If the surmise of a developing New Republic--a Republic that must
ultimately become a World State of capable rational men, developing
amidst the fading contours and colours of our existing nations and
institutions--be indeed no idle dream, but an attainable possibility in
the future, and to that end it is that the preceding Anticipations have
been mainly written, it becomes a speculation of very great interest to
forecast something of the general shape and something even of certain
details of that common body of opinion which the New Republic, when at
last it discovers and declares itself, will possess. Since we have
supposed this New Republic will already be consciously and pretty freely
controlling the general affairs of humanity before this century closes,
its broad principles and opinions must necessarily shape and determine
that still ampler future of which the coming hundred years is but the
opening phase. There are many processes, many aspects of things, that
are now, as it were, in the domain of natural laws and outside human
control, or controlled unintelligently and superstitiously, that in the
future, in the days of the coming New Republic, will be definitely taken
in hand as part of the general work of humanity, as indeed already,
since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the control of
pestilences has been taken in hand. And in particular, there are certain
broad questions much under discussion to which, thus far, I have
purposely given a value disproportionately small:--
While the New Republic is gathering itself together and becoming aware
of itself, that other great element, which I have called the People of
the Abyss, will also have followed out its destiny. For many decades
that development will be largely or entirely out of all human control.
To the multiplying rejected of the white and yellow civilizations there
will have been added a vast proportion of the black and brown races, and
collectively those masses will propound the general question, "What will
you do with us, we hundreds of millions, who cannot keep pace with you?"
If the New Republic emerges at all it will emerge by grappling with this
riddle; it must come into existence by the passes this Sphinx will
guard. Moreover, the necessary results of the reaction of irresponsible
wealth upon that infirm and dangerous thing the human will, the
spreading moral rot of gambling which is associated with irresponsible
wealth, will have been working out, and will continue to work out, so
long as there is such a thing as irresponsible wealth pervading the
social body. That too the New Republic must in its very development
overcome. In the preceding chapter it is clearly implicit that I believe
that the New Republic, as its consciousness and influence develop
together, will meet, check, and control these things; but the broad
principles upon which the control will go, the nature of the methods
employed, still remain to be deduced. And to make that deduction, it is
necessary that the primary conception of life, the fundamental,
religious, and moral ideas of these predominant men of the new time
should first be considered.
Now, quite inevitably, these men will be religious men. Being
themselves, as by the nature of the forces that have selected them they
will certainly be, men of will and purpose, they will be disposed to
find, and consequently they will find, an effect of purpose in the
totality of things. Either one must believe the Universe to be one and
systematic, and held together by some omnipresent quality, or one must
believe it to be a casual aggregation, an incoherent accumulation with
no unity whatsoever outside the unity of the personality regarding it.
All science and most modern religious systems presuppose the former, and
to believe the former is, to any one not too anxious to quibble, to
believe in God. But I believe that these prevailing men of the future,
like many of the saner men of to-day, having so formulated their
fundamental belief, will presume to no knowledge whatever, will presume
to no possibility of knowledge of the real being of God. They will have
no positive definition of God at all. They will certainly not indulge in
"that something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness" (not
defined) or any defective claptrap of that sort. They will content
themselves with denying the self-contradictory absurdities of an
obstinately anthropomorphic theology,[50] they will regard the whole of
being, within themselves and without, as the sufficient revelation of
God to their souls, and they will set themselves simply to that
revelation, seeking its meaning towards themselves faithfully and
courageously. Manifestly the essential being of man in this life is his
will; he exists consciously only to _do_; his main interest in life is
the choice between alternatives; and, since he moves through space and
time to effects and consequences, a general purpose in space and time is
the limit of his understanding. He can know God only under the semblance
of a pervading purpose, of which his own individual freedom of will is a
part, but he can understand that the purpose that exists in space and
time is no more God than a voice calling out of impenetrable darkness is
a man. To men of the kinetic type belief in God so manifest as purpose
is irresistible, and, to all lucid minds, the being of God, save as that
general atmosphere of imperfectly apprehended purpose in which our
individual wills operate, is incomprehensible. To cling to any belief
more detailed than this, to define and limit God in order to take hold
of Him, to detach one's self and parts of the universe from God in some
mysterious way in order to reduce life to a dramatic antagonism, is not
faith, but infirmity. Excessive strenuous belief is not faith. By faith
we disbelieve, and it is the drowning man, and not the strong swimmer,
who clutches at the floating straw. It is in the nature of man, it is in
the present purpose of things, that the real world of our experience and
will should appear to us not only as a progressive existence in space
and time, but as a scheme of good and evil. But choice, the antagonism
of good and evil, just as much as the formulation of things in space and
time, is merely a limiting condition of human being, and in the thought
of God as we conceive of Him in the light of faith, this antagonism
vanishes. God is no moralist, God is no partisan; He comprehends and
cannot be comprehended, and our business is only with so much of His
purpose as centres on our individual wills.
