must give the children some reason for behaving well when no one is
looking, and there is no danger of being found out, or when they would
rather do the forbidden thing at the cost of a whacking than leave it
undone with impunity. You may tell them that God is always looking,
and will punish them inevitably when they die. But you will find that
posthumous penalties are not immediate enough nor real enough to deter
a bold child. In the end you must threaten it with some damage to a
part of it called its soul, of the existence of which you can give it
no physical demonstration whatever. You need not use the word soul:
you can put the child “on its honor”. But its honor also is an organ
which no anatomist has yet succeeded in dissecting out and preserving
in a bottle of spirits of wine for the instruction of infants. When it
transgresses you can resort to scolding, calling it a naughty, dirty,
greedy little thing. Or you may lecture it, telling it solemnly that
“it is a sin to steal a pin” and so forth. But if you could find such
a monster as an entirely matter-of-fact child, it might receive both
scoldings and lectures unmoved, and ask you “What then? What is a
sin? What do you mean by naughty, greedy? I understand dirty; but why
should I wash my hands if I am quite comfortable with them dirty. I
understand greedy; but if I like chocolates why should I give half of
them to Jane?” You may retort with “Have you no conscience, child?”;
but the matter-of-fact reply is “What is conscience?” Faced with this
matter-of-fact scepticism you are driven into pure metaphysics, and
must teach your child that conduct is a matter, not of fact, but of
religious duty. Good conduct is a respect which you owe to yourself in
some mystical way; and people are manageable in proportion to their
possession of this self-respect. When you remonstrate with a grown-up
person you say “Have you no self-respect?” But somehow one does not say
that to an infant. If it tells a lie, you do not say “You owe it to
yourself to speak the truth”, because the little animal does not feel
any such obligation, though it will later on. If you say “You must not
tell lies because if you do nobody will believe what you say”, you are
conscious of telling a thundering lie yourself, as you know only too
well that most lies are quite successful, and that human society would
be impossible without a great deal of goodnatured lying. If you say
“You must not tell lies because if you do you will find yourself unable
to believe anything that is told to you”, you will be much nearer the
truth; but it is a truth that a child cannot understand: you might as
well tell it the final truth of the matter, which is, that there is a
mysterious something in us called a soul, which deliberate wickedness
kills, and without which no material gain can make life bearable. How
can you expect a naughty child to take that in? If you say “You must
not tell a lie because it will grieve your dear parents”, the effect
will depend on how much the child cares whether its parents are grieved
or not. In any case to most young children their parents are as gods,
too great to be subject to grief, as long as the parents play up to
that conception of them. Also, as it is not easy to be both loved and
feared, parents who put on the majesty of gods with their children must
not allow the familiarity of affection, and are lucky if their children
do not positively hate them. It is safer and more comfortable to invent
a parent who is everybody’s Big Papa, even Papa’s papa, and introduce
it to the child as God. And it must be a god that children can imagine.
It must not be an abstraction, a principle, a vital impulse, a life
force, or the Church of England god who has neither body, parts, nor
passions. It must be, like the real papa, a grown-up person in Sunday
clothes, very very good, terribly powerful, and all-seeing: that is,
able to see what you are doing when nobody is looking. In this way the
child who is too young to have a sufficiently developed self-respect
and intelligent sense of honor: in short, a conscience, is provided
with an artificial, provisional, and to a great extent fictitious
conscience which tides it over its nonage until it is old enough to
attach a serious meaning to the idea of God.
In this way it was discovered in the nursery, long before Voltaire said
it, that “if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him”.
