^^ 
 
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT 
 THE WORLD 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 I 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/englishmanlooksaOOwellrich 
 
An Englishman Looks 
 at the World ^ Being a 
 
 Series of Unrestrained Remarks 
 upon Contemporary Matters ^ 
 
 By 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 Cassell and Company, Ltd 
 London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 
 
 1914 
 

 
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE 
 WORLD 
 
 Bleriot arrives and sets him thinking. (1) 
 
 He flies, (2) 
 
 And deduces certain consequences of cheap travel. (3) 
 
 He considers the King, and speculates on the New Epoch ; (4) 
 
 He thinks Imperially, (5) 
 
 And then, coming to details, about Labour, (6) 
 
 Socialism, (7) 
 
 And Modern Warfare, (8) 
 
 He discourses on the Modern Novel, (9) 
 
 And the Public Library; (10) 
 
 Criticises Chesterton, Belloc, (11) 
 
 And Sir Thomas More, (12) 
 
 And deals with the London Traffic Problem as a Socialist 
 should. (13) 
 
 He doubts the existence of Sociology, (14) 
 
 Discusses Divorce, (15) 
 
 Schoolmasters, (16) 
 
 Motherhood, (17) 
 
 Doctors, (18) 
 
 And Specialisation ; (19) 
 
 Questions if there is a People, (20) 
 
 And diagnoses the Political Disease of our Times. (21) 
 
vi Synopsis 
 
 He then speculates upon the future of the American 
 Population, (22) 
 
 Considers a possible set-back to civilisation, (23) 
 
 The Ideal Citizen, (24) 
 
 The still undeveloped possibilities of Science, (25), and — in 
 the broadest spirit — 
 
 The Human Adventure. (26) 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 1. The Coming of Bl^riot 
 
 2. My First Flight 
 
 3. Off the Chain . 
 
 4. Of the New Reign . 
 
 5. Will the Empire Live? 
 
 6. The Labour Unrest . 
 
 7. The Great State 
 
 8. The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 9. The Contemporary Novel 
 
 10. The Philosopher's Public Library 
 IL About Chesterton and Belloc 
 
 12. About Sir Thomas More 
 
 13. Trafl&c and Rebuilding 
 
 14. The So-called Science of Sociology 
 
 15. Divorce 
 
 16. The Schoolmaster and the Empire 
 
 17. The Endowment of Motherhood 
 
 18. Doctors 
 
 1 
 
 8 
 
 15 
 
 22 
 
 33 
 
 43 
 
 95 
 
 132 
 
 148 
 
 170 
 
 175 
 
 183- 
 
 188 
 
 192- 
 
 207 
 
 218 
 
 229 
 
 235 
 
Vlll 
 
 Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 19. An Age of Specialisation .... 240 
 
 20. Is there a People? 245 
 
 21. The Disease of Parliaments .... 251 
 
 22. The American Population .... 275 
 
 23. The Possible Collapse of Civilisation . . 330 
 
 24. The Ideal Citizen .^ 336 
 
 25. Some Possible Discoveries .... 342 
 
 26. The Human Adventure 352 
 
AN ENGLISHMAN 
 LOOKS AT THE WQRLD 
 
 THE COMING OF BLfiRIOT 
 
 {July, igog.) 
 
 THE telephone bell rings with the petulant per- 
 sistence that marks a trunk call, and I go in 
 from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn 
 to deal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in 
 connecting up, minute voices in Folkestone and Dover 
 and London call to one another and are submerged by 
 buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the real 
 message comes through : " Bleriot has crossed the Channel. 
 ... An article . . . about what it means." 
 
 I make a hasty promise and go out and tell my 
 friends. 
 
 From my garden I look straight upon the Channel, 
 and there are white caps upon the water, and the iris 
 and tamarisk are all asway with the south-west wind 
 that was also blowing yesterday. M. Bleriot has done 
 very well, and Mr. Latham, his rival, had jolly bad 
 luck. That is what it means to us first of all. It also, 
 I reflect privately, means that I have under-estimated 
 the possible stability of aeroplanes. I did not expect 
 anything of the sort so soon. This is a good five years 
 before my reckoning of the year before last. 
 
/•Airi' E'dghsilimath Eooks at the World 
 
 We all, I think, regret that being so near we were 
 not among the fortunate ones who saw that little flat 
 shape skim landward out of the blue ; surely they have 
 an enviable memory ; and then w^e fell talking and dis- 
 puting about what that swift arrival may signify. It 
 starts a swarm of questions. 
 
 First one remarks that here is a thing done, and 
 done with an astonishing effect of ease, that w^as in- 
 credible not simply to ignorant people but to men well 
 informed in these matters. It cannot be fifteen years 
 ago since Sir Hiram Maxim made the first machine 
 that could lift its weight from the ground, and I well 
 remember how the clumsy quality of that success con- 
 firmed the universal doubt that men could ever in any 
 effectual manner fly. 
 
 Since then a conspiracy of accidents has changed 
 the whole problem ; the bicycle and its vibrations de- 
 veloped the pneumatic tyre, the pneumatic tyre rendered 
 a comfortable mechanically driven road vehicle possible, 
 the motor-car set an enormous premium on the develop- 
 ment of very light, very efficient engines, and at last 
 the engineer was able to offer the experimentalists in 
 gliding one strong enough and light enough for the new 
 purpose. And here we are ! Or, rather, M. Bleriot is ! 
 
 What does it mean for us? 
 
 One meaning, I think, stands out plainly enough, 
 unpalatable enough to our national pride. This thing 
 from first to last was made abroad. Of all that made it 
 possible we can only claim so much as is due to the 
 improvement of the bicycle. Gliding began abroad w^hile 
 our young men of muscle and courage w^ere braving the 
 dangers of the cricket field. The motor-car and its 
 engine was being worked out "over there,'' while in 
 
 2 
 
The Coming of Bl^riot 
 
 this country the mechanically propelled road vehicle, lest 
 it should frighten the carriage horses of the gentry, 
 was going meticulously at four miles an hour behind a 
 man with a red flag. Over there, where the prosperous 
 classes have some regard for education and some free- 
 dom of imaginative play, where people disQUss all sorts 
 of things fearlessly, and have a respect for science, this 
 has been achieved. 
 
 And now our insularity is breached by the foreigner 
 who has got ahead with flying. 
 
 It means, I take it, first and foremost for us, that 
 the world cannot wait for the English. 
 
 It is not the first warning we have had. It has been 
 raining warnings upon us; never was a slacking, dull 
 people so liberally served with warnings of what was in 
 store for them. But this event — this foreigner-invented, 
 foreigner-built, foreigner-steered thing, taking our silver 
 streak as a bird soars across a rivulet — puts the case 
 dramatically. We have fallen behind in the quality of 
 our manhood. In the men of means and leisure in this 
 island there was neither enterprise enough, imagination 
 enough, knowledge nor skill enough to lead in this 
 matter. I do not see how one can go into the history 
 of this development and arrive at any other conclusion. 
 The French and Americans can laugh at our aeroplanes, 
 the Germans are ten years ahead of our poor navigables. 
 We are displayed a soft, rather backward people. Either 
 we are a people essentially and incurably inferior, or 
 there is something wrong in our training, something 
 benumbing in our atmosphere and circumstances. That 
 is the first and gravest intimation in M. Bleriot's 
 feat. 
 
 The second is that, in spite of our fleet, this is no 
 
 3 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 longer, from the military point of view, an inaccessible 
 island. 
 
 So long as one had to consider the navigable balloon 
 the aerial side of warfare remained unimportant. A 
 Zeppelin is little good for any purpose but scouting and 
 espionage. It can carry very little weight in proportion 
 to its vast size, and, what is more important, it cannot 
 drop things without sending itself up like a bubble in 
 soda water. An armada of navigables sent against this 
 island would end in a dispersed, deflated state, chiefly 
 in the seas between Orkney and Norway — though I say 
 it who should not. But these aeroplanes can fly all 
 round the fastest navigable that ever drove before the 
 wind ; they can drop weights, take up weights, and do 
 all sorts of able, inconvenient things. They are birds. 
 As for the birds, so for aeroplanes ; there is an upward 
 limit of size. They are not going to be very big, but 
 they are going to be very able and active. Within a 
 year we shall have — or rather they will have — aeroplanes 
 capable of starting from Calais, let us say, circling over 
 London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive 
 upon the printing machines of The Times , and return- 
 ing securely to Calais for another similar parcel. They 
 are things neither difficult nor costly to make. For 
 the price of a Dreadnought one might have hundreds. 
 They will be extremely hard to hit with any sort of 
 missile. I do not think a large army of under-educated, 
 under-trained, extremely unwilling conscripts is going to 
 be any good against this sort of thing. 
 
 I do not think that the arrival of M. Bleriot means 
 a panic resort to conscription. It is extremely desirable 
 that people should realise that these foreign machines 
 are not a temporary and incidental advantage that we 
 
 4 
 
The Coming of Bl^riot 
 
 can make good by fussing and demanding eight, and 
 saying we won't wait, and so on, and then subsiding 
 into indoknce again. They are just the first-fruits of a 
 steady, enduring lead that the foreigner has won. The 
 foreigner is ahead of us in education, and this is especially 
 true of the middle and upper classes, from which in- 
 vention and enterprise come — or, in our own case, do 
 not come. He makes a better class of man than we do. 
 His science is better than ours. His training is better 
 than ours. His imagination is livelier. His mind is 
 more active. His requirements in a novel, for example, 
 are not kindly, sedative pap; his uncensored plays deal 
 with reality. His schools are places for vigorous educa- 
 tion instead of genteel athleticism, and his home has 
 books in it, and thought and conversation. Our homes 
 and schools are relatively dull and uninspiring ; there is 
 no intellectual guide or stir in them ; and to that w^e 
 owe this new generation of nicely behaved, unenterprising 
 sons, who play golf and dominate the tailoring of the 
 world, while Brazilians, Frenchmen, Americans and 
 Germans fly. 
 
 That we are hopelessly behindhand in aeronautics is 
 not a fact by itself. It is merely an indication that we 
 are behindhand in our mechanical knowledge and in- 
 vention. M. Bleriot's aeroplane points also to the fleet. 
 
 The struggle for naval supremacy is not merely a 
 struggle in shipbuilding and expenditure. Much more 
 is it a struggle in knowledge and invention. It is not 
 the Power that has the most ships or the biggest ships 
 that is going to win in a naval conflict. It is the Power 
 that thinks quickest of what to do, is most resourceful 
 and inventive. Eighty Dreadnoughts manned by dull 
 men are only eighty targets for a quicker adversary. 
 
 5 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Well, is there any reason to suppose that our Navy is 
 going to keep above the general national level in these 
 things? Is the Navy bright? 
 
 The arrival of M. Bleriot suggests most horribly to 
 me how far behind we must be in all matters of ingenuity, 
 device, and mechanical contrivance. I am reminded 
 again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised 
 that it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army 
 that it was possible to make a military use of barbed 
 wire or construct a trench to defy shrapnel. Suppose 
 in the North Sea we got a surprise like that, and fished 
 out a parboiled, half-drowned admiral explaining what 
 a confoundedly slim, unexpected, almost ungentlemanly 
 thing the enemy had done to him. 
 
 Very probably the Navy is the exception to the 
 British system ; its officers are rescued from the dull 
 homes and dull schools of their class while still of tender 
 years, and shaped after a fashion of their own. But 
 M. Bleriot reminds us that we may no longer shelter 
 and degenerate behind these blue backs. And the keenest 
 men at sea are none the worse for having keen men 
 on land behind them. 
 
 Are we an awakening people? 
 
 It is the vital riddle of our time. I look out upon 
 the windy Channel and think of all those millions just 
 over there, who seem to get busier and keener every 
 hour. I could imagine the day of reckoning coming like 
 a swarm of birds. 
 
 Here the air is full of the clamour of rich and pros- 
 perous people invited to pay taxes, and beyond measure 
 bitter. They are going to live abroad, cut their charities, 
 dismiss old servants, and do all sorts of silly, vindictive 
 things. We seem to be doing feeble next-to-nothings 
 
 6 
 
The Coming of Bleriot 
 
 in the endowment of research. Not one in twenty of 
 the boys of the middle and upper classes learns German 
 or gets more than a misleading smattering of physical 
 science. Most of them never learn to speak French. 
 Heaven alone knows what they do with their brains ! 
 The British reading and thinking public probably does 
 not number fifty thousand people all told. It is difficult 
 to see whence the necessary impetus for a national 
 renascence is to come. . . . The universities are poor 
 and spiritless, with no ambition to lead the country. I 
 met a Boy Scout recently. He was hopeful in his 
 way, but a little inadequate, I thought, as a basis for 
 confidence in the future of the Empire. 
 
 We have still our Derby Day, of course. . . . 
 
 Apart from these patriotic solicitudes, M. Bleriot has 
 set quite another train of thought going in my mind. 
 The age of natural democracy is surely at an end 
 through these machines. There comes a time when men 
 will be sorted out into those who will have the know- 
 ledge, nerve, and courage to do these splendid, dangerous 
 things, and those who will prefer the humbler level. 
 I do not think numbers are going to matter so much 
 in the warfare of the future, and that when organised 
 intelligence differs from the majority, the majority will 
 have no adequate power of retort. The common man 
 with a pike, being only sufficiently indignant and 
 abundant, could chase the eighteenth century gentleman 
 as he chose, but I fail to see what he can do in the way 
 of mischief to an elusive chevalier with wings. But 
 that opens too wide a discussion for me to enter upon 
 now. 
 
MY FIRST FLIGHT 
 
 (Eastbourne, August $, igi2 — three years later) 
 
 Hitherto my only flights have been flights of imagina- 
 tion, but this morning I flew. I spent about ten or 
 fifteen minutes in the air; we went out to sea, soared 
 up, came back over the land, circled higher, planed 
 steeply down to the water, and I landed with the con- 
 viction that I had had only the foretaste of a great store 
 of hitherto unsuspected pleasures. At the first chance 
 I will go up again, and I will go higher and further. 
 
 This experience has restored all the keenness of my 
 ancient interest in flying, which had become a little 
 fagged and flat by too much hearing and reading about 
 the thing and not enough participation. Sixteen years 
 ago, in the days of Langley and Lilienthal, I was one 
 of the few journalists who believed and wrote that flying 
 was possible ; it affected my reputation unfavourably, 
 and produced in the few discouraged pioneers of those 
 days a quite touching gratitude. Over my mantel as I 
 write hangs a very blurred and bad but interesting photo- 
 graph that Professor Langley sent me sixteen years ago. 
 It shows the flight of the first piece of human machinery 
 heavier than air that ever kept itself up for any length 
 of time. It was a model, a little affair that w^ould not 
 have lifted a cat ; it went up in a spiral and came down 
 unsmashed, bringing back, like Noah's dove, the promise 
 of tremendous things. 
 
 That was only sixteen years ago, and it is amusing 
 
 8 
 
My First Flight 
 
 to recall how cautiously even we out-and-out believers 
 did our prophesying. I was quite a desperate fellow; 
 I said outright that in my lifetime we should see men 
 flying. But I qualified that by repeating that for many 
 years to come it would be an enterprise only for quite 
 fantastic daring and skill. We conjured up stupendous 
 difficulties and risks. I was deeply impressed and greatly 
 discouraged by a paper a distinguished Cambridge mathe- 
 matician produced to show that a flying machine was 
 bound to pitch fearfully, that as it flew on its pitching 
 must increase until up went its nose, down went its 
 tail, and it fell like a knife. We exaggerated every possi- 
 bility of instability. We imagined that when the aero- 
 plane wasn't "kicking up ahind and afore" it would 
 be heeling over to the lightest side wind. A sneeze 
 might upset it. We contrasted our poor human equip- 
 ment with the instinctive balance of a bird, which has 
 had ten million years of evolution by way of a start. . . . 
 
 The waterplane in which I soared over Eastbourne 
 this morning with Mr. Grahame- White was as steady as 
 a motor-car running on asphalt. 
 
 Then we went on from those anticipations of sway- 
 ing insecurity to speculations about the psychological and 
 physiological effects of flying. Most people who look 
 down from the top of a cliff or high tower feel some 
 slight qualms of dread, many feel a quite sickening 
 dread. Even if men struggled high into the air, we 
 asked, wouldn't they be smitten up there by such a 
 lonely and reeling dismay as to lose all self-control? And, 
 above all, wouldn't the pitching and tossing make them 
 quite horribly sea-sick? 
 
 I have always been a little haunted by that last 
 dread. It gave a little undertow of funk to the mood 
 
 9 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 of lively curiosity with which I got aboard the water- 
 plane this morning — that sort of faint, thin funk that 
 so readily invades one on the verge of any new experi- 
 ence; when one tries one's first dive, for example, or 
 pushes off for the first time down an ice run. I thought 
 I should very probably be sea-sick — or, to' be more 
 precise , air-sick ; I thought also that I might be very 
 giddy, and that I might get thoroughly cold and un- 
 comfortable. None of those things happened. 
 
 I am still in a state of amazement at the smooth 
 steadfastness of the motion. There is nothing on earth 
 to compare with that, unless — and that I can't judge — 
 it is an ice yacht travelling on perfect ice. The finest 
 motor-car in the world on the best road would be a 
 joggling, quivering thing beside it. 
 
 To begin with, we went out to sea before the wind, 
 and the plane would not readily rise. We went with 
 an undulating movement, leaping with a light splashing 
 pat upon the water, from wave to wave. Then we came 
 about into the wind and rose, and looking over I saw 
 that there were no longer those periodic flashes of white 
 foam. I was flying. And it was as still and steady as 
 dreaming. I watched the widening distance between 
 our floats and the waves. It wasn't by any means a 
 windless day ; there was a brisk, fluctuating breeze blow- 
 ing out of the north over the downs. It seemed hardly 
 to affect our flight at all. 
 
 And as for the giddiness of looking down, one does 
 not feel it at all. It is difficult to explain why this 
 should be so, but it is so. I suppose in such matters 
 I am neither exceptionally steady-headed nor is my head 
 exceptionally given to swimming. I can stand on the 
 edge of cliffs of a thousand feet or so and look down, 
 
 lO 
 
My First Flight 
 
 but I can never bring myself right up to the edge nor 
 crane over to look to the very bottom. I should want 
 to lie down to do that. And the other day I was on 
 that Belvedere place at the top of the Kotterdam sky- 
 scraper, a rather high wind was blowing, and one looks 
 down through the chinks between the boards one stands 
 on upon the heads of the people in the streets below ; I 
 didn't like it. But this morning I looked directly down 
 on a little fleet of fishing boats over w^hich we passed, 
 and on the crowds assembling on the beach, and on 
 the bathers who stared up at us from the breaking surf, 
 with an entirely agreeable exaltation. And Eastbourne, 
 in the early morning sunshine, had all the brightly de- 
 tailed littleness of a town viewed from high up on the 
 side of a great mountain. 
 
 When Mr. Grahame- White told me we were going 
 to plane down I will confess I tightened my hold on 
 the sides of the car and prepared for something like 
 the down-going sensation of a switchback railway on a 
 larger scale. Just for a moment there was that familiar 
 feeling of something pressing one's heart up towards 
 one's shoulders, and one's lower jaw up into its socket 
 and of grinding one's lower teeth against the upper, 
 and then it passed. The nose of the car and all the 
 machine was slanting downwards, we were gliding 
 quickly down, and yet there was no feeling that one 
 rushed, not even as one rushes in coasting a hill on a 
 bicycle. It wasn't a tithe of the thrill of those three 
 descents one gets on the great mountain railway in the 
 White City. There one gets a disagreeable quiver up 
 one's backbone from the wheels, and a real sense of 
 falling. 
 
 It is quite peculiar to flying that one is incredulous 
 
 II 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 of any collision. Some time ago I was in a motor-car 
 that ran over and killed a small dog, and this wretched 
 little incident has left an open wound upon my nerves. 
 I am never quite happy in a car now ; I can't help keep- 
 ing an apprehensive eye ahead. But you fly with an 
 exhilarating assurance that you cannot possibly run over 
 anything or run into anything — except the land or the 
 sea, and even those large essentials seem a beautifully 
 safe distance away. 
 
 I had heard a great deal of talk about the deafening 
 uproar of the engine. I counted a headache among my 
 chances. There again reason reinforced conjecture. 
 When in the early morning Mr. Travers came from 
 Brighton in this Farman in which I flew I could hear 
 the hum of the great insect when it still seemed abreast 
 of Beachy Head, and a good two miles away. If one 
 can hear a thing at two miles, how much the more will 
 one not hear it at a distance of two yards? But at the 
 risk of seeming too contented for anything I will assert 
 I heard that noise no more than one hears the drone of 
 an electric ventilator upon one's table. It was only 
 when I came to speak to Mr. Grahame- White, or he to 
 me, that I discovered that our voices had become almost 
 infinitesimally small. 
 
 And so it was I went up into the air at Eastbourne 
 with the impression that flying was still an uncomfort- 
 able, experimental, and slightly heroic thing to do, and 
 came down to the cheerful gathering crowd upon the 
 sands again with the knowledge that it is a thing achieved 
 for everyone. It will get much cheaper, no doubt, and 
 much swifter, and be improved in a dozen ways — we 
 must get self -starting engines, for example, for both our 
 aeroplanes and motor-cars — but it is available to-day for 
 
 12 
 
My First Flight 
 
 anyone who can reach it. An invalid lady of seventy 
 could have enjoyed all that I did if only one could have 
 got her into the passenger's seat. Getting there was a 
 little difficult, it is true; the waterplane was out in the 
 surf, and I was carried to it on a boatman's back, and 
 then had to clamber carefully through the wires, but that 
 is a matter of detail. This flying is indeed so certain to 
 become a general experience that I am sure that this 
 description will in a few years seem almost as quaint 
 as if I had set myself to record the fears and sensations 
 of my First Kide in a Wheeled Vehicle. And I suspect 
 that learning to control a Farman waterplane now is 
 probably not much more difficult than, let us say, twice 
 the difficulty in learning the control and management of 
 a motor-bicycle. I cannot understand the sort of young 
 man who won't learn how to do it if he gets half a 
 chance. 
 
 The development of these waterplanes is an important 
 step towards the huge and swarming popularisation of 
 flying which is now certainly imminent. We ancient 
 survivors of those who believed in and wrote about flying 
 before there was any flying used to make a great fuss 
 about the dangers and difficulties of landing and getting 
 up. We wrote with vast gravity about *' starting rails" 
 and *' landing stages," and it is still true that landing 
 an aeroplane, except upon a well-known and quite level 
 expanse, is a risky and uncomfortable business. But 
 getting up and landing upon fairly smooth water is easier 
 than getting into bed. This alone is likely to determine 
 the aeroplane routes along the line of the world's coast- 
 lines and lake groups and waterways. The airmen will 
 go to and fro over water as the midges do. Wherever 
 there is a square mile of water the waterplanes will come 
 
 13 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 and go like hornets at the mouth of their nest. But 
 there are much stronger reasons than this convenience 
 for keeping over water. Over water the air, it seems, 
 Hes in great level expanses ; even when there are gales 
 it moves in uniform masses like the swift, still 
 rush of a deep river. The airman, in Mr. Grahame- 
 White's phrase, can go to sleep on it. But over the 
 land, and for thousands of feet up into the sky, the air 
 is more irregular than a torrent among rocks ; it is — if 
 only we could see it — a waving, whirling, eddying, flam- 
 boyant confusion. A slight hill, a ploughed field, the 
 streets of a town, create riotous, rolling, invisible streams 
 and cataracts of air that catch the airman unawares, 
 make him drop disconcertingly, try his nerves. With a 
 powerful enough engine he climbs at once again, but 
 these sudden downfalls are the least pleasant and most 
 dangerous experience in aviation. They exact a tiring 
 vigilance. 
 
 Over lake or sea, in sunshine, within sight of land, 
 this is the perfect way of the flying tourist. Gladly 
 would I have set out for France this morning instead 
 of returning to Eastbourne. And then coasted round to 
 Spain and into the Mediterranean. And so by leisurely 
 stages to India. And the East Indies. . . . 
 
 I find my study unattractive to-day. 
 
OFF THE CHAIN 
 
 {^December^ igio.) 
 
 I WAS ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren's "Ten 
 Thousand a Year," and noting how much the world can 
 change in seventy years. 
 
 I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London 
 to Yorkshire in that ex-sheriff's coach he bought in 
 Long Acre — where now the motor-cars are sold — when 
 there came a telegram to bid me note how a certain 
 Mr. Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England 
 from a little excursion. He had left London last Satur- 
 day week at midday ; he hoped to be back by Thursday ; 
 and he had talked to the President in Washington, 
 visited Philadelphia, and had a comparatively loitering 
 afternoon in New York. What had I to say about it? 
 
 Firstly, that I wish this article could be written 
 by Samuel Warren. And failing that, I wish that 
 Charles Dickens, who wrote in his "American Notes" 
 with such passionate disgust and hostility about the first 
 Cunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of cross- 
 ing the Atlantic by steamship, could have shared Mr. 
 Holt's experience. 
 
 Because I am chiefly impressed by the fact not that 
 Mr. Holt has taken days where weeks were needed fifty 
 years ago, but that he has done it very comfortably, 
 without undue physical exertion, and at no greater ex- 
 pense, I suppose, than it cost Dickens, whom the journey 
 nearly killed. 
 
 IS 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 If Mr. Holt's expenses were higher, it was for the 
 special trains and the sake of the record. Anyone taking 
 ordinary trains and ordinary passages may do what he 
 has done in eighteen or twenty days. 
 
 When I was a boy, "Around the World in Eighty 
 Days " was still a brilliant piece of imaginative fiction. 
 Now that is almost an invalid's pace. It will not be 
 very long before a man will be able to go round the 
 world if he wishes to do so ten times in a year. And 
 it is perhaps forgivable if those who, like Jules Verne, 
 saw all these increments in speed, motor-cars, and air- 
 ships, aeroplanes, and submarines, wireless telegraphy 
 and what not, as plain and necessary deductions from 
 the promises of physical science, should turn upon a 
 world that read and doubted and jeered with "I told 
 you so. Now will you respect a prophet?'* 
 
 It was not that the prophets professed any mystical 
 and inexplicable illumination at which a sceptic might 
 reasonably mock ; they were prepared with ample reasons 
 for the things they foretold. Now, quite as confidently, 
 they point on to a new series of consequences, high 
 probabilities that follow on all this tremendous develop- 
 ment of swift, secure, and cheapened locomotion, just 
 as they followed almost necessarily upon the mechanical 
 developments of the last century. 
 
 Briefly, the ties that bind men to plac* are being 
 severed ; we are in the beginning of a new phase in 
 human experience. 
 
 For endless ages man led the hunting life, migrating 
 after his food, camping, homeless, as to this day are 
 many of the Indians and Esquimaux in the Hudson 
 Bay Territory. Then began agriculture, and for the 
 sake of securer food man tethered himself to a place. 
 
 i6 
 
Off the Chain 
 
 The history of man's progress from savagery to civilisa- 
 tion is essentially a story of settling down. It begins 
 in caves and shelters; it culminates in a wide spectacle 
 of farms and peasant villages, and little towns among 
 the farms. There were wars, crusades, barbarous in- 
 vasions, set-backs, but to that state all Asia, Europe, 
 North Africa worked its way with an indomitable per- 
 tinacity. The enormous majority of human beings stayed 
 at home at last ; from the cradle to the grave they lived, 
 married, died in the same district, usually in the same 
 village ; and to that condition, law, custom, habits, morals, 
 have adapted themselves. The whole plan and concep- 
 tion of human society is based on the rustic home and 
 the needs and characteristics of the agricultural family. 
 There have been gipsies, wanderers, knaves, knights- 
 errant and adventurers, no doubt, but the settled per- 
 manent rustic home and the tenure of land about it, 
 and the hens and the cow, have constituted the funda- 
 mental reality of the whole scene. 
 
 Now, the really wonderful thing in this astonishing 
 development of cheap, abundant, swift locomotion we 
 have seen in the last seventy years — in the development 
 of which Mauretanias, aeroplanes, niile-a-minute ex- 
 presses, tubes, motor-buses and motor-cars are just the 
 bright, remarkable points — is this : that it dissolves 
 almost all the reason and necessity why men should go 
 on living permanently in any one place or rigidly dis- 
 ciplined to one set of conditions. The former attach- 
 ment to the soil ceases to be an advantage. The human 
 spirit has never quite subdued itself to the laborious 
 and established life ; it achieves its best with variety 
 and occasional vigorous exertion under the stimulus of 
 novelty rather than by constant toil, and this revolution 
 c 17 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 in human locomotion that brings nearly all the globe 
 within a few days of any man is the most striking aspect 
 of the unfettering again of the old restless, wandering, 
 adventurous tendencies in man's composition. 
 
 Already one can note remarkable developments of 
 migration. There is, for example, that flow to and fro 
 across the Atlantic of labourers from the Mediterranean. 
 Italian workmen by the hundred thousand go to the 
 United States in the spring and return in the autumn. 
 Again, there is a stream of thousands of prosperous 
 Americans to summer in Europe. Compared with any 
 European country, the whole population of the United 
 States is fluid. Equally notable is the enormous pro- 
 portion of the British prosperous which winters either 
 in the high Alps or along the Eiviera. England is rapidly 
 developing the former Irish grievance of an absentee 
 propertied class. It is only now by the most strenuous 
 artificial banking back that migrations on a far huger 
 scale from India into Africa, and from China and Japan 
 into Australia and America are prevented. 
 
 All the indications point to a time when it will be an 
 altogether exceptional thing for a man to follow one 
 occupation in one place all his life, and still rarer for 
 a son to follow in his father's footsteps or die in his 
 father's house. 
 
 The thing is as simple as the rule of three. We are 
 off the chain of locality for good and all. It was neces- 
 sary heretofore for a man to live in immediate contact 
 with his occupation, because the only way for him to 
 reach it was to have it at his door, and the cost and 
 delay of transport were relatively too enormous for him 
 to shift once he was settled. Now he may live twenty 
 or thirty miles away from his occupation ; and it often 
 
 i8 
 
Off the Chain 
 
 pays him to spend the small amount of time and money 
 needed to move — it may be half-way round the world — 
 to healthier conditions or more profitable employment. 
 
 And with every diminution in the cost and duration 
 of transport it becomes more and more possible, and more 
 and more likely, to be profitable to move great multi- 
 tudes of workers seasonally between regions where work 
 is needed in this season and regions where work is 
 needed in that. They can go out to the agricultural 
 lands at one time and come back into towns for artistic 
 work and organised work in factories at another. They 
 can move from rain and darkness into sunshine, and 
 from heat into the coolness of mountain forests. Chil- 
 dren can be sent for education to sea beaches and healthy 
 mountains. 
 
 Men will harvest in Saskatchewan and come down 
 in great liners to spend the winter w^orking in the forests 
 of Yucatan. 
 
 People have hardly begun to speculate about the 
 consequences of the return of humanity from a closely 
 tethered to a migratory existence. It is here that the 
 prophet finds his chief opportunity. Obviously, these 
 great forces of transport are already straining against 
 the limits of existing political areas. Every country 
 contains now an increasing ingredient of unenfranchised 
 Uitlanders. Every country finds a growing section of 
 its home-born people either living largely abroad, draw- 
 ing the bulk of their income from the exterior, and 
 having their essential interests wholly or partially across 
 the frontier. 
 
 In every locality of a Western European country 
 countless people are found delocalised, uninterested in 
 the affairs of that particular locality, and capable of 
 
 19 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 moving themselves with a minimum of loss and a maxi- 
 mum of facility into any other region that proves more 
 attractive. In America political life, especially State 
 life as distinguished from national political life, is 
 degraded because of the natural and inevitable apathy 
 of a large portion of the population whose interests go 
 beyond the State. 
 
 Politicians and statesmen, being the last people in 
 the world to notice what is going on in it, are making 
 no attempt whatever to re-adapt this hugely growing 
 floating population of delocalised people to the public 
 service. A^ Mr. Marriott puts it in his novel, 
 ''Now" they "drop out" from politics as we understand 
 politics at present. Local administration falls almost 
 entirely — and the decision of Imperial affairs tends more 
 and more to fall — into the hands of that dwindling and 
 adventurous moiety which sits tight in one place from 
 the cradle to the grave. No one has yet invented any 
 method for the political expression and collective 
 direction of a migratory population, and nobody is 
 •attempting to do so. It is a new problem. . . . 
 
 Here, then, is a curious prospect, the prospect of a 
 new kind of people, a floating population going about 
 the world, uprooted, delocalised, and even, it may be, 
 denationalised, with wide interests and wide views, de- 
 veloping, no doubt, customs and habits of its own, a 
 morality of its own, a philosophy of its own, and yet 
 from the point of view of current politics and legisla- 
 tion, unorganised and ineffective. 
 
 Most of the forces of international finance and inter- 
 national business enterprise will be with it. It will 
 develop its own characteristic standards of art and 
 literature and conduct in accordance with its new neces- 
 
 20 
 
Off the Chain 
 
 sities. It is, I believe, the mankind of the future. 
 And the last thing it will be able to do will be to legislate. 
 The history of the immediate future will, I am convinced, 
 be very largely the history of the conflict of the needs 
 of this new population with the institutions, the bound- 
 aries, the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditions 
 established during the home-keeping, localised era of 
 mankind's career. 
 
 This conflict follows as inevitably upon these new 
 gigantic facilities of locomotion as the Mauretania 
 followed from the discoveries of steam and steel. 
 
 21 
 
OF THE NEW REIGN 
 
 (June, iQii.) 
 
 The bunting and the crimson vanish from the streets. 
 Already the vast army of improvised carpenters that 
 the Coronation has created set themselves to the work 
 of demolition, and soon every road that converges upon 
 Central London will be choked again with great loads 
 of timber — but this time going outward — as our capital 
 emerges from this unprecedented inundation of loyalty. 
 The most elaborately conceived, the most stately of all 
 recorded British Coronations is past. 
 
 What new phase in the life of our nation and our 
 Empire does this tremendous ceremony inaugurate? 
 The question is inevitable. There is nothing in all the 
 social existence of men so full of challenge as the crown- 
 ing of a king. It is the end of the overture ; the curtain 
 rises. This is a new beginning-place for histories. 
 
 To us, the great mass of common Englishmen, who 
 have no place in the hierarchy of our land, who do not 
 attend Courts nor encounter uniforms, whose function 
 is at most spectacular, who stand in the street and watch 
 the dignitaries and the liveries pass by, this sense of 
 critical expectation is perhaps greater than it is for 
 those more immediately concerned in the spectacle. 
 They have had their parts to play, their symbolic acts to 
 perform, they have sat in their privileged places, and 
 we have waited at the barriers until .their comfort and 
 dignity was assured. I can conceive many of them, a 
 
 92 
 
Of the New Reign 
 
 little fatigued, preparing now for social dispersal, re- 
 laxing comfortably into gossip, discussing the detail of 
 these events with an air of things accomplished. They 
 will decide whether the Coronation has been a success 
 and whether everything has or has not passed off very 
 well. For us in the great crowd nothing has as yet 
 succeeded or passed off well or ill. We are intent upon 
 a King newly anointed and crowned, a King of whom 
 we know as yet very little, but who has, nevertheless, 
 roused such expectation as no King before him has done 
 since Tudor times, in the presence of gigantic oppor- 
 tunities. 
 
 There is a conviction widespread among us — his own 
 words, perhaps, have done most to create it — that King 
 George is inspired, as no recent predecessor has been 
 inspired, by the conception of kingship, that his is to 
 be no role of almost indifferent abstinence from the 
 broad processes of our national and imperial development. 
 That greater public life which is above party and above 
 creed and sect has, we are told, taken hold of his imagina- 
 tion ; he is to be no crowned image of unity and correla- 
 tion, a layer of foundation-stones and a signature to 
 documents, but an actor in our drama, a living Prince. 
 
 Time will test these hopes, but certainly we, the 
 innumerable democracy of individually unimportant men, 
 have felt the need for such a Prince. Our consciousness 
 of defects, of fields of effort untilled, of vast possibilities 
 neglected and slipping away from us for ever, has never 
 really slumbered again since the chastening experiences 
 of the Boer War. Since then the national spirit, 
 hampered though it is by the traditions of party 
 government and a legacy of intellectual and social 
 heaviness, has been in uneasy and ineffectual revolt 
 
 23 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 against deadness, against stupidity and slackness, against 
 waste and hypocrisy in every department of life. We 
 have come to see more and more clearly how little we 
 can hope for from politicians, societies and organised 
 movements in these essential things. It is this that 
 has invested the energy and manhood, the untried possi- 
 bilities, of the new King with so radiant a light of hope 
 for us. 
 
 Think what it may mean for us all — I write as one 
 of that great ill-informed multitude, sincerely and 
 gravely patriotic, outside the echoes of Court gossip 
 and the easy knowledge of exalted society — if our King 
 does indeed care for these wider and profounder things ! 
 Suppose w^e have a King at last who cares for the 
 advancement of science, who is willing to do the hundred 
 things that are so easy in his position to increase re- 
 search, to honour and to share in scientific thought. 
 Suppose we have a King whose head rises above the 
 level of the Court artist, and who not only can but will 
 appeal to the latent and discouraged power of artistic 
 creation in our race. Suppose we have a King who 
 understands the need for incessant, acute criticism to 
 keep our collective activities intelligent and efficient, and 
 for a flow of bold, unhampered thought through every 
 department of the national life, a King liberal without 
 laxity and patriotic without pettiness or vulgarity. 
 Such, it seems to us who wait at present almost inex- 
 pressively outside the immediate clamours of a mere 
 artificial loyalty, are the splendid possibilities of the 
 time. 
 
 For England is no exhausted or decaying country. 
 It is rich with an unmeasured capacity for generous 
 responses. It is a country burthened indeed, but not 
 
 24 
 
Of the New Reign 
 
 overwhelmed, by the gigantic responsibilities of Empire, 
 a little relaxed by wealth, and hampered rather than 
 enslaved by a certain shyness of temperament, a certain 
 habitual timidity, slovenliness and insincerity of mind. 
 It is a little distrustful of intellectual power and enter- 
 prise, a little awkward and ungracious to brave and 
 beautiful things, a little too tolerant of dull, well-meaning 
 and industrious men and arrogant old women. It suffers 
 hypocrites gladly, because its criticism is poor, and it 
 is wastefully harsh to frank unorthodoxy. But its heart 
 is sound if its judgments fall short of acuteness and if 
 its standards of achievement are low. It needs but a 
 quickening spirit upon the throne, always the traditional 
 centre of its respect, to rise from even the appearance 
 of decadence. There is a new quality seeking expression 
 in England like the rising of sap in the spring, a new 
 generation asking only for such leadership and such 
 emancipation from restricted scope and ungenerous 
 hostility as a King alone can give it. . . . 
 
 When in its turn this latest reign comes at last to 
 its reckoning, what will the sum of its achievement be? 
 What will it leave of things visible? Will it leave a 
 London preserved and beautified, or will it but add 
 abundantly to the lumps of dishonest statuary, the scars 
 and masses of ill-conceived rebuilding which testify to 
 the aesthetic degradation of the Victorian period? Will 
 a great constellation of artists redeem the ambitious 
 sentimentalities and genteel skilfulness that find their 
 fitting mausoleum in the Tate Gallery? Will our litera- 
 ture escape at last from pretentiousness and timidity, 
 our philosophy from the foolish cerebrations of university 
 "characters" and eminent politicians at leisure, and our 
 starved science find scope and resources adequate to its 
 
 25 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 gigantic needs? Will our universities, our teaching, our 
 national training, our public services, gain a new health 
 from the reviving vigour of the national brain? Or is 
 all this a mere wild hope, and shall we, after perhaps 
 some small flutterings of effort, the foundation of some 
 ridiculous little academy of literary busybodies and 
 hangers-on, the public recognition of this or that 
 sociological pretender or financial "scientist,** and a 
 little polite jobbery with picture-buying, relapse into 
 lassitude and a contented acquiescence in the rivalry of 
 Germany and the United States for the moral, intel- 
 lectual, and material leadership of the world? 
 
 The deaths and accessions of Kings, the changing 
 of names and coins and symbols and persons, a little 
 force our minds in the marking off of epochs. We are 
 brought to weigh one generation against another, to 
 reckon up our position and note the characteristics of a 
 new phase. What lies before us in the next decades? 
 Is England going on to fresh achievements, to a re- 
 newed and increased predominance, or is she falling 
 into a secondary position among the peoples of the 
 world? 
 
 The answer to that depends upon ourselves. Have 
 
 we pride enough to attempt still to lead mankind, and 
 
 if we have, have we the wisdom and the quality? Or 
 
 are we just the children of Good Luck, who are being 
 
 .found out? 
 
 Some years ago our present King exhorted this island 
 to "wake up " in one of the most remarkable of British 
 royal utterances, and Mr. Owen Seaman assures him 
 in verse of an altogether laureate quality that we 
 are now 
 
 "Free of the snare of slumber's silken bands," 
 26 
 
Of the New Reign 
 
 though I have not myself observed it. It is interesting 
 to ask, Is England really waking up? and if she is, what 
 sort of awakening is she likely to have? 
 
 It is possible, of course, to wake up in various 
 different ways. There is the clear and beautiful dawn 
 of new and balanced effort, easy, unresting, planned, 
 assured, and there is also the blundering-up of a still 
 half-somnolent man, irascible, clumsy, quarrelsome, who 
 stubs his toe in his first walk across the room, smashes 
 his too persistent alarum clock in a fit of nerves, and 
 cuts his throat while shaving. All patriotic vehemence 
 does not serve one's country. Exertion is a more critical 
 and dangerous thing than inaction, and the essence of 
 success is in the ability to develop those qualities which 
 make action effective, and without which strenuousness 
 is merely a clumsy and noisy protest against inevitable 
 defeat. These necessary qualities, without which no 
 community may hope for pre-eminence to-day, are a 
 passion for fine and brilliant achievement, relentless 
 veracity of thought and method, and richly imaginative 
 fearlessness of enterprise. Have we English those 
 qualities, and are we doing our utmost to select and 
 develop them? 
 
 I doubt very much if we are. Let me give some 
 of the impressions that qualify my assurance in the 
 future of our race. 
 
 I have watched a great deal of patriotic effort during 
 the last decade, I have seen enormous expenditures of 
 will, emotion and material for the sake of our future, 
 and I am deeply impressed, not indeed by any effect 
 of lethargy, but by the second-rate quality and the 
 shortness and weakness of aim in very much that has 
 been done. I miss continually that sharply critical 
 
 27 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 imaginativeness which distinguishes all excellent work, 
 which shines out supremely in Cromwell's creation of 
 the New Model, or Nelson's plan of action at Trafalgar, 
 as brightly as it does in Newton's investigation of gravi- 
 tation, Turner's rendering of landscape, or Shakespeare's 
 choice of words, but which cannot be absent altogether 
 if any achievement is to endure. We seem to have busy, 
 energetic people, no doubt, in abundance, patient and 
 industrious administrators and legislators ; but have we 
 any adequate supply of really creative ability? 
 
 Let me apply this question to one matter upon which 
 England has certainly been profoundly in earnest during 
 the last decade. We have been almost frantically re- 
 solved to keep the empire of the sea. But have we really 
 done all that could have been done? I ask it with all 
 dififidence, but has our naval preparation been free from 
 a sort of noisy violence, a certain massive dullness of 
 conception? Have we really made anything like a sane 
 use of our resources? I do not mean of our resources 
 in money or stuff. It is manifest that the next naval 
 war will be beyond all precedent a war of mechanisms, 
 giving such scope for invention and scientifically equipped 
 wit and courage as the world has never had before. Now, 
 have we really developed any considerable proportion 
 of the potential human quality available to meet the 
 demand for wits? What are we doing to discover, 
 encourage and develop those supreme qualities of personal 
 genius that become more and more decisive with every 
 new weapon and every new complication and unsuspected 
 possibility it introduces? Suppose, for example, there 
 was among us to-day a one-eyed, one-armed adulterer, 
 rather fragile, prone to sea-sickness, and with just that 
 one supreme quality of imaginative courage which made 
 
 28 
 
Of the New Reign 
 
 Nelson our starry admiral. Would he be given the 
 ghost of a chance now of putting that gift at his 
 country's disposal? I do not think he would, and I 
 do not think he would because we underrate gifts and 
 exceptional qualities, because there is no quickening 
 appreciation for the exceptional best in a man, and 
 because we overvalue the good behaviour, the sound 
 physique, the commonplace virtues of mediocrity. 
 
 I have but the knowledge of the man in the street 
 in these things, though once or twice I have chanced on 
 prophecy, and I am uneasily apprehensive of the quality 
 of all our naval preparations. We go on launching these 
 lumping great Dreadnoughts, and I cannot bring myself 
 to believe in them. They seem vulnerable from the air 
 above and the deep below, vulnerable in a shallow 
 channel and in a fog (and the North Sea is both foggy 
 and shallow), and immensely costly. If I were Lord 
 High Admiral of England at war I would not fight 
 the, things. I would as soon put to sea in St. Paul's 
 '-Cathedral. If I were fighting Germany, I would stow 
 half of them away in the Clyde and half in the Bristol 
 Channel, and take the good men out of them and fight 
 with mines and torpedoes and destroyers and airships 
 and submarines. 
 
 And when I come to military matters my persuasion 
 that things are not all right, that our current hostility 
 to imaginative activity and our dull acceptance of estab- 
 lished methods and traditions is leading us towards 
 grave dangers, intensifies. In South Africa the Boers 
 taught us in blood and bitterness the obvious fact that 
 barbed wire had its military uses, and over the high 
 passes on the way to Lhassa (though, luckily, it led to 
 no disaster) there was not a rifle in condition to use 
 
 29 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 because we had not thought to take glycerine. The 
 perpetual novelty of modern conditions demands an 
 imaginative alertness we eliminate. I do not believe 
 that the Army Council or anyone in authority has worked 
 out a tithe of the essential problems of contemporary 
 war. If they have, then it does not show. Our military 
 imagination is half-way back to bows and arrows. The 
 other day I saw a detachment of the Legion of Frontiers- 
 men disporting itself at Totteridge. I presume these 
 young heroes consider they are preparing for a possible 
 conflict in England or Western Europe, and I presume 
 the authorities are satisfied with them. It is at any rate 
 the only serious war of which there is any manifest 
 probability. Western Europe is now a network of rail- 
 ways, tramways, high roads, wires of all sorts; its chief 
 beasts of burthen are the railway train and the motor 
 car and the bicycle ; towns and hypertrophied villages are 
 often practically continuous over large areas ; there is 
 abundant water and food, and the commonest form of 
 cover is the house. But the Legion of Frontiersmen is 
 equipped for war, oh ! — in Arizona in 1890, and so far 
 as I am able to judge the most modem sections of the 
 army extant are organised for a colonial war in (say) 
 1899 or 1900. There is, of course, a considerable amount 
 of vague energy demanding conscription and urging our 
 youth towards a familiarity with arms and the back- 
 woodsman's life, but of any thought-out purpose in our 
 arming widely understood, of any realisation of what 
 would have to be done and where it would have to be 
 done, and of any attempts to create an instrument for 
 that novel unprecedented undertaking, I discover no 
 trace. 
 
 In my capacity of devil's advocate pleading against 
 
 30 
 
Of the New Reign 
 
 national over-confidence, I might go on to the quality 
 of our social and political movements. One hears nowa- 
 days a vast amount of chatter about efficiency — that 
 magic word — and social organisation, and there is no 
 doubt a huge expenditure of energy upon these things 
 and a widespread desire to rush about and make showy 
 and startling changes. But it does not follow that this 
 involves progress if the enterprise itself is dully con- 
 ceived, and most of it does seem to me to be dully 
 conceived. In the absence of penetrating criticism, any 
 impudent industrious person may set up as an "expert," 
 organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, 
 and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. 
 The "expert" quack and the bureaucratic intriguer 
 increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical, 
 strenuous period as disease germs multiply in darkness 
 and heat. 
 
 I find the same doubts of our quality assail me when 
 I turn to the supreme business of education. It is true 
 we all seem alive nowadays to the need of education, 
 are all prepared for more expenditure upon it and more, 
 but it does not follow necessarily in a period of stag- 
 nating imagination that we shall get what we pay for. 
 The other day I discovered my little boy doing a sub- 
 traction sum, and I found he was doing it in a slower, 
 clumsier, less businesslike way than the one I was taught 
 in an old-fashioned " Commercial Academy " thirty odd 
 years ago. The educational "expert," it seems, has been 
 at work substituting a bad method for a good one in our 
 schools because it is easier of exposition. The educa- 
 tional "expert," in the lack of a lively public intelligence, 
 develops all the vices of the second-rate energetic, and 
 he is, I am only too disposed to believe, making a terrible 
 
 31 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 mess of a great deal of our science teaching and of the 
 teaching of mathematics and English. . . . 
 
 I have written enough to make clear the quality of 
 my doubts. I think the English mind cuts at life with 
 a dulled edge, and that its energy may be worse than 
 its somnolence. I think it undervalues gifts and fine 
 achievement, and overvalues the commonplace virtues 
 of mediocre men. One of the greatest Liberal statesmen 
 in the time of Queen Victoria never held office because 
 he was associated with a divorce case a quarter of a 
 century ago. For him to have taken office would have 
 been regarded as a scandal. But it is not regarded as 
 a scandal that our Government includes men of no more 
 ability than any average assistant behind a grocer's 
 counter. These are your gods, England ! — and with 
 every desire to be optimistic I find it hard under the 
 circumstances to anticipate that the New Epoch is likely 
 to be a blindingly brilliant time for our Empire and 
 our race. 
 
 32 
 
WILL THE EMPIRE LIVE? 
 
 What will hold such an Empire as the British together, 
 this great, laxly scattered, sea-linked association of 
 ancient states and new-formed countries. Oriental 
 nations, and continental colonies? What will enable 
 it to resist the endless internal strains, the inevitable 
 external pressures and attacks to which it must be sub- 
 jected? This is the primary question for British 
 Imperialism ; everything else is secondary or subordinated 
 to that. 
 
 There is a multitude of answers. But I suppose 
 most of them will prove under examination either to be, 
 or to lead to, or to imply very distinctly this generalisa- 
 tion, that if most of the intelligent and active people in 
 the Empire want it to continue it will, and that if a 
 large proportion of such active and intelligent people are 
 discontented and estranged, nothing can save it from 
 disintegration. I do not suppose that a navy ten times 
 larger than ours, or conscription of the most irksome 
 thoroughness, could oblige Canada to remain in the 
 Empire if the general will and feeling of Canada were 
 against it, or coerce India into a sustained submission if 
 India presented a united and resistant front. Our 
 Empire, for all its roll of battles, was not created by 
 force ; colonisation and diplomacy have played a far 
 larger share in its growth than conquest; and there is 
 no such strength in its sovereignty as the rule of pride 
 and pressure demand. It is to the free consent and 
 D 33 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 participation of its constituent peoples that we must 
 look for its continuance. 
 
 A large and influential body of politicians considers 
 that in preferential trading between the parts of the 
 Empire, and in the erection of a tariff wall against 
 exterior peoples, lies the secret of that deepened emotional 
 understanding we all desire. I have never belonged to 
 that school. I am no impassioned Free Trader — the 
 sacred principle of Free Trade has always impressed me 
 as a piece of party claptrap ; but I have never been able 
 to understand how an attempt to draw together dominions 
 so scattered and various as ours by a network of fiscal 
 manipulation could end in anything but mutual incon- 
 venience, mutual irritation, and disruption. 
 
 In an open drawer in my bureau there lies before me 
 now a crumpled card on which are the notes I made 
 of a former discussion of this very issue, a discussion 
 between a number of prominent politicians in the days 
 before Mr. Chamberlain's return from South Africa and 
 the adoption of Tariff Reform by the Unionist Party ; 
 and I decipher again the same considerations, unanswered 
 and unanswerable, that leave me sceptical to-day. 
 
 Take a map of the world and consider the extreme 
 differences in position and condition between our scattered 
 states. Here is Canada, lying along the United States, 
 looking eastward to Japan and China, westward to all 
 Europe. See the great slashes of lake, bay, and mountain 
 chain that cut it meridianally. Obviously its main routes 
 and trades and relations lie naturally north and south ; 
 obviously its full development can only be attained with 
 those ways free, open, and active. Conceivably, you may 
 build a fiscal wall across the continent ; conceivably, you 
 may shut off the east and half the west by impossible 
 
 34 
 
Will the Empire Live ? 
 
 tariffs, and narrow its trade to one artificial duct to 
 England, but only at the price of a hampered develop- 
 ment. It will be like nourishing the growing body of 
 a man with the heart and arteries of a mouse. 
 
 Then here, again, are New Zealand and Australia, 
 facing South America and the teeming countries of 
 Eastern Asia; surely it is in relation to these vast 
 proximities that their economic future lies. Is it possible 
 to believe that shipping mutton to London is anything 
 but the mere beginning of their commercial develop- 
 ment? Look at India, again, and South Africa. Is it 
 not manifest that from the economic and business points 
 of view each of these is an entirely separate entity, a 
 system apart, under distinct necessities, needing entire 
 freedom to make its own bargains and control its trade 
 in its own way in order to achieve its fullest material 
 possibilities ? 
 
 Nor can I believe that financial entanglements greatly 
 strengthen the bonds of an empire in any case. We lost 
 the American colonies because we interfered with their 
 fiscal arrangements, and it was Napoleon's attempt to 
 strangle the Continental trade with Great Britain that 
 began his downfall. 
 
 I do not find in the ordinary relations of life that 
 business relations necessarily sustain intercourse. The 
 relations of buyer and seller are ticklish relations, very 
 liable to strains and conflicts. I do not find people grow 
 fond of their butchers and plumbers, and I doubt whether 
 if one were obliged by some special taxation to deal only 
 with one butcher or one plumber, it would greatly endear 
 the relationship. Forced buying is irritated buying, and 
 it is the forbidden shop that contains the coveted goods. 
 Nor do I find, to take another instance, among the hotel 
 
 35 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 staffs of Switzerland and the Eiviera — ^who live almost 
 entirely upon British gold — those impassioned British 
 imperialist views the economic link theory would lead 
 me to expect. 
 
 And another link, too, upon which much stress is 
 laid but about which I have very grave doubts, is the 
 possibility of a unified organisation of the Empire for 
 military defence. We are to have, it is suggested, an 
 imperial Army and an imperial Navy, and so far, no 
 doubt, as the guaranteeing of a general peace goes, we 
 may develop a sense of participation in that way. 
 But it is well in these islands to remember that our 
 extraordinary Empire has no common enemy to weld it 
 together from without. 
 
 It is too usual to regard Germany as the common 
 enemy. We in Great Britain are now intensely jealous 
 of Germany. We are intensely jealous of Germany not 
 only because the Germans outnumber us, and have a 
 much larger and more diversified country than ours, and 
 lie in the very heart and body of Europe, but because 
 in the last hundred years, while we have fed on platitudes 
 and vanity, they have had the energy and humility to 
 develop a splendid system of national education, to toil 
 at science and art and literature, to develop social 
 organisation, to master and better our methods of busi- 
 ness and industry, and to clamber above us in the scale 
 of civilisation. This has humiliated and irritated rather 
 than chastened us, and our irritation has been greatly 
 exacerbated by the swaggering bad manners, the talk 
 of "Blood and Iron" and Mailed Fists, the Welt-Politik 
 rubbish that inaugurated the new German phase. 
 
 The British middle-class, therefore, is full of an 
 angry, vague disposition to thwart that expansion which 
 
 36 
 
Will the Empire Live? 
 
 Germans regard very reasonably as their natural destiny ; 
 there are all the possibilities of a huge conflict in that 
 disposition, and it is perhaps well to remember how 
 insular — or, at least, how European — the essentials of 
 this quarrel are. We have lost our tempers, but Canada 
 has not. There is nothing in Germany to make Canada 
 envious and ashamed of wasted years. Canada has no 
 natural quarrel with Germany, nor has India, nor South 
 Africa, nor Australasia. They have no reason to share 
 our insular exasperation. On the other hand, all these 
 states have other special preoccupations. New Zealand, 
 for example, having spent half a century and more in 
 sheep-farming, land legislation, suppressing its drink 
 traffic, lowering its birth-rate, and, in short, the achieve- 
 ment of an ideal preventive materialism, is chiefly con- 
 sumed by hate and fear of Japan, which in the same 
 interval has made a stride from the thirteenth to the 
 twentieth century, and which teems with art and life 
 and enterprise and offspring. Now Japan in Welt-Politik 
 is our ally. 
 
 You see, the British Empire has no common economic 
 interests and no natural common enemy. It is not 
 adapted to any form of Zollverein or any form of united 
 aggression. Visibly, on the map of the world it has a 
 likeness to open hands, while the German Empire — 
 except for a few ill-advised and imitative colonies — is 
 clenched into a central European unity. 
 
 Physically, our Empire is incurably scattered, various, 
 and divided, and it is to quite other links and forces, it 
 seems to me, than fiscal or military unification that we 
 who desire its continuance must look to hold it together. 
 There never was anything like it before. Essentially it is 
 an 9,dventure of the British spirit, sanguine, discursive, 
 
 37 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 and beyond comparison insubordinate, adaptable, and 
 originating. It has been made by odd and irregular 
 means, by trading companies, pioneers, explorers, un- 
 authorised seamen, adventurers like Clive, eccentrics like 
 Gordon, invalids like Ehodes. It has been made, in 
 spite of authority and officialdom, as no other empire 
 was ever made. The nominal rulers of Britain never 
 planned it ; it happened almost in spite of them. Their 
 chief contribution to its history has been the loss of the 
 United States. It is a living thing that has arisen, not 
 a dead thing put together. Beneath the thin legal and 
 administrative ties that hold it together lies the far more 
 vital bond of a traditional free spontaneous activity. It 
 has a common medium of expression in the English 
 tongue, a unity of liberal and tolerant purpose amidst 
 its enormous variety of localised life and colour. And 
 it is in the development and strengthening, the enrich- 
 ment, the rendering more conscious and more purposeful, 
 of that broad creative spirit of the British that the 
 true cemtent and continuance of our Empire is to be 
 found. 
 
 The Empire must live by the forces that begot it. 
 It cannot hope to give any such exclusive prosperity as 
 a Zollverein might afford ; it can hold out no hopes of 
 collective conquests and triumphs — its utmost military 
 role must be the guaranteeing of a common inaggressive 
 security ; but it can, and, if it is to survive, it must, give 
 all its constituent parts such a civilisation as none of 
 them could achieve alone, a civilisation, a wealth and 
 fullness of life increasing and developing with the years. 
 Through that, and that alone, can it be made worth 
 having and worth serving. 
 
 And in the first place the whole Empire must use 
 
 38 
 
Will the Empire Live? 
 
 the English language. I do not mean that any language 
 must be stamped out, that a thousand languages may 
 not flourish by board and cradle and in folk-songs and 
 village gossip — Erse, the Taal, a hundred Indian and 
 other Eastern tongues, Canadian French — but I mean 
 that also English must be available, that everywhere 
 there must be English teaching. And everyone who 
 wants to read science or history or philosophy, to come 
 out of the village life into wider thoughts and broader 
 horizons, to gain appreciation in art, must find ready 
 to hand, easily attainable in English, all there is to know 
 and all that has been said thereon. It is worth a hundred 
 Dreadnoughts and a million soldiers to the Empire, that 
 wherever the imperial posts reach, wherever there is a 
 curious or receptive mind, there in English and by the 
 imperial connection the full thought of the race should 
 come. To the lonely youth upon the New Zealand sheep 
 farm, to the young Hindu, to the trapper under a 
 Labrador tilt, to the half-breed assistant at a Burmese 
 oil-well, to the self-educating Scottish miner or the 
 Egyptian clerk, the Empire and the English language 
 should exist, visibly and certainly, as the media by 
 which his spirit escapes from his immediate surroundings 
 and all the urgencies of every day, into a limitless 
 fellowship of thought and beauty. 
 
 Now I am not writing this in any vague rhetorical 
 way ; I mean specifically that our Empire has to become 
 the medium of knowledge and thought to every intelli- 
 gent person in it, or that it is bound to go to pieces. It^ 
 has no economic, no military, no racial, no religious 
 unity. Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language 
 and purpose and outlook. If it is not held together 
 by thought and spirit, it cannot be held together. 
 
 39 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 No other cement exists that can hold it together 
 indefinitely. 
 
 Not only English literature, but all other literatures 
 well translated into English, and all science and all 
 philosophy, have to be brought within the reach of 
 everyone capable of availing himself of such reading. 
 And this must be done, not by private enterprise or 
 for gain, but as an Imperial function. Wherever the 
 Empire extends there its presence nfiust signify all 
 that breadth of thought and outlook no localised life 
 can supply. 
 
 Only so is it possible to establish and maintain the 
 wide understandings, the common sympathy necessary 
 to our continued association. The Empire, mediately or 
 immediately, must become the universal educator, news- 
 agent, book-distributor, civiliser-general, and vehicle of 
 imaginative inspiration for its peoples, or else it must 
 submit to the gravitation of its various parts to new and 
 more invigorating associations. 
 
 No empire, it may be urged, has ever attempted any- 
 thing of this sort, but no empire like the British has ever 
 yet existed. Its conditions and needs are unprecedented, 
 its consolidation is a new problem, to be solved, if it is 
 solved at all, by untried means. And in the English 
 language as a vehicle of thought and civilisation alone 
 is that meansi to be found. 
 
 Now it is idle to pretend that at the present time 
 the British Empire is giving its constituent peoples any 
 such high and rewarding civilisation as I am here 
 suggesting. It gives them a certain immunity from war- 
 fare, a penny post, an occasional spectacular coronation, 
 a few knighthoods and peerages, and the services of an 
 honest, uns3^m pathetic, narrow-minded, and unattractive 
 
 40 
 
Will the Empire Live? 
 
 officialism. No adequate effort is being made to render 
 the English language universal throughout its limits, 
 none at all to use it as a medium of thought and en- 
 lightenment. Half the good things of the human mind 
 are outside English altogether, and there is not sufficient 
 intelligence among us to desire to bring them in. If one 
 would read honest and able criticism, one must learn 
 French ; if one would he abreast of scientific know- 
 ledge and philosophical thought, or see many good 
 plays or understand the contemporary European mind, 
 German. 
 
 And yet it would cost amazingly little to get every 
 good foreign thing done into English as it appeared. It 
 needs only a little understanding and a little organisation 
 to ensure the immediate translation of every significant 
 article, every scientific paper of the slightest value. The 
 effort and arrangement needed to make books, facilities 
 for research, and all forms of art accessible throughout 
 the Empire, would be altogether trivial in proportion 
 to the consolidation it would effect. 
 
 But English people do not understand these things. 
 Their Empire is an accident. It was made for them by 
 their exceptional and outcast men, and in the end it will 
 be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness of their 
 commonplace and dull-minded leaders. Empire has hap- 
 pened to them and civilisation has happened to them as 
 fresh lettuces come to tame rabbits. They do not under- 
 stand how they got, and they will not understand how 
 to keep. Art, thought, literature, all indeed that raises 
 men above locality and habit, all that can justify and 
 consolidate the Empire, is nothing to them. They are 
 provincials mocked by a world-wide opportunity, the 
 stupid legatees of a great generation of exiles. They go 
 
 41 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 out of town for the '*shootin'," and come back for the 
 fooleries of Parliament, and to see what the Censor 
 has left of our playwrights and Sir Jesse Boot of our 
 writers, and to dine in restaurants and wear clothes. 
 
 Mostly they call themselves Imperialists, which is 
 just their harmless way of expressing their satisfaction 
 with things as they are. In practice their Imperialism 
 resolves itself into a vigorous resistance to taxation and 
 an ill-concealed hostility to education. It matters nothing 
 to them that the whole next generation of Canadians has 
 drawn its ideas mainly from American publications, that 
 India and Egypt, in despite of sounder mental nourish- 
 ment, have developed their own vernacular Press, that 
 Australia and New Zealand even now gravitate to 
 America for books and thought. It matters nothing to 
 them that the poverty and insularity of our intellectual 
 life has turned American art to France and Italy, and 
 the American universities towards Germany. The slow 
 starvation and decline of our philosophy and science, the 
 decadence of British invention and enterprise, troubles 
 them not at all, because th-ey fail to connect these 
 things with the tangible facts of empire. "The world 
 cannot wait for the English." . . . And the sands of 
 our Imperial opportunity twirl through the neck of the 
 hour-glass. 
 
 4^ 
 
THE LABOUR UNREST 
 
 {May, igi2.) 
 
 §1 
 
 Our country is, I think, in a dangerous state of social 
 disturbance. The discontent of the labouring mass of 
 the community is deep and increasing. It may be that 
 we are in the opening phase of a real and irreparable 
 class war. 
 
 Since the Coronation we have moved very rapidly 
 indeed from an assurance of extreme social stability 
 towards the recognition of a spreading disorganisation. 
 It is idle to pretend any longer that these Labour 
 troubles are the mere give and take of economic adjust- 
 ment. No adjustment is in progress. New and strange 
 urgencies are at work in our midst, forces for which 
 the word " revolutionary " is only too faithfully appro- 
 priate. Nothing is being done to allay these forces ; 
 everything conspires to exasperate them. 
 
 Whither are these forces taking us? What can still 
 be done and what has to be done to avoid the phase 
 of social destruction to which we seem to be drifting? 
 