So, or in some such phrases, I believe, these men of the New Republic
will formulate their relationship to God. They will live to serve this
purpose that presents Him, without presumption and without fear. For the
same spacious faith that will render the idea of airing their egotisms
in God's presence through prayer, or of any such quite personal
intimacy, absurd, will render the idea of an irascible and punitive
Deity ridiculous and incredible....
The men of the New Republic will hold and understand quite clearly the
doctrine that in the real world of man's experience, there is Free Will.
They will understand that constantly, as a very condition of his
existence, man is exercising choice between alternatives, and that a
conflict between motives that have different moral values constantly
arises. That conflict between Predestination and Free Will, which is so
puzzling to untrained minds, will not exist for them. They will know
that in the real world of sensory experience, will is free, just as new
sprung grass is green, wood hard, ice cold, and toothache painful. In
the abstract world of reasoning science there is no green, no colour at
all, but certain lengths of vibration; no hardness, but a certain
reaction of molecules; no cold and no pain, but certain molecular
consequences in the nerves that reach the misinterpreting mind. In the
abstract world of reasoning science, moreover, there is a rigid and
inevitable sequence of cause and effect; every act of man could be
foretold to its uttermost detail, if only we knew him and all his
circumstances fully; in the abstract world of reasoned science all
things exist now potentially down to the last moment of infinite time.
But the human will does not exist in the abstract world of reasoned
science, in the world of atoms and vibrations, that rigidly predestinate
scheme of things in space and time. The human will exists in this world
of men and women, in this world where the grass is green and desire
beckons and the choice is often so wide and clear between the sense of
what is desirable and what is more widely and remotely right. In this
world of sense and the daily life, these men will believe with an
absolute conviction, that there is free will and a personal moral
responsibility in relation to that indistinctly seen purpose which is
the sufficient revelation of God to them so far as this sphere of being
goes....
The conception they will have of that purpose will necessarily determine
their ethical scheme. It follows manifestly that if we do really
believe in Almighty God, the more strenuously and successfully we seek
in ourselves and His world to understand the order and progress of
things, and the more clearly we apprehend His purpose, the more assured
and systematic will our ethical basis become.
If, like Huxley, we do not positively believe in God, then we may still
cling to an ethical system which has become an organic part of our lives
and habits, and finding it manifestly in conflict with the purpose of
things, speak of the non-ethical order of the universe. But to any one
whose mind is pervaded by faith in God, a non-ethical universe in
conflict with the incomprehensibly ethical soul of the Agnostic, is as
incredible as a black horned devil, an active material anti-god with
hoofs, tail, pitchfork, and Dunstan-scorched nose complete. To believe
completely in God is to believe in the final rightness of all being. The
ethical system that condemns the ways of life as wrong, or points to the
ways of death as right, that countenances what the scheme of things
condemns, and condemns the general purpose in things as it is now
revealed to us, must prepare to follow the theological edifice upon
which it was originally based. If the universe is non-ethical by our
present standards, we must reconsider these standards and reconstruct
our ethics. To hesitate to do so, however severe the conflict with old
habits and traditions and sentiments may be, is to fall short of faith.
Now, so far as the intellectual life of the world goes, this present
time is essentially the opening phase of a period of ethical
reconstruction, a reconstruction of which the New Republic will possess
the matured result. Throughout the nineteenth century there has been
such a shattering and recasting of fundamental ideas, of the
preliminaries to ethical propositions, as the world has never seen
before. This breaking down and routing out of almost all the cardinal
assumptions on which the minds of the Eighteenth Century dwelt securely,
is a process akin to, but independent of, the development of mechanism,
whose consequences we have traced. It is a part of that process of
vigorous and fearless criticism which is the reality of science, and of
which the development of mechanism and all that revolution in physical
and social conditions we have been tracing, is merely the vast imposing
material bye product. At present, indeed, its more obvious aspect on the
moral and ethical side is destruction, any one can see the chips flying,
but it still demands a certain faith and patience to see the form that
ensues. But it is not destruction, any more than a sculptor's work is
stone-breaking.
The first chapter in the history of this intellectual development, its
definite and formal opening, coincides with the opening of the
nineteenth century and the publication of Malthus's _Essay on
Population_. Malthus is one of those cardinal figures in intellectual
history who state definitely for all time, things apparent enough after
their formulation, but never effectively conceded before. He brought
clearly and emphatically into the sphere of discussion a vitally
important issue that had always been shirked and tabooed heretofore, the
fundamental fact that the main mass of the business of human life
centres about reproduction. He stated in clear, hard, decent, and
unavoidable argument what presently Schopenhauer was to discover and
proclaim, in language, at times, it would seem, quite unfitted for
translation into English. And, having made his statement, Malthus left
it, in contact with its immediate results.
