that they express the real intelligence of the American public in this
matter. But they do express a very widely diffused feeling, prevailing
especially on the Pacific slope. That same reckless levity of the party
politician, which in Britain in the “great days” of Gladstone and
Disraeli, made the relations of Russia to Britain a mere party counter,
has appealed to that feeling. We are forced to recognise that a great
multitude of people in California and elsewhere are at a mental level
from which it is possible to contemplate a future of pent-up races and
cultures, each living in its own bit of the little planet and forcibly
restrained from wandering or expanding beyond its boundaries.
Is such a future possible for mankind? It was, one must admit, a
dominant idea in the past. More’s _Utopia_ and most of the old Utopias
were closed countries. Japan itself was a completely closed country
for several centuries, and no one went into or came out of it. It was
Americans who forced the closed door of Japan; they of all peoples have
the least reason to complain of the Japanese spill-over into their
world. But no country yet tolerates the free movement of peoples. Yet
the secular force of human inventiveness fights against this system of
pen and barrier.
Our States, our boundaries become intolerably small to the new
methods of communication, to the broadening general intelligence. Our
economic lives, in spite of tariffs and the most strenuous resistance,
spread out to the ends of the earth. Financially the world is one. No
peoples on the earth travel and migrate more widely, or would suffer
more acutely in mind and spirit from the complete restriction of
international movement than the British and Americans--the Americans
even more now than the British. But we cannot go thrusting our white
faces into the markets of Timbuctoo, the bazaars of Central Asia, and
the temples of Osaka, if we refuse to see brown and black and yellow in
the street cars of Chicago and London. There is a plain antagonism of
ideals here, between a venerable parochial and a new planetary mind. Is
it not time for us to sort out our ideas in these matters a little more
exactly?
Opinion lies between the absolute exclusionist and the free mixer. Most
of us find ourselves somewhere intermediate between these extremes. The
case of the exclusionists is based on just these increasing facilities
of communication which make others think that at any cost the world
must become one united system. This quicker and closer intercourse
is intensifying racial clash. It was all very well when only a few
foreigners could travel with difficulty to one’s country, but now they
come in multitudes, they come to settle, they congest in lumps too
solid for assimilation. It is necessary, says the exclusionist, to make
the barriers higher and stronger. Yet is this more than a temporary
arrest of racial conflict in a world where finance is world-wide
and every people has a need, a necessity for the produce of lands
unacceptable to it? In a world, too, of increasing hygienic knowledge,
in which populations tend to increase and overflow? Is it anything more
than the opening phase of a development of an antagonism whose natural
end is war?
It seems to me that the forces that make for material world
unification, the forces of invention and enlightenment, are now so
great, various and subtle that they cannot be defeated. They may be
delayed, but in the end they will be stronger than any exclusionist
localism. The practical question before mankind is how we are to react
to these forces; and the practical alternatives are either a vast cycle
of wars and race conflicts, race riots, tyrannies of secret societies,
struggles for ascendancy ending perhaps after many centuries of tragedy
and wasted opportunity in the complete triumph of some specific
culture, or a deliberate attempt to minimise race hostility, devise
fair methods of co-operation and work out a mixed and various world
society with a code of mutual tolerance and service for the common good.
This is not to be done by ignoring race and racial differences; the
natural thought forms, and dispositions and instinctive reactions of
northern Europeans and Jews, negroes and whites, Indians and Chinese,
vary subtly and profoundly; you can no more ignore differences of
race than differences of sex. They are things greatly intensified and
supplemented by differences of tradition, training, and conditions,
but when all such modifications are eliminated, essential differences
remain. Intermarriage provides no remedy but rather a multiplication of
types. But a well-directed education can at least restrain a passionate
exaggeration of these differences and prevent the antagonisms that
arise out of their recognition. Man is by nature a fierce resentful
being of excessive desires and facile prejudices, and no society has
ever existed or could ever exist without some sort of educational
adaptation of this natural savage, some schooling and toning down of
his hostile impulses. But the educational necessities of the small
and limited past are as nothing to the educational necessities of the
present time. If races are to be brought together, and not merely
jumbled together or still more dangerously held apart, an educational
effort has to be made on an altogether unprecedented scale.
An educational effort on an altogether unprecedented scale; that,
I take it, is the only way of escape from the chancy, disorderly,
restricted, and tragic life men are living now. The question of race,
like every other great question in human affairs so soon as we follow
it up, leads us to the school--no! it does not bring us to the school
as we know it, but to the site of the school, the crying blank for a
school that has yet to be. Get on with a school and college system
commensurate with the enormous needs and dangers of this new age
of world communication, or blunder and suffer. Teach everyone born
into the world the history of mankind, the significance of racial
differences, expand every individual imagination to the conception of
the racial life as a great adventure, and to some sense of what it may
achieve in the days to come. Replace the suspicious conservatism of
ignorance by the curiosity and generosity of wide vision. These are
enormous demands.
