Chapter XXIII: Part 23

The social creed must be imposed on us when we are children; for it is like riding, or reading music at sight: it can never become a second nature to those who try to learn it as adults; and the social creed, to be really effective, must be a second nature to us. It is quite easy to give people a second nature, however unnatural, if you catch them early enough. There is no belief, however grotesque and even villainous, that cannot be made a part of human nature if it is inculcated in childhood and not contradicted in the child’s hearing. Now that you are grown up, nothing could persuade you that it is right to lame every woman for life by binding her feet painfully in childhood on the ground that it is not ladylike to move about freely like an animal. If you are the wife of a general or admiral nothing could persuade you that when the King dies you and your husband are bound in honor to commit suicide so as to accompany your sovereign into the next world. Nothing could persuade you that it is every widow’s duty to be cremated alive with the dead body of her husband. But if you had been caught early enough you could have been made to believe and do all these things exactly as Chinese, Japanese, and Indian women have believed and done them. You may say that these were heathen Eastern women, and that you are a Christian Western. But I can remember when your grandmother, also a Christian Western, believed that she would be disgraced for ever if she let anyone see her ankles in the street, or (if she was “a real lady”) walk there alone. The spectacle she made of herself when, as a married woman, she put on a cap to announce to the world that she must no longer be attractive to men, and the amazing figure she cut as a widow in crape robes symbolic of her utter desolation and woe, would, if you could see or even conceive them, convince you that it was purely her luck and not any superiority of western to eastern womanhood that saved her from the bound feet, the suttee, and the hara-kiri. If you still doubt it, look at the way in which men go to war and commit frightful atrocities because they believe it is their duty, and also because the women would spit in their faces if they refused, all because this has been inculcated upon them from their childhood, thus creating the public opinion which enables the Government not only to raise enthusiastic volunteer armies, but to enforce military service by heavy penalties on the few people who, thinking for themselves, cannot accept wholesale murder and ruin as patriotic virtues.

It is clear that if all female children are to have their minds formed as the mind of Queen Victoria was formed in her infancy, a Socialist State will be impossible. Therefore it may be taken as certain that after the conquest of Parliament by the proletariat, the formation of a child’s mind on that model will be prevented by every means within the power of the Government. Children will not be taught to ask God to bless the squire and his relations and keep us in our proper stations, nor will they be brought up in such a way that it will seem natural to them to praise God because he makes them eat whilst others starve, and sing while others do lament. If teachers are caught inculcating that attitude they will be sacked: if nurses, their certificates will be cancelled, and jobs found for them that do not involve intercourse with young children. Victorian parents will share the fate of Shelley. Adults must think what they please subject to their being locked up as lunatics if they think too unsocially; but on points that are structural in the social edifice, constitutional points as we call them, no quarter will be given in infant schools. The child’s up-to-date second nature will be an official second nature, just as the obsolete second nature inculcated at our public schools and universities is at present.

When the child has learnt its social creed and catechism, and can read, write, reckon, and use its hands: in short, when it is qualified to make its way about in modern cities and do ordinary useful work, it had better be left to find out for itself what is good for it in the direction of higher cultivation. If it is a Newton or a Shakespear it will learn the calculus or the art of the theatre without having them shoved down its throat: all that is necessary is that it should have access to books, teachers, and theatres. If its mind does not want to be highly cultivated, its mind should be let alone on the ground that its mind knows best what is good for it. Mentally, fallow is as important as seedtime. Even bodies can be exhausted by overcultivation. Trying to make people champion athletes indiscriminately is as idiotic as trying to make them Ireland Scholars indiscriminately. There is no reason to expect that Socialist rule will be more idiotic than the rule which has produced Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and Squeers.

82

SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES

How far a Socialist State will tolerate a Church in our sense at all is a pretty question. The quarrel between Church and State is an old one. In speculating on it we must for the moment leave our personal churchgoings and persuasions out of account, and try to look at the question from the outside as we look at the religions of the east; or, to put it bookishly, objectively, not subjectively. At present, if a woman opens a consulting room in Bond Street, and sits there in strange robes professing to foretell the future by cards or crystals or revelations made to her by spirits, she is prosecuted as a criminal for imposture. But if a man puts on strange robes and opens a church in which he professes to absolve us from the guilt of our misdeeds, to hold the keys of heaven and hell, to guarantee that what he looses or binds on earth shall be loosed and bound in heaven, to alleviate the lot of souls in purgatory, to speak with the voice of God, and to dictate what is sin and what is not to all the world (pretensions which, if you look at them objectively, are far more extravagant and dangerous than those of the poor sorceress with her cards and tea leaves and crystals), the police treat him with great respect; and nobody dreams of prosecuting him as an outrageous impostor. The objective explanation of his immunity is that a great many people do not think him an impostor: they believe devoutly that he can do all these things that he pretends to do; and this enables him and his fellow priests to organize themselves into a powerful and rich body calling itself The Church, supported by the money, the votes, and the resolution to die in its defence, of millions of citizens. The priest can not only defy the police as the common sorceress cannot: he has only to convince a sufficient number of people of his divine mission to thrust the Government aside; assume all its functions except the dirty work that he does not care to soil his hands with and therefore leaves to “the secular arm”; take on himself powers of life and death, salvation and damnation; dictate what we shall all read and think; and place in every family an officer to regulate our lives in every particular according to his notions of right and wrong.

