What a fantastically courageous thing is this mind of ours! My thoughts
seem to me at once presumptuous and inevitable. I do not know why it is
that I should dare, that any of us should dream of this attempt to
comprehend. But we who think are everyone impelled to this amazing
effort to get it all together into some simple generality. It is not
reason but a deep-seated instinct that draws our intelligence towards
explanations, that sets us perpetually seeking laws, seeking statements
that will fit into infinite, incessantly interweaving complexities, and
be true of them all! There is I perceive a valiant and magnificent
stupidity about the human mind, a disregard of disproportion and
insufficiency--like the ferret which will turn from the leveret it has
seized to attack even man if he should interfere. By these desperate
feats of thinking it is that our species has achieved its victories. By
them it survives. By them it must stand the test of ultimate survival.
Some forgotten man in our ancestry--for every begetting man alive was in
my individual ancestry and yours three thousand years ago--first dared
to think of the world as round,--an astounding temerity. He rolled up
the rivers and mountains, the forests and plains and broad horizons
that stretched beyond his ken, that seemed to commonsense to go on
certainly for ever, into a ball, into a little ball "like an orange."
Magnificent feat of the imagination, outdoing Thor's deep draught of the
sea! And once he had done it, all do it and no one falters at the deed.
You are not yet seven as I write and already you are serenely aware that
you live upon a sphere. And in much the same manner it is that we, who
are sociologists and economists, publicists and philosophers and what
not, are attempting now to roll up the vast world of facts which concern
human intercourse, the whole indeed of history and archæology, into some
similar imaginable and manageable shape, that presently everyone will be
able to grasp.
I suppose there was a time when nobody bothered at all about the shape
of the earth, when nobody had even had the idea that the earth could be
conceived as having a shape, and similarly it is true that it is only in
recent centuries that people have been able to suppose that there was a
shape to human history. It is indeed not much more than a century since
there was any real emergence from theological assumptions and pure
romanticism and accidentalism in these matters. Old Adam Smith it was,
probing away at the roots of economics, who set going the construction
of ampler propositions. From him spring all those new interpretations
which have changed the writing of history from a record of dramatic
reigns and wars and crises to an analysis of economic forces. How
impossible it would be for anyone now to write that great chapter of
Gibbon's in which he sweeps together into one contempt the history of
sixty Emperors and six hundred years of time. His note of weariness and
futility vanishes directly one's vision penetrates the immediate
surface. Those Heraclians and Isaurians and Comneni were not history, a
schoolboy nowadays knows that their record is not history, knows them
for the mere scum upon the stream.
And still to-day we have our great interpretations to make. Ours is a
time of guesses, theories and provisional generalizations. Our phase
corresponds to the cosmography that was still a little divided between
discs and domes and spheres and cosmic eggs; that was still a thousand
years from measuring and weighing a planet. For a long time my mind
hovered about the stimulating theories of Socialism and particularly
about those more systematic forms of Socialist teaching that centre
about Karl Marx. He rose quite naturally out of those early economists
who saw all the world in terms of production and saving. He was a
necessary step for me at least, on the way to understanding. For a time
I did so shape the world in my mind that it seemed to me no more than a
vast enterprise for the organization and exploitation of labor. For a
time I thought human life was essentially a labor problem, that working
and controlling work and lending and selling and "speculating" made the
essential substance of human life, over which the forms of politics ran
as the stripes of a tiger's skin run and bend over its living muscles. I
followed my period in thinking that. You will find in Ferrero's "Roman
Decline," which was published early in this century, and which waits for
you in the library, almost exactly the method of interpretation that was
recommending itself to me in 1904 and 1905.
Well, the labor problem concerns a great--_substantial_, shall I
say?--in human society. It is only I think the basis and matter of
society, not its shape and life and reality, but it had to be
apprehended before I could get on to more actual things. Insensibly the
idea that contemporary political forms mattered very fundamentally to
men, was fading out of my mind. The British Empire and the German
Empire, the Unity of Italy, and Anglo-Saxon ascendency, the Yellow Peril
and all the other vast phantoms of the World-politician's mythology were
fading out of my mind in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have
faded from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the days of
Heraclitus. And I revised my history altogether in the new light. The
world had ceased to be chaotic in my mind; it had become a vast if as
yet a quite inconclusive drama between employer and employed.
