hope, but we can have no certainty. Save only the certainty that no
element will outlive the revolution unchanged--not faiths, nor classes,
nor domestic relations, nor any other component factor of our complex
civilisation. All are becoming plastic in the organic plasm; all are
losing features in the common mass of the melting-pot. For that reason,
I never trouble my head for a moment when people object to me that this,
that, or the other petty point of detail in Bellamy's Utopia or William
Morris's Utopia, or my own little private and particular Utopia, is
impossible, or unrealisable, or wicked, or hateful. For these, after
all, are mere Utopias; their details are the outcome of individual
wishes; what will emerge must be, not a Utopia at all, either yours or
mine, but a practical reality, full of shifts and compromises most
unphilosophical and illogical--a practical reality distasteful in many
ways to all us Utopia-mongers. "The Millennium by return of post" is no
more realisable to-day than yesterday. The greatest of revolutions can
only produce that unsatisfactory result, a new human organisation.
Yet, it is something, after all, to believe at least that the grub will
emerge into a full-fledged butterfly. Not, perhaps, quite as glossy in
the wings as we could wish; but a butterfly all the same, not a crawling
caterpillar.
XVII.
_ON THE CASINO TERRACE._
I have always regarded Monte Carlo as an Influence for Good. It helps to
keep so many young men off the Stock Exchange.
Let me guard against an obvious but unjust suspicion. These remarks are
not uttered under the exhilarating effect of winning at the tables.
Quite the contrary. It is the Bank that has broken the Man to-day
at Monte Carlo. They are rather due to the chastening and
thought-compelling influence of persistent loss, not altogether
unbalanced by a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in any
town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces
which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of
roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste,
by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity,
and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a
brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and
belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and the
gleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance. 'Tis a modest
tribute, my poor little forty francs. Surely the veriest puritan, the
oiliest Chadband of them all, will allow a humble scribbler, at so cheap
a yearly rate, to purchase wisdom, not unmixed with tolerance, at the
gilded shrine of Fors Fortuna!
For what a pother, after all, the unwise of this world are wont to make
about one stranded gambling-house, in a remote corner of Liguria! If
they were in earnest or sincere, how small a matter they would think it!
Of course, when I say so, hypocrisy holds up its hands in holy horror.
But that is the way with the purveyors of mint, cumin, and anise; they
raise a mighty hubbub over some unimportant detail--in order to feel
their consciences clear when business compels them to rob the widow and
the orphan. In reality, though Monte Carlo is bad enough in its way--do
I not pay it unwilling tribute myself twice a year out of the narrow
resources of The Garret, Grub Street?--it is but a skin-deep surface
symptom of a profound disease which attacks the heart and core in London
and Paris. Compared with Panama, Argentines, British South Africans, and
Liberators, Monte Carlo is a mole on the left ankle.
"The Devil's advocate!" you say. Well, well, so be it. The fact is, the
supposed moral objection to gambling as such is a purely commercial
objection of a commercial nation; and the reason so much importance is
attached to it in certain places is because at that particular vice men
are likely to lose their money. It is largely a fetish, like the
sinfulness of cards, of dice, of billiards. Moreover, the objection is
only to the _kind_ of gambling. There is another kind, less open, at
which you stand a better chance to win yourself, while other parties
stand a better chance to lose; and that kind, which is played in great
gambling-houses known as the Stock Exchange and the Bourse, is
considered, morally speaking, as quite innocuous. Large fortunes are
made at this other sort of gambling, which, of course, sanctifies and
almost canonises it. Indeed, if you will note, you will find not only
that the objection to gambling pure and simple is commonest in the most
commercial countries, but also that even there it is commonest among the
most commercial classes. The landed aristocracy, the military, and the
labouring men have no objection to betting; nor have the Neapolitan
lazzaroni, the Chinese coolies. It is the respectable English
counting-house that discourages the vice, especially among the clerks,
who are likely to make the till or the cheque-book rectify the little
failures of their flutter on the Derby.
