Chapter Ix. the Great Alternative to Social Reform 199

INDEX 217

12, Wilton Crescent, London, S.W. 1. May 1st, 1921.

Dear Mr. Ludovici,--

Thank you very much for letting me see the proofs of your book. It seems to me to be written at a very opportune moment, and to suggest a line of thought which could be followed with great advantage.

In these days of “propaganda,” when our fine old language is being wrested every hour of the day in speeches, pamphlets and leaflets, to illustrate the views of political parties, it is more than ever important that we should have a clear understanding of the true meaning of words.

Nor is the vague use of phrases confined to the pioneer of political causes. Our very war memorials are utilised to inform us that the brave fellows whose honour they commemorate died for “freedom.” If that were true, they indeed died in vain. Nothing can be further from even the most elementary conception of freedom than the present condition of society in these islands. But the pious and devout people who wrote those inscriptions are possibly not to blame.

Long before the war the nation had been so content to be governed by phrases that [p. viii] we were actually asked to enlist for such phrases as “The rights of small nations,” “Self-determination,” and the like, whereas in very truth we were forced to fight to save our own skins.

Your suggestions open up so many considerations that I cannot explore them all. But your proposition that the quality of our institutions may, after all, be sounder than the quality of the men who have failed to work them, seems especially worthy of notice. If your book serves to direct attention to the wisdom of our ancestors, it will be a great benefit to the public.

Yours very truly, Willoughby de Broke.

The Great War has left the world, and particularly poor old battered Europe, with many a high ideal shattered and many a respected principle destroyed. Not only the beliefs of our grandfathers, but also the convictions of our fathers, seem now old-fashioned and no longer seaworthy. Certainly an old era is dead; but has a new era been born? A new era suggests new ideals, new leading principles; it suggests a breastful of new and stout convictions. Have we of this dawning era any new ideals or principles? Have we any new and stout convictions?

It seems as if we had been plunged into this new world unclothed. True enough, millions have doffed their khaki; but the citizen clothing they have donned in exchange--is it all make-believe, all eye-wash? Are we really naked?

At all events, before we can possibly tell where we are, or how we stand, the most necessary preliminary step would seem to be a general stock-taking of our ideals, principles and convictions--a re-definition of the big words that once led us, and of the great phrases with which we were once inspired. Only then, only when this re-definition shall have been accomplished, does it seem possible that we shall be able to [p. x] clothe ourselves in the ideology of our new and brightly illuminated age.

This book is a modest attempt at this spade work of re-definition. It does not pretend to be either exhaustive or expert. It takes up just a few of the old words and phrases, and by re-examining them in the new light, hopes rather to point the way than to cover the whole distance to the destination.

Alarming sounds fill the air. There are wars and rumours of wars wherever you turn. Indeed, there are rumours abroad and at home of the worst kind of war, the cruellest and most devastating kind of war--civil war. Can it be possible that a good deal of this threat of civil war arises from the very need which this book undertakes however imperfectly to supply? Can it be possible that revolution and even Bolshevism may arise out of this need for a re-definition of terms?

At all events, even if this need is only a small contributory cause, it is serious enough and cannot be lightly passed over. It is for fear lest this need may be something more serious than a small contributory cause, that the author has suggested the remedy of re-definition outlined both in precept and example in this book. If his pioneer effort, however limited in range, may lead others to produce more thorough examples of his method, he will consider that his pains have been more than adequately repaid.

Anthony M. Ludovici. London, August, 1921.

INTRODUCTION.

THE CONFUSION OF LANGUAGE AND ITS RELATION TO REVOLUTION.

“Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last.” Tennyson (Locksley Hall--Sixty Years After).

Nothing on earth leads more certainly to disunion than a division of tongues. When it became necessary to disperse the iniquitous builders of the Tower of Babel, we know the expedient to which the Lord resorted, and how effective it proved to be. But whereas unity is a desirable condition, and a common tongue is one of the most potent means of realising it, people not infrequently forget that a common tongue presupposes a common uniform culture. It depends upon a common view of human life and the world. This common culture provides the frame, so to speak, to the design of life, in which every word of a language fits like a piece of mosaic. Remove the frame, disturb the arrangement, and the odd pieces of mosaic fall all about you and lose their significance and their necessary association. They can be used only as--missiles.

Whatever weight the usual arguments against the Middle Ages may possess, at least this is plain, that in mediæval times a common culture prevailed among the leading nations of Europe. Indeed, if we wished to sum up the effect of the Middle Ages in one sentence, we could not express ourselves more clearly than by saying, that in those days the leaders of men attempted to convert Europe into a single nation. This effort, though only partially successful, at least led to the magnificent result that most men, of what nation soever, understood one another--understood one another particularly in their use of abstract or general terms. For that is the test. In the end the names of things remain. The words representing common objects are usually as permanent as those objects themselves. Fashion may destroy the object and thus render the word obsolete; but for hundreds of years none will dispute the proper connotation of the word “chair,” “table,” “basket,” for instance; while in the realm of abstract and general terms such severe fluctuations may have taken place as to make the same word mean something different to each generation.

Now the supreme importance of abstract or general terms lies in the fact that they are the words with which we guide our lives, mark out our goals and direct our effort. It is therefore urgently necessary that they should stand for very precise ideas, and that as the current coinage of speech they should mean the same things to all men of the same group, body, or nation.

As opposed to the effort of the Middle Ages, however, the effort of this Age, or the Muddle Age, seems to be directed towards turning every nation into a Europe--into a unit, that is to say, without unity. And this lack of unity is nowhere more acute and more apparent than in the realm of abstract or general terms. People of the same nation, nowadays, no longer speak the same language. They no longer mean the same things, or convey the same ideas, when they speak of Happiness, Beauty, Order, Right, Freedom, Liberty, Justice, etc. The frame has gone. The common culture has been replaced by a congeries of pseudo-cultures, all in active conflict. The consequence is that the all-important words of this class have fallen out of place in the design of life; they have no unifying whole in which they can find a stable position, they are at a loose end, so to speak, and they can be used not as intelligent missives, but only as missiles between isolated groups and parties that are doomed to eternal conflict.

A word at a loose end, however, is a word devoid of definite associations and therefore of meaning. Can a word devoid of meaning be used as a missile? Certainly it can, provided that it be given, despite its loss of an intellectual appeal, sufficient motive power to provoke an emotion. But of this anon.

There can be no doubt that we have reached a condition in modern Europe, in which each nation is, as it were, a complex of nations--a complex in which the majority of the most important words (the abstract and general terms) not only mean different things to different groups and coteries, but also convey no precise meaning whatsoever to anybody. This, however, constitutes a state of complete confusion, and therefore a very grave danger. Just as one cannot help appearing stupid when one is trying and failing to understand a foreign tongue, one really is stupid when one cannot understand one’s own tongue.

If stupidity seems to be increasing--and there surely cannot be much doubt concerning at least this form of “Progress,”--it is due chiefly to men’s growing incapacity to understand their mother tongue. Abstract and general terms are no longer comprehensible even to the most literate; to the illiterate they are simply fireworks, flags or flagstones.

Now this would be all very well if it ended in stupidity. But that is not the final bourne of the present confusion of language. The final bourne is something much more serious, much more disastrous. It is revolution.

All those who may be tempted to regard this conclusion as extreme, would do well to pause a moment here, in order to dwell upon the possible consequences of a confusion of language.

Is it not clear that at all times and in all climes where a confusion of language has existed, man has been doomed not only to be misleading and misled, but also to be incapable of leading? That is the worst danger. A lack of precision amounting almost to incomprehensibility is sure in any case to mislead; but what if it makes it no longer possible to lead?

There will always be thousands of men prepared to mislead their fellows. Even in the heydey of every culture this has been so. Even with language at its brightest and best in precision and adequacy this is always so. But how about those who are prepared to lead their fellows, and who are admirably equipped for so doing? What are they to do if the only medium which lies to hand is so corrupt, so devoid of meaning, that they cannot use it without the tragic certainty of being misunderstood?

And yet who would undertake to stand up and speak to-day, even before an educated audience, without feeling certain beforehand that he would be misunderstood if he used the words Liberty, Freedom, Right, Democracy, Patriotism, etc.?

That is the danger. While there is a harvest prepared for those who would mislead in days like the present; for the rare individual who would lead, who is sufficiently gifted to lead, and whose leadership is needed, there can be but disappointment and barrenness.

This is the pass to which our present confusion of language has brought us. It makes revolution possible, because it makes the pursuit of false ideals inevitable, and conflict and misunderstanding a certainty.

The causes of our present condition are to be sought, first and chiefly, in the decline of a common and uniform culture, secondly in the cheap literature that has come into being since the Education Act of 1870, and thirdly in modern journalism.

In modern journalism the distortion and abuse of terms, the crippling of words has become almost a habit. Catachresis, or the forcing and straining of words, is the rule; nowhere is the sacred duty of precision less observed than in the very quarter where its sway should be most uncontested. The journalist, intent only on sensation, is the first to debase words into missiles or empty symbols. He it is who sets the example to the crowd, by picking up these unfortunate fallen pieces of mosaic, in order to fling them about with the wantonness of a schoolboy. He it is who shakes the shoddy frame of modern culture in the hope of making even more of these sparkling fragments fall out of the design of life, until ultimately when some one does arise who would choose to construct rather than to destroy, he finds nothing to hand but shapeless and irrecognisable monstrosities, chipped into mere stones by the mad fury with which they have been hurled about.

Matters would not be so bad if it were possible to point to one class, one stratum of society in England, in which language was treated with more respect. Unfortunately this is no longer possible. Even among speakers of good education this misuse of language is all too common. The present writer once heard the Bishop of London address a cultivated audience on the subject of Reconstruction, and was compelled to take exception at least a dozen times to that dignitary’s illegitimate use of the word “Democracy.”

The reality of the danger, its imminence, will perhaps strike the most incredulous when it is pointed out to them that the French Revolution itself was the outcome of a confusion of language; nor can there be any doubt that the Russian Revolution had a similar origin.

The French Revolution can be traced, and has been traced, even by writers quite friendly to “democracy,” to the radical misunderstanding of three words--Nature, Freedom, and Man--by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This writer, as is well known, after having formed a totally fantastic and false concept of Nature, began to speculate upon the unhappy contrast that human civilisation presented in comparison with this fairylike figment of his mind. He compared man in the state of Nature--Rousseau’s “Nature”--with civilised man in the 18th century, and then proceeded to show how impure, immoral and corrupt, was the second kind of man as compared with the former. The fact that the whole comparison was vitiated by the absurd impossibility of this so-called “thinker’s” arbitrary definition of Nature, was only discovered scores of years later, when the untold damage to which his insane misunderstanding led, had long been past repair.

For the “Nature” of Rousseau was the Nature of our most successful Victorian poets--all smiling meadows, babbling brooks, nodding flowers and innocence. He had neither the profundity nor the honesty to see Nature as she really is--immoral, hard, merciless and tasteless. Like our Victorian poets when Rousseau gazed upon a rustic scene, he thought neither of the stoat in the hedge quietly devouring its field mouse, nor of the starling in the coppice solemnly and methodically hammering a snail to a pulp before swallowing it. He gave no thought either to the pitiless and eternal conflict of all the vegetation at his feet, or to the struggle probably going on in the adjoining village between a beautiful child and the microbe of tuberculosis. He dwelt only on that something which was not Man and proceeded to endow that something, which was not Man, with all the qualities that his feverish imagination regarded as desirable.

