possibilities just as a more or less constructive Socialism does or does
not get hold of and inspire the working mass of the population. In the
worst event—given an emotional and empty hostility to property as such,
masquerading as Socialism—one has the prospect of a bitter and aimless
class war between the expropriated many and the property-holding few, a
war not of general insurrection but of localised outbreaks, strikes and
brutal suppressions, a war rising to bloody conflicts and sinking to
coarsely corrupt political contests, in which one side may prevail in
one locality and one in another, and which may even develop into a
chronic civil war in the less-settled parts of the country or an
irresistible movement for secession between West and East. That is
assuming the greatest imaginable vehemence and short-sighted selfishness
and the least imaginable intelligence on the part of both workers and
the plutocrat-swayed government. But if the more powerful and educated
sections of the American community realise in time the immense moral
possibilities of the Socialist movement, if they will trouble to
understand its good side instead of emphasising its bad, if they will
keep in touch with it and help in the development of a constructive
content to its propositions, then it seems to me that popular Socialism
may count as a third great factor in the making of the civilised
American State.
In any case, it does not seem to me probable that there can be any
national revolutionary movement or any complete arrest in the
development of an aristocratic phase in American history. The area of
the country is too great and the means of communication between the
workers in different parts inadequate for a concerted rising or even for
effective political action in mass. In the worst event—and it is only in
the worst event that a great insurrectionary movement becomes
probable—the newspapers, magazines, telephones and telegraphs, all the
apparatus of discussion and popular appeal, the railways, arsenals,
guns, flying machines, and all the material of warfare, will be in the
hands of the property owners, and the average of betrayal among the
leaders of a class, not racially homogeneous, embittered, suspicious,
united only by their discomforts and not by any constructive intentions,
will necessarily be high. So that, though the intensifying trouble
between labour and capital may mean immense social disorganisation and
lawlessness, though it may even supply the popular support in new
attempts at secession, I do not see in it the possibility and force for
that new start which the revolutionary Socialists anticipate; I see it
merely as one of several forces making, on the whole and particularly in
view of the possible mediatory action of the universities, for
construction and reconciliation.
§ 10
What changes are likely to occur in the more intimate social life of the
people of the United States? Two influences are at work that may modify
this profoundly. One is that spread of knowledge and that accompanying
change in moral attitude which is more and more sterilising the once
prolific American home, and the second is the rising standard of
feminine education. There has arisen in this age a new consciousness in
women. They are entering into the collective thought to a degree
unprecedented in the world’s history, and with portents at once
disquieting and confused.
In § 5 I enumerated what I called the silent factors in the American
synthesis, the immigrant European aliens, the Catholics, the coloured
blood, and so forth. I would now observe that, in the making of the
American tradition, the women also have been to a large extent, and
quite remarkably, a silent factor. That tradition is not only
fundamentally middle-class and English, but it is also fundamentally
masculine. The citizen is the man. The woman belongs to him. He votes
for her, works for her, does all the severer thinking for her. She is in
the home behind the shop or in the dairy at the farmhouse with her
daughters. She gets the meal while the men talk. The American
imagination and American feeling centre largely upon the family and upon
“mother.” American ideals are homely. The social unit is the home, and
it is another and a different set of influences and considerations that
are never thought of at all when the home sentiment is under discussion,
that, indeed, it would be indelicate to mention at such a time, which
are making that social unit the home of one child or of no children at
all.
That ideal of a man-owned, mother-revering home has been the prevalent
American ideal from the landing of the _Mayflower_ right down to the
leader-writing of Mr. Arthur Brisbane. And it is clear that a very
considerable section among one’s educated women contemporaries do not
mean to stand this ideal any longer. They do not want to be owned and
cherished, and they do not want to be revered. How far they represent
their sex in this matter it is very hard to say. In England in the
professional and most intellectually active classes it is scarcely an
exaggeration to say that _all_ the most able women below five-and-thirty
are workers for the suffrage and the ideal of equal and independent
citizenship, and active critics of the conventions under which women
live to-day. It is at least plausible to suppose that a day is
approaching when the alternatives between celibacy or a life of economic
dependence and physical subordination to a man who has chosen her, and
upon whose kindness her happiness depends, or prostitution, will no
longer be a satisfactory outlook for the great majority of women, and
when, with a newly aroused political consciousness, they will be
prepared to exert themselves as a class to modify this situation. It may
be that this is incorrect, and that in devotion to an accepted male and
his children most women do still and will continue to find their
greatest satisfaction in life. But it is the writer’s impression that so
simple and single-hearted a devotion is rare, and that, released from
tradition—and education, reading and discussion do mean release from
tradition—women are as eager for initiative, freedom and experience as
men. In that case they will persist in the present agitation for
political rights, and these secured, go on to demand a very considerable
reconstruction of our present social order.
