THE NEW SIMPLICITY

My first caption was _Democracy, Plumbing, and the War_. That will

hardly do as a title, for it does not hint the heart of the matter;

though the war has precipitated conditions which our special form of

democracy has long been preparing us for, and plumbing is perhaps as

symbolic as it is ubiquitous in the American domestic scene. All three,

with all their implications, are factors, certainly, in our present

problem of living, and if war has brought that problem to acuteness,

democracy and plumbing (and what they may be taken to stand for) have

made us ripe for upheaval. Edison and his like are as responsible,

in their way, as Thomas Jefferson or William Haywood. All three

have, without doubt, contributed to the present and future dilemma

of educated people in moderate circumstances. War has, of necessity,

turned moderate circumstances to actual poverty; but democracy and

plumbing were already preparing the _débâcle_ for this group.

All of us--the educated classes as well as the uneducated--are guilty

together, that is, of pampering ourselves with physical comforts;

and democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind

of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly

speaking, physical. Democracy and plumbing, as well as war, make the

problem of our immediate future a rather special one. We do not share

all phases of it with our Allies. Let me explain, a little, what I mean.

If America has led the world in labor-saving devices, it is because

America is democratic on a bigger scale than any other country. The

person who profits by the labor-saving device is the person who does

the work. The fact that France and England have not kept pace with

us in plumbing and tiled kitchens and electrical appliances does not

mean--as we have sometimes fatuously taken it to mean--that they are

less civilized than we. It means only that personal service has been,

with them, cheaper and more a matter of course. Where prosperous

Americans multiply vacuum cleaners and electric washing machines and

garbage incinerators, prosperous Europeans multiply their number of

servants. The Englishman really prefers a huge tin tub in his bedroom

of a morning. We prefer to walk into the bathroom and turn on the tap.

That preference may well have become so natural that we cannot explain

it. But the origin of the American preference is surely that in America

only the very rich could afford a personal servant whose duty it was to

set up the tub, fetch in huge cans of water, and remove all traces of

the bath as soon as it was done with. Even a few years ago, I remember

having great difficulty in a London hotel of the better sort (but very

English and almost totally unfrequented by Americans) in getting the

chambermaid to procure me a slop-jar. The hotel was much too British to

run to numbers of private baths. Hence the crying need of a slop-jar.

The maid finally stole one for me from a room across the corridor, and

assured me that the gentleman from whom she stole would not miss it.

Nothing would induce her to resume, in his behalf, the treasure. I

am informed, by friends who have more British social experience than

I, that slop-jars are not in the best English tradition--because,

theoretically, in the opulent old-fashioned household, as soon as

you have washed your hands, the water in which you washed them, the

towel on which you wiped them, mysteriously and gracefully disappear.

Perfection of service lies in having plenty of dexterous servants lying

in wait to discover your needs; so many servants, and such well-trained

ones, that you cannot wash your hands without their becoming aware of

it and, with the least possible impinging on your notice, removing the

traces of your ablutions. Perfection of service does not involve your

emptying your own wash-basin, even into a slop-jar. Hence, no slop-jar.

Now there are very few of us who would take the trouble to invent a

tiled bathroom if our tubs were automatically fetched, filled, and

removed for us, all at the proper instant; or if a hot-water can

miraculously sprang into being as soon as the desire for hot water

seized us. There is no labor-saving device so perfectly convenient

as ringing a bell and having some one else do the thing for you

with complete competence. It is by no means strange that well-to-do

Europeans have been content to be supremely waited upon, instead of

making practical tasks mechanically easier for themselves. The goddess

of the labor-saving invention is the woman who does all, or a good

share, of “her own work.” Old-fashioned English and French houses are

cold; but (climate apart) nothing like so cold as American houses

would be if Americans depended on open fires. For in England or France

there are ten people to make the fires, to one in America. We simply

dare not--again, climate apart--depend, as our British cousins have

been wont to, on open fires. The average household cannot afford the

servants to do incessant fire-making all over the house.

So we have multiplied devices, from the modest kitchen cabinet up;

because that majority which advertisers and inventors are always trying

to reach does a lot of things for itself. Even those Americans who

always have had, and perhaps still will have, plenty of servants, have

indulged in these devices. For pure philanthropy’s sake? Well, I am

afraid not quite. Rather, because the standard having been set by the

mistress who is also the servant, the standard must be lived up to, or

professional servants would complain. The interesting point is that

in America the standard is set by the woman who does her own work or

a part of it, or who may, at any given moment, have to occupy herself

thus. We are, you see, a democracy beyond the democracies of other

lands. For it is not simply a question of money; it is a question of

our all being in the same boat.

