Chapter LV: After a Year of Journalism: an Outbreak of Auto-Obituary 347 (7)

No party has a monopoly of creative ideals; the Labour Party little more than the Conservative. For consider what the great constructive ideas before the world at the present time are. There is the rescue of civilisation from the destructive pressure of unregulated births through the extension of the necessary knowledge for efficient birth-control. There is the reorganisation of educational method throughout the world to develop the habits of service and co-operation upon the lines so admirably demonstrated by Sanderson and the re-orientation of educational aims and material by making universal history the basis of the conception of a universal citizenship. There is the rescue of democracy from its hopeless suffocation under the party system, by the reduction in the size of representative bodies to efficient proportions, and the adoption of the method of proportional representation in large constituencies. Only in that way can the ordinary citizen be released from his slavery to party managers and brought into a direct personal relationship to the member his vote elects. There is the liberation of the economic life of the world from restrictive and destructive financial manipulations by the creation of a world authority for a regulated currency and the clearing of the world debt jungle. There is the lifting of the waste and weight of private profiteering and nationalist sabotage, from shipping and world transport and the staple productions of the world, through the creation of a group of world authorities for these ends. Everybody of intelligence knows that these are just possible achievements for mankind, and that the outlook for mankind is dangerous and on the whole dingy until they are attained and secured. But there is no political party in the world that dare do more in office than fumble and prevaricate about any of them.

XXXVIII

THE WEMBLEY EMPIRE: AN EXHIBITION OF LOST OPPORTUNITIES

24.5.24

The preparation of a great exhibition of the glories of the British Empire at Wembley profoundly deranged the order of nature. The skies wept copiously; the English spring showed every sign of distress. The builders struck at the eleventh hour, and were only allayed by a patriotic speech by Mr. Thomas. The show opened in a state of entirely British unpreparedness, and the ceremony went chiefly to demonstrate that the development of building in concrete was a much more imposing fact in human life than the continued existence of the British Empire.

Under the circumstances it was unfortunate that the King should have reminded the assembled company of the Great Exhibition of 1851. That was opened in sunshine, and in a sunshine of hope and great ideas. It was international in design and spirit; the first of a great series of such displays. Its guiding spirit was the Prince Consort, one of the most intelligent and creative princes who have ever stood near the British throne. Heaven alone knows how deep Britain would not be wallowing in ignorance and vain delusions if it had not been for his initiatives. He stirred the self-satisfied lethargy of Oxford and Cambridge, so that they have never really slept in peace since, and to this day the Commissioners of his Exhibition administer great funds for scientific and artistic education. The most stimulating things in that Exhibition were the displays of foreign products. They woke up England to the fact that she was falling behind technically and artistically; they caused heart-searchings and effort. But this show is a show of Empire products, “just among ourselves.” We no longer want to know what the world is thinking and doing outside the ring fence of Empire. If the foreigner is being cleverer than we are in any department we do not propose to hear of it.

The King said that the aim of the Exhibition was more “modest” than that of the great show of seventy-three years ago. Was “modest” the word to use? Or “base”? Is this flat bragging that follows really modesty? It is the tune to which the whole thing goes. The London show of 1851 was Tennysonian, and Tennyson sang of the confederation of the world; Wembley in 1924 is Kiplingesque or nothing, and this is Mr. Kipling’s “modest” cry to the Dominions. To set the rhyme going, and without any particular geographical reference, he informs the Dominions “the pathways are broad”:

“In thy house and my house is half the world’s hoard;
In thy house and my house hangs all the world’s fate;
On thy house and my house lies half the world’s hate.”

What a combination of the spirit of grab and the spirit of panic is here! Not thus did the Hyde Park crystal palace reflect God’s sunlight. Is it true of the British Empire, is it just to the British Empire, that the rhyming of this hysterical boy scout should be accepted as the expression of its deepest realities? It is at Wembley. At Wembley the British people do seem to be represented to the world in perfect good faith as the scared favourites of good fortune, keenly aware of a richly merited unpopularity, but reluctant to disgorge. So they are all g-g-going to h-hold together and not be afraid. The Exhibition, apart from a large area devoted to Coney Island amusements, where the Imperial citizen can for a time forget his imperial anxieties in vehement motion and noise, is a display of scenery and merchandise. There are, of course, one or two unclassifiable exhibits--the Queen’s delightful Dolls’ House, for example--but these are in the nature of irrelevances, and a small extra admission fee emphasises the fact. The core, the reality of Wembley, is a show of natural resources and manufactured goods, for which preferential consideration is demanded on the score of a common jealousy, fear and hatred of foreign peoples.

A small pavilion does remind us, it is true, of the League of Nations to which the Empire as a whole and also in pieces belongs, but the League of Nations is far less pervasive than Australian wool or New Zealand mutton. It peeps like a little man in the back row at a football match; the salesman’s shoutings drown its voice.

