CHAPTER IV. The Coming Clash

THE COMING CLASH

Before I endeavour to answer the question with which I concluded the last chapter, there are one or two additional considerations to which it is necessary to refer, since they must affect our estimate of the future.

I have spoken of the possibility of a new freedom for women due to birth-control and economic independence. Other factors are likely to make such freedom more imperative on social grounds and less intimidating on moral ones.

The first is the great and growing preponderance of women in the community. It is estimated that in Great Britain there are already two million more women than men, and the figures can no doubt be paralleled from other Western European countries. Our present moral code condemns these two million, and as many more as the number of bachelors involves, to perpetual celibacy and sterility. In other words one woman out of every ten is expected to deny herself the right to motherhood or to become an outcast from decent society.

This system is intolerable; it is manifestly breaking down in many directions, and it continues at all only because public opinion among women is still too unorganized to protest against it. It is already the subject of wholesale disregard and infringement in practice, and it will be abolished in theory as soon as the social sense of the community has progressed to the point of removing the stigma from illegitimacy and the reproach from unmarried motherhood. In other words the system is bound up with the man-made convention which insists that the right to have a child shall be saddled with the duty of looking after a man, and, since there are not enough men to go round, women will sooner or later be forced in self-defence to permit themselves to have children without husbands.

So far as the right to sexual experience, independently of the right of motherhood, is concerned, this is already safeguarded by birth-control. The growing surplus of women will tend, therefore, through the sheer pressure of virginity, to promote an increase in irregular relationships, and to reinforce the movement towards freedom already described.

Nor will religious considerations deter with their traditional force. I have already spoken of the decline of religious sentiment in connection with the growth of moral rigour in the herd. Lacking the conviction that God will punish wrong-doers, they arrogate the right to themselves. But the same scepticism which lights the fires of the heresy-hunters encourages the wickedness of the heretics. If marriages were not made by God, and torment in hell is probably not the result of adultery, there is no longer reason to think that five minutes’ bliss must be paid for in terms of eternal damnation. It is, no doubt, true, that God still loves the pure, but when earthly lovers are available, the price of God’s love may be not worth the paying. Hence the religious argument, though doubtless it will operate as a brake in a diminishing number of cases, will no longer act as a wholesale deterrent.

A more serious consideration is put forward in the name of biology. “You are,” the biologist will point out, “conducting your argument on the basis of certain assumptions with regard to the nature of women, since you predict an increase in sexual irregularity not only among men, but also, and inevitably, among women. Men, it is agreed, are regrettably promiscuous, in the sense that, even if they are monogamous in fact, they are varietist by inclination. But women are different. Their nature is not varietist but monogamous, and it will, in spite of all changes of material circumstances and moral sentiments, remain so. For this reason irregular sexual unions will not increase in the manner you predict.”

Biological arguments of this type, derived from the alleged nature of women, are in my view mere man-made superstitions. The particular argument in question was invented by the peccant male who wished to convince himself that, however flagrant his own infidelities, his wife would remain faithful because it was her nature. The superstition was also useful, because it implied that, although a life of unvarying fidelity might do violence to his natural proclivities, he need suffer no qualm of conscience in expecting and exacting conduct which he repudiated for himself from his monogamous wife. The notion too was flattering and appealed readily to male conceit.

Now as to the existence of the facts asserted by my imaginary biologist, there is, I imagine, little doubt. There are, of course, countless exceptions either way, but the general tendency is not obscure. While the cases of My Lord and the barmaid are legion, those of My Lady and the groom are notoriously few. But admitting the fact, are we to regard it as necessarily unalterable? Many, I know, are inclined to do so. Contemplating the domestic tragedies springing from the nomadic tendencies of the male, they have seen in them one more piece of evidence for the satirical plan on which they believe the Universe to have been constructed. If indeed there be design in the scheme of things, to what sort of design do the facts point? To have made man polygamous and woman monogamous they regard as God’s worst practical joke, and conclude that, whatever may have been the objects and disposition of the creator of the Universe, they were certainly not those of a gentleman.

