Part 10

The difficulty is to retain this faith after one has been, as it were, inside politics. One goes into politics believing in the faith that will remove mountains: one remains in politics believing in the machine that will remove mole-hills. It is only the rare politician who does not ultimately succumb to the fatal fascination of the machine. It may be the party machine or the Parliamentary machine or the administrative machine. In any case, and to whatever party he belongs, he soon comes to take it for granted, not that the machine must be made to do what the people want, but that the people must learn to be patient, even to the point of reverence, with the machine, and must be careful to keep it supplied, not with the vinegar of criticism, but with the oil of agreement, which alone enables its wheels to run smoothly. Democracy has again and again had to rise up and smash its machines, just because they had become idols in this way. No doubt, even were Socialism in full swing, the idolatry of machinery would still, to some extent, continue, and new machines would constantly have to be invented to take the place of the old as soon as the latter began to acquire this pseudo-religious sanction. There will probably still also be people who will go about wanting to destroy machinery from a rather illogical idea that anything which is even capable of being turned into an idol must be evil. The politicians and the anti-politicians will always stand to each other in the relation of priests and iconoclasts. "Priests of machinery," indeed, would be a much more realistic description of most politicians than Mr Lloyd George's phrase, "priests of humanity."

There you have the politician's doom. There you have the real terror for the good man going into politics. He dreads not that he will be called names so much as that he will deserve them. Office, he knows, is as perilous a gift as riches, and the temptation to be a tyrant, if it is only in a committee room down a side street, has destroyed men who stood out like heroes against drink and the flesh and gold. The House of Commons could easily drift into becoming the house of the six hundred tyrants, if only the public would permit it. There is no amulet against the despotism of politicians except living opinions among the people. It would be foolish, however, merely because politicians are in danger of setting themselves up as tyrants, to propose to exterminate them. They can, if taken in time and domesticated, be made at least as useful as the horse and the cow. Indeed, so long as they are content to be regarded merely as our poor brothers, they can be as useful as any other human beings almost, except the saints. But they must demand no sacrosanctity for their position. At present, when they denounce people for abusing them, they are as often as not angry merely at being criticised. They are too fond of thinking that it is the chief function of the electors to pass votes of confidence in them. That is why, heartily as I love politicians, I would keep them on a chain. But I would not throw stones at them in their misery. I would even feed the brutes.

XXI

ON DISASTERS

It is a remarkable thing that human beings have never yet got reconciled to disaster. Each new disaster, like the ship on fire, the burning mine and the wrecked train inspires us with a new horror, as though it were something without precedent. Occasionally in the history of the world horror has been heaped on horror till people became indifferent. During the Reign of Terror, for instance, the tragic death of a man or woman became so everyday an affair that before long it was regarded with almost as little emotion as a stumble on the stairs. Luckily, the periods are rare in which this terrible indifference is possible to us. It is only by keeping our sense of disaster sharp and burnished that we shall ever succeed in stirring ourselves into action against it. On the other hand, it is amazing for how brief a period the impulse to action in most of us lasts. On the morrow of a great preventable disaster it is as if the whole human race stood up with bared heads and swore in the presence of Heaven that this abominable thing should never be allowed to occur again. But, alas! a full meal and a bottle of wine do wonders in restoring the rosy view of life. Our tears which at first seemed to flow from the depths of our hearts soon give place to commonplaces of the lips and to sighs that actually increase our sense of comfort rather than otherwise. We who but yesterday realised that trusting to luck was a crime far deadlier in its effects than a mere passionate murder will to-morrow accommodate ourselves once more to the accidental medley of life which at least justified itself in letting so many of our fathers and grandfathers die in their beds.

