Let us see how we treat, in our nurseries, this foundation of ethics,

this sentiment of individual rights. We enter a middle-class nursery

where a baby and his sister Jessie, a child of three years of age, are

side by side on the floor. An impulse seizes baby to clutch the doll,

which Jessie holds firmly. Baby screams and nurse turns round and lifts

him in her arms. “See, Jessie,” she says, “he wants your doll, surely

you will be kind to baby brother?” She takes the doll from Jessie and

gives it to the infant. Jessie throws herself on the ground and kicks

and screams. A paroxysm of emotion sweeps over her, and until the wave

has spent itself tranquillity in nerve or muscle is simply impossible.

But the nurse, ignorant of the fact that the child is for the moment

bereft of any power of self-control, commands her to be still, and when

not obeyed, she scolds her severely. Finally she puts her in a corner,

and there poor Jessie sobs and weeps till pure exhaustion brings her to

passivity and an abject state of mind which nurse calls “being good

again.” She signifies her approval of it by a kiss of forgiveness as

unmerited as the previous anger.

Now here we have an emotion supremely important to the welfare of

humanity rudely desecrated in infancy. There was nothing base, sordid,

exclusive or even selfish in the tempest of feeling that swept away the

placidity of Jessie’s little soul. Mingled together there was an impulse

to defend her personal rights and a hot indignation that any

infringement of these rights should occur. And the whole was a wave of

the complex forces destined to weld society into an organic whole,

capable of maintaining free institutions. When the nurse through

ignorance punished the child for the involuntary expression of a

virtuous social-emotion, she was opposing the very order of nature that

genetic evolution is striving to attain; she was checking the progress

of modern civilization.

Later in the day Jessie with her doll restored to her arms is happy

again. Baby plays with his rattle on nurse’s knee; but Jessie thinks,

“My dolly is a baby too and wants a rattle.” She takes the rattle out of

baby’s hands to give to dolly. Baby shouts and kicks, and nurse is

furious. She slaps Jessie and calls her a “naughty child.” There is no

ebullition of anger this time, although the tender little fingers ache

from the rude blow. Jessie shrinks aside with a subdued air. Had her

former rebellion been an impulse of pure vindictiveness it would have

repeated itself now. It had no such feature. It revealed the fact that

Jessie was the offspring of a self-dependent, self-protective race

preparing for a new stage of social evolution, and her aspect at the

present crisis reveals the same. She did not know she was in the wrong;

but vaguely she felt it. She had trespassed on baby’s rights, and

conscience dumbly stirred in her infant bosom. If intelligence is strong

the child questions silently, “Why may baby take my doll when I may not

take his rattle?” The nurse will give no answer. Her province is to feed

and cleanse and clothe her charges, and, if need be, punish action. But

the motive springs of action lie quite beyond her range, and what is the

consequence? If Jessie’s intellect predominates over her emotional

quality, her conscience may develop, although under adverse conditions;

but if the balance tends the other way the position is fatal. The child

gathers her ideas of right and wrong from the frowns and smiles, the

slaps or kisses of an ignorant woman who is ruling the nursery with an

authority purely barbaric, and the budding conscience of a modern

civilization adapts itself to the archaic environment and reverts or

lapses backward.

Further, observe, the nurse strove to create—in this case, at

least—sympathy towards a baby brother. Was this wise? It was not wise,

although well-intentioned. Sympathy never develops under command, and to

order a child to be kind at the moment when an aggression has been made

on his or her rights is like commanding a steam-engine to move forward

without turning on the steam! Moreover, baby, young as he was, suffered

mentally and morally by the event. He learned an evil lesson, viz., that

if he cried he would probably get what he wanted. Vigorously, though

unconsciously, he will pursue that vicious course and act up to the

principle.

Does my reader inquire “What should the nurse have done?” She should

have instantly removed the baby, saying gently to Jessie, “Children must

never take things from one another. Not even a baby can be permitted to

do that, and we must teach him better. But see he is so young, he does

not know the doll is yours, not his. Would you like to lend it to him

for a little? No? Ah, well he cannot have it then, but come and help me

to amuse him that he may forget the doll.” The older child puts down her

treasure to fondle her baby brother, and there are ten chances to one

that by-and-bye her sympathy—called out naturally and not by

command—carries her a step further, and she says: “Nurse, baby may hold

my doll for a little now.” Later, when the brilliant idea occurs that

dolly would enjoy the rattle, Jessie understands—she does not blindly,

vaguely feel, she knows—that she must not trespass on baby’s rights. She

restrains her impulse therefore to snatch the rattle, and in this

self-control she is exercising the noblest faculty of her nature under

the dominion of a moral conscience—a sense of justice or equivalence of

rights.

And now we pass from an upper middle-class nursery to any British boys’

school or playground. We find that quarrels there arise not so much from

the simple barbarous impulses of cruelty, hatred, revenge, fear, as from

a different source—an effective sense of personal rights unbalanced by

an equally effective sense of sympathy with the rights of others. The

phenomenon here is justice in embryo, self-conscious, but lacking

development on the altruistic side. “It isn’t” or “it wasn’t fair” is a

phrase frequently upon a schoolboy’s lips, and it is remarkable with

what courage and dignity an urchin of ten or twelve will criticize a

master’s treatment of him, and perhaps tell the man of fifty to his face

that this or that “wasn’t fair.”

Were every boy as eager that all human beings—schoolmasters

included—should be as fairly treated as he himself, the only further

regulation of conduct necessary would be a clear intelligence to discern

truth from falsehood in every case of misdemeanour. Instructed

intelligence is however a minus quantity, and the sympathetic jealousy

for the rights of others that exists here and there amongst boys in

minor quantity, gets deflected from its true course. It links boys of

one age together in a mutual fellowship that excludes masters and all

others. Nor is this difficult to understand. Mutual interests is the

soil in which sympathy grows; but with arbitrary authority in the field,

also conflicting desires, and no distinct teaching on the subject, the

deeper relations of life, I mean the mutual interests of teacher and

taught and of the whole school as a social unity, are often ignored. To

shield a companion from punishment, at all hazards, becomes virtue in a

schoolboy’s eyes, and antagonisms spring up with confused notions of

right and wrong, and a general impulse to falsehood and deceit in

special directions. These are menacing features of character for the

social life of the future. Men of introspection have recognized in

themselves the baneful after-effects of the clannishness engendered at

school. Robert Louis Stevenson bewailed the extreme difficulty he had in

forcing himself to perform a distinct public duty. It involved some

exposure dishonourable to a former schoolmate! “I felt,” he said, “like

a cad!”

From middle-class nurseries where authority is chiefly barbaric and the

budding conscience is hurt, children destined to become the élite of a

future society and its rulers, pass into schools where there is no clear

and definite training for the emotional nature, no scientific

development of the social, and repression of the anti-social impulses.

From school the student passes to college or university, and is

emancipated more or less from outward control. When he enters upon the

duties and pleasures of adult life he presents, in many ways, an element

of social danger, for this simple reason, his native bumptiousness, his

sense of individual rights is not held in check by an intelligent

understanding of, and feeling of sympathy with, the equal rights of

others. The groundwork of the modern conscience has been tampered with

while authority—propelled by genetic forces of evolution—has gradually

relaxed and fallen back before the free-born British schoolboy. By our

present system of education we destroy infant virtue in the nursery and

in the school. We dwarf that sympathy which should grow and expand till

it bursts forth in manhood into deeds of rectitude, justice, love,

manifesting the threefold quality of human nature which alone is

competent to lift the whole area of man’s existence into line with

cosmic order. Our schools are yearly pouring into the busy world a rich

harvest of human aptitudes that are quickly absorbed in activities

mercantile, professional, legislative, but the outcome of these

activities is not tuning life into social harmony, it is merely

increasing national wealth, and that without any marked increase of

plenty and pleasure to the nation at large. The picture presented is one

of perpetual warfare—an outward struggle in money-making for oneself and

family, an inward contentious spirit that reveals itself abroad in our

blatant imperialism, at home in class antagonisms—the whole re-acting

fatally on individual character and lowering the general standard of

civilized life. Generous enthusiasms die down, the emotional nature

hardens, till intelligence itself is dimmed and becomes incapable of any

wide outlook that entails unselfish effort.

As a rule—though with honourable exceptions—our compatriots advanced in

life do not fulfil the promise of their youth; and with forces of nature

amenable to man’s will, if wisely directed, real progress in this

scientific age is wofully sluggish. We focus attention on environments

that press on adults only, and in seeking reform overlook the

environments that vitally effect our infant population, therefore the

adult life of the future.

How different is our action in other directions. In horticultural

nurseries, for instance, progress is not sluggish. Scientific discovery

and methods of practice are applied and promptly produce definite

results. The composite plants are distinguished from simple plants, and

while all are secured in necessary conditions of healthy life—good soil,

air, light, etc.—those receive from the gardener a special fostering

care. He studies the laws of differentiation, the peculiarities of each

organism with its hidden possibilities of varied efflorescence, and by

fitting environment to wider issues, watching them day by day,

nourishing every tendency favourable, checking every tendency

unfavourable, he induces an outburst of blossom as varied in colour and

form as it is marvellous in beauty or grace, and that in spite of the

fact that unaided by natural forces he is utterly powerless to make a

blade of grass grow.

That human plants give promise of blossoming into a _moral_ beauty as

yet undreamed of by the British public is patent to any wise observer of

the confused social life of to-day. Our greatest realists in fiction

note the point. We have George Meredith putting into the mouth of his

hero, Matthew Weyburn, these significant words: “Eminent station among

men doesn’t give a larger outlook ... I have come now and then across

people we call common, slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of facts and

ready to learn and logical. They were at the bottom of wisdom, for they

had in their heads the delicate sense of justice upon which wisdom is

founded ... that is what their rulers lack. Unless we have the sense of

justice abroad like a common air there’s no peace and no steady advance.

But these humble people had it. I felt them to be my superiors. On the

other hand, I have not felt the same with our senators, rulers and

lawgivers. They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.”

(_Lord Ormont and his Aminta._)

As regards physical health, I have shown the necessity for stirpiculture

and the birth of the fit; as regards mental and moral health, i.e.

Humanity’s efflorescence on higher planes—the need of the times is less

eugenics than education and training. Germs of truth, justice, love, lie

latent in the basic structure of our half-civilized race, and so long as

we neglect or destroy these germs it were folly to desire material of

finer quality. “Our raw material is of the very best,” said the

headmistress of a London Board School, “our children are full of

generous impulses and fearless spontaneity. I sometimes think the

no-rule in the homes of the masses a better preparation for life than

the factitious training given in homes of the classes. But our teachers

are so few and so seldom scientifically enlightened that we spoil very

much of the good material.” On behalf of the classes my reader might

argue that susceptibility to beauty or the aesthetic sentiment with its

creative expression in art belongs almost exclusively to the upper

section of society, and is deemed by some social reformers the very

foundation of moral life, the basis of the ethical temper.

It is not my purpose to provoke comparison between the classes and the

masses, and I fully recognize the value of the fine arts as factors in

the general elevation of life and character, but I submit that evolution

does not pursue the same line of development in the various races of

mankind, and in the British race an advanced ethical temper is in

process of formation quite irrespective of the fine arts and the

aesthetic sentiment.

Dr. Le Bon laid before the French Geographical Society an account of a

primitive group of people, numbering several hundred thousand, who

inhabit a remote region high up among the Carpathian mountains. Of this

people, the Podhalians, he says, “they are born improvisatori, poets and

musicians, singing their own songs, set to music of their own

composition. Their poetry is tender and artless in sentiment, generous

and elevated in style.” He attributes these qualities to the wealth of

spontaneous resources possessed by natures which neither know violent

passions nor unnatural excitements. The British race, moulded by

different conditions—geographical and historical—has developed

differently. Great masses of our population are wholly insensitive to

the influences of art. The picture drawn by Wordsworth of his Peter Bell

comes nearer to our native uncultured type—

A primrose by the river’s brim

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.

The soft blue sky did never melt

Into his heart, he never felt

The witchery of the soft blue sky.

Nevertheless, through another channel he was touched to the quick.

Thrilled into sudden sweetness and pathos by the sight of a widow’s

tears—

In agony of silent grief

From his own thoughts did Peter start;

He longs to press her to his heart

From love that cannot find relief.

