Produced by Mark C. Orton, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)









    “I BELIEVE”

    AND OTHER ESSAYS

    BY

    GUY THORNE

    Author of “When it Was Dark,” “First it was Ordained,”
    “Made in His Image,” etc., etc.

    LONDON

    F. V. WHITE & CO., Limited
    14, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C.

    1907


    RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
    BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
    BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




CONTENTS


      I. “I BELIEVE”
     II. THE FIRES OF MOLOCH
    III. THE HISTORICIDES OF OXFORD
     IV. THE BROWN AND YELLOW PERIL
      V. THE MENACES OF MODERN SPORT
     VI. VAGROM MEN
    VII. AN AUTHOR’S POST-BAG




DEDICATION

To F. V. WHITE, ESQUIRE.


MY DEAR WHITE,

The publication of this book is a business arrangement between you and
me. Its dedication however has nothing to do with the relations of
author and publisher in those capacities, but is merely an expression
of friendship and esteem. This then is to remind you of pleasant hours
we have spent together on the other side of the channel, in your house
at London, and my house in Kent.

Yours ever sincerely,

GUY THORNE.




“I BELIEVE”




I

“I BELIEVE”

“_Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision_.”


When I was a boy I made an occasional invasion of my father’s study,
and in the absence of more congenial matter tried to extract some
amusement from the shelves devoted to Christian apologetics. At any
rate the pictures of the portly divines, which sometimes prefaced
their polemics, interested me, and I was sometimes allured to read a
few pages of their scripture. I remember that I enjoyed the sub-acid
flavour of Bishop Butler’s advertisement, prefixed to the First
Edition of his _Analogy_, at an early age, and I have thought lately
that in certain circles one hundred and seventy years have not greatly
modified the mental attitude.

Hear what the Rector of Stanhope who, as Horace Walpole said, was
shortly to be “Wafted to the see of Durham in a cloud of metaphysics,”
says about his literary contemporaries--

“It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many persons
that Christianity is not so much as a subject for inquiry, but that it
is now at length discovered to be fictitious, and accordingly they
treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among
all people of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a
principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were, by way of
reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of the
world.”

Perhaps the difference between the times of George the Second and
Edward the Seventh may be best discerned in the status and calibre of
the popular penmen who in either age have found, or furnished
amusement in a tilt against the Catholic Faith.

The man in the street, as we know him, did not exist in the eighteenth
century. He is the predominant person to-day, and he requires the
services of able authors to assure him of immunity, when he is
inclined to frolic away from chastity or integrity, much as did the
county members who pocketed the bribes of Sir Robert Walpole and
prated of patriotism.

Fortunately for society the man in the street is a very decent fellow,
and generally finds out before long that Wisdom’s ways are ways of
pleasantness. A man may enjoy posing as an agnostic when he wants an
excuse for--as the negro said--“doing what he dam please,” but when he
takes to himself a wife, and children are born to him, a certain
anxiety as to the continuity and perpetuation of these relationships
begins to show itself. A man who has lost a little child, or waited in
agonizing suspense to hear the physician’s verdict, when sickness
overshadows his home, discovers that he needs something beyond
negations, something that will bring life and immortality to light
again within his soul.

Moreover, the man in the street finds it necessary to come to some
decision on other problems of existence. He is a citizen and must
needs exercise his enfranchisement and give his vote at an election
now and again. He must help to decide whether the State shall ignore
religion and establish a system of ethical education, of which the
ultimate sanction is social convenience, or maintain the thesis that
Creed and Character are mutually inter-dependent.

As he pays his poor rate wrathfully, or with resignation, its annual
increase reminds him of the necessity of curing or eliminating the
unfit. When he reads of Belgian and Prussian colonial enterprise, or
ponders on the perplexing problem of the Black Belt which the Southern
States must solve, he is compelled to consider whether it is true
that “God has made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all
the face of the earth,” or whether this shall be accounted as another
of the delusions of Saul of Tarsus whom Governor Festus found to be
mad.

Indeed, our friend, the man in the street, when he becomes a family
man, without any pretensions to be a man of family, very often finds
himself face to face with other problems. Shall he simply sing with
the Psalmist “Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are
the young children. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of
them,” or shall he be guided by the gloss of a modern interpreter who
maintains that the oriental quiver was designed to hold but two or
three arrows at most?

Even when the plain man confines his interests to his business and
seeks relaxations in “sport” alone, endeavouring to evade the puzzles
of politics and avoid all theologized inquiry, he cannot escape from
ethical consideration. Professionalism in athletics and questions of
betting and bribery contend with his conviction that there is
something which ennobles man in running and striving for mastery, and
it is futile to curse the bookmaker when his clients are so many, his
occupation so lucrative.

The average man gets little guidance from pulpit or press. It is dull
work reading sermons, even if sermons came in his way. From time to
time some eloquent bishop or canon is reported in the Monday morning
papers, but journalists know that the publication of a summary with,
in the case of a few of the preachers, some epigrams or denunciations,
is all that can be permitted or expected. These may arouse the
attention to the existence of evils, but give no guiding principle for
their cure.

The habit of attendance at some place of worship is easily abandoned
in the days of bachelor freedom, and rarely regained in maturer years.
Men for the most part find the preacher unconvincing. The usual
audience does not desire discussion of difficulties. When the honest
instinct of devotional worship is gratified by common praise and
prayer, the people who regularly go to church, elderly, and orthodox
in their own way, resent a demand upon their intellectual exertion,
and the Northern farmer of Tennyson hardly misrepresents them, “I
thought he said what he ought to ha’ said and I comed away.” The great
Nonconformist societies may, in some congregations, give a larger
latitude to the preacher, but his freedom is rather in the direction
of divinity than of ethics. Mr. Rockefeller is a prominent pillar of
Protestantism in the States, and Mr. Jabez Balfour, in another
congregation at Croydon, apparently knew no qualms of conscience
before his actual conviction, which was public, of sin.

There is an old proverb which tells us that “A man is either a fool or
a philosopher at forty”--and, though proverbs are often only venerable
prejudices in disguise, it is true that a man, who has attained his
eighth lustrum and is of average ability, generally has come to
certain definite conclusions as to the rudimentary laws of health. He
knows enough about his body to avoid fatal errors in diet, and has
learned the necessity of exercise and fresh air. But when he is called
upon, as a member of the body politic, to decide questions of ethics
on which the sanitation of society must depend, he feels himself at a
loss. To many people it will seem a hard saying that a man must be
either a fool or a philosopher at forty, but long ere he has reached
that age he will have encountered problems of philosophy which it is
impossible to shirk if he is to do his duty as a free man.

St. Paul, it is true, when writing to a Christian Community in Asia
Minor, bids them “beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy.”
And the unfortunate habit of Bible Christians, of tearing a text from
a treatise and making it into a precept, has thrown a sort of
discredit upon philosophic thinking, while the mass of mankind will
always prefer rules to principles of conduct. But in vain do we
clamour against intellectual complications which are the inevitable
endowment of these days. Life is necessarily intricate, subtle and
anxious, and Democracy has made of each man a ruler and governor in
his degree. Is it possible to point to a single principle which shall
be a motive and a standard of duty, which shall establish a synthetic
method after the ruthless analysis of the later Victorian days?

How searching that analysis has been! Fifty years ago the man in the
street might rarely read the Bible, but he had a tolerably assured
conviction that the Bible was infallible, however resolutely he might
refuse its interpretation by an infallible church.

Then

     “...the Essays and Reviews debate Begins to tell on the
     public mind, and Colenso’s views have weight.”

Plain people were taught to look on the Old Testament as a library of
Hebrew literature containing not only poetry and history, but romance.

When Colenso’s book first appeared, Matthew Arnold deprecated its
publication since it brought criticisms familiar to men of culture
before the notice of the public, without considering how the beliefs
of “the vulgar” might be upset.

The supercilious apostle of “sweetness and light,” himself contributed
largely in later years to the general confusion in men’s minds, and
the New Testament criticism has been introduced to the general public
by Mr. Arnold’s accomplished niece.

Our friend, the man in the street, was all unprepared!

What had he ever been taught of theology, the Divine word to man? In
his school-days, if his father was an income tax payer he probably had
a weekly lesson in “Divinity,” when he construed a few verses of the
Gospels in the Greek Testament, and showed up to his master, now and
then, a map of the journeying of the Apostle Paul in Asia Minor and
Eastern Europe. If his father expected him to be confirmed, in due
course, some lessons in the catechism were added for his benefit, but
prudent pedagogues took care not to endanger the popularity of a
school, whether public or private, by any definite teaching which
might be accused of being dogmatic. The head-master was probably a
person of unsuspected orthodoxy, with a possible deanery or bishopric
in view for his days of superannuation. His sermons in chapel used to
set a fine standard of conduct before the boys, and were gracefully
free from all mention of controversial questions. In due course they
were published with the title _Sermons at Yarrow_, and enterprising
parents turning over their pages would find little to criticize and
much to admire. The Cross, if presented at all in these publications,
was so bespangled with rhetorical jewellery that “Jews might kiss and
Infidels adore.” And the children of Israel as public-school boys were
never painfully conscious of any great difference between themselves
and their baptized companions. But unfortunately only a few of the
boys came under the civilizing instruction of the Chief. Bright young
athletes from Oxford and Cambridge, lured into the ranks of pedagogy
by their love of football and cricket, were the assistant-masters. A
regular salary with holiday for a fourth of the year, the prospect of
early marriage, and a remunerative boarding-house, attracted them to a
pleasant position, and they had no wish to rebel against the
time-table which made them teachers of “Divinity” for at least one
hour in the week. All educated people should be tolerably familiar
with a book so largely used in quotation as the Bible, and the
succession of the Kings of Israel and Judah could be used in
strengthening the memory, whilst the stories of “Jehu and those other
Johnnies you know” were by no means devoid of picturesque incident.
Greek Testament could also be made useful in the acquisition of a
vocabulary, or in a lesson showing the difference between classical
and vernacular Greek. “Of course we must leave the application of
these studies to conduct to _Home influence_,” the headmasters would
blandly observe, and between parent and pedagogue the teaching of the
Christian Faith fell neglected to the ground.

What chance had the boys so brought up, of forming any conception of
the essential truths of Religion? A superficial acquaintance with the
stories of Hebrew history, a perfunctory attendance at chapel, some
well-meant exhortations on the subject of temperance and chastity, as
the catechism was revived in their memories before they were brought
to be confirmed by the Bishop, and some ability “to translate and give
the context” of a few phrases from the Greek texts of the Gospels,
these were their intellectual religious equipment for a life of fierce
temptation from within and without. And when they encountered the
storm and stress of modern social life they found that the critics had
taken from them the old reverence of nursery days for “God’s Book,”
their school training had taught them only a rough code of honour, and
their chief restraint from any ignoble impulse was a feeling that to
do certain deeds was not “good form.”

A little lower down the social ladder the man in the street has fared
no better in his boyhood. In the public elementary schools he has had
a half-hour’s lesson in Scripture and catechism five days of the week,
and annually the Diocesan, or the School Board, Inspector came round
to ascertain whether the Syllabus of religious teaching had been duly
followed. But only when devout parish priests had a talent for
teaching and a love for boys and girls was any attempt made to give
children a _religion_, and even in this case not very much could be
done for those who left school for ever when they were twelve years
old.

A generation ago Lord Sherbrooke, on the extension of the franchise,
told his contemporaries that it was time to begin “to educate our
masters”--but we have not gone very far in our instruction of
Christian Sociology, though as yet we have not adopted the Utilitarian
basis of morals accepted by the French Republic, and endeavoured to
establish principles of duty towards man without any reference
whatever to a duty towards God.

Can any one be surprised if the plain man be perplexed when he is
called upon to decide questions of economy and morality without any
guiding principle? As a matter of fact he makes no such effort.
“Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision, for the day of the
Lord is near in the valley of decisions,” but the sun and the moon are
darkened, and the stars withdraw their shining. The puzzled popular
vote is but as the swing of the pendulum, first to this side, then to
the other. “These fellows have been no good, let us give the others a
show.”

Yet assuredly there is a principle which is guidance and strength if
only men could discern it. There are Teachers who can tell men of its
beneficent power, but they are as yet few in number, and their voices
are not sufficiently strong. When once these can get a hearing, men
welcome their evangel and find in it a guide of life.

I am persuaded that just as Bishop Butler, when he perused the preface
of his _Analogy_, had no prescience of the young fellow of Lincoln,
who was in a few years to give the Christian faith a fresh hold in the
hearts of the common people, who gladly heard him, so in our time many
of our Bishops seem unable to perceive the dawn of another “day of the
Lord.”

Indeed, it is our misfortune in England that Bishops are almost
necessarily bad leaders. We are told when an election to the Papacy is
imminent that this or that Cardinal is in the list of “Papabili”--a
possible Pope--so in like manner we may almost select amongst the
undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge our future diocesans. These are
men clever, shrewd, and hard-working, of estimable private character,
and not without some modest patrimony. Early entered in the race for
preferment, ambitious, and yet, _mirabile dictu_, devout, they are
endowed first of all with the true qualification for episcopacy, a
capacity for compromise and a pliant political mind. _Sic itur ad
astra_ the excellent curate or tutor, the courteous and accomplished
chaplain to the Bishop, the eloquent canon and ecclesiastical courtier
is consecrated and enthroned. Henceforward for the rest of his days he
must hurry from his study table, crowded with correspondence, to his
confirmations, his diocesan society meetings, and his weary,
humiliating attendance at the House of Lords. What wonder if Bishops
discourage new ventures of faith, who have no time for thinking, no
time for reading, and perhaps, sometimes, too little opportunity for
prayer!

And so we find them not unwilling to accommodate the Catholic Faith to
the popular prejudice of the moment, acquiescing in an undogmatic,
undenominational, more or less Christian creed. Popularity becomes the
very breath of their nostrils, and they proceed to hide in an
appendix to the Prayer-book, the hymn _Quicunque vult_.

Yet the discerning can see that now is no time for keeping in the
background the great truths of religion. Already men are being
prepared in many ways to receive them.

The Christian Faith in England is no longer hampered by certain
arbitrary axioms of the Puritan Divines. In the sixteenth century men
were almost compelled by the exigencies of the situation to discover
some Infallible authority which they could set up over against the
Infallibility of the Church of Rome, and they endeavoured to treat
Holy Scripture as though the great library of Jewish and Christian
writers contained a complete code of consistent legislation. A text
was a convincing argument for the Divine right of Kings, or for
binding them in chains, for the burning of witches or the destruction
of a shrine, and although in the two following centuries the
Protestant ministers taught men to modify this conception, and to
realize the difference between the Old Testament and the New, the
popular idea of Revelation allowed small scope for theological
inquiry. The biographies of our literary men of the Victorian period
have shown us how they were tempted to separate themselves from all
public communion with the Church, by their misgiving that the Church
was committed to an impossible position. Carlyle groaned for what he
called an “exit from Houndsditch,” some deliverance from the Rabbinic
interpretation and use of the Bible. Things are very different to-day,
as Henry Sidgwick says in a letter to Alfred Lord Tennyson published
by his son in a recent memoir. “The years pass, the struggle with what
Carlyle used to call ‘Hebrew old clothes’ is over, Freedom is won.”
And in the result a scientific criticism of the Old and New Testament
is found to be compatible with, and often a compulsion to an
acceptance of the Christian creed, not the creed of Calvin, or the
Westminster Confession, but the reasoned statement of Nicæa. The
student of physical science no longer believes that if he goes to
church he must be taken to accept the cosmogony of Genesis, and on his
side he no longer stumbles at the difficulty of miraculous events. He
knows too much about the influence of mind over matter to say that it
is impossible that Jesus Christ and His Apostles should have healed
the paralytic and made the blind to see and the deaf to hear. He is no
longer “cocksure” of his capability of drawing a line of division
between the organic and the inorganic. He can conceive of the
existence of spirits which can control and modify the ordinary laws
of life. He finds it probable that evolution is not exhausted when Man
has come into being, and can look forward to a spiritual existence
without suspecting himself of superstition. Sacraments, the union of
the spiritual with the material, seem to him to be in accordance with
the laws of the Universe, and he would never now-a-days stigmatize
them as “Magic.” However he may explain the methods by which cures
were wrought upon the afflicted, the scientific man of to-day would
not accuse St. Luke of falsehood because he tells us that, “God
wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul, so that from his body
were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases
departed from them and the evil spirits went out of them.” Indeed the
man of science knows himself to be on the track of discoveries which
will show us secrets of personality and spiritual possession which
will banish for ever the absurd incredulity of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.

Who now-a-days would assert that “miracles do not happen,” when men
like Sir Oliver Lodge are laboriously discovering some few of these
laws of the Universe which give us these portents and signs? Who dares
to sneer at Parthenogenesis or repeat the slander of Celsus about the
Mother of God? Men only who have grown rusty in reposing on their past
reputations and cannot see that materialism as a philosophy is dead.
Day by day fresh evidence of the power of the spirit over matter
bursts upon us. A plea for “philosophic doubt” of Professor Huxley’s
infallibility is no longer necessary. The very distinction between
matter and spirit grows more and more difficult as science develops
analytical power. The minds of men are being prepared again to receive
that Supreme revelation which told of the wedding of the earth and
heaven, the taking of the Manhood into God.

In truth, this is the one principle which can give men guidance in the
tangled intricacy of modern life. It is necessary to salvation, _now_,
not hereafter only, to believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord
Jesus Christ.

For, first of all, men need to be saved from the apathy of despair.
They need some hope that there is an answer to the riddle of the
Universe. Let them once begin to feel that it _may_ be true that the
very God cares for His creatures and has made His love for them
manifest by taking to Himself the body, mind and spirit of man, and
joining for ever human nature to the Godhead, then through the
darkness comes a human voice saying--

    “O heart I made, a heart beats here!
    Face, my hands fashioned, see it in Myself.
    Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
    But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,
    And thou must love Me who have died for thee.”

A man regains his self-respect when once he has escaped from the
paralyzing sense that his is only

    “a life of nothings nothing worth
    From that first nothing ere our birth
    To that last nothing under earth.”

And there is only one starting-point for those who journey on this
quest of an answer to the enigma of life. They must resolutely abandon
the long travelled “_a priori_ road.” They must understand that the
science of to-day is not tied to any materialistic axioms, that
metaphysic cannot be ignored by the physician, and that no competent
scientist to-day would say of the Resurrection of Jesus on which
ultimately depends His claims to our adoration, “_That could not
happen_.” We know enough now of the laws of the Universe to know that
we do not know them all.

So some of us perceive that what is needed to-day is to arrest the
attention of the man in the street, to get him to perceive that
Christianity has much more to say for itself than he suspected, and
that Christian Philosophy will place in his hand a clue which will
guide him in the labyrinth of life.

    “I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ
    Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
    All questions in the earth and out of it.”

We must set men free from phrases and get them to think. It suits the
game of the party politician to pretend that ethics are easily
self-evident, and that there is a simple fundamental religion on which
all men are agreed; but there is a question which must be insistently
urged, and upon the answer to which all things depend, “What think ye
of Christ?”

Probably nothing has done more to alienate the man in the street from
religious observance than the hypocritical pretence that all men are
agreed about “simple Bible teaching.” He knows well enough that what
really matters is whether a man believes or not that God became man.
If ever the Labour Party should definitely declare for elementary
education without religious teaching it will be because the men whose
children attend the elementary schools know that they cannot read the
New Testament without asking, “Is it true?”

“Did Jesus Christ really die and rise again the third day according to
the Scriptures?” “Did Jesus Christ go up into heaven in the sight of
the apostles till a cloud received Him?” “Did Mary’s Son come to her
as other babies come?” “Was Joseph Jesus Christ’s real father?” Our
members of Parliament who have no leisure to know their own children,
who keep them in the nursery till it is time for them to go to the
Preparatory School, who leave their training to the governess and the
head-master, may talk about “the cruelty of the religious differences
which hinder the establishment of an efficient system of education for
the children of the State.” But the men and the mothers who live with
their children and talk to them about their lessons, know that a child
will insist upon an answer to its questions. A father of a family in
the artisan and labouring classes, if he be at all intelligent, loses
all respect for ministers of the Gospel who pretend that there is no
difficulty about the simple Gospel story, and losing his self-respect
for the men who have appointed themselves his teachers, he is tempted
to throw all theology aside. And if he ventures on this despairing
expedient he finds himself in mental confusion again over ethics
instead of theology, and there arises a prospect of anarchy and
disorder. Capital is timid, so enterprise is checked. Poverty
increases and riot follows, and it all ends, not now-a-days in the
Napoleonic “whiff of grape-shot,” but in the rattle of the maxim in
the streets and the desolation of a thousand homes.

The experience of all civilization is that you cannot separate
morality from religion. When the Romans lost their faith in the old
gods and became “undenominational,” civic virtue decayed. When the
genius of the Empire was set up for a universal Deity and men were
bidden as good citizens to burn their few grains of incense before the
statue of the reigning Emperor--the representative of an ordered and
moral state--we know what happened. You cannot make an abstraction
alive and deify Government. Laws, which have the sanction only of
expediency, do but furnish mankind with exercise in evasion.
Indefinite belief in the existence of “something not ourselves which
makes for righteousness” has no motive force, and though men may rub
on in some fashion or other by following ancient custom, and the law
of use and wont, this can only be done in quiet times. And ours are
not quiet times; indeed, the air is thick with principles which are
forcing themselves into expression. The principles of Nationality or
Cosmopolitanism, the comity of nations and the limits of destruction,
international trades unionism, and the laws of marriage are recurring
items upon the programme of every social science congress. All these
dark questions are forced upon the attentions of men, and never was
there greater need of some synthetic philosophy which may help us in
their exploration. Are we going to put Christianity aside and rule out
theology from our calculations?

I may quote the testimony of the late Sir Leslie Stephen here. Every
one knows that he held no brief to defend orthodoxy--

     “To proclaim unsectarian Christianity is, in circuitous
     language, to proclaim that Christianity is dead. The love of
     Christ, as representing the ideal perfection of human nature,
     may indeed be still a powerful motive, and powerful whatever
     the view which we take of Christ’s character. The advocates of
     the doctrine in its more intellectual form represent this
     passion as the true essence of Christianity. They assert with
     obvious sincerity of conviction that it is the leverage by
     which alone the world can be moved. But, as they would
     themselves admit, this conception would be preposterous if,
     with Strauss, we regarded Christ as a mere human being. Our
     regard for Him might differ in degree, but would not differ in
     kind, from our regard for Socrates or for Pascal. It would be
     impossible to consider it as an overmastering and all-powerful
     influence. The old dilemma would be inevitable; he that loves
     not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love Christ whom
     he hath not seen? A mind untouched by the agonies and wrongs
     which invest London hospitals and lanes with horror, could not
     be moved by the sufferings of a single individual, however
     holy, who died eighteen centuries ago.

     “No; the essence of the belief is the belief in the Divinity of
     Christ. But accept that belief; think for a moment of all that
     implies, and you must admit that your Christianity becomes
     dogmatic in the highest degree. Our conceptions of the world
     and its meaning are more radically changed than our conceptions
     of the material universe, when the sun instead of the earth
     becomes its centre. _Every view of history, every theory of our
     duty, must be radically transformed by contact with that
     Stupendous Mystery._ Whether you accept or reject the special
     tenets of the Athanasian Creed is an infinitesimal trifle. You
     are bound to assume that every religion which does not take
     this dogma into account is without true vital force. Infidels,
     heathens, and Unitarians reject the single influence which
     alone can mould our lives in conformity with the everlasting
     laws of the universe. Of course, there are tricks of sleight of
     hand by which the conclusion is evaded. It would be too long
     and too trifling to attempt to expose them. Unsectarian
     Christianity consists in shirking the difficulty without
     meeting it, and trying hard to believe that the passion can
     survive without its essential basis. It proclaims the love of
     Christ as our motive, whilst it declines to make up its mind
     whether Christ was God or man; or endeavours to escape a
     categorical answer under a cloud of unsubstantial rhetoric. But
     the difference between man and God is infinite, and no effusion
     of superlatives will disguise the plain fact from honest
     minds. To be a Christian in any real sense you must start from
     a dogma of the most tremendous kind, and an undogmatic Creed is
     as senseless as a statue without shape or a picture without
     colour. Unsectarian means un-Christian.“--From _Freethinking
     and Plainspeaking_ (pp. 122-4), by Leslie Stephen. (Longmans,
     London.)

The considerations which seemed to compel the clearheaded author of
this extract to his own well-known intellectual position no longer
apply. In England, at any rate, the Church is not bound down to any
mechanical theory of the inspiration of the Bible, and accepts all the
discoveries of Modern Physical Science without misgiving. Such books
as the late Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Temple) gave us in his
Bampton Lectures have long ago shown the futility of attempting to map
out the exact terms of a reconciliation between the claims of science
and religion, but they have shown that religion and science are _not_
destructive and contradictory of each other.

“The same principles are found in each. The principle of evolution,
for instance, is as evident in the gradual development of religion as
in the age-long process by which the natural world was created; the
order and beauty and regular succession manifest in Nature can be
traced also in the spiritual universe. The revelation which was
formerly held to be violation of law is seen to be a revelation of
higher law. The great postulate of science, the uniformity of Nature,
is not infringed.”

We know now that there are laws of the Universe which, if we knew more
about them, would tell us how it was that a Virgin could conceive and
bear a Son. It is not to us an inconceivable superstition that “The
Son of Man” should have in His own person powers of which the
rudimentary signs can be traced in all humanity, manifesting
themselves from time to time. The day is long past when the
resurrection of Jesus Christ can be set aside as a “cunningly devised
fable.” No scientific man, who has not deliberately shut himself in an
hermetically sealed materialism would say to-day that “Miracles” do
not happen. It is a question of evidence.

And educated men know that there is a science of metaphysics, that
there is a science of psychology, that literary criticism is
scientific, that the age of a document can be decided, that cumulative
evidence cannot be ignored, and that simply to put aside the claims of
Christianity without examination is absurd.

But, as Sir Leslie Stephen shows, it is the Christianity of the
Catholic creed that matters, and it is this Christianity of which the
man in the street has need. It gives him a solution of those social
and ethical problems which he must solve, which he can only neglect at
the peril of natural degradation. For example, the position of women
depends upon our belief or disbelief that Christ was born of the
Virgin Mary. To say that monogamy is the natural evolution of
humanity, that chastity in the young unmarried man is a product of
civilization, that a high conception of a man’s duty to posterity will
keep him from harlotry, is simply to show ignorance of history, of
human nature, and of the world as it is. A man who talks now-a-days
about the respect of marriage being a Teutonic contribution to the
evolution of civilized society, is behind the times. We _know_ that
respect for women, and marriage held in honour, are the creations of
the Holy Catholic Church, which insists on the Incarnation of the Lord
Jesus Christ.

But the man in the street does not know these things. The discoveries
in science, whether physical or psychical, do not reach him. Technical
treatises are too strong meat for his intellectual digestion. The
pulpit does not appeal to him. At every baptism in the Church of
England the priest solemnly instructs the god-parents of the child,
“Ye shall call upon him to hear sermons,” but for the most part the
admonition is in vain. As a matter of fact, he picks up his religious
notions from the newspaper press. And the newspaper press is not now
controlled by men who have a distinct and definite belief in
Christianity. It depends upon Finance, and financiers have other
interests. The assertion of the Psalter, “Notus in Judæa” has been
changed now-a-days into an interrogation, and we ask, “In Jewry _is_
God known?” Let any man who has an intimate acquaintance with the
newspaper world run over in his mind the names of the great newspaper
proprietors, the editors of our journalistic press, the writers of
leading articles, the rising young journalists; and when he has
excepted a few Irishmen, who may happen to remain faithful to the
Roman Catholic Church, to which they owe their education, how many men
will he find who honestly believe the Nicene Creed, and are habitually
present on the first day of the week at the Breaking of the Bread?

The tone of the daily paper is tolerant. There is no rude hostility
displayed towards definite Christian doctrines, but the toleration is
politely contemptuous. “All wise men are of the same religion, and
what that religion is wise men do not say.”

It is true that in political matters the press has less power than it
used to have. A magnate of finance cannot now seriously affect public
opinion, though he may buy newspaper after newspaper, and sweep out
the editorial staff to supply their places with men of his own choice.
One wealthy wirepuller has other plutocrats to reckon with in
questions of party politics, and a newspaper man who is dismissed by
the proprietor of the _Tariff Reformer_ may find another editorial
chair placed at his disposal by the owner of _The Standard of Free
Trade_.

The man in the street looks out for a newspaper which may strengthen
his own party proclivities. He expects to find political questions
discussed, but so far as religion is concerned he accepts without
knowing it the current convention of the pressman, and imbibes a
semi-sceptical atmosphere without misgiving or suspicion.

And yet, as Sir Leslie Stephen saw, every theory of duty depends upon
Belief or Disbelief in the Divinity of Christ. We may talk of duty to
Society, duty to the Race, duty to Posterity, duty to Civilization;
but the plain man will recall the question of Sir Boyle Roche: “I do
not understand, Mr. Speaker, all this talk about our duty to
Posterity! What has Posterity ever done for us?”

You cannot control conduct by asserting that a man owes a debt to an
abstraction which you vivify by printing it with a capital letter,
and there remains always the question of the dying Lucretius--

    “Thy duty? What is duty? Fare thee well.”

The problem, then, which we have to solve is--how to arrest the
attention of the average man to those Christian principles, of which
the acceptance or definite refusal will determine the course of
civilization during the next twenty years.

The mere assertion of authority will not suffice, and men are not
impressed in favour of Catholic doctrine simply by dignified ceremony
and Ritual. We have only to look across the English Channel to be
assured of this. Frenchmen have not been encouraged to study the
evidences of Christianity. Bishops and priests have only advertised
sceptical books by forbidding their perusal to the faithful; and as
the devout have been instructed to live by faith, but not how to give
a reason for the faith which is in them, in the result M. Viviani’s
atheistic rhetoric has been placarded at the cost of the State in
every commune throughout France.

We may consider, then, if there be any method by which the man who
does not read theological or scientific or philosophical books, the
man who has left off going to church, or gets no help from the
average sermon, the man who has no reverence for mere authority, may
be induced to consider the Christian Revelation as offering him a key
to those riddles of life which his civic responsibilities are
perpetually propounding.

Remember that his present condition may be roughly described as
consisting of religious haziness and moral laziness. The moral
laziness is being subjected to a series of rough shocks. He _must_
make up his mind about some questions of morality. The relation of the
sexes, the duties of property, the treatment of the subject savage,
the survival of the unfit, the ethics of commerce, the control of the
sale of alcohol, the education of children, these things he has to
decide and he will ultimately decide. But he is at present perplexed,
and his religious haziness is the reason of his perplexity. He perhaps
has not reached the conclusion of his contemporary in France, but he
is on the way to it. Those heavenly lights which M. Viviani declares
that his Government has extinguished still shine faintly for men in
England, though the mists obscure them.

Can we get men to look upwards for light, and instead of cursing the
ancient creed in a confused commination, to take Arthur Clough’s
advice--

    “Ah! yet consider it again.”

I believe that there is a method, and as I mention it I am prepared
for derision from all the “chorus of irresponsible reviewers, the
irresponsible indolent reviewers.”

I believe that Fiction will find those that can be reached by no other
means. Fiction sometimes sets a man seeking for Fact.

Very diffidently and very reverently I may remind my contemporaries
that one, who has, at any rate, profoundly influenced the course of
history, whatever view we may take of His person, did not disdain this
method, “He taught them by parables.”

“Let me tell you a story.” Is there any age of mankind which does not
respond to the invitation and give audience? A story stilled the
tumult of the nursery in our earliest days, when heavy storms shook
the windows and the tedium of a long, wet afternoon had turned play
into fretfulness. A story beguiled us into interest when our History
lesson had seemed an arid futility in Fourth Form days, and our
magisterial enemies began to show themselves human after all when they
bade us read _The Last of the Barons_ as we were painfully plodding in
the Plantagenet period, and found the War of the Roses a very thorny
waste.

It is strange to turn over the pages of eminent evangelical sermons
of the early Victorian days and to notice how “Novel reading” is
denounced. Probably the worthy divines who fulminated against fiction
were thinking of their own boyhood, and the mischief which came to
them from Fielding and Richardson and Smollett surreptitiously
perused. Sir Anthony Absolute’s detestation of the circulating library
survived in some provincial circles even when Sir Walter Scott had
come to his own. The last forty years have altered things
considerably, and though some men may pretend to despise novels,
now-a-days they must take them into account. Wise and learned persons
began to prescribe them, not only as a vehicle for the exhibition of
wholesome but unattractive information, but as having a remedial value
of their own. “The intellectual anodyne of the nineteenth century,” I
remember that somebody called them--perhaps it was Sir Arthur Helps.
It came about that those who had a secret and timid predilection for
the story-book, but blushed a little if at Mudie’s counter they
ventured to ask for a novel, found that their ordinary reading of
Biography and Memoirs revealed some unsuspected sympathies of the
illustrious and wise. Who would have thought that Darwin devoured
novels and Dean Church did not disdain them, and that Mr. Gladstone
sat up all night to finish _John Inglesant_? The respectable
pater-familias has long ceased to proscribe novel reading, and the
most austere biographer no longer hides as a revelation of weakness
his hero’s literary divertisements. Finally, in this year of Grace
1906 we are boldly told that Archbishop Temple could stand an
examination in Miss Yonge’s novels, and on one occasion was heard
keenly discussing with Lord Rosebery the careers of the May family in
the _Daisy Chain_ as though they were living acquaintances. From being
recognized as a recreation the novel has developed into a power, and
Charles Dickens was a pioneer in its progress. It is the custom
amongst certain “superior persons” to sneer at the novel with a
purpose, and to suggest that authors attained remunerative results by
taking some subject which was already ripe for discussion and weaving
round it a web of fiction.

Undoubtedly there is danger to-day of such artifice, but I maintain
that the great reforms of the past century owed much to writers whose
purpose was perfectly innocent. Cardinal Newman has told us of the
literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, who turned men’s minds in the
direction of the Middle Ages.

“The general need,” he said, “of something deeper and more attractive
than what had offered itself elsewhere, may be said to have led to
his popularity; and by means of his popularity he reacted on his
readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting
before them visions, which when once seen are not easily forgotten,
and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might
afterwards be appealed to as first principles.”

If Cardinal Newman could thus maintain the value of Fiction in the
great ecclesiastical movement which has regenerated the Church of
England, I may claim without apology that the reform in Poor Law
Administration gained the attention of the public when Dickens made
“Bumbledom” ridiculous, and that the Court of Chancery was swept
cleaner by the breezes which were blowing from _Bleak House_. Let any
man run over in his mind the undoubted improvements in social matters
during the last fifty years, and it will be seen how Fiction has
assisted in their promotion. Did Charles Reade’s _Hard Cash_ do
nothing to arouse the attention of the public to the condition of the
insane? Did Sir Walter Besant’s novels turn no light on the sins of
the sweater, or Charles Kingsley’s _Alton Locke_ show no reason for
legalizing the Trade Union and the reform of the Law of Conspiracy?
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe may to-day be forgotten, but the southern
states of North America would not dispute the influence of Fiction
upon the public mind.

The fact is that men, who generally read nothing else but newspapers,
will read a good novel, and if the book brings before them principles
which they have hitherto neglected, they will very often consider
those principles again. It is necessary, however, that the novel shall
appeal to them as being a fair record of the present or the past. They
may as they read it be unable to pronounce on the thesis which is at
the back of the book, but they will be led to consider and discuss it
if the story, as a story, holds them. And it is here that the story
which has a genuine religious motive often fails. Most of the great
artists in fiction, when they have taken in hand a subject which is of
religious interest, have written in a spirit of detachment. George
Eliot’s _Romola_ is an example, and the result is that men are more
interested in Tito Melema than in Savonarola. Novels in which religion
is necessarily much in evidence have been written either by literary
artists who have studiously endeavoured to lay aside their own
personal convictions, or if the books have been written with a
distinctly religious purpose the hero and heroine have been
unconvincing, the people in the story have not been alive.

When Cardinal Newman had abandoned prematurely his hope of maintaining
the Catholic character of the Church of England, he did not disdain to
employ his pen in the production of a novel with a religious purpose;
but we are amazed to find that the exquisite grace of style which is
one of the charms of the _Apologia_ could not render Charles Riding
interesting, or the novel _Loss and Gain_, of which he is the hero,
readable.

It is perhaps dangerous to give another example from contemporary
fiction, but those who justly admire Mrs. Humphry Ward’s subtle
discernment of character and great and increasing mastery of form and
style, will not be inclined to dispute the opinion that when, in
_Robert Elsmere_, she undertook the defence of the modern Unitarian
position, her hero was hardly a “Man’s man.”

The reason is not far to seek. The average man knows too much of the
darker side of life; and the necessary effort made by the author of
religious novels to depict that of which they, fortunately for their
own souls, have had no experience, is not successful. Charles
Kingsley’s undergraduate days were perhaps not without knowledge of
the shadows, but he is happier in the Schools of Alexandria, or in the
spacious days of Great Elizabeth, than in a tale of modern life such
as _Two Years Ago_. His Broad Church Catholic teaching does not always
find its way to the man in the street, and Henry Kingsley, whose life
was so different from that of his illustrious clerical brother, has
more of human interest in his stories.

The novel with a purpose, and especially with a religious purpose,
fails only, when it does fail, because the author’s knowledge of the
average man in his sins and his temptations to sin, is altogether
incommensurate with his familiarity with the great religious and
social problems of which his story would suggest a solution.

