CHAPTER I

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EUGENICS AND OTHER EVILS

Eugenics and

Other Evils

By

G.K. Chesterton

Cassell and Company, Limited

London, New York, Toronto & Melbourne

1922

TO THE READER

I publish these essays at the present time for a particular reason

connected with the present situation; a reason which I should like

briefly to emphasise and make clear.

Though most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, are

conceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk of

preliminary notes about the science of Eugenics were written before

the war. It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when

eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies)

sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy

of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr.

Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man

like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilisation,

of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be

found in cart-horses. It may therefore appear that I took the opinion

too controversially, and it seems to me that I sometimes took it too

seriously. But the criticism of Eugenics soon expanded of itself into

a more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialism

and strict social organisation.

And then the hour came when I felt, not without relief, that I might

well fling all my notes into the fire. The fire was a very big one,

and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries. And,

anyhow, the issue itself was being settled in a very different style.

Scientific officialism and organisation in the State which had

specialised in them, had gone to war with the older culture of

Christendom. Either Prussianism would win and the protest would be

hopeless, or Prussianism would lose and the protest would be needless.

As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, it

grew more and more plain that the scientifically organised State was

not increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishmen would

ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So I

thought all I had written irrelevant, and put it out of my mind.

I am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It has

gradually grown apparent, to my astounded gaze, that the ruling

classes in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia

is a pattern for the whole world. If parts of my book are nearly nine

years old, most of their principles and proceedings are a great deal

older. They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the same

bullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors

that have led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumph. For

that reason, three years after the war with Prussia, I collect and

publish these papers.

G.K.C.

CONTENTS

PART I

The False Theory

CHAPTER PAGE

1. WHAT IS EUGENICS? 3

2. THE FIRST OBSTACLES 12

3. THE ANARCHY FROM ABOVE 22

4. THE LUNATIC AND THE LAW 31

5. THE FLYING AUTHORITY 46

6. THE UNANSWERED CHALLENGE 61

7. THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF DOUBT 73

8. A SUMMARY OF A FALSE THEORY 82

PART II

The Real Aim

1. THE IMPOTENCE OF IMPENITENCE 91

2. TRUE HISTORY OF A TRAMP 101

3. TRUE HISTORY OF A EUGENIST 114

4. THE VENGEANCE OF THE FLESH 126

5. THE MEANNESS OF THE MOTIVE 136

6. THE ECLIPSE OF LIBERTY 148

7. THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIALISM 159

8. THE END OF THE HOUSEHOLD GODS 169

9. A SHORT CHAPTER 180

Part I

THE FALSE THEORY

Eugenics and Other Evils

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS EUGENICS?

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is

no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are

mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but

sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because

men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before

it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the

scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried

while it is in the air.

There exists to-day a scheme of action, a school of thought, as

collective and unmistakable as any of those by whose grouping alone we

can make any outline of history. It is as firm a fact as the Oxford

Movement, or the Puritans of the Long Parliament; or the Jansenists;

or the Jesuits. It is a thing that can be pointed out; it is a thing

that can be discussed; and it is a thing that can still be destroyed.

It is called for convenience "Eugenics"; and that it ought to be

destroyed I propose to prove in the pages that follow. I know that it

means very different things to different people; but that is only

because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity. I know it is praised

with high professions of idealism and benevolence; with silver-tongued

rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity. But that is

only because evil is always flattered, as the Furies were called "The

Gracious Ones." I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions

are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely

astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil

always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has

in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and

abnormal sin. Of these who are deceived I shall speak of course as we

all do of such instruments; judging them by the good they think they

are doing, and not by the evil which they really do. But Eugenics

itself does exist for those who have sense enough to see that ideas

exist; and Eugenics itself, in large quantities or small, coming

quickly or coming slowly, urged from good motives or bad, applied to a

thousand people or applied to three, Eugenics itself is a thing no

more to be bargained about than poisoning.

It is not really difficult to sum up the essence of Eugenics: though

some of the Eugenists seem to be rather vague about it. The movement

consists of two parts: a moral basis, which is common to all, and a

scheme of social application which varies a good deal. For the moral

basis, it is obvious that man's ethical responsibility varies with his

knowledge of consequences. If I were in charge of a baby (like Dr.

Johnson in that tower of vision), and if the baby was ill through

having eaten the soap, I might possibly send for a doctor. I might be

calling him away from much more serious cases, from the bedsides of

babies whose diet had been far more deadly; but I should be justified.

I could not be expected to know enough about his other patients to be

obliged (or even entitled) to sacrifice to them the baby for whom I

was primarily and directly responsible. Now the Eugenic moral basis is

this; that the baby for whom we are primarily and directly responsible

is the babe unborn. That is, that we know (or may come to know) enough

of certain inevitable tendencies in biology to consider the fruit of

some contemplated union in that direct and clear light of conscience

which we can now only fix on the other partner in that union. The one

duty can conceivably be as definite as or more definite than the

other. The baby that does not exist can be considered even before the

wife who does. Now it is essential to grasp that this is a

comparatively new note in morality. Of course sane people always

thought the aim of marriage was the procreation of children to the

glory of God or according to the plan of Nature; but whether they

counted such children as God's reward for service or Nature's premium

on sanity, they always left the reward to God or the premium to

Nature, as a less definable thing. The only person (and this is the

point) towards whom one could have precise duties was the partner in

the process. Directly considering the partner's claims was the nearest

one could get to indirectly considering the claims of posterity. If

the women of the harem sang praises of the hero as the Moslem mounted

his horse, it was because this was the due of a man; if the Christian

knight helped his wife off her horse, it was because this was the due

of a woman. Definite and detailed dues of this kind they did not

predicate of the babe unborn; regarding him in that agnostic and

opportunist light in which Mr. Browdie regarded the hypothetical child

of Miss Squeers. Thinking these sex relations healthy, they naturally

hoped they would produce healthy children; but that was all. The

Moslem woman doubtless expected Allah to send beautiful sons to an

obedient wife; but she would not have allowed any direct vision of

such sons to alter the obedience itself. She would not have said, "I

will now be a disobedient wife; as the learned leech informs me that

great prophets are often the children of disobedient wives." The

knight doubtless hoped that the saints would help him to strong

children, if he did all the duties of his station, one of which might

be helping his wife off her horse; but he would not have refrained

from doing this because he had read in a book that a course of falling

off horses often resulted in the birth of a genius. Both Moslem and

Christian would have thought such speculations not only impious but

utterly unpractical. I quite agree with them; but that is not the

point here.

The point here is that a new school believes Eugenics _against_

Ethics. And it is proved by one familiar fact: that the heroisms of

history are actually the crimes of Eugenics. The Eugenists' books and

articles are full of suggestions that non-eugenic unions should and

may come to be regarded as we regard sins; that we should really feel

that marrying an invalid is a kind of cruelty to children. But history

is full of the praises of people who have held sacred such ties to

invalids; of cases like those of Colonel Hutchinson and Sir William

Temple, who remained faithful to betrothals when beauty and health had

been apparently blasted. And though the illnesses of Dorothy Osborne

and Mrs. Hutchinson may not fall under the Eugenic speculations (I do

not know), it is obvious that they might have done so; and certainly

it would not have made any difference to men's moral opinion of the

act. I do not discuss here which morality I favour; but I insist that

they are opposite. The Eugenist really sets up as saints the very men

whom hundreds of families have called sneaks. To be consistent, they

ought to put up statues to the men who deserted their loves because of

bodily misfortune; with inscriptions celebrating the good Eugenist

who, on his fiancee falling off a bicycle, nobly refused to marry her;

or to the young hero who, on hearing of an uncle with erysipelas,

magnanimously broke his word. What is perfectly plain is this: that

mankind have hitherto held the bond between man and woman so sacred,

and the effect of it on the children so incalculable, that they have

always admired the maintenance of honour more than the maintenance of

safety. Doubtless they thought that even the children might be none

the worse for not being the children of cowards and shirkers; but this

was not the first thought, the first commandment. Briefly, we may say

that while many moral systems have set restraints on sex almost as

severe as any Eugenist could set, they have almost always had the

character of securing the fidelity of the two sexes to each other, and

leaving the rest to God. To introduce an ethic which makes that

fidelity or infidelity vary with some calculation about heredity is

that rarest of all things, a revolution that has not happened before.

It is only right to say here, though the matter should only be touched

on, that many Eugenists would contradict this, in so far as to claim

that there was a consciously Eugenic reason for the horror of those

unions which begin with the celebrated denial to man of the privilege

of marrying his grandmother. Dr. S.R. Steinmetz, with that creepy

simplicity of mind with which the Eugenists chill the blood, remarks

that "we do not yet know quite certainly" what were "the motives for

the horror of" that horrible thing which is the agony of Oedipus. With

entirely amiable intention, I ask Dr. S.R. Steinmetz to speak for

himself. I know the motives for regarding a mother or sister as

separate from other women; nor have I reached them by any curious

researches. I found them where I found an analogous aversion to eating

a baby for breakfast. I found them in a rooted detestation in the

human soul to liking a thing in one way, when you already like it in

another quite incompatible way. Now it is perfectly true that this

aversion may have acted eugenically; and so had a certain ultimate

confirmation and basis in the laws of procreation. But there really

cannot be any Eugenist quite so dull as not to see that this is not a

defence of Eugenics but a direct denial of Eugenics. If something

which has been discovered at last by the lamp of learning is something

which has been acted on from the first by the light of nature, this

(so far as it goes) is plainly not an argument for pestering people,

but an argument for letting them alone. If men did not marry their

grandmothers when it was, for all they knew, a most hygienic habit; if

we know now that they instinctly avoided scientific peril; that, so

far as it goes, is a point in favour of letting people marry anyone

they like. It is simply the statement that sexual selection, or what

Christians call falling in love, is a part of man which in the rough

and in the long run can be trusted. And that is the destruction of the

whole of this science at a blow.

The second part of the definition, the persuasive or coercive methods

to be employed, I shall deal with more fully in the second part of

this book. But some such summary as the following may here be useful.

Far into the unfathomable past of our race we find the assumption

that the founding of a family is the personal adventure of a free man.

Before slavery sank slowly out of sight under the new climate of

Christianity, it may or may not be true that slaves were in some sense

bred like cattle, valued as a promising stock for labour. If it was so

it was so in a much looser and vaguer sense than the breeding of the

Eugenists; and such modern philosophers read into the old paganism a

fantastic pride and cruelty which are wholly modern. It may be,

however, that pagan slaves had some shadow of the blessings of the

Eugenist's care. It is quite certain that the pagan freemen would have

killed the first man that suggested it. I mean suggested it seriously;

for Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in

Greek. Among free men, the law, more often the creed, most commonly of

all the custom, have laid all sorts of restrictions on sex for this

reason or that. But law and creed and custom have never concentrated

heavily except upon fixing and keeping the family when once it had

been made. The act of founding the family, I repeat, was an individual

adventure outside the frontiers of the State. Our first forgotten

ancestors left this tradition behind them; and our own latest fathers

and mothers a few years ago would have thought us lunatics to be

discussing it. The shortest general definition of Eugenics on its

practical side is that it does, in a more or less degree, propose to

control some families at least as if they were families of pagan

slaves. I shall discuss later the question of the people to whom this

pressure may be applied; and the much more puzzling question of what

people will apply it. But it is to be applied at the very least by

somebody to somebody, and that on certain calculations about breeding

which are affirmed to be demonstrable. So much for the subject itself.

I say that this thing exists. I define it as closely as matters

involving moral evidence can be defined; I call it Eugenics. If after

that anyone chooses to say that Eugenics is not the Greek for this--I

am content to answer that "chivalrous" is not the French for "horsy";

and that such controversial games are more horsy than chivalrous.

CHAPTER II

THE FIRST OBSTACLES

Now before I set about arguing these things, there is a cloud of

skirmishers, of harmless and confused modern sceptics, who ought to be

cleared off or calmed down before we come to debate with the real

doctors of the heresy. If I sum up my statement thus: "Eugenics, as

discussed, evidently means the control of some men over the marriage

and unmarriage of others; and probably means the control of the few

over the marriage and unmarriage of the many," I shall first of all

receive the sort of answers that float like skim on the surface of

teacups and talk. I may very roughly and rapidly divide these

preliminary objectors into five sects; whom I will call the

Euphemists, the Casuists, the Autocrats, the Precedenters, and the

Endeavourers. When we have answered the immediate protestation of all

these good, shouting, short-sighted people, we can begin to do justice

to those intelligences that are really behind the idea.

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle

them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of

translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the

same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of

the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of

longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate

and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they

will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles.

Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet

the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them

"It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once

useful distinction between the anthropoid _homo_ and the other

animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be

modified also even in regard to the important question of the

extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of

murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a

simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is

quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing. Now, if

anyone thinks these two instances extravagant, I will refer to two

actual cases from the Eugenic discussions. When Sir Oliver Lodge spoke

of the methods "of the stud-farm" many Eugenists exclaimed against the

crudity of the suggestion. Yet long before that one of the ablest

champions in the other interest had written "What nonsense this

education is! Who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound?" Which

most certainly either means nothing, or the human stud-farm. Or again,

when I spoke of people "being married forcibly by the police," another

distinguished Eugenist almost achieved high spirits in his hearty

assurance that no such thing had ever come into their heads. Yet a few

days after I saw a Eugenist pronouncement, to the effect that the

State ought to extend its powers in this area. The State can only be

that corporation which men permit to employ compulsion; and this area

can only be the area of sexual selection. I mean somewhat more than an

idle jest when I say that the policeman will generally be found in

that area. But I willingly admit that the policeman who looks after

weddings will be like the policeman who looks after wedding-presents.

