TRUE HISTORY OF A EUGENIST
He does not live in a dark lonely tower by the sea, from which are
heard the screams of vivisected men and women. On the contrary, he
lives in Mayfair. He does not wear great goblin spectacles that
magnify his eyes to moons or diminish his neighbours to beetles. When
he is more dignified he wears a single eyeglass; when more
intelligent, a wink. He is not indeed wholly without interest in
heredity and Eugenical biology; but his studies and experiments in
this science have specialised almost exclusively in _equus celer_, the
rapid or running horse. He is not a doctor; though he employs doctors
to work up a case for Eugenics, just as he employs doctors to correct
the errors of his dinner. He is not a lawyer, though unfortunately
often a magistrate. He is not an author or a journalist; though he not
infrequently owns a newspaper. He is not a soldier, though he may have
a commission in the yeomanry; nor is he generally a gentleman, though
often a nobleman. His wealth now commonly comes from a large staff of
employed persons who scurry about in big buildings while he is playing
golf. But he very often laid the foundations of his fortune in a very
curious and poetical way, the nature of which I have never fully
understood. It consisted in his walking about the street without a hat
and going up to another man and saying, "Suppose I have two hundred
whales out of the North Sea." To which the other man replied, "And let
us imagine that I am in possession of two thousand elephants' tusks."
They then exchange, and the first man goes up to a third man and says,
"Supposing me to have lately come into the possession of two thousand
elephants' tusks, would you, etc.?" If you play this game well, you
become very rich; if you play it badly you have to kill yourself or
try your luck at the Bar. The man I am speaking about must have played
it well, or at any rate successfully.
He was born about 1860; and has been a member of Parliament since
about 1890. For the first half of his life he was a Liberal; for the
second half he has been a Conservative; but his actual policy in
Parliament has remained largely unchanged and consistent. His policy
in Parliament is as follows: he takes a seat in a room downstairs at
Westminster, and takes from his breast pocket an excellent cigar-case,
from which in turn he takes an excellent cigar. This he lights, and
converses with other owners of such cigars on _equus celer_ or such
matters as may afford him entertainment. Two or three times in the
afternoon a bell rings; whereupon he deposits the cigar in an ashtray
with great particularity, taking care not to break the ash, and
proceeds to an upstairs room, flanked with two passages. He then walks
into whichever of the two passages shall be indicated to him by a
young man of the upper classes, holding a slip of paper. Having gone
into this passage he comes out of it again, is counted by the young
man and proceeds downstairs again; where he takes up the cigar once
more, being careful not to break the ash. This process, which is known
as Representative Government, has never called for any great variety
in the manner of his life. Nevertheless, while his Parliamentary
policy is unchanged, his change from one side of the House to the
other did correspond with a certain change in his general policy in
commerce and social life. The change of the party label is by this
time quite a trifling matter; but there was in his case a change of
philosophy or at least a change of project; though it was not so much
becoming a Tory, as becoming rather the wrong kind of Socialist. He is
a man with a history. It is a sad history, for he is certainly a less
good man than he was when he started. That is why he is the man who is
really behind Eugenics. It is because he has degenerated that he has
come to talking of Degeneration.
In his Radical days (to quote from one who corresponded in some ways
to this type) he was a much better man, because he was a much less
enlightened one. The hard impudence of his first Manchester
Individualism was softened by two relatively humane qualities; the
first was a much greater manliness in his pride; the second was a much
greater sincerity in his optimism. For the first point, the modern
capitalist is merely industrial; but this man was also industrious.
He was proud of hard work; nay, he was even proud of low work--if he
could speak of it in the past and not the present. In fact, he
invented a new kind of Victorian snobbishness, an inverted
snobbishness. While the snobs of Thackeray turned Muggins into De
Mogyns, while the snobs of Dickens wrote letters describing themselves
as officers' daughters "accustomed to every luxury--except spelling,"
the Individualist spent his life in hiding his prosperous parents. He
was more like an American plutocrat when he began; but he has since
lost the American simplicity. The Frenchman works until he can play.
The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his
master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the
Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he
never worked at all. He becomes as far as possible another person--a
country gentleman who has never heard of his shop; one whose left hand
holding a gun knows not what his right hand doeth in a ledger. He uses
a peerage as an alias, and a large estate as a sort of alibi. A stern
Scotch minister remarked concerning the game of golf, with a terrible
solemnity of manner, "the man who plays golf--he neglects his
business, he forsakes his wife, he forgets his God." He did not seem
to realise that it is the chief aim of many a modern capitalist's life
to forget all three.
