E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made
available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)



Note: Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive. See
      https://archive.org/details/ploughsharepruni00hous





PLOUGHSHARE AND PRUNING-HOOK

Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by

LAURENCE HOUSMAN






The Swarthmore Press Ltd.
(formerly trading as Headley Bros. Publishers Ltd.)
72 Oxford Street, London, W1

First Printed September, 1919




PREFACE


These papers, originally given as lectures, make no pretence to the
solution of the social or political problems with which they are
concerned. They indicate rather a certain standpoint or attitude of
mind from which these and like questions may be viewed, one which may
find acceptance with only a few of my readers. Even those who are
friendly may consider it too idealistic; those who are adverse will
employ other and harder terms.

With regard to that standpoint, while not wishing to avert criticism,
I would like to secure understanding; and if a few words of general
application can make that more possible it may be well to offer them
here.

Whether these lectures were primarily intended for the pulpit or
the platform it would be hard to say. Most of them have been given
in both places: and their drawback to some who heard them in the
former was (I have been told) their occasional tendency to make the
congregation laugh. That in itself is no special recommendation; it
takes so much less to make a congregation laugh than an audience.
Between the pulpit and the platform there is bound to be a difference;
even the fact that the preacher is normally immune from interjection
or debate tends to give to his statements a complacency which is not
always intellectually justified. And I remember well that two of these
lectures, after having been accepted in a church with only momentary
breaches of decorum, aroused elsewhere a storm of criticism and rebuke
which taught me, if I did not know it before, that a preacher occupies
a very privileged position, and can turn a church, if he chooses, into
a place of licence which elsewhere will not be accorded him.

But there is one point of difference between the pulpit and the
platform, between the exposition of religion and politics, which I
have never been able to understand. After all, in both cases, you
are dealing with and making your appeal to human nature; you may
be inciting it to virtue, you may be exposing its imperfections
and its faults. Why is it, then, that in the religious appeal
“conversion”--change of heart--stands for almost everything, whilst on
the political platform it is hardly reckoned with? It is so much easier
and safer to tell a congregation that they are “miserable sinners,” and
even to get them (perhaps conventionally) to say it of themselves, than
to tell it, or to extract a like confession from a political audience.
In a church we allow ourselves to be taken to task for “hardness of
heart and contempt of God’s word and commandments”; at a political
meeting it is only our opponents whom we so take to task, while of
ourselves and our party we have nothing but praise. It is on these
lines that a general election is run--revivalist meetings are held
throughout the country to denounce, not our own sins, but the sins of
others. Is it any wonder that it does not produce honest results?

Having said this, I have given the main standpoint of the papers
that follow. I do not believe that we can get home to our political
and social problems without self-accusation going quite as deep as
anything we say of ourselves in church or chapel--or without making
the application very direct and personal. There is no institution
in our midst, religious or secular, which does not stand quite as
much in need of conversion, change of heart, as do the individuals
for whose benefit or disciplinary treatment it is run. Our schools,
prisons, law courts, State institutions, ministries, diplomacies--all
those things on which we most pride ourselves--are just as liable,
perhaps more liable, to hardness of heart and contempt of God’s word
and commandments as we ourselves, for they are all part of us. It
is, indeed, one of our social devices to get rid of our consciences
by making them institutional. There is a certain class of mind which
thinks that if it has established legality it has established a right
over conscience--that if it has established order it has established
virtue. It has very often established quite the contrary--not virtue
but a State-regulation of vice; for if we can turn the hardness of our
hearts into a State-regulation, there we have vice enthroned; and
the callousness of the individual is enlarged and becomes a national
callousness, all the more difficult to get rid of, because it has
become identified with law and authority.

A very good (or bad) example of this was provided by the conduct of
the Bishops in the House of Lords a few years ago, when, to provide
the Government with a short cut out of its difficulties in dealing
with political prisoners (mainly caused by its refusal to treat them
as political prisoners) they allowed the rules of the House to be
suspended for the passing through all its stages in twenty-four hours
of the “Cat and Mouse Act.” Before long its operations horrified
them, and they signed (or some of them did) letters and memorials of
protest to the Government, asking for those operations to be stopped.
But not one of them would make a motion in the House of Lords for
the suspension or repeal of that Act for which, in so special a way,
they had made themselves responsible. By allowing it to become law
they had passed on the responsibility to others; and being thus quit
of it, the last thing probably that occurred to any of them was that
they themselves needed “a change of heart” in order to recover moral
integrity, or even political honesty.

And so, in these pages, law and authority are just as much questioned
as any other of our social features, on the direct assumption that
like produces like, and that a form of society which establishes,
encourages, or condones as “necessary” such defilements of human
nature as militarism, prostitution, sweated labour, slum-dwellings,
vengeful and unreformative punishment--having its heart so hardened as
to tolerate these--is not likely in its institutions and government
departments to have escaped from a reproduction of that attitude of
mind which makes them possible or regards them as a defensible solution
of the social problem.

The war has revealed much to us. It has shown how much society is
willing to afford for things which it considers worth while; and has
thus shown by implication those things which formerly society did not
think worth while--because its heart was not in them. It has had the
heart to spend colossal sums, to conscript millions of young lives to
death in defence of its organisation upon the lines of power against
a rival organisation willing to pay a similar price. It had not the
heart, in the days of peace and prosperity, to spend one-hundredth part
of that sum in organising even those institutions which it entirely
controlled, on the lines of love.

In our own midst, behind our sea-defences, we were still competitive,
jealous, grudging, parsimonious, wasteful, slow to mercy and of great
anger; and the prevailing characteristic of our civil contentions was
that no side would ever admit itself to be in the wrong, or consent
to think that a change of its own heart was necessary. And as the
very crown and apex to that mountain of self-deception, stood the
ministerial bench in Parliament. When blunders had been perpetrated and
became too obvious for concealment, we might occasionally be told that
to make mistakes was human, and that government did not claim immunity
from the operation of that law; but ministers would dodge, and shuffle,
and lie--suppress, or even falsify information to which only they had
access, rather than admit that they had “done wrong,” or open their
eyes to the fact that what they mainly needed was a change of heart.

And as with ministers as a whole, so as a whole with people. Those
elements of our national and international relations which were leading
steadily on to the great conflagration wherein we were all presently
to be involved, were those in which (our pride being implicated) we
stubbornly denied that any change of heart was necessary. The State
would not admit that its exaltation of the Will to Power over the Will
to Love was morally wrong; it would not admit that the alternative
came within the scope of practical politics; such teaching it left
to the advocacy of the Churches; and how half-hearted that advocacy
had become under pressure of the surrounding atmosphere of national
self-sufficiency was revealed when the war came upon us. Christianity
became almost mute; the one form of prayer, special to the occasion,
which the Church could not or would not use was that which alone is
truly Christian--prayer in identical terms both for ourselves and our
enemies. To pray that spiritual strength and moral virtue might be
given equally to us and them was beyond us--though in the granting of
it war would have ceased. We were not content to pray merely that right
should prevail--right, that most difficult of all outcomes to secure
when once, even for a just cause, nations embark on war--we insisted on
praying that we should prevail: and so (praying for things materially
established) not that we should prevail by a clean adherence to the
principles of democracy, but by the instrumentality of a corrupt and
secret diplomacy. And so before long--knowingly or unknowingly--we were
praying for the success of the secret treaties, for the successful
repudiation of the very principles for which we had set out to
fight, for the suppression of Ireland’s right to self-determination,
for the downfall of the Russian Revolution, which was insisting so
inconveniently on a belated return to first principles, and for other
doubtful advantages not at all synonymous with the coming of Christ’s
Kingdom. And we were praying for these things--just as really, though
we did not mention them by name--because our hearts were not set
on praying for the well-being of all nations and all governments
alike. Had we been capable of so praying, it would have meant that a
real change of heart had come to us, and that we were offering that
changed heart to all the world alike for the establishment of the new
International.

But to such change of heart we could not attain--could not even
consent; for it would have implied that there was something morally
wrong in our national institutions, in our government and our whole
social structure, which we would not admit. We would not admit that the
chemic elements of our own national life had conduced to war in common
with the chemic elements of the nation whose flagrant violation of
treaties had given us the immediate materials for a good conscience. We
fattened our hearts for war on the immediate material thus provided us,
ignoring those other materials which lay behind, and which we and all
other nations shared alike--though not necessarily in equal degrees.

And here we have the essential and fundamental difference between the
genuine profession of Christianity and the profession of Cæsarism.
For the follower of Christ to confess that he has done wrong, that he
needs a change of heart, redounds to his honour--he goes down to his
house justified. But when a nation has given itself to Cæsar, its main
idea of “honour” is to refuse to admit it has done wrong, or to accept
punishment; it may be beaten, crushed, but you cannot extract from it
a confession of moral wrong-doing; a sense of sin is the negation not
only of the German State system, but of all. A “proud nation” will not
own that it has been in the wrong, least of all when it embarks on war;
if it did it would go down to its house in dust.

Now that being, as I see it, the moral product of Cæsarism, in all its
degrees and kinds--whether autocratic or democratic Cæsarism--of the
setting up of the Will to Power over the Will to Love--it follows that
the change of heart which I predicate in these pages for the solution
of our social and international problems, is almost a Tolstoian
negation of the principle upon which the modern state system stands. As
such, it will be very unwelcome to many of my readers; but I hope that,
as here set down, I have made my standpoint plain. The ploughshare and
the pruning-hook are not mine to wield; I only point in the direction
where I think they are to be found.

L. H.




CONTENTS

                                          PAGE
Great Possessions                            1

Crime and Punishment                        26

Christianity a Danger to the State          48

The Salt of the Earth                       63

The Rights of Majorities                    85

Discreditable Conduct                      109

What is Womanly?                           135

Use and Ornament                           157

Art and Citizenship                        189

Conscious and Unconscious Immortality      218




GREAT POSSESSIONS

(1913)


“You never know yourself,” says Thomas Traherne, “till you know more
than your own body. The Image of God was not seated in the features of
your face but in the lineaments of your soul. In the knowledge of your
powers, inclinations, and principles, the knowledge of yourself chiefly
consisteth.... The world is but a little centre in comparison of you
... like a gentleman’s house to one that is travelling, it is a long
time before you come unto it--you pass it in an instant--and you leave
it for ever. The omnipresence and eternity of God are your fellows and
companions. Your understanding comprehends the world like the dust of a
balance, measures Heaven with a span, and esteems a thousand years but
as one day.”

To this statement of man’s comprehensive powers, a further one might
legitimately be added: You shall never know delight, till you delight
in more than your own body.

Man’s body being the crucible wherein such vast things come to be
tested, “Eternal Delights are,” says Traherne, in a further passage,
“its only fit enjoyment.”

His doctrine is remarkable in this, that while he tends to see in
everything a spiritual significance, and almost refuses to find beauty
in externals alone, he insists, nevertheless, that man was sent into
the world to enjoy himself, to stretch out for new acquisitions with
all his faculties, and take to himself great possessions. He regards
even the base and material form of conquest, expressed in endless
covetousness and fierce desire for possession, rather as a lower
type of what man should do and be, than of what he should not. Man’s
faculties were given him so that he might be divinely unsatisfied, ever
seeking more, ever assimilating more--regarding this earth not as a
vale of misery or a source of temptation, but as a very Paradise and
the true gate by which Heaven is to be attained and entered. “It is,
indeed,” he writes, “the beautiful frontispiece of Eternity, the Temple
of God, and the Palace of His Children.”

In this respect Traherne’s teaching is remarkably like the teaching of
William Blake, who regarded the mere outwardness of things as nothing
in comparison with their real inwardness, and yet was insistent that
here and now the spirit of delight and energy and enjoyment was the
true and undefiled way of life.

But this revolt against the monastic asceticism of the middle ages
stands far removed from any implication of sensual indulgence.

“My mind to me a kingdom is,” wrote one of our poets. “The kingdom of
Heaven is within you” gives in more scriptural phrase precisely the
same truth; and for its application to the conduct of life we have
this further scripture: “Lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth
where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and
steal, but lay up for yourselves treasure in Heaven where neither moth
nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal.”

And if it be a true boast that man’s mind is his real and legitimate
kingdom, then he must make that kingdom his Heaven, and within that
kingdom his treasure must be stored. It is there, by the power of
his mind more than by the power of his hands, that he must gather
and hold together his great possessions. We are accustomed to speak
in one single connection (with book-knowledge, namely, and with the
use of words)--of “learning things by heart.” It is only “by heart”
that we can ever really learn anything; only when our heart is in it
do we know and value a thing so as to understand it. The man whose
heart is not in his work is not a complete craftsman; he has not yet
learned the “mystery” of his trade. When men’s hearts were in their
work they called their trades “mysteries,” and did, as a consequence,
more excellently than we do now, when we make rather for the price of a
thing than for the joy of it.

Until we have joy in our labour, all labour is a form of waste--for it
wastes the bodies and souls which are put to it, and is destructive
of the most wonderful and valuable commodity which this planet has yet
produced--human nature. Labour without joy causes it to deteriorate;
and if a man is put to work wherein it is impossible to find joy, then
it were better for the wealth of the nation, as well as for the wealth
of his own individual soul, that he should be free from it.

And if that is impossible then let us not boast ourselves about our
“national wealth” or our great possessions. Nations whose wealth
and industries are built up out of the hard and grinding mechanical
labour of millions are not capable in any true sense of holding
great possessions, for at their very root is an enormous mass of
poverty--impoverished blood, impoverished brain, and impoverished
spirit.

If you would examine into the wealth of this or any other nation, look
not first at its temples or its arts, but into the bodies and minds
and characters--and the faculty for joy--of its men and women. And
if these, in the majority of cases, are below par, then the nation’s
wealth is below par also; its great possessions are overshadowed by the
greater dispossession which stands imposed upon the lives of its people.

The word possession itself has, in our use of it, a double
significance. When we speak of a man “having a possession,” we may mean
two things--either that he possesses, or else that he is possessed. A
man with a possession of jealousy, or hatred, lust or covetousness,
has no real possession or control of those things, but is himself
possessed or controlled by them, and so is rendered not stronger but
weaker--subject to a master other than himself.

Yet the man who is thus possessed is not conscious of any diminution
of his individuality, any reduction of personal power or prowess: he
does not discern from it any closing in of that round horizon to which
first his spirit was heir. For that by which he is possessed fills him
with such a pressure of emotion--its dynamic forces within him are so
strong, that he may actually imagine his personality to be thereby not
diminished but enlarged, and may (by reason of the violence with which
this distemper discharges itself on others) be cheated into the belief
that thus he secures for himself a broader base, raising his life to a
higher level of consciousness, instead of what actually is the truth,
turning it to consumption and waste--not opening his senses to new joys
but shutting them in; sharpening them indeed like teeth, but closing
them together with springs made not for expansion but for contraction,
so that they act like a trap destructive of the very life they would
control. And as with individual men, so with nations.

“Would you know a man,” said the Greek oracle, “give him power.” But
that, though sure as a test of others, is no sure means for enabling a
man to know himself. Power all down the ages has been the arch-deceiver
of mankind. Power which has set itself on great possessions has
brought disinheritance to the human race. We do not know what humanity
might be--how fair, how lovely, and of what good report--that great
beatific vision is still hidden from our eyes--mainly because we
have interpreted power in terms of possession; and, forcing others
to go without, in order that we ourselves may possess, we stand
to-day immeasurably poorer and weaker than we should have been had we
interpreted our power and our possessions differently.

For centuries of time (so long, indeed, as history records anything)
the leading nations of the world have gone out to conquer other nations
and to possess them. And how have they done so?--mainly by depriving
them of their liberty, by reducing their power of initiative, by
undermining and warping their racial characteristics. How much has
not that impoverished the history of the world and the real wealth of
nations? For people living in subservience or subjection, accepting and
not rebelling against it, breed less nobly as a consequence--they fail,
then, to produce great minds or to express themselves greatly in the
arts. Their life-potency is diminished; and we, holding them upon those
terms, are owners of a property which we squander by our very mode of
possessing it.

Quite as much of the art, the literature and the philosophy of the
greatest periods of civilisation has been wiped out and destroyed
beyond recovery by these possessive struggles of the past as has
been hazardously preserved and passed down to us through interludes
of peace; nor have we any cause to think that in the future we shall
be any wiser while our views as to possession show so little change.
And that loss in beautiful production is but the symbol, the outward
and visible sign of a loss immensely more great in flesh and blood
and spirit, which has gone on--not only while wars were waged, but
when (war being ended) dominance over the conquered was imposed as a
condition of peace. Every nation that has made itself materially great
on these terms, has done so on a _débris_ of perished loveliness which
does not reach its full amount in the hour of the victors’ triumph; but
goes on accumulating till that also which caused it is brought to the
dust.

It is many years, for instance, since we conquered India; and in so
far as our dominion has saved it from other conquests and wars of
native State against State, and creed against creed, our rule may
have been beneficial--though I do not think that we ought to take our
own word for it, or indeed anyone’s word except that of the native
communities themselves and a native press, free and unfettered for
the giving or the withholding of its testimonial. But one thing we
assuredly have done: we have gone on steadily destroying the native
arts and “mysteries,” and substituting for them our own baser code of
commercialism and capitalised industry. And in so far as we have done
this we have not possessed ourselves, but have dispossessed ourselves
of the real beauties and values of Indian civilization; and, for the
sake of trade-profit to our merchants and manufacturers, we hold in our
hand a poorer India in consequence, and are the poorer possessors of it.

All that poverty--poverty of invention, poverty of craft--is the
product of a false ideal of possession, false to human nature, because
quite obviously a cause of deterioration to those visible proofs of
man’s well-being--the joyous labour of his hand and brain.

Set against the witness of all that misguidance of the past that
wise and lovely saying of Christ, so unlikely in its first seeming:
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth.” At first
it sounds so improbable--so contrary to all we know of man’s long
struggle for existence up to date. And yet, (however much we must
still qualify the possession of the meek upon earth) still more must
we qualify the possession of the overbearing and the proud, when we
realise what true possession should be. A modern writer has described
war as “the great illusion,” and has set himself to show that all
those advantages at which the State aims when it turns to military
operations, become as dust in the balance if compared to the real
cost in treasure which war entails even for those who are nominally
the victors. And war is only one form or aspect of that great strife
for possession which has afflicted every race in its progress from
the cradle to the grave--merely a larger and more apparent version of
the conflict between folly and wisdom which goes on in every human
breast. Possession is the great illusion through which man physically
or intellectually strong seeks to secure power, and succeeds only in
securing weakness--not only for himself but for others.

For you cannot test strength truthfully without relation to its
surroundings. A tower built upon foundations that shift and give way
under its weight is not strong, however formidably it has been reared,
or however closely its windows are grated and barred. Its very bulk
and weight may help to bring about its fall. Similarly any strength of
despotism or government which is reared up and depends for its stay
upon the weakness of others is a mere apparition of power. Here to-day,
it is gone to-morrow when those upon whose subjection it rested have
discovered a strength of their own--or, because of their weakness, have
failed in its support.

True possession can only be had in relation and in proportion to the
self-possession of others; the man who reduces the self-possession of
others never adds to his own; and where self-possession is absent, no
real or strength-giving possession remains possible.

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his
own soul,” is one of those profound messages of wisdom which have
been obscured by the theological gloss laid upon them. Instead of the
immediate and practical condemnation of here and now, the hypothetical
condemnation to loss in a future life has been substituted, and our
spiritual preceptors have not concentrated upon making clear to us how,
here and now, possession of the whole world (in any material sense)
does actually tend to destroy soul.

The possessive outlook, in its very inception, sets a limit to the
springs of spiritual growth or action, and to that “perfect freedom”
the basis of which is service. But if “service is perfect freedom,”
then “domination is perfect bondage,” as much for those who impose as
for those who suffer it. For the man who domineers over his fellows
receives in his own soul the reflex or complementary part of that evil
effect which he has on others. There is no act done by man to man which
is not sacramental in its operation for good or ill; in all his deeds
to his neighbours he both gives and receives, either for his own help
or hindrance. Whosoever gives a blow receives one; and that blow may
be the heavier that is not returned in kind. He who does unkindness to
others is unkind to his own soul; he who diminishes the self-possession
of others diminishes his own.

Yet possession--in the sense of realising each one for himself the
wealth and enjoyment which life has to offer--is so deep an instinct,
is so knit up with the adventurous and progressive spirit out of which
the higher human consciousness is built--that it is useless to turn
on man and say to him: “Possess nothing--rid yourself of all joys, of
all the delights of the senses and the understanding--so only shall
you attain to the heavenly stature.” That doctrine has been preached
in the past; and the squeals of Manichean hermits in the wilderness,
and of monastic contortionists, denying to their senses the very
ground upon which they stood, has been its echoing chorus all down
the ages. Never were souls more horribly possessed than these fliers
from possession; never were men more defeated in their warfare with
the thing they spurned. Like a tin tied to a dog’s tail the more they
ran from it, the more the flesh afflicted them reminding them of its
neglected claims. The loveliest and wisest of these mediæval sinners
against the life which God had given them was brought by his own
gospel of peace to a death-bed repentance which others did not attain
to. “Brother ass, I have been too hard upon thee,” said St. Francis,
turning with compunction at last to his much-wronged body, the one
thing to which, in mistaken piety, he had denied either consideration
or love. The single greed which ate up and destroyed the life of that
lovely saint was a greed for mortification; and he died very literally
of blood-poisoning, brought about by his own suicidal act, because
he willed too possessively to share the passion and sufferings of
Christ--the death instead of the life.

That blood-poisoning of the mediæval saint’s was a reaction, violent
and unkind, against the wrongful version of possession which, in their
day as in our own, was destroying the peaceful possibilities of human
society.

Yet without a certain quality of possessiveness the human mind cannot
grow. Wordsworth pictures for us very beautifully that natural
possessive element in its age of innocence.


     Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
     A six year darling of a pigmy size!
     See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies,
     Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
     With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
     See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
     Some fragment from his dream of human life,
     Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
         A wedding or a festival,
         A mourning or a funeral;
         And this hath now his heart,
         And unto this he frames his song.


With these mental possessions he is opening his mind to the coming
conquests of life: as much to be conquered by its beauty as to conquer
it. But what he gains from his appreciation of earth’s loveliness
brings loss to none; in this extension of his mental horizon there is
no shutting of others from a like view; this aspect of the dominion
upon which he is now entering is communal, something illimitable, which
all may share. Of possession acquired upon those terms we need never
be afraid. And it is a very real possession, far more real, as I shall
hope presently to show, than any mere power to thwart, hinder, or
control the freedom of others, which is the form of possession at which
too often man aims.

Let us start, in order to realise this, with certain other experiments
of childhood. Which child more truly “possesses” the life of linnet
or hedge-sparrow, making it in some measure his own: the child who
stays quiet and disciplines himself to watch the bird at the building
of its nest, the hatching of its eggs and the feeding of its young;
or the child who puts an end to all that beauty and complexity of
motion by bringing down his bird with a stone? If he comes to tell
others of his experience, what alternatively is there for him to
tell? In the one case only his own act of destruction, a thing done
and brought to a dead end; in the other he has a dozen new things to
tell of--discoveries made in a process of life which he has watched
with delight and knows still to be going on. From which of these
two experiments does he draw the larger consciousness? Which of the
two most peoples his world for him? Step by step as he advances he
will find how much, by interfering with the lives of others, he can
destroy, but how little he can build up; he can take hold of the
daddy-legs leg by leg and find that they all come off, and wonder
perhaps at the zest with which that eager little martyr fulfils the
words of Scripture, “If thy foot offend thee cut it off and cast it
from thee.” But constant repetition of the experiment, though it may
give him an evil sense of power, will give him no variety, no real
advance in knowledge concerning the life, or the use and beauty of
flies’ legs. He will not treasure--to benefit by them--the legs that
he has pulled off, nor will his brain have stored anything but an
added sense of and liking for his own power to destroy. And so will
it be with everything on which he experiments destructively. His
knowledge and understanding of their nature will remain at a minimum.
Progressing on these lines, he will for ever be making things cease to
be themselves without making them really his own. But if he reverse
that process of experiment by encouraging things to be themselves,
how varied and multitudinous will grow his consciousness of life,
his appreciation of its finer shades, its delicacy, its grace, its
adaptability, its vigour and its freedom. If his interest is in birds,
how much more he will know of them, and find in them how much more of
alertness and beauty, if he hang food for them outside his window,
rather than cages for them within; if he will recognise that the beauty
of a bird lies too largely in its wings, for caging to be anything but
a contradiction of its true existence. If his interest is in animals,
how far more he will learn of their resources and character, if he aims
not at cowing them and causing them to flee from him in fear, but at
encouraging them in all genuine and characteristic development. That
does not mean teaching them to “perform” in painful and artificial
ways--exploits which are always built up on processes of cruelty, and
do not in the least reveal animal nature as it really is but only
impose upon it a mask of concealment--anthropomorphic, full of conceit
and self-flattery--the same fond thing which he did when he began
making God also in his own image to worship it.

There, indeed, in man’s shaping of God to be like himself, revengeful,
deceitful, pompous, inconsiderate, unmerciful, one-sided and masculine;
in making Him, too, a performer of tricks, so that in those attributes
he might see himself reflected and stand enlarged in his own
eyes--surely there more than in any other department of life has man by
his foolish possessiveness brought to the human race poverty instead of
wealth, a curse instead of a blessing.

That is but one example of how this narrow possessiveness with which
man set out to conquer heaven and earth wears thin and poor under the
test of time, and leaves him in the end no standing monuments but just
a heap of rubble on which to gaze--only that, or perhaps less--perhaps
only desert sand.

That failure of material ambitions stands immortalised for us in
Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:


     I met a traveller from an antique land,
     Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
     Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
     Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
     And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
     Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
     Which yet survive--stamped on these lifeless things--
     The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
     And on the pedestal these words appear:--
     ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
     Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
     Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
     Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
     The lone and level sands stretch far away!”


That is a moral which we shall do well to remember. All great
possessions materially founded come at last to that, and the heart that
clings to them must go down after them to the grave.

It is the same when we base our delight of human relationship in an
insistence upon possession: it serves only to accentuate the place of
death in the world and to give it size. The man, or woman, whose idea
of love lies in the claim to possess and to control others, dies many
deaths before he reaches his final end, and walks daily with his foot
in the grave. These tragedies of possession, so impoverishing to the
spirit, are all round us; the world is humanly more full of them than
of anything else: Husbands who adore their wives, but cannot let them
call their souls their own; parents, possessive of their children,
imposing upon them their will up to the legal limit and beyond; homes
devouring the independence of womanhood, cramping, constraining,
robbing of initiative and force, and doing all these things under cover
of the claims of love, of natural affection, of piety! What is all this
really but possession masquerading under another name? I remember once
reading a remarkable story by Mr. John Gray, called _Niggard Truth_,
of a woman who took masterful possession of a weak husband and “ran”
him as an expression, not of his own personality, but of hers. And when
at last she had very literally run him to earth, she buried him in a
garment of red flannel so that, as she expressed it, she might “see
him better” in the grave. And there, at the end of a strenuous life,
she sat amid her domestic possessions, her glass shades, her family
plate, and her mahogany, with her mental eye fixed upon a corpse, and
her heart filled with a _Magnificat_ of self-applause. She was the
“Ozymandias” of the domestic hearth; and there are thousands of them in
this country to-day. “Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!”

I have taken for example the domestic relations, because there we get
in small, but simple and concise, that demoralising claim to possession
which goes forth with missionary zeal to devastate the world; and
because here, in the home, the true social service that is owing is, in
theory at least, recognised and admitted.

The duty--surely the obvious duty--of parents to their children
is to assist them, to the full extent of their means, toward
self-development. We have no right to bring children into the world
to warp and stunt their growth, to make them merely reflections of
ourselves, or to keep them back from independence when they come to
man’s or woman’s estate. What the parent needs, perhaps, most to learn
is to relax constantly and in ever-increasing degree that hold which
was necessary during the early years of childhood, but which, even
then, we take too much for granted and employ far too habitually.
Parents often claim too great a possession of their own children;
they make cages for their characters, and mould them away from their
natural bent to what suits their own family pride, their own taste,
or their own sense of importance, sometimes conscientiously believing
this to be the parental prerogative. But if parents are to use safely
their power to impose moral training they must build up first in their
children a sense of self-reliance, of initiative, of freedom, and then
trust to it. They have no right to rely for their reward on caged
characters, or, by any dictation or control, to exact recompense for
the services which (with whatever devotion) they have rendered. The
same holds good through all human relations, parental, marital, social,
racial: it is ignoble to claim loyalty or devotion from those whom you
have not first made free. Gratitude--even filial gratitude--has no
moral value save if it comes from a free agent. If it comes from one
trained to be not free it partakes of servility. And it is better for
parents to forgo gratitude than to exact its imitation or substitute,
by the imposition of any restrictive conditions or claims after the
years of tutelage are over. It may well be that gratitude has far too
small a place in the human heart; but I am quite sure that the claim
for gratitude has too large a one, and that this in excess brings the
very reverse of a remedy when the other is lacking. And what is true
in relation to parents and their children is true also in every other
human relationship where the claim to possess intrudes to the hindrance
of self-realization and self-development. The possessor, in claiming
restrictive possession of others, loses possession of himself.

That is what made slavery as an institution so doubly impoverishing
to the human race. It impoverished the mind of the slave, but it
impoverished quite as much the mind of the slave-owner.

Wherever man has tried to possess others he has lost possession of
himself. That is the price inevitably paid by any class or section
of the community which seeks to dominate the lives and restrict the
liberty of its fellows. Tyranny does not strengthen but weakens the
moral nature of those who exercise it, and he who owns slaves cannot
himself be free. Domination is as destructive to human worth and more
destructive to moral integrity than subjection. If “possession is nine
points of the law” on the material plane, the tenth point--spiritual in
its working--is anarchy to the soul.

From time immemorial man has claimed it as his natural right to possess
woman. And it is in consequence in relation to woman, and in matters
of sex, that he has most obviously lost self-possession. And just as
he has claimed that to possess woman is the natural prerogative of the
male, so you will hear him maintain that lack of self-possession in
regard to woman is natural also--and a certain degree of licence the
male prerogative. The two things go together--claim to possess others
and you lose possession of yourself: Give to all with whom you come in
contact their full right of self-possession and self-development, and
you, from that social discipline and service, will in your own body and
mind become self-possessed. For that is true possession which, while
it brings you a sense of enlargement and joy, takes nothing from the
freedom and the joy of others.

Of that kind of possession you may be prodigal, but of that which
takes anything from others, or demands any condition of service from
others, have a care! And look well what the conditions may be. Ask
yourself constantly what is this or that demand for service or labour
doing to other souls? What conditions does it lay upon them? You may
boast that you have simplified your life--rid yourself, for instance,
of domestic service by getting rid of cook and housemaid. You have
not. The bread, the meat, even the ground flour that comes into your
house is all provided by a domestic service which takes place outside
your door and which you do not see. And you are as morally concerned
for the conditions of that labour as if you yourself supervised it.
You need it and use it as much; it is only done for you at a further
remove--out of sight and out of mind--so that it is much easier (but
not more justifiable), to be callous as to the conditions of those who
render it. And if upon those material lines of comfort and luxury you
extend your demands, you are also extending your claim over the lives
of others--and your responsibility for those lives, if they go lacking
where you go fed.

Surely, for the whole of that part of your life you are under a strict
obligation to render service in return--equal to that which you claim.
And if you, by your service, cannot insure to others an equality of
possession in things material (and make as good and wholesome a use of
them as they could make), those material possessions should be a weight
upon your conscience, till you have got matters more fairly adjusted.
Take it as your standard of life to consume no more than you, by your
own labour, in your own lifetime, could produce. What right has any
man to more than that, except through the bounty and kindness of his
fellows? But if he insists on more, and takes more, does he really
possess it? Only in an ever diminishing degree in proportion to his
excess, because as he exceeds he is ever diminishing his true faculty
for reception.

Here is a simple illustration of that truth, a gross example which I
read in a newspaper the other day: In America a prize is annually given
to the man who can eat the largest number of pies at a sitting--each
of the pies, a compound of jam and pastry, weighing on an average
half a pound. The prize-winner became the external possessor of
twenty-seven. But internally he could hardly be said to possess them at
all--they possessed him, and made him, one would imagine, a thoroughly
ineffective citizen for at least the two or three following days. That
man would have been far more really the possessor of three or four pies
(seeing that he could have properly digested them) than it was possible
for him to be of the twenty-seven. In this excess he merely injured
himself without any gain, except the monetary bribe which induced
him to make a beast of himself. And how many men are there not, who
(receiving the monetary bribe of our present unequal and inequitable
system of reward for industry or for idleness) proceed to make beasts
of themselves--more elaborately, but just as truly and completely as
this pie-eater; and by making beasts of themselves are by so much the
less men of soul and understanding--not more, but less the possessors
of their human birthright.

