We are now in a position to point out and consider certain general ways
in which the various factors and elements in the deliquescent society of
the present time will react one upon another, and to speculate what
definite statements, if any, it may seem reasonable to make about the
individual people of the year 2000--or thereabouts--from the reaction of
these classes we have attempted to define.
To begin with, it may prove convenient to speculate upon the trend of
development of that class about which we have the most grounds for
certainty in the coming time. The shareholding class, the rout of the
Abyss, the speculator, may develop in countless ways according to the
varying development of exterior influences upon them, but of the most
typical portion of the central body, the section containing the
scientific engineering or scientific medical sort of people, we can
postulate certain tendencies with some confidence. Certain ways of
thought they must develop, certain habits of mind and eye they will
radiate out into the adjacent portions of the social mass. We can even,
I think, deduce some conception of the home in which a fairly typical
example of this body will be living within a reasonable term of years.
The mere fact that a man is an engineer or a doctor, for example, should
imply now, and certainly will imply in the future, that he has received
an education of a certain definite type; he will have a general
acquaintance with the scientific interpretation of the universe, and he
will have acquired certain positive and practical habits of mind. If the
methods of thought of any individual in this central body are not
practical and positive, he will tend to drift out of it to some more
congenial employment. He will almost necessarily have a strong
imperative to duty quite apart from whatever theological opinions he may
entertain, because if he has not such an inherent imperative, life will
have very many more alluring prospects than this. His religious
conclusions, whatever they may be, will be based upon some orderly
theological system that must have honestly admitted and reconciled his
scientific beliefs; the emotional and mystical elements in his religion
will be subordinate or absent. Essentially he will be a moral man,
certainly so far as to exercise self-restraint and live in an ordered
way. Unless this is so, he will be unable to give his principal energies
to thought and work--that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. If
sensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore,--a
point we must leave open here--it will appear without any trappings of
sentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach's
sake, and it is better to marry than to burn, a concession to the flesh
necessary to secure efficiency. Assuming in our typical case that pure
indulgence does not appear or flares and passes, then either he will be
single or more or less married. The import of that "more or less" will
be discussed later, for the present we may very conveniently conceive
him married under the traditional laws of Christendom. Having a mind
considerably engaged, he will not have the leisure for a wife of the
distracting, perplexing personality kind, and in our typical case, which
will be a typically sound and successful one, we may picture him wedded
to a healthy, intelligent, and loyal person, who will be her husband's
companion in their common leisure, and as mother of their three or four
children and manager of his household, as much of a technically capable
individual as himself. He will be a father of several children, I think,
because his scientific mental basis will incline him to see the whole of
life as a struggle to survive; he will recognize that a childless,
sterile life, however pleasant, is essentially failure and perversion,
and he will conceive his honour involved in the possession of offspring.
Such a couple will probably dress with a view to decent convenience,
they will not set the fashions, as I shall presently point out, but
they will incline to steady and sober them, they will avoid exciting
colour contrasts and bizarre contours. They will not be habitually
promenaders, or greatly addicted to theatrical performances; they will
probably find their secondary interests--the cardinal one will of course
be the work in hand--in a not too imaginative prose literature, in
travel and journeys and in the less sensuous aspects of music. They will
probably take a considerable interest in public affairs. Their _ménage_,
which will consist of father, mother, and children, will, I think, in
all probability, be servantless.
They will probably not keep a servant for two very excellent reasons,
because in the first place they will not want one, and in the second
they will not get one if they do. A servant is necessary in the small,
modern house, partly to supplement the deficiencies of the wife, but
mainly to supplement the deficiencies of the house. She comes to cook
and perform various skilled duties that the wife lacks either knowledge
or training, or both, to perform regularly and expeditiously. Usually it
must be confessed that the servant in the small household fails to
perform these skilled duties completely. But the great proportion of the
servant's duties consists merely in drudgery that the stupidities of our
present-day method of house construction entail, and which the more
sanely constructed house of the future will avoid. Consider, for
instance, the wanton disregard of avoidable toil displayed in building
houses with a service basement without lifts! Then most dusting and
sweeping would be quite avoidable if houses were wiselier done. It is
the lack of proper warming appliances which necessitates a vast amount
of coal carrying and dirt distribution, and it is this dirt mainly that
has so painfully to be removed again. The house of the future will
probably be warmed in its walls from some power-generating station, as,
indeed, already very many houses are lit at the present day. The lack of
sane methods of ventilation also enhances the general dirtiness and
dustiness of the present-day home, and gas-lighting and the use of
tarnishable metals, wherever possible, involve further labour. But air
will enter the house of the future through proper tubes in the walls,
which will warm it and capture its dust, and it will be spun out again
by a simple mechanism. And by simple devices such sweeping as still
remains necessary can be enormously lightened. The fact that in existing
homes the skirting meets the floor at right angles makes sweeping about
twice as troublesome as it will be when people have the sense and
ability to round off the angle between wall and floor.
