reading the satires of our fathers' contemporaries; and we conclude
(usually quite ignorantly) that the abuses exposed by them are things of
the past. We see also that reforms of crying evils are frequently
produced by the sectional shifting of political power from oppressors to
oppressed. The poor man is given a vote by the Liberals in the hope
that he will cast it for his emancipators. The hope is not fulfilled;
but the lifelong imprisonment of penniless men for debt ceases; Factory
Acts are passed to mitigate sweating; schooling is made free and
compulsory; sanitary by-laws are multiplied; public steps are taken to
house the masses decently; the bare-footed get boots; rags become rare;
and bathrooms and pianos, smart tweeds and starched collars, reach
numbers of people who once, as "the unsoaped," played the Jew's harp or
the accordion in moleskins and belchers. Some of these changes are
gains: some of them are losses. Some of them are not changes at all:
all of them are merely the changes that money makes. Still, they
produce an illusion of bustling progress; and the reading class infers
from them that the abuses of the early Victorian period no longer exist
except as amusing pages in the novels of Dickens. But the moment we
look for a reform due to character and not to money, to statesmanship
and not to interest or mutiny, we are disillusioned. For example, we
remembered the maladministration and incompetence revealed by the
Crimean War as part of a bygone state of things until the South African
war shewed that the nation and the War Office, like those poor Bourbons
who have been so impudently blamed for a universal characteristic, had
learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. We had hardly recovered from the
fruitless irritation of this discovery when it transpired that the
officers' mess of our most select regiment included a flogging club
presided over by the senior subaltern. The disclosure provoked some
disgust at the details of this schoolboyish debauchery, but no surprise
at the apparent absence of any conception of manly honor and virtue, of
personal courage and self-respect, in the front rank of our chivalry.
In civil affairs we had assumed that the sycophancy and idolatry which
encouraged Charles I. to undervalue the Puritan revolt of the XVII
century had been long outgrown; but it has needed nothing but favorable
circumstances to revive, with added abjectness to compensate for its
lost piety. We have relapsed into disputes about transubstantiation at
the very moment when the discovery of the wide prevalence of theophagy
as a tribal custom has deprived us of the last excuse for believing that
our official religious rites differ in essentials from those of
barbarians. The Christian doctrine of the uselessness of punishment and
the wickedness of revenge has not, in spite of its simple common sense,
found a single convert among the nations: Christianity means nothing to
the masses but a sensational public execution which is made an excuse
for other executions. In its name we take ten years of a thief's life
minute by minute in the slow misery and degradation of modern reformed
imprisonment with as little remorse as Laud and his Star Chamber clipped
the ears of Bastwick and Burton. We dug up and mutilated the remains of
the Mahdi the other day exactly as we dug up and mutilated the remains
of Cromwell two centuries ago. We have demanded the decapitation of the
Chinese Boxer princes as any Tartar would have done; and our military
and naval expeditions to kill, burn, and destroy tribes and villages for
knocking an Englishman on the head are so common a part of our Imperial
routine that the last dozen of them has not called forth as much pity as
can be counted on by any lady criminal. The judicial use of torture to
extort confession is supposed to be a relic of darker ages; but whilst
these pages are being written an English judge has sentenced a forger to
twenty years penal servitude with an open declaration that the sentence
will be carried out in full unless he confesses where he has hidden the
notes he forged. And no comment whatever is made, either on this or on
a telegram from the seat of war in Somaliland mentioning that certain
information has been given by a prisoner of war "under punishment." Even
if these reports are false, the fact that they are accepted without
protest as indicating a natural and proper course of public conduct
shews that we are still as ready to resort to torture as Bacon was. As
to vindictive cruelty, an incident in the South African war, when the
relatives and friends of a prisoner were forced to witness his
execution, betrayed a baseness of temper and character which hardly
leaves us the right to plume ourselves on our superiority to Edward III.
at the surrender of Calais. And the democratic American officer
indulges in torture in the Philippines just as the aristocratic English
officer did in South Africa. The incidents of the white invasion of
Africa in search of ivory, gold, diamonds, and sport, have proved that
the modern European is the same beast of prey that formerly marched to
the conquest of new worlds under Alexander, Antony, and Pizarro.