Now I know I am not supposed to be a very perfect patriot, but I protest that this meretricious shop-window at Wembley does no justice to the real greatness of the British people in the world’s affairs. The New Zealand pavilion, for example--I quote an advertisement--“displays in the most picturesque and attractive way the wonderful charms and remarkable industrial development of this important Dominion. New Zealand is the greatest supplier to Great Britain of Dairy Produce, Mutton and Lamb, and Cross-Bred Wool--industries which have impressive representation. Her export and import trade is the greatest per capita in the world. New Zealand has the finest Mountain, Forest, Lake, and River scenery, and deer-stalking, trout and salmon fishing equal to the best in the world,” and so on. But New Zealand does not exhibit Professor Gilbert Murray nor Mr. Harold Williams nor a score of other brilliant sons and daughters she has given back to the world’s affairs. There is a great display of the rich and picturesque side of Indian life again, but no satisfactory representation of the very considerable work of education that must have been done in India. The British have founded Universities at Khartoum and in Mesopotamia; one looks in vain for models or schemes of them here. You may go about the Exhibition, and find butter and tallow and hides at every turn, but you will find no reproductions of the fine new public schoolhouses these rich young Dominions _must_ possess, the colleges and research institutions they _must_ have set going, and their magnificent arrangements for the interchange of students and ideas with India and the Homeland and the world generally.

We British cannot be such fools as to have neglected these things. But I cannot find the exhibits. Nor is there any display of the scientific and intellectual irrigation of the Press, nor of the machinery of book-publication and distribution that sustains the mental unity of the Dominions....

But I find my mind slipping away from the Wembley that is, to the dream of the Wembley that might have been. I drift off into a vision of the exhibits of work and achievement from the eighteen or twenty great Universities we have surely set up in India; the studies and reports of the two thousand students we send annually to that great land; the display of intellectual interchanges between the four or five splendid Australian Universities and Japan and China, Burmah and Siam; the achievements of the great schools of Polynesian ethnology at Sidney and Adelaide and Brisbane; the splendid educational work of Canada in China, rivalling the American effort: the joint exhibit of the United States and Canada of the scientific exploration of the Arctic and the Pacific; the vast pavilion giving a comparative treatment of the efforts of South Africa, Jamaica, and the United States to deal with the civilisation and assimilation of “colour”; the Capetown to Cairo school of African history, ethnology and economic geography. Surely these things have been seen to! We are so rich.

“_In thy house and my house is half the world’s hoard._”

But what are we doing with it? Are we just hoarding it? I thought the White Man’s Burthen was a magnificent task, not a bundle of loot that he stood upon to brag about. I must have taken the wrong turning when I went to Wembley. I must go there again. I must go right on and find the turning _beyond_ the ones that lead to these magnificent displays of machinery and metal and wool and grease.

XXXIX

THE EXTINCTION OF PARTY GOVERNMENT

31.5.24

The politicians of Great Britain, under the pressure of various accidental and some fundamental necessities, are being forced towards an honest democracy and efficient government. But they resist with great activity and ingenuity.

A Bill for what is called Proportional Representation, but which is really sane voting, has recently been rejected by the House of Commons by a majority of 238 to 144. It had the official support of the Liberal Party. Previously the Liberal hacks were all against it, but they have been chastened by the last two elections. The Bill went very far towards honest representative government, but in one respect it went no distance at all towards a great revolution in political method. When the time comes for its re-introduction it will be necessary to extend it or supplement it by another reducing the numbers of the representative assembly.

The urgencies of the British situation have put Great Britain far in advance of the United States in this matter. There is a very respectable movement for Proportional Representation in the United States of America, but it has still to be realised as practical politics and a serious need by the American public. In America every citizen is born either a little Republican or else a little Democrat; it does not matter what the Republican or Democratic platform is or what sort of man is put up for him in his division, he has to vote for his party. Or else go through a crisis almost like disowning his father and mother and vote for the other party. There is nothing else in the world for him to do in politics, just as there was nothing else but being “either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative” in the great days of Gilbert and Sullivan in London. The United States is young, prosperous, and at a great advantage to the rest of the world; it may be able to afford its present travesty of democracy for a long time yet. Britain cannot. The party system has always been more rigidly organised in America than in England. In Britain on the Left side, counting Liberal, Labour, and Communist together, there are eight or ten distinct schools of political thought and intention; on the Right side there are five or six. The British voter grows more and more erratic and uncertain under the present idiotic system, and the results of General Elections more and more silly and incalculable.

The idea of Proportional Representation is now nearly a century old. It is due to a clear-headed man named Hare. He proposed that a number of candidates should stand for the whole country as one constituency. The voter would vote for the man he liked and trusted best. If that man were so widely liked and trusted that he got more votes than were needed to return him, he would take as large a fraction of every vote as he needed, and if the voter had indicated a second choice on his paper, the rest of his vote would go to the candidate next on his list. _Whatever happened, some or all of the voter’s support would go to the man he had chosen._ That man would be his man par excellence. There could be no more direct relationship between voter and representative. But if that man were a very great and desirable man, the voter could also congratulate himself on the partial possession of a second or even a third, more personal representative. There are people who profess to find great difficulty in understanding Proportional Representation; mostly this is a purely wilful and subjective befuddlement. The filling up of the voting papers is perfectly simple and the counting and fractionation of the votes offers no difficulty to any properly instructed educated person.

