Chapter II: Introduction (1)

THE CONFUSION OF LANGUAGE AND ITS RELATION TO REVOLUTION.

“Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last.”
Tennyson (_Locksley Hall--Sixty Years After_).

Nothing on earth leads more certainly to disunion than a division of tongues. When it became necessary to disperse the iniquitous builders of the Tower of Babel, we know the expedient to which the Lord resorted, and how effective it proved to be. But whereas unity is a desirable condition, and a common tongue is one of the most potent means of realising it, people not infrequently forget that a common tongue presupposes a common uniform culture. It depends upon a common view of human life and the world. This common culture provides the frame, so to speak, to the design of life, in which every word of a language fits like a piece of mosaic. Remove the frame, disturb the arrangement, and the odd pieces of mosaic fall all about you and lose their significance and their necessary association. They can be used only as--missiles. [p12]

Whatever weight the usual arguments against the Middle Ages may possess, at least this is plain, that in mediæval times a common culture prevailed among the leading nations of Europe. Indeed, if we wished to sum up the effect of the Middle Ages in one sentence, we could not express ourselves more clearly than by saying, that in those days the leaders of men attempted to convert Europe into a single nation. This effort, though only partially successful, at least led to the magnificent result that most men, of what nation soever, understood one another--understood one another particularly in their use of abstract or general terms. For that is the test. In the end the names of things remain. The words representing common objects are usually as permanent as those objects themselves. Fashion may destroy the object and thus render the word obsolete; but for hundreds of years none will dispute the proper connotation of the word “chair,” “table,” “basket,” for instance; while in the realm of abstract and general terms such severe fluctuations may have taken place as to make the same word mean something different to each generation.

Now the supreme importance of abstract or general terms lies in the fact that they are the words with which we guide our lives, mark out our goals and direct our effort. It is therefore urgently necessary that they should stand for very precise ideas, and that as the current coinage of speech they should mean the same things to all men of the same group, body, or nation. [p13]

As opposed to the effort of the Middle Ages, however, the effort of this Age, or the Muddle Age, seems to be directed towards turning every nation into a Europe--into a unit, that is to say, without unity. And this lack of unity is nowhere more acute and more apparent than in the realm of abstract or general terms. People of the same nation, nowadays, no longer speak the same language. They no longer mean the same things, or convey the same ideas, when they speak of Happiness, Beauty, Order, Right, Freedom, Liberty, Justice, etc. The frame has gone. The common culture has been replaced by a congeries of pseudo-cultures, all in active conflict. The consequence is that the all-important words of this class have fallen out of place in the design of life; they have no unifying whole in which they can find a stable position, they are at a loose end, so to speak, and they can be used not as intelligent missives, but only as missiles between isolated groups and parties that are doomed to eternal conflict.

A word at a loose end, however, is a word devoid of definite associations and therefore of meaning. Can a word devoid of meaning be used as a missile? Certainly it can, provided that it be given, despite its loss of an intellectual appeal, sufficient motive power to provoke an emotion. But of this anon.

There can be no doubt that we have reached a condition in modern Europe, in which each nation is, as it were, a complex of nations--a complex in which the majority of the most important words (the abstract [p14] and general terms) not only mean different things to different groups and coteries, but also convey no precise meaning whatsoever to anybody. This, however, constitutes a state of complete confusion, and therefore a very grave danger. Just as one cannot help appearing stupid when one is trying and failing to understand a foreign tongue, one really is stupid when one cannot understand one’s own tongue.

If stupidity seems to be increasing--and there surely cannot be much doubt concerning at least this form of “Progress,”--it is due chiefly to men’s growing incapacity to understand their mother tongue. Abstract and general terms are no longer comprehensible even to the most literate; to the illiterate they are simply fireworks, flags or flagstones.

Now this would be all very well if it ended in stupidity. But that is not the final bourne of the present confusion of language. The final bourne is something much more serious, much more disastrous. It is revolution.

All those who may be tempted to regard this conclusion as extreme, would do well to pause a moment here, in order to dwell upon the possible consequences of a confusion of language.

Is it not clear that at all times and in all climes where a confusion of language has existed, man has been doomed not only to be misleading and misled, but also to be incapable of leading? That is the worst danger. A lack of precision amounting almost to incomprehensibility is sure in any case to mislead; but what if it makes it no longer possible to lead? [p15]

There will always be thousands of men prepared to mislead their fellows. Even in the heydey of every culture this has been so. Even with language at its brightest and best in precision and adequacy this is always so. But how about those who are prepared to lead their fellows, and who are admirably equipped for so doing? What are they to do if the only medium which lies to hand is so corrupt, so devoid of meaning, that they cannot use it without the tragic certainty of being misunderstood?

And yet who would undertake to stand up and speak to-day, even before an educated audience, without feeling certain beforehand that he would be misunderstood if he used the words Liberty, Freedom, Right, Democracy, Patriotism, etc.?

That is the danger. While there is a harvest prepared for those who would mislead in days like the present; for the rare individual who would lead, who is sufficiently gifted to lead, and whose leadership is needed, there can be but disappointment and barrenness.