So one great lump of the servant's toil will practically disappear. Two
others are already disappearing. In many houses there are still the
offensive duties of filling lamps and blacking boots to be done. Our
coming house, however, will have no lamps to need filling, and, as for
the boots, really intelligent people will feel the essential ugliness of
wearing the evidence of constant manual toil upon their persons. They
will wear sorts of shoes and boots that can be cleaned by wiping in a
minute or so. Take now the bedroom work. The lack of ingenuity in
sanitary fittings at present forbids the obvious convenience of hot and
cold water supply to the bedroom, and there is a mighty fetching and
carrying of water and slops to be got through daily. All that will
cease. Every bedroom will have its own bath-dressing room which any
well-bred person will be intelligent and considerate enough to use and
leave without the slightest disarrangement. This, so far as "upstairs"
goes, really only leaves bedmaking to be done, and a bed does not take
five minutes to make. Downstairs a vast amount of needless labour at
present arises out of table wear. "Washing up" consists of a tedious
cleansing and wiping of each table utensil in turn, whereas it should be
possible to immerse all dirty table wear in a suitable solvent for a few
minutes and then run that off for the articles to dry. The application
of solvents to window cleaning, also, would be a possible thing but for
the primitive construction of our windows, which prevents anything but a
painful rub, rub, rub, with the leather. A friend of mine in domestic
service tells me that this rubbing is to get the window dry, and this
seems to be the general impression, but I think it incorrect. The water
is not an adequate solvent, and enough cannot be used under existing
conditions. Consequently, if the window is cleaned and left wet, it
dries in drops, and these drops contain dirt in solution which remain as
spots. But water containing a suitable solvent could quite simply be
made to run down a window for a few minutes from pinholes in a pipe
above into a groove below, and this could be followed by pure rain water
for an equal time, and in this way the whole window cleaning in the
house could, I imagine, be reduced to the business of turning on a tap.
There remains the cooking. To-day cooking, with its incidentals, is a
very serious business; the coaling, the ashes, the horrible moments of
heat, the hot black things to handle, the silly vague recipes, the want
of neat apparatus, and the want of intelligence to demand or use neat
apparatus. One always imagines a cook working with a crimsoned face and
bare blackened arms. But with a neat little range, heated by electricity
and provided with thermometers, with absolutely controllable
temperatures and proper heat screens, cooking might very easily be made
a pleasant amusement for intelligent invalid ladies. Which reminds one,
by-the-by, as an added detail to our previous sketch of the scenery of
the days to come, that there will be no chimneys at all to the house of
the future of this type, except the flue for the kitchen smells.[30]
This will not only abolish the chimney stack, but make the roof a clean
and pleasant addition to the garden spaces of the home.
I do not know how long all these things will take to arrive. The
erection of a series of experimental labour-saving houses by some
philanthropic person, for exhibition and discussion, would certainly
bring about a very extraordinary advance in domestic comfort even in the
immediate future, but the fashions in philanthropy do not trend in such
practical directions; if they did, the philanthropic person would
probably be too amenable to flattery to escape the pushful patentee and
too sensitive to avail himself of criticism (which rarely succeeds in
being both penetrating and polite), and it will probably be many years
before the cautious enterprise of advertising firms approximates to the
economies that are theoretically possible to-day. But certainly the
engineering and medical sorts of person will be best able to appreciate
the possibilities of cutting down the irksome labours of the
contemporary home, and most likely to first demand and secure them.
The wife of this ideal home may probably have a certain distaste for
vicarious labour, that so far as the immediate minimum of duties goes
will probably carry her through them. There will be few servants
obtainable for the small homes of the future, and that may strengthen
her sentiments. Hardly any woman seems to object to a system of things
which provides that another woman should be made rough-handed and kept
rough-minded for her sake, but with the enormous diffusion of levelling
information that is going on, a perfectly valid objection will probably
come from the other side in this transaction. The servants of the past
and the only good servants of to-day are the children of servants or the
children of the old labour base of the social pyramid, until recently a
necessary and self-respecting element in the State. Machinery has
smashed that base and scattered its fragments; the tradition of
self-respecting inferiority is being utterly destroyed in the world. The
contingents of the Abyss, even, will not supply daughters for this
purpose. In the community of the United States no native-born race of
white servants has appeared, and the emancipated young negress
degenerates towards the impossible--which is one of the many stimulants
to small ingenuities that may help very powerfully to give that nation
the industrial leadership of the world. The servant of the future, if
indeed she should still linger in the small household, will be a person
alive to a social injustice and the unsuccessful rival of the wife. Such
servants as wealth will retain will be about as really loyal and servile
as hotel waiters, and on the same terms. For the middling sort of
people in the future maintaining a separate _ménage_ there is nothing
for it but the practically automatic house or flat, supplemented,
perhaps, by the restaurant or the hotel.
Almost certainly, for reasons detailed in the second chapter of these
Anticipations, this household, if it is an ideal type, will be situated
away from the central "Town" nucleus and in pleasant surroundings. And I
imagine that the sort of woman who would be mother and mistress of such
a home would not be perfectly content unless there were a garden about
the house. On account of the servant difficulty, again, this garden
would probably be less laboriously neat than many of our gardens
to-day--no "bedding-out," for example, and a certain parsimony of mown
lawn....