This is not a fancy picture. History tells us of an emperor crawling on his knees through the snow and lying there all night supplicating pardon from the head of a Church, and of a king of England flogging himself in the cathedral where a priest had been murdered at his suggestion. Citizens have been stripped of all their possessions, tortured, mutilated, burned alive, by priests whose wrath did not spare even the dead in their graves, whilst the secular rulers of the land were forced, against their own interest and better sense, to abet them in their furious fanaticism.

You may say that this was far off or long ago; that I am raking up old tales of Canossa, of Canterbury in the middle ages, of Spain in the fifteenth century, of Orange bogies like Bloody Mary and Torquemada; that such things have not been done in England since the British parliamentary government cut off Archbishop Laud’s head for doing them; and that popes are now in greater danger of being imprisoned, and priests and monks of being exiled, by emperors and republicans alike, than statesmen of being excommunicated. You may add that the British State burnt women alive for coining and for rebellion, and pressed men to death under heavy weights for refusing for their wives’ and children’s sake to plead to charges of felony, long after priests had dropped such methods of dealing with heretics.

But even if women were still burnt at the stake as ruthlessly as negroes are today by lynching mobs in America, there would still be a struggle between Church and State as to which of them had the right and power to burn. Who is to be allowed to exercise the great powers that the Government of a modern civilized State must possess if its civilization is to endure? The kings have subjugated the barons; the parliaments have subjugated the kings; democracy has been subjugated by plutocracy; and plutocracy is blindly provoking the subjugated Demos to set up the proletarian State and make an end of Capitalist Oligarchy. But there is a rival power which has persisted and will persist through all these changes; and that is Theocracy, the power of priests (sometimes called parsons) organized into Churches professing to derive their authority from God. Crushed in one form it arises in another. When it was organized as the Church of Rome its abuses provoked the Reformation in England and Northern Europe, and in France the wrath of Voltaire and the French revolution. In both cases it was disarmed until its power to overrule the State was broken, and it became a mere tool of Plutocracy.

But note what followed. The reaction against the priests went so far in Britain, Switzerland, Holland, and America that at the cry of No Popery every Roman Catholic trembled for his house and every priest for his life. Yet under Laud and the Star Chamber in England, and Calvin in Geneva, Theocracy was stronger than ever; for Calvin outpoped all the popes, and John Knox in Scotland made her princes tremble as no pope had ever done. But perhaps you will say again “This was long ago: we have advanced since them”. So you have always been told; but look at the facts within my own recollection. Among my contemporaries I can remember Brigham Young, President Kruger, and Mrs Eddy. Joseph Smith, Junior, was martyred only twelve years before I was born. You may never have heard of Joseph; but I assure you his career was in many respects, up to the date of his martyrdom, curiously like that of Mahomet, the obscure Arab camel driver whose followers conquered half the world, and are still making the position of the British Empire in Asia very difficult. Joseph claimed direct revelation from God, and set up a Theocracy which was carried on by Brigham Young, a Mormon Moses, one of the ablest rulers on record, until the secular Government of the United States became convinced that Mormon Theocracy was not compatible with American Democracy, and took advantage of the popular prejudice against its “plurality of wives” (polygamy) to smash it. It is by no means dead yet; but for the moment its teeth, which were sharp, are drawn; and its place in the struggle is occupied by The Church of Christ Scientist, founded by an American lady (who might have been yourself) named Mrs Eddy. I often pass two handsome churches of hers in London; and for all I know there may be others that are out of my beat there. Now unless you happen to be a Mormon or a Christian Scientist, it is probable that you think about Mrs Eddy exactly as a Roman lady in the second century a.d. thought about the mother of Christ, and about Joseph Smith as an English lady in the Middle Ages thought about “the accurst Mahound” You may be right or you may be wrong; but for all you know Mrs Eddy a thousand years hence may be worshipped as the Divine Woman by millions of civilized people, and Joseph Smith may be to millions more what Mahomet now is to Islam. You never can tell. People begin by saying “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” and end by saying “Behold the Lamb of God!”

The secular Governments, or States, of the future, like those of the present and past, will find themselves repeatedly up against the pretensions of Churches, new and old, to exercise, as Theocracies, powers and privileges which no secular Government now claims. The trouble becomes serious when a new Church attempts to introduce new political or social institutions, or to revive obsolete ones. Joseph Smith was allowed to represent himself as having been directed by an angel to a place where a continuation of the Bible, inscribed on gold plates, was buried in the earth, and as having direct and, if necessary, daily revelations from God which enabled him to act as an infallible lawgiver. When he found plenty of able business women and men to believe him, the Government of the United States held that their belief was their own business and within their own rights as long as Joseph’s laws harmonized with the State laws. But when Joseph revived Solomonic polygamy the monogamic secular Government had to cross swords with him. Not for many years did it get the upper hand; and its adversary is not dead yet.