I am not going into the servant question, for that is a question as

trite as it is tragic. But, as we all know, even before the war it was

growing acute. The best servants we had in the old days came from the

countries where personal service was a tradition--chiefly from the

territories of Great Britain. But northern Europe is ceasing to enter

domestic service; rather, it seeks to employ. One has only to read the

pathetic testimony in the daily press, in the “women’s magazines,”

even sometimes in philanthropic periodicals. What they all say is that

the only way you can keep your cook in your kitchen is to treat her as

if she were the governess, or to give her factory hours and factory

freedom--to put her on a level, that is, with the more independent

worker. At that, they do not give us much hope of keeping her. But I

fancy that, before we turn the whole house over to the cook, we shall

dispense with her and get our meals from co-operative kitchens.

I have noticed of late years in the magazines that deal with

architectural and decorative problems increasing stress on the

absurdity of having a dining-room. Why absurd? For only one reason:

that here is a room which must be cleaned, which, therefore, means more

service. If you have your meals in the “living-room,” you dispense with

so much floor-and-wall space to be gone over. In only that sense is it

absurd. For most of us will agree that while English lodgings are all

very well, especially for a solitary creature, it is a painful business

for a large family to eat three meals a day in a room which has to be

lived in otherwise. All people may not have the prejudice known to some

of us against social consumption of food; but any one will agree that

the best dinner in the world leaves a smell behind it. A dining-room

may be a luxury, but it is not an absurdity, so long as you can by

any means afford it. If the æsthetic and pseudo-æsthetic experts in

domesticity are telling us that a dining-room is ridiculous, it is

only because they wish to prepare us for an inevitable contraction

of our comfort, an unavoidable mitigation of decency. The one most

aristocratic element in life, physically speaking, is spaciousness;

it has always been in the best tradition to be frugal to starvation

in a corner of a palace. But we have come nowadays to care more for

what we eat (I fear) than for how or where we eat it. The abolition of

the dining-room is only a further step on the road we entered when we

moved _en masse_ out of houses into flats. It has been hard to get

service; and meanwhile we have grown soft and would rather do without

those amenities which are not conveniences than to furnish them for

ourselves.

It must in fairness be admitted that two things have combined to bring

us to this pass. The most obvious fact is this of the labor situation,

which is now immensely accentuated by the war. But another force has

always been at work. Except in that part of the country which imported

slaves early and kept them as long as it could, more or less pioneer

standards prevailed. We were a new country; we dispensed perforce

(as in other colonies) with many of the inherited comforts. Our love

of personal (I do not mean political) independence was a kind of

protective coloring. The enforced simplicity of the pioneer scene bred

in us a distaste for being waited on too importunately. Because we

had to do certain things for ourselves, we developed a preference for

doing them, a distaste for the constant interposition of another human

being among the more private processes of existence. Even in the South,

some modification of the tradition must have been necessary, for the

South must always have been badly, though exuberantly, served. Here

and there a butler, a lady’s maid, may, after years of struggle, have

been highly trained; and the colored race has a gift for cooking. But

in many ways Southerners must have contended with the disheartening

conditions faced by all English households in the outposts of empire,

dependent on another and a stupid race for the satisfaction of their

needs. Southern luxury lay in having a score of inadequate menials to

keep the masters as comfortable as three or four really good servants

would have done. It was slave labor, and slave labor reaches competence

only by sheer force of numbers. There was never an ideal of domestic

service there, because there was never the rounded conception of

civilized domestic comfort in any slave’s mind. And nothing is more

slovenly or incompetent in domestic service than the younger generation

of free-born negroes. I do not think the colored race is going to prove

our domestic salvation.

We welcomed the labor-saving device, in the first place, for the

reasons I have given. By the labor-saving device we have been brought

insensibly to an almost animal dependence on creature comforts. With

all our theoretical glorification of simplicity, we have really prided

ourselves supremely on our physical luxuries, and most of all, it

must be said, on those physical luxuries which have no æsthetic value.

Our plumbing has been our civilization. The European aristocracy is

for the most part not so “comfortable” as the American middle class;

and therefore we have considered ourselves the greatest nation in the

world. We have been snobbish about many things, but about nothing

so much as our electrical appliances and our skyscrapers. We have

sinned, all of us together, as I said before; and now we are paying.

Simplicity, austerity, even, are forced upon us; and it behooves those

of us who really care, in spite of temporary apostasies, about real

values, to take thought and to plan. The vital question is not whether

we shall simplify, but how. On that depends our civilization.

