one remembers that even Mr Gladstone was accused of the vulgarest
immorality till a journalist tracked him down and discovered that it
was rescue work, and not the deadly sin with the largest circulation,
which was his private hobby. That sort of libel no man can escape who
risks remaining alive. Perhaps we should come to hate our public men
as the Athenians came to hate Aristides if we could find nothing evil
to think about them. What the politician of the present day has to
fear is not an occasional high tide of calumny, or even a volley of
the old-fashioned abusive epithets, which are, so to speak, all in the
day's play. It is rather the million-eyed beast of suspicion which
democracies every now and then take to their bosoms as a pet. Often it
seems a noble beast, for it is impossible to be suspicious all the
time without sometimes suspecting the truth. Its food, however, is
neither primarily truth nor primarily falsehood; it thrives on both
indifferently. And one foresees that, during the transition stage
between the break-up of the old manners of servility and the
inauguration of the new manners of service, this beast is going to be
more voracious than ever. This may from some points of view be a good
thing. It will be an announcement, at least, of new forces struggling
to become politically articulate. On the other hand from the
politician's point of view, it will be not only deplorable, but
terrifying. It will be worse than having to fight wild beasts in the
arena. Politics, it is safe to prophesy, will before long call for as
cool a nerve, as determined a heroism, as aviation.
It may be that things have always been like this--that base motives
have been imputed to politicians ever since politics began--that one's
political enemies always charged one with a dishonest greed for the
spoils of office and all the rest of it. But the terror of the
politics of the future is likely to be, not that one will be abused by
one's enemies, but that one will be abused by one's friends. That is
the tendency in a democracy which has not yet found itself. It is a
tendency which one sees occasionally at work to-day at labour
conventions. The unofficial leaders denounce the official leaders; the
official leaders retort in kind; and the hosts of Labour set out to
face the enemy tugging at each other's ears. There is no job on earth
less enviable than the job of a Labour leader. The Tory and Radical
leaders are supported at least in public by their respective parties;
but the Labour leader at home among his followers is commonly regarded
as a cross between a skunk and a whited sepulchre. As a rule, it may
be, he deserves all he gets, but the point is that he would get it
just the same whether he deserved it or not. The light that beats upon
a Labour M.P.'s seat on the platform is a thousand times fiercer and
more devouring than any that ever beat upon a throne. This partly
arises from the fact that the working classes are less practised than
others in concealing what passes through their minds. If they suspect
the worst they say so instead of passing a vote of thanks to the
object of their suspicions. Further, they are still fresh enough to
politics to be very exacting in their demands upon politicians. Other
people have got accustomed to the idea that lawyers, whether Liberal
or Tory, do not go into the House of Commons, as the Americans say,
for their health. They have settled down comfortably to regard
politics as a field of personal ambition even more than a field of
public service. No doubt the two aims are, to a great extent,
compatible, but, even so, no one expects the ordinary party politician
to have the faith that goes to the stake for a conviction. Labour, on
the other hand, in so far as it is articulate, does demand faith of
this kind from its leaders. If they do not possess it already it is
prepared to thump it into them with a big stick.
The difficulty is to retain this faith after one has been, as it were,
inside politics. One goes into politics believing in the faith that
will remove mountains: one remains in politics believing in the
machine that will remove mole-hills. It is only the rare politician
who does not ultimately succumb to the fatal fascination of the
machine. It may be the party machine or the Parliamentary machine or
the administrative machine. In any case, and to whatever party he
belongs, he soon comes to take it for granted, not that the machine
must be made to do what the people want, but that the people must
learn to be patient, even to the point of reverence, with the machine,
and must be careful to keep it supplied, not with the vinegar of
criticism, but with the oil of agreement, which alone enables its
wheels to run smoothly. Democracy has again and again had to rise up
and smash its machines, just because they had become idols in this
way. No doubt, even were Socialism in full swing, the idolatry of
machinery would still, to some extent, continue, and new machines
would constantly have to be invented to take the place of the old as
soon as the latter began to acquire this pseudo-religious sanction.
There will probably still also be people who will go about wanting to
destroy machinery from a rather illogical idea that anything which is
even capable of being turned into an idol must be evil. The
politicians and the anti-politicians will always stand to each other
in the relation of priests and iconoclasts. "Priests of machinery,"
indeed, would be a much more realistic description of most politicians
than Mr Lloyd George's phrase, "priests of humanity."
