1
Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But I am concerned with a
more tangled business than selection, I want to show a contemporary man
in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in
relation to that man. To tell my story at all I have to simplify. I have
given now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passed
from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive
aristocracy. I have tried to set that out in the form of a man
discovering himself. Incidentally that self-development led to a
profound breach with my wife. One has read stories before of husband
and wife speaking severally two different languages and coming to an
understanding. But Margaret and I began in her dialect, and, as I came
more and more to use my own, diverged.
I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended for
me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me up to my
married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to show the
queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in which these interests
break upon the life of a young man under contemporary conditions. I
do not think my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance of
sisters and girl playmates, but that is not an uncommon misadventure
in an age of small families; I never came to know any woman at all
intimately until I was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were
encounters of sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that
made them things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a
boyish disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I
had passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things
inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time Margaret
had blotted out all other women; she was so different and so near;
she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a little window
through which one has been surveying a crowd. She didn't become
womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from my world.... And
then came this secret separation....
Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development of
my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to have
solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I thought these
things were over. I went about my career with Margaret beside me, her
brow slightly knit, her manner faintly strenuous, helping, helping; and
if we had not altogether abolished sex we had at least so circumscribed
and isolated it that it would not have affected the general tenor of our
lives in the slightest degree if we had.
And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and her
problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life returned. The
thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and how
it was changing our long intimacy. I have already compared the lot of
the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in his study; in his day
women and sex were as disregarded in these high affairs as, let us say,
the chemistry of air or the will of the beasts in the fields; in ours
the case has altogether changed, and woman has come now to stand beside
the tall candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of the
shadows, besetting, interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an altogether
unprecedented attention. I feel that in these matters my life has been
almost typical of my time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is
no longer a mere physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental
background; she is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life.
She comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is
she a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came
to me and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an
unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and
controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once trust
more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most
necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of
understanding....
2
In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed either
that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow they
didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever “they” were, had
to settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was possible then.
But even before 1906 there were endless intimations that the dams
holding back great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling. We political
schemers were ploughing wider than any one had ploughed before in the
field of social reconstruction. We had also, we realised, to plough
deeper. We had to plough down at last to the passionate elements of
sexual relationship and examine and decide upon them.
The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the metropolis
were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one clamorous aspect
of the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd, new
sense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that
the Vote for Women was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic
madness that would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who
sought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women and
sympathisers and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things
than an idle fancy for the franchise. The existing laws and conventions
of relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a
disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and that
also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't
propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities
and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that
unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that were
absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except for its
one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was amazingly
effective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, to the
forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple argument based on a
simple assumption; it was the first crude expression of a great mass and
mingling of convergent feelings, of a widespread, confused persuasion
among modern educated women that the conditions of their relations with
men were oppressive, ugly, dishonouring, and had to be altered. They
had not merely adopted the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly
manifest to me that, given it, they meant to use it, and to use it
perhaps even vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things
they had every reason to hate....
I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in the
session of 1909, when--I think it was--fifty or sixty women went to
prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I came
down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a confusion
outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with an immense
multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a silent,
close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part white-faced
and intent. I still remember the effect of their faces upon me. It was
quite different from the general effect of staring about and divided
attention one gets in a political procession of men. There was an
expression of heroic tension.
There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout that
winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was shown
in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an ugly,
dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet good-tempered and sympathetic. When
at last we got within sight of the House the square was a seething seat
of excited people, and the array of police on horse and on foot might
have been assembled for a revolutionary outbreak. There were dense
masses of people up Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The
scuffle that ended in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow
such stupendous preparations....
3
Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night, and
all through the long nights of the Budget sittings, at all the piers
of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, stood women
pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we went to and
fro. They were women of all sorts, though, of course, the independent
worker-class predominated. There were grey-headed old ladies standing
there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered-looking, ambiguous women,
with something of the desperate bitterness of battered women showing in
their eyes; north-country factory girls; cheaply-dressed suburban women;
trim, comfortable mothers of families; valiant-eyed girl graduates
and undergraduates; lank, hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's
imagination; one very dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall,
grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those
women looked defiant, some timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of
adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never ceased.
I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or cease. I
found that continual siege of the legislature extraordinarily
impressive--infinitely more impressive than the feeble-forcible
“ragging” of the more militant section. I thought of the appeal that
must be going through the country, summoning the women from countless
scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to Westminster.
I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should
ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as I hurried past with
averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards the end the
House evoked an etiquette of salutation.
4
There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat the
whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue, irrelevant
to all other broad developments of social and political life. We
struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it thrust out
before us. “Your schemes, for all their bigness,” it insisted to
our reluctant, averted minds, “still don't go down to the essential
things....”
We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient children
will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That conservatism which
works in every class to preserve in its essentials the habitual daily
life is all against a profounder treatment of political issues. The
politician, almost as absurdly as the philosopher, tends constantly, in
spite of magnificent preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself
out of the reality he has so stupendously summoned--he bolts back to
littleness. The world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but
without, he adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning
cup of tea....