It is often supposed that the men do not care to find the subject of
religion introduced in fiction, that they resent religion in a novel,
as children resent the administration of a medicinal powder in a
spoonful of jam; but the expert witness of publishers demolishes this
opinion. After all, the religious claim is insistent, and life is
untruly depicted when men and women are described in a story as
uninfluenced by it. There is something unreal in a book which has no
Sundays in it. Critical opinion as expressed in the notices of books
in the daily papers, and in more weighty reviews, is very misleading,
simply because the reviewers are generally very young men or women
who know more or less of literature but very little of life. The wrath
of the young man fresh from the University at the success of those
books which do not ignore the spiritual needs of men and women amuses
the experienced author.

“Faugh!” cries Mr. Jones of Balliol; “another batch of sin and
sentiment!” “The Christian creed and the conjugal copula! Religion and
Patchouli!” Yet the critic forgets that those who would reach the
minds and hearts of men must deal with the problems of creed and
character which men have to solve, each one for himself.

Our censors, dilettante, delicate-handed, with their canons of
criticism might do worse than reckon up the number of English novels
which have lived on into the twentieth century. They will be surprised
to find that they are nearly all novels with a purpose and a religious
purpose for their “motif.” Charles Reade when he wrote _Never too late
to mend_, not only helped forward the humane and intelligent treatment
of criminals, he showed how the Divine Image was stamped indelibly on
human nature, and where it seemed to be obliterated could be restored.
But Charles Reade drew real men and women. His characters are not
puppets of the play-house but are alive. And Thackeray--_Clarum et
venerabile nomen_--making hypocrites his quarry, and raining his
quiver full of satiric shafts upon the hateful crew, never scoffed for
a moment at reverent things, but with bowed head and hushed footsteps
passed by the sanctuary. Therefore, these men are still living forces.
Men will read other novels of the past as women look at old-fashion
plates, and amuse themselves with the differences and contrasts of
succeeding generations, but the novels which men buy in their hundreds
of thousands, the novels which are reprinted again and again, the
novels for which the publishers wait as their copyright is expiring,
like heirs expecting a rich man’s death, that each may endeavour to be
first in the field with an edition which pays no royalty to the
author; these novels are those which truly represented life as it
seemed in other days, life seeking ever to be reassured that One has
come who offers to those who walk in darkness the light of life.

It is exasperating to some minds to discover that the man of the world
is not altogether worldly, and that he finds in books which recognize
religion as a considerable part of man’s life, something which gives
to them reality and truth. Immature minds and inexperienced penmen are
not impressed by the things which really matter, and in the interval
between the University and man’s settlement in life much nonsense is
written and spoken.

I speak from personal experience; and when I look back upon the
reviews I wrote ten years ago, it is with invariable consternation,
and sometimes a real sense of shame.

Nevertheless, there is some criticism of the religious novel which
must be taken seriously. I have maintained that men generally in
England are in a state of theological confusion, but that they are
interested in religion if they can be induced to consider it. There
is, as the great African Presbyter wrote seventeen hundred years ago,
a natural response in the hearts of men to the chief articles of the
Christian Faith. There is a _Testimonium animæ naturaliter
christianæ_. But there are some who can only be described by a
quotation: “They are the enemies of the cross of Christ.” They are
determined that the Catholic creed shall have no place in the counsels
and considerations of social legislation. Of Jesus Christ they have
said, “We will not have this man to reign over us;” and if there be
any chance that a man’s books may catch the eye of the public and
rouse people to think whether opportunism is really statesmanship, and
empiricism in politics really prudent, if, in a word, the principles
of Christianity are offered as a solution of social problems, then
the author is attacked on every side. It is suggested that his
intention is insincere, that his knowledge is inadequate. The things
which have been part of his painful discipline and development are
described as his accepted environment. If a Bishop happens to find an
illustration for a sermon in his pages, or a prominent Nonconformist
divine recognizes that the laity like to read them, and says so; if
any of those true hearts who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity
have been ready to see that men who have been rescued _de profundis_,
men who have had experience of [Greek: ta bathea tou satana] are not
thereby disqualified for duty in the field of Faith; if, in a word,
books which claim for Christianity the first place in the thought of
the time are successful, a very malignant hostility is aroused.

It is most probable that this hatred of Christianity will grow and
increase. The world has never before been as it is to-day. The system
of party politics has placed power in the hands of the democracy. The
“working man” has at last discovered what he can do. He must make his
choice between the secular and the religious principle. Hitherto the
Christian pastors of the people have appealed to his emotions, and not
without success. The emotions will always be the chief guides in
conduct for many; but the leaders of the working men are hard-headed,
well read in social science and politics; and, owing to the
insufficient training of the clergy in these subjects, the politicians
of the _proletariat_ have conceived a sort of contempt for the parson
and the minister and the priest. The small body of Unitarians, wealthy
from their constant intermarriage with the great Jewish families, and
opposed to an aristocracy which has only in the last forty years been
willing to receive them, has been quick to see that the working man
must be alienated from the Catholic creed, and his vote secured at any
cost. On the railway bookstalls we may note the activity of the
Unitarian propaganda committee. Fifty years ago it was not necessary
to consider the opinions of the man in the street: the Unitarian
minister and his congregation were comfortable in the assurance of
their own intellectual culture and their kindly interest for the
poorer classes. In politics they were Liberals, for an Established
Church interfered with their sense of superiority, and the landed
proprietors and the hereditary aristocracy socially ignored them. But
they had no notion of calling into existence an electorate which
should endanger the supremacy of the capitalist, and, like
Frankenstein, they are afraid of their own creations, now that the
working man has become the dispenser of Parliamentary power. It is
vital to their interests that he should be diverted from further
attacks upon capital, and encouraged to believe that it is the priest
who is his true foe. “_Le cléricalisme voilà l’ennemi_” is a
convenient cry. A vague Deism is not dangerous to wealthy
manufacturers; but if the clergy are going to take up Christian
Socialism it is time to be up and doing. So every weapon against the
creed of Christendom is being taken down and examined, and many an old
fallacy is refurbished and employed once more. Celsus is disinterred
from the tomb in which Origen had buried him, and his filthy slander
of the Blessed Virgin is printed as though it were a new discovery of
historical research. Collins is called into court again as though
Bentley had never exposed his ignorance, and Hume’s _a priori_ method
is revived as though it had never been discredited; whilst Strauss and
Renan are quoted as authorities, as if Westcott and Lightfoot had
never been known. Shunt the working classes on a new line of rails.
Set them shrieking against sacramentalists, and swearing at
sacerdotalists, and we may quietly arrange our commercial combinations
and protect our manufacturing interests!

I want to see the seats under the dome of St. Paul’s filled not by
only the middle-aged middle classes, who for the most part are
Christian in creed, but by the young artisans and craftsmen, and the
strong politicians who fill the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, and
crowd the great Assembly Rooms of Birmingham and Liverpool when an
election is drawing near. The timid members of the Episcopate who may
be reminded that “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he
that regardeth the clouds shall not reap,” are not our only Bishops.
Occasionally a Prime Minister offers for election and consecration a
man who can reach the minds and consciences of men. Is it too great an
ambition for a storyteller to try to arouse in people’s minds a
suspicion that after all something may be said for the Catholic Faith,
and so to bring them to listen to those who know and can teach it?
Each man must do his work with such tools as have come in his way. The
Mission preacher will use his magnetic power, the artist whose skill
it is to build or to paint, will make his appeal to the love of order
and beauty, the musicians will meet the heart through the ear. May not
the writer of fiction use his psychological training and his knowledge
of many sides of human life to create a story which shall set men
thinking about the old doctrines which he believes to have lost none
of their regenerating power?

There is danger lest men with good intentions should go blindly to
work to redress and diminish social grievances. Individualism with its
hateful cry, “Each man for himself and the devil take the hindmost,”
is now at a discount, but it may be replaced by a despotism of State
regulation which will destroy the family and the home. There is, I
believe, only one creed which can make the capitalist unselfish and
the sons of labour satisfied, which will tell men that wealth means
responsibility and that there is dignity in toil, which will teach the
rich man to order himself lowly and reverently to those who are _his_
betters and to hurt nobody by word or deed, which will teach the
labourer that his chief need is not other men’s wealth, but the
“carrière ouverte aux talents” and the determination to do his duty in
that state of life, whatever it may be, unto which God _shall_ call
him.

It is the Holy Catholic Faith which makes equality of opportunity for
all men its earthly ambition, and offers refreshment and hope to those
who are not strong enough to strive with the rest. The old men saw
visions and we have found that they were prophecies, a young man may
dream dreams. My dream is that the men who are doing the work of the
world to-day may be taught that Christ is their best teacher and the
Incarnate God their refuge and strength.

There is a tale of an acrobat and juggler who knew well that his
tricks were the outcome of years of concentrated effort and constant
exercise, and being moved by the Grace of God, he desired to offer the
best thing he had to give to the Lord of Life. His best was his skill.
He lived by it. Shown in the streets and the play places, it won for
him his daily bread. His work was to give men amusement in their hours
of recreation by an exhibition of his feats of strength and
nimbleness. Could this, his one talent, be consecrated and devoted to
God? So he considered, and humbly sought the sanctuary, and there
before the Presence he performed his fantastic tricks which had cost
him years of endeavour. The story is a parable which men have not been
slow to read, and it has become the theme of the musician and artist.

Shall I offend my fellow-writers if I repeat it here in this
connection?




THE FIRES OF MOLOCH




II

THE FIRES OF MOLOCH

“_There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets._”


Every three months with unfailing regularity small paragraphs appear
in the daily papers headed “RECORD LOW BIRTH-RATE.” Some figures
follow, and then occurs the sentence--unhappily a stereotyped one in
our day--“_This is the lowest rate recorded in any quarter since civil
registration began._”

Now and again a blue-book upon the subject of the birth-rate is
dissected by a journalist and the result appears in his newspaper as a
series of startling figures. The story of England’s decadence is set
out in the plainest language for every one to read.

At rarer intervals still, some prominent clergyman or sociologist
writes or lectures in order to call attention to what is going on, and
thus to bring home the spiritual and economic dangers of our racial
suicide.

A few people read or listen and are convinced. A good many other
people are too utterly ignorant of either the Philosophy of
Christianity or the Science of Sociology to understand in the least
what the point of view of the protesters is. According to their
temperament, they smile quietly and dismiss the subject, or bellow
their disgust at such a subject being mentioned at all.

    “He who far off beholds another dancing,
          And all the time
    Hears not the music that he dances to,
          Thinks him a madman.”

A party which has the fools at its back is always in the majority, and
discussion is stifled, alarm is lulled by the anodyne of indifference
and the great number of honest folk who call themselves both Patriots
and Christians have no time to spare from fighting and squabbling for
money--in order that the dishonest men may not get it all.

Half-a-dozen problems of extreme national importance confront every
thinking English man and woman in 1907. The air is thick with their
stir and movement, and so great is the noise and reverberation of them
that true “royalty” of “_inward_ happiness” seems a thing impossible
and past by in these troubled times. Be that as it may, it is quite
certain that one of the most real and pressing of these problems is
that summed up in the stock phrase “Record Low Birth-rate.”

We hear a great deal about the doings of a class of people who are
referred to as “The Smart Set,” and it is actually said that its
influence is having a serious effect upon the national character. I do
not believe it for a moment. It seems a folly to suppose that a
handful of champagne corks floating on a cess-pool has any
far-reaching influence upon the English home. I mention that small
section of society constituted by the idle and luxurious rich,
because, whatever their vices are, they are being used as whipping-boy
for enormous numbers of people whose lives are equally guilty with
theirs in at least one regard--in the matter of which I am writing
now.

I propose in this essay to discuss the question of the decline in the
birth-rate from the Christian and Catholic standpoint. There is only
one perfect philosophy, and all other half-true philosophies in the
light of which we might consider such a momentous matter as this, lead
only to the conclusion that expediency is the highest good. Without
the incentive of the Christian Faith and without the light of the
Incarnation one may sit in a corner and think till “all’s blue in
cloud cuckoo land.” Christianity can alone be reconciled with
Economics, theory and practice celebrating always the marriage of the
King’s son, the wedding of Heaven and Earth, the spiritual and the
material. Plato knew that it was impossible to raise the Greek state
to the level of his philosophic principles, and Aristotle frankly
abandons the attempt to connect ethics and politics with the highest
conclusions of his creed. We are in the same position to-day if we
ignore the supreme truth which is our possession and which was not
vouchsafed to the great Greek thinkers.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is one cause and one cause only of the decline in the birth-rate
and the beginning of the country’s spiritual and material suicide.

The way of Nature is for every species to increase nearly to its
possible maximum of numbers. This is a proved law, and nothing but the
limitation of families by artificial means, or infanticide, can check
its operation.

The truth is exactly as Dr. Barry put it nearly two years ago, “It
stands confessed that the great, proud, English race, famous as a
people for manly virtues, once the very Stoics of Christian Europe
decline more and more to be fathers and mothers, will not be worried
with children, and--cannot be spoken of in decent language.”

It is a truth of history that when a nation begins to refuse the
responsibility of providing for posterity it begins to decline.

The doctrines of Malthus in his great _Essay on the Principles of
Population_, are no longer believed in by the Christian philosopher.
Malthus was perfectly sound upon the ethical problem, and the
“Neo-Malthusians,” of whom I shall presently speak, have no right
whatever to use his name upon their banners. Malthus, so the modern
socialistic thinker, such as Mr. H. G. Wells avers, “demonstrated for
all time that a State whose population continues to increase in
obedience to unchecked instinct can progress only from bad to worse.
From the point of view of human comfort and happiness the increase of
population that occurs at each advance in human security is the
greatest evil of life.”

Malthus, however, never once suggested or advocated the limitation of
population by mechanical means. He believed that it was a patriotic
duty of men and women to _abstain from producing more children_ than
the State could bear, and it is as well to remove at once a popular
misconception which stains the name of a good man and a powerful
though mistaken thinker.

Otter says of him in a memoir, “His life was more than any other we
have ever witnessed, a perpetual flow of enlightened benevolence,
contentment and peace; it was the best and purest philosophy,
brightened by Christian views and softened by Christian charity.”

It is economically and from the sociological point of view that the
modern student condemns the theories of Malthus and those who follow
him.

Socialist thinkers disregard the entity of nations, and treat of the
world and its population as a whole. The Christian Patriot loves his
own country, believes in its destiny no less than he reveres its past,
and knows that if our English nation is going to live, it must go on
reproducing itself.

The “no room to live” theory is preposterous upon the face of it. In
1879, Lord Derby asked a somewhat obvious question. “Surely,” he said,
“it is better to have thirty-five millions of human beings leading
useful and intelligent lives, rather than forty millions struggling
painfully for a bare subsistence.”

This has been made into a watchword by those who advocate the
limitation of population.

It can be answered by a simple statement of fact--in our colonies
there are places for a hundred million wives.

While I have not lost sight of the main object of this paper--to
summarize the weight of Catholic Christian feeling upon the
_mechanical_ limitation of population, and to tell how this is being
accomplished--I find that there is yet some ground to be cleared
before coming to the main issue.

I have said that there is only one material cause of our decadence,
but there are many reasons.

More than a year ago in one or two newspapers, particularly the _Daily
Chronicle_, various sociologists gave the results of their thought
upon the matter. I print a few extracts here.

The outspoken Dr. Barry wrote:--

     ......”‘As for religion, Christian or any other, when its
     dogmas are no longer believed, its ethics pass away,’ and he
     draws a picture of the rotten state of society in our Western
     world, which he attributes directly to the growth of
     agnosticism. The fact that the birth-rate in England has been
     declining for twenty-five years, and was lowest in 1904, seems
     to Dr. Barry to be due to several causes--‘poverty and luxury,
     pleasure-seeking and disbelief in the Bible,’ and he adds, ‘The
     spirit of anarchic individualism that cries, “No God, no
     Master!” is needed to tell us why Englishmen and their wives,
     once dedicated to a blameless and lasting union, have fallen
     into the pit which Malthus or his followers digged for them.’
     England alone is not at fault. ‘Wherever unbelief has taken
     hold, or doubt saps the ancient creeds, there Malthus reigns
     instead of Christ.’”

A “well-known public man” wrote:--

     ......“It is within my knowledge that certain flats in Mayfair
     and elsewhere for the married servant and artisan class are let
     on the express or implied condition that not only no children
     shall be brought into the tenements, but that none shall be
     born there. The direct consequence of this embargo on natural
     increase is terribly disastrous. Many footmen and coachmen in
     Mayfair could tell a tragical story of the results of
     compulsory sterility.

     “A Japanese friend was telling me the other day that after an
     absence from England of a dozen years he is startled at the
     visible deterioration of the race and the great increase of
     penniless British weaklings, who add strength to no nation.
     ‘You English are losing both patriotism and religion, and
     consequently you are not only decadent but doomed, unless you
     mend your ways in the treatment of women and children.’”

I take the following from a leading article in the _Church Times_:--

     ......“After making all allowances for minor contributory
     causes, the fact remains and may be proved by a little inquiry,
     that married people have come to regard a large family as a
     curse instead of a Divine blessing. The birth-rates in London
     are instructive. Residential districts, with fewest poor, show
     the lowest rates. Hampstead 16·6 and Fulham 32·3 may be taken
     as typical districts at each end of the scale. Stepney with its
     Jewish population has a rate of 37. If the Aliens Bill is to be
     effective it will need a clause compelling Jews to limit their
     families, just as their Christian (!) neighbours do. The misery
     of it all is that we find the practice of child murder, for
     such it is in plain English, defended by men of education;
     lawyers, medical men, and even priests make no secret of their
     approval of it, if no more. And as working men become aware of
     what their ‘betters’ are saying and doing--and they are not
     slow to follow a similar course--the evil spreads. Our proper
     leaders, the Bishops, ought long ago to have dealt with this
     subject resolutely and firmly. But apparently a grain of
     incense is a more terrible thing to them than the murder of an
     existing if unborn personality. We can only judge by their
     public utterances, but we have yet to learn that as a body
     their lordships have spent a thousandth part of the time over
     this supreme question of national morality that they have
     devoted to the suppression of things disapproved of by Lady
     Wimborne and her league. The spectacle of disproportionate
     interest and action is melancholy, and indicative of incapacity
     to observe the real dangers to be faced.”

Again--

     “The personal causes of this mischief are fear of pain (_i. e._
     failure to see in pain the discipline of God which elevates
     human nature), hatred of duty, shirking of responsibility, love
     of pleasure, the substitution of hedonism for the religion of
     Jesus Christ the Lord, and ignorance of the Holy Spirit as Lord
     of _all_ life. How far religious teachers are accountable for
     this we leave to their own consciences to say. The same causes
     are at work in the high mortality of infants. The honour of
     doing her best for her child is cast aside by many a mother
     because it involves a certain amount of self-restraint and some
     seclusion from the gaieties of the hour; and recourse is had to
     all sorts of patent nostrums and infants’ ‘food’ (often the
     cause of rickets) until the hospitals are over full of young
     children, whose sufferings are the result (God grant that they
     may be the atonement also) of their mothers’ negligences and
     ignorances. Where there is not deliberate and wilful avoidance
     of maternal duty, there is neglect through awful ignorance.”

In the _Daily Mail_ Mr. H. G. Wells writes:--

     .......“On the other hand think of the discouragements. While
     the mother toils in a restricted anxious home amid her
     children, she sees through her imperfectly cleaned window (one
     can’t do everything) the childless wives having a glorious
     time, going a-bicycling with their husbands, dressed gaudily
     with all his superfluous income, talking about their ‘Rights.’
     As her children grow up to an age when they might help drudge
     with her or drudge for her, the State, without a word of thanks
     to her, takes them away to teach them and make good citizens of
     them. If the husband presently becomes bored by his restricted
     prolific household and its incessant demands, and absconds, or
     if he is simply unlucky and gets out of work, the State deals
     with her in a spirit of austere ingratitude. She is subjected
     to ‘charity’ and every conceivable indignity; she undergoes
     profounder humiliations than fall to the lot of the most
     dissolute women. If a husband ‘goes wrong’ and a woman has kept
     childless, she can get employment, she can shift for herself
     and be well quit of him, but a family disaster for a mother is
     catastrophe.

     “I submit the situation is preposterous. I do not believe that
     with increasing intelligence and refinement women will go on
     marrying and bearing children under such conditions. I gather
     that the statistics of marriage-rates and birth-rates bear me
     out in this.”

And in the _Daily Chronicle_ the Rev. Cartmel-Robinson:--

     ......“This phenomenon of the falling birth-rate is of course
     not confined to England; it is to be met with, you might say
     generally, in all Christian countries. It would be far more
     marked but for the tremendous decline in the death-rate,
     especially among infants. We ourselves should be vitally
     bankrupt but for this factor, and in France, as you know, the
     population is slowly dropping. That is an old story, but it is
     startling to learn, as President Roosevelt tells us, that the
     native-born American population is actually declining.

     “One of the main causes, no doubt, is the determined pursuit of
     pleasure by all classes. The man will not take the burden of
     providing for a family, or, at any rate, a large family, upon
     himself, because that would mean a curtailment of his luxuries,
     perhaps even his necessities, while the woman refuses to spend
     all the prime of her life in child-bearing and child-rearing.
     She also wants to enjoy herself, and the pure, simple joys of
     maternity, which we used to think ought to be sufficient for a
     woman, have in many cases become irksome.

     “For my part I do not think that you will ever rouse England to
     this question of home and children by an appeal to patriotism.
     The Englishman has become too cosmopolitan for that, and I am
     afraid the feeling is growing.

     “The reason for the decline in America is said to be that women
     are becoming neurotic, and will not face the dangers and
     responsibilities of motherhood. No doubt that is true to a
     certain extent here also, and it is quite certain that among
     intellectual and highly-educated women, such as are trained at
     our universities in increasing numbers, the maternal instinct,
     the capacity for love, if you like to put it in that way, is
     apt to be destroyed.

     “Then, among the middle classes thousands of young women, who
     not many years ago would have looked to marriage as their
     natural career, are earning their own livings, and are less
     eager to rush into matrimony.”

I have taken these extracts from the words of a few people crying in
the wilderness. All of the dicta are at least eighteen months old. I
am writing now, in November 1906, and three days ago the apparently
inevitable paragraph again made its appearance:--

     “RECORD LOW BIRTH-RATE.

     “The births registered in England and Wales during the three
     months ended September 30--234,624, or 26·9 per 1,000 of the
     population--was the lowest rate recorded in any third quarter
     since civil registration was established.

     “The average in the same quarters of the past ten years was
     28·8.”

These opinions as to the reasons for the terrible decadence of England
are doubtless all true. They are all contributory causes, and I do not
think we can put a single one of them aside. Nothing could be more
dismal or more hopeless reading. As one goes on, one experiences a
sense as of a chill, deepening shadow.

Few people who read will be able to adopt the average man’s attitude
towards unpleasant and disturbing matters--to sidle by with a
deprecatory shrug of the shoulders.

Where then do we stand?

So far I have endeavoured to show (_a_) the entire indifference of the
ordinary man and woman to the fall in the birth-rate; (_b_) the only
light, in which, as I understand it, one can see the problem as a
whole--in the light of the Incarnation; (_c_) the fact that the
Christian Sociologist to-day is inclined to condemn the theory that
the limitation of population is necessary at all, even by legitimate
methods of abstinence and control; (_d_) the varied reasons which, in
the opinion of those who have studied the question deeply, contribute
to the one central and shocking fact--

_That incredible numbers of English men and women many of them
professing themselves Christians, are constantly using methods to
prevent the birth of children._

Every parish clergyman in England is perfectly aware of what is going
on. Every Nonconformist minister, and indeed every one whose work
brings him in touch with large masses of people in the capacities of
leader, adviser, or friend, knows it also. Just as the figures of the
Registrar General form a gauge by which to measure the generality of
the malignant influence, so the personal experience of any man of the
world will supply particular evidence of the state of things within
his immediate purview and surroundings.

Always remembering that the evil is progressive, is hourly increasing,
the observer of social phenomena at once asks himself if there is not
some definite and organized control and direction of it. The desire
to obtain the gratifications of passion while evading its
responsibilities is, perhaps, the strongest feeling implanted in the
fallen nature of mankind. This is sufficient to create a demand for
knowledge of how to obtain the desired end, and the demand has in its
turn created the supply.

There is a definite literature upon the subject, there is a large body
of highly-trained and cultured men and women ready and anxious to
disseminate the necessary information to produce these results.

I propose to deal briefly, in the first instance, with the literature
which urges and explains practices which the laws of God, the laws of
Nature, and the teachings of the Church utterly and emphatically
condemn.

The people who call themselves “Malthusians” (and to avoid an
injustice to the memory of Malthus I shall here style them
Neo-Malthusians) have an organ of their own in the shape of a
periodical which is the official voice of a league into which they
have formed themselves. The periodical has, I believe, an extensive
circulation, and it is published at the lowest possible price.
Moreover, in each number of it which I have seen the following notice
appears:--

     “The Secretary of the Malthusian League will be glad to send
     copies of back numbers of this journal to friends willing to
     distribute them for propagandist purposes.”

We see that an ordered press campaign is in progress. This periodical
is most ably written and edited. Signed articles appear in it by men
and women of standing and position. I find it impossible to doubt for
a moment that these economists and scientists are not absolutely
sincere, and actuated by a high and laudable desire to benefit the
world in which they live.

It is unnecessary to give the title of the periodical, but immediately
beneath it the following sentence is printed in large letters--

“A CRUSADE AGAINST POVERTY.”

Here is the _raison d’être_ of the journal plainly stated, and so far
it is no more than indicating the precise aim of Malthus--to find an
economic remedy for the sufferings of poverty.

I proceed to give some examples of the teaching inculcated in the
journal, and in the first place quote from a review of _L’Instinct
d’Amour_, by Dr. Joanny Roux, a very distinguished French physician:--

     “Must all who refuse to procreate refrain from love? How easy
     it is to clothe one’s self in the robes of social purity when
     replying to this question! The social purists tell the world
     that chastity is obligatory if procreation be not intended. It
     is impossible to carry out this view. The philosopher contents
     himself with studying sterile love and its consequences. He
     rejoices to think that thousands of infants are left out of the
     world who would have been doomed to suffer. The inconveniences
     resulting from some selfish people who refrain from parentage
     are as nothing in the balance when weighed against the horrors
     of indigence.

     “Should we not, by acting thus, lead to a progressive
     diminution of the population? Certainly; but that would be a
     good thing. As if, forsooth, human progress depended on
     quantity, and not on quality! Take China as an example of
     quantity without quality. Some writers seem to wish that the
     earth should be filled up with miserable and suffering people.
     Malthus, that gentle clergyman, in 1798, was the first to
     protest against such a view. Over-reproduction, he showed, was
     the cause of poverty. He, however, thought the only remedy for
     this was chastity, and was quite opposed to _sterile love_.

     “To accept sterile love, some say, is to run counter to Nature
     and natural morality. ‘No,’ says Dr. Roux, ‘it is the
     preserving of these laws. In all cases where we construct
     houses or warm ourselves, we get one law of Nature to defend us
     against the other which injures us. We must not forget that our
     instincts are fixed customs of very ancient date; and there can
     be no doubt that man has the right to intervene in questions of
     that sexual instinct if morality (_i. e._ happiness) requires
     it of him.’”

When one reads these passages a flood of light as to the real
influence and direction of such teachings comes to us at once. The
writer, no doubt sincerely enough, assumes as an axiom of his whole
position, that there is no law but “Nature,” no morality but what he
calls “Natural Morality.” We are, in fact, under no obligations to
anything but the promptings of animal instinct which are part of our
human nature.

We see immediately the inherent negation of Christianity implied in
this attitude, and apart from the definite teaching of the Faith upon
the question, which I shall enter into later, it is most important
that we should realize that the holders and preachers of
Neo-Malthusianism must always be opposed to Christianity. Even those
people who do not profess their hatred for, or disbelief in our Lord
in so many words, logically imply them. Christians who may not have
troubled themselves about this menace to the State and its morals must
be told in no uncertain voice that the movement is purely heathen in
its position and built upon a basis of heathenism. Let us call things
by their right names, and realize that the Neo-Malthusian worshipping
Nature and the Chinese Coolie worshipping his Joss are only two
manifestations of exactly the same thing.

Nor are the people who are attempting to turn marriage into a polite
and recognized form of prostitution always so reticent as to their
attitude towards the Christian Faith. In an article which professes
to sum up the work of the Malthusian League I read:--

     ......“The medical profession in England is still too much under
     the sway of the Church and conventional opinion to be able to
     discuss the population difficulty, except to censure those who
     are wise enough to follow science instead of theological
     traditions derived from the _juventus mundi_. Dr. Taylor, of
     Birmingham, who is said to be an ardent Churchman, in a
     presidential address to the Gynæcological Society, attacked the
     views of the Neo-Malthusians.”

And again:--

     .......“We have to chronicle the prosecution of a new organ of the
     League, _Salud y Fuerza_, published in Barcelona, on account of
     an admirable article by Señor Leon Devaldez. Spain is the most
     retrograde of all our European nations; but the prosecution, we
     believe, will end in the defeat of the clerical party, as has
     been the case in England and in France. Science is destroying
     our traditional superstitions.”

I feel sure that a great many people have not the slightest idea that
not only is this detestable propaganda utterly incompatible with the
profession of Christianity, but must logically be opposed to it.

Here is a case in point. The official organ of the Malthusian League
quotes a letter from “a warmhearted clergyman,” whose name is not
given, in which he says:--

     “The theory of Neo-Malthusianism finds a way out of the
     difficulty. It is the use of preventive checks which, while
     they make possible to all married persons the gratification of
     their natural desires, will prevent the possibility of the
     ordinary results of such gratification following. ‘This
     clergyman,’ adds the editor, ‘is one of the few who are fit to
     follow in the footsteps of Malthus, Whately, and Chalmers.’”

It is a not uninteresting speculation, which we may permit ourselves
for a moment, as to the probable identity and character of this
“clergyman.” One hopes, of course, that he was not a clergyman, and
that the editor of the journal, naturally unfamiliar with
ecclesiastical affairs, gives the title to some minister of one of the
Unitarian sects. But if the writer of the letter is really an ordained
priest, then he must surely be either--

(1) An honest fool who means to do right, and does it as far as he
knows how.

(2) A dishonest fool who means to do wrong, and does it.

(3) A fool who does whichever of the two he finds most convenient in
this or that regard.

We need not, therefore, take the anonymous writer very seriously, but
I quote him because the incident throws a side-light upon the
psychology of the half Christian. It would be as unwise as it is
unnecessary to quote freely from any of the Neo-Malthusian
publications. My business in this essay is to make it quite clear to
readers that there is a powerful and able organization which is
constantly producing literature teaching the limitation of families.
There are now six or seven “Malthusian Leagues” in existence, in
England, Holland, Germany, France, Belgium, and Spain, and a Woman’s
International Branch uniting the women of these countries, while the
printed matter issued by these organizations is enormous.

In the English journal to which I have been referring there are many
advertisements of books and pamphlets in which the wording is
undoubtedly designed to attract others than the earnest seeker after
truth. I read, to give one example, that for eightpence post free I
can obtain “_The Strike of a Sex_; or, Woman on Strike against the
Male Sex for her ‘Magna Charta.’ One of the most advanced books ever
published; intended to revolutionize public opinion on the relation of
the sexes. Should be read by every person.”

And lower down in the same column I am informed that the publishers of
this sort of thing not only sell books advocating Neo-Malthusian
practices, but are also willing to provide the means for committing
them.

So much for the unsavoury products of the Neo-Malthusian press,
products which would make the gentle old clergyman of Haileybury turn
away in loathing and disgust could he but see them. Large as the
output of this pseudo-economic obscenity is, it does not reach a
twentieth part of the people who are responsible for the decline of
the birth-rate. They have derived their knowledge from another
channel, from the instructions of the medical man or his lesser
colleague the chemist.

The poorer classes who, a few years ago were ignorant of this
propaganda, are now being instructed in it by the men from whom they
buy their medicines. Doctors, in the majority of cases, are perfectly
willing to explain to married people how they may avoid having
children by means other than those of self-control. As a rule the
medical man seems to have no conscience at all in this regard. His
point of view is too often merely materialistic and concerned with
nothing but physical function, and he has become in many cases, the
active agent of the malignant forces which are sapping our national
honour and prosperity. In discussing the question, more than one
person has expressed his amazement at the readiness of doctors to
explain and advocate the limitation of families. The doctors of
England form one of the finest classes in the community. I will
venture to say that very few men and women arrive at middle life
without experiencing a lively feeling of gratitude, friendship, or
even affection for some medical man. The devotion to his high calling,
of even the average English doctor, is a fact in the lives of nearly
all of us. It is the more surprising, and alarming also, when we
realize, as inquirers are forced to realize, how wrong and mistaken
the general attitude of the physician is towards this aspect of the
sexual relations of men and women. It is said that infidelity is rife
among those who are educated to cure our bodily ailments, that the
agnostic habit of mind is frequent in this profession. I am not
competent to judge of this, or to pronounce an opinion upon such a
statement, though my own experience is directly opposed to it. But it
is certain that until the last fifteen years the scientific
temperament was disinclined to believe in anything it could not weigh,
measure, analyze, touch, or see. Huxley, for example, was a striking
instance of this position. But science has been revolutionized within
the experience of one generation, and the “cock-sureness” has
disappeared. We are all realizing that “unseen” simply means that
which does not appeal to our sense of sight, or perhaps that which
does not appeal to any of our senses. One of the most famous and
honoured scientific men of to-day, Sir Oliver Lodge, says in regard to
miracles, “I think we should hesitate very much before saying that
they are impossible, because we do not know what may be the power of a
great personality over natural forces.”

As the years go on, we may have great hopes that the regarding of
psychology as just as much a necessary part of a doctor’s education as
biology, or therapeutics will produce a better feeling among medical
men in regard to the great question of which the statistics of the
birth-rate form the gauge. Doctors will probably understand that harm
done to the body and harm done to the soul react upon one another with
remorseless certainty, and that there can be no real separation of
spirit and matter. And directly this is understood we shall never find
medical men recommending and assisting what Dr. Roux calls “sterile
love” though some of us could find a very different name for it.

The layman unhesitatingly accepts the advice of his physician, and
here “private judgment” hardly exists. If a priest tells a certain
type of Englishman that Evening Communions spoil and maim our holiest
sacrament, and are bad for the soul, he will resent it, and say that
he will choose for himself in the matter. Yet if a doctor tells the
same person that it is dangerous to eat mushrooms that have been
gathered for more than two days, or that the irritation at his wrists
is a symptom of uric acid in the blood, there will be no question of
disbelief. The influence of doctors is incalculable, they rule us by
our fear of death and our instinct of self-preservation, and rarely do
we find that they abuse the trust reposed in them, or use their great
power for ill always excepting the instance under discussion. When,
therefore, the medical profession can be brought to see the preventive
check system as it really is, when doctors understand that
interference with natural laws induces a deterioration of character
and temperament which eventually acts upon the body for its harm, and
tends to race-degeneracy, then much will be gained. And when they
progress still further in the coming reconciliation of science with
the Christian Revelation, and own that the laws of God, set out and
promulgated by His Holy Church, are no less binding than the laws made
known by the revelation of science, then the battle will be half won.
The final victory or defeat will be with the priests and ministers of
every church and sect, the men who are the physicians of our souls.

The last few pages have been occupied with a statement of the
Neo-Malthusian propaganda. I have been careful rather to understate
than exaggerate the case. Much that I might have included,
corroborative testimony from people who know, individual instances,
letters, and so forth, has been rejected for the purposes of this
essay. Were I writing another book upon the subject I should have used
this material. In a collection of papers devoted to various subjects,
and which will have a more general appeal than a work devoted entirely
to vital statistics, it is impossible. But any one who has followed me
thus far may be sure that I have been strictly temperate in statement.

We have seen what the Neo-Malthusians, avowed and secret, are doing.
What is the Church doing to stem the evil? and what is the teaching of
the Church upon the subject?

The teaching of the Church is perfectly clear; my contention is that
it is so rarely taught as to be practically unknown to large masses of
Christians.

No one ever goes to his parish priest and asks if adultery is wrong.
Yet innumerable clergymen have told me that they are constantly asked
by parishioners if there is “any harm” in the use of methods to limit
families.

Such people are not, of course, of a very spiritual life, or very
acute intelligence, or they would easily find the answer to such a
question for themselves. But very few of us are either spiritually
minded or of uncommon intelligence, and legislation must be for the
average man. Voltaire said, “_on dit que Dieu est toujours pour les
gros bataillons_,” and what was spoken as a sneer contains the germ of
a great truth. Let me say once more, and I am certain of what I say,
that the “_gros bataillons_” are quite ignorant of their moral
obligations in marriage in so far as they relate to the question under
discussion.

Why?

The truth is, in the first instance, very difficult to convey from the
pulpit and to a mixed audience, though, to take three great names at
random, the President of the United States, and our own Bishops of
Ripon and London have spoken out. In accusing the clergy and
nonconformist ministers of shirking their duty we must remember the
enormous difficulty of their task. I have no responsibility but that
of my own conviction, and no one is compelled to buy this book who
does not wish to do so. It is therefore quite easy for me to sit in my
study and write as I am doing. But the preacher, great as his
opportunity and influence are, must by the nature of the case, be in a
very different position. He is an official and recognized leader of
his flock in spiritual affairs, a hundred considerations weigh with
him; he is constrained on all sides by prejudice and convention which
might do incalculable harm in other directions if the one was outraged
and the other ignored. The position of the priest is admirably summed
up in a pamphlet which Father Black has sent me. In it he explains
that it is impossible for a preacher when addressing a general
congregation to speak in other than general terms, or to say all that
he may feel it is, in some cases, very desirable or even necessary to
convey. He cannot but be aware that with sins of impurity especially,
the very persons who commit them are generally of too delicate ears to
endure to hear them called by their right names. This _sentimental_
purity is not incompatible with corruption of life. He wishes to warn
the innocent without enlightening their innocence, to lift the veil
sufficiently to show their sin to the guilty, and yet to teach them by
delicacy and not bring a railing accusation which would probably only
harden instead of converting.