This is the pass to which our present confusion of language has brought us. It makes revolution possible, because it makes the pursuit of false ideals inevitable, and conflict and misunderstanding a certainty.

The causes of our present condition are to be sought, first and chiefly, in the decline of a common and uniform culture, secondly in the cheap literature that has come into being since the Education Act of 1870, and thirdly in modern journalism.

In modern journalism the distortion and abuse of terms, the crippling of words has [p16] become almost a habit. Catachresis, or the forcing and straining of words, is the rule; nowhere is the sacred duty of precision less observed than in the very quarter where its sway should be most uncontested. The journalist, intent only on sensation, is the first to debase words into missiles or empty symbols. He it is who sets the example to the crowd, by picking up these unfortunate fallen pieces of mosaic, in order to fling them about with the wantonness of a schoolboy. He it is who shakes the shoddy frame of modern culture in the hope of making even more of these sparkling fragments fall out of the design of life, until ultimately when some one does arise who would choose to construct rather than to destroy, he finds nothing to hand but shapeless and irrecognisable monstrosities, chipped into mere stones by the mad fury with which they have been hurled about.

Matters would not be so bad if it were possible to point to one class, one stratum of society in England, in which language was treated with more respect. Unfortunately this is no longer possible. Even among speakers of good education this misuse of language is all too common. The present writer once heard the Bishop of London address a cultivated audience on the subject of Reconstruction, and was compelled to take exception at least a dozen times to that dignitary’s illegitimate use of the word “Democracy.”[1]

The reality of the danger, its imminence, will perhaps strike the most incredulous when it is pointed out to them that the [p17] French Revolution itself was the outcome of a confusion of language; nor can there be any doubt that the Russian Revolution had a similar origin.

The French Revolution can be traced, and has been traced, even by writers quite friendly to “democracy,” to the radical misunderstanding of three words--Nature, Freedom, and Man--by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This writer, as is well known, after having formed a totally fantastic and false concept of Nature, began to speculate upon the unhappy contrast that human civilisation presented in comparison with this fairylike figment of his mind. He compared man in the state of Nature--Rousseau’s “Nature”--with civilised man in the 18th century, and then proceeded to show how impure, immoral and corrupt, was the second kind of man as compared with the former. The fact that the whole comparison was vitiated by the absurd impossibility of this so-called “thinker’s” arbitrary definition of Nature, was only discovered scores of years later, when the untold damage to which his insane misunderstanding led, had long been past repair.

For the “Nature” of Rousseau was the Nature of our most successful Victorian poets--all smiling meadows, babbling brooks, nodding flowers and innocence. He had neither the profundity nor the honesty to see Nature as she really is--immoral, hard, merciless and tasteless.[2] Like our Victorian poets when Rousseau gazed upon a rustic scene, he thought neither of the stoat in the hedge quietly devouring its field mouse, nor of the starling in the coppice solemnly and methodically hammering a snail to a pulp before swallowing it. He gave no thought either to the pitiless and eternal conflict of all the vegetation at his feet, or to the struggle probably going on in the adjoining village between a beautiful child and the microbe of tuberculosis. He dwelt only on that something which was not Man and proceeded to endow that something, which was not Man, with all the qualities that his feverish imagination regarded as desirable.

When, therefore, he proceeded to plant his “natural man” down in this utterly fanciful scenario of Rousseau-esque “Nature,” he perforce drew a picture even more distorted of humanity than he had already drawn of Nature, and thus proceeded to his ultimate fatuous conclusion that “Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

Absurd and meaningless as this phrase was, it succeeded, as Lord Morley has pointed out, in thrilling the generation to which it was uttered in two continents; and it was not until a hundred years later that someone appeared who demonstrated that Rousseau was not only a liar but a pernicious liar. Meanwhile, Napoleon had proved to the French people, in deeds if not in words, how ludicrously fantastic were the ravings of this Genevan firebrand; but the philosophic demonstration of his radical misunderstanding of the three words, “Freedom,” [p19] “Nature,” and “Man,” had to be left to a later generation.

The fact that the French Revolution was the outcome of this radical misunderstanding is now no longer contested by any serious thinker.

A searching and forcible re-definition of “Nature,” “Freedom,” and “Man,” in the light of history, biology, psychology, and a sound outlook on life and humanity, if it had been rapidly prepared and widely circulated in Rousseau’s lifetime, might have defeated the efforts of this Arch-charlatan to poison his own country and the world; but, in those days, who dreamt that the misunderstanding, or the deliberate misinterpretation, of three such simple words as Freedom, Nature, and Man, could lead to so much horror and bloodshed?

The world at that time was only faintly aware of the far-reaching practical effect even of sound ideas; how could it justly estimate the consequences of false or unsound ideas?

Now, however, we know. There is no longer any excuse for us; our lesson is before us. And, alas! to-day, we are confronted not by the mere misunderstanding of three simple words, we are confronted by the very much more formidable fact that there is scarcely one general or abstract term in the whole of our language that has any definite meaning. We are confronted by the imminent menace of no longer having any language at all with which to appeal either to the reason or the unreason of man.