The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one. It
reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And at
any particular time only a small minority have a personal interest in
changing the established state of affairs. Habit and interest are in a
constantly recruited majority against conscious change and adjustment
in these matters. Drift rules us. The great mass of people, and an
overwhelming proportion of influential people, are people who have
banished their dreams and made their compromise. Wonderful and beautiful
possibilities are no longer to be thought about. They have given up
any aspirations for intense love, their splendid offspring, for keen
delights, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense
of righteousness as their compensation. It's a settled affair with
them, a settled, dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the
slightest reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to
the Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal
marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, “I am for leaving all
these things alone.” And then, with a groan in his voice, “Leave them
alone! Leave them all alone!”
That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed
passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and went
out.
For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone. I
developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music, for the
human figure in art--turning my heart to landscape. I wanted to sneer
at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable until I found
the effective sneer. In matters of private morals these were my most
uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of these things any more for
ever. I hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were not
of my opinion. I wanted to believe that their views were immoral and
objectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them as
at that level. I was, in fact, falling into the attitude of the normal
decent man.
And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds it
hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still dreams
beyond these commonplace acquiescences,--the appeal of beauty suddenly
shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer nights, the
sweetness of distant music....
It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the present
time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and so heavily,
that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people
and sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes,
people whose very deficiency in feeling has left them free to follow
ambition, people beautyblind, who don't understand what it is to fall in
love, what it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel in
their blood and bodies the supreme claim of good births and selective
births above all other affairs in life, people almost of necessity
averse from this most fundamental aspect of existence....
5
It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of the
position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about all these
intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was bringing about, that
led me to the heretical views I have in the last five years dragged from
the region of academic and timid discussion into the field of practical
politics. Those influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end,
and given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, but it was a
broader and colder view of things that first determined me in my attempt
to graft the Endowment of Motherhood in some form or other upon British
Imperialism. Now that I am exiled from the political world, it is
possible to estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.
I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a universal
education grew to paramount importance in my political scheme. It is but
a short step from this to the question of the quantity and quality of
births in the community, and from that again to these forbidden and
fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and the family organisation.
A sporadic discussion of these aspects had been going on for years, a
Eugenic society existed, and articles on the Falling Birth Rate, and the
Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit were staples of the monthly magazines.
But beyond an intermittent scolding of prosperous childless people
in general--one never addressed them in particular--nothing was done
towards arresting those adverse processes. Almost against my natural
inclination, I found myself forced to go into these things. I came to
the conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,
based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work. It
wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and well
trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised state.
Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its intimate
substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some very extensive
and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old haphazard system
of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly discretions, no longer
secures a young population numerous enough or good enough for the
growing needs and possibilities of our Empire. Statecraft sits weaving
splendid garments, no doubt, but with a puny, ugly, insufficient baby in
the cradle.
No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present question
for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and sits at
every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional except the
improvement of the race, and it became more and more doubtful to me if
we were improving the race at all! Splendid and beautiful and courageous
people must come together and have children, women with their fine
senses and glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compels
them to be celibate, compels them to be childless and useless, or to
bear children ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous
pressure of circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that,
and so few dare even to whisper it for fear that they should seem, in
seeking to save the family, to threaten its existence. It is as if
a party of pigmies in a not too capacious room had been joined by a
carnivorous giant--and decided to go on living happily by cutting him
dead....
The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it can
get the best possible increase under the best possible conditions.
I became more and more convinced that the independent family unit
of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and owner of the
children, in which all are dependent upon him, subordinated to his
enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up or down, does not
supply anything like the best conceivable conditions. We want to
modernise the family footing altogether. An enormous premium both in
pleasure and competitive efficiency is put upon voluntary childlessness,
and enormous inducements are held out to women to subordinate
instinctive and selective preferences to social and material
considerations.
The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition of
the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is changing,
secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything is
changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls and falls most among
just the most efficient and active and best adapted classes in the
community. The species is recruited from among its failures and from
among less civilised aliens. Contemporary civilisations are in effect
burning the best of their possible babies in the furnaces that run the
machinery. In the United States the native Anglo-American strain has
scarcely increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European
countries the same is probably true of the ablest and most energetic
elements in the community. The women of these classes still remain
legally and practically dependent and protected, with the only natural
excuse for their dependence gone....
The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory
groupings; here childless couples bored to death in the hopeless effort
to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary child
grows unsocially, here small two or three-child homes that do no more
than continue the culture of the parents at a great social cost, here
numbers of unhappy educated but childless married women, here careless,
decivilised fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the heedlessly
begotten. It is just the disorderly proliferation of Bromstead over
again, in lives instead of in houses.
What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying boundaries,
pushing research and discovery, building cities, improving all the
facilities of life, making great fleets, waging wars, while this aimless
decadence remains the quality of the biological outlook?...