Parliaments and vestries are just what they were when Cromwell
suppressed them and Dickens derided them. The democratic politician
remains exactly as Plato described him; the physician is still the
credulous impostor and petulant scientific coxcomb whom Molière
ridiculed; the schoolmaster remains at best a pedantic child farmer and
at worst a flagellomaniac; arbitrations are more dreaded by honest men
than lawsuits; the philanthropist is still a parasite on misery as the
doctor is on disease; the miracles of priestcraft are none the less
fraudulent and mischievous because they are now called scientific
experiments and conducted by professors; witchcraft, in the modern form
of patent medicines and prophylactic inoculations, is rampant; the
landowner who is no longer powerful enough to; set the mantrap of
Rhampsinitis improves on it by barbed wire; the modern gentleman who is
too lazy to daub his face with vermilion as a symbol of bravery employs
a laundress to daub his shirt with starch as a symbol of cleanliness; we
shake our heads at the dirt of the middle ages in cities made grimy with
soot and foul and disgusting with shameless tobacco smoking; holy water,
in its latest form of disinfectant fluid, is more widely used and
believed in than ever; public health authorities deliberately go through
incantations with burning sulphur (which they know to be useless)
because the people believe in it as devoutly as the Italian peasant
believes in the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius; and
straightforward public lying has reached gigantic developments, there
being nothing to choose in this respect between the pickpocket at the
police station and the minister on the treasury bench, the editor in the
newspaper office, the city magnate advertizing bicycle tires that do not
side-slip, the clergyman subscribing the thirty-nine articles, and the
vivisector who pledges his knightly honor that no animal operated on in
the physiological laboratory suffers the slightest pain. Hypocrisy is
at its worst; for we not only persecute bigotedly but sincerely in the
name of the cure-mongering witchcraft we do believe in, but callously
and hypocritically in the name of the Evangelical creed that our rulers
privately smile at as the Italian patricians of the fifth century smiled
at Jupiter and Venus. Sport is, as it has always been, murderous
excitement; the impulse to slaughter is universal; and museums are set
up throughout the country to encourage little children and elderly
gentlemen to make collections of corpses preserved in alcohol, and to
steal birds' eggs and keep them as the red Indian used to keep scalps.
Coercion with the lash is as natural to an Englishman as it was to
Solomon spoiling Rehoboam: indeed, the comparison is unfair to the Jews
in view of the facts that the Mosaic law forbade more than forty lashes
in the name of humanity, and that floggings of a thousand lashes were
inflicted on English soldiers in the XVIII and XIX centuries, and would
be inflicted still but for the change in the balance of political power
between the military caste and the commercial classes and the
proletariat. In spite of that change, flogging is still an institution
in the public school, in the military prison, on the training ship, and
in that school of littleness called the home. The lascivious clamor of
the flagellomaniac for more of it, constant as the clamor for more
insolence, more war, and lower rates, is tolerated and even gratified
because, having no moral ends in view, we have sense enough to see that
nothing but brute coercion can impose our selfish will on others.
Cowardice is universal; patriotism, public opinion, parental duty,
discipline, religion, morality, are only fine names for intimidation;
and cruelty, gluttony, and credulity keep cowardice in countenance. We
cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death
so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram
them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds
to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for
no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we
connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some
magical cure for our own diseases by them.