He will be in plain clothes. I do not mean that a man in blue with a

helmet will drag the bride and bridegroom to the altar. I do mean that

nobody that man in blue is told to arrest will even dare to come near

the church. Sir Oliver did not mean that men would be tied up in

stables and scrubbed down by grooms. He meant that they would undergo

a less of liberty which to men is even more infamous. He meant that

the only formula important to Eugenists would be "by Smith out of

Jones." Such a formula is one of the shortest in the world; and is

certainly the shortest way with the Euphemists.

The next sect of superficial objectors is even more irritating. I have

called them, for immediate purposes, the Casuists. Suppose I say "I

dislike this spread of Cannibalism in the West End restaurants."

Somebody is sure to say "Well, after all, Queen Eleanor when she

sucked blood from her husband's arm was a cannibal." What is one to

say to such people? One can only say "Confine yourself to sucking

poisoned blood from people's arms, and I permit you to call yourself

by the glorious title of Cannibal." In this sense people say of

Eugenics, "After all, whenever we discourage a schoolboy from marrying

a mad negress with a hump back, we are really Eugenists." Again one

can only answer, "Confine yourselves strictly to such schoolboys as

are naturally attracted to hump-backed negresses; and you may exult in

the title of Eugenist, all the more proudly because that distinction

will be rare." But surely anyone's common-sense must tell him that if

Eugenics dealt only with such extravagant cases, it would be called

common-sense--and not Eugenics. The human race has excluded such

absurdities for unknown ages; and has never yet called it Eugenics.

You may call it flogging when you hit a choking gentleman on the back;

you may call it torture when a man unfreezes his fingers at the fire;

but if you talk like that a little longer you will cease to live among

living men. If nothing but this mad minimum of accident were involved,

there would be no such thing as a Eugenic Congress, and certainly no

such thing as this book.

I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the

Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good

they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who

give us generally to understand that every modern reform will "work"

all right, because they will be there to see. Where they will be, and

for how long, they do not explain very clearly. I do not mind their

looking forward to numberless lives in succession; for that is the

shadow of a human or divine hope. But even a theosophist does not

expect to be a vast number of people at once. And these people most

certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has

left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen.

If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, "Oh, I

would certainly insist on this"; or "I would never go so far as that";

as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever

done quite successfully--force men to forsake their sins. Of these it

is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any

more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a

dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you

have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not

be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put

into it.

Along with such idealists should go the strange people who seem to

think that you can consecrate and purify any campaign for ever by

repeating the names of the abstract virtues that its better advocates

had in mind. These people will say "So far from aiming at _slavery_,

the Eugenists are seeking _true_ liberty; liberty from disease and

degeneracy, etc." Or they will say "We can assure Mr. Chesterton that

the Eugenists have _no_ intention of segregating the harmless; justice

and mercy are the very motto of----" etc. To this kind of thing

perhaps the shortest answer is this. Many of those who speak thus are

agnostic or generally unsympathetic to official religion. Suppose one

of them said "The Church of England is full of hypocrisy." What would

he think of me if I answered, "I assure you that hypocrisy is

condemned by every form of Christianity; and is particularly

repudiated in the Prayer Book"? Suppose he said that the Church of

Rome had been guilty of great cruelties. What would he think of me if

I answered, "The Church is expressly bound to meekness and charity;

and therefore cannot be cruel"? This kind of people need not detain us

long. Then there are others whom I may call the Precedenters; who

flourish particularly in Parliament. They are best represented by the

solemn official who said the other day that he could not understand

the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill, as it only extended the

principles of the old Lunacy Laws. To which again one can only answer

"Quite so. It only extends the principles of the Lunacy Laws to

persons without a trace of lunacy." This lucid politician finds an old

law, let us say, about keeping lepers in quarantine. He simply alters

the word "lepers" to "long-nosed people," and says blandly that the

principle is the same.

Perhaps the weakest of all are those helpless persons whom I have

called the Endeavourers. The prize specimen of them was another M.P.

who defended the same Bill as "an honest attempt" to deal with a great

evil: as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow

citizens as a kind of chemical experiment; in a state of reverent

agnosticism about what would come of it. But with this fatuous notion

that one can deliberately establish the Inquisition or the Terror, and

then faintly trust the larger hope, I shall have to deal more

seriously in a subsequent chapter. It is enough to say here that the

best thing the honest Endeavourer could do would be to make an honest

attempt to know what he is doing. And not to do anything else until he

has found out. Lastly, there is a class of controversialists so

hopeless and futile that I have really failed to find a name for them.

But whenever anyone attempts to argue rationally for or against any

existent and recognisable _thing_, such as the Eugenic class of

legislation, there are always people who begin to chop hay about

Socialism and Individualism; and say "_You_ object to all State

interference; _I_ am in favour of State interference. _You_ are an

Individualist; _I_, on the other hand," etc. To which I can only

answer, with heart-broken patience, that I am not an Individualist,

but a poor fallen but baptised journalist who is trying to write a

book about Eugenists, several of whom he has met; whereas he never met

an Individualist, and is by no means certain he would recognise him if

he did. In short, I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the

State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it

would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be

turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless

botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative

advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the

left.

And for the rest, there is undoubtedly an enormous mass of sensible,

rather thoughtless people, whose rooted sentiment it is that any deep

change in our society must be in some way infinitely distant. They

cannot believe that men in hats and coats like themselves can be

preparing a revolution; all their Victorian philosophy has taught

them that such transformations are always slow. Therefore, when I

speak of Eugenic legislation, or the coming of the Eugenic State,

they think of it as something like _The Time Machine_ or _Looking

Backward_: a thing that, good or bad, will have to fit itself to

their great-great-great-grandchild, who may be very different and may

like it; and who in any case is rather a distant relative. To all

this I have, to begin with, a very short and simple answer. The

Eugenic State has begun. The first of the Eugenic Laws has already

been adopted by the Government of this country; and passed with the

applause of both parties through the dominant House of Parliament.

This first Eugenic Law clears the ground and may be said to proclaim

negative Eugenics; but it cannot be defended, and nobody has

attempted to defend it, except on the Eugenic theory. I will call it

the Feeble-Minded Bill both for brevity and because the description

is strictly accurate. It is, quite simply and literally, a Bill for

incarcerating as madmen those whom no doctor will consent to call

mad. It is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them

weak-minded. Since there is scarcely any human being to whom this

term has not been conversationally applied by his own friends and

relatives on some occasion or other (unless his friends and relatives

have been lamentably lacking in spirit), it can be clearly seen that

this law, like the early Christian Church (to which, however, it

presents points of dissimilarity), is a net drawing in of all kinds.

It must not be supposed that we have a stricter definition

incorporated in the Bill. Indeed, the first definition of

"feeble-minded" in the Bill was much looser and vaguer than the

phrase "feeble-minded" itself. It is a piece of yawning idiocy about

"persons who though capable of earning their living under favourable

circumstances" (as if anyone could earn his living if circumstances

were directly unfavourable to his doing so), are nevertheless

"incapable of managing their affairs with proper prudence"; which is

exactly what all the world and his wife are saying about their

neighbours all over this planet. But as an incapacity for any kind of

thought is now regarded as statesmanship, there is nothing so very

novel about such slovenly drafting. What is novel and what is vital

is this: that the _defence_ of this crazy Coercion Act is a Eugenic

defence. It is not only openly said, it is eagerly urged, that the

aim of the measure is to prevent any person whom these propagandists

do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children.

Every tramp who is sulky, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who

is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as

were designed for homicidal maniacs. That is the situation; and that

is the point. England has forgotten the Feudal State; it is in the

last anarchy of the Industrial State; there is much in Mr. Belloc's

theory that it is approaching the Servile State; it cannot at present

get at the Distributive State; it has almost certainly missed the

Socialist State. But we are already under the Eugenist State; and

nothing remains to us but rebellion.

CHAPTER III

THE ANARCHY FROM ABOVE

A silent anarchy is eating out our society. I must pause upon the

expression; because the true nature of anarchy is mostly

misapprehended. It is not in the least necessary that anarchy should

be violent; nor is it necessary that it should come from below. A

government may grow anarchic as much as a people. The more sentimental

sort of Tory uses the word anarchy as a mere term of abuse for

rebellion; but he misses a most important intellectual distinction.

Rebellion may be wrong and disastrous; but even when rebellion is

wrong, it is never anarchy. When it is not self-defence, it is

usurpation. It aims at setting up a new rule in place of the old rule.

And while it cannot be anarchic in essence (because it has an aim), it

certainly cannot be anarchic in method; for men must be organised when

they fight; and the discipline in a rebel army has to be as good as

the discipline in the royal army. This deep principle of distinction

must be clearly kept in mind. Take for the sake of symbolism those two

great spiritual stories which, whether we count them myths or

mysteries, have so long been the two hinges of all European morals.

The Christian who is inclined to sympathise generally with

constituted authority will think of rebellion under the image of

Satan, the rebel against God. But Satan, though a traitor, was not an

anarchist. He claimed the crown of the cosmos; and had he prevailed,

would have expected his rebel angels to give up rebelling. On the

other hand, the Christian whose sympathies are more generally with

just self-defence among the oppressed will think rather of Christ

Himself defying the High Priests and scourging the rich traders. But

whether or no Christ was (as some say) a Socialist, He most certainly

was not an Anarchist. Christ, like Satan, claimed the throne. He set

up a new authority against an old authority; but He set it up with

positive commandments and a comprehensible scheme. In this light all

mediaeval people--indeed, all people until a little while ago--would

have judged questions involving revolt. John Ball would have offered

to pull down the government because it was a bad government, not

because it was a government. Richard II. would have blamed Bolingbroke

not as a disturber of the peace, but as a usurper. Anarchy, then, in

the useful sense of the word, is a thing utterly distinct from any

rebellion, right or wrong. It is not necessarily angry; it is not, in

its first stages, at least, even necessarily painful. And, as I said

before, it is often entirely silent.

Anarchy is that condition of mind or methods in which you cannot stop

yourself. It is the loss of that self-control which can return to the

normal. It is not anarchy because men are permitted to begin uproar,

extravagance, experiment, peril. It is anarchy when people cannot

_end_ these things. It is not anarchy in the home if the whole family

sits up all night on New Year's Eve. It is anarchy in the home if

members of the family sit up later and later for months afterwards. It

was not anarchy in the Roman villa when, during the Saturnalia, the

slaves turned masters or the masters slaves. It was (from the

slave-owners' point of view) anarchy if, after the Saturnalia, the

slaves continued to behave in a Saturnalian manner; but it is

historically evident that they did not. It is not anarchy to have a

picnic; but it is anarchy to lose all memory of mealtimes. It would, I

think, be anarchy if (as is the disgusting suggestion of some) we all

took what we liked off the sideboard. That is the way swine would eat

if swine had sideboards; they have no immovable feasts; they are

uncommonly progressive, are swine. It is this inability to return

within rational limits after a legitimate extravagance that is the

really dangerous disorder. The modern world is like Niagara. It is

magnificent, but it is not strong. It is as weak as water--like

Niagara. The objection to a cataract is not that it is deafening or

dangerous or even destructive; it is that it cannot stop. Now it is

plain that this sort of chaos can possess the powers that rule a

society as easily as the society so ruled. And in modern England it is

the powers that rule who are chiefly possessed by it--who are truly

possessed by devils. The phrase, in its sound old psychological sense,

is not too strong. The State has suddenly and quietly gone mad. It is

talking nonsense; and it can't stop.

Now it is perfectly plain that government ought to have, and must

have, the same sort of right to use exceptional methods occasionally

that the private householder has to have a picnic or to sit up all

night on New Year's Eve. The State, like the householder, is sane if

it can treat such exceptions as exceptions. Such desperate remedies

may not even be right; but such remedies are endurable as long as they

are admittedly desperate. Such cases, of course, are the communism of

food in a besieged city; the official disavowal of an arrested spy;

the subjection of a patch of civil life to martial law; the cutting of

communication in a plague; or that deepest degradation of the

commonwealth, the use of national soldiers not against foreign

soldiers, but against their own brethren in revolt. Of these

exceptions some are right and some wrong; but all are right in so far

as they are taken as exceptions. The modern world is insane, not so

much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the

normal.

We see this in the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment;

often the very reformers who admit that prison is bad for people

propose to reform them by a little more of it. We see it in panic

legislation like that after the White Slave scare, when the torture of

flogging was revived for all sorts of ill defined and vague and

variegated types of men. Our fathers were never so mad, even when they

were torturers. They stretched the man out on the rack. They did not

stretch the rack out, as we are doing. When men went witch-burning

they may have seen witches everywhere--because their minds were fixed

on witchcraft. But they did not see things to burn everywhere, because

their minds were unfixed. While tying some very unpopular witch to the

stake, with the firm conviction that she was a spiritual tyranny and

pestilence, they did not say to each other, "A little burning is what

my Aunt Susan wants, to cure her of back-biting," or "Some of these

faggots would do your Cousin James good, and teach him to play with

poor girls' affections."

