Chapter LV: After a Year of Journalism: an Outbreak of Auto-Obituary 347 (8)

The case of General Dyer was not before the Court. This announcement was a lawless outbreak on the part of Justice McCardie. How much due deliberation there was in Justice McCardie’s utterance and how much instinctive passion may be judged by the fact that General Dyer does not seem to have been punished by the Secretary of State for India at all; his case did not come up to the Secretary of State for India; he was punished for his hasty excessive violence by his own proper military superiors in India. Internal dissension restrained the jury from inflicting excessive and exemplary damages upon Sir C. Sankaran Nair for his careless libel; the damages awarded amounted to five hundred pounds, but it will be very difficult, it will be impossible, to persuade the sore and sensitive, quick and resentful mind of India that Britain has not gone back upon even such clumsy and insufficient apologies and atonements as she had made for Amritsar and its associated sins.

There comes a time in the relationships of nations and peoples, as in the relationships of partners and lovers and married couples, when offences become irrevocable. The breaking point seemed to have been reached by the British in India. The argument is practically over, the negotiations at an end. When in the opening stages of the Great War Ireland was bilked of Home Rule there remained nothing for it, between Britain and Ireland, but a practical separation. Englishmen like myself, who regard the present detachment of Ireland and England as excessive and regrettable, were entangled, in spite of themselves, in that offence; and we were helpless to avert its just and logical consequences. So now with India. It is a sort of treachery to Indians to go on talking liberally to them, to seek their friendship, to attempt co-operations, with Dyer’s impenitent rifles reloaded and our Justice McCardies ready and eager to tear up our poor attempts to make amends.

XLV

THE SPIRIT OF FASCISM: IS THERE ANY GOOD IN IT AT ALL?

12.7.24

During the last few weeks an extraordinary fuss has been made over the brutal murder of one of Signor Mussolini’s most able and honourable opponents. Fascism has been put upon its defence. Weak but distinct sounds of disapproval have come from the more respectable sections of the Italian public. Even the London _Times_ has published leading articles that seem to hint at a faint reluctant perception that the Italian dictator is remotely connected with the bloody and filthy terrorism on which his power rests.

It is, I say, an extraordinary fuss, a remarkable and almost unaccountable outbreak of the public conscience of Europe. Because it is surely a matter of common knowledge that hundreds of people have been beaten and tortured to death by the Fascisti, that innumerable outrages of a peculiarly dirty kind have been committed, that arson, wreckage, and threats are the normal expedients of Italian political life, and that the power of Mussolini has been built up upon the organisation of such violence. These things have been going on for some years in Italy. Ambitious imitators have arisen in France and Germany and Britain. British “Crusaders” have gathered for the blessing of the Duke of York and strange young men in Oxford and Cambridge have braved misunderstanding by wearing badges bearing the challenging initials B. F. Young Italians in black shirts have even been allowed to insult the decent British dead by cocking snooks--or performing whatever the Fascist salutation is--holding out an arm and twiddling the fingers or something of that sort--at the Westminster Cenotaph. In America, however, there does not seem to be much of a Fascist movement. There has been no temptation for America, with the Ku Klux Klan in active operation and a long tradition of lynch law, to adopt the Italian model. But there have been many American expressions of sympathy with Fascism. And then in the full tide of sunny approval just one more little murder occurs--a murder not essentially different from many other Fascist murders--and the world wakes up to the infernal vileness of a thing that has been plainly before its eyes for years.

There never was so remarkable a case of the camel bearing itself bravely up to the very moment of the last straw.

To me this break back from Fascism is astonishing. I am inclined to think that Signor Mussolini found it so too. His prompt repudiation of the crime, his eager search for the body of his butchered antagonist, his sacrifice of valued cronies and close associates seem to show that his rich, emotional, rhetorical nature was very considerably scared. Nitti’s house had been burnt and Nitti driven abroad. No one had protested, except perhaps Nitti. No apology to Nitti has been made by Mussolini, and no apology, no reparation for the stupid, malicious violence shown him, is likely to be made. And now, simply because Matteotti had been more difficult to handle and had got himself rather nastily killed, this uproar! It may be some time before the dictator is really comfortable again about the matter.

I do not propose to speculate here whether the storm will blow itself out and leave Signor Mussolini still on his blood-stained pedestal doing his solemn gestures of good government before the world, or whether we are in sight of the beginning of the end of Fascism. What interests me most is the complex of motives that drives behind Fascism, Ku Klux Klanism, the British Crusaders, and all these romantic attempts to organise ultra-legal tyrannies. The destructive instinct that gives us all a pleasure in smashing plates is plainly there, the natural malice against the unlike or the disturbing is very powerfully present, and the craving to exercise power. The stuff is in all of us, almost ineradicably so. (It betrays itself in this article.) We repress these impulses to a very large extent largely out of a fear of our fellow creatures’ reprisals. But by joining a great society with high and disinterested professions of purpose we can conspire with a certain number of our fellows for a common indulgence of this malignant drive, and we can get some protection from the consequences and establish a real sense of moral justification. Many of us who would never dare to stab a negro in the street because of his offensive contrast with ourselves, or even to push him off the sidewalk if we encountered him alone, can respond to the call for his lynching with a tremulous reassurance. Many an Italian employer who would not dare to face his workers in a crisis about wages will help burn up a Labour Party office with a stout heart.

