necessary consequence of the individualistic competition of modern life.
People talk of modern women “shirking” motherhood, but it would be a
silly sort of universe in which a large proportion of women had any
natural and instinctive desire to shirk motherhood, and, I believe, a
huge proportion of modern women are as passionately predisposed towards
motherhood as ever women were. But modern conditions conspire to put a
heavy handicap upon parentage and an enormous premium upon the partial
or complete evasion of offspring, and that is where the clue to the
trouble lies. Our social arrangements discourage parentage very heavily,
and the rational thing for a statesman to do in the matter is not to
grow eloquent, but to do intelligent things to minimise that
discouragement.
Consider the case of an energetic young man and an energetic young woman
in our modern world. So long as they remain “unencumbered” they can
subsist on a comparatively small income and find freedom and leisure to
watch for and follow opportunities of self-advancement; they can travel,
get knowledge and experience, make experiments, succeed. One might
almost say the conditions of success and self-development in the modern
world are to defer marriage as long as possible, and after that to defer
parentage as long as possible. And even when there is a family there is
the strongest temptation to limit it to three or four children at the
outside. Parents who can give three children any opportunity in life
prefer to do that than turn out, let us say, eight ill-trained children
at a disadvantage, to become the servants and unsuccessful competitors
of the offspring of the restrained. That fact bites us all; it does not
require a search. It is all very well to rant about “race-suicide,” but
there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for
all but the really rich, and so patent are they that I doubt if all the
eloquence of Mr. Roosevelt and its myriad echoes has added a thousand
babies to the eugenic wealth of the English-speaking world.
Modern married people, and particularly those in just that capable
middle class from which children are most urgently desirable from the
statesman’s point of view, are going to have one or two children to
please themselves, but they are not going to have larger families under
existing conditions, though all the ex-Presidents and all the pulpits in
the world clamour together for them to do so.
If having and rearing children is a private affair, then no one has any
right to revile small families; if it is a public service, then the
parent is justified in looking to the State to recognise that service
and offer some compensation for the worldly disadvantages it entails. He
is justified in saying that while his unencumbered rival wins past him
he is doing the State a most precious service in the world by rearing
and educating a family, and that the State has become his debtor.
In other words, the modern State has got to pay for its children if it
really wants them—and more particularly it has to pay for the children
of good homes.
The alternative to that is racial replacement and social decay. That is
the essential idea conveyed by this phrase the Endowment of Motherhood.
Now, how is the paying to be done? That needs a more elaborate answer,
of which I will give here only the roughest, crudest suggestion.
Probably it would be found best that the payment should be made to the
mother, as the administrator of the family budget, that its amount
should be made dependent upon the quality of the home in which the
children are being reared, upon their health and physical development,
and upon their educational success. Be it remembered, we do not want any
children; we want good-quality children. The amount to be paid, I would
particularly point out, should vary with the standing of the home.
People of that excellent class which spends over a hundred a year on
each child ought to get about that much from the State, and people of
the class which spends five shilling a week per head on them would get
about that, and so on. And if these payments were met by a special
income tax there would be no social injustice whatever in such an
unequality of payment. Each social stratum would pay according to its
prosperity, and the only redistribution that would in effect occur would
be that the childless people of each class would pay for the children of
that class. The childless family and the small family would pay equally
with the large family, incomes being equal, but they would receive in
proportions varying with the health and general quality of their
children. That, I think, gives the broad principles upon which the
payments would be made.
Of course, if these subsidies resulted in too rapid a rise in the
birth-rate, it would be practicable to diminish the inducement, and if,
on the other hand, the birth-rate still fell, it would be easy to
increase the inducement until it sufficed.
That concisely is the idea of the Endowment of Motherhood. I believe
firmly that some such arrangement is absolutely necessary to the
continuous development of the modern State. These proposals arise so
obviously out of the needs of our time that I cannot understand any
really intelligent opposition to them. I can, however, understand a
partial and silly application of them. It is most important that our
good-class families should be endowed, but the whole tendency of the
timid and disingenuous progressivism of our time, which is all mixed up
with ideas of charity and aggressive benevolence to the poor, would be
to apply this—as that Fabian tract I mention does—only to the poor
mother. To endow poor and bad-class motherhood and leave other people
severely alone would be a proceeding so supremely idiotic, so harmful to
our national quality, as to be highly probable in the present state of
our public intelligence. It comes quite on a level with the policy of
starving middle-class education that has left us with nearly the worst
educated middle class in Western Europe.