There you have the politician's doom. There you have the real terror
for the good man going into politics. He dreads not that he will be
called names so much as that he will deserve them. Office, he knows,
is as perilous a gift as riches, and the temptation to be a tyrant, if
it is only in a committee room down a side street, has destroyed men
who stood out like heroes against drink and the flesh and gold. The
House of Commons could easily drift into becoming the house of the six
hundred tyrants, if only the public would permit it. There is no
amulet against the despotism of politicians except living opinions
among the people. It would be foolish, however, merely because
politicians are in danger of setting themselves up as tyrants, to
propose to exterminate them. They can, if taken in time and
domesticated, be made at least as useful as the horse and the cow.
Indeed, so long as they are content to be regarded merely as our poor
brothers, they can be as useful as any other human beings almost,
except the saints. But they must demand no sacrosanctity for their
position. At present, when they denounce people for abusing them, they
are as often as not angry merely at being criticised. They are too
fond of thinking that it is the chief function of the electors to pass
votes of confidence in them. That is why, heartily as I love
politicians, I would keep them on a chain. But I would not throw
stones at them in their misery. I would even feed the brutes.
XXI
ON DISASTERS
It is a remarkable thing that human beings have never yet got
reconciled to disaster. Each new disaster, like the ship on fire, the
burning mine and the wrecked train inspires us with a new horror, as
though it were something without precedent. Occasionally in the
history of the world horror has been heaped on horror till people
became indifferent. During the Reign of Terror, for instance, the
tragic death of a man or woman became so everyday an affair that
before long it was regarded with almost as little emotion as a stumble
on the stairs. Luckily, the periods are rare in which this terrible
indifference is possible to us. It is only by keeping our sense of
disaster sharp and burnished that we shall ever succeed in stirring
ourselves into action against it. On the other hand, it is amazing for
how brief a period the impulse to action in most of us lasts. On the
morrow of a great preventable disaster it is as if the whole human
race stood up with bared heads and swore in the presence of Heaven
that this abominable thing should never be allowed to occur again.
But, alas! a full meal and a bottle of wine do wonders in restoring
the rosy view of life. Our tears which at first seemed to flow from
the depths of our hearts soon give place to commonplaces of the lips
and to sighs that actually increase our sense of comfort rather than
otherwise. We who but yesterday realised that trusting to luck was a
crime far deadlier in its effects than a mere passionate murder will
to-morrow accommodate ourselves once more to the accidental medley of
life which at least justified itself in letting so many of our fathers
and grandfathers die in their beds.
This accommodation of ourselves to life, it is curious to reflect, is
just the consenting to drift without a star which is condemned by all
the religions. Life is conceived in the religions as a vigilance. If
we are not vigilant, we are damned. It is the same in politics, where
we all quote Burke's sentence about eternal vigilance being the price
of liberty. But religion and politics do not long survive the dessert.
We are as much in love with drowsiness as the lotus-eaters, and at a
seemingly safe distance we are as careless of the ruin of the skies as
Horace's just man. Preachers may tell us once a week that we are
sentinels sleeping at our posts, and, if they say it eloquently
enough, we may possibly raise their salaries. But we have got used to
sleeping at our posts, and what we have got used to, we feel in our
bones, cannot be regarded as a very serious sin. Once, in the fine
wakefulness of our youth, we summoned the world out of its sleep. But
our voices sounded so thin and lonely in the sleep-laden air that we
felt rather ashamed of ourselves, and we soon climbed down out of our
golden balconies and took our places with our brothers among the hosts
of slumber. Upon our slumber, no doubt, there still breaks the
occasional voice of a prophet who persists--who bids us arise and get
ready for the battle, or flee from the wrath to come, or do anything
indeed except acquiesce with a sleepy grunt in the despotism of
disaster. It is to fight against disaster and destruction that we were
born. Our prophets are those who put wakeful hearts in us for the
conflict.
There should perhaps be no prophet needed to belabour us into making
an end of such disasters as have recently taken place in so far as
they are preventable. Even our common-sense, it might be thought,
would be strong enough to insist upon the ordinary rules of caution
being observed in ships and railways, and, though most of us are in
little danger of dying in a pit explosion, even in coal-mines.
