THE MEANNESS OF THE MOTIVE
Now, if any ask whether it be imaginable that an ordinary man of the
wealthier type should analyse the problem or conceive the plan, the
inhumanly far-seeing plan, as I have set it forth, the answer is:
"Certainly not." Many rich employers are too generous to do such a
thing; many are too stupid to know what they are doing. The eugenical
opportunity I have described is but an ultimate analysis of a whole
drift of thoughts in the type of man who does not analyse his
thoughts. He sees a slouching tramp, with a sick wife and a string of
rickety children, and honestly wonders what he can do with them. But
prosperity does not favour self-examination; and he does not even ask
himself whether he means "How can I help them?" or "How can I use
them?"--what he can still do for them, or what they could still do for
him. Probably he sincerely means both, but the latter much more than
the former; he laments the breaking of the tools of Mammon much more
than the breaking of the images of God. It would be almost impossible
to grope in the limbo of what he does think; but we can assert that
there is one thing he doesn't think. He doesn't think, "This man might
be as jolly as I am, if he need not come to me for work or wages."
That this is so, that at root the Eugenist is the Employer, there are
multitudinous proofs on every side, but they are of necessity
miscellaneous, and in many cases negative. The most enormous is in a
sense the most negative: that no one seems able to imagine capitalist
industrialism being sacrificed to any other object. By a curious
recurrent slip in the mind, as irritating as a catch in a clock,
people miss the main thing and concentrate on the mean thing. "Modern
conditions" are treated as fixed, though the very word "modern"
implies that they are fugitive. "Old ideas" are treated as impossible,
though their very antiquity often proves their permanence. Some years
ago some ladies petitioned that the platforms of our big railway
stations should be raised, as it was more convenient for the hobble
skirt. It never occurred to them to change to a sensible skirt. Still
less did it occur to them that, compared with all the female fashions
that have fluttered about on it, by this time St. Pancras is as
historic as St. Peter's.
I could fill this book with examples of the universal, unconscious
assumption that life and sex must live by the laws of "business" or
industrialism, and not _vice versa_; examples from all the magazines,
novels, and newspapers. In order to make it brief and typical, I take
one case of a more or less Eugenist sort from a paper that lies open
in front of me--a paper that still bears on its forehead the boast of
being peculiarly an organ of democracy in revolt. To this a man writes
to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we
have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper
classes prevent procreation. The man had the horrible playfulness to
sign his letter "Hopeful." Well, there are certainly many methods by
which people in the upper classes prevent procreation; one of them is
what used to be called "platonic friendship," till they found another
name for it at the Old Bailey. I do not suppose the hopeful gentleman
hopes for this; but some of us find the abortion he does hope for
almost as abominable. That, however, is not the curious point. The
curious point is that the hopeful one concludes by saying, "When
people have large families and small wages, not only is there a high
infantile death-rate, but often those who do live to grow up are
stunted and weakened by having had to share the family income for a
time with those who died early. There would be less unhappiness if
there were no unwanted children." You will observe that he tacitly
takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately
shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of
human life. Compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries,
things to be modified to suit the wage-market. There are unwanted
children; but unwanted by whom? This man does not really mean that the
parents do not want to have them. He means that the employers do not
want to pay them properly. Doubtless, if you said to him directly,
"Are you in favour of low wages?" he would say, "No." But I am not, in
this chapter, talking about the effect on such modern minds of a
cross-examination to which they do not subject themselves. I am
talking about the way their minds work, the instinctive trick and turn
of their thoughts, the things they assume before argument, and the way
they faintly feel that the world is going. And, frankly, the turn of
their mind is to tell the child he is not wanted, as the turn of my
mind is to tell the profiteer he is not wanted. Motherhood, they feel,
and a full childhood, and the beauty of brothers and sisters, are good
things in their way, but not so good as a bad wage. About the
mutilation of womanhood, and the massacre of men unborn, he signs
himself "Hopeful." He is hopeful of female indignity, hopeful of human
annihilation. But about improving the small bad wage he signs himself
"Hopeless."
This is the first evidence of motive: the ubiquitous assumption that
life and love must fit into a fixed framework of employment, even (as
in this case) of bad employment. The second evidence is the tacit and
total neglect of the scientific question in all the departments in
which it is not an employment question; as, for instance, the
marriages of the princely, patrician, or merely plutocratic houses. I
do not mean, of course, that no scientific men have rigidly tackled
these, though I do not recall any cases. But I am not talking of the
merits of individual men of science, but of the push and power behind
this movement, the thing that is able to make it fashionable and
politically important. I say, if this power were an interest in truth,
or even in humanity, the first field in which to study would be in the
weddings of the wealthy. Not only would the records be more lucid,
and the examples more in evidence, but the cases would be more
interesting and more decisive. For the grand marriages have presented
both extremes of the problem of pedigree--first the "breeding in and
in," and later the most incongruous cosmopolitan blends. It would
really be interesting to note which worked the best, or what point of
compromise was safest. For the poor (about whom the newspaper
Eugenists are always talking) cannot offer any test cases so complete.