To such a type of home it seems the active, scientifically trained
people will tend. But usually, I think, the prophet is inclined to over
estimate the number of people who will reach this condition of affairs
in a generation or so, and to under estimate the conflicting tendencies
that will make its attainment difficult to all, and impossible to many,
and that will for many years tint and blotch the achievement of those
who succeed with patches of unsympathetic colour. To understand just how
modifications may come in, it is necessary to consider the probable line
of development of another of the four main elements in the social body
of the coming time. As a consequence and visible expression of the
great new growth of share and stock property there will be scattered
through the whole social body, concentrated here perhaps, and diffused
there, but everywhere perceived, the members of that new class of the
irresponsible wealthy, a class, as I have already pointed out in the
preceding chapter, miscellaneous and free to a degree quite
unprecedented in the world's history. Quite inevitably great sections of
this miscellany will develop characteristics almost diametrically
opposed to those of the typical working expert class, and their
gravitational attraction may influence the lives of this more efficient,
finally more powerful, but at present much less wealthy, class to a very
considerable degree of intimacy.
The rich shareholder and the skilled expert must necessarily be sharply
contrasted types, and of the two it must be borne in mind that it is the
rich shareholder who spends the money. While occupation and skill
incline one towards severity and economy, leisure and unlimited means
involve relaxation and demand the adventitious interest of decoration.
The shareholder will be the decorative influence in the State. So far as
there will be a typical shareholder's house, we may hazard that it will
have rich colours, elaborate hangings, stained glass adornments, and
added interests in great abundance. This "leisure class" will certainly
employ the greater proportion of the artists, decorators, fabric makers,
and the like, of the coming time. It will dominate the world of
art--and we may say, with some confidence, that it will influence it in
certain directions. For example, standing apart from the movement of the
world, as they will do to a very large extent, the archaic, opulently
done, will appeal irresistibly to very many of these irresponsible rich
as the very quintessence of art. They will come to art with uncritical,
cultured minds, full of past achievements, ignorant of present
necessities. Art will be something added to life--something stuck on and
richly reminiscent--not a manner pervading all real things. We may be
pretty sure that very few will grasp the fact that an iron bridge or a
railway engine may be artistically done--these will not be "art"
objects, but hostile novelties. And, on the other hand, we can pretty
confidently foretell a spacious future and much amplification for that
turgid, costly, and deliberately anti-contemporary group of styles of
which William Morris and his associates have been the fortunate
pioneers. And the same principles will apply to costume. A
non-functional class of people cannot have a functional costume, the
whole scheme of costume, as it will be worn by the wealthy classes in
the coming years, will necessarily be of that character which is called
fancy dress. Few people will trouble to discover the most convenient
forms and materials, and endeavour to simplify them and reduce them to
beautiful forms, while endless enterprising tradesmen will be alert for
a perpetual succession of striking novelties. The women will ransack the
ages for becoming and alluring anachronisms, the men will appear in the
elaborate uniforms of "games," in modifications of "court" dress, in
picturesque revivals of national costumes, in epidemic fashions of the
most astonishing sort....
Now, these people, so far as they are spenders of money, and so far as
he is a spender of money, will stand to this ideal engineering sort of
person, who is the vitally important citizen of a progressive scientific
State, in a competitive relation. In most cases, whenever there is
something that both want, one against the other, the shareholder will
get it; in most cases, where it is a matter of calling the tune, the
shareholder will call the tune. For example, the young architect,
conscious of exceptional ability, will have more or less clearly before
him the alternatives of devoting himself to the novel, intricate, and
difficult business of designing cheap, simple, and mechanically
convenient homes for people who will certainly not be highly
remunerative, and will probably be rather acutely critical, or of
perfecting himself in some period of romantic architecture, or striking
out some startling and attractive novelty of manner or material which
will be certain, sooner or later, to meet its congenial shareholder.
Even if he hover for a time between these alternatives, he will need to
be a person not only of exceptional gifts, but what is by no means a
common accompaniment of exceptional gifts, exceptional strength of
character, to take the former line. Consequently, for many years yet,
most of the experimental buildings and novel designs, that initiate
discussion and develop the general taste, will be done primarily to
please the more originative shareholders and not to satisfy the demands
of our engineer or doctor; and the strictly commercial builders, who
will cater for all but the wealthiest engineers, scientific
investigators, and business men, being unable to afford specific
designs, will--amidst the disregarded curses of these more intelligent
customers--still simply reproduce in a cheaper and mutilated form such
examples as happen to be set. Practically, that is to say, the
shareholder will buy up almost all the available architectural talent.
This modifies our conception of the outer appearance of that little
house we imagined. Unless it happens to be the house of an exceptionally
prosperous member of the utilitarian professions, it will lack something
of the neat directness implicit in our description, something of that
inevitable beauty that arises out of the perfect attainment of ends--for
very many years, at any rate. It will almost certainly be tinted, it may
even be saturated, with the secondhand archaic. The owner may object,
but a busy man cannot stop his life work to teach architects what they
ought to know. It may be heated electrically, but it will have sham
chimneys, in whose darkness, unless they are built solid, dust and
filth will gather, and luckless birds and insects pass horrible last
hours of ineffectual struggle. It may have automatic window-cleaning
arrangements, but they will be hidden by "picturesque" mullions. The
sham chimneys will, perhaps, be made to smoke genially in winter by some
ingenious contrivance, there may be sham open fireplaces within, with
ingle nooks about the sham glowing logs. The needlessly steep roofs will
have a sham sag and sham timbered gables, and probably forced lichens
will give it a sham appearance of age. Just that feeble-minded
contemporary shirking of the truth of things that has given the world
such stockbroker in armour affairs as the Tower Bridge and historical
romance, will, I fear, worry the lucid mind in a great multitude of the
homes that the opening half, at least, of this century will produce.
