THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON AUTHOR OF "VARIED TYPES," "CHARLES DICKKKS," "TREMENDOUS TRIFLES." KTC. NEW YORK DQDD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1918 COPYBIGHT, 1910, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANT Published, October, 1910 H A/- DEDICATION To C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M. P. MY DEAR CHARLES, I originally called this book "What is Wrong," and it would have satisfied your sar- donic temper to note the number of social mis- understandings that arose from the use of the title. Many a mild lady visitor opened her eyes when I remarked casually, " I have been doing * What is Wrong ' all this morning." And one minister of religion moved quite sharply in his chair when I told him (as he understood it) that I had to run upstairs and do what was wrong, but should be down again in a minute. Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused me I cannot conjecture, but I know of what I accuse myself; and that is, of having written a very shapeless and inadequate book, and one quite unworthy to be dedicated to you. As far DEDICATION as literature goes, this book is what is wrong, and no mistake. It may seem a refinement of insolence to present so wild a composition to one who has recorded two or three of the really impressive visions of the moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who can make the map of England crawl with life; a most creepy and enviable accomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which, even if it achieves its object (which is monstrously un- likely) can only be a thundering gallop of theory ? Well, I do it partly because I think you poli- ticians are none the worse for a few inconvenient ideals ; but more because you will recognise the many arguments we have had ; those arguments which the most wonderful ladies in the world can never endure for very long. And, perhaps, you will agree with me that the thread of com- radeship and conversation must be protected be- cause it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred, it must not be snapped, because it is not worth tying together again. It is exactly because argu- DEDICATION ment is idle that men (I mean males) must take it seriously ; for when (we feel) , until the crack of doom, shall we have so delightful a difference again? But most of all I offer it to you be- cause there exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing, called friendship; an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which, please God, will never break. Yours always, G. 1C. CHESTERTON. CONTENTS PART I THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN CHAPTER PAGE I THE MEDICAL MISTAKE .... 1 II WANTED: AN UNPRACTICAL MAN . 8 III THE NEW HYPOCRITE .... 18 IV THE FEAR OF THE PAST .... 29 V THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE ... 44 VI THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY . . , 54 VII THE FREE FAMILY ..... 61 VIII THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY . 69 IX HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE . 77 X OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM ... 86 XI THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES . . 91 I THE CHARM OF JINGOISM . . . 101 II WISDOM AND THE WEATHER . ,. ... 108 III THE COMMON VISION ., . .., . . 119 IV THE INSANE NECESSITY M *. ... ., 126 CONTENTS PART III iFEMINISM, OR THE MlSTAKE ABOUT WOMAN CHAPTER PAGE I THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE . . 141 II THE UNIVERSAL STICK . . . .146 III THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY 157 IV THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT . . . 168 V THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE . . . 178 VI THE PEDANT AND SAVAGE . . . 186 VII THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN 192 VIII THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS . 198 IX SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS . . 204 X THE HIGHER ANARCHY .... 209 XI THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES 217 XII THE MODERN SLAVE 220 PART IV EDUCATION, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD I THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY . . . 229 II THE TRIBAL TERROR ..... 234 III THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT . . 239 IV THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION . . 242 V AN EVIL CRY 247 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE VI AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE . . 252 VII THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY . 260 VIII THE BROKEN RAINBOW .... 268 IX THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS . . 275 X THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 280 XI THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES . . 291 XII THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS 301 XIII THE OUTLAWED PARENT .... 308 XIV FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION . . 314 PART V THE HOME OF THE MAN 1 THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT . . 323 II THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND 335 III THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE . 343 IV A LAST INSTANCE 348 V CONCLUSION 350 THREE NOTES I ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE .... 361 II ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION . 364 III ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP . . 366 WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD PART I THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN v rV ' > A > V v V f' u 0- ' VIT >* ^ *> V* >V n Cradley Heath. I know all about them and what they are doing. They are engaged in a very wide- spread and flourishing industry of the present age. They are making chains. EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY WHEN 1 wrote a little volume on my friend Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is needless to say that he reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to an- swer and to criticise the book from the same disinterested and impartial standpoint from which Mr. Shaw had criticised the subject of it. I was not withheld by any feeling that the joke was getting a little obvious; for an ob- vious joke is only a successful joke; it is only the unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves with being subtle. The real reason why I did not answer Mr. Shaw's amusing attack was this: that one simple phrase in it surrendered to me all that I have ever wanted, or could want from him to all eternity. I told Mr. Shaw (in substance) that he was a charming and clever fellow, but a common Calvinist. He 229 CALVINISM OF TO-DAY admitted that this was true; and there (so far as I am concerned) is an end of the matter. He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right in holding that " if once a man is born it is too late to damn or save him." That is the fundamental and subterranean secret; that is the last lie in hell. The difference between Puritanism and Catholicism is not about whether some priestly word or gesture is significant and sacred. It is about whether any word or gesture is signifi- cant and sacred. To the Catholic every other daily act is a dramatic dedication to the service of good or of evil. To the Calvinist no act can have that sort of solemnity, because the person doing it has been dedicated from eter- nity, and is merely filling up his time until the crack of doom. The difference is something subtler than plum-puddings or private theatri- cals ; the difference is that to a Christian of my kind this short earthly life is intensely thrilling and precious ; to a Calvinist like Mr. 230 CALVINISM OF TO-DAY Shaw it is confessedly automatic and uninter- esting. To me these threescore years and ten are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by his own confession) they are only a long pro- cession of the victors in laurels and the van- quished in chains. To me earthly life is the drama; to him it is the epilogue. Shavians think about the embryo; Spiritualists about the ghost ; Christians about the man. It is as well to have these things clear. Now all our sociology and eugenics and the rest of it are not so much materialist as con- fusedly Calvinist; they are chiefly occupied in educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a singular depression about what one can do with the populace, com- bined with a strange disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity. These es- sential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more liberal and universal parts of Cal- vinism, such as the belief in an intellectual de- sign or an everlasting happiness. But though 231 CALVINISM OF TO-DAY Mr. Shaw and his friends admit it is a super- stition that a man is judged after death, they stick to their central doctrine, that he is judged before he is born. In consequence of this atmosphere of Cal- vinism in the cultured world of to-day, it is apparently necessary to begin all arguments on education with some mention of obstetrics and the unknown world of the prenatal. All I shall have to say, however, on heredity will be very brief, because I shall confine myself to what is known about it, and that is very nearly nothing. It is by no means self-evi- dent, but it is a current modern dogma, that nothing actually enters the body at birth ex- cept a life derived and compounded from the parents. There is at least quite as much to be said for the Christian theory that an ele- ment comes from God, or the Buddhist theory that such an element comes from previous ex- istences. But this is not a religious work, and I must submit to those very narrow intellec- tual limits which the absence of theology al- CALVINISM OF TO-DAY ways imposes. Leaving the soul on one side, let us suppose for the sake of argument that the human character in the first case comes wholly from parents; and then let us curtly state our knowledge, or rather our ignorance. 233 THE TRIBAL TERROR POPULAB science, like that of Mr. Blatchford, is in this matter as mild as old wives' tales. Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, ex- plained to millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle of blue beads and the father like a bottle of yellow beads ; and so the child is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just as well have said that if the father has two legs and the mother has two legs, the child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a question of simple addition or simple division of a number of hard detached " qualities," like beads. It is an or- ganic crisis and transformation of the most mysterious sort ; so that even if the result is unavoidable, it will still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow beads ; it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of 234, THE TRIBAL TERROR which is green, a totally novel and unique ex- perience, a new emotion. A man might live in a complete cosmos of blue and yellow, like the " Edinburgh Review " ; a man might never have seen anything but a golden cornfield and a sapphire sky; and still he might never have had so wild a fancy as green. If you paid a sovereign for a bluebell ; if you spilled the mus- tard on the blue-books ; if you married a canary to a blue baboon ; there is nothing in any of these wild weddings that contains even a hint of green. Green is not a mental combination, like addition ; it is physical result, like birth. So, apart from the fact that nobody ever really understands parents or children either, yet even if we could understand the parents, we could not make any conjecture about the children. Each time the force works in a different way ; each time the constituent colors combine into a different spectacle. A girl may actually in- herit her ugliness from her mother's good looks. A boy may actually get his weakness from his father's strength. Even if we admit it is really 235 THE TRIBAL TERROR a fate, for us it must remain a fairy tale. Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvin- ists and materialists may be right or wrong; we leave them their dreary debate. But con- sidered in regard to its results there is no doubt about it. The thing is always a new color; a strange star. Every birth is as lonely as a miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a mon- strosity. On all such subjects there is no science, but only a sort of ardent ignorance; and nobody has ever been able to offer any theories of moral heredity which justified themselves in the only scientific sense; that is that one could cal- culate on them beforehand. There are six cases, say, of a grandson having the same twitch of mouth or vice of character as his grandfather ; or perhaps there are sixteen cases, or perhaps sixty. But there are not two cases, there is not one case, there are no cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown that the grandfather will have a grandson with the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal with 236 THE TRIBAL TERROR heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and the fulfillment of dreams. The things do hap- pen, and when they happen we record them; but not even a lunatic ever reckons on them. Indeed, heredity, like dreams and omens, is a barbaric notion ; that is, not necessarily an untrue, but a dim, groping and unsystematized notion. A civilized man feels himself a little more free from his family. Before Christian- ity these tales of tribal doom occupied the sav- age north ; and since the Reformation and the revolt against Christianity (which is the re- ligion of a civilized freedom) savagery is slowly creeping back in the form of realistic novels and problem plays. The curse of Rougon- Macquart is as heathen and superstitious as the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well written. But in this twilight barbaric sense the feeling of a racial fate is not irrational, and may be allowed like a hundred other half emotions that make life whole. The only es- sential of tragedy is that one should take it lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge 237 THE TRIBAL TERROR rose to its highest in the madder novels of Zola (such as that called " The Human Beast"; a gross libel on beasts as well as hu- manity), even then the application of the he- reditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and fumbling. The students of heredity are sav- ages in this vital sense; that they stare back at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to schemes. In practice no one is mad enough to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physi- cal inheritance; and even the language of the thing is rarely used except for special modern purposes, such as the endowment of research or the oppression of the poor. 238 Ill THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT AFTER all the modern clatter of Calvinism, therefore, it is only with the born child that anybody dares to deal; and the question is not eugenics but education. Or again, to adopt that rather tiresome terminology of pop- ular science, it is not a question of heredity but of environment. I will not needlessly com- plicate this question by urging at length that environment also is open to some of the objec- tions and hesitations which paralyze the em- ployment of heredity. I will merely suggest in passing that even about the effect of environ- ment modern people talk much too cheerfully and cheaply. The idea that surroundings will mold a man is always mixed up with the to- tally different idea that they will mold him in one particular way. To take the broadest case, landscape no doubt affects the soul; but how it affects it is quite another matter. To 239 TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT be born among pine-trees might mean loving pine-trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees. It might quite seriously mean never having seen a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture of these or any degree of any of them. So that the scientific method here lacks a little in pre- cision. I am not speaking without the book; on the contrary, I am speaking with the