Toleration to-day is becoming a different thing from the toleration
of former times. The toleration of the past consisted very largely in
saying, “You are utterly wrong and totally accurst, there is no truth
but my truth and that you deny, but it is not my place to destroy you
and so I let you go.” Nowadays there is a real disposition to accept the
qualified nature of one’s private certainties. One may have arrived at
very definite views, one may have come to beliefs quite binding upon
one’s self, without supposing them to be imperative upon other people.
To write “I believe” is not only less presumptuous and aggressive in
such matters than to write “it is true,” but it is also nearer the
reality of the case. One knows what seems true to one’s self, but we are
coming to realize that the world is great and complex, beyond the utmost
power of such minds as ours. Every day of life drives that conviction
further home. And it is possible to maintain that in perhaps quite a
great number of ethical, social, and political questions there is no
absolute “truth” at all--at least for finite beings. To one intellectual
temperament things may have a moral tint and aspect, differing widely
from that they present to another; and yet each may be in its own way
right. The wide differences in character and quality between one human
being and another may quite conceivably involve not only differences in
moral obligation, but differences in fundamental moral aspect--we may
act and react upon each other towards a universal end, but without any
universally applicable rule of conduct whatever. In some greater vision
than mine, my right and wrong may be no more than hammer and anvil in
the accomplishment of a design larger than I can understand. So that
these papers are not written primarily for all, nor with the same
intention towards all who read them. They are designed first for those
who are predisposed for their reception. Then they are intended to
display in an orderly manner a point of view, and how things look from
that point of view, to those who are not so predisposed. These latter
will either develop into adherents as they read, or, what is more
likely, they will exchange a vague disorderly objection for a clearly
defined and understood difference. To arrive at such an understanding is
often for practical purposes as good as unanimity; for in narrowing down
the issue to some central point or principle, we develop just how far
those who are divergent may go together before separation or conflict
become inevitable, and save something of our time and of our lives from
those misunderstandings, and those secondary differences of no practical
importance whatever, which make such disastrous waste of human energy.
Now the point of view which will be displayed in relation to a number of
wide questions in these pages is primarily that of the writer’s. But he
hopes and believes that among those who read what he has to say, there
will be found not only many to understand, but some to agree with him.
In many ways he is inclined to believe the development of his views may
be typical of the sort of development that has gone on to a greater or
lesser extent in the minds of many of the younger men during the last
twenty years, and it is in that belief that he is now presenting them.
And the questions that will be dealt with in relation to this point of
view are all those questions outside a man’s purely private self--if he
have a purely private self--in which he interacts with his fellow-man.
Our attempt will be to put in order, to reduce to principle, what is at
present in countless instances a mass of inconsistent proceedings, to
frame a general theory in accordance with modern conditions of social
and political activity.
This is one man’s proposal, his attempt to supply a need that has
oppressed him for many years, a need that he has not only found in
his own schemes of conduct, but that he has observed in the thought
of numberless people about him, rendering their action fragmentary,
wasteful in the gross, and ineffective in the net result, the need for
some general principle, some leading idea, some standard, sufficiently
comprehensive to be of real guiding value in social and political
matters, in many doubtful issues of private conduct, and throughout the
business of dealing with one’s fellow-men. No doubt there are many
who do not feel such a need at all, and with these we may part company
forthwith; there are, for example, those who profess the artistic
temperament and follow the impulse of the moment, and those who consult
an inner light in some entirely mystical manner. But neither of these I
believe is the most abundant type in the English-speaking communities.
My impression is that with most of the minds I have been able to examine
with any thoroughness, the attempt to systematize one’s private and
public conduct alike, and to reduce it to spacious general rules, to
attempt, if not to succeed, in making it coherent, consistent, and
uniformly directed, is an almost instinctive proceeding.
There is an objection I may anticipate at this point. If I am to leave
this statement unqualified, it would certainly be objected that such
a need is no more nor less than the need of religion, that a properly
formulated religion does supply a trustworthy guide at every fork and
labyrinth in life. By my allusion to the failure of old formulae
and methods to satisfy now, I am afraid many people will choose to
understand that I refer to what is often spoken of as the conflict of
religion and science, and that I intend to propound some contribution
to the conflict. I will at any rate anticipate that objection here, in
order to mark out my boundaries with greater precision.