For trivial reasons Hare’s voting method, which would give us an almost pure representative democracy, has been modified in all the practical proposals made by the division of the country into large constituencies instead of leaving it one whole, and the assignation of a limited but still large number of members to each. But its virtue of comparative veracity in representation still to a large extent remains. Mr. Rendall’s recent Bill proposed constituencies returning not less than three and not more than seven members. This is much too small for a real representation of British opinion, but it was as much as the party wire-pullers would allow. When the question is reopened this maximum should be increased.

Of course the systems called Proportional Representation in use in France and Italy are scoundrelly caricatures of the idea. Under them the voters vote not for men but for party gangs, and the whole object of Proportional Representation is to release men from servitude to party manipulation.

The objections to the measure made in the debate upon the rejected Bill were mostly very trivial or based on positive misconceptions. The question was indeed not discussed. Most of the opponents from the Labour side contented themselves with twitting the Liberal politicians with change of heart upon the question. They behaved just as the Liberal Party hacks did in 1918 because they are exactly the same sort of men. The mentality of the party hack, Liberal, Labour, or Conservative, is very much on a level in this matter. Most of the big men in all parties are for Proportional Representation, because they know they are outstanding enough to survive its establishment. The party hack knows he lives through and by his party: the voter does not choose him but suffers him, and at the first clear opportunity the voter will push him out of the way and choose a more interesting non-party man. About seventy Labour men who have at one time or another professed approval of Proportional Representation did not vote.

The struggle against Proportional Representation is really the life struggle of the professional party politician. Under Proportional Representation the legislative assembly, instead of being elected by a small majority, or even a minority of the voters in the country, will be representative of nearly the whole country. In a constituency electing ten members, for instance, there will probably be less than a tenth of that constituency not actually represented by members returned. This wipes out every hope of a bilateral political system, because it will fill the assembly with free members, responsible only to the voters who have returned them, and practically independent of organised party support. They will necessarily be very various in their opinions.

It is not yet sufficiently realised, even by the supporters of Proportional Representation, that a country which returns men because they are distinctive and significant to its Legislature--and that is what the adoption of Proportional Representation means--will need an assembly of a different size and type from the present clumsy crowd of notables and nobodies at Westminster. There are too many members of Parliament at Westminster for efficiency, just as there are too many Congressmen at Washington. They loaf about. They do mischief in obscurity. They make trouble in order to realise their own existence. They are to public affairs what excessive fat is to the body of a man. These big legislative bodies date from a time when group psychology was not thought of. It is even possible that a big legislative body elected by Proportional Representation would be a worse evil even than the party house. Released from the party ties that control them, bunched into fluctuating groups, the scores and hundreds of unnecessary members would obstruct and confuse every legislative proposal. Proportional Representation must mean not only the suppression of the hack politician, but also the suppression of the commonplace member. For efficient government we want a Legislature no larger than is fairly representative of the broad varieties of public opinion. At the largest we need only from two hundred to three hundred members, a grand committee of the nation, appointing Ministers severally, assigning tasks to sub-committees, and expressing the general ideas of the country. We shall certainly be able to dispense with the rotation of the “ins and outs” and possibly with the organised Cabinet in such a Legislature. The adoption of Proportional Representation will be a much profounder and more revolutionary change than a mere change in voting procedure. It will necessitate an entirely new type of representative government. In that lies its importance in the world’s affairs and its fascination and desirability for most intelligent people.

XL

THE SERFDOM OF IGNORANCE: THE RIGHT OF WOMEN TO KNOWLEDGE

7.6.24

The British Labour movement is being agitated at present by one of the most important questions in the world, the question whether a woman has a right to clear and complete knowledge about her own body and the fundamental facts of her life. It is a searching and dividing question that may very well split the party into two discordant sections. The old-fashioned politicians who haven’t yet observed that women have now got votes, consider the question ought to be left outside politics. It is too real a question for the old parliamentary game. What would the grand Old Man have said about it? The Elder Spinsters of the Labour movement also rally to the protection of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s gentility, his fine old-fashioned statesmanlike evasiveness. But the Labour Women’s Conference carried a resolution against the blushingly tactful Elder Spinsters. These younger women believe that women really are responsible citizens, that democracy does mean treating adults with respect instead of concealing anything that matters most to them from them; that women ought to know what marriage means for them and how motherhood may be undertaken or declined before diseases and children and such-like intense and overwhelming things blot out their youth and health.