Now please observe that these are not exceptional developments of our
admitted vices, deplored and prayed against by all good men. Not a word
has been said here of the excesses of our Neros, of whom we have the
full usual percentage. With the exception of the few military examples,
which are mentioned mainly to shew that the education and standing of a
gentleman, reinforced by the strongest conventions of honor, esprit de
corps, publicity and responsibility, afford no better guarantees of
conduct than the passions of a mob, the illustrations given above are
commonplaces taken from the daily practices of our best citizens,
vehemently defended in our newspapers and in our pulpits. The very
humanitarians who abhor them are stirred to murder by them: the dagger
of Brutus and Ravaillac is still active in the hands of Caserio and
Luccheni; and the pistol has come to its aid in the hands of Guiteau and
Czolgosz. Our remedies are still limited to endurance or assassination;
and the assassin is still judicially assassinated on the principle that
two blacks make a white. The only novelty is in our methods: through
the discovery of dynamite the overloaded musket of Hamilton of
Bothwellhaugh has been superseded by the bomb; but Ravachol's heart
burns just as Hamilton's did. The world will not bear thinking of to
those who know what it is, even with the largest discount for the
restraints of poverty on the poor and cowardice on the rich.
All that can be said for us is that people must and do live and let live
up to a certain point. Even the horse, with his docked tail and bitted
jaw, finds his slavery mitigated by the fact that a total disregard of
his need for food and rest would put his master to the expense of buying
a new horse every second day; for you cannot work a horse to death and
then pick up another one for nothing, as you can a laborer. But this
natural check on inconsiderate selfishness is itself checked, partly by
our shortsightedness, and partly by deliberate calculation; so that
beside the man who, to his own loss, will shorten his horse's life in
mere stinginess, we have the tramway company which discovers actuarially
that though a horse may live from 24 to 40 years, yet it pays better to
work him to death in 4 and then replace him by a fresh victim. And
human slavery, which has reached its worst recorded point within our own
time in the form of free wage labor, has encountered the same personal
and commercial limits to both its aggravation and its mitigation. Now
that the freedom of wage labor has produced a scarcity of it, as in
South Africa, the leading English newspaper and the leading English
weekly review have openly and without apology demanded a return to
compulsory labor: that is, to the methods by which, as we believe, the
Egyptians built the pyramids. We know now that the crusade against
chattel slavery in the XIX century succeeded solely because chattel
slavery was neither the most effective nor the least humane method of
labor exploitation; and the world is now feeling its way towards a still
more effective system which shall abolish the freedom of the worker
without again making his exploiter responsible for him.
Still, there is always some mitigation: there is the fear of revolt; and
there are the effects of kindliness and affection. Let it be repeated
therefore that no indictment is here laid against the world on the score
of what its criminals and monsters do. The fires of Smithfield and of
the Inquisition were lighted by earnestly pious people, who were kind
and good as kindness and goodness go. And when a negro is dipped in
kerosene and set on fire in America at the present time, he is not a
good man lynched by ruffians: he is a criminal lynched by crowds of
respectable, charitable, virtuously indignant, high-minded citizens,
who, though they act outside the law, are at least more merciful than
the American legislators and judges who not so long ago condemned men to
solitary confinement for periods, not of five months, as our own
practice is, but of five years and more. The things that our moral
monsters do may be left out of account with St. Bartholomew massacres
and other momentary outbursts of social disorder. Judge us by the
admitted and respected practice of our most reputable circles; and, if
you know the facts and are strong enough to look them in the face, you
must admit that unless we are replaced by a more highly evolved
animal--in short, by the Superman--the world must remain a den of
dangerous animals among whom our few accidental supermen, our
Shakespears, Goethes, Shelleys, and their like, must live as
precariously as lion tamers do, taking the humor of their situation, and
the dignity of their superiority, as a set-off to the horror of the one
and the loneliness of the other.