It is gravely necessary to realize how difficult the priest’s task is,
but at the same time it is extraordinary how little organized
condemnation of the evil exists. No one can accurately measure or
gauge the influence exercised by clergy in private conversations and
admonitions, and this is doubtless considerable. But it is sporadic
and not systematic, there is too much timidity and hesitation, and
while the enemy is well organized and equipped we are without a plan
of campaign and have no regular army in the field.

The Prayer-book, in the Marriage Service, tells us explicitly, “First
it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in
the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of His Holy Name.”
Here we have the voice of the Church speaking plainly enough, and both
it and the authority of Scripture are unanimous in clear expression or
unmistakable implication. The Christian attitude has been admirably
summed up in Father Black’s pamphlet, to which I acknowledged my
indebtedness in the preface of my book _First it was Ordained_, and
from which strong, lucid, and outspoken statement I quote a few
sentences:--

     “Of this systematic wickedness, unfaithfulness is the natural
     consequence in many cases. Logically there is nothing but a
     sense of commercial honesty to keep a woman who has lost the
     reverence of marriage to one man. The obligation has no hold on
     her higher nature, and when passion or convenience press the
     balance there is no sufficient reason why she should be very
     scrupulous.

     “If women treat themselves, and are treated by their husbands
     as mere animals, all idea of chivalry is at an end; and this,
     no doubt, is in a measure the ground for a license of speech
     and action in even our public amusements, contrary not only to
     the _ethos_ of Christianity, but to the principles of a
     civilization worthy of the name.

     “Women who interfere with the natural end of marriage--the
     bearing of children--are wives in name, in reality prostitutes.
     Men who require or encourage such acts are corrupters, not
     husbands. When I said in my sermon that trifling with God’s
     laws of marriage was a horrible sin, I was thinking chiefly of
     the woman’s side of the matter.

     “True manliness is, however, no less to be desired than true
     womanliness. In the words of Lord Tennyson--

     “‘Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,’ the man should
     find in himself and display to his wife. Philosophy and
     religion are in accord here. St. John writes to young men,
     ‘because ye are _strong_ and have overcome the wicked one.’
     Professor Huxley, ‘that man has had a liberal education who has
     been so trained that his body is the ready servant of his will;
     whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will
     the servant of a tender conscience, who has learned to love all
     beauty and to hate all vileness, to respect others as himself.’
     To me that judgment seems a manly one which pronounces the
     corruption of a wife by a husband a viler thing than the
     gratification of lust in the common stews. This latter less
     deeply degrading to society or injurious to the nation at
     large.

     “But you and I, my dear sir, are Christians; and our concern is
     with Christian marriage. Here, as in everything else, the truth
     of Christ will deliver men from mistakes. Christian marriage in
     common with all other Christian things has in it the law of
     self-denial and self-conquest. Such is the Apostolic view of
     it; thus it is to be ‘in the Lord,’ and only ‘in the Lord’ is
     it permitted to the Christian.

     “Holy Scripture is of course everywhere clear as to the end of
     marriage, and God’s condemnation express against the perversion
     of it, ‘the Lord slew him.’ St. Paul wills ‘that women marry
     _and bear children_.’”

Is not this plain speaking? and could it be bettered as an expression
of a militant Christian’s hatred and horror of what is debasing and
foul?--I think not. We are not all given the power of feeling the
intense loathing for a very generally committed sin which is
manifested here. A life in the world and of the world induces a
tolerance which is very often laziness and cowardice. We are not to
hate the sinner, of course, but only the sin, but which of us cares to
inveigh against the vice of a friend? Savonarola was not a popular
parson, though Santa Maria del Fiore was always crowded when he was in
the pulpit. We ought to be thankful for such bludgeon-sturdy words as
these which show us the carrion-passions which war against the soul
in their true light.

I know, you know, most men know, how extraordinarily easy it is to
become familiar with our vices so that in a short time they become no
vices at all, but just little pleasant failings which we share with
some of the best fellows in the world. And all becomes dim and misty
in the shadowy thoroughfares of thought, while it is only now and
then--perhaps never at all--that some bugle-breeze blows over us and
sounds _réveillée_ to the sleeping soul.

If we are sensualists, though we don’t realize it, we always live as
though we were immortal; immortal in the sense that we shall never die
and once more be born. Yet it is a strange truth in life that the man
or woman who is converted to a clean life from sins of the body, has
often more power than any one else to warn and exhort against
sensuality. It is the man from whose eye the mote and beam has been
removed who can speak most convincingly of the horrors of the dark.
“Experto crede!” he calls out to mankind, and out of the uncleanness
is brought forth meat. Let us see what Aurelius Augustinus--that old
Father of the Church we call Saint Augustine--has to say of this
danger and sin which we are considering. We all know what the Saint’s
early life was like, what was the life of a young man at a Pagan
University in the fourth century. From his eighteenth year until he
was thirty-two the Saint whom we revere lived in open vice at
Carthage. On Easter Eve, April 387, he was baptized, and tradition
tells us that then the massive harmony of the _Te Deum_ was composed.
No theologian has influenced the mind of Christendom more greatly than
this man, not only by his writings, but by the spectacle we find in
them of the fervour and devotion of his inner life. Remember that he
knew all the bitter knowledge of lust, and hear how he writes of those
who would prevent conception:--

     “Quia etsi non causa propagandæ prolis concumbitur, non tamen
     hujus libidinis causa propagationi prolis obsistitur sive voto
     malo, sive opere malo. Nam quid hoc faciunt quamvis vocentur
     conjuges, non sunt, nec ullam nuptiarum retinent veritatem, sed
     honestum nomen velandæ turpitudini obtendunt.”

And of those who use drugs to prevent the birth of children, he
further says:--

     “Aliquando eo usque pervenit hæc libidinosa crudelitas, vel
     libido crudelis, ut etiam sterilitatis venena procuret.

     “Prorsus si ambo tales sunt, conjuges non sunt, et si ab initio
     tales fuerunt, non sibi per connubium, sed per stuprum potius
     convenerunt. Si autem non ambo sunt tales audeo dicere aut
     illa est quodam mode meretrix mariti, aut ille adulter uxoris.”

What is to be done? What is the duty of Christians, and how shall they
combat this evil? Unless it is to spread and spread till every part of
our natural life is infected, something must be done. The
Neo-Malthusians are not only teaching married people how to avoid the
responsibilities of marriage, but they are teaching unmarried people
to do so as well. This is a fact which must not be lost sight of, as
more than one clergyman has pointed out. If fear of consequences is
removed chastity becomes more than ever threatened. If there is the
wish and inclination to sin, and that wish is only not gratified
because inconvenient results may lead to discovery, it is true that
the moral value of people in such a case is small. But a general
recognition of the fact that it is easy to sin will have incalculable
influence for harm on those who are as yet on the border-line between
the claims of self-gratification and control. Public sentiment becomes
lax and unstrung. Simultaneously with the decline of the birth-rate
the newspapers show every day that the old ideal, the sacred English
ideal of the family is departing. Our greatest living novelist says
openly, “Certainly one day the conditions of marriage will be changed.
Marriage will be allowed for a certain period, say ten years.” In
many parts of America, where the President is ceaselessly urging his
countrymen to denounce and give up Neo-Malthusian practices, the home
has already disappeared. From a large collection of information and
statistics I take only one example, quoted in a leading English
newspaper. There is no need for a single word of comment, save that I
do not vouch for the truth of the newspaper report which, in its very
appearance, proves my point.

     “Mrs. Le Page, a New York lady who has just married her eighth
     husband, crystallizes her experience in life.

     “Five of her seven former husbands are still alive, and they
     have just sent messages of encouragement to the new incumbent.
     The other two have died.

     “Mrs. Le Page’s maiden name was Mary Johnson, and she was the
     daughter of a Connecticut farmer. She was only fourteen, but
     well grown for her age, when she contracted a runaway marriage
     with a seventeen-year-old Danbury clerk named William Wakeman.
     In accordance with the American practice of hyphenating family
     names, she became Mrs. William Johnson-Wakeman. It was a happy
     marriage for three days, and then her family interfered, and
     the marriage was annulled.

     “Two years later, while in a New York elevated train, she made
     the acquaintance of Mr. Harry Saunders, a rich contractor’s son
     and a commercial traveller. After two days’ courtship she
     became Mrs. Henry Johnson-Wakeman-Saunders, and lived in
     perfect happiness, accompanying her husband on his travels for
     three years, until he died.

     “Shortly afterwards the lady married a railroad man, and was
     happy as Mrs. Joseph Johnson-Wakeman-Saunders-Powers, until he
     was killed in an accident. She next married a Jersey grocer,
     but the bonds being severed in the Divorce Court, she married a
     hotel-keeper, becoming Mrs. John
     Johnson-Wakeman-Saunders-Powers-Lindley.

     “Being once more disappointed, she was again freed by
     the Divorce Court, and continued her search for the ideal
     husband, whom she thought she had found when she became
     Mrs. Thomas Johnson-Wakeman-Saunders-Powers-Lindley-Godfrey.
     But John Godfrey compared unfavourably with his predecessors, and
     the Divorce Court restored her freedom. On the following day she
     became Mrs. Wilbury-Johnson-Wakeman-Saunders-Powers-Godfrey-Gay-
     (she says that the name too well described his character, as she
     shortly proved to the satisfaction of the Divorce Court) Crowther.
     This husband soon revealed his true character, and she had no
     difficulty in regaining her maiden liberty.

     “Mrs. Benjamin (many hyphens) Le Page believes that her
     husband, who is English born, and has made considerable money
     in this country, is the long-sought ideal, but if he does not
     prove so--she is only thirty-nine, and there is still plenty of
     time to continue the search. She says that she had long wished
     to marry an Englishman, having been favourably impressed by
     what she had heard of their high qualities as husbands. She
     intends giving the experiment a thorough trial. So far, it has
     proved satisfactory, but she says that it is impossible to form
     a correct judgment of any man until she has been married for
     two or three weeks.

     “Marriage, she says, is such a lottery, but it is the blessed
     state which it is ordained every woman shall occupy. Her life’s
     mission is to find a pre-ordained mate, and she would not be
     deterred as many women, by a first failure, but should try and
     try again until successful.

     “‘My experience,’ she says, ‘is that women make a mistake in
     waiting for a man to do all the wooing. When I was young and
     inexperienced I fell into that error, and consequently I had
     several disappointments. But when I was thirty I realized that
     a woman’s duty--well, right--was to do the wooing.’”

Again I ask what is to be done to influence public opinion, to rouse
Christians in the same way that the National Conscience has been
roused upon the Drink question?

An enormous amount of good can be done by the personal efforts and
example of those in a position to influence others--pastors, doctors,
Christian layworkers. Yet is it an impossible hope that some day a
league or confraternity to fight the battle may be started? Are there
no people of sufficient weight and importance in the world’s eye to
come forward and do this, no folk whose place will secure them a
hearing, whose convictions will interest and convert others?

Eighteen months ago I published, in my book _First it was Ordained_,
the sketch of an organized society on definite lines. In the course of
the tale the founder of this league writes to an official in the
Census Office who is alarmed at the decline of the birth-rate, and
outlines the lines on which the society is to be started.

With some necessary elisions this is the letter:--

     “You will see, therefore, that though there has been, and
     doubtless will continue to be, a great deal of windy talk on
     these matters, there is no organized body of men and women, no
     league, no union, either religious or political or both, which
     is devoted to dealing with the question, to rousing the
     national conscience and fighting the Neo-Malthusians tooth and
     nail.

     “Wifehood--which generally means motherhood--is the predominant
     profession of women all over the world. The future of the
     world, and of course of any state in it, rests upon the quality
     and the quantity of its children. A prominent sociologist has
     just written, ‘If the conditions under which the profession of
     motherhood is exercised are silly and rotten, our fleets, our
     armies, do no more than guard a thing that dies. In Great
     Britain, now, I think they are more or less silly and rotten.’
     Let us admit that this writer is correct. He does no more than
     voice conclusions at which even the most superficial student of
     the census returns must have arrived.

     “What is to be done, then? How are we who are Christians and
     love our Lord, citizens who love our country, to fight the
     present conditions?

     “That is what a band of people, including those I have
     mentioned, are discussing. They have arrived at a definite
     conclusion.

     “A great league is to be formed of English men and women. Great
     names will be at the head of it, it is to be national. I have
     already pointed out to you that even the revelations of the
     census have not stirred the ordinary person. His patriotism has
     not been roused, and, you may be certain--as I am certain--that
     no question of national expediency on this point _will_ stir
     the ordinary person, who is either indifferent or actually
     engaged in helping England’s decadence by the restriction of
     his own family. A league started on the grounds of expediency
     and the common good alone would be an egregious failure.

     “Utilitarianism never fired a great moral movement yet. It
     never will; because, before a man becomes a national
     utilitarian, he must get over _personal_ utilitarianism. And in
     this case of the restriction of family, the degradation of
     marriage, _personal_ utilitarianism is directly opposed to
     national welfare, and the personal wins.

     “We must come back to the one Power and Force over the hearts
     and minds of men and women. We must come back to religion.

     “Here is the Church’s great opportunity. There has never,
     perhaps, in the whole history of the Church in England been
     such a chance given to her. Our crusade must be a crusade made
     in the light of the Incarnation, under the auspices of God the
     Holy Ghost--_the Lord and Giver of Life_.

     “Do you begin to see what I mean, what we hope for? The part of
     the Holy Spirit’s work, which we recite in the Creed, has been
     largely forgotten. Lord and Giver of Life! We are about to
     revive the recognition and memory of the fact. We are going to
     use this cardinal point of Christian belief as our watchword
     and battle-cry.

     “The gradual decline of literal belief in the Incarnation, the
     growth of a Protestantism which is on its way towards
     Unitarianism, the spread of Unitarian doctrines under other
     names, among the varied sects of dissent, have meant that an
     appalling disregard of life as the gift of God, its Author, has
     come among us. It is because you and I believe that Jesus was
     God as well as man that we insist upon the sacredness of human
     life.

     “To-day, the loss of thousands of lives in a battle is printed
     as a piece of casual news. There is no particular sense of
     horror in the minds of any one. Murders are committed every day
     in momentary bursts of passion over trifles. Suicides increase,
     not only when some long-continued misery may seem to give a
     shadow of excuse, but when there has been some trivial
     disappointment. And so, leaving out a hundred other instances,
     one comes down to the truth of which every priest, every
     doctor, and every nurse is aware, the frustration of God’s
     intention of childbirth--the reason for the terrible
     disclosures which you and your colleagues have given to the
     world in your census returns.

     “Our league will be, therefore, a great _Church_ League. We
     shall invite every English man and woman to join it, who
     believes that Christ was God. This is the only way in which we
     can make such a society do its work and accomplish its end.
     Directly we begin to allow the political altruist who has no
     definite belief in Christianity to join us, so surely our
     influence and opportunity will begin to decline. Compromise is
     no use whatever. We shall be bitterly assailed, and for a time
     we shall not seem to make much headway. I say _seem_, and for
     this reason: people who belong to us will not advertise their
     membership. The press, which is not interested, as a whole, in
     religious affairs, will not understand our aims, nor will it
     be--so I imagine--in sympathy with them. And any movement that
     has for its object, as this will have, the improvement of
     sexual morality, will be fought by the methods of ridicule and
     contempt. But this will be but surface, and in time the
     influence of our work will not only be felt, but seen. The
     wizards of figures will be at work once more.”

Is this a dream and impracticable? It is for the great middle classes
of England to answer during the coming years. The middle classes
really rule. They do not command public opinion, but they do what is
more than that--they persuade it. They represent more than the
remaining classes the austerity and also the Christianity of the
United Kingdom and the Dominions beyond the seas.

The question rests with them, and there are many who still hope and
believe they will be faithful to their trust who are convinced--“DABIT
DEUS HIS QUOQUE FINEM.”




THE HISTORICIDES OF OXFORD




III

THE HISTORICIDES OF OXFORD

        “_Et quidquid Graecia mendax,
    Audet in historia._”
                                JUVENAL.


Sir Robert Walpole, who sometimes spoke with an eloquent crash that
echoes in our ears to-day, once said, “Do not read history to me, for
that, I know, must be false.” Walpole may have read the _Scienza
Nuova_ of Vico probably in the French translation, and could hardly
have failed to know something of Bossuet and Montesquieu. The result
of his deliberations on the labours of contemporary historians is
expressed thus, in a short, sudden bark of contempt.

Sir Robert made history, and did not dare to attempt the far more
arduous task of writing it. When he gave it, his judgment had not so
much value as it has to-day. Some of us read the limpid prose of
Bossuet still, nor is the _Grandeur et Décadence des Romains_
forgotten. Yet if at this moment a statesman were to repeat the
opinion in reference to most of the history taught and written in
Oxford, he would only be speaking the literal truth. The youth of a
nation are Trustees for posterity, and it is to them in the first
place, and to those who are responsible for their education in the
second, that this paper is addressed.

I am aware that I am going to say some astonishing things, nor am I,
under the sense of a strong conviction, confounding antipathy with
duty. My words may fail to penetrate into the gloom of that temple
where the fanatic priests of the inarticulate, inaccurate, and dull
still sacrifice victims to the idols Freeman and Stubbs. But I have a
reasonable expectation of a wider audience, and it lies in the hands
of that audience, the undergraduate members of the University and
their parents, to say if the present state of things shall continue.
The Hebdomadal Council, Congregation and Convocation represent an
insignificant minority. It is to the Pupil not the Tutor, to the
Parent not the Fellow, to the Majority not to the Minority that I
propose to speak.

It is axiomatic that no sum which the well-to-do undergraduate is
prepared to pay could be too high for a perfect education and a
learned environment. It is the fact that neither the one nor the other
is provided, which deserves the attention, and should excite the
alarm, of those who expect the former, the latter, or a combination of
them both.

The poor man, to whom a good degree means a knife with which he will
open the world’s oyster, suffers more greatly than the wealthier man.
But both suffer, and both have a right to expect that in paying money
for a genuine article they shall certainly obtain it.

The object of this essay, therefore, is to awaken the majority upon
the whole matter, more especially that portion of the majority that
designs to read history. The power lies in your hands. It is only by
your acquiescence that the scandal continues, and it is the money of
you and your parents which runs the machine. Once supplies are
stopped, the present state of things will also stop with automatic
suddenness. The art of history--for it is an art and not a
science--will then revive in its full splendour, as the frescoes glow
out upon the walls of an ancient church when the disfiguring whitewash
is removed. The art of history will take its proper place and exercise
its right function in the University, and the Historicides will remove
their activities to a sphere in which they will be more appreciated. I
believe that a University exists in Hayti....

I purpose a comprehensive summary of this question, and have spared no
trouble to make the indictment as fair and accurate as I can. For a
considerable period I have been steadily gathering data and forming
opinions. Documents of importance and value have been furnished to me,
and if something actual and conclusive does not result, then the fault
is that of the writer, who has failed to deal adequately with the
material which he has himself collected and with which he has been
lavishly and generously supplied.

“Doest thou well to be angry?” was the question asked of the Hebrew
prophet, who thereupon “went out of the city, and sat on the east side
of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the
shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.” And finally
came the answer of Jonah, “I do well to be angry, even unto death.” My
friends and I have built our modest place of espial, and we have our
idea of what would become of the city were it left in the hands of
certain rulers. That we do well to be angry I hope to show.

In the first place, it is really necessary to define history, and the
duties of the historian. Until we have done this we have no
standpoint. The axiom must always precede the syllogism just as the
epithet concludes it. No one can build a basis in a vacuum.
Innumerable minds have been at pains to define history.

From the remote time when Lucian published his treatise _How History
ought to be Written_ until the depressing moment when Bishop Stubbs
first attempted to write it, there has been an enormous divergence of
thought on this point. Kant believed that Dynasty and Nation, Emperor
and Clown were alike incidents and puppets illustrating the theory
that an irresistible, all-pervading Force works through history
towards one end--the development of a perfect constitution. If Kant
had written history and applied his method instead of indicating it,
he would have had us believe that history is a science to be studied
under the limiting influence of a rigid formula.

Ranke thought, and thought rightly, that the analysis of original
documents alone made possible the synthesis of the past, while the
trained historian in his endeavour to get at the truth should be chary
of accepting contemporary authors, unless eye-witnesses of the events
they chronicled. Yet Ranke definitely placed himself with those who
were beginning to believe that history was a science and nothing more.

Guizot, who edited Gibbon, freshly defined the labours of the
historian. Guizot’s view was that faithful research, _with its
results duly applied, ought to enable the historian to supply such a
picture of the past that it should be both to his readers and himself
a veritable present_. I know of no more illuminating conception. But
how can an historian supply the picture unless he has a competent
knowledge of psychology? To write about human beings in the past
without a knowledge of psychology is exactly like writing a history of
locomotives without understanding anything whatever about the nature
and properties of steam.

It is only quite lately that the scientists have allowed psychology to
be a science, with, for example, as fixed a place and purpose as
biology. If any one asked me for a list of authors from whom he would
learn something of psychology I should probably commend to him Maher
(1900), Spencer (1890), Stout (1899), James (1892), M’Cosh (1886), and
so on.

You see the dates, do you not? You realize what every one who lives in
the realm of thought, as also many who work in the sphere of action,
must realize? Briefly it is this. The old historians were concerned
only with the simple results of investigation; the best modern
historian adds to his equipment a knowledge of the processes of
thought. The older sciences are joining hands with the new science of
psychology. It is discerned that the individual temperament must
clothe the bones of fact with the colour and movement that
psychological knowledge alone can give.

It is discerned, but only by the important people as yet--only by the
people who matter and count. The Oxford historians whom I am attacking
have not realized it and will never realize it, which is the precise
reason why we must reform them or give them the alternative of
staffing the upper grade board schools.

James Anthony Froude did realize this certainty, and his works are not
recommended to be read by candidates for history honours. The
malignant personal hatred of Freeman, the stupidity of lesser men,
long endeavoured to crush and limit the influence of the greatest
historian, because the completest artist, who wrote history in our
era. The endeavour to suppress him continues, but it is no longer
anything but an endeavour. The times are changing very rapidly, and
the triumphant war-whoops of some years ago have sunk to-day into the
moribund whimpers of the discredited and deposed.

Everybody in Oxford is waking up to the fact that if history is to
have unity of organism and purpose it must have artistic proportion
and be informed by art. The leaven has been working for a long time,
unobserved by the people it is destined to destroy at the moment of
completed fermentation. It is always thus with revolutions. The
period of gestation is lengthy and its processes are obscure. But the
completed moment arrives, the goddess bursts in full armour from her
sire, or Gargantua is born “crying not as other babes used to do,
miez, miez, miez, miez, but with a high, sturdy, and big voice!”

The occasion that has set in motion forces which in no short time will
destroy the little eminence of the Oxford Historicides, was the
publication of Mr. Herbert Paul’s _Life of James Anthony Froude_.
Everything had led up to that; I was cognizant of all the restlessness
and disgust which were seething below the surface, and when at last
the volume fell into Oxford with the noise and reverberation of a
thunder-bolt, I was daily informed of the hideous consternation of
those who realized that their day was over, that the judge was set and
the doom begun, that no one could stay it.

I wish that I could write frankly and openly of the disturbance and
alarm the book occasioned. If I were publishing this essay in the
first instance in America I should certainly do so. However, as it
will appear in England and afterwards in the Land of Freedom of
Speech, this joy is not permitted to me. As Mr. H. G. Wells would say,
“Figure that the bomb fell upon the green of All Souls’ while the
clock in the gateway of Christ Church was in the act of striking
twelve.”

The rush and hurry, the frightened consultations, the squeaks of those
who realized that Nemesis was at hand at last and was beating at the
door, were, I can assure the public that will read this paper,
comparable to nothing so much as the occasion when the feet of the
ferret are heard drumming down the hollow burrows of the warren, while
the rabbits know the day of irresponsible frolic is over and that they
must die in the dark or in the open, but must die.

The Historicides of Oxford have always feared an extended public and
distrusted a name that has been made without their connivance, and
which is beyond their reach. I find it difficult to suppose that those
who do not realize the incredible narrowness and stupidity of a
certain type of history don, will believe the anecdote I am about to
tell. Nevertheless, it is true. A pedant, whose name I will not give,
was recently heard to refer to Mr. Thomas Hardy in these words,
“Hardy? Hardy? Oh, do you mean the little novelist man?”

Let me put it before you quite plainly and in antithesis. Hardly
anything could better illustrate the appalling mental position of the
_camarilla_ that has got to go. Here is a priggish person, whom no
one has ever heard of outside Oxford, piping out his contempt for a
man who is generally recognized as one of the most distinguished
novelists and one of the chief artists alive in our time.

It is possible that many people will not immediately appreciate the
reason for all the terror excited by Mr. Paul’s biography. The outside
man cannot quite know how Froude is, and always was, hated and feared
by a certain section of the Oxford historians. They were always trying
to hit him below the belt because he hit them above the intellect.
There was a definite conspiracy among the malignant, from Freeman
downwards, to lie about Froude in every conceivable way, and to
complete their malicious impudence by calling Froude himself a liar.
Froude was a master of English prose; the highest praise that can be
given to the jargon which his detractors wrote, and write, is that it
is not exactly Esperanto. Froude understood the colour of words, the
movements of a paragraph, the harmonic rhythm of an emotion expressed
in prose. His words were the incarnation of his original thought,
theirs but accentuated their borrowings. While the genius of this
great man was coming into its own, while it burned brightly and yet
more bright, while all thoughtful England was beginning to be moved
and stirred by a new force, and the possessor of it was living with
intellects as great and gracious as his own, the Oxford historians
slept in their padded rooms, and because they snored loudly imagined
they were thinking. Too indolent to search for the truth, they
contented themselves with dodging difficulties, and persuading each
other that their ostentatious obscurity was fame.

There came a time at last when James Anthony Froude could no longer be
ignored. His achievement was beginning to be a national possession,
and he shared the councils of the rulers. The echoes of his fame
reached the ears of the troglodytes, and, led by Freeman, they swarmed
to the attack, yelping a pæan to mediocrity and brandishing weapons
from a more than doubtful armoury.

Froude, as Mr. Paul has pointed out, “toiled for months and years over
parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting
the calligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition
assigning his proper share to each. Freeman wrote his _History of the
Norman Conquest_, upon which he was at this time engaged, entirely
from books, without consulting a manuscript or original document of
any kind.”

Freeman,--the head of the daguerreotypical historians,--attacked a
man whom he very well knew was his superior, pretending publicly to a
greater knowledge of the special subject under discussion, and
cynically denying any special knowledge in private. In public Freeman
represented his hostile attitude as the natural outcome of his zeal
for truth; in private it was known that he was actuated by personal
hatred, and the discoveries made by Mr. J. B. Rye on the margins of
Freeman’s books in Owens College library have discredited him for all
time. Again I quote from Mr. Paul’s _Life of Froude_:--

     “Freeman’s biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and
     unbroken silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I
     think the Dean’s conduct was judicious. But there is no reason
     why a biographer of Froude should follow his example. On the
     contrary, it is absolutely essential that he should not; for
     Freeman’s assiduous efforts, first in _The Saturday_, and
     afterwards in _The Contemporary Review_, did ultimately produce
     an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an
     habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the
     truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more
     about Freeman’s qualifications for the task which he so lightly
     and eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion,
     was not incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and
     spoke openly to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean
     Hook, famous for his _Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury_,
     he wrote, on the 27th of April, 1857, ‘You have found me out
     about the sixteenth century. I fancy that from endlessly
     belabouring Froude, I get credit for knowing more of those
     times than I do. But one can belabour Froude on a very small
     amount of knowledge, and you are quite right when you say that
     I “have never thrown the whole force of my mind on that portion
     of history.”’ These words pour a flood of light on the temper
     and knowledge with which Freeman must have entered on what he
     really seemed to consider a crusade. His object was to belabour
     Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as he says,
     ‘very small,’ but sufficient for enabling him to dispose
     satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient
     toil in thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion,
     also writing to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, ‘I
     find I have a reputation with some people for knowing the
     sixteenth century, of which I am profoundly ignorant.’ It does
     not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in _The
     Saturday Review_ to make people think that, as Froude’s critic,
     he deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private
     disclaims.

     “Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After
     Freeman’s death his library was transferred to Owens College,
     Manchester, and there, among his other books, is his copy of
     Froude’s _History_. He once said himself, in reference to his
     criticism of Froude, ‘In truth there is no kind of temper in
     the case, but only a strong sense of amusement in bowling down
     one thing after another.’ Let us see. Here are some extracts
     from his marginal notes. ‘A lie, _teste_ Stubbs,’ as if Stubbs
     were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any more
     than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or
     original documents. Another entry is ‘Beast,’ and yet another
     is ‘Bah!’ ‘May I live to embowel James Anthony Froude,’ is the
     pious aspiration with which he has adorned another page. ‘Can
     Froude understand honesty?’ asks this anxious inquirer; and
     again, ‘Supposing Master Froude were set to break stones, feed
     pigs, or do anything else but write paradoxes, would he not
     curse his day?’ Along with such graceful compliments as ‘You’ve
     found that out since you wrote a book against your own father,’
     ‘Give him as slave to Thirlwall,’ there may be seen the
     culminating assertion, ‘Froude is certainly the vilest brute
     that ever wrote a book.’ Yet there was ‘no kind of temper in
     the case,’ and ‘only a strong sense of amusement.’ I suppose it
     must have amused Freeman to call another historian a vile
     brute. But it is fortunate that there was no temper in the
     case. For if there had, it would have been a very bad temper
     indeed.”

Until Mr. Herbert Paul’s _Life of Froude_ appeared a year ago, the
Historicides had been continually repeating the lie that Froude
garbled documents, was untrustworthy, and wrote not history but
fiction. History, of course, often imitates fiction, for good fiction
always deals with realities. But these slanderers did not pause for a
definition. They continued to abuse Froude, to prevent their pupils
from reading him, and to refuse him a place in the recognized
curriculum of historical study at the University.

From time to time a doubter or inquirer arose and was promptly
suppressed. Nor was it likely that a man, whatever his private opinion
of those in authority might be, was going to jeopardize his chance of
a good degree by publishing it. There were awkward moments, of course,
for the slanderers. A lie is like a forged promissory note. When it
becomes due another must be forged in order to take up the first. But
the Historicides had the whip-hand. They controlled the examinations,
and they could do what they pleased.

I once wrote a little story which I will outline here, because I think
it illustrates the method of these people whenever any ugly fact was
discovered and some one required an explanation.

There was once a simple-minded old gentleman of a philosophic temper
and an inquiring mind. Blessed with an ample fortune and untroubled by
any business instincts, he devoted his life to the search for truth.
On the whole his life was a happy one, because he possessed the
faculty of going on. His failures were not made tragic with courage,
but were minimized by persistence, and so were not very different from
successes. Yet, as the years went on, he began to feel that in his
time he would never achieve his end. Seeing him somewhat downcast, and
becoming indifferent to his chop and Chambertin, his butler, a
faithful person, came to him one day, and, after venturing a
privileged remonstrance, stated that he had something to disclose. “I
have lately heard, sir,” said the butler, “that truth is really hidden
at the bottom of a well. It may of course, sir, be mere idle talk, but
I think, as far as I remember, we have not looked there yet? There was
the church, sir--we found nothing there--and then I held the lantern
for you in the chapel, too. There was none behind the art wall-paper,
nor did Liberty have any in stock. And it wasn’t in history, sir,
because I turned over every leaf of them Oxford books myself, and
shook them well, too. You did think you’d found it in science, sir, I
remember, there was something that you thought was truth in the bottom
of the test-tube, but then you told me it wasn’t, though I forget what
you said it was after all.”

“Merely a note of a recorded fact, Thomas,” said the old gentleman
sorrowfully. “But do you _really_ think there is anything in this idea
of yours?”

“I cannot be positive, sir,” the butler replied; “but I see it stated
definite at the end of a leading article in the _Artesian Engineer_.”

“Have we a well on the premises, Thomas?” the old gentleman asked,
putting on his spectacles and rubbing his hands briskly together.

“I asked the gardener this morning, sir,” Thomas answered, “and he
informs me that there is an old disused well by the cucumber-frame
which could be opened easily enough by a couple of men working for a
week.”

“Engage some men at once,” said the old gentleman, now thoroughly
interested and pleased, and that day he enjoyed his chop with all his
accustomed pleasure. The faithful butler, who had all his life lived
worthily and well without truth, was overjoyed at the success of his
suggestion. Anticipating, however, another disappointment, he gave
private instructions, received _con amore_ by the workmen, that they
were not to hurry over their task of opening the well, and for a month
the old gentleman’s appetite whetted by hope, was all that his
faithful retainer could desire.

At length the work was done, the well was fully opened, and the
page-boy (an adventurous youth) descended in the bucket. There was a
tense silence in the garden as the boy disappeared, until his
hollow-sounding voice hailed them from below vibrating with
excitement.

“I’ve got un, sir,” ascended in a triumphant pipe; “he be here, sir,
sure ’nuff!”

In a moment more the young fellow came to the surface, holding a large
and speckled toad in his hand. On the back of the reptile an
arrangement of orange-coloured spots spelt out the word TRUTH.

The old gentleman saw it, fell into uncontrollable rage, snatched the
wondering reptile from the page-boy’s hand and stamped out its life
upon the ground.

“To the house all of you,” he cried; “and never let me hear the name
of truth again!” With that he forswore all his former theories, and in
bitter irony started a society paper. However, the gardener, a wise,
silent, and pawky person, came along later, and, picking a diamond
from the crushed _débris_ of the toad took it home and hid it away for
the rest of his life, fearing discovery. When the gardener died, his
relatives discovered the jewel, and knowing nothing of its value threw
it away.

The old gentleman made an enormous fortune out of the society paper.

Forgive the digression. This, or something like it, was what the
Historicides of Oxford did before the publication of Mr. Paul’s book.
Whenever any one showed them the truth they snatched it from him, and
ordered him back into Stubbs’s Charters.

I have already said something of the terror the _Life of Froude_
excited. In a swift moment pretensions were exposed, lies were shown
to be lies, and people began to read _Froude_. Mr. Paul made it quite
plain that the accusations of dishonesty against Froude were utter
fabrications. Mr. Paul, himself a learned historian, an artist and a
man of letters, has gone into the charges _seriatim_, and triumphantly
disproved them. No one can ever make them again. _They are lies, they
have been proved once and for ever to be lies._ I cannot quote here
the mass of refutation which has brought about the complete
vindication of the accused historian. This is a summary and nothing
more. It stands for all to read in Mr. Paul’s book, a volume which
should be in the hands of every man who is reading, and means to read
history at Oxford.

This memorable book is a protest against the charlatanry of the
pseudo-scientific school of history. The acts and intentions of people
in the past cannot be known better than the intentions and acts of
people in the present. No one man can possibly sift all, or anything
like all the evidence for any period. Much of the important evidence
is missing. No one can be examined or cross-examined, and for an
historian to write as if he were a judge delivering a decision is a
piece of impertinence. The abler man, assuming his honesty, will make
the abler historian, and the mere bookworm is not the best judge of
what probably happened. It is the dull and incompetent who formerly
invented the fable that brilliant writers are superficial. This is the
lie behind which the “dry as dusts” have lurked for years; it was
their last line of defence, and Mr. Paul has destroyed it.

The historian must be able to write distinguished English, and he must
understand the enormous possibilities of his medium. He must add a
sense of artistry to his scholarship. He must be a man of experience
in human event, a man who has done and suffered; must have been in
crowds and seen “how madly men can care about nothings,” and he must
disabuse his mind of formula and theory before he begins to write. Sir
Arthur Helps said this years ago:--

“To make themselves historians, they should also have considered the
combinations among men and the laws that govern such things; for there
are laws. Moreover our historians, like most men who do great things,
must combine in themselves qualities which are held to belong to
opposite natures; must at the same time be patient in research and
_vigorous in imagination_, energetic and calm, cautious and
enterprising.”

History, in short, is the complement of poetry, and with this
definition as a basis let us proceed to examine some of the Oxford
historians of to-day. But first let me recapitulate the points at
which we have so far arrived.

I have endeavoured to make plain, that--

(_a_) The Oxford historians of the moment enjoy an unjust monopoly,
and exercise a disastrous power of veto.

(_b_) That the _power_ to stop all this, to force these people to
their duty or to send them about their business lies with the
majority.

(_c_) That the majority is composed of those who pay for the education
of their sons, and of those who proceed to the University for an
education.

(_d_) That the historian must be not only a scholar, but an artist and
man of letters also.

(_e_) That the fear of Froude provoked the attack on him in the past,
and has maintained it until a year ago.

(_f_) That Mr. Paul’s _Life of Froude_ has silenced the misstatements
of mediocrity and incompetence for ever.

The whole business of Froude has provided one with a lens in which to
focus the question upon the page, and no one was ever provided with a
better text than I have been. Excuse me, however, if I make a brief
personal explanation. While engaged upon this piece of work an Oxford
man, an old-fashioned High Churchman of the Freeman type, has been
staying with me. It is forty years since he was in residence, and he
did not see with me at all in this matter when we discussed it.

“I cannot understand,” he said, “how you are going to champion Froude
and Mr. Paul against Freeman, who was perfectly sound on Church
matters, as I believe you to be. All you have ever published has been
in support of Catholic Truth, and yet you are earnestly advocating a
historian who was the incarnation of Protestantism.”

It was, in the first place, difficult to make my interlocutor see that
I was writing of the art of the historian, and not the trend of his
opinions. In the second place, I do not agree with him as to the
essential Protestantism of Froude. Froude’s religious attitude has
been summed up once and for all by one of the most brilliant writers
of our time, an historian, artist, and scholar, whom Oxford dons
rejected, but for whom Oxford calls aloud, and for whom St. Stephen’s
has naturally a greater attraction--much as one deplores it.

