HOW 
 TO 
 
 LENGTHEN 
 OUR
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN
 
 HOW TO 
 LENGTHEN 
 OUR EARS
 
 COPYRIGHT IN U.S.A.
 
 William 
 Wordsworth 
 
 Algernon' 
 Swinburne
 
 HOW TO LENGTHEN 
 OUR EARS 
 
 AN ENQUIRY WHETHER LEARNING FROM 
 BOOKS DOES NOT LENGTHEN THE EARS 
 RATHER THAN THE UNDERSTANDING 
 
 VISCOUNT HARBERTON 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 "SALVATION BY LEGISLATION" 
 
 LONDON 
 
 C. W. DANIEL, LTD. 
 
 3, Tudor Street, E.G. 
 
 1917
 
 To be of no use belongs to the character of the 
 works of genius ; it is their patent of nobility. 
 
 Schopenhauer.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE main object of the Education Act, or one 
 object, was, I believe, to equalise opportunities, 
 and, by means of council scholarships, to enable 
 the highest and the lowest to meet on equal terms. 
 This favour was made compulsory lest any should 
 miss it. Now look at the facts. In England, a 
 pitch of civilisation has been reached never before 
 equalled in this world. Yet, so far from learning 
 proving valuable, a good mechanic will command 
 better wages than a B.Sc., a schoolmaster, a master 
 of arts, or a clerk in the Bank of England. By 
 providing scholarships out of the rates, we have 
 enabled the mechanic class to become bachelors 
 of science, schoolmasters, or masters of arts. Yet 
 those who fail to secure the scholarships, and 
 avoid a prolonged course of book learning, secure 
 better wages than those who succeed. The wage 
 test is not everything, but it should not be dis- 
 regarded. The aim of these pages is to show that 
 we owe more to unlearned people than to the 
 sons of learning, and that the whole education 
 craze is a wicked mistake. 

 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 To do this in a readable form is not easy. But, 
 suppose you wanted your child to become stupider 
 than was intended by nature, how would you 
 proceed ? The best way, I fancy, would be to 
 make the child learn to read as early as five 
 years of age, and go to school at least 5^ hours 
 a day. This is now compulsory. Next, you 
 might, by means of cheap publications and free 
 libraries, do all that you could to make him 
 spend every minute of his spare time in reading, 
 till the feat had become a habit. This is now 
 encouraged. On those lines, there is the best pos- 
 sible method of lengthening your child's ears, 
 and my aim is to provide you with plenty of evi- 
 dence that you would have every chance of suc- 
 ceeding beyond all reasonable expectations. My 
 book commences with the great principle of aural 
 development ; after that, evidence is given of the 
 actual process, followed by some typical develop- 
 ments; I then turn to a few of those who 
 escaped or resisted education. 
 
 Civilisation owes much more to appliances than 
 to books, and it seems monstrous that, to devote 
 yourself to appliances, before the age of 14, 
 instead of to books, is an offence at law. Our 
 great thinker, Herbert Spencer, described the 
 Education Acts as ' measures for the increase of 
 stupidity,' and, though he need not necessarily be 
 right, it seems going rather far to make such an 
 opinion as his, if acted upon, a police court offence, 
 rendering the whole family pretty certain of in-
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 carceration in an industrial school. The book 
 brigade have always been cruel bigots. 
 
 It must not be thought that this book is an 
 attack on my own class. Very much the reverse. 
 The kind of brain that wins scholarships bears 
 more resemblance to a tiller of the soil of persis- 
 tent industry and energy, who has taken up books, 
 than it does to the carelessness of mind found 
 among the gentry. My opinion is that the upper 
 classes are, as human beings, very superior to 
 trade unionists, but they have paid far too much 
 attention to men of learning, and mark-makers. 
 Hence they have not yet shaken off an inherited 
 tradition that books are better for the mind than 
 handicraft. Why should not gentlemen of small 
 means remedy this, and educate their children, 
 from their earliest years, not in books, but by 
 practical work in mechanical appliances, in 
 mechanical forces, and in the properties of certain 
 very ordinary chemical compounds ? 
 
 It is generally considered that, the higher the 
 price paid for the work, the more valuable the 
 work is, and there is nothing ungentlemanly in 
 doing valuable work. In which case, it will be 
 our own fault if the less affluent of us cannot 
 become well-paid mechanics and superior foremen, 
 while trade unionists will become schoolmasters 
 and bachelors of science and prattle of the uni- 
 versal advantages of books and learning, while 
 receiving a considerably smaller wage than those 
 who do without these advantages.
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 The trade unionist class are now forced to be 
 in a council school, doing lessons, from 5 years of 
 age to 14, and the age looks like being raised 
 considerably. This is the gentleman's chance, 
 for the education prowler only visits the homes of 
 those in humble circumstances, and they cannot 
 withstand him. If a cottager resents the intru- 
 sion, the education spy will report the home as 
 dirty, and the father as mostly in the public-house, 
 and the children will be packed off to an industrial 
 school. The gentry have an enormous advantage 
 here, for they can afford to boot the spy out, as 
 he is well aware, consequently they could give 
 their children a non-book education and start 
 well ahead of the State- educated trade unionist. 
 Such a course would be a great gain to the com- 
 munity, especially in extensive strikes. At pre- 
 sent, superior people are book-educated and can 
 do nothing except read, consequently they are at 
 the mercy of those who become labour leaders 
 backed by a party catering for their votes. 
 In escaping the Education Acts, the superiors of 
 small means can remedy this. The trade unionists 
 will do the reading and have many letters after 
 their names and secure the aural development, 
 while the superiors regain their power. In this 
 direction there is room for improvement. 
 
 LONDON, 1916.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE GREAT PRINCIPLE OF AURAL 
 
 DEVELOPMENT .... 3 
 
 II. UNDEVELOPED EARS IGNORANT 
 
 FELLOWS 10 
 
 III. DEVELOPED EARS MEN OF LEARN- 
 
 ING 17 
 
 PART II 
 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 IV. EARS OF THOUGHT 33 
 V. EARS OF HISTORY .... 47 
 
 VI. EARS OF SCIENCE .... 70 
 VII. EARS OF GOVERNMENT ... 99 
 
 VIII. EARS OF MARS . . . . no 
 ix
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART III 
 
 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 IX. DOCTORS' EARS . . . .115 
 
 X. LITERARY EARS . . . .136 
 
 XI. LAWYERS' EARS .... 145 
 
 XII. MACAULAY'S EARS . . -151 
 
 XIII. ATTIC EARS .... 159 
 
 XIV. DIVINE EARS . . . .178 
 
 PART IV 
 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 XV. NEGLECTED UNITS . . .193 
 
 XVI. UNDESIRABLE TENANTS . . 207 
 
 XVII. BARBARIANS . . . .213 
 
 XVIII. YEARS TO COME .... 221 
 
 CONCLUSION .... 231
 
 PART I 
 
 STATEMENT 
 OF THE 
 PROCEDURE
 
 The shaping of all education into lessons is one 
 of the vices of the time. Herbert Spencer.
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE GREAT PRINCIPLE OF AURAL DEVELOPMENT ] 
 
 I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard 
 of the man void of understanding. 
 
 And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles 
 had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof 
 was broken down. 
 
 Thus I saw, and considered it well : I looked upon it 
 and received instruction. 
 
 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the 
 hands to sleep : 
 
 So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth ; and 
 thy want as an armed man. Proverbs xxiv. 30-34. 
 
 In the older English, when schools and teachers 
 were few and far between, the words ' educated ' 
 and ' uneducated ' were comparatively rare, and 
 to be ' with ' or ' without understanding ' seemed 
 the phrase in use : cf. above, ' void of under- 
 standing.' The extreme simplicity, and also the 
 beauty, of this quotation, is in some measure due 
 to its belonging to a pre-book era. Men can,
 
 4 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 of course, think and ponder just as well without 
 books as with them, and they apparently did so. 
 From the nettles in the field, from the broken wall, 
 the writer in Proverbs received instruction, and 
 the thought comes home that a man might have 
 plenty of understanding without ever having 
 read a book in his life, while another might read 
 a book a day without finding wisdom. 
 
 Take up any modern paper and you will see 
 that, nowadays, ' uneducated ' is used much as 
 ' void of understanding ' was in 1600, and that 
 an ' educated ' man is now supposed to signify a 
 man who has got ' understanding.' So curious a 
 misconception shows the power of words. The 
 same cause has perpetrated an even more mis- 
 chievous notion to the effect that an uneducated 
 man needs improving, and that he must on no 
 account be left alone or he will turn robber. There 
 is no evidence for this, and the phrase used by 
 our forefathers would prevent much misconcep- 
 tion, to wit, Daily Express, May, 1916 : 
 
 The demeanour of Bailey, Casement's fellow- 
 prisoner, was in striking contrast. He wore a brown 
 mackintosh over a brown check suit of rough material. 
 He has the blunt features of an uneducated peasant, 
 and his fair hair lay in confusion on his head. 
 
 Here you see the very common, but very mis- 
 taken notion, that an uneducated man cannot do 
 enough thinking even to prevent him blunting his 
 features. How about the Proverbs writer, pre-
 
 AURAL DEVELOPMENT 5 
 
 viously quoted, who was certainly uneducated in 
 the sense of being devoid of book-learning, yet he 
 was not only a thinker but no mean poet ? The 
 Daily Express reporter might just as well have 
 attributed the prisoner's features to his fair hair as 
 to his lack of education. Caesar's legions cannot 
 have had much education, yet they had fine fea- 
 tures; while a Roman nose would be an addition 
 to Lord Haldane, notwithstanding his superb 
 education. Red Indians are more distinguished in 
 their noses than in books, and they cannot be 
 said to have blunt features. Will a Jew cease to 
 have a nose, unless he learns to read ? The cause 
 of our features is not to be found in books. Our 
 Church is responsible for the further notion that, 
 in addition to his blunt features, the uneducated 
 man, without Bible teaching, will probably steal. 
 This has been said for so many years that educated 
 people believe it. An untaught, penniless man 
 may be more likely to steal than a cultured man 
 with a couple of thousand a year, but even that is 
 not certain if it is worth the latter' s while. The 
 church doctrine proves what foolishness may be 
 accepted, if it is told to us often enough while we 
 are still young. 
 
 Surely no more unwarranted assumption could 
 be made than that any system of book learning 
 is going to give understanding; form features and 
 produce a mind. The cause of all this is from 
 within rather than from without, and Darwin's 
 doctrine has been outrageously exaggerated. A
 
 6 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 man may be called educated after a nine years' 
 course in a council school, but that is no reason 
 why he should not have been made less intelligent 
 than he would have been otherwise, which is 
 generally the case. The current misconception 
 arises from a false analogy derived from a mis- 
 chievous phraseology. A man's understanding is 
 almost, if not quite, independent of his education, 
 and to confuse the two has become the folly of 
 the day. As for moral incentive, if nettles and 
 broken walls did not produce the desired effect, 
 books certainly won't. The State, however, in 
 accordance with scholastic stupidity, relies on 
 book teaching alone, substituting for nettles and 
 for broken walls, free schools, free libraries, 
 churches, and old age pensions. This need not 
 blunt the features but it will assuredly lengthen 
 the ears. Let me explain. 
 
 Our educational system, as theorised, is the 
 simplest thing in the world. Education, i.e. book 
 learning, is asserted, entirely without proof, to 
 yield a high rate of interest to the State. The 
 subject is then closed, schools are built, teachers 
 provided, scholarships supplied, attendance spies 
 appointed, and the children are hounded in. Any 
 one who objects is fined and imprisoned. Yet 
 some think that a school curriculum framed for 
 all, and suited to none, commenced directly a 
 child can toddle to school, is an infallible recipe 
 for making asses. 
 
 The standard statement of this great aural
 
 AURAL DEVELOPMENT 7 
 
 principle reads thus : Ignorant and uneducated 
 persons are a source of danger to the State, in that 
 they are unable to compete successfully with the 
 better educated workmen of foreign countries, 
 while, in internal concerns, their lack of educa- 
 tion prevents them adequately understanding the 
 questions of the day, or voting intelligently on the 
 issues submitted to them. 
 
 The terms ' ignorant ' and ' uneducated' are only 
 applied to those unacquainted with books. A 
 man whose knowledge is confined simply to books 
 is considered educated and well-informed. A 
 man, whose knowledge is confined to locks, will 
 be considered ignorant and uneducated until he 
 takes up books. But the man, who reads books, 
 need never understand locks, nor anything else, 
 nor need he be able to do a single thing except 
 read books. On that alone he stands confidently 
 before the world, usually in a pair of pince-nez's, 
 as the legislative ideal, an ' efficiently ' educated 
 man. 
 
 Now, this great principle may have stood the 
 test of time to the extent that we still have it 
 with us, But, even supposing minds brought up 
 on books to be desirable, their exact value has 
 never been submitted to any practical test, nor 
 substantiated in any way whatsoever. Your 
 pince-nez ' efficient ' is, in reality, what he looks, 
 that is, no use. The type became compulsory in 
 1870, when learned men asserted that, owing to 
 the continual lowering of the franchise from 1832 
 2
 
 8 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 to 1869, it was necessary for us to ' educate our 
 masters.' That was what was said, and no one, 
 apparently, thought of enquiring whether the 
 highly educated brigade were specially noted for 
 sense, or whether the more intense a man' s educa- 
 tion the more sensible he became, or whether 
 there was any connection at all between the two. 
 Owing to this omission, the education theory still 
 stands where it did, and after an infliction of 
 nearly fifty years, we can estimate for ourselves 
 the full measure of wisdom contained in that 
 perishing phrase, ' we must educate our masters.' 
 First of all, has any political question ever been 
 submitted to the electorate in such a form that 
 any education, in the accepted sense, was needed 
 to comprehend it ? The answer is ' No.' What 
 happens is that something, without details, called 
 Repeal of the Corn Laws, Protection, Home Rule, 
 or England for the English, comes before the 
 electorate mixed up with countless other matters 
 of temporary or local interest, and the voter may, 
 if he wishes, vote on the one issue alone. But 
 whether an impecunious scholar is likely to do 
 this any better than a sweep or a well-to-do butcher, 
 however uneducated, is more than doubtful. In 
 so far as national education affects the value of 
 the vote given, it must, obviously, have the worst 
 possible effect ; for, if the voter is to have national 
 education free, why education only ? Why stop 
 there ? Why not everything else ? This is 
 exactly what has occurred. No modern poli-
 
 AURAL DEVELOPMENT 9 
 
 tician ever thought of submitting Home Rule, 
 Payment of Members, or Lloyd Georgian finance 
 to a state- educated electorate, except accompanied 
 by state meals for necessitous children, a state- 
 made eight hours day and state- made old age 
 pensions. 
 
 What an extraordinary way of improving the 
 free and independent voter ! Teach him to re- 
 gard the State as universal provider and giver of 
 all good gifts. Teach him not to work for any- 
 thing but to vote for it. Who in the world can 
 have originated so vicious a theory of the object 
 and functions of government ? Yet this is our 
 direct heritage, free from all safeguards and limita- 
 tions, invented, introduced and imposed upon us, 
 not by ignorant people, but by our well-read, 
 highly cultured, eminently learned ' intellectuals ' 
 and ' high- brows.' So much for Chapter I.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 UNDEVELOPED EARS : IGNORANT FELLOWS 
 
 To all fools : 
 
 Are you in favour of State Education ? 
 Most fools are. 
 
 /. Philpott (eight years certified teacher, Newcastle 
 Council Schools). 
 
 FOR all practical purposes, it has been established 
 
 by the law of England that not to know where 
 
 Blenheim is, and who won it, is ignorance ; but 
 
 not to know how to repair a pneumatic tyre, or 
 
 mend a gas-pipe, is not ignorance. Indeed, to 
 
 some men, this last is a sign of being ' efficiently ' 
 
 educated, and even a scholar. Hence Blenheim is 
 
 made compulsory from the age of five to fourteen ; 
 
 while gas-pipe mending is, between those ages, an 
 
 offence at law during school hours ; and at other 
 
 hours, if done for money, it is a crime visited by 
 
 heavy penalties on all concerned. Consequently 
 
 anything practical, or likely to be of use, in other 
 
 words, manual labour, stands by law condemned 
 
 as something low, and better omitted, and rather 
 
 resembling sin, which we may well be left to pick 
 
 up for ourselves by ourselves, when and how we 
 
 can. 
 
 10
 
 UNDEVELOPED EARS n 
 
 Nevertheless, people exist, counted sane and 
 allowed to dispose of their property, who refuse 
 to consider a boy earning money at six as either 
 a concentrated piece of animated sin, or ignorant, 
 or uneducated, or a danger to the State, or a robber. 
 They also refuse to consider a boy starting algebra 
 at six, and never looking back, as being either a 
 manifestation of corporate wisdom or an imperial 
 asset. In their opinion, given no private means, 
 an alert young job- hunter has taken the better 
 road to improve his birth-right a birth-right of 
 inheriting nothing except what he can earn. 
 Moreover this youngster is contributing to his 
 home and keep, instead of, as now, being a con- 
 stant source of worry and expense, entailing end- 
 less irritating, inquisitorial official visits, at morn, 
 noon, and night, from hordes of education prowlers, 
 licensed midwives, sanitary pests, inspectors, sur- 
 veyors, spies, and that abomination of desolation, 
 the medical officer of health. So, not allowed to 
 help his own family, forbidden to work for money, 
 hounded into school, messed about medically, 
 pryed upon and manufactured to order, the un- 
 fortunate child sees in himself a sad domestic 
 problem from five to fourteen ; and, as Bernard 
 Shaw more or less says, the sad domestic problem, 
 of five to fourteen, retaliates by regarding himself 
 as a serious social problem from fourteen to death. 
 If this problem established itself by itself, for 
 itself, and without state aid, we might ask it not 
 to, or even say : ' Cease ' ; but when we have
 
 12 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 it turned out for us compulsorily at the rate of 
 one a minute, and at a cost of 40,000,000 a year 
 on the rates and taxes, we may well regard the 
 authors as enemies of the human race. 
 
 ' Ah,' one of these well-meaning, well-eared 
 creatures will exclaim, ' but would you have the 
 next generation grow up in ignorance ? ' It de- 
 pends on what you mean by ignorance, but if 
 you refer to Blenheim, and old Caspar babbling 
 in the sun (see Southey's poems), I would say: 
 ' Yes.' Not that Caspar should become a police 
 court offence. In a free country, prohibition is 
 as out of place as is compulsion : we don't want 
 either. 
 
 Some years ago, a distinguished writer pointed 
 out that there was in reality no such thing as an 
 uneducated man, nor could there be unless you, 
 as it were, lassoed one young, and then kept him 
 for ever after shut up in a cage by himself. Every 
 one else has pleasure and pain continually at his 
 elbow telling him what to do and what to avoid. 
 These ceaseless monitors never leave him alone, 
 and they have, in close attendance, experience, 
 and also memory, ' that warder of the brain.' 
 Every one, therefore, with eyes to see, and ears to 
 hear, has a fairly accurate notion of what qualities 
 and acquirements make for peace, quiet and comfort 
 in the home, and what developments do otherwise. 
 Can it be seriously argued that these considera- 
 tions are better perceived, better worked out, better 
 acted on, and better performed, if every child sits
 
 UNDEVELOPED EARS 13 
 
 cooped up in a stuffy council school for 5^ hours a 
 day for 9 years ? 
 
 May not such a thraldom have the worst effect 
 conceivable ? Our older statesmen thought so. 
 Lord Melbourne well said that big men were 
 educated by circumstances, and that circumstances 
 were the best education. State schools, he thought, 
 might do in Germany, but he doubted the English 
 submitting to such an infliction. To do the 
 English justice, we never asked for this. The 
 system was forced on us by ' intellectuals ' and 
 ' high-brows,' who are a miserable substitute for 
 the old English stock of the pre-examination 
 era. 
 
 The need of emphasising such considerations is 
 due to the fact that nearly all our writing has been 
 done by that singularly over-rated and inefficient 
 type of mind, the scholastic, learned and literary. 
 With this type of mind, man knows nothing 
 unless he is taught it, or told it, or reads it in a 
 book. With them, either naturally or by over- 
 education, this may be true. But with mankind 
 at large it is not true. None of us need to be 
 taught to talk, or walk, or throw stones A long- 
 ing to do a thing, and the ability, in some degree, 
 to do it, are parts of the same cause. Both the 
 desire and the aptitude are mainly an inheritance, 
 and to a large extent correlative. Yet the scholas- 
 tics have taught and preached another tale so long, 
 and so assiduously, that the real state of affairs 
 is only guessed by a few people of an untaught and
 
 14 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 rebellious nature. You may prevent a man un- 
 folding and developing himself either properly or 
 naturally. You cannot make him. Nevertheless 
 the new system is collective development, by 
 Boards, Imperial, Municipal and Urban District. 
 The board delusion was well parodied some years 
 ago in a book called The Feathered Enfranchise- 
 ment (Watts & Co.). In this book, the Education 
 Board extended their attention to our birds. A 
 Royal Commission was organised, with high 
 salaries, and in due course, they reported that our 
 birds were, for the most part, houseless and 
 homeless, and had to find sleeping accommodation 
 in hedges, trees, stacks, and roofs of houses or 
 barns. Nests were built in the spring, true, but 
 without adequate instruction or supervision. 
 There were no teachers, and no young bird went 
 through a course in the true principles governing 
 correct nest construction. There were no roofs. 
 Consequently, after a time, or, in inclement 
 weather, in no time, few nests were fit for feathered 
 habitation. Other regrettable features in bird 
 life also existed. Sanitation was non-existent. 
 An abominable system, too, prevailed in which 
 both sexes were huddled together in one nest, 
 which led to early intercourse of a regrettable nature, 
 many young birds, particularly the metropolitan 
 sparrows, being suspected of co- habiting before 
 they had learnt to fly. The bird board then con- 
 demned all the nests in the country, and bird schools 
 were built at the public expense. However, the
 
 UNDEVELOPED EARS 15 
 
 only scholar that arrived, presumably for instruc- 
 tion, was a disreputable cuckoo of a wild and 
 dissipated appearance ; the abandoned bird left 
 an egg in the model nest and went out again. So 
 the scheme fell through. 
 
 Athens originated this craze about education, 
 and, though the Romans were too sensible to 
 have much education themselves, a course at 
 Athens was fashionable. Thus Horace: Rusticus 
 expectat dum defluat amnis (The countryman waits 
 till the stream flows by). Did you ever hear such 
 nonsense ? A scholar might wait thus, but not a 
 countryman. The latter, being nature-taught 
 instead of book-taught, knows all there is to know 
 about streams. He will tell you the time of day 
 by the shadows from the bank ; he will tell you, 
 by the volume of water, the probability of floods 
 in the low- lying meadows ; and many other con- 
 siderations will occur to him that your pallid student 
 would have to be told. The countryman expecting 
 the stream to run by indeed ! Why, he would be 
 ' in or over ' while your city professor, or municipal 
 scholar, was still in the nearest cow-shed, groping 
 anxiously along the wall for a cock, or tap, with 
 which to disconnect the supply and cut it off at the 
 main. 
 
 Even in matters far removed from his calling, 
 an untaught rustic will frequently put you to shame. 
 A literary man of my acquaintance, a year or two 
 ago, found the pipe of the petrol tank on his auto- 
 wheel broken while he was far out in the country.
 
 16 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 He turned off the tap, and, after the manner of 
 ' efficiently ' educated people, he waited not for 
 the road to go by but for some one to come up. 
 In due course, a rustic came along and the littera- 
 teur asked him the way to the nearest repairer. 
 The rustic knew of none in the neighbourhood, but 
 he appeared interested in the machine and asked 
 what was wrong. The literary one showed him. 
 The ignorant fellow then suggested that the literary 
 one might bind the pipe up. This had never 
 occurred to the litterateur, though he knew some 
 Greek and Latin and geometry and algebra, and 
 his French was understood by most of the waiters 
 on the Riviera. However the literary one, seeing 
 that the ignorant one appeared more practically 
 intelligent than he was, handed him his repair 
 outfit, and the ignorant one bound up the pipe, 
 while the litterateur marvelled at him. The 
 ignorant man did the job so well that it took the 
 literary man almost into the nearest town, where 
 he had it repaired by another man of scant educa- 
 tion. Whom do you- consider the ignorant one 
 there ? The man of culture or the man of ignorance ? 
 Why not leave the uneducated man alone ? What's 
 the matter with him ? Do you want him to recite 
 Homer to you ? Do you want him to speak purer 
 grammar to his cows ? And would the beasts 
 understand him ? May I measure your ears ? 
 Which work with the tape measure concludes 
 Chapter II,
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 DEVELOPED EARS : MEN OF LEARNING 
 
 When I hear of those portents of learning and their 
 imposing erudition, I sometimes say to myself : Ah, how 
 little they must have had to think about to have been 
 able to read so much ! Schopenhauer. 
 
 So much has been said and written in favour of 
 study and learning that these things seem gifts 
 which we should be content to regard with admira- 
 tion and give thanks for. The time has come to 
 enquire the grounds for this attitude. 
 
 As far as can be seen, a learned man hopes to 
 impress people with his value to the community by 
 adding as many letters as possible after his name. 
 A learned man thus denotes his class or species. 
 Every batch of letters after his name represents a 
 degree of some kind, and every degree other than 
 honorary testifies to his having passed a stiff 
 examination in certain definite subjects. Now, in 
 what way does this improve a man, and give to his 
 opinion the authority that the learned trade union 
 consider to be its due ? 
 
 Regarding the matter without bias, or any pre- 
 disposition in favour of men of learning, what 
 
 17
 
 i8 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 merit can there be in passing an examination ? The 
 possession of a degree, to my mind, guarantees the 
 existence of a class of subjects on which a man is 
 certified never to have thought for himself, but to 
 have answered questions in the spirit and letter 
 in which he had been previously taught. Those 
 subjects then become to him closed, and, whatever 
 else he may think about subsequently, he is not 
 going to reopen those subjects. Why should he ? 
 He is already certified as an authority thereon, 
 which might no longer be the case if he abandoned 
 or questioned the premises on which he received 
 his degrees. A degree is a label constituting a 
 man' s creed and credentials. You can hardly expect 
 the goods to question their own label. 
 
 Thus every degree represents a mind closed on 
 certain subjects. The more letters behind a man's 
 name, the more subjects on which his mind is 
 closed. This is highly prized in scholastic circles, 
 where the process is termed ' opening ' the mind by 
 education. But, whether because a mind thus 
 favoured is ' opened ' to such an extent that 
 everything falls out, or whether because a mind 
 thus favoured has been ' closed ' in so many 
 directions that nothing can get in, the fact remains 
 that the more letters there are after a man's name, 
 the fewer subjects there are on which he is worth 
 talking to, and any excessive assortment of letters 
 simply means that the man is not worth talking to 
 on any subject at all. Cf. Sir Wm. Osier, F.R.S., 
 F.R.C.P., M.D., Hon. D.Sc. Oxo. ; LL.D. McGill,
 
 DEVELOPED EARS 19 
 
 Toronto, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Yale, Harvard, 
 Johns Hopkins, Liverpool and Leeds Universities; 
 D.C.L. Trin. Univ. Toronto; Gulstonian Lecturer, 
 London ; Clinical Professor, Penna ; Medicine 
 Professor, McGill; Regius Medicine Professor, 
 Oxo. ; Medicine Professor, Johns Hopkins. Con- 
 sequently he is entitled, among other distinctions, 
 to ten LL.D.'s. This alone works out to thirty 
 letters and exceeds all the letters of the alphabet. 
 Aurally, one of the best ! Yet ! 
 
 As long as triposes and honour schools were in 
 dead languages, mathematics and theology, or 
 anything remotely connected with practical life, 
 some of the inherent idiocy of the system escaped 
 notice. In an industrial age, senior wranglers, 
 senior classics and doctors of divinity soon demon- 
 strated themselves as quaint creatures without any 
 market value. Then the teaching trade union 
 clamoured for fresh fields of intellectual talent 
 in the shape of examinations in more up-to-date 
 requirements. So far, finance, farming and flying 
 have escaped, but modern languages, modern 
 literature, and every delusion called science, were 
 ' roped in ' at once, with professors, instructors, 
 examiners, schools, courses and honours. 
 
 A man who has taken honours in the modern 
 language tripos is considered ipso facto ' ear- 
 marked ' as being able to talk and teach French, 
 Italian and German ; he ranks as a capable linguist 
 and may be used as an interpreter. Who could be 
 better ? How can any one, it is asked, know Ian-
 
 20 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 guages until he has been taught ? How otherwise 
 can he acquire a vocabulary from the best authors, 
 with a knowledge of irregular verbs, genders, and a 
 correct construction of foreign sentences? That 
 is the tale, and I have known a man called a French 
 scholar on the grounds that he read Molie*re in the 
 original, quoted La Bruyre and knew many 
 interesting details concerning the life of Condorcet. 
 On the other hand, a child of twelve, the daughter 
 of a jockey, and brought up on the Continent, 
 could speak French more fluently and was more 
 consistently understood by the natives. 
 
 Now take an Italian waiter in a London res- 
 taurant. No one has taught him languages. He 
 has passed no examinations in languages. He has 
 picked them up. If he and the aforementioned 
 jockey's daughter entered together for the modern 
 language Tripos at Cambridge, the examiners 
 would ' spin ' both of them at once without a 
 moment' s hesitation. The Italian waiter would be 
 ' spun ' even in Italian, owing to his carelessness 
 in spelling and grammar, and his lack of informa- 
 tion regarding the comparative merits of Ariosto, 
 Alfieri and Tasso, together with their dates and 
 birthplaces. I refuse to believe that an Italian 
 waiter does not know Italian. I also consider 
 him to be a better linguist than the examiner ever 
 dreamt of being. Take the waiter's French. He 
 understands everything that passes as French in 
 France, or out of it : Vienna French, Milan French, 
 Paris French, Street French, Revue French, your
 
 DEVELOPED EARS 21 
 
 French, my French, and also that of an angry and 
 inebriated Russian talking Moscow French. An 
 Italian waiter is a very fine linguist indeed, the 
 admiration of the civilised world ; and the tripos 
 fellow isn't. Why, if the Army had had their 
 messing and their mess-waiting done by Italian 
 waiters, we should have needed no interpreters at 
 the front, nor in Salonica, and we should have 
 saved a great deal of money in messing. No 
 Italian waiter even went to an L.C.C. cookery 
 class, and yet he could safely be backed to run a 
 restaurant against all the L.C.C. experts alive. 
 Consequently, whatever examinations may do for 
 aural development, there are better means of 
 producing cooks and linguists. The system is 
 sinfully wasteful ; cf. the following : 
 
 Daily Express, June, 1916 
 
 Sir James Roberts, Bart., of Saltaire, Yorks., has 
 offered 10,000 to the University of Leeds for the 
 foundation and maintenance of a Professorship of 
 the Russian Language and Literature, and the gift 
 has been gratefully accepted by the University 
 Council. 
 
 I, however, say if you would speak Russian, go 
 to Russia ; if you would read Russian, buy a 
 translation. 
 
 The root of the examination craze is so strong 
 a growth that, in May, 1916, a lusty young Cam- 
 bridge examiner, well qualified to serve as a soldier 
 and not absolutely without training, was excused
 
 22 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 military service by his tribunal on the extra- 
 ordinary grounds that an impending Tripos could 
 not take place without him. And what of it ? 
 No great loss. Possibly a very good job. As if 
 passing an examination guaranteed performance ! 
 The scholastic theory, as to the close kinship 
 between wisdom and learning, took firm root here 
 in the long period when Latin was, to some extent, 
 our official language. Inscriptions on books, 
 doorways, arches, churches, colleges, tombs, gate- 
 ways and statues were all in Latin, and, though 
 not very many people understood them, the teach- 
 ing profession maintained the practice by saying 
 that only uneducated errand-boys, and vulgar 
 people, scribbled inscriptions in any other way or 
 in any other tongue. Even now salve is to be 
 seen on door-mats, requiescat in pace on tombs, 
 Roman numerals on official buildings, and either 
 Latin phraseology, or written as v, on Admiralty 
 arches. All of which is rather silly, and, with 
 Roman Numerals, a sad waste of time and money, 
 except during particular years such as c. (100). 
 Punch had a picture, a few years ago, representing 
 the delight of the natives in having Magna Charta 
 read to them in the original. In the picture, 
 they were enjoying it hugely. Nothing gives the 
 scholastic mind so much pleasure as putting on 
 canonicals to read out to you, with great solemnity, 
 something in an unknown tongue, which you do 
 not understand at all, and which they themselves 
 understand but imperfectly. Uneducated people,
 
 DEVELOPED EARS 23 
 
 except in Punch, were never enamoured of this 
 practice. 
 
 However, scholastic influence thrived all through 
 the long period, when law and religion were in 
 Latin, and when there were practically no books 
 except those in Greek or Latin, and when the 
 authors of Greece and Rome were regarded as the 
 only source of knowledge and culture. Accord- 
 ingly, since this source of information and know- 
 ledge could only be approached and appreciated 
 by men of considerable learning, a connection was 
 established between wisdom and learning, and 
 also between ignorance and sin very wrongly, of 
 which anon and all learned people were rumoured 
 to be not only good, but also exceedingly wise and 
 clever. And there was no prima facie reason why 
 they should not have been so. Appearances were 
 in their favour. Probability was not against them. 
 Enormous books copied out ornamentally and in 
 curious caligraphy by industrious monks, and 
 lodged in inaccessible buildings in monasteries, 
 suggested big things in the heads of those who 
 perused them. Then the stray Latin quota- 
 tions, that filtered down to ordinary ears and 
 became popular, contained the wisdom and experi- 
 ence of ancient civilisations condensed in an epi- 
 grammatic form, and these quotations were both 
 in shape and matter incomparably above such 
 thoughts as we had yet had means or opportunity 
 to make for ourselves. The scholars then had the 
 time of their lives. To pore over abstruse books 
 
 3
 
 24 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 was the hall-mark of a great mind, and the more 
 energy and zeal they displayed in this direction, 
 and the more authors they had read, the greater 
 their reputation for wisdom and the more highly 
 they were esteemed. There can be no doubt that 
 the more eminent of them, before they died, had 
 read, as barbarians say, the hell of a lot, or at 
 all events a very great deal. Not that it did 
 them much good. For, though learning wise 
 words and repeating wise words may be mistaken 
 for wisdom, the two things are quite distinct, as 
 indeed time was to show. And, if this fact has 
 not been amply established by all the true tradi- 
 tions of scholarship and learning, then, I say, 
 scholarship and learning have simply achieved 
 nothing, the things might as well not have been, 
 and all that midnight oil has been burnt in vain. 
 Nevertheless, when you first hear the weighty 
 observations of men reported deeply learned, and 
 looking preternaturally wise, and often in canoni- 
 cals, who tell you of the condensed wisdom of 
 past ages, and who read out pages of it to you in 
 an unknown tongue, and who occasionally trans- 
 late a few morsels to you lest you become sceptical 
 of the whole, you may be pardoned in ranking 
 them as Solons. This is what happened. Hence 
 the mediaeval mania of encouraging learning by 
 founding Henry VII colleges and Tudor schools, 
 endowed with foundation scholarships. Probably 
 not a single man of any real use to us has ever 
 taken one of those prizes. Our Drakes, Shake-
 
 DEVELOPED EARS 25 
 
 speares, Hampdens, Cromwells, Humes, Burkes, 
 Brights, Bradlaughs and H. Spencers, not to men- 
 tion Watts and Stephensons, don't win scholar- 
 ships. And even if one or two second-raters, now 
 forgotten, may have succeeded, there is no proof 
 that they might not have done better and been 
 better men without these anti-thought endow- 
 ments. 
 
 Cujusvis hominis est enare ; nullius, nisi in- 
 sipientis, in errore persevare (any man may commit 
 a mistake; but none, except a fool, will continue 
 in it), was one of Cicero's observations that our 
 wise men may have read but failed to appreciate. 
 The error of Henry VII is no excuse for council 
 scholarships out of the public pocket all over 
 the country. The best men are taxed to provide 
 scholarships for others to win. Many unfortunates, 
 inventors and others, might have weathered their 
 ill luck had they not had to keep several scholars 
 alive as well as themselves. That is indeed an 
 ass endowment act of the first water. 
 
 What we have to ask ourselves is whether we 
 are so enamoured of this mediaeval mistake that 
 we wish to perpetuate it for ever. We should 
 ask ourselves what there is so valuable about 
 scholars that they should become compulsory ; 
 we should earnestly ask ourselves whether we 
 intend to give the scholastics a new lease of life, 
 and one of a particularly deep-seated and far- 
 reaching order, exceeding that of the divines, 
 commencing at five years of age and which prao
 
 26 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 tically none of us will be able to escape. Can it 
 be that we men of the twentieth century are going 
 to allow our scholastics a peculiarly narrow- 
 minded, dull-witted race to rank their one 
 wretched, petty, mean, miserable, contemptible 
 aptitude as evidencing the whole content and 
 essence of human capacity, ' in that summed up, 
 in that contained ' ? Every administrative post 
 throughout the Empire is being confined more 
 and more to minds that can display a distorted 
 faculty for reading and remembering what they 
 are told, instead of judging for themselves what 
 they care to read or remember. Fancy men like 
 Warren Hastings or Cecil Rhodes, or Charles 
 Bradlaugh, or William Whiteley, or any of us, 
 having our capacities ranked and estimated by 
 the senior examiner at Whitehall ! 'Tis blasphemy 
 on 'man's divinity' and also on the Creator 
 if he's alive. Marie Corelli says he's dead. 
 