In quite a similar way the shareholding body will buy up all the clever
and more enterprising makers and designers of clothing and adornment, he
will set the fashion of almost all ornament, in bookbinding and printing
and painting, for example, furnishing, and indeed of almost all things
that are not primarily produced "for the million," as the phrase goes.
And where that sort of thing comes in, then, so far as the trained and
intelligent type of man goes, for many years yet it will be simply a
case of the nether instead of the upper millstone. Just how far the
influence and contagion of the shareholding mass will reach into this
imaginary household of non-shareholding efficients, and just how far the
influence of science and mechanism will penetrate the minds and methods
of the rich, becomes really one of the most important questions with
which these speculations will deal. For this argument that he will
perhaps be able to buy up the architect and the tailor and the decorator
and so forth is merely preliminary to the graver issue. It is just
possible that the shareholder may, to a very large extent--in a certain
figurative sense, at least--buy up much of the womankind that would
otherwise be available to constitute those severe, capable, and probably
by no means unhappy little establishments to which our typical engineers
will tend, and so prevent many women from becoming mothers of a
regenerating world. The huge secretion of irresponsible wealth by the
social organism is certain to affect the tone of thought of the entire
feminine sex profoundly--the exact nature of this influence we may now
consider.
The gist of this inquiry lies in the fact that, while a man's starting
position in this world of to-day is entirely determined by the
conditions of his birth and early training, and his final position the
slow elaborate outcome of his own sustained efforts to live, a woman,
from the age of sixteen onward--as the world goes now--is essentially
adventurous, the creature of circumstances largely beyond her control
and foresight. A virile man, though he, too, is subject to accidents,
may, upon most points, still hope to plan and determine his life; the
life of a woman is all accident. Normally she lives in relation to some
specific man, and until that man is indicated her preparation for life
must be of the most tentative sort. She lives, going nowhere, like a
cabman on the crawl, and at any time she may find it open to her to
assist some pleasure-loving millionaire to spend his millions, or to
play her part in one of the many real, original, and only derivatives of
the former aristocratic "Society" that have developed themselves among
independent people. Even if she is a serious and labour-loving type,
some shareholder may tempt her with the prospect of developing her
exceptional personality in ease and freedom and in "doing good" with his
money. With the continued growth of the shareholding class, the
brighter-looking matrimonial chances, not to speak of the glittering
opportunities that are not matrimonial, will increase. Reading is now
the privilege of all classes, there are few secrets of etiquette that a
clever lower-class girl will fail to learn, there are few such girls,
even now, who are not aware of their wide opportunities, or at least
their wide possibilities, of luxury and freedom, there are still fewer
who, knowing as much, do not let it affect their standards and
conception of life. The whole mass of modern fiction written by women
for women, indeed, down to the cheapest novelettes, is saturated with
the romance of _mésalliance_. And even when the specific man has
appeared, the adventurous is still not shut out of a woman's career. A
man's affections may wander capriciously and leave him but a little
poorer or a little better placed; for the women they wander from,
however, the issue is an infinitely graver one, and the serious
wandering of a woman's fancy may mean the beginning of a new world for
her. At any moment the chances of death may make the wife a widow, may
sweep out of existence all that she had made fundamental in her life,
may enrich her with insurance profits or hurl her into poverty, and
restore all the drifting expectancy of her adolescence....
Now, it is difficult to say why we should expect the growing girl, in
whom an unlimited ambition and egotism is as natural and proper a thing
as beauty and high spirits, to deny herself some dalliance with the more
opulent dreams that form the golden lining to these precarious
prospects? How can we expect her to prepare herself solely, putting all
wandering thoughts aside, for the servantless cookery, domestic
Kindergarten work, the care of hardy perennials, and low-pitched
conversation of the engineer's home? Supposing, after all, there is no
predestinate engineer! The stories the growing girl now prefers, and I
imagine will in the future still prefer, deal mainly with the rich and
free; the theatre she will prefer to visit will present the lives and
loves of opulent people with great precision and detailed correctness;
her favourite periodicals will reflect that life; her schoolmistress,
whatever her principles, must have an eye to her "chances." And even
after Fate or a gust of passion has whirled her into the arms of our
busy and capable fundamental man, all these things will still be in her
imagination and memory. Unless he is a person of extraordinary mental
prepotency, she will almost insensibly determine the character of the
home in a direction quite other than that of our first sketch. She will
set herself to realize, as far as her husband's means and credit permit,
the ideas of the particular section of the wealthy that have captured
her. If she is a fool, her ideas of life will presently come into
complete conflict with her husband's in a manner that, as the fumes of
the love potion leave his brain, may bring the real nature of the case
home to him. If he is of that resolute strain to whom the world must
finally come, he may rebel and wade through tears and crises to his
appointed work again. The cleverer she is, and the finer and more loyal
her character up to a certain point, the less likely this is to happen,
the more subtle and effective will be her hold upon her husband, and the
more probable his perversion from the austere pursuit of some
interesting employment, towards the adventures of modern money-getting
in pursuit of her ideals of a befitting life. And meanwhile, since "one
must live," the nursery that was implicit in the background of the first
picture will probably prove unnecessary. She will be, perforce, a
person not only of pleasant pursuits, but of leisure. If she endears
herself to her husband, he will feel not only the attraction but the
duty of her vacant hours; he will not only deflect his working hours
from the effective to the profitable, but that occasional burning of the
midnight oil, that no brain-worker may forego if he is to retain his
efficiency, will, in the interests of some attractive theatrical
performance or some agreeable social occasion, all too frequently have
to be put off or abandoned.
