We have seen that the essential process arising out of the growth of
science and mechanism, and more particularly out of the still developing
new facilities of locomotion and communication science has afforded, is
the deliquescence of the social organizations of the past, and the
synthesis of ampler and still ampler and more complicated and still more
complicated social unities. The suggestion is powerful, the conclusion
is hard to resist, that, through whatever disorders of danger and
conflict, whatever centuries of misunderstanding and bloodshed, men may
still have to pass, this process nevertheless aims finally, and will
attain to the establishment of one world-state at peace within itself.
In the economic sense, indeed, a world-state is already established.
Even to-day we do all buy and sell in the same markets--albeit the
owners of certain ancient rights levy their tolls here and there--and
the Hindoo starves, the Italian feels the pinch, before the Germans or
the English go short of bread. There is no real autonomy any more in
the world, no simple right to an absolute independence such as formerly
the Swiss could claim. The nations and boundaries of to-day do no more
than mark claims to exemptions, privileges, and corners in the
market--claims valid enough to those whose minds and souls are turned
towards the past, but absurdities to those who look to the future as the
end and justification of our present stresses. The claim to political
liberty amounts, as a rule, to no more than the claim of a man to live
in a parish without observing sanitary precautions or paying rates
because he had an excellent great-grandfather. Against all these old
isolations, these obsolescent particularisms, the forces of mechanical
and scientific development fight, and fight irresistibly; and upon the
general recognition of this conflict, upon the intelligence and courage
with which its inflexible conditions are negotiated, depends very
largely the amount of bloodshed and avoidable misery the coming years
will hold.
The final attainment of this great synthesis, like the social
deliquescence and reconstruction dealt with in the earlier of these
anticipations, has an air of being a process independent of any
collective or conscious will in man, as being the expression of a
greater Will; it is working now, and may work out to its end vastly, and
yet at times almost imperceptibly, as some huge secular movement in
Nature, the raising of a continent, the crumbling of a mountain-chain,
goes on to its appointed culmination. Or one may compare the process to
a net that has surrounded, and that is drawn continually closer and
closer upon, a great and varied multitude of men. We may cherish
animosities, we may declare imperishable distances, we may plot and
counter-plot, make war and "fight to a finish;" the net tightens for all
that.
Already the need of some synthesis at least ampler than existing
national organizations is so apparent in the world, that at least five
spacious movements of coalescence exist to-day; there is the movement
called Anglo-Saxonism, the allied but finally very different movement of
British Imperialism, the Pan-Germanic movement, Pan-Slavism, and the
conception of a great union of the "Latin" peoples. Under the outrageous
treatment of the white peoples an idea of unifying the "Yellow" peoples
is pretty certain to become audibly and visibly operative before many
years. These are all deliberate and justifiable suggestions, and they
all aim to sacrifice minor differences in order to link like to like in
greater matters, and so secure, if not physical predominance in the
world, at least an effective defensive strength for their racial, moral,
customary, or linguistic differences against the aggressions of other
possible coalescences. But these syntheses or other similar synthetic
conceptions, if they do not contrive to establish a rational social
unity by sanely negotiated unions, will be forced to fight for physical
predominance in the world. The whole trend of forces in the world is
against the preservation of _local_ social systems however greatly and
spaciously conceived. Yet it is quite possible that several or all of
the cultures that will arise out of the development of these
Pan-this-and-that movements may in many of their features survive, as
the culture of the Jews has survived, political obliteration, and may
disseminate themselves, as the Jewish system has disseminated itself,
over the whole world-city. Unity by no means involves homogeneity. The
greater the social organism the more complex and varied its parts, the
more intricate and varied the interplay of culture and breed and
character within it.
It is doubtful if either the Latin or the Pan-Slavic idea contains the
promise of any great political unification. The elements of the Latin
synthesis are dispersed in South and Central America and about the
Mediterranean basin in a way that offers no prospect of an economic
unity between them. The best elements of the French people lie in the
western portion of what must become the greatest urban region of the Old
World, the Rhine-Netherlandish region; the interests of North Italy draw
that region away from the Italy of Rome and the South towards the Swiss
and South Germany, and the Spanish and Portuguese speaking halfbreeds
of South America have not only their own coalescences to arrange, but
they lie already under the political tutelage of the United States.