The demand the younger, more intelligent women in the Labour movement are making is that knowledge should be freely, easily, and honourably accessible to all British women. It is well to get this precisely clear. No one purposes to force this knowledge upon anyone. That typical political artful dodger, Mr. Wheatley, the Labour Minister of Health, pretends obstinately that that is so. But no woman who likes to be coyly ignorant, and to be overtaken by illness and offspring before she understands anything about them, need seek such knowledge. All that the innovators ask is that it should be there available for those women who want to know what they may do and what they can do with their lives, who want to go into motherhood or refuse or delay going into motherhood with their eyes open. Personally, I think that innocence is a charm confined to immaturity, and that every adult of eighteen ought to know clearly all that is of vital importance to conduct in married life before marriage, but in this I go far beyond the modest ambitions of the advanced section of the Labour Party. They want this knowledge to be available only to the married. They want the medical men engaged at such public institutions as child-welfare centres and the like to be free--subject only to their interpretation of their professional honour--to give such information as may be asked for upon these matters. They want doctors in receipt of public money to have the same liberty of advice that every doctor feed by an upper-class woman has. They do not want poor women living in crowded homes to be obliged to bear offspring just as cows bear offspring, whether they want to or not, out of sheer ignorance and helplessness.

Mr. Wheatley says, as his excuse for refusing this liberation of knowledge, that Roman Catholic voters will object to paying rates and taxes if this sort of use is made of public money. The Roman Catholic is to decide what the poor Protestant woman shall know and do. This is a pretty impudent claim for a religion that was formerly disenfranchised. But the whole Labour Party in Parliament cringes at the thought of the Roman Catholic vote. As a matter of fact, there is nothing in sound Roman Catholic teaching to forbid the diffusion of physiological knowledge. There is nothing, indeed, in proper Roman Catholic teaching to prohibit the practice of birth-control under any circumstances. At any time the Vatican might commend birth-control; it is not committed in the least in that respect. But a great number of priests, like our Labour Elder Spinsters, betray an extreme excitability and malignity at the thought of any sexual life that is not mainly frustrated desire. They commit the extreme sin of presumption, they invent teachings quite unsanctioned by the Church to excuse the impulses of their own troubled and unhappy thoughts. And it is of the back-street priest and not of the eternal Church that Mr. Wheatley and his Labour colleagues as pushing politicians have chiefly to think.

Now let the reader note that in this paper I have said not a word for or against the practices known as birth-control nor about anticipatory sexual hygiene. I have my own very definite opinions on these matters, but the question under discussion here is not what should or may be done, but about _what may be known_. It is the far profounder question of whether common poor people are to be treated as worthy of understanding and knowing about the things that concern their most intimate lives, or whether in the interests of cheap labour, the Roman Catholic, population statistics, army recruiting, racial jealousy, or out of regard to the unpleasant feelings and imaginations of priests and elderly spinsters, they are to be left and imprisoned in black ignorance even when they want to know. Here I find in myself a streak of surprisingly passionate democracy. I hold that every man and woman should be the conscious and instructed master of his or her own fate. It is amazing, it is dismaying, to find a Labour Minister as ready to consider the common people a breeding herd of human beasts and as ready to keep them helplessly in the dark as the extremist Tory could be. I am convinced that even as a politician he has blundered. When women fought for votes they fought for a symbol; the reality was the possession of themselves. And that is impossible without this, if not forbidden, at least impeded knowledge.

Most politicians have still to learn the significance of the women’s vote. Because one or two pretty ladies on the Labour side have lost their heads, adorned themselves in trains and ostrich feathers, given themselves over to the photographers and interviewers and succumbed to the delightful temptation of patronising the Queen, it does not follow that the mass of Labour women are not intensely sane and realist. Sexual questions are coming into politics, and they are coming to stay. Before the next election every parliamentary candidate will have to make up his mind whether he stands for knowledge or ignorance in this matter.

XLI

BLINKERS FOR FREE YOUTH: YOUNG AMERICA ASKS TO HEAR AND SEE

14.6.24

A sure way to madden Americans is to make comparisons between education in the United States and in Western Europe. Even if the comparison is flattering it leaves them mad. Apparently belief in the superior education of the American citizen is becoming as sacred as belief in the American constitution. Doubt is prohibited. Visitors to the United States may presently have to sign a form about it.

Hitherto with an extraordinary discretion I have avoided, or at least skirted, this sensitive point. I propose to continue to skirt it. There has been one exception. I touched upon the sore place a little while ago in a book called _The Dream_, and my mail from America came for some weeks bristling with an unwonted and distressing hostility. I gave an account of the elementary school teaching of England--it is much the same stuff, more or less, in most civilised countries--as I think it will appear to an observer a few centuries ahead. I added casually that on the whole the American rural school was worse than the English one I described. To the best of my knowledge and belief it is worse. In many parts of the United States the elementary education is far below the Western European level, the consequent illiteracy is shocking, and I should not be doing my duty as a writer for the English-speaking public if I did not say so. I was not thinking so much of new districts inhabited by fresh immigrants, but of old, native-born American regions, like Kentucky. The United States is abnormally slack about its elementary education, and needs plain, stimulating speech in the matter. But the Americans are in a state of irritable self-satisfaction about their schools. They are refusing almost violently to know that their general education has not kept pace with their enormous increase in wealth and material civilisation. Morally, if not legally, I am as much a citizen of the United States of America as of the British Empire; mentally the American and British worlds are two hemispheres of one brain; I cannot think of them functioning independently, and it is just as much my business to discuss this American slackness as it is to reprove the frightful negligences of the British in respect to Indian education.