This line of speculation, therefore, gives us a second picture of a
household to put beside our first, a household, or rather a couple,
rather more likely to be typical of the mass of middling sort of people
in those urban regions of the future than our first projection. It will
probably not live in a separate home at all, but in a flat in "Town," or
at one of the subordinate centres of the urban region we have foreseen.
The apartments will be more or less agreeably adorned in some decorative
fashion akin to but less costly than some of the many fashions that will
obtain among the wealthy. They will be littered with a miscellaneous
literature, novels of an entertaining and stimulating sort
predominating, and with _bric-à-brac_; in a childless household there
must certainly be quaint dolls, pet images, and so forth, and perhaps a
canary would find a place. I suspect there would be an edition or so of
"Omar" about in this more typical household of "Moderns," but I doubt
about the Bible. The man's working books would probably be shabby and
relegated to a small study, and even these overlaid by abundant copies
of the _Financial_--something or other. It would still be a servantless
household, and probably not only without a nursery but without a
kitchen, and in its grade and degree it would probably have social
relations directly or intermediately through rich friends with some
section, some one of the numerous cults of the quite independent
wealthy.
Quite similar households to this would be even more common among those
neither independent nor engaged in work of a primarily functional
nature, but endeavouring quite ostensibly to acquire wealth by political
or business ingenuity and activity, and also among the great multitude
of artists, writers, and that sort of people, whose works are their
children. In comparison with the state of affairs fifty years ago, the
child-infested household is already conspicuously rare in these classes.
These are two highly probably _ménages_ among the central mass of the
people of the coming time. But there will be many others. The _ménage à
deux_, one may remark, though it may be without the presence of
children, is not necessarily childless. Parentage is certainly part of
the pride of many men--though, curiously enough, it does not appear to
be felt among modern European married women as any part of their
honour. Many men will probably achieve parentage, therefore, who will
not succeed in inducing, or who may possibly even be very loth to
permit, their wives to undertake more than the first beginnings of
motherhood. From the moment of its birth, unless it is kept as a pet,
the child of such marriages will be nourished, taught, and trained
almost as though it were an orphan, it will have a succession of bottles
and foster-mothers for body and mind from the very beginning. Side by
side with this increasing number of childless homes, therefore, there
may develop a system of Kindergarten boarding schools. Indeed, to a
certain extent such schools already exist, and it is one of the
unperceived contrasts of this and any former time how common such a
separation of parents and children becomes. Except in the case of the
illegitimate and orphans, and the children of impossible (many
public-house children, _e.g._), or wretched homes, boarding schools
until quite recently were used only for quite big boys and girls. But
now, at every seaside town, for example, one sees a multitude of
preparatory schools, which are really not simply educational
institutions, but supplementary homes. In many cases these are conducted
and very largely staffed by unmarried girls and women who are indeed, in
effect, assistant mothers. This class of capable schoolmistresses is one
of the most interesting social developments of this period. For the most
part they are women who from emotional fastidiousness, intellectual
egotism, or an honest lack of passion, have refused the common lot of
marriage, women often of exceptional character and restraint, and it is
well that, at any rate, their intelligence and character should not pass
fruitlessly out of being. Assuredly for this type the future has much in
store.
There are, however, still other possibilities to be considered in this
matter. In these Anticipations it is impossible to ignore the forces
making for a considerable relaxation of the institution of permanent
monogamous marriage in the coming years, and of a much greater variety
of establishments than is suggested by these possibilities within the
pale. I guess, without attempting to refer to statistics, that our
present society must show a quite unprecedented number and increasing
number of male and female celibates--not religious celibates, but
people, for the most part, whose standard of personal comfort has such a
relation to their earning power that they shirk or cannot enter the
matrimonial grouping. The institution of permanent monogamous
marriage--except in the ideal Roman Catholic community, where it is
based on the sanction of an authority which in real Roman Catholic
countries a large proportion of the men decline to obey--is sustained at
present entirely by the inertia of custom, and by a number of
sentimental and practical considerations, considerations that may very
possibly undergo modification in the face of the altered relationship of
husband and wife that the present development of childless _ménages_ is
bringing about. The practical and sustaining reason for monogamy is the
stability it gives to the family; the value of a stable family lies in
the orderly upbringing in an atmosphere of affection that it secures in
most cases for its more or less numerous children. The monogamous family
has indisputably been the civilizing unit of the pre-mechanical
civilized state. It must be remembered that both for husband and wife in
most cases monogamic life marriage involves an element of sacrifice, it
is an institution of late appearance in the history of mankind, and it
does not completely fit the psychology or physiology of any but very
exceptional characters in either sex. For the man it commonly involves
considerable restraint; he must ride his imagination on the curb, or
exceed the code in an extremely dishonouring, furtive, and
unsatisfactory manner while publicly professing an impossible virtue;
for the woman it commonly implies many uncongenial submissions. There
are probably few married couples who have escaped distressful phases of
bitterness and tears, within the constraint of their, in most cases,
practically insoluble bond. But, on the other hand, and as a reward that
in the soberer, mainly agricultural civilization of the past, and among
the middling class of people, at any rate, has sufficed, there comes
the great development of associations and tendernesses that arises out
of intimate co-operation in an established home, and particularly out of
the linking love and interest of children's lives....