All the words by which our life, our [p20] aspirations and our energy can be directed, have long ago become so meaningless, as the result of repeated falsification, mutilation and counterfeiting, that we may soon be reduced to the expedients of animals and savages, in order to make ourselves clear, and drown our voices in the clash of arms.

And yet it can be shown that these abstract and general terms, which no longer have any definite meaning, or which have acquired an utterly misleading meaning, do provoke emotions and feelings which are none the less harmful for being indefinite and vague.

How is this possible? If it is claimed that a word has ceased to make any intellectual or rational appeal, owing to repeated catachresis or misunderstanding, how can it still provoke dangerous feelings and emotions? If it fails, owing to the variety of ways in which it is understood, from meeting with uniform interpretation, how can it provoke uniform action?

A word may have ceased from making any intellectual appeal, and yet be forcibly associated by word-counterfeiters and other agitators with certain vague desiderata which defy analysis. For instance, suppose a certain adult A. repeat again and again to a child B. that one day, if it is obedient and amenable, it will be taken to “Chekko’s.” The child may press for a description of “Chekko’s”; but all A. does is to nod his head, smile with prophetical good humour, and say: “Ah, you’ll see. It’s wonderful! It’s magic!”

Here we have a case of a child to whom the word “Chekko’s” means literally nothing. It is, however, associated vaguely [p21] with something mysteriously desirable. “Chekko’s” may have no real existence, but certain emotions are nevertheless suscitated in the child by the sound of the word, because it has been led to believe that something dimly pleasant is associated with the name. Ultimately even a flag inscribed with the word “Chekko’s” will make the child shout with joy; a signpost with the direction: “To Chekko’s” will make it leap with excitement, and a mere passing reference to the “Checko-Slovaks” will lead it to suspect that these people must be a very pleasant and happy nation.

A correct definition of “Chekko’s” given by someone whom the child trusts, would suffice either to dispel the emotion provoked by the sound, or else to confirm it, according to whether it had or had not a real existence, and that existence corresponded with the child’s fostered mental image of it. But in any case the process of dissuasion would take time, and the re-definition would have to be inculcated upon the child as assiduously as the false and hazy original association had been.

It is possible, therefore, to provoke dynamic emotions by means of an absolutely meaningless sound, even when the intellect of the listener receives no appeal whatsoever.

In view of this elementary fact in psychology, the extreme danger of having a very large number of both meaningless and inflammable words in our current speech will perhaps begin to be obvious.

The fact that the word “Freedom” has now become practically meaningless--even more meaningless than Rousseau made it, [p22] because now it has not even a fictitious meaning--does not render it a whit less potent in provoking cheers and wild enthusiasm when it is shouted from the mystic eminence of a public platform.

Presumably when Rousseau spoke of “Freedom” he meant a certain lack of compulsion regarding actions which are peculiar to civilisation, a certain absence of constraint in regard to conventions that do not harass the savage. The savage does not require to wear clean linen, he does not require to wear a hat, he may if he choose eat with his fingers, or come to breakfast unshaven; he may have three or four wives, he may eat human flesh, he may live in the open and shoot down his prey without considering whether it belongs to the squire or to the lord of the manor. Rousseau cannot have meant anything but this by “Freedom.” If Rousseau had been told that while it was true that the savage does not require to perform much that the civilised man has to perform, the civilised man, on the other hand, is “free” from many a duty that is incumbent on the savage, he would have perceived that to drop the constraints of civilisation for those of barbarism merely amounted to exchanging one form of bondage for another. For instance, the savage of certain climes has to tattoo his flesh, sometimes with great pain; he has to observe certain rigid taboos, he has to hunt for his food, he has to fight every day of his life against wild animals and the hostile tribe of his neighbourhood into the bargain; he has to work hard during boyhood and early [p23] manhood to acquire efficiency in the arts of the chase and of war; he is obliged to recognise a chieftain, etc. In fact, it could be shown that Man in a “state of nature” is perhaps even more constrained by conventions and laws than civilised man. Only by deliberately falsifying the evidence--that is to say, by giving a thoroughly distorted notion of Nature, would it be possible to contend that man “in a state of nature” is more “free” than civilised man. Rousseau, as we have seen, however, did not hesitate to falsify the evidence. Hence he was able to say: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

But if we turn to the modern idea of Freedom, we shall find that it is even more difficult to understand than Rousseau’s. For at least Rousseau’s “Freedom” can be traced to a romantic distortion of the true attributes of “Nature”; the modern idea of “Freedom” can be traced to nothing.

In its two forms, the alleged desideratum of modernity. Freedom and Liberty, means literally nothing.

If we put the questions--freedom and liberty from what? and freedom and liberty for what?--it will be seen immediately that there is no definite idea whatsoever behind the words. Freedom or liberty as an aim, presupposes emancipation from a yoke. What is the yoke from which modern man wishes to be free? Is it work? Is it timed work?

Freedom or liberty as an aim presupposes emancipation from a yoke for a definite purpose. What is this purpose? Is it a higher or a lower? Is it more entertainment [p24] or more usefulness? Is it desirable or undesirable?