But it is claimed in the case of all these societies for intimidation and cruelty that the main motive is something higher and better than this. A state of danger, social indiscipline, and slackness is alleged; a failure of the normal processes of law and police. The cruelties and filthy outrages that are the normal activities of these organisations are declared to be the acts of strong men resolute to restore peace, justice, and confidence to a disordered world.

There is something in this plea. It is not to be too lightly dismissed. The condition of Italy before the Fascista movement crystallised out was certainly very bad. The lawlessness of Italian life existed before the Fascists and will outlive them. After the war it expressed itself in terms of Communism; robbing took the name of expropriation, and the natural resentment of human beings at uninteresting and inferior work expressed itself in entirely mischievous strikes. The manifest injustices of the social system were made the plea for a multitude of outrages that did nothing to remedy them. There have been Communist murders and Communist outrages in Italy, though nothing to parallel the extensive systematic terrorism of the Fascista régime. The difference between Communist and Fascist is mainly this, that one conspires and does mischief and cruelty to bring about a state of order and justice that cannot exist, and the other to defend and sustain one that exists only in his imagination.

Moscow and Rome are alike in this, that they embody the rule of a minority conceited enough to believe that they have a clue to the tangled incoherencies of human life, and need only sufficiently terrorise criticism and opposition to achieve a general happiness. Violent revolution and violent reaction are two aspects of one asinine thing, violent uncritical conviction. Neither recognises the enormously tentative quality of human institutions, and the tangled and scarcely explored difficulties in the path of social reconstruction. But they feel these things they will not recognise, these tangles and possible complications, as perverse opposition, and their impatient souls rebel. Your party Communist, like your Fascist, is neither hero nor criminal; he is an ignorant, immodest, impatient fool who wants to grab the glory of inaugurating an epoch that cannot yet possibly begin. The great future of our race will owe little to either of these current nuisances. The maker of that future is the unconvenanted scientific man who works on without hurry and without delay, dissolving problem after problem in the solvent of clear knowledge, insisting on plain speech and free publication, refusing concealment, refusing to conspire and compel, respecting himself completely in his infinite respect for his fellow-men.

At the present level of education in the world, progress is like pushing one’s way through a riot. The underlying fact in all these matters is that the common uneducated man is a violent fool in social and public affairs. He can work in no way better than his quality. He has not sufficient understanding to work in any other way. If there were no Fascism there would be something else of the same sort. The hope of the world lies in a broader and altogether more powerful organisation of education. Only as that develops will the vehement self-righteous and malignant ass abate his mischief in the world.

XLVI

THE RACE CONFLICT: IS IT UNAVOIDABLE?

19.7.24

The action of the United States in setting aside its gentlemanly understanding with Japan in the matter of immigration and excluding the Japanese altogether has greatly exercised the British mind. At this distance it strikes us as an altogether uncivilised thing to do. We believe that for all practical purposes the peace of the Pacific rests on the tripod, America, Britain, Japan; we attached immense importance to the Washington Agreement and the feeling of concord it developed; we abandoned the Anglo-Japanese alliance to American feeling and, after a struggle at home, the threat of the Singapore developments was withdrawn. Our dominant idea was the collaboration, mutual trust, and mutual forbearance of three great civilised Powers. Then, apparently as a move in the dismal party game that still rules American political life, in order to secure California for the Republican Party, Japan is smacked on the face good and hard, and most of this difficult and elaborate work of reassurance is undone.

It is not a question of excluding cheap labour or alien mass immigration; that has been fairly well done for some time. It is an intolerable assertion that individual educated Japanese are unfitted by race and culture for helpful participation in the high civilisation of the Pacific Coast. It implies that Japanese and Americans are for ever incompatible, are for ever two peoples; that for ever on this little planet their destinies are to be worked out parallel or apart--or to mingle only in a bitter conflict for exclusive survival.

These are immensely dangerous implications. It is impossible to believe that they express the real intelligence of the American public in this matter. But they do express a very widely diffused feeling, prevailing especially on the Pacific slope. That same reckless levity of the party politician, which in Britain in the “great days” of Gladstone and Disraeli, made the relations of Russia to Britain a mere party counter, has appealed to that feeling. We are forced to recognise that a great multitude of people in California and elsewhere are at a mental level from which it is possible to contemplate a future of pent-up races and cultures, each living in its own bit of the little planet and forcibly restrained from wandering or expanding beyond its boundaries.

Is such a future possible for mankind? It was, one must admit, a dominant idea in the past. More’s _Utopia_ and most of the old Utopias were closed countries. Japan itself was a completely closed country for several centuries, and no one went into or came out of it. It was Americans who forced the closed door of Japan; they of all peoples have the least reason to complain of the Japanese spill-over into their world. But no country yet tolerates the free movement of peoples. Yet the secular force of human inventiveness fights against this system of pen and barrier.

