The old gentleman took an athletic pull at his liquor, and continued
his discourse. He had been discussing more to himself than to me the
merits of Professor James and Monsieur Bergson, and had inquired was I
aware of the nature of the Pragmatic Sanction. The gentleman behind
the counter remarked, that he had one on his bicycle, but that they
were no good. This statement was denounced by the Philosopher as an
unnatural and clumsy falsehood, and, anathematising the ignorance of
his interrupter, he came by slow degrees to the following discourse--
"I have but little faith in any of the methods of education with which
I am presently acquainted. The objective of every system of teaching
should be to enable the person who is being subjected to this repulsive
treatment to do something which will fit him to maintain a place in
life where he will be as little liable as possible to the changes and
vicissitudes of civilised existence.
"The cumbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can
scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of
language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed
Church and the highest order of the vertebrates.
"If one walks into any school in this kingdom one is certain to meet a
tall, thin, anaemic youth with a draggled moustache and a worried eye
who is endeavouring to coerce a mass of indigestible, inelastic and
unimportant facts into the heads of divers sleepy and disgusted
children. If a small boy, on being asked where Labrador is, replies
that it is the most northerly point of the Berlin Archipelago, he may
be wrong in quite a variety of ways, but even if he answered correctly
he would still know just as little about the matter, while if he were
to give the only proper reply to so ridiculous a conundrum, he would
tell his tormentor that he did not care a rap where it was, that he had
not put it there, and that he would tell his mother if the man did not
leave him alone. What has he got to do with Labrador, Terra del Fuego,
or the Isles of Greece? Give him a fistful of facts about Donnybrook,
and send him away to hunt out the truth of it, with a sandwich in his
pocket and the promise of a lump of toffee when he came back with his
cargo of truths--that would interest him, the toffee would make the
information stick, while the verification of his facts would make his
head fat and fertile.
"When we ceased to be natural creatures and put on the oppressive
shrouds, wraps and disguises which we label in the villainous aggregate
civilisation, we ceased to know either how to teach or how to learn.
We exchanged the freedom and spaciousness of life for a cramped
existence compounded of spectacles and bad grammar, this complicated
still further by the multiplication tables, the dead languages and
indigestion tabloids. During his school-days many a healthy boy had to
parse ten square miles of dead language. Why? he does not know and he
will never be told, for no one else knows any more than he. The only
thing of which he is certain is, that he did not do anything to deserve
it.
"Civilisation, which is responsible for all the woes of life, such as
washing, shaving and buying boots, is responsible for this also.
Potatoes are more productive than Latin roots, are twice as nourishing
and cannot be parsed. Teach a girl how to recognise an egg by the
naked eye, and then teach her how to cook it. Teach a boy how to
discover the kind of trees eggs grow on and what is the best kind of
soil to plant them in. Teach a girl how to keep her hands from
scratching, her tongue from telling lies, and her teeth from dropping
out prematurely, and she will, maybe, turn out a healthy kind of mammal
having a house filled with brightness and laughter. Teach a boy how to
prevent another boy from mashing the head off him, teach him how to be
good to his mother when she is old, teach him how to give two-pence to
a beggar without imagining that he is investing his savings in Paradise
at fifty per cent and a bonus; and then, having eliminated
civilisation, education, clothes, tin whistles and soap this earth will
not be such a bad old ball-alley for a man to smoke a pipe in.
"Everything is wrong. People should rise to their feet and salute when
a farmer or a teacher comes into a room. No man should be allowed into
Parliament who has not engaged in one or other of these professions,
but because they are the two most important professions in the world
their exponents are robbed and harried into slaves and fools."
Having said this with great earnestness the old gentleman
absent-mindedly impounded my drink, absorbed it, and strode away
wrapped in thought. The gentleman-in-waiting sympathetically asked me
if I would have another one, but on learning that I had no more money
he said good-night.
V
The old gentleman was in a state of most unusual content. It might
have been because the sun was shining, or it might have been because he
had just finished his third glass: whatever it was, the smile upon his
face was of a depth and a radiance impossible to describe. He spoke
for a while upon the pleasant smell of hay passing through a city, and,
remarking upon the enviable thirst of hay-makers, he swept gradually to
the following weighty monologue--
"From the earliest times," said he, "drinking has been regarded not
alone as a necessary lubricant, but also as a pastime, and the
ingenuity of every race under the sun has been exercised in the attempt
to give variety and distinction to its beverages.