Mr. Belloc writes:--

     “See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the
     sentences in which Froude asserts that Christianity is Catholic
     or nothing:--

     “‘... This was the body of death which philosophy detected but
     could not explain, and from which _Catholicism_ now came
     forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

     “‘The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are
     compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the
     early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has
     long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was the very
     essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could be
     purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the
     beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without
     his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the natural
     organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization
     could begin again from a new original, no pure material
     substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom God had
     first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in
     the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and around it,
     through the virtue of His creative energy, a material body grew
     again of the substance of His mother, pure of taint and clean
     as the first body of the first man when it passed out under
     His hand in the beginning of all things.’

     “Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity, where
     he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of his
     readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of
     Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and
     Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is
     called a thing ‘worn and old’ even in Luther’s time, and he
     definitely prophesies a period when ‘our posterity’ shall learn
     to ‘despise the miserable fabric which Luther stitched together
     out of its tatters.’”

I can add nothing to Mr. Belloc’s criticism or his quotations.

Let us now take a survey of the history which the powers that be in
Oxford have substituted for the work of Froude. Let us shake the
upas-trees which shadow the quadrangle of the Schools and wonder how
these astonishing vegetables have managed to produce such fruit as
that of which I have to set samples before you.

The Examination Statutes in the section containing the regulations for
the Honour School of Modern History recommend, among other books, that
candidates who take the period 1559-1715 should study _Gustavus
Adolphus_, by Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher, M.A., late Fellow of All Souls’
College, Oxford. The gentlemen who compile the Examination Statutes
would “recommend” almost anything, but I imagine that I am about to
astonish the general reader.

I will begin with Mr. Fletcher’s preface. He himself says in the very
first line that his book “demands little preface.” It would have been
perhaps better for him had he been guided by his own pious opinion and
resisted the temptation to print his confessions in nine
closely-printed pages. I say “confessions” advisedly, for rarely in
the course of a wide experience of books have I set eyes upon a more
candid and almost disarming statement than the one before me here.

In his preface Mr. Fletcher asserts that his book--

(1) “Makes no pretensions to be based upon original research,” and he
follows up this curious admission with ...

(2) “And I cannot claim to have read even all the modern authorities
on the subject.”

And (3) “My knowledge of the Swedish language is by no means
independent of the assistance of a dictionary, nor can I hope to have
escaped that tendency to partiality for which the natural fascination
of such a subject is the only excuse.”

Mr. Fletcher then proceeds to tell us that he was

(4) “Obliged to include accounts of many things of which I had made
no special study. The military history of the Thirty Years’ War is in
itself a case in point. No satisfactory monograph on the subject
exists, and I have often been obliged to confess myself at fault in
grasping the exact meaning of military terms, and the exact effect of
manoeuvres, in an art of which even in its modern shape I know
nothing.

(5) “But the times have so far changed,” he continues, “that I am able
to plead that I am probably not much more ignorant of the art of war
than the majority of my readers are likely to be.

(6) “In those archives” (the archives of Stockholm), “if anywhere, it
is probable that the true Gustavus Adolphus is to be found.” But

(7) He, Mr. Fletcher, “is a man who has no pretension to be a student
of archives.”

Here, then, we have an historian who admits that even the little he
has to offer is borrowed from the books of other people. He has not
taken the trouble to search and inquire for himself, and, content with
profiting by the labours of others more conscientious, he has of
course been unable to verify the accuracy of such labours. Nor has he
even taken the trouble to borrow from the latest sources, for he
informs us, “_and I cannot claim to have read even all the modern
authorities on the subject_.”

Mr. Fletcher does not thoroughly know the language of the country of
which he writes; he has included accounts of many things “of which I
had made no special study” in this precious book; and finally, the
historian of the Victor of Breitenfeld and Lützen knows absolutely
nothing of military history, the art of war, or the meaning of
military terms, in spite of which, at page 119, he declares (_a_) that
Gustavus was “certainly a greater master of tactics than Wallenstein,”
but “not a greater cavalry captain than Pappenheim;” and (_b_) “that
Pappenheim had not the _coup d’oeil_ which enables a man to grasp a
whole battle at once.”

How a man can dare to print such a cataract of admissions I do not
understand. At any rate, tested by the lowest standard, treated with
the utmost leniency, his book stands self-confessed as worthless.
However modest the author’s estimate of his work and the humility of
Heep was as nothing to the assumption of this preface, the book
_cannot_ under any conceivable circumstances be of the least use to
the student. It outrages every canon by which the most amateur of
historians should guide himself to write.

YET THIS BOOK IS RECOMMENDED IN THE EXAMINATION STATUTES TO BE READ BY
MEN WISHING TO TAKE HONOURS IN HISTORY WHILE THE WORKS OF JAMES
ANTHONY FROUDE ARE RIGIDLY EXCLUDED.

I would fain linger a little longer with Mr. Fletcher, possibly one of
the richest unconscious humourists who have ever written history. He
deserves to be known to a wider circle than the mere academic. In
these drab, hurried days, anything that makes for innocent gaiety is
to be welcomed. I think it was Ruskin who said that Edwin Lear’s _Book
of Nonsense_ was one of the most valuable books ever written. It is a
pity that Mr. Ruskin did not live to read Mr. Fletcher’s other work,
_An Introductory History of England_.

_Gustavus Adolphus_ was published in 1900, and Mr. Fletcher was then
described as “Late Fellow of All Souls’ College.” The later and more
mature work was published in 1904, and we then see Mr. Fletcher as a
Fellow of Magdalen.

In _An Introductory History of England_ we have, of course, the usual
preface, from which I wish I had space to quote largely. I have not,
but in turning the leaves, the eye at once falls on another
apologia:--

“I have no pretensions to be a scholar in the original document
sense;” and, “I fear it will be very easy for those who are such
scholars to find many mistakes in detail, as well as to question my
conclusions.”

Further, he speaks of the Honour School of Modern History in language
which I, for one, heartily endorse. “I do not consider,” he says (p.
vi.), “that the immense growth of the History School at Oxford ... is
at all a healthy sign for English education.”

I do not intend to do more than give one specimen of Mr. Fletcher’s
style in this book, though I have read the whole of it with pleasure
and amusement. The paragraph I am about to quote should live in the
annals of the Oxford Historicides for ever. I imagine that in writing
it, Mr. Fletcher had been slyly reading _Oceana_ in secret, and longed
to emulate the vividness of that august prose. The volume of Froude
was obviously out of the way when the purple passage was produced, but
if it loses in style owing to this circumstance, it gains in interest
as the unconnected revelation of a truly extraordinary mind.

“As the ice-sheet advanced, the wild animals gradually moved
southwards; the primitive Briton, unhindered by English Channel or
Mediterranean Sea, walked after the mammoth and the hippopotamus,
shooting at them with wooden arrows tipped with flints. And the
grizzly bear and the sabre-toothed tiger walked after the primitive
Briton.”

We must bid farewell to Mr. Fletcher, the historian preferred to
Froude by certain people! I do not wish to give pain to any one in the
world, much less to one who has given me so much pleasure. But even at
the cost of that, I would ask gentlemen who are reading history at
Oxford, and gentlemen who are sending their sons to read history at
Oxford, to pause and reflect before they entrust grave interests and
momentous personal issues to the mercies of such writers as Mr.
Fletcher, to the direction of the historian _manqué_.

Let us leave the _mala gaudia mentis_ provided by Mr. Fletcher, and
proceed to more considerable men.

In his case we have a person, though ill-equipped by nature or
temperament, engaged in an honest endeavour to write with vigour and
picturesqueness. Grotesque as it may seem to us, the “Primitive Briton
walking after the hippopotamus, and the sabre-toothed tiger walking
after the primitive Briton” shows a genuine attempt at style. It is
from the rude carvings of savage races that the Venus of Milo has been
evolved, and from the mural decoration of the cave-dwellers has the
perfected art of Velasquez or Murillo come.

There are, however, other writers in Oxford to-day who merely
chronicle facts. This is not writing history, of course, but a careful
chronicle of _accurate_ fact is certainly valuable to the student, and
may serve as a ladder by which he may mount into the realms of true
history. Some one must do the spade work, dull and uninteresting as it
may be, and all we ask of the gardener’s labourer is that his toil
should be accomplished thoroughly and well.

One of the books that is put into the hands of history students at
Oxford as a useful work of reference is _European History_ 470-1871,
by Mr. Arthur Hassall, a student and tutor of Christ Church, Oxford.
Let me here explain for the general public that “a Student” of Christ
Church is in the same position as the “Fellow” of another college.

The book at first sight does certainly seem to supply a need. It is a
chronicle, in parallel columns, of the events which occurred in every
country between the dates named. A man who is preparing an essay for
his tutor might well be at a momentary loss for a date. “What was the
exact year in which so-and-so succeeded, or the battle of
such-and-such a place occurred?” he might ask himself, and turn to Mr.
Hassall’s book for answers.

Let us take a particular instance. When was Napoleon III. proclaimed
Emperor? According to Mr. Hassall he was proclaimed twice; in 1852 and
again in 1853. Under _1852_ I read: “The French nation, by a large
majority, sanction the restoration of the Empire (November), and
Napoleon is proclaimed Emperor (December 2).” Lower down, on the same
page, under _1853_, I am told that “Napoleon consults the people on
the subject of the restoration of the Empire, and secures a large
majority in its favour (November 21).... Napoleon is declared Emperor
of the French as Napoleon III. (December 2).”

The right date is 1852. These strange contradictions occur in the
second as well as the first edition of Mr. Hassall’s book, for which
minute accuracy is the only _raison d’être_.

Another “handbook,” this time purporting to be an outline of the
_Political History of England_, and much in use by the long-suffering
student of to-day is published by the Right Honourable Arthur H. Dyke
Acland, M.P., and Cyril Ransome, M.A., Merton College, Oxford. This
book also makes no pretensions to style and any one who buys it has a
right to require that its statements should be minutely accurate.
Nevertheless, in it I find the following conflicting statements.
“1792, April 23. WARREN HASTINGS IS ACQUITTED,” and “1795, Acquittal
of Warren Hastings.” Which is right? A later edition of the handbook
tells me that 1795 is. Yet it is odd, to say the least of it, that in
the seventh edition the wrong date was impressed on the student by the
words, “Warren Hastings is acquitted” being printed in larger type
than they were under 1795.

I am not going to multiply instances of this sort of thing. When it is
necessary to produce a completer indictment of the pseudo-scientific
historians I am able to assure them that it will be done. A great
awakening has come to the University, and a hundred keen, hostile eyes
are focussed upon its chief anachronism. There are many men in Oxford
to-day who can say in their hearts: “So will I break down the wall
that ye have daubed with untempered mortar and bring it down to the
ground.”

I will pass at once to Professor Oman, Commander-in-Chief of
retrograde Dondom.

Much of what Oxford has to bestow of honour and distinction Professor
Oman has received. Some of the rewards of the greatest University have
been his. He may be called the leader of the pseudo-scientific school
now publishing, and in the past has enjoyed such eminence as this
confers, among a corporation whose members are not so famous for the
books they have written as for the books they ought not to have
written.

Professor Oman, in his _Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History_
(1906) said: “I am indignant at all the cheap satire levelled against
the college tutorial system, the curriculum of the schools, the
examinations and their results, which forms the staple of the
irresponsible criticisms of the daily, weekly, or monthly press, of
the pamphlets of a man with a grievance, and of the harangues
delivered when educationalists (horrid word) assemble in conclave.”

I can well understand it. Three months before this lecture was given,
I remember reading an article in the _Army Service Corps Quarterly_,
certainly neither irresponsible nor cheap, though composed by two
writers whose grievance was the inaccuracy of the Chichele Professor.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Napoleon was so profoundly ignorant of the character of the
(‘Spanish’) nation that he imagined,” wrote the Professor in his
_History of the Peninsular War_, “that a few high-sounding
proclamations and promises of liberal reforms would induce them to
accept from his hands any new sovereign whom he chose to nominate.”

At the date when Napoleon is supposed by the Professor to have been
behaving like a Professor, not of war but of history, he was writing
to Murat (May 16, 1808): “Je vous recommande de prendre toutes les
mesures nécessaires pour donner du mouvement dans l’arsenal. _Ce sont
là les meilleures proclamations pour se concilier l’affection des
peuples._” Three days before (May 13), he had warned Murat not to
“flatter the Spaniards too much.... I have,” he wrote, “more
experience of the Spaniards than you. When you told me that Madrid was
very tranquil, I said to every one that you would soon have an
insurrection.”

The article referred to utterly contradicts this statement of
Professor Oman’s. Hundreds of original documents were examined, and
the point was proved with entire brilliance and clarity. The pamphlet
is quite unanswerable, and has never been answered. The quotation from
the Professor’s lecture illustrates the temper and attitude of the
typical unprogressive. Why all criticism of the Professor and his
friends should be cheap and irresponsible I do not know. When Mr.
Herbert Paul writes of Stubbs’s _Constitutional History of
England_--the Bible of the pseudo-historians--that it “may be a useful
book for students. Unless or until it is rewritten, it can have no
existence for the general reader,” and “a novice whose mind is a blank
may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that any
events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century” is
Mr. Paul irresponsible and cheap? Mr. Paul obtained the highest honour
possible in his degree examination; he was a member of Parliament for
South Edinburgh, one of the most cultured constituencies in the
kingdom; he is a member of the present Parliament. As historians,
indeed, the relative positions of Mr. Paul and Mr. Oman, are those of
banker and pawnbroker respectively.

This publicly expressed irritation of the Chichele Professor is
symptomatic.

When Froude gave _his_ inaugural lecture Mr. Oman was present, and
was, he tells us--

...“carried away at the moment by his eloquent plea in favour of the
view that history must be written as literature, that it is the
historian’s duty to present his work in a shape that will be clearly
comprehensible to as many readers as possible, that dull, pedantic,
over-technical diction is an absolute crime, since by it possible
converts to the cause of history may be turned back and estranged.”

Mr. Oman was not carried away very far. The works of the man who was
genius and moralist, man of letters and historian, are still excluded
from the “curriculum,” while the works of the Professor who was
temporarily carried away are still included in it.

It is, indeed, perfectly true, as Mr. Oman very candidly admits, that
“even five years spent as a Deputy-Professor have not eradicated the
old tutorial virus from his system.” He suffers, and I suppose must
always suffer, from the inability to write his history so that it is a
pleasure to read it. The literary instinct is wanting, the artistic
temperament is absent, and like all those writers of whom he is the
most able and the chief, the Chichele Professor can repeat but can
neither create nor recreate.

On the very page where I read “educationalists” (horrid word), I also
read these melodious and polished sentences “equipped with a severely
specialistic curriculum.” _Quip! lis! tic! ric!_ how horribly these
words jar and offend, what a barbarous jargon is this!

Again, “they hope to find this one rather less rebarbative than Law or
Mathematics.” From what sewer of language did the writer drag
“rebarbative” to grace his prose?

It is the same with everything this gentleman writes, or to be exact,
in everything I have read of his.

He speaks of Cæsar’s “chequered and oragious political career.”

He tells us of himself, “I was one of those exceptionals.” You have
only to open any single page of any single book Professor Oman has
written to realize that he either knows nothing of or cares nothing at
all for the art of writing prose. I admit that it is easy enough to
find, and print, faults in the writings of any one, even, here and
there, in the work of a Master. I was re-reading _Oceana_ the other
day, and noticed that Froude has written, “there was no undergrowth,
no rocks or stones, only fresh green grass.” ... But an error such as
this is exactly like a musical discord, inadmissible in the exercise
of a student of harmony, but as nothing in the composition of a
Master.

I do not wish to say whether, in my opinion, Professor Oman’s views of
history are generally sound or if they are not. He would not be where
he is, I suppose, were he not credible and generally accurate. But
what I do know, and what I have a right to say, is that his prose is
turgid, clumsy and without flexibility. He can only tell us that
something has happened, he cannot make that happening live and pulse
within the brain. He is without the first quality of the true
historian, the knowledge and mastery of the medium in which he
expresses his thoughts, and lacking all kinetic power he does not even
know of what wood to make a crutch.

Mr. Oman and all his school are the legitimate descendants of their
Master, Stubbs--the Great Cham of the Historicides. It is a mournful
fact that the incredibly vicious style of William Stubbs has had a
most malign influence over that of lesser men.

The samples of it that I give here will amaze those people who have
not read the learned Bishop, and who have been in the habit of
regarding him as a literary man as well as a historian.

“The steam plough,” Stubbs writes at p. 636, vol. iii. of _The
Constitutional History of England_, “and the sewing machine are less
picturesque, and call for a less educated eye than that of the
plough-man and the seamstress, but they produce more work with less
waste of energy; they give more leisure and greater comfort; they call
out, in the production and improvement of their mechanism, a higher
and more widespread culture. And all these things are growing instead
of decaying.” With what is the historian comparing the steam plough
and sewing machine? And does a sewing machine “call out” a higher
_culture_? and do the things that are “growing instead of decaying”
include a steam plough?

We are also told on page 634, that religion ... “has sunk on the one
hand into a dogma fenced about with walls which its defenders cannot
pass either inward or outward, on the other hand into a mere
war-cry.... Between the two lies a narrow borderland.” Religion,
therefore, “sinks into a war-cry.” Between the war-cry and the dogma
is a narrow borderland. The dogma is “fenced about with walls.”

The recurring word is a constant phenomenon. In paragraph 498, for
instance, we find the sequence “evil,” “debased,” “noble,”
“beautiful,” “good,” “noble,” “beautiful,” “evil,” “debased,” “evil,”
“good,” “good,” “great,” “great,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “noble,”
“greatness,” “great,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “evil,”
“good,” “evil,” “good,” “evil,” “evil,” “good,” “good,” “evil,”
“good,” “good.”

It is true that the devoted and determined fellowship of Oxford men
who are destroying the last position of the Historicides have long
known that Bishop Stubbs was nothing more than a writer of slovenly
text-books. But the general public has not known, and, occupied with
wider interests, has been forced to take the statements of the
pedants on trust.

Yet, if Oxford is to continue to be the chief University of the world,
it will only be by permission of the public. This is a truth which the
pedants will only realize when it is too late. If every father who has
a son whom he hopes will proceed to the University reads what I have
set down here--reads it, and trusting nothing to the assertions of one
man’s pen, makes further and more exhaustive inquiries--we shall very
soon see the frantic capitulation of the Old Guard. I believe the dons
and pedants of whom I have been writing to be honest men enough. They
are sincere in their attitude, no doubt. It is comfortable to think
that everything is for the best in the best of all possible
Universities, but the obstinacy of a dozen mules in a mountain pass
impedes the progress of an army, and because his stupidity is not the
hybrid’s fault is no argument against his removal.

A certain number of Oxford dons are convinced that the Oxford system
is without flaw.

The Historicides are the worst offenders, though some of their
brethren who control the study of Pagan Theology and Philosophy are
not far behind them. Both classes alike are convinced of their
infallibility.

Yet let the educated public realize that--

_No one who wishes to become a B.A. and M.A. of Oxford is forced to
study_

(_a_) English Composition or Literature;

(_b_) The History of the British Empire;

(_c_) The geography of the globe we inhabit;

(_d_) The scientific discoveries and inventions which have profoundly
altered the conditions of modern life;

(_e_) Any of the Fine Arts;

(_f_) Any of the Laws of England;

(_g_) The rules which guide the Law Courts in estimating the value of
human testimony;

(_h_) The Art of Government and Economics;

(_i_) The Art of War;

(_j_) French, German or any Modern Language.

       *       *       *       *       *

In my discredited trade of a novelist--that is to say, the trade of
people who create out of their own brains new things--we have a
technique of phrase. Unimportant to the pedant, as are the methods by
which we are sometimes able to secure a great, and even grateful
public, we still have our little catchwords and there is a certain
freemasonry of craft.

One finishes up, it is generally understood, with “a canter down the
straight.” Bursting away from the restrictions of the Essay, glad to
have finished with an academic convention which says one must write
this way and so, let me attempt to crystallize just what this paper
means, from my own, and doubtless limited, point of view. It means
this.

Upon the sturdy oak, generations old, in which the University may be
typified in allegory, a dusty parasite of ivy has been clinging. This
parasite, which has clogged the newer shoots from the old tree, is a
parasite of the classical and especially of the history don and
pedant. Law, Science and Mathematics have entered Oxford as a bright
light comes into the dark. Here, all is well. And in regard to the
older arts, I think, and many other people who are in the centre of
the ferment of change think with me, all is about to be reconstituted
in a freer air. It remains as a wonder that past and present
undergraduates, the guests of the hotel, remain so individually and
cumulatively distinct from the obstructionist section of its managers
and landlords.

In the darkest days it is astonishing to see how many men reading
history have been able to educate themselves brilliantly in spite of
all opposition. And if Oxford can send out into the world such men as
she is giving to the community now, in spite of the influences which
have checked and hampered them, what may she not do in the days which
are at hand, when the parasite shall be cut down from the old tree and
growth shall be unhampered by the incompetent?

Those days, I am convinced, are at hand, and, curiously enough, it is
the influence of James Anthony Froude which is precipitating the
revolution. What the great historian could not do in his life, the
immortality of his writings is accomplishing. Under Froude’s banner a
devoted and influential band is enlisted. The work of change is
proceeding with wonderful vigour and rapidity.

Let us gird up our loins to push and elbow out the discredited and
effete, and if necessary pay hirelings, and employ executioners to end
the unfortunate history of the immediate past, to destroy the
Obstructionists, the Historicides, and those whom only annihilation
will convince of error.

In conclusion I submit that I have neither been conjecturing what I
cannot find, nor insinuating what I dare not assert; and if a sincere
conviction and a prolonged scrutiny give one title to a part in the
growing condemnation of the Historicides I shall be proud to think
that I have taken a very humble place in the coming renaissance.




THE BROWN AND YELLOW PERIL




IV

THE BROWN AND YELLOW PERIL

A FEW FACTS


This essay, which is a logical conclusion of the last, requires
neither rhetoric nor adornment, were I able to decorate it with them.
It is a statement of plain fact, and I make no apology for writing it
as simply as possible.

The paper is to be regarded in the light of an appendix to the article
on the Oxford Historicides rather than a separate excursus in line
with the others in the volume.

The facts are accurate, and if I could turn them into an
easily-understood diagram and post it up on every hoarding in the
kingdom, I believe that I should be doing a public service.

In 1885--the year when we failed to rescue Gordon--Mr. W. S. Gilbert
produced his “Mikado.”

Which nation or government were, in 1885, the more fitting themes for
satire--the English or the Japanese? The scandals of the Crimean and
Boer Wars; the uniform successes by sea and land of the Japanese in
their struggles with China and Russia, supply us with no uncertain
answer. The Itos, Togos, Oyamas and Kurokis, whom our librettist
represented to us as Ko-Ko, and so on, have taught us--and even the
disciples of Moltke--that the supreme artists of war are at Tokyo and
Osaka, not in London, Washington, Berlin, Moscow or Vienna. The thirty
millions of Japanese who, in the sixties of the last century, were at
the mercy of the white powers, are to-day engaged--politely enough--in
ushering out of China the trades of Europe and North America.

During the last half century a yellow race, a non-Christian people,
has caught up the white races and, so far as the _ultima ratio regum
populorumque_ is concerned--in the bloody tournament of war--has even
surpassed them. Like every one else, I have been alarmed at the sudden
transformation scene. The Mikado who stage-managed the Chino-Japanese
and Russo-Japanese Wars, is very unlike that Mikado who danced for us
on the boards of the Savoy Theatre.

    “_My object all sublime
    I shall achieve in time:
    To make the punishment fit the crime
    The punishment fit the crime._”...

sang Mr. Gilbert’s Mikado.

The punishments which Mutsuhito, the real Mikado, has fitted to the
Czar’s crimes of seizing Port Arthur and Manchuria have been--

(1) The sinking or capture of every Russian man-of-war east of Suez.

(2) The siege and capture of Port Arthur.

(3) The defeats of The Yalu, Nan-shan, Telissu, Laio-Yang, The Sha-ho
and Mukden.

(4) The expulsion of the Russians from Manchuria and Korea.

(5) The cession of half of the island of Sakhalin and indirectly

(6) Civil War and bankruptcy in Russia.

One little point of comparison between ourselves and the Japanese will
make my meaning clear.

We all remember the shameful tale (told, not by Mr. Burdett-Coutts
alone, but by eminent doctors, including Sir Frederick Treves, whose
words were published in Blue-books) of the utter disorganization and
incompetence of the medical and surgical departments attached to the
British army in South Africa.

Sir Frederick Treves has inspected the Japanese hospitals for the
wounded, and pronounced them to be perfect.

The Japanese, your wiseacre retorts, are a race of clever imitators.
We invent; they borrow. They can copy but they cannot produce
masterpieces in the arts and sciences. It is good rhetoric but bad
reasoning. The Japanese have borrowed from us neither their art, nor
their ethics. Never conquered in the past, they have developed a
civilization peculiarly their own. The first Mikado was reigning six
centuries before Julius Cæsar landed his legions at a point not five
miles from the spot where I am writing. The Japanese are an ancient
race with points of view diametrically opposed to our own; and like
the Jews they have lived long and learned wisdom.

     “If I say anything about Shakespeare,” writes Baron Suyematsu,
     “I fear I should at once be considered to be overstepping
     propriety; but I must say that even Shakespeare’s plays, some
     of which I have read or seen performed, have never given me
     such impressions as do the plays of Japan. Whenever we go to
     the Western stages we appreciate the decorations, we admire the
     splendid movements and good figures of the actors and
     actresses, and, so far as we can understand it, the striking
     elegance and powerful delivery of their dialogue, and we enjoy
     ourselves as much as could be hoped; but on coming home we find
     nothing left on our minds which might serve as an incentive in
     our future career. No inspiration, no emulation! Such, then,
     seems to be the difference between our dramatic works and those
     of Western nations.”

Observe that the argument of “art for art’s sake,” is treated by the
talented Japanese diplomatist with the very sanest scorn.

     “In Japan,” says the Baron, “the idea of the ‘encouragement of
     what is good, and the chastisement of what is bad,’ has always
     been kept in view in writing works of fiction, or in preparing
     dramatic books and plays. I know very well that there is some
     opposition to this idea. They say that the writing of fiction
     should be viewed as an art. Hence, so long as the real nature
     and character are depicted, there is an end of the function of
     these works. I do not pretend in any way to challenge this
     argument, but I simply state that it was not so regarded in
     Japan. Consequently, with us, some kind of reward or
     chastisement is generally meted out to the fictitious
     characters introduced in the scene, and these representations,
     either in books or on the stage, are carried out to such a
     pitch as to leave some sort of profound impression on the minds
     of the readers or of the audience. Whatever the other remaining
     parts may be, these features always remain uppermost in the
     minds of the reader or of the theatre-goer. The prominent point
     thus produced is generally a transcendent loyalty, such as a
     loyal servant would feel for his master; the great fortitude
     and perseverance which one exhibits in the cause of justice and
     righteousness; severe suffering for the sake of a dear friend;
     the devotion of parents and their self-sacrifice, great
     suffering, or even self-sacrifice of a wife for her husband, or
     of a mother for her son, to enable the fulfilment of duty to
     the lord and master. I can myself remember many times shedding
     tears when reading works of fiction, or when listening to the
     singing of dramatic songs, or while witnessing dramatic
     performances. This peculiarity seems to be wanting on the
     Western stage. I remember once in London, years ago, my eyes
     becoming moist when I saw a character on the stage, who was
     being taken away as a prisoner, shaking hands with the man who
     had been his dear friend, but who ought to have been suspected
     as the cause of his being taken prisoner, and told him, as he
     went, that he would never suspect or ever forsake him, giving
     the audience a strong impression of chivalric moral strength.
     But that was only a solitary experience.”

As these lines come before my eyes, as I remember the siege of Port
Arthur, I wonder at the subtle irony lurking beneath Baron Suyematsu’s
remark--“Japan is now in alliance with Great Britain; she may not
_perhaps_ be worthy of that alliance, but one may be assured she is
doing, and will always do, her best to deserve it.” The italics are
mine.

The heroism displayed by the Japanese in the late war was almost
unparalleled. I believe only one spy in Japan was discovered. He was
kicked to death. No pro-Russian party existed in Japan.

The Japanese are accused of being dishonest traders. But Japanese
contractors disdained to rob their fellow-countrymen who were risking
life and limb before Port Arthur. Read and re-read _The Garter Mission
to Japan_. Lord Redesdale could detect no signs of arrogance on the
faces of the men who drove back Kuropatkin’s regiments into Siberia or
sank the Baltic fleet.

Some superficial thinkers say that the Japanese are merely mediæval
knights fighting with quick-firing guns instead of lances. This is the
veriest nonsense. They are _practising_ what was _vainly preached_ by
troubadours and romancers to the Brian de Bois Guilberts of the Middle
Ages....

When engaged in the composition of my novel _The Serf_, I studied in
detail the lives of the paladins to whom were chanted the _Chanson de
Roland_, and the stories of _The Round Table_. My conclusions can be
studied in that novel which is now in a sixpenny edition. I found very
few “Ivanhoes” and plenty of “Front-de-Boeufs” at the Court of Richard
“Yea-and-Nay,” who, loyal and filial soul that he was, joined with the
King of France in making war on Henry II., his own father.

There is great force in Professor Inazo Nitobe’s implied criticism of
European chivalry.

     “Did a monarch behave badly, _Bushido_ did not lay before the
     suffering people the panacea of a good government by regicide.
     In all the forty-five centuries during which Japan has passed
     through many vicissitudes of national existence, no blot of the
     death of a Charles I., or a Louis XVI. ever stained the pages
     of her history.”

Whether that be true I do not pretend to say. But what I do know is
that the throne of England, from the conquest of the country by the
first William in 1066, to the accession of the third William in 1688,
has been held on a very precarious tenure.

The Conqueror himself warred with his son Robert. The latter, and his
brothers, gave examples of a _fraternum odium_ worthy of the pen of
Tacitus; Stephen was virtually deposed; Henry II. was attacked by his
own children; a party of the barons supported John against Richard I.,
and French invaders against John; Henry III.’s reign was a long record
of civil war; Edward II., Richard II., Henry VI. and Edward V. were
deposed and murdered; Richard III. was dethroned and slain in battle;
Charles I. was executed by his own subjects; James II. betrayed by the
founder of the Churchill family. Of a truth the virtue of loyalty has
not been the predominant feature of the Anglo-Saxon races. Our
greatest novelist, Thackeray, mocks at it. Ever since the Renaissance
most of the political philosophers of the West have preached the
doctrine “Render _not_ unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.”

     “The love that we bear to our Emperor,” continues Professor
     Inazo Nitobe, “naturally brings with it a love for the country
     over which he reigns. Hence our sentiment of patriotism--I will
     not call it a duty, for, as Dr. Samuel Johnson rightly
     suggests, patriotism is a sentiment and is more than a duty--I
     say our patriotism is fed by two streams of sentiment, namely,
     that of personal love to the monarch, and of our common love
     for the soil which gave us birth and provides us with hearth
     and home. Nay, there is another source from which our
     patriotism is fed: it is that the land guards in its bosom the
     bones of our fathers; and here I may dwell awhile upon our
     Filial Piety.

     “Parental love man possesses in common with the beasts, but
     filial love is little found among animals after they are
     weaned. Was it the last of the virtues to develop in the order
     of ethical evolution? Whatever its origin, Mr. Herbert Spencer
     evidently thinks it is a waning trait in an evolving humanity;
     and I am aware that everywhere there are signs of its giving
     way to individualism and egotism; especially does this seem to
     be the case in Christendom.

     “Christianity, by which I do not mean what Jesus of Nazareth
     taught, but a mongrel moral system, a concoction of a little of
     obsolete Judaism, of Egyptian asceticism, of Greek sublimity,
     of Roman arrogance, of Teutonic superstition, and, in fact, of
     anything and everything that tends to make sublunary existence
     easy by sanctioning the wholesale slaughter of weaker races, or
     now and then the lopping of crowned heads,--Christianity, I
     say, teaches that the nucleus of a well-ordered society lay in
     conjugal relations between the first parents, and further that
     therefore a man must leave father and mother and cleave to his
     wife. A teaching this, in itself not easy of comprehension, as
     Paul himself admits, and very dubious in application, meaning,
     as it so often does, that a silly youth, when he is infatuated
     with a giddy girl, may spurn his parents!

     “Christ certainly never meant it, nor did the decalogue
     command, ‘Thou shalt love thy wife more than thou shouldst
     honour thy father and mother.’”

The dark, unfathomable eyes of our inscrutable Oriental friends are
surveying us. Is it likely that they fail to perceive such patent
facts as the dwindling of the birth-rate, the ever increasing thirst
for material pleasures which is the characteristic of our urban
population, the growth of Socialism, which is its complement, the
ignorance of the rulers, and the obsolete education of the ruled?

We boast of our genius for colonization. Boasts are not facts.

For a century Australia and New Zealand have been English colonies.
The population of Australia is smaller than the population of London:
that of New Zealand is less than a million. Japan is nearer to
Australia and New Zealand than they to England. The Japanese are a
nation in arms; the English rely for their defence on professional
armies. Whilst there is a German fleet at Kiel and a French fleet at
Cherbourg, the bulk of our ships must remain in the vicinity of the
Channel and the German Ocean. We are the allies of the Japanese, and
the Japanese are threatening the Americans, who are rebuilding San
Francisco with funds paid to them by the insurance offices of England.

Now I am no alarmist, _but_ the Japanese have invented for themselves
a high explosive, the shimose powder. I am no alarmist, _but_ the
Japanese have just launched the _Satsuma_, possibly the most powerful
of all men-of-war. I am no alarmist, _but_ the Japanese are turning
school-masters and drill sergeants to four hundred millions of
Chinamen, and the Chinese have been pronounced by General Gordon and
Lord Wolseley to be excellent soldiers. Sir Robert Hart, the
Englishman most likely to prove an accurate prophet, has warned us
against the renaissance of China. The guns of Togo’s fleet have served
Europe with notice to quit the further East, and what the Japanese
have taught themselves, they may teach the Chinamen undisturbed.

The pre-eminence of Japan in the Far East to-day is due to her
admirable system of education.

From _Japan by the Japanese_, a work edited by Mr. Alfred Stead, and
published by Mr. Heinemann, I propose to select certain information
which may startle even retrograde educationalists. _Japan by the
Japanese_ is a collection of studies on Japan written by no
globe-trotters, but by Japanese thinkers and statesmen of the highest
eminence. In the list of contributors I notice the Marquis Ito, Field
Marshals Yamagata and Oyama, Count Okuma and Baron Suyematsu. The
essays on education are from the pens of Count Okuma, Baron Suyematsu,
and other specialists. My humble opinion is that the authorities who
direct the teaching of Modern History at Oxford would do well to
substitute _Japan by the Japanese_ for Aristotle’s _Politics_, Hobbes’
_Leviathan_, and Maine’s _Ancient Law_, which are the only text-books
in Political Science prescribed by the University Examination
Statutes. I may be peculiar, but I prefer the views of Ito, Oyama and
Okuma to those of Aristotle, Hobbes and Maine.

As my last essay dealt with the education supplied at Oxford
University, it will be well to begin by considering the Universities
of Tokyo and Kyoto. Six colleges comprise the former and five the
latter. But, unlike the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge these
colleges are schools for the highly specialized study of some art or
science. At Tokyo the colleges are those of Law, Medicine,
Engineering, Literature, Science, and Agriculture; at Kyoto of Law,
Medicine, Literature, Science, and Engineering. At both Universities
there is also a University Hall established for the purpose of
facilitating original investigation in Arts and Science.

One thing is very noticeable in comparing the University of Tokyo with
the University of Oxford. Amongst the least popular of the Honour
Schools at the institution on the banks of the Isis is the Law School.
At Tokyo the College of Law, in which the student has the option of
specializing on Law or Politics, is by far the favourite. After Law
comes the College of Engineering, and the College of Literature is a
bad third.

It is to the College of Literature (the equivalent of which at Oxford
are the Honour Schools of Languages, dead or living, and the School of
Modern History) that I would call the reader’s special attention. The
Modern History School is the most popular of the Honour Schools at
Oxford; but at Tokyo between 1890 and 1900 there were only 106
students who devoted their time to General History, and 87 to Japanese
History. On the other hand, no less than 651 were engaged in
preparing themselves in Law, and 390 in Politics.

In September 1901, 567 undergraduates were attending a Law course, 409
lectures on Politics; but only 28 were listening to teachers of
Japanese History, while 48 were enrolled in the classes for General
History.

The advocates of Greek insist that the Greek language is the finest of
all instruments for training the human mind. The Japanese do not agree
with our retrogrades. Greek, apparently, is not taught at any School
or University, though Latin is amongst the subjects which a Japanese
medical student is expected to have mastered.

Another great distinction between the Japanese and the English system
is, that only picked men are permitted to avail themselves of a
University education. Further, before proceeding to the University the
undergraduate must have passed through a school specially preparing
him for one of the University Colleges.

“This type of school,” observes Professor Sawayanagi, “is exclusively
peculiar to the educational system of Japan, as there is no equivalent
either in Europe or America.”

In the section of a higher school which instructs candidates for the
Law and Literature Colleges of the University, the subjects taught are
Morals, Japanese and Chinese languages, Foreign languages, History of
Logic and Psychology, the elements of Law, the elements of Political
Economy and Gymnastics. The foreign languages are English, German, and
French, of which two have to be selected.

“Surely,” remark the gentlemen who prepared the article on University
Education in Japan, “a professional man who aims at a high position
could never be satisfied with one language. Certainly it would be
impossible for any one to keep up with the rapid progress of the world
which takes place in all the higher branches of education with only
one European language at his command.”

It is pathetic to think how blind are the rulers of secondary
education in this country to a truth so self-evident.

