Part 11

For all my love of my old school, for all my realization of the fact that her training equips her children with certain qualities invaluable to public life and public service, I do feel that she and all her sisters are disserving the national welfare by refraining from really active and resolute attempt to destroy the bad side of “caste” feeling. They let it grow of its own momentum through the herd instinct till it blinds the eyes and blunts the feelings of those who, being fortunate, must by the laws of human nature make the first advances toward friendship with the less fortunate, if those advances are to be made at all; and must make them not because to neglect them is dangerous, but out of brotherly feeling and a real hearty wish to give all the help they can to such as are not so lucky as themselves. I do not mean that our public schools and universities are consciously refraining. They are not, and their very unconsciousness in the matter is half the danger. And I do not say that there are no masters, or dons, conscious of the danger and trying their best to remove it, but I do say there are not nearly enough. A few swallows do not make a summer.

Since, in relation to the foregoing, four objections, at all events, are bound to be made, let me make them myself, and answer them too. First: It is not the public school and ’varsity man who is lacking in sympathy and good-will towards Labour; it is the self-made capitalist, or the grammar school man. The truth is that, with exceptions, they all are lacking. But the defect is more dangerous and insidious within “the caste” than without; for not only is “the caste” homogeneous, and far more influential in every way, but it veils its lack of sympathy in this very pretension of having sympathy. Next it will be said: “You accuse us of lack of sympathy! But we would gladly be sympathetic, if they would only let us!” Now this in the main is a perfectly genuine belief in members of “the caste” when they have once gone out into life and rubbed off the rawness of youthful hostility and prejudice. But it is the genuine belief of people only passively inclined to friendship; in other words, the belief of the fortunate not imbued with a spirit sufficiently high and generous to take, from the best motives, _active_ steps towards friendship with the less fortunate.

Further it will be said: “But Labour is not really less fortunate than ourselves—it has freedom from cares, responsibilities, and expenses, such as we can never know; in fact, we are not sure that it is not really the more fortunate class.” Well! Apart from the fact that not one in ten thousand of “the caste” would change places with an industrial worker, there is this answer: “On your hypothesis, evolution, which is ‘caste’s’ main justification, is absurd and our system is standing on its head. If, indeed, you require Labour to consider itself at least as fortunate as yourselves, you must set to work at once and revalue everything, alter every present ideal in your social life, and annul the importance of property. Are you prepared to do this?” Finally it will be objected: “It may be as you say, but the evil is implicit and inevitable, for everything possible is already done by our educational authorities to counteract a narrow ‘caste’ spirit and imbue the children of the fortunate with a brotherly feeling towards the less fortunate.” The answer to this is simply: “Has everything been done? Has anything like everything been done? For example, is the danger of this narrow ‘caste’ spirit ever taken into account in the appointment of these same educational authorities?”

Besides being “snobs” in the best sense of that word, boys are high-spirited, generous, and malleable creatures. Let any fair-minded man of “the caste” ask himself: “What sustained and really ‘felt’ effort did he encounter from his own teachers in school and college days to turn that high spirit, and generosity, and malleability of his into a state of mind that regarded his good fortune as a thing to be held in trust to share to the full with the less fortunate?” A few will answer truly: “Yes, I have met with such effort.” But how few!

Again, then, I am brought to the point of saying: There is a general absence of active and sustained effort to produce in the young of the prosperous classes this “good-will” state of mind; to change such general absence of effort into a general presence of effort is a consummation that will never, I think, be reached under our present system of education.

Both these influences, then, contributing to Social Unrest—the one produced by the increasing presence of the fiduciary element, and the other by the unchecked growth of a narrow “caste” spirit—lead us to the same prime underlying deficiency in our national life, the lack of right purpose in our education. They happen to be both incident to Capital, but it is probable that influences incident to Labour, of which I hesitate to speak, since I cannot from personal experience and feeling, may also in measure be traced to the same underlying deficiency in our education.

No national improvement can come from outside. It must come from within, from gradually improved feeling in the body politic. To hope for growth without this improvement is to hope that a man shall raise himself from the ground by the hair of his own head. But improved feeling has no chance of spreading throughout the body politic without that machinery of infection which we know by the name of education. Therefore education is the most sacred concern, indeed the only hope, of a nation.