It makes a wonderful history, this history of mankind as a history of
Labor, as a history of the perpetual attempts of an intelligent minority
to get things done by other people. It does not explain how that
aggression of the minority arose nor does it give any conception of a
primordial society which corresponds with our knowledge of the realities
of primitive communities. One begins rather in the air with a human
society that sells and barters and sustains contracts and permits land
to be privately owned, and having as hastily as possible got away from
that difficulty of beginnings, having ignored the large areas of the
world which remain under a pacific and unprogressive agriculture to this
day, the rest of the story becomes extremely convincing and
illuminating. It does indeed give a sustaining explanation to a large
part of recorded history, this generalization about the proclivity of
able and energetic people to make other people do things. One ignores
what is being done as if that mattered nothing, and concentrates upon
the use and enslavement of men.
One sees that enslavement to labor progressing from crude directness to
the most subtly indirect methods. The first expedient of enterprise was
the sword and then the whip, and still there are remote and ugly corners
of the world, in the Mexican Valle Nazionale or in Portuguese South
Africa, where the whip whistles still and the threat of great suffering
and death follows hard upon the reluctant toiler. But the larger part of
our modern slavery is past the stage of brand and whip. We have fallen
into methods at once more subtle and more effective. We stand
benevolently in front of our fellow man, offering, almost as if it were
food and drink and shelter and love, the work we want him to do; and
behind him, we are acutely aware, is necessity, sometimes quite of our
making, as when we drive him to work by a hut-tax or a poll tax or a
rent, that obliges him to earn money, and sometimes not so obviously of
our making, sometimes so little of our making that it is easy to believe
we have no power to remove it. Instead of flicking the whip, we groan at
last with Harriet Martineau at the inexorable laws of political economy
that condemn us to comfort and direction, and those others to toil and
hardship and indignity....
And through the consideration of these latter later aspects it was that
I came at last to those subtler problems of tacit self-deception, of
imperfect and unwilling apprehension, of innocently assumed advantages,
of wilfully disregarded unfairness; and also to all those other problems
of motive, those forgotten questions of why we make others work for us
long after our personal needs are satisfied, why men aggrandize and
undertake, which gradually have become in my mind the essential problems
of human relationship, replacing the crude problems of labor altogether
in that position, making _them_ at last only questions of contrivance
and management on the way to greater ends.
I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems merely by
the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme. This phase of
expropriation and enslavement, this half designed and half unconscious
driving of the duller by the clever, of the pacific by the bolder, of
those with weak appetites and imaginations by those with stronger
appetites and imaginations, has been a necessary phase in human
development. With my innate passionate desire to find the whole world
purposeful, I cannot but believe that. But however necessary it has
been, it is necessary no longer. Strangest of saviors, there rises over
the conflicts of mankind the glittering angular promise of the machine.
There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not
need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are no longer
essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his brother man out of
the need of servitude. He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of
release, a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom is possible to
every human being. Is possible. And it is there one halts seeing that
splendid possibility of aspiration and creation before mankind--and
seeing mankind for the most part still downcast, quite unaware or
incredulous, following the old rounds, the grooves of ancient and
superseded assumptions and subjections....
But here I will not trace in any detail the growth of my conviction
that the ancient and heavy obligation to work hard and continually
throughout life has already slipped from man's shoulders. Suffice it
that now I conceive of the task before mankind as a task essentially of
rearrangement, as a problem in relationships, extremely complex and
difficult indeed, but credibly solvable. During my Indian and Chinese
journey I was still at the Marxist stage. I went about the east looking
at labor, watching its organization and direction, seeing great
interests and enterprises replace the diffused life of an earlier phase;
the disputes and discussions in the Transvaal which had first opened my
mind to these questions came back to me, and steadily I lost my interest
in those mere political and national issues with their paraphernalia of
kings and flags and governments and parties that had hitherto blinded me
to these more fundamental interactions.
§ 2
It happened that in Bombay circumstances conspired to bring the crude
facts of labor enslavement vividly before me. I found a vigorous
agitation raging in the English press against the horrible sweating that
was going on in the cotton mills, I met the journalist most intimately
concerned in the business on my second day in India, and before a week
was out I was hard at work getting up the question and preparing a
memorandum with him on the possibility of immediate legislative
intervention. The very name of Bombay, which for most people recalls a
spacious and dignified landfall, lateen sails, green islands and
jutting precipices, a long city of trees and buildings like a bright and
various breakwater between the great harbor and the sea, and then
exquisite little temples, painted bullock carriages, Towers of Silence,
Parsis, and an amazingly kaleidoscopic population,--is for me a reminder
of narrow, foetid, plague-stricken streets and tall insanitary
tenement-houses packed and dripping with humanity, and of terrible
throbbing factories working far into the night, blazing with electric
light against the velvet-black night-sky of India, damp with the
steam-clouds that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming
with emaciated overworked brown children--for even the adults, spare and
small, in those mills seem children to a western eye.