To none of these questions is there any answer, because the modern words Freedom and Liberty connote nothing. And the same applies to such words as Equality, Right, Justice. These mere sounds have ceased to be words. But they all imply some mysterious desideratum which it may be worth while fighting for. They are missiles, fireworks, unmusical chords--anything! All they have retained of their original nature, is the power of directing energy. They no longer call up any definite or expressible idea.

Now when the most hortatory and inspiriting words of a language have ceased to have any definite meaning, the nation using that language is in imminent danger of internal discord and rupture, and the beneficent influence of indolence and inertia alone can avert a catastrophe. The only question is, have we sufficient native indolence and inertia to tide over this crisis in our language?

Even if we have, the Continent has not, and ultimately by infection or contagion, our inertia and indolence, too, will be overcome.

What is the remedy? What is the corrective? What is the best means of resisting the influence of the Continent and of the corrosive elements at home without relying too confidently upon our negative qualities alone?

Strange as it may sound, the present writer suggests, as one of the most direct roads to a recovery of political and national [p25] health, in the first place, that the disease of language should be cured. Everywhere, in the whole of the civilised world, disease of language is rampant. That country alone will resist and survive the revolutionary epidemic, which first cures its disease of language.

But how is this to be done?

The grand method, the best method, would of course consist in re-creating a common and uniform culture, in which the spiritual words and phrases of the national language would find a new and definite place, a fresh and unmistakable association.

This, however, is perhaps a counsel of perfection. For where are the men to-day who would be prepared to embark on this gigantic undertaking, even if they were equipped for it? It is possible, and the material for its accomplishment lies close at hand. But where are the free spirits who have the courage, and who are capable of the solidarity, that would be required for such a task?

The second best method, and the one more compatible with the power of our best men of to-day, would consist in rescuing the meaningless terms of our language--and there are thousands of them--from their pointless, unattached and almost disreputable existence. It would consist in re-defining them in the realistic light of history, biology and psychology, and in the light of a sane and sound outlook on humanity and the world. It would consist, further, in creating a convention as rigorous as the existing convention regarding all reference to sexual questions and organs, according to which [p26] it would be regarded as an act of gross immorality and indecency to commit the sin of catachresis or abuse against any of the words thus re-defined, and it should be incumbent upon the ordinary citizen to report to the nearest police station any such breach of decency which he might happen to discover while reading his daily paper, or a novel, or any treatise printed after the promulgation of the law.

How many false ideals, false aspirations, and pernicious creeds and doctrines would then be dispersed? How many agitators, tub-thumpers, self-seeking bell-wethers, would then be put to flight! How many politicians would then starve! But how fresh and crisp the air of every debating chamber would then become!

This is a possible and highly practical method of dealing with our present situation. There is no excuse for its not being adopted. When once it had achieved all it could achieve, the masses should be made to benefit from the results of the undertaking. Indeed, it would be more or less futile if they were not made to benefit in this way. They would then become the alert and merciless critics of people who now sway them as easily as if they were corn in the wind; and seven-eighths of our present-day literature would cease from being published.

It is the surest, the speediest, and the most fruitful method of saving what still remains of Order and Culture. But it is a stupendous undertaking and one that will exact a heavy toll from all those who embark upon it.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: He used the word in the sense of the “proletariat” or the “masses.”]

[Footnote 2: Perhaps Tennyson should be honourably excepted here (see _In Memoriam_ LVI., line 15); but while the realistic estimate of Nature is certainly hinted at in the lines referred to, it could not be claimed that Tennyson consistently upheld this attitude.]

[p27] CHAPTER I

THE PRINCIPLE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY

“There is nothing wrong either in great wealth or in extensive
property, provided that it be wisely administered.”--William Cobbett
(_Rural Rides_).

Behind most of the modern hostility towards established and traditional institutions, it is not only a matter of mere caution, but also essentially scientific to suspect a certain amount of physical as well as psychical exhaustion. Modern mankind is tired, both bodily and spiritually. The pale fireless eyes of our urban adults alone ought to make us suspect the truth about this matter. Two thousand years of the increasing complication of Life, during which man’s attention has had ever more and more detail to occupy it, together with a feeling of very genuine disillusionment on the part of the most enlightened regarding the highest ideals of the past; two thousand years, moreover, of progressive debilitation, during which the resisting powers of exuberant health have gradually and steadily been worn down--must have had their effect upon recent generations, and materially impaired their ability to face the institutions of their forefathers with their forefathers’ spirit, health and understanding.

It cannot be repeated too often that it would be gravely unscientific, nay imprudent, to proceed to an examination of the modern hostility to traditional ideas and principles without taking into account [p28] the attitude of mind, the tone of mind, and the degree of health, of those who represent this hostility. The fact that modern books on political questions usually take as their data the very conclusions to which this hostility has led, without previously determining the validity of the whole standpoint, or discovering the kind of minds that are responsible for it, need not deter us from departing from the customary method. Nor can our superior caution in this respect be fairly interpreted as bias.

It must surely be clear to most of us that, not only we ourselves, but all our contemporaries as well, are radically and incurably weary. Our physical resistance against disease is as seriously in peril as is our spiritual resistance against error, or against those ideals and desires that can appeal only to invalids.