blue- book, with the guide-book and the atlas. It may be that the Highlanders are poetical be- cause they inhabit mountains ; but are the Swiss prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It may be the Swiss have fought for freedom be- cause they had hills ; did the Dutch fight for freedom because they hadn't? Personally I should think it quite likely. Environment might work negatively as well as positively. The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their wild skyline, but because of their wild skyline. The Flemings may be fantastic artists, not in spite of their dull skyline, but because of it. I only pause on this parenthesis to show that, even in matters admittedly within its range, 240 TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT popular science goes a great deal too fast, and drops enormous links of logic. Nevertheless, it remains the working reality that what we have to deal with in the case of children is, for all practical purposes, environment; or, to use the older word, education. When all such de- ductions are made, education is at least a form of will-worship, not of cowardly fact-worship; it deals with a department that we can control ; it does not merely darken us with the barbarian pessimism of Zola and the heredity-hunt. We shall certainly make fools of ourselves ; that is what is meant by philosophy. But we shall not merely make beasts of ourselves ; which is the nearest popular definition for merely fol- lowing the laws of Nature and cowering under the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains much moonshine ; but not of the sort that makes mere mooncalves and idiots, the slaves of a silver magnet, the one eye of the world. In this decent arena there are fads, but not fren- zies. Doubtless we shall often find a mare's nest; but it will not always be the nightmare's. IV THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION WHEN a man is asked to write down what he really thinks on education, a certain gravity grips and stiffens his soul, which might be mistaken by the superficial for disgust. If it be really true that men sickened of sacred words and wearied of theology, if this largely unrea- soning irritation against " dogma " did arise out of some ridiculous excess of such things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up a fine crop of cant for our de- scendants to grow tired of. Probably the word " education " will some day seem honestly as old and objectless as the word "justification" now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thought it frightfully funny that people should have fought about the difference between the " Ho- moousion " and the " Homoiousion." The time will come when somebody will laugh louder TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION to think that men thundered against Sectarian Education and also against Secular Educa- tion ; that men of prominence and position actu- ally denounced the schools for teaching a creed and also for not teaching a faith. The two Greek words in Gibbon look rather alike; but they really mean quite different things. Faith and creed do not look alike, but they mean ex- actly the same thing. Creed happens to be the Latin for faith. Now having read numberless newspaper arti- cles on education, and even written a good many of them, and having heard deafening and indeterminate discussion going on all around me almost ever since I was born, about whether religion was a part of education, about whether hygiene was an essential of education, about whether militarism was inconsistent with true education, I naturally pondered much on this recurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say that it was comparatively late in life that I saw the main fact about it. Of course, the main fact about education is TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION that there is no such thing. It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and ket- tles, with definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like " transmission " or " inheritance " ; it is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most pre- posterous views or the most offensive quali- ties ; but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are education. Ed- ucation is not a thing like theology ; it is not an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong ; in practice probably more educational. It is giving some- thing perhaps poison. Education is tradi- TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION tion, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason. This first truth is frankly banal ; but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast, to take his medi- cine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish the boy's breakfast ; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine; Count Tolstoi would re- buke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatch- ford would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not de- fend any of these advanced views, not even Fagin's. But I do ask what, between the lot of them, has become of the abstract entity cabled education. It is not (as commonly sup- 245 TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION posed) that the tradesman teaches education plus Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the gen- eral idea of authority. It is quaint that peo- ple talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. 246 AN EVIL CRY THE fashionable fallacy is that by education we can give people something that we have not got. To hear people talk one would think it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotchpotch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air and freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we cannot conceive. These pages have, of course, no other general purpose than to point out that we cannot create anything good until we have conceived it. It is odd that these people, who in the matter of heredity are so sullenly at- tached to law, in the matter of environment seem almost to believe in miracle. They in- sist that nothing but what was in the bodies of the parents can go to make the bodies of the children. But they seem somehow to think S47 AN EVIL CRY that things can get into the heads of the chil- dren which were not in the heads of the parents, or, indeed, anywhere else. There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of the confusion. I mean the cry, " Save the children." It is, of course, part of that modern morbidity that in- sists on treating the State (which is the home of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic. This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist and other schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in a famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers, as men do in a shipwreck. That a human com- munity might conceivably not be in a condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. This cry of " Save the children " has in it the hateful implication that it is im- possible to save the fathers ; in other words, that many millions of grown-up, sane, respon- sible and self-supporting Europeans are to be treated as dirt or debris and swept away out 248 AN EVIL CRY of the discussion ; called dipsomaniacs because they drink in public houses instead of private houses ; called unemployables because nobody knows how to get them work; called dullards if they still adhere to conventions, and called loafers if they still love liberty. Now I am concerned, first and last, to maintain that un- less you can save the fathers, you cannot save the children ; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save ourselves. We can- not teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is only truth in a state of transmission ; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand? Thus we find that education is of all the cases the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain to save children; for they cannot remain chil- dren. By hypothesis we are teaching them to be men ; and how can it be so simple to teach an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain and hopeless to find one for ourselves? I know that certain crazy pedants have at- AN EVIL CRY tempted to counter this difficulty by maintain- ing that education is not instruction at all, does not teach by authority at all. They pre- sent the process as coming, not from outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy. Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the dormant fac- ulties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul is a primordial yearn- ing to learn Greek accents or to wear clean col- lars; and the schoolmasters only gently and tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn. The educator only draws out the child's own unapparent love of long division ; only leads out the child's own slightly veiled preference for milk pudding to tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the derivation; I have heard the disgraceful sug- gestion that " educator," if applied to a Roman schoolmaster, did not mean leading out young functions into freedom ; but only meant taking 250 AN EVIL CRY out little boys for a walk. But I am much more certain that I do not agree with the doc- trine; I think it would be about as sane to say that the baby's milk comes from the baby as to say that the baby's educational merits do. There is, indeed, in each living creature a collection of forces and functions ; but educa- tion means producing these in particular shapes and training them to particular purposes, or it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most practical instance of the whole situation. You may indeed " draw out " squeals and grunts from the child by simply poking him and pull- ing him about, a pleasant but cruel pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the matter. 251 VI AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE BUT the important point here is only that you cannot anyhow get rid of authority in educa- tion; it is not so much (as the poor Conserva- tives say) that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming a child's mind. In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself; for he hates something inseparable from human life. I only mentioned educere and the draw- ing out of the faculties in order to point out that even this mental trick does not avoid the inevitable idea of parental or scholastic author- ity. The educator drawing out is just as ar- bitary and coercive as the instructor pouring in ; for he draws out what he chooses. He de- cides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be developed. He does not (I 252 THE UNAVOIDABLE suppose) draw out the neglected faculty of forgery. He does not (so far at least) lead out, with timid steps, a shy talent for tor- ture. The only result of all this pompous and precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes. Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence. Education is violent ; be- cause it is creative. It is creative because it is human. It is as reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house. In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with life and growth. After that it is a trifling and even a jocular question whether we say of this tremendous tormentor, the artist Man, that he puts things into us like an apothecary, or draws things out of us, like a dentist. The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims the right to take his mother Nature 253 THE UNAVOIDABLE under his control; he claims the right to make his child the Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creative authority of man, and the whole courageous raid which we call civili- zation wavers and falls to pieces. Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure re- sponsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an un- shaken voice. That is the one eternal educa- tion ; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they can- not convince themselves enough to convince 254 THE UNAVOIDABLE even a newborn babe. This, of course, is con- nected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice it to say here that when I say that we should in- struct our children, I mean that we should do it, not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes should do it. The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being con- trolled so specially by the few, allows cranks and experiments to go straight to the school- room when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and ex- perienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more ex- perience, and has weathered the world longer, than the dogma to which he is made to submit. Many a school boasts of having the last ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea ; 255 THE UNAVOIDABLE for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience. But this, as I say, is all due to the mere fact that we are managed by a little oligarchy ; my system presupposes that men who govern them- selves will govern their children. To-day we all use Popular Education as meaning educa- tion of the people. I wish I could use it as meaning education by the people. The urgent point at present is that these expansive educators do not avoid the violence of authority an inch more than the old school- masters. Nay, it might be maintained that they avoid it less. The old village schoolmas- ter beat a boy for not learning grammar and sent him out into the playground to play at anything he liked; or at nothing, if he liked that better. The modern scientific schoolmas- ter pursues him into the playground and makes him play at cricket, because exercise is so good for the health. The modern Dr. Busby is a doctor of medicine as well as a doctor of divinity. He may say that the good of ex- 256 THE UNAVOIDABLE ercise is self-evident; but he must say it, and say it with authority. It cannot really be self- evident or it never could have been compulsory. But this is in modern practice a very mild case. In modern practice the free educationists for- bid far more things than the old-fashioned ed- ucationists. A person with a taste for para- dox (if any such shameless creature could ex- ist) might with some plausibility maintain con- cerning all our expansion since the failure of Luther's frank paganism and its replacement by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion has not been an expansion, but the closing in of a prison, so that less and less beautiful and humane things have been permitted. The Puri- tans destroyed images ; the Rationalists for- bade fairy tales. Count Tostoi practically is- sued one of his papal encyclicals against mu- sic ; and I have heard of modern educationists who forbid children to play with tin soldiers. I remember a meek little madman who came up to me at some Socialist soiree or other, and asked me to use my influence (have I any in- 257 THE UNAVOIDABLE fluence?) against adventure stories for boys. It seems they breed an appetite for blood. But never mind that ; one must keep one's tem- per in this madhouse. I need only insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation, are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments were often idiotic and cruel ; though they are much more so in a coun- try like England (where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishment and only a poor man receives it) than in countries with a clearer popular tradition such as Russia. In Russia flogging is often inflicted by peasants on a peasant. In modern England flogging can only in practice be inflicted by a gentleman on a very poor man. Thus only a few days ago as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of course) was sentenced to flogging and impris- onment for five years for having picked up a small piece of coal which the experts value at 5d. I am entirely on the side of such liberals and humanitarians as have protested against this almost bestial ignorance about boys. But 258 THE UNAVOIDABLE I do think it a little unfair that these human- itarians, who excuse boys for being robbers, should denounce them for playing at