THE ECLIPSE OF LIBERTY
If such a thing as the Eugenic sociology had been suggested in the
period from Fox to Gladstone, it would have been far more fiercely
repudiated by the reformers than by the Conservatives. If Tories had
regarded it as an insult to marriage, Radicals would have far more
resolutely regarded it as an insult to citizenship. But in the
interval we have suffered from a process resembling a sort of mystical
parricide, such as is told of so many gods, and is true of so many
great ideas. Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has
destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it
unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they
were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it
undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free
to dispute the value of freedom. But the important point to seize
about this reactionary scepticism is that as it is bound to be
unlimited in theory, so it is bound to be unlimited in practice. In
other words, the modern mind is set in an attitude which would enable
it to advance, not only towards Eugenic legislation, but towards any
conceivable or inconceivable extravagances of Eugenics.
Those who reply to any plea for freedom invariably fall into a certain
trap. I have debated with numberless different people on these
matters, and I confess I find it amusing to see them tumbling into it
one after another. I remember discussing it before a club of very
active and intelligent Suffragists, and I cast it here for convenience
in the form which it there assumed. Suppose, for the sake of argument,
that I say that to take away a poor man's pot of beer is to take away
a poor man's personal liberty, it is very vital to note what is the
usual or almost universal reply. People hardly ever do reply, for some
reason or other, by saying that a man's liberty consists of such and
such things, but that beer is an exception that cannot be classed
among them, for such and such reasons. What they almost invariably do
say is something like this: "After all, what is liberty? Man must live
as a member of a society, and must obey those laws which, etc., etc."
In other words, they collapse into a complete confession that they
_are_ attacking all liberty and any liberty; that they _do_ deny the
very existence or the very possibility of liberty. In the very form of
the answer they admit the full scope of the accusation against them.
In trying to rebut the smaller accusation, they plead guilty to the
larger one.
This distinction is very important, as can be seen from any practical
parallel. Suppose we wake up in the middle of the night and find that
a neighbour has entered the house not by the front-door but by the
skylight; we may suspect that he has come after the fine old family
jewellery. We may be reassured if he can refer it to a really
exceptional event; as that he fell on to the roof out of an aeroplane,
or climbed on to the roof to escape from a mad dog. Short of the
incredible, the stranger the story the better the excuse; for an
extraordinary event requires an extraordinary excuse. But we shall
hardly be reassured if he merely gazes at us in a dreamy and wistful
fashion and says, "After all, what is property? Why should material
objects be thus artificially attached, etc., etc.?" We shall merely
realise that his attitude allows of his taking the jewellery and
everything else. Or if the neighbour approaches us carrying a large
knife dripping with blood, we may be convinced by his story that he
killed another neighbour in self-defence, that the quiet gentleman
next door was really a homicidal maniac. We shall know that homicidal
mania is exceptional and that we ourselves are so happy as not to
suffer from it; and being free from the disease may be free from the
danger. But it will not soothe us for the man with the gory knife to
say softly and pensively "After all, what is human life? Why should we
cling to it? Brief at the best, sad at the brightest, it is itself but
a disease from which, etc., etc." We shall perceive that the sceptic
is in a mood not only to murder us but to massacre everybody in the
street. Exactly the same effect which would be produced by the
questions of "What is property?" and "What is life?" is produced by
the question of "What is liberty?" It leaves the questioner free to
disregard any liberty, or in other words to take any liberties. The
very thing he says is an anticipatory excuse for anything he may
choose to do. If he gags a man to prevent him from indulging in
profane swearing, or locks him in the coal cellar to guard against his
going on the spree, he can still be satisfied with saying, "After all,
what is liberty? Man is a member of, etc., etc."
That is the problem, and that is why there is now no protection
against Eugenic or any other experiments. If the men who took away
beer as an unlawful pleasure had paused for a moment to define the
lawful pleasures, there might be a different situation. If the men who
had denied one liberty had taken the opportunity to affirm other
liberties, there might be some defence for them. But it never occurs
to them to admit any liberties at all. It never so much as crosses
their minds. Hence the excuse for the last oppression will always
serve as well for the next oppression; and to that tyranny there can
be no end.
Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret
and sacred places of personal freedom, where no sane man ever dreamed
of seeing it; and especially the sanctuary of sex. It is as easy to
take away a man's wife or baby as to take away his beer when you can
say "What is liberty?"; just as it is as easy to cut off his head as
to cut off his hair if you are free to say "What is life?" There is no
rational philosophy of human rights generally disseminated among the
populace, to which we can appeal in defence even of the most intimate
or individual things that anybody can imagine. For so far as there was
a vague principle in these things, that principle has been wholly
changed. It used to be said that a man could have liberty, so long as
it did not interfere with the liberty of others. This did afford some
rough justification for the ordinary legal view of the man with the
pot of beer. For instance, it was logical to allow some degree of
distinction between beer and tea, on the ground that a man may be
moved by excess of beer to throw the pot at somebody's head. And it
may be said that the spinster is seldom moved by excess of tea to
throw the tea-pot at anybody's head. But the whole ground of argument
is now changed. For people do not consider what the drunkard does to
others by throwing the pot, but what he does to himself by drinking
the beer. The argument is based on health; and it is said that the
Government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment
that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between
beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with
tobacco or with twenty other things. And there is no escape for the
hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is
to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control
all the habits of all the citizens, and among the rest their habits in
the matter of sex.
But there is more than this. It is not only true that it is the last
liberties of man that are being taken away; and not merely his first
or most superficial liberties. It is also inevitable that the last
liberties should be taken first. It is inevitable that the most
private matters should be most under public coercion. This inverse
variation is very important, though very little realised. If a man's
personal health is a public concern, his most private acts are _more_
public than his most public acts. The official must deal _more_
directly with his cleaning his teeth in the morning than with his
using his tongue in the market-place. The inspector must interfere
_more_ with how he sleeps in the middle of the night than with how he
works in the course of the day. The private citizen must have much
_less_ to say about his bath or his bedroom window than about his vote
or his banking account. The policeman must be in a new sense a private
detective; and shadow him in private affairs rather than in public
affairs. A policeman must shut doors behind him for fear he should
sneeze, or shove pillows under him for fear he should snore. All this
and things far more fantastic follow from the simple formula that the
State must make itself responsible for the health of the citizen. But
the point is that the policeman must deal primarily and promptly with
the citizen in his relation to his home, and only indirectly and more
doubtfully with the citizen in his relation to his city. By the whole
logic of this test, the king must hear what is said in the inner
chamber and hardly notice what is proclaimed from the house-tops. We
have heard of a revolution that turns everything upside down. But
this is almost literally a revolution that turns everything inside
out.
If a wary reactionary of the tradition of Metternich had wished in the
nineteenth century to reverse the democratic tendency, he would
naturally have begun by depriving the democracy of its margin of more
dubious powers over more distant things. He might well begin, for
instance, by removing the control of foreign affairs from popular
assemblies; and there is a case for saying that a people may
understand its own affairs, without knowing anything whatever about
foreign affairs. Then he might centralise great national questions,
leaving a great deal of local government in local questions. This
would proceed so for a long time before it occurred to the blackest
terrorist of the despotic ages to interfere with a man's own habits in
his own house. But the new sociologists and legislators are, by the
nature of their theory, bound to begin where the despots leave off,
even if they leave off where the despots begin. For them, as they
would put it, the first things must be the very fountains of life,
love and birth and babyhood; and these are always covered fountains,
flowing in the quiet courts of the home. For them, as Mr. H.G. Wells
put it, life itself may be regarded merely as a tissue of births. Thus
they are coerced by their own rational principle to begin all coercion
at the other end; at the inside end. What happens to the outside end,
the external and remote powers of the citizen, they do not very much
care; and it is probable that the democratic institutions of recent
centuries will be allowed to decay in undisturbed dignity for a
century or two more. Thus our civilisation will find itself in an
interesting situation, not without humour; in which the citizen is
still supposed to wield imperial powers over the ends of the earth,
but has admittedly no power over his own body and soul at all. He will
still be consulted by politicians about whether opium is good for
China-men, but not about whether ale is good for him. He will be
cross-examined for his opinions about the danger of allowing Kamskatka
to have a war-fleet, but not about allowing his own child to have a
wooden sword. About all, he will be consulted about the delicate
diplomatic crisis created by the proposed marriage of the Emperor of
China, and not allowed to marry as he pleases.