Before proceeding to a special school preparing candidates for the
University, a Japanese boy must have been at a Secondary School, which
is an institution similar to one of our great Public Schools. Here,
again, the Japanese lay far more stress on essentials.

At how many of our great Public Schools, if any, are the elements of
Law (which may be defined as the rules of the club to which every
British citizen belongs) a subject of instruction? The elements of
Law are a regular feature in the Secondary Schools of Japan. Sooner or
later every Englishman or Japanese is brought in contact with the law
of his land. For what conceivable reason is Law excluded from our
Public School course of education?

Once more, in a Japanese Secondary School, boys are taught the
elements of Political Economy. What proportion of Etonians,
Harrovians, and Wykehamists have opened a book on Political Economy
before they have left school? Yet ought not every member of the
community who intends to exercise his right of voting at a General
Election to be cognizant of the main arguments, for instance, that may
be adduced on behalf of Free Trade or Protection?

The appended table will help any Public School boy or his parents to
estimate the vast difference between the Japanese and the English
conceptions of a liberal education.

          IN JAPAN.                             IN ENGLAND.

    Secondary School (from 12 years       Public School (from 12 years and
      to 17 years of age).                  later to 19 years of age).

    _Subjects taught_--                   _Subjects taught_--
      (1) Morals.                           (1) Religious instruction.
      (2) Japanese language.                (2) English language.
      (3) (_a_) English, French or          (3) French, Latin, Greek.
                German.
          (_b_) Chinese Classics.

      (4) History.                          (4) English History.
                                                Roman      ”
                                                Greek      ”
      (5) Geography.                        (5) Geography (a little).
      (6) Mathematics.                      (6) Arithmetic.
                                                Euclid.
                                                Algebra.
      (7) Drawing.                          (7) Drawing.
      (8) Gymnastics, Drilling.             (8) Gymnastics.
                                                Athletic Sports.
      (9) Singing.
      (10) Natural History, Physics,
             Chemistry.
      (11) Elements of Law.
      (12) Elements of Political
             Economy.

The aim of the Japanese statesmen has been to produce a fine character
residing in a strong body, and a memory stored with knowledge having a
direct bearing on the problems of modern life. It seems to me that a
nation led by men trained according to the method I have indicated
must _ceteris paribus_ be more intelligently governed than one like
our own, where the conduct of affairs is entrusted to persons like Mr.
Arnold-Forster and Mr. Brodrick, who, after leaving a great Public
School, attended Oxford University and obtained their degrees through
its Modern History School.

I pass from Secondary to Primary education. Guardians of children of
school age (_i. e._ over six years of age) are under the obligation of
sending them to school to complete at least the ordinary Primary
School course. The subjects taught to the Board School boys and girls
of Japan are:--Morals, the Japanese language, arithmetic, and
gymnastics, and, according to local circumstances, one or more
subjects such as drawing, singing, or manual work, and for females
sewing. The higher Primary Schools complete the education of the
average Japanese of the lower orders. At the higher Primary Schools,
the scholar continues to study Morals, the Japanese language and
arithmetic, and learns, in addition, Japanese history, geography, the
elements of science, and, as optional subjects, agriculture, commerce,
manual work and the English language. Drawing, singing and manual
work, and for females, sewing, are compulsory. There are also special
commercial schools.

The scope of this essay does not permit me to contrast in detail the
Japanese with the English primary education. Both were established
about the same time. I am not so rash as to pose as an authority on
the education of a country which I have never visited. But one point
has greatly impressed me. Tommy Atkins has been educated at the Board
School. It is complained of Tommy Atkins that he neglects hygienic
precautions against diseases like enteric. The rank and file of the
Japanese army were remarkable for their scrupulous obedience to the
rules of hygiene. My deduction is that the Japanese school and the
Japanese curriculum are, in one essential at least, superior to the
English. I may be wrong, but I do not think it is probable.

What are the conclusions to be drawn from the information which I have
extracted from _Japan by the Japanese_?

“England,” signalled Nelson, “expects every man to do his duty.” Those
words should ring in the ears of each of us. The dons and
school-masters of the country should remember that they are Britons
first and Oxonians and Cantabs afterwards. The warnings which we have
received from Tokyo and Berlin are so impressive that the Anglo-Saxon
races will be insane if they do not take them to heart. The masters of
the fate of the British Empire are, at a general election, the
citizens possessed of the franchise, and between the general elections
the King, the members of the two Houses of Parliament and the Civil
and Military servants of the nation.

We must educate our masters, the electorate and the officials who
obey, or pretend to obey, its mandates. To-day the educational system
of Great Britain is, as a whole, an anachronism. If the next
generation of Anglo-Saxons is educated like the last, the brown and
yellow peril will become acute. To a psychologist, the Japanese and
the Chinese with their cool, iron nerves, seem more fitted for a world
of dynamos and flying machines than the neuropathic Englishman or
American. Should, then, the latter be worse educated than the former,
the British Empire and the United States may expect to follow the fate
of the Spanish and Roman Empires.




THE MENACES OF MODERN SPORT




V

THE MENACES OF MODERN SPORT

     “_Imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis._”

     JUVENAL.


I very well remember the morning when the post brought me an advance
copy of the first number of Mr. C. B. Fry’s _Magazine_.

One saw at once, as the public has since seen, that the periodical
struck a new note in regard to matters of sport. It was to be both
practical and idealistic, sport in the realm of action was to stand
side by side with sport in the sphere of thought. Mr. Begbie sounded
the keynote, in his beautiful inaugural poem--when the clean, strong
body sings a hymn of praise and thankfulness for its splendour of
strength and health; because the joy of physical achievement is so
intense, because the currents of the blood run fast and free.

It is a curious fact in life that a fine and noble thing in itself
nearly always harbours or begets an ugly parasite. No plant grows
unhampered by the insect world, a filthy mildew--so the curator of a
famous picture gallery told me the other day, will appear mysteriously
upon the finest canvas.

In particular, certain phases of sport to-day present the observer
with a curious spectacle. There is a monstrous liaison, a horrid
entanglement between sport and drink!

It is as well to put it quite bluntly at the beginning. If an
unpleasant fact is not stated in the frankest way, it loses its appeal
to the hearer. The man in the street, gets up and strangles a
half-statement with the flippancy of a catch-penny juggler at a
country fair. One is not heard.

I say that a grave danger menaces modern sport and that the danger is
just this....

The more popular games of England are being disturbed and discredited
in a marked manner by the amount of drinking--plain, vulgar _excess_
in alcohol--which surrounds them and follows in their train. A great
number of sportsmen know this perfectly well and genuinely deplore it,
but I am not aware that the subject has been properly ventilated as
yet, save perhaps by “temperance” cranks and prejudiced or ignorant
people, who hide a polemic puritanism under the banner of a misused
word.

Some time ago I had occasion to spend a night in a large manufacturing
district in the North of England. I put up at a local hotel.

It is a large place standing in the four cross roads where electric
trams stopped--a definite centre of the town. The landlord is the
secretary of a most prosperous local cricket club, he is intimately
concerned with the local football--Association--and is a prominent
swimmer.

At all times of the year the district is intensely interested in
sport, and the hotel is a headquarters of it. The walls of bars and
smoking-rooms are covered with photographs of this or that local team,
the whole talk is redolent of sport--and your Northerner or Midlander
is generally the keenest sportsman of all.

It was quite obvious that this hotel was extremely and noticeably
prosperous, everything proclaimed it. I was introduced by the
landlord, a thoroughly good fellow, to various local football players
and swimmers. The talk of the smoke-room was entirely occupied with
sport, there was a real knowledge of, and love for games. One heard
shrewd and penetrating criticism, one saw fine healthy-looking men
who were certainly no mere machines for the decomposing of their
lunch and dinner! In fact, the evening was thoroughly congenial.

Next morning after breakfast, I smoked my pipe in the bar parlour. At
one side of the place was a counter which formed a barrier between it
and the ordinary tap-room. Three young and powerful men came in--it
was about 9.30 in the morning. They asked the barmaid for a drink I
had never heard of--“three warm sodas, please.” The girl opened three
bottles of soda, poured some hot water into each glass and gave it to
the customers.

When they had gone, I asked her what was the meaning of this.

“Oh,” she said, “there was a football supper last night These lads
were all drunk. They often come for a warm soda in the morning, it
sobers them.”

The remark was a prelude to some interesting information. The girl was
a native of the North. She had been in the bars of several Lancashire
public-houses; what she told me was simply a dreary record of personal
experience. In effect, it was this: After a big football match the
hotels were always crowded, packed so closely that it was difficult
for a late-comer to enter. On such occasions the staff of pot-boys
and men to keep order was recruited from the stables. Drunkenness,
distinct drunkenness, was very common. The members of the two teams
were often the core of a welter of riot. The players themselves were
treated by their admirers until they frequently became intoxicated.
Quarrels and rows of all sorts were of almost momentary occurrence. “I
hate all big sporting days,” she said. “You’ve no idea what we girls
have to put up with. They all seem to go mad. But there, the takings
are enormous so I suppose sport’s good for trade!”

I tell this little story not because I was unaware of the facts
before, but because a “picture” is always valuable in making a point,
and because a coincidence has provided me with this picture at the
moment when I am writing on this subject.

Every one knows the state of things in this regard thoroughly well. It
isn’t sporadic--it’s _systematic_. And day by day in many districts,
you may witness the paradox of a man who is above his fellows in the
fine cultivation and training of his body, using his gifts in the
finest way--and drugging himself with poison directly afterwards. And
not only does the athlete himself do this, but his influence has a
far-reaching effect upon others. The hero corrupts innumerable valets,
and what should be an uplifting thing for the spectators, becomes, in
the nick of time and in the punctual place, an opportunity for
unbridled indulgence.

Nearly every footballer knows that what I say is true, and still the
thing grows. It is not too much to say that, at the moment, drink
stands before the progress of popular sport like an armed assassin in
a narrow path. I shall give other instances in a moment, but at this
point it is proper to explain that one is no fanatic. Sport calls
aloud for temperance to-day, but sport is not concerned with
teetotalism. Every active sportsman must cultivate each sense to its
highest power, that is a condition of success in sport. But there is a
sixth sense, not sufficiently recognized by writers attacking an evil
no less than by sportsmen who concur in it.

It is the sense of proportion.

Nothing is more necessary than “proportion” in the consideration of
such a question as this, a subject of supreme importance in modern
sporting life; yet to-day the sense of proportion has been lost by
sportsmen and adherents of sport alike. Long ago Plato pointed out
that we shall never have perfect men until we have perfect
circumstances, and it is the people who condemn a good thing because
of its occasional misuse who destroy their own case. Alcohol is a
good thing, sport is a good thing, together they are harmless even;
but moderation has been overstepped and we are in the middle of a
definite and serious crisis.

A _Blue-book_ of statistics of crime has just been issued. From it I
find that drunkenness is greatest in the great football centres of the
North and of Wales. The thirstiest parts of the country are those in
which football is the most eagerly played and watched, in which
innumerable local sporting papers are published, where the man in the
street is a football expert. This is at least significant, though so
patent and obvious is the evil that it almost seems a waste of time to
pile proof on proof. Nevertheless, before I turn to drink in
connection with other varieties of sport, it will be as well to give
all my evidence.

A well-known North-country baronet, a famous sportsman in his day, an
ex-member of one of His Majesty’s ministries and at this moment an
enthusiastic volunteer, told me, a short time ago, that in his
district the abuse of drink was ruining local sport. “Decent people no
longer care to attend football matches,” he said; “the element of
drink and ruffianism is becoming too much in evidence. A new class of
spectators has been created, men who care little or nothing for the
sport itself, but who use a match as a mere opportunity and an excuse
for drinking.”

A shipowner, a member of the present Parliament, who has large
interests in Yorkshire and the further North, entirely endorses these
remarks. “If you go into the cheaper parts of the field at any big
match in our parts, you’ll see that every other man has a bottle of
spirits in his jacket pocket which he drinks at half-time. And
afterwards--well, the brewers that have tied houses anywhere near a
football ground know that they have a gold mine. A brewery will pay
almost any sum to secure a free house in such a position.”

Finally, a well-known Northern clergyman, a relative of my own and a
fine sportsman in his time, albeit an old man now, writes to me as
follows: “I am glad you are writing on this question. The wives of the
colliers and mill-hands in my district all tell me the same story.
They say that the Saturday afternoon matches are a curse to the home.
It is not the few pence that the husbands spend for admission to the
field which matter, but it is the drinking that follows, often
protracted till late at night. For my own part, as a small protest, I
absolutely refuse to subscribe to local football clubs in any way.
They are becoming centres and occasions of vulgar vice. Such money as
I have to spare for sporting objects I give entirely to cricket.”

It is a far cry from football to golf. At first glance any one would
say that of all games golf is the most free from any taint of
attendant excess in drink. This is not so. The evil is less
widespread, just as the game claims fewer adherents; the class of men
who can afford golf is not a class with many temptations to
drunkenness; women play the game and their presence is a safeguard.
But the evil exists nevertheless, and this is the measure of it.

In the famous clubs, where all the great players go, drinking to
excess is an unknown thing, of course. But during the last few years,
especially in the South and West of England, many small clubs have
been started which are almost entirely supported by the residents of
the country towns near which they are situated. And I have not the
least hesitation in saying--however much my statements may be
combated--that many of these clubs are becoming little better than
shebeens for discreet and comfortable over-indulgence in drink.

No one will attempt to deny that the usual football match is regarded
by thousands of people as a mere alcoholiday. I am certain that many
people will attempt to deny what I am going to say about mushroom
golf clubs. When one frankly points out this or that abuse existing
among the middle and upper middle classes, these classes always become
shrill in their defence. There is a sense that while it is a duty to
expose the faults of the poorer people, amusing to attack the follies
of the “smart set,” to write of the failings of the intermediate class
is to let the cat out of the bag. One may give the cat’s tail a pinch
to let people know she is there, but that is all.

But I am writing for only one class, the fellowship of true sportsmen.

In many of the smaller golf clubs drinking has almost destroyed the
game itself. A comfortable club-house is erected, far more money is
spent on it than upon the links themselves, and men spend day after
day playing bridge and--_drinking_!

Golf becomes what Napoleon called a “_fable convenu_,” and while there
is generally a knot of real and enthusiastic players, there is always
a large residuum of idle members who turn a splendid game into an
excuse of indulgence in drink. These are the people who imagine that
they would lose caste if they entered any of the hotels of the small
town in which they live, and so the local golf club becomes the
substitute.

I have a picture in my mental vision of a man, once an athlete of
great renown, for many years after that a good sportsman. Now he is
supposed to devote himself entirely to golf--for he is no longer a
young man. This erstwhile athlete spends all his days in a certain
golf club. He is the oracle of the place. He plays very little, but
rests upon past laurels. And all day long he drinks, drinks, drinks.
He has gathered a society of kindred spirits round him, and, from the
sportsman’s point of view, the club, never eminent in any way, has
ceased to exist. It is atrophied by alcohol--though its finances are
in a flourishing condition owing to the fact that there is no licence
to provide for, and the profits on drinks amount to about thirty-three
per cent.

I am not trying to draw a general conclusion out of a particular
instance. Any one who really cares for sport and has a deep sense of
its high mission and place in life will bear me out. Many of the
smaller and less-known golf clubs are nothing more or less than
discreet drinking-places, secure from observation and shielded from
adverse comment under the too comprehensive ægis of “Sport.”

In my time I have had something to do with pugilism, and here is
another sport which, especially among its professional exponents, is
being ruined and degraded by drink. One of the most pathetic
experiences I have ever had was to watch the utter hopeless downfall
of a famous boxer some years ago. His name was a household word, he
was an American negro and one of the simplest, kindest, most
thoughtless children of nature who ever breathed. I never knew a more
sunny, genial creature. I saw him, during one year, succumb to the
temptations of drink thrust at him on all sides by admiring “sports.”
I was with him a week or two before he died from drink.

I remember, as a young man, going to an ice carnival at Hengler’s
Circus with one of the cleverest middle-weight boxers of modern times.
He had invited many of his friends of the ring, and there was a big
supper afterwards. Of course none of the men were in training, and
they were surrounded by the usual crew of wealthy wasters who counted
it an honour and privilege to ply them with liquor.

I am not going to make a picture of that occasion for you, but one
final scene still remains very vividly in my memory. A month before I
had seen my middle-weight friend in the ring. His proportions were
perfect, the muscles rippled easily and smoothly, he had the clear
eyes of youth that Homer (supreme chronicler of fights) sings of. To
look at him made one glad to be young and strong, to know that one
was a man, with cool blood and a quiet heart.

On the night of the supper I saw him lie like a log. All the soul had
gone out of his face, the pig and the wolf struggled for mastery in
that debauched mask, and a tipsy young stockbroker was pouring a
bottle of claret over the boxer’s crumpled shirt front!

In the early part of last February, I spent part of an afternoon in an
up-stairs room at the National Sporting Club. An Oxford friend, one of
the most promising amateur feather-weights of the day, was having a
practice spar with a professional. After the bout, we went down-stairs
to the bar--always the bar!--and I talked to the boxer. He told me the
same story, the story I already knew: Drink, drink, drink. It
permeates pugilism, it makes it a sport which is looked upon with
suspicion by many people--simply because of its associations, simply
because of the blight of alcohol which surrounds it and seems
inseparable from it.

England is a nation of sportsmen still. We take sport as seriously, we
pursue it as keenly as ever did the Greeks themselves. But we are
allowing this danger and reproach of drink to be mingled with some of
our national pastimes. There is no doubt whatever about it, and, as I
see it, the reason is this.

We are forgetting to idealize sport, to realize what it _means_ no
less than what it _is_.

I feel sure that if we can once get back to that attitude, the drink
trouble will cease automatically. No man can be a thorough sportsman
without a latent sense of the inherent fineness and dignity of sport.
We want an organized campaign to wake up that latent sense!

Historical analogies may be out of fashion in some departments of life
with which I am not here concerned. In sporting matters they are, and
ought to be, very valuable in helping to keep the ideal of sport at a
high level.

For example, among the finest sportsmen of all time, the ancient
Greeks, who were the finest athletes? History tells us they were the
Hellenes. They were mostly townsmen living in a country of dense
cultivation and beholden to the gymnasium and the palæstra for their
recreation, the noblest outcome of which was the Olympian meeting.

The greatest historian of Greek life and thought points out that the
Hellenes “were always abstemious,” and they were the leading athletes
of the world.

The Macedonian ideal was quite different. The Macedonians despised
bodily training in the way of abstinence, and drank to excess. They
were hunters and open-air people, they reproduced the life of the
savage or natural man with artificial improvements, but when they came
into the palæstra they were nowhere at all. A century ago in England
many a rollicking county squire would spend a day in the saddle and a
night under the table, but he could not have run a mile in five
minutes to save his life.

Alexander the Great himself despised the abstemiousness of the Greek
athletes, and though he thought in continents, he drank in oceans, and
died in a drinking bout. He was a mighty hunter and fighter, but he
was not a true sportsman, because he despised the control and
self-denial which a man must practise if he would earn that dignity
and title.

These last paragraphs may savour a little of the don, and possibly
suggest an emanation from the shrunk skull of the pedant. I hope not,
but believe me, they are proper to my purpose. After the brief summary
I have given of the actual position, it is helpful to survey the whole
question from a wider point of view than that of the immediate
present.

Let us consider the sporting history of a time much nearer our own,
the Elizabethan age. Every one was a sportsman then, because every one
was practised in the use of the national arms and was a potential
soldier--as the hidalgoes of the Armada found in 1588. But
nevertheless, nobody was a teetotaller. “Temperance drinks” were not
invented, because most people knew how to be sportsmen and temperate
as well.

Shakespeare took ale for breakfast. Drake, Raleigh and Sir Humphrey
Gilbert put to sea with barrels of beer for the sailors--“for ale went
to sea in those days,” yet every peasant of the country-side was still
expert with crossbow and English yew. In that high age drink had not
become a fungus at the root of a goodly tree.

A great many sportsmen to-day drink far more than the ordinary person
who knows nothing of them but their achievements in this or that game
would suppose.

The quantity of alcohol consumed by some sportsmen who are eminent in
their respective sports would often both astonish and alarm the
layman. There is a very simple pathological reason which explains the
fact. Oxygen is needed for the destruction of alcohol, as for the
destruction of most poisons. Hence it follows that the athlete can get
rid of his quota of alcohol without _immediate_ deteriorating results.
Last year I was at Oxford during eights’ week, the time of strict
training. The stroke of a college boat, by no means an abstemious man
at ordinary times, had been compelled to forego his usual potations.
But there came what is known as a “port night,” an evening when the
crew were allowed to drink a certain quantity of port. The stroke
exceeded this quantity, went back to his rooms, became thoroughly
intoxicated and had to be helped to bed. Next day his boat made a
bump. A strong man--an athlete--can and very often does drink far more
than an ordinary man without any apparent loss of power _at the time_.

Because there is no apparent deterioration the subject imagines that
none is taking place, and the ordinary non-athletic person will find
it difficult to realize that when I say that many fine sportsmen drink
too much, I am speaking literal truth.

How often do we not observe that a sportsman has a brilliant and
public career for a time and then suddenly disappears from the first
rank--“drops out,” and is no more heard of? His sporting life is
brilliant but it is short.

Yet there is no natural reason why the athlete’s athletic life should
be a short one. Muscles and tissues do not easily wear out from
continuous and careful action. Any doctor will admit as much. Indeed,
an alert and healthy brain with correct muscular co-ordination and
with due action of the reflexes is built up, stimulated, and
sustained by hard and interesting physical exercise.

Nevertheless, in too many cases the athlete unconsciously shortens his
sporting career by the too free use of alcohol. He of all people can
least afford to overstep the bounds of strict moderation, yet the
comradeship of sport, its jolly social side brings with it great
temptations, and temptations which are daily increasing.

We can get a very clear idea of the toxic influence of the least
alcoholic excess upon the sportsman by observing the psychology of the
really confirmed inebriate.

In a chronic inebriate, loss of spontaneity is the most marked
characteristic. Such an one has to _think_ of his walking--a thing he
never had to do in his temperate days. He feels safer walking with a
stick, he develops an agoraphobia, or dread of open spaces. There is a
distinct falling off in the accuracy of the purposive movements.

No one knows more about the effects of alcohol upon the brain than Sir
Victor Horsley; _auspice_ Horsley, I have recently made some study of
this question myself. Now the athlete, the true sportsman, _depends as
much upon the condition of his brain for success as upon the condition
of his body_.

That is the finest thing about sport, and in many quarters it is the
least understood thing about it.

Now if we pursue the analogy of the confirmed inebriate we are able to
detect exactly the same symptoms, though in an infinitely less degree,
in the player of games who consciously or unconsciously drinks more
than is good for him.

At a critical moment in a game (let us say) the cerebellum or little
brain fails for a single instant to transmit its message _via_ the
nerve telegraphs of the body to the motor muscles. The catch is
missed, the pass is made half-a-second too late; the little extra dose
of alcohol has disorganized the accurate execution of muscular
action--and perhaps a match is lost, a sportsman’s career definitely
injured.

Even in small quantities--provided always these quantities are in
excess of the reasonable individual need--alcohol has a definite and
harmful effect upon the actual performance of a voluntary movement.

In an essay of this length one is compelled to take a broad
summarizing view of such a question as it deals with. There has been
no space to enter into dozens of aspects of the bad effect that drink
is having upon the sport of the day. But I have said enough to show
how great the evil is, and I am absolutely convinced that hundreds of
sportsmen will agree with me that the poison is active, the danger
imminent.

It is an article of my creed that sport in its best sense means not
only the salvation of the individual but the consolidation of the
country. All sedentary and spoony sins, effeminacy, softness, and
every sort of degeneration _cannot_ form a part of the sportsman’s
temperament. Neither you nor I have ever known a good sportsman who is
mentally “wrong.” When eggs are oysters and tea is Chablis we may meet
with such a phenomenon, and not till then.

What a preposterous and malignant thing it is, therefore, that a cloud
is forming over one of the noblest of modern forces! Every genuine
sportsman _must_ get hot and angry in the presence of such a filthy
and disturbing parasite as this is. Leagues, societies,
confraternities, are all very well in their way. To accomplish, to
carry out a _material_ purpose, they are the best possible machinery.
But I am not so sure that they are always as valuable when the point
is a moral, or rather an ethical one. Be this as it may, and it is a
difficult question to settle, I am sure, at least, that a hundred
thousand pamphlets, offices--and a glib secretary--in Victoria Street,
even a piece of coloured ribbon as a visible badge of enthusiasm, are
not nearly as powerful as a quiet and _individual_ discountenance of
what is base and dangerous. A cynical daylight always follows too
theatrical enthusiasm.

Sportsmen are not theatrical, and their influence can be exerted
without pledges of war and a little book of rules. The reprobate
purlieus of sport can be cleansed by any one who is awake to the
lurking, growing evil on the one hand, and the high mission, the
“commission” is a better word, he holds as a “sportsman” upon the
other.

But certainly something must be done. It is too much that we should
allow whisky, which is two-thirds amyl-alcohol; beer, which is full of
pectins and colouring matter; brandy, which is German potato
spirit--all the allied filths--to sap and weaken a national heritage,
and the chief preservative of manhood which remains in this neurotic
age.

I put a line from Juvenal at the head of this article. Florio
translates it--

    “A wise man will use moderation,
    Even in things of commendation.”

“Sapiens” should have been translated “sportsman,” for it is a synonym
in this case.

I do not know whether one should say that drink or betting is the
greatest menace to modern sport. The latter, at any rate, permeates it
in an alarming degree.

Mealy generalities are of no use, and it is a mere derision to pretend
that nearly every branch of sport is not imperilled and besmirched by
betting.

Dumb protest is always going on, but sportsmen themselves hear very
little of it. Papers devoted to sporting matters do not speak out, and
the campaign against betting made by the layman only reaches the
sportsman’s ears with a muffled sound--like a drum beaten under a
blanket.

Moreover, if the general public desires anything it always declares
solemnly that it is true, the only truth. If it does not, it bawls out
that it does not exist and has never existed. The Christian
Scientists, for instance, are beginning to say this of Death itself,
and the non-sporting majority, who want to make money without earning
it, most certainly desire the continuance of betting.

I am quite confident, therefore, that the second half of this essay
will be assailed quite as widely as the first part was, when it
appeared in a magazine. In the first part the facts are very carefully
authenticated, as they are in this one. Yet the obvious retort was
hunted out with all the enthusiasm of a short-sighted bloodhound, and
in some quarters one was spoken of as a sensation-monger, who probably
made a good thing out of his wares!

That, of course, is very easy to say, but it is not argument. It is
nevertheless welcome, because the vigour of the attack always shows
the strength of the position.

In connection with the Betting Question, the mind at once turns to
horse-racing. There is much to be said in this regard, and I intend to
treat of this branch of sport later on in my statement. But I propose
to begin with other instances of the evil. Evil it undoubtedly is. The
massive harmony which the body and mind sound in correlation under the
influences of true sport, is made discordant by it.

Like the youth of a nation, sportsmen are, in a sense, the trustees of
posterity, and we must unite not only to recognize the fact but to
crush the evil.

No sportsman ever takes a puritanical view of betting. It is the sort
of person who thinks vaccination immoral, and whose conversation is
like a glass of still lemonade, who thinks that a wager is a sin. This
is a fault. I believe that I am voicing the point of view of the
sportsman--which is simply the conviction of the sensible man--when I
say that there is absolutely no harm in an ordinary wager. You put
what you can afford to lose upon the result of a horse-race or a
football match. If you win you are rather pleased and you have hurt no
one. If you lose you are not hurt in any way, and you have done no
more than make a mistake in prescience.

It is necessary to define the difference between a bet which is
harmless, and systematic betting which is eventually an attempt to
obtain the emoluments of industry without the effort of toil, an
attempt which--and here is the very essence of the matter--leads to an
abominable dishonesty and the most scandalous abuse.

And now, by graduated steps, let us proceed to a definite presentment
of the evil as it exists on the day when you read what I am saying.
You will please observe that one begins upon the small organ and in
the minor chord. The swell and the crescendo will start later on,
until we have full pedal music and thunder of the big pipes!

It has always been the boast of Oxford and Cambridge men that the
Boat-race was in its very nature an event which was utterly removed
from the gambling evil. One had a wager on one crew or the other,
perhaps--most people did not--but the great rowing match was at least
pure of offence in this regard. No public harm was ever done. I do
not for a moment say that the Boat-race is provocative of general
gambling, or is injured by it, as so many other sports are injured.
But the fact that I am going to relate is symptomatic. It shows how
the gambling spirit is growing and radiating until, in one instance at
any rate, the Boat-race itself became the incentive to dishonesty.

Upon a dull day on the Stock Exchange, a group of the younger members
began to make wagers about this event. The race was known to be a near
thing. The next day the wagers were continued until quite a little
“market” was established. The prices fluctuated according as the
reports of the training of the crews came to hand. The whole thing was
but half serious, though in a day or two large sums of money became
involved.

One member of this _coterie_, a man who was known to be a sportsman,
and one whose word had influence, deliberately circulated a false
report as to the time in which Oxford had rowed a course, queered the
market, and made a considerable sum.

In regarding the gambling question the attention of the ordinary man
is generally focussed upon the race-course and upon the bookmaker, as
he squirms his careful way through life. People either forget or
don’t realize that most of the minor sports are being utterly spoilt
and ruined by betting.

Cycle-racing is still a sport which is keenly pursued, though perhaps
it has declined somewhat in popularity of late years. In many of the
suburban districts round London there are fine cycle tracks, built
with all the last improvements which the track-architects of America
have discovered. In the Midlands and North of England there are
magnificent tracks in nearly all the principal towns.

Cycle-racing is popular, draws enormous crowds, and draws the small
bookmaker also. It is a known fact that at any big cycle-race meetings
bets are made with all the briskness and regularity possible.

Large sums do not change hands. Half-crowns, sovereigns and
half-sovereigns represent the actual ready-money transactions, though
in sporting public-houses, for days before a big local event, much
greater amounts are wagered.

It is no use for any one to pretend that this is not so--I have
innumerable facts. One instance, which may be interesting to set down
here, was related to me by a friend who is a builder of scientific
miniature rifle ranges. At one time he resided in Manchester, and
frequently visited the great pleasure-gardens known as Belle Vue in
that city. My informant used himself to make a book on the cycle track
in this popular place of amusement.

“I used to make quite a lot of money,” he told me. “It was great fun.”

“But how did you do it?” I asked him. “Describe” ...

“Oh, it was quite easy. You waited till the one or two policemen who
were strolling about were not near; they were never too anxious to
bother one in any case. Then I used to jump up on the railing and say
‘I’ll take money!’ I used to get a lot of punters round in a minute by
shouting the odds.”

How many readers will call out, “Much ado about nothing.” “What harm,”
they will ask, “can the small wagers of a crowd at a Manchester
cycle-race possibly do to Sport?”

I reply that these wagers do the very _gravest_ harm, not perhaps to
the wagerers, but to real Sport itself. The fact of so many hundreds
of people having a financial interest in the success of this or that
rider at once puts the rider--a sportsman--in a position of danger and
temptation. The low class of person who has his being in the
side-scenes, the tortuous _coulisses_ of Sport, is always at hand to
make a disgraceful bargain with the athlete. Men who are accustomed
to regard life as no more than a game of cunning come with gold in
their soiled hands. And if the sportsman succumbs, then not only is a
bar sinister charged on his personal escutcheon, but the whole tone of
Sport is lowered. Every single instance of this kind fosters a base
and ignoble view of Sport, and it _does_ matter very much indeed that
Tom loses half-a-crown, Dick makes five shillings, and Harry comes out
“even on the afternoon.”

If fools _must_ gamble, why are they not allowed to do it apart from
such a fine and splendid thing as Sport? I would far rather see a
nasty little Casino established in every town, where fools might lose
what they can’t afford in the hope of winning what they won’t work
for, than see them tempting athletes and spoiling the game.

Of two evils choose the least--a make-shift maxim, but sound in its
way!

Very few dwellers in the South and West of England are aware of the
extraordinary interest taken in the Midlands and the North in
pigeon-flying. This is a good and fascinating pastime. It certainly
interests me, and there is something very stimulating to the
imagination in it. The careful breeding of strong-pinioned birds, the
training of them, the vast distances they cover under changing skies
and down the long invisible slants of the wind--it has an appeal, has
it not? Certainly it requires real knowledge and care.

I don’t suppose that there is any minor sport so utterly spoilt and
degraded by gambling as this sport is.

They tell a good story in the North which epitomizes the whole thing.
It is a reprobate yarn, but it is funny.... An old pitman lay a-dying.
He had been a worthy fellow, a very well-known breeder and flyer of
pigeons, and his only fault had been that he wagered what, to him,
were reckless sums upon the results of pigeon-flying matches.

He lay dying, and the Vicar of the parish sat by his bedside and tried
to ease the fear of passing from one life to another by telling the
man of what might well await him in the next world.

...“Did thee say as I should be a gradely angel, parson?” the old
fellow said.

“You’ve lived a straight life, John.”

“Angels ’as wings, don’t they?”

“The poets and painters have always imagined so, John.”

“Well, I’m goin’ first, and I’m reet sorry to say good-bye to thee,
Vicar. But I make no doubt thee’ll be up there soon theeself. Now I’ll
tell thee what I’ll do when thee arrives. _I’ll fly thee for a
quid!_”

That makes one laugh--it makes me laugh at least--but it is merely one
of those pleasant jests which divert the mind from the contemplation
of an evil. Clergymen in the Midlands and the North have told me the
saddest stories of humble homes ruined, broken and bankrupt, because
of the gambling on pigeon-races. The moral fibre of many a collier and
millhand is often destroyed by betting on this sport. Women and
children suffer in consequence, rates are raised in the local
commonwealth, and once more “sport”--that misunderstood word--is
soiled and besmirched in the public mind. And those of us who are
capable of taking a broad and comprehensive view of affairs must allow
that the sport-hating Puritan has at least got some reason for his
distorted point of view.

He can say, and with perfect justice, that betting has killed
professional sculling.

He can point out, and no one can deny it, that even the quiet, but
highly-skilled game of bowls is permeated with the gambling spirit,
that owing to the large sums put up as prizes and wagered upon
results, the temptation to players in a public contest is enormous.

“What is this sport you vaunt so loudly?” the Puritan said. “Surely it
is a thing which is essentially bad and wrong, because of the evils it
excites. When the American press accuses English oarsmen of ‘doping’
an American eight’s crew owing to heavy betting on the part of the
other crew, when American athletes refuse to dress in the same room as
a competing team of English athletes--is it not obvious that sport
cannot be the worthy and fine thing you say it is?”

I have voiced the shrill cry of prejudice and exaggeration. But truth
must always be the basis upon which exaggeration is built. No one, to
my theory, can successfully exaggerate a lie. The result is redundant,
and so, unconvincing, while the attempt itself is like trying to add
four pounds of butter to four o’clock.

In the space of an article such as this, I must not unduly prolong the
dismal story of how the _minor_ sports are being injured by gambling.

Yet the whippet-racing of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland
has degenerated, and the sport must be given a bad name--though it is
the owners and not the dogs who ought to be hung!

Pigeon-shooting--if that is indeed a sport, which I personally beg
leave to doubt--has become no trial of skill and readiness, but an
occasion upon which, when the betting is in favour of a right-hand
shot, a needle is sometimes put into the left eye of the bird so that
it may swerve to the right upon its release from the trap and increase
the difficulty of the aim.

I am informed that birds are frequently blinded in this abominable way
at local English meetings, and also in Germany--in the interests of
gambling. In this matter, however, it is only right to say that the
Hon. E. S. Butler--one of the crack pigeon-shots of the day--tells me
that the conditions at Monte Carlo are absolutely fair, though the
betting is most heavy.

There is hardly any “gambling” in English golf. Private matches
sometimes provoke a heavy wager between the players, but that is not
gambling. In Scotland, however, where most towns have links which are
open to everybody for a fee of threepence, there is an immense amount
of gambling among the poorer classes. Now it is certainly far better
that the Scotch mechanic should spend his Saturday afternoon playing
at a fine game than in watching other people play it, as his English
brother does at a football match. But it is an enormous pity that such
facilities as the poorer folk enjoy for sport should be abused and
spoilt. A well-known Scotch clergyman, a favourite preacher of the
late Queen’s, tells me that the gambling at golf makes a constant
watchfulness necessary on the part of players. “Many of them will
cheat if they can,” he said; “and you’ll know how easy it is to cheat
at golf? It’s just the money aspect of the question. It’s small wonder
that a man will move his ball an inch from under a bunker, if it’s
necessary and the other fellow isn’t looking, when perhaps a third of
his week’s wages depends upon the lie.”

Again I would punctuate my instance with the moral it affords. Here
also sport suffers. If I did not believe in the inherent nobility of
sport, if I was not absolutely convinced of its supremely important
place in the life of both soul and body, I should not be writing this.
But as one goes on with this dismal catalogue--no very pleasant task,
one gets into a fever of indignation. “_Duo quum patiuntur idem, non
est idem_,” of course. No two men experience identical effects from
identical causes. But true sportsmen will at least share something of
my feeling. And it’s no use to set out alone to kick the world’s
shins. The world has several million shins to your one. We must
_combine_--we who love sport and realize what it means.

The Hermes of Praxiteles is a perfect type of all that is _physically_
fit and fine--and so _spiritually_ also--in man.

Take that statue and regard it for a moment as a concrete
manifestation of all that is meant by the word “sport.”

And then, suppose that the Hermes of Praxiteles were your own
possession, that you had it in your own house. Would you allow a crew
of people who cared nothing for great art to cover it with mud?

......Now to gambling as it affects the major sports.

Cricket is fortunately untouched, save very occasionally in League
cricket. It is pleasant to think of our national game as unsmirched.