Neither the new war millionaires nor skilled labor can teach us

that. We shall have need of all our trained perceptions, of all our

first-hand and all our book knowledge, of what money has been most

wisely spent for in the past, to make our choice intelligently. The

new millionaire and the enriched laboring man will not, for the most

part, be able to help us; for, by and large, having no experience of

the finer things of civilization, they will not know. For ourselves,

it does not much matter--for us who have seen a world in ruin and can

never “care” for anything in the same way again--but this is perhaps

our first duty to our children. They cannot have all the things we were

brought up to crave and expect; but they must have the essentials.

What, in a practical sense, are those going to be?

The Pennsylvania miner, making from forty to seventy-five dollars

a day, buys an automobile--not necessarily a Ford--which waits for

him at the entrance to the mine. His wife buys finery. Both buy the

best food they can get. It has been publicly said, I understand, by a

distinguished representative of the Food Administration, that almost

every class of the community was doing its duty in the way of food

conservation, except skilled labor. That is the class which cannot

be reached by appeal. The very poorest are still very poor, and they

have neither the money nor the knowledge to enable them to indulge

in forbidden gastronomic luxuries. The rich are apparently--in most

cases--making it a point of honor to help out. But skilled labor, which

is so necessary to the prosecution of war, which has never in its life

been so pampered, so flattered, so kow-towed to, so overpaid (yes, I

mean that; it is overpaid, and I will explain what I mean presently),

has lost its head. It probably believes the things the politicians and

its own leaders have been saying to it. It will work, and consider

itself patriotic for working--but it will exact from the rest of us,

the public, a price it has no right to, and, lest the honor of our

country and the ideals we fight for be lost, we shall pay it. It may be

that the reckoning will come later; or it may be that we are so sunk in

materialism that skilled labor will continue to rule the earth. Just

so long as we feel our greatest need to be of the things it furnishes

us with, and its greatest need is for the things we cannot furnish it

with, our necks will be bowed under labor’s yoke. Our only chance of

emancipation lies in finding some of our greatest goods in fields not

under labor’s control. In other words, to live at all, in any peace,

in any equanimity and longanimity, we must be as little materialistic

in temper and desire as possible. We must teach our children that the

greatest goods are not the things that skilled labor produces. That is

not only truth; it is self-preservation. Labor will have the motor-cars

and the delicacies of the table, the jewels and the joy-rides; we must

see to it that we keep something else, and learn to feel the importance

of our treasure. If we can maintain a prestige value for the things

of our choice (frankly, I doubt if we can) “the lords of their hands”

may come to desire the things we have chosen, and help to make them

accessible. But we must be careful to make no concessions; we must not

take one step, ourselves, in the materialistic direction.

This is not snobbishness; it is a matter of life and death. No one is

going to have leisure, any more, to be a snob or any such non-essential

thing. At least, if any one has the time, it will not be the educated

classes. We shall have to work as we have never worked before,

physically as well as mentally. We shall have to learn to co-operate

with one another, too; to make an almost religious brotherhood. For it

is our children who matter, and we cannot begin too soon to prepare

them for a world which has nothing in common with the world we knew.

Only by joining in utmost effort with the like-minded can we hope to

protect them.

I know there are Utopians who see in the socialization of Anglo-Saxon

governments hope, along Marxian lines, for Anglo-Saxondom. They

foresee, I suppose, the kind of Paradise that the Admirable Crichton

(in Barrie’s immoral and delightful play) must have experienced on the

desert island. There is going to be only one party in England, Mr.

Arthur Henderson has recently said--the Labor party. It may be. Let

us hope that some of the “unattached leaders” will at least preserve

logic if they do not preserve majorities. Mr. Henderson’s own argument

is about as convincing as though one should say: in certain abnormal

conditions martial law is the only régime that will work; therefore,

since civil law has been found inadequate to conditions of riot and

pestilence and famine, we must give it up altogether, and make martial

law perpetual.

The real arguments against private, and for public, ownership are, of

course, quite other than those Mr. Henderson offers. The point is that

Mr. Henderson evidently does not know bad logic when he sees it. Let

Mr. Henderson and his followers keep the motor-cars, one is inclined to

say, and we will keep the logic he discards. Private perception of the

laws of logic is something we shall not be taxed for; though--let us

not deceive ourselves--we shall have to make sacrifices to keep it. If

we can acquire logic, we may have it. It may be increasingly difficult

to maintain the methods of acquiring it: the best education, moral and

intellectual, was becoming endangered before the war, and there is no

telling what may become of it afterward.