But is the fact really unalterable? May it not be the outcome of centuries of servitude and seclusion, made absolute by the knowledge that fidelity meant bread and butter and a home, infidelity starvation or the streets? Since the beginnings of recorded history the great bulk of women have, it is true, remained monogamous, but they may have done so from fear of losing their jobs as wives if they did not. Those who have been rich enough to stand upon their own financial feet, or powerful enough to snap their fingers at public opinion, have not been remarkable for strict observance of the marriage tie. The cases of Messalina, Catherine the Great and the modern film star, not to mention a score of less notorious instances, are instructive. Significant too is the frequency of divorce among those who are sufficiently well to do to afford the enormous fees exacted by the legal profession from those who wish to change their partners. It is difficult, in the face of evidence of this kind, to avoid the conclusion that the monogamous tendencies of women are the product of training, circumstance, and environment, and will not outlast the economic disabilities which produced them.

In any event the present existence of these tendencies, if tendencies they be, affords no indication of what they may become in the future. The fact that the primitive savage could only count on the fingers of one hand does not invalidate the existence of the multiplication table, any more than the fact that most women want only one man each now proves that they will not want more in a hundred years. The use of the word ‘natural’ begs the question. We acquire those characteristics which our circumstances and environment demand, and then transmit them to our children in whom, being inherited, they are termed natural. But this does not mean that our children will not in due course develop new characteristics of their own, if a change of circumstances renders the old ones undesirable. There are signs indeed that the new characteristics are already beginning to appear. The attitude of representative up-to-date women on this subject is curious. They tend to deny the difference between males and females which my imaginary biologist alleged, and to declare that their inclinations are naturally as promiscuous as those of their husbands. The circumstance that they control them better argues, they assert, more sense; it does not imply a difference in nature.

Remarks of this kind are often made by women who, nevertheless, live exemplary lives and would scorn to revenge themselves upon an unfaithful husband by imitating his conduct. Nevertheless there is no reason to suppose that they deliberately misrepresent their feelings, and we can only conclude that, as usually happens, a new tendency is manifesting itself in feeling some time before it is translated into action.

For these reasons I do not think that any convincing arguments as to the future can be based on the alleged monogamousness of women in the present. Nor, so soon as the force of the monogamous habit wanes, do I think that women will consent to put up with the manifest disadvantages of a system which is based upon the assumption that it is as strong as it ever was. It is certain that they will not be deterred by the protests of outraged males. Conventional morality, as I have already pointed out, like many of our other institutions such as matinées, concerts and God, is kept going by women, and directly women withdraw their support, not all the opposition of men will avail to save it.

What then is likely to happen?

Certainly not a relapse into complete promiscuity. The belief that people are fundamentally licentious, and that a partial removal of the barriers with which society has hedged about the business of reproduction will precipitate the population into a welter of unbridled license, pleasantly shocking though it is to the minds of respectable people, has absolutely no foundation in fact.

This belief springs from the doctrine of original sin, which has always been popular among quiet and well-behaved persons. If man is by nature wicked and sinful, and woman is very little better, then, indeed, contraception and the economic independence of women will lead to an orgy of sex indulgence in which the population will shuffle itself like a pack of cards.

Nothing of the kind is likely to happen.

The purely sexual elements in love have come to occupy an entirely disproportionate amount of attention owing to the taboos with which they have been invested. Once these taboos are removed, they will revert to their natural position of comparative unimportance. If it were permissible to reproduce the sexual act upon the stage we should all lose our interest in chorus girls’ legs. Moreover, playwrights would not trouble to avail themselves of the permission.

Within reason, continence and constancy are natural to human beings. It is only the intolerable strain to which our absurd social arrangements have subjected them that has caused us to regard ourselves as being by nature unfaithful and incontinent. There is no ground for the belief that the average man or woman who allow themselves to be guided by their own impulses must needs be scoundrels. For among their impulses must be numbered self-respect, moderation, and a sense of what is right and fitting. Because this sense may be, and often is, at variance with the herd morality which is crystallized in the law, it does not mean that it does not exist. On the contrary, it may be in advance of the morality it disowns, so that people thrown helpless on their passions may find that honesty, that self-respect, that hatred of cowardice and deceit, and the desire for cleanliness, health, and efficiency were master passions disciplining them far more effectively than the artificial inhibitions of a mediaeval morality based on an obsolete religion and deriving its power from lethargy and fear.