The Endowment of Motherhood does not attract the bureaucratic type of
reformer because it offers a minimum chance of meddlesome interference
with people’s lives. There would be no chance of “seeking out” anybody
and applying benevolent but grim compulsions on the strength of it. In
spite of its wide scope it would be much less of a public nuisance than
that Wet Children’s Charter, which exasperates me every time I pass a
public-house on a rainy night. But, on the other hand, there would be an
enormous stimulus to people to raise the quality of their homes, study
infantile hygiene, seek out good schools for them—and do their duty as
all good parents naturally want to do now—if only economic forces were
not so pitilessly against them—thoroughly and well.
DOCTORS
In that extravagant world of which I dream, in which people will live in
delightful cottages and ground rents will serve instead of rates, and
everyone will have a chance of being happy—in that impossible world all
doctors will be members of one great organisation for the public health,
with all or most of their income guaranteed to them: I doubt if there
will be any private doctors at all.
Heaven forbid I should seem to write a word against doctors as they are.
Daily I marvel at the wonders the general practitioner achieves, having
regard to the difficulties of his position.
But I cannot hide from myself, and I do not intend to hide from anyone
else, my firm persuasion that the services the general practitioner is
able to render us are not one-tenth so effectual as they might be if,
instead of his being a private adventurer, he were a member of a sanely
organised public machine. Consider what his training and equipment are,
consider the peculiar difficulties of his work, and then consider for a
moment what better conditions might be invented, and perhaps you will
not think my estimate of one-tenth an excessive understatement in this
matter.
Nearly the whole of our medical profession and most of our apparatus for
teaching and training doctors subsist on strictly commercial lines by
earning fees. This chief source of revenue is eked out by the wanton
charity of old women, and conspicuous subscriptions by popularity
hunters, and a small but growing contribution (in the salaries of
medical officers of health and so forth) from the public funds. But the
fact remains that for the great mass of the medical profession there is
no living to be got except at a salary for hospital practice or by
earning fees in receiving or attending upon private cases.
So long as a doctor is learning or adding to knowledge, he earns
nothing, and the common, unintelligent man does not see why he should
earn anything. So that a doctor who has no religious passion for poverty
and self-devotion gets through the minimum of training and learning as
quickly and as cheaply as possible, and does all he can to fill up the
rest of his time in passing rapidly from case to case. The busier he
keeps, the less his leisure for thought and learning, the richer he
grows, and the more he is esteemed. His four or five years of hasty,
crowded study are supposed to give him a complete and final knowledge of
the treatment of every sort of disease, and he goes on year after year,
often without co-operation, working mechanically in the common incidents
of practice, births, cases of measles and whooping-cough, and so forth,
and blundering more or less in whatever else turns up.
There are no public specialists to whom he can conveniently refer the
difficulties he constantly encounters, only in the case of rich patients
is the specialist available; there are no properly organised information
bureaus for him, and no means whatever of keeping him informed upon
progress and discovery in medical science. He is not even required to
set apart a month or so in every two or three years in order to return
to lectures and hospitals and refresh his knowledge. Indeed, the income
of the average general practitioner would not permit of such a thing,
and almost the only means of contact between him and current thought
lies in the one or other of our two great medical weeklies to which he
happens to subscribe.
Now just as I have nothing but praise for the average general
practitioner, so I have nothing but praise and admiration for those
stalwart-looking publications. Without them I can imagine nothing but
the most terrible intellectual atrophy among our medical men. But since
they are private properties run for profit they have to pay, and half
their bulk consists of the brilliantly written advertisements of new
drugs and apparatus. They give much knowledge, they do much to ventilate
perplexing questions, but a broadly conceived and properly endowed
weekly circular could, I believe, do much more. At any rate, in my
Utopia this duty of feeding up the general practitioners will not be
left to private enterprise.
Behind the first line of my medical army will be a second line of able
men constantly digesting new research for its practical needs,
correcting, explaining, announcing; and, in addition, a force of public
specialists to whom every difficulty in diagnosis will be at once
referred. And there will be a properly organised system of reliefs that
will allow the general practitioner and his right hand, the nurse, to
come back to the refreshment of study before his knowledge and mind have
got rusty. But then my Utopia is a Socialistic system. Under our present
system of competitive scramble, under any system that reduces medical
practice to mere fee-hunting, nothing of this sort is possible.
