estate owners and imposed on their tenants without any legal sanction.
These often prohibit the building on the estate of any place of worship
except an Anglican church, or of any public house. They refuse houses
to practitioners of the many kinds that are now not registered by the
General Medical Council. In fact they exercise a tyranny which would
lead to a revolution if it were attempted by the King, and which
did actually provoke us to cut off a king’s head in the seventeenth
century. We have to submit to these tyrannies because the people who
can refuse us employment or the use of land have powers of life and
death over us, and can therefore make us do what they like, law or no
law. Socialism would transfer this power of life and death from private
hands to the hands of the constitutional authorities, and regulate it
by public law. The result would be a great increase of independence,
self-respect, freedom from interference with our tastes and ways of
living, and, generally, all the liberty we really care about.
Childish people, we saw, want to have all their lives regulated for
them, with occasional holiday outbursts of naughtiness to relieve the
monotony; and we admitted that the ablebodied ones make good soldiers
and steady conventional employees. When they are left to themselves
they make laws of fashions, customs, points of etiquette, and “what
other people will say”, hardly daring to call their souls their own,
though they may be rich enough to do as they please. Money as a means
of freedom is thrown away on these people. It is funny to hear them
declaring, as they often do, that Socialism would be unendurable
because it would dictate to them what they should eat and drink and
wear, leaving them no choice in the matter, when they are cowering
under a social tyranny which regulates their meals, their clothes,
their hours, their religion and politics, so ruthlessly that they dare
no more walk down a fashionable street in an unfashionable hat, which
there is no law to prevent them doing, than to walk down it naked,
which would be stopped by the police. They regard with dread and
abhorrence the emancipated spirits who, within the limits of legality
and cleanliness and convenience, do not care what they wear, and boldly
spend their free time as their fancy dictates.
But do not undervalue the sheepish wisdom of the conventional. Nobody
can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people
are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality
saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one
sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure for freedom
than unconventionality does. Believe me, unless you intend to devote
your life to preaching unconventionality, and thus make it your
profession, the more conventional you are, short of being silly or
slavish or miserable, the easier life will be for you. Even as a
professional reformer you had better be content to preach one form
of unconventionality at a time. For instance, if you rebel against
high-heeled shoes, take care to do it in a very smart hat.
80
SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE
When promising new liberties, Socialists are apt to forget that people
object even more strongly to new liberties than to new laws. If a woman
has been accustomed to go in chains all her life and to see other women
doing the same, a proposal to take her chains off will horrify her. She
will feel naked without them, and clamor to have any impudent hussy who
does not feel about them exactly as she does taken up by the police. In
China the Manchu ladies felt that way about their crippled feet. It is
easier to put chains on people than to take them off if the chains look
respectable.
In Russia marriage under the Tsars was an unbreakable chain. There was
no divorce; but on the other hand there was, as with us, a widespread
practice of illicit polygamy. A woman could live with a man without
marrying him. A man could live with a woman without marrying her. In
fact each might have several partners. In Russia under the Communist
Soviet this state of things has been reversed. If a married couple
cannot agree, they can obtain a divorce without having to pretend to
disgrace themselves as in Protestant England. That shocks many English
ladies, married or unmarried, who take the Book of Common Prayer
literally. But the Soviet does not tolerate illicit relations. If a
man lives with a woman as husband with wife he must marry her, even if
he has to divorce another wife to do it. The woman has the right to
the status of a wife, and must claim it. This seems to many English
gentlemen an unbearable tyranny: they regard the Soviet legislators as
monsters for interfering with male liberty in this way; and they have
plenty of female sympathizers.
In countries and sects where polygamy is legal, the laws compelling the
husband to pay equal attention to all his wives are staggering to a
British husband, who is not now, as he was formerly, legally obliged to
pay any attention to his one wife, nor she to him.
Now marriage institutions are not a part of Socialism. Marriage, of
which we speak as if it were one and the same thing all the world over,
differs so much from sect to sect and from country to country that to
a Roman Catholic or a citizen of the State of South Carolina it means
strict monogamy without the possibility of divorce; whilst to our high
caste fellow-subjects in India it means unlimited polygamy, as it did
to the Latter Day Saints of Salt Lake City within my recollection.
