Chapter 3 of 7 · The Freeman Book by Albert Jay Nock
II. Editorials
EDITORIALS
THE CASE FOR HUMAN NATURE
WHEN the housemaid broke the crock and blamed the cat she created a precedent that has been followed to this day by housemaids of all nationalities. Unfortunately, the precedent has been adopted by servants more highly paid than housemaids as a class are even now apt to be, so that one now finds statesmen, diplomats, and editors resorting to her subterfuge in blaming “human nature” for ruining their pet policies. This expedient for shifting responsibility from the shoulders of political and ecclesiastical rulers, which has been in vogue ever since the day when Aaron cast “the other lot for the scapegoat,” is being challenged on the score of inefficiency, apparently, for it somehow fails to carry off “iniquities unto a land not inhabited.” This system of loading transgressions upon the head of the scapegoat is all very well as a ceremonial, but as a practical method, experience seems to show that it does not by any means come up to the prospectus. It is one thing to put sins on the head of the scapegoat, and quite another thing to make them stick there. The trouble is they do not stick there. They fall off again at once, and the scapegoat goes off about the freedom which he has obtained under scandalously false pretences.
So it has eminently been with the scapegoats of Europe which have been severally sent by the Aarons of this century into the wilderness. They have with such unfailing regularity played hookey that one cannot help feeling that the mechanics of transgression-shirking ought to be revised and brought down to date. From Napoleon and Pitt to Kruger and the Mad Mullah our responsible authorities had invested heavily in a long procession of scapegoats, without receiving any dividends worth talking about: and yet in the autumn of 1914 the undiscouraged high priests of the Allies selected the Kaiser for the journey into the wilderness. Then, when the scapegoat showed an obstinate reluctance against service, they turned their attention temporarily to the head of the House of Hapsburg, and fared no better. Then some genius among them thought of Ferdinand, the autocrat of Bulgaria; and so on from one eligible monarch to another, until they had about exhausted all the material that Europe had in stock. But death and abdication and one accident or another came in to interfere with the due ceremonial proprieties when suddenly, providentially, appeared the real thing in scapegoats—Lenin! Here was a find; and everyone was so sure of his eligibility and competence that they promptly placed upon his head all the transgressions they could think of—enough, indeed, to clear the whole political cosmos of the iniquity of ages past and to come. The vicarious sacrifice was made—made in a hurry, too, for there was no time to lose—and the figure of political morality and virtue, which had seemed to be getting a little swaybacked under the burdens, straightened up again and held its head high and unflinching, ready for any challenge.
But happily—well, the story is an open book, so why rehearse its disappointing upshot here? The scapegoat business has been regretfully abandoned as showing altogether too low an average of efficiency, and instead of sending into the wilderness a burden-bearer of collective sin, it is suggested that the case for sin and sinners alike is pretty hopeless and that after all, probably, nothing much can be done but leave them as they are and say as little about them as possible. It is poor old, recreant, incorrigible human nature that is to blame, and this discovery of our high priests has been promulgated more in sorrow than in anger. One says, “it is useless to reform anything while human nature is what it is.” This counsel of despair seems to show that the diplomatic mind, in its virtue and in its disinterestedness, is overcome with disillusion and despondency. Another says, “we are all barbarians at heart,” and one perceives at once the futility of every substitutionary effort since the days of Aaron. An editor of one of our great dailies tells us, “The painful events of the last eighteen months have somewhat dashed our hopes of being able to reform humanity this year. All of us wish to end war, all of us know its horrors, but few of us have sufficient faith in human nature to believe that any given set of arrangements will make war impossible.” There it is; so human nature, not Wilhelm or Franz Josef or even Lenin—hard as it is to part with him—has been at the bottom of all this terrible business. Human nature reversed the foreign policies of Europe; it made all the secret treaties; it schemed to form the armament and financial rings which have thrived in Europe since the year 1892; it lured the European government into Africa. It was human nature that deliberately made a false profession of fighting to overthrow militarism, autocracy, dictatorship, and bureaucracy; its promises of democracy, freedom, and peace were wilful deception. It fostered revolution in Russia, and made a Foreign Minister of Trotzky. It rejected the armistice terms agreed to by the belligerents, and drafted a military peace now admitted to be unworkable. It blasted the Fourteen Points to smithereens and sent rates of exchange on a downward course, the end of which no man can see. It raised the cost of living to the breaking-point, imposed egregiously unjustifiable taxation, and by consequence, spread discontent and unrest all through the masses who work for their living. On the spiritual side, it made jingoes of many leading pacifists, it turned liberals from the path of progress, it prolonged the war, insisted on the “knockout blow” and the blockade. It is human nature that is responsible for war, pestilence, and hunger; all the death and devastation in Europe is properly chargeable to human nature “being what it is.”
One should refrain from forming hasty conclusions, but still, these suggestions seem to bear many earmarks of an alibi. Perhaps perversity, perhaps an inveterate partiality for human nature, perhaps something a little more substantial than either, counsels caution about accepting them. Surely neither statesman nor editor would suggest that any European people (human nature) had anything to say about the making of this war, or any of the wars that have arisen in its wake. In what way were the people of Europe (human nature) responsible for the outbreak of hostilities? The documents and the secret treaties indicate that all told, including statesmen, diplomatists, military and naval staff officers, not more than five hundred persons at the very outside figure, had anything to say about the business. Never since warfare began has human nature had so little to do with the policy of making war and prolonging war. Not one general election in a belligerent country took place in Europe during the war; human nature had no effective chance to express itself. But one notices that all the Premiers, Chancellors, and Foreign Ministers, of the Governments that entered the fray in 1914 were driven from office with commendable promptness at the earliest opportunity and that President Wilson owes his official existence to the lucky accident of a fixed term.
Thus the case for human nature, on examination, is not so bad as it might be. One gets a distinct impression that human nature will stand a better chance of working out its own salvation if statesmen, diplomatists, and editors will do it the one inestimable service of leaving it alone. The present pessimism of the press makes a curious contrast with the fulsome optimism which appeared constantly in its editorial columns a year or so ago. Editors now despair of human nature because the peace treaty will not work; but bless you, the peace treaty was made in secret, and human nature never got within shouting distance of the little camarilla of half a dozen gentlemen who knaved it into shape. One reads that “the plan which might have done a good deal to make wars less frequent has been mishandled. We did not get and we could not have got a peace that would end war. We wanted it so badly that we once thought it possible; but we have learned something since then.” Well, without prejudice, one may remark that precious few who now say they wanted it so badly did anything very noteworthy for it at the only time when such efforts had a chance of counting.
This ingenious notion of making human nature its own scapegoat is apt to fail: for in the past, human nature, in the shape of living human beings, has only too willingly submitted to the ignominy of being the scapegoat for ministers, diplomatists, armament-makers and propagandists. There are indications that it has found the part to be tedious and unprofitable, and that it is ready to propose a change. Human nature is getting a little tired of economic imperialism abroad and economic exploitation at home. It has begun to see the fundamental place of those hoary iniquities in the political systems whose collision brought Europe to ruin. When the time comes, it is quite probable that human nature will give an extremely good account of itself in dealing with them, in spite of all the despondent forecasts of those who now distrust it.
F. N. 17. iii. 20.
IN THE VEIN OF INTIMACY
THE editors of this paper and its publisher appreciate more than they can say, the unlooked-for cordiality shown by the press to its first two issues. Influential daily newspapers throughout the country have held out the hand of kindly hospitality and have given the paper a most prepossessing editorial introduction to their readers. Very courteously, too, have some of the weekly papers come forward with their greeting; and among these is one whose traditions command the utmost respect of all Americans, and whose specific service during the past two years has been immeasurable. Amid a riot of the lowest passions and the most contemptible prejudices, the Nation walked worthily. For this it deserves, and as time goes on will increasingly be seen to deserve, the lasting gratitude of all citizens whose loyalty is loyalty to their country rather than to its office-holders; and the Nation in its last issue does this paper the honour of generous praise and a cordial welcome into “the field of liberal journalism.”
By gratitude, therefore, as well as unusual respect, this paper seems bound to deprecate with all possible delicacy, this recommendation to the Nations readers. The Freeman is not a liberal paper; it has no lot or part with liberalism; it has no place in the field of liberal journalism and can not pretend to seek one. That field, indeed, is so competently served by the Nation itself and by the New Republic that it would be a superfluity, not to say an impertinence, for the editors of this paper to think of invading it. The Freeman is a radical paper; its place is in the virgin field, or better, the long-neglected and fallow field, of American radicalism; its special constituency, if it ever has any, will be what it can find in that field. Hence, readers of the Nation, if ever they do this paper the honour of picking it up, must not be misled by Mr. Villard’s quick and characteristic generosity in bestowing upon it a distinction to which it has no right.
Radicalism and liberalism, unfortunately, are often used as interchangeable terms; so used, indeed, by whole myriads who, if a free public school-system is half what it is cracked up to be, ought to know better. Really, one is sometimes reminded of the man who told his little boy that ensilage is a kind of mucilage. For present purposes there is no need of contrasting academic and philosophical definitions of the two terms; the dictionary will do that in half the time, and save trouble all round. Some practical distinctions, however—such, for instance, as differentiate a radical from a liberal paper—are perhaps worth mentioning.
In the philosophy of public affairs, the liberal gets at his working theory of the State by the “high priori road”; that is to say, by pure conjecture. Confronted with the phenomenon of the State, and required to say where it came from and why it is here, the liberal constructs his answer by the a priori method; thus Carey, for example, derived the State from the action of a gang of marauders, Rousseau from a social contract, Sir Robert Filmer from the will of God, and so on. All these solutions of the problem are ingenious and interesting speculations, but nothing more than speculations. The radical gets at his theory of the State by the historical method; by tracing back and examining every appearance of the State, to the most remote examples that history can furnish; segregating the sole invariable factor which he finds to be common throughout, and testing it both positively and negatively as a determining cause.
The result carries the radical to the extreme point of difference from the liberal in his practical attitude towards the State. The liberal believes that the State is essentially social and is all for improving it by political methods so that it may function accordingly to what he believes to be its original intention. Hence, he is interested in politics, takes them seriously, goes at them hopefully, and believes in them as an instrument of social welfare and progress. He is politically-minded, with an incurable interest in reform, putting good men in office, independent administrations, and quite frequently in third-party movements. The liberal forces of the country, for instance, rallied quite conspicuously to Mr. Roosevelt in the good old days of the Progressive party. The liberal believes in the reality and power of political leadership; thus, again, he eagerly took Mr. Wilson on his hands at the last two elections. The radical, on the other hand, believes that the State is fundamentally anti-social and is all for improving it off the face of the earth; not by blowing up office-holders, as Mr. Palmer appears to suppose, but by the historical process of strengthening, consolidating and enlightening economic organization. It is the impetus that Lenin has given to economic organization, and not his army, that makes him a terror to the State. The radical has no substantial interest in politics, and regards all projects of political reform as visionary. He sees, or thinks he sees, quite clearly that the routine of partisan politics is only a more or less elaborate and expensive byplay indulged in for the sake of diverting notice from the primary object of all politics and political government, namely, the economic exploitation of one class by another; and hence all candidates look about alike to him, and their function looks to him only like that of Dupin’s pretended lunatic in “The Purloined Letter.”
On the side of economics, the practical difference between the radical and the liberal is quite as spacious. The liberal appears to recognize but two factors in the production of wealth, namely, labour and capital; and he occupies himself incessantly with all kinds of devices to adjust relations between them. The radical recognizes a third factor, namely, natural resources; and is absolutely convinced that as long as monopoly-interest in natural resources continues to exist, no adjustment of the relations between labour and capital can possibly be made, and that therefore the excellent devotion of the liberal goes, in the long-run, for nothing. Labour, applied to natural resources, produces wealth; capital is wealth applied to production; so long, therefore, as access to natural resources is monopolized, so long will both labour and capital have to pay tribute to monopoly and so long, in consequence, will their relations be dislocated. The liberal looks with increasing favour upon the socialization of industry, or as it is sometimes called, the democratization of industry. The radical keeps pointing out that while this is all very well in its way, monopoly-values will as inevitably devour socialized industry as they now devour what the liberals call capitalistic industry. What good would possibly come to labour or capital or to the public, from democratizing the coal-mining business, for example, unless and until monopoly-interest in the coal-beds themselves were expropriated? The miners of England have begun to see this and to shape their demands accordingly. What use in democratizing the business of operating railways, as long as the franchise-value of railways remains unconfiscated? What use in democratizing the building industry, so long as economic rent continues to accrue to monopoly? No use whatever, as the radical sees it, except for a very moderate amount of educative value that may probably be held to proceed from the agitation of such projects.
Thus the fundamental differences between the radical and the liberal may be seen, even from this brief sketch, to be considerable; too considerable by far to permit this paper to go under false colours into the hands of any readers of the Nation. It has been very distasteful to make the Nation’s courtesy a text for the drawing-out of these differences; but the dishonourable acceptance, even for a moment, of an honourable distinction, would be much more distasteful.
A. J. N. 31. iii. 20.
ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS
PRESIDENT WILSON, early in the war, did one of the most just and useful things, probably the most just and useful thing, in his whole career, when he made his famous differentiation between the German Government and the German people. He pointed out that the character, interests and aims of the German Government were wholly different from those of the German people and directly opposed to them; that the Government actively and incessantly worked against the interests of the people, and meanwhile deluded the people with false notions of patriotism in order to get them to accept and fall in with its nefarious purposes. In putting all this so clearly, the President did an inestimable service to the principles of radicalism. Radicalism had been saying just this about the German Government for years and years; it was saying just this when that same Government was in high favour at Washington, when President Roosevelt and the German Emperor were hobnobbing hand and glove.
President Wilson, however, based his admirable statement upon rather different and much less philosophical grounds than those proposed by radicalism. He based it upon the ground, that the German Government was autocratic and irresponsible—one of the most curious assertions, one would say, that Mr. Wilson, in view of his own record, would have the hardihood to make. Radicalism criticized and condemned the German Government; radicals the world over beheld it as inimical to the interests of the German people, not because it was autocratic and irresponsible, not, above all, because it was German, but because it was political. By means of its historical investigations into the origin and nature of the State, of political government in general, radicalism perceived that the State, wherever found and whether autocratic, constitutional or republican, invariably operated against the interests of the people; and that its administration was carried on by what, therefore, could be properly regarded (as Mr. Wilson appeared to regard and encouraged us all to regard the German Administration) as a professional-criminal class. Radicalism saw that the primary interest of political government, wherever found and under whatever mode or form, was in maintaining the economic exploitation of one stratum of society by another. Hence radicalism has long been out of the habit, except for purposes of pure geography, of nationalizing political government; quite as sensible persons, long before the war, had given up the habit of nationalizing atrocities committed by armies. Radicalism sees that the German, English and American Governments are German, English, American, only in the same limited and superficial sense that the atrocities in Belgium, India and the Philippines were German, English, American. Louvain, Amritsar and the “water-cure” were military atrocities; Hell-roaring Jake Smith was not a product of America but of militarism, which is the same the world over. No special indictment of character can properly be held against the German, English or American peoples on account of these, for it is abundantly demonstrable that wherever an army is and under whatever incidental nationality, there of nature and necessity are atrocities. Thus, to the eye of radicalism, the German, English, American Governments are not essentially German, English, American; they are essentially political. They are not, therefore, properly to be criticized or defended or even considered, according to their geography, but according to their nature and character. No one objects to Asiatic cholera because it is Asiatic, but because it is deadly.
Never to greater profit could this view be tenaciously held and energetically propagated than at the present time. All signs point to an era of misunderstanding and ill feeling between the two peoples who of all on earth have least to quarrel about and most to communicate to a needy world—the English people and ourselves. This misunderstanding is being now most industriously promoted in both countries by those who have lost sight of Mr. Wilson’s invaluably just distinction, and are busily identifying the English Government and its aims with the English people and their aims, and the American Government and its aims with the American people and their aims; and there is no telling what misery, distress and error may ensue upon this confusion within the next two years. One section of our press identifies the English Government with the English people as a text for indiscriminate praise, another as a text for indiscriminate blame; and the one is as wrong and contemptible and profoundly dangerous as the other. Talk of the Red Menace!—indeed, the elements that most menace the interests of the American people are, first, the Tory-Federalists and imperialists who day by day release irruptions of adulatory and neurasthenic sycophancy upon England, and, second, those who day by day open upon her the floodgates of their recrimination and invective. They are menacing because both of them alike assume a fixed correspondence in character and purpose between the English Government and the English people; and there is no such correspondence. Meanwhile, like influences in England make the same assumption about our Government and our people; and if such are permitted to have the pre-eminence in both countries, we are likely to see a very pretty quarrel bred by this inveterate and unwarranted confusion.
Probably no one, certainly no radical, would, after the happenings of the last five years, have much of a good word to say for political government, wherever found; any more than President Wilson could find to say for that particular fraction of political government towards which he was endeavoring to arouse all the malignity of which misguided and uninformed human nature is capable. But this is not the point. The point is that in all their consideration of Anglo-American relations, the American people should be clearly aware, and should show themselves clearly aware, that the aims and interests of the English Government are not those of the English people but essentially opposed to them; and that the English people should in their turn, make a similar discrimination. This will be the bond of peace in which a true unity of the spirit can be kept and cultivated to limitless effectiveness. When Mr. Hearst, for example, talks about “England” or “Great Britain,” let us clearly understand that he is proceeding upon a monstrous and shocking assumption; and let the English people have the same fixed understanding with regard to Mr. Bottomley’s outpourings. When another section of our press spews a turbid spate of sycophancy over some ambassador’s sayings or doings, or over some oratory at a Pilgrim’s dinner or at a Washington’s Birthday celebration in London, let us remember that the interest appealed to is not that of the English people but of political government; and let the English people take a similar saving precaution in the premises.
If Americans wish to get a composite of the English people, to know what their fundamental tradition is and what their fundamental loyalties are, they need not turn to English history or literature, for they will find it more conveniently in their own. Let them resolutely close their eyes to diplomatic exchanges and official pronouncements, and read Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, Henry George. There is England; there is the fundamental, imperishable tradition of the English people, obstinately held to and continuously pushed forward against every bulwark that political government has raised against it. If the English wish to know the fundamental tradition of the American people, let them look for it in the centuries before the Conquest, in the Peasants’ War, in Peterloo, in William Cobbett and in Richard Cobden. Ours is theirs, and theirs is ours; political government is opposed to it here, precisely as it is there. It is the magnificent tradition of economic freedom, the instinct to know that without economic freedom no other freedom is significant or lasting, and that if economic freedom be attained, no other freedom can be withheld.
Economic freedom is that to which political government in both countries, as in all countries, is primarily opposed. Political government in England is having an increasingly hard time with its task, in the face of a high and purposeful economic organization; in the United States it has so far, from purely natural causes, had but little trouble. So much the more, then, should the English people be patient with our imperfect understanding of our tradition; consider the disabilities which political government has put upon us with its inhibiting control of our schools and our press; and assist us in our effort to clear and educate and emancipate ourselves. For our part, it is what Burke calls “the ancient and inbred piety, integrity, good nature and good humour of the English people” that Americans should cleave to, and not the words or works of a Government that is no more essentially English than ours is essentially American. If the distinction that Mr. Wilson drew so precisely be but understood in England and in the United States, then it will be perceived at once that the more diligently political government be slighted and disallowed, and the higher the type of economic organization effected by common effort between the two countries, the sooner will the great common tradition of economic freedom prevail.
A. J. N. 14. iv. 20.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
OUR correspondent “Gallerius,” whose letter appears in this issue, perhaps uses the word radical in a Palmerian sense; in which case there is nothing to be said. No one can quite make out what the Palmerian radical is, hence no one can say what he is bent on or with what programme or philosophy he is equipped. But if our correspondent takes his definition from the dictionary, his letter seems based on a misapprehension. The radical is not interested in destructive criticism or destructive methods, let alone regarding them as “a gay business,” but in the promotion of disinterested thought. The ablest and most distinguished of American radicals said:
Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting, by complaints and denunciations, by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions, but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there can not be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow. Power is in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their ignorance, their short-sighted selfishness.
“There rests upon the radical,” proceeds our correspondent, “the obligation to develop in theory a new economics and a new political economy . . . which will bear the test of the severest criticism.” But all this has been done. It was begun a century and a half ago by Turgot and his associates, and its development has been carried forward by a line of economists of, to say the least, quite respectable reputation. This new economics contemplates precisely the thing that seems to engage the interest of our correspondent; namely, a society entirely free from class-domination and class-exploitation, a society which assures absolute freedom of production and freedom of exchange. Its “technique of organization” has been set forth in France by Quesnay, in England by Adam Smith and Richard Cobden, in this country by Henry George, in Austria by Ludwig Gumplowicz and Theodor Hertzka, and in Germany by writers innumerable. Whatever else our correspondent may complain of, he should at least not complain of any failure in “a detailed plan of reconstruction which meets every test of reason.” He might perhaps best see what sort of thing the radical has to offer in this line, by beginning with the last chapter, which is all he need ever read, of Marx’s “Kapital”; then reading carefully the “Grossgrundeigentum und Soziale Frage” of Franz Oppenheimer, the same author’s “Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie,” and then the “Protection or Free Trade” of Henry George. This lay-out of provender will give him most plentifully what he says he wants, “something solid for both the friends and the enemies of the new regime to set their teeth in.” It is something indeed so solid that those who hitherto have undertaken to bite it have simply broken their teeth. Henry George, in a preface to the fourth edition of “Progress and Poverty,” a book which sets forth the same “detailed plan of reconstruction which meets every test of reason,” says what could be said of very few books, “I have yet to see an objection not answered in advance in the book itself.”