Mrs Eddy did the opposite: she did not introduce a new institution; but she challenged one of the standing institutions of the secular State. The secular State prescribed pathogenic inoculations as preventives of disease, and bottles of medicine and surgical operations, administered and performed by its registered doctors and surgeons, as cures; and anyone who left a child or an invalid for whom she was responsible undoctored was punished severely for criminal neglect. Some governments refused to admit uninoculated persons into their territories. Mrs Eddy revived the practice prescribed by St James in the New Testament, instructing her disciples to have nothing to do with bottles and inoculations; and immediately the secular government was at war with Christian Science and began to persecute its healers.

This case is interesting because it illustrates the fact that new Churches sometimes capture the secular government by denying that they are Churches. The conflict between Mrs Eddy and the secular governments was really a conflict between the Church of Christ Scientist and the new Church of Jenner and Pasteur Scientists, which has the secular governments in its pocket exactly as the Church of Rome had Charlemagne. It also incidentally illustrates the tendency of all Churches to institute certain rites to signalize the reception of children and converts into the Church. The Jews prescribe a surgical operation, fortunately not serious nor harmful. The Christian Churches prescribe water baptism and anointing: also quite harmless. The babies object vociferously; but as they neither foresee the rite nor remember it they are none the worse. But the inoculations of the modern Churches which profess Science, with their lists of miracles, their biographies of their saints, their ruthless persecutions, their threats of dreadful plagues and horrible torments if they are dis-obeyed, their claims to hold the keys of mortal life and death, their sacrifices and divinations, their demands for exemption from all moral law in their researches and all legal responsibility in their clinical practice, leave the pretensions of the avowed priests and prophets nowhere, are dangerous and sometimes deadly; and it is round this disguised Church that the persecutions and fanaticisms of today rage. There is very little danger of a British Parliament persecuting in the name of Christ, and none at all of its persecuting in the name of Mahomet in the west; but it has persecuted cruelly for a century in the name of Jenner; and there is a very serious danger of its persecuting the general public as it now persecutes soldiers in the name of Pasteur, whose portrait is already on the postage stamps of the resolutely secularist (as it imagines) French Republic. In the broadest thoroughfare of fashionable London we have erected a startling brazen image of the famous Pasteurite surgeon Lord Lister, who, when the present age of faith in scientific miracles has passed, will probably be described as a high priest who substituted carbolic acid for holy water and consecrated oil as a magic cure for festering wounds. His methods are no longer in fashion in the hospitals; and he has been left far behind as a theorist; but when the centenary of his birth was celebrated in 1927, the stories of his miracles, told with boundless credulity and technical ignorance in all the newspapers, shewed that he was really being worshipped as a saint.

From this, I invite you to note how deceptive history may be. The continual springing up of new Churches has always forced secular governments to make and administer laws to deal with them, because, though some of them are reasonable and respectable enough to be left alone, and others are too strongly represented in Parliament and in the electorate to be safely interfered with, a good many of which you have never heard defy the laws as to personal decency and violate the tables of consanguinity to such an extent that if the authorities did not suppress them the people would lynch them. That is why tribunals like the Inquisition and the Star Chamber had to be set up to bring them to justice. But as these were not really secular tribunals, being in fact instruments of rival Churches, their powers were abused, the new prophets and their followers being restrained or punished, not as offenders against the secular law, but as heretics: that is, as dissenters from the Church which had gained control of the secular government: the Church of Rome in the case of the Inquisition, and the Church of England in the case of the Star Chamber.

