Italy is something more than a huge river valley and a mountainous
peninsula under a Fascist tyrant. Italian intelligence and energy are
now scattered throughout the earth. Who can measure the science and
stimulation we in the rest of the world may not owe presently to the
fine minds, the liberal spirits, who have been driven out of Italy by
the Fascists’ loaded cane? How many men must there be to-day, once
pious sons of Italy, who are now learning to be servants of mankind!
_9 February, 1927._
IV
DOUBTS OF DEMOCRACY. NEW EXPERIMENTS IN GOVERNMENT
Is democracy a failure? Is it going to be retained much as it is in the
years to come, or is it to be changed almost out of recognition, or
cast aside as a hopelessly bad method in human affairs?
Democracy is a word with a remarkable variety of meanings. Here I
am using it in its commonest current sense to express government by
legislators and administrators appointed by a popular vote, government
based on the assumption that ultimately the “people” is sovereign. It
involves a denial of all hereditary or class or professional claims to
power and privilege except in so far as the sovereign people consents
and permits. Even a king is understood to be king by popular consent
and not by any right divine. Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, its
great function, is the election. Thereby power is assigned, and public
issues are understood to be decided.
Unless Democracy is thus defined, its meaning will flap away into the
wildest contradictions. Leaving out of consideration the very especial
and definite meaning it had in the ancient world, it has carried a
hundred different sets of implications since the mighty shock of the
first French Revolution brought it into free and frequent use. It has
stood for human equality against every form of privilege and control,
and it has stood for the right of the individual to realize himself to
the full against every form of restrictive assumption.
It has stood, therefore, for the extremest socialism and the extremest
individualism. And it has stood, with an equal facility, for limitless
progress and for a reaction to a peasant life, just as its liberating
or its equalitarian side was brought uppermost. Europe has seen social
democracy, Christian democracy, even democratic monarchy, shaking
hands with every one, and showing baby to all the world. All these
paradoxical variants and interpretations I put aside here, and I will
not reflect for a moment upon the Democratic Party in the United
States. Here I am discussing simply democracy in politics; government
and the control of affairs in general by persons elected on a broad or
universal franchise.
That sort of democracy is traceable, latent or overlaid, in most
parts of Europe throughout history. Switzerland is an old story
and democracy muttered close to the surface in seventeenth-century
England and Scotland, but it was only with the American and French
revolutions of the late eighteenth century that it became widely
prevalent and respected. It was the creed of nineteenth-century
liberalism everywhere. Throughout that age the great mother of
parliaments at Westminster bred for exportation, like an Ostend
rabbit, and legislatures and responsible cabinets sprang up all round
the globe from Japan to Brazil. Franchise spread like an epidemic,
and has now spread until the nuns in the convents of England and the
ladies in Turkish harems are voting. The coloured vote in South Africa
has become a very grave question indeed. No doubt this comprehensive
democratization of mankind has had many beneficial consequences; it has
forced the most inattentive to a temporary attention to the world’s
affairs, and it has been the symbol of a new self-respect for women
and other enfranchised classes, and for many subject races--but to-day
the question whether it is really a permanently good way of doing our
collective business is being more and more insistently pressed upon
us. Is the world going on that way, or is it seeking for fresh and
more satisfactory paths of development? Or, to put it concretely:
will general elections and municipal elections or any sort of popular
elections be of more than the slightest importance in the affairs of
A.D. 2027?
There exists a great variety of indictments of political democracy,
but the main, most essential one is that it has produced a special
and objectionable type of ruler, the politician, with certain very
definable characteristics. The primitive theory of electional democracy
was that the great, good, and capable men, statesmen, leaders in
affairs, would offer, or be persuaded, to stand for the suffrages of
their fellow-citizens, and would be chosen and elected for their known
gifts and virtues. But the business of getting elected proved to be
susceptible to considerable complication, and demanded almost from the
outset something more than conspicuous public services and utility to
ensure a candidate’s return. No good for Cincinnatus to stay at his
plough; he had to exert himself.
The would-be ruler found it incumbent to divert so much of his time
from being good and great to the task of getting himself elected, and
he had to bind himself in such close party relationship with others
engaged upon the same task, that his individual goodness and greatness
speedily became a minor consideration. His interest in what was good
for his country and mankind has been, and is, entirely subordinate
to what will gain and what will lose votes. Independence of mind,
magnanimity and greatness of desire are positive disadvantages for him.
And so we find in all the great democratic countries that the direction
of affairs has passed into the hands of men who are great merely as
politicians, and who are otherwise neither remarkably intelligent,
creative, nor noble beings.
They are, indeed, in a great number of cases, conspicuously shifty
and ambiguous, strategic, and practically ineffective. Let the reader
try to name a single man of really first-class moral and intellectual
quality in British, French, American, or German politics to-day. With
a sort of baffled dismay we look up to these men we have elected
to make the world anew for us, and we see leaders who do not lead
and representatives who, at best, impress us as acutely humiliating
caricatures of the struggling soul of our race. We realize that the
real working out of human destiny is going on, so far as it is going
on, beside, independently of, or partially hampered by, our ostensible
public life.
In America, France, and Great Britain, for example, where democracy
has had the longest run, we see that the democratic method has brought
about practically the same situation. A number of politicians have
secured the confidence and support of the main groups of prosperous
people, who do not want the world changed to any great extent. These
politicians of the right and centre form so solid, well-alimented, and
effective a constellation that they are generally in power, albeit
not always in an electional majority. Naturally these politicians of
conservation have the support of all the great selling businesses
which advertise in the Press and influence the Press. A second group
of politicians appeals, with a feebler Press support, to the less
comfortable masses. And while property, which demands no changes, can
be of one mind politically, projected remedies for social uneasiness
are various, and the discontented are a divided force. Leftism
seems everywhere in a majority, for this is a very insecure and
unsatisfactory world for the larger half of mankind, but nowhere is it
in effective control.
Scarcely represented at all are the creative minds that would educate,
reorganize, and push towards an ampler life for our race. Their
purposes are difficult to understand and easy to misrepresent, and it
suits the needs of the politician of the left far better to excite
the voter at a disadvantage by wild promises and by stirring up class
resentment--a procedure the politician of the right seeks to counter by
the exacerbation of international hatred and suspicion and threats of
foreign aggression. So he confuses and deflects popular anger. And a
political party that represents wealth is not necessarily a party that
represents stability. In a world of such swaying and uncertain values
as ours to-day, much of our wealth is adventurous wealth and a heavy
mass of business and financial operations are speculative operations
dependent on insecurity. If the party of the right does not want things
changed to any great extent, it may nevertheless find itself dominated
by an active section quite eager to see them very considerably rocked
about. No political party in any of the democratic countries of our
contemporary world is anything but a resultant of current social
and economic with traditional forces. No politician produced by the
democratic methods stands for any authentic effort to order matters
better. The great democratic countries of our globe are entirely
without such political leading at the present time.
Now this is in a phase of the world’s affairs when certain matters
of tremendous practical importance press for attention and can be
handled only through the political machine. The art of war has come
to such a pitch that civilization demands the establishment of
war-proof relationships between State and State. No such relationships
are forthcoming and there are no signs that any politician anywhere
is prepared to risk votes by even seeming to impair the national
independence, as such relationships must necessarily do.
The financial and economic life of mankind has become world-wide, and
it is suffering a vast demoralization by the universal insecurity
in monetary standards. There is no evidence anywhere of democracy’s
ability to tackle this difficult and urgent problem. The world needs
a common money, or--what is a slightly clumsier form of the same
thing--moneys firmly established in relation one to another. It can
only get a practically common money through the co-operation of
governments. No government on this planet displays the intellectual and
moral quality to handle the matter magisterially.
Economic life, too, has ceased to be manageable through comparatively
small businesses run as individual adventures. Control of staple
products, systematic regulated production and distribution in the case
of such commodities as coal are urgently needed. These things extend
beyond national limits. The welfare of thousands of people in Italy,
for example, depends upon the coal production in France and England.
Oil, cotton, wheat--the mention of these words now conjures up thoughts
of world-wide operations. Democracy seems incapable of producing
politicians competent to direct these big affairs. Private business
alone is too chaotic and individualistic to direct them. It is powerful
enough to deflect and involve democratic rulers and politicians, but it
is not united nor powerful enough to achieve efficient administration
nor able to free its creative and productive activities from the
destructive raids of mere money-making adventurers. Economically we
drift upon a rudderless ship.
Such simple truths are being recognized by a growing multitude of
people, and they are felt far more widely than they are clearly
recognized. The discontent with elected persons gathers and grows. No
politician is any longer a hero to his fellow-countrymen. When Lord
Oxford and Lord Birkenhead strike attitudes to remind the world of
Gladstone and Palmerston everybody laughs. And the disposition to push
aside parliamentary governments spreads daily. Russia has a pretence
of representative government entirely and openly controlled by the
Communist Party. The Duma, which I visited in January, 1914, and heard
debating and dividing and rising to points of order about nothing
in the best style, with its Speaker, Opposition, and reporters all
complete, has vanished beyond recall. China, after some parliamentary
beginnings in Peking, has cast them aside for that remarkable students’
association, the Kuomintang. Italy, in the throes of economic crisis
after the war, scrapped and chased away her politicians and gave
herself over also to a banded society. Spain has gone back upon
parliamentary government. Poland and Hungary have scarcely tried the
celebrated mixture before rejecting it. Greece follows on the same
lines, and in the new Turkey it is criminal to be in opposition.
We came near to something of the same sort of thing in France last
summer, when the rapid fall of the franc so scared the politicians
out of their party manœuvres that Herriot, Briand, and Poincaré all
took office together. We have the interesting spectacle in France
of a country with its party politics largely in suspense. For ten
nervous days of general strike it seemed as though Great Britain also
might join the comity of nations weary of politicians. For two years
Parliament has muddled with the vital question of coal production and
done nothing: it has weathered one crisis and learnt nothing from it.
The British coal industry goes on, socially and economically wasteful,
in scandalous defiance of the Samuel Report and the Sankey Report, and
Parliament continues to do nothing. The defeated miners are in the
mental state of France in 1871.
Outside of America extraordinarily few people still believe in
political democracy at all except as a makeshift to stand in the way
of worse things, tyrannies, oligarchies, and the like horrors. Many
of those who still believe demand extensive changes of method. A
number of us do imagine that democracy might be preserved, as a vastly
different and more efficient method of government, if election by
proportional representation with the single transferable vote in large
constituencies returning many representatives could be substituted for
the present bilateral system. Such an electrical method, associated
with very much smaller parliamentary bodies, would in practice wipe out
the party system, destroy the professional politicians, and hand over
the decisive control of things to a body of prominent citizens--whose
return would be very largely due to prominence and public confidence
won by other than political activities. However, all politicians who
have not already arrived at prominence hate the idea, and so, since
they constitute the body of political life, there is not the slightest
chance of its ever becoming, except perhaps in name and with essential
mutilations, the electoral method of any modern state. It can be left
out of this present discussion, therefore, and so also can projects
for a special Economic Parliament of trade unionists and employers and
suchlike collateral developments, or for elections by suddenly and
fortuitously appointed jurymen instead of by entire constituencies.
Such things can be attained only through political bodies, and though
the politician of the existing type can do little or nothing with
things when he has them in his hands, he is far too human to let them
go out of his hands and legislate himself out of existence in favour of
a different kind of ruler altogether--which is the admitted purpose of
these novelties.
None of such schemes for making democracy more effective or more truly
representative really touches the essential weakness of democracy,
which is that the great mass of human beings are not sufficiently
intelligent nor sufficiently interested to follow political issues at
all. The representative body represents, for nine out of ten of its
voters, a vacant mind. At an election the Sovereign People is roused
to a temporary sporting interest, and votes according to panic or
prejudice. It does not even vote according to its interests, because
the ordinary citizen leads so narrow, limited, and purblind a life that
he is unable to see--even in such matters as sound money or war--how
politics may come home to him.
Every extension of the suffrage in Great Britain has brought in more
masses of utterly indifferent people to vote. Half a century ago,
when I was a child, the chief English newspapers gave almost verbatim
reports of parliamentary debates and political speeches. Such a
newspaper would not sell a hundred thousand copies to-day. Now, when
every one has a vote, it is almost impossible to tell from the papers
every one reads whether Parliament is in session. The more “democratic”
democracy has become, the more complete has become its disregard of
public affairs.
I put forward these by no means very exhilarating considerations in
partial answer to the question with which this paper began. Political
democracy is still apparently a going concern in America, least
chastened of continents, but elsewhere there seems very little go left
in it. And I do not think that we begin yet to realize the significance
of those new associations of which Communism and Fascism are the best
known types, and the Kuomintang a less thoroughly understood example.
I find the Communist Party a very wonderful and instructive fact in
my world. I want to be quite plain here in what I am writing; I have
recently produced what I consider a very complete and destructive
analysis of Communist dogma, and here, though it may seem egotistical,
I am obliged to insist upon that fact. But a severely critical and
sceptical attitude towards these doctrines in theory and action is
one thing, and participation in the fear, hostility, and insane abuse
with which those who hold them are treated, is quite another. Economic
and social doctrine apart, I recognize very enviable and admirable
qualities in the Communist Party both in Russia and in England. In
Russia not one person in fifty is a member of the party; in all Great
Britain I doubt if there are three thousand members. In our British
way we try to believe that the Communist Party consists of unwashed
and extremely bearded ruffians flourishing (God knows why they do it!)
bombs. But really it is very largely composed of quite young people
who give themselves to an astonishing extent to what they believe to
be the social, political, and economic rebirth of the world. They
are, the most of them, animated by an intense, essentially religious
passion. They toil mentally and make great sacrifices. They shape
their lives to fit their faith. They study with an immense devotion
what my critical conscience compels me to describe as dull, dogmatic,
and misleading literature. They co-operate with one another with a
remarkably willing discipline. “Religious” is the only word I know to
describe their enthusiasm, and there is not a religious teacher in the
world who would not gladly inoculate the youth of his congregation with
the courage, spirit, and energy these Communists display--if he could
get it separated from the mind and spirit of Marx. There they are, a
numerically quite small organization. And they hold Russia against all
comers with the acquiescence of the general population. They stand up
to quite lively persecutions in most Western countries. They go to
prison and even, in some Eastern countries, to death very courageously.
And if you are loth to hear so much good of the Communist Party,
perhaps the Fascists are more to your taste. I have already criticized
them for stupidity, brutality, cruelty, injustice, and so forth. I have
no respect for their idol, Mussolini. But there, too, in bands of no
very considerable multitude, is a devotion and a spirit that can give
over a great country into their hands.
I want to suggest that we may be only in the opening phase of this
sort of political religiosity, both on the left side and on the right
side, and that in its development lies the answer to the question
of what is to come after democracy. There is an immense fund of
unsatisfied seriousness in the young people of our Western communities
to-day, and not only in the young. These movements of Communism and
Fascism may be mere first attempts of that unsatisfied seriousness
to make a new world out of our present disorders. What is called the
decay of faith and the discrediting and fading of many old loyalties
have not destroyed the serious type; they have merely let it loose
for new experiments. These experiments seem to show already quite new
possibilities of concentrated directive power. If once we get control
of our present obsession about votes, we may discover that it is not
necessary to convert a majority of the “electorate” before a new world
begins.
_20 March, 1927._
V
DEMOCRACY UNDER REVISION
_A Lecture Delivered at the Sorbonne on March 15th, 1927_
In the face of this audience, in the presence of so many distinguished
men and women, I feel in a very apologetic state to-night.
I am not accustomed to make public addresses. I am not used to being
entertained in this flattering fashion. But the invitation I received
to come here was so tactfully and charmingly conveyed, and did me so
much honour, that I could scarcely do otherwise than obey and come.
I come, if you will permit me to say so, less for the great compliment
that your attention does me personally than because this gives me an
opportunity of saluting France, the custodian of the world’s artistic
conscience, the exponent of intellectual freedom, the mighty mother
of valiant and liberal thought for all mankind. The name of the
Sorbonne is a very magical name to every intellectual worker, and I do
not disguise from myself that to speak here to-night is the highest
distinction that is ever likely to fall to me.
You receive me to-night as a man of letters. And as a man of letters
I know I am not very easy to define. I am something of a romancer,
something of a novelist, something of a publicist. I have written
essays and social speculations. I have stolen and dressed myself up
in the plumage of the historian. I have written schoolbooks and a
scientific handbook. For my own part, I fall back upon _Journalist_ as
the least misleading description of my use in the world.
But let me disabuse your minds of any idea that it is out of modesty
or as a pose of modesty that I call myself a Journalist and my very
miscellaneous mass of work Journalism, and that I am conceding a
superiority in kind and quality, as an iron pot might concede a
superiority to a porcelain vessel, to the novelist, the romancer, the
social philosopher, or the political essayist. I am not doing that. I
am not raising that sort of issue. I am not thinking of rank and order
and precedence. What I am doing is trying to express, in as bright
and hard a manner as possible, a very definite view of the value of
all literary effort, all literary and artistic effort. I am trying to
express, in so far as my own activities go, my sense of the temporary
nature, the transitory and personal nature, of every statement made by
science and philosophy and of every beauty revealed by art.
If I find any difference between my mind and the minds of most of the
people I meet, it is that my perception of time is rather more detached
than is usual from the dimensions of the individual life; that my mind
is, as it were, a small-scale map of wide range; that I think with
less detail and in longer stretches; that the race process as a whole
has come home to me with unusual vividness, and that future things and
our relationship to future things have an abnormal reality for me. And
consequently it is natural for me to think that the man of letters,
the artist, the scientific worker, and the philosopher live first and
foremost for their own time and for the times immediately following
their own, and that thereafter their real value diminishes.
Tradition and educational pressure may mask this process to a certain
extent, but only mask it. We belong to our own times and have
significance only in relation to our own times. And this is as true of
those we call “Immortals,” of Homer, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo
or Leonardo or Voltaire, in the measure of their scale, as it is of you
and me who are thinking and discussing here to-night. Great or little,
we work, we serve our purpose, we pass. Into the night or into the
museum of antiquities at last go one and all. Art, poesy, philosophy,
literature, are not permanent things. They change in their methods,
their function, their essential nature...
And when I say that, I do not belittle them, but glorify them. They
are living processes like ourselves who breed and pass, and not dead
things like crystals or cut gems to be treasured for ever in the vaults
of the classical temple. All of them but the mere bric-à-brac I would
sweep into one living mortality as Journalism in its widest sense. The
picture, the music, the book, the research that does not arise out of
actual current things--and does not bear upon what we are doing or what
we intend to do--does not in reality exist. It is a phantom. It is a
pretension. It is Nothing. Science, art, literature, philosophy, all
alike record Humanity’s impression of the present and its attempt to
adjust itself for a future. They express the thought and embody the
will--the growing changing thought, the developing will--of mankind.
They are not a beautiful excrescence upon human life; not mere pearls
secreted by the effort and suffering of mankind; they are the very core
of the life of mankind--its chief directive function.
Now, after this much of self-introduction, I will put before you
certain speculations that occupy me very much. I put them before you
not as something thought out and presented to you in a finished state,
but as something about which I find myself greatly exercised--something
that may evoke kindred operations going on in your minds also, and so
interest you this evening.
I propose to launch a generalization, a generalization about the
probable forms of expression prevalent now and in the immediate
future--expression in political, social, literary, and artistic life.
I am going to suggest that we are in the beginning of an age whose
broad characteristics may be conveyed some day by calling it The Age of
Democracy Under Revision. That title I have chosen by way of defining
its relation to the age which has been drawing to its close under our
eyes: the Age of Democracy Ascendent.
Let us begin by exploring common ground. It would be easy to find
quite a large number of intelligent and well-instructed people who
would agree that the sixteenth century saw the germination, the
seventeenth and the eighteenth the birth struggles, the nineteenth the
rise and prevalence of something called Modern Democracy. Something
not merely political, but social, and profoundly differentiating
the literature and art of this time--quite as much as the political
life--from those of any previous period. That Ascendency of Democracy
has culminated; and like some wave that breaks upon a beach, its end
follows close upon its culmination.
Now what do we mean by this word Democracy? We are apt to say that
such words as Democracy and Socialism may mean anything or nothing.
But the truth is, that, in spite of many variations and convolutions,
both these words retain very definite meanings indeed. One might
compare them to little bags given to a multitude of children to collect
anything they liked from a pebble beach. In such bags, you might find
at the end of the day a great variety of things; in no two bags would
you find exactly the same things, and yet for all that in nearly all
the bags would you find very much the same content.
I suppose we should, nearly all of us, be in agreement that what we
meant by Democracy--in the modern sense--was expressed morally by the
statement:
_All human beings are of equal value in the sight of God_; or legally:
_All men are equal before the law;_
or practically:
_One man’s money is as good as another’s._
This implies a repudiation of caste, of inherent rank and function,
of all privileges and all fixed subordinations. It is equalitarian or
rebellious. And it is mildly paradoxical in the fact that, by insisting
upon the importance of _all_ individualities, it tends to restrain the
exaltation of particular individuals, and by exalting all individuals
to an equal level, it subordinates all individuals to the mass.
The democratic idea is no doubt very deeply rooted in the competitive
and insurgent heart of man. It is implicit in Christianity and in
Islam. But it was only in the sixteenth century, with the progressive
decay of Feudalism, that it began to be effective in the literary,
political, and artistic expression of mankind. If you reflect, I think
you will agree that its appearance was everywhere associated with the
breakdown of outworn or outpaced systems, with processes of release
and liberation, and generally also with processes of disintegration.
Democracy to many minds will also involve the challenging and
repudiation of authority. Some Catholic Democrats may question that,
but I believe I shall have the general feeling with me in accepting
that relaxation also as an aspect of Democracy.
Now as Democracy became ascendent in our world, its spirit produced
new forms in political life, in literature, in art, in music. Let us
consider these distinctive forms.
In politics it produced government by elected representative
assemblies--elected by an ever-widening constituency of voters. We
have Chambers of Representatives, Parliaments, spread throughout the
world, and we have seen the franchise extend until manhood, and at last
womanhood, suffrage seems everywhere in sight. It is strange to us
nowadays to imagine a fully organized country without a constitution,
a Parliament and periodic appeals to the mass of voters to endorse an
elected Government periodically replaceable. Yet six hundred years ago
such a way of managing public affairs would have seemed fantastic. The
Ancient World knew nothing of such devices. There were assemblies then,
but not representative assemblies. The Greek democracies and Republican
Rome assembled all their citizens. Even countries like France and
England before the sixteenth century, which had Parliaments of a sort,
did not conceive of them for a moment as governing bodies and kept
the elected element in a minor position. I doubt if many of us fully
realize the significance of the fact that the current political methods
and assumptions of the world to-day, prevalent from China to Peru,
would have been almost inconceivable even to highly intelligent human
beings until twelve or fifteen generations ago.
So much for the political expression of Democracy. In literature the
democratic spirit found its natural vehicle in the Novel. That too was
new and distinctive. The tale, the story of adventures, mankind has
had always--most usually of kings, princes, and heroic leaders--but
it was only with the ascent of Democracy that stories of characters,
histories of common individual lives detached from politics, detached
from any sense of social function, getting loose from any subordination
or any responsibility, rose towards dominance in literature. At the
very outset of the ascent of Democracy came the great master Cervantes
with his “Don Quixote,” scoffing at aristocracy, scoffing at privileged
responsibility, mocking at the final futility of chivalrous mastery,
putting his wisest words into the mouth of a clown and letting the
flour mills of the common bread-eater overthrow his knight in armour.
As modern Democracy rose to its climax, the novel rose to its climax.
The common characteristic of almost all the great novels of the
nineteenth century, and up to our own time, is that they represent
great crowds of individuals who follow trades, professions, and so
forth, and who have either no public function or, if they have a public
function, are not so differentiated by it that it is of any serious
importance to the story and the values of the novel. The crowd of
individuals and its interplay have become everything. Great ideas that
bind people together into any form of collective life are disregarded.
Great religious ideas, great political ideas and developments are not
there in any living, fermenting, debatable form--are even challenged
and forbidden by the critics as having no place there. Consider
Balzac, Dickens, Turgeniev, Zola, and suchlike representative giants
of this closing age. You think at once of a picture of humanity like
a market-place, like a fair, like the high-road to anywhere on a busy
day. When political life appears, it appears just as any other sort of
life. Here is a novel about elections and their humours, and here is
one about peasants or fishermen. Just different scenery and costumes
for the common story.
It strikes one at first as paradoxical that a period in which the
exaltation of the individual has tended to make every one a voter, a
fractional sovereign of the whole world, should lead in the literary
expression of the time to the disappearance, so to speak, of the
whole world in a crowd of people. But the paradox involves no real
inconsistency. What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business. The
literature of the period of Democracy Ascendent displays what its
political developments mask only very thinly--that Modern Democracy
is not a permanent form of political and social life, but a phase of
immense dissolution.
I think it would be comparatively easy to call the drama of the
last three centuries to confirm the evidence of the novel. With the
beginning of the period under consideration the Miracle Play which gave
you Everyman and related him to God and Heaven and Hell gave place to
Falstaff and his jolly companions, to the jealousy of Othello and the
social aspirations of Monsieur Jourdain. If we turn to painting or to
music we find all over this period the same effect of release--if you
like--detachment, anyhow, from broad constructive conceptions and any
sort of synthesis. There was very little detached painting in the old
world. It was a part of something else. It decorated a building, it
subserved a religious or political as well as a decorative purpose. If
paintings were ever detachable, it was that they might be carried from
a studio to an altar or a palace elsewhere. But with the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries painting became more and more liberated, said
good-bye to the altar-piece and the palace, and set out upon a life of
its own. Now our painters are pure anarchists. They paint what pleases
them for the sake of painting. They paint with a total disregard of
any collective reality, and they are extremely offended when we build
our houses with insufficient accommodation for their bright irrelevant
observations upon the beauty of this and that.
So, too, music has broken loose. In the old world it was relevant
and generally subordinate. I can imagine nothing more astonishing
to a revenant from the ancient to our present world--not even a
general election!--than a visit to a large concert-hall during the
performance, let us say, of Debussy’s “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” or
Ravel’s “Septette,”--this gathering of fortuitous people with no common
function, to listen to music which, apart from its beauty, has no sort
of collective meaning, no social object at all.
So far I have been attempting to make a case for the assertion that a
consideration of the chief forms of human expression during the past
age enables us to see in all of them Democracy as a great process of
loosening of bonds and general disintegration. But that loosening
and disintegration were not universal. Now I would point out that in
certain fields synthesis is so necessary, so inherent, that it has put
up a very successful fight against the solvent tendencies of Democracy.
In certain fields the ascent of Democracy has not meant dissolution.
No doubt the whole world of modern science became possible, and could
only become possible, through the immense mental releases of ascendent
Democracy. But while in the realms of political, literary, and artistic
expression Democracy meant fragmentation and reduction to unorganized
masses, in this newer world of science the onset of Democracy was
accompanied by synthesis of the most extensive sort. The development of
science in the past three centuries has been diametrically different
from the political, literary, and artistic development of the same
period. In the preceding ages, when everything else was organized
and relevant, science was a mere miscellany of disconnected facts.
With the release of the human mind from authority, science began to
be systematic and coherent. Release from established traditions and
precedences meant in the world of politics, literature, and art,
limitless freedom. In science it meant subjugation to experimental
verification and the logical consistency of fact with fact. So while
the broad visible history of the Age of Democracy so far has been one
of release, escape, go-as-you-please: less conspicuous in laboratories
and faculties and books and classes--but in the end infinitely more
significant--has been the growth of one consistent vision of reality to
which all things must be referred, in which the moods of a man are made
to march with chemical changes, and the structure of the smallest atom
is brought into relation with the physics of the remotest star. To that
release of synthetic forces I shall presently return.
Next let me point out that this period of the ascent of Democracy
has by no means been a period of easy, undisputed ascent. Nor has it
been merely a struggle against kings and aristocracies, privileges
and advantages, ancient traditions and old authority. The proposition
that any man is as important as any man has come hard against certain
mental and material realities. History for the last hundred years or so
has been largely the story of that collision. This assertion of human
equality has come against the severest stresses at the boundaries where
language meets language, and at the geographical or social frontiers of
dissimilar races. There the common man, who has been willing to break
down all the boundaries between himself and his superiors, discovers
deep instinctive dispositions to call a halt and draw the line. His
mind is invaded by an exaggerated sense of difference. He develops
rivalries, suspicions, antagonisms. The Age of Democracy has also
been the Age of Nationalism. Never in the whole history of mankind
have national and racial antagonisms been so acute and conscious, so
massive, powerful, and dangerous, as they have become during the ascent
of Democracy. And yet that is entirely inconsistent with the larger
and completer aspirations of Democracy, which have insisted always
that there shall be no distinctions of class or creed or race. One of
the most human and interesting things to watch at the present time is
the struggle of the Labour parties in the European democracies against
their ingrained nationalist feelings and their belligerent patriotism.
And still more edifying are the fluctuations of the Labour movement in
such countries as Australia and South Africa with regard to yellow and
brown immigration and the black vote.
But nationalism is not the greatest force that Modern Democracy has
evoked against itself in its ascent. Far more fundamental is the
synthetic drive in economic life, the enormous material pressure making
for the replacement of individual and small competitive businesses by
great and unifying enterprises, not merely in manufactures but in the
production of such staples as coal, oil, iron and steel, cotton, food
substances, and fundamental chemical products. The small man and the
medium-sized business are pushed aside by highly organized and often
quite scientifically organized concerns.
Here again the paradoxical aspect of Democracy reappears. These
great crystallizations of business--so large as to become at last
monopolies--are plainly due to the releases of Democracy, the freedom
of science, invention, experiment and enterprise, the lack of control
and restriction the ascent of Democracy has involved. But just as
plainly do these crystallizations run counter to the more intimate
feeling of Democracy that every man is as good as every man, that every
man should be his own master and live his life in his own fashion
after his own heart. Essential to the life and success of these big
businesses is an intricate system of specialization and subordination
of functions, and great freedoms of action for the executives. Most
of those engaged in working them must be simply employed persons, and
there must be great inequalities of authority and initiative between
one man and another. In America a sort of reconciliation between this
democratic reality of economic synthesis and democratic ideals of
quality has been attempted by Anti-Trust legislation, and in England
there is a small but delightfully logical movement for what is called
the Distributive State, which is to cut up big businesses periodically
and hand the bleeding fragments back to the common man. But the main
expression of this conflict between synthesis and analysis in the
democratic age has been the struggle for and against Socialism. For
there is scarcely any form of Socialism that does not fall within the
definition of an attempt to take the general economic life out of
whatever hands control it at present and hand it over to the direction
either of representatives elected by the workers, or of politicians
elected by the voters of the entire community. Socialism is the attempt
to democratize economic life as political life has already been
democratized. And the final practical objection to Socialism, partial
or general--the objection that has usually carried the argument--has
always been this: that politicians and elected people are not good
enough for the job.
That brings me to the great conspicuous fact of our present time, to
what I may call the arrest, the pause, in the advance of political
Democracy--to the fact that now, and since the war, there has been
a growing distrust of and discontent with the politicians and the
political methods evolved by Parliamentary Democracy.
In two great Latin countries we have seen politicians and parliamentary
institutions thrust aside with no signs of popular regret. In
Russia a parliamentary republic appeared and vanished like a dream
and gave place to a government by an organized association of a
quite unprecedented pattern, the Communist Party, making only the
slightest concessions to the representative idea. In China we see
another extraordinary organization, the Kuomintang, consolidating the
whole country with tremendous vigour in the face of the discredited
parliamentarianism of Peking. I will not discuss nor even raise other
instances to enforce my argument that the magic has gone out of the
method of government by general elections.
I have said enough, I think, to pose my essential question. Is the
process of ascendent Democracy played out? Or is it going on upon the
old lines, in spite of these appearances? Or is it perhaps entering
upon a new phase, a phase so different as practically to open a new
age in the story of human experience? Are not its synthetic releases
overtaking and mastering its tendency to fragmentation?
I have already betrayed, even in my title, the answer I am disposed
to give to these questions, which is that Democracy is entering upon
a phase of revision in which Parliaments and parliamentary bodies and
political life as we know it to-day are destined to disappear. And that
with the disappearance will come profound changes in all our methods of
expression, indeed in all our lives.
For a number of generations the democratic process ruling the world
has meant nothing but release, enfranchisement for freedom, the
breaking down of controls and restraints and obstacles. There has
been a world-wide detachment of individuals from codes and controls,
subjugations and responsibilities, functions and duties. I suggest that
this process of dissolution is at an end, and that mankind is faced--is
challenged--by the need for reorganization and reorientation, political
and social and intellectual, quite beyond the power of the negligent
common voter and his politicians and the happy-go-lucky education and
literature on which our minds are fed.
Let me state three great interrelated problems that have been facing
mankind since the war, and let me remind you how futile so far have
been the attempts of our modern democratic Governments and communities
to find solutions, to produce any hope of solutions, for these problems.
Foremost of these three in our consciousness is the problem of war. I
need not, before such an audience as this, dilate upon the cruelty, the
horror, the sheer destructiveness into which the war process, equipped
by modern science, necessarily develops. I will not talk of air
bombardment, or of poison gas and germs, nor of the practical abolition
of the immunity of the non-combatant, nor of the complete economic and
social disorganization that would probably ensue upon another group of
wars. I take it that upon these matters you are of the same mind as
myself. I take it that an enormous majority of humanity now wants no
more war.
Yet consider how feeble have been the efforts of any Government since
1918 to set up more than the flimsiest paper barriers against war. The
sabres still rattle in Europe. The big guns are moved from position
to position. In 1910 war hung over Europe, over the world, like a
cliff we knew must fall. And it fell. Here and now, are we any safer?
For what were these politicians elected? Little conferences, little
junketings, little demonstrations of amiability--like tying back the
cliff with coloured cotton. Meanwhile the foundries go on making tanks,
battleships, guns, all the world over.
And second of these three problems Modern Democracy has no power to
handle is the monetary question. If anything is plain, if there is
anything upon which every one must be agreed, it is that for the proper
working of contemporary civilization a stable money basis of world-wide
validity is essential. Just so far as money is unstable, so far does
speculation undermine and replace sound business enterprise and honest
work for profit. For eight years now we have seen the exchanges of the
world dance together. We have seen the effort for economic recuperation
crippled and deflected by this drunkard dance of money. Each democratic
Government has pursued its own policy according to its lights and
apparent interests. The bankers and the financiers have performed their
mysterious operations in obscurity. And nowhere, in any Democracy, has
the mass of voters shown the slightest understanding of or ability to
grasp the processes which threw them out of employment, made their poor
savings evaporate, and snatched the necessaries of life out of their
reach.
But the military obsession with its war threat and the monetary tangle
are, so to speak, merely complications of the more general riddle
before mankind, which is that, chiefly through changes in methods of
transport and the advance of science and invention, economic life
has become world-wide and a certain economic unity is being imposed
willy-nilly upon the globe. A vast change of scale is happening in
economic life--a vast extension of range. So that the method of the
small individual manufacturer and trader, the method even of the
moderate-sized competing company, the method even of national groups,
tend to be superseded, in the case of all our staple supplies, by
combinations upon a universal scale. The master problem before us all,
before our race, is how to achieve this world economic unity, how to
produce a system of world controls with as little blind experiment
as possible, without the sacrifice of countless millions of whole
generations, in the throes of this inevitable reconstruction. How
to establish enough political unity in the world to ensure peace;
how to establish enough political unity to save industry and trade
from becoming the mere preliminaries to a gamble with the exchange;
how to establish enough political unity to control and direct the
distribution of raw products, employment and manufactured goods about
the earth--that, in brief, is the present task before the human
intelligence. And we have no Governments, we have nothing in the world
able to deal with this trinity of problems, this three-headed Sphinx
which has waylaid and now confronts mankind.
Now the sense of the inadequacy of modern democratic Governments
for the task before them grows upon us all. What is going to be
attempted, what is going to be done in the matter? We are all familiar
nowadays with various projects of electoral reform. Some, such as the
Referendum, aim merely at restraining and paralyzing Governments.
Others, such as the proposal to have smaller representative bodies of
members elected by large constituencies by the methods of proportional
representation by the simple transferable vote, would no doubt give
a more free and vigorous assembly, and go far to abolish political
parties and the hack professional politician. But none of these
electoral reform projects go to the root of the trouble with Modern
Democracy, which is the indifference, ignorance, and incapacity of the
common man towards public affairs.
We have to recognize more plainly than is generally admitted to-day
that the ordinary voter does not care a rap for his vote. He does
not connect it with the idea of the world at large, nor use it to
express any will or purpose whatever about the general conduct of
things. I have already called attention to the fact that the novel,
the characteristic literary form of Modern Democracy, and the modern
drama ignore all comprehensive political and religious ideas. Thereby
they display current reality with the utmost veracity. These forms,
the novel and the play, have so far embodied no new concepts and
directions about life as a whole, they have simply represented life
at large released from pre-existing concepts and directions. Our
modern democratic Governments reveal as clearly that the onset of
Modern Democracy did not mean a transfer of power from the few to the
many, but a disappearance of power from the world. The vote is an
instrument of defence, and not a constructive tool. Faced with gigantic
constructive needs of ever-increasing urgency, political Democracy
fails. It cannot produce inventive and original Governments; it
cannot produce resolute Governments; it cannot produce understanding,
far-thinking Governments. Its utmost act of will is the capricious or
peevish dismissal of Governments by a general election.
For a century or more it has worked well that the world should be
under-governed and under-organized. In that liberty science has won its
way, established itself in a world-wide system of research and record,
gained an invincible inertia. Music has achieved the most glorious
developments, painting risen to unprecedented levels of technique,
literature learnt a new fearlessness, and industry and commerce
have tried and expanded a thousand subtle and huge combinations no
official control would ever have permitted. The mere breakdown of the
cramping systems of the past, the escape from traditional privilege and
authority, was enough to permit the great expansion of life that has
gone on since the sixteenth century. But there is a limit to unguided
and uncontrolled expansion, and at that limit we seem to have arrived
with a war threat, a monetary instability, and a chronic conflict
between the organic growth of economic processes and the desire of the
worker for freedom and happiness, which none of the Governments in the
world seem to have the necessary initiative and vigour to meet.
We need now more definite direction and government in human affairs,
on a scale and of a quality commensurate with the three mighty problems
our race has to face. It is idle to talk of returning to the little
royalties, aristocracies, and so forth of the pre-democratic past.
Are there any signs of a new, more decisive, and more vigorously
constructive form of government in our world? I submit there are, and
on these signs I rest my anticipations of the Age of Democracy Under
Revision that is dawning upon us. Coming events cast their shadows
before, and a keen eye can detect a number of shadows of what is
coming. But the two shadows to which I would particularly draw your
attention are the Communist Party and Fascism.
Let me be perfectly clear upon one point here. I am an unsparing
hostile critic of Marxist Communism. I have a strong dislike for many
aspects of Fascism--including particularly its head. May I insist upon
that? There is a mental disease about called “Seeing red,” and I want
to avoid any manifestations of that to-night. I am not sympathetic with
Communist ideas. In my latest book, “The World of William Clissold,”
you will find a most careful, elaborate, and destructive criticism of
Marxism, and my treatment of Lenin has brought down upon me the violent
vituperation of Mr. Trotsky. Quite as fervently have I plunged into
conflict with Fascism. I am anti-Communist and anti-Fascist. But what I
am discussing now is not the mental content of these two movements, but
their quality and spirit as organizations.