If we store up treasure materially (treasure of a kind which, if one
has more of it, another must needs have less)--if we gather about us,
in excess, creature comforts for the over-indulgence of our bodily
appetites, we are gathering that which is liable to moth and rust and
theft--liable to be a cause of envy and covetousness in others; and
when we have gathered to ourselves this excess of perishable delight
and have applied it, the result, more likely than not, is a cloying of
those very appetites to which we seek to minister--and, eventually,
deterioration and enfeeblement of the body itself.

And as with individuals so with nations; there is no greatness of
possession in holding that which involves the deprivation of others,
the diminution of their freedom, their happiness, their power of
self-development. That is not true kingdom. It is the manufacture
of slaves. But if we lay up treasure in the kingdom of the mind, in
the development of our sense of beauty, our faculty for joy, we have
something here on earth which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor
thieves steal. Our possessions then are things that can arouse no base
covetousness, we need not hold them under lock and key, or make laws
for their protection, for none can deprive us of them. And while you
so hold them on such free and noble conditions, you do not fail to
dispense something of their beauty and worth to those with whom you
associate.

These possessions, with which you have enriched your lives, make no man
poorer, rob no fellow creature of his right, conflict not with the law
of charity to all.

Seeking possession upon those lines, you shall find that noble
things do tend to make possible a form of possession in which all
alike may share; that architecture, music, literature and painting
do offer themselves to the service of a far nobler and more communal
interpretation of wealth than that which would keep it for separate
and individual enjoyment. A thousand may look upon the beauty of one
picture, and detract nothing, in the enjoyment of each, from the
enjoyment of all; nor has virtue or value gone out of it because so
many have looked on it; and so it is (or so it may be) with all beauty
whether we find it in nature or in art.

If I were asked to name the man who in the last hundred years had
the greatest possessions, I think I would name Wordsworth. Read his
poetry with this thought in your mind, of how day by day he gathered
possessions of an imperishable kind, which needed no guardianship
beyond the purity of his mind, and excited in others no envy. Nay, how
much of those wonderful possessions was he not able to give to others?
Some of his loveliest lines of poetry are a record of possession
rightly attained. I give here only one of his poems--one of his
simplest in inspiration--to show what I mean:


     I wandered lonely as a cloud
         That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
     When all at once I saw a crowd--
         A host of golden daffodils;
     Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
     Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

     Continuous as the stars that shine
         And twinkle on the Milky Way,
     They stretched in never-ending line
         Along the margin of a bay.
     I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
     What wealth the show to me had brought:

     For oft when on my couch I lie
         In vacant or in pensive mood,
     They flash upon that inward eye
         Which is the bliss of solitude;
     And then my heart with pleasure fills,
     And dances with the daffodils.


“Only daffodils” you say? But he made them for himself and others an
eternal possession of beauty and delight.

Those who have great possessions on these terms need never turn
sorrowfully away when the command comes: “Sell all thou hast and give
to the poor.” For these are the inexhaustible treasures of the soul,
and are in their nature communal; and happy is the man or nation that
finds them.




CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

(1918)


The two words Crime and Punishment have come to us in a conjunction
which it is very difficult to separate. Our fathers have told us, and
our teachers and theologians have strenuously insisted that the one
necessarily entails the other.

The whole of our social order is based upon the idea that if a man
commits crime--an offence, that is to say, against the written law of
the community--he must be punished for it. If he were not, social order
would go to pieces.

But our social order does not lay equal stress upon the idea that if
a man lives virtuously he must be rewarded. If a man lives virtuously
his reward is in Heaven--that is to say, he takes his chance. His
virtue may assist or may hinder his worldly advancement; but we have
not yet committed ourselves to the conviction that social order will
necessarily go to pieces if virtue is not rewarded. It will only go to
pieces if crime is not punished. Society can reconcile itself to the
one omission; but it cannot reconcile itself to the other.

This inequality of interest in retribution and reward is based perhaps
upon the calculation that while you look after the crimes, the virtues
will look after themselves; and that the virtues will not--for lack
of Birthday Honours--rebel against the society in which they find
themselves.

And really, there is something in it. Virtue is already self-governing;
vice is not. The virtuous and humane part of a man--his will to unite
and co-operate with others for social development and service--inclines
him to accept and make the best of the conditions of life, to take the
rough with the smooth, the hindrances with the aids, the good with the
evil: not, indeed, passively, or without some effort to get rid of bad
smells, bad tastes, bad laws, bad governments--but with a definite
consciousness that in operating against these he is operating not for
his own single benefit, but for the benefit of the community. And that
being so, he can be left, unrecompensed and unrewarded, to face a very
considerable amount of discomfort, adversity, and even injustice,
without becoming either a rebel or a criminal. Although if governed
unintelligently enough, or wickedly enough, he may be turned into both.

But with the criminal it is not so. His social sense is more
rudimentary; and when he finds himself up against adverse and perhaps
unjust conditions, he seeks a solution satisfactory to himself alone.
And I suppose the main idea of the use of punishment (apart from the
vengeful pleasure it gives to those who inflict it) is that it takes
the satisfaction out of him again, making him feel that, in a highly
organised community, the individual solution has uncomfortable
results. And Society’s calculation, in thus punishing him, is (or has
been hitherto) that it is a less troublesome and expensive way of
making him cease to be a nuisance, than educating him, or employing
him, or reforming the social conditions which have produced him.

So long as we believe that Society is right in that calculation, so
long, I suppose, shall we continue to advocate punishment; but when
we come to believe that Society is wrong, we shall begin to advocate
education, employment, social reform, and, above all, human sympathy
and understanding as a substitute; with the idea that they may
gradually do away with the necessity for punishment.

But pending that consummation so devoutly to be wished, most of us will
probably continue to believe that punishment is just and right; and
will find it very difficult to think of Society, and of ourselves--as
all equally criminal along with the individual whom our social contempt
and neglect have de-socialised and made a fit recipient for punitive
treatment.

The temptation to think that punishment is just and right has been
with us from time immemorial; it is probably arboreal, certainly
neolithic; and therefore, to our atavistic instincts, it is supremely
sacred. We have got it firmly into our heads that punishment is a
superior ordering of consequences. And as the law of cause and effect
which we see operating in nature is the basis of our moral sense, we
have fallen to the confused notion that punishment is the same. But
as a matter of fact the two are entirely different. The law of cause
and effect stands for natural consequences; the law of punishment
substitutes artificial consequences; and we fly to punishment largely
as an escape from the results of our age-long indifference to natural
consequences. Having produced the criminal we set to work to destroy
his self-respect, as a short cut to the preservation of our own.

That may sound a puzzling statement; but the more we accentuate the
difference between the criminal and ourselves--the more, superficially,
are we able to get rid of our sense of brotherhood and responsibility.
And so, when bishops go on to the platform to advocate the flogging
of men who live on the earnings of prostitutes, it helps them to
forget that they also are living on the earnings of prostitutes, and
are by their support of a capitalist system involving sweated labour
and degraded housing conditions--neatly and efficaciously driving
the prostitute into the hands of the male “bully”--whom they then
flog for extracting his profit from a damaged article which, in the
public market of supply and demand, they have already wrung dry. The
very monstrousness of the proposed penalty helps us to forget that
we are all links in the same chain of circumstances. In the “bully”
the degrading brutality of the system finally emerges and becomes
patent; just as in war the degrading brutality of our peace system
finally emerges. Then we point to it with horror and cry that we are
peace-lovers! So we are; we have loved peace at a price which we would
not exceed--we ran it on sweated conditions; and we pay for it in war.
For there exist, in every nation, sources of wealth, sufficient--if
equitably distributed and constructively applied for the good of
all--to allay that economic unrest which is the main incentive by
which modern nations are led into war. But in every country alike
there are interests which refuse to pay that price, and which will, if
threatened, precipitate their country into war rather than be held at
a ransom which would merely readjust wealth more equitably to the true
sources of its production.

War has come to us--not as a punishment divinely imposed--(a splendid
old lady of ninety told me the other day that the war was God’s
visitation upon us for our divorces and for having given votes to
women)--war has come upon us, not as a punishment for these offences
against Taboo, but as a natural consequence of our social peace
conditions. And at present, in the mentality of nations, punishment
(not of the system, but of the criminal act which has finally emerged
from it to horrify us) is the only remedy.

And so punishment still appears to us as the very bed of justice--the
foundation stone of morality. If you do not insist on it, social order
will go to pieces. And as we have attempted scarcely any criminal
reform without punishment--and none till the day before yesterday--the
contention is accepted as true for lack of witnesses against it.

The standpoint toward human nature of our generally accepted “moral
code” is that of a devout believer in corporal punishment--of that
kind of parent who says: “I have to flog my boy because he is so
untruthful.” And the idea that the untruthfulness is the product of the
corporal punishment never enters the parental mind.

But this vengeful exercise of parental authority is only a secondary
symptom of belief in a vengeful order of Creation--of a God whose
method it was to vindicate the moral law, not by bringing home to
ill-doers through natural consequences the defects of certain courses
of conduct, but by expressing His moral indignation in exemplary
punishments of an arbitrary kind--generally of a miraculous character.

When man first conceived of God, he conceived of Him as a sort of Dr.
Busby--one in whose mind the Rod was the beginning and end of wisdom;
and the Rod of Heaven operated by intervention, over and above the
operations of Nature--the law of cause and effect. Natural consequences
did not sufficiently vindicate divine justice. A belief in miraculous
and vengeful intervention and a belief in “exemplary” legal punishment
go together; and will, I believe, die together.

A great deal of Old Testament teaching is merely an elaborate extension
of _Punch’s_ picture of the British workman holding a brick’s end over
an unfortunate batrachian, and saying, “I’ll l’arn ye to be a toad!”
And all he succeeds in doing is producing a dead toad instead of a live
one; the species itself remaining entirely unaltered.

That is a parable of the doings of our theologians, since theology was
invented for the Fall of Man. And if humans came to the conclusion that
that was the mind of God, it is no wonder that they imitated Him, and
do so to this day.

We must believe in punishment as the proper reward of crime--we must
even believe in unreformative punishment as the proper reward of crime,
if we believe in a Hell to which lost souls are relegated against their
will, and there kept with no hope whatever of cure or betterment from
the process. And that is what the whole of Christendom believed about
Hell when Christians really did believe in it.

Unreformative punishment upon earth was a necessary consequence of that
belief; and, therefore, belief in punishment for the sake of punishment
became universal.

And over against it--quite unregarded--stood the new gospel of
humanity--“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you and
persecute you.” And then the reason, the key to it all:--“That ye may
be children of your Father which is in Heaven, for He maketh His sun to
rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on
the unjust. Be ye, therefore, perfect, even as your Father which is in
Heaven is perfect.”

The Sermon on the Mount, which threw over the doctrine of punishment
on earth, threw over with equal emphasis the doctrine of punishment in
Heaven--of any arbitrary or miraculous intervention for the betterment
(to moral ends) of the law of natural consequences.

“Be ye the children of Creation!” is the real human solution--not by
harking back (as opponents would pretend) to the savagery of a lower
species, but by accepting the spiritualising impulse of evolutionary
forces--which have brought us to this great development from the
mentality of the lower animal world--the knowledge that we are all part
of one whole.

And it is on that recognition of an underlying unity (from which we
are inseparable) that the great natural revolution of our ideas about
crime and punishment must be brought about. If we cling to the violent
and the arbitrary, and the separative solution (of which miraculous
retribution is the corollary) we are in the Dark Ages still.

It must have been the experience of many whose work has taken them
not only into slums but into prisons and police-courts, that the
oppressive sense of Evil triumphant, strong and proud of itself, has
weighed more heavily upon them in the prison and in the police-court
than in the slum; for the slum only represents the neglect of Society,
but the administration of our penal code represents its stereotyped
preoccupation (with sympathy and understanding almost entirely
eliminated) on a problem which nothing but sympathy and understanding
will ever solve. There Society is in its trenches fighting against the
human nature which it first violates and then fears.

We, law-makers and law-abiders, are in league with--and are dependent
for our material prosperity and protection upon--a system which is very
nearly as bad as the crimes we denounce. And until we have made our
system very much more beautiful, very much better, and more convincing
to the criminal and the revolutionarist--it is only by fear and a
punitive code that we can keep it going.

It is not possible to maintain such adjuncts to our social system
as profiteering, exploitation, class privilege, wage-slavery,
race-subjection, international jealousy, without a penal code and its
logical outcome, war. If we want to get rid of the one we must have
a whole mind to get rid of the others too. Do not let us pretend to
separate them, for we cannot. Not only does the attempt produce weak
practical results--it produces also a false mind.

The attempt to separate one thing from another, one human being from
another, is at the root of our belief in punishment. Punishment helps
to separate, helps to make us feel separate; it does not unite.
An English judge declared quite recently that the main object of
punishment was not to reform the criminal but to protect society. And
so long as that is true, the criminal is just as conscious as we are
that the discipline laid on him is the expression of a divided standard
of morality, knowing perfectly well that we in like circumstances
should not think such punishment good for ourselves or our children.

For is it not true that wherever a local or group interest comes to
be established, there the members of that group cease to believe that
punishment from any outside power or authority is good for them?

Take the family--those of you who believe in punishment--those who
profess to be law-abiding; one of its members commits a theft. Is he
handed over to the police to be dealt with according to law? Not at
all. On the contrary, everything is done to enable him to escape the
punishment. We don’t believe in legal punishment when it comes to
our own circle. And we only believe in legal punishment for others,
because, loving and understanding them less, we are unwilling to take
as much trouble about them.

And that same vicious principle of belief in punishment only for
others mounts up and up through every communal interest that has
established itself in our midst on a unity of feeling closer than that
which obtains generally. Every class-interest, every trade-interest,
every party-interest that stands combined for its own benefit does
all it can to evade the punishment of its members by the larger and
more impersonal authority of the State. Scandals are hushed up in the
police; scandals are hushed up in the Army; scandals are hushed up in
the Cabinet; everything possible is done to prevent our penal code
from acting equally on the vested interests in which we specially are
concerned.

And yet we say that we believe in punishment!

But if we do honestly believe in punishment, ought we not then to
insist not merely that the administration of our law-courts should
be impartial and judicial, but that the source and promotion of our
State-prosecutions should be impartial also? Probably most unreflecting
people think that they are. But again and again the Government, when
it chooses or refuses to put the law into motion and prosecute, though
nominally the accuser, is really the accused, using its powers for the
saving of its own skin, to keep the case out of court--sometimes even
in spite of the protests of the magistracy itself. Again and again the
judicial scales have been fraudulently weighted--not in court but out
of it by the interests of party government.

Let us take a rather notorious instance where this was done.

Within quite recent times, two men have conspired--the one to raise an
army of rebellion if Home Rule were imposed on Ulster; the other to
raise an army of rebellion if conscription were imposed on Ireland.
The crime in each case was precisely the same; but the punishment was
different. The one--the more recent--was sent to prison for it without
trial. The other, equally without trial, was elevated to Cabinet rank.

Now, each of these men, in conspiring to break the law, did probably
what he conscientiously thought to be right under the circumstances.
That we can believe. But it is very difficult to believe that the
Government (when, with the connivance of Parliament, it punished the
same offence so differently) thought that it was doing right--the equal
and the just thing in each case. It was only doing the convenient
thing to cover its own blunders. And the question is, therefore,
whether--morally--the Government was not the real criminal.

But if we ask whether it is going to be punished for it, the answer
is--probably not.

It is not my point to urge that the Government should be punished, but
only to show how--as administered to-day--punishment is an arbitrary
and artificial device, partially applied or not, according to the
prosecutor’s political convenience.

The consequence--the logical consequence of this corrupt inequality
of State-prosecution, is that a Government which does such things is
misliked and distrusted by men of honest character--and so weakens its
hold on the more judicious minds of the community--and eventually, one
may hope, its power over the country’s policy.

One might point further to another instance. The Society of Friends,
by its official committee, recently published, without submitting it
to the Censor, a pamphlet called _A Challenge to Militarism_. For
that corporate act of a committee of twenty--all equally guilty--the
Government (to avoid too great a scandal) selected two members for
prosecution, and got them sent to prison for six and for three months.

About a fortnight later another challenge to militarism, a pamphlet
entitled _A League of Nations_, was published, without being submitted
to the Censor, by Lord Grey of Falloden; and he has not been sent to
prison for it.

Now if we believed in punishment, we should want the Government
punished for these acts of corrupt favouritism in State-prosecution.
But if we believe in natural consequences--those which I have already
indicated--we shall confidently anticipate that in the end (the real
end) divine justice will be done; and that these ephemeral misdoings
will eventually help the spirit of man to a better and larger
understanding of the follies which are committed when men substitute
the Will to Power for the Will to Love.

And if we can--as we are going to--if we can leave injustice when done
in conspicuous high places to the natural and logical consequences,
without applying the penal code, why cannot we trust natural
consequences a very great deal more, where smaller and more humble
misdemeanours are concerned, and give to those natural consequences a
greater unity of effect by irradiating them with the true spirit of
man--love, joy, gentleness, peace, against which there is no law?

One of the reasons why we dare not be humane and curative instead of
punitive to our criminals lies in the fact that the standard of life
in which we have allowed honest and hard-working millions to subsist
outside our prisons, has been so inhuman and degraded that if we made
our prisons really humane, really curative, they would be a reward
instead of a punishment.

We dare not offer so beautiful a temptation.

And so it is separation again--the separation of class from class,
of rich from poor, which makes impossible the standardising of our
prisons from living tombs into genuine reformatories and sanatoria.
If we had not separated ourselves in our national life from a sense
of responsibility for the poverty and misery around us, we should not
be driven into so separate a treatment of our criminals. We cannot
afford to humanise our prisons, while we will not afford to humanise
our slums. Again and again, when you appeal for real prison reform, the
obstructive argument arises: “Why should we take so much trouble for
the criminal, when hundreds of thousands of the honest struggling poor
are so much worse off?”

But we have to take trouble anyhow; and the more unintelligently we
take trouble the greater is likely to be the cost of our criminals per
head to the State. In New York State, America, where Mr. Mott Osborne
has been trying to establish the principle of self-government among
the prisoners of Sing-Sing, there was actually a danger that (under an
extension of the system) the prisons might become self-supporting. And
at once trade interests did everything they could to get it condemned;
the contractors were afraid of losing their State contracts.

That is just one little glimpse of what we are up against where vested
interests are concerned--interests so strongly represented in the
legislatures even of “free nations.” But we are up against something
much bigger than that. We are up against a moral reluctance of the
whole community to pronounce the word “Brother.” For if the State is
going to show a really understanding mind toward the criminal, it has
got to show it just as much to the whole social problem of poverty and
disease. And that is going to cost the State more money than it is
prepared to spend on anything--except on War.

Crime is sometimes a very shameful thing. But is not the record of the
way powerful States have dealt with crime in the past more uniformly
shameful even than crime itself? Has not that record stood out as a
ghastly blind spot in the conscience of Christian Society?

People of conservative mind are so extraordinarily ready to make
excuses for organised Society which they will not make for the
individual. “That was a cruel age,” they will say, when you recall the
judicial horrors perpetrated against human nature three hundred, two
hundred, one hundred years ago; it was tradition, it was custom. But
there were nations, professing Christianity--a doctrine having exactly
the same basis then as now--the same creed, the same gospel, the same
divine life of compassion and mercy exemplary of what Heaven required
in the conduct of man to man; and there were rulers and administrators
with minds and power of reason just as capable as our own--giants
of intellect some of them--who, with all their profession of
Christianity--interpreting it to the supposed needs of the State--have
left to us this ghastly record of a penal code worse than the crimes
it was set to remedy. That penal code--the obsequious servant of
State-authority--stood hundreds of years behind the average individual
conscience of the community. And yet in moral authority we exalt it
above the individual! In age after age the conscience, the living
conscience of this country went to prison and to execution to bring
it just a little more up-to-date. Revolting juries refused to convict
because of its savageries; and still it moved slowly and reluctantly,
cruel in its fear of the human nature it did not understand.

Less than a century and a half ago a girl of fourteen was sentenced
in this country to be burned alive for counterfeit coining; only
eighty-five years ago a boy of nine was sentenced to death for breaking
a pane of glass and stealing two pence. The sentences were not carried
out, but they were pronounced. I suppose it was still considered
“exemplary” to remind the criminal classes of what powers the law had
over them.

Now let us imagine that some individual caught a boy indulging in petty
theft; and to punish him--in hot blood perhaps--took him and hung him
up by the neck till he was dead. Should we not be inclined to say that
so rabid a wild beast must be exterminated from the face of the earth,
lest he should have descendants like himself?

Yet that is what our own Courts of Justice--the authorised instrument
of the people of England--were doing in cold blood to young boys in
the time of Charles Lamb. They had not the excuse of national danger,
or war; yet we don’t think that our ancestors ought to have been
abolished off the face of the earth for doing it, or for allowing it.
We manage to forgive them, because after all they were--our ancestors.
When it comes to a State-act, the individual shares the responsibility
with so many that he is able to shift it from his conscience.

But in that process what had the State done to itself? In so dealing
with the criminal--it had become a criminal, making of itself a moral
monstrosity--all the more foul because in the perpetration of such acts
it declared that it was doing no wrong!

How, one may ask, was it possible for such penalties as these, and
others even more savage than these, to become embedded in the penal
code of a civilised and a Christian State?

Mainly for two reasons I believe: first the fact (referred to before)
that the doctrine of unreformative punishment, as expressive of the
Justice of God, was part of its religion; and secondly, that the State
based itself then, as now, on the Will to Power, and not on the Will
to Love. And seeking its safety in terms of power it perpetrated these
atrocities. From those two premises the results were only natural.

Are we going to salve our consciences to-day by mere degrees of
comparison, by saying: “We are not so bad as that now”? Perhaps we are
not so bad; but the basis on which we continue to act has not altered.
The Will to Power (for which the State still stands) must always lag
behind the Will to Love in its understanding of human nature. And
while it lags behind the penal code of the State will always be a drag
upon the social conscience.

Now so far we have been considering this doctrine of punishment in
relation to the criminal section of society--force and punitive
treatment being necessary, we say, for the discipline and control of
the waste products of our civilisation. But in the whole body politic
what does it all come to? What type of mind is finally evolved by the
State which so deals with its human material? What is the final moral
aspect of the State itself?

Examine that question from the international point of view. Why is
every State armed? Because every State, when all is said and done, is
a potential criminal whom other States cannot trust. And though these
States look down upon their criminals, they are proud of themselves.

We are grouped to-day, many States together, in armed alliance for what
(when we took up arms) we believed to be a great and a just cause; and
while we are so grouped we speak well of our Allies. But the groupings
of to-day are not the groupings of yesterday; and the international
spectacle which we have presented age after age has been simply this:
that no nation could trust any other nation to behave morally, justly,
humanely, and for the good of the whole, where single self-interest was
concerned.

So like to its own criminals did each nation remain, that all the
others had ever to keep their instruments of punishment ready to hand
in case of need.

Is not that an extraordinary commentary on the law of punishment; that
not merely does it fail to do away with the criminal within its own
jurisdiction, but reproduces his likeness in all the high places of
the world--giving him his justification by showing him that, where
community of interest ends, States are no other and no better than he?

We all agree that war is a very horrible thing. But at one point it has
a moral value which is not shared so obviously by other penal codes; a
value which people are coming more and more to recognise to-day, and
which will--more than anything else perhaps--help to put an end to war.

For when you seek to punish wrong by going to war, then you yourself
have to share the punishment. Innocent and guilty alike must agonise
and suffer and die. To inflict that punishment you must choose out your
bravest and your best, and send them to share equally with those you
would punish the sentence of suffering and death.

All punishment, inflicted by penal codes, really comes back to
the community; but only in war do we see it shared: actively and
voluntarily by some, passively and unavoidably by others. And perhaps
it is that more than anything else which will eventually persuade
civilised man that war is intolerable--that he cannot punish without
sharing the punishment.

It may sound fantastic to suggest that a like condition should be
definitely attached to our civil and penal system, in order to bring
home to us that all punishment is shared, that what we manufacture in
our prisons becomes a staple commodity.

But I can think of no device that would so quickly and effectively get
rid of that separation of interest which punishment seems to establish.
Imagine that for every prisoner sentenced, a lot fell on someone
else, calling upon him or her to go and share in that demonstration
of society’s failure to produce only good citizens. Imagine the Prime
Minister, about to make an important statement in the House of Commons,
called suddenly by lot to share the incarceration of a defender of the
liberty of the press or of a robber of hen-roosts! Should we have to
wait a month--a week--to have our prisons transformed into places where
human nature was no longer thrown to waste, with its energies cut off
from sane employment and development? Would it not bring home to us--as
perhaps nothing else would--the mill-stone weight on the life of the
nation of all punishment that is not purely reformative and curative?
Would it not very soon put an end to punishment in the old sense
altogether?

You may look upon this suggestion as a fantastic parable; but
spiritually it is what we shall have to do.

“There is only one sin,” said the unknown writer of one of the
most beautiful and famous books of devotion produced during the
middle-ages--the Theologia Germanica. “The only sin is separation.”

We shall never get rid of the criminal till we cease to separate
ourselves from him, till we make his interest our interest, till we
share, willingly and consciously, the responsibility of the society
which has produced him.




CHRISTIANITY A DANGER TO THE STATE

(1916)


The State, which accepts the proposition that force is a remedy, has
logical ground for employing force to secure its ends, until worsted by
the forces opposed to it, or by some other power.

Such a State, naturally and logically, claims the assistance of its
subjects in pursuing a course for which, in time of peace, and with
their apparent consent, it has made great preparation, entailing a vast
expenditure of the nation’s wealth and energy.

This claim of the State for the personal service of its citizens is
always latent even in peace-time; but in peace-time the great majority
of the services it requires are rendered upon a voluntary basis, and
generally in exchange for a monetary equivalent.

Only, therefore, when the State is pressed by necessity to make an
extreme assertion of its claims for personal service does it find
itself actively opposed by citizens who have never in their own lives
and consciences accepted the proposition that force is a remedy for
evil.

It is true that many of these objectors have paid taxes without
resistance for the upkeep of Army and Navy. If they have done so
conscientiously and not merely negligently, it has probably been
upon the lines of “rendering to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s,”
and from a recognition that all the devices of barter and exchange
(including a coin-currency) are a material convenience devised by
the State, which may legitimately be given to or withdrawn from the
control of the individual without affecting his personal integrity.
Men so minded may say quite plausibly: “My worldly goods you can take
or leave; my pockets you may fill or empty; but my body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost, and if I am called upon to give personal service
for the infliction of legal penalties, for the suppression of civil
commotion, or for the prosecution of war, then I am asked for service
in a form which I can only render if my conscience approves.”

Faced by this contention, the State has often thought wise to admit, or
to make allowance for, a claim which nevertheless it will not recognise
by law. People who object to jury-service for the enforcement of a
penal code which is against their conscience, are frequently excused
without fine or penalty. The same allowance would probably be made to
excuse any one opposed to capital punishment from assuming the office
of hangman. Yet capital punishment only exists because a majority in
the State believes it to be essential to public safety; and if there
were a dearth of hands ready to undertake the task, it would then
become a test of good citizenship for all to offer themselves; and the
conscientious objector, whose argument was tolerated and respectfully
listened to the day before, would suddenly become a disreputable object
to all law-abiding men, unless the State were weak enough, or wise
enough, to provide him with the right of exemption. If it did so he
would immediately cease to be disreputable in the eyes of the law, his
right to a conscience being granted.

That concession has frequently been made in the past to people
who, calling themselves Christians, have held tenets subversive of
State-authority. When religious conformity was considered necessary
to the spiritual security of the State, Nonconformists resisted, till
the State made allowance for them. When the taking of an oath was
considered necessary for the security of truth in the witness-box,
Quakers resisted, till the State made allowance for them. When the
coercion of Ulster was considered necessary for the well-being of
Ireland, men who had taken the oath of military obedience threatened
a conscientious strike, and the State made allowance for them.
Incidentally they became the heroes of that party which is to-day most
strenuous in its detestation of those later conscientious objectors who
refuse to take the oath of military obedience; but nobody was sent to
prison for uttering propaganda in their praise!

Now the reason why the State could tolerate them was not a moral
reason; it was simply upon the calculation that, while still pursuing
its policy of physical force, it could afford to do without them. It
could allow non-conformity based upon Christian teaching, or upon
conscientious scruples, to streak the current of its policy, without
thereby suffering any deflection of its course.

But it is quite different when the State, driven by its belief in the
rightness and the remedial value of physical force, comes to commit
the whole of its resources to the prosecution of war. The existence
of the conscientious objector then becomes a more inconvenient factor
in the situation; it may even, from the State’s point of view, become
a dangerous one. Then those insidious Christian idiosyncrasies, which
have so often been allowed to withstand authority, must have all
possible ground cut from under them, lest it should afford standing
to a new social ideal. We have it on the authority of the public
prosecutor himself that, if all men became conscientious objectors,
war would no longer be possible; and from such a catastrophe the State
must, of course, be saved by all possible means.

It is at this point, therefore, that the latent claim (which in
peace-time is often more honoured in the breach than in the observance)
becomes insistent and active. The State must have--if it can get
it--the personal service of all its able-bodied citizens. And thus,
practically for the first time, the rival claims of law and conscience
upon a man’s allegiance come to be fought out in public on a large
scale; and if the Nation is engaged in a popular war, or in one where
the vast majority believes that it has righteousness upon its side,
then there will inevitably be much prejudice in the public mind against
the conscientious objector; whereas there might be much sympathy for
him (though not really on the principle for which he contended) if he
were refusing to fight in a war which happened to be unpopular, or
which a great number of people regarded as unjust.

But if we want to get to the true basis of the principle against which
the conscientious objector is contending (a principle which cannot
logically be separated from any form of government built up on force)
we must not colour our view with the rightness or wrongness (in our
own estimation) of the war in which we are engaged, since we obscure
thereby that quality of allegiance which is claimed by the State.

The State’s claim--latent in peace-time and liable to emerge whenever
war or crisis shall arise--is not that its citizens should fight for
it when the cause is just and right, but that they should fight for it
in any case, if it orders them. That claim, made by every State with
more or less urgency, we are now invited to view with horror operating
at its full efficiency throughout a Prussianised Germany. Thus exalted
and perfected, it has become, we are told, a danger to the world;
in such a State the moral conscience of the individual has become
atrophied by subordination, and he is not free to choose between right
and wrong. But war only brings home to us the logic of a situation
which in peace-time we have burked; and now, in order to combat the
evil, in its fullest manifestation, men in this country are asked to
give their souls into similar keeping--to accept, that is to say, the
over-riding of individual conscience by the law of State-necessity.
It is a claim which any State, founded on force, is bound eventually
to make; it is a claim which anyone who believes force to be evil is
bound to repudiate. The follower of the one school draws his ethics
from the established rules of the body politic to which he belongs;
the follower of the other draws them, it may be, from the personal
example and teaching of One whom the body politic of his day regarded
as a criminal, and put to death; of One whose followers, it may be said
further, were persecuted in the early centuries of the Christian era,
not because of their opinions, but because, in practice, they were a
danger to the State. The Roman mind was very logical; and only when
Christianity had become absorbed in the State system and had accepted
the view that physical force and persecution were good social remedies,
only then did Christianity cease to be an apparent danger and a fit
subject for persecution.

But the primitive Christian standpoint is always liable to emerge; and
when it does, then we get the opposing principles of two incompatible
schools. And we must keep these principles in mind--the principle
of conduct based upon a personal example rejecting force, and the
principle of conduct based upon a social edifice relying upon force
for its well-being and advancement; otherwise we confuse the issue,
and weaken our appreciation of the moral position which each side
assumes. It is surely quite evident that the State, while based upon
force, cannot (except as an indulgence) countenance the claim of any
individual to make the morality of its action the test for personal
allegiance and service. And so this State-claim must be unequivocably
defined, otherwise we do not really know where we are.

Now many fervent supporters of the doctrine that State-necessity must
stand supreme above individual conscience, confuse matters by importing
the moral equation, and by arguing for the compelling principle from
particular instances where moral considerations seem to favour it: “Our
Cause is just; therefore, etc.,” is the line on which they contend. But
the State’s claim stands independent of the justice of its cause; and
“My Country right or wrong!” is the real motto which the objector to
conscientious liberty is called to fight under.

All that the State-backers say as to the obligation for Englishmen to
fight Germany to-day, applies equally to the obligation for Germans
to fight England. So while we continue to assert that a man must fight
here with us for the cause of liberty, honour, righteousness--in a
word, for God--we assert equally that in another country he must
subject his conscience to the claims of the State, and fight for
oppression, dishonour, unrighteousness--in a word, for the Devil (and
that in spite of the baptismal vows which oblige him to “fight manfully
under Christ’s banner,” not merely against sin, as he individually is
concerned, but sin spiritually combined in its symbolic representative,
and defended by the temporalities of the world). From which we must
argue that, if Christ were here on earth to-day, born of German
parents, he would be called upon to fight in the ranks of Germany; that
if he were born of English parents he would be called to fight for
England; while, if again, born of Jewish parents, he might be accorded
the alternative privilege of fighting for England which was not his
country, or of being deported to Russia to fight for the persecutors of
his race.