Some changes in social arrangements there will no doubt be. In Russia, for example, where the knowledge of birth-control is accessible to all classes, where any two parties by agreement, or either of the two parties by request, may obtain a divorce, and where no stigma is placed upon illegitimacy, there has been a considerable relaxation of the family system. If this means, as it probably does, that unhappy families have broken up and that husbands and wives who disliked each other have availed themselves of the opportunity to make a fresh start, we need not regret the change. Nobody would contend that society is the gainer by condemning the unhappily married to a lifetime of domestic misery, and it is difficult to see why the common sense of the community which considers the wishes of the parties concerned a sufficient ground for consummating their marriage does not regard the wishes of the same parties as a sufficient reason for terminating it.

Report of Labour Delegation, 1925. It is interesting to note that this relaxation has taken place concurrently with a marked decrease in prostitution.

On the other hand it is unlikely that those who are happily married will rush to the Registrar with the object of making themselves miserable by separating, simply because reasonable divorce laws give them the opportunity to do so. It would be an interesting experiment, and one which would enable us to estimate the extent of marital unhappiness, to proclaim a day of conjugal amnesty at recurring intervals. We might, for example, celebrate the coronation of every new king by giving to all married couples the right to dissolve their marriages, and seek other mates. If advantage were not taken of the facilities offered within twenty-four hours, there would be a compulsory reversion to the status quo ante. Or it might be better to fix definite periods between the days of amnesty, so that they would recur at regular intervals. Each general election might serve as a signal for a conjugal General Post, so that couples would have the chance of gaining their freedom every five years. I myself would advocate the institution of such amnesties, although I believe that the amount of conjugal dislocation they would cause would be surprisingly small. It is difficult to avoid feeling sentimental at the prospect of parting even from those whom we dislike, and the fact that couples were no longer bound in law would only tighten the bonds of sentiment. A would feel that, unpleasant as B had been, he could not very well let her down, and B would shrink from leaving A with no one to look after him, even when she had herself looked after him very badly. You cannot, in short, live with any one for a number of years without dreading the prospect of their loss. The knowledge, moreover, that quinquennial escape was possible might lead to married people treating their partners with at least the degree of civility they at present reserve for their acquaintances. I do not think, therefore, that the changes caused by a conjugal amnesty would be very extensive.

For the above reasons I conclude that the social results of the changes I have been describing will amount to little more than a diminution in the number of unhappy marriages, and an increase in the number of experimental unions.

But it is not to be supposed that the herd will see the matter in this light. Nothing exceeds the license taken by the imaginations of very rigid people, and there is little doubt that the vast mass of respectable citizens, appalled and horrified by what they will insist on regarding as the prospect of growing and unlimited license, will rise to meet the situation with panic and persecution. And since, for the reasons already given, morality in a modern community is that kind of conduct which suits the stronger, we may expect a revival of Puritanism expressing itself in a new robustness and acerbity in the moral sense of the herd.

Symptoms of this revival are not wanting in this country. If, however, we wish to see the clearest portents of what is coming we must, as I have hinted above, look to America. America, as I have already pointed out, leads the world in morals as in everything else. That American citizens set great store by morality is notorious. With their constant Purity Crusades, Puritan pogroms, Vigilance Committees, and popular juries of selected citizens, who visit surreptitiously and report upon the moral tone of New York plays, they put our more decadent civilization to shame. On what sort of lines do these engines of American morality take action? One instance must suffice. In April of this year, one Miss Jewell Barker went bicycling in white knickers. Her outraged neighbours showed their sense of this vicious act by proceeding to seize and flog Miss Barker’s father. This is at once to usurp and to invert the divine privilege of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.

America is, of course, pre-eminently the Land of Liberty, and we cannot hope to emulate her highest feats. Efforts are, however, not wanting of our endeavours to live up to the standard our cousins set.

I will quote at random one or two American examples with their British parallels.

America. There is sumptuary legislation designed to check the license of the stage. “There is”, we are told, “a rule in some American towns that the chorus girls must wear stockings, although the principals are allowed to appear with bare legs”.

England. In recent months there has been a strong provincial movement against the indecency and unpleasantness of the plays produced in London. Respectable citizens complain that they never can tell what salacious beastliness may not be sprung upon their protesting eyes and ears, what searchlight cast upon the Augæan stables of high society. Actors and actresses have expressed their views, pointing out that a pure stage is as good a paying proposition as a nasty one, and invoking the case of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas to bear witness to the truth of their contention. These operas, a notorious commercial success, have never been known to bring a blush to the most bourgeois cheek. A number of London women have accordingly banded themselves together vowing to purify the stage. Protests are to be made nightly in theatres at which plays to which objection is taken are performed. “We shall stick at nothing,” said the leader of the campaign, “to make our protest effective”.

