Proportional Representation, that a country which returns men because
they are distinctive and significant to its Legislature--and that is
what the adoption of Proportional Representation means--will need an
assembly of a different size and type from the present clumsy crowd
of notables and nobodies at Westminster. There are too many members
of Parliament at Westminster for efficiency, just as there are too
many Congressmen at Washington. They loaf about. They do mischief in
obscurity. They make trouble in order to realise their own existence.
They are to public affairs what excessive fat is to the body of a man.
These big legislative bodies date from a time when group psychology
was not thought of. It is even possible that a big legislative body
elected by Proportional Representation would be a worse evil even
than the party house. Released from the party ties that control them,
bunched into fluctuating groups, the scores and hundreds of unnecessary
members would obstruct and confuse every legislative proposal.
Proportional Representation must mean not only the suppression of the
hack politician, but also the suppression of the commonplace member.
For efficient government we want a Legislature no larger than is
fairly representative of the broad varieties of public opinion. At the
largest we need only from two hundred to three hundred members, a grand
committee of the nation, appointing Ministers severally, assigning
tasks to sub-committees, and expressing the general ideas of the
country. We shall certainly be able to dispense with the rotation of
the “ins and outs” and possibly with the organised Cabinet in such a
Legislature. The adoption of Proportional Representation will be a much
profounder and more revolutionary change than a mere change in voting
procedure. It will necessitate an entirely new type of representative
government. In that lies its importance in the world’s affairs and its
fascination and desirability for most intelligent people.
XL
THE SERFDOM OF IGNORANCE: THE RIGHT OF WOMEN TO KNOWLEDGE
7.6.24
The British Labour movement is being agitated at present by one of the
most important questions in the world, the question whether a woman
has a right to clear and complete knowledge about her own body and the
fundamental facts of her life. It is a searching and dividing question
that may very well split the party into two discordant sections. The
old-fashioned politicians who haven’t yet observed that women have now
got votes, consider the question ought to be left outside politics.
It is too real a question for the old parliamentary game. What would
the grand Old Man have said about it? The Elder Spinsters of the
Labour movement also rally to the protection of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s
gentility, his fine old-fashioned statesmanlike evasiveness. But the
Labour Women’s Conference carried a resolution against the blushingly
tactful Elder Spinsters. These younger women believe that women really
are responsible citizens, that democracy does mean treating adults with
respect instead of concealing anything that matters most to them from
them; that women ought to know what marriage means for them and how
motherhood may be undertaken or declined before diseases and children
and such-like intense and overwhelming things blot out their youth and
health.
The demand the younger, more intelligent women in the Labour movement
are making is that knowledge should be freely, easily, and honourably
accessible to all British women. It is well to get this precisely
clear. No one purposes to force this knowledge upon anyone. That
typical political artful dodger, Mr. Wheatley, the Labour Minister of
Health, pretends obstinately that that is so. But no woman who likes to
be coyly ignorant, and to be overtaken by illness and offspring before
she understands anything about them, need seek such knowledge. All
that the innovators ask is that it should be there available for those
women who want to know what they may do and what they can do with their
lives, who want to go into motherhood or refuse or delay going into
motherhood with their eyes open. Personally, I think that innocence
is a charm confined to immaturity, and that every adult of eighteen
ought to know clearly all that is of vital importance to conduct in
married life before marriage, but in this I go far beyond the modest
ambitions of the advanced section of the Labour Party. They want this
knowledge to be available only to the married. They want the medical
men engaged at such public institutions as child-welfare centres and
the like to be free--subject only to their interpretation of their
professional honour--to give such information as may be asked for upon
these matters. They want doctors in receipt of public money to have the
same liberty of advice that every doctor feed by an upper-class woman
has. They do not want poor women living in crowded homes to be obliged
to bear offspring just as cows bear offspring, whether they want to or
not, out of sheer ignorance and helplessness.
Mr. Wheatley says, as his excuse for refusing this liberation of
knowledge, that Roman Catholic voters will object to paying rates
and taxes if this sort of use is made of public money. The Roman
Catholic is to decide what the poor Protestant woman shall know and
do. This is a pretty impudent claim for a religion that was formerly
disenfranchised. But the whole Labour Party in Parliament cringes at
the thought of the Roman Catholic vote. As a matter of fact, there is
nothing in sound Roman Catholic teaching to forbid the diffusion of
physiological knowledge. There is nothing, indeed, in proper Roman
Catholic teaching to prohibit the practice of birth-control under any
circumstances. At any time the Vatican might commend birth-control;
it is not committed in the least in that respect. But a great number
of priests, like our Labour Elder Spinsters, betray an extreme
excitability and malignity at the thought of any sexual life that
is not mainly frustrated desire. They commit the extreme sin of
presumption, they invent teachings quite unsanctioned by the Church to
excuse the impulses of their own troubled and unhappy thoughts. And it
is of the back-street priest and not of the eternal Church that Mr.