This accommodation of ourselves to life, it is curious to reflect, is just the consenting to drift without a star which is condemned by all the religions. Life is conceived in the religions as a vigilance. If we are not vigilant, we are damned. It is the same in politics, where we all quote Burke's sentence about eternal vigilance being the price of liberty. But religion and politics do not long survive the dessert. We are as much in love with drowsiness as the lotus-eaters, and at a seemingly safe distance we are as careless of the ruin of the skies as Horace's just man. Preachers may tell us once a week that we are sentinels sleeping at our posts, and, if they say it eloquently enough, we may possibly raise their salaries. But we have got used to sleeping at our posts, and what we have got used to, we feel in our bones, cannot be regarded as a very serious sin. Once, in the fine wakefulness of our youth, we summoned the world out of its sleep. But our voices sounded so thin and lonely in the sleep-laden air that we felt rather ashamed of ourselves, and we soon climbed down out of our golden balconies and took our places with our brothers among the hosts of slumber. Upon our slumber, no doubt, there still breaks the occasional voice of a prophet who persists--who bids us arise and get ready for the battle, or flee from the wrath to come, or do anything indeed except acquiesce with a sleepy grunt in the despotism of disaster. It is to fight against disaster and destruction that we were born. Our prophets are those who put wakeful hearts in us for the conflict.

There should perhaps be no prophet needed to belabour us into making an end of such disasters as have recently taken place in so far as they are preventable. Even our common-sense, it might be thought, would be strong enough to insist upon the ordinary rules of caution being observed in ships and railways, and, though most of us are in little danger of dying in a pit explosion, even in coal-mines. Sometimes, when I read the evidence of the cause of a railway disaster, and find a managing director or someone else in authority confessing, without repentance, that his committee for one reason or another ignored the recommendations made by the Board of Trade for the general safety, I marvel that the public never rise up and demand that a railway director shall be hanged. I have small belief in capital punishment, but if capital punishment must still be permitted in order to add a spice to the lives of newspaper readers, then I should confine it to railway directors and other magnates who, though they never commit a murder privately for the delight of the thing, still run a system of murder far more sensational in results than any that was ever planned by French motor-bandits. Think of all the railway accidents of recent times--the accidents of every day to the men on the line, and the accidents of red-letter days to us of the general public. There have been so many of these lately that even the most stupid devotees of private ownership are beginning to think that somebody must be responsible; and if somebody is responsible, then in a society which resorts to penal measures somebody deserves punishment. It is ridiculous to send weak-minded women to gaol for borrowing knicknacks off a shop counter while you send strong-minded railway directors to Belgravia and Mayfair for maintaining a system of sudden death for workmen and travellers. In the days of the Irish famine, coroners' juries, whose business it was to report on the death of some starved man, used to bring in a verdict of wilful murder against Lord John Russell. Is there no coroner's jury of the present day to bring in an occasional verdict of wilful murder against the directors of a railway or a factory? When we see a railway manager sentenced to seven years' penal servitude as the reasonable consequence of some disaster on the line, I have an idea that the number of railway accidents will diminish. When we see the directors of a shipping company fined a year's income and a captain dismissed from his post for sending a ship full steam ahead through a fog, we shall be thrilled by fewer accidents at sea. But it is the old story. One's crime has only to be on a sufficiently grand scale to be as far above punishment as an act of God. What punishment can be too severe for a half-witted farm hand who burns his master's haystack? But as for the railway lords who burn a score of men, women and children in the course of a railway smash by their carefully calculated carelessness, why, one might as well call down punishment on a thunderstorm. It pleases our indolent brains to regard accidents associated with dividends as the works of an inscrutable Providence. It is not enough that Providence should be the author, at least passively, of earthquakes and gales and tidal waves. He must also be held accountable for every breakage of bones that occurs as the result of our passion for saving money rather than life. Some day, I hope, the distinction between Providence and the capitalist will be a little clearer than it at present is. The confusion between the two has hitherto led to the capitalist's being invested with a sacrosanctity to which we offer up human sacrifices on a scale far surpassing anything ever known in Peru or the dark places of Africa.

It would be folly however to prophesy a world from which disaster has disappeared on the heels of the mastodon. One can do little more than regulate disaster. We already regulate death by offering a strong discouragement to murder. Pessimists may contend that, in a world where so many deaths are taking place as it is, one or two more or less can hardly matter. But all the advances the human race has ever made have only been an affair of one or two--the distribution of one or two women, of one or two privileges, of one or two pennies. Consequently, even in a world where disasters grow as thick as trees, we are bound to fight them so far as they can be fought. If we do not, the wilderness will swallow us. One is usually consoled by the leader-writers, after a disaster has taken place, by the reflection that it has taught us certain lessons that will never, never be forgotten. Unfortunately, we knew the lessons already. We do not want to be taught our A B C over again by having the alphabet burned into our flesh with a red-hot iron.