 Yet, since the scholastic mind, which is essen- 
 tially canonical, has managed to acquire complete 
 control in moulding the minds of the next genera- 
 tions, and estimating capacities, and setting the 
 papers by which the capacities are to be judged, 
 and also in marking and selecting them, it has 
 come to pass that what is in reality an absorbent, 
 spongy, servile, unoriginal, unenterprising, and 
 rather pig-headed mental development, has been 
 pushed up and up till it has become the accepted 
 standard recognised as desirable in all public de- 
 partments. Hence endless officials and official
 
 DEVELOPED EARS 27 
 
 regulations imposed upon their betters by inferior 
 people who have always accepted at sight the 
 opinion of those ' qualified to judge,' and who, 
 without a murmur, allowed ecclesiastics to talk to 
 them of the ' sin of doubt.' Those are the minds 
 that make the marks. Those are the minds that 
 win the scholarships. Those are the minds that 
 get the public jobs. Those are the minds that 
 cost us 40,000,000 a year out of the rates and 
 taxes. Those are your lads of promise. Do we 
 want them ? 
 
 It seems incredible that any one should ever have 
 thought an examination paper, except in joke, to 
 be a test for capacity. If you want something 
 done, why should you imagine that the man who 
 makes the marks can do the job ? Private busi- 
 nesses have never adopted the examination system, 
 nor done more than turn it over tentatively, at a 
 distance, with a barge pole, before having it carted 
 away and buried. It is nowhere to be seen except 
 in government offices. -Foremen in shops, fore- 
 men in factories, clerks in private banks, engine- 
 drivers, skilled mechanics, and motor-men pass no 
 examination papers. They are not judged on the 
 scholastic system, by examinations, but on the 
 natural system, by results. So with butlers, stud- 
 grooms, chauffeurs, game-keepers and gardeners. 
 Private employers set no examination papers. 
 Under the L.C.C the gardeners in the London 
 parks have to pass examinations in the L.C.C. 
 educational curriculum. Why ? So in the Army,
 
 28 STATEMENT OF THE PROCEDURE 
 
 where an exceptionally good N.C.O. was ' spun ' 
 for spelling ammunition with three m's. The 
 excellent fellow probably thought there couldn't 
 be too many m's in a matter of that kind. Where- 
 fore some miserable meddler at Whitehall, who 
 can do nothing himself except pass examinations, 
 deprives us of one of our best men. So with the 
 Police, so in the Navy. Moreover, the only practical 
 effect of scholarships on the rates is that scholars 
 may now be seen as waiters, and as cloak-room 
 attendants. They do it alright, yes, but they 
 might have done better for themselves if you had 
 left them alone. 
 
 The seat of wisdom, in the long run, is invariably 
 found, not in books but in men who work, though, 
 should they sit in libraries and cease to be un- 
 learned, they would doubtless, there and then, 
 become just as stupid as our men of learning. 
 The scholastic misconception, embodied in schools 
 and colleges, arose primarily from the now exploded 
 practice of seeking advice from elderly men with 
 full white beards who had adopted wisdom as a 
 pose and who spent their time poring over massive 
 volumes in out-of-the-way spots amid uncomfort- 
 able surroundings. These asinines illusive were 
 known according to their epoch, as sages, seers, 
 elders, fathers, patriarchs, prophets or oracles. 
 The type, in its decadence, may still be seen among 
 us as first lords of the treasury at 5,000 a year, 
 as lord chancellors at 10,000 a year, and as arch- 
 bishops of Canterbury at 15,000 a year. But
 
 DEVELOPED EARS 29 
 
 where we pay salaries out of our own pockets, for 
 work done and value received, instead of tradi- 
 tionally and by compulsion, the tendency of the 
 day is not to have much use for learned old men. 
 The order of events, culminating in the aural 
 development of the masses, appears to have com- 
 menced with an over- valuation of the sage, socratic 
 and senile. His position in England was greatly 
 strengthened by the accidental effect of Latin as 
 our official tongue. A natural but quite unwar- 
 rantable veneration was felt for those who wrote 
 and read in the official language and declaimed im- 
 passionately on the masterpieces of Greece and 
 Rome. Hence Henry VII colleges, Tudor endow- 
 ments, universities, countless examinations and 
 anti-thought grants, followed by boards of educa- 
 tion, council schools and attendance officers to 
 hound in the scholars. Nevertheless these pages 
 will show, and prove to the hilt, that the only 
 effect of book learning is a lengthening of the ears, 
 and, should our race determine on this develop- 
 ment, nothing is simpler; all we need to do is 
 to Educate, Educate, Educate.
 
 PART II 
 
 EVIDENCE 
 
 OF 
 
 DEVELOPMENT
 
 Even the poor student studies and is taught 
 political economy . . . the consequence is that 
 while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and 
 Jay, he runs his father into debt irretrievably. 
 
 H. D. Thoreau.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Were knowledge, property, freedom, reputation, friends, 
 sought only at the dictation of the intellect, then would 
 our investigations be so perpetual, our estimates so com- 
 plex, our decisions so difficult, that life would be wholly 
 occupied in the collection of evidence and the balancing 
 of probabilities. H. Spencer. 
 
 HAVING now stated the principle of aural develop- 
 ment, and having glanced generally at ears de- 
 veloped and undeveloped, it is, one hopes, evident 
 that a man need not be wise and good because he 
 reads books or an idiot and a robber because he 
 doesn't. My object is to go further, and to 
 enquire whether there is any evidence that highly- 
 educated people might have been less bigoted and 
 more sensible if they had never been to school, 
 and whether there is any evidence that the think- 
 ing faculty is disimproved by collective education, 
 competitive examinations and degrees. 
 
 Plenty of people are of opinion that sending a 
 child to school, before it is ten, is bad for the 
 child's brain. Why then did the education zealots 
 make school compulsory at five ? What possible 
 evidence can they produce in support of so mon- 
 strous a tyranny ? None. This consideration 
 
 33
 
 34 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 proves that an intense education, such as has been 
 the portion of our education zealots, does not 
 promote a respect for the liberty of private judg- 
 ment ; in other words, it produces bigotry. 
 
 Secondly, assuming the judgment of education 
 zealots regarding books to be correct, how do they 
 account for the fact that the authors, whose 
 praises they acclaim loudest, are the authors who 
 had the fewest books to study, who were brought 
 up on the fewest books and who never did examina- 
 tion papers ? For instance, if, as experts assert, 
 Homer and Virgil are poets of such excellence that 
 all should read them, this is evidence that study 
 does not assist epic poetry, for these poets cer- 
 tainly had few masters to copy, and whether 
 either of them went to school is exceedingly doubt- 
 ful. The same reasoning applies to Plato, and, in 
 but a slightly less degree, to Aristotle, yet these 
 two sages are supposed to have ruled the world 
 of thought since the dawn of history, and some 
 consider them to be still supreme. Yet whom did 
 they study ? Where were their degrees ? If, as 
 so many maintain, the Bible is still the best book 
 in the world, why is it that the writers of the Old 
 Testament belonged to the pre- school and pre- 
 book era ? Why is it that the authors of the 
 Gospels can produce nothing more learned than 
 Luke, a Jerusalem doctor, at a period when a 
 Jerusalem doctor cannot have known much ? Mark 
 was the son of ' a certain Mary,' father unknown ; 
 John was a fisherman; and Matthew a publican,
 
 EARS OF THOUGHT 35 
 
 a rate-collector speaking the Syriac Chaldean ver- 
 nacular. Four more uncultured writers are diffi- 
 cult to select. There were exceedingly few English 
 plays to serve as models when Shakespeare wrote 
 his; he was, moreover, the son of a butcher, yet 
 many consider him the best playwright that ever 
 existed. The same argument applies to the Greek 
 dramatists. Thespis, B.C. 535, was, perhaps, the 
 first man to write a play as distinct from a recita- 
 tion given or chanted by a chorus. Thespis 
 introduced one actor, mainly to rest the chorus, 
 and this actor gradually played many parts. 
 ^Eschylus in B.C. 499, introduced two actors, and 
 Sophocles some thirty years later introduced three 
 actors. Neither ^Eschylus nor Sophocles, judged 
 by the masters they had studied, can be called 
 qualified dramatists. Epictetus, the great Stoic 
 philosopher, began life as a slave. Plautus, whose 
 plays are the delight of so many ' high-brows,' 
 was originally in the service of some actors and 
 subsequently employed by a baker. He was born 
 B.C. 224. 
 
 To come to ourselves, such writers as Burns, 
 Bunyan and Thomas Hardy must have owed 
 nothing to education. Yet, if some one said that 
 The Mayor of Casterbridge was the finest novel in 
 the world, I should not care to contradict him. 
 Nor can it be argued that Omar Khayyam (born 
 about 1066) owed much to study. Nevertheless, 
 as rendered by Fitzgerald, he is the extraordinary 
 combination of poet and philosopher. In addition
 
 36 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 to this, nearly all our great inventors have been 
 people of little education, and hardly one of them 
 ever studied or took honours in a university. 
 Consequently, when Lord Haldane asserts that we 
 are losing our Watts and Stephensons by insuffi- 
 cient education, elementary and secondary, there 
 seems more reason to argue that we are losing 
 them by over- education and continuation classes 
 and by diverting their aptitudes into something 
 different and less useful, i.e. the ' pince-nez effi- 
 cient ' mentioned in Chapter I. We might lose 
 a Parr or Person by insufficient education, but 
 not a Watt or Stephenson. 
 
 If the aim of education is to produce thought 
 and reflection and to improve the thinking faculty, 
 the next chapter will give plenty of evidence that 
 this result has not been achieved. The effect of 
 much reading is to prompt a man to try and re- 
 member what has been said, and to accept an 
 authority, and to be annoyed with those who pre- 
 sume to have an opinion without having read the 
 authorities. An uneducated man appears to me 
 to make more use of what brain he has than a man 
 of culture, and, ceteris paribus, my impression is 
 that the less book education we had in youth, the 
 better our minds would work subsequently. 
 
 Nowadays, a doctrine is rammed into every 
 young mind that thought, or reflection, is the 
 guide, originator, and instigator of all we do, and 
 that reading books promotes valuable thoughts. 
 I doubt this. The conviction grows on me that
 
 EARS OF THOUGHT 37 
 
 thought, except among geniuses, arises more by 
 doing something practical about which we reflect 
 subsequently. If this is so, our thinking faculties 
 might be more assisted by manual labour than by 
 reading books. Schopenhauer goes so far as to 
 say that nothing is so fatal to thought as continuous 
 reading, and that the sure way to have no thoughts 
 is to pick up a book whenever you have nothing 
 to do ; moreover in manual labour your mind 
 can, to a certain extent, follow its own train of 
 thought. One might go further still. There are 
 plenty of minds who might read all the best 
 authors at their own convenience and yet never 
 be led to think at all ; but, when they are doing 
 something practical, their mind is alive and on the 
 watch, and afterwards they think about it, and 
 how to do better, and they discover small im- 
 provements and inventions. The longer you 
 mis-feed such a mind on books, the more you lessen 
 its natural ardour, and after a nine years' course 
 of five hours a day in a council school, what 
 remains of the remnant spark has struggled and 
 gone out. That is a sinful way of lengthening the 
 human ear against its owner's wishes. Nor are 
 such minds exceptional. 
 
 Sir Hiram Maxim is said to have been out shoot- 
 ing on one occasion with an old rifle which kicked 
 so badly that he could not abide the idea of such 
 a deal of mis- spent force being wasted. He thus 
 conceived the principle of his maxim gun. He 
 might have read all the books connected with
 
 38 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 rifles by all the best authors, and illustrated, 
 but without having had any particular principle 
 brought home to him. In fact, if a man had 
 only read books, and never done anything practical, 
 he might be incapable of thought, as is the case 
 with our scholars. 
 
 Literary men and authors are notoriously bad 
 in all practical affairs, with the exception of such 
 minds as Herbert Spencer and Schopenhauer, 
 who are, however, in a class by themselves, which 
 appears less than once in a hundred years and is 
 absolutely superhuman. 
 
 Statesmen who have written books, or been 
 reputed lovers of literature, have not, omitting 
 Burke, left many wise words or weighty principles 
 behind them, nor has their conduct been superior 
 to other men's; cf. lately, Macaulay, Disraeli, 
 Balfour, Haldane, Morley and Birrell, of whom 
 anon. On the whole, Sir Robert Walpole and John 
 Bright seem the best of their respective eras. Sir 
 Robert Walpole was a non-reader, and John 
 Bright openly confessed that he could not tackle 
 the ' hundred best books,' which caused Charles 
 Kingsley and Matthew Arnold to shake their heads 
 and turn up their eyes to heaven in horror. Sir 
 Hiram Maxim, I fancy, had not partaken of that 
 literary feast. The effect of continuous reading 
 may make you a judge of the merits of Browning's 
 poetry, but what is the object of this, and why is 
 it better than being a judge of reversible detonators, 
 of bi- concave valvular disks or even of vintage
 
 EARS OF THOUGHT 39 
 
 port ? Books lengthen the ears, and I refuse to 
 believe that the longer the ear the better the chap. 
 
 As far as can be seen, most of what we do is 
 done without conscious thinking, so, even if con- 
 scious thought were improved by books, the actual 
 gain might be very slight. For instance, thinking 
 has little to do with hand-writing, shaving or 
 using tools of any kind. Again, suppose you 
 have to wheel a bicycle backwards out of some 
 congested shop or shed, you will find you never 
 think at all. You take hold of the handles and 
 waggle the machine about, or pull it backwards 
 and forwards a few times to get the direction, 
 and the matter proceeds without your knowing 
 exactly why, and sometimes when it hardly looked 
 possible. Some do this better than others, but 
 none think, and none can tell you what they did, 
 except some horrible person who read it up first 
 and found out what he did afterwards. These 
 men become teachers, and teach you the great 
 aural system of reading about a thing first, in- 
 stead of doing it first and thinking how to improve 
 on this subsequently. 
 
 If a bicycle-pump, or something of that kind 
 refuses to work, you may see a cultured person, 
 of aural development, study both ends of it, and 
 reflect and ponder, and attempt to understand 
 what is the cause of the mishap, and he seems to 
 forget that even if he found out he would, in all 
 probability, be no better off than he was before. 
 Accordingly, he wastes a certain amount of time 
 
 4
 
 40 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 quite uselessly. An ordinary person, of little 
 education, in similar circumstances, hardly ever 
 does this. He starts at once twisting the pump 
 about, and tries numerous little things to make 
 it act, and for no very definite reason, yet often 
 successfully, otherwise he gives it up. He does 
 not think not consciously. 
 
 Machinery seems to have some innate power 
 of correcting itself and running straight again. It 
 is not a matter to think about at the time. Like 
 a refractory woman, it has to be humoured, and 
 patted affectionately, or tapped tentatively with 
 a hammer, but not kicked. Those best at this 
 process never think. 
 
 Accordingly, it seems rather curious, nay, 
 pathetic in a mechanical age, to hear, as one of 
 the reasons for compulsory education, that the 
 newcomer would not be able to cope with the 
 intricacies of our various mechanical appliances 
 until his mind had been ' opened ' by books, and 
 his reflective powers stimulated by culture and 
 secondary education. This, as has been here ex- 
 plained, is a fallacy, for our mechanical instincts 
 resemble those of the lower creation, including 
 insects, and, so far from being stimulated by 
 bookwork, they are hampered by book work and 
 set in a wrong direction. All we can do is to think 
 about things afterwards, which animals cannot. 
 An early familiarity with mechanical appliances 
 of all kinds would do far more for this instinct 
 than a long course of lessons in the deadening
 
 EARS OF THOUGHT 41 
 
 atmosphere of a council school. Surely the best 
 way to make a good carpenter is not by means 
 of geography, history or books on carpentry ? Let 
 the child be frequently in a carpenter's shop, 
 and sometimes at work there, which is now a 
 serious offence. Children are true simians and 
 instinctively copy the best style at work and at 
 play. To put them to books instead is a ridiculous 
 thing to do, for childhood is the time when in- 
 stinctive faculties are developed and when we 
 acquire the knack of doing things without think- 
 ing about them first, which is the only way to do 
 a thing well. Energetic minds resent being 
 taught, these minds want to commence ' right 
 away ' and the instinct is a healthy one. 
 
 In a game-playing nation, an analogy from 
 games may be to the point. Do we, in games, 
 think how to do every stroke ? Probably, at the 
 time, we should never think at all, and the best 
 way for us can only be found by actually playing 
 and subsequently recognising our limitations for 
 future guidance. To read books by a champion 
 first would not be the right way for any one, and 
 for a clumsy person it would be the worst system 
 possible. I remember, in my youth, asking the 
 late William Renshaw, lawn tennis champion, 
 whether he put up his thumb along the handle of 
 his racquet in taking ' back-handers/ hoping, I 
 suppose, to miss fewer myself by doing as he did. 
 He, however, said that he wasn't sure, and he 
 made some imaginary passes in the air, but with-
 
 42 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 out solving the problem. Eventually, a racquet 
 was given him and he played several imaginary 
 strokes with much natural grace, which, of course, 
 was unconscious. He then told me that he didn't 
 put up his thumb, as a rule, but he might do so 
 for one or two particular strokes. 
 
 This always stuck in my memory, for so many 
 game- players nowadays are inclined to know too 
 much about what they do and they claim to play 
 with the head. They then support compulsory 
 schools. Luckily for themselves, however, they 
 don't play with the head really, or they wouldn't 
 win. 
 
 Remembering all this, I was quite horrified to 
 hear of a soldier ' spun ' in some examination in 
 which he had been asked to explain on paper how 
 to clean the ordinary magazine rifle. He asked 
 to have a rifle brought him, and, on this being 
 negatived, he refused to answer the question. My 
 heart went out to the man as a stout fellow and 
 one of the right sort. What, he argued, could be 
 more stupid than to ask a man to explain how to 
 clean a rifle without putting a rifle in his hands 
 so that he could show you how to clean it ? His 
 view is sound. The literary man is the opposite. 
 He likes plenty of paper, but he does not like 
 the actual job. This he would leave to you. 
 The performer, the man who can do things, 
 handles a rifle with the instinct of a mother ; he 
 will show you how to clean it, or anything else, 
 in practice, but not on paper. Exams, are not
 
 EARS OF THOUGHT 43 
 
 for him. Think, too, of Renshaw. If Renshaw 
 had been asked to explain the art of tennis on 
 paper, without a racquet in his hand, I doubt 
 many having realised that he was our champion. 
 
 The card game of Bridge is a good example of 
 how little quick decisions have to do with con- 
 scious mental effort. Fancy if you selected Bridge 
 players by an examination in Bridge. Why, the 
 man who made the most marks might easily lose 
 the most rubbers. And yet, in many departments 
 of life, we have examinations which are quite as 
 unsuitable as they would be in cards. Even in 
 Macaulay's favourite test of Cherokee verses, a 
 mind might know all the metres and all the rules, 
 and yet make a miserable hash of a bright national 
 anthem suited to Cherokese requirements. 
 
 Wherefore, in our mechanical age, a council 
 school seems the worst place in the world to 
 develop mechanical instincts. Will a mechanical 
 genius ever win a scholarship ? Scholars may 
 think with their ears, but other types think with 
 their hands. No two aptitudes are more dis- 
 similar than mechanical aptitudes and scholarly 
 aptitudes, and a system of state scholarships, 
 adapted for the latter only, is as wicked a prin- 
 ciple as was ever conceived. Herbert Spencer 
 shows that there is a connection in the scheme of 
 things between what is right and what pays. Our 
 politicians, however, state that such and such a 
 system is ' productive of good results/ quite apart 
 from whether it is just or unjust. But what is
 
 44 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 unjust will not be ' productive of good results ' 
 not for long. This aspect of things should be 
 brought home to us by the Church, who, however, 
 for some reason or other, clamour for more com- 
 pulsion, more scholars and more Bible teaching 
 in the council schools. All Churchmen have been 
 highly educated and have achieved aural develop- 
 ment need I say more ? 
 
 It would be a curious commentary on our 
 educational system if, in the future, a tame bar- 
 barian, a performer, a man who didn't think, was 
 a part of the establishment in all well-regulated 
 households. From the dawn of history, a resident 
 boarder, paid to supply the principal deficiency 
 of the time, seems to have been the practice of 
 our exceedingly practical nobility. First it was 
 a blind harper, then a bard, then a jester, then a 
 chaplain, then a notary, and lastly a private 
 secretary who could spell. A capable, resident, 
 non-thinking barbarian seems indicated as their 
 successor. He would be employed for cultivating 
 the decaying faculty of instinctive thought with 
 the hands as opposed to reflective or book thought 
 with the ears. 
 
 The nett result of the craze for compulsory 
 schools and compulsory culture, in the future, 
 may be the arrival on our shores of foreign mis- 
 sionaries, in the shape of young Sikhs and well- 
 bronzed Zulus, engaged by the State as teachers 
 to develop the lost art of relying on direct percep- 
 tion rather than on the cognition of co-ordinated
 
 EARS OF THOUGHT 45 
 
 conceptions. Possibly, one day, a lightly-clad 
 Zulu professor will be as common an institution in 
 the best houses as a French governess used to be, 
 and one more popular with the girls. His art 
 would be the faculty of doing as opposed to the 
 faculty of knowing. However, we shall have lost 
 all our open championships before anything of the 
 kind occurs. 
 
 The ears of thought, nurtured on books, have 
 been the victims of a vicious delusion which men 
 engaged in manual labour might perhaps have 
 avoided. The well-read ' high-brows ' noticed 
 that a clerk received higher wages than a labourer. 
 They assumed that the reason of this was because 
 a clerk's attainments were more valuable to the 
 community than those of the labourer. Conse- 
 quently, by forcing everybody up educationally to 
 the clerk's level, the whole community, they 
 imagined, would rise in value. Nothing of the 
 sort, of course, occurred. The reason why clerks 
 received better wages than labourers was not 
 because of their value, but because the clerk supply 
 was not unlimited and because a certain initial 
 outlay was needed to produce him. Directly the 
 State provided a supply of potential clerks by free 
 compulsory State Education, the clerk attainments 
 were reduced to the level of unskilled labour, and 
 nowadays a chauffeur or a well-to-do mechanic 
 is far better off than a clerk. The injustice of the 
 procedure is outrageous, but reading books never 
 made men just.
 
 46 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Take another aspect. If the brain, as Schopen- 
 hauer shows, is but a servant of the will or character, 
 then State.Education, even if it discovered a brain, 
 would leave out the far more important part of the 
 person behind the brain. 
 
 And why should a love of books be supposed 
 to show brain ? The real fact is the reverse, and 
 the better the brain, the fewer the books you 
 can read. Herbert Spencer had hardly read any 
 books at all, and he employed sundry readers to 
 look up references for him. By the time you are 
 thirty-five, you will find very few writers worth 
 reading. If you are dull enough, whole libraries 
 are at your service, and at any age. And that is 
 the way to lengthen your ears.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 
 
 It is to a mechanical instinct found in many men, and 
 not to philosophy, that most arts owe their origin. . . . 
 One would not conclude that the business of the most 
 enlightened ages and the most learned bodies is to argue 
 and debate on things invented by ignorant people. 
 
 Voltaire. 
 
 THE object of this chapter is to enquire how far 
 learning from books has exploded superstitions, 
 swept away fallacies, decreased tyranny, improved 
 understanding, furthered personal freedom and 
 combined individualism with a sense of justice. 
 The valuable effects of book education must be 
 mainly imaginary unless they are clearly traceable 
 in all these things. Men of learning and letters 
 are so confident on the subject that their principal 
 object, of late years, has been to increase the out- 
 put of themselves, by rates and taxes, until no 
 one is too poor to become a learned man. Surely 
 something is wrong somewhere if, for generation 
 after generation, the most promising of the 
 descendants of those who have ' got on,' selected 
 for their attainments by scholastic experts, and 
 aided by degrees to give weight to their utterance, 
 
 47
 
 48 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 did not so stagger the world with the width of their 
 wisdom that we have little left to do beyond sorting 
 it out, classifying it, labelling it and bottling it up 
 for future use and reference. Cellars of it have 
 been left behind all over the place, particularly in 
 the Bodleian library and in the British Museum, 
 and scarcely a page has had any sort of effect or 
 made any one any wiser or better. No religious 
 liberty has been obtained from books, nor personal 
 freedom, nor justice, and the gentleman who burnt 
 the Alexandrian library may have been a very 
 sensible fellow, and a benefactor of his race. Now 
 for the evidence. 
 
 Appropriately enough, at just about the time 
 when our learned men thrust free education upon 
 the public and made it compulsory, a work was 
 published in four volumes which might well have 
 been called, An Account of the Errors Maintained 
 and Persisted in by Learned Men -from Caesar to 
 Victoria. The work, in fact, did for the wise 
 what collectors of popular fallacies and common 
 errors have purported to do for the vulgar. It 
 gave an account of all the nonsense accepted 
 as sense by the ' intellectuals ' and ' high- brows ' 
 of Europe for the past 2,000 years, and it con- 
 clusively proved that, for all practical purposes, 
 the people who read and study do not become any 
 wiser than those who work. Unfortunately the 
 author had no such object in view ; which, in many 
 ways, is a pity. 
 
 The first two volumes of this work were called :
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 49 
 
 The History of European Morals ; the second two 
 volumes were called : The Rise and Influence of 
 Rationalism in Europe. Lecky's is so gentle and 
 lovable a disposition that it seems almost a sin to 
 point the conclusion that he so unaccountably 
 missed, or to use his labours for a purpose which he 
 would have been the first to regret. With some 
 authors, particularly with Macaulay, this would 
 have been most enjoyable. But let us get on with 
 our task, and ask how far ignorance or lack of 
 education was responsible for the accepted super- 
 stitions of Rome. 
 
 Through the entire duration of pagan Rome, it was 
 regarded as an unquestionable truth, established by 
 the most ample experience, that prodigies of various 
 kinds announced every memorable event, and that 
 sacrifices had the power of arresting and mitigating 
 the calamity. In the Republic, the Senate itself 
 officially verified and explained the prodigies. In 
 the Empire, there is not an historian, from Tacitus 
 down to the meanest writer in Augustan history, who 
 was not convinced that numerous prodigies fore- 
 shadowed the death and accession of every sovereign, 
 and every catastrophe that fell upon the people. 
 Cicero could say with truth that there was not a 
 single nation of antiquity . . . which did not admit 
 the existence of a real art enabling men to foretell 
 the future. Lecky : European Morals, vol. i., p. 363. 
 
 None of these beliefs originated with uneducated 
 people nor had uneducated people any essential 
 connection with them. The various forms of pagan 
 belief were standardised by the Royal College of
 
 50 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Augurs, the Royal College of Pontiffs and the 
 ancient order of Haruspices (entrail inspectors), and 
 if an uneducated person seemed sceptical he would 
 be referred, as to-day, to the practices of all civil- 
 ised nations and told not to expose his ignorance. 
 The prodigies ' officially verified ' by the Senate 
 included watching how the sacred chickens crossed 
 the road note the word, ' included,' for there 
 were plenty of others. A report was also issued on 
 the entrails of the birds and beasts sacrificed to the 
 gods, which report was based on the technical 
 findings of the Haruspices (entrail inspectors) who 
 were highly educated experts. As this continued 
 ' through the entire duration of Pagan Rome,' 
 a fairly high standard of silliness must have been 
 maintained and for a considerable number of years, 
 and in spite of a regular course of studies in Athens, 
 and a profusion of Greek professors and tutors in 
 Rome. The ' brilliant days of the Antonines ' 
 formed no exception to this, and the ' brilliant ' 
 men of that period owed more to the goodness of 
 their emperors than to any brilliance of their own. 
 Now, though all this silliness was suffered by un- 
 educated people, they cannot be held responsible 
 for it. No sage, after being crowned for wisdom, 
 ever encouraged an uneducated person to dispute 
 with him in a temple, or question the accepted 
 wisdom on public festivals, and the untaught man 
 was more often told to hold his tongue or have it 
 cut out. Uneducated persons took no leading part 
 in the sacred portent performances, and they did
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 51 
 
 little beyond accepting good reports with cheers, 
 and bad ones with groans. The report was drawn 
 up entirely by well-educated men who understood 
 the science of the thing, and why certain effects 
 must follow certain omens as surely as light goes 
 with the sun. In the accepted silliness of the day, 
 an ignoramus has never been more than an ' also 
 ran ' to the man of learning. 
 
 At Rome, as in London, the only difference 
 between the very wise and the very ignorant was 
 that the very wise understood the inner nature of 
 the accepted doctrine more fully and could tell you 
 more about it. The buyers and sellers in the 
 market-place, the pimps and panderers, the 
 gladiators and the slaves, can never have believed 
 any Roman portent quite so extensively, so ex- 
 quisitely, so profoundly, so definitely and so 
 specifically as a member of the sacred College of 
 Pontiffs or a member of the Royal College of Augurs 
 ' (yes, there was one) who had been through a 
 course. Consequently, given the opportunity, the 
 ignorant person was the more likely to shed his 
 beliefs ; which is exactly what has occurred over 
 and over again all the way from Caesar to Victoria. 
 The influence of learning, through Lecky's pages, 
 has never exploded a single fable or cleared up a 
 single superstition, but, on the contrary, has given 
 to every old error, blood, body and backbone. 
 
 Your wise men, ' highly, deeply learned, who 
 think things out and know,' standardise a folly and 
 make it respectable. They organise their silliness
 
 52 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 into a profession and entwine it with vested interests. 
 Every sedile in Rome, every censor of morals, 
 knew, so to speak, the rank, performances and 
 handicaps of all the Roman deities, from Jupiter 
 downwards, and how far the portents of the day 
 were likely to affect the future. The loaded head 
 never doubts, and the only hope is ignorant people. 
 The new thinker dies unheeded unless some un- 
 taught men happen to hear him. After that, time 
 is his ally, though 'time is never in a hurry.' 
 
 Professor Thompson, F.R.S., at the Swathmore 
 lecture, May 18, 1915, attributed the principal 
 sources of error to ' over-respect for authorities 
 and the unwarranted assumptions of historians.' 
 In other words, to learned people, not to ignorant 
 ones. All of this will be more and more difficult 
 to shift in proportion to the ' efficiency ' of state 
 education. The Socialists, being pledged to the 
 system, argue otherwise. They say that the real 
 obstacle to the regeneration of mankind lies in the 
 ignorance of the working man. Among highly- 
 educated people they see much light and promise. 
 I don't doubt it. 
 
 To keep to Rome, if there is anything in Chris- 
 tianity and it is generally regarded as the light 
 of the world its success in ancient times was 
 entirely the work of uneducated men, and without 
 them anything might have happened to the light 
 of the world. But the slaves of Rome found in 
 it a lasting hope, and, though they died slaves, 
 they also died Christians. Christianity, during
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 53 
 
 the ' brilliant days of the Antonines,' was never 
 looked upon, in educated circles, as being more 
 than an ignorant superstition. It had, however, 
 certain innate advantages. The old Roman gods 
 were of noble aspect but typical aristocrats, who 
 never did anything. If you wanted anything done 
 you had to entrust it to demons : 
 
 The immediate objects of the devotion of the 
 pagan world were subsidiary spirits of infinite power 
 and imperfect morality. 
 
 These were the demons. Except to well- 
 educated people, thoroughly grounded from in- 
 fancy, a religion of that kind can have few attrac- 
 tions. Consequently, ignorant people were always 
 open to anything better that might happen to 
 come along. 
 
 When Christianity came to Rome, the un- 
 educated man had to suffer for Christianity, but 
 this being an essential part of the faith, the religion 
 was, if anything, assisted. The Christian enthu- 
 siast did not actually deny the existence of the 
 pagan gods, but he called the whole lot, quite 
 impartially, demons, i.e. devils. In religion a deal 
 is excusable, but a Christian should have realised 
 the feelings of an ancient Roman when he first 
 heard his great god Jupiter, to whom he hardly 
 dare to pray, reduced to the rank of a demon and 
 called a devil. To-day, under the Blasphemy 
 Act, men are locked up for years and with much 
 less reason.
 
 54 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 As long as Christianity was confined to un- 
 educated people, it was a religion of suffering, and 
 the educated people took care that that was thor- 
 oughly understood. In time, however, learned 
 men ' took over ' the ' ignorant superstition ' and 
 made it respectable. They breathed into it what 
 Matthew Arnold calls ' sweetness and light ' ! The 
 faith was then standardised, the angels, devils, 
 forms and nature of deity were re-arranged, re- 
 sorted, re-indexed, re-incarnated and re-classified, 
 and we soon had the Royal Colleges of Pontiffs 
 and Augurs over again, in a different form, under 
 another name, with the Inquisition added. There 
 you have the benign influence of culture ! With 
 compulsory education in Rome, there would have 
 been no Christianity. With compulsory education 
 in London, we shall never get rid of it. 
 
 Scholars have a method of their own for esti- 
 mating the standard of thought and the prevalent 
 creed at any given period. This method is uni- 
 versal and to think otherwise is to expose your 
 ignorance, which, in my opinion, is a sign of hope. 
 The scholarly method is to take some celebrated 
 authors, say, Marcus Aurelius, Juvenal, or Seneca, 
 and urge that the standard of thought there dis- 
 played is incompatible with the acceptance of 
 portents and prodigies. They then argue, in fine 
 style, that these beliefs belonged to the hewers of 
 wood and the drawers of water, but were not 
 shared by the men of intellect and culture. This 
 should not be believed. The idea is founded on
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 55 
 
 the assumption that a fine writer is an indica- 
 tion of sense both in himself and in the people 
 who read him. This, however, is quite untrue. 
 The gift of writing, with the single exception of a 
 great philosopher, is no more a guarantee of sense 
 than the gift of song or the gift of gab, nor will 
 the patrons of one be found any more sensible 
 than will the patrons of the other. Nowadays, no 
 person of understanding is in the least surprised 
 to find, in countless anecdotes and tales, that 
 Tennyson, Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle, Matthew 
 Arnold, Samuel Smiles and Dickens, and their 
 greatest admirers, were and are considerably 
 below the average in common sense. Yet these 
 illustrissimos are already being trotted out as a 
 historical basis for the ' brilliance ' of the Vic- 
 torian era ! On the other side, we should remember 
 that few men of letters are absolutely sane, and 
 their silly side is the main factor in their popularity. 
 If, however, you take a great thinker, you will 
 find he in no way represents the age ; he repre- 
 sents nothing but himself, and the vague hope that 
 ignorant people may one day find him. How can 
 you say Herbert Spencer represented the Victorian 
 era ? He opposed compulsory vaccination, com- 
 pulsory education, and every form of state meddling 
 with the individual for the supposed benefit of the 
 community. Educated England is not repre- 
 sented by Herbert Spencer, but by Viscount 
 Milner, Dr. Macnamara and Geo. R. Sims. Was 
 educated Rome represented by Seneca ? Was 
 
 5
 
 56 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 educated Scotland represented by Hume ? If you 
 took the boy with seven toes recently born in 
 Glasgow, you would be nearer the mark, as regards 
 educated Scotland, and some officious proctor as 
 regards educated Rome. 
 
 Apply this reasoning. Descend from Seneca 
 and come down to some piece of wisdom attri- 
 buted to some eminent consul or senator. Cato 
 is reported, on the authority of Cicero, to have 
 said he could not understand how two Haruspices 
 (entrail inspectors) could pass one another in the 
 street without bursting into laughter. From this 
 scholars deduce considerable scepticism among 
 educated Romans. 
 
 Disraeli is reported by various authorities to 
 have said that his religion was that of all sensible 
 men. On being asked what was the religion of 
 sensible men, he replied : ' Sensible men never 
 say.' From this, some eminent historian, of a far- 
 distant age, may deduce considerable scepticism 
 among the educated classes in the ' brilliant ' Vic- 
 torian era. Yet if this scepticism were at all 
 general, why need the sensible man take such care 
 not to say what his religion might be ? In 1880, 
 when Bradlaugh, an outspoken free- thinker, 
 attempted to take the oath in the House of Com- 
 mons, there was a terrific hullabaloo. The police 
 were called in, and the struggle, in and out of the 
 House, cost Bradlaugh his life. To-day every 
 public school in England has a chapel, and the 
 boys attend divine service at least once a day.
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 57 
 
 They are assembled for prayers every evening 
 and, in addition to these collective prayers, each 
 boy is alleged to pray for himself both on rising 
 and before going to bed. On Sundays the boys 
 go to chapel two or three times ; no game of any 
 kind is permitted ; they may go out for a walk, 
 but they may not run, row, cycle or swim. We 
 also have a Lord's Day Observance Act, of which 
 the less said the better. If this is the religion of 
 all sensible men, no wonder sensible men don't 
 care to say much about their religion. For my 
 part, I would not attach much importance to what 
 Cato said in the second century B.C., or to what 
 Disraeli said in the nineteenth century A.D. 
 Neither of these men spoke out plainly, nor did 
 anything openly, nor left anything on record 
 which could be used openly ; and, from their 
 timidity, one might deduce the exact opposite of 
 what the quotation intended. 
 
 A good remark is often chance rather than con- 
 viction. It may be due to good spirits, anger or 
 despair, or it may be the result of a certain word 
 being used in a very unusual sense. A brave man 
 is another matter. What he says he feels, and 
 something is going to happen, and from what 
 happens the standard of current thought can be 
 gauged. Bradlaugh's struggles, not Disraeli's re- 
 mark, show the sentiments of the time. Evi- 
 dently, in the ' brilliant ' Victorian era, the stan- 
 dard of highly educated M.P.'s sitting at West- 
 minster, and representing the best British thought,
 
 58 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 was far below that of comparatively uneducated 
 men of Northampton, who voted Bradlaugh, and 
 nothing but Bradlaugh, from 1868 to 1880, and 
 when they at last got him in, they stuck to him 
 and kept him there. 
 