Our States, our boundaries become intolerably small to the new methods of communication, to the broadening general intelligence. Our economic lives, in spite of tariffs and the most strenuous resistance, spread out to the ends of the earth. Financially the world is one. No peoples on the earth travel and migrate more widely, or would suffer more acutely in mind and spirit from the complete restriction of international movement than the British and Americans--the Americans even more now than the British. But we cannot go thrusting our white faces into the markets of Timbuctoo, the bazaars of Central Asia, and the temples of Osaka, if we refuse to see brown and black and yellow in the street cars of Chicago and London. There is a plain antagonism of ideals here, between a venerable parochial and a new planetary mind. Is it not time for us to sort out our ideas in these matters a little more exactly?

Opinion lies between the absolute exclusionist and the free mixer. Most of us find ourselves somewhere intermediate between these extremes. The case of the exclusionists is based on just these increasing facilities of communication which make others think that at any cost the world must become one united system. This quicker and closer intercourse is intensifying racial clash. It was all very well when only a few foreigners could travel with difficulty to one’s country, but now they come in multitudes, they come to settle, they congest in lumps too solid for assimilation. It is necessary, says the exclusionist, to make the barriers higher and stronger. Yet is this more than a temporary arrest of racial conflict in a world where finance is world-wide and every people has a need, a necessity for the produce of lands unacceptable to it? In a world, too, of increasing hygienic knowledge, in which populations tend to increase and overflow? Is it anything more than the opening phase of a development of an antagonism whose natural end is war?

It seems to me that the forces that make for material world unification, the forces of invention and enlightenment, are now so great, various and subtle that they cannot be defeated. They may be delayed, but in the end they will be stronger than any exclusionist localism. The practical question before mankind is how we are to react to these forces; and the practical alternatives are either a vast cycle of wars and race conflicts, race riots, tyrannies of secret societies, struggles for ascendancy ending perhaps after many centuries of tragedy and wasted opportunity in the complete triumph of some specific culture, or a deliberate attempt to minimise race hostility, devise fair methods of co-operation and work out a mixed and various world society with a code of mutual tolerance and service for the common good.

This is not to be done by ignoring race and racial differences; the natural thought forms, and dispositions and instinctive reactions of northern Europeans and Jews, negroes and whites, Indians and Chinese, vary subtly and profoundly; you can no more ignore differences of race than differences of sex. They are things greatly intensified and supplemented by differences of tradition, training, and conditions, but when all such modifications are eliminated, essential differences remain. Intermarriage provides no remedy but rather a multiplication of types. But a well-directed education can at least restrain a passionate exaggeration of these differences and prevent the antagonisms that arise out of their recognition. Man is by nature a fierce resentful being of excessive desires and facile prejudices, and no society has ever existed or could ever exist without some sort of educational adaptation of this natural savage, some schooling and toning down of his hostile impulses. But the educational necessities of the small and limited past are as nothing to the educational necessities of the present time. If races are to be brought together, and not merely jumbled together or still more dangerously held apart, an educational effort has to be made on an altogether unprecedented scale.

An educational effort on an altogether unprecedented scale; that, I take it, is the only way of escape from the chancy, disorderly, restricted, and tragic life men are living now. The question of race, like every other great question in human affairs so soon as we follow it up, leads us to the school--no! it does not bring us to the school as we know it, but to the site of the school, the crying blank for a school that has yet to be. Get on with a school and college system commensurate with the enormous needs and dangers of this new age of world communication, or blunder and suffer. Teach everyone born into the world the history of mankind, the significance of racial differences, expand every individual imagination to the conception of the racial life as a great adventure, and to some sense of what it may achieve in the days to come. Replace the suspicious conservatism of ignorance by the curiosity and generosity of wide vision. These are enormous demands.

No community has yet spread more than the thinnest veneer of teaching over its whole population. But the alternative to doing so is to have the machinery and methods of the new age used to arm and intensify the passions of the old. A world no better educated than this will never be very much better than this; it will be a world of race mobs and lynchings, of pogroms and race brigandage, of furious struggles for disputed territories, and wars and wars and wars. If they continue upon the present lines of narrow patriotism, of race pressure and race exclusion, I do not see how a war between Japan and the United States can be avoided for very many years. And until they have made a great educational effort I do not see how they can get away from their present lines of action.

XLVII

THE SCHOOLS OF A NEW AGE: A FORECAST

26.7.24

In these articles I have been harping continuously on the vast disorder, the uncertainty and waste of the world spectacle to-day; and I have been clamouring for more education, for much more education, for a more strenuous and devoted educational effort.

Comments and replies, a quite copious correspondence, have brought home to me two things very plainly. One is the deep resentment aroused in many minds by the statement of what is to me an obvious fact, the littleness, imperfection and unsatisfactoriness and transitoriness of all contemporary life. Manifestly, they think Fifth Avenue in a state of traffic congestion, Ascot week, charity balls, Palm Beach, the opening of Parliament, the movie industry, and an American Presidential election are all right. Or at least right enough to live with pleasantly.