The difficulty, you see, is that though there is a continual rivalry between Churches and States for the powers of government, yet the States do not disentangle themselves from the Churches, because the members of the secular parliaments and Cabinets are all Churchmen of one sort or another. In England this muddle is illustrated by the ridiculous fact that the bishops of the Church of England have seats as such in the House of Lords whilst the clergy are excluded as such from the House of Commons. The Parliaments are the rivals of the Churches and yet become their instruments; so that the struggle between them is rather as to whether the Churches shall exercise power directly, calling in the secular arm merely to enforce their decisions without question, or whether they shall be mere constituents of the Parliaments like any other society of citizens, leaving the ultimate decisions to the State. If, however, any particular Church is powerful enough to make it a condition of admission to Parliament, or of occupation of the throne or the judicial bench, or of employment in the public services or the professions, that the postulant shall be one of its members, that Church will be in practice, if not in theory, stronger than it could be as a Theocracy ruling independently of the secular State. This power was actually achieved by the Church of England; but it broke down because the English people would not remain in one Church. They broke away from the Church of England in all directions, and formed Free Churches. One of these, called the Society of Friends (popularly called Quakers), carried its repudiation of Church of England ecclesiasticism to the length of denouncing priests as impostors, set prayers as an insult to God (“addressing God in another man’s words”), and church buildings as “steeple houses”; yet this body, by sheer force of character, came out of a savage persecution the most respected and politically influential of religious forces in the country. When the Free Churches could no longer be kept out of Parliament, and the Church of England could not be induced to grant any of them a special privilege, there was nothing for it but to admit everybody who was a Christian Deist of any denomination. The line was still drawn at Jews and Atheists; but the Jews soon made their way in; and finally a famous Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, broke down the last barrier to the House of Commons by forcing the House to accept, instead of the Deist oath, a form of affirmation which relieved Atheists from the necessity of perjuring themselves before taking their seats. We are now accustomed to Jewish Prime Ministers; and we do not know whether our Gentile Prime Ministers are Atheists or not, because it never occurs to us to ask the question. The King alone remains bound by a coronation oath which obliges him to repudiate the Church of many of his subjects, though he has to maintain that Church and several others, some not even Christian, in parts of the Empire where the alternative would be no Church at all.

When Parliament is open to all the Churches, including the Atheist Churches (for the Positivist Societies, the Ethical Societies, the Agnostics, the Materialists, the Darwinian Natural Selectionists, the Creative Evolutionists, and even the Pantheists are all infidels and Atheists from the strict Evangelical or Fundamentalist point of view), it becomes impossible to attach religious rites to our institutions, because none of the Churches will consent to make any rites but their own legally obligatory. Parliament is therefore compelled to provide purely civil formalities as substitutes for religious services in the naming of children, in marriage, and in the disposal of the dead. Today the civil registrar will marry you and name your children as legally as an archbishop or a cardinal; and when there is a death in the family you can have the body cremated either with any sort of ceremony you please or no ceremony at all except the registration of the death after certification of its cause by a registered doctor.

As, in addition, you need not now pay Church rates unless you want to, we have arrived at a point at which, from one end of our lives to the other, we are not compelled by law to pay a penny to the priest unless we are country landlords, nor attend a religious service, nor concern ourselves in any way with religion in the popular sense of the word. Compulsion by public opinion, or by our employers or landlords, is, as we have seen, another matter; but here we are dealing only with State compulsion. Delivered from all this, we are left face to face with a body of beliefs calling itself Science, now more Catholic than any of the avowed Churches ever succeeded in being (for it has gone right round the world), demanding, and in some countries obtaining, compulsory inoculation for children and soldiers and immigrants, compulsory castration for dysgenic adults, compulsory segregation and tutelage for “mental defectives”, compulsory sanitation for our houses, and hygienic spacing and placing for our cities, with other compulsions of which the older Churches never dreamt, at the behest of doctors and “men of science”. In England we are still too much in the grip of the old ways to have done either our best or our worst in this direction; but if you care to know what Parliaments are capable of when they have ceased to believe what oldfashioned priests tell them and lavish all their natural childish credulity on professors of Science you must study the statute books of the American State Legislatures, the “crowned republics” of our own Dominions, and the new democracies of South America and Eastern Europe. When all the States are captured by the proletariat in the names of Freedom and Equality, the cry may arise that the little finger of Medical Research (calling itself Science) is thicker than the loins of Religion.

Now what made the oldfashioned religion so powerful was that at its best (meaning in the hands of its best believers) there was much positive good in it, and much comfort for those who could not bear the cruelty of nature without some explanation of life that carried with it an assurance that righteousness and mercy will have the last word. This is the power of Science also: it, too, at its best has done enormous positive good; and it also at its highest flight gives a meaning to life which is full of encouragement, exultation, and intense interest. You may yourself be greatly concerned as to whether the old or the new explanation is the true one; but looking at it objectively you must put aside the question of absolute truth, and simply observe and accept the fact that the nation is made up of a relatively small number of religious or scientific zealots, a huge mass of people who do not bother about the business at all, their sole notion of religion and morality being to do as other people in their class do, and a good many Betwixt-and-Betweens. The neutrals are in one sense the important people, because any creed may be imposed on them by inculcation during infancy, whereas the believers and unbelievers who think for themselves will let themselves be burnt alive rather than conform to a creed imposed on them by any power except their own consciences. It is over the inculcation, involving the creation of that official second nature which we discussed in the preceding chapter, that the State finds itself at loggerheads with the Churches which have not captured it.

Take a typical example or two. If any society of adults, calling itself a Church or not, preaches the old doctrine of the resurrection of the body at a great Last Judgment of all mankind, there is no likelihood of the municipality of a crowded city objecting. But if a survival of the childish idea that a body can be preserved for resurrection by putting it into a box and burying it in the earth, whereas reducing it to ashes in two hours in a cremation furnace renders its resurrection impossible, leads any sect or Church or individual to preach and practise intramural interment as a religious duty, then it is pretty certain that the municipality will not only keep such preaching out of its schools, but see to it that the children are taught to regard cremation as the proper way of disposing of the dead in towns, and forcibly prevent intramural interment whether pious parents approve of it or not.