I seem to have wandered far afield from plumbing; and yet plumbing

(as a symbol of materialistic comfort) is more than germane to the

question. The group whose problem I am concerned with is a very large

one, though always, anywhere, a minority: the professional man, the man

in the smaller business position, the man on a salary, who has been

decently bred, and who can never look forward to any real financial

fortune. I do not include every one who has to economize strictly, for

a large proportion of the people who have to economize strictly are

totally uneducated as to real values. But distinctly I include any of

the last mentioned who are alive to something besides materialistic

needs. I do not include the people who want intellectual and æsthetic

goods only for social and snobbish reasons or out of blind jealousy.

That group, in any case, will cease to exist if intellectual and

æsthetic goods cease to have a social value--as is more and more

definitely coming to be the case. They were never anything but paid

mercenaries in the struggle.

How are we going to save, for our children and our children’s children,

the real amenities of life? Hitherto the new millionaires, for reasons

of social prestige, have tended to link themselves to the group of

the civilized. But the new millionaire has always been an individual

case, and has, therefore, had to make concessions to the group

already established. What we have never had before is the proletariat

suddenly becoming, overnight, in its vast numbers, at once richer and

more powerful politically than the little “educated” aristocracy. We

all know what happens when that happens; if we have forgotten the

French Revolution (and since 1914 a good many of us have) we have the

Russian Revolution to remind us. In this morning’s newspaper I saw

that the daily bread ration in Petrograd was one-half a pound for the

proletariat, one-eighth of a pound for the bourgeoisie. That may or may

not be true, but there is nothing in known facts to make it incredible.

Even granting that skilled labor is not going to Bolshevize itself

completely, there is no doubt that the minority of which I speak is

going to be virtually, if not theoretically, discriminated against.

Labor is not going to draw distinctions between employers of labor; the

college professor is going to have to pay the plumber, the carpenter,

at as exorbitant rates as the great manufacturer. Any one who employs

labor at all--even if it is only to repair a leak--is going to be

gouged. All along the line, the producers of every necessary element in

civilized physical existence are going to rob the ultimate consumer. It

is labor that is responsible for the high cost of living. Labor may say

that the high cost of living is responsible for its increased demands.

In point of fact, there is every evidence that labor at present

is demanding money, not for the necessities of life, but for the

luxuries--just like the capitalists they have so inveighed against. One

would have to be a professional reformer to be shocked. Any knowledge

of human nature leaves one perfectly unsurprised by this phenomenon.

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession

has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism. That is what labor

has always said about the employers of labor; and the employers can say

it quite as truly of the employed. So long as you make the basis of

life materialistic, this law will prevail.

What, then, are we going to do about it? We shall not be able to

afford many of the luxuries we once thought necessities, and we must

decide, with the utmost possible wisdom, what are necessities and what

are not. We had better make our list as short as possible, at that.

Obvious luxuries we shall not have: motor-cars, fine clothing, plenty

of domestic service, the joys of travel. It is costing us more, all the

time, to provide the hygienic necessities for our children: pure milk,

nourishing food, good air, healthful recreation, seasonable clothing. I

do not mean complicated food, or extravagant amusements, or elaborate

clothing; I mean the irreducible minimum required for health and simple

comfort and decency. And we cannot all--especially the professional

people--go back to the farm and live on our own produce. We have to

struggle along as best we can in the communities to which our work has

called us.

In some ways the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect have

always been expensive. The more obvious material comforts--rich food,

for example--have not been necessary to either. Neither, in a sense,

has fine clothing or expensive furniture. Yet it must be remembered

that both the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect tend, in

most cases, to develop the sense of beauty; and that too much ugliness

can become a pain and an obstacle to calm. There is a simplicity that

is pleasing, and a simplicity that is hideous. Leaving aside the social

importance of good clothes and good furniture, there is, in downright

ugliness, a power to fret the soul, a power to lessen the power to

work. But we will neglect, for the moment, the æsthetic side of it.

In the matter of food we will willingly simplify. In the matter of

adornment, whether of our persons or of our houses, we shall have to

simplify, and we can only hope that our simplification can be conducted

more along quantitative than along qualitative lines. We shall try to

omit rather than commit; to be austere rather than cheap.