Probably no more shattering book than the _Essay on Population_ has ever
been, or ever will be, written. It was aimed at the facile Liberalism of
the Deists and Atheists of the eighteenth century; it made as clear as
daylight that all forms of social reconstruction, all dreams of earthly
golden ages must be either futile or insincere or both, until the
problems of human increase were manfully faced. It proffered no
suggestions for facing them (in spite of the unpleasant associations of
Malthus's name), it aimed simply to wither the Rationalistic Utopias of
the time and by anticipation, all the Communisms, Socialisms, and
Earthly Paradise movements that have since been so abundantly audible in
the world. That was its aim and its immediate effect. Incidentally it
must have been a torturing soul-trap for innumerable idealistic but
intelligent souls. Its indirect effects have been altogether greater.
Aiming at unorthodox dreamers, it has set such forces in motion as have
destroyed the very root-ideas of orthodox righteousness in the western
world. Impinging on geological discovery, it awakened almost
simultaneously in the minds of Darwin and Wallace, that train of thought
that found expression and demonstration at last in the theory of natural
selection. As that theory has been more and more thoroughly assimilated
and understood by the general mind, it has destroyed, quietly but
entirely, the belief in human equality which is implicit in all the
"Liberalizing" movements of the world. In the place of an essential
equality, distorted only by tradition and early training, by the
artifices of those devils of the Liberal cosmogony, "kingcraft" and
"priestcraft," an equality as little affected by colour as the equality
of a black chess pawn and a white, we discover that all men are
individual and unique, and, through long ranges of comparison, superior
and inferior upon countless scores. It has become apparent that whole
masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon
the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or
trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their
characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental in the
civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and
demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their
level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity.
The confident and optimistic Radicalism of the earlier nineteenth
century, and the humanitarian philanthropic type of Liberalism, have
bogged themselves beyond hope in these realizations. The Socialist has
shirked them as he has shirked the older crux of Malthus. Liberalism is
a thing of the past, it is no longer a doctrine, but a faction. There
must follow some newborn thing.
And as effectually has the mass of criticism that centres about Darwin
destroyed the dogma of the Fall upon which the whole intellectual fabric
of Christianity rests. For without a Fall there is no redemption, and
the whole theory and meaning of the Pauline system is vain. In
conjunction with the wide vistas opened by geological and astronomical
discovery, the nineteenth century has indeed lost the very habit of
thought from which the belief in a Fall arose. It is as if a hand had
been put upon the head of the thoughtful man and had turned his eyes
about from the past to the future. In matters of intelligence, at least,
if not yet in matters of ethics and conduct, this turning round has
occurred. In the past thought was legal in its spirit, it deduced the
present from pre-existing prescription, it derived everything from the
offences and promises of the dead; the idea of a universe of expiation
was the most natural theory amidst such processes. The purpose the
older theologians saw in the world was no more than the
revenge--accentuated by the special treatment of a favoured minority--of
a mysteriously incompetent Deity exasperated by an unsatisfactory
creation. But modern thought is altogether too constructive and creative
to tolerate such a conception, and in the vaster past that has opened to
us, it can find neither offence nor promise, only a spacious scheme of
events, opening out--perpetually opening out--with a quality of final
purpose as irresistible to most men's minds as it is incomprehensible,
opening out with all that inexplicable quality of design that, for
example, some great piece of music, some symphony of Beethoven's,
conveys. We see future beyond future and past behind past. It has been
like the coming of dawn, at first a colourless dawn, clear and spacious,
before which the mists whirl and fade, and there opens to our eyes not
the narrow passage, the definite end we had imagined, but the rocky,
ill-defined path we follow high amidst this limitless prospect of space
and time. At first the dawn is cold--there is, at times, a quality of
terror almost in the cold clearness of the morning twilight; but
insensibly its coldness passes, the sky is touched with fire, and
presently, up out of the dayspring in the east, the sunlight will be
pouring.... And these men of the New Republic will be going about in the
daylight of things assured.
And men's concern under this ampler view will no longer be to work out
a system of penalties for the sins of dead men, but to understand and
participate in this great development that now dawns on the human
understanding. The insoluble problems of pain and death, gaunt,
incomprehensible facts as they were, fall into place in the gigantic
order that evolution unfolds. All things are integral in the mighty
scheme, the slain builds up the slayer, the wolf grooms the horse into
swiftness, and the tiger calls for wisdom and courage out of man. All
things are integral, but it has been left for men to be consciously
integral, to take, at last, a share in the process, to have wills that
have caught a harmony with the universal will, as sand grains flash into
splendour under the blaze of the sun. There will be many who will never
be called to this religious conviction, who will lead their little lives
like fools, playing foolishly with religion and all the great issues of
life, or like the beasts that perish, having sense alone; but those who,
by character and intelligence, are predestinate to participate in the
reality of life, will fearlessly shape all their ethical determinations
and public policy anew, from a fearless study of themselves and the
apparent purpose that opens out before them.