After Voltaire’s death, when the government of France fell into the
hands of a set of very high-principled professional and middle-class
gentlemen who had no experience of government, and ended by making
such a mess of it that France would have been ruined if they had not
fortunately all cut oneanother’s heads off on the highest principles,
the most high-principled of them all, an intensely respectable lawyer
named Robespierre, who had tried to govern without God because a
good many of the stories told to children about God were evidently
not strictly true, found that governments dealing with nations could
no more do without God than parents dealing with their families. He,
too, declared, echoing Voltaire, that if there were no God it would
be necessary to invent one. He had previously, by the way, tried a
goddess whom he called the Goddess of Reason; but she was no use at
all, not because she was a goddess (for Roman Catholic children have a
Big Mamma, or Mamma’s mamma, who is everybody’s mamma, and makes the
boys easier to manage, as well as a Big Papa), but because good conduct
is not dictated by reason but by a divine instinct that is beyond
reason. Reason only discovers the shortest way: it does not discover
the destination. It would be quite reasonable for you to pick your
neighbor’s pocket if you felt sure that you could make a better use of
your money than she could; but somehow it would not be honorable; and
honor is a part of divinity: it is metaphysics: it is religion. Some
day it may become scientific psychology; but psychology is as yet in
its crudest infancy; and when it grows up it will very likely be too
difficult not only for children but for many adults, like the rest of
the more abstruse sciences.
Meanwhile we must bear in mind that our beliefs are continually passing
from the metaphysical and legendary into the scientific stage. In
China, when an eclipse of the sun occurs, all the intelligent and
energetic women rush out of doors with pokers and shovels, trays and
saucepan lids, and bang them together to frighten away the demon who is
devouring the sun; and the perfect success of this proceeding, which
has never been known to fail, proves to them that it is the right thing
to do. But you, who know all about eclipses, sit calmly looking at
them through bits of smoked glass, because your belief about them is a
scientific belief and not a metaphysical one. You probably think that
the women who are banging the saucepans in China are fools; but they
are not: you would do the same yourself if you lived in a country where
astronomy was still in the metaphysical stage.
You must also beware of concluding, because their conduct seems to
you ridiculous, and because you know that there is no demon, that
there is no eclipse. You may say that nobody could make a mistake
like that; but I assure you that a great many people, seeing how many
childish fables and ridiculous ceremonies have been attached to the
conception of divinity, have rushed to the conclusion that no such
thing as divinity exists. When they grow out of believing that God is
an old gentleman with a white beard, they think they have got rid of
everything that the old gentleman represented to their infant minds. On
the contrary, they have come a little nearer to the truth about it.
Now the English nation consists of many million parents and children
of whom hardly any two are in precisely the same stage of belief as to
the sanctions of good conduct. Many of the parents are still in the
nursery stage: many of the children are in the comparatively scientific
stage. Most of them do not bother much about it, and just do what their
neighbors do and say they believe what most of their neighbors say
they believe. But those who do bother about it differ very widely and
differ very fiercely. Take those who, rejecting the first article of
the Church of England, attach to the word God the conception of a Ruler
of the universe with the body, parts, and passions of man, but with
unlimited knowledge and power. Here at least, you might think, we have
agreement. But no. There are two very distinct parties to this faith.
One of them believes in a God of Wrath, imposing good conduct on us by
threats of casting us for ever into an inconceivably terrible hell.
Others believe in a God of Love, and openly declare that if they could
be brought to believe in a God capable of such cruelty as hell implies,
they would spit in his face. Others hold that conduct has nothing to do
with the matter, and that though hell exists, anyone, however wicked,
can avoid it by believing that God accepted the cruel death of his own
son as an expiation of their misdeeds, whilst nobody, however virtuous,
can avoid it if she has the slightest doubt on this point. Others
declare that neither conduct nor belief has anything to do with it,
as every person is from birth predestined to fall into hell or mount
into heaven when they die, and that nothing that they can say or do or
believe or disbelieve can help them. Voltaire described us as a people
with thirty religions and only one sauce; and though this was a great
compliment to the activity and independence of our minds, it held out
no hope of our ever agreeing about religion.
Even if we could confine religious instruction to subjects which are
supposed to have passed from the metaphysical to the scientific stage,
which is what the advocates of secular education mean, we should be
no nearer to unanimity; for not only do our scientific bigots differ
as fiercely as those of the sects and churches, and try to obtain
powers of ruthless persecution from the Government, but their pretended
advances from the metaphysical to the scientific are often disguised
relapses into the pre-metaphysical stage of crude witchcraft, ancient
augury, and African “medicine”.
