Communist Sunday Schools, and the Archbishop of Canterbury speaks in
tones of horror of the teachings in these establishments. Nothing could
witness more effectively to the wholesome mental stir these schools
create. Most of the teaching in Anglican Sunday Schools is equally
repulsive to me, but so long as they do not raid the public funds for
their support I do not see why they should not teach what they like.
I am English, not Anglican. My blood and traditions incline me to the
utmost free speech and free teaching and free propaganda for everyone.
No one is obliged to send his children to a Communist School, and I do
not see why the half truth of Anglicanism should not have to face the
half truth of Communism. The founder of Christianity talked a lot of
Communism, but I cannot recall a solitary phrase of His to justify the
existence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Yet at the same time I am doubtful whether there is much of a future
for the Communist Party. I doubt whether in twenty-five years’ time
there will be many Communists, under that name, below middle-age. A few
nice, fierce old gentlemen will survive in smoking-rooms and cafés.
The Communist movement is a part of the present world, it is a shadow
cast by existing economic absurdities, it is a current reaction. In
five-and-twenty years’ time the projects of a scientific Socialism
will have converted and absorbed most of the youthful enthusiasm and
resentful energy that now finds its expression in Communism. Communism
is a phase, a bitter and sterile experiment, in the development of the
Socialist idea. Socialism is its parent and its heir. The movement
for the organised exploitation of the whole world in the collective
interest existed before the Communist Party, and will be going on long
after that party is a quaint tradition.
At present the Communist Party still dominates the government of
Russia. But it does so at the sacrifice of all its constructive claims.
In seven years the Russian experiment has demonstrated the intellectual
sterility of the movement beyond any further dispute.
The Bolshevik Government came to power in a state of ignorant
confidence, treating criticisms as a blasphemous reflection on its
omniscience, insulting and persecuting every sort of Socialist outside
its trained and disciplined ranks. The Government took over factories,
uncertain whether it meant to run them under a quasi-military
discipline or on guild lines as free communities of workers; it
“smashed” money, and discovered it had no other way of computing the
mutual services and obligations of men. It was touching to see Lenin
in the Kremlin in 1920 struggling with childish projects for the
“electrification of Russia” and unable to explain what sort of town
centre, if any, his Communist Russia would possess. He had no working
ideas that were worth a rap about this very obvious matter. I left
him, sympathetic with him in the face of his stupendous task, but a
little amazed at his extreme unpreparedness. However, if one may trust
a virulent article by Trotsky that has just been published in English,
he lost his temper in true Communist fashion at being asked awkward
questions and resorted to Trotsky for comfort. “Ugh!” said Lenin.
“_What_ a perfect petit bourgeois!” and so restored the mental calm my
entirely respectful scepticism had ruffled. For in Communist circles if
you can call anyone or anything “bourgeois,” the question is settled
and discussion is at an end.
The emptiness of plan, the extreme assurance, which distinguishes
modern Communism is the secret alike of its attractiveness in times of
social trouble and its futility in constructive effort. It does not
worry the oppressed, the discontented, and the unhappy with difficult
projects for human readjustment. It lumps together the complex and
various disorders of social life, the muddle of human prejudices and
impulses, as one malignant thing, the “Capitalist system.” Destroy this
legendary monster and the Millennium will ensue. Instead of overcoming
the fool in Everyman, you must obstruct, waste, sabotage all the
current services of the community. Having convinced the world that
nothing else will work, the dictatorship of the party will ensue. There
could be no teaching more successful in a mass meeting and less useful
in a bureau. It gives all the excitement and release of a revolution
with none of its tiresome responsibilities.
It was Marx who created modern Communism. It is the sterile mule of
Socialism and a scientific ambition. Socialism from the days of Robert
Owen onward was a thing of schemes and projects. It was perpetually
seeking better arrangements. Its methods were Utopian. But Marx
was bitten by an ambition to rival Darwin; he was to be the Darwin
of social and political science, with none of Darwin’s modesty or
Darwin’s intellectual patience. He had the mind of a theologian with
the pretension of a scientific inquirer, and he had the dull man’s
hatred and contempt for the human imagination. His movement was to
be “scientific” with all the magic that word carried half a century
ago. There was to be nothing imaginative and no confounded ideals.