Where life is ebbing, however, her most fundamental principles, her most inexorable demands, must be losing the force of their appeal. An ear is therefore lent ever more willingly and eagerly to doctrines and precepts which are non-vital, which already have about them the bitter effluvia of death; and it becomes ever more and more difficult to withstand the fascination of this new persuasiveness.

But because Man has reached a degree of lassitude that induces him to listen more patiently and submissively than of yore, to doctrines and precepts of decline and decay, it does not follow that these doctrines are irresistible either in their rational or emotional appeal. It does not even follow that their _rational_ dressing is any more [p29] above suspicion than they are themselves. The attempt intellectually to justify and bolster up a sickly tenet may be as unhealthy as that tenet itself.

It is suspicion, above all, that is needed wherever we turn in our modern storehouse of ideals and panaceas--suspicion coupled with the conviction that man is desperately weary in body and soul.

Now there is a state of weariness and apathy in which things that have become out of gear are no longer readjusted or repaired, but deliberately and ruthlessly destroyed. Each of us can picture in our mind’s eye, the behaviour of the nervous invalid who, too exhausted to repair a persistently clanging bell, tears down the whole fitting, wires and all, so that the disturbing sound may cease for ever. Such an act is typical of exhaustion. It amounts to a deep-seated surrender of the power of repair. Brain and body tissues that are not themselves regularly repaired or recreated can hardly be expected to devise the means of repairing or recreating other things.

Thus we should expect the modern and exhausted mind to proceed in its corrective lust, not by means of readjustment, but by amputation, not by therapeutic art, but by extirpation. There are thousands of bells clanging discordantly in the house of civilisation to-day. The temptation of the modern man is therefore to tear them down, wires and all.

Whenever anything goes wrong--and things cannot always work smoothly in society, particularly in vast and complex communities like those of Western Europe--it is [p30] natural for a certain large element in the population to proceed by means of suppression and amputation, by lopping off some creation of the past, and advancing the most convincing arguments for so doing.

If the Lords fail us, the simplest method is to do away with them. If individual enterprise falls short of its promise, a clamour is raised for its abolition. Family life goes wrong, married life goes wrong, and the remedy suggested is to make the dissolution of the marriage tie easier. It does not matter whether you are destroying a portion of your organism and therefore impoverishing yourself thereby, for you are simplifying your task, and this for an invalid is an achievement of maximum importance. Everything thus falls into a process of general disintegration, all troublesome appendages are sloughed off, and the body of civilisation is gradually truncated or dissolved. Meanwhile, however, since every step in this process of decomposition receives the most convincing intellectual support, no one suspects that there are other and better methods of setting to work. It never occurs to the typical modern mind that if institutions are to be abolished as fast as degenerate people show themselves unable to uphold them, then an immediate and far more speedy way of refuting and abolishing all civilisation would be to fill all its leading positions, and to invest all its institutions, with raw savages from the Cannibal Isles. Every institution and tradition would then break down, and presumably the modern mind would be satisfied that the only remedy [p31] would consist in the abolition of all institutions and traditions.

Long ago the present writer pointed out that to set a buffoon on the throne is not to confute monarchy, and yet this is the principle we work upon in all our reforms. We never once question whether it may not be modern man himself who is wrong or decadent. This at least might lead us to look in the proper direction for improvement. We merely assail with savage fury every institution that modern man can no longer run to his and our own satisfaction.

Thus the instinctive and morbid indolence of sickness, to which amputation and suppression are naturally the most tempting corrective methods, becomes the standard of judgment for all ills; and where ignorant minds are added to sick minds, the natural bankruptcy of ignorance joins hands with the destructive lust of the sick, and the two together, hatchet in hand, set out to “reform” the world.

Can anyone doubt that this is indeed what we are witnessing on all sides? And does not the very specious seductiveness of the Socialist and Bolshevist propaganda lead us to suspect that here, at least, we are invalids listening to invalids?

The principle of Private Property is being assailed on all sides. It is now the fashion to talk glibly of the evanescence of private property, just as it is the fashion to be suffering from pyorrhœa or caries. Private property is another of the features of ancient societies which in this Muddle Age has got out of order; and the consequence is, as we should expect, that it is beginning [p32] to be suggested--nay, it has already been loudly proclaimed--that private property, as the root of all evils, should be abolished.

Now in this new project of vandalism, we have not only one symptom of disease, but two. For, while we have our old friend, the morbid indolence of the sick, which cannot recreate or repair, but must suppress, we also have a frontal attack on Life itself, pressed by the forces of decay and disintegration disguised as Utopians. For private property is a principle of Life.

The fact that this is everywhere apparent, does not, of course, prevent the myopic from overlooking it; it should, however, prevent the multitude from being deceived, and we believe the multitude are still not deceived. For it is obviously the multitude, the vast mass of mankind, who have the least of this world’s goods, who should be the first to be duped about this matter; and yet how long it is taking to convince them! How tenacious they seem of the old principle! How deeply must they believe in private property in order, with their handful of household sticks and baubles, to resist the morbid lie which is being reiterated by a thousand moribund voices all round them, that private property is wrong.

It has been said that private property is a principle of Life. What, then, is its biological value?

Its biological value is the same as the biological value of the best life itself.