The conscientious objector, on the other hand, feels bound to take
the moral equation of all such particular instances as a guide to
his diagnosis of the evils of war; and he comes thus to regard the
expedient of war as altogether so bad a remedy for evil that he dares
to doubt whether Christ would be seen bearing arms on either side;
and he is probably strengthened in that conviction by the fact that
modern conditions of war tend more and more to involve the weak,
the innocent, and the helpless in the ruin and suffering wrought by
industrial and financial exhaustion, invasion and blockade, and that
“arms of precision” are so unprecise and blind in action that they
are quite as likely, when directed against towns, to destroy the
non-fighters as the fighters. And the conscientious objector finds a
difficulty in seeing Christ serving a gun for the artillery of either
side (however righteous the cause) which may have for immediate result
the disembowelling of a mother while in the pains of child-birth, or
the dismembering of young children.

He holds further (and it is a tenable argument addressed to any Power
which maintains despotic sway over an alien race, declaring such sway
to be acceptable to the people concerned, while treating as “seditious”
any reluctance to regard it as acceptable), he holds that, if the worst
comes to the worst, submission to force, or mere passive resistance
thereto, is more lifesaving, both morally and physically, than the
setting of force against force even for the defence of “liberty.” He
holds, probably, that Finland, in her policy of passive resistance to
Tsarist domination, has better conditions and prospects to-day than
Serbia; that the present fate of India, as the result of submission to
a stronger Power is preferable to the present fate of Belgium; even
though the Government forced upon it be more alien to the genius of
its races than is the German to the Flemish. He may believe that in
the long run India is more likely to escape from being Britainised by
bowing to the subjugating Power, than Britain is likely to escape from
being Prussianised by a hurried adoption of a similar system to that
which she has set out to destroy. He may even think (for there is no
limit to the contrariety of his views) that if England wins handsomely
in this war by adopting the Prussian system of militarism, she is more
likely to retain it than if she gets beaten. In a word he thinks war
the most hazardous of all remedies for the evils it sets out to cure.

The State, on the other side, sees the very gravest danger to that
edifice of worldly power which is summed up in the word “imperial,” if
once it allows the individual conscience to pick and choose the moral
terms of its allegiance. And the better the argument the conscientious
objector can present from political parallels in other countries, or
from the failures and blunders of past history, the more dangerous
becomes his propaganda and the more rigorously must it be suppressed.

The State’s claim to our duty to-day is precisely the same, neither
more nor less, than it would be if it required our services for the
prosecution of a second Boer War, a second Opium-trade war against
China, or a second war against the Independence of America. The causes
of the war might be no more reputable than in these cases, but the
State’s claim on our allegiance would remain the same. “It is not for
you,” the State says, in effect, “to judge whether I am right or wrong,
if I come to claim your services for war.”

Now nobody, I presume, is so convinced of the perennial purity of his
country’s motives, or that its foreign policy has in the past been
so safe-guarded by democratic control, as to claim that it has never
waged foolish or unjust wars. Most reasonable people will admit that
the State is, in matters of morals, a fallible authority. The claim
is, therefore, that of a fallible authority for the unquestioning
obedience of its citizens in a course of action which may involve the
ruin, torture, and death of an innocent people, or the subjugation of
a liberty-loving race. That claim by a State which stands based on the
doctrine that Might is a surer remedy and defence than Right, is a
perfectly logical one. I have not a word to say against it.

But when that claim is made for the State by followers of Christianity
on Christian grounds, then I am anxious to relieve the State of the
entanglement they would thrust upon it. I am sure that a State which
bases its authority on Might is weakened and not strengthened by any
attempt to sanction its claim as being compatible with the Christianity
taught by Christ. The less Christianity a State pretends to when it
goes to war, the more is it likely to conduct its war effectively,
and to find no mental hindrance in its way as it advances to its true
end--the destruction of its enemies.

Because our counsels were mixed with a certain modicum of Christianity,
we had a reluctance early in the war to use asphyxiating gas, exploding
bullets, and certain other improved devices for adding to the frightful
effectiveness of war. We still hesitate to smear phosphorus on our
shells so as to make wounds incurable, or to starve our prisoners
because we hear that our fellow countrymen are being starved in
Germany. In some instances with the help of the _Daily Mail_ the
doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” has carried
the day for us; but it is not a Christian doctrine, and elsewhere
Christianity, or its shadow, still holds us by the leg. The _Morning
Post_, seeing the national danger we were in from these divided
counsels, rightly demanded a Government that would “stick at nothing,”
but has only partially succeeded in securing what it wants.

Now the conscientious objectors have been trying to do us the service,
which we have ignored, of pointing out from the very beginning that
war is not and cannot be Christian, and so showing us that when a
nation goes to war Christianity is the real danger. The bigger the
bulk of genuine and practical Christianity in any country, the more
impossible is it for that country to adopt effective methods of war.
The reluctance which we feel to shell out phosphorus, or to starve
civilians, will in the genuinely Christian State make itself felt at a
much earlier stage of warlike practice, long before those particular
devices have been applied or even thought of; and it will arise (to
the discrediting of all power which places Might above Right) from
the assertion that “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is not
Christian doctrine, and is, in result, no remedy for the evil it sets
itself to avenge.

This is the real parting of the ways; it is fundamental. Christianity,
based upon the personal example and teaching of Christ, is too
individualist to be in accordance with Society as at present
constituted. Institutional Christianity, on the other hand, has
obviously transferred its allegiance in certain matters of moral
guidance from Christ to Cæsar; and claims that those matters have
been left for Cæsar to decide. I heard it argued, for instance,
quite recently, by a Roman Catholic, that as Christendom in all ages
had tolerated war, all question of conscientious objection thereto
by a Catholic falls to the ground. The answer of the Christian
individualist, I conceive, would be, that Christendom also tolerated
torture for the extraction of truth, and slavery for the extraction
of labour; and that, nevertheless, the conscientious objection
of resistant minorities succeeded, in spite of the supineness of
Christendom, in placing those monstrosities outside the pale of
civilized convention. No doubt while those devices flourished
under the countenance of Mother Church, Christians opposed to their
abolition would have cried then, as they cry now about war, “How are
you to do without them? How can you extract truth from an unwilling
witness, or labour from a subjugated race, except by compulsion and
force?” The answer to that apparently insoluble problem now stands
written in history--a history which has not eliminated untruth from
the witness-box, or indolence from the labour market; yet torture and
slavery alike have ceased to be practical politics, except where the
State still answers with regard to war as it used to answer with regard
to these: “I cannot do without.” There, in their last real stronghold,
unaffected by Christian ethics, slavery and torture still stand.

But we have to remember that the State’s claim, if we accept it as a
binding principle, comes much closer home to us than it would do if
it arose only in time of war. Military service, once we are in it,
involves us in such things as the firing at Peterloo on defenceless
citizens, in the murder under superior orders of Sheehy Skeffington;
in the shooting, if we are ordered to shoot them, of conscientious
objectors--men who are themselves sworn not to take life. Military
service, loyally rendered in Tsarist Russia, involved the riding down,
the sabring to death, and the drowning of those meek crowds who stood
before the Winter Palace in January, 1905, asking for their “Little
Father” to come and speak to them words of comfort.

These are things unfortunately which Christians cannot do with a
good conscience, but which the State for its safety may say that it
requires. Let those of us who agree with the State’s claim to our
personal service, irrespective of conscience, do our utmost to separate
it from the weakening effects which true and genuine Christianity is
bound to have on it.




THE SALT OF THE EARTH

(1918)


It is a curious commentary upon the confusion of tongues which has
descended upon us in our efforts to build towers reaching to Heaven,
that you would have been misled had I given this address its true
title. Had I called it “the Value of Purity” most of you would have
imagined that I was going to speak of what is usually called--with such
strange one-sidedness--the “social evil”; just as we call the liquor
traffic “the Trade.” You would have thought, probably, that I was
going to speak about Regulation 40 D, or some other aspect of the sex
problem with which the word “purity” has become conventionally allied.
It would, indeed, be one-sided in the other direction, to exclude
such considerations from the scope of so embracing a theme; but my
intention is rather to disencumber the word “purity” from the narrow
and puritanical meaning to which it has become limited; and the “Salt
of the Earth” does bring us nearer by its salutary implication to what
purity should really mean.

For if purity is not a good sanitary principle of fundamental
application to all ethical problems alike, it is merely a pious fad
which may easily become a pious fraud--a religious tenet pigeon-holed
by crabbed age for the affliction of youth. To departmentalise it in
a particular direction leads to impurity of thought; for we destroy
the balance of life and degrade its standards if we do not use our
moral weights and measures consistently in all relations alike. And
if you allow a particular implication of purity to impose its claim
in a society whose impurity in other directions makes it entirely
impracticable, then you are reducing your social ethics to mere
pretence and mockery; and honest youth will find you out, and will turn
away from your religions and your ethical codes with the contempt which
they deserve.

Is not that what is actually happening--more apparently to-day,
perhaps, than ever before? Has not that departmental code to which I
refer broken down and become foolish in the eyes of honest men and
women, largely because purity is nowhere established in the surrounding
conditions of our social life?

What is the true aim of social life and social organisation in regard
to the individual? What claim has it upon his allegiance if it does
not offer the means of self-realisation and self-fulfilment equally to
all? And suppose, instead of doing this in a large majority of cases,
it does the reverse: starves his imagination, reduces his initiative,
cripples his development, makes practically impossible (at the time
when desire awakes and becomes strong) the fulfilment of his nature
instinct for mating; how does the claim stand then? If you can only
offer him marriage conditions which are themselves impure, unequal laws
which are themselves a temptation, houses incompatible with health
or decency, wages insufficient for the healthy support of home, and
wife, and children; if that, broadly speaking, has been the marriage
condition which society offers to wage-earning youth, what right has it
to babble about “purity” in that narrower and more individual relation,
while careless to provide it in its own larger domain?

If you have employments--such as that of bank-clerk or
shop-assistant--which demand of those engaged a certain gentility of
dress and appearance, but offer only a wage upon which (till a man
is over thirty) domestic establishment at the required standard of
respectability is quite impossible--if that is the social condition
imposed in a great branch of middle-class industry--if you tolerate
that condition and draw bigger profits from your business, and bigger
dividends from your investments upon the strength of it--what right
have you to demand of your victims an abstinence which is in itself
unnatural and penurious, and therefore impure?

Yet what proportion of sermons, think you, have been preached
during the last hundred years in churches and chapels against that
great social impurity of underpaid labour, and underfed life which
have between them done so far more to create prostitution than any
indwelling depravity in the heart of youth? Thwarted life, and sweated
labour, those have been the makings of the “social evil,” so called;
and they lie at the door of an impure system which has made its money
savings at the cost of a great waste of life.

That particular instance, which I refer to merely in passing, has to
do with our ordinary application of the word purity. But I want to
show how all social purity really hangs together, and how, unless
you have a great fundamental social principle pure throughout,
corruption will carry infection from one department to the other,
making useless or impracticable any ideal of purity which you try to
set up in one particular direction. If you do--to put it plainly and
colloquially--the doctrine won’t wash; honest minds will find out that
the part is inconsistent with the whole.

What, then, is the whole social ideal which lies at the root of the
modern State? Is it pure, or is it impure? Is it the true “Salt of the
Earth” which, if equally applied, will benefit all nations and all
peoples alike: those to whom, in President Wilson’s phrase, we wish to
be just, and those to whom we do not wish to be just? Does any modern
State really present within its own borders, and in its treatment of
all classes and interests, an example which, if extended, would make
the world safe for Internationalism--an end which I am inclined to
think is more important than making it safe for Democracy?

The phrase “Salt of the Earth,” which I have taken to illustrate the
meaning and value of social purity, has come to us from that wonderful
compendium of ethical teaching known to Christians as the “Sermon
on the Mount”; that body of coherent, consistent, and constructive
doctrine from which Christianity--so soon as it had allied itself with
Cæsar and the things of Cæsar--made such haste to depart. And the
whole process of that departure was (from the pure ethical standard of
the Sermon on the Mount) a process of adulteration--of impurity--an
adaptation of a spiritual ideal to a secular practice of mixed motives.
But the process really began earlier. It began in the attempt to
identify the God of the Sermon on the Mount with Jahveh, the tribal God
of Hebrew history. And in that attempted identification (incompatible
ethics having to be reconciled) ethics became confounded.

The Rabbinical training of St. Paul, the Hebraistic tendencies of the
early Christian Church (whose first device was to proselytize the Jews
on the old nationalistic assumption that they were the Chosen People),
all combined to give an impure vision of God to the followers of the
new faith. The nationalism of Judaism corrupted the internationalism
of the Day of Pentecost; and the primitive Mosaic code uttered from
Sinai, and adapted to the mission of racial conquest there enjoined,
stultified the teaching of Calvary.

The two were incompatible; yet, somehow or another, the Christian
Church had to evolve an ethic which embraced both. And it did so
through allegiance to the State, and the setting-up of a compromise
between things secular and things spiritual which has existed ever
since.

You can see for yourselves which of the two is to-day the more
recognised and observed among nations which call themselves Christian.
The old tenets of Judaism--based on the Mosaic law and summed up in the
saying, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”--can be observed
by any one to-day in practical entirety with the full approval of the
State. A strict observance of the Sermon on the Mount, and a practical
belief in the teaching of Calvary land a man in prison or may even
render him liable to be shot.

Rightly or wrongly he is regarded as a danger or a weakness to the
modern State. Personally, I think that he is rightly regarded so; for I
do not see how the modern State could exist if everyone were a sincere
believer in that great peace-offensive, the Sermon on the Mount, and in
its great practical exposition, the Death on Calvary. The only thing I
am in doubt about is whether the modern State is the better alternative.

Christianity, sincerely and whole-heartedly practised, might have
strange social results; it might, on the other hand, be unexpectedly
pleasant and workable. But of one thing I feel quite sure; it would
not--as humanity is at present constituted--be practised by any but a
very small minority; and it would have to work entirely without State
aid. But that minority would fulfil, for the purposes of demonstration,
the condition which, I think, is necessary for all great ethical
adventures: it would be pure and unadulterated. It would succeed or
it would fail standing upon its own feet and not upon Cæsar’s, not
relying on mixed motives or compromise, but on a single principle--the
principle of loving your neighbour as yourself, and converting him
from evil ways by a process of peaceful penetration. And being--and
remaining, a decisive minority in the world’s affairs, its part therein
would resemble the part played by salt in the chemical sanitation of
the soil out of which grow the clean or the unclean things of earth
which feed or which poison us.

And that is the first point which I ask you to consider; the
extraordinary value to society, and to the whole evolution of the human
race of minorities holding extremist opinions--so extreme that they do
not seem at the present day to be practical politics--and yet having a
chemic influence (which would not be otherwise obtainable) for bringing
into being the mind of to-morrow, which has always been, all down the
ages, the work of minorities, and generally of persecuted minorities.

For the Salt of the Earth is only one single constituent, which enables
a better standard of life to become established where the virtue
of its presence is felt. Salt is not, and cannot be, the general
constituent of life; its essence always remains a minor quantity, and
yet quite definitely it affects the generality of things around it.
But in itself it is an extreme, an uncompromising element; its most
striking characteristic is its saltness.

It would be foolish, therefore, to blame it for not being sweet, or for
not being acid, or for not being capable of taking the place of beef or
mutton in the dietary of the human race, or for not making the whole
human race in its own image. (The only person I ever heard of who was
turned into an image of salt was Lot’s wife; and as a human being it
made her entirely useless). And yet, as, quite literally, the substance
salt has helped the earth to become habitable, and the human race to
become human, so has that symbolic salt of the earth, helped the human
race to become humane, and to envisage (though not to obey) a new ethic
of conduct based upon an ideal conception of the brotherhood of man.

It was the extreme expression of a new and higher moral plane to which
evolution is only gradually bringing us. Had it started upon compromise
it would have been useless. Its special value was, and still is, in
its uncompromising enunciation of a principle which we still regard as
impracticable.

But it had, at least, when it was first uttered, this degree of
practicability--it appealed to men’s minds; and it has gone on
appealing to them ever since.

Had it been uttered to neolithic man, it would have been merely
unintelligible, with no imaginable relation to the experiences of
life; whereas it has a very obvious relation now. Earth was then
in the toils not of a moral but of a physical problem, demanding
a straightforward physical solution; and the salting of the earth
consisted then very largely in the indomitable courage and obstinacy
with which man--the crude struggling biped--stood up against the larger
and more powerful forms of life which barred the way of his advance
toward civilisation--just as previously, the salting of the earth
(the preparing it for a higher form of life) depended upon the huge
and uncouth antediluvian monsters which devoured and trod down the
overwhelming growths of marsh and jungle.

And from that first salting of the earth, lasting through so many
ages, it is no wonder that much of the old physical recipe still
survives; and that the history of civilisation has shown us a process
in which ruthless extermination by war was regarded as the best means
of establishing God’s elect upon earth. The doctrine that force is a
remedy, or a security for moral ends, dies a slow death in the minds
of men. Institutional Christianity has, by its traditions and its
precepts, done all it could to keep it alive. We still have read to us
in our churches--for our approving acceptance--a proposition made by
the Children of Israel to a neighbouring tribe, precisely similar to
that made five years ago by Germany to Belgium. And the inference left
on the minds of Christian congregations, generation after generation,
has been that God quite approved of it (and of the ruthless devastation
which followed) as a means for making his chosen people the salt of the
earth.

It is not without significance that the Christian Church all down
the ages has allowed that sort of teaching to enter the minds of the
common people. It is not without significance that the common people
five years ago rose superior to their Bible-teaching, and regarded its
reproduction in the world of to-day as a moral outrage.

And yet if the world’s affairs, and its racial problems are to be
solved by physical force, it was a perfectly consistent thing to do;
and the inconsistency lies in our moral revolt against it.

The truth is, of course, that we are in a period of transition. We are
indignant with people who regard successful force as a justification
for wrong; but we are almost equally indignant with those who will not
regard it as a remedy for wrong. And we are slow to see that while the
school of justification by force remains rampant in the world, there
may be some chemic value for the spiritual development of the human
race in the school which denies the efficacy of remedy by force. Yet
is it not possible that as the past belongs to the one, so the future
may belong to the other?

When we started upon this war we declared that it was a war to end war;
and it was quite a popular thing to say that if it did not result in
the ending of war, then the cause of the Allies would stand defeated.
But that was only another way of saying that we should suffer defeat
if in the near future the whole world were not converted to the point
of view of the conscientious objector. But that would have been a very
unpopular way of putting it, so it was not said.

Surely this sort of contradiction in which war lands us is only another
proof that we are in an age of transition. Transition makes consistency
difficult.

But the inconsistency, which conditions of war bring into prominent
reality, lies embedded in our social system (which is itself a
compromise between two incompatible principles)--the Will to Love and
the Will to Power; and there will always be that inconsistency till
the world has definitely decided whether Love or Power is to form the
basis of our moral order. It has not decided it yet. In our own country
(leaving out all question of foreign relations) we have not decided it
yet.

It is the condition of impurity resulting from that indecision--and
permeating more or less the whole of our social organisation--which I
ask you now to consider.

How it came about is really not difficult to explain. When primitive
man began to develop the rudiments of society (the group, or the herd)
he did so mainly for self-preservation. In the struggle for existence
coordinated numbers gave him a better chance; and giving him a better
chance of life, they gave him also a better chance of self-development
and self-enjoyment. But into that early society man brought not only
his social instincts but his predatory instincts as well. And while the
group helped him to prey more effectively on those left outside, it did
not prevent him from preying in a certain measure on those within. The
exceptionally strong man had an exceptional value in his own tribe; and
he exacted an exceptional price for it--in wives, or in slaves captured
in war, or in the division of the spoil. It was the same, as society
developed, with the exceptionally resourceful leader; brain began to
count above muscle; and the men of exceptional ability acquired the
wealth. And you know perfectly well, without my going further into
detail, that out of the price exacted within the community (whose broad
interests were in common) separate and conflicting interests arose; the
interest which secured political control exacted from all the dependent
interests an unfair price for its services; and wherever slavery was an
established part of social development, man did not love his neighbour
as himself, he only loved him as his chattel.

You may take a big jump through history, from primitive to feudal, from
feudal to modern times; and you will still find the same interests
strong in every state, using their inherited control of wealth, of
organisation, and of law, to extract advantage to themselves from the
weaker, and the less educated members of the community; and always
doing it in the name of the commonwealth--the strength and stability
of the State. Only the other day (in a State as advanced as any
in its democratic faith and its doctrine of equality for all--the
United States of America) the moment there was a temporary breakdown
in the legal safeguards against child-labour--there was a great
organised rush in certain States of conscripted child-labour into
industry--conscripted not by the State but by capital, exploiting the
increased need of the wage-earning classes brought about by the raised
prices of war.

The men who do that kind of thing (and they are men of great power
and influence in the State) still only love their neighbours as their
chattels, and still take advantage of all forms of law, or absence of
law, to keep established as far as they can the conditions of social
slavery. You may say that a thing like that lies outside the law, or
that it is an abuse which legislation has not yet overtaken and put an
end to; but what is more important and more significant is that it is
an abuse which public opinion in those States where it was done had
not overtaken and put an end to, or not merely put an end to, but made
impossible. It makes it impossible for a black man over there to marry
a white woman; and if it can do the one it can do the other.

But what are those people doing? They are merely reflecting in their
own personal affairs an ideal which lies engrained in every State which
puts self-interest above the interest of the whole human race. And
that, in our present transitional stage, is the standpoint of every
country to-day. In our heart of hearts we still hold Nationalism more
important than Internationalism. And “my country right or wrong” is
still for some people the last word in morality; rather than admit
their country to be in the wrong they will let morality go.

In that matter, indeed, the world to-day seems to be divided into
two schools. There is one school which so exalts the idea of the
State as to say that the State can do no wrong: that if morality and
State-interest conflict morality must go under, or rather that morals
only exist to subserve State-interests,--and being a State-product, the
State has the right to limit their application. We are fighting to-day
against a race which is charged with having taken up that attitude;
and the pronouncements of some of its most distinguished writers, as
well as certain methods which it has employed in war, seem to bear
out the charge. But when it comes to war, that particular school of
State-ethics gives itself away by protesting that the other States
which are in hostile alliance against it are behaving very wrongly
indeed--though by its own doctrine (States being above morals) they are
incapable of wrong. It cannot stick to its own thesis.

But what are we to say if that other school, which admits that the
State can do wrong; but is not going to allow the State to be punished
for doing wrong if that State happens to be its own? It is not
that this school does not believe in punishment; it believes in it
enthusiastically, rapturously, so long as it is directed against the
wrong-doing of some other State. Punishment is good for other States,
when they do wrong; without punishment the justice of God would not
be satisfied. But for their own particular State punishment is bad,
and is no longer to be advocated. And so you may say--looking back in
history--that your country was quite wrong in waging such and such a
war; but patriotism forbids the wish in that case that right should
have prevailed and the justice of God been satisfied.

Now that school was very vocal in England during the Boer War; and I
daresay during the Opium War with China; and I daresay, also, during
the American War of Independence--very loud that we were in the wrong;
but not at all admitting, for that reason, that it would be good for us
to be beaten. But I think it should be one of our proudest boasts that,
in the long run (not immediately--not perhaps for a generation or two)
the political and moral good sense of this country goes back upon the
teaching of that school. I believe that on the whole we are glad that
we were beaten in the war with America; and that we are glad we were
beaten because we were in the wrong. And, perhaps, some day--not yet,
for our fear of the Yellow Race is still greater than our fear of any
white race you can name--but, perhaps, some day we may be sorry that we
were not beaten to a standstill in our opium war with China. (I see,
incidentally, that to-day we are addressing a sharp remonstrance to
the Chinese Government, because it is now doing that very thing which
we then compelled it to do at the point of the bayonet--permitting,
namely, the opium trade to be revived. That remonstrance only came,
however, after we had sold to China sufficient opium to last its
medical needs for 140 years!)

Now those acts of our national past, which we now reprobate, were only
bad prominent expressions of the fundamental idea on which the modern
State runs its foreign policies--reflecting outwardly something which
lives strongly engrained in our midst--the Will to Power. It is because
that principle is more firmly established in the world of diplomacy
than either the Will to Serve or the Will to Love, that our policies
have been able to shape themselves. It was not because we wished to
give the Heathen Chinee a good time that we forced our opium upon him;
it was because we wanted to give our opium trade good returns. And
that was merely a faithful reflection of what was going on at home.
It was because we wanted--or because our ruling classes wanted--to
give capital good returns, that the working classes were not allowed
to combine, that child-labour, and sweated industries remained like
institutions in our midst, that legislation in the interests of labour
and of women and children fell hopelessly into arrears. Democracy,
you may say, has done away with all that: well, with some of it. In
proportion to the broadening of its power in the State, Democracy has
looked after its own interests. But so long as the average human mind
is bent upon securing advantage to the detriment of others, or upon
securing for itself privileges not to be shared by others, that mind
will inevitably be reflected in the way we work our State institutions,
and the form we give to our foreign policies. And always, and in every
instance, you will find, if you follow it out, that this inclination
to secure advantage to the detriment of others always lands you in
an ethical contradiction unless your ideal is entirely inhuman and
non-social. It is inconsistent with that community of interest to which
social order pretends. We set up laws for the good of the State; and
we call them equal laws. And if they are good laws, and if we love
our country, we must necessarily love the laws which are for the good
of our country, and embrace them with equal fervour, whether they
touch us or whether they touch our neighbours. But when a member of
our own family commits a theft, or a forgery, we do everything we can
to save him from the operation of that law which we think so good for
others. And if we do; then our affection or respect for the law is
entirely one-sided and impure. And the people who make laws and devise
punishments upon those unequal premises are not at all likely to make
their laws just, or their forms of punishment wise.

Our whole prison system is bad just because it is not really designed
first and foremost to do the criminal good, and to develop him into a
useful citizen; but only to repress him and make him a discouraging
example to others.

Our prisons are impure because they are lacking in good-will; we have
regarded power instead of love as the solution of the crime problem;
and we have been contented to apply an impatient, unintelligent, and
soul-destroying remedy to the crimes of others, which we would not wish
to see applied in like case to those of our own family.

Of course, I know that our prisons have been greatly improved;
because, as I said before, we are in a state of transition, and a new
school of thought, whose basis is Love and Service, is fighting an
old school of thought whose basis is Power, and gradually--only very
gradually--getting the better of it.

It is the same with Education; the old idea of education was largely
based on dominance and power--the power of the teacher to punish. The
new idea is largely based upon the power of the teacher to interest,
and upon trust in youth’s natural instinct to acquire knowledge. It
is a tremendous change; the old system was impure in its psychology,
and corrupted alike the mind of the teacher and the taught. Nobody in
the old days was so unteachable as a school-master; and yet his whole
profession is really--to learn of youth. And the ethical impurity of
the old system came at the point where there was a lack of goodwill--a
lack of mutual confidence.

In trade again, how much co-operation has been over-ridden by
competition--manœuvres of one against the other, designed to the
other’s detriment. We have been told that competition is absolutely
necessary to keep us efficient in business; it is precisely the same
school of thought which says that war is necessary to keep us efficient
as a nation.

But in a family you don’t need competition; where there is goodwill,
co-operation and the give-and-take of new ideas for the common stock
are enough.

To-day we are beginning to wake up to the possibility of co-operation
taking the place of competition. It is the purer idea; and being the
purer we shall probably in the end find it the more economical.

And what shall we say about politics? Does anyone pretend that our
politics are pure; or that the system on which we run them is
anything but a vast system of adulteration?--which may perhaps be
thus expressed:--Two great bodies of opinion trying to misunderstand
each other and trying to make the general public share in their
misunderstanding, in order that their own side may attain to power.

When you start on a discussion, what is the pure reason for that
discussion? To try to arrive at a common understanding--mental
co-operation. But is it for that purpose that we raise our party cries
and run a general election?

We are being threatened with that great boon in the near future. And
when it takes place a great wave of impurity will rise and will flood
through the land; and men will be strenuously misrepresenting the
words and thoughts and motives of their opponents--and very often men
will be misrepresenting their own motives--because their end is really
power--power over others instead of goodwill to others. And out of that
process we shall draw together the Council of the Nation!

That process--which we see quite well is an impure process--is forced
upon us because we are in a stage of transition; it is difficult as a
matter of practical politics to suggest a better.

But ought not that obvious fact to make us very humble about our
present stage of political development--and humble in general about the
position to which we have attained in our moral evolution? Is it not a
little premature to call ourselves a Free Nation? Is any Nation really
free till it has found itself on peace and good-will to all?

Now I have put before you these sorry spectacles to show that where
the true social ideal of brotherhood and goodwill breaks down, you
arrive at some ethical absurdity of which you have to be ashamed--you
find yourself driven into inconsistency, into impurity. And the only
thing that is consistent and is pure (once you have started with the
social idea) is that we are all one brotherhood--and that harm to one
member of the community is harm to all. And when you have once got a
nation that has really taken that idea to heart and made a practice of
it, such a nation will never rest content till there is a Society of
Nations of like mind extending over all the world.

I referred just now to the Sermon on the Mount. To most of the world
its teachings sound impracticable. They are the extreme statement
of an ideal; and it is hard in this world to live ideally. But that
statement has about it this merit of commonsense--it is pure, it is
consistent--it is a united whole; and it is based on something of which
we have never yet really allowed ourselves the luxury--a trust in human
nature. A belief that if you set yourself whole-heartedly to do good to
others--to do good even to your enemies--human nature will respond.

We cannot all love our neighbours as ourself--that individual emotion
is beyond us. But if we can love our country enough to die for it,
we can also love it enough to give to it laws and institutions and
policies that shall prepare the way for the universal brotherhood of
man.




THE RIGHTS OF MAJORITIES

(1912)


In every age some fetich of government has been set up designed to
delude the governed, and to induce a blind rather than an intellectual
acceptance of authority.

To set up in government some point over which you must not argue, is
always very convenient to those who govern; and so you will note,
throughout the world’s history, that the manipulators of government
have always tried to impose some incontrovertible proposition as the
basis on which their authority shall rest; and then, having done so, to
get the strings of it into their own hands, and work it to their own
convenience.

In the present day “majority rule” is the pretended fetich; a majority
whose qualification is almost automatic, whose registration is all
done for it by the party agents, and whose free and independent vote
is brought up to the polling-booth very largely by the bribe of a free
ride in a motor-car.

Scores of elections, that is to say, are turned by the indifferent
voter, and on this sort of cookery recipe the moral products of
majority rule are served up to us as “a dish fit for a king,” and as
giving moral sanction to government. And whatever indigestion comes
to us as the result of our swallowing it whole we are to sit down
under. If the majority has decided, the matter (we are told) is beyond
argument.

That is the fetich, the superstition on which, in theory, government
rests to-day.

In other times there were other fetiches, quite as respectable. “The
King can do no wrong,” was one of them. And we have had staged before
our eyes, in due order, the divine right--or the divine sanction; it is
all the same--of Kings, of Property, of Inheritance, of Slavery, and of
War.

All these have been maintained as necessities of government--infallible
doctrines, based on Scripture and the will of God.

Some of them present rather a battered front to-day. The fetich which
has taken their place is the “Right of Majorities.”

We do not exactly say “Majorities can do no wrong.” But we do incline
to say (often for the sake of a quiet life, and for no better reason)
“Majorities must be allowed to do as they please.” And that means in
effect--those must be allowed to do as they please who can pull the
wires by which majorities are manipulated.

I need hardly remind you that to-day the wire-pullers are the
statesmen, the leaders of party, who have secured more and more the
control of the party-machine, and with it the control of the education
of the electorate.

Having secured this control, they let loose upon you the astonishing
doctrine that, if you have numbers, there you have your right cut and
dried; that if you have not numbers your right (politically speaking)
does not exist.

Now every student of history knows that in the past majorities,
more especially manipulated majorities--or their counterpart _force
majeure_--have done great crimes.

But we do not to-day maintain that those majorities had a “right” to
sack cities, to violate women, to massacre, to exterminate, and to
bring others into subjection. The most we say is that these happenings
are an extreme, and, under some circumstances, an inevitable expression
of certain bad elements in human nature. Is it not, then, perfectly
absurd to imagine that under internal and domestic conditions all such
bad elements have departed from majorities; and that a consensus of
vice, of self-indulgence, of unfairness, of a desire for domination,
may not spread through very large sections of the community, even
through whole peoples where the opportunity so to indulge is
accorded--especially if it be accorded by law or embodied as a State
doctrine?

Clearly, therefore, there must be some limitation or check imposed
upon the so-called “rights” of majorities; and some of them may be
limitations which those majorities would not choose for themselves,
but will, all the same, submit to without revolt if they are properly
rubbed home! One of the essential conditions for majority rule (if
it is to carry with it any moral sanction at all) is that it must
be ready to submit to the same conditions which it imposes upon
others; and that it must not set up qualification, or prohibition from
qualification, without any liability of that prohibition falling upon
itself. It must make the liability fairly equal.

