Part 18

The guilt or innocence of these two Italians was not the issue that had excited the opinion of the world. Possibly they were the actual murderers, and still more possibly they knew more than they would admit about the crime. Seven years after the crime the Massachusetts police (who have certainly been as much on trial as the actual murderers) produced new and very impressive evidence against Sacco and his associate. They exhibited a bullet which they depose was the bullet found in the body of the victim, and a pistol, which they testify was found upon Sacco at the time of his arrest. The particular bullet is shown conclusively, by a quite beautiful piece of scientific analysis, to have been fired from that particular pistol. This must have been very decisive with Governor Fuller’s committee of inquiry. But these facts were not before the court in the original trial, and, anyhow, they have nothing to do with the monstrous way in which the politics of the accused were dragged into the case. That, I urge upon the American reader, is what perplexes Europe. Europe is not “re-trying” Sacco and Vanzetti, or anything of the sort. It is saying what it thinks of Judge Thayer. Executing political opponents, as political opponents, after the fashion of Mussolini and Moscow we can understand, or bandits as bandits, but this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds, or Reds as murderers, seems to us a new and very frightening line for the courts of a state in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue.

So much for the Sacco and Vanzetti case. I realize the electric storminess that broods over it. Wrathful Massachusetts citizens write to me that they have “consigned” various of my unimportant writings to “the garbage can,” and have otherwise treated them with contumely. I am to be barred and suppressed by a hundred million true Americans. This is melancholy news for me, but of no great importance to the world. The fact remains that these indignant letter-writers are still in the same world with Frankfurter’s book and that if they do not read it in this world, its careful perusal will almost certainly be one of the first purifying tasks set them in the next.

Well, life must go on, and the Braintree case must be left now on the receding beaches of history. After this article I shall write no more about it. And here, indeed, it is not about this case that I am writing, but about the extraordinarily bad temper certain types of Americans display at the mere shadow of its discussion--and, indeed, of any discussion of things American. One can scarcely let a sentence that is not highly flattering glance across the Atlantic without some American blowing up. No other people have so acute a sensibility. This Sacco and Vanzetti business has merely brought this testy impatience to a head. I have spent only a few months of my life in America, and I am always careful to base such comments as I make upon America, upon American authorities. Upon prohibition my silence has been monumental; it is an affair for Americans only. But many other matters are not entirely their affair. For example, it is a matter of concern to the whole world that the general level of education in America should be high. That is another matter on which I have offended, and shall continue to offend. Drawing my instances from American writers, I have pointed out on diverse occasions that the level of elementary education in America is not high enough for her immense possibilities and her limitless aspirations. It is no answer to say that it is as high as it is in most European countries. My answer is that it ought to be much higher because of the immense wealth, power, and opportunity of the United States. I regret I have not saved the whole mass of ill-written, abusive retorts this friendly and helpful reflection has provoked.

The other day, again, I lectured at the Sorbonne on the necessity of democracy entering upon a new phase. I was considering European conditions, and I do not think I even mentioned America, but apparently the word “democracy” infringed the sacredness of the American tradition, and Senator Borah went up with a loud report. I was reminded as a Briton of many humiliating things, and particularly of my financial mismanagement of the war situation, which left Senator Borah so much up on me. Yet I am doing my best to pay off Senator Borah, and I have never complained. And the insufficiency of the American common school is a danger to the peace of the world.

This disposition to answer back hotly and irrelevantly is not confined to Senator Borah and my mail. Several newspaper articles to my address have instituted painful general comparisons between English and American ways. One writer lays much stress on the alleged British habit of playing tennis, taking a bath, and putting on the same underclothing again. This may be all right; I have never searched my fellow countrymen, but personally I don’t play tennis in underclothing. Anyhow it doesn’t matter very much. I admit the immense superiority of Americans in most things; to mention only a few, they win hands down on films and flivvers, steel construction and advertisement, debt collecting and floral offerings, Bunker Hill and bathrooms. American architecture is superb. Their novels are becoming more interesting than British novels, and London, I understand, is full of their plays. If no American alive can write anything to compare with the storm in Tomlinson’s “Gallion’s Reach,” yet Stephen Crane came nearest to it in his “Open Boat.” The variety of type in the American population, as compared with the British, is as fifty to one. America invented flying. Oxford trousers, again, were a plagiarism from America. I could go on for quite a long time jotting down similar glorious points for Old Glory. But I do not see what such things have to do with my articles. I was not at Bunker Hill when Senator Borah, I gather, stormed that position and licked chaps like me to hell. The question of the conduct of a public trial or the value of an educational organization or the imperfection of an electoral method of government is not settled by vehement reminders of a critic’s nationality and its associated disadvantages--especially when he happens to be the most cosmopolitan-spirited of critics.