Observe how artificial is the whole mild out-cry: how absolutely it
partakes of the nature of damning the sins you have no mind to! Here, on
the terrace where I sit, and where ladies in needlessly costly robes are
promenading up and down to exhibit their superfluous wealth
ostentatiously to one another, my ear is continuously assailed by the
constant _ping, ping, ping_ of the pigeon-shooting, and my peace
disturbed by the flapping death-agonies of those miserable victims. Yet
how many times have you heard the tables at Monte Carlo denounced to
once or never that you have heard a word said of the poor mangled
pigeons? And why? Because nobody loses much money at pigeon-matches.
That is legitimate sport, about as good and as bad as pheasant or
partridge shooting--no better, no worse, in spite of artificial
distinctions; and nobody (except the pigeons) has any interest in
denouncing it. Legend has it at Monte Carlo, indeed, that when the
proprietors of the Casino wished to take measures "pour attirer les
Anglais" they held counsel with the wise men whether it was best to
establish and endow an English church or a pigeon-shooting tournament.
And the church was in a minority. Since then, I have heard more than one
Anglican Bishop speak evil of the tables, but I have never heard one of
them say a good word yet for the boxed and slaughtered pigeons.
Let me take a more striking because a less hackneyed case--one that
still fewer people would think of. Everybody who visits Monte Carlo gets
there, of course, by the P.L.M. If you know this coast at all you will
know that P.L.M. is the curt and universal abbreviation for the Paris,
Lyon, Méditerranée Railway Company--in all probability the most gigantic
and wickedest monopoly on the face of this planet. Yet you never once
heard a voice raised yet against the company as a company. Individual
complaints get into the _Times_, of course, about the crowding of the
_train de luxe_, the breach of faith as to places, and the discomforts
of the journey; but never a glimmering conception seems to flit across
the popular mind that here is a Colossal Wrong, compared to which Monte
Carlo is but as a flea-bite to the Asiatic cholera. This chartered abuse
connects the three biggest towns in France--Paris, Lyon, Marseilles--and
is absolutely without competitors. It can do as it likes; and it does
it, regardless--I say "regardless," without qualification, because the
P.L.M. regards nobody and nothing. Yet one hears of no righteous
indignation, no uprising of the people in their angry thousands, no
moral recognition of the monopoly as a Wicked Thing, to be fought tooth
and nail, without quarter given. It probably causes a greater aggregate
of human misery in a week than Monte Carlo in a century. Besides, the
one is compulsory, the other optional. You needn't risk a louis on the
tables unless you choose, but, like it or lump it, if you're bound for
Nice or Cannes or Mentone, you must open your mouth and shut your eyes
and see what P.L.M. will send you. Our own railways, indeed, are by no
means free from blame at the hands of the Democracy: the South-Eastern
has not earned the eternal gratitude of its season-ticket holders; the
children of the Great Western do not rise up and call it blessed.
(Except, indeed, in the most uncomplimentary sense of blessing.) But the
P.L.M. goes much further than these; and I have always held that the one
solid argument for eternal punishment consists in the improbability that
its Board of Directors will be permitted to go scot-free for ever after
all their iniquities.
I am not wholly joking. I mean the best part of it. Great monopolies
that abuse their trust are far more dangerous enemies of public morals
than an honest gambling-house at every corner. Monte Carlo as it stands
is just a concentrated embodiment of all the evils of our anti-social
system, and the tables are by far the least serious among them. It is an
Influence for Good, because it mirrors our own world in all its naked,
all its over-draped hideousness. There it rears its meretricious head,
that gaudy Palace of Sin, appropriately decked in its Haussmanesque
architecture and its coquettish gardens, attracting to itself all the
idle, all the vicious, all the rich, all the unworthy, from every corner
of Europe and America. But Monte Carlo didn't make them; it only gathers
to its bosom its own chosen children from the places where they are
produced--from London, Paris, Brussels, New York, Berlin, St.
Petersburg. The vices of our organisation begot these over-rich folk,
begot their diamond-decked women, and their clipped French poodles with
gold bangles spanning their aristocratic legs. These are the spawn of
land-owning, of capitalism, of military domination, of High Finance, of
all the social ills that flesh is heir to. I feel as I pace the terrace
in the broad Mediterranean sunshine, that I am here in the midst of the
very best society Europe affords. That is to say, the very worst. The
dukes and the money-lenders, the Jay Goulds and the Reinachs. The
idlest, the cruellest: the hereditary drones, the successful
blood-suckers. But to find fault with them only for trying to
win one another's ill-gotten gold at a fair and open game of
_trente-et-quarante_, with the odds against them, and then to say
nothing about the way they came by it, is to make a needless fuss about
a trifle of detail, while overlooking the weightiest moral problems of
humanity.