When, therefore, he proceeded to plant his “natural man” down in this utterly fanciful scenario of Rousseau-esque “Nature,” he perforce drew a picture even more distorted of humanity than he had already drawn of Nature, and thus proceeded to his ultimate fatuous conclusion that “Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

Absurd and meaningless as this phrase was, it succeeded, as Lord Morley has pointed out, in thrilling the generation to which it was uttered in two continents; and it was not until a hundred years later that someone appeared who demonstrated that Rousseau was not only a liar but a pernicious liar. Meanwhile, Napoleon had proved to the French people, in deeds if not in words, how ludicrously fantastic were the ravings of this Genevan firebrand; but the philosophic demonstration of his radical misunderstanding of the three words, “Freedom,” “Nature,” and “Man,” had to be left to a later generation.

The fact that the French Revolution was the outcome of this radical misunderstanding is now no longer contested by any serious thinker.

A searching and forcible re-definition of “Nature,” “Freedom,” and “Man,” in the light of history, biology, psychology, and a sound outlook on life and humanity, if it had been rapidly prepared and widely circulated in Rousseau’s lifetime, might have defeated the efforts of this Arch-charlatan to poison his own country and the world; but, in those days, who dreamt that the misunderstanding, or the deliberate misinterpretation, of three such simple words as Freedom, Nature, and Man, could lead to so much horror and bloodshed?

The world at that time was only faintly aware of the far-reaching practical effect even of sound ideas; how could it justly estimate the consequences of false or unsound ideas?

Now, however, we know. There is no longer any excuse for us; our lesson is before us. And, alas! to-day, we are confronted not by the mere misunderstanding of three simple words, we are confronted by the very much more formidable fact that there is scarcely one general or abstract term in the whole of our language that has any definite meaning. We are confronted by the imminent menace of no longer having any language at all with which to appeal either to the reason or the unreason of man.

All the words by which our life, our aspirations and our energy can be directed, have long ago become so meaningless, as the result of repeated falsification, mutilation and counterfeiting, that we may soon be reduced to the expedients of animals and savages, in order to make ourselves clear, and drown our voices in the clash of arms.

And yet it can be shown that these abstract and general terms, which no longer have any definite meaning, or which have acquired an utterly misleading meaning, do provoke emotions and feelings which are none the less harmful for being indefinite and vague.

How is this possible? If it is claimed that a word has ceased to make any intellectual or rational appeal, owing to repeated catachresis or misunderstanding, how can it still provoke dangerous feelings and emotions? If it fails, owing to the variety of ways in which it is understood, from meeting with uniform interpretation, how can it provoke uniform action?

A word may have ceased from making any intellectual appeal, and yet be forcibly associated by word-counterfeiters and other agitators with certain vague desiderata which defy analysis. For instance, suppose a certain adult A. repeat again and again to a child B. that one day, if it is obedient and amenable, it will be taken to “Chekko’s.” The child may press for a description of “Chekko’s”; but all A. does is to nod his head, smile with prophetical good humour, and say: “Ah, you’ll see. It’s wonderful! It’s magic!”

Here we have a case of a child to whom the word “Chekko’s” means literally nothing. It is, however, associated vaguely with something mysteriously desirable. “Chekko’s” may have no real existence, but certain emotions are nevertheless suscitated in the child by the sound of the word, because it has been led to believe that something dimly pleasant is associated with the name. Ultimately even a flag inscribed with the word “Chekko’s” will make the child shout with joy; a signpost with the direction: “To Chekko’s” will make it leap with excitement, and a mere passing reference to the “Checko-Slovaks” will lead it to suspect that these people must be a very pleasant and happy nation.

A correct definition of “Chekko’s” given by someone whom the child trusts, would suffice either to dispel the emotion provoked by the sound, or else to confirm it, according to whether it had or had not a real existence, and that existence corresponded with the child’s fostered mental image of it. But in any case the process of dissuasion would take time, and the re-definition would have to be inculcated upon the child as assiduously as the false and hazy original association had been.

It is possible, therefore, to provoke dynamic emotions by means of an absolutely meaningless sound, even when the intellect of the listener receives no appeal whatsoever.

In view of this elementary fact in psychology, the extreme danger of having a very large number of both meaningless and inflammable words in our current speech will perhaps begin to be obvious.

The fact that the word “Freedom” has now become practically meaningless--even more meaningless than Rousseau made it, because now it has not even a fictitious meaning--does not render it a whit less potent in provoking cheers and wild enthusiasm when it is shouted from the mystic eminence of a public platform.

Presumably when Rousseau spoke of “Freedom” he meant a certain lack of compulsion regarding actions which are peculiar to civilisation, a certain absence of constraint in regard to conventions that do not harass the savage. The savage does not require to wear clean linen, he does not require to wear a hat, he may if he choose eat with his fingers, or come to breakfast unshaven; he may have three or four wives, he may eat human flesh, he may live in the open and shoot down his prey without considering whether it belongs to the squire or to the lord of the manor. Rousseau cannot have meant anything but this by “Freedom.” If Rousseau had been told that while it was true that the savage does not require to perform much that the civilised man has to perform, the civilised man, on the other hand, is “free” from many a duty that is incumbent on the savage, he would have perceived that to drop the constraints of civilisation for those of barbarism merely amounted to exchanging one form of bondage for another. For instance, the savage of certain climes has to tattoo his flesh, sometimes with great pain; he has to observe certain rigid taboos, he has to hunt for his food, he has to fight every day of his life against wild animals and the hostile tribe of his neighbourhood into the bargain; he has to work hard during boyhood and early manhood to acquire efficiency in the arts of the chase and of war; he is obliged to recognise a chieftain, etc. In fact, it could be shown that Man in a “state of nature” is perhaps even more constrained by conventions and laws than civilised man. Only by deliberately falsifying the evidence--that is to say, by giving a thoroughly distorted notion of Nature, would it be possible to contend that man “in a state of nature” is more “free” than civilised man. Rousseau, as we have seen, however, did not hesitate to falsify the evidence. Hence he was able to say: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

But if we turn to the modern idea of Freedom, we shall find that it is even more difficult to understand than Rousseau’s. For at least Rousseau’s “Freedom” can be traced to a romantic distortion of the true attributes of “Nature”; the modern idea of “Freedom” can be traced to nothing.

In its two forms, the alleged desideratum of modernity. Freedom and Liberty, means literally nothing.

If we put the questions--freedom and liberty from what? and freedom and liberty for what?--it will be seen immediately that there is no definite idea whatsoever behind the words. Freedom or liberty as an aim, presupposes emancipation from a yoke. What is the yoke from which modern man wishes to be free? Is it work? Is it timed work?

Freedom or liberty as an aim presupposes emancipation from a yoke for a definite purpose. What is this purpose? Is it a higher or a lower? Is it more entertainment or more usefulness? Is it desirable or undesirable?

To none of these questions is there any answer, because the modern words Freedom and Liberty connote nothing. And the same applies to such words as Equality, Right, Justice. These mere sounds have ceased to be words. But they all imply some mysterious desideratum which it may be worth while fighting for. They are missiles, fireworks, unmusical chords--anything! All they have retained of their original nature, is the power of directing energy. They no longer call up any definite or expressible idea.

Now when the most hortatory and inspiriting words of a language have ceased to have any definite meaning, the nation using that language is in imminent danger of internal discord and rupture, and the beneficent influence of indolence and inertia alone can avert a catastrophe. The only question is, have we sufficient native indolence and inertia to tide over this crisis in our language?

Even if we have, the Continent has not, and ultimately by infection or contagion, our inertia and indolence, too, will be overcome.

What is the remedy? What is the corrective? What is the best means of resisting the influence of the Continent and of the corrosive elements at home without relying too confidently upon our negative qualities alone?

Strange as it may sound, the present writer suggests, as one of the most direct roads to a recovery of political and national health, in the first place, that the disease of language should be cured. Everywhere, in the whole of the civilised world, disease of language is rampant. That country alone will resist and survive the revolutionary epidemic, which first cures its disease of language.

But how is this to be done?

The grand method, the best method, would of course consist in re-creating a common and uniform culture, in which the spiritual words and phrases of the national language would find a new and definite place, a fresh and unmistakable association.

This, however, is perhaps a counsel of perfection. For where are the men to-day who would be prepared to embark on this gigantic undertaking, even if they were equipped for it? It is possible, and the material for its accomplishment lies close at hand. But where are the free spirits who have the courage, and who are capable of the solidarity, that would be required for such a task?

The second best method, and the one more compatible with the power of our best men of to-day, would consist in rescuing the meaningless terms of our language--and there are thousands of them--from their pointless, unattached and almost disreputable existence. It would consist in re-defining them in the realistic light of history, biology and psychology, and in the light of a sane and sound outlook on humanity and the world. It would consist, further, in creating a convention as rigorous as the existing convention regarding all reference to sexual questions and organs, according to which it would be regarded as an act of gross immorality and indecency to commit the sin of catachresis or abuse against any of the words thus re-defined, and it should be incumbent upon the ordinary citizen to report to the nearest police station any such breach of decency which he might happen to discover while reading his daily paper, or a novel, or any treatise printed after the promulgation of the law.

How many false ideals, false aspirations, and pernicious creeds and doctrines would then be dispersed? How many agitators, tub-thumpers, self-seeking bell-wethers, would then be put to flight! How many politicians would then starve! But how fresh and crisp the air of every debating chamber would then become!

This is a possible and highly practical method of dealing with our present situation. There is no excuse for its not being adopted. When once it had achieved all it could achieve, the masses should be made to benefit from the results of the undertaking. Indeed, it would be more or less futile if they were not made to benefit in this way. They would then become the alert and merciless critics of people who now sway them as easily as if they were corn in the wind; and seven-eighths of our present-day literature would cease from being published.

It is the surest, the speediest, and the most fruitful method of saving what still remains of Order and Culture. But it is a stupendous undertaking and one that will exact a heavy toll from all those who embark upon it.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER I

THE PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY

“There is nothing wrong either in great wealth or in extensive property, provided that it be wisely administered.”--William Cobbett (Rural Rides).

Behind most of the modern hostility towards established and traditional institutions, it is not only a matter of mere caution, but also essentially scientific to suspect a certain amount of physical as well as psychical exhaustion. Modern mankind is tired, both bodily and spiritually. The pale fireless eyes of our urban adults alone ought to make us suspect the truth about this matter. Two thousand years of the increasing complication of Life, during which man’s attention has had ever more and more detail to occupy it, together with a feeling of very genuine disillusionment on the part of the most enlightened regarding the highest ideals of the past; two thousand years, moreover, of progressive debilitation, during which the resisting powers of exuberant health have gradually and steadily been worn down--must have had their effect upon recent generations, and materially impaired their ability to face the institutions of their forefathers with their forefathers’ spirit, health and understanding.

It cannot be repeated too often that it would be gravely unscientific, nay imprudent, to proceed to an examination of the modern hostility to traditional ideas and principles without taking into account the attitude of mind, the tone of mind, and the degree of health, of those who represent this hostility. The fact that modern books on political questions usually take as their data the very conclusions to which this hostility has led, without previously determining the validity of the whole standpoint, or discovering the kind of minds that are responsible for it, need not deter us from departing from the customary method. Nor can our superior caution in this respect be fairly interpreted as bias.

It must surely be clear to most of us that, not only we ourselves, but all our contemporaries as well, are radically and incurably weary. Our physical resistance against disease is as seriously in peril as is our spiritual resistance against error, or against those ideals and desires that can appeal only to invalids.

Where life is ebbing, however, her most fundamental principles, her most inexorable demands, must be losing the force of their appeal. An ear is therefore lent ever more willingly and eagerly to doctrines and precepts which are non-vital, which already have about them the bitter effluvia of death; and it becomes ever more and more difficult to withstand the fascination of this new persuasiveness.

But because Man has reached a degree of lassitude that induces him to listen more patiently and submissively than of yore, to doctrines and precepts of decline and decay, it does not follow that these doctrines are irresistible either in their rational or emotional appeal. It does not even follow that their rational dressing is any more above suspicion than they are themselves. The attempt intellectually to justify and bolster up a sickly tenet may be as unhealthy as that tenet itself.