No community has yet spread more than the thinnest veneer of teaching
over its whole population. But the alternative to doing so is to have
the machinery and methods of the new age used to arm and intensify the
passions of the old. A world no better educated than this will never
be very much better than this; it will be a world of race mobs and
lynchings, of pogroms and race brigandage, of furious struggles for
disputed territories, and wars and wars and wars. If they continue
upon the present lines of narrow patriotism, of race pressure and
race exclusion, I do not see how a war between Japan and the United
States can be avoided for very many years. And until they have made a
great educational effort I do not see how they can get away from their
present lines of action.
XLVII
THE SCHOOLS OF A NEW AGE: A FORECAST
26.7.24
In these articles I have been harping continuously on the vast
disorder, the uncertainty and waste of the world spectacle to-day; and
I have been clamouring for more education, for much more education, for
a more strenuous and devoted educational effort.
Comments and replies, a quite copious correspondence, have brought
home to me two things very plainly. One is the deep resentment aroused
in many minds by the statement of what is to me an obvious fact, the
littleness, imperfection and unsatisfactoriness and transitoriness of
all contemporary life. Manifestly, they think Fifth Avenue in a state
of traffic congestion, Ascot week, charity balls, Palm Beach, the
opening of Parliament, the movie industry, and an American Presidential
election are all right. Or at least right enough to live with
pleasantly.
They think me a dismal and cantankerous hunks for wanting, as I seem
to them to do, to shatter and reconstruct a world which sustains
such delightful things. They do not realise that this world is being
shattered anyhow, and will not be reconstructed by any automatic
process. They want this world left as it is and not “messed about with”
by innovating people. They have a will to be satisfied, an obstinate
will for contentment. Mixed up with that, and probably fundamental to
it, is a profound disbelief in the power of men wilfully to alter their
conditions and determine their collective fate.
Now if I have any claim to distinction among journalists it is that I
do not share that widespread scepticism and fatalism. I do not let the
fact that some of us, myself included, are having an undeservedly good
time hide the fact that the system, such as it is, is wasteful, that it
cripples the possibilities of nearly everyone, and is, to millions of
people, actively distressful and cruel.
I belong to a small but growing minority which believes that man has
come to such a phase of knowledge and power that he is already able and
may very soon be willing to put a bit between the teeth of the monster
of wild change that is now trampling this world. We believe that human
society could be and presently will be deliberately reconstructed
more boldly, more elaborately, and with more definite intention, upon
a scale commensurate with the greatness of modern mechanism and to
an extent that will enable it to anticipate and discipline what are
now the incalculable forces of change. And our faith is that the way
to this expansion of life, this release from chance, lies through
Universities and schools, through a universal education of the entire
population of the world and through a universal and sustained thought
process keeping pace with ever-changing necessities.
We are all democratic Socialists in so far as we regard it as the
general concern to maintain order and law, to secure the common needs
of everyone by carrying on the exploitation of natural wealth and the
production and distribution of staple necessities for the universal and
not for particular profit, and to provide education and health services
for all; but we are aristocratic individualists in demanding world-wide
freedom of movement for all, the utmost scope for self-realisation,
and the freest utterance and hearing for every creative and innovating
spirit--for everyone indeed who may possibly be creative. We see,
as the only way to the sort of human life we desire, an immense
development of the reorganisation of every sort of research and of the
whole educational system of the world.
A rough parallelism of things mechanical and things mental will put the
case as we see it. In the last two centuries the means of transport
has developed from the stage coach and sailing ship to the automobile,
express train, great liner, and aeroplane; there has been much more
than a tenfold increase in speed and a corresponding increase in
security, versatility, and comfort. Our mechanical power and mechanical
productivity have increased in far greater proportion. There has been
an educational advance also, but it has not kept pace with this. More
people in the country are educated now, certain elements of education,
reading and writing, have been spread very widely, but the education
of a fully educated man is not conspicuously better than it was two
hundred years ago, and education has not spread, as railways and
factories have spread from the Atlantic countries, all over the earth.
We believe that we are now in the dawn of a phase of educational
thrust, corresponding to the mechanical thrust of a century ago.