Nowhere except in France and North Italy is there any prospect of such
an intellectual and educational evolution as is necessary before a great
scheme of unification can begin to take effect. And the difficulties in
the way of the pan-Slavic dream are far graver. Its realization is
enormously hampered by the division of its languages, and the fact that
in the Bohemian language, in Polish and in Russian, there exist distinct
literatures, almost equally splendid in achievement, but equally
insufficient in quantity and range to establish a claim to replace all
other Slavonic dialects. Russia, which should form the central mass of
this synthesis, stagnates, relatively to the Western states, under the
rule of reactionary intelligences; it does not develop, and does not
seem likely to develop, the merest beginnings of that great educated
middle class, with which the future so enormously rests. The Russia of
to-day is indeed very little more than a vast breeding-ground for an
illiterate peasantry, and the forecasts of its future greatness entirely
ignore that dwindling significance of mere numbers in warfare which is
the clear and necessary consequence of mechanical advance. To a large
extent, I believe, the Western Slavs will follow the Prussians and
Lithuanians, and be incorporated in the urbanization of Western Europe,
and the remoter portions of Russia seem destined to become--are indeed
becoming--Abyss, a wretched and disorderly Abyss that will not even be
formidable to the armed and disciplined peoples of the new civilization,
the last quarter of the earth, perhaps, where a barbaric or absentee
nobility will shadow the squalid and unhappy destinies of a multitude of
hopeless and unmeaning lives.
To a certain extent, Russia may play the part of a vaster Ireland, in
her failure to keep pace with the educational and economic progress of
nations which have come into economic unity with her. She will be an
Ireland without emigration, a place for famines. And while Russia delays
to develop anything but a fecund orthodoxy and this simple peasant life,
the grooves and channels are growing ever deeper along which the
currents of trade, of intellectual and moral stimulus, must presently
flow towards the West. I see no region where anything like the
comparatively dense urban regions that are likely to arise about the
Rhineland and over the eastern states of America, for example, can
develop in Russia. With railways planned boldly, it would have been
possible, it might still be possible, to make about Odessa a parallel to
Chicago, but the existing railways run about Odessa as though Asia were
unknown; and when at last the commercial awakening of what is now the
Turkish Empire comes, the railway lines will probably run, not north or
south, but from the urban region of the more scientific central
Europeans down to Constantinople. The long-route land communications in
the future will become continually more swift and efficient than Baltic
navigation, and it is unlikely, therefore, that St. Petersburg has any
great possibilities of growth. It was founded by a man whose idea of the
course of trade and civilization was the sea wholly and solely, and in
the future the sea must necessarily become more and more a last resort.
With its spacious prospects, its architectural magnificence, its
political quality, its desertion by the new commerce, and its terrible
peasant hinterland, it may come about that a striking analogy between
St. Petersburg and Dublin will finally appear.
So much for the Pan-Slavic synthesis. It seems improbable that it can
prevail against the forces that make for the linguistic and economic
annexation of the greater part of European Russia and of the minor
Slavonic masses, to the great Western European urban region.
The political centre of gravity of Russia, in its resistance to these
economic movements, is palpably shifting eastward even to-day, but that
carries it away from the Central European synthesis only towards the
vastly more enormous attracting centre of China. Politically the Russian
Government may come to dominate China in the coming decades, but the
reality beneath any such formal predominance will be the absorption of
Russia beyond the range of the European pull by the synthesis of Eastern
Asia. Neither the Russian literature nor the Russian language and
writing, nor the Russian civilization as a whole have the qualities to
make them irresistible to the energetic and intelligent millions of the
far East. The chances seem altogether against the existence of a great
Slavonic power in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. They seem, at the first glance, to lie just as heavily in
favour of an aggressive Pan-Germanic power struggling towards a great
and commanding position athwart Central Europe and Western Asia, and
turning itself at last upon the defeated Slavonic disorder. There can be
no doubt that at present the Germans, with the doubtful exception of the
United States, have the most efficient middle class in the world, their
rapid economic progress is to a very large extent, indeed, a triumph of
intelligence, and their political and probably their military and naval
services are still conducted with a capacity and breadth of view that
find no parallel in the world. But the very efficiency of the German as
a German to-day, and the habits and traditions of victory he has
accumulated for nearly forty years, may prove in the end a very doubtful
blessing to Europe as a whole, or even to his own grandchildren.
Geographical contours, economic forces, the trend of invention and
social development, point to a unification of all Western Europe, but
they certainly do not point to its Germanization. I have already given
reasons for anticipating that the French language may not only hold its
own, but prevail against German in Western Europe. And there are certain
other obstacles in the way even of the union of indisputable Germans.