But how does this fit into the childless, disunited, and probably
shifting _ménage_ of our second picture?
It must be borne in mind that it has been the middling and lower mass of
people, the tenants and agriculturists, the shopkeepers, and so forth,
men needing before all things the absolutely loyal help of wives, that
has sustained permanent monogamic marriage whenever it has been
sustained. Public monogamy has existed on its merits--that is, on the
merits of the wife. Merely ostensible reasons have never sufficed. No
sort of religious conviction, without a real practical utility, has ever
availed to keep classes of men, unhampered by circumstances, to its
restrictions. In all times, and holding all sorts of beliefs, the
specimen humanity of courts and nobilities is to be found developing the
most complex qualifications of the code. In some quiet corner of Elysium
the bishops of the early Georges, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the
contemporary French and Spanish courts, the patriarchs of vanished
Byzantium, will find a common topic with the spiritual advisers of the
kingdoms of the East in this difficult theme,--the theme of the
concessions permissible and expedient to earnest believers encumbered
with leisure and a superfluity of power.... It is not necessary to
discuss religious development, therefore, before deciding this issue. We
are dealing now with things deeper and forces infinitely more powerful
than the mere convictions of men.
Will a generation to whom marriage will be no longer necessarily
associated with the birth and rearing of children, or with the immediate
co-operation and sympathy of husband and wife in common proceedings,
retain its present feeling for the extreme sanctity of the permanent
bond? Will the agreeable, unemployed, childless woman, with a high
conception of her personal rights, who is spending her husband's
earnings or income in some pleasant discrepant manner, a type of woman
there are excellent reasons for anticipating will become more
frequent--will she continue to share the honours and privileges of the
wife, mother, and helper of the old dispensation? and in particular,
will the great gulf that is now fixed by custom between her and the
agreeable unmarried lady who is similarly employed remain so inexorably
wide? Charity is in the air, and why should not charming people meet one
another? And where is either of these ladies to find the support that
will enable her to insist upon the monopoly that conventional sentiment,
so far as it finds expression, concedes her? The danger to them both of
the theory of equal liberty is evident enough. On the other hand, in the
case of the unmarried mother who may be helped to hold her own, or who
may be holding her own in the world, where will the moral censor of the
year 1950 find his congenial following to gather stones? Much as we may
regret it, it does very greatly affect the realities of this matter,
that with the increased migration of people from home to home amidst the
large urban regions that, we have concluded, will certainly obtain in
the future, even if moral reprobation and minor social inconveniences do
still attach to certain sorts of status, it will probably be
increasingly difficult to determine the status of people who wish to
conceal it for any but criminal ends.
In another direction there must be a movement towards the relaxation of
the marriage law and of divorce that will complicate status very
confusingly. In the past it has been possible to sustain several
contrasting moral systems in each of the practically autonomous states
of the world, but with a development and cheapening of travel and
migration that is as yet only in its opening phase, an increasing
conflict between dissimilar moral restrictions must appear. Even at
present, with only the most prosperous classes of the American and
Western European countries migrating at all freely, there is a growing
amount of inconvenience arising out of these--from the point of view of
social physiology--quite arbitrary differences. A man or woman may, for
example, have been the injured party in some conjugal complication, may
have established a domicile and divorced the erring spouse in certain
of the United States, may have married again there with absolute local
propriety, and may be a bigamist and a criminal in England. A child may
be a legal child in Denmark or Australia, and a bastard in this austerer
climate. These things are, however, only the first intimations of much
more profound reactions. Almost all the great European Powers, and the
United States also, are extending their boundaries to include great
masses of non-Christian polygamous peoples, and they are permeating
these peoples with railways, printed matter, and all the stimulants of
our present state. With the spread of these conveniences there is no
corresponding spread of Christianity. These people will not always
remain in the ring fence of their present regions; their superseded
princes, and rulers, and public masters, and managers, will presently
come to swell the shareholding mass of the appropriating Empire.
Europeans, on the other hand, will drift into these districts, and under
the influence of their customs, intermarriages and interracial reaction
will increase; in a world which is steadily abolishing locality, the
compromise of local concessions, of localized recognition of the "custom
of the country," cannot permanently avail. Statesmen will have to face
the alternative of either widening the permissible variations of the
marriage contract, or of acute racial and religious stresses, of a vast
variety of possible legal betrayals, and the appearance of a body of
self-respecting people, outside the law and public respect, a body that
will confer a touch of credit upon, because it will share the stigma of,
the deliberately dissolute and criminal. And whether the moral law
shrivels relatively by mere exclusiveness--as in religious matters the
Church of England, for example, has shrivelled to the proportions of a
mere sectarian practice--or whether it broadens itself to sustain
justice in a variety of sexual contracts, the nett result, so far as our
present purpose goes, will be the same. All these forces, making for
moral relaxation in the coming time, will probably be greatly enhanced
by the line of development certain sections of the irresponsible wealthy
will almost certainly follow.
Let me repeat that the shareholding rich man of the new time is in a
position of freedom almost unparalleled in the history of men. He has
sold his permission to control and experiment with the material wealth
of the community for freedom--for freedom from care, labour,
responsibility, custom, local usage and local attachment. He may come
back again into public affairs if he likes--that is his private concern.