 Hitherto, in Great Britain at any rate, the working 
 man has shown himself a being of the most limited and 
 practical outlook. His narrowness of imagination, his 
 lack of general ideas, has been the despair of the 
 Socialist and of every sort of revolutionary theorist. He 
 may have struck before, but only for definite increments 
 of wages or definite limitations of toil ; his acceptance 
 
 43 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 of the industrial system and its methods has been as 
 complete and unquestioning as his acceptance of earth 
 and sky. Now, with an effect of suddenness, this ceases 
 to be the case. A new generation of workers is seen 
 replacing the old, workers of a quality unfamiliar to 
 the middle-aged and elderly men who still manage our 
 great businesses and political affairs. The worker is 
 beginning now to strike for unprecedented ends — against 
 the system, against the fundamental conditions of labour, 
 to strike for no defined ends at all, perplexingly and 
 disconcertingly. The old-fashioned strike was a method 
 of bargaining, clumsy and yiolent perhaps, but bargaining 
 etill; the new-fashioned strike is far less of a haggle, 
 far more of a display of temper. The first thing that 
 has to be realised if the Labour question is to be under- 
 stood at all is this, that the temper of Labour has 
 changed altogether in the last twenty or thirty years. 
 
 'Essentially that is a change due to intelligence not 
 merely increased but greatly stimulated, to the work, 
 that is, of the board schools and of the cheap Press. 
 
 *'The outlook of the workman has passed beyond the 
 works and his beer and his dog. ''He has become — or, 
 rather, he has been replaced by — a being of eyes, how- 
 ever imperfect, and of criticism, however hasty and 
 unjust. '-The working man of to-day reads, talks, has 
 general ideas and a sense of the round world ; he is far 
 nearer to the ruler of to-day in knowledge and intellectual 
 range than he is to the working man of fifty years ago. 
 The politician or business magnate of to-day is no better 
 educated and very little better informed than his equals 
 were fifty years ago. The chief difference is golf. The 
 working man questions a thousand things his father 
 accepted as in the very nature of the world, and among 
 
 44 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 others he begins to ask with the utmost alertness and 
 persistence why it is that he in particular is expected to 
 toil. The answer, the only justifiable answer, should 
 be that that is the work for which he is fitted by his 
 inferior capacity and culture, that these others are a 
 special and select sort, very specially trained and pre- 
 pared for their responsibilities, and that at once brings 
 this new fact of a working-class criticism of social values 
 into play. The old workman might and did quarrel 
 very vigorously with his specific employer, but he never 
 set out to arraign all employers; he took the law and 
 the Church and Statecraft and politics for the higher 
 and noble things they claimed to be. He wanted an 
 extra shilling or he wanted an hour of leisure, and that 
 was as much as he wanted. The young workman, on 
 the other hand, has put the whole social system upon 
 its trial, and seems quite disposed to give an adverse 
 verdict. He looks far beyond the older conflict of 
 interests between employer and employed. He criticises 
 the good intentions of the whole system of governing 
 and influential people, and not only their good intentions, 
 but their ability. These are the new conditions, and 
 the middle-aged and elderly gentlemen who are dealing 
 with the crisis on the supposition that their vast ex- 
 perience of Labour questions in the 'seventies and 
 'eighties furnishes valuable guidance in this present issue 
 are merely bringing the gunpowder of misapprehension 
 to the revolutionary fort. 
 
 The workman of the new generation is full of dis- 
 trust, the most demoralising of social influences. He 
 is like a sailor who believes no longer either in the 
 good faith or seamanship of his captain, and, between 
 desperation and contempt, contemplates vaguely but 
 
 45 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 persistently the assumption of control by a collective 
 forecastle. He is like a private soldier obsessed with 
 the idea that nothing can save the situation but the 
 death of an incompetent officer. His distrust is so 
 profound that he ceases not only to believe in the 
 employer, but he ceases to believe in the law, ceases 
 to believe in Parliament, as a means to that tolerable 
 life he desires ; and he falls back steadily upon his last 
 resource of a strike, and — if by repressive tactics we 
 make it so — a criminal strike. The central fact of all 
 this present trouble is that distrust. There is only one 
 way in which *our present drift towards revolution or 
 revolutionary disorder can be arrested, and that is by 
 restoring the confidence of these alienated millions, who 
 visibly now are changing from loyalty to the Crown, 
 from a simple patriotism, from habitual industry, to 
 the more and more effective expression of a deepening 
 resentment. 
 
 . This is a psychological question, a matter of mental 
 states. Feats of legal subtlety are inopportune, arith- 
 metical exploits still more so. To emerge with the sum 
 of 4s. 6Jd. as a minimum, by calculating on the basis 
 of the mine's present earnings, from a conference which 
 the miners and everybody else imagined was to give 
 a tninimum of 5s., may be clever, but it is certainly 
 not politic in the present stage of Labour feeling. To 
 stamp violently upon obscure newspapers nobody had 
 heard of before and send a printer to prison, and to' 
 give thereby a flaming advertisement to the possible use 
 of soldiers in civil conflicts and set every barrack-room 
 talking, may be permissible, but it is certainly very 
 ill-advised. The distrust deepens. 
 
 The real task before a governing class that means 
 
 46 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 to go on governing is not just at present to get the 
 better of an argument or the best of a bargain, but to 
 lay hold of the imaginations of this drifting, sullen and 
 suspicious multitude, which is the working body of the 
 country. What we prosperous people, who have nearly 
 all the good things of life and most of the opportunity, 
 have to do now is to justify ourselves. We have to 
 show that we are indeed responsible and serviceable, 
 willing to give ourselves, and to give ourselves gener- 
 ous.ly, for what we have and what we have had. We 
 have to meet the challenge of this distrust. 
 
 The slack days for rulers and owners are over. If 
 there are still to be rulers and owners and managing 
 and governing people, then in the face of the new masses, 
 sensitive, intelligent, critical, irritable, as no common 
 people have ever been before, these rulers and owners 
 must be prepared to make themselves and display them- 
 selves wise, capable and heroic — beyond any aristocratic 
 precedent. The alternative, if it is an alternative, is 
 resignation — to the Social Democracy. 
 
 And it is just because we are all beginning to realise 
 the immense need for this heroic quality in those who 
 rule and are rich and powerful, as the response and 
 corrective to these distrusts and jealousies that are 
 threatening to disintegrate our social order, that we have 
 all followed the details of this great catastrophe in the 
 Atlantic with such intense solicitude. It was one of 
 those accidents that happen with a precision of time 
 and circumstance that outdoes art ; not an incident in 
 it all that was not supremely typical. It was the 
 penetrating comment of chance upon our entire social 
 situation. Beneath, a surface of magnificent efficiency 
 was — slap-dash. The third-class passengers had placed 
 
 47 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 themselves on board with an infinite confidence in the 
 care that was to be taken of them, and they went 
 down, and most of their women and children went 
 down with the cry of those who find themselves cheated 
 out of life. 
 
 In the unfolding record of behaviour it is the 
 stewardesses and bandsmen and engineers — persons of 
 the trade-union class — who shine as brightly as any. 
 And by the supreme artistry of Chance it fell to the 
 lot of that tragic and unhappy gentleman, Mr. Bruce 
 Ismay, to be aboard and to be caught by the urgent 
 vacancy in the boat and the snare of the moment. No 
 untried man dare say that he would have behaved better 
 in his place. He escaped. He thought it natural to 
 escape. His class thinks it was right and proper that 
 he did escape. It is not the man I would criticise, 
 but the manifest absence of any such sense of the 
 supreme dignity of his position as would have sus- 
 tained him in that crisis. He was a rich man and 
 a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud man. 
 In the common man's realisation that such is indeed 
 the case with most of those who dominate our world, 
 lies the true cause and danger of our social indiscipline. 
 And the remedy in the first place lies not in social 
 legislation and so forth, but in the consciences of the 
 wealthy. Heroism and a generous devotion to the 
 common good are the only effective answer to distrust. 
 If such dominating people cannot produce these quali- 
 ties there will have to be an end to them, and the 
 world must turn to some entirely different method of 
 direction. 
 
 48 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 §2 
 
 The essential trouble in our growing Labour disorder 
 is the profound distrust which has grown up in the 
 minds of the new generation of workers of either the 
 ability or the good faith of the property owning, ruling 
 and directing class. I do not attempt to judge the 
 justice or not of this distrust; I merely point to its 
 existence as one of the striking and essential factors in 
 the contemporary Labour situation. 
 
 This distrust is not, perhaps, the proximate cause of 
 the strikes that now follow each other so disconcertingly, 
 but it embitters their spirit, it prevents their settlement, 
 and leads to their renewal. I have tried to suggest 
 that, whatever immediate devices for pacification might 
 be employed, the only way to a better understanding 
 and co-operation, the only escape from a social slide 
 towards the unknown possibilities of Social Democracy, 
 lies in an exaltation of the standard of achievement 
 and of the sense of responsibility in the possessing and 
 governing classes. It is not so much ''Wake up, 
 England ! " that I Would say as "Wake up, gentlemen ! " 
 — for the new generation of the workers is beyond all 
 question quite alarmingly awake and critical and angry. 
 And they have not merely to wake up, they have to 
 wake up visibly and ostentatiously if those old class 
 reliances on which our system is based are to be pre- 
 served and restored. 
 
 We need before anything else a restoration of class 
 confidence. It is a time when class should speak with 
 class very frankly. 
 
 There is too much facile misrepresentation, too ready 
 a disposition on either side to accept caricatures as 
 
 • E ' 49 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 portraits and charges as facts. However tacit our under- 
 standings were in the past, with this new kind of Labour, 
 this young, restive Labour of the twentieth century, which 
 can read, discuss and combine, we need something in 
 the nature of a social contract. And it is when 
 one comes to consider by what possible means these 
 suspicious third-class passengers in our leaking and 
 imperilled social liner can be brought into generous 
 co-operation with the second and the first that one 
 discovers just how lamentably out of date and out of 
 order our political institutions, which should supply the 
 means for just this inter-class discussion, have become. 
 Between the busy and preoccupied owning and employing 
 class on the one hand, and the distressed, uneasy masses 
 on the other, intervenes the professional politician, not 
 as a mediator, but as an obstacle, who must be pro- 
 pitiated before any dealings are possible. Our national 
 politics no longer express the realities of the national 
 life; they are a mere impediment in the speech of the 
 community. With our whole social order in danger, 
 our Legislature is busy over the trivial little affairs 
 of the Welsh Established Church, whose endowment 
 probably is not equal to the fortune of any one of half 
 a dozen Titanic passengers or a tithe of the probable 
 loss of another strike among the miners. We have a 
 Legislature almost antiquarian, compiling a museum of 
 Gladatonian legacies rather than governing our world 
 s^tp-day. 
 
 Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is 
 the law's consequence, and, with us at least, the legal 
 profession is the political profession. ^It delights in false 
 issues and merely technical politics. Steadily with the 
 ascendancy of the House of Commons the barristers 
 
 50 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 have ousted other types of men from political power. 
 The decline of the House of Lords has been the last 
 triumph of the House of Lawyers, and we are governed 
 now to a large extent not so much by the people for 
 the people as by the barristers for the barristers. They 
 set the tone of political life. And since they are the 
 most specialised, the most specifically trained of all 
 the professions, since their training is absolutely an- 
 tagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructive 
 artist and the controlled experiments of the scientific 
 man, since the business is with evidence and advantages 
 and the skilful use of evidence and advantages, and not 
 with understanding, they are the least statesmanlike of 
 all educated men, and they give our public life a tone 
 as hopelessly discordant with our very great and urgent 
 social needs as one could well imagine. They do not 
 want to deal at all with great and urgent social needs. 
 They play a game, a long and interesting game, with 
 parties as sides, a game that rewards the industrious 
 player with prominence, place, power and great rewards, 
 and the less that game involves the passionate interests 
 of other men, the less it draws them into participation 
 and angry interference, the better for the steady develop- 
 ment of the politician's career. A distinguished and 
 active fruitlessness, leaving the world at last as he 
 found it, is the political barrister's ideal career. To 
 achieve that, he must maintain legal and political 
 monopolies, and prevent the invasion of political life 
 by living interests. ^And so far as he has any views 
 about Labour beyond the margin of his brief, the bar- 
 rister politician seems to regard getting men back to 
 work on any terms and as soon as possible as the 
 highest good. 
 
 51 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 V 
 
 ^ And it is with such men that our insurgent modern 
 Labour, with its vaguely apprehended wants, its large 
 occasions and its rapid emotional reactions, comes into 
 contact directly it attempts to adjust itself in the social 
 body. It is one of the main factors in the progressive 
 embitterment of the Labour situation that whatever 
 business is afoot — arbitration, conciliation, inquiry — our 
 contemporary system presents itself to Labour almost 
 invariably in a legal guise. The natural infirmities, of 
 humanity rebel against an unimaginative legality of 
 attitude, and the common workaday man has no more 
 love for this great and necessary profession to-day than 
 he had in the time of Jack Cade. Little reasonable 
 things from the lawyers' point of view — the rejection, 
 for example, of certain evidence in the Titanic inquiry 
 because it might amount to a charge of manslaughter, 
 the constant interruption and checking of a Labour re- 
 presentative at the same tribunal upon trivial points — 
 irritate quite disproportionately. 
 
 Lawyer and working man are antipathetic types, and 
 it is a very grave national misfortune that at this time, 
 when our situation calls aloud for statecraft and a 
 certain greatness of treatment, our public life should be 
 dominated as it has never been dominated before by 
 this most able and illiberal profession. 
 
 Now for that great multitude of prosperous people 
 who find themselves at once deeply concerned in our 
 present social and economic crisis, and either helplessly 
 entangled in party organisation or helplessly outside 
 politics, the elimination and cure of this disease of 
 statecraft, the professional politician, has become a very 
 urgent matter. To destroy him, to get him back to 
 his law courts and keep him there, it is necessary to 
 
 52 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 destroy the machinery of the party system that sustains 
 him, and to adopt some electoral method that will no 
 longer put the independent representative man at a 
 hopeless disadvantage against the party nominee. Such 
 a method is to be found in proportional representation 
 with large constituencies, and to that we must look for 
 our ultimate liberation from our present masters, these 
 politician barristers. But the Labour situation cannot 
 wait for this millennial release, and for the current issue 
 it seems to me patent that every reasonable prosperous 
 man will, even at the cost to himself of some trouble 
 and hard thinking, do his best to keep as much of this 
 great and acute controversy as he possibly can out of 
 the lawyer's and mere politician's hands and in his own. 
 Leave Labour to the lawyers, and we shall go very deeply 
 into trouble indeed before this business is over. They 
 will score their points, they will achieve remarkable 
 agreements full of the possibility of subsequent surprises, 
 they will make reputations, and do everything Heaven 
 and their professional training have made them to do, 
 and they will exasperate and exasperate ! 
 
 Lawyers made the first French Eevolution, and now, 
 on a different side, they may yet bring about an English 
 one. These men below there are still, as a class, 
 wonderfully patient and reasonable, quite prepared to 
 take orders and recognise superior knowledge, wisdom 
 and nobility. They make the most reasonable claims for 
 a tolerable life, for certain assurances and certain lati- 
 tudes. Implicit rather than expressed is their demand 
 for wisdom and right direction from those to whom the 
 great surplus and freedom of civilisation are given. It 
 is an entirely reasonable demand if man is indeed a 
 social animal. But we have got to treat them fairly and 
 
 53 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 openly. This patience and reasonableness and willing- 
 ness for leadership is not limitless. It is no good scoring 
 our mean little points, for example, and accusing them 
 of breach of contract and all sorts of theoretical wrongs 
 because they won't abide by agreements to accept a 
 certain scale of wages when the purchasing power of 
 money has declined. When they made that agreement 
 they did not think of that possibility. When they said 
 a pound they thought of what was then a poundsworth 
 of living. The Mint has since been increasing its annual 
 output of gold coins to two or three times the former 
 amount, and we have, as it were, debased the coinage 
 with extraordinary quantities of gold. But we who know 
 and own did nothing to adjust that ; we did not tell the 
 working man of that ; we have let him find it out slowly 
 and indirectly at the grocer's shop. That may be per- 
 missible from the lawyer's point of view, but it certainly 
 isn't from the gentleman's, and it is only by the plea 
 that its inequalities give society a gentleman that our 
 present social system can claim to endure. 
 
 I would like to accentuate that, because if we are 
 to emerge again from these acute social dissensions a 
 reunited and powerful people, there has to be a change 
 of tone, a new generosity on the part of those who 
 deal with Labour speeches, Labour literature, Labour 
 representatives, and Labour claims. •'Labour is necessarily 
 at an enormous disadvantage in discussion ; in spite of 
 a tremendous inferiority in training and education it is 
 trying to tell^e community its conception of its needs 
 and purposes. ' It is not only young as a participator in 
 the discussion of affairs ; it is actually young. The 
 average working man is not half the age of the ripe 
 politicians and judges and lawyers and wealthy or- 
 
 54 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 ganisers who trip him up legally, accuse him of bad 
 faith, mark his every inconsistency. It isn't becoming 
 so to use our forensic advantages. It isn't — ^if that has 
 no appeal to you — wise. 
 
 The thing our society has most to fear from Labour 
 is not organised resistance, not victorious strikes and 
 raised conditions, but the black resentment that follows 
 defeat. Meet Labour half-way, and you will find a new 
 co-operation in government; stick to your legal rights, 
 draw the net of repressive legislation tighter, then you 
 will presently have to deal with Labour enraged. If the 
 anger burns free, that means revolution; if you crush 
 out the hope of that, then sabotage and a sullen general 
 sympathy for anarchistic crime. 
 
 §3 
 
 In the preceding pages I have discussed certain 
 aspects of the present Labour situation. I have tried 
 to show the profound significance in this discussion of 
 the distrust which has- grown up in the minds of the 
 workers, and how this distrust is being exacerbated by 
 our entirely too forensic method of treating their claims. 
 I want now to point out a still more powerful set 
 of influences which is steadily turning our Labour 
 struggles from mere attempts to adjust hours and wages 
 into movements that are gravely and deliberately 
 revolutionary. 
 
 This is the obvious devotion of a large and growing 
 proportion of the time and energy of the owning and 
 ruling classes to pleasure and excitement, and the way 
 in .which this spectacle of amusement and adventure 
 
 55 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 is now being brought before the eyes and into the 
 imagination of the working man. 
 
 The intimate psychology of work is a thing altogether 
 too little considered and discussed. One asks: "What 
 keeps a workman working properly at his work?" and 
 it seems a sufficient answer to say that it is the need of 
 getting a living. But that is not the complete answer. 
 Work must to some extent interest ; if it bores, no power 
 on earth will keep a man doing it properly. And the 
 tendency of modern industrialism has been to subdivide 
 processes and make work more boring and irksome. Also 
 the workman must be satisfied with the living he is 
 getting, and the tendency of newspaper, theatre, cine* 
 matograph show and so forth is to fill his mind with 
 ideas of ways of living infinitely more agreeable and 
 interesting than his own. Habit also counts very largely 
 in the regular return of the man to his job, and the 
 fluctuations of employment, the failure of the employing 
 class to provide any alternative to idleness during slack 
 time, break that habit of industry. And then, last but 
 not least, there is self-respect. Men and women are 
 capable of wonders of self-discipline and effort if they 
 feel that theirs is a meritorious service, if they imagine 
 the thing they are doing is the thing they ought to do. 
 A miner will cut coal in a different spirit and with a 
 fading zest if he knows his day's output is to be burnt to 
 waste secretly by a lunatic. Man is a social animal ; 
 few men are naturally social rebels, and most will toil 
 very cheerfully in subordination if they feel that the 
 collective end is a fine thing and a great thing. 
 
 Now, this force of self-respect is much more acutely 
 present in the mind of the modern worker than it was 
 in the thought of his fathers. He is intellectually more 
 
 56 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 active than his predecessors, his imagination is relatively 
 stimulated, he asks wide questions. The worker of a 
 former generation took himself for granted ; it is a new 
 phase when the toilers begin to ask, not one man 
 here or there, but in masses, in battalions, in trades: 
 "Why, then, are we toilers, and for what is it that 
 we toil?" 
 
 What answer do we give them? 
 
 I ask the reader to put himself in the place of a good 
 workman, a young, capable miner, let us say, in search 
 of an answer to that question. He is, we will suppose, 
 temporarily unemployed through the production of a 
 glut of coal, and he goes about the world trying to 
 see the fine and noble collective achievements that justify 
 the devotion of his whole life to humble toil. I ask the 
 reader: What have we got to show that man? What 
 are w^e doing up in the light and air that justifies our 
 demand that he should go on hewing in narrow seams 
 and cramped corners until he can hew no more? Where 
 is he to be taken to see these crowning fruits of our 
 release from toil? Shall we take him to the House of 
 Commons to note which of the barristers is making 
 most headway over Welsh Disestablishment, or shall we 
 take him to the Titanic inquiry to hear the latest about 
 those fifty-five third-class children (out of eighty-three) 
 who were drowned? Shall we give him an hour or so 
 among the portraits at the Eoyal Academy, or shall we 
 make an enthusiastic tour of London sculpture and 
 architecture and saturate his soul with the beauty he 
 makes possible? The new Automobile Club, for example. 
 "Without you and your subordination we could not have 
 had that." Or suppose we took him the round of the 
 West-End clubs and restaurants and made him estimate 
 
 57 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 how many dinners London can produce at a pinch at 
 the price of his local daily minimum, say, and upward; 
 or borrow an aeroplane at Hendon and soar about count- 
 ing all the golfers in the Home Counties on any week-day 
 afternoon. "You suffer at the roots of things, far below 
 there, but see all this nobility and splendour, these sweet, 
 bright flowers to which your rootlet life contributes." 
 Or we might spend a pleasant morning trying to get a 
 passable woman's hat for the price of his average weekly 
 wages in some West-End shop. . . . 
 
 But indeed this thing is actually happening. The 
 older type of miner was illiterate, incurious ; he read 
 nothing, lived his own life, and if he had any intellectual 
 and spiritual urgencies in him beyond eating and drinking 
 and dog-fighting, the local little Bethel shunted them 
 away from any effective social criticism. The new 
 generation of miners is on an altogether different basis. 
 It is at once less brutal and less spiritual; it is alert, 
 informed, sceptical, and the Press, v^ith photographic 
 illustrations, the cinema, and a score of collateral forces, 
 are giving it precisely that spectacular view of luxury, 
 amusement, aimlessness and excitement, taunting it with 
 just that suggestion that it is for that, and that alone, 
 that the worker's back aches and his muscles strain. 
 Whatever gravity and spaciousness of aim there may be 
 in our prosperous social life does not appear to him. 
 He sees, and he sees all the more brightly because he 
 is looking at it out of toil and darkness, the glitter, the 
 delight for delight's sake, the show and the pride and 
 the folly. Cannot you understand how it is that these 
 young men down there in the hot and dangerous and 
 toilsome and inglorious places of life are beginning to 
 cry out, "We are being made fools of," and to fling 
 
 58 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 down their tools, and cannot you see how futile it is to 
 dream that Mr. Asquith or some other politician by 
 some trick of a Conciliation Act or some claptrap of 
 Compulsory Arbitration, or that any belated suppression 
 of discussion and strike organisations by the law, will 
 avert this gathering storm? The Spectacle of Pleasure, 
 the parade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury and 
 vanity in the sight of the workers is the culminating 
 irritant of Labour. So long as that goes on, this sombre 
 resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombre re- 
 solve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue 
 patiently at w^ork, will gather strength. It does not 
 matter that such a resolve is hopeless and unseasonable ; 
 we are dealing here with the profounder impulses that 
 underlie reason. Crush this resentment; it will recur 
 with accumulated strength. 
 
 It does not matter that there is no plan in exist- 
 ence for any kind of social order that could be set up 
 in the place of our present system ; no plan, that is, that 
 will endure half an hour's practical criticism. The 
 cardinal fact before us is that the workers do not intend 
 to stand things as they are, and that no clever arguments, 
 no expert handling of legal points, no ingenious appear- 
 ances of concession, will stay that progressive embitter- 
 ment. 
 
 But I think I have said enough to express and 
 perhaps convey my conviction that our present Labour 
 troubles are unprecedented, and that they mean the 
 end of an epoch. The supply of good-tempered, cheap 
 labour — upon which the fabric of our contemporary ease 
 and comfort is erected — is giving out. Th© spread of 
 information and the means of presentation in every class 
 and the increase of luxury and self-indulgence in the 
 
 59 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 prosperous classes are the chief cause of that. In the 
 place of that old convenient labour comes a new sort 
 of labour, reluctant, resentful, critical, and suspicious. 
 The replacement has already gone so far that I am cer- 
 tain that attempts to baffle and coerce the workers back 
 to their old conditions must inevitably lead to a series of 
 increasingly destructive outbreaks, to stresses and dis- 
 order culminating in revolution. It is useless to dream 
 of going on now for much longer upon the old lines ; our 
 civilisation, if it is not to enter upon a phase of conflict 
 and decay, must begin to adapt itself to the new con- 
 ditions, of which the first and foremost is that the wages- 
 earning, labouring class as a distinctive class, consenting 
 to a distinctive treatment and accepting life at a disad- 
 vantage, is going to disappear. Whether we do it soon 
 as the result of our reflections upon the present situation, 
 or whether we do it presently through the impoverish- 
 ment that must necessarily result from a lengthening 
 period of industrial unrest, there can be little doubt that we 
 are going to curtail very considerably the current extrava- 
 gance of the spending and directing classes upon food, 
 clothing, display, and all the luxuries of life. The phase 
 of affluence is over. And unless we are to be the mere 
 passive spectators of an unprecedented reduction of our 
 lives, all of us who have leisure and opportunity have 
 to set ourselves very strenuously to the problem not 
 of reconciling ourselves to the wage-earners, for that 
 possibility is over, but of establishing a new method 
 of co-operation with those who seem to be definitely 
 decided not to remain wage-earners for very much longer. 
 We have, as sensible people, to realise that the old ar- 
 rangement, which has given us of the fortunate minority 
 «o much leisure, luxury, and abundance, advantages we 
 
 60 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 have as a class put to so vulgar and unprofitable 
 a use, is breaking down, and that we have to dis- 
 cover a new, more equable way of getting the world's 
 work done. 
 
 Certain things stand out pretty obviously. It is clear 
 that in the times ahead of us there must be more economy 
 in giving trouble and causing work, a greater willingness 
 to do work for ourselves, a great economy of labour 
 through machinery and skilful management. So much 
 is unavoidable if we are to meet these enlarged require- 
 ments upon which the insurgent worker insists. If we, 
 who have at least some experience of affairs, who own 
 property, manage businesses, and discuss and influence 
 public organisation, if we are not prepared to undertake 
 this work of discipline and adaptation for ourselves, then 
 a time is not far distant when insurrectionary leaders, 
 calling themselves Socialists or Syndicalists, or what not, 
 men with none of our experience, little of our knowledge, 
 and far less hope of success, will take that task out of 
 our hands.* 
 
 We have, in fact, to "pull ourselves together," as 
 the phrase goes, and make an end to all this slack, ex- 
 travagant living, this spectacle of pleasure, that has been 
 spreading and intensifying in every civilised community 
 for the last three or four decades. What is happening to 
 Labour is indeed, from one point of view, little else 
 than the correlative of what has been happening to the 
 more prosperous classes in the community. They have 
 lost their self -discipline, their gravity, their sense of 
 high aims, they have become the victims of their advan- 
 tages, and Labour, grown observant and intelligent, has 
 discovered itself and declares itself no longer subordinate. 
 
 * Larkinism comes to endorse me since this was written. 
 6i 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Just what powers of recovery and reconstruction our 
 system may have under these circumstances the decades 
 immediately before us will show. 
 
 §4 
 
 Let us try to anticipate some of the social develop- 
 ments that are likely to spring out of the present Labour 
 situation. 
 
 It is quite conceivable, of course, that what lies be- 
 fore us is not development but disorder. Given sufficient 
 suspicion on one side and sufficient obstinacy and trickery 
 on the other, it may be impossible to restore social peace 
 in any form, and industrialism may degenerate into a 
 wasteful and incurable conflict. But that distressful 
 possibility is the worst and perhaps the least probable of 
 many. It is much more acceptable to suppose that our 
 social order will be able to adjust itself to the new out- 
 look and temper and quality of the labour stratum that 
 elementary education, a Press very cheap and free, 
 and a period of great general affluence have brought 
 about. 
 
 One almost inevitable feature of any such adaptation 
 will be a changed spirit in the general body of society. 
 We have come to a serious condition of our affairs, 
 and we shall not get them into order again without 
 a thorough bracing-up of ourselves in the process. 
 There can be no doubt that for a large portion of our 
 comfortable classes existence has been altogether too 
 easy for the last lifetime or so. The great bulk of 
 the world's work has been done out of their sight 
 
 62 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 and knowledge; it has seemed unnecessary to trouble 
 much about the general conduct of things, unnecessary, 
 as they say, to 'Hake life too seriously." This has not 
 made them so much vicious as slack, lazy, and over- 
 confident ; there has been an elaboration of trivial things 
 and a neglect of troublesome and important things. The 
 one grave shock of the Boer War has long been explained 
 and sentimentalised away. But it will not be so easy 
 to explain aw^ay a dislocated train service and an empty 
 coal cellar as it was to get a favourable interpretation 
 upon some demonstration of national incompetence half 
 the world away. 
 
 It is indeed no disaster, but a matter for sincere con- 
 gratulation, that the British prosperous and the British 
 successful, to whom warning after warning has rained 
 in vain from the days of Kuskin, Carlyle, Matthew 
 Arnold, should be called to account at last in their own 
 household. They will grumble, they will be very angry, 
 but in the end, I believe, they will rise to the opportuni- 
 ties of their inconvenience. They will shake off their 
 intellectual lassitude, take over again the public and 
 private affairs they have come to leave so largely in the 
 hands of the political barrister and the family solicitor, 
 become keen and critical and constructive, bring them- 
 selves up to date again. 
 
 That is not, of course, inevitable, but I am taking 
 now the more hopeful view. 
 
 And then? What sort of working arrangements are 
 our renascent owning and directing classes likely to 
 make with the new labouring class? How is the work 
 going to be done in the harder, cleaner, more equalised, 
 and better managed State that, in one's hopeful mood, 
 one sees ahead of us? 
 
 63 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Now after the experiences of the past twelve months 
 it is obvious that the days when most of the directed and 
 inferior work of the community will be done by intermit- 
 tently employed and impecunious wage-earners is draw- 
 ing to an end. A large part of the task of reconstruc- 
 tion ahead of us will consist in the working out of 
 schemes for a more permanent type of employment and 
 for a direct participation of the worker in the pride, 
 profits, and direction of the work. Such schemes admit 
 of wide variations between a mere bonus system, a 
 periodic tipping of the employees to prevent their strik- 
 ing, and a real and honest co-partnery. 
 
 In the latter case a great enterprise, forced to con- 
 sider its "hands" as being also in their degree "heads," 
 would include a department of technical and business in- 
 struction for its own people. From such ideas one passes 
 very readily to the conception of guild-managed busi- 
 nesses, in which the factor of capital would no longer 
 stand out as an element distinct from and contrasted 
 wdth the proprietorship of the workers. One sees the 
 worker as an active and intelligent helper during 
 the great portion of his participation, and as an 
 annuitant and perhaps, if he has devised economies 
 and improvements, a receiver of royalties during his 
 declining years. 
 
 And concurrently with the systematic reconstruction 
 of a large portion of our industries upon these lines there 
 will have to be a vigorous development of the attempts 
 that are already being made, in garden cities, garden 
 suburbs, and the like, to re-house the mass of our popu- 
 lation in a more civilised and more agreeable manner. 
 Probably that is not going to pay from the point of view 
 of the money-making business man, but we prosperous 
 
 64 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 people have to understand that there are things more 
 important and more profitable than money-making, and 
 we have to tax ourselves not merely in money, but in 
 time, care, and effort in the matter. Half the money 
 that goes out of England to Switzerland and the Eiviera 
 ought to go to the extremely amusing business of clearing 
 up ugly corners and building jolly and convenient work- 
 men's cottages — even if we do it at a loss. It is part 
 of our discharge for the leisure and advantages the system 
 has given us, part of that just give and take, over and 
 above the solicitor's and bargain-hunter's and money- 
 lender's conception of justice, upon which social order 
 ultimately rests. We have to do it not in a mood of 
 patronage, but in a mood of attentive solicitude. If not 
 on high grounds, then on low grounds our class has to 
 set to work and make those other classes more interested 
 and comfortable and contented. It is what we are for. 
 It is quite impossible for workmen and poor people gener- 
 ally to plan estates and arrange their own homes; they 
 are entirely at the mercy of the wealthy in this matter. 
 There is not a slum, not a hovel, not an eyesore upon the 
 "English landscape for which some well-off owner is not 
 ultimately to be blamed or excused , and the less we leave of 
 such things about the better for us in that day of reckon- 
 ing between class and class which now draws so near. 
 
 It is as plain now as the way from Calais to Paris 
 that if the owning class does not attend to these 
 amenities the mass of the people, doing its best to 
 manage the thing through the politicians, presently will. 
 They may make a frightful mess of it, but that will 
 never bring back things again into the hands that hold 
 them and neglect them. Their time will have passed 
 for ever. 
 
 > 65 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 But these are the mere opening requirements of this 
 hope of mine of a quickened social consciousness among 
 the more fortunate and leisurely section of the com- 
 munity. I believe that much profounder changes in the 
 conditions of labour are possible than those I have sug- 
 gested. I am beginning to suspect that scarcely any of 
 our preconceptions about the way work must be done, 
 about the hours of work and the habits of work, will 
 stand an exhaustive scientific analysis. It is at least 
 conceivable that we could get much of the work that 
 has to be done to keep our community going in far 
 more toil-saving and life-saving ways than we follow 
 at the present time. So far scientific men have done 
 scarcely anything to estimate under what conditions 
 a man works best, does most work, works more 
 happily. Suppose it turns out to be the case that a 
 man always following one occupation throughout his 
 lifetime, working regularly day after day for so many 
 hours, as most wage-earners do at the present time, does 
 not do nearly so much or nearly so well as he would do 
 if he followed first one occupation and then another, or 
 if he worked as hard as he possibly could for a definite 
 period and then took holiday? I suspect very strongly, 
 indeed I am convinced, that in certain occupations, 
 teaching, for example, or surgery, a man begins by work- 
 ing clumsily and awkwardly, that his interest and skill 
 rise rapidly, that if he is really well suited in his pro- 
 fession, he may presently become intensely interested 
 and capable of enormous quantities of his very best 
 work, and that then his interest and vigour rapidly de- 
 cline. I am disposed to believe that this is true of most 
 occupations, of coal-mining or engineering, or brick- 
 laying or cotton -spinning. The thing has never been 
 
 66 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 properly thought about. Our civilisation has grown up in 
 a haphazard kind of way, and it has been convenient to 
 specialise workers and employ them piecemeal. But if 
 it is true that in respect of any occupation a man has his 
 period of maximum efficiency, then we open up a whole 
 world of new social possibilities. What we really want from 
 a man for our social welfare in that case is not regular 
 continuing work, but a few strenuous years of high- 
 pressure service. We can as a community afford to keep 
 him longer at education and training before he begins, 
 and we can release him with a pension while he is still 
 full of life and the capacity for enjoying freedom. But 
 obviously this is impossible upon any basis of weekly 
 wages and intermittent employment ; we must be hand- 
 ling affairs in some much more comprehensive way than 
 that before we can take and deal with the w^orking life 
 of a man as one complete whole. 
 
 That is one possibility that is frequently in my 
 thoughts about the present labour crisis. There is 
 another, and that is the great desirability of every 
 class in the community having a practical knowledge of 
 what labour means. There is a vast amount of work 
 which either is now or is likely to be in the future within 
 the domain of the public administration — road-making, 
 mining, railway work, post-offioe and telephone work, 
 medical work, nursing, a considerable amount of build- 
 ing, for example. Why should we employ people to do 
 the bulk of these things at all? Why should we not as 
 a community do them ourselves? Why, in other w^ords, 
 should we not have a labour conscription and take a 
 year or so of service from everyone in the community, 
 high or low ? I believe this would be of enormous moral 
 benefit to our strained and relaxed community. I believe 
 
 67 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 that in making labour a part of everyone's life and the 
 whole of nobody's life lies the ultimate solution of these 
 industrial difficulties. 
 
 §5 
 
 It is almost a national boast that we "muddle 
 through" our troubles, and I suppose it is true and to 
 our credit that by virtue of a certain kindliness of temper, 
 a humorous willingness to make the best of things, and 
 an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out of 
 pressures and extremities that would smash a harder, 
 more brittle people only a little chipped and damaged. 
 And it is quite conceivable that our country will, in a 
 measure, survive the enormous stresses of labour adjust- 
 ment that are now upon us, even if it never rises to any 
 heroic struggle against these difficulties. But it may 
 survive as a lesser country, as an impoverished and 
 second-rate country. It will certainly do no more than 
 that, if in any part of the world there is to be found a 
 people capable of taking up this gigantic question in a 
 greater spirit. Perhaps there is no such people, and the 
 conflicts and muddles before us will be world-wide. Or 
 suppose that it falls to our country in some strange way 
 to develop a new courage and enterprise, and to be the 
 first to go forward into this new phase of civilisation I 
 foresee, from which a distinctive labouring class, a class 
 that is of expropriated wage -earners, will have almost 
 completely disappeared. 
 
 Now hitherto the utmost that any State, overtaken by 
 social and economic stresses, has ever achieved in the way 
 of adapting itself to them has been no more than patching. 
 
 Individuals and groups and trades have found them- 
 
 68 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 selves in imperfectly apprehended and difficult times, and 
 have reluctantly altered their ways and ideas piecemeal 
 under pressure. Sometimes they have succeeded in 
 rubbing along upon the new lines, and sometimes the 
 struggle has submerged them, but no community has 
 ever yet had the will and the imagination to recast and 
 radically alter its social methods as a whole. The idea 
 of such a reconstruction has never been absent from 
 human thought since the days of Plato, and it has been 
 enormously reinforced by the spreading material suc- 
 cesses of modern science, successes due always to the 
 substitution of analysis and reasoned planning for trial 
 and the rule of thumb. But it has never yet been so 
 believed in and understood as to render any real en- 
 deavour to reconstruct possible. The experiment has 
 always been altogether too gigantic for the available 
 faith behind it, and there have been against it the fear 
 of presumption, the interests of all advantaged people, 
 and the natural sloth of humanity. We do but emerge 
 now from a period of deliberate happy-go-lucky and the 
 influence of Herbert Spencer, who came near raising 
 public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national philo- 
 sophy. Everything would adjust itself — if only it was 
 left alone. 
 
 Yet some things there are that cannot be done by 
 small adjustments, such as leaping chasms or killing an 
 ox or escaping from the roof of a burning house. You 
 have to decide upon a certain course on such occasions 
 and maintain a continuous movement. If you w^ait on 
 the burning house until you scorch and then turn round 
 a bit or move away a yard or so, or if on the verge of a 
 chasm you move a little in the way in which you wish 
 to go, disaster will punish your moderation. And it 
 
 69 
 
^ 
 
 An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 seems to me that the establishment of the world's work 
 upon a new basis — and that and no less is what this 
 Labour Unrest demands for its pacification — ^is just one 
 of those large alterations which will never be made by 
 the collectively unconscious activities of men, by com- 
 petitions and survival and the higgling of the market. 
 Humanity is rebelling against the continuing existence 
 of a labour class as such, and I can see no way by which 
 our present method of weekly wages employment can 
 change by imperceptible increments into a method of 
 salary and pension — for it is quite evident that only by 
 reaching that shall w^e reach the end of these present 
 discontents. The change has to be made on a compre- 
 hensive scale or not at all. We need nothing less than 
 a national plan of social development if the thing is to 
 be achieved. 
 
 Now that, I admit, is, as the Americans say, a large 
 proposition. But we are living in a time of more and 
 more comprehensive plans, and the mere fact that no 
 scheme so extensive has ever been tried before is no 
 reason at all why we should not consider one. We think 
 nowadays quite serenely of schemes for the treatment of 
 the nation's health as one whole, where our fathers con- 
 sidered illness as a blend of accident with special provi- 
 dences ; w^e have systematised the community's water 
 supply, education, and all sorts of once chaotic services, 
 and Germany and our own infinite higgledy-piggledy dis- 
 comfort and ugliness have brought home to us at last 
 even the possibility of planning the extension of our 
 towns and cities. It is only another step upward in 
 scale to plan out new, more tolerable conditions of em- 
 ployment for every sort of worker and to organise the 
 transition from our present disorder. 
 
 70 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 The essential difficulty between the employer and 
 the statesman in the consideration of this problem is the 
 difference in the scope of their view. The employer's 
 concern with the man who does his work is day-long or 
 w^eek-long ; the statesman's is life-long. The conditions 
 of private enterprise and modern competition oblige the 
 employer to think only of the worker as a hand, who 
 appears and does his work and draws his wages and 
 vanishes again. Only such strikes as we have had during 
 the past year will rouse him from that attitude of mind. 
 The statesman at the other extremity has to consider 
 the worker as a being with a beginning, a middle, an 
 end — and offspring. He can consider all these possibili- 
 ties of defen'ing employment and making the toil 
 of one period of life provide for the leisure and freedom 
 of another, which are necessarily entirely out of the 
 purview of an employer pure and simple. And I find it 
 hard to see how we can reconcile the intermittency of 
 competitive employment with the unremitting demands 
 of a civilised life except by the intervention of the State 
 or of some public organisation capable of taking very 
 wide views between the business organiser on the one 
 hand and the subordinate worker on the other. On the 
 one hand we need some broader handling of business 
 than is possible in the private adventure of the solitary 
 proprietor or the single company, and on the other some 
 more completely organised development of the collective 
 bargain. We have to bring the directive intelligence of 
 a concern into an organic relation with the conception 
 of the national output as a w^hole, and either through a 
 trade union or a guild, or some expansion of a trade 
 union, w^e have to arrange a secure, continuous income 
 for the worker, to be received not directly as wages from 
 
 71 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 an employer but intermediately through the organisation. 
 We need a census of our national production, a more 
 exhaustive estimate of our resources, and an entirely 
 more scientific knowledge of the conditions of maximum 
 labour ef&ciency. One turns to the State. . . . And it 
 is at this point that the heart of the patriotic Englishman 
 sinks, because it is our national misfortune that all the 
 accidents of public life have conspired to retard the 
 development of just that body of knowledge, just that 
 scientific breadth of imagination which is becoming a 
 vital necessity for the welfare of a modern civilised 
 community. 
 
 We are caught short of scientific men just as in the 
 event of a war with Germany we shall almost certainly 
 be caught short of scientific sailors and soldiers. You 
 cannot make that sort of thing to order in a crisis. 
 Scientific education— and more particularly the scientific 
 education of our owning and responsible classes — ^has 
 been crippled by the bitter jealousy of the classical 
 teachers who dominate our universities, by the fear and 
 hatred of the Established Church, which still so largely 
 controls our upper-class schools, and by the entire lack 
 of understanding and support on the part of those able 
 barristers and financiers who rule our political life. 
 Science has been left more and more to men of modest 
 origin and narrow outlook, and now we are beginning 
 to pay in internal dissensions, and presently we may have 
 to pay in national humiliation for this almost organised 
 rejection of stimulus and powder. 
 
 But however thwarted and crippled our public 
 imagination may be, we have still got to do the best we 
 can with this situation ; we have to take as comprehensive 
 views as we can, and to attempt as comprehensive a 
 
 72 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 method of handling as our party -ridden State permits. 
 In theory I am a Socialist, and were I theorising about 
 some nation in the alrHt would say that all the great 
 productive activities and all the means of communication 
 should be national concerns and be run as national 
 services. But our State is peculiarly incapable of such 
 functions; at the present time it cannot even produce a 
 postage stamp that will stick ; and the type of official 
 it would probably evolve for industrial organisation, 
 slowly but unsurely, would be a maddening combination 
 of the district visitor and the boy clerk. It is to the 
 independent people of some leisure and resource in the 
 community that one has at last to appeal for such large 
 efforts and understandings as our present situation 
 demands. In the default of our public services, there 
 opens an immense opportunity for voluntary effort. 
 Deference to our official leaders is absurd; it is a time 
 when men must, as the phrase goes, "come forward." 
 
 W-e want a National Plan for our social and economic 
 development which everyone may understand and which 
 will serve as a unifying basis for all our social and 
 political activities. Such a plan is not to be flung out 
 hastily by an irresponsible writer. It can only come 
 into existence as the outcome of a wide movement of 
 inquiry and discussion. My business in these pages has 
 been not prescription but diagnosis. I hold it to be the 
 clear duty of every intelligent person in the country to 
 do his utmost to learn about these questions of economic 
 and social organisation and to work them out to con- 
 clusions and a purpose. We have come to a phase in 
 our affairs when the only alternative to a great, deliberate 
 renascence of will and understanding is national disorder 
 and decay. 
 
 73 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 §6 
 
 I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our 
 national situation. I have pointed out that nearly 
 all the social forces of our time seem to be in con- 
 spiracy to bring about the disappearance of a labour 
 class as such and the rearrangement of our work and 
 industry upon a new basis. That rearrangement demands 
 an unprecedented national effort and the production of 
 an adequate National Plan. Failing that, we seem 
 doomed to a period of chronic social conflict and possibly 
 even of frankly revolutionary outbreaks that may destroy 
 us altogether or leave us only a dwarfed and enfeebled 
 nation. ... 
 
 And before we can develop that National Plan and 
 the effective realisation of such a plan that is needed 
 to save us from that fate, two things stand immediately 
 before us to be done, unavoidable preliminaries to that 
 more comprehensive work. The first of these is the 
 restoration of representative government, and the second 
 a renascence of our public thought about political and 
 social things. 
 
 As I have already suggested, a main factor in our 
 present national inability to deal with this profound and 
 increasing social disturbance is the entirely unrepresenta- 
 tive and unbusinesslike nature of our parliamentary 
 government. 
 
 It is to a quite extraordinary extent a thing apart 
 from our national life. It becomes more and more so. 
 To go into the House of Commons is to go aside out of 
 the general stream of the community's vitality into a 
 comer where little is learnt and much is concocted, into 
 a specialised Assembly which is at once inattentive to 
 
 74 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 and monstrously influential in our affairs. There was a 
 period when the debates in the House of Commons were 
 an integral, almost a dominant, part of our national 
 thought, when its speeches were read over in tens of 
 thousands of homes, and a large and sympathetic public 
 followed the details of every contested issue. Now a 
 newspaper that dared to fill its columns mainly with 
 parliamentary debates, with a full report of the triviali- 
 ties, the academic points, the little familiar jokes, and 
 entirely insincere pleadings which occupy that gathering 
 would court bankruptcy. 
 
 This diminishing actuality of our political life is a 
 matter of almost universal comment to-day. But it is 
 extraordinary how much of that comment is made in 
 a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it is 
 associated with any will to change a state of affairs that 
 so largely stultifies our national purpose. And yet the 
 causes of our present political ineptitude are fairly 
 manife&t, and a radical and effective reconstruction is 
 well within the wit of man. 
 
 All causes and all effects in our complex modern State 
 are complex, but in this particular matter there can be 
 little doubt that the key to the difficulty lies in the crudity 
 and simplicity of our method of election , a method which 
 reduces our apparent free choice of rulers to a ridiculous 
 selection between undesirable alternatives, and hands 
 our whole public life over to the specialised manipulator. 
 Our House of Commons could scarcely misrepresent us 
 more if it was appointed haphazard by the Lord Cham- 
 berlain or selected by lot from among the inhabitants 
 of Notting Hill. Election of representatives in one- 
 member local constituencies by a single vote gives a 
 citizen practically no choice beyond the candidates 
 
 75 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 appointed by the two great party organisations in the 
 State. It is an electoral system that forbids absolutely 
 any vote splitting or any indication of shades of opinion. 
 The presence of more than two candidates introduces an 
 altogether unmanageable complication, and the voter is 
 at once reduced to voting not to secure the return of the 
 perhaps less hopeful candidate he likes, but to ensure the 
 rejection of the candidate he most dislikes. So the 
 nimble wire-puller slips in. In Great Britain we do not 
 have Elections any more ; we have Eejections. What 
 really happens at a general election is that the party 
 organisations — obscure and secretive conclaves with en- 
 tirely mysterious funds — appoint about 1,200 men to be 
 our rulers, and all that we, we so-called self-governing 
 people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled, angry way, 
 to strike off the names of about half of these selected 
 gentlemen. 
 
 Take almost any member of the present Government 
 and consider his case. You may credit him with a life- 
 long industrious intention to get there, but ask yourself 
 what is this man's distinction, and for what great thing 
 in our national life does he stand? By the complaisance 
 of our party machinery he was able to present himself 
 to a perplexed constituency as the only possible alter- 
 native to Conservatism and Tariff Eeform, and so we 
 have him. And so we have most of his colleagues. 
 
 Now such a system of representation is surely a 
 system to be destroyed at any cost, because it stifles our 
 national discussion and thwarts our national will. And 
 we can leave no possible method of alteration untried. 
 It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by 
 the mere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method 
 too crudely conceived. There exist alternatives, and to 
 
 76 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 these alternatives we must resort. Since John Stuart 
 Mill first called attention to the importance of the matter 
 there has been a systematic study of the possible working 
 of electoral methods, and it is now fairly proved that in 
 proportional representation, with large constituencies 
 returning each many members, there is to be found a 
 way of escape from this disastrous embarrassment of our 
 public business by the party wire-puller and the party 
 nominee. 
 
 I will not dwell upon the particulars of the propor- 
 tional representation system here. There exists an active 
 society which has organised the education of the public 
 in the details of the proposal.. Suffice it that it does give 
 a method by which a voter may vote with confidence 
 for the particular man he prefers, with no fear w^hatever 
 that his vote will be wasted in the event of that man's 
 chance being hopeless. There is a method by which the 
 order of the voter's subsequent preference is effectively 
 indicated. That is all, but see how completely it modifies 
 the nature of an election. Instead of a hampered choice 
 between two, you have a free choice between many. 
 Such a change means a complete alteration in the 
 quality of public life. 
 
 The present immense advantage of the party nominee 
 — which is the root cause, which is almost the sole cause 
 of all our present political ineptitude — would disappear. 
 He would be quite unable to oust any well-known and 
 representative independent candidate who chose to stand 
 against him. There would be an immediate alteration in 
 type in the House of Commons. In the place of these 
 specialists in political getting-on there would be few^ men 
 who had not already gained some intellectual and moral 
 hold upon the community ; they would already be out- 
 
 11 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 standing and distinguished men before they came to the 
 work of government. Great sections of our national life, 
 science, art, literature, education, engineering, manu- 
 facture, would cease to be under-represented, or mis- 
 represented, by the energetic barrister and political 
 specialist, and our Legislature would begin to serve, as 
 we have now such urgent need of its serving, as the 
 means and instrument of that national conference upon 
 the social outlook of which we stand in need. 
 
 And it is to the need and nature of that Ck>n- 
 ference that I wfould devote myself. I do not mean 
 by the word Conference any gathering of dull and 
 formal and inattentive people in this dusty hall or 
 that, with a jaded audience and intermittently active 
 reporters, such as this word may conjure up to some 
 imaginations. I mean an earnest direction of attention 
 in all parts of the country to this necessity for a studied 
 and elaborated project of conciliation and social co- 
 operation. We cannot afford to leave such things to 
 specialised politicians and self-appointed, self-seeking 
 "experts" any longer. A modern community has to 
 think out its problems as a whole and co-operate as a 
 w^hole in their solution. We have to bring all our 
 national life into this discussion of the National Plan 
 before us, and not simply newspapers and periodicals 
 and books, but pulpit and college and school have to bear 
 their part in it. And in that particular I would appeal 
 to the schools, because there more than anywhere else is 
 the permanent quickening of our national imagination to 
 be achieved. 
 
 We want to have our young people filled with a new 
 realisation that History is not over, that nothing is 
 settled, and that the supreme dramatic phase in the story 
 
 78 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 of England has still to come. It was not in the Norman 
 Conquest, not in the flight of King James II. nor the 
 overthrow of Napoleon ; it is here and now. It falls to 
 them to be actors not in a reminiscent pageant but a 
 living conflict, and the sooner they are prepared to take 
 their part in that the better our Empire will acquit itself. 
 How absurd is the preoccupation of our schools and 
 colleges with the little provincialisms of our past history 
 before a.d. 1800! "No current politics," whispers the 
 schoolmaster, *'no religion — except the coldest formali- 
 ties. Some parent might object.'' And he pours into 
 our country every year a fresh supply of gentlemanly 
 cricketing youths, gapingly unprepared — unless they 
 have picked up a broad generalisation or so from some 
 surreptitious Socialist pamphlet — for the immense issues 
 they must control, and that are altogether uncontmllable 
 if they fail to control them. The universities do scarcely 
 more for our young men. All this has to be altered, and 
 altered vigorously and soon, if our country is to accom- 
 plish its destinies. Our schools and colleges exist for no 
 other purpose than to give our youths a vision of the 
 world and of their duties and possibilities in the world. 
 We can no longer afford to have them the last preserves 
 of an elderly orthodoxy and the last repository of a decay- 
 ing gift of superseded tongues. They are needed too 
 urgently to make our leaders leader-like and to sustain 
 the active understandings of the race. 
 
 And from the labour class itself we are also justified 
 in demanding a far more effectual contribution to the 
 National Conference than it is making at the present 
 time. Mere 'eloquent apologies for distrust, mere de- 
 nunciations of Capitalism and appeals for a Socialism 
 as featureless as smoke, are unsatisfactory when one 
 
 79 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 regards them as the entire contribution of the ascendant 
 worker to the discussion of the national future. The 
 labour thinker has to become definite in his demands 
 and clearer upon the give and take that will be necessary 
 before they can be satisfied. He has to realise rather 
 more generously than he has done so far the enormous 
 moral difficulty there is in bringing people who have been 
 prosperous and at an advantage all their lives to the pitch 
 of even contemplating a social reorganisation that may 
 minimise or destroy their precedence. We have all to 
 think, to think hard and think generously, and there is 
 not a man in England to-day, even though his hands are 
 busy at work, whose brain may not be helping in this 
 great task of social rearrangement which lies before us 
 all. 
 
 SOCIAL PANACEAS 
 
 {June, igia.) 
 
 To have followed the frequent discussions of the Labour 
 Unrest in the Press is to have learnt quite a lot about 
 the methods of popular thought. And among other 
 things I see now much better than I did why patent 
 m-edicines are so popular. It is clear that as a community 
 we are far too impatient of detail and complexity, we 
 want overmuch to simplify, we clamour for panaceas, we 
 are a collective invitation to quacks. 
 
 Our situation is an intricate one, it does not admit 
 of a solution neatly done up in a word or a phrase. Yet 
 so powerful is this wish to simplify that it is difficult to 
 make it clear that one is not oneself a panacea-monger. 
 One writes and people read a little inattentively and more 
 
 80 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 than a little impatiently, until one makes a positive pro- 
 posal. Then they jump. " So that's your Eemedy ! " 
 they say. "How absurdly inadequate!" I was privi- 
 leged to take part in one such discussion in 1912, and 
 among other things in my diagnosis of the situation I 
 pointed out the extreme mischief done to our public 
 life by the futility of our electoral m<ethods. They 
 make our whole public life forensic and ineffectual, and 
 I pointed out that this evil effect, which vitiates our 
 whole national life, could be largely remedied by an 
 infinitely better voting system known as Proportional 
 Representation. Thereupon the Westminster Gazette 
 declared in tones of pity and contempt that it was no 
 Remedy — and dismissed me. It would be as intelligent 
 to charge a doctor who pushed back the crowd about 
 a broken-legged man in the street with wanting to heal 
 the limb by giving the s.uff'erer air. 
 
 The task before our community, the task of reorganis- 
 ing labour on a basis broader than that of employment 
 for daily or weekly wages, is one of huge complexity, 
 and it is as entirely reasonable as it is entirely preliminary 
 to clean and modernise to the utmost our representative 
 and legislative machinery. 
 
 It is remarkable how dominant is this disposition to 
 get a phrase, a word, a simple recipe, for an undertaking 
 so vast in reality that for all the rest of our lives a large 
 part of the activities of us, forty million people, will 
 be devoted to its partial accomplishment. In the 
 presence of very great issues people become impatient 
 and irritated, as they would not allow themselves to be 
 irritated by far more limited problems. Nobody in his 
 senses expects a panacea for the comparatively simple 
 and trivial business of playing chess. Nobody wants to 
 
 Q 8| 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 be told to *'rely wholly upon your pawns," or "never, 
 never move your rook"; nobody clamours "give me a 
 third knight and all w^ill be well " ; but that is exactly 
 what everybody seems to be doing in our present dis- 
 cussion. And as another aspect of the same impatience, 
 I note the disposition to clamour against all sorts of 
 necessary processes in the development of a civilisation. 
 For example, I read over and over again of the failure 
 of representative government, and in nine cases out of 
 ten I find that this amounts to a cry against any sort 
 of representative government. It is perfectly true that 
 our representative institutions do not work well and need 
 a vigorous overhauling, but while I find scarcely any 
 support for such a revision, the air is full of vague 
 dangerous demands for aristocracy, for oligarchy, for 
 autocracy. It is like a man w^ho jumps out of his auto- 
 mobile because he has burst a tyre, refuses a proffered 
 Stepney, and bawls passionately for anything — for a 
 four-wheeler, or a donkey, as long as he can be free 
 from that exploded mechanism. There are evidently 
 quite a considerable number of people in this country 
 who would welcome a tyrant at the present time, a 
 strong, silent, cruel, imprisoning, executing, melo- 
 dramatic sort of person, who would somehow manage 
 everything while they went on — being silly. I find that 
 form of impatience cropping up everywhere. I hear 
 8choes of Mr. Blatchford's "Wanted, a Man," and we 
 may yet see a General Boulanger prancing in our streets. 
 There never was a more foolish cry. It is not a man w^e 
 want, but just exactly as many million men as there are 
 in Great Britain at the present time, and it is you, the 
 reader, and I, and the rest of us who must together go 
 on with the perennial task of saving the country by 
 
 82 
 
A 
 
 VVM^^ 
 
 The Labour Unrest 
 
 firstly, doing our own jobs just as well as ever we can, 
 and secondly — and this is really just as important as 
 firstly — doing our utmost to grasp our national purpose, 
 doing our utmost, that is, to develop and carry out our 
 National Plan. It is Everyman who must be the saviour 
 ' of the State in a modern community ; we cannot shift 
 our share in the burthen; and here again, I think, is 
 something that may well be underlined and emphasised. 
 At present our " secondly " is unduly subordinated to 
 our "firstly"; our game is better individually than 
 collectively ; we are like a football team that passes 
 badly, and our need is not nearly so much to change 
 the players as to broaden their style. And this brings 
 me, in a spirit entirely antagonistic, up against Mr. 
 Galsworthy's suggestion of an autocratic revolution in 
 the methods of our public schools. 
 
 But before I go on to that, let me first notice a still 
 more comprehensive cry that has been heard again and 
 again in this discussion, and that is the alleged failure 
 of education generally. There is never any remedial 
 suggestion made with this particular outcry ; it is merely 
 a gust of abuse and insult for schools, and more par- 
 ticularly board schools, carrying with it a half-hearted 
 implication that they should be closed, and then the 
 contribution concludes. Now there is no outcry at the 
 present time more unjust or — except for the "Wanted, 
 a Man" clamour — more foolish. No doubt our educa- 
 tional resources, like most other things, fall far short 
 of perfection, but of all this imperfection the elementary 
 schools are least imperfect ; and I would almost go so 
 far as to say that, considering the badness of their 
 material, the huge, clumsy classes they have to deal 
 with, the poorness of their directive administration, their 
 
 83 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 bad pay and uncertain outlook, the elementary teachers 
 of this country are amazingly efficient. And it is not 
 simply that they are good under their existing conditions, 
 but that this service has been made out of nothing 
 whatever in the course of scarcely forty years. An 
 educational system to cover an Empire is not a 
 thing that can be got for th-e asking, it is not even 
 to be got for the paying ; it has to be grown ; and in the 
 beginning it is bound to be thin, ragged, forced, crammy, 
 text-bookish, superficial, and all the rest of it. As 
 reasonable to complain that the children born last year 
 were immature. A little army of teachers does not flash 
 into being at the passing of an Education Act. Not 
 even an organisation for training those teachers comes 
 to anything like satisfactory working order for many 
 years, without considering the delays and obstructions 
 that have been caused by the bickerings and bitter- 
 ness of the various Christian Churches. So that it is 
 not the failure of elementary education we have really 
 to consider, but the continuance and extension of its 
 already almost miraculous results. 
 
 And when it comes to the education of the ruling 
 and directing classes, there is kindred, if lesser reason, 
 for tempering zeal with patience. This upper portion 
 of our educational organisation needs urgently to be 
 bettered, but it is not to be bettered by trying to find 
 an archangel who will better it dictatorially. For the 
 good of our souls there are no such beings to relieve 
 us of our collective responsibility. It is clear that 
 appointments in this field need not only far more care 
 and far more insistence upon creative power than has 
 been shown in the past, but for the rest we have to do 
 with the men we have and the schools we have. We 
 
 84 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 cannot have an educational purge, if only because we 
 have not the new men waiting. Here again the need 
 is not impatience, not revolution, but a sustained and 
 penetrating criticism, a steadfast, continuous urgency 
 towards effort and well-planned reconstruction and 
 efficiency. 
 
 And as a last example of the present hysterical dis- 
 position to scrap things before they have been fairly tried 
 is the outcry against examinations, which has done so 
 much to take the keenness off the edge of school work 
 in the last few years. Because a great number of ex- 
 aminers chosen haphazard turned out to be negligent and 
 incompetent as examiners, because their incapacity 
 created a cynical trade in cramming, a great number of 
 people have come to the conclusion, just as examinations 
 are being improved into efficiency, that all examinations 
 are bad. In particular that excellent method of bring- 
 ing new blood and new energy into the public services 
 and breaking up official gangs and cliques, the competi- 
 tive examination system, has been discredited, and the 
 wire-puller and the influential person are back again 
 tampering with a steadily increasing proportion of 
 appointments. . . . 
 
 But I have written enough of this impatience, which 
 is, as it were, merely the passion for reconstruction losing 
 its head and defeating its own ends. There is no hope 
 for us outside ourselves. No violent changes, no 
 Napoleonic saviours can carry on the task of building the 
 Great State, the civilised State that rises out of our dis- 
 orders. That is for us to do, all of us and each one of us. 
 We have to think clearly, and study and consider and 
 reconsider our ideas about public things to the very 
 utmost of our possibilities. We have to clarify our views 
 
 85 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 and express them and do all we can to stir up thinking 
 and effort in those about us. 
 
 I know it would be more agreeable for all of us if 
 we could have some small pill-like remedy for all the 
 troubles of the State, and take it and go on just as we 
 are going now. But, indeed, to say a word for that 
 idea would be a treason. We are the State, and there 
 is no other way to make it better than to give it the 
 service of our lives. Just in the measure of the 
 aggregate of our devotions and the elaborated and 
 criticised sanity of our public proceedings will the world 
 mend. 
 
 I gather from a valuable publication called "Secret 
 Bemedies," which analyses many popular cures, that this 
 hasty passion for simplicity, for just one thing that will 
 settle the w^hole trouble, can carry people to a level 
 beyond an undivided trust in something warranted in a 
 bottle. They are ready to put their faith in what amounts 
 to practically nothing in a bottle. And just at present, 
 while a number of excellent people of the middle class 
 think that only a "man" is wanted and all will be well 
 with us, there is a considerable wave of hopefulness 
 among the working class in favour of a weak solution of 
 nothing, which is offered under the attractive label of 
 Syndicalism. So far I have been able to discuss the 
 present labour situation without any use of this empty 
 word, but when one finds it cropping up in every other 
 article on the subject, it becomes advisable to point 
 out what Syndicalism is not. And incidentally it may 
 enable me to make clear what Socialism in the broader 
 sense, constructive Socialism, that is to say, is. 
 
 86 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 SYNDICALISM OR CITIZENSHIP 
 
 "Is a railway porter a railway porter first and a man 
 afterwards, or is he a man first and incidentally a railway 
 porter?" 
 
 That is the issue between this tawdrification of trade 
 unionism which is called Syndicalism, and the ideals of 
 that Great State, that great commonweal, towards which 
 the constructive forces in our civilisation tend. Are we 
 to drift on to a disastrous intensification of our present 
 specialisation of labour as labour, or are we to set to 
 work steadfastly upon a vast social reconstruction which 
 will close this widening breach and rescue our community 
 from its present dependence upon the reluctant and 
 presently insurgent toil of a wages-earning proletariat? 
 Regarded as a project of social development, Syndicalism 
 is ridiculous; regarded as an illuminating and uninten- 
 tionally ironical complement to the implicit theories of 
 our present social order, it is worthy of close attention. 
 The dream of the Syndicalist is an impossible social 
 fragmentation. The transport service is to be a demo- 
 cratic republic, the mines are to be a democratic republic, 
 every great industry is to be a democratic republic within 
 the State ; our community is to become a conflict of inter- 
 woven governments of workers, incapable of progressive 
 changes of method or of extension or transmutation of 
 function, the whole being of a man is to lie within his 
 industrial specialisation, and, upon lines of causation not 
 made clear, wages are to go on rising and hours of work 
 are to go on falling. . . . There the mind halts, blinded 
 by the too dazzling vistas of an unimaginative millen- 
 nium. And the way to this, one gathers, is by striking 
 — persistent, destructive striking — until it comes about. 
 
 87 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Such is Syndicalism, the cheap Labour Panacea, to 
 which the more passionate and less intelligent portion 
 of the younger workers, impatient of the large construc- 
 tive developments of modern Socialism, drifts steadily. 
 It is the direct and logical reaction to our present 
 economic system, which has counted our workers neither 
 as souls nor as heads, but as hands. They are beginning 
 to accept the suggestions of that method. It is the 
 culmination in aggression of that, at first, entirely pro- 
 tective trade unionism which the individual selfishness 
 and collective short-sightedness and State blindness of 
 our owning and directing and ruling classes forced upon 
 the working man. At first trade unionism was essentially 
 defensive ; it was the only possible defence of the workers, 
 who were being steadily pressed over the margin of 
 subsistence. It was a nearly involuntary resistance to 
 class debasement. Mr. Vernon Hartshorn has expressed 
 it as that in a recent article. But his paper, if one read 
 it from beginning to end, displayed, compactly and 
 completely, the unavoidable psychological development of 
 the specialised labour case. He began in the mildest 
 tones with those now respectable words, a "guaranteed 
 minimum" of wages, housing, and so forth, and ended 
 with a very clear intimation of an all-labour community. 
 