 With the historical ground thus paved, you 
 would be very surprised, in such a matter as the 
 burning of witches, if the wise men, ' highly 
 deeply learned, who think things out and know,' 
 set to work, in conjunction with the centres of 
 education and the seats of learning, and explained 
 to uneducated people that the whole thing was a 
 mistake, and that the interpretation of certain 
 passages of the Bible had led them to make infer- 
 ences of a regrettable nature which had caused 
 the deaths of many innocent people. Nothing of 
 the sort, of course, occurred. The higher the 
 education the more certain was the conviction as 
 to the necessity of burning witches, male and 
 female, for the term included both. Here is an 
 instance : 
 
 In 1664 two women were hung in Suffolk, under a 
 sentence of Sir Matthew Hale, who took the oppor- 
 tunity of declaring . . . the wisdom of all nations 
 had provided laws against such persons. . . . Sir Thomas 
 Browne, who was a great physician as well as a 
 great writer, was called as a witness, and swore 
 ' that he was clearly of opinion that the persons were 
 bewitched.' Lecky : Rationalism in Europe. 
 
 Glanvill, a writer of some distinction and a 
 fellow of the Royal Society, who are to-day no
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 59 
 
 better than they were in 1664, defended the 
 burning of witches against the growing group of 
 ignorant doubters. His book, called Saducismus 
 Triumphatus, was much valued in educated circles 
 as a very able work and a complete reply to the 
 cavillers, who were alluded to as follows : 
 
 Which sort of infidels, tho' not ordinary among the 
 mere vulgar, yet are they numerous in a little higher 
 rank of understandings. Lecky : ibid. 
 
 ' Not ordinary among the mere vulgar ' is vague, 
 for, if at that time every one who didn't know 
 Latin was ' a mere vulgar/ then so many people 
 would be included that these, without being 
 ' ordinary,' might be quite numerous. How many 
 does Glanvill mean ? You may, of course, find 
 a scholar, a B.A. Oxo :, a man of Balliol, with 
 honours, and also with the Oxford manner, and 
 you may ask him. But, I wouldn't, if I were you. 
 Beyond boring you to tears, he will illumine 
 nothing. However, in common with many other 
 over-evoluted people, I like to be accompanied by 
 a tame barbarian, much as our ready money 
 book-makers have a ' minder/ and he tells me 
 about the weather and the latest news and other- 
 wise keeps me up to date. So, having him with 
 me, I submitted the passage to him and watched 
 him with considerable interest. He got to work 
 on the business at once, like the good fellow he is, 
 and read it through carefully. He didn't seem to 
 think much of it ; perhaps it puzzled him ; any-
 
 60 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 way he made no remark. I began to fear he would 
 not give me the information I wanted. He then 
 examined the cover of the book, both top and 
 bottom. This evidently did him good, for he 
 smiled at me good-humouredly and said Glanvill 
 meant ' a good few, quite a lot, or more than you 
 think.' An ignorant devil, of course ! Still I 
 wish historians would use them more. 
 
 Wherefore, I think we may safely say that, 
 around 1664, Glanvill and the fellows of the Royal 
 Society were, as regards witches and general sense, 
 some way behind ' a good few, or more than you 
 think,' of the ' mere vulgar.' And so they are 
 still. 
 
 Bacon, as a representative of the higher order 
 of understanding, as opposed to the ' mere vulgar,' 
 went out of his way to condemn witches in a book 
 he quaintly called The Advancement of Learning 
 and dedicated to the king. As attorney-general, 
 he was responsible for torturing on the rack a 
 harmless old clergyman, called Peacham, suspected 
 of harbouring a devil somewhere inside him. This 
 shows clearly that a man may thoroughly grasp 
 the science of thought and explain it, and in Latin, 
 and yet think wrong. Why not know less about 
 thought, and think right, in which ' a good few ' 
 of the ' mere vulgar ' found no difficulty at all ? 
 As late as 1736, the Scotch divines met together 
 and published a strong statement affirming 
 belief in witchcraft. John Wesley, educated at 
 Charterhouse and Christ Church, held till his
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 61 
 
 death, in 1791, that ' giving up witchcraft is in 
 effect giving up the Bible ' ; and, like the good 
 churchman he was, his education told him it was 
 better for him to burn witches than to burn his 
 Bible. 
 
 If every child in England had been taught 
 5^ hours a day for nine years that 
 
 The pernicious dangers of witchcraft were amply 
 established by the laws of all civilised countries, and 
 by the researches of able men for several centuries, 
 
 witches would now be isolated and treated as 
 germ-carriers. 
 
 Who, do you suppose, first doubted the king's 
 touch as a cure for scrofula ? The educated men 
 ' who think things out and know ' ? ' Not there, 
 my child, not there.' The belief rested on ample 
 evidence and was supported by all the highest 
 dignitaries in the land, who never saw reason to 
 doubt till the change of dynasty caused uncer- 
 tainty as to who was the rightful owner of the God- 
 given gift. John Browne, surgeon to Charles II, 
 regrets 
 
 There were, however, some Atheists, Sadducees, 
 and ill-conditioned Pharisees who disbelieved in it. 
 Lecky : Rationalism in Europe. 
 
 Sir Frederick Treves, surgeon to King George V, 
 speaks somewhat similarly of those doubting the 
 merits of the Almroth Wright anti-typhoid vaccine. 
 Of the two, I prefer the king's touch, as, at any 
 rate, harmless.
 
 62 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Usury was one of the many sins exploded by 
 untaught people. That it was a crime and con- 
 trary to the laws of nature was held amply estab- 
 lished by the general consent of all nations against 
 it. Aristotle had laid down the doctrine that 
 ' money is sterile by nature/ and this was repeated 
 parrot-like by all the ' high-brows ' of Europe, 
 from B.C. 350 to A.D. 1787, when Bentham pro- 
 pounded the following simple consideration : 
 
 If the borrower employs the borrowed money in 
 buying bulls and cows, and if these produce calves 
 to ten times the value of the interest, the money 
 borrowed can scarcely be said to be sterile or the 
 borrower a loser. Lecky : History of Rationalism, 
 vol. ii. 
 
 Probably it is unnecessary to add that this 
 simple consideration of Bentham's had, in practice, 
 been anticipated and acted upon for years by 
 numbers of people quite ' unqualified to judge,' 
 notwithstanding various punishments (including 
 torture) devised by the highly-educated authorities, 
 who were convinced that the practice of usury (i.e. 
 lending money at interest) was pernicious to all 
 concerned. The whole notion of borrowing money 
 to provide a working capital, and then paying 
 the interest out of the profits, was simply the 
 efforts of uneducated people to make a living with- 
 out paying a man of learning to put them through 
 a three years' wisdom course in a university. It 
 was pure ignorance on their part, and all educated 
 people knew well that so heterodox a notion was,
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 63 
 
 in the first place, wicked, entailing hell-fire later 
 on ; and, in the second place, commercially un- 
 sound, bound to fail, entailing ruin and perhaps 
 imprisonment, and, in their opinion, it deserved 
 to. However, some ignorant people are ' daring 
 thinkers.' 
 
 Finally, up till 1800, those ' qualified to judge ' 
 held that all wealth consisted of gold, and that 
 therefore any trade which resulted in gold leaving 
 the country must be regarded as a dead loss. 
 In 1735, Bishop Berkeley had asked : 
 
 Whether the annual trade between Italy and 
 Lyons be not about four millions in favour of the 
 former, and yet whether Lyons be not a gainer by 
 this trade. Lecky : History of Rationalism, vol. ii., 
 P- 344- 
 
 But well-educated folk held that the bishop was 
 ' breaking up ' if he thought that Lyons could 
 benefit to any appreciable extent by losing 
 4,000,000 a year to Italy. Yet, in spite of this, 
 many wrong-headed people, who had escaped 
 schools of thought, and had remained steeped in 
 ignorance, managed to acquire considerable wealth, 
 mainly because they had no idea in what wealth 
 consisted provided they found themselves better 
 off at the end of twelve months than they were at 
 the beginning. In fact, Lecky' s volumes prove 
 conclusively that, unless ignorant people either 
 had not known, or had ignored, what the authori- 
 ties believed, we should have been a nation of great 
 aural development and of corresponding stupidity.
 
 64 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Histories prove that a country will only advance 
 in (y)ears unless the opinions of learned bodies are 
 successfully resisted and thus prevented becoming 
 any portion of the law of the land. 
 
 Educated people appear to imagine that the 
 acceptance of the doctrine of free trade, as illus- 
 trated in the repeal of the Corn Laws, was due to the 
 writings of Adam Smith, subsequently assisted by 
 the learned essays of gifted professors spreading 
 the light throughout the country. Hence, what 
 some are pleased to call, the Manchester school of 
 thought. As if a school of thought was necessary 
 to tell men that the less Government did, and the 
 less it had to do, the better for all concerned, except 
 the party politicians drawing the salaries. At 
 first, the only books on free trade were the ledgers 
 of merchants, which put in black and white the 
 actual loss to particular trades caused by Govern- 
 ment interferences. Here were the materials of 
 Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. He himself 
 invented nothing; he discovered nothing; nor 
 was he indebted to any Bodleian library. That 
 was where he had luck, for nothing found in a 
 library ever did any one any good. All Adam 
 Smith did was to put down in book form, but rather 
 unreadably, what ignorant people of sound 
 commercial instinct, and endless energy, had been 
 doing for years in spite of Government interference 
 of the most pernicious kind, conducted according 
 to the established principles of all the most learned 
 bodies in Europe. Some one was bound to do this
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 65 
 
 sooner or later, and Adam Smith had the necessary 
 details almost thrown at his head. His father 
 was Commissioner of Customs at Glasgow, which 
 was a nest of traders, and Adam Smith was 
 educated at Glasgow University, and subsequently 
 lived and lectured there. It was impossible for 
 him to escape knowing something about trading 
 profits from his father, and also meeting traders 
 and traders' families, and comparing how they 
 made money with the accepted doctrines of national 
 wealth. After a time, he became tutor to the young 
 Duke of Buccleuch, and he was several years with 
 him on the Continent. There, his Glasgow experi- 
 ences floated in his mind, and it occurred to him 
 that if, when he came back to Glasgow, he did not 
 find a large percentage of these uneducated traders 
 more or less bankrupt, then they were right and 
 the accepted doctrines of wealth were wrong. 
 In due course he returned. The traders were not 
 bankrupt, but were doing well, and Adam Smith 
 merely copied down what untaught men had told 
 him. Directly Adam Smith displays learning, 
 and forms theories of rent and wages, he will be 
 found very ingenious, and often beautiful, but 
 never correct. 
 
 The actual fighters for the repeal of the Corn 
 Laws were not professors at all, but, for the most 
 part, ignorant men, determined not to allow the 
 price of their bread to depend upon the party 
 politician. Bright and Cobden did the talking, 
 and they were anything but scholars. Their
 
 66 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 notion of the limited functions of government is 
 far more sound than anything taught or talked 
 of since, notwithstanding that perishing phrase 
 about ' educating our masters.' And if every 
 child in England had been taught for 5^ hours a 
 day for 9 years that the Corn Laws and the sliding 
 scale were a triumph of human ingenuity and 
 wisdom as all well-educated people were taught 
 and believed do you suppose you would ever have 
 shifted the Corn Laws ? 
 
 At the present moment, many people of scant 
 education seem to have a vague horror of book- 
 lessons, a distrust, the unerring instinct, not yet 
 educated out of us, that all is not well. Supposing 
 they are right. Why then, under Samuel's 
 Children Act, put them in prison and shut up their 
 children in an industrial school ? Is this ' sweet- 
 ness and light ' ? Surely the parents should have 
 perfect freedom of choice ? Leave them alone. 
 Their mistakes may be useful to others if not to 
 themselves. Some new form of education, not 
 books, is in the air, and it may take many curious 
 forms before the most profitable pattern emerges. 
 The worst of the worst, the rudest of the rude, is 
 preferable to any government pattern, or any 
 government interference. One thing is absolutely 
 certain, that the state pattern, being framed for 
 all now, is suitable to none ever. 
 
 Every few years, a certain number of people 
 play their hand better than those around them, 
 and their children become what is called well
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 67 
 
 educated. In many ways, as regards the first step 
 up, this is not easier but harder than it used to be. 
 No one, who can afford anything better, likes a 
 council school, and, except for the well-to-do, 
 there are no other places. Private teachers and 
 private schools, in a small way, were at once 
 ruined by council schools, backed by education 
 boards and inspectors who insisted that the 
 private standard was to be at least as long and at 
 least as bad as that adopted by the Board of 
 Education. The private teachers had also to 
 contribute to their rivals by paying for them in 
 rates and taxes. The wickedness of the thing is 
 fairly obvious. It also nips in the bud the first 
 step up, the differentiation from the common un- 
 desirable ; and increases the advantages of those 
 already up. Therefore not to be common, to differ 
 at all, is harder. However, continuing the conten- 
 tion that every few years a few new families join 
 the well-educated classes, and a few of life's failures 
 go back, then education must be a poor thing if the 
 understanding of well-educated people descended 
 from winners has not proved itself to be the bed- 
 rock of reason, the seat of sense, wherein foul 
 things intrude not and bigotry and prejudice 
 strive in vain to enter. So far from this being so, 
 a well-educated man has always been the cham- 
 pion bigot of the world, having been taught to 
 read from others and not to think for himself. 
 Apparently untaught people, by being untaught, 
 escaped much of this, and actually provided the
 
 68 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 fields of hope where right took root, and the veins 
 of sense along which it travelled. Moreover, in 
 actual writing, in drama, poetry and fiction, the 
 untaught men more than hold their own. What 
 can be the cause, if not the bad effect of books 
 commenced too soon and indulged in too long ? 
 
 The general doctrine handed down by professors 
 and teachers would seem to be that ignorant 
 people remain steeped in sin and error until en- 
 lightened by men of learning and culture; and, 
 further, that ignorant people, in order to account 
 for quite ordinary and natural occurrences, have 
 recourse to childish tales and absurd superstitions, 
 which are one by one investigated and annihilated 
 by the men of learning, in spite of popular passion 
 and prejudice. To think this, a man must have 
 read himself silly. The only fable I can find 
 which was cleared up by learned men, is the fol- 
 lowing, and they also circulated it : 
 
 Aristotle, the greatest naturalist of Greece, had 
 observed that it was a curious fact that on the sea- 
 shore no animal ever dies except during the ebbing 
 of the tide. Several centuries later, Pliny, the 
 greatest naturalist of an Empire that was washed by 
 many tidal seas, directed his attention to this state- 
 ment. He declared that, after careful observations 
 which had been made in Gaul, it had been found to 
 be inaccurate, for what Aristotle had stated of all 
 animals was in fact only true of man. It was in 
 1727, and the two following years, that scientific 
 observations made at Rochefort and Brest finally 
 dissipated the delusion. Lechy : European Morals 
 vol. i., p. 371.
 
 EARS OF HISTORY 69 
 
 When all is said and done, what exactly did this 
 momentous discovery achieve ? Was any one 
 happier ? Probably the only effect was to pro- 
 foundly modify an epoch-making essay on the 
 Influence of Lunar Revolutions on Human Mor- 
 tality, which some J. C. Balbus, B.A., Oxo., had, 
 at home, ripe and ready to be delivered to the 
 fellows of the Royal Society. And none would 
 have laughed ! The F.R.S. may be long in the ear, 
 but he doesn't laugh. It's against the rules in 
 his world. 
 
 Ah, well, those who ' sell sea-shells on the sea- 
 shore ' or make nets, or catch fish, have no time to 
 notice whether the crabs or lobsters watch for the 
 ebb of the tide before they elect to die. Fishermen 
 catch fish and men of learning catch illusions. 
 When we have no uneducated men left, who then 
 will escape the delusions ? 
 
 Why did the untaught men, throughout our 
 history, exhibit a sound sense, above that of the 
 majority of the educated ? Why did they show 
 some instinct for the side that was right, above 
 that of the educated, and to an extent bordering 
 on the wonderful ? They had less opportunity in 
 every respect ; except that they were not brought 
 up on books and cultured people are. In other 
 words, their one advantage was they escaped 
 education, so-called ; which is the lesson of the 
 ears of history.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 
 
 Hence we see at the present day the husk of Nature 
 investigated in the minutest detail, the intestines of in- 
 testinal worms and the vermin of vermin known to a 
 nicety. But if some one comes as, for example, I do, 
 and speaks of the kernel of nature, none will listen ; they 
 even think it has nothing to do with the matter, and go 
 on sifting their husks. Schopenhauer. 
 
 1 SCIENTIFIC ' is the word of the day. Once, 
 when all knowledge was supposed to be contained 
 in the classics or in the Bible, the word had 
 something in its favour. But things have reached 
 such a pitch lately that, if you do not accept 
 scientific thought and scientific evolution, you are 
 supposed to believe in Christianity and Baptism. 
 This is partly due to clergymen and teachers not 
 having realised that religion is merely a barbarous 
 alternative for metaphysics. The ancients had no 
 such word as ' metaphysical ' and, when anything 
 was difficult or impossible to account for, they 
 merely murmured fj.opla Oda, or a deo, which 
 scholars invariably, but incorrectly, rendered as 
 ' by divine providence ' or ' sent by God.' Aris- 
 totle, needless to say, wrote Physics, and some 
 70
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 71 
 
 subsequent works of his were called Metaphysics, 
 but the analogy was that of Xerxes and Arta- 
 xerxes, and his later books only meant ' after 
 physics/ and had no connection with the word as 
 used by us nowadays. If people translated 
 ' divinely ordained ' into unintelligible, or meta- 
 physical, as they should, the sphere of religion 
 would soon be recognised. However, the influ- 
 ence of the Bible is dwindling, and if you support 
 a statement by saying Joshua vii. 14, or Acts 
 xxiii. 9, the testimony is accepted as to the moral 
 value of your reference rather than as to its 
 having actually occurred. ' True as gospel' is now 
 a bright and cheery phrase resembling ' right as 
 rain,' and not to be taken too literally. And 
 this will happen to the word ' scientific ' in due 
 course. 
 
 Scientific thought, if looked into, will be found 
 to differ little from ordinary thought except in 
 being duller, and in its style suggesting a scribe 
 whose reading had been limited to etymological 
 dictionaries. In other respects, scientific thought 
 resembles ordinary thought. It will harbour all 
 the prevalent notions of the day, and it will confer 
 the highest honours on pretentious and undeserv- 
 ing people. Its merits are purely imaginary. 
 Try some of Huxley's Aphorisms, which have been 
 collected and published in the Golden Treasury 
 Series. 
 
 No. XXIII. The only freedom I care about is the 
 freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am 
 
 6
 
 72 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ready to part with on the cheapest terms to any one 
 who will take it from me. 
 
 No. CCCXV. It is better to go wrong in freedom 
 than to go right in chains. 
 
 If both of these are ' scientific ' thoughts, then 
 ' scientific ' signifies ' incorrect ' as applied to one 
 of them. Try another couple : 
 
 No. CCLXXXI. . . . Every ignorant person tends 
 to become a burden upon, and, so far, an infringer 
 of the liberties of his fellows, and an obstacle to 
 their success. Under such circumstances an educa- 
 tion rate is, in fact, a war tax levied for purposes of 
 defence. 
 
 No. CCCLXXIII. People will never recollect that 
 mere learning and mere cleverness are next to no 
 value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the 
 things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are 
 everything. 
 
 The italics are mine and emphasise the fact 
 that these ' scientific ' thoughts contradict one 
 another. If what cannot be taught, ' energy 
 and intellectual grip,' are everything, why is the 
 ignorant or untaught person a burden to his 
 fellows ? The words ' ignorant,' ' uneducated ' 
 and ' untaught,' give rise to much misconception 
 and misunderstanding, which you expect ' scien- 
 tists ' to avoid. My own impression has always 
 been that that old bone-man Huxley was a much 
 overrated person. 
 
 Even so great a thinker as Herbert Spencer does 
 not altogether avoid the educated misconception 
 on ignorance :
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 73 
 
 If to be ignorant were as safe as to be wise, no 
 one would become wise. And all the measures which 
 tend to put ignorance on a par with wisdom, in- 
 evitably check the growth of wisdom. 
 
 Here, again, ignorance is being confused with 
 stupidity or folly. The opposite of ignorant is 
 learned, or well-informed, rather than wise ; and 
 learned men are seldom wise. Yet this thought 
 would be quoted as a ' scientific ' thought. What 
 Herbert Spencer meant was : If not to know were 
 as safe as to know, no one would know. Very 
 likely, and since not to know books is quite as 
 safe as to know books, and since books are not 
 the only means of knowing, the common idea 
 about ignorance is one that is becoming a national 
 danger. Science is described by Herbert Spencer, 
 in First Principles, as ' parti ally- unified know- 
 ledge,' and since most book knowledge, unified 
 partially, or otherwise, is absolutely useless, so is 
 most science. 
 
 Bacon, in England, is held to be the father of 
 scientific thought. His personal character is one 
 of the worst in English history. The Oracle 
 Encyclopedia makes a striking comment on this : 
 
 Considering his lamentable failure in public life, 
 it is to be regretted that he (Bacon) did not devote 
 himself absolutely to literature and science. 
 
 Yet if the faculty of knowing (science) is of so 
 little moral benefit to the knower himself, why 
 should it be so belauded ? Bacon was a thor-
 
 74 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 oughly bad man. He was prosecuting counsel 
 against his benefactor, Essex, and did his utmost 
 to prove him guilty ; as law officer of the Crown, 
 he made new laws against witches and increased 
 the stringency of those existing ; before a parlia- 
 mentary committee, he confessed to twenty-three 
 acts of corruption, and was fined 40,000 and 
 lodged in the Tower. His biographer continues : 
 
 Great as are his claims as a moralist, he will be 
 best known to posterity as founder of the inductive 
 philosophy. 
 
 Both statements deserve comment. First, how 
 can any one be a founder of inductive philosophy ? 
 For ' inductive ' simply means collecting evidence 
 and drawing conclusions therefrom, which has 
 been the common practice of all dull thinkers, 
 except theologians, from time immemorial. A 
 philosophy may well be labelled Stoical or Epi- 
 curean, but to simply say ' inductive,' seems to 
 imply that it consists entirely of system, is all 
 evidence, and that it gets no further. If this is 
 meant, it certainly applies to Bacon, and, to a 
 large extent, to Darwin. 
 
 Bacon's method was very inductive. He said 
 he would rather believe all the legends in the 
 Talmud and the Alcoran than that this world was 
 without a creator. Well, most of us would be- 
 lieve a great deal rather than read all the legends 
 in the Talmud, but why could he not believe in 
 his creator right away, if he wanted to ? This
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 75 
 
 craze for study is inseparable from scientific 
 thought. All that Bacon really demonstrates is 
 that there is simply nothing he can't believe when 
 he wants to. This is ' some ' inductive thought. 
 
 Secondly, I am inclined to resent Bacon being 
 called ' a great moralist.' If him, why not others ? 
 Why not the late Mr. Charles Peace ? Peace used 
 to read the lessons in church with considerable 
 fervour and in a voice of singular sweetness en- 
 riched, it was thought, with a good deal of brandy. 
 Was Charles P. a moralist ? Prefix the word 
 ' scientific ' and all is explained. Such men are 
 ' scientific ' moralists. Bacon was a great ' scien- 
 tific ' moralist, i.e. he knew all about morality, 
 could impart morality, and his knowledge thereon 
 was ' partially unified,' but he did not do any. 
 So with Charley Peace. He certainly could im- 
 part morality, which presupposes he knew some. 
 Evidently another ' scientific ' moralist ! Andrew 
 Do-Little, in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, was a 
 ' scientific ' dustman ; he knew the work, but did 
 none. By results, however, these ' scientific ' 
 successes were failures. Do-Little, if I recollect 
 rightly, was appointed honorary secretary of a 
 church mission for reformed dustmen ; he became 
 respectable, but was miserable ; Bacon was put 
 in the Tower ; C. Peace was hung. 
 
 From Huxley, Bacon and Peace, let us ascend 
 to Darwin. Why is Darwin reckoned as the 
 prince of scientists ? Why are there more pic- 
 tures of Darwin in our polytechnics than of all
 
 76 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 our other scientists together ? What did he 
 actually do for us ? What did he actually tell us 
 that we did not know before ? He was certainly 
 an exceedingly good man, but his success was as 
 a scientist, not as a moralist, and such a scientific 
 success as his makes a striking commentary on 
 the word ' scientific.' 
 
 Everything we know, according to Schopen- 
 hauer, consists of what is known and the knower, 
 neither of which considerations must be omitted. 
 It is, therefore, he said, a ' clumsy process ' to 
 seek to derive all knowledge from objects per- 
 ceived, without paying any attention to their per- 
 ceiver and knower, ' through which, nay, in which 
 alone, the former exist.' If, then, Darwin's- labours 
 should one day come to be regarded as mere 
 material for thought, or as giving a false impres- 
 sion, or as extensive notes round and about a 
 very small context, or, in short, as ' much ado 
 about nothing,' then the word ' scientific ' as 
 applied to a work might still connote a dull work 
 without necessarily conveying that it possessed 
 any value or was likely to bear fruit. Not that 
 this is going to occur just yet. For one thing, 
 Darwin's nature is extremely attractive, and no 
 one wishes to attack him or belittle him. Secondly, 
 his industry was such that, on all organisms, he 
 became an encyclopaedia ; and human beings are 
 so constituted that if a man knows enough, and 
 spends enough time knowing it, his deductions are 
 taken as being equal to his industry in importance
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 77 
 
 and magnitude. As long as knowledge is sup- 
 posed to consist in enumerating long lists of facts, 
 or in passing examinations in them, Darwin's 
 position will be secure, and, at the present moment, 
 if you do not accept Darwin, you are supposed to 
 believe in Genesis, winnowed by an Ark selection. 
 
 The position of Darwin is simply astounding. 
 Other scientists have known plenty of facts and 
 have arranged them with a connecting link but 
 little vaguer than his, and yet their names are 
 barely known. How did this occur ? Can it be 
 that pure luck is a bigger factor in a scientific 
 success than in a commercial one ? 
 
 Ah, no, some scientific enthusiast will say depre- 
 catingly : Luck may be a principal factor in suc- 
 cess as poet laureate or home secretary ; luck 
 may be a principal factor in success as an actor 
 or as lord mayor ; luck may be a principal factor 
 in success as a soldier or as governor-general of 
 Madras ; luck may be a principal factor (smiling 
 scientifically here) in success with prayer, but not 
 in science, ah, no. 
 
 Dare I say : Ah, yes ? Well, I'm over military 
 age and I'm going to risk it. Scientists don't 
 succeed by being scientific. A scientific success is 
 like a commercial success, and consists of intro- 
 ducing your wares at a favourable moment (i.e. 
 luck) ; secondly, in being common enough not to 
 make all the other producers look ' out of it ' (i.e. 
 not a genius) ; thirdly, in promoting kindly feel- 
 ings among the other sellers (i.e. a nice and un-
 
 78 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 pretentious disposition). All of these items were 
 Darwin's and in an extraordinary degree. He 
 came at the moment, his mind and his views were 
 peculiarly common, and he was one of the nicest 
 men ever born. If all the other scientists are 
 against you, you may be a Schopenhauer, but 
 you will not be a Darwin. If you ask yourself 
 what Darwin told us that we did not know before, 
 you will have some difficulty in finding out what 
 it was, and even that little is shared by Wallace. 
 Is he equal to Bichat or Lamarck, except in being 
 nicer and luckier ? No nature other than Dar- 
 win's could possibly have performed his life's task 
 without creating round himself a veritable army 
 corps of enemies, composed of zealous churchmen, 
 university professors, promising politicians and 
 hosts of scientists, all viewing him as a grave 
 attack on the value of their own labours and their 
 own position in the universe. But Darwin's 
 nature steadily disarmed his enemies. The scien- 
 tists eventuaUy united in his praise, and claimed, 
 each in his own sphere, to have afforded him valu- 
 able assistance ; the churchmen saw in him a 
 religious nature and an untiring industry, accom- 
 panied by a few regrettable tendencies only too 
 common in those not ordained to the work of the 
 Master ; the professors and politicians followed 
 suit, and the man was actually buried in West- 
 minster Abbey ! This is a far greater tribute to 
 the nature of the man than to the nature of his 
 thought. For, no great and enduring thinker
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 79 
 
 ever has been, or ever will be, buried in West- 
 minster Abbey, except by being dug up and re- 
 interred subsequently. 
 
 What is so lovable about Darwin is the quiet 
 persistence of his energy, allied with an anxiety 
 never to give any unnecessary offence. He was 
 also animated by a constant eagerness to admit 
 the smallest help, or suggestion of help, from all 
 and everybody. Coupled with luck, that is why 
 he is where he is. How else are you to account 
 for it ? 
 
 Here is the big idea with which he commences 
 operations : 
 
 I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate 
 study and dispassionate judgment of which I am 
 capable, that the view which most naturalists until 
 recently entertained, and which I formerly enter- 
 tained namely, that each species has been inde- 
 pendently created is erroneous. Origin of Speciti, 
 p. 4, Pop. Ed. 
 
 He then attempts to account for the origin of 
 species by a process of a natural selection of 
 favourable variations. But, though he gives in- 
 numerable instances of very peculiar facts, none 
 of them in the least account for the origin of 
 species, and, except in the variation of pigeons 
 under domestication, he seems to have for the 
 most part forgotten what he had set out to prove. 
 To his whole contention one may well reply : 
 
 There are several species of man and several 
 species of monkey, and few, except theologians,
 
 80 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ever thought that each of these were separate 
 formations or special creations. The point, how- 
 ever, is, did any type of man, however low, ever 
 become a monkey, or did any type of monkey, 
 however high, ever become a man ? Darwin may 
 think so, but was he the first to think so, or even 
 among the first to think so ? On Darwin's own 
 showing, the naturalists seem to have been behind 
 the age rather than in advance of it. Plenty of 
 other men have been before him, and without 
 special study. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci, 
 the painter (1452-1519), wrote: 
 
 Compile a particular treatise for the description 
 of four-footed animals and among them place man, 
 who from infancy walks on four paws. 
 
 In the description of man should be comprised 
 animals of the same species such as the baboon, the 
 monkey and their numerous relations. 
 
 This looks as if special creations were not uni- 
 versally believed in even at that date (1452-1519), 
 except perhaps by scientists, naturalists and 
 churchmen. Not that every thought of man, as 
 scientists aver, must be considered non-existent 
 unless it can be found in a book. If the books 
 published in England, previous to the Armada, 
 represented the whole output of our thought and 
 fancy before that date, we should have been a very 
 dull race, with a cumbersome language, and no 
 terse, condensed forms of expression. The case 
 being the reverse, for non-readers and non-writers 
 are not necessarily non-thinkers, neither are they
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 81 
 
 dumb. In fact they really make the language 
 which is subsequently used by learned men. 
 
 To keep to Darwin, the facts seem as follows : a 
 limited theory of evolution from lower grades of 
 life to higher grades of life had existed long before 
 his day, and one common pattern of formation 
 was known to be universal. He himself, however, 
 had accepted special creations. Darwin's claim to 
 fame rests on the introduction of a principle of 
 ' natural selection ' as the sole factor of the evolu- 
 tion. The inheritance of acquired aptitudes was 
 not included in this, and many of Darwin's prin- 
 cipal supporters, such as Weismann, strenuously 
 and specifically denied it. Herbert Spencer, on 
 the other hand, regarded its exclusion as fatal to 
 the theory. Darwin, in a note to the sixth edi- 
 tion of the Origin of Species, writes : 
 
 Natural selection is not the exclusive agency in 
 the modification of species, as always maintained in 
 this work. 
 
 To me, this is strong evidence of the valuable 
 effects of a lovable disposition in science. The 
 concession here made is a far bigger one than 
 that of Malthus in his theory of population. 
 Malthus, as most are aware, published an enquiry 
 on population in which he maintained that man, 
 increasing in a geometric ratio, while his food- 
 stuffs were increasing in an arithmetic ratio, must 
 eventually increase too fast for the wherewithal of 
 existence. I have always thought this a neat and
 
 82 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ingenious theory. But Malt bus, though an ex- 
 ceedingly good man, was an exceedingly unpopular 
 man both in his theory and in his handling of it ; 
 consequently, when he subsequently admitted 
 that the exact ratio was incorrect, he was univer- 
 sally jeered at, his case was considered punctured, 
 and he was practically told to go home. In my 
 opinion, Darwin has retracted far more than 
 Malthus did, and yet he still reigns supreme. How 
 do you account for it ? 
 
 The eighth Duke of Argyll, who was a very 
 level-headed practical man, cautious of his words, 
 and, what is so rare among modern statesmen, a 
 thinker, admired and enjoyed the works of Dar- 
 win, but without accepting him. The duke, though 
 apparently unacquainted even with the name of 
 Schopenhauer, went so far as to deny that outside 
 influences are the cause of a change in structure, 
 which again causes a change in function, and he 
 asserted that ' future functions determined ante- 
 cedently the growth of the structure.' The merit 
 of the aristocracy is that they dislike study, and 
 are more interested in their own opinions than in 
 those of their author, and often rightly so, for the 
 duke's point is, in reality, the key to the whole 
 question, and on it depends whether an organism 
 can, as it were, create itself in conformity with 
 some inner feeling, or blind impulse, or whether 
 it has little say in the matter and is developed by 
 some principle of ' natural selection ' of variations 
 and adaptations caused by outside circumstances.
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 83 
 
 In the Schopenhauer view, modification must be 
 slight, for not only the shape, but the whole scheme 
 of the organism is from within ; it being the out- 
 ward expression of an idea. In the Darwin view, 
 modification is endless, for the organism is the 
 result of fortunate adaptations, and is, so to 
 speak, bumped about the world like a piece of 
 clay. In Schopenhauer's view, each definite 
 species was and is unalterable. The question is 
 whether Darwin's works establish the conflicting 
 thesis. The duke thought not, and said of natural 
 selection : 
 
 Half the scientific world went mad on a verbal 
 metaphor derived from the skill of artificial breeders. 
 
 One day, sooner or later, the scientists will have 
 to meet Schopenhauer, and, if he can be upset, 
 this age so fruitful in scientific thought should at 
 once sweep him away ; for Schopenhauer, if ac- 
 cepted, presents an immovable barrier to the 
 scientific theory of evolution. Omitting all of 
 him that can be found in Kant (whom Herbert 
 Spencer only allows to be ' verbally intelligible ') 
 his position is clearness itself. ' I teach,' he says, 
 ' that the inner nature of everything is will, and 
 I call will the thing in itself.' He considers every 
 kind of life and movement to be the outward ex- 
 pression of the ' will-to-live,' which in man takes 
 the form of living by intelligence, instead of by 
 agility, ferocity, strength or prolific breeding ; 
 and, so successful has conquering man been in his
 
 84 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 endeavour, that certain sections of him seem likely 
 to over- populate the globe. Man's will, accord- 
 ing to Schopenhauer, like all other wills, is imper- 
 ishable, unalterable and metaphysical ; man, 
 though in form a species of monkey, has never 
 been other than a man, in the same way that a 
 lion, though in form a species of tiger, has never 
 been other than a lion, whose ' will-to- live ' is the 
 will of a lion and can never be otherwise. Will is 
 unalterable. 
 
 The scientific theory of evolution, needless to 
 say, asserts the reverse of this and claims that 
 life evolves from the simple to the complex, cul- 
 minating eventually in so wondrous a structure 
 as man, who, it is predicted, should continue to 
 evolve steadily and steadily and grow more and 
 more perfect. This attitude is derived from a 
 prolonged study of innumerable forms of all kinds 
 of life, that is, appearances. 
 
 With Schopenhauer, appearances are false, 
 fickle and illusive. The kernel of investigation 
 is in being and not in appearing. Thus, with him, 
 our one connection with reality is in our conscious- 
 ness of our own will, which is unseen, unalterable 
 and metaphysical. Such knowledge as can be 
 obtained by these means is a real knowledge and 
 a knowledge of the reality, ' the thing in itself ' of 
 which all phenomena are appearances. The diffi- 
 culty is that what can neither be seen nor com- 
 prehended seems unlikely to do much to illumine 
 the riddle of the universe. On the other hand,
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 85 
 
 studying countless appearances opens out an end- 
 less vista of false impressions. Stripped of 
 scientific verbiage, this will be the battle-field be- 
 tween Schopenhauer and the scientists. 
 
 To all haters of education and study, such as 
 myself, the glory of Schopenhauer is in his force 
 and in his brevity. His whole position, prac- 
 tically, is given to you in The World as Will and 
 Idea, vol. i., book iv., 53-59, inclusive. This 
 occupies 71 pages. Herbert Spencer, mighty 
 thinker though he, of course, is, does not seem, like 
 Schopenhauer, to possess the art of riveting your 
 attention and then anchoring it securely with one 
 grand phrase; you seem ever just coming to the 
 end of a position, and ready to have it in a nut- 
 shell, when you are introduced to yet further 
 developments in the shape of yet another annelida, 
 yet another myriapod, and yet another black man. 
 Would that it were otherwise. He runs to eigh- 
 teen volumes, and hefty ones, too, some of them. 
 Darwin is less of a thinker, less of a dictator, and 
 even more of a bill-sticker of evidence, and there- 
 fore more wearisome. Every page introduces yet 
 another fossil, yet another chrysalis, or yet an- 
 other piece of moss, each with an additional lesson 
 written on its back. Few of us can wish to be 
 enrolled as mere registers of evidence. My 
 head is no fact wagon, and I'd rather deny 
 than read Darwin. Schopenhauer's whole teach- 
 ing is contained in one book and two essays. All 
 that he ever wrote barely fills five volumes. He 
 
 1
 
 86 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 tells you what to believe and how to believe it, and, 
 such is his spell, that to dare to doubt him seems 
 only possible to such as ' harbour nothing but 
 words under their low foreheads.' Whether this 
 is the will in him, or in them, or in nature, I 
 know not, but it's great. 
 