The specious excuse and justification for government by majority, as
put forward by the materialists, is that, latent, within it, lies the
physical force of the nation. (I may say, in passing, that the physical
force of the nation lies latent in every form of government which
secures the assent of the governed; and only ceases to be latent when
some of it gets on to its hind-legs and insists on another form of
government; and to be effective, that “some of it” need not always be a
majority.)

But it is no use talking of physical force being the basis and the
moral justification of majority rule--it is no use invoking the
physical force argument--unless your majority is also prepared to go
to the trouble of exercising it and paying the price for exercising
it. And the main phenomenon of our present form of government by
majority is that the majority won’t take any trouble at all; that,
taken in the bulk, they care very little, and won’t put themselves
to inconvenience--certainly won’t risk physical discomfort and
pain--unless government has very seriously incommoded them by damaging
or by neglecting their interests.

If the physical force basis is to be your full sanction of
government--if that is really your argument--then that basis, that
sanction, is possessed equally by king or despot, so long as he has his
organisation at his command. There are his numbers, obeying him just
as, with us, M.P.’s, 700 strong, obey the party-whips, often against
their principles, but from no physical compulsion whatever.

What the preachers of physical force seem to ignore in arguing about
the basis of government, is the aim of government. What, in the minds
and consciences of those who believe in government, is government
aiming for? Is its aim only to keep order or to be just? Does it seek
to repress humanity to the utmost extent, or to develop it? To wrap its
talents in a napkin, or to make it spiritually a ruler of cities?

What is humanity out for? To what is it evolving? What has been its
impulse, its motive force in pressing for, and in extracting from
reluctant authorities Representative Government, with its accompanying
symbol--the voice of the majority?

It has been seeking humane government--in the belief, surely, that
the nearer you get to really humane government the more will unrest
and revolt and crime cease; and, by the consequent reduction of the
police and of the forces of repression now needed, repay the State a
hundred-fold for the liberties it has established. And majority rule
is merely a device to get nearer to humane government, to open up the
mind of man to his own humane possibilities, and to develop his trust
in others by reposing trust in him. The more you spread government as
an organization of the people themselves, the more humane, upon that
working basis, are likely to be its operations--on one condition: that
such organisation of the people, whatever its numbers, submits to the
operation of its own laws and shares equally in the conditions which
it imposes--that, if it provides a qualification for citizenship, it
provides also the means for all to qualify.

Now this brings us to the relative duties of those who govern and of
those who are governed; and, whereas, fundamentally their duty is the
same, in one important respect it differs. In each case, broadly and
fundamentally, their duty is toward their neighbour--to do to him as
they would he should do unto them. That axiom, rightly carried out,
covers all the law and the prophets, being greater than either; nay, if
it were rightly and universally carried out, the law and the prophets
might safely be shelved. Law merely exists as an expedient, because men
have not yet learned thoroughly to do, or even to wish to do, their
duty toward their neighbour; and as law is an imperfect thing, only
existing because of, and only applicable to, imperfect conditions, the
law and its upholders are not, and never can be, a perfect expression
of that duty which is mutually owed by all. Law is only an expedient
for averting greater evils which might, and probably would, take place
without it in our present very imperfect stage of human development.

But there is one obvious difference between the governors and the
governed. In the action of the former there is an assertion of
authority--an underlying assumption of a power to improve matters by
regulating them. In the governed there is no such assumption of moral
superiority; the governed are there whether they like it or no; and the
laws which condition their lives are laid upon them by a power beyond
themselves, even when--under a representative system--they have secured
some minute voice in regard to their shaping.

The governors, therefore, by their assumption of an ability to improve
matters, are in a fiduciary position to the rest of the community--the
_onus probandi_ of their beneficence rests upon them and not upon
the people. It is their duty to pacify the governed; it is not the
duty of the governed to pacify them; and if they fail in the work of
pacification, which is their main _raison d’être_, they, and not the
community, have to meet the charge of functional incompetence.

Government is a function; being governed is not a function. Humanity
in all stages of civilization or of savagery has fallen subject to
government without being asked to show any certificate of its fitness
to be governed. It is therefore, the governors who have to prove
themselves fit--not the governed; and if a penal code be found, or
declared, necessary to enable the governors to secure peace and
order, then (if your system be just and equal) the penal code should
be applicable in at least equal severity to the governors who impose
it, when instead of producing contentment, it produces unrest and
disorder. Liability to impeachment and condemnation under laws of an
equal stringency would be, I think, a very wholesome corrective to the
legislative action of M.P.’s voting coercive measures which only result
in failure. I fancy that under such conditions there would have been,
for instance, a far smaller majority for the “Cat and Mouse Act,” the
futility of which soon became so ridiculously apparent. Imprisonment
with compulsory starvation, followed by release upon a medical
certificate, and then by a fresh term of imprisonment would have been a
most enlightening form of vacation for certain members of Parliament.
And until we have secured in this country a much more equal adjustment
of the relations between governors and governed, some such corrective
for vindictive legislation is certainly needed.

It is not a sufficient equivalent, or safeguard to popular liberty, to
be able merely to dismiss from office a Minister of the Crown who has
by his administrative blunders brought citizens to death and property
to destruction, or who has sedulously manufactured criminals out of
a class whose will is to be law-abiding. He, if anybody, deserves
punishment; and Parliaments (backed by whatever majority) which,
through maintaining political inequalities, produce such results, are
under the same condemnation. The _onus probandi_ of their beneficence
rests upon them; and if, commissioned to secure peace and order, they
produce only unrest and disorder, then the proof is against them.

Listen to these remarkable words by so great a supporter of
constitutional authority as Edmund Burke:

“Nations,” he says, “are not primarily ruled by laws, still less
by violence. Whatever original energy may be supposed in force or
regulation, the operation of both is, in truth, merely instrumental.
Nations are governed by the same methods and on the same principles by
which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who
are his equals or his superiors--by a knowledge of their temper, and by
a judicious management of it. I mean--when public affairs are steadily
and quietly conducted: not when government is nothing but a continued
scuffle between the magistrate and the multitude, in which sometimes
one and sometimes the other is uppermost, in which they alternately
yield and prevail in a series of contemptible victories and scandalous
submissions. The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought,
therefore, to be the first study of the statesman. And the knowledge
of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he
has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn.”

And further on he says:

“In all disputes between them (the governed) and their rulers, the
presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people. Experience
may perhaps justify me in going further. When popular discontents
have been very prevalent, it may well be affirmed that there has
been something found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of
government. The people have no interest in disorder. When they do
wrong, it is their error and not their crime. But with the governing
part of the State it is far otherwise. They certainly may act ill by
design as well as by mistake.... And if this presumption in favour of
the subject against the trustees of power be not the more probable, I
am sure it is the more comfortable speculation; because it is more easy
to change an administration than to reform a people.”

There, then, is a great authority, Edmund Burke, maintaining that
governments are more liable to wilful error than those whom they
govern--and the main value of majority rule is that it tends to bring
the presumption round to the side of government, by making the voice
of government also the voice of the people. I do not think the claims
of majority rule can be put on any higher footing than that--that if
the government is really expressive of a governed majority (and not
merely of a majority to whom the constitution has accorded licence and
privilege above its fellows) then the favourable presumption in any
conflict comes round to the side of government.

But if government claims its sanction from a majority, then we must
enquire further into the composition and character of that majority;
and yet further whether the mandate of that majority is the output
of its conscience or merely of its self-interest; we must watch its
workings, and see what really brings it to the poll--its moral sense,
its pleasure in motor-cars, or its inclination (based on a national
love of sport) to select and to back the winner.

At whose bidding to-day, and for what motive, are we really being
governed? Our duty toward government can never be greater than toward
that voice of sanction on which it rests. And short of a voice of
the whole people conscientiously uttered, and so conditioned as to
be really free and equal, I do not see whence an entire sanction
of government is to come--though you may have (under such and such
circumstances) a large increase of presumption in its favour.

But obviously there are degrees. We in England clearly recognise that.
We have recognised it in our own history; we recognise it in looking
abroad upon other countries. And we rather approve--most of us--of
revolution against a Russian or a German government which has refused
so to aim that the people shall be in some sort their own governors.

Similarly, in this country, the sanction may be imperfect--we may
have secured the form but not the substance. If so--if the form is
so manipulated as to be virtually of no effect--the moral sanction
is by so much lessened. Universal franchise--on the unattainable
qualification, let us say, of standing on one leg for a fortnight,
would be a mockery deserving of instant revolt. And there is some
mockery in setting up any qualification of which a willing and
painstaking citizen cannot avail himself--or herself. Perhaps there
is also some mockery--some cheapening of citizenship--in setting up a
qualification which requires no willingness and no pains.

The moral sanction of government, therefore, is ever fluctuant and
variable--conditioned always by the sincere relationship of theory to
practice, of form to fact. No amount of form or theory, however just
in appearance, or legal in fact, will condone unjust government. And
as we would wish to be condemned and punished were we so to impose on
others--so must we act towards any government which seeks to impose
on us by substituting form for substance. If its moral sanction is
imperfect it cannot claim perfect obedience.

Now if there is not a full and honest wish among those who govern to
do as they would be done by--claiming no advantage or privilege for
themselves, and not attempting to keep in order one section of the
community rather than another by framing laws which penalise this
section rather than that--if there is not this honest wish, there will
all the more be an attempt on the part of the governing section to give
to its government in form that virtue which it lacks in practice,--to
say to objectors: “See how safeguarded on all hands are your interests,
how perfectly you are represented, how obviously you are the masters of
the situation, and we only the servants.” And the nearer the governed
are to an intellectual awakening and apprehension of their true
condition, the more elaborate and plausible will be the pretence that
the real ultimate power rests--not there in the hands of the governors,
but here in the hands of the governed. And best of all--because most
deceptive of all--will be the device which does actually put the means
of reforming or of overthrowing government into the hands of the
governed, while so nullifying the application of those means that the
fair form, so fruitful in seeming, shall be in reality an empty husk.

Now, if it be true--as from history I have contended--that the moral
sanction of government is variable, and depends on honest conditions
and relations, obviously it is not the mere plausible form which shall
decide whether this or that government be deserving of obedience or
not. That form which is established by law must bring forth fruit to
the satisfaction of the governed--producing, as proof of its claim,
peaceful conditions and general content. If it fail to do this then it
must be suspected, enquired into, and, if need be, disowned.

But it must breed something more than the acquiescence of a majority.
The contentment, or at least the acquiescence of minorities is one
of the signs of good government. For while it takes little to make
minorities critical, it takes much to make them revolt--if for no other
reason than that the chances are against them. And it is not in human
nature to face so heavy odds except for some grave cause.

Consider first, then, in any given case, “Are those in the minority
seeking to keep or filch liberty from you, or only to obtain such
liberty as is already yours? Are they seeking to set up equality of
condition or inequality? Are they pressing for privilege or only for
common ground?”

And if the answer to such questions be that they seek only a like
liberty upon common ground and equality with yourselves--then, I
care not how large the majority against them--you must open or make
available to them that same standing which you claim as your due; and
on whatever basis of public service or private worth you have obtained
your right,--that means, that test, that qualification must be open
also to them, else your majority rule is nothing more than brute force,
a despotism extended from the embodiment of one or of a few to an
embodiment of 10, 15, or 20,000,000. But if you sanction that and make
it your base, then, to be logical, you must sanction also (at least
as a test) the employment of force by a minority to make its position
untenable. And remember, that if among a minority some ten per cent.
are willing to die, as against only some one or two per cent. in a
majority, that minority is likely to win, and all your numbers will be
vain.

That fact puts no undue or dangerous power into the hands of
minorities. Consent, on a just basis, can be obtained to government
whose acts are little to the liking of individual minds or of
minorities. But if, after long trial of expedient, persuasion, or
coercion, consent cannot be obtained, then the weight of evidence
(based on the unfailing document of human nature) has shifted against
government; and it rests more with the government than with the rebel
to prove that its claims are just.

When governments establish inequalities affecting the lives and
liberties of any, however few, I see no sanction whatsoever in
majorities. One runaway slave had not to wait upon a majority of
his fellow-slaves in order to establish his right to escape from
slavery--still less upon a majority of the nation which owned him.
If he could find a path along which to escape, that was the highroad
appointed for him by God from of old; and if he died in the attempt his
grave was still a monument to Liberty. Not the will of a million could
destroy the right of that one. And though I admit that a society which
sanctions slavery must treat as a murderer the slave who kills in his
effort to escape,--nevertheless, by posterity, and in a society which
has repudiated slavery, that act will be very differently regarded;
and so long as the man’s aim when he committed that legal offence
was freedom, we, who have repudiated slavery, look upon him not as a
murderer but as a fighter in a just cause.

We are in a society to-day which tolerates and even sanctions things
which to-morrow will be regarded as slavery is regarded now. While
society thus chooses to establish evil it is driven in self-defence to
treat those who rebel as criminals. But posterity will not so think of
them; and the greater the forces of the majority which stood against
them when they struck--the more will it admire and reverence, and
approve. Surely a startling commentary on the “rights” of majorities:
approval of the minority in an inverse proportion to its size!

Now, you might have a State almost equally divided into what were,
broadly speaking, opposed interests; under certain circumstances, for
instance, (circumstances which have actually occurred in the past)
manufacturing and agricultural interests might be opposed. If, then,
you accepted majority rule as a blind dogma, those two interests
would have the right alternately to prey upon and to bleed each other,
according to the fortunes of the polls--and they might do it by putting
forward legislative programmes which would bribe the electoral wobblers
first to this side and then to that. Where, on such a device does moral
right come in? Was ever anything so ludicrous as a doctrine?

As a doctrine of right, majority rule has but doubtful ground to stand
on. As an expedient, for practical use under sound conditions, there
is much to be said for it. But when once you recognise it as a mere
working expedient, then its workings must be watched, proved, and
sometimes corrected and checked--by a minority.

Majority rule is only tolerable when it has the equal rights of man
and woman firmly fixed as its goal; and it is as tending to the
establishment of that doctrine that majority rule is acceptable (with
some caution and reservations) to our progressive sense of citizenship.

In the great historic moments of upheaval which have brought it about,
it has consciously or subconsciously been an attempt to get rid of the
bad principle of dominance over others. It expresses the hope, or it
embodies the probability, that a majority will be so broadly made up of
all sorts and conditions--of the whole chemical composition of human
society, that is to say--that in a government prompted and directed
by a majority there will be no dominance of one section over another
section: that they will, in the long run (or, if efficiently checked,
in the short run) correct each other, strike a balance, and prevent the
rigid and continuous existence in the body politic of any subjected
section.

But if a majority could so sort its materials as to select for rigid
and permanent subjection one section of the community, then the reason
for its existence, and the grounds for its moral sanction would be gone.

If, then, two-thirds or three-quarters of the community can secure
a greater apparent measure of comfort for themselves by forcing the
remaining one-third, or one-quarter, to wait upon them and minister to
their needs, the actual size of that dominant majority confers upon
it no moral right whatever. There would, indeed, be more semblance of
right, or at least more tenable ground, if a minority could so impose
on a majority; because in that case the power of imposition would
arise not from mere brute force so much as from superior ability; and
a minority which can manipulate to its purpose the bulk material of a
community has shown better ground for the rule of others (not very good
ground, I admit) than the mere weight of numbers can supply. Weight
of numbers as a ground for dominating others gives you no moral or
efficient basis at all. Weight of capacity does give you an efficient
basis, if not a moral one.

Now, if your two-thirds majority is extracting comfort on unequal and
compulsory terms from the remaining one-third, you surely cannot deny
the right of the remaining one-third so to diminish the comfort thus
compulsorily extracted as to bring it to vanishing point, or to make
it even a minus quantity. And the bigger the majority which is thus
extracting sustenance from the minority, and exploiting it to its own
ends, the more you will admire the minority if it rises in revolt, and
makes the imposed and one-sided bargain unprofitable to the majority.
And should the contention be carried to extremes (as it will be if
both sides are sufficiently resolved) then the majority will have to
exterminate the minority, and (if it wishes to continue government on
the same lines) will have to extract for exploitation a new minority
from its own body--give up one of its own ribs to servitude--and so
become a diminished people in its perpetuation of a bad system.

Now, these considerations of moral right are irrespective of numbers.
It may be the bounden duty of one man to resist the will of hundreds,
or thousands, or millions. Indeed, every religious system admits, and
history gives clear evidence, that that is so. A man must obey his
conscience; that is his one ultimate guide. That statement expresses
what one may call the atomic theory of human society. It suggests, at
first sight, an impossible splitting to pieces of all systems of law
and order; but it is not so in reality, because--and this is the really
wonderful thing and the spiritual root of the whole matter--conscience
is the most infectious and convincing force in life. In a community
there is really a far greater agreement of conscience than of desire or
of opinion. A conscientious resister may, of course, be mistaken; but
if he is prepared to go on resisting, making sacrifice, and enduring
suffering for his scruples--that process is the least fallible as a
test, and the most converting in its tendency of all the processes of
propaganda that the human mind can conceive; and by recognizing the
moral right of the individual to put himself to that test before the
eyes of his fellow citizens, and so at the same time to test their
consciences in the matter, you are not really encouraging a course
which leads to disunion and anarchy, but a course which, on the whole,
will best bring about a general consensus of opinion. A community
which recognises the moral worth of such tests of its own and of
the individual conscience, will be far less likely to arouse such
demonstrations of revolt than one which altogether ignores and despises
them; for the simple reason that such a community will be better based
in its duty toward its neighbour; it will wish each man to do that
which it would claim the right to do itself in a like case, if faced by
a superior power backed by greater numbers than its own.

If I know that my conscientious resistance will be respectfully
considered (though not made easy or cheap to me), that my test of other
consciences may be tried and may be adjudged to fail--I shall not be
more inclined to enter into conflict with so considerate a majority,
but less; for it is not open-minded justice but close-minded injustice
which arouses opposition and rebellion.

But while human nature makes it safe, in the main, that men and women
will not in any appreciable numbers submit themselves voluntarily to
continuous discomfort, deprivation, loss of liberty and ease, except
for a just cause or a high motive worth looking into, considering, and
making allowances for: human nature does not make it safe that those
in authority will not be overbearing and unjust, unless they too are
liable to a like test.

And here again we come to consider the duty of the law and of
law-makers to individuals.

The law should be prepared wherever its fallibility stands
proved--where, for instance, it has done hurt and damage to innocency
by its operations--at least to make full reparation. It is not an
honourable position, for that which holds fiduciary together with
compulsory powers, to say to one whom it has falsely imprisoned or
unjustly charged--“You, on the whole, benefit by government, and,
therefore, must yourself bear this hurt of government which has fallen
upon you.” The State or the community which permits such individual
hardship to result from its imposition of a fallible code is not just
in its government or dutiful to its neighbour. And if it so acts, it
undermines in the governed their sense of its moral sanction. The State
cannot so do hurt to its citizens and retain an unimpaired claim on
their allegiance; nor can it with any moral decency claim reparation
from its enemies abroad, if it does not make full reparation for its
own miscarriages of justice at home.

“One,” it is sometimes argued, “must suffer for the general good.” But
the general good is not so served. In this connection general good only
means “general cheapness.” The State, and not the citizen, must pay the
price of its presumption--or it must look for an altered mind in every
citizen whom it so afflicts from its position of immunity. Nay, it may
be well that its supposed immunity should occasionally be disproved by
a determined and self-sacrificing citizen, entirely for the general
good, and the State forced to pay in extra upkeep for the bad condition
of its laws.

The careless self-allowance of majorities in wrong done to minorities,
or even to individuals, is not to the general good; and one could
rather wish to a State that its minorities should be alert and
pugnacious, than its majorities self-satisfied and indifferent on the
score of mere numbers.

Numbers, uncorrected by conscience and uncontrolled by penalties, may
be the cheapest, nastiest and most unscrupulous form of tyranny. The
indifference or acquiescence of hundreds to conditions by which they
themselves are not consciously affected cannot have the same moral
weight as the discontent of one or of a few who are so affected.
That is a consideration which must always qualify the “rights” of
majorities. In such circumstances the sanction of mere numbers is not
sufficient.

Are minorities, then, always to have their way? By no means. We know
that they cannot.

Countless minorities in our political controversies have contended,
have failed, and have acquiesced in their failure. Time has tested
them, and has measured the depth of their grievance by the scale of
human nature.

But other minorities, which have persistently refused to acquiesce have
won. Time has tested them also; and human nature, not numbers, has in
the long run proved their case.

Medical science tells us that there is in the human eye a blind spot,
by the existence of which alone we are enabled to see. If that blind
spot were absent the eye would be without focus.

In human nature (however much we hold by the principle of ordered
government) there is a point of revolt which standardises the relations
of the individual to government. It cannot be brought into play by
mere artifice or calculation, except for brief spells; but when
naturally aroused it lasts.

It is that point of revolt, latent at all times in a freedom-loving
people, but only aroused by unjust conditions--it is the existence of
that point of revolt in human nature which secures good government.

Minorities, if determined, can make unjust government an economic
extravagance, and can indicate to majorities (with some trouble and
cost to themselves) the limitation of their rights.

The sleeping partner of good government is the spirit of revolt.

To-day we have not good government; and that is why the sleeping
partner is awake.




DISCREDITABLE CONDUCT

(1915)


Discreditable conduct, according to its right derivation, is conduct
provocative of disbelief. It is that kind of conduct which makes
us doubt the professions of its agents, because it is practically
inconsistent with the things that they preach.

Many things are done in this world which are very reprehensible,
vindictive, cruel, narrow-minded--I might go through a whole catalogue
of the vices; but they are not therefore “discreditable.” A man who
has gone about the world expressing his undying hatred for another
man, and then ends by killing him, has done nothing discreditable from
his own standard. He has not made you believe less in his professions,
but more; for he actually did mean what he said, and has become by his
act a creditable witness to the faith that was in him--the dark gospel
of hatred. But if, while nourishing a personal hatred, he was at the
same time laying it down as the duty of all men to love their enemies,
then we have not to wait for the murder in order to look upon him as
a tainted and a discredited witness. It is not so much the blood upon
his hands as the hatred within his heart which has discredited him as a
preacher to others.

Or, put the case otherwise; without pretending to such a counsel of
perfection as that he can love his enemies, a man may yet assert that
human life is sacred, and that he has no right to take the life of his
fellow. Having done so he begins to set up exceptions: “Though I may
not do it at my own,” he says, “I may do it at the bidding of others.”
And this not by orders that he is compelled into on pain of death or
torture (when he might plead a natural human infirmity as his excuse
for wrongdoing) but by voluntary enlistment in an army, or by voluntary
acceptance of the post of public hangman, or of a judgeship, or of
service upon a jury in cases involving the death-penalty.

Now, it may be very commendable to take human life at the bidding of
others; but it is not consistent with the unqualified statement that
“all human life is sacred.” The one proposition--it is not my concern
here to defend or attack either of them--becomes discredited by the
other. The advocate of the judicial extinction of life under the
institution of capital punishment, or of wholesale extinction under the
institution of war--if he wishes to be heard as a credible witness, and
to avoid the imputation of discreditable conduct when he gives a hand
to it--must reshape his statement something after this manner: “Human
life is so important a thing that one man must not take it on his own
responsibility; but Society may.” And then he will have to make up
his mind what he means by Society, and why he thinks Society is more
to be trusted than himself. And if he finds himself in a community
which permits or even inculcates moral evils which he individually
cannot tolerate, then he must puzzle out for himself why he will
trust such a community with the power to kill, when he sees it make
so vile and miserable a misuse of the power to keep alive--or to keep
from life in any form that is worth having--so many millions of his
fellow-creatures. And he will find presently that his assertion that
human life is sacred must--if it is to mean anything--extend from the
comparatively easy and simple problem of the death-penalty to those far
greater problems, which lie all around him, of the cruel life-penalties
tolerated or exacted by Society.

So before long what he will find himself up against is this--the
necessity of being a creditable or a discreditable witness to the value
of Society itself--of that thing to whose apron-strings he has tied
his conscience. For you cannot assert that it is right for Society to
unmake human life unless you also assert that Society is making human
life in a form that is worth having, in a form, too, that would be
imperilled were its power of judicial murder to be taken from it.

But the point of departure I have wished to bring you to is this:
man did not begin to doubt his own moral right to kill other men
until there entered into his being an idea of something better able
than himself to judge, to control, and to provide. And so long as he
believed in that idea as protective of a morality superior to his
own, and productive of the fruits of life in better quality, he could
without discredit put into its hands powers which he dared not himself
exercise.

But when, on the contrary, a man comes to the conclusion that the
products of Society as constituted have in them more of evil than of
good, he may quite creditably, in a strict sense of the word, start an
attack upon Society, or upon great social institutions, and seek to
bring them to dissolution. Such a course of action may be arrogant, or
may have an insufficient basis of fact, but it is not discreditable.
Rather does it prove the man’s faith in his professions. History
gives record of many such characters, and posterity has approved of
deeds which in their own day were regarded as violent, arrogant, and
unjustifiable.

Martin Luther attacked a far greater social institution of his own day
than was comprised under any single form of government. He attacked
something much bigger than the English or the American Constitution.
In deciding to attack it he was more arrogant (if single unorganised
action against large and organised numbers be the proof of arrogance)
than you or I could be if we attacked any institution to-day that
you like to name, even the institution of war. Now, the result of
that great attack was that it succeeded--not unconditionally, not
universally, but (broadly speaking) racially and territorially. About
one-third of Europe was conquered by it; and about two-thirds remain
to this day--not indeed unaffected, but certainly not conquered by
Lutheranism. If you are to judge of sacred causes by mere numbers,
there are still more nominal Catholics than nominal Protestants in the
world; and, therefore, by numbers, up to date Luther is condemned.

Luther’s real conquest--the thing that he really did bring about,
and in which numbers are now on his side, would have horrified him.
Luther was the root-cause why there are to-day more nominal Christians
in the world who pick and choose doctrines to suit their own taste,
than Christians who submissively take their doctrines wholesale from
others whether from Luther or from Rome. It is due to Luther, as much
as to anybody, that so many Roman Catholics who have no leanings to
Lutheranism, are only nominal Catholics. Luther, that is to say, has
brought into existence an enormous number of discreditable Christians
who will not openly admit that they are free-thinkers.

You have clergy of the Church of England, for instance, who read
themselves into their pulpits with the Thirty-nine Articles, and do not
believe half of them.

The average young man who enters the ministry of the Church of England
has been reasonably mothered by a university education; and when he
takes the plunge it is not total immersion. His mother--his Alma
Mater--still holds him by the heel. It is in consequence, with a sort
of heel of Achilles that he enters upon divinity; and over this he
draws a stocking with a large hole in it just where the wear of the
heel comes hardest. That stocking (containing forty stripes save one)
is the Thirty-nine Articles. It has been loosely knit, it is warranted
to shrink the longer he wears it, and the hole in consequence gets
larger.

There you have the weakness of the Church of England. Nobody to-day in
his senses is prepared to die for the Thirty-nine Articles. Yet to hold
ministry in the Church he has to swear by them, and thus at the very
beginning of his ministerial career discreditable conduct is imposed on
him.

It is no wonder that upon that basis the Church of England is permeated
with unbelief in the things that it professes. A Church, a religion,
may be full of credulity, bigotry, superstition--and with all those
things it may yet have a true and a living faith: it may breed martyrs
and inquisitors in equal numbers and with equal facility; but, in order
to do so it must have at its back something definite and distinctive
that its members are prepared to die for. And if it has not that, it is
bound to become before long a discredited institution.

It is an interesting and a hopeful trait in human nature that it will
only believe obstinately, continuously, and in spite of persecution, in
those things which seem greatly to matter. When they no longer seem
to matter, belief falls away from them. And, broadly speaking, we have
come to see that things do not greatly matter unless they affect life
and conduct.

“The Kingdom of Heaven” is within you; and if your doctrinal test does
not produce good ethical results, you begin to doubt--not the Kingdom
of Heaven--but the doctrine on which it was made to depend.

Similarly, if a doctrine obviously lays itself open to grave abuse,
or presents strong temptation to the infirmities of human nature, you
begin to doubt whether it is so heavenly in origin as it pretends to be.

The doctrine held by some cannibal African tribe that the bride’s
mother shall provide the wedding-breakfast in her own person, is so
clearly a truckling to the prejudice against mothers-in-law--which
exists even in this country--that such a religious tenet immediately
becomes suspect, and we guess that it emanates not from the gods but
from their maker, man.

Notice, too, how the gradual displacement of miracle has been brought
about. So long as miracles appealed to the human mind as a moral and
not a licentious expedient for the Creator of the universe to indulge
in, they remained acceptable to the human understanding and were easily
believed. Their real dethronement began when it was seen that a belief
in them gave the greatest possible assistance to the cruel, grasping,
and criminal instincts of the human race--that, from the social point
of view, they opened a way for the terrorising of the weak, for fraud,
for covetousness, for murder, for theft--in a word for priest-craft in
all its worst forms.

The belief in miracle enabled Samuel, with his punitive threats of
divine vengeance, to terrorise first Eli and then Saul, and bring
Israel to such a pass under his priestly government that at no period
of that people’s early history were they more in subjection to their
enemies.

The belief in miracle enabled Elisha to cajole Elijah into the
wilderness and there murder him, persuading subsequent inquirers that
he had gone up to Heaven in a chariot of fire. Everybody believed him
except the children; and when they mocked him and told him to go and
do likewise, he threatened that bears would come and eat them. And
Scripture, as a warning to us against like conduct, tells us that they
did.

That is how miracle was played under the old dispensation; and (as
long as it could possibly be maintained) under the new also. Then, as
the bad social results of a belief in miracles became accumulatively
apparent--when carried outside the canon of Scripture into contemporary
life--then it began to dawn upon some people how bad also a belief
in them was for the mind of man in relation to the Deity. It began
to be seen that the institution of a law of nature (in conjunction
with an arbitrary suspension thereof whenever divinely convenient)
was not compatible with what men have now come to regard as “moral
conduct.” It was literally “discreditable”; for it made men disbelieve
the law of their own being. In nine hundred and ninety-nine cases
out of a thousand a man was to be guided by experience, by thought,
reason, and conscience--by a belief in cause and effect. Then--in the
off case--unreason and inexperience were to descend upon him like a
thunderbolt, and either beat him to dust, or lift him, an ingenuously
amazed Ganymede to the seats of bliss.

Now, we may admit--indeed we must--that there are many mysteries and
secrets of nature which man has not yet fathomed; there may be many of
which as yet he has no suspicion. A sudden exhibition of any of those
powers and mysteries might even to-day seem “miraculous.” When in the
past some fortuitous circumstance brought them about, “miracle” was the
only explanation of them which human understanding was able to offer.

But now we are coming more and more to believe that if blind men have
suddenly received their sight it has not been by miracle but by law;
if faith has removed mountains literally, or caused the sun and the
moon to stand still, it has done so by reliance on sources which lay
hitherto untapped in the general order of things, and implicit ever
since the creative scheme was established. For if any other explanation
is to be offered, then the work of creation is discredited, and the
meaning and the moral values of those processes which we sum up in the
word “life” become cheapened, because we can no longer regard them as
a law, but only as a sort of police-regulation, arbitrary, capricious,
and provocative of misconduct, in that we are unable to depend
upon them, or to have any guarantee that they will be impartially
administered.

Miracle discredits the ordered scheme of creation; and quite as much
does it do so if you believe creation to be the work of a personal
Deity. Creation (science shows us more and more) was from its inception
a process of absolutely related causes and effects--a whole system
reared up through millions and millions of years upon a structure
involving infinite millions of lives and deaths--and the whole a
perfect sequence of causal happenings.

That is “life” as it is presented to man’s reason and understanding;
and if his reason and understanding are not to faint utterly, he must
in his search for a moral principle “find God (as the Psalmist puts
it) in the land of the living,” or not at all. For as he estimates
the moral value of things solely by that empyric sense which has been
evolved in him through a faithful recognition of the inevitable laws of
cause and effect, so must he become demoralised, if he is to be taught
that what he has regarded as inevitable can be capriciously suspended
by a power independent of those laws which life has taught him to
reverence.

Do not think, for a moment, that I am questioning the power of faith
or the power of prayer. It is a tenable proposition that they are the
most tremendous power in the world; and yet we may hold that they take
effect through the natural law alone, and have come into existence
through the courses of evolution--or, if you like to put it so--in a
faithful following of the Will which, in the act of Creation, made a
compact and kept it.

But if the compact of Creation was not kept, if that impact of spirit
upon matter (which through such vast eras and through such innumerable
phases of life worked by cause and effect) was ever tampered with so
that cause and effect were suspended, then the whole process becomes
discredited to our moral sense, and its presiding genius is discredited
also.

Are we to suppose that through the earlier millions of years, when only
the elementary forms of life were present upon this globe, cause and
effect went on unsuspended and unhindered, and that these processes,
having once been started (engendered, let us assume, by the Immanent
Will), held absolute sway over the development of life for millions and
millions of years, until a time came when humanity appeared, and the
idea of religion and a Deity entered the world; and that this process
then became subject to a dethronement? Are we to believe that then
intervention in a new form, and upon a different basis (not of cause
and effect) began to take place? If that is the proposition, then, it
seems to me, we are asked (having accepted the idea of a Creator) to
impute to Him discreditable conduct--to believe that a point came in
these causal processes which He had instituted when He could no longer
“play the game” without arbitrary interference with its rules, and
that the appearance of man upon the globe was the signal for a fatal
weakening to His character.