Now the name of all this is Anarchy. It not only does not know what it

wants, but it does not even know what it hates. It multiplies

excessively in the more American sort of English newspapers. When this

new sort of New Englander burns a witch the whole prairie catches

fire. These people have not the decision and detachment of the

doctrinal ages. They cannot do a monstrous action and still see it is

monstrous. Wherever they make a stride they make a rut. They cannot

stop their own thoughts, though their thoughts are pouring into the

pit.

A final instance, which can be sketched much more briefly, can be

found in this general fact: that the definition of almost every crime

has become more and more indefinite, and spreads like a flattening and

thinning cloud over larger and larger landscapes. Cruelty to children,

one would have thought, was a thing about as unmistakable, unusual

and appalling as parricide. In its application it has come to cover

almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household. The only

distinction is, of course, that these negligences are punished in the

poor, who generally can't help them, and not in the rich, who

generally can. But that is not the point I am arguing just now. The

point here is that a crime we all instinctively connect with Herod on

the bloody night of Innocents has come precious near being

attributable to Mary and Joseph when they lost their child in the

Temple. In the light of a fairly recent case (the confessedly kind

mother who was lately jailed because her confessedly healthy children

had no water to wash in) no one, I think, will call this an

illegitimate literary exaggeration. Now this is exactly as if all the

horror and heavy punishment, attached in the simplest tribes to

parricide, could now be used against any son who had done any act that

could colourably be supposed to have worried his father, and so

affected his health. Few of us would be safe.

Another case out of hundreds is the loose extension of the idea of

libel. Libel cases bear no more trace of the old and just anger

against the man who bore false witness against his neighbour than

"cruelty" cases do of the old and just horror of the parents that

hated their own flesh. A libel case has become one of the sports of

the less athletic rich--a variation on _baccarat_, a game of chance. A

music-hall actress got damages for a song that was called "vulgar,"

which is as if I could fine or imprison my neighbour for calling my

handwriting "rococo." A politician got huge damages because he was

said to have spoken to children about Tariff Reform; as if that

seductive topic would corrupt their virtue, like an indecent story.

Sometimes libel is defined as anything calculated to hurt a man in his

business; in which case any new tradesman calling himself a grocer

slanders the grocer opposite. All this, I say, is Anarchy; for it is

clear that its exponents possess no power of distinction, or sense of

proportion, by which they can draw the line between calling a woman a

popular singer and calling her a bad lot; or between charging a man

with leading infants to Protection and leading them to sin and shame.

But the vital point to which to return is this. That it is not

necessarily, nor even specially, an anarchy in the populace. It is an

anarchy in the organ of government. It is the magistrates--voices of

the governing class--who cannot distinguish between cruelty and

carelessness. It is the judges (and their very submissive special

juries) who cannot see the difference between opinion and slander. And

it is the highly placed and highly paid experts who have brought in

the first Eugenic Law, the Feeble-Minded Bill--thus showing that they

can see no difference between a mad and a sane man.

That, to begin with, is the historic atmosphere in which this thing

was born. It is a peculiar atmosphere, and luckily not likely to last.

Real progress bears the same relation to it that a happy girl laughing

bears to an hysterical girl who cannot stop laughing. But I have

described this atmosphere first because it is the only atmosphere in

which such a thing as the Eugenist legislation could be proposed among

men. All other ages would have called it to some kind of logical

account, however academic or narrow. The lowest sophist in the Greek

schools would remember enough of Socrates to force the Eugenist to

tell him (at least) whether Midias was segregated because he was

curable or because he was incurable. The meanest Thomist of the

mediaeval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot

discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man. The most owlish

Calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the

Eugenist to reconcile such Bible texts as derided fools with the other

Bible texts that praised them. The dullest shopkeeper in Paris in 1790

would have asked what were the Rights of Man, if they did not include

the rights of the lover, the husband, and the father. It is only in

our own London Particular (as Mr. Guppy said of the fog) that small

figures can loom so large in the vapour, and even mingle with quite

different figures, and have the appearance of a mob. But, above all, I

have dwelt on the telescopic quality in these twilight avenues,

because unless the reader realises how elastic and unlimited they are,

he simply will not believe in the abominations we have to combat.

One of those wise old fairy tales, that come from nowhere and flourish

everywhere, tells how a man came to own a small magic machine like a

coffee-mill, which would grind anything he wanted when he said one

word and stop when he said another. After performing marvels (which I

wish my conscience would let me put into this book for padding) the

mill was merely asked to grind a few grains of salt at an officers'

mess on board ship; for salt is the type everywhere of small luxury

and exaggeration, and sailors' tales should be taken with a grain of

it. The man remembered the word that started the salt mill, and then,

touching the word that stopped it, suddenly remembered that he forgot.

The tall ship sank, laden and sparkling to the topmasts with salt like

Arctic snows; but the mad mill was still grinding at the ocean bottom,

where all the men lay drowned. And that (so says this fairy tale) is

why the great waters about our world have a bitter taste. For the

fairy tales knew what the modern mystics don't--that one should not

let loose either the supernatural or the natural.

CHAPTER IV

THE LUNATIC AND THE LAW

The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do

not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be

right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill

a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man. If the hangman, having

got his hand in, proceeded to hang friends and relatives to his taste

and fancy, he would (intellectually) unhang the first man, though the

first man might not think so. Or thus again, if you say an insane man

is irresponsible, you imply that a sane man is responsible. He is

responsible for the insane man. And the attempt of the Eugenists and

other fatalists to treat all men as irresponsible is the largest and

flattest folly in philosophy. The Eugenist has to treat everybody,

including himself, as an exception to a rule that isn't there.

The Eugenists, as a first move, have extended the frontiers of the

lunatic asylum: let us take this as our definite starting point, and

ask ourselves what lunacy is, and what is its fundamental relation to

human society. Now that raw juvenile scepticism that clogs all thought

with catchwords may often be heard to remark that the mad are only the

minority, the sane only the majority. There is a neat exactitude

about such people's nonsense; they seem to miss the point by magic.

The mad are not a minority because they are not a corporate body; and

that is what their madness means. The sane are not a majority; they

are mankind. And mankind (as its name would seem to imply) is a

_kind_, not a degree. In so far as the lunatic differs, he differs

from all minorities and majorities in kind. The madman who thinks he

is a knife cannot go into partnership with the other who thinks he is

a fork. There is no trysting place outside reason; there is no inn on

those wild roads that are beyond the world.

The madman is not he that defies the world. The saint, the criminal,

the martyr, the cynic, the nihilist may all defy the world quite

sanely. And even if such fanatics would destroy the world, the world

owes them a strictly fair trial according to proof and public law. But

the madman is not the man who defies the world; he is the man who

_denies_ it. Suppose we are all standing round a field and looking at

a tree in the middle of it. It is perfectly true that we all see it

(as the decadents say) in infinitely different aspects: that is not

the point; the point is that we all say it is a tree. Suppose, if you

will, that we are all poets, which seems improbable; so that each of

us could turn his aspect into a vivid image distinct from a tree.

Suppose one says it looks like a green cloud and another like a green

fountain, and a third like a green dragon and the fourth like a green

cheese. The fact remains: that they all say it _looks_ like these

things. It is a tree. Nor are any of the poets in the least mad

because of any opinions they may form, however frenzied, about the

functions or future of the tree. A conservative poet may wish to clip

the tree; a revolutionary poet may wish to burn it. An optimist poet

may want to make it a Christmas tree and hang candles on it. A

pessimist poet may want to hang himself on it. None of these are mad,

because they are all talking about the same thing. But there is

another man who is talking horribly about something else. There is a

monstrous exception to mankind. Why he is so we know not; a new theory

says it is heredity; an older theory says it is devils. But in any

case, the spirit of it is the spirit that denies, the spirit that

really denies realities. This is the man who looks at the tree and

does not say it looks like a lion, but says that it _is_ a lamp-post.

I do not mean that all mad delusions are as concrete as this, though

some are more concrete. Believing your own body is glass is a more

daring denial of reality than believing a tree is a glass lamp at the

top of a pole. But all true delusions have in them this unalterable

assertion--that what is not is. The difference between us and the

maniac is not about how things look or how things ought to look, but

about what they self-evidently are. The lunatic does not say that he

ought to be King; Perkin Warbeck might say that. He says he is King.

The lunatic does not say he is as wise as Shakespeare; Bernard Shaw

might say that. The lunatic says he _is_ Shakespeare. The lunatic

does not say he is divine in the same sense as Christ; Mr. R.J.

Campbell would say that. The lunatic says he _is_ Christ. In all cases

the difference is a difference about what is there; not a difference

touching what should be done about it.

For this reason, and for this alone, the lunatic is outside public

law. This is the abysmal difference between him and the criminal. The

criminal admits the facts, and therefore permits us to appeal to the

facts. We can so arrange the facts around him that he may really

understand that agreement is in his own interests. We can say to him,

"Do not steal apples from this tree, or we will hang you on that

tree." But if the man really thinks one tree is a lamp-post and the

other tree a Trafalgar Square fountain, we simply cannot treat with

him at all. It is obviously useless to say, "Do not steal apples from

this lamp-post, or I will hang you on that fountain." If a man denies

the facts, there is no answer but to lock him up. He cannot speak our

language: not that varying verbal language which often misses fire

even with us, but that enormous alphabet of sun and moon and green

grass and blue sky in which alone we meet, and by which alone we can

signal to each other. That unique man of genius, George Macdonald,

described in one of his weird stories two systems of space

co-incident; so that where I knew there was a piano standing in a

drawing-room you knew there was a rose-bush growing in a garden.

Something of this sort is in small or great affairs the matter with

the madman. He cannot have a vote, because he is the citizen of

another country. He is a foreigner. Nay, he is an invader and an

enemy; for the city he lives in has been super-imposed on ours.

Now these two things are primarily to be noted in his case. First,

that we can only condemn him to a _general_ doom, because we only know

his _general_ nature. All criminals, who do particular things for

particular reasons (things and reasons which, however criminal, are

always comprehensible), have been more and more tried for such

separate actions under separate and suitable laws ever since Europe

began to become a civilisation--and until the rare and recent

re-incursions of barbarism in such things as the Indeterminate

Sentence. Of that I shall speak later; it is enough for this argument

to point out the plain facts. It is the plain fact that every savage,

every sultan, every outlawed baron, every brigand-chief has always

used this instrument of the Indeterminate Sentence, which has been

recently offered us as something highly scientific and humane. All

these people, in short, being barbarians, have always kept their

captives captive until they (the barbarians) chose to think the

captives were in a fit frame of mind to come out. It is also the plain

fact that all that has been called civilisation or progress, justice

or liberty, for nearly three thousand years, has had the general

direction of treating even the captive as a free man, in so far as

some clear case of some defined crime had to be shown against him.

All law has meant allowing the criminal, within some limits or other,

to argue with the law: as Job was allowed, or rather challenged, to

argue with God. But the criminal is, among civilised men, tried by one

law for one crime for a perfectly simple reason: that the motive of

the crime, like the meaning of the law, is conceivable to the common

intelligence. A man is punished specially as a burglar, and not

generally as a bad man, because a man may be a burglar and in many

other respects not be a bad man. The act of burglary is punishable

because it is intelligible. But when acts are unintelligible, we can

only refer them to a general untrustworthiness, and guard against them

by a general restraint. If a man breaks into a house to get a piece of

bread, we can appeal to his reason in various ways. We can hang him

for housebreaking; or again (as has occurred to some daring thinkers)

we can give him a piece of bread. But if he breaks in, let us say, to

steal the parings of other people's finger nails, then we are in a

difficulty: we cannot imagine what he is going to do with them, and

therefore cannot easily imagine what we are going to do with him. If a

villain comes in, in cloak and mask, and puts a little arsenic in the

soup, we can collar him and say to him distinctly, "You are guilty of

Murder; and I will now consult the code of tribal law, under which we

live, to see if this practice is not forbidden." But if a man in the

same cloak and mask is found at midnight putting a little soda-water

in the soup, what can we say? Our charge necessarily becomes a more

general one. We can only observe, with a moderation almost amounting

to weakness, "You seem to be the sort of person who will do this sort

of thing." And then we can lock him up. The principle of the

indeterminate sentence is the creation of the indeterminate mind. It

does apply to the incomprehensible creature, the lunatic. And it

applies to nobody else.

The second thing to be noted is this: that it is only by the unanimity

of sane men that we can condemn this man as utterly separate. If he

says a tree is a lamp-post he is mad; but only because all other men

say it is a tree. If some men thought it was a tree with a lamp on it,

and others thought it was a lamp-post wreathed with branches and

vegetation, then it would be a matter of opinion and degree; and he

would not be mad, but merely extreme. Certainly he would not be mad if

nobody but a botanist could see it was a tree. Certainly his enemies

might be madder than he, if nobody but a lamplighter could see it was

not a lamp-post. And similarly a man is not imbecile if only a

Eugenist thinks so. The question then raised would not be his sanity,

but the sanity of one botanist or one lamplighter or one Eugenist.

That which can condemn the abnormally foolish is not the abnormally

clever, which is obviously a matter in dispute. That which can condemn

the abnormally foolish is the normally foolish. It is when he begins

to say and do things that even stupid people do not say or do, that we

have a right to treat him as the exception and not the rule. It is

only because we none of us profess to be anything more than man that

we have authority to treat him as something less.

Now the first principle behind Eugenics becomes plain enough. It is

the proposal that somebody or something should criticise men with the

same superiority with which men criticise madmen. It might exercise

this right with great moderation; but I am not here talking about the

exercise, but about the right. Its _claim_ certainly is to bring all

human life under the Lunacy Laws.