Wheatley and his Labour colleagues as pushing politicians have chiefly
to think.
Now let the reader note that in this paper I have said not a word for
or against the practices known as birth-control nor about anticipatory
sexual hygiene. I have my own very definite opinions on these matters,
but the question under discussion here is not what should or may
be done, but about _what may be known_. It is the far profounder
question of whether common poor people are to be treated as worthy of
understanding and knowing about the things that concern their most
intimate lives, or whether in the interests of cheap labour, the Roman
Catholic, population statistics, army recruiting, racial jealousy, or
out of regard to the unpleasant feelings and imaginations of priests
and elderly spinsters, they are to be left and imprisoned in black
ignorance even when they want to know. Here I find in myself a streak
of surprisingly passionate democracy. I hold that every man and woman
should be the conscious and instructed master of his or her own fate.
It is amazing, it is dismaying, to find a Labour Minister as ready
to consider the common people a breeding herd of human beasts and as
ready to keep them helplessly in the dark as the extremist Tory could
be. I am convinced that even as a politician he has blundered. When
women fought for votes they fought for a symbol; the reality was the
possession of themselves. And that is impossible without this, if not
forbidden, at least impeded knowledge.
Most politicians have still to learn the significance of the women’s
vote. Because one or two pretty ladies on the Labour side have lost
their heads, adorned themselves in trains and ostrich feathers, given
themselves over to the photographers and interviewers and succumbed to
the delightful temptation of patronising the Queen, it does not follow
that the mass of Labour women are not intensely sane and realist.
Sexual questions are coming into politics, and they are coming to stay.
Before the next election every parliamentary candidate will have to
make up his mind whether he stands for knowledge or ignorance in this
matter.
XLI
BLINKERS FOR FREE YOUTH: YOUNG AMERICA ASKS TO HEAR AND SEE
14.6.24
A sure way to madden Americans is to make comparisons between education
in the United States and in Western Europe. Even if the comparison
is flattering it leaves them mad. Apparently belief in the superior
education of the American citizen is becoming as sacred as belief in
the American constitution. Doubt is prohibited. Visitors to the United
States may presently have to sign a form about it.
Hitherto with an extraordinary discretion I have avoided, or at least
skirted, this sensitive point. I propose to continue to skirt it. There
has been one exception. I touched upon the sore place a little while
ago in a book called _The Dream_, and my mail from America came for
some weeks bristling with an unwonted and distressing hostility. I gave
an account of the elementary school teaching of England--it is much the
same stuff, more or less, in most civilised countries--as I think it
will appear to an observer a few centuries ahead. I added casually that
on the whole the American rural school was worse than the English one
I described. To the best of my knowledge and belief it is worse. In
many parts of the United States the elementary education is far below
the Western European level, the consequent illiteracy is shocking, and
I should not be doing my duty as a writer for the English-speaking
public if I did not say so. I was not thinking so much of new districts
inhabited by fresh immigrants, but of old, native-born American
regions, like Kentucky. The United States is abnormally slack about
its elementary education, and needs plain, stimulating speech in the
matter. But the Americans are in a state of irritable self-satisfaction
about their schools. They are refusing almost violently to know that
their general education has not kept pace with their enormous increase
in wealth and material civilisation. Morally, if not legally, I am
as much a citizen of the United States of America as of the British
Empire; mentally the American and British worlds are two hemispheres of
one brain; I cannot think of them functioning independently, and it is
just as much my business to discuss this American slackness as it is to
reprove the frightful negligences of the British in respect to Indian
education.
This, however, is in parenthesis. It is merely to emphasise the
fact that in this article I am instituting no comparisons at all. I
am taking a text from an American instance; that is all. There has
been a little tiff between the undergraduates and the authorities of
Harvard, and I find it extremely suggestive. The brighter of the
Harvard undergraduates, represented on the governing board of the
Harvard Union by Mr. Corliss Lamont, want to hear about Radicalism and
Communism at first hand from people like Mr. Debs and Mr. W. Z. Foster,
and the authorities are suppressing these youthful aspirations. They
want the young men who will presently sway American affairs to be fed
their knowledge of radical and revolutionary ideas by orthodox and
respectable persons who have pre-digested it for them and removed all
disturbing elements. The young men want the real stuff and to deal with
it themselves. I confess myself heart and soul for these young men.