Concurrently with this development there has arisen a demand for a stricter censorship. I think it probable that we are on the threshold of a period resembling the early seventeenth or middle nineteenth centuries, when life as it is will be driven off the stage by the Puritans’ demand for life as it ought to be, love will give place to sentiment, and reality to romance.

America. A new teetotal version of the Bible is promised from America. The festive passages are all dry, the words ‘raisin cake’ taking the place of the word ‘wine’ wherever the latter occurs in the Authorized Version. Thus we have “And he dealt to everyone of Israel, both men and women, to everyone a roll of bread, a portion of meat and a cake of raisin”.

Scotland. Steps were taken in the spring of this year to transfer to Scotland a film depicting the explorations of Livingstone. An extract from the daily paper tells us that “Prohibitionists there are already strenuously objecting to the incident which shows Livingstone, after he has been found by Stanley, drinking champagne with his rescuer! The difficulty is that the incident is historically correct ... and the problem is whether truth should be suppressed in the interests of morality. ‘At any rate’ said the Secretary of the London Missionary Society ‘the raising of the question is evidence of the progress made since his time.’” It can scarcely be doubted that if the meeting had taken place to-day, Livingstone would have acknowledged the march of progress by drinking water.

A straw shows the direction of the wind, and I should not be at all surprised to see Scotland go dry in the next fifty years, especially if she is successful in obtaining Home Rule. If Scotland goes dry, it is not to be expected that England will fail ultimately to follow suit. The increase in efficiency among dry workmen is very great, and if the business men remain “the stronger” in the community, they cannot continue indefinitely to be blind to its advantages, especially as they themselves would be immune from the hardships it entails. If we ask whether an officially dry but unofficially wet business class, and a working class which is dry both officially and unofficially, does not mean one law for the rich and another for the poor, our answer is that conventional morals always does mean this.

Cp. the case of the legs of the chorus and the principals, p. 70.

The practice of virtue, we are often told, is dependent upon the possession of a sufficient income. It is only the well to do who can afford to be generous, honest, and unselfish, because they have no temptation to be otherwise. But what is true of virtue is equally true of vice, and the experience of the working of prohibition in America shows how easy it is for the rich to procure illicit indulgences which are out of the reach of the poor.

There is likely to be legislation against wantonness in dress. By wantonness is meant the practice among females of unnecessarily exposing parts of their body. The curious belief that the body is in some way disgraceful, and that the exhibition of it is, therefore, wicked is very prevalent among Western peoples. It arises partly from natural prudery, partly from the property view of marriage, and partly from the inclemency of the climate which makes bathing a comparative rarity. The Japanese who have a bath twice a day, observe no discrimination between the sexes in their bathing. “One day”, said the Marquis of X who had just returned from Japan, “my wife went to have a bath, and she got as far as the rinsing stage when two young Japanese came in. She had to take refuge in the tank, screaming at the top of her voice until the two young men were taken away. They no doubt thought her a very fastidious young woman”.

The conviction that the body is wicked and ought to be concealed is important, because it leads women to expose portions of it which they would otherwise protect, and rightly protect, from the rigours of the atmosphere, in the belief that they are making themselves attractive. Thus women swathed in layers of furs in respect of the rest of their persons, will venture forth on the coldest day with bare bosoms and open-work stockings. It is with the same object that, though their religion bids them mortify the flesh and refrain from making of themselves a stumbling block to others, they will appear at dinner with necks, bosoms, backs, and arms completely naked, a proceeding not only acquiesced in but encouraged by their males. This sort of thing is anathema to the herd, who cannot afford the evening dress and the furs, and to the old, the condition of whose bodies does not, except in the case of the incurably optimistic, permit them to take the same liberties as their daughters. Hence we may expect a considerable stiffening of public opinion in the matter of decorum in dress and a return to the days in which everything except the hands and the face was carefully covered up.

In the sphere of what is called sexual morality we may expect a growing tendency to make wickedness (that is to say conduct which is not in the interests of the stronger) punishable by law. Attempts will be made, and successfully made, to multiply crimes by Act of Parliament.