Taken in its completeness, I submit that it is a greater claim than
almost any religion can justifiably make, to satisfy the need I have
stated. No religion prescribes rules that can be immediately applied
to every eventuality. Between the general rules laid down and the
particular instance there is always a wide gap, into which doubts and
alternatives enter and the private judgment has play. No doubt upon
certain defined issues of every-day life some religions are absolutely
explicit; the Mahomedan religion, for example, is very uncompromising
upon the use of wine, and the law of the Ten Commandments completely
prohibits the making of graven images, and almost all the great variety
of creeds professed among us English-speaking peoples prescribe certain
general definitions of what is righteous and what constitutes sin. But
upon a thousand questions of great public importance, on the question
of forms of government, of social and educational necessities, of one’s
course and attitude towards such great facts as the press, trusts,
housing, and the like, religion, as it is generally understood, gives by
itself no conclusive light. It may, no doubt, give a directing light in
some cases, but not a conclusive light. It leaves us inconsistent and
uncertain amidst these unavoidable problems. Yet upon these questions
most people feel that something more is needed than the mood of the
moment or the spin of a coin. Religious conviction may help us, it
may stimulate us to press for clearer light upon these matters, but it
certainly does not give us any decisions.
It is possible to be either intensely religious or utterly indifferent
to religious matters and yet care nothing for these things. One may be a
Pietist to whom the world is a fleeting show of no importance whatever,
or one may say, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die”:
the net result in regard to my need is the same. These questions appear
to be on a different plane from religion and religious discussion; they
look outward, while essentially religion looks inward to the soul, and,
given the necessary temperament, it is possible to approach them in an
unbiassed manner from almost any starting-point of religious profession.
One man may believe in the immortality of the soul and another may not;
one man may be a Swedenborgian, another a Roman Catholic, another a
Calvinistic Methodist, another an English High Churchman, another a
Positivist, or a Parsee, or a Jew; the fact remains that they must go
about doing all sorts of things in common every day. They may derive
their ultimate motives and sanctions from the most various sources, they
may worship in the most contrasted temples and yet meet unanimously in
the market-place with a desire to shape their general activities to the
form of a “public spirited” life, and when at last the life of every day
is summed up, “to leave the world better than they found it.” And it is
from that most excellent expression I would start, or rather from a sort
of amplified restatement of that expression--outside the province of
religious discussion altogether.
A man who will build on that expression _as his foundation_ in political
and social matters, has at least the possibility of agreement in the
scheme of action these papers will unfold. For though we theorize it is
at action that our speculations will aim. They will take the shape of an
organized political and social doctrine. It will be convenient to give
this doctrine a name, and for reasons that will be clear enough to those
who have read my book _Anticipations_ this doctrine will be spoken of
throughout as “New Republicanism,” the doctrine of the New Republic.
The central conception of this New Republicanism as it has shaped itself
in my mind, lies in attaching pre-eminent importance to certain aspects
of human life, and in subordinating systematically and always, all
other considerations to these cardinal aspects. It begins with a way
of looking at life. It insists upon that way, it will regard no human
concern at all except in that way. And the way, putting the thing as
compactly as possible, is to reject and set aside all abstract, refined,
and intellectualized ideas as starting propositions, such ideas as
Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty or Beauty, and to hold fast to the
assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a tissue and succession
of births. These other things may be important, they may be profoundly
important, but they are not primary. We cannot build upon any one of
them and get a structure that will comprehend all the aspects of life.
For the great majority of mankind at least it can be held that life
resolves itself quite simply and obviously into three cardinal phases.
There is a period of youth and preparation, a great insurgence of
emotion and enterprise centering about the passion of Love, and a third
period in which, arising amidst the warmth and stir of the second,
interweaving indeed with the second, the care and love of offspring
becomes the central interest in life. In the babble of the
grandchildren, with all the sons and daughters grown and secure, the
typical life of humanity ebbs and ends. Looked at thus with a primary
regard to its broadest aspect, life is seen as essentially a matter of
reproduction; first a growth and training to that end, then commonly
mating and actual physical reproduction, and finally the consummation of
these things in parental nurture and education. Love, Home and Children,
these are the heart-words of life. Not only is the general outline of
the normal healthy human life reproductive, but a vast proportion of the
infinitely complex and interwoven interests that fill that outline with
incessant interest can be shown by a careful analysis to be more or less
directly reproductive also. The toil of a man’s daily work is rarely
for himself alone, it goes to feed, to clothe, to educate those cardinal
consequences of his being, his children; he builds for them, he plants
for them, he plans for them, his social intercourse, his political
interests, whatever his immediate motives, tend finally to secure their
welfare. Even more obviously is this the case with his wife. Even in
rest and recreation life still manifests its quality; the books the
ordinary man reads turn enormously on love-making, his theatre has
scarcely ever a play that has not primarily a strong love interest, his
art rises to its most consummate triumphs in Venus and Madonna, and his
music is saturated in love suggestions. Not only is this so with the
right and proper life, but the greater portion of those acts we call
vice draw their stimulus and pleasure from the impulses that subserve
this sustaining fact of our being, and they are vicious only because
they evade or spoil their proper end. This is really no new discovery at
all, only the stripping bare of it is new. In nearly every religious and
moral system in the world indeed, the predominant mass of the exposition
of sin and saving virtue positively or negatively centres upon birth.