Then in my Utopia, for every medical man who was mainly occupied in
practice, I would have another who was mainly occupied in or about
research. People hear so much about modern research that they do not
realise how entirely inadequate it is in amount and equipment. Our
general public is still too stupid to understand the need and value of
sustained investigations in any branch of knowledge at all. In spite of
all the lessons of the last century, it still fails to realise how
discovery and invention enrich the community and how paying an
investment is the public employment of clever people to think and
experiment for the benefit of all. It still expects to get a Newton or a
Joule for £800 a year, and requires him to conduct his researches in the
margin of time left over when he has got through his annual eighty or
ninety lectures. It imagines discoveries are a sort of inspiration that
comes when professors are running to catch trains. It seems incapable of
imagining how enormous are the untried possibilities of research. Of
course, if you will only pay a handful of men salaries at which the cook
of any large London hotel would turn up his nose, you cannot expect to
have the master minds of the world at your service; and save for a few
independent or devoted men, therefore, it is not reasonable to suppose
that such a poor little dribble of medical research as is now going on
is in the hands of persons of much more than average mental equipment.
How can it be?
One hears a lot of the rigorous research into the problem of cancer that
is now going on. Does the reader realise that all the men in the whole
world who are giving any considerable proportion of their time to this
cancer research would pack into a very small room, that they are working
in little groups without any properly organised system of
intercommunication, and that half of them are earning less than a
quarter of the salary of a Bond Street shopwalker by those vastly
important inquiries? Not one cancer case in twenty thousand is being
properly described and reported. And yet, in comparison with other
diseases, cancer is being particularly well attended to.
The general complacency with the progress in knowledge we have made and
are making is ridiculously unjustifiable. Enormous things were no doubt
done in the nineteenth century in many fields of knowledge, but all that
was done was out of all proportion petty in comparison with what might
have been done. I suppose the whole of the unprecedented progress in
material knowledge of the nineteenth century was the work of two or
three thousand men, who toiled against opposition, spite and endless
disadvantages, without proper means of intercommunication and with
wretched facilities for experiment. Such discoveries as were
distinctively medical were the work of only a few hundred men. Now,
suppose instead of that scattered band of uncoordinated workers a great
army of hundreds of thousands of well-paid men; suppose, for instance,
the community had kept as many scientific and medical investigators as
it has bookmakers and racing touts and men about town—should we not know
a thousand times as much as we do about disease and health and strength
and power?
But these are Utopian questionings. The sane, practical man shakes his
head, smiles pityingly at my dreamy impracticability, and passes them
by.
AN AGE OF SPECIALISATION
There is something of the phonograph in all of us, but in the sort of
eminent person who makes public speeches about education and reading,
and who gives away prizes and opens educational institutions, there
seems to be little else but gramophone.
These people always say the same things, and say them in the same note.
And why should they do that if they are really individuals?
There is, I cannot but suspect, in the mysterious activities that
underlie life, some trade in records for these distinguished
gramophones, and it is a trade conducted upon cheap and wholesale lines.
There must be in these demiurgic profundities a rapid manufacture of
innumerable thousands of that particular speech about “scrappy reading,”
and that contrast of “modern” with “serious” literature, that babbles
about the provinces so incessantly. Gramophones thinly disguised as
bishops, gramophones still more thinly disguised as eminent statesmen,
gramophones K.C.B. and gramophones F.R.S. have brazened it at us time
after time, and will continue to brazen it to our grandchildren when we
are dead and all our poor protests forgotten. And almost equally popular
in their shameless mouths is the speech that declares this present age
to be an age of specialisation. We all know the profound droop of the
eminent person’s eyelids as he produces that discovery, the edifying
deductions or the solemn warnings he unfolds from this proposition, and
all the dignified, inconclusive rigmarole of that cylinder. And it is
nonsense from beginning to end.
This is most distinctly _not_ an age of specialisation. There has hardly
been an age in the whole course of history less so than the present. A
few moments of reflection will suffice to demonstrate that. This is
beyond any precedent an age of change, change in the appliances of life,
in the average length of life, in the general temper of life; and the
two things are incompatible. It is only under fixed conditions that you
can have men specialising.
They specialise extremely, for example, under such conditions as one had
in Hindustan up to the coming of the present generation. There the metal
worker or the cloth worker, the wheelwright or the druggist of yesterday
did his work under almost exactly the same conditions as his predecessor
did it five hundred years before. He had the same resources, the same
tools, the same materials; he made the same objects for the same ends.
Within the narrow limits thus set him he carried work to a fine
perfection; his hand, his mental character were subdued to his medium.
His dress and bearing even were distinctive; he was, in fact, a highly
specialised man. He transmitted his difference to his sons. Caste was
the logical expression in the social organisation of this state of high
specialisation, and, indeed, what else is caste or any definite class
distinctions but that? But the most obvious fact of the present time is
the disappearance of caste and the fluctuating uncertainty of all class
distinctions.