A good example of this tendency will be found in the Bill entitled The Children, Young Persons, etc., Bill, introduced by a Labour Member during the tenure of office by the Labour Government in 1924. It represents bourgeois or herd morality “in excelsis.” It is known as the Offences against the Person Bill, and its object is to codify and extend the existing enactments against abortion, cruelty to children, offences against children, and neglect of children. Many of its provisions are admirable and afford what is no doubt a necessary protection to children against suffering and neglect. Nevertheless it menaces individual liberty in two ways. In the first place it increases the number of offences punishable by law, often in an arbitrary manner. For example, it is made a crime punishable by two years hard labour for a girl of sixteen to have intercourse with a young man of eighteen, the criminal being not, as one might have expected, the elder of the two parties concerned, but the girl. She alone is liable to imprisonment; the young man is allowed to go free. It is also a criminal offence to conceal the birth of a dead child, to cause or encourage a child to beg, or to celebrate the marriage of a boy and a girl under sixteen, such marriages being declared invalid.

In the second place the Bill authorizes grave interference with personal privacy. The officers and inspectors charged with executing its multifarious provisions are given unlimited powers of search, and authorized in certain cases to arrest without warrant. Even if a bill of this kind were to be administered by angels or sages, the opportunities for espionage and surveillance which it bestows would be sufficiently offensive. Since, however, its provisions will in fact be enforced by inspectors and constables drawn from the lower middle classes, who will be only too willing to denounce as flagrant immorality whatever transcends the experience of Clapham, the measure stands revealed as an attempt to endow the herd with increased powers of interference and control over the private lives of those who venture to stand outside it.

Encouragement would also be given to malevolent and offensive persons who wished to do harm to their neighbours by laying information against them. In general, liberty would be diminished, offences multiplied, and the individual rendered more subservient to public opinion than is the case to-day.

Another expression of herd feeling will be a growing tendency to enquire into the private lives of those who hold public appointments. The herd, that is to say, will increasingly demand of those who fill positions of eminence and authority in the land that they shall conform in practice, and profess to conform in belief, to the code of prejudices and preferences which it pretentiously calls its morals. Even to-day, at the end of half a century of individualist thinking, fitness to perform a particular job is one of the least important qualifications in a candidate. What is important is that he shall be a member of a recognized religious sect, such as the Church of England or one of the sub-sects of Nonconformity, that he shall live with one wife, avoid divorcing and being divorced, and display studiously temperate habits. He must also exercise discretion in his public utterances, be judiciously but not violently patriotic in his sentiments, eschew extreme views in politics, refrain from supporting unpopular causes, and on all occasions give the herd the answers it expects. Thus in Wales it is difficult if not impossible for a man to hold any public appointment unless he is a member of a particular chapel, and at English Universities many teaching posts are reserved for those in Holy Orders. Given the capacity for reflecting the opinions and flattering the prejudices of the many, men of acknowledged incompetence may successfully aspire to the most responsible posts. There is indeed no post in the country a man cannot hold with credit, if he can only succeed in holding his tongue.

Conformity rather than intelligence is more particularly required of those who seek to instruct the young. A man’s ability to demonstrate the differential calculus or impart the facts of history would not, it is true, appear to be lessened by his having passed through the divorce court. Yet there is no doubt that such an event will cast a blight upon his career as a teacher. People are too satisfied with their own ways of thought and habits of conduct to wish for their children anything better than that they should think and act as they do themselves. What is demanded of the teacher, therefore, is that he should transmit to the children the same beliefs as those which are held by their parents. He must hold up to their admiration those things which their parents consider to be admirable, such as God, vaccination, monogamy, the Treaty of Versailles and the capitalist system, and speak with scorn and contempt of Bolshevism, atheism, Germany, free love and agitators, whom parents consider to be evil. When the teacher does this he is what is called a safe man. He inspires confidence and obtains preferment. Provided, in short, that he guarantees not to teach anything new, his capacity to teach anything at all is not seriously questioned. And, since the best minds of every generation, being in advance of their time, would prefer not to teach at all rather than to perpetuate the dogmas in which they have ceased to believe, the successful teacher is not always remarkable for intelligence.

