Clearly this will not do. We must reconcile education with liberty.
We must find out some means of making men workers and, if need be,
warriors, without making them slaves. We must cultivate the noble
virtues that have their root in pride. Now no schoolmaster will teach
these any more than a prison governor will teach his prisoners how to
mutiny and escape. Self-preservation forces him to break the spirit
that revolts against him, and to inculcate submission, even to obscene
assault, as a duty. A bishop once had the hardihood to say that he would
rather see England free than England sober. Nobody has yet dared to say
that he would rather see an England of ignoramuses than an England of
cowards and slaves. And if anyone did, it would be necessary to point
out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have got at
present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves, and
extremely proud of it at that, because in school they are taught to
submit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (as if any
Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robbery
and oppression than we Occidentals do), to be driven day after day into
compounds and set to the tasks they loathe by the men they hate and
fear, as if this were the inevitable destiny of mankind. And naturally,
when they grow up, they helplessly exchange the prison of the school for
the prison of the mine or the workshop or the office, and drudge along
stupidly and miserably, with just enough gregarious instinct to turn
furiously on any intelligent person who proposes a change. It would be
quite easy to make England a paradise, according to our present ideas,
in a few years. There is no mystery about it: the way has been pointed
out over and over again. The difficulty is not the way but the will. And
we have no will because the first thing done with us in childhood was to
break our will. Can anything be more disgusting than the spectacle of a
nation reading the biography of Gladstone and gloating over the account
of how he was flogged at Eton, two of his schoolfellows being compelled
to hold him down whilst he was flogged. Not long ago a public body in
England had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster who, conceiving
himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against his orders by
a pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog him publicly as a
satisfaction to what he called his honor and authority. I had intended
to give the particulars of this ease, but find the drudgery of repeating
such stuff too sickening, and the effect unjust to a man who was
doing only what others all over the country were doing as part of the
established routine of what is called education. The astounding part of
it was the manner in which the person to whom this outrage on decency
seemed quite proper and natural claimed to be a functionary of high
character, and had his claim allowed. In Japan he would hardly have been
allowed the privilege of committing suicide. What is to be said of a
profession in which such obscenities are made points of honor, or of
institutions in which they are an accepted part of the daily routine?
Wholesome people would not argue about the taste of such nastinesses:
they would spit them out; but we are tainted with flagellomania from
our childhood. When will we realize that the fact that we can become
accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary
for us to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?
Before motor cars became common, necessity had accustomed us to a
foulness in our streets which would have horrified us had the street
been our drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particular
about our streets as we now are about our carpets; and their condition
in the nineteenth century will become as forgotten and incredible as the
condition of the corridors of palaces and the courts of castles was as
late as the eighteenth century. This foulness, we can plead, was imposed
on us as a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues; but
flogging has never been so imposed: it has always been a vice, craved
for on any pretext by those depraved by it. Boys were flogged when
criminals were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them. Boys were
flogged at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their memory. Other
methods and other punishments were always available: the choice of
this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice an
abomination. But when its viciousness made it customary, it was
practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent of
anything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to discover
other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen
practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended to
slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39 lashes.
In the early nineteenth century it had become an open madness: soldiers
were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling offences, with the
result (among others less mentionable) that the Iron Duke of Wellington
complained that it was impossible to get an order obeyed in the British
army except in two or three crack regiments. Such frantic excesses of
this disgusting neurosis provoked a reaction against it; but the clamor
for it by depraved persons never ceased, and was tolerated by a nation
trained to it from childhood in the schools until last year (1913), when
in what must be described as a paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked by
the agitation concerning the White Slave Traffic (the purely commercial
nature of which I was prevented from exposing on the stage by the
Censorship twenty years ago) the Government yielded to an outcry for
flagellation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and passed an Act
under which a judge can sentence a man to be flogged to the utmost
extremity with any instrument usable for such a purpose that he cares
to prescribe. Such an Act is not a legislative phenomenon but a
psychopathic one. Its effect on the White Slave Traffic was, of course,
to distract public attention from its real cause and from the people who
really profit by it to imaginary "foreign scoundrels," and to secure a
monopoly of its organization for women.
And all this evil is made possible by the schoolmaster with his cane and
birch, by the parents getting rid as best they can of the nuisance of
children making noise and mischief in the house, and by the denial to
children of the elementary rights of human beings.
The first man who enslaved and "broke in" an animal with a whip would
have invented the explosion engine instead could he have foreseen the
curse he was laying on his race. For men and women learnt thereby to
enslave and break in their children by the same means. These children,
grown up, knew no other methods of training. Finally the evil that was
done for gain by the greedy was refined on and done for pleasure by the
lustful. Flogging has become a pleasure purchasable in our streets, and
inhibition a grown-up habit that children play at. "Go and see what baby
is doing; and tell him he mustnt" is the last word of the nursery; and
the grimmest aspect of it is that it was first formulated by a comic
paper as a capital joke.