Positively in the enormous stresses, the sacramental values which are
concentrated upon marriage and the initial circumstances of being, and
negatively in a thousand significant repudiations. Even when the devotee
most strenuously renounces this world and all its works, when St.
Anthony flees into the desert or the pious Durtal wrestles in his cell,
when the pale nun prays in vigil and the hermit mounts his pillar, it
is Celibacy, that great denial of life, that sings through all their
struggle, it is this business of births as the central fact of life they
still have most in mind.
This is not human life merely, it is all life. This living world, as
the New Republican will see it, is no more than a great birth-place,
an incessant renewal, an undying fresh beginning and unfolding of
life. Take away this fact of birth and what is there remaining? A world
without flowers, without the singing of birds, without the freshness of
youth, with a spring that brings no seedlings and a year that bears no
harvest, without beginnings and without defeats, a vast stagnation, a
universe of inconsequent matter--Death. Not only does the substance of
life vanish if we eliminate births and all that is related to births,
but whatever remains, if anything remains, of aesthetic and intellectual
and spiritual experience, collapses utterly and falls apart, when this
essential substratum of all experience is withdrawn. So at any rate the
world presents itself in the view the New Republican takes. And if it
should chance that the reader finds this ring untrue to him, then he may
take it that he stands outside us, that the New Republic is not for him.
It may be submitted that this statement that Life is a texture of
births may be accepted by minds of the most divergent religious and
philosophical profession. No fundamental or recondite admissions are
proposed here, but only that the every-day life for every-day purposes
has this shape and nature. The utter materialist may say that life
to him is a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, a chance kinking in the
universal fabric of matter. It is not our present business to confute
him. The fact remains this is the form the kinking has taken. The
believer, sedulous for his soul’s welfare, may say that Life is to
him an arena of spiritual conflict, but this is the character of the
conflict, this is the business from which all the tests and exercises of
his soul are drawn. It matters not in this present discussion if Life is
no more than a dream; the dream is this.
And now one comes to another step. The reader may give his assent
to this statement as obvious or he may guard his assent with a
qualification or so, but I doubt if he will deny it. No one, I expect,
will categorically deny it. But although no one will do that, a great
number of people who have not clearly seen things in this light, do in
thought and in many details of their practice follow a line that is,
in effect, a flat denial of what is here proposed. Life no doubt is
a fabric woven of births and the struggle to maintain and develop and
multiply lives. It does not follow that life is _consciously_ a fabric
woven of births and the struggle to maintain and develop and multiply
lives. I do not suppose a cat or a savage sees it in that light. A cat’s
standpoint is probably strictly individualistic. She sees the whole
universe as a scheme of more or less useful, pleasurable and interesting
things concentrated upon her sensitive and interesting personality. With
a sinuous determination she evades disagreeables and pursues delights;
life is to her quite clearly and simply a succession of pleasures,
sensations and interests, among which interests there happen to
be--kittens!
And this way of regarding life is by no means confined to animals and
savages. I would even go so far as to suggest that it is only within
the last hundred years that any considerable number of thoughtful people
have come to look at life steadily and consistently as being shaped to
this form, to the form of a series of births, growths and births. The
most general truths are those last apprehended. The universal fact
of gravitation, for example, which pervades all being, received its
complete recognition scarcely two hundred years ago. And again children
and savages live in air, breathe air, are saturated with air, die for
five minutes’ need of it, and never definitely realize there is such a
thing as air at all. The vast mass of human expression in act and art
and literature takes a narrower view than we have here formulated; it
presents each man not only as isolated from and antagonized with the
world about him, but as cut off sharply and definitely from the past
before he lived and the future after he is dead; it puts what is, in
relation to the view we have taken, a disproportionate amount of stress
upon his egotism, upon the pursuit of his self-interest and his personal
virtue and his personal fancies, and it ignores the fact, the familiar
rediscovery which the nineteenth century has achieved, that he is
after all only the transitory custodian of an undying gift of life, an
inheritor under conditions, the momentary voice and interpreter of a
being that springs from the dawn of time and lives in offspring and
thought and material consequence, for ever.