Sometimes, when I read the evidence of the cause of a railway
disaster, and find a managing director or someone else in authority
confessing, without repentance, that his committee for one reason or
another ignored the recommendations made by the Board of Trade for the
general safety, I marvel that the public never rise up and demand that
a railway director shall be hanged. I have small belief in capital
punishment, but if capital punishment must still be permitted in order
to add a spice to the lives of newspaper readers, then I should
confine it to railway directors and other magnates who, though they
never commit a murder privately for the delight of the thing, still
run a system of murder far more sensational in results than any that
was ever planned by French motor-bandits. Think of all the railway
accidents of recent times--the accidents of every day to the men on
the line, and the accidents of red-letter days to us of the general
public. There have been so many of these lately that even the most
stupid devotees of private ownership are beginning to think that
somebody must be responsible; and if somebody is responsible, then in
a society which resorts to penal measures somebody deserves
punishment. It is ridiculous to send weak-minded women to gaol for
borrowing knicknacks off a shop counter while you send strong-minded
railway directors to Belgravia and Mayfair for maintaining a system of
sudden death for workmen and travellers. In the days of the Irish
famine, coroners' juries, whose business it was to report on the death
of some starved man, used to bring in a verdict of wilful murder
against Lord John Russell. Is there no coroner's jury of the present
day to bring in an occasional verdict of wilful murder against the
directors of a railway or a factory? When we see a railway manager
sentenced to seven years' penal servitude as the reasonable
consequence of some disaster on the line, I have an idea that the
number of railway accidents will diminish. When we see the directors
of a shipping company fined a year's income and a captain dismissed
from his post for sending a ship full steam ahead through a fog, we
shall be thrilled by fewer accidents at sea. But it is the old story.
One's crime has only to be on a sufficiently grand scale to be as far
above punishment as an act of God. What punishment can be too severe
for a half-witted farm hand who burns his master's haystack? But as
for the railway lords who burn a score of men, women and children in
the course of a railway smash by their carefully calculated
carelessness, why, one might as well call down punishment on a
thunderstorm. It pleases our indolent brains to regard accidents
associated with dividends as the works of an inscrutable Providence.
It is not enough that Providence should be the author, at least
passively, of earthquakes and gales and tidal waves. He must also be
held accountable for every breakage of bones that occurs as the result
of our passion for saving money rather than life. Some day, I hope,
the distinction between Providence and the capitalist will be a little
clearer than it at present is. The confusion between the two has
hitherto led to the capitalist's being invested with a sacrosanctity
to which we offer up human sacrifices on a scale far surpassing
anything ever known in Peru or the dark places of Africa.
It would be folly however to prophesy a world from which disaster has
disappeared on the heels of the mastodon. One can do little more than
regulate disaster. We already regulate death by offering a strong
discouragement to murder. Pessimists may contend that, in a world
where so many deaths are taking place as it is, one or two more or
less can hardly matter. But all the advances the human race has ever
made have only been an affair of one or two--the distribution of one
or two women, of one or two privileges, of one or two pennies.
Consequently, even in a world where disasters grow as thick as trees,
we are bound to fight them so far as they can be fought. If we do not,
the wilderness will swallow us. One is usually consoled by the
leader-writers, after a disaster has taken place, by the reflection
that it has taught us certain lessons that will never, never be
forgotten. Unfortunately, we knew the lessons already. We do not want
to be taught our A B C over again by having the alphabet burned into
our flesh with a red-hot iron.
At the same time, the leader-writers do well in trying to arrive at
some philosophy of disaster. But the true philosophy of disaster is
one which will teach us to rage where raging will be of avail and to
endure where there is nothing for it but endurance. Most of us in
these days are content to have no philosophy at all, philosophy being
a name for serious thought about the universal disaster of death. To
read Montaigne, who lived blithely in conversation with death, is to
step right out of our modern civilisation into a wiser world. It is to
become an inhabitant of the universe instead of a rather inefficient
earner of an income. Montaigne tells us that, even when he was in
good health, if a thought occurred to him during a walk he jotted it
down at once for fear he might be dead before he could reach home and
write it down at leisure. He made himself as familiar with death as he
was with the sun or his neighbours. He explains what a happiness it
would have been to him to write a history of the way in which
different great men had died, and his essays are in great part an
expression of interest in the caprices of death among the heroes of
the human race. History was to him a procession of
disasters--disasters, however, seen against a background of faith in
the benevolence of the scheme of things--and he made his account with
life as something to be enjoyed as a privilege rather than a right.
"If a man could by any means avoid it," he said of death, "though by
creeping under a calf's skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of
the shift." Somehow, one hardly believes him. He seems here to be
speaking for our reassurance rather than historically. On the other
hand, he is right a thousand times in summoning even the most
timid-kneed to go out and shake hands with disaster as with a friend.