Waiters never had to marry waitresses, as princes had to marry
princesses. And (for the other extreme) housemaids seldom marry Red
Indians. It may be because there are none to marry. But to the
millionaires the continents are flying railway stations, and the most
remote races can be rapidly linked together. A marriage in London or
Paris may chain Ravenna to Chicago, or Ben Cruachan to Bagdad. Many
European aristocrats marry Americans, notoriously the most mixed stock
in the world; so that the disinterested Eugenist, with a little
trouble, might reveal rich stores of negro or Asiatic blood to his
delighted employer. Instead of which he dulls our ears and distresses
our refinement by tedious denunciations of the monochrome marriages of
the poor.
For there is something really pathetic about the Eugenist's neglect of
the aristocrat and his family affairs. People still talk about the
pride of pedigree; but it strikes me as the one point on which the
aristocrats are almost morbidly modest. We should be learned Eugenists
if we were allowed to know half as much of their heredity as we are
of their hairdressing. We see the modern aristocrat in the most human
poses in the illustrated papers, playing with his dog or parrot--nay,
we see him playing with his child, or with his grandchild. But there
is something heartrending in his refusal to play with his grandfather.
There is often something vague and even fantastic about the
antecedents of our most established families, which would afford the
Eugenist admirable scope not only for investigation but for
experiment. Certainly, if he could obtain the necessary powers, the
Eugenist might bring off some startling effects with the mixed
materials of the governing class. Suppose, to take wild and
hypothetical examples, he were to marry a Scotch earl, say, to the
daughter of a Jewish banker, or an English duke to an American parvenu
of semi-Jewish extraction? What would happen? We have here an
unexplored field.
It remains unexplored not merely through snobbery and cowardice, but
because the Eugenist (at least the influential Eugenist)
half-consciously knows it is no part of his job; what he is really
wanted for is to get the grip of the governing classes on to the
unmanageable output of poor people. It would not matter in the least
if all Lord Cowdray's descendants grew up too weak to hold a tool or
turn a wheel. It would matter very much, especially to Lord Cowdray,
if all his employees grew up like that. The oligarch can be
unemployable, because he will not be employed. Thus the practical and
popular exponent of Eugenics has his face always turned towards the
slums, and instinctively thinks in terms of them. If he talks of
segregating some incurably vicious type of the sexual sort, he is
thinking of a ruffian who assaults girls in lanes. He is not thinking
of a millionaire like White, the victim of Thaw. If he speaks of the
hopelessness of feeble-mindedness, he is thinking of some stunted
creature gaping at hopeless lessons in a poor school. He is not
thinking of a millionaire like Thaw, the slayer of White. And this not
because he is such a brute as to like people like White or Thaw any
more than we do, but because he knows that _his_ problem is the
degeneration of the useful classes; because he knows that White would
never have been a millionaire if all his workers had spent themselves
on women as White did, that Thaw would never have been a millionaire
if all his servants had been Thaws. The ornaments may be allowed to
decay, but the machinery _must_ be mended. That is the second proof of
the plutocratic impulse behind all Eugenics: that no one thinks of
applying it to the prominent classes. No one thinks of applying it
where it could most easily be applied.
A third proof is the strange new disposition to regard the poor as a
_race_; as if they were a colony of Japs or Chinese coolies. It can be
most clearly seen by comparing it with the old, more individual,
charitable, and (as the Eugenists might say) sentimental view of
poverty. In Goldsmith or Dickens or Hood there is a basic idea that
the particular poor person ought not to be so poor: it is some
accident or some wrong. Oliver Twist or Tiny Tim are fairy princes
waiting for their fairy godmother. They are held as slaves, but rather
as the hero and heroine of a Spanish or Italian romance were held as
slaves by the Moors. The modern poor are getting to be regarded as
slaves in the separate and sweeping sense of the negroes in the
plantations. The bondage of the white hero to the black master was
regarded as abnormal; the bondage of the black to the white master as
normal. The Eugenist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence
of Tiny Tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of
Cratchit; but, as a matter of fact, we have here a very good instance
of how much more practically true to life is sentiment than cynicism.
The poor are _not_ a race or even a type. It is senseless to talk
about breeding them; for they are not a breed. They are, in cold fact,
what Dickens describes: "a dustbin of individual accidents," of
damaged dignity, and often of damaged gentility. The class very
largely consists of perfectly promising children, lost like Oliver
Twist, or crippled like Tiny Tim. It contains very valuable things,
like most dustbins. But the Eugenist delusion of the barbaric breed in
the abyss affects even those more gracious philanthropists who almost
certainly do want to assist the destitute and not merely to exploit
them. It seems to affect not only their minds, but their very
eyesight. Thus, for instance, Mrs. Alec Tweedie almost scornfully
asks, "When we go through the slums, do we see beautiful children?"
