Part 17
Enough has been said to show that the humanitarian movement was not in want of able counsellors and allies; and there were not a few others of whom further mention would have to be made if this book were a history of the League. The support of such friends as Mr. Edward Carpenter, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Besant, Mr. W. H. Hudson, and Mr. Herbert Burrows, was taken for granted. Sir Sydney Olivier, distinguished alike as thinker and administrator, was at one time a member of the Committee; a similar position was held for many years by Captain Alfred Carpenter, R.N. Even Old Etonians were not unknown in our ranks. Mr. Goldwin Smith paid tribute to the justice of our protests against both vivisection and the Eton hare-hunt, as may be seen in two letters which he wrote to me, now included in his published Correspondence. In Sir George Greenwood our Committee had for years a champion both in Parliament and in the press, whose wide scholarship, armed with a keen and rapier-like humour, made many a dogmatical opponent regret his entry into the fray. Readers of that subtly reasoned book, _The Faith of an Agnostic_, will not need to be told that its author’s philosophy is no mere negative creed, but one that on the ethical side finds expression in very real humanitarian feeling.
Belonging to the younger generation, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Deuchar were among the most valuable of the League’s “discoveries”: rarely, I suppose, has a reform society had the aid of a more talented pair of writers. Mr. Deuchar has a genuine gift of verse which, if cultivated, should win him a high place among present-day poets: if anything finer and more discriminating has been written about Shelley than his sonnet, first printed in the _Humane Review_, I do not know it; and in his small volume of poems, _The Fool Next Door_, published under a disguised name, there are other things not less good. Mrs. Deuchar, as Miss M. Little, earned distinction as a novelist of great power and insight: she, too, was a frequent contributor to the _Humane Review_ and the _Humanitarian_.
The _Humane Review_, which has been mentioned more than once in the foregoing pages, was a quarterly magazine, published by Mr. Ernest Bell, and edited by myself, during the first decade of the century. It was independent of the Humanitarian League, but was very useful as an organ in which the various subjects with which the League dealt could be discussed more fully than was possible in the brief space of its journal. The list of contributors to the _Review_ included the names of many well-known writers; and if humanitarians had cared sufficiently for their literature, it would have had a longer life: that it survived for ten years was due to the fact that it was very generously supported by two excellent friends of our cause, Mr. and Mrs. Atherton Curtis.
The Humanitarian League itself resembled the _Humane Review_ in this, that its ordinary income was never sufficient to meet the yearly expenditure, and had it not been for the special donations of a few of its members, notably Mr. Ernest Bell, and some welcome bequests, its career would have closed long before 1919. The League ended, as it began, in its character of Forlorn Hope. We had the goodwill of the free-lances, not of the public or of the professions. I have already mentioned how the artists, with one or two important exceptions, stood aloof from what they doubtless regarded as a meddlesome agitation; literary men, even those who agreed with us, were often afraid of incurring the name “humanitarian”; schoolmasters looked askance at a society which condemned the cane; and religious folk were troubled because we did not begin our meetings with prayers (as was the fashion a quarter-century ago), and because none of the usual pietistic phrases were read in our journal. From the clergy we got little cheer; though there were a few of them who did not hesitate to say personally with Dean Kitchin, that the League “was carrying out the best side of our Saviour’s life and teaching.” Mr. Price Hughes, in particular, was most courageous in his endorsement of an ethic which found little favour among his co-religionists. Archbishop Temple and some leaders of religious opinion personally signed our memorials against cruel sport; and the Bishop of Hereford (Dr. Percival) introduced our Spurious Sports Bill in the House of Lords; yet from Churchmen as a body our cause received no sympathy, and many of them were ranged against it.
In the many protests against cruelty in its various forms, whether of judicial torture, or vivisection, or butchery, or blood-sport, the reproachful cry: “Where are the clergy?” has frequently been raised, but raised by those who have forgotten, in each case, that there was nothing new in the failure of organized Religion to aid in the work of emancipation.
I wish to be just in this matter. I know well from a long experience of work in an unpopular cause that humaneness is not a perquisite of any one sect or creed, whether affirmative or negative, religious or secular; it springs up in the heart of all sorts of persons in all sorts of places, according to no law of which at present we have cognisance. In every age there have been men whose religion was identical with their humanity; men like that true saint, John Woolman, whose gift, as has been well said, was love. St. Francis is the favourite instance of this type; but sweet and gracious as he was, with his appeals to “brother wolf” and “sister swallows,” his example has perhaps suffered somewhat by too frequent quotation, which raises the suspicion that the Church makes such constant use of him because its choice is but a limited one. Less known, and more impressive, is the story, related by Gibbon, of the Asiatic monk, Telemachus (A.D. 404), who, having dared to interrupt the gladiatorial shows by stepping into the arena to separate the combatants, was overwhelmed under a shower of stones. “But the madness of the people soon subsided; they respected the memory of Telemachus, who had deserved the honour of martyrdom, and they submitted without a murmur to laws which abolished for ever the human sacrifices of the amphitheatre.” Gibbon’s comment is as follows: “Yet no church has been dedicated, no altar has been erected, to the only monk who died a martyr in the cause of humanity.”
Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless “beasts,” has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty.
I knew a Catholic priest, of high repute, who excused the Spanish bull-fight on the plea that it forms a safety-valve for men’s savage instincts; their barbarity goes out on the bull, and leaves them gentle and kindly in their domestic relations. It is, in fact, the story of the scape-goat repeated; only the victim is not a goat, and he does not escape. Everywhere among the religious, except in a few individuals, one meets the persistent disbelief in the kinship of all sentient life: it is the religious, not the heretics, who are the true infidels and unbelievers. A few years ago the Bishop of Oxford refused to sanction a prayer for the animals, because “it has never been the custom of the Church to pray for any other beings than those we think of as rational.”
I was told by the Rev. G. Ouseley, an old man whose heart and soul were in the work of alleviating the wrongs of animals, that he once approached all the ministers of religion in a large town on the south coast, in the hope of inducing them to discountenance the cruel treatment of cats. He met with little encouragement; and one of the parsons on whom he called, the most influential in the place, bluntly ridiculed the proposal. “One can’t chuck a cat across the room,” he said, “without some old woman making a fuss about it.” Mr. Ouseley’s only comment, when he repeated this remark, was: “A Christian clergyman!”
The following is an extract from a letter written at Jerusalem by my friend Mr. Philip G. Peabody, who has travelled very widely, and has been a most careful observer of the treatment accorded to animals, especially to horses, in the various countries visited by him:
“When I reflect that for centuries, and from all parts of the world, the most earnest Christians have been coming here, and are still coming; that often they remain here until they die; that scores of great churches here are crowded with pious thousands; and that not one human being of them, so far as I can see or can learn, has the slightest regard for the cruelties occurring hundreds of times daily, so atrocious that the most heartless ruffian in Boston would indignantly protest against them--what am I to think of the value of Christianity to make men good, tender, and kind?”
This opinion would seem to be corroborated by that of Dean Inge, who has described Man as “a bloodthirsty savage, not much changed since the first Stone Age.” Unfortunately, the Gloomy Dean, whose oracular utterances are so valued by journalists as providing excellent material for “copy,” does not himself extend any sympathy to those who are endeavouring to mitigate the savageness which he deplores, and which his religion has failed to amend.
Perhaps no better test of a people’s civilization could be found than in the manner of their religious festivals. What of our Christmas--the season when peace and goodwill take the form of a general massacre followed by a general gormandizing, with results not much less fatal to the merry-makers than to their victims? One would think that a decent cannibal would be sickened by the shows of live cattle, fattened for the knife, and thousands of ghastly carcases hung in the butchers’ shops; but, on the contrary, the spectacle is everywhere regarded as a genial and festive one. The protests which the Humanitarian League used to make, in letters to ministers of religion and other persons of influence, met with hardly any response; sometimes a press-writer would piously vindicate the sacred season, as “Dagonet” once did in the _Referee_: “We are, of course, from a certain point of view, barbarians in our butchery of beasts for the banquet. The spectacle of headless animals hanging on hooks and dripping with blood is not æsthetic. But Nature is barbarous in her methods, and it is a law of Nature that one set of live things should live upon another set of live things. To kill and eat is a natural instinct. To denounce it as inhuman is not only absurd, but in a sense impious.” Piety and pole-axe, it will be seen, go together, in the celebration of the Christian Saturnalia.
Christmas comes but once a year: Let this our anguish soften! For who could bide that season drear Of bogus mirth and gory cheer, If it came more often?
From Religion, then, as such, the League expected nothing and got nothing; but it must be owned that its failure to obtain any substantial help from the Labour movement was something of a disappointment; for though not a few leaders, men such as Keir Hardie, J. R. Clynes, J. R. Macdonald, Bruce Glasier, and George Lansbury, were good friends to our cause, the party, as a whole, showed little interest in the reforms which we advocated, even in matters which specially concerned the working classes, such as the Vagrancy Act, the Game Laws, and the use of the cane in Board Schools. As for the non-humans, it is a curious fact that while the National Secular Society includes among its immediate practical objects a more humane treatment of animals, and their legal protection against cruelty, the Labour movement, like the Churches, has not cared to widen its outlook even to the extent of demanding better conditions for the more highly organized domestic animals.