The friendly European critics of the United States are impressed by the facts, first, that the elementary education of the American citizen is cheap and poor and does not fit him for his proper rôle in the world; next, that the methods of democracy used by the States are crude and ineffective, and that they hamper the moral and intellectual development of what is still the greatest, most promising of human communities; and thirdly and finally, that the American sense of justice is clumsy and confused. It does not dispose of such criticisms to say that they come from a poor boob, or that all the world outside the States is just a wilderness of poor boobs. True, no doubt, as that is, and salutary as it is to repeat it, nevertheless it leaves the American defects untouched.

The people of the United States has become very rapidly in the last fifty years the most secure, wealthy, and powerful nation of the world. It is high time its citizens displayed a self-complacency commensurate with this achievement. It is all very well for a touchy little people on the defence to fly up at the mere hint of criticism, but not for the proud citizens of a great empire. Far be it from me to institute vexatious comparisons between Europe and America, but there does seem to be a clearer sense of the freedoms and frankness permitted in discussion on this side of the Atlantic. It has been possible in the past for Americans to discuss the rights and wrongs of British justice in Ireland, India, and Egypt without provoking vehement denials of their liberty to do so. The late President Roosevelt offered the most striking and uninvited advice to English liberal thinkers upon the subject of the Empire. When the British liner, the _Titanic_, went down, the Americans, I recall, held officers and crew for a perfectly gratuitous inquiry before releasing them for the proper legal investigation by the British Board of Trade. There was no fuss on these occasions about “alien intervention” in England, we appreciated the advantage of having our concerns viewed from a fresh angle, and unless we have touched sore consciences, I do not see why the simple response of Bennett, Galsworthy, and myself to an American question should evoke these present transports.

It was precisely because we were not American that we were invited to give an opinion on the Braintree case.

Whatever may be the outcome of this present little affair, I am afraid the Americans, like the rest of the world, must be prepared for an increasing amount of criticism and intellectual and moral intervention from foreigners. The world becomes more and more one community, and the state of mind of each nation has practical reactions upon all the rest that were undreamt of half a century ago. The administration of justice in Massachusetts or Italy concerns me almost as much as the administration of justice in London or Glasgow. Particularly when the lives of aliens are involved. Belligerent teaching in the schoolbooks of France or Germany or America, or a failure of China to unify and protect itself against military adventurers, may lead to the deaths of my sons and the destruction of nearly everything I hold dear about me. The world becomes my village, and whether Senator Borah likes it or not, part of me walks down Main Street and defies all America to expel it. Conversely the voice of Senator Borah reverberates in Dunmow, and is heard along the Maritime Alps. America is part of my spiritual home and Old Glory one of my quarterings. I have a loyal feeling for the American eagle. It is so loyal a feeling that I cannot bear to think of that bird as anything but aquiline. I want to think of it as that aspiring eagle with the open wings one encounters first on the caps of the officials as one steams up the exhilarating approach to New York. An eagle like a victorious invitation. I do not want to have that vision replaced by the butt view of a proud but isolated ostrich, invincibly immense, which has swallowed all the gold in the world and is now keeping its head resolutely buried in the sand.

_16 October, 1927._

XXIV

FUEL-GETTING IN THE MODERN WORLD

Our modern world runs on fuel. It burns its way through the years. The ancient civilizations made no such use of combustion. A few sticks kept the pot boiling, and a bag of charcoal served the purposes of the smith. Torches and oil lamps were convenient but not indispensable. Man set fire to his world seriously only 200 years ago.

The tradition is, therefore, that coal and oil are commodities like marble or leather, to be bought and sold in the same fashion, chaffered over, refused, or withheld. Quite insidiously they have become fundamental necessities for our social and economic order, but the old ways of dealing remain. We still treat them as incidental commodities. Perhaps the old methods have hung about too long. We may be on the road to very profound changes in our dealings with oil and coal.