Now this is the first weakness in the case of the Eugenists: that they

cannot define who is to control whom; they cannot say by what

authority they do these things. They cannot see the exception is

different from the rule--even when it is misrule, even when it is an

unruly rule. The sound sense in the old Lunacy Law was this: that you

cannot deny that a man is a citizen until you are practically prepared

to deny that he is a man. Men, and only men, can be the judges of

whether he is a man. But any private club of prigs can be judges of

whether he ought to be a citizen. When once we step down from that

tall and splintered peak of pure insanity we step on to a tableland

where one man is not so widely different from another. Outside the

exception, what we find is the average. And the practical, legal shape

of the quarrel is this: that unless the normal men have the right to

expel the abnormal, what particular sort of abnormal men have the

right to expel the normal men? If sanity is not good enough, what is

there that is saner than sanity?

Without any grip of the notion of a rule and an exception, the general

idea of judging people's heredity breaks down and is useless. For this

reason: that if everything is the result of a doubtful heredity, the

judgment itself is the result of a doubtful heredity also. Let it

judge not that it be not judged. Eugenists, strange to say, have

fathers and mothers like other people; and our opinion about their

fathers and mothers is worth exactly as much as their opinions about

ours. None of the parents were lunatics, and the rest is mere likes

and dislikes. Suppose Dr. Saleeby had gone up to Byron and said, "My

lord, I perceive you have a club-foot and inordinate passions: such

are the hereditary results of a profligate soldier marrying a

hot-tempered woman." The poet might logically reply (with

characteristic lucidity and impropriety), "Sir, I perceive you have a

confused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people's love

affairs. Such are the hereditary delusions bred by a Syrian doctor

marrying a Quaker lady from York." Suppose Dr. Karl Pearson had said

to Shelley, "From what I see of your temperament, you are running

great risks in forming a connection with the daughter of a fanatic and

eccentric like Godwin." Shelley would be employing the strict

rationalism of the older and stronger free thinkers, if he answered,

"From what I observe of your mind, you are rushing on destruction in

marrying the great-niece of an old corpse of a courtier and

dilettante like Samuel Rogers." It is only opinion for opinion. Nobody

can pretend that either Mary Godwin or Samuel Rogers was mad; and the

general view a man may hold about the healthiness of inheriting their

blood or type is simply the same sort of general view by which men do

marry for love or liking. There is no reason to suppose that Dr. Karl

Pearson is any better judge of a bridegroom than the bridegroom is of

a bride.

An objection may be anticipated here, but it is very easily answered.

It may be said that we do, in fact, call in medical specialists to

settle whether a man is mad; and that these specialists go by

technical and even secret tests that cannot be known to the mass of

men. It is obvious that this is true; it is equally obvious that it

does not affect our argument. When we ask the doctor whether our

grandfather is going mad, we still mean mad by our own common human

definition. We mean, is he going to be a certain sort of person whom

all men recognise when once he exists. That certain specialists can

detect the approach of him, before he exists, does not alter the fact

that it is of the practical and popular madman that we are talking,

and of him alone. The doctor merely sees a certain fact potentially in

the future, while we, with less information, can only see it in the

present; but his fact is our fact and everybody's fact, or we should

not bother about it at all. Here is no question of the doctor bringing

an entirely new sort of person under coercion, as in the

Feeble-Minded Bill. The doctor can say, "Tobacco is death to you,"

because the dislike of death can be taken for granted, being a highly

democratic institution; and it is the same with the dislike of the

indubitable exception called madness. The doctor can say, "Jones has

that twitch in the nerves, and he may burn down the house." But it is

not the medical detail we fear, but the moral upshot. We should say,

"Let him twitch, as long as he doesn't burn down the house." The

doctor may say, "He has that look in the eyes, and he may take the

hatchet and brain you all." But we do not object to the look in the

eyes as such; we object to consequences which, once come, we should

all call insane if there were no doctors in the world. We should say,

"Let him look how he likes; as long as he does not look for the

hatchet."

Now, that specialists are valuable for this particular and practical

purpose, of predicting the approach of enormous and admitted human

calamities, nobody but a fool would deny. But that does not bring us

one inch nearer to allowing them the right to define what is a

calamity; or to call things calamities which common sense does not

call calamities. We call in the doctor to save us from death; and,

death being admittedly an evil, he has the right to administer the

queerest and most recondite pill which he may think is a cure for all

such menaces of death. He has not the right to administer death, as

the cure for all human ills. And as he has no moral authority to

enforce a new conception of happiness, so he has no moral authority

to enforce a new conception of sanity. He may know I am going mad; for

madness is an isolated thing like leprosy; and I know nothing about

leprosy. But if he merely thinks my mind is weak, I may happen to

think the same of his. I often do.

In short, unless pilots are to be permitted to ram ships on to the

rocks and then say that heaven is the only true harbour; unless judges

are to be allowed to let murderers loose, and explain afterwards that

the murder had done good on the whole; unless soldiers are to be

allowed to lose battles and then point out that true glory is to be

found in the valley of humiliation; unless cashiers are to rob a bank

in order to give it an advertisement; or dentists to torture people to

give them a contrast to their comforts; unless we are prepared to let

loose all these private fancies against the public and accepted

meaning of life or safety or prosperity or pleasure--then it is as

plain as Punch's nose that no scientific man must be allowed to meddle

with the public definition of madness. We call him in to tell us where

it is or when it is. We could not do so, if we had not ourselves

settled what it is.

As I wish to confine myself in this chapter to the primary point of

the plain existence of sanity and insanity, I will not be led along

any of the attractive paths that open here. I shall endeavour to deal

with them in the next chapter. Here I confine myself to a sort of

summary. Suppose a man's throat has been cut, quite swiftly and

suddenly, with a table knife, at a small table where we sit. The

whole of civil law rests on the supposition that we are witnesses;

that we saw it; and if we do not know about it, who does? Now suppose

all the witnesses fall into a quarrel about degrees of eyesight.

Suppose one says he had brought his reading-glasses instead of his

usual glasses; and therefore did not see the man fall across the table

and cover it with blood. Suppose another says he could not be certain

it was blood, because a slight colour-blindness was hereditary in his

family. Suppose a third says he cannot swear to the uplifted knife,

because his oculist tells him he is astigmatic, and vertical lines do

not affect him as do horizontal lines. Suppose another says that dots

have often danced before his eyes in very fantastic combinations, many

of which were very like one gentleman cutting another gentleman's

throat at dinner. All these things refer to real experiences. There is

such a thing as myopia; there is such a thing as colour-blindness;

there is such a thing as astigmatism; there is such a thing as

shifting shapes swimming before the eyes. But what should we think of

a whole dinner party that could give nothing except these highly

scientific explanations when found in company with a corpse? I imagine

there are only two things we could think: either that they were all

drunk, or they were all murderers.

And yet there is an exception. If there were one man at table who was

admittedly _blind_, should we not give him the benefit of the doubt?

Should we not honestly feel that he was the exception that proved the

rule? The very fact that he could not have seen would remind us that

the other men must have seen. The very fact that he had no eyes must

remind us of eyes. A man can be blind; a man can be dead; a man can be

mad. But the comparison is necessarily weak, after all. For it is the

essence of madness to be unlike anything else in the world: which is

perhaps why so many men wiser than we have traced it to another.

Lastly, the literal maniac is different from all other persons in

dispute in this vital respect: that he is the only person whom we can,

with a final lucidity, declare that we do not want. He is almost

always miserable himself, and he always makes others miserable. But

this is not so with the mere invalid. The Eugenists would probably

answer all my examples by taking the case of marrying into a family

with consumption (or some such disease which they are fairly sure is

hereditary) and asking whether such cases at least are not clear cases

for a Eugenic intervention. Permit me to point out to them that they

once more make a confusion of thought. The sickness or soundness of a

consumptive may be a clear and calculable matter. The happiness or

unhappiness of a consumptive is quite another matter, and is not

calculable at all. What is the good of telling people that if they

marry for love, they may be punished by being the parents of Keats or

the parents of Stevenson? Keats died young; but he had more pleasure

in a minute than a Eugenist gets in a month. Stevenson had

lung-trouble; and it may, for all I know, have been perceptible to the

Eugenic eye even a generation before. But who would perform that

illegal operation: the stopping of Stevenson? Intercepting a letter

bursting with good news, confiscating a hamper full of presents and

prizes, pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this

is a faint approximation for the Eugenic inaction of the ancestors of

Stevenson. This, however, is not the essential point; with Stevenson

it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he

got. If he had died without writing a line, he would have had more

red-hot joy than is given to most men. Shall I say of him, to whom I

owe so much, let the day perish wherein he was born? Shall I pray that

the stars of the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among

the days of the year, because it shut not up the doors of his mother's

womb? I respectfully decline; like Job, I will put my hand upon my

mouth.

CHAPTER V

THE FLYING AUTHORITY

It happened one day that an atheist and a man were standing together

on a doorstep; and the atheist said, "It is raining." To which the man

replied, "What is raining?": which question was the beginning of a

violent quarrel and a lasting friendship. I will not touch upon any

heads of the dispute, which doubtless included Jupiter Pluvius, the

Neuter Gender, Pantheism, Noah's Ark, Mackintoshes, and the Passive

Mood; but I will record the one point upon which the two persons

emerged in some agreement. It was that there is such a thing as an

atheistic literary style; that materialism may appear in the mere

diction of a man, though he be speaking of clocks or cats or anything

quite remote from theology. The mark of the atheistic style is that it

instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead

things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging

war, which means willing it; they speak of the "outbreak of war," as

if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Thus those

Socialists that are atheist will not call their international

sympathy, sympathy; they will call it "solidarity," as if the poor men

of France and Germany were physically stuck together like dates in a

grocer's shop. The same Marxian Socialists are accused of cursing the

Capitalists inordinately; but the truth is that they let the

Capitalists off much too easily. For instead of saying that employers

pay less wages, which might pin the employers to some moral

responsibility, they insist on talking about the "rise and fall" of

wages; as if a vast silver sea of sixpences and shillings was always

going up and down automatically like the real sea at Margate. Thus

they will not speak of reform, but of development; and they spoil

their one honest and virile phrase, "the class war," by talking of it

as no one in his wits can talk of a war, predicting its finish and

final result as one calculates the coming of Christmas Day or the

taxes. Thus, lastly (as we shall see touching our special

subject-matter here) the atheist style in letters always avoids

talking of love or lust, which are things alive, and calls marriage or

concubinage "the relations of the sexes"; as if a man and a woman were

two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each

other, like a table and a chair.

Now the same anarchic mystery that clings round the phrase, "_il

pleut_," clings round the phrase, "_il faut_." In English it is

generally represented by the passive mood in grammar, and the

Eugenists and their like deal especially in it; they are as passive in

their statements as they are active in their experiments. Their

sentences always enter tail first, and have no subject, like animals

without heads. It is never "the doctor should cut off this leg" or

"the policeman should collar that man." It is always "Such limbs

should be amputated," or "Such men should be under restraint." Hamlet

said, "I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's

offal." The Eugenist would say, "The region kites should, if possible,

be fattened; and the offal of this slave is available for the dietetic

experiment." Lady Macbeth said, "Give me the daggers; I'll let his

bowels out." The Eugenist would say, "In such cases the bowels should,

etc." Do not blame me for the repulsiveness of the comparisons. I have

searched English literature for the most decent parallels to Eugenist

language.

The formless god that broods over the East is called "Om." The

formless god who has begun to brood over the West is called "On." But

here we must make a distinction. The impersonal word _on_ is French,

and the French have a right to use it, because they are a democracy.

And when a Frenchman says "one" he does not mean himself, but the

normal citizen. He does not mean merely "one," but one and all. "_On

n'a que sa parole_" does not mean "_Noblesse oblige_," or "I am the

Duke of Billingsgate and must keep my word." It means: "One has a

sense of honour as one has a backbone: every man, rich or poor, should

feel honourable"; and this, whether possible or no, is the purest

ambition of the republic. But when the Eugenists say, "Conditions

must be altered" or "Ancestry should be investigated," or what not, it

seems clear that they do not mean that the democracy must do it,

whatever else they may mean. They do not mean that any man not

evidently mad may be trusted with these tests and re-arrangements, as

the French democratic system trusts such a man with a vote or a farm

or the control of a family. That would mean that Jones and Brown,

being both ordinary men, would set about arranging each other's

marriages. And this state of affairs would seem a little elaborate,

and it might occur even to the Eugenic mind that if Jones and Brown

are quite capable of arranging each other's marriages, it is just

possible that they might be capable of arranging their own.

This dilemma, which applies in so simple a case, applies equally to

any wide and sweeping system of Eugenist voting; for though it is true

that the community can judge more dispassionately than a man can judge

in his own case, this particular question of the choice of a wife is

so full of disputable shades in every conceivable case, that it is

surely obvious that almost any democracy would simply vote the thing

out of the sphere of voting, as they would any proposal of police

interference in the choice of walking weather or of children's names.

I should not like to be the politician who should propose a particular

instance of Eugenics to be voted on by the French people. Democracy

dismissed, it is here hardly needful to consider the other old models.

Modern scientists will not say that George III., in his lucid

intervals, should settle who is mad; or that the aristocracy that

introduced gout shall supervise diet.