To be quite plain, Life as a whole does not represent a general movement upwards, from the standpoint of quality. On the contrary. The great majority of Life’s activities [p33] have a gravitating or descending tendency--that is to say, in a large number of organisms, acquired embellishments or acquired faculties and qualities more frequently have to be dropped than retained in the course of generations. Spencer has shown conclusively that by far the greater number of existing organisms are the degenerate descendants of higher species (see _Collected Essays_, Vol. I., p. 379). The laws of evolution, therefore, cover millions of cases of _retrograde metamorphosis_, or change consisting of the loss of complex qualities or members for the purpose of survival. And in all these cases of retrograde metamorphosis, instead of the identity of the individual becoming extended, it is actually diminished or reduced.

Development is, therefore, really the exception rather than the rule. It covers only those cases in which a cumulative or forward metamorphosis has taken place. It is characteristic only of those species in which identity has been extended. Indeed, development might be called the law of higher life, or of that life which advances by gradual steps from the homogeneous to the heterogenous, which, in fact, _unfolds itself_ only to reveal and to perpetuate ever fresh and new attributes and activities.

Development is a name which, though not descriptive of all organic evolution,[3] certainly describes the changes of a species _that has grown_ through its thousands of generations--grown, that is to say, in the sense of having become more and more--more and more capable of multifarious activities and adaptations.

Development in this correct and restricted sense of “growth,” thus implies “becoming more,” “extending identity.” Becoming more, therefore, is a principle of higher life.

Now what does this conclusion necessarily involve in the terms of humanity? It means that the _ascending_ line of life in the genus Homo Sapiens, at least, has not only become more and more, but must also have been characterised by the spiritual counterpart of this physical striving, which consists in desiring to become more and more--that is to say, to extend identity.

Any slackening, any reversal, any paralysis of this desire to become more and more, may thus be regarded as the beginning of the other movement--the movement of retrograde development, of decline.

In each healthy individual of a truly _developing_ species, we should therefore expect to find the _conscious_ counterpart of the principle of higher life, which will be the desire to become more and more, to extend identity.

To assail this desire to become more and more is therefore tantamount to a conspiracy against life, it is tantamount to a denial of the healthiest instinct of the species. It is the hand of death outstretched across the _ascending road_ of the animal man.

Call this adverse criticism or hostility [p35] what you will--Socialism, Communism, or Bolshevism, it is all one. It is the cry of those who have lost ascending or developing life’s strongest instinct against those who still possess it. Or else it is the cry of the envious in life’s battle, who pretend to have lost life’s strongest instinct, in order to acquire power over those who have not.

I shall hardly be called upon to draw the obvious conclusion. How does, how can, the individual of a species that falls naturally under the head of Development manifest this incessant striving to become more, which is the conscious counterpart of the physical evolution of the race, except by means of private property? How can he achieve this becoming more which, as we have seen, constitutes an extension of his identity, without private property? I do not refer here to those exceptional individuals who are content with a non-material expression of this “becoming more,” but to the mass of mankind, in which individual extension _must_ take a material form. Private property is the only means, and this private property is so closely identified with individual extension that, as we know, in certain Ages and climes, wives and children have been included in the category.

It constitutes the gratification, nay the very necessity, of one of the deepest instincts of man. It is indistinguishable, inseparable, from the law of growth; hence the obstinate attachment even the poorest still reveal in regard to it; hence the uphill work which the preachers of Death and Decay, still find their propaganda to be.

The very morality of development says [p36] “Yea” to this desire to be and to become more. The very morality of development identifies growth, in the individual sense, with the general growth of the species, and therefore sanctifies and hallows the instinct of self-extension which is the instinct of private property. Only the sincere and whole-hearted pessimist can logically assail the principle of private property, for he alone can honestly desire to cripple his fellows, paralyse their life instinct, and curtail their existence on the globe.

It is hardly necessary here to refer to the dawn of the sense of private property in the lower animals. This has been done often enough. Suffice it to point out, however, that in them also it is most apparent where the variety of activities and adaptations is most complex--among the bees, the ants, the dogs and the cats. True, the private property in question is only food, or matter which will one day be used as food. But is this not true of all property? Has not the revolution in Russia shown that all property is merely so much frozen food, so much wealth that can ultimately be bartered for nourishment? And does not this again point to its deep relationship to the highest law of growth?

The important outcome of this inquiry into the ultimate relation of private property to biology and to the highest laws of life, however, is that it enables one to recognise the Socialist, the Bolshevist, and the Communist (where they are most sincere and fervent) in their true guise--that is to say, as the convinced and determined opponents, not only of a particular class, but of Life [p37] itself; as pessimists and bitter misanthropists, who do not scruple to conceal their hostility to an important life-principle beneath the most engaging and most unctuous of altruistic poses.

But then is all well with the principle of private property to-day? And are the Socialists, Bolshevists and Communists all wrong?

All is certainly not well with the principle of private property as it is allowed to work in our societies at the present day. Hence the colourable warrant that is given to the attacks of the Socialists and Communists upon it. Hence, too, the plausibility of their claims. For it is the simplest of feats to confuse an issue, and in societies where the right of private property is abused, it is easy to convince the thoughtless that the thing abused, and not the abuse itself, is the real curse.