In America the more prominent issue is oil. Both here in England and in America, “Oil,” Mr. Upton Sinclair’s book, in spite of his peculiar methods of advertisement, has crept insidiously and surely to a success. I find quite a number of my friends reading it. I see strangers reading it in the train. Evidently people want ideas about oil. In Britain the more urgent aspect of the fuel question is the coal-mining issue. The General Strike, following the coal lock-out of 1926, settled nothing. In the Labour débâcle that ensued the miners lost most of the points they had fought for; they had to accept longer hours and a lower standard of living, and the industry readjusted itself to the conditions of a declining industry. It has continued to decline. There remain great numbers of miners unemployed, and profits are unsatisfactory. Coal trouble is becoming the chronic ailment of Great Britain.

There was a phase in the British coal drama when coal production was subsidized. I believe that for the effective, permanent re-establishment of British prosperity there must be a return to subsidized coal. It is the only way of reconciling two otherwise incompatible needs, an abundant cheap supply of the various sorts of coal needed for British shipping, transport, and industrial activities, and a decent standard of life for the body of men needed to win the coal.

No doubt, to those who hold to the old-fashioned way of regarding coal as something you can do without and still play your part in life it is shocking to think of the community paying for coal to be sold again at a loss, for that is what the subsidy amounts to, but to any one who grasps its altered status as a social necessity it will be no more shocking than the abolition of toll-gates and the provision of high-roads at the common expense.

Suppose the coal supply firmly established on a subsidized basis and the subsidy counterbalanced by a countervailing duty on the export of coal--because there is no reason whatever why the British taxpayer should pay in part for the coal consumed by the foreign industrialist--what would be the effect upon the community as a whole? Manifestly there would be a cheapening of transport, a stimulation of the metallurgical industries, a cheapening of the cost of power, and either a reduction of wages or an elevation of the standard of life of the ordinary worker, enabling him to spend the money he would save on coal on manufactured goods. I cannot imagine anything but a general stimulation of the entire economic life of the community. Cheaper transport and cost of production would invigorate the country’s competitive export of manufactured goods and in its turn react upon the coal industry with an enlarged demand for coal.

Naturally a subsidized undertaking will mean a controlled industry; there is not the slightest benefit to the community if either coal owners or coal merchants are allowed to intercept and absorb the subsidy. A subsidy means compounded royalties, restricted profits, and scientific direction. And as naturally the recognition of coal-mining as a public service will change the status of the miner.

The present condition of the mining worker has been the result of slow developments, and like most social arrangements that have grown up slowly, it is a thoroughly bad complex of laws, customs, and tolerated conventions. Only usage blinds us to the absurdity of a system by which a man who has specialized in coal-winning, and who is ready and willing to go into the mine and win his stint of coal for the community, should not have every facility given him to discharge his task. It should be possible to calculate the cost to the community of a miner from his birth to his death; it should be possible to charge up to him his schooling, housing, keep, holidays, recreations, police protection, medical attendance, funeral, grave, and everything else he requires and consumes. Against this it should be possible to set as an equivalent so many tons of this or that sort of coal. If he wins less than that he is a parasite; if more, he is robbed. And equally it should be possible to make his stint of coal-winning easy and convenient for him, instead of leaving it as laborious, uncertain, vexatious, and humiliating as it is now.

It is the business of a civilized community to determine that equivalent between coal and consumption, and arrange for the miner to justify his existence as a consumer as easily and pleasantly as possible, slowly or quickly as he chooses. If he sees fit to work like the devil, long spells and all the year around, and get it over and be assured of all his elemental needs thereafter for the rest of his life, while he meditates, goes or walks, paints pictures or writes poetry, he ought to be able to do so without making existence intolerable for a fellow-miner with a more leisurely conception of his life-work. A modern civilized community ought to be able to cater for its labourers on such flexible terms. It ought to command sufficient intelligence to estimate ahead what it will want in the way of coal, and enlist its miners on long-term agreements for a definite amount of work that will make them as safe in their jobs as civil servants.

We are so used to the scrambling quality of life, as we know it, to the desperate grabbing and holding of scraps of property, to strikes and lock-outs, to unemployment, fluctuating prices, speculative cunning, uncertainty, servitude, and frustration, that few of us succeed in realizing that these things are not now necessary. However unavoidable they may have been for mankind in the past, they are not now unavoidable. The chancy and disagreeably adventurous way we live is not the only possible nor the best way of living. It is a phase out of which our race may pass.

