That was a jolly story which Mr. Arthur Ransome told the other day in
one of his messages from Petrograd. A stout old lady was walking with
her basket down the middle of a street in Petrograd to the great
confusion of the traffic and with no small peril to herself. It was
pointed out to her that the pavement was the place for foot-passengers,
but she replied: "I'm going to walk where I like. We've got liberty
now." It did not occur to the dear old lady that if liberty entitled
the foot-passenger to walk down the middle of the road it also entitled
the cab-driver to drive on the pavement, and that the end of such
liberty would be universal chaos. Everybody would be getting in
everybody else's way and nobody would get anywhere. Individual liberty
would have become social anarchy.
There is a danger of the world getting liberty-drunk in these days like
the old lady with the basket, and it is just as well to remind
ourselves of what the rule of the road means. It means that in order
that the liberties of all may be preserved the liberties of everybody
must be curtailed. When the policeman, say, at Piccadilly Circus steps
into the middle of the road and puts up his hand, he is the symbol not
of tyranny, but of liberty. You may not think so. You may, being in a
hurry and seeing your motor-car pulled up by this insolence of office,
feel that your liberty has been outraged. How dare this fellow
interfere with your free use of the public highway? Then, if you are a
reasonable person, you will reflect that if he did not, incidentally,
interfere with you he would interfere with no one, and the result would
be that Piccadilly Circus would be a maelstrom that you would never
cross at all. You have submitted to a curtailment of private liberty
in order that you may enjoy a social order which makes your liberty a
reality.
Liberty is not a personal affair only, but a social contract. It is an
accommodation of interests. In matters which do not touch anybody
else's liberty, of course, I may be as free as I like. If I choose to
go down the Strand in a dressing-gown, with long hair and bare feet,
who shall say me nay? You have liberty to laugh at me, but I have
liberty to be indifferent to you. And if I have a fancy for dyeing my
hair, or waxing my moustache (which heaven forbid), or wearing a tall
hat, a frock-coat and sandals, or going to bed late or getting up
early, I shall follow my fancy and ask no man's permission. I shall
not inquire of you whether I may eat mustard with my mutton. I may
like mustard with my mutton. And you will not ask me whether you may
be a Protestant or a Catholic, whether you may marry the dark lady or
the fair lady, whether you may prefer Ella Wheeler Wilcox to
Wordsworth, or champagne to shandygaff.
In all these and a thousand other details you and I please ourselves
and ask no one's leave. We have a whole kingdom in which we rule
alone, can do what we choose, be wise or ridiculous, harsh or easy,
conventional or odd. But directly we step out of that kingdom our
personal liberty of action becomes qualified by other people's liberty.
I might like to practise on the trombone from midnight till three in
the morning. If I went on to the top of Helvellyn to do it I could
please myself, but if I do it in my bedroom my family will object, and
if I do it out in the streets the neighbours will remind me that my
liberty to blow the trombone must not interfere with their liberty to
sleep in quiet. There are a lot of people in the world, and I have to
accommodate my liberty to their liberties.
We are all liable to forget this, and unfortunately we are much more
conscious of the imperfections of others in this respect than of our
own.
I got into a railway carriage at a country station the other morning
and settled down for what the schoolboys would call an hour's "swot" at
a Blue-book. I was not reading it for pleasure. The truth is that I
never do read Blue-books for pleasure. I read them as a barrister
reads a brief, for the very humble purpose of turning an honest penny
out of them. Now, if you are reading a book for pleasure it doesn't
matter what is going on around you. I think I could enjoy "Tristram
Shandy" or "Treasure Island" in the midst of an earthquake.
But when you are reading a thing as a task you need reasonable quiet,
and that is what I didn't get, for at the next station in came a couple
of men, one of whom talked to his friend for the rest of the journey in
a loud and pompous voice. He was one of those people who remind one of
that story of Home Tooke who, meeting a person of immense swagger in
the street, stopped him and said, "Excuse me, sir, but are you someone
in particular?" This gentleman was someone in particular. As I
wrestled with clauses and sections, his voice rose like a gale, and his
family history, the deeds of his sons in the war, and his criticisms of
the generals and the politicians submerged my poor attempts to hang on
to my job. I shut up the Blue-book, looked out of the window, and
listened wearily while the voice thundered on with themes like these:
"Now what French ought to have done..." "The mistake the Germans
made..." "If only Asquith had..." You know the sort of stuff. I had
heard it all before, oh, so often. It was like a barrel-organ groaning
out some banal song of long ago.