Very much of the cry for faith that sounds in contemporary life so
loudly, and often with so distressing a note of sincerity, comes from
the unsatisfied egotisms of unemployed, and, therefore, unhappy and
craving people; but much is also due to the distress in the minds of
active and serious men, due to the conflict of inductive knowledge, with
conceptions of right and wrong deduced from unsound, but uncriticised,
first principles. The old ethical principles, the principle of
equivalents or justice, the principle of self-sacrifice, the various
vague and arbitrary ideas of purity, chastity, and sexual "sin," came
like rays out of the theological and philosophical lanterns men carried
in the darkness. The ray of the lantern indicated and directed, and one
followed it as one follows a path. But now there has come a new view of
man's place in the scheme of time and space, a new illumination, dawn;
the lantern rays fade in the growing brightness, and the lanterns that
shone so brightly are becoming smoky and dim. To many men this is no
more than a waning of the lanterns, and they call for new ones, or a
trimming of the old. They blame the day for putting out these flares.
And some go apart, out of the glare of life, into corners of obscurity,
where the radiation of the lantern may still be faintly traced. But,
indeed, with the new light there has come the time for new methods; the
time of lanterns, the time of deductions from arbitrary first principles
is over. The act of faith is no longer to follow your lantern, but to
put it down. We can see about us, and by the landscape we must go.[51]
How will the landscape shape itself to the dominant men of the new time
and in relation to themselves? What is the will and purpose that these
men of will and purpose will find above and comprehending their own?
Into this our inquiry resolves itself. They will hold with Schopenhauer,
I believe, and with those who build themselves on Malthus and Darwin,
that the scheme of being, in which we live is a struggle of existences
to expand and develop themselves to their full completeness, and to
propagate and increase themselves. But, being men of action, they will
feel nothing of the glamour of misery that irresponsible and sexually
vitiated shareholder, Schopenhauer, threw over this recognition. The
final object of this struggle among existences they will not understand;
they will have abandoned the search for ultimates; they will state this
scheme of a struggle as a proximate object, sufficiently remote and
spacious to enclose and explain all their possible activities. They will
seek God's purpose in the sphere of their activities, and desire no
more, as the soldier in battle desires no more, than the immediate
conflict before him. They will admit failure as an individual aspect of
things, as a soldier seeking victory admits the possibility of death;
but they will refuse to admit as a part of their faith in God that any
existence, even if it is an existence that is presently entirely erased,
can be needless or vain. It will have reacted on the existences that
survive; it will be justified for ever in the modification it has
produced in them. They will find in themselves--it must be remembered I
am speaking of a class that has naturally segregated, and not of men as
a whole--a desire, a passion almost, to create and organize, to put in
order, to get the maximum result from certain possibilities. They will
all be artists in reality, with a passion for simplicity and directness
and an impatience of confusion and inefficiency. The determining frame
of their ethics, the more spacious scheme to which they will shape the
schemes of their individual wills, will be the elaboration of that
future world state to which all things are pointing. They will not
conceive of it as a millennial paradise, a blissful inconsequent
stagnation, but as a world state of active ampler human beings, full of
knowledge and energy, free from much of the baseness and limitations,
the needless pains and dishonours of the world disorder of to-day, but
still struggling, struggling against ampler but still too narrow
restrictions and for still more spacious objects than our vistas have
revealed. For that as a general end, for the special work that
contributes to it as an individual end, they will make the plans and the
limiting rules of their lives.
It is manifest that a reconstructed ethical system, reconstructed in the
light of modern science and to meet the needs of such temperaments and
characters as the evolution of mechanism will draw together and develop,
will give very different values from those given by the existing systems
(if they can be called systems) to almost all the great matters of
conduct. Under scientific analysis the essential facts of life are very
clearly shown to be two--birth and death. All life is the effort of the
thing born, driven by fears, guided by instincts and desires, to evade
death, to evade even the partial death of crippling or cramping or
restriction, and to attain to effective procreation, to the victory of
another birth. Procreation is the triumph of the living being over
death; and in the case of man, who adds mind to his body, it is not only
in his child but in the dissemination of his thought, the expression of
his mind in things done and made, that his triumph is to be found. And
the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system
which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour
the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in
humanity--beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a
growing body of knowledge--and to check the procreation of base and
servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean
and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the
latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the
method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world,
whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice
and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the
method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases
still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death
is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries
of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the
bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and
pointless things....
The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility,
not a sort of night refuge for base spirits out of the void; and the
alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, and
efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly
creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully
happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born
of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer
incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little
pity and less benevolence. To make life convenient for the breeding of
such people will seem to them not the most virtuous and amiable thing in
the world, as it is held to be now, but an exceedingly abominable
proceeding. Procreation is an avoidable thing for sane persons of even
the most furious passions, and the men of the New Republic will hold
that the procreation of children who, by the circumstances of their
parentage, _must_ be diseased bodily or mentally--I do not think it will
be difficult for the medical science of the coming time to define such
circumstances--is absolutely the most loathsome of all conceivable sins.
They will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion of the
population--the small minority, for example, afflicted with
indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental
disorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for
intoxication--exists only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and
on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee
any reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when that
sufferance is abused. And I imagine also the plea and proof that a grave
criminal is also insane will be regarded by them not as a reason for
mercy, but as an added reason for death. I do not see how they can think
otherwise on the principles they will profess.