Their quality and spirit as organizations.... They are both mainly
composed of youngish people. They are so far democratic that they are
open to any one who will obey their disciplines and satisfy their
requirements. Some of my hearers may know something of the intimate
lives of young Communists or young Fascists. The movement dominates the
entire life. The individual gives himself--or herself--to the movement
in a spirit essentially religious. It enters into the life and into
the conscience as few religions do nowadays. Communism indeed claims
that it is a complete substitute for religion. Everything else is to be
subordinated to the ends of the movement. With the Fascist these are
the supposed good of the Italian community; with the Communist they
are the supposed good of the whole world. These movements began as
voluntary movements of young people, so concerned about public affairs
as willingly to give themselves to the sacrifices and dangers--and
adventure--involved. I submit it is a fact of profound significance
that Fascism could attract enough vigorous young people to capture and
hold and govern Italy, and that the Communist Party, with perhaps a
hundred thousand members or so in Russia, could seize upon the ruins of
that war-broken land and hold it against all comers.
One has to admit, in spite of many assertions to the contrary, that
neither in Italy nor Russia do the masses of the population seem to
resent the dictatorship of these associations. No vote famine has
broken out in these disenfranchised countries. You do not find haggard
peasants wandering about in search of a polling booth. So that our
assertion that the average common man, the common voter, does not care
a rap about the commonweal and his vote, has to be supplemented by
the fact that there is an active-minded minority capable of so vivid
an interest in the direction of public affairs as to make the most
complete sacrifices to see things going in the way it considers right.
This is most conspicuous in Russia and Italy, but in China students’
associations, closely similar in character, are taking possession of
the larger half of the country, and in Japan and many other countries
kindred bodies of mentally energetic types are playing an increasingly
important rôle in public life. In the nineteenth century such types
were either not stimulated to activity, or their energies were spent
upon parliamentary politics or diverted in other directions. Now all
over the world a certain section of them is taking its activities out
of parliamentary affairs and setting itself into vigorous competition
with the parliamentary system.
You see, I am building my expectation of a new phase in human affairs
upon the belief that there is a profoundly serious minority in the
mass of our generally indifferent species. I cannot understand the
existence of any of the great religions, I cannot explain any fine
and grave constructive process in history, unless there is such a
serious minority amidst our confusions. They are the salt of the earth,
these people capable of devotion and of living lives for remote and
mighty ends--and, unless the composition of our species has altered,
they are as numerous as they have ever been. I see them less and less
satisfied and used by existing loyalties and traditional faiths. I see
them ready to crystallize about any constructive idea powerful enough
to grip their minds. Is it not reasonable then to hold that these
associations, these concentrations of mentally energetic types for
political ends, these revelations of politico-religious fervour in the
community--considerable as they are even now--are the mere beginnings
of much greater things? The breakdown of the old loyalties and the
old faiths in the past age has released this great fund of effort and
synthetic possibility for new applications. And over against it we have
the need for world peace--which can be achieved only by some sort of
political unity--and for social adjustment, which seems only possible
through the comprehensible handling of world economic affairs as one
great system.
More than twenty years ago, in a book called “A Modern Utopia,” when
there was not a fact on earth to support me, I sketched a World State
ruled by a self-devoted organization of volunteers. To-day I can
recall that conception of a future society and I can appeal to Russia,
China, Italy, and much that is astir everywhere, to substantiate that
possibility. I have spoken of the youth in these two specimen movements
I have cited, but it is not merely the young who will be found willing
to orient their dispersed lives to great aims and comprehensive ideas.
The pain of aimlessness and ineffectiveness can be aroused at any
age with the realization of insecurity. The search for a consuming
objective ends only with life. In short, we have the morally energetic
types needed for such a movement in a released and nascent state.
We have the manifest need for such a movement. We are gathering the
creative ideas and accumulating the impulse for such a movement.
What is there to prevent a great politico-religious drive for social
and world unity taking hold everywhere of the active and adventurous
minority of mankind--that is to say, of all mankind that matters--even
quite soon?
That is the essence of what I want to put before you to-night. That
is what I mean when I say that the phase of Democracy as release has
come to its end, and that we are already in the beginning of the phase
of Democratic Synthesis, a great religious-spirited phase. If you
choose to link it to Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or any existing
democratic religion; or to Communism, that religious substitute; or
call it in itself the Religion of Progress, nothing that I am saying
here to-night will stand in your way. And if this diagnosis is correct,
then necessarily the changing spirit of Democracy, the change from
fragmentation and irrelevance to synthesis and reference to directive
general ideas on a universal scale, will become apparent in all forms
of human expression.
Here with the time at my disposal I can but ask: Is that so? In
political life, is there any tendency among intelligent people to
be dissatisfied with the passive rôle of voters and to attempt, in
all sorts of ways, to exert a direct influence on common affairs?
In intellectual life, is there an increasing tendency to discuss
world-wide problems--political, economic, social? Is there a marked
increase of such literature? A livelier interest in such questions? If
this thesis is right, the novel and the drama should be changing. They
should both be bringing in great issues, a _quasi_-religious attitude
to world affairs as a living part of the human story. The novel should
no longer be merely a picture of a spectacle relying for its interest
upon adventures and the extraordinary traits of individual characters,
in no way responsible for the whole. It should be turning decisively
towards responsibility, to what I might call creative propaganda. It
should be permeated by the question: “What do these lives make for?”
And the drama--to turn to the drama--should be no longer the well-made
play grouping itself around a situation. Is such a play as Shaw’s
“Saint Joan,” or Toller’s “Masses and Men,” any intimation of Synthetic
Democracy upon the stage? Again, is there in painting and music any
tendency to return from--what shall I say?--pure painting and pure
music to breadth and profundity of reference?
Well, I ask these questions. I put these ideas before you. I have done
my best to give you my impression of this new phase into which human
life is passing, and my forecast of the new spirit that I believe will
guide the criticism of expression in the time before us. And I thank
you with all my heart for the reception and the attention you have
given me.
VI
THE ABSURDITY OF BRITISH POLITICS: A SHADOW ON THE WHOLE WORLD.
WHAT HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT IT?
I loathe Nationalism, and ripening experience has corroded my
Imperialism (of 1899–1900) profoundly, and perhaps incurably, but this
does not prevent my being intensely, affectionately, and profoundly
English. But by being English I do not mean pretending mystical and
impossible emotions at the first grunts of the National Anthem, or the
chance sight of that curious political compromise of the last century,
the Union Jack, which has swallowed up the real English flag of St.
George, and still, against all reason, retains the cross of St. Patrick
in its entanglement. Nor by being English do I mean repudiating the
high republicanism of my English Milton, my English Cromwell, and
my equally English George Washington. Nor again would I mix up the
English idea with a trained aversion from foreign goods and ingenious
attempts to choke the trade of other countries in favour of our home
products. Indeed, I feel a little ashamed of myself when a polite and
kindly foreign post office hands me out my letters stamped with blatant
exhortations to “Buy British Goods.” Yet all the same I maintain that
I am a scion, however unworthy, of a very great race, and heir to an
unapproachable tradition of candid speech and generous act.
My people, the English, have created mighty nations, lived valiantly
for freedom and fair play through many sturdy generations, and
fertilized the whole world with their adventurous dead.
I hold most firmly that we English--who make up perhaps a third of
the United States population and an eighth of that of the British
Empire--are a people necessary to mankind, that there are certain
calls and occasions when either “God’s Englishman”--as our Milton had
it--must play his part, or the occasion fail.
It is our boast that we say what we think without fear or favour
and that we are not easily driven in flocks or cowed by difficulties
or defeated--even by defeat. And believing these things, I hold it
as my right and duty as a common Englishman to watch the steps of my
own people wherever they are found, in Britain or America, in India
or Africa or Australia, and to speak as plainly as I can when they
seem to be falling away from the quality that has won us our place in
history and the respect of mankind. I had rather assert my right to
repudiate the shooting at Amritsar and cry “Stop!” to the justice of
Massachusetts when it grows harsh and unfair to such friendless men as
Sacco and Vanzetti than reap all the material successes that life can
offer me. In that way I can a little discharge the obligation I am put
under when I am counted among Englishmen.
Never have we been a theatrical people; there are few heroic gestures
in our story and little rhetoric; we have never pretended to be a
breed of supermen, and our drama, fiction, and common speech abound in
self-derision. The British common soldier breaks into literature in the
persons of Falstaff and Bardolph and Nym, and the foreigner has always
been given fair play and a welcome among us--up to 1917, at any rate.
Our dearest boast was the prestige of “the word of an Englishman,” and
it is our claim that we would rather be trusted than exalted among the
peoples of the earth. Whatever the diplomatic situation may have been,
the great mass of the English folk in the New World, as in the Old,
believed that they were fighting aggressive monarchist militarism in
the Great War and preparing the way for a peace without uniforms. They
hated Germany more for her goose step than for her fleet. The seed of
that rather wilted but still living plant, the League of Nations, was
sown by the practical liberalism of the English mind on both sides of
the Atlantic, and could never have existed but for the faith of the
English in reasonable dealing. The faith of our people launched that
experiment, and to them alone can the world look for the mental courage
to face its disappointments and accumulate and organize the resolution
needed for the next thrust and experiment in the same direction.
Liberalism of thought and restrained steadfastness in act has been the
contribution of the English people to human affairs during the past
two centuries. None of us claims any preposterous superiorities over
other peoples; and most of us can admit inferiorities without a qualm.
The French are certainly more direct and clear-headed than we are,
and the Germans more thorough. We lack the animation of the Levantine
and the mental richness of the Slav. We have a curiously atmospheric
quality in our thought; we are not rapid with our problems, and we are
apt to muddle about with perplexities and betray a lack of haste and
zeal which exasperates observers. At the present time, and indeed since
1917, we have been making a bad showing. It is time we woke up to what
we are not doing. A time may come when we shall discover that the world
has not waited for the English.
For ten years the English--and by English I mean equally the
English-speaking, English-thinking people of the United States and of
the British Empire, for I cannot separate them in these matters--have
on the whole been disposed towards some settlement of the world’s
affairs that would ensure permanent peace. I do not believe that there
would have been even a League of Nations without the initiative of the
English on both sides of the Atlantic, and I believe that the welcome
and acquiescence of the other nations of the world in that project was
due to their belief “in the word of the Englishmen,” to their belief
that the great section of mankind we English constitute and control
would see the vast promises of President Wilson through to a working
reality. They thought that there was that much moral force in the
world, and that the English-speaking masses embodied it and meant it.
I believe enough in the quality of my own people to be persuaded they
were right. I believe that on November 11, 1918, the world was within
sight of a broad, permanent settlement of its political affairs that
would have ended war, that the war to end war had been fought and won,
that the will to end war was sufficiently abundant to have carried that
settlement through, and that it was the organization of that will that
was wanting and failed. The will to end war was caught and baffled in
a net of political and diplomatic evil habits. And particularly it was
the will to end war in the United States and the British Empire which
should naturally have been the backbone will of peace organization,
that was ineffective and that was diffused and dispersed and defeated.
The failure of the will for peace in America to make itself effective
has been discussed very thoroughly, and the broad facts are history;
the disposition of President Wilson to make world peace the monopoly
of the Democratic Party and the consequent estrangement of the
Republican majority; his obsession by the idea of the sovereignty of
“nationalities” and his incapacity to think out what he meant by a
nationality; his diplomatic incompetence and intellectual and moral
seclusion have been set out plainly in a huge literature of criticism,
and so have the disgusts, resentments, and fitfulness of the American
people as it realized that its will for peace was thwarted, and sought
to shift the blame from its own political institutions.
Now, as always, there is a manifest majority of voters in Great Britain
on the left side in public affairs; the spirit of the British peoples
is now, as it has been generally for a century, liberal, compromising,
tolerant, and anxious for a fair deal between nation and nation; and
yet at the present time the British Government is not simply aloof like
the American from world direction, it is the leading force making for
reaction. The present British Government is, in fact, doing its best
to revive the rôle of the defeated Hohenzollern Imperialism, and if it
can hold the Empire in its present course it will certainly steer the
British people towards a fate that may repeat the German experience.
And this it is able to do in spite of the national temperament and
the high traditions of the English, because of the incapacity and
shortsightedness of the politicians who have contrived to impose
themselves upon the main masses of liberal thought.
That is the most momentous fact in world affairs at the present time.
The paralysis of English liberalism carries with it the paralysis of
progress throughout the world.
The elemental necessity before that moiety of the English people which
forms the nucleus of the British Empire, if it is to go on playing
its proper part in the shaping of human destiny, is to get rid of Mr.
Baldwin’s Government and all its works as speedily as possible. It has
to do this for its own sake and for the sake of the world’s future.
It has to shake itself clear of this imperialist militarism which is
alien to its nature. It is an obligation. But when the English people
turns to the Liberal and Labour politicians who should be translating
its manifest will into achieved fact, it finds a crew of active and
ingenious second-rate and third-rate men engaged in petty feuds and
divided into two bitterly contentious camps, without a shadow of
principle to distinguish them.
It is extraordinary how hard it is to separate Liberal from Labour
Party men except by the fact that they are separated. Of many of these
people I, who live fairly close to it all, do not know the party
associations from day to day. Of So-and-so or So-and-so I asked: “Has
he gone over or has he come back?”--it is so little a question of
quality and so much of postal address. There seem to be rather more
lawyers in the Liberal Party and many more glorified trade-union
officials in the Labour Party, but a man like Commander Kenworthy,
for example, can go from one party to the other or back again with as
little change of nature as a performing sea lion hopping to and fro
through a hoop. In power the Labour politicians have shown themselves
mild snobs, socially ignorant rather than virtuous, and pathetically
anxious to assure the world that there is no danger of “Socialism in
our time.” They are Liberals in red ties who have to cater for the
earnestness of the young supporter. On the Liberal side, wary, alert
figures like Sir John Simon and Sir Herbert Samuel dodge and posture
about with a manifest effort to look like the sort of commanding,
attractive, and inspiring personalities English masses are supposed
to trust and adore--these two are the more prominent of a whole host
of commonplace careerists of no personal significance at all--and Mr.
Lloyd George tries an infinitude of poses to catch the unifying spirit
as it flits uncertain through the dither. Mr. Lloyd George might very
well catch the unifying spirit if only the unifying spirit could be
sure that it had caught him. But there is no outstanding figure at all
to hold and reassure both factions. There might be in Philip Snowden
were he physically a stronger man.
That is the situation. One by-election follows another. Each time the
Government vote shrinks to a smaller proportion of the total; sometimes
a Liberal scrapes in (and oh! the joy of Mr. Masterman), sometimes a
Labour man, and sometimes the Conservative keeps his seat with close
upon two-thirds of the poll against him. But in a general election the
mutual animosities of these wrangling factions rise to a malice that
prefers a Government victory to the success of the kindred competitor.
It is just as likely that the next election will leave the existing
Government in power, a possibility fraught with disaster to the whole
world, as that either of these Opposition gangs will scramble to a
greater total than the Tories.
Now to the great mass of English people these party feuds and
bickerings between Liberal and Labour are a matter of entire
insignificance. Nobody believes that the Labour Party has the courage
or capacity to carry through any extensive socializing operations,
nor that a Liberal Government would carry out a policy very different
from that of a Labour Government. But either a Liberal or a Labour
Government would release educational progress, check armament, relieve
the world from the fear of adventures against Russia and China
sustained more or less furtively by Britain, break the ugly association
with Mussolini, show a living regard for free speech and private
freedom, and reassure the forces of peace and civilization in France,
Germany, Poland, and Hungary.
Either would do. The general desire is for one or the other, and the
question which the politicians pose is Which? Both the Liberals and
the Labour Party tricksters have in turn cheated the country out of
proportional representation, which would have relieved us of much of
this present difficulty. It is too late to go into that issue now.
The primary concern of intelligent Englishmen now is to get rid of
this Baldwin-Junker Ministry, which is as unpalatable to intelligent
financial and business men, with some understanding of the necessary
cosmopolitanism of modern economic life, as it is to the main mass of
liberal-minded labour.
How is this to be done?
It seems to me that the occasion would be best met by the formation of
a series of new local political organizations, beside, and independent
of, the local official Liberal and Labour Parties.
What is needed is a block of voters who will vote primarily against
the Government and only secondarily for either Liberal or Labour. The
sensible thing seems to be a vote in each constituency for whichever
of these two political parties secured the largest vote against the
Conservatives at the preceding contest, irrespective of all their
bletherings against each other. One would vote Liberal here or one
would vote Labour there in order not to waste one’s vote. In that way
the Government could be reduced to a minority, and probably a small
minority in the House of Commons, and, whatever else happened, there
would be an arrest of the threatened “Hohenzollernization” of British
policy and the British Empire.
I do not know what supplies of non-partisan political energy are
available in Great Britain at the present time. Certain newspapers--the
“Express” group and Mr. Garvin’s “Sunday Observer,” for example--seem
to care about as much for party loyalty as I do, and are probably at
bottom quite of my mind about stopping the reactionary drift; they are
conducted by men of imagination with a sense of the greatness of our
people; others are mere party organs, in which not merely the leading
articles but the arrangements and display of news are calculated to
favour one or other of the contending parties. But even among the
readers of these biassed newspapers there must be a growing multitude
impatient with the extraordinary way in which Great Britain at present
belies itself and endangers the outlook of mankind. It needs but a
crystallizing touch to give that impatience a form and a direction.
We want a “Wake Up, England!” movement in Great Britain, and not merely
in Great Britain, but for all the English throughout the earth. We
want a mood and form of politics that will save our destinies from our
politicians while there are still great things to be saved.
_7 August, 1927._
VII
BALDWINISM A DANGER TO THE WORLD. WANTED, A COALITION GOVERNMENT.
THE DEADLOCK AND THE WAY OUT
The ordinary game of politics bores me, and I rarely write about it.
The manœuvres of X., Y., and Z. to get towards the head of the queue
of possible tenants of No. 10, Downing Street, fill me with that cold
disgust we all feel for vices to which we are not inclined. I have
wanted many things in life, but never “place.” The “party game” I have
loathed from my youth up. My primary interest in the Labour Party was
that it promised to end that game. Alas! it has only made it worse.
But there are times when some attention has to be paid to these
detestable sports. Normally it matters very little to most of us
whether the income tax is decreased or increased a little by X. or
Y. or Z., and whether it is Z. or A. who damps our hopes for the
education of the country. The Westminster permanent officials run
their departments in very much the same manner whether it is a Tory
or a Liberal or a Labour man who intervenes trivially in their sway.
Why should I care whether it is Mr. Baldwin pretending to be a simple,
honest farmer, or Mr. Ramsay MacDonald pretending to be a romantic
gentleman, at 10, Downing Street?
Normally there is no reason at all. But it happens that this is an
abnormal time, and, like millions of my fellow-countrymen, I wake up to
find that this Baldwin Government, which we considered merely narcotic
and drowsed under inattentively, is the most dangerous government that
Britain has ever had. Its peculiar danger is that it has learnt nothing
from the war, that its stupidity is not the passive stupidity we hoped
and believed, but a very active stupidity, so that at three cardinal
points it has set things moving in the direction of war.
In the first place, it has carried its support of the aggressive
and reactionary Mussolini dictatorship to a pitch which amounts to a
virtual betrayal of both France and the republican régime in Germany.
We are under great obligations to France. In the past I criticized
French policy when it seemed to be obsessed by a blind hostility
to Germany, because I believed, and I still believe, that upon the
development of a Franco-German friendship hangs all the hope we have
of a great future for Europe. A liberal France, a liberal Germany in
accord--the European future is utterly black without that accord.
But to criticize France when she is aggressive is one thing, and to
undermine her position in Europe is quite another. This tawdry, unclean
tyranny in Italy insults and threatens France. Would it dare do that
alone? without American money and British moral support? without the
hope that if it can entangle France in a conflict, all the suppressed
barbarism of the other side in Germany, the side which is now the
under-side, will flare up to its assistance? And this “safe” Government
of ours in Britain moves not a finger to arrest this advancing
disaster, can find no better rôle to play in such a European situation
than that of Mussolini’s friend.
Next comes the failure to get to an understanding with the United
States upon the issue of disarmament. At the present time, as Kenworthy
has demonstrated in the completest fashion in his recent book, Great
Britain and the United States are arming against each other. Do people
realize the significance of this? Neither country has, for example, an
educational organization adequate to its needs and opportunities, and
yet vast sums are being squandered, upon the advice of military and
naval “experts,” on military and naval preparations that are bringing
these two countries, with the same language, a common culture, and a
long tradition of mutual forbearance, more and more into the attitude
of armed rivals. The Baldwin Government has its excuses for its failure
at Geneva. It puts the blame on the American representatives. But who
wants its excuses? Its failure is a crime.
Thirdly, we have the Russian muddle. For an amount of espionage and
propaganda not much, if at all, greater than that normally practised
by all the chief governments of the world--a publication like “Asia,”
for example, coming from New Hampshire, is far more efficient as
anti-imperialist propaganda than anything the Russians have ever
done--the Russian representatives in London were expelled in the most
insulting manner, and the premises of the Russian Trade Delegation
burgled. Ministers like Lord Birkenhead and Mr. Churchill reviled the
régime in Russia unpardonably. What are the results? Trade is broken
off. A market particularly desirable for the manufacturers of Great
Britain is more or less closed. The world in general, and Russia in
particular, is impressed with the idea that Great Britain is _the_
enemy of the Soviet Government.
Naturally that Government does its best to retaliate. What would you do
if you were a Russian? We British _oblige_ the Russian Government to
press on with whatever propaganda it conducts against us in Asia--in
Turkey, China, India especially. What else can you imagine it doing?
And it was totally unnecessary to stimulate this hostility and embitter
this enemy. The antagonism was dying down. Intercourse was increasing.
Trade was improving.
Now all that has been put back. The British have grimaced threats at
Russia until now there is an active propaganda in Russia to prepare
that people for the attack the blusterings of such Ministers as Mr.
Churchill and the Home Secretary seem to forebode. And Britain trains
a highly mechanicalized expeditionary force. So behind Britain and
Central Asia, in the heart of Europe and across the Atlantic, the
spectre of war becomes more threatening, more substantial, less of a
phantom and more of a possibility, with every month of this Government
rule. Throughout the world the present British Government has been
evoking the war idea and the war spirit.
I will say nothing of the social war this Government has waged at
home. Grave as that is, it is dwarfed by the monstrous dangers of the
international situation. I will not say that the British Government
wants war--with two possible exceptions among its members. But it
is stupid; its stupidity is that sort of mental inflexibility which
makes men inadaptable to new circumstances. It goes on upon the old
diplomatic, militarist, nationalist, and competitive lines that
carried Europe so inevitably to the smash of 1914, and it has not the
imagination to see plainly how surely it drives to another smash. If
the present British Government remains in office for another five years
that smash, I believe, will come.
I am not indulging here in single-handed prophecy. What I am writing
here is realized now more or less lucidly by an immense multitude of
observers. It lies upon the surface of things, just as the war of
1914 lay plainly on the surface of things for years before it came.
And one might reasonably imagine that this great multitude would set
about preparing to push the Government out of office effectively and
thoroughly, would make sure of a complete purge of its supporter at
the next general election. Nothing could be further from the reality
of the case. The same want of imagination that allows the British
Government to drum along with international bickerings and military
preparations towards a new great war robs the huge majority of people
who are against the Government of any effective coherence. The Great
War seems to have passed over the politicians in opposition with as
small intellectual profit as it has over the Ministers in office.
In the face of a rapidly approaching disaster that may wreck civilized
life, these people go on with the old tricks and the old antics that
distinguished political life in those days of apparently eternal
security when good Queen Victoria sat upon the throne. They do not seem
to see that there is any situation or any stream of events outside
the little arena in which they manœuvre against each other for office
and the petty glories of a party triumph. Two figures in particular
I contemplate with blank amazement. One is Sir Herbert Samuel. I am
loth to believe him as silly as his public proceedings. But of their
immense silliness there can be no doubt. He is the figure-head of
pure party Liberalism. He is the typical advocate of the candidature
of those five hundred Liberal candidates who are everywhere to wage
implacable warfare against the Labour Party. Everywhere they are to
busy themselves in breaking up the peace vote and, if they cannot get
in themselves, letting in the Tory--and war.
Over against him is Ramsay MacDonald, a figure of fantastic vanity and
secretiveness, equally resolute on keeping the Labour Party in bitter
antagonism to the Liberals--though the heavens fall. The poor little
“Daily Herald” under his influence spends most of its ammunition on the
Liberals, and the mere whisper of “coalition” is treated like an attack
upon fundamental political virtue. The implacable stupidity of both
these groups, the pure party Liberals and the pure party Labourites,
exceeds even the unteachable stupidity of the Government policy. And
they are helping it forward. When the bombs begin to burst and the
smash comes Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, because of
their inveterate party spirit, will be as responsible for the disaster
as Mr. Amery or Mr. Baldwin.
But the question I have been asking myself and most of the people I
have been meeting lately is, “What are we personally going to do about
it?” Like the majority of people in Great Britain, I want a coalition
of the Liberal and Labour Parties. That plainly is our salvation. I
realize--surely everyone realizes--that the internal legislation and
the foreign policy of a Liberal Government in Great Britain for the
next ten years at least would be substantially the same as that of a
Labour Government. Of the two Mr. MacDonald is the least likely to
move a step towards Socialism. The pretence of any irreconcilable
fundamental differences does not deceive 5 per cent. of the British
Electorate. The Liberals might be rather more economical and skimpy
over social services and the Labour people more snobbish and more
extravagant over the army, navy, and air services. The blend might
indeed be better than either party, faults might cancel out. And since
I am convinced that people like Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr. Ramsay
MacDonald are incurably set upon their party follies, I am obliged,
we are obliged, to cast about for other figures upon which we may
concentrate our enthusiasm and to whom we may look for some sort of
leadership beyond mere party strategy in the approaching struggle.
One’s mind turns to Mr. Lloyd George. He is a seasoned Coalitionist,
and he is plainly disposed towards another Coalition. He has made
alluring gestures towards the left, but an unusual hesitation to return
them is apparent. Plainly Labour, though it may work with him, will not
put itself under him.
And that applies not merely to the party-obsessed Labour people.
We all like Mr. Lloyd George, but at times he veils his solid worth
beneath an agility and flexibility that leaves us uneasy. I do not
know if we can look at him to play a secondary rôle in a combination.
It would necessarily be a very considerable rôle. And, after all, he
is technically a Liberal, and the majority of the anti-Government mass
is Labour. The headship of any combination for the preservation of
peace in the world should reside in the majority. The leader should
be a Labour man. This also excludes Lord Cecil, with his traditional
attitude towards Church and land, from the formal leadership. So one
turns to the Labour Party and looks for a Coalitionist there.
I consider Henderson, Thomas, Clynes, all surely Ministers in a
coalition, but none of them quite what we require as a figure-head.
Then I come to Snowden and stop. There, I believe, is the man who can
best lead the British Empire, under a Coalition Government, back to
sanity, security, and the service of peace. There is a certain quality
of greatness about Snowden which is not very widely distributed in our
political world to-day. I suppose that among statesmen, politicians,
and public servants of all types and parties, Philip Snowden is more
generally respected and would be more willingly trusted than any other
contemporary. He is a man whose public character, quite as much as his
private character, is without spot or blemish. He is a man of real
capacity and great personal force. He is the man we want. And I do not
see why we, the growing multitude of British people who want to get rid
of this dangerous Government of ours who do not care a rap either way
for the Liberal “machine” or the Labour “machine,” should not set about
getting him now.
Would he serve us? Probably not at first. He might plead his
allegiance to his party. But there are popular invitations that have
the force of commands. Would Mr. Lloyd George work with him? I do not
know. Mr. Lloyd George has neither the narrow-mindedness of Sir Herbert
Samuel nor the lonely vanity of Mr. MacDonald. He is quite capable of
magnanimity; and for him also a strong popular feeling, effectively
expressed, might have imperative force. Many of the dissentient
Liberals, on account of minor feuds and unforgettable sayings during
those feuds, would, I know, serve much more gladly under Snowden as a
leader than under Lloyd George.
But at the present stage of affairs I do not see why we should wait
upon the Tadpoles and Tapers to fix up this arrangement for us. The
growing multitude of people who see things in this way has the power
to force this combination over the heads of the party managers. We can
write; we can organize; we are not without a Press. Why wait while the
leaders negotiate?
At the next election it will be comparatively simple for us to
disregard the difference between Liberalism and Labour altogether.
When we find ourselves in any constituency where a Liberal is trying
to cut down a Labour majority or where a Labour candidate is trying to
cut down a Liberal majority, we can vote solidly for the legitimate
claimant to the seat, whether he be Liberal or Labour. When we hear
the Liberal beginning to make his little points against Labour or the
Labour man chipping the Liberal, instead of getting on to the real
business in hand, the proper comment is a loud “Bah!” repeated until
the gentleman takes notice. Then we shall get the maximum number of
Liberals and Labour men into the House of Commons, and when they are
there they will have to shake down into a coalition whether they like
it or not.
The Labour Party is surely not so foolish as to take office in a
minority again, with the Liberals primly in possession of what Sir
Herbert Samuel calls the “casting vote,” and equally will the Liberals
refuse to shoulder responsibility alone. Everybody in Parliament
knows that Coalition waits at the end of the passage even if a second
election intervenes. Why have the expense and delay of a second
election? As practical people with an empire to save, let us get on to
that coalition now.
_27 November, 1927._
VIII
COMMUNISM AND WITCHCRAFT
I have recently been reading the “History of Witchcraft and
Demonology,” by Mr. Montague Summers, and various utterances upon the
Soviet Government of Russia by supporters of the present enlightened
Government of the British Empire, and I find a curious confusion in
my mind between the two. Mr. Summers, like all good Catholics, is a
believer in witchcraft; and he hates witches as soundly and sincerely
as the British county families hate the “Reds”; and he believes as
freely and fiercely about the detested breed. Here is a passage, and
I will leave the reader to guess whether it is from the pages of Mr.
Summers or the columns of a Conservative newspaper on the eve of a
general election:
The witch or the Red (as the case may be) is “an evil liver; a
social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed;
an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and all creeping crimes; a member
of a powerful secret organization inimical to Church and State; a
blasphemer in word and deed; swaying the villagers by terror and
superstition; a charlatan and a quack sometimes, a...”--here I censor
my authority--“an...”--the censorship is really imperative; “a minister
of vice and inconceivable corruption; battening upon the filth and
foulest passions of the age.”
The doubts the simple, honest reader of the British Conservative Press
will feel--whether this is the more accurate description of Mother
Shipton, Gilles de Rais, any Knight Templar, the late Mr. Krassin,
Mr. Lunacharsky, or Lenin--will do much to carry out the interesting
views of that great historical writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, that modern
Communism is the lineal descendant of the black traditions of medieval
sorcery, Manichean heresies, Free Masonry, and the Witch of Endor. Be
that as it may, modern Communism is certainly heir now to the estate of
fear and terror which descends to us from the past.
Perhaps mankind has a standing need for somebody to tar, feather,
and burn. Perhaps if there was no devil, men would have to invent
one. In a more perfect world we may have to draw lots to find who
shall be the witch or the “Red,” or the heretic or the nigger, in
order that one man may suffer for the people. Mr. Summers’ book
makes interesting, disagreeable reading of the sort that enhances
its excitement here and there by a coy resort to transparent Latin;
and it shows Popes and prelates and Puritans, kings and judges, all
manner of respectable people, succumbing to exactly the same sort
of emotional disturbance that now makes membership of the Communist
Party so dangerous, exciting, and attractive to the light-minded young
of Western Europe and America. Nothing was too dreadful for belief
about witches and warlocks, and, alas for the feebleness of the human
imagination, most things, it is felt, were not nearly dreadful enough.
They made mischief, they fostered strikes, and they raised storms and
insurrections in such scanty leisure as a constant round of Witches’
Sabbaths allowed. They were drowned, tortured, beaten, and burnt alive,
and still the kindly righteous had a baffling sense of inadequate
retort to all the bestial cruelty and wickedness charged against them.
As one turns over the record of Mr. Summers’ book, it is fairly plain
to any one not under a conscientious necessity to believe in witchcraft
that all these waves of inquisition and cruelty were a sort of pooling
of the normal indignation of mankind against the orgies and queer and
vile acts that lurk at the roots of our animal nature, and of our fear
of the tricks and malicious resentments of inferior and unhappy people,
and a direction of this pooled force of disapproval and hostility
against heresy, sedition, and unpopular opinions generally. Gilles
de Rais was an insane murderer, guilty of almost incredibly bestial
cruelties, but his wickedness was pinned to heresy and made an excuse
against the gentlest and purest of unbelievers. Evil men, you said were
heretics, and then when some one ventured to differ from your high
orthodoxy you charged him promptly with organized association with
filth and every form of evil. If any one questioned your theology,
well, manifestly he was a second Gilles de Rais. Mr. Summers, for
instance, has no doubt that great epidemics of witchcraft followed
doctrinal disputes; that religious doubt and a flirtatious alliance
with the devil were in the sequence of cause and effect.
To-day there are many signs that the “Red” has a good chance of
playing the part of the witch of older times in a new world mania. The
examination of Sacco and Vanzetti, charged with ordinary murder and
robbery, upon their political opinions, in the Massachusetts courts,
was quite in the vein of the old witch trials. “Tell me what you
think,” said the prosecution, “and what you did may be judged by that.”
It is wonderful how witch-hanging Massachusetts has kept true to its
old traditions.
This tendency to associate unpopular opinions with murderable offences
seems to be an increasing one on both sides of the Atlantic. I am sure
it needs only a very slight Press campaign to convince any number of
people in London that when Sir W. Joynson-Hicks made his preposterous
raid on the Soviet business headquarters in search of an alleged
stolen paper, members of the Arcos staff escaped on broomsticks from
an upper window with that wonderful confidential document the police
sought and never found. When I came back from Russia in 1920 and wrote
that Lenin seemed an intelligent little man, who was rather at a loss
what to do with the great country that had fallen so wonderfully into
his hands, I pleased nobody. The Communists and Left Labour people
wanted extravagant praise and a glorification of a state of affairs
that seemed to me to be a frightful muddle, and the anti-Bolshevik
witch-hunters wanted yarns about orgies in the Kremlin, Mme. Lenin
dressed up in the Russian Crown jewels, drinking champagne out of
cups of gold in the worst possible taste, and aristocratic babies
being tortured and murdered after dinner just for fun and devilry by
commissars. They wanted to excite themselves about Moscow, just as the
mediæval witch-hunters excited themselves with wild imaginations about
the Witches’ Sabbaths.
Failing “hot stuff” of that sort, the anti-Bolsheviks were convinced I
was in the pay of Moscow. They wanted their Bolsheviks not small and
bothered, but horrible. They wanted me to make their blood run cold.
They wanted to work themselves up into a frenzy of indignation, terror,
and violence.
And they wanted to do so because, as I say, there seems to be in the
dark, tortuous, and dangerous heart of man a real craving for vehement
self-righteous persecution and enthusiastic and irrational punishment.
I know. I have felt it in me. If I have never killed and massacred in
the waking day, I have known all these bright reliefs and excitements
in dreams. And in reveries.
To any one who can think about Bolshevism and retain a normal
temperature the facts are as plain as daylight. Russia has been, is,
and must remain for some time to come a largely barbaric country.
Large areas of Russia are still as backward as England was in Tudor
times, and few of its towns have a social life much in advance of
early nineteenth-century conditions in Great Britain. It was in the
days of the Czar, and it is to-day, a backward land of hardships and
intense discomforts, a land of rough methods, frequent crimes, and
much sporadic cruelty. Until ten years ago it was ruled by a stupid,
disorderly, and tyrannous autocracy--superstitious and hostile to
education--which collapsed through sheer inherent rottenness under the
stresses of the Great War. The resources of Russia were so wasted,
and its army so ruthlessly handled in that war, as to wreck the whole
social system. Those Bolsheviks are in possession of the wreck. They
are in possession because they were the only people with sufficient
faith, discipline, and determination to hold together in the general
chaos.
But they are neither gods nor devils. They are limited, conceited, and
as liable to witch panics and suspicion mania as the most enlightened
citizens of Middlesex or Massachusetts. Their “reprisals” for the
Arcos raid and for the various recent murders of their members would
have disgraced a lynching State in the American Union. They cling to
the old theories and dogmas of Marx, half a century stale. They seem
as little capable of modern industrial organization as the British
coal-owners, and their need is far more urgent. They have a percentage
of cads, roughs, and scoundrels hanging to them which may or may not be
higher than the similar percentage of any political party in Britain or
America. They are as a whole just a band of worried, rather incompetent
doctrinaires, some able and sympathetic, some obtuse and dangerous, and
they have an empire on their hands. There they are, the only possible
Government for Russia, and if they are submerged, nothing will be left
of Russia but a wilderness of warring brigand armies and barbaric
peasants. Failing them Russia will repeat on a larger, more dreadful
scale, and without the same substructure of civilized urban tradition,
the Germany of the Thirty Years’ War.
They will probably resent my conception of them as muddled,
overstrained men with an old-fashioned and inapplicable social theory
to guide them in an overwhelming job, far more than the current
idea of them as a crew of super-devils. Like the mediæval witches,
they threaten and boast to keep up their self-respect, and so they
bring down upon themselves the cowardly violence of the timid.
Whatever happens abroad to the discomfort of the American or European
capitalists they claim as the result of their marvellous machinations.
It is a pitiful posturing.
I do not believe that the coal muddle and that dismal strike of last
year would have happened any differently if Russia had never existed.
They have a conceit of ordering about the labouring classes of the
earth. It is touching. I found poor Lenin in the Kremlin swallowing the
stuff in Miss Sylvia Pankhurst’s “Dreadnought” as the current opinion
of the British “proletariat.”
As a matter of fact, in all the world from end to end outside Russia--I
am not forgetting China--the Communist Party cannot count upon the
services of twenty thousand men or raise half a million pounds. It is
always poking into gatherings and claiming to have called them, jumping
on coaches driven by other people and pretending to run them. The only
advantage of this sort of rubbish to the Bolsheviks is to give the
simple Russian worker a good conceit of himself and his rulers, but
it is disastrous to the friends of the worker everywhere. It supplies
the witch-finder and the hunter of radicals with just the “’orrible
’orrible” evidence he needs.
When I visited the House of Science in Petrograd in 1920, there was
a Communist Party representative who had poked in among the men of
science to explain how different and superior “Marxist” chemistry and
astronomy were to the bourgeois teaching, and Fülop-Miller’s “Geist
and Gesicht des Bolshewismus” (which has recently been translated into
English) collects, with destructive malice and deadly illustrations,
flagrant examples of the nonsense about new philosophy, new science,
new art, new religion, new everything, newer and better than ever
before, with which the Bolsheviks console themselves in their grim and
from many aspects amazingly plucky struggle to keep a strained and
damaged civilization going and even progressing, in the face of the
extravagant hatred and hostility of the outer world.