 If anything is certain in this world, it is that the 
 mass of the community will not rest satisfied with these 
 guaranteed minima. All those possible legislative in- 
 crements in the general standard of living are not going 
 to diminish the labour unrest ; they are going to increase 
 it. A starving man may think he wants nothing in the 
 world but bread, but when he has eaten you will find 
 he wants all sorts of things beyond. Mr. Hartshorn 
 assures us that the worker is "not out for a theory." 
 
 88 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 So much the worse for the worker and all of us when, 
 like the mere hand we have made hun, he shows himself 
 unable to define or even forecast his ultimate intentions. 
 He will in that case merely clutch. And the obvious 
 immediate next objective of that clutch directly its 
 imagination passes beyond the "guaranteed minima" 
 phase is the industry as a whole. 
 
 I do not see how anyone who desires the continuing 
 development of civilisation can regard a trade union as 
 anything but a necessary evil, a pressure-relieving con- 
 tiivance, an arresting and delaying organisation begotten 
 by just that class separation of labour which in the com- 
 monweal of the Great State will be altogether destroyed. 
 It leads nowhither; it is a shelter hut on the road. The 
 wider movement of modern civilisation is against class 
 organisation and caste feeling. These are forces antago- 
 nistic to progress, continually springing up and en- 
 deavouring to stereotype the transitory organisation, and 
 continually being defeated. 
 
 Of all the solemn imbecilities one hears, surely the 
 most foolish is this, that we are in "an age of specialisa- 
 tion." The comparative fruitfulness and hopefulness of 
 our social order, in comparison with any other social 
 system, lies in its flat contradiction of that absurdity. 
 Our medical and surgical advances, for example, are 
 almost entirely due to the invasion of medical research 
 by the chemist ; our naval development to the super- 
 session of the sailor by the engineer ; we sweep away 
 the coachman with the railway, beat the suburban line 
 with the electric tramway, and attack that again with 
 the petrol omnibus, oust brick and stonework in sub- 
 stantial fabrics by steel frames, replace the skilled maker 
 of woodcuts by a photographer, and so on through the 
 
 89 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 whole range of our activities. Change of function, arrest 
 of specialisation by innovations in method and appliance, 
 progress by the infringement of professional boundaries 
 and the defiance of rule : these are the commonplaces 
 of our time. The trained man, the specialised man, is 
 the most unfortunate of men ; the world leaves him 
 behind, and he has lost his power of overtaking it. 
 Versatility, alert adaptability, these are our urgent needs. 
 In peace and war alike the unimaginative, uninventive 
 man is a burthen and a retardation, as he never was 
 before in the world's history. The modern community, 
 therefore, that succeeds most rapidly and most completely 
 in converting both its labourers and its leisure class into 
 a population of active, able, unhurried, educated, and 
 physically well-developed people will be inevitably the 
 dominant community in the world. That lies on the face 
 of things about us ; a man who cannot see that must be 
 blind to the traf&c in our streets. 
 
 Syndicalism is not a plan of social development. It 
 is a spirit of conflict. That conflict lies ahead of us, 
 the open war of strikes, or — if the forces of law and 
 order crush that down — then sabotage and that black 
 revolt of the human spirit into crime which we speak 
 of nowadays as anarchism, unless we can discover a 
 broad and promising way from the present condition of 
 
 \ things to nothing less than the complete abolition of 
 
 \ the labour class. 
 
 I That, I know, sounds a vast proposal, but this is a 
 gigantic business altogether, and we can do nothing with 
 it unless we are prepared to deal with large ideas. If 
 St. Paul's begins to totter it is no good propping it up 
 with half a dozen walking-sticks, and small palliatives 
 have no legitimate place at all in this discussion. Our 
 
 90 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 generatiou has to take up this tremendous necessity of 
 a social reconstruction in a great way ; its broad lines 
 have to be thought out by thousands of minds, and it is 
 for that reason that I have put the stress upon our need 
 of discussion, of a wide intellectual and moral stimula- 
 tion, of a stirring up in our schools and pulpits, and 
 upon the modernisation and clarification of what should 
 be the deliberative assembly of the nation. 
 
 It would be presumptuous to anticipate the National 
 Plan that must emerge from so vast a debate, but certain 
 conclusions I feel in my bones will stand the test of an 
 exhaustive criticism. The first is that a distinction will 
 be drawn between what I would call "interesting work " 
 and what I would call "mere labour." The two things, 
 I admit, pass by insensible gradations into one another, 
 but while on the one hand such work as being a master 
 gardener and growing roses, or a master cabinet maker 
 and making fine pieces, or an artist of almost any sort, 
 or a story writer, or a consulting physician, or a scientific 
 investigator, or a keeper of wild animals, or a forester, 
 or a librarian, or a good printer, or many sorts of 
 engineer, is w^ork that will always find men of a certain 
 temperament enthusiastically glad to do it, if they can 
 only do it for comfortable pay — for such work is in itself 
 living — there is, on the other hand, work so irksome and 
 toilsome, such as coal mining, or being a private soldier 
 during a peace, or attending upon lunatics, or stoking, 
 or doing over and over again, almost mechanically, little 
 bits of a modern industrial process, or being a cash desk 
 clerk in a busy shop, that few people would undertake 
 if they could avoid it. 
 
 And the whole strength of our collective intelligence 
 will .be directed first to reducing the arnount of such 
 
 91 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 irksome work by labour-saving machinery, by ingenuity 
 of management, and by the systematic avoidance of 
 giving trouble as a duty, and then to so distributing the 
 residuum of it that it will become the whole life of no 
 class whatever in our population. I have already quoted 
 the idea of Professor William James of a universal con- 
 scription for such irksome labour, and while he would 
 have instituted that mainly for its immense moral effect 
 upon the community, I would point out that, combined 
 with a nationalisation of transport, mining, and so forth, 
 it is also a way to a partial solution of this difficulty of 
 "mere toil." 
 
 And the mention of a compulsory period of labour 
 service for everyone — a year or so with the pickaxe as 
 well as with the rifle — leads me to another idea that I 
 believe will stand the test of unlimited criticism, and 
 that is a total condemnation of all these eight-hour-a-day, 
 early-closing, guaranteed - weekly - half - holiday notions 
 that are now so prevalent in Liberal circles. Under 
 existing conditions, in our system of private enterprise 
 and competition, these restrictions are no doubt neces- 
 sary to save a large portion of our population from lives 
 of continuous toil, but, like trade unionism, they are a 
 necessity of our present conditions, and not a way to a 
 better social state. If wo rescue ourselves as a com- 
 munity from poverty and discomfort, we must take care 
 not to fling ourselves into something far more infuriating 
 to a normal human being — and that is boredom. The 
 prospect of a carefully inspected sanitary life, tethered to 
 some light, little, uninteresting daily job, six or eight 
 hours of it, seems to me — and I am sure I write here 
 for most normal, healthy, active people — more awful 
 than hunger and death. It is far more in the quality of 
 
 92 
 
The Labour Unrest 
 
 the human spirit, and still more what we all in our 
 hearts want the human spirit to be, to fling itself with 
 its utmost power at a job and do it with passion. 
 
 For my own part, if I was sentenced to hew a thou- 
 sand tons of coal, I should want to get at it at once and 
 work furiously at it, with the shortest intervals for rest 
 and refreshment and an occasional night holiday, until 
 I hewed my way out, and if some interfering person with 
 a benevolent air wanted to restrict me to hewing five 
 hundredweight, and no more and no less, each day and 
 every day, I should be strongly disposed to go for that 
 benevolent person with my pick. That is surely what 
 every natural man would want to do, and it is only the 
 clumsy imperfection of our social organisation that will 
 not enable a man to do his stint of labour in a few vigor- 
 ous years and then come up into the sunlight for good 
 and all. 
 
 It is along that line that I feel a large part of our 
 labour reorganisation, over and beyond that conscription, 
 must ultimately go. The community as a whole would, 
 I believe, get far more out of a man if he had such a com- 
 paratively brief passion of toil than if he worked, with 
 occasional lapses into unemployment, drearily all his life. 
 J3ut at present, with our existing system of employment, 
 one cannot arrange so comprehensive a treatment of a 
 man's life. There is needed some State or quasi-public 
 organisation which shall stand between the man and the 
 employer, act as his banker and guarantor, and exact his 
 proper price. Then, with his toil over, he would have 
 an adequate pension and be free to do nothing or any- 
 thing else as he chose. In a Socialistic order of society, 
 where the State would also be largely the employer, such 
 a method would be, of course, far more easily contrived. 
 
 93 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 The more modern statements of Socialism do not 
 contemplate making the State the sole employer; it is 
 chiefly in transport, mining, fisheries, forestry, the culti- 
 vation of the food staples, and the manufacture of a few 
 such articles as bricks and steel, and possibly in hous- 
 ing, in what one might call the standardisable industries, 
 that the State is imagined as the direct owner and em- 
 ployer, and it is just in these departments that the bulk 
 of the irksome toil is to be found. There remain large 
 regions of more specialised and individualised production 
 that many Socialists nowadays are quite prepared to leave 
 to the freer initiatives of private enterprise. Most of 
 these are occupations involving a greater element of 
 interest, less direction and more co-operation, and it is 
 just here that the success of co-partnery and a sustained 
 life participation becomes possible. . . . 
 
 This complete civilised system without a specialised, 
 property-less labour class is not simply a possibility, it 
 is necessary ; the whole social movement of the time, 
 the stars in their courses, war against the permanence 
 of the present state of affairs. The alternative to this 
 gigantic effort to rearrange our world is not a continua- 
 tion of muddling along, but social war. The Syndicalist 
 and his folly will be the avenger of lost opportunities. 
 Not a Labour State do we want, nor a Servile State, 
 but a powerful Leisure State of free men. 
 
 94 
 
THE GREAT STATE 
 
 §1 
 Foe many years now I have taken a part in the dis- 
 cussion of Socialism. During that time Socialism has 
 become a more and more ambiguous term. It has seemed 
 to me desirable to clear up my own ideas of social pro- 
 gress and the public side of my life by restating them, 
 and this I have attempted in this essay. 
 
 In order to do so it has been convenient to coin two 
 expressions, and to employ them with a certain defined 
 intention. They are firstly: The Normal Social Life, 
 and secondly : The Great State. Throughout this essay 
 these expressions will be used in accordance with the 
 definitions presently to be given, and the fact that they 
 are so used will be emphasised by the employment of 
 capitals. It will be possible for anyone to argue that 
 what is here defined as the Normal Social Life is not the 
 normal social life, and that the Great State is indeed 
 no state at all. That will be an argument outside the 
 range delimited by thesie definitions. 
 
 Now what is intended by the Normal Social Life here 
 is a type of human association and employment, of 
 extreme prevalence and antiquity, which appears to have 
 been the lot of the enormous majority of human beings 
 as far back as history or tradition or the vestiges of 
 material that supply our conceptions of the neolithic 
 period can carry us. It has never been the lot of all 
 humanity at any time, to-day it is perhaps less pre- 
 
 95 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 dominant than it has ever been, yet even to-day it is 
 probably the lot of the greater moiety of mankind. 
 
 Essentially this type of association presents a local- 
 ised community, a community of which the greater pro- 
 portion of the individuals are engaged more or less 
 directly in the cultivation of the land. With this there 
 is also associated th<e grazing or herding over wilder or 
 more restricted areas, belonging either collectively or 
 discretely to the community, of sheep, cattle, goats, 
 or swine, and almost always the domestic fowl is com- 
 m-ensal with man in this life. The cultivated land at least 
 is usually assigned, temporarily or inalienably, as pro- 
 perty to specific individuals, and the individuals are 
 grouped in generally monogamic families of which the 
 father is the head. Essentially the social unit is the 
 Family, and even where, as in INIohammedan countries, 
 there is no legal or customary restriction upon polygamy, 
 monogamy still prevails as the ordinary way of living. 
 Unmarried women are not esteemed, and children are 
 desired. According to the dangers or securiti-es of the 
 region, the nature of the cultivation and the tempera- 
 ment of the people, this community is scattered either 
 widely in separate steadings or drawn together into 
 villages. At one extreme, over large areas of thin pasture 
 this agricultural community may verge on the nomadic ; 
 at another, in proximity to consuming markets, it may 
 present the concentration of intensive culture. There 
 may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and perhaps 
 controlled by a simple forestry. The law that holds this 
 community together is largely traditional and custo- 
 mary, and almost always as its primordial bond there 
 is some sort of temple and some sort of priest. Typically, 
 the temple is devoted to a local god or a localised saint, 
 
 96 
 
The Great State 
 
 and itg position indicates the central point of the locality, 
 its assembly plaoe and its market. Associated with the 
 agriculture there are usually a few imperfectly specialised 
 tradesmen, a smith, a garment-maker perhaps, a basket- 
 maker or potter, who group about the church or temple. 
 The community may maintain itself in a state of com- 
 plete isolation, but more usually there are tracks or roads 
 to the centres of adjacent communities, and a certain 
 drift of travel, a certain trade in non-essential things. 
 In the fundamentals of life this normal community is 
 independent and self-soibsisting, and where it is not 
 beginning to be modified by the novel forces of the new 
 times it produces its own food and drink, its own clothing, 
 and largely intermarries within its limits. 
 
 This in general terms is what is here intended by 
 the phrase the Normal Social Life. It is still the sub- 
 stantial part of the rural life of all Europe and most 
 Asia and Africa, and it has been the life of the great 
 majority of human beings for immemorial years. It is 
 the root life. It rests upon the soil, and from that soil 
 below and its reaction to the seasons and the moods of 
 the sky overhead have grown most of the traditions, 
 
 y institutions, sentiments, beliefs, superstitions, and funda- 
 
 \ mental siongs and stories of mankind. 
 
 « ' But since the very dawn of history at least this 
 Normal Social Life has never been the whole complete 
 life of mankind. Quite apart from the marginal life of 
 the savage hunter, there have been a number of forces 
 and influences within men and women and without, that 
 have produced abnormal and surplus ways of living, 
 supplemental, additional, and even antagonistic to this 
 normal scheme. 
 
 And first as to the forces within men and women. 
 H 97 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Long as it has lasted, almost universal as it has been, 
 the human being has never yet achieved a perfect adap- 
 tation to the needs of the Normal Social Life. He has 
 attained nothing of that frictionless fitting to the needs 
 of association one finds in the bee or the ant. Curiosity, 
 deep stirrings to wander, the still more ancient inheri- 
 tance of the hunter, a recurrent distaste for labour, and 
 resentment against the necessary subjugations of family 
 life have always been a straining force within the agri- 
 cultural community. The increase of population during 
 periods of prosperity has led at the touch of bad seasons 
 and adversity to the desperate reliefs of war and the 
 invasion of alien localities. And the nomadic and ad- 
 venturous spirit of man found reliefs and opportunities 
 more particularly along the shores of great rivers and 
 inland seas. Trade and travel began, at first only a 
 trade in adventitious things, in metals and rare objects 
 and luxuries and slaves. With trade came writing and 
 money ; the inventions of debt and rent, usury and 
 tribute. History finds already in its beginnings a thin 
 network of trading and slaving flung over the world of 
 the Normal Social Life, a network whose strands are the 
 early roads, whose knots are the first towns and the 
 first courts. 
 
 Indeed, all recorded history is in a sense the history 
 of these surplus and supplemental activities of mankind. 
 The Normal Social Life flowed on in its immemorial 
 fashion, using no letters, needing no records, leaving 
 no history. Then, a little minority, bulking dispropor- 
 tionately in the record, come the trader, the sailor, the 
 slave, the landlord and the tax-compeller, the townsman 
 and the king. 
 
 All written history is the story of a minority and their 
 
 98 
 
The Great State 
 
 peculiar and abnormal affairs. Save in so far as it notes 
 great natural catastrophes and tells of the spreading or 
 retrocession of human life through changes of climate 
 and physical conditions it resolves itself into an account 
 of a series of attacks and modifications and supplements 
 made by excessive and superfluous forces engendered 
 within the community upon the Normal Social Life. 
 The very invention of w^riting is a part of those modify- 
 ing developments. The Normal Social Life is essentially 
 illiterate and traditional. The Normal Social Life is as 
 mute as the standing crops ; it is as seasonal and cyclic 
 as nature herself, and reaches towards the future only 
 an intimation of continual repetitions. 
 
 Now this human over-life may take either beneficent 
 or maleficent or neutral aspects towards the general life 
 of humanity. It may present itself as law and pacifi- 
 cation, as a positive addition and superstructure to the 
 Normal Social Life, as roads and markets and cities, as 
 courts and unifying monarchies, as helpful and directing 
 religious organisations, as literature and art and science 
 and philosophy, reflecting back upon the individual in 
 the Normal Social Life from which it arose, a gilding 
 and refreshment of new and wider interestsi and added 
 pleasures and resources. One may define certain phases 
 in the history of various countries when this was the 
 sitate of affairs, when a countryside of prosperous com- 
 munities with a healthy family life and a wide distribu- 
 tion of property, animated by roads and towns and uni- 
 fied by a generally intelligible religious belief, lived in a 
 transitory but satisfactory harmony under a sympathetic 
 government. I take it that this is the condition to which 
 the minds of such original and vigorous reactionary 
 thinkers as Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Hilaire Belloc 
 
 99 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 for example turn, as being the most desirable state of 
 mankind. 
 
 But the general effect of history is to present these 
 phases as phases of -exceptional good luck, and to show 
 the surplus forces of humanity as on the whole antagon- 
 is/tic to any such equilibrium with the Normal Social 
 Life. To open the book of history haphazard is, most 
 commonly, to open it at a page where the surplus forces 
 appfear to be in more or less destructive conflict with the 
 Normal Social Life. One opens at the depopulation of 
 Italy by the aggressive great estates' of the Eoman 
 Empire, at the impoverishm'ent of the French peasantry 
 by a too centralised monarchy before the revolution, or 
 at the huge degenerative growth of the great industrial 
 towns of western Europe in the nineteenth century. Or 
 again one opens at destructive wiars. One sees these 
 surplus forces over and above the Normal Social Life 
 working towards unstable concentrations of population, 
 to centralisation of government, to migrations and con- 
 flicts upon a large scale ; one discovers the process de- 
 veloping into a phase of social fragmentation and destruc- 
 tion, and then, unless the whole country has been wasted 
 down to its very soil, the Normal Social Life returns as 
 the heath and furze and grass return after the burning of 
 a common. But it never returns in precisiely its old form. 
 The surplus forces have always produced some traceable 
 change; the rhythm is a little altered. As between the 
 Gallic peasant before the Eoman conquest, the peasant 
 of the Gallic province, the Carlovingian peasant, the 
 French peasant of the thirteenth, the seventeenth, and 
 the twentieth centuries, there is, in spite of a general 
 uniformity of life, of a common atmosphere of cows, 
 hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy, and domestic 
 
 ICO 
 
The Great State 
 
 intimacy, an effect of accumulating generalising influ- 
 ences and of wider relevancies. And the oscillations of 
 empires and kingdoms, religious movements, wars, in- 
 vasions, settlements leave upon the mind an impression 
 that the surplus life of mankind, the less-localised life 
 of mankind, that life of mankind which is not directly 
 connected with the soil but which has become more or 
 less detached from and independent of it, is becoming 
 proportionately more important in relation to the Normal 
 Social Life. It is as if a different w^ay of living was 
 emerging from the Normal Social Life and freeing itself 
 from its traditions and limitations. 
 
 And this is more particularly the effect upon the 
 mind of a review of the history of the past two hundred 
 years. The little speculative activities of the alchemist 
 and natural philosopher, the little economic experiments 
 of the acquisitive and enterprising landed proprietor, 
 favoured by unprecedented periods of security and free- 
 dom, have pass>ed into a new phase of extraordinary 
 productivity. They had added preposterously and con- 
 tinue to add on a gigantic scale and without any evident 
 limlits to the continuation of their additions, to the 
 resources of humanity. To the strength of horses and 
 men and slaves has been added the power of machine? 
 and the possibility of economies that were once in- 
 credible. The Normal Social Life has been over- 
 shadowed as it has never been overshadowed before by 
 the concentrations and achievements of the surplus life. 
 Vast new possibilities open to the race ; the traditional 
 life of mankind, itsf traditional systems of association, 
 are challenged and threatened ; and all the social thought, 
 all the political activity of our time turns in reality upon 
 the conflict of this ancient system whose essentials we 
 
 lOI 
 
An Eflglishman Looks at the World 
 
 have here defined and termed the Normal Social Life 
 with the still vague and formless impulses that seem 
 destined 'either to involve it and the race in a final 
 destruction or to replace it by some new and probably 
 more elaborate method of human association. 
 
 Because there is the following difference between the 
 action of the surplus forces! as we see them to-day and 
 as they appeared before the outbreak of physical science 
 and mechanism. Then it seemed clearly necessary that 
 whatever social and political organisation developed, it 
 must needs' rest ultimately on the tiller of the soil, 
 the agricultural holding, and the Normal Social Life. 
 But now even in agriculture huge wholesale methods 
 have appeared. They are declared to be destructive; 
 but it is quite conceivable that they may be made ulti- 
 mately as recuperative as that small agriculture which 
 has hitherto been the inevitable social basis. If that is 
 so, then the new ways of living may not simply impose 
 themselves in a growing proportion upon the Normal 
 Social Life, but they may even oust it and replace it 
 altogether. Or they may oust it and fail to replace it. 
 In the newer countries the Normal Social Life does 
 not appear to establish itself at all rapidly. No real 
 peasantry appears in either America or Australia ; and in 
 the older countries, unless there is the most elaborate 
 legisilative and fiscal protection, the peasant population 
 w?anes before the large farm, the estate, and overseas 
 production. 
 
 Now most of the political and social discussion of 
 the last hundred years may be regarded and rephrased as 
 an attempt to apprehend this' defensive struggle of the 
 Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and inno- 
 vation, and to give a direction and guidance to all of us 
 
 I02 
 
The Great State 
 
 who participate. And it is very largely a matter of 
 temperament and free choice still, just where we shall 
 decide to place ourselves. Let us consider some of the 
 key words of contemporary thought, such as Liberalism, 
 Individualism, Socialism, in the light of this broad 
 generalisation we have made ; and then we shall find it 
 easier to explain our intention in employing as a second 
 technicality the phrase of The Great State as an oppo- 
 site to the Normal Social Life, which we have already 
 defined. 
 
 §2 
 
 The Normal Social Life has been defined as one based 
 on agriculture, traditional and essentially unchanging. 
 It has needed no toleration and displayed no toleration 
 for novelty and strangeness. Its beliefs have been oi 
 such a nature as to justify and sustain itself, and it has 
 had an intrinsic hostility to any other beliefs. The God 
 of its community has been a jealous god even when he 
 was only a tribal and local god. Only very occasionally 
 in history until the coming of the modem period do we 
 find any human community relaxing from this ancient 
 and more normal state of entire intolerance towards 
 ideas or practices other than its own. When toleration 
 and a receptive attitude towards alien ideas was mani- 
 fested in th«e Old World, it was at some trading centre 
 or political centre ; new ideas and new religions came by 
 water along the trade routes. And such toleration as 
 there was rarely extended to active teaching and propa- 
 ganda. Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in the 
 last resort at the service of the ancient gods and the 
 ancient morals against the sceptical critic. 
 
 103 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 But with the steady development of innovating forces 
 in human affairs there has actually grown up a cult of 
 receptivity, a readiness for new ideas, a faith in the 
 probable truth of novelties. Liberalism — I do not, of 
 course, refer in any w^ay to the political party which 
 makes this profession — is essentially anti-traditionalism ; 
 its tendency is to commit for trial any institution or belief 
 that is brought before it. It is the accuser and antagon- 
 ist of all the fixed and ancient values and imperatives 
 and prohibitions of the Normal Social Life. And grow- 
 ing up in relation to Liberalism and sustained by it is 
 the great body of scientific knowledge, which professes 
 at least to be absolutely undogmatic and perpetually on 
 its trial and under assay and re-examination. 
 
 Now a very large part of the advanced thought of the 
 past century is no more than the confused negation of 
 the broad beliefs and institutions which have been the 
 heritage and social basis of humanity for immemorial 
 years. This is as true of the extremest Individualism as 
 of the extremest Socialism. The former denies that 
 element of legal and customary control which has always 
 subdued the individual to the needs of the Normal Social 
 Life, and the latter that qualified independence of dis- 
 tributed property which is the basis of family autonomy. 
 Both are movements against the ancient life, and nothing 
 is more absurd than the misrepresentation which 
 presents either as a conservative force. They are two 
 divergent schools with a common disposition to reject 
 the old and turn towards the new. The Individualist 
 professes a faith for w'hich he has no rational evidence, 
 that the mere abandonment of traditions and controls 
 must ultimately produce a new and beautiful social order ; 
 while the Socialist, with an equal liberalism, regards the 
 
 104 
 
The Great State 
 
 outlook with a kind of hopeful dread, and insists upon 
 an elaborate readjustment, a new and untried scheme of 
 social organisation to replace the shattered and weaken- 
 ing Normal Social Life. 
 
 Both these movements, and, indeed, all movements 
 that are not movements for the soibjugation of inno- 
 vation and the restoration of tradition, are vague in th-e 
 prospect they contemplate. They produce no definite 
 forecasts of the quality of the future towards which they 
 so confidently indicate the way. But this is less true of 
 modern socialism than of its antithesis, and it becomes 
 less and less true as socialism, under an enormous tor- 
 rent of criticism, slowly washes itself clean from the 
 mass of partial statement, hasty misstatement, sheer 
 error and presumption that obscured its first emergence. 
 
 But it is well to be very clear upon one point at this 
 stage, and that is, that this present time is not a battle- 
 ground between individualism and socialism; it is a 
 battle-ground between the Normal Social Life on the 
 one hand and a complex of forces on the other which 
 seek a form of replacement and seem partially to find 
 it in these and other doctrines. 
 
 Nearly all contemporary thinkers who are not too 
 muddled to be assignable fall into one of three classes, 
 of which the third we shall distinguish is the largest 
 and most various and divergent. It will be convenient 
 to say a little of each of these classes before proceeding 
 to a more particular account of the third. Our analysis 
 will cut across many accepted classifications, but there 
 will be ample justification for this rearrangement. All 
 of them may be dealt with quite justly as accepting 
 the general account of the historical process which is 
 here given. 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Then first we must distinguish a series of writers and 
 iOiinkers which one may call — the word conservative 
 being already politically assigned — the Conservators. 
 
 These are people who really do consider the Normal 
 Social Life as the only proper and desirable life for the 
 great mass of humanity, and they are fully prepared to 
 subordinate all exceptional and surplus lives to the moral 
 standards and limitations that arise naturally out of the 
 Normal Social Life. They desire a state in which 
 property is widely distributed, a community of indepen- 
 dent families protected by law and an intelligent demo- 
 cratic statecraft from the economic aggressions of large 
 accumulations and linked by a common religion. Their 
 attitude to the forces of change is necessarily a hostile 
 attitude. They are disposed to regard innovations in 
 transit and machinery as> undesirable, and even mis- 
 chievous disturbances of a wholesome equilibrium. They 
 are at least unfriendly to any organisation of scientific 
 research, and scornful of the pretensions of science. 
 Criticisms of the methods of logic, scepticism of the more 
 widely diffused human beliefs, they would classify as 
 insanity. Two able English writers, Mr. G. K. Ches- 
 terton and Mr. Belloc, have given the clearest expression 
 to this system of ideals, and stated an admirable case 
 for it. They present a conception of vinous, loudly 
 singing, earthy, toiling, custom -ruled, wholesome, and 
 insanitary men ; they are pagan in the sense that their 
 hearts are with the villagers and not with the townsmen, 
 Christian in the spirit of the parish priest. There are no 
 other Conservators so clear-headed and consistent. But 
 their teaching is merely the logical expression of an 
 enormous amount of conservative feeling. Vast multi- 
 tudes of less lucid minds share their hostility to novelty 
 
 io6 
 
The Great State 
 
 and research; hate, dread, and are eager to despise 
 science, and glow responsive to the warm, familiar 
 expressions of primordial feelings and immemorial pre- 
 judices. The rural conservative, the liberal of the 
 allotments and small-holdings type, Mr. Eoosevelt — 
 in his Western-farmer, philoprogenitive phase as dis- 
 tinguished from the phase of his more imperialist 
 moments — all present themselves as essentially Conser- 
 vators, as seekers after and preservers of the Normal 
 Social Life. 
 
 So, too, do Socialists of the William Morris type. 
 The mind of William Morris was profoundly reaction- 
 ary. He hated the whole trend of later nineteenth- 
 century modernism with the hatred natural to a man of 
 considerable scholarship and intense aesthetic sensibili- 
 ties. His mind turned, exactly as Mr. Belloc's turns, to 
 the finished and enriched Normal Social Life of western 
 Europe in the middle ages, but, unlike Mr. Belloc, he 
 believed that, given private ownership of land and the 
 ordinary materials of life, there must necessarily be an 
 aggregatory process, usury, expropriation, the develop- 
 ment of an exploiting wealthy class. He believed profit 
 was the devil. His "News from Nowhere" pictures a 
 communism that amounted in fact to little more than a 
 system of private ownership of farms and trades without 
 money or any buying and selling, in an atmosphere of 
 geniality, generosity, and mutual helpfulness. Mr. 
 Belloc, with a harder grip upon the realities of life, would 
 have the widest distribution of proprietorship, with an 
 alert democratic government continually legislating 
 against the protean reappearances of usury and accumu- 
 lation, and attacking, breaking up, and redistributing 
 any large unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared. 
 
 107 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 But both men are equally set towards the Normal Social 
 Life, and equally enemies of the New. The so-called 
 " socialist " land legislation of New Zealand again is 
 a tentative towards the realisation of the same school of 
 ideas: great estates are to be automatically broken up, 
 property is to be kept disseminated ; a vast amount of 
 political speaking and writing in America and throughout 
 the world enforces one's impression of the wide-spread 
 influence of Conservator ideals. 
 
 Of course, it is inevitable that phases of prosperity 
 for the Normal Social Life will lead to phases of over- 
 population and scarcity, there will be occasional famines 
 and occasional pestilences and plethoras of vitality lead- 
 ing to the blood-letting of war. I suppose Mr. Chesterton 
 and Mr. Belloc at least have the courage of their opinions, 
 and are prepared to say that such things always have 
 been and always must be ; they are part of the jolly 
 rhythms of the human lot under the sun, and are to be 
 taken with the harvest home and love-making and the 
 peaceful ending of honoured lives as an integral part of 
 the unending drama of mankind. 
 
 §3 
 
 Now opposed to the Conservators are all those who do 
 not regard contemporary humanity as a final thing nor 
 the Normal Social Life as the inevitable basis of human 
 continuity. They believe in secular change, in Progress, 
 in a future for our species differing continually more from 
 its past. On the whole, they are prepared for the gradual 
 disentanglement of men from the Normal Social Life 
 altogether, and they look for new ways of living and 
 
 io8 
 
The Great State 
 
 new methods of human association with a certain adven- 
 turous hopefulness. 
 
 Now, this second large class does not so much admit 
 of subdivision into two as present a great variety of 
 intermediaries between two extremes. I propose to give 
 distinctive names to these extremes, with the very clear 
 proviso that they are not antagonised, and that the great 
 multitude of this second, anti-conservator class, this 
 liberal, more novel class modem conditions have pro- 
 duced, falls between them, and is neither the one nor 
 the other, but partaking in various degrees of both. On 
 the one hand, then, we have that type of mind which 
 is irritated by and distrustful of all collective proceed- 
 ings, which is profoundly distrustful of churches and 
 states, which is expressed essentially by Individualism. 
 The Individualist appears to regard the extensive dis- 
 integrations of the Normal Social Life that are going on 
 to-day with an extreme hopefulness. Whatever is ugly 
 or harsh in modern industrialism or in the novel social 
 development of our time he seems to consider as a neces- 
 sary aspect of a process of selection and survival, whose 
 tendencies are on the whole inevitably satisfactory. The 
 future welfare of man he believes in effect may be trusted 
 to the spontaneous and planless activities of people of 
 goodwill, and nothing but state intervention can effec- 
 tively impede its attainment. And curiously close to this 
 extreme optimistic school in its moral quality and logical 
 consequences, though contrasting widely in the sinister 
 gloom of its spirit, is the socialism of Karl Marx. He 
 declared the contemporary world to be a great process 
 of financial aggrandisement and general expropriation, 
 of increasing power for the few and of increasing hard- 
 ship and misery for the many, a process that would go 
 
 109 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 on until at last a crisis of unendurable tension would be 
 reached and the social revolution ensue. The world had, 
 in fact, to be worse before it could hope to be better. 
 He contemplated a continually exacerbated Class War, 
 with a milliennium of extraordinary vagueness beyond as 
 the reward of the victorious workers. His common 
 quality with the Individualist lies in his repudiation of 
 and antagonism to plans and arrangements, in his belief 
 in the overriding power of Law. Their common influence 
 is the discouragement of collective understandings upon 
 the basis of the existing state. Both converge in practice 
 upon laissez faire, I would therefore lump them together 
 under the term of Planless Progressives, and I would 
 contrast with them those types which believe supremely 
 in systematised purpose. 
 
 The purposeful and systematic types, in common with 
 the Individualist and Marxist, regard the Normal Social 
 Life, for all the many thousands of years behind it, as 
 a phase, and as a phase which is now passing, in human 
 experience ; and they are prepared for a future society 
 that may be ultimately different right down to its essential 
 relationships from the human past. But they also believe 
 that the forces that have been assailing and disintegrating 
 the Normal Social Life, which have been, on the one 
 hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private 
 freedom, and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially danger- 
 ous power, and, on the other, labour hordes, for the 
 most part urban, without any property or outlook except 
 continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have 
 substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the 
 independent peasant almost completely, and in America 
 seem to be arresting any general development of the 
 Normal Social Life at all , are forces of wide and indefinite 
 
 no 
 
The Great State 
 
 possibility that need to be controlled by a collective effort 
 implying a collective design, deiSected from merely in- 
 jurious consequences and organised for a new human 
 vs^elfare upon new lines. They agree with that class 
 of thinking I have distinguished as the Conservators 
 in their recognition of vast contemporary disorders and 
 their denial of the essential beneficence of change. But 
 while the former seem to regard all novelty and innova- 
 tion as a mere inundation to be met, banked back, de- 
 feated and survived, these more hopeful and adventurous 
 minds would rather regard contemporary change as 
 amounting on the whole to the tumultuous and almost 
 catastrophic opening-up of possible new channels, the 
 violent opportunity of vast, deep, new ways to great 
 unprecedented human ends, ends that are neither feared 
 nor evaded. 
 
 Now while the Conservators are continually talking 
 of the "eternal facts" of human life and human nature 
 and falling back upon a conception of permanence that 
 is continually less true as our perspectives extend, these 
 others are full of the conception of adaptation, of de- 
 liberate change in relationship and institution to meet 
 changing needs. I would suggest for them, therefore, 
 as opposed to the Conservators and contrasted with the 
 Planless Progressives, the name of Constructors. They 
 are the extreme right, as it were, while the Planless 
 Progressives are the extreme left of Anti-Conservator 
 thought. 
 
 I believe that these distinctions I have made cover 
 practically every clear form of contemporary thinking, 
 and are a better and more helpful classification than any 
 now current. But, of course, nearly every individual 
 nowadays is at least a little confused, and will be found 
 
 III 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 to wobble in the course even of a brief discussion between 
 one attitude and the other. This is a separation of 
 opinions rather than of persons. And particularly that 
 word Socialism has become so vague and incoherent that 
 for a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to give 
 no indication whatever whether he is a Conservator like 
 William Morris, a non-Constructor like Karl Marx, or 
 a Constructor of any of half a dozen different schools. 
 On the whole, however, modern socialism tends to fall 
 towards the Constructor wing. So, too, do those various 
 movements in England and Germany and France called 
 variously nationalist and imperialist, and so do the 
 American civic and social reformers. Under the sam'C 
 heading must come such attempts to give the vague im- 
 pulses of Syndicalism a concrete definition as the " Guild 
 Socialism" of Mr. Orage. All these movements are 
 agreed that the world is progressive towards a novel and 
 unprecedented social order, not necessarily and fatally 
 better, and that it needs organised and even institutional 
 guidance thither, however much they differ as to the 
 form that order should assume. 
 
 For the greater portion of a century socialism has 
 been before the world, and it is not perhaps premature 
 to attempt a word or so of analysis of that great move- 
 ment in the new terms we are here employing. The 
 origins of the socialist idea were complex and multi- 
 farious, never at any time has it succeeded in separating 
 out a statement of itself that was at once simple, com- 
 plete, and acceptable to any large proportion of those 
 who call themselves socialists. But always it has pointed 
 to two or three definite things. The first of these is 
 that unlimited freedoms of private property, with in- 
 creasing facilities of exchange, combination, and aggran- 
 
 112 
 
The Great State 
 
 disement, become more and more dangerous to human 
 liberty by the expropriation and reduction to private 
 wages slavery of larger and larger proportions of the 
 population. Every school of socialism states this in 
 some more or less complete form, however divergent 
 the remedial methods suggested by the different schools. 
 And, next, every school of socialism accepts the concen- 
 tration of management and property as necessary, and 
 declines to contemplate what is the typical Conservator 
 remedy, its re-fragmentation. Accordingly it sets up not 
 only against the large private owner, but against owners 
 generally, the idea of a public proprietor, the State, 
 which shall hold in the collective interest. But where 
 the earlier socialisms stopped short, and where to this 
 day socialism is vague, divided, and unprepared, is upon 
 the psychological problems involved in that new and 
 largely unprecedented form of proprietorship, and upon 
 the still more subtle problems of its attainment. These 
 are vast, and profoundly, widely, and multitudinously 
 difi&cult problems, and it was natural and inevitable that 
 the earlier socialists in the first enthusiasm of their idea 
 should minimise these difficulties, pretend in the fullness 
 of their faith that partial answers to objections were 
 complete answers, and display the common weaknesses 
 of honest propaganda the whole world over. Socialism 
 is now old enough to know better. Few modern socialists 
 present their faith as a complete panacea, and most are 
 now setting to work in earnest upon these long-shirked 
 preliminary problems of human interaction through which 
 the vital problem of a collective head and brain can alone 
 be approached. 
 
 A considerable proportion of the socialist movement 
 remains, as it has been from the first, vaguely democratic, 
 i 113 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 It points to collective ownership with no indication of 
 the administrative scheme it contemplates to realise that 
 intention. Necessarily it remains a formless claim 
 without hands to take hold of the thing it desires. In- 
 deed, in a large number of cases it is scarcely more than 
 a resentful consciousness in the expropriated masses 
 of social disintegration. It spends its force very largely 
 in mere revenges upon property as such, attacks simply 
 destructive by reason of the absence of any definite 
 ulterior scheme. It is an ill-equipped and planless 
 belligerent who must destroy whatever he captures be- 
 cause he can neither use nor take away. A council of 
 democratic socialists in possession of London would be 
 as capable of an orderly and sustained administration as 
 the Anabaptists in Munster. But the discomforts and 
 disorders of our present planless system do tend steadily 
 to the development of this crude socialistic spirit in the 
 mass of the proletariat ; merely vindictive attacks upon 
 property, sabotage, and the general strike are the logical 
 and inevitable consequences of an uncontrolled concen- 
 tration of property in a few hands, and such things must 
 and will go on, the deep undertow in the deliquescence 
 of the Normal Social Life, until a new justice, a new 
 scheme of compensations and satisfactions is attained, 
 or the Normal Social Life re-emerges. 
 
 Fabian socialism was the first systematic attempt to 
 meet the fatal absence of administrative schemes in the 
 earlier socialisms. It can scarcely be regarded now as 
 anything but an interesting failure, but a failure that 
 has all the educational value of a first reconnaissance 
 into unexplored territory. Starting from that attack on 
 aggregating property, which is the common starting- 
 point of all socialist projects, the Fabians, appalled at 
 
 114 
 
The Great State 
 
 the obvious difficulties of honest confiscation and an open 
 transfer from private to public hands, conceived the ex- 
 traordinary idea of filching property for the state. A 
 small body of people of extreme astuteness v/ere to bring 
 about the municipalisation and nationalisation first of 
 this great system of property and then of that, in a 
 manner so artful that the millionaires were to wake up 
 one morning at last, and behold, they would find them- 
 selves poor men! For a decade or more Mr. Pease, 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, Mrs. 
 Besant, Dr. Lawson Dodd, and their associates of the 
 London Fabian Society, did pit their wits and ability, 
 or at any rate the wits and ability of their leisure 
 moments, against the embattled capitalists of England 
 and the world, in this complicated and delicate enterprise, 
 without any apparent diminution of the larger accumula- 
 tions of wealth. But in addition they developed another 
 side of Fabianism, still more subtle, which professed to 
 be a kind of restoration in kind of property to the pro- 
 letariat, and in this direction they were more successful. 
 A dexterous use, they decided, was to be made of the 
 Poor Law, the public health authority, the education 
 authority, and building regulations and so forth, to create, 
 so to speak, a communism of the lower levels. The 
 mass of people whom the forces of change had expro- 
 priated were to be given a certain minimum of food, 
 shelter, education, and sanitation, and this, the sociahsts 
 were assured, could be used as^ the thin end of the 
 wedge towards a complete communism. The minimum, 
 once established, could obviously be raised continually 
 until either -everybody had what they needed, or the 
 resources of society gave out and set a limit to the 
 process. 
 
 115 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 This second method of attack brought the Fabian 
 movement into co-operation with a large amount of 
 benevolent and constructive influence outside the socialist 
 ranks altogether. Few wealthy people really grudge the 
 poor a share of the necessities of life, and most are quite 
 willing to assist in projects for such a distribution. But 
 while these schemes naturally involved a very great 
 amount of regulation and regimentation of the affairs of 
 the poor, the Fabian Society fell away more and more 
 from its associated proposals for the socialisation of the 
 rich. The Fabian project changed steadily in character 
 until at last it ceased to be in any sense antagonistic to 
 wealth as such. If the lion did not exactly lie down 
 with the lamb, at any rate the man with the gun and 
 the alleged social mad dog returned very peaceably to- 
 gether. The Fabian hunt was up. 
 
 Great financiers contributed generously to a School 
 of Economics that had been founded with moneys left 
 to the Fabian Society by earlier enthusiasts for socialist 
 propaganda and education. It remained for Mr. Belloc 
 to point the moral of the whole development with a 
 phrase, to note that Fabianism no longer aimed at the 
 socialisation of the whole community, but only at the 
 socialisation of the poor. The first really complete 
 project for a new social order to replace the Normal Social 
 Life was before the world, and this project was the 
 compulsory regimentation of the workers and the com- 
 plete state control of labour under a new plutocracy. 
 Our present chaos was to be organised into a Servile 
 State. 
 
 ii6 
 
The Great State 
 
 §4 
 
 Now to many of us who found the general spirit of the 
 socialist movement at least hopeful and attractive and 
 sympathetic, this would be an almost tragic conclusion, 
 did we believe that Fabianism was anything more than 
 the first experiment in planning — and one almost in- 
 evitably shallow and presumptuous — of the long series 
 that may be necessary before a clear light breaks upon 
 the road humanity must follow. But we decline to be 
 forced by this one intellectual fiasco towards the laissez 
 faire of the Individualist and the Marxist, or to accept 
 the Normal Social Life with its atmosphere of hens and 
 cows and dung, its incessant toil, its servitude of women, 
 and its endless repetitions as the only tolerable life con- 
 ceivable for the bulk of mankind — as the ultimate life, 
 that is, of mankind. With less arrogance and confidence, 
 but it may be with a firmer faith, we declare that we be- 
 lieve a more spacious social order than any that exists or 
 ever has existed, a Peace of the World in which there is 
 an almost universal freedom, health, happiness, and well- 
 being, and which contains the seeds of a still greater 
 future, is possible to mankind. We propose to begin 
 again with the recognition of those same difficulties the 
 Fabians first realised. But we do not propose to organise 
 a society, form a group for the control of the two chief 
 political parties, bring about "socialism" in twenty-five 
 years, or do anything beyond contributing in our place 
 and measure to that constructive discussion whose real 
 magnitude we now begin to realise. 
 
 We have faith in a possible future, but it is a faith 
 that makes the quality of that future entirely dependent 
 upon the strength and clearness of purpose that this 
 
 117 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 present time can produce. We do not believe the greater 
 social state is inevitable. 
 
 Yet there is, we hold, a certain qualified inevitability 
 about this greater social state because we believe any 
 social state not affording a general contentment , a general 
 freedom, and a general and increasing fullness of life, 
 must sooner or later collapse and distintegrate again, and 
 revert more or less completely to the Normal Social 
 Life, and because we believe the Normal Social Life is 
 itself thick-sown with the seeds of fresh beginnings. 
 The Normal Social Life has never at any time been 
 absolutely permanent, always it has carried within itself 
 the germs of enterprise and adventure and exchanges 
 that finally attack its stability. The superimposed social 
 order of to-day, such as it is, with its huge development 
 of expropriated labour, and the schemes of the later 
 Fabians to fix this state of affairs in an organised form 
 and render it plausibly tolerable, seem also doomed to 
 accumulate catastrophic tensions. Bureaucratic schemes 
 for establishing the regular lifelong subordination of a 
 labouring class, enlivened though they may be by frequent 
 inspection, disciplinary treatment during seasons of un- 
 employment, compulsory temperance, free medical 
 attendance, and a cheap and shallow elementary educa- 
 tion, fail to satisfy the restless cravings in the heart of 
 man. They are cravings that even the baffling methods 
 of the most ingeniously worked Conciliation Boards 
 cannot permanently restrain. The drift of any Servile 
 State must be towards a class revolt, paralysing sabot- 
 age, and a general strike. The more rigid and complete 
 the Servile State becomes, the more thorough will be 
 its ultimate failure. Its fate is decay or explosion. From 
 its debris we shall either revert to the Normal Social 
 
 ii8 
 
The Great State 
 
 Life and begin again the long struggle towards that 
 ampler, happier, juster arrangement of human afPairs 
 which we of this book, at any rate, believe to be possible, 
 or we shall pass into the twilight of mankind. 
 
 This greater social life we put, then, as the only real 
 alternative to the Normal Social Life from which man 
 is continually escaping. For it we do not propose to 
 use the expressions the "socialist state'' or ** socialism," 
 because we believe those terms have now by constant 
 confused use become so battered and bent and discoloured 
 by irrelevant associations as to be rather misleading than 
 expressive. We propose to use the term The Great State 
 to express this ideal of a social system no longer localised , 
 no longer immediately tied to and conditioned by the 
 
 /cultivation of the land, world-wide in its interests and 
 outlook and catholic in its tolerance and sympathy, a 
 system of great individual freedom with a universal 
 understanding among its citizens of a collective thought 
 
 \and purpose. 
 
 Now, the difficulties that lie in the way of humanity 
 in its complex and toilsome journey through the coming 
 centuries towards this Great State are fundamentally 
 difficulties of adaptation and adjustment. To no con- 
 ceivable social state is man inherently fitted : he is a 
 creature of jealousy and suspicion, unstable, restless, 
 acquisitive, aggressive, intractable, and of a most subtle 
 and nimble dishonesty. Moreover, he is imaginative, 
 adventurous, and inventive. His nature and instincts are 
 as much in conflict with the necessary restrictions and 
 subjugation of the Normal Social Life as they are likely 
 to be with any other social net that necessity may weave 
 about him. But the Normal Social Life has this advan- 
 tage, that it has a vast accumulated moral tradition and 
 
 119 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 a minutely worked-out material method. All the funda- 
 mental institutions have arisen in relation to it and are 
 ^Adapted to its conditions. To revert to it after any 
 phase of social chaos and distress is and will continue for 
 many years to be the path of least resistance for per- 
 plexed humanity. 
 
 This conception of the Great State, on the other hand, 
 is still altogether unsubstantial. It is a project as dream- 
 like to-day as electric lighting, electric traction, or 
 aviation would have been in the year 1850. In 1850 a 
 man reasonably conversant with the physical science of 
 his time could have declared with a very considerable 
 confidence that, given a certain measure of persistence 
 and social security, these things were more likely to be 
 attained than not in the course of the next century. But 
 such a prophecy was conditional on the preliminary 
 accumulation of a considerable amount of knowledge, on 
 many experiments and failures. Had the world of 1850, 
 by some wave of impulse, placed all its resources in the 
 hands of the ablest scientific man alive, and asked him 
 to produce a practicable paying electric vehicle before 
 1852, at best he would have produced some clumsy, 
 curious toy, more probably he would have fail-ed altogether ; 
 and, similarly, if the whole population of the world came 
 to the present writer and promised meekly to do whatever 
 it was told, we should find ourselves still very largely 
 at a loss in our project for a millennium. Yet just as 
 nearly every man at work upon Voltaic electricity in 
 1850 knew that he was preparing for electric traction, 
 so do I know quite certainly, in spite of a whole row of 
 unsolved problems before me, that I am working towards 
 the Great State. 
 
 Let me briefly recapitulate the main problems which 
 
 I20 
 
The Great State 
 
 have to be attacked in the attempt to realise the outline 
 of the Great State. At the base of the whole order 
 there must be some method of agricultural production, 
 and if the agricultural labourer and cottager and the 
 ancient life of the small householder on the holding, a 
 life laborious, prolific, illiterate, limited, and in imme- 
 diate contact with the land used, is to recede and dis- 
 appear, it must recede and disappear before methods 
 upon a much larger scale, employing wholesale machinery 
 and involving great economies. It is alleged by modem 
 writers that the permanent residence of the cultivator 
 in close relation to his ground is a legacy from the days 
 of cumbrous and expensive transit, that the great pro- 
 portion of farm work is seasonal, and that a migration 
 to and fro between rural and urban conditions would 
 be entirely practicable in a largely planned community. 
 The agricultural population could move out of town into 
 an open-air life as the spring approached, and return for 
 spending, pleasure, and education as the days shortened. 
 Already something of this sort occurs under extremely 
 unfavourable conditions in the movement of the fruit 
 and hop pickers from the east end of London into Kent, 
 but that is a mere hint of the extended picnic which a 
 broadly planned cultivation might afford. A fully de- 
 veloped civilisation, employing machines in the hands of 
 highly skilled men, will minimise toil to the very utmost, 
 no man will shove where a machine can shove, or carry 
 where a machine can carry ; but there will remain , more 
 particularly in the summer, a vast amount of hand opera- 
 tions, invigorating and even attractive to the urban popu- 
 lation. Given short hours, good pay, and all the jolly 
 amusement in the evening camp that a free, happy, and 
 intelligent people will develop for themselves, and there 
 
 121 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 will be little difficulty about this particular class of work 
 to differentiate it from any other sort of necessary labour. 
 
 One passes, therefore, with no definite transition from 
 the root problem of agricultural production in the Great 
 State to the wider problem of labour in general. 
 
 A glance at the countryside conjures up a picture 
 of extensive tracts being cultivated on a wholesale scale, 
 of skilled men directing great ploughing, sowing, and 
 reaping plants, steering cattle and sheep about carefully 
 designed enclosures, constructing channels and guiding 
 sewage towards its proper destination on the fields, and 
 then of added crowds of genial people coming out to 
 spray trees and plants, pick and sort and pack fruits. 
 But who are these people? Why are they in particular 
 doing this for the community? Is our Great State still 
 to have a majority of people glad to do commonplace 
 work for mediocre wages, and will there be other indi- 
 viduals who will ride by on the roads, sympathetically, 
 no doubt, but with a secret sense of superiority? So 
 one opens the general problem of the organisation for 
 labour. 
 
 I am careful here to write "for labour" and not **of 
 Labour," because it is entirely against the spirit of the 
 Great State that any section of the people should be 
 set aside as a class to do most of the monotonous, 
 laborious, and uneventful things for the community. 
 That is practically the present arrangement, and that, 
 with a quickened sense of the need of breaking people 
 in to such a life, is the ideal of the bureaucratic Servile 
 State to which, in common with the Conservators, we 
 are bitterly opposed. And here I know I am at my 
 most difficult, most speculative, and most revolutionary 
 point. We who look to the Great State as the present 
 
The Great State 
 
 aim of human progress believe a state may solve its 
 economic problem without any section whatever of the 
 community being condemned to lifelong labour. And 
 contemporary events, the phenomena of recent strikes, 
 the phenomena of sabotage, carry out the suggestion that 
 in a community where nearly everyone reads exten- 
 sively, travels about, sees the charm and variety in the 
 lives of prosperous and leisurely people, no class is going 
 to submit permanently to modern labour conditions 
 without extreme resistance, even after the most elaborate 
 Labour Conciliation schemes and social minima are estab- 
 lished. Things are altogether too stimulating to the 
 imagination nowadays. Of all impossible social dreams 
 that belief in tranquillised and submissive and virtuous 
 Labour is the wildest of all. No sort of modern men 
 will stand it. They will as a class do any vivid and 
 disastrous thing rather than stand it. Even the illiterate 
 peasant will only endure lifelong toil under the stimulus 
 of private ownership and with the consolations of re- 
 ligion ; and the typical modern worker has neither the 
 one nor the other. For a time, indeed, for a generation 
 or so even, a labour mass may be fooled or coerced, but 
 in the end it will break out against its subjection, even 
 if it breaks out to a general social catastrophe. 
 
 We have, in fact, to invent for the Great State, if 
 we are to suppose any Great State at all, an economic 
 method without any specific labour class. If we cannot 
 do so, we had better throw ourselves in with the Con- 
 servators forthwith, for they are right and we are absurd. 
 Adhesion to the conception of the Great State involves 
 adhesion to the belief that the amount of regular labour, 
 skilled and unskilled, required to produce everything 
 necessary for everyone living in its highly elaborate 
 
 123 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 civilisation may, under modern conditions, with the help 
 of scientific economy and power-producing machinery, be 
 reduced to so small a number of working hours per head 
 in proportion to the average life of the citizen, as to 
 be met as regards the greater moiety of it by the payment 
 of wages over and above the gratuitous share of each 
 individual in the general output ; and as regards the 
 residue, a residue of rough, disagreeable, and monotonous 
 operations, by some form of conscription, which will de- 
 mand a year or so, let us say, of each person's life for the 
 public service. If we reflect that in the contemporary 
 state there is already food, shelter, and clothing of a sort 
 for everyone, in spite of the fact that enormous numbers 
 of people do no productive work at all because they are 
 too well off, that great numbers are out of work, great 
 numbers by bad nutrition and training incapable of work, 
 and that an enormous amount of the work actually done 
 is the overlapping production of competitive trade and 
 work upon such politically necessary but socially useless 
 things as Dreadnoughts, it becomes clear that the 
 absolutely unavoidable labour in a modern community 
 and its ratio to the available vitality must be of very 
 small account indeed. But all this has still to be worked 
 out even in the most general terms. An intelligent 
 science of economics should afford standards and tech- 
 nicalities and systematised facts upon which to base an 
 estimate. The point was raised a quarter of a century 
 ago by Morris in his '*News from Nowhere," and indeed 
 it was already discussed by More in his "Utopia." Our 
 contemporary economics is, however, still a foolish, pre- 
 tentious pseudo-science, a festering mass of assumptions 
 about buying and selling and wages-paying, and one 
 would as soon consult Bradshaw or the works of Dumas 
 
 124 
 
The Great State 
 
 as our orthodox professors of economics for any light 
 upon this fundamental matter. 
 
 Moreover, we believe that there is a real disposition 
 to work in human beings, and that in a well-equipped 
 community, in which no one was under an unavoidable 
 urgency to work, the greater proportion of productive 
 operations could be made sufficiently attractive to make 
 them desirable occupations. As for the irreducible residue 
 of undesirable toil, I owe to my friend the late Professor 
 William James this suggestion of a general conscription 
 and a period of public service for everyone, a suggestion 
 which greatly occupied his thoughts during the last years 
 of his life. He was profoundly convinced of the high 
 educational and disciplinary value of universal compul- 
 sory military service, and of the need of something more 
 than a sentimental ideal of duty in public life. He would 
 have had the whole population taught in the schools and 
 prepared for this year (or whatever period it had to be) 
 of patient and heroic labour, the men for the mines, 
 the fisheries, the sanitary services, railway routine, the 
 women for hospital, and perhaps educational work, and 
 so forth. He believed such a service would permeate 
 the whole state with a sense of civic obligation. . . . 
 
 But behind all these conceivable triumphs of scientific 
 adjustment and direction lies the infinitely greater diffi- 
 culty on our way to the Great State, the difficulty of 
 direction. What sort of people are going to distribute 
 the work of the community, decide what is or is not to 
 be done, determine wages, initiate enterprises ; and under 
 what sort of criticism, checks, and controls are they 
 going to do this delicate and extensive work? With this 
 we open the whole problem of government, administra- 
 tion, and officialdom. 
 
 "5 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 The Marxist and the democratic socialist generally 
 shirk this riddle altogether; the Fabian conception of a 
 bureaucracy, official to the extent of being a distinct class 
 and cult, exists only as a starting-point for healthy 
 repudiations. Whatever else may be worked out in the 
 subtler answers our later time prepares, nothing can be 
 clearer than that the necessary machinery of government 
 must be elaborately organised to prevent the development 
 of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy, tacit or 
 expressed, against the normal man. Quite apart from 
 the danger of unsympathetic and fatally irritating govern- 
 ment, there can be little or no doubt that the method of 
 making men officials for life is quite the worst way of 
 getting official duties done. Officialdom is a species 
 of incompetence. This rather priggish, teachable, 
 and well-behaved sort of boy, who is attracted by the 
 prospect of assured income and a pension to win his 
 way into the Civil Service, and who then by varied 
 assiduities rises to a sort of timidly vindictive importance, 
 is the last person to whom we would willingly entrust the 
 vital interests of a nation. We want people who know 
 about life at large, who will come to the public service 
 seasoned by experience, not people who have specialised 
 and acquired that sort of knowledge which is called, in 
 much the same spirit of qualification as one speaks of 
 German Silver, Expert Knowledge. It is clear our public 
 servants and officials must be so only for their periods of 
 service. They must be taught by life, and not ** trained " 
 by pedagogues. In every continuing job there is a time 
 when one is crude and blundering, a time, the best time, 
 when one is full of the freshness and happiness of doing 
 well, and a time when routine has largely replaced the 
 stimulus of novelty. The Great State will, I feel con- 
 
 126 
 
The Great State 
 
 vinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circum- 
 stance in the Ufe of every citizen ; it will value a certain 
 amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite 
 omniscience of the stale official. On that score of the 
 necessity or versatility, if on no other score, I am flatly 
 antagonistic to the conceptions of "Guild Socialism" 
 which have arisen recently out of the impact of Mr. Penty 
 and Syndicalism upon the uneasy intelligence of Mr. 
 Orage. 
 
 And since the Fabian socialists have created a wide- 
 spread belief that in their projected state every man will 
 be necessarily a public servant or a public pupil because 
 the state will be the only employer and the only educator, 
 it is necessary to point out that the Great State pre- 
 supposes neither the one nor the other. It is a form of 
 liberty and not a form of enslavement. We agree with 
 the older forms of socialism in supposing an initial pro- 
 prietary independence in every citizen. The citizen is a 
 shareholder in the state. Above that and after that, he 
 works if he chooses. But if he likes to live on his 
 minimum and do nothing — though such a type of charac- 
 ter is scarcely conceivable — he can. His earning is his 
 own surplus. Above the basal economics of the Great 
 State we assume with confidence there will be a huge 
 surplus of free spending upon extra-collective ends. 
 Public organisations, for example, may distribute im- 
 partially and possibly even print and make ink and paper 
 for the newspapers in the Great State, but they will 
 certainly not own them. Only doctrine-driven men have 
 ever ventured to think they would. Nor will the state 
 control writers and artists, for example, nor the stage 
 — though it may build and own theatres — the tailor, the 
 dressmaker, the restaurant cook, an enormous multitude 
 
 127 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 of other busy workers-for-preferences. In the Great 
 State of the future, as in the life of the more prosperous 
 classes of to-day, the greater proportion of occupations 
 and activities will be private and free. 
 
 I would like to underline in the most emphatic way 
 that it is possible to have this Great State, essentially 
 socialistic, owning and running the land and all the great 
 public services, sustaining everybody in absolute freedom 
 at a certain minimum of comfort and well-being, and still 
 leaving most of the interests, amusements, and adorn- 
 ments of the individual life, and all sorts of collective 
 concerns, social and political discussion, religious worship, 
 philosophy, and the like to the free personal initiatives 
 of entirely unofficial people. 
 
 This still leaves the problem of systematic knowledge 
 and research, and all the associated problems of aesthetic, 
 moral, and intellectual initiative to be worked out in 
 detail ; but at least it dispels the nightmare of a collective 
 mind organised as a branch of the civil service, with 
 authors, critics, artists, scientific investigators appointed 
 in a phrensy of wire-pulling — as nowadays the British 
 state appoints its bishops for the care of its collective 
 soul. 
 
 Let me now indicate how these general views affect 
 the problem of family organisation and the problem of 
 women's freedom. In the Normal Social Life the 
 position of women is easily defined. They are sub- 
 ordinated but important. The citizenship rests with the 
 man, and the woman's relation to the community as a 
 whole is through a man. But within that limitation her 
 functions as mother, wife, and home-maker are cardinal. 
 It is one of the entirely unforeseen consequences that 
 have arisen from the decay of the Normal Social Life 
 
 128 
 
The Great State 
 
 and its autonomous home that great numbers of women 
 while still subordinate have become profoundly unim- 
 portant. They have ceased to a very large extent to bear 
 children, they have dropped most of their home-making 
 a'rts, they no longer nurse nor educate such children as 
 they have, and they have taken on no new functions that 
 compensate for these dwindling activities of the domestic 
 interior. That subjugation w^hich is a vital condition to 
 the Normal Social Life does not seem to be necessary 
 to the Great State. It may or it may not be necessary. 
 And here we enter upon the most difficult of all our 
 problems. The whole spirit of the Great State is against 
 any avoidable subjugation ; but the whole spirit of that 
 science which will animate the Great State forbids us to 
 ignore woman's functional and temperamental differences. 
 A new status has still to be invented for women, a 
 Feminine Citizenship differing in certain respects from 
 the normal masculine citizenship. Its conditions remain 
 to be worked out. We have indeed to work out an entire 
 new system of relations between men and women, that 
 will be free from servitude, aggression, provocation, or 
 parasitism. The public Endowment of Motherhood as 
 such may perhaps be the first broad suggestion of the 
 quality of this new status. A new type of family, a 
 mutual alliance in the place of a subjugation, is perhaps 
 the most startling of all the conceptions which confront 
 us directly we turn ourselves definitely towards the Great 
 State. 
 
 And as our conception of the Great State grows, so 
 we shall begin to realise the nature of the problem of 
 transition, the problem of w^hat we may best do in the 
 confusion of the present time to elucidate and render 
 practicable this new phase of human organisation. Of 
 J 129 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 one thing there can be no doubt, that whatever increases 
 thought and knowledge moves towards our goal ; and 
 equally certain is it that nothing leads thither that 
 tampers with the freedom of spirit, the independence of 
 80ul in common men and women. In many directions, 
 therefore, the believer in the Great State will display a 
 jealous watchfulness of contemporary developments rather 
 than a premature constructiveness. We must w^atch 
 wealth ; but quite as necessary it is to watch the legislator, 
 who mistakes propaganda for progress and class exaspera- 
 tion to satisfy class vindictiveness for construction. 
 Supremely important is it to keep discussion open, to 
 tolerate no limitation on the freedom of speech, writing, 
 art and book distribution, and to sustain the utmost 
 liberty of criticism upon all contemporary institutions 
 and processes. 
 
 This briefly is the programme of problems and effort 
 to which my idea of the Great State, as the goal of 
 contemporary progress, leads me. 
 
 The diagram on p. 131 shows compactly the gist 
 of the preceding discussion ; it gives the view of social 
 development upon which I base all my political con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 130 
 
The Great State 
 
 THE NORMAL SOCIAL LIFE 
 
 produces an increasing surplus of energy and opportunity, more 
 particularly under modern conditions of scientific organisation 
 and power production ; and this through the operation of rent 
 and of usury tends to , 
 
 (a) release and (b) expropriate 
 
 an increasing proportion of the population to become : 
 (a) A LEISURE CLASS and (6) a labour class 
 
 under no urgent compulsion to 
 work 
 1 I 
 
 divorced from the land and 
 
 living upon uncertain wages 
 
 1 1 
 
 which may de- 
 generate into 
 a waster class 
 
 which may degen- 
 erate into a sweat- 
 ed, overworked, 
 violently resentful 
 and destructive 
 rebel class 
 
 and produce a 
 Social Dkbaclk 
 
 which may be- 
 come a Governing 
 Class (with wasttir 
 elements) in 
 an un progressive 
 Bureaucratic 
 Skrvile State 
 
 -^' 
 
 which may be- 
 come the con- 
 trolled, regimen- 
 ted, and discip- 
 lined Labour Class 
 of an unprogres- 
 sive Bureaucratic 
 Sebvilk Statb 
 
 which may become 
 the whole community 
 of the Great State 
 working under vari- 
 ous motives and in- 
 ducements, but not 
 constantly, nor per- 
 manently, nor un- 
 willingly 
 
 which may be 
 
 rendered needless 
 by a universal 
 compulsory year 
 or so of labour ser- 
 vice together with 
 a scieutiiic organ- 
 isation of produc- 
 tion, and so reab- 
 sorbed by re-en- 
 dowment into the 
 Leisure Class of 
 the Great State 
 
 131 
 
THE COMMON SENSE OF WARFARE 
 
 §1 
 
 Conscription 
 
 I WANT to say as compactly as possible why I do not 
 believe that conscription would increase the military 
 efficiency of this country, and why I think it might be a 
 disastrous step for this country to take. 
 