In any event, whether intelligent or not, he must conform, and will have to do so increasingly. The herd morality which drove a statesman of the calibre of Dilke out of public life because it disapproved of his private life, is, after a temporary relapse, increasing in strength, and in the immediate future nobody who does not profess the morality to which the middle classes adhere will stand any chance of public office. If a man’s actions belie his professions he must be careful to conceal them.

One of the results of this development will be an increase in hypocrisy. To-day the agnostic don at Oxford worships regularly in the College Chapel, and men will be driven increasingly to give lip-service to ideals and shibboleths which in their hearts they despise. In general, the gulf which separates public profession and private practice, a gulf which has made England a byword for hypocrisy, will grow wider. Driven to profess the beliefs of shopkeepers, men will rely increasingly upon their private judgment as a sanction for their conduct. Hence the attempt to impose a uniform standard based upon an obsolete morality upon our public men may lead to a revival of that unfashionable organ the private conscience, and those from whom an unwilling conformity is exacted in public, will insist that they and they alone are the judges of what is right and wrong in private.

I have taken the Offences against the Person Bill as a typical instance of the kind of legislation in which the new Puritanism may express itself. It indicates a return to the Greek conception that men can be made good by Act of Parliament. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this conception was regarded with disfavour. As the result of the individualist thinking of the preceding fifty years, the idea that there was one good life which all men ought to lead had been abandoned. The individualist view was that there were different kinds of good lives for different men, as many in fact as there were men to live them, and that it was, therefore, impracticable to establish by law a positive standard of ethical conduct to which all must conform. In so far as law had any function in the matter, it was, by prohibiting violence and the cruder forms of robbery, to guarantee to the community a certain background of order without which no good life was possible. Since the mere process of obeying the law did not make a man a good man but only restrained him from certain unappetizing kinds of vice by which no decent upper or middle class citizen was attracted, it followed that the function of the law was negative merely; its object was to prevent citizens from so conducting themselves that nobody could be virtuous, not to define virtue or to tell men how to attain it. The definition of virtue was a matter for the individual’s insight, and the attainment of virtue a matter for the individual’s conscience; provided, therefore, that a man abstained from the grosser forms of anti-social conduct which were prohibited by law, the question of what he ought to do, and what refrain from doing, was one which he alone could decide.

I believe that this nineteenth and early-twentieth century libertarianism in matters of thought and conduct is decreasing and will continue to decrease. The cult of uniformity is hostile to the liberty of the individual, and in order to secure the performance of conduct of which the herd approves, the legislature is likely to assume a more positive control over men’s lives than has been customary in the past. We shall, in other words, revert to the conception of one good life for all men, or rather for all poor men, a good life which it is conceived to be the business of the State and of public opinion to promote.

Summing up, therefore, we may predict the immediate future somewhat as follows: Coming into contact with the increased facilities for freedom of action to which reference has been made, the new itch to regulate men’s lives will lead to persecution and heresy-hunting. Men will be hounded out of public life because of their private morals, and acceptance of certain habits of belief and codes of conduct will be made indispensable to the holding of public appointments. Instead of choosing for a post the man who is best qualified to do the job, we shall choose the man who most nearly reflects the habits of thought and conduct of the selection board, that is to say, of the herd who elected the selection board to represent them. The growth of Puritanism will bring a growth in hypocrisy, a fruitful and invaluable offshoot of Puritanism. There will be an even greater disparity between men’s practices and their professions than there is at present, and their professions will tend increasingly to condemn their practices. The world, in short will become a paradise for the average man and a hell for the exceptional one.

So much we may expect during the next fifty years. If, however, I am asked which of the two opposing tendencies I have attempted to describe in this book will ultimately prevail, my answer is that it will not be the bourgeois Puritanism whose apparent victory I foresee in the immediate future. Nor, indeed, do I think that that victory will be more than apparent.

The history of morals, like that of politics, follows the swing of the pendulum, and some reaction on the part of each generation from the habits of its fathers seems to be inevitable. In so reacting it reverts to those of its fathers’ fathers. Thus each generation tends to take the gods of its grandfathers from the shelf upon which its fathers have placed them.