They think me a dismal and cantankerous hunks for wanting, as I seem to them to do, to shatter and reconstruct a world which sustains such delightful things. They do not realise that this world is being shattered anyhow, and will not be reconstructed by any automatic process. They want this world left as it is and not “messed about with” by innovating people. They have a will to be satisfied, an obstinate will for contentment. Mixed up with that, and probably fundamental to it, is a profound disbelief in the power of men wilfully to alter their conditions and determine their collective fate.

Now if I have any claim to distinction among journalists it is that I do not share that widespread scepticism and fatalism. I do not let the fact that some of us, myself included, are having an undeservedly good time hide the fact that the system, such as it is, is wasteful, that it cripples the possibilities of nearly everyone, and is, to millions of people, actively distressful and cruel.

I belong to a small but growing minority which believes that man has come to such a phase of knowledge and power that he is already able and may very soon be willing to put a bit between the teeth of the monster of wild change that is now trampling this world. We believe that human society could be and presently will be deliberately reconstructed more boldly, more elaborately, and with more definite intention, upon a scale commensurate with the greatness of modern mechanism and to an extent that will enable it to anticipate and discipline what are now the incalculable forces of change. And our faith is that the way to this expansion of life, this release from chance, lies through Universities and schools, through a universal education of the entire population of the world and through a universal and sustained thought process keeping pace with ever-changing necessities.

We are all democratic Socialists in so far as we regard it as the general concern to maintain order and law, to secure the common needs of everyone by carrying on the exploitation of natural wealth and the production and distribution of staple necessities for the universal and not for particular profit, and to provide education and health services for all; but we are aristocratic individualists in demanding world-wide freedom of movement for all, the utmost scope for self-realisation, and the freest utterance and hearing for every creative and innovating spirit--for everyone indeed who may possibly be creative. We see, as the only way to the sort of human life we desire, an immense development of the reorganisation of every sort of research and of the whole educational system of the world.

A rough parallelism of things mechanical and things mental will put the case as we see it. In the last two centuries the means of transport has developed from the stage coach and sailing ship to the automobile, express train, great liner, and aeroplane; there has been much more than a tenfold increase in speed and a corresponding increase in security, versatility, and comfort. Our mechanical power and mechanical productivity have increased in far greater proportion. There has been an educational advance also, but it has not kept pace with this. More people in the country are educated now, certain elements of education, reading and writing, have been spread very widely, but the education of a fully educated man is not conspicuously better than it was two hundred years ago, and education has not spread, as railways and factories have spread from the Atlantic countries, all over the earth.

We believe that we are now in the dawn of a phase of educational thrust, corresponding to the mechanical thrust of a century ago. That former thrust redistributed the population of every country it affected, created new towns, altered the build and lay-out of every town it touched, created new suburban systems, and revolutionised the visible aspect of life. The new thrust will reconstruct the scattered and confused mental life of the age, will create mental nuclei everywhere, link up the whole countryside to new and more powerful mental centres. I doubt whether at present, apart from school children, one person in a hundred in either Europe or America could be described as a mental worker; we foretell a time when something like one in eight or one in five will be definitely employed in work that is primarily mental, either as student, as teacher, as scientific investigator, as artist or writer.

In every village there will be a school, a reading-room, a theatre, closely associated with the health service and recreation of the place. It will be the central architectural fact of the place, the group of buildings about which the homes will cluster. In every town there will be the district schools and the great high school, the art studios, the theatres, the laboratories. Every considerable town will have a University as its chief expression and its crowning glory. The agricultural and industrial life of the land will be closely linked to the technical research of the colleges; they will go thither for advice and direction. The business and financial system will no longer be secret and private, a system of competitive conspiracies, but it will be working in close touch with the general scientific life; the banker will be a professor of economics, the iron-master will be a metallurgist. That is the order of the world we desire, and which we foresee through our hopes. That is the world that will replace the system of stampedes, scrambles, riots, and traffic jams in which we live to-day.

XLVIII

THE IMPUDENCE OF FLAGS: OUR POWER RESOURCES AND MY ELEPHANTS, WHALES,
AND GORILLAS

2.8.24

The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley is open to all sorts of criticism, and is occasionally quite absurd, but it contrives to be entertaining. Many of us dislike the Kipling quality and the strong, unpleasant flavour of Imperial Preference that hang about it. I have reviled its commercialism; its relative disregard of educational duties and responsibilities; its suggestion of imperial self-sufficiency. But all sorts of conferences are meeting at Wembley, and occasionally a strong breath of human common sense dispels for a time the stuffy, foggy conceit of our recent and transitory Empire. Wembley, in spite of itself, becomes international and contributes to the project of a new world.

The British Electrical and Associated Trades have been holding a most enlightening and hopeful conference on the power resources of the world--not of the Empire, be it noted, but of the world. Prominent among the speakers at the opening were the secretary of the United States Federal Power Commission, the president of the Italian Electrical Committee, and other “outsiders.” A real attempt to see the world as one economic whole has been made. A frank admission of the need for organised world unity and world co-operation underlies the activities of this particular gathering.