If only people would recognize, first, that Russia is, and must be for
some decades, a very backward country, and that, whatever Government
rules there, rough and barbaric things are bound to happen; second,
that the whole of the Bolshevik propaganda is about as injurious to
modern capitalism as the brews and spells of those poor old women our
ancestors found such satisfaction in burning alive were to the people
against whom they were aimed; third, that panic, violence, brag,
bad manners, and petty irritations towards foreigners are not the
monopoly of the Bolsheviks; and, fourth, that the existing Government
of Russia is the only possible Government there at the present time;
and that the only hope of saving the vast areas and resources of
European and Asiatic Russia for civilization lies in getting to some
working compromise with that Government and co-operating in its
development--if, I say, people would bear these fairly obvious things
in mind, I should be able to look forward with more confidence to the
immediate future of the world than I feel at the present time. But with
Britain in the hands of a Government suffering from witch mania with
regard to Russia and the ruling powers of America in little better
case, with the liberalism of the world leaderless, misrepresented, and
confused, there is a very considerable probability that that ailing
State will be, as a potential modern State, ruined and destroyed
in the next few decades. Nothing will be achieved by the overthrow
of Bolshevism in Russia as the result of this witch mania but the
completer desolation of a great area of the old world.
_21 August, 1927._
IX
THE FUTURE OF LABOUR. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN CAPITAL AND LABOUR.
CONTROVERSIAL HALLUCINATIONS
A correspondent in America writes to suggest an article on the struggle
between Capital and Labour, and what it is coming to. To-morrow in the
United States is the legal holiday for the celebration of Labour, and
it seems an appropriate date for some general remarks that have been
accumulating in my mind about this indisputable struggle.
I am afraid I shall disappoint my correspondent. From some phrases
in his letter I am inclined to think he expects me to be violently
partisan in this issue, to foretell the doom of the capitalist system
and the great days when Labour alone shall rule the earth. This shows
a lamentable ignorance of my voluminous and--I am told--correctly
I think--reiterative works. I cannot hope for the abolition of the
capitalist system, because I do not believe there is a capitalist
system, and my only aspiration for Labour is that it should get right
off the earth. I believe this conflict between Capital and Labour is
like that great struggle between Arianism and Trinitarianism, which
tore the Roman world to pieces thirteen or fourteen centuries ago; that
is to say, I regard it as a struggle about theoretical definitions
having only the remotest relationship to any fundamental realities
in life. Most Christians nowadays, I remark, are Arians professing a
Trinitarian creed, and much the same effacement may overtake this false
antagonism of Capital and Labour. We may come to a world of capitalist
professing to be a Labour community. Or we may follow quite other and
more rational lines of development.
Most of the issues upon which men are antagonized in crowds--because of
the uniformity of our intelligences and the eagerness of our minds--are
false issues. Throughout all history most human conflicts have turned
on false issues. The issue of patriotism, for example, is so false that
it is indelicate almost to the treasonable pitch to say so.
But, braving the indelicacy, can any intelligent person argue to-day
that patriotism nowadays has anything whatever to do with race, or
thought? Take a concrete example to illustrate this current insanity.
My distant cousin and namesake at Chicago, Professor H. G. Wells,
the eminent physiologist, living under the stresses of his local
patriotism, is obliged to pay for the construction of cruisers and
aeroplanes to protect himself, the American Constitution, and the
Standard Oil Company against me, and I am obliged to pay for the
construction of cruisers and aeroplanes to protect the House of
Windsor, the Anglo-Dutch Oil people, and this Wembley Exhibition
Empire of ours, against him, when, as a matter of the most obvious
common sense, we are so much akin and so much after the same ends,
that what we both need is mutual protection from these monsters of the
imagination that have got hold of us, and which are quite likely to
gas us or blow us to shreds before they have done with us. Clearly we
two are parts of the same biological, intellectual, and moral strain,
we belong to the same civilization, we are of one outlook, blood, and
name, and our chief real political interest is to get rid of these
people in uniform, these diplomatists, and the difference of our flags,
which may in the end waste most of the good of both our lives in a
fatuous war.
And it is equally false to imagine that because the evil passions of
men can be involved to the pitch of judicial murder--at least in such
barbaric countries as Soviet Russia or Italy or Massachusetts--there
is any profound matter involved in this century-old conflict between
Capital and Labour that muddles our minds and devastates our public
affairs to-day. It is a conflict embodying certain easy misconceptions
of social, and particularly of economic, life. It is an incidental
squabble exaggerated to the dimensions of a fundamental process. But it
rules a huge proportion of current political activity. It is another
of the great hallucinations which make history in our time and prepare
infinite perplexity for the historians of the days to come.
This “capitalist system” has never been defined; it has merely been
indicted. Try to define it. “Labour” is equally undefined. According to
a Communist informant, “Labour” is the proletariat, that is to say, the
people who produce offspring for whose education and upbringing they
have made no provision. It is the propertyless class which works for
wages and breeds so that it keeps those wages down to the subsistence
level.
There certainly is such a class in most countries where there are towns
and cities, but it is a residual class. It is much more in evidence
in a mediæval city like Hankow than in a modern city like New York.
In China the brigand armies now prevalent are drawn largely from that
class. It supplies the gang labour which under recent conditions
took the place of gang slavery. The pressure of its hunger exercises
a degrading influence upon life in general. So far it justifies the
“proletarian” legend. But it is absurd to project its characteristics
and limitations over the great multitude of workers in a modern
community. It is preposterous to present economic life as substantially
the exploitation of this class by a hard-minded minority.
In the United States the actual proletariat, as we have defined it,
must be a very small proportion of the population. There is less of
such exploitation of degraded propertyless people now than there was a
hundred years ago, and it is a diminishing factor in economic life.
If we abandon this romantic, this Victor Hugoesque conception of
“Labour” as living in rags and slums, and begin to incorporate
semi-skilled and skilled workers with savings, insurances, and
other property and a certain minimum of education, and peasants
with leases or owning land, we shall cease to have any definite
boundary to stop us, and before we know where we are we shall find
ourselves in perplexity whether in this or that case we are dealing
with a capitalist or a worker, “exploiter” or exploited. We may draw
our social boundaries, we shall find, anywhere. If we draw them
sufficiently high we may arrive at last at the proposition that every
activity in the State is “Labour,” and that nothing lies outside that
term except a few usurers, gamblers, criminals, official parasites, and
the heirs of rich men.
The economic processes of the modern community and the psychology of
these processes are, as a matter of fact, extraordinarily complex and
still largely unmapped, and they yield to no such elementary antagonism
as the Capital and Labour picture assumes. Human beings carry on by use
and wont. They are imitative, habitual, mechanical, lazy, greedy, and
afraid; there is no such simple, shark-like consumption of the honest
toiling community by highly intelligent property owners as the legend
suggests. Property in excess does not make most people either active
or aggressive; generally it makes them indolent, insolent, evasive,
and wasteful. Property in small quantities brings out much inherent
meanness and causes much anxiety. It terrifies more often than it
stimulates. Want of any possessions leaves people spiritless, driven,
or desperate. A sense of secure earning-power is at the same time the
basis for the satisfaction of most people who are satisfied in the
modern State, and the thing most conducive to activity.
It is across the seething, swarming stir of miscellaneous modern
life that these great collective hallucinations of patriotism and of
class assertion sweep. We are worried or out-of-sorts, and suddenly,
under their influence, we see ourselves threatened or oppressed and
the victims of a malignant conspiracy to keep us down. If we get the
patriotic delusion, this inclines us to war; if the Capital and Labour
notion, to revolution. When Labour Days and Labour holidays come round,
a certain number of us gather in meetings and processions to menace the
phantoms that we suppose afflict or threaten us and our kind.
Menaces find a billet somewhere. A number of rich and well-off people,
secretly conscious of a poor contribution to the general well-being,
struggle not only against their consciences, but against a gnawing fear
of retribution and expropriation. They have a lingering and troublesome
belief that God may be righteous, and that these vague threatenings of
the uncomfortable and limited may foreshadow the method of His judgment.
They are probably wrong upon the latter count, at any rate. I do not
believe that under modern conditions, in a modern mechanicalized State,
common low-grade labour is capable of carrying through a revolution,
much less a big social reconstruction. Something like a world
revolution may occur in the smash that may follow another great war, a
greater Soviet experiment, for example; but it will not be in reality
a constructive revolution, but merely a phase in the process of that
human collapse to which war must surely bring us all, if we do not head
off war. There will be no Labour-ruled world because, as I have said,
“Labour” so conceived is a phantom form imposed upon a great complex of
forces.
But these rich and well-off idle people do believe that phantom
is real, and a multitude of politicians, journalists, and
organization-running rogues prey on their fears to extract subsidies
for political groups, newspapers, and “anti-Socialist” propaganda,
and to conduct a persecution of “Left” opinion. They embody the
“Capitalist” antagonism to “Labour,” and give it a voice and a
countervailing crazy group of ideas, fears, loyalties, and motives.
They “frame up” cases to murder talkative fish pedlars and the like,
and feel much safer for a bit after such squalid acts of defence
against these absurd but impotent threats to their comfort and
self-complacency.
Meanwhile the mills of God are grinding against them in a manner
they do not understand nor suspect. They really believe they are a
beneficent “Capitalist System” malignantly pursued by the unsuccessful,
and as sincerely do a great multitude of excellent people believe that
they are “Labour” implacably oppressed by a “Capitalist System.” It is
just as though we classified all the colour in the world as either pink
or green.
The more we clear our minds of this prevalent hallucination about
Capitalism versus Labour the more we shall be able to distinguish the
real processes at work in our world now. So far from there having
been a progressive enslavement of the masses of mankind during the
past hundred years, there has been a great release from toil. In the
civilizations of the ancient world, slavery or serfdom seems to have
been a necessity in the economic process. The only source of power,
except for a slight use of wind and water mills, was human or animal
muscle.
The most fundamental facts in human history during the past two
centuries have been, first, the rapid progressive replacement of human
toil, not merely of muscular toil, but of toilsome skilled effort, by
a magnificent development of mechanism; and, secondly, an enormous
increase of the amount of energy available for human purposes. A
certain fraction of this increase has no doubt been consumed in
reckless breeding; a much larger part has been and is being wasted in
the traditional fooleries and cruelties of war and war preparation,
due to our continued toleration of the uniform and title-worshipping
classes. And the increase in prosperity itself has been, and is,
much less rapid than was possible, because of the vague but powerful
traditions of proprietary method which have hampered the development of
new larger-scale dealing with national resources. The enlargement of
the machine has outrun the lawyer, the legislator, and the banker, and
they have still to come up to its enlarged possibilities. Until they
do, the machinery of modern life clogs, drags, and is dangerous.
But when all these deductions have been made, there remains in hand a
huge achievement of welfare, freedom, and hope in the last two hundred
years due entirely to inventions and discovery, science and common
sense. The facts of material advance are altogether more important in
the history of the past two centuries than the amount of subjection
and human frustration that has occurred during this period. The former
are new phenomena, the latter are old conditions of life that have, if
anything, diminished.
The line of progress lies not in these disputes about proprietary
rights and claims upon the ever more bountiful gifts of science and
invention, but in the search for the most efficient means of turning
these gifts to the general advantage. There is a growing science of
industrial psychology and industrial efficiency. It is, I believe,
likely to develop into a very powerful group of ideas and realizations.
At present it concerns itself mainly with the question of how to
secure the most effective labour. We discover that long hours are
often less profitable to every one concerned than reasonably short
hours; that air, light, and cheerful conditions for the worker are good
investments. The investigations spread to an inquiry into the worker’s
home. Presently we shall realize that the waste of strikes, unwilling
service, sabotage, and other forms of industrial friction is largely
due to the want of reasonable hope in the worker’s life. It will be
good business and good politics to give the worker hope and security.
And it will be impossible to study industrial efficiency in the mine
and field and workshop, we shall find, and ignore the bearing of the
country house and the director’s home upon the quality of the economic
services rendered. In other words, we shall bring the social system to
the touchstone of efficiency instead of to the bar of justice.
Few people nowadays defend or attack private property on grounds of
abstract morality and justice. Ownership is not an institution of the
order of primary right. Ownership is an institution that has to be
justified. The case of individualism against collectivism stands or
falls almost entirely upon the assertion that competitive individualism
gives a larger and better product always than any non-competitive
system. The case of the socialist is that this is untrue. Without
limitation it is a very incredible assertion that the individualist
makes. Neither case has ever been proved, but the study of the
psychology of economic life, as it extends, is bound to turn what are
at present mere wranglings for a greater share in the economic output
into a search for the most productive arrangements for work and living.
Then mankind may find that while the administration of transport,
credit, land, and natural resources are far better taken out of the
domain of private proprietorship into the collective control either
of public authorities or _quasi_-public trusts, there are other
directions, householding, many forms of cultivation and construction
and artistic work, for example, in which a great increase in
independent proprietorship is desirable. While socialization progresses
in some directions, individualism will assert itself in others. And
always machinery and mechanical organization will be dispensing
with toil. In the long run it seems probable that the sort of thing
we understand by “Labour” now will dwindle to a small, minor, and
unimportant class in the community, and that simultaneously there may
be an absorption of much privately owned wealth by a scientifically
conducted collective administration. While we are representing
life in melodramatic colours as a struggle between the “Haves” and
the “Have-nots,” the less romantic but infinitely more subtle and
interesting reality of a struggle between scientific organization on
the one hand and the alliance of personal greed with chaotic stupidity
on the other may be undermining all the grounds of our melodrama.
Such being my convictions, I do not find myself excited by the
advent of a Labour Day to any demonstrations against the Capitalist
System. I refrain with perfect ease from gathering in mass meetings or
pouring in my myriads, with banners and bands and red flags, through
the streets of great cities. I do not believe Labour is marching to
triumph; I believe it is soaking away towards absorption in a modern
mechanicalized community of a middle-class type. A day will come when
Labour Day will be a quaint and interesting anniversary, like fireworks
in November in London or beating the bounds of some old English borough.
_4 September, 1927._
X
WHAT IS THE BRITISH EMPIRE WORTH TO MANKIND?
MEDITATIONS OF AN EMPIRE CITIZEN
The other day I was turning out the drawers of a bureau, and I came
upon a little collection of printed cards and papers, the agenda and
minutes of a dinner-discussion club of which I was a member far back in
the days of good King Edward, when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was raising
the banner of Tariff Reform. It was a small club of thirteen, and I
was the least in it; never a government then or since that has not
contained a member or so of it; and the aim of all our talks was to
sharpen our ideas about the Empire to which we belonged and to come to
some sort of agreement, if we could, about what we wanted to do with
it and how we had to serve it. We never came to any agreement; Tariff
Reform cleft us from the beginning, but I doubt if any one of us failed
to give something or to learn much in these agreeable encounters.
I sat recalling these old discussions and linking them with writings
of mine that preceded and followed them. I have been writing and
thinking and talking about the Empire for thirty years. My ideas have
changed and expanded; my knowledge has grown, I have moved with the
times. Except that I have put more of it on record and so checked my
steps more exactly, my thoughts and feelings about the Empire have
probably been very like the thoughts and feelings of thousands of
mediocre liberal Englishmen. It is interesting to recall some of the
chief phases of the story.
I have had a phase of disillusionment about the Empire since 1919
so intense that I have come near to a complete antagonism to
“Imperialism.” But as I sit over these papers and think not merely
of my own reactions, but of some of the “Empire builders” and Empire
rulers I have known--Sir Harry Johnston, Sir Hugh Clifford, Lord
Olivier, for example--I find myself still reluctant to turn against all
the dreams of that liberal Imperialism of twenty years ago. For twenty
years ago I was a firm believer in the great importance of the British
Empire to mankind, and as hostile as I am to-day to the Nationalisms
that set themselves up against it.
I am still--I am even more--anti-nationalist to-day. I see no good
at all in people getting together into groups to exaggerate and
overvalue their own peculiarities and run down, exclude, and injure
the rest of mankind. I find nothing charming in the faked-up national
costumes--which are all alike all over Europe, women in muslin caps
and bits of red and black stuff, and men in pearl buttons--national
arts--thumby bits of wood carving, pottery, and lace that are
even more the same thing everywhere--national dialects, national
literatures, and national symbols, which pretend to discursiveness
but really aim to pickle a dismal uniformity of petty localism,
conceit, narrow-mindedness, and customary tyranny, throughout the
continent. I am all for Cosmopolis and the high-road, and when I find
nationalism rising to intricate interferences with trade and money,
the free movement of men and goods about this none too large a planet,
boastings, hostilities, armies, and the strangulation of the general
welfare in the interests of the gangs exploiting patriotic instincts,
my lack of enthusiasm deepens to positive hatred.
I think I was born cosmopolitan. I could never sympathize completely,
though I realized the reality of their peculiar grievances, with the
preference of the southern Irish to be lords upon their own dunghills
rather than partners of the Ulstermen, the English, Scotch, and Welsh
in the world adventure of the Empire, and, though I had qualms about
the aims and methods of Cecil Rhodes and Dr. Jameson, I thought it
was better to keep South Africa united and part of a great world
system than to permit two illiberal republics to monopolize the Kaffir
vitality and mineral wealth of a great region that should benefit all
humanity. I have never found Nationalism even a plausible excuse for
the sterilization of some great area of potential wealth because a
backward people happened to live upon it. The whole earth is for the
whole race.
But even in those dinner-club discussions of twenty years ago very
marked divergencies of opinion and spirit became manifest. Our opening
discussion was upon the possibility of an Imperial Zollverein, and that
question, we found, went to the very root of our ideas. Did we want to
unite the Empire, economically, financially, politically, militarily,
against the rest of the world or not? Was it to be a closed fist in
imitation of the Teutonic Zollverein, or an open hand to all the world?
I recall with satisfaction that it was I who appealed to geography and
introduced the figure of the open hand. Our British fingers, I argued,
spread over the whole keyboard of the world. We could never sound a
uniform note. Canada, India, New Zealand, were incurably divergent,
except in the idea of a common peace, and that uniformity in diversity
was our asset. We had the confidence of foreign states in our tropical
and other “raw-product” possessions, because we stood--in those
days--not for monopolization, but the open door. The less assertive
we were, the more possible it would be for other kindred powers to
work with us and work out forms of co-operation with us in our task of
coalescing and evolving into a world-wide civilization.
That sort of idea about the empire was very prevalent in those
days of twenty years ago. Kipling went about calling upon Americans
and Germans, and indeed all Europe, to take up the “White Man’s
Burthen”--and at the time of its first issue that memorable burden was
intended to be something quite other than a mere bundle of loot. The
Rhodes scholarships are another fossil good intention which remains to
us from that age of potential incorporation. Americans and Germans at
least were to be made like-minded with the British at Oxford! The idea
of the eventual amalgamation of the Empire with other Powers in some
comprehensive world control was, indeed, constantly cropping up. This
involved no more thought of overcoming or conquering other competitors
than did the big series of bank and industrial amalgamations that have
occurred in Great Britain since the war. It was a pool we had in mind.
The Empire was seen as the pacific precursor of a practical world
State. Our “raw-material” possessions were seen as part of the common
estate of the human race, our share in a trusteeship; our Navy as a
world police that might be at last as denationalized as the Knights
Templars. These expansive possibilities were what attracted me to that
club, and that, if I may name him, was what attracted Mr. Bertrand
Russell, who was also one of our thirteen.
But against us we found from the outset a group of Empire patriots,
who were all for the Empire of the clenched fist. They were fierce
fellows who believed that life was a violent struggle and that what
one had in the world had to be held savagely against all comers. They
did not want to unite the world, they wanted to subdue it to their
conception of what was British. Whatever was British was right--kings,
Lords and Commons, our remarkable orthography, Ascot and the Derby,
cricket and the Boat Race, the faithful Sikh and Simla, and the Navy.
The outer world had to admire us, serve our purposes, and carry itself
humbly towards us. They were, in fact, glorified Nationalists; their
Imperialism was merely Nationalism distended, arrogant, intolerant of
rivalry. Our fiercest member at every feast prepared our minds for war
with Germany. He saw things quite simply: we had the best place in
the world, and Germany wanted to take it, and we had to prepare for a
fight. Education, efficiency of production, these Imperialists of the
clenched fist saw only as necessary evils forced upon us by German
competition. Their attitude to the Empire was what one might call the
United Services attitude, a pose of unquestioning devotion. It is the
exact parallel of the devotion that surrounded the German Kaiser in his
glorious days. “The Empire right or wrong,” they said, “whatever it
was, whatever it became, whatever it did.”
Naturally and logically they wanted a tariff wall and indeed
every sort of wall about this divine reserve of earth, great
armies and an overwhelming fleet, and outside it nations as
poor, divided, and incapable of disturbing it as possible.
That was the Nationalist-Imperialist idea as distinct from the
Cosmopolitan-Imperialist idea that Russell and I embodied.
One evening when I was absent and the attendance was exceptionally
low, there was a great dispute between Russell and four of the
Nationalist-Imperialists. They were ready, they said, to die for the
Empire, or commit any informality to serve it. Russell said there
were quite a number of things on which he put a higher value than
the Empire, and that if it came to a choice on these cases he would
be against the Empire. This opinion I share. But that night the talk
grew heated, and Russell, without waiting for the next meeting and
reinforcements, resigned, and we saw him no more. Which was a pity,
because one great charm of those discussions was the depth of the
crevasses we found between us, and Russell was certainly the centre of
the deepest crevasse system of all.
This incident, however, did pose for me quite plainly what is after
all the essential question for all of us so far as our political lives
go, whether the political system we live in is to be regarded as an
end in itself, a divine unquestionable thing, or whether it is to be
considered merely a transitory means to a greater end, to be judged on
its merits, to be used, altered, and in the end gradually or completely
replaced by something better. The Roman citizen was compelled to
worship the Empire like a god, the Empire indivisible and eternal.
Many people in Europe and America would impose the same uncritical
abjection towards the American Constitution or the British Empire. You
must salute, you must stand, stiff and stupid. Behind this personal
abjection lurks moral corruption, a sort of collective scoundrelism.
You must not trade fair and square, you must favour “Empire” goods. You
must not publish scientific truth, but make whatever you discover an
“Empire” secret. You may spy, you may lie for the “Empire’s” sake. Such
“loyalty” I repudiate as an insult to humanity. I refuse my pinch of
incense on that altar.
And I will go on to say that a British Empire which does not seem
to me to be realizing the wide and generous dreams of the liberal
imperialism with which the century began is of no use to me, and I do
not believe the Universe will suffer it to continue. For ten years I
have seen the Empire going heavily and dully about its business; I
have seen it made an excuse for much meanness and clumsy violence.
It suffers in credit and direction by the hard “loyalty” of stupid
adherents and stupid representatives who do not understand how gracious
and mighty a civilizing organization it could be. They control it
and they cripple it. It carries a vast crowd of parasites who snatch
monopolies and profits in its name. It has lost moral prestige in
Ireland, in India, in China, and before all the world. Enormously.
Perhaps even fatally. To-day, what is it doing? Officially, I mean.
Is it showing any intelligent sympathy for the efforts of the more
progressive Chinese to found a modern State amid the ruins of the
antiquated Manchu system, or is it just bullying and blustering in the
confusion? Is it displaying the slightest generosity to the struggles
of its fallen and shattered ally and helper, Russia, to reconstruct its
economic life? Is it building up a free and friendly modern India? In
the past it did great things for Japan, and it gave unity and freedom
to and won the fellowship of Canada and South Africa. Is it doing
anything to compare with these former feats to-day? Why is it engaging
in a childish wrangle with the equally reprehensible Government of the
United States about which is to have the biggest navy? For what on
earth are these navies wanted now? It is improving its tanks, I gather;
is it improving its educational machinery? What is it doing with its
manhood? What chance has a boy of distinguished gifts born son of a
miner under the shadow of the Duke of Northumberland?
How much of its tremendous resources is at the disposal of scientific
research? In the measure of the available wealth and man-power, which
is doing the most for scientific work to-day--Moscow or London? Has the
British Empire made, indeed, one fine, great, and ennobling gesture
towards the future unity of mankind for the past ten years? Wembley!
Rodeos and military tattoos! Immeasurable things could be done with
the vast opportunity of the British Empire, but are they being even
attempted?
I put these questions to myself, and I put them to the reader.
It would be all too easy to fly off into an attitude of
anti-imperialism, and say with the Communists, “These Imperialisms
are evil things; let us destroy them.” But they are not inherently
evil things. To destroy Imperial systems with nothing to replace them
is simply to leap backward because one is not going forward fast
enough. The British Empire is not a thing to destroy; it is a thing to
rescue. But the time for rescue is now--and the need is urgent. It has
to be rescued from the arrogant flag-worshipping class and from the
tariff-monopoly adventurers who at present are in control. It has to be
saved from its “patriots” and its “patriot” Government. We have seen
the great civilized States of Central Europe humiliated and brought to
disaster by just that same combination of exasperating militarism with
industrial nationalism that now imperils Great Britain. Are we in our
turn to tread that path? We want the Empire of the open hand. We want
an Empire which is not an end but a means.
_18 September, 1927._
XI
THE PRESENT USELESSNESS AND DANGER OF AEROPLANES.
A PROBLEM IN ORGANIZATION
In this world of great and irregular change, in this Western
civilization which is gradually becoming world-wide, men and women are
living longer, more healthily, and more abundantly than they have ever
done before. But in many respects they seem to be living much less
abundantly than they could do. One of the most remarkable facts in our
present astonishing spectacle of life is the now quite considerable
accumulation of life-enlarging inventions that, so far as the
generality goes, are being put to no use at all or to extremely limited
and unsatisfactory uses.
These things wait. Or, like the excessive birthday presents of a
spoilt child, some are partially unpacked and put aside for future
consideration. And some have been broken. Science and invention have
given these things to that spoilt child, the ordinary man of to-day. He
has still to learn the full benefit of them.
The most striking of these ill-appreciated gifts is flying. For the
last ten years at least safe, swift, delightful air travel round about
this entrancingly bright and various planet of ours has been available
for mankind at considerably less than the cost of ordinary first-class
rail or steamship travel. When I write “available for mankind,” I do
not mean that it is available for the reader or myself. I mean that
if mankind had been able to take it up, it would have been available
for us and all other individuals willing to pay the charges, charges
so low that almost any well-paid worker would have had a reasonable
use of this means of transport at his command. And when I say safe,
I mean safer than ordinary travel by rail or ship; and by swift I
mean travelling at something like a hundred miles an hour, and by
delightful--smooth, beautiful, and in the sweetest air. I have flown
fairly often. I know what I am writing about, I know the happiness
and wonder of flying, and I know that its present rarity, danger, and
unattractiveness are not due to any defects in the aeroplane or airship
itself--physical science and mechanical invention have failed at no
point in the matter--but mainly, almost entirely, to the financial,
administrative, and political difficulties of aviation.
The business and administrative side is not up to the mechanical side;
it is so plainly and unenterprisingly behind that I, for example, am
beginning to despair altogether of my once confident hope of flying
very agreeably round the world before I die. I have a nostalgia for the
coloured gorges of South Algeria, for the Great Wall of China, for the
scorched jungles of India, and the palaces of Ambar, and if I had my
rights as a civilized man I should be able to fly down over them all in
a handful of days. Never shall I set eyes on them.
I have flown fairly often but I fly no longer. I find it too
uncomfortable, irregular, and stupidly dangerous. In the old days
flying was a novel experience; one flew for the fun of the thing, and
there was no objection whatever to an element of danger in the affair.
In the experimental days one had no more right to complain of danger in
an aeroplane than in big-game hunting. And it was fair to make one wait
for a favourable day and a good machine. But those sporting days are
past. It is one thing to get killed in a hopeful and daring experiment
on the edge of things known, and quite another to be drowned or smashed
or roasted to death on an omnibus route because a certain number of
able but restricted gentlemen in control of the business have--with all
sorts of excellent excuses for doing so--sent one off in an overworked,
perfunctorily inspected, or overloaded machine. I have seen enough of
European flying services not to wish to see any more of them until the
whole thing is under “entirely new management.”
Nearly every one of the series of horrible accidents that have so
powerfully retarded the expansion of European passenger air travel
was a foretellable disaster. Sooner or later these tragedies were
inevitable under current conditions. I have crossed the Channel at
about two thousand feet with both engines popping away dismally, and
got to Lympne by a miracle, and the only thing that astonished me when
at last one of these things flopped into the water was that no one was
drowned. Hardly more than half of the passenger flights I have made
got through according to schedule, and I suppose I have spent almost
as many hours at LeBourget and Lympne and Amsterdam and Prague--and
Heaven knows which is the least attractive promenade!--waiting about
for machines that did not turn up or could not be put right, as I have
in the air. I do not complain of delays due to bad weather. What has
most wasted my time and endangered my life, in my attempts to be an
up-to-date traveller, has been that there were not enough machines and
pilots to run the service properly and safely.
Never in any case of forced landing have I known a fresh machine appear
to take on the passengers--only last month I saw that twelve dismal
passengers were landed in the wilderness of Puckeridge, in Kent, to
get to London by train at God knows what hour of the evening--and only
at Prague have I ever observed a number of reserve machines having a
reasonable rest and overhaul.
Now I am not reflecting here on the personal capacity and honesty of
any of the people concerned with the European air services. I live
quite outside the feuds and competitions, ambitions and disappointments
of that queer world. Whenever I state such facts as these, plain and
simple and easily verifiable, about the European air services, the
air press becomes extremely heated and defensively rude about it--but
the facts remain facts. For ten years Europe has been pottering,
dangerously and ineffectively, with this glorious possibility of air
transport about the globe, and it seems no nearer to its realization
to-day than it was in 1919. And the reason for this, I submit, is
because the old world cannot produce a financial and administrative
organization of a sufficient largeness, power, and scope to handle the
thing effectively.
It needs only common knowledge and a few grains of common sense to
realize that the exploitation of the air, as a means of safe, happy,
and generally available travel, is hopeless without the expenditure
of capital on the scale of, say, fifteen million pounds, plus secure
wayleaves over Europe and most of Asia and Africa. On that scale it
would be the most obviously easy and profitable of undertakings.
On that scale a number of main routes could be prepared and lit
between all the chief cities from Dublin, Lisbon, and Stockholm to
Vladivostok and Capetown, and a sufficient supply of machines and
a sufficiently big organization could be developed to ensure that,
except during very unfavourable phases of the weather, a machine, a
pilot, and an assistant in perfect condition would be ready to start
as passengers accumulated during certain hours of departure specified
for each aerodrome, with still plentiful machines in reserve. Then the
travelling public would know what to expect.
One could put together one’s valise in the morning in London, and dine
and hear some music in Munich, spend a second pleasant evening in the
Crimea after a day above the Danube, and so over the Taurus to Bagdad,
and into the sunshine of India by the fourth or fifth evening. Once
people were sure of the services they would begin to flow steadily
along the established routes. Their numbers and the seasons of their
coming would become more and more calculable; with that the fares would
fall and the passengers multiply. Air services can be far more elastic
things than train services. It is a most intricate thing to rearrange
trans-continental expresses, but an air service can turn over its
machines from one air route to another as occasion requires with an
ease impossible to any other form of transport. If it have enough; if
it is on that scale. In a few years the international air service would
represent not millions, but thousands of millions, of capital value,
and would be sustaining a vast industry beside which the motor-car
industry of the world would seem a small affair. But the business
cannot get started unless it starts with assurance and security. And
that means an initial effort quite beyond the futile pottering of
to-day. All the world at present cannot get together into one united
effort enough capital to give aviation that start.
So it doesn’t start. It doesn’t get on. It seems highly probable that
twenty years hence we shall be muckering about with air travel very
much as we are doing to-day. It will be as fitful, unpunctual, and
uncertain. The tale of needless air tragedies will have lengthened. A
great majority of air passengers will still be in the air as a rather
daring “experience” for the first and last time.
Let me repeat that I am not criticizing the galaxy of brilliant,
energetic, and enterprising people who are the magnates of the air
world to-day. I do not suggest that any one could, under these
conditions, do better than they are doing. In what may prove, I fear, a
vain effort to propitiate the air press, I am prepared to concede that
they are all without invidious exceptions quite marvellous people. What
I am saying here reflects upon their peerlessness hardly at all. I am
calling attention to the net in which their great abilities seem to
be caught, and the barriers set to their benefactions. If a shadow of
blame creeps into my comments, it is that with a modest gallantry they
make what they can out of a necessarily cramped business, and do not
complain loudly and vehemently enough against these things that prevent
them year after year from opening up those world airways that would
lead to a more united and happier life for mankind.
The crux of the business lies in the comparative under-development
of the financial and business and political worlds in respect to the
vast expansion of mechanical and economic possibility. We talk a lot of
nonsense nowadays about Big Business. There is really no Big Business
in the world to-day. No business big enough. There are a number of
banking and industrial combinations in existence much larger than
any that preceded them, and the fact that they are larger than their
predecessors blinds us to the fact that they are not large enough for
their jobs. Shipping, the world trade in many staple products, cry
aloud for unification also--but for the present let us stick to this
simple case of the air. Business is entangled with finance, finance
with politics, and when we begin to look into this riddle of why that
fifty million pounds trust does not appear, secure its concessions
and its wayleaves, and get to work upon a real world air service, we
discover, as a first effectual barrier, national boundaries. We find
every single country of the European patchwork messing about dwarfishly
with its own “national” aviation and placing every possible impediment
in the way of “foreign” air development.
Now effective air travel has to be internationalized from the start.
The aeroplane makes leaps of three or four hundred miles, and there is
hardly any sense in going up in a machine--in Europe, at least--unless
you mean to come down in another country. It is as sensible to hope for
an air transport system developed on national lines as it would be to
hope for an interoceanic railway system through the coalescence of mile
and half-mile of bits of line built, each at its own sweet will, to its
own design and gauge, by every village and township en route. Here I
will not rouse the deep and passionate emotions of patriotism in the
reader by any general condemnation of national partisanship, but from
the point of view of air development, merely and solely, nationalism is
an unmitigated nuisance.
At present the only areas of the world’s surface capable of being
brought under one control for air exploitation are firstly the
European and Asiatic areas under Soviet government, alliance,
or influence; secondly, the United States of America and their
continent; and, thirdly, the territories, protectorates, allies, and
dependents of the British Empire east and south of Palestine--as
far as Malaya, Australia, and the Cape. The development of Soviet
flying is retarded by comparative poverty and the under-development
of the huge region concerned; the United States is a railway-made
unity, with admirably organized rail transport and powerful railway
influences for air services to fight, and with none of the separating
channels, inland seas, and so forth that make flying so desirable
in the western part of the Old World; while, as for the third great
flying area, the steamship-created British Empire, it is, aerially
speaking, decapitated. You cannot fly from the British Isles to the
vast dominions round and about the Indian Ocean without infringing
foreign territory. I see no hope that any one of these three areas,
so handicapped, will be able to initiate practicable air services
for general use, and still less can I see any hope of our existing
sovereign powers going so far as to coalesce for air development with
their neighbours. That would involve a reversal of the entire drift of
nationalist feeling.
But, given such a miracle, given for example a pooling of German and
Russian and Chinese air interests, backbone lines could be created from
the North Sea to the Pacific and to Peking and Anatolia, to which every
other air line in the Old World would be compelled to articulate. But
even if one supposes a sufficient liberality of the principals to make
such an enterprise practicable, it is difficult to imagine the Foreign
Offices and the War Offices of the rest of the “Powers” permitting such
a Germano-Russian-Chinese system to develop without a great war. For if
they did not make a great war of it they would presently have to go out
of business.
These are my reasons for doubting if men will be able to use the
gift and glory of flying, fully and abundantly, for very many years
to come. We shall crawl because we are old-fashioned patriots instead
of flying as some day good cosmopolitans will. But the reaction of
our time-honoured and beloved political institutions upon flying is
not merely negative. We do not just go without this beautiful thing.
Our patriotic passions demand something more positive than that. Our
flags demand, not only abstinences, but blood and burnt offerings. If,
on the one hand, the custodians of our national distinctness block
the development of safe flying, they do, on the other hand, work with
considerable vigour to develop dangerous flying. However much air
transport may limp and lag, there is no cessation of research, within
the limits of the military intelligence, into the possibilities of war
aviation.
In the year 1926, a year of profound peace, technically speaking, the
English R.A.F. killed eighty-three young men. The numbers killed show a
considerable advance upon 1925. France, Italy, America show comparable
losses. Germany, lucky land, does not appear in this massacre. She is
forbidden to kill her young aviators in spite of all patriotic cravings
to do so; she is devoting them therefore to an air transport service
that in spite of many handicaps is already the best in Europe. Since
the Great Peace, while you and I have been going about our various
little concerns, some thousands of young men, not common young men,
but picked human beings, exceptionally courageous and well bred and
well made, have been dashed to pieces and burnt alive, to the end that
when presently the nations have sufficiently forgotten the last war to
be guided into the next, flying shall not fail in its contribution to
the spectacle. These splendid young men have been killed, just as the
carefully chosen youths of the Aztec nation were killed, to propitiate
the national gods. Even in peace-time these sacred monsters had to be
kept alive by the blood of the young. These gallant youngsters have
been learning to fly in hazardous ways, or they have been practising
the throwing of explosive bombs and poison bombs at the imaginary homes
and refuges of offending foreigners below, and they have paid the
penalty. Very great advances, we are assured, are being made every year
in the destructiveness, deadliness, and general disgustingness of the
air offensive at the price of these deaths.
There is no need to elaborate this monstrous contrast further. What
has been said is sufficient to establish the thesis that for a century
human affairs have been developing at an unequal pace, that while our
economic and political ideas and methods have made only sluggish and
insecure advances, mechanical science has so progressed as entirely
to outscale them. This instance of the air is only one vivid instance
of what is happening to most of the economic and industrial affairs
of mankind. Governments are not helping, not fostering, the huge
and desirable reorganizations that are possible. Politicians live
by keeping alive feuds and hatreds. Governments subsist upon old
sentiments and traditions; there is no such thing as a progressive
creative Government in the world anywhere, to accept and use in a full
and proper fashion the gifts science and invention now hold out to us.
The chief recognition of progress by Governments everywhere takes the
form of attempts to turn the gifts of progress into weapons to kill
progress. And the chief riddle before mankind on its way to that world
peace, that larger, happier, nobler, and fuller life which certainly
awaits it, is the riddle of how to introduce into its methods of
government that idea of progress, which has given us the key to these
vast treasures, and so convert the nationalist parochialisms of to-day,
stage by stage and surely and conclusively, into the world commonweal,
which is the essential condition of their exploitation.
_20 February, 1927._
XII
CHANGES IN THE ARTS OF WAR. ARE ARMIES NEEDED ANY LONGER?
THE TWILIGHT OF THE GUARDS
I have never abused the Senate of the United States.
No sign of gratitude have I ever had from any of these ninety-six
gentlemen for this extraordinary treatment. Extraordinary it is.
Everybody except myself abuses the Senate. It turned down American
participation in the League of Nations, to the edification of all
mankind. It prevents the United States tangling itself up in treaties,
understandings, and complications of the balance-of-power description.
It makes the United States “different” in the world of international
affairs. America’s representatives abroad never represent her. What
the President signs to-day the Senate revokes to-morrow. The New World
would not be half such a fresh world if it were not for the Senate.
Lately the scolding of the Senate has broken out with revived
bitterness. At Geneva somebody from America agreed to a treaty against
the use of poison gas in warfare, a very silly and mischievous treaty
from any points of view. The Senate cast it out. Embittered idealists
declare that this is due to “lobbying” by the American chemical
industries. Why the American chemical industries should not lobby upon
a question of this sort passes my comprehension. They know about it.
Why should all the arrangements for the warfare of the future be left
to the gold-laced gentlemen who pose as naval and military experts?
The Senate has saved poison gas for warfare. I hope the Senate will
continue to stand for every sort of disagreeable novelty in warfare. I
hope the Senate will save disease germs for warfare and make a stand
about poisoning the water supply. Let war be war and not merely a
tedious cruel game under rules. The more various, open, perplexing,
and unpleasant the available methods of warfare are to professional
soldiers, the less likely the world is to get another large and
deliberate war.