Roughly speaking, governments in imposing education on the people
have to deal with three fanaticisms: first, that which believes in a
God of Wrath, and sees in every earthquake, every pestilence, every
war: in short, every calamity of impressive or horrifying magnitude,
a proof of God’s terrible power and a warning to sinners; second,
that which believes in a God of Love in conflict with a Power of Evil
personified as the Devil; and third, that of the magicians and their
dupes, believing neither in God nor devil, claiming that the pursuit
of knowledge is absolutely free from moral law, however atrocious
its methods, and pretending to work miracles (called “the marvels of
science”) by which they hold the keys of life and death, and can make
mankind immune from disease if they are given absolute control over our
bodies.
A good many women are still so primitive and personal in religious
matters that their first impulse on hearing them discussed at all is
to declare that their beliefs are the only true beliefs, and must of
course be imposed on everyone, all other beliefs to be punished as
monstrous blasphemies. They do not regard Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, as
different names for God: if they call God Brahma they regard Allah and
Jehovah as abominable idols, and all Christians and Moslems as wicked
idolaters whom no respectable person would visit. Or if Jehovah, they
class Moslems and Indians as “the heathen”, and send out missionaries
to convert them. But this childish self-conceit would wreck the British
Empire if our rulers indulged it. Only about 11 per cent of British
subjects are Christians: the enormous majority of them call God Allah
or Brahma, and either do not distinguish Jesus from any other prophet
or have never even heard of him. Consequently when a woman goes into
Parliament, central or local, she should leave the sectarian part of
her religion behind her, and consider only that part of it which is
common to all the sects and Churches, however the names may differ.
Unfortunately this is about the last thing that most elected persons
ever dream of doing. They all strive to impose their local customs,
names, institutions, and even languages on the schoolchildren by main
force.
Now there is this to be said for their efforts, that all progress
consists in imposing on children nobler beliefs and better institutions
than those at present inculcated and established. For instance, as
every Socialist believes that Communism is more nobly inspired and
better in practice than private property and competition, her object in
entering Parliament is to impose that belief on her country by having
it taught to the children in the public schools so that they may grow
up to regard it as the normal obvious truth, and to abhor Capitalism
as a disastrous idolatry. At present she finds herself opposed by
statesmen who quite lately spent a hundred millions of English public
money in subsidizing military raids on the Russian Government because
it was a Socialist Government. To such statesmen Socialist, Communist,
Bolshevist, are synonyms for Scoundrel, Thief, Assassin. In opposition
to them the Socialists compare Labor exploited by landlords and
capitalists to Christ crucified between two thieves. They both say that
we no longer persecute in the name of religion; but this means only
that they refuse to call the creeds they are persecuting religions,
whilst the beliefs they do call religions have become comparatively
indifferent to them. To put down sedition, rebellion, and attacks on
property, or, on the other hand, to make an end of the robbery of
the poor, suppress shameless idleness, and restore the land of our
country, which God made for us all, to the whole people, seems simple
enforcement of the moral law, and not persecution; therefore those who
do it are not, they think, persecutors, to prove which they point to
the fact that they allow us all to go to church or not as we please,
and to believe or disbelieve in transubstantiation according to our
fancy. Do not be deceived by modern professions of toleration. Women
are still what they were when the Tudor sisters sent Protestants to
the stake and Jesuits to the rack and gallows; when the defenders of
property and slavery in Rome set up crosses along the public roads
with the crucified followers of the revolted gladiator slave Spartacus
dying horribly upon them in thousands; and when the saintly Torquemada
burnt alive every Jew he could lay hands on as piously as he told
his beads. The difference between the Socialist versus Capitalist
controversy and the Jew versus Christian controversy or the Roman
Catholic versus Protestant controversy is not that the modern bigot is
any more tolerant or less cruel than her ancestors, nor even that the
proletarians are too numerous and the proprietors too powerful to be
persecuted. If the controversy between them could be settled by either
party exterminating the other, they would both do their worst to settle
it in that way. History leaves us no goodnatured illusions on this
point. From the wholesale butcheries which followed the suppression
of the Paris Commune of 1871 to the monstrous and quite gratuitous
persecution of Russians in the United States of America after the
war of 1914-18, in which girls were sentenced to frightful terms of
imprisonment for remarks that might have been made by any Sunday
School teacher, there is abundant evidence that modern diehards are no
better than medieval zealots, and that if they are to be restrained
from deluging the world in blood and torture in the old fashion it
will not be by any imaginary advance in toleration or in humanity. At
this moment (1927) our proprietary classes appear to have no other
conception of the Russian Soviet Government and its sympathizers than
as vermin to be ruthlessly exterminated; and when the Russian Communist
and his western imitators speak of the proprietors and their political
supporters as “bourgeois”, they make no secret of regarding them as
enemies of the human race. The spirit of the famous manifesto of 1792,
in which the Duke of Brunswick, in the name of the monarchs of Europe,
announced that he meant to exterminate the French Republican Government
and deliver up the cities which tolerated it to “military execution
and total subversion”, is reflected precisely in the speeches made
by our own statesmen in support of the projected expedition against
the Union of Soviet Republics which was countermanded a few years ago
only because the disapproval of the British proletarian voters became
so obvious that the preparations for the Capitalist Crusade had to be
hastily dropped.