This, however, is in parenthesis. It is merely to emphasise the fact that in this article I am instituting no comparisons at all. I am taking a text from an American instance; that is all. There has been a little tiff between the undergraduates and the authorities of Harvard, and I find it extremely suggestive. The brighter of the Harvard undergraduates, represented on the governing board of the Harvard Union by Mr. Corliss Lamont, want to hear about Radicalism and Communism at first hand from people like Mr. Debs and Mr. W. Z. Foster, and the authorities are suppressing these youthful aspirations. They want the young men who will presently sway American affairs to be fed their knowledge of radical and revolutionary ideas by orthodox and respectable persons who have pre-digested it for them and removed all disturbing elements. The young men want the real stuff and to deal with it themselves. I confess myself heart and soul for these young men.

There has recently been a controversy between Mr. Bertrand Russell and President Lowell about the relative mental freedom of American and British Universities. As Mr. Bertrand Russell was turned down for pacifism from Cambridge during the war, he started in that controversy with a handicap. It seems to me that such a dispute is bound to be ineffectual. There are cases of mental restriction and suppression from both sides of the Atlantic, and there are no scales invented yet to weigh this case against that. The real conflict here is not between American and European conditions, but between two types of men. It is a conflict that rages throughout the entire world. Everywhere one finds the managing, directive, limiting type of mind with a craving to get on to governing bodies, the industry to get on governing bodies, and a consequent tendency to get on governing bodies. Everywhere we find also a less abundant supply of critical, sceptical, creative, restless minds producing innovations and stimulating ideas and with an equal tendency to get thrown out of organisations and governing bodies. They are the seed, the ferment, the living factor in the human mind. In Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler America has produced the perfect specimen of the former class, just as in the late William James and in James Harvey Robinson she has produced excellent samples of the second. It is loudly boasted in British intellectual circles that Britain could not have produced Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, but so far as I am able to judge there is as much Nicholas Murray Butlerism in Britain as in America, as much large empty active influential pretentiousness, though it may be more diffused, and it is at least as resolute to sit upon and addle intellectual institutions.

For the peculiar evil of the governing body type is its failure to understand its lack of finality. It has no sense of the unknown, no sense of the provisional nature of all mundane things. It wants to fix knowledge in its own image, to make subsidiary and to apportion and departmentalise the work of the gifted exceptional and disturbing men. It seeks to set up classics, to perpetuate existing institutions, to inaugurate ancestor worship. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler is to be the American Confucius and stereotype this perfect world of 1924; the last of the Founders. The coming generation will learn that at this point the world congealed. The thing this dominating type dreads supremely is revolutionary suggestion and the possibility of the young getting away with new ideas. Its educational ideal is blinkers and an obedient youth looking neither to the right nor the left, but pursuing the one right path.

But the sustaining factor of life is death. Happily, most happily, Founders die, and their codes and constitutions, their classical utterances, die and pass away. Even the inspired addresses and deliverances of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, so beautifully printed and so relentlessly distributed, will some day shrivel and pass, and be no more heeded. So that life may go on. Without death there could be no birth. The most fundamental fact about youth is its disrespect for its elders and the past. That is what it is for. A generation that wanted to repeat the preceding generation would not be birth, it would be life stuttering. And the one thing youth does most need and want and fight to get, as its supreme instinctive duty, is and always will be every sort of destructive criticism of existing authorities, of the existing order, and of established institutions. Young America at Harvard probably has no illusions about Mr. Debs or Mr. Foster; it calls them, I am reasonably certain, “Old Debs” and “Old Foster.” But it means to hear them, it will hear them, and the college authorities had better help it to hear without any attempts whatever to jam the message Old Debs and Old Foster have to deliver against the old system young Harvard has been born to alter--and has been born for no other apparent end that I can see.

Schools and Universities are surely the most paradoxical things in the whole preposterous spectacle of human life. They exist to prepare youth for a world of enormous changes, and their chief activity seems to be, at Oxford and Cambridge quite as much as at Harvard and Yale, to get youth apart from the world and conceal the forces of change from its curious and intelligent eyes. The youth of the Universities in particular should be the living eggs of the good new things of the days to come. The efforts of the governing bodies everywhere seem to be directed chiefly to getting them hard-boiled. My congratulations to Mr. Corliss Lamont for having so far escaped the culinary process. Nowadays there are Corliss Lamonts from China to Peru. The matter and the forms change but the spirit is the same. In Moscow they have to fight as hard as anywhere else; there it is to escape being made into hard-boiled Communists. By virtue of the rebellious vitality in our youth this world of mankind lives on and does not die and freeze into a monument to its Founders.

XLII

THE LAWLESSNESS OF AMERICA AND THE WAY TO ORDER

21.6.24

Miss Rebecca West, that acute and brilliant observer, has recently been in America, and she has been writing her impressions of the American scene. She has been lecturing and hand-shaking, but with commendable restraint she says little of her audiences, her hotels, and her railway journeys. She has looked over the heads of her hearers and out of the carriage windows. She has looked at the great spectacle as a whole, and she generalises about it broadly and bravely.