IX
THE VERDICT OF HISTORY
It may be said that though the wild beast breaks out in Man and casts
him back momentarily into barbarism under the excitement of war and
crime, yet his normal life is higher than the normal life of his
forefathers. This view is very acceptable to Englishmen, who always
lean sincerely to virtue's side as long as it costs them nothing either
in money or in thought. They feel deeply the injustice of foreigners,
who allow them no credit for this conditional highmindedness. But there
is no reason to suppose that our ancestors were less capable of it than
we are. To all such claims for the existence of a progressive moral
evolution operating visibly from grandfather to grandson, there is the
conclusive reply that a thousand years of such evolution would have
produced enormous social changes, of which the historical evidence would
be overwhelming. But not Macaulay himself, the most confident of Whig
meliorists, can produce any such evidence that will bear
cross-examination. Compare our conduct and our codes with those
mentioned contemporarily in such ancient scriptures and classics as have
come down to us, and you will find no jot of ground for the belief that
any moral progress whatever has been made in historic time, in spite of
all the romantic attempts of historians to reconstruct the past on that
assumption. Within that time it has happened to nations as to private
families and individuals that they have flourished and decayed, repented
and hardened their hearts, submitted and protested, acted and reacted,
oscillated between natural and artificial sanitation (the oldest house
in the world, unearthed the other day in Crete, has quite modern
sanitary arrangements), and rung a thousand changes on the different
scales of income and pressure of population, firmly believing all the
time that mankind was advancing by leaps and bounds because men were
constantly busy. And the mere chapter of accidents has left a small
accumulation of chance discoveries, such as the wheel, the arch, the
safety pin, gunpowder, the magnet, the Voltaic pile and so forth: things
which, unlike the gospels and philosophic treatises of the sages, can be
usefully understood and applied by common men; so that steam locomotion
is possible without a nation of Stephensons, although national
Christianity is impossible without a nation of Christs. But does any
man seriously believe that the chauffeur who drives a motor car from
Paris to Berlin is a more highly evolved man than the charioteer of
Achilles, or that a modern Prime Minister is a more enlightened ruler
than Cæsar because he rides a tricycle, writes his dispatches by the
electric light, and instructs his stockbroker through the telephone?
Enough, then, of this goose-cackle about Progress: Man, as he is, never
will nor can add a cubit to his stature by any of its quackeries,
political, scientific, educational, religious, or artistic. What is
likely to happen when this conviction gets into the minds of the men
whose present faith in these illusions is the cement of our social
system, can be imagined only by those who know how suddenly a
civilization which has long ceased to think (or in the old phrase, to
watch and pray) can fall to pieces when the vulgar belief in its
hypocrisies and impostures can no longer hold out against its failures
and scandals. When religious and ethical formulae become so obsolete
that no man of strong mind can believe them, they have also reached the
point at which no man of high character will profess them; and from,
that moment until they are formally disestablished, they stand at the
door of every profession and every public office to keep out every able
man who is not a sophist or a liar. A nation which revises its parish
councils once in three years, but will not revise its articles of
religion once in three hundred, even when those articles avowedly began
as a political compromise dictated by Mr Facing-Both-Ways, is a nation
that needs remaking.
Our only hope, then, is in evolution. We must replace the man by the
superman. It is frightful for the citizen, as the years pass him, to
see his own contemporaries so exactly reproduced by the younger
generation, that his companions of thirty years ago have their
counterparts in every city crowd, where he had to check himself
repeatedly in the act of saluting as an old friend some young man to
whom he is only an elderly stranger. All hope of advance dies in his
bosom as he watches them: he knows that they will do just what their
fathers did, and that the few voices which will still, as always before,
exhort them to do something else and be something better, might as well
spare their breath to cool their porridge (if they can get any). Men
like Ruskin and Carlyle will preach to Smith and Brown for the sake of
preaching, just as St Francis preached to the birds and St Anthony to
the fishes. But Smith and Brown, like the fishes and birds, remain as
they are; and poets who plan Utopias and prove that nothing is necessary
for their realization but that Man should will them, perceive at last,
like Richard Wagner, that the fact to be faced is that Man does not
effectively will them. And he never will until he becomes Superman.