It is suspicion, above all, that is needed wherever we turn in our modern storehouse of ideals and panaceas--suspicion coupled with the conviction that man is desperately weary in body and soul.

Now there is a state of weariness and apathy in which things that have become out of gear are no longer readjusted or repaired, but deliberately and ruthlessly destroyed. Each of us can picture in our mind’s eye, the behaviour of the nervous invalid who, too exhausted to repair a persistently clanging bell, tears down the whole fitting, wires and all, so that the disturbing sound may cease for ever. Such an act is typical of exhaustion. It amounts to a deep-seated surrender of the power of repair. Brain and body tissues that are not themselves regularly repaired or recreated can hardly be expected to devise the means of repairing or recreating other things.

Thus we should expect the modern and exhausted mind to proceed in its corrective lust, not by means of readjustment, but by amputation, not by therapeutic art, but by extirpation. There are thousands of bells clanging discordantly in the house of civilisation to-day. The temptation of the modern man is therefore to tear them down, wires and all.

Whenever anything goes wrong--and things cannot always work smoothly in society, particularly in vast and complex communities like those of Western Europe--it is natural for a certain large element in the population to proceed by means of suppression and amputation, by lopping off some creation of the past, and advancing the most convincing arguments for so doing.

If the Lords fail us, the simplest method is to do away with them. If individual enterprise falls short of its promise, a clamour is raised for its abolition. Family life goes wrong, married life goes wrong, and the remedy suggested is to make the dissolution of the marriage tie easier. It does not matter whether you are destroying a portion of your organism and therefore impoverishing yourself thereby, for you are simplifying your task, and this for an invalid is an achievement of maximum importance. Everything thus falls into a process of general disintegration, all troublesome appendages are sloughed off, and the body of civilisation is gradually truncated or dissolved. Meanwhile, however, since every step in this process of decomposition receives the most convincing intellectual support, no one suspects that there are other and better methods of setting to work. It never occurs to the typical modern mind that if institutions are to be abolished as fast as degenerate people show themselves unable to uphold them, then an immediate and far more speedy way of refuting and abolishing all civilisation would be to fill all its leading positions, and to invest all its institutions, with raw savages from the Cannibal Isles. Every institution and tradition would then break down, and presumably the modern mind would be satisfied that the only remedy would consist in the abolition of all institutions and traditions.

Long ago the present writer pointed out that to set a buffoon on the throne is not to confute monarchy, and yet this is the principle we work upon in all our reforms. We never once question whether it may not be modern man himself who is wrong or decadent. This at least might lead us to look in the proper direction for improvement. We merely assail with savage fury every institution that modern man can no longer run to his and our own satisfaction.

Thus the instinctive and morbid indolence of sickness, to which amputation and suppression are naturally the most tempting corrective methods, becomes the standard of judgment for all ills; and where ignorant minds are added to sick minds, the natural bankruptcy of ignorance joins hands with the destructive lust of the sick, and the two together, hatchet in hand, set out to “reform” the world.

Can anyone doubt that this is indeed what we are witnessing on all sides? And does not the very specious seductiveness of the Socialist and Bolshevist propaganda lead us to suspect that here, at least, we are invalids listening to invalids?

The principle of Private Property is being assailed on all sides. It is now the fashion to talk glibly of the evanescence of private property, just as it is the fashion to be suffering from pyorrhœa or caries. Private property is another of the features of ancient societies which in this Muddle Age has got out of order; and the consequence is, as we should expect, that it is beginning to be suggested--nay, it has already been loudly proclaimed--that private property, as the root of all evils, should be abolished.

Now in this new project of vandalism, we have not only one symptom of disease, but two. For, while we have our old friend, the morbid indolence of the sick, which cannot recreate or repair, but must suppress, we also have a frontal attack on Life itself, pressed by the forces of decay and disintegration disguised as Utopians. For private property is a principle of Life.

The fact that this is everywhere apparent, does not, of course, prevent the myopic from overlooking it; it should, however, prevent the multitude from being deceived, and we believe the multitude are still not deceived. For it is obviously the multitude, the vast mass of mankind, who have the least of this world’s goods, who should be the first to be duped about this matter; and yet how long it is taking to convince them! How tenacious they seem of the old principle! How deeply must they believe in private property in order, with their handful of household sticks and baubles, to resist the morbid lie which is being reiterated by a thousand moribund voices all round them, that private property is wrong.

It has been said that private property is a principle of Life. What, then, is its biological value?

Its biological value is the same as the biological value of the best life itself.

To be quite plain, Life as a whole does not represent a general movement upwards, from the standpoint of quality. On the contrary. The great majority of Life’s activities have a gravitating or descending tendency--that is to say, in a large number of organisms, acquired embellishments or acquired faculties and qualities more frequently have to be dropped than retained in the course of generations. Spencer has shown conclusively that by far the greater number of existing organisms are the degenerate descendants of higher species (see Collected Essays, Vol. I., p. 379). The laws of evolution, therefore, cover millions of cases of retrograde metamorphosis, or change consisting of the loss of complex qualities or members for the purpose of survival. And in all these cases of retrograde metamorphosis, instead of the identity of the individual becoming extended, it is actually diminished or reduced.

Development is, therefore, really the exception rather than the rule. It covers only those cases in which a cumulative or forward metamorphosis has taken place. It is characteristic only of those species in which identity has been extended. Indeed, development might be called the law of higher life, or of that life which advances by gradual steps from the homogeneous to the heterogenous, which, in fact, unfolds itself only to reveal and to perpetuate ever fresh and new attributes and activities.

Development is a name which, though not descriptive of all organic evolution, certainly describes the changes of a species that has grown through its thousands of generations--grown, that is to say, in the sense of having become more and more--more and more capable of multifarious activities and adaptations.

Development in this correct and restricted sense of “growth,” thus implies “becoming more,” “extending identity.” Becoming more, therefore, is a principle of higher life.

Now what does this conclusion necessarily involve in the terms of humanity? It means that the ascending line of life in the genus Homo Sapiens, at least, has not only become more and more, but must also have been characterised by the spiritual counterpart of this physical striving, which consists in desiring to become more and more--that is to say, to extend identity.

Any slackening, any reversal, any paralysis of this desire to become more and more, may thus be regarded as the beginning of the other movement--the movement of retrograde development, of decline.

In each healthy individual of a truly developing species, we should therefore expect to find the conscious counterpart of the principle of higher life, which will be the desire to become more and more, to extend identity.

To assail this desire to become more and more is therefore tantamount to a conspiracy against life, it is tantamount to a denial of the healthiest instinct of the species. It is the hand of death outstretched across the ascending road of the animal man.

Call this adverse criticism or hostility what you will--Socialism, Communism, or Bolshevism, it is all one. It is the cry of those who have lost ascending or developing life’s strongest instinct against those who still possess it. Or else it is the cry of the envious in life’s battle, who pretend to have lost life’s strongest instinct, in order to acquire power over those who have not.

I shall hardly be called upon to draw the obvious conclusion. How does, how can, the individual of a species that falls naturally under the head of Development manifest this incessant striving to become more, which is the conscious counterpart of the physical evolution of the race, except by means of private property? How can he achieve this becoming more which, as we have seen, constitutes an extension of his identity, without private property? I do not refer here to those exceptional individuals who are content with a non-material expression of this “becoming more,” but to the mass of mankind, in which individual extension must take a material form. Private property is the only means, and this private property is so closely identified with individual extension that, as we know, in certain Ages and climes, wives and children have been included in the category.

It constitutes the gratification, nay the very necessity, of one of the deepest instincts of man. It is indistinguishable, inseparable, from the law of growth; hence the obstinate attachment even the poorest still reveal in regard to it; hence the uphill work which the preachers of Death and Decay, still find their propaganda to be.

The very morality of development says “Yea” to this desire to be and to become more. The very morality of development identifies growth, in the individual sense, with the general growth of the species, and therefore sanctifies and hallows the instinct of self-extension which is the instinct of private property. Only the sincere and whole-hearted pessimist can logically assail the principle of private property, for he alone can honestly desire to cripple his fellows, paralyse their life instinct, and curtail their existence on the globe.

It is hardly necessary here to refer to the dawn of the sense of private property in the lower animals. This has been done often enough. Suffice it to point out, however, that in them also it is most apparent where the variety of activities and adaptations is most complex--among the bees, the ants, the dogs and the cats. True, the private property in question is only food, or matter which will one day be used as food. But is this not true of all property? Has not the revolution in Russia shown that all property is merely so much frozen food, so much wealth that can ultimately be bartered for nourishment? And does not this again point to its deep relationship to the highest law of growth?

The important outcome of this inquiry into the ultimate relation of private property to biology and to the highest laws of life, however, is that it enables one to recognise the Socialist, the Bolshevist, and the Communist (where they are most sincere and fervent) in their true guise--that is to say, as the convinced and determined opponents, not only of a particular class, but of Life itself; as pessimists and bitter misanthropists, who do not scruple to conceal their hostility to an important life-principle beneath the most engaging and most unctuous of altruistic poses.

But then is all well with the principle of private property to-day? And are the Socialists, Bolshevists and Communists all wrong?

All is certainly not well with the principle of private property as it is allowed to work in our societies at the present day. Hence the colourable warrant that is given to the attacks of the Socialists and Communists upon it. Hence, too, the plausibility of their claims. For it is the simplest of feats to confuse an issue, and in societies where the right of private property is abused, it is easy to convince the thoughtless that the thing abused, and not the abuse itself, is the real curse.

It is, therefore, readily admitted that there is a good deal that is wrong about private property as a principle practised by modern man; the wrong, however, is no more inherent in the principle itself, than cruelty to children, because it happens to occupy the attention of a large and wealthy society in England, is inherent in the principle of parenthood. And it is because the present evils of the distribution of wealth are not inherent in the principle of private property, that it is ridiculous--not only ridiculous, but also highly suspicious--to wish to sweep away the institution itself in order to remedy the evils that now unquestionably account for its disrepute.

It has been shown why this desire to sweep away the institution is doubly suspicious:--

(a) Because it is the natural resort of sick and exhausted people, who are incapable of repairing or recreating anything.

(b) Because it is the action of people who are hostile not merely to private property, but to Life in general. (The fact that they are usually completely unconscious of this hostility only renders them all the more dangerous.)

The recognition of the right of private property is probably the oldest of all human principles. It is seen in all great civilisations. Every great culture has been built upon it. All societies, however, have not created the evils of modern Western civilisation. This alone ought to have provided a hint in the right direction. It ought to have been seen that the evils attending the distribution of wealth to-day, are evils more or less peculiar to the kind of culture we have evolved.

What are these evils?

(1) The chief evil of all is that by our present method of wealth distribution, the best people are not infrequently the most sorely oppressed, the most severely chastised by poverty and lack of power. The correlative evil to this is that those who are powerful to-day through wealth, are frequently so hopelessly unfitted to hold their position that the system which elevates such people to their present eminence seems as if it must be bad to the root.

(2) The next in importance is that life at present is organised in such wise that poverty does not mean merely humbleness of station; for which of us would object to that? It means being compelled to perform some of the most heart-rending, most unhealthy, most besotting and characterless work that the economy of the community has to offer. Society should be organised in such a way that either filthy and besotting labours should not be necessary or else that where they are necessary, they should entail compensating advantages.

(3) The next in importance is that, as society is organised at present, poverty, which might be readily and cheerfully accepted by thousands of us, aye, actually preferred in some cases--now almost necessarily signifies bad air, ugly surroundings, poor food, and consequently an unsecured bill of health. Accessibility to conditions in which good air and beauty are, as it were, happily wedded, is becoming ever more and more the restricted privilege of the wealthy.

(4) Owing to a misunderstanding of the true nature of social unity, wealth, or extensive private property, now gives certain classes the power of trespassing upon the life-needs of their fellows, without, however, being amenable to law--cornering markets, levying undue profits, destroying beautiful sites, supporting a host of societies which are simply parasitic pests on the nation’s back, unwise disposal of fortunes, etc.