The President of the Conference was the Prince of Wales. He made a very remarkable speech. Three or four years ago I made a number of people extremely indignant by criticising the world tour of the Prince. I complained that his speeches and proceedings seemed to ignore the world situation and to intensify the imperialist egotism of the narrower sort of English throughout the world. He did seem to me then to be behaving as so many Army and Indian Civil Service people and so forth still behave, as if the British Empire was a clique of Anglican communities aloof from the common interests of mankind.

Quite a number of worthy persons seemed to think that a typical common Englishman like myself had no right to pass a judgment upon a young man, a quarter of a century his junior, simply because that young man happened to be the Heir Apparent. They wanted him to be treated as divine, above politics. But that sort of thing is not in the English tradition. The British Royal Family is not divine; it cannot keep out of politics if it is to function at all, because it has constantly to speak and act for the Empire as a whole; and it is a matter of very great importance that the Prince should show himself as he has now shown himself, growing in political wisdom and sensible of the wider vision of human unity that opens before mankind. Here, for example, is a sentence from his speech in which he sinks the Prince altogether, lost in that much nobler thing, the creative citizen of the world:

“Finance, science and research are universal, but the utilisation of the results derived from these activities is not universal, and in this disparity lies one of the greatest obstacles to progress.”

And again: “You have before you, in the reports submitted to the World Power Conference, the raw material for a survey of the power resources of the world; you can now explore many countries which have hitherto been veiled in mystery, and assess at their true value the possibilities of an immense industrial development in many of them; you may, from this material, erect the structure which will go beyond the confines of one country, or group of countries, and include all those parts of the world where man can hope to prosper. International co-operation may emerge from the realm of the ideal into the realm of practical utilisation as the result of your deliberations, and I sincerely trust that full success will attend them.”

I doubt if any royal personage has ever so distinctly repudiated that narrow particularism to the realm, to which royalty is supposed to be distinctly pledged. This is hoisting the flag of the world-State over all the Imperial flags that wave from the Wembley buildings as plainly and frankly as, considering all things, it can be done--at Wembley.

In very many ways the last half-year has been a year of mental and moral recovery in Europe. A year ago, when one wrote of nationalism as a dangerous and dividing sentiment, of national sovereignty as a nuisance, of the pre-emption of this or that area of the world’s surface and of this or that supply of necessary national material in the interests of the exploiters under this or that flag as a method of crippling and wasting the whole economic life of mankind, one felt that one was writing and thinking in an almost hopeless minority. All the world seemed to have gone nationalist and exclusive. One felt one shouted to an entirely inattentive preoccupied crowd under a stormy sky against which nothing was bright but the national and Imperial flags. Flags were supreme. Now it is as if the sun of reason shone everywhere, and the sundering flags visibly droop in that sunlight.

There are moments when it would seem that after all man is a reasonable creature. The accumulation of considerations that is now plainly driving men, in spite of ancient traditions and prejudices, towards an organised cosmopolitanism is very great. These considerations come in on us from all sides. While one is refusing to be anything but an isolated patriot on this count, one is being undermined almost unawares upon another. Many of us who will hear of no super-Government to save us from war, nor of any properly equipped and provided super-Court to settle international disputes, find ourselves presently confronted by the problem of epidemics and consenting to the idea of supernational controls from the health point of view. The postal union, which the Great War strained but has not destroyed, is after all only the thin framework of a much more comprehensive union of communications. When I read the speech of the Prince of Wales at the World Power Conference I was at once reminded of the preachings and efforts of that wonderful old man, David Lubin, the Israelite who set up the International Institute of Agriculture. The chief objective of this “Institute” was a contemporary survey with a view to a proper distribution of the world’s staple productions. Shortages were to be anticipated and headed off; over-production was to be restrained. And arising out of this main idea was Lubin’s secondary project, the placing of all the shipping of the world and all the great international railway lines--he lived before air transport seemed a probability--under one world authority which would fix freights as we fix postal charges. This Power Conference has been talking pure Lubinism about the world distribution of power.

I suppose it is because I had a biological training that I find one of the most attractive arguments for world unity, and the suppression of flag-worship, in the need of protecting whales from ourselves and ourselves from bacteria. The dwindling world fauna of this planet is in urgent need of international game laws and a supernational game-keeper. Species of whales are being exterminated because the ocean is no man’s land, and if one State restrains its whalers from excessive wasteful slaughter they can shelter their activities beneath some less scrupulous flag. Diseases cannot be stamped out of the world by systematic sanitation while one affected Power sees fit to exercise its sovereign right to remain filthy. And any species of birds or beasts that lives under a careless flag may be exterminated by the sportsman and no one have a right to protest. The gorilla, they say, is going fast, and the African elephant. These marvels of life, these strange and wonderful beings of whose vitality and impulses we know so little, are being killed because they are insufficiently protected. Their chief slaughterers are patriotic collectors, and the fewer the survivors the hotter is the competition for specimens to adorn their beastly national collections. Yet the gorilla belongs not to the flag that claims its habitat but to all mankind. It belongs to me, to any man in Canada or in Texas, as much as it does to any West African or any Belgian. But there is no world control to protect these grotesque and marvellous creatures for us and for our children’s children. They will go--one more vivid item in the vast wastage of animal, vegetable and mineral wealth that the scrambling insufficiency of mere flag rule involves. For them and for a thousand vital treasures the world government may come too late. Yet that it is coming rapidly and surely, the words and the spirit of the discourse of the Prince of Wales, in that very temple of British Imperial exclusiveness, the Wembley Empire Exhibition, bear witness. Wembley was to have inaugurated Imperial Preference, but it is really Imperial Preference lying in state. I wonder how many years it will be before we have a World Exhibition to bring home to us the need for free trade, free speech, and free movement everywhere under unified world controls.