Let us consider how fresh wars are most likely to arise, and what
classes of people lean most heavily towards war. There can be little
dispute that the enormous majority of human beings nowadays hates and
dreads the idea of war; that most financial interests have become chary
of using its possibility as a threat in the game of wealth acquisition;
and that industrialism and trade contemplate an extensive outbreak as
unalloyed disaster. Little bullying punitive wars against small and
uncivilized peoples may still appeal to powerful groups exploiting
natural resources, but even these minor affairs seem to evoke a greater
distaste than they used to do. The war-makers who are trying to force
Britain into hostilities with China and the United States into a
Mexican adventure are meeting with an extremely stiff opposition. Half
a century ago, both adventures would have gone with a click.
The minority which favours war is very largely the professionally
belligerent class officers, their womenkind, and every sort of person
who upon occasion wears uniform and a sword and is entitled to a
salute. Salutes are ten times more intoxicating than absolute alcohol.
They reassure the arrogant; they allay all doubts. This salutable
minority is very strongly entrenched in the political traditions
and misconceptions of mankind. It has an air of being in the scheme
of things. Its heads are highly placed. And it is picturesque. It
photographs easily and is, by that alone, assured of a steady newspaper
publicity. It commands a great supply of bands. It is the custodian
of the flag. The facts that it may be dangerous and useless weigh but
lightly in the common mind against such attractions.
One may doubt if the generality of adorned and salutable soldiers in
the world really want war. They want the possibility of war, of course,
the world parcelled up into competing nations, and so forth, because
otherwise they could have no professional careers, no inferiors to
salute them, and might at any time be retrenched out of existence.
They have to “defend” us against the soldiers next door, and the
soldiers next door have to “defend” the other fellows against our
team, and there you are. That is primary. But war itself one may doubt
their hunger for, and quite evidently war to the utmost is not to the
professional soldiers’ taste.
It is part of the general absurdity with which human affairs are at
present conducted that when we want a discussion of disarmament or
the mitigation and prevention of war we consult “naval and military
experts,” existing by and for professional war, and quite naturally
they advise us on strictly professional lines. They set their faces
against all disturbing novelties that would oblige them to learn
their trade anew or against any proposals that might abolish their
profession, and they do their best to make warfare honourable,
comfortable, and dignified for military gentlemen. This, as people
say, is only human nature. They want _nice_ wars. They will provide
the spectacle, they will face the more sportsmanlike toils and dangers
of the entertainment, and the taxpayers, the civilians, and the common
herd, the “men,” will bear the less agreeable part of the burthen and
stand the racket of the subsequent clearing-up.
These charges are sustained by the proceedings of the experts who
have been discussing “disarmament” at Geneva under the auspices of
the League--as one might call it--for the Preservation of Distinct
Nations and Established Boundaries for Ever. The whole tenor of their
activities is to retain war as a standing institution, by restricting
its expensiveness and keeping its horrors within the bounds of
human endurance. Aeroplanes are to be defined as war aeroplanes (to
be used) and peace aeroplanes (not to be used). Navies are to be
restricted to so many battleships a side. Unsportsmanlike tools and
particularly submarines are to be forbidden. Professional soldiers
found killed by poker blows or poisoned food or other illegitimate
means are to be restored to life by the League of Nations umpires.
Nations found playing more soldiers than are allowed by the rules will
be disqualified. Such, at least, is the spirit of these entertaining
researches, though the complete scheme has still to be produced. So
protected, there is no reason why the professional soldier, dressed in
full uniform, from spurs to feathers, and the professional sea-dog in
blue and gold lace should not strut about the world, “defending” us
all, to the very end of time.
The virtuous proposals of President Coolidge for further naval
agreement are open to precisely the same objection as these Geneva
schemes. They would bar invention. They would professionalize and trade
unionize war. Except as paymaster and victim they would eliminate the
civilian.
My friend, Mr. J. B. S. Haldane, has called this disposition of the
military authorities to give a pleasant and honourable quality to
war, “Bayardism,” because the Chevalier Bayard, that peerless knight,
felt such a funk and detestation of gunpowder that he put every
musketeer who fell into his hands to death. Donne, on the other hand,
says Brigadier-General Hartley--who is really not such a soldier as
that sounds, seeing that he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a
distinguished chemist--preaching in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621,
thanked God for artillery because it brought wars to a quicker end.
Mr. Haldane has written one of the most instructive and well-informed
books about Chemical Warfare that exist; he knows about ten times
as much in this field as most of the worthy gentlemen in gold lace,
tabs, badges, labels, swords, belts, and suchlike adornments who would
in practice have to mismanage it, and his brains are certainly ten
times as good. Consequently his book, which gives away every point of
importance concerning gas warfare, is treated as light literature,
and the real professional soldiers will torture and kill scores of
thousands of conscripts before they learn, horribly and slowly, what he
so charmingly tells them in his little volume.
Just as in the Great War--when in 1914 the French and British soldiers
were a quarter of a century behind-hand with trench warfare, and not a
military expert in Europe would attempt the tank until 1916, although
its use and necessity as a solution of the trench blockade had been
quite lucidly discussed and set forth by civilians as early as 1903.
Brigadier-General Hartley still returns at times to read papers about
gas warfare to the army folk he supplemented so effectively during the
war, though no one supposes they want to take him seriously now. He
has made it clear that a country in which everybody, man, woman, and
child, has a specially efficient gas-mask handy may face the next great
war with a certain qualified equanimity, and his anxiety about the gas
discipline of troops trained since 1918 is only too manifest in all he
says and does in this connection. Meanwhile at the Royal College of
Science in London, young engineers and chemists are beguiled away from
their studies in order to learn saluting and flourishing about with
swords, bayonets, and battle axes in a Cadet corps.
At present the British Army, which is perhaps the liveliest, most
industrious technically, and, according to its lights, the most nearly
up-to-date of all the old armies now surviving in the world, is working
out methods of fighting that are not much more than twenty years behind
the level of contemporary thought and intelligence. Having resisted
the tank for twelve years, having muffed the tank outrageously in the
war, the British Army is now evidently quite enslaved by the tank. It
plays with tanks all day and dreams of them at nights. It exhibits them
with childish pride to Colonial Premiers and Indian princes. It has
dinky one-man tanks now and great big land battleships and transport
tanks and shock tanks. Cavalry is at last at a discount, and the Air
Force practises deadly stunts and does musical drill at pageants very
prettily. Perhaps a new generation of military men, accustomed in their
younger days to driving motor-cars to the public danger, is responsible
for this change of heart, this sudden glorification of the once-hated
tank. But it is to be hoped for the sake of England and all the world
that these exercises will never get beyond the gravity of an expensive
amusement for the British military authorities.
Because, quite apart from the aeroplane gas attack, which is the
really modern mode of warfare, if warfare we must have, there are a
score of ways of countering a tank rush. This tank rush of which the
British Army seems to be dreaming now is as out of date as those vast
cavalry charges the German Emperor loved to rehearse before 1914. There
are pitfalls, there are trailing land torpedoes, gas-poisoned belts,
and zones of sudden flame that would make tanks mere cooking-pots. A
committee of half a dozen alert and intelligent specialists of the
type of Mr. Haldane and General Hartley, men who have given their
minds to biology, chemistry, mechanics, and suchlike sensible pursuits
instead of mere soldiering, could work out twenty schemes to make tanks
impossible in a month or so. The tank may have been all very well in
1907 or thereabouts; 1914 was the time for it. It was the winning card
in the days when Lord Kitchener turned it down as a “mechanical toy.”
Now the only excuse for thinking of it at all is that the professional
soldiers against whom the British professionals will be pitted will
probably be even more backward and unintelligent than they are. Given a
war on the basis of “Back to 1903,” and all may be well with England.
There is nowadays, however, much more danger than there ever was
before that some strange new outcast country, Soviet Russia, for
example, with German science to help her--or even with her own
sedulously stimulated science--will refuse to play the recognized
soldiers’ game according to the rules, and resort directly to
chemists, biologists, and engineers for some entirely unchivalrous
way of destroying a military force. Suppose this eccentric outcast to
concentrate on that. It would need to have a good supply of aviators
and aeroplanes, but no man has ever yet discovered how to prevent the
instantaneous conversion of a civil aeroplane into a military one;
and also it would have to have access to great chemical works. But
given these things, and men to operate them, that enemy need not have
ten thousand soldiers in uniform. It could hold up the huge tank rush
by a few simple expedients of the type I have glanced at above, and
it could set about locating, chasing, and annihilating every sort of
general headquarters and political and directive centre of the orthodox
military people--with gas and germs.
The idea would be to tarnish, suffocate, blister, and burn the
gentlemen in gold lace, and their political associates behind them,
to the pitch of entire disorganization. There would be no necessity
to pester the general enemy population except in regions of chemical
industrialism. That eminent air-archæologist, Mr. O. G. S. Crawford,
can teach any ground soldier who cares to learn how difficult, how
almost impossible it would be, to conceal the lay-out of vital military
centres from an acute air observer. Still less easy would it be to
conceal plant for the accumulation and distribution of munitions. In a
little while the front-line trenches would be telephoning to deaf ears,
and the tanks of the great offensive, until their petrol was all used
up, would be wandering back like sheep without a shepherd.
That sort of thing, a defensive trench and tank-trap system, and an air
and gas offensive against vital spots, is the really contemporary form
of war--if we must have war. That is the best way of achieving disaster
for the other side. It is, from first to last, a job for technicians
and artisans. There is no more use for drilled troops in it than there
is for the Greek phalanx. The military experts as a class loathe and
detest the new methods, and will do everything they can to set up a
flimsy barrier of treaties against their use, for the simple reason
that they abolish the military class. The whole world owes a debt of
gratitude to the American Senate for thwarting their endeavours.
It may seem paradoxical at first, but it is not nearly as paradoxical
as it sounds, to say that the evolution of war is abolishing the
soldier altogether. Suppose we drop considering whether war is out of
date or whether it pays, and assume that it is still a current concern.
It does not follow in the least that we still want soldiers to wage
it. I am inclined to think that on most scores we do not. If we were
not so profoundly obsessed by tradition and romance, I think we should
come to see that now, even for the direct purposes of war, for the
defence of a state from intruders, for the destruction of peoples and
institutions that have aroused our animosity to the murder pitch, and
for the imposition of some national or imperial will on recalcitrant
populations, all these handsome individuals running about or galloping
about in tabs and buttons and gold lace are of no earthly use at all.
We keep them because we are creatures of habit and wont. We endure them
because we have still to realize how unnecessary they are. But the
soldier in uniform is as out of date to-day as the man in armour was in
1600.
Drill, uniform, salutes, and the segregation of soldiers from most
human interests and all mental stimuli in barracks and camps have
always been so deeply impressed upon our minds as the proper way of
war, that it is only nowadays that this question becomes debatable. Few
of us realize how much of the old soldiering is already superseded.
Flags have long since disappeared from the modern battlefield. To-day
they wave chiefly for public occasions, at political meetings, and
in the advertisements of goods not otherwise attractive. Military
bands leave their instruments at home, or take them only as far as
the base, and the common soldier is deprived of all his conspicuous
regimental characters and clapped into a severely practical outfit
directly fighting begins. But we still think that the disciplines
and recognizable uniforms demanded by the mass fighting of departed
conditions are somehow imperative if war is to continue. We have not
yet made full allowance for the fact that while victory in the past was
generally conceded to rigidity, obstinacy, and a blind obedience, it is
now more and more the reward of flexibility, knowledge, invention, and
a witty use of modern resources. It is the country that has the courage
to scrap its army most completely which may come nearest winning in the
next great war--if human foolishness does contrive another great war
and a final delirium.
But while the abandonment of an army as the instrument of warfare and
the handing over the business of defensive and offensive killing as a
special problem to chemists, biologists, and engineers would probably
increase the military efficiency of a country very greatly, it would
also greatly diminish its disposition for war. The man of science
and organizing ability would be much more likely to regard war as a
tiresome distraction than as a great and glorious opportunity. The
needs and ambitions of the uniform-wearing classes would cease to
be a power in the land because they would cease to be in the land.
They would have dropped out altogether in favour of the Haldanes and
Hartleys and practical people of that kind, who would probably prefer
to work in laboratory overalls.
To me it seems almost certain that neither the war of 1870 nor the
Great War would have occurred if France and Germany had remained
republics after 1848. France succumbed to Napoleon III, who was
nothing if not Napoleonic. Germany after 1870 set out to be a great
modern state, and she found herself fatally entangled with a dynasty
whose chief interest in life was to exhibit itself in belligerent
costumes and attitudes. Each of the countries, when it reverted to
monarchy, broke out into a vivid rash of uniforms, and after that the
disease had to run its course. German militarism was not a necessity
to an expanding Germany; it was a reversion that wrecked an expanding
Germany. Germany to-day is much more likely to take a great place in
a united Europe than she ever was before, because of the wholesome
surgery that has been done upon her. She has had her Hohenzollerns
removed. Her state of health will be displayed and judged by the
disappearance of uniforms from her complexion.
Several European countries, in spite of the monstrous futile victories
and ineffective defeats of the Great War, are still gravely infected by
these antiquated armies and their traditions and sentimentalities. But
in view of what has been advanced in this article, it is quite possible
that the free advancement of belligerent science may be the true way to
achieve the peace of mankind. The improvement of war may be synonymous
with the ending of war.
_6 March, 1927._
XIII
DELUSIONS ABOUT WORLD PEACE. THE PRICE OF PEACE
Let us assume that a great number of people in the world want peace,
permanent world peace. We have to assume this because there is no
way of proving it, and it is open to very considerable doubt. But it
is a prevalent habit to assert as much. If it is true, then there is
amazingly little effort to realize this aspiration. Those people who
want permanent world peace carry inaggressiveness too far. Nowhere
in the world do I find any evidence of a real, strenuous effort to
establish the peace of the world on sure foundations. Nowhere do I
find really clear-headed, resolute efforts on a scale commensurate to
the task to restrain the processes that will inevitably develop into
warfare in the not very remote future.
Many readers will no doubt rebel against this statement. They
will point to the League of Nations, League of Nations Unions and
Societies, innumerable declarations by prominent people, “No More
War” organizations, and so forth and so on. I admit a prevalent
sentimentality in the matter. I can even believe that if the peace of
the world could be secured for ever by a show of hands, there would
be a considerable majority in its favour. I am convinced, too, that
wars in the future, even at the outset, will not be undertaken with
the gusto with which we all set about the Great War. But if a man has
an idiot incendiary in his house, it is no good for him to go about
saying, “No more fire,” unless he has the matches locked up, the fires
guarded, and the idiot watched. Since 1914, in spite of vast volumes of
pious intention, hardly anything of practical value has been done to
prevent future wars.
Peace talk bores many people. And it is interesting to note that it
bores them. Among the hundreds of thousands who will glance over this
article there are thousands, especially among the younger contingent,
who will probably be killed or maimed in war. The present reader has a
fairly good chance of having some of his face blown out at the back of
his head, or his hips smashed to splinters, or his viscera dispersed
rather painfully, or some such surprising experience--it always seems
to surprise them--by one of the missiles that will be flying about in
great abundance when the next fighting is under way. It is a touching
manifestation of the careless bravery of our race that this probability
does not seem to move them to any appreciable effort to avert such a
culmination of their careers. Until it happens they seem rather to
enjoy the prospect, and after it has happened their opinion loses any
weight in the matter.
Still more of my readers will be maimed or impoverished, and wasted by
the coming war, but they never seem to think they will draw bad numbers
until they get them, and after they have got them, like the fox that
lost its tail, the common reaction seems to be a more or less conscious
desire to see the experience spread to those still intact. And for most
women and girls war is as good as a richly sentimental film that moves
them to tears and pity. While it converts great multitudes of men into
a muddy mixture of rags of flesh and uniform, it greatly enhances the
economic importance of women and their value as nurses, war wives, and
the inspirers of heroic sacrifices. The feminine disapproval of war
is an outward and visible gentleness that is entirely compatible with
a very considerable readiness to face it bravely and to discourage
effective efforts to prevent it. This widespread objection to war of
which we hear so much does not go very deep into people’s hearts; it
certainly does not stir them as religious hatred or unfamiliar customs
can stir them, and it is a complete delusion to regard it as in itself
an operative cause preventing war.
One real test of pacifist sincerity is to be found in the pose towards
national independence. To any one who will sit down for five minutes
and face the facts squarely it must be evident that the organization of
world peace, so that wars will be impossible and disarmament secure,
involves some sort of federal authority in the world’s affairs. At some
point there must be the certainty of a decision upon all disputes of
races and peoples and nations that would otherwise necessitate war. And
this authority must clearly have the power to enforce its decisions.
Whatever navies and armies survive, other than police forces for local
and definite ends, must be under the control of this central authority.
It may be a committee of national representatives or what you will, but
central authority there must be. Pax Mundi, like the Pax Romana or the
Pax Britannica, must be the only sovereign power within its realm. If
you are not prepared to see your own country and your own flag so far
subordinated to collective control, whatever protestations of peaceful
intentions you make are either made unintelligently or else in bad
faith. Your country cannot be both independent and restricted. Either
you are for Cosmopolis or you are for war.
It is interesting to note how many excellent people boggle at this
obvious alternative. They declare they are for peace, first, last, and
all the time; they belong to this or that association for universal
arbitration or for propaganda on behalf of the League of Nations, they
advocate disarmament, and all the while they shirk the plain logical
consequences of these pretensions, which are, in one word, _disloyalty_
to their own government. The idea of loyalty is unquestioning
obedience, complete devotion; “our country, right or wrong.” We abandon
easy and natural poses and stiffen up to a mechanical salute at the
first note of the national anthem. By that we indicate that, before all
other things, and even to the sacrifice of our lives, we are prepared
to serve, support, and sustain the free and separate existence, alleged
collective prosperity, natural destiny, necessary expansion, honour,
and glory of our own sovereign government, its Empire and its subjects,
against right, reason, justice, the knavish tricks of foreigners (and
practically that is all foreigners are supposed to do), the stars in
their courses, or the welfare of mankind. We put our nationality first
in our hearts and souls and lives. We regard _our_ country as something
primary and eternal. We must never think of it subordinated nor imagine
that its separateness can end. It is to go on for all time just as
it is, only more so. The rest of the world may go to the devil. If
patriotism is not all that, then what is patriotism?
Now, I maintain that in this matter you cannot run with the hare and
hunt with the hounds. You cannot be an advocate of organized world
peace and a full and complete patriot also. A great number of worthy
people are trying to achieve this impossibility. If we subtract them
from the total of those who are “working for world peace,” I doubt if
any large number of people remain. The patriotic attitude seems to be
a much more natural and satisfactory one than the cosmopolitan. It
is much easier to adhere to a government that exists than to get at
cross-purposes with all the honour and procedure of your own country
in order to work for one that does not and never may exist. Patriotism
is rich with associations; it is romantic and poetic. It is always
nice and strengthening to hate and despise something, and patriotism
gives you the whole outer world for that sustaining use. Its chief
drawback is that it takes you along roads that end sooner or later in
war, and that, in spite of the professional soldiers, war becomes more
frightful, disgusting, destructive, and futile every year. And another
drawback is that it restricts your movements to your own dear country,
and that on the rest of this small planet you must travel about as a
latent enemy and a potential spy.
Nor do the logical consequences of a desire for world peace end
with the sacrifice of complete national freedom in the matter of
disarmament and in diplomatic action. These concern merely the material
and forms of war. The underlying cause of most recent wars seems to
be the treatment of each sovereign community as a separate economic
system in hostile competition with all the rest, and the consequent
struggle to secure priority in markets and exclusive or privileged
access to supplies of raw material. Arrangements for disarmament and
arbitration may delay conflicts and render warfare clumsier and more
sluggish, exhausting, and painful, but they will do little or nothing
to prevent the ultimate resort to war, so long as we are living under
the assumption that there is a struggle for existence, an unavoidable
competition for vital material, between sovereign states. Unless people
are prepared to accept the idea that the economic life of the world can
be regarded and controlled as one system to the general advantage of
the race, their aspirations for a universal peace will remain the most
unreal of all possible aspirations. Separate economic systems _must_
compete, _must_ jostle, _must_ forestall, and _must_ drive, for all
their virtuous protestations, towards a tussle.
No doubt the reorganization of the world’s affairs and the world’s
ideas to the form of an economic unity is a gigantic task. But it is
not a bit of good preparing palm branches and hosannahs for the final
pacification of mankind unless we believe and intend that that gigantic
task will and shall be done.
When some central body determines the distribution of raw material
and staple commodities throughout the world, when these movements are
lubricated by transactions in a common currency, then, and only then,
is a stable world peace a reasonable proposition.
And it is not only trade and business that have to be brought to
the scale of world affairs, but the movements of population demand a
similar unified control. We have to remember that the idea of world
peace runs counter to the general processes of nature. Nature’s way
with species seems always to have been multiplication up to the
limits of subsistence and a consequent struggle to survive. This
has not always produced happy or dignified results; the hyena, the
wart-hog, thousands of species of parasites that seem very cruel,
hideous, and vile to us, have been brought to their present state
of survival efficiency by this struggle. War, both internecine and
external, is nature’s way. But we are told by the moving spirits of
what is called the birth-control movement that mankind need be driven
no longer by population pressure. If they are right in saying that,
then world peace is possible. If they are wrong it is not. If they are
wrong, then the Italians and Japanese are justified in breeding like
rabbits, clamouring to grab land from more restrained populations,
and threatening war. If they are wrong, there is an excuse for the
Italian threats against the French, and for the Japanese claims to
a foothold in Australia and California. But if their increase is
a preventable increase due to the sinful ignorance fostered by a
repressive Government, then those “expansion”-seeking people cease to
appear as heroic aggressors and become instead merely philoprogenitive
nuisances in the commonweal of mankind. Apparently birth-rates fall
as knowledge increases; the lower the standard of life, the greater
the breeding. It is clear that unless there is a common protection
of knowledge and information throughout the world, this biological
suffocation of peace possibilities must continue. Civilization will
remain restricted by the militant protective necessities imposed upon
it by such slum-breeding regions as Fascist Italy, Japan, and Bengal.
The space-consuming communities must arm against them. So here again
we see a clear incompatibility between any hope of world peace and the
sovereign freedom of individual states.
I suppose that this article is what amiable supporters of the dear
League of Nations at Geneva will call a “pessimistic” article. It
is not in the least pessimistic, but it does attempt to indicate
something of the scale and quality of the task if peace is indeed to
be established for ever in the world. The Anglo-Saxon community in
particular suffers from a delusion that afternoon meetings (with tea),
small regular subscriptions to societies with noble intentions, the
circulation of nicely printed reports, and a polite and deferential
attitude towards all that is respected and influential in life, may
be considered not merely as progressive activities, but as all that
is required in the way of progressive activities. This job calls for
something much rougher and more fundamental. I do not see how we can
avoid the conclusion that the search for world peace, since it is a
project to subordinate our sovereign government to something larger,
comes near to or passes the legal definition of treason. Moreover, the
necessary conditions for world peace bring us into sharp conflict,
not simply with the ordinary patriot but with much that is regarded
by large sections of people as current morality. And, as a further
obstacle, such views must necessarily antagonize big interests
entrenched behind tariff walls and currency advantages. A real world
peace movement must be a revolutionary movement in politics, finance,
industrialism, and the daily life alike. It is not a proposed change in
certain formal aspects of life; it is a proposal to change the whole of
life. People are allowed to go about talking of world peace now, not
because their views are regarded as acceptable, but because they are
supposed to be incoherent and ineffective. As the conditions of world
peace are made plainer and as the movement for world peace becomes more
distinctly practicable, that present tolerance is unlikely to continue.
The first phase when any creative movement passes from the realm of
mere talk towards realization is resistance and persecution. The first
sign that an attack is approaching its objective is that shots and
shell take effect, amateurism vanishes, men fall, and the strain and
effort mount steeply to the climax. My impression is that at present
the movement for world peace is still at a considerable distance from
its objective. One may doubt, indeed, whether any of these various
League of Nations Unions and “No More War” societies that play about
in the sun of popular approval can be regarded as even a preliminary
assembly for the main attack. Great revolutions in human affairs need
time to incubate, and the price of the peace of the world means an
effort whose duration will have to be measured by lifetimes. I believe
that such an effort will be made, but I believe it is a delusion to say
that it has even begun.
_12 June, 1927._
XIV
THE POSSIBILITY OF WAR BETWEEN BRITAIN AND AMERICA. SUCH A WAR IS
BEING PREPARED NOW. WHAT ARE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE TO DO ABOUT IT?
Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy is one of the most vivid and provocative
members of the House of Commons. He qualifies great abilities by a
certain tactlessness which has won him an unpopularity altogether
beyond his merits. The other day, for example, when he was in America
he confided to an interviewer, who quoted some trivial comment I had
made upon the Labour Party, that I had “gone gaga.” In that manner he
made reverence to my seniority of twenty years. He now asks me to say
something for his forthcoming book, “Will Civilization Crash?” It is, I
assume, a respite from the gaga sentence; and gladly do I halt on the
road to Dr. Voronoff or the crematorium to salute the still-unmellowed
vigour of my friend’s intelligence.
He has done a very useful, very competent, very stimulating book. I am
happy to recommend it. I do not think it would be easy to better his
summary of the complex of forces that make for war in the world to-day.
He has a good clear sense of fact, and of the size of a fact and the
weight of a fact; and if, in his culminating chapter, “The Only Road,”
he does a little seem to fade, it is only where we all fade. Because,
although the omens of another great war are as plain now as they were
in 1907, the forces to which one can turn to stem the drift seem
relatively even more confused and feeble than they were in the days
when King Edward the Peacemaker flitted amiably about the Continent.
David Lubin made his treaties for economic controls with every country
upon earth, the League of Nations Society met thinly ever and again to
hear the discreet counsels of Sir Willoughby Dickinson and Mr. Aneurin
Williams, and Sir Charles Walston preached a federal constitution for
Europe.
In those days one relied very much on the common sense of mankind. I
will confess I was taken by surprise by the Great War. Yet I saw long
ahead how it could happen, and wove fantastic stories about it, I let
my imagination play about it, but at the bottom of my heart I did not
feel and believe it would really be let happen. I did not suspect that
Lord Grey, the German Emperor, and the rest of them were incompetent
to that pitch. And when at last it did happen, and that profession of
ruthless insensitive mediocrities, the military profession, was given
power for four years of stupid, clumsy, and inconclusive massacre and
destruction, I still clung to a delusion that at the end the common
sense of mankind would say quite definitely, “Never again,” to any such
experience, and would be prepared to revise its ideas of nationality,
empire loyalty, race competition, and propagation, soundly and
effectively as soon as it could for a moment struggle out of the mud
and blood and reek in which it was entangled. Whether the phrase “the
war to end war” was my contribution to the world or not, I cannot now
remember. My mistake was in attributing any common sense to mankind.
To-day the huge majority of people in the world think no more about the
prevention of war than a warren of rabbits thinks about the suppression
of shot-guns and ferrets. They just don’t want to be bothered about it.
It is amazing how they accept the things that will presently slaughter
them.
The other day my wife and I were sitting on the lawn of a pleasant
seaside hotel. Charming young people in pretty wraps raced down to
the water to bathe; others came chatting from the tennis courts.
The sea front below was populous with a happy crowd; the sands gay
with children. The faint sounds of a distant band on the pier were
punctuated rather quaintly by practice gunfire from a distant fort.
About us, in chairs of the most comfortable sort, sat the mature and
prosperous, smiling pleasantly at the three military aeroplanes that
manœuvred overhead. “Wonderful!” they said.
Of the hundreds of people in sight then, many scores will certainly
be killed in horrible ways if war comes in the next twenty years, they
will be suffocated by lethal gases, torn to ribbons by explosives, sent
limping and crying for help with frightful mortal mutilations, buried
and smashed and left to die under collapsed buildings. Many more will
be crippled; most perhaps impoverished. But they weren’t worrying.
They weren’t taking life as seriously as that. Across the trim turf
came a group of military officers, discussing some oafish “idea” of a
landing, of “operations,” and so forth, and casting no shadow at all
upon the smiling people about them. Just the same fine sort of fellows
they were, agreeably dull-witted, as sent hundreds of thousands of
Englishmen to cruel and useless deaths in France.
They passed, and we heard a note of anxiety from an adjacent
bathchair. So after all there was some one who saw it as well as
ourselves! We listened, but it was only an old gentleman worried by
the morning’s newspaper, vexed at the last reprieve of Sacco and
Vanzetti and troubled by another fall in the British birth-rate. He was
expostulating about it to his stout and elderly wife, who assented as
by habit and seemed chiefly preoccupied with her knitting.
He did not know what the world was coming to, he said. Lucky old boy!
He never may.
I doubt if there was a human being in sight who was ever likely
to read Commander Kenworthy’s admirable chapter on the application
of Science in Battle or his other on War in the Air, and learn the
pleasures awaiting those whose share in the next war may include a
whiff of diphenyl chloroarsine. Perhaps they will know everything that
is practically important about this delicious substance long before
they know its name. They may even try to call it by some quite wrong
name before they choke. It is very conveniently administered by air
bomb in the form of an intensely irritating smoke which can penetrate
most gas-masks yet devised. Says the “1926 Manual of Chemical Warfare”
quoted by Commander Kenworthy:--
“In man slight and transitory nasal irritation is appreciable
after an exposure of five minutes to as little as one part of
diphenyl chloroarsine in two hundred million parts of air, and
as the concentration is increased the irritation shows itself
sooner and in rapidly increasing severity. Marked symptoms are
produced by exposure to one part of diphenyl chloroarsine in fifty
million parts of air, and it may be stated in general that this
concentration forms the limit of tolerance of ordinary individuals
for an exposure lasting five minutes. A concentration of one part
in ten million will probably incapacitate a man within a minute
from the pain and distress, and nausea and vomitting accompany an
exposure of from two to three minutes of this concentration....
These substances are generally used to cause such sensory
irritation that the victim is unable to tolerate a respirator.”
Then the victim tears it off, and the other gas with which the region
has been soaked, the killing gas, gets him.
When the lieutenant-commander raised the question of teaching the use
of gas-masks to children in the infant schools during the debate on
the Air Estimates in the House of Commons in 1927, he was greeted with
laughter by the members present. Nothing could better illustrate the
happy carelessness with which we move towards the next catastrophe. The
air manœuvres over London this past summer have demonstrated clearly
that it will be almost impossible to prevent the copious gassing of
that great warren within a few hours of the opening of any new European
conflict of first-class rank.
The gravest chapters in this book are not so much the recital of the
novel and enhanced horror, for civilians quite as much as for soldiers,
of the next war, as the excellent and disturbing study of the gathering
rivalry of the United States and Britain in naval affairs, and the
discussion of the possibility of a war between these two halves of the
English-speaking world. The stupid professionalism of the experts is
largely to blame, and the still more stupid readiness of the present
governments in both Britain and America to follow the lead of these
obsessed gentlemen. Whether a war between the United States and Great
Britain is to be regarded as a tolerable possibility does not enter
into the philosophy of the naval monomaniacs on either side of the
water. Their business is to make Britain “safe” from the United States
and the United States “safe” from Britain, and they are quite capable
of calculating on Japan as an ally in such a war. The wholesome
brotherly jealousy of our two people is to be fostered and inflamed
in the cause of armament and preparedness to the fighting pitch. The
rivalries of industrialists and oil manipulators are to be dragged into
the elaborating quarrel.
The reader must turn to Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy’s book to realize
how far this obscene foolery with human welfare has gone already and
how easily it may go further. He shows how step by step the trouble may
be worked up until the two great masses of English-speaking people find
themselves upon different sides in the alliances of a new war that will
outdo all the destructions and miseries of 1914, as that outdid the
Napoleonic wars.
Very good and convincing, too, is the summary of the activities of
the League of Nations, and the very complete demonstration that that
ill-planned and ill-supported assembly has fallen back even from the
poor courage of its earlier enterprises. As a means of settlement for
minor international difficulties, which the states concerned want
settled, it has a considerable usefulness, but as a guarantee against
graver quarrels it is beneath contempt.
It is more than useless because it is dangerous; a great number of
people in Europe and America are persuaded that it is a sort of war
preventative, and that when they have paid their subscription to a
local branch of the League of Nations Union and been to a lecture or a
garden-party once a year under its auspices, they have done all that
they can be reasonably required to do to secure world peace for ever.
Upon many such excellent people the existence of the League of Nations
acts as a mischievous opiate. They would be far more actively and
intelligently at work against the war-makers, if it did not exist to
lull them into a false security.
But when I reach Chapter the Nineteenth, which is to tell us what is to
be done, I find, as I have remarked already, a certain fading in the
tones of our author’s voice. He is for an alliance to suppress war;
and he points out very clearly that the United States, Great Britain,
Holland, and Switzerland could prohibit war to all the rest of the
world to-morrow--if they chose. Between them they
“control the finance of the whole world. No nations breaking the
peace could hope for any financial help against their combined
boycott. England, America, and Holland between them control the
greater part of the world’s supplies of petroleum, Russia being
the only large-scale producer of oil in an independent position.
England and Holland between them control the world’s supplies
of rubber. England and America between them control the greater
part of the world’s supplies of cotton and copper, Russia again
producing comparatively small quantities of cotton and copper
independently. England and France and Belgium, if she adhered, as
is highly probable, control the greater part of the tropically
produced edible fats. Most of the wool and jute is controlled by
the British Empire.
“Without money, oil, cotton, wool, rubber, copper, zinc, jute, tin,
or edible fats no war on the modern scale could be waged for very
long. A very large proportion of the meat and wheat of the world
would also be controlled by this group of peace-keepers. Do not let
us involve ourselves in complications about aggressive Powers or
who is to blame in any war. To do so would simply be to cloud the
issue.”
Let us, in short, simply put our collective foot down and say, “Stop
that war!” and it will stop.
That is an excellent passage. It should be given out as a dictation
lesson in every school in the English-speaking world. We, just
ourselves, can stop war almost completely.
But who are “we”?
America, Britain, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, with France and
Germany in accord, will be the reply. But in what form are they to do
it? There the lieutenant-commander boggles and remains vague. Because
you see there is no way of getting these Powers together except by
getting them together, and that means a federal merger of so much of
their independent sovereignty as concerns their foreign relations.
Before we can have peace these Powers must form a league to enforce
peace. That means no tinpot debating society of every state, big or
little, barbaric or civilized, strong or feeble, at Geneva, with no
powers worth speaking about, but a real permanent league and alliance
of these, the only really war-potent states, and _a sincere surrender
of independent action_ on the part of all of them for the general good.
Well, not one of the communities named is even slightly prepared for
such a step. It would shock them more than any declaration of war could
possibly do. And until the common sense of these communities can be
raised to the level of realizing this, they will continue to drift as
they are drifting--to another shattering war catastrophe.
I suspect that the author of this book before me knows that as well
as I do. But there is Hull to consider. What would happen to the
lieutenant-commander’s majority if he advocated plainly and simply
putting the Empire under a greater League? I quite realize he cannot
afford to take so grave a risk of extinction and frustration.
A phrase, now popular in America, seized upon him in the ensuing
hesitation, and was for the moment “The Only Road.” Yet it is not a
road out or anything like a road. It is just another piece of empty,
fruitless American “idealism” utterly worthless to the world at large.
War is to be “outlawed.” A wonderful word! Senator Borah finds the
phrase suits his voice, and I gather it has the approval of that
champion international visitor and retriever of foreign orders and
honorary degrees, President Nicholas Murray Butler. Between these
gentlemen and Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy I note much friendliness
and intimacy exists. He has been in windy, unsubstantial company,
where phrases and good feeling count for more than effective action.
You are to “outlaw” war. You are just to make a treaty between the
Powers concerned saying as much--and there you are! You leave those
Powers completely untrammelled by their declaration. Indeed, you leave
everything as it was before. But you say it.
Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy gives a treaty projected by Mr. Houghton,
“speaking in his private capacity as a citizen”--and only so far in
earnest--which is probably the most vacuous treaty ever proposed. At
present, peace, for an indefinite period, exists legally between all
these great Powers; nevertheless “a hundred years’ peace agreement
between the United States and Great Britain and, perhaps, other Powers”
is to be signed with much fuss and ceremony--“in the most solemn
manner.” I can see the impressive gatherings that could be imposed
upon the affair, the parties, the megaphoned and broadcast speeches,
the grip of hand and hand, the noble, rich, respectable emotions.
Royalty would have to be present, and Washington--it would surely be
Washington--would be as full of silk hats and uniforms as a Buckingham
Palace garden-party. No intimations of any method of settling all
possible issues conclusively without war are made in this resonant
phantom of a proposal. To do that would be to limit sovereignty.
I am sorry I cannot share Lieut.-Commander Kenworthy’s faith in this
magic word “Outlawry” and its stately solemnization. I accept all his
premonitions of another great war; they are only too convincing; but I
believe that the ending of war is a far more complex, laborious, and
difficult task than such mere gesticulations as this imply. A great
change is needed in the teaching of history and the training of the
young citizen, a substitution of a biological for a merely economic and
political conception of human life, before we can begin to hope for
the secure establishment of these world controls upon which alone an
enduring world peace can be sustained.
In the meantime the most effective resistance to the approach of
another great war lies in the expressed determination _now_ of as
many people as possible that they will have nothing to do with it,
that they will not fight in it, work for it, nor pay taxes when it
comes--whatever sort of war it is.
Pacificism is very ineffective, and has an unpleasant flavour if it
is adopted after war has arrived; the time for active pacificism is
while peace still rules. People who have made no effort to avert war
cannot very well resist and grumble when through their tacit invitation
war takes hold of them. The last war was a war to end war, and the
politicians and statesmen have not made good. So now is the time for a
great pacificist effort. Now is the time for people who want to delay
and avert a catastrophe before the more deliberate organization of a
world peace can be achieved, to make it clear that the war-makers will
have to reckon with immense defections. That is the really practicable
anti-war measure to attempt now, but it is much more likely to lead to
jail than to impressive ceremonial junketings at the White House.
_2 October, 1927._
XV
THE REMARKABLE VOGUE OF BROADCASTING: WILL IT CONTINUE?
When I think of the way in which mankind in general takes the gifts of
science, gifts actual and gifts conditional, there comes back to my
mind my own, perhaps earliest encounter with these gifts. It took the
form of a box entitled, if I remember rightly, “The Young Chemist,”
an inexpensive box with ungrammatical and badly printed instructions
for eliciting wonders of science to “the delight of all beholders” who
could be induced to behold. We evoked a “lead tree,” which in practice
proved to be a mere seedling that damped off, and some sluggish
gunpowder, and several very gratifying stinks and smells, and we wound
up by mixing everything and preparing for a stupendous crash that never
occurred. And another very early gift was a telephone made of two
pill-boxes and a tightly stretched length of cotton between.
I still recall the sense of wonder, of passing beyond common
experience during those pioneer experiments with this great modern
convenience. My elder brother and I were to communicate secretly and
marvellously by this instrument. I had no doubt, and he had no doubt,
that things would vibrate along that stretched cotton, altogether
lovelier and livelier than the common speech and whispers of every day.
He went to an upper window, from which he shouted directions to me
through the vulgar air, and I stood down in the backyard. The apparatus
was adjusted, and I prepared to hear such things as I had never heard
before. My brother up above was seen to whisper. “Can’t hear anything,”
I called back. “You haven’t got it tight enough,” said my brother, and
tried again. Still no elfin voices. “Tighter!” yelled my brother with
that familiar note of fraternal threatening in his voice. I made a
desperate effort. And the bottom came out of the pill-box! My brother’s
head disappeared from the window, and I inferred he was coming
downstairs.