The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or
inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the
possibilities of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that will
make killing worth the while; like Abraham, they will have the faith to
kill, and they will have no superstitions about death. They will
naturally regard the modest suicide of incurably melancholy, or diseased
or helpless persons as a high and courageous act of duty rather than a
crime. And since they will regard, as indeed all men raised above a
brutish level do regard, a very long term of imprisonment as infinitely
worse than death, as being, indeed, death with a living misery added to
its natural terror, they will, I conceive, where the whole tenor of a
man's actions, and not simply some incidental or impulsive action, seems
to prove him unfitted for free life in the world, consider him
carefully, and condemn him, and remove him from being. All such killing
will be done with an opiate, for death is too grave a thing to be made
painful or dreadful, and used as a deterrent from crime. If deterrent
punishments are used at all in the code of the future, the deterrent
will neither be death, nor mutilation of the body, nor mutilation of the
life by imprisonment, nor any horrible things like that, but good
scientifically caused pain, that will leave nothing but a memory. Yet
even the memory of overwhelming pain is a sort of mutilation of the
soul. The idea that only those who are fit to live freely in an orderly
world-state should be permitted to live, is entirely against the use of
deterrent punishments at all. Against outrageous conduct to children or
women, perhaps, or for very cowardly or brutal assaults of any sort, the
men of the future may consider pain a salutary remedy, at least during
the ages of transition while the brute is still at large. But since most
acts of this sort done under conditions that neither torture nor
exasperate, point to an essential vileness in the perpetrator, I am
inclined to think that even in these cases the men of the coming time
will be far less disposed to torture than to kill. They will have
another aspect to consider. The conscious infliction of pain _for the
sake of the pain_ is against the better nature of man, and it is unsafe
and demoralizing for any one to undertake this duty. To kill under the
seemly conditions science will afford is a far less offensive thing. The
rulers of the future will grudge making good people into jailers,
warders, punishment-dealers, nurses, and attendants on the bad. People
who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the
lives of others are better out of it. That is a current sentiment even
to-day, but the men of the New Republic will have the courage of their
opinions.
And the type of men that I conceive emerging in the coming years will
deal simply and logically not only with the business of death, but with
birth. At present the sexual morality of the civilized world is the most
illogical and incoherent system of wild permissions and insane
prohibitions, foolish tolerance and ruthless cruelty that it is possible
to imagine. Our current civilization is a sexual lunatic. And it has
lost its reason in this respect under the stresses of the new birth of
things, largely through the difficulties that have stood in the way, and
do still, in a diminishing degree, stand in the way of any sane
discussion of the matter as a whole. To approach it is to approach
excitement. So few people seem to be leading happy and healthy sexual
lives that to mention the very word "sexual" is to set them stirring, to
brighten the eye, lower the voice, and blanch or flush the cheek with a
flavour of guilt. We are all, as it were, keeping our secrets and
hiding our shames. One of the most curious revelations of this fact
occurred only a few years ago, when the artless outpourings in fiction
of certain young women who had failed to find light on problems that
pressed upon them for solution (and which it was certainly their
business as possible wives and mothers to solve) roused all sorts of
respectable people to a quite insane vehemence of condemnation. Now,
there are excellent reasons and a permanent necessity for the
preservation of decency, and for a far more stringent suppression of
matter that is merely intended to excite than at present obtains, and
the chief of these reasons lies in the need of preserving the young from
a premature awakening, and indeed, in the interests of civilization, in
positively delaying the period of awakening, retarding maturity and
lengthening the period of growth and preparation as much as possible.
But purity and innocence may be prolonged too late; innocence is really
no more becoming to adults than a rattle or a rubber consoler, and the
bashfulness that hampers this discussion, that permits it only in a
furtive silly sort of way, has its ugly consequences in shames and
cruelties, in miserable households and pitiful crises, in the production
of countless, needless, and unhappy lives. Indeed, too often we carry
our decency so far as to make it suggestive and stimulating in a
non-natural way; we invest the plain business of reproduction with a
mystic religious quality far more unwholesome than a savage nakedness
could possibly be.
The essential aspect of all this wild and windy business of the sexual
relations is, after all, births. Upon this plain fact the people of the
emergent New Republic will unhesitatingly go. The pre-eminent value of
sexual questions in morality lies in the fact that the lives which will
constitute the future are involved. If they are not involved, if we can
dissociate this relationship from this issue, then sexual questions
become of no more importance than the morality of one's deportment at
chess, or the general morality of outdoor games. Indeed, then the
question of sexual relationships would be entirely on all fours with,
and probably very analogous to, the question of golf. In each case it
would be for the medical man and the psychologist to decide how far the
thing was wholesome and permissible, and how far it was an aggressive
bad habit and an absorbing waste of time and energy. An able-bodied man
continually addicted to love-making that had no result in offspring
would be just as silly and morally objectionable as an able-bodied man
who devoted his chief energies to hitting little balls over golf-links.