Between these extremes there are many grades. There are marriages
which nothing can break except death or annulment by the Pope; and
there are divorces that can be ordered at a hotel like a bottle of
champagne or a motor car. There is English marriage, Scottish marriage,
and Irish marriage, all different. There is religious marriage and
civil marriage, civil marriage being a recent institution won from
the Churches after a fierce struggle, and still regarded as invalid
and sinful by many pious people. There is an established celibacy,
the negation of marriage, among nuns, priests, and certain Communist
sects. With all this Socialism has nothing directly to do. Equality of
income applies impartially to all the sects, all the States, and all
the communities, to monogamists, polygamists, and celibates, to infants
incapable of marriage and centenarians past it.
Why, then, is it that there is a rooted belief that Socialism would in
some way alter marriage, if not abolish it? Why did quite respectable
English newspapers after the Russian revolution of 1917 gravely infer
that the Soviet had not only nationalized land and capital, but
proceeded, as part of the logic of Socialism, to nationalize women?
No doubt the main explanation of that extravagance is that the highly
respectable newspapers in question still regard women as property,
nationalizable like any other property, and were consequently unable
to understand that this very masculine view is inconceivable to a
Communist. But the truth under all such nonsense is that Socialism
must have a tremendous effect on marriage and the family. At present
a married woman is a female slave chained to a male one; and a girl
is a prisoner in the house and in the hands of her parents. When the
personal relation between the parties is affectionate, and their powers
not abused, the arrangement works well enough to be bearable by people
who have been brought up to regard it as a matter of course. But
when the parties are selfish, tyrannical, jealous, cruel, envious,
with different and antagonistic tastes and beliefs, incapable of
understanding oneanother: in short, antipathetic and incompatible, it
produces much untold human unhappiness.
Why is this unhappiness endured when the door is not locked, and the
victims can walk into the street at any moment? Obviously because
starvation awaits them at the other side of the door. Vows and
inculcated duties may seem effective in keeping unhappy wives and
revolting daughters at home when they have no alternative; but there
must be an immense number of cases in which wives and husbands, girls
and boys, would walk out of the house, like Nora Helmer in Ibsen’s
famous play, if they could do so without losing a single meal, a single
night’s protection and shelter, or the least loss of social standing in
consequence.
As Socialism would place them in this condition it would infallibly
break up unhappy marriages and families. This being obviously desirable
we need not pretend to deplore it. But we must not expect more domestic
dissolutions than are likely to happen. No parent would tyrannize as
some parents tyrannize now if they knew that the result would be the
prompt disappearance of their children, unless indeed they disliked
their children enough to desire that result, in which case so much the
better; but the normal merely hasty parent would have to recover the
fugitives by apologies, promises of amendment, or bribes, and keep them
by more stringent self-control and less stringent parental control.
Husbands and wives, if they knew that their marriage could only last on
condition of its being made reasonably happy for both of them, would
have to behave far better to oneanother than they ever seem to dream
of doing now. There would be such a prodigious improvement in domestic
manners all round that a fairly plausible case can be made out for
expecting that far fewer marriages and families will be broken up under
Socialism than at present. Still, there will be a difference, even
though the difference be greatly for the better. When once it becomes
feasible for a wife to leave her husband, not for a few days or weeks
after a tiff because they are for the moment tired of oneanother, but
without any intention of returning, there must be prompt and almost
automatic divorce, whether they like it or not. At present a deserted
wife or husband, by simply refusing to sue for divorce, can in mere
revenge or jealousy or on Church grounds, prevent the deserter from
marrying again. We should have to follow the good example of Russia
in refusing to tolerate such situations. Both parties must be either
married or unmarried. An intermediate state in which each can say to
the other “Well, if I cannot have you nobody else shall” is clearly
against public morality.
It is on marriage that the secular State is likely to clash most
sensationally with the Churches, because the Churches claim that
marriage is a metaphysical business governed by an absolute right and
wrong which has been revealed to them by God, and which the State must
therefore enforce without regard to circumstances. But to this the
State will never assent, except in so far as clerical notions happen to
be working fairly well and to be shared by the secular rulers. Marriage
is for the State simply a licence to two citizens to beget children.
To say that the State must not concern itself with the question of
how many people the community is to consist of, and, when a change is
desired, at what rate the number should be increased or reduced, is to
treat the nation as no sane person would dream of treating a ferryman.
If the ferryman’s boat will hold only ten passengers, and you tell him
that it has been revealed to you by God that he must take all who want
to cross over, even though they number a thousand, the ferryman will
not argue with you, he will refuse to take more than ten, and will
smite you with his oar if you attempt to detain his boat and shove a
couple more passengers into it. And, obviously, the ten already aboard
will help him for their own sakes.