The hard life of our workers has undoubtedly deprived them, as yet, of

any widespread aesthetic development, but the chords of their vital

part, if played upon, produce a sentient state far removed from the

rudimentary stage. It is a product of centuries of evolution.

This humanity will move forward to higher planes of existence, and a

spiritual plenitude—of which aestheticism is by no means the crown and

glory, but only an imperfect foretaste—by two convergent paths trodden

concurrently. These are a steady growth in social qualities and the

happiness that flows from these qualities, the creation, in short, of

organic socialism; and the opening up outwardly of channels of sympathy

and community of interests throughout the whole nation, causing the

banishment of class distinctions, the establishment of an organized

socialism. Perfection in art is not the appropriate ideal for this age,

but perfection in social life, and it is not from a love of art to a

love of mankind and the practices of moral rectitude that our masses

will advance. It is by the practice of all the humanities on ever

broader, deeper lines, until the nation, vibrating with harmonized life,

frames new visions of art, and strengthens all the well-springs of art’s

creation.

The aestheticism that belongs exclusively to one social class neither

elevates general morals nor produces the noblest art. Its narrowing

influences are exemplified in Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son: “If

you love music, go to operas, concerts, and pay fiddlers to play to you;

but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a

gentleman in a contemptible light; ... few things would mortify me more

than to see you bearing a part in a concert with a fiddle under your

chin.” Lord Chesterfield belonged to a past century, but the spirit of

his thought is not dead; it manifests prominently to-day. In my own

experience a lady novelist was invited to a London At Home, and accepted

conditionally. If evening costume were necessary she must decline, but

if less ceremonious dress were permissible she would gladly appear, and

the hostess consenting, she did so. Now I heard a large group of

middle-class ladies passionately condemning this action, on the ground

that aestheticism had been outraged and the rules of society set at

nought by a blot in rooms otherwise beautiful. Yet the novelist had been

tastefully attired, that was freely admitted. She had sinned merely in

nonconformity to fashion and in covering her neck and arms. Can we

seriously believe that the type of humanity to which these ladies belong

is developing the liberal mind which alone may create and support the

highest morality, the noblest art? Are we not compelled to recognize the

truth of Mr. J. H. Levy’s profound remark: “In the present stage of

human progress the aesthetic and the moral are conterminate at neither

end. Aesthetic emotion may be roused in us by that which is ethically

odious, and moral feeling may be called up by that which is artistically

ugly.” (_The National Reformer._)

The true ethical temper is engendered by a complexity of social

attractions issuing in an inward sense of justice and the delicate

equipoise of natural rights between _meum_ and _tuum_. The task before

us is to unite the half-conscious, instinctive justice already existent

with an intellectual apprehension and clear understanding of right and

wrong, in other words, to complete the modern conscience; and in view of

this task we must distinctly realize that the sentiment of what is

proper and improper in conventional society has no ethical value, and is

a false guide to conduct.

CHAPTER II

RAPACITY, PRIDE, LOVE OF PROPERTY

The facts which it is at once most important and most difficult to

appreciate are what may be called the facts of feeling.—LECKY.

The area of man’s emotional life is one of vast magnitude. It lies

behind the scenes of his outward existence, yet it interpenetrates the

social structure throughout, and stretches beyond it to distances we

know not whence or whither. Mysterious as this region is, no sooner does

man aspire to control the social forces of collective life, as he

already largely controls the natural forces of physical life, than he is

compelled to apply his reason scientifically to the phenomena of human

emotions, and to contemplate, trace out and master there the general

features of the process of evolution.

In the case of personal development the task is comparatively easy. A

child’s feelings are simple, not compound. For the most part they seem

vague and indefinite, always fleeting and evanescent; but as the child

grows his powers of feeling grow likewise and alter in character. Their

childish simplicity passes away; they augment in mass, they become

complex, more permanent and coherent in their nature, and far more

delicate in susceptibility. Consequently the breadth of range, the depth

and richness of emotion possible in an adult, as compared with the

emotions of a child, are as the music of an organ to the sweet notes

that lie within the compass of a penny whistle.

In racial development evolution of feeling has not pursued one

invariable course. Distinctive sentiments and modes of feeling

characterize the different races of mankind as well as distinctive

outward features, and the impressing on a plastic race of these

divergent states of feeling is mainly, though not entirely, due to

external conditions—not climatic and geographical conditions only, but

also the form of civilization that had taken root and moulded the habits

and customs of the race. Greek civilization, for instance, tended to

develop largely the aesthetic group of feelings, while in Scotland these

feelings, through outward influences I must not pause to consider, have

been stunted in growth, and moral sentiments have had a deeper and

firmer development.

Amongst barbarous tribes of men the violent emotions—anger, fear,

jealousy, revenge—generally speaking, hold sway; but there are also in

various parts of the world uncivilized communities where these fierce

passions are little known, and where, in consequence of the absence of

warlike surroundings, the gentle, tender sentiments that have for their

foundation family ties and peaceful social life, prevail, and are

considerably developed.

The conditions of emotional evolution in a given race, then, are

complex. We have to bear in mind a threefold environment—cosmic,

planetary, social—pressing upon individual life and powerfully swaying

the emotional part of it. Social environment is pre-eminently potent in

modifying emotional characteristics; yet the prime factor of change in

social environment springs from this region of feeling, and this factor

may, under rational guidance, take a path of direct and rapid

progression.

British civilization is the product of a turbulent, militant stage of

evolution, an epoch of military glory, followed by a long period of

industrial development and commercial activity. We inherit a survival of

virtues and vices from each of these evolutional stages. To the first we

attribute our courage, independence and proper pride, both national and

individual; and we are apt to suppose that without the experience of

military glory our manly John Bull would have been a milk-sop. That may

or may not be true; but when we infer that the above characteristics

depend fundamentally and absolutely upon a military environment we are

vastly mistaken. Observe what is said by travellers and missionaries of

certain unwarlike tribes found in India and the Malay Peninsula. The

Jakuns are inclined, we are told, to gratitude and beneficence, their

tendency being not to ask favours, but to confer them. The Arifuras have

a very excusable ambition to gain the name of rich men by paying the

debts of their poorer fellow-villagers! One gentle Arifura, who had

hoped to be chosen chief of his village and was not, met his

disappointment with the spirit of a philosopher and philanthropist,

saying: “What reason have I to grieve? I still have it in my power to

assist my fellow-villagers.” When brought into contact with men of an

opposite type—hardy, fierce and turbulent, they have no tendency to show

the white feather. The amiable Dhimal is independent and courageous, and

resists “with dogged obstinacy” injunctions that are urged

injudiciously. The Jakun is extremely proud—his pride showing itself in

refusals to be domesticated and made useful to men of a different race

and therefore alien to himself. The simple-minded Santal has a “strong

natural sense of justice, and should any attempt be made to coerce him,

he flies the country. The Santal is courteous and hospitable, whilst at

the same time he is free from cringing.” Dalton writes of the Hos—a

tribe belonging to the same group as the Santals—“a reflection on a

man’s honesty or veracity may be sufficient to send him to

self-destruction”; and of the Lepchas, Hooker says, “In all my dealings

with them they have proved scrupulously honest.... They cheer on the

traveller by their unostentatious zeal in his service, and when a

present is given to them, it is divided equally among many without a

syllable of discontent or a grudging look or word.”[4]

Footnote 4:

Herbert Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_, vol. 2, pp. 628, 630, 631.

From these facts we gather that a number of virtues associated in our

minds with Western civilization are present amid barbarous tribes, and

that the vices associated by us with barbarism—cruelty, dishonesty,

treachery, selfishness—are in some cases glaringly absent. Human nature

is not dependent on culture or Christianity to humanize and make it

lovable. There is that in the very groundwork of its nature which

renders it capable of developing, under favourable conditions, into what

is admirable, pure and gracious. The traits given us of these peoples

show virtue, truth, generosity, moral courage and justice, and what

nobler, more elevated sentiments have as yet been found in civilized

man?

The favourable conditions are an entire absence of warlike surroundings

and warlike training, hence an absence also of any inheritance of

warlike proclivities. These tribes “have remained unmolested for

generation after generation; they have inflicted no injuries on others.”

Their social or unselfish feelings have been fostered and nourished by

the sympathetic intercourse of a peaceful life.

In a purely military state unselfish feelings are necessarily repressed,

whilst the bold, keen, hard and cruel side of human nature is liberally

developed. To hate an enemy and avenge an injury are manly virtues. The

predatory instincts are useful and approved. Treachery is not

discredited, and the man clever enough to take advantage of an enemy and

successfully intrigue against him may be ranked among the gods! The

plunderer who falters not in keen pursuit of prey and in the hour of

victory shows relentless cruelty is deemed heroic. No thought of

happiness or misery to others gives him pause; military glory is his

absorbing aim, and in the intervals of peace his callous nature

manifests in ruling with tyrannic power slavish subordinates, who bend

and cringe before him.

Now let us glance at two of these militant characteristics, viz.

rapacity and personal pride, with a view to observe how their survival

into our industrial epoch has vitiated the national life.

The purely militant stage of British development has passed, and the

outward form of our collective life is industrial, not military. A

sanguinary path of glory has no intrinsic fascination for our people,

and there is no national desire to conquer and rule over races

established on other parts of the earth’s surface, however superior to

ours may be their climate and quarters. Nevertheless, within the last

half century we have fought battles and shed blood copiously in China,

Persia, Afghanistan, Abyssinia, Egypt, South Africa and elsewhere.

Seldom, however, has the nation itself clamoured for war. In the year

1854 a relapse into militant mood occurred, and, in spite of

unwillingness on the part of individual rulers, the Government yielded

to a sinister wave of barbaric feeling in the nation—a martial frenzy

that impelled to the Crimean War. Since that period wars have originated

from other causes than the will of the nation. Our people, immersed in a

painful struggle for livelihood at home, are indifferent to the rights

and wrongs of the many squabbles into which we flounder abroad. General

malevolence has no part in this matter; our real collective attitude

towards foreigners is one of friendliness, combined with an impulse to

the peaceful exchange of commodities, kind words and gentle arts—the

whole provocative of love, not hatred.

The fundamental causes of war, then, have been: first, the commercial

interests of a capitalist class, or, if expressed in terms of feeling,

the desire in that class for increased wealth—a desire partly the

product of inherited rapacity, a sentiment descended to us from our

militant epoch; second, national pride—a pride which has kindled

animosities, embroiled us in disputes and dragged us into wars, the

pettiness of whose small beginnings is only matched by the pettiness of

British conduct throughout their whole extent. But both this rapacity

and this national pride belong almost exclusively to our ruling classes.

Their existence is explained by the action of outward conditions on

special sections of the community. The British passed suddenly out of a

period of constant fighting and feud into a period of frantic industrial

activity. Feudal chiefs and their descendants became grasping landlords.

There also sprang up a class of sharp-witted, keen-sighted men, whose

native rapacity strengthened in the genial hot-bed of our brilliant

commercial success. A tremendous start in the international race after

wealth was secured to Great Britain by her possession of iron, coal,

etc. She absorbed riches from every quarter of the globe, and mercantile

triumph swelled the pride already deeply implanted in our industrial

organizers, our politicians and plenipotentiaries. The great mass of the

people were differently affected by industrial conditions. Workers of

every description, packed together in towns and factories, rapidly

developed the qualities of intimate social life, and out-grew, in the

main, the savage instincts of militancy. Our commercial wars and

Imperialistic policy are fruits—not of the nation’s brutality, its

greed, or its pride, but of its simple ignorance and its blind trust in

individuals peculiarly unfitted by inheritance and personal bias to

guide it aright in relations with other, and especially with weaker,

nations. All the wars of recent times—a record of cruel bloodshed

causing needless sorrow and suffering to the innocent—have been

instigated by the ruling classes under the dominion of rapacity and

pride. When these ruling classes are dispossessed of supreme power, and

civilized democracies assume public responsibility with political

supremacy, the day of disarming of nations will dawn. The world’s

workers who, apart from their rulers, have no tendency to undue

accumulation or national pride, but whose bias, on the contrary, is

towards sympathetic co-operation in industry, will strenuously seek the

joys and blessings of universal peace.