This abandonment of a boyish vanity in work, this substitution of a
senile vanity in indolence, this is the first respect in which the
rich Englishman has fallen. He was more of a man when he was at least
a master-workman and not merely a master. And the second important
respect in which he was better at the beginning is this: that he did
then, in some hazy way, half believe that he was enriching other
people as well as himself. The optimism of the early Victorian
Individualists was not wholly hypocritical. Some of the
clearest-headed and blackest-hearted of them, such as Malthus, saw
where things were going, and boldly based their Manchester city on
pessimism instead of optimism. But this was not the general case; most
of the decent rich of the Bright and Cobden sort did have a kind of
confused faith that the economic conflict would work well in the long
run for everybody. They thought the troubles of the poor were
incurable by State action (they thought that of all troubles), but
they did not cold-bloodedly contemplate the prospect of those troubles
growing worse and worse. By one of those tricks or illusions of the
brain to which the luxurious are subject in all ages, they sometimes
seemed to feel as if the populace had triumphed symbolically in their
own persons. They blasphemously thought about their thrones of gold
what can only be said about a cross--that they, being lifted up, would
draw all men after them. They were so full of the romance that anybody
could be Lord Mayor, that they seemed to have slipped into thinking
that everybody could. It seemed as if a hundred Dick Whittingtons,
accompanied by a hundred cats, could all be accommodated at the
Mansion House. It was all nonsense; but it was not (until later) all
humbug.
Step by step, however, with a horrid and increasing clearness, this
man discovered what he was doing. It is generally one of the worst
discoveries a man can make. At the beginning, the British plutocrat
was probably quite as honest in suggesting that every tramp carried a
magic cat like Dick Whittington, as the Bonapartist patriot was in
saying that every French soldier carried a marshal's _baton_ in his
knapsack. But it is exactly here that the difference and the danger
appears. There is no comparison between a well-managed thing like
Napoleon's army and an unmanageable thing like modern competition.
Logically, doubtless, it was impossible that every soldier should
carry a marshal's _baton_; they could not all be marshals any more
than they could all be mayors. But if the French soldier did not
always have a _baton_ in his knapsack, he always had a knapsack. But
when that Self-Helper who bore the adorable name of Smiles told the
English tramp that he carried a coronet in his bundle, the English
tramp had an unanswerable answer. He pointed out that he had no
bundle. The powers that ruled him had not fitted him with a knapsack,
any more than they had fitted him with a future--or even a present.
The destitute Englishman, so far from hoping to become anything, had
never been allowed even to be anything. The French soldier's ambition
may have been in practice not only a short, but even a deliberately
shortened ladder, in which the top rungs were knocked out. But for
the English it was the bottom rungs that were knocked out, so that
they could not even begin to climb. And sooner or later, in exact
proportion to his intelligence, the English plutocrat began to
understand not only that the poor were impotent, but that their
impotence had been his only power. The truth was not merely that his
riches had left them poor; it was that nothing but their poverty could
have been strong enough to make him rich. It is this paradox, as we
shall see, that creates the curious difference between him and every
other kind of robber.
I think it is no more than justice to him to say that the knowledge,
where it has come to him, has come to him slowly; and I think it came
(as most things of common sense come) rather vaguely and as in a
vision--that is, by the mere look of things. The old Cobdenite
employer was quite within his rights in arguing that earth is not
heaven, that the best obtainable arrangement might contain many
necessary evils; and that Liverpool and Belfast might be growing more
prosperous as a whole in spite of pathetic things that might be seen
there. But I simply do not believe he has been able to look at
Liverpool and Belfast and continue to think this: that is why he has
turned himself into a sham country gentleman. Earth is not heaven, but
the nearest we can get to heaven ought not to _look_ like hell; and
Liverpool and Belfast look like hell, whether they are or not. Such
cities might be growing prosperous as a whole, though a few citizens
were more miserable. But it was more and more broadly apparent that it
was exactly and precisely _as a whole_ that they were not growing more
prosperous, but only the few citizens who were growing more prosperous
by their increasing misery. You could not say a country was becoming a
white man's country when there were more and more black men in it
every day. You could not say a community was more and more masculine
when it was producing more and more women. Nor can you say that a city
is growing richer and richer when more and more of its inhabitants are
very poor men. There might be a false agitation founded on the pathos
of individual cases in a community pretty normal in bulk. But the fact
is that no one can take a cab across Liverpool without having a quite
complete and unified impression that the pathos is not a pathos of
individual cases, but a pathos in bulk. People talk of the Celtic
sadness; but there are very few things in Ireland that look so sad as
the Irishman in Liverpool. The desolation of Tara is cheery compared
with the desolation of Belfast. I recommend Mr. Yeats and his mournful
friends to turn their attention to the pathos of Belfast. I think if
they hung up the harp that once in Lord Furness's factory, there would
be a chance of another string breaking.
