When Lord Morley said that the House of Lords must be either mended
or ended, he used a phrase which has caused some confusion; because
it might seem to suggest that mending and ending are somewhat similar
things. I wish specially to insist on the fact that mending and ending
are opposite things. You mend a thing because you like it; you end a
thing because you don’t. To mend is to strengthen. I, for instance,
disbelieve in oligarchy; so I would no more mend the House of Lords
than I would mend a thumbscrew. On the other hand, I do believe in the
family; therefore I would mend the family as I would mend a chair; and
I will never deny for a moment that the modern family is a chair that
wants mending. But here comes in the essential point about the mass of
modern advanced sociologists. Here are two institutions that have always
been fundamental with mankind, the family and the state. Anarchists, I
believe, disbelieve in both. It is quite unfair to say that Socialists
believe in the state, but do not believe in the family; thousands of
Socialists believe more in the family than any Tory. But it is true
to say that while anarchists would end both, Socialists are specially
engaged in mending (that is, strengthening and renewing) the state; and
they are not specially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family.
They are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother,
and child, as such; they are not tightening the machine up again; they
are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing. With
the state they are doing this; they are sharpening its machinery,
they are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are making mere
government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before.
While they leave the home in ruins, they restore the hive, especially
the stings. Indeed, some schemes of labor and Poor Law reform recently
advanced by distinguished Socialists, amount to little more than putting
the largest number of people in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble.
Apparently, progress means being moved on--by the police.
The point it is my purpose to urge might perhaps be suggested thus:
that Socialists and most social reformers of their color are vividly
conscious of the line between the kind of things that belong to the
state and the kind of things that belong to mere chaos or uncoercible
nature; they may force children to go to school before the sun rises,
but they will not try to force the sun to rise; they will not, like
Canute, banish the sea, but only the sea-bathers. But inside the outline
of the state their lines are confused, and entities melt into each
other. They have no firm instinctive sense of one thing being in its
nature private and another public, of one thing being necessarily
bond and another free. That is why piece by piece, and quite silently,
personal liberty is being stolen from Englishmen, as personal land has
been silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century.
I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist
means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because
they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a
battle-ax and a bootjack. The essential idea of an umbrella is breadth
and protection. The essential idea of a stick is slenderness and,
partly, attack. The stick is the sword, the umbrella is the shield, but
it is a shield against another and more nameless enemy--the hostile but
anonymous universe. More properly, therefore, the umbrella is the roof;
it is a kind of collapsible house. But the vital difference goes far
deeper than this; it branches off into two kingdoms of man’s mind, with
a chasm between. For the point is this: that the umbrella is a shield
against an enemy so actual as to be a mere nuisance; whereas the
stick is a sword against enemies so entirely imaginary as to be a pure
pleasure. The stick is not merely a sword, but a court sword; it is a
thing of purely ceremonial swagger. One cannot express the emotion in
any way except by saying that a man feels more like a man with a stick
in his hand, just as he feels more like a man with a sword at his side.
But nobody ever had any swelling sentiments about an umbrella; it is
a convenience, like a door scraper. An umbrella is a necessary evil. A
walking-stick is a quite unnecessary good. This, I fancy, is the real
explanation of the perpetual losing of umbrellas; one does not hear of
people losing walking sticks. For a walking-stick is a pleasure, a piece
of real personal property; it is missed even when it is not needed. When
my right hand forgets its stick may it forget its cunning. But anybody
may forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a shed that he has stood
up in out of the rain. Anybody can forget a necessary thing.
If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say that the
whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men
can share an umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick.
Umbrellas might possibly be replaced by some kind of common awnings
covering certain streets from particular showers. But there is nothing
but nonsense in the notion of swinging a communal stick; it is as if one
spoke of twirling a communal mustache. It will be said that this is a
frank fantasia and that no sociologists suggest such follies. Pardon me
if they do. I will give a precise parallel to the case of confusion
of sticks and umbrellas, a parallel from a perpetually reiterated
suggestion of reform. At least sixty Socialists out of a hundred, when
they have spoken of common laundries, will go on at once to speak of
common kitchens. This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as the
fanciful case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rods
that go into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and washhouses
are both large rooms full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul and
function of the two things are utterly opposite. There is only one way
of washing a shirt; that is, there is only one right way. There is no
taste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody says, “Tompkins likes five
holes in his shirt, but I must say, give me the good old four holes.”
Nobody says, “This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; now
if there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped up.” The
ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed. But it is by no
means true that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing back cooked.
Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for
the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be
perverse. I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch common
sausages unless they are almost burned to a coal. He wants his sausages
fried to rags, yet he does not insist on his shirts being boiled to
rags. I do not say that such points of culinary delicacy are of high
importance. I do not say that the communal ideal must give way to
them. What I say is that the communal ideal is not conscious of their
existence, and therefore goes wrong from the very start, mixing a wholly
public thing with a highly individual one. Perhaps we ought to accept
communal kitchens in the social crisis, just as we should accept
communal cat’s-meat in a siege. But the cultured Socialist, quite at his
ease, by no means in a siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they
were the same kind of thing as communal laundries. This shows at the
start that he misunderstands human nature. It is as different as three
men singing the same chorus from three men playing three tunes on the
same piano.
*****