 The sad side of Schopenhauer is that all life 
 should seem satisfied in its willing except man. 
 Man alone, perfectly conscious of what he wills, is 
 left unsatisfied. He perceives, he wills, he attains, 
 and is dissatisfied ; he tries again, same result. 
 His life is an endless succession of potential gratifi- 
 cations all ending in disappointment. Death, 
 objectively considered, may come as a ' merciful 
 release,' but he doesn't want that either. So far 
 as this view is correct, and correct it is in essentials, 
 our scientific creation the perfect man will be 
 perfect only in misery. His gratifications may 
 increase but so will his disappointments, and, in 
 his increased sensibility, he will feel them more. 
 For my part, such are my imperfections that, 
 when I think of him, I sometimes chuckle. 
 
 Schopenhauer, apart from being a writer of 
 extraordinary force, has, in his origin of species, 
 incomparably more life than Darwin has, and all 
 that he says is more definitely and peculiarly his 
 own. But professors have always disliked Schopen- 
 hauer, nor was he fond of them. Scientists could 
 never accept him because he would persist in 
 knowing things without evidence, arguing that 
 evidence had no value except in relation to what
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 87 
 
 the seer should choose to see in it. Schopenhauer 
 commences, not with a dozen volumes of data and 
 evidence, but with the penetrating glance of genius, 
 saying that what we see in the blind impulse of an 
 insect, or in the conscious desire of man, are but 
 the expressions of the ' will-to-live/ the ' will-in- 
 nature.' He has an essay, The Will in Nature, 
 consisting of only a few chapters but going right 
 into the heart of the principle of life, and the origin 
 of species, far further than Darwin or any one else. 
 To the religious nature, asking for the majesty of 
 awe, Schopenhauer undertakes to provide him with 
 a way to wonder fuller and wider than anything 
 he had ever wondered previously. To the scientist 
 clamouring for evidence, evidence and nothing 
 but evidence, Schopenhauer turns with the con- 
 tempt of which he is so consummate a master : 
 
 These knights of the crucible and retort should be 
 made to understand that the mere study of chemistry 
 qualifies a man to become an apothecary, not a 
 philosopher. Certain other like-minded investigators 
 of Nature, too, must be taught that a man may be 
 an accomplished zoologist, and have the sixty species 
 of monkeys at his fingers' ends, and yet, on the 
 whole, be an ignoramus to be classed with the vulgar. 
 . . . Send him to the servants' hall, where his 
 wisdom will best find a market. 
 
 Naturally, this man is going to have enemies, 
 always fatal in ' scientific ' thought, as the 
 lives of great thinkers have shown. It is my 
 intention to copy out a few quotations from The 
 
 7
 
 88 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Will in Nature, and let him tell his tale as he alone 
 can ; to alter a word seems sacrilege. But why 
 has not this already been done ? There is, too, 
 another question : Schopenhauer published The 
 Will in Nature in 1836, some fifteen years after 
 his great work, The World as Will and Idea, which 
 had brought him some modicum of notice. He 
 died September i8th, 1860. Darwin had been 
 writing on his own investigations since 1838, 
 which culminated in the Origin of Species in 1859. 
 That Darwin and Schopenhauer should not have 
 heard of one another is quite conceivable, though 
 Schopenhauer read his Times regularly every day 
 and the third edition of The Will of Nature con- 
 tains a reference to the Times of May igth, 1860. 
 Great minds, as I say, live in a world of their 
 own, and that they should know nothing of one 
 another must not astonish us. But what about 
 our thousands of professors in England and 
 Germany who know all about every one and every- 
 thing in the great world of thought ? They must 
 have known Schopenhauer as one of the greatest 
 thinkers, as well as perhaps the most powerful 
 writer who ever lived ; they must have known 
 of The World as Will and Idea, and of The Will in 
 Nature ; why did they never secure for us any 
 notice of Darwin's enquiries by Schopenhauer, a 
 grand opponent ? Or, better still, a review from 
 him of the Origin of Species ? 'Twould have 
 been a lasting joy. That the professors and 
 scientists should never have thought of such a
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 89 
 
 thing shows how useless they are even in their 
 own sphere. 
 
 However, in the absence of professors, it falls 
 to me to show that the origin of life on this planet 
 is accounted for in another way besides Genesis 
 and the Ark, or Darwin and Wallace. The odd 
 thing is that I should be, as far as I know, the first 
 to point the matter out ; though some one who 
 had no education, or had resisted it, would be 
 sure to pave the way. Here, then, is what may 
 be gathered by a few quotations from The Will in 
 Nature : 
 
 Not only the voluntary actions of animals, but 
 the organic mechanism, nay even the shape and 
 quality of their living body, the vegetation of plants, 
 and finally, even in inorganic nature, crystallisation 
 . . . not excepting gravity ... is absolutely identical 
 with the will we find in us. The Will in Nature : 
 Introduction. 
 
 Now, if we enter more closely into the above- 
 mentioned fitness of every animal's organisation for 
 its mode of life and means of subsistence, the ques- 
 tion that first presents itself is, whether that mode 
 of life has been adapted to the organisation or vice 
 versa. At first sight, the former assumption would 
 seem to be the more correct one ; since, in time, the 
 organisation precedes the mode of life, and the 
 animal is thought to have adopted the mode of 
 existence for which its structure was best suited, 
 making the best use of the organs it found within 
 itself : thus, for instance, we think that a bird flies 
 because it has wings, and that the ox butts because 
 it has horns ; not conversely. The Will in Nature : 
 Comparative Anatomy.
 
 90 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 The use of the weapon frequently precedes its ex- 
 istence, thus denoting that it is the weapon which 
 arises out of the existence of the endeavours, not, 
 conversely, the desire to use it out of the existence 
 of the weapon. Aristotle expressed this long ago, 
 when he said, with reference to insects armed with 
 stings : Quia iram hdbent arma habent (because they 
 have anger, they have arms). Ibid. 
 
 The immortal De Lamarck . . . seriously main- 
 tains and tries to prove at length, that the shape of 
 each animal species, the weapons peculiar to it, and 
 its organs of every sort destined for outward use, 
 were by no means present at the origin of that 
 species, but have on the contrary come into being 
 gradually in the course of time and through continued 
 generation, in consequence of the exertions of the 
 animal's will, evoked by the nature of its position 
 and surroundings through its own repeated efforts 
 and the habits to which these gave rise. . . . The 
 giraffe, in the barren, grassless African deserts, being 
 reduced for its food to the leaves of lofty trees, 
 stretched out its neck and forelegs until at last it 
 acquired its singular shape, with a height in front 
 of twenty feet ; and thus De Lamarck goes on de- 
 scribing a multitude of animal species as arising 
 according to the same principle, in doing which he 
 overlooks the obvious objection which may be made, 
 that long before the organs necessary for its pre- 
 servation could have been produced, by means of 
 such endeavours as these for countless generations, 
 the whole species must have died out for want of 
 them. ... It is an error of genius, which in spite of 
 all the absurdity it contains, still does honour to its 
 originator. . . . If De Lamarck had had the courage 
 to carry out his theory fully, he ought to have 
 assumed a primary animal which, to be consistent, 
 must have originally had neither shape nor organs,
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 91 
 
 and then proceeded to transform itself according to 
 climate and local conditions into myriads of animal 
 shapes of all sorts, from the flea to the elephant. 
 But this primary animal is the will to live. As such 
 however, it is metaphysical, not physical. Ibid. 
 
 An enthusiastic disciple, such as myself, cannot 
 hope, with a few quotations, to do more than 
 summarise the position, yet it can be gathered 
 that Darwin's position as a thinker is much over- 
 rated. That a personal creator, or Darwin's 
 impersonal nature, selecting favourable variations 
 by ' natural selection,' should seem more intelli- 
 gible, and easier to understand, than Schopenhauer' s 
 ' will-in-nature,' is nothing in their favour but 
 rather the reverse, because our minds are not 
 fitted to deal with what is outside our immediate 
 needs. Darwin fixes his attention on the outward 
 shapes and peculiarities of animal formation, 
 rather than on the character of ' the will to live,' 
 which is the unseen and unintelligible cause of 
 the animal being what it is. Schopenhauer's 
 animal species is no chance adaptation of faculties 
 to functions and functions to environment. His 
 animal is complete in itself, and, as it were, comes 
 into existence, the outward expression of an idea, 
 a will-to-live ; the method and means by which 
 this takes place being absolutely beyond us. The 
 ant-bear, according to him, was, is and will be an 
 ant-eater for ever and ever. It began thus and 
 will end thus : 
 
 The ant-bear, for instance, is not only formed
 
 92 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 with long claws on its fore feet, in order to break 
 into the nests of the white ant, but also with a pro- 
 longed cylindrical muzzle, in order to penetrate 
 into them, with a small mouth and a long, thread- 
 like tongue, covered with glutinous slime, which it 
 inserts into the white ant's nest and then withdraws 
 covered with the insects that adhere to it ; on the 
 other hand it has no teeth, because it does not want 
 them. Who can fail to see that the ant-bear's form 
 stands in the same relation to the white ant's as an 
 act of the will to its motive ? ... If we want to 
 understand Nature's proceeding, we must not try to 
 do it by comparing her works with our own. . . . This 
 is the meaning of Kant's great doctrine, that Tele- 
 ology is brought into Nature by our own understand- 
 ing, which accordingly wonders at a miracle of its 
 own creation. 
 
 Surely, if we want to wonder, why ask for 
 scripture ? or why ask for a scientific wonder ? 
 Let us wonder, as here, in a higher and fuller 
 measure than we have ever wondered before. 
 The so-called marvels of science are mere lifeless 
 collections of facts compiled by very second-rate 
 people in a very second-rate style. Schopenhauer 
 fills one with the pride of wonder, knowing no 
 creator and bowing to none, but alive with the 
 glory of one's own wonder ' a miracle of one's 
 own creation.' That we cannot completely under- 
 stand this miracle, elevates it into a matter of 
 religion a religion, however, without a Bible, 
 which is always a good thing. No one can want 
 another Bible. Metaphysical wonder is religion 
 in a greater and grander form. But each of us
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 93 
 
 must do his own wondering for himself, and the 
 finer the mind, the grander the wonder. That is 
 the religion of Schopenhauer, and, while he speaks, 
 the riddle of the universe seems to vibrate in 
 response to him. Why want more ? Give your- 
 self to him ; entrust the soul of your mind into 
 his keeping ; listen to him as his disciple, and feel 
 privileged to wonder with a wonder that, through 
 and in him, you can, admiring, share. 
 
 To come down to mere argument and evidence 
 in his case seems the rankest and blankest of 
 heresies. Look around for yourself, not to make 
 marks, not to get a degree, but content to 
 look. 
 
 Behold the countless varieties of animal shapes ; 
 how entirely is each of them the mere image of its 
 volition, the evident expression of the strivings of 
 the Will, which constituted its character ! Their 
 difference in shape is only the portrait of their dif- 
 ference in character. The Will in Nature. 
 
 The ' will-to-live ' determines to crawl in the 
 mud, to burrow, or to fly, and thence we see before 
 us the outward expression of this Will the manner 
 of which we shall never understand. 
 
 The will to live is seized with a longing to live on 
 trees, to hang on their branches, to devour their 
 leaves, without battling with other animals, and 
 without ever touching the ground ; this longing 
 presents itself throughout endless time in the form 
 (or Platonic idea) of the sloth. It can hardly walk 
 at all, being only adapted for climbing ; helpless
 
 94 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 on the ground, it is agile on trees and looks like a 
 moss-clad bough in order to escape the notice of its 
 pursuers. 
 
 The position, then, is this : The origin of species 
 may be scriptural, i.e., special creations commenc- 
 ing in Palestine. It may be Darwinian, i.e. one 
 or more primary beings, without shape or organs, 
 calmly dividing itself, or themselves, up, and 
 populating the globe, aided by ' natural selection ' 
 and the ' survival of the fittest.' Or the origin of 
 life may be Schopenhauerian and metaphysical. 
 The scientific method of examining countless 
 creations, and reporting on them, is open to the 
 objection that our knowledge, being one of appear- 
 ances only, leaves out of sight a very important 
 factor, the inner nature, the base of religion, or, 
 in metaphysics, ' the thing in itself' 
 
 Surely the origin of life will never be cleared up 
 by accumulating myriads of varieties of instances 
 for ever and ever. These are, as Schopenhauer 
 says, the mere clothing of the ' will-to-live,' which 
 is veiled in these forms, ' related to it as thought 
 to words.' Can we account for Shakespeare by 
 compiling a dictionary ? The evolution theory of 
 science attributes to itself a steady progress, very 
 slow but none the less sure, and independent of 
 any ordinary time limit. Schopenhauer, who 
 carries you along, outside the world of space and 
 time, by the fire and glory of his intellect, does 
 not seem impressed with this idea : 
 
 The oft-repeated doctrine of the progressive deve-
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 95 
 
 lopment of man to an ever higher perfection, or, in 
 general, of any kind of becoming by means of the 
 process of the world, is opposed to the a priori know- 
 ledge that at any point of time an infinite time has 
 already run its course, and consequently all that is 
 supposed to come with time would necessarily have 
 already existed. The World as Will and Idea, vol. ii., 
 ch. xvii. 
 
 That no metaphysical or religious explanation 
 can be clearly conceived, much less understood, is, 
 from the nature of the case, not against the 
 explanation but necessary, and, perhaps, desirable. 
 Does the conception aid in any way to a reading 
 of the universe, that is the real test ? Scientists 
 may read the world by ' a struggle for existence,' 
 by ' a survival of the fittest,' by ' an inheritance 
 of acquired characters,' by ' an inheritance of 
 functionally produced modifications ' and ' by 
 natural selection ' ; but such considerations are 
 lacking in vitality. Where is their inner mechan- 
 ism or mainspring ? The best they can hope for 
 is to be lit into life by the ' will-in-nature ' and the 
 character of the ' will- to- live.' This is the glance 
 of genius, owing nothing to study or education, 
 and which accounts for the world from the inside, 
 from the inner nature of its own mind, independent 
 of volumes of books, multitudinous degrees or eter- 
 nal figures. There indeed is the Caesar that canje 
 and saw and conquered. 
 
 Among objections, to the theory popularised by 
 Darwin, is the principle of reversion to type and 
 the non-existence of missing links. There is also
 
 96 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the time limit, an important consideration, con- 
 sidering that the living world is said to have been 
 destroyed and re- stocked at least three times. 
 Herbert Spencer only partially accepted Darwin's 
 theory, and, in an essay, The Inadequacy of Natural 
 Selection, he points out that ' natural selection,' 
 in weeding out the unfit, may indeed keep the 
 survivors up to the mark, but that this tends to 
 consolidate a type and render it permanent rather 
 than vary it. There is, too, the objection that 
 before any variation can have become pronounced 
 enough to benefit its owners in any appreciable 
 degree, they must have rubbed along satisfactorily 
 without it, unaware in what direction they were 
 being benefited, if at all. Why then did the varia- 
 tion continue ? However, this question has 
 already been debated so deeply, so determinedly, 
 and need I add, so dully, by so many eminent 
 scientists that the cultured view is here, as always, 
 blind acceptance. 
 
 One of the strangest delusions ever foisted on 
 mankind by men of learning is that you are 
 unfitted, or as they say ' unqualified,' to disbelieve 
 a book until you have not only read it but studied 
 it. Before you venture to doubt the Bible, so 
 they say, you must have read it. This I deny. 
 You must then, they assert, collect discrepancies 
 and conflicting statements, and, by subsequently 
 searching authorities, see how many of these have 
 been satisfactorily accounted for. Why ? The 
 whole style, and also the matter, of the book is
 
 EARS OF SCIENCE 97 
 
 very childish, and the morality deplorable. A few 
 pages will tell you this. Why try more ? The 
 unintelligible or metaphysical portion of the 
 universe undoubtedly exists for us, and what is 
 called pessimism, in Schopenhauer, is represented 
 in the Bible by Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. 
 What is called optimism, in Herbert Spencer, is 
 represented, in the Bible, by our Lord ascending 
 into heaven, greatly to the delight of all who 
 were privileged to witness it. To realise this, a 
 prolonged study of the Bible is needless. 
 
 So with Darwin. He tells you in his introduc- 
 tion to The Origin of Species what it is he proposes 
 to do, and one can see at a glance that he hasn't 
 the brain to do it. He introduces his life's labours 
 thus : 
 
 When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as a Naturalist, I 
 was much struck with certain facts in the distribu- 
 tion of the organic beings inhabiting South America. 
 . . . On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, 
 that something might perhaps be made out on 
 this question by patiently accumulating and reflect- 
 ing on all sorts of facts which could possibly have 
 any bearing on it. After five years' work, I allowed 
 myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up 
 short notes ; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch 
 of conclusions. . . . From that period to the present 
 day [Jan. 1872] I have steadily pursued the same 
 object. Origin of Species : Introduction, line i, p. i, 
 Sixth Edition. 
 
 In short, he saw something in 1837, an ^ patiently 
 accumulated facts thereon for thirty-five years.
 
 g8 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 After a few pages, you will find that he is all 
 evidence and evidence of evidence, which prac- 
 tically proves nothing, and, in the hands of 
 Schopenhauer, would have been used to prove 
 the exact reverse of Darwin's aim. Darwin was a 
 dear old man, and he was buried at Westminster 
 Abbey, but was he anything else ? Schopenhauer's 
 grave bears the words ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 
 alone that and nothing more. But ' time brings 
 back to time,' and, one day, not to have visited 
 the grave of Schopenhauer will cast a slur on 
 you.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 EARS OF GOVERNMENT 
 
 Government is essentially immoral. Is it not the 
 offspring of evil bearing about it all the marks of its 
 parentage ? H. Spencer. 
 
 THE moral of history is that the less the govern- 
 ment do, the better for those governed. The 
 last few parliaments have contained more men 
 connected with the learned professions of law 
 and letters than ever was the case formerly, but 
 they do not appear to have digested the above 
 elementary lesson, and modern ministers have 
 increased legislative functions to a point beyond 
 what we suffered under the Tudors. ' Comrades,' 
 of course, wish the government to do everything ; 
 their ideal is ' from each according to his capacities 
 and to each according to his needs.' The oppo- 
 site view is taken by the two great modern 
 philosophers, Herbert Spencer and Arthur Scho- 
 penhauer, who both of them specifically limit 
 the functions of government to national defence 
 and the administration of justice. Assuming that 
 these two philosophers are right and that the 
 
 99
 
 loo EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ' comrade ' is wrong, what is a fair price to pay 
 for this limited form of government ? 
 
 The charges for law and justice for the year 
 ending March 31 st, 1915, was 4,769,234, of which 
 1,369,292 was for the Royal Irish Constabulary, 
 against 108,186, for police in England and Wales. 
 The Dublin police cost 107,472, in addition to 
 the Royal Irish Constabulary. The Army for 
 this year was 28,885,000, and the Navy 
 51,550,000. The National Debt interest and re- 
 payment came to 24,500,000. These four items, 
 added, come to 109,704,234. The budget esti- 
 mate of national expense was 205,985,000. So 
 we pay about double as much for our government 
 as we ought, besides heavy local rates, of a com- 
 munistic order. 
 
 After this war, our correct course must surely be 
 to tell our politicians that we can no longer afford 
 them on the old lines, and that we must be satisfied 
 with fewer politicians, fewer political appoint- 
 ments, fewer political pensioners, and smaller 
 salaries for politicians. 
 
 The government that is our politicians aim at 
 the reverse of this. They wish to keep their hand 
 on various industries entrusted to them because 
 of the war and during war time, and they wish to 
 resume further fathering functions from which 
 the English alone had to some extent wrenched 
 themselves. At the cessation of hostilities, the 
 position of the wounded, the future of our soldiers, 
 the disorganisation of trade, and a general boycott
 
 EARS OF GOVERNMENT 101 
 
 of Germany, the more intense the better, which 
 can only be done with government aid, will necessi- 
 tate certain political influences which our object 
 should be to escape. We should take care that 
 every fresh government function is definitely 
 understood to be only a temporary evil and not 
 to be endured willingly, nor for ever. 
 
 All men should understand that owing to the 
 government that is our party politicians having 
 taken out of our hands the education of our chil- 
 dren, provisions for old age, insuring our health, 
 and many other matters quite outside their proper 
 province, the result is that, before the war, the 
 government that is our party politicians had 
 no time or attention or money to give to national 
 defence, nor to justice between man and man. 
 Consequently these, though the only true functions 
 of government, have been regularly and systemati- 
 cally neglected for the past fifty years, while our 
 taxes have been raised to a pitch never yet reached 
 in our history, though, at one time, under George 
 III, we were at war with almost the whole globe 
 and, of course, without winning everywhere. 
 
 Since, then, before this war with Germany, the 
 government that is our party politicians had 
 so much on their hands that they had no time 
 to do what they ought to do, and, since they were 
 charging so much for misdoing what they had 
 no right to do that they had in a few years more 
 than doubled the cost of governing the most law- 
 abiding people in the world, surely the time has
 
 102 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 come for us to say to our prime minister : ' My 
 dear sir, if every nation depended on its govern- 
 ment for its existence, none would be left. That 
 we continue to survive you is the marvel of the 
 age. We must therefore resuscitate ourselves by 
 ourselves for ourselves by means of combinations 
 of various kinds. You must stand aside, for you 
 are no sort of use and never were. You have 
 the Army and the Navy and the war debt to 
 attend to, as well as improving our law-courts, if 
 you've the time, so, for heaven's sake, stick to that 
 and get busy.' 
 
 Does he contemplate this limited programme ? 
 Not at all; he is already committee-ing as fol- 
 lows : 
 
 Scholarships, state grants, and other means by 
 which specially promising boys and girls may be 
 assisted to undertake a long course of training, ex- 
 tending from the elementary and secondary schools 
 to the university, the scientific laboratory, and the 
 manufactory. D. Express. 
 
 Now if we can't find out for ourselves who are 
 our lads of promise, and reward them for our- 
 selves, the government certainly can't. Indus- 
 trial civilisation is doomed if money is not, to some 
 extent, an index of value, and if the qualities that 
 earn money are not, to a large extent, the qualities 
 we need; government assistance is the ruin of 
 natural development, which needs to be left alone. 
 Is it fair to a unit, regarded as unpromising, to be
 
 EARS OF GOVERNMENT 103 
 
 specially taxed to provide grants and other facilities 
 for a unit regarded as promising, and who ought, 
 ex hypothesi, to be able to get along without any 
 assistance ? What is more, the unpromising unit 
 of to-day may be a unit we ought to have attended 
 to instead of taxing him to assist his rivals. The 
 modern craze for government pensions and govern- 
 ment grants is a curse and a snare. In nine cases 
 out of ten, the money is wrongly spent and the 
 wrong man gets it. The fact of the grant having 
 been made tells that it was unnecessary and that 
 a considerable sum might have been subscribed 
 voluntarily ; for no modern cabinet committee 
 ever risked losing a section of doubtful supporters 
 for the sake of giving a pension to some solitary 
 soul standing alone, one against the world. Every 
 day the task of the new thinker, out of touch 
 with his time, is rendered more and more diffi- 
 cult ; every day his rates and taxes will be higher 
 by pensions conferred on his rivals and by jobs 
 provided for his competitors, each of which the 
 job and the pension is a practical testimonial to 
 the value of the theories which the new thinker 
 is combating. No system was ever invented so 
 debasing and so fatal to true progress as that of 
 allowing cabinet committees the most worthless 
 of mediocrities to consider themselves entitled 
 to discover brains and reward merit. What is 
 more, the idea is steadily gaining ground that the 
 government that is our politicians is the pen- 
 sioner of all deserving people, and that the fact 
 8
 
 104 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 of a man receiving nothing proves him to be a 
 pretender whose goods had little value. Whereas 
 the truth would be more nearly the opposite, since 
 no man of real worth can expect anything from 
 a democratic government, excepting constant fines 
 for doing what he is perfectly entitled to do. 
 
 Gustav le Bon, in his Psychology of Crowds, gives 
 another reason why government selections of 
 merit are certain to be bad. He explains, and 
 partially proves, that the decisions and resolu- 
 tions adopted by a committee are rather sillier 
 than the stupidest man on that committee would 
 have been by himself. A cabinet is a committee. 
 It is also a committee engaged in appointing other 
 committees : 
 
 The Prime Minister has appointed a committee 
 to consider the commercial and industrial policy to 
 be adopted after the war, with special reference 
 to the conclusions reached at the Economic Con- 
 ference of the Allies, and to the following questions : 
 
 What industries are essential to the future 
 safety of the nation ; and what steps should be 
 taken to maintain or establish them ? 
 
 What steps should be taken to recover home 
 and foreign trade lost during the war, and to 
 secure new markets ? 
 
 To what extent and by what means the 
 resources of the Empire should and can be 
 developed. Daily Express. 
 
 ' Has appointed a committee.' Remember Gus- 
 tav le Bon. A committee of celebrities appointed
 
 EARS OF GOVERNMENT 105 
 
 by a committee of politicians, to consider what 
 ' industries are essential to the future safety of 
 the nation ' ! Good Lord deliver us ! Has no 
 one ever read history ? Our first industry should 
 be to save ourselves from committees appointed 
 by committees. That is an industry ' essential 
 to the future safety of the nation.' Let us begin 
 there. 
 
 It is perfectly absurd to suppose that the govern- 
 ment after the war will be entirely different to 
 any other government ever known to man. In 
 every system of government, there will always 
 be parties and party combinations, and, if no 
 other name fits, the names of party leaders will 
 serve, as with Redmondites, and Healyites, and 
 Parnellites and Anti-Parnellites. 
 
 But in England, of course, our parties are 
 quite different from an Irish riff-raff composed 
 mainly of Fenians, discontented persons and 
 evicted tenants. Our party system began when 
 Charles lost his head. It had an exciting youth, 
 through the Commonwealth and Restoration, to 
 the Rebellion and change of dynasty in 1688. It 
 came of age under the Hanoverian succession. 
 Hence, since perfect loyalty to the Crown could 
 not be hoped or expected of every one, the 
 English with a stroke of genius substituted loyalty 
 to party. Every loyal Whig was considered by 
 the Whigs worthy of the name of an Englishman ; 
 and every loyal Tory was thought of similarly 
 by the Tories ; and, though they hated one an-
 
 io6 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 other with a hatred exceeding the hatred of 
 women, and though no man could serve his 
 country unless he were of one party or the other, 
 the conditions of the time needed some such 
 solution, and few, if any, good men were lost. 
 Everything in our country, every hotel, every 
 institution, every club, every newspaper was Whig 
 or Tory. It was a battle, but it was played on 
 the whole fairly, and, marvellous to relate, it 
 worked. But not for ever. 
 
 By 1832 the system was showing crevices, and 
 shortly afterwards it became an abortion. Slowly 
 but surely the two parties began bidding against 
 one another for the votes of newly enrolled and 
 doubtful supporters. The good old Whigs and the 
 good old Tories had no say in the matter at all, 
 for their support was assured, and our legislation 
 took the form of pandering to the more discon- 
 tented and less responsible sections. By 1869, the 
 Tories had come down to looking for leaders outside 
 the old Tory families, and their leader then was 
 an absurd Hebrew, wearing a greasy curl and a 
 velveteen waistcoat. The Tories at this date all 
 imagined that they were opposed to any further 
 extensions of the franchise. The Jew- boy, how- 
 ever, calmly ' ratted.' He succeeded in ' outing ' 
 Gladstone by refusing to extend the franchise. 
 But, on taking office himself, he introduced a 
 measure going considerably further than Gladstone 
 had gone. The party never recovered from this 
 ' smart ' work. From that day, every Tory found
 
 EARS OF GOVERNMENT 107 
 
 himself pledged to support practically anything at 
 a moment's notice. The best of them discarded 
 politics for good. 
 
 In 1886, Gladstone copied the Jew-boy, and 
 ' ratted ' on Home Rule. The Whig party sud- 
 denly found that they were Home Rulers. The 
 best of them objected. Nowadays a party poli- 
 tician will vote for anything you like. He calls 
 it the ' will of the people.' All Home Rulers say 
 Home Rule is the will of the people, though the 
 people were not aware of this till the politicians 
 told them so. 
 
 In 1905, the Unionist party, as it was then called, 
 were told by Joseph Chamberlain that the will 
 of the people demanded Tariff Reform. When 
 the people were consulted they gave Joseph 
 Chamberlain the order of the boot. But Tariff 
 Reformers still put forward Tariff Reform as the 
 will of the people. 
 
 Think, then, what the party politicians have 
 brought us to. At one time, all England was Whig 
 or Tory, and not without reason. Now all Eng- 
 land is supposed to be Home Rule or Tariff Reform. 
 Think what that means. The Tariff Reform ques- 
 tion is simply this : 
 
 Are our politicians a fitting body to be trusted 
 with the whole trade of our Empire ? 
 
 Surely the answer is : No. 
 
 The Home Rule question is simply this :
 
 io8 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 How far are any set of men to be trusted who 
 have never professed loyalty to our king and country, 
 and whose programme is rooted in every manner of 
 crime ? 
 
 Surely the answer is obvious. The whole 
 Nationalist party were tried and convicted, in 
 February, 1891, of ' inciting to sedition and crime ' 
 and of having ' made payment to those injured in 
 the commission of crime.' In 1800, when we were 
 at war with France, 900 Frenchmen landed in 
 Mayo and, backed by Nationalists, advanced on 
 Dublin, while the Nationalists murdered as many 
 loyalists as they could find. In 1916, Germany 
 attempt similarly, indirectly assisted to a large 
 extent by our Home Rule party who filled the 
 government posts. When John Daly, the dynami- 
 tard, sentenced to penal servitude for life in 1883, 
 was released on ticket- of- leave by our party poli- 
 ticians, for party purposes, on the passing of the 
 Irish Local Government Act, this John Daly was 
 promptly elected Lord Mayor of Limerick three 
 years in succession ! 
 
 What sort of men are we likely to have to repre- 
 sent us when no one can fill a government appoint- 
 ment unless he is a Tariff Reformer or a Home 
 Ruler ? It is almost confessing that none is fitted 
 for a government post unless he be ass or knave. 
 What a plight for the greatest Empire the world 
 has yet seen ! Whatever our politicians attempt 
 in trade, education, or anything else will always 
 be done more with a view to party combinations
 
 EARS OF GOVERNMENT 109 
 
 than to anything else, and it always will be so. 
 Limit their functions, that is the only remedy. 
 
 It will never be well with us, said the old Liberty 
 Review, till, in the spirit of our forefathers, we see 
 the folly of beheading a king for interfering with 
 our liberties, and then submitting to exactly the 
 same interference from a half- educated official at 
 305. a week. Substitute Lord Haldane at 10,000 
 a year for the half- educated official, and you see 
 plainly enough that interference is pernicious, 
 however much the man is educated and however 
 much you pay him. In fact, to pay a politician 
 anything seems absurd when plenty of people are 
 willing to do the work for nothing. 
 
 After the war, there can be no doubt that our 
 politicians intend doing more than they ever did 
 before and with renewed vigour. According to 
 the Daily Express : 
 
 The abolition of poverty is the aim of a measure 
 now under consideration by the government. 
 
 Are they going to abolish poverty all over the 
 world, or only in the British Empire? Before 
 they begin, one might repeat to them Malthus's 
 words : 
 
 Distress and poverty multiply in proportion to 
 the funds created to assist them. 
 
 Our politicians have ears.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 EARS OF MARS 
 
 Dedicated to the conventionally educated classes, the 
 mainstay of all superstitions. Beatrice E. Kidd. 
 
 THE quotation at the top of this chapter formed the 
 title-page to a leaflet on one of our recruits inocu- 
 lated with life-long paralysis as a substitute for 
 typhoid fever, in conformity with the regulations 
 of the Medical Board. Everything in the Army, 
 including the MEAT, comes before a board, with 
 one exception, and that is the liberty of private 
 judgment : there is no liberty of private judgment 
 board in the Army, though there should be one, and 
 no examination paper would be needed to sit on it. 
 However, in the army code, ' orders is orders,' and, 
 in the absence of orders, you come before a board. 
 No profession has suffered more from boards 
 than the Army, and in no profession are boards 
 more unsuitable. No profession has suffered more 
 from examination papers than the Army, and in no 
 profession are examination papers more unsuit- 
 able. When a man bought his commission, he 
 gave evidence of one of the qualifications for an 
 officer the possession of means. When a man 
 no
 
 EARS OF MARS in 
 
 passes an examination paper, he does not give 
 evidence of a single qualification for an officer ; 
 in fact, he gives evidence of having learnt up 
 standard books, which is bad for the brain and no 
 incentive to reasoning. Nowadays, the Army is 
 one long succession of examination papers, con- 
 sequently the best soldiers come out of it as quick 
 as they can. The men who soldier, if they stick 
 to it, may one day command a regiment ; but all 
 the soft jobs, the nice jobs, and the billets are 
 reserved for the men who pass examinations. The 
 army council, the war office, and the staff college 
 are all mark-makers. These are the ears of Mars. 
 
 What has the Army gained by the advent of the 
 ' high-brow ' ? Our privates are still of the best, 
 but what about the military authorities ? The old 
 manual of military law still remains in force, and 
 with all its intolerable brutalities, including 
 ' crucifixion,' still there. The army council are 
 mainly responsible for this, and they are true ' high- 
 brows.' They prescribe the sword-frogs to be 
 worn with a Sam Browne belt, they alter the regula- 
 tions as to a military moustache, they forbid shoes 
 to be worn in uniform, but the manual of military 
 law is as it was. Possibly it came over from 
 Prussia with the Hanoverian succession. 
 
 The time has come to do away with examination 
 papers in the Army, to break all boards, to place 
 the army council on the retired list, to burn the 
 manual of military law, to understand that one 
 soldier or several soldiers can reach a destination
 
 ii2 EVIDENCE OF DEVELOPMENT 
 
 without being accompanied by a corporal or by 
 forming fours, to make saluting voluntary, and to 
 realise that quite half the orders given to a soldier 
 cause him a deal of trouble and are absolutely un- 
 necessary. We must appoint some unlearned man, 
 with no letters after his name, to alter all this 
 more in accordance with the dictates of common 
 sense and humanity.
 
 PART III 
 
 TYPICAL 
 DEVELOPMENTS
 
 Can so many doctors, solemn pedants, and pro- 
 fessors for some two thousand years can Longinus, 
 Demosthenes, Cicero and all the universities, par- 
 liaments, stump oratories, and spouting places in 
 this lower world, be unconsciously wearing, instead 
 of aureoles round their heads, long ears on each 
 side of it ? Carlyle.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 DOCTORS' EARS 
 
 When I was a young man, the Peculiars were usually 
 acquitted. . . . To-day all this is changed. ... A modern 
 doctor thinks nothing of signing the death certificate of 
 one of his own diphtheria patients, and then going into 
 the witness-box and swearing a Peculiar into prison for 
 six months by assuring the jury, on oath, that if the 
 prisoner's child, dead of diphtheria, had been placed under 
 his treatment ... it would not have died. . . . 
 
 Any one who has ever known doctors well enough to 
 hear medical shop, talked without reserve, knows that 
 they are full of stories about each other's blunders. . . . 
 
 In surgery all operations are recorded as successful if 
 the patient can be got out of the hospital, or nursing home, 
 alive, though the subsequent history of the case may be 
 such as would make an honest surgeon vow never to 
 recommend or perform an operation again. Bernard 
 Shaw : ' Doctor's Dilemma,' Preface. 
 
 PART III will deal with what the author of Happy 
 Thoughts termed ' Typical Developments.' Let us 
 start with the M.D. as fitted for the place of honour. 
 A well-educated person is visibly impressed by a 
 man who claims to be familiar with ' the clinical 
 relations of anti-tropic elements/ ' reaction of im- 
 munisation,' ' stimulating the phagocytes/ ' the 
 
 115
 
 Ii6 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 agglutinin test,' ' the opsonic index,' and ' the dis- 
 organisation of erythrocytotropic substances.' The 
 uneducated man is, doubtless, impressed, too, but 
 he keeps his head, and, when it comes to cutting 
 him open or inoculating him, he usually objects. 
 A well-educated man, with money, who has not 
 been operated on internally at least once, and 
 been vaccinated and inoculated, is comparatively 
 rare. The uneducated man, though he often es- 
 capes this, is supposed to be the victim of un- 
 scrupulous ' quacks.' The question arises, is the 
 unauthorised doctor, on the whole, a greater danger 
 to humanity than the authorised one ? Does he 
 do as much harm or kill as many patients ? 
 
 The unauthorised unorthodox doctor is often a 
 man with great natural aptitude for tending the 
 sick, and without having had his faculties of ob- 
 servation blunted by a five years' course in the 
 fallacies of the day. Some training and some ex- 
 perience are, of course, an advantage to every one ; 
 the question is why only one system of medicine 
 should be officially recognised. 
 
 Leaving out the ' scientific pretensions,' the 
 great distinction between the fully licensed medical 
 practitioner and all others is that he alone is 
 authorised to sign death certificates. With the 
 inevitable result that the accepted medical fetish 
 of the day seldom, if ever, figures as a cause of 
 death. When, however, the patient of an un- 
 orthodox doctor dies, though the patient may have 
 been given up by the orthodox practitioners, an
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 117 
 
 inquest is called for by the Medical Council, the 
 orthodox man will swear the unorthodox treatment 
 was the main cause of death, and the unorthodox 
 doctor is tried for manslaughter. 
 
 A verdict of manslaughter against Harry Burdee, 
 a music teacher and a hydropathist, was returned at 
 the inquest at Fulham on Saturday on Elizabeth 
 Mary Beckerson, of Hammersmith, who died after 
 undergoing a course of treatment prescribed by 
 Burdee for rheumatism. 
 
 Burdee ordered that Mrs. Beckerson should have 
 no food for several days and only a little water every 
 few hours. After following the prescription and 
 undergoing other hydropathic treatment for five days, 
 Mrs. Beckerson died, and Dr. Spilsbury stated at 
 the inquest that the deprivation of food had un- 
 doubtedly hastened the woman's death, which was 
 due to heart failure. Daily Express, August 7, 1916. 
 