Within the limits of the law and his capacity and courage, he may do as
the imagination of his heart directs. Now, such an experimental and
imperfect creature as man, a creature urged by such imperious passions,
so weak in imagination and controlled by so feeble a reason, receives
such absolute freedom as this only at infinite peril. To a great number
of these people, in the second or third generation, this freedom will
mean vice, the subversion of passion to inconsequent pleasures. We have
on record, in the personal history of the Roman emperors, how freedom
and uncontrolled power took one representative group of men, men not
entirely of one blood nor of one bias, but reinforced by the arbitrary
caprice of adoption and political revolution. We have in the history of
the Russian empresses a glimpse of similar feminine possibilities. We
are moving towards a time when, through this confusion of moral
standards I have foretold, the pressure of public opinion in these
matters must be greatly relaxed, when religion will no longer speak with
a unanimous voice, and when freedom of escape from disapproving
neighbours will be greatly facilitated. In the past, when depravity had
a centre about a court, the contagion of its example was limited to the
court region, but every idle rich man of this great, various, and widely
diffused class, will play to a certain extent the moral _rôle_ of a
court. In these days of universal reading and vivid journalism, every
novel infraction of the code will be known of, thought about, and more
or less thoroughly discussed by an enormous and increasing proportion of
the common people. In the past it has been possible for the churches to
maintain an attitude of respectful regret towards the lapses of the
great, and even to co-operate in these lapses with a sympathetic
privacy, while maintaining a wholesome rigour towards vulgar vice. But
in the coming time there will be no Great, but many rich, the middling
sort of people will probably be better educated as a whole than the
rich, and the days of their differential treatment are at an end.
It is foolish, in view of all these things, not to anticipate and
prepare for a state of things when not only will moral standards be
shifting and uncertain, admitting of physiologically sound _ménages_ of
very variable status, but also when vice and depravity, in every form
that is not absolutely penal, will be practised in every grade of
magnificence and condoned. This means that not only will status cease to
be simple and become complex and varied, but that outside the system of
_ménages_ now recognized, and under the disguise of which all other
_ménages_ shelter, there will be a vast drifting and unstable population
grouped in almost every conceivable form of relation. The world of
Georgian England was a world of Homes; the world of the coming time will
still have its Homes, its real Mothers, the custodians of the human
succession, and its cared-for children, the inheritors of the future,
but in addition to this Home world, frothing tumultuously over and
amidst these stable rocks, there will be an enormous complex of
establishments, and hotels, and sterile households, and flats, and all
the elaborate furnishing and appliances of a luxurious extinction.
And since in the present social chaos there does not yet exist any
considerable body of citizens--comparable to the agricultural and
commercial middle class of England during the period of limited
monarchy--that will be practically unanimous in upholding any body of
rules of moral restraint, since there will probably not appear for some
generations any body propounding with wide-reaching authority a new
definitely different code to replace the one that is now likely to be
increasingly disregarded, it follows that the present code with a few
interlined qualifications and grudging legal concessions will remain
nominally operative in sentiment and practice while being practically
disregarded, glossed, or replaced in numberless directions. It must be
pointed out that in effect, what is here forecast for questions of
_ménage_ and moral restraints has already happened to a very large
extent in religious matters. There was a time when it was held--and I
think rightly--that a man's religious beliefs, and particularly his
method of expressing them, was a part not of his individual but of his
social life. But the great upheavals of the Reformation resulted finally
in a compromise, a sort of truce, that has put religious belief very
largely out of intercourse and discussion. It is conceded that within
the bounds of the general peace and security a man may believe and
express his belief in matters of religion as he pleases, not because it
is better so, but because for the present epoch there is no way nor
hope of attaining unanimous truth. There is a decided tendency that
will, I believe, prevail towards the same compromise in the question of
private morals. There is a convention to avoid all discussion of creeds
in general social intercourse; and a similar convention to avoid the
point of status in relation to marriage, one may very reasonably
anticipate, will be similarly recognized.
But this impending dissolution of a common standard of morals does not
mean universal depravity until some great reconstruction obtains any
more than the obsolescence of the Conventicle Act means universal
irreligion. It means that for one Morality there will be many
moralities. Each human being will, in the face of circumstances, work
out his or her particular early training as his or her character
determines. And although there will be a general convention upon which
the most diverse people will meet, it will only be with persons who have
come to identical or similar conclusions in the matter of moral conduct
and who are living in similar _ménages_, just as now it is only with
people whose conversation implies a certain community or kinship of
religious belief, that really frequent and intimate intercourse will go
on. In other words, there will be a process of moral segregation[31] set
up. Indeed, such a process is probably already in operation, amidst the
deliquescent social mass. People will be drawn together into little
groups of similar _ménages_ having much in common. And this--in view of
the considerations advanced in the first two chapters, considerations
all converging on the practical abolition of distances and the general
freedom of people to live anywhere they like over large areas--will mean
very frequently an actual local segregation. There will be districts
that will be clearly recognized and marked as "nice," fast regions,
areas of ramshackle Bohemianism, regions of earnest and active work,
old-fashioned corners and Hill Tops. Whole regions will be set aside for
the purposes of opulent enjoyment--a thing already happening, indeed, at
points along the Riviera to-day. Already the superficial possibilities
of such a segregation have been glanced at. It has been pointed out that
the enormous urban region of the future may present an extraordinary
variety of districts, suburbs, and subordinate centres within its
limiting boundaries, and here we have a very definite enforcement of
that probability.