It is, therefore, readily admitted that there is a good deal that is wrong about private property as a principle practised by modern man; the wrong, however, is no more inherent in the principle itself, than cruelty to children, because it happens to occupy the attention of a large and wealthy society in England, is inherent in the principle of parenthood. And it is because the present evils of the distribution of wealth are not inherent in the principle of private property, that it is ridiculous--not only ridiculous, but also highly suspicious--to wish to sweep away the institution itself in order to remedy the evils that now unquestionably account for its disrepute.

It has been shown why this desire to [p38] sweep away the institution is doubly suspicious:--

(_a_) Because it is the natural resort of sick and exhausted people, who are incapable of repairing or recreating anything.

(_b_) Because it is the action of people who are hostile not merely to private property, but to Life in general. (The fact that they are usually completely unconscious of this hostility only renders them all the more dangerous.)

The recognition of the right of private property is probably the oldest of all human principles. It is seen in all great civilisations. Every great culture has been built upon it. All societies, however, have not created the evils of modern Western civilisation. This alone ought to have provided a hint in the right direction. It ought to have been seen that the evils attending the distribution of wealth to-day, are evils more or less peculiar to the kind of culture we have evolved.

What are these evils?

(1) The chief evil of all is that by our present method of wealth distribution, the best people are not infrequently the most sorely oppressed, the most severely chastised by poverty and lack of power. The correlative evil to this is that those who are powerful to-day through wealth, are frequently so hopelessly unfitted to hold their position that the system which elevates such people to their present eminence seems as if it must be bad to the root.

(2) The next in importance is that life at present is organised in such wise that poverty does not mean merely humbleness [p39] of station; for which of us would object to that? It means being compelled to perform some of the most heart-rending, most unhealthy, most besotting and characterless work that the economy of the community has to offer. Society should be organised in such a way that either filthy and besotting labours should not be necessary or else that where they are necessary, they should entail compensating advantages.

(3) The next in importance is that, as society is organised at present, poverty, which might be readily and cheerfully accepted by thousands of us, aye, actually preferred in some cases--now almost necessarily signifies bad air, ugly surroundings, poor food, and consequently an unsecured bill of health. Accessibility to conditions in which good air and beauty are, as it were, happily wedded, is becoming ever more and more the restricted privilege of the wealthy.

(4) Owing to a misunderstanding of the true nature of social unity, wealth, or extensive private property, now gives certain classes the power of trespassing upon the life-needs of their fellows, without, however, being amenable to law--cornering markets, levying undue profits, destroying beautiful sites, supporting a host of societies which are simply parasitic pests on the nation’s back, unwise disposal of fortunes, etc.

(5) Owing to the educational advantages associated with wealth--an association which is quite unessential and arbitrary--modern society imposes a certain measure of benightedness and ignorance as an inevitable inheritance upon poverty, which is not in the least essential to poverty _per se_. [p40]

After this brief enumeration of some of the leading evils of our present system of wealth distribution, is it not, however, more than ever clear that none of these evils is inherent in the principle of private property itself? Who would venture to prove that any one of the wrongs enumerated was (_a_) either inherent in the principle of private property, or (_b_) irremediable without the sacrifice of that principle?

If we consider the first and chief wrong which consists in the fact that private property at the present day frequently elevates to power people who are totally unfitted to wield any power at all, while it as frequently condemns to impotence, obscurity and ignominy, people who would be eminently fitted to wield power, we realise at once that the fault does not lie in the amount of property held by these people, but upon the significance which current opinion and the prevailing estimate of wealth attaches to the accident of great or small possessions in either case.

It is well known, everybody indeed has heard of it, that in certain cultures that have existed and still exist, the significance of great possessions has not been the same as that which Western civilisation has chosen to attach to them. The Brahmin of India, for instance, although he is doomed to poverty in the most literal sense, is the most highly respected among rich and poor alike. He rules and directs opinion, neither because he is rich, nor because he is poor, but because he is profoundly wise, and because power does not happen to be connected, in the enlightened Hindu mind, [p41] with great possessions. It can be shown, and has been shown often enough, that the famous mendicant monks of the Middle Ages did not increase their power, but actually forfeited it, when they acquired riches and became as the other holy orders.

Evidently, then, the equation Wealth = Importance = Power, is not an inevitable one. It does not depend upon mathematical necessity. It is a perfectly arbitrary association of ideas, which is the result of a singular and quite gratuitous valuation.

The fact that it is deeply seated in the prejudices and prepossessions of all Western peoples, appears to give it the sanction almost of a social law. It would, however, constitute the acme of imprudence and superficiality to allow oneself to be led by this apparent unanimity into the belief that it either denotes or implies an ordinance of Fate.

The unanimity with which reverence is now felt for wealth alone, is only one of the many instances which it would be possible to give, of the stubborn and determined manner in which an arbitrary valuation strikes root in the heart of whole nations, when once it has been systematically and painstakingly inculcated upon them. It is one of those cases which inspire with hope all those who may be confronted with the apparently thankless task of altering the prejudices and prepossessions of a people. For, if it has been possible erroneously to raise wealth to the highest among our valuations, without a trace of social law to help us, it is clear that it must be possible to alter that valuation, to “transvalue” it, [p42] as the technical phrase has it, and to bring mankind back to a more rational understanding of the proper equipment of power, which consists chiefly of wisdom, virtue, character and resolution.