It is interesting to point the direction in which this desire for
independence will probably take them. They will discover that the
dependence of women at the present time is not so much a law-made as an
economic dependence due to the economic disadvantages their sex imposes
upon them. Maternity and the concomitants of maternity are the
circumstances in their lives, exhausting energy and earning nothing,
that place them at a discount. From the stage when property ceased to be
chiefly the creation of feminine agricultural toil (the so-called
primitive matriarchate) to our present stage, women have had to depend
upon a man’s willingness to keep them, in order to realise the organic
purpose of their being. Whether conventionally equal or not, whether
voters or not, that necessity for dependence will still remain under our
system of private property and free independent competition. There is
only one evident way by which women as a class can escape from that
dependence each upon an individual man and from all the practical
inferiority this dependence entails, and that is by so altering their
status as to make maternity and the upbringing of children a charge not
upon the husband or the mother but upon the community. The public
Endowment of Maternity is the only route by which the mass of women can
reach that personal freedom and independent citizenship so many of them
desire.
Now, this idea of the Endowment of Maternity—or, as it is frequently
phrased, the Endowment of the Home—is at present put forward by the
modern Socialists as an integral part of their proposals, and it is
interesting to note that there is this convergent possibility which may
bring the feminist movement at last altogether into line with
constructive Socialism. Obviously, before anything in the direction of
family endowment becomes practicable, public bodies and the State
organisation will need to display far more integrity and efficiency than
they do in America at the present time. Still, that is the trend of
things in all contemporary civilised communities, and it is a trend that
will find a powerful reinforcement in men’s solicitudes as the
increasing failure of the unsupported private family to produce
offspring adequate to the needs of social development becomes more and
more conspicuous. The impassioned appeals of President Roosevelt have
already brought home the race-suicide of the native-born to every
American intelligence, but mere rhetoric will not in itself suffice to
make people, insecurely employed and struggling to maintain a
comfortable standard of life against great economic pressure, prolific.
Presented as a call to a particularly onerous and quite unpaid social
duty the appeal for unrestricted parentage fails. Husband and wife alike
dread an excessive burthen. Travel, leisure, freedom, comfort, property
and increased ability for business competition are the rewards of
abstinence from parentage, and even the disapproval of President
Roosevelt and the pride of offspring are insufficient counterweights to
these inducements. Large families disappear from the States, and more
and more and more couples are childless. Those who have children
restrict their number in order to afford those they have some reasonable
advantage in life. This, in the presence of the necessary knowledge, is
as practically inevitable a consequence of individualist competition and
the old American tradition as the appearance of slums and a class of
millionaires.
These facts go to the very root of the American problem. I have already
pointed out that, in spite of a colossal immigration, the population of
the United States was at the end of the nineteenth century over twenty
millions short of what it should have been through its own native
increase had the birth-rate of the opening of the century been
maintained. For a hundred years America has been “fed” by Europe. That
feeding process will not go on indefinitely. The immigration came in
waves as if reservoir after reservoir was tapped and exhausted. Nowadays
England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Scandinavia send hardly any more;
they have no more to send. Germany and Switzerland send only a few. The
South European and Austrian supply is not as abundant as it was. There
may come a time when Europe and Western Asia will have no more surplus
population to send, when even Eastern Asia will have passed into a less
fecund phase, and when America will have to look to its own natural
increase for the continued development of its resources.
If the present isolated family of private competition is still the
social unit, it seems improbable that there will be any greater natural
increase than there is in France.
Will the growing idea of a closer social organisation have developed by
that time to the possibility of some collective effort in this matter?
Or will that only come about after the population of the world has
passed through a phase of absolute recession? The peculiar constitution
of the United States gives a remarkable freedom of experiment in these
matters to each individual state, and local developments do not need to
wait upon a national change of opinion; but, on the other hand, the
superficial impression of an English visitor is that any such profound
interference with domestic autonomy runs counter to all that Americans
seem to hold dear at the present time. These are, however, new ideas and
new considerations that have still to be brought adequately before the
national consciousness, and it is quite impossible to calculate how a
population living under changing conditions and with a rising standard
of education and a developing feminine consciousness may not think and
feel and behave in a generation’s time. At present for all political and
collective action America is a democracy of untutored individualist men
who will neither tolerate such interference between themselves and the
women they choose to marry as the Endowment of Motherhood implies, nor
view the “kids” who will at times occur even in the best-regulated
families as anything but rather embarrassing, rather amusing by-products
of the individual affections.