How do we now treat our education—this sacred thing, this only hope? In regard to the classes, its direction and control are left entirely to the haphazard beck and call of each separate school or college, without conformity to or guidance from any professed national aim, principle, or ideal. In regard to the masses, it is the concern of a Department of State, just as are Trade, the Post Office, or the Navy, and is treated, not as a spiritual matter underlying all else, but as a material affair. The spiritual side of education is supposed to be the concern of the religious bodies; but if we are quite honest we have to confess that the religious bodies have no longer sufficient hold on classes or masses to inspire in either such wide mutual good-will and sense of service as will forward any real improvement in the relations between Capital and Labour, between the fortunate and less fortunate classes. The religious bodies, let us say, have tried their best, but, since our last state is worse than our first, they must be considered to have failed. Their influence, indeed, is too incoherent and dispersed, pervasive here and there, but without either the centrality or force to promote in us a great national change towards that essence of Christianity—mutual good-will and sense of service. There is no longer, I am afraid, hope in that direction.

Deep down, we know all this, but we have not yet bestirred ourselves to find out what it is that we are trying to do with our civilization, or indeed whether we are trying to do anything except just keep our heads above water from hour to hour.

And we have not yet bestirred ourselves, partly because we are still breathless and uncertain after that long and tremendous struggle within us between Science and Orthodox Religion, which has torn the wings off both, and partly because we are paralysed by the word Democracy. We dare not move for fear of endowing education with too much authority. There may, of course, be another and far more deadly reason why we have not bestirred ourselves. We may be too far gone to devise any improved standard or machinery of education, too flaccid to impart, or even to desire to impart, to our education that spiritual quality, that devotion to an ideal, which is our only hope. If so, we must resign ourselves to a desperate Class struggle, as to some bitter, poisonous tonic, from which we may perhaps gain strength to deal with our disease, but of which we may take too much and die. Personally—being, as they say, a pessimist—I prefer to think that all is not yet lost; that we are still capable of expressing in the form of a faith the aspiration towards Perfection that does, that must, lie inarticulate within us; still capable of finding machinery, and men to work it, that shall drive this faith into the very heart of all classes.

At all events, I refuse to believe that we cannot do a good deal more with education as a solvent of our troubles than we have done hitherto. The main and obvious difficulty—one might say the only real difficulty—in education, as in all the affairs of life, is to find the men; and to find the men we can only make use of machinery which is acceptable to a democratic age. Yes, we cannot now go outside Democracy, and that is something to be profoundly grateful for. The only trouble with Democracy is that it is slow and inarticulate. And I do not feel that the democratic principle—in which I believe as much as any man—will ever do itself justice until it discovers some quicker way than it yet has of shaping out of itself its spiritual essence, some swifter way of extracting from itself and utilizing for its own service the highest aspiration and finest feeling within it. It has succeeded on the whole fairly well in discovering and making use of its best business and administrative minds; but so far it has regarded spirituality as completely outside its province and deliberately left it to religious bodies that have no longer, nationally speaking, a real hold on us, and are professedly autocratic. In fact, Democracy at present—and not only here but in America—offers the spectacle of a man running down a road followed at a more and more respectful distance by his own soul.

Can our education any longer be safely treated in this casual way, be safely left to Churches from whose hand it has too far slipped; be safely left as to the Classes to chance and to vested interests; as to the Masses to mere business management?

Should we not rather trust it coherently and as a whole to the finest spirits and broadest minds in the country; to spirits that can be relied on to hold, and to minds that can be relied on to apply, a really high ideal; relied on, too, _to select and train the best men available for the propagation of that Ideal_? If by some democratic process we could sift out these minds from among us, and endow them with wholesale powers of selection, appointment, and training of teachers, we should have established a sort of endless band on which might travel a perpetual vitalizing current of the best feeling within us. To find these finest spirits and broadest minds we might conceivably use the existing representative machinery of Parliament, or some reformed representative system; or we might institute a special straining and sifting process, by means of plebiscite within plebiscite, till we were reasonably sure of arriving at the men best fitted to be entrusted with a high, coherent plan of education. We have, then, to found and place under their guidance a great training college, wherein the higher leaders of education may be imbued with the new spirit, trained in the new standards, and pass out, as posts fall vacant, to the headship of schools and colleges. And if it be objected, as it certainly will, that this is to constitute a too rigid spiritual bureaucracy, the answer is two-fold: This is the plan on which you order all your political, your material life, without regarding it as in the least dangerous or undemocratic. And, secondly, you have at present exactly the same bureaucratic methods of appointment in education, only they are exercised in a hole-and-corner manner, quite incoherently, and _without any democratic check at all_.

There is no revolution in this idea, and it will certainly prove no immediate or quack remedy. It is, in few words, a suggestion that we should adopt for spiritual things, for states of mind, the method that, roughly speaking, we have found works best in material matters. Democracy will never really flourish till it has taken charge, and that right heartily, of its own spirituality.