I hold it clear, therefore, if anything is clear about the business,

that the Eugenists do not merely mean that the mass of common men

should settle each other's marriages between them; the question

remains, therefore, whom they do instinctively trust when they say

that this or that ought to be done. What is this flying and evanescent

authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it? Who is the man who

is the lost subject that governs the Eugenist's verb? In a large

number of cases I think we can simply say that the individual Eugenist

means himself, and nobody else. Indeed one Eugenist, Mr. A.H. Huth,

actually had a sense of humour, and admitted this. He thinks a great

deal of good could be done with a surgical knife, if we would only

turn him loose with one. And this may be true. A great deal of good

could be done with a loaded revolver, in the hands of a judicious

student of human nature. But it is imperative that the Eugenist should

perceive that on that principle we can never get beyond a perfect

balance of different sympathies and antipathies. I mean that I should

differ from Dr. Saleeby or Dr. Karl Pearson not only in a vast

majority of individual cases, but in a vast majority of cases in which

they would be bound to admit that such a difference was natural and

reasonable. The chief victim of these famous doctors would be a yet

more famous doctor: that eminent though unpopular practitioner, Dr.

Fell.

To show that such rational and serious differences do exist, I will

take one instance from that Bill which proposed to protect families

and the public generally from the burden of feeble-minded persons.

Now, even if I could share the Eugenic contempt for human rights, even

if I could start gaily on the Eugenic campaign, I should not begin by

removing feeble-minded persons. I have known as many families in as

many classes as most men; and I cannot remember meeting any very

monstrous human suffering arising out of the presence of such

insufficient and negative types. There seem to be comparatively few of

them; and those few by no means the worst burdens upon domestic

happiness. I do not hear of them often; I do not hear of them doing

much more harm than good; and in the few cases I know well they are

not only regarded with human affection, but can be put to certain

limited forms of human use. Even if I were a Eugenist, then I should

not personally elect to waste my time locking up the feeble-minded.

The people I should lock up would be the strong-minded. I have known

hardly any cases of mere mental weakness making a family a failure; I

have known eight or nine cases of violent and exaggerated force of

character making a family a hell. If the strong-minded could be

segregated it would quite certainly be better for their friends and

families. And if there is really anything in heredity, it would be

better for posterity too. For the kind of egoist I mean is a madman

in a much more plausible sense than the mere harmless "deficient"; and

to hand on the horrors of his anarchic and insatiable temperament is a

much graver responsibility than to leave a mere inheritance of

childishness. I would not arrest such tyrants, because I think that

even moral tyranny in a few homes is better than a medical tyranny

turning the state into a madhouse. I would not segregate them, because

I respect a man's free-will and his front-door and his right to be

tried by his peers. But since free-will is believed by Eugenists no

more than by Calvinists, since front-doors are respected by Eugenists

no more than by house-breakers, and since the Habeas Corpus is about

as sacred to Eugenists as it would be to King John, why do not _they_

bring light and peace into so many human homes by removing a demoniac

from each of them? Why do not the promoters of the Feeble-Minded Bill

call at the many grand houses in town or country where such nightmares

notoriously are? Why do they not knock at the door and take the bad

squire away? Why do they not ring the bell and remove the dipsomaniac

prize-fighter? I do not know; and there is only one reason I can think

of, which must remain a matter of speculation. When I was at school,

the kind of boy who liked teasing half-wits was not the sort that

stood up to bullies.

That, however it may be, does not concern my argument. I mention the

case of the strong-minded variety of the monstrous merely to give one

out of the hundred cases of the instant divergence of individual

opinions the moment we begin to discuss who is fit or unfit to

propagate. If Dr. Saleeby and I were setting out on a segregating trip

together, we should separate at the very door; and if he had a

thousand doctors with him, they would all go different ways. Everyone

who has known as many kind and capable doctors as I have, knows that

the ablest and sanest of them have a tendency to possess some little

hobby or half-discovery of their own, as that oranges are bad for

children, or that trees are dangerous in gardens, or that many more

people ought to wear spectacles. It is asking too much of human nature

to expect them not to cherish such scraps of originality in a hard,

dull, and often heroic trade. But the inevitable result of it, as

exercised by the individual Saleebys, would be that each man would

have his favourite kind of idiot. Each doctor would be mad on his own

madman. One would have his eye on devotional curates; another would

wander about collecting obstreperous majors; a third would be the

terror of animal-loving spinsters, who would flee with all their cats

and dogs before him. Short of sheer literal anarchy, therefore, it

seems plain that the Eugenist must find some authority other than his

own implied personality. He must, once and for all, learn the lesson

which is hardest for him and me and for all our fallen race--the fact

that he is only himself.

We now pass from mere individual men who obviously cannot be trusted,

even if they are individual medical men, with such despotism over

their neighbours; and we come to consider whether the Eugenists have

at all clearly traced any more imaginable public authority, any

apparatus of great experts or great examinations to which such risks

of tyranny could be trusted. They are not very precise about this

either; indeed, the great difficulty I have throughout in considering

what are the Eugenist's proposals is that they do not seem to know

themselves. Some philosophic attitude which I cannot myself connect

with human reason seems to make them actually proud of the dimness of

their definitions and the uncompleteness of their plans. The Eugenic

optimism seems to partake generally of the nature of that dazzled and

confused confidence, so common in private theatricals, that it will be

all right on the night. They have all the ancient despotism, but none

of the ancient dogmatism. If they are ready to reproduce the secrecies

and cruelties of the Inquisition, at least we cannot accuse them of

offending us with any of that close and complicated thought, that arid

and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages; they have

discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a

sympathetic softening of the head. Nevertheless, there is one large,

though vague, idea of the Eugenists, which is an idea, and which we

reach when we reach this problem of a more general supervision.

It was best presented perhaps by the distinguished doctor who wrote

the article on these matters in that composite book which Mr. Wells

edited, and called "The Great State." He said the doctor should no

longer be a mere plasterer of paltry maladies, but should be, in his

own words, "the health adviser of the community." The same can be

expressed with even more point and simplicity in the proverb that

prevention is better than cure. Commenting on this, I said that it

amounted to treating all people who are well as if they were ill. This

the writer admitted to be true, only adding that everyone is ill. To

which I rejoin that if everyone is ill the health adviser is ill too,

and therefore cannot know how to cure that minimum of illness. This is

the fundamental fallacy in the whole business of preventive medicine.

Prevention is not better than cure. Cutting off a man's head is not

better than curing his headache; it is not even better than failing to

cure it. And it is the same if a man is in revolt, even a morbid

revolt. Taking the heart out of him by slavery is not better than

leaving the heart in him, even if you leave it a broken heart.

Prevention is not only not better than cure; prevention is even worse

than disease. Prevention means being an invalid for life, with the

extra exasperation of being quite well. I will ask God, but certainly

not man, to prevent me in all my doings. But the decisive and

discussable form of this is well summed up in that phrase about the

health adviser of society. I am sure that those who speak thus have

something in their minds larger and more illuminating than the other

two propositions we have considered. They do not mean that all

citizens should decide, which would mean merely the present vague and

dubious balance. They do not mean that all medical men should decide,

which would mean a much more unbalanced balance. They mean that a few

men might be found who had a consistent scheme and vision of a healthy

nation, as Napoleon had a consistent scheme and vision of an army. It

is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men's

marriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize and

segregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a few

great hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens, as

nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it is tyranny;

but tyranny is a workable thing. When we ask by what process such men

could be certainly chosen, we are back again on the old dilemma of

despotism, which means a man, or democracy which means men, or

aristocracy which means favouritism. But as a vision the thing is

plausible and even rational. It is rational, and it is wrong.

It is wrong, quite apart from the suggestion that an expert on health

cannot be chosen. It is wrong because an expert on health cannot

exist. An expert on disease can exist, for the very reason we have

already considered in the case of madness, because experts can only

arise out of exceptional things. A parallel with any of the other

learned professions will make the point plain. If I am prosecuted for

trespass, I will ask my solicitor which of the local lanes I am

forbidden to walk in. But if my solicitor, having gained my case, were

so elated that he insisted on settling what lanes I should walk in; if

he asked me to let him map out all my country walks, because he was

the perambulatory adviser of the community--then that solicitor would

solicit in vain. If he will insist on walking behind me through

woodland ways, pointing out with his walking-stick likely avenues and

attractive short-cuts, I shall turn on him with passion, saying: "Sir,

I pay you to know one particular puzzle in Latin and Norman-French,

which they call the law of England; and you do know the law of

England. I have never had any earthly reason to suppose that you know

England. If you did, you would leave a man alone when he was looking

at it." As are the limits of the lawyer's special knowledge about

walking, so are the limits of the doctor's. If I fall over the stump

of a tree and break my leg, as is likely enough, I shall say to the

lawyer, "Please go and fetch the doctor." I shall do it because the

doctor really has a larger knowledge of a narrower area. There are

only a certain number of ways in which a leg can be broken; I know

none of them, and he knows all of them. There is such a thing as being

a specialist in broken legs. There is no such thing as being a

specialist in legs. When unbroken, legs are a matter of taste. If the

doctor has really mended my leg, he may merit a colossal equestrian

statue on the top of an eternal tower of brass. But if the doctor has

really mended my leg he has no more rights over it. He must not come

and teach me how to walk; because he and I learnt that in the same

school, the nursery. And there is no more abstract likelihood of the

doctor walking more elegantly than I do than there is of the barber or

the bishop or the burglar walking more elegantly than I do. There

cannot be a general specialist; the specialist can have no kind of

authority, unless he has avowedly limited his range. There cannot be

such a thing as the health adviser of the community, because there

cannot be such a thing as one who specialises in the universe.

Thus when Dr. Saleeby says that a young man about to be married should

be obliged to produce his health-book as he does his bank-book, the

expression is neat; but it does not convey the real respects in which

the two things agree, and in which they differ. To begin with, of

course, there is a great deal too much of the bank-book for the sanity

of our commonwealth; and it is highly probable that the health-book,

as conducted in modern conditions, would rapidly become as timid, as

snobbish, and as sterile as the money side of marriage has become. In

the moral atmosphere of modernity the poor and the honest would

probably get as much the worst of it if we fought with health-books as

they do when we fight with bank-books. But that is a more general

matter; the real point is in the difference between the two. The

difference is in this vital fact: that a monied man generally thinks

about money, whereas a healthy man does not think about health. If

the strong young man cannot produce his health-book, it is for the

perfectly simple reason that he has not got one. He can mention some

extraordinary malady he has; but every man of honour is expected to do

that now, whatever may be the decision that follows on the knowledge.

Health is simply Nature, and no naturalist ought to have the impudence

to understand it. Health, one may say, is God; and no agnostic has any

right to claim His acquaintance. For God must mean, among other

things, that mystical and multitudinous balance of all things, by

which they are at least able to stand up straight and endure; and any

scientist who pretends to have exhausted this subject of ultimate

sanity, I will call the lowest of religious fanatics. I will allow him

to understand the madman, for the madman is an exception. But if he

says he understands the sane man, then he says he has the secret of

the Creator. For whenever you and I feel fully sane, we are quite

incapable of naming the elements that make up that mysterious

simplicity. We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can

conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by

which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like

precipices, He has hanged the world upon nothing.

We conclude, therefore, that unless Eugenic activity be restricted to

monstrous things like mania, there is no constituted or constitutable

authority that can really over-rule men in a matter in which they are

so largely on a level. In the matter of fundamental human rights,

nothing can be above Man, except God. An institution claiming to come

from God might have such authority; but this is the last claim the

Eugenists are likely to make. One caste or one profession seeking to

rule men in such matters is like a man's right eye claiming to rule

him, or his left leg to run away with him. It is madness. We now pass

on to consider whether there is really anything in the way of Eugenics

to be done, with such cheerfulness as we may possess after discovering

that there is nobody to do it.

CHAPTER VI

THE UNANSWERED CHALLENGE

Dr. Saleeby did me the honour of referring to me in one of his

addresses on this subject, and said that even I cannot produce any but

a feeble-minded child from a feeble-minded ancestry. To which I reply,

first of all, that he cannot produce a feeble-minded child. The whole

point of our contention is that this phrase conveys nothing fixed and

outside opinion. There is such a thing as mania, which has always been

segregated; there is such a thing as idiotcy, which has always been

segregated; but feeble-mindedness is a new phrase under which you

might segregate anybody. It is essential that this fundamental fallacy

in the use of statistics should be got somehow into the modern mind.

Such people must be made to see the point, which is surely plain

enough, that it is useless to have exact figures if they are exact

figures about an inexact phrase. If I say, "There are five fools in

Acton," it is surely quite clear that, though no mathematician can

make five the same as four or six, that will not stop you or anyone

else from finding a few more fools in Acton. Now weak-mindedness, like

folly, is a term divided from madness in this vital manner--that in

one sense it applies to all men, in another to most men, in another

to very many men, and so on. It is as if Dr. Saleeby were to say,

"Vanity, I find, is undoubtedly hereditary. Here is Mrs. Jones, who

was very sensitive about her sonnets being criticised, and I found her

little daughter in a new frock looking in the glass. The experiment is

conclusive, the demonstration is complete; there in the first

generation is the artistic temperament--that is vanity; and there in

the second generation is dress--and that is vanity." We should answer,

"My friend, all is vanity, vanity and vexation of spirit--especially

when one has to listen to logic of your favourite kind. Obviously all

human beings must value themselves; and obviously there is in all such

valuation an element of weakness, since it is not the valuation of

eternal justice. What is the use of your finding by experiment in some

people a thing we know by reason must be in all of them?"