There has recently been a controversy between Mr. Bertrand Russell
and President Lowell about the relative mental freedom of American
and British Universities. As Mr. Bertrand Russell was turned down for
pacifism from Cambridge during the war, he started in that controversy
with a handicap. It seems to me that such a dispute is bound to be
ineffectual. There are cases of mental restriction and suppression
from both sides of the Atlantic, and there are no scales invented yet
to weigh this case against that. The real conflict here is not between
American and European conditions, but between two types of men. It is a
conflict that rages throughout the entire world. Everywhere one finds
the managing, directive, limiting type of mind with a craving to get
on to governing bodies, the industry to get on governing bodies, and
a consequent tendency to get on governing bodies. Everywhere we find
also a less abundant supply of critical, sceptical, creative, restless
minds producing innovations and stimulating ideas and with an equal
tendency to get thrown out of organisations and governing bodies. They
are the seed, the ferment, the living factor in the human mind. In Dr.
Nicholas Murray Butler America has produced the perfect specimen of the
former class, just as in the late William James and in James Harvey
Robinson she has produced excellent samples of the second. It is loudly
boasted in British intellectual circles that Britain could not have
produced Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, but so far as I am able to judge
there is as much Nicholas Murray Butlerism in Britain as in America,
as much large empty active influential pretentiousness, though it may
be more diffused, and it is at least as resolute to sit upon and addle
intellectual institutions.
For the peculiar evil of the governing body type is its failure to
understand its lack of finality. It has no sense of the unknown, no
sense of the provisional nature of all mundane things. It wants to fix
knowledge in its own image, to make subsidiary and to apportion and
departmentalise the work of the gifted exceptional and disturbing men.
It seeks to set up classics, to perpetuate existing institutions, to
inaugurate ancestor worship. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler is to be the
American Confucius and stereotype this perfect world of 1924; the last
of the Founders. The coming generation will learn that at this point
the world congealed. The thing this dominating type dreads supremely is
revolutionary suggestion and the possibility of the young getting away
with new ideas. Its educational ideal is blinkers and an obedient youth
looking neither to the right nor the left, but pursuing the one right
path.
But the sustaining factor of life is death. Happily, most happily,
Founders die, and their codes and constitutions, their classical
utterances, die and pass away. Even the inspired addresses and
deliverances of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, so beautifully printed and
so relentlessly distributed, will some day shrivel and pass, and be no
more heeded. So that life may go on. Without death there could be no
birth. The most fundamental fact about youth is its disrespect for its
elders and the past. That is what it is for. A generation that wanted
to repeat the preceding generation would not be birth, it would be life
stuttering. And the one thing youth does most need and want and fight
to get, as its supreme instinctive duty, is and always will be every
sort of destructive criticism of existing authorities, of the existing
order, and of established institutions. Young America at Harvard
probably has no illusions about Mr. Debs or Mr. Foster; it calls them,
I am reasonably certain, “Old Debs” and “Old Foster.” But it means to
hear them, it will hear them, and the college authorities had better
help it to hear without any attempts whatever to jam the message
Old Debs and Old Foster have to deliver against the old system young
Harvard has been born to alter--and has been born for no other apparent
end that I can see.
Schools and Universities are surely the most paradoxical things in
the whole preposterous spectacle of human life. They exist to prepare
youth for a world of enormous changes, and their chief activity seems
to be, at Oxford and Cambridge quite as much as at Harvard and Yale,
to get youth apart from the world and conceal the forces of change
from its curious and intelligent eyes. The youth of the Universities
in particular should be the living eggs of the good new things of the
days to come. The efforts of the governing bodies everywhere seem to be
directed chiefly to getting them hard-boiled. My congratulations to Mr.
Corliss Lamont for having so far escaped the culinary process. Nowadays
there are Corliss Lamonts from China to Peru. The matter and the forms
change but the spirit is the same. In Moscow they have to fight as hard
as anywhere else; there it is to escape being made into hard-boiled
Communists. By virtue of the rebellious vitality in our youth this
world of mankind lives on and does not die and freeze into a monument
to its Founders.
XLII
THE LAWLESSNESS OF AMERICA AND THE WAY TO ORDER
21.6.24
Miss Rebecca West, that acute and brilliant observer, has recently been
in America, and she has been writing her impressions of the American
scene. She has been lecturing and hand-shaking, but with commendable
restraint she says little of her audiences, her hotels, and her railway
journeys. She has looked over the heads of her hearers and out of the
carriage windows. She has looked at the great spectacle as a whole, and
she generalises about it broadly and bravely.
The lack of civil order is the thing that strikes her most, and she
illustrates her perception of it by a vivid and illuminating discussion
of the necessity for prohibition and its consequent evils, and of the
colour trouble in the South. Various previous British visitors have
noted that lack in other terms, have remarked upon the want of a sense
of the State in American thought, and of the reaction upon humanity of
the fierce, untutored naturalness, the wide deserts, the undisciplined
rivers, and spontaneous tangled forest growths of the New World.