And so we arrive at the end of the Socialist's dream of "the
socialization of the means of production and exchange," of the
Positivist's dream of moralizing the capitalist, and of the ethical
professor's, legislator's, educator's dream of putting commandments and
codes and lessons and examination marks on a man as harness is put on a
horse, ermine on a judge, pipeclay on a soldier, or a wig on an actor,
and pretending that his nature has been changed. The only fundamental
and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of
Man: in other terms, of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo,
or his vote will wreck the commonwealth.
X
THE METHOD
As to the method, what can be said as yet except that where there is a
will, there is a way? If there be no will, we are lost. That is a
possibility for our crazy little empire, if not for the universe; and as
such possibilities are not to be entertained without despair, we must,
whilst we survive, proceed on the assumption that we have still energy
enough to not only will to live, but to will to live better. That may
mean that we must establish a State Department of Evolution, with a seat
in the Cabinet for its chief, and a revenue to defray the cost of direct
State experiments, and provide inducements to private persons to achieve
successful results. It may mean a private society or a chartered
company for the improvement of human live stock. But for the present it
is far more likely to mean a blatant repudiation of such proposals as
indecent and immoral, with, nevertheless, a general secret pushing of
the human will in the repudiated direction; so that all sorts of
institutions and public authorities will under some pretext or other
feel their way furtively towards the Superman. Mr Graham Wallas has
already ventured to suggest, as Chairman of the School Management
Committee of the London School Board, that the accepted policy of the
Sterilization of the Schoolmistress, however administratively
convenient, is open to criticism from the national stock-breeding point
of view; and this is as good an example as any of the way in which the
drift towards the Superman may operate in spite of all our hypocrisies.
One thing at least is clear to begin with. If a woman can, by careful
selection of a father, and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen
with efficient senses, sound organs, and a good digestion, she should
clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make
her willing to undertake and repeat it. Whether she be financed in the
undertaking by herself, or by the father, or by a speculative
capitalist, or by a new department of, say, the Royal Dublin Society, or
(as at present) by the War Office maintaining her "on the strength" and
authorizing a particular soldier to marry her, or by a local authority
under a by-law directing that women may under certain circumstances have
a year's leave of absence on full salary, or by the central government,
does not matter provided the result be satisfactory.
It is a melancholy fact that as the vast majority of women and their
husbands have, under existing circumstances, not enough nourishment, no
capital, no credit, and no knowledge of science or business, they would,
if the State would pay for birth as it now pays for death, be exploited
by joint stock companies for dividends, just as they are in ordinary
industries. Even a joint stock human stud farm (piously disguised as a
reformed Foundling Hospital or something of that sort) might well, under
proper inspection and regulation, produce better results than our
present reliance on promiscuous marriage. It may be objected that when
an ordinary contractor produces stores for sale to the Government, and
the Government rejects them as not up to the required standard, the
condemned goods are either sold for what they will fetch or else
scrapped: that is, treated as waste material; whereas if the goods
consisted of human beings, all that could be done would be to let them
loose or send them to the nearest workhouse. But there is nothing new
in private enterprise throwing its human refuse on the cheap labor
market and the workhouse; and the refuse of the new industry would
presumably be better bred than the staple product of ordinary poverty.
In our present happy-go-lucky industrial disorder, all the human
products, successful or not, would have to be thrown on the labor
market; but the unsuccessful ones would not entitle the company to a
bounty and so would be a dead loss to it. The practical commercial
difficulty would be the uncertainty and the cost in time and money of
the first experiments. Purely commercial capital would not touch such
heroic operations during the experimental stage; and in any case the
strength of mind needed for so momentous a new departure could not be
fairly expected from the Stock Exchange. It will have to be handled by
statesmen with character enough to tell our democracy and plutocracy
that statecraft does not consist in flattering their follies or applying
their suburban standards of propriety to the affairs of four continents.
The matter must be taken up either by the State or by some organization
strong enough to impose respect upon the State.