That former thrust redistributed the population of every country it
affected, created new towns, altered the build and lay-out of every
town it touched, created new suburban systems, and revolutionised the
visible aspect of life. The new thrust will reconstruct the scattered
and confused mental life of the age, will create mental nuclei
everywhere, link up the whole countryside to new and more powerful
mental centres. I doubt whether at present, apart from school children,
one person in a hundred in either Europe or America could be described
as a mental worker; we foretell a time when something like one in eight
or one in five will be definitely employed in work that is primarily
mental, either as student, as teacher, as scientific investigator, as
artist or writer.
In every village there will be a school, a reading-room, a theatre,
closely associated with the health service and recreation of the
place. It will be the central architectural fact of the place, the
group of buildings about which the homes will cluster. In every town
there will be the district schools and the great high school, the art
studios, the theatres, the laboratories. Every considerable town will
have a University as its chief expression and its crowning glory. The
agricultural and industrial life of the land will be closely linked
to the technical research of the colleges; they will go thither for
advice and direction. The business and financial system will no longer
be secret and private, a system of competitive conspiracies, but it
will be working in close touch with the general scientific life; the
banker will be a professor of economics, the iron-master will be a
metallurgist. That is the order of the world we desire, and which we
foresee through our hopes. That is the world that will replace the
system of stampedes, scrambles, riots, and traffic jams in which we
live to-day.
XLVIII
THE IMPUDENCE OF FLAGS: OUR POWER RESOURCES AND MY ELEPHANTS, WHALES,
AND GORILLAS
2.8.24
The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley is open to all sorts of
criticism, and is occasionally quite absurd, but it contrives to be
entertaining. Many of us dislike the Kipling quality and the strong,
unpleasant flavour of Imperial Preference that hang about it. I have
reviled its commercialism; its relative disregard of educational duties
and responsibilities; its suggestion of imperial self-sufficiency.
But all sorts of conferences are meeting at Wembley, and occasionally
a strong breath of human common sense dispels for a time the stuffy,
foggy conceit of our recent and transitory Empire. Wembley, in spite of
itself, becomes international and contributes to the project of a new
world.
The British Electrical and Associated Trades have been holding a most
enlightening and hopeful conference on the power resources of the
world--not of the Empire, be it noted, but of the world. Prominent
among the speakers at the opening were the secretary of the United
States Federal Power Commission, the president of the Italian
Electrical Committee, and other “outsiders.” A real attempt to see the
world as one economic whole has been made. A frank admission of the
need for organised world unity and world co-operation underlies the
activities of this particular gathering.
The President of the Conference was the Prince of Wales. He made a very
remarkable speech. Three or four years ago I made a number of people
extremely indignant by criticising the world tour of the Prince. I
complained that his speeches and proceedings seemed to ignore the world
situation and to intensify the imperialist egotism of the narrower sort
of English throughout the world. He did seem to me then to be behaving
as so many Army and Indian Civil Service people and so forth still
behave, as if the British Empire was a clique of Anglican communities
aloof from the common interests of mankind.
Quite a number of worthy persons seemed to think that a typical common
Englishman like myself had no right to pass a judgment upon a young
man, a quarter of a century his junior, simply because that young man
happened to be the Heir Apparent. They wanted him to be treated as
divine, above politics. But that sort of thing is not in the English
tradition. The British Royal Family is not divine; it cannot keep out
of politics if it is to function at all, because it has constantly to
speak and act for the Empire as a whole; and it is a matter of very
great importance that the Prince should show himself as he has now
shown himself, growing in political wisdom and sensible of the wider
vision of human unity that opens before mankind. Here, for example, is
a sentence from his speech in which he sinks the Prince altogether,
lost in that much nobler thing, the creative citizen of the world:
“Finance, science and research are universal, but the utilisation of
the results derived from these activities is not universal, and in this
disparity lies one of the greatest obstacles to progress.”
And again: “You have before you, in the reports submitted to the
World Power Conference, the raw material for a survey of the power
resources of the world; you can now explore many countries which have
hitherto been veiled in mystery, and assess at their true value the
possibilities of an immense industrial development in many of them;
you may, from this material, erect the structure which will go beyond
the confines of one country, or group of countries, and include all
those parts of the world where man can hope to prosper. International
co-operation may emerge from the realm of the ideal into the realm
of practical utilisation as the result of your deliberations, and I
sincerely trust that full success will attend them.”
I doubt if any royal personage has ever so distinctly repudiated that
narrow particularism to the realm, to which royalty is supposed to be
distinctly pledged. This is hoisting the flag of the world-State over
all the Imperial flags that wave from the Wembley buildings as plainly
and frankly as, considering all things, it can be done--at Wembley.