Here it will be as well to pause a moment and avert one possible

misunderstanding. I do not mean that you and I cannot and do not

practically see and personally remark on this or that eccentric or

intermediate type, for which the word "feeble-minded" might be a very

convenient word, and might correspond to a genuine though indefinable

fact of experience. In the same way we might speak, and do speak, of

such and such a person being "mad with vanity" without wanting two

keepers to walk in and take the person off. But I ask the reader to

remember always that I am talking of words, not as they are used in

talk or novels, but as they will be used, and have been used, in

warrants and certificates, and Acts of Parliament. The distinction

between the two is perfectly clear and practical. The difference is

that a novelist or a talker can be trusted to try and hit the mark; it

is all to his glory that the cap should fit, that the type should be

recognised; that he should, in a literary sense, hang the right man.

But it is by no means always to the interests of governments or

officials to hang the right man. The fact that they often do stretch

words in order to cover cases is the whole foundation of having any

fixed laws or free institutions at all. My point is not that I have

never met anyone whom I should call feeble-minded, rather than mad or

imbecile. My point is that if I want to dispossess a nephew, oust a

rival, silence a blackmailer, or get rid of an importunate widow,

there is nothing in logic to prevent my calling them feeble-minded

too. And the vaguer the charge is the less they will be able to

disprove it.

One does not, as I have said, need to deny heredity in order to resist

such legislation, any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world

in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning. I admit there may be

such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness; I believe there is such

a thing as witchcraft. Believing that there are spirits, I am bound in

mere reason to suppose that there are probably evil spirits;

believing that there are evil spirits, I am bound in mere reason to

suppose that some men grow evil by dealing with them. All that is mere

rationalism; the superstition (that is the unreasoning repugnance and

terror) is in the person who admits there can be angels but denies

there can be devils. The superstition is in the person who admits

there can be devils but denies there can be diabolists. Yet I should

certainly resist any effort to search for witches, for a perfectly

simple reason, which is the key of the whole of this controversy. The

reason is that it is one thing to believe in witches, and quite

another to believe in witch-smellers. I have more respect for the old

witch-finders than for the Eugenists, who go about persecuting the

fool of the family; because the witch-finders, according to their own

conviction, ran a risk. Witches were not the feeble-minded, but the

strong-minded--the evil mesmerists, the rulers of the elements. Many a

raid on a witch, right or wrong, seemed to the villagers who did it a

righteous popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny, a papacy of

sin. Yet we know that the thing degenerated into a rabid and

despicable persecution of the feeble or the old. It ended by being a

war upon the weak. It ended by being what Eugenics begins by being.

When I said above that I believed in witches, but not in

witch-smellers, I stated my full position about that conception of

heredity, that half-formed philosophy of fears and omens; of curses

and weird recurrence and darkness and the doom of blood, which, as

preached to humanity to-day, is often more inhuman than witchcraft

itself. I do not deny that this dark element exists; I only affirm

that it is dark; or, in other words, that its most strenuous students

are evidently in the dark about it. I would no more trust Dr. Karl

Pearson on a heredity-hunt than on a heresy-hunt. I am perfectly ready

to give my reasons for thinking this; and I believe any well-balanced

person, if he reflects on them, will think as I do. There are two

senses in which a man may be said to know or not know a subject. I

know the subject of arithmetic, for instance; that is, I am not good

at it, but I know what it is. I am sufficiently familiar with its use

to see the absurdity of anyone who says, "So vulgar a fraction cannot

be mentioned before ladies," or "This unit is Unionist, I hope."

Considering myself for one moment as an arithmetician, I may say that

I know next to nothing about my subject: but I know my subject. I know

it in the street. There is the other kind of man, like Dr. Karl

Pearson, who undoubtedly knows a vast amount about his subject; who

undoubtedly lives in great forests of facts concerning kinship and

inheritance. But it is not, by any means, the same thing to have

searched the forests and to have recognised the frontiers. Indeed, the

two things generally belong to two very different types of mind. I

gravely doubt whether the Astronomer-Royal would write the best essay

on the relations between astronomy and astrology. I doubt whether the

President of the Geographical Society could give the best definition

and history of the words "geography" and "geology."

Now the students of heredity, especially, understand all of their

subject except their subject. They were, I suppose, bred and born in

that brier-patch, and have really explored it without coming to the

end of it. That is, they have studied everything but the question of

what they are studying. Now I do not propose to rely merely on myself

to tell them what they are studying. I propose, as will be seen in a

moment, to call the testimony of a great man who has himself studied

it. But to begin with, the domain of heredity (for those who see its

frontiers) is a sort of triangle, enclosed on its three sides by three

facts. The first is that heredity undoubtedly exists, or there would

be no such thing as a family likeness, and every marriage might

suddenly produce a small negro. The second is that even simple

heredity can never be simple; its complexity must be literally

unfathomable, for in that field fight unthinkable millions. But yet

again it never is simple heredity: for the instant anyone is, he

experiences. The third is that these innumerable ancient influences,

these instant inundations of experiences, come together according to a

combination that is unlike anything else on this earth. It is a

combination that does combine. It cannot be sorted out again, even on

the Day of Judgment. Two totally different people have become in the

sense most sacred, frightful, and unanswerable, one flesh. If a

golden-haired Scandinavian girl has married a very swarthy Jew, the

Scandinavian side of the family may say till they are blue in the face

that the baby has his mother's nose or his mother's eyes. They can

never be certain the black-haired Bedouin is not present in every

feature, in every inch. In the person of the baby he may have gently

pulled his wife's nose. In the person of the baby he may have partly

blacked his wife's eyes.

Those are the three first facts of heredity. That it exists; that it

is subtle and made of a million elements; that it is simple, and

cannot be unmade into those elements. To summarise: you know there is

wine in the soup. You do not know how many wines there are in the

soup, because you do not know how many wines there are in the world.

And you never will know, because all chemists, all cooks, and all

common-sense people tell you that the soup is of such a sort that it

can never be chemically analysed. That is a perfectly fair parallel to

the hereditary element in the human soul. There are many ways in which

one can feel that there is wine in the soup, as in suddenly tasting a

wine specially favoured; that corresponds to seeing suddenly flash on

a young face the image of some ancestor you have known. But even then

the taster cannot be certain he is not tasting one familiar wine among

many unfamiliar ones--or seeing one known ancestor among a million

unknown ancestors. Another way is to get drunk on the soup, which

corresponds to the case of those who say they are driven to sin and

death by hereditary doom. But even then the drunkard cannot be certain

it was the soup, any more than the traditional drunkard who is certain

it was the salmon.

Those are the facts about heredity which anyone can see. The upshot of

them is not only that a miss is as good as a mile, but a miss is as

good as a win. If the child has his parents' nose (or noses) that may

be heredity. But if he has not, that may be heredity too. And as we

need not take heredity lightly because two generations differ--so we

need not take heredity a scrap more seriously because two generations

are similar. The thing is there, in what cases we know not, in what

proportion we know not, and we cannot know.

Now it is just here that the decent difference of function between Dr.

Saleeby's trade and mine comes in. It is his business to study human

health and sickness as a whole, in a spirit of more or less

enlightened guesswork; and it is perfectly natural that he should

allow for heredity here, there, and everywhere, as a man climbing a

mountain or sailing a boat will allow for weather without even

explaining it to himself. An utterly different attitude is incumbent

on any conscientious man writing about what laws should be enforced or

about how commonwealths should be governed. And when we consider how

plain a fact is murder, and yet how hesitant and even hazy we all grow

about the guilt of a murderer, when we consider how simple an act is

stealing, and yet how hard it is to convict and punish those rich

commercial pirates who steal the most, when we consider how cruel and

clumsy the law can be even about things as old and plain as the Ten

Commandments--I simply cannot conceive any responsible person

proposing to legislate on our broken knowledge and bottomless

ignorance of heredity.

But though I have to consider this dull matter in its due logical

order, it appears to me that this part of the matter has been settled,

and settled in a most masterly way, by somebody who has infinitely

more right to speak on it than I have. Our press seems to have a

perfect genius for fitting people with caps that don't fit; and

affixing the wrong terms of eulogy and even the wrong terms of abuse.

And just as people will talk of Bernard Shaw as a naughty winking

Pierrot, when he is the last great Puritan and really believes in

respectability; just as (_si parva licet_ etc.) they will talk of my

own paradoxes, when I pass my life in preaching that the truisms are

true; so an enormous number of newspaper readers seem to have it fixed

firmly in their heads that Mr. H.G. Wells is a harsh and horrible

Eugenist in great goblin spectacles, who wants to put us all into

metallic microscopes and dissect us with metallic tools. As a matter

of fact, of course, Mr. Wells, so far from being too definite, is

generally not definite enough. He is an absolute wizard in the

appreciation of atmospheres and the opening of vistas; but his answers

are more agnostic than his questions. His books will do everything

except shut. And so far from being the sort of man who would stop a

man from propagating, he cannot even stop a full stop. He is not

Eugenic enough to prevent the black dot at the end of a sentence from

breeding a line of little dots.

But this is not the clear-cut blunder of which I spoke. The real

blunder is this. Mr. Wells deserves a tiara of crowns and a garland of

medals for all kinds of reasons. But if I were restricted, on grounds

of public economy, to giving Mr. Wells only one medal _ob cives

servatos_, I would give him a medal as the Eugenist who destroyed

Eugenics. For everyone spoke of him, rightly or wrongly, as a

Eugenist; and he certainly had, as I have not, the training and type

of culture required to consider the matter merely in a biological and

not in a generally moral sense. The result was that in that fine book,

"Mankind in the Making," where he inevitably came to grips with the

problem, he threw down to the Eugenists an intellectual challenge

which seems to me unanswerable, but which, at any rate, is unanswered.

I do not mean that no remote Eugenist wrote upon the subject; for it

is impossible to read all writings, especially Eugenist writings. I do

mean that the leading Eugenists write as if this challenge had never

been offered. The gauntlet lies unlifted on the ground.

Having given honour for the idea where it is due, I may be permitted

to summarise it myself for the sake of brevity. Mr. Wells' point was

this. That we cannot be certain about the inheritance of health,

because health is not a quality. It is not a thing like darkness in

the hair or length in the limbs. It is a relation, a balance. You have

a tall, strong man; but his very strength depends on his not being too

tall for his strength. You catch a healthy, full-blooded fellow; but

his very health depends on his being not too full of blood. A heart

that is strong for a dwarf will be weak for a giant; a nervous system

that would kill a man with a trace of a certain illness will sustain

him to ninety if he has no trace of that illness. Nay, the same

nervous system might kill him if he had an excess of some other

comparatively healthy thing. Seeing, therefore, that there are

apparently healthy people of all types, it is obvious that if you mate

two of them, you may even then produce a discord out of two

inconsistent harmonies. It is obvious that you can no more be certain

of a good offspring than you can be certain of a good tune if you play

two fine airs at once on the same piano. You can be even less certain

of it in the more delicate case of beauty, of which the Eugenists talk

a great deal. Marry two handsome people whose noses tend to the

aquiline, and their baby (for all you know) may be a goblin with a

nose like an enormous parrot's. Indeed, I actually know a case of this

kind. The Eugenist has to settle, not the result of fixing one steady

thing to a second steady thing; but what will happen when one toppling

and dizzy equilibrium crashes into another.

This is the interesting conclusion. It is on this degree of knowledge

that we are asked to abandon the universal morality of mankind. When

we have stopped the lover from marrying the unfortunate woman he

loves, when we have found him another uproariously healthy female whom

he does not love in the least, even then we have no logical evidence

that the result may not be as horrid and dangerous as if he had

behaved like a man of honour.

CHAPTER VII

THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF DOUBT

Let us now finally consider what the honest Eugenists do mean, since

it has become increasingly evident that they cannot mean what they

say. Unfortunately, the obstacles to any explanation of this are such

as to insist on a circuitous approach. The tendency of all that is

printed and much that is spoken to-day is to be, in the only true

sense, behind the times. It is because it is always in a hurry that it

is always too late. Give an ordinary man a day to write an article,

and he will remember the things he has really heard latest; and may

even, in the last glory of the sunset, begin to think of what he

thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the

nearest text-book on the topic, and make the best mosaic he may out of

classical quotations and old authorities. Give him ten minutes to

write it and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery where

he learnt his stalest proverbs, or the old school where he learnt his

stalest politics. The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his

thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can

be delivered earlier and earlier, and which, every day, is less worth

delivering at all. The poor panting critic falls farther and farther

behind the motor-car of modern fact. Fifty years ago he was barely

fifteen years behind the times. Fifteen years ago he was not more than

fifty years behind the times. Just now he is rather more than a

hundred years behind the times: and the proof of it is that the things

he says, though manifest nonsense about our society to-day, really

were true about our society some hundred and thirty years ago. The

best instance of his belated state is his perpetual assertion that the

supernatural is less and less believed. It is a perfectly true and

realistic account--of the eighteenth century. It is the worst possible

account of this age of psychics and spirit-healers and fakirs and

fashionable fortune-tellers. In fact, I generally reply in eighteenth

century language to this eighteenth century illusion. If somebody says

to me, "The creeds are crumbling," I reply, "And the King of Prussia,

who is himself a Freethinker, is certainly capturing Silesia from the

Catholic Empress." If somebody says, "Miracles must be reconsidered in

the light of rational experience," I answer affably, "But I hope that

our enlightened leader, Hebert, will not insist on guillotining that

poor French queen." If somebody says, "We must watch for the rise of

some new religion which can commend itself to reason," I reply, "But

how much more necessary is it to watch for the rise of some military

adventurer who may destroy the Republic: and, to my mind, that young

Major Bonaparte has rather a restless air." It is only in such

language from the Age of Reason that we can answer such things. The

age we live in is something more than an age of superstition--it is an

age of innumerable superstitions. But it is only with one example of

this that I am concerned here.