One element in Germany's present efficiency must become more and more of
an encumbrance as the years pass. The Germanic idea is deeply interwoven
with the traditional Empire and with the martinet methods of the
Prussian monarchy. The intellectual development of the Germans is
defined to a very large extent by a court-directed officialdom. In many
things that court is still inspired by the noble traditions of education
and discipline that come from the days of German adversity, and the
predominance of the Imperial will does, no doubt, give a unity of
purpose to German policy and action that adds greatly to its efficacy.
But for a capable ruler, even more than for a radiantly stupid monarch,
the price a nation must finally pay is heavy. Most energetic and capable
people are a little intolerant of unsympathetic capacity, are apt on the
under side of their egotism to be jealous, assertive, and aggressive. In
the present Empire of Germany there are no other great figures to
balance the Imperial personage, and I do not see how other great figures
are likely to arise. A great number of fine and capable persons must be
failing to develop, failing to tell, under the shadow of this too
prepotent monarchy. There are certain limiting restrictions imposed upon
Germans through the Imperial activity, that must finally be bad for the
intellectual atmosphere which is Germany's ultimate strength. For
example, the Emperor professes a violent and grotesque Christianity with
a ferocious pro-Teutonic Father and a negligible Son, and the public
mind is warped into conformity with the finally impossible cant of this
eccentric creed. His Imperial Majesty's disposition to regard criticism
as hostility stifles the public thought of Germany. He interferes in
university affairs and in literary and artistic matters with a quite
remarkable confidence and incalculable consequences. The inertia of a
century carries him and his Germany onward from success to success, but
for all that one may doubt whether the extraordinary intellectuality
that distinguished the German atmosphere in the early years of the
century, and in which such men as Blumenthal and Moltke grew to
greatness, in which Germany grew to greatness, is not steadily fading in
the heat and blaze of the Imperial sunshine. Discipline and education
have carried Germany far; they are essential things, but an equally
essential need for the coming time is a free play for men of initiative
and imagination. Is Germany to her utmost possibility making capable
men? That, after all, is the vital question, and not whether her policy
is wise or foolish, or her commercial development inflated or sound. Or
is Germany doing no more than cash the promises of those earlier days?
After all, I do not see that she is in a greatly stronger position than
was France in the early sixties, and, indeed, in many respects her
present predominance is curiously analogous to that of the French Empire
in those years. Death at any time may end the career of the present
ruler of Germany--there is no certain insurance of one single life. This
withdrawal would leave Germany organized entirely with reference to a
Court, and there is no trustworthy guarantee that the succeeding Royal
Personality may not be something infinitely more vain and aggressive, or
something weakly self-indulgent or unpatriotic and morally indifferent.
Much has been done in the past of Germany, the infinitely less exacting
past, by means of the tutor, the Chamberlain, the Chancellor, the
wide-seeing power beyond the throne, who very unselfishly intrigues his
monarch in the way that he should go. But that sort of thing is
remarkably like writing a letter by means of a pen held in lazy tongs
instead of the hand. A very easily imagined series of accidents may
place the destinies of Germany in such lazy tongs again. When that
occasion comes, will the new class of capable men on which we have
convinced ourselves in these anticipations the future depends--will it
be ready for its enlarged responsibilities, or will the flower of its
possible members be in prison for _lèse majesté_, or naturalized
Englishmen or naturalized Americans or troublesome privates under
officers of indisputably aristocratic birth, or well-broken labourers,
won "back to the land," under the auspices of an Agrarian League?
In another way the intensely monarchical and aristocratic organization
of the German Empire will stand in the way of the political synthesis of
greater Germany. Indispensable factors in that synthesis will be Holland
and Switzerland--little, advantageously situated peoples, saturated with
ideas of personal freedom. One can imagine a German Swiss, at any rate,
merging himself in a great Pan-Germanic republican state, but to bow the
knee to the luridly decorated God of His Imperial Majesty's Fathers will
be an altogether more difficult exploit for a self-respecting man....