It was all to be fatalistic. It was never going to plan what would
happen because it was going to know what would happen. He and his
associates produced a very sound and ample analysis of the processes
of decay in the business life of the time, but with such ambitions
and such repudiations they could produce no scheme of any replacement
system. They have no scheme to this day. Even Russia has not taught the
Communist the practical need of Utopias.
At a certain level of intelligence party Communism is a very attractive
teaching indeed. Its self-assurance is very reassuring. Any human being
not absolutely stupid hates to be robbed of freedom and educational
opportunity before thirteen or fourteen and thrust into uncongenial
and hopeless toil. Most employment is bitter for young people. At the
same time people whose education is truncated so soon usually fail to
develop sufficient intellectual power to understand complex industrial
and financial processes. They develop an inferiority complex about such
things that clamours in them for comfort.
Communism embodies that hate and provides that comfort. It points
to the “Capitalist” as the oppressor and claims to furnish in a few
phrases all that needs to be known. In a social system that educated
everyone to sixteen or eighteen and then gave a fair wide choice of
public service there would be none of that hate and that defensive
aggressiveness, that suppressed suspicion of ignorance and inefficiency
that makes Communist controversy so loud and rude, which has made
Mr. Trotsky so loud and rude. The marshes in which the cantankerous
spirit of Communism grows would be drained and evaporated. By the
theory of Marx it was in the highly developed industrial system of
Western Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, that the Communist
Revolution would first occur. The disconcerting fact for Communists is
that it occurred in Russia, where the industrial organisation was at
a low level and there were eighty per cent. of illiterates. In Great
Britain nobody except the enterprising people who want to raise money
from imbecile dukes and rich old ladies even pretends to be afraid of a
Communist Revolution.
There is a considerable dread of Communist activities in America.
That is very largely due to an uneasy conscience, aware of a great
mass of unassimilated immigrant labour very unfairly treated and
very inadequately educated. There may be some grounds for such
apprehensions; I will confess I do not think the present schools and
colleges of America good enough and strong enough for the constructive
work they ought to do. There may be a future for Communism there,
and there will probably be a big movement towards Communism in the
industrial centres of India and China and Japan. But in Europe I think
that the Communist drive has passed its maximum and that the popular
mind is moving onward to a more constructive and hopeful type of
Socialism.
Just as art in a phase of extreme sterility escaped by going back
behind Raphael and starting afresh from the Pre-Raphaelite phase,
so I think Socialism will soon be getting behind the unfortunate
misdirection of Marx and Engels to become once more Utopian and
fruitful.
L
THE LITTLE HOUSE: AS IT WAS, IS NOW, AND APPARENTLY EVER WILL BE
16.8.24
What a very odd spectacle the British Parliament face to face with
the housing problem is! On the strength of that issue alone I should
imagine that any really civilised judgment would condemn the poor old
institution at once and set about a revolutionary search for a better
constructed instrument of government.
There is a shortage of housing accommodation in Great Britain; the
picturesque, creeper-clad country cottage is too often a cramped,
decivilising, insanitary fraud, and most of the industrial population
lives in slums worse than the corresponding slums in America and
little better than those on the Continent of Europe. You cannot get
a house or flat in which a civilised family can live for much less
than a hundred pounds a year rent, and most of those available at that
price are stereotyped and dull-looking, and sometimes detestably ugly.
Below that level comes a descending series of inconvenient, unsound,
and unpleasant lodgments for the mass of the population. The Labour
Ministry of Health has been making large encouraging gestures of help,
it has projected big and complicated bargains with the building trades
and the building trades unions that may--if all goes well--provide
at an immense cost on a quasi-charity basis, at the public expense,
a sufficiency of houses for the poorer sort of people of fifty years
hence, according to the ideas of comfort and decency prevailing fifty
years ago.