Life itself is the best education in spirituality a nation gets. But the plea here is only for better machinery to express and direct the experience and latent good-will which is implicit within the nation, and is not now brought out into the light for the nation’s service. We are living in a parched field under which there is plenty of water, but we have sunk no well, put up no pumping gear, with which to make our pasture green. Is the notion that we can still do this a preposterous dream, a mere presumptuous counsel of perfection?

We have at present an air charged with trouble; if we are not to shut our eyes, fold our hands, and drift, all that we do must be in the direction of improving our state of mind. But there is no way of improving a state of mind save by fertilizing it with the faith and good-will of a higher mind. Our machinery for doing this has failed us. Indeed, nationally speaking, we no longer have any such machinery. What more useful efforts, then, can we make than efforts in the direction of discovering a new machinery? And the finer the spirits, the broader the minds, we place in charge thereof, the greater power we give them, always subject to the safeguard of election, the more we may hope to emerge gradually from our sinister situation.

[6] Many think the war will alter all this. I only wish I did.—J. G.

ON PEACE

I

THE WILL TO PEACE (From the _Daily Mail_, 1909.)

I was walking in the district known as Notting Dale looking for signs of the Millennium, when I saw on a poster these words: “Why England and Germany must go to war.”

I stood gazing at them in the company of a woman the worse for drink, a brutal-looking man, a consumptive boy, and a half-starved horse harnessed to a cart. With the exception of the horse, these persons were soon replaced by a little labourer with a very sad face, and a sick-looking woman, in a ragged shawl. When they, in turn, passed on, I was joined in front of the poster by three girls going home from work—the sound of whose laughter was like the snapping of dried sticks—and by a whisky-perfumed man with that peculiar, brazen look in the eye which is liable to sudden eclipse. These, too, stayed but a short time, and their places before the poster were filled by two youths in ragged clothes, with dun-coloured faces, and the stumps of cigarettes between pale lips. Their foot-steps and obscenity having died away, I was left alone with the poster and the horse. This horse’s ribs were conspicuous, and from the size of eggcup-shaped hollows above eyes covered with a bluish film, he had evidently laboured to the limit of his capacity. He was resting one thin leg—too hairless at the knee, too hairy at the heel. Two very young children came now, and, holding each other’s hands, flattened their noses against the poster in the shop window. One of them moved her feet continually as if her boots hurt her, while on the feet of the other were the wrecks of boots.

And I said to myself: In hundreds of towns all over the country, people like this are standing before that poster, or passing by it. One third of the population are below the line of reasonable subsistence, another third are able by the constant employment of every energy to keep their heads just on that line. We are the richest country in the world, so that even in organised Germany conditions little better may very well be prevalent. This poster declares that England and Germany must go to war. And this poster is no joke, but the indication of a frame of mind. Moreover, I mused, credit for sincerity being due to all men until the opposite is proved against them, this frame of mind must be honest and founded on genuine fear—must be, in fact, the conviction of many, not only in this country, but in Germany. They contemplate a war between two nations, two thirds of whose respective populations are as yet barely able to make a living; a war that means wasting many hundred million pounds and the earning power of many hundred thousand lives; a war that will in six months cast on to the dust heap twenty years of social progress; a war that may well have no semblance of nobility, no great motto, no inspiring cause, but be a mere sordid struggle between two business communities, for so-called commercial ends; a war that may be unparalleled for cold-blooded horror and myopic puerility. And the poster speaks of this war as if it were inevitable!

Where, I asked myself, can the people who thus think and speak have lived? Where have they kept their hearts, and brains, and eyes, and noses? Can they not see these millions of ghosts in their midst? Or do they think to fatten them by war? Do they think by war to cheapen the price of bread and coals, to spread education, to foster the growth of science and of the arts? Will they by war preserve the strongest males for the improvement of the human stock? Will they by war advance in any single way the slow process of humanizing a civilization which still produces in millions the beings who have been standing with me here before that poster? No—I thought—they will certainly reply: “War is an evil, but it is necessary; for the human race is divided into breeds, distinct from one another, and plunged into struggle from their births up. Only in each country’s jealous preservation of itself can we look for the welfare of the whole. There is no avail in dreams of peace; no use in preparation for it; men have always killed each other for their own advantage and always will; if they did not so kill their neighbours they could not themselves survive. Life is so conditioned; there is not enough for all. We know, therefore, that this war must come. We see it coming. We have fastened our eyes on it. We cannot get out of its way. We must offer ourselves up in holy sacrifice before this bloody, predestined monster.”