XLIX

HAS COMMUNISM A FUTURE? THE POSSIBILITY OF A SOCIALIST RENASCENCE

9.8.24

I have a real affection for Communists--and a temperate admiration. It is the sort of love that leaps forward to chasten. In a world of oafish self-complacencies set in a morass of dull submission to the chances of life it is a consolation and refreshment to find any people who realise the self-destructiveness of the present system and, however vaguely, the possibility of remaking human society upon richer and happier lines. The value of the Communist Party as an organised ferment is very high. I should like to see a properly accredited representative of the party free to air his opinions in every high school and college--particularly in the United States. Everybody in the place would be the brighter and better for his beneficent irritation.

The House of Lords entertains its leisure by passing Bills to suppress Communist Sunday Schools, and the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks in tones of horror of the teachings in these establishments. Nothing could witness more effectively to the wholesome mental stir these schools create. Most of the teaching in Anglican Sunday Schools is equally repulsive to me, but so long as they do not raid the public funds for their support I do not see why they should not teach what they like. I am English, not Anglican. My blood and traditions incline me to the utmost free speech and free teaching and free propaganda for everyone. No one is obliged to send his children to a Communist School, and I do not see why the half truth of Anglicanism should not have to face the half truth of Communism. The founder of Christianity talked a lot of Communism, but I cannot recall a solitary phrase of His to justify the existence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Yet at the same time I am doubtful whether there is much of a future for the Communist Party. I doubt whether in twenty-five years’ time there will be many Communists, under that name, below middle-age. A few nice, fierce old gentlemen will survive in smoking-rooms and cafés. The Communist movement is a part of the present world, it is a shadow cast by existing economic absurdities, it is a current reaction. In five-and-twenty years’ time the projects of a scientific Socialism will have converted and absorbed most of the youthful enthusiasm and resentful energy that now finds its expression in Communism. Communism is a phase, a bitter and sterile experiment, in the development of the Socialist idea. Socialism is its parent and its heir. The movement for the organised exploitation of the whole world in the collective interest existed before the Communist Party, and will be going on long after that party is a quaint tradition.

At present the Communist Party still dominates the government of Russia. But it does so at the sacrifice of all its constructive claims. In seven years the Russian experiment has demonstrated the intellectual sterility of the movement beyond any further dispute.

The Bolshevik Government came to power in a state of ignorant confidence, treating criticisms as a blasphemous reflection on its omniscience, insulting and persecuting every sort of Socialist outside its trained and disciplined ranks. The Government took over factories, uncertain whether it meant to run them under a quasi-military discipline or on guild lines as free communities of workers; it “smashed” money, and discovered it had no other way of computing the mutual services and obligations of men. It was touching to see Lenin in the Kremlin in 1920 struggling with childish projects for the “electrification of Russia” and unable to explain what sort of town centre, if any, his Communist Russia would possess. He had no working ideas that were worth a rap about this very obvious matter. I left him, sympathetic with him in the face of his stupendous task, but a little amazed at his extreme unpreparedness. However, if one may trust a virulent article by Trotsky that has just been published in English, he lost his temper in true Communist fashion at being asked awkward questions and resorted to Trotsky for comfort. “Ugh!” said Lenin. “_What_ a perfect petit bourgeois!” and so restored the mental calm my entirely respectful scepticism had ruffled. For in Communist circles if you can call anyone or anything “bourgeois,” the question is settled and discussion is at an end.

The emptiness of plan, the extreme assurance, which distinguishes modern Communism is the secret alike of its attractiveness in times of social trouble and its futility in constructive effort. It does not worry the oppressed, the discontented, and the unhappy with difficult projects for human readjustment. It lumps together the complex and various disorders of social life, the muddle of human prejudices and impulses, as one malignant thing, the “Capitalist system.” Destroy this legendary monster and the Millennium will ensue. Instead of overcoming the fool in Everyman, you must obstruct, waste, sabotage all the current services of the community. Having convinced the world that nothing else will work, the dictatorship of the party will ensue. There could be no teaching more successful in a mass meeting and less useful in a bureau. It gives all the excitement and release of a revolution with none of its tiresome responsibilities.

It was Marx who created modern Communism. It is the sterile mule of Socialism and a scientific ambition. Socialism from the days of Robert Owen onward was a thing of schemes and projects. It was perpetually seeking better arrangements. Its methods were Utopian. But Marx was bitten by an ambition to rival Darwin; he was to be the Darwin of social and political science, with none of Darwin’s modesty or Darwin’s intellectual patience. He had the mind of a theologian with the pretension of a scientific inquirer, and he had the dull man’s hatred and contempt for the human imagination. His movement was to be “scientific” with all the magic that word carried half a century ago. There was to be nothing imaginative and no confounded ideals. It was all to be fatalistic. It was never going to plan what would happen because it was going to know what would happen. He and his associates produced a very sound and ample analysis of the processes of decay in the business life of the time, but with such ambitions and such repudiations they could produce no scheme of any replacement system. They have no scheme to this day. Even Russia has not taught the Communist the practical need of Utopias.