The matter of servants is going to hit us harder; for only with

“help”--in the quite literal sense--can we manage to get any peace or

any time, in the hours left free by our wage-earning, for reading,

for contemplation, for conversation. The “general houseworker” has

tended to disappear; which is an acknowledgment that when a great

many different things have to be done, one human being cannot stand

the strain. Only by her being helped out by the family, only by some

features of household service being scanted or ill done, could the

general houseworker ever manage to keep outside her job. The good cook

could not also be the perfect parlor-maid and the perfect child’s

nurse. Neither can the good physician, the good lawyer, the good

clergyman, also be the perfect choreman, the perfect gardener, and

the perfect butler--with hours of casual bookkeeping, plumbing, and

carpentering. Even if he had the talent, he would not have the time;

for the physician, the lawyer, and the clergyman are not safeguarded

by an “eight-hour day.” His wife, moreover, even if she has no private

intellectual interests, cannot suffice to all the modern domestic

tasks any more than can the general houseworker, who has faded out of

existence precisely because she could not. We shall modify as we can;

shall have our food sent in from outside where that is possible; shall

buy vacuum cleaners (on the instalment plan); shall win occasional

hours of freedom by hiring some safe person to come in and watch over

the children while they sleep. Hospitality will, of necessity, be

much curtailed. Our personal freedom--in any familiar sense of the

term--will be almost _nil_. We might defy our house, our garden,

our table, our door-bell, to shackle us; but we cannot defy our

children to shackle us.

In these ways, we shall probably intrigue for the life of the

spirit, the life of the intellect. But, still, they are expensive.

Education--good education--is, in the first place, expensive. I do

not know how much it costs to make a man a good plumber or a good

coal-miner or a good carpenter; but I am sure it does not cost so much

as it does to make him a good doctor or a good clergyman. It takes

seven years after the “prep” school or the high school to start the

professional man on his road, costing fairly heavily all the time. That

is why I said that skilled labor is overpaid--it gets an exorbitant

return for its expenditure. Most of us hope to have college for our

boys, even if they do not take up a profession--just because we think

that education is going to matter to a man, all his life, no matter

in what field he works. The joys of travel, as I intimated, are going

to be cut out for most of us; the opera and the play will become

infrequent blessings. But we shall have to have some books--even if

we do not start the furnace until December. Indeed, the books we have

ourselves are perhaps going to be our best guarantee of our children’s

being educated at all. To be sure, we shall be taxed on them, with

increasing heaviness; but then, the coal-miner will (let us hope) be

taxed on his motor-car.

It may be that we shall come to state-endowed motherhood, and all the

rest. But the trouble is that all these socialistic schemes are based

on a lower-class demand on life. State endowment of motherhood will

perhaps have to come; but what does it guarantee except the child born

under decent conditions? The health of the mother, and through her of

the child, is to be safeguarded. Very well. _Et après?_ Pure milk

may be provided at municipal stations; there will be a day nursery and

then a public kindergarten. There will follow--if modern “educators”

have their way--the whole desolating career in the public schools,

where real education is reduced to a minimum, and “vocational” training

is substituted. The child will, in time, be graduated into the ranks of

skilled labor, and perhaps will eventually have his motor-car and his

tiled bathroom and his “movie” every night.

Yet for some of us this is not a supremely cheering prospect, because

it is a wholly materialistic vision. Certainly it is a good thing

to start with health as a requisite. Certainly everything that can

be done to insure a healthy childhood, in every case where it is

physically possible, should be done. But the great mistake of the

reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and

that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to

enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind. It may be that the

enormous expense of guaranteeing health to all children born in our

vast American community will take all the money that the community

has. It may be that no one will ever be free to devote his health to

pursuing the life of the mind and the spirit--to the purposes, that is,

of civilization not purely physical. But we have not come to that yet;

and the war is there to remind us that we really do not know precisely

what will come. If real socialism--as distinguished from our temporary

utilization of certain socialistic methods--comes, we shall inevitably

turn our backs on civilization for a time. Successful socialism depends

on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are

high-minded and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten failure in

any but a physical sense. Even though it is altruism, socialism means

materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but

you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can

guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied

to any one who chooses to seek them. And socialism, believing as it

must (to hold its head high) in the spiritual as well as the political

equality of men, is not going to create special opportunities for

the special case. “To hell with the special case” is implicit in the

socialist slogan. Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect

and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That

any minority is precious? Is there any evidence whatever that the

socialist is less avid of personal political power, less averse to

demagogic methods, than the other person? Does he himself go far to

prove his perfectionism? A good many socialists are calling other

socialists names because they put nationality before internationality;

though any one with any sense could have told them beforehand that they

would, because human beings are--fortunately or unfortunately--like

that. Lenin and Trotzky are disappointed because the German socialists

do not rise to betray their rulers; and some socialists are

disappointed because Lenin and Trotzky appear to be selling Russia out

to Germany in order to keep themselves--two individuals--in places of

power. Every one is calling names all round; and if socialism were

anything in particular, it would (one would think) be very sorry for

itself.