If I had asked him to be good enough to talk in a lower tone I daresay
he would have thought I was a very rude fellow. It did not occur to
him that anybody could have anything better to do than to listen to
him, and I have no doubt he left the carriage convinced that everybody
in it had, thanks to him, had a very illuminating journey, and would
carry away a pleasing impression of his encyclopaedic range. He was
obviously a well-intentioned person. The thing that was wrong with him
was that he had not the social sense. He was not "a clubbable man."
A reasonable consideration for the rights or feelings of others is the
foundation of social conduct. It is commonly alleged against women
that in this respect they are less civilised than men, and I am bound
to confess that in my experience it is the woman--the well-dressed
woman--who thrusts herself in front of you at the ticket office. The
man would not attempt it, partly because he knows the thing would not
be tolerated from him, but also because he has been better drilled in
the small give-and-take of social relationships. He has lived more in
the broad current of the world, where you have to learn to accommodate
yourself to the general standard of conduct, and his school life, his
club life, and his games have in this respect given him a training that
women are only now beginning to enjoy.
I believe that the rights of small people and quiet people are as
important to preserve as the rights of small nationalities. When I
hear the aggressive, bullying horn which some motorists deliberately
use, I confess that I feel something boiling up in me which is very
like what I felt when Germany came trampling like a bully over Belgium.
By what right, my dear sir, do you go along our highways uttering that
hideous curse on all who impede your path? Cannot you announce your
coming like a gentleman? Cannot you take your turn? Are you someone
in particular or are you simply a hot gospeller of the prophet
Nietzsche? I find myself wondering what sort of a person it is who can
sit behind that hog-like outrage without realising that he is the
spirit of Prussia incarnate, and a very ugly spectacle in a civilised
world.
And there is the more harmless person who has bought a very blatant
gramophone, and on Sunday afternoon sets the thing going, opens the
windows and fills the street with "Keep the Home Fires Burning" or some
similar banality. What are the right limits of social behaviour in a
matter of this sort? Let us take the trombone as an illustration
again. Hazlitt said that a man who wanted to learn that fearsome
instrument was entitled to learn it in his own house, even though he
was a nuisance to his neighbours, but it was his business to make the
nuisance as slight as possible. He must practise in the attic, and
shut the window. He had no right to sit in his front room, open the
window, and blow his noise into his neighbours' ears with the maximum
of violence. And so with the gramophone. If you like the gramophone
you are entitled to have it, but you are interfering with the liberties
of your neighbours if you don't do what you can to limit the noise to
your own household. Your neighbours may not like "Keep the Home Fires
Burning." They may prefer to have their Sunday afternoon undisturbed,
and it is as great an impertinence for you to wilfully trespass on
their peace as it would be to go, unasked, into their gardens and
trample on their flower beds.
There are cases, of course, where the clash of liberties seems to defy
compromise. My dear old friend X., who lives in a West End square and
who is an amazing mixture of good nature and irascibility, flies into a
passion when he hears a street piano, and rushes out to order it away.
But near by lives a distinguished lady of romantic picaresque tastes,
who dotes on street pianos, and attracts them as wasps are attracted to
a jar of jam. Whose liberty in this case should surrender to the
other? For the life of me I cannot say. It is as reasonable to like
street pianos as to dislike them--and vice versa. I would give much to
hear Sancho Panza's solution of such a nice riddle.
I suppose the fact is that we can be neither complete anarchists nor
complete Socialists in this complex world--or rather we must be a
judicious mixture of both. We have both liberties to preserve--our
individual liberty and our social liberty. We must watch the
bureaucrat on the one side and warn off the anarchist on the other. I
am neither a Marxist, nor a Tolstoyan, but a compromise. I shall not
permit any authority to say that my child must go to this school or
that, shall specialise in science or arts, shall play rugger or soccer.
These things are personal. But if I proceed to say that my child shall
have no education at all, that he shall be brought up as a primeval
savage, or at Mr. Fagin's academy for pickpockets, then Society will
politely but firmly tell me that it has no use for primeval savages and
a very stern objection to pickpockets, and that my child must have a
certain minimum of education whether I like it or not. I cannot have
the liberty to be a nuisance to my neighbours or make my child a burden
and a danger to the commonwealth.
It is in the small matters of conduct, in the observance of the rule of
the road, that we pass judgment upon ourselves, and declare that we are
civilised or uncivilised. The great moments of heroism and sacrifice
are rare. It is the little habits of commonplace intercourse that make
up the great sum of life and sweeten or make bitter the journey. I
hope my friend in the railway carriage will reflect on this. Then he
will not cease, I am sure, to explain to his neighbour where French
went wrong and where the Germans went ditto; but he will do it in a way
that will permit me to read my Blue-book undisturbed.