The Government and the local authorities are to pay about half the
cost of building a multitude of houses, the assistance being given on
the sole condition that they fall below a certain standard of size and
comfort, and the industrial employer will be able to pay low wages
in proportion to the cheapness attained. In other words, the Labour
Government is doing a deal with the building trade in the interest of
the low-grade employer and is putting British industry “on the rates.”
They are returning by a circuitous route to the condition of things in
England before the New Poor Law, when farmers grew rich by employing
labour in receipt of outdoor relief, at otherwise impossibly low wages.
The most striking thing about these housing proposals is the tacit
acceptance by all parties in Parliament that the population of the
coming years must be put away, each family in a little separate house
of its own. If anything was needed to prove that the Socialism of
the Labour Party was merely skin deep and its creative intentions
an electioneering bid, it would be this. If one thing is clearer
than another in the outlook of the modern community, it is the
impossibility of the small separate house. It is a cage of needless
toil for women; it is a place of deprivation and hardship for children.
The whole drift of things is in favour of the highly organised block
building containing a great number of houses. In this there can be
electric light, radiators, a supply of hot and cold water, efficient
sanitary accommodation, group wash-houses, adequate cupboards, and
convenient shopping facilities, all provided at a less cost than is
needed for the same number of scattered low-grade homes, each under its
separate roof, with lamps to clean, fires to light, water to boil, and
every possible demand for feminine drudgery and servitude.
In their dreams people think of Mr. Wheatley’s projected houses as
little flower-girdled cottages, each with a bright little garden and a
drying-ground and an uncontrolled multitude of children playing in the
sun; in reality we shall get rows and rows of mean little boxes on the
outskirts of our towns, jammed together into slums, each fouling the
air with a separate chimney, and remote from every modern amenity.
At present a large part of the population of East London lives in small
houses of two stories, or two stories and a basement. Idiotic foreign
visitors surveying this from train windows remark on the Englishman’s
superb individualism, so that every man’s house is his castle. In the
East End no man’s house is his castle; every floor, and often every
room, is a separate household, and sometimes these households entertain
lodgers. This state of affairs the new Labour legislation will extend
and perpetuate. Yet plans have been made that show beyond dispute that
the whole population of industrial London could be rehoused in fine and
handsome apartment buildings, with night and day lifts, roof-gardens,
and nearly all the light, air, and conveniences to be found in a
Kensington flat, at hardly greater cost than would be needed to choke
all the ways out of London with a corresponding spread of Wheatley
hovels, and so great an amount of space could be saved by doing so that
half that area of London could be made into a playground and garden.
But even to entertain schemes of that sort requires imagination, and
the new Labour Government has shown itself the least imaginative of
Governments. It has excreted or suppressed all its creative elements.
It is a class-Government, and it embodies the subdued mind of the
common wages-earner. Whatever is, it accepts, from Court costume to
slums. Its idea of life is the life of the back street in which it has
always lived, and it wants more back streets and cheaper back streets
to live in, with an occasional treat in the garden of Buckingham
Palace. In dealing with housing, just as in dealing with mines or
with transport, it shows itself incapable of any breadth or power of
initiative.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this housing legislation is
the ineffectiveness of the women. When women were struggling for the
vote the world was given to understand that their success would be an
end to “man-made laws” and “man-made” ways of living. There was to
be an astonishing release of the sensible, practical feminine mind.
