Part 7

Nature, assuredly, has provided us with coincidences so lavishly that we may well go about in amazement. Even the fiction of Mr William Le Queux is not quite so abundant in strange coincidences as the life of the most ordinary man you could see reading a halfpenny newspaper. It is only in literature, indeed, that coincidences seem unnatural. Sophocles has been blamed for making a tragedy out of a man who unwittingly slew his father and afterwards unwittingly married his mother. It is incredible as fiction; but I imagine real life could give us as startling a coincidence even as that. Each of us is, to use Sir Thomas Browne's phrase, Africa and its prodigies. We tread a miraculous earth which is all mirrors and echoes, hints and symbols and correspondences. Each deed we do may, for all we know, be echoed and mirrored in Nature in a thousand places, even before we do it, and I can imagine it possible that the shape of a man's fate may be scattered over the palm of his hand. I am a sceptic on the subject, and I see what a door is opened to charlatanry if we admit the presence of too many meanings in the world about us. But I am not ready to deride the notion that there may be some undiscovered law underlying many of the coincidences which puzzle us. True, if someone contended that a mysterious sort of gravitation was working steadily through the years to bring those four soldiers together again at the Birmingham dinner, I should be anxious to hear his proofs. But I am willing to listen patiently to almost any theory on the subject. No theory could be more sensational than the facts.

XIV

ON INDIGNATION

There is nothing in which the newspapers deal more generously than indignation. There is enough indignation going to waste in the columns of the London Press to overturn the Pyramids in ruins and to alter the course of the Danube. We have had a characteristic flow of popular indignation over the execution of Mr Benton, a British citizen, in Mexico. Probably not one Englishman in a million had ever heard of Mr Benton before, but no sooner was he executed and in his grave than he rose, as it were, the very impersonation of British citizenship outraged by foreigners. On the whole, there is nothing healthier than group-indignation of the kind that sees in an injury to one an injury to all--that demands just dealing for even the poorest and least distinguished member of the group. It is the sort of passion it would be pleasant to see trained and developed. My only complaint against it is that in the present state of the world it is too often reserved for foreigners and for those semi-foreigners, the people who belong to a different political party or social class from your own. One would have thought, for instance, that the group-indignation which denounced the execution of Mr Benton without a fair trial might also have denounced the expulsion of the labour leaders from South Africa with no trial at all. The fact that it did not and that several of the London capitalist papers treated the whole South African episode as a good joke at the expense of Labour is evidence that to a good many Englishmen the maltreatment of British citizens is not in itself an objectionable thing, provided it happens within the British Empire. It seems to me that this is an entirely topsy-turvy kind of patriotism. For every British citizen who is likely to be badly treated abroad, there must be thousands who are in danger of being badly treated in the British Empire itself. Is not the killing of an Englishman by an English railway company, for instance, as outrageous a crime as the killing of an Englishman by a foreign general? There is also this to be remembered: your indignation against the criminal in your own country is more likely to bear fruit than your indignation against the criminal in a foreign country. You can catch your English railway-director with a single policeman; you may not be able to catch your foreigner without an international war. Thus, though I do not question the occasional value of indignation against wicked foreigners, I contend that a true economy of indignation would lead to most of its being directed against wicked fellow-countrymen.