I have seen a clergyman cheat at croquet. He was the by-word of the
neighbourhood for that curious little weakness; but I assure you that
the spectacle of that reverend gentleman surreptitiously pushing his
ball into better position with his foot instead of depending upon the
legitimate use of his mallet, was no more ignoble a spectacle than
that which I am asked to contemplate by believers in miracle when they
present to my eyes a Deity who (upon their assertion) does similar
things.

Test upon this basis of morality the most crucial of all events in
Christian theology.

The idea of the Incarnation of God in human form as the final
and logical fulfilment of the Creative purpose and process--the
manifestation of the Creator in the created--has had for many great
thinkers a very deep attraction. But if the process which brings Him
into material being--the so-called Virgin-Birth--is not a process
implicit in Nature itself and one that only depends for its realisation
on man’s grasp of the higher law which shall make it natural and normal
to the human race--if the Virgin-Birth is miracle instead of perfectly
conditioned law revealing itself, then, surely, such a device for
bringing about the desired end is “discreditable conduct”--because
it discredits that vast system of evolution through cause and effect
which we call “life.” From such an Incarnation I am repulsed as from
something monstrous and against nature; and the doings and sayings of
a being so brought into the world are discredited by the fact of a
half-parentage not in conformity with creative law.

Now when one ventures to question the moral integrity of so fundamental
a religious doctrine, and to give definite grounds as to why adverse
judgment should be passed on it, there will not be lacking theologians
ready to turn swiftly and rend one something after this manner: “Who
are you, worm of a man, to question the operations of the Eternal mind,
or dare to sit in judgment on what God your maker thinks good?”

The answer is “I don’t. It is only your interpretation of those
operations that I question.” But on that head there is this further to
say: “By the Creative process God has given to man a reasoning mind;
and it is only by the use of the reason so given him that man can
worship his Maker.” To give man the gift of reason and then to take
from him the right fully to exercise it, is discreditable conduct.

That tendency I attribute not to the Deity but to the theologian--more
especially as I read in the Scriptures that where God had a special
revelation to make to a certain prophet who thought a prostrate
attitude the right one to assume under such circumstances, divine
correction came in these words, “Stand upon thy feet, and I will speak
to thee.” Some people seem to think that the right attitude is to stand
upon their heads.

It is told in some Early Victorian memoirs that a group of Oxford
dons were discussing together the relations of mortal man to his God,
and one postulated that the only possible attitude for man to assume
in such a connection was that of “abject submission and surrender.”
But even in that dark epoch such a doctrine was not allowed to go
unquestioned. “No, no,” protested another, “deference, not abject
submission.” And though it is a quaint example of the Oxford manner,
surely one must agree with it. Reason being man’s birthright, “Stand
upon thy feet and I will speak to thee,” is the necessary corollary.
Even if there be such a thing as divine revelation--the revelation
must be convincing to man’s reason, and not merely an attack upon his
nerves, or an appeal to his physical fears.

Similarly any form of government or of society which does not allow
reason to stand upon its feet and utter itself unashamed is a
discreditable form of discipline to impose, if reason is to be man’s
guide.

Now I do not know whether, by characterising the device of a
“miraculous” birth as discreditable to its author, I am not incurring
the penalty of imprisonment in a country which says that it permits
free thought and free speech (at all events in peace-time). A few years
ago a man was sent to prison--I think it was for three months--for
saying similar things: a man who was a professed unbeliever in
Divinity. And quite obviously the discreditable conduct in that case
was not of the man who acted honestly up to his professions, but of
this country which, professing one thing, does another. And the most
discreditable figure in the case was the Home Secretary who, though
entirely disapproving of this legal survival of religious persecution,
and with full power to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy which
has now become his perquisite, refused to move in the matter, and said
he saw no reason for doing so. His discredit was, of course, shared by
the Cabinet, by Parliament and by the Country--which (without protest
except from a few distinguished men of letters and leaders of religious
thought) allowed that savage sentence to stand on grounds so antiquated
and so inconsistent with our present national professions.

Nationally we are guilty of a good deal of discreditable conduct on
similar lines. We profess one thing, and we do another.

Our politicians tell us that they rely upon the voice of the people,
yet often they employ the political machine which they control, for
the express purpose of evading it. A few years ago a Liberal statesman
was appointed to Cabinet-rank, and had in consequence to go to his
constituency for re-election. He belonged to the party which makes a
particular boast of its trust in the popular verdict. But in order
to make his election more safe--before his appointment became public
property--he communicated to his party agent his ministerial knowledge
of the coming event so that the date of the bye-election could be
calculated. And the agent proceeded to book up all the public halls
in the constituency over the period indicated. Then, in order that
the scandal might not become too flagrant he generously released a
proportion of his bookings to his Conservative opponent, but refused to
release any at all to his Labour opponent; and on those nicely arranged
conditions he fought his election--and got beaten.

Now that was surely discreditable conduct, for here was a statesman
who, while ostensibly appealing to the voice of the people was doing
his level best behind the scenes to deny to it a full and a free
opportunity of expression. Yet the whole political world was in so
discreditable a condition that there were actually people who thought
then--and perhaps still think to-day--that that budding politician
was unfairly and hardly treated when he was thereafter pursued from
constituency to constituency by his cheated opponent, and successfully
prevented from re-entering Parliament even to this day. Probably in
other branches of life he was an upright and honourable man, but
politics had affected him, as religion or social ambition has affected
others, and made him a discreditable witness to the faith which he
professed.

Now when you have great organisations and great institutions thus
discrediting themselves by conniving at the double-dealings of those
whom they would place or keep in authority--you cannot expect the
honestly critical observer to continue to place their judgment above
his own, or to believe (when some difficult moral problem presents
itself) that there is safety for his own soul in relying upon their
solution of it.

The sanction of the popular verdict in a community which is true to
its professions is very great and should not lightly be set aside. But
the sanction of a community or of an organisation which is false to
its professions is nil. And it is in the face of such conditions (to
which Society and religion always tend to revert so long as their claim
is to hold power on any basis of inequality or privilege) that the
individual conscience is bound to assert itself and become a resistant
irrespective of the weight of numbers against it. And so, in any State
where it can be said with truth that the average ethical standard for
individual conduct is better than the legal standard, the duty of
individual resistance to evil law begins to arise. “Bad laws,” said a
wise magistrate, “have to be broken before they can be mended.” And
to be broken with good effect they must be broken not by the criminal
classes but by the martyrs and the reformers. It is not without
significance that every great moral change in history has been brought
about by lawbreakers and by resistance to authority.

When the English Nonconformists of two or three centuries ago were
fighting governments and breaking laws, they were doing so in defence
of a determination to hold doctrines often of a ridiculous kind and
productive of a very narrow and bigoted form of religious teaching--a
form which, had it obtained the upper hand and secured a general
allegiance, might have done the State harm and not good. But, however
egregious and even pernicious their doctrine, the justice (and even
the value) of the principle for which they contended was not affected
thereby. The life of the spirit must take its chance in contact with
the life material, and Society must have faith that all true and vital
principles will (given a free field and no favour) hold their own
against whatever opponents. That is the true faith to which Society is
called to-day--but which it certainly does not follow--especially not
in war time.

We talk a great deal about liberty, democratic principle, and
government by majority; but if those ideals have any real meaning, they
mean that--given free trade in ideas and in propaganda on all ethical
and moral questions--you have got to trust your community to choose
what it thinks good. And to refuse to the general community the means
of deciding for itself by the utmost freedom of discussion, is--in
a State based on these principles--the most discreditable conduct
imaginable.

But of what worth, you may ask, is this moral sanction of a majority?
I am not myself greatly enamoured of majority rule in the sense of a
majority exercising compulsion on a minority. Compulsion by a majority
I should often think it a duty to resist. But to the testimony of a
majority that refrained from compulsion I should attach the greatest
possible weight. There you would get a public opinion which by its own
self-restraint and scrupulous moderation of conduct would be of the
highest moral value. For Society fearlessly to admit the full and open
advocacy of that which it disapproves is the finest proof I can imagine
of its moral stability, and of its faith in the social principles it
lives by.

Broadly speaking--with the exception I have already referred to--that
view is now admitted in matters of religion; you may hold and you
may advocate what religious principles you like. But you are not so
free to hold and advocate social and ethical principles. The veto of
Society has shifted, and you are far less likely to incur opprobrium
and ostracism to-day if you advocate polytheism than if you advocate
polygamy or pacifism. And the reason for this, I take to be, that the
religion of modern Society is no longer doctrinal but ethical; and so
our tendency is to inhibit new ethical teaching though we would not for
a moment countenance the inhibition of new doctrinal teaching.

That is our temptation, and I think that in the coming decade there
will be a great fight about it; we are not so prepared as we ought to
be to allow a free criticism of those social institutions on which our
ideas of moral conduct are based, even when they cover (as at present
constituted) a vast amount of double-dealing.

Take for instance this Western civilization of ours which bases its
social institutions of marriage, property, and inheritance on the
monogamic principle, but persists in moral judgments and practices
whose only possible justification is to be found in the rather
divergent theory that the male is naturally polygamous and the female
monogamous.

These two ideals, or social practices, make mutually discrediting
claims the one against the other. I am not concerned to say which I
think is right. But on one side or the other we are blinking facts, and
are behaving as though they had not a determining effect upon conduct
and character which Society ought straightforwardly to recognise.

The man who maintains that it is impossible for the male to live
happily and contentedly in faithful wedlock with one wife and then
goes and does so, commits himself by such matrimonial felicity to
discreditable conduct--discreditable to his professions, I mean. And it
is, of course, the same if his inconsistency takes him the other way
about.

There may, however, be an alternative and more honest solution to this
conflict of claims; both may contain a measure of truth. It may be true
that monogamy--or single mating--faithfully practised by man and woman
alike, is ideally by far the best solution of the sex-relations, and
the best for the State to recognise and encourage by all legitimate
means; just as vegetarianism and total abstinence may be the best
solution of our relation to food, or non-resistance of our relation
to government, or abject submission of our relation to theological
teaching. But though these may be ideals to strive for, it does not
follow that human nature is so uniformly constructed upon one model
as to justify us in making them compulsory, or in turning round and
denouncing as moral obliquity either plural mating or the eating of
meat, or the drinking of wine, or rebellion against civil authority, or
free thought in matters of religion.

If the community deliberately decides that one of these courses gives
the better social results, it is within its power to discourage the
other course, without descending to compulsion; and I am inclined to
think that this may, in the majority of cases, be done by treating the
desires and appetites of resistant minorities as taxable luxuries. If
the State finds, for instance, that alcoholism increases the work of
its magistrates and police, and diminishes the health and comfort of
home-conditions, it may quite reasonably tax beer, wine and spirits,
not merely to produce revenue but to abate a nuisance. But it would be
foolish, were it to go on to say that everybody who incurred such taxes
was guilty of moral obliquity.

In the same way, if the State wishes to discourage vegetarianism and
temperance, it will tax sugar, currants, raisins, tea, cocoa and
coffee, and will continue to tax them till it has diminished the
consumption; and incidentally it will let meat go free. But it will
not pass moral judgments--having the fear of human nature before its
eyes--on those who conscientiously bear the burden of those taxes
rather than give up what they think good for them.

I could imagine the State, in its wisdom, seeking to discourage luxury
and the accumulation of wealth into the possession of the few, by
imposing a graduated income tax of far more drastic severity than
that which is now depleting the pockets of our millionaires--but not
therefore saying that all who incurred income tax above a certain scale
were guilty of moral obliquity.

We have seen a State which required an increase of its population
setting a premium on children so as to encourage parents to produce
them; and I can imagine a State which required a diminution in the
increase of its population setting a tax on children, but not therefore
joining in the cry of the Neo-Malthusians that every married couple
who produced more than four children were guilty of a kind of moral
depravity. And further, I can imagine a State which wished to encourage
pure and unadulterated monogamy putting a graduated tax, practically
prohibitive in price, on any other course of conduct productive of
second or third establishments. But I do not see why the State, as
State, should concern itself further, or why Society should concern
itself more deeply about sexual than it does about commercial and trade
relations, wherein it allows far more grievous defections from the
ideal of human charity to exist.

Leaving it to the individual is not to say that your views as to
the desirability of such conduct will not influence your social
intercourse, and perhaps even affect your calling list. A great many
things affect our calling lists, without any necessity for us to be
self-righteous and bigoted about the principle on which we make our
own circle select. There are some people who will call upon the wives
of their doctors, but not of their dentists; there are others who will
not call upon the organist who conducts them to the harmonies of Divine
Service on Sunday, but would be very glad to call upon Sir Henry Wood,
who conducts their popular concerts for them during the week. We make
our selection according to our social tastes and aspirations, and
sometimes those social tastes may include a certain amount of moral
judgment. But that moral judgment need not make us interfere; if it
keeps us at a respectful and kindly distance from those whom we cannot
regard with full charity, it keeps us sufficiently out of mischief.

Take the public hangman, for instance. I, personally, would not have
him upon my calling list. I would like to put a graduated tax upon
him and tax him out of existence. I think he is lending himself to a
base department of State service; but I also think that the State is
tempting him; and I think that, in a symbolical way, all of you who
approve of capital punishment ought to put the public hangman upon
your calling list--or not exclude him because of his profession (which
you regard as useful and necessary), but only because he happens to
be personally unattractive to you. If you exclude him, because of
his profession, while you consider his profession a necessity--you
are guilty, I think, of discreditable conduct, and in order to stand
morally right with yourselves you had better go (I speak symbolically)
and leave cards on him to-morrow.

What I mean seriously to say is this: there is a great danger to
moral integrity in any acceptance of social conditions which you
would refuse to interpret into social intercourse. If you believe
prostitution to be necessary for the safety of the home--which is the
doctrine of some--you must accept the prostitute as one who fulfils an
honourable function in the State. If you accept capital punishment,
you must accept the hangman. If you accept meat, you must accept the
slaughterman; if you accept sanitation you must accept the scavenger.
If you accept dividends or profit from sweated labour, you must
accept responsibility for sweated conditions, and for the misery, the
ill-health, the immorality and the degradation which spring from them.

We may be quite sure that far worse things come from these conditions
on which we make our profit than are contained in the majority of those
lives which, because of their irregularities or breaches of convention,
we so swiftly rule off our calling lists. If we are not willing to
forego the dividends produced for us out of our tolerated social
conditions, why forego contact with that human material which they
bring into being? But if you accept contact there, then you will have a
difficulty in finding any human material of greater abasement to deny
to it the advantage of your acquaintance.

I have purposely put my argument provocatively, and applied it to
thorny and questionable subjects, because I want to reach no halfway
conclusion in this matter, and because the real test of our spiritual
toleration is now shifting from matters religious to matters social,
from questions of doctrine to questions of daily life. To-day we must
be prepared to tolerate a propaganda of social ideas--the products of
which, if they succeeded in obtaining a hold, would in the estimation
of many be as regrettable as were the products of Calvinism or
Puritanism in the past, when they were much more powerful than now.

Our hatred of these new social ideas may be just as keen as the hatred
of Catholicism for Protestantism or of Protestantism for Catholicism,
in days when religious doctrine seemed to matter everything. More
keen it could not be. The dangers these new ideas present could not
be greater in our eyes than in the eyes of our forefathers were the
dangers of false doctrine three centuries ago. But the principle
which demands that they shall be free to state their case and to make
converts remains always the same. Nevertheless it is unlikely to be
granted without struggle except by an intelligent minority.

The religious movement of the twentieth century, I say again, is not
doctrinal but social; and its scripture is not the Bible or any written
word, but human nature itself.

We are on the brink of great discoveries in human nature, and many
of our ethical foundations are about to be gravely disturbed. The
old Manichee dread of the essential evil--the original and engrained
sin--of human nature remains with us still, and there will be a great
temptation, as there always has been, not merely to controvert (which
is permissible) but to persecute and suppress those who preach new
ideas. It is against such discreditable conduct that we have now to be
on our guard.

At the threshold of this new era to which we have come, with our old
civilisation so broken and shattered about us by our own civilising
hands, the guiding spirit of man’s destiny has its new word to say,
to which we must listen with brave ears. And first and foremost it is
this, “Stand upon thy feet--and I will speak with thee.”




WHAT IS WOMANLY?

(1911)


The title of my lecture has, I hope, sent a good many of you here--the
women of my audience, I mean--in a very bristling and combative frame
of mind, ready to resent any laying down of the law on my part as to
what is or what is not “womanly.” I hope, that is to say, that you are
not prepared to have the terms of your womanliness dictated to you by a
man--or, for that matter, by a woman either.

For who can know either the extent or the direction of woman’s social
effectiveness until she has secured full right of way--a right of way
equal to man’s--in all directions of mental and physical activity, or,
to put it in one word, the right to experiment?

There are, I have no doubt, many things which women might take it into
their heads to do, which one would not think womanly at their first
performance, but which one would think womanly when one saw their
results at long range. No rule of conduct can be set up as an abstract
right or wrong; we must form our ethics on our social results; and in
the world’s moral progress the really effective results have generally
come by shock of attack upon, or of resistance to, some cherished
conventions of the day.

Take, for example, a thing which has seemed to concern only the male
sex, but which has really concerned women just as intimately--the
history of our male code of honour in relation to the institution of
duelling. There was a time in our history when it would have been very
difficult to regard as manly the refusal to fight a duel. But it is
not difficult to-day to see in such a refusal a very true manliness.
We in this country have got rid of the superstition that honour can in
any way be mended by two men standing up to take snap-shots at each
other; and now that we are free from the superstition ourselves, we can
understand, looking at other countries--Germany, for instance--that it
must often require more courage to refuse to fight than to consent. But
we have arrived at that stage of enlightenment only because in our own
history there have been men courageous enough and manly enough to dare
to be thought unmanly and cowardly. And as with our manhood so with
our womanhood; you cannot judge of what is womanly merely on the lines
of past conventions, produced under circumstances very different from
those of our own days. You must give to women as you give to men the
right to experiment, the right to make their own successes and their
own failures. You cannot with good results lay upon men and women, as
they work side by side in the world (very often under hard competitive
conditions) the incompatible rules which govern respectively a living
language and a dead language. A living language is constantly in
flux, inventing new words for itself, modifying its spelling and its
grammatical construction, splitting its infinitives. In a dead language
the vocabulary is fixed, the spelling is fixed, the construction is
fixed; but the use and the meaning often remain doubtful. And so, if
you attempt to determine the woman’s capabilities merely by her past
record, and to fix the meaning of “womanliness” in any way that forbids
flux and development, then you are making the meaning and the use of
the word very doubtful.

Now, obviously, if to be “womanly” means merely to “strike an average,”
and be as like the majority of women as possible--womanliness as a
quality is not worth thinking about; it will come of its own accord,
and exists probably a good deal in excess of our social need for it. It
stands on a par with that faculty for submission to the unconscionable
demands of others which makes a sheep sheepish and a hen prolific.
To be what Henry James calls “intensely ordinary” is, from the
evolutionary point of view, to be out of the running.

We see this directly we start applying the word “manly” to men.
For we do not take that to mean merely average quality--if it did,
over-eating, over-drinking, and that form of speech which I will call
over-emphasis--would all be manly qualities--and the evolution of the
race would, according to that doctrine, lie on the lines of all sorts
of over-indulgence. But when we say “manly,” we mean the pick and
polish of those qualities which enable a man to possess himself and to
develop all his faculties; and if it denotes discipline it also denotes
an insistence on freedom--freedom for development, so that all that is
in him may be brought out for social use.

Now, the great poverty which modern civilization suffers from, is the
undevelopment or the under-development of the bulk of its citizens.
And the great wastage that we suffer from lies in the misdirection
toward the over-indulgence of our material appetites--of the energies
which should make for our full human development. And you may be quite
sure that where in a community of over-population and poverty such as
ours, the average man, as master, is demanding for himself more of
these things than his share, there the average woman (where she is in
economic subjection) is getting less than her share. Yet there are
many people who (viewing this problem of woman’s subjection where the
savage in man is still uppermost) will tell you that it is “womanly”
to be self-sacrificing and self-denying; they will say that it is the
woman’s nature to be so more than it is the man’s; for, like Milton, in
his definition of the ideal qualities of womanhood, they put the word
“subjection” first and foremost. That condition, which, according to
Scripture, only followed after the curse as its direct product, was,
you will remember, predicated by Milton, quite falsely, as essential
even to the paradisal state; and when in _Paradise Lost_ he laid down
this law of “subjection” as the right condition for unfallen womanhood,
he went on to describe the divinely appointed lines on which it was to
operate. The woman was to subject herself to man--


                             “with submission,
     And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”


Those, surely, are the qualifications of the courtesan for making
herself desired; and it is no wonder, if he had such an Eve by his side
as was invented for him by Milton, that Adam fell.

Where true womanliness is to end I do not know; but I am pretty sure
of this--that it must begin in self-possession. It is not womanly
for a woman to deny herself either in comforts or nourishment, or
in her instincts of continence and chastity in order that someone
else--whether it be her children or her husband--may over-indulge.
It _is_ womanly (it is also manly), when there is danger of hurt or
starvation to those for whom you are responsible, to suffer much rather
than that they should suffer; but it is not in the least womanly
or manly to suffer so that they may indulge. The woman who submits
to the starving of herself or of her children by a drunken or a
lazy husband is not in any positive sense womanly--for she is then
proving herself ineffective for her social task. And she would be more
effective, and therefore more womanly, if she could, by any means you
like to name, drive that lazy husband into work, or abstract from that
drunken husband a right share of his wages. And if by making his home
a purgatory to him she succeeded, she would be more womanly in the
valuable sense of the word than if (by submission to injustice) she
failed, and let her children go starved.

Then, again, a woman may see that the children she and her husband
are producing ought never to have been born. And if that is so, is it
womanly for her to go on bearing children at the dictates of the man,
even though St. Paul says, “Wives, obey your husbands”? Is she any more
womanly, if she knowingly brings diseased offspring into the world,
than he is manly in the fathering of them?

But now, come out of the home into Society--not into any of those
departments of unsolved problems where humanity is seen at its
worst--pass all those by for the moment--and come to the seat of
administration--into that great regulator of Society, the law-courts
(in the superintendence and constitution of which woman is conspicuous
by her absence). There, as in matters connected with the male code of
honour, any duty of initiative on the part of women may seem, at first
sight, to be far removed. But let us see! In the law-courts you meet
with a doctrine--a sort of unwritten law--that there are certain cases
to which women must not listen. And occasionally “all decent women” are
requested to leave the court, when “decent” men are allowed to stay.
Now, in the face of that request it must be a very painful thing indeed
for a woman to hold her ground--but it may be womanly for her to do
so. It may be that in that case there are women witnesses; and I do
not think our judges sufficiently realise what mental agony it may be
to a woman to give evidence in a court where there are only men. I am
quite sure that in such cases, if the judge orders women generally out
of court, he ought to provide one woman to stand by the woman in the
witness-box. How would any man feel, if he were called before a court
composed only of women, women judges, a woman jury, women reporters,
and saw all men turned out of the court before he began his evidence?
Would he feel sure that it meant justice for him? I think not.

Now these cases to which women are not to listen almost always
specially concern women; yet here you have men claiming to deal with
them as much as possible behind the woman’s back, and to keep her in
ignorance of the lines on which they arrive at a conclusion. Surely,
then, it would be well for women of expert knowledge and training to
insist that these things shall not be decided without women assessors,
and to be so “womanly” as to incur the charge of brazenness and
immodesty in defending the woman’s interest, which in such matters is
also the interest of the race.

But it is only very gradually--and in the face of immemorial
discouragement--that this communal or social spirit, when it began to
draw woman outside her own domesticity, has fought down and silenced
the reproach raised against it, of “unwomanliness,” of an intrusion
by woman into affairs which were outside her sphere. The awakening of
the social conscience in women is one of the most pregnant signs of
the time. But see what (in order to make itself effective) it has had
to throw over at each stage of its advance--things to which beautiful
names have been given, things which were assumed all through the
Victorian era to be essential to womanliness, and to be so engrained in
the woman’s nature, that without them womanliness itself must perish.
The ideal of woman’s life was that she should live unobserved except
when displayed to the world on the arm of a proud and possessive
husband, and the height of her fortune was expressed in the phrase
enviously quoted by Mrs. Norton, “Happy the woman who has no history.”
Now that ideal was entirely repressive of those wider activities which
during the last fifty years have marked and made happy, in spite of
struggle, the history of woman’s social development; and every fresh
effort of that social spirit to find itself and to become effective has
always had to face, at the beginning of each new phase in its activity,
the charge of unwomanliness.

Compare that attack, fundamental in its nature, all-embracing in
its condemnation, with the kind of attack levelled against the
corresponding manifestations of the social or reforming spirit in
man. In a man, new and unfamiliar indications of a stirring-up of the
social conscience may earn such epithets of opprobrium as “rash,”
“hot-headed,” “ill-considered,” “impracticable,” “utopian”--but
we do not label them as “unmanly.” Initiative, fresh adventure of
thought or action in man have always been regarded as the natural
concomitant of his nature. In a woman they have very generally been
regarded as unnatural, unwomanly. The accusation is fundamental: it
does not concern itself with any unsoundness in the doctrines put
forward; but only with the fact that a woman has dared to become their
mouthpiece or their instrument. Go back to any period in the last 200
years, where a definitely new attempt was made by woman toward civic
thought and action, and you will find that, at the time, the charge
of “unwomanliness” was levelled against her; you find also that in
the succeeding generation that disputed territory has always become
a centre of recognised womanly activity. Take, for instance, the
establishment of higher training for girls; there are towns in this
country where the women, who first embarked on such a design, were
jeered and laughed at, and even mobbed. And the same thing happened in
an even greater degree to the women who sought to recover for their own
sex admission to the medical profession: and while the charge levelled
against them was “unwomanliness,” it was yet through their instincts
of reserve and sex-modesty that their enemies tried to defeat them.
Even when they gained the right of admission to medical colleges there
were lecturers who tried, by the way they expressed themselves in their
lectures, to drive them out again.

Or take the very salient instance of Florence Nightingale. When she
volunteered to go out and nurse our soldiers in the Crimea, the
opposition to a woman’s invasion of a department where men had shown a
hopeless incompetence at once based itself on the plea that such a task
was “unwomanly.” Though in their own homes from time immemorial, women
had been nursing fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, cousins, servants,
masters, through all the refined and modestly-conducted diseases to
which these lords of creation are domestically subject, directly one
woman proposed to carry her expert knowledge into a public department
and nurse men who were strangers to her, she was told that she was
exposing herself to an experience which was incompatible with womanly
modesty. Well, she was prepared to let her womanly modesty take its
risk in face of the black looks of scandalised officials of Admiralty
or War Office; and she managed to live down pretty completely the
charge of unwomanliness. But the example is a valuable one to remember,
for there you get the claim of convention to keep women from a great
work of organisation and public service, although already, in the home,
their abilities for that special service had been proved. And so,
breaking with that convention of her day Florence Nightingale went to
be the nursing mother of the British Army in the Crimea, and came home,
the one conspicuously successful general of that weary and profitless
campaign, shattered in health by her exertions, but of a reputation so
raised above mistrust and calumny that through her personal prestige
alone was established that organisation of nursing by trained women
which we have in our hospitals to-day.

Take again the special and peculiar opposition which women had to face
when they began to agitate against certain laws which particularly
affected the lives of women and did cruel wrong to them even in their
home relations. Read the life of Caroline Norton, for instance--a woman
whose husband brought against her a public charge of infidelity, though
privately admitting that she was innocent; and when, after that charge
was proved to be baseless, she separated from her husband, refusing to
live with him any more, then he, in consequence of that refusal cut
her off absolutely from her children, though they were all under seven
years of age. That wrong, which our laws had immemorially sanctioned,
roused her to action, and it was through her efforts, so long ago as
1838, that the law was altered so as to allow a mother of unblemished
character right of access to her own children during the years of early
infancy!

And that is how the law still stands to-day--a woman’s
contribution--the most that could be done at the time for justice
to women. But there is no statue to Caroline Norton in Parliament
Square--or anywhere else, so far as I know.

But what I specially want to draw attention to is this--that when
she wrote the pamphlet with which she started her agitation all
her relatives entreated her not to publish it, because it would be
an exposure to the world of her own private affairs. By that time,
however, Caroline Norton had learned her lesson in “womanliness,” and
she no longer said “Happy is the woman who has no history.” Her answer
was: “There is too much fear of publicity among women: with women it
is reckoned a crime to be accused, and such a disgrace that they wish
nothing better than to hide themselves and say no more about it.”
Does not that set forth in all its weakness the conventional womanly
attitude of the period?

The Bill which, through her efforts, was brought three times before
Parliament, was at first defeated. How? By the votes of the Judges,
to whom the House of Lords left the matter to be decided. And Lord
Brougham, in speaking against that Bill used this line of argument:
There were, he said, several legal hardships which were of necessity
inflicted on women; therefore we should not relieve them from those
which are not necessary--the necessary hardships being the greater;
and it being bad policy to raise in women a false expectation that
the legal hardships relating to their sex were of a removable kind!
Was ever a more perverted and devilish interpretation given to the
Scripture, “To him that hath shall be given, and from her that hath not
shall be taken even that which she hath.”

Let us remember that we are the direct descendants and inheritors of
the age and of the men who pronounced these unjust judgments, and that
no miracle has happened between then and now to remove the guilt of
the fathers from the third and the fourth generation. Heredity is too
strong a thing for us to have any good ground for believing that our
eyes, even now, are entirely opened. There are many of us who cannot
drink port at all, because our grandfathers drank it by the bottle
every night of their lives.

We inherit constitutions, personal and political--we also inherit
proverbs, which express so vividly and in so few words, the full-bodied
and highly-crusted wisdom of former generations. Those proverbs
expressed once--else they had not become proverbs--an almost universal
contemporary opinion. Some of them are now beginning to wear thin, have
of recent years been dying the death, and will presently be heard no
more. But their source and incentive are still quite recognisable; and
their dwindled spirit still lives in our midst.

There was one, for instance, on which genteel families were brought up
in the days of my youth--a rhymed proverb which laid it down that--


     A whistling woman and a crowing hen
     Are hateful alike to God and men.


Now let us look into the bit of real natural history which lies at
the root of that proverb. A crowing hen is a disturbance, but so is a
crowing cock. But the hen is not to crow because she only lays eggs,
and because the bulk of hens manage to lay eggs without crowing. They
make, it is true, a peculiar clutter of their own which is just as
disturbing; but that is a thoroughly feminine noise and a dispensation
of Providence; and they don’t do it at all times of the night, and
without a reason for it, as cocks do. But as a matter of fact it is far
more easy to prevent a cock from crowing than a hen from cluttering;
you have only to put a cock in a pen the roof of which knocks his head
whenever he rears himself up to crow and he will remain as silent as
the grave, though he will continue to do that spasmodic duty by his
offspring which is all that nature requires of him. But no such simple
method will stop the cluttering of a hen when her egg is once well and
truly laid; the social disturbance caused by the pomp of masculine
vain-glory is far less inevitable than the disturbance caused by the
circumstances of maternity. Yet the normal masculine claim to pomp of
sound is more readily allowed in our proverbial philosophy than the
occasional feminine claim.

And that is where we have gone wrong; it is really maternity which
under wholesome conditions decides the social order of things; and we
have been fighting against it by putting maternity into a compound
and setting up paternity to crow on the top rail. We have not learned
that extraordinary adaptability to sound economic conditions which we
find in many birds and in a few animals. There exists, for instance,
a particular breed of ostriches, which mates and lays its eggs in a
country where the days are very hot and the nights very cold; and as
it takes the female ostrich some 13 or 14 days to lay all her eggs
and some weeks to incubate, she cannot as she does in other countries
deposit them in the sand and leave the sun to hatch them, because
after the sun has started the process, the cold night comes and kills
them. The mother bird finds, therefore, that she cannot both produce
and nurse her eggs; yet directly they are laid somebody must begin
sitting on them. Well, what does she do? She goes about in flocks,
13 or 14 females accompanied by an equal number of the sterner sex.
And on a given day, all the hens lay each an egg in one nest, and one
of the father birds is selected to sit upon them. And so the process
goes on till all the males are sedentarily employed in hatching out
their offspring. And I would ask (applying for the moment our own
terminology to that wonderfully self-adaptive breed of sociologists)
are not those male ostriches engaged in a thoroughly “manly”
occupation? Could they be better engaged than in making the conditions
of maternity as favourable and as unhampered as possible? Yet how
difficult it is to make our own countrymen see that the strength of a
nation lies mainly--nay, entirely--in eugenics, in sinking every other
consideration for that great and central one--the perfecting of the
conditions of maternity.