If a Church, holding that animals are set apart from human beings by having no souls, and were created for the use of mankind and not for their own sakes, teaches that animals have no rights, and women and men no duties to them, their teaching on that point will be excluded from the schools and their members prosecuted for cruelty to animals by the secular authority.

If another Church wants to set up an abattoir in which animals will be killed in a comparatively cruel manner instead of by a humane killer in the municipal abattoir, it will not be allowed to do it nor to teach children that it ought to be done, unless, indeed, it commands votes enough to control the municipality to that extent; and if its members refuse to eat humanely slaughtered meat they will have to advance, like me, to vegetarianism.

When the question is raised, as it will be sooner or later, of the reservation of our cathedrals for the sermons of one particular Church, it will not be settled on the assumption that any one Church has a monopoly of religious truth. It is settled at present on the Elizabethan assumption that the services of the Church of England ought to please everybody; and it is quite possible that if the services of the Church of England were purified from its grosser sectarian superstitions, and a form of service arrived at containing nothing offensive to anyone desiring the consolation or stimulus of a religious ritual, the State might very well reserve the cathedrals for that form of service exclusively, provided that, as at present, the building were available most of the time for free private meditation and prayer. (You may not have realized that any Jew, any Mahometan, any Agnostic, any woman of any creed or no creed, may use our cathedrals daily to “make her soul” between the services.) To throw open the cathedrals to the rituals of all the Churches is a physical impossibility. To sell them on capitalist principles to the highest bidders to do what they like with is a moral impossibility for the State, though the Church has sold churches often enough. To simply make of them show places like Stonehenge, and charge for admission, as the Church of England sometimes does in the choir, would destroy their value for those who cannot worship without the aid of a ritual.

There is also the Russian plan of the State taking formal possession of the material property of the national Church, and then letting it go on as before, with the quaint difference that the statesmen and officials, instead of posing as devout Churchmen, sincerely or not, as in England, solemnly warn the people that the whole business is a superstitious mummery got up to keep them in submissive slavery by doping them with promises of bliss after death if only they will suffer poverty and slavery patiently before it. This, however, cannot last. It is only the reaction of the victorious proletariat against the previous unholy alliance of the Church with their former oppressors. It is mere anti-clericalism; and when clericalism as we know it disappears, and Churches can maintain themselves only as Churches of the people and not as spiritual fortresses of Capitalism, the anti-clerical reaction will pass away. The Russian Government knows that a purely negative attitude towards religion is politically impossible; accordingly, it teaches the children a new creed called Marxism, of which more presently. Even in the first flush of the reaction the Soviet was more tolerant than we were when our hour came to revolt. We frankly robbed the Church of all it possessed and gave the plunder to the landlords. Long after that we deliberately cut off our Archbishop’s head. Certainly the Soviet made it quite clear to the Russian archbishop that if he did not make up his mind to accept the fact of the revolution and give to the Soviet the allegiance he had formerly given to the Tsar, he would be shot. But when he very sensibly and properly made up his mind accordingly, he was released, and is now presumably pontificating much more freely than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

So far, I have dealt with the Churches objectively and not with religion subjectively. It is an old saying: the nearer the Church the farther from God. But we must cross the line just for a paragraph or two. A live religion alone can nerve women to overcome their dread of any great social change, and to face that extraction of dead religions and dead parts of religions which is as necessary as the extraction of dead or decaying teeth. All courage is religious: without religion we are cowards. Men, because they have been specialized for fighting and hunting whilst women, as the child-bearers, have had to be protected from such risks, have got into the way of accepting the ferocities of war and the daring emulations of sportsmanship as substitutes for courage; and they have imposed that fraud to some extent on women. But women know instinctively, even when they are echoing male glory stuff, that communities live not by slaughter and by daring death, but by creating life and nursing it to its highest possibilities. When Ibsen said that the hope of the world lay in the women and the workers he was neither a sentimentalist nor a demagogue. You cannot have read this far (unless you have skipped recklessly) without discovering that I know as well as Ibsen did, or as you do, that women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death. But the homicidal heroes are often abject cowards in the face of new ideas, and veritable Weary Willies when they are asked to think. Their heroism is politically mischievous and useless. Knowing instinctively that if they thought about what they do they might find themselves unable to do it, they are afraid to think. That is why the heroine has to think for them, even to the extent of often having no time left to think for herself. She needs more and not less courage than a man; and this she must get from a creed that will bear thinking of without becoming incredible.