If one looks into the conditions of industrial employment,
specialisation will be found to linger just in proportion as a trade has
remained unaffected by inventions and innovation. The building trade,
for example, is a fairly conservative one. A brick wall is made to-day
much as it was made two hundred years ago, and the bricklayer is in
consequence a highly skilled and inadaptable specialist. No one who has
not passed through a long and tedious training can lay bricks properly.
And it needs a specialist to plough a field with horses or to drive a
cab through the streets of London. Thatchers, old-fashioned cobblers,
and hand workers are all specialised to a degree no new modern calling
requires. With machinery skill disappears and unspecialised intelligence
comes in. Any generally intelligent man can learn in a day or two to
drive an electric tram, fix up an electric lighting installation, or
guide a building machine or a steam plough. He must be, of course, much
more generally intelligent than the average bricklayer, but he needs far
less specialised skill. To repair machinery requires, of course, a
special sort of knowledge, but not a special sort of training.
In no way is this disappearance of specialisation more marked than in
military and naval affairs. In the great days of Greece and Rome war was
a special calling, requiring a special type of man. In the Middle Ages
war had an elaborate technique, in which the footman played the part of
an unskilled labourer, and even within a period of a hundred years it
took a long period of training and discipline before the common
discursive man could be converted into the steady soldier. Even to-day
traditions work powerfully, through extravagance of uniform, and through
survivals of that mechanical discipline that was so important in the
days of hand-to-hand fighting, to keep the soldier something other than
a man. For all the lessons of the Boer war we are still inclined to
believe that the soldier has to be something severely parallel, carrying
a rifle he fires under orders, obedient to the pitch of absolute
abnegation of his private intelligence. We still think that our officers
have, like some very elaborate and noble sort of performing animal, to
be “trained”. They learn to fight with certain specified “arms” and
weapons, instead of developing intelligence enough to use anything that
comes to hand.
But, indeed, when a really great European war does come and lets loose
motor-cars, bicycles, wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes, new projectiles
of every size and shape, and a multitude of ingenious persons upon the
preposterously vast hosts of conscription, the military caste will be
missing within three months of the beginning, and the inventive,
versatile, intelligent man will have come to his own.
And what is true of a military caste is equally true of a special
governing class such as our public schools maintain.
The misunderstanding that has given rise to this proposition that this
is an age of specialisation, and through that no end of mischief in
misdirected technical education and the like, is essentially a confusion
between specialisation and the division of labour. No doubt this is an
age when everything makes for wider and wider co-operations. Work that
was once done by one highly specialised man—the making of a watch, for
example—is now turned out wholesale by elaborate machinery, or effected
in great quantities by the contributed efforts of a number of people.
Each of these people may bring a highly developed intelligence to bear
for a time upon the special problem in hand, but that is quite a
different thing from specialising to do that thing.
This is typically shown in scientific research. The problem or the parts
of problems upon which the inquiry of an individual man is concentrated
are often much narrower than the problems that occupied Faraday or
Dalton, and yet the hard and fast lines that once divided physicist from
chemist, or botanist from pathologist have long since gone. Professor
Farmer, the botanist, investigates cancer, and the ordinary educated
man, familiar though he is with their general results, would find it
hard to say which were the chemists and which the physicists among
Professors Dewar and Ramsey, Lord Rayleigh and Curie. The classification
of sciences that was such a solemn business to our grandfathers is now
merely a mental obstruction.
It is interesting to glance for a moment at the possible source of this
mischievous confusion between specialisation and the division of labour.
I have already glanced at the possibility of a diabolical world
manufacturing gramophone records for our bishops and statesmen and
suchlike leaders of thought, but if we dismiss that as a merely elegant
trope, I must confess I think it is the influence of Herbert Spencer.
His philosophy is pervaded by an insistence which is, I think, entirely
without justification, that the universe, and every sort of thing in it,
moves from the simple and homogeneous to the complex and heterogeneous.
An unwary man obsessed with that idea would be very likely to assume
without consideration that men were less specialised in a barbaric state
of society than they are to-day. I think I have given reasons for
believing that the reverse of this is nearer the truth.
IS THERE A PEOPLE?
Of all the great personifications that have dominated the mind of man,
the greatest, the most marvellous, the most impossible and the most
incredible, is surely the People, that impalpable monster to which the
world has consecrated its political institutions for the last hundred
years.
It is doubtful now whether this stupendous superstition has reached its
grand climacteric, and there can be little or no dispute that it is
destined to play a prominent part in the history of mankind for many
years to come. There is a practical as well as a philosophical interest,
therefore, in a note or so upon the attributes of this legendary being.
I write “legendary,” but thereby I display myself a sceptic. To a very
large number of people the People is one of the profoundest realities in
life. They believe—what exactly do they believe about the people?