Perhaps our correspondent, at the end of this exercise, will see that radicals have been quite forward to “accept the obligations of careful, methodical and constructive thought.” They have assumed no monopoly of those obligations or of the ability to discharge them; they desire the production and exchange of thought to be quite as free as the production and exchange of goods. But they have done well enough, possibly, not quite to deserve the implication that they habitually shirk those obligations. It seems unfortunate, perhaps a little unfair, that our correspondent should disparage the “apostles of the new order,” without knowing at least a little of the best that those apostles can do. He would, for example, find a great deal of careful, methodical and constructive thought applied to the most modern conditions and our very latest problems, in the solid treatise called “Democracy versus Socialism,” by the Australian economist, Max Hirsch; and if he can summon energy to chew his way through seven chapters of the most highly concentrated and most highly nutritious pemmican ever put before mankind, he will find it in Franz Oppenheimer’s little volume, hardly more than a pamphlet, called “The State.” It is solid food-value, if one can worry it down, but it is very, very rough.
May not our correspondent’s suspicion of radicalism—we put this forward quite tentatively—be due to two things? May it not be due in part to the distrust of simplicity which is consequent upon sophistication by the apparent complexity of human society? The law of the economic fundamental, as he will discover from a persual of the literature here cited, is extremely simple, simple as Newton’s formula. The process of establishing the economic fundamental is also extremely simple. Therefore one may easily doubt whether anything so simple can possibly reach as far and accomplish as much as “the apostles of the new order” think it may. It looks too much like a nostrum or a panacea to recommend itself to the sophisticated and more or less bewildered sense of the observer of affairs. One can be a little encouraged, however, by remembering that all the fundamentals of nature are quite simple; Newton’s formula is a happy parallel. This encouragement may induce our correspondent to fall back on his own prescription of careful and methodical thought. If he will go through some such course of reading as we have suggested, grasp the economic fundamental, and then stringently think through to the end of its implications in any set of economic circumstances he chooses to postulate, he will then know for himself, which is the most satisfactory kind of knowledge, how far those implications may be expected to extend.
May not our correspondent be influenced also by the radical’s attitude towards the “myriad of practical problems” intimated in the last paragraph of his letter? Perhaps this attitude may not seem to him devout enough towards “the functions of the technician in industry,” towards industrial democratization, the Plumb plan, the shop-stewards’ movement, or what not. The radical, however, does not disparage these matters; he is merely aware that until the economic fundamental is established, none of them can be adjusted with any permanence, and that once the economic fundamental be established, most of them will adjust themselves. Here is another opportunity for careful and methodical thought. Let our correspondent follow through the implications of the economic fundamental upon every one of his “myriad of practical problems” and see how many of those problems will disappear bodily, and how many will be simplified almost to the point of automatic adjustment. The radical’s governing maxim is, “First things first”; or, as it might be put, “In digging a well, begin at the top and not at the bottom—it is easier work and less than half as much of it.” The radical, however, has a very keen interest in all organized dealings with the “myriad of practical problems,” because he is aware that all such dealings are educative. Trade-unionism, for example, as an end in itself, does not interest the radical; but as a way to the establishment of the cooperative principle, he has great interest in it. Nationalization of coal-mines, again, is nothing to stir the radical very deeply; as bringing men into a much clearer view of the economic fundamental, however, it has value which he recognizes and fully appreciates.
We hope our correspondent will not complain because, instead of arguing his letter, we have tried merely to put him in the way of satisfying his own doubts; instead of taking up cudgels for the radical cause, we have tried only to indicate how he might most fairly and competently assess that cause for himself. We would not do him the injustice of assuming that he wishes us to engage in dialectics or to do his thinking for him. Doing any one’s thinking is no part of this paper’s business; to attempt it is an immense and silly pretension. We are glad of the privilege, however, of encouraging independent thought along what seems to us a profitable and infrequently chosen line, and of pointing out such waymarks as are known to us.
A. J. N. 16. vi. 20.
ILLUSIONS OF THE LANDLESS
THE news from Italy of the metal-workers’ strike is particularly interesting because it exhibits practically all the elements of the Russian industrial revolution. In Milan and Turin the workers have occupied the factories, and in many respects they seem to be masters of the situation, but they are masters only in name and for the time, for already they are finding how difficult it is to take over the factories and run them in the interests of labour unless they have the good will and support of the supervisors and the technicians. It has not taken them long to find out that under this economic system administration is a factor to be reckoned with in any industrial revolution. A dispatch from Rome says that “the men have no adequate direction and expert advice in carrying on the work of the different factories, and are declared to have made advances to technical employees, asking them to make common cause with the workers.” It seems that the Engineers’ Association has emphatically declined this suggestion; which is quite to be expected because the technical expert is as a rule, by his social and industrial affiliations, remote from socialist theory of any kind. It is true that technicians of socialist persuasion are not infrequently found in professional associations, but their influence on the body of their associates seldom in a political sense, extends very far.
The primary question seems to be whether it is practically possible for the Italian workers to take over the factories and run them successfully without the co-operation of technical and administrative experts. In Russia, Lenin found out very soon that it could not be done. Indeed, one of the most significant incidents of the industrial revolution in Russia was the quickness with which Lenin saw the grave danger of utter industrial chaos, and the alacrity of his move away from the principles of Marxian socialism to what is called by loose thinkers the individualistic system, and his coming to terms with the experts of industry. Whether Lenin’s course will be followed by the workers in Italy, remains to be seen, but from the advices that have reached us it looks as though the employers and the experts are at agreement to permit the industrial revolution there to come to a chaotic end.
There is, moreover, to be considered how the workers are to be supplied with the necessary raw materials. All the dispatches received here from Milan, Turin and Rome indicate quite clearly the enormous difficulties the workers have to contend with in finding supplies of raw material. In this matter the Italian industrial revolutionists are at an unusual disadvantage. They, unlike the Russians, have a system of landlordism which is all in favour of the employers, the technicians and the administrators. In Russia, raw materials of all kinds were to be had, but not so in Italy; coal, coke, crude oil, and other such primary necessities have to be imported, or can be obtained at home only in trifling amounts. Semi-raw materials of all kinds are imported in huge quantities.
Here is another case of industrial revolution apparently doomed to defeat, because it is begun at the wrong end of the economic scale. The Italian industrial revolution will almost surely end disastrously; and those who will be hit hardest will be the workers themselves, for they have done just what the French did on several occasions, and what the Russians also did. They have made their start by taking over the factories, without first dealing with the landlord, who is the supreme ruler of the natural resources from which labour has to draw all raw materials, and the landlord will reveal a power, over their revolution, far more effective than the power that any government can exert or that the co-operating employers and the technicians can exert. Then, further, the Italian situation shows clearly that it is impossible for the workers to carry out any industrial revolution under the present economic system, until economic internationalization has taken place. The employers and technicians can put a stop to the importation of the supplies of raw material, and at the same time they can neutralize domestic and foreign markets so far as the purchase of manufactured articles is concerned. They themselves can afford to wait while the revolutionists are piling up a mountain of difficulties. They may have to go on what is for them short commons, for a time, but men in that position usually have something put by for a rainy day. It is tolerably certain that the workers will be reduced to extremities long before their opponents feel the pinch of poverty. And in all this conflict the employers, the technicians, the supervisors, and the administrators of industry have the landlord at their backs in the absolutely impregnable position that he has always occupied under our economic system. The holder of natural resources can laugh at any and every industrial revolution which is begun by the “socialization of industry.”
The capitalistic system arose from the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil. That is the fundamental fact pointed out by Marx in “Das Kapital,” but as he does it in the last chapter, most of his disciples have never discovered it and are unaware that he has pointed it out at all. That was the way by which the worker was deprived of his economic alternative, and the worker without an alternative is in a hopeless position. Strikes and industrial revolutions take place with increasing frequency, bringing only an illusion to the landless, to the expropriated masses who have been thrust into the labour market, there to compete with one another and depress wages. These strikes and revolutions have value of the kind that we have often remarked, and are not to be deprecated; but otherwise they are futile. The only sound beginning is by first undoing the wrong that Marx referred to, by dealing scientifically with the land-question. The labour-question is the land-question. Socialists, whether led by Lenin or Malatesta or Sidney Webb or Eugene Debs, might profitably turn from the Italian news-dispatches to muse upon Marx’s great chapter on the modern theory of colonization. Not until this economic lesson is thoroughly learned can any effective reform of industry take place. It must be clearly understood that private ownership of economic rent is the root of all the present industrial discontent. No one has put this quite so clearly as Tolstoy:
It is sufficient to understand all the criminality, the sinfulness, of the situation in this respect, in order to understand that until this atrocity, continually being committed by the owners of the land, shall cease, no political reforms will give freedom and welfare to the people, but that, on the contrary, only the emancipation of the majority of the people from that land-slavery in which they are now held can render political reforms, not a plaything and a tool for personal aims in the hands of politicians, but the real expression of the will of the people.
Neither political nor industrial reforms will give freedom to the people. What did political reform do for France? What has it done for England? What did the most highly specialized developments of paternalism do for Germany? There is only one thing to be done first, and this is to re-impropriate the mass of the people upon the soil by the confiscation of economic rent. Mere haphazard and superficial revolutionary activity, whatever its collateral value—and it is bound to be relatively slight—is sterile. Henry George said:
Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting, by complaints and denunciation, by the formation of parties or the making of revolutions, but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought there can not be right action, and when there is correct thought right action will follow.
Perhaps the Italian industrial revolution will provide a salutary illustration of this great truth, no matter what apparent benefit may accrue to the workers in the terms they make with the employers. Only apparent they will be, no matter how impressively the revolution may end, for whatever the power wielded by Italian labour, it will be found that a greater power is silently, constantly, at work frustrating labour’s efforts and hopes; and this power is the landlord’s .
F. N. 22. ix. 20.
THE BASES OF THE FIVE ESSENTIALS
WHEN we look back to that remote period immediately following the announcement of the armistice-terms, when all the world was talking about a lasting peace and reconstruction and the dawn of a new era, we recall the unanimity with which most people at that time believed that at least five specific reforms were essential to the upbuilding of the new world: 1. A peace based on reason and justice. 2. The abolition of economic, commercial and financial imperialism. 3. The removal of tariff-barriers. 4. The abolition of armaments. 5. The abolition of secret diplomacy.
These were regarded as lofty aims, it is true; but after all those years of sorrow, who could dare ask for less? The common people of all countries were not alone in believing that the new era would at once be ushered in with the achievement of these reforms; but men in high places, leaders of opinion, declared these aims to be a practical residuum of good precipitated from all the evil that the world had so long endured. Even those who were sceptical of the large promise of a new world were ready to accept the smaller promise of a new Europe. So much, at least, was considered to be within the sphere of practical politics, even of the kind in vogue in Paris during the spring of 1919. Indeed, so confident were the reconstructionists that they were content to leave to their so-called representatives in Paris the whole business of building the new era and even the lesser task of making a new Europe. The treaty of peace was an unconscionable time coming, just as it now is an unconscionable time dying, but when at last its terms were made public the world was not slow to realize that the five essentials were not there, nor any faint hint or promise of them.
One would hesitate to go back over all this old ground and restate these too well-known facts, were it not that signs are abroad of a revival of that same blind and simple-minded optimism which was displayed by the reconstructionists and reformers in the days of the armistice. Now as then, the exercise of ordinary observation and common-sense, the willingness to see and to acknowledge that two and two make four, is disparaged as mere calamity-mongering. This state of affairs is as preposterous as it is vicious. Everyone will agree that there was never such need as there is to-day for cheerfulness and hope; that now is the time beyond all others for the exercise of the utmost patience, equanimity and tenacity of purpose; but these qualities must spring from something more substantial than mere illusion, and must be nourished on something more satisfying than the west wind. It is to enforce this truth that one may quite properly even at this late day recall the temper of the armistice-period, and remind oneself of what came of that temper in the end.
To begin with, there is little merit in a peace which lacks all five of the essentials upon which alone a new Europe can be built. After the recent meeting at Geneva any surviving faith in the League of Nations has to whistle hard to keep its courage up. What, then, have those who are making such a specialty of cheerfulness to suggest for the rescue of Europe from the devastation that has been wrought upon it by the old system? If anybody still wants the five essentials why be so much annoyed when told that they are not being had? If, however, these things are no longer regarded as the essentials of reconstruction, this paper would be unfeignedly glad to know what better proposals can be suggested. For ourselves, we still believe the five essentials to be pretty good for a beginning; and so far are we from being annoyed with those who tell us that we are not getting them, that we are even eager to listen to anyone who can tell us how to discover a way that looks towards their attainment.
The first constructive suggestion that seems to make directly towards this end, is that all of us should acquire a very much better knowledge of the economic system which alone makes war possible. Other than this knowledge, there is no durable foundation for the five essentials, and this foundation is not yet laid. We need to know how diplomacy, secret and aggressive in its economic and commercial commitments, fosters the growth of armaments, and through a servile press spreads envy, hatred and malice on every hand. Suppose, again, that we turn our attention to the question of tariff-barriers and try to understand their bearing upon the other four of our five essentials. We should soon come to learn that the frontier-question is a tariff-question. Here in this country, the greatest free-trade area in the world, there are no tariff-barriers between any two of the States, and thus we have no frontiers in the European sense. Frontiers in that sense call for armies as coast-lines call for navies; these frontiers, indeed, demand all the unproductive services of military and naval systems.
Another important fact calling for close observation is the desire of nations with tariffs and frontiers to exploit the natural resources of other nations possessing tariffs and frontiers: for example, France and Germany, in the matter of ore and coal. The little pamphlet “Where Iron is, there is the Fatherland” reveals the interplay of the great international exploiting interests that foment wars—the secret interests that have for twenty or thirty years fought in bitter rivalry for control of the diplomacy of Europe.
Again, let any man or woman take an uncoloured map of the United States, and over it pin a map of Europe; then with a hard-pointed pencil go over all the frontier-lines of European countries, and observe the tracings left upon the map of the United States. Notice the size of the divisions, the multiplicity of frontiers, and think of the tariffs, the armies, the navies, the chancelleries, the international concessionaires; and then imagine what would be going on here if our country were split up in such a way, and what the frame of mind of our citizenry would be under such disabilities.
These are only a few preliminary considerations for those Americans who are really in earnest in their desire for a positive constructive programme, to put their minds on. There are deeper things, such as the economic question of land-reform, upon which all other modes of privilege depend, but these that we have named are sufficient to give a sense of the direction in which our minds must work if we are ever to establish the five essentials of a new world.
F. N. 23. ii. 21.
THE CLASSICIST’S OPPORTUNITY
THE approach of spring attracts attention to the annual spawning of the colleges and universities; and this suggests in turn that the present would be an uncommonly good time for the friends of “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum,” the advocates of Greek and Latin studies, to put on their war-paint and return to battle. They have suffered many defeats in recent years; the vocationalists and professors of natural science have had their own way with them for a generation, without let or hindrance. The reason is, in our opinion, that they have been content to remain on the defensive and have let the enemy choose the battle-ground. This is bad strategy. When the vocationalists have challenged the bread-and-butter value of training in the classics, the classicists (we use these terms in a general way, merely to save words) have always gone over to their ground and undertaken to show how much better electrician, chemist, horse-doctor, or what not, a man would become by having studied Greek and Latin literature. In point of fact, they are no doubt right; but it is bad tactics, unimaginative tactics, to rely for ever on sheer defence. The programme of events has now so played into their hand, the stars in their courses have so strikingly arrayed themselves on their side, that we think they ought to hearten up tremendously, and carry the war over into the enemy’s country, horse, foot and dragoons.
If we were planning the campaign, we would start it off with a violent frontal assault on the enemy’s whole theory of life. If the vocationalist’s theory, Murdstone’s theory, be the true one; if the world be merely a place to work in, not a place, as Murdstone said, “to be moping and droning in,” then it is to the point to discuss the value of the classics in relation to the individual’s place in such a world. But now let our friends stand up to the vocationalist and make him defend his theory, make him show cause for holding that the world is such a place. Let them boldly say that the world is nothing of the kind, that it is a place to have fun in, and that you can have ten times more fun and better fun throughout your life if you know Greek and Latin literature, and the more intimately you know it and the closer you stick to it, the more fun you will have. Our friends will remind us that a good deal has been said and written in this vein. Yes, but always on the tacit assumption that the pleasure one has out of life is a sort of by-product, a secondary affair and something to be enjoyed “on the side,” as one might say, instead of being life’s primary object. Hence there is a general flavour of diffidence and deprecation about all this literature that impairs its apologetic value. Let the classicists come out flatfooted that life was given us to be enjoyed; let them not be afraid of exaggeration or overemphasis; let them resolutely close their ears to any other proposition; and then let them remorselessly take advantage of the support which human nature instinctively gives to that theory of life, and split the ranks of the vocationalists wide open.
There is no time like the present for doing this. The vocationalists have had a clear field; they have ridden organized education like the Old Man of the Sea for twenty-five years, thus bringing out one full generation of adult men and women, in whose hands the affairs of the world now are. They have made an immense success, and no one ought to begrudge them a jot of credit for it. The mechanical organization of society is a marvellous thing, and the development of mechanical facilities for its service is even more marvellous and startling. The only trouble is that nobody seems to be having a very good time. The poor and the exploited are not having a good time, which is to be expected; but the rich and privileged are not having a good time either. All the physical apparatus of happiness is about us, and yet no one, apparently, is having a cent’s worth of fun out of it. Well, here is the classicist’s opportunity. He can throw his experienced eye, trained by his incessant commerce with the ages, over this anomaly and show cause for it. He can survey the life of our well-to-do and poor alike, and show that about the only fun to be had out of such a life is the search for fun, and show why the desire remains ungratified. He can show by practical example—by horrible example—where, in the preparation for life, certain essential values which have been disregarded by the vocationalist, come in. Thus he has now an advantage which he never had before, in the opportunity to appraise a whole society which represents quite fairly the finished work of his opponents. But we are convinced that he will once more merely fumble this advantage unless he stands immovable upon the bed-rock thesis that life is given to human beings for their enjoyment, that all its other purposes, if it have any, are incidental and ancillary to this one; that the human world by its original intention is not Murdstone’s world, not a world of industry and efficiency, but a world of joy.
A. J. N. 2. iii. 21.
THE SKIRMISH AT TULSA
SINCE the great day of shooting and burning at Tulsa, Oklahoma, the press has dropped a tear upon the ashes, murmured a few ritualistic words about law-’n-order, and turned its back once more upon the race-problem. Naturally we ourselves have seen only a very small portion of the comment called forth by this affair, and yet we will gamble that most of it would have been equally applicable if a mob of whites had entered the jail at Tulsa, dragged out the Negro who was accused of assault on a white girl, and lynched him peaceably, in the good old-fashioned way. In other words, we do not believe that either the press or the public has come to grips with the fact that in this country race-prejudice is now manifested less and less frequently in unresisted racial persecution, and more and more often in the skirmishes of racial war. It appears to us that the significance of the annual decline in the number of lynchings can not be altogether understood by anyone who fails to give some attention to the recent increase in the number and violence of race-riots.
For a very long time, the professional friends of the Negro have habitually deprecated the idea that the black man might eventually attempt to meet force with force. The Negrophil might or might not believe sincerely in the all-suffering patience of the coloured people, but opportunism seemed to demand that he express such a belief, in order to allay the fears and flatter the pride of the South; nor is it to be forgotten that an appeal for the charitable treatment of a helpless and pacific race is somewhat flattering to the white man who makes it, as well as to the whites to whom the appeal is addressed.
It is true even to-day that any white man who invites the attention of his fellows to the possibility of a black uprising is likely to be looked upon as a fomenter of race-war, eager to turn loose hell-fire upon the Negroes. We are quite well aware of the fact that any mention of the possibility of resistance or retaliation on the part of the Negroes is frowned upon by some of our good friends, on the ground that the mere suggestion that such a thing is possible is likely to stir the whites to further violence; and yet we can not see how any final good can come of a refusal to acknowledge that America is now in the actual presence of developments long predicted by white alarmists.
It is not exactly clear how the trouble began at Tulsa, but what difference does it make? Whether or not the whites were planning to lynch the prisoner accused of assault, the Negroes had every historical reason for believing that an attempt of this sort would be made. Whether or not the Negroes were armed and organized and eager for a fight, they certainly put up a stiff defence when the clash came. The salient facts are plain enough; the only thing necessary to turn the habitual white persecution of the Negro into a free-for-all fight is a disposition on the part of the blacks to meet force with force, and unquestionably this disposition is on the increase, as the citizens of Washington, Chicago, Tulsa and a half-dozen other American cities now have reason to know.