To-day we are at the beginning of a period of reaction from the license of the War. The difference between young people of between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four and their predecessors of seven years ago is very marked. The latter were casual, offhand, and easy-going. They observed little ceremonial in their relationships with each other, smoked, flirted and made love when and where they pleased, married in haste and repented at leisure or dispensed with marriage altogether, and despised rather than revered the aged to whom they were a constant source of horror and amazement. What is perhaps most noticeable about their successors to-day is their improvement in manners. They are chivalrous to women, considerate to the old, maintain a decorum at dances which is positively Victorian, and instead of hastening to establish sexual relations with whomsoever attracts them, have actually gone out of their way to postpone the fruition of their desires by a reintroduction of the rite known as “engagement”.

In particular, women, no longer treated as the equals of men, are alternatively worshipped and disregarded, blown aloft like soap bubbles or jettisoned as lumber. The reaction, in short, is already well under weigh, and its influence for many years to come will be great.

But the normal cycle of action and reaction, of licentious eighteenth and Puritanical nineteenth centuries, depends for its recurrence on the entrance of no new factors; it is bound up that is to say with the property status of women and the production of children as the fruit of sexual intercourse. Once new factors are introduced, it may well be thrown permanently out of gear. Birth control and the economic independence of women are to my mind factors of this kind. The changes they portend are incalculable, and, though their full effects may be delayed for two or three decades, no Puritan revival nor any number of such revivals, whether backed by the law or finding expression in public opinion merely, will in the long run be able to stand against them.

* * * * *

I am conscious that what I have written in this book will seem to many to be cynical and disruptive. I shall be charged with taking a low view of human nature, and speaking slightingly of morality. My answer is, first, that what I have written of in these pages is not human nature as a whole, but that part of human nature only which expresses itself in what is called morality; and secondly, that what is called morality is not in any true sense of the word morality at all. Morality, as I understand it, is positive: it insists that certain things are good and ought to be pursued even if the heavens fall. But the habits of thought and standards of conduct I have analyzed in this book, although they are called morality, are not positive but negative. Their appeal is to men’s fears rather than to their hopes; they tell them not what they must do to be saved, but what they must not do if they are to avoid the censure of society. Their basis is the instinct to possess, and their weapon the power to blame. Men blame those who claim a liberty they dare not assert for themselves, and dignify with the name of morality the indulgence of possessive instincts in which savages glory without hypocrisy. “What could I have done in the circumstances?” asked the husband of an erring wife in a recent society scandal case. “If you ask me to tell you I will. You could have told your wife that if she went with the man again, you would get her divorced. You could then have gone up to London and assaulted Sir X Y, and to hell with your career”, replied the eminent counsel on the other side.

This is the law of the jungle; it is the expression of most of what passes for morality to-day, and, while it prevails, there is little hope for the world. Of positive morality which brings the conviction that some things are good and ought to be pursued for their own sake, there has never been less. It is doubtful indeed whether a positive morality can exist without a strong and lively religious feeling, and religion was never at so low an ebb.

The emotional enthusiasm which religion generates is indispensable to a true morality. For good or for evil religion is the looser of great forces. It may be captured and made to serve base ends, but under the influence of the emotion which it creates men can be brought to believe that some things are better than others, and to overcome any obstacle in order that the good things may prevail. It is this belief which is lacking in the world to-day.

Until, then, the life-force can contrive again to send a great religious teacher into the world, a true, positive morality will be lacking. The man who is born in England will continue to believe that it is right to marry one wife, and the man who is born in Persia will continue to believe that it is right to marry four, and each will invoke morality to justify his belief. Such morality is merely topographical; it reflects no conception of what is good, and it gives us no hope that the world can be made better because it does not believe that its own world is bad.

Meanwhile the less we write and think about morality the better. A world without religion is a sad and a tiring world because it lacks an object, and for this reason there have been few generations which have known less happiness than our own. In such a world those who think the least have the best of it. In such a world reflection can only produce despondency, and it is better to take our professions and prejudices ready made from the social shop, than to embark on a sea of troubles by thinking out a morality for ourselves, to act with the business man rather than to brood with the philosophers.

In a new and positive morality in which men can believe lies the hope for the world; yet such a morality cannot come without a revival of religion. Religion and religion alone gives the driving force which impels men to change things, and until a religious attitude to the world again becomes part of man’s common heritage, all the apparent changes in morality, of which different ages and countries are the witnesses, will fail to disguise the fundamental fact that there is no morality to change.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (italics).

――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.