Well, here is a question that concerns women primarily. A very large
proportion of the girls and women of to-day, before their lives are
out, will have to live either in the slums that the Labour Government
is failing to reorganise, or in the rows and clumps of boxes of brick
or timber that are to be spread out over the outskirts of every centre
of population. There was nothing to prevent the distinguished women of
the Labour Party from giving these men who are framing-up these schemes
to build pauper houses and endow the building trade at the public
expense a lead towards better things. These houses of the Wheatley
project mean an effectual subjugation of great multitudes of women to
dingy drudgery for scores of years to come; they mean the growth of
a new generation of children with miserable standards of comfort and
freedom. But so far we have had no guidance from intelligent women at
all, but only speeches from such mere party supporters as Dr. Marion
Phillips sustaining the preposterous pretensions of Mr. Wheatley. The
Women’s Housing Councils’ National Federation, with its resolutions
for the glorification of Mr. Wheatley’s building ramp, does no more
than emphasise the general feminine apathy. Generally, the women of
the country seem not to be awake to the manner in which this business
concerns them.
Only one exception occurs to me at the present moment in the widespread
indifference of intelligent and influential women to the comfort and
outlook of the mass of their sex, and that is Mrs. Leonora Eyles,
the novelist. Her book, _The Woman in the Little House_, is a most
intelligent, sympathetic, and illuminating account of what it means
to live in just such little houses as Mr. Wheatley and his friends,
the employers and employed of the building trade, are conspiring to
stereotype. She describes not slum life but the life of an ordinary
working man’s wife in London, without exaggeration and without
extenuation. It is a picture of extreme dinginess and meanness,
relieved only by the pluck and devotion and hopefulness and cheerful
humour that enable these people to hang on and hope for better things.
It is this sort of life the Wheatley legislation proposes to extend and
perpetuate, because in Britain, as everywhere in the world, political
life is divorced from the creative imagination, and because the mass
of common men and women in the world do not know how much they may
reasonably ask for from those who have access to the science and
control of the resources of the world.
LI
THE TRIVIALITY OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FEMININE INFLUENCE IN POLITICS
23.8.24
The other day I was discussing the political outlook in Great Britain
with a very close and shrewd observer of political motives. I live very
much in a dream of a saner world and he lives in active reaction to the
passing hour, but we both knew most of the leading figures in public
affairs and we were surveying the present extraordinary fragmentation
of parties in Parliament--for even the Labour Party now is hardly
on speaking terms with itself and has nothing but office to hold it
together. His thoughts ran much more on personalities than mine did.
Was Mr. Asquith played out? Would Lloyd George “come back”? What was
the future of Lord Birkenhead? Would Mr. Baldwin ever be brighter and
better? Was Mr. Masterman the resuscitated hope of the Liberal Party?
Was there anyone of any promise at all in the Labour Party? And so on.
Unlike my friend, I do not go about culling incompatible posies of
politicians. I have no interest in gathering together a marketable
bunch. The failure of party government, the dissolution of all British
parties, cheers and pleases me. Great Britain, I said, would have to
lead the way to a new stage of democratic government and get itself
a Legislature of a more manageable size, elected by Proportional
Representation.
“They won’t,” said my friend, meaning by “they” our bright-eyed
millions of voters. “They can’t grasp ideas like that--new, _difficult_
ideas. It takes ten minutes’ attention to understand Proportional
Representation. You can’t go to the country with a thing like that.”
“But unless we get a more efficient Legislature, how can we tackle our
difficulties with money, with Europe, with India?”
“We don’t tackle difficulties,” said my friend; “Parliaments can’t.”
“Most of the Labour Party promised to support Proportional
Representation at the last election.”
“And ran away from it. There was a tuppenny-ha’penny advantage in
cheating on that, so of course they cheated. They’ll run away from
everything except office. They’re just a lot of poor things who’ve
spent too much money on Court clothes and in dressing up their wives
and daughters fit and proper for the Garden Parties, and they want
to get the wear out of it all before they go back into the shadows.
Nobody in Parliament who isn’t conspicuous is going to let Parliament
be altered so that it excludes second-rate people. It’s against nature.
You might as soon expect Congress to scrap the American Constitution.
You’ll never live to see a General Election in England or America that
isn’t fought on thoroughly silly lines--on the old electoral method.”
“But think of the tasks that lie before the world!”
“What’s the good of thinking of them?” asked my friend. “It only
worries you.”