It may be retorted that Englishmen certainly do not limit their indignation to foreigners, and that the Marconi campaign is a proof that a good Englishman can always become righteously indignant against a bad Englishman--at least when the latter happens to be a Welshman or a Jew. But the Marconi campaign was only another example of group-indignation against persons who were outside the group. It was not, in this instance, a national or Imperial group: it was a party group. What I am arguing for is the direction of group-indignation, not against outsiders, but when necessary against the members of the group. I should like to see Conservatives becoming really indignant about Conservative scandals, Liberals becoming really indignant about Liberal scandals, Socialists becoming really indignant about Socialist scandals. As it is, indignation is usually merely a form of sectarian excitement It is always easy to find something about which to become indignant in your political opponent, if it is only his good temper. His crime of crimes is that he is your political opponent--you use his minor crimes merely as rods to punish him for that. Our indignation against our opponents, to say truth, is usually ready long before the happy excuse comes which looses it like a wild beast into the arena. One sees a good example of this leashed indignation in the Ulster Unionist attitude to Nationalist Ireland. There is a silly scuffle about flags at Castledawson between a Sunday-school excursion party and a Hibernian procession, both of which ought to have known better. Not a woman or child is injured, according to the verdict of a judge on the bench, but the Ulster Unionists, armed to the teeth with indignation in advance, denounce the affair as though it were on the same level of villainy with the September Massacres. Not long afterwards real outrages break out in Belfast, and Catholics and Socialists are kicked and beaten within an inch of their lives. Here was a test of the reality of the indignation against outrages on human beings. Did the Ulstermen then come forward in a righteous fury against the wrongdoers on their own side? Not a bit of it. Sir Edward Carson did disown them in the House of Commons. But the Ulster Unionists, as a whole, raised not a breath of indignation. Being average human beings, indeed, they invariably retort to any charges made against them with an angry _tu quoque_ to the South. It is not long, for instance, since a Special Commission sat to investigate the facts about sweated women workers in Belfast, and issued a report in which the prevalence of sweating was demonstrated beyond the doubt of any but a blind man. Instead, however, of directing their indignation against the evils of a system in their own midst, the Ulster Unionists--at least, one of their organs in the Press--straightway sent one of their representatives down into the South of Ireland to prove how bad wages and conditions of life were there. What a waste of indignation all this was! Munster was full of indignation against the disease of sweating in Belfast, which it could not cure. Ulster, on the other hand, was full of indignation against the disease of bad housing in Dublin, which it could not cure. There is a flavour of hypocrisy in much of this anger against sins that are outside the circle of one's own responsibility. I do not mind how many sins a man is angry with provided they include the sins he is addicted to himself and that are at his own door. There is little credit in a rich manufacturer's indignation against the evils of the land system if he is indifferent to the evils of the factory system, and landlords who denounce industrial evils but see nothing that needs redressing in the lot of the agricultural labourer are in the same boat. Perhaps, in the end, the world is served even by this outside virtue. The landlords, in order to distract attention from their own case, have more than once brought a useful indignation to bear on the case of the manufacturers, and _vice versa_, and ultimately the bewildered, ox-like public has begun to drink in a little of the truth. On the other hand, this is an unhealthy atmosphere for public virtue. It gives rise to cynical views such as are expressed in the proverb, "When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own," and in the lines concerning those who

Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to.

We all do it, unfortunately. The Presbyterian speaks with horror of the way in which the Catholic breaks the Sabbath, and the Catholic thinks it a terrible thing that the Presbyterian should go to a theatre on Good Friday. Montaigne, who was by inclination a sensualist, looked with disgust on the man who drank too much, and the drunkard retorts that every vice except his own is selfish and anti-social. Even when we admit our own sins we are half in love with them. It seems a less intolerable crime in oneself to rob the poor-box than in one's neighbour to have an unwashed neck. Englishmen never began to sing the praises of cleanliness as the virtue that makes a nation great until they had themselves taken to the bath. True, they often wash, as they govern themselves, not directly but by proxy; but, even so, cleanliness has been exalted into a national virtue till the very people of the slums, where the bath is used only for the storage of coal, have learned to shout "Dirty foreigner!" as the most indignant thing that can be said at a crisis.

There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that some one else is an evildoer. Our scandal about our neighbours is nearly all a muttered tribute to our own virtue. It fills us with a new pride in ourselves that it was not we who gambled with trust money or made love to our neighbour's wife or ran away in battle. By kicking our neighbours down for their sins we secure for ourselves, it seems, a better place on the ladder. The object of all religion is to destroy this self-satisfied indignation with our neighbours--to make us feel that we ourselves are no better than the prostitute or the foreigner. Similarly philosophy bids us know ourselves instead of following the line of least resistance and damning others. That is why one would like to see Englishmen concerned about injuries done to Englishmen by Englishmen, even more than about injuries done to Englishmen by foreigners. Indignation against the latter, necessary though it may be, is apt to become a mere melodramatic substitute for native virtue. There are crimes enough at home for any Englishman to practise his indignation upon without ever letting his eye wander further than Dover--crimes of underpayment, crimes of overwork, crimes of rotten houses, crimes that are murder in everything but swiftness and theft in everything except illegality. It is fine, no doubt, that Englishmen should become hot with anger at the news of a Benton murdered in Mexico as it is fine that the democracies of Europe should be inflamed with indignation at the murder of a Ferrer in Spain. These things are evidence of large brotherhoods, of an extension of those family charities which are at the back of all advance in civilisation. On the other hand, can none of this passionate fraternity be spared for John Smith, aged fourteen, done to death by the half-time system, or for his father killed on the line as the result of the need of making dividends for railway shareholders, or for his mother working for a halfpenny an hour in a narrow room the filth of which is transmuted into gold for some rich man? These, too, are your brothers and sisters, and deserve the angry eloquence of an epitaph. Here is subject enough for indignation--not a weak and ineffectual indignation against foreigners, but indignation knocking terribly at your own doors.