To hide from it is only a kind of watered-down atheism. It is a
distrust of life. It is easy, of course, to compose sentences on the
subject: it is quite another thing to compose ourselves. Matthew
Arnold relates in one of his prefaces how he once failed to bring any
consolation to the occupants of a railway carriage at a time when a
panic about murder in railway trains was running its course by bidding
them reflect that, even if any of them died suddenly by violent hands,
the gravel-walks of their villas would still be rolled, and there
would still be a crowd at the corner of Fenchurch Street. It is a very
rational mind that can get comfort out of a thought like that. Even
when we are not troubled by thinking of our work or our family, we
cannot but cry out against the corruption of this flesh of our bodies,
and many of us quake at the thought of the enforced adventure of the
soul into a secret world. Marked down for disaster, we may add to our
income, or win a place in the Cabinet, or make a reputation for
singing comic songs, but death will steal upon us in our security, and
strip us bare of everything save the courage we have learned from
philosophy and the faith that has been given us by religion. We spend
our hours shirking that fact. Cowardice and pessimism will avail on
our death-beds no more than wealth or stuffed birds of paradise.
Logically, then, every circumstance shouts to us to be brave. But,
alas! bravery, though in face of the disasters of others it is easy
enough, in the face of our own disasters is a rare and splendid form
of genius, To attain it is the crown of existence.
XXII
THE RIGHTS OF MURDER
Mr Justice Darling, before passing a sentence of seven years' penal
servitude on Julia Decies for wounding her lover with intent to kill
him, made a remark which must interest all students of the morals of
murder. No one, probably, he declared, would very much lament the
wounded man, but "that was not the question." So far as one can gather
from the scrappy reports in the newspapers, the crime was in the main
a crime of jealousy. The man and woman had lived together for some
years, had then separated, had come back to each other, and had
finally quarrelled as the result of a suggestion "that he had taken up
with some other woman, with whom he was going to Paris." Incidentally
it was stated that the man had given Julia Decies L500 and some
furniture in the previous October on the understanding that she was to
trouble him no further. It was also stated that "the prosecutor had
infected the woman with a terrible disease and that she was
pregnant." There you have a story of contemporary life as mean in its
horror as any that Gorky has written. It is a story in which the only
conceivably beautiful element is the insurgent anger of the woman. It
is a tragedy, not of heroic suffering, but of the dull slums of human
nature. Probably, in any country where they managed things according
to "rough justice" instead of with judges and juries, no one would
have blamed Julia Decies even to the extent of a day's imprisonment
for seeking to avenge herself in the most extreme form on an
environment so intolerable--on a man whom, in the judge's phrase, "no
one, probably, would very much lament." There is a mining camp logic
which holds that if a man is not worth lamenting, one need not be
greatly concerned whether he is alive or dead. Civilisation however,
speaking from under the wig of Mr Justice Darling, says of even the
most worthless of its human products: "He was a person whose life was
entitled to the protection of the law as though he were a person with
the best of characters." To the moralist of the mining camp this would
seem like saying that the weeds have as good a right to exist as the
flowers.
It is obviously one of the earliest instincts of man to get rid of his
rivals by killing them. Cain was representative of the human race at
this barbarous stage. It is the stage of unhampered egoism, of
_laissez-faire_ applied to morals. Poets, who sometimes inherit this
egoism, have written sympathetically of Cain: now that art is becoming
deliberately primitive again, we may expect to see new statues to Cain
insolently set up in the poets' back bedrooms. Civilisation is, in one
aspect, a war against Cain and the minor poets. It depends in its
early stages on the suppression of the private right to murder--on the
socialisation, one may say, of the right to kill. No doubt, even in
the most highly-developed civilisations, the right to kill is still
left to some extent in the hands of private individuals. One has the
right to kill certain people in self-defence. But the more advanced
civilisation is, the more limited will that right be. So limited has
it become in modern England that it has been maintained one is not
even entitled to shoot a burglar unless, by running away and in
various other ways, one has first exhausted all the gentler devices
for escaping injury at his hands. This may seem a sad falling-away
from the dramatic virtues of the heroic age, when one slung dead
burglars round one's neck like a bag of game. But the heroic age, as
has been pointed out, was an age of egoists, not of citizens. When
heroes evolved into citizens, as we see in the history of Athens, the
culminating triumph came with the abandonment of the right to kill as
symbolised in the carrying of arms. Athens was the first city in
Greece in which the men went about unarmed. That was a recognition of
the fact that civilised man is not a killing animal to the greatest
degree possible, but only in the least degree possible.