(5) Owing to the educational advantages associated with wealth--an association which is quite unessential and arbitrary--modern society imposes a certain measure of benightedness and ignorance as an inevitable inheritance upon poverty, which is not in the least essential to poverty per se.

After this brief enumeration of some of the leading evils of our present system of wealth distribution, is it not, however, more than ever clear that none of these evils is inherent in the principle of private property itself? Who would venture to prove that any one of the wrongs enumerated was (a) either inherent in the principle of private property, or (b) irremediable without the sacrifice of that principle?

If we consider the first and chief wrong which consists in the fact that private property at the present day frequently elevates to power people who are totally unfitted to wield any power at all, while it as frequently condemns to impotence, obscurity and ignominy, people who would be eminently fitted to wield power, we realise at once that the fault does not lie in the amount of property held by these people, but upon the significance which current opinion and the prevailing estimate of wealth attaches to the accident of great or small possessions in either case.

It is well known, everybody indeed has heard of it, that in certain cultures that have existed and still exist, the significance of great possessions has not been the same as that which Western civilisation has chosen to attach to them. The Brahmin of India, for instance, although he is doomed to poverty in the most literal sense, is the most highly respected among rich and poor alike. He rules and directs opinion, neither because he is rich, nor because he is poor, but because he is profoundly wise, and because power does not happen to be connected, in the enlightened Hindu mind, with great possessions. It can be shown, and has been shown often enough, that the famous mendicant monks of the Middle Ages did not increase their power, but actually forfeited it, when they acquired riches and became as the other holy orders.

Evidently, then, the equation Wealth = Importance = Power, is not an inevitable one. It does not depend upon mathematical necessity. It is a perfectly arbitrary association of ideas, which is the result of a singular and quite gratuitous valuation.

The fact that it is deeply seated in the prejudices and prepossessions of all Western peoples, appears to give it the sanction almost of a social law. It would, however, constitute the acme of imprudence and superficiality to allow oneself to be led by this apparent unanimity into the belief that it either denotes or implies an ordinance of Fate.

The unanimity with which reverence is now felt for wealth alone, is only one of the many instances which it would be possible to give, of the stubborn and determined manner in which an arbitrary valuation strikes root in the heart of whole nations, when once it has been systematically and painstakingly inculcated upon them. It is one of those cases which inspire with hope all those who may be confronted with the apparently thankless task of altering the prejudices and prepossessions of a people. For, if it has been possible erroneously to raise wealth to the highest among our valuations, without a trace of social law to help us, it is clear that it must be possible to alter that valuation, to “transvalue” it, as the technical phrase has it, and to bring mankind back to a more rational understanding of the proper equipment of power, which consists chiefly of wisdom, virtue, character and resolution.

Nobody denies, of course, that when once wisdom, virtue, character and resolution, happen to combine in the same individual, the addition of wealth may make that individual exceptionally precious; but wealth, as we frequently see it to-day, endowing with power people who are neither wise, virtuous, characterful nor resolute, is little less than a national curse.

For what does wealth mean? It means simply that the owner of it has a purchasing power over the services of his fellows. It by no means signifies that this purchasing power will of necessity be wisely, virtuously or profitably exercised. Wherever it is not wisely, virtuously and profitably exercised, therefore, it becomes a scourge. The power itself becomes violence; and it is incumbent upon the laws of all well-regulated communities to suppress at least man-made violence. The besetting vice of all Western societies, whether Monarchies, Aristocracies, Republics, or “Democracies,” has been and is still that they have never taken adequate steps to suppress this particular kind of violence.

But the remedy for such violence would not consist in abolishing the principle of private property. You might just as well abolish knives because they are frequently used by homicidal maniacs. The remedy consists in so modifying the life of the nation, and the prejudices and prepossessions of the nation, that wealth may not necessarily mean power, and that poverty may not necessarily mean ignominy, ignorance and ill-health; also that it should be difficult for material success to be achieved by people who are frequently the most contemptible members of the community both in spiritual and physical gifts.

All those who question the possibility of such an achievement in the recasting of values, are invited to dwell upon the genesis and growth of the prevalent ruling equation, Wealth = Importance = Power. They are invited, furthermore, to discover the moment in history when another valuation showed signs of becoming prevalent, and to ascertain by what means, foul or otherwise, it was made to fail. Then only, in the light of what they found, will they be able to decide whether a new equation and a new valuation have not even now a chance of being initiated, accepted, and universally believed.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER II

JUSTICE

“Si nos coeurs battent, c’est dans ce but ... c’est pour que nous puissions compter sur l’avenir et savoir s’il y a dans les choses d’ici bas une justice immanente qui vient à son jour et à son heure.”--L. Gambetta (Cherbourg speech. August 9th, 1880).

A discussion of the idea of justice almost necessarily precedes the subject of the next chapter, for the kind of justice which is the object of public clamour outside the law and police-courts, and beyond the dealings of man with man, provides one of the principal arguments to those who believe in human equality.

In this essay, then, it is clear that we shall not be concerned either with the justice which includes the administration of the law, and the incidence of the law of any country, or with the justice which relates to the unwritten rules of conduct governing the commerce of men and women; but rather with that idea of equity which, while it enjoys a fast hold upon the imagination of all Western peoples, is supposed to have an existence apart from statutes, codes, regulations and by-laws, and human conventions. It is an abstraction, somewhat like the idea of equality; but it is not a mathematician’s abstraction, it is the abstraction of a moralist. It arises out of the idea of a moral order--that is to say, of a supposed universal tendency to arrive at a perfect equilibrium between deserts and rewards, and it assumes that the moment this perfect balance is disturbed, a violation of this abstract justice--Gambetta’s “justice immanente,”--is supposed to have occurred.

To take an instance which illustrates this notion of justice, it is popularly supposed that for a child, who can have committed no crime sufficiently great to deserve severe punishment, to be born in a sordid home, in a still more sordid city-quarter, of drunken parents, some disturbance of the balance of justice must have occurred--a disturbance which, if it is to be corrected, must require some kind of compensation. If the compensation cannot be conceived as forthcoming in this life, another life is postulated, in which the proper equilibrium between deserts and rewards; will be restored. It is not enough to say that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Although the ancient Jewish view of universal justice doubtless required some such explanation, and found it satisfactory, the modern view of “immanent justice” is not satisfied by this method of settling the question. Indeed, the very idea that children should expiate their parents’ sins is abhorrent to the modern mind, steeped as it is in this notion of justice. It only consents to it as a fact in the face of overwhelming physiological and biological evidence, and, even then, takes refuge from the apparent harshness of the law, in the settled conviction that somewhere, somewhen, compensation will be provided for the expiatory suffering.

It is the suffering that can be traced to no particular transgression on the part of the individual, that chiefly outrages the modern man; that is why it seems fair to conclude that this notion of immanent justice has a moral foundation.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing more unjust than this notion of justice, but its injustice is by no means obvious.

There is no outcry when a murderer is hanged, although psychology, heredity and even sociology, may be called to witness that his act was as inevitable as is the crippledom of the child born of tainted blood. There is no outcry when a vicious reprobate dies in poverty and pain. There is no outcry when an habitual criminal ends his days on the treadmill. Morality here receives its tribute. Chemistry, physiology, biology, and the laws of heredity that derive from them are superseded by the moral bias, and there appears to be no violation of that “immanent” justice when one of Nature’s born ne’er-do-wells comes to a sad end in a prison quadrangle.

In cases of suffering which are less easily traced to an apparently deliberate transgression of moral laws, however, a miscarriage of universal justice is supposed to have occurred, and the sympathy of all, and even the indignation of some, are immediately aroused.

It is true that attempts have been made to withhold even this sympathy, as in the case of the second commandment already referred to above; but the best instance is that of David’s famous observation in the 37th Psalm: “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread.” This, however, is so obviously a desperate endeavour to square a moral reading of the universe, or the conception of an eternal justice behind all phenomena, with the spectacle of misery and indigence, that its transparency offends the dullest vision. It is not unlike the attitude of some Eugenists who would argue that the poorly remunerated of to-day should be prevented from multiplying because they are not only the unfit, but the undesirable. To call them unfit is biologically correct; for it merely amounts to saying that they are unadapted to their environment. The idea of undesirability is, however, smuggled in gratuitously, only in order to try to account for what would otherwise appear an injustice. If the poor be made to appear as lying under a stigma, the difficulty presented by the apparent injustice of their position is easily removed.

In the same way the necessity of condoling with an invalid is unconsciously resented by most of us when we endeavour, particularly to the invalid’s face, to ascribe his or her trouble to some glaring imprudence or violation of rational living, through which we infer that the illness or indisposition has been brought about. We thus reduce it to a pain or penalty that the sufferer has deserved, and in this way we release our minds from the constant preoccupation concerning justice and injustice.

Women, who are very much less social in their instincts, and, therefore, much harder than men, repeatedly behave in this way, even with their own children; and before they make a movement to relieve suffering, their lips will have pronounced innumerable reasons why the particular indisposition or pain confronting them is the sufferer’s own fault.

Why did David say that he had never seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread? Why do certain Eugenists try their hardest to attach some stigma to poverty, or to what they call the poorly remunerated? And why do people suddenly heap all kinds of blame upon the head of an unfortunate man, woman or child, who has suddenly contracted an illness?

It is suggested that the reason is because the acceptance of the view that there is a moral order to the universe, implies two conditions: (a) That nothing occurs that is not just; (b) that, therefore, there is no suffering that is not in some way retribution or penalty.

When confronted with any form of suffering, therefore, the first impulse of everybody trained in this school of thought is an attempt, at once, to square the particular example of unhappiness before them with this notion of universal justice; and if it will not square, without supposing some ultimate compensation that will balance it, or some pain or crime that is sufficient to account for it, some such ultimate compensation or some such transgression is quickly imagined, which seems to satisfy the requirements of “immanent justice.”

If it is quite impossible to discover a sin or a crime in the individual that will account for the individual’s suffering--as, for instance, when a child is born of diseased or drunken parents--when, moreover, doubts are beginning to be felt, as they are to-day, in a large number of minds, regarding the possibility of compensation in another world for undeserved miseries in this world--then a gross injustice is supposed to have occurred, and everybody who looks at the universe through moral glasses, feels acutely uncomfortable.

“Why should Tommy Jones,” they say, “be born of diseased or drunken parents, when Thomas Vere de Vere was born of healthy or sober parents! It is unjust!”

They are indignant, and they look indignant, and those among them who cannot believe in an after-life in which this apparently monstrous miscarriage of “immanent justice” will be rectified, become social reformers who are prepared to fight, and lead others to fight for--justice!

Those people, on the other hand, who are persuaded that their religion can explain anything, and who enjoy the most determined optimism where the suffering of others is concerned, have yet another loophole of escape from the disagreeable certainty that a miscarriage of universal justice has occurred. Nodding their heads gravely and wisely, they say: “Who can tell? Providence moveth in mysterious ways. May not these sufferers be the most sorely tried because they are the most loved? For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”

Everything is done, every expedient is tried in order to escape from the maddening certainty that suffering is possible without a sin or a crime having been committed. When finally it is discovered that such things as pain and misery do co-exist with innocence, or at least with a lack of guilt, then the feeling arises that an injustice has been perpetrated which must at all costs be corrected. And since eternal, or universal, or immanent justice cannot be held responsible, man himself and his civilisation are frequently accused of having been guilty of an injustice of which neither is in any way capable.

What is it that has forced this conviction upon mankind? Failing the comforting assurances of religion, which postulates a heaven in which the uneven balance of pain and pleasure is adjusted, and a deity who chastens those whom he most loves, why is it that at the sight of unearned misery and pain the average man has a feeling of revolt, as if a primary law of the universe had been wantonly outraged?