This over-accentuation in the past of man’s egoistic individuality, or,
if one puts it in another way, this unsuspicious ignorance of the
real nature of life, becomes glaringly conspicuous in such weighed
and deliberate utterances as _The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_.
Throughout these frank and fundamental discourses one traces a
predominant desire for a perfected inconsequent egotism. Body is
repudiated as a garment, position is an accident, the past that made us
exists not since it is past, the future exists not for we shall never
see it; at last nothing but the abstracted ego remains,--a sort of
complimentary Nirvana. One citation will serve to show the colour of all
his thought. “A man,” he remarks, “is very devout to prevent the loss
of his son. But I would have you pray rather against the fear of
losing him. Let this be the rule for your devotions.” [Footnote: _The
Meditations of M. A. Antoninus_, ix. 40.] That indeed is the rule
for all the devotions of that departing generation of wisdom. Rather
serenity and dignity than good ensuing. Rather a virtuous man than any
resultant whatever from his lifetime, for the future of the world. It
points this disregard of the sequence of life and birth in favour of an
abstract and fruitless virtue, it points it indeed with a barbed point
that the son of Marcus Aurelius was the unspeakable Commodus, and that
the Roman Empire fell from the temporizing detachment of his rule into a
century of disorder and misery.
To the thoughtful reader to whom these papers appeal, to the reader
whose mind is of the modern cast, who has surveyed the vistas of the
geological record and grasped the secular unfolding of the scheme of
life, who has found with microscope and scalpel that the same rhythm of
birth and re-birth is woven into the minutest texture of things that has
covered the earth with verdure and shaped the massifs of the Alps, to
such a man the whole literature the world produced until the nineteenth
century had well progressed, must needs be lacking in any definite and
pervading sense of the cardinal importance in the world of this central
reproductive aspect, of births and of the training and preparation for
future births. All that literature, great and imposing as we are bound
to admit it is, has an outlook less ample than quite common men may
have to-day. It is a literature, as we see it in the newer view, of
abstracted personalities and of disconnected passions and impressions.
To one extraordinary and powerful mind in the earlier half of the
nineteenth century this realization of the true form of life came with
quite overwhelming force, and that was to Schopenhauer, surely at once
the most acute and the most biassed of mortal men. It came to him as
a most detestable fact, because it happened he was an intensely
egotistical man. But his intellect was of that noble and exceptional
sort that aversion may tint indeed but cannot blind, and we owe to him a
series of philosophical writings, written with an instinctive skill
and a clearness and a vigour uncommon in philosophers, in which a very
complete statement of the new view is presented to the reader in terms
of passionate protest. [Footnote: _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung._]
“Why,” he asked, “must we be for ever tortured by this passion and
desire to reproduce our kind, why are all our pursuits tainted with this
application, all our needs deferred to the needs of the new generation
that tramples on our heels?” and he found the answer in the presence of
an overwhelming Will to Live manifesting itself throughout the universe
of Matter, thrusting us ruthlessly before it, as a strong swimmer
thrusts a wave before him as he swims. That the personal egotism should
be subordinated to and overwhelmed by a pervading Will to Live filled
his soul with passionate rebellion and coloured his exposition with the
hues of despair. But to minds temperamentally different from his, minds
whose egotism is qualified by a more unselfish humour, it is possible to
avail one’s self of Schopenhauer’s vision, without submitting one’s self
to his conclusions, to see our wills only as temporary manifestations
of an ampler will, our lives as passing phases of a greater Life, and
to accept these facts even joyfully, to take our places in that larger
scheme with a sense of relief and discovery, to go with that larger
being, to serve that larger being, as a soldier marches, a mere unit
in the larger being of his army, and serving his army, joyfully into
battle.