Broadly, and as things bulk to the eye, towns like Leeds, if placed
beside towns like Rouen or Florence, or Chartres, or Cologne, do
actually look like beggars walking among burghers. After that
overpowering and unpleasant impression it is really useless to argue
that they are richer because a few of their parasites get rich enough
to live somewhere else. The point may be put another way, thus: that
it is not so much that these more modern cities have this or that
monopoly of good or evil; it is that they have every good in its
fourth-rate form and every evil in its worst form. For instance, that
interesting weekly paper _The Nation_ amiably rebuked Mr. Belloc and
myself for suggesting that revelry and the praise of fermented liquor
were more characteristic of Continental and Catholic communities than
of communities with the religion and civilisation of Belfast. It said
that if we would "cross the border" into Scotland, we should find out
our mistake. Now, not only have I crossed the border, but I have had
considerable difficulty in crossing the road in a Scotch town on a
festive evening. Men were literally lying like piled-up corpses in the
gutters, and from broken bottles whisky was pouring down the drains. I
am not likely, therefore, to attribute a total and arid abstinence to
the whole of industrial Scotland. But I never said that drinking was a
mark rather of the Catholic countries. I said that _moderate_ drinking
was a mark rather of the Catholic countries. In other words, I say of
the common type of Continental citizen, not that he is the only person
who is drinking, but that he is the only person who knows how to
drink. Doubtless gin is as much a feature of Hoxton as beer is a
feature of Munich. But who is the connoisseur who prefers the gin of
Hoxton to the beer of Munich? Doubtless the Protestant Scotch ask for
"Scotch," as the men of Burgundy ask for Burgundy. But do we find them
lying in heaps on each side of the road when we walk through a
Burgundian village? Do we find the French peasant ready to let
Burgundy escape down a drain-pipe? Now this one point, on which I
accept _The Nation's_ challenge, can be exactly paralleled on almost
every point by which we test a civilisation. It does not matter
whether we are for alcohol or against it. On either argument Glasgow
is more objectionable than Rouen. The French abstainer makes less
fuss; the French drinker gives less offence. It is so with property,
with war, with everything. I can understand a teetotaler being
horrified, on his principles, at Italian wine-drinking. I simply
cannot believe he could be _more_ horrified at it than at Hoxton
gin-drinking. I can understand a Pacifist, with his special scruples,
disliking the militarism of Belfort. I flatly deny that he can dislike
it _more_ than the militarism of Berlin. I can understand a good
Socialist hating the petty cares of the distributed peasant property.
I deny that any good Socialist can hate them _more_ than he hates the
large cares of Rockefeller. That is the unique tragedy of the
plutocratic state to-day; it has _no_ successes to hold up against the
failures it alleges to exist in Latin or other methods. You can (if
you are well out of his reach) call the Irish rustic debased and
superstitious. I defy you to contrast his debasement and superstition
with the citizenship and enlightenment of the English rustic.
To-day the rich man knows in his heart that he is a cancer and not an
organ of the State. He differs from all other thieves or parasites for
this reason: that the brigand who takes by force wishes his victims to
be rich. But he who wins by a one-sided contract actually wishes them
to be poor. Rob Roy in a cavern, hearing a company approaching, will
hope (or if in a pious mood, pray) that they may come laden with gold
or goods. But Mr. Rockefeller, in his factory, knows that if those who
pass are laden with goods they will pass on. He will therefore (if in
a pious mood) pray that they may be destitute, and so be forced to
work his factory for him for a starvation wage. It is said (and also,
I believe, disputed) that Bluecher riding through the richer parts of
London exclaimed, "What a city to sack!" But Bluecher was a soldier if
he was a bandit. The true sweater feels quite otherwise. It is when he
drives through the poorest parts of London that he finds the streets
paved with gold, being paved with prostrate servants; it is when he
sees the grey lean leagues of Bow and Poplar that his soul is uplifted
and he knows he is secure. This is not rhetoric, but economics.
I repeat that up to a point the profiteer was innocent because he was
ignorant; he had been lured on by easy and accommodating events. He
was innocent as the new Thane of Glamis was innocent, as the new Thane
of Cawdor was innocent; but the King---- The modern manufacturer, like
Macbeth, decided to march on, under the mute menace of the heavens.
He knew that the spoil of the poor was in his houses; but he could
not, after careful calculation, think of any way in which they could
get it out of his houses without being arrested for housebreaking. He
faced the future with a face flinty with pride and impenitence. This
period can be dated practically by the period when the old and genuine
Protestant religion of England began to fail; and the average business
man began to be agnostic, not so much because he did not know where he
was, as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to
scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way
out. But in any case, the man who had made a mistake not only refused
to unmake it, but decided to go on making it. But in this he made yet
another most amusing mistake, which was the beginning of all
Eugenics.