But no more. Both would probably be wasting the lives of other human
beings--the golfer must employ his caddie. It is entirely the matter of
births, and a further consideration to be presently discussed, that
makes this analogy untrue. It does not, however, make it so untrue as to
do away with the probability that in many cases the emergent men of the
new time will consider sterile gratification a moral and legitimate
thing. St. Paul tells us that it is better to marry than to burn, but to
beget children on that account will appear, I imagine, to these coming
men as an absolutely loathsome proceeding. They will stifle no spread of
knowledge that will diminish the swarming misery of childhood in the
slums, they will regard the disinclination of the witless "Society"
woman to become a mother as a most amiable trait in her folly. In our
bashfulness about these things we talk an abominable lot of nonsense;
all this uproar one hears about the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit
and the future of the lower races takes on an entirely different
complexion directly we face known, if indelicate, facts. Most of the
human types, that by civilized standards are undesirable, are quite
willing to die out through such suppressions if the world will only
encourage them a little. They multiply in sheer ignorance, but they do
not desire multiplication even now, and they can easily be made to dread
it. Sensuality aims not at life, but at itself. I believe that the men
of the New Republic will deliberately shape their public policy along
these lines. They will rout out and illuminate urban rookeries and all
places where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive a land
legislation that will keep the black, or yellow, or mean-white squatter
on the move; they will see to it that no parent can make a profit out of
a child, so that childbearing shall cease to be a hopeful speculation
for the unemployed poor; and they will make the maintenance of a child
the first charge upon the parents who have brought it into the world.
Only in this way can progress escape being clogged by the products of
the security it creates. The development of science has lifted famine
and pestilence from the shoulders of man, and it will yet lift war--for
some other end than to give him a spell of promiscuous and finally cruel
and horrible reproduction.
No doubt the sentimentalist and all whose moral sense has been
vigorously trained in the old school will find this rather a dreadful
suggestion; it amounts to saying that for the Abyss to become a "hotbed"
of sterile immorality will fall in with the deliberate policy of the
ruling class in the days to come. At any rate, it will be a terminating
evil. At present the Abyss is a hotbed breeding undesirable and too
often fearfully miserable children. _That_ is something more than a
sentimental horror. Under the really very horrible morality of to-day,
the spectacle of a mean-spirited, under-sized, diseased little man,
quite incapable of earning a decent living even for himself, married to
some underfed, ignorant, ill-shaped, plain and diseased little woman,
and guilty of the lives of ten or twelve ugly ailing children, is
regarded as an extremely edifying spectacle, and the two parents
consider their reproductive excesses as giving them a distinct claim
upon less fecund and more prosperous people. Benevolent persons throw
themselves with peculiar ardour into a case of this sort, and quite
passionate efforts are made to strengthen the mother against further
eventualities and protect the children until they attain to nubile
years. Until the attention of the benevolent persons is presently
distracted by a new case.... Yet so powerful is the suggestion of
current opinions that few people seem to see nowadays just what a
horrible and criminal thing this sort of family, seen from the point of
view of social physiology, appears.
And directly such principles as these come into effective operation, and
I believe that the next hundred years will see this new phase of the
human history beginning, there will recommence a process of physical and
mental improvement in mankind, a raising and elaboration of the average
man, that has virtually been in suspense during the greater portion of
the historical period. It is possible that in the last hundred years, in
the more civilized states of the world, the average of humanity has
positively fallen. All our philanthropists, all our religious teachers,
seem to be in a sort of informal conspiracy to preserve an atmosphere of
mystical ignorance about these matters, which, in view of the
irresistible nature of the sexual impulse, results in a swelling tide of
miserable little lives. Consider what it will mean to have perhaps half
the population of the world, in every generation, restrained from or
tempted to evade reproduction! This thing, this euthanasia of the weak
and sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animate
the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I
have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and
achieved.