Part of this prophecy or probability has already been accomplished;
the rest of it, in the absence of any protest, is in process of
accomplishment. It would be easy to give an almost endless catalogue
of examples, to show how, in dealing with the poorer classes at least,
coercion has already come near to a direct control of the relations of
the sexes. But I am much more concerned in this chapter to point out
that all these things have been adopted in principle, even where they
have not been adopted in practice. It is much more vital to realise
that the reformers have possessed themselves of a _principle_, which
will cover all such things if it be granted, and which is not
sufficiently comprehended to be contradicted. It is a principle
whereby the deepest things of flesh and spirit must have the most
direct relation with the dictatorship of the State. They must have it,
by the whole reason and rationale upon which the thing depends. It is
a system that might be symbolised by the telephone from headquarters
standing by a man's bed. He must have a relation to Government like
his relation to God. That is, the more he goes into the inner
chambers, and the more he closes the doors, the more he is alone with
the law. The social machinery which makes such a State uniform and
submissive will be worked outwards from the household as from a
handle, or a single mechanical knob or button. In a horrible sense,
loaded with fear and shame and every detail of dishonour, it will be
true to say that charity begins at home.
Charity will begin at home in the sense that all home children will be
like charity children. Philanthropy will begin at home, for all
householders will be like paupers. Police administration will begin at
home, for all citizens will be like convicts. And when health and the
humours of daily life have passed into the domain of this social
discipline, when it is admitted that the community must primarily
control the primary habits, when all law begins, so to speak, next to
the skin or nearest the vitals--then indeed it will appear absurd that
marriage and maternity should not be similarly ordered. Then indeed it
will seem to be illogical, and it will be illogical, that love should
be free when life has lost its freedom.
So passed, to all appearance, from the minds of men the strange dream
and fantasy called freedom. Whatever be the future of these
evolutionary experiments and their effect on civilisation, there is
one land at least that has something to mourn. For us in England
something will have perished which our fathers valued all the more
because they hardly troubled to name it; and whatever be the stars of
a more universal destiny, the great star of our night has set. The
English had missed many other things that men of the same origins had
achieved or retained. Not to them was given, like the French, to
establish eternal communes and clear codes of equality; not to them,
like the South Germans, to keep the popular culture of their songs;
not to them, like the Irish, was it given to die daily for a great
religion. But a spirit had been with them from the first which fenced,
with a hundred quaint customs and legal fictions, the way of a man who
wished to walk nameless and alone. It was not for nothing that they
forgot all their laws to remember the name of an outlaw, and filled
the green heart of England with the figure of Robin Hood. It was not
for nothing that even their princes of art and letters had about them
something of kings incognito, undiscovered by formal or academic fame;
so that no eye can follow the young Shakespeare as he came up the
green lanes from Stratford, or the young Dickens when he first lost
himself among the lights of London. It is not for nothing that the
very roads are crooked and capricious, so that a man looking down on
a map like a snaky labyrinth, could tell that he was looking on the
home of a wandering people. A spirit at once wild and familiar rested
upon its wood-lands like a wind at rest. If that spirit be indeed
departed, it matters little that it has been driven out by perversions
it had itself permitted, by monsters it had idly let loose.
Industrialism and Capitalism and the rage for physical science were
English experiments in the sense that the English lent themselves to
their encouragement; but there was something else behind them and
within them that was not they--its name was liberty, and it was our
life. It may be that this delicate and tenacious spirit has at last
evaporated. If so, it matters little what becomes of the external
experiments of our nation in later time. That at which we look will be
a dead thing alive with its own parasites. The English will have
destroyed England.