We should like very much to join the quietists in the prediction that everything will come out all right, and yet we find ourselves tied up to the belief that men reap pretty much as they sow. The people of this country have planted hatred and violence among the Negroes, and now at last the crop is beginning to come in. If we do not like the harvest, it is high time we began another seeding.
If the Negro’s appeal to force is, under present conditions, inevitable, it seems to us to be futile also. If the violence of the white majority has not kept the Negroes in their place, violence on the part of the Negroes themselves can hardly help very much to lift them out of it. It is perfectly natural that the Negroes should fight back, and it is quite certain that the sheer weight of numbers will crush them in any conflict of force.
On the other hand, this assurance of final triumph can hold no great comfort for the whites. The Negroes can be ridden down, but not without cost. In nearly one-fourth of the counties of the South, the population is half or more than half black; in some regions, the Negroes outnumber the whites six to one, even ten to one; and John Brown’s soul as it goes marching among them is more and more “the soul of vengeance and wrath.” If the appeal to force offered any promise of a final settlement, opportunism might find some excuse for it; but now that the Negroes are beginning to resist, violence can beget nothing but more violence, world without end.
This business of crying in the wilderness is quite uncongenial to us, and we should by no means indulge in it if we did not feel morally certain that the era of increasing violence is already upon the country. We are not prepared to recommend any specific cure for this symptom of race-prejudice; indeed we are inclined to believe that there is no such cure. We are not altogether sure that there is a cure for the disease itself. However it seems likely that a careful diagnosis of the case will show that the Negro is now generally recognized as an increasingly dangerous economic competitor of the white man and of the white worker in particular. Those of our friends who agree with us that such is actually the case may properly ask themselves two questions: To what extent can any direct attack upon the race-problem alter the conditions which govern economic competition? Can any approach to a final solution of the race-problem be made, by any means whatever, as long as these conditions remain what they are?
G. T. R. 15. vi. 21.
THE VANISHED UNIVERSITY
SOME one, writing about our universities, remarked after the fashion of Bishop Pontoppidan’s famous chapter on owls, that there is not a university, properly so called, in the United States; that our universities are patterned after the modern English college, and have little in common, either in organization or in function, with the typical university. This is probably true; and as long as it remains true, the prospects for higher education are discouraging. An excellent French critic, M. Renan, said years ago that “countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular tuition without any serious higher education, will long expiate their error by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence.” As matters have turned out, this too seems probable. Our creation of “a considerable popular tuition” has turned out a great grist of people who can read and write, after a fashion, and therefore in our graduated, popular scale of speech, are called educated. The full fruit of education, however—logic, lucidity, the power of independent thought, largeness of temper, sensitive good taste, strong intellectual curiosity combined with a quick and active faculty of selection—this is less often to be met with in our civilization than one would wish. One reason for this is undoubtedly that on which M. Renan put his finger; our system of higher education is not serious, it is not organized to produce this fruit. An interesting proof that it is not so organized may be found in the general instinctive recognition of the qualitative difference between native and foreign education. An American who speaks two or three languages, who knows one or two literatures beside his own, who has made some progress in the liberal arts and exhibits a correspondingly cultivated taste—such a one is taken, nine times out of ten, for a foreigner or as having been “educated abroad,” even though he may never in his life have been outside the United States.
Unusual interest attaches therefore to the centenary of an educational institution which was organized differently. The University of Virginia was by its original intention very largely a true university; and on this account the celebration of its centennial must, to the friends of “serious higher education” in M. Renan’s sense, bear somewhat of an in memoriam character. The buildings in the quadrangle, opening on the West Lawn, are still there, much as Mr. Jefferson left them, and their charm is still eloquent, still moving—all the more so, probably, because the tradition that Mr. Jefferson established, the tradition that for so many years they appropriately expressed, is now departed—
Up to Olympus from the widespread earth.
It was perhaps inevitable that this should be; the occasion, at all events, is one for neither praise nor blame, but rather for gratefully reminding ourselves of how great a thing it is to have had the University of Virginia bearing witness to that tradition for more than eighty years. To this extent anyone can, and every one should, unite heartily with the sentiment that is this year being expressed towards the University all over the land.
Some day, we may hope, that tradition will return; not only upon the University of Virginia, but upon, all the schools of the country. Some day, possibly, we shall see State-owned education disappear as we have seen a State-owned Church disappear. The relations between the State and education are as immoral and monstrous as those between the State and religion; and some day they will be so seen—though how many times, alas! before that day dawns, will the hawthorn and azaleas of Albemarle County bloom and decay! In the Middle Ages, some man of learning and ability, with a gift for teaching, like Peter Abélard or William of Champeaux or John of Scotland, emerged into repute; and people went to him from here and there, camped down on him and made him talk about such subjects as they wanted to hear discussed—and this was the university. The only organization it had was the loose, spontaneous and informal organization of students to protect themselves against the exactions of the natives—for the most part, curiously, the exactions of landlords, just such as we find practised to-day if we compare the scale of ground-rents in a “college town” with that in other towns. The university was, as we say, “run” by the students. If they got what they wanted, they remained; if not, they moved on. Meanwhile, they lived as they pleased and as they could, quite on their own responsibility. Then came Frederick Barbarossa, who threw the protection of the State over the university—and what moved him to do it was, again, the rapacity of certain Bolognese landlords—and he seems thereby to have done as much well-meant damage to education as Constantine did to religion when he threw the protection of the State over the Christian Church.
Mark Hopkins sitting on one end of a log and a student on the other—not a bad notion of a university, by any means; and the nearer we revert to that notion, the nearer we will come to establishing in this country some “serious higher education” that the manes of M. Ernest Renan would find respectable. A university run by the students, with only the loosest and most informal organization, with little property, no examinations, no arbitrary gradations, no money-grubbing president, no ignorant and meddling trustees! A university that would not hold out the slightest inducement to any but those who really wanted to be put in the way of learning something, and who knew what they wanted to learn; a university that imposed no condition but absolute freedom—freedom of thought, of expression and of discussion! As one surveys actual university life in the United States, such a notion seems fanciful, almost fantastic. All the more gratefully then should we remember that a good approximation to this ideal, the only one, in fact, that this country has ever seen, was in the University of Virginia. Mr. Jefferson knew what freedom was, and believed in it and loved it; and this anniversary should remind us that the University of Virginia, founded by him, maintained with reasonable faithfulness the tradition of freedom for more than eighty years; maintained it, indeed, until overpowered by the sheer brute mass of a generation which does not know what freedom is and does not believe in it and cares nothing at all about it.
A. J. N. 29. vi. 21.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
A FINANCIAL writer on one of our Gargantuan contemporaries has discovered that “the ignorance prevalent everywhere concerning the workings of business, finance and economics, constitutes a national danger that ought to be combated very earnestly” by political, educational and business leaders, in order to prevent the suffering masses from seeking a blind revenge. He has discovered that “there is dire need for intelligent, comprehensive, cooperative effort to spread through the land elementary education in economics, so that, instead of relatively few persons being able to understand why times like the present occur, the great majority of our 107 million people will blame fundamental economic causes rather than the capitalists.”
If the daily press were free to undertake a serious discussion of these important matters, much of the prevailing ignorance might be dispelled; but even more could be accomplished if the public would insist upon the right of open controversy. Politicians, teachers and men of affairs are by no means agreed upon fundamental laws; and if they were, their wisdom would be thrown away upon people who have lost the power to think for themselves. No doubt the press is peculiarly responsible for the present ignorance, for it has applied the principles of monopoly to the presentation of facts, prevented free competition in the exchange of thought, and impoverished the minds of a spiritless public.
The writer above quoted does not venture to express an opinion regarding the nature of fundamental economic laws, but modesty has not prevented us from making attempts at definition, and we have tried to draw an intelligible distinction between the monopolist and the capitalist, between forced competition and the freedom of action which the economists had in mind when they noted the beneficent results of competition in the world of human exertion. These distinctions are lost sight of by writers who are struck by the growth of combinations and trusts, and draw the conclusion that competition is, as one of them puts it, “for ever gone, consigned to the scrap-heap with the stagecoach, the hand loom and the horse-plough.”
It would be unwise to accept this prophecy without inquiring whether the elimination of competition has been due to natural or artificial causes; whether it has tended towards a balance of social forces or towards an arrangement that is likely to be upset. When we speak of combinations, we think first of steel, coal, copper, oil, lumber, water-power, all of which, in the language of political economy, are classed as “land.” Then comes transportation over the surface of the land, and finally the control of money and credit. The importance of land-monopoly in enterprises requiring large amounts of capital may be judged by the stress laid upon perpetual or long-term franchises; but the point is especially well made in the prospectus of an oil-venture that lies before us, from which we learn that “ownership of the land . . . is the key to all oil-profits.” It is not only the marketing of oil that attracts investment, but the fact that “by its very discovery it creates far vaster quick property-values than those flowing from the actual production of oil,” as the land for miles around the discovery is at once invested with “tremendous speculative possibilities.” The speculation in land-values is the central fact of our economic life, and it is made possible by laws which are common to all civilized countries, but none the less open to criticism. If they are finally declared unjust and mischievous, the validity of existing combinations will be seriously affected; and if the legal privilege of exclusive land-ownership is cancelled, the combinations based on the possession of natural resources can not continue in their present form.
As competition in the use of the earth has been reduced by combination, competition for the opportunity to work has become intensified. But the victims are no more enlightened than their masters. Instead of trying to strike off their chains, they imitate the methods of monopoly and attempt in their turn to limit competition by trade-union regulations. So trust faces trust; neither side in the bitter struggle seeing that mutual service depends upon liberty of action, and that interference with liberty contracts the range of co-operative effort. No one will deny the advantages of combination in securing economies and increasing production, but that these advantages can be enjoyed without recourse to legal privileges is sufficiently indicated by the achievements of cooperative enterprise. Nor are they possible under the monopoly-system without serious attendant evils—gluts and famines, waste and high living-costs, to say nothing of the corrupt practices revealed by the Lockwood inquiry. Even the apologists of the trusts are shocked at the spectacle of food being deliberately destroyed because it can not be profitably marketed, or because of desire to keep up prices; and they offer regulation as the necessary counterpoise. So there is no end to the multiplication of laws. We first grant a private monopoly in the necessities of life, and having surrendered the responsibilities of free men, we call in the Government to protect us from the results of our own folly. But the bodies appointed to neutralize the effects of monopoly always fail, because, being human, they are liable to be influenced by the powerful forces they seek to control; and not being omniscient, they can not know what is fair as between the intricate conflicting interests.
When the economists declared that competition was the life of trade, and was competent to determine prices with substantial justice, they were thinking of a world in which the individuals were free to act in their proper interests. They may not have understood the full meaning of freedom, but they saw that no one in the absence of compulsion need accept an unfavourable bargain; and it has yet to be shown that competition among free men will not do all that was claimed for it, however baneful it may be when unnaturally forced. Labour-unrest, race-hatred and wars are but part of the price exacted by monopoly, by the attempt to circumvent nature’s impartiality. The repeal of restrictive laws would give full play to co-operation and would remove the fear of competition in a closed market. Employers’ associations and labour-unions would no longer serve anybody’s interest, racial animosity would lose its chief stimulus, and a basis would be laid for peaceful diplomacy.
Indeed it is idle to hope for genuine disarmament until this time arrives, and therefore one is pained to see the false hopes aroused by altruistic demonstrations that are so sure to lead to disappointment and discouragement as long as valid cause for conflict remains. Glad as we are to note the enthusiasm for international rapprochement, we can not shut our eyes to the fact that under cover of this emotional display, the privileged interests can the more easily stake out their claims, the bankers spread their nets, and the Governments which they control raise barriers to be battered down eventually by guns—all to the profit of the steel-trust, the powder-trust and their sister combinations. If the amount of energy now being expended on disarmament could be used to uncover and exhibit the legal privileges which create discord, we might hope for the beginning of a new era of prosperity and amity.
F. W. G. 20. vii. 21.
THE GREAT RECRUITING SERGEANT
THE Spanish Government appears to be meeting with considerable success in its efforts to recruit a foreign legion for service against the rebellious Moroccans. Indeed, from the viewpoint of this latest undertaking on the part of civilization, the rebellion could hardly have come more opportunely. Because of the great war there are millions of men with experience in up-to-date fighting, and because of the Versailles peace hundreds of thousands of these men are out of work; it follows, therefore, that the Spanish Government is having no difficulty at all in finding in the Allied countries unlimited numbers of trained recruits who are willing to fight the Moors in Northern Africa for ninety cents a day and “something to eat, something to wear and a place to sleep,” rather than face the alternative of starving at home. This seems a desperate choice, but a considerable number of our late heroes have been driven to make it. During the past few days the Spanish consulate in New York has been besieged by hungry, out-of-work Americans who have conveniently forgotten the ancient slogan of “Remember the Maine,” and all of those old stories of Spanish atrocities in Cuba which were once upon a time as fresh in the popular mind as stories of German atrocities are today. In London, too, one reads that the would-be recruits have flocked to the Spanish consulate in such numbers that the police have been obliged to disperse them, and this general eagerness on the part of unemployed ex-soldiers to substitute a fighting chance for life in Morocco for the prospect of starving at home has even caused some inquiries to be made in the House of Commons.
The situation offers an excellent opportunity to moralize. It might be cited to the Governments of the victorious Allies as pointing their failure to make good their grandiose war-time promises. Some caustic things, for instance, might be said about this rush to fight the Moors in relation to Mr. Lloyd George’s famous pronouncement about making England “a land fit for heroes to live in.” However, such comment seems rather inept. Governments, as the agents of privilege, are interested in the ordinary citizen only in the degree that privilege finds him useful as a labour-motor or as an instrument of war. If privilege has no need for him in either of these ways his Government’s interest in him will naturally lapse until the time when he again becomes useful, economically or militarily; or it will continue only in such degree as is absolutely necessary to keep his misery from causing him to become a source of danger to itself. With Governments what they are it is futile to expect them to keep those promises which they find it expedient to make in times of crisis, and ridiculous to expect them to show embarrassment over breaking them when the crisis is past. This paper, never having taken such promises seriously, is unable to work itself up into a state of excitement over any fresh evidence of failure to carry them out.
It is rather in its relation to the viewpoint of the sentimental pacifist that the situation appears to us to be noteworthy. The sentimental pacifist bases his arguments against war upon its horror, its waste of life, its wrongfulness from an ethical viewpoint. All these arguments are incontrovertible: these recruits that have been storming the Spanish consulate in New York and the Spanish legation in London have presumably had first-hand opportunities to prove their soundness. Yet with no illusions about the nature of war, they are undertaking to fight under hard conditions in a foreign land under a foreign flag in a cause which can have no more interest for them than Hecuba had for the Player. Obviously there is in this situation a determining factor undreamed of in the philosophy of sentimental pacifism; and it was admirably set forth by one of the would-be legionaries after this fashion:
I’m not kidding myself about this Spanish outfit. I know the grub will probably be rotten, and I saw enough bullets go by with the old First to satisfy me for the rest of my life, but I’ve got to live. If I can’t do it here in my own country I’ll do it in another country. Some of these birds are going over because they think they’re going to have a good time and see some action. I’m joining up because I don’t want to starve to death.
For ourselves, we have not the temerity to criticize this man’s choice. Strictly speaking, we suppose, it is no more unethical to kill Moors for one’s daily bread than to kill Germans for the economic advantage of a few privileged interests; and while we should be extremely reluctant to kill at all, still, we reflect that we have never been reduced to spending our nights on a park-bench and depending for our sustenance upon the nearest public drinking-fountain; we are not prepared, therefore, to be overpositive about the probable effect of such a predicament upon our respect for the sixth commandment.
What our pacifist friends fail to take into account is that there may be conditions under which to the average man peace becomes quite as intolerable as war. Those conditions are unemployment and involuntary poverty; and while they continue to exist it will always be easy enough to recruit an army for any purpose under the sun. The Black-and-Tans who have terrorized Ireland for the past two years are an excellent case in point. These men are British ex-soldiers who were glad enough to undertake the brutal work of the British Government in Ireland as an alternative to starving in the streets of British cities. Yet who can honestly doubt that they would have preferred peaceable, profitable employment at home, if such employment had been obtainable? There are comparatively few men who are willing to risk their lives in murderous work of this kind because they enjoy it.
Unemployment and involuntary poverty arise from the causes that produce war, and like war, they will disappear only when those causes are removed. It is land-monopoly that drives people from the land into the industrial labour-market, where the consequent overcrowding produces unemployment or employment at starvation-wages. It is land-monopoly at home that drives capital to look for investment in foreign markets where it can find the larger returns due to cheap land and cheap labour; and when conflicts arise between rival groups of concessionaires the result is war between their respective Governments. Protective tariffs are likewise a fruitful source of unemployment, because of their interference with the free exchange of goods; and they are, moreover, a fruitful source of trouble between nations because of the resentment which they must needs engender.
Therefore we say again that while privilege is thus allowed to make peace hideous and war inevitable, it is futile to talk about disarmament. It is likewise futile and silly to lament the hard conditions which are driving our demobilized soldiers into the ranks of the Spanish foreign legion. These men may walk our city streets, jobless and hungry, without overmuch interest or sympathy being manifested for their plight; there is no real occasion, therefore, for any large display of these feelings when they choose the only way out of their miserable condition that happens to offer itself. Spain needs these men for cannon-fodder; their own country does not need them just now for anything; therefore they go to Spain. That is about all there is to it. When the people of this country and Great Britain begin to show some real interest in making “a land fit for heroes to live in,” no doubt these heroes will be glad enough to stay at home and enjoy it: and the only kind of land that is fit for heroes to live in is a land that the heroes own.
S. L. F. 7. ix. 21.
BY WHOM THE OFFENCE COMETH
THE mills of government grind with exceeding slowness when it comes to turning out reform-measures. Indeed, it requires an enormous popular pressure to make them move at all; and when a measure designed to correct some crying evil in our social system is finally ground out into law, even then its enforcement is by no means assured. Political government offers privilege every facility for circumventing the popular will whenever it becomes inimical to the interests of privilege, as it is the business of political government to do; and the way of the reformer is by consequence hard and wearisomely repetitious. Thus, Federal laws aimed at the abolition of child-labour have twice been declared unconstitutional by the Federal courts; meanwhile the economic slavery of children continues, just as the economic slavery of the expropriated masses, be they children or adults, will inevitably continue until its causes are finally known for what they are and are done away with.
There are many well-meaning people who, while they accept the social order which fosters economic slavery, have yet a horror of its manifestation in the enforced labour of children. This is perhaps due to the fact that in child-labour the cruelty of the system is dramatically apparent. The natural human instinct to protect the helplessness of childhood makes people who have not dividends at stake resent any advantage being taken of that helplessness; whereas the exploitation of adults does not arouse the same feeling of pity and indignation because people, even those without dividends, are not accustomed to recognize the equal helplessness of adults in face of the existing economic order. Then, too, as our child-welfare workers are at pains to point out, the health of the growing child may be permanently impaired and his proper physical and mental development thwarted by excessive labour at arduous tasks; while his legitimate claim to some degree of acquaintance with the three R’s is denied him when he is kept out of school in order that he may augment the family income through his labours. Indeed, the literature of the reformers of child-labour conditions, like most literature of reform, impresses one with the desire of its authors to right a lesser social evil in so far as is compatible with the careful preservation of the greater evil from which the lesser springs.
It is hard to discover any proper place for sentiment in this matter of child-labour. There are, as this paper sees it, two logical attitudes towards the up-bringing of children, both of which depend for justification upon the attitude which is to be taken towards life itself. If the purpose of life be hard labour for the many with excessive ease for the few, then the children of the working masses, as the labour-motors of the future, should of course be reared with a proper regard to their future effectiveness as labour-motors. That is, they should not be required during their period of growth to perform labours which will incapacitate them, physically or mentally, for their more profitable exploitation later on, when they should normally be more powerful and productive machines. Here the reformer has a logical place. Employers of child-labour, be they industrialists, or parents who use their children’s labour to assist them in their own occupations, are likely to overwork their little employees, the industrialist through shortsightedness or indifference, the parent through ignorance or necessity, or both. The reformer, by securing the passage of laws regulating the hours and conditions of child-labour, and prescribing a certain amount of compulsory “education,” may do much to correct this tendency, and thus insure a greater- degree of health and a lesser degree of stupidity in that larger life of exploitation which awaits the exploited children of the poor.