 Burdee received a sentence of twelve months' 
 hard labour from Justice Low at the Old Bailey, 
 September 7, 1916, yet he had made no false 
 claims of any kind, or done any wrong of any kind. 
 Shortly afterwards, a fully licensed medical prac- 
 titioner lost a patient under identical conditions, 
 and the same Dr. Spilsbury gave evidence that 
 deprivation of food could not have caused death. 
 
 The actual result, unjust as it is, makes the un- 
 orthodox practitioner exceedingly careful of his 
 patients, whereas the orthodox man is, as a rule, 
 a mere fee-hunter. It seems extraordinary, in 
 the twentieth century, that one particular school 
 of medicine man the bacteriological allopath
 
 u8 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 should be the only recognised brand, and alone can 
 sign death certificates. Naturally his position is 
 unassailable, and his treatment never comes in 
 for the criticism it would receive, were other 
 medical qualifications recognised in addition to 
 that of the state M.D. The nonconformist in 
 medicine is in a worse position than the noncon- 
 formist in religion. Uneducated men will one day 
 achieve for us the same liberty in medicine that 
 they won for us in religion. But the M.D., labelled 
 ' scientific,' and backed by State education, is going 
 to be a nasty nut to crack. However, even the 
 word ' scientific ' will not save him for ever. One 
 day, ' scientific,' like ' divine,' will excite suspicion 
 and will only be used in advertisements. 
 
 The history of medicine is a constant testimony 
 to the value of the uneducated man. He cannot 
 take ah 1 the glory of exploding the king's touch as 
 a cure for scrofula, for this was mainly effected by 
 the change of dynasty in 1688 ; but, since the king's 
 touch is the only medical remedy that never did 
 any one any harm, the uneducated man had no 
 particular cause to find fault with it. In other 
 medical triumphs, the uneducated man has noticed 
 the results and, refusing to be persuaded against 
 his own eyes, he has ' bust ' them up steadily one 
 by one. 
 
 It is interesting to take the leading medical 
 men of their age and notice what they believed. 
 John Harvey, the discoverer, I had almost written 
 the inventor, of the circulation of the blood, be-
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 119 
 
 lieved in the king's touch and bleeding. He was 
 born 1578 and was surgeon to Charles I and 
 James I. Probably, no life was ever saved by 
 Harvey's discovery, or invention, and some deaths 
 may have been caused by overdoing the analogy, 
 and top- speeding the circuit, which those who 
 doubted it would escape. Possibly, an ignorant 
 man who had never heard of his circulation and 
 denied that he had one, might, on the whole, 
 have good reason to be thankful. 
 
 The medical fraternity must meddle, whereas the 
 ignorant man is for leaving well alone. The earliest 
 statistics we have are very unfavourable to medi- 
 cine, but they were not compiled by medical men : 
 
 In 1552, at Mentua Carpentaria, three miles from 
 Madrid, two thousand were let blood of and all died. 
 
 Buckle. 
 
 Since then, the fully licensed medical practi- 
 tioners compiled their own statistics, and the value 
 of bleeding was soon re-established. In 1824, the 
 medical men successfully bled Byron to death at 
 the age of thirty-six. There was, of course, no 
 mention of bleeding in his death certificate. Un- 
 educated people refused to be bled, and the prac- 
 tice was slowly discarded. 
 
 The cultured brigade have no literary reason 
 to believe in doctors, but degrees and long words 
 have always proved too much for a cultivated 
 brain. The literary evidence is all against the 
 physician. 
 
 9
 
 120 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 1. Petronins, 'Satyr.' ii. c. 42 : Medicus nihil aliud 
 est quam animi consolatio. (Doctoring is but a sop 
 to the mind.) 
 
 2. Highly esteemed Latin Proverb : Multitudo 
 medicorum certa mors est acgrotantium. (A number 
 of doctors spells certain death to the patients.) 
 
 3. Pliny complains that surgeons try experiments 
 on their patients and that a doctor is the only man 
 who may kill people with impunity. (Inge.) 
 
 4. Virgil, ' Mneid,' xii. 46: -fligrescitque medendo. 
 (And gets worse by being doctored .) Cf . ' The remedy 
 worse than the disease.' 
 
 5. Sir J. Forbes, M.D., medical adviser to Queen 
 Victoria, the last modern royalty to die without 
 having been operated on, states : ' It is a subject 
 of rational enquiry not merely to what extent, but 
 whether to any extent at all, dangerous diseases are 
 modified in regard to their mortality by the medical 
 art. Not that individual lives may not have been 
 saved occasionally, but their proportion is too small 
 to modify the general result in a way recognisable by 
 statistics.' (Almroth Wright statistics in favour of 
 the Almroth Wright anti-typhoid vaccine please 
 note.) 
 
 6. Herbert Spencer ('Autobiography,' 1904) states 
 that he had been attended to by half a dozen doctors ; 
 none had done him the least good, and some had done 
 him considerable harm. 
 
 7. O. W. Holmes (1830) : I firmly believe that if 
 the whole Materia Medica were sunk to the bottom of 
 the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and 
 all the worse for the fishes. 
 
 8. Schopenhauer (1850) quotes how the real value 
 of a doctor may be derived from the fact that we see 
 him die, and not from old age, and without being in 
 the least surprised. 
 
 9. Shakespeare (1590) : Throw physic to the dogs.
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 121 
 
 10. Leonardo da Vinci (1519), ' Textes choisis ' : How 
 many men aim at making a fortune in order to give 
 it to the doctors the wreckers of life ! 
 
 11. Balthazar Gratian (1647) : Neither fate nor 
 the mob are so bold against two. Hence the wise 
 physician, if he has failed to cure, looks out for some 
 one, who, under the name of a consultation, may 
 help him to carry out the corpse. 
 
 12. MolUre's Works (1650) show he couldn't abide 
 a doctor. 
 
 So much for the literary evidence. To continue 
 the enquiry into the medical celebrities them- 
 selves, perhaps the greatest celebrity after John 
 Harvey, would be Sir Thomas Browne, M.D., the 
 first titled medicine man. His statue at Norwich 
 states : 
 
 Thomas Browne, M.D., et Miles, A 1605 
 Londoni natus . . . Per orbem notissimus 
 Vir Plentissimus, Integerimus, Doctis- 
 simus, obiit, Oct 19, 1682. 
 
 Which means that he was soldier and doctor, too ; 
 that he was notoriously learned and that there 
 was plenty of him (plentissimus}. He believed in 
 king's touch, bleeding and burning witches. Some 
 of his other beliefs can be guessed from Collectanea 
 Medica, London, 1725, probably the first standard 
 medical work known in England. The nature of 
 the ' sovereign remedies ' adopted by the profes- 
 sion can be gathered from p. 25 : 
 
 For quinsy, powder of burnt owls, one drachm ;
 
 122 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 cats' brains, two drachms ; dried and powdered 
 blood of white puppy dogs, two drachms. 
 
 For colic, wolf's guts dried and powdered, two 
 drachms ; old man's urine, three drachms ; sheep's 
 excrements, two drachms. A sovereign remedy. 
 
 For more serious complaints, the remedy was 
 king's touch or bleeding. The objection to this 
 work was that the ' sovereign remedies ' were 
 published in English. The medical men did not 
 repeat the mistake, and the exact materials of pure 
 glycerinated calf-lymph or the Almroth Wright 
 anti-typhoid vaccine are veiled in mystery ; one 
 is some form of horse-grease cow-pox and the 
 other is a germ-broth of some kind derived from 
 human excrement. Whether in 1725, or 1916, the 
 M.D. seems a ' dirty dog.' The curious thing 
 about Sir Thomas was that his antipathy to ignorant 
 men caused him to compile a book called Vulgar 
 Errors. His own errors, of course, were culture : 
 cf. for colic, wolf's guts dried and powdered, ad- 
 ministered to all the leading families. 
 
 The next great titled medical celebrity would 
 perhaps be Baron Dimsdale, M.D., a very dis- 
 tinguished medical practitioner. He secured the 
 largest fee ever paid to any professional man, 
 whether doctor, lawyer, pimp, attorney or church- 
 man, who have all earned big fees in their time for 
 services rendered. In 1769, Dr. Dimsdale, as he 
 then was, inoculated with smallpox Catherine II 
 of Russia and her favourite Potemkin. In other 
 words, in accordance with the best medical tenets
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 123 
 
 of the time, he gave them both smallpox, and he, 
 doubtless, felt sure they would like it. For this he 
 actually ' trowsered ' 12 ,000 in cash, with an 
 annuity of 500 a year, and the title of baron thrown 
 in. By 1840, if Baron Dimsdale had performed a 
 similar feat in England, he would have been locked 
 up ; for the valuable remedy of giving people 
 smallpox had, owing to its pernicious results, 
 become illegal. The remedy was introduced into 
 England from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu, in 1718. In one of her letters from 
 Constantinople she said, rather wittily, that the 
 Turks took smallpox much as other nations took 
 waters. By 1754, the Royal College of Physicians 
 were disappointed at the remedy not being in more 
 general use, and they were particularly astounded 
 at the apathy of the uneducated classes. Our 
 uneducated people, you see, refused to swallow the 
 remedy. Accordingly, the leading physicians pub- 
 lished a manifesto stating smallpox inoculation 
 ' to be highly salutary to the human race.' Before 
 that, they must have compiled valuable statistics, 
 for so brilliant a thinker as Voltaire was evidently 
 much impressed with the eloquence of their testi- 
 mony and the convincing nature of their figures. 
 Thus in his Letters on England (1726-1729), he 
 states : 
 
 It [smallpox] does not prove fatal to so much as 
 one among those inoculated in England, unless the 
 patient be infirm, or would have died had not the 
 experiment been made upon him.
 
 124 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 Yet in 1840, the practice was made illegal ! If, 
 in 1769, Baron Dimsdale had become doubtful as 
 to whether he was justified in presenting Catherine 
 of Russia, and her favourite Potemkin, with an 
 attack of smallpox, and if he had wired to the 
 Royal College of Physicians for advice, they would 
 have wired back : ' Ignoramus, not a moment 
 to lose, give it her at once.' Anyway she got it, 
 and so did Potemkin. 
 
 The Royal College of Physicians, till close on 
 1900, must have published some eloquent testi- 
 mony on the value to humanity of brandy, port, 
 burgundy and alcohol generally ; so much so that 
 temperance folk had to pay an extra rate for 
 insuring their lives. People who were ' run down ' 
 were ordered by their medical advisers to drink 
 port and burgundy and ' tone up ' the system ; 
 they frequently regretted it. Temperance folk, 
 of little education, said, with some truth, that 
 those vintages would only ' tone up ' the nose. 
 The new doctor with his ' scientific ' microscope 
 and his myriads of microbes has changed his 
 doctrines, but he has not, therefore, altered all 
 medical traditions and suddenly become right. 
 The fact is that certain microbes are the symptoms 
 of a disease and not the cause. The medicine man 
 thinking otherwise is nothing in favour of his germ 
 theory. Even if he succeeds in giving a man a 
 disease by injecting into him the symptoms in a 
 concentrated form, what does he actually prove, 
 except that he is a ' dirty dog ' ?
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 125 
 
 We now come to the great Edward Jenner, M.D., 
 sometimes called the Cow-pox King, who has a 
 statue in Kensington Gardens. The Oracle En- 
 cyclopedia refers to him thus : 
 
 After a long series of careful experiments, he 
 established the truth of the local tradition that one 
 who had suffered from cow-pox was insusceptible 
 to smallpox. He discovered what variety of cow-pox 
 offered the best protection and in 1796 made the 
 experiment which has resulted in such benefit to 
 mankind. . . . He was elected honorary member of 
 nearly all the scientific societies and received a grant 
 of ^20,000 from Parliament, in addition to previous 
 grants, and another of ^7,000 from India. 
 
 Apparently, then, the two great precursors of the 
 ' scientific ' inoculation system, of rendering a man 
 immune from disease by giving him one or two in 
 advance, were directly derived (a) from some non- 
 reading Turks, and (b) from some Gloucestershire 
 dairy- maids. Now though these two remedies 
 were never accepted, in any degree worth mention- 
 ing, by uneducated people, the fact of their having 
 originated in that quarter affords presumptive 
 evidence that they had some basis in fact, and were 
 not pure ' scientific ' discoveries deduced from 
 torturing thousands of unfortunate animals or 
 anything of that kind. Uneducated people do not 
 invent a theory, or manufacture one out of specula- 
 tive inquiries ; they see something occur, and may 
 mistake the cause of it, as we all may. This is 
 what happened to those dairy- maids. It seems the
 
 126 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 case, as is natural, that people do not catch two 
 diseases at the same time. If you already have 
 measles, you may escape an epidemic of mumps, 
 and if you are suffering from diphtheria, you may 
 escape an attack of smallpox. Not that disease 
 experts have not occasionally been known to catch 
 two diseases, but it is exceedingly rare. Con- 
 sequently, some farm hands in Gloucestershire 
 who were suffering from severe cow-pox may well 
 have escaped an epidemic of small-pox, and more 
 than once. Hence the justifiable tradition of the 
 Gloucestershire dairy- maids that cow-pox was a 
 protection. The non-reading Turks may have 
 made a similar discovery with regard to some milder 
 form of smallpox than the particularly poisonous 
 brand of it common in the streets of Constantinople. 
 Hence the ' scientific ' system of inoculating with 
 disease, which can only achieve a fictitious success 
 if you have the inoculated ailment badly enough 
 when the epidemic appears. But if the epidemic 
 occurs when you are still run down, and weakened 
 by the inoculation, though not ill with it, you are 
 much worse off than you would be otherwise. This 
 is the ' scientific ' bacteriological system. These 
 'scientists' inject various germs into an animal 
 till it is too unwell to be susceptible to a certain 
 disease to which it is exposed in every possible 
 way. The poor beast is then said to be immune, 
 and probably wishes it wasn't. Various filth 
 vaccines are manufactured by these means and 
 injected into man, who is advised to repeat the
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 127 
 
 standard doses at short intervals. He is thus 
 weakened for life and rendered liable to new 
 ailments far nastier than anything he knew of be- 
 fore. And yet Mr. Bernard Shaw can truly say : 
 
 I presume nobody will question the existence of 
 a widely spread popular delusion that every doctor 
 is a man of science. 
 
 This cannot be denied, and, as long as the 
 orthodox doctor retains his monopoly of the death 
 certificates, he will not only murder you, but have 
 you indicted for manslaughter unless you call 
 him in, should occasion arise. In uneducated 
 people lies our only hope of salvation. They 
 never in any large numbers accepted either the 
 Turco-Dimsdale smallpox or the Jenner horse- 
 grease cow-pox. So hope lies there. 
 
 What every sensible man should ask himself 
 is whether the medical testimony officially pro- 
 nounced by the Royal College of Physicians, in 
 1749, in favour of inoculation with smallpox, is in 
 any way less reliable than that pronounced in 1823 
 in favour of inoculation with cow-pox. In 1824, 
 if the physicians in Greece had asked that college 
 what to do with Byron, they would have wired 
 back : ' Bleed him.' The physicians did so and 
 killed him. In 1840, inoculation with smallpox 
 was made an offence at law, and in 1853 inocula- 
 tion with cow-pox was made compulsory. In 
 1908, a clause was inserted in the Vaccination Act 
 granting a parent a sort of dog licence to keep an
 
 128 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 unvaccinated baby in the house provided he applied 
 to the proper authority within four months of 
 birth. Even this small favour was opposed by a 
 minority of fourteen members of amazing culture 
 and corresponding bigotry, including Sir H. 
 Craik, M.A. Oxford, LL.D., Glasgow and St. 
 Andrews, M.P. Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities, 
 educated High School, Glasgow, Glasgow Uni- 
 versity, Balliol College, Oxford, honours in classics 
 and history, and senior examiner at Whitehall; 
 /. F. P. Rawlinson, K.C., LL.B., LL.M., Recorder 
 of Cambridge, educated Eton, Trinity College, 
 ist Class Law Tripos; Sir John Batty Tuke, 
 M.D., F.R.C.P.S., F.R.S.E. LL.D. Edinburgh, 
 D.Sc. Dublin, M.P. Edinburgh and St. Andrews 
 Universities (significant publication : ' Insanity of 
 over-exertion of the brain') ; George Cave, K.C., 
 J.P., D.L., V.L., B.A. Oxford, Scholar St. John's 
 Oxford, Taylorian Exhibitioner, First Class Modera- 
 tions and Final Classical School, Inner Temple 
 Scholar, Recorder of Guildford; Sir A. Bignold, 
 LL.B., F.R.Z.S., F.R.G.S., J.P., Scholar and Prize- 
 man, Trinity Hall, Cambridge. All well ear- 
 marked by letters ! 
 
 By 1940, inoculation with cow-pox (vaccina- 
 tion) may be an offence at law. In 1906, 1907, 
 1908 and 1910, there were more deaths from vac- 
 cination than from smallpox. In 1914, the last 
 year for which there are official figures, there were 
 six deaths from vaccination, and four from small- 
 pox. A death from vaccination has to be very
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 129 
 
 soon after the injection, or no orthodox practi- 
 tioner, even an honest one, is going to mention it 
 in the death certificate. You can hardly expect 
 the orthodox practitioner to condemn his own 
 remedy which makes every baby vaccinated worth 
 at least 75. 6d. to him, in cash, together with the 
 subsequent complications that nearly always ensue. 
 Probably, for every mention of vaccination yet 
 made in a death certificate, there have been at 
 least a thousand cases where it should have been 
 made. There is, of course, such a thing as an 
 honest doctor, just as there is such a thing as an 
 honest politician ; but the standard is low. 
 
 The orthodox medical aspect is adopted by 
 Maine in Popular Government (1885) : 
 
 Even in our day vaccination is in the utmost 
 danger, and we may say generally that the gradual 
 establishment of the masses in power is of the blackest 
 omen for all legislation founded on scientific opinion, 
 which requires tension of mind to understand it and 
 self-denial to submit to it. 
 
 You see ' scientific ' opinion. And why is 
 more tension of mind needed to believe in cow- 
 pox than to doubt it ? The cultured craze for pro- 
 tecting uneducated people from the effects of their 
 ignorance is one of the most amazing supersti- 
 tions ever foisted upon mankind. It should be 
 the other way on, and it is the educated people, 
 ' the mainstay of all superstitions/ who need to be 
 protected, and particularly from the fully qualified 
 medical practitioner.
 
 rso TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 After Jenner we come to Lord Lister, M.D., the 
 founder of the Lister Institute for torturing 
 animals, and the great inventor of anti- septic 
 treatment in surgery. He is described in Jack's 
 General Information, 1908, as follows : 
 
 LISTER, JOSEPH, b. 1827, a distinguished surgeon 
 who occupied the post of ' Surgeon-extraordinary ' 
 to Queen Victoria, who in 1896 created him a baron. 
 He is one of the leading authorities in bacteriology, 
 and is famous as the introducer of the anti-septic 
 treatment in performing surgical operations. 
 
 He hasn't been dead long, but his anti- septic 
 treatment was buried before he was. One should 
 never be down on a good surgeon. They are 
 almost invariably beautifully shaved, and they 
 do it themselves, quickly ; they can cut a ham 
 in a way that all ham-lovers love. There is no 
 doubt a good surgeon is very handy, and if you 
 can only induce him to clean his instruments he 
 is quite a useful fellow. He has, of course, the 
 brains of a butcher, but we should not mind that. 
 A good butcher has points, and one with his own 
 slaughter-house, who played ' snooker ' in the 
 evenings, would make a first-class surgeon, and 
 vice versa. Sir F. Treves, Surgeon to King George, 
 and Sir W. Watson Cheyne, President of the Royal 
 College of Surgeons, both cut hams gloriously. 
 They would have been first-class butchers, and 
 would have been highly respected in their villages, 
 as good men at either carving a joint or at ' snooker ' 
 at the Blue Anchor in the evenings. So far so
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 131 
 
 good, but when surgeons claim to be men of science 
 you can only smile. And that is what happened to 
 Lister. Lister, not content with carving people, 
 insisted on being no mean ' scientist,' in fact an 
 imperial ' scientist.' Oh the pity of it ! Accordingly, 
 though he was too fine a butcher to be accused of 
 ' studying ' the germ theory of disease, he caught 
 it and he caught it broad-gauge. 
 
 He took for granted that all the surgical fevers 
 and heavy death-rates in vogue in the hospital wards 
 of that day were due to these mysterious ' germs of 
 disease ' rather than to the filthy and scandalous 
 conditions by which the patients were surrounded. 
 So he invented a steam apparatus to carbolise the 
 atmosphere and kill all the germs in the operating 
 theatre, used carbolic acid solutions to douse the 
 wounds, and the carbolic dressings to apply to them. 
 Walter Hadwen, J.P., M.D., L.R.C.P., M.R.C.S., 
 L.S.B., etc. 
 
 Few germs survived the Lister carbolisers, and 
 no more did many patients ; for the same thing 
 that destroyed the patients' germs also destroyed 
 the patients' tissues. This astonished Lister, but, 
 like the inspired imperial ' scientist ' he was, he 
 ' scientifically ' killed numbers and numbers of 
 patients before the scientific induction was com- 
 plete enough to warrant him in giving it up. 
 Nothing carbolic ever appeared in their death 
 certificates. But, in spite of this, he eventually 
 stopped anti-septing and contented himself with 
 pure cleanliness in wounds and instruments a
 
 132 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 system just commencing in the orthodox medical 
 profession, and hitherto regarded as a fad of the 
 herbalists and other peculiar people. This was 
 called the a- septic treatment. It is words make 
 the ' scientist/ and Lister was determined to be a 
 ' scientist.' So, as he could not be an anti-septic 
 ' scientist,' he became an a-septic ' scientist.' He 
 was, of course, simply a successful butcher. If an 
 unorthodox practitioner had been allowed a say 
 in the death certificates of those first ' scientific- 
 ally ' treated with the new anti-septic treatment, 
 the ' science ' would have ceased far sooner. 
 
 Sir W. Watson Cheyne, who would have been an 
 ornament to Smithfield, like Lister, wants to be a 
 scientist. And at the present moment (October, 
 1916) he is on the pursuit of anti-septics for wounds 
 and gangrene. Sir Almroth W right has told him 
 that surgeons don't think and that thought is 
 done in the laboratory and that he (Watson) is 
 suffering from ' confused cerebration and deficient 
 logic.' This last point is, of course, true enough 
 with all successful surgeons, but, as to a laboratory 
 being the home of thought, there is more dirty 
 work than pure thought done in a laboratory. 
 Also, Sir Almroth Wright is forgetting that 
 Surgeon Sir Frederick Treves, and Surgeon Sir 
 W. Watson Cheyne, and Surgeon J. Hodson 
 (President of Edinburgh Royal College of Sur- 
 geons) were induced to sign a leaflet in favour of 
 the Almroth Wright anti-typhoid vaccine, which 
 declared that ' with proper care it had never done
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 133 
 
 any one any harm.' The surgeons signed this 
 leaflet in the ' scientific' spirit, i.e. on the Almroth 
 Wright ' scientific ' evidence and without insisting 
 on being given the two standard injections them- 
 selves. If the surgeons had remembered that they 
 were non-thinkers, and far better judges of actual 
 effects than of long words, and had actually had 
 the two injections inside them, they would not, I 
 fancy, have signed the leaflet. The value of 
 ' scientific ' thought is shown in the fact that 
 carving and operations have improved enormously, 
 while the ' scientific ' germ theory of disease is 
 slowly inoculating our race to death. Some of 
 our soldiers have been inoculated eight times, and 
 because, after this, their wounds, naturally enough, 
 fester, they are supposed to want an anti-gangrene 
 inoculation as well ! Heaven help them, but they 
 get one ! The butcher part of doctoring is so 
 excellent that it is over-done ; the ' scientific ' 
 part is appalling. Dentistry is first-rate, because 
 it is all derived from practice and there are no books 
 on it. The ' scientific ' dentist, when one appears, 
 will be a man to avoid. 
 
 Lastly we come to the great twentieth century 
 celebrity, Sir Almroth Wright, the eminent in- 
 ventor of the Almroth Wright anti-typhoid vac- 
 cine. He has got most of the surgeons and most 
 of the medical fraternity to swallow it, but the 
 uneducated men say : ' No.' Many soldiers have 
 been killed by it and many more maimed for life, 
 but it's ' scientific/ and scientific induction takes a
 
 134 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 long time to warrant a conclusion in any direction. 
 So many people nowadays die a ' scientific ' death 
 that a few more or less are accepted as a portion of 
 science. The vaccine is sanctioned and recom- 
 mended by the Royal College of Physicians, for 
 they adopt all remedies that bring fees. Waiting 
 for a man to catch a disease, before he attends to 
 him, is far too slow a process for a ' scientific ' 
 doctor ; he catches the man and gives him a disease 
 ' right away ' and tells him he is immune. 
 
 An unlearned man has always imagined that, the 
 fewer diseases he has had, the stronger and healthier 
 he shows himself to be. An ignorant man may 
 be sometimes heard to boast that he has never had 
 a day's sickness in his life, and such a one, on wish- 
 ing to join the army, has been startled to hear that 
 he is not sound enough to serve his King, and that 
 he must have had small- pox or cow-pox (successful 
 ' vaccination ') at least once, and that he must 
 consent to be given one or two other ailments by 
 means of injection. The ignorant man thinks this 
 nonsense, and so do most uneducated people. They 
 are, as usual, right. They always have been right, 
 so far, in their distrust of doctors. 
 
 The unorthodox doctor does not want to give 
 men diseases. He seems also superior to the fully 
 licensed practitioner, morally. Mr. Barker (not 
 M.D.), the great bone-setter, the saviour of hundreds 
 of cripples, offered his services to our soldiers, 
 free. The medical authorities rudely refused his 
 services, while Sir Almroth Wright (M.D.) wanted
 
 DOCTORS' EARS 135 
 
 and obtained 5,000 a year for his services. So our 
 soldiers are taxed an extra 5,000 a year to have 
 gangrene injected into their system, instead of 
 having their bones set, free. Soldiers now have 
 their blood ' scientifically ' poisoned by no less 
 than eight vaccines. 
 
 The vaccines on sale at the Vaccine Department, 
 R.A.M.C. College, Grosvenor Road, London, S.W., 
 include typhoid, para-typhoid, cholera, pneumo- 
 coccus, b. coli, acne, anti- sepsis, anti- gangrene, 
 anthrax and others. The fully licensed medical 
 practitioners persist in dubbing every man a 
 ' quack ' who is not professionally interested in the 
 sale of these vaccines, and who has not gone 
 through a five years' course of believing in them. 
 The result is the Doctor's Ear, and a very nasty 
 one it is. It wants operating on with an anti- 
 septic ' scientific ' treatment and the Lister car- 
 boliser. 
 
 10
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 LITERARY EARS 
 
 The compulsory exertion of the brain, in studies for 
 which it is not fitted, dulls the brain. The learning of 
 Latin and Greek, from the sixth to twelfth years, lays 
 the foundation of the stupidity of most scholars. Schopen- 
 hauer. 
 
 Is it true that the opinions on books and authors 
 to be found in literary journals and literary me- 
 moirs, represent the views of humanity at large, 
 and, if not, is there any reason why we should con- 
 tinue to accept them ? Judged by the observations 
 of literary authorities, Fanny Burney should be as 
 interesting now as she seemed to be to Macaulay 
 when he wrote his essay about her. J ane Austen 
 should be a topic of interest in any house where 
 books are read. Tom Jones should be a novel that 
 every intelligent person has revelled in at least 
 once. Smollett should be a sheer delight to young 
 and old, whether in a hammock on the lawn or 
 confined to a sick-bed. Any essay by Hazlitt or 
 De Quincey should stimulate the cerebral cells and 
 rekindle anew fading memories. And, as for Homer 
 and Virgil, such transcendental joys as those must 
 
 136
 
 LITERARY EARS 137 
 
 be left to an abler pen than mine. Yet, to be 
 honest, except Murder as a Fine Art (De Quincey) 
 and The Ignorance of the Learned (Hazlitt), nothing 
 in this list would appeal to me or to many other 
 every-day folk ordinarily met with. Is this neces- 
 sarily some deficiency on our part ? 
 
 An eminent literary authority, some years ago, 
 stated that it was worth while learning Spanish in 
 order to enjoy Don Quixote in the original. Is this 
 statement true ? Is it true of i per cent, of those 
 educated at our public schools ? I doubt it. The 
 cause is more than taste and is due to a different 
 mental standard. Luckily for the nation, ordinary 
 people are not silly enough to care for that 
 particular brand of silliness. With the world at 
 large, the reputation of Don Quixote is purely 
 traditional, and rests on its being always praised 
 and never quoted. Next time a man praises it to 
 you, ask him to read out in English some of his 
 favourite pieces. You will be amazed at the stuff 
 he can admire. So with Homer, so with Virgil. 
 Literary opinion must be some fungoid growth, 
 born of over- reading, from which ordinary folk are 
 free. 
 
 A rich insight into what literary men admire 
 is given by Sir John Lubbock's list of the hundred 
 best books. This list, for the sake of our children, 
 should be burnt at once by the common hangman. 
 In the year 1886, Sir John Lubbock (since, Lord 
 Avebury) gave an address, at the Working Men's 
 College, On Books and Reading, in which this list
 
 138 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 was made public, and subsequently met with the 
 approval of men of letters. Here are a few of the 
 items : 
 
 Mahdbharata, Rdmdyana, the Shahnameh, the She- 
 King or Chi-King (not the Shoo-King), Kalidasa's 
 Sakuntala, Cervante's Don Quixote, Homer, Horace, 
 Virgil, Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Livy, Aris- 
 totle, the Koran, Confucius, the Bible (in Hebrew ?), 
 Epictetus, St. Augustine, Spinoza's Tractatus, 
 Sophocles, jEschylus and Malory's Morte D' Arthur. 
 
 Fancy anybody at the Working Men's College, 
 or anywhere else, wanting to read many of those ! 
 A stalwart, who stuck to it gamely, at home and 
 elsewhere, in trains, trams, tubes, and buses, and 
 who eventually read the lot, would have in him 
 the making of a first- class ass. Of the two courses, 
 'twere better to read none than all. Then, note 
 the slovenly way in which the list has been com- 
 piled. For instance, in the absence of informa- 
 tion to the contrary, one may suppose that every 
 book in the list should be read in the language in 
 which it was originally written. If a translation 
 is meant, whose should be stated, for this is most 
 important. Men of letters are always wanting to 
 educate grocers, but no grocer ever compiled a 
 provision list quite as inaccurately as the Lubbock 
 book list. When a grocer puts strawberry jam 
 on his list, he is careful to add the maker, Crosse & 
 Blackwell, Beach, Lipton and so on, as the case 
 may be. Sir John Lubbock' s list simply says 
 ' Bible.' Does this mean the Hebrew book con-
 
 LITERARY EARS 139 
 
 taining the old Testament only, and no Gospels, or 
 our version of 1611, or the Revised Version com- 
 pleted in 1885 ? The question may well be asked, 
 for the list goes out of its way to make the matter 
 as involved as possible. In some cases, the titles 
 of the books are translated into English, and, in 
 some cases, they are not. Dante's Divina Corn- 
 media is found close to the Meditations of Marcus 
 Aurelius, as if one should be in Italian and the 
 other in English. A similar course is followed with 
 the plays of ^Eschylus ; with one play an English 
 title is given, with another play the title is in 
 Greek. Are they to be read in Greek or English ? 
 Then you will find Dry den's Poems, Scott's Poems, 
 and Gray's Poems, but in the case of Burns, it is 
 simply Burns. No other English author is treated 
 that way except Shakespeare. He is on the list as 
 Shakespeare. Does this include all his plays, all 
 his poetry, his correspondence about his alleged 
 coat of arms, his will, his stray doggerel, and his 
 152 sonnets ? One hopes not. 
 
 When you remember that the list was compiled 
 for an English Working Men's College, it seems 
 extraordinary how large a proportion of the books 
 could only be read by a Mexican, a Parsee or a 
 man of colour. Surely it is no part of the white 
 man's burden to make the black man read. And, 
 if so, why the hundred best books ? However, 
 better him than us. What a ridiculous list it is ! 
 As historians, Livy, Tacitus and Thucydides all 
 get a place, but not Buckle or Lecky. In poetry,
 
 140 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 those two antique incomprehensibles, Chaucer and 
 Edmund Spenser, are mentioned, but not Fitz- 
 gerald's Omar Khayydm. In religion, the Koran 
 figures, which is described by Schopenhauer : 
 ' This wretched book . . . the saddest and poorest 
 form of Theism ... I have not been able to dis- 
 cover one single valuable thought in it.' Ah well, 
 the work may have been meant as a companion 
 for Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights, which 
 both find a place. Charles Lamb is omitted, and 
 so is Alice in Wonderland. In philosophy, Lewes's 
 History of Philosophy and Smiles' s Self Help adorn 
 the so-called immortals, but not Schopenhauer 
 nor Herbert Spencer. Sir J. Lubbock rigorously 
 disqualified any author who was not dead ; but, 
 if he could not trust himself to judge of living 
 authors, this does not seem to specially qualify 
 him as a judge of those deceased. The proverb, 
 ' Dead men tell no tales,' hardly applies in his case, 
 for he would not look at a tale not told by a dead 
 man. A bas-relief of the Lubbock Avebury ear, 
 in bronze, should be nailed over the door of every 
 free library in England. 
 
 Surely nothing but an extraordinary perversity 
 of taste would enable a man to read the hundred 
 best books ! Once this has been realised, then the 
 literary ear becomes suspect. Take a well-known 
 book such as Germany and England, by Professor 
 Cramb : 
 
 Germany has one of the greatest and most profound 
 schools of poetry yet how many Englishmen have
 
 LITERARY EARS 141 
 
 the secret of its high places, or access to its templed 
 wonders ? Since the decline of Alexandria there has 
 been no such group of daring thinkers as those of 
 Germany in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth 
 centuries ; yet to most English men and women the 
 Critique of Pure Reason and the larger version of 
 Hegel's Logic are sealed as the Enneads of Plautus. 
 
 Not a single quotation is given from any of those 
 ' templed wonders,' and I am inclined to be doubt- 
 ful as to how wonderful they really are. How 
 daring, for instance, were the daring thinkers of 
 Alexandria ? Were they as daring as, say, our 
 anti-vaccinators who from 1843 to 1908 not only 
 risked confluent smallpox predicted as their in- 
 evitable portion by all our leading doctors, but also 
 suffered constant fines and imprisonment, plus 
 endless abuse and additional fees for insuring 
 their lives ? Those men seem to me daring thinkers. 
 Why should some antique incomprehensibles alone 
 enjoy the term ? Try another piece from Cramb : 
 
 Not a page of Treitschke's greatest work has yet 
 been translated ; yet his history of the first stages of 
 Prussia's wrestle for supremacy, his literary essays, 
 and his lectures on political theory, excite a more 
 ardent curiosity in modern Germany than the essays 
 and history of Macaulay did in mid- Victorian Eng- 
 land. Giesebrecht's great history of the early em- 
 pire, with its vivid portraiture of the tragic figures 
 of the Saxon and Suabian lives, is still inaccessible 
 to all but a small minority of Englishmen ; and its 
 companion work, a masterpiece at once in erudition 
 and in thought, as well as one of the most alluring 
 of books, the Verfassungsgeschichte, are there fifty
 
 142 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 Englishmen living who have turned its grave and 
 weighty pages or even heard its name ? 
 
 On the analogy of Lubbock's hundred best 
 books, few sensible people should have any desire 
 to read Treitschke, Giesebrecht or the Verfas- 
 sungsgeschichte. Surely, instead of asking if fifty 
 Englishmen have ever heard the name of this last, 
 the professor might quote a line or two for us. We 
 might have enjoyed them. The ears of literature 
 rarely risk this, and they may be wise in their 
 generation, for some of their samples are not 
 winners. Sir M. E. Grant Duff relates how, at a 
 dinner-table, Swinburne gave it as his opinion that 
 the two finest lines in the English language were 
 in Browning's Sordello : 
 
 As the king-bird with ages in his plumes 
 Travels to die in his ancestral glooms. 
 
 Few, on this, can have been in any hurry to 
 sample Sordello. In the introduction to Old 
 Familiar Faces, we are told how the voice of 
 Theodore Watts Dunton, the friend of Tennyson, 
 Meredith, Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris, Matthew 
 Arnold and Borrow, would falter with emotion 
 when quoting his favourite passage from Keats. 
 The quotation is: 
 
 Charm 'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 
 
 Theodore Watts Dunton, the friend of the eight 
 poetic Dreadnoughts previously mentioned, con-
 
 LITERARY EARS 143 
 
 sidered these lines to be the finest in English poetry. 
 What do you think of them ? 
 
 Professor Cramb, by not quoting, avoids your 
 verdict. He alludes to Goethe ' as perhaps the 
 most serene artist in words since Sophocles.' 
 Nothing, however, from either author is given in 
 support of this statement. Should we then accept 
 it ? German is certainly a clumsy and uncouth 
 language to be serene in, and so is Greek, and it 
 seems odd that the two ' most serene artists in 
 words ' should have selected those two languages 
 for such a purpose. 
 
 The reason why so many famous writers never 
 die, the reason why so many so-called master- 
 pieces bloomperennial, the reason why the memories 
 of Plato and Aristotle linger so long, is not, as 
 Lord Haldane asserts, owing to a Hegel, a Prantl 
 and a Zeller, but because they are not read ; they 
 are ' studied.' When an author is ' studied,' he 
 is too profound to be quoted. Then he is safe, for 
 no one ever hears ' the templed wonders ' on which 
 the reputation rests. Professor Cramb, like so 
 many educational authorities, judges of value more 
 by the name of the sayer than by what was said. 
 By these means, whole libraries become store- 
 houses of pellucid thoughts. Herbert Spencer 
 entered a caveat against excessive study or exces- 
 sive reading : 
 
 The mischiefs of ' Cram ' (not the professor) are 
 often heard of, but insistence on them seems to pro- 
 duce no effect. . . . The minds of the young,
 
 144 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 overburdened with useless knowledge, will presently 
 exhibit the effects of measures which might fitly be 
 called measures for the increase of stupidity. 
 