In the previous chapter I spoke of boating centres and horsey suburbs,
and picturesque hilly districts and living places by the sea, of
promenade centres and theatrical districts; I hinted at various fashions
in architecture, and suchlike things, but these exterior appearances
will be but the outward and visible sign of inward and more spiritual
distinctions. The people who live in the good hunting country and about
that glittering Grand Stand, will no longer be even pretending to live
under the same code as those picturesque musical people who have
concentrated on the canoe-dotted river. Where the promenaders gather,
and the bands are playing, and the pretty little theatres compete, the
pleasure seeker will be seeking such pleasure as he pleases, no longer
debased by furtiveness and innuendo, going his primrose path to a
congenial, picturesque, happy and highly desirable extinction. Just over
the hills, perhaps, a handful of opulent shareholders will be pleasantly
preserving the old traditions of a landed aristocracy, with servants,
tenants, vicar, and other dependents all complete, and what from the
point of view of social physiology will really be an arrested contingent
of the Abyss, but all nicely washed and done good to, will pursue home
industries in model cottages in a quite old English and exemplary
manner. Here the windmills will spin and the waterfalls be trapped to
gather force, and the quiet-eyed master of the machinery will have his
office and perhaps his private home. Here about the great college and
its big laboratories there will be men and women reasoning and studying;
and here, where the homes thicken among the ripe gardens, one will hear
the laughter of playing children, the singing of children in their
schools, and see their little figures going to and fro amidst the trees
and flowers....
And these segregations, based primarily on a difference in moral ideas
and pursuits and ideals, will probably round off and complete themselves
at last as distinct and separate cultures. As the moral ideas realize
themselves in _ménage_ and habits, so the ideals will seek to find
expression in a literature, and the passive drifting together will pass
over into a phase of more or less conscious and intentional
organization. The segregating groups will develop fashions of costume,
types of manners and bearing, and even, perhaps, be characterized by a
certain type of facial expression. And this gives us a glimpse, an
aspect of the immediate future of literature. The kingdoms of the past
were little things, and above the mass of peasants who lived and obeyed
and died, there was just one little culture to which all must needs
conform. Literature was universal within the limits of its language.
Where differences of view arose there were violent controversies,
polemics, and persecutions, until one or other rendering had won its
ascendency. But this new world into which we are passing will, for
several generations at least, albeit it will be freely
inter-communicating and like a whispering gallery for things outspoken,
possess no universal ideals, no universal conventions: there will be the
literature of the thought and effort of this sort of people, and the
literature, thought, and effort of that.[32] Life is already most
wonderfully arbitrary and experimental, and for the coming century this
must be its essential social history, a great drifting and unrest of
people, a shifting and regrouping and breaking up again of groups, great
multitudes seeking to find themselves.
The safe life in the old order, where one did this because it was right,
and that because it was the custom, when one shunned this and hated
that, as lead runs into a mould, all that is passing away. And
presently, as the new century opens out, there will become more and more
distinctly emergent many new cultures and settled ways. The grey expanse
of life to-day is grey, not in its essence, but because of the minute
confused mingling and mutual cancelling of many-coloured lives.
Presently these tints and shades will gather together here as a mass of
one colour, and there as a mass of another. And as these colours
intensify and the tradition of the former order fades, as these cultures
become more and more shaped and conscious, as the new literatures grow
in substance and power, as differences develop from speculative matter
of opinion to definite intentions, as contrasts and affinities grow
sharper and clearer, there must follow some very extensive modifications
in the collective public life. But one series of tints, one colour must
needs have a heightening value amidst this iridescent display. While the
forces at work in the wealthy and purely speculative groups of society
make for disintegration, and in many cases for positive elimination, the
forces that bring together the really functional people will tend more
and more to impose upon them certain common characteristics and beliefs,
and the discovery of a group of similar and compatible class interests
upon which they can unite. The practical people, the engineering and
medical and scientific people, will become more and more homogeneous in
their fundamental culture, more and more distinctly aware of a common
"general reason" in things, and of a common difference from the less
functional masses and from any sort of people in the past. They will
have in their positive science a common ground for understanding the
real pride of life, the real reason for the incidental nastiness of
vice, and so they will be a sanely reproductive class, and, above all,
an educating class. Just how much they will have kept or changed of the
deliquescent morality of to-day, when in a hundred years or so they do
distinctively and powerfully emerge, I cannot speculate now. They will
certainly be a moral people. They will have developed the literature of
their needs, they will have discussed and tested and thrashed out many
things, they will be clear where we are confused, resolved where we are
undecided and weak. In the districts of industrial possibility, in the
healthier quarters of the town regions, away from the swamps and away
from the glare of the midnight lights, these people will be gathered
together. They will be linked in professions through the agency of great
and sober papers--in England the _Lancet_, the _British Medical
Journal_, and the already great periodicals of the engineering trades,
foreshadow something, but only a very little, of what these papers may
be. The best of the wealthy will gravitate to their attracting
centres.... Unless some great catastrophe in nature break down all that
man has built, these great kindred groups of capable men and educated,
adequate women must be, under the operation of the forces we have
considered so far, the element finally emergent amidst the vast
confusions of the coming time.