However, it is not to Schopenhauer and his writings, at least among the
English-speaking peoples, that this increasing realization of life as
essentially a succession of births, is chiefly ascribed. It is mainly,
as I have already suggested, the result of that great expansion of our
sense of time and causation that has ensued from the idea of organic
Evolution. In the course of one brief century, the human outlook upon
the order of the world has been profoundly changed. It is not simply
that it has become much more spacious, it is not only that it has opened
out from the little history of a few thousand years to a stupendous
vista of ages, but, in addition to its expanded dimensions, it has
experienced a change in character. That wonderful and continually more
elaborate and penetrating analysis of the evolutionary process by
Darwin and his followers and successors and antagonists, the entire
subordination of the individual lot to the specific destiny that these
criticisms and researches have emphasized, has warped and altered the
aspect of a thousand human affairs. It has made reasonable and in order
what Schopenhauer found so suggestively perplexing, it has dispelled
problems that have seemed insoluble mysteries to many generations of
men. I do not say it has solved them, but it has dispelled them and made
them irrelevant and uninteresting. So long as one believed that life
span unprogressively from generation to generation, that generation
followed generation unchangingly for ever, the enormous preponderance
of sexual needs and emotions in life was a distressing and inexplicable
fact--it was a mystery, it was sin, it was the work of the devil. One
asked, why does man build houses that others may live therein; plant
trees whose fruit he will never see? And all the toil and ambition,
the stress and hope of existence, seemed, so far as this life went,
and before these new lights came, a mere sacrifice to this pointless
reiteration of lives, this cosmic _crambe repetita_. To perceive this
aspect, and to profess an entire detachment from the whole vacuous
business was considered by a large proportion of the more thoughtful
people of the world the supreme achievement of philosophy. The acme
of old-world wisdom, the ultimate mystery of Oriental philosophy is to
contemn women and offspring, to abandon costume, cleanliness, and all
the decencies and dignities of life, and to crawl, as scornfully as
possible, but at any rate to crawl out of all these earthly shows and
snares (which so obviously lead to nothing), into the nearest tub.
And the amazing revelation of our days is that they do not lead to
nothing! Directly the discovery is made clear--and it is, I firmly
believe, the crowning glory of the nineteenth century to have
established this discovery for all time--that one generation does not
follow another in _fac simile_, directly we come within sight of
the reasonable persuasion that each generation is a step, a definite
measurable step, and each birth an unprecedented experiment, directly it
grows clear that instead of being in an eddy merely, we are for all our
eddying moving forward upon a wide voluminous current, then all these
things are changed.
That change alters the perspective of every human affair. Things that
seemed permanent and final, become unsettled and provisional. Social
and political effort are seen from a new view-point. Everywhere the old
direction posts, the old guiding marks, have got out of line and askew.
And it is out of the conflict of the new view with the old institutions
and formulae, that there arises the discontent and the need, and the
attempt at a wider answer, which this phrase and suggestion of the “New
Republic” is intended to express.
Every part contributes to the nature of the whole, and if the whole of
life is an evolving succession of births, then not only must a man in
his individual capacity (_physically_ as parent, doctor, food dealer,
food carrier, home builder, protector, or _mentally_ as teacher, news
dealer, author, preacher) contribute to births and growths and the
future of mankind, but the collective aspects of man, his social and
political organizations must also be, in the essence, organizations that
more or less profitably and more or less intentionally, set themselves
towards this end. They are finally concerned with the birth and with the
sound development towards still better births, of human lives, just as
every implement in the toolshed of a seedsman’s nursery, even the hoe
and the roller, is concerned finally with the seeding and with the sound
development towards still better seeding of plants. The private and
personal motive of the seedsman in procuring and using these tools
may be avarice, ambition, a religious belief in the saving efficacy of
nursery keeping or a simple passion for bettering flowers, that does not
affect the definite final purpose of his outfit of tools.
And just as we might judge completely and criticise and improve that
outfit from an attentive study of the welfare of plants and with an
entire disregard of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective
human enterprises from the standpoint of an attentive study of human
births and development. _Any collective human enterprise, institution,
movement, party or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as
it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births, and according
to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence made
by each generation of citizens born under its influence towards a higher
and ampler standard of life_.
Or putting the thing in a slightly different phrasing, the New
Republican idea amounts to this: the serious aspect of our private
lives, the general aspect of all our social and co-operative
undertakings, is to prepare as well as we possibly can a succeeding
generation, which shall prepare still more capably for still better
generations to follow. We are passing as a race out of a state of
affairs when the unconscious building of the future was attained by
individualistic self-seeking (altogether unenlightened or enlightened
only by the indirect moralizing influence of the patriotic instinct and
religion) into a clear consciousness of our co-operative share in that
process. That is the essential idea my New Republic would personify and
embody. In the past man was made, generation after generation, by forces
beyond his knowledge and control. Now a certain number of men are coming
to a provisional understanding of some at least of these forces that go
to the Making of Man. To some of us there is being given the privilege
and responsibility of knowledge. We may plead lack of will or lack of
moral impetus, but we can no longer plead ignorance. Just as far as our
light upon the general purpose goes, just so far goes our responsibility
(whether we respect it or not) to shape and subdue our wills to the
Making of Mankind.