I have suggested that the average man reads morality into phenomena, that he imagines that the world is a moral world, and that consequently pain and pleasure alike must have a moral explanation or cause. It is this that creates the idea of an “immanent” justice.

But, if we contemplate the world as a whole, what justification have we for postulating a moral order of phenomena? Why should we expect something so essentially peculiar to human society to pervade the design of things in general?

As a matter of fact, from the standpoint of civilised human society, Nature is utterly immoral, Life is hopelessly unjust. It is not only the sinful young rabbit that provides the fox with his meal. It is not only the guilty mouse that dies an agonising death in the cat’s jaws. It is not only the dissipated sparrow that is torn to fragments by the young of the sparrow-hawk. Neither is it only the vicious worm that gets rationed out piecemeal to the young of the mole. And what of the antelopes that fall victims to lions and tigers, the sheep and cattle that fall victims to man, the pheasants that fall victims to our sportsmen, the fish that fall victims to their larger fellows? Wherever we look, we see suffering--undeserved suffering--aye, undeserved agony. The world and Life are therefore essentially unmoral, they are not concerned with justice. The rain falls both on the just and on the unjust. The hurricane kills the just and the unjust alike. The lightning burns the house of the just or unjust indifferently. Microbes feed on the pure and undefiled virgin just as ravenously as upon the polluted jade. Tuberculosis does not pick and choose; it kills where it can. Virtue is no safeguard against it, neither is genius.

Wherever we look, either in the jungle or the prairie, we see the blood-red fangs and the carmine claws of the bully rampant! Fair play? Where is the fair play between the cat and the mouse? Where is the fair play between the stoat and the shrew? Where is the fair play between the wolf and the lamb? Justice? What is justice, where is justice in Life and Nature? In the vegetable world, which is said to be inanimate, the fierce uneven struggle is not even mitigated by the “sporting chance” of escape.

Truth to tell, the word justice--whether immanent or otherwise--is meaningless when applied to the universe. Nobody has ever dreamed of thinking out the billions and billions of post-mortem compensations which would be necessary to adjust the balance of only one year’s rapine and slaughter in the world of nature. Nobody has ever dreamt that such a calculation would even be possible. Injustice, if it have any meaning at all in this respect, is therefore written large all over the face of Life and Nature.

Sentimentalists, like Wordsworth and Rousseau, by wilfully turning their backs upon the cruel sufferings of animals and insects in Nature, have been able to present a picture of Life to the world as attractive as it is false. But although pleasant lies of this sort are bound ultimately to do a good deal of damage, and have actually done a good deal of damage, they are also bound ultimately to be found out, and it is to be hoped that there is then an end to them, once and for all.

It is not accurate, therefore, to read a moral order into the Universe. Life and Nature are essentially amoral. They are not concerned even with the A.B.C. of morality. All life outside human society, therefore, knows nothing of justice. On the contrary, “Life is appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation, and, at the very least, exploitation.”

There is no such thing as a natural balance of virtue and reward, crime and punishment--even in the realm of social justice this balance is difficult enough to achieve. Misery is frequently encountered in Nature--in fact, universally so, divorced from sin. To perceive anything else in Nature is to contemplate her through rather smoky human spectacles--anthropomorphically.

If, then, this notion of justice exists at all, it is only in the fancy of the morally prejudiced. Morality arises only in human society; therefore justice is exclusively a social phenomenon, a social expedient. It is not a universal law, but a concept of the social human being. It is not a principle transcending social life; it is the creation of social life, and means nothing outside it; it is man-made, man-maintained.

In the light of this conclusion, what is meant, therefore, when Mrs. Jelleby-Jones, of Hampstead, who is a welfare worker, exclaims over her dinner to her husband that it seems so “unjust” that the poor little diseased babies she has been inspecting that afternoon should have been born with such a heavy handicap?

Whose injustice, what injustice does she mean? Does she know what she means, and does she mean anything?

We have seen that if her statement is to have any meaning at all, it must signify that mankind is unjust, that human society is unjust, and that, therefore, her particular form of human society is unjust; consequently that she and her husband, as forming part of that society, are unjust.

Truth to tell, she will mean nothing half as intelligible as that; but since this is the only meaning her remark can have, let us examine it calmly.

She supposes an injustice to have been perpetrated because--say--three babies she has seen were born diseased. This happens in every class, irrespective of banking account, and the poor are not more unhealthy than the rich. She says the babies will be handicapped. Their disease is an obstacle in their road; therefore it is unjust. She is perfectly right, in a sense, when she says that disease is an obstacle. But it might be pointed out to her that to be born of stupid or criminally disposed parents would also constitute an obstacle. Psychologists now tell us that even to be born of parents who disagree constitutes a grave obstacle in life. It might be argued that to be born of people who can afford to keep cars also constitutes an initial obstacle, because great comfort and luxury reduces moral fibre, paralyses energy, and destroys eagerness for the fray. It might be pointed out to her that to be born the son of the King of England is an obstacle in life, because it limits freedom; a man cannot aspire to becoming Bishop of Bristol if he is destined to become his Britannic Majesty. If being born of sick or stupid parents is an injustice, all these cases are injustices also.

Mrs. Jelleby-Jones might reply that illness or disease is at least an obstacle that could be avoided, whereas to have as father the King of England, is not a fate that could so easily be circumvented. Agreed! But only flagrant cases of illness or disease are even noticeable. What about those more subtle gradations of health or ill-health which though they are frequently sufficiently virulent to convert a potential genius into a merely talented man, or a potentially talented man into a fool, are nevertheless not sufficiently glaring to be observed or guarded against? Would Mrs. Jelleby-Jones argue that to be born of ugly parents, for instance, is an injustice? To be ugly is certainly a great disadvantage, particularly to the women of any tasteful country. Is it also an injustice?

Look at it how we will, injustice, or inequality of endowment and of chances of survival, is rooted in the very heart of Nature. Society endeavours to mitigate Nature’s harsh rule by means of preventing or assuaging unnecessary suffering, succouring indigence, and trying to make ugly and botched people forget their ugliness; but society cannot divorce herself completely from Nature. She is bound to act with Nature and allow natural laws to operate with comparative freedom in her midst. Particularly is this so with regard to the act of pro-creation. Here is a natural process, and a natural passion, on which society can only impose a certain modicum of order; she cannot do away with it. Now, as we have seen, the sort of injustice that we are examining in this chapter, is rooted in the very act of procreation, which is essentially a natural act. Two people, male and female, decide to procreate a third creature (more frequently they do not give the third creature a thought)--a child, who can have no voice in deciding whether it should be born or not, whether it should be born of precisely those parents or not, or whether it should be their daughter or their son, their legitimate or illegitimate offspring. It cannot even choose which parent it will resemble. What could be more unjust? It is obviously one of those manifestations of Nature, of Life, which like all those we have been examining, is completely and hopelessly unjust. It is the amoral character of Nature and Life persisting in spite of moral or social conditions. This amount of Nature’s, or Life’s, inevitable injustice must be accepted, or included with the bargain which is life.

What, then, do these people really mean who rail against this so-called injustice--this necessary survival of natural and vital amorality within a moral society? They are, of course, extravagantly stupid. They read their own back-parlour ethics into Nature’s scheme, conclude erroneously that she is just, and then wherever this kind of injustice appears, they throw the responsibility of it on to man instead of on to Nature. They rightly assume that “injustice” can be only man-made, and imagine that in railing against this “injustice” of their fancy, they are really opposing something substantial, some grievance that could, or ought to be, redressed, if society or the government were more moral.

This “injustice” of their fancy, however, as we have seen, is built up upon an idea of universal and eternal Justice which is a pure myth. Justice exists nowhere outside civilised man’s own institutions, and least of all in Nature. Whenever and wherever, therefore, Nature, pure and undefiled, peeps out even in our civilised societies, as it does in procreation, there also appears, and cannot fail to appear, what these people call “injustice.”

Civilised man has done his utmost to mitigate Life’s natural “injustices”--to use these people’s language--but since in order to survive he is bound to allow Nature a certain modicum of free-play within his societies, a certain modicum of so-called “injustice” cannot be removed from even the most ideal and perfect community.

Thus, far from this “injustice” of the stupid sentimentalists à la Gambetta, etc., etc., being man-made, or man-contrived, it is man who has done, and still does, his utmost to mitigate its asperities. But because he cannot sweep it away without also sweeping away Life itself, or without tampering with a very sacred function of his fellows, it is preposterous to hold him responsible for it.

Apart from the creation and administration of law in an organised society, therefore, and the accepted rules which control the treatment of one man by another, or of a child by its parents, or vice versâ, justice has no genuine existence at all. To complain about the absence of a purely fantastic conception, therefore, is an absurdity. As well might you complain that your son is born without wings, or that you yourself do not possess seven-league boots.

In its essence, however, this act of setting up an impossible ideal, which is supposed to belong to the very scheme of the universe, amounts to an attitude of hostility to life, because it is tantamount to a refusal to accept life as she is--that is to say, amoral. It is equivalent to setting up a false scale of measurement, in order to depreciate human society and its value.

When once these people are convinced that the “injustices” about which they complain really are rooted in Life and Nature, they cry out desperately: Look how dreadful Life is, she is unjust! But it is only in their benighted brains that the ideal of justice was ever conceived as inherent in phenomena, as a possible attribute of life Life is amoral; therefore she is essentially beyond or beneath justice. You can only love her or loathe her as she is. And it is a proof of degeneracy to loathe her as she is. Hence degenerates invariably clothe her with false attributes, and talk about a “justice immanente”; they are not brave enough, or proud enough, to love her without trying to paint her in the light of their back-parlour morality.

All Life’s light and shade, all her excitement, all her incitement to man to compete with energy and spirit in her game, depends for more than half its charm precisely on the fact that she is amoral--that is to say, that she produces inequalities, contrasts and divergent types, indifferently, lavishly, without taking thought, without mercy. Her call is to the brave, to the stout of heart, and to the adventurous and spirited. Those who in the midst of this great adventure cry out “Injustice!” either misunderstand, or wilfully misrepresent the whole scheme.

The alleged “injustices” of Life, can never be put right by man. They are beyond his power to remedy, however just his laws may be. All he can do is to mitigate the asperity of life for those of Nature’s less fortunately endowed offspring, who cannot aspire to the highest ridge; but even in doing this, he must be careful not to make it too easy for Nature’s failures to multiply over abundantly, otherwise the race most certainly deteriorates.

The modern tendency, therefore, which consists in deliberately confounding the issue, by pointing to a number of Nature’s own “injustices” as if they were the outcome of man-made law, man-made conditions, and clamouring for them to be redressed, is wholly vicious. It deceives the multitude, maddens them into a false sense of their grievances, and frequently leads to disturbances which, though they prove sadly destructive of life and treasure, must leave things more or less as they were, because the grievances chiefly complained of, are frequently rooted in Life itself.

This does not mean that there are not man-made injustices in the creation and administration of law. Unfortunately they are too often as plentiful as those of Life itself. But by far the grossest so-called injustices are those of Nature and Life, which cannot by any means be removed, and least of all can they be even mitigated in a country whose population distinguishes so imperfectly between grievances which can be rightly brought home to man, and those that are inherent in the natural order of existence, that while they blindly clamour for the removal of the latter, the former, which might be corrected and are within man’s power to correct, are generally left studiously alone.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER III

EQUALITY

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men were created equal; that they were endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”--Thomas Jefferson (Declaration by the Representatives of the United States).

From whichever quarter the principle of human equality is approached, it appears to recede into ever deeper dimness and obscurity the more hotly it is pursued. What does this elusiveness signify? Has the principle any reality at all? That is to say, is it something that can be realised? Or is it the most unscrupulous lie that has ever been sewn as a device upon the banner of a faction? In any case it seems to provoke very real emotions. Thump your fist hard enough, and shout from a public platform: “Ladies and gentlemen, what we want more than anything else to-day, that which our birth, our common origin, our common shape and stature--aye, even our common spark of Divine Spirit--most surely guarantees us, is Equality, ladies and gentlemen, the blessed condition of Equality!”