Nobody denies, of course, that when once wisdom, virtue, character and resolution, happen to combine in the same individual, the addition of wealth may make that individual exceptionally precious; but wealth, as we frequently see it to-day, endowing with power people who are neither wise, virtuous, characterful nor resolute, is little less than a national curse.

For what does wealth mean? It means simply that the owner of it has a purchasing power over the services of his fellows. It by no means signifies that this purchasing power will of necessity be wisely, virtuously or profitably exercised. Wherever it is not wisely, virtuously and profitably exercised, therefore, it becomes a scourge. The power itself becomes _violence_; and it is incumbent upon the laws of all well-regulated communities to suppress at least man-made violence. The besetting vice of all Western societies, whether Monarchies, Aristocracies, Republics, or “Democracies,” has been and is still that they have never taken adequate steps to suppress this particular kind of violence.

But the remedy for such violence would not consist in abolishing the principle of private property. You might just as well abolish knives because they are frequently used by homicidal maniacs. The remedy consists in so modifying the life of the nation, and the prejudices and prepossessions of the [p43] nation, that wealth may not necessarily mean power, and that poverty may not necessarily mean ignominy, ignorance and ill-health[4]; also that it should be difficult for material success to be achieved by people who are frequently the most contemptible members of the community both in spiritual and physical gifts.

All those who question the possibility of such an achievement in the recasting of values, are invited to dwell upon the genesis and growth of the prevalent ruling equation, Wealth = Importance = Power. They are invited, furthermore, to discover the moment in history when another valuation showed signs of becoming prevalent, and to ascertain by what means, foul or otherwise, it was made to fail. Then only, in the light of what they found, will they be able to decide whether a new equation and a new valuation have not even now a chance of being initiated, accepted, and universally believed.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: An enormous amount of confusion has been caused by the loose application of the term “Development,” to all processes of change in life. Strictly speaking, development means unfolding. But the process by which the tape-worm has degenerated from the higher species to which it once belonged is not a process of unfolding or development, but one of loss and reduction, one of gradual truncation and limitation.]

[Footnote 4: It should be remembered, however, that in a society in which success really did depend upon the possession of the highest moral and bodily qualities that the community could display,--which is by no means the case at present,--poverty or failure would undoubtedly have a certain inexpungeable stigma upon it; and quite rightly too. That which removes the stigma from poverty or failure to-day, in the eyes of the enlightened, is the fact that riches and success are frequently achieved by people who could not possibly lay claim to any high moral and bodily qualities,--not to mention the highest.]

[p44] CHAPTER II

JUSTICE

“Si nos coeurs battent, c’est dans ce but ... c’est pour que nous
puissions compter sur l’avenir et savoir s’il y a dans les choses
d’ici bas une justice immanente qui vient à son jour et à son
heure[5].”--L. Gambetta (Cherbourg speech. August 9th, 1880).

A discussion of the idea of justice almost necessarily precedes the subject of the next chapter, for the kind of justice which is the object of public clamour outside the law and police-courts, and beyond the dealings of man with man, provides one of the principal arguments to those who believe in human equality.

In this essay, then, it is clear that we shall not be concerned either with the justice which includes the administration of the law, and the incidence of the law of any country, or with the justice which relates to the unwritten rules of conduct governing the commerce of men and women; but rather with that idea of equity which, while it enjoys a fast hold upon the imagination of all Western peoples, is supposed to have an existence apart from statutes, codes, regulations and by-laws, and human conventions. It is an abstraction, somewhat like the idea of equality; but it is not a mathematician’s abstraction, it is the abstraction of a moralist. It arises out of the idea of a moral order--that is to say, of a supposed universal tendency to arrive at a perfect equilibrium between deserts and rewards, and it assumes that the moment this perfect balance is disturbed, a violation of this abstract justice--Gambetta’s “_justice immanente_,”--is supposed to have occurred.

To take an instance which illustrates this notion of justice, it is popularly supposed that for a child, who can have committed no crime sufficiently great to deserve severe punishment, to be born in a sordid home, in a still more sordid city-quarter, of drunken parents, some disturbance of the balance of justice must have occurred--a disturbance which, if it is to be corrected, must require some kind of compensation. If the compensation cannot be conceived as forthcoming in this life, another life is postulated, in which the proper equilibrium between deserts and rewards;[sic] will be restored. It is not enough to say that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Although the ancient Jewish view of universal justice doubtless required some such explanation, and found it satisfactory, the modern view of “immanent justice” is not satisfied by this method of settling the question. Indeed, the very idea that children should expiate their parents’ sins is abhorrent to the modern mind, steeped as it is in this notion of justice. It only consents to it as a fact in the face of overwhelming [p46] physiological and biological evidence, and, even then, takes refuge from the apparent harshness of the law, in the settled conviction that somewhere, somewhen, compensation will be provided for the expiatory suffering.