I mean the error that still sends men marching about disestablishing

churches and talking of the tyranny of compulsory church teaching or

compulsory church tithes. I do not wish for an irrelevant

misunderstanding here; I would myself certainly disestablish any

church that had a numerical minority, like the Irish or the Welsh; and

I think it would do a great deal of good to genuine churches that have

a partly conventional majority, like the English, or even the Russian.

But I should only do this if I had nothing else to do; and just now

there is very much else to do. For religion, orthodox or unorthodox,

is not just now relying on the weapon of State establishment at all.

The Pope practically made no attempt to preserve the Concordat; but

seemed rather relieved at the independence his Church gained by the

destruction of it: and it is common talk among the French clericalists

that the Church has gained by the change. In Russia the one real

charge brought by religious people (especially Roman Catholics)

against the Orthodox Church is not its orthodoxy or heterodoxy, but

its abject dependence on the State. In England we can almost measure

an Anglican's fervour for his Church by his comparative coolness about

its establishment--that is, its control by a Parliament of Scotch

Presbyterians like Balfour, or Welsh Congregationalists like Lloyd

George. In Scotland the powerful combination of the two great sects

outside the establishment have left it in a position in which it feels

no disposition to boast of being called by mere lawyers the Church of

Scotland. I am not here arguing that Churches should not depend on the

State; nor that they do not depend upon much worse things. It may be

reasonably maintained that the strength of Romanism, though it be not

in any national police, is in a moral police more rigid and vigilant.

It may be reasonably maintained that the strength of Anglicanism,

though it be not in establishment, is in aristocracy, and its shadow,

which is called snobbishness. All I assert here is that the Churches

are not now leaning heavily on their political establishment; they are

not using heavily the secular arm. Almost everywhere their legal

tithes have been modified, their legal boards of control have been

mixed. They may still employ tyranny, and worse tyranny: I am not

considering that. They are not specially using that special tyranny

which consists in using the government.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is

Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science.

And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the

creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that

really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by

pilgrims but by policemen--that creed is the great but disputed

system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in

Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the

Government will really help it to persecute its heretics. Vaccination,

in its hundred years of experiment, has been disputed almost as much

as baptism in its approximate two thousand. But it seems quite natural

to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them

madness to enforce baptism.

I am not frightened of the word "persecution" when it is attributed to

the churches; nor is it in the least as a term of reproach that I

attribute it to the men of science. It is as a term of legal fact. If

it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory,

incapable of final proof--then our priests are not now persecuting,

but our doctors are. The imposition of such dogmas constitutes a State

Church--in an older and stronger sense than any that can be applied to

any supernatural Church to-day. There are still places where the

religious minority is forbidden to assemble or to teach in this way or

that; and yet more where it is excluded from this or that public post.

But I cannot now recall any place where it is compelled by the

criminal law to go through the rite of the official religion. Even the

Young Turks did not insist on all Macedonians being circumcised.

Now here we find ourselves confronted with an amazing fact. When, in

the past, opinions so arguable have been enforced by State violence,

it has been at the instigation of fanatics who held them for fixed

and flaming certainties. If truths could not be evaded by their

enemies, neither could they be altered even by their friends. But what

are the certain truths that the secular arm must now lift the sword to

enforce? Why, they are that very mass of bottomless questions and

bewildered answers that we have been studying in the last

chapters--questions whose only interest is that they are trackless and

mysterious; answers whose only glory is that they are tentative and

new. The devotee boasted that he would never abandon the faith; and

therefore he persecuted for the faith. But the doctor of science

actually boasts that he will always abandon a hypothesis; and yet he

persecutes for the hypothesis. The Inquisitor violently enforced his

creed, because it was unchangeable. The _savant_ enforces it violently

because he may change it the next day.

Now this is a new sort of persecution; and one may be permitted to ask

if it is an improvement on the old. The difference, so far as one can

see at first, seems rather favourable to the old. If we are to be at

the merciless mercy of man, most of us would rather be racked for a

creed that existed intensely in somebody's head, rather than

vivisected for a discovery that had not yet come into anyone's head,

and possibly never would. A man would rather be tortured with a

thumbscrew until he chose to see reason than tortured with a

vivisecting knife until the vivisector chose to see reason. Yet that

is the real difference between the two types of legal enforcement. If

I gave in to the Inquisitors, I should at least know what creed to

profess. But even if I yelled out _a credo_ when the Eugenists had me

on the rack, I should not know what creed to yell. I might get an

extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed they confessed

quite a week ago.

Now let no light-minded person say that I am here taking extravagant

parallels; for the parallel is not only perfect, but plain. For this

reason: that the difference between torture and vivisection is not in

any way affected by the fierceness or mildness of either. Whether they

gave the rack half a turn or half a hundred, they were, by hypothesis,

dealing with a truth which they knew to be there. Whether they

vivisect painfully or painlessly, they are trying to find out whether

the truth is there or not. The old Inquisitors tortured to put their

own opinions into somebody. But the new Inquisitors torture to get

their own opinions out of him. They do not know what their own

opinions are, until the victim of vivisection tells them. The division

of thought is a complete chasm for anyone who cares about thinking.

The old persecutor was trying to _teach_ the citizen, with fire and

sword. The new persecutor is trying to _learn_ from the citizen, with

scalpel and germ-injector. The master was meeker than the pupil will

be.

I could prove by many practical instances that even my illustrations

are not exaggerated, by many placid proposals I have heard for the

vivisection of criminals, or by the filthy incident of Dr. Neisser.

But I prefer here to stick to a strictly logical line of distinction,

and insist that whereas in all previous persecutions the violence was

used to end _our_ indecision, the whole point here is that the

violence is used to end the indecision of the persecutors. This is

what the honest Eugenists really mean, so far as they mean anything.

They mean that the public is to be given up, not as a heathen land for

conversion, but simply as a _pabulum_ for experiment. That is the

real, rude, barbaric sense behind this Eugenic legislation. The

Eugenist doctors are not such fools as they look in the light of any

logical inquiry about what they want. They do not know what they want,

except that they want your soul and body and mine in order to find

out. They are quite seriously, as they themselves might say, the first

religion to be experimental instead of doctrinal. All other

established Churches have been based on somebody having found the

truth. This is the first Church that was ever based on not having

found it.

There is in them a perfectly sincere hope and enthusiasm; but it is

not for us, but for what they might learn from us, if they could rule

us as they can rabbits. They cannot tell us anything about heredity,

because they do not know anything about it. But they do quite honestly

believe that they would know something about it, when they had married

and mismarried us for a few hundred years. They cannot tell us who is

fit to wield such authority, for they know that nobody is; but they do

quite honestly believe that when that authority has been abused for a

very long time, somebody somehow will be evolved who is fit for the

job. I am no Puritan, and no one who knows my opinions will consider

it a mere criminal charge if I say that they are simply gambling. The

reckless gambler has no money in his pockets; he has only the ideas in

his head. These gamblers have no ideas in their heads; they have only

the money in their pockets. But they think that if they could use the

money to buy a big society to experiment on, something like an idea

might come to them at last. That is Eugenics.

I confine myself here to remarking that I do not like it. I may be

very stingy, but I am willing to pay the scientist for what he does

know; I draw the line at paying him for everything he doesn't know. I

may be very cowardly, but I am willing to be hurt for what I think or

what he thinks--I am not willing to be hurt, or even inconvenienced,

for whatever he might happen to think after he had hurt me. The

ordinary citizen may easily be more magnanimous than I, and take the

whole thing on trust; in which case his career may be happier in the

next world, but (I think) sadder in this. At least, I wish to point

out to him that he will not be giving his glorious body as soldiers

give it, to the glory of a fixed flag, or martyrs to the glory of a

deathless God. He will be, in the strict sense of the Latin phrase,

giving his vile body for an experiment--an experiment of which even

the experimentalist knows neither the significance nor the end.

CHAPTER VIII

A SUMMARY OF A FALSE THEORY

I have up to this point treated the Eugenists, I hope, as seriously as

they treat themselves. I have attempted an analysis of their theory as

if it were an utterly abstract and disinterested theory; and so

considered, there seems to be very little left of it. But before I go

on, in the second part of this book, to talk of the ugly things that

really are left, I wish to recapitulate the essential points in their

essential order, lest any personal irrelevance or over-emphasis (to

which I know myself to be prone) should have confused the course of

what I believe to be a perfectly fair and consistent argument. To make

it yet clearer, I will summarise the thing under chapters, and in

quite short paragraphs.

In the first chapter I attempted to define the essential point in

which Eugenics can claim, and does claim, to be a new morality. That

point is that it is possible to consider the baby in considering the

bride. I do not adopt the ideal irresponsibility of the man who said,

"What has posterity done for us?" But I do say, to start with, "What

can we do for posterity, except deal fairly with our contemporaries?"

Unless a man love his wife whom he has seen, how shall he love his

child whom he has not seen?

In the second chapter I point out that this division in the conscience

cannot be met by mere mental confusions, which would make any woman

refusing any man a Eugenist. There will always be something in the

world which tends to keep outrageous unions exceptional; that

influence is not Eugenics, but laughter.

In the third chapter I seek to describe the quite extraordinary

atmosphere in which such things have become possible. I call that

atmosphere anarchy; but insist that it is an anarchy in the centres

where there should be authority. Government has become ungovernable;

that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that

is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our

time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government. In

this atmosphere it is natural enough that medical experts, being

authorities, should go mad, and attempt so crude and random and

immature a dream as this of petting and patting (and rather spoiling)

the babe unborn.

In chapter four I point out how this impatience has burst through the

narrow channel of the Lunacy Laws, and has obliterated them by

extending them. The whole point of the madman is that he is the

exception that proves the rule. But Eugenics seeks to treat the whole

rule as a series of exceptions--to make all men mad. And on that

ground there is hope for nobody; for all opinions have an author, and

all authors have a heredity. The mentality of the Eugenist makes him

believe in Eugenics as much as the mentality of the reckless lover

makes him violate Eugenics; and both mentalities are, on the

materialist hypothesis, equally the irresponsible product of more or

less unknown physical causes. The real security of man against any

logical Eugenics is like the false security of Macbeth. The only

Eugenist that could rationally attack him must be a man of no woman

born.

In the chapter following this, which is called "The Flying Authority,"

I try in vain to locate and fix any authority that could rationally

rule men in so rooted and universal a matter; little would be gained

by ordinary men doing it to each other; and if ordinary practitioners

did it they would very soon show, by a thousand whims and quarrels,

that they were ordinary men. I then discussed the enlightened

despotism of a few general professors of hygiene, and found it

unworkable, for an essential reason: that while we can always get men

intelligent enough to know more than the rest of us about this or that

accident or pain or pest, we cannot count on the appearance of great

cosmic philosophers; and only such men can be even supposed to know

more than we do about normal conduct and common sanity. Every sort of

man, in short, would shirk such a responsibility, except the worst

sort of man, who would accept it.

I pass on, in the next chapter, to consider whether we know enough

about heredity to act decisively, even if we were certain who ought to

act. Here I refer the Eugenists to the reply of Mr. Wells, which they

have never dealt with to my knowledge or satisfaction--the important

and primary objection that health is not a quality but a proportion of

qualities; so that even health married to health might produce the

exaggeration called disease. It should be noted here, of course, that

an individual biologist may quite honestly believe that he has found a

fixed principle with the help of Weissmann or Mendel. But we are not

discussing whether he knows enough to be justified in thinking (as is

somewhat the habit of the anthropoid _Homo_) that he is right. We are

discussing whether _we_ know enough, as responsible citizens, to put

such powers into the hands of men who may be deceived or who may be

deceivers. I conclude that we do not.

In the last chapter of the first half of the book I give what is, I

believe, the real secret of this confusion, the secret of what the

Eugenists really want. They want to be allowed to find out what they

want. Not content with the endowment of research, they desire the

establishment of research; that is the making of it a thing official

and compulsory, like education or state insurance; but still it is

only research and not discovery. In short, they want a new kind of

State Church, which shall be an Established Church of Doubt--instead

of Faith. They have no Science of Eugenics at all, but they do really

mean that if we will give ourselves up to be vivisected they may very

probably have one some day. I point out, in more dignified diction,

that this is a bit thick.