The answer is, "Yes, very often indeed." I have seen children in the
slums quite pretty enough to be Little Nell or the outcast whom Hood
called "young and so fair." Nor has the beauty anything necessarily to
do with health; there are beautiful healthy children, beautiful dying
children, ugly dying children, ugly uproarious children in Petticoat
Lane or Park Lane. There are people of every physical and mental type,
of every sort of health and breeding, in a single back street. They
have nothing in common but the wrong we do them.
The important point is, however, that there is more fact and realism
in the wildest and most elegant old fictions about disinherited dukes
and long-lost daughters than there is in this Eugenist attempt to make
the poor all of a piece--a sort of black fungoid growth that is
ceaselessly increasing in a chasm. There is a cheap sneer at poor
landladies: that they always say they have seen better days. Nine
times out of ten they say it because it is true. What can be said of
the great mass of Englishmen, by anyone who knows any history, except
that they have seen better days? And the landlady's claim is not
snobbish, but rather spirited; it is her testimony to the truth in the
old tales of which I spoke: that she _ought not_ to be so poor or so
servile in status; that a normal person ought to have more property
and more power in the State than _that_. Such dreams of lost dignity
are perhaps the only things that stand between us and the
cattle-breeding paradise now promised. Nor are such dreams by any
means impotent. I remember Mr. T.P. O'Connor wrote an interesting
article about Madame Humbert, in the course of which he said that
Irish peasants, and probably most peasants, tended to have a
half-fictitious family legend about an estate to which they were
entitled. This was written in the time when Irish peasants were
landless in their land; and the delusion doubtless seemed all the more
entertaining to the landlords who ruled them and the money-lenders who
ruled the landlords. But the dream has conquered the realities. The
phantom farms have materialised. Merely by tenaciously affirming the
kind of pride that comes after a fall, by remembering the old
civilisation and refusing the new, by recurring to an old claim that
seemed to most Englishmen like the lie of a broken-down lodging-house
keeper at Margate--by all this the Irish have got what they want, in
solid mud and turf. That imaginary estate has conquered the Three
Estates of the Realm.
But the homeless Englishman must not even remember a home. So far from
his house being his castle, he must not have even a castle in the air.
He must have no memories; that is why he is taught no history. Why is
he told none of the truth about the mediaeval civilisation except a few
cruelties and mistakes in chemistry? Why does a mediaeval burgher never
appear till he can appear in a shirt and a halter? Why does a mediaeval
monastery never appear till it is "corrupt" enough to shock the
innocence of Henry VIII.? Why do we hear of one charter--that of the
barons--and not a word of the charters of the carpenters, smiths,
shipwrights and all the rest? The reason is that the English peasant
is not only not allowed to have an estate, he is not even allowed to
have lost one. The past has to be painted pitch black, that it may be
worse than the present.
There is one strong, startling, outstanding thing about Eugenics, and
that is its meanness. Wealth, and the social science supported by
wealth, had tried an inhuman experiment. The experiment had entirely
failed. They sought to make wealth accumulate--and they made men
decay. Then, instead of confessing the error, and trying to restore
the wealth, or attempting to repair the decay, they are trying to
cover their first cruel experiment with a more cruel experiment. They
put a poisonous plaster on a poisoned wound. Vilest of all, they
actually quote the bewilderment produced among the poor by their first
blunder as a reason for allowing them to blunder again. They are
apparently ready to arrest all the opponents of their system as mad,
merely because the system was maddening. Suppose a captain had
collected volunteers in a hot, waste country by the assurance that he
could lead them to water, and knew where to meet the rest of his
regiment. Suppose he led them wrong, to a place where the regiment
could not be for days, and there was no water. And suppose sunstroke
struck them down on the sand man after man, and they kicked and danced
and raved. And, when at last the regiment came, suppose the captain
successfully concealed his mistake, because all his men had suffered
too much from it to testify to its ever having occurred. What would
you think of the gallant captain? It is pretty much what I think of
this particular captain of industry.
Of course, nobody supposes that all Capitalists, or most Capitalists,
are conscious of any such intellectual trick. Most of them are as much
bewildered as the battered proletariat; but there are some who are
less well-meaning and more mean. And these are leading their more
generous colleagues towards the fulfilment of this ungenerous evasion,
if not towards the comprehension of it. Now a ruler of the Capitalist
civilisation, who has come to consider the idea of ultimately herding
and breeding the workers like cattle, has certain contemporary
problems to review. He has to consider what forces still exist in the
modern world for the frustration of his design. The first question is
how much remains of the old ideal of individual liberty. The second
question is how far the modern mind is committed to such egalitarian
ideas as may be implied in Socialism. The third is whether there is
any power of resistance in the tradition of the populace itself. These
three questions for the future I shall consider in their order in the
final chapters that follow. It is enough to say here that I think the
progress of these ideals has broken down at the precise point where
they will fail to prevent the experiment. Briefly, the progress will
have deprived the Capitalist of his old Individualist scruples,
without committing him to his new Collectivist obligations. He is in a
very perilous position; for he has ceased to be a Liberal without
becoming a Socialist, and the bridge by which he was crossing has
broken above an abyss of Anarchy.