But let us come back for a moment to whistling. It is an accomplishment
which, as a rule, men do better than women; it is the only natural
treble left to them after they reach the age of puberty; and they are
curiously proud of it; perhaps, because women, as a rule, have not
the knack of it. Now, the real offence of a woman’s whistling was not
when she did it badly (for that merely flattered the male vanity) but
when she did it well; and no doubt it was because some women managed
to do it well that the proverb I speak of was invented. We should not
have been troubled with such a proverb if crowing hens and whistling
women had been unable to raise their accomplishment above a whisper.
Yet whistling is really quite beautiful, when it is well done; and why
is woman not to create this beauty of sound, if it is in her power
to create it, merely because it finds her in a minority among her
sex? Does it make her less physically fit, less capable of becoming a
mother--less inclined, even, to become a mother? No; it does none of
these things; but it distinguishes her from a convention which has laid
it down that there are certain things which women can’t do; and so,
when the exceptional woman does it, she is--or she was the day before
yesterday--labelled “unwomanly.”

I do not suggest that whistling is a necessary ingredient for
the motherhood of the new race; but, as a matter of fact, I have
noticed that those women who whistle well have, as a rule, strength
of character, originality, the gift of initiative and a strong
organising capacity; and if these things do go together, then surely
we should welcome an increase of whistling as a truly womanly
accomplishment--something attained--which has not been so generally
attained hitherto.

Let us pass now to a much more serious instance of those artificial
divisions between masculine and feminine habits of thought and
action which have in the past seemed so absolute, and are, in fact,
so impossible to maintain. For you can have no code or standard of
manhood that is not intimately bound up with a corresponding code or
standard of womanhood. What raises the one, raises the other, what
degrades the one degrades the other; and if there is in existence,
anywhere in our social system, a false code of manliness, there
alongside of it, reacting on it, depending on it, or producing it, is a
false code of womanliness.

Take, for example, that matter of duelling already referred to, in
relation to the male code of honour, and the manliness which it is
supposed to encourage and develop. You might be inclined to think that
it lies so much outside the woman’s sphere and her power of control,
as to affect very little either her womanliness or her own sense of
honour. But I hope to show by a concrete example how very closely
womanliness and woman’s code of honour are concerned and adversely
affected by that “manly” institution of duelling--how, in fact, it
has tended to deprive women of a sense of honour, by taking it from
their own keeping and not leaving to them the right of free and final
judgment.

Here is what happened in Germany about seven years ago. A young married
officer undertook to escort home from a dance the fiancée of another
officer; and on the way, having drunk rather more than was good for
him, he tried to kiss her. She resented the liberty, and apparently
made him sufficiently ashamed of himself to come next day and beg her
pardon. Whether she would grant it was surely a matter for herself to
decide; she accepted his apology, and there, one would have thought,
the matter might have ended. But unfortunately, several months later,
word of this very ordinary bit of male misdemeanour reached the ears
of the lady’s betrothed. It at once became “an affair of honour”--his
affair, not the lady’s affair--his to settle in his own way, not hers
to settle in her way. Accordingly he calls out his brother officer,
and, probably without intending it, shoots him dead. The murdered
man, as I have said, was married, and at that very time his wife was
in expectation of having a child. The child was prematurely born to a
poor mother gone crazed with grief. There, then, we get a beautiful
economic product of the male code of honour and its criminal effects on
Society; and if traced to its source we shall see that such a code of
honour is based mainly on man’s claim to possession and proprietorship
in woman--for, had the woman not been one whom he looked upon as his
own property, that officer would have regarded the offence very lightly
indeed. But because she was his betrothed the woman’s honour was not
her own, it was his; she was not to defend it in her own way--though
her own way had proved sufficient for the occasion--he must interfere
and defend it in his. And we get for result, a man killed for a petty
offence--the offence itself a direct product of the way in which
militarism has trained men to look on women--a woman widowed and driven
to the untimely fulfilment of her most important social function in
anguish of mind, and a child born into the world under conditions which
probably handicapped it disastrously for the struggle of life.[1]

Now, obviously, if women could be taught to regard such invasions
of their right to pardon offence in others as a direct attack upon
their own honour and liberty--a far worse attack than the act of
folly which gave occasion for this tragedy--and if they would teach
these possessive lovers of theirs that any such intrusion on their
womanly prerogative of mercy was in itself an unforgivable sin against
womanhood--then such invasions of the woman’s sphere would quickly come
to an end. They might even put an end to duelling altogether.

See, on the other hand, how acceptance of such an institution trains
women to give up their own right of judgment, to think even that
honour, at first hand, hardly concerns them. Is it not natural that, as
the outcome of such a system from which we are only gradually emerging,
we should hear it said of these conventionally womanly women that they
have “a very low sense of honour.”

Low it must naturally be. For that attitude of complaisant passivity
on the part of the woman while two male rivals fight to possess her is
the normal attitude of the female in the lower animal world; but it is
an attitude from which, as the human race evolves into more perfect
self-government, you see the woman gradually drawing away. While it
pleases something in her animal instincts, it offends something in her
human instincts; and while to be fought over is the highest compliment
to the female animal, it is coming to be something like an insult to
the really civilized woman--the woman who has the spirit of citizenship
awake within her. One remembers how Candida, when her two lovers are
debating which of them is to possess her--brings them at once to their
senses by reminding them that it is not in the least necessary that
she should be possessed by either of them; but she does in the end
give herself to the one who needs her most. That may be the truest
womanliness under present conditions; as it may once have been the
truest womanliness for the woman to give herself to the strongest. But
it may be the truest womanliness, at times, for the woman to bring men
to their senses by reminding them that it is not necessary for her to
give herself at all. To be quite sure of attaining to full womanliness,
let her first make sure that she possesses herself. In the past men
have set a barrier to her right of knowledge, her right of action,
her right of independent being; and in the light of that history it
seems probable that she will best discover her full value by insisting
on right of knowledge, on right of way, and on right of economic
independence. So long as convention lays upon women any special and
fundamental claim of control--a claim altogether different in kind
and extent from the claim it lays upon men--so long may it be the
essentially womanly duty of every woman to have quick and alive within
her the spirit of criticism, and latent within her blood the spirit of
revolt.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] It may be noted that the war has caused a recrudescence of this
brutal “code of honour” in our own country. But here it has not
troubled to resume the obsolete form of the duel. The “defender of his
wife’s honour” simply commits murder, and the jury acquits.




USE AND ORNAMENT

(OR THE ART OF LIVING)

(1915)


I suppose you would all be very much surprised if I said that not use
but ornament was the object of life.

I refrain from doing so because so definite a statement makes an
assumption of knowledge which it may always be outside man’s power to
possess. The object of life may for ever remain as obscure to us as its
cause. It seems, indeed, likely enough that the one ignorance hinges
necessarily on the other, and that without knowing the cause of life
neither can we know its object.

The writers of the Scottish Church Catechism, it is true, thought
that they knew why man was created. The social products of their
cocksure theology cause me to doubt it. I would prefer to worship more
ignorantly a more lovable deity than the one which is there presented
to my gaze.

But though we may never know why we are here, we may know, by taking a
little thought and studying the manifestations of the life around us,
what aspects of it make us glad that we are here. And gladness is as
good a guide as any that I know to the true values of life.

Examining life from that standpoint I know of nothing that gives me
more delight than the decoration and embellishment with which man has
overlaid all the mere uses of existence--things which without those
embellishments might not delight us at all--or only as a dry crust of
bread delights in his necessity the starving beggar, or ditch-water one
dying of thirst.

I can scarcely think of a use in life which I enjoy, that I do not
enjoy more because of the embellishment placed about it by man, who
claims to have been made “in God’s image.” Nothing that my senses
respond to with delight stays limited within the utilitarian aspect
on which its moral claims to acceptance are too frequently based--or
remains a benefit merely material in its scope.

When we breathe happily, when we eat happily, and when we love happily,
we do not think of the utilitarian ends with which those bodily
instincts are related. The utilitarian motive connects, but only
subconsciously, with that sense of well-being and delight which then
fills us; and the conscious life within us is happy without stooping to
reason.

Underlying our receptivity of these things is, no doubt, the fact that
our bodies have a use for them. But were we to consider the material
uses alone, our enjoyment would be less; and if (by following that
process) we absorbed them in a less joyous spirit, our physical
benefit, so science now tells us, would be less also.

For some reason or another, which is occasionally hard to define, you
find pleasure in a thing over and above its use; and I want to persuade
you that the finer instinct, the genius of the human race, tends always
in that direction--not to rest content with the mere use of a thing,
but to lay upon it that additional touch of adornment--whether by
well-selected material, or craftsman’s skill, or social amenity, which
shall make it a thing delightful to our senses or to our intelligence.

Take, for instance, so simple a thing as a wine-glass, or a
water-glass. Materially, it is subject to a very considerable
drawback; it is brittle, and if broken is practically unmendable.
From the point of view of utility, strength, cheapness, cleanliness,
it has no advantage over hardware or china. But in its relation to
beverages beautiful in colour and of a clear transparency, glass has a
delightfulness which greatly enhances the pleasure of its use. There
is a subtle relation between the sparkle of the glass, and the sparkle
produced in the brain by the sight and the taste of good wine (or--let
me add, for the benefit of temperance members of my audience--of good
ginger-ale). I think one could also trace a similar delight to the
relations subsisting between glass in its transparency and a draught of
pure water.

That relationship set up between two or more senses (in this case
between the senses of sight, taste and touch) brings into being a new
value which I ask you to bear in mind, as I shall have a good deal to
say about it later--the value of association. The more you examine into
the matter, the more you will find that association is a very important
element for evoking man’s faculties of enjoyment; it secures by the
inter-relation of the senses a sort of compound interest for the appeal
over which it presides. And it is association, with this compound
appeal, which again and again decides (over and above all questions
of use) what material is the best, or the most delightful, to be
employed for a given purpose. You choose a material because it makes a
decorative covering to mere utility. That beauty of choice in material
alone is the beginning of ornament.

When I began, I spoke for a moment as though use and ornament were
opposite or separate principles; but what I shall hope soon to show
is that they are so interlocked and combined that there is no keeping
them apart when once the spirit of man has opened to perceive the true
sacramental service which springs from their union, and the social
discordance that inevitably follows upon their divorce. But as man’s
ordinary definition of the word “use” is sadly material and debased,
and as his approval and sanction of the joys of life have too often
been limited by a similar materialism of thought, one is obliged, for
the time being, to accept the ordinary limiting distinction, so that
the finer and less realised uses of beauty and delight may be shown
more clearly as the true end to which all lesser uses should converge.

Life itself is a usage of material, the bringing together of atoms into
form; and we know, from what science teaches of evolution, that this
usage has constantly been in the direction of forms of life which,
for certain reasons, we describe as “higher.” Emerging through those
forms have come manifestations or qualities, which quite obviously give
delight to the holders of them; and we are able to gather in watching
them, as they live, move, and have their being, that for them life
seems good. It is no part of their acceptance of what has come that
they are here not to enjoy themselves.

Thus we see from the upward trend of creation a faculty for enjoyment
steadily emerging, and existing side by side with fears, risks, and
hardships which the struggle for existence entails--probably an even
increased faculty for enjoyment, as those fears and risks become more
consciously part of their lives. And I question whether we should think
that the wild deer had chosen well, could it resign its apprehension
of death at the drinking-place for the sake of becoming a worm--the
wriggling but scarcely conscious prey of the early bird.

Man (the most conscious prey of death) has also his compensations;
but, wishing to eat his cake and have it, he insists that his increased
self-consciousness is the hall-mark of an immortality which he is
unwilling to concede to others. He sees (or the majority of those see,
who preach personal immortality after death) no moral necessity for
conceding immortality to the worm because the early bird cuts short
its career, or to the wild deer because it enjoys life, shrinks from
death, and endures pain; or to the peewit, because she loves her young;
or to the parrot, because it dies with a vocabulary still inadequate
for expressing that contempt for the human species with which the caged
experience of a life-time has filled its brain. Yet, for these and
similar reasons applied to himself, man thinks that immortality is his
due.

In doing so, he does but pursue, to a rather injudicious extent, that
instinct for the ornamentation and embellishment of the facts of life
which I spoke of to begin with. For whether it be well-founded or not,
a belief in immortality gives ornament to existence.

Of course, it may be bad ornament; and I think it becomes bad ornament
the moment he bases it upon the idea that this life is evil and not
good. If he says “Life is so good that I want it to go on for ever and
ever,” and thinks that he can make it better by asserting that it will
go on for ever and ever, that is a playful statement which may have
quite a stimulating effect on his career, and make him a much more
charming and social and imaginative person than he would otherwise be.
But if he wants a future life merely because he regards this life as a
“vale of misery”--and wants that future life to contain evil as well
as good--a Hell as well as a Heaven (in order that he may visualise
retribution meted out on a satisfactory scale upon those whom he cannot
satisfactorily visit with retribution to-day) then, I think, that it
tends to become bad ornament, and is likely to make him less charming,
less social, and less imaginatively inventive for the getting rid of
evil conditions from present existence than he would be if he had not
so over-loaded his brain with doctrinal adornments.

Still, it is ornament of a kind; and with ornament, good or bad (the
moment he has got for himself leisure or any elbow-room at all in the
struggle for existence) man cannot help embellishing the facts of
life--the things that he really knows.

Now that instinct for embellishment is of course latent in Nature
itself, or we should not find it in man; and it comes of Nature (the
great super-mathematician) putting two and two together in a way which
does not merely make four. When two and two are put together by Nature,
they come to life in a new shape; and man is (up-to-date) the most
appreciative receptacle of that fact which Nature has yet produced. Man
builds up his whole appreciation of life by association--by studying
a method of putting two and two together which comes to something very
much more than a dead numerical result.

This, as I have said, is Nature’s way of giving to our investments in
life a compound interest. Man throws into life his whole capital, body,
soul, and spirit; and as a result of that investment Nature steadily
returns to him year by year--not detached portions of his original
outlay, but something new and different. Out of every contact between
man’s energy and Nature’s, something new arises. And yet, though new,
it is not strange; it has features of familiarity; it is partly his,
partly hers; and if his spirit rises above the merely mechanical, it
is endeared to him by and derives its fullest value from association.
All beautiful work, all work which is of real use and benefit to the
community, bears implicitly within it this mark of parentage--of the
way it has been come by, through patience, skill, ingenuity, something
more intimate and subtle than the dead impenetrable surface of a thing
mechanically formed without the accompaniment either of hope or joy.

This creation of new values by association (which you can trace through
all right processes of labour) is seen even in things which have very
little of human about them.

The germ of its expression is to be found in that simplest of
arithmetic propositions to which I have just referred: two and two
make--not two twos but four, which is, in fact, a fresh concept; and
the mind that can embrace so much--the idea of four as a number with
an identity of its own has already raised itself above the lowest
level of savagery. In that mind something has begun out of which the
social idea may presently be developed; for the man who has conceived
the number four will presently be identifying his new concept with a
variety of correspondencies under fresh aspects: he will discover that
certain animals have four legs, whereas, until then, his view of them
was rather that of the child who said that a horse had two legs in
front, two legs behind, and two at each side--a statement which shows,
indeed, that the horse has been earnestly considered from as many
points of view as are sometimes necessary to enable a Cabinet Minister
to make up his mind, but, for all that, never as a whole; and in such a
mind, though the identity of the horse may be established from whatever
point of view he presents himself, the thought of the horse, as a being
of harmoniously related parts, having order and species, has not yet
been established. Until a man can count, and sum up the results of
his counting in synthesis, Nature is composed merely of a series of
units--and the mind cannot begin that grouping and defining process
which leads to association and from that to the development of the
social idea.

You will remember in _Alice through the Looking Glass_, when the two
Queens set to work to test her educational proficiency--you will
remember how the White Queen says (in order to discover whether Alice
can do addition) “What’s one, and one, and one, and one, and one, and
one?”

“I don’t know,” says Alice, “I lost count.”

“She can’t do addition,” says the White Queen.

Well--she “lost count,” and, therefore, that series of ones failed to
have any fresh meaning or association for her.

In the same way the primitive savage loses count; beyond three, numbers
are too many for him--they become merely a “lot.” But war and the
chase begin to teach him the relative value of numbers; and he finds
out that if one lot goes out to fight a bigger lot, the smaller lot
probably gets beaten; so that, before long, calculation of some sort
becomes necessary for the preservation of existence. He finds out also
(and this is where ornament begins to come in) that a certain amount of
wilful miscalculation has a beauty and a value of its own. So, after
going out to fight ten against ten, and defeating them, he comes back
and says to his wives and the surrounding communities by whom he wishes
to be held in awe--“My lot killed bigger lot--much, much bigger lot.”
And so, when he comes later on to set down his wilful miscalculations
in records of scripture, he provides delightful problems for the Bishop
Colensos of future ages--problems the undoing of which may shake to
the foundations the authority of documents which some mid-Victorian
school of Christianity has hitherto held to be divinely and verbally
inspired--not realising that the normal tendency of human nature is
to be decorative when writing its national history or when giving its
reasons for having plunged into war.

You begin now, then, to perceive (if you did not before), the
importance of ornamental association, even when confined to matters of
arithmetic; and the moral value to future ages not merely of calculated
truths but of calculated untruths.

But this merely figurative illustration of the quickness of the human
brain, in its primitive stage, to use mathematics to unmathematical
ends (or science to ends quite unscientific) does not bring us very far
upon the road to that self-realisation, in ornament rather than in use,
which I hope to make manifest by tracing to their most characteristic
forms of expression the higher grades of civilization.

And I shall hope, by and by, to show that you cannot be social without
also being ornamental; it is the beginning of that connecting link
which shall presently make men realise that life is one, and that all
life is good.

Take, to begin with, the earliest instruments by which primitive man
began raising himself from the ruck of material conditions; his
weapons--first of the chase, and then of war. No sooner had he proved
their use than he began to ornament them--to make them records,
trophies, and so--objects of beauty. He cannot stop from doing so;
his delight in the skill of his hands breaks out into ornament. It is
the same with the arts of peace, the work of the woman-primitive--she
moulds a pot, or weaves a square of material, and into it--the moment
she has accomplished the rudiments--goes pattern, beauty, something
additional and memorable that is not for use material, but for use
spiritual--pleasure, delight.

And that quite simple example, from a time when man was living the
life, as we should now regard it, of a harried and hunted beast--with
his emergence from surrounding perils scarcely yet assured to him--goes
on consistently up and up the scale of human evolution; and the more
strongly it gets to be established in social institutions, the more
noble is likely to be the form of civilization which enshrines it. And
the less it shows, the less is that form of civilization likely to be
worthy of preservation, or its products of permanent value to the human
race.

It is not the millionaire who leaves his mark on the world so that
hereafter men are glad when they name him; it is the “maker” who
has turned uses into delights; not the master of the money-market,
but the Master of Arts. The nearest thing we have on earth to that
immortality which so many look to as the human goal lies in those forms
of ornament--of embellishment over and above mere use--which man’s
genius has left to us in architecture, poetry, music, sculpture, and
painting. Nothing that stops at utility has anything like the same
value, for the revelation of the human spirit, as that which finds its
setting in the Arts--the sculptures of Egypt and Greece, the Gothic
and Romanesque cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Italy, the
paintings of the Renaissance, the masterpieces of Bach and Beethoven,
the poems and writings all down the ages of men comparatively poor in
monetary wealth, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice in their power
to communicate their own souls to things material and to leave them
there, when their own bodies have turned to dust. In the embellishment
they added to life they bestowed on the age in which they lived its
most significant commentary. There you will find, as nowhere else, the
meaning and the interpretation of the whole social order to which these
forms were as flower and fruit. Ancient Greece is not represented to us
to-day by its descendants in the flesh (as an expression of that life
they have ceased to exist) but by those works of art and philosophy
through which men--many now nameless--made permanent the vision of
delight to which, in the brief life of the flesh, they had become
heirs. The self-realisation of that age--all the best of it that we
inherit--comes to us through embodiment in forms transcending material
use.

Run your mind’s eye through the various peoples and nationalities of
Europe--of the world--and you will find that their characteristic
charm--that which is “racy” of their native soil, marking the
distinction between race and race, lies in the expression they have
given to life over and above use. If we had kept to use, race would
have remained expressionless. Race expresses itself in ornament; and
even among a poor peasant people (and far more among them than among
the crowded and over-worked populations of our great cities where
we pursue merely commercial wealth) comes out in a characteristic
appreciation of the superabundance of material with which, at some
point or another, life has lifted them above penury. In the great
civilizations it extends itself over a rich blend of all these, drawn
from far sources; and the more widely it extends over the material uses
of life, the higher and the more permanent are the products of that
form of civilization likely to be. What does it mean but this?--man is
out to enjoy himself.

Having said that, need I add that I put a very high interpretation upon
the word “joy”?

To that end--man’s enjoyment of life--all art is profoundly useful. I
put that forward in opposition to the specious doctrine of Oscar Wilde
that “all art is entirely useless.” But it is usefulness extended in a
new direction; leaving the material uses, by which ordinary values are
measured, it shifts to the spiritual; and by the spiritual I mean that
which animates, vitalizes, socializes.

To that end it may often be--and is generally the case--that, in the
material sense, art is a useless addition or refinement upon that which
was first planned merely for the service of man’s bodily needs. Yet
where the need is of a worthy and genuine kind, art never ceases to
rejoice at the use that is underlying it. This can be clearly seen in
architecture, where the beauty of design, the proportion, the capacity
of the edifice--though far transcending the physical need which called
it into being--remain nevertheless in subtle relation thereto, and give
to it a new expression--useless indeed to the body--but of this use to
the mind, that it awakens, kindles, enlivens, sensitizes--making it to
be in some sort creative, by perception of and response to the creative
purpose which evoked that form. You cannot enter a cathedral without
becoming aware that its embracing proportions mean something far more
than the mere capacity to hold a crowd; its end and aim are to inspire
in that crowd a certain mental attitude, a spiritual apprehension--to
draw many minds into harmony, and so to make them one--a really
tremendous fact when successfully achieved.

Now nothing can be so made--to awaken and enlarge the spirit--without
some apparent wastefulness of material or of energy. A cathedral will
absorb more stone, and the labour of more men’s lives, before it is
finished, than a tenement of equal housing capacity which aims only at
providing warmth and a cover from the elements. To provide so much joy
and enlargement to the human spirit, a kind of waste, upon the material
plane, is necessary; and the man without joy or imagination in his
composition is likely to say on beholding it: “Why was all this waste
made?”

Bear in mind this accusation of waste which can constantly be made,
from a certain standpoint against all forms of joy evolved by the art
of living--possibly against all forms of joy that you can name; for all
joy entails an expenditure of energy, and for those who do not realise
the value of joy such expenditure must necessarily seem wasteful.

But when a man employs hand or brain worthily, straightway he discovers
(latent within that connection) the instinct of delight, of ornament.
He cannot rejoice in his craftsmanship without wishing to embellish
it--to place upon it the expression of the joy which went with the
making. All that he does to this end is apparently (from the material
point of view) useless; but from the spiritual it is profoundly useful;
and from the spirit (and this I think is important) it tends to re-act
and kindle the craftsman to finer craftsmanship than if he had worked
for utility alone.

Now if spirit thus acts on matter--achieving its own well-being only
through a certain waste of material, or expenditure of labour upon the
lower plane, yet communicating back to matter influences from that
state of well-being to which it has thus attained--may it not be that
waste of a certain kind (what I would call “selective waste” _versus_
“haphazard waste”) is the concomitant not only of spiritual but of
material growth also? May it not be that evolution has followed upon a
course of waste deliberately willed and insisted on--and that without
such waste, life--even material life--had not evolved to its present
stage?

We see a certain wastefulness attaching to many of the most beautiful
biological manifestations in the world. Up to a certain point, the
construction of flower, bird, beast, fish, shows a wonderful economy of
structure, of means to end (it is the same also in the arts). But there
comes a point at which Nature, “letting herself go,” becomes fantastic,
extravagant--may one not say “wilful”?--in the forms she selects for
her final touches of adornment. And is it not nearly always when the
matter in hand is most closely related to the “will to live”--or, in
other words, in relation to the amative instincts--that the “art of
living” breaks out, and that Nature quits all moderation of design and
becomes frankly ornamental and extravagant? Just at the point where to
be creative is the immediate motive, where, in the fulfilment of that
motive, life is found to be a thing of delight, just there, Nature,
being amative, becomes playful, exuberant and ornamental.

There are some birds which, in this connection, carry upon their
persons adornments so extravagant that one wonders how for so many
generations they have been able to live and move and multiply, bearing
such edifices upon their backs, their heads, their tails--that they
were not a crushing hindrance to the necessary affairs of life. They
certainly cannot have been a help; and yet--they still persist in them!

Taking, then, these natural embryonic beginnings as our starting point,
I would be inclined to trace out the living value of art and ornament
somewhat upon these lines: Exuberance--the emergence of beauty and
adornment, in addition to the mere functional grace arising out of
fitness for use--has always been going on through the whole process
of creation among animate nature. We see it established in a thousand
forms, not only in bird, beast and reptile, but in the vegetable
world as well. The tendency of all life that has found a fair field
for its development, is to play with its material--to show that it
has something over and above the straight needs imposed on it by the
struggle for existence, which it can spare for self-expression.

It has been lured on to these manifestations mainly by that “will
to live” which underlies the attractions of sex. That exuberance
is an essential feature of the evolutionary process at the point
where self-realisation by self-reproduction is the game to play.
Under that impulse the selective principle begins to assert itself,
and straightway the outcome is ornament. Self-realisation (by
self-reproduction under all sorts of images and symbols) is the true
basis of ornament and of art: self-realisation!

The spirit of man, moving through these means, impresses itself
reproductively on the spirits of others with a far better calculation
of effect than can be secured through bodily inheritance. For in
physical parentage there is always the chance of a throw-back to
tainted origins; the sober and moral citizen cannot be sure of sober
and moral children in whom the desire of his soul shall be satisfied.
They may be drawn, by irresistible forces, to take after some giddy and
disreputable old grandfather or grandmother instead of after him; for
in his veins run the parental weaknesses of thousands of generations;
and over the racial strain that passes through him to others he
possesses no control whatever. But the man who has given ornament to
life in any form of art--though he commits it to the risks and chances
of life, the destructive accidents of peace and war--is in danger
of no atavistic trick being played upon the product of his soul; he
is assured of his effect, and so long as it endures it reflects and
represents his personality more faithfully than the descendants of his
blood.

Now for the satisfaction of that instinct, the perpetuation of name
and identity is not necessary. The artist would not (if told that his
self-realisation was destined to become merged anonymously in the
existence of fresco, or canvas, or mosaic)--he would not therefore lay
down his mallet or his brush, and say that in that case the survival
of these things to a future age was no survival for him. The maker of
beautiful inlay would not lose all wish to do inlay if the knowledge
that he, individually, as the craftsman were destined to oblivion.
Let the future involve him in anonymity as impenetrable as it liked,
he would still go on expressing himself in ornament; self-realisation
would still be the law of his being.

That is the psychology of the artist mind--of that part of humanity
which produces things that come nearest, of all which earth has to
show, to conditions of immortality, and so presumably are the most
satisfying to man’s wish for continued individual existence. The makers
of beauty do not set any great store on the continuance of their
names--the continuance of their self-realisation is what they care
about.

But the possessors of these works of beauty do very often make a great
point of having their own names perpetuated, even though the vehicle is
another personality than their own. And so very frequently we have the
names passed down to us of these parasites of immortality--the tyrants
for whom palaces, or arches, or temples were built--but not the names
of the artists who designed them, whose immortality they really are.
And though the official guide may refresh our memory with snippets
of history, and say this, that, or the other about the name to which
the temple remains attached--the really important thing that lives,
survives, and influences us is not the externally applied name, but the
invested beauty which has no name, but is soul incarnate in stone to
the glory of God--the self-realisation of a being who (but for that)
has passed utterly from remembrance.

That, as I have said before, is the nearest thing to immortality that
we know. And it comes to us, in a shape which, (so to be informed with
immortality) cannot limit itself to the demands of use. When all the
claims of use are satisfied, then the life of personality begins to
show--the fullest and the most permanent form of self-realisation known
to man on earth lies in ornament.

Of course, when I say “ornament,” I use the word in a very wide sense.
What I have said of sculpture, painting or architecture, applies
equally to poetry, music or philosophy. I would even go further, and
apply it in other directions where no material matrix for it exists.
Every department of mental activity has its ornament--the culminating
expression of that particular direction of the human will. Faith is
the ornament of destiny, Hope the ornament of knowledge, Love the
ornament of sex. Without these ornaments destiny and knowledge and sex
would have no beauty that the soul of man should desire them. Those
additions or glosses were quite unnecessary to existence--up to a
point; for millions of years the world did without them, and Evolution
managed to scramble along without faith, without hope, without love.
But Evolution itself brought them into being; and then for millions of
years they existed in germ, without self-consciousness; but steadily,
as they germinated, they produced beauty and a sense of design in
their environment. Co-ordination, dovetailing (peaceful word!), the
harmonising and gentle effect of one life upon another, as opposed to
the savage and predatory, began to have effect. And in response came
ornament; faith, hope and love showed their rudimentary beginnings even
in the lower animals.

One of the most perfectly decorative objects that I have ever seen in
the animal world (you will find it in still-life form in our Natural
History Museum) is the device by which a certain small possum has
taught her young to accompany her from branch to branch. Along her back
she seats her litter, then over their heads like the conducting-wire
of a tram-line she extends her tail--and then (each like an electric
connecting rod) up go the little tails, make a loop, adjust themselves
to the maternal guide-rope, and hang on. And there, safe from upset, is
the family-omnibus ready to start!

Of course, you may say that is use; but it is use in which the
spiritualities, faith, hope and love, begin to appear; and in the
gentleness of its intention it forms a basis for the up-growth
of beauty. Now all the arts are, in the same way, first of all
structural--having for their starting-point a sound and economic use of
the material on which they are based. Music, architecture, poetry, and
the rest were all, to begin with, the result of an instinctive choice
or selection, directed to the elimination of superfluities, accidents,
excrescences--which to the craftsman’s purpose are nothing.

Nature, in her seed-sowing, has gone to work to propagate by profusion;
her method is to sow a million seeds so as to make sure that some may
live; thus she meets and out-matches the chances that are against her.
The seed of Art sprang up differently; maker-man took hold of the one
selected seed, not of a dozen, or of a thousand dozen promiscuously,
and bent his faculties on making that one seed (his chosen material)
fit to face life and its chances: if a house--walls and roof
calculated to keep out the rain and resist the force of storms: if a
textile--fabric of a staple sufficient to resist the wear and tear to
which it would be subjected: if a putting together of words meant to
outlast the brief occasion of their utterance--then in a form likely
to be impressive, and therefore memorable; so that in an age before
writing was known they might find a safe tabernacle, travelling from
place to place in the minds of men. And similarly with music--a system
of sounds so ruled by structural law as to be capable of transmission
either by instrument, or by voice disciplined and trained to a certain
code of limitations. And being thus made memorable and passed from
mouth to mouth, from one place to another, and from age to age, they
acquired a social significance and importance; till, seeing them thus
lifted above chance, man set himself to give them new forms of beauty
and adornment.

And the governing motive was, and always has been, first man’s wish to
leave memorable records--beyond the limits of his own generation--of
what life has meant for him; and secondly (and this is the more
intimate phase) the delight of the craftsman in his work, the
exuberance of vital energy (secure of its structural ground-work)
breaking out into play. “See,” it says, “how I dance, and gambol, and
triumph! This superfluity of strength proves me a victor in my struggle
to live.”

Nothing else does; for if (having survived the struggle) man only lives
miserably--scrapes through as it were--the question in the face of so
poverty-stricken a result, may still be--“Was the struggle worth it?”
And so by his arts and graces, by his adornment of his streets, temples
and theatres, by his huge delight in himself, so soon as the essentials
of mere material existence are secured to him, man has really shown
that life is good in itself, that he can do well enough without the
assurance of personal immortality held out to him by the theologians.
Whether that be or be not his reward hereafter, he will still strive to
express himself; but for that end mere use alone will not satisfy him.

We have seen, then, how man, in his social surroundings, begins to
secure something over and above the mere necessities of life; and so,
after providing himself with a certain competence of food, clothing
and shelter, has means and energy left for the supply of luxuries,
ornaments, delights--call them what you will. And according to
the direction in which he flings out for the acquisition of these
superfluities--so will his whole manhood develop, or his type of racial
culture be moulded.

Far back in the beginnings of civilization one of the first forms
taken by this surplus of power and energy over mere necessity was the
acquisition of slaves and wives. Civilization then began to ornament
itself with two modes of body-service--the menial attendance of the
slave upon his master, and the polygamous sexual attendance of the
woman upon her lord.

To-day we think that both those things were, from a moral point of
view, bad ornament. But you cannot look into the history of any
civilization conducted on those lines without seeing that they
decorated it--and that, out of their acceptance, came colour,
pomp, splendour, means for leisure, for enjoyment--for a very keen
self-realisation of a kind by the few at the expense of the many. And
the masterful few made that form of decorated civilization more sure
for themselves by extending a good deal of the decorative element
to the subservient lives around them. The slaves wore fine liveries
and lorded it over lower slaves, the favourite wives lived in luxury
and laziness, eating sweets and spending their days in the frivolous
mysteries of the toilet.