But although the war-spirit of the ancient Briton dies out and general

brutality declines, individual brutality, practised privately, is common

enough. Class tyranny, sex tyranny, and much of domestic tyranny are

rampant; and the co-relative feelings, viz. abject fear giving rise to

hatred, anger, malice, cunning and despicable meanness of soul, are all

strongly in evidence.

The industrial system that succeeded our military system is of no

genuinely social type. It is distinctly contentious, and when we

consider how it has pressed for about a century upon a plastic race

inwardly prone to every vice engendered by militancy, the matter for

surprise perhaps is that we are as good as we are.

In classifying emotional states there is a sentiment which, if not

begotten, has at least been bred, nourished and widely diffused during

our industrial epoch—I mean the sentiment, love of property. On no

subject are opposite opinions more strongly and disputatiously held than

on the question of the nature and value of this sentiment. It is claimed

by some as not only the chief support of present-day society, but the

prime evolutional factor of our entire civilization. A savage only cares

to secure the things he is in immediate need of. He lacks imagination to

picture what he may want to-morrow, also intelligence to provide for

future contingencies and sympathetic desire to provide for the wants of

others.

No sooner, however, does an established government give safe protection

to individual property than prudence and forethought appear. The man who

acquires property soon surrounds himself with comforts, and inspires in

others the desire to follow his example. Social wealth accumulates, and

energies are set free for further development. Some social units become

complex, intellectual tastes and love of travel arise, and works of

art—the treasure-trove of earlier civilizations—are impounded to lay the

foundation of artistic life in the later civilization. Aesthetic culture

now grows rapidly. Painting, poetry, music abound, and men may be lifted

above the meaner cares of existence to an inward freedom, where sympathy

expands through the exercise of elevated thought and feeling. Is not

love of property, then, a sentiment to honour and conserve? Its genesis

and history certainly command respect; but the already quoted case of

the Podhalians proves that by no means is it an essential in human

evolution. To that primitive people, as Dr. Le Bon has shown, riches

have no charms; they are poor, living principally upon oats made into

cakes and goat’s milk. They enjoy perfect health and live long. They are

quick in apprehension, fond of dancing, singing, music and poetry. There

is clearly no development here of the property-sense, yet the Podhalians

have a very considerable development of that group of emotions we term

aesthetic and regard as an evidence of high refinement and culture. We

are not therefore logically entitled to claim that were British love of

property and British cupidity greatly diminished, art as a consequence

must needs decay and the race revert into barbarism.

Herbert Spencer tells us “that in some established societies there has

been a constant exercise of the feeling which is satisfied by a

provision for the future, and a growth of this feeling so great that it

now prompts accumulation to an extent beyond what is needful.” (1st vol.

of _Essays_, 2nd series, p. 132.)

That point has been overpassed by the British. What we have now to

struggle against are varied evils arising from a glut of national wealth

(but I do not mean by this term commodities of intrinsic value, only

wealth representing an acknowledged claim on the labour of others) and a

frightful inflation of the sentiments allied with wealth, which at one

time were useful, but for generations have been producing outward vice

and inward misery and corruption.

The British merchant goes on accumulating long after he has amply

provided for himself and family, and many a poor man feels towards that

other’s wealth precisely as a savage feels towards his fetish. He is

filled with reverence, admiration, desire and a sense of distance from

the golden calf that makes him hopeless, abject, despairing.

The American millionaire, as depicted by Mr. Howells, will, “on a hot

day, when the mortal glare of the sun blazes in upon heart and brain,

plot and plan in his New York office till he swoons at the desk.” Such a

man is as much a victim to over-development of acquisitiveness as the

drunkard is victim to an undue development of the love of stimulants,

and in each case the depraved taste carries ruin to the individual and

havoc into society. Social unity is rent in twain. A life of exuberant

wealth and extravagant expenditure runs parallel with one of constant,

inescapable poverty, and so long as the nation continues to heap up

riches in private possession, just so long must we reap an emotional

harvest of envy, malice, private animosities, class hatreds and a subtle

estrangement of heart throughout the length and breadth of the land. Yet

even the great poet Tennyson in his writings exalts into a worthy motive

for holy wedlock this sentiment—love of property. An affectionate

father, in the poem, “The Sisters,” exhorts his daughters thus: “One

should marry, or ... all the broad lands will pass collaterally”!

The small accumulator whose petty hoard of gold was gloated over piece

by piece has long been labelled miser. He is publicly condemned, and in

literature derided. But the merchant-prince who, already wealthy,

devotes days and years and his whole mind and heart to business; the

proprietor of broad lands who adds acre to acre, and anxiously meditates

on their passing collaterally; the rich capitalist who craftily seeks to

lower wages in the interests of employers; the gambler on the Stock

Exchange; the market manipulator whose predatory instincts are so

pleasurably excited by risks and gains that he will hazard in the game

all that nobler men hold precious—these beings, I say, are as worthy of

scorn and infinitely more baneful than the miser. They must take their

true place by his side in public estimation. They are social

deformities, morally diseased. In other words, these men are incapable

of moral duty, which consists in “the observance of those rules of

conduct that contribute to the welfare of society—the end of society

being peace and mutual protection, so that the individual may reach the

fullest and highest life attainable by man.” (_Huxley’s Life_, vol. ii.

p. 305.)

In the preceding chapter I have shown that the self-regarding

sentiment exercised with due consideration for the welfare of others

is a social virtue. It promotes national prosperity and personal

improvement. But self-regarding actions, induced by this

master-passion over-acquisitiveness, invariably issue in automatic

selfishness and general deterioration.

In regard to aesthetic emotions also the cleavage between rich and poor

has a fatal significance. A luxurious, idle, for the most part, inane,

life led by the rich, profoundly influences the poor; not by creating

anti-social feeling only, but by checking aesthetic development. In the

city of many slums there is also a west-end of gay shops filled with

objects _de luxe_, of showily dressed women, profligate men, theatre,

music-hall and ball-room entrances, at which to stand gazing as into a

fairy peep-show. Suggestion here plays a mischievous part. Poverty

hinders the purchase of all commodities that possess any real artistic

value, but commercial enterprise has flooded the markets with

meretricious imitations. East-end shops reflect the glitter and glow of

west-end attractions, and the ignorant, spell-bound by suggestion,

become possessors of that which degrades and vulgarizes taste or the

sense of the beautiful. Now that science partially dominates thought,

our eyes have been opened to the fact of essential unity in human

groups. We may trace the cause of a social evil to a special section or

class, but the effects of that cause radiate forth till they touch

_every_ section or class. Dwellers in the west-end cannot escape disease

propagated by the vilely unwholesome conditions of life at the east-end.

Micro-organisms of disease are wafted from hither to thither, and on the

physical plane social unity is recognized. A like continuity exists on

the non-physical side. Minds are as closely united by psychical law as

bodies by physical law. The experienced facts of hypnotism make this

clear, and the logical inference is that in Western civilization the

vices of wealthy classes infect and corrupt the masses.

That the imagination of the great mass of our people should be snared

and their evolutional progress thwarted by mental suggestion from a

banal, vicious life led by a comparatively small portion of the nation,

is an outrage on civilization. It renders it imperative that the cause

of this evil, viz., our contentious, i.e. our competitive system of

industry, should be fundamentally changed.

For every group of human beings the steady growth of those social

qualities which create happiness and the steady advance in intellectual,

aesthetic and spiritual life, depend on a close community of interests

and the constant opening up of fresh channels of sympathy throughout the

group. But the British racial group has lost this community of

interests—this primary condition of steady growth. It is split up into,

first, a class of property possessors made effeminate by ill-spent

leisure, often inflated by pride, and at all times demanding the

artificial pleasures of a luxurious life; second, a class striving to

amass property, a class whose thoughts and desires circle round and

centre in property, and who to acquire it often sacrifice serenity of

mind, health of body, and even life itself; and third, the mass of the

people who, having no property, are yet enslaved by it, and who on the

emotional side of their human nature are debased and corrupted by the

mental state of the classes.

As evolution approaches the era of manhood of human reason it becomes

conscious, and demands a national effort to improve. That effort first

appears in the strenuous, scientific study of life as it is, in attempts

at social reconstruction, and at improvement in public and private

education. It is seen to be necessary to stamp out all the militant and

predatory instincts of mankind by ethical nurture and training, while

all the gentle, gracious qualities of mankind must be carefully guarded

and nourished, until, in every social unit the effort to improve is

habitual, i.e. has become “the essential mode of its being.” (J. McGavin

Sloan.)

CHAPTER III

PERSONAL JEALOUSY—NATIONAL PATRIOTISM

“Jealousy is cruel as the grave.”

We shall progress faster by diligent striving to fashion the feeling

of the time and stir it from the intellectual apathy which is the

chiefest curse of the State.—ALEX. M. THOMSON.

The danger that confronts the new century is the recrudescence of

racial antipathies and national animosities.—HERMANN ADLER.

The passion of jealousy has a long and significant history, and a

pedigree more ancient than the allied sentiment, love of property, which

has just been considered. The passion was useful to the welfare of the

tribe at an early period, but it survives as purely a vice in the midst

of consolidated nations, for it is essentially anti-social, not

necessary to general welfare, and impossible to be exercised

sympathetically or for the good of others. If I am jealous it means that

I have a source of personal delight that I would guard from others and

monopolise if I could. The happiness may be self-produced or rest on a

being whom I love. In both cases it causes within me fears of

interference, suspicion of my fellows, and a general tendency to

dislike, nay, even to hate them if they dare to meddle with my secret

joy. The emotion is fundamentally selfish, and when an individual is

sympathetic all round he becomes incapable of it. He has risen above the

egoistic passion of jealousy.

Mr. Darwin tells us that amongst savages addicted to “intemperance,

utter licentiousness and unnatural crimes, no sooner does marriage,

whether polygamous or monogamous, become common than jealousy leads to

the inculcation of female virtue.” This gives the clue to the problem of

jealousy’s evolutional value. It has played a part in the destiny of

woman, and tended to shape her emotional nature. Its history is

inextricably intertwined with hers, in all the varying degrees of

servitude that mark her slow advance from a condition of absolute

chattelism to one of rational equality with man.

By virtue of superior strength man has acted on the theory that he was

made for God, and woman for him! and in the process of establishing his

dominancy jealousy appeared and aided powerfully the gradual development

of a new emotion—constancy, a social grace and virtue as certain to wax

and grow as jealousy is to wane and slowly disappear.

In literature one finds a reflection of the entire history of jealousy

and all its consecutive changes from barbarous times through the ages,

when frequent duels witnessed to the honourable place it held in public

estimation down to the present day, when it is somewhat discredited, and

duelling—in Great Britain at least—has ceased altogether. To track this

history were impossible here; I can only point to one or two significant

pictures.

The play of “Othello” depicts the barbarous social conditions in which

jealousy flourishes. Shakespeare reveals both the anti-social nature of

the passion and the intellectual weakness of the mind that harbours it.

“Trifles light as air,” says Iago, “are to the jealous confirmation

strong as proofs of holy writ.” And in effect Othello is incapable of

sifting evidence. The poor device of the stolen handkerchief seals the

fate of Desdemona! Woman’s subject position is plainly set forth, and

the foundations of the passion in masculine master-hood and pride of

power are fully exposed. Othello’s wife must be his slave and puppet.

“Out of my sight,” he cries, and patiently she goes. “Mistress,” he

calls, and she returns. “You did wish,” he says to Lodovico, “that I

would make her turn.” Desdemona is the very type of patient, gentle,

enslaved womanhood, the ideal woman of a rough, brutal age. Her father

describes her as—

A maiden never bold;

Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion

Blush’d at herself.

Observe, however, inwardly she is more advanced than the men. She

perceives the low nature of jealousy, and to Emilia says touchingly, “My

noble Moor is true of mind, and made of no such baseness as jealous

creatures are.” Alas, for her generous confidence! And when the base

passion transforms her “noble Moor” into a monster of cruelty, she, true

to the type of her sex at the period, resembles a pet dog that fawns

upon and licks the hand that strikes him. This patient moan is all her

utterance—

’Tis meet I should be used so, very meet,

How have I been behaved that he might stick

The small’st opinion on my least misuse.

The only dignity she shows is in her refusal to display her sorrow

before Emilia:

Do not talk to me, Emilia;

I cannot weep, nor answer I have none.