 Otium sine litteris est mors (leisure without a 
 taste for letters is death), said Seneca. The 
 observation is not true, without many qualifica- 
 tions, except in the slave epoch, when business 
 and manual labour were practically forbidden. 
 A man of leisure would not have been able, in 
 Rome, to attend to his garden himself and mend 
 his fences and build a tool- house. Seneca's 
 observation is inapplicable to-day when drink is 
 not, as Macaulay held, the only alternative to 
 letters. A truer remark would be that a taste for 
 letters without leisure is hell. Why, then, increase 
 it artificially ? Men of letters should realise that it 
 is possible to think with the hands as well as with 
 the ears, and there is no necessity to be dull 
 because you do not read. A day will dawn when 
 ' well-read,' of a mind, will be a term of contempt, 
 something resembling ' boose- born ' as applied to 
 an ode. My hope is to help the arrival of this 
 wished-for day.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 LAWYERS' EARS 
 
 That we, the independent, determined, self-ruling 
 English, should daily behold the giant abominations of 
 our judicial system, and yet do nothing to rectify them, 
 is really quite incomprehensible. It is not as though the 
 facts were disputed ; all men are agreed upon them. The 
 dangers of law are . . . the experience of him who said 
 he had only twice been on the verge of ruin ; once when 
 he had lost a lawsuit, and once when he had gained one. 
 H. Spencer. 
 
 LAW as an institution for the benefit of lawyers 
 seems a curious commentary on civilisation, and 
 not, one hopes, permanent. To hear our moral 
 reformers talk, whether episcopal or martial, one 
 would imagine that gambling and debauchery 
 spelt ruin to a nation. Yet bad and expensive 
 law does infinitely more harm ; and, provided the 
 administration of justice was what it ought to be, 
 considerable sums might be spent annually in 
 encouraging vice without doing us any damage 
 worth mentioning. That this should not be uni- 
 versally realised is because our moral reformers 
 will read sermons instead of thinking for them- 
 selves.
 
 146 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 The first basis of law lies in Mr. J. C. Spence's 
 dictum that no one should be punished until a 
 definite wrong has been proved to have been done 
 to a definite person. This is not recognised at all. 
 The second basis is, that if we have been wronged, 
 it should be our interest to go to law. If going to 
 law does not pay, the wrong- doer is encouraged. 
 Now, our legal system does not recognise either of 
 those two points. If a woman is fined 25 for 
 stealing goods from a shop, the shopman does not 
 get the money, and if a man is fined 25 for assault- 
 ing you, you do not get the money. The only 
 man who gets any money is the lawyer. He sees to 
 that by having made it illegal for any one to be 
 represented except by a member of the legal 
 profession, whose fees rank before the debts due 
 to other creditors. When you go to law, you must 
 employ a firm of solicitors, a senior counsel and a 
 junior counsel, and, should you lose, you have to 
 pay the expenses of both sides. Such a system 
 is a direct encouragement to rogues, but our 
 leading politicians do not mind that, provided 
 we enjoy free compulsory education. 
 
 With free trade in law, restrictions on natural 
 aptitude would be removed far more effectively, 
 and also more justly, than by compulsory educa- 
 tion. We have, born among us, native geniuses 
 in law, just as we have in medicine, whose natural 
 bent cannot come to light. Remove the restric- 
 tions, give us free trade, let us be represented 
 by whomsoever we choose. If the horse- hair
 
 LAWYERS' EARS 147 
 
 brigade, who took their honours in law, and ate 
 their dinners at the bar, are so valuable, let us 
 discover this for ourselves. It seems odd that the 
 K.C.'s and M.D.'s should be the men so sure of the 
 value of certain educational courses, and also the 
 men who refuse to risk a contest in the open market. 
 The value of a course of studies, lasting from three 
 to five years, is really an inheritance from the 
 pre-book era, when it was difficult to find out any- 
 thing without personal interviews. Cheap refer- 
 ence books and encyclopaedias have altered all that, 
 and information is now open to everybody. A 
 man who hangs about the courts for a few weeks, 
 and picks up the procedure, has most of the know- 
 ledge that he wants. The rest would depend on 
 natural aptitude. There are thousands of men, 
 not at the bar, who can state a case, and 
 conduct a case, and frame an act, better than our 
 lord chancellor. Why then need the lord 
 chancellor be a lawyer ? If the chancellor of the 
 exchequer can be a solicitor, as he was ; if the 
 secretary of state for war can be a K.C., as he was ; 
 if the first lord of the admiralty can be a barrister, 
 as he was; and if the prime minister can be a 
 lawyer, as he is, why should not the Lord Chan- 
 cellor be a sailor ? Anything for a change. The 
 legal gentry, as things are, have certain posts, 
 entirely to themselves, with no corresponding 
 aUowances elsewhere. If these aren't open to 
 us, ours should not be open to them. Note 
 this :
 
 148 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 Lord Chancellor . 10,000 a year, and pension 
 
 of 5,000 a year. 
 
 Attorney-General . . 7,000 a year, and fees and 
 
 pension. 
 
 Solicitor- General . . 6,000 a year, and fees. 
 
 Lord Advocate, Scotland . 5,000 a year 
 
 Solicitor-General, Scotland . 2,000 a year. 
 
 Lord Chancellor, Ireland . 6,000 a year. 
 
 Attorney-General, Ireland . 5,000 a year. 
 
 Solicitor-General, Ireland . 2,000 a year. 
 
 Total 43,000 a year, and fees and 
 pensions. 
 
 43,000 a year of public money reserved for 
 lawyers only, in addition to which we have two 
 ex-Lord-Chancellors drawing 5,000 a year each! 
 No lawyers should be given a salary till they have 
 rectified the law of libel, which, as it stands, is an 
 insult to civilisation. 
 
 It seems odd, with a profession specially trained 
 in the meaning of words and their possibilities of 
 distortion, that our legal luminaries should not 
 have devised some means of expression clearer 
 than the methods in ordinary use. But this is 
 not the case. Legal English, in addition to being 
 difficult to understand, bears several meanings 
 and the final one is the one that happens to have 
 commended itself to certain judges, and has 
 usually cost private individuals vast sums of money 
 to obtain. Take the Education Act : the legal 
 English gives education ' in some other manner ' 
 as a reasonable excuse for not attending the 
 council school. The Education Board hold this
 
 LAWYERS' EARS 149 
 
 to mean that the child must pass the council 
 standards for a child of that age, though the 
 education may have been given elsewhere. The 
 magistrates, paid and unpaid, accept this. You 
 may possibly, in a particular case, get the decision 
 reversed at the High Court at a cost of 300 or 
 400. Now if the lawyers, who drew the Act up 
 for their Government, intended to state that 
 education ' in some other manner ' meant edu- 
 cation of some other kind, why on earth could not 
 they say so in plain English, even if it took four 
 lines or four sentences instead of four words ? 
 In spite of appearances, I cannot believe that 
 all lawyers frame Acts with a view to future fees. 
 The results must be mainly due to the copying 
 of the methods and language of antiquated Acts, 
 which are, in reality, vicious models, and we 
 should be better off had they been drawn up by 
 journalists previously cautioned that each clause 
 should only bear one interpretation. I would 
 willingly back a journalist to do this better than 
 our Lord Chancellors at 10,000 a year. All the 
 Acts, I have read, have been models of how the 
 thing should not be done, and they might be used 
 for this purpose. 
 
 Considering that lawyers in practice are occupied 
 with litigation between two parties, plaintiff and 
 defendant respectively, and that all their experience 
 takes this form, it seems incredible that they should 
 not have been the first to see the folly and wicked- 
 ness of prohibiting something by statute without
 
 150 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 the thing being proved in a court of law to be an 
 offence if done by one person to another. In 
 which case, however, no statute is needed, for 
 common law is our remedy without it. 
 
 Lawyers should have been the first to realise 
 that Acts framed on some notion of general 
 expedience or on some imaginary common weal 
 are wrong in principle and must fail ; for, if you, 
 in suffering a hardship, cannot issue a summons 
 against any one, or charge any one as being the 
 cause of your misfortune, your complaint is against 
 the cosmic system, or the creator. 
 
 The proper basis of right and wrong, as Mr. 
 J. C. Spence well shows, consists in the proving of 
 a definite wrong against a definite person. That 
 is indeed human justice, and there is no other. 
 Lawyers with all their advantages of education, 
 training and practice have never propounded so 
 very simple and obvious a thesis, which is further 
 evidence of the futility of books.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 MACAULAY'S EARS 
 
 Tell me not in calf-bound numbers 
 
 That, by reading, men grow wise ; 
 Fourth form boys had better slumber 
 
 Than ' cram ' and ' swat ' to win a prize. 
 When you see some far-famed reader 
 
 Highly thought of by his peers, 
 You can bet the senile bleater's 
 
 Merely learnt to grow his ears. 
 
 Earthborn. 
 
 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, as is often for- 
 gotten, was a politician of the Haldane-Birrell 
 brand ; he became Secretary of State for War, 
 and was made a peer, not for his prose, but for the 
 length and fluency of his speeches. He was also 
 a poet. His father, Zachary Macaulay, belonged to 
 one of the sects on Clapham Common so interested 
 in the spiritual welfare of the black. Macaulay 
 himself was the prime and principal propounder 
 of the modern craze that every one is ignorant 
 who does not read books, and that all gifts are to be 
 discovered by examinations. Many of his speeches 
 are devoted to books and education, and inas- 
 much as his fame as a speaker was only second to 
 ii 151
 
 152 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 his fame as a writer, some of his addresses in and 
 out of the House of Commons are just worth 
 glancing at. 
 
 His worship of the moral value of books and 
 reading is well shown in his address at the open- 
 ing of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, 
 November 4th, 1846 : 
 
 There is, I will venture to say, no judicious com- 
 manding officer of a regiment who will not tell you 
 that the vicinity of a valuable library will improve 
 perceptibly the whole character of a mess. I well 
 knew one eminent servant of the East India Com- 
 pany, a man of great and various accomplishments, 
 a man honourably distinguished both in war and 
 diplomacy, a man who enjoyed the confidence of 
 some of the greatest generals of our time . . . whom 
 free access of books had, at the most critical period 
 of his life, saved from being a mere smoking, card- 
 playing, punch-drinking lounger. 
 
 His audience, whose whole life had been confined 
 to libraries and reading-rooms, here indulged in 
 much hand-clapping, and exchanged with one 
 another bright- eyed animated glances, hinting 
 that, if the Army had only listened to them, our 
 generals would have read more books and won 
 more battles. Macaulay, like people will who are 
 propounding the craze of the day, states an in- 
 stance of something, that may have happened 
 once, as a lesson for all time, but he gives no definite 
 reason why reading should be the only alternative 
 to drink. Could not the eminent soldier of the
 
 MACAULAY'S EARS 153 
 
 East India Company have taken up cycling, or 
 botany, or spread the gospel, or why didn't he 
 join the band ? Off duty, a soldier must be pre- 
 pared to be, to some extent, a picturesque lounger ; 
 otherwise he has mistaken his profession, a pro- 
 fession where, if this be not the attraction, it cer- 
 tainly isn't the pay. An army, where any large 
 proportion of the soldiers were being ' saved ' by 
 books, would not inspire confidence. The moral 
 effect of books is entirely imaginary ; the fact 
 being that a man watching something, or doing 
 nothing, is not nearly so averse to a sudden call 
 of duty as a man immersed in a book ; nor is 
 any one less to be depended on, to do a little more 
 than he need, than is the man dying to return to the 
 page where he left off. Reading is one of the most 
 tempting forms of selfishness, and more men have 
 missed their chances in life by having given way 
 to this tempter than have ever been ' saved ' 
 by it. Any encouragement is sinful. 
 
 Macaulay is an instance of a man believing in 
 himself to such an extent that whatever he did was 
 to be taken as the best course for all, and, if possible, 
 made compulsory. However, now that he is 
 dead, one begins to wonder what his own genera- 
 tion saw in him. He was so fond of reading, 
 he would read as he walked along the street. This 
 cannot be a good habit, and is very bad for the eyes. 
 His love of examination papers was such that he 
 didn't mind what the examination was in provided 
 there was one. Even if the examination were in
 
 154 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 Cherokee verses, he said, the best man would come 
 to the top. I doubt this myself. You might get a 
 Birrell or a Haldane by Cherokee verses, but you 
 would not get a Bright or a Bradlaugh, and a 
 Wellington might well have refused to compete 
 at all; nor would good engine-drivers or cavalry 
 rough-riders be discovered by such means. One 
 of these days, a man who wants to be tested by an 
 examination paper will be regarded as a bad type. 
 Macaulay took honours in all the examinations he 
 entered for, and he twice won the Chancellor medal 
 for verse. Yet this does not necessarily prevent 
 a man being an ass. The fact of the matter is that 
 a strain of ' dottiness ' is no handicap in examina- 
 tion papers and even gives a certain elan to the 
 answers. It is quite possible that life's winners are 
 not fitted to make marks and display elan on paper. 
 They wish for the real thing. They want to do 
 something themselves, and not to tell you what 
 Hannibal said to Antonio before crossing the 
 Alps. To choose a Secretary of State for War by 
 examination papers seems pure wantonness. 
 
 In 1847, one of the earliest grants was voted in 
 aid of education. The sum asked for was one of 
 100,000, and this was opposed by the member for 
 Finsbury. He asked whether this sum might not 
 develop into an annual tax of increasing dimensions, 
 and whether such a scheme was not invading the 
 liberties of the subject and unduly extending the 
 functions of government. We now know that 
 the member for Finsbury was quite right, and his
 
 MACAULAY'S EARS 155 
 
 name, Mr. Thomas Buncombe, deserves recogni- 
 tion. He, however, only secured 47 votes against 
 372. Macaulay was put up by the Government to 
 answer the member for Finsbury, and he is sup- 
 posed, on that occasion, to have excelled himself. 
 He stated that every fresh school resembled the 
 building of a fresh iron- clad or a fresh fortress at 
 Portsmouth, and that halls of culture were the 
 fortresses to stop the path of the ' moral distempers 
 inseparable from ignorance.' Poor ignorance ! 
 you never did any harm to any one. Moral dis- 
 tempers may arise from poverty, but as the building 
 of schools out of the public pocket makes every one 
 poorer, this seems a method of increasing moral 
 distempers rather than of checking them. And 
 what is ignorance ? Not having read Macaulay' s 
 essays ? Moral distempers, not due to misery, 
 do not arise from ignorance, but from evil disposi- 
 tions, and evil dispositions are not due to lack of 
 education, or all highly educated people would be 
 nice ; but are they ? Bacons, Machiavellis and 
 Talleyrands, and countless celebrities in the criminal 
 world, point to a different conclusion. 
 
 As an epoch-making argument, Macaulay enu- 
 merated all the riots he could remember, particu- 
 larly Popish plots, and ended with the breaking 
 of the new weaving machinery in Yorkshire. He 
 then asked in atone of pained, parsonical reproof 
 
 Could such things have been done in a country in 
 which the mind of the labourer had been opened by 
 education ; in which he had been taught to revere
 
 156 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 his Maker ; taught to respect legitimate authority ; 
 and taught to seek the redress of real wrongs by 
 peaceful and constitutional means ? 
 
 But the labourer was taught ' to revere his 
 Maker,' and he always has been taught that, and 
 hard. To call this ' opening ' the labourer's mind 
 is amusing, considering that the professional object 
 is to close the mind, and not open it, certainly on 
 that subject and probably on a good many others 
 as well. Some people think that more minds 
 have been 'bunged up' by education than education 
 ever opened. Then, most of the religious riots 
 mentioned by Macaulay were entirely due to the 
 labourer being over-particular as to how his Maker 
 had been revered. None of them were due to th,e 
 labourer's ignorance, or apathy on the subject. 
 Surely this old clap- trap will no longer wash ! If 
 a new invention causes a man to lose his place, 
 through no fault of his own, I defy you to teach 
 him to like it ; and to tell him to ' revere his 
 Maker,' just then, is a bitter mockery of the posi- 
 tion. The Government our party politicians 
 have the unpleasant duty of making a man, the 
 victim of circumstance, behave himself, and they 
 may have to kill him if he refuses to do so ; and, 
 if they draw their salaries, without doing the job, 
 as they do, they show the futility of education. 
 
 Since the labourer' s mind was ' opened ' by 
 education, he has adopted the doctrine that the 
 less work he does the longer his job lasts. Edu- 
 cation zealots consider this is due to ignorance.
 
 MACAULAY'S EARS 157 
 
 They wish to cram the unfortunate man with the 
 Bible, Algebra and Euclid. But where do these 
 come in ? Is the man wrong ? As a statement, 
 and independent of futurist considerations, what 
 he says seems true. Yet those of us who prefer 
 other workers should be properly protected. In 
 1907, the accumulated funds of one hundred labour 
 unions amounted to 4,616,230, and the sum is 
 now more. Let them use their own capital and 
 employ themselves. If their theory does not 
 answer, they will starve. No education is needed 
 to tell a man when he is starving. He tells you. 
 You may reply that that is his job, and that the 
 less he does the longer his job will last. He would 
 soon grasp the position. 
 
 The peroration of this great speech of Macaulay's 
 on education reads rather curiously in the light 
 of modern experience. It was delivered more or 
 less as follows, in fine style with the head thrown 
 back, and modelled on Demosthenes, Chatham 
 and Mirabeau : 
 
 ' We are accused,' he said scornfully, ' of compelling 
 men to pay for an education from which they reap 
 no reward. Is there one industrious man, one honest 
 man alive, who derives no benefit, no reward, from 
 living among honest and industrious neighbours 
 rather than among rioters and vagabonds ? Is it 
 necessary to appoint a committee to tell us whether 
 knowledge be the ally or the enemy of liberty ? ' 
 
 Here, amid loud and prolonged cheers, he re- 
 sumed his seat, flushed with pride and ' sweating
 
 158 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 profusely,' having spoken for an hour and fifty- six 
 minutes. What a pity he has no industrious 
 grandson residing to-day among some ' efficiently 
 educated ' trade unionists who have called him a 
 black-leg ! He would probably be a safer man 
 and a happier man .among rogues arid vagabonds. 
 Is Macaulay still regarded as a great mind ? He 
 was no friend of liberty. Still, the man could 
 write, and we must not be bigots. The question 
 should rather be how best to enjoy him. Samuel 
 Titmarsh gave us the cue by always calling 
 him Thomas Babbletongue Macaulay or Tom 
 Macaw. The name, ' Tom Macaw,' is a happy 
 one. Murmur it to yourself, once or twice re- 
 proachfully, while you take in his more exasperat- 
 ing periods. It works wonders. ' Tom Macaw ' 
 may be enjoyed provided you know how, but this 
 is not taught in the council schools.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 ATTIC EARS 
 
 Where the Attic bird 
 Trills his thick warbled notes. 
 
 Milton. 
 
 ATTIC ears a typical development among those 
 revelling in the glories of Greece and Rome will 
 one day be considered a disease and treated with 
 an injection of petrol. The history of Athens is 
 extremely inglorious, and the principal episodes 
 are as follows : 
 
 B.C. 480, burnt by Xerxes; B.C. 404, captured by 
 Sparta. B.C. 338, reduced to subjection by Mace- 
 donia. B.C. 86, captured by Sulla, and Rome kept 
 the place going till A.D. 262, when the Goths forced 
 their way in ; A.D. 396, Alaric got in, nominally as 
 a guest. From A.D. 600, cosmopolitan Christians 
 changed the temples into churches. The Italians 
 owned it from 1204 till 1456, when the Turks took it 
 over, and the Church of the Virgin was converted 
 into a mosque. In 1687, the Venetians captured it. 
 In 1688, the Turks resumed possession. In 1820, 
 Byron, in poem form, dreamed that Greece might 
 still be free. In 1834, after the war of liberation, 
 Athens again became the capital of Greece. In 1916 
 the Allies take over the fleet of Greece, and occupy 
 the municipal theatre. 
 
 159
 
 160 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 Speculations are rife as to what will be the end 
 of this seat of so much greatness and glory. 
 Possibly it will be handed over to a New York 
 and Chicago combine for a good round sum in 
 cash. Why not ? 
 
 The Turks have always had a profound con- 
 tempt for the Greeks and, as they are the nearest 
 residents, they may well be the best judges. The 
 merits of Greek plays have to be taken on trust 
 from scholars. No one who has read a Greek 
 play, in English only, ever has a word to say for 
 it. This seems significant, for such readers did 
 certainly understand every word that they read. 
 Did any one else ? ' Shakespeare,' says Schopen- 
 hauer, ' is much greater than Sophocles.' And 
 even Goethe he ranked superior to Euripides, 
 whose iphigenia seemed ' crude and vulgar.' So 
 much for Athenian drama. 
 
 Plato and Aristotle had the enormous advantage 
 of not being brought up on Adam and Eve and 
 the Bible ; Herbert Spencer in his autobiography 
 admits that their works may contain some very 
 fine passages, but, whether these were worth 
 searching for, he thought doubtful. 
 
 Plato pronounced the trade of a shopkeeper to 
 be a degradation to a freeman, and he wished it 
 to be punished as a crime. Aristotle declared 
 that, in a perfect State, no citizen should exercise 
 any mechanical art. The Romans accepted this 
 verdict, and Augustus Csesar condemned a senator 
 to death because he had debased his rank by
 
 ATTIC EARS 161 
 
 taking part in a manufacture (see Lecky : History 
 of Rationalism, vol. ii. p. 231). 
 
 Plato and Aristotle, in regarding trade as a sin, 
 seem not ahead of their age, and, when they 
 are ahead of their age, there seems more in 
 this to wonder at than to accept. 
 
 So much for Greece, ' Mother of arts and elo- 
 quence.' Rome is another matter. The Romans, 
 like the English, were performers rather than 
 writers. No real Roman ever wished Rome to 
 become a home of art and flute-playing, or an 
 academy of peripatetic philosophers discussing the 
 ens rationis and the principia cognoscendi. That 
 sort of thing was left to Athens with its academe, 
 ' its marble nymphs and scrolls of wordy lore.' 
 The real English resemble Romans. They do not 
 want London to be world- famed for her lectures, 
 her halls of science, her preachers, her public 
 statues, or her national galleries. Those things 
 we prefer bad. We pride ourselves on our train 
 service, our shops, our policemen, our Rugby foot- 
 ball matches and our race meetings. Bond Street 
 is a national glory. So is the policeman at the 
 corner directing the traffic. The capital of the 
 world, pace our meddlesome politicians, should 
 illustrate the fact that vice and vigour have 
 much in common. At Rome, that view of life 
 found a pitch of excellence difficult to imagine; 
 indeed, the B.C. boys declared that all roads led 
 to Rome. The Romans were eventually destroyed 
 by their eminent politicians, much as we shall be.
 
 i6a TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 The mistake, hallowed by historians, is that the 
 fame of Rome rests on her consuls, her aediles, 
 her writers, and her political celebrities, i.e. those 
 who altered the punishments for defacing a statue, 
 changed the status quo of the freedman, and en- 
 trusted to the virgin her pre-nuptial dos to be 
 disposed of according to her testamentary wishes. 
 Such people never made a city. Do you suppose 
 our county councillors, our borough mayors and 
 our politicians represent the men who made Lon- 
 don ? Do you suppose a nation of Dr. Mac- 
 namaras and Rt. Hon. Augustine Birrells would 
 have ever formed an empire ? Such people make 
 bad laws and their position is a national disaster. 
 
 The fame of Rome rests on the kind of man the 
 average Roman was, whose city was the capital 
 of the world because of his glorious animalism, 
 his vitality and his contempt for culture. Cer- 
 tainly, art, letters and oratory existed at Rome, as 
 in London to-day, and they were taught by Greeks. 
 There was also a culture course at Athens; but 
 what the Roman really thought of the Greek is 
 shown by the epithet esuriens (hungry). The 
 ' hungry Greek ' was a stock phrase in Rome. 
 Now, in England, as in Rome, no epithet is more 
 withering than ' hungry.' To have done yourself 
 well is nothing against you. But a ' hungry ' man 
 suggests the last of the last, no home, no money, 
 no food, no friends and no fortune. When ' Ben ' 
 Tillett addressed the hungry strikers a year or 
 two ago on Tower Hill, he took pains not to look
 
 ATTIC EARS 163 
 
 hungry, and he was reported, in the Press, to have 
 been seen dining right royally at Frascati's. He 
 thus testified that his sympathy was not merely 
 stomachic, but mental, aye, and moral. Hungry 
 people may collect hungry people, but their prospec- 
 tive outlook has to be presented on a food basis. 
 
 A typical Roman, attending to his own pur- 
 suits, is not to be found in Livy or Tacitus, any 
 more than a typical Englishman is to be found in 
 Clarendon, Froude, or even in Thomas Babington 
 Macaulay. To find that, you must know ' What 
 things we have seen, what things there have been, 
 done at the Mermaid.' 
 
 In spite of erudite and scholarly romancers, 
 I refuse to believe that young Romans walked 
 down their Via Appia discussing Suetonius and 
 Quintilian ; or that they would have showed any 
 wisdom in doing so ; or that they spoke of these 
 or of their political celebrities, beyond cursing 
 them to Hades. On the other hand, romancers 
 seem to me wrong in limiting the conversation in 
 ancient Rome to ' By Pollux,' interspersed occa- 
 sionally with ' What ho ! without there.' 
 
 Horace, when he jots down what he has just 
 heard in the street, instead of composing odes 
 more lasting than brass, will show that stray 
 thoughts must have been heard in the Appian 
 Way much like what we may hear in Piccadilly : 
 
 Omnibus hoc vitium est cantoribus, inter amicos. 
 Ut nunquam inducunt animi cantare rogati. Injussi 
 nuuquam desistunt. (The trouble with singers is
 
 164 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 that, when their friends ask them to sing, they 
 never comply ; but, when not asked to sing, they 
 never leave off). 
 
 The chance thought, the careless phrase, the 
 men of the Mermaid, that is what has been lost to 
 us, lost to us, and not old Postumus, or the volume 
 of Tacitus, or the forgotten oration of Demos- 
 thenes. The celebrities traditionally served up 
 to us were, with few exceptions, what we have 
 to-day as ministers, burgomasters and borough 
 mayors. Such people are not interesting. The 
 men who make the world leave nothing behind 
 except the world they make. They seldom pub- 
 lish memoirs. Writers will persist in imagining 
 that the average person is as poor a specimen 
 as his politicians. This is not the case, and never 
 was the case. The average man makes the 
 empire, his politicians make the bad laws, and the 
 bad laws ruin the empire. Then a picture of the 
 average man is caricatured from reminiscences 
 of his politicians. What a wicked libel on hu- 
 manity ! Really great men are as much above 
 us as the eminent politician is below us. 
 
 At ancient Rome, the probability is that neither 
 writing nor reading were much indulged in. 
 The writing was done on stiff parchment, and the 
 ancient writing materials, recently unearthed at 
 Herculaneum, resemble nothing so much as fire- 
 irons ; useful, doubtless, as ' persuaders,' in order 
 to catch the parchment a resounding whack in 
 the middle when it persisted in bulging. This
 
 ATTIC EARS 
 
 165 
 
 may account for the complete absence of lightness 
 in ancient writings. 
 
 The Latin name for a book (liber) really means 
 rind. The Romans wrote only on one side of this 
 rind, or parchment, and stained the back saffron, 
 
 Painting al 
 
 or yellow. The pieces of parchment, when the 
 work was completed, were joined together so as 
 to form one sheet, and then rolled on a staff ; 
 hence the word volume (volumen). The roll 
 within the rind was strong and solid and embossed 
 at the ends with balls of wood or brass. Reading, 
 under such circumstances, would be no light 
 matter; moreover, there were practically no 
 lamps or candles in Rome, and people who can
 
 166 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 read on a fine day, with the sun shining, are only 
 half alive. 
 
 The above print, from Smith's Dictionary of 
 Antiquities, does not look as if reading were com- 
 mon in ancient Rome. The crowned reader may 
 have read before, but he is not reading as a man 
 who likes it, or is used to it, or has done so often. 
 His position is stiff and he has removed some of 
 his clothes. The fixed set look on his face is 
 most unusual nowadays, unless we are suddenly 
 confronted with an avis aux voyageurs in a foreign 
 tongue. Modern people read quite carelessly, 
 as if it were a mere nothing. The incorrigible 
 reader, who reads even when feeding, will be seen 
 holding the book by one corner and with his head 
 at such an angle that one fancies he could read 
 upside down; all of which is very different from 
 the crowned poet in the print. 
 
 The Roman idea of greatness resembled our 
 own, and, to be honest, is yours reading ? The 
 Romans recognised gladiators, charioteers, warriors, 
 women of statuesque proportions, and ' class ' 
 libertines. The best of the latter were the pride 
 of Rome. Dissipation in loco, that is a dissipa- 
 tion embarked upon from a sense of duty to your- 
 self, or to others, was ranked by Horace with 
 dying for one' s country, and, to both of them, he 
 applies the word dulce (heavenly). Such was the 
 spirit that made and animated Roma, i.e. Rome. 
 Self-denial or spiritual fervour may make a Mecca 
 or a J erusalem ; municipal socialism may make
 
 ATTIC EARS 167 
 
 a Glasgow or a Birmingham ; free trade and free 
 libraries may make a Manchester ; but a capital 
 of the world is not made that way. It is not, as 
 the phrase goes, made with hands. The spending 
 of money, profligacy and the higher vices are 
 what distinguish a capital from a provincial town. 
 Athens may have been the home of Art, but 
 people who wanted revelry came to Rome. If 
 you desire visitors of the right sort, visitors with 
 ' money to burn,' visitors who count, this must be 
 realised. 
 
 The ancient Romans were performers, non- 
 readers. They spoke the truth and their word 
 was their bond, but their knowledge and culture 
 is the invention of the mediaeval high-brow. 
 Nevertheless, these ' ignorant ' devils built an 
 aqueduct B.C. 314, and had a water supply, a 
 hundred years before they had any authors or 
 a library. They had no difficulty in making an 
 excellent road straight from one place to another. 
 Ac-cording to them, to go straight was very simple ; 
 the man of culture has quite lost that art and he 
 finds it difficult. The Romans cannot have en- 
 joyed mathematics or intricate calculations, for 
 Roman numerals would be fatal ; even to sub- 
 tract xix from xxvn does not look by any 
 means simple. However, they managed to trade 
 and prosper without doing sums. Their know- 
 ledge of geography was so primitive that they 
 thought the west coast of Spain ran back in a 
 north-easterly direction into the Arctic regions, 
 12
 
 i68 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 and that England was an island on the west coast 
 of France. If they had known how far north 
 Great Britain was, they would have left it alone 
 as too cold for a civis Romanus. On arrival, they 
 found it not unfit for human habitation and we 
 were a colony of theirs for 300 years. 
 
 The Roman Empire was such a magnificent 
 performance that men of culture have become im- 
 bued with an imaginary notion that their authors 
 were also great. Their authors ! ! Try Virgil ! 
 But authors have nothing to do with the greatness 
 of a country, and do not matter one way or the 
 other. Highly educated people will here raise 
 their eyebrows. The trouble with highly educated 
 people is that they will like anything if they have 
 been told how good it is often enough, while they 
 are still young. With Virgil, and all the classic 
 authors, this has been done for them. 
 
 Tacitus has been said by a notorious scholar 
 to be a greater legacy to humanity than the Roman 
 Empire itself. What a slander on Rome ! The 
 Roman Empire can do without Tacitus. The old 
 camps and Roman roads and remains of Roman 
 villas are far better than books, which will be the 
 ruin of any nation that feeds on them. Still, try 
 Tacitus. I will not insult you by supposing you 
 to be one of those over-educated people who can 
 only read Tacitus in the original. There is by me 
 a volume of his Annals, close on 600 pages, trans- 
 lated by Messrs. A. P. Church, M.A. Oxo: , and 
 W. J. Broadribb, M.A. Cantab: whose names,
 
 ATTIC EARS 169 
 
 Church and Broadribb, inspire confidence. Yet 
 Tacitus comes out poorly. Open about the middle, 
 say, p. 289 : 
 
 But as Corbulo could not endure a rival, so Foetus, 
 who would have been sufficiently honoured in rank- 
 ing second to him, disparaged the results of the war, 
 and said repeatedly that there had been no blood- 
 shed or spoil, that the sieges of cities were only 
 sieges in name, and that he would soon impose on 
 the conquered tribute and law and Roman adminis- 
 tration, instead of the empty shadow of a king. 
 
 To get your words in an order, even more in- 
 volved than that necessitated by the construction 
 of your language, is a gift ; and Tacitus had it. 
 Here is another sample from the same page : 
 
 While he was over-running in tedious expeditions 
 districts which could not be held, the supplies which 
 he had captured, were spoilt, and as winter was now 
 at hand, he led back his army and wrote a letter to 
 the Emperor, as if the war was finished, in pompous 
 language, but barren of facts. 
 
 My dear Tacitus, it's terrible to make our boys 
 construe you as a means of improving their 
 language, it seems unkind. If my fame as a 
 writer ever ran to my being called the English 
 Tacitus, my hope would be that the man who 
 said it hadn't read Tacitus. 
 
 So much for Roman celebrities, who, like our 
 own, display the common vices of the day in their
 
 170 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 most repulsive forms. Against this, it may be 
 said the average person is responsible for his 
 celebrities, particularly his senators and his poli- 
 ticians. He is, perhaps, negatively responsible, 
 for not drowning them or cutting their throats, 
 as the ancient Romans occasionally did, but he 
 can hardly be said to be positively responsible 
 for them or their policy. Take ourselves. How 
 many Englishmen, of themselves, ever clamoured 
 for free education, Home Rule, Tariff Reform, 
 Old Age Pensions or an Insurance Act ? Very, 
 very few. Naturally, if you offer people bread 
 and circuses, you can hardly expect them to say 
 ' No,' or realise the pernicious effects of such a 
 policy. Probably it was the same at Rome. 
 
 Take a case. Supposing the Rt. Hon. Augus- 
 tine Birrell, King's Counsellor, Privy Councillor, 
 writer, wit and statesman, were held up to you 
 which he may be a thousand years hence as 
 typical of England's greatness and a part cause 
 of it, you would ask for cognac. Yet, for century 
 after century, that is how we have treated Rome. 
 An exact prototype of the Rt. Hon. Augustine, at 
 Rome, could only be unearthed by a Mommsen, 
 but Aulus Gellius is not far from the type yes, 
 they knew it well. Aulus Gellius was a man of 
 good family, who flourished at Rome, A.D. 117- 
 180, about the apex of Roman greatness. After 
 taking the toga virilis, he ' studied ' philosophy at 
 Athens. His work, Attic Nights (Nodes Atticae], 
 was written during the long winter evenings in a
 
 ATTIC EARS 171 
 
 country house near Athens. He prefaces his book 
 thus : 
 
 More pleasing works than the present may cer- 
 tainly be found ; but my object in writing this was 
 to provide my children as well as myself with that 
 kind of amusement in which they might properly 
 relax and indulge themselves at the intervals from 
 more important business. . . . Whatever book came 
 into my hand, whether it was Greek or Latin, or 
 whatever I heard that was either worthy of being 
 recorded, or agreeable to my fancy, I took down 
 without distinction, or order. 
 
 You see his object. He lived on terms of fami- 
 liarity with many eminent men of his day, whose 
 names need not now concern us, and he was made 
 a judge. His translator, the Rev. W. Belloc, 
 F.S.A., takes a deal of trouble with Attic Nights ; 
 he consults ' Mr. Person, the Coryphoeus of 
 Greek Literature,' also ' Dr. Parr, in whom I 
 found an able instructor,' and he dedicates the 
 work to the Earl of Orford. It was published 
 in 1745. 
 
 There are twenty books of this, and a more 
 dreary collection will never be met with. Nine- 
 tenths of it deal with such matters as ' Different 
 opinions of Greeks on the number of Niobe's chil- 
 dren,' ' Wise and elegant answer of King Romulus 
 upon the use of wine.' The mental level of the 
 man who could copy out such things is consider- 
 ably below that of our labour members, which is 
 saying a good deal, and immeasurably inferior to
 
 172 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 any bus- driver. And recollect that ' after taking 
 the toga virilis, he ' studied ' philosophy at 
 Athens.' 
 
 A fatal fault of his is the incorrigible habit of 
 writing all his anecdotes in the style adopted by 
 W. S. Gilbert when quoting one of the merrie jests 
 of Hugh Ambrose. In this strain, of which there 
 are thousands, about the least bad of Aulus 
 Gellius's is the following : 
 
 Vol. i. bk. iv. ch. xx. : Unseasonable jesters were 
 cognisable by the censors ; they even deliberated on 
 punishing one who yawned in their presence : Among 
 the severities of the censors, examples are recorded 
 of their extreme rigour of discipline. One is this: 
 The censor extracted a solemn oath concerning wives. 
 It was thus expressed ' You, according to your 
 mind (ex animi tua sententia), have you a wife ? ' A 
 certain jeering, vulgar and ridiculous fellow was about 
 to take this oath, thinking this a fair opportunity 
 for a jest : when, as usual, the censor said, ' You, 
 according to your mind, have you a wife ? ' ' I have,' 
 says the fellow, ' a wife truly, but not according to 
 my mind.' Then the censor degraded him, and 
 assigned the reason this scurvy jest spoken in his 
 presence. 
 
 Another man, who was almost degraded for 
 yawning, escaped. He swore firmly and with 
 conviction : 
 
 That his yawning was reluctant and involuntary, 
 and that he was afflicted with a disease termed the 
 gapes.
 