Whoever allows red herrings like these to be trailed across the path of
his moral consciousness, to the detriment of the scent which should lead
him straight on to the lairs of gigantic evils, deserves little credit
either for conscience or sagacity. My son, be wise. Strike at the root
of the evil. Let Monte Carlo go, but keep a stern eye on London
ground-rents.
XVIII.
_THE CELTIC FRINGE._
We Celts henceforth will rule the roost in Britain.
What is that you mutter? "A very inopportune moment to proclaim the
fact." Well, no, I don't think so. And I'm sorry to hear you say it, for
if there _is_ a quality on which I plume myself, it's the delicate tact
that makes me refrain from irritating the susceptibilities of the
sensitive Saxon. See how polite I am to him! I call him sensitive. But,
opportune or inopportune, Lord Salisbury says we are a Celtic fringe. I
beg to retort, we are the British people.
"Conquered races," say my friends. Well, grant it for a moment. But in
civilised societies, conquerors have, sooner or later, to amalgamate
with the conquered. And where the vanquished are more numerous, they
absorb the victors instead of being absorbed by them. That is the
Nemesis of conquest. Rome annexed Etruria; and Etruscan Mæcenas,
Etruscan Sejanus organised and consolidated the Roman Empire. Rome
annexed Italy; and the _Jus Italicum_ grew at last to be the full Roman
franchise. Rome annexed the civilised world; and the provinces under
Cæsar blotted out the Senate. Britain is passing now through the
self-same stage. One inevitable result of the widening of the electorate
has been the transfer of power from the Teutonic to the Celtic half of
Britain. I repeat, we are no longer a Celtic fringe: at the polls, in
Parliament, we are the British people. Lord Salisbury may fail to
perceive that fact, or, as I hold more probable, may affect to ignore
it. What will such tactics avail? The ostrich is not usually counted
among men as a perfect model of political wisdom.
And _are_ we, after all, the conquered peoples? Meseems, I doubt it.
They say we Celts dearly love a paradox--which is perhaps only the
sensible Saxon way of envisaging the fact that we catch at new truths
somewhat quicker than other people. At any rate, 'tis a pet little
paradox of my own that we have never been conquered, and that to our
unconquered state we owe in the main our Radicalism, our Socialism, our
ingrained love of political freedom. We are tribal not feudal; we think
the folk more important than his lordship. The Saxon of the south-east
is the conquered man: he has felt on his neck for generations the heel
of feudalism. He is slavish; he is snobbish; he dearly loves a lord. He
shouts himself hoarse for his Beaconsfield or his Salisbury. Till
lately, in his rural avatar, he sang but one song--
"God bless the squire and his relations,
And keep us in our proper stations."
Trite, isn't it? but so is the Saxon intelligence.
Seriously--for at times it is well to be serious--South-Eastern England,
the England of the plains, has been conquered and enslaved in a dozen
ages by each fresh invader. Before the dawn of history, Heaven knows
what shadowy Belgæ and Iceni enslaved it. But historical time will serve
our purpose. The Roman enslaved it, but left Caledonia and Hibernia
free, the Cambrian, the Silurian, the Cornishman half-subjugated. The
Saxon and Anglian enslaved the east, but scarcely crossed over the
watershed of the western ocean. The Dane, in turn, enslaved the Saxon in
East Anglia and Yorkshire. The Norman ground all down to a common
servitude between the upper and nether millstones of the feudal
system--the king and the nobleman. At the end of it all, Teutonic
England was reduced to a patient condition of contented serfdom: it had
accommodated itself to its environment: no wish was left in it for the
assertion of its freedom. To this day, the south-east, save where
leavened and permeated by Celtic influences, hugs its chains and loves
them. It produces the strange portent of the Conservative working-man,
who yearns to be led by Lord Randolph Churchill.