Then, as now, I hated controversy. I was the nearer to the front door.
I went off at once for a nice long solitary walk.
Since those early days science has showered its gifts upon my world
and me. Science assisted by invention and stimulated by commercial
enterprise. I realized that the “Young Chemist” and the pill-box
telephone came only indirectly from the sublimated common sense of
mankind. Science may illuminate and reveal and state and develop
and suggest, but something is needed in the recipient before even a
half-crown box of “chemicals” can be made to yield its best results.
To the incurably puerile like Messrs. Amery and Winston Churchill
chemistry will never be more than a search for stinks of offence, and
a chemical industry that can produce the loveliest colours, exquisite
and subtly useful substances, and the most enriching fertilizers,
will be merely a necessary source of explosives and poison gas. And
to the world at large, the possibility of radiating and receiving
electro-magnetic waves means almost exactly what the promise of that
pill-box telephone conveyed to my childish imagination. The hope of an
undefined wonder, followed by disillusionment.
It must be almost half a century since the wireless transmission
of electric phases was understood to be possible, and only within
the present century that wireless telegraphy has been a practical
reality. The wireless telephone and all the broadcasting business is
a post-war outbreak. It came, with Mlle. Suzanne Lenglen, to distract
the democratic mind from the far too difficult problems of organizing
a world peace. We dropped that fatiguing and contentious subject for
until after the next war, and went outside to fix our aerial between
the chimney and the old fir tree.
And when it was fixed we were just going to sit down and listen and
listen. We should hear the best music whenever we wished. Chaliapin
and Melba would sing to us; President Coolidge and Mr. Baldwin would
talk to us, simply, earnestly, directly; the most august in the world
would wish us good evening and pass a friendly word; should a fire or
a shipwreck happen we were to get the roar of the flames and the cries
for help; Anita Loos and Charlie Chaplin (hitherto so silent) would
tickle our humour, and A. A. Milne and Sir James Barrie join with us
to delight the little ones when the children’s hour came round. Were
we earnest, Einstein would adapt himself to the available powers of
transmission, or President Nicholas Murray Butler, the authentic voice
of America, grand commander of all existing orders, honorary doctor of
every attainable university in the world, would remind us of the broad
fundamentals of wisdom and nobility. There would be debates, and in a
compact ten minutes Julian Huxley, for example, and Bernard Shaw would
settle about Darwinism for ever. And then finally to religion, and we
should hear masses of preachers as we chose, Dean Inge in his pulpit
or Palestrina given from St. Peter’s itself. All the sporting results
before we went to bed would be included, a weather forecast, advice
about our gardens, treatment for influenza, and the exact time. One
would live in a new world and ask in all the neighbours. Such was the
dream of thousands of men, panting perilously on their ladders, and
rather irritated and impatient to get that aerial fixed correctly.
It didn’t turn out like that. Instead of first rate came tenth rate;
the music was by the Little Winklebeach Pier band; mysterious unknowns,
Uncle Bray and Aunt Twaddle, usurped our hour with the children, the
one precious hour when parents and children came together mentally; we
were told short stories and read out scientific articles of a quality
any magazine would reject; Mr. Shaw, when he tried to speak to us, was
censored by the authorities, such as they were, and Professor Julian
Huxley was interrupted; President Nicholas Murray Butler, it was found,
could only speak in large print on superfine paper; the dog began
barking untimely, and the news was drowned by the “oscillations” of an
excited neighbour. Across it all dear old Mother Nature cast her net of
“atmospherics” with a humour all her own. We began to ask ourselves for
the first time what in particular the broadcasting was giving us that
we could not get far better in some other fashion.
Music one can have at home now, very perfectly and beautifully rendered
by the gramophone. Some of the newer records are marvellously true.
There, indeed, one can get the very best performers and the music of
one’s choice. One can summon the music when one thinks fit, by day or
night, repeat it, control it, finish it as one wills. Even for jazz and
dance music broadcasting has but one very slight advantage--that once
it is started it goes on without any change of record. But the dance
music only goes on for a small part of the evening, and at any moment
it may give way to Doctor Flatulent being thoughtful and kindly in a
non-sectarian way.
Religious services are also more perfectly available as gramophone
records. News and time signals and so forth could be sent into a house
far more conveniently if there were a silent recording apparatus such
as the ticker. Broadcasting shouts out its information once and cannot
be recalled. If you miss a word, that word is missed for good; names
and figures are easily missed. If you do not hear the news at the time,
you do not even know that it has been given. It is absurd to suppose
that science and invention could not furnish us with a silent recording
set as cheap and controllable as the listening set, if this side of the
wireless enterprises was turned over to ordinary ticker transmission.
The much-discussed “talks” and debates and so on are, we discover,
merely spoken magazine matter; they can be far more effectively studied
in the magazine itself, where diagrams and illustrations be used in
conjunction with them. The number of people who have never learnt to
read or who are too lazy to read and yet intellectually active enough
to be interested by “serious” topics when they are vocalized, must
be very small indeed. I doubt if such people really follow what they
are hearing. The book is the only adequate vehicle for modern thought
and discussion and for the conveyance of exact knowledge. Between its
pages there is no censorship and no interrupting boy official. _Litera
scripta manet._
As a medium for advertisement again, broadcasting suffers from
the disadvantage that every one turns off the noise as soon as the
advertisement begins. The bawling of loud speakers, as I have heard it
in the streets of some French towns, is so obviously disconcerting to
traffic that it is bound to be suppressed by legislation.
In all these matters broadcasting is an inferior substitute for better
systems of transmitting news and evoking sound. Upon what is known
technically as “humorous entertainment” I will be gently silent. “Radio
drama” in which you cannot see the faces nor the gestures of the actors
nor the scene in which they play is a new and useful art, if only
because it teaches us what life must be for the blind. The listening
for cuckoos which may perchance be cuckooing, or to lions who may
oblige by roaring near the listening microphone, or suchlike noises
of nature must be difficult to arrange and unattractive as a frequent
amusement. There remain only certain possible uses of broadcasting for
blind, lonely, and suffering people. To those I will return.
Most of us have been drawn sooner or later into the possession of some
form of receiving apparatus, and it would be interesting to know just
how many of these sets of apparatus sold are still in use. In Great
Britain, where broadcasting has been centrally organized and where
there is one national licensing system, it should not be difficult
presently to determine the average life of the broadcast listener. I am
inclined to suspect that a very large proportion of the sets sent out
since the beginning must be already broken up or out of order. And that
the life of the ordinary listener is so brief that there may soon be
a grave dearth of listeners. But that may be because I cannot imagine
myself a patient listener even for one day, and I am still more at a
loss to imagine any sort of person becoming addicted to listening-in
as a frequent entertainment. Other people may be less restless. I
quite understand the stage of inauguration and eagerness, the initial
delight of the new toy. And afterwards there may be a kind of struggle
to keep on with a thing that began with so much hope and has given so
much trouble. But sooner or later boredom and disappointment with these
poor torrents of insignificant sounds must ensue. Are there indeed any
indefatigable listeners who have stuck to this amusement since the
beginning? If so, I think they are probably very sedentary persons,
living in badly lit houses or otherwise unable to read, who have never
realized the possibilities of the gramophone and the pianola, and who
have no capacity nor opportunity for thought or conversation.
The rest of the available population is, I should imagine, passing
rapidly through the listener stage from surprise to disillusionment.
When they have flowed past, then I suggest that the whole broadcasting
industry will begin to dry up. The British Government has created an
important salaried official body to preside over the broadcasting
programmes, and it relies upon this service in times of crisis for
the distribution of tendential official information. In the end that
admirable committee may find itself arranging schemes of entertainment
for a phantom army of expiring licences, the last living listeners
having dispersed and gone to other things. The ether will pulsate
unheard with the bedtime talks of uncles who have lost their nephews
and nieces, and “comics” all unaware of the emptiness of their
reception, and the ultimate artfulness of official misinformation will
throb in a void of inattention, as if it were the last of the dinosaurs
calling for its mate.
And there will be about half-a-dozen convenient sinecures more for the
Prime Minister to distribute.
The recent public discussions in the Press about broadcasting
programmes are very significant symptoms. They reveal a widespread
discontent among the present users of receiving sets. The disillusioned
take little part in these debates. The waiters are still holding on
and listening and complaining. Each one suggests a different “ideal
programme.” These ideal programmes recall the first bright stages
of hope. There is still the fancy that busy and eminent people may
be induced to spend half a day preparing and timing and saying over
a measured piece--that any broadcasting official may burke if he
dislikes. There is still the conception of some vast orchestra playing
music to suit every mind and taste simultaneously. There is still the
craving for unsectarian religiosity, for faith in things in general,
combined with faith in nothing in particular. Upon one thing only do
they agree. Every one wants something in vivid contrast to what is
provided.
The transmitting authorities, still unwilling to face the plain
intimations of destiny, are trying all sorts of novelties, nervously
and absurdly. The most delightful of all the recent attempts has been
the thought-transmission experiments from the London centre. This
was really radio-drama reduced to its simplest expression; even the
words and sounds were omitted. It was pure blank listening. Sir Oliver
Lodge cleared his throat and announced the crucial moment. Cloistered
individuals sat and glared at objects and thought about them like
anything. Listeners listened with straining ear-drums and painfully
focussed minds. The poor ether, if it has feelings, must have felt
like a cat harnessed to a cart--a most uncongenial job to put upon
the theoretical vehicle of material vibrations. A hush fell upon the
British Isles until Sir Oliver said “Ahem!” and permitted them to
relax. Then we were to write in what we had thought or seen. The only
really pleasing result of this widely diffused mind strain was that a
lady in Torquay guessed object No. 5 very nearly, when object No. 3
was in the glare of the transmitting souls. The first recorded case of
anticipatory wireless telepathy and clear evidence of the relativity of
time....
But to radio mental nothings in this way was, perhaps, too delicate
a task for the broadcasting, at least as a beginning. Something a
little more material might conceivably have had a better chance of
getting through. Transmitters sitting before steaming plates or other
appetizing objects might more easily have conveyed impressions to
fasting listeners. Perhaps this will be tried later as this restful
custom of listening-in to nothing audible whatever extends.
Under the spell of the radio idea I have been doing my utmost to write
impartial, impersonal, unsectarian, non-tendential, non-controversial,
unprejudiced, kindly things about it, like the stuff its authorities
invite us to transmit. Nevertheless, I am afraid that my own opinion
peeps through, my opinion that the future of broadcasting is like
the future of crossword puzzles and Oxford trousers, a very trivial
future indeed. It will end as a Government job. There is a future for
the wireless news ticker; that is a different proposition altogether.
Yet my discouraging forecast is mingled with regret. There could be
one very fine use made of broadcasting, though I cannot imagine how
it could be put upon a commercially paying footing. It would give the
poorest chance for any Government jobbing; there would be no scope
in it for pushful young men. There are in the world a sad minority
of lonely people, isolated people, endangered helpless people,
sleepless people, suffering people who must lie on their backs,
and who cannot handle books--and there are the blind. Convenient,
portable, and not too noisy listening instruments now exist, and for
this band of exceptional folk I wish there could be a transmission,
day and night--and the slack hours of the night for them are often
more dreadful than the day--of fine, lovely, and heartening music,
beautiful chanting and the reciting of a sort of heroic anthology. The
sturdy will of the race, the courage in the world, could speak to its
faltering sons and daughters. There can be a great hunger for the human
voice. How good for many a tormented spirit to hear in the darkness:
“Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid!”
_3 April, 1927._
XVI
THE SILLIEST FILM: WILL MACHINERY MAKE ROBOTS OF MEN?
I have recently seen the silliest film. I do not believe it would be
possible to make one sillier. And as this film sets out to display
the way the world is going, I think “The Way the World Is Going” may
very well concern itself with this film. It is called “Metropolis”; it
comes from the great Ufa studios in Germany, and the public is given
to understand that it has been produced at enormous cost. It gives in
one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, _cliché_,
platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in
general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.
It is a German film and there have been some amazingly good German
films. Before they began to cultivate bad work under cover of a
protective quota. And this film has been adapted to the Anglo-Saxon
taste, and quite possibly it has suffered in the process, but even
when every allowance has been made for that, there remains enough to
convince the intelligent observer that most of its silliness must be
fundamental. Possibly I dislike this soupy whirlpool none the less
because I find decaying fragments of my own juvenile work of thirty
years ago, “The Sleeper Awakes,” floating about in it. Capek’s Robots
have been lifted without apology, and that soulless mechanical monster
of Mary Shelley’s, who has fathered so many German inventions, breeds
once more in this confusion. Originality there is none. Independent
thought, none. Where nobody has imagined for them the authors have
simply fallen back on contemporary things. The aeroplanes that wander
about above the great city show no advance on contemporary types,
though all that stuff could have been livened up immensely with a few
helicopters and vertical and unexpected movements. The motor cars
are 1926 models or earlier. I do not think there is a single new
idea, a single instance of artistic creation or even of intelligent
anticipation, from first to last in the whole pretentious stew; I may
have missed some point of novelty, but I doubt it; and this, though it
must bore the intelligent man in the audience, makes the film all the
more convenient as a gauge of the circle of ideas, the mentality, from
which it has proceeded.
The word “Metropolis,” says the advertisement in English, “is in
itself symbolical of greatness”--which only shows us how wise it is
to consult a dictionary before making assertions about the meaning
of words. Probably it was the adapter who made that shot. The German
“Neubabelsburg” was better, and could have been rendered “New Babel.”
It is a city, we are told, of “about one hundred years hence.” It is
represented as being enormously high; and all the air and happiness are
above and the workers live, as the servile toilers in the blue uniform
in “The Sleeper Awakes” lived, down, down, down below.
Now far away in dear old 1897 it may have been excusable to symbolize
social relations in this way, but that was thirty years ago, and a
lot of thinking and some experience intervene. That vertical city of
the future we know now is, to put it mildly, highly improbable. Even
in New York and Chicago, where the pressure upon the central sites is
exceptionally great, it is only the central office and entertainment
region that soars and excavates. And the same centripetal pressure that
leads to the utmost exploitation of site values at the centre leads
also to the driving out of industrialism and labour from the population
centre to cheaper areas, and of residential life to more open and airy
surroundings. That was all discussed and written about before 1900.
Somewhere about 1930 the geniuses of the Ufa studios will come up to
a book of “Anticipations” which was written more than a quarter of a
century ago. The British census returns of 1901 proved clearly that
city populations were becoming centrifugal, and that every increase in
horizontal traffic facilities produced a further distribution. This
vertical social stratification is stale old stuff. So far from being
“a hundred years hence,” “Metropolis,” in its forms and shapes, is
already, as a possibility, a third of a century out of date.
But its form is the least part of its staleness. This great city is
supposed to be evoked by a single dominating personality. The English
version calls him John Masterman, so that there may be no mistake
about his quality. Very unwisely he has called his son Eric, instead
of sticking to good hard John, and so relaxed the strain. He works
with an inventor, one Rotwang, and they make machines. There are a
certain number of other rich people, and the “sons of the rich” are
seen disporting themselves, with underclad ladies in a sort of joy
conservatory, rather like the “winter garden” of an enterprising 1890
hotel during an orgy. The rest of the population is in a state of
abject slavery, working in “shifts” of ten hours in some mysteriously
divided twenty-four hours, and with no money to spend or property or
freedom. The machines make wealth. _How_, is not stated. We are shown
rows of motor cars all exactly alike; but the workers cannot own these,
and no “sons of the rich” would. Even the middle classes nowadays want
a car with personality. Probably Masterman makes these cars in endless
series to amuse himself.
One is asked to believe that these machines are engaged quite
furiously in the mass production of nothing that is ever used, and that
Masterman grows richer and richer in the process. This is the essential
nonsense of it all. Unless the mass of the population has spending
power there is no possibility of wealth in a mechanical civilization.
A vast, penniless slave population may be necessary for wealth where
there are no mass production machines, but it is preposterous with
mass production machines. You find such a real proletariat in China
still; it existed in the great cities of the ancient world; but you
do not find it in America, which has gone furthest in the direction
of mechanical industry, and there is no grain of reason for supposing
it will exist in the future. Masterman’s watchword is “Efficiency,”
and you are given to understand it is a very dreadful word, and the
contrivers of this idiotic spectacle are so hopelessly ignorant of
all the work that has been done upon industrial efficiency that
they represent him as working his machine-minders to the point of
exhaustion, so that they faint and machines explode and people are
scalded to death. You get machine-minders in torment turning levers
in response to signals--work that could be done far more effectively
by automata. Much stress is laid on the fact that the workers are
spiritless, hopeless drudges, working reluctantly and mechanically.
But a mechanical civilization has no use for mere drudges; the more
efficient its machinery the less need there is for the quasi-mechanical
minder. It is the inefficient factory that needs slaves; the
ill-organized mine that kills men. The hopeless drudge stage of human
labour lies behind us. With a sort of malignant stupidity this film
contradicts these facts.
The current tendency of economic life is to oust the mere drudge
altogether, to replace much highly skilled manual work by exquisite
machinery in skilled hands, and to increase the relative proportion
of semi-skilled, moderately versatile and fairly comfortable workers.
It may indeed create temporary masses of unemployed, and in “The
Sleeper Awakes” there was a mass of unemployed people under hatches.
That was written in 1897, when the possibility of restraining the
growth of large masses of population had scarcely dawned on the world.
It was reasonable then to anticipate an embarrassing underworld of
under-productive people. We did not know what to do with the abyss.
But there is no excuse for that to-day. And what this film anticipates
is not unemployment, but drudge employment, which is precisely what is
passing away. Its fabricators have not even realized that the machine
ousts the drudge.
“Efficiency” means large-scale productions, machinery as fully
developed as possible, and _high wages_. The British Government
delegation sent to study success in America has reported unanimously to
that effect. The increasingly efficient industrialism of America has so
little need of drudges that it has set up the severest barriers against
the flooding of the United States by drudge immigration. “Ufa” knows
nothing of such facts.
A young woman appears from nowhere in particular to “help” these
drudges; she impinges upon Masterman’s son Eric, and they go to the
“Catacombs,” which, in spite of the gas mains, steam mains, cables, and
drainage, have somehow contrived to get over from Rome, skeletons and
all, and burrow under this city of “Metropolis.” She conducts a sort of
Christian worship in these unaccountable caverns, and the drudges love
and trust her. With a nice sense of fitness she lights herself about
the Catacombs with a torch instead of the electric lamps that are now
so common.
That reversion to torches is quite typical of the spirit of this show.
Torches are Christian, we are asked to suppose; torches are human.
Torches have hearts. But electric hand-lamps are wicked, mechanical,
heartless things. The bad, bad inventor uses quite a big one. Mary’s
services are unsectarian, rather like afternoon Sunday-school, and
in her special catacomb she has not so much an altar as a kind of
umbrella-stand full of crosses. The leading idea of her religion seems
to be a disapproval of machinery and efficiency. She enforces the
great moral lesson that the bolder and stouter human effort becomes,
the more spiteful Heaven grows, by reciting the story of Babel. The
story of Babel, as we know, is a lesson against “Pride.” It teaches
the human soul to grovel. It inculcates the duty of incompetence. The
Tower of Babel was built, it seems, by bald-headed men. I said there
was no original touch in the film, but this last seems to be a real
invention. You see the bald-headed men building Babel. Myriads of them.
Why they are bald is inexplicable. It is not even meant to be funny,
and it isn’t funny; it is just another touch of silliness. The workers
in “Metropolis” are not to rebel or do anything for themselves, she
teaches, because they may rely on the vindictiveness of Heaven.
But Rotwang, the inventor, is making a Robot, apparently without any
licence from Capek, the original patentee. It is to look and work like
a human being, but it is to have no “soul.” It is to be a substitute
for drudge labour. Masterman very properly suggests that it should
never have a soul, and for the life of me I cannot see why it should.
The whole aim of mechanical civilization is to eliminate the drudge and
the drudge soul. But this is evidently regarded as very dreadful and
impressive by the producers, who are all on the side of soul and love
and suchlike. I am surprised they do not pine for souls in the alarm
clocks and runabouts. Masterman, still unwilling to leave bad alone,
persuades Rotwang to make this Robot in the likeness of Mary, so that
it may raise an insurrection among the workers to destroy the machines
by which they live, and so learn that it is necessary to work. Rather
intricate that, but Masterman, you understand, is a rare devil of a
man. Full of pride and efficiency and modernity, and all those horrid
things.
Then comes the crowning imbecility of the film, the conversion of the
Robot into the likeness of Mary. Rotwang, you must understand, occupies
a small old house, embedded in the modern city, richly adorned with
pentagrams and other reminders of the antiquated German romances out
of which its owner has been taken. A quaint smell of Mephistopheles
is perceptible for a time. So even at Ufa, Germany can still be dear
old magic-loving Germany. Perhaps Germans will never get right away
from the Brocken. Walpurgis Night is the name-day of the German poetic
imagination, and the national fantasy capers insecurely for ever with a
broomstick between its legs. By some no doubt abominable means Rotwang
has squeezed a vast and well-equipped modern laboratory into this
little house. It is ever so much bigger than the house, but no doubt he
has fallen back on Einstein and other modern bedevilments. Mary has to
be trapped, put into a machine like a translucent cocktail shaker, and
undergo all sorts of pyrotechnic treatment in order that her likeness
may be transferred to the Robot. The possibility of Rotwang just simply
making a Robot like her, evidently never entered the gifted producer’s
head. The Robot is enveloped in wavering haloes, the premises seem
to be struck by lightning repeatedly, the contents of a number of
flasks and carboys are violently agitated, there are minor explosions
and discharges. Rotwang conducts the operations with a manifest lack
of assurance, and finally, to his evident relief, the likeness is
taken and things calm down. The false Mary then winks darkly at the
audience and sails off to raise the workers. And so forth and so on.
There is some rather good swishing about in water, after the best film
traditions, some violent and unconvincing machine-breaking and rioting
and wreckage, and then, rather confusedly, one gathers that Masterman
has learnt a lesson, and that workers and employers are now to be
reconciled by “Love.”
Never for a moment does one believe any of this foolish story; never
for a moment is there anything amusing or convincing in its dreary
series of strained events. It is immensely and strangely dull. It
is not even to be laughed at. There is not one good-looking nor
sympathetic nor funny personality in the cast; there is, indeed, no
scope at all for looking well or acting like a rational creature
amid these mindless, imitative absurdities. The film’s air of having
something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence. It has
nothing to do with any social or moral issue before the world or with
any that can ever conceivably arise. It is bunkum and poor and thin
even as bunkum. I am astonished at the toleration shown it by quite a
number of film critics on both sides of the Atlantic. And it cost, says
the London “Times,” six million marks! How they spent all that upon it
I cannot imagine. Most of the effects could have been got with models
at no great expense.
The pity of it is that this unimaginative, incoherent,
sentimentalizing, and make-believe film, wastes some very fine
possibilities. My belief in German enterprise has had a shock. I am
dismayed by the intellectual laziness it betrays. I thought Germans
even at the worst could toil. I thought they had resolved to be
industriously modern. It is profoundly interesting to speculate upon
the present trend of mechanical invention and of the real reactions
of invention upon labour conditions. Instead of plagiarizing from a
book thirty years old and resuscitating the banal moralizing of the
early Victorian period, it would have been almost as easy, no more
costly, and far more interesting to have taken some pains to gather
the opinions of a few bright young research students and ambitious,
modernizing architects and engineers about the trend of modern
invention, and develop these artistically. Any technical school would
have been delighted to supply sketches and suggestions for the aviation
and transport of A.D. 2027. There are now masses of literature upon the
organization of labour for efficiency that could have been boiled down
at a very small cost. The question of the development of industrial
control, the relation of industrial to political direction, the way
all that is going, is of the liveliest current interest. Apparently
the Ufa people did not know of these things and did not want to know
about them. They were too dense to see how these things could be
brought into touch with the life of to-day and made interesting to the
man in the street. After the worst traditions of the cinema world,
monstrously self-satisfied and self-sufficient, convinced of the power
of loud advertisement to put things over with the public, and with
no fear of searching criticism in their minds, no consciousness of
thought and knowledge beyond their ken, they set to work in their huge
studio to produce furlong after furlong of this ignorant, old-fashioned
balderdash, and ruin the market for any better film along these lines.
Six million marks! The waste of it!
The theatre when I visited it was crowded. All but the highest-priced
seats were full, and the gaps in these filled up reluctantly but
completely before the great film began. I suppose every one had come
to see what the city of a hundred years hence would be like. I suppose
there are multitudes of people to be “drawn” by promising to show them
what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought,
an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell
from their bearing whether they believed that “Metropolis” was really
a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the
film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly.
But it must have been one thing or the other.
_17 April, 1927._
XVII
IS LIFE BECOMING HAPPIER?
Criticism of this series of articles is not always praise. Critics,
and even friendly critics, complain that I run things down. I imagined
that my real failing was an impatience to push things up. It has been
complained and repeated, even by Sir Alan Cobham, who ought to know
better, that I take a gloomy view of aviation, whereas I take so
bright a view of its possibilities that I am driven to exasperation
by the financial incompetence and narrow patriotism that restrict its
practical development. And I am reported to be “pessimistic” about
broadcasting, though the truth is that I have anticipated its complete
disappearance--confident that the unfortunate people, who must now
subdue themselves to “listening-in” will soon find a better pastime for
their leisure.
But these comments and certain observations arising out of that
film “Metropolis,” a stray article by Mr. Mencken, and a week-end
conversation, have turned my attention to the astonishing prevalence
of a disposition to disregard and deny, firstly that life in general
is happier than it ever was before, and secondly, that it needs but a
little vigour and clearheadedness to make it much happier than it is
now or ever has been.
It was pretended in that film “Metropolis,” for example, that the
development of a great mechanical civilization must reduce a large
part of the population from some imaginary old-world happiness, sweet,
golden, tender, and true, to machine-minding drudgery. That is a quite
common assertion made without a shadow of justification in fact. And
we are constantly being told that the human animal is “degenerating,”
body and mind, through the malign influence of big towns; that a miasma
of “vulgarity” and monotony is spreading over a once refined and rich
and beautifully varied world, that something exquisite called the
human “soul,” which was formerly quite all right, is now in a very bad
way, and that plainly before us, unless we mend our ways and return to
mediæval dirt and haphazard, the open road, the wind upon the heath
brother, simple piety, an unrestricted birth-rate, spade husbandry,
handmade furniture, honest, homely surgery without anæsthetics, long
skirts and hair for women, a ten-hour day for workmen, and more
slapping and snubbing for the young, there is nothing before us but
nervous wreckage and spiritual darkness. This sort of stuff is exuded
in enormous volume, and it offers an immense resistance to systematic
progress. It is sustained by multitudes of people who are in a position
to be better informed. The Gummidge chorus is never silent; the
thoughtful headshaker moping for a return to mediævalism casts his
daily shadow on every patch of sunshine, on each new social enterprise
and hopeful effort. Everything we have is cheapened by comparison with
an entirely legendary past and with an entirely imaginary state of
“natural” health and joyfulness.
Let us admit that life still displays much unhappiness and that it is
overhung by the frightful dangers of modern war. Let us concede the
black possibilities latent in nationalism, flag worship, educational
slackening, and the class jealousy and class malignancy of the
prosperous. Even so, there are the soundest reasons for maintaining
that never, since life first appeared upon this planet, has there been
so great a proportion of joy, happiness, and contentment as there is
about us now, nor so bright an outlook.
But before we can see this issue plainly, we have to clear our minds
of certain popular errors based mainly on a misconceived theology.
Many people believe it is their duty to assume the perfection of
nature, and with them there is no arguing. They will hold the hyena
lovely and the fever germ a perfect device. If, however, we dismiss
such preconceptions and ask ourselves plainly what happiness there is
now in the wild life of the jungle or desert or deep sea, we shall
come upon a different answer. Nature is clumsy and heedlessly cruel.
Life apart from man is not a happy spectacle. It is a flight and a
chase, a craving, famished business, a round of assassinations. The
jungle is no merry meeting place; it is a rustling ambush in which
things lurk and creep. They become noisy only under the spur of an
extravagant sexual desire. How cruel and tormented seems the sexual
life of almost every living creature except our modern, sophisticated
selves! Even over the herd browsing in the midst of plenty hangs a
constant, vague apprehension. A cracking twig will start a panic. The
first motives in animal life are hunger and fear. Apart from the brief
capering spring-time of young creatures--and how brief it is!--there
is no intimation of any happiness whatever except the fierce, bolted
gratification of an intense appetite or the monstrous triumph of a
“kill.” The most fortunate thing in the life of an animal is the
shortness of its memory and its want of foresight. Throughout the whole
realm of nature it is only among birds and mammals that we detect any
indication whatever of a real delight in life. Birds sing in spring and
the young of birds and mammals play through a brief phase of parental
protection; mere gleams of sunshine these on the universal hard drive
for bare existence.
Thoughtless people talk of “nature’s remedies” and imagine that
every wild animal with that instinctive pharmacopœia must be in the
pink of condition. But variations are far too infrequent and natural
selection far too loose a guide to keep pace with the secular change
of conditions and equip animals with an inherent cure for every
ailment and an automatic counter-stroke to every danger. There is no
such self-righting arrangement in the natural world. Most of nature’s
handwork is loose-jointed and casual. The sick and weak and maimed
are sooner destroyed and less in evidence, that is all. Wild species
are just as subject to epidemics and hideous parasitism as man. Few
creatures seem to have found their “perfect” food, or, having found it,
are able to keep to it. Indigestion and malnutrition are as rife in the
forest as the slum. Elephant-hunters say they can tell the proximity
of a herd by the borborygmic noises the poor brutes emit, and Glasfurd
describes a tiger’s life as an alternation of uncomfortable hunger and
uncomfortable repletion. There is no reason to suppose that early man
was any better off than an animal or any happier. Like the animals
he was a fear-driven, hunger-driven, lust-driven creature, feeding
perforce on what he could find. Some of the earliest known human bones
are diseased bones.
The story of the common man since the beginning of social life has
been anything but a record of innocent festivals and homely happiness.
With the development of agriculture he began to escape from the hunger
and fear, the tramp’s life in the wilderness, of the wandering savage,
but only by accepting an increasing burthen of regular toil. History
and archæology preserve only the records of the successful few; we
must guess how many myriads of drudges worked the mines, pulled the
galleys, and hoed the fields for the greatness of the Pyramids or the
pretty palaces of Cnossus. And pestilence and famine returned in every
lifetime. Pestilence and famine have disappeared from the general
routine of life in the last hundred years or less, and that only in
the Atlantic civilizations. The social history of the Old Testament
goes to the accompaniment of a prolonged groan from the common people.
The Roman Empire was an administrative pyramid based on slaves,
serfs, and distressed taxpayers. Its distinctive instrument of social
discipline was the cross. There is no period in the past upon which a
well-informed man can put his finger and say, “At this time common men
had more joyful lives than they have to-day.”
There is only a very scanty account of the life of the common man
through most of the historical period. It was not worth writing about.
As M. Abel Chevalley points out in his admirable study of that father
of the English novel, Thomas Deloney, it is suddenly in the Elizabethan
period that literature stoops so low as to tell of tradespeople
and their servants. Peasant life still remained in darkness. Even
now we get only half-lit pictures of that earthly underworld. Mr.
Liam O’Flaherty’s glimpses of the Irish cultivator and Mr. Caradoc
Evans’s sketches of the primitive folk in Wales are more convincing
than pleasant. Deloney shows us a squabbling, insecure, undignified
life, much pervaded by envy and malice, ill-housed, ill-clothed, and
irregularly fed, without medical attention, amusement, reading, change
of scene. It is much the same squalor that we find as the background
of the adventures in the Roman world of Petronius. And still it was a
marked advance, as Chevalley notes, on mediæval life.
That squalid life remained the common life until the third or
fourth decade of the nineteenth century. There seemed little hope
of any improvement. There were great social changes, an increase of
productivity and population in the eighteenth century, but they brought
no perceptible amelioration of the common lot. The common man remained
dirty and ignorant, needy, or incessantly laborious. The first clumsy
machines brought trouble rather than relief; they threw multitudes out
of employment; they needed drudges to prepare the way for them; they
needed drudges to supplement their mechanical imperfections.
It was only after the middle of the nineteenth century that the real
significance of mechanical invention and the practical applications
of scientific knowledge and method became apparent. Then it began to
dawn upon mankind that the age of the mere drudge was at an end. The
outbreak of universal education in Western Europe was the practical
recognition of this. Meanly and grudgingly planned, against the
resistance of many privileged people, and much disturbed by their
intense jealousy of their “social inferiors,” the establishment of
compulsory elementary education marks, nevertheless, a new phase in
the history of our species. It is the beginning of at least a chance
for everybody. Close upon it came a fall in the birth-rate, and an
even greater fall in the infantile death-rate--clear intimations that
the common people no longer consented to leave their increase to
the unchecked urgency of bestial instincts nor the health of their
offspring to chance. Concurrently, too, there began such a shortening
of the hours of work as to extend leisure, which had once been the
privilege of a minority, to nearly the whole population.
The present phase of these changes shows us the old once necessary
drudge population becoming in part an unemployable and unwanted abyss
of people who are either natural inferiors or exceptionally unlucky
individuals, and in part a much larger and increasing new mass of
comparatively versatile semi-skilled workers, whose efficiency and
standards of life are rising, whose security, leisure, and opportunity
increase. These latter are the new common people that the extension
of knowledge and machine production has given the world, and their
development will be the measure of civilization in the future. Even at
its present level it is an unprecedented mass of happy and hopeful life
in comparison with any common life that has ever existed before, and
there are many reasons for hoping--if great wars can be avoided and if
it does not swamp itself by unrestrained proliferation--that it will go
on to much higher levels still.
This expanding mass of new common people bulks largest in the United
States of America, but it is as highly developed in the more complex
British system even though proportionally it is not so great, and
it exists with qualifications and differences in all industrialized
Europe. It needs only a decade or so of peace and security to appear in
China, and as the economic reconstruction of Russia brings that country
into line and co-operation again with other European developments,
we shall probably find that there also the conditions of machine
production have evoked a new town population and a new agricultural
worker, able to read, write, discuss, and think, with much the same
amount of leisure and freedom as his Western comrade. The dictatorship
of the proletariat may dictate what it likes, but the machine will
insist, there as everywhere, that the people who will work it and for
whom it will work must have minds quickened by education and refreshed
by leisure, must be reasonably versatile, and must not be overworked or
embittered.
Let me note one or two other points making for happiness in our days.
For the first time in history over large parts of the earth the beating
of inferiors has disappeared. For the first time in history the common
worker has leisure assigned to him as his right. Never have common
people been so well clad or so well housed. Never have they had so much
freedom of movement. There is a horror of cruelty to men and animals
more widely diffused than it has ever been before. There has been an
extraordinary increase in social gentleness. There has never been so
small a proportion of sickness and death in the community. All these
things mean happiness--more universal than it has ever been.
But this general march towards happiness is not fated and assured.
There is no guarantee in progress. This much of release for the common
man from disease, privation, and drudgery has come about very rapidly
as a consequence of inventions and discoveries that were not made to
that end, and the development of the new common people into a world of
civilization of free and happy individuals is manifestly challenged by
enormous antagonistic forces. It may be impeded, delayed, or defeated.
Flags and the loyalties and passions of insensate nationalism are
flatly opposed to the attainment of a general human welfare. Every man
in military uniform is a threat of violence; every gun and military
implement is a man-trap in the path to a universal order. The false
legend of the glorious past of our race is in a perpetual struggle
against the hope of its future. Obscurantism and fear lie in wait for
every courageous innovation in social and economic life. Indolence is
their ally and false thinking their friend. Continual progress can only
be assured by an incessant acutely critical vigilance. None the less,
the common man to-day is happier than he has ever been, and with a
clearer hope of continuing betterment. The common man in quite a little
space of years may be better off than are even the fortunate few to-day.
And now call me a pessimist if you can!
_1 May, 1927._
XVIII
EXPERIMENTING WITH MARRIAGE. LEGAL RECOGNITION OF CURRENT REALITIES
For some time sounds of confused disputation have been coming out
of Denver and gathering the attention of the world. The story is
complex in its telling but simple in its essentials. Judge Lindsey,
of the well-known Juvenile Court in that city, is being subjected to
processes of ousting that need not hold our attention too closely.
Mighty forces have worked for his overthrow. The Ku Klux Klansmen have
gathered in “Klavern” against the Judge. The Grand Dragon of the Ku
Klux Klan, a Baptist minister in his less fiery moments, seems to be in
unwonted alliance with eminent Roman Catholic leaders against him. He
is violently assailed and violently supported. In detail the conflict
becomes squabble, but the matter upon which issue is raised is one of
quite fundamental significance to any one concerned with the present
drift of things. The fight rages about the institution of marriage.
Judge Lindsey has been offering to improve it.
That Juvenile Court in Denver is known throughout the civilized world.
It has attracted many European students and inquirers. It is as old
as the century. It owes its constitution and methods very largely to
Lindsey’s indefatigable zeal. Its primary function was the separation
of delinquent children and juvenile first offenders from the hard
atmosphere of the common police court. They were to be dealt with upon
special lines, saved from the stigma of conviction, and if possible
turned back from becoming members of the criminal class. This task
the court has performed admirably. Its functions developed into very
valuable preventive work. It became a place of reconciliation between
parents and erring and recalcitrant sons and daughters, it shepherded
home a multitude of runaways, and it saved great numbers of misguided
and luckless girls from shame and degradation. Naturally it antagonized
the saloon and the white-slave trader. For twenty years it worked with
the blessing of the Roman Catholic community. Father McMenamin, one of
the leading clergy in Denver, described it as “a constructive force in
our community, and a godsend to many a boy and girl.”
The Klansmen, however, were early hostile, and their first hostility
was based on the good relations between the Juvenile Court and the
Catholics. They denounced Judge Lindsey for sending girls, girls of
Catholic antecedents, to the Catholic House of the Good Shepherd, to
work for nothing, as they alleged, in the laundry and be debauched.
That was their agreeable version of the methods of a well-managed
Catholic Home of spotless repute. It is interesting to consider the
proposals that could bring Klansmen and Catholic, in spite of this,
into alliance against the Judge.
Nothing could better illuminate the struggle between innovation and
conservative reaction in matrimonial relations that goes on to-day
all over the civilized world. It is not a struggle between good men
and bad men; it is a struggle between novel and established ideas,
between projected and time-honoured social usages. Father McMenamin
and Judge Lindsey are well-known men in Denver; their characters have
been gauged by years of public service, and there can be no question
that each is a conspicuously honest, trustworthy, disinterested leader.
The Klansmen lie a little under the shadow of “Elmer Gantry,” that
deadly book; there is much rant, froth, and violence upon their Denver
record, and their testimonial remains in suspense, but for our present
purposes we can very well restrict the issue to the two unquestionably
straightforward protagonists, Judge Lindsey and Father McMenamin.