Directly the man, who has found akin to himself and who has accepted and
assimilated this new view, turns to the affairs of the political
world, to the general professions of our great social and business
undertakings, and to the broad conventions of human conduct, he will
find, I think, a very wide discrepancy from the implications of this
view. He will find--the New Republican finds--that the declared aims and
principles of the larger amount of our social and political effort are
astonishingly limited and unsatisfactory, astonishingly irrelevant to
the broad reality of Life. He will find great masses of men embarked
collectively upon enterprises that will seem to his eyes to have no
definable relation to this real business of the world, or only the
most accidental relationship, he will find others in partial lop-sided
cooperation or unintelligently half helpful and half obstructive, and he
will find still other movements and developments which set quite in
the opposite direction, which make neither for sound births nor sound
growth, but through the thinnest shams of excuse and purpose, through
the most hypnotic and unreal of suggestions and motives, directly and
even plainly towards waste, towards sterility, towards futility and
death and extinction.
But not deliberately towards Death. It is only in the theoretical
aspirations of Schopenhauer that he will find an expression of conscious
and resolved opposition to the pervading will and purpose in things.
In the common affairs of the world he will find neither deliberate
opposition nor deliberate co-operation, chance opposition indeed
and chance co-operation, but for the most part only a complete
unconsciousness, a blind irrelevance or a purely accidental accordance
to the essential aspect of Life.
Take, for example, the great enthusiasm that set all England waving
bunting in June, 1902. It was made clear to the most unwilling observer
that the great mass of English people consider themselves aggregated
together in one nation mainly to support, honour, and obey a King, and
that they rejoice in this conception of their national purpose. Great
sums of money were spent to emphasize this purpose, public work of all
sorts was dislocated, and the channels of public discussion clogged and
choked. A discussion of the education of the next generation, a matter
of supreme interest from the New Republican point of view, passed from
public sight amidst the happy tumults and splendours of the time. The
land was filled with poetry in the Monarch’s praise, bad beyond any
suspicion of insincerity. All that was certainly great in the land,
all that has any hold upon the motives and confidence of the English,
gathered itself into a respectful proximity, assumed attitudes of
reverent subordination to the Monarch. All that was eminent in science
and literature and art, the galaxy of the episcopate, the crowning
intellectualities of the army, came to these rites, clad in robes and
raiment that no sane person would ever voluntarily assume in public
except under circumstances of extreme necessity. The whole business was
conducted with a zest and gravity that absolutely forbids the theory
that it was a mere formality, a curious survival of mediævalism
cherished by a country that makes no breaks with its past. The spirit
and idea of the whole thing was intensely real and contemporary; one
could believe only that those who took part in it regarded it as a
matter of primary importance, as one of the cardinal things for which
they existed. The alternative is to imagine that they believe nothing
to be of primary importance in this world; a quite incredible levity of
soul to ascribe to all those great and distinguished people.
But it reflects not at all upon the high intelligence, the unobtrusive
but sterling moral qualities, the tact, dignity, and personal charm
of the central figure in their pageantries, a charm the pathetic
circumstances of his unseasonable illness very greatly enhanced, if
the New Republican fails to consider these ceremonials of primary
importance, if he declines to see them as of any necessary importance at
all, until it has been conclusively shown that they do minister to
the bettering of births and of the lives intervening between birth and
birth. On the surface they do not do that. Unless they can be shown to
do that they are dissipations of energy, they are irrelevant and wrong,
from the New Republican point of view. The New Republican can take no
part in these things, or only a very grudging and qualified part, on his
way to real service. He may or he may not, after deliberate examination,
leave these things on one side, unchallenged but ignored.
It may be urged that all the subserviences that distinguish our kingdom
and that become so amazingly conspicuous about a coronation, the kissing
of hands, the shambling upon knees, the crawling of body and mind, the
systematic encouragement of that undignified noisiness that nowadays
distinguishes the popular rejoicings of our imperial people, are simply
a proof of the earnest preoccupation of our judges, bishops, and leaders
and great officers of all sorts with remoter and nobler aims. The
kingdom happens to exist, and it would be complex and troublesome to get
rid of it. They stand these things, they get done with these things, and
so are able to get to their work. The paraphernalia of a Court, the sham
scale of honours, the submissions, the ceremonial subjection, are, it is
argued, entirely irrelevant to the purpose and honour of our race, but
then so would rebellion against these things be also irrelevant and
secondary. To submit or to rebel is a diversion of our energies from the
real purpose in things, and of the two it is infinitely less bother to
submit. In private conversation, I find, this is the line nine out of
ten of the King’s servants will take. They will tell you the public
understands; the thing is a mere excuse for festivity and colour; their
loyalty is of a piece with their Fifth of November anti-popery.