But there is another, and we are inclined to believe a more legitimate conception of the purpose of life than this, namely: that life is given to us to be enjoyed; and the only true enjoyment of life consists in fulfilling the inherent law of being, which is physical, mental and spiritual growth. “The best man,” says Socrates, “is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself.” If one accept this simple and logical view of goodness and happiness, then one must repudiate the economic exploitation, not of children only but also of adults, for the man whose nose is kept securely tied to the grindstone of physical necessities will have precious little leisure in which to perfect himself or to give thought to the proper development of his children. If he is obliged to work for a wage less than the amount needed to support his family, then if his children are to be adequately fed and clothed and sheltered, they must perforce be set to work at some gainful occupation, however much better it might be for them if they could play a little, or go to school. It is unfortunate, but people must eat before they can grow, and the only way they can get beyond a preoccupation with mere eating is to rid themselves of the gourmand that devours all their surplus—that is, of the land-monopolist.
It is land-monopoly which, in the last analysis, makes it necessary for people to put their children to work; because land-monopoly means high rents and low wages. The connexion between land-monopoly and child-labour is especially clear, since seventy-two per cent of the child-labour in this country is agricultural and by far the greater number of that seventy-two per cent of rural child-workers are the children of tenant-farmers. Because of the extortionate demands of the landlords, the tenant-farmer is obliged to use the labour of his children in order to make ends meet; and in this connexion it is significant that tenant-farming and child-labour have both shown a very considerable increase in this country in recent years.
With the causes of child-labour thus apparent, it would seem that people who can regard with complacency such evils in our social order as starvation-wages or a “normal” unemployment-condition involving a million and a half-workers, must be either fools or knaves when they concern themselves with child-labour on anything but a strictly utilitarian basis. As for those whose enlightened love for childhood teaches them that the development and happiness of these little ones depends upon the removal of the economic disabilities which hamper all workers, their place is certainly not among the ranks of the reformers.
S. L. F. 2. xi. 21.
SCRAPS OF PAPER AT WASHINGTON
THE Washington conference last week did the regular thing, the expected and invariable thing, in adopting the Root resolutions concerning China. These resolutions followed the stereotyped form in such case made and provided, with no more significant verbal deviations than one sees sometimes in obituary-resolutions over the memory of some defunct lodge-brother. Drafting these resolutions was no tax upon the resources or the mentality of Mr. Root; anyone who had a moderate knowledge of European diplomatic history could close his eyes and dictate them from memory. They pledge the conferring Powers to respect the sovereignty, independence and the territorial and administrative integrity of China; to provide “the fullest and most unembarrassed opportunity to China to develop and maintain for herself effective and stable government”; to use their influence for the principle of equal opportunity for the commerce and trade of all nations in the Chinese market; and to refrain from taking advantage of present conditions in order to secure special rights or privileges in China.
The adoption of these resolutions puts this paper in a position not to show just what we have all along meant by intimating that the published decisions and agreements of the conference are of no importance whatever, but that its secret agreements and decisions are extremely important. Our readers are by this time aware, probably, that the last significant squabble over a market was over Morocco, and that this squabble culminated in the late unpleasantness of 1914. Well, the squabbling nations adopted precisely such resolutions, not only once but twice—at the Madrid conference in 1880, and at the Algeciras conference in 1906. These resolutions were backed up by various other formal public declarations to the same effect; as for instance in 1901 and 1902, when France gave public assurance to Morocco on several occasions that she had no designs whatever against Morocco’s integrity or independence. Nothing could be fairer or handsomer all round than the public attitude of Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy towards Morocco. Any complaint about it would have seemed hypercritical, any suspicion of it would at any time have been bitterly resented by the right-thinkers and hundred-per-centers of all the nations concerned. Any publication which ventured to warn its readers to take their time about accepting it at its face value, would have incurred all the superstitious displeasure that falls upon those who do not promote the popular illusions about statesmen and statecraft.
Just so. But this is what really happened: France wanted an economic monopoly in Morocco; England wanted one in Egypt; so the two Governments came to a secret understanding whereby, in consideration of France letting England alone in Egypt, England should not stand in France’s way in Morocco. This agreement was made on 8 April, 1904, by the two Foreign Secretaries, Lord Lansdowne and M. Delcassé; and it did not become public until November, 1911, and then only by accident, and its existence was not suspected, or even dreamed of, in either France or England until that time. The date of this agreement is noteworthy—8 April, 1904. The Act of Algeciras, pledging all the Powers to respect the sovereignty and integrity of Morocco, was signed 7 April, 1906. Therefore, when France and England signed that Act, the secret agreement between them had been in force just one day short of two years! Furthermore, it was in January, 1906, three months before the signing of the Act of Algeciras, that the British and French Governments entered into the secret military and naval “conversations” that never became known until 3 August, 1914. Finally, in April, 1906, the same month in which the Act of Algeciras was signed, the British and Belgian military authorities entered into their secret arrangements for co-operation.
So much, then, for the value of the published agreements of an international conference. If this paper be thought over-cautious for its incorrigible suspicions of the Washington conference, and of the Root resolutions in particular, we adduce the foregoing as fair reason for putting the burden of proof on those who think, or rather think they think, that this conference and these resolutions are somehow “different.” The war of 1914 was “different”; for quite a long time it was different, and those whose foresight was as good as their hindsight, those who merely asked to be shown wherein it was different, were answered with the “one plain argument” that Lord Peter offered his brethren, in the “Tale of a Tub.” But it looks in retrospect quite as other wars look; quite as sordid, quite as commonplace, quite as unproductive of any of the beneficent results that were so hopefully expected from it. We now have a conference composed of precisely the same kind of people that composed the conferences of Madrid and Algeciras, representing precisely the same sort of interests, actuated by precisely the same motives, and conferring over precisely the same sort of issue. Wherein, then, can this conference be reasonably thought different, and where is the slightest tenable ground for supposing that its methods or its upshot will be different?
There is no difference whatever, and can be none. One pack of dogs fighting over a bone behaves like any other pack of dogs that ever fought over a bone. Introduce a bone amongst any pack of dogs, and you can foretell precisely how the dogs will behave. Introduce a parcel of alien exploitable territory amongst a pack of nationalist politicians, and you know to a certainty what they are going to do. There is no clairvoyance about it; anyone who knows enough to come in when it rains, probably, can manage this very moderate feat of intelligence. Morocco was good exploitable territory in the ’nineties. France, Germany and England were great capital-exporting countries, due to the fact that landlordism had pre-empted domestic economic opportunity and was charging a monopoly-price for access to it. Therefore the only thing that could happen, did happen. Through the secret trades and deals that we have just mentioned, one nation secured an economic monopoly in Morocco, and finally, in stark violation of every international agreement, like the Root resolutions, and in cynical disregard of its published pledges, consolidated a political control that extinguished Morocco’s political and administrative sovereignty.
China to-day is the plum. China, in the first place, has the finest assortment of natural resources yet unexploited by the great exporting Powers. Second, her immense population constitutes the largest potential trade-market. England attacked China in the early ’forties, and pocketed a port. Then France stepped in and took a slice of South China. Then Russia cabbaged certain areas in Mongolia. Then latterly Japan picked up some highly valuable odds and ends of territory, and when the war of 1914 provided her with a truly golden opportunity, she became as busy as a bee. But now, in addition to these freebooting brethren who are already on the ground, there is another great exporting Power to be considered, which stands in the same relation to China as Germany to Morocco in 1900, i. e., the United States. Germany did not own an inch of Moroccan soil, and never asked for anything more than a fair field in commerce; but she already had a good trade going with Morocco and naturally wanted to develop it; quite as naturally, too, Germany disliked being crowded out by the economic monopoly which France, with the connivance of England, was busily establishing. Similarly, the United States does not own any Chinese land, but she has a huge deal of exportable capital that could find very remunerative employment over there, much more so than at home. Land in the United States began to bear a monopoly-value about 1890; consequently she was forced into the ranks of the exporting nations, making her debut in full-fledged economic imperialism in 1898. She was comparatively a late-comer, but has developed the policy with great energy, and her development, as every one knows, has been tremendously accelerated recently, by sheer force of circumstances. Although the United States wants no territory in China and would probably be as well satisfied with an honest open-door trade-policy in China as Germany was in Morocco, still China, as an exploitable market, looks just as good to the United States as it does to any of the other exporting Powers who have been for years buccaneering in the Yellow Kingdom.
One must estimate the Root resolutions by the light of these facts; and this is precisely what the journalists, and especially our liberal contemporaries who write decorative nonsense about Mr. Hughes’s statesmanship and the wonderful things that can be expected of it, never take the trouble to do. The man who in the course of the last seven years has learned a thing or two about the diplomacy of imperialism will read the Root resolutions and say that they are admirable and first-class, quite as noble and disinterested as those of Madrid and Algeciras; and after that, he will think no more about them. His interest will then be to guess which way the secret trades and deals will go. Would it be better business, say, for England to afford Japan a little substantial quid pro quo in a private way, or to afford it to the United States? Would Mr. Balfour do better to make up to his strongest commercial competitor, personified by Mr. Hughes, or do as Lord Lansdowne did in 1904, and combine with the next strongest to oust the strongest? The answer is not difficult.
Bill Nye once spoke of stopping at a hotel which printed a bill of fare chiefly, he thought, as a literary effort. Judged in this way, the Root resolutions are very interesting and commendable. For their content of fact, however, one would be wise to wait awhile before accepting them. When the secret understandings which accompany or ensue upon them are indicated—as inevitably they will be indicated—by the attitude taken towards China by the various nations and groups of nations, one will be better able to decide what they are worth.
A. J. N. 7. xii. 21.
THE “SANCTITY” OF TREATIES
THE Senate’s debate goes on quite as though the Washington treaties had in themselves some actual significance for the American people. The public’s conception of the force and sanctity of treaties is one of the most curious instances of mass-illusion to be found in all the realm of fancy; and yet no generation since the first treaty was made has had such profound and weighty experience of the unreliability of treaties and their makers, such overwhelming evidence of the futility of putting any confidence in either. It might, indeed, until very recently, have been thought that we had reached that stage where, in this respect, all the people could be fooled all the time.
That stage, however, as Lincoln said, is never reached; and to strengthen suspicions in those who have them, and to arouse suspicions in those who have them not, we have several times drawn the historical parallel between the Washington conference and those of Madrid and Algeciras. We now go on to remark that there is no better example of the duplicity and chicanery of treaty-making statesmen than that which is exhibited by the treaties of 1831 and 1839, the so-called and miscalled Belgian treaties, the famous “scrap of paper.” The history of these treaties shows quite clearly what flimsy pretexts are set forth for foreign policy; that continuity in foreign policy is a figment of the imagination; and that the real business of diplomacy over Belgium was territorial aggrandizement and the control of dangerous commercial competition.
These treaties were not Belgian treaties, but treaties covering the whole of the Netherlands; they were Dutch-Belgian treaties. The making of the Dutch-Belgian treaties necessitated the tearing-up of one of the main provisions of the treaty of Vienna which united Holland and Belgium. Lord Palmerston was responsible for making a “scrap of paper” of that solemn instrument. Why did he do it? What principle was involved in separating the Dutch and the Belgians after so short a union, a union which was believed by the statesmen at Vienna to be essential to the peace of Europe? With Palmerston, the matter was solely that of preventing Belgium from falling into the hands of the French. The coast from the Scheldt to the French frontier, stretching far and wide on England’s weakest flank, had been a source of a thousand grave fears and forebodings to British statesmen during the war with France. A recurrence of such a situation was, from the viewpoint of British interests, to be prevented at all costs. On the other hand, Talleyrand desired mightily that France should incorporate Belgium. He knew as well as Palmerston the value of the Belgian coast to France, in case of another war with England. Evelyn Ashley, the biographer of Lord Palmerston, puts the whole matter in a nut-shell when he says: “To side with Holland would have been contrary to all the traditions which Palmerston had inherited from Canning. To acquiesce in French aggrandizement would have been little short of a national disgrace.” No one can read the record of that disreputable business without being left with the impression that the Dutch and the Belgians were merely pawns in the game played between Talleyrand and Palmerston.
What then happened? A treaty was drawn up in 1831, separating Belgium from Holland. This treaty was signed by Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia. No sooner was this done than the two States that had been neutralized began a bitter row about the division of the territories of Luxemburg and Limburg, and during eight years the quarrel grew in intensity, threatening the peace of Europe with crisis after crisis, until the Powers had to meet again, reopen the whole question of the separation of Belgium from Holland, and draw up a new treaty to end the dispute. This second treaty was signed at London, 19 April, 1839. Briefly, this is the history of the so-called Belgian treaties.
One will search the treaty of 1839 in vain for any guarantee to Belgium, for Lord Palmerston himself purposely omitted it. No one Power, according to the treaty, could go to the assistance of Belgium. All the powers signatory to the treaty had to act together. Moreover, the general guarantee which might be constructed out of the phraseology in the treaty of 1839 does not concern the neutrality of Belgium at all; indeed it is not given to Belgium but to the Netherlands. Yet in 1914 Britain’s pretext for going to war was Germany’s threatened violation of Belgian territory! In taking up that unprecedented position Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey reversed the policy of Gladstone and Granville; for at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, Great Britain made treaties with the King of Prussia and the Emperor of the French for maintaining the integrity of the sovereign State of Belgium, and preserving her territory against invasion by either force. These treaties which were made for the duration of the war and one year after, were, according to Mr. Gladstone, more stringent measures for the protection of Belgian neutrality than the general guarantee of 1839.
Strangely enough, at the London conference of 1871, while these new treaties made on the one hand between Great Britain and Prussia, and on the other by Great Britain and France were in force, it was laid down by the Powers that “no Power can liberate itself from the engagements of a treaty nor modify the stipulations thereof, unless with the consent of the contracting Powers.” Nobody at that time seemed to notice how this extraordinary decision affected all the treaty-making of forty years in connexion with Holland and Belgium. Neither Russia nor Austria consented, or was asked to consent to the changes made by the agreements of 1870 in the treaties of 1831 and 1839; and some international lawyers, indeed, were of opinion that these treaties were automatically nullified. Be that as it may, the important thing is to observe the evidence that treaties are made to be broken when it is expedient to break them. What Gladstone and Granville succeeded in doing in 1870, was impossible of achievement in 1914 because of secret agreement and understandings among France, Russia, and Great Britain, which tied the hands of the British Ministry. As a member of the secretly-fashioned Triple Entente, Britain was powerless to act in the true interest of Belgium when the crisis arose.
Now a new set of circumstances has arisen which threaten to make Belgium the occasion of further quarrels between Great Britain and France. About a year ago France caught Great Britain napping, and made a secret treaty with the Belgians, and in that stroke crowned the efforts of Talleyrand and destroyed the policy which Palmerston had at heart when he broke the provisions of the treaty of Vienna for the purpose of separating and neutralizing Holland and Belgium. Britain can not now, any more than ever she could, stand idly by and see the triumph of Talleyrand’s policy with regard to Belgium. If the Belgian coast were a danger to England during the Napoleonic wars, how much greater danger would it now be, after France has discovered what effective submarine-work can be done from that coast! A well-informed Flemish politician recently told the parliamentary correspondent of the Manchester Guardian that the Franco-Belgian treaty is regarded by the militarist party of Belgium as the sheet-anchor of their policy; further, that a French propaganda is being carried out in Belgium through schools, lectures, theatres, films, and the press, and that it is largely attended by strong abuse of England. Whether this be all true, or only in part true, the fact is that a secret Franco-Belgian treaty does exist, and that its only possible objective is that of anticipating a conflict with Great Britain.
Treaties!—what are they worth to the peace and prosperity of peoples? Anyone can make them, anyone can break them. When our liberals and their ilk of incurable sentimentalists, and the masses who regard public treaties as meaning in some sense what they say and as made in some sort of good faith—when these are tempted to lift up their eyes unto Washington, we respectfully suggest that they remember the treaties of Madrid and Algeciras, and peruse the history of the Netherlands treaties of 1831 and 1839.
F. N. 22. iii. 22.
THE NEW LEISURED CLASS
BY all appearances, we are rapidly approaching the time when the “leisured class” that waxed fat on rent and interest will become the helots of the bureaucratic class; if, indeed, we be not there already. If so, the old theory of the leisured class will soon be on its way to limbo, and with it will go innumerable theories and ideas such as the idea of the exploitation of producers by landlords, or the socialist’s theory of the exploitation of the labourer by the capitalist class. The private appropriation of rent and the ownership of the tools of production, have done long service to the revolutionary tendencies of the individualist and socialist, but all without making any considerable dent in the existing economic system. The unequal distribution of wealth has not been checked; the leisured class has diligently gone on owning and exploiting; the producing class, which includes labour and capital, has diligently gone on being exploited. But now there seems every possibility of a new, large element, a distinct class, coming in with a view to a most rapacious exploitation of both the leisured class and the producing class, and possessed of unlimited powers of exploitation.
In short, it appears that the producers and the leisured class have entered upon a fierce struggle for existence with officeholders; and the former do not stand the ghost of a show, for all the weapons are in the hands of the latter, except the irresistible weapon of the boycott, which the former have neither the sense to understand nor the courage to use. Indeed, the producers and the leisured class are devoid even of a sense of protest, for the laws made by the officeholders do not permit protest. The Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest seems in for profound disparagement, for the fitness of the fittest is being speedily nullified. The law of the jungle has been superseded, and the law of the bureaucratic parasite is in a way to rule every activity of life. How long a time it seems since the day of Herbert Spencer, a solitary voice crying in the wilderness of economic heresy! how long a time it seems since he told us what we were in for! Few paid any attention to him. He was a high-brow, a philosopher, an impractical person; devoid of business experience, a calamity-howler, an alarmist, he put incendiary notions into the heads of ignorant men, and tended to make them dissatisfied with that station in life unto which it had pleased God to call them. Indeed it might be said that in “Social Statics” and “Man Versus the State,” Spencer was something dangerously and reprehensibly akin to a bolshevik. He was agin the Government. Well, but for all that, here we are, just where he said we would be! The State has just about absorbed the man. The officeholders have become all-powerful, and the producers—labour and capital—and the leisured class alike, stand before their indiscriminate voracity, helpless and appalled, like a litter of guinea-pigs before a python.
The new leisured class, the bureaucracy, has an immense fecundity. It multiplies its kind like rabbits, nay, like shad, like house-flies. Nothing, moreover, stimulates this reproductive power like a state of war. Most of us remember Washington a dozen years ago; many of us remember it in the days of the famous “billion-dollar Congress.” Think of it now! No, there is nothing like a war for making a bureaucracy truly prolific, for multiplying departments of the State, and making a horde of officeholders thrive where a handful throve before. In France, according to a current newspaper-item, one person out of every forty in the population is an officeholder! Every item of paternalistic legislation foisted upon a country by officeholders—prohibition, housing-laws, labor-laws, laws providing for this or that commission, this or that board or bureau or conference—every such item means a new litter of officials, inspectors and what not; and a consequent new creation of vested interest in officeholding, and a new lot of insatiable mouths set sucking at the veins of the producing class and the leisured class.
The officeholder, moreover, unfortunately has not, as far as we can see, a single quality to justify his parasitism. The leisured class that battened on rent and interest had, by and large, some virtues, some sense of obligation, often imperfectly and capriciously expressed, no doubt, but present and active. Its members played a more or less beneficent part in the communal life; a part which, at any rate, was meant to be beneficent. They maintained a kind of official interest, sometimes a genuine and fruitful interest, in the things of the spirit, in literature, art and science. As a whole, the leisured class had some culture, and there is no doubt that under the existing economic system, culture was almost wholly dependent upon the leisured class for such promotion as it got. The leisured class, too, was useful for the service—too little recognized or appreciated—of setting a standard of social life and manners which was for the most part agreeable and becoming. Of the new leisured class, however, nothing of the sort can be said. It is notably characterized by ignorance, stupidity and venality. Its activities benefit no one but itself. It cares nothing for culture. As for manners, it seems to have been born with a genius for offence. If it is possible to do a thing either civilly or rudely, the officeholder may be depended on to do it rudely. As far as one can see, in short, the officeholding class is devoid of any sense of responsibility to anything but its own maintenance in place and power.
As a result of the officeholder’s pernicious activity, industry has everywhere to-day become largely a routine matter of cutting losses, reducing staffs and closing plants. Great numbers of producers, the world over, have lost interest in the business of production. Many of them freely say that they have decided to work no longer for the benefit of government; they are tired of sweating out the wherewithal to feed officeholders; and they have shut up shop, taken out what fragments of their capital they could salvage, and retired. As for the leisured class, there is precious little left of it, and what is left is in an immediate way to be less. Perhaps, after all, the extinction of the producer and the leisured class, is, from their own point of view, not greatly to be dreaded or deplored. The officeholders have, as the slang of the ring-side goes, “got them where they want them,” but what of it? True, they might rebel, but they will not, because there are laws against rebellion, and we must all respect these laws because officeholders have made them, and because the Bar Association frowns on disrespect for law, and so does Mr. Root. So there seems really nothing for the producer of wealth—the labourer and the capitalist—and the leisured class as well, but to face extinction; and again what of it? Extinction is preferable, anything is preferable, to the continuance of a condition in which the producer is the helot of the officeholder, the servile creature of a dominant State.