Moreover, before Germany can unify to the East she must fight the
Russian, and to unify to the West she must fight the French and perhaps
the English, and she may have to fight a combination of these powers. I
think the military strength of France is enormously underrated. Upon
this matter M. Bloch should be read. Indisputably the French were beaten
in 1870, indisputably they have fallen behind in their long struggle to
maintain themselves equal with the English on the sea, but neither of
these things efface the future of the French. The disasters of 1870 were
probably of the utmost benefit to the altogether too sanguine French
imagination. They cleared the French mind of the delusion that personal
Imperialism is the way to do the desirable thing, a delusion many
Germans (and, it would seem, a few queer Englishmen and still queerer
Americans) entertain. The French have done much to demonstrate the
possibility of a stable military republic. They have disposed of crown
and court, and held themselves in order for thirty good years; they have
dissociated their national life from any form of religious profession;
they have contrived a freedom of thought and writing that, in spite of
much conceit to the contrary, is quite impossible among the
English-speaking peoples. I find no reason to doubt the implication of
M. Bloch that on land to-day the French are relatively far stronger than
they were in 1870, that the evolution of military expedients has been
all in favour of the French character and intelligence, and that even a
single-handed war between France and Germany to-day might have a very
different issue from that former struggle. In such a conflict it will be
Germany, and not France, that will have pawned her strength to the
English-speaking peoples on the high seas. And France will not fight
alone. She will fight for Switzerland or Luxembourg, or the mouth of the
Rhine. She will fight with the gravity of remembered humiliations, with
the whole awakened Slav-race at the back of her antagonist, and very
probably with the support of the English-speaking peoples.
It must be pointed out how strong seems the tendency of the German
Empire to repeat the history of Holland upon a larger scale. While the
Dutch poured out all their strength upon the seas, in a conflict with
the English that at the utmost could give them only trade, they let the
possibilities of a great Low German synthesis pass utterly out of being.
(In those days Low Germany stretched to Arras and Douay.) They
positively dragged the English into the number of their enemies. And
to-day the Germans invade the sea with a threat and intention that will
certainly create a countervailing American navy, fundamentally modify
the policy of Great Britain, such as it is, and very possibly go far to
effect the synthesis of the English-speaking peoples.
So involved, I do not see that the existing Germanic synthesis is likely
to prevail in the close economic unity, the urban region that will arise
in Western Europe. I imagine that the German Empire--that is, the
organized expression of German aggression to-day--will be either
shattered or weakened to the pitch of great compromises by a series of
wars by land and sea; it will be forced to develop the autonomy of its
rational middle class in the struggles that will render these
compromises possible, and it will be finally not Imperial German ideas,
but central European ideas possibly more akin to Swiss conceptions, a
civilized republicanism finding its clearest expression in the French
language, that will be established upon a bilingual basis throughout
Western Europe, and increasingly predominant over the whole European
mainland and the Mediterranean basin, as the twentieth century closes.
The splendid dream of a Federal Europe, which opened the nineteenth
century for France, may perhaps, after all, come to something like
realization at the opening of the twenty-first. But just how long these
things take, just how easily or violently they are brought about,
depends, after all, entirely upon the rise in general intelligence in
Europe. An ignorant, a merely trained or a merely cultured people, will
not understand these coalescences, will fondle old animosities and stage
hatreds, and for such a people there must needs be disaster, forcible
conformities and war. Europe will have her Irelands as well as her
Scotlands, her Irelands of unforgettable wrongs, kicking, squalling,
bawling most desolatingly, for nothing that any one can understand.
There will be great scope for the shareholding dilettanti, great
opportunities for literary quacks, in "national" movements, language
leagues, picturesque plotting, and the invention of such "national"
costumes as the world has never seen. The cry of the little nations
will go up to heaven, asserting the inalienable right of all little
nations to sit down firmly in the middle of the high-road, in the midst
of the thickening traffic, and with all their dear little toys about
them, play and play--just as they used to play before the road had
come....
And while the great states of the continent of Europe are hammering down
their obstructions of language and national tradition or raising the
educational level above them until a working unity is possible, and
while the reconstruction of Eastern Asia--whether that be under Russian,
Japanese, English, or native Chinese direction--struggles towards
attainment, will there also be a great synthesis of the English-speaking
peoples going on? I am inclined to believe that there will be such a
synthesis, and that the head and centre of the new unity will be the
great urban region that is developing between Chicago and the Atlantic,
and which will lie mainly, but not entirely, south of the St. Lawrence.