Let me then assume that you have a religion, and that the most important question you have to ask about Socialism is whether it will be hostile to that religion. The reply is quite simple. If your religion requires that incomes shall be unequal, Socialism will do all it can to persecute it out of existence, and will treat you much as the government of British India treated the Thugs in 1830. If your religion is compatible with equality of income, there is no reason on earth to fear that a Socialist Government will treat it or you any worse than any other sort of government would; and it would certainly save you from the private persecution, enforced by threats of loss of employment, to which you are subject under Capitalism today, if you are in the employment of a bigot.

There is, however, a danger against which you should be on your guard. Socialism may be preached, not as a far-reaching economic reform, but as a new Church founded on a new revelation of the will of God made by a new prophet. It actually is so preached at present. Do not be misled by the fact that the missionaries of Church Socialism do not use the word God, nor call their organization a Church, nor decorate their meeting-places with steeples. They preach an inevitable, final, supreme category in the order of the universe in which all the contradictions of the earlier and lower categories will be reconciled. They do not speak, except in derision, of the Holy Ghost or the Paraclete; but they preach the Hegelian Dialectic. Their prophet is named neither Jesus nor Mahomet nor Luther nor Augustine nor Dominic nor Joseph Smith, Junior, nor Mary Baker Glover Eddy, but Karl Marx. They call themselves, not the Catholic Church, but the Third International. Their metaphysical literature begins with the German philosophers Hegel and Feuerbach, and culminates in Das Kapital, the literary masterpiece of Marx, described as “The Bible of the working classes”, inspired, infallible, omniscient. Two of their tenets contradict oneanother as flatly as the first two paragraphs of Article 27 of the Church of England. One is that the evolution of Capitalism into Socialism is predestined, implying that we have nothing to do but sit down and wait for it to occur. This is their version of Salvation by Faith. The other is that it must be effected by a revolution establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. This is their version of Salvation by Works.

The success of the Russian revolution was due to its leadership by Marxist fanatics; but its subsequent mistakes had the same cause. Marxism is not only useless but disastrous as a guide to the practice of government. It gets no nearer to a definition of Socialism than as a Hegelian category in which the contradictions of Capitalism shall be reconciled, and in which political power shall have passed to the proletariat. Germans and Clydeside Scots find spiritual comfort in such abstractions; but they are unintelligible and repulsive to Englishwomen, and could not by themselves qualify anyone, English, Scotch, or German, to manage a whelkstall for five minutes, much less to govern a modern State, as Lenin very soon found out and very frankly confessed.

But Lenin and his successors were not able to extricate the new Russian national State they had set up from this new Russian international (Catholic) Church any more than our Henry II or the Emperor who had come to Canossa were able to extricate the English State and the medieval Empire from the Church of Rome. Nobody can foresee today whether the policy of Russia in any crisis will be determined on secular and national grounds by the Soviet or by the Third International on Marxist grounds. We are facing the Soviet as Queen Elizabeth faced Philip of Spain, willing enough to deal with him as an earthly king, but not as the agent of a Catholic Theocracy. In Russia the State will sooner or later have to break the temporal power of the Marxist Church and take politics out of its hands, exactly as the British and other Protestant States have broken the temporal power of the Roman Church, and been followed much more drastically by the French and Italian States. But until then the Church of Marx, the Third International, will give as much trouble as the Popes did formerly. It will give it in the name of Communism and Socialism, and be resisted not only by Capitalists but by the Communists and Socialists who understand that Communism and Socialism are matters for States and not for Churches to handle. King John was no less Christian than the Pope when he said that no Italian priest should tithe and toll in his dominions; and our Labor leaders can remain convinced Socialists and Communists whilst refusing to stand any foreign or domestic interference from the Third International or to acknowledge the divinity of Marx.

Still, our Protestant repudiation of the authority of the new Marxist Church should not make us forget that if the Marxist Bible cannot be taken as a guide to parliamentary tactics, the same may be said of those very revolutionary documents the Gospels. We do not on that account burn the Gospels and conclude that the preacher of The Sermon on the Mount has nothing to teach us; and neither should we burn Das Kapital and ban Marx as a worthless author whom nobody ought to read. Marx did not get his great reputation for nothing: he was a very great teacher; and the people who have not yet learnt his lessons make most dangerous stateswomen and statesmen. But those who have really learnt from him instead of blindly worshipping him as an infallible prophet are not Marxists any more than Marx himself was a Marxist. I myself was converted to Socialism by Das Kapital; and though I have since had to spend a good deal of time pointing out Marx’s mistakes in abstract economics, his total lack of experience in the responsible management of public affairs, and the unlikeness at close quarters of his typical descriptions of the proletariat to any earthly working woman or of the bourgeoisie to any real lady of property, you may confidently set down those who speak contemptuously of Karl Marx either as pretenders who have never read him or persons incapable of his great mental range. Do not vote for such a person. Do not, however, vote for a Marxist fanatic either, unless you can catch one young enough or acute enough to grow out of Marxism after a little experience, as Lenin did. Marxism, like Mormonism, Fascism, Imperialism, and indeed all the would-be Catholicisms except Socialism and Capitalism, is essentially a call to a new Theocracy. Both Socialism and Capitalism certainly do what they can to obtain credit for representing a divinely appointed order of the universe; but the pressure of facts is too strong for their pretensions: they are forced to present themselves at last as purely secular expedients for securing human welfare, the one advocating equal distribution of income, and the other private property with free contract, as the secret of general prosperity.