When Socialism does away with the artificial overpopulation which
Capitalism, as we have seen, produces by withdrawing workers from
productive employments to wasteful ones, the State will be face to
face at last with the genuine population question: the question of how
many people it is desirable to have in the country. To get rid of the
million or so for whom our capitalists fail to find employment, the
State now depends on a high death-rate, especially for infants, on war,
and on swarming like the bees. Africa, America, and Australasia have
taken millions of our people from us in bee swarms. But in time all
places comfortable enough to tempt people to emigrate get filled up;
and their inhabitants, like the Americans and Australians today, close
their gates against further immigration. If we find our population
still increasing, we may have to discuss whether we should keep it
down, as we keep down the cat population, by putting the superfluous
babies into the bucket, which would be no wickeder than the avoidable
infant mortality and surgical abortion resorted to at present. The
alternative would be to make it a severely punishable crime for
married couples to have more than a prescribed number of children.
But punishing the parents would not dispose of the unwanted children.
The fiercest persecution of the mothers of illegitimate children has
not prevented illegitimate children from being born, though it has
made most of them additionally undesirable by afflicting them with the
vices and infirmities of disgrace and poverty. Any State limiting the
number of children permitted to a family would be compelled not only
to tolerate contraception, but to inculcate it and instruct women in
its methods. And this would immediately bring it into conflict with
the Churches. Whether under such circumstances the State would simply
ignore the Churches or pass a law under which their preachers could
be prosecuted for sedition would depend wholly on the gravity of the
emergency, and not on the principles of liberty, toleration, freedom of
conscience, and so forth which were so stirringly trumpeted in England
in the eighteenth century when the boot was on the other foot.
In France at present the State is striving to increase the population.
It is thus in the position of the Israelites in the Promised Land,
and of Joseph Smith and his Mormons in the State of Illinois in 1843,
when only a rapid increase in their numbers could rescue them from a
condition of dangerous numerical inferiority to their enemies. Joseph
Smith did what Abraham did: he resorted to polygamy. We, not being in
any such peril ourselves, have seen nothing in this but an opportunity
for silly and indecent jocularity; but there are not many political
records more moving than Brigham Young’s description of the horror with
which he received Joseph’s revelation that it was the will of God that
they should all take as many wives as possible. He had been brought up
to regard polygamy as a mortal sin, and did sincerely so regard it.
And yet he believed that Smith’s revelations were from God. In his
perplexity, he tells us, he found himself, when a funeral passed in
the street, envying the corpse (another mortal sin); and there is not
the slightest reason to doubt that he was perfectly sincere. After all,
it is not necessary for a married man to have any moral or religious
objection to polygamy to be horrified at the prospect of having twenty
additional wives “sealed” to him. Yet Brigham Young got over his
horror, and was married more than thirty times. And the genuinely pious
Mormon women, whose prejudices were straiter than those of the men,
were as effectively and easily converted to polygamy as Brigham.
Though this proves that western civilization is just as susceptible
to polygamy as eastern when the need arises, the French Government,
for very good reasons, has not ventured to propose it as a remedy for
underpopulation in France. The alternatives are prizes and decorations
for the parents of large families (families of fifteen have their
group portraits in the illustrated papers, and are highly complimented
on their patriotism), bounties, exemptions from taxation, vigorous
persecution of contraception as immoral, facilities for divorce
amounting to successive as distinguished from simultaneous polygamy,
all tending towards that State endowment of parentage which seems
likely to become a matter of course in all countries, with, of course,
encouragement to desirable immigrants. To these measures no Church is
likely to object, unless indeed it holds that celibacy is a condition
of salvation, a doctrine which has never yet found enough practising
converts to threaten a modern nation with sterility. Compulsory
parentage is as possible as compulsory military service; but just as
the soldier who is compelled to serve must have his expenses paid by
the State, a woman compelled to become a mother can hardly be expected
to do so at her own expense.
But the maintenance of monogamy must always have for its basis a
practical equality in numbers between men and women. If a war reduced
the male population by, say, 70 per cent, and the female population
by only one per cent, polygamy would immediately be instituted, and
parentage made compulsory, with the hearty support of all the really
popular Churches.
Thus, it seems, the State, Capitalist or Socialist, will finally settle
what marriage is to be, no matter what the Churches say. A Socialist
State is more likely to interfere than a Capitalist one, because
Socialism will clear the population question from the confusion into
which Capitalism has thrown it. The State will then, as I have said, be
face to face with the real population question; but nobody yet knows
what the real population question will be like, because nobody can
now settle how many persons per acre offer the highest possibilities
of living. There is the Boer ideal of living out of sight of your
neighbors’ chimneys. There is the Bass Rock ideal of crowding as many
people on the earth as it can support. There is the bungalow ideal and
the monster hotel ideal. Neither you nor I can form the least notion of
how posterity will decide between them when society is well organized
enough to make the problem practical and the issues clear.