F. N. 5. iv. 22.
ABANDONED ROADS
“THERE seems to me,” writes a friend of ours from abroad, “to be a desire now not so much to organize and regulate life as to create, beautify, and enjoy it. The two aims should perhaps not be contradictory; but in the last generation they certainly seemed so, and I am afraid that the organizers will no longer be able to sit in the coachman’s box and keep the creators in check, with whip and rein.”
The change to which our friend points seems to mark the difference between the old generation and the new; and it has set us reflecting upon the conflicts that are now so rapidly coming to the surface of our social life. Viewed in one light, the conflict between fathers and children is a perpetual, recurrent fact; what was nectar to their fathers is proclaimed, in the taste of the young folks, to be very small beer indeed. It is doubtless sad that this should be so; the creatures that build coral reefs have more venerable ways, and are quite content to go on adding their calcareous carcasses to the dead mass that lies beneath them: and whilst the result is not a very stimulating or lively existence, it goes to make what every nice, serious person would ungrudgingly regard as a solid achievement.
Now, the business of reform, regulation, and organization would be a much more satisfactory field for an intelligent person if human society were a coral reef, and every member of it a loyal, hundred-percent polyp. As things go, however, no “constructive measure” is likely to last much longer than its sponsor, and the stones that slay the prophet probably will not lie long enough in place to form a burial cairn. Nothing seems so certain about a reform as the fact that the next generation will itch to reform it; and when it comes to treating the ideals upon which the reform has tacitly or openly been based, the younger generation usually finds a way of making short work of them without going through any other ceremony than thought.
All this is very remarkable at the present time. The older generation in America, whose last fine flowers in the domain of thought were William James and Josiah Royce, was above all things a confoundedly earnest collection of human beings. Its chief interest was, it seems fair to say, with the machinery of the political State; and it was very much disposed to patch it and tinker around with it in order that the wretched contraption might not creak so loudly and proclaim so baldly that it was a machine, and not an organic growth of living communities.
Human nature being the naughty thing that it is, there was always the possibility, which the progressive and serious thinker dreaded, that some one would put sand in the valves or open up the throttle and tear loose, or do something equally dreadful, not specified in the regulations for a safe and sane commonwealth. Instinctive dispositions and tendencies which could not be supervised or at least registered, by expert official persons, were looked upon as perverse, atavistic, and inimical to progress. But while progress was its very watchword, the older generation was in fact complacently conservative, in that it supposed the goods of life were already established in existing customs and institutions, and that it needed but a proper modicum of regulation, and a steady amendment, to bring us within sight of the Perfections.
In sum, the older generation was highly interested in making economic, social, and political institutions go, and was a little indifferent to both their actual direction and their end. What happened is notorious. The war gave all the uplifters and sub-uplifters a shocking jolt; and when they recovered consciousness they found a generation around them that was no longer interested in trying to make the machinery of society more perfect, but that sought so to provide that their own lives, for a little while at any rate, should be lively and enjoyable—no matter what condition the machinery might be in, or, for that matter, whether any machinery existed. With the war in its memory, and the smell of new wars brewing in the witches’ cauldron of diplomacy, the younger generation committed the little heresy of doubting whether the future was likely to be much better than the present. The older generation had sniffed at enjoyment and had clung to “work,” “service,” and “uplift” because it fancied that the best was yet to be. To deny this was to deny progress, and to deny all the quantitative values of a community that every day was growing more literate, more sober, and more “democratic.”
The younger generation, on the other hand, would apparently rather have its mess of pottage right away than be remembered in the family will as the inheritor of an estate it might never live to possess, especially since all that a perfect estate would offer would be a steady and satisfactory supply of pottage. Perhaps these young people are a little oblivious to the necessity for continuity in human undertakings, and to the fact that a human being’s present is determined by a past that pushes him forward and a future he must make some slight efforts to anticipate; but once the seed corn has been stored, the younger generation is quite right, it seems to us, in holding that there is no excuse for letting the present crop rot on the ground, or eating it in a panic of indigestion for fear that next season’s crop will not be so good.
At bottom, it is not the failure to take life seriously which makes the younger generation let so many respectable things go hang; it is rather a passionate refusal to sacrifice life itself to respectability—a refusal to sacrifice joy and freedom to duty, service, loyalty, and a score of other praiseworthy notions which were ever on the lips of the older folk, and occasionally well within their grasp, but for whom joy, the joy of being free, and freedom, the freedom to enjoy, meant next to nothing. Unfortunately, the older generation is for the most part in command of all the established institutions from the school upward and outward; and since there seems to be small prospect of introducing joy and freedom within these respectable precincts, or rather, of giving them room to exist there, it is only natural that joy and freedom should lay down avenues of their own. The progressives complain that no one will keep up the old roads and pay the annual tax of labour. In our callousness, we think that the complaint is a little amusing. Where did those roads lead to? The shambles. Who followed them? The sheep. If the younger generation is indeed running wild, it is rather quaint to hear moral indignation coming from the mouth of the butcher.
The younger generation has reason to believe that time is a cheat, and the future is time’s basest accomplice. It is wisdom to cultivate the present moment, and the present place, and the present opportunity, for this is like plucking flowers from a heavily laden plant, and is the condition of there being other flowers to cultivate in future. The older generation did not seem to understand this; at any rate, it snatched its flowers furtively, and was always ready to fetch up some thumping moral reason for doing so; as, for example, beautiful flowers do not hurt anyone, or by cultivating flowers the species might be improved, or by demanding flowers one provides work for the gardener; in short, any reason but the sensible one, namely: that flowers are beautiful, and their presence makes the senses tingle.
So we might continue the parable. The generation that connives at jazz, reads Mr. D. H. Lawrence, and likes to walk on ground that angels fear to tread may well appear to be lost—aye! lost to civilization—among those who were content to see the individual wither as the world grew more and more. But sometimes it looks as if the world of progress and political reform and mechanical improvement and moral uplift and wars for democracy—in brief, the world of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Society—had been on the wrong road, and that the younger generation is getting back, by blind fumbling and feeling, upon the main track.
L. M. 12. iv. 22.
DEBTS THAT ARE NO MORE
OF late years a number of American statesmen and near-statesmen have put forth the dictum from time to time that it would be an unprecedented enormity for a Government to repudiate its foreign indebtedness. These statements have been made with particular emphasis before committees of Congress that have investigated, not too searchingly, matters growing out of our present peculiar relations to Russia. Like most of the dicta of politicians, they are not strictly accurate. Repudiation has not been an uncommon proceeding, and many a Government is alive and kicking to-day whose frustrated creditors have long since either charged off their bonded investments to profit and loss, or compromised on refunding-operations which netted them a fraction of the principal. Most of these defaulting Governments are apparently on excellent terms with that model of fiscal probity, Secretary Hughes, who would not even deign to speak with the representative of a Russian Government which has forsworn the Tsar, and, in principle at least, all his debts. Moreover, during the past few decades, one out of every four of the sovereign States of this Union which Mr. Hughes so appropriately represents in their foreign relations, has indulged in the doubtful business of repudiation, and got away with it.
Back in 1870, the council of the Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, a British organization, compiled a list of a score of Governments whose foreign indebtedness, in part or in whole, was in default. The aggregate amount was close to $200 million, a great sum in those days, and of course did not include domestic indebtedness in default, in which the corporation had no interest. The list included three of our States, which were in default for upwards of $10 million. A few years later the same organization compiled a list of governmental loans of various kinds that had been defaulted or partly defaulted in the past half century. The total, with interest omitted, ran to about a billion dollars.
Greece defaulted on the interest of its 1824–25 loans for upwards of half a century. In 1878 this indebtedness, with interest, had reached about $50 million. The Government then effected a compromise with its creditors by redeeming the old bonds with a new issue at thirty cents on the dollar. Yet the diplomatic representative of Greece is received at Washington, and during the recent war the American Government amiably loaned the Greek Government about $50 million.
Spain is another country with which we enjoy diplomatic relations, which has twice been insolvent since King Philip V began rolling up the national debt by borrowing $40 million to lay out gardens for his enjoyment, in imitation of those at Versailles. After the revolution of 1868–76 its creditors went scratching, and again after the Spanish-American war. In 1882, a Spanish Government scaled down the national debt from nearly two billion dollars to a little over one billion, but that had nothing to do with our opening hostilities against the defaulter sixteen years later, though perhaps in view of Mr. Hughes’s attitude, it should.
In 1881, Rumania wiped off the slate all except twenty-one per cent of the value of certain outstanding certificates. Yet we loaned the Rumanian Government $25 million during the war, an investment of negligible value as measured in military results. Earlier in the century, Portugal converted a debt of $50 million into one of $32,500,000. Turkey has been a consistent defaulter, and British bankers appeared to encourage Turkish insolvency for a long period, through a series of larger and larger “refunding” loans, at progressively higher interest; or to be exact, at a rate of interest that remained nominal while Turkey received less and less of the principal until she was getting considerably under half the par value.
Among our South American neighbours, defaulting on foreign obligations has not been sufficiently uncommon to merit special attention. As for our major associates in the late unpleasantness, neither England nor France is above reproach. Charles II closed the British exchequer and defrauded the State’s creditors of £2,800,000, though subsequently somewhat less than one-fourth of this was paid. Revolutionary France issued some forty-five billion francs in assignats, pledging the “public faith” in their redemption. In time these sank to one-half of one per cent of their original value, and though some of them were redeemed with “mandats” at the rate of thirty-eight for one, the value of the “mandats” likewise faded. This is a species of progressive repudiation which might well merit the attention of M. Poincaré; and while he is about it, he might get some precedents on defaulting by looking into the history of the $50 million French loan of 1870.
Our own continental money, issues of which were estimated by Hamilton at a third of a billion dollars, fell to one one-thousandth of the original rating, and, after constant talk of redemption, was permitted to drop out of use and value altogether. Of course, in later years, the paper currency of the Southern Confederacy similarly became reduced, with greater excuse, to mere scraps of paper; and the “national debt” of the Confederacy, estimated as high as a billion dollars, became properly chargeable to profit and loss, including the $15 million in bonds arranged with our friends the British bankers in 1863. Though the Confederate Government lived to a ripe old age as compared with the transitory regime represented by M. Bakhmetiev, as far as we know Mr. Hughes has made no move for the recognition of this solemn public obligation on the part of the Government that succeeded to the one headed by Jefferson Davis in the Southern States.
The founding fathers who are held in such high regard by the Harding Administration went in for repudiation on a broader scale than merely serving up their currency à la Russe. Massachusetts as early as 1747 redeemed a public debt of £2,200,000 by paying half the sum, in silver. Early in the century, Mississippi and Louisiana disowned certain public debts. Rhode Island flatly refused to pay Revolutionary obligations. Pennsylvania and Maryland failed to pay interest on their debts. Soon after the Revolution, Virginia “redeemed” the State issues of paper money by funding them at the rate of 1000 for one.
Coming up towards the middle of the century, we find Mississippi in 1842 repudiating a bond-issue of $5,000,000 issued for the State bank in 1838. In 1837 the Government of Michigan authorized an issue of $5,000,000 in bonds. Of this about $3,000,000 was by agreement guaranteed by the United States Bank of Pennsylvania, but that institution failed before any considerable sum was paid into the State Treasury. The State arranged redemption only on the basis of what had been paid in, though the bonds had been purchased at full value by European holders.
The people of Minnesota in i860 voted a special amendment to the State Constitution repudiating $2,275,000 in State bonds issued to underwrite a private railway-project which had not materialized. After several attempts to rescind popular repudiation had failed, the State Supreme Court declared the amendment unconstitutional; but it was not until 1881 that the creditors got any consideration, and then they had to be content with a new bond-issue at fifty cents on the dollar.
Louisiana in 1874 had a Sitate debt of $42 million. The Governor recommended the repudiation of about half of this and the refunding of the residue to $12 million. This eventually was done, but even on the reduced total, the interest was repudiated for a period of years and finally was arbitrarily reduced. Likewise, in the late ’seventies, North Carolina scratched off the State debt to the tune of nearly $13 million, to which must be added several million dollars in arrears of interest. South Carolina about the same time refunded the State debt at fifty cents on the dollar, incidentally repudiating several millions outright. Georgia cancelled $600,000 in State railway-bonds in 1869 and indulged in other repudiations during the next decade. Alabama took French leave of responsibility for some $15 million in State bonds and endorsements. Florida turned its back on two State bond-issues, one of $3,900,000 held largely abroad. Among the other State Governments that engaged in similar financial peccadilloes were Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia.
Thus there is a long catalogue of American cancellations, involving many millions in obligations held in foreign hands. If Mr. Hughes is aware of it, we can not see how he can consistently continue to serve these reneging States and their populations in his present capacity. Whenever he writes a pious note about Russia, one would think that the ghosts of all these dead American obligations, slain by due process of law, would rise up to mock him. To us it appears that under the circumstances there is a choice of two possible courses for Mr. Hughes to pursue in order to retain his self-respect. One is to get his Government to refuse to associate with any of these erring States until they have made full restitution with interest to date. This could easily be effected by having the Harding Administration decline to accept Federal taxes from the citizens of these States until they have recognized all the fiscal proprieties. The second course is for Mr. Hughes to resign. We do not know which of these courses would more effectively rebuke the inhabitants of the dozen or more States concerned. The relative disadvantage of not being permitted to pay one’s income-tax or of not being honoured with the official ministrations of Mr. Hughes involves delicate comparisons which we do not pretend to be competent to make.
H. K. 5. vii. 22.
THE NEED FOR SYNTHESIS
UPON returning home from a recent adventure in conversation, we found that we had carried off two scraps of comment to which we had given, in the first instance, no special attention. Our partner in discourse had said that when, as a university student, he had wished to get some general notion of the structure and function of living matter, his masters had required him to spend most of his time in studying the parasites in the stomach of a frog; and again, in another connexion, he had remarked that Professor J. Arthur Thomson, the editor of the “Outline of Science,” had never made any “original contribution” to the stock of scientific knowledge.
Now that some subconscious process of the mind has brought these two observations into conjunction, it seems to us that each serves to illuminate the other, and that both together cast a certain amount of light upon the problem of specialization. Our friend is altogether at outs with the system of the specialists; and yet his own thought is so much influenced by the thought of these very specialists that he denies to Professor Thomson a place among scientists of the first rank, simply because he—the editor of the “Outline”—has to his credit no such achievement as the discovery of a new parasite in the stomach of a frog. Whether or not Professor Thomson has made any such discovery, we have no means of knowing; but if we were obliged to give him some sort of rating, we should first inquire whether he has accomplished in the volumes of the “Outline” a genuine synthesis of scientific knowledge; and if we found that he had succeeded in this great enterprise, we should say that his contribution has more creative value and originality than that of any of the specialist whose name has figured recently in the press.
If ever there was a task that required all the strength of an able and mature mind, it is the labour of synthesis in this day of specialization; and yet it is symptomatic of the state of the sciences that in the universities the work of synthesis is degraded almost to the vanishing point. The broader the field covered by any given course, the more likely it is to be assigned to a cub-instructor who is not yet out of his academic knee-pants. The great and the near great often confine themselves to grubbing minutiae out of narrow fields of research, and then leaving the uprooted facts to shrivel away in unread monographs. If this order of affairs could be reversed; if the young instructor could be set to work in a special line of research, from which he would advance, as his powers increased, in the general direction of philosophy, there might be some chance that the particular would be brought into vital relation with the general. As the mass of particulars increases, the labour of organization and interpretation becomes day by day more difficult; but instead of devoting their energies to this great work, most of our abler scientists allow their energies to be absorbed by their devotion to special fields of research.
Like most of our contemporaries we have become so lost among the trees of new knowledge that we can not see the forest. When we take as a measure, the ratio between the knowledge of the individual man, and the sum total of human knowledge, it appears to us that men are becoming increasingly ignorant as the years go by; the world as it is actually known to the individual has been expanding, of course, but at a far less rapid rate than the “known world” of science. That this process of expansion has been also a process of disintegration, some of us have felt only too keenly as we have watched the specialists move outward and disappear from sight along a thousand new paths of knowledge which stand to the generality of human individuals as just so many new indications of things that they can never know.
Whether the totality of existence, known and unknown, constitutes universe or multiverse, is a matter of small consequence here. The point we are trying to make is simply this: that in a lawful and orderly universe, the method of the specialists tends to reduce the known world of the individual man to chaos; while on the other hand, even in actual chaos, a broader science might help to raise the known world of the individual man into something like a universe. Such, at any rate, is our belief; and if we had the opportunity to act upon it, we should shut the ablest men of science out of their laboratories for a decade or so, and force them to sit down together, with their masses of data in front of them, and think things over. If they did not eventually produce something like “a larger synthesis,” we should turn them loose again, and begin in our blindness to pray for the coming of a wiser generation.
G. T. R. 2. viii. 22.
THE UNKNOWN DIPLOMAT
THE unknown diplomat at Washington is again at his old tricks of influencing American opinion by insinuation and innuendo. He has become indeed a notable figure in the conduct, or misconduct, of American foreign affairs. He came into his own during Mr. Wilson’s Administration, apparently as an adjunct to open diplomacy. Under the anonymity of a “high authority” or a “high official” of the Administration, he grew and flourished and his observations, particularly on the affairs of countries with which Mr. Wilson enjoyed unfriendly relations or against which he conducted private warfare, were printed throughout the length and breadth of the land by respectable newspapers which would without question fling into the wastebasket an anonymous communication from an unofficial source.
In the matter of Russia especially, Mr. Wilson’s unknown diplomat displayed a consistency which the ultimate standpatter might well envy. Beginning shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, this gentleman launched a series of inspirational predictions about Russia, all of which without exception subsequently proved untrue. Again and again he demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the Soviets were doomed and must inevitably disappear in a few weeks. Again and again, with characteristic perversity, the ignorant Slavs failed him. From his watch-tower on the Potomac he would report Petrograd consumed with flames, or his careful vision would discover Trotzky and Lenin chasing each other around the Kremlin, craftily hurling bombs at one another’s heads, and anon dining together amiably on buckets of bourgeois blood. In October, 1919, he heralded “official reports” received in Washington, possibly from Mr. Wilson’s voices in the air, that General Yudenitch had taken Petrograd and that Trotzky and the whole Bolshevik crew were dashing for their lives into Siberia, zealously hunted by the entire Russian population. Unhappily, at that time General Yudenitch and his merry boys were fleeing ignominiously over the Esthonian border. He had not captured Petrograd and there had never been any likelihood of such an accomplishment. But mere fact and experience never swayed the unknown diplomat from his course. At the moment of Mr. Wilson’s retirement to private life the anonymous spokesman was still buoyantly giving out his advices from the most reliable sources that the Soviets could not cling to power more than two months longer.
In one respect the unknown diplomat slipped up in his portrayal of the Russian scene. He failed to report the nationalization of women, that final infamy of the Bolsheviki, which for a considerable period served the pious horror of our Rotarians and other moral conservationists. The honour of discovering this particular wickedness, as we recall, belongs to Secretary Baker’s Military Intelligence Section, which during the great conflict and for some time thereafter dwelt in the realm of imagination pure and un-defiled. On the other hand we believe it was the unknown diplomat who, after considerable criticism had been aroused over Mr. Wilson’s peculiar manner of conferring self-determination on the Haitians, discovered that the island of Haiti was populated by a race of the wickedest kind of voodoo worshippers. For a century or more the Haitians had imagined themselves to be of the Roman Catholic persuasion, as far as religion was concerned, and they support a pair of bishops and a full set of clergymen of that faith; but presumably this is by way of keeping up appearances.
The great advantage of this Ku-Klux or blind-tiger fashion of diplomacy is that it lends to useful mendacities an air of official authority without the assumption of any official responsibility. It is not surprising therefore that the unknown diplomat should have survived Mr. Wilson’s Administration. To his latest manifestation attention has been directed by Mr. de la Huerta, Mexican Minister of Finance, who has recently visited us in the attempt to secure from American bankers, American oil-men and the American State Department, permission for Mexico to function as a regular nation in good standing. Mr. de la Huerta, it was reported, secured the draft of a working-agreement with the bankers and the oil-men, and apparently thereafter he was received amicably by President Harding and Secretary Hughes. Yet he had scarcely left the White House before the familiar voice of the “high spokesman of the Administration” was heard over the length and breadth of the land protesting that the Mexican Government apparently had no intention of ratifying any of Mr. de la Huerta’s agreements, and that the attitude of the Mexican Government in regard to American landholders in Mexico was still unsatisfactory, especially in respect to lands expropriated in certain Mexican States, which were being paid for in “practically worthless bonds.” Mir. de la Huerta pointed out that there was no ground for such harsh criticisms, that the various agreements referred to were being moved towards ratification, one having actually been signed by President Obregon, and as for the “practically worthless bonds” for expropriated lands, they had not even been issued yet, and the Mexican Government was making every possible effort to give them real value.
After Mr. de la Huerta’s statement the unknown diplomat bobbed up again, apparently in a chastened spirit, with the explanation that he did not impugn the good faith of the Mexican Government, and if Mr. de la Huerta could put his hand on an authoritative translation of the original discourse he would see nothing in it to which he could possibly object. This would indicate that the unknown has a sense of humour, for his outgivings invariably appear in indirect discourse, as if they were whispered to the reporters in Washington rather than handed about on the usual official mimeographed forms.