I find in the London _New Age_ for August 15th, 1908, a description by
Mr. Jerome K. Jerome of “John Smith,” the average British voter. John
Smith might serve in some respects for the common man of all the modern
civilisations. Among other things that John Smith thinks and wants, he
wants:
“a little house and garden in the country all to himself. His idea
is somewhere near half an acre of ground. He would like a piano in
the best room; it has always been his dream to have a piano. The
youngest girl, he is convinced, is musical. As a man who has knocked
about the world and has thought, he quite appreciates the argument
that by co-operation the material side of life can be greatly
improved. He quite sees that by combining a dozen families together
in one large house better practical results can be obtained. It is
as easy to direct the cooking for a hundred as for half a dozen.
There would be less waste of food, of coals, of lighting. To put
aside one piano for one girl is absurd. He sees all this, but it
does not alter one little bit his passionate craving for that small
house and garden all to himself. He is built that way. He is typical
of a good many other men and women built on the same pattern. What
are you going to do with them? Change them—their instincts, their
very nature, rooted in the centuries? Or, as an alternative, vary
Socialism to fit John Smith? Which is likely to prove the shorter
operation?”
That, however, is by the way. Here is the point at issue:
“He has heard that Socialism proposes to acknowledge woman’s service
to the State by paying her a weekly wage according to the number of
children that she bears and rears. I don’t propose to repeat his
objections to the idea; they could hardly be called objections.
There is an ugly look comes into his eyes; something quite
undefinable, prehistoric, almost dangerous, looks out of them.... In
talking to him on this subject you do not seem to be talking to a
man. It is as if you had come face to face with something behind
civilisation, behind humanity, something deeper down still among the
dim beginnings of creation....”
Now, no doubt Mr. Jerome is writing with emphasis here. But there is
sufficient truth in the passage for it to stand here as a rough symbol
of another factor in this question. John Smithism, that manly and
individualist element in the citizen, stands over against and resists
all the forces of organisation that would subjugate it to a collective
purpose. It is careless of coming national cessation and depopulation,
careless of the insurgent spirit beneath the acquiescences of Mrs.
Smith, careless of its own inevitable defeat in the economic struggle,
careless because it can understand none of these things; it is
obstinately muddle-headed, asserting what it conceives to be itself
against the universe and all other John Smiths whatsoever. It is a
factor with all other factors. The creative, acquisitive, aggressive
spirit of those bigger John Smiths who succeed as against the myriads of
John Smiths who fail, the wider horizons and more efficient methods of
the educated man, the awakening class-consciousness of women, the
inevitable futility of John Smithism, the sturdy independence that makes
John Smith resent even disciplined co-operation with Tom Brown to
achieve a common end, his essential incapacity, indeed, for collective
action; all these things are against the ultimate triumph, and make for
the ultimate civilisation even of John Smith.
§ 11
It may be doubted if the increasing collective organisation of society
to which the United States of America, in common with all the rest of
the world, seem to be tending will be to any very large extent a
national organisation. The constitution is an immense and complicated
barrier to effectual centralisation. There are many reasons for
supposing the national government will always remain a little
ineffectual and detached from the full flow of American life, and this
notwithstanding the very great powers with which the President is
endowed.
One of these reasons is certainly the peculiar accident that has placed
the seat of government upon the Potomac. To the thoughtful visitor to
the United States this hiding away of the central government in a minute
district remote from all the great centres of thought, population and
business activity becomes more remarkable, more perplexing, more
suggestive of an incurable weakness in the national government as he
grasps more firmly the peculiarities of the American situation.
I do not see how the central government of that great American nation of
which I dream can possibly be at Washington, and I do not see how the
present central government can possibly be transferred to any other
centre. But to go to Washington, to see and talk to Washington, is to
receive an extraordinary impression of the utter isolation and
hopelessness of Washington. The National Government has an air of being
marooned there or as though it had crept into a corner, to do something
in the dark. One goes from the abounding movement and vitality of the
Northern cities to this sunny and enervating place through the
negligently cultivated country of Virginia, and one discovers the
slovenly, unfinished promise of a city, broad avenues lined by negro
shanties and patches of cultivation, great public buildings and an
immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert university, a splendid
desert library, a street of souvenir shops, a certain industry of
“seeing Washington,” an idiotic colossal obelisk. It seems an ideal nest
for the tariff manipulator, a festering corner of delegates and agents
and secondary people. In the White House, in the time of President
Roosevelt, the present writer found a transitory glow of intellectual
activity, the spittoons and glass screens that once made it like a
London gin palace had been removed, and the former orgies of handshaking
reduced to a minimum. It was, one felt, an accidental phase. The
assassination of McKinley was an interruption of the normal Washington
process. To this place, out of the way of everywhere, come the senators
and congressmen, mostly leaving their families behind them in their
states of origin, and hither, too, are drawn a multitude of journalists
and political agents and clerks, a crowd of underbred, mediocre men. For
most of them there is neither social nor intellectual life. The thought
of America is far away, centred now in New York; the business and
economic development centres upon New York; apart from the President, it
is in New York that one meets the people who matter, and the New York
atmosphere that grows and develops ideas and purposes. New York is the
natural capital of the United States, and would need to be the capital
of any highly organised national system. Government from the district of
Columbia is in itself the repudiation of any highly organised national
system.