robbers. I do think that those who understand a gutter- snipe playing with a piece of coal might, by a sudden spurt of imagination, understand him playing with a tin soldier. To sum it up in one sentence : I think my meek little madman might have understood that there is many a boy who would rather be flogged, and unjustly flogged, than have his adventure story taken away. 259 VII THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY IN short, the new education is as harsh as the old, whether or no it is as high. The freest fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff with authority. It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that they are for- bidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that the boy would think so. The average boy's impression certainly would be simply this : " If your father is a Methodist you must not play with soldiers on Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not play with them even on week days." All education- ists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian. You cannot have free education ; for if you left a child free you would not educate him at all. Is there, then, no distinction or difference be- tween the most hide-bound conventionalists and 260 HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY the most brilliant and bizarre innovators? Is there no difference between the heaviest heavy father and the most reckless and speculative maiden aunt? Yes; there is. The difference is that the heavy father, in his heavy way, is a democrat. He does not urge a thing merely because to his fancy it should be done; but, because (in his own admirable republican for- mula) " Everybody does it." The conven- tional authority does claim some popular man- date ; the unconventional authority does not. The Puritan who forbids soldiers on Sunday is at least expressing Puritan opinion; not merely his own opinion. He is not a despot; he is a democracy, a tyrannical democracy, a dingy and local democracy perhaps ; but one that could do and has done the two ultimate virile things fight and appeal to God. But the veto of the new educationist is like the veto of the House of Lords ; it does not pretend to be representative. These innovators are al- ways talking about the blushing modesty of Mrs. Grundy. I do not know whether Mrs. 261 HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY Grundy is more modest than they are; but I am sure she is more humble. But there is a further complication. The more anarchic modern may again attempt to escape the dilemma by saying that education should only be an enlargement of the mind, an opening of all the organs of receptivity. Light (he says) should be brought into dark' ness ; blinded and thwarted existences in all our ugly corners should merely be permittee! to perceive and expand; in short, enlighten- ment should be shed over darkest London. Now here is just the trouble; that, in so far as this is involved, there is no darkest London. Lon- don is not dark at all; not even at night. We have said that if education is a solid substance, then there is none of it. We may now say that if education is an abstract expansion there is no lack of it. There is far too much of it. In fact, there is nothing else. There are no uneducated people. Every body in England is educated; only most peo- ple are educated wrong. The state schools HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY were not the first schools, but among the last schools to be established ; and London had been educating Londoners long before the London School Board. The error is a highly prac- tical one. It is persistently assumed that un- less a child is civilized by the established schools, he must remain a barbarian. I wish he did. Every child in London becomes a highly civi- lized person. But there are so many different civilizations, most of them born tired. Any- one will tell you that the trouble with the poor is not so much that the old are still foolish, but rather that the young are already wise. Without going to school at all, the gutter- boy would be educated. Without going to school at all, he would be over-educated. The real object of our schools should be not so much to suggest complexity as solely to restore sim- plicity. You will hear venerable idealists de- clare we must make war on the ignorance of the poor; but, indeed, we have rather to make war on their knowledge. Real educationists have to resist a kind of roaring cataract of 263 HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY culture. The truant is being taught all day. If the children do not look at the large letters in the spelling-book, they need only walk out- side and look at the large letters on the poster. If they do not care for the colored maps pro- vided by the school, they can gape at the col- ored maps provided by the Daily Mall. If they tire of electricity, they can take to elec- tric trams. If they are unmoved by music, they can take to drink. If they will not work so as to get a prize from their school, they may work to get a prize from Prizy Bits. If they cannot learn enough about law and citi- zenship to please the teacher, they learn enough about them to avoid the policeman. If they will not learn history forwards from the right end in the history books, they will learn it backwards from the wrong end in the party newspapers. And this is the tragedy of the whole affair: that the London poor, a particularly quick-witted and civilized class, learn everything tail foremost, learn even what is right in the way of what is wrong. They HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY do not see the first principles of law in a law book ; they only see its last results in the police news. They do not see the truths of politics in a general survey. They only see the lies of politics, at a General Election. But whatever be the pathos of the London poor, it has nothing to do with being unedu~ cated. So far from being without guidance, they are guided constantly, earnestly, excit- edly; only guided wrong. The poor are not at all neglected, they are merely oppressed; nay, rather they are persecuted. There are no people in London who are not appealed to by the rich ; the appeals of the rich shriek from every hoarding and shout from every hustings. For it should always be remembered that the queer, abrupt ugliness of our streets and cos- tumes are not the creation of democracy, but of aristocracy. The House of Lords objected to the Embankment being disfigured by trams. But most of the rich men who disfigure the street-walls with their wares are actually in the House of Lords. The peers make the country 265 HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY seats beautiful by making the town streets hide- ous. This, however, is parenthetical. The point is, that the poor in London are not left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and despotic advice. They are not like sheep without a shepherd. They are more like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are shouting at. All the newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the new medicines and new theologies, all the glare and blare of the gas and brass of modern times it is against these that the national school must bear up if it can. I will not question that our elementary education is better than barbaric ignorance. But there is no barbaric ignorance. I do not doubt that our schools would be good for un- instructed b'oys. But there are no uninstructed boys. A modern London, school ought not merely to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more rapid than ignorance and darkness. It must also be clearer than a picture postcard, cleverer than a Limerick competition, quicker than the tram, and kindlier than the tavern. 266 HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY The school, in fact, has the responsibility of universal rivalry. We need not deny that everywhere there is a light that must conquer darkness. But here we demand a light that can conquer light. 267 vin THE BROKEN RAINBOW I WILL take one case that will serve both as symbol and example: the case of color. We hear the realists (those sentimental fellows) talking about the gray streets and the gray lives of the poor. But whatever the poor streets are they are not gray; but motley, striped, spotted, piebald and patched like a quilt. Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be monochrome ; and there is nothing of the Celtic twilight about it. As a matter of fact, a Lon- don gutter-boy walks unscathed among fur- naces of color. Watch him walk along a line of hoardings, and you will see him now against glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic forest ; now black like a bird against the burning blue of the Midi; now passant across a field gules, like the golden leopards of England. He ought to understand the irrational rapture of 268 THE BROKEN RAINBOW that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about "that bluer blue, that greener green." There is no blue much bluer than Reckitt's Blue and no blacking blacker than Day and Martin's; no more emphatic yellow than that of Colman's Mustard. If, despite this chaos of color, like a shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is not exactly intoxicated with art and cul- ture, the cause certainly does not lie in univer- sal grayness or the mere starving of his senses. It lies in the fact that the colors are pre- sented in the wrong connection, on the wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive. It is not colors he lacks, but a philosophy of colors. In short, there is nothing wrong with Reckitt's Blue except that it is not Reckitt's. Blue does not belong to Reckitt, but to the sky ; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about the iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury; a thing 269 THE BROKEN RAINBOW in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special irony in these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to such very little meat. Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungent pleasure. But to look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who should swallow gallons of mustard. He would either die, or lose the taste of mustard alto- gether. Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings with those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediarvals recorded their dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than a single sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold. The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature more hasty than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancient artist was serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving the lords. It is that the old artist contrived to convey an impression that colors really were significant and precious things, like jewels and talismanic stones. The 270 THE BROKEN RAINBOW solor was often arbitrary; but it was always authoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was silver, if a cloud was scar- let, the artist managed to convey that these colors were important and almost painfully in- tense; all the red red-hot and all the gold tried in the fire. Now that is the spirit touching color which the schools must recover and pro- tect if they are really to give the children any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing. It is not so much an indulgence in color; it is rather, if anything, a sort of fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in heraldry as straitly as a green field in peasant proprietorship. It would not fling away gold leaf any more than gold coin ; it would not heedlessly pour out purple or crimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood. That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter; they have to teach people to relish colors like liquors. They have the heavy business of turning drunkards into wine tasters. If even the twentieth century succeeds in doing 271 THE BROKEN RAINBOW these things, it will almost catch up with the twelfth. The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life. Morris and the merely aesthetic medievalists always indicated that a crowd in the time of Chaucer would have been brightly clad and glittering, compared with a crowd in the time of Queen Victoria. I am not so sure that the real distinction is here. There would be brown frocks of friars in the first scene as well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second. There would be purple plumes of factory girls in the second scene as well as purple lenten vestments in the first. There would be white waistcoats against white ermine; gold watch chains against gold lions. The real differ- ence is this : that the brown earth-color of the monk's coat was instinctively chosen to express labor and humility, whereas the brown color of the clerk's hat was not chosen to express anything. The monk did mean to say that he robed himself in dust. I am sure the clerk does not mean to say that he crowns himself 272 THE BROKEN RAINBOW with clay. He is not putting dust on his head, as the only diadem of man. Purple, at once rich and somber, does suggest a triumph tem- porarily eclipsed by a tragedy. But the fac- tory girl does not intend her hat to express a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy ; far from it. White ermine was meant to ex- press moral purity; white waistcoats were not. Gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity; gold watch chains do not. The point is not that we have lost the material hues, but that we have lost the trick of turning them to the best advantage. We are not like children who have lost their paint-box and are left alone with a gray lead-pencil. We are like children who have mixed all the colors in the paint-box together and lost the paper of instructions. Even then (I do not deny) one has some fun. Now this abundance of colors and loss of a color scheme is a pretty perfect parable of all that is wrong with our modern ideals and especially with our modern education. It is the same with ethical education, economic edu- 273 THE BROKEN RAINBOW cation, every sort of education. The growing London child will find no lack of highly con- troversial teachers who will teach him that ge- ography means painting the map red; that economics means taxing the foreigner; that patriotism means the peculiarly un-English habit of flying a flag on Empire Day. In mentioning these examples specially I do not mean to imply that there are no similar crudi- ties and popular fallacies upon the other politi- cal side. I mention them because they consti- tute a very special and arresting feature of the situation. I mean this, that there were always Radical revolutionists ; but now there are Tory revolutionists also. The modern Conservative no longer conserves. He is avowedly an inno- vator. Thus all the current defenses of the House of Lords which describe it as a bulwark against the mob, are intellectually done for; the bottom has fallen out of them; because on five or six of the most turbulent topics of the day, the House of Lords is a mob itself; and exceedingly likely to behave like ona- 274 IX THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS THROUGH all this chaos, then, we come back once more to our main conclusion. The true task of culture to-day is not a task of expan- sion, but very decidedly of selection and re- jection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not a theological creed, it must still be as fastidious and as firm as theology. In short, it must be orthodox. The teacher may think it antiquated to have to decide precisely between the faith of Calvin and of Laud, the faith of Aquinas and of Swedenborg ; but he still has to choose between the faith of Kipling and of Shaw, between the world of Blatchford and of General Booth. Call it, if you will, a narrow question whether your child shall be brought up by vicar or the minister or the popish priest. You have still to face that larger, more liberal, more highly 275 NEED FOR NARROWNESS civilized question, of whether he shall be brought up by Harmsworth or by Pearson, by Mr. Eustace Miles with his Simple Life or Mr. Peter Keary