But football, which we may well call our other national game, is most
deeply and gravely involved.

Of the two games, rugby is cleanest in this regard. In the Northern
Union District there is more gambling than elsewhere, but, take it all
in all, rugby does not greatly suffer.

But what can one say of Association football?

......There are many quite well-known instances of goal-keepers being
bribed. They are, indeed, so well known that people who are
interested in the game, and know anything of its polity and ways need
hardly be reminded of them.

The buying and selling of players--for it is just that--and their
transference from club to club, is responsible for much of the evil,
as I see it. But in Association especially, not only does sport suffer
from the occasional dishonesty of the players, but the game itself
provides a constant incentive to the spectators to forget the beauty
of its _raison d’être_ and to regard it merely as an opportunity for
speculation.

Is running untainted? Not a bit of it!

Professional running is in an even worse condition than when Wilkie
Collins wrote his remarkable novel about it--though _professional_
running no longer holds its old position or keeps its old importance.
But the Sheffield handicaps, and the Scotch professional contests at
Edinburgh, still exist as prominent features in the sporting life of
our time. And as prominent scandals also.

Amateur running is far more widely entangled with betting than most
people are aware.

Some time ago, on the County Ground at Bristol, there were six men in
a heat for a 120 yards race. Five of these were friends and the sixth
was almost a stranger, but one whose record, by comparison, would
certainly have secured him the race in the opinion of experts.

This last gentleman was taken aside before the race and offered ten
pounds “To let Bill win.”

Please remember that I am neither inventing nor exaggerating, that I
have chapter and verse, that I have gone into the whole question most
carefully, that I relate _fact_.

From the ancient times when gladiators fought with the brutal spiked
cestus, until the present day, boxing has always been a fine sport.
Among the Romans it was certainly brutally misused, and in our own
time of the Prince Regent it was not free from the charge of
brutality. To-day, in the humane progress of ideas, the ring cannot be
assailed in this regard. We have refined this splendid sport until it
stands purged of all imputations of savagery.

Of savagery, yes; of the far meaner vice of gambling, no! Who can say
for certainty that any fight, in Bristol, Liverpool, Cumberland, at
the N.S.C., “Wonderland,” or even at the Belsize, is absolutely a
square fight? Who knows whether the blind old heathen goddess of
chance has not been harnessed by the money-mongers and is waiting with
malevolent intention at the ropes?

No one can say with _certainty_, outside the Army, Public Schools, and
the ’Varsity contests.

The rascality of the ring would fill a number of a magazine. Boxing is
no longer a national sport, which goes on everywhere and, as a matter
of course, under the full sunlight. It has sunk into a local amusement
or a located disgrace. And it has sunk simply and solely because of
gambling.

Wrestling, that worthy and ancient English sport, has almost ceased to
exist. I have had a cottage in Cornwall for some years and it is my
privilege to know many of the champions of the past in this chief old
home of the game.

I know what it was once, how splendid and stimulating to the life of
the community. And what is wrestling to-day? It is a sporadic contest,
between great players indeed, but one which is utterly spoilt and
discredited, when looked upon from the true sportsman’s point of view.
In the most cynical and open way many of the sporting newspapers
discuss the probability of this or that bout being a “square” one or
not. With the indifference with which one would discuss the chances of
an egg proving to be fresh or stale, some journalists determine the
pros and cons of honour and dishonour.

I have a friend who is a theatrical agent and _entrepreneur_. Among
his various activities, he is the manager for the champion wrestler of
the world. “You never know,” he said to me at dinner, “you never
really know the truth about the _bona fides_ of many wrestling bouts
until the contest is over. Of course men like ‘----’ and ‘----’ are
absolutely square. They are the _haute noblesse_ of the game. They’ve
got to be. But you may take it from me that dozens and dozens of
contests are faked in the interests of the betting ring.”

After extreme youth is over, life mercifully dulls the hunger for
perfection in all of us. There never was a time in the history of
horse-racing when people did not bet. Nor does one expect the
impossible. But while racing was never more popular and more strongly
organized than it is to-day, it was never so provocative of evil, so
_manqué_ from the true sportsman’s point of view. The men of carrion
passions, and the army of muddy knaves who live by the exploitation
and bespatterment of the noblest of sports, are legion.

The smaller fry who make existence possible for the knaves--the
ordinary men who bet regularly on races--are millions. There is no
need to insist upon the fact, it is as dismal and obvious as a lump of
clay. The whole atmosphere of the turf is like the degradation of the
air in a close bedroom with the windows shut.

It is not my province or intention here to go very deeply into
illustrative detail in the matter of the turf. It is better to be
luminous than voluminous. But there are one or two points which may be
new and instructive for the non-gambling sportsman.

Here is a recent quotation from a well-known English “sporting”
paper--one of those, by the way, which conveys “humour” direct from
the pit to the front page.

It is about some English jockeys in America--

     “Our jockeys are having a hard time, in a way, inasmuch as they
     are being kept under the closest surveillance by Pinkerton
     detectives. They are practically caged off from the public, are
     escorted to the scales and paddock, are not allowed to speak to
     any one except an employer, and then only when mounting, and
     their valets must wear a distinctive uniform, with numbers on
     their sleeves. This is reform with a vengeance, and by no means
     agreeable to some of our young swells, who are also shadowed
     after the races.”

“_By sports like these are all their cares beguiled!_”

Was Goldsmith a prophet?

It is not always easy to remember that the professed aim of the Jockey
Club is “the furtherance of the breeding and preservation of the
English thoroughbred horse.”

Yet to-day the officers of foreign armies buy Australian walers. They
won’t purchase English stallions. I belong to the “_Cercle Privée
civil et militaire_” of Bruges, a great military centre. Every day the
General commanding the district and his staff are in the Club. They
tell me that English horses are no longer looked upon as they were
upon the Continent.

Does not this “_give one furiously to think_,” as my friend the
General said here the other morning? Doping in the interests of the
gambling market seems to be beginning to tell!

The gambling industry is organized with consummate skill and great
business capacity.

Gambling by post is almost incredibly upon the increase. In Middleburg
and Flushing there are twelve huge betting firms. One person employs
ninety people in his office, and has his own printing establishment,
which is always glutted with work.

Often £1000 is received by one firm in a single day--nearly all in
small bets, and all from England. The post-offices of Dutch towns of
the size of Middleburg or Flushing normally keep in stock stamps which
will supply the needs of a population of 20,000 persons. Now, these
two towns are compelled to keep enough to supply a population of
200,000--all for the “furtherance of the breeding and preservation,”
etc., etc.

Here is another significant fact which may possibly elucidate the
recent and somewhat cryptic utterance, “The battle of Waterloo was won
on the playing fields of Eton just as certainly as the battle of Spion
Kop was lost upon the playing fields of Sandhurst.”

The fact is this ...

In the issue of _The War Office Times_, May 25, 1905, occurs a
flagrant puff of a bookmaker, who without the humour of a less eminent
_confrère_ who described himself as a “brass finisher” in the census
returns, calls himself a “high-class turf-accountant.”

“We strongly advise any of our readers who require a high-class
Turf-accountant to send for Mr. ----’s book of rules, bound in
leather, which will be sent post free to applicants. We have convinced
ourselves that this is a thoroughly genuine business, and, as such, we
have no hesitation in recommending it to our readers.”

I have the book “bound in leather,” and a good many others also, which
I acquired for the purposes of this article.

And precious and elaborate productions they are! The ingenuity of red
morocco and gilding, of alluring propositions and the suggestion of a
bludgeon-sturdy honesty deserve the highest praise. I was especially
delighted with the telegraphic code of one hero, which used the names
of fish to symbolize the amount of “investments.” “Salmon,” for
example, means “put me ten pounds on.”

All the denizens of ocean are used save one....

With commendable modesty, or possibly a fellow feeling, this worthy
has omitted “shark.”

One has said enough to outline--I hope vividly and strongly--how Sport
is being spoilt by gambling.

Sport, thank goodness, is not yet retrograde owing to this curse. But
it may be. Let us all remember that progress is merely the power of
seeing new beauties. The more Sport progresses unhindered by gambling,
the sooner will it take its high place in life and fulfil its noble
destiny.

And every sportsman can do something to help that progress.

The fiery Erasmus writes this of Sir Thomas More, who was a thorough
sportsman, to his German friend, Ulrich von Hutten:--

“Gambling of all kinds, balls, dice and such like he detests. None of
that sort are to be found about him. In short, he is the best type of
sportsman.”

“_Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus._”

       *       *       *       *       *

NOTE.--_Since this essay was written, three short articles appeared in
the sporting columns of the _Daily Mail_ which are a striking
corroboration of my contentions. All the articles appeared within a
few days of each other, and I print parts of them as an appendix._


     FOOTBALL AND ALCOHOL

     HOW PLAYERS MAY LENGTHEN THEIR CAREERS

     By William McGregor.

     I dealt a few days ago with the question of what constituted a
     sensible diet for footballers, and hinted that the so-called
     special training which teams undergo on the eve of a great
     encounter was often prejudicial rather than beneficial.

     Now, a well-known medical man, who fills the position of
     official doctor to one of our leading football clubs, met me on
     the evening of the day that the article appeared and said
     (excuse the apparent egotism, but it is necessary for the
     purpose of the article), “That was a really good article of
     yours in the London _Daily Mail_. You put the matter precisely
     as I should put it, as a medical man. You might follow it up
     with an article pointing out that there are two abuses which
     footballers suffer from, viz. errors in regard to eating, and
     errors in regard to drinking. If you can put in a strong plea
     for either the abolition of alcohol, or the sparing use of
     alcohol by footballers, you will be doing the game a good
     service, and you will be doing the players a good service.”

     I then remembered a little incident which occurred at the Aston
     Villa ground early in the season. The occasion was a match
     played during that tropical weather, weather which was utterly
     unfit for football. Violent exercise such as football imposed a
     very severe strain upon the men that day.

     As soon as the interval was over, a medical man came up to me,
     and in quite excited accents said, “I say, Mr. McGregor, do you
     know that they have been giving the visiting team spirits
     during the interval? I have never heard of such a foolish
     proceeding. Why, alcohol is the worst possible thing for
     footballers to have at any time, but more especially on a day
     like this. You could not have anything more heating than
     spirits.”

     Speaking from a general rather than a professional or technical
     experience, I agreed with him. I asked him, as a medical man,
     what he would have given the men under such peculiar
     circumstances. His answer was, “At any rate, I should not have
     given them alcohol. I do not know that I should have given them
     anything. The best thing would have been for them to have
     rinsed their mouths out with cold water.”


     CHAMPAGNE OR LEMONS?

     In a match which took place in the Midlands last season, the
     home team gave a particularly poor display in the second half,
     and one of the directors said to me, “They have been behaving
     foolishly to our men. The trainer gave them champagne during
     the interval, and I do not think that is a good drink for them
     to have. The momentary feeling of exhilaration following a
     glass of champagne soon wears off.”

     If the form manifested by the team which had the champagne that
     day may be taken as a criterion as to the merits of champagne
     as a stimulant for football purposes, then all I can say is,
     that I never want to see a team receive such a stimulant again.
     It may not have been the champagne that caused their poor form;
     but at any rate their play was poor.

     I recall another interesting instance in which champagne played
     a part. I am going back a long time now, but the circumstances
     were exceptional.

     Away in the remote eighties, Moseley (as they often were then)
     were in possession of the Midland Counties Rugby Challenge Cup,
     and one of their supporters was interested in Aston Villa. I do
     not know whether it was Kenneth Wilson or not, for Kenneth
     Wilson, I may say, was a Pollokshields man, who was in business
     in Birmingham. He was a splendid athlete, and played for Aston
     Villa, and also for Moseley under Rugby rules simultaneously. I
     expect he had something to do with the incident.

     At any rate, the Cup made its appearance at Perry Barr on the
     day that Aston Villa were playing an English Cup tie with
     Darwen. Now the Aston Villa team of that period, captained by
     the great Archie Hunter, was as bonny a set in a social sense
     as I have ever known. They were grand footballers, and played
     the game for all they were worth when they were on the field.
     But it was a loose and lax age as compared with the present
     football era, and during the interval some one filled the Cup
     with champagne, and the Villa players drank to the prosperity
     of the Moseley Club--and very bad football they played after
     the interval, too.

     I do not suppose for a moment that any one player had much
     champagne, but from what I could see of their demeanour, I came
     to the conclusion that champagne was a bad thing to play
     football on. At any rate, the Villa had the greatest difficulty
     in avoiding defeat at the hands of Darwen. If I remember
     aright, the great Hugh McIntyre, who died in London last year,
     and was better known as a Blackburn Rover, kept goal
     brilliantly for Darwen that day.


     THE GREATEST ENEMY

     You hear of well-known footballers kicking over the traces,
     passing from club to club, and marring what might have been
     great reputations. If you will look into the history of these
     men you will find that in nineteen cases out of twenty their
     bad relations with their employers are due to the fact that
     they are accustomed to imbibe too much alcohol. Alcohol is,
     indeed, the footballer’s greatest enemy; at any rate, to put it
     simply and straightforwardly, no man ever played football the
     better for taking alcohol, and many men have played it
     infinitely worse by reason of their indulgence therein.

     Every football manager likes to get together a team of
     tee-totalers. If you take the records of the greatest players,
     or perhaps I might say the great players who have had
     phenomenally long and honourable careers, you will find that in
     nearly every case they were either life-long abstainers or
     rigidly moderate men. I could give many instances if space
     permitted.


     FOOTBALL BOOKMAKERS

     WHAT REALLY ATTRACTS LEAGUE CROWDS?

     “The public are getting rather weary,” writes a correspondent,
     “of the professional football promoters’ periodical rigmarole
     under the heading of ‘Betting at Football Matches.’

     “Why not make it ‘Betting on Football‘? Here he would have
     ‘copy’ for every day in the week, as long as professional
     football lasts.

     “I cannot speak for the south, but, as for the north, it is a
     fact that football betting is rife in Newcastle, Sunderland,
     Middlesbrough--thanks to the professional football promoter. It
     is not done at the matches, but beforehand, on the combination
     football betting coupon system, but it is betting all the same.

     “Thousands and thousands of football coupons are distributed
     weekly by bookmakers among the working men at the big
     factories, ship-yards, etc.

     “This betting is the sole reason why many of these working men
     and others, who know practically nothing of football, take an
     interest in the League and attend matches in connection with
     the same.

     “The betting is not on a particular match, but on a combination
     of matches.

     “Football loafing and betting will always go hand in hand.
     There are none so blind as those who will not see. What is
     more, in this case it would not pay to see. Certainly, the
     professional football promoter has a great deal to answer for.”


     DISHONESTY IN SPORT

     STRONG EFFORTS TO BE MADE TO STOP IMPERSONATION

     The recent case of a young Hereford sprinter who, by
     impersonating another runner, secured a prize of the value of
     £4, and who was ordered by the Bench to pay three guineas
     towards the cost of the prosecution and refund the prize or its
     equivalent value, shows that the justices are doing all they
     can to assist the Amateur Athletic Association in preserving
     amateur athletics for the pure sportsman.

     It is to be regretted that such instances are by no means rare,
     and the Amateur Athletic Association has several cases in hand
     at the present time. The Association is, however, determined to
     put a stop to the practice.

     The trick of impersonating amateurs and thereby winning prizes
     at athletic sports is, in fact, as old as the hills, and years
     ago used to be carried on unblushingly and free from detection.

     One of the earliest cases on record was that of a man at
     Ashford. His head was as innocent of hair as a billiard ball,
     and to play the part properly it was necessary for him to wear
     a wig. He was winning his race easily enough, when his hirsute
     adornment was blown off by the wind, and the attempted fraud
     ended in failure.

     Quite recently there were two brothers in the army, one an
     amateur and the other a professional. The latter impersonated
     the former with sufficient success as to secure the prize; but
     although the fraud was afterwards discovered, it was felt that
     the evidence was not strong enough to secure a conviction.

     In a similar case in the Northampton district a couple of years
     ago, the judge took a serious view of the case, and the
     offender received exemplary punishment.

     Strong action is undoubtedly needed to stamp out the practice,
     and the Amateur Athletic Association will leave no stone
     unturned in its endeavours to purify it.




VAGROM MEN




VI

VAGROM MEN

[AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE WORKING MEN’S CLUB, ST. MARGARETS’]

“_In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread, till thou return unto
the ground._”--GENESIS iii. 19.


In the November of last year--1905--I was invited to consider the
problem which is known as “The Unemployed Question,” and to write
something about it in a London daily paper. In 1905 the subject was
attracting the attention of every one, and it was thought that by
means of my own method--the method of Fiction--I might possibly
interest people.

I welcomed the opportunity, and wrote a story expressing my views,
which was published among the news columns of the _Daily Mail_.

Before the tale began to appear I had several conferences with Lord
Northcliffe, then Sir Alfred Harmsworth, the editor of the newspaper.
Certain facts were told me; a mass of expert opinion and evidence was
placed at my disposal, and I was enjoined to study my new material and
write exactly as I felt about the question. No restrictions were
placed upon my point of view. I suppose that very rarely indeed has it
happened to an ordinary novelist that the ruling powers of a journal
which has one of the largest circulations in the world have said,
“Here are our columns; come and say what you think in them.”

It is, no doubt, good journalism to print a single article written by
a man whose conviction on the subject of the article is diametrically
opposed to that of the newspaper in which it is published. A standard
of value is created by an exhibition of contrasts. It is good
journalism also to print the views of experts such as Mr. Booth or Mr.
McKenzie. Both these things are constantly done. But to give a
novelist columns of enormously valuable space for some weeks--“news
space,” not the space generally reserved for fiction--in order that he
may express his own ideas, is very unusual. At the time when this was
offered to me I thought it a very great compliment. I can hardly
believe that I was mistaken, and I think so still.

I wrote the story, and called it, _Made in His Image_. When it had run
through the newspaper it was published in book form. Fourteen months
have gone by, and during them I have endeavoured to keep myself
informed as to the position of affairs. With the additional knowledge
that the past year and its inquiries have given me, I find myself
still of precisely the same opinion as I was before. If anything, my
conviction is stronger than before. What my opinions are, such
conclusions as I have come to, I have been invited to tell you
to-night.

I will get to the point at once without further preamble, save only to
say how much I value the privilege of addressing you.

For a long time past every class of the community has been exercised
by the problem of the unemployed. The question has steadily become
more acute year by year, and at the present moment its solution is the
most pressing and necessary of all that confront thinking men and
women.

I propose to touch briefly upon the existing state of things, to
explain what I conclude to be the cause of it, and to set before you
my belief as to the only remedy.

In London, Manchester, Birmingham, and all the great cities of
England, the streets are full of men with bright eyes, and faces cut
and whittled to an edge by hunger. Men and women with kindly hearts
and sympathetic natures cannot go abroad in winter unless they taste
the bitterness of sights and sounds that tear the heart and lacerate
the soul.

Dismal and terrible processions move throughout the streets of our
capitals like spectres from the underworld. I have myself, in the
course of my investigations, been packed tight among a crowd of
tattered, coughing humans in London. I have walked with them, brethren
of yours and mine, men who offended and distressed every sense, men
who groaned and sighed because they had not eaten, men who exhaled an
odour like the caged animals in a menagerie, men who fed, when they
fed at all, upon garbage, men who could not wash.

I have seen faces all round me like the faces that the great Italian
poet Dante describes as flitting through the gloom of hell. On one
side is a face grown witless from hunger, sorrow, and foul
environment. It is a horrible face, a face like a glass of dirty
water. Another face is simply a grey drawn wedge of cunning; a third
man has a face that might have been that of a saint, but the horror of
his life has put its heel upon the countenance, and has ground the
possibility to pulp. I have stood among living bodies which have no
heat in them, a company of ghosts that cough and curse in bloodless
voices. And among these gaunt, dismal, and hopeless men the one who
can snarl and cry his sorrows loudly is the one who is envied by all
the rest. He must have had a meal that day.

I expect many of you have seen something of what I describe, and those
who have had this sad experience will bear witness that I am
exaggerating nothing. This is not Fiction; it is melancholy Truth. In
the opening chapter of the story I wrote on the Unemployed question, I
described a meeting of the Unemployed in Trafalgar Square. In the
course of the chapter I told how some charitable people drove up with
a cart full of buns and bread and butter. Immediately there was a
riot. The poor starving people fought with each other for the food
like wolves. The scene was horrible. This first chapter appeared on
November 18, in the _Daily Mail_. Two days afterwards I met a friend
in my London Club who had read it. “My dear fellow,” he said, “you’ve
let your imagination run away with you. A story is all very well, but
it should closely follow the lines of fact. Don’t you tell me that
English workmen are in such a pass that they will fight for a morsel
of food in the heart of London. You’re coming it a bit _too_ tall, my
dear chap.”

He was a ruddy, prosperous friend. As he came into the Club
smoking-room he gave a heavy fur coat, which probably cost him fifty
guineas, to one of the waiters. He called for a whisky and soda, and
sank into an arm-chair of red leather with a comfortable sigh of
pleasure. He stretched out his legs towards a blazing fire of logs,
and said again, “You novelist johnnies are always coming it a bit too
thick, don’t you know!”

My worthy friend was one of those who have eyes but see not; because
they won’t see, and don’t wish to see.

Now listen to the sequel--

Three days after this a procession of Unemployed marched along the
Embankment in London. Some charitable people did actually bring down a
cart of food. _There was a riot and a fight for the food exactly as I
had foreseen in my imaginary tale._ It was reported in the newspaper.
Five days after I had imagined that, under existing conditions,
something _might_ happen, that thing actually _did_ happen--men came
fighting for a scrap of bread in the heart of the Metropolis.

This is what we see in the great streets of London and other
towns--the streets full of shops which are crammed with costly and
beautiful things, thronged with prosperous people. What we see when
we follow the procession of the Unemployed back to the awful dens in
which they live is impossible to do more than hint at. To tell the
absolute unvarnished truth in a public assembly, to publish a faithful
description in a public print is an utter impossibility. These
dreadful facts are those which despairing clergymen and ministers,
doctors, nurses, would-be helpers, tell to each other in whispers.

I knew a lady whose husband had turned out worthless, and who finally
deserted her. Her one source of income was a row of small houses in
the East End of London, houses that were let out in rooms to the very
poor. My friend was too poor to employ an agent to collect her rents
and draw a commission for his work. Every week she did so herself, and
one week she invited me to accompany her. I did so, and it was the
most horrible day I ever spent. No working man in a district such as
this can form any idea of the filth and misery in which the lost,
degraded tenants of these houses lived. I shall not attempt to
describe it, for it would be a poor return for your kindness in coming
here to-night to rob you of your night’s rest!

I will merely quote some lines written by Mr. F. A. McKenzie, one of
the foremost sociologists of the day. They deal with the lives of the
Unemployed in the East End of London, and they are guarded, reticent
words.

I read--

     “To say that scores of thousands of them are facing the coming
     winter with fear and dread is but mildly to imply their
     situation. They are the derelicts of London, whom the changes
     in modern conditions have left hopelessly behind. Without
     crafts, without knowledge, many of them with hope dead, they
     face a future that good trade can do little to relieve, and bad
     trade must greatly darken.”

“The prodigal son” of to-day plays out the last act of his tragedy, not
before a fatted calf, but in a Poplar back room. The shiftless and
incapables, attracted by low rent, by the chance of casual work, and
by the abundance of relief, drift here. To them are added the scores
of thousands of locally born people who are trained in such a way that
they cannot be anything else than casuals.

The very streets proclaim the lives of these people. Apart from the
main thoroughfares and from certain more prosperous avenues, you are
swallowed up in an endless succession of long roads of cheaply built
houses. The walls are crumbling, and the bricks seem as though they
would fall at a blow; many houses have broken, paper-stuffed windows;
there are whole streets where the doors and windows have not seen
paint for a generation. The children, babies with ophthalmic eyes,
girls dirty beyond belief play in the gutters. The women gossip at the
doors. The men, strong, yet none wanting their strength, lounge at
street corners.

In home after home you will find that the sole regular wage earned is
by a young son, who obtains ten shillings a week as errand boy in the
City. On this, with occasional additions from the others, the whole
family exists. The mother may obtain a few shillings a week at
‘charing,’ although such work is scarce in Poplar.

Twenty years ago the poverty of the East End was lessened by the home
work which the women could obtain. It is one of the most serious,
although often overlooked, factors of to-day that such home work
cannot be had save by a few. The aliens in Whitechapel and in Stepney
absorb almost all of it. The foreigners are more capable, more
thrifty, and more sober, and, save where brute strength is required,
our own derelicts stand no chance before them. The homes inside are
often enough indescribable. Here and there you find the one room kept
clean, but generally dirt is the outstanding feature. The beds are
black masses of filth. The walls of the rooms prevent real
cleanliness. I went into one two-roomed tenement inhabited by a man,
wife and three children. The kitchen was overrun with rats, which had
free entrance and exit through numerous holes in the wall. In the
bedroom a large part of the lath and plaster wall underneath the
window was torn away, leaving great gaps open to the yard. ‘Why
doesn’t your landlord do some repairs here?’ my companion asked. ‘He
won’t, sir; he says it is healthy for us to have holes in the walls,’
the woman replied. Many of these Poplar rooms urgently require the
active intervention of the local sanitary officers.

In such fetid dens, badly built, ill kept, and furnished with the
strangest of oddments, most of the Poplar poor live.

If it were necessary and part of my scheme this evening, I could take
up the whole of our time in telling the truth about the existing
horrors. But I do not think that any one will deny them. They exist,
and no one can disprove the fact. Let us rather consider _why_ they
exist, and what their existence means to the working man.

Stated in a few brief words, this is my theory and my unalterable
belief.


IF THERE WERE NO UNEMPLOYABLES THERE WOULD BE NO UNEMPLOYED.

To amplify my statement I will say--and in a moment I will endeavour
to prove--that if the idle, vicious, hopeless and sullen scoundrels
who act as a drag upon the wheel of the Commonwealth, who have been
allowed too long to clog social progress, were removed, the whole
problem would be solved.

I beg you to listen carefully to me while I tell you how the
_Unemployables_ have created the problem of the Unemployed, how they
are throttling charitable enterprise, how they are making economic
methods of relief impossible, how they are destroying the present and
the future of the honest working man. Who are the people I have called
“The Unemployables”? What is _their_ idea of work and what is the
_real ideal_ of work? I will answer these questions. I will show you
who and what the Unemployables are. I will contrast their attitude
towards honest toil with the attitude of honest men towards toil, and
when I have done this I will try to explain how these people are
injuring you and me, what a terrible burden they are upon our backs.

The month before my story dealing with the Unemployed appeared in the
_Daily Mail_, a series of articles on the same subject was published.
In some of them the Unemployables were painted with perfect fidelity
and vividness. I take some paragraphs here and there to make a
connected picture.

“Half-past eleven on Friday morning in a back street in the most
poverty-stricken and most largely relieved district in Canning Town. A
group of women wait around the gates of a chapel, from which doles are
being issued. Dirty, ragged and untidy, they certainly are, but
hunger-stricken--No! Their children playing in the roadway near by are
ill-clad, filthy, and in many cases bare-footed, and do show signs of
under-feeding, but not the mothers.

These are the wives of the habitual Unemployed seeking relief.

The curious stranger notices that some of the women go from the relief
station to the public-houses. Let us look inside a few of these
establishments. In a side bar of the first place we enter, we find
eleven women, exactly of the same type as those soliciting charity
without. One of them carries a recently-born baby in her arms, and
another has a little girl two years old clinging to her apron. Each
woman has a glass in front of her. Some of them have been here since
half-past nine in the morning, and will stay for hours yet. In the
next drinking shop is a party of nine, in the next but two, while in
the last of all we find seven. Now one rises to go out, for her hour
has come to beg for aid from school or parson or Unemployed fund.

An hour later we can see the husbands of these women amusing
themselves at the street corner higher up. Five bookmakers’ touts are
busy among them at one cross roads alone.

At this time, when we are threatened with a new Unemployed agitation,
it is as well that the causes of much of the distress in some of the
Unemployed areas should be understood. For several years the public
has tried to deal with the sufferings of the very poor by sentimental
means. Each winter has brought increase of relief, and each increase
of relief has helped to render more permanent the problem it has set
about to cure.

We have now in one district alone, a large number of people, totalling
many thousands, incapable of regular work and unwilling to attempt it.
They have been taught to lean on charity to aid them, and they have
proved themselves apt pupils. Their homes will, as a rule, for sheer
uncleanliness, bear comparison with the dwelling of an Australian
aborigine. Their children are systematically made untidy, and are
given a neglected air in order more successfully to extort outside
aid. Parental love is so dead that, in very many cases, the mothers
will sell the boots given to their children in order to buy gin.

This is no vague, general charge. Three years ago the readers of the
_Daily Mail_ entrusted the writer with a sum of money to spend on
meals and shoes for needy children in this district. Teachers from
many schools assured me that such effort would be wasted. ‘Buy the
shoes and give them to the children to-day,’ they said; ‘and to-morrow
the shoes will be in the pawnshops, and the mothers will have drunk
the proceeds.’ It was necessary for us to construct a careful system
of guard checks to save the children from their own mothers.

Last year four separate general funds were distributing doles and aid
among these people in one district. A fund for the children, the best
of all, kept them from starvation. Two outside agencies collected many
thousands of pounds and scattered them about. The West Ham Corporation
spent over £26,000 on relief works. What has been the result? The
first outcome was to draw to this district many of the loafers from
other parts, who saw the chance to obtain something for nothing. The
more money that came, the more the number of Unemployed grew.

There is, without question, an amount of perfectly genuine distress,
distress that should be relieved. But it is not, as a rule, found in
the ‘Unemployed’ processions. The men who are making the most noise
could not work properly if they would, and would not if they could.

This is a hard saying. Some facts may help to prove it. Many employers
of labour around the docks agree in testifying that their difficulty
is to induce casual men to remain long at their work. A man will take
on a job for a couple of hours, and then ask for his 1_s._ 2_d._
(7_d._ an hour) and go. ‘Look here, guv’nor, I’ve had enough of this,’
he exclaims, with perfect truthfulness. He has secured enough to see
him through the day--why should he trouble after more?

The labourer of the casual loafing type who works for two days a week
thinks that he has done all his duty. His work is worth comparatively
little when it is done. The municipal relief work at West Ham last
winter spent £14,000 on material and £12,000 on labour. On the most
liberal estimate, the labour value obtained was worth not more than
£4500, and the tasks would have been done by any contractor for that
amount. Many whose names were down on the Unemployed Register refused
work when offered to them.

Last winter the workhouse authorities began to distribute relief on a
more liberal scale. A number of distressed cases were taken in without
labour. The number increased until it reached 473. Then the guardians
resolved to re-establish the labour test, and to make the applicants
do some work for the aid they had. The numbers at once fell to 119.

The people have been taught to look upon the outside public as a milch
cow, and the guardians and municipal authorities as officials from
whom everything possible is to be extorted. The members of an
‘unofficial’ relief committee invited me last week to one of their
meetings. A bloated woman came asking them for aid. They gave her a
small dole, with repeated injunctions that she was to lie to the
relieving officer if he asked her if she had had anything. ‘Take care
that your fire is out and your cupboard is bare when the relieving
officer comes,’ one member added.

Here, then, is the problem to be solved. A great army of habitual
loafers and incapables live off the woes of the genuine Unemployed.
The latter, too, often suffer in silence. The spongers, hardened by
long experience, adepts in every trick to impress a generous public,
ply their calling more boldly each year.

Such are the men who will not work--the ‘work-shy’ men, the
‘bone-idle’ men, the ‘wasters,’ the scoundrels who turn the holy
virtue of charity into a foolishness, and who recruit the ranks of
those who keep society in a state of siege.

These people form the majority of the Unemployables. Please remember
that I am not talking of the _Unemployed_, but of the Unemployables.
The men who won’t work form the majority, but the hopeless herd of
Unemployables is also swelled by those who _can’t_ work. They can’t
work because their life has never taught them how to work. From
infancy they have been trained to depend upon charity, from childhood
they have been denied an education which will enable them to earn a
living.

Their very birth has been charitably conducted. The parish doctor has
given free aid, the blankets have come from a local fund, and probably
there has been a Salvation lass scrubbing the room for the mother.
From infancy they are accustomed to look to charity for their very
comfort. A boots fund supplies them with shoes, free meals are their
main sustenance, and if they are very fortunate a holiday fund gives
them a week in the country. Their first lessons are in begging, and
they are taught to lie and to cringe to the givers of doles.

When such children leave their slum schools, what awaits them? There
is little or no possibility of the slum boy learning a trade, while
the girl finds it impossible, even if she desires, to learn
housewifery by going to service. The factory awaits the girl, and odd
jobs, as potboy, errand boy, runner for bookmakers, or the like, await
the lad. At seventeen or so the youth becomes a man, and applies for
casual labour at the docks or elsewhere. About the same time he mates
with a girl who has been working at the factory.

By this time he has forgotten nearly all he learned at school. What
can reasonably be expected of him?

It is impossible to condemn this second class of Unemployable. If you
and I had been brought up in the same way, we should live as they do
and behave as they do, in all probability. If a child has seen his
father and mother, his grandfather and grandmother, his uncles, aunts
and all the friends of the family habitually go to bed in their boots,
he will sleep in his boots too. If he lives in a village where every
one goes to bed in boots, and has never been out of that village nor
witnessed the customs of any other village, who is to tell him that
sleeping in boots is an unpleasant trick which spoils the sheets? A
stranger who came upon a child of this village and told him that he
was a dirty little boy who ought to be punished, would be an idiot who
understood nothing of the power of environment, the truth of education
or the facts of life.

But the first, and largest, class of Unemployables who have worked,
can work, know how to work, but _won’t_ work, is in a very different
case, and is formed of very different people.

These are the men who are lost.

For my own part, I believe that idleness is the greatest of all sins,
the chief of all crimes. It is not those offences against the law of
God and the ordinance of man that we punish which are always the
worst. I may be wrong, but I give it as my opinion that sloth is the
prime sin of all those lusts and iniquities that war against the soul
and destroy manhood. I believe that the thief who works, the drunkard
who works, the liar who works, the adulterer who works, may often be a
better man than the boneless, bloodless idler who is neither thief,
drunkard, liar, or adulterer.

Work--all work--has in it a fine spiritual element, just as the
smallest and meanest thing in the world has a divine side, inasmuch as
God made it and saw that it was good. All temporary forms, it has been
said, include essences that are eternal. Whatever be the meanness and
loneliness of a man’s occupation, he may discharge it on principles
common to himself and the Archangel Gabriel. The man who spends his
whole life in cleaning codfish in Leadenhall Market is a better and
finer man in the eye of God, a worthier and more valuable man to the
Commonwealth, than the poor man who loafs away his life in a four-ale
bar, or the rich one who lounges through his existence in a palace.

However far I may go in my belief that idleness is the greatest vice
of all, hardly any one here would attempt to combat the general view
that it is a vice and a very bad one.

But leaving the purely moral standpoint for a moment, let me point out
to you the value of work as an aid to _material_ success and
happiness.

For a moment we will put aside the fact that toil is a virtue and
laziness a sin. Let me briefly repeat what has been said a thousand
times by far abler and more important lips than mine--

Work pays.

In the spring of this year I was staying in the South of France with
a friend who is a great employer of labour. He employs nearly 16,000
men. He told me that, quite unknown to every one, he has established a
system of reports upon the work and ability of each separate man. His
agents inform him that Jack Smith, whom he has never met and will
never meet in this world, is a hard worker. The next promotion goes to
Jack Smith.

Genius, the highest and rarest attribute of the human being, has been
said to be “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” A capacity for
work which is not infinite but finite, yet which is still strong and
vigorous, ought always and in all circumstances to secure a livelihood
and ensure respect. This is the very least that it should do. It may
do much more. It may command success.

What was it but work that enabled Heyne of Gottingen, the son of a
poor weaver, to become one of the greatest classical scholars; that
enabled Akenside, the son of a butcher, to write _The Pleasures of the
Imagination_; Arkwright, the barber, to become Sir Richard Arkwright,
inventor of the spinning-jenny; Beattie, the school-master, to become
Professor of Moral Philosophy; Prideaux to become the Bishop of
Winchester from being the assistant in the kitchen at Exeter College;
Edmund Saunders, the errand lad, to become Sir Edmund Saunders, Chief
Justice of the King’s Bench; Jonson, the common bricklayer, to become
Ben Jonson the famous? Adrian VI. rose to his great fame as a scholar
from being a poor lad in the streets, who, for want of other
convenience, had to read by the lamps in the church porches; Parkes,
the grocer’s, and Davy, the apothecary’s apprentice, became the two
greatest chemical investigators of their age. What enabled Dr. Isaac
Milner, Dean of Carlisle and Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, to
rise from the humble position of a weaver; and White, who was also a
weaver, to become Professor of Arabic at Oxford; Hunter, the
cabinet-maker, to attain the first rank among anatomists? Incredible
labour enabled Demosthenes to become the greatest orator of antiquity.
_The Economy of Human Life_ and _The Annual Register_ were the
production of Dodsley, who by labour raised himself from the position
of a weaver and a footman. Labour enabled Falconer, the barber’s son,
to write his celebrated poem of _The Shipwreck_. The editor of _The
Quarterly Review_, Gifford, somehow acquired the needed capability
from being a cabin-boy and shoemaker’s apprentice. Haydn, the son of a
poor cartwright, became the eminent composer; Johnson, through
sickness and poverty, rose to be the immortal linguist; Jeremy
Taylor, a barber’s son, ended as theologian and bishop; Barry, from a
working mason, became the renowned painter. Dr. Livingstone attained
his celebrity from being a “piecer” in a factory. Indeed, if we read
the lives of distinguished men in any department, we find them
celebrated for the amount of labour they could perform. There is no
exception to this rule even in the military profession. Julius Cæsar,
Cromwell, Washington, Napoleon, and Wellington, were all renowned as
hard workers. We read how many days they could support the fatigues of
a march; how many hours they spent in the field, in the cabinet, in
the court; how many secretaries they kept employed; in short, how hard
they worked. Superficial thinkers are ready to cry out, “Miracles!”
Yes! but they are miracles of industry and of labour.