Jealousy and duelling flourished long after the Shakesperian period.

Prose fiction in the eighteenth century is full of the subject of

masculine rivalry in the appropriation of the female sex. The woman

passionately desired is the prize or reward of a victory in which the

hero has manifested adroitness in arts of bloodshed. Feminine will plays

no part in the decision to which man the heroine shall belong, and the

rivals for her possession make no pretence of superior character as a

claim on her favour. The gentle spiritual qualities that alone create

union of heart and mind seem unknown. Master-hood, an apotheosis of

force, is the key to the drama; and the rapid rise of the novel in

public esteem shows that pleasurable sensations were closely allied with

the barbarous actions and feelings that belong to a militant age.

Early in the nineteenth century George Eliot draws the hero of her first

great novel (_Adam Bede_) in the act of picking a quarrel with a rival

for a woman’s love. She shows jealousy in him springing chiefly from a

sense of property in Hetty. The wounded pride and self-importance of a

too despotic nature finds relief in fighting Arthur Donnithorne. In

_Middlemarch_ the transition to a higher stage of evolution is marked.

She gives us there a graphic picture of a woman wrestling with jealousy

in the secrecy of her own chamber, and correctly places in the tenderly

emotional nature of that sex the primary impulse to subdue the vile

passion. Female jealousy made no appeal to arms, but in a thousand

subtle ways it was sending forth currents of anti-social force, and

without a widespread feminine repudiation of jealousy no clear advance

to higher social life was possible. Dorothea is a true type of

progressing womanhood. She gains a victory in the noble warfare we see

her waging inwardly, and, rising far above the vile passion, she goes

forth to her rival in a glow of generous emotion that not only compels

the confidence of the latter, but for the time draws that selfish,

narrow nature up to the level of her own.

There is no false note in this picture, and if we glance at the

transcript of real life at the period we may easily find its

counterpart. The well-known writer, Mrs. Jamieson (in her _Commonplace

Book_) relates: “I was not more than six years old when I suffered, from

the fear of not being loved, and from the idea that another was

preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me! Whether those

around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper or a fit of illness I do

not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered

me, but I never forgot that suffering. It left a deep impression, and

the recollection was so far salutary that in after life I guarded myself

against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonizing thing which

men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If

such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has

saved me from the demoralizing effects of the passion, by a wholesome

terror and even a sort of disgust.”

The knell of a departing phase of inner life was sounding when womanhood

acquired the power to sift evidence from childish recollections, to

detect the utter uselessness of the suffering jealousy creates and the

ignominy of allowing it to become a cause of suffering at all.

Mrs. Jamieson stands on the threshold of a new era, for critical

intellect here enters the sphere of the emotions, and these, yielding to

guidance and control, human reason is henceforth a prime factor in

emotional evolution.

But further, sympathy when developed to a certain point inevitably leads

men astray if not guided by reason. Let me here relate a sequence of

events that occurred in my own experience.

Two girls became deeply attached; they worked and studied together, and

their friendship was a source of constant joy. In course of time,

however, one married, and the other girl felt forsaken. She suffered

from jealousy, and imagined that the husband would suffer similarly if

she kept her place in her friend’s affections. A husband’s right

amounted, in her view, to a monopoly of a wife’s tenderness. She strove,

therefore, to loosen the bond of friendship; to cool her own ardent

affection and make no claims, lest it should disturb conjugal bliss. The

action was brave and prompted by sympathy, but it did not make for

happiness. In a few short years the wife on her deathbed spoke thus to

her former friend: “Why did you separate yourself from me? How could you

think my love would change? I have been happy in my husband and child,

but love never narrowed, it widened me. There was plenty of room for

friendship, too. I sorely missed you, and felt your loss threw a shadow

over my married life.”

Sympathy alone, then, is no unerring guide to conduct. Nevertheless, in

a society permeated by true knowledge of the nature of the emotions and

their significance in evolution primitive good-feeling may evolve,

passing through each stage from the basic or simple to the complex, and

every generous emotion prove accordant with the truth of things, and

therefore productive of inward joy and outward right action, i.e. action

tending to general welfare even in all the labyrinthine complexities of

a high civilization. _Emotion accordant with the truth of things_—that

is the crux of the position; and again I can best illustrate the point

by reference to events that occurred within my own knowledge—events,

too, by no means uncommon. During eight years a girl was engaged to

marry a man we shall call Roger. He was in India and she in England.

They corresponded, but meanwhile an intimacy sprang up between the girl

and another man—we may call him Mark—to whom unwittingly her heart went

out more warmly than it had ever done to Roger. She thought the relation

to Mark was one of pure friendship, and he knew nothing of her

engagement to Roger. The latter’s approaching return to England,

however, opened the girl’s eyes to her true position, and on Mark it

fell as a cruel blow. He had courted affection and responded to it in

all sincerity, and was merely withheld from an open avowal by the

consciousness of, as yet, insufficient means to justify his suit in the

eyes of her parents. When concealment was at an end the problem to him

seemed simple enough. “Which do you love best?” he asked, and added

dominantly, “he is the man you should marry.” The girl was not

convinced. The knowledge that she could not love Roger best filled her

with tenderness towards him. Her emotional nature—wide enough to embrace

both rivals with sympathy—could give no decision, and intellect was

confused by false teaching in childhood. “Duty,” she thought, “is always

difficult; ought I not then to choose the hardest path of the two before

me, and give up Mark?” In this grave dilemma she turned for advice to an

elderly man on whose judgment she felt reliance. Bravely and truthfully

she stated her case, innocently betraying that ignorance and the wish to

do right were dangerously near carrying her into action that was wrong.

“Let us reverse the position,” said her mentor. “Roger, we shall

suppose, has written to you to come out to India and marry him, the fact

being he has fallen in love with another girl. He did not mean to do

that. His heart slipped away from you to her unconsciously, and he is

shocked, and blames himself, not wholly without cause. But being an

honourable man, he reasons with himself thus: ‘I am bound to keep my

engagement to Mary; I will do so, and strive to make her happy.’ He

meets you then with a lie in his heart, not on his tongue, for he will

say nothing of your rival and of his sacrifice and pain. Would you be

happy, think you? Would you miss nothing? And if later you discovered

the truth, would you feel that the generous action was a just one to

you?” “No, no,” she cried, “I never could wish him to sacrifice his

happiness to mine; I would infinitely rather he told me the truth, and

married the other girl.” “Precisely so,” said her friend, “the truth is

always best; but I see you think Roger is less unselfish than you are!

Is that just to him?” “I hardly know,” she murmured, “men are jealous,

are they not?” “Jealous, ah, well, we men are frail, no doubt! But were

I Roger, I tell you frankly, it would not mend matters to me that I had

won my wife without the priceless jewel of her love. Be true to

yourself, my young friend, that means also justice to him, and fling to

the winds all fears that make you swerve from the path of open

rectitude.” The girl fulfilled her difficult task. She relinquished the

heroic mood, met her first lover with perfect candour, and a short time

later became Mark’s wife. “Roger freed me at once,” she said to her wise

mentor; “he’d rather have my friendship, which is perfectly sincere,

than love with a strain of falseness. Oh, I am glad, and yet I know he

grieves; I would give much to be able to console him!” “Ah,” said her

friend, “beware of sentimentality and self-importance there. Roger’s

consolation will come through his own true heart. In time he will love

again. See to it that you ‘let the dead past bury its dead.’”

Loyalty to truth is not firmly rooted in humanity, while without truth

as its guiding principle social feeling, constantly rising, overflows

old channels and floods with new dangers the semi-civilization of the

present. There is no escape at this juncture from the absolute necessity

of developing the critical faculty and applying it to the social

questions of the day; in other words, using reason, intelligence,

knowledge, as the guides and controllers of feeling.

We turn now from personal emotions to an emotion that sways mankind

collectively, and manifests itself in still more direful results than

those of individual jealousy. Patriotism, like jealousy, is of ancient

origin, and at one time possessed social utility. Without it there could

hardly have occurred the transformation of vagrant tribes into massive

communities solidly established on one portion of the earth’s surface

and sectionally swarming to other portions as occasion requires.

The original element holding a tribe together has been termed by a

recent sociologist “consciousness of kind,” i.e. a feeling not dependent

on intellectual congeniality or emotional sympathy, but simply on

nearness in place, time and blood. With tribal growth cohesion proves

necessary to self-protection from adverse environments, whether of

natural forces, wild animals or human foes. Experience reveals that

union is strength, and hostility to other tribes fosters union in

opposition. The inward attitude becomes complex; it embraces cohesion

and repulsion; it is essentially a _union in enmity_. Now we have seen

how in boyhood an innocent camaraderie or _esprit de corps_ begets

injustice to schoolmasters, and balks the development of the modern

conscience; similarly here there are ethical dangers inseparable from a

sentiment that beginning in “consciousness of kind” expands into

sociality, yet has a converse side of hostility and hate. At the present

day patriotism and international warfare are closely combined. The

student of life who knows that the general trend of evolution is towards

a reign of universal peace, recognizes that although nations have been

consolidated by outward warfare and inward patriotism, this sentiment,

so limited in range and so largely anti-social, can be no virtue for all

time. Patriotism belongs to the militant stage of national history, and

as regards Great Britain it is plainly out of date. Its action is not

good, but evil.

The war in South Africa begun in 1899 was not caused by racial enmity,

but by mercantile enterprise. Economic forces involved in Great

Britain’s competitive commercial system were the prime factors in its

creation, but without the existence of a vague unintelligent patriotic

sentiment in the country generally the Government would not have been

supported by the people in the prosecution of that war. Our enfranchised

masses, fired by a sudden enthusiasm and racked by sympathy in the brave

deeds and cruel sufferings of our soldiers and sailors, saw the

phantasmagoria of modern warfare in false colours. Imagination was

grasped and controlled by a press working—though half-unconsciously—in

the interests of a special mercantile class; and while tender emotions

overflowed in generous help to one’s own kind, a sympathy stimulated by

public laudation, the reverse side of the picture was ignored. But in

this, as in all wars, sympathy had its counterpoise in antagonism and

rancorous enmity. All the brutal instincts latent in a race that had

fought its way to supremacy among European Powers were roused afresh and

stirred into fatal activity, and the evolving modern conscience and

sentiments of justice, honour, truth towards all men, were checked and

overborne by a loyalty that condones the fierce primitive passions.

Hatred and uncharitableness were even voiced from some pulpits, and the

term Pro-Boer was opprobriously launched at those lovers of peace who

tried to defend their country’s foes from exaggerated blame. It was

skilfully handled to promote militant enthusiasm, and discountenance all

criticism of militant action and feeling.

On the emotional side of human nature inimical effects of warfare were

wholly disregarded, and opinions on the subject of war given forth by a

so-called educated class of men and eagerly imbibed by an ignorant

public were confused, often false and shamefully misleading. One of

these pseudo-teachers alleged that the wars of past times indicated

chronic disease, but militarism in the present was useful, because in

the home-life of the nation the restraints of authority are becoming

weak (Capt. Mahan). And an eminent statesman announced his impression

that the South African war was “designed to build up those moral

qualities which are after all the only solid and the only permanent

foundation on which any empire can be built”! (Mr. Balfour’s speech at

Manchester; _Scotsman’s_ Report, January 9, 1900.)

But the true method of judging an event is to exercise comparison,

taking into account a far greater mass of social phenomena than that of

the immediate present. Now the careful study of past history has proved

that an outbreak of militant fraternity, combined with indulgence in the

principle of enmity, leaves a society less fraternal than before in

regard to the labours of peace and of building up; and against the claim

that military training is a good preparation for civic life there lies

the whole testimony of civilization. Further, the survival of militancy

frustrates the solving of our great social problems, and the recent

relapse to the militarist ideal is a grave hindrance to that social

science which would provide the true ways of humanizing defective types.

(I refer my reader for a fuller statement on these lines to Mr. J. M.

Robertson’s _Patriotism and Empire_.) “After Waterloo,” says Mr.

Robertson, “it seems to have been realized by the intelligence of Europe

that militarism and imperialism had alike pierced the hands that leant

on them.” Nevertheless, they reappeared, as we know, galvanized into

fatal activity in human affairs, at the close of the nineteenth century.