Now this is what has blown up Judge Lindsey and his Juvenile Court in
Denver. After years of experience of adolescent misbehaviour he has
come to the conclusion that in our modern community marriage is delayed
too late, and that a long and lengthening gap has been opened between
the days when school and college are left behind and the days when it
seems safe and reasonable to settle down and found a family. There is
a growing proportion of fretting and impatient young people in the
community, and out of their undisciplined eagerness springs a tangle
of furtive promiscuity, prostitution, disease, crime, and general
unhappiness. Young men cannot apply themselves to sound work because of
nature’s strong preoccupation, and the life of possibly even a majority
of young women is a life of tormented uncertainty. Judge Lindsey,
with the weight of a new immense experience upon him, and with the
assertions of the advocates of birth control before him, has suggested
a more orderly accommodation of social life to the new conditions.
He has proposed a type of preliminary marriage which he calls
Companionate Marriage. This is to be a marriage undertaken by two
people for “mutual comfort,” as the Prayer-book has it, with a
full knowledge of birth control, and with the deliberate intention
of not having children. So long as there are no children and with
due deliberation, this companionate marriage may be dissolved by
mutual consent. On the other hand, at any time the couple may turn
their marriage into the permanent “family marriage” form. That is
his proposal, and the State of Colorado has full power to make the
experiment of such an institution. He wants such laws to be made. He
believes that in most cases such marriages would develop naturally into
permanent unions and that their establishment would clear the social
atmosphere of a vast distressful system of illicit relationships,
irrevocable blunders, abortions, desertions, crimes, furtive
experimenting and all those dangers to honour, health, and happiness
that go with furtiveness in these matters. He believes it would mean a
great simplification and purification of social life and the release of
much vexed and miserable energy.
Now before we consider the opposition of Father McMenamin to this
project it may be well to note the fact that there is a considerable
conflict of authority about this birth control. It is certainly not
a sure and complete avoidance of offspring in all cases, though with
due observances and with most people it works as Judge Lindsey counts
upon its working. But a certain small percentage of his companionate
marriages will unintentionally convert themselves into normal family
marriages. Birth control does not certainly remove, it does but
diminish, the probability of consequences, and it affords no such
opening of “flood gates” to “unbridled licence,” and so forth, as its
antagonists assume. Furtive and illicit indulgence are not relieved of
anxiety by current birth-control knowledge. That is one point in this
question not generally made clear.
Another criticism of wilfully restrained fecundity seems to be of
far less value. People of medical and quasi-scientific standing who
dislike birth control talk of its disastrous effects upon the nerves
and general health. They babble of “nervous wrecks.” They produce
no evidence of these effects, they assert that they exist and talk
copiously of their own remarkable opportunities for observation. But
equally authoritative witnesses of an opposite school of thought, with
equally remarkable opportunities for observation, will talk of the
disastrous consequences of chastity and suppression. It is a field in
which most people seem to think with individual bias and a violent
disregard of fact. The truth seems to be that the human constitution
is remarkably adaptable in these matters, a normal individual can
establish habits of self-indulgence or habits of restraint, can pass
from phases of great liveliness to phases of apathy and remain a happy
and healthy organism. We can build up systems of habit either way.
There is no standard sexual life.
Quite apart from the varieties of temperamental type, each type is
capable of living in a variety of ways and there is practically nothing
in any of these vehement asseverations for or against this or that
liberty or this or that restriction. Many abstinent people and many
declared birth-controllers are obviously healthy and vigorous people;
the way of living of one sort is just as healthy as the way of living
of the other sort; there are sturdy old rakes, equally sturdy priests
and other celibates, hale grandmothers of a multitude, and brisk and
happy old maids. One has but to look around one at the people one meets
to make all this alarmist propaganda dissolve away.
Speaking very loosely and generally I would give it as my own matured
impression that amidst the strains, provocations, challenges, incessant
suggestions and reminders of modern life, it conduces to calm of mind
and personal pride, it is the least troublesome and easiest way of
living for most people, to lead a life of normal sexual reactions
reasonably safeguarded against overwhelming offspring, and that all
the specific demands of nature upon the nerves and health of even the
most feminine of women are to be met by bringing one or two children
into the world. Nature is much more accommodating than moral and social
theories. The question of physical health has indeed very little to do
with these discussions. It is a pity that each side will drag it in.
But after dismissing that much of the argument there still remains a
complex tangle of perplexities about marriage. It is a tangle that it
may be perhaps impossible to resolve altogether. Many modern people
discuss it as though it was a simple problem for the comfortable
satisfaction of physical desire. But in the human being there is no
such thing as unmixed physical desire; there is always in matters
sexual a stir of the imagination. Thereby even the grossest sexual
indulgence is lifted to a plane above gourmandize or gluttony. And
also, long before one begins to think about the way in which children
affect the problem, there is a vast system of reactions between men and
women over and above sexuality. There is a general magic, there are
elements of admiration, vague pleasure, fear and friendship long before
the development of those crowding preferences that become love. Further
beyond the passion of love, resting upon that as a basis, resting upon
the intimacy and association it establishes, is married love, which is
the deepest and tenderest relationship on earth. It is in its fullness
a slow growth; perhaps it needs youth and a struggle in common for its
perfect establishment, perhaps like some sorts of fruit it needs cold
and storm as well as sunshine for its ripening.
In the atmosphere created by this sure, deep-rooted married love alone
can one find the happy assurance, the perfect security of help and
loyal sympathy in which children will grow easily and insensibly to the
loyalties, the habitual serviceableness, the necessary generosities, of
modern citizenship.
I believe at the bottom of the mind of such a good man as Father
McMenamin in his antagonism to Judge Lindsey is an intense conviction
that for most people married love is the highest good, and certainly
that is the persuasion of all his more reputable allies. They think it
is not only the highest personal good but the highest social good. And
because they know it is a thing of slow growth, they want to protect
people against hasty and fitful breaches, to tie them irrevocably,
to bind their habits and interests into one indissoluble bundle, so
that they may grow together in spite of themselves. They hate any
thought of divorce. They distrust birth control because it seems to
them to minimize fidelity. They will not trust people to find out for
themselves in time how good and precious this thorough, permanent,
inseparable union can be. They are afraid that Judge Lindsey’s
companionate marriages will be too readily voided and that a shallow,
promiscuous habit of mind will be established in young people. Judge
Lindsey argues, on the contrary, that his project enables them to begin
a lifelong association at the very outset of their emotional lives and
that the greater danger of promiscuity and the trivialization of the
sexual life lies in a delayed marriage. He thinks that the rigidities
of the established system defeat its own ends. The real issue lies
there.
This is not fundamentally a religious question. People are too
inclined to think that the Roman Catholic Church is opposed to any
dissolution of marriage or the family, as a part of its faith, but
this is a complete mistake. The Roman Catholic Church, it is true,
sets its face against divorce, but on the other hand it will annul a
marriage with great facility and so reduce children who have imagined
themselves to be legitimate to the status of bastards, a thing no sort
of civil divorce has ever done. If such annulments are infrequent in
the Roman Catholic community, that is not because of any doctrinal bar
to them, but because the habits and organization and common sense of
that community are against a ready resort to such releases. It is as
unfair to accuse Roman Catholicism of distinctive rigidity here as it
is to charge liberal thinkers with immoral motives. Religious prejudice
is as much out of place in this discussion as medical prejudice. The
real issue is one of social psychology; whether one universal binding,
invariable, intolerant marriage contract does or does not conduce to
the establishment in the larger number of cases of this deep, fine,
full, rich, socially beneficial, child-protecting relationship of
married love or whether that is a harmful delusion. Those who are with
Father McMenamin are of the former opinion; those who are with Judge
Lindsey, of the latter.
For my own part I must confess myself not so much on the side of
Judge Lindsey as further away from Father McMenamin on the other side
out beyond Judge Lindsey. I want people to have all the knowledge
and freedom I can in these things as in all things. I think that
compulsion defeats its own ends and that animals and human beings have
an instinctive disposition to resist being forced along paths that,
left to themselves, they would quite naturally follow. A vast amount of
sexual misbehaviour is _provoked_ by prohibitions and proscriptions.
It does not follow that because a thing is very, very good it ought to
be forced upon everybody. There are great varieties of character in
the world and for many of them married love is impossible. There are
many who miss a full natural development of married love and yet have a
reasonable claim for respect and consideration in less complete or less
enduring relationships.
People are needlessly afraid of a variety of reputable contracts and
of freedom in the unions of men and women because they do not realize
how natural and necessary is the habitual association of one man with
one woman in the workaday world. It is a thing you can safely leave
most people to discover and realize for themselves. If people were
completely free to do anything they pleased in sexual matters, they
would do, only more easily and happily, much the same things that we
take great pains to insist they shall do and compel them to do now. As
many would pair as pair now and perhaps more, and the unfortunate and
the unpairable would not be made to suffer for bad luck or singularity
of temperament. People would not be constrained; there would be less
shame and less persecution through it all. There would be easier
readjustment after mistakes, earlier mating in most cases, and a great
diminution of prostitution and the quasi-criminal sexual underworld.
On the whole, I think that popular thought and will are moving steadily
in the direction of rationalism, candour, and charity in sexual things
and away from emotionalism, concealment, compulsion, and repression.
This dispute at Denver is certainly only one of the opening incidents
in a very wide and far-reaching movement for the courageous revision
and modernization of marriage.
_26 June, 1927._
XIX
NEW LIGHT ON MENTAL LIFE:
MR. J. W. DUNNE’S EXPERIMENTS WITH DREAMING
An old friend, Mr. J. W. Dunne, has recently sent me a new book he
has written, “An Experiment with Time.” I find it a fantastically
interesting book. It has stirred my imagination vividly and I think
most imaginative people will be stirred by the queer things he has
advanced in it. I do not think it has yet been given nearly enough
attention.
Years ago, in the last century, Mr. Dunne came to see me for the first
time. He was then a young captain in the army, and he had to go out to
the South African war. He wanted to tell me something, an idea, that he
didn’t want to have lost if, too abruptly for explanations, some Boer
marksman chanced to wipe him out of existence. It was the idea of an
aeroplane with V-shaped wings based on a number of experiments he had
made with paper models--a perfectly sound idea, which has since been
realized in a very stable but not very swift or agile machine. If Dunne
had had money and opportunity for experiment, I am sure that about
A.D. 1902–3 he would have constructed a practicable heavier-than-air
machine, but he had to go off to his blockhouse work in the Orange
River Colony, and he never got a free hand to build until other
investigators had passed him by.
In those days it was extraordinarily hard to get people to show a
practical interest in the air. He came to me because I had written
what was considered very wild stuff about flight. I had said that we
should fly before 1950! Not a dazzling hit, but better than the mighty
majority opinion that we should never fly at all. This magnificent
encouragement won Dunne’s gratitude and confidence; he put all he had
done so far in my hands and I was to lock it up and keep it secret for
him until he was either killed or could go on with his experiments
again. He had to come to me, a perfect stranger, before he could find
any one who would take him seriously enough to harbour what he had to
deposit.
I still remember very cheerfully a funny afternoon we spent in my
garden at Sandgate, while Dunne rushed about, climbing up walls and
jumping on garden seats, to release little fluttering paper models
which illustrated this or that aspect of his idea.
He struck me then as having one of the most patient and persistent
minds I had ever encountered. None of the magnesium flare about his
mind, the sort of thing that goes fizz and lights up everything--as
much as it is ever going to light up everything--but wary, observing,
and, when at last it gets on a trail, indefatigable. He worried on with
aviation for a long time, bad health and the Great War used him up and
partly veiled him from me, and it is only now that I learn of another
scent that he has been following to the most remarkable conclusions.
What set him going was a very common experience, the fact that dreams
in an odd, erratic way seem to foreshadow events. Many of us have had
the experience of an anticipatory dream, and usually we have been so
vague about it that the story was hardly worth the telling. Mr. Townley
Searle, the London bookseller, told the other day of an unusually
lucid one. He dreamt he was among the stalls in the Caledonian Market,
and found and bought a first edition of Thomas Hardy’s “Desperate
Remedies,” which is worth £100 nowadays. So vivid was the impression
that he got up the next morning and went straight to the market, bought
an umbrella for sixpence because it was coming on to rain, and then,
recognizing the stall of his dream, went straight to it and got the
three volumes for a shilling, a clear profit of £99, 18_s._ 6_d._
That was a rarely simple case. The ordinary dream with foreshadowing
elements is more mixed than that. One of my own has stuck in my mind
for years and is much more typical. In my dream I was riding a bicycle
on the Neva, which was frozen over; the bicycle skidded on the ice,
went faster and faster, and got more and more out of control; ahead
of me appeared a great sledge with a gaunt horse driven by a woman
in white furs; I swept towards it helplessly and collided with the
horse, clung to its head, and pulled it down as I awoke. The moment of
clinging to the head of the horse was prolonged, and it haunted me. I
had a vivid sense of the feel of the animal’s ears and long cheek. I
was then actually learning to ride the bicycle and, a day or so after,
I came round a corner on a little chariot-like milk-cart on the wrong
side of the road. I lacked the skill to avoid this and found myself
clinging to the head of the pony, which came down in exactly the mood
of suspense, and with exactly the same feel as the sledge horse did in
my dream. But as I am not of Dunne’s curious and persistent quality
I never followed up that very striking experience. I had not told it
to any one before the accident and I accepted very uncritically the
current explanation of these apparently foreshadowing dreams.
Probably the reader knows that “explanation.” It is that there is
lack of simultaneousness in the action of the two hemispheres of the
brain so that one lags a little behind the other; there is a double
impression and the second one has the effect of being a memory of some
previous event. The theory is that there was no real dream at all,
but only the delusion of a memory of a dream produced by the flagging
impression. That accounts for the resemblances of the event to the
pseudo-dream but manifestly it does not account for the differences;
the lady in white furs and the Neva for example have still to be
accounted for. If I never really had that dream, as a dream how did
they get into my memory? Why wasn’t the dream exactly like the event?
Dunne seems to have had more than one such experience. He dreamt, for
example, of the great volcanic outbreak in Martinique while he was
soldiering in the Orange Free State. He saw it just about to happen,
fissures opening in the ground and steam jetting out. What he saw was
quite unlike what probably did happen. In his dream he made violent
attempts to warn the inhabitants; he was very clear about the number.
He woke up shouting, “Four thousand people will be killed.” Days later
came a newspaper. Headlines proclaimed the disaster and the probable
loss of forty thousand, not four thousand, lives. The reading of
these headlines was the event foreshadowed by the dream. He read them
hastily, misread the figures as four thousand, and the paper passed out
of his reach. Long afterwards he found that these figures, both four
thousand and forty thousand, were quite erroneous. His dream, it is
plain, was not of the actual event, but merely an anticipation of his
mental impression when he looked at the paper.
Several occurrences of this sort put Dunne on the alert. He decided to
write down all his dreams so soon as he was awake. He kept a bedside
notebook. He trained himself to watch for his dreams at the moment of
awakening and acquired considerable skill at recovering his dreams as
they slipped away into nothingness. He made a parallel daylight diary
of his more vivid waking impressions. And he induced several other
people to take up this business of dream watching. He has accumulated
records. All this he tells very interestingly in this book of his. And
the striking conclusion that emerges from these observations is this,
that the share of future mental impressions is almost as important or
quite as important in the making of dreams as mental impressions in the
past. To-morrow’s happenings are just as likely to appear, clipped and
disturbed, in the dream flow as yesterday’s.
We most of us have some idea of the making of dreams. Some sound,
some internal or external disturbance lifts the mental existence out
of the unconscious towards waking. The mind ceases to forget, memory
and attention dawn, and the drifting mental content groups itself
with an assumption of reasonable connectedness about the disturbing
sensation. Then we either wake and remember, or the whole stir subsides
back into forgetfulness and unconsciousness. Most of us realize how
the impressions of yesterday in particular, and of remote yesterdays
less patently, supply forms and colour to the stir, and how desires we
have thwarted and temptations we have resisted escape into this dream
of life and play havoc with our suppressions. What most of us do not
realize, says Dunne, is the share which little scraps of tomorrow’s
impressions also contribute. That is the essence of his discovery.
It is difficult at the time to sift the foreshadowings from the
recollections and the distorted, escaped suppressions, so unimportant
and elusive they seem to be. It is only when the premonitions are
exceptionally striking that they are remembered and recognized when
they turn up in actual fact, and so detected. They have to be very
vivid or very peculiar. But the more closely and skilfully you watch,
he insists, the more of the futurist element is evident in the dream.
Moreover, he had added to the observation of what I may call natural
dreaming the observation of states of mind when the attention is
deliberately relaxed so as to leave the mental existence at a level
hardly above the level of recording consciousness. He turns his back,
as it were, on the mental existence, and then suddenly snatches what is
there before it sails out of reach, and in these phases of mind also he
finds the images of future and past impressions mingling together.
Now I think it may be possible to put these facts into a
comprehensible relationship to quite a number of other facts which
do not enter into Dunne’s speculation. I won’t exactly follow him in
this statement that follows, which is necessarily in the space at my
disposal a very sketchy statement. Partly it derives from him and
partly I am adding something of my own. The point of interest is that
our mind can be considered as existing in the past and in the future,
as extending, so to speak, both ways beyond what we consider to be the
actual moment. I hope that does not strike the reader as too crazy a
proposition. Most of us have given very little thought to what we mean
by the actual moment. What do we mean by “now”? How much time is it?
Behind “now” stretches the past, ahead is the future, but is it itself
an infinitesimal instant? Do we merely exist as a flash, as a series
of flashes, so to speak, of no duration at all, between a past gone
by and a future still to come, or does “now” bulge into both past and
future? This will be a novel and amusing question to most people and a
profoundly irritating one to certain types. They will be so accustomed
to speak of past and future as though they were in actual contact at
the present, that the assertion will be astonishing and difficult,
and yet as they think it over it will acquire an insinuating and
troublesome plausibility, that “now” is perhaps always a measurable,
and may under certain circumstances be a quite considerable, piece of
time. It sounds paradoxical to say that portions of the past and future
both enter into “now,” but actual experience gives a feeling in favour
of that illogical view. To be illogical is not necessarily to be in
error. Mankind may have been thinking about past and future in the
wrong way.
Next I would suggest that as we become attentive to anything and
excited by actual fact, “now” gathers itself together, and the more
excited and attentive we are, the more “now” gathers itself together
towards its central point. As we become increasingly active and “on
the spot,” the acuter and the narrower does the “now” under attention
become. In our crises we live, as we say, only for the moment. As we
relapse towards inattention, reverie, dreaminess, “now” becomes obtuse
and broader and broader. In the hypnotic condition, in dreaming, and
still more so in dreamless sleep, “now” may broaden down towards and
below the limit of consciousness, until it spreads, it may be, to large
parts, and even to all of our mental life from beginning to end. In
the sleeping mind or in the dead mind nothing is past or future. As we
rouse ourselves, as we become alert, as we wake up and pay attention
to things, that vague “now” is drawn together towards the moment of
action. But as the attention leaps to action, it trails with it faint
and rapidly fading impressions of the more diffused state of mind from
which it has arisen.
This queer idea that the “now” of the dreaming and inattentive
mind may extend to an undefined amount into both past and future is
compatible with all Dunne’s dreaming and quasi-dreaming phenomena. On
any other supposition they are inexplicable. And it is consistent with
the remarkable story of Mr. Townley Searle, and many other like tales
of premonition. Moreover, Professor Gilbert Murray recently published
some disconcerting facts, disconcerting, that is, for the sceptic, with
regard to what he considered to be telepathy. One would as soon doubt
his word as one would doubt that of Aristides. He is above suspicion
even of careless testimony. I have not the report of his experiments
by me, but they were very puzzling and perplexing indeed. They went
something in this way: he would, with various friends, read or be told
or agree upon some strange scene and event, and his daughter would
then come into the room and open her mind, as it were, to any floating
impression that offered itself, while he and his friends fixed their
minds on the chosen topic. On this theory it was unnecessary so to fix
the mind, but that, I believe, was what was done. Presently she would
describe what came to her. Many of her guesses were amazingly good.
She was then told the actual thing chosen, and no doubt she saw it
very vividly as it was described to her. She would be keen to know how
near she had got to the chosen subject. But that she should see the
thing before it was described to her and because it was presently to be
described to her, is all of a piece with Dunne seeing the Martinique
explosion before the newspaper headings evoked the picture in his
imagination. It would be extremely interesting if Professor Murray
would try to get scenes to his daughter which would not be revealed
to her later. If he failed to do that, it would be confirmatory of
this supposition, that what happened was merely the foreshadowing of a
strong impression, exactly on the lines of Dunne’s anticipatory dreams.
The idea that the mental “now” prolongs itself into the past and
future, as the attention flattens down from its waking acuteness into a
state of suspense, also brings many of the more remarkable and hitherto
abnormal phenomena of hypnotism into line with the general body of
interpreted fact. The feats of many of the more successful mediums in
producing the names and significant incidents in the lives of people
hitherto unknown to them, but whose names and circumstances they were
personally to know, cease to be isolated phenomena. They are no longer
in the least discordant with everyday reality so soon as we clear
our minds of the delusion that the practical, fleshly, substantial
“now” of ordinary experience is a mathematical instant, a locus, an
infinitesimal abstraction, and accept the view I am propounding here
that it has duration, and that its duration in both directions, past
and future, increases with the weakening of our attention and our lapse
from acute contact with outer reality.
By this reasoning people must often be dreaming ahead of the winners
of races, of winning numbers in lotteries, speculative opportunities
and the like. They are. But dreams draw their material not only from
the future but from the past, from our bodily desires and cravings,
our hopes, our mental preoccupations, and the interpretation and
misinterpretation of noises and other impressions. Very rarely have
they a convincing quality of reality. The dream artist in us is
essentially and incurably unsystematic and maundering. We all, as our
attention sinks down towards the threshold of consciousness, become
false and incoherent in our associations. Every sleeping, hypnotized,
anæsthetized, or dreaming man is, so to speak, insane. Sanity is a
waking state. Accordingly, I do not see any prospect of our keeping
so sufficiently alive to what we are doing as to direct our minds
to the next big race or the run of the numbers for the next hour at
roulette, and at the same time letting ourselves go sufficiently to tap
the mental states ahead. Things may and do happen as they happened to
Mr. Townley Searle, but such dreams are gifts and cannot be forced or
persuaded to come by any means now known to us. Practical life lies in
the present. Dream states, like drug states, are a dangerous field of
exploration for any but very specially endowed and guarded minds.
_10 July, 1927._
XX
POPULAR FEELING AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. ANTI-VIVISECTION
There are some questions that really serve to classify men’s minds.
Nowadays the popularly received classifications rarely mean anything
at all. Are you Republican or Democrat, are you Liberal, Labour, or
Conservative? The answer tells you only of accidents of upbringing and
circumstance. Are you a Socialist? “We are all Socialists nowadays.”
Are you a Christian? Yes and no, or a “Yes”--and a long explanation.
But these other questions are test questions. Fairly put and fairly
answered they reveal the quality--or rather, let me say, the key and
colour--of a mind quite definitively. They mean exact things. They show
you are this sort of man or that.
One of these test questions is birth control, because on your belief
whether that is possible and desirable or whether it is not, hang,
logically and necessarily, all your ideas of the competition of types,
peoples, and races, and of the possibility of socialism and world
peace. If you can believe it is possible then world peace is possible,
and if you think it is impossible all talk of world peace is just
sentimental foolishness or a humbugging preparation for propaganda
in the next war. Another test issue is the question whether the Mass
as performed by a properly qualified priest is or is not the central
fact of Christian religious life. If your answer is “Yes,” you are a
Catholic, and if “No” a Protestant. All the other points at issue among
the different sorts of Christians are subordinate to that, and you will
find that the decisions people make upon them are always more or less
clearly consequent upon that primary decision. Your attitude towards
education will be different, and towards literature and history.
You will face death differently and pain differently. Upon a great
multitude of the important problems of to-day you do not know where
you are, you are just maundering about, until you have thought out and
decided clearly on these two key matters and adjusted your ideas to
them.
A third cardinal issue, not perhaps quite so far-reaching in its
implications as these others, but very far-reaching, is the question
of vivisection. To get your attitude to that quite clear and settled
in your mind is--after these other two--as sound and profitable an
enterprise in self-examination as it is possible to imagine.
What is vivisection? It is a clumsy and misleading name for
experimentation on animals for the sake of the knowledge to be gained
thereby. It is clumsy and misleading because it means literally cutting
up alive and trails with it to most uninstructed minds a suggestion of
highly sensitive creatures, bound and helpless, being slowly anatomized
to death. This is an idea naturally repulsive to gentle and kindly
spirits, and it puts an imputation of extreme cruelty on vivisection
which warps the discussion from the outset. But the larger bulk of
experiments upon animals for scientific purposes involve no cutting
about and very little pain. Many cause discomfort rather than actual
pain. There may be the prick of an injection and a subsequent illness.
Where there is actual cutting it is nearly always performed under
anæsthetics, and in a considerable proportion of such cases there is no
need for the animal to recover consciousness and it does not recover
consciousness.
Still, a residue of cases remains in which real suffering is
inflicted. Far more pain, terror, and distress is inflicted on the
first day of pheasant shooting every year, for no purpose at all except
the satisfaction of the guns, upon the wounded and mutilated birds
which escape than is inflicted by all the scientific investigators in
the world vivisecting for a year. The lives of “fancy” dogs, again,
invalid and grotesque deformations of the canine type, must make an
aggregation of prolonged discomfort beyond all comparison greater
than that of the creatures inoculated by the physiologist. But such
considerations do not release us from the straight question whether it
is right and permissible to cut even a single animal about, or indeed
to hurt any living creature at all, for the sake of knowledge.
That is what the scientific experimentalist claims to be free to do
and which the anti-vivisectionists labour strenuously to prevent.
There is no denial on the part of the scientific experimentalist that
a certain number of experiments are painful and have to be painful,
and that they are of a sort that have to be performed upon animals of
an order of intelligence that leaves one in no doubt of the reality of
the sufferings inflicted. The large majority of experiments involve no
inconvenience to the creatures tested, but there is this residuum of
admittedly painful cases. It is an amount of suffering infinitesimal in
comparison with the gross aggregate of pain inflicted day by day upon
sentient creatures by mankind, but it occurs.
The anti-vivisectionist wants legislation to prevent all experiment
upon living things for the sake of knowledge. Failing that he wants to
prevent experiment upon dogs in particular, even when the experiment
involves no pain whatever to the subject. But you will find that
the typical anti-vivisectionist is incapable of believing that an
experiment can be painless; his imagination is too vivid for any
assurance to the contrary. The idea of living substance cut while it
quivers and feels is too powerful for him. When the arguments and
imaginative appeals to his agitation are scrutinized it will be found
that his objection is to real or imagined pain, inflicted in cold blood
to no matter what beneficial end.
That is what he wants to stop. His propaganda literature is filled
with assertions that no knowledge of any value has ever been gained by
biological experimentation, but these preposterous denials of widely
known facts are the natural and habitual exaggerations of controversial
literature. The sound anti-vivisectionist would not rest his case on
any such proposition, for, even if it were true, a single wonderful
discovery to-morrow would upset it again. Pushed into a corner he will
admit that he does not care whether the knowledge gained is worth while
or no. He will not have knowledge gained in this fashion.
It would be easy to convict the anti-vivisectionist movement of
many manifest inconsistencies, but my object here is rather to
disentangle a fundamental idea than to exhibit confusions of thought.
I want to disentangle what is at the root of the feelings of the
anti-vivisectionist, and not to score controversial points. But I
must call attention to the marked disregard shown by the active
spirits in this agitation for any sort of experimenting with animals,
however productive of pain, that does not produce scientific results.
The world of pet animals is a world of aimless experimenting with
life. The lives of the “pets” of careless women are for the most
part remarkable histories of wrong and excessive feeding and fitful
fussing and negligence, and these creatures are themselves, in many of
their varieties, products of a ruthlessly dysgenic breeding industry
which sacrifices vigour and vitality to minuteness, quaintness, and
delicious ugliness, but the anti-vivisectionist has never shown the
slightest disposition to couple this ugly trade in animal deformity
with the pursuit of scientific research. Nor does he show any animus
against the importation of little monkeys and suchlike small attractive
beasts, dragged from their natural environment to die en route or
perish miserably but “amusingly” in uncongenial and often terrifying
surroundings. Indeed, a large part of the social and financial support
of anti-vivisection seems to come from just the sort of people who
sustain the breeders and procurers of animals for “petting.”
But very probably the toy-dog lover does not realize the biological
abomination of these practices. In his disregard of possible pain and
discomfort in one case and in his exaggeration of pain and discomfort
in the other, we find the clue to the fundamental issue of this
controversy. The pet is to him a dear little thing and its incessant
struggles to breathe with its pug nose are considered to be funny;
its fitful appetite is interpreted as fastidiousness; its manifest
ill-health is “delicacy”; if it is constantly washed and combed it does
not smell and it is a sweet creature; its abject physical dependence on
its owner, its terror and hatred of the world beyond the proprietary
aura is very flattering and easily interpreted as love. There is the
same disinclination to see the realities in the case of the pet dog
as in the case of the dog in the hands of the experimentalist, but
the disinclination is set at a different angle. The former leads a
life of general discomfort, but it is necessary for the pet-owning and
pet-protecting type to think of it as exquisitely indulged; the latter
may not suffer in the slightest degree, and may show the friendliest
feelings to the man who has made it a contributor to science or may
jump on the table eagerly for the injection that is followed by a pat
and a tit-bit of food, but it has to be regarded as being thrillingly
and outrageously tormented. These, however, are honest delusions, the
outcome of a peculiar mental make-up, and the anti-vivisectionist is
not to be charged with wilful inconsistency. His or her--it is more
commonly her--intention is to prevent and forbid the infliction in cold
blood and for a scientific end of anything that looks like pain on any
animal that can be imagined to suffer.
The hatred is not against pain as such; it is against pain inflicted
for knowledge. The medical profession is massively in support of
vivisection, and its testimony is that the knowledge derived from
vivisection has made possible the successful treatment of many cases
of human suffering. So far as we can measure one pain against another,
or the pain of this creature against the pain of that, vivisection
has diminished the pain of the world very considerably. But the
anti-vivisectionists will hear nothing of that. They will hear nothing
of that because it is not material to their conception of the case.
The peculiar animus of the anti-vivisectionist is clearly against the
deliberation and the scientific aim and not against the pain in itself.
The general subjugation of animals to human ends is not questioned.
Many anti-vivisectionists are, like their pets, carnivorous. They will
leave the abattoir to go on when they have closed the laboratory; they
will recognize the right and duty of the owner of a big dog to beat his
fortunate possession into good behaviour and keep it short of food to
tame it. They would be indignant if they were refused the freedom of
giving their pets anything to eat that they fancied--provided always
that no scientific knowledge ensued from its subsequent reactions. It
is the quiet determination of the clean-handed man with the scalpel
that they cannot endure.
It is not that he is cruel, because manifestly he is not cruel--if
he had a lust for cruelty the richly emotional nature of the
anti-vivisectionists would probably understand him better--it is
because he is not driven by his feelings or cravings to do what
he does, but by a will for abstract lucidity, that he rouses the
antagonism, the violent sense of difference, in his “antis.”
Vivisection is only occasionally and incidentally the infliction of
pain, and anti-vivisection is not really a campaign against pain at
all. The real campaign is against the thrusting of a scientific probe
into mysteries and hidden things which it is felt should either be
approached in a state of awe, tenderness, excitement, or passion, or
else avoided. It is, we begin to realize, a campaign to protect a world
of fantasy against science, a cherished and necessary world of fantasy.
It is a counter-attack upon a treatment of animals that gives the lie
to a delightful and elaborated mythology in which these poor limited
creatures are humanized and have thrust upon them responses, loyalties,
and sympathetic understandings of which they are, in reality, scarcely
more capable than plants. The curious, materialistic, shameless, and
intelligent monkey lends itself far less easily than the dog to such
mythological interpretation, and so gets far less consideration from
the anti-vivisectionists. It pulls everything to pieces, including
pleasant fantasies about itself. But you can tell a dog that it
thinks and feels anything you like, however noble and complex, and it
watches you hopefully and wags its tail. And so it is about the dog
that the controversy centres and the passions of the dispute rage most
obstinately.
To the question we have posed, whether it is justifiable to inflict
pain upon animals if need be for the sake of knowledge, the supporter
of vivisection says “Yes.” He says “Yes” because he regards the whole
animal creation as existing not merely for its present sensations, but
as a contributing part of a continuing and developing reality which
increases in knowledge and power. His disposition is to see things
plainly and to accept the subservience of beasts to man in man’s
increasing effort to understand and control. He regards animals as
limited and simplified cognates of our own infinitely more complex
and important beings, illuminating inferiors, and he can conceive no
better or more profitable use for their lives than to serve the ends of
mental growth. What otherwise are their lives? A play of desires and
fears, that ends in being devoured by other creatures great and small.
To this mentality that of the natural anti-vivisectionist is in the
completest contrast. The world that the pro-vivisectionist is by his
nature impelled to strip bare, the anti-vivisectionist clothes in rich
swathings of feeling and self-projection. He imagines souls in birds
and beasts, long memories and intricate criticism. He can imagine dogs
and cats pressed by forebodings, a prey to anxiety, vexed and thwarted.
He does not clearly separate them from humanity. Often he will compare
these dream-enriched animals of his with mankind to the disadvantage of
the latter. He enriches reality but at the same time he distorts and
conceals it by these ornamentations. He is afraid of bare reality as a
child is afraid of a skeleton.
The biological experimenter experiments because he wants to know.
He is neither dismayed by pain nor does he desire that pain should
enter into his experiments. He avoids it when possible. I doubt if
his work is largely determined by practical ends, or whether it would
have much value if he undertook it directly for the sake of curing
disease, benefiting humanity, or anything of that sort. Sentimental
aims mean loose, sentimental, ineffective work. He wants knowledge
because he wants knowledge; it is his characteristic good. Practical
applications follow unsought. He is a type of humanity that may or
may not be increasing in the world. Most of us do not stand up to
knowledge like that. We want to keep our illusions. We do not want
knowledge for ourselves or others very much, we prefer to be happy in
our imaginations, and the rescue of animals from the “clutches” of the
vivisectionists appeals to our deep instinctive self-protection quite
as much as it does to the widely diffused desire to champion the weak
against the strong.
_24 July, 1927._
XXI
THE NEW AMERICAN PEOPLE: WHAT IS WRONG WITH IT?
The American people is far less sensitive to foreign opinion than it
used to be, but three or four letters to this address witness that
there are still Americans who want to have themselves discussed. They
ask for prophecies of the American future. The demand is too big for
me. But, in common with many other English people, I have been made
to think rather vividly about certain aspects of the American future
in the last few months, and it may be interesting to turn over the
convergent reactions and conclusions.
English people will not consent to think of Americans as foreigners
and aliens in the way in which they think of Turks or Italians. They
have a great and intimate curiosity about things American. It is
not always a friendly intimacy they feel; there is a great deal of
irritation and hostility both ways. But while an Englishman will never
say, “I might be an Italian,” it comes very easily to him to say, “I
might be an American.” Imaginatively he tries on the stars and stripes.
He is eager for American plays and receptive of American novels. He can
see himself living like that. Without a monarchy, the “county” and our
army people, I do not know how like Americans we English might not be.
American common life is being set down now very ably and vividly by
American writers, primarily for the benefit of American readers, but
their work is gaining the constantly increasing and constantly more
respectful attention of European readers. Until quite our own time,
American novels have been, so to speak, European novels about America;
they followed European methods and respected European standards. Their
characters had a morbid predisposition to cross the Atlantic. But
now there is a growing school of American writers who take their own
way with their own novel and enviable wealth of material. Sherwood
Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and above all Dreiser, are outstanding
examples of this new-won American literary independence, of which
Edgar Allan Poe and Whitman were the prophets and Stephen Crane the
most brilliant pioneer. Upton Sinclair veils the power of a very
considerable writer in the flag of a vehement propagandist, but he too
must not be forgotten in the reckoning of America’s literary liberation.
“Babbitt” we felt was a great exposition of commercial America seen
and written with complete originality, and though many of us found
“Martin Arrowsmith” a little incredible and unconvincing, “Elmer
Gantry” again has produced the distinctive Sinclair Lewis effect, which
is that of looking at a vividly interesting reality through a lens
which refracts and exaggerates indeed, but which may even exhibit all
the better by virtue of its magnification. One believes in Babbitt and
understands that the American world may be infested by innumerable
Babbitts, while at the same time one may doubt whether there was ever
quite such a Babbitt as Babbitt. “Elmer Gantry,” which deals with the
popular religious life, is even more like seeing through the curves of
a bottle. It has the quality of veracity. One feels, that is to say,
that what is seen in it is truly there; that it is not “made up.” But
also one feels that the thing seen is different in its proportions. The
story is universal. Where there is revivalism and popular missioning,
whether it be Catholic or Protestant, or “New Thought” or No Thought,
there is the same danger of reaction between the “magnetic” preacher
type and the excitable woman convert or associate. But the scale of the
development is distinctive because of the entirely unprecedented social
atmosphere in which it goes on, and there lies the major interest of
the European observer.
The first quality that impresses the European is the abounding vigour
of the social life these books reveal; the next is its immense crudity,
and hard on that its lack of variety in culture and the absence of half
shades, a sort of universal black and whiteness. Everybody seems to
think the same things and to express them by the same common idioms.
Henry James, in his all too rarely cited book, “The American Scene,”
complains of his native land as he saw it in 1909, that “nothing in
the array is ‘behind’ anything else--an odd result, I admit, of the
fact that so many things affirm themselves as preponderantly before.”
“Babbitt” and “Elmer Gantry” tell of a world that must be on the
street line or perish. With the book in hand one might say, “This
is a community wholly without criticism,” which would be to ignore
completely the existence of the book in hand. But it is a community in
which criticism and the idea of dropping out of the front line to think
about things is evidently only beginning.
An American novel of outstanding power which is being read all over
Europe with great curiosity and admiration is Dreiser’s “An American
Tragedy.” Dreiser is, in the extreme sense of the word, a genius.
He seems to work by some rare and inexplicable impulse, enormously,
without self-criticism or any fun or fatigue in the writing. Long ago
I admired his “Sister Carrie,” and rebelled against his long novel,
“The Genius,” surely the largest, dullest piece of ineptitude that has
ever been produced by a first-class writer. His “American Tragedy,”
still vaster, is--I agree with Bennett--one of the very greatest
novels of this century. It is a far more than life-size rendering of
a poor little representative corner of American existence, lit up by
a flash of miserable tragedy. But I would disagree with Bennett’s
condemnation of its style. It is raw, full of barbaric locutions, but
it never fatigues; it keeps the reader reading, it gets the large,
harsh, superficial truth that it has to tell with a force that no
grammatical precision and no correctitude could attain. Large, harsh,
and superficial that truth is, and fresh from this book I am moved to
express something about America that has been smouldering in my mind
for some time.
Let me set down two impressions of a very intelligent French reader of
these representative books. The first impression was one of the wide
freedom of movement and the universal restlessness of these common
people, compared with the rooted, limited lives of their European
equivalents (so far as they can be counted as equivalents). The next,
and the stronger, was the extreme thinness and poverty of their mental
life. We were in the presence of a people with no depth of conversation
at all. They had no variety nor penetration in their discussion. They
had no poetry whatever. They did not seem to know the names of, or ever
to have observed, any birds, flowers, minerals, or any natural things.
They had no metaphors, but slang phrases horribly bent and flattened
by excessive use. They betrayed nothing a European could recognize
as religion and no general ideas of any sort. Their revivalism was
the cheapest, shallowest orgy of mass emotion. They knew nothing of
any literature. They read so badly that their news had to be shouted
at them from the tops of columns. The poverty of their language was
amazing. The lover wrung to ecstasy might say: “My! but you’re cute.”