with his Strenuous Life; whether he shall most eagerly read Miss Annie S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short, whether he shall end up in the mere violence of the S. D. F., or in the mere vulgarity of the Primrose League. They say that nowadays the creeds are crumbling; I doubt it, but at least the sects are increasing; and education must now be sectarian education, merely for practical purposes. Out of all this throng of theories it must somehow select a theory; out of all these thundering voices it must manage to hear a voice ; out of all this awful and aching battle of blinding lights, without one shadow to give shape to them, it must manage somehow to trace and to track a star. I have spoken so far of popular education, which began too vague and vast and which therefore has accomplished little. But as it happens there is in England something to com- 276 NEED FOR NARROWNESS pare it with. There is an institution, or class of institutions, which began with the same pop- ular object, which has since followed a much narrower object; but which had the great ad- vantage that it did follow some object, unlike our modern elementary schools. In all these problems I should urge the solu- tion which is positive, or, as silly people say, " optimistic." I should set my face, that is, against most of the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist. Most educators of the poor seem to think that they have to teach the poor man not to drink. I should be quite content if they teach him to drink; for it is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink that is accountable for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. I do not wish to make Par- liament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up churches, but rather to 277 NEED FOR NARROWNESS open them ; not to put out the lamp of learn- ing or destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper. In many cases, let it be remembered, such action is not merely going back to the old ideal, but is even going back to the old reality. It would be a great step forward for the gin shop to go back to the inn. It is incontro- vertibly true that to medisevalize the public schools would be to democratize the public schools. Parliament did once really mean (as its name seems to imply) a place where people were allowed to talk. It is only lately that the general increase of efficiency, that is, of the Speaker, has made it mostly a place where peo- ple are prevented from talking. The poor do not go to the modern church, but they went to the ancient church all right ; and if the com- mon man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own. I therefore can claim that I have no vulgar itch of inno- 278 NEED FOR NARROWNESS vation in anything I say about any of these institutions. Certainly I have none in that particular one which I am now obliged to pick out of the list ; a type of institution to which I have genuine and personal reasons for being friendly and grateful : I mean the great Tudor foundations, the public schools of England. They have been praised for a great many things, mostly, I am sorry to say, praised by themselves and their children. And yet for some reason no one has ever praised them for the one really convincing reason. 279 THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS THE word success can of course be used in two senses. It may be used with reference to a thing serving its immediate and peculiar pur- pose, as of a wheel going around; or it can be used with reference to a thing adding to the general welfare, as of a wheel being a useful discovery. It is one thing to say that Smith's flying machine is a failure, and quite another to say that Smith has failed to make a flying machine. Now this is very broadly the differ- ence between the old English public schools and the new democratic schools. Perhaps the old public schools are (as I personally think they are) ultimately weakening the country rather than strengthening it, and are there- fore, in that ultimate sense, inefficient. But there is such a thing as being efficiently ineffi- cient. You can make your flying ship so that 280 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS it flies, even if you also make it so' that it kills you. Now the public-school system may not work satisfactorily, but it works ; the public schools may not achieve what we want, but they achieve what they want. The popular elemen- tary schools do not in that sense achieve any- thing at all. It is very difficult to point to any guttersnipe in the street and say that he embodies the ideal for which popular education has been working, in the sense that the fresh- faced, foolish boy in " Etons " does embody the ideal for which the headmasters of Harrow and Winchester have been working. The aristo- cratic educationists have the positive purpose of turning out gentlemen ; and they do turn out gentlemen, even when they expel them. The popular educationists would say that they had the far nobler idea of turning out citizens. I concede that it is a much nobler idea, but where are the citizens? I know that the boy in " Etons " is stiff with a rather silly and senti- mental stoicism, called being a man of the world. I do not fancy that the errand-boy is 281 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS rigid with that republican stoicism that is called being a citizen. The schoolboy will really say with fresh and innocent hauteur, " I am an English gentleman." I cannot so easily pic- ture the errand-boy drawing up his head to the stars and answering, "Romanus civis sum.** Let it be granted that our elementary teachers are teaching the very broadest code of morals, while our great headmasters are teaching only the narrowest code of manners. Let it be granted that both these things are 'being taught. But only one of them is being learned. It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage to bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a real sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strange inversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for, but does get what he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much longer and reshapes the world much 282 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS more than the actualities by which he at- tempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter, which he thought so practical. What endures is the spirit, which he felt to be unat- tainable and even unutterable. It is exactly his schemes that are not fulfilled; it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled. Thus the ten or twelve paper constitutions of the French Revo- lution, which seemed so business-like to the framers of them, seem to us to have flown away on the wind as the wildest fancies. What has not flown away, what is a fixed fact in Europe, is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea of a land full of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners and minimum of wealth, the vision of the eighteenth century, the reality of the twentieth. So I think it will generally be with the creator of social things, desirable or undesirable. All his schemes will fail, all his tools break in his hands. His compromises will collapse, his concessions will be useless. He must brace himself to bear his fate; he shall have nothing but his heart's desire. 283 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS Now if one may compare very small things with very great, one may say that the English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same sort of success and solid splendor as the French democratic politics. At least they can claim the same sort of superiority over the dis- tracted and fumbling attempts of modern Eng- land to establish democratic education. Such success as has attended the public schoolboy throughout the Empire, a success exaggerated indeed by himself, but still positive and a fact of a certain indisputable shape and size, has been due to the central and supreme circum- stance that the managers of our public schools did know what sort of boy they liked. They wanted something and they got something; in- stead of going to work in the broad-minded manner and wanting everything and getting nothing. The only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got. There is something highly maddening in the circumstance that when mod- 84 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS ern people attack an institution that really does demand reform, they always attack it for the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our public schools, imagining themselves to be very democratic, have exhausted themselves in an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek. I can understand how Greek may be regarded as useless, especially by those thirsting to throw themselves into the cutthroat commerce which is the negation of citizenship ; but I do not understand how it can be considered undemo- cratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie has a hatred of Greek. It is obscurely founded on the firm and sound impression that in any self-governing Greek city he would have been killed. But I cannot comprehend Avhy any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch, or Mr. Will Crooks, or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be opposed to people learning the Greek alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty. Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language is written all the earliest and, Heaven knows, the 285 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS most heroic history of the Radical party. Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word democrat is Greek? A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attacking the athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and brutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice of the English public schools. There is much moral bullying, owing to the general lack of moral courage in the public-school atmosphere. These schools do, upon the whole, enocurage physical courage; but they do not merely discourage moral cour- age, they forbid it. The ultimate result of the thing is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot even endure to wear a bright uni- form except when it is blurred and hidden in the smoke of battle. This, like all the affec- tations of our present plutocracy, is an entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the old aris- tocrats. The Black Prince would certainly have asked that any knight who had the cour- age to lift his crest among his enemies, should 386 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS also have the courage to lift it among his friends. As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly. But physical courage they do, on the whole, sup- port; and physical courage is a magnificent fundamental. The one great, wise Englishman of the eighteenth century said truly that if a man lost that virtue he could never be sure of keeping any other. Now it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage is connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere more at one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some small sectarian quarrel with each other, the one saying that courage must be abandoned because it is connected with cruelty, and the other main- taining that cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. But it is all, thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body may make a man stupid or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does not make him spiteful. And we may admit heartily (without joining in that 287 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS perpetual praise which public-school men are always pouring upon themselves) that this does operate to the removal of mere evil cruelty in the public schools. English public-school life is extremely like English public life, for which it is the preparatory school. It is like it spe- cially in this, that things are either very open, common and conventional, or else are very se- cret indeed. Now there is cruelty in public schools, just as there is kleptomania and secret drinking and vices without a name. But these things do not flourish in the full daylight and common consciousness of the school; and no more does cruelty. A tiny trio of sullen-looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some ugly business always ; it may be indecent liter- ature, it may be the beginning of drink, it may occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on this stage the bully is not a braggart. The proverb says that bullies are always cowardly, but these bullies are more than cowardly ; they are shy. As a third instance of the wrong form of 288 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS revolt against the public schools, I may men- tion the habit of using the word aristocracy with a double implication. To put the plain truth as briefly as possible, if aristocracy means rule by a rich ring, England has aristocracy and the English public schools support it. If it means rule by ancient families or flawless blood, England has not got aristocracy, and the public schools systematically destroy it. In these circles real aristocracy, like real democ- racy, has become bad form. A modern fash- ionable host dare not praise his ancestry; it would so often be an insult to half the other oligarchs at table, who have no ancestry. We have said he has not the moral courage to wear his uniform ; still less has he the moral courage to wear his coat-of-arms. The whole thing now is only a vague hotch-potch of nice and nasty gentlemen. The nice gentleman never refers to anyone else's father, the nasty gentleman never refers to his own. That is the only difference; the rest is the public-school manner. But Eton and Harrow have to be aristocratic because 289 CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS they consist so largely of parvenues. The pub- lic school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats, like an asylum, a place where they go in and never come out. It is a factory for aristocrats ; they come out without ever having perceptibly gone in. The poor little private schools, in their old-world, sentimental, feudal style, used to stick up a notice, "For the Sons of Gentle- men only." If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be inscribed, " For the Fath- ers of Gentlemen only." In two generations they can do the trick. 290 XI THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES THESE are the false accusations ; the accusa- tion of classicism, the accusation of cruelty, and the accusation of an exclusiveness based on perfection of pedigree. English public-school boys are not pedants, they are not torturers ; and they are not, in the vast majority of cases, people fiercely proud of their ancestry, or even people with any ancestry to be proud of. They are taught to be courteous, to be good tem- pered, to be brave in a bodily sense, to be clean in a bodily sense; they are generally kind to animals, generally civil to servants, and to anyone in any sense their equal, the j oiliest companions on earth. Is there then anything wrong in the public-school ideal? I think we all feel there is something very wrong in it, but a blinding network of newspaper phraseology obscures and entangles us; so that it is hard 291 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES to trace to its beginning, beyond all words and phases, the faults in this great English achieve- ment. Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objec- tion to the English public school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of telling the truth. I know there does still linger among maiden ladies in remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seri- ously for a moment. Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal another man's wit, apostatize to another man's creed, or poison another man's coffee, all with- out ever telling a lie. But no English school- boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a 292 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES fact is a fact ; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his " side " when he is engaged in " playing the game." He takes sides in his Union debating society to settle whether Charles I. ought to have been killed, with the same solemn and pompous frivolity with which he takes sides in the cricket field to decide whether Rugby or Westminster shall win. He is never allowed to admit the abstract notion of the truth, that the match is a mat- ter of what may happen, but that Charles I. is a matter of what did happen or did not. He is Liberal or Tory at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the boat-race. He knows that sport deals with the unknown ; he has not even a notion that pol- itics should deal with the known. If anyone really doubts this self-evident proposition, that the public schools definitely discourage the love of truth, there is one fact which I should think would settle him. England is the country of the Party System, and it has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there any- 293 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES one out of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its conveniences or in- conveniences, could have been created by peo- ple particularly fond of truth? The very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy. When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he him- self is a liar. David said in his haste, that is, in his honesty, that all men are liars. It was afterwards, in some leisurely official explana- tion, that he said that Kings of Israel at least told the truth. When Lord Curzon was Viceroy he delivered a moral lecture to the Indians on their reputed indifference to veracity, to ac- tuality and intellectual honor. A great many people indignantly discussed whether orientals deserved to receive this rebuke ; whether Indians were indeed in a position to receive such severe admonition. No one seemed to ask, as I should venture to ask, whether Lord Curzon was in a position to give it. He is an ordinary party politician; a party politician means a politi- cian who might have belonged to either party. 294 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES Being such a person, he must again and again, at every twist and turn of party strategy, either have deceived others or grossly deceived himself. I do not know the East ; nor do I like what I know. I am quite ready to believe that when Lord Curzon went out he found a very false atmosphere. I only say it must have been something startlingly and chokingly false if it was falser than that English atmosphere from which he came. The English Parliament ac- tually cares for everything except veracity. The public-school man is kind, courageous, po- lite, clean, companionable; but, in the most awful sense of the words, the truth is not in him. This weakness of untruthfulness in the Eng- lish public schools, in the English political sys- tem, and to some extent in the English charac- ter, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious crop of superstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions clung to through low spir- itual self-indulgence. There are so many of these public-school superstitions that I have 295 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES here only space for one of them, which may be called the superstition of soap. It appears to have been shared by the ablutionary Pharisees, who resembled the English public-school aris- tocrats in so many respects : in their care about club rules and traditions, in their offensive op- timism at the expense of other people, and above all in their unimaginative plodding pa- triotism in the worst interests of their country. Now the old human common sense about wash- ing is that it is a great pleasure. Water (applied externally) is a splendid thing, like wine. Sybarites bathe in wine, and Noncon- formists drink water; but we are not concerned with these frantic exceptions. Washing being a pleasure, it stands to reason that rich people can afford it more than poor people, and as long as this was recognized all was well; and it was very right that rich people should offer baths to poor people, as they might offer any other agreeable thing a drink or a donkey ride. But one dreadful day, somewhere about the middle of the nineteenth century, somebody 296 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES discovered (somebody pretty well off) the two great modern truths, that washing is a virtue in the rich and therefore a duty in the poor. For a duty is a virtue that one can't do. And a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily; like the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes. But in the public-school tradi- tion of public life, soap has become creditable simply because it is pleasant. Baths are rep- resented as a part of the decay of the Roman Empire ; but the same baths are represented as part of the energy and rejuvenation of the British Empire. There are distinguished pub- lic-school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and high politicians, who, in the course of the eu- logies which from time to time they pass upon themselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness with moral purity. They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school man is clean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while saints can afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean. As if everyone did not know that the harlot must be clean, because 297 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES it is her business to captivate, while the good wife may be dirty, because it is her business to clean. As if we did not all know that whenever God's thunder cracks above us, it is very likely indeed to find the simplest man in a muck cart and the most complex blackguard in a bath. There are other instances, of course, of this oily trick of turning the pleasures of a gentle- man into the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon. Sport, like soap, is an admirable thing, but, like soap, it is an agreeable thing. And it does not sum up all mortal merits to be a sports- man playing the game in a world where it is so often necessary to be a workman doing the work. By all means let a gentleman congrat- ulate himself that he has not lost his natural love of pleasure, as against the blase, and un- childlike. But when one has the childlike joy it is best to have also the childlike unconscious- ness ; and I do not think we should have special affection for the little boy who everlastingly explained that it was his duty to play Hide 298 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES and Seek and one of his family virtues to be prominent in Puss in the Corner. Another such irritating hypocrisy is the oligarchic attitude towards mendicity as against organized charity. Here again, as in the case of cleanliness and of athletics, the attitude would be perfectly human and intel- ligible if it were not maintained as a merit. Just as the obvious thing about soap is that it is a convenience, so the obvious thing about beggars is that they are an inconvenience. The rich would deserve very little blame if they simply said that they never dealt directly with beggars, because in modern urban civilization it is impossible to deal directly with beggars ; or if not impossible, at least very difficult. But these people do not refuse money to beggars on the ground that such charity is difficult. They refuse it on the grossly hypocritical ground that such charity is easy. They say, with the most grotesque gravity, "Anyone can put his hand in his pocket and give a poor man a penny ; but we, we philanthropists, go home and 299 SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES brood and travail over the poor man's troubles until we have discovered exactly what jail, re- formatory, workhouse, or lunatic asylum it will really be best for him to go to." This is all sheer lying. They do not brood about the man when they get home, and if they did it would not alter the original fact that their motive for discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational one that beggars are a bother. A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this or that incidental act of charity, especially when the question is as genuinely difficult as is the case of mendicity. But there is something quite pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea that it is not hard enough. If any man will really try talking to the ten beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really so much easier than the labor of writing a check for a hospital. 300 XII THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS FOR this deep and disabling reason therefore, its cynical and abandoned indifference to the truth, the English public school does not pro- vide us with the ideal that we require. We can only ask its modern critics to remember that right or wrong the thing can be done : the factory is working, the wheels are going around, the gentlemen are being produced, with their soap, cricket and organized charity all complete. And in this, as we have said before, the public school really has an advantage over all the other educational schemes of our time-. You can pick out a public-school man in any of the many companies into which they stray, from a Chinese opium den to a German-Jewish dinner-party. But I doubt if you could tell which little match girl had been brought up by 301 NEW SCHOOLS undenominational religion and which by secu- lar education. The great English aristocracy which has ruled us since the Reformation is really, in this sense, a model to the moderns. It did have an ideal, and therefore it has pro- duced a reality. We may repeat here that these pages pro- pose mainly to show one thing: that progress ought to be based on principle, while our mod- ern progress is mostly based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed in theory, but by what has been already admitted in practice. That is why the Jacobites are the last Tories in history with whom a high-spirited person can have much sympathy. They wanted a spe- cific thing; they were ready to go forward for it, and so they were also ready to go back for it. But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of arma- 302 NEW SCHOOLS merits is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky in- heritance. Men have votes, so women must soon have votes ; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force ; the police shut public houses by twelve o'clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o'clock ; children stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of reason, nd momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monoto- nous gallop of mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution. By this logic of events, the Radical gets as much into a rut as the Conservative. We meet one hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather told him to .stand by one stile. We meet an- other hoary old lunatic whc says his grand- father told him only to walk along one lane. I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument, because we have just now come to the place where it is most startlingly 303 NEW SCHOOLS *nd strongly shown. The final proof that our elementary schools have no definite ideal of their own is the fact that they so openly imitate the ideals of the public schools. In the elementary schools we have all the ethical prejudices and exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully copied for people to whom they do not even roughly apply. We have the same wildly dis- proportionate doctrine of the effect of physical cleanliness on moral character. Educators and educational politicians declare, amid warm cheers, that cleanliness is far more important than all the squabbles about moral and religious training. It would really seem that so long as a little boy washes his hands it does not matter whether he is washing off his mother's jam or his brother's gore. We have the same grossly in- sincere pretense that sport always encourages a sense of honor, when we know that it often ruins it. Above all, we have the same great upper- class assumption that things are done best by large institutions handling large sums of money and ordering everybody about ; and that trivial 304 NEW SCHOOLS and impulsive charity is in some way contemp- tible. As Mr. Blatchford says, " The world does not want piety, but soap and Socialism." Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap and Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class. These " healthy " ideals, as they are called, which our politicians and schoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and applied to the democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate to an impoverished democracy. A vague admiration for organized government and a vague distrust of individual aid cannot be made to fit in at all into the lives of people among whom kindness means lending a saucepan and honor means keeping out of the workhouse. It resolves itself either into discouraging that system of prompt and patch- work generosity which is a daily glory of the poor, or else into hazy advice to people who have no money not to give it recklessly away. Nor is the exaggerated glory of athletics, de- fensible enough in dealing with the rich who, 305 NEW SCHOOLS if they did not romp and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any means so much to the point when applied to Deople, most of whom will take a great deal of exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And for the third case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort of rhetoric about corporeal dainti- ness which is proper to an ornamental class cannot, merely as it stands, be applicable to a dustman. A gentleman is expected to be sub- stantially spotless all the time. But it is no more discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for a deep-sea diver to be wet. A sweep is no more disgraced when he is covered with soot than Michael Angelo when he is covered with clay, or Bayard when he is covered with blood. Nor have these extenders of the public-- school tradition done or suggested anything by way of a substitute for the present snobbish system which makes cleanliness almost impos- sible to the poor ; I mean the general ritual of linen and the wearing of the cast-off clothes of the rich. One man moves into another man's 306 NEW SCHOOLS clothes as he moves into another man's house. No wonder that our educationists are not hor- rified at a man picking up the aristocrat's second-hand trousers, when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrat's second- hand ideas. 