Inevitably, I think, that region must become the intellectual,
political, and industrial centre of any permanent unification of the
English-speaking states. There will, I believe, develop about that
centre a great federation of white English-speaking peoples, a
federation having America north of Mexico as its central mass (a
federation that may conceivably include Scandinavia) and its federal
government will sustain a common fleet, and protect or dominate or
actually administer most or all of the non-white states of the present
British Empire, and in addition much of the South and Middle Pacific,
the East and West Indies, the rest of America, and the larger part of
black Africa. Quite apart from the dominated races, such an
English-speaking state should have by the century-end a practically
homogeneous citizenship of at least a hundred million sound-bodied and
educated and capable _men_. It should be the first of the three powers
of the world, and it should face the organizing syntheses of Europe and
Eastern Asia with an intelligent sympathy. By the year 2000 all its
common citizens should certainly be in touch with the thought of
Continental Europe through the medium of French; its English language
should be already rooting firmly through all the world beyond its
confines, and its statesmanship should be preparing openly and surely,
and discussing calmly with the public mind of the European, and probably
of the Yellow state, the possible coalescences and conventions, the
obliteration of custom-houses, the homologization of laws and coinage
and measures, and the mitigation of monopolies and special claims, by
which the final peace of the world may be assured for ever. Such a
synthesis, at any rate, of the peoples now using the English tongue, I
regard not only as a possible, but as a probable, thing. The positive
obstacles to its achievement, great though they are, are yet trivial in
comparison with the obstructions to that lesser European synthesis we
have ventured to forecast. The greater obstacle is negative, it lies in
the want of stimulus, in the lax prosperity of most of the constituent
states of such a union. But such a stimulus, the renascence of Eastern
Asia, or a great German fleet upon the ocean, may presently supply.
Now, all these three great coalescences, this shrivelling up and
vanishing of boundary lines, will be the outward and visible
accompaniment of that inward and social reorganization which it is the
main object of these Anticipations to display. I have sought to show
that in peace and war alike a process has been and is at work, a process
with all the inevitableness and all the patience of a natural force,
whereby the great swollen, shapeless, hypertrophied social mass of
to-day must give birth at last to a naturally and informally organized,
educated class, an unprecedented sort of people, a New Republic
dominating the world. It will be none of our ostensible governments that
will effect this great clearing up; it will be the mass of power and
intelligence altogether outside the official state systems of to-day
that will make this great clearance, a new social Hercules that will
strangle the serpents of war and national animosity in his cradle.
Now, the more one descends from the open uplands of wide generalization
to the parallel jungle of particulars, the more dangerous does the road
of prophesying become, yet nevertheless there may be some possibility of
speculating how, in the case of the English-speaking synthesis at least,
this effective New Republic may begin visibly to shape itself out and
appear. It will appear first, I believe, as a conscious organization of
intelligent and quite possibly in some cases wealthy men, as a movement
having distinct social and political aims, confessedly ignoring most of
the existing apparatus of political control, or using it only as an
incidental implement in the attainment of these aims. It will be very
loosely organized in its earlier stages, a mere movement of a number of
people in a certain direction, who will presently discover with a sort
of surprise the common object towards which they are all moving.
Already there are some interesting aspects of public activity that,
diverse though their aims may seem, do nevertheless serve to show the
possible line of development of this New Republic in the coming time.
For example, as a sort of preliminary sigh before the stirring of a
larger movement, there are various Anglo-American movements and leagues
to be noted. Associations for entertaining travelling samples of the
American leisure class in guaranteed English country houses, for
bringing them into momentary physical contact with real titled persons
at lunches and dinners, and for having them collectively lectured by
respectable English authors and divines, are no doubt trivial things
enough; but a snob sometimes shows how the wind blows better than a
serious man. The Empire may catch the American as the soldier caught the
Tartar. There is something very much more spacious than such things as
this, latent in both the British and the American mind, and observable,
for instance, in the altered tone of the Presses of both countries since
the Venezuela Message and the Spanish American War. Certain projects of
a much ampler sort have already been put forward. An interesting
proposal of an interchangeable citizenship, so that with a change of
domicile an Englishman should have the chance of becoming a citizen of
the United States, and an American a British citizen or a voter in an
autonomous British colony, for example, has been made. Such schemes
will, no doubt, become frequent, and will afford much scope for
discussion in both countries during the next decade or so.[47] The
American constitution and the British crown and constitution have to be
modified or shelved at some stage in this synthesis, and for certain
types of intelligence there could be no more attractive problem. Certain
curious changes in the colonial point of view will occur as these
discussions open out. The United States of America are rapidly taking,
or have already taken, the ascendency in the iron and steel and
electrical industries out of the hands of the British; they are
developing a far ampler and more thorough system of higher scientific
education than the British, and the spirit of efficiency percolating
from their more efficient businesses is probably higher in their public
services. These things render the transfer of the present mercantile and
naval ascendency of Great Britain to the United States during the next
two or three decades a very probable thing, and when this is
accomplished the problem how far colonial loyalty is the fruit of Royal
Visits and sporadic knighthoods, and how far it has relation to the
existence of a predominant fleet, will be near its solution. An
interesting point about such discussions as this, in which indeed in all
probability the nascent consciousness of the New Republic will emerge,
will be the solution this larger synthesis will offer to certain
miserable difficulties of the present time. Government by the elect of
the first families of Great Britain has in the last hundred years made
Ireland and South Africa two open sores of irreconcilable wrong. These
two English-speaking communities will never rest and never emerge from
wretchedness under the vacillating vote-catching incapacity of British
Imperialism, and it is impossible that the British power, having
embittered them, should ever dare to set them free. But within such an
ampler synthesis as the New Republic will seek, these states could
emerge to an equal fellowship that would take all the bitterness from
their unforgettable past.