Great success came to these great workers I have enumerated, people
who started life as working men. If they had lived to-day they would
have achieved the same, though the task would have been a more
difficult one. Men of this stamp cannot be crushed. But more ordinary
men who have the capacity for hard work and are willing to do it, what
shall we say of many of them in the year 1906? What shall we say of
the thousands who want work and can’t get it, of the Unemployed?

We must say just this--the Unemployed are the victims of the
Unemployable, and all working men suffer to support the idle and
worthless classes of the community.

Every one suffers, every one has to pay for the maintenance of the
Unemployable. But the working man pays most and suffers most. Let me
put it to the working men here to-night.

Out of every pound I earn I have to pay a shilling to the Government
in income-tax. I call this hard, because every penny of my income is
made by hard mental work. The parson and the doctor, the farmer, the
lawyer, the author, are taxed exactly the same as the man who has not
earned his income, but who has been left land or other property by his
father. I work ten hours a day nearly every day of my life, and I only
make nineteen shillings out of every pound I earn, while the man who
has an income without working for it pays not a penny more. You are
probably wondering what this has to do with your side of the question.
You do not pay income-tax, you may say, it is only the people who make
more than three pounds odd a week who have to pay this tax.

You are quite wrong if you think this. In proportion to your earnings,
you pay, even here in this country, more than I do, more than the
doctor, more than the farmer--more than almost any one, except the
parson, who is always the most heavily taxed man in proportion to his
means and his duties in the community. It is true that you don’t get
yellow papers “On His Majesty’s Service” by the post demanding this or
that sum. You don’t get polite gentlemen calling for money, and backed
up by the whole force of the British Constitution. You pay in other
ways. Take the case of a farm labourer. The farmer rents his land from
the original owner, and he makes as much as he can out of it. The
farmer has to pay the Government a proportion of every shilling he
makes. It stands to reason, therefore, that he can’t afford to pay his
labourers as much as he would were he himself less heavily taxed. And
there are other ways in which the working man pays out of all
proportion to his earnings. The working man who buys a pound of tea, a
glass of beer, or an ounce of tobacco, pays exactly the same duty on
these articles as people with ten times his income. I may buy a pound
of tea at two shillings and the working man may not be able to pay
more than a shilling. But that is merely a question of quality, and
does not affect the argument. The working man with a very small
income pays the same duty as the man with a much larger one.

The working man also pays other taxes, called rates, in his
house-rent. They are not collected direct from him, they are collected
from the landlord, who puts up the rent accordingly.

Therefore, although a superficial view would tend to show that the
working man is without many of those burdens which fall upon the
shoulders of larger earners, such a view would be utterly wrong.

I have still so much to say that I cannot go further into the economic
aspect of the question. Detailed proof, abundant and overflowing,
could be easily supplied. I have no time to do so now, I merely repeat
the indubitable fact that the working man has to pay for the
workhouses, the asylums, and the prisons; poor as he is, he must
support the Unemployables.

In the workhouses, at any rate in the London unions, he must support
them in a comparative luxury which he himself can by no means afford.

In one great workhouse, for example, we find that the finest butter,
the best Irish bacon, the whitest bread, the most expensive cuts of
beef are for the pauper. Outside the workhouse the working head of a
family who is struggling to bring up his children in honourable
independence has none of these luxuries. In place of the best butter,
he and his family have the cheapest margarine or dripping; their
bacon, if they have any, is bought in inferior scraps; their bread is
of common description, and instead of costly cuts of beef, they too
often have to content themselves with the cheapest form of food in
London--fried fish. At no time have they too much of even this food.
Yet, while they are existing in such pinching poverty, fighting their
way from day to day and from hour to hour, an enormous tax is levied
on them in the form of rates, to maintain in unnecessary comfort those
who are living an idle and unprofitable life.

The contrast to the worker must seem poignant. On the one side of the
workhouse gate are poverty and incessant misery, with insufficient
food to eat. On the other side are warmth and light, complete freedom
from care, and abundance of food to eat, with no necessity whatever to
earn the day’s food by labour. All the prizes are to the unfit; all
the effort and misery are to the laborious. If the honourable working
man loses his employment through some change in industrial
organization or through the growth of foreign competition, he finds it
too often impossible to struggle back to his feet. He sees the help
which might have carried him through his misfortune diverted by the
blatant outcries of the worthless. He must be content to suffer and
die in proud silence, while those who have never done or wished to do
an honest day’s work absorb the contributions of public and private
charity.

Mr. McKenzie, to whom I am indebted for so many illuminating facts,
completes the picture in a few vivid paragraphs. He takes the huge and
poverty-stricken London district of Poplar for his text, and he tells
us--

     “Had the Poplar poor law authorities contented themselves with
     dealing adequately with the old and the sick, and the maimed
     who are among them, all their resources would have been taxed,
     for the district is now very, very poor. They went further.
     They deliberately attracted to themselves the great shifting
     army of loafers and of idlers from all parts of London.

     “How has this been done? By two means. Outdoor relief has been
     freely granted to all kinds of folk, and the people inside the
     workhouse have been treated in a sumptuous manner far above the
     style of their class.

     “The guardians decided that the stone-yard is derogatory, and
     abolished the labour test. They had no sufficient labour for
     men, so they allow them to remain in practical idleness. There
     are over two hundred and fifty young men in the workhouse
     to-day, amply fed, well clothed, and maintained week by week,
     and month by month, in idleness. They are lazy,
     good-for-nothing scamps, many of them, as their records clearly
     show. Naturally they take advantage of the glorious prospect of
     plenty to eat and nothing to do. There is another army, only
     less numerous, of young women in the prime of years and of
     health, equally idle.

     “A few days since, I went over the ‘workhouse’ at midday, and
     watched the great rooms packed with legal idlers, all busy
     eating a dinner such as few labourers outside have. ‘Do you
     mean seriously to tell me that these men have no proper
     employment?’ I asked my guide, as we stood in a great room
     thronged with not far short of three hundred men, mostly
     varying in age from eighteen to forty, all sound limbed, all
     physically fit. ‘We use them as far as we can in cleaning up,’
     my informant replied.

     “The next extraordinary point at Poplar is the feeding of the
     inmates. No one denies that the pauper should have a
     sufficiency of wholesome food, and most of us would willingly
     support the generous feeding of the old and the infirm. But the
     Poplar guardians have gone to the extreme here. They work on
     the policy avowed by some of them that ‘the poor man ought to
     have the best sometimes.’ They are going to give him the best
     when he is in the workhouse, and they do! The butter costs,
     bought by the ton, 1_s._ 2-3/4_d._ a pound. I am informed that
     the contractors are required to supply only ‘Denny’s best
     Irish’ bacon. The meat is of the very finest quality to be
     bought, and the bread is of a grade and perfection rarely to be
     had in shops or restaurants. I examined the dinners being
     served in the course of an ordinary visit, and I declare in
     sober truth that the quality was at least as high as that given
     in an average West End club. The mealy potatoes and the fine
     boiled meats certainly equal those served in the modest club
     where I lunch.”

This, my working-men listeners, is what you and I are paying for. The
obvious result upon any district where the rates must be raised to an
impossible height in order to support the idle and worthless, is that
such a district ceases to be an area of employment.

The great manufacturing firms decline to continue their operations in
a place where local taxation is so heavy that it prevents them from
paying a dividend to their shareholders.

The firms go, but their labourers do not go with them. These, after a
brief struggle, swell the ranks of the Unemployed, that sorrowful army
for which the Government has just voted £200,000 as a small temporary
relief.

Now I do not think that I need say much more as to the manner in which
the Unemployables have created the class of the Unemployed, and as to
how the working man suffers. I have given a brief summary enough--in
the endeavour to be as thorough as possible--but it is already
somewhat lengthy.

I wish to come at once to the principal point of this lecture--_the
remedy for it all_!

I am personally convinced that the remedy I am about to propound is
the only satisfactory one, and the object of my presence here to-night
is to outline it for you.

There is a time in the history of certain diseases when any malignant
growth must be removed with the knife. Cancer, the tiger of all
physical ills, can only be treated in this way. The hideous thing
which has fastened on the human body must be cut away from it, or the
body dies. The gentle measures of medicine and diet are useless. Life
must be preserved by the scalpel and knife of the surgeon. “Is there
no other way, doctor?” the nervous patient asks. “Don’t you think that
I might get well if I kept on the Chian Turpentine treatment or the
injection of Tryptic Ferment?”

The surgeon of to-day who knows his business will answer “No.” He will
proceed to the stern though inevitable operation.

And that is what we have got to do in regard to this social cancer,
this economic disease of the Unemployed question. We must stop the
whole thing. You working men have the power to do it, and this is the
way in which you must do it.

In the first place, you must realize your own power over the councils
of the nation, in the ordering and determining of the laws of England.
You who are working men are already beginning to do this. To take only
one instance, the Trades Unions have already combined to send a number
of labour members to Parliament, and a working man holds a high
ministerial position with conspicuous honesty and ability. I don’t in
the least agree with most of the aims of what is known as the Labour
Party. My reading, education, and experience have taught me that
Socialism is the dream of an impossibility, and that the witness of
history, the experience of nations, and the laws of God are all
hostile to it alike. There has never yet been a continuing
Commonwealth in which all men were equal inasmuch as they were State
officials. There never will be.

But working men have now the power to remedy the unjust conditions
under which they live. The more they realize that power the more able
will they be to bring about the change.

One of the first things that they must do is to relieve themselves
and others of the burden of the Unemployables--this is the way in
which I believe it can be done.

We must follow the plan adopted with signal success by Germany,
Denmark, Belgium, and other foreign countries, only, in proportion as
our own problem is more menacing and acute than in other States, we
must adapt, amplify, and extend their plan to our needs. In these
countries every effort is made to assist the deserving poor, while the
undeserving are not merely repelled; they are also punished. Relief is
given, after a careful visitation of the distressed case and thorough
personal inquiry, in the shape of a loan, and repayment of the loan is
required except in cases where the assisted are not able-bodied. The
lazy and worthless are relegated to labour colonies, or to penal
workhouses, whence they can return to ordinary life after a term of
labour has been served. The old are cared for, when deserving, in a
different kind of workhouse, and receive indulgent treatment. In this
way sturdiness and independence of character are assured, and there is
no danger of the excessive multiplication of paupers, or of enormous
expenditure on relief.

This is speaking generally. The two chief agencies for dealing with
the Unemployed question are the systems of insurance against
unemployment and the establishment of labour colonies in which the
Unemployables are forced to work.

It is impossible for me to-night to do more than sketch the working of
these two institutions in a single country. I will, therefore, outline
the method of insurance adopted in Germany, and give an account of the
greatest labour colony in existence--that of Merxplas in Belgium.

A month or two ago I was in the great German city of Cologne. There I
found the following system in operation:--

“The ‘City of Cologne Office for Insurance against Unemployment in
Winter’ was established in 1896. The object of the office is to
provide, with the assistance of the Cologne Labour Registry, an
insurance against unemployment during the winter (December to March)
for the benefit of male workpeople in the Cologne district. In order
to insure with the office, a man must be at least eighteen years of
age, must have lived for at least a year in Cologne, and must not
suffer from permanent incapacity to work. He is required to pay a
weekly premium, payment of which must commence as from April 1, and
must continue for thirty-four weeks.

“The amount of the premium was originally 3_d._ per week for both
skilled and unskilled workmen; in 1901 the rate of premium was fixed
at 3_d._ for unskilled and 4-1/4_d._ for skilled men; in 1903 the rate
was raised to 3-1/2_d._ per week for unskilled and 4-3/4_d._ per week
for skilled workmen. In no case must a man be more than four weeks
late in paying his weekly premium, otherwise he loses all claim upon
the office; but in special cases the operation of this rule may be
suspended by the committee of the insured.

“In return for these payments the insured workman, if and when out of
work in the period named above, receives, for not more than eight
weeks in all, a daily amount, which is 2_s._ for each of the first
twenty days (nothing being paid for Sundays), and then 1_s._ on each
subsequent day. These payments begin on the third week-day after the
date on which the man has reported himself as out of work.

“While out of work, a man must report himself to the office twice
daily, and if work is offered him, he must take it, provided that the
nature of the employment and the rate of pay be, so far as
practicable, similar to what the man had been getting while in work.
But he cannot be asked to fill a place left vacant in consequence of a
trade dispute. Unmarried men, with no dependants living at Cologne,
are required to take work away from that city, if offered to them,
their fares being paid for them.

“No money is paid in respect of unemployment caused by illness or
infirmity, or by the man’s own fault, or by a trade dispute.

“The administration of the affairs of this Insurance Office is in the
hands of the Executive Committee, the Committee of the Insured, and
the General Meeting of Members.

“The Executive Committee consists of the head of the Cologne
Municipality (_Oberbürgermeister_) or his delegate, of the President
for the time being of the Cologne Labour Registry, and of twenty-four
members, twelve elected by the insured workmen, and twelve patrons or
honorary members (six employers and six employees) chosen by the
patrons and honorary members.

“The twelve representatives of the insured on the Executive Committee,
together with the business manager of the office, form the Committee
of the Insured, referred to above.

“The Executive Committee has the right to decline to make any further
insurance contracts, should it become doubtful whether the fund is
adequate to meet further liabilities; and on two occasions (in 1901-2
and 1902-3) it became necessary to suspend operations in this manner.”

What an excellent plan this is! The working man has, I know, his sick
club, his benefit society, to which he must subscribe. If he is a
member of a Trades Union there again is another claim upon his purse.
But all working men are not members of Trades Unions. The greater the
skill of the trained mechanic, for example, the more the disfavour
with which he regards the Trades Unions. It is a splendid thing to be
a member of a great and powerful organization which has for its object
to ensure that every man shall be paid a living wage. But when a Union
forces all its members to a dead level of equality with that of the
least skilled, when the good workman is compelled to do no more work,
and no better work, than the worst workman in the confederation, then
the good workman very naturally takes his name off the books. Once
more, many working men, especially in the country, are fairly sure of
always being able to obtain work if they are prepared to do it. But in
the great, crowded, competitive centres of England, the uncertainty of
regular employment, especially in regard to unskilled labour, the
establishment of such a system of insurance would be of incalculable
benefit, nor do I believe that the infinitesimal premium would be
regretted or missed by any sensible and hard-working man.

You may object that probably the funds of the insurance companies
might possibly come to be diverted to the support and assistance of
the _won’t_ works--the Unemployables. Please hear me to the end and
you will see that this objection cannot be upheld.

I do not appeal to the experience of despotic Germany but of
democratic Belgium when I describe the largest Continental Labour
Colony, that of Merxplas in Belgium. During the present year I have
spent some months in Belgium, and have been enabled to gather the
opinions of all sorts of people upon the subject. Every thinking man I
have consulted in this country is emphatic in his praise of the
institution.

The Law of November 27, 1891, “for the repression of vagrancy and
begging,” which came into operation on January, 4, 1892, imposed upon
the Belgian Government the duty of organizing correctional
establishments to be called (A) Beggars’ Depôts, (B) Houses of Refuge,
and (C) Reformatory Schools. The Labour Colonies are maintained in
order to fulfil the requirements of the Law under (A) and (B).

All persons confined in a Beggars’ Depôt or in a House of Refuge, not
suffering from incapacity, are to be put to work of such nature as may
be prescribed, and shall, unless deprived thereof as a measure of
discipline, receive a daily wage, part of which shall be kept in hand
and credited to the “leaving fund” of the inmate in respect of whose
labour the same shall be paid.

The Minister of Justice fixes, with respect to the Beggars’ Depôts and
Houses of Refuge, the rate of wage which the inmates shall receive,
and the deductions to be retained out of this wage towards the
“leaving fund.” This fund is handed over partly in the shape of cash,
partly in that of clothing and tools, when the inmate is discharged.

The internal regulations of the Beggars’ Depôts and Houses of Refuge
are settled by Royal Decree. Any person confined in either class of
institution may be ordered to undergo solitary confinement.

The classes of persons whom the magistrates are directed (by Article
13 of the Law) to send to be confined in a Beggars’ Depôt, are all
persons not suffering from incapacity, who instead of providing
themselves with the means of existence by labour, abuse the charity of
the public by habitual mendicancy; those persons who, through
laziness, or drunken or immoral habits, pass their lives in vagrancy,
and those who live on the earnings of vice (_souteneurs de filles
publiques_).

Merxplas is reached from Antwerp by a steam tramway running through a
cultivated country with occasional stretches of pine plantations.
There are only a few villages, all small, and there is no place which
can be in any way styled a town on the way to Merxplas, or indeed,
within a considerable radius round the colony. The surrounding country
is sandy heath, with pine plantations, but this is transformed at
Merxplas by the manual labour of the colonists into excellent
agricultural land, with fields and gardens neatly cultivated and
well-grown avenues of oak, poplar, and pines. Such a transformation
has been rendered more easy by the nature of the sub-soil, which is
clay everywhere underlying the top-soil of sand. The buildings are
large and handsome, and of good design. They seem excellently built.
The main block consists of a large quadrangle, and is entered by a
principal gate on the western side. The offices of administration are
centred round this gate, with dining-halls capable of seating 1500
colonists at a time, on the left, and reception-rooms, baths,
fire-engine house, etc., on the right. The _quartier cellulaire_ as
the prison for refractory colonists is named, is easily marked by the
exercise grounds. To this is attached on one side a barracks for 150
soldiers and on the other a building set apart for the _immoraux_.

The east side, opposite to the main gate, is occupied by the hospital
in the centre, and by two wings on each side for the _infirmes_, who
are still capable of light work, and for the _incurables_, who are
unfit for any kind of labour. The remaining side on the north consists
of four long galleries, _chauffoirs_, which are intended for the use
of the colonists in inclement weather. Between these, placed
centrally, are the lavatories and the canteen. There also is a
library, from which they can obtain books on Sunday, in which at the
time of our visit a tramp choir was practising with considerable skill
under a tramp organist, and without any supervision.

The dormitories are four large buildings on the west front flanking
the approach to the main gate, and beyond these lies the large new
church which the colonists have just erected. This will hold 1500 men
standing, and is a very effective building. Adjoining are the
farm-buildings, which are nearly all on a very lavish scale, and
thoroughly modern in construction. To the northward are the
workshops. All these also are admirably built, and are thoroughly
suited to their purposes. Beyond these lie the brickyards, stoneyards,
pottery works, tannery, cement yard, etc.

The inmates are divided into six classes--

     Class I. Men sentenced for offences against morality and for
     arson.

     Class II. Men sentenced to Colony life as a sequel to a term of
     imprisonment of less than one year.

     Men whose past history shows them to be dangerous to the
     community.

     Class III. Habitual vagabonds, mendicants, inebriates, and men
     generally unable to support themselves.

     Class IV. Men under twenty-one years of age.

     Class V. (_a_) The infirm and (_b_) the incurable.

     Class VI. First offenders.

These come under the normal conditions of Colony life; that is to say,
they are obliged to do about nine hours work a day, of a character
suited to their capacity, in return for which they receive board and
lodging, and in addition, a small amount of pay.... This is partly
paid in tokens valid only at the Colony stores and canteen, and partly
it is banked against the time when the colonist leaves. The normal
day is as follows: the colonists rise at 4.30 (summer), and after
leaving the lavatory each man receives his ration of bread for the day
(1-1/2 lbs.) and as much coffee (chicory) as he likes. What bread is
not eaten then is kept for dinner and supper. At 6 they enter the
shops, where they remain until 11.30, with a half-hour interval from 8
to 8.30 a.m., when they can go outside and smoke. At 11.30 they are
all marched back to the quadrangle and go into the dining-halls in two
relays. After this they rest until 1.30, when they re-enter the shops
until 6, with another half-hour interval at 4 o’clock. On their return
supper is served, and immediately afterwards they go to bed, when the
roll-call is made, requiring every man to stand to his bed, and those
missing are noted.

In the winter the short day necessitates the farmhands retiring very
early to bed. Those who work in the shops begin their work at 7.30 in
the morning, and work on after dusk by artificial light.

The colonists are given no meat, but the soup of vegetables is very
good, and each man has a large quantity. They have a sweet drink made
of liquorice-wood boiled in water, with their meals; coffee and bread
for breakfast; potatoes or other vegetables, with a meat sauce for
supper; and chicory-water in large cans in their dormitories. To
supplement the above they can make purchases from the canteen of beer,
tobaccos, lard, herrings, etc., which are sold at exceedingly small
prices, representing only the actual cost price of the article when
produced by the Colony labour itself.

The staff is small, and consists of a Director-in-Chief at
Hoogstraeten, who exercises a general financial supervision over all
the Colonies, a Director at Wortel and Merxplas, and at the latter
place the following officers: Deputy-Directors, 2; Doctor, 1; Priests,
2; Teachers, 5; Clerks, 19; Manufacturing Manager, 1; Warders, 81;
Sisters of Mercy, 6.

All offences against the regulations of the Colony and all cases of
slack work are summarily dealt with by the Director, who has full
power to transfer men from one class to another, and from a more to a
less remunerative form of work. He can also award imprisonment or
solitary confinement, and bread and water diet in the Colony cells for
any period up to sixty days at a time. This power can also, in case of
necessity, be used repeatedly, so that a bad character can practically
be permanently locked up.

A further help to the maintenance of discipline is undoubtedly the
privilege of earning wages and of spending them directly on beer and
tobacco, etc.

There is one feature of Merxplas which is at first rather startling;
that is, that every day there are a certain number who escape. This
does not seem to give the authorities much concern, because they are
nearly always brought back again in a short time, either through
capture, or because their mode of living brings them again to the
notice of the police.

A beginning was once made of digging a moat round the grounds, but it
was abandoned because it was thought that the possibility of escape
helped to prevent disaffection. The colonists also, in the eyes of the
law, are patients rather than criminals. Those in Classes I. and II.
are, of course, much more closely guarded. Escape, like all other
breaches of Colony discipline, can be punished by the Director with
imprisonment in the Colony cells.

The results of the work done at the Colony is thus summed up in the
“Blue Book” from which the greater part of the detailed particulars
have been taken.

“Even more important than the economy of the system is its effect on
the colonists. The men at Merxplas have retained a large proportion of
whatever manual and technical skill they possessed when they first
began to slip out of employment in the outside world. They have
entered the Colony before the rapid deterioration, which is the
inevitable result of the tramp life, has had time to take effect, and
the opportunity afforded them to practise their trades has, in most
cases, prevented their ever sinking to the level of the average
English tramp. In every shop the keen interest the men take in their
work is most noticeable; only one foreman and one warder are employed
in each shop, and without coercion the men seemed all working with
remarkable energy and real interest. This is, in our opinion, perhaps
the most striking feature of the whole establishment.

“The permanent effect on the individual is less, perhaps, than one
would at first sight expect. About ninety per cent are habituals. The
reason given by all the authorities was always the same. Outside, this
class of man of weak moral fibre, and generally of inferior physique,
cannot keep from drink. Sooner or later he breaks down, loses his
place and returns. Inside, away from temptation, they work well, and
as long as the sentence does not exceed two or three years, seem
content to remain. The colonies, it must be remembered, do not claim
to deal largely with the temporarily unemployed, but with a class that
is more or less permanently inefficient. In this connection, however,
it seems that no attempt has been made to bring any strong religious
influence to bear. There are the usual masses and other observances
of the Roman Church, but there seems to be little personal mission
work undertaken.”

I come to my remedy.

As I see it, what we have to do is this--we must establish colonies in
which the Unemployables shall spend their lives. When once a man has
been proved to be irreclaimable by ordinary methods, when a properly
established tribunal, after searching inquiry, has pronounced him a
burden and a drag upon the community, then I would put him away for
life, if he is irreclaimable, and continues to remain so.

I would make his life just as pleasant as he himself chose to make it.
If he refused to work, then his lot should be a prison cell and bread
and water until he did. If he made the best of the situation in which
his own fault had placed him, he should be enabled to earn enough to
keep him in considerable comfort, and to provide him with harmless and
judicious pleasures.

Such a man should live in a state of almost freedom. The one thing
denied him would be the privilege of mixing with the outside world and
of reproducing his kind. Such gratifications and amusements as he had
earned should be supplied him with no ungrudging hand. The
consolations of religion should be always at his command and should
be constantly brought before him.

But he should not be allowed to beget children who would swell the
ranks of the Unemployable and increase the intolerable burden already
carried by the honest working man. It is just about as certain as
science and economic experience can make it, that the child of an
Unemployable will become an Unemployable too. It is possible that one
child in a thousand may turn out a decent citizen. That is about the
maximum percentage, and if, for the sake of possibly producing one
ordinary worker we ought to allow nine hundred and ninety-nine
hopeless idlers to come into existence, then I have nothing more to
say.

I do not think such a position can be maintained for a moment. I
venture to think that you will agree with me.

I admit that such a method would be inhuman, immoral and unchristian,
if we were to treat the hopeless social failure as a criminal pure and
simple. Let us make his life as happy as he chooses to make it; treat
him as a criminal if he won’t work in the colony, comfort and pet him
if he will. But we need go no further than this. I do not honestly
think that our duty as Christians or sociologists imposes more
consideration upon us than just this. “If thine arm offend thee cut it
off.”

Sir Robert Anderson, for many years Assistant Commissioner of
Metropolitan Police, has long held the view that the professional
criminal is not a necessity of civilization, and that a reform of the
method of dealing with him would soon bring about his complete
extinction. Sir Robert, with his extensive Scotland Yard experience
behind him, declares that the number of high-class criminals in
England does not exceed a few dozen, and that if these were got out of
the way organized crime against property would cease. The plan which
Sir Robert Anderson has conceived is that of providing asylums in
place of the present prisons, where a man who has proved to have
devoted his life to crime would be sent for life and made to earn his
living.

We must provide asylums for the Unemployables also, in order to
preserve ourselves. It is no use being sentimental. We must relegate
social parasites to a state and condition where they can no longer
infest the social body and cannot increase in numbers. When we have
done this, when you working men have done this, in less than a
generation the question of the Unemployed will be satisfactorily
settled. It may well be, moreover, that such a method will change the
least degraded Unemployables into honest, hard-working citizens who
can be once more admitted into the world on probation.

These are my opinions, and though I have given you but a sketch of
them to-night, I submit that they are at least reasonable and worth
consideration.

The words of the poet Shelley are no less applicable in the present
than they were in the past. He had an unconquerable faith in the
spiritual destiny of our race, and his lines, when he wrote his “song
to the men of England” were filled with flame:--

    “The seed ye sow another reaps;
    The wealth ye find another keeps;
    The robes ye weave another wears;
    The arms ye forge another bears.

    Sow seed--but let no tyrant reap;
    Find wealth--let no impostor heap;
    Weave robes--let not the idle wear;
    Forge arms, in your defence to bear.”




AN AUTHOR’S POST-BAG




VII

AN AUTHOR’S POST-BAG

“_You have the letters Cadmus gave_”----


As I sit down to write this paper I am experiencing a quite novel
sensation. Most of us like to talk about ourselves when any one will
listen, and nearly all of us do so now and then. But to write about
one’s self in the reasonable expectation that a large number of
people, friends, enemies and those who are indifferent, will read what
one has written, is curious. There have been times when an interviewer
has come from a Magazine and I have found myself trying to explain my
views, to answer questions that were put, with some degree of fluency,
to do myself justice and yet not to be egotistical in a somewhat
difficult situation. Knowing quite well what I wanted to say, and
exactly how I wished to explain myself, I have listened to my words
with a kind of embarrassed wonder at their inadequacy. “What an ass
this fellow must be thinking me!” has been one’s continual thought.
Then, when the interview appears, sometimes with pictures of “Mr. Guy
Thorne at his desk,” “the dining-room,” “shooting upon the moor,” one
finds that the writer has made a nice smooth sequence of the
conversation, just as the photographer has taken charming pictures of
one’s carefully-arranged furniture. Yet one was rather prevented from
really saying what one would have liked to say because of the
interviewer’s presence as the medium who was to give the words to the
public. This is a foolish self-consciousness, no doubt, but it is not
easy to overcome. Now, and at this moment, there is no such
restriction upon free speech. The snow is driving over the Dover
cliffs, no sound penetrates to the ancient room in which I write, and
for the first time in my life I am sitting down to talk of myself, as
an author to his readers.

The essay has come to be written in this way. There were still some
pages of this book to fill when last week, I was asked to open a
bazaar in Dover. The vicar said a good many absurdly kind things about
my stories when he introduced me to the people there, and afterwards I
had to stand a continuous fire of questions for two hours. I could not
understand, and I do not now understand, why any one should be
interested in the _personal_ explanations of a writer as to how he
writes, what happens when he is writing, and so forth. I do not often
go to a theatre, but when I do I never buy a programme. I don’t want
to know the private name of the lady who plays Ophelia or the
gentleman who is the Hamlet of the night. I pay my money in order that
they shall be Hamlet and Ophelia to me, that I shall watch the agonies
of a dark and troubled spirit, shall sigh over the tender fancies of
an unhappy love-sick girl, and the more I am forced to realize that
the gentleman is Mr. Jones, who was fined five pounds in the morning
for driving his motor-car too fast, the less real he is as the Prince.

But, although this is my way of thinking, I am well aware it is not
the general way; and as I have proved for myself that there is a
demand for some sort of personal explanation, and as I endeavour to
conduct my trade of writing upon common-sense principles, this essay
is getting itself written.

Addison said that “So excessive is the egotism of the egotist that he
makes himself the darling theme of contemplation; he admires and loves
himself to that degree that he can talk of nothing else.” This is an
obvious statement, and made with little of Mr. Secretary’s usual charm
of style. But it is perfectly true. I beg leave to submit, however,
that what I am doing here is not so much an act of egotism--egoism is
the better word--but a legitimate statement for those, if there are
any, who care to read it.

I have strong convictions upon certain points, and I endeavour to pack
my stories with these convictions. That, by doing this, I please many
readers who think as I do I am presently going to show, by quoting
some of their letters which have reached me.

A novel is simply this: it is a certain portion of the lives of
certain people imagined by the author and seen through his
temperament. Very well then; let me proceed to prove that the modern
nonsense which would have people believe that Christianity in fiction
is _against the canons of art_, is simply a lie.

The life of every single human being in England is punctuated and
impinged upon by Christianity. As I pointed out in my first essay, the
usual modern novel never mentions--never even mentions!--Sunday. Yet
on Sunday, the shops, factories, theatres and public-houses close. The
drunkard has as much reason to find Sunday the most dismal day in the
week as the saint to know it the happiest and best. For half-an-hour
in every town and village the bells of church and chapel ring--if
indeed chapels are “ritualistic” enough to have bells, a point upon
which I am not informed!

And again, speaking of the constant reminder we all have of religion,
every coin we have in our pockets bears the inscription REX FID.
DEF.--our King is officially known as the Defender of the Christian
Faith. Every day as I write, the newspapers are full of the
controversy--the religious controversy--of the Education Bill. Each
time you and I go to a concert we finish it with the music of the
National Anthem, which is a prayer to God that he will bless and
preserve the Dynasty. Is it necessary to multiply instances? I think
not.

How can any one say, as the literary critics have sometimes said of my
own books and of others much more important, that “religion” is out of
place in a novel?

As I have pointed out at some length, the greatest novels are one and
all permeated with the sense of religion. Take your Thackeray and read
in _Vanity Fair_ of George Osborne going out to battle and first
saying “Our Father” with his wife. Read the works of this great writer
and regard how, whenever a great emotion, a poignant situation occurs,
so surely the author sends up a prayer to Almighty God either in his
own person or that of his characters. In that almost greatest of
English novels, Charles Reade’s _The Cloister and the Hearth_, the
hero dies with the holy name of Jesus on his lips. There is religion
in _Pickwick!_--we read of the Christmas of Dingley Dell. In _Les
Misérables_, that huge epic novel, Victor Hugo has drawn more than one
saint of God, has made Christianity the motive of his drama.

It _is_ so in life, be certain that it is and always will be.
Christianity is the central thing, the only important thing, and the
attempt to minimize its importance and influence is as the chirping of
a linnet on the roadside as some stately procession passes by.

     _They say. What say they? Let them say!_

But let no one be deluded into believing that the printed sneers of
those who are afraid to recognize our Lord represent any real opinion,
any weight of opinion, as to the public distaste to Christianity as an
integral part of the fiction which they buy.

Sir Arthur Helps once said, “The influence of works of fiction is
unbounded. Even the minds of well-informed people are more often
stored with characters from acknowledged fiction than from history or
biography, or the real life around them. We dispute about these
characters as if they were realities. Their experience is our
experience; we adopt their feelings and imitate their acts.
Shakespeare’s Plays were the only history to the Duke of Marlborough.
Thousands of Greeks acted under the influence of what Achilles or
Ulysses did in Homer.”

All this is entirely true. As a young American novelist once put it to
me, “To-day is the day of the novel.” In no other day and by no other
vehicle is contemporaneous life so adequately expressed, and the
critics of the twenty-second century, reviewing our times, striving to
reconstruct our civilization, will look not to the painters, not to
the architects nor dramatists, but to the novelists to find our
idiosyncrasy.

This is by no means intended as an apologia for the sort of tales I
write. I know that it is my duty to write them, the duty I owe to my
own convictions, and however badly I write them I am doing my best.
No, I am not apologizing for my point of view. I am only trying to
suggest that even in my greatest artistic failures my artistic
standpoint can’t be assailed. Any critic who says that because I write
as a Christian and that _therefore (and for that reason only)_ my
books are inartistic, is wrong.

I have headed this article “An Author’s Post-Bag” et cetera. Probably
you will be wondering when I am going to justify the title. I will
begin to do so now.

Post-time is always a recurring wonder to me. The lowest classes of
all, the people who don’t get letters, are incapable of experiencing
more than a third of the sensations which the highly-organized life of
our time has to offer us.

A novelist, and I have no reason to think that I am any exception to
the rule, receives a very varied correspondence. The business side of
his operations is more extensive than the layman would suppose. The
writer whose output is regular and whose work is in demand has an
almost daily letter to receive from his agent. There is the question
of a serial for this or that paper, an editor wants a short story, a
publisher is writing impatient letters to the agent for a book that is
overdue, “close times” for various books have to be arranged so that
they do not clash between various publishers--he is confronted every
day with an infinity of detail which even such an experienced and
assiduous agent as I myself am fortunate to possess cannot save him.

When the business letters have been read, there is his own private
correspondence, and then the great mass of communications from people
whom one has never heard of and never seen. It is of these letters
that I would speak, and of their varied appeals to one’s pocket, one’s
vanity, the sense of gratitude and the feeling of anger.

As Cowper said, “None but an author knows an author’s cares,” and not
the least of them is the number of letters he receives asking for
money. There is a rooted idea in the general mind that fame and
fortune come immediately a writer publishes his first book. A novelist
is popularly supposed to be a man of affluence in the twentieth
century, just as in the eighteenth century he was known to be a
pauper. “All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar were blended
with those of the author. The prizes in the wretched lottery of
bookmaking were scarcely less ruinous than the blanks. If good fortune
came, it came in such a manner that it was almost certain to be
abused. After months of starvation and despair, a full third night or
a well-received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged,
unwashed poet with guineas.... A week of taverns soon qualified him
for another year of night cellars.” Well, we have progressed since
then certainly. There are beds to sleep in, food to eat and fire upon
the hearth for most of us. Nevertheless the ordinary novelist is
nearly always a poor man, sometimes bitter poor. I _know_ what I am
talking about and there is not an author, agent or publisher who
would not say the same. For the first book I ever wrote I received ten
pounds, and this was paid in two instalments. Until four years ago
thirty pounds was the largest sum I had received for a long novel.

The word “royalty” has a fine sound. It is a purple word and opens
vistas to the outsider of luxury and ease. Yet in its literary
application it is the biggest humbug and liar of a word that ever
masqueraded for what it is not. There are plenty of “royalties” that
will not pay the third-class return fare between London and Penzance.
A great personal friend of mine, a man of culture and real love of
human event, wrote his first novel three years ago. He had something
definite to say, knew how to say it, and had a first-rate plot. For
months and months I saw him toiling lovingly at his novel. When it was
written he found a publisher willing to produce it, and it duly
appeared. In almost every case the reviews were extremely laudatory.
Papers of position and weight praised it unreservedly, to all
appearances the book was a definite success--a minor success, no
doubt, but a success. From first to last his earnings realized five
pounds, and neither he nor I have reason to believe that his publisher
cheated him in the matter of sales. Here is the written testimony of
what I say, given by an author who died after producing four or five
really excellent and successful novels.

“Take, then, an unusually lucky instance, literally a novel whose
success is extraordinary, a novel which has sold 2500 copies. I repeat
that this is an extraordinary success. Not one book out of fifteen
will do as well. But let us consider it. The author has worked upon it
for--at the very least--six months. It is published. Twenty-five
hundred copies are sold. Then the sale stops. And by the word stop one
means cessation in the completest sense of the word. There are
people--I know plenty of them--who suppose that when a book is spoken
of as having stopped selling, a generality is intended, that merely a
falling off of the initial demand has occurred. Error. When a book--a
novel--stops selling, it stops with a definiteness of an engine when
the fire goes out. It stops with a suddenness that is appalling, and
thereafter not a copy, not one single, solitary copy is sold. And do
not for an instant suppose that ever after the interest may be
revived. A dead book can no more be resuscitated than a dead dog.