Pronounce the words emphatically enough, as your exordium, and your whole audience will cheer and applaud as with one voice.

Not one of the assembled crowd will protest indignantly that you have been talking nonsense. Everybody will really believe that your words have some meaning, and a beautiful meaning.

We have already seen, however, that a word does not require to have any precise meaning, or any definite association whatever, in order to excite pleasurable feelings in those who hear it pronounced, or in order to provoke these people to energetic action. Is Equality perhaps one of these empty, inflammatory words?

It is originally a term borrowed from mathematics. The mathematician says:--“Two and two are equal; this triangle and that are equal; this length and that length are equal; this weight and that weight are equal.”

He is dealing with mere ciphers, symbols or abstractions, and consequently the mathematician has everything his own way, and so long as he abides by ciphers, symbols and abstractions we have no wish to interfere. He can carry his egalitarian principle right through the English weights and measures, viâ the decimal system, into geometry. He is speaking of pure abstractions, arbitrarily supposed to be identical, and if it amuses him to postulate equality as their characteristic, nobody cares. They are his abstractions, his ciphers, he can postulate what he likes about them. We have the feeling that it does not matter. It is only when the mathematician, who, as a rule, is a hopeless psychologist, begins to apply the lifeless notions he has learnt in his study, to the world of activity and reality; it is only when he begins to speak of things that are not his own abstractions--things that really have an existence known to us--that we immediately begin to feel that he is taking liberties with reality.

For instance, if he say that a certain 2,000 pear leaves are equal to another 2,000 pear leaves, we who know that no two leaves have ever been known to be exactly the same, straightway call him to order and say: “No, sir, abide by your abstractions! That statement of yours is not true.” Likewise, if he say that a certain 2,000 cows are equal to another 2,000 cows, we feel that he is either taking too much for granted, or else that he should try to enlist our confidence by specifying the precise weight and individual qualities of each cow in each set, before inviting us to acquiesce in his assertion. And even if the two sets of 2,000 cows weighed exactly the same amount and were of the same race, we should still feel that there were differences in the quality and supply of milk in each set, as also in the vitality of the respective cows in each set, etc., which ought to be taken into account and which it would hardly be possible to estimate with perfect accuracy.

But let us think of things which have less individual divergence from the common type. Let us think of screws, bolts, plates, chain links, etc. After these have been made with the utmost care by means of machines capable of almost mathematical precision, and when once they have been accurately weighed and found equal both as regards size and ponderability, you would think that you had groups of things or individual things as between which you would be justified in postulating the attribute equality. But if you should ask anyone accustomed to dealing with such things, he would tell you that one bolt in ten or in twenty usually splits, that one screw in a hundred or in a thousand usually strips, and that one plate in fifty usually cracks. Thus here and there, even when enormous pains have been taken to attain uniformity, marked differences become apparent. What about those differences that are not sufficiently marked to be noticeable until some considerable time has elapsed?

Can equality be postulated of no two objects on earth then?

Provided that the mathematical abstracts, or arbitrary identities, size, weight, bulk and number, alone, are in question, equality can be postulated; but the moment mathematical abstractions are departed from, it is not only unsafe, it is positively dishonest to speak of equality.

For instance, you can say that these hundred rails are equal to those hundred rails in number, in weight, or in length. You could not say that these hundred rails are equal to those hundred rails in durability, resilience, or frangibility. You might say they are approximately equal in these attributes, or as nearly as possible equal; but apart from the arbitrary identities or abstractions of the mathematicians, you could not postulate perfect equality.

Does the term “Equality” mean anything at all apart from these mathematical abstractions then?----Absolutely nothing!

What, then, are those people who earnestly and warmly claim and advocate equality among men--men who are so different in their ancestry, size, shape, endowments, beauty, desires, appetites, and spirit, whose very features proclaim their inequality as they approach us?

Are such clamourers for equality all liars?

They are certainly liars, but the majority of them are probably perfectly unconscious liars. From childhood onwards they may have heard the word “Equality” pronounced as if it implied a very certain reality, a very much coveted desideratum. Deep emotions over which they have no control, and concerning which they have even less understanding, are therefore stirred every time they hear the word, or see it written or printed; and thus they live and die earnestly believing that this meaningless principle “Equality,” if it could be realised, would be an unqualified boon.

How the equality is to be achieved, whether by bleeding the too sanguine, truncating the too tall, deliberately debilitating the too healthy, delicately injuring the brains of the too intelligent, or systematically fattening the too thin, nobody troubles definitely to specify. Egalitarians have a vague notion concerning a still more vague desideratum, and this, coupled with the word “Equality,” that is utterly meaningless outside the abstractions of the mathematicians, completes the content of their hallucination.

But, it may be objected, the world is surely not so foolish. What men mean when they demand equality, is equality before the law--that is to say, that the law-officers should regard them, for the purposes of law-administration as equal to one another in their chances of being right.

This may be true of a few cases in which the cry “Equality” is set up; but is it true of all? Do all egalitarians court equality because at some time or another they may have to confront the officers of the law?

No, says the objector, but the law is not merely felt when two litigants face each other, or when a criminal is apprehended; it is felt in the home of the just as well as in that of the unjust; it is felt in the life of the city, in the village and in the factory.

But it is precisely in such circumstances that the law would be most harsh, if it assumed equality. It is compelled to assume inequality in legislating for large communities, otherwise it could not be just at all.

The very symbol of justice--a blindfold female with a pair of scales in one hand--is a mathematical symbol, which can have no relation to human affairs, but only to the mathematical abstraction, weight.

“A good law should be good for all men,” said Condorcet, “even as a proposition is true for all men.”

“The capital error of the whole French Revolution,” says Louis Madelin, “lies in the dogma thus proclaimed by Condorcet.”

Yes, but Condorcet was not a political thinker, he was one of the foremost mathematicians of his time! And Thomas Jefferson, whose words head this chapter, was his disciple.

The danger to which the mathematician, like the engineer exposes us, begins when he pretends to apply his principles to human affairs.

But, continues the objector, although it is admitted that initial equality, as between human beings, or any living things for that matter, is an impossibility, seeing that nature’s products are all diverse and unequal; and although subsequent equality is hard to achieve without behaving unjustly and barbarously to all those who depart from a certain norm or standard--that is to say, without bleeding, debilitating, truncating, or otherwise injuring all those who vary from an arbitrarily selected pattern--there surely can be such a thing as Equality of Opportunity.

At this point in the discussion it is only fair to say that most opponents of Egalitarianism promptly capitulate, and eagerly concede that equality of opportunity is a genuine desideratum capable of practical realisation.

At the risk of appearing captious and sophistical, however, it can no more be admitted here that Equality of Opportunity has any actual possibilities of realisation than has the principle of equality itself. It is, in fact, an illusion rather more complex and more serious than the latter. For it presupposes, not only equality among men, but equality of opportunity--two equalities instead of one--and among a class of things which can be made equal only by a miracle.

In the first place, it may be assumed, without any further discussion, that a moment’s calm reflection is enough to dispel even from the meanest intelligence, the illusion that men can ever be equal.

On this score, alone, then, opportunities cannot be equal, because, however accurately their equality may be established, in regard to a supposed standard man, the moment they are placed in relation to the multitude of unequal men, they, too, become unequal. For an opportunity is not a thing in itself; it only becomes something in relation to the creature who seizes it. Given an equal means of access to a particular ridge or hill-top, the opportunity to reach that hill-top or ridge, is the equal means of access plus the kind of creature to whom it is afforded. The introduction of an unequal element on the one hand--the men--makes the other element, the means of access, not unequal as means of access in the abstract, but unequal as opportunity in the concrete.

Suppose as much inequality between three men as exists between a hen, a hare, and a hippopotamus--and as regards fleetness and swimming power such inequality is not unusual between men--how could you devise equal opportunities which would enable all three men to reach a certain objective at the same moment of time, if a strip of water, a high wall, and a ravine stood between the starting point and the objective?

You might do it by first holding a rehearsal, in which you would accurately time each man and note his abilities, and then handicap the fleetest accordingly.

But unfortunately life cannot be rehearsed, a life-handicap cannot be calculated. Besides, it is to the advantage of society not to handicap her fleetest and her best. As Lord Morley very rightly says: “The well-being of the community demands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty.”

But suppose our objector replies: Very well, but that is all we ask. We do not demand a handicap; we simply demand an equal means of access to a particular objective, no matter whether ultimately those means prove unequal or not, owing to the inequality of the men to whom they are open.

It may then be asked whether even this equality in means of access is not in itself utterly fanciful and fantastic. Given the radical inequality of men at birth, together with the highly complex arrangement of modern society, with its enormous variety of prizes, it may reasonably be questioned whether it be even possible, not to mention practicable.

A large number of people cannot all travel along the same narrow path. Several narrow paths all exactly alike would have to be constructed. The accidents, vicissitudes, fatalities that would attend some of the early travellers along the roads--faintness, loss of luggage, sprains, deaths, etc.--would either impede or facilitate the way of the later travellers. Thus, in life, the means of access themselves, however equal at the start, would quickly acquire unforeseen inequalities.

Let us select an example from life in England.

Two boys, A and B, one living at Whitstable, the other in London, are quite unequal in gifts, ancestral tradition, build and tastes. Nevertheless, it is desired to give them an equal opportunity, say, of earning £1,000 a year when they are forty. The father of A wishes A to have the same opportunities as B, and B’s father holds the same view about B in his relation to A.

Very well, A, having learnt the art of oyster fishing, which is the principal industry of Whitstable, is sent to London to learn to be a clerk, and B is sent from London to Whitstable, after training as a clerk, in order to have an opportunity of being an oyster fisherman. Meanwhile, A’s father has heard that B is also studying agriculture at a school of agriculture somewhere near Whitstable. A, after having trained as a clerk, is therefore recalled to Whitstable and made to undergo a course of agriculture, and B having acquired a knowledge of oyster-fishing and agriculture, is sent back to London to learn French, which A acquired there. Ultimately, however, A’s father, remembering that a brother of his did extremely well as an engineer, prevails upon B’s father to consent to the plan of sending both boys A and B to Armstrong & Whitworth’s or to Vickers.

We can imagine both A’s father and B’s father dying long before A and B had had every opportunity that society now offers to the aspirant for success; we can also picture A and B themselves becoming grey-haired octogenarians before they finally settled down.

No, says the objector. That is not what opportunity egalitarians mean. They mean not that everybody should have an equal chance of succeeding in all the careers that lie open, but that they should have an opportunity of succeeding in life.

But what is meant by success here? Does it consist in becoming Prime Minister of England, or Commander-in-Chief in India, or Lord Mayor, or Editor of John Bull? In any case opportunities for becoming any one of these four cannot be made equal. Perhaps success consists in becoming a millionaire? But who is going to determine the equality of opportunity for this achievement? Pullitzer, one of the most powerful American millionaires of the first decade of this century, crawled ashore in America as a penniless fugitive, after having swum from the ship that had conveyed him as an emigrant from Europe!

Moreover, supposing that a boy’s opportunity-egalitarianism extends beyond the shores of his native land, and he says: I wish to have the same opportunity as the Frenchman, or the Canadian, or the Chinaman. What then? Is there any valid reason why opportunity-egalitarianism should be confined to a single country, or even to a single continent?

What, then, is left of this cry for equality of opportunity? Simply the sting of resentment which gives rise to it; and this we shall now proceed to examine.