Another type of public activity which foreshadows an aspect under which
the New Republic will emerge is to be found in the unofficial
organizations that have come into existence in Great Britain to watch
and criticize various public departments. There is, for example, the
Navy League, a body of intelligent and active persons with a distinctly
expert qualification which has intervened very effectively in naval
control during the last few years. There is also at present a vast
amount of disorganized but quite intelligent discontent with the tawdry
futilities of army reform that occupy the War Office. It becomes
apparent that there is no hope of a fully efficient and well-equipped
official army under parliamentary government, and with that realization
there will naturally appear a disposition to seek some way to military
efficiency, as far as is legally possible, outside War Office control.
Already recruiting is falling off, it will probably fall off more and
more as the patriotic emotions evoked by the Boer War fade away, and no
trivial addition to pay or privilege will restore it. Elementary
education has at last raised the intelligence of the British lower
classes to a point when the prospect of fighting in distant lands under
unsuitably educated British officers of means and gentility with a
defective War Office equipment and inferior weapons has lost much of its
romantic glamour. But an unofficial body that set itself to the
establishment of a school of military science, to the sane organization
and criticism of military experiments in tactics and equipment, and to
the raising for experimental purposes of volunteer companies and
battalions, would find no lack of men.... What an unofficial syndicate
of capable persons of the new sort may do in these matters has been
shown in the case of the _Turbinia_, the germ of an absolute revolution
in naval construction.
Such attempts at unofficial soldiering would be entirely in the spirit
in which I believe the New Republic will emerge, but it is in another
line of activity that the growing new consciousness will presently be
much more distinctly apparent. It is increasingly evident that to
organize and control public education is beyond the power of a
democratic government. The meanly equipped and pretentiously conducted
private schools of Great Britain, staffed with ignorant and incapable
young men, exist, on the other hand, to witness that public education is
no matter to be left to merely commercial enterprise working upon
parental ignorance and social prejudice. The necessary condition to the
effective development of the New Republic is a universally accessible,
spacious, and varied educational system working in an atmosphere of
efficient criticism and general intellectual activity. Schools alone are
of no avail, universities are merely dens of the higher cramming, unless
the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and lecturers are in touch with
and under the light of an abundant, contemporary, and fully adult
intellectuality. At present, in Great Britain at least, the headmasters
entrusted with the education of the bulk of the influential men of the
next decades are conspicuously second-rate men, forced and etiolated
creatures, scholarship boys manured with annotated editions, and brought
up under and protected from all current illumination by the kale-pot of
the Thirty-nine Articles. Many of them are less capable teachers and
even less intelligent men than many Board School teachers. There is,
however, urgent need of an absolutely new type of school--a school that
shall be, at least, so skilfully conducted as to supply the necessary
training in mathematics, dialectics, languages, and drawing, and the
necessary knowledge of science, without either consuming all the leisure
of the boy or destroying his individuality, as it is destroyed by the
ignorant and pretentious blunderers of to-day; and there is an equally
manifest need of a new type of University, something other than a happy
fastness for those precociously brilliant creatures--creatures whose
brilliance is too often the hectic indication of a constitutional
unsoundness of mind--who can "get in" before the portcullis of the
nineteenth birthday falls. These new educational elements may either
grow slowly through the steady and painful pressure of remorseless
facts, or, as the effort to evoke the New Republic becomes more
conscious and deliberate, they may be rapidly brought into being by the
conscious endeavours of capable men. Assuredly they will never be
developed by the wisdom of the governments of the grey. It may be
pointed out that in an individual and disorganized way a growing sense
of such needs is already displayed. Such great business managers as Mr.