 By conscription I mean the compulsory enlistment 
 for a term of service in the Army of the whole manhood 
 of the country. And I am writing now from the point 
 of view merely of military effectiveness. The educational 
 value of a universal national service, the idea which as 
 a Socialist I support very heartily, of making every 
 citizen give a year or so of his life to our public needs, 
 are matters quite outside my present discussion. What 
 I am writing about now is this idea that the country 
 can be strengthened for war by making every man in it 
 a bit of a soldier. 
 
 And I want the reader to be perfectly clear about 
 the position I assume with regard to war preparations 
 generally. I am not pleading for peace when there is 
 no peace ; this country has been constantly threatened 
 during the past decade, and is threatened now by gigantic 
 hostile preparations ; it is our common interest to be 
 and to keep at the maximum of military efficiency possible 
 to us. My case is not merely that conscription will not 
 contribute to that, but that it would be a monstrous 
 diversion of our energy and emotion and material re- 
 
 132 
 
The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 sources from the things that need urgently to be done. 
 It would be like a boxer filling his arms with empty 
 boxing-gloves and then rushing — his face protruding over 
 the armful — into the fray. 
 
 Let me make my attack on this prevalent and in- 
 creasing superstition of the British need for conscription 
 in two lines, one following the other. For, firstly, it is 
 true that Britain at the present time is no more capable 
 of creating such a conscript army as France or Germany 
 possesses in the next ten years than she is of covering 
 her soil with a tropical forest, and, secondly, it is equally 
 true that if she had such an army it would not be of 
 the slightest use to her. For the conscript armies in 
 which Europe still so largely believes are only of use 
 against conscript armies and adversaries* who will 
 consent to play the rules of the German war game ; 
 they are, if we chose to determine they shall be, if 
 w© chose to deal with them as they should be dealt 
 with, as out of date as a Roman legion or a Zulu 
 impi. 
 
 Now, first, as to the impossibility of getting our great 
 army into existence. All those people who write and 
 talk so glibly in favour of conscription seem to forget 
 that to take a common man, and more particularly a 
 townsman, clap him into a uniform and put a rifle in 
 his hand does not make a soldier. He has to be taught 
 not only the use of his weapons, but the methods of a 
 strange and unfamiliar life out of doors ; he has to be 
 not simply drilled, but accustomed to the difficult modern 
 necessities of open order fighting, of taking cover, of 
 entrenchment, and he has to have created within him, 
 so that it will stand the shock of seeing men killed round 
 about him, confidence in himself, in his officers, and the 
 
 133 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 methods and weapons of his side. Body, mind, and 
 imagination have all to be trained — and they need 
 trainers. The conversion of a thousand citizens into 
 an3^thing better than a sheep-like militia demands the 
 enthusiastic services of scores of able and experienced 
 instructors who know^ what war is ; the creation of a 
 universal army demands the services of many score's of 
 thousands of not simply "old soldiers," but keen, expert, 
 modem-minded officers. 
 
 Without these officers our citizen army would be a 
 hydra without heads. And we haven't these officers. 
 We haven't a tithe of them. 
 
 We haven't these officers, and we can't make them 
 in a hurry. It takes at least five years to make an officer 
 who knows his trade. It needs a special gift, in addition 
 to that knowledge, to make a man able to impart it. 
 And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the 
 matter, because India and our other vast areas of service 
 and opportunity overseas drain away a large proportion 
 of just those able and educated men who would in other 
 countries gravitate towards the army. Such small wealth 
 of officers as we have — and I am quite prepared to 
 believe that the officers we have are among the very 
 best in the w^orld — are scarcely enough to go round our 
 present supply of private soldiers. And the best and 
 most brilliant among this scanty supply are being drawn 
 upon more and more for aerial work, and for all that in- 
 creasing quantity of highly specialised services which are 
 manifestly destined to be the real fighting forces of the 
 future. We cannot spare the best of our officers for 
 training conscripts ; w^e shall get the dismallest results 
 from the worst of them ; and so even if it were a vital 
 necessity for our country to have an army of all its man- 
 
 134 
 
The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 hood now, we could not have it, and it would be a mere 
 last convulsion to attempt to make it with the means 
 at our disposal. 
 
 But that brings me to my second contention, which 
 is that we do not want such an army. I believe that 
 the vast masses of men in unifoiTn maintained by the 
 Continental Powers at the present time are enormously 
 overrated as fighting machines. I see Germany in the 
 likeness of a boxer with a mailed fist as big as and rather 
 heavier than its body, and I am convinced that when 
 the moment comes for that mailed fist to be lifted, the 
 whole disproportionate system will topple over. The 
 miUtary ascendancy of the future lies with the country 
 that dares to experiment most, that experiments best, 
 and meanwhile keeps its actual fighting force fit and 
 admirable and small and flexible. The experience of 
 war during the last fifteen years has been to show 
 repeatedly the enormous defensive power of small, 
 scientifically handled bodies of men. These huge con- 
 script armies are made up not of masses of military 
 muscle, but of a huge proportion of militaiy fat. Their 
 one way of fighting will be to fall upon an antagonist 
 with all their available weight, and if he is mobile and 
 dexterous enough to decline that issue of adiposity they 
 will become a mere embarrassment to their own people. 
 jModern weapons and modem contrivance are continually 
 decreasing the number of men who can be employed 
 efficiently upon a length of front. I doubt if there is 
 any use for more than 400,000 men upon the whole 
 Franco-Belgian frontier at the present time. Such an 
 army, properly supplied, could — so far as terrestrial 
 forces are concerned — hold that frontier against any 
 number of assailants. The bigger the forces brought 
 
 135 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 against it the sooner the exhaustion of the attacking 
 power. Now, it is for employment upon that frontier, 
 and for no other conceivable purpose in the world, that 
 Great Britain is asked to create a gigantic conscript 
 army. 
 
 And if too big an army is likely to be a mere encum- 
 brance in war, it is perhaps even a still graver blunder 
 to maintain one during that conflict of preparation which 
 is at present the European substitute for actual hostilities. 
 It consumes. It produces nothing. It not only eats 
 and drinks and wears out its clothes and withdraws men 
 from industry, but under the stress of invention it needs 
 constantly to be re-armed and freshly equipped at an 
 expenditure proportionate to its size. So long as the 
 conflict of preparation goes on, then the bigger the army 
 your adversary maintains under arms the bigger is his 
 expenditure and the less his earning power. The less 
 the force you employ to keep your adversary over-armed, 
 and the longer you remain at peace wdth him while he 
 is over-armed, the greater is your advantage. There 
 is only one profitable use for any army, and that is 
 victorious conflict. Every army that is not engaged in 
 victorious conflict is an organ of national expenditure, 
 an exhausting growth in the national body. And for 
 Great Britain an attempt to create a conscript army 
 would involve the very maximum of moral and material 
 exhaustion with the minimum of military efficiency. It 
 would be a disastrous waste of resources that we need 
 most urgently for other things. 
 
 136 
 
The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 §2 
 
 In the popular imagination the Dreadnought is still the 
 one instrument of naval war. We count our strength 
 in Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts, and so long 
 as we are spending our national resources upon them 
 faster than any other country, if we sink at least d6160 
 for every £100 sunk in these obsolescent monsters by 
 Germany, we' have a reassuring sense of keeping ahead 
 and being thoroughly safe. This confidence in big, very 
 expensive battleships is, I believe and hope, shared by 
 the German Government and by Europe generally, but 
 it is, nevertheless, a very unreasonable confidence, and 
 it may easily lead us into the most tragic of national 
 disillusionments. 
 
 We of the general public are led to suppose that the 
 next naval war — if ever we engage in another naval 
 war — will begin with a decisive fleet action. The plan 
 of action is presented with an alluring simplicity. Our 
 adversary will come out to us, in a ratio of 10 to 16, 
 or in some ratio still more advantageous to us, according 
 as our adversary happens to be this Power or that Power, 
 there will be some tremendous business with guns and 
 torpedoes, and our admirals will return victorious to 
 discuss the discipline and details of the battle and each 
 other's little weaknesses in the monthly magazines. This 
 is a desirable but improbable anticipation. No hostile 
 Power is in the least likely to send out any battleships 
 at all against our invincible Dreadnoughts. They will 
 promenade the seas, always in the ratio of 16 or 
 more to 10, looking for fleets securely tucked away 
 out of reach. They will not, of course, go too near 
 the enemy's coast, on account of mines, and, mean- 
 
 137 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 while, our cruisers will hunt the enemy's commerce 
 into port. 
 
 Then other things will happen. 
 
 The enemy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike 
 devices against our capital ships. Unless he is a lunatic, 
 he will prove to be much stronger in reality than he 
 is on paper in the matter of submarines, torpedo-boats, 
 waterplanes and aeroplanes. These are things cheap to 
 make and easy to conceal. He will be richly stocked 
 with ingenious devices for getting explosives up to these 
 two million pound triumphs of our naval engineering. 
 On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent about these 
 islands he will have extraordinary chances, and sooner 
 or later, unless we beat him thoroughly in the air above 
 and in the waters beneath, for neither of which pro- 
 ceedings we are prepared, some of these chances will 
 come off, and we shall lose a Dreadnought. 
 
 It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and 
 stranded Zeppelin or so enlivens the quiet of the English 
 countryside by coming down and capitulating. It will be 
 a trifling countershock to wing an aeroplane or so, or 
 blow a torpedo-boat out of the water. Our Dread- 
 noughts will cease to be a source of unmitigated con- 
 fidence. A second battleship disaster will excite the 
 Press extremely. A third will probably lead to a retire- 
 ment of the battle fleet to some east coast harbour, a 
 refuge liable to aeroplanes, or to the west coast of 
 Ireland — and the real naval war, which, as I have argued 
 in an earlier chapter, will be a war of destroyers, sub- 
 marines and hydroplanes, will begin. Incidentally a com- 
 merce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement 
 of our fleet to raid our trade routes. 
 
 We shall then realise that the actual naval weapons 
 
 138 
 
The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 are these smaller weapons, and especially the destroyer, 
 the submarine, and the waterplane — the waterplane most 
 of all, because of its possibilities of a comparative bigness 
 — in the hands of competent and daring men. And I 
 find myself, as a patriotic Englishman, more and more 
 troubled by doubts whether we are as certainly superior 
 to any possible adversary in these essential things as 
 we are in the matter of Dreadnoughts. I find myself 
 awake at nights, after a day much agitated by a 
 belligerent Press, wondering whether the real Empire 
 of the Sea may not even now have slipped out of 
 our hands while our attention has been fixed on our 
 stately procession of giant warships, wiiile our country 
 has been in a dream, hypnotised by the Dreadnought 
 idea. 
 
 For some years there seems to have been a complete 
 an-est of the British imagination in naval and military 
 matters. That declining faculty, never a very active 
 or w^ell-exercised one, staggered up to the conception of 
 a Dreadnought, and seems now to have sat down for 
 good. Its reply to every demand upon it has been *'more 
 Dreadnoughts." The future, as we British seem to see 
 it, is an avenue of Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts 
 and Super-Super-Dreadnoughts, getting bigger and bigger 
 in a kind of inverted perspective. But the ascendancy 
 of fleets of great battleships in naval warfare, like the 
 phase of huge conscript armies upon land, draws to its 
 close. The progress of invention makes both the big 
 ship and the army crowd more and more vulnerable and 
 less and less effective. A new phase of warfare opens 
 beyond the vista of our current programmes. Smaller, 
 more numerous and various and mobile weapons and 
 craft and contrivances, manned by daring and highly 
 
 139 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 skilled men, must ultimately take the place of those 
 massivenesses. We are entering upon a period in which 
 the invention of methods and material for war is likely 
 to be more rapid and diversified than it has ever been 
 before, and the question of what we have been doing 
 behind the splendid line of our Dreadnoughts to meet 
 the demands of this new phase is one of supreme im- 
 portance. Knowing, as I do, the imaginative indol-ence 
 of my countrymen, it is a question I face with something 
 very near to dismay. 
 
 But it is one that has to be faced. The question 
 that should occupy our directing minds now is no longer 
 *'How can we get more Dreadnoughts?'* but "What 
 have we to follow the Dreadnought ? " 
 
 To the Power that has most nearly guessed the 
 answer to that riddle belongs the future Empire of the 
 Seas. It is interesting to guess for oneself and to 
 speculate upon the possibility of a kind of armoured 
 mother-ship for waterplanes and submarines and torpedo 
 craft, but necessarily that would be a mere journalistic 
 and amateurish guessing. I am not guessing, but 
 asking urgent questions. What force, what council, 
 how many imaginative and inventive men has the coun- 
 try got at the present time employed not casually but 
 professionally in anticipating the new strategy, the new 
 tactics, the new material, the new training that invention 
 is so rapidly rendering necessary? I have the gravest 
 doubts whether we are doing anything systematic at all 
 in this way. 
 
 Now, it is the tremendous seriousness of this de- 
 ficiency to which I want to call attention. Great Britain 
 has in her armour a gap more dangerous and vital than 
 any mere numerical insufficiency of men or ships. She 
 
 140 
 
The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 is short of minds. Behind its strength of current arma- 
 ments to-day, a strength that begins to evaporate and 
 grow obsolete from the very moment it comes into being, 
 a country needs more and more this profounder strength 
 of intellectual and creative activity. 
 
 This country most of all, which was left so far behind 
 in the production of submarines, airships and aeroplanes, 
 must be made to realise the folly of its trust in established 
 things. Each new thing we take up more belatedly and 
 reluctantly than its predecessor. The time is not far 
 distant when we shall be "caught" lagging unless we 
 change all this. 
 
 We need a new arm to our service ; we need it 
 urgently, and we shall need it more and more, and that 
 arm is Research. We need to place inquiry and ex- 
 periment upon a new footing altogether, to enlist for 
 them and organise them, to secure the pick of our young 
 chemists and physicists and engineers, and to get them 
 to work systematically upon the anticipation and prepara- 
 tion of our future war equipment. We need a service 
 of invention to recover our lost lead in these matters. 
 
 And it is because I feel so keenly the want of such 
 a service, and the want of great sums of money for it, 
 that I deplore the disposition to waste millions upon 
 the hasty creation of a universal service army and upon 
 excessive Dreadnoughting. I am convinced that we are 
 spending upon the things of yesterday the money that 
 is sorely needed for the things of to-morrow. 
 
 With our eyes averted obstinately from the future 
 we are backing towards disaster. 
 
 iii 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 §3 
 
 In the present armament competition there are 
 certain considerations that appear to be almost uni- 
 versally overlooked, and which tend to modify our views 
 profoundly of what should be done. Ultimately they 
 will affect our entire expenditure upon war preparation. 
 
 Expenditure upon preparation for w^ar falls, roughly, 
 into two classes : there is expenditure upon things that 
 have a diminishing value, things that grow old-fashioned 
 and w^ar out, such as fortifications, ships, guns, and 
 ammunition, and expenditure upon things that have a 
 permanent and even growing value, such as organised 
 technical research, military and naval experiment, and 
 the education and increase of a highly trained class of 
 war experts. 
 
 I want to suggest that we are spending too much 
 money in the former and not enough in the latter direc- 
 tion. We are buying enormous quantities of stuff that 
 will be old iron in twenty years' time, and we are starv- 
 ing ourselves of that which cannot be bought or made in 
 a hurry, and upon which the strength of nations 
 ultimately rests altogether ; we are failing to get and 
 maintain a sufficiency of highly educated and developed 
 men inspired by a tradition of service and efficiency. 
 
 No doubt we must be armed to-day, but every penny 
 we divert from men-making and knowledge-making to 
 armament beyond the margin of bare safety is a sacrifice 
 of the future to the present. Every penny we divert 
 from national wealth-making to national weapons means 
 so much less in resources, so much more strain in the 
 years ahead. But a great system of laboratories and ex- 
 perimental stations, a systematic, industrious increase 
 
 142 
 
The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 of men of the officer-aviator type, of the research student 
 type, of the engineer type, of the naval-officer type, of 
 the skilled sergeant-instructor type, a methodical develop- 
 ment of a common sentiment and a common zeal among 
 such a body of men, is an added strength that grows 
 greater from the moment you call it into being. In our 
 schools and military and naval colleges lies the proper 
 field for expenditure upon preparation for our ultimate 
 triumph in war. All other war preparation is temporary 
 but that. 
 
 This would be obvious in any case, but what makes 
 insistence upon it peculiarly urgent is the manifestly 
 temporary nature of the present European situation and 
 the fact that within quite a small number of years our 
 war front will be turned in a direction quite other than 
 that to which it faces now. 
 
 For a decade and more all Western Europe has been 
 threatened by German truculence; the German, inflamed 
 by the victories of 1870 and 1871, has poured out his 
 energy in preparation for war by sea and land, and it has 
 been the difficult task of France and England to keep 
 the peaee with him. The German has been the provo- 
 cator and leader of all modern armaments. But that is 
 not going on. It is already more than half over. If we 
 can avert war with Germany for twenty years, we shall 
 never have to fight Germany. In twenty years* time 
 we shall be talking no more of sending troops to fight 
 side by side on the frontier of France ; we shall be talking 
 of sending troops to fight side by side with French and v 
 Germans on the frontiers of Poland. 
 
 And the justification of that prophecy is a perfectly 
 plain one. The German has filled up his country, his 
 birth-rate falls, and the very vigour of his military and 
 
 143 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 naval preparations, by raising the cost of living, hurries 
 it down. His birth-rate falls as ours and the French- 
 man's falls, because he is nearing his maxim'um of popu- 
 lation. It is an inevitable consequence of his geographi- 
 cal conditions. But eastward of him, from his eastern 
 boundaries to the Pacific, is a country already too 
 populous to conquer, but with possibilities of further 
 expansion that are gigantic. The Slav will be free to 
 increase and multiply for another hundred years. East- 
 ward and southward bristle the Slavs, and behind the 
 Slavs are the colossal possibilities of Asia. 
 
 Even German vanity, even the preposterous ambitions 
 that spring from that brief triumph of Sedan, must 
 awaken at last to these manifest facts, and on the day 
 when Germany is fully awake we may count the Western 
 European Armageddon as "off" and turn our eyes to the 
 greater needs that will arise beyond Germany. The old 
 game will be over and a quite different new game will 
 begin in international relations. 
 
 During these last few years of worry and bluster 
 across the North Sea w^e have a little forgotten India in 
 our calculations. As Germany faces round eastward 
 again, as she must do before very long, we shall find 
 India resuming its former central position in our ideas 
 of international politics. With India we may pursue one 
 of two policies : we may keep her divided and inefficient 
 for war, as she is at present, and hold her and own her 
 and defend her as a prize, or we may arm her and assist 
 her development into a group of quasi-independent 
 English-speaking States — in which case she will become 
 our partner and possibly at last even our senior partner. 
 But that is by the way. What I am pointing out now 
 is that whether we fight Germany or not, a time is draw- 
 
 144 
 
The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 ing near when Germany will cease to be our war objec- 
 tive and we shall cease to be Germany's war objective, 
 and when there will have to be a complete revision of 
 our military and naval equipment in relation to those 
 remoter, vaster Asiatic possibilities. 
 
 Now that possible campaign away there, whatever 
 its particular nature may be, which will be shaping our 
 military and naval policy in the year 1933 or thereabouts, 
 will certainly be quite different in its conditions from the 
 possible campaign in Europe and the narrow seas which 
 determines all our preparations now. We cannot con- 
 template throwing an army of a million British conscripts 
 on to the North- West Frontier of India, and a fleet of 
 Super-Dreadnoughts will be ineffective either in Thibet 
 or the Baltic shallows. All our present stuff, indeed, 
 will be on the scrap-heap then. What will not be on the 
 scrap-heap will be such enterprise and special science and 
 inventive power as we have got together. That is 
 versatile. That is good to have now and that will be 
 good to have then. 
 
 Everyone nowadays seems demanding increased ex- 
 penditure upon war preparation. I will follow the 
 fashion. I will suggest that we have the courage to 
 restrain and even to curtail our monstrous outlay upon 
 war material and that we begin to spend lavishly upon 
 military and naval education and training, upon labora- 
 tories and experimental stations, upon chemical and 
 physical research and all that makes knowledge and 
 leading, and that we increase our expenditure upon these 
 things as fast as we can up to ten or twelve millions 
 a year. At present we spend about eighteen and a half 
 millions a year upon education out of our national funds, 
 but fourteen and a half of this, supplemented by about 
 
 K 145 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 as much again from local sources, is consumed in merely 
 elementary teaching. So that we spend only about four 
 millions a year of public money on every sort of research 
 and education above the simple democratic level. Nearly 
 thirty millions for the foundations and only a seventh 
 for the edifice of will and science ! Is it any marvel that 
 we are a badly organised nation, a nation of very widely 
 diffused intelligence and very second-rate guidance and 
 achievement? Is it any marvel that directly we are 
 tested by such a new development as that of aeroplanes 
 or airships we show ourselves in comparison with the 
 more braced-up nations of the Continent backward, un- 
 organised, unimaginative, unenterprising? 
 
 Our supreme want to-day, if we are to continue a 
 belligerent people, is a greater supply of able educated 
 men, versatile men capable of engines, of aviation, of 
 invention, of leading and initiative. We need more 
 laboratories, more scholarships out of the general mass 
 of elementary scholars, a quasi-military discipline in our 
 colleges and a great array of new colleges, a much readier 
 access to instruction in aviation and military and naval 
 practice. And if we are to have national service let us 
 begin with it where it is needed most and where it is 
 least likely to disorganise our social and economic life; 
 let us begin at the top. Let us begin with the educated 
 and propertied classes and exact a couple of years' service 
 in a destroyer or a waterplane, or an airship, or a re- 
 search laboratory, or a training camp, from the sons of 
 everybody yAiq, let us say, pays income tax without 
 deductions. Let us mix with these a big proportion — a 
 proportion we may increase steadily — of keen scholar- 
 ship men from the elementary schools. Such a braced-up 
 class as we should create in this way would ^ive us the 
 
 146 
 
The Common Sense of Warfare 
 
 realities of military power, which are enterprise, know- 
 ledge, and invention ; and at the same time it would add 
 to and not subtract from the economic wealth of the com- 
 munity. Make men ; that is the only sane, permanent 
 preparation for war. So we should develop a strength 
 and create a tradition that would not rust nor grow old- 
 fashioned in all the years to come. 
 
 »47 
 
THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 
 
 CiECUM STANCES have made me think a good deal at 
 different times about the business of writing novels, 
 and what it means, and is, and may be; and I was a 
 professional critic of novels long before I wrote them. 
 I have been writing novels, or writing about novels, for 
 the last twenty years. It seems only yesterday that I 
 wrote a review — the first long and appreciative review 
 he had — of Mr. Joseph Conrad's "Almayer's Folly" 
 in the Saturday Review. When a man has focussed so 
 much of his life upon the novel, it is not reasonable 
 to expect him to take too modest or apologetic a view 
 \ of it. I consider the novel an important and neces- 
 sary thing indeed in that complicated system of uneasy 
 adjustments and readjustments which is modern civilisa- 
 tion. I make very high and wide claims for it. In many 
 directions I do not think we can get along without it. 
 
 Now this, I know, is not the usually received opinion. 
 There is, I am aware, the theory that the novel is 
 wholly and solely a means of relaxation. In spite of 
 manifest facts, that was the dominant view of the great 
 period that we now in our retrospective way speak of 
 as the Victorian, and it still survives to this day. It 
 is the man's theory of the novel rather than the 
 woman's. One may call it the Weary Giant theory. 
 The reader is represented as a man, burthened, toiling, 
 worn. He has been in his office from ten to four, 
 with perhaps only two hours' interval at his club for 
 
 148 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 lunch ; or he has been playing golf ; or he has been 
 waiting about and voting in the House ; or he has been 
 fishing ; or he has been disputing a point of law ; or 
 writing a sermon ; or doing one of a thousand other 
 of the grave important things which constitute the 
 substance of a prosperous man's life. Now at last 
 comes the little precious interval of leisure, and the 
 Weary Giant takes up a book. Perhaps he is vexed : 
 he may have been bunkered, his line may have been 
 entangled in the trees, his favourite investment may 
 have slumped, or the judge have had indigestion and 
 been extremely rude to him. He wants to forget the 
 troublesome realities of life. He wants to be taken out 
 of himself, to be cheered, consoled, amused — above all, 
 amused. He doesn't want ideas, he doesn't want facts; 
 above all, he doesn't want — Problems, He wants to 
 dream of the bright, thin, gay excitements of a phantom 
 world — in which he can bo hero — of horses ridden and 
 lace worn and princesses rescued and won. He wants 
 pictures of funny slums, and entertaining paupers, and 
 laughable longshoremen, and kindly impulses making 
 life sweet. He wants romance without its defiance, 
 and humour without its sting ; and the business of the 
 novelist, he holds, is to supply this cooling refreshment. 
 That is the Weary Giant theory of the novel. It ruled 
 British criticism up to the period of the Boer war — 
 and then something happened to quite a lot of us, and 
 it has never completely recovered its old predominance. 
 Perhaps it will ; perhaps something else may happen to 
 prevent its ever doing so. 
 
 Both fiction and criticism to-day are in revolt against 
 that tired giant, the prosperous Englishman. I cannot 
 think of a single writer of any distinction to-day, unless 
 
 149 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 it is Mr. W. W. Jacobs, who is content merely to 
 serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far 
 from the weary reader being a decently tired giant, 
 we realise that he is only an inexpressibly lax, slovenly 
 and undertrained giant, and we are all out with one 
 accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every 
 posisible w^ay. And so I will say no more of the idea 
 that the novel is merely a harmless opiate for the vacant 
 hours of prosperous men. As a matter of fact, it never 
 " V has been, and by its nature I doubt if it ever can be. 
 
 I do not think that women have ever quite suc- 
 cumbed to the tired giant attitude in their reading. 
 Women are more serious, not only about life, but about 
 books. No type or kind of woman is capable of that 
 lounging, defensive stupidity which is the basis of the 
 tired giant attitude, and all through the early 'nineties, 
 during which the respectable frivolity of Great Britain 
 left its most enduring marks upon our literature, there 
 was a rebel undertow of earnest and aggressive writing 
 and reading, supported chiefly by women and supplied 
 very largely by women, which gave the lie to the pre- 
 vailing trivial estimate of fiction. Among readers, 
 women and girls and young men at least will insist 
 upon having their novels significant and real, and it is 
 / to these perpetually renewed elements in the public that 
 the novelist must look for his continuing emancipation 
 from the Wearier and more massive influences at work 
 in contemporary British life. 
 
 And if the novel is to be recognised as something 
 more than a relaxation, it has also, I think, to be kept 
 free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce 
 pedantries of those who would define a general form 
 for it. Every art nowadays must steer its way between 
 
 150 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 the rocks of trivial and degrading standards and the 
 wliirlpool of arbitrary and irrational criticism. When- 
 ever criticism of any art becomes specialised and pro- 
 fessional, whenever a class of adjudicators is brought 
 into existence, those adjudicators are apt to become as 
 a class distrustful of their immediate impressions, and 
 anxious for methods of comparison between work and 
 work, they begin to emulate the classifications and exact 
 measurements of a science, and to set up ideals and 
 rules as data for such classification and measurements. 
 They develop an alleged sense of technique, which is 
 too often no more than the attempt to exact a laborious- 
 ness of method, or to insist upon peculiarities of method 
 which impress the professional critic not so much as 
 being merits as being meritorious. This sort of thing 
 has gone very far with the critical discussion both of 
 the novel and the play. You have all heard that im- 
 pressive dictum that some particular theatrical display, 
 although moving, interesting, and continually entertain- 
 ing from start to finish, was for occult technical 
 reasons "not a play," and in the same way you are 
 continually having your appreciation of fiction dashed 
 by the mysterious parallel condemnation, that the story 
 you like "isn't a novel." The novel has been treated 
 as though its form was as well-defined as the sonnet. 
 Some year or so ago, for example, there was a quite 
 serious discussion, which began, I believe, in a weekly 
 paper devoted to the interests of various nonconformist 
 religious organisations, about the proper length for a 
 novel. The critic was to begin his painful duties with a 
 yard measure. The matter was taken up with profound 
 gravity by the Westminster Gazette, and a considerable 
 number of literary men and women were circularised 
 
 151 
 
 ^ 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 and asked to state, in the face of "Tom Jones," "The 
 Vicar of Wakefield," "The Shabby-Genteel Story," and 
 "Bleak House," just exactly how long the novel ought 
 to be. Our replies varied according to the civility of 
 our natures, but the mere attempt to raise the question 
 shows, I think, how< widespread among the editorial, 
 paragraph- writing, opinion-making sort of people is this 
 notion of prescribing a definite length and a definite 
 form for the novel. In the newspaper correspondence 
 that followed, our friend the weary giant made a tran- 
 sitory appearance again. We were told the novel ought 
 to be long enough for him to take up after dinner and 
 finish before his whisky at eleven. 
 
 That was obviously a half -forgotten echo of Edgar 
 Allan Poe's discussion of the short story. Edgar Allan 
 Poe was very definite upon the point that the short 
 story should be finished at a sitting. But the novel 
 and short story are two entirely different things, and 
 the train of reasoning that made the American master 
 limit the short story to about an hour of reading as 
 a maximum, does not apply to the longer work. A 
 short story is, or should be, a simple thing; it aims 
 at producing one single, vivid effect; it has to seize the 
 
 V attention at the outset, and never relaxing, gather it 
 together more and more until the climax is reached. 
 The limits of the human capacity to attend closely 
 therefore set a limit to it ; it must explode and finish 
 before interruption occurs or fatigue sets in. But the 
 
 ^ / novel I hold to be a discursive thing ; it is not a single 
 interest, but a w^oven tapestry of interests ; one is drawn 
 on first by this affection and curiosity, and then by 
 that; it is something to return to, and I do not see 
 that we can possibly set any limit to its extent. The 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 distinctive value of the novel among written works of 
 art is in characterisation, and the charm of a well- 
 conceived character lies, not in knowing its destiny, but 
 in watching its proceedings. For my own part, I will 
 confess that I find all the novels of Dickens, long as 
 they are, too short for me. I am sorry they do not 
 flow into one another more than they do. I wish 
 Micawber and Dick Swiveller and Sairey Gamp turned 
 up again in other novels than their own, just as 
 Shakespeare ran the glorious glow of Falstaff through 
 a group of plays. But Dickens tried this once when 
 he carried on the Pickwick Club into "Master Hum- 
 phrey's Clock." That experiment was unsatisfactory, 
 and he did not attempt anything of the sort again. 
 Following on the days of Dickens, the novel began to 
 contract, to subordinate characterisation to story and 
 description to drama; considerations of a sordid nature, 
 I am told, had to do with that; something about a 
 guinea and a half and six shillings with which we will 
 not concern ourselves — but I rejoice to see many signs 
 to-day that that phase of narrowing and restriction is 
 over, and that there is every encouragement for a return 
 towards a laxer, more spacious form of novel- writing. 
 The movement is partly of English origin, a revolt 
 against those more exacting and cramping conceptions 
 of artistic perfection to which I will recur in a moment, 
 and a return to the lax freedom of form, the rambling 
 discursiveness, the right to roam, of the earlier English 
 novel, of "Tristram Shandy" and of "Tom Jones"; 
 and partly it comes from abroad, and derives a stimulus 
 from such bold and original enterprises as that of 
 Monsieur Rolland in his "Jean Christophe." Its double 
 origin involves a double nature; for while the English 
 
 153 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 spirit is towards discursiveness and variety, the new 
 French movement is rather towards exhaustiveness. 
 Mr. Arnold Bennett has experimented in both forms 
 of amplitude. His superb "Old Wives' Tale," wander- 
 ing from person to person and from scene to scene, is 
 by far the finest "long novel" that has been written 
 in English in the English fashion in this generation, 
 and now in "Clayhanger" and its promised collaterals, 
 he undertakes that complete, minute, abundant pre- 
 sentation of the growth and modification of one or two 
 individual minds, which is the essential characteristic 
 of the Continental movement towards the novel of 
 amplitude. While the "Old Wives' Tale" is discursive, 
 " Clayhanger " is exhaustive ; he gives us both types of 
 the new movement in perfection. 
 
 I name "Jean Christophe" as a sort of archetype 
 in this connection, because it is just at present v-ery 
 much in our thoughts by reason of the admirable 
 translation Mr. Cannan is giving us ; but there is a 
 greater predecessor to this comprehensive and spectacular 
 treatment of a single mind and its impressions and 
 ideas, or of one or two associated minds, that comes 
 to us now via Mr. Bennett and Mr. Cannan from 
 France. The great original of all this work is that 
 colossal last unfinished book of Flaubert, " Bouvard et 
 Pecuchet." Flaubert, the bulk of whose life was spent 
 upon the most austere and restrained fiction — Turgenev 
 was not more austere and restrained — broke out at last 
 into this gay, sad miracle of intellectual abundance. 
 It is not extensively read in this country ; it is not yet, 
 I believe, translated into English ; but there it is — 
 and if it is new to the reader I make him this present 
 of the secret of a book that is a precious wilderness 
 
 154 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 of wonderful reading. But if Flaubert is really the 
 Continental emancipator of the novel from the restric- 
 tions of form, the master to whom we of the English 
 persuasion, we of the discursive school, must for ever 
 recur is he, whom I will maintain against all comers 
 to be the subtlest and greatest artist — I lay stress upon 
 that word artist — that Great Britain has ever pro- 
 duced in all that is essentially the novel, Laurence 
 Sterne. . . . 
 
 The confusion between the standards of a short 
 story and the standards of the novel which leads at 
 last to these — what shall I call them? — Westminster 
 Gazettisms? — about the correct length to which the 
 novelist should aspire, leads also to all kinds of absurd 
 condemnations and exactions upon matters of method 
 and style. The underlying fallacy is always this : the 
 assumption that the novel, like the story, aims at a 
 single, concentrated impression. From that comes a 
 fertile growth of error. Constantly one finds in the 
 reviews of works of fiction the complaint that this, 
 that or the other thing in a novel is irrelevant. Now 
 it is the easiest thing, and most fatal thing, to become 
 irrelevant in a short story. A short story should go 
 to its point as a man flies from a pursuing tiger: he 
 pauses not for the daisies in his path, or to note the 
 pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But the 
 novel by comparison is like breakfasting in the open 
 air on a summer morning ; nothing is irrelevant if the 
 wTj^iter's mood is happy, and the tapping of the thrush 
 upon the garden path, or the petal of apple-blossom that 
 floats down into my coffee, is as relevant as the egg 
 I open or the bread and butter I bite. And all sorts 
 of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which 
 
 155 
 
J / 
 
 x/ 
 
 An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 is the aim of the short story — the introduction, for 
 example, of the author's personality — any comment that 
 seems to admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change 
 in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, 
 invective, all such things are not necessarily wrong in 
 the novel. Of course, all these things may fail in their 
 effect; they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult 
 to do w^ell ; but it is no artistic merit to evade a diffi- 
 culty any more than it is a merit in a hunter to refuse 
 even the highest of fences. Nearly all the novels that 
 have, by the lapse of time, reached an assured position 
 of recognised greatness, are not only saturated in the 
 personality of the author, but have in addition quite 
 unaffected personal outbreaks. The least successful in- 
 stance, the one that is made the text against all such 
 first-personal interventions, is, of course, Thackeray. 
 But I think the trouble with Thackeray is not that he 
 makes first-personal interventions, but that he does so 
 with a curious touch of dishonesty. I agree with the 
 late Mrs. Craigie that there was something profoundly 
 vulgar about Thackeray. It was a sham thoughtful, 
 sham man-of-the-world pose he assumed ; it is an 
 aggressive, conscious, challenging person astride before 
 a fire, and a little distended by dinner and a sense of 
 social and literary precedences, who uses the first person 
 in Thackeray's novels. It isn't the real Thackeray; 
 it isn't a frank man who looks you in the eyes and 
 bares his soul and demands your sympathy. That is 
 a criticism of Thackeray, but it isn't a condemnation 
 of intervention. 
 
 I admit that for a novelist to come in person in 
 this way before his readers involves grave risks; but 
 when it is done without affectations, starkly as a man 
 
 156 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 comes in out of the darkness to tell of perplexing things 
 without — as, for instance, Mr. Joseph Conrad does for 
 all practical purposes in his "Lord Jim" — then it gives 
 a sort of depth, a sort of subjective reality, that no 
 such cold, almost affectedly ironical detachment as that 
 which distinguishes the work of Mr. John Galsworthy, 
 for example, can ever attain. And in some cases the 
 whole art and delight of a novel may lie in the author's 
 personal interventions ; let such novels as " Elizabeth and 
 her German Garden," and the same writer's "Elizabeth 
 in Eiigen," bear witness. 
 
 Now,, all this time I have been hacking away at 
 certain hampering and limiting beliefs about the novel, 
 letting it loose, as it were, in form and purpose; I 
 have still to say just what I think the novel is, and 
 where, if anywhere, its boundary-line ought to be drawn. 
 It is by no means an easy task to define the novel. 
 It is not a thing premeditated. It is a thing that has f 
 grown up into modern life, and taken upon itself uses f 
 and produced results that could not have been foreseen j 
 by its originators. Few of the important things in the I 
 collective life of man started out to be what they are. 7 
 Consider, for example, all the unexpected aesthetic 
 values, the inspiration and variety of emotional result 
 which arises out of the cross-shaped plan of the Gothic 
 cathedral, and the undesigned delight and wonder of 
 white marble that has ensued, as I have been told, 
 through the ageing and whitening of the realistically 
 coloured statuary of the Greeks and Romans. Much 
 of the charm of the old furniture and needlework, again, 
 upon which the present time sets so much store, lies 
 in acquired and unpremeditated qualities. And no doubt 
 the novel grew up out of simple story-telling, and the 
 
 157 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 universal desire of children, old and young alike, for a 
 story. It is only slowly that we have developed the 
 distinction of the novel from the romance, as being a 
 story of human beings, absolutely credible and con- 
 ceivable, as distinguished from human beings frankly 
 endowed wdth the glamour, the w^onder, the brightness, 
 of a less exacting and more vividly eventful world. The 
 novel is a story that demands, or professes to demand, 
 no make-believe. The novelist undertakes to present 
 you people and things as real as any that you can 
 meet in an omnibus. And I suppose it is conceivable 
 that a novel might exist which was just purely a story 
 of that kind and nothing more. It might amuse you 
 as one is amused by looking out of a window into a 
 street, or listening to a piece of agreeable music, and 
 that might be the limit of its effect. But almost always 
 the novel is something more than that, and produces 
 more effect than that. The novel has inseparable 
 moral consequences. It leaves impressions, not simply 
 of things seen, but of acts judged and made attractive 
 or unattractive. They may prove very slight moral 
 consequences, and very shallow moral impressions in 
 the long run, but there they are, none the less, its 
 inevitable accompaniments). It is unavoidable that 
 this should be so. Even if the novelist attempts or 
 affects to be impartial, he still cannot prevent his 
 characters setting examples; he still cannot avoid, 
 as people say, putting ideas into his readers' heads. 
 The greater his skill, the more convincing his treat- 
 ment, the more vivid his power of suggestion. And 
 it is equally impossible for him not to betray his 
 sense that the proceedings* of this person are rather 
 jolly and admirable, and of that, rather ugly and de- 
 
 «S8 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 testable. I suppose Mr. Bennett, for example, would 
 say that he should not do so ; but it is as manifest to 
 any disinterested observer that he greatly loves and 
 admires his Card, as that Richardson admired his Sir 
 Charles Grandison, or that Mrs. Humphry Ward con- 
 siders her Marcella a very fine and estimable young 
 woman. And I think it is just in this, that the novel 
 is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a 
 study and judgment of conduct, and through that of 
 the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and in- 
 creasing value — or perhaps to avoid controversy I had 
 better say the real and increasing importance — of the 
 novel and of the novelist in modem life comes in. 
 
 It is no new discovery that the novel, like the drama, | 
 is a powerful instrument of moral suggestion. This has 
 been understood in England ever since there has been 
 such a thing as a novel in England. This has been 
 recognised equally by novelists, novel-readers, and the 
 people who wouldn't read novels under any condition 
 whatever. Eichardson wrote deliberately for edification, 
 and ''Tom Jones" is a powerful and effective appeal for .^ 
 a charitable, and even indulgent, attitude towards loose- 
 living men. But excepting Fielding and one or two 
 other of those partial exceptions that always occur in 
 the case of critical generalisations, there is a definable ' 
 difference between the novel of the past and what I 
 may call the modern novel. It is a difference that is 
 reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general 
 way of thinking. It lies in the fact that formerly there \ 
 was a feeling of certitude about moral values and "^ 
 standards of conduct that is altogether absent to-day. 
 It wasn't so much that men were agreed upon these 
 things — about these things there have always been enor- 
 
 159 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 mous divergences of opinion — as that men were emphatic , 
 cocksure, and unteachable about whatever they did 
 happen to believe to a degree that no longer obtains. 
 This is the Balfourian age, and even religion seeks to 
 establish itself on doubt. There were, perhaps, just as 
 many differences in the past as there are now, but the 
 outlines were harder — they were, indeed, so hard as to 
 be almost, to our sense, savage. You might be a Eoman 
 Catholic, and in that case you did not want to hear 
 about Protestants, Turks, Infidels, except in tones of 
 horror and hatred. You knew exactly what was good 
 and what was evil. Your priest informed you upon 
 these points, and all you needed in any novel you read 
 was a confirmation, implicit or explicit, of these vivid, 
 rather than charming, prejudices. If you were a Pro- 
 testant you were equally clear and unshakable. Your 
 sect, whichever sect you belonged to, knew the whole 
 of truth and included all the nice people. It had 
 nothing to leam in the world, and it wanted to learn 
 nothing outside its sectarian convictions. The un- 
 believers, you know, were just as bad, and said their 
 creeds \\ith an equal fury — merely interpolating nots. 
 People of every sort — Catholic, Protestant, Infidel, or 
 what not — were equally clear that good was good and 
 bad was bad, that the world was made up of good 
 characters whom you had to love, help and admire, and 
 of bad characters to whom one might, in the interests 
 of goodness, even lie, and whom one had to foil, defeat 
 and triumph over shamelessly at every opportunity. 
 That was the quality of the times. The novel reflected 
 this quality of assurance , and its utmost charity was to 
 unmask an apparent villain and show that he or she 
 was really profoundly and correctly good, or to unmask 
 
 i6o 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 an apparent saint and show the hypocrite. There was 
 no such penetrating and pervading element of doubt 
 and curiosity — and charity, about the rightfulness and 
 beauty of conduct, such as one meets on every hand 
 to-day. 
 
 The novel-reader of the past, therefore, like the 
 novel-reader of the more provincial parts of England 
 to-day, judged a novel by the convictions that had been 
 built up in him by his training and his priest or his 
 pastor. If it agreed with these convictions he approved ; 
 if it did not agree he disapproved — often with great 
 energy. The novel, where it was not unconditionally 
 banned altogether as a thing disturbing and unnecessary, 
 was regarded as a thing subordinated to the teaching 
 of the priest or pastor, or whatever director and dogma 
 was followed. Its modest moral confirmations began 
 when authority had completed its direction. The novel 
 was good — if it seemed to harmonise with the graver 
 exercises conducted by Mr. Chadband — and it was bad 
 and outcast if Mr. Chadband said so. And it is 
 over the bodies of discredited and disgruntled Chad- 
 bands that the novel escapes from its servitude and 
 inferiority. 
 
 Now the conflict of authority against criticism is one 
 of the eternal conflicts of humanity. It is the conflict 
 of organisation against initiative, of discipline against 
 freedom. It was the conflict of the priest against the 
 prophet in ancient Judaea, of the Pharisee against the 
 Nazarene, of the Realist against the Nominalist, of 
 the Church against the Franciscan and the Lollard, of 
 the Respectable Person against the Artist, of the hedge- 
 clippers of mankind against the shooting buds. And 
 to-day, while we live in a period of tightening and 
 L i6i 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 extending social organisation, we live also in a period 
 of adventurous and insurgent thought, in an intellectual 
 spring unprecedented in the vt^orld's history. There is 
 an enormous criticism going on of the faiths upon which 
 men's lives and associations are based, and of every 
 standard and rule of conduct. And it is inevitable that 
 the novel, just in the measure of its sincerity and ability, 
 X^ should reflect and co-operate in the atmosphere and 
 uncertainties and changing variety of this seething and 
 creative time. 
 
 And I do not mean merely that the novel is unavoid- 
 ably charged with the representation of this wide and 
 . wonderful conflict. It is a necessary part of the conflict. 
 The essential characteristic of this great intellectual 
 revolution amidst which we are living to-day, that revo- 
 lution of which the revival and restatement of nominalism 
 under the name of pragmatism is the philosophical aspect, 
 consists in the reassertion of the importance of the 
 individual instance as against the generalisation. All 
 our social, political, moral problems are being approached 
 in a new spirit, in an inquiring and experimental spirit, 
 which has small respect for abstract principles and deduc- 
 i tive rules. We perceive more and more clearly, for 
 example, that the study of social organisation is an empty 
 and unprofitable study until we approach it as a study 
 of the association and inter-reaction of individualised 
 human beings inspired by diversified motives, ruled by 
 traditions, and swayed by the suggestions of a complex 
 ' intellectual atmosphere. And all our conceptions of the 
 relationships between man and man, and of justice and 
 rightfulness and social desirableness, remain something 
 misfitting and inappropriate, something uncomfortable 
 and potentially injurious, as if we were trying to wear 
 
 i6a 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 sharp-edged clothes made for a giant out of tin, until 
 we bring them to the test and measure of realised 
 individualities. 
 
 And this is where the value and opportunity of the 
 modern novel comes in. So far as I can see, it is the 
 only medium through which we can discuss the great 
 majority of the problems which are being raised in such 
 bristling multitude by our contemporary social develop- 
 ment. Nearly every one of those problems has at its 
 core a psychological problem, and not merely a psycho- 
 logical problem, but one in which the idea of individuality 
 is an essential factor. Dealing with most of these ques- 
 tions by a rule or a generalisation is like putting a cordon 
 round a jungle full of the most diversified sort of game. 
 The hunting only begins ^hen you leave the cordon 
 behind you and push into the thickets. 
 
 Take, for example, the immense cluster of difficulties 
 that arises out of the increasing complexity of our state. 
 On every hand we are creating officials, and compared 
 w^ith only a few years ago the private life in a dozen fresh 
 directions comes into contact with officialdom. But we 
 still do practically nothing to work out the interesting 
 changes that occur in this sort of man and that, when 
 you withdraw him as it were from the common crowd 
 of humanity, put his mind if not his body into uniform 
 and endow him with powers and functions and rules. It 
 is manifestly a study of the profoundest public and 
 personal importance. It is manifestly a study of increas- 
 ing importance. The process of social and political 
 organisation that has been going on for the last quarter 
 of a century is pretty clearly going on now if anything 
 with increasing vigour — and for the most part the entire 
 dependence of the consequences of the whole problem 
 
 163 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 upon the reaction between the office on the one^hand 
 and the weak, uncertain, various human beings who take 
 office on the other, doesn't seem even to be suspected by 
 the energetic, virtuous and moi^ or less amiable people 
 whose activities in politics and upon the backstairs of 
 pontics bring abopt these -developments. They assume 
 that the sort of official they need, a combination of god- 
 like virtue and intelligence with unfailing mechanical 
 obedience, can be made out of just any young nephew. 
 And I know of no means of persuading people that this 
 is a rather unjustifiable assumption, and of creating an 
 intelligent controlling criticism of officials and of assist- 
 ing conscientious officials to an effective self-examination, 
 and generally of keeping the atmosphere of official life 
 sweet and healthy, except the novel. Yet so far the novel 
 has scarcely begun its attack upon this particular field of 
 human life, and all the attractive varied play of motive 
 it contains. 
 
 Of course we have one supreme and devastating study 
 of the illiterate minor official in Bumble. That one figure 
 lit up and still lights the whole problem of Poor Law 
 administration for the English reading community. It 
 was a translation of well-meant regulations and pseudo- 
 scientific conceptions of social order into blundering, 
 arrogant, ill-bred flesh and blood. It was worth a hun- 
 dred Eoyal Commissions. You may make your regula- 
 tions as you please, said Dickens in effect ; this is one 
 sample of the^tuff that will carry them out. But Bumble 
 stands almost alone. Instead of realising that he is only 
 one aspect of officialdom, we are all too apt to make him 
 the type of all officials, and not an urban district council 
 can get into a dispute about its electric light without 
 being denounced as a Bumbledom by some whirling 
 
 164 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 enemy or other. The burthen upon Bumble's shoulders 
 is too heavy to be borne, and we want the contemporary 
 novel to give us a score of other figures to put beside 
 him, other aspects and reflections upon this great problem 
 of officialism made flesh. Bumble is a magnificent figure 
 of the follies and cruelties of ignorance in office — I would 
 have every candidate for the post of workhouse master 
 pass a severe examination upon " Oliver Twist " — but 
 it is not only caricature and satire I demand. We must 
 have not only the fullest treatment of the temptations, 
 vanities, abuses, and absurdities of office, but all its 
 dreams, its sense of constructive order, its consolations, 
 its sense of service, and its nobler satisfactions. You 
 may say that is demanding more insight and power in 
 our novels and novelists than we can possibly hope to 
 find in them. So much the worse for us. I stick to my 
 thesis that the complicated social organisation of to-day 
 cannot get along without the amount of mutual 
 understanding and mutual explanation such a range of 
 characterisation in our novels implies. The success of 
 civilisation amounts ultimately to a success of sympathy 
 and understanding. If people cannot be brought to an 
 interest in one another greater than they feel to-day, to 
 curiosities and criticisms far keener, and co-operations 
 far subtler, than we have now ; if class cannot be brought 
 to measure itself against, and interchange experience and 
 sympathy with class, and temperament with tempera- 
 ment, then we shall never struggle very far beyond the 
 confused discomforts and uneasiness of to-day, and the 
 changes and complications of human life will remain as 
 they are now, very like the crumplings and separations 
 and complications, of an immense avalanche that is sliding 
 down a hill. And in this tremendous work of human 
 
 i6s 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 reconciliation and elucidation, it seems to me it is the 
 novel that must attempt most and achieve most. 
 
 You may feel disposed to say to all this : We grant 
 the major premises, but why look to the work of prose 
 fiction as the main instrument in this necessary process 
 of, so to speak, sympathising humanity together? Can- 
 not this be done far more effectively through biography 
 and autobiography, for example? Isn't there the lyric; 
 and, above all, isn't there the play? Well, so far as 
 the stage goes, I think it is a very charming and exciting 
 form of human activity, a display of actions and surprises 
 of the most moving and impressive sort ; but beyond the 
 opportunity it affords for saying startling and thought- 
 provoking things — opportunities Mr. Shaw, for example, 
 has worked to the utmost limit — I do not see that the 
 
 V drama does much to* enlarge our sympathies and add to 
 our stock of motive ideas. And regarded as a medium 
 for startling and thought-provoking things, the stage 
 seems to me an extremely clumsy and costly affair. One 
 might just as well go about with a pencil writing up 
 the thought-provoking phra&e, whatever it is, on walls. 
 The drama excites our sympathies intensely, but it 
 
 y seems to me it is far too objective a medium to widen 
 them appreciably, and it is that widening, that increase 
 in the range of understanding, at which I think civilisa- 
 tion is aiming. The case for biography, and more par- 
 ticularly autobiography, as against the novel, is, I admit, 
 at the first blush stronger. You may say : Why give us 
 these creatures of a novelist's imagination, these phantom 
 and fantastic thinkings and doings, when we may have 
 the stories of real lives, really lived — ^the intimate record 
 of actual men and women ? To which one answers : 
 
 V "Ah, if one could! But it is just because biography 
 
 x66 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 does deal with actual lives, actual facts, because it 
 radiates out to touch continuing interests and sensitive 
 survivors, that it is so unsatisfactory, so untruthful. Its 
 inseparable falsehood is the worst of all kinds of false- 
 hood — the falsehood of omission. Think what an 
 abounding, astonishing, perplexing person Gladstone 
 must have been in life, and consider Lord Morley's "Life 
 of Gladstone," cold, dignified — not a life at all, indeed, 
 so much as embalmed remains ; the fire gone, the passions 
 gone, the bowels carefully removed. All biography has 
 something of that post-mortem coldness and respect, 
 and as for autobiography — a man may show his soul in 
 a thousand half -conscious ways, but to turn upon 
 oneself and explain oneself is given to no one. It is 
 the natural liars and braggarts, your Cellinis and Casa- 
 novas, men with a habit of regarding themselves w^ith 
 a kind of objective admiration, who do best in auto- 
 biography. And, on the other hand, the novel has neither 
 the intense self-consciousness of autobiography nor the 
 paralysing responsibilities of the biographer. It is by 
 comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters 
 are figments and phantoms, they can be made entirely 
 transparent. Because they are fictions, and you know 
 they are fictions, so that they cannot hold you for an 
 instant so soon as they cease to be true, they have a 
 power of veracity quite beyond that of actual records. 
 Every novel carries its own justification and its own 
 condemnation in its success or failure to convince you 
 that the thing was so. Now history, biography, blue- 
 book, and so forth, can hardly ever get beyond the 
 statement that the superficial fact was so. 
 
 You see now the scope of the claim I am making for 
 the novel ; it is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of 
 
 167 
 
 ^ 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 understanding, the instrument of self-examination, the 
 parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the 
 factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions 
 and of social dogmas and ideas. It is to be the home 
 confessional, the initiator of knowledge, the seed of 
 fruitful self -questioning. Let me be very clear here. I 
 I do not mean for a moment that the novelist is going 
 / to set up as a teacher, as a sort of priest with a pen, 
 who will make men and women believe and do this and 
 ^ that. The novel is not a new sort of pulpit ; humanity 
 is passing out of the phase when men sit under preachers 
 and dogmatic influences. But the novelist is going to 
 be the most potent of artists, because he is going to 
 present conduct, devise beautiful conduct, discuss con- 
 duct, analyse conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate it 
 through and through. He will not teach, but discuss, 
 point out, plead, and display. And this being my view 
 you will be prepared for the demand I am now about to 
 make for an absolutely free hand for the novelist in his 
 choice of topic and incident and. in his method of treat- 
 ment ; or rather, if I may presume to speak for other 
 novelists, I would say it is not so much a demand we 
 make as an intention we proclaim. We are going to 
 write, subject only to our limitations, about the whole 
 of human life. We are going to deal with ^political 
 questions and religious questions and social questions. 
 We cannot present people unless we have this free hand, 
 this unrestricted field. What is the good of telling stories 
 about people's lives if one may not deal freely with tha 
 religious beliefs and organisations that have controlled 
 or failed to control them ? What is the good of pretend- 
 ing toHvrite about love, and the loyalties and treacheries 
 y and quarrels of men and women, if one must not glance 
 
 i68 
 
The Contemporary Novel 
 
 at those varieties of physical temperament and organic 
 quality, those deeply passionate needs and distresses 
 from which half the storms of human life are brewed? 
 We mean to deal with all these things, and it will need 
 very much more than the disapproval of provincial 
 librarians, the hostility of a few influential people in 
 London, the scurrility of one paper, and the deep and 
 obstinate silences of another, to stop the incoming tide 
 of aggressive novel- writing. We are going to write about 
 it all. We are going to write about business and finance 
 and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and 
 decorum and indecorum, until a thousand pretences and 
 ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold, clear air of 
 our elucidations. We are going to write of w^asted oppor- 
 tunities and latent beauties until a thousand new ways 
 of living open to men and women. We are going to 
 appeal to the young and the hopeful and the curious, 
 against the established, the dignified, and defensive, 
 i Before we have done, we will have all life within thej 
 scope of the novel. * 
 
 y 
 
 169 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER'S PUBLIC LIBRARY 
 
 Suppose a philosopher had a great deal of money to 
 spend — though this is not in accordance with experience, 
 it is not inherently impossible — and suppose he thought, 
 as any philosopher does think, that the British public 
 ought to read much more and better books than they 
 do, and that founding public libraries was the way to 
 induce them to do so, what sort of public libraries would 
 he found? That, I submit, is a suitable topic for a 
 disinterested speculator. 
 
 He would, I suppose, being a philosopher, begin by 
 asking himself what a libraiy essentially was, and he 
 would probably come to the eccentric conclusion that it 
 was essentially a collection of books. He would, in his 
 unw^orldliness , entirely overlook the fact that it might 
 be a job for a municipally influential builder, a costly 
 but conspicuous monument to opulent generosity, a 
 news-room, an employment bureau, or a meeting-place 
 for the glowing young ; he would never think for a 
 moment of a library as a thing one might build, it would 
 present itself to him with astonishing simplicity as a 
 thing one would collect. Bricks ceased to be literature 
 after Babylon. 
 
 His first proceeding would be, I suppose, to make a 
 list of that collection. What books, he would say, have 
 all my libraries to possess anyhow? And he would begin 
 to jot down — with the assistance of a few friends, perhaps 
 — this essential list. 
 
 He would, being a philosopher, insist on good 
 
 170 
 
The Philosopher's Public Library 
 
 editions, and he would also take great pains with the 
 selection. It would not be a limited or an exclusive 
 list — when in doubt he would include. He would dis- 
 regard modern fiction very largely, because any book 
 that has any success can always be bought for sixpence, 
 and modern poetry, because, wdth an exception or so, 
 it does not signify at all. H-e would set almost all 
 the Greek and Eoman literature in well-printed trans- 
 lations and with luminous introductions — and if there 
 were no good translations he would give some good man 
 dOSOO or so to make one — translations of all that is 
 good in modern European literatures, and, last but 
 largest portion of his list, editions of all that is worthy 
 of our own. He would make a very careful list of 
 thoroughly modern encyclopaedias, atlases, and volumes 
 of information, and a particularly complete catalogue of 
 all literature that is still copyright; and then — vidth 
 perhaps a secretary or so — he would revise all his lists 
 and mark against every book whether he would have 
 two, five or ten or twenty copies, or whatever number of 
 copies of it he thought proper in each library. 
 
 Then next, being a philosopher, he would decide that 
 if he was going to buy a great number of libraries in 
 this way, he was going to make an absolutely new sort 
 of demand for these books, and that he w^as entitled to 
 a special sort of supply. 
 
 He would not expect the machinery of retail book- 
 selling to meet the needs of wholesale buying. So he 
 would go either to w^holesale booksellers, or directly to 
 the various publishers of the books and editions he had 
 chosen, and ask for reasonable special prices for the two 
 thousand or seven thousand or fifty thousand of each 
 book he required. And the publishers would, of course, 
 
 171 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 give him very special prices, more especially in the case 
 of the out-of-copyright books. He would probably find 
 it best to buy whole editions in sheets and bind them 
 himself in strong bindings. And he would emerge from 
 these negotiations in possession of a number of complete 
 libraries each of — how many books? Less than twenty 
 thousand ought to do it, I think, though that is a matter 
 for separate discussion, and that should cost him, buying 
 in this wholesale way, under rather than over d62,000 a 
 library. 
 
 And next he would bethink himself of the readers 
 of these books. "These people,'' he would say, "do not 
 know very much about books, which, indeed, is why I 
 am giving them this library." 
 
 Accordingly, he would get a number of able and 
 learned people to write him guides to his twenty thou- 
 sand books, and, in fact, to the whole world of reading, 
 a guide, for example, to the books on history in general, 
 a special guide to books on English history, or French 
 or German history, a guide to the books on geology, a 
 guide to poetry and poetical criticisms, and so forth. 
 
 Some such books our philosopher would find already 
 done — the "Bibliography of American History," of the 
 American Libraries' Association, for example, and Mr. 
 Nield's "Guide to Historical Fiction " — and what are not 
 done he would commission good men to do for him. 
 Suppose he had to commission forty such guides alto- 
 gether, and that they cost him on the average £500 
 each, for he would take care not to sweat their makers, 
 then that would add another £20,000 to his expenditure. 
 But if he was going to found 400 libraries, let us say, 
 that would only be £50 a library — a very trivial addition 
 to his expenditure. 
 
 172 
 
The Philosopher's Public Library 
 
 The rarer books mentioned in these various guides 
 would remind him, however, of the many even his ample 
 limit of twenty thousand forced him to exclude, and he 
 would, perhaps, consider the need of having two or three 
 libraries each for the storage of a hundred thousand books 
 or so not kept at the local libraries, but which could be 
 sent to them at a day's notice at the request of any 
 reader. And then, and only then, would he give his 
 attention to the housing and staffing that this reality of 
 books would demand. 
 
 Being a philosopher and no fool, he would draw a 
 very clear, hard distinction between the reckless endow- 
 ment of the building trade and the dissemination of 
 books. He would distinguish, too, between a library 
 and a news-room, and would find no great attraction in 
 the prospect of supplying the national youth with free 
 but thumby copies of the sixpenny magazines. He would 
 consider that all that was needed for his library was, first, 
 easily accessible fireproof shelving for his collection, with 
 ample space for his additions, an efficient distributing 
 office, a cloak-room, and so forth, and eight or nine not 
 too large, well lit, well carpeted, well warmed and well 
 ventilated rooms radiating from that office, in which the 
 guides and so forth could be consulted, and where those 
 who had no convenient, quiet room at home could read. 
 
 He would find that, by avoiding architectural vul- 
 garities, a simple, well proportioned building satisfying 
 all these requirements and containing housing for the 
 librarian, assistant, custodian and staff could be built 
 for between £4,000 and dG5,000, excluding the cost of 
 site, and his sites, which he would not choose for their 
 conspicuousness, might average something under another 
 £1,000. 
 
 173 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 He would try to make a bargain with the local people 
 for their co-operation in his enterprise, though he would, 
 as a philosopher, understand that where a public library 
 is least wanted it is generally most needed. But in most 
 cases he would succeed in stipulating for a certain 
 standard of maintenance by the local authority. Since 
 moderately prosperous illiterate men undervalue educa- 
 tion, and most town councillors are moderately illiterate 
 men, he would do his best to keep the salary and appoint- 
 ment of the librarian out of such hands. He would 
 stipulate for a salary of at least i6400, in addition to 
 housing, light and heat, and he would probably find it 
 advisable to appoint a little committee of visitors who 
 would have the power to examine qualifications, endorse 
 the appointment, and recommend the dismissal of all 
 his four hundred librarians. He would probably try to 
 make the assistantship at £100 a year or thereabout a 
 sort of local scholarship to be w^on by competition, and 
 only the cleaner and caretaker's place would be left to 
 the local politician. And, of course, our philosopher 
 would stipulate that, apart from all other expenditure, 
 a sum of at least £200 a year should be set aside for 
 buying new books. 
 
 So our rich philosopher would secure at the minimum 
 cost a number of efficiently equipped libraries throughout 
 the country. Eight thousand pounds down and £900 a 
 year is about as cheap as a public library can be. Below 
 that level, it would be cheaper to have no public library. 
 Above that level, a public library that is not efficient is 
 either dishonestly or incapably organised or managed, 
 or it is serving too large a district and needs duplication, 
 or it is trying to do too much. 
 
 174 
 
ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOG 
 
 It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life 
 to be a painted Pagan God and live upon a ceiling. I 
 crown myself becomingly in stars or tendrils or with 
 electric coruscations (as the mood takes me), and wear 
 an easy costume free from complications and appro- 
 priate to the climate of those agreeable spaces. The 
 company about me on the clouds varies greatly with 
 the mood of the vision, but always it is in some way, 
 if not always a very obvious way, beautiful. One 
 frequent presence is G. K. Chesterton, a joyous whirl 
 of brush work, appropriately garmented and crowned. 
 When he is there, I remark, the whole ceiling is by 
 A sort of radiation convivial. We drink limitless old 
 October from handsome flagons, and we argue mightily 
 about Pride (his weak point) and the nature of Deity. 
 A hygienic, attentive, and essentially ansesthetic Eagle 
 checks, in the absence of exercise, any undue enlarge- 
 ment of our Promethean livers. . . . Chesterton often 
 — but never by any chance Belloc. Belloc I admire 
 beyond measure, but there is a sort of partisan vicious- 
 ness about Belloc that bars him from my celestial 
 dreams. He never figures, no, not even in the remotest 
 corner, on my ceiling. And yet the divine artist, by 
 some strange skill that my ignorance of his technique 
 saves me from the presumption of explaining, does in- 
 dicate exactly where Belloc is. A little quiver of the 
 paint, a faint aura, about the spectacular masses of 
 
 175 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Chesterton? I am not certain. But no intelligent 
 beholder can look up and miss the remarkable fact that 
 Belloc exists — and that he is away, safely away, away 
 in his heaven, which is, of course, the Park Lane 
 Imperialist's hell. There he presides. . . . 
 
 But in this life I do not meet Chesterton exalted upon 
 clouds, and there is but the mockery of that endless 
 leisure for abstract discussion afforded by my painted 
 entertainments. I live in an urgent and incessant world, 
 which is at its best a wildly beautiful confusion of im- 
 pressions and at its worst a dingy uproar. It crowds 
 upon us and jostles us, we get our little interludes for 
 thinking and talking between much rough scuffling and 
 laying about us with our fists. And I cannot afford to 
 be continually bickering with Chesterton and Belloc 
 about forms of expression. There are others for whom 
 I want to save my knuckles. One may be wasteful in 
 peace and leisure, but economies are the soul of conflict. 
 