307 XIII THE OUTLAWED PARENT THERE is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper inside the popular schools ; and that is the opinion of the people. The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents. Yet the English poor have very definite traditions in many ways. They are hidden under embarrassment and irony ; and those psy- chologists who have disentangled them talk of them as very strange, barbaric and secretive things. But, as a matter of fact, the traditions of the poor are mostly simply the traditions of humanity, a thing which many of us have not seen for some time. For instance, workingmen have a tradition that if one is talking about a vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is the less likely to be seduced into excusing it. But mankind had this tradi- 308 THE OUTLAWED PARENT tion also, until the Puritans and their children, the Ibsenites, started the opposite idea, that it does not matter what you say so long as you say it with long words and a long face. Or again, the educated classes have tabooed most jesting about personal appearance; but in do- ing this they taboo not only the humor of the slums, but more than half the healthy liter- ature of the world ; they put polite nose-bags on the noses of Punch and Bardolph, Stiggins and Cyrano de Bergerac. Again, the educated classes have adopted a hideous and heathen cus- tom of considering death as too dreadful to talk about, and letting it remain a secret for each person, like some private malformation. The poor, on the contrary, make a great gossip and display about bereavement ; and they are right. They have hold of a truth of psychology which is at the back of all the funeral customs of the children of men. The way to lessen sorrow is to make a lot of it. The way to endure a pain- ful crisis is to insist very much that it is a crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at 309 THE OUTLAWED PARENT least to feel important. In this the poor are simply the priests of the universal civilization ; and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering there is the smell of the baked meats of Hamlet and the dust and echo of the funeral games of Patroclus. The things philanthropists barely excuse (or do not excuse) in the life of the laboring classes are simply the things we have to excuse in all the greatest monuments of man. It may be that the laborer is as gross as Shakespeare or as garrulous as Homer ; that if he is religious he talks nearly as much about hell as Dante; that if he is worldly he talks nearly as much about drink as Dickens. Nor is the poor man without historic support if he thinks less of that ceremonial washing which Christ dismissed, and rather more of that ceremonial drinking which Christ specially sanctified. The only difference between the poor man of to-day and the saints and heroes of history is that which in all classes separates the common man who can feel things from the great man who can 310 THE OUTLAWED PARENT express them. What he feels is merely the her- itage of man. Now nobody expects of course that the cabmen and coal-heavers can be com- plete instructors of their children any more than the squires and colonels and tea merchants are complete instructors of their children. There must be an educational specialist in loco parentis. But the master at Harrow is in loco parentis; the master in Hoxton is rather contra parentum. The vague politics of the squire, the vaguer virtues of the colonel, the soul and spiritual yearnings of a tea merchant, are, in veritable practice, conveyed to the children of these people at the English public schools. But I wish here to ask a very plain and emphatic question. Can anyone alive even pretend to point out any way in which these special vir- tues and traditions of the poor are reproduced in the education of the poor? I do not wish the costers' irony to appear as coarsely in the school as it does in the taproom; but does it appear at all? Is the child taught to sympa- thize at all with his father's admirable cheer- 311 THE OUTLAWED PARENT fulness and slang? I do not expect the pa- thetic, eager pietas of the mother, with her fu- neral clothes and funeral baked meats, to be exactly imitated in the educational system ; but has it any influence at all on the educational system? Does any elementary schoolmaster ac- cord it even an instant's consideration or re- spect? I do not expect the schoolmaster to hate hospitals and C.O.S. centers so much as the schoolboy's father; but does he hate them at all? Does he sympathize in the least with the poor man's point of honor against official institutions? Is it not quite certain that the ordinary elementary schoolmaster will think it not merely natural but simply conscientious to eradicate all these rugged legends of a labori- ous people, and on principle to preach soap and Socialism against beer and liberty? In the lower classes the schoolmaster does not work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern education means handing down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. Instead of their Christlike char- THE OUTLAWED PARENT ity, their Shakespearean laughter and their high Homeric reverence for the dead, the poor have imposed on them mere pedantic copies of the prejudices of the remote rich. They must think a bathroom a necessity because to the lucky it is a luxury ; they must swing Swedish clubs because their masters are afraid of Eng- lish cudgels ; and they must get over their prej- udice against being fed by the parish, because aristocrats feel no shame about being fed by the nation. 313 XIV FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION IT is the same in the case of girls. I am often solemnly asked what I think of the new ideas about female education. But there are no new ideas about female education. There is not, there never has been, even the vestige of a new idea. All the educational reformers did was to ask what was being done to boys and then go and do it to girls ; just as they asked what was being taught to young squires and then taught it to young chimney-sweeps. What they call new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong place. Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play football ; boys have school-colors, why shouldn't girls have school-colors ; boys go in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn't girls go in hun- dreds to day-schools ; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford in short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mus j FEMALE EDUCATION taches that is about their notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that, and why, any more than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but plodding, elaborate, ele- phantine imitation. And just as in the case of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least, which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet there is no boy's game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics have not pro- moted among girls. To take a stronger case, they give girls very heavy home-work; never reflecting that all girls have home-work already in their homes. It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; there must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is already a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon, serf if he wore that collar of O 7 cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass. 315 FEMALE EDUCATION It will then be answered, not without a sneer, '* And what would you prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water-colors, dabbling a little in Italian, play- ing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar al- bums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that? " To which I answer, " Em- phatically, yes." I solidly prefer it to the new female education, for this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design, while there is none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in point of practical fact that elegant female would not have been more than a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could do one thing neither of them could do : she could coolly and sensibly describe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could only smatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who 316 FEMALE EDUCATION can only stammer American ; nor am I certain that the bygone duchesses who were scarcely successful when they painted Melrose Abbey, were so much more weak-minded than the mod- ern duchesses who paint only their own faces, and are bad at that. But that is not the point. What was the theory, what was the idea, in their old, weak water-colors and their shaky Italian? The idea was the same which in a ruder rank expressed itself in home-made wines and hereditary recipes ; and which still, in a thousand unexpected ways, can be found cling- ing to the women of the poor. It was the idea I urged in the second part of this book: that the world must keep one great amateur, lest we all become artists and perish. Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may conquer all the conquerors. That she may be a queen of life, she must not be a private sol- dier in it. I do not think the elegant female with her bad Italian was a perfect product, any more than I think the slum woman talking gin and funerals is a perfect product ; alas ! there 317 FEMALE EDUCATION are few perfect products. But they come from a comprehensible idea ; and the new woman comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right to have an ideal, it is right to have the right ideal, and these two have the right ideal. The slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate daughter of Antigone, the obstinate priestess of the household gods. The lady talking bad Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia, the great and golden Italian lady, the Renas- cence amateur of life, who could be a barrister because she could be anything. Sunken and neglected in the sea of modern monotony and imitation, the types hold tightly to their orig- inal truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often drunken, will still bury her father. The elegant female, vapid and fading away to nothing, still feels faintly the fundamental difference between herself and her husband : that he must be Some- thing in the City, that she may be everything in the country. There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God; so that even 318 FEMALE EDUCATION now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty ; as if they were fragments of a muddled mes- sage, or features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education ; and closest to the child comes the woman she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She 319 FEMALE EDUCATION was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattain- able. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. 320 PART V THE HOME OF MAN THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT A CULTIVATED Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress because in a gay mo- ment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision ; it was meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God, like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth which it is here relevant to repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the French Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revo- lution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or con- venience. If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man. Here Burke made 323 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT his brilliant -diversion; he did not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval doctrine of jus divinum (which, like the Robes- pierre doctrine, was theistic), he attacked it with the modern argument of scientific rela- tivity; in short, the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere molded by or fitted to its environment and in- stitutions ; in fact, that each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have. " I know nothing of the rights of men," he said, " but I know some- thing of the rights of Englishmen." There you have the essential atheist. His argument is that we have got some protection by natural accident and growth ; and why should we pro- fess to think beyond it, for all the world as if we were the images of God ! We are born under a House of Lords, as birds under a house of leaves ; we live under a monarchy as niggers live under a tropic sun ; it is not their fault if they are slaves, and it is not ours if we are snobs. Thus, long before Darwin struck his 324 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT great blow at democracy, the essential of the Darwinian argument had been already urged against the French Revolution. Man, said Burke in effect, must adapt himself to every- thing, like an animal; he must not try to alter everything, like an angel. The last weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism and deism of the eighteenth century came in the voice of Sterne, saying, ** God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." And Burke, the iron evo- lutionist, essentially answered, " No ; God tem- pers the shorn lamb to the wind." It is the lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he either dies or becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught. The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere offense at the gro- tesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in a cage in the Regent's Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and many other gro- tesque things ; they do not much mind making beasts of themselves, and would not much mind having beasts made of their forefathers. The 325 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT real instinct was much deeper and much more valuable. It was this: that when once one begins to think of man as a shifting and alter- able thing, it is always easy for the strong and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all kinds of unnatural purposes. The popular in- stinct sees in such developments the possibility of backs bowed and hunch-backed for their bur- den, or limbs twisted for their task. It has a very well-grounded guess that whatever is done swiftly and systematically will mostly be done by a successful class and almost solely in their interests. It has therefore a vision of inhuman hybrids and half-human experiments much in the style of Mr. Wells's " Island of Dr. Mo- reau." The rich man may come to breeding a tribe of dwarfs to be his jockeys, and a tribe of giants to be his hall-porters. Grooms might be born bow-legged and tailors born cross- legged ; perfumers might have long, large noses and a crouching attitude, like hounds of scent ; and professional wine-tasters might have the horrible expression of one tasting wine stamped 326 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT upon their faces as infants. Whatever wild image one employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, when once it supposes that the fixed type called man could be changed. If some millionaire wanted arms, some porter must grow ten arms like an octo- pus ; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must go with a hundred trotting legs like a centi- pede. In the distorted mirror of hypothesis, that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see such monstrous and evil shapes ; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left but one nostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the mere notion of adaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so very far from the reality. It will be said that not the wildest evolution- ist really asks that we should become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Par- don me, that is exactly what not merely the wild- est evolutionists urge, but some of the tamest evolutionists, too. There has risen high in recent history an important cultus which bids fair to 327 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT be the religion of the future which means the religion of those few weak-minded people who live in the future. It is typical of our time that it has to look for its god through a microscope ; and our time has marked a definite adoration of the insect. Like most things we call new, of course, it is not at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes bees se- riously, but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully as he wrote about them. The wise king told the sluggard to watch the ant, a charming occupation for a sluggard. But in our own time has appeared a very different tone, and more than one great man, as well as numberless intelligent men, have in our time seriously suggested that we should study the in- sect because we are his inferiors. The old mor- alists merely took the virtues of man and dis- tributed them quite decoratively and arbitrarily among the animals. The ant was an almost heraldic symbol of industry, as the lion was of courage, or, for the matter of that, the pelican of charity. But if the mediaevals had been con- 328 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT vinced that a lion was not courageous, they would have dropped the lion and kept the cour- age ; if the pelican is not charitable, they would say, so much the worse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say, permitted the ant to en- force and typify man's morality; they never, allowed the ant to upset it. They used the ant for industry as the lark for punctuality; they looked up at the flapping birds and down at the crawling insects for a homely lesson. But we have lived to see a sect that does not look down at the insects, but looks up at the insects ; that asks us essentially to bow down and wor- ship beetles, like the ancient Egyptians. Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistak- able genius, and genius always carries a mag- nifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we have seen the bees not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armies and hier- archies of warriors and queens. Imagination perpetually peers and creeps further down the avenues and vistas in the tubes of science, and one fancies every frantic reversal of propor- 329 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT tions ; the earwig striding across the echoing plain like an elephant, or the grasshopper com- ing roaring above our roofs like a vast aero- plane, as he leaps from Hertfordshire to Sur- rey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple of enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on something wilder than arms or back^. bones; in which the ribbed columns have the half-crawling look of dim and monstrous cater- pillars; or the dome is a starry spider hung horribly in the void. There is one of the mod- ern works of engineering that gives one some- thing of this nameless fear of the exaggera- tions of an underworld ; and that is the curious curved architecture of the underground railway, commonly called the Twopenny Tube. Those squat archways, without any upright line or pillar, look as if they had been tunneled by huge worms who have never learned to lift their heads. It is the very underground palace of the Serpent, the spirit of changing shape and color, that is the enemy of man. 330 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic suggestions that writers like Maeterlinck have influenced us in the matter; there is also an ethical side to the business. The upshot of M. Maeterlinck's book on bees is an admiration, one might also say an envy, of their collective spirituality; of the fact that they live only for something which he calls the Soul of the Hive. And this admiration for the communal morality of insects is expressed in many other modern writers in various quarters and shapes ; in Mr. Benjamin Kidd's theory of living only for the evolutionary future of our race, and in the great interest of some Socialists in ants, which they generally prefer to bees, I suppose, because they are not so brightly colored. Not least among the hundred evidences of this vague insectolatry are the floods of flattery poured by modern people on that energetic nation of the Far East of which it has been said that " Pa- triotism is its only religion " ; or, in other words, that it lives only for the Soul of the 331 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT Hive. When at long intervals of the centuries Christendom grows weak, morbid or skeptical, and mysterious Asia begins to move against us her dim populations and to pour them westward like a dark movement of matter, in such cases it has been very common to compare the inva- sion to a plague of lice or incessant armies of locusts. The Eastern armies were indeed like insects ; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in their black nihilism of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to individual life and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their pessimistic courage and their atheistic patriot- ism, the riders and raiders of the East are in- deed like all the creeping things of the earth. But never before, I think, have Christians called a Turk a locust and meant it as a compliment. Now for the first time we worship as well as fear; and trace with adoration that enormous form advancing vast and vague out of Asia, faintly discernible amid the mystic clouds of winged creatures hung over the wasted lands, thronging the skies like thunder and discolor- 332 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT ing the skies like rain ; Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies. In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul of the Hive, we of Christendom stand not for ourselves, but for all humanity; for the essen- tial and distinctive human idea that one good and happy man is an end in himself, that a soul is worth saving. Nay, for those who like such biological fancies it might well be said that we stand as chiefs and champions of a whole sec- tion of nature, princes of. the house whose cog- nizance is the backbone, standing for the milk of the individual mother and the courage of the wandering cub, representing the pathetic chivalry of the dog, the humor and perversity of cats, the affection of the tranquil horse, the loneliness of the lion. It is more to the point, however, to urge that this mere glorification of society as it is in the social insects is a trans- formation and a dissolution in one of the out- lines which have been specially the symbols of man. In the cloud and confusion of the flies and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as if 333 EMPIRE OF THE INSECT finally disappearing, the idea of the human family. The hive has become larger than the house, the bees are destroying their captors; what the locust hath left, the caterpillar hath eaten; and the little house and garden of our friend Jones is in a bad way. 334. n THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA STAND WHEN Lord Morley said that the House of Lords must be either mended or ended, he used a phrase which has caused some confusion ; be- cause it might seem to suggest that mending and ending are somewhat similar things. I wish specially to insist on the fact that mend- ing and ending are opposite things. You mend a thing because you like it; you end a thing because you don't. To mend is to strengthen. I, for instance, disbelieve in oligarchy; so I would no more mend the House of Lords than I would mend a thumbscrew. On the other hand, I do believe in the family; therefore I would mend the family as I would mend a chair ; and I will never deny for a moment that the modern family is a chair that wants mending. But here comes in the essential point about the 335 THE UMBRELLA STAND mass of modern advanced sociologists. Here are two institutions that have always been fun- damental with mankind, the family and the state. Anarchists, I believe, disbelieve in both. It is quite unfair to say that Socialists believe in the state, but do not believe in the family ; thousands of Socialists believe more in the fam- ily than any Tory. But it is true to say that while anarchists would end both, Socialists are specially engaged in mending (that is, strength- ening and renewing) the state; and they are not specially engaged in strengthening and re- newing the family. They are not doing any- thing to define the functions of father, mother, and child, as such ; they are not tightening the machine up again ; they are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing. With the state they are doing this; they are sharp- ening its machinery, they are blacking in iis black dogmatic lines, they are making mere government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before. While they leave the home in ruins, they restore the hive, espe- 336 THE UMBRELLA STAND cially the stings. Indeed, some schemes of labor and Poor Law reform recently advanced by distinguished Socialists, amount to little more than putting the largest number of peo- ple in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble. Ap- parently, progress means being moved on by the police. The point it is my purpose to urge might perhaps be suggested thus : that Socialists and most social reformers of their color are vividly conscious of the line between the kind of things that belong to the state and the kind of things that belong to mere chaos or uncoercible na- ture ; they may force children to go to school before the sun rises, but they will not try to force the sun to rise ; they will not, like Canute, banish the sea, but only the sea-bathers. But inside the outline of the state their lines are confused, and entities melt into each other. They have no firm instinctive sense of one thing being in its nature private and another public, of one thing being necessarily bond and an- other free. That is why piece by piece, and 337 THE UMBRELLA STAND quite silently, personal liberty is being stolen from Englishmen, as personal land has been silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century. I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a care- less simile. A Socialist means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a battle-ax and a bootjack. The essential idea of an umbrella is breadth and protection. The essential idea of a stick is slenderness and, partly, attack. The stick is the sword, the umbrella is the shield, but it is a shield against another and more nameless enemy the hostile but anonymous universe. More properly, therefore, the umbrella is the roof; it is a kind of collapsible house. Bat the vital difference goes far deeper than this ; it branches off into two kingdoms of man's mind, with a chasm between. For the point is this : that the umbrella is a shield against an enemy so actual as to be a mere nuisance ; whereas the stick is a sword against enemies so entirely im- aginary as to be a pure pleasure. The stick is 338 THE UMBRELLA STAND not merely a sword, but a court sword; it is a thing of purely ceremonial swagger. One cannot express the emotion in any way except by saying that a man feels more like a man with a stick in his hand, just as he feels more like a man with a sword at his side. But no- body ever had any swelling sentiments about an umbrella; it is a convenience, like a door- scraper. An umbrella is a necessary evil. A walking-stick is a quite unnecessary good. This, I fancy, is the real explanation of the perpetual losing of umbrellas; one does not hear of people losing walking-sticks. For a walking-stick is a pleasure, a piece of real per- sonal property ; it is missed even when it is not needed. When my right hand forgets its stick may it forget its cunning. But anybody may forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a shed that he had stood up in out of the rain. Anybody can forget a necessary thing. If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that the whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men can 339 THE UMBRELLA STAND share an umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick. Umbrellas might possibly be replaced by some kind of common awnings cov- ering certain streets from particular showers. But there is nothing but nonsense in the notion of swinging a communal stick; it is as if one spoke of twirling a communal mustache. It will be said that this is a frank fantasia and that no sociologists suggest such follies. Par- don me, they do. I will give a precise parallel to the case of the confusion of sticks and um- brellas, a parallel from a perpetually reiterated suggestion of reform. At least sixty Socialists out of a hundred, when they have spoken of common laundries, will go on at once to speak of common kitchens. This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as the fanciful case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rods that go into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and washouses are both large rooms full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul and function of the two things are utterly oppo- site. There is only one way of washing a shirt ; 340 T,HE UMBRELLA STAND that is, there is only one right way. There is no taste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody says, " Tompkins likes five holes in his shirt, but I must say, give me the good old four holes." Nobody says, " This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; now if there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped up." The ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But it is by no means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back cooked. Cooking is an art ; it has in it per- sonality, and even perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse. I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch common sausages un- less they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausages fried to rags, yet he does not in- sist on his shirts being boiled to rags. I do not say that such points of culinary delicacy are of high importance. I do not say that the communal ideal must give way to them. What I say is that the communal ideal is not con- scious of their existence, and therefore goes 341 THE UMBRELLA STAND wrong from the very start, mixing a wholly public thing with a highly individual one. Per- haps we ought to accept communal kitchens in the social crisis, just as we should accept com- munal cat's-meat in a siege. But the cultured Socialist, quite at his ease, by no means in a siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they were the same kind of thing as communal laun- dries. This shows at the start that he misun- derstands human nature. It is as different as three men singing the same chorus from three men playing three tunes on the same piano. Ill THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE IN the quarrel earlier alluded to between the energetic Progressive and the obstinate Conser- vative (or, to talk a tenderer language, between Hudge and Gudge), the state of cross-purposes is at the present moment acute. The Tory says he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown; the Socialist very reasonably points out to him that in Cindertown at present there isn't any family life to preserve. But Hudge, the So- cialist, in his turn, is highly vague and myste- rious about whether he would preserve the fam- ily life if there were any ; or whether he will try to restore it where it has disappeared. It is all very confusing. The Tory sometimes talks as if he wanted to tighten the domestic bonds that do not exist ; the Socialist as if he wanted to loosen the bonds that do not bind anybody. The question we all want to ask of both of 349 DUTY OF GUDGE them is the original ideal question, " Do you want to keep the family at all? " If Hudge, the Socialist, does want the family he must be prepared for the natural restraints, distinctions and divisions of labor in the family. He must brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman having a preference for the private house and a man for the public house. He must manage to endure somehow the idea of a woman being womanly, which does not mean soft and yield- ing, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very humorous. He must confront without a quiver the notion of a child who shall be childish, that is, full of energy, but without an idea of inde- pendence; fundamentally as eager for author- ity as for information and butter-scotch. If a man, a woman and a child live together any more in free and sovereign households, these ancient relations will recur; and Hudge must put up with it. He can only avoid it by de- stroying the family, driving both sexes into sexless hives and hordes, and bringing up all children as the children of the state like Oliver DUTY OF GUDGE Twist. But if these stern words must be ad- dressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escape a somewhat severe admonition. For thfe plain truth to be told pretty sharply to the Tory is this, that if he wants the family to remain, if he wants to be strong enough to resist the rending forces of our essentially savage com- merce, he must make some very big sacrifices and try to equalize property. The overwhelm- ing mass of the English .people at this partic- ular instant are simply too poor to be domestic. They are as domestic as they can manage ; they are much more domestic than the govern- ing class ; but they cannot get what good there was originally meant to be in this institution, simply because they have not got enough money. The man ought to stand for a cer- tain magnanimity, quite lawfully expressed in throwing money away; but if under given cir- cumstances he can only do it by throwing the week's food away, then he is not magnanimous, but mean. The woman ought to stand for a certain wisdom which is well expressed in valu- 349 DUTY OF GUDGE ing things rightly and guarding money sensi- bly ; but how is she to guard money if there is no money to guard? The child ought to look on his mother as a fountain of natural fun and poetry; but how can he unless the fountain, like other fountains, is allowed to play? What chance have any of these ancient arts and func- tions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a house where the woman is out working and the man isn't ; and the child is forced by law to think his schoolmaster's requirements more im- portant than his mother's? No, Gudge and his friends in the House of Lords and the Carl- ton Club must make up their minds on this matter, and that very quickly. If they are content to have England turned into a beehive and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with a few faded butterflies playing at an old game called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce court, then let them have their empire of in- sects ; they will find plenty of Socialists who will give it to them. But if they want a do- mestic England, they must " shell out," as the 346 DUTY OF GUDGE phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than any Radical politician has yet dared to sug- gest; they must endure burdens much heavier than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than the death duties; for the thing to be done is nothing more nor less than the distribution of the great fortunes and the great estates. We can now only avoid Socialism by a change as vast as Socialism. If we are to save property we must distribute property, almost as sternly and sweepingly as did the French Revolution. If we are to preserve the family we must revo- lutionize the nation. 