Andrew Carnegie, for example, and many other of the wealthy efficients
of the United States of America, are displaying a strong disinclination
to found families of functionless shareholders, and a strong disposition
to contribute, by means of colleges, libraries, and splendid
foundations, to the future of the whole English-speaking world. Of
course, Mr. Carnegie is not an educational specialist, and his good
intentions will be largely exploited by the energetic mediocrities who
control our educational affairs. But it is the intention that concerns
us now, and not the precise method or effect. Indisputably these rich
Americans are at a fundamentally important work in these endowments, and
as indisputably many of their successors--I do not mean the heirs to
their private wealth, but the men of the same type who will play their
_rôle_ in the coming years--will carry on this spacious work with a
wider prospect and a clearer common understanding.
The establishment of modern and efficient schools is alone not
sufficient for the intellectual needs of the coming time. The school and
university are merely the preparation for the life of mental activity in
which the citizen of the coming state will live. The three years of
university and a lifetime of garrulous stagnation which constitutes the
mind's history of many a public schoolmaster, for example, and most of
the clergy to-day, will be impossible under the new needs. The
old-fashioned university, secure in its omniscience, merely taught; the
university of the coming time will, as its larger function, criticize
and learn. It will be organized for research--for the criticism, that
is, of thought and nature. And a subtler and a greater task before those
who will presently swear allegiance to the New Republic is to aid and
stimulate that process of sound adult mental activity which is the
cardinal element in human life. After all, in spite of the pretentious
impostors who trade upon the claim, literature, contemporary literature,
is the breath of civilized life, and those who sincerely think and write
the salt of the social body. To mumble over the past, to live on the
classics, however splendid, is senility. The New Republic, therefore,
will sustain its authors. In the past the author lived within the limits
of his patron's susceptibility, and led the world, so far as he did
lead it, from that cage. In the present he lives within the limits of a
particularly distressful and ill-managed market. He must please and
interest the public before he may reason with it, and even to reach the
public ear involves other assiduities than writing. To write one's best
is surely sufficient work for a man, but unless the author is prepared
to add to his literary toil the correspondence and alert activity of a
business man, he may find that no measure of acceptance will save him
from a mysterious poverty. Publishing has become a trade, differing only
from the trade in pork or butter in the tradesman's careless
book-keeping and his professed indifference to the quality of his goods.
But unless the whole mass of argument in these Anticipations is false,
publishing is as much, or even more, of a public concern than education,
and as little to be properly discharged by private men working for
profit. On the other hand, it is not to be undertaken by a government of
the grey, for a confusion cannot undertake to clarify itself; it is an
activity in which the New Republic will necessarily engage.
The men of the New Republic will be intelligently critical men, and they
will have the courage of their critical conclusions. For the sake of the
English tongue, for the sake of the English peoples, they will set
themselves to put temptingly within the reach of all readers of the
tongue, and all possible readers of the tongue, an abundance of living
literature. They will endeavour to shape great publishing trusts and
associations that will have the same relation to the publishing office
of to-day that a medical association has to a patent-medicine dealer.
They will not only publish, but sell; their efficient book-shops, their
efficient system of book-distribution will replace the present haphazard
dealings of quite illiterate persons under whose shadows people in the
provinces live.[48] If one of these publishing groups decides that a
book, new or old, is of value to the public mind, I conceive the
copyright will be secured and the book produced all over the world in
every variety of form and price that seems necessary to its exhaustive
sale. Moreover, these publishing associations will sustain spaciously
conceived organs of opinion and criticism, which will begin by being
patiently and persistently good, and so develop into power. And the more
distinctly the New Republic emerges, the less danger there will be of
these associations being allowed to outlive their service in a state of
ossified authority. New groups of men and new phases of thought will
organize their publishing associations as children learn to talk.[49]
And while the New Republic is thus developing its idea of itself and
organizing its mind, it will also be growing out of the confused and
intricate businesses and undertakings and public services of the present
time, into a recognizable material body. The synthetic process that is
going on in the case of many of the larger of the businesses of the
world, that formation of Trusts that bulks so large in American
discussion, is of the utmost significance in this connection.