The phrase for all occasions seemed to be “That gets me!” My French
observer insisted that here was a people degenerating, worn down,
halfway back to speechlessness and brutishness. We had a long argument,
because I am still a backer of the United States, and in the end we
both gave ground.
I had to grant the flattening and cheapening of the language, but it
was arguable that that was a phase. Two-thirds of the surnames in
Dreiser’s book were Central or Eastern European names. These people
were newcomers; they had left Polish, or Czech, or Yiddish, or German
behind them, and the names of flowers and legend and metaphor had been
also left behind. There had been a vast mental attrition during the
process of transplantation to a new soil. No real attempt had been made
to assimilate them to any conceivable American culture. Was it any
wonder if they dealt with each other through a cheap sort of English,
tenses and moods all wrong? And, moreover, they were still unsettled,
moving over a big area, where flowers and suchlike poetic material
varied. People do not pick up the phraseology for that sort of thing
_en route_. And just as their native languages had worn off in the rub
and movement of immigration so too their native faith and traditions
had been rubbed down to something very cheap, thin, and raw. But that
was only a phase of clearance. Stripping is not degeneration. Clearing
a site is not decay.
So I argued. The antagonist, however, scored points by demanding what,
if there was a clearance, was being built in the clearing. Where were
the great vigorous schools and colleges in which the new culture was
to arise? Where were the signs of a copious cheap literature of high
quality? One had glimpses of American college life, and the quality of
the new civilization brewing there was, well, questionable. America,
said my friend, was a new thing in the world, a vast possibility,
a hope for all mankind. The schools, the colleges, the popular
literature, the intellectual leading of such a community, if it was
indeed to realize these hopes and achieve its destiny, had to be far
stouter, bigger, and better things than poor old muddling Europe
could show. Were they even as good? The travelling Americans one met
in Europe seemed, when it came to any abstract discussion, to be far
less able to express and handle ideas than their European equivalents.
But that brought down the talk to individual instances, in which no
argument is ever possible.
I turn back to Henry James. He describes a long journey from north to
south. He speaks of “the general pretension of the Pullman, the great,
monotonous rumble of which seems for ever to say to you: ‘See what I’m
making of all this, see what I’m making, what I’m making...’”
To which in his character of returning native he replies: “I see what
you are _not_ making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not, and how can
I help it if I am subject to that lucidity?--which appears never so
welcome to you, for its measure of truth, as it ought to be!”
I still hesitate to adjudicate. I hate to cheapen, or even to
seem to cheapen, the immense achievement which America embodies
in material form. But I could wish for better evidence than these
novels and the general report of things over there give me, of a
great and unprecedented movement throughout that community towards
sustained intellectual activity on a scale commensurate with American
opportunity. Things, it seems to me, stand very much as follows. The
common schools of a number of States in the Union (but by no means all)
are perhaps as good as the elementary schools of Britain and Germany.
No better. Yes, but for the peculiar needs of America they ought to be
four times better. Children do not go to school so regularly as they do
in Western Europe, and they ought to go more. America is rich enough to
keep all her children at school until sixteen, learning to use their
own language fully and skilfully, learning the elements of science and
something sound and solid about the rest of the world. She does nothing
of the sort. Her educational progress is shallow and pretentious. It is
decades behind her material progress. The Fundamentalist controversy
displayed great areas of the United States as being mentally twenty
years behind Western Europe. She ought to be handing out to her people
all the best literature of the world, good scientific works and modern
discussion at a quarter of a dollar or less for a full book. We can
do that in England, but in America books of that sort cost anything
from one dollar to twenty. Common people in America and their children
must read old, worn books or none. She is, in fact, building the great
nation of the future on a foundation that would be thought insufficient
even for an effete and tradition-cemented European community. This will
not do. She has to see to that. If she does not see to that all her
large promise is in vain. But the growing volume of self-criticism in
America, of which the books I have cited are only samples, is a very
hopeful sign that she will see to it. The sooner she sets about seeing
to it good and hard, the more cheerfully will my hopes for America go
about in my mind.
But the job is no slight one. If it is to be done at all, a very great
effort indeed is required. The universities, book distribution, and
above all the common schools in America must have something like a
renascence before the atmosphere of “An American Tragedy” can be pushed
out of reality into history, and the American people take the place its
material advantages offer it of leadership among the nations of the
earth.
_15 May, 1927._
XXII
OUTRAGES IN DEFENCE OF ORDER.
THE PROPOSED MURDER OF TWO AMERICAN RADICALS
One of the most intriguing phenomena of the present time is the
increasing readiness of the supporters of established institutions
to use violent and illegal methods against anything that seems to
threaten these institutions. Law and Order have become excuses for
lawlessness and crime. The gravest threats to freedom and progress,
personal security and security of property, have come in late years
far more from within established institutions than from without. In
crimes against life, truth, personal honour, private freedom, and
legal rights, the professional “rebel,” though by no means an angel,
finds himself a poor second to the responsible administrator, the
judge, the official, and, above all, the conservative “strong man.”
The instances multiply. They vary from the grotesque to the sheerly
horrible, from the ridiculous burglaries of the British Government up
the scale to prolonged torment and murder. At present the western world
is confronted with a case altogether typical of this paradoxical resort
to evil on the part of those who are supposed to be its professional
antagonists--the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, in Massachusetts. It is an
affair more dismaying from some points of view even than the long tale
of atrocities on which the Fascist dominion in Italy rests to-day. It
calls for the closest study on the part of every one who is concerned
with the present development of our civilization.
I will state the bare, indisputable facts of this amazing case. They
do not admit of contradiction; they are matters of common knowledge.
I quote them from a small, generally accessible book, “The Case of
Sacco and Vanzetti,” by Professor Felix Frankfurter. He is far abler
and far better qualified to deal with such an affair than I can hope
to be. Intellectually and politically, he is a figure of the utmost
respectability. He is Professor of Administrative Law in the law
department of Harvard University; he was Assistant Secretary of War at
Washington during the war. He has come into the affair from no motives
but the interest of a specialist, the passion of a good patriot for the
honour of his country, and the indignation and pity of an honest man.
He has made an exhaustive study of all the evidence and records in the
trial, and he has presented the results with extreme lucidity. Before
his intervention William G. Thompson, a great Massachusetts lawyer, had
already taken up the cause of the two miserable defendants. And these
are the essentials of this abominable business as these two have laid
them bare.
Sacco was a worker in a shoe factory in Stoughton, Mass.; Vanzetti
was a fish pedlar. They were arrested and charged with participation
in a “hold-up,” involving the murder of a paymaster and his guard, and
the theft of a box containing about sixteen thousand dollars. It was a
hold-up in broad daylight, the victims were shot, the box was snatched,
and the murderers made off in a car. The evidence for the presence of
the two accused upon the scene of the murder, when one examines the
record, is contemptible. It is manifestly, to any one who has assisted
at police court proceedings, that sort of cultivated evidence one gets
out of unintelligent witnesses by pestering and pressure long after
their real testimony has been exhausted. One poor woman, for example,
who saw the scene from a window at a distance of thirty yards or more,
who had a second and a half to observe a car passing at fifteen or
eighteen miles an hour, and who refused at first to identify Sacco,
was induced after a year of police education to describe how in that
brief interval she had remarked the peculiar shape of his forehead, the
distinctive length of his hair, and the particular size of his hands.
On the other hand, the evidence that both of the accused were
elsewhere is sound and convincing. The murder was committed at
Braintree, in the outskirts of Boston, at 3 P.M., and an official
of the Italian consulate in Boston witnesses that he was visited by
Sacco, who was seeing about his passport to Italy, at 2.15 on that
day. Vanzetti, the prosecution maintained, was, as various customers
testified, with Italian duplicity, selling fish far away from the place
where he was simultaneously committing murder. On the evidence for an
alibi alone, the active complicity of these two men in the Braintree
crime would have been laughed out of court in any unimpassioned
trying of the case. The rest of the case for the prosecution is as
contemptible. It is a feeble and tortured attempt to convict. No traces
of booty, no association with any murder gang, no contributory facts of
weight sustain the contention of the prosecution.
But this is not all. It is not merely that these men have been found
guilty contrary to the weight of the evidence so far as it concerns
themselves; they are held guilty, and they are to be executed on
July 10th next in the teeth of the fact that a Portuguese named
Madeiros subsequently confessed, and that the real murderers are quite
clearly indicated. Professor Frankfurter names them and demands their
prosecution. Is this too incredible for the reader? Let him read the
Professor’s dispassionate statements. I do not see how any clear-headed
man, after a reading of the Professor’s summary, can have any other
conviction than that Sacco and Vanzetti are as innocent of the
Braintree murder, for which they are now (after seven years of prison
hardship and mental torture) awaiting death, as Julius Cæsar, or--a
better name in this connection--Karl Marx.
But why then are they to die? The clue to the riddle is to be found
in the cross-examination of Sacco by District Attorney Katzmann, and
in an illuminating remark made by one of the jurymen in the case.
This murder, it must be understood, occurred as long ago as April,
1920, near the height of the great “Red” scare in the United States.
It was a hot time for any miserable worker who had involved himself
with Communist or even mere Socialist propaganda and organization.
Sacco and Vanzetti, honest, industrious, worthy men in most other
relations, as the assembled evidence shows, were--radicals! They were
pacificists and Socialists. They seem to have been connected with a
certain Salsedo, whose wickedness may be judged from the fact that in
the general “drive” against the Reds he was arrested by the United
States Department of Justice, put in a room on the fourteenth floor
of a Park-road building, and then found dead on the sidewalk below.
Evidently a desperate bad character. Perhaps he fell in an attempt to
climb down from the fourteenth floor; perhaps he did not. These two men
were certainly associated with him; they had taken part in pacifist
and socialist activities. Sacco, drawn to fight in the Great War, had
evaded and gone to Mexico, and Vanzetti, in addition, had spoken at
meetings against military service, and the prosecution directed itself
less to the trifling matter of the Braintree murder than to these facts.
Mr. Katzmann’s method with his victim was to worry him about his
evasion of military service during the war and about his Socialist
views. To go on worrying and wearying and provoking him, with his
imperfect knowledge of English, until he blundered into phrases and
statements that would be acutely offensive to the carefully selected
jury. Before a jury of inflamed Massachusetts patriots, Mr. Katzmann’s
ideas of fair play allowed him to ask these poor devils whether they
_loved_ the United States, whether they thought the United States a
free country, whether they were disappointed by the United States,
whether they subscribed to newspapers likely to be distasteful to the
jury, whether they were sympathetic with anarchists, and so forth,
and so on, and Judge Thayer, the presiding judge, instead of kicking
a prosecution of this quality back to the proper charges, aided and
abetted these foul irrelevancies.
What had these disputes to do with the plain question of murder with
violence before the courts? The prosecution, says the “Yale Law
Journal,” was allowed to ask, “at a time of intense popular feeling
against anarchists and all opposed to the established order, questions
emphasizing in a picturesque and telling manner the political views of
a defendant on trial for a crime which admittedly had not the slightest
relation to these views.”
That was the spirit and method of this trial. The quality of the jury
at which this stuff was aimed may be judged by the fact on record that
before the trial Ripley, the foreman, said to a friend who doubted the
guilt of the accused: “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.” These
two men were in fact condemned not as murderers, but as socialists
and pacifists, and it is as Socialists and pacifists that they are to
be killed in July. The pro-killing party in the United States hardly
troubles to maintain the flimsy story of their murder guilt. The
Braintree murder is indeed merely a legal fiction in this case like
the John Doe and Richard Roe of various old-fashioned English legal
instruments. If it can be used to kill Sacco and Vanzetti, then I do
not see why it should not become a standard legal form, and why any
other people in the United States whose opinions are considered to
be unsound, whose presence on earth is regarded as unpropitious, or
who have got themselves disliked in any way, should not presently be
included in this murder case and sent after these first victims to the
electric chair.
The facts of the case are now so patent and so widely known that no
American citizen from the President downward who studies the evidence
has any excuse for pretending to believe that Sacco and Vanzetti had
hand or part in the Braintree murder. The case has passed out of the
purview of courts and persons, and become a challenge to every American
citizen. The fact, plain as day and staring the world in the face,
cleared of all prevarications and pretences, is that the greatest, most
powerful, and modern state in the world is now confronted with the
question whether it will or will not permit these men to be killed upon
a false accusation because of their political views. Is their blood to
stain Old Glory?
I will say no more of Sacco, the factory hand, and Vanzetti, the
pedlar of fish, who have been doomed to die lest America fall. I turn
to a much more intricate and interesting figure, Judge Thayer. These
others are just confused, common back-street men, but Judge Thayer is
a type. After reading Professor Frankfurter’s book through I went to
and fro in it, picking out everything I could about Judge Thayer. My
curiosity grows. I would like to study him intensively, get photographs
of him, dive into his life story, learn about his school and college.
And that, not because I think he is anything strange and out of the
way, but because he is so tremendously normal. I perceive that he was
in perfect accord with the District Attorney, Katzmann, and in close
sympathy with the jury, when Sacco and Vanzetti were, not so much
tried, as baited in his court. He had no feeling of wrong-doing at
that time. “Thayerism,” if he will permit me to draw a word from him,
is no rare thing in America. Nor is it rare in England. It interweaves
intimately with the mental quality of the European Fascist. It is a
widely diffused and dangerous force in our modern world. “Thayerism,”
the self-righteous unrighteousness of established people. Let us
consider its more salient characteristics.
In the first place, after my first exploration of Judge Thayer, I
am left with the persuasion that he is, legally speaking, a quite
honest man. That is to say, I do not think that he was guided by any
considerations of personal profit to take the line of conduct that
is making him Stupor Mundi, the amazement of the civilized world. I
think that he and his jurymen had a feeling of profound obligation to
their country, and that they really supposed that they were serving
great civilized ideals in doing as they did in the conviction of their
victims. I am not so sure of the District Attorney. I thought his
cross-examination tricky and evil; but then I am accustomed to the
candours of science, and I find most lawyers in most cross-examinations
tricky and evil. But District Attorney apart, the court, I am
convinced, felt that it was making a large fair display and doing
helpful work to maintain the good life, the spacious and generous
and wholesome American life, by accepting proofs that were no proofs
against these friendless men--who “deserved to be hanged anyway.” I
feel sure that the Judge went home to his family--and I can quite
believe he has a very nice family--with a sense of a stern duty
manfully done.
After the trial I agree that his record is not so straightforward. The
criticism of his verdict seems to have surprised and hurt him. He must
have felt that he had settled this business for his country’s good,
and that he did not deserve the trouble made about his settlement. His
conduct suggests wounded vanity and bad temper rather than any Satanic
qualities. People came into court and hurt his feelings by motions for
a new trial, which he refused indignantly. The Supreme Judicial Court
of Massachusetts, without inquiry into the evidence of the murder,
but simply upon legal issues, upheld his right to block a retrial. It
still upholds him. To the last application based upon the Madeiros
confession of 1925, after studying the motion “for several weeks
without interruption,” he produced an opinion of twenty-five thousand
words. Professor Frankfurter describes it, with manifest deliberation
of phrase and with all the weight of a trained critic of just this
sort of material, as “a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations,
suppressions, and mutilation.” I quote without endorsement this opinion.
I believe Judge Thayer’s conduct of the original case was entirely
honest; and if his final opinion hardly comes up to the standards of
that high word, it still remains, for most fallible men, a very human
and sympathetic effort. What is the matter with Judge Thayer is not
that he is a bad man, not that he is antimoral, but that he is--to put
it mildly--extremely obtuse mentally and morally. This mental and moral
obtuseness seems to have extended to his court and to a considerable
body of opinion in the United States which sustained him in his
crushing of these two unfortunates.
It is difficult to say just how far that obtuseness does not extend
in our English-speaking communities. Many people in the continent
of Europe hold that it is innate, that the American and English are
by nature stupid people, acting often with clumsy and unintentional
cruelty, and missing the point of most issues. That stupidity carried
with it a certain obduracy which in many rough practical issues has the
effect of strength. But the writing and acts of Judge Thayer and his
District Attorney indicate considerable acuteness and liveliness. I do
not believe they are naturally dishonest or stupid. I am quite willing
to credit them with intelligence, integrity, and public spirit. But it
is crude intelligence, dull integrity, and sentimental public spirit.
They have under-developed minds; the minds of lumpish, overgrown
children. They have had no fine moral and intellectual training. They
have lived in an atmosphere where there is no subtle criticism of
conduct and opinion, where everything is black or white, bad “to be
hanged anyway,” or good to be given every privilege. Everything is
overemphasized. To be bad or wrong is not to be against the law on this
issue or that; it is to be outlawed and not given a dog’s chance. It
is to be hounded down. They have acquired no pride in discrimination
or exactitude. They are easily prejudiced violently for or against
anything, and they are as incapable of behaving with scrupulous
fairness to any one who they think is in the wrong as they are capable
of the sloppiest adulation and indulgence for any one they think is in
the right. In religion they have never learnt to distinguish cant from
faith, they are the natural prey of Elmer Gantry and his kind, and in
politics and social questions they cannot distinguish honest criticism
of their fundamental ideas from aimless malignant wickedness. They are
not mentally quickened to the point of generosity; they are blind to
the pathetic idealism of these poor aliens in their midst; they have
panics against dreaming workmen who can scarcely talk intelligibly;
they see red and feel murderous. And they mean well!
They mean well. That is the tragedy of this situation. The Judge
Thayers of our world, just as much as the Saccos and Vanzettis, want
the world to be fair and fine. The motives on neither side are entirely
base. But Thayerism has the upper hand, and it is all too ready for
hasty conclusions even if they involve blood sacrifices. Too many
Americans, I fear, believe that a little blood-letting is good for
their civilization. So did the Aztecs before them. But blood is a poor
cement for the foundations of a civilization. It is less a cement than
a corrosive. There have been civilizations before the present one in
America, and for all the blood they shed so abundantly upon their high
places they have gone and are buried and stuff for the archæologist.
Six weeks still remain for justice and pity. Will the mighty and
fortunate United States, perhaps the greatest power in the world
to-day, allow the State of Massachusetts to kill this machine hand
and this fish pedlar on the charge that they have committed a crime
of which all the world now knows them innocent, or will it, at the
eleventh hour, induce the Governor of that State to put an end to their
seven years of misery and hardship in some more gracious fashion?
Sacco and Vanzetti were not executed in July; they were reprieved
for a special inquiry until August 10th. On the eve of that day they
were again reprieved for a further twelve days until the United
States Supreme Court could decide upon certain points of law that
still remained unsettled. No legal power existed outside the State of
Massachusetts to avert the infamous conclusion. They were electrocuted
on August 22nd.
_29 May, 1927._
XXIII
SOME PLAIN WORDS TO AMERICANS. ARE THE AMERICANS A SACRED PEOPLE?
IS INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM RESTRICTED TO THE EASTWARD POSITION?
This paper is addressed primarily to certain American correspondents,
but it discusses a matter of considerable interest to all
English-speaking readers--namely, the right of British and European
people generally to have and to express opinions about American
affairs. The converse right has never been questioned, and is exercised
freely by Americans throughout the world.
In this article I maintain my right as a free-born Englishman to think
freely about the affairs of the United States, and to say what I think
to be true and right and proper about all or any of these affairs. I
refuse to regard the people of the United States as in any way a Holy
People. It is not blasphemous to deny them perfection. It may even
be wholesome that their present great exaltation of spirit should be
tempered by criticism. And if I have anything upon my conscience with
regard to the United States in the past, it is that my disposition
has been more consistently favourable and flattering to the American
tone, the American quality, and the American future than the present
ungraciousness of these correspondents of mine justifies.
True that when first I crossed the Atlantic some artless comments
of mine offended Boston. There has always been something a little
difficult between myself and Massachusetts, some incompatibility. New
York I loved frankly, and Chicago amazed me. I left verbal instructions
that the ashes of my heart were to be thrown into the Potomac where
Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia meet; but Boston I
found refined and genteel and sensitive beyond my capacity. Everybody
admired the Winged Victory and had a replica of it somewhere. I had
never encountered such a serried unanimity of culture before. I made
remarks about it, and about Longfellow’s house. I began wrong perhaps
by going to Boston in a Fall River boat with my cabin near the syren,
and spending the next day sceptically in an open automobile exploring
the wildernesses into which Boston was proposing to expand. I doubt it
ever will. And now again my trouble is with the super-civilization of
Massachusetts. All the haughtier letters I get in this correspondence
come from that State.
My gravest offence, I gathered, lies in this, that together with two
other miscreants, to wit, one Arnold Bennett and one John Galsworthy,
I did wantonly issue a manifesto or appeal upon the issue of the
Sacco and Vanzetti trial while it was still in suspense. For myself
and my associates I object to every word in that indictment. We were
approached severally by an American gentleman, bearing one of the
greatest names in the history of American science, and himself of
respectable academic standing, and asked to sign an appeal to Governor
Fuller which he put before us, and I, at least, was given to understand
that this was to be an extensively signed document not confined to
English or American opinion. We were not so pontifical, therefore,
as we seemed to be. In fact, we were not pontifical at all. We
responded to an American invitation and did not expect to be treated as
principals but as chorus in the matter.
Still, that is a minor point. I signed that appeal very readily, and,
later on, when the execution occurred, I expressed an opinion about
it, an indignant opinion, for which I had ample justification in the
facts as they had been put before me from American sources. From the
examination actually quoted to me, I was impressed by the extravagant
unfairness of the questions put to the accused, and by the way in
which, being charged with ordinary murder and robbery, their political
opinions were dragged into court to create a prejudice against them.
I was concerned about the moral quality of the court far more than
about the moral quality of the accused. I wrote an article upon this,
which did not get all the publicity I had hoped for in America. The
question of whether these two Italians were guilty or innocent I made
a secondary matter. The thing that scandalized me was that they should
have been tried in such a fashion.
Now for six years before that, although I was frequently hearing
about it vaguely, I had left the Sacco and Vanzetti affair alone as
no concern of mine. It is only recently that I have been roused to
the realization that it is a case like the Dreyfus case, by which the
soul of a people is tested and displayed. I had supposed it to be a
row between the “Reds” and the authorities, and I had assumed that the
accused were involved in some political or semi-political crime. I am
not a “Red,” though a number of people I have stung by criticisms they
could not answer in any other fashion have sought comfort in calling me
that. I have criticized Communism with a passionless destructiveness
far more deadly than the mere brawling abuse of Moscow habitual to
these people who denounce me. And it was only when I found that two
men, who might or might not be murderers and robbers, were being tried
as though anarchist opinions and murder were interchangeable things
that my sense of intellectual decency was aroused.
It was my friend H. W. Nevinson who induced me to look into this
case more closely, by a review of a book by Mr. Felix Frankfurter.
His précis was so startling that I got the book itself forthwith and
read it. It was manifestly a very honest and competent book, and its
exposure of the prejudice imported into the case by the prosecution
amazed and shocked me profoundly. I inquired further who this Mr. Felix
Frankfurter might be. He was, I discovered, a member of President
Wilson’s government, and he is now Professor of Administrative Law at
Harvard. This seems good enough to go upon. The Communist movement
had seized upon this trial and made it an occasion for demonstrations
and outrages throughout the world. The favourite rôle of the extreme
Red seems always to be that of agent provocateur for reaction. The
extreme Red is the curse of creative liberalism. But the misbehaviour
of excited crowds here and there has nothing to do with the essential
offence of this case, which has been stated for history and all time by
Frankfurter. Frankfurter is no more a Red than I am, and had as little
to gain by taking up this unpopular case. He took it up because it
shocked him, and he imparted his shock to me. The trial and the manner
of the trial are the facts that most concerned him. There they are.
Now the curious thing is that a great number of Americans do not seem
to see in the least what is the point at issue. They do not get, many
of them do not seem able to get, what it is that has roused the liberal
opinion of all Europe against the courts of Massachusetts. There is a
profound psychological difference laid bare in this case.
The guilt or innocence of these two Italians was not the issue that
had excited the opinion of the world. Possibly they were the actual
murderers, and still more possibly they knew more than they would admit
about the crime. Seven years after the crime the Massachusetts police
(who have certainly been as much on trial as the actual murderers)
produced new and very impressive evidence against Sacco and his
associate. They exhibited a bullet which they depose was the bullet
found in the body of the victim, and a pistol, which they testify was
found upon Sacco at the time of his arrest. The particular bullet is
shown conclusively, by a quite beautiful piece of scientific analysis,
to have been fired from that particular pistol. This must have been
very decisive with Governor Fuller’s committee of inquiry. But these
facts were not before the court in the original trial, and, anyhow,
they have nothing to do with the monstrous way in which the politics of
the accused were dragged into the case. That, I urge upon the American
reader, is what perplexes Europe. Europe is not “re-trying” Sacco and
Vanzetti, or anything of the sort. It is saying what it thinks of Judge
Thayer. Executing political opponents, as political opponents, after
the fashion of Mussolini and Moscow we can understand, or bandits as
bandits, but this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds,
or Reds as murderers, seems to us a new and very frightening line for
the courts of a state in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth
to pursue.
So much for the Sacco and Vanzetti case. I realize the electric
storminess that broods over it. Wrathful Massachusetts citizens write
to me that they have “consigned” various of my unimportant writings to
“the garbage can,” and have otherwise treated them with contumely. I am
to be barred and suppressed by a hundred million true Americans. This
is melancholy news for me, but of no great importance to the world. The
fact remains that these indignant letter-writers are still in the same
world with Frankfurter’s book and that if they do not read it in this
world, its careful perusal will almost certainly be one of the first
purifying tasks set them in the next.
Well, life must go on, and the Braintree case must be left now on
the receding beaches of history. After this article I shall write no
more about it. And here, indeed, it is not about this case that I am
writing, but about the extraordinarily bad temper certain types of
Americans display at the mere shadow of its discussion--and, indeed,
of any discussion of things American. One can scarcely let a sentence
that is not highly flattering glance across the Atlantic without some
American blowing up. No other people have so acute a sensibility. This
Sacco and Vanzetti business has merely brought this testy impatience
to a head. I have spent only a few months of my life in America, and I
am always careful to base such comments as I make upon America, upon
American authorities. Upon prohibition my silence has been monumental;
it is an affair for Americans only. But many other matters are not
entirely their affair. For example, it is a matter of concern to the
whole world that the general level of education in America should
be high. That is another matter on which I have offended, and shall
continue to offend. Drawing my instances from American writers, I have
pointed out on diverse occasions that the level of elementary education
in America is not high enough for her immense possibilities and her
limitless aspirations. It is no answer to say that it is as high as it
is in most European countries. My answer is that it ought to be much
higher because of the immense wealth, power, and opportunity of the
United States. I regret I have not saved the whole mass of ill-written,
abusive retorts this friendly and helpful reflection has provoked.
The other day, again, I lectured at the Sorbonne on the necessity
of democracy entering upon a new phase. I was considering European
conditions, and I do not think I even mentioned America, but apparently
the word “democracy” infringed the sacredness of the American
tradition, and Senator Borah went up with a loud report. I was reminded
as a Briton of many humiliating things, and particularly of my
financial mismanagement of the war situation, which left Senator Borah
so much up on me. Yet I am doing my best to pay off Senator Borah, and
I have never complained. And the insufficiency of the American common
school is a danger to the peace of the world.
This disposition to answer back hotly and irrelevantly is not
confined to Senator Borah and my mail. Several newspaper articles
to my address have instituted painful general comparisons between
English and American ways. One writer lays much stress on the alleged
British habit of playing tennis, taking a bath, and putting on the same
underclothing again. This may be all right; I have never searched my
fellow countrymen, but personally I don’t pay tennis in underclothing.
Anyhow it doesn’t matter very much. I admit the immense superiority
of Americans in most things; to mention only a few, they win hands
down on films and flivvers, steel construction and advertisement, debt
collecting and floral offerings, Bunker Hill and bathrooms. American
architecture is superb. Their novels are becoming more interesting
than British novels, and London, I understand, is full of their plays.
If no American alive can write anything to compare with the storm in
Tomlinson’s “Gallion’s Reach,” yet Stephen Crane came nearest to it
in his “Open Boat.” The variety of type in the American population,
as compared with the British, is as fifty to one. America invented
flying. Oxford trousers, again, were a plagiarism from America. I
could go on for quite a long time jotting down similar glorious points
for Old Glory. But I do not see what such things have to do with my
articles. I was not at Bunker Hill when Senator Borah, I gather,
stormed that position and licked chaps like me to hell. The question
of the conduct of a public trial or the value of an educational
organization or the imperfection of an electoral method of government
is not settled by vehement reminders of a critic’s nationality and its
associated disadvantages--especially when he happens to be the most
cosmopolitan-spirited of critics.
The friendly European critics of the United States are impressed
by the facts, first, that the elementary education of the American
citizen is cheap and poor and does not fit him for his proper rôle in
the world; next, that the methods of democracy used by the States are
crude and ineffective, and that they hamper the moral and intellectual
development of what is still the greatest, most promising of human
communities; and thirdly and finally, that the American sense of
justice is clumsy and confused. It does not dispose of such criticisms
to say that they come from a poor boob, or that all the world outside
the States is just a wilderness of poor boobs. True, no doubt, as that
is, and salutary as it is to repeat it, nevertheless it leaves the
American defects untouched.
The people of the United States has become very rapidly in the last
fifty years the most secure, wealthy, and powerful nation of the world.
It is high time its citizens displayed a self-complacency commensurate
with this achievement. It is all very well for a touchy little people
on the defence to fly up at the mere hint of criticism, but not for
the proud citizens of a great empire. Far be it from me to institute
vexatious comparisons between Europe and America, but there does
seem to be a clearer sense of the freedoms and frankness permitted
in discussion on this side of the Atlantic. It has been possible in
the past for Americans to discuss the rights and wrongs of British
justice in Ireland, India, and Egypt without provoking vehement denials
of their liberty to do so. The late President Roosevelt offered the
most striking and uninvited advice to English liberal thinkers upon
the subject of the Empire. When the British liner, the _Titanic_,
went down, the Americans, I recall, held officers and crew for a
perfectly gratuitous inquiry before releasing them for the proper legal
investigation by the British Board of Trade. There was no fuss on these
occasions about “alien intervention” in England, we appreciated the
advantage of having our concerns viewed from a fresh angle, and unless
we have touched sore consciences, I do not see why the simple response
of Bennett, Galsworthy, and myself to an American question should evoke
these present transports.
It was precisely because we were not American that we were invited to
give an opinion on the Braintree case.
Whatever may be the outcome of this present little affair, I am afraid
the Americans, like the rest of the world, must be prepared for an
increasing amount of criticism and intellectual and moral intervention
from foreigners. The world becomes more and more one community, and
the state of mind of each nation has practical reactions upon all the
rest that were undreamt of half a century ago. The administration of
justice in Massachusetts or Italy concerns me almost as much as the
administration of justice in London or Glasgow. Particularly when the
lives of aliens are involved. Belligerent teaching in the schoolbooks
of France or Germany or America, or a failure of China to unify and
protect itself against military adventurers, may lead to the deaths
of my sons and the destruction of nearly everything I hold dear about
me. The world becomes my village, and whether Senator Borah likes it
or not, part of me walks down Main Street and defies all America to
expel it. Conversely the voice of Senator Borah reverberates in Dunmow,
and is heard along the Maritime Alps. America is part of my spiritual
home and Old Glory one of my quarterings. I have a loyal feeling for
the American eagle. It is so loyal a feeling that I cannot bear to
think of that bird as anything but aquiline. I want to think of it as
that aspiring eagle with the open wings one encounters first on the
caps of the officials as one steams up the exhilarating approach to
New York. An eagle like a victorious invitation. I do not want to have
that vision replaced by the butt view of a proud but isolated ostrich,
invincibly immense, which has swallowed all the gold in the world and
is now keeping its head resolutely buried in the sand.
_16 October, 1927._
XXIV
FUEL-GETTING IN THE MODERN WORLD
Our modern world runs on fuel. It burns its way through the years. The
ancient civilizations made no such use of combustion. A few sticks
kept the pot boiling, and a bag of charcoal served the purposes of the
smith. Torches and oil lamps were convenient but not indispensable. Man
set fire to his world seriously only 200 years ago.
The tradition is, therefore, that coal and oil are commodities like
marble or leather, to be bought and sold in the same fashion, chaffered
over, refused, or withheld. Quite insidiously they have become
fundamental necessities for our social and economic order, but the old
ways of dealing remain. We still treat them as incidental commodities.
Perhaps the old methods have hung about too long. We may be on the road
to very profound changes in our dealings with oil and coal.
In America the more prominent issue is oil. Both here in England
and in America, “Oil,” Mr. Upton Sinclair’s book, in spite of his
peculiar methods of advertisement, has crept insidiously and surely
to a success. I find quite a number of my friends reading it. I see
strangers reading it in the train. Evidently people want ideas about
oil. In Britain the more urgent aspect of the fuel question is the
coal-mining issue. The General Strike, following the coal lock-out of
1926, settled nothing. In the Labour débâcle that ensued the miners
lost most of the points they had fought for; they had to accept longer
hours and a lower standard of living, and the industry readjusted
itself to the conditions of a declining industry. It has continued to
decline. There remain great numbers of miners unemployed, and profits
are unsatisfactory. Coal trouble is becoming the chronic ailment of
Great Britain.
There was a phase in the British coal drama when coal production
was subsidized. I believe that for the effective, permanent
re-establishment of British prosperity there must be a return to
subsidized coal. It is the only way of reconciling two otherwise
incompatible needs, an abundant cheap supply of the various sorts of
coal needed for British shipping, transport, and industrial activities,
and a decent standard of life for the body of men needed to win the
coal.
No doubt, to those who hold to the old-fashioned way of regarding
coal as something you can do without and still play your part in life
it is shocking to think of the community paying for coal to be sold
again at a loss, for that is what the subsidy amounts to, but to any
one who grasps its altered status as a social necessity it will be no
more shocking than the abolition of toll-gates and the provision of
high-roads at the common expense.
Suppose the coal supply firmly established on a subsidized basis
and the subsidy counterbalanced by a countervailing duty on the
export of coal--because there is no reason whatever why the British
taxpayer should pay in part for the coal consumed by the foreign
industrialist--what would be the effect upon the community as a whole?
Manifestly there would be a cheapening of transport, a stimulation
of the metallurgical industries, a cheapening of the cost of power,
and either a reduction of wages or an elevation of the standard of
life of the ordinary worker, enabling him to spend the money he would
save on coal on manufactured goods. I cannot imagine anything but a
general stimulation of the entire economic life of the community.
Cheaper transport and cost of production would invigorate the country’s
competitive export of manufactured goods and in its turn react upon the
coal industry with an enlarged demand for coal.
Naturally a subsidized undertaking will mean a controlled industry;
there is not the slightest benefit to the community if either coal
owners or coal merchants are allowed to intercept and absorb the
subsidy. A subsidy means compounded royalties, restricted profits, and
scientific direction. And as naturally the recognition of coal-mining
as a public service will change the status of the miner.
The present condition of the mining worker has been the result of slow
developments, and like most social arrangements that have grown up
slowly, it is a thoroughly bad complex of laws, customs, and tolerated
conventions. Only usage blinds us to the absurdity of a system by which
a man who has specialized in coal-winning, and who is ready and willing
to go into the mine and win his stint of coal for the community, should
not have every facility given him to discharge his task. It should
be possible to calculate the cost to the community of a miner from
his birth to his death; it should be possible to charge up to him his
schooling, housing, keep, holidays, recreations, police protection,
medical attendance, funeral, grave, and everything else he requires and
consumes. Against this it should be possible to set as an equivalent so
many tons of this or that sort of coal. If he wins less than that he is
a parasite; if more, he is robbed. And equally it should be possible to
make his stint of coal-winning easy and convenient for him, instead of
leaving it as laborious, uncertain, vexatious, and humiliating as it is
now.
It is the business of a civilized community to determine that
equivalent between coal and consumption, and arrange for the miner
to justify his existence as a consumer as easily and pleasantly as
possible, slowly or quickly as he chooses. If he sees fit to work like
the devil, long spells and all the year around, and get it over and be
assured of all his elemental needs thereafter for the rest of his life,
while he meditates, goes or walks, paints pictures or writes poetry,
he ought to be able to do so without making existence intolerable for
a fellow-miner with a more leisurely conception of his life-work. A
modern civilized community ought to be able to cater for its labourers
on such flexible terms. It ought to command sufficient intelligence to
estimate ahead what it will want in the way of coal, and enlist its
miners on long-term agreements for a definite amount of work that will
make them as safe in their jobs as civil servants.
We are so used to the scrambling quality of life, as we know it, to
the desperate grabbing and holding of scraps of property, to strikes
and lock-outs, to unemployment, fluctuating prices, speculative
cunning, uncertainty, servitude, and frustration, that few of us
succeed in realizing that these things are not now necessary. However
unavoidable they may have been for mankind in the past, they are not
now unavoidable. The chancy and disagreeably adventurous way we live is
not the only possible nor the best way of living. It is a phase out of
which our race may pass.
The reason why our community cannot figure out what the life task of
a coal-miner should be is simply because it does not know enough about
things that can be quite effectively known. It cannot figure out even
its broad staple needs and supplies and be certain of them as yet,
even within quite wide limits. So we have to guess and gamble our way
through life, to overcharge and underpay and “keep on the safe side.”
We hoard if we can. We think ourselves lucky if we can saddle the
world with a debt for the loan of our hoarded accumulations. We cannot
imagine freedom and independence except in the rôle of a well-secured
creditor. Again, we have to fall back on the gold standard for monetary
purposes because we have not the necessary facts for a regulated
currency, although theoretically a regulated currency is a far more
desirable thing than a currency resting finally for its sanctions on
a brute quantity of gold. We not only live in anxieties that could
be dispelled; by virtue of this same ignorance, we sicken and die of
diseases which might have been prevented or cured. We are still as much
the prey of chance as any other animals. All our lives are worried,
shadowed, belittled, and laid waste by the preoccupations arising out
of the lack of that comprehensive knowledge without which the sane and
comprehensive direction of human affairs is impossible.
Now what I am writing here of life, its present uncertainty and
disorder, is to be found in the lamentations of the preacher and in the
pessimistic literature of the Egypt of five thousand years ago. The
reader of Breasted’s “Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient
Egypt” will find passages about human life that say exactly what my
last paragraph repeats. But what is new, what we have clear in our
minds to-day, is the growth of a body of knowledge charged with the
promise of order and assurance to replace these ancient distresses.
Then, indeed, the world was limitless and dreams of control absurd.
Now, in the last three centuries, we have begun the surveying and
mapping of the whole planet. After contours and topography follow
geological surveys, biological exploration, climatology, economic
appraisal. As the surveyor advances the prospector disappears. We are
bringing all the material basis of human life into the sphere of the
calculable. We are numbering the people, always an annoying process
to the ancient gods. In quite a few years we shall know within quite
small limits the population of the world and its rate of increase;
we shall know, within the limits of a few hundred tons, its annual
requirements of wheat and rice, steel and coal, cotton and wool. We
shall know how and where to get these and all other staple commodities.
We shall be able to work out the whole processes of getting and
distributing the material requirements of human life upon lines not of
commercial adventure, but clear certitude. We shall have a grip upon
disease, of which our present attempts at public and world hygiene
are only the faintest first intimations. And the little scattered
band of meteorologists who now observe and guess about the weather
will have been reinforced and developed into a big, competent, world
organization, which may even forecast our crops and anticipate our
shortages within a continually closer margin of accuracy years ahead.