XV

THE HEART OF MR GALSWORTHY

Mr Galsworthy has been writing to the _Times_ on "the heartlessness of Parliament." The _Times_, always noted for its passion for humane causes, ranges itself behind him and asserts that Englishmen have now learned to speak of the politician "with intellectual contempt, as of one who is making a game of realities, who fiddles a dull tune while Rome is burning." Both Mr Galsworthy and the _Times_ are apparently agreed that the measures which Parliament has for some time past been discussing are matters of trivial significance and, in so far as they take up time which might be devoted to better things, are an outrage upon the conscience of (to use the odd phrase of the newspaper) "those who are most interested in the spectacle of life and the future of mankind." Mr Galsworthy, wearing his heart in his ink-pot not only denounces the indifference of politicians to vital things, but goes on to lay down an alternative programme--a programme of the heart, as he might call it, in contrast to the programme of the hustings. He begins his list of things which ought to be legislated about with the sweating of women workers and insufficient feeding of children, and he ends it with live instances of--in an even odder phrase than that quoted from the _Times_--"abhorrent things done daily, daily left undone."

Export of horses worn-out in work for Englishmen--save the mark! Export that for a few pieces of blood-money delivers up old and faithful servants to wretchedness.

Mutilation of horses by docking, so that they suffer, offend the eye, and are defenceless against the attacks of flies that would drive men, so treated, crazy.

Caging of wild things, especially wild song-birds, by those who themselves think liberty the breath of life, the jewel above price.

Slaughter for food of millions of creatures every year by obsolete methods that none but the interested defend.

Importation of the plumes of ruthlessly slain wild birds, mothers with young in the nest, to decorate our gentlewomen.

Probably ninety-nine readers out of a hundred will sympathise with Mr Galsworthy's bitter cry against a Parliament that has so long left these and other wrongs unrighted. Let Mr Galsworthy take any one of his cases of inhumanity by itself, and he is sure of the support of nearly all decent people in demanding that an end shall be put to it. The human conscience has developed considerably in recent years in regard to the treatment both of human beings and of animals, and, though conscience is frequently dumb in the impressive presence of economic interests, it has still the power to get things done, as witness, for example, the establishment of minimum-wage boards in certain sweated trades. Mr Galsworthy, however, does not ask you to consider each of his desired reforms on its merits. He asks you, in effect, to put them in place of the reforms which politicians are at present discussing. "Almost any one of them," he declares of his brood of evils, "is productive of more suffering to innocent and helpless creatures, human or not, and probably of more secret harm to our spiritual life, more damage to human nature, than, for example, the admission or rejection of Tariff Reform, the Disestablishment or preservation of the Welsh Church, I would almost say than the granting or non-granting of Home Rule."

It seems to me that Mr Galsworthy is doing his cause, or causes, no service in making comparisons of this sort. He is like a man who would go before Parliament, when it was discussing some big project like the nationalisation of the railways and deny its right to legislate on such a matter till it had passed a measure forbidding the sticky sort of fly-papers. One might sympathise heartily with his desire to abolish the slow torture of flies, and I for one detest with my whole soul those filthy fly-traps in which the insects go dragging their legs out till they die. But it is obvious that the question of cruelty to flies is one which must be dealt with on its merits. To weigh it in the balance against such a thing as nationalisation of the railways is merely to invite a humorous rather than a serious treatment of the question. It is not a comic question in itself: it may easily become comic as a result of some ridiculous comparison. That is, more or less, what one feels in regard to Mr Galsworthy's implied comparison between the importance of Free Trade and the importance of putting an end to the "export of horses worn-out in work for Englishmen--save the mark! Export that for a few pieces of blood-money delivers up old and faithful servants to wretchedness." In so far as the export of horses leads to cruelty and wretchedness I agree with Mr Galsworthy that it ought to be stopped. Not because the horses are "worn out in work for Englishmen," not because they are "old and faithful servants"--that is mere sentimentalising and rhetoric--but because they are living creatures which ought not to be subjected to any pain that is not necessary. On the other hand, is not Mr Galsworthy rather unimaginative in failing to see that Tariff Reform might conceivably lead in present circumstances to intense pain and distress in every town and county in England? The imposition or non-imposition of a tariff may seem, at a superficial glance, to belong to the mere pedantry of politics. But consider the human consequences of such a thing. Every penny taken out of the pockets of the poor owing to an increase in the price of goods means the disappearance of a potential pennyworth of food from the poor man's home. Obviously, in a country where hundreds of thousands of people are living on the edge of starvation--and over it--even a slight rise in the cost of things might produce the most calamitous results. Starvation and disease and the anguish of those who have to watch their children suffer, an increase in crime and insanity and wretchedness--these are all quite conceivable results of a sudden change in the poor man's capacity to buy the necessaries of life. That is the humane Free Trader's case for Free Trade. The humane Tariff Reformer's case for Tariff Reform, on the other hand, is that a change in the fiscal system would increase wages and employment and quickly put an end to the present abominations of starvation, sweating, and unemployment. I am not concerned for the moment with the comparative merits of Free Trade and Tariff Reform. I am concerned merely with pointing out that Mr Galsworthy's theory that such a thing as the export of worn-out horses causes "more suffering to innocent and helpless creatures" than would be caused by an error in fiscal policy, affecting millions of men and women and children, does not bear a moment's examination.