Conceivably the first impulse to form Trusts came from a mere desire to
control competition and economize working expenses, but even in its very
first stages this process of coalescence has passed out of the region of
commercial operations into that of public affairs. The Trust develops
into the organization under men far more capable than any sort of public
officials, of entire industries, of entire departments of public life,
quite outside the ostensible democratic government system altogether.
The whole apparatus of communications, which we have seen to be of such
primary importance in the making of the future, promises to pass, in the
case of the United States at least, out of the region of scramble into
the domain of deliberate control. Even to-day the Trusts are taking over
quite consciously the most vital national matters. The American iron and
steel industries have been drawn together and developed in a manner that
is a necessary preliminary to the capture of the empire of the seas.
That end is declaredly within the vista of these operations, within
their initial design. These things are not the work of dividend-hunting
imbeciles, but of men who regard wealth as a convention, as a means to
spacious material ends. There is an animated little paper published in
Los Angeles in the interests of Mr. Wilshire, which bears upon its
forefront the maxim, "Let the Nation own the Trusts." Well, under their
mantle of property, the Trusts grow continually more elaborate and
efficient machines of production and public service, while the formal
nation chooses its bosses and buttons and reads its illustrated press. I
must confess I do not see the negro and the poor Irishman and all the
emigrant sweepings of Europe, which constitute the bulk of the American
Abyss, uniting to form that great Socialist party of which Mr. Wilshire
dreams, and with a little demonstrating and balloting taking over the
foundry and the electrical works, the engine shed and the signal box,
from the capable men in charge. But that a confluent system of
Trust-owned business organisms, and of Universities and re-organized
military and naval services may presently discover an essential unity of
purpose, presently begin thinking a literature, and behaving like a
State, is a much more possible thing....
In its more developed phases I seem to see the New Republic as (if I may
use an expressive bull) a sort of outspoken Secret Society, with which
even the prominent men of the ostensible state may be openly affiliated.
A vast number of men admit the need but hesitate at the means of
revolution, and in this conception of a slowly growing new social order
organized with open deliberation within the substance of the old, there
are no doubt elements of technical treason, but an enormous gain in the
thoroughness, efficiency, and stability of the possible change.
So it is, or at least in some such ways, that I conceive the growing
sense of itself which the new class of modern efficients will develop,
will become manifest in movements and concerns that are now
heterogeneous and distinct, but will presently drift into co-operation
and coalescence. This idea of a synthetic reconstruction within the
bodies of the English-speaking States may very possibly clothe itself in
quite other formulæ than my phrase of the New Republic; but the need is
with us, the social elements are developing among us, the appliances are
arranging themselves for the hands that will use them, and I cannot but
believe that the idea of a spacious common action will presently come.
In a few years I believe many men who are now rather aimless--men who
have disconsolately watched the collapse of the old Liberalism--will be
clearly telling themselves and one another of their adhesion to this new
ideal. They will be working in schools and newspaper offices, in
foundries and factories, in colleges and laboratories, in county
councils and on school boards--even, it may be, in pulpits--for the time
when the coming of the New Republic will be ripe. It may be dawning even
in the schools of law, because presently there will be a new and
scientific handling of jurisprudence. The highly educated and efficient
officers' mess will rise mechanically and drink to the Monarch, and sit
down to go on discussing the New Republic's growth. I do not see,
indeed, why an intelligent monarch himself, in these days, should not
waive any silliness about Divine Right, and all the ill-bred pretensions
that sit so heavily on a gentlemanly King, and come into the movement
with these others. When the growing conception touches, as in America it
has already touched, the legacy-leaving class, there will be fewer new
Asylums perhaps, but more university chairs....
So it is I conceive the elements of the New Republic taking shape and
running together through the social mass, picking themselves out more
and more clearly, from the shareholder, the parasitic speculator and the
wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an
informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be
influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments,
they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and
controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at
any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its
cardinal ideas, will not rest. The clearest and simplest statement, the
clearest and simplest method, is inevitably associated with the
conceptions of that science upon which the New Republic will arise.
There will be a time, in peace it may be, or under the stresses of
warfare, when the New Republic will find itself ready to arrive, when
the theory will have been worked out and the details will be generally
accepted, and the new order will be ripe to begin. And then, indeed, it
will begin. What life or strength will be left in the old order to
prevent this new order beginning?