The lack of civil order is the thing that strikes her most, and she illustrates her perception of it by a vivid and illuminating discussion of the necessity for prohibition and its consequent evils, and of the colour trouble in the South. Various previous British visitors have noted that lack in other terms, have remarked upon the want of a sense of the State in American thought, and of the reaction upon humanity of the fierce, untutored naturalness, the wide deserts, the undisciplined rivers, and spontaneous tangled forest growths of the New World.

But when she looks for the forces that will presently bring order and graciousness into this characteristically splendid display of energy at large she calls rather startlingly for peasants. She thinks, in a phrase that might have come straight from something by Chesterton, that “nameless men who plough furrows that are straight and deep,” peasants in bulk and multitude, are needed to establish a permanent social order, an enduring and developing civilisation.

America has not enough peasants. This is an interesting development, or perhaps I had better say an interesting lapse, in the ideas of a woman we had come to regard, perhaps rashly, as a boldly progressive spirit. This is turning back to the earthy romanticism of Belloc and Chesterton, and I think it shows the profoundest misapprehension of the fundamentals of the American situation. America has not developed a peasant population--for it is sheer perversity of Miss West to write as she does of Abraham Lincoln as a peasant’s son, as a traditional plough-driver, instead of an axe-wielder from the East. America, with machines to plough straighter and deeper than any clodhopper can ever do, has no need of peasants for any purpose at all, except perhaps as negro cotton-growers in the South. America is not developing a peasantry and probably never will. At present the drift to the towns is continuous, and rural depopulation is as present a problem in the United States as in Great Britain.

That Miss West should associate civil order with a peasantry shows an odd forgetfulness of European conditions. England, which has had practically no peasantry for two centuries, but only wage-earning labourers, displays the greatest social order and security in the world; Russia, which is practically all peasantry, can, and could before the war, show a lawlessness, an indiscipline and social insecurity far exceeding anything of which Miss West complains in America. I would as soon accept Zola’s valuation of the peasant in _La Terre_ as Miss West’s discovery of him as the soil from which all the social virtues spring.

It is in quite another quarter that I should look for the forces that will ultimately adjust and bring together into a law-abiding social harmony all the loose and conflicting elements of the American State, and that is in a great development of schools and colleges. It is from the head and centre and not from the base that the modern community must be unified. It is a point that Miss West seems to ignore altogether, that the United States is, in spite of the aggregatory form of its constitution, the first instance of a new type of community altogether, the type that steam railways, electrical communications, and power machinery have made possible. It may have much trouble and darkness in its destiny, but nothing but complete disaster can ever lead to another repetition of that levelling down and earthing up of the human spirit in peasant life that underlies the old-world civilisations. The chief faults and merits of American life are alike the characteristics of a released population that has escaped from that intimate servitude to pedestrian locality, to the dungheap, the patch, the hovel, and the bitter narrow outlook, for ever.

The reconstruction of human society in the great frame of these coming modern communities is the fascinating reality of political life behind the dullness and violence and unreality of personal rivalries and party issues. Its cardinal process is the establishment of a new education in terms of the common history and the common aim and a new training of everyone in service to scientifically conceived human purposes. It is an education that should not only occupy the first sixteen years of life altogether, but which should continue its informing and stimulating work throughout life. Only a few people, but it is a rapidly growing number, are beginning to realise the scale and equipment needed for this new nexus of education that will replace the old-world peasants’ grubby priest by the new teachers of mankind. The educational effort that lies before the world, and more immediately before the United States as the pioneer of communal life upon a new scale, must needs be a vast and elaborate one--it is useless for the American to be content with schools about as good as European schools, or a little better, or not quite so good; they have to be reconceived in relation to the coming modern community, they have to be better and more effective, they have to be wider in range, if he is not to be thwarted of his immense opportunities of leadership in the present advance of our race towards new conditions of living. But the forces of educational development in a country work obscurely, the new beginnings are difficult to come at, the living seed lies below the surface. It is easy enough to go to America and be entertained and astonished by the bootlegger and the “snow” dealer, to feel the chromatic emotions of “colour,” and note the drug store flaring at every street corner. These things signify about as much as the vivid spots that will sometimes appear on the face and shoulders of growing youth. But the research for educational developments is a subtle task, and it yields less florid pictures. We are badly in need of some stock-taking, English or American, of educational conditions in America.

XLIII

THE SHABBY SCHOOLS OF THE PIOUS: DRAINS AND THE ODOUR OF SANCTITY

28.6.24

One of the numerous questions which the Labour Government has to avoid most sedulously in its official egg dance is the question of the denominational school. Many of the denomination schools of England are in an advanced state of decay, most of them fall short of modern educational requirements, and the Labour Party made the amplest promises of educational progress in the electoral campaign that led it to office. Something drastic ought to be done about these denominational schools. But the present voting system, which gives the power of political decision to well-organised minorities, puts the Labour Party at the mercy of the Roman Catholic vote in a number of constituencies, the Roman Catholic community is particularly hostile to educational development, and so nothing is done. The decay of these schools proceeds.