 In many ways we three are closely akin ; we diverge 
 not by necessity but accident, because we speak in 
 different dialects and have divergent metaphysics. All 
 that I can I shall persuade to my way of thinking about 
 thought and to the use of words in my loose, expressive 
 manner, but Belloc and Chesterton and I are too grown 
 and set to change our languages now and learn new 
 ones ; we are on different roads, and so we must needs 
 shout to one another across intervening abysses. These 
 two say Socialism is a thing they do not want for men, 
 and I say Socialism is above all what I want for men. 
 We shall go on saying that now to the end of our days. 
 But what we do all three want is something very alike. 
 Our different roads are parallel. I aim at a growing 
 collective life, a perpetually enhanced inheritance for our 
 
 176 
 
About Chesterton and Belloc 
 
 race, through the fullest, freest development of the in- 
 dividual life. What they aim at ultimately I do not 
 understand, but it is manifest that its immediate form 
 is the fullest and freest development of the individual 
 life. We all three hate equally and sympathetically the 
 spectacle of human beings blown up with windy wealth 
 and irresponsible powder as cruelly and absurdly as boys 
 blow up frogs ; we all three detest the complex causes 
 that dwarf and cripple lives from the moment of birth 
 and starve and debase great masses of mankind. We 
 w^ant as universally as possible the jolly life, men and 
 women warm-blooded and well-aired, acting freely and 
 joyously, gathering life as children gather corn-cockles 
 in com. We all three want people to have property of 
 a real and personal sort, to have the son, as Chesterton 
 put it, bringing up the port his father laid down, and 
 pride in the pears one has grown in one's own garden. 
 And I agree with Chesterton that giving — giving oneself 
 out of love and fellowship — is the salt of life. 
 
 But there I diverge from him, less in spirit, I think, 
 than in the manner of his expression. There is a base 
 because impersonal way of giving. "Standing drink," 
 which he praises as noble, is just the thing I cannot 
 stand, the ultimate mockery and vulgarisation of that 
 fine act of bringing out the cherished thing saved for 
 the heaven-sent guest. It is a mere commercial trans- 
 action, essentially of the evil of our time. Think of it ! 
 Two temporarily homeless beings agree to drink to- 
 gether, and they turn in and face the public supply of 
 drink (a little vitiated by private commercial necessities) 
 in the public-house. (It is horrible that life should be 
 so wholesale and heartless.) And Jones, with a sudden 
 effusion of manner, thrusts twopence or ninepence (got 
 
 M 177 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 God knows how) into the economic mysteries and personal 
 deHcacy of Brown. I'd as soon a man slipped sixpence 
 down my neck. If Jones has used love and sympathy 
 to detect a certain real thirst and need in Brown and 
 knowledge and power in its assuaging by some specially 
 appropriate fluid, then we have an altogether different 
 matter ; but the common busine>ss of " standing treat " 
 and giving presents and entertainments is as proud and 
 unspiritual as cock-crowing, as foolish and inhuman as 
 that sorry compendium of mercantile vices, the game of 
 poker, and I am amazed to find Chesterton commend it. 
 But that is a criticism by the way. Chesterton and 
 Belloc agree with the Socialist that the present world 
 does not give at all what they want. They agree that 
 it fails to do so through a wild derangement of our 
 property relations. They are in agreement with the 
 common contemporary man (whose creed is stated, I 
 think, not unfairly, but with the omission of certain 
 important articles by Chesterton), that the derangements 
 of our property relations are to be remedied by concerted 
 action and in part by altered laws. The land and all 
 sorts of great common interests must be, if not owned, 
 then at least controlled, managed, checked, redistributed 
 by the State. Our real difference is only about a little 
 more or a little less owning. I do not see how Belloc 
 and Chesterton can stand for anything but a strong 
 State as against those wild monsters of property, the 
 strong, big private owners. The State must be complex 
 and powerful enough to prevent them. State or pluto- 
 crat, there is really no other practical alternative before 
 the world at the present time. Either we have to let 
 the big financial adventurers, the aggregating capitalist 
 and his Press, in a loose, informal combination, rule 
 
 178 
 
About Chesterton and Belloc 
 
 the earth, either we have got to stand aside from pre- 
 ventive legislation and leave things to work out on their 
 present lines, or we have to construct a collective organi- 
 sation sufficiently strong for the protection of the liberties 
 of the some-day-to-be-jolly common man. So far we go 
 in common. If Belloc and Chesterton are not Socialists, 
 they are at any rate not anti- Socialists. If they say they 
 want an organised Christian State (which involves prac- 
 tically seven-tenths of the Socialist desire), then, in the 
 face of our big common enemies, of adventurous capital, 
 of alien Imperialism, base ambition, base intelligence, 
 and common prejudice and ignorance, I do not mean to 
 quarrel with them politically, so long as they force no 
 quarrel on me. Their organised Christian State is nearer 
 the organised State I want than our present plutocracy. 
 Our ideals will fight some day, and it will be, I know, a 
 first-rate fight, but to fight now is to let the enemy in. 
 When we have got all we want in common, then and 
 only then can we afford to differ. I have never believed 
 that a Socialist Party could hope to form a Government 
 in this country in my life-time ; I believe it less now than 
 ever I did. I don't know if any of my Fabian colleagues 
 entertain so remarkable a hope. But if they do not, then 
 unless their political aim is pure cantankerousness, they 
 must contemplate a working political combination be- 
 tween the Socialist members in Parliament and just that 
 non-capitalist section of the Liberal Party for which 
 Chesterton and Belloc speak. Perpetual opposition is a 
 dishonourable aim in politics ; and a man who mingles 
 in political development with no intention of taking on 
 responsible tasks unless he gets all his particular formulae 
 accepted is a pervert, a victim of Irish bad example, and 
 unfit for decent democratic institutions. ... 
 
 179 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 I digress again, I see, but my drift I hope is clear. 
 Differ as we may, Belloc and Chesterton are with all 
 Socialists in being on the same side of the great political 
 and social cleavage that opens at the present time. We 
 and they are with the interests of the mass of common 
 men as against that growing organisation of great owners 
 who have common interests directly antagonistic to those 
 of the community and State. We Socialists are only 
 secondarily politicians. Our primary business is not to 
 impose upon, but to ram right into the substance of that 
 object of Chesterton's solicitude, the circle of ideas of 
 the common man, the idea of the State as his own, as 
 a thing he serves and is served by. We want to add 
 to his sense of property rather than offend it. If I had 
 my way I would do that at the street corners and on the 
 trams, I w'ould take dow^n that alien-looking and de- 
 testable inscription "L.C.C.," and put up, "This Tram, 
 this Street, belongs to the People of London." Would 
 Chesterton or Belloc quarrel with that? Suppose that 
 Chesterton is right, and that there are incurable things 
 in the mind of the common man flatly hostile to our 
 ideals ; so much of our ideals will fail. But we are doing 
 our best by our lights, and all we can. What are Chester- 
 ton and Belloc doing? If our ideal is partly right and 
 partly wrong, are they trying to build up a better ideal? 
 Will they state a Utopia and how they propose it shall 
 be managed? If they lend their weight only to such fine 
 old propositions as that a man w^ants freedom, that he 
 has a right to do as he likes with his own, and so on, 
 they won't help the common man much. All that fine 
 talk, without some further exposition, goes to sustain 
 Mr. Eockefeller's simple human love of property, and 
 the woman and child sweating manufacturer in his fight 
 
 i8o 
 
About Chesterton and Belloc 
 
 for the inspector-free home industry. I bought on a 
 bookstall the other day a pamphlet full of misrepresenta- 
 tion and bad argument against Socialism by an Australian 
 Jew, published by the Single-Tax people apparently in a 
 disinterested attempt to free the land from the landowner 
 by the simple expedient of abusing anyone else who 
 wanted to do as much but did not hold Henry George 
 to be God and Lord ; and I know Socialists who will 
 protest with tears in their eyes against association with 
 any human being who sings any song but the "Eed 
 Flag " and doubts whether Marx had much experience 
 of affairs. Well, there is no reason why Chesterton and 
 Belloc should at their level do the same sort of thing. 
 When we talk on a ceiling or at a dinner-party with any 
 touch of the celestial in its composition, Chesterton and 
 I, Belloc and I, are antagonists with an undying feud, 
 but in the fight against human selfishness and narrow^- 
 ness and for a finer, juster law, w^e are brothers — at the 
 remotest, half-brothers. 
 
 Chesterton isn't a Socialist — agreed ! But now, as 
 between us and the Master of Elibank or Sir Hugh Bell 
 or any other Free Trade Liberal capitalist or landlord, 
 which side is he on? You cannot have more than one 
 fight going on in the political arena at the same time, 
 because only one party or group of parties can win. 
 
 And going back for a moment to that point about a 
 Utopia, I want one from Chesterton. Purely unhelpful 
 criticism isn't enough from a man of his size. It isn't 
 justifiable for him to go about sitting on other people's 
 Utopias. I appeal to his sense of fair play. I have done my 
 best to reconcile the conception of a free and generous 
 stj'le of personal living with a social organisation that will 
 save V^.e world from the harsh predominance of dull, per- 
 
 i8i 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 sistent, energetic, unscrupulous grabbers tempered only 
 by the vulgar extravagance of their wives and sons. It 
 isn't an adequate reply to say that nobody stood treat 
 there, and that the simple, generous people like to beat 
 their own wives and children on occasion in a loving and 
 intimate manner, and that they won't endure the spirit 
 of Mr. Sidney Webb. 
 
 182 
 
ABOUT SIR THOMAS MORE 
 
 There are some writers who are chiefly interesting in 
 themselves, and some whom chance and the agreement 
 of men have picked out as symbols and convenient 
 indications of some particular group or temperament of 
 opinions. To the latter it is that Sir Thomas More 
 belongs. An age and a type of mind have found in him 
 and his Utopia a figurehead and a token; and pleasant 
 and honourable as his personality and household present 
 themselves to the modern reader, it is doubtful if they 
 would by this time have retained any peculiar distinction 
 among the many other contemporaries of whom we have 
 chance glimpses in letters and suchlike documents, w^ere 
 it not that he happened to be the first man of affairs in 
 England to imitate the "Eepublic" of Plato. By that 
 chance it fell to him to give the world a noun and an 
 adjective of abuse, "Utopian," and to record how under 
 the stimulus of Plato's releasing influence the opening 
 problems of our modern world presented themselves to 
 the English mind of his time. For the most part the 
 problems that ex-ercised him are the problems that 
 exercise us to-day, some of them, it may be, have 
 grown up and intermarried, new ones have joined their 
 company, but few, if any, have disappeared, and it is 
 alike in his resemblances to and differences from the 
 modern speculative mind that his essential interest lies. 
 
 The portrait presented by contemporary mention and 
 his own intentional and unintentional admissions, is of 
 
 183 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 an active-minded and agreeable-mannered man, a hard 
 worker, very markedly prone to quips and v^himsical 
 sayings and plays upon words, and aware of a double 
 reputation as a man of erudition and a wit. This latter 
 quality it was that won him advancement at court, and 
 it may have been his too clearly confessed reluctance to 
 play the part of an informal table jester to his king that 
 laid the grounds of that deepening royal resentment that 
 ended only with his execution. But he was also valued 
 by the king for more solid merits, he was needed by 
 the king, and it was more than a table scorned or a 
 clash of opinion upon the validity of divorce ; it 
 was a more general estrangement and avoidance of 
 service that caused that fit of regal petulance by which 
 he died. 
 
 It would seem that he began and ended his career 
 in the orthodox religion and a general acquiescence in 
 the ideas and customs of his time, and he played an 
 honourable and acceptable part in that time ; but his 
 permanent interest lies not in his general conformity 
 but in his incidental scepticism, in the fact that under- 
 lying the observances and recognised rules and limitations 
 that give the texture of his life were the profoundest 
 doubts, and that, stirred and disturbed by Plato, he 
 saw fit to write them down. One may question if such 
 scepticism is in itself unusual, whether any large pro- 
 portion of great statesmen, great ecclesiastics and ad- 
 ministrators have escaped phases of destructive self- 
 criticism, of destructive criticism of the principles upon 
 w^hich their general careers were framed. But few have 
 made so public an admission as Sir Thomas More. A 
 good Catholic undoubtedly he was, and yet we find him 
 capable of conceiving a non-Christian community ex- 
 
 184 
 
About Sir Thomas More 
 
 celling all Christendom in wisdom and virtue ; in practice 
 his sense of conformity and orthodoxy was manifest 
 enough, but in his *' Utopia " he ventures to contemplate, 
 and that not merely wistfully, but with some confidence, 
 the possibility of an absolute religious toleration. 
 
 The " Utopia " is none the less interesting because 
 it is one of the most inconsistent of books. Never 
 were the forms of Socialism and Communism animated 
 by so entirely an Individualist soul. The hands are the 
 hands of Plato, the wide-thinking Greek, but the voice 
 is the voice of a humane, public-spirited, but limited and 
 very practical English gentleman who takes the in- 
 feriority of his inferiors for granted, dislikes friars and 
 tramps and loafers and all undisciplined and unproduc- 
 tive people, and is ruler in his own household. He 
 abounds in sound practical ideas, for the migration of 
 harvesters, for the universality of gardens and the 
 artificial incubation of eggs, and he sweeps aside all 
 Plato's suggestion of the citizen woman as though it 
 had never entered his mind. He had indeed the Whig 
 temperament, and it manifested itself down even to the 
 practice of reading aloud in company, which still pre- 
 vails among the more representative survivors of the 
 Whig tradition. He argues ably against private property, 
 but no thought of any such radicalism as the admission 
 of those poor peons of his, with head half-shaved and 
 glaring uniform against escape, to participation in owner- 
 ship, appears in his proposals. His communism is all 
 for the convenience of his Syphogrants and Tranibores, 
 those gentlemen of gravity and experience, lest one 
 should swell up above the others. So too is the essential 
 Whiggery of the limitation of the Prince's revenues. It 
 is the very spirit of eighteenth century Constitutionalism. 
 
 185 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 And his Whiggery bears Utilitarianism instead of the 
 vanity of a flower. Among his cities, all of a size, so 
 that "he that knoweth one knoweth all," the Benthamite 
 would have revised his sceptical theology and admitted 
 the possibility of heaven. 
 
 Like any Whig, More exalted reason above the 
 imagination at every point, and so he fails to understand 
 the magic prestige of gold, making that beautiful metal 
 into vessels of dishonour to urge his case against it, nor 
 had he any perception of the charm of extravagance, for 
 example, or the desirability of various clothing. The 
 Utopians w^ent all in coarse linen and undyed w^ool — 
 why should the world be coloured? — and all the economy 
 of labour and shortening of the working day was to no 
 other end than to prolong the years of study and the 
 joys of reading aloud, the simple satisfactions of the good 
 boy at his lessons, to the very end of life. "In the 
 institution of that weal publique this end is only and 
 chiefly pretended and minded, that what time may 
 possibly be spared from the necessary occupations and 
 affairs of the commonwealth, all that the citizens should 
 withdraw from the bodily service to the free liberty of 
 the mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they 
 suppose the felicity of this life to consist." 
 
 Indeed, it is no paradox to say that "Utopia," which 
 has by a conspiracy of accidents become a proverb for 
 undisciplined fancifulness in social and political matters, 
 is in reality a very unimaginative work. In that, next 
 to the accident of its priority, lies the secret of its 
 continuing interest. In some respects it is Uke one of 
 those precious and delightful scrapbooks people disinter 
 in old country houses ; its very poverty of synthetic 
 power leaves its ingredients, the cuttings from and 
 
 i86 
 
About Sir Thomas More 
 
 imitations of Plato, the recipe for the hatching of eggs, 
 the stern resolutions against scoundrels and rough fellows, 
 all the sharper and brighter. There will always be found 
 people to read in it, over and above the countless multi- 
 tudes who will continue ignorantly to use its name for 
 everything most alien to More's essential quality. 
 
 187 
 
TRAFFIC AND REBUILDING 
 
 The London traf&c problem is just one of those ques- 
 tions that appeal very strongly to the more prevalent 
 and less charitable types of English mind. It has a 
 practical and constructive air, it deals with impressively 
 enormous amounts of tangible property, it rests with a 
 comforting effect of solidity upon assumptions that are 
 at once doubtful and desirable. It seems free from 
 metaphysical considerations, and it has none of those 
 disconcerting personal applications, those penetrations 
 towards intimate qualities, that makes eugenics, for 
 example, faintly but persistently uncomfortable. It is 
 indeed an ideal problem for a healthy, hopeful, and pro- 
 gressive middle-aged public man. And, as I say, it deals 
 with enormous amounts of tangible property. 
 
 Like all really serious and respectable British prob- 
 lems, it has to be handled gently to prevent its coming 
 to pieces in the gift. It is safest in charge of the expert, 
 that wonderful last gift of time. He will talk rapidly 
 about congestion, long-felt wants, low efficiency, 
 economy, and get you into his building and rebuilding 
 schemes with the minimum of doubt and head-swimming. 
 He is like a good Hendon pilot. Unspecialised writers 
 have the destructive analytical touch. They pull the 
 wrong levers. So far as one can gather from the 
 specialists on the question, there is very considerable 
 congestion in many of the London thoroughfares, delays 
 that seem to be avoidable occur in the delivery of goods, 
 
 i88 
 
Traffic and Rebuilding 
 
 multitudes of empty vans cumber the streets, we have 
 hundreds of acres of idle trucks — there are more acres of 
 railway sidings than of public parks in Greater London 
 — and our Overseas cousins find it ticklish work crossing 
 Kegent Street and Piccadilly. Kegarding life simply 
 as an affair of getting people and things from where 
 they are to where they appear to be wanted, this seems 
 all very muddled and wanton. So far it is quite easy 
 to agree with the expert. And some of the various and 
 entirely incompatible schemes experts are giving us by 
 way of a remedy, appeal very strongly to the imagina- 
 tion. For example, there is the railway clearing house, 
 which, it is suggested, should cover I do not know how 
 many acres of what is now. slumland in Shoreditch. The 
 position is particularly convenient for an underground 
 connection with every main line into London. Upon the 
 underground level of this great building every goods 
 train into London will run. Its trucks and vans will 
 be unloaded, the goods passed into lifts, which will take 
 every parcel, large and small, at once to a huge, ingeni- 
 ously contrived sorting-floor above. There in a manner 
 at once simple, ingenious and effective, they will be 
 sorted and returned, either into delivery vans at the street 
 level or to the trains emptied and now reloading on the 
 train level. Above and below these three floors will be 
 extensive warehouse accommodation. Such a scheme 
 would not only release almost all the vast area of London 
 now under railway yards for parks and housing, but it 
 would give nearly every delivery van an effective load, 
 and probably reduce the number of standing and empty 
 vans or half-empty vans on the streets of London to a 
 quarter or an eighth of the present number. Mostly these 
 are heavy horse vans, and their disappearance would 
 
 189 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 greatly facilitate the conversion of the road surfaces to 
 the hard and even texture needed for horseless traffic. 
 
 But that is a scheme too comprehensive and rational 
 for the ordinary student of the London traffic problem, 
 whose mind runs for the most part on costly and devastat- 
 ing rearrangements of the existing roadways. Moreover, 
 it would probably secure a maximum of effect with a 
 minimum of property manipulation ; always an undesir- 
 able consideration in practical politics. And it would 
 commit London and England to goods transit by rail- 
 way for another century. Far more attractive to the 
 expert advisers of our various municipal authorities are 
 such projects as a new Thames bridge scheme, which will 
 (with incalculable results) inject a new stream of traffic 
 into Saint Paul's Churchyard ; and the removal of 
 Charing Cross Station to the south side of the river. 
 Then, again, we have the systematic widening of various 
 thoroughfares, the shunting of tramways into traffic 
 streams, and many amusing, expensive, and interesting 
 tunnellings and clearances. Taken together, these huge 
 reconstructions of London are incoherent and conflicting ; 
 each is based on its own assumptions and separate 
 "expert" advice, and the resulting new opening plays 
 its part in the general circulation as duct or aspirator, 
 often with the most surprising results. The discussion 
 of the London traffic problem as we practise it in our 
 clubs is essentially the sage turning over and over again of 
 such fragmentary schemes, headshakings over the vacant 
 sites about Aldwych and the Strand, brilliant petty sug- 
 gestions and — dispersal. Meanwhile the experts in- 
 trigue ; one partial plan after another gets itself accepted, 
 this and that ancient landmark perish, builders grow rich, 
 and architects infamous, and some Tower Bridge horror, 
 
 19D 
 
Traffic and Rebuilding 
 
 some vulgarity of the Automobile Club type, some Buck- 
 ingham Palace atrocity, some Eegent Street stupidity, 
 some such cramped and thwarted thing as that new arch 
 which gives upon Charing Cross is added to the confusion. 
 I do not see any reason to suppose that this continuous 
 muddle of partial destruction and partial rebuilding is 
 not to constitute the future history of London. 
 
 Let us, however, drop the expert methods and handle 
 this question rather more rudely. Do we want London 
 rebuilt? If we do, is there, after all, any reason why 
 we should rebuild it on its present site? London is 
 where it is for reasons that have long ceased to be 
 valid; it grew there, it has accumulated associations, an 
 immense tradition, that this constant mucking about of 
 builders and architects is destroying almost as effectually 
 as removal to a new site. The old sort of rebuilding 
 was a natural and picturesque process, house by house, 
 and street by street, a thing as pleasing and almost 
 as natural in effect as the spreading and interlacing of 
 trees; as this new building, this clearance of areas, 
 the piercing of avenues, becomes more comprehensive, 
 it becomes less reasonable. If we can do such big things 
 we may surely attempt bigger things, so that whether w^e 
 want to plan a new capital or preserve the old, it comes 
 at last to the same thing, that it is unreasonable to be 
 constantly pulling down the London we have and putting 
 it up again. Let us drain away our heavy traffic into 
 tunnels, set up that clearing-house plan, and control the 
 growth at the periphery, which is still so witless and 
 ugly, and, save for the manifest tidying and preserving 
 that is needed , begin to leave the central parts of London , 
 which are extremely interesting even where they are 
 not quite beautiful, in peace. 
 
 191 
 
THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY 
 
 It has long been generally recognised that there are two 
 quite divergent ways of attacking sociological and 
 economic questions, one that is called scientific and one 
 that is not, and I claim no particular virtue in the recogni- 
 tion of that; but I do claim a certain freshness in my 
 analysis of this difference, and it is to that analysis that 
 your attention is now called. When I claim freshness I 
 do not make, you understand, any claim to original dis- 
 covery. What I have to say, and have been saying for 
 some time, is also more or less, and with certain differ- 
 ences, to be found in the thought of Professor Bosanquet, 
 for example, in Alfred Sidgwick's *'Use of Words in 
 Reasoning," in Sigwart's "Logic," in contemporary 
 American metaphysical speculation. I am only one 
 incidental voice speaking in a general movement of 
 thought. My trend of thought leads me to deny 
 that sociology is a science, or only a science in the 
 same loose sense that modern history is a science, 
 and to throw doubt upon the value of sociology 
 that follows too closely what is called the scientific 
 method. 
 
 The drift of my argument is to dispute not only that 
 sociology is a science, but also to deny that Herbert 
 Spencer and Comte are to be exalted as the founders 
 of a new and fruitful system of human inquiry. I find 
 myself forced to depreciate these modern idols, and 
 to reinstate the Greek social philosophers in their 
 
 192 
 
The So-called Science of Sociology 
 
 vacant niches, to ask you rather to go to Plato for 
 the proper method, the proper way of thinking sociolo- 
 gically. 
 
 We certainly owe the word Sociology to Comte, a 
 man of exceptionally methodical quality. I hold he de- 
 veloped the word logically from an arbitrary assumption 
 that the whole universe of being was reducible to 
 measurable and commeasurable and exact and consistent 
 expressions. 
 
 In a very obvious way, sociology seemed to Comte to 
 crown the edifice of the sciences ; it was to be to the 
 statesman what pathology and physiology were to the 
 doctor; and one gathers that, for the most part, he 
 regarded it as an intellectual procedure in no way 
 differing from physics. His classification of the sciences 
 shows pretty clearly that he thought of them all as exact 
 logical systematisations of fact arising out of each other 
 in a synthetic order, each lower one containing the 
 elements of a lucid explanation of those above it — 
 physics explaining chemistry; chemistry, physiology; 
 physiology, sociology; and so forth. His actual method 
 was altogether unscientific ; but through all his work 
 runs the assumption that in contrast with his prede- 
 cessors he is really being as exact and universally valid 
 as mathematics. To Herbert Spencer — very appropri- 
 ately, since his mental characteristics make him the 
 English parallel to Comte — we owe the naturalisation of 
 the word in English. His mind being of greater calibre 
 than Comte' 8, the subject acquired in his hands a far 
 more progressive character. Herbert Spencer was less 
 unfamiliar with natural history than with any other 
 branch of practical scientific work ; and it was natural 
 he should turn to it for precedents in sociological re- 
 N 193 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 search. His mind was invaded by the idea of classifica- 
 tion, by memories of specimens and museums; and he 
 initiated that accumulation of desiccated anthropological 
 anecdotes that still figures importantly in current 
 sociological work. On the lines he initiated sociolo- 
 gical investigation, what there is of it, still tends 
 to go. 
 
 From these two sources mainly the work of contem- 
 porary sociologists derives. But there persists about it 
 a curious discursiveness that reflects upon the power and 
 value of the initial impetus. Mr. V. V. Branford, 
 the able secretary of the Sociological Society, recently 
 attempted a useful work in a classification of the 
 methods of what he calls "approach," a word 
 that seems to me eminently judicious and expres- 
 sive. A review of the first volume the Sociological 
 Society has produced brings home the aptness of this 
 image of exploratory operations, of experiments in 
 "taking a line." The names of Dr. Beattie Crozier and 
 Mr. Benjamin Kidd recall works that impress one as 
 large-scale sketches of a proposed science rather than 
 concrete beginnings and achievements. The search for 
 an arrangement, a "method,'^ continues as though they 
 were not. The desperate resort to the analogical method 
 of Commenius is confessed by Dr. Steinmetz, who talks 
 of social morphology, physiology, pathology, and so forth. 
 There is also a less initiative disposition in the Vicomte 
 Combes de Lestrade and in the work of Professor Gid- 
 dings. In other directions sociological work is apt to 
 lose its general reference altogether, to lapse towards 
 some department of activity not primarily sociological 
 at all. Examples of this are the works of Mr. and Mrs. 
 Sidney Webb, M. Ostrogorski and M. Gustave le Bon. 
 
 194 
 
The So-called Science of Sociology 
 
 From a contemplation of all this diversity Professor 
 Durkheim emerges, demanding a "synthetic science," 
 "certain synthetic conceptions" — and Professor Karl 
 Pearson endorses the demand — to fuse all these various 
 activities into something that will live and grow. What 
 is it that tangles this question so curiously that there is 
 not only a failure to arrive at a conclusion, but a failure 
 to join issue? 
 
 Well, there is a certain not too clearly recognised 
 order in the sciences to which I wish to call your atten- 
 tion, and which forms the gist of my case against this 
 scientific pretension. There is a gradation in the import- 
 ance of the instance as one passes from mechanics and 
 physics and chemistry through the biological sciences 
 to economics and sociology, a gradation whose correlatives 
 and implications have not yet received adequate recog- 
 nition, and which do profoundly affect the method of 
 study and research in each science. 
 
 Let me begin by pointing out that, in the more 
 modern conceptions of logic, it is recognised that there 
 are no identically similar objective experiences ; the dis- 
 position is to conceive all real objective being as individual 
 and unique. This is not a singular eccentric idea of mine ; 
 it is one for which ample support is to be found in the 
 writings of absolutely respectable contemporaries, who 
 are quite untainted by association with fiction. It is 
 now understood that conceivably only in the subjective 
 world, and in theory and the imagination, do we deal 
 with identically similar units, and with absolutely com- 
 mensurable quantities. In the real world it is reasonable 
 to suppose we deal at most with practically similar units 
 and practically commensurable quantities. But there is 
 a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias in the normal 
 
 195 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 human mind to ignore this, and not only to speak but 
 to think of a thousand bricks or a thousand sheep or a 
 thousand sociologists as though they were all absolutely 
 true to sample. If it is brought before a thinker for a 
 moment that in any special case this is not so, he slips 
 back to the old attitude as soon as his attention is with- 
 drawn. This source of error has, for instance, caught 
 nearly the whole race of chemists, with one or two dis- 
 tinguished exceptions, and atoms and ions and so forth 
 of the same species are tacitly assumed to be similar 
 one to another. Be it noted that, so far as the practical 
 results of chemistry and physics go, it scarcely matters 
 which assumption we adopt. For purposes of inquiry 
 and discussion the incorrect one is infinitely more con- 
 venient. 
 
 But this ceases to be true directly we emerge from 
 the region of chemistry and physics. In the biological 
 sciences of the eighteenth century, commonsense strug- 
 gled hard to ignore individuality in shells and plants and 
 animals. There was an attempt to eliminate the more 
 conspicuous departures as abnormalities, as sports, 
 nature's weak moments, and it was only with the estab- 
 lishment of Darwin's great generalisation that the hard 
 and fast classificatory system broke down, and individu- 
 ality came to its own. Yet there had always been a 
 clearly felt difference between the conclusions of the 
 biological sciences and those dealing with lifeless sub- 
 stance, in the relative vagueness, the insubordinate 
 looseness and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist 
 accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not 
 go triumphantly from generalisation to generalisation 
 after the fashion of the chemist or physicist. It is easy 
 to see, therefore, how it came about that the inorganic 
 
 196 
 
The So-called Science of Sociology 
 
 sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. 
 It was scarcely suspected that the biological sciences 
 might perhaps, after all, be truer than the experimental, 
 in spite of the difference in practical value in favour of 
 the latter. It was, and is by the great majority of people 
 to this day, supposed to be the latter that are invincibly 
 true ; and the former are regarded as a more complex 
 set of problems merely, with obliquities and refractions 
 that presently will be explained away. Comte and 
 Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken 
 that much for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt 
 talked of the unknown and the unknowable, but not in 
 this sense, as an element of inexactness running through 
 all things. He thought of the unknown as the indefinable 
 beyond to an immediate world that might be quite clearly 
 and exactly known. 
 
 Well, there is a growing body of people who are 
 beginning to hold the converse view — that counting, 
 classification, measurement, the whole fabric of mathe- 
 matics, is subjective and deceitful, and that the unique- 
 ness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number 
 of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and 
 inexactness of generalisation increases, because individu- 
 ality tells more and more. Could you take men by the 
 thousand billion, you could generalise about them as 
 you do about atoms ; could you take atoms singly, it 
 may be you would find them as individual as your 
 aunts and cousins. That concisely is the minority 
 belief, and it is the belief on which this present paper 
 is based. 
 
 Now, what is called the scientific method is the 
 method of ignoring individualities; and, like many 
 mathematical conventions, its great practical convenience 
 
 197 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 is no proof whatever of its final truth. Let me admit 
 the enormous value, the wonder of its results in 
 mechanics, in all the physical sciences, in chemistry, 
 even in physiology — but what is its value beyond that? 
 Is the scientific method of value in biology? The great 
 advances made by Darwin and his school in biology were 
 not made, it must be remembered, by the scientific 
 method, as it is generally conceived, at all. He con- 
 ducted a research into pre-documentary history. He 
 collected information along the lines indicated by certain 
 interrogations ; and the bulk of his work was the digest- 
 ing and critical analysis of that. For documents and 
 monuments he had fossils and anatomical structures and 
 germinating eggs too innocent to lie, and so far he was 
 nearer simplicity. But, on the other hand, he had to 
 correspond with breeders and travellers of various sorts, 
 classes entirely analogous, from the point of view of 
 evidence, to the writers of history and memoirs. I 
 question profoundly whether the w^ord "science," in 
 current usage anyhow, ever means such patient disen- 
 tanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the attain- 
 ment of something positive and emphatic in the way 
 of a conclusion, based on amply repeated experiments 
 capable of infinite repetition, "proved," as they say, 
 "up to the hilt." 
 
 It would be, of course, possible to dispute whether 
 the word "science" should convey this quality of certi- 
 tude ; but to most people it certainly does at the present 
 time. So far as the movements of comets and electric 
 trams go, there is, no doubt, practically cocksure science; 
 and indisputably Comte and Herbert Spencer believed 
 that cocksure could be extended to every conceivable 
 finite thing. The fact that Herbert Spencer called a 
 
 198 
 
The So-called Science of Sociology 
 
 certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the 
 non-individualising quality of his primary assumptions 
 and of his mental texture. He believed that individuality 
 (heterogeneity) was and is an evolutionary product from 
 an original homogeneity. It seems to me that the general 
 usage is entirely for the limitation of the use of the word 
 "science" to knowledge and the search after knowledge 
 of a high degree of precision. And not simply the 
 general usage: "Science is measurement," Science is 
 "organised common sense," proud, in fact, of its essential 
 error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms. 
 
 If we quite boldly face the fact that hard positive 
 methods are less and less successful just in proportion 
 as our "ologies'^ deal with larger and less numerous 
 individuals ; if we admit that we become less " scientific " 
 as we ascend the scale of the sciences, and that we do 
 and must change our method, then, it is humbly sub- 
 mitted, we shall be in a much better position to consider 
 the question of "approaching" sociology. We shall 
 realise that all this talk of the organisation of sociology, 
 as though presently the sociologist would be going about 
 the world with the authority of a sanitary engineer, is 
 and will remain nonsense. 
 
 In one respect we shall still be in accordance with 
 the Positivist map of the field of human knowledge ; with 
 us as with that, sociology stands at the extreme end of 
 the scale from the molecular sciences. In these latter 
 there is an infinitude of units ; in sociology, as Comte 
 perceived, there is only one unit. It is true that Herbert 
 Spencer, in order to get classification somehow, did, as 
 Professor Durkheim has pointed out, separate human 
 society into societies, and made believe they competed 
 one with another and died and reproduced just like 
 
 199 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 animals, and that economists, following List, have for 
 the purposes of fiscal controversy discovered economic 
 types ; but this is a transparent device , and one is sur- 
 prised to find thoughtful and reputable writers off their 
 guard against such bad analogy. But, indeed, it is im- 
 possible to isolate complete communities of men, or to 
 trace any but rude general resemblances between group 
 and group. These alleged units have as much individu- 
 ality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse 
 and separate. And we are forced to conclude that not 
 only is the method of observation, experiment, and verifi- 
 cation left far away down the scale, but that the method 
 of classification under types, which has served so useful 
 a purpose in the middle group of subjects, the subjects 
 involving numerous but a finite number of units, has also 
 to be abandoned here. We cannot put Humanity into 
 a museum , or dry it for examination ; our one single 
 still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and 
 the fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory 
 means of dividing it, and nothing else in the real world 
 with which to compare it. We have only the remotest 
 ideas of its '* life-cycle" and a few^ relics of its origin 
 and dreams of its destiny. . . . 
 
 Sociology, it is evident, is, upon any hypothesis, no 
 less than the attempt to bring that vast, complex, unique 
 Being, its subject, into clear, true relations with the 
 individual intelligence. Now, since individual intelli- 
 gences are individual, and each is a little differently 
 placed in regard to the subject under consideration, since 
 the personal angle of vision is much wider towards 
 humanity than towards the circumambient horizon of 
 matter, it should be manifest that no sociology of 
 universal compulsion, of anything approaching the 
 
 200 
 
The So-called Science of Sociology 
 
 general validity of the physical sciences, is ever to be 
 hoped for — at least upon the metaphysical assumptions 
 of this paper. With that conceded, we may go on to 
 consider the more hopeful ways in which that great Being 
 may be presented in a comprehensible manner. Essenti- 
 ally this presentation must involve an element of self- 
 expression, must partake quite as much of the nature of 
 art as of science. One finds in the first conference of 
 the Sociological Society, Professor Stein, speaking, in- 
 deed, a very different philosophical dialect from mine, 
 but coming to the same practical conclusion in the matter, 
 and Mr. Osman Newland counting "evolving ideals for 
 the future " as part of the sociologist's work. Mr. Alfred 
 Fouillee also moves very interestingly in the region of 
 this same idea ; he concedes an essential difference be- 
 tween sociology and all other sciences in the fact of a 
 "certain kind of liberty belonging to society in the 
 exercise of its higher functions." He says further: "If 
 this view be correct, it will not do for us to follow in 
 the steps of Comte and Spencer, and transfer, bodily 
 and ready-made, the conceptions and the methods of 
 the natural sciences into the science of society. For 
 here the fact of consciousness entails a reaction of the 
 whole assemblage of social phenomena upon themselves, 
 such as the natural sciences have no example of." And 
 he concludes : " Sociology ought, therefore, to guard care- 
 fully against the tendency to crystalhse that which is 
 essentially fluid and moving, the tendency to consider 
 as given fact or dead data that which creates itself and 
 gives itself into the world of phenomena continually by 
 force of its own ideal conception." These opinions do, 
 in their various keys, sound a similar motif to mine. 
 If, indeed, the tendency of these remarks is justifiable, 
 
 20I 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 then unavoidably the subjective element, which is beauty, 
 must coalesce with the objective, which is truth ; and 
 sociology must be neither art simply, nor science in 
 the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge 
 rendered imaginatively, and with an element of person- 
 ality ; that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, 
 literature. 
 
 If this contention is sound, if therefore we boldly set 
 aside Comte and Spencer altogether, as pseudo-scientific 
 interlopers rather than the authoritative parents of 
 sociology, we shall have to substitute for the classifica- 
 tions of the social sciences an inquiry into the chief 
 literary forms that subserve sociological purposes. Of 
 these there are two, one invariably recognised as valu- 
 able, and one which, I think, under the matter-of-fact 
 scientific obsession, is altogether underrated and neg- 
 lected. The first, which is the social side of history, 
 makes up the bulk of valid sociological work at the 
 present time. Of history there is the purely descriptive 
 part, the detailed account of past or contemporary social 
 conditions, or of the sequence of such conditions; and, 
 in addition, there is the sort of historical literature that 
 seeks to elucidate and impose general interpretations 
 upon the complex of occurrences and institutions, to 
 establish broad historical generalisations, to eliminate the 
 mass of irrelevant incident, to present some great period 
 of history, or all history, in the light of one dramatic 
 sequence, or as one process. This Dr. Beattie Crozier, 
 for example, attempts in his "History of Intellectual 
 Development." Equally comprehensive is Buckle's 
 "History of Civilisation." Lecky's "History of Euro- 
 pean Morals," during the onset of Christianity again, 
 is essentially sociology. Numerous works — Atkinson's 
 
 202 
 
The So-called Science of Sociology 
 
 "Primal Law," and Andrew Lang's "Social Origins," 
 for example — may be considered, as it were, to be frag- 
 ments to the same purport. In the great design 
 of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Boman 
 Empire,*' or Carlyle's "French Eevolution," you have 
 a greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque 
 elements in history, but in other respects an altogether 
 kindred endeavour to impose upon the vast confusions 
 of the past a scheme of interpretation, valuable just to 
 the extent of its literary value, of the success with which 
 the discrepant masses have been fused and cast into the 
 shape the insight of the writer has determined. The 
 writing of great history is entirely analogous to fine 
 portraiture, in which fact is indeed material, but material 
 entirely subordinate to vision. 
 
 One main branch of the work of a Sociological 
 Society therefore should surely be to accept and render 
 acceptable, to provide understanding, criticism, and 
 stimulus for such literary activities as resttore the 
 dead bones of the past to a living participation in 
 our lives. 
 
 But it is in the second and at present neglected 
 direction that I believe the predominant attack upon the 
 problem implied by the word "sociology" must lie; the 
 attack that must be finally driven home. There is no 
 such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering 
 what is, without considering what is intended to he. In 
 sociology, beyond any possibility of evasion, ideas are 
 facts. The history of civilisation is really the history of 
 the appearance and reappearance, the tentatives and 
 hesitations and alterations, the manifestations and re- 
 flections in this mind and that, of a very complex, im- 
 perfect, elusive idea, the Social Idea. It is that idea 
 
 203 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 struggling to exist and realise itself in a world of egotisms, 
 animalisms, and brute matter. Now, I submit it is not 
 only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the 
 most promising and hopeful form of approach, to en- 
 deavour to disentangle and express one's personal version 
 of that idea, and to measure realities from the stand- 
 point of that idealisation. I think, in fact, that the 
 creation of Utopias — and their exhaustive criticism— is 
 the proper and distinctive method of sociology. 
 
 Suppose now the Sociological Society, or some con- 
 siderable proportion of it, were to adopt this view, that 
 sociology is the description of the Ideal Society and its 
 relation to existing societies, would not this give the 
 synthetic framework Professor Durkheim, for example, 
 has said to be needed? 
 
 Almost all the sociological literature beyond the 
 province of history that has stood the test of time and 
 established itself in the esteem of men is frankly Utopian. 
 Plato, when his mind turned to schemes of social recon- 
 struction, thrust his habitual form of dialogue into a 
 corner; both the "Eepublic*' and the "Laws" are 
 practically Utopias in monologue ; and Aristotle found 
 the criticism of the Utopian suggestions of his pre- 
 decessors richly profitable. Directly the mind of the 
 world emerged again at the Renascence from intellectual 
 barbarism in the brief breathing time before Sturm and 
 the schoolmasters caught it and birched it into scholar- 
 ship and a new period of sterility, it went on from Plato 
 to the making of fresh Utopias. Not without profit did 
 More discuss pauperism in this form and Bacon the 
 organisation of research ; and the yeast of the French 
 Revolution was Utopias. Even Comte, all the while that 
 he is professing science, fact, precision, is adding detail 
 
 204 
 
The So-called Science of Sociology 
 
 after detail to the intensely personal Utopia of a Western 
 Republic that constitutes his one meritorious gift to the 
 world. Sociologists cannot help making Utopias ; though 
 they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with 
 passion, their very silences shape a Utopia. Why should 
 they not follow the precedent of Aristotle, and accept 
 Utopias as material? 
 
 There used to be in my student days, and probably 
 still flourishes, a most valuable summary of fact and 
 theory in comparative anatomy, called Rolleston's 
 "Forms of Animal Life." I figure to myself a similar 
 book, a sort of dream book of huge dimensions, in 
 reality perhaps dispersed in many volumes by many 
 hands, upon the Ideal Society. This book, this picture 
 of the perfect state, would be the backbone of sociology. 
 It would have great sections devoted to such questions 
 as the extent of the Ideal Society, its relation to racial 
 differences, the relations of the sexes in it, its economic 
 organisations, its organisation for thought and education, 
 its "Bible" — as Dr. Beattie Crozier would say — its 
 housing and social atmosphere, and so forth. Almost 
 all the divaricating work at present roughly classed 
 together as sociological could be brought into relation 
 in the simplest manner, either as new suggestions, as 
 new discussion or criticism, as newly ascertained facts 
 bearing upon such discussions and sustaining or 
 eliminating suggestions. The institutions of existing 
 states would come into comparison with the institutions 
 of the Ideal State, their failures and defects would be 
 criticised most effectually in that relation, and the whole 
 science of collective psychology, the psychology of human 
 association, would be brought to bear upon the question 
 of the practicability of this proposed ideal. 
 
 20S 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 This method would give not only a boundary shape 
 to all sociological activities, but a scheme of arrangement 
 for text books and lectures, and points of direction and 
 reference for the graduation and post graduate work of 
 sociological students. 
 
 Only one group of inquiries commonly classed as 
 sociological would have to be left out of direct relation- 
 ship with this Ideal State ; and that is inquiries con- 
 cerning the rough expedients to meet the failure of im- 
 perfect institutions. Social emergency work of all sorts 
 comes under this head. What to do with the pariah 
 dogs of Constantinople, what to do with the tramps who 
 sleep in the London parks, how to organise a soup kitchen 
 or a Bible coffee van, how to prevent ignorant people, 
 who have nothing else to do, getting drunk in beer- 
 houses, are no doubt serious questions for the practical 
 administrator, questions of primary importance to the 
 politician; but they have no more to do with sociology 
 than the erection of a temporary hospital after the 
 collision of two trains has to do with railway engineering. 
 
 So much for my second and most central and essential 
 portion of sociological work. It should be evident that 
 the former part, the historical part, which conceivably 
 will be much the bulkier and more abundant of the two, 
 will in effect amount to a history of the suggestions in 
 circumstance and experience of that Idea of Society of 
 which the second will consist, and of the instructive 
 failures in attempting its incomplete realisation. 
 
 206 
 
DIVORCE 
 
 The time is fast approaching when it will be neces- 
 sary for the general citizen to form definite opinions 
 upon proposals for probably quite extensive alterations 
 of our present divorce laws, arising out of the recommen- 
 dations of the recent Koyal Commission on the subject. 
 It may not be out of place, therefore, to run through 
 some of the chief points that are likely to be raised, and 
 to set out the main considerations affecting these issues. 
 
 Divorce is not one of those things that stand alone, 
 and neither divorce law nor the general principles of 
 divorce are to be discussed without a reference to ante- 
 cedent arrangements. Divorce is a sequel to marriage, 
 and a change in the divorce law is essentially a change 
 in the marriage law. There was a time in this country 
 when our marriage was a practically divorceless bond, 
 soluble only under extraordinary circumstances by people 
 in situations of exceptional advantage for doing so. Now 
 it is a bond under conditions, and in the event of the 
 adultery of the wife, or of the adultery plus cruelty or 
 plus desertion of the husband, and of one or two other 
 rarer and more dreadful offences, it can be broken at 
 the instance of the aggrieved party. A change in the 
 divorce law is a change in the dissolution clauses, so 
 to speak, of the contract for the marriage partnership. 
 It is a change in the marriage law. 
 
 A great number of people object to divorce under 
 any circumstances whatever. This is the case with the 
 
 207 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 orthodox Catholic and with the orthodox Positivist. And 
 many rehgious and orthodox people carry their assertion 
 of the indissolubility of marriage to the grave; they 
 demand that the widow or widower shall remain unmar- 
 ried, faithful to the vows made at the altar until death 
 comes to the release of the lonely survivor also. Ke- 
 marriage is regarded by such people as a posthumous 
 bigamy. There is certainly a very strong and logical 
 case to be made out for a marriage bond that is indis- 
 soluble even by death. It banishes step-parents from the 
 world. It confers a dignity of tragic inevitability upon 
 the association of husband and wife, and makes a love 
 approach the gravest, most momentous thing in life. It 
 banishes for ever any dream of escape from the presence 
 and service of either party, or of any separation from 
 the children of the union. It affords no alternative to 
 "making the best of it " for either husband or wife ; they 
 have taken a step as irrevocable as suicide. And some 
 logical minds would even go further, and have no law 
 as between the members of a family, no rights, no private 
 property within that limit. The family would be the 
 social unit and the father its public representative, and 
 though the law might intervene if he murdered or ill- 
 used wife or children, or they him, it would do so in just 
 the same spirit that it might prevent him from self- 
 mutilation or attempted suicide, for the good of the 
 State simply, and not to defend any supposed inde- 
 pendence of the injured member. There is much, I 
 assert, to be said for such a complete shutting up of the 
 family from the interference of the law, and not the 
 least among these reEisons is the entire harmony of such 
 a view with the passionate instincts of the natural man 
 and woman in these matters. All unsophisticated human 
 
 208 
 
Divorce 
 
 beings appear disposed to a fierce proprietorship in their 
 children and their sexual partners, and in no respect is 
 the ordinary mortal so easily induced to vehemence and 
 violence. 
 
 For my own part, I do not think the maintenance of 
 a marriage that is indissoluble, that precludes the sur- 
 vivor from re-marriage, that gives neither party an ex- 
 ternal refuge from the misbehaviour of the other, and 
 makes the children the absolute property of their parents 
 until they grow up, would cause any very general un- 
 happiness. Most people are reasonable enough, good- 
 tempered enough, and adaptable enough to shake down 
 even in a grip so rigid, and I would even go further and 
 say that its very rigidity, the entire absence of any 
 way out at all, would oblige innumerable people to ac- 
 commodate themselves to its conditions and make a 
 working success of unions that, under laxer conditions, 
 would be almost certainly dissolved. We should have 
 more people of what I may call the "broken-in" type 
 than an easier release would create, but to many thinkers 
 the spectacle of a human being thoroughly "broken-in" 
 is in itself extremely satisfactory. A few more crimes 
 of desperation perhaps might occur, to balance against 
 an almost universal effort to achieve contentment and 
 reconciliation. We should hear more of the "natural 
 law " permitting murder by the jealous husband or by 
 the jealous wife, and the traffic in poisons would need 
 a sedulous attention — but even there the impossibility 
 of re-marriage would operate to restrain the impatient. 
 On the whole, I can imagine the w^orld rubbing along 
 very well with marriage as unaccommodating as a per- 
 fected steel trap. Exceptional people might suffer or 
 sin wildly — to the general amusement or indignation. 
 . o 209 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 But when once we part from the idea of such a 
 rigid and eternal marriage bond — and the law of every 
 civilised country and the general thought and sentiment 
 everywhere have long since done so — then the whole 
 question changes. If marriage is not so absolutely sacred 
 a bond, if it is not an eternal bond, but a bond we may 
 break on this account or that, then at once we put the 
 question on a different footing. If we may terminate it 
 for adultery or cruelty, or any cause whatever, if we may 
 suspend the intimacy of husband and wife by separation 
 orders and the like, if we recognise their separate pro- 
 perty and interfere between them and their children to 
 ensure the health and education of the latter, then we 
 open at once the whole question of a terminating agree- 
 ment. Marriage ceases to be an unlimited union and 
 becomes a definite contract. We raise the whole question 
 of "What are the limits in marriage, and how and when 
 may a marriage terminate?" 
 
 Now, many answers are being given to that question 
 at the present time. We may take as the extremest 
 opposite to the eternal marriage idea the proposal of 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw, that marriage should be terminable 
 at the instance of either party. You would give due and 
 public notice that your marriage was at an end, and it 
 would be at an end. This is marriage at its minimum, as 
 the eternal indissoluble marriage is marriage at its maxi- 
 mum, and the only conceivable next step would be to 
 have a marriage makeable by the oral declaration of 
 both parties and terminable by the oral declaration of 
 either, which would be, indeed, no marriage at all, 
 but an encounter. You might marry a dozen times in 
 that way in a day. . . . Somewhere between these 
 two extremes lies the marriage law of a civilised 
 
Divorce 
 
 state. Let us, rather than working down from the 
 eternal marriage of the rehgious idealists, work up from 
 Mr. Shaw. The former course is, perhaps, inevitable 
 for the legislator, but the latter is much more convenient 
 for our discussion. 
 
 Now, the idea of a divorce so easy and wilful as Mr. 
 Shaw proposes arises naturally out of an exclusive con- 
 sideration of what I may call the amorous sentiment- 
 alities of marriage. If you regard marriage as merely 
 the union of two people in love, then, clearly, it is 
 intolerable, an outrage upon human dignity, that they 
 should remain intimately united when either ceases to 
 love. And in that world of Mr. Shaw's dreams, in 
 which everybody is to have an equal income and 
 nobody is to have children, in that culminating con- 
 versazione of humanity, his marriage law will, no doubt, 
 work with the most admirable results. But if we make 
 a step towards reality and consider a world in which 
 incomes are unequal, and economic difficulties abound — 
 for the present we will ignore the complication of off- 
 spring — ^we at once find it necessary to modify the first 
 fine simplicity of divorce at either partner's request. 
 Marriage is almost always a serious economic disturb- 
 ance for both man and woman : work has to be given 
 up and rearranged , resources have to be pooled ; only 
 in the rarest cases does it escape becoming an indefinite 
 business partnership. Accordingly, the withdrawal of 
 one partner raises at once all sorts of questions of finan- 
 cial adjustment, compensation for physical, mental, and 
 moral damage, division of furniture and effects and so 
 forth. No doubt a very large part of this could be met if 
 there existed some sort of marriage settlement providing 
 for the dissolution of the partnership. Otherwise the 
 
 311 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 petitioner for a Shaw-es'que divorce must be prepared for 
 the most exhaustive and penetrating examination before, 
 say, a court of three assessors — representing severally the 
 husband, the wife, and justice — to determine the distri- 
 bution of the separation. This point, however, leads me 
 to note in passing the need that does exist even to-day for 
 a more precise business supplement to marriage as we 
 know it in England and America. I think there ought to 
 be a very definite and elaborate treaty of partnership 
 drawn up by an impartial private tribunal for every 
 couple that marries, providing for most of the eventuali- 
 ties of life, taking cognizance of the earning power, the 
 property and prospects of either party, insisting upon 
 due insurances, ensuring private incomes for each 
 partner, securing the welfare of the children, and lay- 
 ing down equitable conditions in the event of a divorce 
 or separation. Such a treaty ought to be a necessary 
 prelude to the issue of a licence to marry. And given 
 such a basis to go upon, then I see no reason w^hy, in the 
 case of couples who remain childless for five or six years, 
 let us say, and seem likely to remain childless, the 
 Shaw-esque divorce at the instance of either party, with- 
 out reason assigned, should not be a very excellent thing 
 indeed. 
 
 And I take up this position because I believe in the 
 family as the justification of marriage. Marriage to me 
 is no mystical and eternal union, but a practical affair, 
 to be judged as all practical things are judged — by its 
 returns in happiness and human welfare. And directly 
 we pass from the mists and glamours of amorous passion 
 to the warm realities of the nursery, we pass into a new 
 system of considerations altogether. We are no longer 
 considering A. in relation to Mrs. A., but A. and Mrs. A. 
 
 212 
 
Divorce 
 
 in relation to an indefinite number of little A.'s, who are 
 the very life of the State in which they live. Into the 
 case of Mr. A. v. Mrs. A. come Master A. and Miss A. 
 intervening. They have the strongest claim against both 
 their parents for love, shelter and upbringing, and the 
 legislator and statesman, concerned as he is chiefly with 
 the future of the community, has the strongest reasons 
 for seeing that they get these things, even at the price 
 of considerable vexation, boredom or indignity to Mr. 
 and Mrs. A. And here it is that there arises the rational 
 case against free and frequent divorce and the general 
 unsettlement and fluctuation of homes that would ensue. 
 At this point we come to the verge of a jungle of 
 questions that would demand a whole book for anything 
 hke a complete answer. Let us try as swiftly and simply 
 as possible to form a general idea at least of the way 
 through. Kemember that we are w^orking upward from 
 Mr. Shaw's question of "Why not separate at the choice 
 of either party?" We have got thus far, that no two 
 people who do not love each other should be com- 
 pelled to live together, except where the welfare of their 
 children comes in to override their desire to separate, 
 and now we have to consider what may or may not be 
 for the welfare of the children. Mr. Shaw, following the 
 late Samuel Butler, meets this difficulty by the most 
 extravagant abuse of parents. He would have us believe 
 that the worst enemies a child can have are its mother 
 and father, and that the only civilised path to citizen- 
 ship is by the incubator, the creche, and the mixed 
 school and college. In these matters he is not only 
 ignorant, but unfeeling and unsympathetic, extraordin- 
 arily so in view of his great capacity for pity and sweet- 
 ness in other directions and of his indignant hatred of 
 
 213 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 cruelty and unfairness, and it is not necessary to waste 
 time in discussing what the common experience con- 
 futes. Neither is it necessary to fly to the other extreme, 
 and indulge in preposterous sentimentalities about the 
 magic of fatherhood and a mother's love. These are not 
 magic and unlimited things, but touchingly qualified and 
 human things. The temperate truth of the matter is that 
 in most parents there are great stores of pride, interest, 
 natural sympathy, passionate love and devotion which 
 can be tapped in the interests of the children and the 
 social future, and that it is the mere commonsense of 
 statecraft to use their resources to the utmost. It does 
 not follow that every parent contains these reservoirs, 
 and that a continual close association with the parents 
 is always beneficial to children. If it did, we should 
 have to prosecute everyone who employed a governess or 
 sent away a little boy to a preparatory school. And 
 our real task is to establish a test that will gauge the de- 
 sirability and benefit of a parent's continued parentage. 
 There are certainly parents and homes from which the 
 children might be taken with infinite benefit to them- 
 selves and to society, and whose union it is ridiculous 
 to save from the divorce court shears. 
 
 Suppose, now, we made the willingness of a parent to 
 give up his or her children the measure of his bene- 
 ficialness to them. There is no reason why we should 
 restrict divorce only to the relation of husband and wife. 
 Let us broaden the word and make it conceivable for a 
 husband or wife to divorce not only the partner, but the 
 children. Then it might be possible to meet the demands 
 of the Shaw-esque extremist up to the point of per- 
 mitting a married parent, who desired freedom, to 
 petition for a divorce, not from his or her partner simply, 
 
 214 
 
Divorce 
 
 but from his or her family, and even for a widow or 
 widower to divorce a family. Then would come the task 
 of the assessors. They would make arrangements for 
 the dissolution of the relationship, erring from justice 
 rather in the direction of liberality towards the divorced 
 group, they would determine contributions, exact securi- 
 ties, appoint trustees and guardians. . . . On the whole, 
 I do not see why such a system should not work very 
 well. It would break up many loveless homes, quarrel- 
 ling and bickering homes, and give a safety-valve for 
 that hate which is the sinister shadow of love. I do not 
 think it would separate one child from one parent who 
 was really worthy of its possession. 
 
 So far I have discussed only the possibility of divorce 
 without offences, the sort of divorce that arises out of 
 estrangement and incompatibilities. But divorce, as it 
 is known in most Christian countries, has a punitive ele- 
 ment, and is obtained through the failure of one of the 
 parties to observe the conditions of the bond and the 
 determination of the other to exact suffering. Divorce 
 as it exists at present is not a readjustment but a 
 revenge. It is the nasty exposure of a private wrong. 
 In England a husband may divorce his wife for a single 
 act of infidelity, and there can be little doubt that we are 
 on the eve of an equalisation of the law in this respect. 
 I will confess I consider this an extreme concession to 
 the passion of jealousy, and one likely to tear off the roof 
 from many a family of innocent children. Only infidelity 
 leading to supposititious children in the case of the wife, 
 or infidelity obstinately and offensively persisted in or en- 
 dangering health in the case of the husband, really injure 
 the home sufficiently to justify a divorce on the assump- 
 tions of our present argument. If we are going to make 
 
 215 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 the welfare of the children our criterion in these matters, 
 then our divorce law does in this direction already go too 
 far. A husband or wife may do far more injury to the 
 home by constantly neglecting it for the companionship 
 of some outside person with whom no "matrimonial 
 offence" is ever committed. Of course, if our divorce law 
 exists mainly for the gratification of the fiercer sexual 
 resentments, well and good, but if that is so, let us 
 abandon our pretence that marriage is an institution for 
 the establishment and protection of homes. And while on 
 the one hand existing divorce laws appear to be obsessed 
 by sexual offences, other things of far more evil effect 
 upon the home go without a remedy. There are, for 
 example, desertion, domestic neglect, cruelty to the chil- 
 dren, drunkenness or harmful drug-taking, indecency of 
 living and uncontrollable extravagance. I cannot con- 
 ceive how any logical mind, having once admitted the 
 principle of divorce, can hesitate at making these entirely 
 home- wrecking things the basis of effective pleas. But 
 in another direction, some strain of sentimentality in my 
 nature makes me hesitate to go with the great majority 
 of divorce law reformers. I cannot bring myself to agree 
 that either a long term of imprisonment or the misfor- 
 tune of insanity should in itself justify a divorce. I 
 admit the social convenience, but I wince at the thought 
 of those tragic returns of the dispossessed. So far as 
 insanity goes, I perceive that the cruelty of the law 
 would but endorse the cruelty of nature. But I do not 
 like mien to endorse the cruelty of nature. 
 
 And, of course, there is no decent-minded person 
 nowadays but wants to put an end to that ugly blot upon 
 our civilisation, the publication of whatever is most 
 spicy and painful in divorce court proceedings. It is an 
 
 216 
 
Divorce 
 
 outrage which falls even more heavily on the innocent 
 than on the guilty, and which has deterred hundreds of 
 shy and delicate-minded people from seeking legal reme- 
 dies for nearly intolerable wrongs. The sort of person 
 who goes willingly to the divorce court to-day is the sort 
 of person who would love a screaming quarrel in a 
 crowded street. The emotional breach of the ma«rriage 
 bond is as private an affair as its consummation, and it 
 would be nearly as righteous to subject young couples 
 about to marry to a blustering cross-examination by some 
 underbred bully of a barrister upon their motives, and 
 then to publish whatever chance phrases in their answers 
 appeared to be amusing in the press, as it is to publish 
 contemporary divorce proceedings. The thing is a nasti- 
 ness, a stream of social contagion and an extreme cruelty, 
 and there can be no doubt that whatever other result 
 this British Koyal Commission may have, there at least 
 will be many sweeping alterations. 
 
 217 
 
THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE EMPIRE 
 
 "If Youth but Knew" is the title of a book published 
 some years ago, but still with a quite living interest, by 
 "Kappa " ; it is the bitter complaint of a distressed senior 
 against our educational system. He is hugely disap- 
 pointed in the public-school boy, and more particularly in 
 one typical specimen. He is — if one might hazard a guess 
 — an uncle bereft of great expectations. He finds an echo 
 in thousands of other distressed uncles and parents. They 
 use the most divergent and inadequate forms of expres- 
 sion for this vague sense that the result has not come 
 out good enough ; they put it contradictorily and often 
 wrongly, but the sense is widespread and real and justifi- 
 able, and we owe a great debt to "Kappa '' for an accurate 
 diagnosis of what in the aggregate amounts to a grave 
 national and social evil. 
 
 The trouble with "Kappa's" particular public-school 
 boy is his unlit imagination, the apathetic commonness 
 of his attitude to life at large. He is almost stupidly 
 not interested in the mysteries of material fact, nor in 
 the riddles and great dramatic movements of history, 
 indifferent to any form of beauty, and pedantically de- 
 voted to the pettiness of games and clothing and social 
 conduct. It is, in fact, chiefly by his style in these 
 latter things, his extensive unilluminated knowledge of 
 Greek and Latin, and his greater costliness, that he 
 differs from a young carpenter or clerk. A young car- 
 
 218 
 
The Schoolmaster and the Empire 
 
 penter or clerk of the same temperaraent would have 
 no narrower prejudices nor outlook, no less capacity 
 for the discussion of broad questions and for imaginative 
 thinking. And it has come to the mind of "Kappa" 
 as a discovery, as an exceedingly remarkable and moving 
 thing, a thing to cry aloud about, that this should be 
 so, that this is all that the best possible modern educa- 
 tion has achieved. He makes it more than a personal 
 issue. He has come to the conclusion that this is not 
 an exceptional case at all, but a fair sample of what 
 our upper-class education does for the imagination of 
 those who must presently take the lead among us. He 
 , declares plainly that we are raising a generation of rulers 
 and of those with whom the duty of initiative should 
 chiefly reside, who have minds atrophied by dull studies 
 and deadening suggestions, and he thinks that this is a 
 matter of the gravest concern for the future of this land 
 and Empire. It is difi&cult to avoid agreeing with him 
 either in his observation or in his conclusion. Anyone 
 who has seen much of undergraduates, or medical 
 students, or Army candidates, and also of their social 
 subordinates, must be disposed to agree that the differ- 
 ence between the two classes is mainly in unimportant 
 things — in polish, in manner, in superficialities of accent 
 and vocabulary and social habit — and that their minds, 
 in range and power, are very much on a level. With 
 an invincibly aristocratic tradition we are failing alto- 
 gether to produce a leader class adequate to modem 
 needs. The State is light-headed. 
 
 But while one agrees with "Kappa" and shares his 
 alarm, one must confess the remedies he considers in- 
 dicated do not seem quite so satisfactory as his diagnosis 
 of the disease. He attacks the curriculum and tells us 
 
 219 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 we must reduce or revolutionise instruction and exercise 
 in the dead languages, introduce a broader handling of 
 history, a more inspiring arrangement of scientific 
 courses, and so forth. I wish, indeed, it were possible 
 to believe that substituting biology for Greek prose com- 
 position, or history with models and photographs and 
 diagrams for Latin versification, would make any con- 
 siderable difference in this matter. For so one might 
 discuss this question and still give no offence to a most 
 amiable and influential class of men. But the roots of 
 the evil, the ultimate cause of that typical young man's 
 deadness, lie not at all in that direction. To indicate 
 the direction in which it does lie is quite unavoidably 
 to give offence to an indiscriminatingly sensitive class. 
 Yet there is need to speak plainly. This deadening of 
 soul comes not from the omission or inclusion of this 
 specific subject or that ; it is the effect of the general 
 scholastic atmosphere. It is an atmosphere that admits 
 of no inspiration at all. It is an atmosphere from which 
 living stimulating influences have • been excluded, 
 from which stimulating and vigorous personalities are 
 now being carefully eliminated, and in which dull, 
 prosaic men prevail invincibly. The explanation of the 
 inert commonness of "Kappa's" schoolboy lies not in 
 his having learnt this or not learnt that, but in the fact 
 that from seven to twenty he has been in the intellectual 
 shadow of a number of good-hearted, sedulously respect- 
 able, conscientiously manly, conforming, well-behaved 
 men, who never, to the knowledge of their pupils and 
 the public, at any rate, think strange thoughts, do 
 imaginative or romantic things, pay tribute to beauty, 
 laugh carelessly, or countenance any irregularity in the 
 world. All erratic and enterprising tendencies in him 
 
 220 
 
The Schoolmaster and the Empire 
 
 have been checked by them and brought at last to 
 nothing ; and so he emerges a mere residuum of decent 
 minor dispositions. The dullness of the scholastic atmo- 
 sphere, the grey, intolerant mediocrity that is the natural 
 or assumed quality of every upper-class schoolmaster, is 
 the true cause of the spiritual etiolation of '* Kappa's" 
 young friend. 
 
 Now, it is a very grave thing, I know, to bring this 
 charge against a great profession — to say, as I do say, 
 that it is collectively and individually dull. But some- 
 one has to do this sooner or later; we have restrained 
 ourselves and argued away from the question too long. 
 There is, I allege, a great lack of vigorous and inspiring 
 minds in our schools. Our upper-class schools are out of 
 touch with the thought of the time, in a backwater of 
 intellectual apathy. We have no original or heroic 
 school-teachers. Let me ask the reader frankly what 
 part our leading headmasters play in his intellectual 
 world ; if when some prominent one among them speaks 
 or writes or talks., he expects anything more than plati- 
 tudes and little things? Has he ever turned aside to 
 learn what this headmaster or that thought of any ques- 
 tion that interested him? Has he ever found freshness 
 or power in a schoolmaster's discourse ; or found a school- 
 master caring keenly for fine and beautiful things? 
 Who does not know the schoolmaster's trite, safe admira- 
 tions, his thin, evasive discussion, his sham enthusiasms 
 for cricket, for fly-fishing, for perpendicular architecture, 
 for boyish traits; his timid refuge in "good form," his 
 deadly silences? 
 