Again, the action of international capitalism and the ideal of

imperialism have been analysed from the standpoint of social philosophy

by Mr. J. A. Hobson, an advanced and logical thinker on economic

questions. His conclusion is that the driving forces of aggressive

imperialism are the organized influences of certain professional and

commercial classes which have definite economic advantages to gain by

assuming a spurious patriotism, and the most potent of all these

influences emanates from the financier. The power of financiers, exerted

directly upon politicians and indirectly through the press upon public

opinion, is, perhaps, so says Mr. Hobson, the most serious problem in

public life to-day.[5]

Footnote 5:

The _Contemporary Review_ of January, 1900.

It is not by sanguinary conflicts in which victory turns on superior

numbers, superior arms, and superior cunning in military tactics, that a

nation’s greatness is built up at this period of the world’s history.

What progress demands is not more of national wealth and international

power; it is a better system of industrial life and a finer type of

humanity—men and women of clear intellectual insight, high moral

courage, unselfish instincts and humane sentiments guiltless of narrow

exclusiveness. These men and women, discerning ideally the best methods

of building up a nation’s greatness _on the happiness of its people_,

will aid our half-civilized races to embody that ideal on the physical

plane, and to educate their children to live up to it and show forth all

its beauty.

In the mental basis of a high spiritual life even now our children are a

reproach, for here and there they emit sparks indicative of embryonic

sentiment in advance of practice around them. At the height of the Boer

War a child in his nursery on being told that his nurse was opening a

tin of boar’s head for breakfast, exclaimed, every feature quivering

with sudden disgust, “Catch me eat my enemy’s head.”

When a nation repudiates with similar disgust that wholesale destruction

of life, which is no whit less evil than the cannibalism of an earlier

date, then will war and patriotism cease to be—their place taken by a

civilization standing firm on the foundation of human happiness and

love.

Given such outward conditions of life as are favourable to a freer

exercise of the noblest social attributes and impulses of man, and the

ethical temper will prevail. By ethical temper I mean not only the

absence of all animosities that engender conflict, but the presence of a

strong sense of personal rights and an equally strong protectiveness

over the rights of others—a national impulse, in short, to an

equivalence of liberty and social comfort for all mankind. But this

justice is a supremely complex emotion—the one of all others that

demands most of human capacity. It rests upon mental development, i.e. a

universal enlargement of mind.

Industrial changes there must be, but these alone will not secure

progress; we need _true education_, for in the deeper strata of

existence—the region of feeling, the movements of change must be guided

from the old order to the new. Hence the vital importance of moral

education—an education that will create an intelligent appreciation of

truth wherever presented, and bind all men together in loyalty to truth.

_PART V_

EDUCATION

OR

DIRECT TRAINING OF CHILDHOOD TO THE CIVILIZED HABIT OF MIND

We acquire the virtues by doing the acts.

We become builders by building.

ARISTOTLE.

EDUCATION

Next in importance to the inborn nature is the acquired nature which a

person owes to his education and training; not alone to the education

which is called learning, but to that development of character which

has been evoked by the conditions of life.—Dr. H. MAUDSLEY.

We are beginning to realize the responsibilities that rest on each

generation of adults in respect of the life evolving around us. It is

not merely the structure and texture of civilization that is affected by

every passing generation, it is the intrinsic quality of the human life

to follow.

We have seen how the laws of heredity largely decide the physical

embodiment of the coming lives as a resultant of the reproductive action

of parents whether motived by ethical principle or by unrestrained

animal passion. We have now to consider the second great human factor in

man’s evolution, viz. nurture or education, which depends in its highest

terms upon sound knowledge and the application of that knowledge by men

and women of the period. In an advanced scientific age, the reproductive

forces of man will be socially controlled and guided to the creation of

normal, i.e. healthy, physical life; while the whole apparatus of

nurture, or the entire range of influence, playing upon childhood, will

manifest a rational adaptation of means to a special end, namely, the

elevation of humanity.

Adaptation necessarily becomes more difficult with the growing

complexities of evolving humanity, but never has man’s intellect been

stronger than to-day to grapple with difficult problems, or so furnished

with the facts required in dealing with this problem of education.

The marvellous scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century and the

practical uses to which these discoveries are put, have created in man a

new attitude towards external nature. All Western nations partake of the

scientific bent. They are interpenetrated by reverence for science, and

are conscious that its method of close observation and study of nature

is the direct road to material progress. This bent is influencing school

education. There are few thoughtful teachers to-day who do not recognize

that some hours spent at intervals in country lanes and fields, on the

sea-shore, or in a farm-yard, with children free to observe according to

native impulse, when followed by careful instruction concerning the

objects observed, are of far more value than weeks of book-learning

indoors.

In many parts of America “nature-studies” on this plan are worked into

the public school curriculum.[6] But adaptation implies also a fuller

knowledge of the rudimentary faculties which are to be scientifically

nurtured, and here again America has taken the lead. In its

“child-study” movement, now spreading in this country, an effort is made

to apprehend nature’s processes in unfolding mental powers; and the

inference is that teachers may thwart progress by traversing the true

order of mental development. This clearly indicates the entrance of a

scientific spirit into the field of education. It shows regard for the

order of nature, willingness to be guided by knowledge of that order,

and a conviction that the laws of a child’s inner being must be

respected and no arbitrary compulsion exercised in bringing him into

harmony with the laws of the environment.

Footnote 6:

The schools of to-day are made more and more into miniature worlds

where children are taught how to live. The actual industries of the

world as well as its art galleries, museums and parks are being

utilized as part of public school equipment. The children are taken to

the shops, the markets, the gardens, etc. _The New Spirit of

Education_, by Arthur Henry, _Munsey’s Magazine_, 1902.

A child’s capacities, however, are not centred in his intellect. On the

passional side of his being, his spontaneous impulses of desire, fear,

joy, grief, love, hatred, jealousy, etc., have to be studied, and

educative forces found for their guidance and control. Moreover, the

ultimate aim is not his subjection to fixed rules of life, but the

establishment within the heart of the child of a supreme rule over all

his passions. And again, every child has characteristics indicative of

the course of development undergone by the special race to which he

belongs. The geographical position and primitive industry of that race,

its conquests and failures in struggling upwards from savagery to a

measure of civilization—all have left an impress in specific effects.

In respect of our formal methods of giving instruction there is much

that is open to discussion; but the points usually raised are the best

means of teaching grammar, history, geography, arithmetic, and so forth,

not the far more important question of how best to achieve an all-round

development in face of the organic unity and marvellous multiplicity of

qualities in the child of a civilized race. Great improvement has taken

place in every branch of school teaching both as regards the knowledge

of teachers and the methods they adopt in imparting the knowledge;

nevertheless, these improvements are minor matters as compared with the

general question before us.

During the rise and progress of our industrial system based on

individualism, the constant fluctuations of trade, the competing of

machinery against human labour, the perpetual danger of getting thrown

out of work, the utter failure of thrift as any protection from

intermittent poverty—have been factors eminently calculated to produce a

highly nervous type of humanity. Children of that type may happily prove

bright and eager amid wretched surroundings, but it were folly to expect

them to show any impulse towards a high standard of living, any outlook

beyond the immediate present, or any inherent check upon action socially

immoral.

On the other hand, our city workers have sprung mainly from an

agricultural class whose scattered families presented the defects of a

low order of life reared in isolation. Many of these defects have been

counteracted by segregation within towns, however unfavourable in other

directions that may have proved. The close proximity of beings affected

by the same fateful conditions, the actual sorrowing and rejoicing

together have expanded the emotional nature and engendered true

sympathy. Professor Huxley once said, “It is futile to expect a hungry

and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.” Yet we

have an immense population of workers, often hungry, and at all times

environed more or less by squalor, whose average character is not

violent and gross, but distinctly humane.

Turning from the masses to the classes we find some points of difference

between the rich and the poor, viz. differences following from the

diverse industrial conditions. Leisure, as commanded by the rich, has

made mental development possible wherever desire prompted intellectual

effort, and the magnificent record of last century’s achievements in

discovery of truth, acquisition of knowledge, and promotion of artistic

skill, is a gain to the world at large—a gain made possible by

accumulation of wealth unequally distributed. But intellectual faculty

has frequently been depraved through its devotion to wealth production.

The true aims of life are lost sight of by chiefs of industry whose

emotional nature has hardened under the daily spectacle of struggling

fellow-beings, on whose labour their fortunes are built up. The dignity

of useful labour has had no vogue in general education. An opposite

principle—that the highest dignity consists in being served by others

and in possessing the means of constraining and exploiting the labour of

others, is impressed on the children of our classes by the whole play of

circumstance around them. The property-sense has become unduly

developed, and a selfish mammon-worship holds the place which an

altruistic public spirit ought to hold in the inner life of a civilized

people. It is true that a showy charity—a patronage by the rich of the

poor—is everywhere present throughout society, but that which creates

and supports it is a sentiment wholly different from the simple kindness

of the poor to the poor. It is without the essential features of that

charity that “vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not her

own ... thinketh no evil.”

Now the scientific spirit of to-day, in observing the uncontrolled play

of middle-class children, has discovered how great is their interest and

joy in the spontaneous exercise of the faculty of make-believe. Costly

toys will readily be thrown aside to take part in a game of “pretended”

housekeeping or shopkeeping, or acting the part of father, mother,

nursemaid, or cook. And herein there lies, says one of our advanced

teachers, “a powerful hint how to keep children’s attention alive while

cultivating to the utmost their imaginative, observing, constructive and

correlating faculties. We must dramatize our school education and

connect school ideally with real life.” (Mr. Howard Swan; his

introductory lecture at the opening of Bedford Park School.)

But the “powerful hint” goes deeper. It points to an instinct or a

deeply implanted desire and capacity for actual work on the part of

children of a practical race. To play at work is pleasurable, to do work

more pleasurable still. Yet in blindness to the fact that in drawing out

into action every rudimentary faculty favourable to happy life lies the

true path of education or an all-round development, society has shut off

middle and upper-class children from the sight and hearing of household

labour. In nurseries, amid artificial toys, their daily routine is to

seek amusement self-centred; and as in these days of small rather than

large families, nursery children are often solitary, there is a

systematic repression both of natural activities and infolded natural

emotions. The same repressions are carried forward into school life.

Dramatized teaching may connect school ideally with real life, but it

cannot satisfy a child’s cravings for the real, and the companionship of

children of similar age will never call out the complex forces of a

many-sided emotional nature. It is not playing at life that is required

for education, it is the sharing of life’s duties of service, and

constant opportunity given for the practice of varied humanities.

The children of our superior workers may perchance fare better if the

mother is a capable woman, and the home not overcrowded. The lighter

parts of her work are shared by the little ones, and to help mother in

sweeping and dusting, washing cups and saucers, and placing them neatly

in the cupboard, etc., are not only interesting and useful occupations,

they are educative, for they imply a simultaneous training of the eye,

the fingers, the mental faculties and the heart. But overcrowding, the

miserable housing of the poor, and the early age at which infant

school-life begins, makes such home-training difficult even to the best

of mothers, while to the upper classes—frost-bound in artificial

domestic customs, all home-training seems impossible.

Nothing, however, should deter a student of evolution from proclaiming

that the home-life of our people will largely decide the nation’s

future. Unless the great problem of the housing of the poor is rightly

solved, and unless educated women become roused to the necessity of a

changed home-life in the interests of their children, and set themselves

voluntarily to the task of domestic reform within their own circle, the

social state can never be greatly improved.

All children born in a civilized nation have a right to education. That

this principle has been fully acknowledged is evidenced by our

Educational Acts and the innumerable Board Schools that stud the

country. But as long as population among the masses rises without check,

the highest aim of education, viz. the development and elevation of

individual character must, as regards their children, remain in

abeyance. The only practicable line of action is to gather them together

into large schools, and while bestowing general instruction in reading,

writing, arithmetic, etc., to subject them to some hours of systematic

guidance and control. This signifies obedience to rule and order—a

useful discipline to juveniles of Bohemian nature, and it is the only

method of restraining tendencies to licence, without rousing a spirit of

revolt. Fresh air, wholesome food, ample bathing, and the play of

sunlight and colour upon nerves of sensation—these stimulate bodily

health, while music, and the personal influence of high-minded teachers,

throw into vibration finer nerves of sensibility, and elevate the mental

and moral tone. But beyond this point, large schools are incapable of

scientific adaptation to the needs of a modern education in a rapidly

socializing community.