What is clear is this: that the socialization of governments places

vast power in the hands of the skilled laborer. It is only in order

that labor shall produce as fast and as furiously as possible that

we have socialized our national organization. We need, chiefly for

war’s sake, certain physical things--food, munitions, coal, khaki

clothing, and transportation for the same. We are calling for Y. M.

C. A. men, and K. of C., and chaplains; but what we really expect of

them, more than anything else, is to go under fire, if necessary, to

give the soldiers tobacco and hot chocolate. The newspapers lay eager

and delighted stress on the unclerical nature of the services these

gentlemen find themselves cheerfully performing. War, you see, is

a physical business. Of the spiritual side of it I am not going to

speak. No one really can speak of it in terms of actual achievement

until the armies have come home and we see what manner of men they

are. You cannot tell from the straws you see which way the great last

wind of all is going to blow. Some wise people doubt whether the

veterans of this war are going to spiritualize the world. Many of

them will have had, at this or that supreme moment, something akin to

a spiritual revelation. But the spiritual adventure is a desperately

and exclusively personal thing; you cannot socialize it. It is

incommunicable, and for the most part inexpressible. The attempt to

socialize a spiritual experience ends in the camp-meeting; it goes no

farther. Like all mental ecstasies, it cannot be felt simultaneously by

millions of people. I fancy that the opinions the veterans are going

to express at the polls are quite unforeknowable. We are all willingly

kow-towing to the materialists for the sake of the armies. Whether

the armies will wish to kow-tow to them when the war is over is a

question more difficult of present solution than the Balkan boundaries.

Certainly, if the armies have developed an _esprit de corps_

and a philosophy of their own, they will be listened to. We shall

inevitably be very sentimental about them. Whether we shall continue

to be sentimental about the man who selected this moment to hold up

his country and his compatriots for exorbitant pay, and demonstrated

his patriotism by earning it, I do not know. We can deal only with the

present situation.

What, the present outlook being what it is, can we count on for our

children? We shall be practically aided, in time, as I have said, by

all sorts of co-operative schemes--invented for the use of the very

poor, and adapted and expanded, of necessity, for the not quite so

poor. Some of the amenities of life, some of the space and the privacy,

will have gone irretrievably. After considerations of health come

considerations of education. We shall not be able, probably, to afford

private schools for our children; and our sole comfort must be that

most private schools are not much good, anyhow. They are a little safer

gamble, in most communities, than the public schools. That is all. We,

the parents, must supplement the bad teaching as best we can, must

keep at least some spark of intelligent interest in the universe alive

by the gas-log. It may well become our painful and subversive duty to

inform our children, from the beginning, that what is being offered

them by the state as education is not really education at all; and that

teaching a boy how to make bookshelves is in no sense a substitute

for teaching him to read and appreciate Latin. (Better not mention

Greek!) It is very desirable, if not absolutely necessary, for our

daughter to know how to cook; but we must not permit her to consider

that domestic science is education, in the proper sense. We must keep

the fact before ourselves and before the next generation that the

training of the mind does not mean quite the same thing as the training

of the muscles. Time was when a cobbler--and I do not mean anything so

remote and legendary as Hans Sachs--found philosophy a very natural

complement to cobbling. I knew a cobbler in my childhood who was much

in demand among the intellectuals, as being one of the few people who

could expound Emerson’s transcendentalism in a completely satisfactory

way. He went about--I can still recall the spun snow of his hair, the

canny saintliness of his much-modelled face, the thin figure under the

long black cloak--to philosophical conferences, to discuss metaphysics

with the metaphysicians; and returned to sit in his little shop and

cobble shoes. But one has yet to hear of philosophy’s coming from a

member of the lasters’ union. Machinery means specialization; and it

is an old story that there is no mental comfort or development in

repeating the same gesture for eight hours a day, even if one has time

and a half for overtime. The single gesture is not educative. When you

saw the shoe as an entity, when it grew under your hands and you built

up the whole consciously from the related parts; even when you were

a mere cobbler, a physician to sick shoes, and had to know the whole

shoe-organism--there was something in that humblest, most physical of

tasks which demanded a conception in the brain. That time is gone,

and if William Morris in the flesh could not bring it back, certainly

his ghost will not. But if you think for a moment of the difference in

mental attitude and mental grasp, it shows up skilled labor for what it

is.