It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion until
I faced this mass of problems. But so far back as 1910 I had it clear
in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than participate in all the
surrenders of mind and body that are implied in Dayton's snarl of “Leave
it alone; leave it all alone!” Marriage and the begetting and care of
children, is the very ground substance in the life of the community.
In a world in which everything changes, in which fresh methods, fresh
adjustments and fresh ideas perpetually renew the circumstances of life,
it is preposterous that we should not even examine into these matters,
should rest content to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions of a
barbaric age.
Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the
solution of the woman's individual problem. The two go together, are
right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out from our
IMPASSE lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to say of adequate
mothering, as no longer a chance product of individual passions but
a service rendered to the State. Women must become less and less
subordinated to individual men, since this works out in a more or less
complete limitation, waste, and sterilisation of their essentially
social function; they must become more and more subordinated as
individually independent citizens to the collective purpose. Or, to
express the thing by a familiar phrase, the highly organised, scientific
state we desire must, if it is to exist at all, base itself not upon
the irresponsible man-ruled family, but upon the matriarchal family,
the citizen-ship and freedom of women and the public endowment of
motherhood.
After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows clear
to modern women that a conscious, deliberate motherhood and mothering is
their special function in the State, and that a personal subordination
to an individual man with an unlimited power of control over this
intimate and supreme duty is a degradation. No contemporary woman of
education put to the test is willing to recognise any claim a man can
make upon her but the claim of her freely-given devotion to him. She
wants the reality of her choice and she means “family” while a man
too often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the family
relationships fundamentally. Their form remains just what it was
when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and incidentally a
child-producing, chattel. Against these time-honoured ideas the new
spirit of womanhood struggles in shame, astonishment, bitterness, and
tears....
I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the matter.
I want this coddling and browbeating of women to cease. I want to
see women come in, free and fearless, to a full participation in the
collective purpose of mankind. Women, I am convinced, are as fine
as men; they can be as wise as men; they are capable of far greater
devotion than men. I want to see them citizens, with a marriage law
framed primarily for them and for their protection and the good of the
race, and not for men's satisfactions. I want to see them bearing and
rearing good children in the State as a generously rewarded public duty
and service, choosing their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no
way enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have chosen. The social
consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched mine
of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to change
the respective values of the family group altogether, and make the home
indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner and responsible
guardian of her children.
It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it is.
The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social organization,
a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human experience--as
untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800. Of course, it may
work out to modify men's ideas of marriage profoundly. To me that is
a secondary consideration. I do not believe that particular assertion
myself, because I am convinced that a practical monogamy is a
psychological necessity to the mass of civilised people. But even if I
did believe it I should still keep to my present line, because it is the
only line that will prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending
in biological decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only
possible way which will ensure the permanently developing civilised
state at which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in
the life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction
must be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove
insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is not so
much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral inadaptability.
The old code fails under the new needs. The only alternative to this
profound reconstruction is a decay in human quality and social collapse.
Either this unprecedented rearrangement must be achieved by our
civilisation, or it must presently come upon a phase of disorder and
crumble and perish, as Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain
of the Pilgrim Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may
be in the attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.
6
I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price
of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt monstrously
dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a politician alive who
didn't look scared at the mention of “The Family,” but if raising these
issues were essential to the social reconstructions on which my life
was set, that did not matter. It only implied that I should take them
up with deliberate caution. There was no release because of risk or
difficulty.
The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project in
this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my speculations
about a change of party, like bass and treble in a complex piece of
music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I would not only go over
to Imperialism, but I would attempt to biologise Imperialism.
I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.
But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong
persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative
proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were
much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced people
out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to phrase
the thing in a parliamentary fashion, “something might be done in the
constituencies” with the Endowment of Motherhood forthwith, provided
only that it was made perfectly clear that anything a sane person could
possibly intend by “morality” was left untouched by these proposals.
I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE and
Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of State Help
for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics, upon the fall
in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE WEEKLY, leading up
to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the public endowment of the
nation's children. I was more and more struck by the acceptance won by a
sober and restrained presentation of this suggestion.
And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the
Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,
and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I returned
triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of Motherhood
as part of my open profession and with the full approval of the party
press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me on my way to the
table between the whips.
That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new
members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new
purposes in the national life.
Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book
ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of this
great world of political possibilities. I close this Third Book as I
opened it, with an admission of difficulties and complexities, but now
with a pile of manuscript before me I have to confess them unsurmounted
and still entangled.
Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay of
individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the basis of
morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must be given, from
that will come the perpetual fresh release and further ennoblement of
individual lives....
I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this book
the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have called it
the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a dominating truth and
rightness which must force men's now sporadic motives more and more into
a disciplined and understanding relation to a plan. And I have tried
to indicate how I sought to serve this great clarification of our
confusions....
Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal, and
how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of mine, a
mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as it pleases
them.