I have often thought that Walter Crane’s cartoon, “The Triumph of Labour,” has a deep esoteric meaning, though perhaps not intended by its author. Every socialist knows the picture--a May-day procession, in which a number of working-folk are riding to the festival in a large wain, with a brave flutter of flags and banners, and supporting above them, with upturned palms, a ponderous-looking globe on which is inscribed “The Solidarity of Labour”--the whole party being drawn by two sturdy Oxen, the true heroes of the scene, who must be wishing the solidarity of labour were a little less solid, for it would appear that those heedless merry-makers ought to be prosecuted for overloading their faithful friends. The Triumph of Labour seems a fit title for the scene, but in a sense which democrats would do well to lay to heart. Do not horses and other “beasts of burden” deserve their share of citizenship? Centuries hence, perhaps, some learned antiquarian will reconstruct, from such anatomical data as may be procurable, the gaunt, misshapen, pitiable figure of our now vanishing cab-horse, and a more civilized posterity will shudder at the sight of what we still regard as a legitimate agent in locomotion.
Such, then, was the position of our Forlorn Hope in the years that saw the menace of Armageddon looming larger. Like every one else, humanitarians underrated the vastness of the catastrophe towards which the world was drifting; but some at least saw the madness of the scaremongers who were persistently fostering in their respective nations the spirit of hatred; and five years before the crash came it was pointed out in the _Humanitarian_ that a terrible war was, consciously or unconsciously, the aim and end of the outcry that was being raised about the wicked designs of Germany, to the concealment of the more important fact that every nation’s worst enemies are the quarrelsome or interested persons within its own borders, who would involve two naturally friendly peoples in a foolish and fratricidal strife.
We knew too well, from the lessons of the Boer War, what sort of folk some of these were, who, themselves without the least intention of fighting, had stirred up such warlike passions in the Yellow Press. I had been acquainted with some of them at that time, and had not forgotten how, meeting one such firebrand, I noticed with surprise that he had become facially, as well as journalistically, yellow, his cheeks having assumed an ochreous hue since I had seen him a day or two before. He confided his secret to me. He had once enlisted in the army; and having, as he supposed, been discharged, was now stupefied by receiving a notice to rejoin his regiment. And there he sat, wondering how he could meet his country’s call, a yellow journalist indeed: I saw him in his true colours that day.
But even thus, though we suspected, with a great eruption in prospect, that to pursue our humanitarian work was but to cultivate the slopes of a volcano, we did not at all guess the magnitude of the coming disaster. It might bring a return, we feared, to the ethics of, say, the Middle Ages; our countrymen’s innate savagery would be rather more openly and avowedly practised--that would be all. They would be like the troupe of monkeys who, having been trained to go through their performance with grave and sedate demeanour, were loosed suddenly, by the flinging of a handful of nuts, into all their native lawlessness. What we did _not_ anticipate--the very thing that happened--was that the atavism aroused by such a conflict would bring to light much more aboriginal instincts than those of a few centuries back; that it was not the medieval man who was being summoned from the vasty deep, but the prehistoric troglodyte, or Cave-Man, who, far from having become extinct, as was fondly supposed, still survived in each and all of us, awaiting his chance of resurrection.
XV
THE CAVE-MAN RE-EMERGES
I scan him now, Beastlier than any phantom of his kind That ever butted his rough brother-brute For lust or lusty blood or provender. TENNYSON.
It is a subject of speculation among zoologists whether the swamps and forests of Central Africa may still harbour some surviving Dinosaur, or Brontosaur, a gigantic dragon-like monster, half-elephant, half-reptile, a relic of a far bygone age. The thought is thrilling, though the hope is probably doomed to disappointment. What is more certain is that not less marvellous prodigies may be studied, by those naturalists who have the eyes to see them, much nearer home; for though Africa has been truly called a wonderful museum, it cannot compare in that respect with the human mind, a repository that still teems with griffins and gorgons, centaurs and chimæras, not less real because they are not creatures of flesh and blood. Two thousand years ago it was shown by the Roman poet Lucretius that what mortals had to fear was not such fabled pests as the Nemean lion, the Arcadian boar, or the Cretan bull, but the much more terrible in-dwelling monsters of the mind. In like manner, it was from some hidden mental recesses that there emerged that immemorial savage, the Cave-Man, who, released by the great upheaval of the war, was sighted by many eye-witnesses, on many occasions, during the five-years’ carnival of Hatred.[41]
Some day, perhaps, a true history of the war will be written, and it will then be made plain how such conflict had been rendered all but inevitable by the ambitious schemes and machinations not of one Empire, but of several; by the piling up of huge armaments under the pretence of insuring peace; by the greed of commercialists; and by the spirit of jealousy and suspicion deliberately created by reckless speakers and writers on both sides; further, how, when the crisis arrived, the working-classes in all the nations concerned were bluffed and cajoled into a contest which to their interests was certain in any event to be ruinous. Then, the flame once lit, there followed in this country the clever engineering of enforced military service, rendered possible by the preceding Registration Act (disguised under the pretence of a quite different purpose), and by a number of illusory pledges and promises for the protection of conscientious objectors to warfare. The whole story, faithfully told, will be a long record of violence and trickery masquerading as “patriotism”; but what I am concerned with here is less the war itself than the brutal spirit of hatred and persecution which the war engendered.