I am far from saying that, in this much simpler world which the

increasing complication of life is going, paradoxically, to create for

some of us, it is a bad thing that children should be “vocationally”

trained. (You cannot say “vocationally educated,” for that is virtually

a contradiction in terms.) Even so, it is only to a very limited degree

that our sons can be, in the intervals, their own plumbers or their own

carpenters or their own masons, for the unions will never allow it.

It is a very minor tinkering that is permitted to the private person.

You cannot help to paint your own woodwork in your own house, for the

union painter will leave his job if you touch your private paint-brush

in his presence. What good, after all, is this famous vocational

training, except as you definitely choose to follow through life some

one of the trades they teach you? It will not really make the whole

man more efficient; for he will not be allowed to use his potential

efficiency. It may teach him whether he prefers to be a steamfitter or

a bricklayer; but it cannot guarantee him any power to practise either

steamfitting or brick-laying, unless he is willing to forsake all

else and cling only to that. Never was such nonsense talked by any one

as by the new “educators.” Labor frankly uses the argument of might

and the big stick; but labor, as far as I know, does not pretend that

it is something else. It rests its case cynically on our own pampered

inability to get on without it.

“Philosophy can bake no bread,” replied some philosopher to his

critics, “but it can give us God, freedom, and immortality.” Those are

the last things, I take it, that modern philosophy is really concerned

with giving us; but the perversity of one generation need not obscure

all history. It is possible for the contemplation of great ideas, of

great art, of great poetry, of the epic motions of the human race as

revealed in history, to mitigate physical deprivation. It is possible

to have plain living and high thinking together--though it is not

easy, and never has been, and some of the best-known exponents of that

theory have been pitiful failures. Certainly we of the minority must

accept for ourselves austerities we were not bred to in our easy-going,

materialistic generation. Without taking, like St. Simeon, to the

wilful discomfort of a pillar, we must learn to do without a hundred

“necessities” that Dante and Shakespeare never dreamed of. We must

keep it possible for our children to delight in Dante and Shakespeare;

we must not let the authentic intellectual thrill disappear from the

world. And, for that, we must insist that the past be not closed to

them, and that learning shall not be an unknown good. They will have to

do it on bread and milk, not on caviare; but it can be done on bread

and milk. That is the point.

I confess that as I look forth in these distressed times on the vast

American scene, I find myself pinning my hope to two things--the

self-consciousness of this minority, and the older Eastern

universities. For unless we plan our simplicities cannily, the other

people will have won out; and unless the older universities keep up a

standard of learning, hold the door open, by main force, to the past,

the garnered lore of the world will fail us. We shall progress--but

blindly, as the brute creation. The fact is that we are living in

an obscurantist epoch. For surely it is obscurantism to deny the

legitimacy of any field of knowledge or of virtue, and those folk who

would reduce everything to a physical basis are as deadly foes of light

as their ancestors who saw in physical experiments nothing but the

black art. Every sane person wants science left free to accomplish its

marvellous work; but no sane person past early youth would say, as a

young woman fresh from her college laboratories said to me a few days

since, that chemistry is the root of all knowledge. The Protestants,

when they were on top, were as given to obscurantism, and its

accompaniment of persecution, as the Catholics.

In the matter of education, as I have suggested, we shall have to rely

on the older colleges of the East. We cannot count on the West to help

us, for the West is cursed with state universities. It is by no means

my intention or my private inclination to minimize the value of the

state universities. The point is that they are uncertain; they are

not free; they are dependent, in the last analysis, on public favor,

which means public funds, on a kind of initiative and referendum.

They may have good luck and become great schools of learning; they

may have bad luck and become indifferent and negligible places. They

are not really allowed to set their own standards; they must ever be

compromising with the personnel of state legislatures. The private

colleges and universities of the East at least are not dependent on

politics. Their funds are for the most part inadequate, but they do

not have to change their curricula to please people who know nothing

about what a curriculum should be. As long as their private fortunes

last, they can afford to say the thing which they believe to be true.

One of the most heartening things that have happened since 1914 is

the acquisition of great wealth by Yale University. It means--one

hopes--that one at least of our old academic foundations can snap its

fingers at ignorance enthroned; that it can send out its thousands

endowed with some sense of intellectual values. Intellectual values

are not the only ones; but most sane people believe that only by the

rigid training of the mind can human beings be taught wise living and

moral values. There is no morality by instinct, though there can be

morality by inherited inhibitions. There is no social salvation--in the

end--without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application

of logic to human experience. These things, because they are not the

natural man, are not carelessly come by; they must be deliberately

achieved. You will not learn them from the Bolsheviki, or from the I.