It is therefore very urgently necessary that I should explain to
you why it is that a Labor Party can neither establish Socialism by
exterminating its opponents, nor its opponents avert Socialism by
exterminating the Socialists.
75
REVOLUTIONS
You must first grasp the difference between revolutions and social
changes. A revolution transfers political power from one party to
another, or one class to another, or even one individual to another,
just as a conquest transfers it from one nation or race to another. It
can be and often is effected by violence or the threat of violence.
Of our two revolutions in the seventeenth century, by which political
power in England was transferred from the throne to the House of
Commons, the first cost a civil war; and the second was bloodless only
because the King ran away. A threat of violence was sufficient to carry
the nineteenth century revolution of 1832, by which the political
power was transferred from the great agricultural landowners to the
industrial urban employers. The South American revolutions which
substitute one party or one President for another are general elections
decided by shooting instead of by voting.
Now the transfer of political power from our capitalists to our
proletariat, without which Socialist propaganda would be suppressed
by the Government as sedition, and Socialist legislation would be
impossible, has already taken place in form. The proletarians can
outvote the capitalists overwhelmingly whenever they choose to do so.
If on the issue of Socialism versus Capitalism all the proletarians
were for Socialism and all the capitalists for Capitalism, Capitalism
would have had to capitulate to overwhelming numbers long ago. But the
proletarians who live upon the incomes of the capitalists as their
servants, their tradesmen, their employees in the luxury trades, their
lawyers and doctors and so on, not to mention the troops raised,
equipped, and paid by them to defend their property (in America there
are private armies of this kind) are more violently Conservative than
the capitalists themselves, many of whom, like Robert Owen and William
Morris, not to mention myself, have been and are ardent Socialists. The
Countess of Warwick is a noted Socialist; so you have seen a Socialist
Countess (or at least her picture); but have you ever seen a countess’s
dressmaker who was a Socialist? If the capitalists refused to accept a
parliamentary decision against them, and took to arms, like Charles I,
they would have in many places a majority of the proletariat on their
side.
If you are shocked by the suggestion that our capitalists would act so
unconstitutionally, consider the case of Ireland, in which after thirty
years of parliamentary action, and an apparently final settlement of
the Home Rule question by Act of Parliament, the establishment of the
Irish Free State was effected by fire and slaughter, the winning side
being that which succeeded in burning the larger number of the houses
of its opponents.
Parliamentary constitutionalism holds good up to a certain point: the
point at which the people who are outvoted in Parliament will accept
their defeat. But on many questions people feel so strongly, or have
such big interests at stake, that they leave the decision to Parliament
only as long as they think they will win there. If Parliament decides
against them, and they see any chance of a successful resistance, they
throw Parliament over and fight it out. During the thirty years of the
parliamentary campaign for Irish Home Rule there were always Direct
Action men who said “It is useless to go to the English Parliament:
the Unionists will never give up their grip of Ireland until they are
forced to; and you may as well fight it out first as last”. And these
men, though denounced as wanton incendiaries, turned out to be right.