They will tell you the peers understand, the bishops understand,
the coronating archbishop has his tongue in his cheek. They all
understand--men of the world together. The King understands, a most
admirable gentleman, who submits to these traditional things, but who
admits his preference is for the simple, pure delight of the incognito,
for being “plain Mr. Jones.”
It may be so. Though the psychologist will tell you that a man who
behaves consistently as though he believed in a thing, will end in
believing it. Assuredly whatever these others do, the New Republican
must understand. In his inmost soul there must be no loyalty or
submission to any king or colour, save only if it conduces to the
service of the future of the race. In the New Republic all kings are
provisional, if, indeed--and this I shall discuss in a later paper--they
can be regarded as serviceable at all.
And just as kingship is a secondary and debatable thing to the New
Republican, to every man, that is, whom the spirit of the new knowledge
has taken for its work, so also are the loyalties of nationality, and
all our local and party adhesions.
Much that passes for patriotism is no more than a generalized jealousy
rather gorgeously clad. Amidst the collapse of the old Individualistic
Humanitarianism, the Rights of Man, Human Equality, and the rest of
those broad generalizations that served to keep together so many men of
good intention in the age that has come to its end, there has been much
hasty running to obvious shelters, and many men have been forced to take
refuge under this echoing patriotism--for want of a better gathering
place. It is like an incident during an earthquake, when men who have
abandoned a cleft fortress will shelter in a drinking bothy. But the
very upheavals that have shattered the old fastnesses of altruistic
men, will be found presently to be taking the shape of a new gathering
place--and of this the New Republic presents an early guess and
anticipation. I do not see how men, save in the most unexpected
emergency, can be content to accept such an artificial convention as
modern patriotism for one moment. On the one hand there are the patriots
of nationality who would have us believe that the miscellany of European
squatters in the Transvaal are one nation and those in Cape Colony
another, and on the other the patriots of Empire who would have me, for
example, hail as my fellow-subjects and collaborators in man-making a
host of Tamil-speaking, Tamil-thinking Dravadians, while separating me
from every English-speaking, English-thinking person who lives south of
the Great Lakes. So long as men are content to work in the grooves set
for them by dead men, to derive all their significances from the past,
to accept whatever is as right and to drive along before the compulsions
of these acquiescences, they may do so. But directly they take to
themselves the New Republican idea, directly they realize that life is
something more than passing the time, that it is constructive with its
direction in the future, then these things slip from them as Christian’s
burthen fell from him at the very outset of his journey. Until grave
cause has been shown to the contrary, there is every reason why all men
who speak the same language, think the same literature, and are akin
in blood and spirit, and who have arrived at the great constructive
conception that so many minds nowadays are reaching, should entirely
disregard these old separations. If the old traditions do no harm
there is no reason to touch them, any more than there is to abolish the
boundary between this ancient and invincible kingdom of Kent in which I
write and that extremely inferior country, England, which was conquered
by the Normans and brought under the feudal system. But so soon as these
old traditions obstruct sound action, so soon as it is necessary to
be rid of them, we must be prepared to sacrifice our archaeological
emotions ruthlessly and entirely.
And these repudiations extend also to the political parties that
struggle to realize themselves within the forms of our established
state. There is not in Great Britain, and I understand there is not in
America, any party, any section, any group, any single politician even,
based upon the manifest trend and purpose of life as it appears in the
modern view. The necessities of continuity in public activity and of a
glaring consistency in public profession, have so far prevented any such
fundamental reconstruction as the new generation requires. One hears of
Liberty, of Compromise, of Imperial Destinies and Imperial Unity,
one hears of undying loyalty to the Memory of Mr. Gladstone and the
inalienable right of Ireland to a separate national existence. One
hears, too, of the sacred principle of Free Trade, of Empires and
Zollvereins, and the Rights of the Parent to blockade the education of
his children, but one hears nothing of the greater end. At the best
all the objects of our political activity can be but means to that end,
their only claim to our recognition can be their adequacy to that
end, and none of these vociferated “cries,” these party labels, these
programme items, are ever propounded to us in that way. I cannot see
how, in England at any rate, a serious and perfectly honest man, holding
as true that ampler view of life I have suggested, can attach himself
loyally to any existing party or faction. At the utmost he may find
their faction-fighting may be turned for a time towards his remoter
ends. These parties derive from that past when the new view of life had
yet to establish itself, they carry faded and obliterated banners that
the glare and dust of conflict, the vote-storms of great campaigns, have
robbed long since of any colour of reality they once possessed. They
express no creative purpose now, whatever they did in their inception,
they point towards no constructive ideals. Essentially they are things
for the museum or the bonfire, whatever momentary expediency may
hold back the New Republican from an unqualified advocacy of such a
destination. The old party fabrics are no more than dead rotting things,
upon which a great tangle of personal jealousies, old grudges, thorny
nicknames, prickly memories, family curses, Judas betrayals and sacred
pledges, a horrible rubbish thicket, maintains a saprophytic vitality.