347 IV A LAST INSTANCE AND now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the reader's ear a horrible suspi- cion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspi- cion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in part- nership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that the way in which they perpetually play into each other's hands is not an everlasting coin- cidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an an- archic industrialism ; Hudge, the idealist, pro- vides him with lyric praises of anarchy. Gudge wants women-workers because they are cheaper ; Hudge calls the woman's work " freedom to live her own life." Gudge wants steady and obedi- ent workmen ; Hudge preaches teetotalism to workmen, not to Gudge. Gudge wants a tame and timid population who will never take arms against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi 348 A LAST INSTANCE that nobody must take arms against anything. Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed gentleman; Hudge earnestly preaches the per- fection of Gudge's washing to people who can't practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse and cruel system of sacking and sweating and bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with the free family and which is bound to destroy it ; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that the family is something that we shall soon gloriously outgrow. I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common man homeless. I only know I still meet Jones walking the streets in the gray twi- light, looking sadly at the poles and barriers and low red goblin lanterns which still guard the house which is none the less his because he has never been in it. 349 CONCLUSION HERE, it may be said, my book ends just where it ought to begin. I have said that the strong centers of modern English property must swiftly or slowly be broken up, if even the idea of prop- erty is to remain among Englishmen. There are two ways in which it could be done, a cold administration by quite detached officials, which is called Collectivism, or a personal distribution, so as to produce what is called Peasant Pro- prietorship. I think the latter solution the finer and more fully human, because it makes each man as somebody blamed somebody for saying of the Pope, a sort of small god. A man on his own turf tastes eternity or, in other words, will give ten minutes more work than is required. But I believe I am justified in shutting the door on this vista of argument, instead of opening it. For this book is not designed to prove the case 350 CONCLUSION for Peasant Proprietorship, but to prove the case against modern sages who turn reform to a routine. The whole of this book has been a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethical fact. And if by any chance it should happen that there are still some who do not quite see what that point is, I will end with one plain parable, which is none the worse for being also a fact. A little while ago certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean, of course, all little girls whose parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits are common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffo- cating underworlds of squalor, that poor people must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean lice in the hair. There- 351 CONCLUSION fore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it could be done. As is common in most modern discussions the unmentionable thing is the pivot of the whole discussion. It is obvious to any Christian man (that is, to any man with a free soul) that any coercion applied to a cabman's daughter ought, if possible, to be applied to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a matter of fact, apply their rule to a Cabinet Minister's daughter. I will not ask, because I know. They do not because they dare not. But what is the excuse they would urge, what is the plausible argument they would use, for thus cutting and clipping poor children and not rich? Their argument would be that the disease is more likely to be in the hair of poor people than of rich. And why? Because the poor children are forced (against all the instincts of the highly domestic working classes) to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of public instruction ; and be- 352 CONCLUSION cause in one out of the forty children there may be offense. And why ? Because the poor man is so ground down by the great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has to work as well as he. Therefore she has no time to look after the children ; therefore one in forty of them is dirty. Because the workingman has these two persons on top of him, the land- lord sitting (literally) on his stomach, and the schoolmaster sitting (literally) on his head, the workingman must allow his little girl's hair, first to be neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly, to be abol- ished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl's hair. But he does not count. Upon this simple principle (or rather prece- dent) the sociological doctor drives gayly ahead. When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down into the dirt, so that their very hair is dirty, the scientific course is clear. It would be long and laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants ; it is easier to cut off the hair of the slaves. In the same way, if it should ever happen that 353 CONCLUSION poor children, screaming with toothache, dis- turbed any schoolmaster or artistic gentleman, it would be easy to pull out all the teeth of the poor ; if their nails were disgustingly dirty, their nails could be plucked out ; if their noses were indecently blown, their noses could be cut off. The appearance of our humbler fellow-citizen could be quite strikingly simplified before we had done with him. But all this is not a bit wilder than the brute fact that a doctor can walk into the house of a free man, whose daugh- ter's hair may be as clean as spring flowers, and order him to cut it off. It never seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums is the wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. Hair is, to say the least of it, a rooted thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and oriental armies of whom we have spoken) sweep upon us but seldom. In truth, it is only by eter- nal institutions like hair that we can test passing institutions like empires. If a house is so built as to knock a man's head off when he enters it, it is built wrong. 354 CONCLUSION The mob can never rebel unless it is conserva- tive, at least enough to have conserved some reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful thought in all our anarchy, that most of the ancient blows struck for freedom would not be struck at all to-day, because of the obscuration of the clean, popular customs from which they came. The insult that brought down the ham- mer of Wat Tyler might now be called a medi- cal examination. That which Virginius loathed and avenged as foul slavery might now be praised as free love. The cruel taunt of Foulon, " Let them eat grass," might now be repre- sented as the dying cry of an idealistic vegetar- ian. Those great scissors of science that would snip off the curls of the poor little school chil- dren are ceaselessly snapping closer and closer to cut off all the corners and fringes of the arts and honors of the poor. Soon they will be twist- ing necks to suit clean collars, and hacking feet to fit new boots. It never seems to strike them that the body is more than raiment ; that the Sabbath was made for man ; that all institutions 355 CONCLUSION shall be judged and damned by whether they have fitted the normal flesh and spirit. It is the test of political sanity to keep your head. It is the test of artistic sanity to keep your hair on. Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this : to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tender- nesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have 356 CONCLUSION an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother ; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious land- lord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property ; because there should be a redistribu- tion of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's ; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image ; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down; and not one hair of her head shall be harmed. THREE NOTES ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE NOT wishing to overload this long essay with too many parentheses, apart from its thesis of progress and precedent, I append here three notes on points of detail that may possibly be misunderstood. The first refers to the female controversy. It may seem to many that I dismiss too curtly the contention that all women should have votes, even if most women do not desire them. It is constantly said in this connection that males have received the vote (the agricultural labor- ers for instance) when only a minority of them were in favor of it. Mr. Galsworthy, one of the few fine fighting intellects of our time, has talked this language in the " Nation." Now, broadly, I have only to answer here, as every- where in this book, that history is not a tobog- gan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced. If we really forced General 361 362 ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE Elections upon free laborers who definitely dis- liked General Elections, then it was a thor- oughly undemocratic thing to do; if we are democrats we ought to undo it. We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people ; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more valuable than the democ- racy it declares. But this analogy is false, for a plain and particular reason. Many voteless women re- gard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dig- nity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote; he did not un- derstand the word any better than Bimetallism. His opposition, if it existed, was merely nega- tive. His indifference to a vote was really in- difference. But the female sentiment against the fran- 363 chise, whatever its size, is positive. It is not negative; it is by no means indifferent. Such women as are opposed to the change regard it (rightly or wrongly) as unfeminine. That is, as insulting certain affirmative traditions to which they are attached. You may think such a view prejudiced; but I violently deny that any democrat has a right to override such prej- udices, if they are popular and positive. Thus he would not have a right to make millions of Moslems vote with a cross if they had a preju- dice in favor of voting with a crescent. Unless this is admitted, democracy is a farce we need scarcely keep up. If it is admitted, the Suf- fragists have not merely to awaken an indif- ferent, but to convert a hostile majority. n ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION ON re-reading my protest, which I honestly think much needed, against our heathen idola- try of mere ablution, I see that it may possibly be misread. I hasten to say that I think wash- ing a most important thing to be taught both to rich and poor. I do not attack the posi- tive but the relative position of soap. Let it be insisted on even as much as now; but let other things be insisted on much more. I am even ready to admit that cleanliness is next to godliness ; but the moderns will not even admit godliness to be next to cleanliness. In their talk about Thomas Becket and such saints and heroes they make soap more important than soul; they reject godliness whenever it is not cleanliness. If we resent this about remote saints and heroes, we should resent it more about the many saints and heroes of the 364 EDUCATION 365 slums, whose unclean hands cleanse the world. Dirt is evil chiefly as evidence of sloth ; but the fact remains that the classes that wash most are those that work least. Concerning these, the practical course is simple; soap should be urged on them and advertised as what it is a luxury. With re- gard to the poor also the practical course is not hard to harmonize with our thesis. If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then emphatically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty. m ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP I HAVE not dealt with any details touching dis- tributed ownership, or its possibility in Eng- land, for the reason stated in the text. This book deals with what is wrong, wrong in our root of argument and effort. This wrong is, I say, that we will go forward because we dare not go back. Thus the Socialist says that property is already concentrated into Trusts and Stores : the only hope is to concentrate it further in the State. I say the only hope is to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent and re- turn ; the only step forward is the step back- ward. But in connection with this distribution I have laid myself open to another potential mis- take. In speaking of a sweeping redistribu- tion, I speak of decision in the aim, not neces- sarily of abruptness in the means. It is not at all too late to restore an approximately ra- 366 PROPRIETORSHIP 367 tional state of English possessions without any mere confiscation. A policy of buying out landlordism, steadily adopted in England as it has already been adopted in Ireland (notably in Mr. Wyndham's wise and fruitful Act), would in a very short time release the lower end of the see-saw and make the whole plank swing more level. The objection to this course is not at all that it would not do, only that it will not be done. If we leave things as they are, there will almost certainly be a crash of confiscation. If we hesitate, we shall soon have to hurry. But if we start doing it quickly we have still time to do it slowly. This point, however, is not essential to my book. All I have to urge between these two boards is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop, and that I dislike Socialism because it will (ac- cording to Socialists) be so like that shop. It is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not ob- ject to Socialism because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it will leave it so horribly the same. HN389 C44 1918 Chesterton, G. K. 1874-1936. What's wrong with the world UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 001 347 459 8