In very many ways the last half-year has been a year of mental and
moral recovery in Europe. A year ago, when one wrote of nationalism
as a dangerous and dividing sentiment, of national sovereignty as
a nuisance, of the pre-emption of this or that area of the world’s
surface and of this or that supply of necessary national material in
the interests of the exploiters under this or that flag as a method
of crippling and wasting the whole economic life of mankind, one felt
that one was writing and thinking in an almost hopeless minority. All
the world seemed to have gone nationalist and exclusive. One felt one
shouted to an entirely inattentive preoccupied crowd under a stormy sky
against which nothing was bright but the national and Imperial flags.
Flags were supreme. Now it is as if the sun of reason shone everywhere,
and the sundering flags visibly droop in that sunlight.
There are moments when it would seem that after all man is a reasonable
creature. The accumulation of considerations that is now plainly
driving men, in spite of ancient traditions and prejudices, towards
an organised cosmopolitanism is very great. These considerations come
in on us from all sides. While one is refusing to be anything but an
isolated patriot on this count, one is being undermined almost unawares
upon another. Many of us who will hear of no super-Government to save
us from war, nor of any properly equipped and provided super-Court to
settle international disputes, find ourselves presently confronted by
the problem of epidemics and consenting to the idea of supernational
controls from the health point of view. The postal union, which the
Great War strained but has not destroyed, is after all only the thin
framework of a much more comprehensive union of communications. When I
read the speech of the Prince of Wales at the World Power Conference I
was at once reminded of the preachings and efforts of that wonderful
old man, David Lubin, the Israelite who set up the International
Institute of Agriculture. The chief objective of this “Institute” was a
contemporary survey with a view to a proper distribution of the world’s
staple productions. Shortages were to be anticipated and headed off;
over-production was to be restrained. And arising out of this main idea
was Lubin’s secondary project, the placing of all the shipping of the
world and all the great international railway lines--he lived before
air transport seemed a probability--under one world authority which
would fix freights as we fix postal charges. This Power Conference has
been talking pure Lubinism about the world distribution of power.
I suppose it is because I had a biological training that I find one
of the most attractive arguments for world unity, and the suppression
of flag-worship, in the need of protecting whales from ourselves and
ourselves from bacteria. The dwindling world fauna of this planet is in
urgent need of international game laws and a supernational game-keeper.
Species of whales are being exterminated because the ocean is no
man’s land, and if one State restrains its whalers from excessive
wasteful slaughter they can shelter their activities beneath some
less scrupulous flag. Diseases cannot be stamped out of the world by
systematic sanitation while one affected Power sees fit to exercise its
sovereign right to remain filthy. And any species of birds or beasts
that lives under a careless flag may be exterminated by the sportsman
and no one have a right to protest. The gorilla, they say, is going
fast, and the African elephant. These marvels of life, these strange
and wonderful beings of whose vitality and impulses we know so little,
are being killed because they are insufficiently protected. Their chief
slaughterers are patriotic collectors, and the fewer the survivors the
hotter is the competition for specimens to adorn their beastly national
collections. Yet the gorilla belongs not to the flag that claims its
habitat but to all mankind. It belongs to me, to any man in Canada or
in Texas, as much as it does to any West African or any Belgian. But
there is no world control to protect these grotesque and marvellous
creatures for us and for our children’s children. They will go--one
more vivid item in the vast wastage of animal, vegetable and mineral
wealth that the scrambling insufficiency of mere flag rule involves.
For them and for a thousand vital treasures the world government may
come too late. Yet that it is coming rapidly and surely, the words and
the spirit of the discourse of the Prince of Wales, in that very temple
of British Imperial exclusiveness, the Wembley Empire Exhibition, bear
witness. Wembley was to have inaugurated Imperial Preference, but it is
really Imperial Preference lying in state. I wonder how many years it
will be before we have a World Exhibition to bring home to us the need
for free trade, free speech, and free movement everywhere under unified
world controls.
XLIX
HAS COMMUNISM A FUTURE? THE POSSIBILITY OF A SOCIALIST RENASCENCE
9.8.24
I have a real affection for Communists--and a temperate admiration.
It is the sort of love that leaps forward to chasten. In a world of
oafish self-complacencies set in a morass of dull submission to the
chances of life it is a consolation and refreshment to find any people
who realise the self-destructiveness of the present system and, however
vaguely, the possibility of remaking human society upon richer and
happier lines. The value of the Communist Party as an organised ferment
is very high. I should like to see a properly accredited representative
of the party free to air his opinions in every high school and
college--particularly in the United States. Everybody in the place
would be the brighter and better for his beneficent irritation.