Well!—I thought—if it is sacrifice you want, look at that horse! Look at all the people who have stood before this poster! They will take all your powers of sacrifice before you have done with them! And I, myself, looked at the horse; with his bleared eyes and the curves at the corners of his mouth, I thought I had never seen such a cynical-looking creature. “What are you, after all,” he seemed to be saying to me, “but a set of sanguinary tailless animals?”

But suddenly the eyes of my mind travelled beyond sight of that poster, and as in a vision I seemed to see all the great lives men have lived, all the high thoughts they have conceived, all their wonderful ingenuity and perseverance and strength of will; how they have always found a way to fulfil that on which they have set their hearts. And as background to that vision there seemed disclosed to me the untold, unexploited wealth of the fields, woods, and waters under the sun. And I thought: “What that poster says is only true of such as _will_ it to be true. _Where there is a will to peace there is a way._[7] War between two such countries, two trustees of civilization need not be inevitable. To believe that is to blaspheme; to belittle human nature, to deny the Earth.”

[7] I recollect that the journal which this poster served to sell contained an article proposing to prove that war between England and Germany was inevitable, because of the rivalry between their trades. I thought then, and think now, that such a reason was revolting. In spite of all the bitter cry for commercial war that has now arisen, we did not begin, we never should have begun a war with Germany for such a reason alone. The war that—alas!—has come, has for us a better cause. None the less, I freely admit not gauging rightly the state of mind of Germany’s ruling classes. I always thought the question of war or no war was a great “toss-up” between the craze for armament and the growth of international feeling through social democracy. I thought the latter would win if people would set their wills on peace, and we could tide over the next few years. I was wrong.—J. G.

II

PEACE OF THE AIR (A Letter to _The Times_, 1911.)

Beyond all the varying symptoms of madness in the life of modern nations the most dreadful is this prostitution of the conquest of the air to the ends of warfare.

If ever men presented a spectacle of sheer inanity it is now—when, having at last triumphed in their struggle to subordinate to their welfare the unconquered element, they have straightway commenced to defile that element, so heroically mastered, by filling it with engines of destruction. If ever the gods were justified of their ironic smile—by the gods, it is now! Is there any thinker alive watching this still utterly preventable calamity without horror and despair? Horror of what must come of it if not promptly stopped; despair that men can be so blind, so hopelessly and childishly the slaves of their own marvellous inventive powers. Was there ever so patent a case for scotching at birth a hideous development of the black arts of warfare; ever such an occasion for the Powers in conference to ban once and for all a new and ghastly menace?

A little reason, a grain of common sense, a gleam of sanity before it is too late; before vested interests and the chains of a new habit have enslaved us too hopelessly. If this fresh devilry be not quenched within the next few years, it will be too late. Water and earth are wide enough for men to kill each other on. For the love of the sun, and stars, and the blue sky, that have given us all our aspirations since the beginning of time, let us leave the air to innocence! Will not those who have eyes to see, good-will, and the power to put that good-will into practice, bestir themselves while there is yet time, and save mankind from this last and worst of all its follies?

THE WAR

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

(From the _Nation_, 1915.)

God, I am travelling out to death’s sea, I, who exulted in sunshine and laughter, Thought not of dying—death is such waste of me!— Grant me one comfort: Leave not the hereafter Of mankind to war, as though I had died not— I, who in battle, my comrade’s arm linking, Shouted and sang—life in my pulses hot Throbbing and dancing! Let not my sinking In dark be for naught, my death a vain thing! God, let me know it the end of man’s fever! Make my last breath a bugle call, carrying Peace o’er the valleys and cold hills, for ever!

CREDO

(From the _Neutral Press_, 1914.)

To love peace with all one’s heart. To feel that war is a black stain on the humanity and fame of man. To hate militarism. To go any length to avoid war for material interests, war that involves no great principle, distrusting profoundly the common meaning of the phrase “national honour”—all this is my belief.

But there is a national honour charged with the future happiness of man; loyalty is due from those living to those that will come after; civilization can only wax and flourish in a world where faith is kept; for nations, as for individuals, there are laws of duty, whose violation harms the whole human race; in sum, stars of conduct shine for peoples, as for private men.

And so I hold that without tarnishing true honour, endangering civilization present and to come, and ruining all hope of future tranquillity, my Country could not have refused to take up arms for the defence of her little neighbour Belgium’s outraged neutrality, which she had solemnly guaranteed.

I claim from the trend of events, and of national character, during the last century that in democracy alone lies any coherent hope of progressive civilization or any chance of lasting peace in Europe, or the world.