I plunged into this heated dreadful business with a passionate interest
and went back to the Yacht Club only when the craving for air and a good
bath and clean clothes and space and respect became unendurable. I waded
deep in labor, in this process of consuming humanity for gain, chasing
my facts through throbbing quivering sheds reeking of sweat and
excrement under the tall black-smoking chimneys,--chasing them in very
truth, because when we came prying into the mills after the hour when
child-labor should cease, there would be a shrill whistle, a patter of
feet and a cuffing and hiding of the naked little creatures we were
trying to rescue. They would be hidden under rugs, in boxes, in the most
impossible places, and we dragged them out scared and lying. Many of
them were perhaps seven years old at most; and the adults--men and women
of fourteen that is to say--we could not touch at all, and they worked
in that Indian heat, in a noisome air drenched with steam for fourteen
and fifteen hours a day. And essential to that general impression is a
memory of a slim Parsi mill-manager luminously explaining the inherited
passion for toil in the Indian weaver, and a certain bulky Hindu with a
lemon-yellow turban and a strip of plump brown stomach showing between
his clothes, who was doing very well, he said, with two wives and five
children in the mills.
That is my Bombay, that and the columns of crossed circles marking
plague cases upon the corners of houses and a peculiar acrid smell, and
the polychromatic stir of crowded narrow streets between cliffs of
architecture with carved timbers and heavy ornamentations, into which
the sun strikes obliquely and lights a thousand vivid hues....
Bombay, the gateway of what silly people were still calling in those
days "the immemorial East," Bombay, which is newer than Boston or New
York, Bombay which has grown beneath the Englishman's shadow out of a
Portuguese fort in the last two hundred years....
§ 3
I came out of these dark corners presently into the sunblaze of India. I
was now intensely interested in the whole question of employment and
engaged in preparing matter for my first book, "Enterprise and India,"
and therein you may read how I went first to Assam and then down to
Ceylon following up this perplexing and complicated business of human
enslavement to toil, exercised by this great spectacle of human labor,
and at once attracted by and stimulated by and dissatisfied with those
socialist generalizations that would make all this vast harsh spectacle
of productive enterprise a kind of wickedness and outrage upon humanity.
And behind and about the things I was looking for were other things for
which I was not looking, that slowly came into and qualified the
problem. It dawned upon me by degrees that India is not so much one
country as a vast spectacle of human development at every stage, in
infinite variety. One ranges between naked savages and the most
sophisticated of human beings. I pursued my enquiries about great modern
enterprises, about railway labor, canal labor, tea-planting, across vast
stretches of country where men still lived, illiterate, agricultural,
unprogressive and simple, as men lived before the first stirrings of
recorded history. One sees by the tanks of those mud-built villages
groups of women with brass vessels who are identical in pose and figure
and quality with the women modelled in Tanagra figures, and the droning
wall-wheel is the same that irrigated the fields of ancient Greece, and
the crops and beasts and all the life is as it was in Greece and Italy,
Phoenicia and Judea before the very dawn of history.
By imperceptible degrees I came to realize that this matter of
expropriation and enslavement and control, which bulks so vastly upon
the modern consciousness, which the Socialists treat as though it was
the comprehensive present process of mankind, is no more than one aspect
of an overlife that struggles out of a massive ancient and traditional
common way of living, struggles out again and again--blindly and always
so far with a disorderly insuccess....
I began to see in their proper proportion the vast enduring normal human
existence, the peasant's agricultural life, unlettered, laborious and
essentially unchanging on the one hand, and on the other those
excrescences of multitudinous city aggregation, those stormy excesses of
productive energy that flare up out of that life, establish for a time
great unstable strangenesses of human living, palaces, cities, roads,
empires, literatures, and then totter and fall back again into ruin. In
India even more than about the Mediterranean all this is spectacular.
There the peasant goes about his work according to the usage of fifty
thousand years. He has a primitive version of religion, a moral
tradition, a social usage, closely adapted by countless years of trial
and survival to his needs, and the whole land is littered with the
vestiges and abandoned material of those newer, bolder, more
experimental beginnings, beginnings that merely began.