Mr. de la Huerta has done all Americans a service in directing attention to this mysterious diplomatic Grand Goblin. Of all the collection of ornery critters that swarm about the national capital he is about the meanest and lowest, as well as indirectly one of the most expensive, and the sooner he can be eliminated from the political zoo the better it will be for all of us.
H. K. 9. viii. 22.
CULTURAL NATIONALISM
NOT long since, we found ourselves engaged in conversation with a visitor from overseas, who had just seen for the first time the two huge railway-terminals in New York City. “They are splendid,” he said. “In them I see a genuine expression of the American creative genius. They are yours, because you are an American. They express you.” In the course of the next half-hour, our visitor expressed emphatically the opinion that the people of this country must remain in a condition of spiritual under-nourishment until they have evolved an art which is distinctively American and is therefore peculiarly fitted to their spiritual needs.
If the individual man be primarily a “national being,” then of course he can realize himself only in so far as he shares in, and helps to develop a “national culture.” Obviously it should be his business to concentrate his attention upon such works of art as his countrymen have produced, to emphasize the national qualities of these productions, and to make these qualities the special source of his enjoyment and inspiration. Under certain circumstances, however, this procedure leads to results which may fairly be called fantastic. During the nineteenth century, for example, the educated men of more than one small nationality in Eastern Europe deliberately turned their backs upon the highly developed language and the rich literature of their imperial masters, and shut themselves up within the confines of a peasant-speech and a collection of folk-songs. According to the theory of the nationalists, the way of escape lies now through the creation by each of these nationalities of a great national literature; but how long do they think it will be before Latvia, for instance—a country of German landlords and Russian governors—will produce a Goethe, a Schiller, a Pushkin, a Dostoievsky, a Tolstoy?
If it be true that man is primarily a national being—if he be born to his national culture, as men were born to their social station in the feudal age—then the quality of his national inheritance is all-important, for nothing that does not belong to his nation can ever really belong to him. If, on the other hand, the individual is first and foremost a human being, the national classification can have no primary significance; the richest national heritage is a handicap, unless he learn to disregard its limitations, and the poorest birthright is a blessing if its poverty drive him out into the broad field of humanism.
If the humanist is right, the great hope of culture in America lies in the fact that we in this country have not yet agreed upon a definition of “American culture.” The greatness of our opportunity consists in the very fact that thus far we have set up no definite boundaries of nationality where culture is concerned. So long as nothing belongs to us as a nation, there is nothing that may not belong to us as individuals; so long as our taste has not been nationalized, there is always the possibility that it will be humanized. The humanist knows that in the realm of the arts, the one criterion of the right to possess is the ability to enjoy; he sets up before the artist those models that are, by the canons of art itself, the best, and his taste fosters and stimulates, where nationalism coddles and deforms.
G. T. R. 6. ix. 22.
THE FOUNDING STEPFATHERS
OUR excellent contemporary, the Christian Science Monitor, recently published some articles giving a list of six countries to the south of us over which the United States Government has established a greater or less degree of financial hegemony. The supervision ranges from control of the customs to actual dictatorship. The countries are Haiti, Santo Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Bolivia, and though their total population is somewhat less than eleven million, their area is nearly fourteen million square miles, or almost half the area of the continental United States, and their potential wealth in minerals, forests and oil is almost beyond computation. It is worth noting that arrangements have recently been made or are in the making for these various countries to negotiate loans from American bankers, at the appropriately large interest that obtains in such transactions, aggregating some $135 million. Before the war the total foreign debt of these countries came to less than $120 million. If we add to these figures the enormous value of the pickings snapped up by our concessionaires with the aid of our imperialist officials, and the profits they derive from peon-labour on a wage-basis of twenty cents a day or thereabouts, with the pressure of American bayonets to keep the workers at their tasks, it can be seen that this policy of southerly expansion and penetration is immediately highly profitable to a limited but apparently most influential element of our citizenship.
The imperialist process began back in the days of President Roosevelt’s neat little revolution in Panama, by which that Republic conveniently severed itself from Colombia and became a satellite of the American Government. Before the late war, Panama had a national debt of some $5000. Reorganization of its finances under an American fiscal commission was completed last year, at which time the debt of the little Republic was shown to have increased to the sturdy figure of seven million dollars, most of it held in the United States. The 400,000 inhabitants have further troubles in prospect, for arrangements are now being made for a new American loan of $10 million.
It was under President Taft that some of our banking-interests kindly took over Nicaragua, after the revolution of 1909, which was organized and financed in the United States. The revolutionists drove out the President of the country, but the Nicaraguan Congress elected another who was equally unsatisfactory to the American intriguers. The new President was beating the revolutionists all along the line, when Secretary Knox took advantage of the fact that two American adventurers, part of an insurgent band, had been killed in the fighting, to send in some 2350 marines to put over the revolution and see that a candidate agreeable to American interests was declared president. When the Congress refused to ratify the dummy, it was dissolved with the aid of our brave lads, and Nicaraguan independence passed into history. The ensuing treaty gave us the right to build a canal across the country at any time we should be moved to do so, and granted the United States valuable leasehold-concessions on either coast. Before we began our altruistic endeavors, Nicaragua had a national debt of $2,500,000. By the time we had established law and order, the country was mortgaged to our bankers for some $15 million, and those same bankers were in control of its railways and were collecting the customs and administering the public finances. These financial founding stepfathers are now, on behalf of the people of Nicaragua, negotiating a new loan of three million dollars from themselves. Curiously enough, the Nicaraguans have all along exhibited the most callous lack of appreciation for these various and sundry favours conferred by their Uncle Samuel.
Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft made tentative beginnings in our southerly imperialism. It was not until the pious Mr. Wilson came in and events on another continent engrossed public attention that the American Government really got into its stride in this matter. It was under those staunch pacifists and anti-imperialists, Mr. William J. Bryan and Mr. Josephus Daniels, the one transmitting the orders and the other furnishing the marines, that the American Government appropriated Haiti and Santo Domingo and began to perfect various other arrangements involving Central and South American real estate. It was possibly through coincidence that whenever Mr. Wilson delivered one of his peculiarly effective excoriations of the imperialist policy of the Kaiser’s Government, Mr. Daniels’s valiant boys would set about shooting a few hundred more Haitians or the State Department would issue an order for the overthrow of another native Government that stood in the way of making the Caribbean safe for American bankers. Both Haiti and Santo Domingo were seized by force of arms and have been held under military dictatorship. A short time ago, with a considerable flourish of trumpets, Mr. Hughes announced that we were prepared to withdraw our forces from Santo Domingo as soon as the Government functioning there under our guns complied with certain conditions. These included the ratification of all acts of the military regime of the United States, the validation of the so-called final loan sought by our bankers, and an extension of the powers of the American General Receiver of Customs which would legally make that officer the financial dictator of the country. Here again the ungrateful natives have raised a considerable uproar of protest and the whole matter is still in process of solution. A loan of $6,500,000 was imposed on Santo Domingo last year and the plans for Haiti contemplate a loan of $40 million, which will give the banking-interests concerned a substantial mortgage on that country.
Under Mr. Hughes the policy of extending our financial hegemony throughout the hemisphere has been further developed, and two great countries, Peru and Bolivia, with a combined area of some 1,250,000 square miles, have come into the American financial solar system. Our bankers are planning to favour Peru with a loan of $50 million and in preparation for this, a former officer of our State Department has been made administrator of customs in that country, the customs-system has been reorganized, and the programme includes the establishment of a bank of issue under the supervision of our interested bankers and the revision, in the interests of American concessionaires, of the laws relating to oil-lands. Bolivia has already obtained a loan of $24 million, in return for which American bankers have stepped into the Banca de la Nacion, and a commission of three members, including two Americans, has been appointed to take command of the revenues and the fiscal affairs of the nation.
Paraguay has also selected an American customs-adviser, but though the country has recently suffered from political disturbances, our marines have not yet slipped in to establish law and order and no loans have been effected.
The recent American policy in Cuba has of course been consistent with these other developments of financial imperialism. In conformity with the “recapture” clauses which our Government originally inserted in the Constitution of the Cuban Republic, our General Crowder has been sitting in Havana as a sort of uncrowned dictator of the island for the past twenty months, and under the direction of our State Department, arrangements for a bankers’ loan of $50 million have been worried through the reluctant Cuban Congress. The obvious indisposition of the Cubans to sign up for this sizable mortgage has resulted in some monitory brandishing of the Big Stick by Mr. Hughes, and at present the Cubans seem faced by the unfortunate alternative of accepting the loan, with its attached financial and political conditions, or else having their semi-independent political administration supplanted by one manned directly by American political place-holders of the type which is already making our name so malodorous in the region of the Caribbean.
A variant of this established imperialist policy was revealed recently when the Administration made an effort to plant a new American financial colony in Africa. Here the scheme for which the Administration sought the approval of Congress was for a loan of five million dollars to Liberia, to be made from the United States treasury. It developed in the discussion of this measure that two-thirds of the money was to be devoted to paying off at par the various bonded obligations of the Government of Liberia, a good part of which had been bought up by speculative financiers at twenty cents on the dollar, and the rest was to be dissipated in a few years by American fiscal administrators, with aggregate salaries of $100,000 a year, to be appointed to take charge of the annual Liberian revenues of $160,000. This philanthropic plan to divide five million dollars of our money between the speculators and the politicians on a sixty-forty basis was luckily deferred until after Senator Borah had exposed its true significance, and since such appropriations involve debates in Congress which are likely to prove embarrassing, it is to be assumed that hereafter the Wilsonian technique of bankers’ loans with the co-operation of the marines will be followed. Such matters can be managed quietly without stirring up inquisitive senators.
In sum, it would appear that with the aid of the political arm our bankers have already gathered in mortgages on a considerable part of South and Central America. The process is apparently not unlike that followed by British imperialists in the case of Egypt, when successive loans under military duress reduced the country in course of time to such a state of fiscal dependence and helplessness that a formal protectorate in the interest of the bondholders became inevitable. In such cases as Haiti and Nicaragua, our financial penetration has virtually assumed the substance of annexation, though all the legal formalities have not been established.
Since this expansionist policy has been pursued with equal zest under a Taft, a Wilson and a Harding, it is fair to assume that it is now a fixed policy, and according to the laws of financial gravitation it would seem inevitable that in course of time all the South American republics will become satellites of our banking-interests. The metaphor is perhaps unfortunate, for instead of planetary dependents circling placidly about their worshipful sun, these will be satellites wildly straining at their orbits and hating the centripetal power and the system which holds them in confinement. The situation that has already developed in Haiti, in Nicaragua and elsewhere indicates that the maintenance of our imperialism must involve us in a series of sordid and dirty little wars against peoples unaccustomed to the repressions and exactions of alien domination. When the maladjustments of the masters of the Versailles conference work out to their inevitable conclusion and we find ourselves involved in a new clash with fresh combinations of great Powers for the mastery of the world, we must be prepared to reap what our political and financial founding stepfathers are so assiduously sowing for us through the length and breadth of this hemisphere. Instead of one Ireland, hoping, praying and contriving for our downfall, we shall face a whole continent of Irelands which will see in American dissolution their only hope for freedom.
H. K. II. X. 22.
THE FAILURE OF A THEORY
ACCORDING to our interpretation, the history of Russia during the last half-dozen years is extremely damaging to the Marxian theory of the social revolution. The stimulus to revolt seems to have been felt almost as keenly by the Russian peasantry as by the industrial workers, and certainly the peasants have been more successful than the proletarians in the post-revolutionary conduct of productive operations. In a country like the United States, where the agricultural population has never borne such burdens as were laid upon the Russian peasantry, the progress of industrialization and the growth of the proletariat may increase the likelihood of revolt, but it does not by any means follow that the ability of the labour-force to control and carry on the operations of production will increase in like proportion. Indeed it seems to us that the possibility of the achievement, by any sudden change, of anything like economic democracy, is decreased as the scale and scope of industrial and commercial operations is extended.
For the Russian peasant, the process of revolution was the simple one of the Jacquerie. Reconstruction was likewise a simple matter, for when the landlords had been expelled, the peasants extended to the estates a system of allotment and cultivation which had previously been in vogue within the holdings of the village-commune. Thus it was not necessary for the peasants to unite under a centralized leadership, or to accept and act on a complex programme, or to adopt overnight a new way of life; they had learned by years of hard experience to maintain themselves in comparatively isolated, semi-cooperative groups, and each of these groups was prepared to engage in self-directed labour on the landlord’s estate, the morning after the manor house was burned.
The industrial workers were in a different case altogether. For them, as for the peasants, the revolution was a comparatively simple matter; but the task of reconstruction was infinitely complex. Here there was no question of extending to new factories and new mines a system of production with which the workers were already familiar. Year after year, within the narrow limits of their holdings, the peasant-communes had functioned in the actual conduct of agriculture, but the labour-unions, where they existed, had had no such significance in the conduct of industry. Indeed the industrial workers had had no experience in self-direction, except in respect to occasional withdrawal of labour.
Being thus without practical knowledge of the conduct and control of production, the industrial class was faced with a problem much more complex than that which confronted the peasantry. If the peasants had not been prepared by experience for the task of reconstruction, they could still have worked out their destiny by experimentation. The comparative self-sufficiency of the communes would have permitted a wide diversity in opinion and procedure; but in the case of the factories nothing of the sort was possible. Here the only alternative to a return to the old regime seemed to be the common action of millions of people in accordance with a plan which very few of them understood, even in theory. In our opinion, any attempt at reconstruction on such a basis puts upon human nature a strain which it simply will not bear. The demands that it makes in the way of unanimous and intelligent action on the part of the masses, and wise generalship on the part of their leaders, can hardly be met this side of Paradise. If, then, Russia has not already relapsed into the economy of pre-war days, it is not so much the ability of the Bolshevik leaders that has prevented it, though they have sometimes shown themselves wiser than Solomon; it is first of all, we think, the experience of communal life which has taught the peasants how to utilize in some measure of co-operation, the possibilities which were created by the revolution.
An industrialized society gives its members little practical training of this sort, and the advocates of revolution are not much concerned to make the shortage good. Usually they preach a doctrine which can not become effective in practice until it has been very generally accepted in theory, and must then be acted on hastily and in wholesale fashion, without previous experimentation or experience. In the prospect of such action, we find the promise of disaster only, followed by a slow, painful return to the old regime.
It seems to us that those who contemplate the democratic control of productive operations by the producers, should be able to see that the acceptance of a theory, even its unanimous and intelligent acceptance, can not adequately prepare the workers in industry to participate in the new task laid out for them. The ideal of democratic control makes a great appeal to certain elements of organized labour; but if the aim is ever to be realized, it must come about through the gradual extension of co-operative methods to one plant after another. If the resources of nature were free and labour were at a premium, this gradual extension would be much easier than it is; but in any case there is no prospect that the actual conduct of industrial operations can be successfully democratized by any wholesale revolution.
G. T. R. 25. x. 22.
AMOR FATI
IN one of his recent essays, Mr. Santayana speaks of the immense value in the world of thought, in the world of the arts, of a complete indifference to forms of life that are beyond one’s power of realization. He is discussing snobs and snobbishness; and he suggests, apropos of the instinct of social emulation, that nothing could be better calculated to advance the material well-being of society: it is in ages and among races in which that instinct is weakest, on the other hand, that we find the most marked variations in the sphere of the intellect. Mr. Santayana cites the Hindus who roll in the dust, rapt in their separate universes, oblivious of the destiny of king or merchant; but we do not need to go to Asia to perceive that, so far as the life of thought is concerned, nothing is more advantageous than a certain fatalism in all mundane affairs. It has been plausibly argued that the decline of English letters dates from the hour when the writer was enabled to compete with the gentleman. Charles Lamb and his circle, for example, knew nothing of that social aspiration which has had so deleterious an effect upon their successors; and who will deny that among the circumstances that have retarded the development of our own literature, opportunity, as we cheerfully call it, has been chiefly to blame? Man is a being that thinks, but only by compulsion; and when there are so many paths to fortune, and all open, why should he subject himself to that discomfort which, as Renan said, is the principle of movement? For this reason, the closing of the American frontier may fairly be taken to portend a certain intensification in our literary life.
The probability is, indeed, that so long as other and more natural forms of life are not beyond one’s power of realization, the mind can not, or at least will not, be indifferent to them. If that is true, the absence of caste and class in our civilization must be regarded as a positive detriment to literature; for writers, like all craftsmen, are happiest when they possess a sphere of their own, a self-sufficient sphere out of which they are never tempted to stray. That ancient tag about “the world forgetting, by the world forgot” really states the first principle of the conservation of energy in the literary life: such modern writers as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing exemplify it, and it was their acting on this principle that justified, as the late Alexander Teixeira de Mattos observes in one of his recently published letters, so many of the “men of the ’nineties.” They “hadn’t clubs, homes, wives or children,” the admirable “Tex” remarks; “lunched for a shilling, dined for eighteenpence, and didn’t want a lot of money. They cared neither for money nor fame; they cared for their own esteem and that of what you call their coterie and I their set.” There we have the guild-spirit, the pride of the métier, out of which the art and literature of the past have come; but how far has not that pride been a consequence of the stratification of life in societies in which the individual has had virtually no chance of “rising in the world”? That heights can exist, as it were, at every social level, or rather that life is not entirely a matter of climbing the social bean-stalk, is an idea that seems to lodge only in minds that accept their level as predetermined. Thus the extremity of the old Adam is the opportunity of the new; and we may say that the star of hope rose over our literature on the day when the last barefoot boy in Missouri ceased to dream of inhabiting the White House.
It is certainly true that the writers of our generation have, as a class, begun to accept their fate. They have seceded, that is, from the bourgeoisie, and ceased to accept the verdict of their bankers as the last word on their own success or failure. Henry Adams justly remarked that the American mind of his day had less respect for money than the European or Asiatic mind, and bore its loss more easily; but he added that it had been deflected by the pursuit of money “till it could turn in no other direction.” We can see the result in the American literature of the thirty years preceding the war: it was characteristic of the age of the “best sellers” that the chief preoccupation of its authors was the maintenance of a “standard of living,” and few were those who were not driven by the fear of dropping behind in the race. That essentially alien ideal, to the pursuit of which we can trace the exaggerated “inferiority-complex” of the American writer as a type—for how can artists compete with captains of industry and preserve their self-respect?—that alien ideal no longer dominates our literary life. Our chief difficulty is that as yet no other ideal has taken its place.
The historians of the next generation who look back upon the American literature of our day will find in it, if one is not mistaken, all the traits of an interregnum of ideals. It will appear as marked, that is, by the habits of mind of the preceding epoch, oddly disoriented, fading, dissolving and at the same time undergoing all manner of indefinable transmutations; it will seem to bear a sort of intermediate character, as between a pioneer literature and a high literature in the proper sense. It is, in other words, the expression of a will to create, in minds that are incompletely adapted to the creative life. The assumed necessity of having to justify themselves financially, to conform to public opinion, to be useful and to produce only that which is useful; all this, together with our faulty education and our lack of leisure, combines to prevent American writers from accepting their status and making a fine art of it: they have at bottom the mental constitutions of practical men; and an ingrained need of the approval of the majority whom they despise perpetually stands in the way of their strongest conscious desires. Hence the universal egomania and “tender-mindedness” of our contemporaries, their itch for publicity, their haunting fear of not being known, their desperate anxiety to keep up with every new idea, every new movement. They carry into the intellectual sphere the practices of the stock exchange, and for this there is a very good reason. Literature occupies only the upper levels of their minds, though it may occupy them so fully that they are aware of nothing else; but deep down, what still actuates them is a desire for a practical success.
In the normal course of things, the conscious cravings of one generation are likely to become the unconscious impulsions of the next. The passionate material desires of the America of fifty years ago have passed below the threshold of the consciousness of our own epoch. Meanwhile, the typical minds of our day, actuated unwittingly by those desires, have been filled by desires of a very different order. When the latter have been ploughed under the soil, we may reasonably expect a genuine literary movement in this country; indeed, all the signs seem to point that way. In things of the mind, however, nothing is automatic: literary evolution, like heaven, helps only those who help themselves; and the American renaissance will not get very far unless it develops that guild-spirit which is the exact opposite of the spirit of log-rolling. The bad habits of the writers of today are due not only to their inheritance, but also to the precariousness of their situation: our society is not sufficiently organized for them to be able to feel that they are voicing, or can voice, anything but their individual sentiments, and for this reason they lack confidence in themselves; for all their sincere intentions, they can not quite believe in the legitimacy of the parts they are playing. Towards the organization of society, which is perhaps indispensable as the condition of a high literature, they can contribute very little; but the development of a craft-sense, a sense of the art, not only of writing but of being a writer, is within their power; and by means of it, by adhering exclusively to the standards and values of their métier and by steeping themselves in its traditions, they can prepare for the hour when society has need of them, and perhaps considerably hasten its coming. By so doing they will at least escape from that state of unstable equilibrium in which they now achieve so little that is good. “Let each one ask himself,” said Goethe, “for what he is best fitted, and let him cultivate this most ardently and wisely in himself and for himself; let him consider himself successively as apprentice, as journeyman, as older journeyman, and finally, but with the greatest circumspection, as master.” How different this attitude is, and how much more productive, than the prevailing attitude of our well-intentioned contemporaries. Strictly speaking, however, it is one of the logical consequences, in a human nature that exists by faith and will, of the necessity of accepting a limited status in life.