At the same time, the leader-writers do well in trying to arrive at some philosophy of disaster. But the true philosophy of disaster is one which will teach us to rage where raging will be of avail and to endure where there is nothing for it but endurance. Most of us in these days are content to have no philosophy at all, philosophy being a name for serious thought about the universal disaster of death. To read Montaigne, who lived blithely in conversation with death, is to step right out of our modern civilisation into a wiser world. It is to become an inhabitant of the universe instead of a rather inefficient earner of an income. Montaigne tells us that, even when he was in good health, if a thought occurred to him during a walk he jotted it down at once for fear he might be dead before he could reach home and write it down at leisure. He made himself as familiar with death as he was with the sun or his neighbours. He explains what a happiness it would have been to him to write a history of the way in which different great men had died, and his essays are in great part an expression of interest in the caprices of death among the heroes of the human race. History was to him a procession of disasters--disasters, however, seen against a background of faith in the benevolence of the scheme of things--and he made his account with life as something to be enjoyed as a privilege rather than a right.

"If a man could by any means avoid it," he said of death, "though by creeping under a calf's skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of the shift." Somehow, one hardly believes him. He seems here to be speaking for our reassurance rather than historically. On the other hand, he is right a thousand times in summoning even the most timid-kneed to go out and shake hands with disaster as with a friend. To hide from it is only a kind of watered-down atheism. It is a distrust of life. It is easy, of course, to compose sentences on the subject: it is quite another thing to compose ourselves. Matthew Arnold relates in one of his prefaces how he once failed to bring any consolation to the occupants of a railway carriage at a time when a panic about murder in railway trains was running its course by bidding them reflect that, even if any of them died suddenly by violent hands, the gravel-walks of their villas would still be rolled, and there would still be a crowd at the corner of Fenchurch Street. It is a very rational mind that can get comfort out of a thought like that. Even when we are not troubled by thinking of our work or our family, we cannot but cry out against the corruption of this flesh of our bodies, and many of us quake at the thought of the enforced adventure of the soul into a secret world. Marked down for disaster, we may add to our income, or win a place in the Cabinet, or make a reputation for singing comic songs, but death will steal upon us in our security, and strip us bare of everything save the courage we have learned from philosophy and the faith that has been given us by religion. We spend our hours shirking that fact. Cowardice and pessimism will avail on our death-beds no more than wealth or stuffed birds of paradise. Logically, then, every circumstance shouts to us to be brave. But, alas! bravery, though in face of the disasters of others it is easy enough, in the face of our own disasters is a rare and splendid form of genius, To attain it is the crown of existence.

XXII

THE RIGHTS OF MURDER

Mr Justice Darling, before passing a sentence of seven years' penal servitude on Julia Decies for wounding her lover with intent to kill him, made a remark which must interest all students of the morals of murder. No one, probably, he declared, would very much lament the wounded man, but "that was not the question." So far as one can gather from the scrappy reports in the newspapers, the crime was in the main a crime of jealousy. The man and woman had lived together for some years, had then separated, had come back to each other, and had finally quarrelled as the result of a suggestion "that he had taken up with some other woman, with whom he was going to Paris." Incidentally it was stated that the man had given Julia Decies L500 and some furniture in the previous October on the understanding that she was to trouble him no further. It was also stated that "the prosecutor had infected the woman with a terrible disease and that she was pregnant." There you have a story of contemporary life as mean in its horror as any that Gorky has written. It is a story in which the only conceivably beautiful element is the insurgent anger of the woman. It is a tragedy, not of heroic suffering, but of the dull slums of human nature. Probably, in any country where they managed things according to "rough justice" instead of with judges and juries, no one would have blamed Julia Decies even to the extent of a day's imprisonment for seeking to avenge herself in the most extreme form on an environment so intolerable--on a man whom, in the judge's phrase, "no one, probably, would very much lament." There is a mining camp logic which holds that if a man is not worth lamenting, one need not be greatly concerned whether he is alive or dead. Civilisation however, speaking from under the wig of Mr Justice Darling, says of even the most worthless of its human products: "He was a person whose life was entitled to the protection of the law as though he were a person with the best of characters." To the moralist of the mining camp this would seem like saying that the weeds have as good a right to exist as the flowers.