“There has to be an organisation of international affairs to prevent
war, there has to be disarmament with security, world transport at
standard charges, the re-establishment of a workable world currency,
the development of education throughout the world----”
“Things like that aren’t going to be done by Parliament,” said my
friend. “They may be done behind the backs of the politicians--if there
are interests and intelligences big enough to want them and organise
them, but----Have you ever met the average voter?”
“I know, I suppose, as many people as you do.”
“But your head’s in the clouds....”
My friend paused, and then remarked with malignant satisfaction, “The
next big question for England is Prohibition.”
“But it’s such a secondary matter!”
“Exactly. That’s why it’s going to be primary. It’s trivial enough
for a democracy to be really earnest about it. Take international
settlements and war possibilities; these are infinitely more important
things, I grant you. But what does the average voter know about them?
There are possibilities of enslavement, of blood and death, of millions
of the silly rabbits being scared and starved and mutilated and killed
in international conflicts. But these voters of yours can’t grasp the
complexity of that. They want peace, of course, but they don’t know
what makes peace. So everybody puts peace on the party platform, peace
and the League of Nations, or peace and conscription, ‘be prepared,’ or
peace and isolation, peace and the dear old flag. It doesn’t matter.
The poor mutts can’t grasp it at all. Talk of that kind of thing,
argument about that kind of thing, only confuses and wearies them. It
doesn’t count in politics. And then there’s currency and finance. Even
the bankers don’t understand that--and most of them don’t want to.
Prices go up and down and credit expands and contracts and the rabbits
get suddenly well off and full of conceit, or they get out-of-work and
starved and driven to suicide, but it’s all quite beyond them how it
happens, and it gives them a headache and a vicious temper even to try
to understand. Obviously they don’t know and obviously therefore they
ought to be concerned for knowledge, but what is obvious to you or me
isn’t obvious to them. What is the vote-catching value of spending
money on scientific and social and political research? What is the
vote-catching value of raising the school age to sixteen? That only
makes the grown-up voter jealous of the next generation.
“But Prohibition, shutting the public-house round the corner, every
man and woman understands that, and the women will vote for it
anyhow, blind to every other consideration. That is something they
can understand, and the peace of the world, the volume of trade, and
economic justice may go hang so long as son and husband can be shut
and barred from the drink. Interference with the personal habits of
other people is innate in women; they acquire it as sisters, wives,
and mothers. The enfranchisement of women was the last step in the
devotion of democracy to futility. It ended the last possibilities of
constructive legislation and inaugurated the age of restraint.”
He went on to sketch the growth of the Prohibition movement in England;
the drift of politicians towards a defined attitude in the matter; the
way in which the question could be used to thrust aside wider and more
abstract issues. “Watch the speeches of Lloyd George,” he said. “Watch
the speeches of the pushing young men. They are nearer to it than you
are. They know.” So-and-so said this yesterday, and So-and-so said that
last week.
He produced an effect of being detestably right about his facts. He
said that making Prohibition a part of the American Constitution was
the silliest thing in history; one might hold the extremest temperance
views and still understand that a matter of personal health and
conduct should have no part in the fundamental laws of a State.
But the American citizen had lost any idea of what a constitution
was. Presently the American woman might put a morning bath in the
constitution, or the weekly weighing of babies or the universal use
of tooth-brushes. Or they might require every married man and woman
to carry his or her marriage lines conspicuously displayed upon the
person, like the bright little licence on an English motor-car. These
were the things they held important. England was going the same way,
following a few years behind America, because it was a country of
more deeply established disciplines and diffidences, but I might rest
assured it would get to the same end. In twenty years’ time there would
be no politics left in Parliament but the politics of scandal and minor
moralities, and the big things of human life would be managed in some
other fashion.
Thus my friend, and I found it very difficult to gainsay him.
LII
SEX ANTAGONISM: AN UNAVOIDABLE AND INCREASING FACTOR IN MODERN LIFE
30.8.24