At a certain point in the social scale this form of ornamental
existence produced great misery, great hardships, great abasement. But
it was not instituted and maintained for that reason. Those underlying
conditions were a drawback, they were a misuse of human nature employed
as a basis for that ornamental superstructure to build on. And out of
that underlying misuse came the weakness and the eventual decay of that
once flourishing school of ornament.

But when that school of ornament was threatened by other schools, it
was ready to fight to the death for its ornamental superfluities--for
polygamy, for slavery, for power over others, which had come to mean
for it all that made life worth living! Life was quite capable of
being carried on without those things--was, and is, happily lived by
other races to the accompaniment of another set of ornaments which
those races think more enjoyable. But no race will consent to live
without some sort of ornament of its own choosing; and when its choice
of ornaments, or of social superfluities, over and above the needs
of existence, is seriously threatened from without it declares that
it is fighting not merely for liberty but for existence. Yet we know
quite well that the people of invaded and conquered States continue
in the main to exist--they continue even to wear ornaments; but these
are apt to be imposed ornaments galling to the national pride. And so
to-day, in the midst of a vast belligerency, we have committees and
consultations going on, to see to it lest, at the end of the war, under
German dominance, our women should have their future fashions imposed
on them from Berlin instead of from Paris, a fearful doom for any lady
of taste to contemplate.

The example may seem frivolous, but it is a parable of the truth;
we call our ornaments our liberties, and if we cannot ourselves die
fighting for them, we make others die for us.

Let us take up (for illustration of the same point) another stage
of civilization--that of ancient Greece. In Greece the city was the
centre of civilization, and its public buildings became the outward and
visible sign of the people’s pride of life and of their sense of power.
The fact that their private dwellings were very simple, and that they
expended nearly the whole of their artistry upon public works (things
to be shared and delighted in by all the citizens in common) had a
profound influence upon their civilization. That new social ideal of
civic pride found its way irresistibly into ornament. You could not
have had civic pride in anything like the same degree without it.

But Greek civilization did not fall into decay because of the beauty
and perfection with which it crowned itself in the public eye, but
because of certain underlying evils and misuses in the body politic--in
which again slavery and the subjection of women had their share. Greek
civilization fell because it failed to recognise the dignity of all
human nature; it reserved its sense of dignity for a selected race
and class; it failed to recognise the dignity of all true kinds of
service, and prided itself in military service alone--in that and in
the philosophies and the arts. It built a wonderful temple to its gods,
but failed in a very large degree to take into God the whole body of
humanity over which it had control. And so, Greek civilization broke up
into portions of an unimportant size and perished.

At a later day--and again with the city as centre to its life of
self-realisation--we get the great period of the Italian Renaissance,
a period in which civic and feudal and ecclesiastical influences
alternately jostled and combined.

And out of these three prides arose a wonderfully complex
art--tremendously expressive of what life meant for that people. And
you got then (for the first time, I think), grouped under the civic
arm, a new life-consciousness--the consciousness of the guilds, the
workers, and the craftsmen. The dignity of labour began to assert
itself; and when it did, inevitably it broke into ornament on its own
account--not at the bidding of an employer, but for the honour and
glory of the worker himself. And so, from that date on, the homes and
halls and churches of the guilds became some of the noblest monuments
to what life meant for men who had found joy in their labour.

Now that did not come till the craftsman had won free from slavery
and from forced labour; but when he was a freeman, with room to turn
round, he built up temples to his craft, to make more evident that the
true goal of labour is not use but delight. And only when it fell back
into modern slavery at the hands of commercial capitalism, only then
did labour’s power of spontaneous expression depart from it and become
imitative and debased.

I could take you further, and show you (among the survivals from our
England of the Middle Ages) the “joy of the harvest” expressed in the
great granaries and tithe-barns which still crown like abbey-churches
the corn-lands of Home. Concerning one of these William Morris said
that it stood second in his estimation among all the Gothic buildings
of Europe! Think of it!--of what that means in the realisation of
life-values by the age which had a mind so to celebrate man’s rest
after the labour of the harvest! In those days England was called
“merry” and foreigners who came to her shores reported as a national
characteristic the happy looks of her people: even their faces showed
adornment! And thus it is that beautiful use always clothes itself in
beauty.

I have said that all art is useful. To many that may have seemed a
very contentious statement. But how can one separate beauty from use
if one holds that everything which delights us is useful? On that
statement there is only one condition I would impose. The use in
which we delight must not mean the misuse or the infliction of pain
on others. In those periods of civilization to which I have referred
(so magnificent in their powers of self-discovery and self-adornment),
there were always dark and cruel habitations where the “art of living”
was not applied. They were content that the beauty on which they prided
themselves should be built up on the suffering, the oppression, or the
corruption of others. In the lust of their eyes there was a blind spot,
so that they cared little about the conditions imposed by their own
too arrogant claim for happiness on the lives that were spent to serve
them. And out of their blindness came at last the downfall of their
power.

So it has always been, so it always must be. I believe that beauty,
delight, ornament, are as near to the object of life as anything that
one can name, and that through right uses we attain to these as our
goal. But it is no good claiming to possess delightful things if we do
not see to it that those who make them for us have also the means to
live delightfully.

If man cannot make all the uses and services of life decent and
wholesome as a starting-point, neither can he make life enjoyable--not,
I mean, with a good conscience. If he would see God through beauty, he
must see Him not here and there only, but in the “land of the living”;
else (as the psalmist said) his spirit must faint utterly.

Our life is built up--we know not to what ultimate end--on an infinite
number of uses, functions, mechanisms. These uses enable us to live;
they do not necessarily enable us to enjoy. You can quite well imagine
the use of all your senses and organs so conditioned that you could
not enjoy a single one of them, and yet they might still fulfil their
utilitarian purpose of keeping you alive.

I need not rehearse to you in troublesome detail conditions of life
where everything you see is an eyesore, every touch a cause of
shrinking, every sound a discord, where taste and smell become a revolt
and a loathing.

Our modern civilization derives many of its present comforts from
conditions such as these under which thousands, nay millions, of
subservient human lives become brutalised. So long as we base our
ideal of wealth on individual aggrandisement, and on monetary and
commercial prosperity, and not (as we should do) upon human nature
itself--making it our chief aim that every life should be set free for
self-realisation in ornament and delight--so long will these things be
inevitable.

But when we, as men and women, and as nations, realise that human
nature is the most beautiful thing on earth (in its possibilities, I
mean) then surely our chief desire will be to make that our wealth here
and now, and out of it rear up our memorial to the ages that come after.




ART AND CITIZENSHIP

(1910)


The most hardened advocate of “Art for Art’s sake,” will hardly deny
that Art, for all its “sacred egoism,” is a social force. The main
question is where does your Art-training begin?

The conditions of the home, the workshop, and of social industries
do more than the schools and the universities to educate a nation;
and more especially, perhaps, to educate it toward a right or a wrong
feeling about Art.

And if, in these departments, your national education takes a wrong
line, then (however much you build schools over the heads of your
pupils and intercept their feet with scholarships, and block their
natural outlook on life with beautiful objects produced in past ages
and in other countries) your Art-training will partake of the same
condemnation.

True education, as opposed to merely commercial education, is a
training of mind and body to an appreciation of right values; values,
not prices. The man who has an all-round appreciation of right values
is a well-educated man; and he could not have a better basis either for
the love or the practice of Art than this appreciation of what things
are really worth.

But, in the present age, which prides itself on its inhuman system
of specialisation as a means to economy, such a man is rather a
rare phenomenon; for it is about as difficult to get out of present
conditions a true appreciation of life values--a true Art-training--as
it is to get a true artist. Where your national conditions shut down
the critical faculties, and make their exercise difficult, there too,
your creative artistic faculties are being shut down and made difficult
also. They are far more interdependent than your average Art-teacher
or Art-student is generally willing to admit. The idea that he has to
concern himself with conditions outside his own particular department
threatens him with extra trouble, and the burden of a conscience
that the doctrine of “Art for Art’s sake,” will not wholly satisfy;
and so he is inclined to shut his eyes, and direct his energies to
the securing of favourable departmental instead of right national
conditions.

But the man, or woman, who embarks whole-heartedly on Art-training
must in the end find himself involved in a struggle for the recovery
of those true social values which have been lost (or the acquisition
of those which are as yet unrealised) and for the substitution, among
other things, of true for false economics. He cannot afford to live
a life of aloof specialisation, when the conditions out of which he
derives and into which he is throwing his work are of a complementarily
disturbing kind. If, that is to say, the give-and-take conditions
between artistic supply and social demand have become vitiated, if
the conditions of the market, or of society, are unfavourable to the
reception of products of true worth, then the artist must to some
extent be an active party in the struggle for getting things set right.

That does not mean that, if he has a gift for the designing of
stage-scenery, he should necessarily be involved in a struggle to
secure a good drainage system (though even that should have an interest
for him) but it does mean very much that he should be tremendously
interested in the education of his own and the public mind to the point
of receiving good drama rather than bad, in order that his art may have
worthy material to work upon; and as good drama largely arises from a
lively conscience and the quickening in the community of new ideas, he
will wish his public a keen and open mind on all social questions.

Similarly a man who designs for textile fabrics should be very much
concerned indeed in getting cleanly conditions and pure air in the
towns and dwelling-houses where his designs have to live and look
beautiful, or grow ugly and rot. And there you get set before you in
small, the opposition between the interests of Art and the supposed
interests of trade. It is--or it is supposed to be--in the interest of
trade that things should wear out or get broken, and be replaced by
other things. It is in the interest of Art that they should not wear
out, that they should last; that everything worthy which is given to
man’s hand to do should have secured to it the greatest possible length
of life. And the reason is that the artist, if he be a true artist,
realises the value of things, the life value; that he is on the side of
creation and not of destruction, of preservation and not of waste. He
has within his nature an instinct that the greatest possible longevity
is the right condition for all manual labour; that when a man sets his
hand to a thing he should have it as his main aim to give good value,
to make it so that it will endure. And in this connection I would like
to substitute for the words “art training” the word “education.” It
is in the interests of education that things should be made to last,
and that only things should be made of any lasting material that
deserve lasting. Nothing should be produced the value of which will
become negligible before it is honestly worn out. And so it is in the
interest of education, as of Art, that we should eliminate as much as
possible the passing and the ephemeral, the demand of mood and fashion,
the thing cheaply chosen, cheaply acquired, and cheaply let go; and
substitute the thing that we shall have a long use for, and should like
to keep permanently--the thing acquired with thought and care, and
thoughtfully and carefully preserved because it has in itself a value.

But you won’t get any broad exercise of that kind of choice between
evil and good until you get a sense of right values--going far away
from what apparently touches art--in the mind, and the public and
private life of the community. And so, as I started by saying, true Art
is bound up with true education and social conditions. Good citizenship
is one of the conditions for setting national Art upon a proper basis.
A lively sense of your duty to your neighbour cannot fail to have an
effect upon your taste in art.

Now I want to bring this view of things home to you. So I will ask
everyone here to think for a moment of their own homes, their own
living-rooms, and especially of their parlours or drawing-rooms, which
are by their nature intended to express not so much our domestic
necessities as our domestic sense of the value of beauty, recreation,
and rest. And to begin with, how do you show your sense of duty to
the architect, who has (if you are fortunate) designed for you rooms
of pleasant and restful proportions? How many of the objects in those
rooms help at all to give a unifying and a harmonious effect, or are
in themselves in any way beautiful--things, that is to say, which (if
not of actual use) we love to set our eyes on, and feel what fineness
of skill in handling, what clean human thought in design went to their
production? Have those things been put there quite irrespective of
their price and the display they make of their owner’s “comfortable
circumstances”? Are they subordinated to a really intelligent sense
of what a living-room should be? Or are they merely a crowd, a
litter, things flung into the room pell-mell by a house-mistress
bent on securing for her parlour-maid a silly hour’s dusting every
day of objects--not of virtue--and for herself the recognition by
her neighbours that she has money enough to throw away in making her
living-room a silly imitation of a shop for bric-a-brac. Can you, even
those of you who do not live in streets where you have to safeguard
your privacy--can you look out of the window without being tickled in
the face by lace curtains, blind-tassels, or potted palm-leaves? Can
you sit down to the writing-table without entangling the legs of your
chair in a woolly mat and your feet in the waste-paper basket, or get
at the drawer of the cabinet without moving two or three arm-chairs,
or play the piano without causing the crocks which stand upon it to
jangle? Is the rest and recreation you get in that room anything else
but a sense of self-complacency based upon pride of possession? I ask
you to think what your furnishing of your rooms means, and remember
that to every person who comes into those rooms--and more especially
perhaps to the maids whom you set to dust them--you are helping to give
either an Art-training or an anti-Art-training, a training in true uses
and values, or in misuses and mere waste and wantonness.

Of course I know that to some extent you are victims. You have dear
friends who will give you presents, and you can’t hurt their feelings
by not putting up another shelf, or erecting another glass-shade,
where neither are wanted, or driving another peg into the wall to hang
a picture where no picture can be properly seen. And probably the
reason you cannot is because you have shown yourself so thoughtless
and haphazard in all your ideas about decoration and house-furnishing
that even in that house, which you falsely assert to be your castle,
you stand defenceless before this invasion of ornamental microbes!
Obviously the house is not yours if others can break in and spoil its
borders with their own false taste. But I can assure you that those
inroads do not happen to people whose rooms show a scrupulous sense of
selection. You inspire then (even in the thoughtless) a certain dread
and respect. Though they regard you as uncanny and call you a crank,
you are beginning their Art-training for them.

I remember, in this connection, a Quaker acquaintance whose friends
descended upon him at the time of his marriage with certain household
monstrosities which he was expected thereafter to live down to. It was
a cataclysm which he could not avert; but he found a remedy. He became
a passive resister to the Education rate, and year by year he placed
at the disposal of the distraining authorities a selection of his
wedding-presents till his house was purged of them. I have said that
you cannot separate Art-training from general education; and here, at
all events, you find the two happily combined--a war on bad art and on
a bad educational system joined economically in one.

So much, then, for thoughtless superfluity as an impediment to a
recognition of true values. I want now to come to the importance of
permanence as a condition underlying the aim of all production if
it is to be wholesome in its social results. I have said that an
instinct for permanence is what differentiates artistic from supposed
trade interests. Take architecture. Do you imagine that architects or
builders are likely to design or build in the same style for a system
of short leaseholds as they might for freeholds? And is the building
which is calculated just to “save its face” until the lease expires
likely to be so good either in design or workmanship?

Read, in that connection, what Coventry Patmore says in his essay on
“Greatness in Architecture”:

“The house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was,” he says, “fully aware that the strength of a rafter
lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at
least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways,
would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him
better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the
reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous
substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an
old house that strikes us as “architectural,” though it may not contain
a single item of architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances
in which modern buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the
beholder at once feels that their generous regard for the far future
is of almost as poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a
similar house of the time of Henry VII. or Elizabeth. A man,” he goes
on, “now hires a bit of ground for eighty or ninety years; and, if he
has something to spare to spend on beauty, he says to himself: ‘I will
build me a house that will last my time, and what money I have to spare
I will spend in decorating it. Why should I waste my means in raising
wall and roof which will last five times as long as I or mine shall
want them?’ The answer is: Because that very ‘waste’ is the truest and
most striking ornament; and though your and your family’s enjoyment of
a house thus magnanimously built may last but a tenth of its natural
age, there lies in that very fact an ‘ornament’ of the most noble and
touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons to yourself and
every beholder, though the consciousness of its cause may be dormant;
whereas the meanness of the other plan will be only the more apparent
with every penny you spend in making it meretricious.”

Again, are you likely to get so good an architectural design where you
cannot be fairly sure that the use for which the building is raised
is likely to be permanent? And do our modern trade conditions and
present enormous demand for thoughtless superfluities tend to make that
prospect more probable? If not, then instability of trade, or trade
directed to the satisfaction of frivolous and ephemeral demands is bad
for architecture, and hinders any worthy development in it of national
characteristics.

But there, mind you, in trade, lies to-day the very life of the nation;
for the life of our teeming millions depends on it. By our industrial
specialisation in the pursuit of wealth vast numbers of us have ceased
to be self-supporting in the necessaries of life. And the question for
artists is, are we basing our national life on conditions that cannot
secure permanence and stability in the things which we produce? Is it
a necessary condition of our industrial development that things should
have a shorter life and we a shorter use for them than in the old days?
To the artist the drawback of machine-made things is not necessarily
in the mechanism of their production (for in some cases your machine
relieves the human hand of a hard and wearing monotony), but there is
a very obvious drawback if it imposes upon the worker merely another
form of hard and wearing monotony, and at the same time shortens the
life of the thing produced. If handicraft does not offer to the worker
worthier conditions for hand and brain, and insure longer life in the
thing produced, it is no good pinning our faith to it. Eliminate it,
and let machinery take its place. You have not, then, in the transfer,
destroyed any right values, and you are not going counter to the
conditions which tend to produce national Art.

But, as an example of the particular value which does sometimes attach
to hand labour (irrespective of its artistic value), I have here a
small unused sample of chair-cover material of English make, produced
about eighty years ago, at a probable cost--so I am told by experts--of
under £2 the square yard. The chairs it was made to cover are now
in my possession. During the twenty-five years of my own personal
acquaintance with them they have had plenty of hard wear; but even at
the corners that material has not yet begun to wear out; and the colour
has only become softer and more mellow in quality.

Within the last ten years I endeavoured to get that covering matched in
a modern material, and I paid for the nearest match I could get about
one-fifth of the price I have quoted. That material has already gone
shabby; and where it is most worn and faded the colour, instead of
mellowing, has gone dead and dirty in quality. The older material will
probably outlast my time.

There, then, are the comparative values of the old and the new
material. You pay the higher price for the old, but in the end it is
more economical. And it has this double advantage (or what would be a
double advantage in a State where industrial conditions were sound),
that it inclines its possessor to adopt a more permanent style of
furnishing, by making age beautiful and change unnecessary; and so it
sets free a great amount of human labour for other purposes; not merely
the labour of the textile workers who have not to provide new covers,
but the labour of the upholsterers, who are not called upon to rip off
a series of old covers and fit on new ones, dragging old nails out and
driving fresh nails in, with the result that the framework of the chair
itself is presently worn out and a new one required in its place. All
that labour is saved.

That small example is important because it exemplifies those
possibilities of permanence attaching to certain forms of hand-labour
out of which can be developed a school of textile manufacture
indigenous in character--indigenous in that you give it time to become
embedded in its domestic setting, and to make for itself domestic
history. It enables you to develop an appreciation for subtleties
of colour, and to secure tones and harmonies which you cannot get
ready-made in a shop: it gives to a piece of furniture life-value.

But it is bad for trade!

Now why is it bad for trade? It is bad for trade because our modern
industrial conditions have brought us to this pass, that it is no
longer our national aim to direct labour and set it free for other
work that really needs to be done. Our national problem is rather to
find work for people, at times even to invent needs, and to create a
fictitious turnover in trade so that we may not have upon our hands an
enormous increase of the unemployed problem. And as hands go begging,
as we have more hands in the country than we can employ on useful and
fit labour (fit, I mean, for such fine implements as these and for the
brains behind them), therefore hands are inevitably put to degrading
uses, and the joy goes out of work; and for the delight (or at least
the intelligent patience) of true craftsmanship is substituted the
soul-destroying bondage of mechanical labour at something which is not
really worth producing.

You may take that, I think, as a test whether a State is in industrial
health or disease--whether, namely, it tends more in the direction
of setting labour free for other and higher purposes (through the
permanent quality of its products), and so evolving an aristocracy of
labour; or whether (owing to their ephemeral quality) it constantly
tends to invent work of a lower and more trivial kind, and to provide
jobs of an ephemeral character which are not really wanted.

Now bad and wasteful taste is directly productive, not so much of trade
as of fluctuations in trade, because that sort of taste soon tires
and asks for change; and the consequence is that thousands of workers
(especially women, whose industries used to be home industries before
machinery drew them out of the homes) are in this country constantly
being thrown out of one useless employment into another, and very often
have to pass through a fresh apprenticeship at a starvation wage.
And so, when we create frivolous demands for things that we shall not
want the day after to-morrow, we are not (as we too often think) doing
anything that is really good for trade, but only something much more
horrible, which you will understand without my naming it.

You see, then, how very closely the artist’s inclination toward
permanence of taste may be connected with morality. And if that
instinct for permanence (with an accompanying adaptation of material
and design to making things last their full time without waste) is not
present in the craftsmanship of our day, then we have not got the true
basis, either in spirit or material, for Art to build upon.

Now I am going to put before you some quite homely instances, because
I think they will stick best in your memories, in order to show
you that the real struggle of the artist to-day is not so much to
secure appreciation of beauty in line and texture, as honesty of
construction, and real adaptation of form to utility and of production
to lastingness. I have been noticing, with quite simple objects of
domestic use, that the trade-purpose toward them seems almost the
opposite. The trade purpose is to present us with an article which,
apparently sound in construction, will break down at some crucial point
before the rest of it is worn out. A watering can, a carving fork,
a kettle, a dustbin, a coal scuttle, the fixings of a door-handle,
are generally made, I find, on an ignobly artful plan which insures
that they shall break down just at that point where the wear and tear
come hardest, so that an article otherwise complete shall be scrapped
wastefully or go back to the trade to be tinkered.

But leave things the actual design of which you cannot control, and
come to dress, our own daily wearing apparel. I do not know if the men
of my audience are aware that undergarments wear out much quicker if
they are tight-fitting and worn at a stretch than if they are loose,
but that is so. And, in consequence, a smart shopman has the greatest
reluctance to sell you anything that is, as he conceives it, one size
too large for you. The reason being that the looser fit lasts longer
and is bad for trade--that it makes for endurance instead of for
galloping consumption.

In the majority of houses whose cold water systems I have inspected
the pipes are nearly always run at the most exposed angle of the
containing walls, so that if there is a frost, the frost may have a
chance of getting at the pipes and bursting them, and so give the trade
a fresh job. Again, every housewife knows that in the ordinary daily
conflicts between tea-sets and domestic service more cups get broken
than saucers. And I suppose every household in London has got some
corner shelf piled with superfluous saucers (useless widowers mourning
the departure of their better halves); but it is very exceptional--only
in one shop that I know--that one is able to replace the cup (in
certain stock patterns) without encumbering oneself with the saucer
which one does not want. The saucers continue to be made in wasteful
superabundance, because waste of that sort is “good for trade.”

I have been assured by an observant housewife that certain articles do
now and again appear upon the market specially designed to safeguard by
little constructive devices, the main point of wear-and-tear through
which they become useless, and that presently these things disappear
and are unobtainable, presumably because they prove too lasting, and so
are “bad for trade.” And they are allowed to disappear because we, as a
community, have not sufficiently set our hearts and minds against waste
and uselessness. We buy cheaply because we think cheaply, and because
we have lost our sense of honour towards the products of men’s hands,
and toward that wonderful instrument itself which we are content to
put to such base uses, letting the workers themselves see how much we
despise the things they have made.

I have seen in London a comic music-hall “turn” in which the comedy
largely consisted in a continuous breakage of piles of plates by a
burlesque waiter, who, in the course of his duties, either drops them,
falls against them, sits on them, or kicks them. During the turn I
should say some thirty or forty plates get broken. They were cheap
plates, no doubt; but it seems to me that if there is any fun in this
monotonous repetition of destruction, then the greater the cost and
waste of human labour the more irresistibly comic should the situation
appear; and the management which provided Worcester or Dresden china
for its low-comedy wits to play upon would have logical grounds for
considering that it was thereby supplying its audience with livelier
entertainment more satisfying to its taste.[2]

Now what I want you to see is that such a production would not be
entertaining to an audience which had not come to regard the labour of
man’s hands with a licentious indifference--which had not developed the
gambler’s contempt for the true relations between labour and value.
And here I want to put before you a proposition which may at first
shock you, but which I hope to prove true. And that is that labour in
itself, apart from its justification in some useful result, is bad and
degrading; the man who is put to work which he knows is to have no
result comes from that work more degraded and crushed in spirit than
the man who merely “loafs” and lives “naturally.”

Perhaps the readiest example of that is the old treadmill system which
was once employed in our prisons, where the prisoner was set to grind
at a crank artificially adjusted to his physical strength, but having
no useful result; and I believe that the main reason why prisoners
on those machines were not allowed to grind their own bread or put
their strength to any self-supporting industry was because it was “bad
for trade” and brought them into competition with the contractors who
supplied food to his Majesty’s prisons. It was not the monotony half
so much as the consciousness that it was without result which made
that form of labour so degrading and so utterly exhausting to mind and
body. You might think it was the compulsion; but I am not sure that
compulsion to work may not sometimes be very moral and salutary. At any
rate, here is an instance of the same thing presented under voluntary
conditions. A man out of work applied to a farmer for a job; the
farmer had no job for him, and told him so; but as the man persisted
he started him at half a crown a day to move a heap of stones from one
side of the road to the other. And when the man had done that and asked
what next he was to do, he told him to move them back again! But though
that man was out of work, and was on his way to earn the half-crown,
rather than submit his body to the conscious degradation of such
useless labour, he did as the farmer had calculated on his doing, and
threw up the job.

That same quality of outrage and degradation attends on all labour that
is subject, within the worker’s knowledge, to wanton destruction, or is
obviously of no real use or of “faked” value. And the finer the skill
employed the greater the anguish of mind, or else the hard callousness
of indifference which must result. Call upon men to make useless
things, or things which you mean wantonly to destroy the day after
to-morrow, or to which by the conditions you tolerate you make a fair
length of life impossible--call upon labour to do those things, and you
are either filling its spirit with misery and depression, or you are
making it, in self-defence, callous and hard.

Industrial conditions which encourage the building of houses that are
only intended to last a lease; which permit the destruction of our
canal system because that means of transit has proved a dangerous
rival to the railway system; which impose a quick change in fashions
on which depend various kinds of ephemeral and parasitic industries;
which encourage a vast production of ephemeral journalism and
magazine illustration which after a single reading is thrown aside
and wasted--all these things, which have become nationalised in our
midst, are a national anti-Art training. We English have, as the
result of these things, no national school of architecture; we have
no national costume (though I myself can remember the time when in
our Midland counties not only the farm labourer, but the small yeoman
farmer himself went to church as well as to labour in the beautiful
smock-frock worn by their forefathers) and we have killed out from our
midst one of the most beautiful national schools of popular art that
ever existed, the school of the illustrators of the ’sixties; and we
have done these things mainly from our increasing haste to get hold of
something new, and our almost equal haste, when we have it, to throw it
away again.

We have cast our bread upon the waters. The sort of wealth to the
pursuit of which nations have committed themselves needs (it now
appears) an enormous amount of protection. And it cannot have been
without some demoralising effect upon the mind of the community that
we have been driven by our outstanding necessities to build every
year six or seven of those enormous engines of destruction called
“Dreadnoughts,” whose effective lease of life is about 20 years,
something considerably shorter than the lease of life which we allow
for our most jerry-built lodging-houses! And on these short-lived
products of industry (which are to-day the sign and symbol and
safeguard of our world-power), our aristocracy of labour has been
spending its strength, and the nation has now to depend on them for
its safety. The cost of building a “Dreadnought” is about the same
as the cost of building St. Paul’s Cathedral. Imagine to yourself a
nation building every year six or seven St. Paul’s Cathedrals, with the
consciousness that in twenty-five or thirty years they will all again
be levelled to the dust, and you will get from that picture something
of the horror which an artist is bound to feel at the necessity
which thus drives us forward, even in peace-time, to the continuous
destruction, on such a colossal scale, of the labour of men’s hands.
And the more it is revealed to us to-day (by the present catastrophe)
as an absolute political necessity, the more is the disorder of
civilization we have arrived at condemned.

Well, I must leave now, in that example I have set before you, the
wasteful aspect of modern industry, in order to touch briefly on
another, and an almost equally hateful aspect, which I will call “the
vivisection of modern industry.” I mean its subdivision into so many
separate departments, or rather fragments, that it loses for the mind
of the worker all relation to the thing made--that time-saving device
at the expense of the human hand and brain, which we glorify under the
term “specialisation.” Now, however much you may defend that system on
ground of trade competition, the artist is bound by his principles to
regard it as a national evil; for anything which tends to take away
the worker’s joy and pride in the distinctiveness of his trade and
to undo its human elements is anti-Art training. And so that inhuman
specialisation which (for the sake of trade cheapness) sets down a man
to the performance of one particular mechanical action all his life,
in the making of some one particular part of some article which in its
further stages he is never to handle, or a woman to stamp out the tin
skeleton of a button, with her eyes glued to one spot for ten hours
of the day--all these dehumanising things are anti-Art because they
are destructive of life-values. We have erected them into a system,
and while cutting prices by such means at one end, we are mounting up
costs at the other. We are promoting, maybe, a quicker circulation of
the currency of the realm, but we are impoverishing the currency of
the race. For that hard mechanical efficiency we are paying a price
which is eating up all our real profits; quite apart from its effect
in the increase of lunacy and of the unfit birth-rate and death-rate
among children, it is helping to implant in the whole world of labour
a bitter and a revengeful spirit which we have no right to wonder at
or to blame. And the results affect us not only in our workshops but
in our pastimes, by driving those whose labour is so conditioned into
a more consumptive form of pleasure-seeking and relaxation. You cannot
put people into inhuman conditions for long hours of each day, and
expect them to be normal and humane when you turn them out to their
short hours of leisure. I am pointing to conditions which you know
probably as well as, or better than, I do; but I am pointing to them
for the express purpose of saying that you cannot dissociate them from
your national appreciation of Art. The more you can connect the worker
with the raw material on the one hand and the finished product on the
other, the more surely you are establishing conditions out of which
national Art can grow; and the more you dissociate him from these two
ends of his material the more you make national Art impossible.

I will give you an instance, quite away from sweated labour conditions,
where you will see at once how wasteful and opposed to Art is this
system of breaking up craftsmanship into departments. It was an
architect who told me that the following system is quite frequently
followed in dealing with the stone out of which we build the outside
walls of our modern churches. It is hewn at the quarries into a rough
surface, thoroughly expressive of the stonemason’s craft, and not in
any way too rough for its purpose. It is then taken and submitted by
machinery to a grinding process which makes it mechanically smooth, and
it is then handed over to other workmen who give back to it a chiselled
surface of an absolutely uniform and mechanical character which
expresses nothing. And with that wanton and wasteful lie we are content
to set up temples to the God of Truth!

Now if the Church has become so blind to the values of life, and so
lacking in any standard of honour toward the labour of men’s hands, as
to allow itself to be so clothed in falsehood, yet I do still plead
that those who call themselves artists shall protest by all means in
their power against the systematisation of such indignities toward
handicraft. That is the sort of thing against which any national Art
training we have ought to fight.

How can we fight? Best of all, I believe, by establishing a standard
of honour toward manual labour; and, quite definitely, wherever we
have Art schools, by training all students to hate and despise shams
and to loathe all waste of labour. But, perhaps, the most direct way
would be for the State to set up, in every town, in connection with
its Art schools and its technical schools, a standard of honesty by
practical demonstration, in the staple industry of the locality. I
would not trouble, so long as that industry had a useful purpose,
how much or how little it was connected with Art; but I would give
the youth of that place the chance of an honest apprenticeship under
true human conditions to the trade in which they might be called upon
to spend their lives. I would not have those schools of labour adopt
any amateurishness of method or standard; they should not obstinately
reject the aid of machinery where machinery can relieve monotony, but
they should very carefully consider at what stage the dehumanising
element came in, either by substituting mechanism for skill, or by
separating the worker too much from his work in its completed form.
And from those schools of labour I would allow people to purchase all
the work of these State-apprentices which their master-craftsmen could
pass as being of a standard quality. They would not compete in point
of cheapness with the trade article, for their price would almost
certainly be higher, but they would, I trust, compete in point of
quality and design; and by exhibiting a standard, and making the thing
procurable, they might create a demand which the very trade itself
would at last be forced to recognise.

This is but a very bald and brief statement of the kind of extension I
mean; but what I want to put to you is this, that wherever a nation has
turned from agriculture to trade, there, if you want national Art you
must invade those trade conditions and set up your standard of honour,
not outside, but in the trades themselves; you must get hold of those
who are going to be your workers and craftsmen and put into them (by
exhibiting to them manual labour under right human conditions) the old
craftsman’s pride which existed in the days of the Guilds, when the
trade unions were not merely organisations to secure good wages, but
to secure good work, and to maintain a standard of honour in labour.
But you must not stop there. To make your training in any true sense
national you must make it characteristic, or rather it must make
itself. It must aim at bringing out racial and local character; and
before it can do so we must recover that love of locality which we have
so largely lost. A mere multiplication of schools and classes where a
departmental system evolved at some city centre is put in force, is not
national: it is only metropolitan, perhaps only departmental. You can
put such a system, in a certain superficial way, into the heads and
hands of your local students, but you cannot put it into the blood.
Unless your Art training enters into and links up the lives of those
you would teach with a larger sense of citizenship, it isn’t national.
They won’t carry it away with them into their daily pursuits, they
won’t make a spontaneous and instinctive application of it; they will
only come to it at class-hours, and, when class-hours are over, quit
again. I have spoken of the necessity of a standard of honour toward
labour, but we need also a standard of honour toward life. It is still,
you see, values--life-values--that I am trying to get at as a basis for
Art.