The reason why our community cannot figure out what the life task of a coal-miner should be is simply because it does not know enough about things that can be quite effectively known. It cannot figure out even its broad staple needs and supplies and be certain of them as yet, even within quite wide limits. So we have to guess and gamble our way through life, to overcharge and underpay and “keep on the safe side.” We hoard if we can. We think ourselves lucky if we can saddle the world with a debt for the loan of our hoarded accumulations. We cannot imagine freedom and independence except in the rôle of a well-secured creditor. Again, we have to fall back on the gold standard for monetary purposes because we have not the necessary facts for a regulated currency, although theoretically a regulated currency is a far more desirable thing than a currency resting finally for its sanctions on a brute quantity of gold. We not only live in anxieties that could be dispelled; by virtue of this same ignorance, we sicken and die of diseases which might have been prevented or cured. We are still as much the prey of chance as any other animals. All our lives are worried, shadowed, belittled, and laid waste by the preoccupations arising out of the lack of that comprehensive knowledge without which the sane and comprehensive direction of human affairs is impossible.

Now what I am writing here of life, its present uncertainty and disorder, is to be found in the lamentations of the preacher and in the pessimistic literature of the Egypt of five thousand years ago. The reader of Breasted’s “Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt” will find passages about human life that say exactly what my last paragraph repeats. But what is new, what we have clear in our minds to-day, is the growth of a body of knowledge charged with the promise of order and assurance to replace these ancient distresses. Then, indeed, the world was limitless and dreams of control absurd. Now, in the last three centuries, we have begun the surveying and mapping of the whole planet. After contours and topography follow geological surveys, biological exploration, climatology, economic appraisal. As the surveyor advances the prospector disappears. We are bringing all the material basis of human life into the sphere of the calculable. We are numbering the people, always an annoying process to the ancient gods. In quite a few years we shall know within quite small limits the population of the world and its rate of increase; we shall know, within the limits of a few hundred tons, its annual requirements of wheat and rice, steel and coal, cotton and wool. We shall know how and where to get these and all other staple commodities. We shall be able to work out the whole processes of getting and distributing the material requirements of human life upon lines not of commercial adventure, but clear certitude. We shall have a grip upon disease, of which our present attempts at public and world hygiene are only the faintest first intimations. And the little scattered band of meteorologists who now observe and guess about the weather will have been reinforced and developed into a big, competent, world organization, which may even forecast our crops and anticipate our shortages within a continually closer margin of accuracy years ahead.

Do not the achievements of science in the past two centuries fully justify what I have written here? And if this is so, and if there is this clear prospect of a world in which we can plan out the general activities of mankind on estimates, trustworthy to within a very small fraction of the total amount, is it conceivable that any of the main disputes of our present economic world-scramble will survive? You may call me a dreamer in these matters, but it is not I who dream, it is you, who are not properly awake to what man has done and what man can hope to do.

I wish my wakefulness was more contagious than it seems to be. Britain the Sleeper mutters “Muddle through” in its sleep, and will not open its eyes to the facts that are in the same room with it. The heavy industries of the old country grow heavier and heavier. Unless those drowsy eyelids can be lifted, unless Britain can rouse itself--within a very brief term of years--to meet the irksome demand for more knowledge, more science, and more imaginative courage, it must sink into a permanently inferior position to the United States of America and to a renascent Central Europe. Leadership is for those who will lead, and the direction in which the world has to be led is manifestly towards the systematic control and stimulation of the production of basic substances in the common interest. Production primarily for profit in raw materials and basic substances, like the mere commercialization of the transport services, works out in the crippling of the higher types of industrial life. The movement for the conservation of forests and other national resources from the recklessness of unbridled private enterprise in America, with which President Roosevelt identified himself, was merely one early recognition of what is now becoming a widely recognized truth. With the development of material civilization and the accumulation of exact knowledge, the concern of the commonweal spreads into fields that were once left quite legitimately to adventurous exploitation. For Great Britain, in respect to fuel, the issue is now a vital one. Either she must prepare to subsidize and then nationalize her coal supply, or she must face the clear prospect of retrocession from her position of leadership in the world.

_30 October, 1927._

XXV

THE MAN OF SCIENCE AND THE EXPRESSIVE MAN. TO WHOM DOES THE FUTURE BELONG? SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT IVAN PAVLOFF AND GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I have before me as I write a very momentous book. It is entitled “Conditioned Reflexes,” and it is by Professor Pavloff, of Petrograd. It is not an easy book to read but it is not an impossible one, and when one has read, marked, and learnt, one finds--I find--that one has at least attained the broad beginnings of a clear conception of the working of that riddle within us which is perpetually asking us riddles, the convoluted grey matter of the brain. The book is translated by Dr. Anrep of Cambridge and it is published by the Oxford University Press with the assistance of the Royal Society.