With the North and the West, things go wholly otherwise. Even Cornwall,
the earliest Celtic kingdom to be absorbed, was rather absorbed than
conquered. I won't go into the history of the West Welsh of Somerset,
Devon, and Cornwall at full length, because it would take ten pages to
explain it; and I know that readers are too profoundly interested in the
Shocking Murder in the Borough Road to devote half-an-hour to the origin
and evolution of their own community. It must suffice to say that the
Devonian and Cornubian Welsh coalesced with the West Saxon for
resistance to their common enemy the Dane, and that the West Saxon
kingdom was made supreme in Britain by the founder of the English
monarchy--one Dunstan, a monk from the West Welsh Abbey of Glastonbury.
Wales proper, overrun piecemeal by Norman filibusterers, was roughly
annexed by the Plantagenet kings; but it was only pacified under the
Welsh Tudors, and was never at any time thoroughly feudalised.
Glendower's rebellion, Richmond's rebellion, the Wesleyan revolt, the
Rebecca riots, the tithe war, are all continuous parts of the ceaseless
reaction of gallant little Wales against Teutonic aggression. "An alien
Church" still disturbs the Principality. The Lake District and
Ayrshire--Celtic Cumbria and Strathclyde--only accepted by degrees the
supremacy of the Kings of England and Scotland. The brother of a Scotch
King was Prince of Cumbria, as the elder son of an English King was
Prince of Wales. Indeed, David of Cumbria, who became David I. of
Scotland, was the real consolidator of the Scotch kingdom. Cumbria was
no more conquered by the Saxon Lothians than Scotland was conquered by
the accession of James I. or by the Act of Union. That means absorption,
conciliation, a certain degree of tribal independence. For Ireland, we
know that the "mere Irish" were never subjugated at all till the days of
Henry VII.; that they had to be reconquered by Cromwell and by William
of Orange; that they rebelled more or less throughout the eighteenth
century; and that they have been thorns in the side of Tory England
through the whole of the nineteenth. As for the Highlands, they held out
against the Stuarts till England had rejected that impossible dynasty;
and then they rallied round the Stuarts as the enemies of the Saxon.
General Wade's roads and the forts in the Great Glen, aided by a few
trifles of Glencoe massacres, kept them quiet for a moment. But it was
only for a moment. The North is once more in open revolt. Dr. Clark and
the crofters are its mode of expressing itself.
Nor is that all. The Celtic ideas have remained unaltered. Of course, I
am not silly enough to believe there is any such thing as a Celtic race.
I use the word merely as a convenient label for the league of the
unconquered peoples in Britain. Ireland alone contains half-a-dozen
races; and none of them appear to have anything in common with the Pict
of Aberdeenshire or the West-Welsh of Cornwall. All I mean when I speak
of Celtic ideas and Celtic ideals is the ideas and ideals proper and
common to unconquered races. As compared with the feudalised and
contented serf of South-Eastern England, are not the Irish peasant, the
Scotch clansman, the "statesman" of the dales, the Cornish miner, free
men every soul of them? English landlordism, imposed from without upon
the crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside,
has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, the
native resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has been
brutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; the
west and north still retain the instincts of freemen.
As long as South-Eastern England and the Normanised or feudalised Saxon
lowlands of Scotland contained all the wealth, all the power, and most
of the population of Britain, the Celtic ideals had no chance of
realising themselves. But the industrial revolution of the present
century has turned us right-about-face, has transferred the balance of
power from the secondary strata to the primary strata in Britain; from
the agricultural lowlands to the uplands of coal and iron, the cotton
factories, the woollen trade. Great industrial cities have grown up in
the Celtic or semi-Celtic area--Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds,
Bradford, Sheffield, Belfast, Aberdeen, Cardiff. The Celt--that is to
say, the mountaineer and the man of the untouched country--reproduces
his kind much more rapidly than the Teuton. The Highlander and the
Irishman swarm into Glasgow; the Irishman and the Welshman swarm into
Liverpool; the west-countryman into Bristol; Celts of all types into
London, Southampton, Newport, Birmingham, Sheffield. This eastward
return-wave of Celts upon the Teuton has leavened the whole mass; if you
look at the leaders of Radicalism in England you will find they bear,
almost without exception, true Celtic surnames. Chartists and Socialists
of the first generation were marshalled by men of Cymric descent, like
Ernest Jones and Robert Owen, or by pure-blooded Irishmen like Fergus
O'Connor. It is not a mere accident that the London Socialists of the
present day should be led by Welshmen like William Morris, or by the
eloquent brogue of Bernard Shaw's audacious oratory. We Celts now lurk
in every corner of Britain; we have permeated it with our ideas; we have
inspired it with our aspirations; we have roused the Celtic remnant in
the south-east itself to a sense of their wrongs; and we are marching
to-day, all abreast, to the overthrow of feudalism. If Lord Salisbury
thinks we are a Celtic fringe he is vastly mistaken. But he doesn't
really think so: 'tis a piece of his ponderous Saxon humour. Talk of
"Batavian grace," indeed! Well, the Cecils came first from the fens of
Lincolnshire.