81
SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN
In the case of young children we have gone far in our interference
with the old Roman rights of parents. For nine mortal years the child
is taken out of its parents’ hands for most of the day, and thus made
a State school child instead of a private family child. The records
of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children are still
sickening enough to shew how necessary it is to protect children
against their parents; but the bad cases are scarce, and shew that it
is now difficult for the worst sort of parent to evade for long the
school attendance officer, the teacher, and the police. Unfortunately
the proceedings lead to nothing but punishment of the parents: when
they come out of prison the children are still in their hands. When
we have beaten the cat for cruelty we give it back its mouse. We have
now, however, taken a step in the right direction by passing an Act
of Parliament by which adoptive parents have all the rights of real
parents. You can now adopt a child with complete security against the
parents coming to claim the child back again whenever it suits them.
All their rights pass to you by the adoption. Bad natural parents can
be completely superseded by adoptive ones: it remains only to make
the operation compulsory where it is imperative. Compulsory adoption
is already an old established institution in the case of our Poor Law
Guardians. Oliver Twist was a compulsory adopted child. His natural
parents were replaced by very unnatural ones. Mr Bumble is being
happily abolished; but there must still be somebody to adopt Oliver.
When equality of income makes an end of his social disadvantages there
will be no lack of childless volunteers.
Our eyes are being opened more and more to the fact that in our school
system education is only the pretext under which parents get rid of
the trouble of their children by bundling them off into a prison or
child farm which is politely called a school. We also know, or ought to
know, that institutional treatment of children is murderous for infants
and bad for all children. Homeless infants can be saved from that by
adoption; but the elder children are forcing us to face the problem of
organizing child life as such, giving children constitutional rights
just as we have had to give them to women, and ceasing to shirk that
duty either by bundling the children off to Bastilles called schools
or by making the child the property of its father (in the case of an
illegitimate child, of its mother) as we have ceased to shirk women’s
rights by making the woman the property of her husband. The beginnings
of such organization are already visible in the Girl Guides and the
Boy Scouts. But the limits to liberty which the State has to set and
the obligations which it has to impose on adults are as imperative for
children as for adults. The Girl Guide cannot be always guiding nor
the Boy Scout always scouting. They must qualify themselves for adult
citizenship by certain acquirements whether they like it or not. That
is our excuse for school: they must be educated.
Education is a word that in our mouths covers a good many things.
At present we are only extricating ourselves slowly and, as usual,
reluctantly and ill humoredly, from our grossest stupidities about
it. One of them is that it means learning lessons, and that learning
lessons is for children, and ceases when they come of age. I, being a
septuagenarian, can assure you confidently that we never cease learning
to the extent of our capacity for learning until our faculties fail
us. As to what we have been taught in school and college, I should say
roughly that as it takes us all our lives to find out the meaning of
the small part of it that is true and the error of the large part that
is false, it is not surprising that those who have been “educated”
least know most. It is gravely injurious both to children and adults
to be forced to study subjects for which they have no natural aptitude
even when some ulterior object which they have at heart gives them a
fictitious keenness to master it. Mental disablement caused in this way
is common in the modern examination-passing classes. Dickens’s Mr Toots
is not a mere figure of fun: he is an authentic instance of a sort
of imbecility that is dangerously prevalent in our public school and
university products. Toots is no joke.
Even when a natural aptitude exists it may be overcome by the repulsion
created by coercive teaching. If a girl is unmusical, any attempt to
force her to learn to play Beethoven’s sonatas is torture to herself
and to her teachers, to say nothing of the agonies of her audiences
when her parents order her to display her accomplishment to visitors.
But unmusical girls are as exceptional as deaf girls. The common case
of a rooted loathing for music, and a vindictive hope that Beethoven
may be expiating a malevolent life in eternal torment, is that of the
normally musical girl who, before she had ever heard a sonata or any
other piece of music played well enough to seem beautiful to her, has
been set to practise scales in a cold room, rapped over the knuckles
when she struck a wrong note, and had the Pathetic Sonata rapped and
scolded and bullied into her bar by bar until she could finger it
out without a mistake. That is still what school-taught music means
to many unfortunate young ladies whose parents desire them to have
accomplishments, and accordingly pay somebody who has been handled in
the same way to knock this particular accomplishment into them. If
these unhappy victims thought that Socialism meant compulsory music
they would die in the last ditch fighting against it; and they would be
right.