It is obviously one of the earliest instincts of man to get rid of his rivals by killing them. Cain was representative of the human race at this barbarous stage. It is the stage of unhampered egoism, of _laissez-faire_ applied to morals. Poets, who sometimes inherit this egoism, have written sympathetically of Cain: now that art is becoming deliberately primitive again, we may expect to see new statues to Cain insolently set up in the poets' back bedrooms. Civilisation is, in one aspect, a war against Cain and the minor poets. It depends in its early stages on the suppression of the private right to murder--on the socialisation, one may say, of the right to kill. No doubt, even in the most highly-developed civilisations, the right to kill is still left to some extent in the hands of private individuals. One has the right to kill certain people in self-defence. But the more advanced civilisation is, the more limited will that right be. So limited has it become in modern England that it has been maintained one is not even entitled to shoot a burglar unless, by running away and in various other ways, one has first exhausted all the gentler devices for escaping injury at his hands. This may seem a sad falling-away from the dramatic virtues of the heroic age, when one slung dead burglars round one's neck like a bag of game. But the heroic age, as has been pointed out, was an age of egoists, not of citizens. When heroes evolved into citizens, as we see in the history of Athens, the culminating triumph came with the abandonment of the right to kill as symbolised in the carrying of arms. Athens was the first city in Greece in which the men went about unarmed. That was a recognition of the fact that civilised man is not a killing animal to the greatest degree possible, but only in the least degree possible.

It may be retorted, on the other hand, that murder was not condoned in the case either of Cain or of Orestes, and there are many other examples of guilty murderers in the heroic age. This, however, only means that there was some limitation put upon the right to kill from the beginning. The right to kill did not exist as against the members of one's own family. It would have been impossible to explain the humour of _The Playboy of the Western World_ to men of the heroic age. The women who flocked with their farmhouse gifts to show their appreciation of the boy who had killed his father would have seemed long-nailed monsters of depravity to the Greeks of the time of Oedipus. Professor Freud, in his book on dreams, maintains that men in all ages desire to kill their fathers out of jealousy; he contends even that Hamlet's reluctance to kill his father's murderer was due to the fact that he had often wished to murder his father himself. This, however, is an abnormal interpretation of the jealousies and hatreds of human beings. The philosopher, perhaps, may see the principle of murder in every feeling of anger in the same way as the Christian Apostle saw that, if you hate a man, you are already a murderer in your own heart. The hatred of parents and children, however, is not universal any more than the hatred of husbands and wives. Still, family quarrels are sufficiently natural to enable us to see that the first step towards good citizenship must have been the prohibition of the right to kill the members of one's own family. Gradually, the family widened into the clan, the clan into the city, the city into the nation, the nation into the larger unit embracing men of the same colour, and it will ultimately widen, one hopes, into the human race. But we are far from having reached that stage yet. It is said to be almost impossible to get a death sentence passed on an Englishman who has murdered an Indian native. This merely means that it is regarded as a lesser crime for a European to murder an Asiatic than for a European to murder a European. In other words the family sanctities have been extended in some respects so as to cover Europe, but they have not yet overflowed so far as Asia and Africa. The objection of the war-at-any-price party to-day to civil war is purely on the ground that it is fratricidal--that it is an outrage on recognised family sanctities. The militarists do not see that every war is fratricidal--that every war is a civil war. As a rule, indeed, they deny the existence of family rights outside the borders of their own nation in the narrowest sense. They do not realise that it is as horrible a thing to shoot fellow-Europeans--not to say, fellow-men--as it is to shoot fellow-countrymen. As private citizens they not only admit but insist upon the foreigner's right to live. As public-minded men and patriots, they will admit nothing beyond his right to be carried off on a stretcher if they fail to kill him on the field of battle.