 And if we do not find him a refreshing and inspiring 
 person, and his mind a fountain of thought in which 
 we bathe and are restored, is it likely our sons will? 
 
 221 
 
 ( 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 If the schoolmaster at large is grey and dull, shirking 
 interesting topics and emphatic speech, what must he 
 be like in the monotonous class-room? These may seem 
 wanton charges to some, but I am not speaking without 
 my book. Monthly I am brought into close contact with 
 the pedagogic intelligence through the medium of three 
 educational magazines. A certain morbid habit against 
 which I struggle in vain makes me read everything I 
 catch a schoolmaster writing. I am, indeed, one of the 
 faithful band who read the Educational Supplement of the 
 Times. In these papers schoolmasters write about their 
 business, lectures upon the questions of their calling 
 are reported at length, and a sort of invalid discussion 
 moves with painful decorum through the correspondence 
 column. The scholastic mind so displayed in action 
 fascinates me. It is like watching a game of billiards 
 with wooden cushes and beech wood balls. 
 
 §2 
 
 But let me take one special instance. In a periodical, 
 now no longer living, called the Independent Review ^ 
 there appeared some years ago a very curious and typical 
 contribution by the Headmaster of Dulwich, which I 
 may perhaps use as an illustration of the mental 
 habits which seem inseparably associated with modern 
 scholastic work. It is called "English Ideas on Edu- 
 cation," and it begins — trite, imitative, undistinguished 
 — thus : 
 
 "The most important question in a country is that 
 of education, and the most important people in a country 
 are those who educate its inhabitants. Others have most 
 
 999 
 
The Schoolmaster and the Empire 
 
 of the present in their hands : those who educate have 
 all the future. With the present is bound up all 
 the happiness only of the utterly selfish and the 
 thoughtless among mankind ; on the future rest all 
 the thoughts of every parent and every wise man and 
 patriot." 
 
 It is the opening of a boy's essay. And from first 
 to last this remarkable composition is at or below that 
 level. It is an entirely inconclusive paper, it is impos- 
 sible to understand why it was written ; it quotes no- 
 thing, it says nothing about and was probably written in 
 ignorance of "Kappa" or any other modern contributor 
 to English ideas, and it occupied about six and a quarter 
 of the large-type pages of this now vanished Independent 
 Review. "English Ideas on Education"! — this very 
 brevity is eloquent, the more so since the style is by no 
 means succinct. It must be read to be believed. It is 
 quite extraordinarily non-prehensile in quality and sub- 
 stance, nothing is gripped and maintained and developed ; 
 it is like the passing of a lax hand over the surfaces of 
 disarranged things. It is difficult to read, because one's 
 mind slips over it and emerges too soon at the end, 
 mildly puzzled though incurious still as to what it is all 
 about. One perceives Mr. Gilkes through a fog dimly 
 thinking that Greek has something vital to do with "a 
 knowledge of language and man," that the classical 
 master is in some mysterious way superior to the science 
 man and more imaginative, and that science men ought 
 not to be worried with the Greek that is too high for 
 them; and he* seems, too, to be under the odd illusion 
 that "on all this" Englishmen "seem now to be nearly 
 in agreement," and also on the opinion that games are 
 a little overdone and that civic duties and the use of the 
 
 ?23 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 rifle ought to be taught. Statements are made — the sort 
 of statements that are suffered in an atmosphere where 
 there is no swift, fierce opposition to be feared ; they frill 
 out into vague qualifications and butt gently against 
 other partially contradictory statements. There is a 
 classification of minds — the sort of classification dear to 
 the Y.M.C.A. essayists, made for the purposes of the essay 
 and unknown to psychology. There are, we are told, ac- 
 curate , unimaginative , ingenious minds capable of science 
 and kindred vulgar things (such was Archimedes), and 
 vague, imaginative minds, with the gift for language and 
 for the treatment of passion and the higher indej&nable 
 things (such as Homer and Mr. Gilkes), and, somehow^ 
 this justifies those who are destined for "science" in 
 dropping Greek. Certain "considerations," however, 
 loom inconclusively upon this issue — rather like inter- 
 ested spectators of a street fight in a fog. For example, 
 to learn a language is valuable "in proportion as the 
 nation speaking it is great " — a most empty assertion ; 
 and "no languages are so good," for the purpose of im- 
 proving style, "as the exact and beautiful languages of 
 Eome and Greece." 
 
 Is it not time at least that this last, this favourite 
 but threadbare article of the schoolmaster's creed was 
 put away for good? Everyone who has given any at- 
 tention to this question must be aware that the intel- 
 lectual gesture is entirely different in highly inflected 
 languages such as Greek and Latin and in so uninflected 
 a language as English, that learning Greek to improve 
 one's English style is like learning to swim in order 
 to fence better, and that familiarity with Greek seems 
 only too often to render a man incapable of clear, strong 
 expression in English at all. Yet Mr. Gilkes can permit 
 
 224 
 
The Schoolmaster and the Empire 
 
 this old assertion, so dear to country rectors and the 
 classical scholar, to appear within a column's distance 
 of such style as this : 
 
 "It is now understood that every subject is valuable, 
 if it is properly taught; it will perform that which, as 
 follows from the accounts given above of the aim of 
 education, is the work most important in the case of 
 boys — that is, it will draw out their faculties and make 
 them useful in the w^orld, alert, trained in industry, and 
 able to understand, so far as their school lessons educated 
 them, and make themselves master of any subject set 
 before them." 
 
 This quotation is conclusive. 
 
 §3 
 
 I am haunted by a fear that the careless reader will 
 think I am writing against upper-class schoolmasters. 
 I am, it is undeniable, writing against their dullness, but 
 it is, I hold, a dullness that is imposed upon them by the 
 conditions under which they live. Indeed, I believe, 
 could I put the thing directly to the profession — "Do 
 you not yourselves feel needlessly limited and dull?" — 
 I should receive a majority of affirmative responses. We 
 have, as a nation, a certain ideal of what a schoolmaster 
 must be; to that he must by art or nature approximate, 
 and there is no help for it but to alter our ideal. 
 Nothing else of any wide value can be done until that 
 is done. 
 
 In the first place, the received ideal omits a most 
 necessary condition. We do not insist upon a head- 
 master, or indeed any of our academic leaders and 
 p 225 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 dignitaries, being a man of marked intellectual character, 
 a man of intellectual distinction. It is assumed, rather 
 lightly in many cases, that he has done "good work," as 
 they say — the sort of good work that is usually no good 
 at all, that increases nothing, changes nothing, stimulates 
 no one, leads no whither. That, surely, must be altered. 
 We must see to it that our leading schoolmasters at any 
 
 ./ rate must be men of insight and creative intelligence, 
 men who could at a pinch write a good novel or produce 
 illuminating criticism or take an original part in theo- 
 logical or philosophical discussion, or do any of these 
 minor things. They must be authentic men, taking a 
 line of their own and capable of intellectual passion. 
 They should be able to make their mark outside the 
 school, if only to show they carry a living soul into it. 
 As things are, nothing is so fatal to a schoolmaster's 
 career as to do that. 
 
 And closely related to this omission is our extreme 
 insistence upon what we call high moral character, 
 meaning, really, something very like an entire absence 
 of moral character. We insist upon tact, conformity, 
 and an unblemished record. Now, in these days of 
 warring opinion, these days of gigantic, strange issues 
 that cannot possibly be expressed in the formulas of 
 the smaller times that have gone before, tact is evasion, 
 conformity formality, and silence an unblemished 
 record, mere evidence of the damning burial of a talent 
 
 ] of life. The sort of man into whose hands we give 
 our sons' minds must never have experimented morally 
 or thought at all freely or vigorously about, for example, 
 God, Socialism, the Mosaic account of the Creation, 
 social procedure, Kepublicanism, beauty, love, or, indeed, 
 about anything likely to interest an intelligent adolescent. 
 
 afl6 
 
The Schoolmaster and the Empire 
 
 At the approach of all such things he must have acquired 
 the habit of the modest cough, the infectious trick of 
 the nice evasion. How can "Kappa" expect inspiration 
 from the decorous resultants who satisfy these conditions? 
 What brand can ever be lit at altars that have borne 
 no fire? And you find the secondary schoolmaster who 
 complies with these restrictions becoming the zealous 
 and grateful agent of the tendencies that have made 
 him what he is, converting into a practice those vague 
 dreads of idiosyncrasy, of positive acts and new ideas, 
 that dictated the choice of him and his rule of life. 
 His moral teaching amounts to this : to inculcate truth- 
 telling about small matters and evasion about large, and 
 to cultivate a morbid obsession in the necessary dawn 
 of sexual consciousness. So far from wanting to stimulate 
 the imagination, he hates and dreads it. I find him 
 perpetually haunted by a ridiculous fear that boys will 
 "do something," and in his terror seeking whatever is 
 dull and unstimulating and tiring in intellectual work, 
 clipping their reading, censoring their periodicals, ex- 
 purgating their classics, substituting the stupid grind 
 of organised "games" for natural, imaginative play, 
 persecuting loafers — and so achieving his end and turn- 
 ing out at last, clean-looking, passively well-behaved, 
 apathetic, obliterated young men, with the nicest manners 
 and no spark of initiative at all, quite safe not to "do 
 anything " for ever. 
 
 I submit this may be a very good training for polite 
 servants, but it is not the way to make masters in 
 the world. If we English believe we are indeed a 
 masterful people, we must be prepared to expose our 
 children to more and more various stimulations than 
 we do; they must grow up free, bold, adventurous, 
 
 227 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 initiated, even if they have to take more risks in the 
 doing of that. An able and stimulating teacher is as 
 rare as a fine artist, and is a thing \\^rth having for 
 your son, even at the price of shocking your wife by 
 his lack of respect for that magnificent compromise, 
 the Establishment, or you by his Socialism or by his 
 Catholicism or Darwinism, or even by his erroneous 
 choice of ties and collars. Boys who are to be free, 
 masterly men must hear free men talking freely of 
 religion, of philosophy, of conduct. They must have 
 heard men of this opinion and that, putting what they 
 believe before them with all the courage of conviction. 
 They must have an idea of will prevailing over form. 
 It is far more important that boys should learn from 
 original, intellectually keen men than they should learn 
 from perfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox 
 men, or perfectly nice men. The vital thing to consider 
 about your son's schoolmaster is whether he talked 
 lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not 
 whether he loved unwisely or was born of poor parents, 
 or was seen wearing a frock-coat in combination with 
 a bowler, or confessed he doubted the Apostles' Creed, 
 or called himself a Socialist, or any disgraceful thing 
 like that, so many years ago. It is that sort of thing 
 "Kappa" must invert if he Giants a change in our 
 public schools. You may arrange and rearrange curricula, 
 abolish Greek, substitute '* science" — it will not matter 
 a rap. Even those model canoes of yours, "Kappa," will 
 be wasted if you still insist upon model schoolmasters. 
 So long as we require our schoolmasters to be politic, 
 conforming, undisturbing men, setting up Polonius as an 
 ideal for them, so long will their influence deaden the 
 souls of our sons. 
 
 228 
 
THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 Some few years ago the Fabian Society, which has been 
 so efficient in keeping English Socialism to the lines of 
 "artfulness and the 'eighties," refused to have anything 
 to do with the Endowment of Motherhood. Subsequently 
 it repented and produced a characteristic pamphlet in 
 which the idea was presented with a sort of minimising 
 furtiveness as a mean little extension of outdoor relief. 
 These Fabian Socialists, instead of being the daring 
 advanced people they are supposed to be, are really in 
 many things twenty years behind the times. There need 
 be nothing shamefaced about the presentation of the 
 Endowment of Motherhood. There is nothing shameful 
 about it. It is a plain and simple idea for which the 
 mind of the man in the street has now been very com- 
 pletely prepared. It has already crept into social legisla- 
 tion to th-e extent of thirty shillings. 
 
 I suppose if one fact has been hammered into us in 
 the past two decades more than any other it is this : 
 that the supply of children is falling off in the modern 
 State; that births, and particularly good-quality births, 
 are not abundant enough ; that the birth-rate, and par- 
 ticularly the good-class birth-rate, falls steadily below 
 the needs of our future. 
 
 If no one else has said a word about this important 
 matter, ex-President Koosevelt would have sufficed to 
 shout it to the ends of the earth. Every civilised 
 community is drifting towards "race-suicide" as 
 
 229 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Eome drifted into "race-suicide" at the climax of her 
 empire. 
 
 Well, ifc is absurd to go on building up a civilisation 
 with a dwindling supply of babies in the cradles — and 
 these not of the best possible sort — and so I suppose there 
 is hardly an intelligent person in the English-speaking 
 communities who has not thought of some possible 
 remedy — from the naive scoldings of Mr. Koosevelt and 
 the more stolid of the periodicals to sane and intelligible 
 legislative projects. 
 
 The reasons for the fall in the birth-rate are obvious 
 enough. It is a necessary consequence of the indi- 
 vidualistic competition of modem life. People talk of 
 modern women ** shirking" motherhood, but it would 
 be a silly sort of universe in which a large proportion of 
 women had any natural and instinctive desire to shirk 
 motherhood, and, I believe, a huge proportion of modern 
 women are as passionately predisposed towards mother- 
 hood as ever women were. But modern conditions con- 
 spire to put a heavy handicap upon parentage and an 
 enormous premium upon the partial or complete evasion 
 of offspring, and that is where the clue to the trouble 
 lies. Our social arrangements discourage parentage very 
 heavily, and the rational thing for a statesman to do in 
 the matter is not to grow eloquent, but to do intelligent 
 things to minimise that discouragement. 
 
 Consider the case of an energetic young man and an 
 energetic young woman in our modern world. So long 
 as they remain *' unencumbered " they can subsist on a 
 comparatively small income and find freedom and leisure 
 to watch for and follow opportunities of self-advance- 
 ment ; they can travel, get knowledge and experience, 
 make experiments, succeed. One might almost say the 
 
 130 
 
The Endowment of Motherhood 
 
 conditions of success and self-development in the modern 
 world are to defer marriage as long as possible, and after 
 that to defer parentage as long as possible. And even 
 when there is a family there is the strongest temptation 
 to limit it to three or four children at the outside. 
 Parents who can give three children any opportunity in 
 life prefer to do that than turn out, let us say, eight 
 ill-trained children at a disadvantage, to become the 
 servants and unsuccessful competitors of the offspring of 
 the restrained. That fact bites us all ; it does not require 
 a search. It is all very well to rant about "race-suicide," 
 but there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary 
 circumstances for all but the really rich, and so patent 
 are they that I doubt if all the eloquence of Mr. Eoose- 
 velt and its myriad echoes has added a thousand babies 
 to the eugenic wealth of the English-speaking world. 
 
 Modern married people, and particularly those in just 
 that capable middle class from which children are most 
 urgently desirable from the statesman's point of view, 
 are going to have one or two children to please them- 
 selves, but they are not going to have larger families 
 under existing conditions, though all the ex-Presidents 
 and all the pulpits in the world clamour together for them 
 to do so. 
 
 If having and rearing children is a private affair, then 
 no one has any right to revile small families ; if it is a 
 public service, then the parent is justified in looking to 
 the State to recognise that service and offer some com- 
 pensation for the worldly disadvantages it entails. He 
 is justified in saying that while his unencumbered rival 
 wins past him he is doing the State the most precious 
 service in the world by rearing and educating a family, 
 and that the State has become his debtor. 
 
 231 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 In other words, the modem State has got to pay for 
 its children if it really wants them — and more particu- 
 larly it has to pay for the children of good homes. 
 
 The alternative to that is racial replacement and social 
 decay. That is the essential idea conveyed by this phrase, 
 the Endowment of Motherhood. 
 
 Now, how is the paying to be done? That needs a 
 more elaborate answer, of which I will give here only 
 the roughest, crudest suggestion. 
 
 Probably it w^ould be found best that the payment 
 should be made to the mother, as the administrator of 
 the family budget, that its amount should be made 
 dependent upon the quality of the home in which the 
 children are being reared, upon their health and physical 
 development, and upon their educational success. Be it 
 remembered, we do not want any children; we want 
 good-quality children. The amount to be paid, I would 
 particularly point out, should vary with the standing of 
 the home. People of that excellent class w^hich spends 
 over a hundred a year on each child ought to get about 
 that much from the State, and people of the class which 
 spends five shillings a week per head on them would 
 get about that, and so on. And if these payments were 
 met by a special income tax there would be no social 
 injustice whatever in such an unequality of payment. 
 Each social stratum would pay according to its prosperity, 
 and the only redistribution that would in effect occur 
 would be that the childless people of each class would 
 pay for the children of that class. The childless family 
 and the small family would pay equally with the large 
 family, incomes being equal, but they would receive 
 in proportions varying with the health and general 
 quality of their children. That, I think, gives the 
 
 2^2 
 
The Endowment of Motherhood 
 
 broad principles upon which the payments would be 
 made. 
 
 Of course, if these subsidies resulted in too rapid a 
 rise in the birth-rate, it would be practicable to diminish 
 the inducement ; and if, on the other hand, the birth-rate 
 still fell, it would be easy to increase the inducement 
 until it sufi&ced. 
 
 That concisely is the idea of the Endowment of 
 Motherhood. I believe firmly that some such arrange- 
 ment is absolutely necessary to the continuous develop- 
 ment of the modern State. These proposals arise so 
 obviously out of the needs of our time that I cannot 
 understand any really intelligent opposition to them. I 
 can, however, understand a partial and silly application 
 of them. It is most important that our good-class 
 families should be endowed, but the whole tendency of 
 the timid and disingenuous progressivism of our time, 
 which is all mixed up with ideas of charity and aggressive 
 benevolence to the poor, would be to apply this — as that 
 Fabian tract I mention does — only to the poor mother. 
 To endow poor and bad-class motherhood and leave other 
 people severely alone would be a proceeding so supremely 
 idiotic, so harmful to our national quality, as to be highly 
 probable in the present state of our public intelligence. 
 It comes quite on a level with the policy of starving 
 middle-class education that has left us with nearly the 
 worst educated middle class in Western Europe. 
 
 The Endowment of Motherhood does not attract the 
 bureaucratic type of reformer because it offers a minimum 
 chance of meddlesome interference with people's lives. 
 There would be no chance of "seeking out" anybody 
 and applying benevolent but grim compulsions on the 
 strength of it. In spite of its wide scope it would 
 
 233 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 be much less of a public nuisance than that Wet Chil- 
 dren's Charter, which exasperates me every time I pass 
 a public-house on a rainy night. But, on the other hand, 
 there would be an enormous stimulus to people to raise 
 the quality of their homes, study infantile hygiene, seek 
 out good schools for them — and do their duty as all good 
 parents naturally want to do now — if only economic forces 
 were not so pitilessly against them — thoroughly and well. 
 
 «34 
 
DOCTORS 
 
 In that extravagant world of which I dream, in which 
 people will live in delightful cottages and ground rents 
 will serve instead of rates, and everyone will have a 
 chance of being happy — in that impossible world all 
 doctors will be members of one great organisation for 
 the public health, with all or most of their income 
 guaranteed to them : I doubt if there will be any private 
 doctors at all. 
 
 Heaven forbid I should seem to write a word against 
 doctors as they are. Daily I marvel at the wonders 
 the general practitioner achieves, having regard to the 
 difficulties of his position. 
 
 But I cannot hide from myself, and I do not intend 
 to hide from anyone else, my firm persuasion that the 
 services the general practitioner is able to render us are 
 not one-tenth so effectual as they might be if, instead 
 of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of 
 a sanely organised public machine. Consider what his 
 training and equipment are, consider the peculiar diffi- 
 culties of his work, and then consider for a moment what 
 better conditions might be invented, and perhaps you 
 will not think my estimate of one-tenth an excessive 
 understatement in this matter. 
 
 Nearly the whole of our medical profession and most 
 of our apparatus for teaching and training doctors subsist 
 on strictly commercial lines by earning fees. This chief 
 source of revenue is eked out by the wanton charity of 
 
 23S 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 old women, and conspicuous subscriptions by popularity 
 hunters, and a small but growing contribution (in the 
 salaries of medical officers of health and so forth) from 
 the public funds. But the fact remains that for the 
 great mass of the medical profession there is no living 
 to be got except at a salary for hospital practice or 
 by earning fees in receiving or attending upon private 
 cases. 
 
 So long as a doctor is learning or adding to knowledge, 
 he earns nothing, and the common, unintelligent man 
 does not see why he should earn anything. So that a 
 doctor who has no religious passion for poverty and self- 
 devotion gets through the minimum of training and learn- 
 ing as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and does all 
 he can to fill up the rest of his time in passing rapidly 
 from case to case. The busier he keeps, the less his 
 leisure for thought and learning, the richer he grows, 
 and the more he is esteemed. His four or five years of 
 hasty, crowded study are supposed to give him a complete 
 and final knowledge of the treatment of every sort of 
 disease, and he goes on year after year, often without 
 co-operation, working mechanically in the common in- 
 cidents of practice, births, cases of measles and whooping 
 cough, and so forth, and blundering more or less in 
 whatever else turns up. 
 
 There are no public specialists to whom he can con- 
 veniently refer the difficulties he constantly encounters ; 
 only in the case of rich patients is the specialist available ; 
 there are no properly organised information bureaus for 
 him, and no means whatever of keeping him informed 
 upon progress and discovery in medical science. He is 
 not even required to set apart a month or so in every 
 two or three years in order to return to lectures and 
 
 236 
 
Doctors 
 
 hospitals and refresh his knowledge. Indeed, the income 
 of the average general practitioner would not permit of 
 such a thing, and almost the only means of contact 
 between him and current thought lies in the one or other 
 of our two great medical weeklies to which he happens 
 to subscribe. 
 
 Now just as I have nothing but praise for the average 
 general practitioner, so I have nothing but praise and 
 admiration for those stalwart-looking publications. With- 
 out them I can imagine nothing but the most terrible 
 intellectual atrophy among our medical men. But since 
 they are private properties run for profit they have to 
 pay, and half their bulk consists of the brilliantly written 
 advertisements of new drugs and apparatus. They give 
 much knowledge, they do much to ventilate perplexing 
 questions, but a broadly conceived and properly endowed 
 weekly circular could, I believe, do much more. At 
 any rate, in my Utopia this duty of feeding up 
 the general practitioners will not be left to private 
 enterprise. 
 
 Behind the first line of my medical army will be 
 a second line of able men constantly digesting new 
 research for its practical needs — correcting, explaining, 
 announcing ; and, in addition, a force of public specialists 
 to whom every difficulty in diagnosis will be at once 
 referred. And there will be a properly organised system 
 of reliefs that will allow the general practitioner and 
 his right hand, the nurse, to come back to the refresh- 
 ment of study before his knowledge and mind have got 
 rusty. But then my Utopia is a Socialistic system. 
 Under our present system of competitive scramble, under 
 any system that reduces medical practice to mere fee- 
 hunting, nothing of this sort is possible. 
 
 237 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Then in my Utopia, for every medical man who was 
 mainly occupied in practice, I would have another who 
 was mainly occupied in or about research. People hear 
 so much about modern research that they do not realise 
 how entirely inadequate it is in amount and equipment. 
 Our general public is still too stupid to understand the 
 need and value of sustained investigations in any branch 
 of knowledge at all. In spite of all the lessons of the 
 last century, it still fails* to realise how discovery and 
 invention enrich the community and how paying an 
 investment is the public employment of clever people 
 to think a<nd experiment for the benefit of all. It 
 still expects to get a Newton or a Joule for d08OO a 
 year, and requires him to conduct his researches in 
 the margin of time left over when he has got through 
 his annual eighty or ninety lectures. It imagines 
 discoveries are a sort of inspiration that comes when 
 professors are running to catch trains. It seems in- 
 capable of imagining how enormous are the untried 
 possibilities of research. Of course, if you will only 
 pay a handful of men salaries at which the cook of 
 any large London hotel w^ould turn up his nose, you 
 cannot expect to have the master minds of the world 
 at your service; and save for a few independent or 
 devoted men, therefore, it is not reasonable to suppose 
 that such a poor little dribble of medical research as is 
 now going on is in the hands of persons of much more 
 than average mental equipment. How can it be? 
 
 One hears a lot of the rigorous research into the 
 problem of cancer that is now going on. Does the 
 reader realise that all the men in the whole world who 
 are giving any considerable proportion of their time to 
 this cancer research would pack into a very small room, 
 
 238 
 
Doctors 
 
 that they are working in little groups without any 
 properly organised system of intercommunication, and 
 that half of them are earning less than a quarter of 
 the salary of a Bond Street shopwalker by those vastly 
 important inquiries? Not one cancer case in twenty 
 thousand is being properly described and reported. And 
 yet, in comparison with other diseases, cancer is being 
 particularly well attended to. 
 
 The general complacency with the progress in know- 
 ledge we have made and are making is ridiculously 
 unjustifiable. Enormous things were no doubt done in 
 the nineteenth century in many fields of knowledge, but 
 all that was done was out of all proportion petty in 
 comparison with what might have been done. I suppose 
 the whole of the unprecedented progress in material 
 knowledge of the nineteenth century was the work of 
 two or three thousand men, who toiled against oppo- 
 sition, spite and endless disadvantages, without proper 
 means of intercommunication and with wretched facilities 
 for experiment. Such discoveries as were distinctively 
 medical were the work of only a few hundred men. 
 Now, suppose instead of that scattered band of un- 
 co-ordinated workers a great army of hundreds of 
 thousands of well-paid men ; suppose, for instance, the 
 community had kept as many scientific and medical 
 investigators as it has bookmakers and racing touts and 
 men about town — should we not know a thousand times 
 as much as we do about disease and health and strength 
 and power? 
 
 But these are Utopian questionings. The sane, 
 practical man shakes his head, smiles pit5dngly at my 
 dreamy impracticability, and passes them by. 
 
 ^39 
 
AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION 
 
 There is something of the phonograph in all of us, 
 but in the sort of eminent person who makes public 
 speeches about education and reading, and who gives 
 away prizes and opens educational institutions, there 
 seems to be little else but gramophone. 
 
 These people always say the same things, and say 
 them in the same note. And why should they do that 
 if they are really individuals'? 
 
 There is, I cannot but suspect, in the mysterious 
 activities that underlie life, some trade in records 
 for these distinguished gramophones, and it is a trade 
 conducted upon cheap and wholesale lines. There must 
 be in these demiurgic profundities a rapid manufacture 
 of innumerable thousands of that particular speech about 
 "scrappy reading," and that contrast of "modern" with 
 "serious" literature, that babbles about in the provinces 
 so incessantly. Gramophones thinly disguised as bishops, 
 gramophones still more thinly disguised as eminent 
 statesmen, gramophones K.C.B. and gramophones 
 F.K.S. have brazened it at us time after time, and 
 will continue to brazen it to our grandchildren when 
 we are dead and all our poor protests forgotten. And 
 almost equally popular in their &hameless mouths is the 
 speech that declares this present age to be an age of 
 specialisation. We all know the profound droop of the 
 eminent person's eyelids as he produces that discovery, 
 the edifying deductions or the solemn warnings he 
 
 240 
 
An Age of SiJeclalisatioii 
 
 unfolds from this proposition, and all the dignified, 
 inconclusive rigmarole of that cylinder. And it is non- 
 sense from beginning to end. 
 
 This is most distinctly not an age of specialisation. 
 There has hardly been an age in the whole course of 
 history less so than the present. A few moments of 
 reflection will suffice to demonstrate that. This is 
 beyond any precedent an age of change, change in the 
 appliances of life, in the average length of life, in the 
 general temper of life ; and the two things are incom- 
 patible. It is only under fixed conditions that you 
 can have men specialising. 
 
 They specialise extremely, for example, under such 
 conditions as one had in Hindustan up to the coming 
 of the present generation. There the metal worker or 
 the cloth worker, the wheelwright or the druggist of 
 yesterday did his work under almost exactly the same 
 conditions as his predecessor did it five hundred years 
 before. He had the same resources, the same tools, 
 the same materials; he made the same objects for the 
 same ends. Within the narrow limits thus set him 
 he carried work to a fine perfection; his hand, his 
 mental character were subdued to his medium. His 
 dress and bearing even were distinctive; he was, in fact, 
 a highly specialised man. He transmitted his difference 
 to his sons. Caste was the logical expression in the 
 social organisation of this state of high specialisation, 
 and, indeed, what else is caste or any definite class 
 distinctions but that? But the most obvious fact of 
 the present time is the disappearance of caste and the 
 fluctuating uncertainty of all class distinctions. 
 
 If one looks into the conditions of industrial employ- 
 ment, specialisation will be found to linger just in 
 Q 241 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 proportion as a trade has remained unaffected by 
 iinventiona and innovation. The building trade, for 
 example, is a fairly conservative one. A brick wall 
 is made to-day much as it was made two hundred years 
 ago, and the bricklayer is in consequence a highly skilled 
 and inadaptable specialist. No one who has not passed 
 through a long and tedious training can lay bricks 
 properly. And it needs a specialist to plough a field 
 with horses or to drive a cab through the streets of 
 London. Thatchers, old-fashioned cobblers, and hand 
 workers are all specialised to a degree no new modern 
 calling requires. With machinery skill disappears and 
 unspecialised intelligence comes in. Any generally in- 
 telligent man can learn in a day or two to drive an 
 electric tram, fix up an electric lighting installation, or 
 guide a building machine or a steam plough. He must 
 be, of course, much more generally intelligent than the 
 average bricklayer, but he needs far less specialised skill. 
 To repair machinery requires, of course, a special sort of 
 knowledge, but not a special sort of training. 
 
 In no way is this disappearance of specialisation 
 more marked than in military and naval affairs. In 
 the great days of Greece and Eome war was a special 
 calling, requiring a special type of man. In the Middle 
 Ages war had an elaborate technique, in which the 
 footman played the part of an unskilled labourer, and 
 even within a period of a hundred years it took a long 
 period of training and discipline before the common 
 discursive man could be converted into the steady soldier. 
 Even to-day traditions work powerfully, through ex- 
 travagance of uniform, and through survivals of that 
 mechanical discipline that was so important in the days 
 of hand-to-hand fighting, to keep the soldier something 
 
 242 
 
An Age of Specialisation 
 
 other than a man. For all the lessons of the Boer 
 war we are still inclined to believe that the soldier has 
 to be something severely parallel, carrying a rifle he fires 
 under orders, obedient to the pitch of absolute abnegation 
 of his private intelligence. We still think that our officers 
 have, like some very elaborate and noble sort of per- 
 forming animal, to be "trained." They learn to fight 
 with certain specified "arms" and weapons, instead of 
 developing intelligence enough to use anything that comes 
 to hand. 
 
 But, indeed, when a really great European war does 
 come and lets loose motor-cars, bicycles, wireless tele- 
 graphy, aeroplanes, new projectiles of every size and 
 shape, and a multitude of ingenious persons upon the 
 preposterously vast hosts of conscription, the military 
 caste will be missing within three months of the begin- 
 ning, and the inventive, versatile, intelligent man will 
 have come to his own. 
 
 And what is true of a military caste is equally true 
 of a special governing class such as our public schools 
 maintain. 
 
 The misunderstanding that has given rise to this 
 proposition that this is an age of specialisation, and 
 through that no end of mischief in misdirected technical 
 education and the like, is essentially a confusion between 
 specialisation and the devision of labour. No doubt 
 this is an age when everything makes for wider and wider 
 co-operations. Work that w^as once done by one highly 
 specialised man — the making of a watch, for example — 
 is now turned out wholesale by elaborate machinery, or 
 effected in great quantities by the contributed efforts of 
 a number of people. Each of these people may bring a 
 highly developed inteUigence to bear for a time upon the 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 special problem in hand, but that is quite a different 
 thing from specialising to do that thing. 
 
 This is typically shown in scientific research. The 
 problem or the parts of problems upon which the inquiry 
 of an individual man is concentrated are often much 
 narrower than the problems that occupied Faraday 
 or Dalton, and yet the hard and fast lines that once 
 divided physicist from chemist, or botanist from patholo- 
 gist, have long since gone. Professor Farmer, the 
 botanist, investigates cancer, and the ordinary educated 
 man, familiar though he is with their general results, 
 would find it hard to say which were the chemists and 
 which the physicists among Professors Dewar and Ram- 
 sey, Lord Eayleigh and Curie. The classification of 
 sciences that was such a solemn business to our grand- 
 fathers is now merely a mental obstruction. 
 
 It is interesting to glance for a moment at the possible 
 source of this mischievous confusion between specialisa- 
 tion and the division of labour. I have already glanced 
 at the possibility of a diabolical world manufacturing 
 gramophone records for our bishops and statesmen and 
 suchlike leaders of thought, but if we dismiss that as a 
 merely elegant trope, I must confess I think it is the 
 influence of Herbert Spencer. His philosophy is per- 
 vaded by an insistence which is, I think, entirely without 
 justification, that the universe, and every sort of thing 
 in it, moves from the simple and homogeneous to the 
 complex and heterogeneous. An unwary man obsessed 
 with that idea would be very likely to assume without 
 consideration that men were less specialised in a barbaric 
 state of society than they are to-day. I think I have 
 given reasons for believing that the reverse of this is 
 nearer the truth. 
 
 , 244 
 
IS THERE A PEOPLE? 
 
 Of all the great personifications that have dominated the 
 mind of man, the greatest, the most marvellous, the most 
 impossible and the most incredible, is surely the People, 
 that impalpable monster to which the world has con- 
 secrated its political institutions for the last hundred 
 years. 
 
 It is doubtful now whether this stupendous super- 
 stition has reached its grand climacteric, and there can 
 be little or no dispute that it is destined to play a 
 prominent part in the history of mankind for many years 
 to come. There is a practical as well as a philosophical 
 interest, therefore, in a note or so upon the attributes of 
 this legendary being. I write "legendary," but thereby 
 I display myself a sceptic. To a very large number of 
 people the People is one of the profoundest realities in 
 life. They believe — what exactly do they believe about 
 the people? 
 
 When they speak of the People they certainly mean 
 something more than the whole mass of individuals in a 
 country lumped together. That is the people, a mere 
 varied aggregation of persons, moved by no common 
 motive, a complex interplay. The People, as the believer 
 understands the word, is something more mysterious than 
 that. The People is something that overrides and is 
 added to the individualities that make up the people. It 
 is, as it were, itself an individuality of a higher order — 
 as, indeed, its capital '*P" displays. It has a will of 
 
 245 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 its own which is not the will of any particular person in 
 it, it has a power of purpose and judgment of a superior 
 sort. It is supposed to be the underlying reality of all 
 national life and the real seat of all public religious 
 emotion. Unfortunately, it lacks powers of expression, 
 and so there is need of rulers and interpreters. If they 
 express it well in law and fact, in book and song, they 
 prosper under its mysterious approval; if they do not, it 
 revolts or forgets or does something, else of an equally 
 annihilatory sort. That, briefly, is the idea of the People. 
 My modest thesis is that there exists nothing of the 
 sort, that the world of men is entirely made up of 
 the individuals that compose it, and that the col- 
 lective action is just the algebraic sum of all individual 
 actions. 
 
 How far the opposite opinion may go, one must talk 
 to intelligent Americans or read the contemporary litera- 
 ture of the first French Kevolution to understand. I 
 find, for example, so typical a young American as the 
 late Frank Norris roundly asserting that it is the People 
 to whom we are to ascribe the triumphant emergence of 
 the name of Shakespeare from the ruck of his contem- 
 poraries, and the passage in which this assertion is made 
 is fairly representative of the general expression of this 
 sort of mysticism. "One must keep one's faith in the 
 People — the Plain People, the Burgesses, the Grocers — 
 else of all men the artists are most miserable and their 
 teachings vain. Let us admit and concede that this 
 belief is ever so sorely tried at times. . . . But in the 
 end, and at last, they will listen to the true note and 
 discriminate between it and the false." And then he 
 resorts to italics to emphasise : *' 7n the last analysis the 
 People are always right.'* 
 
 246 
 
Is There a People? 
 
 And it was that still more typical American, Abraham 
 Lincoln, who declared his equal confidence in the political 
 wisdom of this collective being. '*You can fool all the 
 people some of the time and some of the people all the 
 time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." 
 The thing is in the very opening words of the American 
 Constitution, and Theodore Parker calls it "the American 
 idea '* and pitches a still higher note : " A government of 
 all the people, by all the people, for all the people ; a 
 government of all the principles of eternal justice, the 
 unchanging law of God." 
 
 It is unavoidable that a collective wisdom distinct 
 from any individual and personal one is intended in 
 these passages. Mr. Norris, for example, never figured 
 to himself a great wave of critical discrimination sweep- 
 ing through the ranks of the various provision trades 
 and a multitude of simple, plain burgesses preferring 
 Shakespeare and setting Marlowe aside. Such a particu- 
 larisation of his statement would have at once reduced 
 it to absurdity. Nor does any American see the people 
 particularised in that way. They believe in the People 
 one and indivisible, a simple, mystical being, which per- 
 vades and dominates the community and determines its 
 final collective consequences. 
 
 Now upon the belief that there is a People rests a 
 large part of the political organisation of the modern 
 world. The idea was one of the chief fruits of the 
 speculations of the eighteenth century, and the American 
 Constitution is its most perfect expression. One turns, 
 therefore, inevitably to the American instance, not 
 because it is the only one, but because there is the thing 
 in its least complicated form. We have there an almost 
 exactly logical realisation of this belief. The whole 
 
 347 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 political machine is designed and expressed to register 
 the People's will, literature is entirely rewarded and 
 controlled by the effectual suffrages of the bookseller's 
 counter, science (until private endowment intervened) 
 was in the hands of the State Legislatures, and religion 
 the concern of the voluntary congregations. 
 
 On the assumption that there is a People there could 
 be no better state of affairs. You and I and everyone, 
 except for a vote or a book, or a service now and then, 
 can go about our business , you to your grocery and I to 
 mine, and the direction of the general interests rests safe 
 in the People's hands. Now that is by no means a 
 caricature of the attitude of mind of many educated 
 Americans. You find they have little or nothing to do 
 with actual politics, and are inclined to regard the 
 professional politician with a certain contempt ; they 
 trouble their heads hardly at all about literature, and 
 they contemplate the general religious condition of 
 the population with absolute unconcern. It is not 
 that they are unpatriotic or morally trivial that they 
 stand thus disengaged ; it is that they have a 
 fatalistic belief in this higher power. Whatever 
 troubles and abuses may arise they have an absolute 
 faith that " in the last analysis " the People will get 
 it right. 
 
 And now^ suppose that I am right and that there is 
 no People ! Suppose that the crowd is really no more 
 than a crowd, a vast miscellaneous confusion of persons 
 which grows more miscellaneous every year. Suppose 
 this conception of the People arose out of a sentimental 
 idealisation, Rousseau fashion, of the ancient homo- 
 geneous peasant class — a class that is rapidly bein^ swept 
 out of existence by modern industrial developments — and 
 
 248 
 
Is There a People? 
 
 that whatever slender basis of fact it had in the past 
 is now altogether gone. What consequences may be 
 expected? 
 
 It does not follow that because the object of your 
 reverence is a dead word you will get no oracles from 
 the shrine. If the sacred People remains impassive, in- 
 articulate, non-existent, there are always the keepers of 
 the shrine who will oblige. Professional politicians, 
 venal and violent men, will take over the derelict political 
 control, people who live by the book trade will alone have 
 a care for letters, research and learning will be subor- 
 dinated to political expediency, and a great development 
 of noisily competitive religious enterprises will take the 
 place of any common religious formula. There will 
 commence a secular decline in the quality of public 
 thought, emotion and activity. There will be no arrest 
 or remedy for this state of affairs so long as that 
 superstitious faith in the People as inevitably right '*in 
 the last analysis " remains. And if my supposition is 
 correct, it should be possible to find in the United 
 States, where faith in the people is indisputably domi- 
 nant, some such evidence of the error of this faith. 
 Is there? 
 
 I write as one that listens from afar. But there come 
 reports of legislative and administrative corruption, of 
 organised public blackmail, that do seem to carry out 
 my thesis. One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, who dreamt 
 of founding a distinctive American literature, drugged 
 and killed almost as it were symbolically, amid election- 
 eering, and nearly lied out of all posthumous respect by 
 that scoundrel Griswold ; one thinks of State Universities 
 that are no more than mints for bogus degrees ; one thinks 
 of " Science " Christianity and Zion City. These things 
 
 249 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 are quite insufficient for a Q.E.D., but I submit they 
 favour my proposition. 
 
 Suppose there is no People at all, but only enormous, 
 differentiating millions of men. All sorts of widely 
 accepted generalisations will collapse if that foundation 
 is withdrawn. I submit it as worth considering. 
 
 J 50 
 
THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS 
 
 §1 
 
 Theee is a growing discord between governments and 
 governed in the world. 
 
 There has always been discord between governments 
 and governed since States began ; government has always 
 been to some extent imposed, and obedience to some 
 extent reluctant. We have come to regard it as a 
 matter of course that under all absolutions and narrow 
 oligarchies the community, so soon as it became educated 
 and as its social elaboration developed a free class with 
 private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as it attained to any 
 power of thought and expression at all, would express 
 discontent. But we English and Americans and Western 
 Europeans generally had supposed that, so far as our 
 own communities w^ere concerned, this discontent was 
 already anticipated and met by representative institutions. 
 We had supposed that, with various safeguards and 
 elaborations, our communities did, as a matter of fact, 
 govern themselves. Our panacea for all discontents was 
 the franchise. Social and national dissatisfaction could 
 be given at the same time a voice and a remedy in 
 the ballot box. Our liberal intelligences could and do 
 still understand Russians wanting votes, Indians wanting 
 votes, women wanting votes. The history of nineteenth- 
 century Liberalism in the world might almost be summed 
 up in the phrase "progressive enfranchisement." But 
 these are the desires of a closing phase in political 
 
 251 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 history. The new discords go deeper than that. The 
 new situation which confronts) our Liberal intelligence 
 is the discontent of the enfranchised, the contempt and 
 hostility of the voters for their elected delegates and 
 governments. 
 
 This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, 
 and hostility to duly elected representatives is no mere 
 accident of this democratic country or that; it is an 
 almost worldwide movement. It is an almost universal 
 disappointment with so-called popular government, and 
 in many communities — in Great Britain particularly — 
 it is manifesting itself by an unprecedented lawlessness 
 in political matters, and in a strange and ominous con- 
 tempt for the law. One sees it, for example, in the 
 refusal of large sections of the medical profession to 
 carry out insurance legislation, in the repudiation of 
 Irish Home Eule by Ulster, and in the steady drift 
 of great masses of industrial workers towards the con- 
 ception of a universal strike. The case of the dis- 
 contented workers in Great Britain and France is 
 particularly remarkable. These people form effective 
 voting majorities in many constituencies ; they send 
 alleged Socialist and Labour representatives into the 
 legislative assembly; and, in addition, they have their 
 trade unions with staffs of elected officials, elected 
 ostensibly to state their case and promote their interests. 
 Yet nothing is now more evident than that these officials, 
 working-men representatives and the like, do not speak 
 for their supporters, and are less and less able to 
 control them. The Syndicalist movement, sabotage in 
 France, and Larkinism in Great Britain, are, from 
 the point of view of social stability, the most sinister 
 demonstrations of the gathering anger of the labouring 
 
 252 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 classes with representative institutions. These move- 
 ments are not revolutionary movements, not movements 
 for reconstruction such as were the democratic Socialist 
 movements that closed the nineteenth century. They 
 are angry and vindictive movements. They have behind 
 them the most dangerous and terrible of purely human 
 forces, the wrath, the blind destructive wrath, of a 
 cheated crowd. 
 
 Now, so far as the insurrection of labour goes, 
 American conditions differ from European, and the pro- 
 cess of disillusionment Will probably follow a different 
 course. American labour is very largely immigrant labour 
 still separated by barriers of language and tradition from 
 the established thought of the nation. It will be long 
 before labour in America speaks with th-e massed effective- 
 ness of labour in France and England, where master 
 and man are racially identical, and where there is no 
 variety of "Dagoes" to break up the revolt. But in 
 other directions the American disbelief in and impatience 
 with "elected persons" is and has been far profounder 
 than it is in Europe. The abstinence of men of pro- 
 perty and position from overt politics, and the contempt 
 that banishes political discussion from polite society, are 
 among the first surprises of the visiting European to 
 America, and now that, under an organised pressure 
 of conscience, college-trained men and men of wealth 
 are abandoning this strike of the educated and returning 
 to political life, it is, one notes, with a prevailing dis- 
 position to correct democracy by personality, and to 
 place affairs in the hands of autocratic mayors and 
 presidents rather than to carry out democratic methods 
 to the logical end. At times America seems hot for a 
 Caesar. If no Caesar is established, then it will be the 
 
 253 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 good fortune of the Kepublic rather than its democratic 
 virtue which will have saved it. 
 
 And directly one comes to look into the quality and 
 composition of the elected governing body of any modern 
 democratic State, one begins to see the reason and nature 
 of its widening estrangement from the community it 
 represents. In no sense are these bodies really repre- 
 sentative of the thought and purpose of the nation ; 
 the conception of its science, the fresh initiatives of its 
 philosophy and literature, the forces that make the 
 future through invention and experiment, exploration 
 and trial and industrial development have no voice, or 
 only aij accidental and feeble voice, there. The typical 
 elected person is a smart rather than substantial lawyer, 
 full of cheap catchwords and elaborate tricks of procedure 
 and electioneering, professing to serve the interests of 
 the locality which is his constituency, but actually bound 
 hand and foot to the specialised political association, 
 his party, which imposed him upon that constituency. 
 Arrived at the legislature, his next ambition is ofi&ce, 
 and to secure and retain office he engages in elaborate 
 manoeuvres against the opposite party, upon issues which 
 his limited and specialised intelligence indicates as 
 electorally effective. But being limited and specialised, 
 he is apt to drift completely out of touch with the 
 interests and feelings of large masses of people in the 
 community. In Great Britain, the United States and 
 France alike there is a constant tendency on the part 
 of the legislative body to drift into unreality, and to 
 bore the country with the disputes that are designed 
 to thrill it. In Great Britain, for example, at the 
 present time the two pohtical parties are both pro- 
 foundly unpopular with the general intelligence, which 
 
 254 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 is sincerely anxious, if only it could find a way, to 
 get rid of both of them. Irish Home Eule — an issue 
 as dead as mutton, is opposed to Tariff Reform, which 
 has never been alive. Much as the majority of people 
 detest the preposterously clumsy attempts to amputate 
 Ireland from the rule of the British Parliament which 
 have been going on since the breakdown of Mr. Glad- 
 stone's political intelligence, their dread of foolish and 
 scoundrelly fiscal adventurers is sufficiently strong to 
 retain the Liberals in office. The recent exposures of 
 the profound financial rottenness of the Liberal party 
 have deepened the public resolve to permit no such 
 enlarged possibilities of corruption as Tariff Eeform 
 would afford their at least equally dubitable opponents. 
 And meanwhile, beneath those ridiculous alternatives, 
 those sham issues, the real and very urgent affairs of 
 the nation, the vas-t gathering discontent of the workers 
 throughout the Empire, the racial conflicts in India and 
 South Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end 
 in our severance from India, the insane waste of national 
 resources, the control of disease, the frightful need of 
 some cessation of armament, drift neglected. . . . 
 
 Now do these things indicate the ultimate failure and 
 downfall of representative government? Was this idea 
 which inspired so much of the finest and most generous 
 thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a 
 wrong idea, and must we go back to Csesarism or 
 oligarchy or plutocracy or a theocracy, to Eome or Venice 
 or Carthage, to the strong man or the ruler by divine 
 right, for the political organisation of the future? 
 
 My answer to that question would be an emphatic 
 No. My answer would be that the idea of representative 
 government is the only possible idea for the government 
 
 255 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 of a civilised community. But I would add that so 
 far representative government has not had even the 
 beginnings of a fair trial. So far we have not had 
 representative government, but only a devastating 
 caricature. 
 
 It is quite plain now that those who first organised 
 the parliamentary institutions which now are the ruling 
 institutions of the greater part of mankind fell a prey 
 to certain now very obvious errors. They did not realise 
 that there are hundreds of different ways in which voting 
 may be done, and that every way will give a different 
 result. They thought, and it is still thought by a great 
 number of mentally indolent people, that if a country 
 is divided up into approximately equivalent areas, each 
 returning one or two representatives, if every citizen is 
 given one vote, and if there is no legal limit to the pre- 
 sentation of candidates, that presently a cluster of the 
 wisest, most trusted and best citizens will come together 
 in the legislative assembly. 
 
 In reality the business is far more complicated than 
 this. In reality a country will elect all sorts of different 
 people according to the electoral method employed. It 
 is a fact that anyone who chooses to experiment with 
 a willing school or club may verify. Suppose, for example, 
 that you take your country, give every voter one single 
 vote, put up six and twenty candidates for a dozen 
 vacancies, and give them no adequate time for organisa- 
 tion. The voters, you will find, will return certain 
 favourites, A and B and C and D let us call them, by 
 enormous majorities, and behind these at a considerable 
 distance will come E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and L. Now 
 give your candidates time to develop organisation. A 
 lot of people who swelled A's huge vote will dislike J 
 
 356 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 and K and L so much, and prefer M and N so much, 
 that if they are assured that by proper organisation A's 
 return can be made certain without their voting for him, 
 they will vote for M and N. But they will do so only 
 on that understanding. Similarly certain B-ites will 
 want O and P if they can be got without sacrificing B. 
 So that adequate party organisation in the community 
 may return not the dozen a naive vote would give, but 
 A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, M, N, O, P. Now suppose 
 that, instead of this arrangement, your community is 
 divided into twelve constituencies and no candidate may 
 contest more than one of them. And suppose each con- 
 stituency has strong local preferences. A, B and C are 
 widely popular; in every constituency they have sup- 
 porters, but in no constituency does any one of the three 
 command a majority. They are great men, not local 
 men. Q, who is an unknown man in most of the country, 
 has, on the contrary, a strong sect of followers in the 
 constituency for which A stands, and beats him by one 
 vote ; another local celebrity, R, disposes of B in. the 
 same way; C is attacked not only by S but T, whose 
 peculiar views upon vaccination, let us say, appeal to 
 just enough of C's supporters to let in S. Similar 
 accidents happen in the other constituencies, and the 
 country that would have unreservedly returned A, B, C, 
 D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L on the first system, return 
 instead 0, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Numerous 
 voters who would have voted for A if they had a chance 
 vote instead for R, S, T, etc., numbers who would have 
 voted for B, vote for Q, V, W, X, etc. But now suppose 
 that A and B are opposed to one another, and that there 
 is a strong A party and a strong B party highly organised 
 in the country. B is really the second favourite over 
 R 257 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 the country as a whole, but A is the first favourite. D, 
 F, H, J, L, N, P, E, U, W, Y constitute the A candi- 
 dates, and in his name they conquer. B, C, E, G, I, K, 
 M, 0, Q, S, V are all thrown out in spite of the wide 
 popularity of B and C. B and C, we have supposed, 
 are the second and third favourites, and yet they go out 
 in favour of Y, of whom nobody has heard before, some 
 mere hangers-on of A's. Such a situation actually occurs 
 in both Ulster and Home-Eule Ireland. 
 
 But now let us suppose another arrangement, and 
 that is that the whole country is one constituency, and 
 every voter has, if he chooses to exercise them, twelve 
 votes, which, however, he must give, if he gives them 
 all, to twelve separate people. Then quite certainly A, 
 B, C, D will come in, but the tail will be different. M, 
 N, 0, P may come up next to them, and even Z, that 
 eminent non-party man, may get in. But now organisa- 
 tion may produce new effects. The ordinary man, when 
 he has twelve votes to give, likes to give them all, so 
 that there will be a good deal of wild voting at the tails 
 of the voting papers. Now if a small resolute band 
 decide to plump for T or to vote only for A and T or B 
 and T, T will probably jump up out of the rejected. This 
 is the system which gives the specialist, the anti-vaccina- 
 tor or what not, the maximum advantage. V, W, X and 
 Y, being rather hopeless anyhow, will probably detach 
 themselves from party and make some special appeal, 
 say to the teetotal vote or the Mormon vote or the single 
 tax vote, and so squeeze past 0, P, Q, K, who have 
 taken a more generalised line. 
 
 I trust the reader will bear with me through these 
 alphabetical fluctuations. Many people, I know from 
 colloquial experiences, do at about this stage fly into a 
 
 258 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 passion. But if you will exercise self-control, then I 
 think you will see my point that, according to the method 
 of voting, almost any sort of result may be got out of 
 an election except the production of a genuinely repre- 
 sentative assembly. 
 
 And that is the a priori case for supposing, what our 
 experience of contemporary life abundantly verifies, that 
 the so-called representative assemblies of the world are 
 not really representative at all. I will go farther and 
 say that were it not for the entire inefficiency of our 
 method of voting, not one-tenth of the present American 
 and French Senators, the French Deputies, the American 
 Congressmen, and the English Members of Parliament 
 would hold their positions to-day. They would never 
 have been heard of. They are not really the elected 
 representatives of the people ; they are the products of a 
 ridiculous method of election ; they are the illegitimate 
 children of the party system and the ballot-box, who have 
 ousted the legitimate heirs from their sovereignty. They 
 are no more the expression of the general will than the 
 Tsar or some President by pronunciamento . They are 
 an accidental oligarchy of adventurers. Eepresentative 
 government has never yet existed in the world ; there was 
 an attempt to bring it into existence in the eighteenth 
 century, and it succumbed to an infantile disorder at the 
 very moment of its birth. What we have in the place 
 of the leaders and representatives are politicians and 
 "elected persons." 
 
 The world is passing rapidly from localised to 
 generalised interests, but the method of election into 
 which our fathers fell is the method of electing one or 
 two representatives from strictly localised constituencies. 
 Its immediate corruption was inevitable. If discussing 
 
 259 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 and calculating the future had been, as it ought to be, a 
 common, systematic occupation, the muddles of to-day 
 might have been foretold a hundred years ago. From 
 such a rough method of election the party system 
 followed as a matter of course. In theory, of course, 
 there may be any number of candidates for a con- 
 stituency, and a voter votes for the one he likes best; 
 in practice there are only two or three candidates, and 
 the voter votes for the one most likely to beat the candi- 
 date he likes least. It cannot be too strongly insisted 
 that in contemporary elections we vote against ; we do not 
 vote for. If A, B and C are candidates, and you hate 
 C and all his works and prefer A, but doubt if he will 
 get as many votes as B, who is indifferent to you, the 
 chances are you will vote for B. If C and B have the 
 support of organised parties, you are still less likely to 
 risk " wasting " your vote upon A. If your real confidence 
 is in G, who is not a candidate for your constituency, 
 and if B pledges himself to support G, while A retains 
 the right of separate action, you may vote for B even if 
 you distrust him personally. Additional candidates would 
 turn any election of this type into a wdld scramble. The 
 system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of political 
 organisations, calls out, indeed, for th© control of political 
 organisations, and has in every country produced what 
 is so evidently demanded. The political organisations 
 to-day rule us unchallenged. Save as they speak for us, 
 the people are dumb. 
 
 Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were in- 
 tended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to 
 give every voter participation in government, do as a 
 matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give him 
 an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents 
 
 260 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 of two party organisations, over neither of which he 
 has any intelligible control. For twenty-five years I have 
 been a voter, and in all that time I have only twice had 
 an opportunity of voting for a man of distinction in whom 
 I had the slightest confidence. Commonly my choice 
 of a "representative" has been between a couple of 
 barristers entirely unknown to me or the world at large. 
 Rather more than half the men presented for my selec- 
 tion have not been English at all, but of alien descent. 
 This, then, is the sum of the political liberty of the 
 ordinary American or Englishman, that is the political 
 emancipation which Englishwomen have shown them- 
 selves so pathetically eager to share. He may reject one 
 of two undesirables, and the other becomes his "repre- 
 sentative." Now this is not popular government at all ; 
 it is government by the profession of politicians, whose 
 control becomes more and more irresponsible in just the 
 measure that they are able to avoid real factions within 
 their own body. Whatever the two party organisations 
 have a mind to do together, whatever issue they chance 
 to reserve from "party politics," is as much beyond the 
 control of the free and independent voter as if he were a 
 slave subject in ancient Peru. 
 
 Our governments in the more civilised parts of the 
 world to-day are only in theory and sentiment democratic. 
 In reality they are democracies so eviscerated by the 
 disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere cloaks 
 for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within 
 their form and substance. The old spirit of freedom and 
 the collective purpose which overthrew and subdued 
 priestcrafts and kingcrafts, has done so, it seems, only 
 to make way for these obscure political conspiracies. 
 Instead of liberal institutions, mankind has invented a 
 
 261 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 new sort of usurpation. And it is not unnatural that 
 many of us should be in a phase of political despair. 
 
 These oligarchies of the party organisations have now 
 been evolving for two centuries, and their inherent evils 
 and dangers become more and more manifest. The first 
 of these is the exclusion from government of the more 
 active and intelligent sections of the community. It is 
 not treated as remarkable, it is treated as a matter of 
 course, that neither in Congress nor in the House of 
 Commons is there any adequate representation of the real 
 thought of the time, of its science, invention and enter- 
 prise, of its art and feeling, of its religion and purpose. 
 When one speaks of Congressmen or Members of Parlia- 
 ment, one thinks, to be plain about it, of intellectual 
 riff-raff. When one hears of a pre-eminent man in the 
 English-speaking community, even though that pre- 
 eminence may be in political or social science, one is 
 struck by a sense of incongruity if he happens to be also 
 in the Legislature. When Lord Haldane disengages the 
 Gifford lectures or Lord Morley writes a *'Life of Glad- 
 stone *^ or ex-President Eoosevelt is delivered of a 
 magazine article, there is the same sort of excessive 
 admiration as when a Eoyal Princess does a water-colour 
 sketch or a dog walks on its hind legs. 
 
 Now this intellectual inferiority of the legislator is 
 not only directly bad for the community by producing 
 dull and stupid legislation, but it has a discouraging and 
 dwarfing effect upon our intellectual life. Nothing so 
 stimulates art, thought and science as realisation ; nothing 
 so cripples it as unreality. But to set oneself to know 
 thoroughly and to think clearly about any human question 
 is to unfit oneself for the forensic claptrap which is con- 
 temporary politics, is to put oneself out of the effective 
 
 a.6j 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 current of the nation's life. The intelHgence of any 
 community which does not make a collective use of that 
 intelligence, stai'ves and becomes hectic, tends inevitably 
 to preciousness and futility on the one hand, and to 
 insurgency, mischief and anarchism on the other. 
 
 From the point of view of social stability this 
 estrangement of the national government and the 
 national intelligence is far less serious than the estrange- 
 ment between the governing body and the real feeling 
 of the mass of the people. To many observers this latter 
 estrangement seems to be drifting very rapidly towards 
 a social explosion in the British Isles. The organised 
 masses of labour find themselves baffled both by their 
 parliamentary representatives and by their trade union 
 officials. They are losing faith in their votes and falling 
 back in anger upon insurrectionary ideals, upon the idea 
 of a general strike, and upon the expedients of sabotage. 
 They are doing this without any constructive proposals 
 at all, for it is ridiculous to consider Syndicalism as a 
 constructive proposal. They mean mischief because they 
 are hopeless and bitterly disappointed. It is the same 
 thing in France, and before many years are over it will 
 be the same thing in America. That way lies chaos. In 
 the next few years there may be social revolt and blood- 
 shed in most of the great cities of Western Europe. 
 That is the trend of current probability. Yet the 
 politicians go on in an almost complete disregard of this 
 gathering storm. Their jerrymandered electoral methods 
 are like wool in their ears, and the rejection of Tweedle- 
 dum for Tweedledee is taken as a '* mandate " for 
 Tweedledee's distinctive brand of political unrealities. . . . 
 
 Is this an incurable state of things? Is this method 
 of managing our affairs the only possible electoral method, 
 
 263 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 and is there no remedy for its monstrous clumsiness and 
 inefficiency but to *'show a sense of humour," or, in other 
 words, to grin and bear it? Or is it conceivable that 
 there may be a better way to government than any we 
 have yet tried, a method of government that would draw 
 every class into conscious and willing co-operation with 
 the State, and enable every activity of the community to 
 play its proper part in the national life? That was the 
 dream of those who gave the world representative govern- 
 ment in the past. Was it an impossible dream? 
 
 §2 
 
 Is this disease of Parliaments an incurable disease, 
 and have we, therefore, to get along as well as we caji 
 with it, just as a tainted and incurable invalid diets 
 and is careful and gets along through life? Or is it 
 possible that some entirely more representative and 
 effective collective control of our common affairs can be 
 devised ? 
 
 The answer to that must determine our attitude to 
 a great number of fundamental questions. If no better 
 governing body is possible than the stupid, dilator}^ 
 and forensic assemblies that rule in France, Britain 
 and America to-day, then the civili&ed human community 
 has reached its climax. That more comprehensive 
 collective handling of the common interests to which 
 science and intelligent Socialism point, that collective 
 handling which is already urgently needed if the present 
 uncontrolled waste of natural resources and the ultimate 
 bankruptcy of mankind is to be avoided, is quite beyond 
 the capacity of such assemblies/; already there is too 
 
 264 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 much in their clumsy and untrustworthy hands, and 
 the only course open to us is an attempt at enlightened 
 Individualism, an attempt to limit and restrict State 
 activities in every possible way, and to make little private 
 temporary islands of light and refinement amidst the 
 general disorder and decay. All collectivist sch-emes, all 
 rational Socialism, if only Socialists would realise it, all 
 hope for humanity, indeed, are dependent ultimately 
 upon the hypothetical possibility of a better system of 
 government than any at present in existence. 
 
 Ijet us see first, then, if we can lay down any 
 conditions which such a better governing body would 
 satisfy. Afterwards it will be open to us to believe or 
 disbelieve in its attainment. Imagination is the essence 
 of creation. If we can imagine a better government 
 we are half-way to making it. 
 
 Now, whatever other conditions such a body will 
 satisfy, we may be sure that it will not be made up of 
 members elected by single-member constituencies. A 
 single-member constituency must necessarily contain a 
 minority, and may even contain a majority of dissatisfied 
 persons whose representation is, as it were, blotted out 
 by the successful candidate. Three single-member con- 
 stituencies which might all return members of the same 
 colour, if they were lumped together to return three 
 members would probably return two of one colour and 
 one of another. There would still, however, be a sup- 
 pressed minority averse to both these colours, or desiring 
 different shades of those colours from those afforded them 
 in the constituency. Other things being equal, it may 
 be laid down that the larger the constituency and the 
 more numerous its representatives, the greater the chance 
 of all varieties of thought and opinion being represented. 
 
 265 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 But that is only a preliminary statement ; it still leaves 
 untouched all the considerations advanced in the former 
 part of this discussion to show how easily the compli- 
 cations and difficulties of voting lead to a falsification of 
 the popular will and understanding. But here we enter a 
 region where a really scientific investigation has been 
 made, and where established results are available. A 
 method of election was worked out by Hare in the middle 
 of the last century that really does seem to avoid or 
 mitigate nearly every falsifying or debilitating possibility 
 in elections; it was enthusiastically supported by J. S. 
 Mill ; it is now advocated by a special society — the Pro- 
 portional Eepresentation Society — to which belong men 
 of the most diverse type of distinction, united only by 
 the common desire to see representative government a 
 reality and not a disastrous sham. It is a method which 
 does render impossible nearly every way of forcing candi- 
 dates upon constituencies, and nearly every trick for 
 rigging results that now distorts and cripples the political 
 life of the modern world. It exacts only one condition, 
 a difficult but not an impossible condition, and that is 
 the honest scrutiny and counting of the votes. 
 
 The peculiar invention of the system is what is called 
 the single transferable vote — that is to say, a vote which 
 may be given in the first instance to one candidate, but 
 which, in the event of his already having a sufficient 
 quota of votes to return him, may be transferred to 
 another. The voter marks clearly in the list of the 
 candidates the order of his preference by placing 1, 2, 
 3, and so forth against the names. In the subsequent 
 counting the voting papers are first classified according 
 to the first votes. Let us suppose that popular person 
 A is found to have received first votes enormously in 
 
 266 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 excess of what is needed to return him. The second votes 
 are then counted on his papers, and after the number 
 of votes necessary to return him has been deducted, the 
 surplus votes are divided in due proportion among the 
 second choice names, and count for them. That is the 
 essential idea of the whole thing. At a stroke all that 
 anxiety about wasting votes and splitting votes, which 
 is the secret of all party political manipulation vanishes. 
 You may vote for A well knowing that if he is safe your 
 vote will be good for C. You can make sure of A, and 
 at the same time vote for C. You are in no need of a 
 "ticket" to guide you, and you need have no fear that 
 in supporting an independent candidate you will destroy 
 the prospects of some tolerably sympathetic party man 
 without any compensating advantage. The independent 
 candidate does, in fact, become possible for the first time. 
 The Hobson's choice of the party machine is abolished. 
 