Now to some of you I must have seemed, in all conscience, gloomy
and pessimistic in my outlook on present conditions; and therefore,
before I end, I will try to emit a ray of hope. There are certain
social developments going on around us which make me hope that we
may yet emerge from this valley of the shadows through which we are
still stumbling. One is that there has been in the last generation a
very general breakdown of the old artificial class notion of the kind
of work which was compatible with “gentility.” And one meets to-day
people, whose culture has given them every chance to develop that
standard of honour toward life (without which their claim to be gentry
means nothing); you meet with many such people nowadays who have come
back to manual labour in various forms, in farming, in horticulture,
and in craftsmanship--some also, I am glad to say, who have become
shopkeepers--and who are bringing, presumably, their standard of honour
to bear on those trades on which they no longer foolishly look down.
Among these a definite revival of handicraft is taking place, and
where they are doing their work honestly and well they are undoubtedly
inculcating a better taste. It is especially among this class which
has come back to handicraft that one meets with domestic interiors of
a fine and scrupulous simplicity which we may eventually see imitated
(meretriciously, perhaps, but on the whole beneficially) even in
lodging-houses which are at present the dust-hung mausoleums of the
aesthetic movement of thirty years ago.

Another matter for congratulation--not a movement, but a survival--is
the unspoiled tradition of beauty which still exists in the cottage
gardens of England. There, in our villages, you find a note of beauty
that has scarcely been touched by the evil of our modern conditions.
And I take it as a proof that where, by some happy chance, we have
managed to “let well alone,” there the instinct for beauty and for
fitness is still a natural ingredient of industrial life. That survival
of taste in our cottage gardens is culture in the best sense of the
word; and it is still popular. We do not yet dig our gardens by
machinery; when we do they will die the death.

And two other bright points of movement, which I look to as having in
them the basis of a true Art training, are the widespread revival,
in so many of our towns and villages, through the efforts of Miss
Mary Neal, Mr. Cecil Sharp and others, of our old folk-songs and
Morris dances, and lastly--perhaps I shall surprise you--the Boy Scout
movement.

Coming into contact with these two movements, I have found that they
have in them certain elements in common. Instituted with a rare
combination of tact and enthusiasm, they have taken hold of the blood;
they have got home at a certain point in boy and girl nature which has
already made them become native. I find that these two organisations
tend to develop among their members grace and vigour of movement, good
manners, a cheerful spirit, a more alert interest in the things about
them, a feeling of comradeship, and best of all, a certain sense of
honour toward life. And therefore, even in a place technically devoted
to the training of students, I say boldly that I see nowhere better
hope of a sound basis for national Art than in this revival of village
dancing and folk-song and in the Boy Scout movement.

The assertion may perhaps seem strange and ironic to some of you
that it is not from a study of beautiful objects that the sense of
beauty can be made national, but only in the recovery of an ordered
plan for our social and industrial life, and in the finding of a true
and worthy purpose for all that our hands are put to do. But in that
connection you may remember how Ruskin maintained that great Art has
only flourished in countries which produced in abundance either wine or
corn; in countries, that is to say, where the greatest industries were
those with which we most readily associate that note of joy which has
become proverbial, the joy of the harvest. It is perhaps too much to
dream that we shall ever again see England living upon its own corn;
and the greatest forms of Art may, therefore, remain for ever beyond
our reach. But until a nation does honour to the human hand as the
most perfect and beautiful of all instruments under the sun, by giving
it only honourable and useful tasks--until then I must rather wish
you to be good valuers, keen--indignantly keen--to destroy the false
values which you see about you, than that you should be either good
draughtsmen or good artists.

You can do honest and good work as designers and illustrators and
architects, as workers in wood and metal and stone; but you are
hampered and bound by the conditions of your day, and you cannot by
your best efforts make Art national till you have established joy in
labour. No great school of Art can ever arise in our midst in such a
form as to carry with it through all the world its national character,
until the nation itself has found that voice (which to-day seems so
conspicuously absent, even when we close our shops to make holiday); I
mean the voice of joy.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] _By that reckoning we in Europe are to-day the best comedians the
world has ever seen. Out of peace-conditions nations produce their
wars._




CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY.

(1915.)


We are frequently told (more especially by those whose profession it is
to preach belief in a revealed religion), that if man be not endowed
with an immortal soul, then the game of life is not worth the candle.
Incidentally we are warned that if the bottom were knocked out of that
belief, morals would go to pieces and humanity would become reprobate.

Now I can imagine a similar sort of claim put forward in other
departments of life for other pursuits which seem to their advocate to
make life more appetising.

I can imagine sportsmen saying that without sport men would cease to
be manly, morals and physique would deteriorate and life be no longer
worth living. I can imagine the butcher saying that without meat, and
the licensed victualler that without beer, men were of all things the
most miserable. I have recently seen advertisements which say that
only by supporting the cinema (made beautiful by the feet of Charlie
Chaplin), can we hope to be victorious in the present war.

The assertion that man cannot do without certain things which, as a
matter of fact, vast numbers of his fellows are constantly doing
without--(and with no very marked set-back as regards health,
efficiency, or general morals)--is a questionable way of forcing home
conviction that these things or beliefs are indispensable. It is quite
possible that beer, meat, the pursuit of game, the personality of
Charlie Chaplin, and a belief in immortality are all alike capable of
giving stimulus to the human soul (especially to those souls which
have come by habit to depend upon them). But it is quite certain that
other human souls have found without them sufficient stimulus to make
life worth living. And though, against that fact, it may be argued
that these unconsciously receive their driving force, their social
and ethical standards, from those whose motive power they reject as
superfluous, and that we, who do not go to see Charlie Chaplin on the
films, are winning this war somewhat circuitously through the powers of
those who do--the argument is hardly a convincing one, since it remains
for ever in the nature of an unproved hypothesis.

But when the majority of those who believe in personal immortality are
asked for the ground of their belief, it generally resolves itself into
this: they have an intense individual conviction that it is so--so
intense that to hold the contrary becomes “unthinkable.” But that
intense, individual conviction, over things we greatly care about, is
a constant phenomenon of the working of the human mind, and is not
limited to belief in a future state. To a convinced Liberal it is
“unthinkable” that he should ever pass into such a state of mental
annihilation as to become a Conservative. To a convinced Conservative
it is unthinkable that he should fall from the grace which guides
him into the slough of Liberalism. It is the same with Protestant or
Catholic, with Socialist, Universalist, or Sectarian: conviction always
presents an adamantine front to opposing forces and arguments--so long
as it lasts.

The same phenomenon constantly occurs in the domain of the amative
passion. The lover (if he be really in love), believes that his love
will last for ever--that nothing can possibly change it; and all the
evidence in the world that lovers of a like faith have too often lived
to see the immortal dream put on mortality, will fail to convince him
(while he is in the toils) that his own love is liable to any such
change as theirs.

The reason is that strongly vitalised forces always carry with them a
sense of permanence.

The vital spark (focused within us by strong conviction or emotion),
is but an individually apprehended part of a great whole: for this
thread of life passing through us has already stretched itself out
over millions of years, and countless atavisms have touched it to
individual ends which were not ours; the will to live has clung to it
by myriads of adhesions, feelers, tentacles, and not by human hands
alone (though our palms still moisten, and our arms fly upward to
the imaginary branch overhead when danger of falling threatens us,
because the instinct of our arboreal ancestry still prevails in us over
reason). And through those atavisms, the struggle to secure survival
for the family, the clan, the race, has left an impress which may
very naturally convey from the general to the individual a sense of
immortality.

For of all these constituent forces the majority knew and thought
very little about death, except in their instinctive and spasmodic
efforts to escape from it; and when at last man began to envisage death
consciously and philosophically, straightway, with all these atavisms
behind him, he belittled it with dreams of a future life.

It was as perfectly natural a thing to do as for the lover to declare
that his love for his mistress was eternal and not merely for a
season, since any lesser statement would fail to convey adequately
the intensity of the force by which he was moved. Moreover, though
in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief
that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are
contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself
is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite
recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving
generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. Just as
the water we drink is an imperishable thing, though after drinking it
we shall thirst again, so is that love, which satisfies the lover’s
soul, a principle of life extending illimitably beyond his own use for
it. And if that be true about love, why should it not be true about
life?

For surely (put it thus), when across limited vision a thread passes,
of which the eye can see neither the beginning nor the end, and
when upon that thread, for the time being, the limited life hangs
all its hopes, is it not quite natural for that clinging life to
identify itself, through the closeness of its momentary contact,
with the spiritually apprehended whole, and to identify with that
concept of a general continuity its own present degree of individual
consciousness. Moreover, in a world governed by cause and effect, it
can hardly be predicated that the results either of love or hatred,
individually indulged, are not, or may not be illimitable, even though
the individual spirit be not there to preside consciously over their
extended operations.

When, therefore, so much is true, when so many elements which pass
through our lives have (by association), links and connections which
to finite minds seem infinite, they may well impress us (by reason of
the close identification established between us and them for the time
being) with a sense that our own individual share and apprehension of
them are addressed also to a universal goal.

“Universal,” for surely mere continuity--a stretching out of length
without corresponding breadth--ought not to be the limit of our
claim. Yet it is significant that, in their demand for personal
immortality, so many thinkers have found sufficient satisfaction in
the idea of an extended survival through time into eternity, without
making a corresponding demand for extension into unity through space.
They are willing, that is to say, to put up for all eternity with
those limitations of personality which they enjoy--the relations of
_meum_ and _tuum_ upon which the possessive life of the senses is
based, but not with those limitations (the prospect of which they do
not enjoy), the termination of those same relationships imposed by
death. It seems rather a one-sided way of doing things--this narrowing
of the claim in a two-dimensional direction (one might almost say
in a one-dimensional), yet it has been very generally done--I shall
presently hope to show why--and most of our Western theology has built
up our future hopes for us entirely on those lines. Personality,
the sort of personality we have learned to enjoy, is based upon
limitations. Abolish limitations in your conception of future life, and
for the majority of those pious minds which now clamour for it as their
due you abolish personality also; it is swallowed up not in death but
in a life from which the individual power to focus and to enjoy has
disappeared.

It is true that there has now begun, in modern socialistic
Christianity, a yeasting of desire for an all round, or expansive,
as well as a forward, or extensive personality after death; that an
all-embracing and not merely an all-surviving consciousness is more
and more predicated for the full satisfaction of man’s spiritual need.
But that was by no means the form of moral hunger which permeated
primitive or mediæval Christianity, and sufficed, we are to suppose,
to keep poor human nature from that depravity into which it will fall
if belief in personal immortality is surrendered. Oregon, as we know,
looked forward to finding in the nether groans of the damned a full
completion of the orchestral harmonies of Heaven; and in the whole
conception of immortality as it has illumined the path of the Church
from its beginning down to quite modern times, individualism has been
rampant. On that basis, so long as it satisfied his moral conscience,
man did great things with it, making it shine as a great light by the
unflinching witness which he bore to its efficacy through suffering and
through martyrdom.

It is probably true that an individualistic form to the doctrine was
then, and always will be, necessary to attract those whose lives have
been run from a highly individualised standpoint; and that, for them,
death-bed consolation would hardly be achieved in the presentation of
a doctrine so defined as to threaten annihilation to all the fetish
worship and social values of the past.

“God would think twice,” said a courtly French Abbé of the seventeenth
century to a King’s mistress who, upon her death-bed, was seized by
spiritual qualms--“God would think twice before damning a lady of your
quality.” And no one who holds by class-distinctions really wishes to
find in the New Jerusalem any abolition of that respect for persons
or prejudices which has, in this world, been the main ground on which
their self-esteem and their estimate of personality have been based.

To them the most “unthinkable” proposition would be not the contraction
of the future world to narrower and more select limits than those of
the one they know, but a future world conducted on any code of morals
which had not their own entire approval and sanction.

We are told that the late Queen Victoria looked forward with very
great interest to a future meeting with the Hebrew patriarchs, with
Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, but hoped to be excused from any personal
acquaintance with King David on account of his affair with Bathsheba.
And when we realise how very often the hope of Heaven is really a
species of self-love and self-applause, conditional on Heaven being
what we ourselves want it to be, one is led to wonder whether the real
condition for entry into that state of bliss may not prove to be the
precise opposite, and whether the disciplinary motto upon its portal
may not be those mystic words, hitherto attributed to another place,
“All hope abandon ye who enter here.” That, after all, is only a more
emphatic way of stating what Christ Himself laid down as the path by
which man should attain; that only those namely who were ready to
lose life should find it. And I rather question whether our Christian
individualists have, up till now, been honestly prepared to “lose life”
in the full sense, without condition or reserve, and whether, (if they
have not), they have yet attained the spiritual standpoint necessary to
bring them within the terms of the promise.

So far I have dealt with the doctrine of immortality as presented to us
from the individualistic basis alone. But, in some form or another, the
doctrine of immortality belongs to many religions and schools (indeed,
one might almost say to all) and has, therefore, most varied and even
contradictory meanings attached to it. In some schools, as we have
seen, it sets great store on the survival of the individual; in others
individuality is held to be of small account--a diminishing rather than
a persistent factor in the ultimate ends of life viewed as a whole.

I remember in that connection discussing with the late Father George
Tyrrell, in the days before Rome’s excommunication fell on him, the
divergent views as to immortality of Christianity and Buddhism; and
at that time he held that the superiority of the Christian faith
lay in its insistence on the personal immortality, conscious and
self-contained, of every human being. Some years later, a month before
his death, we discussed the matter again; and I asked him then, in what
degree, if at all, his view as to personal immortality had changed.
His answer gave me a curious instance of those scientific analogies by
which Modernism has been seeking to deliver the Roman Church from its
mediæval entanglements.

“In the main,” he said, “I have only changed in my apprehension of what
‘personality’ really is. Just as one may find in an hysterical subject
five or six pseudo-personalities which reveal themselves in turn, each
one of which is a character quite separately and consistently defined,
but not one of them (however completely in possession for the time) a
real person, so it seems to me must we regard all those limitations
of ‘personality’ which find expression in individual form. There is
only one true personality, and that is Christ; anything less than the
one all-embracing whole is but a simulacrum, concealing rather than
revealing the true substance and form.”

I cannot pretend to give his actual words, but I believe that I have
accurately stated the sense of them; and you will see, I think, that
they go a long way toward the adaptation of the Christian to the
Buddhistic standpoint. That tendency, I believe, we shall find more
and more at work in the Christian Church as time goes on--not merely
because by such a definition the doctrine will be better able to hold
its own against the inroads of science--but because it gives also a
better response to that socialising genius of the human race which
is coming more and more to demand a perfect unity as the ultimate
expression of good.

That, then, we shall probably find to be the future tendency of
idealism. There remains, of course, the Rationalistic school of
thought, by which the possibility of individual or personal survival
after death is from first to last either absolutely denied or very
severely discountenanced as an idea based upon wholly insufficient
evidence.

Nevertheless, in some form or another, immortality, conscious or
unconscious, personal or impersonal, is accepted by all schools alike;
the scientific law of the conservation of energy being one form of it
which human reason would now find it very difficult to deny.

Let us for one moment apply that law to our own individual lives and
consciousness.

Has life convinced us that we are all self-contained persons? Through
social contact we have undergone many changes, many damages, and
many repairs. Parts of us have gone to other people, parts of other
people have come, to us. We have shed and have absorbed quite as much
spiritually as materially; and though through our material changes we
retain a certain likeness, so that friends meeting us after a seven
years’ absence recognise us again in bodies no particle of which have
they ever seen before; and though similarly we can recognise our
inner selves across wider intervals of time, have we any reason to
suppose that our identity is more fixed in the spiritual substance
than in the material? For myself, I hope not. May one not prefer the
idea of interchange between life and life, to the notion that one is
to remain for ever fixed and self-possessed--a thing apart? The more
we are compounded of other lives, the more we have contributed to
the lives of others--the more can we recognise our entrance into the
only eternal life that we can demonstrably be sure about, or that can
(so it must seem to many of us), be sensibly desired or deserved. Is
Eternal Bliss, in the individual sense, a more tolerable doctrine than
eternal Hell-fire? Though, indeed, this latter may be but a scientific
statement of fact perverted and made foolish by the theologians.
For life, after all, is but a form of combustion for ever going on,
and outside of it we know nothing. No doubt the atoms of our being,
whether physical or spiritual, will forever form part of it; but I see
no reason why our spirits should not be as diffused, through proper
elemental changes, as our bodies are now being diffused from day to
day; or why I should repine that I personally shall not always be there
to preside over the operation and find it good. Even if, at the far end
of this earth’s history, everything is again to be reabsorbed in the
heat and light out of which it came, I can trust the suns and planets
to fulfil their mission of progress--or the will of God--quite as well
as, or better than, in my own small sphere I can trust Constitutional
Governments or Established Churches. And since these lesser lights,
in their foolish and providential dealings, do not confound my faith,
neither do the stars in their courses fight against it. Rather do they
confirm me in my sense that even the most acute perceptions with which
human life is endowed fail of themselves to justify me in any claim to
a larger lease of life than can naturally belong to them; for I see in
the universe things far greater than any individual man, doing service
and sustaining the life of countless millions, (which without them
could not live at all), without any prospect of so great a reward.

The eye of the sun itself is blind; and for ever, while it dazzles
us with its light, blind it must remain. Nay, what need has it for
sight at all, if in blindness it be able to fulfil its mission? And
yet implicit within its vast energies, there lies the gift of sight.
For that blind Eye of Heaven taught us to see; our substance came from
it, our eyes were made by it, and without it was not anything made on
earth that was made. And if, by this gift of sight, it has opened to us
so vast a space for our understanding to dwell in--bestowing so huge
a conception of life on this frail vessel of clay--if by so giving
of itself through long aeons of time it has opened to us so much more
than it knows itself, cannot we render back without grudging these
shorter, frailer lives of ours, whose brevity, perhaps, is the very
price required of us for their enjoyment, since without such limits our
far-reaching comprehension of space and its possessions could never
have been gained. Should there be any despair, or any depression in
the thought that from the blind eye of day and from the powers of its
heat was developed the human brain? For if from that apparent Blindness
of our Universe came really the eyes of life by which we perceive all
things, can we not commit our spirits back to its keeping with an
equal trust that what lies ahead will be at least as good as what lies
behind, though we be not there to see it?

But the law of the conservation of energy does not in the least satisfy
the aspirations of those who are out for personal immortality in the
individual sense. To these it seems a grievance that they should have
been called into being for any end not wholly satisfying to that
Ego which is now laying upon their consciousness the weight of its
possessive limitations. This separative quality of the Ego is to them
the whole principle of existence; without it they cannot see life.
To them, life in any less focused or more diffused form would be no
better than annihilation, an obvious setting-back of the evolutionary
process by which creation has led step by step to that degree of
self-consciousness realised in the human race.

Do not these objectors forget not merely how considerable a part of
human nature already moves and has its being on the lines of a diffused
and rather decentralised subconsciousness, but also how largely the
genius of the human race has committed to such conditions of separation
from all possible enjoyment by the Ego, some of the rarest gifts and
highest efforts at self-realisation that the world has ever seen? It
is a condition attaching to all the more permanent forms of expression
in the arts, to everything that man designs and makes for the delight
of the generations that come after. It is a condition willingly
accepted by all who rejoice in their power to throw the influence of
their personalities beyond the material uses of their own present
existence. And in that willingness to lose out of themselves for
future generations--to turn aside from mere physical enjoyment--the
life-forces within them, in that willingness artist, poet, and thinker,
have come far nearer to the finding of life than those who live
indulgently for ends finished by their own absorption thereof.

Now it is the supporters of the individualistic school of thought who
have generally urged that grave moral dangers would befall the human
race were a belief in personal immortality to perish; and it is at
least arguable (by minds that can only see values individually), that
if man is not to be permanently rewarded or punished for his present
and future conduct, he has no reason for conducting himself as a decent
part of the social whole, and that it would be better for him to break
out on entirely individual lines, live a short and merry life, and
throwing all altruistic and ethical considerations to the winds, enjoy
himself as much as he can while the material is to him.

On paper that consideration may seem to hold strong ground; but when it
is put into practice the facts of life are found to be overwhelmingly
against it. For one thing excess and self-indulgence fail to produce
enjoyment, for another the socialising of life by mutual aid tends
quite obviously to the increase of comfort, safety, and happiness. And
where apparently it does not is mainly at that point where rampant
individualism grasps and warps it to its own ends, making the social
organism subserve not the goodwill of the many but the ill-will of the
few.

But the ethical argument about the bad effects of non-belief in
personal immortality has been considerably discounted by the growing
sensitiveness of the modern conscience--more especially among those who
are in a serious sense “free-thinkers”--toward the social ills lying
around us. Generally speaking, our sense of duty toward our neighbour
is much more lively than it was in the mid-Victorian era; but our
conviction of personal immortality is probably far less. The two things
do not go together: the diminution of church attendance in the last
fifty years has not worsened the conditions of labour.

It may, however, be argued that an instinct for immortality is still
subconsciously at work within us, colouring our actions and directing
us on right ethical lines. But if it be a subconscious direction
which thus works in us for righteousness, it may equally be to a
subconscious end. The subconscious impulse may merely be guiding us to
a subconscious realisation which would not at all satisfy the advocates
of conscious immortality after death. What works subconsciously can in
all probability find satisfaction in a subconscious reward. The chemic
processes of the stomach and of the blood, for instance, are largely
subconscious in their operation; and their needs may be subconsciously
appeased without the brain being told anything about it through the
usual intermediaries of taste and mastication. We have a preference for
a conscious performance of the functions of life which we have always
been accustomed to perform consciously; but a very large proportion of
our life-functions work themselves out subconsciously and independently
of our will. Our hearts beat, our blood circulates, our nails grow,
our stomachs digest, our wounds heal, whether we tell them to or no,
and yet we are quite happy about them. We do not consider (because
they operate by a volition of which we are unaware), that therefore we
carry about with us a body of death from which our conscious ego must
needs shrink in disgust--a dead heart, dead stomach, dead blood--that
the unconsciousness which accompanies health is a state nearer to
annihilation, and so less to be desired, than the pains accompanying
functional disturbances.

When those things happen--functional disturbances--we are conscious
of something more immediately relating to death than to life: it is
because of local mortification that we become so much aware of things
which our immortal part helps us to use unconsciously and without
thought. Virtue itself, when engrained, tends to become instinctive and
subconscious instead of an effort.

There is quite as much evidence, therefore, in our own bodies that
unconsciousness is the real gate to immortal life, and the condition
toward which all that is best and highest in us is seeking, as of the
contrary teaching that increased self-consciousness is man’s final
goal. In the functional working of our own bodies an enormous amount of
self-consciousness has been eliminated, and we do not for our happiness
or self-realisation wish it restored to us; whole tracts and areas are
immune from it, or only make a spasmodic grab at our consciousness when
things go ill with them. “If you go on doing that,” they say, when
you misuse them, “we will make you know that we are here.” And so you
become conscious of them: but that doesn’t make you happier. Yet in a
sort of way, I suppose, a man would realise himself more completely if
he had sciatica all over him, and could count up his nerves, and tell
all his bones by the aches and pains attaching to them.

Now it is easy enough for a man to say (I think it was H. M. Stanley,
the explorer, who did say so) that he would rather endure torment for
all eternity than accept a state of annihilation. In thus protesting
he is talking through his hat of something too far beyond human
experience for the mind to realise. Toothache he has probably always
found bearable, because he knew that in course of time it would end. On
the other hand, sound dreamless sleep is probably not less bearable to
him because during that sleep he has not a ghost of a notion that he
will ever wake up again. He is carried, that is to say, every day of
his life while in health, into a state closely resembling annihilation
of consciousness, in which such annihilation has no terrors for him
at all; he accepts it as a comfortable part of existence, and goes to
it with delight when his faculties are tired. Its attractions for him
would naturally be less while all his senses were alert and fresh.

But the waking man is not the whole man; the subconscious life,
acquiescent to imposed conditions, occupies by far the larger part
of him. He can, therefore, only predicate the inclinations of his
waking hours; in sleep he may revert to a very strong affinity for that
annihilation of self-conscious life against which, in his waking hours,
he protests his dread.

And now a further word of comfort for those moral teachers who assure
us that if once we let go the idea of personal immortality, with its
accompanying implications of eternal reward or punishment, the conduct
of the human race is bound to degenerate, and that man’s only logical
motto will then be, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we
die.”

To refute that deduction we have but to remember that sociology is a
thing of ancestry and evolution, and has committed us to a weight of
facts against which precept and theory are powerless. We have only
to look back into Nature to see how persistently (without, one must
suppose, any promise of future reward after death) a contrary instinct
emerges from the establishment of the social bond in nest and herd and
hive. And why--if that emerging instinct leads on, in man’s reasoned
estimation, to foolishness--why do we so specially admire the communal
life of ant and bee, and incline sometimes to wonder whether (behind so
marvellous an order of altruistic energy) there be not concealed more
and not less of spiritual apprehension than in the more individualistic
forms of insect and animal life? And why, on the contrary, has the
wise cuckoo become a sort of byword for the singular economy with which
it has disentangled its life from care or responsibility?

It is surely very unfair thus to erect the cuckoo into a moral emblem
for reprobation, if it is only doing by instinct, what man would do by
reason and logic were the darkness of his own destiny made clear to him.

And similarly, it is surely disingenuous on our part to exalt as a
moral emblem the instinct of ant and bee to subordinate the life of the
individual to the general--if we deny to ant and bee the immortality
by which alone such altruism can be recompensed; or if we are to
believe that a clearer knowledge of their future lot would cause them
in logic and reason to declare that life on those terms was not worth
living, and that “to eat, drink, and die to-morrow” were better than to
live longer and labour for a vain repetition of lives like their own
indefinitely multiplied. It is ridiculous to impose the moral emblem
unless you grant also the justifying conditions.

Because the bee and the ant live unconscious of their impending doom,
are we, therefore, to regard them as a hoodwinked race, set to labour
at the dictates of the Creative capitalist on terms which contain in
them no adequate reward? Suppose, for a moment, that revelation could
descend upon ants’ nest and hive, and tell these workers that beyond
death the future held for them no store--that their immortality
was the immortality not of individual but of race; and suppose that
thereupon they all struck and went forth to die each singly in their
own way--would that moral emblem impress us, do you think, as a thing
worthy of imitation or of praise?

But why (let us think) is the predication of such an event so
impossible and so grotesque? Is it not because the life, the individual
life of ant or bee is so impregnated with that instinct of communalism
which gives the species its distinctive character, that it is
impossible to sunder them, or to imagine the individual capable (while
in the social _milieu_) of pursuing individual ends alone, after a
following, over millions of years, of life in the communal form. Life,
the thread of life which runs through them, is too much engrained with
communism for separatist principles ever again to prevail.

And surely it is the same with man. Individualism, separatism,
self-obsessionism, though still present in the phenomena of existence,
are more and more subject to qualifications from which they cannot
escape. And even the most evil form of individualism has to be
parasitic or predatory; it cannot exist alone; even against its
will it becomes conditioned by other lives. And the communal sense
of man, implicit within the innumerable forms of life through which
he has evolved, will continue to lay its hold on the parasitic and
the predatory, and will do so quite effectively on the basis of an
evolutionary past, the tendencies of which were established before ever
theological definitions came to give them impulse and strength.

Is it not almost ludicrous to suggest that that communal instinct
will cease to play, if the hope of individual reward after death is
withdrawn from the human race? Will man--because he is nobler than
the beast, because at his best he does things more altruistic, more
self-sacrificing, more self-forgetting, more self-transcending than any
of these--do less nobly because he envisages destiny, which (if he see
it as destiny) he will see as the logical outcome of evolutionary law?

It is possible, it is even probable, that all phases of theological
thought have had their use in giving direction and stimulus to the
human brain; if they have done nothing but stimulate rebellion against
obscurantist authority they have had value of a positive kind. But
we may go even further than this, for “everything possible to be
believed,” says Blake, “is an image of truth.” And under many a
concept, distorted by ignorance or guile, has lain a germ of the true
life which draws man on to communal ends. In time that germ puts off
the husk that seemed once (perhaps in some cases actually was) the
protective armoury through which alone it could survive for the use
of a later day. But though old reasons have been shed, the essential
value has not changed; and often it is less by logic and reason than
by the strong and subtle links of association that we preserve what is
good of past credulities.

The doctrine of conscious immortality, however much belittled by its
appeal to selfish individualism, has done a work for the human race.
It has held the germ of an ideal for unity which is receiving a more
universal interpretation to-day than the earlier theologians would ever
have allowed, or than man, in his then stage of development, could have
thought it worth while to hand on to his intellectual heirs. Perhaps
only because he conceived it in just such a form have its values been
preserved.

I am reminded in this connection of the method by which the wild swine
of the New Forest were taught to obey the voice of the horn by means
of which the swine-herd, called them back each night from their free
roaming in the forest. The way he did it was this. Having first formed
his herd, some four or five hundred strong, he penned them in a narrow
space where water and warm shelter were to be found; and there, in the
allotted enclosure, according them no liberty, he fed them daily to the
sound of the horn. Food and music became a sort of celestial harmony to
pig’s brain--when they heard the one, good reason was given them for
expecting the other.

Presently, in a well-fed condition, they were set free to roam; and
being full and satisfied they did not roam far; and at night the horn
sounded them back to an ample meal, and continued to sound while again
they ate and were satisfied.

So at last, by association, the horn came to have such a beneficent
meaning that the mere sound of it sufficed to bring them back at
nightfall to their appointed place of rest. They might roam for miles
and miles during the day, but night and the sound of the horn brought
them all back safe to fold. And when that habit had become established,
they did not cease to return even though the swineherd no longer
supplied the food which had first given music its charm to those savage
breasts.

And, similarly, I doubt not, that, though all hope of material profit
or reward be withdrawn from man’s mind, that call of the horn which
he has heard of old will still bring his spirit to the resting-place
at the appointed time; nor will he wish either to shorten his days or
debase his pleasures because the horn has ceased to provide the meal
which it once taught him to expect.

Do not let anything I have said be taken as suggesting that the
spiritual forces of man’s nature may not be conserved, transmuted,
re-assimilated, or re-distributed, as surely and with as little waste
as are the material elements of life which pass through disintegration
and decay into new forms. The processes by which such changes are
wrought may be, and may ever remain, a mystery to human sense. There
may be yet in the making a new order or plane of evolution by which
the process will be quickened and perfected. Soul of man may be in
the making, though it may be very far removed from that aspect of
individualism with which the anthropomorphic tendencies of theology
have burdened it. But--whether life thus rises by unknown law to
further ends, or whether it passes out, like the life of leaves, into
the general decay with which autumn each year fertilises the bed of
mother earth--of one thing I would ask you to be confident--that the
bandying of words and theories, and the discussion, tending this way
or that, of man’s destiny after death, are not in any way likely to
alter or to undo those forward-driving forces and communal desires with
which, from an inheritance of so many millions of years, the life of
humanity has become endowed. The will to live will still lift up the
race and carry it forward to new ends, whether man thinks he sees in
death the end of his personal existence, or only a new and a better
beginning. And whether he claims or resigns that prospect of reward he
will never be able to rid himself of the sense which revives after all
failures and crimes, that man is his brother-man--or be able to refrain
at his best from laying down his life, without calculation of personal
benefit to himself, so that others may live.

The highest manifestations of human genius, the most perfected forms
of self-realisation in art, in literature, and science, have been
given to us--and will continue to be given to us--independent of any
bargain that name and identity shall for ever remain attached thereto
while posterity enjoys the benefit. The artist might foresee that his
name would, in a brief time, become dissociated from his work, and his
memory blotted out from the book of the living; he would produce it all
the same. The reformer might know that his motives would be aspersed,
that his name would become after death a spitting and a reproach; but,
for the sake of the cause he believed in, he would still be willing to
die a dishonoured death and leave a reprobated name, to a world that
had failed to understand.

That is human nature at its best; and you will not change it or
endanger it through any increased doubt thrown by modern thought or
science on the prospect of conscious immortality after death. For
whether we recognise it or not, a subconscious spirit, not perhaps of
immortality but of unity, permeates us all; and for furtherance and
worship of that which his soul desires, the spirit of man will ever be
ready to work and strive, and to pass unconditionally into dust--if
that indeed be the condition on which he holds his birthright in a life
worth living.


W. H. Smith & Son, The Arden Press, Stamford Street, London, S.E.1




+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber’s note:                              |
|                                                 |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.  |
|                                                 |
+-------------------------------------------------+