Do not the achievements of science in the past two centuries fully
justify what I have written here? And if this is so, and if there is
this clear prospect of a world in which we can plan out the general
activities of mankind on estimates, trustworthy to within a very small
fraction of the total amount, is it conceivable that any of the main
disputes of our present economic world-scramble will survive? You may
call me a dreamer in these matters, but it is not I who dream, it is
you, who are not properly awake to what man has done and what man can
hope to do.
I wish my wakefulness was more contagious than it seems to be.
Britain the Sleeper mutters “Muddle through” in its sleep, and will
not open its eyes to the facts that are in the same room with it.
The heavy industries of the old country grow heavier and heavier.
Unless those drowsy eyelids can be lifted, unless Britain can rouse
itself--within a very brief term of years--to meet the irksome demand
for more knowledge, more science, and more imaginative courage, it
must sink into a permanently inferior position to the United States
of America and to a renascent Central Europe. Leadership is for those
who will lead, and the direction in which the world has to be led
is manifestly towards the systematic control and stimulation of the
production of basic substances in the common interest. Production
primarily for profit in raw materials and basic substances, like
the mere commercialization of the transport services, works out in
the crippling of the higher types of industrial life. The movement
for the conservation of forests and other national resources from
the recklessness of unbridled private enterprise in America, with
which President Roosevelt identified himself, was merely one early
recognition of what is now becoming a widely recognized truth. With
the development of material civilization and the accumulation of exact
knowledge, the concern of the commonweal spreads into fields that were
once left quite legitimately to adventurous exploitation. For Great
Britain, in respect to fuel, the issue is now a vital one. Either she
must prepare to subsidize and then nationalize her coal supply, or
she must face the clear prospect of retrocession from her position of
leadership in the world.
_30 October, 1927._
XXV
THE MAN OF SCIENCE AND THE EXPRESSIVE MAN. TO WHOM DOES THE FUTURE
BELONG? SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT IVAN PAVLOFF AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I have before me as I write a very momentous book. It is entitled
“Conditioned Reflexes,” and it is by Professor Pavloff, of Petrograd.
It is not an easy book to read but it is not an impossible one, and
when one has read, marked, and learnt, one finds--I find--that one
has at least attained the broad beginnings of a clear conception of
the working of that riddle within us which is perpetually asking
us riddles, the convoluted grey matter of the brain. The book is
translated by Dr. Anrep of Cambridge and it is published by the Oxford
University Press with the assistance of the Royal Society.
Quite apart from its subject this book is a very reassuring book for
those whose hopes for the future of mankind are bound up with the
steadfast growth of scientific knowledge. It gives in broad outline
the substance of nearly twenty-five years of wonderfully imagined and
marvellously conducted research. That research was carried on in a city
that changed its name twice, from St. Petersburg to Petrograd and from
Petrograd to Leningrad; it saw flood, famine, war, and revolutions;
there was a great shortage of medicaments and scientific apparatus, and
one winter the whole city was well-nigh frozen to death through want of
fuel and people went out after midnight to steal the wood blocks out of
the roadway for their stoves, but the work went on. It is true there
appears a gap in the number of publications cited from between the
years 1917–1920, but this was due largely to the interruption of the
paper supply in these years. The deficiency was more than made up by
the reports of results that came out in the subsequent years when the
tide of paper flowed again.
There is something vastly heroic in this persistence and something
profoundly significant in the respectful cessation of political
violence in the precincts of the Institute of Experimental Medicine.
It happened that when I was in Russia in 1920 I visited Professor
Pavloff and saw something of his work. I remember that the corners of
his study were piled high with potatoes and turnips he had grown in a
patch of earth outside his laboratory, and dug up and brought in. He
remarked casually that that was how he took his exercise nowadays, and
that was all the notice he gave to the immense political and social
stresses of the world about him. He went on to talk about the more
permanent realities with which he was dealing and took me through the
ingenious building in which he and his little band of assistants were
conducting their researches. I saw the dogs on which he was working.
They did not seem to be in the slightest degree uncomfortable; they
wagged their tails, and he patted their heads. He explained as much of
his methods and ideas as he thought my unspecialized mind could grasp.
He was a brownish-faced, gentle-mannered man, with brown eyes and a
general cast of countenance that reminded me of portraits I had seen of
the late Lord Kelvin. He showed a lively interest in the explorations
he was conducting, and he did his best to make his points clear to
me, without any attempt to astonish me by any sudden strangeness of
statement or epigrammatic gymnastics. He was pleased, I think, to get
some one from outer Europe again asking him questions. He spoke of the
work of other people and particularly of Sherrington without any note
of rivalry or attempt to caricature; he spoke of them as collaborators
and collateral explorers in this great work of illuminating some of the
obscurest niches of the world of reality. Never in a moment in his talk
did he seem aware of anything besides his subject, and least of all
was he aware of himself. He seemed in another world from any thoughts
of personal competition. He embarked upon no praises of Sherrington.
Merely he spoke with respect and interest of his work. To have raised
the question of whether he thought Sherrington or himself the greater
or more remarkable would have been like letting a drop of ink or mud
fall into a glass of clear wine.
My sense of the man’s simple greatness returns to me as I read this
skilful patient piecing together of fact and inference and question,
doubt, experiment and conclusion for the third of a lifetime, which
supplies the matter of this book. And as I read I am reminded of a
vehement outbreak I recently provoked in another great man I know, a
man for whom I have an admiration and affection at least as strong as
I have for Professor Pavloff, though my admiration is of an entirely
different quality, George Bernard Shaw. I recall that Professor Pavloff
is one of the greatest of vivisectors--“these scoundrels” Shaw called
them--and that according to Shaw it is his habit to boil babies alive
and see what happens. Queer that one fine man should write so of
another! In that screaming, wildly foolish denunciation of vivisection
to which I refer, Shaw, just to give his readers an idea of what
vivisection meant, described one of the villains as chopping off the
paws of a dog one after the other to observe its behaviour, and as
being quite surprised to find that after his fourth operation there
were no more paws. And suchlike platform stuff.
It is interesting to compare the reality of vivisection as it is given
in this book. For the most part the amount of operation performed
involved far less temporary suffering for the animals than lies at the
door of any “dog-lover” who has the ears of a Belgian griffon docked,
and the vast mass of the experiments and observations recorded required
as a primary condition that the animals should be altogether calm and
comfortable. The distraction of even a slight pain or any alarming or
distressful circumstance would have inhibited altogether the delicate
responses to stimuli, upon which this great mass of new knowledge
has been erected. I know it will outrage the dearest feelings of the
anti-vivisector to say this; it is his peculiar delight to gloat upon
imagined “tortures,” but this book is available for the judgment of the
intelligent reader. One dog Pavloff describes incidentally as jumping
into the stand, impatient for what any hearty anti-vivisector would no
doubt describe as its “torment.”
But when I set out to write this article I did not intend to
touch so definitely as this upon the delicate sensibilities of the
anti-vivisectionist, probably the most indefatigable and fiercest of
all epistolatory creatures. That issue is a little off my present
track. I had in mind the remarkable contrast of these two eminent
figures, both in their way commanding my admiration and both in their
way very sympathetic to me. I come somewhere between them; in my
humbler measure I partake a little of both. I do not know what Pavloff
thinks of Shaw, probably about as much as he does of the “proletarian
science” of Moscow, but we have Shaw’s ringing “Scoundrel!” for Pavloff
properly on record. I have been amusing myself for some minutes with
that old game of the One Life-Belt. Probably you know and play that
game. You put it as a problem rather after the fashion of the Doctor’s
Dilemma; if A. is drowning on one side of a pier, and B. is equally
drowning on the other, and you have one life-belt and cannot otherwise
help, to which of the two would you throw it? Which would I save, for
example, Pavloff or Shaw?
I do not think it would interest the reader to give my private answer.
But while I was considering it I was manifestly obliged to ask myself,
“What is the good of Shaw?” And what _is_ the good of Shaw? Pavloff
is a star which lights the world, shining down a vista hitherto
unexplored. Why should I hesitate with my life-belt for one moment?
To begin with the elements so to speak, Shaw writes English
extraordinarily well. I feel a sort of benefit of clergy attaches to
that alone. Pavloff translated by Anrep is rather clumsy reading and
I doubt if that is altogether the fault of Anrep. I doubt if Pavloff
is much of a writer. Sometimes I try to write English, and I am always
keenly interested in the writing of English, and I am even interested
in the writing of stuff about the writing of English, and I know enough
of the business to know how beautifully it is done by Shaw. And he
walks about writing in a little note-book, avoiding passers-by with
remarkable skill, and presently he produces, out of his head and out
of his vivid misconceptions about life, shows for the theatre of the
brightest, liveliest, freshest quality, so that there is nothing quite
like them in the world. “John Bull’s Other Island” and “Androcles
and the Lion” and “Saint Joan” float off from reality like vast soap
bubbles, reflecting it in vivid patches, curved and brightened,
iridescent and delightful. And he talks incessantly, and a larger
proportion of that talk is fun of the very best quality than is found
in the talk of any one else on record.
Moreover, he has invented a most amusing personal appearance: he is
an adept at gravely absurd conduct, and his extraordinary industry
in sitting to painters, photographers, and sculptors will fill the
museums of the future with entire galleries of his portraits, medals,
statues, and busts. All the rest of us will be rare in comparison. The
likeness varies with the artist, and it is possible that contrasted
series of these representations will be ascribed to different
contemporary reputations which have been less sedulous for physical
record. It will be incredible that one single man could have sat so
persistently. Some will perhaps be attributed to eminent vivisectors
otherwise undocumented. So Shaw may even defeat his end of individual
assertion and become the general type of our time. But certainly he is
the greatest living artist in expression, in self-expression, and he
does it so excellently that it seems ungracious to raise the question
whether he has ever had anything but himself to express.
But with the life-belt in my hands and Pavloff, so to speak,
splashing, it is a question I must raise. What has Shaw added to our
arsenal of ideas, to our store of knowledge, to the illumination of the
world? Has he been more than a confusing commentary, a gesticulating
shadow athwart light not his own? He has been a prominent Socialist.
What is there in Socialist thought, what contribution, or correction,
or deflection, to which one can attach the initials of G. B. S.?
He has been a mighty reverberator for Samuel Butler’s self-consoling
detraction of Darwin. He has restored the inheritance of acquired
characters by proclamation, and he has co-operated with that equally
vigorous expressionist, Mr. Belloc, in proclaiming Darwinism--whatever
it is--extinct. He has made a free use of the phrase the “Life Force,”
but what meaning he attaches to these magic words is unknown. He
expands the word Will on the lines of various nineteenth-century
German thinkers. He seems to be suggesting at times that man can do
anything by merely willing it, but whether that is possible on any
dietary or only upon vegetarian nourishment, and whether it can be
done without apparatus, is never clear. He has an aversion from sex
and children which may be either Butler or temperamental, and he seems
to want mankind to try laying parthenogenetic eggs, and coming out of
them fully whiskered. I doubt if there will ever be this will to the
egg on the part of mankind. And in his wonderful prefaces--as good as
the best Dublin-brewed talk they are--he has made a vast jungle of
shrewd commentary and dogmatic statements that collectively amount to
somewhere in the region of nothing at all. It is interesting to read
these prefaces and the rest of his abundant controversial literature,
and note how inevitably he slides away from any general question to
issues of motive. If he has no visible antagonist, he invents one. Just
as he shirked all the issues of vivisection by describing imaginary
monsters of stupidity and cruelty, so always he has dressed a punching
dummy for every view he has assailed. It is not because he is a
dishonest controversialist, but because he is incurably a dramatist,
that he does this. The poverty of his abstract thought assures the
excellence of his plays.
People call him a thinker. I doubt any consecutive thinking at all.
Most intelligent men have their ideas in some sort of grouping and
order, even if it is no more than the order of a patchwork quilt,
but I do not find even that much coherence in Shaw. His ideas are a
jackdaw’s hoard picked up anyhow and piled together anyhow. Knowing
my Shaw fairly well, and knowing his surroundings, I think I could
trace to some intimate personal influence nearly everything he has
ever held. This he got from Samuel Butler, and that from Webb; this
he expanded from a chance remark by Haden Guest, and that was loaded
into him by one of Mussolini’s sedulous propagandists. The worst
element in his mental make-up is a queer readiness to succumb to the
poses of excessive virility. His soul goes down before successful
force. He exalted the maker of enormous guns in “Man and Superman”;
he has rejoiced in the worst claptrap of the Napoleonic legend; now
he is striking attitudes of adoration towards the poor, vain, doomed
biped who is making Rome horrible and ridiculous to all the world.
When it comes to the torture of intelligent men, to vile outrages on
old women, to the strangulation of all sane criticism and an orgy of
claptrap more dreadful than its attendant cruelties, this vituperative
anti-vivisectionist becomes an applauding spectator. So he is welcomed
to Italy and fêted in the sunlit streets along which other less
fortunate intellectuals have been hurried through the darkness to
an ignominious death. What does it matter to him that the shadow of
destruction creeps closer and closer to so great a man as Ferrero?
What does it matter that the soul of a whole people is dishonoured and
bowed and bent? To him it does not matter, because his thought is too
trifling to apprehend the threat this triumph of base violence conveys
to the whole world of man. He is taken and subdued by posturings that
outdo his own, and his political thinking, like his thinking about life
and medicine, brings him at last to no better end than a defence of
impudent quackery.
Empty he is as few of my contemporaries are empty--yes; but he echoes
most sonorously in his own cathedral-like emptiness, and his outward
effect is striking and entertaining, not simply to himself, but to
us all. He resembles an iridescent film upon the pool of life, and
Pavloff, a great stone built in and built upon, and so completely
incorporated that his name may have become hardly more than a name,
widely forgotten. To the future Shaw will have contributed nothing,
and yet he may be harder to forget. We can know what Pavloff knows
now if we will do the necessary reading of him, but a hundred years
hence industrious students may still be discussing whether Shaw meant
this or whether he meant that, or whether he meant anything at all.
Unless, that is, still more Shavian Shaws, still emptier, still more
resonant and preposterous, have swamped their attention by that time
and obliterated him altogether.
Empty and sometimes intensely vexatious, and yet I think that like
Belloc he is playing a very necessary rôle in the intellectual world.
Scientific men are apt to forget their obligations to the general
intelligence of mankind. Though nobody acknowledged the indebtedness,
it was Belloc as much as any one who shook up the biologists at the
recent meeting of the British Association to tell us less mumblingly
than they have done for some time how matters stood with them about
Natural Selection, Darwin and the Origin of Man. And while I find
reading Shaw is like shooting rapids in sunshine, Pavloff-Anrep,
though, as Baedeker puts it, “rewarding,” is very heavy going, a deep
dark gorge of thought. I wish men of science would express themselves
better. Scientific inquiry takes its workers into remote and lonely
places where they do a little lose the faculty of ordinary speech.
Our interest in scientific work and sound thinking might fade out
altogether if the mental irritation of these expressionists did not
keep our attention alive.
And with these few remarks, which I hope may prove helpful, I will hand
the life-belt to the reader and repudiate any further responsibility in
the matter.
_13 November, 1927._
XXVI
THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL. DIFFICULTIES OF THE MODERN NOVELIST
My distinguished and, I gather from a convenient autobiography,
incomparably clever junior, Lord Birkenhead, has recently been abusing
me in speech and book. With the deep parental bay mingles the sharp
undergraduate bark of Lord Furneaux, his promising son. It seems to be
a family affair. Some answer is desirable. I do not see why I should
pretend to a high and mighty line with these gentlemen and affect a
disregard I do not feel. What they have to say is interesting and worth
discussing.
Lord Birkenhead would be impossible in America; the American lawyer at
his wickedest is still a pompous concealing sort of figure, but Lord
Birkenhead has displayed a disregard of personal dignity that verges on
the outrageous. He is the gamin of Lord Chancellors, the bright promise
of a better age when, in the midst of robes and dignities, the man will
be, if anything, rather more the man for “a’ that.” No public figure in
America would dare to bend and unbend like our Lord Birkenhead.
This biography I speak of (“Lord Birkenhead,” by “Ephesian”), since
it contains precise details of its hero’s early earnings, anecdotes
of incidents at which “no reporters were present,” and so forth,
must either have been written from his direct inspiration or by some
intensely familiar spirit, and it exhibits as smart a specimen of the
“Card” type as the world can ever honestly wish to see. No end of a
fellow he is, and we are told with immense detail and appreciation how
he called Judge Willis to his face in his own court a “garrulous old
county court judge,” and snapped back at a witness who had mentioned
the village idiot, “I see--a relation.” Much more of such brilliance.
Among the cherished testimonials--they began early, for the wet-nurse
came near to foretelling the Woolsack and school governors said, “Watch
him!”--I find myself on record as declaring that he is “the greatest
man in England.” If I did I was unconscious at the time or talking of
somebody else. But manifestly there are lots of other people who did
say it. Mr. Asquith, “in the presence of Mr. Balfour,” came near it,
and it will be easy to substitute a better name for mine in a later
edition of this revealing book.
Lord Birkenhead, one learns, is not only a great success as a lawyer
and politician, but a very important figure in literature, and by way
of proof I have before me a copy of his “Law, Life and Letters,” two
handsome volumes, as dignified anyhow as paper and print can make
them. They are mostly what a journalist would call articles, but I
suppose for a writer of Lord Birkenhead’s standing we should substitute
“essays.” One or two I judge to be after-dinner speeches rather too
faithfully reported. They are done in a prose of the kind that in the
last century was known as _Telegraphese_ and carried to its highest
levels by Mr. George Augustus Sala, a fine fabric of ornate but
familiar phrases which produces an effect of strength and dignity and
makes little demand for close attention upon the reader. Occasionally,
indeed, one finds an arresting sentence. For example, in discussing the
murder of a girl of sixteen, he writes: “The mother of the murdered
child stated that, although living with her at the time of death, the
girl had been brought up by another person whom her husband on his
deathbed had asked to undertake the guardianship of her child.” That
pulls up the reader for a moment and makes him think. But for the most
part the stuff flows without an interruption, easily and as one might
expect, like the procession of a judge on circuit with the street well
cleared ahead.
Much of his matter concerns the greater figures of our time, “The
Truth about Margot Asquith” or “Milestones of My Life,” for example.
Other of the articles deal with the practice of the law in its spicier
aspects, and others again with political issues. I have heard about
Lord Birkenhead from his youth up as a great controversialist, and
I refresh my mind with a brilliance--“brilliant” is his peculiar
adjective, and I make no apology for its frequent repetition--that
middle age has scarcely dimmed. To a protest that the Bolsheviks are
not all robbers and assassins, for example, he retorts in big print
that has all the effect of a deafening shout, “THEY ARE.” Simply
that. How warmly every one who agrees with him will agree with him on
that point! In a crowded court or a public meeting I have no doubt
that shout would have been decisive; only a still more energetic man
with very stout lungs indeed would have had a chance against it. But
the written word does not triumph and pass; it remains for further
consideration. This is just one of several passages where I find the
habits of the successful speaker carrying the less habituated writer
beyond the recognized discretions of the writer’s art, of which he is
an amateur, brilliant, of course, but an amateur. It is not for me
to question the truth about the lady he calls Margot Asquith, or to
comment upon the rough fun of the law courts over this or that wretched
misdemeanour, but I have a certain claim to discuss a literary matter.
He embarks upon criticism and lays down the law about the novel, and
I find it pretty bad law. When this glittering torrent of prose comes
into my own quarter and even with a certain clamour invades, so to
speak, my individual courtyard, I feel that any failure to put in an
appearance might be misconstrued.
Lord Birkenhead, brilliant advocate that he is, confuses the issue a
little by personal invective, but it is easy to disentangle it again.
The issue is whether it is permissible and desirable, in a novel of
contemporary life, to name and let one’s characters discuss, as I have
done in “The World of William Clissold” and “Meanwhile,” prominent
living people. The irrelevant attack consists in the assumption that
this was done deliberately and meanly as a whet to promote the sales
of the books. He represents me as “persuading” my publisher to call
attention to those personalities, out of which I “make my living.”
This is evidently a naïve transference of Lord Birkenhead’s own
relations with his publisher and his public to my case, and he will
no doubt learn with surprise that I have practically nothing to do
with the methods of the firm to whom my agents, Messrs. A. P. Watt &
Son, nowadays entrust the issue of my books in Great Britain, and that
in the case of the two novels in dispute my only intervention was a
protest at the stress that was being put upon the matter in question.
But I will not dwell upon that. The question of real names and real
people in a book is of much more general interest, and since it affects
the whole future of the novel, it is worth some further discussion.
The tradition of the English novel is, I admit, dead against me in
this matter. The English novel as we knew it some fifty years ago was
excessively pseudonymous. This extended not only to persons but places.
The lovers would meet in “the little village of X.” Hardy wove a fabric
of fictitious lives across Wessex, and even such respectable places as
Dorchester and Winchester take on an _alias_, and add the excitement of
identification to the natural interest of the story. I have never been
able to share in that excitement. I do not see why a town exactly like
Dorchester, intended to be recognized as Dorchester, and identified
with Dorchester, should not be called Dorchester forthwith and have
done with it, just as I do not see why Mr. Arnold Bennett, when he
writes about the Five Towns, does not call Burslem, Burslem, and
Newcastle, Newcastle. The older novelists so far as place names went
were more downright. At all times and in all novels whatever London
has remained London and Paris Paris. I recall no instance of London
being masked as Georgetown, let us say, the great capital of Bingland,
or Paris being thinly veiled as Seineville. Dickens varied in his
practice, but his disposition was to be frank about his topography. Mr.
Tulkinghorn was killed fairly and squarely in an identifiable house in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Took’s Court is hardly so much disguised as
misspelt Cook’s Court.
To-day the scene of the English and American novel becomes realistic
in everything but the actual foreground. There we have the parlour of
No. 7, Blank Street, or the chancel of the parish church of Dashington,
but the trains run fair and square into Liverpool Street or Paddington,
and the eloping pair get off the afternoon boat at Boulogne and catch
the train to Paris in strict accordance with the time-table. If the
heroine sticks her head out of the carriage at Grosvenor Road and says
“Good-bye, dirty old London,” no Lord Birkenhead hectors the author
for “making a living” by an illegitimate and unjust criticism (thrust
into the mouth of a character who is a mere mask for himself) of the
cleanest, etc., etc. The common sense of the reading and critical
public has long ago accepted the necessity of putting “real places”
into fiction under their proper names and of admitting comment on and
discussion of them. Why should there be any objection to the same
thing being done with the cardinal figures in the contemporary social
landscape?
To answer that is to realize very extensive changes that are in
progress in the common texture of life to-day. In the days of Jane
Austen it was possible to write a novel, giving the mental life of
decent folk in England, with not a glance at political, social, or
economic changes. Life and its processes had such an air of established
stability upon her countryside that it was possible for her to ignore
the battle of Waterloo and disregard the infinitely remote social
distresses of manufacturing England. Life went on inside a frame of
public events so remote that no connection was apprehended between the
two. If the squire babbled politics, what he said mattered no more
than the odd things said by his lady when she had a fever. And even
in the great novels of the Dickens-Thackeray-George Eliot period, in
Flaubert, in the chief novels of pre-revolutionary Russia, the march of
large events was so remote that it could be still treated as the stars
or China or the structure of the atom are still treated to-day, as
irrelevant altogether. Even wars could be kept “off stage” in novels in
English, at any rate until 1914. When they come in, as the war in North
Italy comes into some of Meredith’s novels, they come in _externally_,
as scenery, as an uncontrollable outer event with which the action
of the novel has no connection. The common flow of human life--and
therefore the normal novel--was going on right up to the opening
decade of the twentieth century, with slight and negligible reactions
to formal government or conspicuous personalities. To-day that is no
longer true.
To-day, just as the world is growing smaller, as people say, because
communications grow more rapid, so also public and collective life is
growing intenser and penetrating the private individual life more and
more. We ordinary people are in closer touch with the direction of
affairs, and it with us. The personalities concerned are not only more
clearly and fully known, but they react more upon us. And the drive
of change is far more perceptible. Institutions and standards that
seemed to be established altogether and completely unchallengeable in
the novel of fifty years ago are now challenged and changing; and the
discussion of such changes, which was once unthinkable for ordinary
people, is now a determining factor in their lives. People like Lord
Birkenhead complain that in my novels, instead of picturing life, I
discuss it. I certainly have it discussed. It is impossible to picture
contemporary life without discussion. People who are not discussing
now are not alive. No doubt it is hard to report people thinking in
character as well as acting in character, and I admit I do it at times
atrociously, but it has to be done. I plead the pioneer’s right to be
clumsy. Better be clumsy than shirk the way we have to go.
I happen to have lived as a novelist through the dawning realization
of this change in the relations of private and public events, and to
have felt my way before I saw it clearly towards the new methods this
change has made necessary. I began, when I found that I wanted to
convey the social scenery and put in some of its more characteristic
peaks and prominences by the old-established method of the more or less
modified real person under a false name. I have found that method out.
It is an utterly rotten method. It had been practised by the masters
before me; compare, for example, the Marquis of Steyne in “Vanity
Fair.” Let me give quite frankly a particular case of my own. My chief
character in “The New Machiavelli” was an ambitious young man who came
into Parliament with the big Liberal wave in the opening decade of this
century. Such a young man was bound to get into some relations with
the Fabian Society and to be in touch with and meet and get points of
view from Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb. They all did. The influence of that
house in Grosvenor Road was immense. If that phase was to be left out
the story would get so out of drawing as to be unreal. Well, I hold now
that I ought to have put these two people into my novel by name, just
as I put in the Speaker or Palace Yard. They were just as much a part
of the scene. Then I should have treated them discreetly and properly.
People in my book might have abused them, or people might have praised
them; it would have been fair and square. But, under the influence of
the old tradition, I put in some people in the place of the Webbs,
rather like them, but not exactly them. These phantoms who were like,
but yet not identified with my friends, got worked into the story. One
was amused to invent things about them, and one did so because one had
released oneself from direct statement. They are not the Webbs, but
only Webby people. I succumbed to the temptation of making it rather a
lark. But every one recognized the “originals,” so what was the good
of the sham concealment? Every one said, naturally enough, that I had
made a malicious caricature. (In fiction all caricature is called
“malicious,” which is where Law gets the laugh of us.) Except Mr. and
Mrs. Webb, who took it very cheerfully and charmingly and refused to
make a quarrel of it to please their ardent friends. And there was a
Balfouresque Mr. Evesham too in that novel. And these quasi-Webbs and
this quasi-Balfour set all the hunters of “originals” agog to hunt
identifications up and down the wretched book. Heavens! the bore that
has been to me! For years I could not write a book without having half
the characters identified each with a dozen different “originals.” And
any figures left over at last, bless their hearts! were me.
The _roman à clé_ is not the way to handle the political novel. But
if we are not to put in prominent people under false names, we must
put them in under their own names or destroy the reality of the human
scenery altogether. There is nothing left for the novel nowadays but
crime and adultery, if public life, economic forces, and the highly
individualized personalities directing them are to be taboo. That is
how the novel has gone in France. I do not believe it is the way it is
going in England.
In brief, the difference between the modern novel and the novel of the
last century is this, that then the drive of political and mercantile
events and the acts of their directing personalities scarcely showed
above the horizon of the ordinary life, and now they do. My refined
contemporaries who explain to interviewers that there is nothing real
in _their_ novels are not really keeping close to simple humanity; they
are merely keeping on the old course while humanity turns into the new.
So it is that when my Lord Birkenhead comes home weary to his fireside
after calling some eminent fellow-lawyer an old fool, or deriding the
Labour Party, or insulting Russia, or otherwise bearing the heavy
burthen of imperial responsibilities, he no longer finds his former
pleasure in my work. He goes through “Clissold” and finds himself
mentioned, indeed, but not as “Ephesian” would do. He reads “Meanwhile”
and finds himself not mentioned at all. The way I deal with Mr. Baldwin
makes him indignant. I cease to be the solace of his exhausted mind.
He gives me up. He casts me aside and reads other novelists. He thinks
so little about me nowadays that he breaks out about it in speeches at
literary dinners and drags it into these physically imposing volumes.
I have become so unmentionable upon his domestic hearth that even the
shrill, small voice of Lord Furneaux echoes that magnificent disregard.
I hate not to be loved. I was happier in the old days when, on every
occasion of encountering Lord Birkenhead, he recited the same obvious
compliments. But I do not think the development of the modern novel
will be retarded very much by his aversion.
_11 December, 1927._
XXVII
IS A BELIEF IN A SPIRIT WORLD GROWING? WHY MANY SENSIBLE MEN
CONTINUE TO DOUBT AND DISREGARD IT. WHAT IS IMMORTALITY?
A number of people, including many whose intelligence and achievements
in other directions one is bound to respect, believe and carry on a
propaganda to spread their belief in a world of spirits, disembodied
human beings for the most part, in fact what we used to call ghosts,
which exists invisibly and intangibly side by side with our world of
commonplace things, but which is capable of slight but significant
physical and mental interference with this material, everyday, daylight
world.
This belief, or something very like it, has been held by a certain
number of people in nearly every age. One can trace it continuously
through the last three centuries. It has always been stoutly denied
by a considerable number of people and generally disregarded by the
mass of active human beings. In earlier times, the powers of the
spirits invoked by the necromancers seem to have been greater than
they are to-day. They could inflict serious physical injuries and
associate themselves with a cult of witches and warlocks, unpleasant
in their habits and now happily unfashionable. Then they were more
generally respected. They were respected rather than liked. The chief
solicitude of the believer seems to have been to find expedients to
keep them at a distance. But now they have mended their manners, and
the chief solicitude of a number of people seems to be to develop this
intercourse even at the price of very considerable fatigue and boredom.
Why is there so general a disregard now of allegations which, if
true, should have the profoundest reaction upon our whole lives? Sir
Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle ask this question in tones of natural
astonishment. They have produced evidence of the real existence of
this other world which they believe to be convincing. Sir Oliver Lodge
has drawn back the veil on a sort of sublimated Hampstead, and Sir
Conan Doyle has drawn back quite a number of veils. His latest book
records the communications of an individual named “Pheneas,” through
various media, to himself and his family, and he asks me to note the
extraordinary quality and significance of the mind of Pheneas thus
displayed. I am sorry to say I can find none of the qualities Sir Conan
seems to expect me to observe. Pheneas seems to me a platitudinous bore
and a reckless maker of vague promises. Ever since the end of 1922 he
has been promising wonderful changes for the better in human life and
knowledge, “the biggest thing in the earth’s history” and so forth.
Well, here is Christmas, 1927.
Now I hate to seem derisive of two such men as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
and Sir Oliver Lodge. I know something of the trade of story-writing,
and I acknowledge Sir Conan Doyle as a master. I can peep up at the
scientific achievements of Sir Oliver Lodge. But in this matter of
the ghosts they put the evidence before us and invite us to judge
for ourselves. _A priori_ I find their ghosts and their ghost worlds
incredible. And when they produce their evidence to convince me that
this queer extra-existence does go on, I am bound to confess I find it
unconvincing.
Now the fact that I find the ghost world revealed by these gentlemen
far less attractive than an everlasting peace does not prove that such
a world does not exist. It may be my fate to follow our old friend
E. W. Hornung into that world of vague featureless satisfaction and
hang about spots of “light” in order to transmit to earth through
unattractive strangers the startling news that “This is wonderful,” and
that I am “sorry and realize things” (never explicitly stated) now. I
may be brought to confess that “I like this place. There is peace here,
and beautiful vibrations. God bless you” (five times!), and suchlike
maunderings. But I want very sound evidence indeed that this dismal
substitute for the pungent liveliness of our present existence, its
tender and flaming moments and its sweet earthliness, awaits me, before
I resign myself to it, and so we come down to the material proofs.
I have done my best to sample the very large mass of records
available. No doubt I start with a bias against the evidence, and that
the reader must allow for, but I have been prepared to go on into the
details of any group of investigations that produced a _prima facie_
case. But I find that I am not given phenomena that I can scrutinize,
recall, and examine in any way that pleases me. I am asked to make
immense concessions before the evidence can be put before me. A person
called the Medium, it is explained, has to be considered. He or she is
the material vehicle of the phenomena. Most Mediums have been caught
cheating. This, I am to grant, may be due to a peculiar temperamental
weakness frequently associated with psychic gifts. Or to nasty, vulgar,
_bad_ ghosts.
I am to believe my eyes and ears. When a conjurer seems to me to take
a large new-laid egg out of the top of his head, I am allowed to say
that he has successfully deceived me without pretending to know how
the trick was done, but when an entranced Medium produces the pet name
of an old schoolfellow long deceased out of _his_ head, I am asked to
believe at once in all the explanations he gives of spirit controls,
high and low spirits and so forth, unless I can trace every step by
which he came to utter a name he had no right to know.
Moreover, I must go into favourable rooms for the phenomena and sit
for a long time in a light so bad that it is the next thing to complete
darkness. I must be still and not hostile. I must sit there until my
fagged attention wanders. Many people must sleep at séances. But they
never mention it. And dream. Possibly as they expect to dream. I must
not complain if after some hours of such horrible boredom nothing
ensues. I must be “fair” to the spirits and try again.
In some slightly incoherent way these moral and intellectual
revelations of the ghosts which reveal nothing, which at best
touch trivially upon quite minor matters in the intimate life, are
inextricably mixed up with queer material phenomena. These are
“materializations.”
Most Mediums are committed to these material phenomena, and by them
their reputations stand or fall. There is this “ectoplasm,” which is
our earthly foretaste of the wonderful loveliness of over there. Queer
stuff, sometimes queer-smelling stuff, is exuded by the Mediums in
the obscurity, often rather disagreeably. Its texture and appearance
varies very greatly. This exudation defies all our daylight experiences
of physical and chemical phenomena. It leaps in its character across
gulfs that it has taken normal life vast ages to traverse. It becomes
organized, in a few minutes, we are assured, as skin, muscle, nerve. It
takes on the character of limbs, of heads, of entire quasi-human beings
who move about.
Artists, like John Tissot, attending such séances have put on record
their impression of these exuded beings in all their dignity and
beauty. In Paris an International Metapsychic Institute has been
endowed for these experimentations, and the late Dr. Geley, a man of
high scientific standing, produced a considerable book giving cases in
which beautiful beings from another world have been exuded by Mediums,
snapshotted in all their beauty and returned again through the pores
and passages of the Mediums into that marvellous other world.
I have looked at Geley’s illustrations with interest. I note that the
hands of the Medium when they appear in these pictures do not seem to
be held as he says they were held. The head and face of a young woman
are visible projecting from the body of the Medium, and it is certainly
a very pretty face, rather of the Monna Lisa type, but when Dr. Geley
assures me that it is a substantial face, I find myself sceptical. The
eyes, the eyelids, the mouth and pose and expression of this being
coming into our world from the mysterious outside remain absolutely
the same throughout the séance in a series of photographs. But living
eyes move. Living lips breathe. Living eyelids quiver. These do not.
Living souls display interest. The more one looks at these pictures
the less like a living face that face is seen to be and the more like
a face painted or photographed on some distensible bladder. Dr. Geley
considers many possibilities of fraud, but he never considers the part
distensible pellicles may play in these manifestations. I find it more
intelligible to suppose that this was the particular device adopted
in this case than to suppose the hundred incredible things that are
involved if one accepts this appearance as a “materialized” ghost.
Years ago in “Love and Mr. Lewisham” I ventured to hint that the
possibilities of distensible skins were far too much neglected in the
criticism of spiritualistic séances. Dr. Geley’s ideas recall that idea
very vividly.
Another point about the material evidence for these phenomena upon
which Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir Conan Doyle and their associates rest their
belief in a whole second universe of immortal spirits interwoven with
our own, is its unprogressive and unconfirmatory character. As Dr.
Fournier d’Albe has recently pointed out in “Nature,” these phenomena
keep on repeating themselves with variations in the same vague and
inconclusive way without ever coming to a gripping demonstration.
In spite of the promises of “Pheneas,” they never get on. There
are changes in fashion, but no progress. With the tightening up of
observation and the introduction of photography and moulds, for
example, the noble and exalted figures put on record by John Tissot
give place to these pellicular faces, to grotesque and horrible
half-shapen things, and even to mere suggestively shaped lumps.
With the introduction of proper and complete photographic records
of the mutterings of entranced Mediums there will probably be a very
considerable diminution in the characteristic flavour that now makes
the recognition of the revenants so facile. The phenomena still abound,
but they deteriorate in quality even if they increase in abundance. We
are told of floods of spiritual light, and, behold, “Pheneas speaks!”
Wonderful prophecies are spoken of. Where are they?
For me the most fatal line of thought for all this stuff lies in the
steadily changing ideas of modern people about individuality. Beneath
all these necromancies is an assumption of the complete and incurable
integrity of the eternal human person from the rest of the universe.
The normal man, who is unaccustomed to analysis, assumes, it may be too
readily, that his self is something detached and _vis à vis_ with all
other things. It may end, but it cannot amalgamate.
But that may be no more than an innate delusion by which for our
lifetimes we carry on a fight for certain qualities and characteristics
against our environment. We are self-centred for the ends of
life, and we are most of us so richly endowed with self-love and
self-appreciation that we find it extremely difficult to imagine or
tolerate an existence turning on some other centre to which we may
be merely incidental and contributory. Yet we lay aside self in deep
sleep, and in our moments of greatest exaltation, and for most of us
who are over thirty, the self of childhood has already faded out for us.
We may be but parts of a larger whole, as the quivering cells in our
living bodies are parts of us. Perhaps the blood corpuscles in our
arteries have a dim sense of being living individuals in a crowded
thoroughfare. Perhaps we ourselves share a mightier immortality.
Perhaps the dear lives we have loved close to our own are finished and
done, not like something ended and cast away, but like beautiful deeds
done for ever and fruitful for ever.
I do not know how new these ideas are to the reader, but he will find
them set out very strikingly from the biological side in such a book as
Huxley and Haldane’s recent volume on “Animal Biology.” Along that line
he will come to conceptions of individuality and personality that will
make the idea of Pheneas, who lived at Ur before the time of Abraham
and was an Arab, “a magnificent man, honoured by all who knew him,” who
is “a great power” in the spirit world, and who now attends Sir Conan
Doyle’s lectures, directs his lecturing tours, advises in the choice of
a new house, tells him when to take a day off in bed, knows “Johanna of
Arc,” considers “the state of the churches a scandal,” and likes the
room dark, as infantile and inadmissible as the nursery belief in Santa
Claus or Old Bogey on the Stairs. “Pheneas” appears to be a new way of
spelling “Phineas,” and the learned tell us that Phineas is probably of
Egyptian origin and means negro. Racial snobbery perhaps accounts for
Pheneas claiming to be an Arab. This Pheneas, I venture to think, is an
impostor, wrought of self-deception, as pathetic as a rag doll which
some lonely child has made for its own comfort.
The men of Ur have lived and passed like the light upon the specks in
yesterday’s sunbeam that glowed upon my retina. Ur the ancient is dust
to-day, and mounds of rubbish and disused and worn-out things, and all
its individual lives are a fading memory. If ever a gentleman with the
un-Ur-like name of Pheneas enlivened its streets, he melted back into
the universal stream of being when his enlivening was done. But Ur was
a place of events and a seed of consequences that live and continue
so long as man endures. And we too live and pass, reflecting for our
moment, and in the measure of our capacity, the light and wonder of the
Eternal.
And is not that enough?
_25 December, 1927._
THE END
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