At a certain level of intelligence party Communism is a very attractive teaching indeed. Its self-assurance is very reassuring. Any human being not absolutely stupid hates to be robbed of freedom and educational opportunity before thirteen or fourteen and thrust into uncongenial and hopeless toil. Most employment is bitter for young people. At the same time people whose education is truncated so soon usually fail to develop sufficient intellectual power to understand complex industrial and financial processes. They develop an inferiority complex about such things that clamours in them for comfort.

Communism embodies that hate and provides that comfort. It points to the “Capitalist” as the oppressor and claims to furnish in a few phrases all that needs to be known. In a social system that educated everyone to sixteen or eighteen and then gave a fair wide choice of public service there would be none of that hate and that defensive aggressiveness, that suppressed suspicion of ignorance and inefficiency that makes Communist controversy so loud and rude, which has made Mr. Trotsky so loud and rude. The marshes in which the cantankerous spirit of Communism grows would be drained and evaporated. By the theory of Marx it was in the highly developed industrial system of Western Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, that the Communist Revolution would first occur. The disconcerting fact for Communists is that it occurred in Russia, where the industrial organisation was at a low level and there were eighty per cent. of illiterates. In Great Britain nobody except the enterprising people who want to raise money from imbecile dukes and rich old ladies even pretends to be afraid of a Communist Revolution.

There is a considerable dread of Communist activities in America. That is very largely due to an uneasy conscience, aware of a great mass of unassimilated immigrant labour very unfairly treated and very inadequately educated. There may be some grounds for such apprehensions; I will confess I do not think the present schools and colleges of America good enough and strong enough for the constructive work they ought to do. There may be a future for Communism there, and there will probably be a big movement towards Communism in the industrial centres of India and China and Japan. But in Europe I think that the Communist drive has passed its maximum and that the popular mind is moving onward to a more constructive and hopeful type of Socialism.

Just as art in a phase of extreme sterility escaped by going back behind Raphael and starting afresh from the Pre-Raphaelite phase, so I think Socialism will soon be getting behind the unfortunate misdirection of Marx and Engels to become once more Utopian and fruitful.

L

THE LITTLE HOUSE: AS IT WAS, IS NOW, AND APPARENTLY EVER WILL BE

16.8.24

What a very odd spectacle the British Parliament face to face with the housing problem is! On the strength of that issue alone I should imagine that any really civilised judgment would condemn the poor old institution at once and set about a revolutionary search for a better constructed instrument of government.

There is a shortage of housing accommodation in Great Britain; the picturesque, creeper-clad country cottage is too often a cramped, decivilising, insanitary fraud, and most of the industrial population lives in slums worse than the corresponding slums in America and little better than those on the Continent of Europe. You cannot get a house or flat in which a civilised family can live for much less than a hundred pounds a year rent, and most of those available at that price are stereotyped and dull-looking, and sometimes detestably ugly. Below that level comes a descending series of inconvenient, unsound, and unpleasant lodgments for the mass of the population. The Labour Ministry of Health has been making large encouraging gestures of help, it has projected big and complicated bargains with the building trades and the building trades unions that may--if all goes well--provide at an immense cost on a quasi-charity basis, at the public expense, a sufficiency of houses for the poorer sort of people of fifty years hence, according to the ideas of comfort and decency prevailing fifty years ago.

The Government and the local authorities are to pay about half the cost of building a multitude of houses, the assistance being given on the sole condition that they fall below a certain standard of size and comfort, and the industrial employer will be able to pay low wages in proportion to the cheapness attained. In other words, the Labour Government is doing a deal with the building trade in the interest of the low-grade employer and is putting British industry “on the rates.” They are returning by a circuitous route to the condition of things in England before the New Poor Law, when farmers grew rich by employing labour in receipt of outdoor relief, at otherwise impossibly low wages.

The most striking thing about these housing proposals is the tacit acceptance by all parties in Parliament that the population of the coming years must be put away, each family in a little separate house of its own. If anything was needed to prove that the Socialism of the Labour Party was merely skin deep and its creative intentions an electioneering bid, it would be this. If one thing is clearer than another in the outlook of the modern community, it is the impossibility of the small separate house. It is a cage of needless toil for women; it is a place of deprivation and hardship for children. The whole drift of things is in favour of the highly organised block building containing a great number of houses. In this there can be electric light, radiators, a supply of hot and cold water, efficient sanitary accommodation, group wash-houses, adequate cupboards, and convenient shopping facilities, all provided at a less cost than is needed for the same number of scattered low-grade homes, each under its separate roof, with lamps to clean, fires to light, water to boil, and every possible demand for feminine drudgery and servitude.