The French had to cut off the heads of both king and queen because the
king could not control the queen, and the queen would not accept a
constitutional revolution, nor stop trying to induce the other kings
of Europe to march their armies into France and slaughter the Liberals
for her. In England we beheaded our king because he would not keep
faith with the Liberal Parliament even after he had fought it and
lost. In Spain at this moment the King and the army have suppressed
Parliament, and are ruling by force of arms on the basis of divine
right, which is exactly what Cromwell did in England after he had cut
off King Charles’s head for trying to do the same. Signor Mussolini,
a Socialist, has overridden parliament in Italy, his followers having
established what is called a reign of terror by frank violence.
These repudiations of constitutionalism in Spain and Italy have been
made, not to effect any definite social change, but because the Spanish
and Italian governments had become so unbearably inefficient that
the handiest way to restore public order was for some sufficiently
energetic individuals to take the law into their own hands and just
break people’s heads if they would not behave themselves. And it may
quite possibly happen that even if the most perfect set of Fabian Acts
of Parliament for the constitutional completion of Socialism in this
country be passed through Parliament by duly elected representatives of
the people; swallowed with wry faces by the House of Lords; and finally
assented to by the King and placed on the statute book, the capitalists
may, like Signor Mussolini, denounce Parliament as unpatriotic,
pernicious, and corrupt, and try to prevent by force the execution of
the Fabian Acts. We should then have a state of civil war, with, no
doubt, the Capitalist forces burning the co-operative stores, and the
proletarians burning the country houses, as in Ireland, in addition to
the usual war routine of devastation and slaughter.
As we have seen, the capitalists would be at no loss for proletarian
troops. The war would not be as the Marxist doctrinaires of the Class
War seem to imagine. In our examination of the effect of unequal
distribution of income we found that it is not only the rich who live
on the poor, but also the servants and tradesmen who live on the money
the rich spend, and who have their own servants and tradesmen. In the
rich suburbs and fashionable central quarters of the great cities,
and all over the South of England where pleasant country houses are
dotted over the pleasantest of the English counties, it is as hard
to get a Labor candidate into Parliament as in Oxford University. If
the unearned incomes of the rich disappeared, places like Bournemouth
would either perish like the cities of Nineveh and Babylon, or else the
inhabitants would have, as they would put it, to cater for a different
class of people; and many of them would be ruined before they could
adapt themselves to the new conditions. Add to these the young men who
are out of employment, and will fight for anyone who will pay them well
for an exciting adventure, with all the people who dread change of
any sort, or who are duped by the newspapers into thinking Socialists
scoundrels, or who would be too stupid to understand such a book as
this if they could be persuaded to read anything but a cheap newspaper;
and you will see at once that the line that separates those who live on
rich customers from those who live on poor customers: in other words
which separates those interested in the maintenance of Capitalism from
those interested in its replacement by Socialism, is a line drawn
not between rich and poor, capitalist and proletarian, but right
down through the middle of the proletariat to the bottom of the very
poorest section. In a civil war for the maintenance of Capitalism the
capitalists would therefore find masses of supporters in all ranks of
the community; and it is their knowledge of this that makes the leaders
of the Labor Party so impatient with the extremists who talk of such a
war as if it would be a Class War, and echo Shelley’s very misleading
couplet “Ye are many: they are few”. And as the capitalists know it
too, being reminded of it by the huge number of votes given for them
by the poor at every election, I cannot encourage you to feel too sure
that their present denunciations of Direct Action by their opponents
mean that when their own sooner-or-later inevitable defeat by Labor in
Parliament comes, they will take it lying down.
But no matter how the government of the country may pass from the hands
of the capitalists into those of the Socialist proletarians, whether
by peaceful parliamentary procedure or the bloodiest conceivable civil
war, at the end of it the survivors will be just where they were at
the beginning as far as practical Communism is concerned. Returning a
majority of Socialists to Parliament will not by itself reconstruct
the whole economic system of the country in such a way as to produce
equality of income. Still less will burning and destroying buildings
or killing several of the opponents of Socialism, and getting several
Socialists killed in doing so. You cannot wave a wand over the country
and say “Let there be Socialism”: at least nothing will happen if you
do.