As a single instance of Cave-Man’s ferocity, take the ill-treatment of “enemy aliens” by non-combatants, who, themselves running no personal risks, turned their insensate malice against helpless foreigners who had every claim to a generous nation’s protection. “They are an accursed race,” said a typical speaker at one of the meetings held in London. “Intern them all, or rather leave out the _n_, and inter them all. Let the name ‘German’ be handed down to posterity, and be known to the historian as everything that was bestial, damnable, and abominable.” These would be words of criminal lunacy--nothing less--in the mouth of civilized beings, yet they are merely examples of things said on innumerable occasions in every part of our land. Great masses of Englishmen were, for the time, in a mental state lower than that of remote tribes whom we regard as Bushmen and cannibals.
Perhaps the most curious feature of this orgie of patriotic Hatred was its artificial nature: it was at home, not at the front, that it flourished; and if those who indulged in it had been sane enough to read even the war-news with intelligence, they would there have found ample disproof of their denunciations. Half a dozen lines from one of Mr. Philip Gibbs’s descriptions would have put their ravings to shame. “Some of them [English wounded] were helped down by German prisoners, and it was queer to see one of our men with his arms round the necks of two Germans. German wounded, helped down by our men less hurt than they, walked in the same way, with their arms round the necks of our men; and sometimes an English soldier and a German soldier came along together very slowly, arm in arm, like old cronies.” Not much patriotic Hatred _there_.
Nor, of course, was it only the wounded, companions in misfortune, who thus forgot their enmity; for the practice of “fraternizing” sprang up to such an extent at the first Christmas of the war, that it was afterwards prohibited. “They gave us cigars and cigarettes and toffee,” wrote an English soldier who took part in this parley with the accursed race, “and they told us that they didn’t want to fight, but they had to. We were with them about an hour, and the officers couldn’t make head or tail of it.” To this a military correspondent adds: “There is more bitterness against the Germans among the French soldiers than among the British, who as a rule show no bitterness at all, but the general spirit of the French army is much less bitter than that of many civilians.” It is an interesting psychological fact that it was the civilians, the do-nothings, who made Hatred into a cult.
And what a beggarly, despicable sort of virulence it was! For a genuine hatred there is at least something to be said; but this spurious manufactured malevolence, invented by yellow journalists, and fostered by Government placards, was a mere poison-gas of words, a thing without substance, yet with power to corrupt and vitiate the minds of all who succumbed to it. Men wrangled, as in Æsop’s fable, not over the ass, but over the shadow of the ass. Theirs was, in Coleridge’s words:
A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile, Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile.
Yet it was difficult not to smile at it. The Niagara of nonsense that the war let loose--the war that was supposed to be “making people think”--was almost as laughable as the war itself was tragic; and satirists[42] there were who, like Juvenal, found it impossible to keep a grave countenance under such provocation. Hereafter, no doubt, smiles and tears will be freely mingled, when posterity realizes, for example, what tragi-comic part was played by “the scrap of paper,” that emblem of national adherence to obligations of honour; by the concern felt among the greater nations for the interests of the smaller; or by the justification of the latest war as “the war to end war.”[43] What a vast amount of material, too, will be available for an illustrated book of humour, when some wag of the future shall collect and reprint the series of official war-posters, including, of course, those printed as advertisements of the war-loans (the melancholy lady, reminded that “Old Age must Come,” and the rest of them), and when it shall be recollected that these amazing absurdities could really influence the public! As if militarism in itself were not comical enough, its eulogists succeeded in making it still more ridiculous by their cartoons. As for the blind credulity which the war-fever inspired, the legend of the Angels of Mons will stand for age-long remembrance.
Parturiunt mures, nascetur ridiculus Mons.