83

CURRENT CONFUSIONS

I could go on like this for years; but I think I have now told you enough about Socialism and Capitalism to enable you to follow the struggle between them intelligently. You will find it irritating at first to read the newspapers and listen to the commonplaces of conversation on the subject, knowing all the time that the writers and talkers do not know what they are writing and talking about. The impulse to write to the papers, or intervene in the conversation to set matters right, may be almost irresistible. But it must be resisted, because if you once begin there will be no end to it. You must sit with an air of placid politeness whilst your neighbors, by way of talking politics, denounce the people they do not like as Socialists, Bolshevists, Syndicalists, Anarchists, and Communists on the one side, and Capitalists, Imperialists, Fascists, Reactionaries, and Bourgeois on the other, none of them having an idea of the meaning of these words clear enough to be called without flattery the ghost of a notion. A hundred years ago they would have called one another Jacobins, Radicals, Chartists, Republicans, Infidels, and even, to express the lowest depth of infamy, Co-operators; or, contrariwise, Tories, Tyrants, Bloated Aristocrats, and Fundholders. None of these names hurt now: Jacobins and Chartists are forgotten; republics are the rule and not the exception in Europe as well as in America; Co-operators are as respectable as Quakers; Bloated Aristocracy is the New Pauperism; and the proletariat, with its millions invested in Savings Certificates and Savings Bank deposits, would not at all object to being described as having money “in the funds”, if that expression were still current. But the names in the mouths of the factions mean nothing anyhow. They are mere electioneering vituperation. In France at elections the Opposition posters always exhort the electors to vote against Assassins and Thieves (meaning the Cabinet); and the Government posters “feature” precisely the same epithets, whilst the candidates in their own homes call their pet dogs Bandits when pretending to scold them. It all means nothing. They had much better call each other Asses and Bitches (they sometimes do, by the way), because everyone knows that a man is not an ass nor a woman a bitch, and that calling them so is only a coarse way of insulting them; whereas most people do not know what the words Bolshevik, Anarchist, Communist, and so forth mean, and are too easily frightened into believing that they denote every imaginable extremity of violence and theft, rapine and murder. The Russian word Bolshevik, which has such a frightful sound to us, means literally nothing more than a member of a parliamentary majority; but as an English epithet it is only the political form of Bogey or Blackguard or the popular Bloody, denoting simply somebody or something with whom the speaker disagrees.

But the names we hurl at oneanother are much less confusing than the names we give ourselves. For instance, quite a lot of people, mostly a very amiable mild sort of people, call themselves Communist-Anarchists, which Conservatives interpret as Double-Dyed Scoundrels. This is very much as if they called themselves Roman Catholic Protestants, or Christian Jewesses, or undersized giantesses, or brunette blondes, or married maids, or any other flat contradiction in terms; for Anarchism preaches the obliteration of statute law and the abolition of Governments and States, whilst Communism preaches that all the necessary business of the country shall be done by public bodies and regulated by public law. Nobody could logically be in favor of both all the time. But there is a muddled commonsense in the name for all that. What the Communist-Anarchist really means is that she is willing to be a Communist as to the work and obedience to public law for everybody that is necessary to keep the community healthy and solvent, and that then she wants to be let go her own way. It is her manner of saying that she needs leisure and freedom as well as taskwork and responsibility: in short, as I have heard it expressed, that she does not want to be “a blooming bee”. That is the attitude of all capable women; but to apply the term Communist-Anarchism to it is so confusing, and so often perversely adopted by the kind of muddler who, being against law and public enterprise because she wants to be free, and against freedom because freedom of contracts is a capitalist device for exploiting the proletariat, spends her life in obstructing both Socialism and Capitalism and never getting anywhere, that, on the whole, I should not call myself a Communist-Anarchist if I were you.

The truth is, we live in a Tower of Babel where a confusion of names prevents us from finishing the social edifice. The Roman Catholic who does not know what his Church teaches, the member of the Church of England who would repudiate several of the Thirty-Nine Articles if they were propounded to her without a hint of where they came from, the Liberal who has never heard of the principles of the Manchester School and would not have understood them if she had, and the Tory who is completely innocent of De Quincey’s Logic of Political Economy: that is to say, the vast majority of Catholics, Protestants, Liberals, and Tories, have their counterparts in the Socialists, the Communists, the Syndicalists, the Anarchists, the Laborists, who denounce Capitalism and middle class morality, and are saturated with both all the time. The Intelligent Woman, as she reads the newspapers, must allow for this as best she can. She must not only remember that every professing Socialist is not necessarily a Trade Unionist, and cannot logically be an Anarchist, but is sometimes so little a Socialist that, when entrusted with public business enough to bring her face to face with the Conservative or Liberal leaders she has been denouncing, she will be flattered to find that these eminent persons are quite of her real way of thinking, and vote with them enthusiastically every time.