W. W., or even from Mr. Arthur Henderson. A great deal is said nowadays

about practical politics and the rôle of the practical man in building

the social structure. Before you can carry out an idea you must have

the idea. You cannot get rid of the world of abstract thought. One

after the other, leaders of the Church are laying more and more stress

on religion’s being a strictly social matter. Perhaps it is, though

I do not believe it. I should have said that social regeneration was

a by-product of religion, not religion itself. But even the folk who

think that Christianity means no slums, and means little else, derive

their sanction--or think they do--from Christ, who dealt in abstract

ideas more exclusively than any other religious teacher the world has

had.

We must, then, seriously facing the moral, political, and physical

conditions of our time, be frankly ascetic. We must make our children

healthy, first of all--if only because specialists will be beyond our

pocketbooks. I have implied that the combination of plain living and

high thinking is a difficult one; I fancy it is the most difficult in

the world. “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.”

We shall obliterate the coarser contacts, as far as possible, not by

engaging other people to take the burden of those coarser contacts,

but by buying, as we can, the machinery that will suffice to them

impersonally. We shall “co-operate” to the limit of our incomes, losing

thereby, I repeat, many of the amenities which tend to civilize.

We shall not sleep soft, we shall not live high, and we shall do

without external beauty to a painful extent. We shall exist in cramped

quarters, and if we achieve the dignity of one spacious room, that

will be a great deal. We cannot hope to furnish it fittingly. But if

we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a

book, not on asparagus out of season. If we have a holiday, we shall

not go to Europe or Asia, which would be beyond our means; but we shall

find some quiet spot where there will at least be trees and sky and

no motor-cars or aeroplanes. We shall, I hope, ameliorate our lack of

space and privacy by a very perfectly developed courtesy and by the

capacity for silence. It sounds monastic, and, at its best, monastic

it will be. Certain things we shall have given up at the start;

certain ambitions will have been erased from our tablets. We shall not

compete with, or interfere with, the lords of this world. We shall do

our modest work, and receive our modest pay, and by a corresponding

modesty of life and temper we shall disarm, we hope, the unsympathetic

and uncomprehending. Our kingdom cannot be of this world; and instead

of complaining and criticizing, we must apply ourselves to realizing

that our compensations can be made greater than our losses. We shall

be passionately concerned with humanity; the more so, that we shall

endeavor to be aware of the voice of God as well as of the voice of the

people. We shall not be snobs in any sense; for we shall have the same

charity for other people’s choices that we beg them to have for ours.

Besides, snobbishness dies out quickly--in America, at least--among the

impoverished.

Even those who find all this an intolerable idea will dub it Utopian.

A counsel of perfection it certainly is. But the higher the standard

we set for ourselves the less likely we are to put up with a low

one. And if we merely drift, I fear we shall find ourselves getting

nothing--wearing ourselves out in the unequal, familiar race for

physical privileges, and leaving to one side the intangible goods. We

can guarantee our children nothing except that they shall be armored

against certain kinds of suffering; the lust of non-essentials, for

example. I do not say that we shall not lose much that our best

interest would suggest our having; but we shall not lose everything.

And with the new simplicity will come some of the compensations of

earlier simplicity. The man who has three things gets more pleasure out

of one than does the man who has a hundred. Perhaps we shall capture

the “joy in widest commonalty spread.” A rose will always be cheaper

than an alligator pear, and it is quite possible to enjoy it as much

and as vividly. We shall be very grateful, I have no doubt, to Thomas

Edison and the other genii of democracy. In some ways we shall fare

better than folk of our clan in Europe. We must thank our stars for

plumbing--itself a “joy in widest commonalty spread.” But we shall

value it chiefly as it releases time for better things, and those

better things not physical pleasures.

Not only shall we not glorify our plumbing with marble; we shall see

that there is really no sense in marble when porcelain will do as

well--that marble has better uses and should be kept for them. Not only

shall we have no ermine to shield us from the cold; we shall see that

ermine was more beautiful when rarely and ritually worn. We shall learn

to take pleasure in beautiful things that do not and never can belong

to us; and we shall purge ourselves of the ignoble passion of envy. But

the power to discriminate between the truth and a lie--which is the

foundation of all moral and intellectual enjoyment--we shall cling to

with greed. For in keeping that we rob no one, and insult no law. I am

far from believing that any group of people can achieve all this with

completeness. But I believe we shall do well to set it before us as a

goal.