It was in the year 1837 that there issued from the press a work on

education written by Isaac Taylor, who there lays down this proposition:

“If large schools were granted to be generally better adapted to the

practical ends of education than private instruction, the welfare of

society on the whole demands also the other method. The school-bred man

is of one sort, the home-bred man of another—the community has need of

both. Hence no tyranny of fashion is more to be resisted than such as

would render a public education compulsory and universal.”[7]

Notwithstanding this warning, the tyranny of fashion is carrying us

yearly more and more into the production of school-bred women, as well

as school-bred men. Our girls’ high schools are replicas of our boys’

public schools, and society suffers still more from the loss of the

home-bred woman than the home-bred man.

Footnote 7:

_Home Education_, p. 22.

Again, the late Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson, in his charmingly-written

_Day-dreams of a Schoolmaster_, gives us the fruits of a ripe experience

gained during twelve years of boyhood in a large public school, and many

years of manhood as teacher of classics in schools and university. His

boyhood, he tells us, was dreary because of the monotonous routine. He

was “fed on dull books, and the manuals were in many cases mere tramways

to pedantry. His mental training was a continuous sensation of

obstruction and pain. His spiritual parts were furrowed.” (Observe,

there were no nature-studies at that period.) The incitement to effort

was the cane or the tawse, and flogging, he believes, never instils

courage, it has transformed many a boy into a sneak. “Let us discard

punishment,” says the Professor, “and endeavour to make our pupils

_love_ work.” The whole educational system in his day was mechanical and

artificial, yet when he strove to initiate new methods the boys were

withdrawn from his charge. Parents understood little of true education.

They were slaves to custom. “How is it,” he asks, “that fathers with a

personal experience like my own send their boys to school?” He answers:

“They say to themselves, ‘Depend upon it if there were no virtue in

birching and caning, in Latin verses and Greek what-you-may-call-’ems,

they would not have held their ground so long amongst a practical people

like ourselves!’ So Johnnie is sent to the town grammar school and the

great time-honoured gerund-stone turns as before, and will turn to the

last syllable of recorded time.” For the gerund-stone he would

substitute an easy _vivâ voce_ conversational method of instruction in

all elementary classes, and throughout the school; for coercion, the

more than hydraulic pressure of a persistent, continuous gentleness.

Thirty years before the _Day-dreams_ was published, one writer at least

was open-eyed to the defects of school education. He charged parents

with adopting the new boarding-school system because it spared them some

responsibility, and children were apt to be teasing and importunate.

“Boys advance at school quickly,” he said, “in knowledge of the

auxiliary verbs, the mysteries of syntax and the stories of gods and

goddesses; but I am confident that the reason why women generally are so

much better disposed than men is this: they live domestically and

familiarly. They are penetrated with the home-spirit, they are imbued

with all its influences, their memory is not fed to plethora while the

heart is left to waste and perish. No daughter of mine shall ever be

sent to school; at home the heart, wherein are the issues of all good,

develops itself from day to day. There children ripen in their

affections. There they learn their humanities, not in the academic

sense, but in the natural and true one.”[8]

Footnote 8:

_Self-Formation_, by Capel Lofft, vol. 1, p. 42.

Where, alas! do we find to-day the daughters of the classes who are not

sent to school? Our girls’ high schools overflow; and that, not by the

action of State control, but by the voluntarily assumed yoke and tyranny

of fashion. Girls emerging from these schools are not “so much better

disposed than men.” They are certainly not domesticated and imbued with

a home-spirit. They may have gained in refinement—even to

fastidiousness! and in the knowledge of Latin and Greek, or what is

called the higher culture, but they are characterized generally by a

spirit of pleasure-seeking. They become, in many cases, what has aptly

been called “nonsense women, prepared only to lead butterfly lives.”

Now, parents who shirk the responsibility and effort entailed in shaping

their children’s characters to the best of their ability can only expect

their own self-indulgence to become intensified in the lives of their

children. Let me not, however, be here misunderstood. The movement for

the higher education of women is a step forward in civilization. Many

women are born with great mental capacity, and without the specific

intellectual culture now obtainable the world would lose much, while the

nonexercise of such native powers creates inward misery. But culture,

according to Matthew Arnold, implies the study of perfection, and the

late Professor Huxley’s ideal is expressed as follows:—“That man has had

a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is

the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the

work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is clear,

with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; whose

mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of

Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who—no stunted ascetic—is

full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by

a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learnt to

love all beauty, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

Such an one and no other has had a liberal education, for he is as

completely as man can be in harmony with nature.” (An Address at South

London Working Men’s College, January, 1869.)

Childhood is characterized by sensational activity. The reflective and

reasoning powers lie comparatively dormant. Mobile sensibility is the

distinguishing feature of childhood, and parents and teachers taking

advantage of the law of nature whereby pleasurable sensation stimulates

growth should train children step by step to the enjoyment of _useful_

activities, to physical and manual dexterity; to simple efforts in

pursuit of knowledge; to infantile firmness in discharge of duty; to

unconstrained dignity in defence of the right, and sympathetic jealousy

over the rights of others; to gentleness towards all mankind; to

admiration of all that is noble in character, to veneration of age,

experience and virtue; and to the love of truth and justice and personal

devotion to both. These are the qualities of human nature that make for

real civilization; and further progress requires their steady

development in the race.

Now, these qualities cannot be evoked by school methods nor even by the

easy _vivâ voce_ conversational instruction proposed by Professor

Thompson. An indispensable factor in the process is a rich, full,

domestic environment, an atmosphere suffused with affection and

vibrating with varied activities—_a home-life_, in short, where the

delicate qualities of noble character will not be commanded to come

forth, but will come of themselves through the play of circumstance,

i.e. by the action of example and gentle sympathetic co-operation.

In upper-class houses, even where wealth and luxury abound, there are

none of the diverse and liberal domestic surroundings conducive to early

training. The first essential is that the nurseries be freed from all

physical, mental and moral forces that belong to a comparatively

primitive stage of evolution. Nurses drawn from the masses—however

carefully selected—are incompetent by nurture for training infants in

the best way. The authority they have known has been archaic, and

elements of barbarism have been near them from babyhood, while education

as yet has done little to raise their intelligence to the plane of

civilized thought. Hence an ordinary nurse, of kindly and affectionate

disposition, may seriously misdirect the budding conscience of a babe,

as I have shown in my chapters on Emotional Life.

To women of great attainments and culture the training of infancy

properly belongs, and that training in the homes of the classes will be

of the highest value to the State. The problem of how to create in

childhood a ready obedience to authority without jarring the nerves, or

checking freedom unnecessarily, is a very difficult one. It requires a

cultured intelligence to grasp the problem and carry out the true method

of its solution. The aim in the training of infancy is to develop

superior types of men and women by evoking the higher qualities of human

nature _in a sphere of comparative liberty_. A babe in the nursery, let

us say, has had his attention caught by the flames leaping up in the

well-guarded grate. He creeps towards them and pushes his fingers

through the wires of the guard. The educated nurse gently lifts him to a

safe distance, but he starts creeping again to the fire. Now there are

in the nursery some baskets of different size and depth, all softly

lined and weighted. Baby is put into one of these to amuse himself with

a toy until the fascinating flames are forgotten.

An older child flings her ball in another child’s face. Nurse tells her

the ball might hurt, but on persistence in the selfish amusement she,

too, is firmly placed in a larger basket or nursery prison, and must

stay there till the impulse to be disobedient has passed off; for the

principle which guides nurse in the training of these infants is this:

liberty abused must be abridged.

After a few such experiences the little ones feel that a network is

around them—a network of authority never physically painful and that has

no connection with anger.

As the reasoning powers develop they feel that liberty is theirs in the

straight course of obedience to authority, and later they find that this

authority represents a knowledge of the laws of nature, for when in

garden and field they join in the nature-study lessons, they discover

that if plants creep into unfavourable conditions, they languish; if

animals run counter to laws of health, they suffer and die.

From nursery to home-training the infants pass forward. Their nerves

have never been irritated by harshness, nor their affections repressed,

and their impulses to unhurtful activities are of normal strength. In

the more advanced training now given, the aim is no longer to impress

automatically, but rationally to guide the growing intelligence. Blind

obedience is not required, but every command is explained and related to

the facts of happy and healthful life. At this point a discriminating

judgment is profoundly necessary, and the child should be studied

individually, for to each there comes the right moment when self-rule is

possible, and unless outward restraints are wisely withdrawn that power

of self-rule may be injured.

The human types to be desired are not slavish, but independent beings,

capable of noble service to God and man; and choosing to do right

because they know true happiness lies that way.

At sixteen or upwards the young thus trained may safely leave home for

high school or university, in pursuit of the special instruction

required for their future career. An education that has laid the

foundation of noble character, comes to no abrupt conclusion. The love

of truth when firmly implanted prompts to the acquisition of new

knowledge, and knowledge is boundless as the universe. Fields of science

become the happy hunting-ground of minds that are markedly intellectual,

and although self-culture supersedes formal instruction, and original

research supersedes the following of authority, education moves

continuously and steadily forward.

“The environment,” says Clifford Harrison, “that lies open to men

rationally developed is as vast as the ideal that lies before them. This

environment is not a spiritual matter merely; not of the soul alone, but

of body, mind, soul and spirit; not of heaven only, but of earth as

well; not of eternity and a beyond, but of time and here.”

_PART VI_

CONDITIONS IN AID OF HAPPY LIFE IN A DEVELOPING CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER I

THE NEEDS OF ADOLESCENCE

The woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink

Together, dwarf’d, or godlike, bond or free:

· · · · ·

If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,

How shall men grow?

—TENNYSON.

Adolescence is a critical period in the life of an individual. At that

period, character, speaking generally, fully manifests, and the life is

decided for good or evil. What advanced ethics requires is that each

adult generation should deliberately examine its inheritance from the

previous, less conscious, less informed epoch, in order to detect and

destroy every social snare that entangles unwary feet in adolescence;

and to devise the best methods of bringing to the young the wisdom and

sympathy of their seniors.

In the autobiography of the late Anthony Trollope (vol. 1, p. 69), some

facts of his own adolescence are stated in a spirit as generous as it is

candid. His fate, like that of thousands of young men in his day, and in

the present day, was to live at that critical time in a town, surrounded

by all the attractions that a keen competitive commercialism has created

to supplement profits—though at the expense of young men’s money and

morals—and with no private retreat save a solitary lodging, a shelter,

but in no sense a home. “No allurement to decent respectability,” he

says, “came in my way.” For the spending of his evenings, the choice lay

between what he calls “questionable resorts” and sitting alone reading

or drinking tea. “There was no house in which I could habitually see a

lady’s face and hear a lady’s voice, and in these circumstances the

temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young

man; at any rate they prevailed with me.”[9] Similar evidence may be

found in a realistic, powerful novel, _Jude the Obscure_. Mr. Thomas

Hardy there depicts the tragedy of unfulfilled aims, the shipwreck of

what might have been a noble life; and the cause of shipwreck is pointed

out in the words of the dying Jude: “My impulses and affections were too

strong ... a man without advantages should be as cold-blooded as a fish

and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his

country’s worthies.” Now, affection and the impulse to love purely can

never be too strong for the interests of general evolution, therefore we

are entitled to assume that the environment is at fault. The fact that

thousands of young men deprived of healthy home-life succumb to the

temptations of city-life, condemns our industrial competition. Public

consciousness has not grasped the needs and dangers of adolescence, and

the slowly evolving community-conscience disregards the terrible penalty

paid in general degradation for retaining a system of industry that

produces among other evils “questionable resorts where young men see

life in false, delusive colours.” These and all other injurious outcomes

of our tragic struggle for the necessaries and amenities of life, will

persist until the individualistic system of industry disappears, i.e. is

superseded by a rational collectivist system. Standing as we do on the

verge of conscious evolution, that time is not yet, but something may be

done by parents and guardians of youth to counteract the evils of a

transitional epoch.

Footnote 9:

More recently still the world has been afforded a glance into the

inner history of a life destined to noble uses and high achievements.