And now, in the second half of this book, we will proceed to the

consideration of things that really exist. It is, I deeply regret to

say, necessary to return to realities, as they are in your daily life

and mine. Our happy holiday in the land of nonsense is over; we shall

see no more its beautiful city, with the almost Biblical name of Bosh,

nor the forests full of mares' nests, nor the fields of tares that are

ripened only by moonshine. We shall meet no longer those delicious

monsters that might have talked in the same wild club with the Snark

and the Jabberwock or the Pobble or the Dong with the Luminous Nose;

the father who can't make head or tail of the mother, but thoroughly

understands the child she will some day bear; the lawyer who has to

run after his own laws almost as fast as the criminals run away from

them; the two mad doctors who might discuss for a million years which

of them has the right to lock up the other; the grammarian who clings

convulsively to the Passive Mood, and says it is the duty of something

to get itself done without any human assistance; the man who would

marry giants to giants until the back breaks, as children pile brick

upon brick for the pleasure of seeing the staggering tower tumble

down; and, above all, the superb man of science who wants you to pay

him and crown him because he has so far found out nothing. These

fairy-tale comrades must leave us. They exist, but they have no

influence in what is really going on. They are honest dupes and tools,

as you and I were very nearly being honest dupes and tools. If we

come to think coolly of the world we live in, if we consider how very

practical is the practical politician, at least where cash is

concerned, how very dull and earthy are most of the men who own the

millions and manage the newspaper trusts, how very cautious and averse

from idealist upheaval are those that control this capitalist

society--when we consider all this, it is frankly incredible that

Eugenics should be a front bench fashionable topic and almost an Act

of Parliament, if it were in practice only the unfinished fantasy

which it is, as I have shown, in pure reason. Even if it were a just

revolution, it would be much too revolutionary a revolution for modern

statesmen, if there were not something else behind. Even if it were a

true ideal, it would be much too idealistic an ideal for our

"practical men," if there were not something real as well. Well, there

is something real as well. There is no reason in Eugenics, but there

is plenty of motive. Its supporters are highly vague about its theory,

but they will be painfully practical about its practice. And while I

reiterate that many of its more eloquent agents are probably quite

innocent instruments, there _are_ some, even among Eugenists, who by

this time know what they are doing. To them we shall not say, "What is

Eugenics?" or "Where on earth are you going?" but only "Woe unto you,

hypocrites, that devour widows' houses and for a pretence use long

words."

Part II

THE REAL AIM

CHAPTER I

THE IMPOTENCE OF IMPENITENCE

The root formula of an epoch is always an unwritten law, just as the

law that is the first of all laws, that which protects life from the

murderer, is written nowhere in the Statute Book. Nevertheless there

is all the difference between having and not having a notion of this

basic assumption in an epoch. For instance, the Middle Ages will

simply puzzle us with their charities and cruelties, their asceticism

and bright colours, unless we catch their general eagerness for

building and planning, dividing this from that by walls and

fences--the spirit that made architecture their most successful art.

Thus even a slave seemed sacred; the divinity that did hedge a king,

did also, in one sense, hedge a serf, for he could not be driven out

from behind his hedges. Thus even liberty became a positive thing like

a privilege; and even, when most men had it, it was not opened like

the freedom of a wilderness, but bestowed, like the freedom of a city.

Or again, the seventeenth century may seem a chaos of contradictions,

with its almost priggish praise of parliaments and its quite barbaric

massacre of prisoners, until we realise that, if the Middle Ages was a

house half built, the seventeenth century was a house on fire. Panic

was the note of it, and that fierce fastidiousness and exclusiveness

that comes from fear. Calvinism was its characteristic religion, even

in the Catholic Church, the insistence on the narrowness of the way

and the fewness of the chosen. Suspicion was the note of its

politics--"put not your trust in princes." It tried to thrash

everything out by learned, virulent, and ceaseless controversy; and it

weeded its population by witch-burning. Or yet again: the eighteenth

century will present pictures that seem utterly opposite, and yet seem

singularly typical of the time: the sack of Versailles and the "Vicar

of Wakefield"; the pastorals of Watteau and the dynamite speeches of

Danton. But we shall understand them all better if we once catch sight

of the idea of _tidying up_ which ran through the whole period, the

quietest people being prouder of their tidiness, civilisation, and

sound taste than of any of their virtues; and the wildest people

having (and this is the most important point) no love of wildness for

its own sake, like Nietzsche or the anarchic poets, but only a

readiness to employ it to get rid of unreason or disorder. With these

epochs it is not altogether impossible to say that some such form of

words is a key. The epoch for which it is almost impossible to find a

form of words is our own.

Nevertheless, I think that with us the keyword is "inevitability," or,

as I should be inclined to call it, "impenitence." We are

subconsciously dominated in all departments by the notion that there

is no turning back, and it is rooted in materialism and the denial of

free-will. Take any handful of modern facts and compare them with the

corresponding facts a few hundred years ago. Compare the modern Party

System with the political factions of the seventeenth century. The

difference is that in the older time the party leaders not only really

cut off each other's heads, but (what is much more alarming) really

repealed each other's laws. With us it has become traditional for one

party to inherit and leave untouched the acts of the other when made,

however bitterly they were attacked in the making. James II. and his

nephew William were neither of them very gay specimens; but they would

both have laughed at the idea of "a continuous foreign policy." The

Tories were not Conservatives; they were, in the literal sense,

reactionaries. They did not merely want to keep the Stuarts; they

wanted to bring them back.

Or again, consider how obstinately the English mediaeval monarchy

returned again and again to its vision of French possessions, trying

to reverse the decision of fate; how Edward III. returned to the

charge after the defeats of John and Henry III., and Henry V. after

the failure of Edward III.; and how even Mary had that written on her

heart which was neither her husband nor her religion. And then

consider this: that we have comparatively lately known a universal

orgy of the thing called Imperialism, the unity of the Empire the only

topic, colonies counted like crown jewels, and the Union Jack waved

across the world. And yet no one so much as dreamed, I will not say of

recovering, the American colonies for the Imperial unity (which would

have been too dangerous a task for modern empire-builders), but even

of re-telling the story from an Imperial standpoint. Henry V.

justified the claims of Edward III. Joseph Chamberlain would not have

dreamed of justifying the claims of George III. Nay, Shakespeare

justifies the French War, and sticks to Talbot and defies the legend

of Joan of Arc. Mr. Kipling would not dare to justify the American

War, stick to Burgoyne, and defy the legend of Washington. Yet there

really was much more to be said for George III. than there ever was

for Henry V. It was not said, much less acted upon, by the modern

Imperialists; because of this basic modern sense, that as the future

is inevitable, so is the past irrevocable. Any fact so complete as the

American exodus from the Empire must be considered as final for aeons,

though it hardly happened more than a hundred years ago. Merely

because it has managed to occur it must be called first, a necessary

evil, and then an indispensable good. I need not add that I do not

want to reconquer America; but then I am not an Imperialist.

Then there is another way of testing it: ask yourself how many people

you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who

attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the

British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate?

How few have we met who realised that British education can be

altered, but British weather cannot? How few there were that knew that

the clouds were more immortal and more solid than the schools? For a

thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or

the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? Indeed,

the very word proves my case by its unpromising and unfamiliar sound.

At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform

and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; but nobody talks about

repeal. Our fathers did not talk of Free Trade, but of the Repeal of

the Corn Laws. They did not talk of Home Rule, but of the Repeal of

the Union. In those days people talked of a "Repealer" as the most

practical of all politicians, the kind of politician that carries a

club. Now the Repealer is flung far into the province of an impossible

idealism: and the leader of one of our great parties, having said, in

a heat of temporary sincerity, that he would repeal an Act, actually

had to write to all the papers to assure them that he would only amend

it. I need not multiply instances, though they might be multiplied

almost to a million. The note of the age is to suggest that the past

may just as well be praised, since it cannot be mended. Men actually

in that past have toiled like ants and died like locusts to undo some

previous settlement that seemed secure; but we cannot do so much as

repeal an Act of Parliament. We entertain the weak-minded notion that

what is done can't be undone. Our view was well summarised in a

typical Victorian song with the refrain: "The mill will never grind

again the water that is past." There are many answers to this. One

(which would involve a disquisition on the phenomena of Evaporation

and Dew) we will here avoid. Another is, that to the minds of simple

country folk, the object of a mill is not to grind water, but to grind

corn, and that (strange as it may seem) there really have been

societies sufficiently vigilant and valiant to prevent their corn

perpetually flowing away from them, to the tune of a sentimental song.

Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an

intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our

mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also

our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake. It was

mere vanity in Mr. Brummell when he sent away trays full of

imperfectly knotted neck-cloths, lightly remarking, "These are our

failures." It is a good instance of the nearness of vanity to

humility, for at least he had to admit that they were failures. But it

would have been spiritual pride in Mr. Brummell if he had tied on all

the cravats, one on top of the other, lest his valet should discover

that he had ever tied one badly. For in spiritual pride there is

always an element of secrecy and solitude. Mr. Brummell would be

satanic; also (which I fear would affect him more) he would be badly

dressed. But he would be a perfect presentation of the modern

publicist, who cannot do anything right, because he must not admit

that he ever did anything wrong.

This strange, weak obstinacy, this persistence in the wrong path of

progress, grows weaker and worse, as do all such weak things. And by

the time in which I write its moral attitude has taken on something of

the sinister and even the horrible. Our mistakes have become our

secrets. Editors and journalists tear up with a guilty air all that

reminds them of the party promises unfulfilled, or the party ideals

reproaching them. It is true of our statesmen (much more than of our

bishops, of whom Mr. Wells said it), that socially in evidence they

are intellectually in hiding. The society is heavy with unconfessed

sins; its mind is sore and silent with painful subjects; it has a

constipation of conscience. There are many things it has done and

allowed to be done which it does not really dare to think about; it

calls them by other names and tries to talk itself into faith in a

false past, as men make up the things they would have said in a

quarrel. Of these sins one lies buried deepest but most noisome, and

though it is stifled, stinks: the true story of the relations of the

rich man and the poor in England. The half-starved English proletarian

is not only nearly a skeleton but he is a skeleton in a cupboard.

It may be said, in some surprise, that surely we hear to-day on every

side the same story of the destitute proletariat and the social

problem, of the sweating in the unskilled trades or the overcrowding

in the slums. It is granted; but I said the true story. Untrue

stories there are in plenty, on all sides of the discussion. There is

the interesting story of the Class Conscious Proletarian of All Lands,

the chap who has "solidarity," and is always just going to abolish

war. The Marxian Socialists will tell you all about him; only he isn't

there. A common English workman is just as incapable of thinking of a

German as anything but a German as he is of thinking of himself as

anything but an Englishman. Then there is the opposite story; the

story of the horrid man who is an atheist and wants to destroy the

home, but who, for some private reason, prefers to call this

Socialism. He isn't there either. The prosperous Socialists have homes

exactly like yours and mine; and the poor Socialists are not allowed

by the Individualists to have any at all. There is the story of the

Two Workmen, which is a very nice and exciting story, about how one

passed all the public houses in Cheapside and was made Lord Mayor on

arriving at the Guildhall, while the other went into all the public

houses and emerged quite ineligible for such a dignity. Alas! for this

also is vanity. A thief might become Lord Mayor, but an honest workman

certainly couldn't. Then there is the story of "The Relentless Doom,"

by which rich men were, by economic laws, forced to go on taking away

money from poor men, although they simply longed to leave off: this is

an unendurable thought to a free and Christian man, and the reader

will be relieved to hear that it never happened. The rich could have

left off stealing whenever they wanted to leave off, only this never

happened either. Then there is the story of the cunning Fabian who sat

on six committees at once and so coaxed the rich man to become quite

poor. By simply repeating, in a whisper, that there are "wheels within

wheels," this talented man managed to take away the millionaire's

motor car, one wheel at a time, till the millionaire had quite

forgotten that he ever had one. It was very clever of him to do this,

only he has not done it. There is not a screw loose in the

millionaire's motor, which is capable of running over the Fabian and

leaving him a flat corpse in the road at a moment's notice. All these

stories are very fascinating stories to be told by the Individualist

and Socialist in turn to the great Sultan of Capitalism, because if

they left off amusing him for an instant he would cut off their heads.

But if they once began to tell the true story of the Sultan to the

Sultan, he would boil them in oil; and this they wish to avoid.

The true story of the sin of the Sultan he is always trying, by

listening to these stories, to forget. As we have said before in this

chapter, he would prefer not to remember, because he has made up his

mind not to repent. It is a curious story, and I shall try to tell it

truly in the two chapters that follow. In all ages the tyrant is hard

because he is soft. If his car crashes over bleeding and accusing

crowds, it is because he has chosen the path of least resistance. It

is because it is much easier to ride down a human race than ride up a

moderately steep hill. The fight of the oppressor is always a

pillow-fight; commonly a war with cushions--always a war for cushions.

Saladin, the great Sultan, if I remember rightly, accounted it the

greatest feat of swordsmanship to cut a cushion. And so indeed it is,

as all of us can attest who have been for years past trying to cut

into the swollen and windy corpulence of the modern compromise, that

is at once cosy and cruel. For there is really in our world to-day the

colour and silence of the cushioned divan; and that sense of palace

within palace and garden within garden which makes the rich

irresponsibility of the East. Have we not already the wordless dance,

the wineless banquet, and all that strange unchristian conception of

luxury without laughter? Are we not already in an evil Arabian Nights,

and walking the nightmare cities of an invisible despot? Does not our

hangman strangle secretly, the bearer of the bow string? Are we not

already eugenists--that is, eunuch-makers? Do we not see the bright

eyes, the motionless faces, and all that presence of something that is

dead and yet sleepless? It is the presence of the sin that is sealed

with pride and impenitence; the story of how the Sultan got his

throne. But it is not the story he is listening to just now, but

another story which has been invented to cover it--the story called

"Eugenius: or the Adventures of One Not Born," a most varied and

entrancing tale, which never fails to send him to sleep.