What kind of person is it who clamours for this meaningless desideratum, equality? Certainly not the beautiful person, because to him equality, if it could be achieved, would result in bringing him down to the common level. Neither can it be the person specially gifted in any of the arts and sciences; for, again, equality, if it could by some miracle be wrought, would amount to wiping out the advantage of such special gifts. The self-reliant, the strong, the skilful, the able and the desirable, in all walks of life, are never stirred by this cry for equality; because they look down from their eminence, and cannot therefore conceive that levelling could possibly prove an advantage.

It must therefore be the undesirable, the unskilful, the incompetent, the ugly, the ungifted, in all walks of life, the incapable of all classes, who want equality. And they want it because, looking up from their position of chafing mediocrity and ungainliness, and beholding their more gifted brethren, they realise that equality must redound to their benefit. A moment’s reflection would tell them that it is an impossible ideal; their mortified vanity, however, is stronger than their reason, and urges them to believe in it, ridiculous as it may be.

“Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn, Cries to weakest, as to strongest, ‘Ye are equals, equal-born.’”

“What made the Revolution? Vanity! Liberty was nothing but a pretext!” Thus spoke Napoleon, the greatest and probably the deepest man since Cæsar.

But, however fantastic the cry for equality may seem, it is a dangerous cry, because it is still capable of stimulating and directing energy. It is, therefore, still a weapon in the hands of the unscrupulous agitator and demagogue.

It means nothing. We have seen that it has only a mathematical value. But until the ignorant, the arrogant, and the revengeful among Nature’s (not society’s) failures are brave and honest enough to realise that the apparent injustice of the radical inequality of man, is irremediable and inevitable, until they realise that it cannot be corrected without resorting to the most savage extreme of Procrustean barbarity, the lie Equality, as a high explosive, as a generator of social perturbations and upheavals, as a weapon and a war-cry, will continue to give rise to meaningless hopes, and to suggest utterly false claims to the overweening ambition of all discontented humanity.

There is, however, another factor in this clamour for the impracticable ideal of equality, and that is our old friend the natural indolence of the weary and the exhausted. If all were equal--no matter how this equality is to be achieved--it is felt that things would be easier. Not only would the shame of the ugly and the repulsive in the presence of the beautiful and the gifted be spared, but the uphill race of the poor runners beside the fleet and enduring runners, would also be rendered less strenuous. The ineffective brain-cracking of the fools beside the swift and efficient thought of the intelligent would be less heart-rending, and so on.

Finally, the notion of Justice, of “immanent” Justice, constrains those who hold it, to assume a scheme of life, according to which all human beings are at least equal at birth. Such people very easily argue as follows: If all human beings were not equal at birth, it would not be just, “immanent” Justice would be caught red-handed in an act of flagrant injustice at the very portals of life. But this is inconceivable, therefore all must be born equal. We have seen, however, that this notion of justice is quite as mythical as the idea of equality itself.

Generated in this way, by innumerable powerful wishes, the idea of equality begins to take shape and assume the appearance of a realisable object in the minds of the weary and the exhausted; and without troubling to ask themselves what the merits or possibilities of their idea may be, they are prepared to advocate it, applaud it--aye and even fight for it, at the cost of all the rest of the world--so long as they continue to be assured by unscrupulous people that it will effect all they want it to effect.

So far, then, it has been impossible to trace any substantial measure of reality behind this notion and this cry of equality. Is it conceivable that a word should give rise to such intense feeling and yet bear no relation whatever to practical life? Was President Jefferson raving when he, following the lead of almost thirty millions of French people, also spoke of equality as a desideratum that could be gravely and confidently placed on a political programme? For it seems only fair to presume that he could not have been serious when he maintained that all men were created equal.

It is possible that at the end of the 18th century equality as a cry had a very definite meaning. It probably meant in its best and most rational interpretation, that every citizen had an equal right to have his interests safeguarded by the laws of his society, that is to say, by the government of his country. This was not recognised as a principle by the rulers of France before the Revolution, and it is at least conceivable that the substantial reality behind this cry for equality was precisely the demand on the part of all that each man’s interests should be protected with equal vigour and conscientiousness by the state.

But in this sense has the cry for equality any meaning?

In so far as certain sections of the community may still believe that their interest is not so perfectly safeguarded as that of other sections, the cry for equality of treatment has as much meaning to-day as it had in the last years of the 18th century, but beyond this one claim, it is difficult to discover any meaning in it whatsoever.

Unfortunately, however, this very necessary and incontrovertible limitation of the idea of equality, is not likely to deter those whose base purpose may best be served by extending the significance of the word beyond its proper bounds, when appealing to the least desirable elements in every nation; and unless in the mass of the people of all countries there is that understanding of the term which alone bears any resemblance to reality, mankind will continue at intervals to be incited to energetic though fruitless violence in the pursuit of a phantom which can have no practical or effective existence outside the calculations of a mathematician’s brain.

FOOTNOTES:

CHAPTER IV

FREEDOM

“Freedom such as God hath given Unto all beneath His heaven, With their breath, and from their birth, Though guilt would sweep it from the earth.” --Byron (Poems on Napoleon).

“Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”--This meaningless, but highly inflammatory statement of Rousseau’s is probably at the root of most of the misunderstanding that prevails to-day in regard to the subject of liberty. Just as people eagerly accept, without a moment’s thought, the lie that men are born equal, so they are only too ready to embrace a doctrine according to which they may lay claim to a sort of primitive, or natural freedom, which has been stolen from them by their rulers, their civilisation, or by invading hordes.

On examination, of course, the proposition “men are born free” proves to be wholly and wildly fantastic.

Freedom implies, one would suppose, the right, the capacity, and the opportunity to choose one course from another, one kind of life from another. But how much can a man really choose?

At birth, for instance, all kinds of conditions are imposed upon the future adult--conditions which are bound to determine the whole of the principal events of his or her career,--over which there is no possibility of control whatsoever.

It may be assumed, for instance, that a baby might like to choose its nationality and the language that it will speak in later life. Can it do so? It may reasonably be taken for granted that a baby might like to choose its parents, its brothers and sisters, and its other relatives. Can it do so? Its very constitution and health are dependent upon the kind of mother and father it has; its very happiness and success as an adult may depend upon the way in which it is treated as an infant. Has it any choice, any freedom, in regard to any of these matters?

It is not fanciful to suspect that the baby might like to choose its particular form and features, its ultimate height as an adult, etc., etc. The most vital and important issues will hang upon this question of its face and form when it is grown up. But it has no power whatsoever to determine any one of these most vital and important conditions.

An imaginative baby, realising the inexorable fate which hangs over certain gifts, certain endowments, and a particular sex, might regard it as all important to be able to select these freely.

But the rigidity of natural law, the impossibility of controlling any of these matters, ordain that at birth a baby has all its important ultimate characteristics, and therefore all its proclivities, tastes, vices, virtues, and even aspirations settled for it. Its nationality, its language, its parents, its other relatives, its constitution, its degree of beauty, its stature, its physical and mental endowments, its sex,--all these things, upon which the figure it will ultimately cut in the world most surely depend,--are fixed by an iron necessity which allows of no choice, no preference,--aye, and scarcely any modification either.

If this is freedom, then what does constraint, what does oppression mean?

It may be objected that this is not what Rousseau meant; that Rousseau maintained that man was born free, because in a savage state he would really be free from the conventions, laws, and constraints of civilisation.

This appears convincing enough. The savage is certainly free from the laws and constraints of civilisation, but the savage race has yet to be found that is free from all conventions, laws and constraints, nor is it by any means certain that these obstacles to freedom are the more pleasant for being barbarous instead of civilised.

But even if we suppose that Rousseau’s alleged freedom of babies is a reality, at what point, it may be asked, is it exchanged for bondage?

Most people would reply: when the child goes to school. It is at school that the shackles of civilisation are first fastened on the free infant’s wrists. It is the work that civilisation ultimately holds in store for the child that necessitates his being trained and “educated.”

To this the naturalist and anthropologist might reply: is there now, or has there ever been, a race of men or animals that did not have to undergo some process of training in childhood in order to learn to be efficient adults?

Of course there neither is, nor ever was any such race.

Iron necessity again precludes the possibility of this alleged freedom even in childhood.

In manhood, again, freedom is purely a will-o’-the-wisp. No man who wishes to continue living is free. He is bound to procure food and clothing for himself even in the cannibal islands. If he have passions, he is bound to find some means of gratifying them. This means shouldering responsibilities; for no community, even of animals, undertakes to rear the fruits of other people’s passions. He cannot even select his calling, for his calling will depend upon his special aptitudes. In fact, the more gifted he is, and the more marked his capabilities, the less will he be able to choose how to earn a living. Only a man of mediocre and insignificant gifts is really free to choose his calling, because he feels no irresistible impulse in a given direction. But these mediocre people who are free to choose their calling, don’t really choose a “calling” at all--the very idea of choosing something to which one is called is absurd--what they choose is a more or less characterless and humdrum means of earning a living, which requires neither very special gifts nor any marked proclivities. To be free to choose what one will be, is always a sign of hopelessly humble tastes and endowments.

Putting it at its lowest, however, we might concede the point that as far as choosing a means of livelihood is concerned, there are a certain number of very mediocre men whose gifts are so indistinct and feeble, and whose tastes are so wavering and undefined, that they are “free.”

Apart from these unhappy individuals, then, if Rousseauesque freedom exist at all, it exists only between the hour of birth and the hour when the child first goes to school. We have seen that even this is untrue. But has it even a semblance of truth as a conclusion?

Surely nothing could be clearer than the fact that even in those years freedom is as remote as ever; for quite apart from the reasons already adduced above, it will easily be seen that the infant is as much the victim of convention and form as any adult could possibly be. It has a home, its life is subjected to rules, to a time-table, it cannot eat or do what it likes, except within very well-defined limits severely imposed.

“It can think what it likes,” somebody may object.

But even this is not strictly true. Its thoughts are as much necessitated by its environment and its constitution as is its food.

If it is born in England or France, for instance, it will be brought up to believe in “immanent justice,” in “equality,” in “freedom.” It cannot escape these imbecilities. They are its fate. It will be taught the inanity that “every man has a right to his own opinion,” and that “Britons never never never shall be slaves,”--whatever that means, if it means anything at all. Later in life it may claim the idea that “every man has a right to his own opinion” as its own. It will have forgotten how it could not help holding this idea, any more than it could help learning the English language.

Rousseau then was talking nonsense when he said that men were born free; but both his reading and his education were so pool that it is doubtful whether he knew that he was talking nonsense.

Apart from Rousseauesque freedom, however, has the word no meaning?

It will be seen that, in the end, it has very little.

Voluntary actions, or actions that are performed as the result of a free choice between two or more alternatives, are not known. They never occur. Even when they appear to occur, they are generally, if not always, associated with a weak or useless personality.

Strong natures have no choice; they have no alternative; they have therefore no freedom. They are driven to their deeds by an iron necessity. If they speak or write, it is out of the fulness of their hearts. It is a phenomenon akin to the mechanical overflow of a flooded basin. If they go in search of big undertakings and of vast responsibilities, in order to shoulder them, it is because they have a store of accumulated energy which must discharge itself over a large area, over a large mass of material.

When Napoleon took leave of his comrades in Egypt, before embarking on that gigantic enterprise, the reconstitution of anarchical bleeding and devastated France, he said: “I am going to drive out the lawyers.”

His strength demanded a gigantic task, just as the nasal horn of the rhinoceros drives the animal who possesses it to uproot the soil. He could not help himself. Martin Luther likewise had no choice. Before the famous Diet of Worms, he openly avowed this lack of freedom. He said: “Here I stand. I cannot act otherwise. God help me.”

Indeed the character of all strength is precisely that it gives those who possess it no choice, no “freedom.” The moment choice enters into the domain of action, the moment there is apparent freedom or self-determination, weakness, or a lack of native impetus may be suspected.