V. W. B. 17. i. 23.
FOUNTAINS OF JOY
CURRENT discussions of the philosophy of art remind us that, according to Goethe, a little common sense will sometimes do duty for a great deal of philosophy, but no amount of philosophy will make up for a failure in common sense. It is usually the case that as analysis becomes closer and philosophizing becomes more profound, there is a tendency to obscure certain broad general fundamentals which to the eye of common sense are always apparent; and thus very often the complete truth of the matter is imperfectly apprehended. A great deal of what we read about the arts seems in some such fashion as this to get clear away from the notion that the final purpose of the arts is to give joy; yet common sense, proceeding in its simple, unmethodical manner, would say at once that this is their final purpose, and that one who did not keep it in mind as such, could hardly hope to arrive at the truth about any of the arts. Matthew Arnold once said most admirably that no one could get at the actual truth about the Bible, who did not enjoy the Bible; and that one who had all sorts of fantastic notions about the origin and composition of the Bible, but who knew how to enjoy the Bible deeply, was nearer the truth about the Bible than one who could pick it all to pieces, but could not enjoy it. Common sense, we believe, would hold this to be true of any work of art.
When Hesiod defined the function of poetry as that of giving “a release from sorrows and a truce from cares,” he intimated the final purpose of all great art as that of elevating and sustaining the human spirit through the communication of joy, of felicity; that is to say, of the most simple, powerful and highly refined emotion that the human spirit is capable of experiencing. This, no doubt, does not exhaust its beneficence; no doubt it works for good in other ways as well; but this is its great and final purpose. It is not to give entertainment or diversion or pleasure, not even to give happiness, but to give joy; and through this distinction, common sense comes immediately upon a test of good and valid art, not infallible, perhaps, but nevertheless quite competent. It is, in fact, the test that the common sense of mankind always does apply, consciously or unconsciously, to determine the quality of good art. Great critics, too, from Aristotle down, have placed large dependence on it. One wonders, therefore, whether more might not advantageously be made of it in the critical writing of the present time.
A work of art—a poem or novel, a picture, a piece of music—may affect the average cultivated spirit with interest, with curiosity, with pleasure; it may yield diversion, entertainment or even solace, not in the sense of edification or tending to build up a permanent resource against sorrows and cares, but in the sense that its pleasurable occupation of the mind excludes sorrow and care for the time being, somewhat as physical exercise or a game of chess or billiards may do. But all this is not a mark of good art. Good art affects one with an emotion of a different quality; and this quality may be rather easily identified, provided one does not make a great point of proceeding with the stringency of a philosopher in trying to define it. Joubert said that it is not hard to know God, if one will only not trouble oneself about defining him; and this is true as well of the profound and obscure affections of the human spirit—they are much better made known in the experience of the devout than in the analysis of the philosopher. A critic, indeed, might content himself at the outset by laying down some examples of classic art, and saying that the emotion he wishes to identify, the emotion of joy, is simply what is produced upon the average cultivated spirit by those; and that the difference in quality between this emotion and the emotion produced by another work of art, is a fair index or registration of the difference in quality of art between the two objects or examples. We have space but for one illustration, so for convenience we shall take it from the realm of poetry. Let us take two examples, both dealing with the valid and excellent poetic theme of the shortness of human life and the transitory character of its interests. First, this one:
How nothing must we seem unto this ancient thing!
How nothing unto the earth—and we so small!
O, wake, wake! do you not feel my hands cling?
One day it will be raining as it rains to-night; the same wind blow,
Raining and blowing on this house wherein we lie, but you and I,
We shall not hear, we shall not ever know.
Is the emotion wherewith this verse affects the average cultivated spirit, of the same order, the same quality, as the emotion produced by this—
The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
—or is the difference merely one of degree? Well, then this difference may be used at the outset by criticism, as the common sense of mankind does continually use it, as an index of the poetic quality of the two examples; and criticism can go safely on in assuming that to whatever degree a work of art succeeds in arousing just that emotion, so far can it justify its candidacy for a place as valid art.
We do not put forward this test as one to be used mechanically, nor have we any exaggerated notion of its importance. There are some very welcome signs that criticism, after long running derelict in fantastic extravagance, is beginning to come to its sober senses. Well, then, here, in this test that we speak of, is an implement of criticism that great critics have found extremely useful, but which has of late fallen into disuse—why not bring it out and use it again, not fanatically, but with judgment and discretion? It is primarily an implement for the critic to use upon himself in shaping the course of his criticism; the layman, as we said, has had the more or less conscious use of it all the time. When confronted with the claims of this or that work of art, the critic will be greatly helped to get his bearings if for the moment he puts all other considerations aside, and asks himself with what order or quality of emotion, precisely, does this work of art affect him. Is it with a pleasurable emotion due to interest, curiosity, entertainment, diversion, or is it the emotion of felicity, of joy? No matter about the degree, but is it or is it not, in any measure, small or great, the kind of thing that he gets out of “The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces”? We do not say that this test will ensure his judgment; all we say is that it will greatly assist it.
A. J. N. 21. iii. 23!
THE MOODS OF MARCH
When daffodils begin to peer—
With, heigh! the doxy over the dale—
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.
WHAT strange, indefinable emotions trouble our hearts anew each year at the approach of spring! This sweet complaint of the loveliest of the seasons, inconstant and yet insistent, invades the consciousness of king and cobbler alike all the world over. The most staid man of business amongst us is not altogether incognizant of its tremulous appeal; and sure it is that there is scarce an urchin of the streets who is not in some way aware of it. There are moments when the business man regards with no very friendly eye his desk and all the sad furniture which makes up the appurtenances of his routine-life; and when the ragamuffin feels no longer a sensation of glee at the kindling of his miniature bonfires of broken boxes, which, in the clear air of autumn evenings, were wont to transform with a lovely magic of their own the chilled curbstones of many a noisy, traffic-filled thoroughfare.
The very fish which disport themselves in the cold grey waters of the Baltic feel its influence, as does the tiniest seed buried deep under brown earth in the far-off plains of Siberia. In Africa, in April, at the time of the breaking of the heavy rains, enormous Negroes emerge from their smoky huts and grinning up at the sun, set to work to turn over the steaming, fecund soil. In the Island of Jersey, the French peasants in their blue smocks busy themselves with planting their potatoes in exact geometrical rows. Indeed, with the coming of the warmer weather it is apparent everywhere that a great spiritual liberation has taken place throughout all creation.
Who is able to walk in the country during the month of March and not feel this astonishing awareness that the stern ordering of the world has been in some inexplicable way relaxed? From all sides the freshets, swollen high with melting snow, dance down to the rivers with a sound as of tinkling bells. In the rivers themselves the burden of ice which they have borne for so long grows less and less. At the lapping surface of the water the black river-stakes are still swathed in ice, but each succeeding sunset sees these white bandages diminished in size, while already, away out in midstream, great slabs of floating ice, flat and snow-covered, are being rapidly carried toward the sea. The wise white gulls are aware of what is happening, and in sedate lines stand upon these moving masses, as though, by some strange ordering, it had become their duty to help conduct this winter’s wealth on its last journey.
Up the long country roads we make our way. The wheels of the cars have worn deep furrows, the way is ribbed with long, hard, dirty-coloured snow ridges; but behold! between these ridges there trickles a jocund, infinitesimal river. Glad sunshine is upon everything and there is gold and silver in the air. We branch off into the woods. The crows are abroad, but no longer, as in December, croaking of disaster as they wing their solitary way across naked, frozen tree-tops. They are on the ground now, and their grey beaks are continually piercing the soft, thawing soil. The first green grass is appearing in separate tufts—“leaves of grass” in very truth—delicate and tender and sweet-smelling. Not far off, where the slender stems of the birch trees stripe the dark shadows of the wood, is the place where the pussy willows grow. Already their soft buds are showing, though still clothed warm in furry down against the last few spiteful winds. Small wonder is it, so exquisite and quaint and unexpected is their shape, that the children in the little town should later follow us along the streets with pretty cries of “Give me a pussy willow.” Even children, it would seem, have the wit to appreciate the unequivocal message that is brought into a winter parlour by the presence on the table of one or two of these slim brown twigs.
In the long-drawn-out English spring, the pussy willows are by no means the first heralds of the approach of summer. Long before they are ready to be plucked for the village churches on Palm Sunday, other flowers and plants have already reminded the rook-boys in the chilled, sprouting barley-fields that no winter lasts for ever. Under sheltering, crinkled leaves of the deepest green, pale yellow primroses have appeared. They are to be found everywhere—in the damp-smelling covers side by side with white, over-sensitive wood anemones, and in the moist, fern-grown ditches where cold-eared rabbits stamp in amorous delight or race for shelter back into their root-raftered burrows. It is the same in the English gardens. In many a sheltered terrace-border down in the west country, where all winter long the snaps of hard weather have been broken up by soft west winds from the Atlantic, the snowdrops first show their chastened, unassuming loveliness before ever holly and mistletoe have crackled on a Twelfth-Night hearth; and long before the coming of Shrove Tuesday many a brave crocus has thrust its spear petals up through the inert soil, for all the world like tiny chips that have fallen to the ground from the great sun itself.
What then, exactly, is the origin of these vague sensations of misgiving, of subliminal exultation, which distress us mortals each year in the months of early spring? Is it that at this time we become aware in an almost physical way of the fact that our mother the grain-bearing earth is once more quick, has once more been stirred to the very depths of her being by the caresses of her ancient paramour at whose tyrannical pleasure, for countless ages, she has danced through wide plains of eternally illuminated space?
Or is it merely the ubiquitous presence of virginal beauty that haunts us, virginal beauty that is so palpably, so indisputably present in every field and garden, every rubbish-heap and window box! The briefest glimpse of it has before now made poets run mad; and do we perhaps, whose moods are set to a slower tempo, impotently rattle the shackles of our standardized lives as “April comes like an idiot babbling and strewing flowers”? Surely it is here that the trouble lies. Through summer and autumn and winter we are content with our lot; we are neither irked by the restrictions that beset us, nor put out of countenance by any sudden demand of our inner spirits for a fuller, more gracious, more exciting existence. But with the coming of the soft winds and small, rain all this alters; and each one of us, old men and children, young men and maidens, becomes terribly conscious of the fleeting, fluctuating nature of an existence which bears us forward to the grave, insidiously, inevitably, before ever we have had time or opportunity to experience that ineffable happiness which surely must exist somewhere, somehow, in a world where Beauty in her primal element is so convincingly revealed each year at the coming of the spring.
L. P. 4. iv. 23.
A SALESMAN DE LUXE
AFTER a period of secret communion with editors and bankers, Lord Robert Cecil has emerged upon the public platform to display his political wares and his engaging personality before the gaze of the vulgar. He is not such an heroic figure as M. Clemenceau, who came to us some months back to sell a somewhat similar line of goods; but on the whole he seems more persuasive, perhaps because he has a subtler technique. The earnestness of his manner is assisted by his presence, for in appearance he is, like our own Mr. Will Rogers, of a prepossessing homeliness; and if he does not, like Mr. Rogers, jump amazingly through a looped rope, he displays an equal agility in evading the entanglements of logic. Undoubtedly he is the most accomplished salesman of the many that Europe has sent over to impress us with its somewhat questionable stock.
It is a partnership that Lord Robert comes to offer us, a full partnership in the League of Governments. Here Lord Robert’s persuasiveness labours under some disability. It was only a few years ago that we entered into a partnership with these same associates. For two reasons, the venture left us in a dismal state of mind. In the first place, the character of the business was not as originally nominated in the bond. In the second place, the enterprise was disastrous to us financially; in fact we are still compelled to dig into our pockets to the extent of a billion dollars a year, in order to pay the interest on our losses. Moreover, our partners borrowed ten billion dollars from us on no security whatever, and, with one possible exception, none of them has given any indication of either desire or ability to pay back its borrowings. One is reminded in this connexion of the occasion when Mr. Morris Perlmutter was invited to take as a partner the son-in-law of one of the memebers of the firm of Zudrowsky and Cohen. As Abe Potash pointed out to Mr. Perlmutter, the reputation of Zudrowsky and Cohen was such that “you wouldn’t trust them the wrapping paper on a C. O. D. shipment of two dollars.” The American people may not know much about the intricacies of European affairs; but against going into partnership with European politicians, they cherish an aversion similar to that expressed by Abe Potash against the son-in-law of Zudrowsky and Cohen. In fact, within recent memory, in what Mr. Woodrow Wilson called “a solemn referendum” on the subject, they registered their sentiment against partnership by a majority of seven million. Possibly Lord Robert, with the aid of his banking and editorial friends, may overcome this prejudice, but the odds are against him.
By way of bringing home to us the blessings of membership in the League, Lord Robert puts great emphasis on the curse of war, that “horrible and devilish thing.” In demonstrating that war is wholly unpleasant and undesirable for the general population, Lord Robert is thoroughly convincing. There seems little question that he is sincerely opposed to war, or at least to large wars. In fact one enthusiastic newspaper, upon his arrival, hailed him as the angel of peace. In his monitions about war, however, we have noted that Lord Robert carefully avoids trespassing on one topic, the causes of war. Apparently he is not interested in the causes of war. We have recently passed through an international Kilkenny fight in which all the principal nations were engaged; what with diplomatic indiscretions, the publication of secret documents, and other revelations, the casual background is fairly complete. One would think that a first step towards avoiding wars would be a dispassionate, searching analysis of the causes of the world-war, and a careful study of possible means to eliminate the practices and methods that bred that war and are breeding others. Lord Robert and his League have avoided this plain method as a certain personage is said to avoid holy water. In fact, Lord Robert’s prescription for peace is to give more power to the very agencies that fomented the last war.
“The League,” announced Lord Robert, in his maiden speech in this country, “has been the means of settling several grave international disputes.” Here it seemed that our visitor was getting down to brass tacks, and with high expectation one sped to his next phrases. What were these “grave international disputes” so happily nipped in the bud? Lord Robert speedily informed us. The League had saved Albania from invasion; it was planning to save Austria from bankruptcy. This was his impressive list. Well, the population of Albania is equal to that of Rhode Island; the population of Austria is equal to that of Ohio. An invasion of Albania, deplorable as it may be, is scarcely of grave international import. As for Austria, we recall that when Austrian children were dying of starvation, the League displayed no great concern; but when Austrian banks, in which British interests predominate, threatened to perish of anæmia, the League suddenly awoke to activity and referred the matter to a commission headed by a heavily interested British financier. When one considers that when Poland invaded Russia on a land-grabbing expedition, the members of the League gave the invader their blessing; that when Poland snatched Lithuanian territory the League sanctioned the thievery; that when Greece hurled her forces into Asia Minor the League did nothing; and that when M. Poincaré seized the Ruhr, the League did not even dare to talk about it; when one considers the record of the League in these really important imperialistic outbreaks, Albania and Austria seem pretty small potatoes. Indeed, one feels that Lord Robert committed a tactical error in going into specific instances. He would be more convincing, one thinks, were he merely to smile and smile and be a liberal.
At the conclusion of Lord Robert’s address, one of his auditors had the temerity to ask him whether he was prepared to advocate the scrapping of imperialism in the East, particularly in such places as Egypt, India and Mesopotamia, where alien rule rests wholly upon armed forces. Lord Robert answered promptly that he was opposed to “any policy which I could describe as imperialistic.” He added, however, that he would not advocate the abandonment by a great Power of “any trust undertaken on behalf of a weak and struggling people,” and that he “would not advocate any policy which would hand over the populations of great districts to disorder, bloodshed and slaughter.” This is a splendid moral view; and it is unfortunate that the lesser peoples are so steeped in barbarism that they do not also appreciate what a blessing it is to be murdered and robbed by civilized foreigners rather than by one another. It is a view which shows that Lord Robert’s heart is in the right place. “If I have blackjacked you and seem to be sitting on your chest and relieving you of your valuables,” remarked the highwayman, “it is merely an exhibition of altruism. Had I let you pass in peace, you might have fallen and hurt yourself, smashed your watch and lost your money.”
It is encouraging to find a politician so heartily opposed to war and imperialism as Lord Robert. His speeches and interviews here have given us an excellent measure of his quality, his wonderful mental ductility. The impression is not different from that to be derived from the recent debate in Parliament, in which he took part, on ways and means for devising some sort of intervention in the Ruhr, to save Europe from falling into ultimate chaos. “When the League of Nations is proposed as the proper authority to intervene,” wrote Mr. Arthur Ponsonby, M. P., in reporting the debate, “then Lord Robert says no. When something else is proposed, then Lord Robert says the League of Nations.”
Perhaps Lord Robert may sell his plan of partnership in the League to the gentlemen, not always visible to the public eye, who guides the destinies of the American people. With the great American herd, still staggering under the burdensome debts piled up during the recent war-time association with European Governments, he will need all the charm and subtlety he possesses—and more. The general feeling of the population seems to be similar to that of Mr. Potash towards his sometimes business associate, Pincus Vesell. “That feller,” said Abe, “got an idee that there ain’t nothing in the cloak and suit business but auction pinochle and taking out-of-town customers to the theayter”; and later in a reminiscent vein, he remarked: “He’s the kind of feller that if we would part friends, he would come back every week and touch me for five dollars yet.”
“I do not ask you to enter the League,” says our persuasive visitor, with characteristic directness. “I merely ask if you can afford to stay out.” After some simple financial calculation, we’ll say we can.
H. K. 18. iv. 23.
MECHANISM AND HUMANISM
OFTEN we wonder if “man’s conquest of nature” is still being pushed with all the unquestioning self-assurance that characterized the work of inventors and technicians in ante-bellum days. It seems obvious enough that an improvement in technique does not necessarily connote a change for the better in the life of man; and it is always a pleasure to discover that this disturbing idea has made its way into the mind of an expert. Recently the New York Times asked a number of technicians to answer the question, “What invention does the world most need?” and in reply one spoke out for some means of preventing inferior human beings from reproaching themselves; another called for an increase in the output of food; a third was interested in universal intercommunication (he was a radio-engineer); while the other five all emphasized the need for cheap and easily utilizable energy. One member of this last group says (just out of hand) that a cheap supply of power would put an end to poverty; while another takes it for granted that “It is desirable or necessary that civilization should proceed, for a moment, farther along the present lines of material progress,” and assumes also that “our present civilization can develop a proper control of new material agencies as fast as these agencies are evolved.”
Now it seems to us that the development of a proper control of new material agencies is the thing that can least of all be taken for granted. In view of the experience of the past, it would appear to be much more rational to reverse the situation; that is, to assume that the material agencies will somehow get invented, and to turn a major share of attention upon the social problems which are infinitely farther from solution than the technical ones.
Again, in regard to our technician’s first assumption, it should be remarked that the European press of to-day is liberally sprinkled with articles that question not only the desirability but the possibility of continuing in the present line of material development. A German predicts “the ruin of the Occident”; a Pole prophesies “the downfall of Western civilization”; and indeed a good many Europeans seem ready to join in the condemnation which the Russian Slavophils pronounced long ago upon the culture of the “rotten West.” The Slavophil theory was formulated shortly before the middle of the last century, at the time when railway-construction was getting well under way in Russia, and textile-machinery was being imported in considerable quantities from the factory-towns of England. The Slavophils did not ask for more inventions; they rejected Western science and technology outright, because these material agencies seemed to them wholly foreign to Russia, and because they believed that nowhere, not even in the West, could such agencies be humanized and controlled. It was the purpose of the Slavophils to save Russia from the West, and the West from itself, by the revival and spread of village communism and mystical Christianity.
The Communists of to-day are as emphatic as the Slavophils ever were in their rejection of the notion that material progress translates itself automatically into human well-being; but instead of rejecting the material agencies of the West, as the Slavophils did, the Communists are attempting to master these agencies and to utilize them for the good of the masses. Communism, like Slavophilism, has a Messianic character, and the Communists, like the Slavophils, would teach us a fundamental fact that our Western technicians, and our people very generally, have missed—the fact that the basic problems of life are problems of humanism, and not of mechanism.
G. T. R. 20. vi. 23.
AN UNDELIVERED ADDRESS
THE train stopped at a small station on the plains in a Western State, and the President appeared on the platform of the observation-car at the rear. There was some lively hand-clapping, but it stopped suddenly when the President signalled that he was about to speak.
“My fellow-citizens,” he said, “it is indeed pleasant to be welcomed by groups of citizens everywhere. It is plain that political friends and adversaries sink their differences in order to express their respect for the high office which I happen to occupy. I might easily delude myself concerning the significance of your enthusiasm, but from my knowledge of the past I am aware that you would greet any President in exactly the same way.