But government from this ineffectual, inert place is only the most
striking outcome of that inflexible constitution the wrangling delegates
of 1787–8 did at last produce out of a conflict of State jealousies.
They did their best to render centralisation or any coalescence of
States impossible and private property impregnable, and so far their
work has proved extraordinarily effective. Only a great access of
intellectual and moral vigour in the nation can ever set it aside. And
while the more and more sterile millions of the United States grapple
with the legal and traditional difficulties that promise at last to
arrest their development altogether, the rest of the world will be
moving on to new phases. An awakened Asia will be reorganising its
social and political conceptions in the light of modern knowledge and
modern ideas, and South America will be working out its destinies,
perhaps in the form of a powerful confederation of states. All Europe
will be schooling its John Smiths to finer discipline and broader ideas.
It is quite possible that the American John Smith may have little to
brag about in the way of national predominance, by A.D. 2000. It is
quite possible that the United States may be sitting meekly at the feet
of at present unanticipated teachers.
THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION
(_New Year, 1909_)
The Editor of the _New York World_ has asked me to guess the general
trend of events in the next thirty years or so with especial reference
to the outlook for the State and City of New York. I like and rarely
refuse such cheerful invitations to prophesy. I have already made a sort
of forecast (in my _Anticipations_) of what may happen if the social and
economic process goes on fairly smoothly for all that time, and shown a
New York relieved from its present congestion by the development of the
means of communication, and growing and spreading in wide and splendid
suburbs towards Boston and Philadelphia. I made that forecast before
ever I passed Sandy Hook, but my recent visit only enhanced my sense of
growth and “go” in things American. Still, we are nowadays all too apt
to think that growth is inevitable and progress in the nature of things;
the Wonderful Century, as Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace has called it, has
made us perhaps over-confident and forgetful of the ruins of great
cities and confident prides of the past that litter the world, and here
I will write about the other alternative, of the progressive process
“hitting something,” and smashing.
There are two chief things in modern life that impress me as dangerous
and incalculable. The first of these is the modern currency and
financial system, and the second is the chance we take of destructive
war. Let me dwell first of all on the mysterious possibilities of the
former, and then point out one or two uneasy developments of the latter.
Now, there is nothing scientific about our currency and finance at all.
It is a thing that has grown up and elaborated itself out of very simple
beginnings in the course of a century or so. Three hundred years ago the
edifice had hardly begun to rise from the ground, most property was
real, most people lived directly on the land, most business was on a
cash basis, oversea trade was a proportionately small affair, labour was
locally fixed. Most of the world was at the level at which much of China
remains to-day—able to get along without even coinage. It was a
rudimentary world from the point of view of the modern financier and
industrial organiser. Well, on that rude, secure basis there has now
been piled the most chancy and insecurely experimental system of
conventions and assumptions about money and credit it is possible to
imagine. There has grown up a vast system of lending and borrowing, a
worldwide extension of joint-stock enterprises that involve at last the
most fantastic relationships. I find myself, for example, owning
(partially, at least) a bank in New Zealand, a railway in Cuba, another
in Canada, several in Brazil, an electric power plant in the City of
Westminster, and so on, and I use these stocks and shares as a sort of
interest-bearing money. If I want money to spend, I sell a railway share
much as one might change a hundred-pound banknote; if I have more cash
than I need immediately, I buy a few shares. I perceive that the value
of these shares oscillates, sometimes rather gravely, and that the value
of the alleged money on the cheques I get also oscillates as compared
with the things I want to buy; that, indeed, the whole system (which has
only existed for a couple of centuries or so, and which keeps on getting
higher and giddier) is perpetually swaying and quivering and bending and
sagging; but it is only when such a great crisis occurs as that of 1907
that it enters my mind that possibly there is no limit to these
oscillations, that possibly the whole vast accidental edifice will
presently come smashing down.
Why shouldn’t it?