"Isn't old Eccles _good_?" whispered the colonel's wife beside me, and
recalled me to the play....
Somehow that picture of a narrow canvas tent in the midst of immensities
has become my symbol for the whole life of the governing English, the
English of India and Switzerland and the Riviera and the West End and
the public services....
But they are not England, they are not the English reality, which is a
thing at once bright and illuminating and fitful, a thing humorous and
wise and adventurous--Shakespeare, Dickens, Newton, Darwin, Nelson,
Bacon, Shelley--English names every one--like the piercing light of
lanterns swinging and swaying among the branches of dark trees at night.
§ 5
I went again to Ceylon to look into the conditions of Coolie
importation, and then I was going back into Assam once more, still in
the wake of indentured labor, when I chanced upon a misadventure. I had
my first and only experience of big game shooting in the Garo Hills, I
was clawed out of a tree by a wounded panther, he missed his hold and I
got back to my branch, but my shoulder was put out, my thigh was badly
torn, and my blood was poisoned by the wound. I had an evil
uncomfortable time. My injury hampered me greatly, and for a while it
seemed likely I should be permanently lamed. I had to keep to vehicles
and reasonably good roads. I wound up my convalescence with a voyage to
Singapore, and from thence I went on rather disconnectedly to a number
of exploratory journeys--excursions rather than journeys--into China. I
got to Pekin and then suddenly faced back to Europe, returning overland
through Russia.
I wanted now to study the conditions of modern industrialism at its
sources, and my disablement did but a little accelerate a return already
decided upon. I had got my conception of the East as a whole and of the
shape of the historical process. I no longer felt adrift in a formless
chaos of forces. I perceived now very clearly that human life is
essentially a creative struggle out of the usage of immemorial years,
that the synthesis of our contemporary civilization is this creative
impulse rising again in its latest and greatest effort, the creative
impulse rising again, as a wave rises from the trough of its
predecessors, out of the ruins of our parent system, imperial Rome. But
this time, and for the first time, the effort is world-wide, and China
and Iceland, Patagonia and Central Africa all swing together with us to
make--or into another catastrophic failure to make--the Great State of
mankind. All this I had now distinctly in my mind. The new process I
perceive had gone further in the west; was most developed in the west.
The lighter end lifts first. So back I came away from the great body of
mankind, which is Asia, to its head. And since I was still held by my
promise from returning to England I betook myself first to the Pas de
Calais and then to Belgium and thence into industrial Germany, to study
the socialistic movement at its sources.
And I was beginning to see too very clearly by the time of my return
that what is confusedly called the labor problem is really not one
problem at all, but two. There is the old problem, the problem as old as
Zimbabwe and the pyramids, the declining problem, the problem of
organizing masses of unskilled labor to the constructive ends of a Great
State, and there is the new modification due to machinery, which has
rendered unskilled labor and labor of a low grade of skill almost
unnecessary to mankind, added coal, oil, wind and water, the elementary
school and the printing-press to our sources of power, and superseded
the ancient shepherding and driving of men by the possibility of their
intelligent and willing co-operation. The two are still mixed in every
discussion, even as they are mixed in the practice of life, but
inevitably they will be disentangled. We break free from slavery, open
or disguised, just as we illuminate and develop this disentanglement....
I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human
society. Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties. There is
enough for everyone, and only a fool can be found to deny it. But our
methods of getting and making are still ruled by legal and social
traditions from the time before we had tapped these new sources of
power, before there was more than enough for everyone, and when a bare
supply was only secured by jealous possession and unremitting toil. We
have no longer to secure enough by a stern insistence. We have come to a
plenty. The problem now is to make that plenty go round, and _keep it
enough_ while we do.
Our real perplexities are altogether psychological. There are no valid
arguments against a great-spirited Socialism but this, that people will
not. Indolence, greed, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of
authority, and above all jealousy, jealousy for our pride and vanity,
jealousy for what we esteem our possessions, jealousy for those upon
whom we have set the heavy fetters of our love, a jealousy of criticism
and association, these are the real obstacles to those brave large
reconstructions, those profitable abnegations and brotherly feats of
generosity that will yet turn human life--of which our individual lives
are but the momentary parts--into a glad, beautiful and triumphant
co-operation all round this sunlit world.