The name Communist is at the present moment (1927) specially applied to and adopted by those who believe that Capitalism will never be abolished by constitutional parliamentary means in the Fabian manner, but must be overthrown by armed revolution and supplanted by the Muscovite Marxist Church. This is politely called the policy of Direct Action. Conservative Diehards who advocate a forcible usurpation of the government by the capitalists as such call it a _coup d’état_. But a proletarian may be an advocate of Direct Action without being a bit of a Communist. She may believe that the mines should belong to the miners, the railways to the railwaymen, the army to the soldiers, the churches to the clergymen, and the ships to the crews. She may even believe that the houses should belong to the housemaids, especially if she is a housemaid herself. Socialism will not hear of this. It insists that industries shall be owned by the whole community, and regulated in the interests of the consumer (or customer), who must be able to buy at cost price without paying a profit to anybody. A shop, for instance, must not belong to the shop assistants, nor be exploited by them for their profit: it must be run for the benefit of the customers, the shop assistant’s safeguard against finding herself sacrificed to the customer being that she is herself a customer at the other shops, and the customer herself a worker in other establishments. When incomes are equal, and everyone is both a producer and a consumer, the producers and consumers may be trusted to treat each other fairly from self-love if from no more generous motive; but until then, to make any industry the property of the workers in it would be merely to replace the existing idle joint stock shareholders by working shareholders profiteering on a much larger scale, as they would appropriate the rent of their sites and make none of those contributions to a central exchequer for the benefit of the nation that now take place under parliamentary rule. The inequalities of income between, say, miners in the richest mines and farmers on the poorest soils would be monstrous. But I need not plague you with arguments: the arrangement is impossible anyhow; only, as several of the proletarian proposals, and cries of the day, including Trade Unionism, Producers’ Co-operation, Workers’ Control, Peasant Proprietorship, and the cruder misunderstandings of Syndicalism and Socialism, are either tainted or saturated with it to such an extent that it wrecked the proletarian movement in Italy after the war and led to the dictatorship of Signor Mussolini, and as it is often supposed to be part of Socialism, you had better beware of it; for it has many plausible pseudo-socialistic disguises. It is really only Poor Man’s Capitalism, like Poor Man’s Gout.

On their negative side the proletarian Isms are very much alike: they all bring the same accusations against Capitalism; and Capitalism makes no distinction between them because they agree in their hostility to it. But there is all the difference in the world between their positive remedies; and any woman who voted for Syndicalism or Anarchism or Direct Action disguised as Communism indiscriminately under the impression that she was voting for Socialism would be as mistaken as one who voted for Conservatism or Liberalism or Imperialism or the Union Jack or King and Country or Church and State indiscriminately under a general impression that she was voting against Socialism.

And so you have the curious spectacle of our Parliamentary Labor Party, led by Socialists who are all necessarily Communists in principle, and are advocating sweeping extensions of Communism, expelling the so-called Communist Party from its ranks, refusing to appear on the same platforms with its members in public, and being denounced by it as bourgeois reactionaries. It is most confusing until you know; and then you see that the issue just now between the rival proletarian parties in England is not Communism against Socialism: it is constitutional action, or Fabianism as it used to be called, against Direct Action followed by a dictatorship. And as Diehard Capitalism is now sorely tempted to try a British-Fascist _coup d’état_ followed by a dictatorship, as opposed to Liberal constitutional Capitalism, the confusion and disunion are by no means all on the Labor side. The extremists of the Right and those of the Left are both propagandists of impatient disgust with parliament as an institution. There is a Right wing of the Right just as there is a Left wing of the Left; whilst the Constitutional Centre is divided between Capitalism and Socialism. You will need all your wits about you to find out where you are and keep there during the coming changes.

The proletarian party inherits from Trade Unionism the notion that the strike is the classic weapon and the only safeguard of proletarian labor. It is therefore dangerously susceptible to the widespread delusion that if instead of a coal strike here and a railway strike there, a lightning strike of waitresses in a restaurant today, and a lightning strike of match girls in a factory tomorrow, all the workers in all the occupations were to strike simultaneously and sympathetically, Capitalism would be brought to its knees. This is called The General Strike. It is as if the crew of a ship, oppressed by its officers, were advised by a silly-clever cabin boy to sink the ship until all the officers and their friends the passengers were drowned, and then take victorious command of it. The objection that the crew could not sail the ship without navigating officers is superfluous, because there is the conclusive preliminary objection that the crew would be drowned, cabin boy and all, as well as the officers. In a General Strike ashore the productive proletarians would be starved before the employers, capitalists, and parasitic proletarians, because these would have possession of the reserves of spare food. It would be national suicide.