I spent this morning hoeing in a part of the garden which had run to
weeds very miserably. Thistles, nettles, chickweed, and a multitude
of other undesirable growths had taken possession and extinguished
every decent inhabitant of the soil. There are few more depressing
spectacles than a garden that has fallen on evil times and has become
a sort of slum of nature, where everything that is beautiful and
wholesome has been trampled out of existence and everything that is
coarse and worthless riots in profusion and triumph. As I hoed the
weeds up I indulged in the familiar reflection on the prodigality
with which Nature looks after the weeds and the parsimony she shows
for the more delicate and beautiful of her children. Lincoln said
that God must love the common people, or He would not have made so
many of them. Nature must love the weeds, or she would not have made
them such sturdy fellows and given them such a lusty hold on life.
For the truth is that in the battlefield of the garden barbarism is
never suppressed. All the cunning of the gardener is needed to keep
it in reasonable check. Let the watchman sleep but a week and the
barbarian hosts will have begun to overrun the civilised population
that his labour and science have planted and nurtured. Let him sleep
for a month and the work of a season will be undone. The strawberry
bed will be a ruin, the vegetable garden will be yellow with charlock
and creeping buttercup, and white with sheep's parsley, and scarlet
with poppies, and the flower-beds will be a forlorn picture of rank
growths. It is a familiar saying of the gardener that one year's
seeds means ten years' weeds, and it is certainly a slow business to
redeem soil that has once lapsed into foulness.
This train of thought took a wider circle as I proceeded with my
task. The garden became a symbol that seemed to offer a not
inapposite comment on the problem that is disturbing so many minds at
this time. Mankind has for some years made so shocking an exhibition
of itself that there seems nothing to be said in our defence. On the
face of it, the argument is with the Dean Inges who regard the human
growth as incurably bad and progress as an idle illusion. We just go
round and round in circles. Sometimes we seem to be getting our
garden of life civilised and cultivated. At last, we say, we have
got the weeds under. Then suddenly we relapse into barbarism and all
our delicate cultures vanish before the onrush of the blind furies
and savageries that may be chained in us, but are never extinguished.
It is a depressing philosophy, and in the light of our recent
experience it would not be easy to entertain the dream of human
perfectibility which was so popular an idea with the philosophic
Radical of a century ago. It would hardly be possible to claim that
human nature is better than it was a thousand or perhaps ten thousand
years ago. Our garden is as full of potential weeds as ever it was,
and when they spring up they are as obscene and devastating as ever
they were.
If that were all we might despair. But it is not less true that the
gardening has not been in vain. Even in the presence of the terrific
reaction of these days it is possible to maintain that human society
has won great victories over the weeds of human nature. Man may not
be better than he was ten thousand years ago, but the community of
men is better. The laws under which we live are humaner laws than
ever obtained in the past. There is more equity and justice in our
common relations, more respect for human life, more sense of human
rights and liberties. We make war savagely, but we do not massacre
the women and children, and we do not enslave the defeated as the
Greeks did.
Contrast the position of women in the modern world with their
position in the Tudor world, or the treatment of children to-day with
their treatment in the not far distant days when Elizabeth Barrett
Browning wrote _The Cry of the Children_, and we have a measure of
real progress. When Dr. Clifford was once interrupted by a "voice"
which denied that the world was growing better, he replied: "But I
know it is growing better. I know that when I was a child of eight,
I was called at five o'clock in the morning to go to work in a
factory for twelve hours a day, and I know that to-morrow morning
there will not be a child in all the land who will suffer that
wrong." Or to apply another test. Turn to Plutarch's _Lives_ and
count the violent deaths that befell his subjects. I doubt whether
one in four died a natural death. To be famous in the ancient world
was to be doomed. But there is little personal peril in being either
famous or infamous in these days.
And so I think the case is not quite so black as our pessimists paint
it. We shall never subdue the old Adam that dwells in us, but we
have collectively developed a social conscience which does keep him
in check. The gardening is not profitless. The weeds are always
lurking in the soil ready to spring up and turn the garden to a
desolation, just as the germs of pneumonia are said to be in every
nostril waiting for the moment of weakness in the body to leap to the
attack. The moral to be drawn from these desperate times is not the
futility of weeding, but the urgency of it. We can easily be too
despairing about ourselves. Perhaps after all we are only in the
infancy of our days, and though as men and women we may never achieve
perfectibility we need not despair of strengthening our social
defences against future collapses into barbarism. Human nature may
be as bad as it seems, but it is still possible to say with Arnold
that there is a stream of tendency in us that makes for
righteousness. So let us get on with our weeding.