XIX.
_IMAGINATION AND RADICALS._
Conservatism, I believe, is mainly due to want of imagination.
In saying this, I do not for a moment mean to deny the other and equally
obvious truth that Conservatism, in the lump, is a euphemism for
selfishness. But the two ideas have much in common. Selfish people are
apt to be unimaginative: unimaginative people are apt to be selfish.
Clearly to realise the condition of the unfortunate is the beginning of
philanthropy. Clearly to realise the rights of others is the beginning
of justice. "Put yourself in his place" strikes the keynote of ethics.
Stupid people can only see their own side of a question: they cannot
even imagine any other side possible. So, as a rule, stupid people are
Conservative. They cling to what they have; they dread revision,
redistribution, justice. Also, if a man has imagination he is likely to
be Radical, even though selfish; while if he has no imagination he is
likely to be Conservative, even though otherwise good and kind-hearted.
Some men are Conservative from defects of heart, while some are
Conservative from defects of head. Conversely, most imaginative people
are Radical; for even a bad man may sometimes uphold the side of right
because he has intelligence enough to understand that things might be
better managed in the future for all than they are in the present.
But when I say that Conservatism is mainly due to want of imagination, I
mean more than that. Most people are wholly unable to conceive in their
own minds any state of things very different from the one they have been
born and brought up in. The picturing power is lacking. They can
conceive the past, it is true, more or less vaguely--because they have
always heard things once were so, and because the past is generally
realisable still by the light of the relics it has bequeathed to the
present. But they can't at all conceive the future. Imagination fails
them. Innumerable difficulties crop up for them in the way of every
proposed improvement. Before there was any County Council for London,
such people thought municipal government for the metropolis an insoluble
problem. Now that Home Rule quivers trembling in the balance, they think
it would pass the wit of man to devise in the future a federal league
for the component elements of the United Kingdom; in spite of the fact
that the wit of man has already devised one for the States of the Union,
for the Provinces of the Dominion, for the component Cantons of the
Swiss Republic. To the unimaginative mind difficulties everywhere seem
almost insuperable. It shrinks before trifles. "Impossible!" said
Napoleon. "There is no such word in my dictionary!" He had been trained
in the school of the French Revolution--which was _not_ carried out by
unimaginative pettifoggers.
To people without imagination any change you propose seems at once
impracticable. They are ready to bring up endless objections to the mode
of working it. There would be this difficulty in the way, and that
difficulty, and the other one. You would think, to hear them talk, the
world as it stands was absolutely perfect, and moved without a hitch in
all its bearings. They don't see that every existing institution just
bristles with difficulties--and that the difficulties are met or got
over somehow. Often enough while they swallow the camel of existing
abuses they strain at some gnat which they fancy they see flying in at
the window of Utopia or of the Millennium. "If your reform were
carried," they say in effect, "we should, doubtless, get rid of such and
such flagrant evils; but the streets in November would be just as muddy
as ever, and slight inconvenience might be caused in certain improbable
contingencies to the duke or the cotton-spinner, the squire or the
mine-owner." They omit to note that much graver inconvenience is caused
at present to the millions who are shut out from the fields and the
sunshine, who are sweated all day for a miserable wage, or who are
forced to pay fancy prices for fuel to gratify the rapacity of a handful
of coal-grabbers.
Lack of imagination makes people fail to see the evils that are; makes
them fail to realise the good that might be.