 Let me be a little more precise about the particulars 
 of this method, the only sound method, of voting in order 
 to ensure an adequate representation of the community. 
 Let us resort again to the constituency I imagined in 
 my last paper, a constituency in which candidates repre- 
 sented by all the letters of the alphabet struggle for twelve 
 places. And let us suppose that A, B, C and D are the 
 leading favourites. Suppose that there are twelve thou- 
 sand voters in the constituency, and that three thousand 
 votes are cast for A — I am keeping the figures as simple 
 as possible — then A has two thousand more than is needed 
 to return him. All the second votes on his papers are 
 counted, and it is found that 600, or a fifth of them, go 
 to C; 600, or a sixth, go to E ; 300, or a tenth, to G; 
 300 to J; 200, or a fifteenth, each to K and L, and a 
 hundred each, or a thirtieth, to M, N, 0, P, Q, E, S, T, 
 
 a67 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 W and Z. Then the surplus of 2,000 is divided in these 
 proportions — that is a fifth of 2,000 goes to C, a sixth 
 to E, and the rest to G, J, etc., in proportion. C, who 
 already has 900 votes, gets another 400, and is now re- 
 turned, and has, moreover, 300 to spare; and the same 
 division of the next votes upon C's paper occurs as has 
 already been made with A's. But previously to this there 
 has been a distribution of B's surplus votes, B having 
 got 1,200 of first votes. And so on. After the distri- 
 bution of the surplus votes of the elect at the top of the 
 list, there is a distribution of the second votes upon the 
 papers of those who have voted for the hopeless candi- 
 dates at the bottom of the list. At last a point is reached 
 when twelve candidates have a quota. 
 
 In this way the "wasting " of a vote, or the rejection 
 of a candidate for any reason except that hardly anybody 
 wants him, become practically impossible. This method 
 of the single transferable vote with very large con- 
 stituencies and many members does, in fact, give an 
 entirely valid electoral result ; each vote tells for all it is 
 worth, and the freedom of the voter is only limited by 
 the number of candidates who put up or are put up for 
 election. This method, and this method alone, gives 
 representative government ; all others of the hundred and 
 one possible methods admit of trickery, confusion and 
 falsification. Proportional Eepresentation is not a faddist 
 proposal, not a perplexing ingenious complication of a 
 simple business ; it is the carefully worked out right way 
 to do something that hitherto we have beeft doing in the 
 wrong way. It is no more an eccentricity than is proper 
 baking in the place of baking amidst dirt and with un- 
 limited adulteration, or the running of trains to their 
 destinations instead of running them without notice into 
 
 268 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 casually selected sidings and branch lines. It is not the 
 substitution of something for something else of the same 
 nature ; it is the substitution of right for wrong. It is 
 the plain common sense of the greatest difficulty in 
 contemporary affairs. 
 
 I know that a number of people do not, will not, 
 admit this of Proportional Kepresentation. Perhaps 
 it is because of that hideous mouthful of words for a 
 thing that would be far more properly named Sane 
 Voting. This, which is the only correct way, these 
 antagonists regard as a peculiar way. It has unfamiliar 
 features, and that condemns it in their eyes. It takes at 
 least ten minutes to understand, and that is too much 
 for their plain, straightforward souls. "Complicated" — 
 that word of fear ! They are like the man who approved 
 of an electric tram, but said that he thought it would go 
 better without all that jiggery-pokery of wires up above. 
 They are like the Western judge in the murder trial who 
 said that if only they got a man hanged for this abominable 
 crime, he wouldn't make a pedantic fuss about the ques- 
 tion of which man. They are like the plain, straight- 
 forward promoter who became impatient with maps and 
 planned a railway across Switzerland by drawing a 
 straight line with a ruler across Jungfrau and Matter- 
 horn, and glacier and gorge. Or else they are like Mr. 
 J. Bamsay Macdonald, M.P., who knows too well what 
 would happen to him. 
 
 Now let us consider what would be the necessary 
 consequences of the establishment of Proportional Kepre- 
 sentation in such a community as Great Britain — that is 
 to say, the redistribution of the country into great con- 
 stituencies, such as London or Ulster or Wessex or South 
 Wales, each returning a score or more of members, and 
 
 269 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 the establishment of voting by the single transferable 
 vote. The first, immediate, most desirable result would 
 be the disappearance of the undistinguished party candi- 
 date ; he would vanish altogether. He would be no more 
 seen. Proportional Bepresentation would not give him 
 the ghost of a chance. The very young man of good 
 family, the subsidised barrister, the respectable nobody, 
 the rich supporter of the party would be ousted by known 
 men. No candidate who had not already distinguished 
 himself, and who did not stand for something in the 
 public eye, would have a chance of election. There alone 
 we have a sufficient reason for anticipating a very 
 thorough change in the quality and character of the 
 average legislator. 
 
 And next, no party organisation, no intimation from 
 headquarters, no dirty tricks behind the scenes, no con- 
 spiracy of spite and scandal would have much chance of 
 keeping out any man of real force and distinction who 
 had impressed the public imagination. To be famous 
 in science, to have led thought, to have explored or 
 administered or dissented courageously from the schemes 
 of official wire-pullers would no longer be a bar to a 
 man's attainment of Parliament. It would be a help. 
 Not only the level of parliamentary intelligence, but the 
 level of personal independence would be raised far above 
 its present position. And Parliament would become a 
 gathering of prominent men instead of a means to 
 prominence. 
 
 The two-party system which holds all the English- 
 speaking countries to-day in its grip would certainly be 
 broken up by Proportional Bepresentation. Sane Voting 
 in the end would kill the Liberal and Tory and Demo- 
 cratic and Eepublican party-machines. That secret 
 
 370 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 rottenness of our public life, that hidden conclave which 
 sells honours, fouls finance, muddles pubHc affairs, fools 
 the passionate desires of the people, and ruins honest 
 men by obscure campaigns would become impossible. 
 The advantage of party support would be a doubtful 
 advantage, and in Parliament itself the party men would 
 find themselves outclassed and possibly even outnumbered 
 by the independent. It would be only a matter of a 
 few years between the adoption of Sane Voting and the 
 disappearance of the Cabinet from British public life. 
 It would become possible for Parliament to get rid of 
 a minister without getting rid of a ministry, and to 
 express its disapproval of — let us say — some foolish pro- 
 ject for rearranging the local government of Ireland 
 without opening the door upon a vista of fantastical fiscal 
 adventures. The party-supported Cabinet, w^hich is now 
 the real government of the so-called democratic countries, 
 would cease to be so, and government would revert more 
 and more to the legislative assembly. And not only 
 would the latter body resume government, but it would 
 also necessarily take into itself all those large and grow- 
 ing exponents of extra-parliamentary discontent that 
 now darken the social future. The case of the armed 
 " Unionist " rebel in Ulster, the case of the workman 
 who engages in sabotage, the case for sympathetic strikes 
 and the general strike, all these cases are identical in 
 this, that they declare Parliament a fraud, that justice 
 lies outside it and hopelessly outside it, and that to seek 
 redress through Parliament is a waste of time and energy. 
 Sane Voting would deprive all these destructive move- 
 ments of the excuse and necessity for violence. 
 
 There is, I know, a disposition in some quarters to 
 minimise the importance of Proportional Kepres^ntation, 
 
 271 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 as though it were a mere readjustment of voting methods. 
 It is nothing of the sort; it is a prospective revolution. 
 It will revolutionise government far more than a mere 
 change from kingdom to republic or vice versa could 
 possibly do ; it will give a new and unprecedented sort 
 of government to the world. The real leaders of the 
 country will govern the country. For Great Britain, for 
 example, instead of the secret, dubious and dubitable 
 Cabinet, which is the real British government of to-day, 
 poised on an unwieldy and crowded House of Commons, 
 we should have open government by the representatives 
 of, let us say, twenty great provinces, Ulster, Wales, 
 London, for example, each returning from twelve to 
 thirty members. It would be a steadier, stabler, more 
 confident, and more trusted government than the world 
 has ever seen before. Ministers, indeed, and even minis- 
 tries, might come and go, but that would not matter, as 
 it does now, because there would be endless alternatives 
 through which the assembly could express itself instead 
 of the choice between two parties. 
 
 The arguments against Proportional Representation 
 that have been advanced hitherto are trivial in comparison 
 with its enormous advantages. Implicit in them all is 
 the supposition that public opinion is at bottom a foolish 
 thing, and that electoral methods are to pacify rather 
 than express a people. It is possibly true that notorious 
 windbags, conspicuously advertised adventurers, and the 
 heroes of temporary sensations may run a considerable 
 chance upon the lists. My own estimate of the popular 
 wisdom is against the idea that any vividly prominent 
 figure must needs get in ; I think the public is capable 
 of appreciating, let us say, the charm and interest of Mr. 
 Sandow or Mr. Jack Johnson or Mr. Harry Lauder or 
 
 272 
 
The Disease of Parliaments 
 
 Mr. Evan Roberts without wanting to send these gentle- 
 men into Parliament. And I think that the increased 
 power that the Press would have through its facilities in 
 making reputations may also be exaggerated. Reputa- 
 tions are mysterious things and not so easily forced, and 
 even if it were possible for a section of the Press to lime- 
 light a dozen or so figures up to the legislature, they 
 would still have, I think, to be interesting, sympathetic 
 and individualised figures ; and at the end they would be 
 only half a dozen among four hundred men of a repute 
 more naturally achieved. A third objection is that this 
 reform would give us group politics and unstable govern- 
 ment. It might very possibly give us unstable ministries, 
 but unstable ministries may mean stable government, 
 and such stable ministries as that which governs England 
 at the present time may, by clinging obstinately to office, 
 mean the wildest fluctuations of policy. Mr. Ramsay 
 Macdonald has drawn a picture of the too-representative 
 Parliament of Proportional Representation, split up into 
 groups each pledged to specific measures and making the 
 most extraordinary treaties and sacrifices of the public 
 interest in order to secure the passing of these definite 
 bills. But Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is exclusively a par- 
 liamentary man ; he knows contemporary parliamentary 
 **shop" as a clerk knows his "guv'nor," and he thinks 
 in the terms of his habitual life ; he sees representatives 
 only as politicians financed from party headquarters ; it 
 is natural that he should fail to see that the quality and 
 condition of the sanely elected Member of Parliament 
 will be quite different from these scheming climbers into 
 positions of trust with whom he deals to-day. It is the 
 party system based on insane voting that makes govern- 
 ments indivisible wholes and gives the group and the cave 
 s 273 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 their terrors and their effectiveness. Mr. Kamsay Mac- 
 donald is as typical a product of existing electoral 
 methods as one could well have, and his peculiarly keen 
 sense of the power of intrigue in legislation is as good 
 evidence as one could wish for of the need for drastic 
 change. 
 
 Of course, Sane Voting is not a short cut to the 
 millennium, it is no way of changing human nature, and 
 in the new type of assembly, as in the old, spite, vanity, 
 indolence, self-interest, and downright dishonesty will 
 play their part. But to object to a reform on that account 
 is not a particularly effective objection. These things 
 will play their part, but it will be a much smaller part 
 in the new than in the old. It is like objecting to some 
 projected and long-needed railway because it does not 
 propose to carry its passengers by immediate express 
 to heaven. 
 
 «74 
 
THE AMERICAN POPULATION 
 
 §1 
 
 The social conditions and social future of America 
 constitute a system of problems quite distinct and 
 separate from the social problems of any other part of 
 the world. The nearest approach to parallel conditions, 
 and that on a far smaller and narrower scale, is found 
 in the British colonies and in the newly settled parts 
 of Siberia. For while in nearly every other part of the 
 world the population of to-day is more or less completely 
 descended from the prehistoric population of the same 
 region , and has developed its so(^al.X)rder in a slow growth 
 extending over many centuries! tne American population 
 is essentially a transplanted ^jopulation, a still fluid 
 and imperfect fusion of great fragments torn at this 
 point or that from the gradually evolved societies of 
 Europe. ) The European social systems grow and flower 
 upon their roots, in soil which has made them and to 
 which they are adapted. The American social accu- 
 mulation is a various collection of cuttings thrust into 
 a new soil and respiring a new air, so different that 
 the question is still open to doubt, and indeed there 
 are those who do doubt, how far these cuttings are 
 actually striking root and living and growing, whether 
 indeed they are destined to more than a temporary life 
 in thie new hemisphere. I propose to discuss and weigh 
 certain arguments for and against the belief that 
 these ninety million people who constitute the United 
 
 275 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 States of America are destined to develop into a 
 great distinctive nation with a character and culture of 
 its own. 
 
 Humanly speaking, the United States of America 
 (and the same is true of Canada and all the more 
 prosperous, populous and progressive regions of South 
 Ainerica) m a vast sea of newly arrived and unstably 
 rooted people. Of the seventy-six million inhabitants 
 recorded by the 1900 census, ten and a half million 
 were born and brought up in one or other of the Euro- 
 pean social systems, and the parents of another twenty- 
 six millions were foreigners. Another nine million are 
 of African negro descent. Fourteen million of the 
 sixty-five million native-bom are living not in the state 
 of their birth, but in other states to which they have 
 migrated. Of the thirty and a half million whites 
 whose parents on both sides were native Americans, a 
 high proportion probably had one if not more grand- 
 parents foreign-born. Nearly five and a half million 
 out of thirty-three and a half million whites in 1870 
 were foreign-born, and another five and a quarter million 
 the children of foreign-born parents. The children of 
 the latter five and a quarter million count, of course, 
 in the 1900 census as native-born of native parents. 
 Immigration varies enormously with the activity of 
 business, but in 1906 it rose for the first time above 
 a million. 
 
 These figures may be difficult to grasp. The facts 
 may be seen in a more concrete form by the visitor to 
 Ellis Island, the receiving station for the immigrants 
 into New York Harbour. One goes to this place by 
 tugs from the United States barge office in Battery 
 Park, and in order to see the thing properly one needs 
 
 276 
 
The American Population 
 
 a letter of introduction to the commissioner in charge. 
 Then one is taken through vast barracks littered with 
 people of every European race, every type of low-class 
 European costume, and every degree of dirtiness, to a 
 central hall in which the gist of the examining goes on. 
 The floor of this hall is divided up into a sort of maze 
 of winding passages between lattice work, and along 
 these passages, day after day, incessantly, the immigrants 
 go, wild-eyed Gipsies, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, 
 Euthenians, Cossacks, German peasants, Scandinavians, 
 a few Irish still, impoverished English, occasional Dutch ; 
 they halt for a moment at little desks to exhibit papers, 
 at other little desks to show their money and prove they 
 are not paupers, to have their eyes scanned by this 
 doctor and their general bearing by that. Their thumb- 
 marks are taken, their names and heights and weights 
 and so forth are recorded for the card index ; and so, 
 slowly, they pass along towards America, and at last 
 reach a little wicket, the gate of the New World. 
 Through this metal wicket drips the immigration stream 
 — all day long, every two or three seconds, an immi- 
 grant, wtith a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk 
 and goes on past the well-managed money-changing 
 place, past the carefully organised separating ways that 
 go to this railway or that, past the guiding, protecting 
 officials — into a new world. The great majority are 
 young men and young women between seventeen and 
 thirty, good, youthful, hopeful peasant stock. They 
 sitand in a long string, waiting to go through that wicket, 
 with bundles, with httle tin boxes, with cheap port- 
 manteaus, with odd packages, in pairs, in families, 
 alone, women with children, men with strings of de- 
 pendents, young couples. All day that string of human 
 
 271 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again ; all day 
 and every day, constantly replenished, cons<tantly drop- 
 ping the end beads through the wicket, till the units 
 mount to hundreds and the hundreds to thousands. . . . 
 In such a prosperous year as 1906 more immigrants 
 passed through that wicket into America than children 
 were born in the whole of France. 
 ^/ This figure of a perpetual stream of new stranger 
 citizens will serve to mark the primary distinction 
 between the American social problem and that of any 
 European or Asiatic community. 
 
 The vast bulk of the population of the United States 
 has, in fact, only got there from Europe in the course 
 of the last hundred years, and mainly since the accession 
 of Queen Victoria to the throne of Great Britain. That 
 is the first fact that the student of the American social 
 future must realise. Only an extremely small pro- 
 portion of its blood goes back now to those who fought 
 for freedom in the days of George Washington. The 
 American community is not an expanded colonial society 
 that has become autonomous. It is- a great and deepen- 
 ing pool of population accumulating upon the area these 
 predecessors freed, and since fed copiously by affluents 
 from every European community, y Fresh ingredients are 
 still being added in enormous quantity, in quantity so 
 great as to materially change the racial quality in a 
 score of years. It is particularly noteworthy that each 
 accession of new blood seems to sterilise its predecessors. 
 Had there been no immigration at all into the United 
 States, but had the rate of increase that prevailed in 
 1810-20 prevailed to 1900, the population, which would 
 then have been a purely native American one, would have 
 amounted to a hundred million — that is to say, to ap- 
 
 278 
 
The American Population 
 
 proximately nine million in excess of the present total 
 population. The new waves are for a time amazingly 
 fecund, and then comes a rapid fall in the birth-rate. 
 The proportion of colonial and early republican blood 
 in the population is, therefore, probably far smaller even 
 than the figures I have quoted would suggest. 
 
 These accesses of new population have come in a 
 series of waves, very much as if successive reservoirs 
 of surplus population in the Old World had been tapped, 
 drained and exhausted. First came the Irish and 
 Germans, then Central Europeans of various types, 
 then Poland and Western Eussia began to pour out 
 their teeming peoples, and more particularly their Jews, 
 Bohemia, the Slavonic stat?es, Italy and Hungary fol- 
 lowed, and the latest arrivals include great numbers 
 of Levantines, Armenians and other peoples from Asia 
 Minor and the Balkan Peninsula. The Hungarian 
 immigrants have still a birth-rate of forty-six per 
 thousand, the highest birth-rate in the w^orld. 
 
 A considerable proportion of the Mediterranean 
 arrivals, it has to be noted, and more especially the 
 Italians, do not come to settle. They work for a season 
 or a few years, and then return to Italy. The rest 
 come to stay. 
 
 A vast proportion of these accessions to the American 
 population since 1840 has, with the exception of the 
 East European Jews, consisted of peasantry, mainly 
 or totally illiterate, accustomed to a low standard of 
 life and heavy bodily toil. For most of them the transfer 
 to a new country meant severance from the religious 
 communion in which they had been bred and from the 
 servilities or subordinations to which they were accus- 
 tomed. They brought little or no positive social tradition 
 
 279 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 to the synthesis to which they brought their blood and 
 muscle. 
 
 The earlier German, English and Scandinavian in- 
 comers were drawn from a somewhat higher social level, 
 and w»ere much more closely akin in habits and faith to 
 the earlier founders of the Eepublic. 
 
 Our inquiry is this : What social structure is this pool 
 of mixed humanity developing or likely to develop? 
 
 §2 
 
 If we compare any European nation w^ith the 
 Am'erican, w^e perceive at once certain broad differences. 
 The former, in comparison with the latter, is evolved 
 and organised ; the latter, in comparison with the former, 
 is aggregated and chaotic. In nearly every European 
 country there is a social system often quite elaborately 
 classed and defined ; each class with a sense of function, 
 with an idea of what is due to it and what is expected 
 of it. Nearly everywhere you find a governing class, 
 aristocratic in spirit, sometimes no doubt highly modified 
 by recent economic and industrial changes, with more 
 or less of the tradition of a feudal nobility, then a 
 definite great mercantile class, then a large self-respecting 
 middle class of professional men, minor merchants, and 
 so forth, then a new industrial class of employees in 
 the manufacturing and urban districts, and a peasant 
 population rooted to the land. There are, of course, 
 many local modifications of this form : in France the 
 nobility is mostly expropriated; in England, since the 
 days of John Bull, the peasant has lost his common 
 rights and his holding, and become an "agricultural 
 
 280 
 
The American Population 
 
 labourer" to a newer class of more extensive farmer. 
 But these are differences in detail ; the fact of the 
 organisation, and the still more important fact of the 
 traditional feeling of organisation, remain true of all 
 these older communities. 
 
 And in nearly every European country, though it 
 may be somewhat despoiled here and shorn of exclusive 
 predominance there, or represented by a dislocated 
 "reformed" member, is the Church, custodian of a 
 great moral tradition, closely associated with the national 
 universities and the organisation of national thought. 
 The typical European town has its castle or great house, 
 its cathedral or church, its middle-class and lower-class 
 quarters. Five miles off one can see that the American 
 town is on an entirely different plan. In his remarkable 
 "American Scene," Mr. Henry James calls attention 
 to the fact that the Church as one sees it and feels it 
 universally in Europe is altogether absent, and he adds 
 a comment as suggestive as it is vague. Speaking of 
 the appearance of the Churches, so far as they do appear 
 amidst American urban scenery, he says : 
 
 " Looking for the most part no more established or 
 seated than a ^stopped omnibus, they are reduced to the 
 inveterate bourgeois level (that of private, accommodated 
 pretensions merely), and fatally despoiled of the fine old 
 ecclesiastical arrogance. : : . The field of American Hfe is 
 as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centre-piece ; a 
 truth that the myriad little structures * attended' on Sundays 
 and on the * off ' evenings of their * sociables * proclaim as 
 with the audible sound of the roaring of a milhon mice. . . : 
 " And however one indicates one's impression of the 
 clearance, the clearance itself, in its completeness, with the 
 innumerable odd connected circumstances that bring it 
 281 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 home, represents, in the history of manners and morals, a 
 deviation in the mere measurement of which hereafter may 
 well reside a certain critical thrill. I say hereafter because 
 it is a question of one of those many measurements that 
 would as yet, in the United States, be premature. Of all 
 the solemn conclusions one feels as * barred,' the list is quite 
 headed in the States, I think, by this particular abeyance 
 of judgment. When an ancient treasure of precious vessels, 
 overscored with glowing gems and wrought artistically into 
 wondrous shapes, has, by a prodigious process, been con- 
 verted through a vast community into the small change, 
 the simple circulating medium of dollars and * nickels,' we 
 can only say that the consequent permeation will be of 
 values of a new order. Of what order we must wait to 
 see." 
 
 America has no Church. Neither has it a peasantry 
 nor an aristocracy, and until well on in the Victorian 
 epoch it had no disproportionately rich people. 
 
 In America, except in the regions where the negro 
 abounds, there is no lower stratum. There is no "soil 
 people " to this community at all ; your bottom-most 
 man is a mobile freeman who can read, and who has 
 ideas above digging and pigs and poultry-keeping, except 
 incidentally for his own ends. No one owns to sub- 
 ordination. As a consequence, any position which 
 involves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority 
 is difficult to fill; there is, from the European point 
 of view, an extraordinary dearth of servants, and this 
 endures in spite of a great peasant immigration. The 
 servile tradition will not root here now ; it dies forth- 
 with. An enormous importation of European serfs and 
 peasants goes on, but as they touch this soil their backs 
 begin to stiffen with a new assertion. 
 
 2B2 
 
The American Population 
 
 And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses 
 an element. There is no territorial aristocracy, no 
 aristocracy at all, no throne, no legitimate and acknow- 
 ledged representative of that upper social structure of 
 leisure, power and State responsibility which in the old 
 European theory of Society was supposed to give signifi- 
 cance to the whole. The American community, one 
 cannot too clearly insist, does not correspond to an entire 
 European community at all, but only to the middle 
 masses of it, to the trading and manufacturing class 
 between the dimensions of the magnate and the clerk 
 and skilled artisan. It is the central part of the European 
 organism without either the dreaming head or the sub- 
 jugated feet. Even the highly feudal slave-holding 
 "county family" traditions of Virginia and the South 
 pass now out of memory. So that in a very real sense 
 the past of the American nation is in Europe, and the 
 settled order of the past is left behind there. This com- 
 munity was, as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of 
 its branches, and brought hither. It began neither serf 
 nor lord, but burgher and farmer; it followed the normal 
 development of the middle class under Progress every- 
 where, and became capitalistic. The huge later immigra- 
 tion has converged upon the great industrial centres and 
 added merely a vast non-servile element of employees to 
 the scheme. 
 V America has been and still very largely is a one-class 
 country. It is a great sea of human beings detached 
 from their traditions of origin. The social difference 
 from Europe appears everywhere, and nowhere more 
 strikingly than in the railway carriages. In England the 
 compartments in these are either "first class," originally 
 designed for the aristocracy, or "second class," for the 
 
 283 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 middle class, or "third class," for the populace. In 
 America there is only one class, one universal simple 
 democratic car. In the Southern States, however, a 
 proportion of these simple democratic cars are inscribed 
 with the word "White," whereby nine million people 
 are excluded. But to this original even-handed treatment 
 there was speedily added a more sumptuous type of car, 
 the parlour car, accessible to extra dollars ; and then came 
 special types of train, all made up of parlour cars and 
 observation cars and the like. In England nearly every 
 train remains still first, second and third, or first and 
 third. And now, quite outdistancing the differentiation 
 of England, America produces private cars and private 
 trains, such as Europe reserves only for crowned heads. 
 
 The evidence of the American railways , then , suggests 
 very strongly what a hundred other signs confirm, that 
 the huge classless sea of American population is not 
 destined to remain classless, is already developing separa- 
 tions and distinctions and structures of its own. And 
 monstrous architectural portents in Boston and Salt Lake 
 City encourage one to suppose that even that churchless 
 aspect, which so stirred the speculative element in Mr. 
 Henry James, is only the opening formless phase of a 
 community destined to produce not only classes but 
 intellectual and moral forms of the most remarkable 
 kind. 
 
 §3 
 
 It is well to note how these ninety millions of people 
 whose social future we are discussing are distributed. 
 This huge development of human appliances and re- 
 sources is here going on in a community that is still, for 
 
 284 
 
The American Population 
 
 all the dense crowds of New York, the teeming con- 
 gestion of East Side, extraordinarily scattered. America, 
 one recalls, is still an unoccupied country across which 
 the latest developments of civilisation are rushing. We 
 are dealing here w^ith a continuous area of land which 
 is, leaving Alaska out of account altogether, equal to 
 Great Britain, France, the German Empire, the Austro- 
 Hungarian Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Holland, 
 Spain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in 
 Europe, Egypt and the whole Empire of India, and the 
 population spread out over this vast space is still less 
 than the joint population of the first two countries named 
 and not a quarter that of India. 
 
 Moreover, it is not spread at all evenly. Much of it 
 is in undistributed clots. It is not upon the soil ; barely 
 half of it is in holdings and homes and authentic com- 
 munities. It is a population of an extremely modern 
 type. Urban concentration has already gone far with 
 it ; fifteen millions of it are crowded into and about twenty 
 great cities, another eighteen millions make up five hun- 
 dred towns. Between these centres of population run 
 railways indeed, telegraph w^ires, telephone connections, 
 tracks of various sorts, but to the European eye these 
 are mere scratchings on a virgin surface. An empty 
 wilderness manifests itself through this thin network of 
 human conveniences, appears in the meshes even at the 
 railroad side. 
 
 Essentially, America is still an unsettled land, with 
 only a few incidental good roads in favoured places, with 
 no universal police, with no wayside inns where a civilised 
 man may rest, with still only the crudest of rural postal 
 deliveries, with long stretches of swamp and forest and 
 desert by the track side, still unassailed by industry. 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 This much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago. 
 Westward it becomes more and more the fact. In Idaho, 
 at last; comes the untouched and perhaps invincible 
 desert, plain and continuous through the long hours of 
 travel. Huge areas do not contain one human being to 
 the square mile, still vaster portions fall short of 
 two. . . . 
 
 It is upon Pennsylvania and New York State and the 
 belt of great towns that stretches out past Chicago to 
 Milwaukee and Madison that the nation centres and 
 seems destined to centre. One needs but examine a 
 tinted population map to realise that. The other con- 
 centrations are provincial and subordinate ; they have the 
 same relation to the main axis that Glasgow or Cardiff 
 have to London in the British scheme. 
 
 §4 
 
 When I speak of this vast multitude, these ninety 
 millions of the United States of America as being for 
 the most part peasants de-peasant-ised and common 
 people cut off from their own social traditions, I do not 
 intend to convey that the American community is as a 
 whole traditionless. There is in America a very dis- 
 tinctive tradition indeed, which animates the entire 
 nation, gives a unique idiom to its press and all 
 its public utterances, and is manifestly the starting 
 point from which the adjustments of the future must 
 be made. 
 
 The mere sight of the stars and stripes serves to 
 recall it ; " Yankee " in the mouth of a European gives 
 something of its quality. One thinks at once of a careless 
 
 2S6 
 
The American Population 
 
 abandonment of any pretension, of tireless energy and 
 daring enterprise, of immense self-reliance, of a disrespect 
 for the past so complete that a mummy is in itself a 
 comical object, and the blowing out of an ill-guarded 
 sacred flame, a delightful jest. One thinks of the enter- 
 prise of the sky-scraper and the humour of "A Yankee 
 at the Court of King Arthur," and of "Innocents 
 Abroad." Its dominant notes are democracy, freedom, 
 and confidence. It is religious-spirited without super- 
 stition, consciously Christian in the vein of a nearly 
 Unitarian Christianity, fervent but broadened, broadened 
 as a halfpenny is broadened by being run over by an 
 express train, substantially the same, that is to say, but 
 with a marked loss of outline and detail. It is a tradition 
 of romantic concession to good and inoffensive women 
 and a high development of that personal morality which 
 puts sexual continence and alcoholic temperance before 
 any public virtue. It is equally a tradition of sporadic 
 emotional public-spiritedness, entirely of the quality of 
 gallantry, of handsome and surprising gifts to the people, 
 disinterested occupation of office and the like. It is 
 emotionally patriotic, hypotheticating fighting and dying 
 for one's country as a supreme good while inculcating 
 also that working and living for oneself is quite within 
 tlie sphere of virtuous action. It adores the flag but 
 suspects the State. One sees more national flags and 
 fewer national servants in America than in any country 
 in the world. Its conception of manners is one of free 
 plain-spoken men revering women and shielding them 
 from most of the realities of life, scornful of aristocracies 
 and monarchies, while asserting simply, directly, boldly 
 and frequently an equal claim to consideration with all 
 other men. If there is any traditional national costume, 
 
 287 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 it is shirt-sleeves. And it cherishes the rights of property 
 above any other right whatsoever. 
 
 Such are the details that come clustering into one's 
 mind in response to the phrase, the American tradition. 
 
 From the War of Independence onward until our 
 own times that tradition, that very definite ideal, has 
 kept pretty steadily the same. It is the image of a man 
 and not the image of a State. Its living spirit has been 
 the spirit of freedom at any cost, unconditional and 
 irresponsible. It is the spirit of men who have thrown 
 off a yoke, who are jealously resolved to be unhampered 
 masters of their *'own," to whom nothing else is of any- 
 thing but secondary importance. That was the spirit of 
 the English small gentry and mercantile class, the com- 
 fortable property owners, the Parliamentarians, in Stuart 
 times. Indeed even earlier, it is very largely the spirit 
 of More's "Utopia." It was that spirit sent Oliver 
 Cromwell himself packing for America, though a heed- 
 less and ill-advised and unforeseeing King would not let 
 him go. It was the spirit that made taxation for public 
 purposes the supreme wrong and provoked each country, 
 first the mother country and then in its turn the 
 daughter country, to armed rebellion. It has been the 
 spirit of the British Whig and the British Nonconformist 
 almost up to the present day. In the Eeform Club of 
 London, framed and glazed over against Magna Charta, 
 is the American Declaration of Independence, kindred 
 trophies they are of the same essentially English spirit 
 of stubborn insubordination. But the American side of 
 it has gone on unchecked by the complementary aspect 
 of the English character which British Toryism 
 expresses. 
 
 The War of Independence raised that Whig suspicion 
 
 288 
 
The American Population 
 
 of and hostility to government and the freedom of private 
 property and the repudiation of any but voluntary emo- 
 tional and supererogatory co-operation in the national 
 purpose to the level of a religion, and the American Con- 
 stitution, with but one element of elasticity in the 
 Supreme Court decisions, established these principles 
 impregnably in the political structure. It organised dis- 
 organisation. Personal freedom, defiance of authority, 
 and the stars and stripes have always gone together in 
 mto's minds; and subsequent waves of immigration, the 
 Irish fleeing famine, for which they held the English 
 responsible, and the Eastern European Jews escaping 
 relentless persecutions, brought a persuasion of immense 
 public wrongs, as a necessary concomitant of systematic 
 government, to refresh without changing this defiant 
 thirst for freedom at any cost. 
 \i In my book, *'The Future in America,** I have tried 
 to make an estimate of the working quality of this 
 American tradition of unconditional freedom for the adult 
 male citizen. I have shown that from the point of view 
 of anyone who regards civilisation as an organisation of 
 human interdependence and believes that the stability of 
 society can be secured only by a conscious and disciplined 
 co-ordination of effort, it is a tradition extraordinarily 
 and dangerously deficient in what I have called a ''sense 
 of the State" And by a "sense of the State** I mean 
 not merely a vague and sentimental and showy public- 
 spiritedness — of that the States have enough and to spare 
 — but a real sustaining conception of the collective 
 interest embodied in the State as an object of simple 
 duty and as a determining factor in the life of each 
 individual. It involves a sense of function and a sense 
 of "place,'* a sense of a general responsibility and of a 
 
 . T 289 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 general well-being overriding the individual's well-being, 
 which are exactly the senses the American tradition 
 attacks and destroys. 
 
 For the better part of a century the American 
 tradition, quite as much by reason of what it disregards 
 as of what it suggests, has meant a great release of 
 human energy, a vigorous if rough and untidy exploita- 
 tion of the vast resources that the European invention 
 of railways and telegraphic communication put within 
 reach of the American people. It has stimulated men to 
 a greater individual activity, perhaps, than the world has 
 ever seen before. Men have been wasted by misdirection 
 no doubt, but there has been less waste by inaction and 
 lassitude than was the case in any previous society. 
 Great bulks of things and great quantities of things have 
 been produced, huge areas brought under cultivation, vast 
 cities reared in the wilderness. 
 
 But this tradition has failed to produce the beginnings 
 or promise of any new phase of civilised organisation, the 
 growths have remained largely invertebrate and chaotic, 
 and, concurrently with its gift of splendid and monstrous 
 growth, it has also developed portentous political and 
 economic evils. No doubt the increment of human 
 energy has been considerable, but it has been much less 
 than appears at first sight. Much of the human 'energy 
 that America has displayed in the last century is not a 
 development of new energy but a diversion. It has been 
 accompanied by a fall in the birth-rate that even the 
 immigration torrent has not altogether replaced. Its 
 insistence on the individual, its disregard of the collec- 
 tive organisation, its treatment of women and children 
 as each man's private concern, has had its natural out- 
 come. Men's imaginations have been turned entirely 
 
 2^ 
 
The American Population 
 
 upon individual and immediate successes and upon con- 
 crete triumphs ; they have had no regard or only an 
 ineffectual sentimental regard for the race. Every man 
 was looking after himself, and there was no one to look 
 after the future. Had the promise of 1815 been fulfilled, 
 there would now be in the United States of America 
 one hundred million descendants of the homogeneous and 
 free-spirited native population of that time. There is 
 not, as a matter of fact, more than thirty-five million. 
 There is probably, as I have pointed out, much less. 
 Against the assets of cities, railways, mines and industrial 
 wealth won, the American tradition has to set the price 
 of five-and-seventy million native citizens who have never 
 found time to get born, and whose place is now more or 
 less filled by alien substitutes. Biologically speaking, 
 this is not a triumph for the American tradition. It 
 is, however, very clearly an outcome of the intense 
 individualism of that tradition. Under the sway of 
 that it has burnt its future in the furnace to keep up 
 steam. 
 
 The next and necessary evil consequent upon this 
 exaltation of the individual and private property over the 
 State, over the race that is and over public property, 
 has been a contempt for public service. It has identified 
 public spirit with spasmodic acts of public beneficence. 
 The American political ideal became a Cincinnatus whom 
 nobody sent for and who therefore never left his plough. 
 There has ensued a corrupt and undignified political 
 life, speaking claptrap, dark with violence, illiterate 
 and void of statesmanship or science, forbidding any 
 healthy social development through public organisation 
 at home, and every year that the increasing facili- 
 ties of communication draw the alien nations closer, 
 
 •9« 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 deepening the risks of needless and disastrous wars 
 abroad. 
 
 And in the third place it is to be remarked that the 
 American tradition has defeated its dearest aims of a 
 universal freedom and a practical equality. The economic 
 process of the last half-century, so far as America is con- 
 cerned, has completely justified the generalisations of 
 Marx. There has been a steady concentration of wealth 
 and of the reality as distinguished from the forms of 
 power in the hands of a small energetic minority, and a 
 steady approximation of the condition of the mass of the 
 citizens to that of the so-called proletariat of the European 
 communities. The tradition of individual freedom and 
 equality is, in fact, in process of destroying the realities 
 of freedom and equality out of which it rose. Instead 
 of the six hundred thousand families of the year 1790, 
 all at about the same level of property and, excepting the 
 peculiar condition of seven hundred thousand blacks, with 
 scarcely anyone in the position of a hireling, we have 
 now as the most striking, though by no means the most 
 important, fact in American social life a frothy confusion 
 of millionaires' families, just as wasteful, foolish and 
 vicious as irresponsible human beings with unlimited 
 resources have always shown themselves to be. And, 
 concurrently with the appearance of these concentrations 
 of great wealth, we have appearing also poverty, poverty 
 of a degree that was quite unknown in the United States 
 for the first century of their career as an independent 
 nation. In the last few decades slums as frightful as any 
 in Europe have appeared with terrible rapidity, and there 
 has been a development of the viler side of industrialism, 
 of sweating and base employment of the most ominous 
 kind. 
 
 29a 
 
The American Population 
 
 In Mr. Eobert Hunter's "Poverty '* one reads of "not 
 less than eighty thousand children, most of whom are 
 little girls, at present employed in the textile mills of 
 this country. In the South there are now six times as 
 many children at work as there were twenty years ago. 
 Child labour is increasing yearly in that section of the 
 country. Each year more little ones are brought in from 
 the fields and hills to live in the degrading and demoralis- 
 ing atmosphere of the mill towns. . . .'* 
 
 Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I 
 gathered from Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island 
 that the proportion of little nephews and nieces, friends' 
 sons and so forth brought in by them is peculiarly high, 
 and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It 
 was a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a 
 dull-eyed little boy of no ascertainable relationship. . . . 
 
 In the w^orst days of cotton-milling in England the 
 conditions were hardly worse than those now existing 
 in the South. Children, the tiniest and frailest, of five 
 and six years of age, rise in the morning and, like old 
 men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labour ; 
 and, when they return home, "wearily fling themselves 
 on their beds, too tired to take off their clothes." Many 
 children work all night — "in the maddening racket of 
 the machinery, in an atmosphere insanitary and clouded 
 with humidity and lint." 
 
 "It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter in his description, 
 "before I forget the face of a little boy of six years, with 
 his hands stretched forward to rearrange a bit of 
 machinery, his pallid face and spare form already showing 
 the physical effects of labour. This child, six years of 
 age, was working twelve hours a day." 
 
 From Mr. Spargo's "Bitter Cry of the Children" I 
 ^93 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 learn this much of the joys of certain among the youth 
 of Pennsylvania : 
 
 "For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and 
 eleven stoop over the chute and pick out the slate and 
 other impurities from the coal as it moves past them. 
 The air is black with coal dust, and the roar of the 
 crushers, screens and rushing mill-race of coal is deafen- 
 ing. Sometimes one of the children falls into the 
 machinery and is terribly mangled, or slips into the chute 
 and is smothered to death. Many children are killed in 
 this way. Many others, after a time, contract coal- 
 miners' asthma and consumption, which gradually under- 
 mine their health. Breathing continually day after day 
 the clouds of coal dust, their lungs become black and 
 choked with small particles of anthracite. . . ." 
 
 In Massachusetts, at Fall Kiver, the Hon. J. F. 
 Carey tells how little naked boys, free Americans, work 
 for Mr. Borden, the New York milhonaire, packing cloth 
 into bleaching vats, in a bath of chemicals that bleaches 
 their little bodies like the bodies of lepers. . . . 
 
 Altogether it would seem that at least one million 
 and a half children are growing up in the United States 
 of America stunted and practically uneducated because 
 of unregulated industrialism. These children, ill-fed, ill- 
 trained, mentally benighted, since they are alive and 
 active, since they are an active and positive and not a 
 negative evil, are even more ominous in the American 
 outlook than those five and sixty million of good race 
 and sound upbringing who will now never be born. 
 
 294 
 
/, 
 
 The American Population 
 
 §5 
 
 ^It must be repeated that the American tradition is 
 really the tradition of one particular ingredient in this 
 great admixture and stirring up of peoples. This in- 
 gredient is the Colonial British, whose seventeenth 
 century Puritanism and eighteenth century mercantile 
 radicalism and rationalism manifestly furnished all the 
 stuff out of which the American tradition is made. It 
 is this stuff planted in virgin soil and inflated to an 
 immense and buoyant optimism by colossal and unantici- 
 pated material prosperity and success. From that British 
 middle-class tradition comes the individualist protestant 
 spirit, the keen self-reliance and personal responsibility, 
 the irresponsible expenditure, the indiscipline and mys- 
 tical faith in things being managed properly if they are 
 only let alone. " State-blindness " is the natural and 
 almost inevitable quality of a middle-class tradition, a 
 class that has been forced neither to rule nor obey, which 
 has been concentrated and successfully concentrated on 
 private gain. 
 
 This middle-class British section of the American 
 population was, and is to this day, the only really articu- 
 late ingredient in its mental composition. And so it has 
 had a monopoly in providing the American forms of 
 thought. The other sections of peoples that have been 
 annexed by or have come into this national synthesis 
 are silent so far as any contribution to the national stock 
 of ideas and ideals is concerned. There are, for example, 
 those great elements, the Spanish Catholics, the French 
 Catholic population of Louisiana, the Irish Catholics, the 
 French-Canadians who are now ousting the sterile New 
 Englander from New England, the Germans, the Italians 
 
 295- 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 the Hungarians. Comparatively they say nothing. From 
 all the ten million of coloured people come just two or 
 three platform voices, Booker Washington, Dubois, Mrs. 
 Church Terrell, mere protests at specific wrongs. The 
 clever, restless Eastern European Jews, too, have still 
 to find a voice. Professor Miinsterberg has written with 
 i certain bitterness of the inaudibility of the German 
 element in the American population. They allow them- 
 selves, he remonstrates, to count for nothing. They did 
 not seem to exist, he points out, even in politics until 
 prohibitionist fury threatened their beer. Then, indeed, 
 the American German emerged from silence and 
 obscurity, but only to rescue his mug and retire again 
 with it into enigmatical silence. 
 
 If there is any exception to this predominance of the 
 tradition of the English-speaking, originally middle- 
 class, English-thinking northerner in the American mind, 
 it is to be found in the spread of social democracy out- 
 ward from the festering tenement houses of Chicago into 
 the mining and agrarian regions of the middle west. It 
 is a fierce form of socialist teaching that speaks through- 
 out thiese regions, far more closely akin to the revolu- 
 tionary Socialism of the continent of Europe than to the 
 constructive and evolutionary Socialism of Great Britain. 
 Its typical organ is The Appeal to Reason , which circu- 
 lates more than a quarter of a million copies weekly from 
 Kansas City. It is a Socialism reeking with class feel- 
 ing and class hatred and altogether anarchistic in spirit ; 
 a new and highly indigestible contribution to the Ameri- 
 can moral and intellectual synthesis. It is remarkable 
 chiefly as the one shrill exception in a world of plastic 
 acceptance. 
 
 Now it is impossible to believe that this vast silence 
 296 
 
The American Population 
 
 of these imported and ingested factors that the American 
 nation has taken to itself is as acquiescent as it seems. 
 No doubt they are largely taking over the traditional 
 forms of American thought and expression quietly and 
 without protest, and wearing them; but they will wear 
 them as a man wears a misfit, shaping and adapting it 
 every day more and more to his natural form, here strain- 
 ing a seam and there taking in a looseness. A force of 
 modification must be at work. It must be at work in 
 spite of the fact that, with the exception of social 
 democracy, it does not anywhere show as a protest or 
 a fresh beginning or a challenge' to the prevailing forms. 
 How far it has actually been at work is, perhaps, 
 to be judged best by an observant stroller, surveying 
 the crowds of a Sunday evening in New York, or read 
 in the sheets of such a mirror of popular taste as th^ 
 Sunday edition of the New York American or the New 
 York Herald. In the former just what I mean by the 
 silent modification of the old tradition is quite typically 
 shown. Its leading articles are written by Mr. Arthur 
 Brisbane, the son of one of the Brook Farm Utopians, 
 that gathering in which Hawthorne and Henry James 
 senior, and Margaret Fuller participated, and in which 
 the whole brilliant world of Boston's past, the world of 
 Emerson, Longfellow, Thoreau, was interested. Mr. 
 Brisbane is a very distinguished man, quite over anfl 
 above the fact that he^is paid the greatest salary of 
 any journalist in the world. He writes with a wit 
 and directness that no other living man can rival, and 
 he holds up constantly what is substantially the American 
 ideal of the past century to readers who evidently need 
 strengthening in it. It is, of course, the figure of a 
 man and not of a State; it is a man, clean, clean 
 
 297 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 shaved and almost obtrusively strong-jawed, honest, 
 mua'cular, alert, pushful, chivalrous, self-reliant, non- 
 political except when he breaks into shrewd and pene- 
 trating voting — "you can fool all the people some of 
 the time," etc. — and independent — independent — in a 
 world which is therefore certain to give way to him. 
 
 His doubts, his questionings, his aspirations, are 
 dealt with by Mr. Brisbane with a simple direct fatherli- 
 ness, with all the beneficent persuasiveness of a revivalist 
 preacher. Millions read these leaders and feel a mo- 
 mentary benefit, en route for the more actual portions 
 of the paper. He asks: "Why are all men gamblers?" 
 He discusses our Longing for Immortal Imperfection, 
 and "Did we once live on the moon? " He recommends 
 the substitution of whisky and soda for neat whisky, 
 drawing an illustration from the comparative effect of 
 the diluted and of the undiluted liquid as an eye-wash 
 ("Try whisky on your friend's eyeball ! " is the heading), 
 sleep ("The man who loses sleep will make a failure 
 of his life, or at least diminish greatly his chances of 
 success"), and the education of the feminine intelligence 
 ("The cow that kicks her weaned calf is all heart"). 
 He makes identically the same confident appeal to the 
 moral motive which was for so long the salvation of 
 the Puritan individualism from which the American 
 tradition derives. "That hand," he writes, "which 
 supports the head of the new-born baby, the mother's 
 hand, supports the civilisation of the world." 
 
 But that sort of thing is not saving the old native 
 strain in the population. It moves people, no doubt, 
 but inadequately. And here is a passage that is quite 
 the quintessence of Americanism, of all its deep moral 
 feeling and sentimental untruthfulness. I wonder if 
 
 298 
 
The American Population 
 
 any man but an American or a British nonconformist 
 in a state of rhetorical excitement ever beHeved that 
 Shakespeare wrote his plays or Michael Angelo painted 
 in a mood of humanitarian exaltation, ''for the good 
 of all men." 
 
 " What shaU we strive for ? Money ? 
 
 *' Get a thousand millions. Your day will come, and 
 in due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at 
 your bump of acquisitiveness as at the mean coat of the 
 pauper. 
 
 *' Then shall we strive for fower ? 
 
 " The names of the first great kings of the world are 
 forgotten, and the names of all those whose power we envy 
 will drift to forgetfulness soon. What does the most power- 
 ful man in the world amount to standing at the brink of 
 Niagara, with his solar plexus trembling ? What is his 
 power compared with the force of the wind or the energy 
 of one small wave sweeping along the shore ? 
 
 " The power which man can build up within himself, 
 for himself, is nothing. Only the dull reasoning of gratified 
 egotism can make it seem worth while. 
 
 " Then what is worth while ? Let us look at some of 
 the men who have come and gone, and whose hves inspire 
 us. Take a few at random : 
 
 " Columbus, Michael Angelo, Wilberforce, Shakespeare, 
 Galileo, Fulton, Watt, Hargreaves — ^these will do. 
 
 " Let us ask ourselves this question : * Was there any 
 one thing that distinguished all their lives, that united all 
 these men, active in fields so different ? ' 
 
 " Yea. Every man among them, and every man whose 
 life history is worth the telhng, did something for the good 
 of other men. ; . : 
 
 '" Get money if you can. Get power if you can.- Then, if 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 you want to be more than the ten thousand million unknown 
 mingled in the dust beneath you, see what good you can 
 do with your money and your power. 
 
 " If you are one of the many millions who have not 
 and can't get money or power, see what good you can do 
 without either; 
 
 " You can help carry a load for an old man. You can 
 encourage and help a poor devil trying to reform. You 
 can set a good example to children. You can stick to the 
 men with whom you work, fighting honestly for their 
 welfare. 
 
 " Time was when the ablest man would rather kill ten 
 men than feed a thousand children. That time has gone. 
 We do not care much about feeding the children, but we 
 care less about killing the men. To that extent we have 
 improved already. 
 
 *' The day will come when we shall prefer helping our 
 neighbour to robbing him^egally — of a million dollars. 
 
 " Do what good you can now, while it is unusual, 
 and have the satisfaction of being a pioneer and an 
 eccentric." 
 
 It is the voice of the American tradition strained to 
 the utmost to make itself audible to the new world, 
 and cracking into italics and breaking into capitals with 
 the strain. The rest of that enormous bale of paper 
 is eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost 
 to any sense of comprehensive things, deaf to ideas, 
 impervious to generalisations, a public which has carried 
 the conception of freedom to its logical extreme of entire 
 individual detachment. These tell-tale columns deal 
 all with personality and the drama of personal life. 
 They witness to no interest but the interest in intense 
 individual experiences. The engagements, the love 
 
 300 
 
The American Population 
 
 affairs, thie scandals of conspicuous people are given in 
 pitiless* detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits 
 and sensational pictorial comments. Even the eaves- 
 droppers who write this stuff strike the personal note, 
 and their heavily muscular portraits frown beside the 
 initial letter. Murders and crimes are worked up to 
 the keenest pitch of realisation, and any new indelicacy 
 in fashionable costume, any new m-edical device or cure, 
 any new dance or athleticism, any new breach in the 
 moral code, any novelty in sea bathing or the woman's 
 seat on horseback, or the like, is given copious and 
 moving illustration, stirring headlines, and eloquent 
 reprobation. There is a coloured supplement of knock- 
 about fun, written chiefly in the quaint dialect of the 
 New) York slums. It is a language from which "th" 
 has vanished, and it presents a world in which the 
 kicking by a mule of an endless succession of victims 
 is an inexhaustible joy to young and old. "Dat ole 
 Maud ! " There is a smaller bale dealing with sport. In 
 the advertisement columns one finds nothing of books, 
 nothing of art; but great choice of bust developers, hair 
 restorers, nervous tonics, clothing sales, self-contained 
 flats, and business opportunities. . . . 
 
 Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, 
 as people say, taken off its frills. All but one ; Mr. 
 Arthur Brisbane's eloquence one may consider as the 
 last stitch of the old costume — mere decoration. Excite- 
 ment remains the residual object in life. The New York 
 American represents a clientele to be counted by the 
 hundred thousand, manifestly with no other solicitudes, 
 just burning to live and living to bum. 
 
 301 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 §6 
 
 The modifications of the American tradition that 
 will occur through its adoption by these silent foreign 
 ingredients in the racial synthesis are not likely to add 
 to it or elaborate it in any way. They tend merely to 
 simplify it to bare irresponsible non-moral individualism. 
 It is with the detail and qualification of a tradition as 
 with the inflexions of a language ; when another people 
 takes it over the refinements disappear. But there are 
 other forces of modification at work upon the American 
 tradition of an altogether more hopeful kind. It has 
 entered upon a constructive phase. Were it not so, 
 then the American social outlook would, indeed, be 
 hopeless. 
 
 The effectual modifying force at work is not the 
 strangeness nor the temperamental maladjustment of 
 the new elements of population, but the conscious 
 realisation of the inadequacy of the tradition on the 
 part of the more intelligent sections of the American 
 population. That blind national conceit that would 
 hear no criticism and admit no deficiency has disappeared. 
 In the last decade such a change has come over the 
 American mind as sometimes comes over a vigorous 
 and wilful child. Suddenly it seems to have grown up, 
 to have begun to weigh its powers and consider its 
 possible deficiencies. There wlas a time when American 
 confidence and self-satisfaction seemed impregnable ; at 
 the slightest qualm of doubt America took to violent 
 rhetoric as a drunkard resorts to drink. Now the 
 indictment I have drawn up harshly, bluntly and un- 
 flatteringly in § 4 would receive the endorsement of 
 American after American. The falling birthrate of all 
 
 30<a 
 
The American Population 
 
 the best elements in the State, the cankering effect 
 of political corruption, the crumbling of independence 
 and equality before the progressive aggregation of wealth 
 — he has to face them, he cannot deny them. There 
 has arisen a new literature, the literature of national 
 self-examination, that seems destined to modify the 
 American tradition profoundly. To me it seems to 
 involve the hope and possibility of a conscious collective 
 organisation of social life. 
 
 If ever there was an epoch-marking book it was surely 
 Henry Demarest Lloyd's "Wealth against Common, 
 wealth." It marks an epoch not so much by what it 
 says as by what it silently abandons. It was published 
 in 1894, and it stated in the very clearest terms the 
 incompatibility of the almost limitless freedom of pro- 
 perty set up by the constitution, with the practical 
 freedom and general happiness of the mass of men. 
 It must be admitted that Lloyd never followed up the 
 implications of this repudiation. He made his state- 
 ments in the language of the tradition he assailed, and 
 foreshadowed the replacement of chaos by order in quite 
 chaotic and mystical appeals. Here, for instance, is 
 a typical passage from "Man, the Social Creator". 
 
 " Property is now a stumbling-block to the people, just 
 as government has been. Property will not be abolished, 
 but, like government, it will be democratised. 
 
 " The philosophy of self-interest as the social solution 
 was a good living and working synthesis in the days when 
 civilisation was advancing its frontiers twenty miles a day 
 across the American continent, and every man for himself 
 was the best social mobilisation possible. 
 
 " But to-day it is a belated ghost that has overstayed 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 the cock-crow. These were frontier morals. But this same, 
 everyone for himself, becomes most immoral when the 
 frontier is abolished and the pioneer becomes the fellow- 
 citizen, and these frontier morals are most uneconomic when 
 labour can be divided and the product multiplied. Most 
 uneconomic, for they make closure the rule of industry, 
 leading not to wealth, but to that awful waste of wealth 
 which is made visible to every eye in our unemployed — not 
 hands alone, but land, machinery, and, most of all, hearts. 
 Those who still practise these frontier morals are like 
 criminals, who, according to the new science of penology, 
 are simply reappearances of old types. Their acquisitive- 
 ness, once divine like Mercury's, is now out of place except 
 in jail. Because out of place, they are a danger. A sorry 
 day it is likely to be for those who are found in the way 
 when the new people rise to rush into each other's arms, 
 to get together, to stay together and to live together. The 
 labour movement halts because so many of its rank and 
 file — and all its leaders — do not see clearly the golden thread 
 of love on which have been strung together all the past 
 glories of human association, and which is to serve for 
 the link of the new Association of Friends who Labour, 
 whose motto is * All for All.' " 
 
 The establishm'ent of the intricate co-operative com- 
 monwealth by a rush of eighty million flushed and 
 ehiny-eyed enthusiasts, in fact, is Lloyd's proposal. He 
 will not face, and few Americans to this day will face, 
 the cold need of a great science of social adjustment 
 and a disciplined and rightly ordered machinery to turn 
 such enthusiasms to effect. They seem incurably wedded 
 to gush. However, he did express clearly enough 
 the opening phase of American disillusionment with 
 the wild go-as-you-please that had been the concep- 
 
 304 
 
The American Population 
 
 tion of life in America through a vehement, 
 wasteful, expanding century. And he was the precursor 
 of what is now> a bulky and extremely influential 
 literature of national criticism. A number of writers, 
 literary investigators one may call them, or sociological 
 men of letters, or magazine publicists — they are a little 
 difficult to place — has taken up the inquiry into the 
 condition of civic administration, into economic or- 
 ganisation, into national politics and racial interaction, 
 with a frank fearlessness and an absence of windy 
 eloquence that has been to many 'Europeans a surprising 
 revelation of the reserve forces of the American mind. 
 President Eoosevelt, that magnificent reverberator of 
 ideas, that gleam of wilful humanity, that fantastic first 
 interruption to the succession of machine-made politicians 
 at the White House, has echoed clearly to this move- 
 ment, and made it an integral part of the general 
 intellectual movement of America. 
 
 It is to these first intimations of the need of a 
 " sense of the State " in America that I would par- 
 ticularly direct the reader's attention in this discussion. 
 They are the beginnings of what is quite conceivably 
 a great and complex reconstructive effort. I admit they 
 are but beginnings. They may quite possibly wither 
 and perish presently ; they may much more probably be 
 seized upon by adventurers and converted into a new 
 cant almost as empty and fruitless as the old. The fact 
 remains that, through this busy and immensely noisy con- 
 fusion of nearly a hundred millions of people, these little 
 voices go intimating more and more clearly the intention 
 to undertake public affairs in a new spirit and upon 
 new principles, to strengthen the State and the law 
 against individual enterprise, to have done with those 
 u 305 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 national superstitions under which hypocrisy and dis- 
 loyalty and private plunder have sheltered and prospered 
 for so long. 
 
 Just as far as these reform efforts succeed and 
 develop is the organisation of the United States of 
 America into a great, self-conscious, civilised nation, 
 unparalleled in the world's history, possible ; just as far 
 as they fail is failure written over the American future. 
 The real interest of America for the next century to 
 the student of civilisation will be the development of 
 these attempts, now in their infancy, to create and 
 realise out of this racial hotchpotch, this human chaos, 
 an idea of the collective commonwealth as the datum 
 of reference for every individual life. 
 
 §7 
 
 I have hinted in the last section that there is a 
 possibility that the new wave of constructive ideas in 
 American thought may speedily develop a cant of its 
 own. But even then, a constructive cant is better than 
 a destructive one. Even the conscious hypocrite has to 
 do something to justify his pretences, and the mere 
 disappearance from current thought of the persuasion 
 that organisation is a mistake and discipline needless, 
 clears the ground of one huge obstacle even if it guar- 
 antees nothing about the consequent building. 
 
 But, apart from this, are there more solid and 
 effectual forces behind this new movement of ideas that 
 makes for organisation in American medley at the 
 present time? 
 
 The speculative writer casting about for such elements 
 
 306 
 
The American Population 
 
 lights upon four sets of possibilities which call for 
 discussion. First, one has to ask : How far is the 
 American plutocracy likely to be merely a wasteful and 
 chaotic class, and how far is it likely to become con- 
 sciously aristocratic and constructive? Secondly, and 
 in relation to this, what possibilities of pride and leading 
 are there in the great university foundations of America ? 
 Will they presently begin to tell as a restraining and 
 directing force upon public thought? Thirdly, will the 
 growing American Socialist movement, which at present 
 is just as anarchistic and undisciplined in spirit as every- 
 thing else in America, presently perceive the constructive 
 implications of its general propositions and become 
 statesmanlike and constructive? And, fourthly, what 
 are the latent possibilities of the American women? 
 Will women as they become more and more aware of 
 themselves as a class and of the problem of their sex 
 become a force upon the anarchistic side, a force 
 favouring race-suicide, or upon the constructive side 
 which plans and builds and bears the future? 
 
 The only possible answer to each one of these 
 questions at present is guessing and an estimate. But 
 the only way in w^hich a conception of the American 
 social future may be reached lies through their dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 Let us begin by considering what constructive forces 
 may exist in this new plutocracy which already so largely 
 sways American economic and political development. 
 The first impression is one of extravagant and aimless 
 expenditure, of a class irresponsible and wasteful beyond 
 all precedent. One gets a Zolaesque picture of that 
 aspect in Mr. Upton Sinclair's "Metropolis," or the 
 fashionable intelligence of the popular New York Sunday 
 
 307 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 editions, and one finds a good deal of confirmatory 
 evidence in many incidental aspects of the smart 
 American life of Paris and the Eiviera. The evidence 
 in the notorious Thaw trial, after one has discounted 
 its theatrical elements, was still a very convincing 
 demonstration of a rotten and extravagant, because 
 aimless and functionless, class of rich people. But one 
 has to be careful in this matter if one is to do justice 
 to the facts. If a thing is made up of two elements, 
 and one is noisy and glaringly coloured, and the other 
 is quiet and colourless, the first impression created will 
 be that the thing is identical with the element that 
 is noisy and glaringly coloured. One is much less 
 likely to hear of the broad plans and the quality of 
 the wise, strong and constructive individuals in a 
 class than of their foolish wives, their spendthrift 
 sons, their mistresses, and their moments of irritation 
 and folly. 
 
 In the making of very rich men there ia always a 
 factor of good fortune and a factor of design and will. 
 One meets rich men at times who seem to be merely 
 lucky gamblers, who strike one as just the thousandth 
 man in a myriad of wild plungers, who are, in fact, 
 chance nobodies washed up by an eddy. Others, again, 
 strike one as exceptionally lucky half -knaves. But there 
 are others of a growth more deliberate and of an 
 altogether higher personal quality. One takes such men 
 as Mr. J. D. Eockefeller or Mr. Pierpont Morgan — the 
 scale of their fortunes makes them public property — 
 and it is clear that we are dealing with persons on 
 quite a different level of intellectual power from the 
 British Colonel Norths, for example, or the South African 
 Joels. In my ''Future in America" I have taken the 
 
 308 
 
The American Population 
 
 former largely at Miss Tarbell's estimate, and treated 
 him as a case of acquisitiveness raised in Baptist 
 surroundings. But I doubt very much if that exhausts 
 the man as he is to-day. Given a man brought up to 
 saving and "getting on" a,s if to a religion, a man very 
 acquisitive and very patient and restrained, and indubit- 
 ably with great organising power, and he grows rich 
 beyond the dreams of avarice. And having done so, 
 there he is. What is he going to do? Every step he 
 takes up the ascent to riches gives him new perspectives 
 and new points of view. 
 
 It may have appealed to the young Eockefeller, 
 clerk in a Chicago house, that to be rich was itself a 
 supreme end ; in the first flush of the discovery that 
 he was immensely rich, he may have thanked Heaven 
 as if for a supreme good, and spoken to a Sunday school 
 gathering as if he knew himself for the most favoured 
 of men. But all that happened twenty years ago or 
 more. One does not keep on in that sort of satisfaction ; 
 one settles down to the new facts. And such men as 
 Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Pierpont Morgan do not live 
 in a made and protected world with their minds trained, 
 tamed and fed and shielded from outside impressions 
 as royalties do. The thought of the world has washed 
 about them ; they have read and listened to the dis- 
 cussion of themselves for some decades; they have had 
 sleepless nights of self-examination. To succeed in 
 acquiring enormous wealth does not solve the problem 
 of life; indeed, it reopens it in a new form. "What 
 shall I do with myself?" simply recurs again. You 
 may have decided to devote yourself to getting on, 
 getting wealthy. Well, you have got it. Now, again, 
 comes the question: "What shall I do?" 
 
 3P9 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 Mr. Pierpont Morgan, I am told, collected works of 
 art. I can understand that satisfying a rich gentleman 
 of leisure, but not a man who has felt the sensation 
 of holding great big things in his great big hands. 
 Saul, going out to seek his father's asses, found a king- 
 dom — and became very spiritedly a king, and it seems 
 to me that these big industrial and financial organisers, 
 whatever in their youth they proposed to do or b-e, 
 must many of them come to realise that their organis- 
 ing power is up against no less a thing than a 
 nation's future. Napoleon, it is curious to remem- 
 ber, once wanted to run a lodging-house, and a man 
 may start to corner oil and end the father of a 
 civilisation. 
 
 Now, I am disposed to suspect at times that an 
 inkling of such a realisation may have come to some 
 of these very rich men. I am inclined to put it among 
 the possibilities of our time that it may presently 
 become clearly and definitely the inspiring idea of many 
 of those who find themselves predominantly rich. I 
 do not see why these active rich should not develop 
 statesmanship, and I can quite imagine them developing 
 very considerable statesmanship. Because these men 
 w^ere able to realise their organising power in the 
 absence of economic organisation, it does not follow 
 that they will be fanatical for a continuing looseness 
 and freedom of property. The phase of economic liberty 
 ends itself, as Marx long ago pointed out. The American 
 business world becomes more and more a managed world 
 with fewer and fewer wild possibilities of succeeding. 
 Of all people the big millionaires should realise this 
 most acutely, and, in fact, there are many signs that 
 they do. It seems to me that the educational zeal of 
 
 310 
 
The American Population 
 
 Mr. Andrew Carnegie and the university and scientific 
 endowments of Mr. Kockefeller are not merely showy 
 benefactions ; they express a definite feeling of the 
 present need of constructive organisation in the social 
 scheme. The time has come to build. There is, I 
 think, good reason for expecting that statesmanship of 
 the millionaires to become more organised and scientific 
 and comprehensive in the coming years. It is plausible 
 at least to maintain that the personal quality of the 
 American plutocracy has risfen in the last three decades, 
 has risen from the quality of a mere irresponsible wealthy 
 person towards that of a real aristocrat with a "sense 
 of the State." That one may reckon the first hopeful 
 possibility in the American outlook. 
 
 And intimately connected with this development of 
 an attitude of public responsibility in the very rich is 
 the decay on the one hand of the preposterous idea 
 once prevalent in America that politics is an unsuitable 
 interest for a "gentleman," and on the other of the 
 democratic jealousy of any but poor politicians. In 
 New York they talk very much of "gentlemen," and 
 by "gentlemen" they seem to mean rich men "in 
 society" with a college education. Nowadays, "gentle- 
 men" seem more and more disposed towards politics, 
 and less and less towards a life of business or detached 
 refinement. President Eoosevelt, for example, was one 
 of the pioneers in this new development, this restoration 
 of virility to the gentlemanly ideal. His career marks 
 the appearance of a new and better type of man in 
 American politics, the close of the rule of the idealised 
 nobody. 
 