In the meridian of his fame Professor Huxley wrote thus to Charles

Kingsley: “Kicked into the world a boy without guide or training, or

with worse than none, I confess to my shame that few men have drunk

deeper of all kinds of sin than I. Happily my course was arrested in

time—before I had earned absolute destruction—and for long years I

have been slowly and painfully climbing, with many a fall, towards

better things.”—_Life of Professor Huxley_, vol. 1, p. 220.

Progress in an evolving society largely depends upon true union, i.e.

mental, emotional and spiritual union of the sexes. But a careful

examination of the prominent movements in society, and especially the

various divisions of the woman’s emancipation movement, reveals that all

are defective through inattention to this fundamental need. They do not

aim at social conditions in which solidarity of heart and soul will

naturally ensue.

The woman movement is the issue in great measure of pent-up forces of

youth in the female sex of the upper classes. It is less the revolt of

labour against poverty, injustice, and overtaxed strength, than a revolt

from enforced idleness on the part of the victims of wealth. The

position is graphically put before us by the late Charles Reade in his

amusing tale _The Woman Hater_.

Fanny Dover, a common enough type of upper-class femininity, appears to

the woman-hater a mere shallow-minded, selfish coquette, till suddenly

at an unexpected emergency she assumes new and very different colours.

“How is this?” he exclaims. “You were always a bright girl and no fool,

but not exactly what humdrum people call good ... you are not offended?”

“The idea,” says Fanny, “why I have publicly denounced goodness again

and again.” “Yes, and yet you turn out as good as gold!... I have

watched you; you are all over the house to serve two suffering women.

You are cook, housemaid, nurse and friend to both of them. In an

interval of your time so creditably employed you cheer me up with your

bright little face and give me wise advice! Explain the phenomenon.” “My

dear Harrington, if you cannot read so shallow a character as I am, how

will you get on with those ladies upstairs ... but there, I will have

pity on you. You shall understand one woman before you die ... give me a

cigarette.... What women love and can’t do without if they are young and

spirited, is excitement. I am one who pines for it. Society is so

constructed that to get excitement you must be naughty. Waltzing ...

flirting, etc., are excitement, ... dining _en famille_, going to bed at

ten, etc., are stagnation; good girls mean stagnant girls; I hate and

despise these tame little wretches; I never was one and never will be.

But look here, we have two ladies in love with one villain—that is

exciting. One gets nearly killed in the house—that is gloriously

exciting; the other is broken-hearted. If I were to be a bad girl and

say: ‘It is not my business; I will leave them to themselves and go my

little mill-round of selfishness as before, why what a fool I must be! I

should lose excitement. Instead of that I run and get things for the

Klosking—excitement. I cook for her and nurse her and sit up half the

night—excitement. Then I run to Zoe and do my best for her or get

snubbed—excitement. Then I sit at the head of your table and order

you—excitement. Oh! it is lovely.’ ‘Shall you be sorry when they both

get well and routine re-commences?’ Of course I shall; that is the sort

of good girl I am.”

This youthful exuberance or restlessness is favourable to social

advance, and the woman movement has accomplished good service in

claiming and turning it to useful account. But here, as in all partial

reforms, new evils dog the footsteps of the new good effected. To-day we

have numerous city workers of the female as well as the male sex,

compelled by the exigencies of their labour to live far apart from their

nearest and dearest, in solitary lodgings like Anthony Trollope, or at

best in the make-believe homes limited to inmates of one sex. I do not

infer that these girls fall under any special temptations to licence,

but, deprived as they are of the immediate influences of early

associations and the subtle tendernesses of home-life, I hold it

impossible that their emotional human nature should not suffer loss.

Their need for the happy and useful exercise of activities which were

running into mischievous courses, is satisfactorily met, but at the

expense of domestic traits, and these are precisely what lie at the root

of human fellowship—that union of heart and soul which is indispensable

to true progress.

Some social reformers regard the higher education of women movement as a

potent factor in uniting men and women through the mutual interests of

cultured thought. A knowledge, however, of Greek, Latin, the classics,

etc., accomplishes little so long as the sexes are not educated

together, and this form of culture has no _direct_ bearing on elevation

of character and development of the emotional side of human nature.

Cricket, golf, and all our fashionable out-door sports have done more,

in creating mutual interests and furthering progress by securing for

girls greater social freedom than was previously theirs, and Mr. H. W.

Massingham spoke truly when he said: “No special complications have

followed in any marked degree the vast extension that has taken place in

the field of girls’ free companionship with men. Yet what would our

fathers have thought of it?”[10] But sports are for the hours of

leisure, and ample leisure belongs only to the idle or to a minor

section of female workers. Meanwhile we have thousands of young women,

of different calibre to Fanny Dover, whose noblest attribute, viz. their

innate capacity for all the finer vibrations of social feeling, is never

called into play.

Footnote 10:

_Ethical World_, June, 1900.

Amid all the kaleidoscopic scenes of our transition period, a new figure

of womanhood has undoubtedly appeared—a type not characterized by

frivolity or love of excitement, but by strenuousness, sincerity,

refinement, moral courage, a will-force in short, that breaking through

selfish limitations seeks nobler spheres of action. This will-force is

subject to constant recoil. It is thrown back on itself by adverse

conditions of society, of industry, of private individual life.

In _Jude the Obscure_ this new type of woman is skilfully sketched.

Susan Bridehead is a creature of high aspiration, rich inward resources

and manifold imperfections. She has foibles and feminine vanities, but

the human nature is essentially large-minded, generous, truthful. “I did

not flirt,” she says to Jude, “but a craving to attract and captivate,

regardless of the injury it might do, was in me ... my liking for you is

not as some women’s perhaps, but it is a delight in being with you of a

supremely delicate kind ... I did want and long to ennoble some man to

high aims.” Here we have love transferred from the lower reaches of pure

sensation to a higher level of tender sentiment, and energized from the

intellectual plane. This denotes a slow evolution of ages during which

all the grossness, i.e. the coarser vibrations of primitive love, are

transmuted into the finer vibrations of sympathetic, altruistic feeling.

It is important to see clearly the distinction between primitive and

modern love, in order that no confusion may arise in contemplating the

ideal social life that scientific meliorism forecasts. The intrinsic

quality of primitive love is illustrated in Mrs. Bishop’s description of

her favourite horse’s attachment. “I am to him an embodiment of melons,

cucumbers, grapes, pears, peaches, biscuits and sugar, with a good deal

of petting and ear-rubbing thrown in!” Human attachments based on these

pleasurable sensations or simple animal appetites and passions, form the

main soldering ingredients in humanity’s mass; but love’s development

has marched concurrently with true civilization, and to men and women in

the van of civilization one chief cause of misery to-day is repression

of the normal, healthy impulse to pure and unselfish love.

_Unselfishness_ is the distinguishing feature of higher forms of love,

and an unselfishness that had its origin not in conjugal union but in

motherhood. Mr. Finck, in his study of love’s evolution, puts it thus:

“The helpless infant could not survive without a mother’s

self-sacrificing care, hence there was an important use for womanly

sympathy which caused it to survive and grow while man immersed in wars

and struggles remained hard of heart and knew not tenderness....

Selfishness in a man is perhaps less offensive because competition and

the struggle for existence necessarily foster it.” (Henry Finck’s

_Primitive Love_, pp. 160–161.) The social need for a specialized

unselfishness has tended to differentiate the sexes emotionally, and in

process of building up the entire structure of social life the pressure

of outward forces has carried this differentiation further. I am not

then traversing the natural laws of evolution when I assume that all

questions relating to women are at this date pre-eminently important.

The population problem, as I have shown, can only be solved through a

diminution of the birth-rate, and throughout the British nation the

family group is breaking up. It is disintegrating especially in the

upper and middle classes.

The movement towards industrial socialism is the outcome of masculine

thought and energy. Man is its mainspring, although many thoughtful

women take part in it. Conversely, the house-ruler, woman, must be the

mainspring of a movement towards domestic socialism, although no success

will accrue without the steadfast aid and co-operation of man. That some

women are already fitted to begin this great work is evident from much

of our female public service. Let me quote some words recently spoken of

lady-workers by a male critic, Mr. H. W. Massingham: “They have moral

courage and refinement. They do not tire more easily than men; they do

not shirk the detail work; they take to drudgery.” Pioneers of the new

movement must be religious in the best sense, i.e. their philosophy must

bring into touch the worlds seen and unseen, inspiring action conducive

to personal and universal happiness.

The task before them is of double intent, viz. of immediate utility and

of far-reaching benefit. It will attract inferior natures as well as the

superior, for a well-organized modern home will present more

convenience, comforts and embellishments than the family homes of the

past or present, and at smaller expense. Herein a certain danger lurks.

Pioneers will have to guard against dropping out of the enterprise its

supreme purpose and main evolutional value, viz. the raising humanity on

to higher levels of happiness. There is no other policy to this end than

that of domestically uniting the sexes from infancy, in order that in

the idealistic period of adolescence soul may meet soul with fearless

unreserve and young men and women realize by experience that in the pure

realms of thought and feeling the closest union is possible. It is this

union manifesting in dual sympathy that will become the liberating force

of the world, and in it and through it woman’s emancipation will be

complete.

Woman is not undevelopt man

But diverse ...

Yet in the long years liker must they grow;

The man be more of woman, she of man;

He gain in sweetness and in moral height,

She mental breadth, nor fail in child-ward care

Till at the last she set herself to man,

Like perfect music unto noble words;

And so these twain upon the skirts of time,

Sit side by side ...

Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,

Self-reverent each and reverencing each

Distinct in individualities,

But like each other ev’n as those who love.

Then comes the statelier Eden back to men;

· · · · ·

Then springs the crowning race of humankind,

May these things be!

_The Princess._—TENNYSON.

CHAPTER II

DOMESTIC REFORM

The animating spring of all improvement in individuals and in

societies is not the knowledge of the actual but the conception of the

possible.—H. MARTINEAU.

How shall the new era be inaugurated? By ceasing to strive for self

and family; by thinking of both only as instruments of the common

weal.—PROF. A. W. BICKERTON.

The model family home of the British middle class half a century ago

comprised a father and mother of sound constitution and domestic habits

with a group of children of both sexes—a group large enough to supply

companionship to one another, and a family income sufficient for

comfortable maintenance and recreation, occasional travel and the free

exercise of hospitality. If homes of this type were widely and firmly

established throughout the land they might be competent to breed,

nurture and send forth into the world a good average material of human

life for repairing waste and building up the British nation. But in the

present epoch such homes are exceedingly rare, and the trend of social

forces and modern ideas alike make for their becoming still rarer.

To speak only of the more obvious factors of change, State action in

reference to the education of the young lifts children of the masses at

almost an infantile age out of the effective control of family life, and

in our centres of national industry economic forces bring about a hasty

pairing and breeding, with an abrupt scattering of the brood that

resembles the nesting of birds rather than the home-making of rational

beings; while so immature are the heads of these evanescent family homes

that the break-up is by no means an unmitigated evil.

Among the classes, forces of a higher, more penetrative order are

working similarly. Prudence is acting towards the restraint of

population in a manner that narrows the basis of family groups and

shortens the natural term of their existence; and under a new impulse of

right reason and high resolve the educated section of the female sex is

deliberately forsaking the domestic hearth to share the world’s labour

with man. These concurrent movements in society are destroying family

life on the old lines, and by the homes of the present, individual needs

are met only temporarily and provisionally.

One conspicuous result is an ever-increasing discomfort to the aged.

They are stranded in homes become empty, or wander abroad seeking touch

with their kind. Distinctly are they shunted off the rails of busy life

before a lowered vitality prompts to inertia. The British “Philistine”

lacks sentiment. Old age makes no special appeal to him, and he is

content to bestow on relatives no longer young a brief moment of his

precious time, a fragment of his tenderness. At an earlier stage of our

social evolution the mature in years were centres of a rich, full,

domestic life, and pivots on which turned the wider social life

encircling it. At the present stage of that evolution the young and the

comparatively young focus and absorb the whole sunshine of life, while

the guardians of their infancy pass into declining years enveloped in

gloom.

This premature effacement entails on society a double loss—first, the

loss interiorly of that individual happiness which intensifies and

raises the tide of life; second, the loss of activities guided by and

based upon _mellow experience_.