But when she looks for the forces that will presently bring order and
graciousness into this characteristically splendid display of energy
at large she calls rather startlingly for peasants. She thinks, in a
phrase that might have come straight from something by Chesterton, that
“nameless men who plough furrows that are straight and deep,” peasants
in bulk and multitude, are needed to establish a permanent social
order, an enduring and developing civilisation.
America has not enough peasants. This is an interesting development,
or perhaps I had better say an interesting lapse, in the ideas of a
woman we had come to regard, perhaps rashly, as a boldly progressive
spirit. This is turning back to the earthy romanticism of Belloc and
Chesterton, and I think it shows the profoundest misapprehension of
the fundamentals of the American situation. America has not developed
a peasant population--for it is sheer perversity of Miss West to write
as she does of Abraham Lincoln as a peasant’s son, as a traditional
plough-driver, instead of an axe-wielder from the East. America, with
machines to plough straighter and deeper than any clodhopper can ever
do, has no need of peasants for any purpose at all, except perhaps
as negro cotton-growers in the South. America is not developing a
peasantry and probably never will. At present the drift to the towns
is continuous, and rural depopulation is as present a problem in the
United States as in Great Britain.
That Miss West should associate civil order with a peasantry shows
an odd forgetfulness of European conditions. England, which has had
practically no peasantry for two centuries, but only wage-earning
labourers, displays the greatest social order and security in the
world; Russia, which is practically all peasantry, can, and could
before the war, show a lawlessness, an indiscipline and social
insecurity far exceeding anything of which Miss West complains in
America. I would as soon accept Zola’s valuation of the peasant in _La
Terre_ as Miss West’s discovery of him as the soil from which all the
social virtues spring.
It is in quite another quarter that I should look for the forces
that will ultimately adjust and bring together into a law-abiding
social harmony all the loose and conflicting elements of the American
State, and that is in a great development of schools and colleges.
It is from the head and centre and not from the base that the modern
community must be unified. It is a point that Miss West seems to ignore
altogether, that the United States is, in spite of the aggregatory form
of its constitution, the first instance of a new type of community
altogether, the type that steam railways, electrical communications,
and power machinery have made possible. It may have much trouble and
darkness in its destiny, but nothing but complete disaster can ever
lead to another repetition of that levelling down and earthing up
of the human spirit in peasant life that underlies the old-world
civilisations. The chief faults and merits of American life are alike
the characteristics of a released population that has escaped from that
intimate servitude to pedestrian locality, to the dungheap, the patch,
the hovel, and the bitter narrow outlook, for ever.
The reconstruction of human society in the great frame of these coming
modern communities is the fascinating reality of political life behind
the dullness and violence and unreality of personal rivalries and party
issues. Its cardinal process is the establishment of a new education
in terms of the common history and the common aim and a new training
of everyone in service to scientifically conceived human purposes.
It is an education that should not only occupy the first sixteen
years of life altogether, but which should continue its informing
and stimulating work throughout life. Only a few people, but it is
a rapidly growing number, are beginning to realise the scale and
equipment needed for this new nexus of education that will replace the
old-world peasants’ grubby priest by the new teachers of mankind. The
educational effort that lies before the world, and more immediately
before the United States as the pioneer of communal life upon a new
scale, must needs be a vast and elaborate one--it is useless for the
American to be content with schools about as good as European schools,
or a little better, or not quite so good; they have to be reconceived
in relation to the coming modern community, they have to be better
and more effective, they have to be wider in range, if he is not to
be thwarted of his immense opportunities of leadership in the present
advance of our race towards new conditions of living. But the forces of
educational development in a country work obscurely, the new beginnings
are difficult to come at, the living seed lies below the surface. It
is easy enough to go to America and be entertained and astonished by
the bootlegger and the “snow” dealer, to feel the chromatic emotions of
“colour,” and note the drug store flaring at every street corner. These
things signify about as much as the vivid spots that will sometimes
appear on the face and shoulders of growing youth. But the research
for educational developments is a subtle task, and it yields less
florid pictures. We are badly in need of some stock-taking, English or
American, of educational conditions in America.
XLIII
THE SHABBY SCHOOLS OF THE PIOUS: DRAINS AND THE ODOUR OF SANCTITY
28.6.24
One of the numerous questions which the Labour Government has to
avoid most sedulously in its official egg dance is the question
of the denominational school. Many of the denomination schools of
England are in an advanced state of decay, most of them fall short
of modern educational requirements, and the Labour Party made the
amplest promises of educational progress in the electoral campaign
that led it to office. Something drastic ought to be done about these
denominational schools. But the present voting system, which gives the
power of political decision to well-organised minorities, puts the
Labour Party at the mercy of the Roman Catholic vote in a number of
constituencies, the Roman Catholic community is particularly hostile
to educational development, and so nothing is done. The decay of these
schools proceeds.