If birth were all the making of a civilized man, the men of the future,
on the general principles we have imputed to them, would under no
circumstances find the birth of a child, healthy in body and brain, more
than the most venial of offences. But birth gives only the beginning,
the raw material, of a civilized man. The perfect civilized man is not
only a sound strong body but a very elaborate fabric of mind. He is a
fabric of moral suggestions that become mental habits, a magazine of
more or less systematized ideas, a scheme of knowledge and training and
an æsthetic culture. He is the child not only of parents but of a home
and of an education. He has to be carefully guarded from physical and
moral contagions. A reasonable probability of ensuring home and
education and protection without any parasitic dependence on people
outside the kin of the child, will be a necessary condition to a moral
birth under such general principles as we have supposed. Now, this
sweeps out of reason any such promiscuity of healthy people as the late
Mr. Grant Allen is supposed to have advocated--but, so far as I can
understand him, did not. But whether it works out to the taking over of
the permanent monogamic marriage of the old morality, as a going
concern, is another matter. Upon this matter I must confess my views of
the trend of things in the future do not seem to be finally shaped. The
question involves very obscure physiological and psychological
considerations. A man who aims to become a novelist naturally pries into
these matters whenever he can, but the vital facts are very often hard
to come by. It is probable that a great number of people could be paired
off in couples who would make permanently happy and successful monogamic
homes for their sound and healthy children. At any rate, if a certain
freedom of regrouping were possible within a time limit, this might be
so. But I am convinced that a large proportion of married couples in the
world to-day are not completely and happily matched, that there is much
mutual limitation, mutual annulment and mutual exasperation. Home with
an atmosphere of contention is worse than none for the child, and it is
the interest of the child, and that alone, that will be the test of all
these things. I do not think that the arrangement in couples is
universally applicable, or that celibacy (tempered by sterile vice)
should be its only alternative. Nor can I see why the union of two
childless people should have an indissoluble permanence or prohibit an
ampler grouping. The question is greatly complicated by the economic
disadvantage of women, which makes wifehood the chief feminine
profession, while only for an incidental sort of man is marriage a
source of income, and further by the fact that most women have a period
of maximum attractiveness after which it would be grossly unfair to cast
them aside. From the point of view we are discussing, the efficient
mother who can make the best of her children, is the most important sort
of person in the state. She is a primary necessity to the coming
civilization. Can the wife in any sort of polygamic arrangement, or a
woman of no assured status, attain to the maternal possibilities of the
ideal monogamic wife? One is disposed to answer, No. But then, on the
other hand, does the ordinary monogamic wife do that? We are dealing
with the finer people of the future, strongly individualized people, who
will be much freer from stereotyped moral suggestions and much less
inclined to be dealt with wholesale than the people of to-day.
I have already shown cause in these Anticipations to expect a period of
disorder and hypocrisy in matters of sexual morality. I am inclined to
think that, when the New Republic emerges on the other side of this
disorder, there will be a great number of marriage contracts possible
between men and women, and that the strong arm of the State will insist
only upon one thing--the security and welfare of the child. The
inevitable removal of births from the sphere of an uncontrollable
Providence to the category of deliberate acts, will enormously enhance
the responsibility of the parent--and of the State that has failed to
adequately discourage the philoprogenitiveness of the parent--towards
the child. Having permitted the child to come into existence, public
policy and the older standard of justice alike demand, under these new
conditions, that it must be fed, cherished, and educated, not merely up
to a respectable minimum, but to the full height of its possibilities.
The State will, therefore, be the reserve guardian of all children. If
they are being undernourished, if their education is being neglected,
the State will step in, take over the responsibility of their
management, and enforce their charge upon the parents. The first
liability of a parent will be to his child, and for his child; even the
dues of that darling of our current law, the landlord, will stand second
to that. This conception of the responsibility of the parents and the
State to the child and the future runs quite counter to the general
ideas of to-day. These general ideas distort grim realities. Under the
most pious and amiable professions, all the Christian states of to-day
are, as a matter of fact, engaged in slave-breeding. The chief result,
though of course it is not the intention, of the activities of priest
and moralist to-day in these matters, is to lure a vast multitude of
little souls into this world, for whom there is neither sufficient food,
nor love, nor schools, nor any prospect at all in life but the
insufficient bread of servitude. It is a result that endears religion
and purity to the sweating employer, and leads unimaginative bishops,
who have never missed a meal in their lives, and who know nothing of the
indescribable bitterness of a handicapped entry into this world, to draw
a complacent contrast with irreligious France. It is a result that must
necessarily be recognized in its reality, and faced by these men who
will presently emerge to rule the world; men who will have neither the
plea of ignorance, nor moral stupidity, nor dogmatic revelation to
excuse such elaborate cruelty.
And having set themselves in these ways to raise the quality of human
birth, the New Republicans will see to it that the children who do at
last effectually get born come into a world of spacious opportunity. The
half-educated, unskilled pretenders, professing impossible creeds and
propounding ridiculous curricula, to whom the unhappy parents of to-day
must needs entrust the intelligences of their children; these
heavy-handed barber-surgeons of the mind, these schoolmasters, with
their ragtag and bobtail of sweated and unqualified assistants, will be
succeeded by capable, self-respecting men and women, constituting the
most important profession of the world. The windy pretences of "forming
character," supplying moral training, and so forth, under which the
educationalist of to-day conceals the fact that he is incapable of his
proper task of training, developing and equipping the mind, will no
longer be made by the teacher. Nor will the teacher be permitted to
subordinate his duties to the entirely irrelevant business of his
pupils' sports. The teacher will teach, and confine his moral training,
beyond enforcing truth and discipline, to the exhibition of a capable
person doing his duty as well as it can be done. He will know that his
utmost province is only a part of the educational process, that equally
important educational influences are the home and the world of thought
about the pupil and himself. The whole world will be thinking and
learning; the old idea of "completing" one's education will have
vanished with the fancy of a static universe; every school will be a
preparatory school, every college. The school and college will probably
give only the keys and apparatus of thought, a necessary language or so,
thoroughly done, a sound mathematical training, drawing, a wide and
reasoned view of philosophy, some good exercises in dialectics, a
training in the use of those stores of fact that science has made. So
equipped, the young man and young woman will go on to the technical
school of their chosen profession, and to the criticism of contemporary
practice for their special efficiency, and to the literature of
contemporary thought for their general development....