The compromise under which these denominational schools exist was made in 1902. It was a characteristic British patch-up, and one of the most active figures in the making of it was the present Lord Cecil. Under it the schools of the various religious denominations were incorporated in the national education scheme, and the common public was to pay the running expenses of these schools and control the general instruction. The managers appointed by the religious body concerned were, however, to appoint all the teachers and control the religious instruction, and in return for these privileges they were to provide the school buildings and keep them in good repair. If, for instance, a particular school belonged to the Mumbo Jumbo sect, which believes that the earth was created flat and has never been more than slightly bent since, that it is wrong to regard bread as nutritious and improper for men and women to speak together in public places, then the managers were empowered to discover and appoint teachers of geography, physiology, and social history whose teachings would not disturb the children in their peculiar beliefs and practices, over the heads of more efficient and less orthodox candidates. A Mumbo Jumbo “atmosphere” would be created within the school, the sexes would be segregated, bread never mentioned or mentioned with a proper horror, and all terrestrial and celestial globes, maps of the world in hemispheres, busts or portraits of Columbus, Magellan, and the like excluded. In return for these supremely important religious privileges the sect of the Mumbo-Jumboites was to pay for the upkeep of the schools and keep them up to date in their appointments.

Now it is a melancholy fact that parents belonging to the various British religious bodies concerned, parents we understood to be so passionately eager to see their children taught only their own tested and certified brand of truth that this compromise was made, have shown themselves indisposed to make any effort to pay even honestly, far less generously, for the spiritual advantages secured to them. A recent inquiry has directed attention to a very alarming state of affairs in these schools--of which altogether there are about twelve thousand in England and Wales--claiming to educate a million and a third children. A large proportion of them, we discover, have become badly decayed. They are described as “ill-ventilated, ill-lighted, with insufficient or worn-out sanitary, cloakroom, and lavatory accommodation.” “A number of schools”--I quote the Leslie report--“are noted as having been condemned by the Board of Education before the war, but as being still in full use. The complaint is made that the Board’s inspectors have ceased to mention the condition of these schools in their reports, presumably on instructions from headquarters, in the supposed interests of economy.”

“‘Action would have to be taken with regard to playgrounds, sanitary arrangements, etc.,’ says one authority, ‘had there been any prospect of the requirements being carried out,’ and many others say the same in different words. In one case there has been a sinkage of ground resulting in the breakage of drain-pipes, with the result that the soil is being polluted, but the managers will do nothing. In another case the authority says that ‘both teachers and children are suffering physically and educationally, but the only possible alternative would be new buildings, and the managers have no funds.’”

“General complaint is made as to the condition of the playgrounds, usually as being too small and inconvenient to begin with, and many either unusable or dangerous for want of repair. One of the counties, replying, says that out of 131 playgrounds attached to its Voluntary Schools 95 per cent. are in bad condition.” ...

There is no need to extend these quotations. Enough has been cited to show the peculiar quality of a problem which sooner or later will have to be faced by the British people. The fact is now beyond dispute that the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and such other denominations as maintain these spiritually ear-marked schools, though they can be stirred indeed to energetic action at election times in defence of their grip upon local teaching, are far too indifferent to the health or education of their children to keep their buildings in a good and going state. It would seem as though they cared less about having a school than about preventing the invasion of their lives by an open and vigorous and efficient school. They hate a clean and impartial education far more than they care for one upon their own lines. They are anti-educational far more than they are religious. One might fancy the fortunate Mumbo-Jumboites rejoicing in the special opportunities they have had in the last twenty years and still possess, and saying: “Now, under the happiest conditions possible, let us demonstrate and fix and establish for ever the delightful proofs of our great doctrines. Let us show the flatness of the earth and the inedible qualities of bread by bright and exquisite diagrams and models. Let us irradiate the place with all the happiness that the sedulous avoidance of the other sex in public can give. Let us make our schools an example to all schools with splendid buildings with new and abundant equipment, and with such teachers as only Mumbo-Jumboism can inspire.” But there is not a hint of that spirit in these dismal places in which their religion has had a free hand. For two and twenty years religious denominations in England have had these twelve thousand schools upon which to demonstrate their qualities, and they have demonstrated that shabbiness, stuffiness, meanness, and low standards of performance follow upon doctrinal exclusiveness as surely as twilight leads into the night.

XLIV

THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF INDIA: DIVORCE OR LEGAL SEPARATION

5.7.24

Is the Anglo-Saxon fit to govern any other race?

He sprawls across the earth. He rules hundreds of millions of brown and black and buff peoples; he dominates and “protects” an even larger number than he actually governs. And there are moments when one is struck by a sense of his immense ineptitude. In many respects he is unquestionably a fine figure, but with regard to other races he is overbearing, he is unsympathetic, he is obtuse. Possibly he is exceptionally so. But it is more probable that no race is fit to have the upper hand over any other race; the possession of the upper hand leads at best to an inconsiderate self-righteousness, and at the worst to an extreme contempt, injustice, and cruelty. There are very few instances in the world of an even moderately satisfactory alien rule.