 The prophecy has been made at times that the United 
 States might develop a Caesarism, and certainly the 
 
 3" 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 position of president might easily become that of an 
 imperator. No doubt in the event of an acute failure 
 of the national system such a catastrophe might occur, 
 but the more hopeful and probable line of development 
 is one in which a conscious and powerful, if informal, 
 aristocracy will play a large part. It may, indeed, never 
 have any of the outward forms of an aristocracy or any 
 definite public recognition. The Americans are as chary 
 of the coronet and the known aristocratic titles as the 
 Romans were of the word King. Octavius, for that 
 reason, never called himself king nor Italy a kingdom. 
 He was just the Caesar of the Republic, and the Empire 
 had been established for many years before the Romans 
 fully realised that they had returned to monarchy. 
 
 §8 
 
 The American universities are closely connected in 
 their development with the appearance and growing 
 class-consciousness of this aristocracy of wealth. The 
 fathers of the country certainly did postulate a need of 
 universities, and in every state Congress set aside public 
 lands to furnish a university with material resources. 
 Every State possesses a university, though in many 
 instances these institutions are in the last degree 
 of feebleness. In the days of sincere democracy the 
 starvation of government and the dislike of all manifest 
 inequalities involved the starvation of higher education. 
 Moreover, the entirely artificial nature of the State 
 boundaries, representing no necessary cleavages and 
 traversed haphazard by the lines of communication, 
 made some of these State foundations unnecessary and 
 
 31a 
 
The American Population 
 
 others inadequate to a convergent demand. From the 
 very beginning, side by side with the State universities, 
 were the universities founded by benefactors; and with 
 the evolution of new centres of population, new and 
 extremely generous plutocratic endowments appeared. 
 The dominant universities of America to-day, the treasure 
 houses of intellectual prestige, are almost all of them 
 of plutocratic origin, and even in the State universities, 
 if new resources are wanted to found new chairs, to 
 supply funds for research or publication or what not, 
 it is to the more State-conscious wealthy and not to 
 the State legislature that the appeal is made almost as 
 a matter of course. The common voter, the small in- 
 dividualist, has less constructive imagination — is more 
 individualistic, that is, than the big individualist. 
 
 This great network of universities that is now spread 
 over the States, interchanging teachers, literature and 
 ideas, and educating not only the professions but a 
 growing proportion of business leaders and wealthy 
 people, must necessarily take an important part in the 
 reconstruction of the Amerian tradition that is now in 
 progress. It is giving a large and increasing amount 
 of attention to the subjects that bear most directly upon 
 th<e peculiar practical problems of statecraft in America, 
 to psychology, sociology and poHtical science. It is 
 influencing the press more and more directly by supply- 
 ing a rising proportion of journalists and creating an 
 atmosphere of criticism and suggestion. It is keep- 
 ing itself on the one hand in touch with the popular 
 literature of public criticism in those new and curious 
 organs of public thought, the ten-cent magazines ; and 
 on the other it is making a constantly more solid basis 
 of common understanding upon which the newer 
 
 3»a 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 generation of plutocrats may meet. That older senti- 
 mental patriotism must be giving place under its in- 
 fluence to a more definite and effectual conception of 
 a collective purpose. It is to the moral and intellectual 
 influence of sustained scientific study in the universities, 
 and a growing increase of the college-trained element 
 in the population that we must look if we are to look 
 anywhere for the new progressive methods, for the 
 substitution of persistent, planned and calculated social 
 development for the former conditions of systematic 
 neglect and corruption in public affairs varied by epileptic 
 seizures of "Keform." 
 
 §9 
 
 A third influence that may also contribute very 
 materially to the reconstruction of the American tradition 
 is the Socialist movement, vlt is true that so far American 
 Socialism has very largely taken an Anarchistic form, 
 has been, in fact, little more than a revolutionary move- 
 ment of the wages-earning class against the property 
 owner. \ It has already been pointed out that it derives 
 not from contemporary English Socialism but from the 
 Marxist social democracy of the continent of Europe, and 
 has not even so much of the constructive spirit as has been 
 developed by the English Socialists of the Fabian and 
 Labour Party group or by the newer German evolutionary 
 Socialists. Nevertheless, whenever Socialism is intelli- 
 gently met by discussion or whenever it draws near to 
 practicable realisation, it becomes, by virtue of its in- 
 herent implications, a constructive force, and there is no 
 reason to suppose that it will not be intelligently met on 
 
 3^4 
 
The American Population 
 
 the whole and in the long run in America. The alter- 
 native to a developing Socialism among the labouring 
 masses in America is that revolutionary Anarchism from 
 which it is slowly but definitely marking itself off. In 
 America we have to remember that we are dealing with 
 a huge population of people who are for the most part, 
 and more and more evidently destined under the present 
 system of free industrial competition, to be either very 
 small traders, small farmers on the verge of debt, or 
 wages-earners for all their lives. They are going to lead 
 limited lives and worried lives — and they know it. 
 Nearly everyone can read and discuss now, the process 
 of concentrating property and the steady fixation of 
 conditions that were once fluid and adventurous goes 
 on in the daylight visibly to everyone. And it has 
 to be borne in mind also that these people are so 
 far under the sWay of the American tradition that 
 each thinks himself as good aa any man and as much 
 entitled to the fullness of life. Whatever social tradition 
 their fathers had, whatever ideas of a place to be filled 
 humbly and seriously and duties to be done, have been 
 left behind in Europe. No Church dominates the scenery 
 of this new land, and offers in authoritative and convinc- 
 ing tones consolations hereafter for lives obscurely but 
 faithfully lived. Whatever else happens in this national 
 future, upon one point the patriotic American may feel 
 assured, and that is of an immense general discontent 
 in the working class and of a powerful movement in 
 search of a general betterment. The practical forms 
 and effects of that movement will depend almost entirely 
 upon the average standard of life among the workers and 
 their general education. Sweated and ill-organised 
 foreigners, such as one finds in New Jersey living under 
 
 315 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 conditions of great misery, will be fierce, impatient and 
 altogether dangerous. They will be acutely exasperated 
 by every picture of plutocratic luxury in their newspaper, 
 they will readily resort to destructive violence. The 
 western miner, the western agriculturist, worried beyond 
 endurance between the money-lender and railway com- 
 binations, will be almost equally prone to savage methods 
 of expression. The Appeal to Reason, for example, 
 to which I have made earlier reference in this chapter, 
 is furious to wreck the present capitalistic system, 
 but it is far too angry and impatient for that satis- 
 faction to produce any clear suggestion of what shall 
 replace it. 
 
 To call this discontent of the seething underside of 
 the Am-erican system Socialism is a misnomer. Were 
 there no Socialism there would be just as much of this 
 discontent, just the same insurgent force and desire 
 for violence, taking some other title and far more 
 dtestructive methods. This discontent is a part of the 
 same planless confusion that gives on the other side the 
 wanton irresponsible extravagances of the smart people 
 of New York. But Socialism alone, of all the forms 
 of expression adopted by the losers in the economic 
 struggle, contains constructive possibilities and leads its 
 adherents towards that ideal of an organised State, 
 planned and developed, frona which these terrible social 
 stresses may be eliminated, which is also the ideal to 
 w^^hich sociology and the thoughts of every constructive- 
 minded and foreseeing man in any position of life tend 
 to-day. In the Socialist hypothesis of collective owner- 
 ship and administration as the social basis, there is the 
 germ of a "sense of the State" that may ultimately 
 develop into comprehensive conceptions of social order, 
 
 316 
 
The American Population 
 
 conceptions upon which enlightened millionaires and 
 unenlightened workers may meet at last in generous 
 and patriotic co-operation. 
 
 The chances of the American future, then, seem to 
 range between two possibilities just as a more or less 
 constructive Socialism does or does not get hold of and 
 inspire the working mass of the population. In the 
 worst event — given an emotional and empty hostility 
 to property as such, masquerading as Socialism — one 
 has the prospect of a bitter and aimless class war 
 between the expropriated many and the property-holding 
 few, a war not of general insurrection but of localised 
 outbreaks, strikes and brutal suppressions, a war rising 
 to bloody conflicts and sinking to coarsely corrupt poli- 
 tical contests, in which one side may prevail in one 
 locality and one in another, and which may even develop 
 into a chronic civil war in the less-settled parts of the 
 country or an irresistible movement for secession between 
 west and east. That is assuming the greatest imaginable 
 vehemence and short-sighted selfishness and the least 
 imaginable inteUigence on the part of both workers and 
 the plutocrat-swayed government. But if the more 
 powerful and educated sections of the American com- 
 munity realisQ in time the immense moral possibilities 
 of the Socialist movement, if they will trouble to under- 
 stand its good side instead of emphasising its bad, if 
 they will keep in touch with it and help in the develop- 
 ment of a constructive content to its propositions, then 
 it seems to me that popular Socialism may count 
 as a third great factor in the making of the civilised 
 American State. 
 
 In any case, it does not seem to me probable that 
 there can be any national revolutionary movement or 
 
 317 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 any complete arrest in the development of an aristo- 
 cratic phase in American history. The area of the country 
 is too great and the means of communication between 
 the workers in different parts inadequate for a concerted 
 rising or even for effective political action in mass. In 
 the worst event — and it is only in the worst event that 
 a great insurrectionary movement becomes probable — 
 the newspapers, magazines, telephones and telegraphs, 
 all the apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the 
 railways, arsenals, guns, flying machines, and all the 
 material of warfare, will be in the hands of the property 
 owners, and the average of betrayal among the leaders 
 of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, sus- 
 picious, united only by their discomforts and not by 
 any constructive intentions, will necessarily be high. 
 So that, though the intensifying trouble between labour 
 and capital may mean immense social disorganisation 
 and lawlessness, though it may even supply the popular 
 support in new attempts at secession, I do not see 
 in it the possibility and force for that new start 
 which the revolutionary Socialists anticipate ; I see it 
 merely as one of several forces making, on the whole 
 and particularly in view of the possible mediatory 
 action of the universities, for construction and recon- 
 ciliation. 
 
 §10 
 
 What changes are likely to occur in the more 
 intimate social life of the people of the United States? 
 Two influences are at work that may modify this pro- 
 foundly. One is that spread of knowledge and that 
 accompanying change in mor^l attitude which is more 
 
 318 
 
The American Population 
 
 and more sterilising the once prolific American home, 
 and the second is the rising standard of feminine 
 education. There has arisen in this age a new con- 
 sciousness in women. They are entering into the col- 
 lective thought to a degree unprecedented in the world's 
 history, and with portents at once disquieting and 
 confused. 
 
 In § 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors 
 in the American synthesis, the immigrant European 
 aliens, the Catholics, the coloured blood, and so forth. 
 I would now observe that, in the making of the 
 American tradition, the women also have been to a 
 large extent, and quite remarkably, a silent factor. 
 That tradition is not only fundamentally middle-class 
 and English, but it is also fundamentally masculine. 
 The citizen is the man. The woman belongs to him. 
 He votes for her, works for her, does all the severer 
 thinking for her. She is in the home behind th-e shop 
 or in the dairy at the farmhouse with her daughters. 
 She gets the meal while the men talk. The American 
 imagination and American feeling centre largely upon 
 the family and upon "mother." American ideals are 
 homely. The social unit is the home, and it is another 
 and a different set of influences and considerations that 
 are never thought of at all when the home sentiment 
 is under discussion, that, indeed, it would be indelicate 
 to mention at such a time, which are making that social 
 unit the home of one child or of no children at all. 
 
 That ideal of a man-owned, mother-revering home 
 has been the prevalent American ideal from the landing 
 of the Mayflower right down to the leader writing of 
 Mr. Arthur Brisbane. And it is clear that a very con- 
 siderable section among one's educated women con- 
 
 319 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 temporaries do not mean to stand this ideal any longer. 
 They do not w-ant to be owned and cherished, and 
 they do not want to be revered. How far they repre- 
 sent their sex in this matter it is very hard to say. 
 In England in the professional and most inteltectually 
 active classes it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that 
 all the most able women below five-and-thirty are 
 workers for the suffrage and the ideal of equal and 
 independent citizenship, and active critics of the con- 
 ventions under which women Jive to-day. It is at least 
 plausible to suppose that a day is approaching when 
 the alternatives between celibacy or a life of economic 
 dependence and physical subordination to a man who 
 has chosen her, and upon whose kindness her happiness 
 depends, or prostitution, will no longer be a satisfactory 
 outlook for the great majority of women, and when, 
 with a newly aroused political consciousness, they will 
 be prepared to exert themselves as a class to modify 
 this situation. It may be that this is incorrect, and 
 that in devotion to an accepted male and his children 
 most women do still and will continue to find their 
 greatest satisfaction in life. But it is the wTiter's impres- 
 sion that so simple and single-hearted a devotion is rare, 
 and that, released from tradition — and education, reading 
 and discussion do mean release from tradition — w^omen 
 are as eager for initiative, freedom and experience as 
 men. In that case they will persist in the present 
 agitation for political rights, and these secured, go -on 
 to demand a very considerable reconstruction of our 
 present social order. 
 
 It is interesting to point the direction in which this 
 desire for independence will probably take them. They 
 will discover that the dependence of women at the 
 
 320 
 
The American Population 
 
 present time is not so much a law-made as an economic 
 dependence due to the economic disadvantages their sex 
 imposes upon them. Maternity and the concomitants 
 of maternity are the circumstances in their Hves, ex- 
 hausting energy and earning nothing, that place them 
 at a discount. From the stage when property ceased to 
 be chiefly the creation of feminine agricultural toil (the 
 so-calkd primitive matriarchate) to our present stage, 
 women have had to depend upon a man's willingness 
 to keep them, in order to realise the organic purpose of 
 their being. Whether conventionally equal or not, 
 whether voters or not, that necessity for dependence will 
 still remain under our system of private property and 
 free independent competition. There is only one evident 
 way by which women as a class can escape from that 
 dependence each upon an individual man and from all 
 the practical inferiority this dependence entails, and 
 that is by so altering their status as to make maternity 
 and the upbringing of children a charge not upon the 
 husband of the mother but upon the community. The 
 public Endowment of Maternity is the only route by 
 which the mass of women can reach that personal free- 
 dom and independent citizenship so many of them desire. 
 Now, this idea of the Endowment of Maternity-r- 
 or, as it is frequently phrased, the Endowment of the 
 Home — is at present put forward by the modern Socialists 
 as an integral part of their proposals, and it is in- 
 teresting to note that there is this convergent possibility 
 which may bring the feminist movement at last alto- 
 gether into line with constructive Socialism. Obviously, 
 before anything in the direction of family endowment 
 becomes practicable, public bodies and the State or- 
 ganisation will need to display far more integrity and 
 V 321 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 efficiency than they do in America at the present time. 
 Still, that is the trend of things in all contemporary 
 civilised communities, and it is a trend that will find 
 a powerful reinforcement in men's solicitudes as the 
 increasing failure of the unsupported private family to 
 produce offspring adequate to the needs of social develop- 
 ment becomes more and more conspicuous. The im- 
 passioned appeals of President Koosevelt have already 
 brought home the race-suicide of the native-bom to 
 every American intelligence, but mere rhetoric will not 
 in itself suffice to make people, insecurely employed and 
 struggling to maintain a comfortable standard of life 
 against great economic pressure, prolific. Presented as 
 a call to a particularly onerous and quite unpaid social 
 duty the appeal for unrestricted parentage fails. Husband 
 and wife alike dread an excessive burthen. Travel, 
 leisure, freedom, comfort, property and increased ability 
 for business competition are the rewards of abstinence 
 from parentage, and even the disapproval of President 
 Koosevelt and the pride of offspring are insufficient 
 counterweights to these inducements. Large families 
 disappear from the States, and more and more couples 
 are childless. Those who have children restrict their 
 nwnber in order to afford those they have some reason- 
 able advantage in life. This, in the presence of the 
 necessary knowledge, is as practically inevitable a con- 
 sequence of individualist competition and the old Ameri- 
 can tradition as the appearance of slums and a class 
 of millionaires. 
 
 These facts go to the very root of the American 
 problem. I have already pointed out that, in spite of 
 a colossal immigration, the population of the United 
 States was at the end of the nineteenth century over 
 
 322 
 
The American Population 
 
 twenty millions short of what it should have been 
 through its own native increase had the birth-rate of 
 the opening of the century been maintained. For a 
 hundred years America has been "fed" by Europe. 
 That feeding process will not go on indefinitely. The 
 immigration came in waves as if reservoir after reservoir 
 was tapped and exhausted. Nowadays England, Scot- 
 land, Ireland, France and Scandinavia send hardly any 
 more ; they have no more to send. Germany and 
 Switzerland send only a few. The South European and 
 Austrian supply is not as abundant as it was. There 
 may come a time when Europe and Western Asia will 
 have no more surplus population to send, when even 
 Eastern Asia will have passed into a less fecund phase, 
 and when America will have to look to its own natural 
 increase for the continued development of its resources. 
 
 If the present isolated family of private competition 
 is still the social unit, it seems improbable that there will 
 be any greater natural increase than there is in France. 
 
 Will the growing idea of a closer social organisation 
 have developed by that time to the possibility of some 
 collective effort in this matter? Or will that only come 
 about after the population of the world has passed 
 through a phase of absolute recession? The peculiar 
 constitution of the United States gives a remarkable 
 freedom of experiment in these matters to each individual 
 state, and local developments do not need to wait upon 
 a national change of opinion; but, on the other hand, 
 the superficial impression of an English visitor is that 
 any such profound interference with domestic autonomy 
 runs counter to all that Americans seem to hold dear 
 at the present time. These are, however, new ideas 
 and new considerations that have still to be brought 
 
 323 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 adequately before the national consciousness, and it is 
 quite impossible to calculate how a population living 
 under changing conditions and with a rising standard 
 of education and a developing feminine consciousness 
 may not think and feel and behave in a generation's 
 time. At present for all political and collective action 
 America is a democracy of untutored individualist m'en 
 who will neither tolerate such interference between 
 themselves and the wom<en they choose to marry as the 
 Endowment of Motherhood implies, nor view the "kids " 
 who will at times occur even in the best-regulated families 
 as anything but rather embarrassing, rather amusing by- 
 products of the individual affections. 
 
 I find in the London l>Iew Age for August 15th, 1908, 
 a description by Mr. Jerome K. Jerome of "John Smith," 
 the average British voter. John Smith might serve in 
 some respects for the common man of all the modem 
 civilisations. Among other things that John Smith 
 thinks and wants, he wiants : 
 
 " a little house and garden in the country all to himself. 
 His idea is somewhere near half an acre of ground. He 
 would like a piano in the best room ; it has always been his 
 dream to have a piano. The youngest girl, he is convinced, 
 is musical. As a man who has knocked about the world 
 and has thought, he quite appreciates the argument that 
 by co-operation the material side of hfe can be greatly 
 improved. He quite sees that by combining a dozen families 
 together in one large house better practical results can be 
 obtained. It is as easy to direct the cooking for a hundred 
 as iof half a dozen. There would be less waste of food, of 
 coals, of lighting. To put aside one piano for one girl is 
 absurd. He sees all this, but it does not alter one Uttle 
 bit his passionate craving for that small house and garden 
 324 
 
The American Population 
 
 all to himself. He is built that way. He is typical of a 
 good many other men and women built on the same pattern. 
 What are you going to do with them ? Change them — 
 their instincts, their very nature, rooted in the centuries ? 
 Or, as an alternative, vary Socialism to fit John Smith ? 
 Which is likely to prove the shorter operation ? " 
 
 That, howiever, is by the way. Here is the point 
 at issue: 
 
 " He has heard that Socialism proposes to acknowledge 
 woman's service to the State by paying her a weekly wage 
 according to the number of children that she bears and 
 rears. I don't propose to repeat his objections to the idea ; 
 they could hardly be called objections. There is an ugly 
 look comes into his eyes ; something quite undefinable, 
 prehistoric, almost dangerous, looks out of them. ... In 
 talking to him on this subject you do not seem to be 
 talking to a man. It is as if you had come face to face 
 with something behind civilisation, behind humanity, some- 
 thing deeper down still among the dim beginnings of 
 creation. . . .** 
 
 Now, no doubt Mr. Jerome is writing with emphasis 
 here. But there is sufficient truth in the passage for 
 it to stand here as a rough symbol of another factor 
 in this question. John Smithism, that manly and in- 
 dividualist element in the citizen, stands over against 
 and resists all the forces of organisation that would 
 subjugate it to a collective purpose. It is careless of 
 coming national cessation and depopulation, careless of 
 the insurgent spirit beneath the acquiescencea of Mrs. 
 Smith, careless of its own inevitable d<efeat in the 
 economic struggle, careless because it can understand 
 
 325 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 none of these things; it is obstinately muddle-headed, 
 asserting what it conceives to be itself against the 
 universe and all other John Smiths whatsoever. It is 
 a factor with all other factors. The creative, acquisitive, 
 aggressive spirit of those bigger John Smiths who 
 succeed as against the myriads of John Smiths who 
 fail, the wider horizons and more efficient methods of 
 the educated man, the awakening class-consciousness of 
 women, the inevitable futility of John Smithism, the 
 sturdy independence that makes John Smith resent even 
 disciplined co-operation with Tom Brown to achieve a 
 common end, his essential incapacity, indeed, for col- 
 lective action ; all these things are against the ultimate 
 triumph, and make for the ultimate civilisation even of 
 John Smith. 
 
 §11 
 
 It may be doubted if the increasing collective or- 
 ganisation of society to which the United States of 
 America, in common with all the rest of the world, 
 seem to be tending will be to any very large extent a 
 national organisation. The constitution is an immense 
 and complicated barrier to effectual centralisation. There 
 are many reasons for supposing the national government 
 will always remain a little ineffectual and detached from 
 the full flow of American life, and this notwithstanding 
 the very great powers with which the President is 
 endowed. 
 
 One of these reasons is certainly the peculiar accident 
 that has placed the seat of government upon the 
 Potomac. To the thoughtful visitor to the United States 
 this hiding away of the central government in a minute 
 
 326 
 
The American Population 
 
 district remote from all the great centres of thought, 
 population and business activity becomes more remark- 
 able, more perplexing, more suggestive of an incurable 
 weakness in the national government as he grasps more 
 firmly the peculiarities of the American situation. 
 
 I do not see how the central government of that 
 great American nation of which I dream can possibly 
 be at Washington, and I do not see how the present 
 central government can possibly be transferred to any 
 other centre. But to go to Washington, to see and talk 
 to Washington, is to receive an extraordinary impression 
 of the utter isolation and hopelessness of Washington. 
 The National Government has an air of being marooned 
 there. Or as though it had crept into a comer to 
 do something in the dark. One goes from the 
 abounding movement and vitality of the northern 
 cities to this sunny and enervating place through 
 the negligently cultivated country of Virginia, and 
 one discovers the slovenly, unfinished promise of 
 a city, broad avenues lined by negro shanties 
 and patches of cultivation, great public buildings and 
 an immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert 
 university, a splendid desiert library, a street of souvenir 
 shops, a certain industry of "seeing Washington," an 
 idiotic colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nest for the 
 tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and 
 agents and secondary people. In the White House, in 
 the time of President Koosevelt, the present writer 
 found a transitory glow of intellectual activity, 
 the spittoons and glass screens that once made it 
 like a London gin palace had been removed, and 
 the former orgies of handshaking reduced to a minimum. 
 It was, one felt, an accidental phase. The assassination 
 
 327 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 of McKinley was an interruption of the normal Wash- 
 ington process. To this place, out of the way of 
 everywhere, come the senators and congressmen, mostly 
 leaving their families behind them in their states of 
 origin, and hither, too, are drawn a multitude of 
 journalists and political agents and clerks, a crowd 
 of underbred, mediocre men. For most of them there 
 is neither social nor intellectual life. The thought of 
 America is far away, centred now in New York; the 
 business and -economic development centres upon New 
 York; apart from the President, it is in New York 
 that one meets the people who matter, and the New 
 York atmosphere that grows and develops ideas and 
 purposes. New York is the natural capital of the 
 United States, and would need to be the capital of any 
 highly organised national system. Government from 
 th-e district of Columbia is in itself the repudiation of 
 any highly organised national system. 
 
 But government from this ineffectual, inert place is 
 only the most striking outcome of that inflexible con- 
 stitution the wrangling delegates of 1787-8 did at last 
 produce out of a conflict of State jealousies. They did 
 their best to render centralisation or any coalescence of 
 States impossible and private property impregnable, and 
 so far their work has proved extraordinarily effective. 
 Only a great access of intellectual and moral vigour in 
 the nation can ever set it aside. And while the more 
 and more sterile millions of the United States grapple 
 with the legal and traditional difficulties that promise 
 at last to arrest their development altogether, the rest 
 of the world will be moving on to new phases. An 
 awakened Asia will be reorganising its social and poli- 
 tical conceptions in the light of modern knowledge and 
 
 328 
 
The American Population 
 
 modern ideas, and South America will be working out 
 its destinies, perhaps in the form of a powerful con- 
 federation of states. All Europe will be schooling its 
 John Smiths to finer discipline and broader ideas. It 
 is quite possible that the American John Smiths may 
 have little to brag about in the way of national pre- 
 dominance by A.D. 2000. It is quite possible that the 
 United States mscy be sitting meekly at the feet of at 
 present unanticipated teachers. 
 
 3^9 
 
THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION 
 
 {Mew Year, igog.) 
 
 The Editor of tbe "New York World has asked me to 
 guess the general trend of events in the next thirty 
 years or so with especial reference to the outlook for 
 the State and City of New York. I like and rarely 
 refuse such cheerful invitations to proph-esy, I have 
 already made a sort of forecast (in my " Anticipations ") 
 of what may happen if the social and economic process 
 goes on fairly smoothly for all that time, and shown 
 a New York relieved from its present congestion by 
 the development of the means of communication, and 
 growing and spreading in wide and splendid suburbs 
 towards Boston and Philadelphia. I made that forecast 
 before ever I passed Sandy Hook, but my recent visit 
 only enhanced my sense of growth and "go" in things 
 American. Still, we are nowadays all too apt to think 
 that growth is inevitable and progress in the nature of 
 things; the Wonderful Century, as Dr. Alfred Eussel 
 Wallace called the nineteenth, has made us perhaps over- 
 confident and forgetful of the ruins of great cities and con- 
 fident prides of the past that litter the world, and here I 
 will write about the other alternative, of the progressive 
 process "hitting something," and smashing. 
 
 There are two chief things in modern life that 
 impress me as dangerous and incalculable. The first 
 of these i& the modern currency and financial system, 
 and the second is the chance we take of destructive war. 
 
 330 
 
The Possible Collapse of Civilisation 
 
 Let me dwell first of all on the mysterious possibilities 
 of the former, and then point out one or two uneasy 
 developments of the latter. 
 
 Now, there is nothing scientific about our currency 
 and finance at all. It is a thing that has grown up 
 and elaborated itself out of very simple beginnings in 
 the course of a century or so. Three hundred years 
 ago the edifice had hardly begun to rise from the 
 ground, most property was real, most people lived 
 directly on the land, most business was on a cash 
 basis, oversea trade was a proportionately small affair, 
 labour was locally fixed. Most of the world was at 
 the level at which much of China remains to-day — able 
 to get along without even coinage. It was a rudimentary 
 world from the point of view of the modern financier 
 and industrial oragniser. Well, on that rude, secure 
 basis there has now been piled the most chancy and 
 insecurely experimental system of conventions and 
 assumptions about money and credit it is possible to 
 imagine. There has grown up a vast system of lending 
 and borrowing, a world-wide extension of joint-stock 
 enterprises that involve at last the most fantastic 
 relationships. I find myself, for example, owning 
 (partially, at least) a bank in New Zealand, a railway 
 in Cuba, another in Cainada, several in Brazil, an 
 electric power plant in the City of Westminster, and 
 so on, and I use these stocks and shares as a sort of 
 interest-bearing money. If I want money to spend, I 
 sell a railwjay share much as one might change a hundred- 
 pound banknote ; if I have more cash than I need im- 
 mediately, I buy a few shares. I perceive that the value 
 of these shares oscillates, sometimes rather gravely, 
 and that the value of the alleged money on the cheques 
 
 331 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 I get also oscillates as compared with the things I want 
 to buy; that, indeed, the whole system (which has only 
 existed for a couple of centuries or so, and which 
 keeps on getting higher and giddier) is perpetually sway- 
 ing and quivering and bending and sagging ; but it is 
 only when such a great crisis occurs as that of 1907 
 that it enters my mind that possibly there is no hmit 
 to these oscillations, that possibly the whole vast acci- 
 dental edifice will presently come smashing down. 
 
 Why shouldn't it? 
 
 I defy any economist or financial expert to prove 
 that it cannot. That it hasn't done so in the little time 
 for which it has existed is no reply at all. It is like 
 arguing that a man cannot die because he has never 
 been known to do so. Previous men have died, previous 
 civilisations have collapsed, if not of acute, then of 
 chronic financial disorders. 
 
 The experience of 1907 indicated very clearly how a 
 collapse might occur. A panic, like an avalanche, is 
 a thing much easier to start than stop. Previous panics 
 have been arrested by good luck ; this last one in 
 America, for example, found Europe strong and pros- 
 perous and helpful. In every panic period there is a 
 huge dislocation of business enterprises, vast multitudes 
 of men are thrown out of employment, there is grave 
 social and political disorder; but in the end, so far, things 
 have an air of having recovered. But now, suppose 
 the panic wave a little more universal — and panic waves 
 tend to be more ext?ensive than they used to be. 
 Suppose that when securities fall all round, and gold 
 appreciates in New York, and frightened people begin 
 to sell investments and hoard gold, the same thing 
 happens in other parts of the world. Increase the scale 
 
 332 
 
The Possible Collapse of Civilisation 
 
 of the trouble only two or three times, and would our 
 system recover? Imagine great masses of men coming 
 out of employment, and angry and savage, in all our 
 great towns ; imagine the railways working with reduced 
 staffs on reduced salaries or blocked by strikers ; imagine 
 provision dealers stopping consignments to retailers, and 
 retailers hesitating to give credit. A phase would arrive 
 when the pohce and militia keeping order in the streets 
 would find themselves on short rations and without their 
 weekly pay. 
 
 What we moderns, with our little three hundred years 
 or so of security, do not recognise is that things that 
 go up and down may, given a certain combination of 
 chances, go down steadily, down and down. 
 
 What would you do, dear reader — what should I do 
 — if a slump went on continually? 
 
 And that brings me to the second great danger to 
 our modern civilisation, and that is War. We have 
 over^developed war. While we have left our peace 
 organisation to the niggling, slow, self-seeking methods 
 of private enterprise; while we have left the breeding 
 of our peoples to chance, their minds to the halfpenny 
 press and their wealth to the drug manufacturer, 
 we have pushed forward the art of war on severely 
 scientific and Socialist lines; we have put all 
 the collective resources of the community and an 
 enormous proportion of its intelligence and invention 
 ungrudgingly into the improvement and manufacture 
 of the apparatus of destruction. Great Britain, for 
 example, is content with the railways and fireplaces 
 and types of housing she had fifty years ago ; she still 
 uses telephones and the electric light in the most ten- 
 tative spirit ; but every ironclad she had five-and-twenf y 
 
 333 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 years ago is old iron now and abandoned. Everything 
 crawls forward but the science of war; that rushes on. 
 Of what will happen if presently the guns begin to 
 go off I have no shadow of doubt. Every year has 
 seen the disproportionate increase until now. Every 
 modern European state is more or less like a cranky, 
 ill-built steamboat in which some idiot has mounted 
 and loaded a monstrous gun with no apparatus to damp 
 its recoil. "Whether that gun hits or misses when it 
 is fired, of one thing we may be absolutely certain — 
 it will send the steamboat to the bottom of the sea. 
 
 Modern warfare is an insanity, not a sane business 
 proposition. Its preparation eats more and more into 
 the resources which should be furnishing a developing 
 civilisation ; its possibilities of destruction are incalculable. 
 A new epoch has opened with the coming of the 
 navigable balloon and the flying machine. To begin 
 with, these things open new gulfs for expenditure; in 
 the end they mean possibilities of destruction beyond all 
 precedent. Such things as the Zeppelin and the Ville de 
 Paris are only the first pigmy essays of the aeronaut. 
 It is clear that to be effective, capable of carrying guns 
 and comparatively insensitive to perforation by shot and 
 shell, these things will have to be very much larger and 
 as costly, perhaps, as a first-class cruiser. Imagine such 
 monsters of the air, and wild financial panic below ! 
 
 Here, then, are two associated possibilities with 
 which to modify our expectation of an America advancing 
 steadily on the road to an organised civilisation, of New 
 York rebuilding herself in marble, spreading like a garden 
 city over New Jersey and Long Island and New York 
 State, becoming a new and greater Venice, queen of 
 the earth. 
 
 334 
 
The Possible Collapse of Civilisation 
 
 Perhaps, after all, the twentieth century isn't going 
 to be so prosperous as th<e nineteenth. Perhaps, instead 
 of going resistlessly onward, we are going to have a 
 set-back. Perhaps we are going to be put back to 
 learn over again under simpler conditions some of those 
 necessary fundamental lessons our race has learnt as 
 yet insufficiently well — honesty and brotherhood, social 
 collectivism, and the need of some common peace- 
 preserving council for the whole world. 
 
 335 
 
THE IDEAL CITIZEN 
 
 Our conceptions of what a good citizen should be are 
 all at sixes and sevens. No two people will be found 
 to agree in every particular of such an ideal, and the 
 extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what is 
 permissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span 
 nearly the whole range of human possibility and conduct. 
 As a consequence, we bring up our children in a 
 mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warring 
 voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain 
 as to what they may do, doomed to lives of compromise 
 and fluctuating and inoperative opinion. Ideals and 
 suggestions come and go before their eyes like figures 
 in a fog. The commonest pattern, perhaps — the com- 
 monest pattern certainly in Sunday schools and edifying 
 books, and on all those places and occasions when 
 morality is sought as an end — is a clean and able-bodied 
 person, truthful to the extent that he does not tell lies, 
 temperate so far as abstinence is concerned, honest 
 without pedantry, and active in his own affairs, stead- 
 fastly law-abiding and respectful to custom and usage, 
 though aloof from the tumult of politics, brave but not 
 adventurous, punctual in some form of religious exercise, 
 devoted to his wife and children, and kind without 
 extravagance to all men. Everyone feels that this is not 
 enough, everyone feels that something more is wanted 
 and something different; most people are a little in- 
 terested in what that difference can be, and it is a 
 
 336 
 
The Ideal Citizen 
 
 business that much of what is more than trivial in our 
 art, our hterature and our drama must do to fill in bit 
 by bit and shade by shade the subtle, the permanent detail 
 of the answer. 
 
 It does very greatly help in this question to bear 
 in mind the conflict of our origins. Every age is an 
 age of transition, of minglings, of the breaking up of 
 old, narrow cultures, and the breaking down of barriers, 
 of spiritual and often of actual interbreeding. Not only 
 is the physical but the moral and intellectual ancestry 
 of everyone more mixed than ever it was before. "We 
 blend in our blood, everyone of us, and we blend in 
 our ideas and purposes, craftsmen, warriors, savages, 
 peasants', and a score of races, and an endless multitude 
 of social expedients and rules. Go back but a hundred 
 generations in the lineage of the most delicate girl you 
 know, and you will find a dozen murderers. You will 
 find liars and cheats, lascivious sinners, women who 
 have sold themselves, slaves, imbeciles, devotees, saints, 
 men of fantastic courage, discreet and watchful persons, 
 usurers,., savages, criminals and kings, and every one of 
 this miscellany, not simply fathering or mothering on 
 the way to her, but teaching urgently and with every 
 grade of intensity, views and habits for which they 
 stand. Something of it all has come to her, albeit 
 much may seem forgotten. In every human birth, with 
 a new little variation, a fresh slight novelty of arrange- 
 ment, the old issues rise again. Our ideas, even more 
 than our blood, flow from multitudinous sources. 
 
 Certain groups of ideas come to us distinctively asso- 
 ciated with certain marked ways of life. Many, and 
 for a majority of us, it may be, most of our ancestors 
 were serfs or slaves. And men and women who have 
 w 337 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 had, generation after generation, to adapt themselveg 
 to slavery and the rule of a master, develop an idea of 
 goodness very different from that of princes. From our 
 slave ancestry, says Lester Ward, we learnt to work, 
 and certainly it is from slavery we derive the conception 
 that industry, even though it be purposeless industry, 
 is a virtue in itself. The good slave, too, has a morality 
 of restraints ; he abstains from the food he handles and 
 hungers for, and he denies himself pride and initiative 
 of every sort. He is honest in not taking, but he is 
 unscrupulous about adequate service. He makes no virtue 
 of frankness, but much of kindly helpfulness and charity 
 to the weak. He has no sense of duty in planning or 
 economising. He is polite and soft-spoken, and disposed 
 to irony rather than denunciation, ready to admire 
 cuteness and condone deception. Not so the rebel. 
 That tradition is working in us also. It has been the 
 lot of vast masses of population in every age. to be 
 living in successful or unsuccessful resistance to mastery, 
 to be dreading oppression or to be just escaped from it. 
 Besentment becomes a virtue then, and any peace with 
 the oppressor a crime. It is from rebel origins so many 
 of us get the idea that disrespectfulness is something 
 of a duty and obstinacy a fine thing. And under the 
 force of this tradition we idealise the rugged and un- 
 manageable, we find something heroic in rough clothes 
 and hands, in bad manners, insensitive behaviour, and 
 unsociableness. And a community of settlers, again, 
 in a rough country, fighting for a bare existence, makes 
 a virtue of vehemence, of a hasty rapidity of execution. 
 Hurried and driven men glorify "push" and impatience, 
 and despise finish and fine discriminations as weak and 
 demoralising things. These three, the Serf, the Eebel, 
 
 338 
 
The Ideal Citizen 
 
 and the Squatter, are three out of a thousand types 
 and aspects that have gone to our making. In the 
 American composition they are dominant. But all 
 those thousand different standards and traditions are 
 our material, each with something fine, and each with 
 something evil. They have all provided the atmosphere 
 of upbringing for men in the past. Out of them and 
 out of unprecedented occasions, we in this newer age, 
 in which there are no slaves, in which every man is 
 a citizen, in which the conveniences of a great and 
 growing civilisation makes the frantic avidity of the 
 squatter a nuisance, have to set ourselves to frame the 
 standard of our children's children, to abandon what 
 the slave or the squatter or the rebel found necessary 
 and that we find unnecessary, to fit fresh requirements 
 to our new needs. So we have to develop our figure 
 of the fine man, our desirable citizen in that great and 
 noble civilised state we who have a "sense of the state" 
 would build out of the confusions of our world. 
 
 To describe that ideal modern citizen now is at best 
 to make a guess and a suggestion of what must be 
 built in reality by the efforts of a thousand minds. But 
 he will be a very different creature from that indifferent, 
 well-behaved business man who passes for a good citizen 
 to-day. He will be neither under the slave tradition 
 nor a rebel nor a vehement elemental man. Essentially 
 he will be aristocratic, aristocratic not in the sense that 
 he has slaves or class inferiors, because probably he will 
 have nothing of the sort, but aristocratic in the sense 
 that he will feel the State belongs to him and he to 
 the State. He will probably be a public servant; at 
 any rate, he will be a man doing some work in the 
 complicated machinery of the modern community for 
 
 339 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 a salary and not for speculative gain. Typically, he 
 will be a professional man. I do not think the ideal 
 modern citizen can be a person living chiefly by buying 
 for as little as he can give and selling for as much as 
 he can get; indeed, most of what we idolise to-day as 
 business enterprise I think he will regard with con- 
 siderable contempt. But, then, I am a Socialist, 
 and look forward to the time when the economic 
 machinery of the community will be a field not for 
 private enrichment but for public service. 
 
 He will be good to his wife and children as he will 
 be good to his friend, but he will be no partisan for 
 wife and family against the common welfare. His 
 solicitude will be for the welfare of all the children of 
 the community ; he will have got beyond blind instinct ; 
 he will have the intelligence to understand that almost 
 any child in the world may have as large a share as 
 his own offspring in the parentage of his great-great- 
 grandchildren. His wife he will treat as his equal ; 
 he will not be "kind" to her, but fair and frank and 
 loving, as one equal should be with another; he will 
 no more have the impertinence to pet and pamper her, 
 to keep painful and laborious things out of her know- 
 ledge, to "shield" her from the responsibility of poli- 
 tical and social work, than he will to make a Chinese 
 toy of her and bind her feet. He and she will love 
 that they may enlarge and not limit one another. 
 
 Consciously and deliberately the ideal citizen will seek 
 beauty in himself and in his way of living. He will 
 be temperate rather tha.n harshly abstinent, and he 
 will keep himself fit and in training as an elementary 
 duty. He will not be a fat or emaciated person. Fat, 
 panting men, and thin, enfeebled ones cannot possibly 
 
 340 
 
The Ideal Citizen 
 
 be considered good citizens any more than dirty or 
 verminous people. He will be just as fine and seemly 
 in his person as he can be, not from vanity and self- 
 assertion, but to be pleasing and agreeable to his fellows. 
 The ugly dress and ugly bearing of the "good man" of 
 to-day will be as incomprehensible to him as the filth 
 of a palaeolithic savage is to us. He will not speak 
 of his "frame," and hang clothes like sacks over it; 
 he will know and feel that he and the people about 
 him have wonderful, delightful and beautiful bodies. 
 
 And — I speak of the ideal common citizen — he will 
 be a student and a philosopher. To understand will 
 be one of his) necessary duties. His mind, like his body, 
 will be fit and well clothed. He wall not be too busy 
 to read and think, though he may be too busy to rush 
 about to get ignorantly and blatantly rich. It follows 
 that, since he will have a mind exercised finely and 
 flexible and alert, he wdll not be a secretive man. 
 Secretiveness and secret planning are vulgarity ; men 
 and women need to be educated, and he will be educated 
 out of these vices. He will be intensely truthful, not 
 simply in the vulgar sense of not misstating facts when 
 pressed, but truthful in the manner of the scientific 
 man or the artist, and as scornful of concealment as 
 they ; truthful, that is to say, as the expression of a 
 ruling desire to have things made plain and clear, 
 because that so they are most beautiful and life is at 
 its finest. . . . 
 
 And all that I have written of him is equally true 
 and applies word for word, with only such changes of 
 gender as are needed, to the woman citizen also. 
 
 341 
 
SOME POSSIBLE DISCOVERIES 
 
 The present time is harvest home for the prophets. The 
 happy speculator in future sits on the piled-up wain, 
 singing "I told you so," with the submarine and the 
 flying machine and the Marconigram and the North Pole 
 successfully achieved. In the tumult of realisations it 
 perhaps escapes attention that the prophetic output of 
 new hopes is by no means keeping pace with the crop 
 of consummations. The present trend of scientific 
 development is not nearly so obvious as it was a score 
 of years ago ; its promises lack the elementary breadth 
 of that simpler time. Once you have flown, you have 
 flown. Once you have steamed about under water, you 
 have steamed about under water. There seem no more 
 big things of that kind available — so that I almost regret 
 the precipitance of Commander Peary and Captain 
 Amundsen. No one expects to go beyond that atmo- 
 sphere for some centuries at least ; all the elements are 
 now invaded. Conceivably man may presently contrive 
 some sort of earthworm apparatus, so that he could go 
 through the rocks prospecting very much as an earth- 
 worm goes through the soil, excavating in front and 
 dumping behind, but, to put it moderately, there are 
 considerable difficulties. And I doubt the imaginative 
 effect. On the whole, I think material science has got 
 samples now of all its crops at this level, and that what 
 lies before it in the coming years is chiefly to work them 
 out in detail and realise them on the larger scale. 
 
 342 
 
Some Possible Discoveries 
 
 No doubt science will still yield all sorts of big surprising 
 effects, but nothing, I think, to equal the dramatic 
 novelty, the demonstration of man having got to some- 
 thing altogether new and strange, of Montgolfier, or the 
 Wright Brothers, of Columbus, or the Polar conquest. 
 There remains, of course, the tapping of atomic energy, 
 but I give two hundred years yet before that. . . . 
 
 So far, then, as mechanical science goes I am inclined 
 to think the coming period will be, from the point of 
 view of the common man, almost without sensational 
 interest. There will be an immense amount of enrich- 
 ment and filling-in, but of the sort that does not get 
 prominently into the daily papers. At every point there 
 will be economies and simplifications of method, dis- 
 coveries of new artificial substances with new capabilities , 
 and of new methods of utilising power. There will be 
 a progressive change in the apparatus and quality of 
 human life — the sort of alteration of the percentages that 
 causes no intellectual shock. Electric heating, for 
 example, will become practicable in our houses, and then 
 cheaper, and at last so cheap and good that nobody will 
 burn coal any more. Little electric contrivances will dis- 
 pense with menial service in more and more directions. 
 The builder will introduce new, more convenient, 
 healthier and prettier substances, and the young architect 
 will become increasingly the intelligent student of 
 novelty. The steam engine, the coal yard, and the tall 
 chimney, and indeed all chimneys, will vanish quietly 
 from our urban landscape. The speeding up and cheapen- 
 ing of travel, and the increase in its swiftness and com- 
 fort, will go on steadily — widening experience. A more 
 systematic and understanding social science will be 
 estimating the probable growth and movement of popu- 
 
 343 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 lation, and planning town and country on lines that would 
 seem to-day almost inconceivably wise and generous. All 
 this means a quiet broadening and aeration and beautify- 
 ing of life. Utopian requirements, so far as the material 
 side of things goes, will be executed and delivered with 
 at last the utmost promptness. . . . 
 
 It is in quite other directions that the scientific 
 achievements to astonish our children will probably 
 be achieved. Progress never appears to be uniform in 
 human affairs. There are intricate correlations between 
 department and department. One field must mark time 
 until another can come up to it with results sufficiently 
 arranged and conclusions sufficiently simplified for appli- 
 cation. Medicine waits on organic chemistry, geology 
 on mineralogy, and both on the chemistry of high pres- 
 sures and temperature. And subtle variations in method 
 and the prevailing mental temperament of the type 
 of writer engaged, produce remarkable differences in the 
 quality and quantity of the stated result. Moreover, there 
 are in the history of every scientific province periods of 
 seed-time, when there is great activity without immediate 
 apparent fruition, and periods, as, for example, the last 
 two decades of electrical application, of prolific realisa- 
 tion. It is highly probable that the physiologist and the 
 organic chemist are working towards co-operations that 
 may make the physician's sphere the new scientific 
 wonderland. 
 
 At present dietary and regimen are the happy hunting 
 ground of the quack and that sort of volunteer specialist, 
 half-expert, half -impostor, who flourishes in the absence 
 of worked out and definite knowledge. The general mass 
 of the medical profession, equipped with a little experi- 
 ence and a muddled training, and preposterously impeded 
 
 344 
 
Some Possible Discoveries 
 
 by the private adventure conditions under which it lives, 
 goes about pretending to the possession of precise know- 
 ledge which simply does not exist in the world. Medical 
 research is under-endowed and stupidly endowed, not for 
 systematic scientific inquiry so much as for the un- 
 scientific seeking of remedies for specific evils — for 
 cancer, consumption, and the like. Yet masked, mis- 
 represented, limited and hampered, the work of estab- 
 lishing a sound science of vital processes in health and 
 disease is probably going on now, similar to the clarifica- 
 tion of physics and chemistry that went on in the later 
 part of the eighteenth and the early years of the nine- 
 teenth centuries. It is not unreasonable to suppose that 
 medicine may presently arrive at far-reaching generalised 
 convictions, and proceed to take over this great hinter- 
 land of human interests which legitimately belongs to it. 
 But medicine is not the only field to which we may 
 reasonably look for a sudden development of wonders. 
 Compared with the sciences of matter, psychology and 
 social science have as yet given the world remarkably 
 little cause for amazement. Not only is our medicine 
 feeble and fragmentary, but our educational science is 
 the poorest miscellany of aphorisms and dodges. Indeed, 
 directly one goes beyond the range of measurement and 
 weighing and classification, one finds a sort of unpro- 
 gressive floundering going on , which throws the strongest 
 doubts upon the practical applicability of the current 
 logical and metaphysical conceptions in those fields. We 
 have emerged only partially from the age of the school- 
 men. In these directions we have not emerged at all. 
 It is quite possible that in university lecture rooms 
 and forbidding volumes of metaphysical discussion a new 
 emancipation of the human intellect and will is even now 
 
 345 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 going on. Presently men may be attacking the problems 
 of the self-control of human life and of human destiny in 
 new phrases and an altogether novel spirit. 
 
 Guesses at the undiscovered must necessarily be 
 vague, but my anticipations fall into two groups, and 
 first I am disposed to expect a great systematic increment 
 in individual human power. We probably have no 
 suspicion as yet of what may be done with the human 
 body and mind by way of enhancing its effec- 
 tiveness. I remember talking to the late Sir Michael 
 Foster upon the possibilities of modern surgery, 
 and how he confessed that he did not dare for his repu- 
 tation's sake tell ordinary people the things he believed 
 would some day become matter-of-fact operations. In 
 that respect I think he spoke for very many of his 
 colleagues. It is already possible to remove almost any 
 portion of the human body, including, if needful, large 
 sections of the brain ; it is possible to graft living flesh 
 on living flesh, make new connections, mould, displace, 
 and rearrange. It is also not impossible to provoke local 
 hypertrophy, and not only by knife and physical treat- 
 ment, but by the subtler methods of hypnotism, profound 
 changes can be wrought in the essential structure of 
 a human being. If only our knowledge of function 
 and value were at all adequate, we could correct and 
 develop ourselves in the most extraordinary way. Our 
 knowledge is not adequate, but it may not always remain 
 inadequate. 
 
 We have already had some very astonishing sugges- 
 tions in this direction from Doctor Metchnikoff. He 
 regards the human stomach and large intestine as not 
 only vestigial and superfluous in the human economy, 
 but as positively dangerous on account of the harbour 
 
 346 
 
Some Possible Discoveries 
 
 they afford for those bacteria that accelerate the decay of 
 age. He proposes that these viscera should be removed. 
 To a layman like myself this is an altogether astounding 
 and horrifying idea, but Doctor Metchnikoff is a man of 
 the very greatest scientific reputation, and it does not give 
 him any qualm of horror or absurdity to advance it. I 
 am quite sure that if a gentleman called upon me *'done 
 up" in the way I am dimly suggesting, with most of 
 the contents of his abdomen excavated, his lungs and 
 heart probably enlarged and improved, parts of his brain 
 removed to eliminate harmful tendencies and make room 
 for the expansion of the remainder, his mind and sensi- 
 bilities increased, and his liability to fatigue and the need 
 of sleep abolished, I should conceal with the utmost 
 difficulty my inexpressible disgust and terror. But, then, 
 if M. Bleriot, with his flying machine, ear-flaps and 
 goggles, had soared down in the year 54 B.C., let us say, 
 upon my woad-adomed ancestors — every family man in 
 Britain was my ancestor in those days — at Dover, they 
 would have had entirely similar emotions. And at present 
 I am not discussing what is beautiful in humanity, but 
 what is possible — and what, being possible, is likely to be 
 attempted. 
 
 It does not follow that because men will some day 
 have this enormous power over themselves, physically 
 and mentally, that they will necessarily make themselves 
 horrible — even by our present standards quite a lot of 
 us would be all the slenderer and more active and grace- 
 ful for '* Metchnikoffing " — nor does surgery exhaust the 
 available methods. We are still in the barbaric age, so 
 far as our use of food and drugs is concerned. We stuff 
 all sorts of substances into our unfortunate interiors and 
 blunder upon the most various consequences. Few people 
 
 347 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 of three score and ten but have spent in the aggregate 
 the best part of a year in a state of indigestion, stupid, 
 angry or painful indigestion as the case may be. No 
 one would be so careless and ignorant about the fuel he 
 burnt in his motor-car as most of us are about the fuel 
 we burn in our bodies. And there are all sort of stimu- 
 lating and exhilarating things, digesting things, fatigue- 
 suppressing things, exercise economising things, we dare 
 not use because we are afraid of our ignorance of their 
 precise w^orking. There seems no reason to suppose that 
 human life, properly understood and controlled, could 
 not be a constant succession of delightful and for the 
 most part active bodily and mental phases. It is sheer 
 ignorance and bad management that keep the majority 
 of people in that disagreeable system of states which we 
 indicate by saying we are **a bit off colour" or a little 
 "out of training." It may seem madly Utopian now 
 to suggest that practically everyone in the community 
 might be clean, beautiful, incessantly active, "fit," and 
 long-lived, with the marks of all the surgery they have 
 undergone quite healed and hidden, but not more madly 
 Utopian than it would have seemed to King Alfred the 
 Great if one had said that practically everyone in this 
 country, down to the very swineherds, should be able to 
 read and write. 
 
 Metchnikoff has speculated upon the possibility of 
 delaying old age, and I do not see why his method should 
 not be applied to the diurnal need of sleep. No vital 
 process seems to be absolutely fated in itself ; it is a thing 
 conditioned and capable of modification. If Metchnikoff 
 is right — and to a certain extent he must be right — the 
 decay of age is due to changing organic processes that 
 may be checked and delayed and modified by suitable 
 
 348 
 
Some Possible Discoveries 
 
 food and regimen. He holds out hope of a new phase 
 in the human cycle, after the phase of struggle and 
 passion, a phase of serene intellectual activity, old age 
 with all its experience and none of its infirmities. Still 
 more are fatigue and the need for repose dependent upon 
 chemical changes in the body. It would seem we are 
 unable to maintain exertion, partly through the ex- 
 haustion of our tissues, but far more by the loading of 
 our blood with fatigue products — a recuperative interlude 
 must ensue. But there is no reason to suppose that the 
 usual food of to-day is the most rapidly assimilable 
 nurture possible, that a rapidly digestible or injectable 
 substance is not conceivable that would vastly accelerate 
 repair, nor that the elimination and neutralisation of 
 fatigue products might not also be enormously hastened. 
 There is no inherent impossibility in the idea not only 
 of various glands being induced to function in a modified 
 manner, but even in the insertion upon the circulation 
 of interceptors and artificial glandular structures. No 
 doubt that may strike even an adventurous surgeon as 
 chimerical, but consider what people, even authoritative 
 people, were saying of flying and electric traction twenty 
 years ago. At present a man probably does not get more 
 than three or four hours of maximum mental and 
 physical efficiency in the day. Few men can keep at 
 their best in either physical or intellectual work for so 
 long as that. The rest of the time goes in feeding, 
 digesting, sleeping, sitting about, relaxation of various 
 kinds. It is quite possible that science may set itself 
 presently to extend systematically that proportion of 
 efficient time. The area of maximum efficiency may 
 invade the periods now demanded by digestion, sleep, 
 exercise, so that at last nearly the whole of a man's 
 
 349 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 twenty-four hours will be concentrated on his primary 
 interests instead of dispersed among these secondary 
 necessary matters. 
 
 Please understand I do not consider this concentration 
 of activity and these vast " artificialisations " of the 
 human body as attractive or desirable things. At the 
 first proposal much of this tampering with the natural 
 stuff of life will strike anyone, I think, as ugly and 
 horrible, just as seeing a little child, green-white and 
 still under an ansesthetic, gripped my heart much more 
 dreadfully than the sight of the same child actively 
 bawling with pain. But the business of this paper is 
 to discuss things that may happen, and not to evolve 
 dreams of loveliness. Perhaps things of this kind will 
 be manageable without dreadfulness. Perhaps man will 
 come to such wisdom that neither the knife nor the drugs 
 nor any of the powers which science thrusts into his 
 hand will slay the beauty of life for him. Suppose we 
 assume that he is not such a fool as to let that happen, 
 and that ultimately he will emerge triumphant with all 
 these powers utilised and controlled. 
 
 It is not only that an amplifying science may give 
 mankind happier bodies and far more active and eventful 
 lives, but that psychology and educational and social 
 science, reinforcing literature and working through litera- 
 ture and art, may dare to establish serenities in his soul. 
 For surely no one who has lived, no one who has watched 
 sin and crime and punishment, but must have come to 
 realise the enormous amount of misbehaviour that is mere 
 ignorance and want of mental scope. For my own part 
 I have never believed in the devil. And it may be a greater 
 undertaking but no more impossible to make ways to 
 goodwill and a good heart in men than it is to tunnel 
 
 3SO 
 
Some Possible Discoveries 
 
 mountains and dyke back the sea. The way that led 
 from the darkness of the cave to the electric light is the 
 way that will lead to light in the souls of men, that is to 
 say, the way of free and fearless thinking, free and fear- 
 less experiment, organised exchange of thoughts and 
 results, and patience and persistence and a sort of intel- 
 lectual civility. 
 
 And with the development of philosophical and 
 scientific method that will go on with this great increase 
 in man's control over himself, another issue that is now 
 a mere pious aspiration above abysses of ignorance and 
 difficulty, will come to be a manageable matter. It has 
 been the perpetual wonder of philosophers from Plato 
 onward that men have bred their dogs and horses and 
 left any man or woman, however vile, free to bear off- 
 spring in the next generation of men. Still that goes 
 on. Beautiful and wonderful people die childless and 
 bury their treasure in the grave, and we rest content with 
 a system of matrimony that seems designed to perpetuate 
 mediocrity. A day will come when men will be in 
 possession of knowledge and opportunity that will enable 
 them to master this position, and then certainly will it 
 be assured that every generation shall be born better than 
 was the one before it. And with that the history of 
 humanity will enter upon a new phase, a phase which 
 will be to our lives as daylight is to the dreaming of a 
 child as yet unborn. 
 
 351^ 
 
THE HUMAN ADVENTURE 
 
 Alone among all the living things this globe has borne, 
 man reckons with destiny. All other living things obey 
 the forces that created them; and when the mood of 
 the power changes, submit themselves passively to ex- 
 tinction. Man only looks upon those forces in the face, 
 anticipates the exhaustion of Nature's kindliness, seeks 
 weapons to defend himself. Last of the children of 
 Saturn, he escapes their general doom. He dispossesses 
 his begetter of all possibility of replacement, and grasps 
 the sceptre of the world. Before man the great and 
 prevalent creatures followed one another processionally 
 to extinction ; the early monsters of the ancient seas, 
 the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the land, 
 the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the 
 bat-winged reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal 
 grotesque first mammals, the giant sloths, the mastodons 
 and mammoths; it is as if some idle dreamer moulded 
 them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last 
 comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe 
 him out of being again. 
 
 There is nothing else in all the world that so turns 
 against the powers that have made it, unless it be man's 
 follower fire. But fire is witless; a little stream, a 
 changing breeze can stop it. Man circumvents. If 
 fire were human it would build boats across the rivers 
 and outmanoeuvre the wind. It would lie in wait in 
 sheltered places, smouldering, husbanding its fuel until the 
 
 3Sa 
 
The Human Adventure 
 
 grass was yellow and the forests sere. But fire is a mere 
 creature of man's; our world before his coming knew 
 nothing of it in any of its habitable places, never saw 
 it except in the lightning flash or remotely o^ some 
 volcanic coronet. Man brought it into the commerce 
 of life, a shining, resentful slave, to hound off the 
 startled beasts from his sleeping-place and serve him 
 like a dog. 
 
 Suppose that some enduring intelligence watched 
 through the ages the successions of life upon this planet, 
 marked the spreading first of this species and then that, 
 the conflicts, the adaptations, the predominances, the 
 dyings away, and conceive how it would have witnessed 
 this strange dramatic emergence of a rare great ape to 
 manhood. To such a mind the creature would have 
 seemed at first no more than one of several varieties 
 of clambering frugivorous mammals, a little distinguished 
 by a disposition to help his clumsy walking with a stake 
 and reinforce his fist vnth a stone. The foreground of 
 the picture would have been filled by the rhinoceros 
 and mammoth, the great herds of ruminants, the sabre- 
 toothed lion and the big bears. Then presently the 
 observer would have noted a peculiar increasing handi- 
 ness about the obscurer type, an unwonted intelligence 
 growing behind its eyes. He would have perceived a 
 disposition in this creature no beast had shown before, 
 a disposition to make itself independent of the conditions 
 of climate and the chances of the seasons. Did shelter 
 fail among the trees and rocks, this curious new thing 
 began to make itself harbours of its own ; was food 
 irregular, it multiplied food. It began to spread out 
 from its original circumstances, fitting itself to novel 
 needs, leaving the forests, invading the plains, following 
 .X 353 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 the watercourses upward and downward, presently 
 carrying the smoke of its fires like a banner of con- 
 quest into wintry desolations and the high places of 
 the earth. 
 
 The first onset of man must have been comparatively 
 slow, the first advances needed long ages. By small 
 degrees it gathered pace. The stride from the scattered 
 savagery of the earlier stone period to the first cities, 
 historically a vast interval, would have seemed to that 
 still watcher, measuring by the standards of astronomy 
 and the rise and decline of races and genera and orders, 
 a step almost abrupt. It took, perhaps, a thousand 
 generations or so to make it. In that interval man 
 passed from an animal-like obedience to the climate 
 and the weather and his own instincts, from living in 
 small family parties of a score or so over restricted 
 areas of indulgent country, to permanent settlements, 
 to the life of tribal and national communities and the 
 beginnings of cities. He had spread in that fragment 
 of time over great areas of the earth's surface, and 
 now he was adapting himself to the Arctic circle on 
 the one hand and to the life of the tropics on the other ; 
 he had invented the plough and the ship, and subjugated 
 most of the domestic animals ; he was beginning to 
 think of the origin of the world and the mysteries of 
 being. Writing had added its enduring records to oral 
 tradition, and he was already making roads. Another 
 five or six hundred generations at most bring him to 
 ourselves. We sweep into the field of that looker-on, 
 the momentary incarnations of this sempiternal being, 
 Man. And after us there comes 
 
 A curtain falls. 
 
 The time in which we, whose minds meet here in 
 
 354 
 
The Human Adventure 
 
 this writing, were born and live and die, w^ould be to 
 that imagined observer a mere instant's phase in the 
 swarming Uberation of our kind from ancient imperatives. 
 It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift 
 change and expansion and achievement. In this last 
 handful of years, electricity has ceased to be a curious 
 toy, and now carries half mankind upon their daily 
 journeys, it lights our cities till they outshine the moon 
 and stars, and reduces to our service a score of hitherto 
 unsuspected metals ; we clamber to the pole of our globe, 
 scale every mountain, soar into the air, learn how to 
 overcome the malaria that barred our white races from 
 the tropics, and how to draw the sting from a hundred 
 such agents of death. Our old cities are being rebuilt 
 in towering marble ; great new cities rise to vie with 
 them. Never, it would seem, has man been so various 
 and busy. and persistent, and there is no intimation of 
 any check to the expansion of his energies. 
 
 And all this continually accelerated advance has come 
 through the quickening and increase of man's intelligence 
 and its reinforcement through speech and w^riting. All 
 this has come in spite of fierce instincts that make 
 him the most combatant and destructive of animals, 
 and in spite of the revenge Nature has attempted time 
 after time for his rebellion against her routines, in the 
 form of strange diseases and nearly universal pestilences. 
 All this has come as a necessary consequence of the 
 first obscure gleaming of deliberate thought and reason 
 through the veil of his animal being. To begin with, 
 he did not know what he w^as doing. He sought his 
 more immediate satisfaction and safety and security. 
 He still apprehends imperfectly the change that 
 comes upon him. The illusion of separation that 
 
 355 
 
An Englishman Looks at the World 
 
 makes animal life, that is to say, passionate competing 
 and breeding and dying, possible, the blinkers Nature 
 has put upon us that we may clash against and 
 sharpen one another, still darken our eyes. We 
 live not life as yet, but in millions of separated 
 lives, still unaware except in rare moods of illumina- 
 tion that we are more than those fellow beasts 
 of ours who drop off from the tree of life and perish 
 alone. It is only in the last three or four thousand 
 years, and through weak and tentative methods of 
 expression, through clumsy cosmogonies and theologies, 
 and with incalculable confusion and discoloration, that 
 the human mind has felt its way towards its undying 
 being in the race. Man still goes to war against 
 himself, prepares fleets and armies and fortresses, 
 like a sleep-walker who wounds himself, like some 
 infatuated barbarian who hacks his own limbs with a 
 knife. 
 
 But he awakens. The nightmares of empire and 
 racial conflict and war, the grotesques of trade jealousy 
 and tariffs, the primordial dream-stuff of lewdness and 
 jealousy and cruelty, pale before the daylight which 
 filters between his eyelids. In a little while we in- 
 dividuals will know ourselves surely for corpuscles in 
 his being, for thoughts that come together out of strange 
 wanderings into the coherence of a waking mind. A 
 few score generations ago all living things were in our 
 ancestry. A few score generations ahead, and all man- 
 kind will be in sober fact descendants from our blood. 
 In physical as in mental fact we separate persons, with 
 all our difference and individuality, are but fragments, 
 set apart for a little while in order that we may return 
 to the general life again with fresh experiences and 
 
 356 
 
The Human Adventure 
 
 fresh acquirements, as bees return with pollen and 
 nourishment to the fellowship of the hive. 
 
 And this Man, this wonderful child of old earth, 
 who is ourselves in the measure of our hearts and 
 minds, does but begin his adventure now. Through all 
 time henceforth he does but begin his adventure. This 
 planet and its subjugation is but the dawn of his 
 existence. In a little while he will reach out to the 
 other planets, and take that greater fire, the sun, into 
 his service. He will bring his solvent intelligence to 
 bear upon the riddles of his individual interaction, 
 transmute jealousy and every passion, control his own 
 increase, select and breed for his embodiment a con- 
 tinually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none 
 of us can think or vnll, save in a disconnected partiality, 
 he will think and will collectively. Already some of 
 us feel our merger with that greater life. There come 
 moments when the thing shines out upon our thoughts. 
 Sometimes in the dark sleepless solitudes of night, one 
 ceases to be so-and-so, one ceases to bear a proper name, 
 forgets one's quarrels and vanities, forgives and under- 
 stands one's enemies and oneself, as one forgives and 
 understands the quarrels of little children, knowing 
 oneself indeed to be a being greater than one's personal 
 accidents, knowing oneself for Man on his planet, flying 
 swiftly to unmeasured destinies through the starry still- 
 nesses of space. 
 
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