“But to go back. The 2500 have been sold. The extraordinary, the
marvellous has been achieved. What does the author get out of it? A
royalty of ten per cent. Eighty-three pounds six shillings and
eightpence for six months’ hard work. Roughly less than £3 9_s._ 0_d._
a week. An expert carpenter will easily make much more than that, and
the carpenter has infinitely the best of it in that he can keep the
work up year in and year out, where the novelist must wait for a new
idea, and the novel writer must then jockey and manoeuvre for
publication. Two novels a year is about as much as the writer can turn
out and yet keep a marketable standard. Even admitting that both the
novels sell 2500 copies there is only £166 13_s._ 4_d._ of profit. One
may well ask the question: Is fiction writing a money-making
profession?

“The astonishing thing about the affair is that a novel may make a
veritable stir, almost a sensation, and yet fail to sell very largely.

“There is so-and-so’s book. Everywhere you go you hear about it. Your
friends have read it. It is in demand at the libraries. You don’t pick
up a paper that does not contain a review of the story in question. It
is in the ‘Book of the Month’ column. It is even, even--the pinnacle
of achievement--in that shining roster, the list of best sellers of
the week.

“Why, of course, the author is growing rich! Ah, at last he has
arrived! No doubt he will build a country house out of his royalties.
Lucky fellow; one envies him.

“Catch him unawares and what is he doing? As like as not writing
unsigned book reviews at thirty shillings a week in order to pay his
lodging bill--and glad of the chance.”

This is absolutely and literally true.

Yet novelists are perhaps more pestered than any other people by
requests for help. A writer who, like myself, can live in fair comfort
by means of unceasing labour, but is not even a well-to-do man, to say
nothing of a “wealthy one,” receives innumerable letters to which he
is quite unable to reply as the applicants would wish, but which are
most distressing to read. At a time when I certainly had not a hundred
pounds in the world, I received the following letter--of course I
suppress the name and address.

                                          “---- Vicarage,
                                               “----shire.

     “MY DEAR SIR,

     “Thank you a thousand times for _When it was Dark_. I am now
     looking forward to Friday, when your next book begins in the
     _Daily Mail_. I have been reading about you to-day and have
     taken courage to ask your help. You say ‘Let nothing disturb
     thee,’ etc. How can I help it in such trouble as mine. My
     husband has failed in health from years of hard work, and out
     of an income of _under_ £200 a year we are paying a curate
     £100. At this moment we are in _extremes_. My boy is reading
     for Holy Orders, and we are in need of funds for his expenses.
     He has been two years a licensed lay reader, and is a thorough
     Catholic and has the highest testimonials. Will you help me in
     my need to-day with a donation. I can give references, and for
     any help I shall be so thankful. Please forgive me for
     troubling you.”

I have no doubt that this appeal is quite genuine, and a very poignant
comment it is upon the way in which the priests of the Church of
England are paid. This type of letter is not a pleasant one to receive
when one is sitting down to work. The imagination with which one is
endowed and by which one earns one’s bread, is not a faculty very easy
to discipline or to control, and the power which should be devoted to
the chapter one is engaged upon wanders away and constructs a picture
of want and sorrow which one is quite powerless to alleviate.

Nor is it once or twice that such letters as this arrive. Here is a
far more piteous document still, if it is genuine. I think that when
you have read it you will agree with me that it is genuine enough.
There is nothing of the ordinary begging letter about it; and if the
writer could invent such a story, he ought not to be so hopelessly
unable to earn a single halfpenny by his pen. It is to be observed
also that in this case the writer wants work, not money.

     “London, N.

     “DEAR SIR,

     “About two years ago I arrived in England from Australia, with
     the object of striving to gain a footing in literature, but so
     far have been unsuccessful. I have written two novels and
     numerous short stories and articles, but I have ever had them
     rejected, and all I can show for my work is a pile of
     publishers’ letters. My resources long since gave out, and I
     worked myself into the lowest poverty, and then I was
     prostrated by a long illness. Knowing, sir, that you have had
     much to do with journalistic work, I decided to write and ask
     you if you knew of any one in the city--or elsewhere--to whom
     you could refer me for some employment. I am practically
     destitute, and knowing no one in London makes it extremely
     difficult for me to get anything to do. About six months ago I
     was turned out of my lodgings owing to arrears of rent, and
     then I commenced tramping the country in the hope of getting
     work. I managed to get three weeks’ hop-picking, but nothing
     else, and so for a while I tramped aimlessly about, being
     exposed to all kinds of weather, sleeping in haystacks, or
     wherever else offered, until at last my health again gave way.
     It was then that I called on a well-known novelist, and he was
     very kind and assisted me, at the same time expressing a wish
     to see my works. They were sent for, and duly forwarded on to
     his agents, and I have been advised to write books for boys,
     the agent expressing his opinion that I would succeed in this,
     but as I am situated writing is out of the question. When I met
     this novelist my health failed utterly, and I was compelled to
     go into the infirmary for a while, and whilst there he wrote
     telling me to try and get some practice in journalistic work
     and to study for a while until I gained a little more
     experience.

     “I think he is out of England at present, but he gave me
     permission to use his letter as a reference if I needed it.
     Well, sir, I returned to London about a month ago, and managed
     to get a few days’ work envelope addressing at Morgan and
     Scott’s, in Paternoster Row, but so far I have been unable to
     find anything else to do. I am very anxious to get some work
     immediately, and if you could help me in this I should be
     indeed grateful. I care not of what nature the employment may
     be, manual or otherwise, if I can only get it at once.

     “Apologizing for troubling you,

    “I am,
    “Dear Sir,
    “Yours faithfully.”

Some time ago a drawing appeared in the _Daily Mail_ of a Cornish
cottage where I was then living. Within a week, by a curious
coincidence, I received _three_ water-colour drawings of the place,
made from the sketch in the newspaper. Two were excellent, and
accompanied by the kindest letters; they hang on my walls now. The
third was by no means a work of art, to say the very least of it, and
this letter came with it:--

     “North Kensington.

     “I am sending you a copy of the cottage I have painted from the
     sketch in the _Daily Mail_ of November 16 last, if you will
     accept it.

     “I must explain that I am only a very poor hand at such work.
     The fact of the matter is that through much _illness_ and _lost
     trade_ that I am left very _badly off_, and seeing the sketch
     and account of your work, thought perhaps if I could paint a
     few copies and you would introduce the matter to your many
     friends I could sell some to them, which would assist me to
     earn something, my health being bad and getting on to seventy
     years of age it is not much I can do. You will understand that
     I do not know anything of the appearance of the country around
     the cottage. I have not been in that part, so all I have put in
     is imaginary. Will you please say what you think to it, and how
     much you think I could sell them for. I have not means to buy
     canvas so have painted on card. Your kind assistance in this
     matter will great oblige

     “Yours truly.”

I have quoted but three letters from a vast pile of others. “Que vivre
est difficile ô mon coeur fatigué!” says the French poet, and nobody
knows it better than the English novelist. But with the best will in
the world we cannot help everybody. Charity begins at home, its sun
rises there and should set abroad, but it is limited by the purse of
the giver. Among all the contents of his post-bag such letters are the
most distressing to the author, and add enormously to a difficult and
often very thankless task.

But such letters as these and all worries _ejusdem generis_ are, after
all, only a small portion of my post-bag. During the last year or two
I have received hundreds and hundreds of letters from all parts of the
world--letters which have given me inexpressible happiness. I think I
may be forgiven for quoting some of them here. The real reward of an
author’s labours lies in the sympathy and appreciation of his readers,
and in that alone. When, moreover, a writer works with a definite
object in view, the purpose of leading others to believe what he
himself believes, such letters are indeed a strong stay and holdfast
which console for any amount of misrepresentation and bring a
veritable oil of joy for mourning.

A priest writes:--

     “SIR

     “I don’t ask you because I know you will pardon a stranger for
     addressing you, and I shall not say much. And the little I mean
     to say I hardly know how to express. Some few years ago I was
     a vicar in----. Now I am sick in body and soul. I had lost all
     my faith, but I have been reading _Made in His Image_, and
     to-day I prayed for the first time for more than a year, and
     tears came, and I don’t know if you heard my voice calling to
     you.

     “I should like to see you. _Can it be?_

    “Yours,
    “DE PROFUNDIS.”

A gentleman from Hull tells me:--

     “DEAR SIR,

     “You will please pardon the intrusion of this letter. I am a
     Sunday School teacher, and have been a Christian for three
     years.

     “A month ago, as a result of reading the _Clarion_ and Haeckel,
     I became disturbed in my mind, and wished to resign my class. I
     sought the assistance of my minister. Instead of answering my
     doubts himself he placed a copy of _When it was Dark_ in my
     hand, telling me to read it prayerfully, and go to him again.
     The following evening I completed the reading of a book whose
     influence will live with me. My dear sir, I feel I cannot thank
     you half enough, and I shall never cease to thank God that the
     book was written.

     “I saw my minister, not with any doubts this time, but with my
     faith renewed, and with a fixed determination to work harder
     for my Divine Master.

     “I expect you will receive many letters expressing thanks, but
     I cannot refrain from adding my humble testimony.

     “Allow me to remain, sir,

     “Yours very faithfully.”

And here is another kind letter from Bridgewater, again from a man:--

     “DEAR ‘MR. THORNE,’

     “Will you please accept my best thanks for your book, _When it
     was Dark_. I started to read it as one distinctly prejudiced
     against it, but I finished the last page saying, ‘It is
     wonderful.’ I only wish that those who condemn it would read it
     for themselves and see the forcible manner in which you have
     depicted what the world would be if the Resurrection was a
     myth. Faith cannot but be strengthened by reading it, and the
     coming Eastertide will be more real to me through having read
     _When it was Dark_.

     “Wishing you every success and happiness.”

From Brantford in far-away Canada this letter reaches me:--

     “DEAR SIR AND FRIEND,

     “After reading your splendid edition, _When it was Dark_, I
     take this manner in addressing. The book impressed me very
     greatly from start to finish, and it always will be henceforth
     a great pleasure, and I am sure a great help, to read your
     publications. We greatly need in this world to-day good strong
     men who will set forth their thoughts in a fearless manner.
     This is in a very large measure the way the book appealed to
     me.

     “It is with a great deal of sincere pleasure I note in the----
     Magazine (which publication is in our home) for a coming issue
     the beginning of one of Guy Thorne’s stories. The writer is a
     young man of twenty years and a Methodist, and presume I am
     taking up too much of a good man’s time. But I might say my
     idea in writing was to convey from a Canadian my thanks for the
     good which I have received, and many others in our city, from
     the reading of this one work.

     “Wishing you every success in your work,

     “Yours sincerely.”

From Brixton:--

     “DEAR SIR,

     “Among the shoals of letters which doubtless you now receive
     may I place this, so that I may thank you for the invaluable
     work which you are doing in writing your novels.

     “The article in to-day’s _Daily Mail_ shows me that you have
     grasped the ideal which I have tried to attain since my teens
     (three years).

     “I am one of the lonely digits in ‘diggins,’ who either fall or
     rise, according to the company they keep. I have thus found
     that religion is to man what the rudder is to the crew of a
     ship.

     “I have regularly attended church since my exile, and delight
     to hear the beautiful service of the English Church. Are they
     not precious words and inspiring. The service effectually
     clears me of that ugly black cloak of worldliness which clings
     to me during the working days.

     “This, I believe, is the lesson which you are engraving so well
     on the minds of all people.

     “I conclude with the wish that your pen will ever respond to
     the spirit which now animates you.”

Again from a far country, this time near East Guzna, W. Tarsus,
Cilicia:--

     “MY DEAR SIR,

     “For weeks I have wanted to write and thank you for your book,
     _When it was Dark_, but I have been laid aside with fever. It
     stirs thousands of us, and you must feel thankful as you look
     round to see the success which is granted you in drawing people
     to ponder upon subjects of such weight. You will like to know
     that I have spread your book right and left in Cyprus, having
     obtained three copies, one of which I sent to a Judge.

     “Your account of the ride to Nablous is a vivid word picture,
     and you must, I think, be familiar with the East.

     “May I say that I find a dignity and vivacity in your book,
     dealing as you do with so solemn and glorious a subject as our
     Lord’s Resurrection, which I firmly hold, and have been
     accustomed to put in the forefront of my teaching as missionary
     both in Australia and Russia.

     “At present my work lies in Cyprus, where I find good
     opportunities of helping on friendliness with the Greek Church.

     “I am now on holiday, and have just given away my last copy of
     _When it was Dark_ while staying in the Carmelite Monastery at
     Haiffa, with those charming French Pères, to an American canon
     who was also there.

     “Sir, what I want to do is to suggest that you should have your
     book translated into French and German. I lent it to a French
     engineer a month ago, and I feel sure it would do good in those
     countries. Think this out. You might take the advice of some
     competent friend.

     “I should like to do the translating myself, but I should make
     so many mistakes, _Magna est veritas, et prævalebit_.

     “Have sent home for _A Lost Cause_, and am expecting another
     treat, with some salt of sarcasm.

     “With sincere respect and gratitude.”

My kind correspondent’s idea has been carried out, I am glad to say.
The book in question has been translated into French and German and
several other languages. And in this regard I may perhaps mention the
surprise I have felt on learning that the French issue has already
gone into three editions. I am in France a good deal each year, and
know something of the temper of the reading public there to-day. I had
not thought that many people would read the book.

From San Remo, in Italy, this letter comes:--

     “DEAR SIR,

     “I read last week _When it was Dark_ and wish each of my
     children to have a copy, as it will show them what the
     Christian Faith means to the world. I still hold to the simple
     faith of my childhood taught me by my dear parents, which
     carried each through a _peaceful death-bed_. Our Heavenly
     Father, the King of kings and the only Ruler of princes,
     sacrificed His beloved Son for His people, and allowed His
     cruel death, knowing that in the future the thought of His
     terrible sufferings would touch the hearts of most and often
     keep them from sinning. I have never doubted _His
     Resurrection_, neither would I allow any person to suggest that
     doubt in my presence. And to me the convincing proof that He
     was indeed the Son of God is, that He rose again from the dead,
     He ascended to Heaven and sitteth on the right hand of His
     Father--God only could possess this power. How very lax we are
     apt to become and take as our due that great sacrifice.

     “I send to Mr. Guy Thorne my little testimony and best wishes,
     as I cannot thank him personally for _reminding me so fully_
     how dark it would indeed be for us all had we not our beloved
     Saviour always ready and willing to intercede with His Holy
     Father for us poor erring mortals. Some one said to me, of
     course Guy Thorne makes a good thing out of his book. I
     replied, certainly, it is his due to be paid for the labour of
     his brain, and in this case he fully deserves it, as he might
     have written a book leading many farther away instead of
     bringing them nearer to the Cross. Also the interesting style
     of _When it was Dark_ will induce many to read it. Whereas, if
     it were very dry, none of us would wade half through.”

An old clergyman in Wales writes thus:--

     “Rectory, Brecon.

     “DEAR SIR,

     “I am seventy; at seventeen I had read more novels and other
     literature than nine out of ten lads of my age. For years past
     I can’t read novels. My daughters sometimes induce me to start
     one, but after a couple of chapters I throw it on one side
     feeling strongly inclined to exclaim with Conan Doyle’s
     school-boy, ‘Rot.’

     “After reading the _Life of Father Dolling_, one of my married
     daughters brought me _When it was Dark_, which I promised to
     read, and enjoyed it very much. My wife _devoured_ it.

     “This won’t interest you very much, but the following fact may.
     A few days after finishing your book our rural
     post-messenger--an old army man--we live quite in the
     country--came to me, quite confidentially, and said he had a
     book he was quite sure I should enjoy; he produced it--it was
     _When it was Dark!_ Poor fellow! he seemed so disappointed when
     he found I had read it. A fortnight ago an Irish lady and her
     daughter stayed with us. They were _good church women_. They
     left me a book for perusal. It is _A Lost Cause_. I have read
     it and enjoyed it. It reminds me of Father Dolling and Kensit
     and Son.

     “I hope you will give us many more. We want Catholic truth
     placed before people in an attractive dress. We want to break
     down the great wall of Protestant ignorance and prejudice. Your
     books are doing this.

     “Don’t heed letters in the Daily Press. I saw a letter in the
     _Daily Mail_. These letters are only a proof that your books
     are _telling_. Go straight forward and may every success and
     blessing attend your efforts. This is the earnest wish of

     “Yours truly.”

I was intensely interested to receive this letter from India:--

                                                “---- Mission,
                                                    “Madras,
                                                       “South India.

     “DEAR SIR,

     “As you are not unwilling to receive letters from strangers,
     perhaps this from a distant land might not be unacceptable to
     you. I am a missionary and have not read two novels during the
     last five years (but thousands before then), but a friend of
     mine having read your _When it was Dark_ persuaded me to read
     it.

     “I was greatly interested in the first few pages describing the
     scenes of my birth and young manhood. I suppose Walktown is
     meant for ----, if so, I was born in that part of Salford, and
     although I belonged to St. ---- Church, I attended very
     frequently St. ---- as the senior church of the district.

     “I enclose an account of my conversion which will no doubt
     interest you. I have thought many a time that it would be an
     admirable theme for a novel. There are many other incidents in
     my life that would lend interest, especially my association
     with some of the most notorious anarchists of England and the
     Continent, and America, I was also a journalist on the
     _Clarion_, and a bosom friend of Robert Blatchford for fourteen
     years, John Burns, the new Cabinet Minister, slept at my house
     when he was an unemployed mechanic in 1885. I was personally
     acquainted with Mrs. Annie Besant for many years, and now she
     is here in Madras, the head-quarters of the Theosophical
     Society. I have renewed my acquaintance with her.

     “I have come to think that much good might be done by treating
     of sacred subjects in the form that you have done, as you can
     by this means reach the minds and souls of those millions whom
     the Church cannot reach.

     “The University here is turning out educated Hindus who, having
     parted with their heathenism have taken up Western scepticism
     in its place, and our Christian Missionaries are helpless to
     avert it, the youth here are swamped by the cheap Rationalist
     reprints. Could we but supply them with novels of Western life
     showing up the folly of Haeckel, Blatchford, Spencer and Co.,
     in the manner you have done, it would be a powerful
     counter-attraction.

     “Yours in Him we love.

     “P.S.--The British people also need a novel that will show up
     ‘Blatchfordism,’ and you now have the ear of the reading
     public.”

It is curious that in many of the letters I receive Mr. Robert
Blatchford’s name is mentioned. With some minds his writings have
great power and influence, probably I imagine because of their real
sincerity of purpose. It is the more cheering to know that an honest
effort to render the Incarnation increasingly credible to the man in
the street is not without reward. It is as difficult for me to
disbelieve in the fact that Christ was God as it is difficult for Mr.
Blatchford to believe it. Where one man sees a landscape the other
sees only a map. But there are, nevertheless, a great many people who
deny the Catholic Faith because, while they desire to retain the name
of Christians, they are unwilling to accept the obligations of
Christianity. And while looking about for something to believe, a
necessity of the human soul, they either find it in Mrs. Eddy and
other false prophets, or finally join issue with the editor of the
_Clarion_.

An author’s letter-bag is always full of surprises, and such a
correspondence as I am privileged to receive often entails a vast
amount of extra work. But it is almost impossible not to reply to at
least two-thirds of the letters that reach one, and though reply
sometimes leads to a lengthy interchange of letters all are helpful
and encourage one to continue, while some are full of the most
illuminating suggestions.

Of this the following letter from one of the Canons of Durham
Cathedral is a typical example:--

     “DEAR SIR,

     “In your coming story I hope you will lay stress on the fact
     that our ‘higher’ education is practically a Pagan one. All
     University honours, fellowships, scholarships, prizes are for
     proficients in Pagan literature; interesting (for some people).
     Beautiful in language as this literature is, it lacks the
     spirit and power of the Christian Faith. The common rooms smell
     of Plato and Aristotle. There is no cross in a Don’s life, as
     such, though a few rise above the normal standard.

     “This system filters through the public schools down to the
     smallest private schools, in most of which the daily bread, the
     upholding of Christ as Saviour, teacher, master, example and
     king is left out.

     “At Eton, where I was myself, religious teaching did not exist.
     We had Sunday questions of which one specimen will suffice,
     given to my nephew the other day.

     “‘Of what judge is a curious incident recorded and what was the
     incident?’ The result of this is far-reaching and deplorable.

     “In Parliament the members assemble by troops to hear about
     some personal scandal, but when the happiness of English
     girlhood is in question there is hardly a ‘house.’ And so with
     other questions that concern the personal holiness and
     happiness of our men and women and children.

     “Forgive me for this taking up of your time, but your pen may
     do what I feel myself unable to do.”

I have received a good many letters from clergymen endorsing the views
I expressed in my book called _First it was Ordained_, views which I
have consolidated in the previous essay, “The Fires of Moloch.” I give
only one example owing to reasons of space. In view, however, of the
strong opposition which exists, and of which I have had plenty of
evidence, to any attempt to tell the truth, the following short
letter, which is typical of many others, was a great pleasure to
get:--

                                             “The Clergy House,
                                                 “---- E.C.

     “May I say how much I have enjoyed your last book? _First, &c_.
     It was hard to put it down without finishing it straight off.

     “I hope it will do a power of good to stop the fearful and
     widespread sin.

     “I do not think it at all too outspoken. The Bishop of London
     is quite plain on the matter. I believe a learned gynæcologist
     has an article supporting the statements made in his speech, in
     last month’s _Nineteenth Century_.”

I began by complaining that my post-bag often contained distressing
letters asking for help which I was generally unable to supply. When I
read over the correspondence which I have printed here I feel that I
ought to regard my letter-box as a coffer of treasure, that my postman
is indeed that same Hermes who brought the magic herb to Odysseus, my
letters--

    “--Wing’d postilions that can fly
    From the Atlantic to the Arctic sky--
    The heralds and swift harbingers that move
    From East to West on embassies of love.”

I only made what at the time I thought was a very small collection to
print here--just a thin bundle taken from hundreds. Yet already I find
that a third of the little pile has nearly filled my space and I fear
that my readers will weary, even if they have read so far.

“The man is printing his testimonials like a pill-maker!” I can hear
Meletus snarl. “Who cares whether a few stupid people _do_ like his
twaddle!” Lycom answers. Yet bear with me a little, brethren; you need
not have read this paper, you know. Laugh if you will; laughter is the
great agent that preserves a sense of proportion among us, and the man
who laughs sounds the keynote of tolerance. But laugh kindly,
remembering the vanity of authors and the wish of all of us to stand
well with the world.

My post-bag day by day contains a certain missive which is not a
letter. It is a little green, printed wrapper which most authors,
painters, players, and musicians are in the habit of receiving--it is
the batch of press-cuttings which show how the critics regard my books
and what the paragraphists have to say. The critics are always being
criticized by authors. Mr. Jones gravely points out the duty of
appreciating his work that the reviewer owes to literature. Nor is it,
as Mr. Birrell pointed out, in the days when he wrote delightful
essays and had not been forced to dance to the dictates of political
dissent, the unsuccessful author who is the loudest in complaint. The
beginner, the men and women who cannot say as yet that they have
achieved a definite position, these seem to have digested the poet
laureate’s neat advice--

    “Friend, be not fretful if the voice of fame,
        Along the narrow way of hurrying men,
        Whereunto echo echo shouts again,
    Be all day long not noisy with your name.”

But others are not so reticent. For my part I cannot understand the
attitude of the novelist who publishes shouts of resentment at
criticism which is not to his liking--remember, in view of what I am
going to say later, that I use the word _criticism_. The other day,
while on a journey to the Riviera, I bought a copy of Miss Marie
Corelli’s last book of essays, in Paris. I read it through the night
until I fell asleep, and when the sun flooded the olive trees I took
it up once more, and finished it just as we ran into Marseilles. I
suppose that this lady is the most popular writer of the day. She is a
great modern force; she reaches an enormous audience, and speaks
straight to their hearts. I have heard dozens of men and women say
that they prefer her to any author alive or dead. Now this is surely
to be in a very splendid position, is it not? Why, then, should a
woman whose talents have won for her such place and power, print an
angry, comprehensive, and I am afraid sometimes, spiteful indictment
of all critics? I can’t see her reason.

Destouches wrote:--

    “La plainte est pour le fat, le bruit est pour le sot;
    L’honnête homme hue s’éloigne et ne dit mot!”

Miss Corelli assumes that all the reviewers are venal and dishonest,
and that because they do not praise her books, books which are so
influential and popular, they are bad critics. Reviewers, take them
all in all, are nothing of the sort. I have written hundreds of book
reviews. I have reviewed for the _Saturday Review_, the _Academy_, and
the _Bookman_, among other journals. Therefore you may assume that I
met plenty of other critics, and know their polity and ways. We were
all honest enough in those days--that I say without any doubt at all.
I remember Mr. Frank Harris, the then editor of the _Saturday_, giving
me a certain novel to review, and expressing himself with great point
and freedom about it. As I was leaving his room he called me back, and
said, as well as I can remember his words, “Remember that this is only
_my_ point of view, and what I want in this case is yours. You may
like the stuff, and if you do, of course you will say so.”

I _didn’t_ like it, and said so, but I have never forgotten the
incident.

As I said in the beginning of this paper, directly my stories began to
be occupied with religion as the force, _qui fait le monde à la
ronde_, some of the critics began to be unkind. But what on earth is
the use of wasting one’s own time, and the time of the public, in
fussing and complaining? The people who said this about my work were
quite sincere. Their opinion is quite as good as mine, however much I
don’t agree with it. _Quot homines tot sententiæ._ My business is to
earn a living for myself and for those who are dependent on me. Thank
God I can do so. My duty is to hammer away at the doctrines in which I
believe, and endeavour to get others to believe in them. Therefore I
must not “call or cry aloud.” I must go on doing what I am doing, and
doing it _sans rançune_.

Remember, and I wish Miss Corelli, for example, could see this also,
that criticism of novels in our day is a purely _literary_ criticism.
The theory of modern criticism is that Art is a thing by itself and
owes no duty to Ethics. The reason for Art is, art. Ten years ago I
think I would almost have gone to the stake for this doctrine. I
believed in it devoutly; I couldn’t be patient, even, in the presence
of any one who argued otherwise. I well remember the indignant anger
with which I repudiated the suggestion of my father, a clergyman, that
when I grew older and had suffered, when I came into real contact with
the great central facts of life, I should think very differently. He
was perfectly right. Art is the essential part of fiction, but it is
not destroyed because it is employed as the handmaid of an ethical
standpoint.

But this truth is no reason for “answering back” the critics who do
not appreciate it. Nothing is quite true--except The Incarnation--a
naïve statement you may call it, but as a corollary of the epigram,
true too! It is better, by far, to realize that modern criticism is
most valuable from the purely literary point of view, and yet that the
purely literary point of view is only one side of the model the artist
must study before he learns how to draw.

Therefore, when any critic tells me of this or that fault in
technique, I take his expert opinion for what it is worth--an expert
opinion--and try to learn from his criticism. I try to learn and do
better. When the post-bag discloses a criticism obviously animated by
personal prejudice or dictated by the religious politics of the paper
in which it appears, I grin and bear it--though I don’t like it!--and
console myself with the verse composed by the American poet whose
critics were _always_ unfair, or at least he said so--

    “The cow is in the garden,
    The cat is in the lake,
    The pig is in the hammock,
    What difference _does_ it make!”

No author, who has a public at all, suffers from _criticism_ which is
fair or even from _criticism_ which is unfair.

An author is not well advised in publicly answering or combating
either.

When Disraeli said that the critics were the “people who had failed in
literature and art,” he forgot that bad wine often makes excellent
vinegar. I am quite certain that I have never suffered in the
suffrages of my readers--and so in pocket!--from hostile criticism.
And I have had any amount of it--the little green wrapper is not
always pleasant reading. But I have never shouted out that I have been
personally hurt or wounded by hostile criticism, and I certainly never
shall. The days are past when the _Quarterly_ could kill Keats, and
the days have not arrived when the reprobatory finger which is
sometimes wagged at one can take one’s bread-and-butter away.

But sometimes--and now, please, I unsheathe my toy sword, or at least
flourish my cane--the postman brings something that cannot hurt one
seriously, though it stings. This something is not criticism at all.
It stings, not because of the actual attempt--even the smallest plants
cannot grow unhampered by insect life--but because, puny as it may be,
it is so manifestly unfair. In this regard I can sympathize with Miss
Corelli because, however the critics may write of her books from the
literary pedestal, they sometimes write of her, from a shelter
trench, in a very different way.

One morning I read a little sneer about myself which was entirely
without justification or explanation. It occurred in a Catholic
magazine, which I will call _The Thesaurus_, dated June 1906, and was
written by the editor, who may be designated as the Rev. Mr. Roget.
Here it is:--

     “Perhaps one of those authors whom the public love--Miss
     Corelli, Mr. Hall Caine, or Mr. ‘Guy Thorne‘--may be preparing
     a novel with the education controversy as its theme. In that
     case, one can only hope devoutly that the Bishop of London will
     _not_ think it advisable to advertise the book from the pulpit.
     Yet if one could only have heard a frank opinion of _When it
     was Dark_ expressed by the last Bishop of London--Dr.
     Creighton--that would indeed have been a joy.”

_The Thesaurus_ is a pleasant little magazine devoted to quite
innocuous fiction and articles. It has, in the number I quote above,
nine pages of advertisements, an article called “In the Engadine,” a
“Few hints on church embroidery,” a very happily named story called
“In a Dull Moment,” etc, etc. Indeed it could not hurt a fly. I say
this much, not because I have any dislike for this nice little
periodical, but in order to point out that in answering its editor’s
remarks about me, I am not endeavouring to become known to the world,
and to advertise myself by the endeavour to link my name to its
editor’s.

There is a certain sort of hurried and sporadic writing which is not
criticism, but is irresponsible nonsense set down to fill a page no
less than to gratify a prejudice.

It’s all give and take in literary polemics. People are always going
for one in the press, and very often with perfect justice. But when
one reads remarks like those I have quoted, and remarks written by a
Mr. Roget, then, if it amuses one, there is at least a text for a
small monition.

Miss Marie Corelli is very well able to look after herself. However
much Mr. Roget may endeavour to pillory this lady in his “Study
Window,” I don’t suppose she cares. She is a great modern force; Mr.
Roget isn’t. Mr. Hall Caine will not, I imagine, try to stop being one
of the authors “whom the public love” because of the editor of _The
Thesaurus_. Nor have I, the humblest person in the trilogy, yet
suffered.

And, believe me, it is not because I personally care much that I am
writing like this, nor is Mr. Roget any armed assassin in a narrow
path. But such an one ought to be laughed at a little, because he is
typical of a class of young men who should be taught the economy of
reserve.

Mr. Roget did not explain his reasons for attacking me, though I,
quite frankly, give mine for attacking him. But as--through the
lamentable chances of war--my remarks will be read by a great many
more folk than his were read by, we are quits, and I can start fair,
though with all the rigour of the game.

The Editor in his paragraph not only states that he himself does not
like one of my stories--_i. e., When it was Dark_, but implies that the
Bishop of London was not justified in liking it, and saying that he
liked it in public.

It is quite within Mr. Roget’s right not to like the book--thousands
of people didn’t like it. But what are his functions for sneering at
it with confidence and weight?

First of all his age is thirty-six, and he is the editor of _The
Thesaurus_.

We can dismiss those qualifications at once.

Then he is the Vicar of a Worcestershire church, and a well-known
writer of light verse.

He began his journalistic career in 1890 by contributing “turnovers”
to the _Globe_, has contributed to _Punch_ and _The Nineteenth
Century_, is a leader writer on a Church paper, and reviews
theological books.

This is his journalistic career, and he has written seven little books
in all, mostly verse. I take these particulars from _Who’s Who_.

All this is very well. It is a good thing for all of us to be in
_Who’s Who_, though, by the way, it does the latter-day “celebrity”
more harm to be out of it than it does him good to be in it!

Mr. Roget’s record for a young clergyman of thirty-six is honourable
enough. He has done better for himself than most young priests of that
age. But this does not constitute him “An author whom the public
love,” etc.

I am very glad to find my own name in the fat red book, which is so
useful, though in my little autobiography I never thought it necessary
to mention the first “turnover.” I certainly did venture to say that
one of my stories had sold 300,000 copies; but that was probably
vanity, and I regret it.

But, to be serious, has my critic done as much in journalism or the
literary world as your deponent? I’m not going to catalogue my work
any more, but, frankly, he has not. All I ask, with proper humility,
is just this--Is this gentleman qualified to sneer at me--not to
_criticize_ me, which is quite another thing--just because the public
have approved of what I have tried to sell them and have bought it?

In sneering at me he sneers at the public, whose taste I have been
fortunate enough to please, and whose opinion of what I have to sell
has lifted me and those who are dear to me from poverty to comfort. I
have worked enormously. I have put all I have got in me into my work,
and I feel that work honestly done has been honestly rewarded. If I
could write better than I do, I should be very happy. I know perfectly
well how inadequate my work is, but I know what this “critic” of mine
does not know, and has not inquired into, how much it costs me to do
it and how deeply I believe in what I say.

And does not Mr. Roget also seek the suffrages of the public? In the
same issue of _The Thesaurus_ to which I have referred above, he uses
the phrase “...us who are trying to make an income out of literature.”

Of course, he is trying to be “one of those authors,” etc. He admits
it. He tells us he is trying to make an income out of the public. And
yet, while he is doing this, he insults the public for preferring
“those other authors”--or, at least, that’s how one can hardly help
taking it!

Moreover he is a priest as well as a literary man. As a literary man,
I attack one who has not yet shown himself to have the slightest right
to sneer at people who write--whatever their literary faults may seem
to him--always on the side of good, with a belief in the saving power
of the Christian faith, and in the same hope as that in which he
writes.

A million people read one of Miss Corelli’s books, and they pay her to
do so.

Two hundred people listen to one of Mr. Roget’s sermons, and he is
paid to preach them. But do authors go down into Worcestershire and
sneer at the sermon of the priest because his own congregation love to
hear him?

This is the first time in my life that I have ever answered any one
who has written unkindly of me. And it will be the last. _Literary_
criticism is a thing done by specialists, and with every right on
their side. _Literary_ criticism is in the main correct. When I
publish a book, and a literary writer points out this or that fault, I
am myself literary man enough to know that he has put his finger on
the weak spot nine times out of ten. Then I try again. I have said
this before.

But mere unqualified contempt on the part of one who has not been able
to qualify himself to express any contempt of value for public
judgment deserves remark.

And now it is necessary to say a word about this gentleman’s
reprobation of the Bishop of London’s sermons about _When it was
Dark_. It is not a nice thing to have to say, but this young clergyman
is typical of a small tribe which make it necessary for me to say it.

The obvious suggestion is that I went out of my way to induce the
Bishop of London to advertise one of my books. That is not the case.

I have never met the Bishop of London in my life. I have never even
seen him. I have had one letter from him about my book, which I will
not quote here, but which I will send Mr. Roget whenever he asks for
it. It is the only communication I have ever had from him. Neither
directly nor indirectly did I attempt to get the bishop to advertise
me.

Yet his lordship preached about the book six or seven times--once in
Westminster Abbey. He advised his ordination candidates to read it,
and in his addresses to these gentlemen--subsequently published in
book form--the passage remains.

The late Bishop of Truro advised the clergy to read it in several
diocesan meetings. He also wrote a long signed article in a great
London daily paper about my books, in which he said:--

     “A story written by Guy Thorne, who has proved his gift and its
     purpose, may well touch the sore place of our race with a hand
     that is more human than statistics and more sympathetic than
     many organizations.”

Dr. Gott is just dead as I write this. I have many letters from him.
In one of them--which again I will not quote, but which I will send my
critic for his private reading when he asks for it--his lordship said
that the book had helped him greatly.

There have been thousands of personal letters from readers about this
one book. Dozens of them were from clergymen, from pastors of the
Nonconformist and also the Anglican Churches. All this also I have
said before, and the half-dozen letters which I have quoted have their
own value, bear their own witness.

One of the greatest Nonconformist divines of England preached about
the book.

There--I have said enough. It is sickening to have to say it. But Mr.
Roget leaves one no alternative. He is not fair. For some reason or
other--I do not know or care what it is, for he is an utter stranger
to me--he takes this line. In the same issue of his magazine he
writes of the President of the Congregational Union--“Mr. Jowett’s
presidential address, as well as the speeches which followed it, were
not remarkable, to say the least, for the charity of language used
about the Church. All the old sectarian bitterness was expressed in
the usual way.”

...I have been writing for many hours. The snow was blowing in from
the Channel over the South Foreland when I began. The sky was a great
pewter-coloured dome from which Mother Hulda’s feathers were falling,
when I took up the pen.

As the day waxed there came a faint, yellow, and almost menacing gleam
of sunshine, and as it waned the leaden-grey grew black, and night
came silently over the landscape until at last she opened her great
funereal black fan.

They brought me lamps and set them on my table. Those who love me and
look after me came noiselessly up the stairs, silently into the room
and put logs upon the study fire and left me alone once more.

It is nearly midnight, and the winter wind pipes sadly outside this
old Kentish house, so remote from other habitations, so renowned in
the annals of the Channel cliffs. With all its faults, all its
egoisms, take this last essay in my first book of essays, and do not
think hardly of me. Forgive what you discern here of petulance, of
arrogance, and of conceit. I have done my day’s labour, and I have
tried to be sincere. I have done my day’s labour, and now I am going
to descend to an old room, with its oaken beams and aroma of the past,
to take the supper of a man who has toiled. The dear people, and
unfortunate ones! who wait upon the erratic hours of an author are
waiting for me there.

And then to bed, and may the humble supplication I shall send up to
Almighty God for myself and those I love, for those who read what I
have written, have its hearing in the place where “hearts and wills
are weighed.” May I become a better and worthier man because I have
the opportunity of addressing you who read. And may God grant me to
mend a faulty life.

Good-night and Amen.

    _Wanstone Court,
    December, 1906._


       *       *       *       *       *


    RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
    BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
    BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.