The Jesuits in South America seem to have done well in a kindly unprogressive way; the British rule in Nigeria and some of the West Indies is a comparatively bright spot in the history of racial interaction, the Maoris and the Basutos seem to be well-treated peoples, and the Dutch are credited with a fairly happy and prosperous Java. Until the last few years the British Empire seems to have dealt justly with its old allies, the Six Nations in Canada. These are outstanding exceptions. The general rule for peace between two races seems to be mix or get away; the darkest tragedy comes when, as in the southern United States, they can neither mix nor disentangle.

In the great elaborately educated State of the future towards which human affairs are moving, everyone and every community will be most sedulously educated and trained in inter-racial good manners. Our world at present has scarcely such a thing yet as good manners in anyone or a fully educated man. All the more reason, then, for maintaining the separation of peoples unfit to associate generously and peacefully with each other, and for releasing those who are not already separated.

The recent libel case brought by Sir Michael O’Dwyer against Sir Sankaran Nair has brought out very vividly the tremendous failure of the British Imperial system, after a century of opportunity, to produce any working tradition of interaction between the British people, the British garrison, and the Indian population. It has demonstrated the impossibility of any very long continuation of British rule in the peninsula.

After one has looked into the particulars of the case, one has just the same depressing realisation of a hopeless incompatibility that one has in some matrimonial cases. It is not so much that this or that has been done or not done; it is that the two peoples are unequally yoked in temperament and intelligence; that they do not get on together; that they never will get on together while they are closely associated. The British are not good enough nor wise enough for the job; the Indians are not great enough nor patient enough. It is a case for a separation, as friendly and speedy a separation as possible, if there is not presently to be a tragic divorce.

I must confess that I cannot conjure up any very profound indignation against General Dyer. He was, I think, stupid, spasmodically violent, and unnecessarily bloody. I do not believe that the shooting at Amritsar was inevitable, and he certainly went on shooting too long. But the sort of stupid and spasmodic violence he displayed is very characteristic of many English and many Americans. I find it in myself. I have not, luckily for myself, had General Dyer’s opportunities, but it is not necessary to kill people to discover that one may be harsh and cruel when one is thwarted by mental processes one does not understand.

I had a Dyer phase, for example, as a young, eager, and untrained schoolmaster, whipping-in the difficult stragglers for class work against which they rebelled. The whole story of the Punjab troubles is really a very pitiful story not only for the native population but for the British administrators. It is the story of a conflict of resentments. One begins with an officialdom eager for “volunteers” for the Great War, unable to understand that the Great War meant nothing and should have meant nothing to any reasonable Indian person. How could it matter to them? One goes on to a story of “pressure” increasing in its ugly details until we come to thrashings, deep indignities, and tortures to stimulate the cheerful “volunteer.” Pressure passes from chief to subordinate and degenerates towards cruelty at every transition; it is hard to fix responsibility at any point. It rouses resistance. The pestered and tormented populace begin to hold meetings, make vague gestures of counter violence. The irritable ass in the Anglo-Saxon make-up responds with “firmness.” The firmness loads the rifles and prepares aeroplane bombs to disperse “dangerous assemblies.”

There is a mood of scared obstinacy in which the Anglo-Saxon becomes capable of almost any swift atrocity. He is rarely deliberately cruel, but he is easily clumsily and hotly cruel. In the twilight the highly strung creature will shoot or lynch at very slight provocation indeed. Confronted with the dead body, his self-respect demands an adequate reason for the murder he has done. So soon as the Amritsar gardens were littered with dead and dying people, it became clear to General Dyer that a very dangerous rebellion, a second Indian Mutiny, had been heroically nipped in the bud.

His military superiors did not think so. He was rebuked and punished, very properly, very necessarily. Some amends were made to smitten and outraged India in that treatment of General Dyer, and the wretched incident of Amritsar would have passed into the receding perspectives of history if it had not been for the litigious enterprise of Sir Michael O’Dwyer. Sir C. Sankaran Nair, in a book that was extensively used by the British Government for propaganda purposes in India, wrote phrases that certainly put an unjustifiable blame upon Sir Michael O’Dwyer for the Punjab outrages. Sir Michael brought his action and reopened the question.

Now the alarming and disconcerting thing is that the Court of King’s Bench showed itself far less intelligent, far less alive to the realities of the Indian situation, than General Dyer’s military superiors in India. It is impossible to read the reports of the case without realising that the mutual irritation of English and Indian, the profound temperamental incompatibility of the two worlds, was manifested in that Court in an exaggerated degree. The case transcended its proper limits and became a wrangle on the whole Punjab question. Mr. Justice McCardie took upon himself to inform the world at large and the people of India in particular, with all the weight and prestige of the High Court upon him, “speaking with due deliberation,” that in his view General Dyer had been wrongly punished by the Secretary of State for India.