It was when I was going through the panther-haunted palaces of Akbar at
Fatehpur Sikri that I first felt how tremendously the ruins of the past
may face towards the future; the thing there is like a frozen wave that
rose and never broke; and once I had caught that light upon things, I
found the same quality in all the ruins I saw, in Amber and Vijayanagar
and Chitor, and in all that I have seen or heard of, in ancient Rome and
ancient Verona, in Pæstum and Cnossus and ancient Athens. None of these
places was ever really finished and done with; the Basilicas of Cæsar
and Constantine just as much as the baths and galleries and halls of
audience at Fatehpur Sikri express not ends achieved but thwarted
intentions of permanence. They embody repulse and rejection. They are
trials, abandoned trials, towards ends vaguely apprehended, ends felt
rather than known. Even so was I moved by the Bruges-like emptinesses of
Pekin, in the vast pretensions of its Forbidden City, which are like a
cry, long sustained, that at last dies away in a wail. I saw the place
in 1905 in that slack interval after the European looting and before the
great awakening that followed the Russo-Japanese war. Pekin in a century
or so may be added in its turn to the list of abandoned endeavors.
Insensibly the sceptre passes.... Nearer home than any of these places
have I imagined the same thing; in Paris it seemed to me I felt the
first chill shadow of that same arrest, that impalpable ebb and
cessation at the very crest of things, that voice which opposes to all
the hasty ambitions and gathering eagerness of men: "It is not here, it
is not yet."
Only the other day as I came back from Paris to this quiet place and
walked across the fields from the railway station to this house, I saw
an old woman, a grandmother, a bent old crone with two children playing
about her as she cut grass by the wayside, and she cut it, except that
her sickle was steel, exactly as old women were cutting grass before
there was writing, before the dawn of history, before men laid the first
stones one upon the other of the first city that ever became a ruin....
You see Civilization has never yet existed, it has only continually and
obstinately attempted to be. Our Civilization is but the indistinct
twilight before the dawn. It is still only a confused attempt, a
flourish out of barbarism, and the normal life of men, the toiling
earthy life of the field and the byre, goes on still like a stream that
at once supports and carries to destruction the experimental ships of
some still imperfect inventor. India gives it all from first to last,
and now the modern movement, the latest half-conscious struggle of the
New Thing in mankind, throws up Bombay and Calcutta, vast feverish
pustules upon the face of the peninsula, bridges the sacred rivers with
hideous iron lattice-work and smears the sky of the dusty ruin-girdled
city of Delhi,--each ruin is the vestige of an empire,--with the black
smoke of factory chimneys.
Altogether scattered over that sun-burnt plain there are the remains of
five or six extinguished Delhis, that played their dramas of frustration
before the Delhi of the Great Mogul. This present phase of human
living--its symbol at Delhi is now, I suppose, a scaffold-bristling pile
of neo-Georgian building--is the latest of the constructive synthetic
efforts to make a newer and fuller life for mankind. Who dares call it
the last? I question myself constantly whether this life we live to-day,
whether that too, is more than a trial of these blind constructive
forces, more universal perhaps, more powerful perhaps than any
predecessor but still a trial, to litter the world with rusting material
when the phase of recession recurs.
But yet I can never quite think that is so. This time, surely, it is
different. This time may indeed be the beginning of a permanent change;
this time there are new elements, new methods and a new spirit at work
upon construction that the world has never known before. Mankind may be
now in the dawn of a fresh phase of living altogether. It is possible.
The forces of construction are proportionally gigantic. There was never
so much clear and critical thought in the world as there is now, never
so large a body of generally accessible knowledge and suggestion, never
anything like the same breadth of outlook, the same universality of
imaginative freedom. That is so in spite of infinite turmoil and
confusion. Moreover the effort now is less concentrated, less dramatic.
There is no one vital center to the modern movement which disaster can
strike or decay undermine. If Paris or New York slacken and grow dull
and materialist, if Berlin and London conspire for a mutual destruction,
Tokio or Baku or Valparaiso or Christiania or Smyrna or Delhi will
shelter and continue the onward impetus.
And this time too it is not any one person, any one dynasty, any one
cult or race which carries our destiny. Human thought has begun to free
itself from individual entanglements and dramatic necessities and
accidental standards. It becomes a collective mind, a collective will
towards achievement, greater than individuals or cities or kingdoms or
peoples, a mind and will to which we all contribute and which none of us
may command nor compromise by our private errors. It ceases to be
aristocratic; it detaches itself from persons and takes possession of us
all. We are involved as it grows free and dominant, we find ourselves,
in spite of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and jealousies and
conflicts, helping and serving in the making of a new world-city, a new
greater State above our legal States, in which all human life becomes a
splendid enterprise, free and beautiful, whose aptest symbol in all our
world is a huge Gothic Cathedral lit to flame by the sun, whose scheme
is the towering conquest of the universe, whose every little detail is
the wrought-out effort of a human soul....