 ATTIC EARS 173 
 
 Girls sometimes say they have ' got the giggles ' 
 but I never heard any one say that they had ' got 
 the gapes.' 
 
 Now, imagine this Aulus Gellius type of mind, 
 this collector of quaint and wise sayings, as one 
 of the most eminent men of his day, a student of 
 rhetoric and philosophy, in the most brilliant days 
 of Rome, the friend of all the celebrities, and 
 made a judge ! None of the other stories he re- 
 counts can even raise a smile. Those were the 
 Birrells of Rome, the men who made the Empire ! 
 Two more instances and then good-bye. 
 
 Vol. ii. bk. vi. ch. viii. Memorable Anecdotes of 
 A lexander and Publius Scipio : . . . Alexander for- 
 bade, says Appius, the wife of a conquered enemy, 
 who was a woman of extraordinary beauty, to be 
 introduced to his presence, that he might not touch 
 her even with his eyes. 
 
 A pleasant question may therefore be proposed : 
 Who [? which] is to be reckoned the most continent, 
 Publius Africanus the Elder, who having taken 
 Carthage, a considerable city in Spain, restored with- 
 out violation to her father, a blooming virgin of 
 remarkable beauty, the daughter of a noble Span- 
 iard, who had been taken captive and brought to 
 him [note the appalling arrangement of this sentence], 
 or Alexander, who refused to see the wife and sister 
 of King Darius, captured in a mighty battle, who 
 had been described to him as very beautiful, and 
 forbade them to be brought into his presence ? 
 [What a tangle /] 
 
 The translator, the friend of Person and Parr, 
 writes like a scholar, in other words, atrociously.
 
 174 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 Possibly he was modelled on Tacitus. Scipio, to 
 continue, receives censure in the pages of Aulus 
 Gellius: 
 
 These verses were written by Cn. Nsevius, the 
 poet, against him (Scipio) : 
 
 He who carried on great affairs with glory, whose 
 exploits yet live and flourish, who alone is renowned 
 among men, was by his father led away in his shirt 
 from his mistress. . . . This captive maid was not 
 restored to her father, but was ' detained ' by Scipio, 
 and used by him for his amorous pleasures. 
 
 Note the word ' detained,' which, however, is 
 rather lost in the Latin. You now have had all 
 the best of Attic Nights, and you must remember 
 who and what the author was. What do you 
 think of him ? Did he conquer England ? 
 
 And what about Art ? some cultured person is 
 itching to enquire. Certainly, one or two em- 
 perors of idle habits were Art experts, but that 
 the Romans should be supposed to have been 
 judges of Art, or to have cared about it, is a sup- 
 position for which there is no evidence. The 
 tradition rests on the remains of the old city and 
 the ancient buildings. Against this, some of our 
 own old castles and farmhouses are undeniably 
 picturesque, though the owners never cared for 
 Art. Constantinople looks exceedingly beautiful 
 as you approach it from the sea, and, on this 
 analogy, the Turks should love Art. Yet, when 
 they occupied Athens, they made limestone of 
 most of the statues, The English have always
 
 ATTIC EARS 175 
 
 had a fondness for the Turks. The Romans 
 painted their statues with some pigments of 
 coloured wax, laid on with a small trowel, which 
 must have livened them up, and made their Forum 
 as animated as Madame Tussaud's. But if that's 
 Art, what fun to touch up some of those at West- 
 minster ! Even Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, 
 never mentions Art. He never discusses the com- 
 parative merits of Greek and Roman Art, nor 
 compares the Acropolis, the Parthenon and the 
 Propylae of Pericles at Athens with the Coliseum, 
 the Capitolium and the Tabularium at Rome. 
 Neither does he ever mention statues ; yet he was 
 a man of culture, and, while he was at Athens, he 
 must have seen all the statues that there were, 
 and in good condition, with the noses on, etc., 
 which is more than can be done now. His silence 
 is difficult to account for, if he cared for Art. 
 
 Nevertheless, Csesar is reported to have given 
 80 talents for two pictures by his contemporary, 
 Timomachus, one of which was Ajax, and the other, 
 Medea, meditating the murder of her children. 
 If a talent represents 243 155., Caesar must have 
 given 20,000 for those two pictures. Before 
 you let yourself be stunned at so incongruous an 
 act on Caesar's part, you should remember it 
 may have been a pose, or it may have been 
 due to an oft- repeated desire of Mrs. Caesar's to 
 have those pictures. Women are extraordinary 
 about Art. American millionaires are far too 
 sensible to give 80,000 for an old master if it
 
 176 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 wasn't for their wives. Women love Art, not in 
 a gallery, specially built for pictures, but in the 
 home, where all is snug and cosy. Considering 
 any old master can be copied perfectly for a few 
 pounds, and made to look fresher and brighter 
 as well, 'tis time the 80,000 idiocy ceased. No 
 uneducated man ever was so foolish. 
 
 Roman architecture may be imposing, but it 
 was not due to artistic inspiration craving an 
 outlet, nor did the ancient Romans particularly 
 admire it themselves. They built that way be- 
 cause they knew no other way. In old days, the 
 first attempt at architecture was probably a pillar, 
 then two pillars, then two pillars connected and 
 then a portico. Mankind gradually improved on 
 this, and a modern villa with little wooden bal- 
 conies and plenty of windows, of various shapes 
 and sizes, seems as nice a building as you can want. 
 Ancient architecture has revived in the Piccadilly 
 Hotel and Selfridge's, but it seems an absurd 
 anachronism. There is far too much fuss about 
 ancient Rome, the city, the authors, and the 
 senators. We should keep our admiration for the 
 average unlearned Roman, who was one of the 
 best of men and an eternal glory. The following 
 anecdote is worth more than a laugh : 
 
 ' Now, Sadie,' said the mother proudly, ' 'fore ever 
 you rest, you sit right down an' write up your diary, 
 an' send a picture postcard to your popper.' 
 
 Sadie pouted, and produced a picture postcard 
 /rorja her writing-case.
 
 ATTIC EARS 177 
 
 ' Guess the diary can wait,' she said, decisively, 
 ' but I'll send pop a line,' and then she paused, pen 
 in hand. ' Say mammer, what's the name of this 
 place, anyway ? ' 
 
 ' Rome, my pet. An' remember tell your popper 
 you've seen the Collosseum and the Qu-ri-nal, an* 
 we're going to do Michael Angelo to-morrow.' 
 
 Sporting Times : ' Consule Balfouro.' 
 
 Sadie was further right than she wotted of. 
 The real greatness of Rome lay in her every-day 
 folk of whom there are no statues. You can look 
 at the old silent buildings, and think big thoughts 
 about them and write them down if you like, but 
 it's a waste of time, really. Imagine ourselves in 
 the same position. Imagine a man fondling the 
 ruins of the National Gallery, gazing at a statue 
 of Irving at the back of it, and reading Obiter 
 Dicta (Birrell), and then reconstructing, in his im- 
 agination, the old English race ! It would be a 
 sad case of Attic Ears.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 DIVINE EARS 
 
 It is again objected, as a very ridiculous custom, that 
 a set of men should be suffered, much less employed and 
 hired, to bawl one day in seven against the lawfulness of 
 those methods most in use towards the pursuit of great- 
 ness, riches and pleasure, which are the constant practice 
 of all men alive on the other six. Swift. 
 
 1 DIVINE ears ' sound something good, but the 
 misconception is due to the word ' divine,' and 
 these ears are bad, and might be used as a synonym 
 for injustice. A divine is quite entitled to pity 
 an unbeliever because of his gloomy prospects 
 hereafter, but he should be fair to him; this he 
 certainly is not. To have no religion ought, in 
 a way, to be a slice of luck, a saving, an economy, 
 like not smoking, or drinking, or gambling, or 
 subscribing to a library. But our divines refuse 
 to see religion in that light, and insist on all con- 
 tributing to the large houses with spires and the 
 very expensive fittings. Thus every dissenter is 
 made into a religious spendthrift indulging in the 
 wanton luxury of two religions, though his income 
 can only entitle him to one, or perhaps none. 
 178
 
 DIVINE EARS 179 
 
 The whole proceeding may be divine, but it is 
 certainly immoral. 
 
 The morality of our divines is behind our 
 civilisation. They will not understand that cer- 
 tain things which are wrong to them, owing to 
 their faith, are not, on that account, wrong in 
 themselves, or wrong to others. Such a concep- 
 tion of morals is vicious. For instance, there are 
 few of the commandments that an honest man, 
 qua honest man, is not perfectly justified in break- 
 ing. He is perfectly entitled to make graven 
 images of whatever he likes, to have as many gods 
 as he likes, to covet his neighbour's house if he 
 likes it, to take the Lord's name in vain when he 
 wants to, or work hard on the Sabbath Day. 
 There is nothing essentially wrong in any of these 
 things, and even honouring one's parents may, in 
 some cases, be overdone. Thus, as long as there 
 is a Lord's Day Observance Act on the statute 
 book, the wicked principle is established of punish- 
 ing a man, not for doing a wrong thing, but for 
 breaking a prohibition, or a commandment, under 
 which an innocent action has been transformed 
 irrationally into a police-court offence. Our re- 
 ligious guardians, our moral advisers, should be 
 the first to warn our politicians that church regula- 
 tions must only apply to churchmen, or the regula- 
 tions become innately wicked and a source of 
 injustice. So far, the Church has not done so. 
 Our politicians, from what they hear in church, 
 seem unaware that there is anything wrong in
 
 i8o TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 manufacturing crimes and making things wrong 
 by statute. Our divines should be the first to 
 teach them that they are quite right to worship 
 their Maker, but they must not copy Him. So 
 far our divines have not done so. Yet the com- 
 mandments of a Creator can be no models for 
 politicians, unless we could confer divinity by 
 election, which is not yet the case. 
 
 Mr. J. C. Spence in The Conscience of the King 
 well observes that no man should be punished until 
 a definite wrong has been proved against a definite 
 person. This is a far better practical basis of 
 morality than anything in the Scripture : it is not 
 a matter of faith or belief or awe, but of results. 
 Because the Christian deity, according to Moses, 
 sees fit to punish a man, not for a wrong done to 
 another, but for taking the Lord's name in vain 
 or omitting to keep holy the Sabbath Day, does 
 this justify the Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George in 
 fining a man and imprisoning him for refusing 
 to insure under the Lloyd George Insurance Act ? 
 The universal basis of right and wrong should not 
 depend on what Moses claimed to have heard said 
 to him on a B.C. morning near Canaan, nor, as 
 Herbert Spencer observes, on the votes of a few 
 men sitting in a room at Westminster. Are we 
 really going to allow right and wrong to depend 
 on votes ? 
 
 Divines, by not repudiating this system, become 
 more unjust than is warranted by their faith. 
 Another evil, originating from churchmen, is the
 
 DIVINE EARS 181 
 
 enormous importance attached to sin. Owing to 
 the attitude of divines, a certain cachet is conferred 
 on badness to which it has no sort of right. The 
 bad man is made interesting. Any assistance to 
 the bad, said Plautus, is an injustice to the 
 good. The right view is that the lost sheep can 
 well be spared, the return of the prodigal is a bad 
 day for his home, and the sinner is ' better dead,' 
 whether he repenteth or not. Character never 
 changes, and, as Schopenhauer puts it, ' to forget 
 and forgive is to throw away a dearly bought ex- 
 perience.' To forgive your enemy, to love the 
 man who has wronged you, is a sloppy sentiment. 
 The most useful good man is the good man who 
 kills a bad one. Nobody should love a bad 
 man. It is most uncalled for. A bad action 
 is bad, simply and solely, because it has injured 
 the doer or somebody else ; the first kind doesn't 
 much matter, the second does. A wrong one, a 
 man who has wronged another, should, for the 
 sake of that other, be dropped by all ; even a 
 clergyman should never be seen speaking to him. 
 Have we no good men to care for ? That is the 
 real religion of loving sympathy, of sympathy 
 with innocent suffering. The bad man deserves 
 all he gets, and, if he got half he deserved, there 
 would be fewer bad men. To forgive the swine is 
 to encourage him. The Christian ' man of sin,' the 
 dare-devil, going to get hell later on, suggests 
 courage, and is a constant call to depravity. 
 All the divines of England have taught, and
 
 i8 2 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 still teach, that the fountain and reservoir of 
 goodness is the Bible. No one, they argue, knows 
 good or evil, right or wrong, till he has been taught 
 their nature and has had them explained to him 
 by a man of God. Yet if you can find an untaught 
 person and ask him the difference between good 
 and evil, you will find he distinguishes these 
 things just as well as he distinguishes sounds, 
 shapes, textures and colours. If you go further 
 and ask him what he considers the main cause of 
 goodness, he will probably attribute it to a nice 
 disposition, which seems to me likely enough. 
 
 But how I caught it, found it, came by it, 
 What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, 
 I am to learn. 
 
 But not from ' untaught ' people, for they don't 
 know. Does any one else ? 
 
 Herbert Spencer, in his Principles of Sociology, 
 vol. ii. p. 234, gives instances of many primitive 
 races where ' truthfulness seems to be organic ' and 
 theft unknown ; which looks as if our disposition 
 was the seat of morality, rather than the mental 
 effect of education or religion. Schopenhauer 
 continually quotes, almost as a refrain, Velle non 
 discitur, which he often renders ' to wish right 
 cannot be taught.' 
 
 The conviction grows upon me that it was un- 
 fortunate for us that our early wisdom came from 
 Athens and Rome, and that our religion came all 
 the way from Jerusalem. Our learning was
 
 DIVINE EARS 183 
 
 written in Latin and Greek an ominous circum- 
 stance and our Bible was written in an abstruse 
 language, of no status or position, and of which, 
 till recently, there was not even a standard dic- 
 tionary; this led to a deal of interpretation, reputed 
 wise by tradition, before uneducated people had 
 any chance of knowing what was being inter- 
 preted. The nett result of it all was an imaginary 
 link between learning and wisdom, and between 
 learning and goodness. Accordingly, there arose, 
 in a vague irrational way, a connexion between 
 learning, religion and morality, and between ignor- 
 ance, lawlessness and vice, from which alleged 
 trinities we still suffer. Hence the absurd delu- 
 sion that the more morality a man is taught the 
 more he will do, and that the better he is educated 
 the better he will behave. And hence also the 
 immoral legend that goodness rests on divine 
 commandments, which have to be taught you, 
 instead of on the simple consideration that nothing 
 is wrong, unless you thereby injure yourself or 
 somebody else, which consideration is so obvious 
 that education alone has prevented its universal 
 acceptance. 
 
 There is only one way you can excuse divines 
 for their general injustice, their glorification of 
 sin, and their misguided notions of morality, and 
 that is to plead their incorrigible stupidity. But, 
 naturally enough, this plea would have to be enter- 
 tained for them by others, and they could hardly 
 be expected to dwell on it themselves. There is 
 
 13
 
 i84 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 good reason for entertaining it. Suppose you 
 heard some B.A. Oxos :, with the Oxford manner, 
 say that they had come to the conclusion that the 
 English of the Bible was mediaeval, and that it 
 wanted correcting, and that they were going to 
 alter it and bring it up to date till the scriptural 
 English was as faultless as that of the Times, 
 what would you think of them ? You would pro- 
 bably class them as asses of the first water. Yet 
 this supposititious enterprise is exactly what our 
 divines did. Our divines discussed this matter 
 and came to the conclusion that the Scriptures 
 contained many obsolete words, and words whose 
 sense had completely altered, and that there was 
 hardly a chapter in the Bible in which several of 
 the verses were no longer in accordance with the 
 rules of strict grammar. Accordingly twenty-five 
 of our most eminent churchmen and scholars took 
 the New Testament in hand with a view to put- 
 ting it right. They put it right from 1870 to 
 1880. Thirty-five others, equally learned and 
 reverend, took the Old Testament in hand. They 
 put it right from 1870 to 1885. The result of 
 their labours was heralded as a ' rich draught of 
 delight ' to all who loved learning, letters, scholar- 
 ship and literature : 
 
 The Revised Old Testament represents the result 
 of the patient deliberation of the best scholars of 
 the whole English-speaking world. Church Quarterly 
 Review, July, 1885, p. 442. 
 
 The revised New Testament was ushered into
 
 DIVINE EARS 185 
 
 being in similar strains. Yet 'twas a miserable 
 failure. The revisers were stupider than our 
 game-players. Any one who had entered in golf 
 or tennis handicaps would have realised that if 
 the book you propose to alter was published in 
 1611, and if you publish your revised version 
 about 1880 or 1885, the original edition has had 
 a good start. To change an expression of some 
 270 years' standing, and one that has been read 
 in schools, and churches, and at family prayers, 
 during the whole period, takes considerable assur- 
 ance ; it shows nerve rather than nous. For ex- 
 ample, should the revisers alter ' Our Father, 
 which art in heaven,' Matt. vi. 9 ? Yet, if they 
 pass that, why alter anything ? They left ' which 
 art ' alone, as they should have done with the 
 whole book. 
 
 The Revised Version never prospered. It is not 
 read in churches, nor have our law courts yet 
 accepted it as an improved medium for swearing 
 on. Hardly any one took the trouble to criticise 
 it. Mr. Moon, in Learned Men's English, uses it 
 to instance the fact that our learned men do not 
 know their mother tongue. He shows that the 
 revisers, in addition to writing bad English, mis- 
 applied their learning to such an extent that the 
 new work was more incorrect than the old one. 
 He proves his case well; but, whether because 
 the revisers were in holy orders, or whether be- 
 cause he feared that, in holy writ, any pithiness 
 would be mistaken for scoffing or scepticism, the
 
 186 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 fact remains that his criticism is heavy and diffi- 
 cult to use in any readable form. He points out 
 that the revisers seemed aware that our word 
 prevent was derived from the Latin pr<zvenire and 
 originally meant ' to come before.' However, 
 they sometimes forgot this, and Ps. cxix. 147, 
 though revised, reads : ' I prevented the dawning 
 of the morning,' which, under the circumstances, 
 sounds a big performance. Moon's book is full 
 of such cases. 
 
 Then, the revisers were over-fond of meddling 
 and not always with good results. In the au- 
 thorised edition, Proverbs xxxi. 26 reads : 
 
 She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her 
 tongue is the law of kindness. 
 
 In the Revised Version, as Moon shows, this 
 becomes ' on her tongue is the law of kindness.' 
 However, he continues, as ' tongue ' there is the 
 Latin lingua (language), and as the kindness re- 
 ferred to was in her language not on it, the learned 
 revisers have come a cropper. ' Thus,' says Moon, 
 ' the language of this wise and virtuous woman 
 can no longer linger in the ear and dwell undis- 
 turbed in the memory.' One is entitled to regret 
 this, and also that very few of their other altera- 
 tions can be said to have ' bloomed blossoms,' a 
 feat attributed by the revisers to the rod of Aaron, 
 Numbers xvii. 10. 
 
 Moon seems puzzled, in the Revised Version, 
 that when the people in Proverbs swallow anything,
 
 DIVINE EARS 187 
 
 whether oil, fruit or riches, they invariably ' swal- 
 low it up,' but the people in Job, when they 
 swallow anything, whether kingdoms, increase or 
 abundance, invariably ' swallow it down.' May- 
 be the practice was ' to swallow up ' on the sea of 
 Galilee, and ' to swallow down ' again on getting 
 to land. I think so, Moon, I think so. 
 
 Oddly enough, though the revisers could ' ob- 
 serve the force of /,/ and note the use of yap,' 
 they did not know how to use a and an. They 
 seem to have thought that our practice was to 
 write a as an when a occurs before a vowel. 
 Moon, in pointing out to them their mistake, well 
 states that ' such an one ' is no less ridiculous 
 than ' such an wonder.' The English language 
 absolutely refuses either to obey, or recognise, 
 rules and regulations, and this endears it to all 
 right-thinking people. We say ' a eunuch ' not 
 ' an eunuch ' ; 'a ewe lamb ' not ' an ewe lamb ' ; 
 cf. ' a yew tree.' Some people say ' a man has a 
 ear for music ' ; some do not. 'Hotel' and ' his- 
 torian ' are privileged in both ways. The revisers 
 talk of ' an harp,' ' an horse/ ' an horn,' ' an he- 
 goat,' and ' an harlot,' but not ' an whore,' lest, 
 perhaps, the abandoned woman objected. Moon 
 sums the matter up as ' an howling ' procedure ; cf . 
 Zeph. i. 10. On this point our Moon becomes 
 quite bright : 
 
 Can any one tell me [he asks] why the revisers 
 have described Esau as ' a hairy man ' and Elijah as 
 ' an hairy man ' ? Was it because it was considered
 
 i88 TYPICAL DEVELOPMENTS 
 
 that in Elijah's case, the ' h ' should be dropped, 
 ' airy ' being a more appropriate description of him 
 who ' went up by a whirlwind into heaven ' ? 
 (2 Kings ii. n). For my part I consider such jokes 
 as quite out of place in the Bible. 
 
 Well, yes, Moon, quite so, but we should not 
 blame the revisers. Were not their faults more 
 due to stupidity than to sacrilege ? The hypo- 
 thesis must be that only a very stupid man, or a 
 very sacrilegious one, would dream of correcting 
 the Bible. The worthy divines who decided to 
 take the holy job in hand, the worthy divines who 
 appointed a committee for the purpose and elected 
 a chairman, and the worthy divines to whom was 
 subsequently allotted the sacred task, were not, 
 methinks, sacrilegious. Ergo, they were stupid. 
 And these were the best divines of the divine 
 world at that time ! So what about the rest ? 
 What to do with our clergy is the problem for the 
 future. They, however, think the problem is our 
 children, and they have circulated the following 
 memorial, of which clause i reads : 
 
 i. Great numbers of children, some of them so 
 young as n, are being withdrawn from school to 
 take part in industry. If they do not soon return, 
 and no other provision is made for them, a great 
 social problem is being created for the future, by 
 allowing them thus to drift away from educational 
 influences. 
 
 The children only need to be left alone. The 
 clergy are the problem, not the children.
 
 DIVINE EARS 189 
 
 The Church certainly presides over some very 
 deserving charities, but those charities are not a 
 part of the religion and might do better in other 
 hands. 
 
 The tide may turn soon, and degrees, schools 
 and mark- makers will, one hopes, be swept aside. 
 The Church might well assist the movement. 
 They should employ a learned ecclesiastic in full 
 canonicals, to stand on the steps of St. Paul's 
 daily, at noon, and bellow at the top of his voice : 
 
 My dear friends, I am an ass, an awful ass, one of 
 the worst. And I say unto you, verily and truly, 
 that you will be so likewise, unless you avoid books ; 
 yea, and point the finger of scorn, and say' Lo there,' 
 to all who have studied in the universities of Europe, 
 and subsequently burnt midnight oil instead of 
 going to bed. Amen, the Lord be with you 1 
 
 Here endeth the fourteenth chapter.
 
 PART IV 
 
 THE 
 
 NEGATIVE 
 
 PHASE
 
 'It is a most curious thing how book-learning 
 dulls one's intelligence,' said Mr. Winter uneasily. 
 B. Harraden: The Scholar's Daughter
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 NEGLECTED UNITS 
 
 If we can depend upon any principle, which we learn 
 from philosophy, this, I think, may be considered as cer- 
 tain and undoubted, that there is nothing, in itself, 
 valuable or despicable, desirable or hateful, beautiful 
 or deformed ; but that these attributes arise from the 
 particular constitution and fabric of human sentiment 
 and affection. . . . You will never convince a man, who is 
 not accustomed to Italian music, and has not an ear to 
 follow its intricacies, that a Scots' tune is not preferable. 
 You have not even any single argument, beyond your 
 own taste, which you can employ in your behalf : and 
 to your antagonist his particular taste will always appear 
 a more convincing argument to the contrary. If you be 
 wise, each of you will allow that the other may be right ; 
 and having many other instances of this diversity of taste, 
 you will both confess, that beauty and worth are merely 
 of a relative nature, and consist in an agreeable senti- 
 ment, produced by an object in a particular mind, accord- 
 ing to the peculiar structure and constitution of that 
 mind. ... To diminish, therefore, or augment any per- 
 son's value for an object, there are no direct arguments or 
 reasons, which can be employed with any force or in- 
 fluence. The catching of flies, like Domitian, if it give 
 more pleasure, is preferable to the hunting of wild beasts, 
 like William Rufus, or the conquering of kingdoms, like 
 Alexander. Hume. 
 
 THE above words were written by Hume in an 
 193
 
 194 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 essay called The Sceptic as long ago as 1740, and 
 they are as true now as when they were written. 
 Why is it, then, that they are so completely 
 ignored by our educational enthusiasts and social 
 reformers ? If they have an answer to Hume 
 let us hear it. 
 
 To me, it seems obvious that no one pleasure 
 can be preferable to another pleasure, except to 
 the person concerned, and to tax him for some- 
 body else's pleasure, even though you call this 
 ' soul-wealth/ is a wicked thing to do and as 
 sinful as burglary. You, doubtless, hope to 
 improve your friend, and you may sometimes 
 succeed, yet the result is pure injustice and 
 may be dear at the price. Take a case : In 
 an Italian, humming La Boheme as he dresses, 
 most will see a son of song, musically gifted 
 to an endearable extent ; while a Scot with a 
 bagpipe may seem objectionable. But nothing 
 further can be deduced. A free opera tax is an 
 injustice to a lover of the bagpipe. On the 
 wage test, a Scot, except as a singer or a waiter, 
 will more than hold his own with an Italian. He 
 is quite as moral, quite as sensible, and less likely 
 to stab you after dark. On what grounds, then, 
 should municipal opera be provided as a moral 
 stimulant ? Why free music rather than free 
 milk ? The book brigade have themselves to 
 thank that other sections of the community are 
 making similar claims. The art contingent, in 
 addition to robbing us of at least 200,000 a year
 
 NEGLECTED UNITS 195 
 
 in art galleries, are making more and more de- 
 mands for free art, and they deny that a picture 
 gallery should pay the amusement tax. 
 
 The idea of an amusement tax is that those who 
 cannot afford the amusement need not pay the 
 tax. For practical purposes, humanity have only 
 two motives, money and pleasure. What is done 
 for money is called business; what is done for 
 pleasure is called amusement. Strictly speaking, 
 not only patrons of museums and galleries, but even 
 pewholders in church, should pay the amusement 
 tax, since only children attend divine service 
 without any hope of enjoying the performance. 
 With adults, they are not paid to go, so it is not 
 business; and, if they pay to go, it must come 
 under the head of amusement. There can be no 
 doubt that some people would rather hear the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury preach than go to see 
 George Robey, Robert Hale, or Bernard Shaw, 
 and though, technically, a sermon can hardly be 
 called amusing, nevertheless, the main motive is 
 not business but pleasure, or, at all events, pleas- 
 ing sensations. 
 
 Apply this just reasoning to the growing claims 
 for municipal theatres and free Shakespeare. Ask 
 a man with well- developed ears why, and in what 
 way, the stallites at, say, the Empire, are inferior 
 to the patrons of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, 
 or a Midsummer Night's Dream ? The Imperials, 
 or Empire men, certainly aren't poorer. Are they 
 less intelligent ? Are they less truthful ? They
 
 1 96 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 appear in better health, in better spirits, better 
 fed, better off, better ' sorts ' and far more cheer- 
 ful. What is the matter with them ? Has 
 Bentham's dictum ever been upset that, given a 
 like amount of pleasure, push-pin is equal to 
 poetry? If so, tell me who upset this dictum 
 and how he did it ? If the book sense is to be 
 developed at the expense of the sense of justice, 
 then books are more baneful than liquor, and 
 public libraries should only be opened to those 
 certified as mentally deficient or suffering from 
 senile decay, who are, as it is, the principal patrons. 
 
 The whole question has been so misrepresented 
 for so many centuries that one despairs of seeing 
 it righted. We should never forget that our 
 writing has been done for us by people unreason- 
 ably and unwarrantably prejudiced in favour of 
 their own calling. Literature abounds in anec- 
 dotes mainly fiction of men of genius writing 
 masterpieces in a garret and subsequently selling 
 their immortal work for a few pence rather than 
 starve. Pathetic, yes, but no more pathetic, or 
 harder to bear, than trudging the streets penniless 
 in search of work, or in making ingenious articles 
 at a penny each which no one will buy. After all, 
 the author did get something. Writers! Do 
 they alone suffer ? Do they alone know misery ? 
 They make more noise about it, that is all. 
 
 Neglected ears, to the extent of a childhood 
 which has escaped books, is now a police-court 
 offence. Consequently we are justified in asking
 
 NEGLECTED UNITS 197 
 
 whether no untaught people have ever succeeded 
 in life, or whether the value of culture ever ascends 
 to the countenance, or whether it persists in 
 hiding itself in that apocryphal locality some- 
 times called the soul. 
 
 Firstly, take the frontispiece. There you have 
 four of our leading men of letters. Gibbon, 
 Goldsmith, Wordsworth and Swinburne. Three of 
 them figure in the ' hundred best books,' and the 
 fourth would have, too, had he not been disqualified 
 for not being dead. The late William Whiteley, 
 the great universal provider, is in the centre. 
 He seems to me a superior type of man, more 
 alert, quite as intelligent, and with twice the 
 vitality and character. A nation could more 
 easily dispense with Gibbon, Goldsmith, Words- 
 worth and Swinburne than such productions as 
 Whiteley ; yet the object of the Education Act is 
 to turn us to literature rather than to commerce 
 or mechanical invention. To look at old Whiteley 
 inspires confidence in our nation and makes one 
 feel glad. 
 
 Secondly, take the educational reports of some 
 of our celebrities. Oddly enough, the apostles of 
 learning and literature don't get all the testi- 
 monials even from men of their own kidney a 
 subtle phrase this, hinting of internal complica- 
 tions due to sedentary habits and insufficient 
 exercise ? Let us commence with the Master. 
 
 Renan, ' Vie de Jesu ' : 
 
 It is not probable that the Master knew a word of
 
 198 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 Greek, or was able to read or write. His mind pre- 
 served that innocence which an extended or varied 
 culture infallibly weakens. 
 
 Viscount Bryce and Sir H. Craik, please note. 
 Strauss, 'Intellectual Development of Jesus' : 
 
 The boy Jesus did not pass formally through a 
 Rabbinical school. ... A comprehensive faculty of 
 reception is with great men ever the reverse side of 
 their powerful originality. 
 
 Yet Jesus easily withstood forty days' tempta- 
 tion in the wilderness. 
 
 Omar Khayyam, astronomer-poet of Persia to- 
 wards the end of our eleventh century (Fitzgerald) : 
 
 Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 
 
 About it and about : but evermore 
 Came out by the same door where in I went. 
 
 With them the seed of wisdom did I sow, 
 
 And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow ; 
 
 And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd 
 ' I came like Water and like Wind I go.' 
 
 This great wind and water harvest is now com- 
 pulsory. 
 
 Pope mentions : 
 
 The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read 
 With loads of learned lumber in his head. 
 
 We do meet them.
 
 NEGLECTED UNITS 199 
 
 Wordsworth gives the stock argument adopted 
 by education committees : 
 
 ' Where are your books ? ' that light bequeathed 
 
 To beings else forlorn and blind I 
 Up ! Up ! and drink the spirit breathed 
 
 From dead men to their kind. 
 
 And he replies to it : 
 
 Books 1 Tis a dull and endless strife : 
 Come, hear the woodland linnet, 
 
 How sweet his music ! On my life, 
 There's more of wisdom in it. 
 
 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 
 Than all the sages can. 
 
 Nevertheless, if any young Wordsworths are 
 found to-day imbibing impulses ' from a vernal 
 wood ' during school hours, some education prowler 
 will summon them and have them fined L, and if 
 they do it again they will, under Samuel's Chil- 
 dren Act, be packed off to an industrial school to 
 herd with embryo thieves till the age of sixteen. 
 English law, A.D. 1916. 
 
 Herbert Spencer, 'Study of Sociology,' p. 313 
 (Kegan, Paul and Trench) : 
 
 This belief in the moralising effects of intellectual 
 culture, flatly contradicted by facts, is absurd, a 
 
 14
 
 200 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 priori. What imaginable connexion is there between 
 the learning that certain clusters of marks on paper 
 stand for certain words, and the getting a higher 
 sense of duty ? What possible effect can acquire- 
 ment of facility in making written signs of sounds, 
 have in strengthening the desire to do right ? How 
 does knowledge of the multiplication-table, or quick- 
 ness in adding or dividing, so increase the sympathies 
 as to restrain the tendency to trespass against fellow 
 creatures ? In what way can the attainment of 
 accuracy in parsing and spelling, etc., make the 
 sentiment of j ustice more powerful than it was ; 
 or why, from stores of geographical information, 
 perseveringly gained, is there likely to come increased 
 regard for truth ? 
 
 In other words, nothing is developed by educa- 
 tion excepting the ears. 
 Schopenhauer, 'Men of Learning' : 
 
 Students and men of learning of all sorts and 
 every age, aim as a rule at acquiring information 
 rather than insight. They pique themselves upon 
 knowing about everything stones, plants, battles, 
 experiments and all the books in existence. It 
 never occurs to them that information is only a 
 means of insight, and in itself of little or no value ; 
 that it is his way of thinking that makes a man a 
 philosopher. 
 
 Schopenhauer always seems to me the grand old 
 man of thought, our monarch and master. 
 Butler, in ' H udibras' : 
 
 Yet he that is able to express 
 
 No sense at all in several languages,
 
 NEGLECTED UNITS 201 
 
 Will pass for learneder than he that's known 
 To speak the strongest reason in his own. 
 
 Butler should perhaps have put ' wiser/ rather 
 than ' learneder ' ; for, in acquiring several lan- 
 guages, a man might claim to be ' learneder ' ; 
 wiser is what he is not. However, in verse, the 
 general sense is enough. 
 
 Carlyle, in ' Sartor Resartus ' : 
 
 What are your historical facts ; still more your 
 biographical ? Wilt thou know a Man, above all a 
 Mankind, by stringing together bead rolls of what 
 thou namest Facts ? . . . Facts are engraved Hiero- 
 grams, for which the fewest have the key I 
 
 Does an honour degree give you the key ? 
 Sterne, in ' Tristram Shandy ' : 
 
 An ounce of a man's own wit is worth a ton of 
 other people's. 
 
 Harold Gorst, in ' The Curse of Education ' : 
 
 If every school and college were closed to-morrow 
 negative good would probably result and much posi- 
 tive harm be abolished. ... In healthy children a 
 vigorous and healthy brain offers a stout resistance 
 to the stuffing process. Modern methods of educa- 
 tion are only salutary as long as they fail. 
 
 Frank Harris, in 'England or Germany' : 
 
 It was the low birth, the poverty and the scanty 
 education of Shakespeare that made him our chief 
 of men.
 
 202 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 Mr. F. Harris does not say anything so sensible 
 elsewhere, but I do not like to disqualify the man 
 on that account. In justice to him the fact must 
 be stated. 
 
 Hazlitt, 'Ignorance of the Learned' : 
 
 Any one who has passed through the regular grada- 
 tions of a classical education, and is not made a fool 
 by it, may consider himself to have had a lucky 
 escape. 
 
 Shakespeare : 
 
 To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune, 
 but to write and read comes by nature. 
 
 Education committees think otherwise. 
 Milton, 'Paradise Regained' : 
 
 Many books, 
 
 Wise men have said, are wearisome ; who reads 
 Incessantly, and to his reading brings not 
 A spirit and judgment equal or superior 
 (And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek !) 
 Uncertain and unsettled still remains, 
 Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself, 
 Crude or intoxicate. 
 
 If only 'crude' had been 'screwed' what a 
 popular quotation this would have been ! ' Deep 
 versed in books, screwed or intoxicate.' Quite so. 
 
 Thirdly, take a list of men who did without 
 education or got on in spite of it. 
 
 Keir Hardie was a pit-boy at seven, and quite
 
 NEGLECTED UNITS 203 
 
 uneducated. Yet, as leader of the Independent 
 Labour Party, he more than held his own against 
 countless rivals and scholars of council schools, 
 all fighting like dogs for a position with a good 
 salary, little work and plenty of ' gassing.' He 
 died ' gassing.' 
 
 Patrick McGill, the author of The Children of 
 the Dead End, was at work on a farm, free from 
 stuffy schools, at the age of nine. 
 
 Darwin tells us : ' During the three years which 
 I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far 
 as academical studies were concerned, as com- 
 pletely as at Edinburgh and at school.' 
 
 Herbert, Spencer, in his Autobiography, says : ' I 
 never passed an examination. In Euclid, Algebra, 
 Trigonometry and Mechanics, I might have done 
 fairly well, but in nothing else.' The next few 
 instances are from his Autobiography. 
 
 John Ericsson, a celebrated engineer, considered 
 he was fortunate in never having graduated in 
 any technological institute. He was of opinion 
 that if he had gone through a course, he would 
 have acquired such a belief in authorities that he 
 would never have been able to develop originality 
 and make his own way in physics and mechanics. 
 
 James Brindley and George Stephenson were 
 without any early instruction at all; the one 
 taught himself writing when an apprentice, and 
 the other put himself to school when a grown man. 
 
 Smeaton, Rennie and Watt had little schooling, 
 and in no case did they pass through a curriculum
 
 204 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 appropriate to their profession, nor did they re- 
 gret it. 
 
 Sir Benjamin Baker, who designed and executed 
 the Forth Bridge, at that time the greatest and 
 most remarkable bridge in the world, had received 
 no regular engineering instruction. 
 
 To these instances might be added : 
 
 Sir Hiram Maxim, educated very slightly and 
 irregularly, in Maine, free from education prowlers, 
 education boards, inspectors or examinations. 
 
 Thomas Edison. No educational information is 
 given in Who's Who. It is stated that he became 
 a telegraph operator and that he was born in Ohio. 
 He is said by Herbert Spencer to have been self- 
 educated and to have considered college-bred men 
 as ' no use.' 
 