In their dreams people think of Mr. Wheatley’s projected houses as little flower-girdled cottages, each with a bright little garden and a drying-ground and an uncontrolled multitude of children playing in the sun; in reality we shall get rows and rows of mean little boxes on the outskirts of our towns, jammed together into slums, each fouling the air with a separate chimney, and remote from every modern amenity.

At present a large part of the population of East London lives in small houses of two stories, or two stories and a basement. Idiotic foreign visitors surveying this from train windows remark on the Englishman’s superb individualism, so that every man’s house is his castle. In the East End no man’s house is his castle; every floor, and often every room, is a separate household, and sometimes these households entertain lodgers. This state of affairs the new Labour legislation will extend and perpetuate. Yet plans have been made that show beyond dispute that the whole population of industrial London could be rehoused in fine and handsome apartment buildings, with night and day lifts, roof-gardens, and nearly all the light, air, and conveniences to be found in a Kensington flat, at hardly greater cost than would be needed to choke all the ways out of London with a corresponding spread of Wheatley hovels, and so great an amount of space could be saved by doing so that half that area of London could be made into a playground and garden.

But even to entertain schemes of that sort requires imagination, and the new Labour Government has shown itself the least imaginative of Governments. It has excreted or suppressed all its creative elements. It is a class-Government, and it embodies the subdued mind of the common wages-earner. Whatever is, it accepts, from Court costume to slums. Its idea of life is the life of the back street in which it has always lived, and it wants more back streets and cheaper back streets to live in, with an occasional treat in the garden of Buckingham Palace. In dealing with housing, just as in dealing with mines or with transport, it shows itself incapable of any breadth or power of initiative.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this housing legislation is the ineffectiveness of the women. When women were struggling for the vote the world was given to understand that their success would be an end to “man-made laws” and “man-made” ways of living. There was to be an astonishing release of the sensible, practical feminine mind. Well, here is a question that concerns women primarily. A very large proportion of the girls and women of to-day, before their lives are out, will have to live either in the slums that the Labour Government is failing to reorganise, or in the rows and clumps of boxes of brick or timber that are to be spread out over the outskirts of every centre of population. There was nothing to prevent the distinguished women of the Labour Party from giving these men who are framing-up these schemes to build pauper houses and endow the building trade at the public expense a lead towards better things. These houses of the Wheatley project mean an effectual subjugation of great multitudes of women to dingy drudgery for scores of years to come; they mean the growth of a new generation of children with miserable standards of comfort and freedom. But so far we have had no guidance from intelligent women at all, but only speeches from such mere party supporters as Dr. Marion Phillips sustaining the preposterous pretensions of Mr. Wheatley. The Women’s Housing Councils’ National Federation, with its resolutions for the glorification of Mr. Wheatley’s building ramp, does no more than emphasise the general feminine apathy. Generally, the women of the country seem not to be awake to the manner in which this business concerns them.

Only one exception occurs to me at the present moment in the widespread indifference of intelligent and influential women to the comfort and outlook of the mass of their sex, and that is Mrs. Leonora Eyles, the novelist. Her book, _The Woman in the Little House_, is a most intelligent, sympathetic, and illuminating account of what it means to live in just such little houses as Mr. Wheatley and his friends, the employers and employed of the building trade, are conspiring to stereotype. She describes not slum life but the life of an ordinary working man’s wife in London, without exaggeration and without extenuation. It is a picture of extreme dinginess and meanness, relieved only by the pluck and devotion and hopefulness and cheerful humour that enable these people to hang on and hope for better things. It is this sort of life the Wheatley legislation proposes to extend and perpetuate, because in Britain, as everywhere in the world, political life is divorced from the creative imagination, and because the mass of common men and women in the world do not know how much they may reasonably ask for from those who have access to the science and control of the resources of the world.

LI

THE TRIVIALITY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FEMININE INFLUENCE IN POLITICS

23.8.24

The other day I was discussing the political outlook in Great Britain with a very close and shrewd observer of political motives. I live very much in a dream of a saner world and he lives in active reaction to the passing hour, but we both knew most of the leading figures in public affairs and we were surveying the present extraordinary fragmentation of parties in Parliament--for even the Labour Party now is hardly on speaking terms with itself and has nothing but office to hold it together. His thoughts ran much more on personalities than mine did. Was Mr. Asquith played out? Would Lloyd George “come back”? What was the future of Lord Birkenhead? Would Mr. Baldwin ever be brighter and better? Was Mr. Masterman the resuscitated hope of the Liberal Party? Was there anyone of any promise at all in the Labour Party? And so on.

Unlike my friend, I do not go about culling incompatible posies of politicians. I have no interest in gathering together a marketable bunch. The failure of party government, the dissolution of all British parties, cheers and pleases me. Great Britain, I said, would have to lead the way to a new stage of democratic government and get itself a Legislature of a more manageable size, elected by Proportional Representation.

“They won’t,” said my friend, meaning by “they” our bright-eyed millions of voters. “They can’t grasp ideas like that--new, _difficult_ ideas. It takes ten minutes’ attention to understand Proportional Representation. You can’t go to the country with a thing like that.”

“But unless we get a more efficient Legislature, how can we tackle our difficulties with money, with Europe, with India?”