Such were the ideas that grew together in my mind as I went about India
and the East, across those vast sunlit plains, where men and women still
toil in their dusty fields for a harsh living and live in doorless
hovels on floors of trampled cow-dung, persecuted by a hundred hostile
beasts and parasites, caught and eaten by tigers and panthers as cats
eat mice, and grievously afflicted by periodic famine and pestilence,
even as men and women lived before the dawn of history, for untold
centuries, for hundreds of thousands of years.
§ 4
How strange we English seem in India, a little scattered garrison. Are
we anything more than accidental, anything more than the messenger-boy
who has brought the impetus of the new effort towards civilization
through the gates of the East? Are we makers or just a means, casually
taken up and used by the great forces of God?
I do not know, I have never been able to tell. I have never been able to
decide whether we are the greatest or the dullest of peoples.
I think we are an imaginative people with an imagination at once
gigantic, heroic and shy, and also we are a strangely restrained and
disciplined people who are yet neither subdued nor subordinated....
These are flat contradictions to state, and yet how else can one render
the paradox of the English character and this spectacle of a handful of
mute, snobbish, not obviously clever and quite obviously ill-educated
men, holding together kingdoms, tongues and races, three hundred
millions of them, in a restless fermenting peace? Again and again in
India I would find myself in little circles of the official
English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out"
people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and
gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as
mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me.
And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat
of strategic foresight, some simple, penetrating realization of
deep-lying things, I would find an effect, as if out of a thickly rusted
sheath one had pulled a sword and found it--flame....
I recall one evening I spent at a little station in Bengal, between
Lucknow and Delhi, an evening given over to private theatricals. The
theatre was a huge tent, and the little roughly improvised stage was lit
by a row of oil footlights and so small as barely to give a foothold for
the actors and actresses in the more crowded scenes. About me were the
great people, the colonel's wife, a touring young man of family,
officers and the wife of the manager of the big sugar refinery close at
hand. Behind were English of a more dubious social position, also
connected with the sugar refinery, a Eurasian family or so, very dressy
and aggressive and terribly snubbed, and then I think various Portuguese
and other nondescripts and groups of non-commissioned officers and men,
some with their wives. The play, admirably chosen, was that
crystallization of liberal Victorian snobbery, _Caste_, and I remember
there was a sub-current of amusement because the young officer who
played--what _is_ the name of the hero's friend? I forget--had in the
haste of his superficiality adopted a moustache that would not keep on
and an eyeglass that would not keep in.
Everybody was acting very badly, nobody was word-perfect and a rasping
prompter would not keep ahead as he ought to have done; the scenery and
the make-ups were daubs, and I was filled with amazement that having
quite wantonly undertaken to do this thing these people could then do it
so slackly. Then a certain sudden warmth in the applause about me
quickened my attention, and I realized the satirical purport of drunken
old father Eccles, and the moral intention of his son-in-law, the
plumber. Between them they expressed the whole duty of the workingman as
the prosperous Victorians conceived it. He was to work hard always at
any job he could find for any wages he could get, and if he didn't he
was a "drunken shirker" and the dupe of "paid agitators." A comforting
but misleading doctrine. And here were these people a decade on in the
twentieth century, with Time, Death, and Judgment close upon them, still
eagerly applauding, eager to excuse their minds with this one-sided,
ungracious, old-fashioned nonsense, that has done so much to intensify
the deepening class antagonisms that strain us now at home almost to the
breaking point!
How amazingly, it seemed, those people didn't understand and wouldn't
understand any class but their own, any race but their own, any usage
other than their use! Covertly I surveyed the colonel's profile. It
expressed nothing but entire satisfaction with these disastrous
interpretations. What a weather-worn thought-free face that grizzled
veteran showed the world!
I was seized with a sudden curiosity to see how the private soldiers
behind me were taking old Eccles. I turned round to discover cropped
heads and faces as expressionless as masks, and behind them dusky faces
watching very alertly, and then other dusky faces, Eurasians, inferiors,
servants, natives.
Then at a sharp edge the glare of our lighting ceased and the canvas
walls of our narrow world of illusion opened into a vast blue twilight.
At the opening stood two white-clad Sikhs, very, very still and
attentive, watching the performance, and beyond them was a great space
of sky over a dim profile of trees and roofs and a minaret, a sky
darkling down to the flushed red memory--such a short memory it is in
India--of a day that had gone for ever.