 Lord Strathcona. His education, in Who's Who, 
 is given as ' Scotland ' in the open, one hopes. 
 He ' entered Hudson Bay Company's service at 
 an early age.' Fortunate man ! 
 
 Andrew Carnegie has been appointed Lord 
 Rector of St. Andrew's University, chiefly, 'tis 
 said, because he was never there. He is a great 
 lover of education ; but he had none himself, and 
 did very well without it. fortnnatos niminm, 
 sua bona si norint ! (Thrice fortunate those who 
 realise their good luck !). 
 
 Dean Swift was ' stripped of his degree for dul- 
 ness and insufficiency.' 
 
 The following instances are from the ' Curse of 
 Education,' H. Gorst :
 
 NEGLECTED UNITS 205 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, as a boy, invariably went to 
 sleep in church in the course of the sermon and 
 was counted a dull lad. At Edinburgh University 
 he was called the Greek blockhead and Professor 
 Dalzell dubbed him a dunce. 
 
 Burns stated that whatever he knew he owed 
 to his having exercised his own taste and having 
 only read what appealed to him. 
 
 Carlyle expresses himself thus : ' Academia ! 
 School instructors of youth ! ye unspeakable ! ' 
 He himself had some taste for mathematics but 
 never won a prize, and in classics, ' I am truly as 
 nothing.' 
 
 Wellington gained no sort of distinction either at 
 Eton or at the French Military College of Angiers, 
 and ' it is not improbable that a competitive ex- 
 amination might have excluded him from the 
 Army.' 
 
 Dr. Livingstone worked in a cotton factory as a 
 boy of ten. And probably was all the better for 
 it. Would that Viscounts Bryce, Morley and 
 Haldane had had plenty of factory work when 
 young ! 
 
 Clive : ' A hopeless youth, who loathed work.' 
 
 Sheridan was stated by his tutor, an eminent 
 Dublin scholar, to be ' an impenetrable dunce.' 
 At Harrow, he earned himself a considerable 
 reputation for idleness, but beyond that, none of 
 his instructors had a word to say for him. 
 
 There then is a list of eminent men, some of 
 whom had no education, and some of whom sue-
 
 206 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 cessfully resisted what they had. Personally, my 
 best qualifications for writing this book are : 
 education, resisted ; faith, small ; degrees, none. 
 If people could be proved to be stupid and incap- 
 able because they wouldn't or couldn't read, and 
 if those who read and studied all became wise, 
 and if scholastics invariably selected and improved 
 any good brain that came their way, something, 
 though not much, might be said for hounding little 
 children into council schools. However, in the 
 absence of any such evidence, this consideration 
 is out of court. Matthew Arnold, a name to con- 
 jure with in refined circles, gave the definition of 
 culture thus : 
 
 Culture is an increased spiritual activity, having 
 for its character increased sweetness, increased light, 
 increased life, increased sympathy. 
 
 Compare that statement with the brutality of 
 the compulsory clauses in our Education Acts and 
 the inhuman proceedings of school attendance 
 committees. Compare that statement with the 
 conduct of the cultured Germans both to prisoners 
 of war and to non-combatants. Compare that 
 statement with the injustice of state schools, 
 state libraries, state museums and state homes 
 of Art; and Matthew Arnold's definition will not 
 bear inspection.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 f 
 
 UNDESIRABLE TENANTS 
 
 On general questions, a vote recorded by forty 
 academicians is no better than that of forty water carriers, 
 
 Gustav Le Bon. 
 
 SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S Inquiry into Vulgar and 
 Common Errors seems the earliest book on the 
 occupants of ignorant heads. He died in 1682. 
 When you examine his work, you find ' the vulgar 
 and common errors' therein are things that no 
 uneducated person could have heard of, unless 
 you had taught them to him, and then he would 
 no longer have been an uneducated person. None 
 of the errors arose from ignorance, and they are 
 what teachers have handed down to us as know- 
 ledge since the commencement of the Christian 
 era. For instance, Browne's first twenty chapters 
 deal with feats attributed to Hannibal while cross- 
 ing the Alps; with drinking exploits performed 
 by the soldiers of Xerxes, who apparently, on 
 more than one occasion, drank a river dry and 
 then crossed it ; with the doctrine that there was 
 no rainbow seen on earth previous to the Flood, 
 207
 
 208 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 which Noah so ably negociated in an ark : with 
 the story of the Spartan boy and the fox beneath 
 his tunic ; with the specification of the fruit, 
 with which Eve tempted Adam, as an apple ; with 
 the food of John the Baptist having been, for 
 years, locusts and wild honey, etc., etc. Now, 
 though some uneducated person may have re- 
 peated some of these tales, no one can accuse him 
 of having been their cause and origin, or of having 
 been the main instrument of their circulation ; 
 and, unless he had been taught them, he wouldn't 
 have known them. Teachers sowed the stories, 
 and well-educated people swallowed them. Con- 
 sequently Sir T. Browne should not have called 
 his list ' common and vulgar errors ' so much as 
 'class knowledge,' or 'learning.' 
 
 Sir Thomas devotes a whole chapter to the 
 question: Do Jews stink? Strangely enough, if 
 any such belief ever existed, it was certainly shared 
 by the men of learning, as is shown by the fol- 
 lowing footnote in his chapter x. : 
 
 Howell, in a letter written to Lord Clifford, in 
 reply to his enquiries respecting Jews, does not hesi- 
 tate to adopt the common opinion as one so well 
 known as to need no proof. ' As they are,' says he, 
 ' the most contemptible people, and have a kind of 
 fulsome scent, no better than a stink, that distin- 
 guisheth them from others.' Howell : Familiar 
 Letters, Book i. p. 252. 
 
 James Howell, the writer of these letters, was 
 ' historiographer royal to Charles II.,' so the error
 
 UNDESIRABLE TENANTS 209 
 
 as to the fcetor Judaicus may have been princely 
 rather than common. The fact, of course, being 
 that, though rude boys and vulgar people may 
 have called Jews ' stinkers/ both before and after 
 1660, only a scholar would have treated the ques- 
 tion seriously and propounded a theory that odour 
 went with religion. Terms of abuse contain more 
 metaphor than fact. If all the progressives, Home 
 Rulers, and members of education committees, 
 who have been called Bulgarians, actually came 
 from Bulgaria, we should be in a considerable 
 danger of becoming a mere colony of this benighted 
 race. 
 
 Sir T. Browne mentions the popular notion that 
 the heart is on the left side. This he considers 
 a very vulgar fallacy. He is evidently very proud 
 of himself for knowing that the larger portion of 
 the heart is on the right side. But, as the pulse 
 and indicator of the heart is on the left, I incline 
 to the old address, and if you feel on your left 
 front, your heart should afford you evidence of 
 being in residence. A significant fact, in con- 
 nection with Sir Thomas, is that he was an 
 eminent physician as well as a learned man. 
 Now, when a physician has the audacity to write 
 about popular errors, he is suffering from Doctors' 
 Ears. 
 
 The only book in circulation similar to Browne's, 
 which is known to me, is Popular Fallacies, by 
 A. S. E. Ackerman (Cassell & Co. 1907). There 
 are other writings on ' fallacies/ such as Mill's
 
 210 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 and Bentham's, but these refer to the wiles 
 and stratagems adopted by men of learning to 
 deceive one another, and they can hardly be called 
 popular ; ' learned fallacies ' would perhaps de- 
 scribe them. 
 
 Mr. Ackerman is himself an instance of a fallacy 
 common to men of culture, viz. that an opinion 
 expressed by some qualified authority, with count- 
 less letters after his name, is sufficient to annihi- 
 late an ignorant or less qualified view. But he 
 should remember that, just as the evidence of one 
 doctor can always be contradicted by another, 
 so with other qualified authorities; another 
 expert can always be found to say the opposite. 
 Mr. Ackerman evidently considers the view of Sir 
 W. Preece, K.C.B., LL.D., J.P., F.R.S., to be 
 final as to the value of lightning conductors. 
 Why ? The man has too many letters after 
 his name, and I never believe your belettered 
 expert. They only know what they have been 
 told. 
 
 Another of Mr. Ackerman' s fallacies is that what 
 is repeated is necessarily believed. For instance, 
 he quotes many jingling rhymes such as ' Rain, 
 before seven, clear before eleven.' Plenty of us 
 repeat this, sometimes in hope, but not as a definite 
 conviction. Many an old farmer Haycock has 
 said : ' The ash before the oak, a summer of 
 smoke ; the oak before ash, a summer of splash,' 
 and he may have sometimes acted on it. But no 
 one ever ventured to gamble in cereals on the
 
 UNDESIRABLE TENANTS 211 
 
 strength of a saying of this kind. Many of the 
 fallacies in this book are peculiar to Mr. Acker- 
 man, and should be called 'Ackerman's Own/ 
 such as the one that aluminium is yellow. This 
 should be classed rather as ' news ' than as a 
 popular fallacy. 
 
 Again, as regards the saying that ' red ears show 
 their possessor is being talked about,' the first 
 sayer of this was no mean wit, but there is no 
 evidence of a definite belief. I class this fallacy 
 as another of 'Ackerman's Own,' in believing 
 that any one believed it. 
 
 In the whole book, I can only find one fallacy 
 that is really common, viz. that the sun shining 
 on the fire puts it out. Women are staunch be- 
 lievers of this one, and if you tell a woman that 
 it is domestic fallacy, no. 421, in Mr. Ackerman's 
 book of Popular Fallacies, she will reply : ' Fal- 
 lacy yourself.' This is a very feminine retort, 
 and how you are to reply to it, I do not 
 know. 
 
 After all, none need complain about popular 
 fallacies. They are quite harmless, except to the 
 owner, and never compulsory. It is only the 
 fallacies of learned men that have a nasty habit 
 of becoming the law of the land. A book of fal- 
 lacies published in Rome ' in the brilliant days of 
 the Antonines ' would have certainly included the 
 Christian religion among the errors of ignorant 
 people. As soon as it ceased to be a fallacy, 
 the biggest believers became bishops. These sat
 
 212 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 in high places, and lived in palaces, and ex- 
 pounded the doctrines. First priests, and then 
 doctors, have been the bane of humanity. They 
 form a walking encyclopaedia of far the worst 
 of all human fallacies a belief in learned men. 
 Ackerman forgot this one.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 BARBARIANS 
 
 Johnny Tarleton : I do say that the time has come for 
 sane, healthy, unpretending men like me to make a stand 
 against this conspiracy of the writing and talking and 
 artistic lot to put us in the back row. It isn't a fact that 
 we are inferior to them. . . . We run the country for 
 them ; and all the thanks we get is to be told we're 
 Philistines and vulgar tradesmen and sordid city men 
 and so forth. . . . The time has come to put a stop to 
 their nonsense. Perhaps if we had nothing better to do 
 than talking or writing, we could do it better than them. 
 
 Bernard Shaw. 
 
 A BARBARIAN is the term applied by men of cul- 
 ture to one who, with the means and opportunity 
 of enjoying art and literature, has not done so, 
 and is glad of it. There is an unexpressed assump- 
 tion that, had the barbarian had more brain, 
 things might have been different. The barbarian, 
 however, does not share this view. He is quite 
 satisfied with himself and sees nothing to regret 
 or complain about. 
 
 The literary man is full of aspirations. He 
 hopes to add to our language some pearl of thought, 
 or some beautiful image, such as : 
 213
 
 214 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 O Cuckoo ! shall I call thee bird, or but a wandering 
 voice ? 
 
 The barbarian has no such ideal. He does add 
 to our language, but his additions do not take 
 that form. His genius, naturally enough, pro- 
 claims itself in what is said, or shouted, rather 
 than in what is written. Our colloquialisms owe 
 nothing to books. The more a man mixes with 
 the world, and the less he reads, the more apt his 
 phraseology becomes, and the better suited to the 
 different sides of life, each of which has its par- 
 ticular atmosphere. In the toil of^the day, words 
 and phrases are coined and selected, and would be 
 lost unless they were continually repeated. This 
 unconscious literary art is the work of barbarians. 
 Being ' well-read ' is all very well in its way, but, 
 in ordinary conversation, the treasures of litera- 
 ture frequently sound forced, and they do not, as 
 it were, ' touch the spot.' In general, a slice 
 of luck is better described as ' a bit of all right ' 
 than as ' sweet as remembered kisses after death,' 
 or as recalling ' buds that ope in spring.' In the 
 latter quotation, many barbarians will suspect 
 you meant ' hope/ for the word ' ope ' is not 
 much used. 
 
 The first sayer of the sayings of the day is 
 nearly always a barbarian, and yet he is no mean 
 artist in words. ' A month of Sundays ' what a 
 long time that sounds and how dreary a time 
 'tis a telling phrase. ' As much use as a sick head- 
 ache/ sounds as if what had been suggested was
 
 BARBARIANS 215 
 
 wretched. Game players use many effective ex- 
 pressions : ' He never looked like winning/ ' He 
 hadn't a dog's chance,' 'Likely to make a cham- 
 pion, I don't think,' and so on. In describing a 
 match that he had not won, I heard a marker at 
 Queen's Club accuse his adversary of ' having 
 fluked something cruel.' Did such ' serene artists 
 in words ' as Goethe or Sophocles ever phrase any- 
 thing better ? It is very fine. However, for 
 grim pithiness of wit, give me the man who first 
 called another ' an old boose-hound ' ! It is 
 abusive, yes, but what a picture ! Faintly, at 
 first, you see arise in your mind's eye a man who 
 is fond of the bottle. But the picture does not 
 stop there ; it widens till you see before you a 
 shameless toper, sniffing his way to all the liquor 
 in the arrondissement and ' downing ' it with a 
 rare joy. It is a great phrase. ' A boose-hound,' 
 like a fox- hound or a harrier, suggests a particular 
 breed especially adapted for the work. And then 
 ' old.' No novice, but ' old.' That ' puts the lid 
 on it.' Yes, it's fine work, the work of an 
 artist. The first earner of the phrase becomes a 
 benefactor to mankind as well as the barbarian 
 who coined it. 
 
 Then, many of the best retorts in a play come 
 from the street, as well as many quaint characters 
 in novels. Writers owe more to the street than 
 the street does to writers. This is what writers 
 always forget. They meet with a person, or a 
 phrase, which they use, and, in the course of time, 
 
 15
 
 2i6 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 if they survive, they are thought to be the origina- 
 tors. Cherchez le barbare. 
 
 It must be admitted that everyday folk are 
 inclined to overdo the catchwords of the day. I 
 remember a time when few up-to-date fellows 
 would converse for more than five minutes without 
 one or other saying : ' What ho !' she bumps.' 
 But literary people are just as bad. What is 
 more wearing than such expressions as ' Piled 
 Pelion on Ossa,' ' Avoided Scylla only to be seized 
 by Charybdis,' ' A Roland for an Oliver/ ' A Silenus 
 mask/ and also all allusions to Davus, (Edipus, 
 Attila, Tissaphernes, Ahriman, Ormuzd, Absalom, 
 Achitophel, etc. No one can have any very clear 
 idea what these champions actually did. It must 
 have been some time ago. 
 
 The presumption that a literary man is superior 
 to a barbarian has been tolerated so long that no 
 one seems to query it or to test it. The mental 
 play, expressing itself in the idle chatter going 
 on in bars, billiard- rooms and boudoirs, may be 
 a better -mental stimulant than reading. A de- 
 lightful picture of the more conventional view is 
 given by Lord Morley : 
 
 Lord Morley : Try for yourselves what you can 
 read in half an hour. Then multiply the half -hour 
 by 365, and consider what treasures you might have 
 laid up at the end of the year ; and what happiness, 
 fortitude and wisdom they would have given you 
 for a life-time. 
 
 To get happiness, fortitude and wisdom so
 
 BARBARIANS 217 
 
 easily, sounds excellent, but try it. Get a dozen 
 people to converse in a bar or boudoir for half 
 an hour a day, and get a dozen people to read 
 improving works for half an hour a day, and see 
 if the wisdom of either party improves in any 
 marked degree. If literature improves the brain, 
 then literary men, out of their element, should 
 show up better than barbarians out of theirs. My 
 experience has not found this to be the case. 
 Literary men are generally poor talkers, and, in 
 ribald conversation, quite hopeless. A barbarian 
 may not write much, for he uses telephones and 
 wires, but you cannot say he can't write at all. 
 What would be a fair analogy ? Would a poem 
 on death be to a barbarian what light conversa- 
 tion is to a literary man ? Assume so, and take 
 the conversational part as read, and come straight 
 to death. Can a barbarian compose an ode on 
 death not worse, in that department, than, say, 
 a merry ' high-brow ' gassing in the Strand. 
 Here are a few samples on death from the poet 
 proper : 
 
 Byron (Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics) : 
 
 Oh, snatched away in beauty's bloom 1 
 On thee shall press no ponderous tomb. 
 
 Wordsworth (Golden Treasury of Songs and 
 rics) : 
 
 Six feet in earth my Emma lay 
 And yet I loved her more. 
 
 15*
 
 21 8 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 E. H. Poe : To - 
 
 I laugh to think how poor. 
 That pleasure ' to endure ' ? 
 What ! shade of Zeno ! I 
 Endure ! No no defy. 
 
 Tennyson, ' Crossing the Bar ' : 
 May there be no moaning. 
 
 Wordsworth, ' Lucy Gray ' : 
 
 The wretched parents all that night 
 Went shouting far and wide. 
 
 Coleridge, ' Monody on the Death of Chatterton ' : 
 
 Away, grim Phantom ! Scorpion king, away I 
 Reserve thy horrors and thy stings display. 
 
 You can hardly expect a barbarian to equal all 
 these. How bad is he ? The late Mr. Binstead 
 (Tale- pitcher), who was originally a racing reporter 
 on a sporting weekly, has preserved for us perhaps 
 the only determined effort by a barbarian to put 
 into poetry what he had been robbed of by the 
 tomb. The man had not lost a dog, or a horse 
 or an old parrot, but his wife had been snatched 
 away in her bloom, and he was very much, in 
 fact, exceedingly, upset about it. Why not ? 
 May a barbarian have no feelings ? So, late one 
 evening, he poured himself out a stiff whisky and 
 soda, and sat himself down before her picture to
 
 BARBARIANS 219 
 
 write an ode to her memory. Mr. Binstead, aU 
 honour to him, has preserved for us the fragment, 
 but it is only a fragment : 
 
 I gazed at the sad reminder 
 
 Of the form that had made me weep ; 
 
 Then I swallowed a useful ' binder,' 
 And suddenly fell asleep. 
 
 It is not for me to criticise unkindly the work 
 of any man under such circumstances. Moreover 
 I am quoting him from memory. But compare 
 his effort with the poet proper, with his ' parents 
 shouting far and wide,' with his ' grim phantom,' 
 with his ' scorpion king,' with his ' no, no,' with 
 his ' no moaning,' and with his ' loving her more.' 
 You must remember the barbarian's literary 
 medium is mainly rudeness and shouting, and you 
 must compare his verse on death with what a 
 literary man might do in the way of a retort to a 
 barmaid supercilious, or in exchanging repartees 
 with a bus- conduct or. On such a subject, you 
 will doubtless need to reflect before coming to a 
 satisfactory conclusion. Still the barbarian makes 
 a case for himself. 
 
 George Savage Fitzboodle states a point that 
 should be remembered by all good barbares : 
 
 What is it makes you literary persons so stupid ? 
 I have met various individuals in society who I was 
 told were writers of books, and that sort of thing, 
 and, expecting to be rather amused by their conversa- 
 tion, have invariably found them dull to a degree,
 
 220 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 and as for information, without a particle of it. 
 Sir, I actually asked one of these fellows, ' What 
 was the nick to seven ? ' and he stared in my face 
 and said he didn't know ! 
 
 Why is no*t the ' nick to seven,' qua knowledge, 
 equal to the date of Magna Charta ? Why is 
 knowing the names of all the popes better than 
 knowing the names of all the golf champions ? 
 Best of all, perhaps, to know none of these things. 
 
 When you think how well a barbarian finds out 
 the right attitude towards life, without teachers, 
 how wicked it seems to make teachers compulsory. 
 The author of An Englishman's Diary in France 
 tells us how in crossing to Southampton, he passed 
 a transport crowded with young soldiers off to 
 the front. They were the picture of life and 
 health, ruddy and lively. He prepared his kodak 
 to take a snapshot of them, when a lusty voice 
 rang out : ' It's all right, guv' nor, we die hearty.' 
 Something in the way it was said, something in 
 the thought behind the words, made him almost 
 fling his kodak into the sea. He took no picture. 
 Surely ' We die hearty/ is a fine barbaric attitude 
 and preferable to anything in a hymn-book or 
 said by a missionary. It is quite possible that 
 Culture and Christianity have had their day ; we 
 should salute them and say ' good-bye.'
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 YEARS TO COME 
 
 The grandeur of Thebes is a vulgar grandeur. More 
 sensible is the stone wall that bounds an honest man's 
 field. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder 
 at in them so much as the fact that so many men could 
 be found degraded enough to spend their lives in con- 
 structing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it 
 would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in 
 the Nile. Thoreatt. 
 
 AFTER seventeen chapters, one would like to know 
 how far the reader agrees. Does he think that 
 books and learning have for generations been 
 systematically overrated as a means of making 
 people wiser and better, or even as a hobby ? 
 Does he think that books are less beneficial than 
 making something or selling something ? Would 
 he consider a golf professional, without education, 
 who made golf-clubs, sold golf balls, attended to 
 the course and played matches, to be a worse 
 judge of the duties to our allies, or the mischievous 
 effects of the Lloyd George Insurance Act, than 
 an Oxford don, the head master of Harrow, or 
 the late Professor Cramb ? Thoreau thought that 
 a boy who made his own jack-knife, smelting his 
 
 221
 
 222 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 own ore, was a superior being to the products of 
 all our colleges and halls of culture. 
 
 Hannah More relates, with wondering admira- 
 tion, how Thomas Babington Macaulay, at the age 
 of fourteen, was heard discussing with another 
 boy the comparative merits of Eugene and Marl- 
 borough. Is there any reason why this should 
 prognosticate a more valuable talent than two 
 boys discussing the comparative merits of putty 
 and Portland cement ? Is there any reason for 
 supposing that an interest in dead generals is 
 superior to an interest in existing compounds ? 
 The matter has never been tested. 
 
 For generations, the sons of those who have 
 ' got on ' our successes have been given, as 
 a matter of course, a prolonged book education 
 lasting for some fifteen years, and yet no new ideas 
 have come from the offspring of old successes. If 
 the sons of fortune, in spite of fifteen years of 
 book culture, and in spite of being the descendants 
 of superior stock, have shown less common sense, 
 less originality, and less fairness than the better 
 products of poorer soil, then there is something 
 wrong with book education, it must have a bad 
 effect, and to make it compulsory is a sin. 
 
 Presumably, the principal aim, of every one 
 who works for a living, is to earn enough not to 
 have to work any more. The education for the 
 offspring of those, who have attained this ideal, 
 has always been the same, viz. books. Why ? 
 The best education for any one who has his living
 
 YEARS TO COME 223 
 
 to make would probably be a special education 
 suited to the requirements in view. Now take 
 some one with an income of 1,000 a year. There 
 is no particular reason why he should work, and 
 nowadays the endless toil of making a name for 
 oneself is pretty generally considered not to be 
 worth the trouble. Surely the standard book 
 education is utterly unsuited to any one who does 
 not look forward to spending most of his time in 
 a library, which, in passing, would make him more 
 stupid than he need be. 
 
 What, then, are the facts of life ? First and 
 foremost, doing absolutely nothing must certainly 
 result in boredom. On the other hand, with the 
 possession of means, there is no real necessity to 
 do anything. What is the way out ? The tra- 
 ditional education, so far as it has any definite 
 purpose, aims to develop in man the more delicate 
 sensibilities to such an extent that, surrounded 
 by the highest treasures of art, music and litera- 
 ture particularly literature he can revel in 
 those indefinitely, with no other interest beyond 
 discovering, from time to time, fresh objects to 
 revel in. The fatal mistake in such an educa- 
 tion lies in the assumption that, because a man is 
 surrounded by all the means of happiness, he will 
 therefore be happy. How odd that the highest 
 education should only fit man to gape at pic- 
 tures and read books instead of doing something 
 for himself. A better object for a boy would be 
 to be able to do anything except gape at pictures
 
 224 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 or read books. If his future happiness has had 
 any recognised place in the education of our youth, 
 then education has been a wretched failure. 
 
 Suppose there was a public school, catering for 
 the same class as our other public schools, where 
 the education curriculum consisted not in books 
 but in work, and the boys there, in school hours, 
 washed their clothes, mended their clothes, cooked 
 their meals, cleaned out their rooms, made cricket 
 pitches, built fives courts, constructed canoes, 
 grew vegetables and did everything connected 
 with the school, and that superfluous work was 
 devoted to laying out small cottages or even 
 villas, and that their evenings, instead of being 
 spent in preparation, were devoted to Auction 
 Bridge. Suppose no boy, there, ever had anything 
 done for him by a servant, and there were no ser- 
 vants. Do you suppose these boys would be less 
 intelligent or less capable than the boys of our 
 other public schools ? You must remember that 
 the predisposition in favour of books and learn- 
 ing, though purely traditional, is so strong that 
 such a school would be illegal and parents sending 
 their sons to it would be prosecuted, at least 
 poor people would be. 
 
 This book superstition is an inheritance from 
 Greece and Rome, where all manual labour was 
 done by slaves, and trade of any kind was sinful 
 and forbidden to patricians. Consequently the 
 abler minds of Greece and Rome, when not en- 
 gaged in fighting or gambling, wasted their time
 
 YEARS TO COME 225 
 
 in fruitless discussions on mere verbal subtleties. 
 The Middle Ages inherited this superstition. With 
 them, all wisdom consisted in the verbal laby- 
 rinths debated in Greece and Rome, together with 
 a knowledge of ancient authors ; while all morality 
 and goodness was to be found in the archives of 
 the Christian religion. Hence the searching of 
 back numbers of holy writ for morality, and the 
 searching of learned disquisitions by eminent 
 ancients for wisdom. This became the accepted 
 tradition from which we still suffer. The effect of 
 depressing manual labour and exalting books is 
 seen in the lamentable fact that, the better educated 
 a man is, the fewer things he can do. 
 
 It has always seemed to me that the best 
 educated man is the man who can do the most 
 things. Yet a rich man, who has had the best 
 education that money can buy, is singularly in- 
 competent. He hardly knows what he is or what 
 he wants. The house of a wealthy man is a satire 
 on his education ; it will be filled with useless and 
 expensive knick-knacks, many of silver, which 
 take a deal of trouble to clean, hot and cold 
 water laid on, electric light, hosts of servants, 
 curtains that spoil the light, pictures all over the 
 place, a statue of Pompey in the hall, and a 
 library of 7,000 volumes; whereas a higher ideal 
 would be to liy_ejn a log hut that you had built 
 yourself, with few books and no servants. Until 
 you have taken the trouble to put up a thing 
 for yourself, you do not know yourself, and
 
 226 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 you are a poor judge of whether you want it 
 or not. 
 
 Let me explain. You can hardly expect a man 
 of means to want to be an accountant, a stock- 
 broker or an attorney. He should therefore wish 
 to be the expression of himself, of his ' will-to- 
 live/ and he cannot be that if he does nothing, 
 Nor can he be so if he has servants; and, if he 
 can do nothing for himself, he must have servants. 
 Consequently a different bringing up is necessary. 
 
 A rich man dining by himself in a dining-room 
 with massive fittings, a Rembrandt on the wall, 
 a deal of silver, and waited upon by a couple of 
 men in plush, is not the expression of himself. He 
 has put on evening clothes, often against his secret 
 wishes, he is eating far more than he wants, be- 
 cause it is there and has been cooked specially for 
 him ; and, what with the Rembrandt, the silver, 
 the men in plush and so on, he cannot well drink 
 less than a bottle of champagne to keep the scene 
 in countenance. His surroundings demand it of 
 him. Yet the man's nature is not this. Nor is 
 there any reason, because you can have all that 
 money can buy, that you need necessarily buy it. 
 A fashionable woman in a fur cloak who has cost 
 2,000 to dress, or a fat man leaving Park Lane 
 in an Astrakan coat, a tall hat and patent leather 
 boots, or a plate basket of silver that it takes 
 two men to clean, are horrible sights. A book 
 education is a part cause. If a boy was brought 
 up, not on books, but to do things for himself.
 
 YEARS TO COME 227 
 
 instead of being taught that none did so who 
 could help it, which is the lesson in public schools, 
 he would never look forward to a mansion in 
 Park Lane, with hosts of servants, as something to 
 work for and strive for, but rather as something 
 to avoid. Schopenhauer has proved conclusively 
 that any permanent condition of happiness is im- 
 possible to beings constituted as we are, and that 
 the best we can hope for is a succession of small 
 achievements not unduly deferred. Take away 
 these, give a man a host of servants, and nothing 
 remains but ennui. One day, the palatial resi- 
 dences, to be seen in London and New York, will 
 be considered as standing emblems of the mon- 
 strous delusion, which is a part of book education, 
 that happiness can be bought by surrounding 
 yourself with the delights of culture and all the 
 means of happiness : these havens of happiness 
 will be to let. 
 
 So far from living in a mansion, whatever house 
 you live in ought to have been built mainly by 
 your own hands, and then it certainly wouldn't 
 be a mansion. Your house should be the expres- 
 sion of yourself ; what garden there was should 
 be such as you chose to find time for ; what 
 books there were should only be those that at 
 some time or other had given you pleasure, 
 wherefore reference books, or books containing a 
 useful reference, should be carefully kept out of 
 sight in a cupboard and have no place in a hori- 
 zon that was you and you only. Nothing you
 
 228 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 really liked should be absent ; nothing you dis- 
 liked should be there. Your cellar should reflect 
 your own tastes and no one else's. In a hovel 
 constructed by yourself, whether of wood or 
 brick, there might be many deferred pleasures to 
 be added one day, and I fancy the library for 
 7,000 volumes would be among them, and also 
 the countless knick-knacks to clean and also the 
 statue of Pompey. Very likely the nicest house 
 to live in would be the one that suggested the 
 least culture. To go into details is a mistake, for 
 in a matter of this kind our diverse individualities 
 would proclaim themselves, but resident servants 
 must be wrong. I have actually seen people ring 
 the bell to have coals put on the fire, and ap- 
 parently unashamed. The smaller the thing is, 
 the more one should be ashamed of having it done 
 for one. The art of living should be in that 
 direction. 
 
 Plenty of experiments would in time secure an 
 average form for the life to take. And very 
 useless, you may say. But, don't you be too 
 sure, economically one would be sound ; and surely 
 a man with 1,000 a year can suit himself as to 
 the opinion of others and of how much use to 
 others he wishes to be ; his self- development may 
 not take that form. Moreover, so far from these 
 self- builders being useless, if we had had a few 
 wealthy ones, an organised opposition to the 
 building by-laws would have been instituted at 
 once, and that atrocious tyranny, under which a
 
 YEARS TO COME 229 
 
 man may not add a wooden cycle shed to his own 
 house, would have been nipped in the bud ; as 
 also would the clauses in the Education Act under 
 which a boy between five and fourteen may not 
 be educated except in books. My impression is 
 that if the offspring of our successes, men with 
 money, took to educating their children thus and 
 living thus, countless small inventions in the art 
 of life would come from our moneyed classes, and 
 it would be those educated in council schools who 
 became the great readers suffering from earitis and 
 aural development. 
 
 So far, few experiments of this kind of life are 
 in print. Pascal, as far as I remember, did not 
 feel it right that he should be waited upon by 
 servants, and, though he had one to cook for him, 
 he used to come into the kitchen to carry his 
 tray out and he brought it back again when he 
 had done. Thoreau put the more complete idea 
 into practice, but he was a naturalist dreamer, 
 considerably above us, and his life took the form 
 of a hermitage out in the forest. That, perhaps, 
 is going too far. Some of the idea is inherent 
 in us, as can be seen in the way we preserve our 
 brown paper and bits of string. Directly you 
 contrive your own house, you will find yourselves 
 husbanding a quantity of odds and ends and 
 assorting them carefully. 
 
 On the other side, a well-known letter of Pliny's 
 describes his new villa to a friend in which he 
 enlarges on its beauties and luxuries. The villa
 
 230 - THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 contains rooms bathed in sun, rooms where the 
 sun cannot enter, and a garden containing cedars, 
 springs and fountains. He, however, omits to 
 say what on earth he is going to do when he gets 
 there. A library was mentioned, I fancy, but 
 not anything to do, that was left to the slaves 
 a very rotten system. 
 
 Every man should be interesting to himself, 
 and I do not see how this interest can take a 
 better form than letting his domicile be the out- 
 ward expression of his inner development, and 
 represent, as far as possible, what he himself is. 
 Doubtless there is an amusing side to it, but what 
 about the people who live in palaces ? Thoreau 
 asserts that, hide the fact as we may, a mansion 
 is only the porch above the burrow where man 
 stores his roots. Thoreau continues that he has 
 often been amazed to see the door of a mighty 
 mansion open and, emerging therefrom, a tiny 
 creature will be seen hurrying along the pavement 
 and eventually disappearing into another burrow 
 equally vast and imposing. The self- developer is 
 an improvement on that type. 
 
 It would be curious, just as our well-read men 
 have saddled us with a compulsory book- educa- 
 tion, and free libraries out of the rates, if our 
 highest ranks took to avoiding many books and 
 to living in houses of their own construction. Yet 
 that may well be the right road.
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 I STATED in the Preface what I intended to do. 
 My endeavour has been to show that, were we 
 all what is called ' well- educated/ the nation, as a 
 whole, would not be wiser or more just, but, in all 
 probability, less so. 
 
 Take a case : supposing every one were qualified, 
 -educationally, to study the germ theory of disease 
 and pronounce an opinion thereon, what would 
 be the result ? Would the majority be any less 
 anxious to make their inoculations compulsory ? 
 Not in the least. The only difference would be 
 that the arguments in daily use would contain a 
 larger assortment of somewhat meaningless tech- 
 nical terms. The advantage to the community 
 would be nil. It has been demonstrated over 
 and over again that our opinions do not come to 
 us from study, or argument, but rather from a 
 predisposition to believe, and, even if we be faced 
 with an unanswerable argument, we feel sure that 
 there is an answer, though we may not, at the 
 moment, have it at hand. Study may provide 
 you with more arguments, but if, as is usually 
 the case, this only renders you more unbearably 
 231
 
 232 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 superior in your intolerance, the advantage is 
 yours alone and cannot be regarded as a national 
 asset. If among civilised people, as is the case, 
 ignorance tends to tolerance, the latter may be 
 the more desirable attitude of the two, even when 
 wrong. Furthermore, in the glorious words of 
 Burke, ' inconstancy is the natural corrective of 
 ignorance/ and the man may change, whereas 
 your learned bigot changes not ; he is unalterable. 
 The value of an opinion does not depend on the 
 amount of study behind it nor upon the number 
 of letters after the owner's name, but on how far 
 he realises that his world is in his own head, and 
 that what may apply to that world need not apply 
 to the world of another. My experience is that 
 unlearned men recognise this better than learned 
 ones, at all events in civilised communities. You 
 will hear a highly educated medicine man tell an 
 uninoculated man that he is a danger to his fellows. 
 Now, if the uninoculated man's world was the 
 same as that of the highly educated medicine 
 man's, the argument might apply. But this is 
 not the case. The reason the uninoculated man 
 rejected the vaccine was because, in his world, 
 the inoculated men are the danger, being rendered 
 thereby weaker and more susceptible to every 
 known disease, including the one against which 
 they are supposed to be protected. And so much 
 is the world in one's own head a real world that 
 the more you shrink from a vaccine, and disbelieve 
 in it, the more likely it is to do you harm, and the
 
 CONCLUSION 233 
 
 more likely it is to cause the actual disease of 
 which it is the substitute. Even if the vaccine 
 were non-poisonous, which none are, even then 
 human organisms would exist to whom this stuff 
 was eminently unsuited and of which the evil 
 effect was increased by the mental antipathy. 
 This realisation of the reality of the world in an- 
 other man's head s& far from being improved by 
 study seems weakened by it. Students devote 
 their whole attention to the object seen and have 
 the impudence to ignore the seer. 
 
 Our real haven of refuge against every tyranny, 
 medical or other, should be our law courts. But 
 these have been rendered almost useless by our 
 politicians, who decree that certain things are 
 offences (particularly under Public Health Acts 
 and Education Acts) without any adequate proof, 
 and then calmly fix the penalties. To call this 
 justice in A.D. 1916 seems inconceivable. By 
 these means, you are held guilty before you come 
 into court, and, on the bare word of an education 
 informer, or an urban district medical officer of 
 health, who is really a sower of disease you are 
 fined and imprisoned. The pitch to which things 
 have come may be seen in the case of Henry Bur- 
 dee mentioned in chapter ix. Here the medical 
 trade union council bolster up a charge of man- 
 slaughter against an unauthorised rival, who was 
 unfortunate enough to lose a patient, and he re- 
 ceives a sentence of one year's hard labour. If it 
 had not been for the status given to fully licensed
 
 234 THE NEGATIVE PHASE 
 
 medical practitioners and to their remedies, under 
 Public Health Acts, so scandalous a sentence could 
 hardly have been possible. At the same time, 
 unjust judges are a part of humanity which we 
 cannot entirely escape. We cannot do more than 
 appoint a judge. Increase of education has been 
 accompanied by increase of statute law, or law 
 framed on the model of the Ten Commandments, 
 instead of on an actual wrong done to somebody 
 proved in a law court. People brought up on 
 books will persist in trying to be too clever, though 
 they should know better. My aim has been to 
 remind them of this fact. 
 
 FINIS
 
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