Thomas de Quincey, that profound psychologist of the artist’s soul, explained the matter very well in his Autobiography. Discussing the nature of true poetry, he said: “By far the larger proportion of what is received in every age for poetry, and for a season usurps that consecrated name, is not the spontaneous overflow of real unaffected passion, deep, and at the same time original, and also forced into public manifestation of itself from the necessity which cleaves to all passion.”

It will be seen that de Quincey here speaks of a “spontaneous overflow” which is “forced into public manifestation of itself from the necessity which cleaves to all passion.” There is no freedom about it, no choice. It flows from an impetuous and imperious abundance.

In the light which this throws on all human greatness or strength, what does the value of freedom appear to be?

Does it not seem as if freedom and the apparent liberty to choose belong essentially to a lack of strength, to an absence of necessity in the characteristic action of man? To be able to weigh and select either one of two alternatives,--say action or inaction,--implies that no overwhelming native impetus forces a man to the one and blinds him to the other. Is it possible then that the very cry of “freedom” belongs essentially to weakness? to feebleness of character?

Let another example be taken. A young man A. has just reached the age of one and twenty without having had a serious affair of the heart. His friends regard him as free to pursue any pastime, any sport. When once he has discharged the duties by means of which he earns his livelihood, he is always free to join a tennis party, a cricket team, a bridge party, or a debating circle. His mind can devote itself to the task of choosing what he shall do,--is it to be tennis, cricket, bridge, or argument? He has no overpowering inclination for anything particular, consequently he is free to choose.

Suddenly, however, he meets a young lady B, who strains a certain fibre in his being almost to snapping point. The tension of this strain is so powerful that, like the main spring of a watch, it presses its host to constant activity in a certain direction. The direction in this case is B’s person. Now choice falls out of the question altogether. It is no longer a matter of dwelling critically upon cricket, tennis, bridge or argument, and selecting that which seems for the moment the most alluring pastime. The tension in A’s being relaxes only at one sound, at one call. It is B B B --B recurring. When urged by his whilom tennis companions to join them, these friends now encounter, not hesitating freedom, but formidable resistance, immovable decision, determined refusal. When approached by his debating society, he declares that all his spare time is now taken up. He is in fact no longer free. Something strong in him has been roused. He cannot help himself. His actions are no longer voluntary.

But who would long for freedom in such circumstances? Who longs for freedom when bondage is sweet?

It may be taken for granted, then, that strength and greatness know nothing of freedom. The strong man is not free; the great man is not free;--nor for that matter, as history or the observation of our fellows can show, do they wish to be free. Only weakness is apparently free, or is conscious of desiring freedom; because, having no strong native impetus to drive it willy nilly in any given direction, it appears to be able to choose its own direction. Thus only weakness can even desire freedom.

The obvious inference would be that as fast as the mass of mankind decline in strength and greatness, the louder would become the cry for freedom. Is this conclusion valid?

It is only partially so; for there are cases when freedom is demanded not from weakness, but from strength.

Let us abide by the examples we have chosen.

Napoleon, driven by the iron necessity of his native strength, leaves Egypt to make himself master of France. But suppose that he had been conquered and kept as a harem servant in Egypt, or restrained in some other way from exerting his strength,--what then?

It is conceivable, in that case, that he would have longed for the freedom which would have allowed him to fall into the bondage of his own overpowering impulses to rule and to direct the destiny of France.

For the first time the idea of “freedom” begins to assume a definite shape. It begins to acquire the appearance of a genuine reality.

Judging by Napoleon’s case, therefore, we may say of the desire for freedom, that although it never arises in normal conditions, it begins to make a definite appeal when it signifies a release from bondage that is incompatible and inharmonious with strong innate impulses, for a bondage that is compatible and harmonious with strong innate impulses.

The bondage consisting in being a harem servant is incompatible with innate impulses of a stronger order; therefore, although the obedience to impulses of a stronger order also constitutes bondage, Napoleon, as a harem servant, would have longed for the freedom to fall into the bondage of his stronger impulses, because it was there that his “calling” lay.

Reverting to the case of the young man A who became enamoured of a young lady B, we are confronted by a case that is somewhat different; because, although A was apparently “free” before meeting B, he nevertheless prefers the bondage of his attachment to B to his former freedom. Why,--obviously because his former apparent freedom, was freedom for nothing, a state of being constrained to nothing in particular, a lack of bondage to anything, which was tantamount to a lack of everything.

He finds his strength on meeting B. He finds one of his powerful impulses taking possession of him. He is therefore happy, because, though he is in bondage, a vital impulse is directing his life, a necessity of his being has found a pursuit for him. If his cricket club now kidnap him and imprison him in the cricket field, in order to play in a cricket match, he will make a determined attempt to escape. He will endeavour to obtain freedom. Freedom for what?--Freedom from a bondage incompatible with the powerful impulses of his being, for the purpose of falling into a bondage compatible with the powerful impulses of his being.

Has the “liberty” of our political agitators this meaning? Has it any meaning?

We know that man can never be free. We have seen that from his very birth conditions are imposed upon him which direct his subsequent career as inevitably as railway lines direct the course of a train. Nothing that lives in finite conditions can be free. And no other conditions are known. Life even in the animal world means work, battle, struggle, the observance of certain very strict habits. Human life means work, the observance of social conventions; even the necessity of eating, drinking, breathing and performing the other bodily functions entails responsibility. Work may be altered, the particular social conventions of a nation may be changed; but it is merely a matter of altering one kind into another kind, exchanging one rule for another rule.

What then does the political agitator mean when he offers “Liberty” to those whom he would induce to support or follow him?

It has been seen that the only sense in which liberty as an idea bears any relation to reality, is when it signifies the opportunity that can be given to a man to enable him to exchange a bondage incompatible with his strongest impulses for a bondage that harmonises with them.

Is this the meaning of the cry for freedom to-day? When the newspapers told us that the Great War was fought by us in the cause of “freedom”, is this the freedom they meant?

How many of those who believe they aspire to something definite and real when they aspire to “freedom,” fully understand the limitations of their ideal? How many of them really possess stronger impulses than those that actually find expression in their daily work?

Some people might reply, “very few.” I reply that the number of men and women to-day, who yearn for freedom vaguely, fretfully, and insistently, because they realise dimly that they seek a kind of bondage in which their stronger impulses would have more scope, is very much greater than is generally supposed.

One of the results of the industrial revolution, and of the vast increase of mechanical appliances and machinery generally, has been the creation of occupations by the hundred thousand, which are in every way besotting, heartrending, and depressing. Sometimes it is their asinine simplicity and their monotony, that destroy the heart of those employed in them, frequently it is their extreme disagreeableness, noisiness or unhealthiness. The particular objection that is common to almost all of them, however, is that the natural impulses which most strongly animate a human being at his work, the impulse to make “a good job” of the task he is occupied upon, the impulse to excel his neighbour in his skill, care or foresight, the impulse to earn the praise of those for whom he is producing the work, the impulse to improve day by day in his own speciality and to derive fair profit from this improvement,--all these natural impulses scarcely ever get an opportunity of expressing themselves in the whole of the week’s round; and when the weekly wage is received, it is felt that it has been earned by a species of prostitution rather than by an occupation of which the wage-earner can justly feel proud.

This, as I understand it, is the fundamental meaning of the cry for freedom to-day. In any case it is the only meaning it can have. For freedom in the sense of non-relation, non-dependance, absence of duties, absence of work, and absence of responsibilities or conventions, is utterly impossible. Not only is it utterly impossible to-day, but it has always been impossible. Even animals in a state of nature cannot achieve that condition.

It behoves all those, therefore, who nowadays feel this craving for liberty, and who are tempted to follow wherever and whenever it is upheld before them as a cause, thoroughly to understand what it is they are invited to fight for. They must not allow themselves to be led astray by those who would promise them unconstrained freedom of action, for that is a physical impossibility, a lie, an illusion, and a mirage only of the ignorant. They must not be deceived by agitators who lead them to imagine that this “freedom” for which they are invited to strive, is a sort of paradise of fairies, from whom the natural cares and responsibilities of this world have been miraculously lifted. Nor must they suppose that it has much to do with the kind of government which their country enjoys,--whether monarchical, aristocratic, plutocratic or Bolshevik.

Modern governments in their nature can do little for the spiritual requirements of the working man. As far as that freedom is concerned which consists in finding expression in one’s daily duties for the strongest impulses of one’s being, the masses of the working people in this country were infinitely more “free” under the despotic Tudors than they are at present under the benign rule of the people’s elected representatives.

Thus the only kind of freedom that the most honest politician can definitely promise, political freedom--is in itself one of the most wanton deceptions ever practised upon humanity. For what does this political freedom consist of?--It begins and ends with the vote. But in what manner does this constitute freedom? To what extent does the voter at the poll secure or realise his own freedom by the vote he registers? He gives his vote on a programme which frequently has only a very remote relation to his private life or interests. What can his vote accomplish then in the cause of his own freedom? In registering his vote he is bound to choose one out of two or three men who stand as candidates for his constituency. He may heartily dislike every one of them, and yet be driven to vote for A because A’s programme is a little less pernicious than that of B or C. After having voted for A, if our voter is lucky, A may get into Parliament. Every time A votes in the House itself, however, he may be out-voted by other members, so the very reason for which our voter elected A may be frustrated when once A is an M.P. If, however, our voter does not succeed in getting A into Parliament, he may be one of six or even ten thousand in his constituency who will not be represented in Parliament for four or five whole years. Every Parliament that sits in England fails in this way to be representative of millions of voters. In what manner have these millions of voters achieved their own freedom, or in what manner are they safeguarding it? For even if we grant that it is right that millions of voters should not be represented in Parliament because they belong to the out-voted minority, can we reasonably speak of this vast minority as having secured their political freedom by their vote? But the case is in fact worse than this; for John Stuart Mill, that whole-hearted believer in “democracy,” has shown, not only that the minority in the land is bound to be unrepresented in every Parliament, but that it is also possible for the majority in the land to be unrepresented. How then the promise even of political freedom, which is the only promise of freedom that an honest politician may make, can even appear to possess any reality, so long as it is dependent entirely upon the vote, it is difficult to discover.

There is only one kind of freedom that bears any relation to reality, only one kind of freedom therefore that can be striven after, that can be realised; and that is the freedom to exchange a bondage incompatible with our strongest impulses for a bondage that harmonises with them.

Nothing else has any meaning.

The very success with which voluntary recruiting proceeded directly after the declaration of war against Germany in 1914 is one of the best demonstrations of the truth of this conclusion. For it was the opportunity to exchange an occupation incompatible with the strongest impulses of their being, for an occupation that harmonised with those strongest impulses, that led the majority of those young men to embark for the shambles in France. I mixed with them, so I ought to be able to speak with some knowledge of the subject.

Now the fight for this freedom, for the freedom that, as we have seen, has some meaning, really is worth while. It is a noble fight, and a decent fight. But it is a fight with which no modern Government, Liberal, Socialist, or Bolshevik, can possibly have any sympathy. For Liberal policy has always meant commercial and industrial expansion; Socialist policy must, if it is honest, include in its programme, compulsory labour, whether compatible or incompatible with the strongest impulses of our being; and Bolshevik policy, as we have already seen, insists upon this kind of labour. It is, however, precisely the Liberals, the Socialists, and the Bolsheviks who have been loudest in their cries for freedom. If, therefore, this humble attempt at investigating the meaning and limitations of the idea of freedom has done nothing more than demonstrate the hollowness of this Liberal catchword, it cannot have been written or read in vain.

Thus, it is not merely a matter of caution, it is in the highest degree wise, to test every yearning and every demand for freedom, even in one’s own breast, with the practical question, “What for?”--“What is the strongest impulse that would find expression if the bondage of the present task were exchanged for the bondage of a new occupation?” Only those who can answer that question satisfactorily, only those who feel that they would increase the fullness of their lives, and thus add to the sum of beauty and happiness in the world, have any right to “freedom,” or have any understanding of the only sense in which the idea of freedom can have some meaning.

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