"We may take it that the earliest race of men drank nothing but water,
and hot water to boot, for at that era the earth must have been, if not
hot, at least tepid. One can easily imagine that the contemporaries of
the five-toed horse might have welcomed death as a happy release from
their too sultry existence.
"I suppose man is the only brewing animal known to scientific research.
All other creatures take their food and drink neat, or in a raw state.
Of course, almost all mammals are enabled by a highly ingenious
internal mechanism to brew milk, or some other lacteal substitute, but
this is performed by a natural, instinctive impulse towards the
preservation of their young and conserves none of the spirit of
artifice and calculation so necessary to authentic brewing operations.
"Brewing was possible only when the stability of the human race was,
more or less, assured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a
state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet
aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families--a father, an
uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of
children--wandered wherever food seemed most abundant, and fought with
or eluded such other families as they chanced upon. This state of
existence was too precarious and haphazard to allow of the niceties of
brewing being evolved.
"But the natural tendency of families to lengthen, the gregarious
instincts of the race, and the need of mutual protection and assistance
ultimately welded these indiscriminate families into communities of
ever-varying extent, and the movement of these huge troops and
transportation of their baggage becoming more and more difficult
(vehicles being unknown and horses, perhaps, treble-toed, wily and
ferocious) and food, which until then had only been obtained in a
fugitive state, becoming less easy of access, these communities were
forced to select a settled habitation, scratch the earth for provender,
settled down to the breeding of one-toed horses, and exercise the
respectable virtues of thrift and industry for their preservation.
Thus, laws were formulated, tentative and unsatisfactory at first, and
ever tending, as to this day, to become more complex and less
satisfactory. Villages took shape, straggled into towns, widened into
cities and coalesced into kingdoms and empires: and so, the
civilisation of which we are partakers crawled laboriously into being,
with the brewer somewhere in the centre, active, rubicund and
disputatious, as he has continued to date, with a seat on the County
Council which he had swindled some thirsty statesman out of, and more
property than he could deal with by himself.
"It is a singular reflection that thirst has very little to do with the
consumption of drink, nor is this appetite subject to the vagaries of
climate, for the inhabitants of the coldest regions will, it is feared,
drink on equal terms with those dwelling in the sun-burnt tropics. In
almost all ceremonial observances drinking has had a special place, and
this diversion lends itself to an infinite number of objects--we can
from the same bowl quaff health to our friends and confusion to our
enemies, doubtless with equal results. Here alone men meet on equal
terms. There is no religion, nationality or politics in liquor: let it
be but sufficiently wet and potent and it matters not if the brew has
been fermented in the tub of a Christian or the vessel of a heathen
Turk.
"I understand that this latter race are forbidden, by the form of
heresy which they call religion, to use liquors more potent than
sherbet. Some thinkers believe that this deprivation is possibly the
reason of their being Turks.--They are Turks, not from conviction, but
from habit, spite, and the bile engendered by a too rigid and bigoted
abstinence. In this belief, however, I do not concur, for I consider
that a Turk is a Turk naturally, and without any further constraint
than those imposed by the laws of geography and primogeniture.
"Meanwhile it is interesting to speculate on the future of an abstinent
nation whose politics have the misfortune to be guided by a Peerage
instead of a Beerage, and whose national destiny is irrationally
divorced from the interests of 'The Trade.' Any departure from the
established customs of humanity must be criticised unsparingly, and, if
necessary, destructively. To overthrow the customs of antiquity must
entail its own punishment and that punishment may be an awe-inspiring
and chastening Success. Therefore, this happy whisky-governed land of
ours should never forsake its liquor or it may be forced by opportunity
and work to become great. The foundations of our civilisation are
steeped in beer--let no sacrilegious hand seek to interfere with it,
for, even if the foundations were rotten, the interests of the Trade
must not be disturbed, the grave and learned members of our Corporation
might be horribly reduced to working for their living, and our
unfortunate City might have the extraordinary misfortune to scramble
out of debt in the absence of its statesmen."
The old gentleman, with a bright smile, said that "he did not mind if
he did," and he "did" with such gusto that I had to call a cab.