Society is too materialistic to recognize that human beings physically

on the down-grade may be psychically on the up-grade, and pre-eminently

fitted to inspire and promote progress. But in thinking of latent

possibilities realizable in a better environment we are bound not to

judge by average humanity, but by the superior types of the preceding

generation. The old age of W. E. Gladstone, Harriet Martineau, Mary

Somerville, and others was neither gloomy nor unproductive. The

last-mentioned at the age of eighty-one turned her attention to writing

a book on microscopic science. “I seemed,” she says, “to resume the

perseverance and energy of my youth. I began it with courage, though I

did not think I could live to finish it.” She did, however, finish it,

and lived to the age of ninety-two, maintaining at all times her habits

of study and a full social intercourse with many friends. (From

_Personal Recollections_, by her Daughter.)

It is not intellectual powers only that are running to waste. Under the

double pressure of competition in trade and competition in the labour

market, good manual workers are found ineffective and dismissed at an

earlier age than formerly.

An immense mass of our industrial population is forced by circumstance

into the workhouse when still comparatively active, and life there is

but a gloomy vacant existence—a complete suppression of the best

faculties of body and mind.

Comparing the past with the present in respect of the old age of

workers, we are told by Professor Thorold Rodgers that village homes

were centres of multifarious occupations, in which naturally the aged,

if able, would take part. And in towns, although streets were narrow, at

the rear of the houses there were gardens where old and young together

spent the long summer evenings. “Not long ago,” says the American Social

Science Committee Report of 1878, “the farm found constant employment

for the men of the family—the women had abundant employment in the home,

there was carding, spinning, weaving.” “And the neverending labour of

our grandmothers must not be forgotten, who with nimble needle knit our

stockings and mittens. The knitting-needle was in as constant play as

their tongues, whose music only ceased under the power of sleep.... Now

no more does the knitting-needle keep time to the music of their

tongues, for the knitting-machine in the hands of one little girl will

do more work than fifty grandmothers. Labour-saving machinery has broken

up and destroyed our whole system of household and family manufacture,

when all took part in the labour and shared in the product to the

comfort of all.”

The system that has superseded that of “household and family

manufacture” has been adverse to the aged from the first, and neglect of

old age has become a wrong-doing that eats like a canker into our social

life.

As Professor Bickerton well remarks: “Unhappiness is the disease of

social life, and misery is an indication that there is something wrong

with our social system. Just as it is unreasonable to expect bodily

health under insanitary conditions, so we cannot look for social concord

and joy unless mankind be placed in circumstances that suit his social

nature. Man has been considered too exclusively as a producing machine

with subsidiary mental capacity, whereas he is essentially a moral being

with deep emotions and universal sympathies. The cure for the

uncleanliness of society is not difficult. The plans for the edifice of

human life are obtainable. What are the plans? Those laws of nature

which are concerned in the development of mankind. What is the cure?

Such understanding of the principles of evolution and such consonant

action as shall restore to the race an environment befitting its

humanity.” (_The Romance of the Earth._)

Nevertheless, we cannot return to a system of household and family

manufacture. To relinquish mechanical aids to production would be

contrary to, not consonant with, evolution. A civilized race outgrows

its primitive conditions of life and industry—new wine must be put into

new bottles.

The immediate step of advance as regards manual labour is this—in our

centres of local administration there should be organized municipal

employment with shortened hours for elderly people, the wage to be

supplemented by pensions ample enough to secure for these workers an

honourable social standing instead of a pauper’s dole. But a closer

adaptation to humanity’s needs may be quickly achieved by the classes

where poverty plays a less part in the social phenomena. Of present

conditions Mr. Escott, in his _England, its People, Polity and

Pursuits_, thus speaks: “The nation is only an aggregate of households.

Modern society is possessed by a nomadic spirit which is the sure

destroyer of home ties. The English aristocracy flit from mansion to

mansion during the country-house season; they know no peace during the

London season. Existence for the wealthy is one unending whirl of

excitement, admitting small opportunity for the cultivation of the

domestic affections. The claims of society have continually acquired

precedence of the duties of home.”

In the middle class, however, wedged in between the rich and the poor,

the greatest factor of change is the servant difficulty, and this

difficulty we must glance at in its causal relations.

Civilized communities divide broadly into two parts—productive units

whose labour supplies what is needful for existence, and unproductive

units whose existence depends on the labour of others. The latter have

been correctly termed “parasites.” M. Jean Massart explains in his

scientific scrutiny of social phenomena,[11] that during the period of

our industrial development a force of integration has gradually

strengthened the main body of the social organism, giving it power to

resist in some degree the burden of parasitism. Consequently arbitrary

authority and slavish subserviency have abated, and two movements

affecting family life in the middle class are discernible—first, there

is an increasing revolt from domestic service as a form of labour

directly opposed to the spirit of independence that is growing in

workers and to the force of integration which by ranging them shoulder

to shoulder is preparing them for a new form of industrial life; second,

sons of the aristocracy and daughters of the middle class are joining

the ranks of producers with some sense of the dignity of labour and the

degradation of a purely parasitic existence. Social parasitism is not

organic. It is an extraneous condition induced in a society developing

its civilization. No man is necessarily a parasite; he acquires the

character in the course of his life history, and happily the young are

refusing to acquire it.

Footnote 11:

_Parasitism, Organic and Social_, p. 121.

Observe, then, it is not in one or two sections of our community life,

but in all sections that diverse causes are producing one uniform

result—the break-up of the family home; and behind all the more

superficial causes there is working a profound factor of change in the

centripetal or constructive and the centrifugal or destructive forces of

nature. Whilst the latter destroys old forms, the former prepares for

the new form—prepares, not only by an integration of workers, but by a

fresh inspiration of love and desire for work. Hence women and men

endowed with reason, knowledge and practical skill may bring the life of

their own immediate circle into express and positive line with this

constructive, profoundly evolutional, movement.

Domestic reform implies the relinquishment of that whole system of

household labour that requires the combination of a subject with a

parasitic class. Co-operation among equals takes the place of masterful

authority and slavish subjection, and heavy labour will be relieved by

scientific appliance. Labour-saving contrivances in family homes hardly

exist. There has been little spur to invention on these lines. But, as

in industrial fields, a saving of money, material and labour by the use

of machinery has followed the introduction of organized co-operation,

so, doubtlessly, a similar process will follow the gradual adoption of

organized co-operation within the home. This is not the solution of the

servant problem merely. It has a far wider significance. Many educated

women who are now seeking useful work and economic independence outside

of home-life will find these within the domestic circle, and further

will find that it is possible to combine such necessary conditions of

dignified life with fulfilment of duty alike to the aged and to the

young.

Pioneers who aim at social solidarity must in practice recognize labour

as the indispensable basis of social life and social institutions. All

methods of wage-payment dependent on industrial competition will be

repudiated for a system that acknowledges every form of useful work as

entitling the worker to financial independence; and in the emotional

sphere, with its possibilities of inner union and solidarity, who can

measure the impetus towards the desired goal that will be given by the

setting of the solitary in families and the re-gathering of the old into

the bosom of a rich, full, domestic life.

Let us suppose that from fifteen to twenty groups—they may be families

or groups of friends—combine and pass out from their numerous separate

houses into one large commodious dwelling built for them or bought and

adapted to their purpose. The bedrooms are furnished on the continental

plan with accommodation for writing, reading, solitary study, or rest by

day, and all the latest improvements in lighting, heating and

ventilating, etc. By the rules of the house—except for cleaning—no one

enters these rooms uninvited by the inmate, who has there at all times,

if wished, perfect privacy and the most thorough personal comfort. Two

eating apartments are placed contiguous to the kitchens, and by taking

advantage of every invention to facilitate cooking and serving, the

lady-cooks and attendants may place prepared food on the table and sit

down to partake of it with their friends. One wing of the house is set

apart for nurseries and nursery training, another for school teaching,

inclusive of indoor kindergarten; a music-room well-deafened enables the

musical to practise many instruments without jarring the nerves of

others; a playroom for the young and a recreation-room set apart for

whist and chess, etc., a billiard room, and if desired, a smoking room;

a large drawing-room where social enjoyment is carefully promoted every

evening, a library or silent room where no interruption to reading is

permitted, these, and a few small boudoirs for intercourse with special

friends form the chief outer requirements of the ideal collectivist

home.

All the details of household management may safely be left to pioneers

of the new woman movement; it belongs only to scientific meliorism to

point out the general features and structure of the reformed domestic

system and to show its vitally important position in relation to any

rational scheme of wide-reaching social reform.

Humanity as a whole has to climb upward in the scale of being and to

leave behind it the individual or family selfishness allied with animal

passions that are purely anti-social; it has further to develop that

self-respect that allied with heart-fellowship brings in its train all

the social virtues that distinguish the man from the brute. Germs of

that self-respecting life are with us even now, but the soil in which

they will spring up to vigorous growth must be created, i.e. brought

together by man himself. The fitting of character to a new domestic

system should not be difficult in the case of children under wise

training, for it is as easy to acquire good habits in childhood as bad

habits, and the wholesome atmosphere of a well-regulated superior home

will powerfully and painlessly aid in shaping the young. But for the

grown-up to alter personal habits, and adapt thought and feeling to a

new order of every-day life, the task is not easy. It may press heavily

on the ordinary adult at the initial stage of the movement. Happily that

task may be rendered easier by mutual criticism kindly and gravely

exercised. The method was practised for upwards of thirty years in the

Oneida Creek Community with a marked success. Criticism, says one of the

members, is a boon to those who seek to live a higher life and only a

bugbear to those who lack ambition to improve. It was to the community a

bond of love and an appeal to all that is noblest, most refined and

elevated in human nature; it helped a man out of his selfishness in the

easiest, most kindly way possible. Whereas in ordinary life the

interference of the busybody, the tongue of the tale-bearer, the shaft

of ridicule, the venom of malice, are unavoidable—in the Community such

criticizing was almost unknown. It was bad form for anybody to speak

complainingly of anyone else, because criticism was the prerogative of

the Community, and was instituted to supersede all evil-speaking or

back-biting. Nor was it an occasion for direct fault-finding merely.

Those criticizing were always glad to dilate on the good qualities of

their subject, and to express their love and appreciation of what they

saw to commend. (Abel Easton, Member of the Oneida Community.)

Another member, Allan Estlake, thus speaks: “Criticism was a barrier to

the approach of unworthy people from without, and equally a bar to the

development of evil influences within.” The practice was not original.

Mr. Noyes found it established in a select society of missionaries he

had joined previous to his forming the Oneida Community.

One of the weekly exercises of this society, he tells us, was a frank

criticism of each other’s character for the purpose of improvement. The

mode of proceeding was this: At each meeting the member whose turn it

was, according to alphabetic order, to submit to criticism, held his

peace while the others one by one told him his faults. This exercise

sometimes crucified self-complacency, but it was contrary to the rules

of society for any one to complain. I found much benefit in submitting

to this ordeal both while I was at Andover and afterward.[12] If a

number of young men adopted criticism as a means of improvement it

should not be more difficult to pioneers of the new domestic life, young

and old, provided they have the same desire to improve. It might be

irksome to the young, until they had learned to profit by it, as all

discipline is at first, but when “our young people,” says Mr. Estlake,

“had formed habits in harmony with their means of improvement they

learned to love the means by which they had progressed and to rejoice in

the results of sufferings that were incident only to their

inexperience.”[13]

Footnote 12:

_The Oneida Community_, Allan Estlake, p. 65.

Footnote 13:

_The Oneida Community_, Allan Estlake, p. 66.

Personal habits in the new domestic life will be judged in their

relation to the general interests of the household, and regulations made

to safeguard these interests. Cleanliness, orderliness, punctuality are

essential to home comfort, but conventional etiquette destroys the

geniality of domestic freedom. While simple rules of a positive kind are

strictly observed, the negative rule of non-interference with personal

habits that are unhurtful to others will be the most stringent of all,

and for this reason—happiness is the great object to attain, and a

supreme condition of happiness is the free interaction of social units

without intrusive interference.

Committees will be necessary—for organizing labour on a method that will

ensure variety to workers and frequent leisure—for consultation on the

best means to adopt in training children individually—for management of

the finances—for recreative arrangements—and for purposes of general

direction and control.