And while the emergent New Republic is deciding to provide for the
swarming inferiority of the Abyss, and developing the morality and
educational system of the future, in this fashion, it will be attacking
that mass of irresponsible property that is so unavoidable and so
threatening under present conditions. The attack will, of course, be
made along lines that the developing science of economics will trace in
the days immediately before us. A scheme of death duties and of heavy
graduated taxes upon irresponsible incomes, with, perhaps, in addition,
a system of terminable liability for borrowers, will probably suffice to
control the growth of this creditor elephantiasis. The detailed
contrivances are for the specialist to make. If there is such a thing as
bitterness in the public acts of the New Republicans, it will probably
be found in the measures that will be directed against those who are
parasitic, or who attempt to be parasitic, upon the social body, either
by means of gambling, by manipulating the medium of exchange, or by such
interventions upon legitimate transactions as, for example, the legal
trade union in Great Britain contrives in the case of house property and
land. Simply because he fails more often than he succeeds, there is
still a disposition among sentimental people to regard the gambler or
the speculator as rather a dashing, adventurous sort of person, and to
contrast his picturesque gallantry with the sober certainties of honest
men. The men of the New Republic will be obtuse to the glamour of such
romance; they will regard the gambler simply as a mean creature who
hangs about the social body in the hope of getting something for
nothing, who runs risks to filch the possessions of other men, exactly
as a thief does. They will put the two on a footing, and the generous
gambler, like the kindly drunkard, in the face of their effectual
provision for his little weakness, will cease to complain that his worst
enemy is himself. And, in dealing with speculation, the New Republic
will have the power of an assured faith and purpose, and the resources
of an economic science that is as yet only in its infancy. In such
matters the New Republic will entertain no superstition of _laissez
faire_. Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and
as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalent
but imperfect machine.
And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal
with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle
that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not
as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though
probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world-state
with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads,
its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will,
I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain
standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult, and it will have
cast aside any coddling laws to save adult men from themselves.[52] It
will tolerate no dark corners where the people of the Abyss may fester,
no vast diffused slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnant
plague-preserves. Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship
it will let come--white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be
the test. And the Jew also it will treat as any other man. It is said
that the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. If
there are parasites on the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for the
legislative cleaning of the apparatus of credit, but it is no reason for
the special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a certain incurable
tendency to social parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible,
we shall abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish
the Jew. We are much more likely to find we have abolished the Caucasian
solicitor. I really do not understand the exceptional attitude people
take up against the Jews. There is something very ugly about many Jewish
faces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The Jew
asserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singular
tactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jews
are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, and
cunning and base in method, but no more so than many Gentiles. The Jew
is mentally and physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner than
the average European, but in that and in a certain disingenuousness he
is simply on all fours with the short, dark Welsh. He foregathers with
those of his own nation, and favours them against the stranger, but so
do the Scotch. I see nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality to
dread or dislike. He is a remnant and legacy of mediævalism, a
sentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive plotter against the present
progress of things. He was the mediæval Liberal; his persistent
existence gave the lie to Catholic pretensions all through the days of
their ascendency, and to-day he gives the lie to all our yapping
"nationalisms," and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming of
the world-state. He has never been known to burke a school. Much of the
Jew's usury is no more than social scavenging. The Jew will probably
lose much of his particularism, intermarry with Gentiles, and cease to
be a physically distinct element in human affairs in a century or so.
But much of his moral tradition will, I hope, never die.... And for the
rest, those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow
people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?
Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institution, and I take it
they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see
it, is that they have to go. So far as they fail to develop sane,
vigorous, and distinctive personalities for the great world of the
future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.
The world has a purpose greater than happiness; our lives are to serve
God's purpose, and that purpose aims not at man as an end, but works
through him to greater issues.... This, I believe, will be the
distinctive quality of the New Republican's belief. And, for that
reason, I have not even speculated whether he will hold any belief in
human immortality or no. He will certainly not believe there is any
_post mortem_ state of rewards and punishments because of his faith in
the sanity of God, and I do not see how he will trace any reaction
between this world and whatever world there may be of disembodied lives.
Active and capable men of all forms of religious profession to-day tend
in practice to disregard the question of immortality altogether. So, to
a greater degree, will the kinetic men of the coming time. We may find
that issue interesting enough when we turn over the leaf, but at present
we have not turned over the leaf. On this side, in this life, the
relevancy of things points not in the slightest towards the immortality
of our egotisms, but convergently and overpoweringly to the future of
our race, to that spacious future, of which these weak, ambitious
Anticipations are, as it were, the dim reflection seen in a shallow and
troubled pool.
For that future these men will live and die.