It is quite possible I misjudge the thing altogether. Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman, for example, may hide the profoundest and
most wide-reaching aims beneath his superficial effect of utter
superficiality. His impersonation of an amiable, spirited,
self-conscious, land-owning gentleman with a passion for justice in
remote places and a whimsical dislike of motor cars in his immediate
neighbourhood, may veil the operations of a stupendous intelligence bent
upon the regeneration of the world. It may do, but if it does, it is a
very amazing and purposeless impersonation. I at any rate do not believe
that it does. I do not believe that he or any other Liberal leader or
any Conservative minister has any comprehensive aim at all--as we of the
new generation measure comprehensiveness. These parties, and the phrases
of party exposition--in America just as in England--date from the
days of the limited outlook. They display no consciousness of the new
dissent. They are absorbed in the long standing game, the getting in,
the turning out, the contests and governments, that has just about the
same relation to the new perception of affairs, to the real drift of
life, as the game of cricket with the wheel as a wicket would have to
the destinies of a ship. They find their game highly interesting and
no doubt they play it with remarkable wit, skill and spirit, but
they entirely disregard the increasing number of passengers who are
concerning themselves with the course and destination of the ship.
Those particular passengers in the figure, present the New Republic. It
is a dissension, an inquiry, it is the vague unconsolidated matter for a
new direction. “We who are young,” says the spirit of the New Republic,
“we who are in earnest can no more compass our lives under these
old kingships and loyalties, under these old leaders and these old
traditions, constitutions and pledges, with their party liabilities,
their national superstitions, their rotting banners and their
accumulating legacy of feuds and lies, than we can pretend we are indeed
impassioned and wholly devoted subjects of King Edward, spending our
lives in the service of his will. It is not that we have revolted
from these things, it is not that we have grown askew to them and that
patching and amendment will serve our need; it is that we have travelled
outside them altogether--almost inadvertently, but quite beyond any
chance of return to a simple acceptance again. We are no more disposed
to call ourselves Liberals or Conservatives and to be stirred to party
passion at the clash of these names, than we are to fight again the
battles of the Factio Albata or the Factio Prasina. These current
dramas, these current conflicts seem scarcely less factitious. Men
without faith may be content to spend their lives for things only half
believed in, and for causes that are contrived. But that is not our
quality. We want reality because we have faith, we seek the beginning of
realism in social and political life, we seek it and we are resolved to
find it.”
So we attempt to give a general expression to the forces that are new
at this time, to render something at least of the spirit of the New
Republic in a premature and experimental utterance. It is, at any rate,
a spirit that finds itself out of intimacy and co-ordination with all
the older movements of the world, that sees all pre-existing formulae
and political constitutions and political parties and organizations
rather as instruments or obstacles than as guiding lines and precedents
for its new developing will, its will which will carry it at last
irresistibly to the conscious and deliberate making of the future of
man. “We are here to get better births and a better result from the
births we get; each one of us is going to set himself immediately to
that, using whatever power he finds to his hand,” such is the form its
will must take. And such being its will and spirit these papers will
address themselves comprehensively to the problem, What will the New
Republic do? All the rest of this series will be a discussion of the
forces that go to the making of man, and how far and how such a New
Republic might seek to lay its hands upon them.
It is for the adversary to explain how presumptuous such an enterprise
must be. But presumption is ineradically interwoven with every beginning
that the world has ever seen. I venture to think that even to a reader
who does not accept or sympathize with the conception of this
New Republic, a general review of current movements and current
interpretations of morality from this new standpoint may be suggestive
and interesting. Assuredly it is only by some such general revision, if
not on these lines then on others, that a practicable way of escape is
to be found for any one, from that base and shifty opportunism in public
and social matters, that predominance of fluctuating aims and spiritless
conformities, in which so many of us, without any great positive
happiness at all to reward us for the sacrifice we are making, bury the
solitary talents of our lives.