Take, again, Mr Galsworthy's comparison of the case of the Home Rule Bill with the case of the caging of wild song-birds. Is not Mr Galsworthy in this instance also lacking in imagination? Had he read Irish history he would have learned a little about the "suffering to innocent and helpless creatures" that logically flows from the denial of a country's right to self-government. I will give the classic example. In the late forties of the nineteenth century, the Irish potato crop failed. The crops of corn were abundant, cattle were abundant, but the potatoes everywhere rotted in the fields under a mysterious blight. As the potato was the staple food of the people, this would have been sufficiently disastrous, even in a self-governed country. But, if Ireland had had self-government in 1847, does any one believe that her Ministers would have allowed corn and cattle to go on being exported from the country while the people were starving? Right through the Famine Ireland went on exporting grain and cattle to the value of seventeen million pounds a year so that rents might be paid. Many leading Irishmen urged the Government to pass a temporary measure prohibiting the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while the Famine lasted. This step had been taken by the Governments of Belgium and Portugal in similar circumstances. Had it been taken in Ireland--as it is incredible that it would not if the Union had not been in existence--between half a million and a million men, women, and children would have been saved from the torture of death by starvation and typhus fever. Not only this, but does not Mr Galsworthy also overlook those multiplied agonies of exile, eviction, and agrarian crime, which living creatures in Ireland would have been spared--in great measure, at least--if the country had possessed self-government? It may be doubted, whether all the wild song-birds that have ever existed since the Garden of Eden have endured among them such an excess of misery as fell to the lot of the Irish people in the half century following the Famine--much of it preventable by a simple change in the machinery of the constitution. Nor can one easily measure the amount of suffering in England indirectly due to the fact that the political intellect of the country was so occupied with the Irish question that it had not the time or the energy left to tackle scores of pressing English questions. Housing, poor law reform, half-time--these and a host of other matters have been thrust out of the way till statesmen, released from the woes of Ireland, might have time to consider them. Many Socialists have a way of forgetting the social meaning of constitutional changes. They regard constitutional reform as something that delays social reform, whereas it may be something that enables the public, if it so desires, to speed up social reform. That is why Home Rule, the abolition of the veto of the House of Lords, and a dozen comparable matters, must be as eagerly ensued by Socialists as by Radicals. The underfed child, the sweated woman--even the maltreated animal, I imagine--will benefit as a result of changes which, to say the least, take some of the impediments out of the way of the social reformer. Meanwhile, let Mr Galsworthy and those who think with him redouble their efforts on behalf of humanity, whether towards man or beast. But let them not seek to destroy a good thing that is being done in order to call attention to a good thing that is not being done. Let them not try to persuade us that it is more important for the Russian people to abolish mouse traps than to get a constitutional monarch and sound Parliamentary institutions. I have the sincerest respect for Mr Galsworthy's heart--for the generous passion with which he stands up for all the lame dogs in the world. I agree heartily with every separate cause he advocates in his letter to the _Times_. It is only his table of values with which I quarrel, and the destructive use he makes of it. I believe that an overwhelming case could be made out against Parliament on the score of its heartlessness, but Mr Galsworthy has not made it.

XVI

SPRING FASHIONS