“You have been kind to me, and I will be frank with you. It has long been the custom of our citizens to demand that, when a plain man—one of you—becomes, of tener by a series of accidents than because of superior merit, the chief officer of the Government, he gives utterance to profound wisdom on every subject under the sun, early and often. The people like to ignore the fact that when a farmer or an editor becomes President he remains the same farmer or editor that he was before election. The office confers honour, responsibility and dignity, but not learning or wisdom. Too frequently the President permits himself to be blinded to this truth by the eager acceptance, by large numbers, of all that he says; and, once he has fallen into error, he begins to believe that his words are prophetic or otherwise important. Thus he is led to consider himself endowed, by virtue of his position, with gifts that are bestowed by an inscrutable power upon leaders of men but not necessarily upon politicians; and in his anxiety to respond to the clamour of his fellows for an opinion on all subjects, he is bound to say many things that are ill-considered, puerile and unworthy. Eventually he is found out, for, in the long run, the people do find out. Then the people laugh him into oblivion and contemn him.
“My friends, the fault lies with you. Every man who attains to this high place, even a petty man, enters it with a resolve to do his duty, as he conceives it. If you would but permit him to mind his own business he might step down, at the conclusion of his term, with a reasonable amount of self-respect, and with the respect of his countrymen. But you insist on his being a philosopher, a poet, a financier, a statesman, an historian, a bon viveur and—most reprehensible of all—you almost force him to become a dictator.
“Your good-natured importunity has ruined men who might have proved to be good Presidents, cobblers who intended to stick to their last, but whom you forced to be vicars of God. I speak thus to you because I seem to have seen the light for a moment, and I wish to unburden myself while the inspiration lasts. By the time we arrive at the capital of your State, in a few hours, I presume that the Presidential habit will have got the better of me, and I shall deliver the address prepared for me by one of my secretaries, on co-operative farming, Greek drama, the gold standard, a universal tribunal, vegetarianism and infant damnation. Give me your earnest prayers. Farewell.”
B. W. H. 8. viii. 23.
POINTING A MORAL
THE situation in the Ruhr, the coup de main of Italy and the consequent commotion in the Danube States, make this a most appropriate time to raise an urgent inquiry of those who wish the United States to take a hand in Europe’s affairs. What do they want us to do? We have raised that question before, and so have many others, and it has never yet been competently answered. We say competently, because it is no answer merely to reiterate some stock phrase like “The United States ought to join the League of Nations,” or to say that our Government ought to cancel the Allied war-debts in return for an equivalent reduction in the German indemnity. Granted, for argument’s sake, that the United States should do both these things; let us suppose that they were done to-morrow; let us, indeed, suppose that they had been done two weeks after the promulgation of the Treaty of Versailles. The real question is, what reasonable ground is there for assuming, in the one case, that matters would have gone one whit differently up to the present; or, in the other case, for supposing that they would begin to go differently the day after to-morrow?
Not a single interventionist has ever given an answer to that question, and none ever will. All who have tried to answer it have merely delivered some vague rhetoric about the “moral effect” of such action on the part of the United States; and this is rubbish. The war immensely fortified a universal faith in violence; it set in motion endless adventures in imperialism, endless nationalist ambitions. Every war does this to a degree roughly corresponding to its magnitude. The final settlement at Versailles, therefore, was a mere scramble for loot. We venture to say that there is no human being upon earth who can make anything else of it and look one in the eye while he does so. Now, suppose that the United States Government entered the war from the purest of altruistic motives and that it stuck by the Versailles treaty through thick and thin, League of Nations and all, can anyone in his right mind imagine that its “moral effect” would have kept Mr. Poincaré from looting the Ruhr and setting up his Napoleonic scheme of military hegemony in Europe? Could our moral influence have kept the Poles from grabbing Upper Silesia or, to come down to date, could it have kept M. Mussolini from laying his hands on Corfu?
To imagine such a thing bespeaks incredible ignorance and incredible credulity. Moreover, the United States Government did not go to war with disinterested motives, and every European Government knows that it did not. M. Poincaré knows it, and so do the Poles and M. Mussolini, just as well as MM. Clemenceau and Orlando and Mr. Lloyd George knew it at the time of the conference at Versailles. To expect disinterested action on the part of our Government now is simply the amiable and hopeful naïveté of one who expects to catch a weasel asleep. But assuming that it might be, by some miracle, capable of disinterested action, what form could that action possibly take to be effective?
Fortunately, the cause of intervention has been so thoroughly discredited by circumstances that there is no use in saying much about it now. We doubt whether any politician would dare bring it before the country again. It seems that the time has come to point the moral; and in so doing, we come in sight of the one and only service that America can render—not the American Government, but such Americans as are candid enough and flexible enough to have learned a good many things in the past four years, and to have forgotten a good many as well. This service consists in pointing out that the matters at stake in Europe can not be settled by machinery alone; they must be settled by a wider culture, a firmer will and a better spirit. The League of Nations is machinery, and so is the World Court; machinery, moreover, devised for an entirely different purpose from that to which the interventionists would invoke it. This is plain to every one; as plain as that a reaper is not designed to pull a train. The thing is to abandon a blind and unintelligent faith in machinery, and to give oneself over to the promotion of a culture competent really to envisage a world-order of peace and freedom erected upon the only basis able to sustain it, the basis of social justice. Those who do this are the true interventionists; they proffer Europe the only real help that Americans can give. The interventionists here, and those abroad who ask our aid, never show, we regret to say, that they are concerned by the injustices that afflict Europe; they are concerned only by the inconveniences arising from her condition. Even the British liberals who lately addressed a communication to Americans at large, show hardly more than a perfunctory concern with injustice, but an enormous concern with inconvenience.
The time has come, in our opinion, to disallow all this and to reaffirm the revolutionary doctrine set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that the Creator has endowed human beings with certain inalienable rights; to give more interest to principles and less to machinery; to think less about acting and organizing and instituting, and more about establishing a culture that will afford a proper foundation for national action. The time has come, in short, for inaugurating a really moral movement instead of protracting the succession of ludicrous and filthy hypocrisies which have so long passed for moral movements; for an interest in justice and a belief in human rights wherever there are human beings—in Egypt and Haiti, India and Santo Domingo, quite as much as in Corfu or the Ruhr. It is all very well to go about establishing justice and human rights, in the time of it; but the first step towards establishing them is to believe in them, and that is the step to be taken now.
A. J. N. 19. ix. 23.
WHAT IS EUROPE
THE curious disregard of geography which the average American often displays when he speaks of any country except his own, is strikingly illustrated by a good deal of the current talk about American intervention in “Europe.” “Europe,” we are told, is in a bad way, and the United States ought to help it out; “European” finances are all awry, and we ought to aid in putting them in order; the economic life of “Europe” is upset, and we should take a hand in putting it on its feet; and so forth and so on, similar, accordin’. What is this “Europe” that is so glibly talked about, and in regard to which our national duty is insistently declared to be so plain? Judging by the benevolent and hortatory stuff that appears almost daily in the newspapers, especially just after another contingent of sight-seeing businessmen and editors and statesmen has arrived from the other side of the Atlantic, Europe would appear to be a place somewhat like the United States, rather pent in so far as its area is concerned, beset by a few amusing or annoying local peculiarities that have not yet yielded to progress, and embarrassed by certain difficulties of language which are rapidly disappearing with the increasing use of English; but otherwise a homogeneous kind of a country which may probably be thought of and treated as a whole, just as at present we are thinking of and treating afflicted Japan.
Nothing could be more visionary or misleading. There is no such Europe. The name itself is only a geographical expression applicable to a continent, as the names of Africa, Asia or South America are applicable to other continents; but within the area so named there is hardly a trace of political, economic or social unity or homogeneity. To think or speak of “a Europe” as one thinks or speaks of “a United States” is to assume the existence of similarities which in fact are almost wholly lacking. Europe is not a country; it is an aggregation of not less than twenty-seven different countries, each of which is as separate and distinct from any or all of the others as the United States is separate and distinct from Brazil or Newfoundland; not to mention half a dozen small communities which enjoy as yet only a qualified independence. Each of these twenty-seven or more States has its own Government, its own system of law, and its own economic and social life, wholly distinct from that of its neighbours; and the intellectual differences are, in most respects, equally marked. Two of the largest European States, moreover, are only the European portions of States which have the larger part of their territory lying in Asia, and whose policy toward the rest of Europe is determined quite as much by Asiatic as by European considerations. There are more languages too, than there are States; for not only do a number of the European States, as Belgium, Switzerland, Jugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, speak two or more languages, but there are also innumerable differences of dialect sufficiently well marked to amount in practice, in a State like Italy, to a difference of language.
This is the parti-coloured agglomeration of peoples, Governments, languages and international interests which ought really to be thought of when “Europe” is mentioned; an agglomeration with no political or social unity and with extremely little sense, so far as can be gathered from events, of common obligation. Some one will probably protest, however, that even if there is no organic political or social unity there are, nevertheless, certain common problems, and in particular certain common distresses, most of which owe their origin to the world war; and that it is to these that the United States is morally bound to address its benevolent aid. Take reparations, for example; is not that question keeping all Europe in turmoil? Or the war-debts; are not most of the European States entangled in these? Or foreign exchange; is not every European country struggling with its depreciated currency? Here, surely, are things in plenty for the United States to take hold of, even if it does not care to tackle everything and launch a general clean-up. America ought to have a heart, and “go in.” Where there’s a will there’s a way.
Is there? Let us look a bit at that seductive appeal. America should help to settle the great European difficulties that have arisen out of the war. Lay that proposition athwart the map of Europe and observe the States upon which it falls. What do we find? To begin with, we shall discover that six important European States—the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Spain—contrived, to their everlasting honour, to keep out of the war, and were rewarded for their good sense by being also kept out of the peace-conference. None of them has any reparations to collect or war-borrowings of importance to repay: while their currencies, although depreciated, are at the present time in very much better condition than those of most of the former belligerents. Incidentally, they are all distinctly more pro-German than pro-Ally, and this also notwithstanding the war. Russia was out of the fray some time before the war ended; no other European Power seems particularly desirous to pick a quarrel with it; and its new gold-secured currency will shortly shift off into space the depreciated roubles in which a number of ardent patriots elsewhere have been speculating. Add together the populations of these seven States, and it will appear that about one-half of the population of Europe neither needs nor desires American intervention, either political or financial, so far as anything immediately connected with the world war is involved. We strongly suspect that, if the whole truth were told, they all hope very much that the United States will be so good as to let them alone.
How about the “Europe” of the one-time belligerents, of the nations which vowed before high heaven that they would act together until the great “enemy” was vanquished and an “enduring peace” enthroned? Are there any two of the former Allies that show much sign of agreement upon a method of handling the problems of reparations and war-debts, for example? Even Belgium and France, which joined forces for the invasion of the Ruhr, have not been able to make joint replies to the various British notes; while Italy, notwithstanding that it has kept out of the Ruhr, is at odds with both Belgium and France because neither of those Powers will consent to tie together reparations and war-debts in the same bundle. About the only value of the British notes that Mr. Baldwin and Lord Curzon have concocted is their demonstration of British incapacity in the face of an international quarrel, and the manœuvrings of the Cuno and Stresemann Governments have wreathed no halo about the German mind; but the most convinced advocate of American intervention can hardly fail to see, if only he will reflect, that almost anything that any one of these mutually suspicious or openly hostile Powers liked, the others would be much disposed to reject. We have the ennobling spectacle of four great States, all agreeing that Germany ought to pay and ought to be made to pay, but wholly unable to agree as to how or how much it shall be made to pay, or how the payments, if any are obtained, shall be divided among the claimants; and this is the “Europe” which, it is insisted, America ought long since to have helped!
The whole plea for “doing something” in Europe is sentimental humbug and political claptrap; and it is mischievous into the bargain, because it is supported by men and women who know better, but who make no use of what they know. The only way in which the United States can intervene in Europe is by playing the game of some one of the quarrelling Powers, and that is what every Government that pleads for America to “come in” really wants. France would burn incense on every altar and light a bonfire on every hill if Mr. Coolidge would throw his arms about M. Poincaré and call him brother; but if by any chance Mr. Coolidge were to embrace Mr. Baldwin, the mud-slinging batteries of the subsidized French press would work overtime in hurling abuse. What would happen in Paris and London if the United States should express the opinion that the pressure on Germany ought to be relaxed, can be better imagined than described. There is no “Europe” that America can aid. The Europe that is broadcasting its regrets over American isolation is, with the honourable exception of the former neutral States, a collection of Governments each of which wants to get American money and American influence for itself, no matter what happens to the other. Some one has remarked that Mr. Wilson went to Paris bent upon carrying out some great and generous purposes; but that, once seated among the Allies, his whole attention was absorbed in guarding his watch and his pocketbook. If the essential spirit of the men who are arrogating to themselves the right to say what Europe shall be and do, and who have made so dismal a mess of the business, has radically changed since 1919, it is incumbent upon interventionists to make clear the nature of the change.
W. M. 26. ix. 23.
A TOUCHSTONE FOR SOCIETY
“WHAT is really important in a country is the quality of life in it, and this far transcends its nominal political status or the names of its political institutions.” This reflection by Mr. George W. Russell (“A. E.”), in the first issue of the Irish Statesman, is so obvious as to be of the nature of a truism; it is almost as if Mr. Russell had declared that two and two make four; yet it is so rarely expressed that it must arrest the attention of even the casual reader.
How effectively the application of Mr. Russell’s simple formula shatters the pretensions of the dwindling band of romanticists who maintain that certain vague blessings were derived from the war, with its thoroughgoing victory for the cause of “democracy”! In the various belligerent countries of Europe, with the possible exception of Russia, the quality of life has suffered a profound degradation. In great reaches of territory, especially in the vanquished countries, the major part of the population has been reduced to concentrating every effort on a brutalizing day-to-day struggle for food sufficient merely to keep alive. Under such circumstances it is a presumption to use the term “quality” in relation to life. In the so-called victorious countries one finds scarcely less evidence of prostration. Those who have any doubt whether England and France, as well as Germany, lost the war, can easily get rid of their optimism by glancing over the French press, or by subjecting themselves to the depressing experience of a visit to Hampstead Heath on a holiday.
Even in our country, virtually untouched by the hardships of war and remote even from the hardships of the peace, the quality of life has sharply declined. The great crusade left us in possession of a flourishing crop of prejudices and intolerances which have sadly undermined the general intelligence. The wartime propaganda of force to the uttermost has its natural aftermath in epidemics of violence, which in numerous instances have virtually wiped out orderly civil processes. As proof of this one has only to cite the recent clash between the Governor and the legislature in Oklahoma, the murderous attacks on striking railway-workers in Arkansas, the slaughter of strike-breakers at Herrin, Illinois, the outlawing of members of the I. W. W. in California, and the various terroristic outbreaks of the Ku Klux Klan. Our political life has assumed the character of a conspiracy of deceptions, and the political brokers who angle for the higher offices bait their hooks almost exclusively with spurious issues and blatant insincerities.
Mr. Russell’s dictum is an infallible test of the claims of self-styled patriots. We have a super-abundance of such gentry, many of them banded together in organizations devoted largely to atavistic self-admiration. One rarely finds the least evidence that such organizations are interested in improving the quality of life in the country to which they loudly profess devotion. Most of them seem to confuse patriotism with the service of privilege; some have degenerated into mere hate-mongers of the baser sort. It would be interesting if these organizations would strike a balance-sheet at the end of each year and try to show to what extent, if any, their several and combined efforts have improved, either spiritually or materially, the quality of American life. Our guess is that the balance would be fearfully slender.
We have in this country the natural resources and the material development with which to establish a quality of life, in so far as it can be affected by physical comfort and well-being, far above anything hitherto attained. Yet, though we have produced the finest machines in the world, in a spiritual sense our achievement is so meagre that peoples in lands wasted by starvation and confusion hold us but a stage removed from the barbarian. Certain it is that in our land of plenty the Idea has starved.
It may be that the very fact that ours is the highest attainment of material civilization under the established system condemns us to comparative spiritual sterility. A society wherein the agencies of life are most elaborately organized, not for the service of life, but for the aggrandizement of privilege, is scarcely likely to shake the world except with the thunder of its guns. In such a system creative intelligence is forced to be the mendicant of privilege, and thus it is denied that atmosphere of liberty in which alone it can find full play for its ambitions. A study of the list of trustees of our Eastern universities will indicate how closely cultural opportunity is shackled to privilege.
Under a system moulded to the pattern of the profiteer and the imperialist, political Government must inevitably degenerate into an organized hypocrisy. It can survive only so long as the political hierarchy is able to delude the population with unrealities. Under Mr. Russell’s touchstone, the base alloys of a society based on such a system are at once revealed. Though its vaults be bursting with treasure and its power extend to the most remote corners of the earth, it is shown for what it is, an unsubstantial thing; for what doth it profit a society to gain the whole world and lose its own soul?
To prophets of all kinds and conditions, to economists and to political aspirants of every shade, to conservative and reformer and revolutionist alike, we would apply Mr. Russell’s inexorable formula as a common test. How, we would ask, do you propose to improve the quality of life? If the American people could hold their leaders and pretenders to this test, they would immediately be able to rid themselves of a great burden of demagogues, charlatans, tricksters and sentimental idiots, and would speedily clear the way for a real advance in civilization.
H. K. 7. xi. 23.
TOADSTOOLS
IN one of his earlier books Mark Twain tells of seeing a toadstool which in its growth had dislodged and pushed up into the air a mass of tangled roots and leaves, amounting to twice its own bulk. Commenting on this display of strength, he says: “Ten thousand toadstools with the right purchase could lift a man, I suppose. But what good would it do?”
There should be more of this strong common sense employed to make our estimate of our civilization less formal and more fundamental. One of the most striking differences between the Oriental mind and ours is seen here. The Oriental is struck with our way of regarding things and actions as good in themselves, without reference to individual and personal realization; and it seems strange and unnatural to him. Railways, banks, telephones, finance-companies, industrial development, newspapers—all such things are most commonly and generally accepted among us as absolute goods in themselves, quite irrespective of their effect upon the spirit of the individual life, and the quality of the collective life, which are lived under their influence. Let a new railway be laid out, or the postal service be increased, or some new device be invented for quickening communication or transportation, and our general tendency is to accept it at once without question as a good thing, not considering that its whole value is to be measured by its effect upon the spirit and quality of life, and that until this effect be ascertained our estimate of it is worthless and misleading. Our newspapers teach us to take this formal and mechanical view of trade-balances and the expansion of industry, never raising the question whether these actually tend towards a better spirit and finer quality of human life or whether they tend towards a spiritual impoverishment and vulgarization; nor is it regularly pointed out that unless they are so employed as progressively to improve life, unless they are practically interpreted in terms of personal realization, they are hardly worth having.
Surely common sense and the free play of consciousness upon the facts of the material world about us are enough to show that this formal view, almost universal as it is, is superficial and retarding. We read the other day a complaint from a railway-official about new trackage. It seems that only a few miles of new trackage have been laid during the past year. He spoke of this as a calamity, as indeed it may be, but the mere fact does not prove itself as such. One must go further and ask whether it can be shown that individual realization has at all profited, and if so how much, by what trackage we already have. How does the spirit of American life compare, indeed, with the spirit of life at a period when there was no trackage at all? Again, we read not long ago a statement by the president of a great chemical concern, in which he predicted that science would possibly before long enable us to produce synthetic food, cheap fuel, artificial wool; to store solar heat, to do without sleep and to prolong mental and physical vigour. The tone of the statement left no doubt that this chemist regarded all these matters as absolute goods in themselves, whereas clearly they are nothing of the kind. If they are made to tend towards the enrichment and deepening of the spiritual life of man, they will be good; if they are made to tend against it, they will be bad; if they are made to tend neither way, they are of no consequence except in point of curiosity, like Mark Twain’s toadstool.
Again, we lately saw the advertisement of a life-extension institute, headed, “Do You Want to Add Ten Years to Your Life?” Here once more the obvious assumption was that longevity is in itself a good and desirable thing. But is it? There is of course in all of us the primary instinct of self-preservation which speaks out strongly in favour of living as long as we can; and it is to this instinct, this irrational and almost bloodthirsty clinging to life, that the advertisement was intended to appeal. As such it seemed to us, we admit, a little ignoble; we were reminded, as all such enterprises which are now so much in vogue remind us, of Julius Cæsar’s remark that life is not worth having at the expense of an ignoble solicitude about it. But instinct apart, the worth of such enterprises is measured, surely, by the quality of the life which we are invited to prolong. The content of the average life being what it is, and its prospects of spiritual enlargement and enrichment being what they are, may longevity be so indubitably regarded as an absolute good that one is justified in an almost ferocious effort to attain it?
We are not now concerned that these questions be answered; we are concerned only that they be raised. We are concerned with the habit, which seems to us unintelligent and vicious, of regarding potential accessories to civilization as essential elements in civilization. We insist that civilization is not to be measured in terms of longevity, trackage, the abundance of banks and newspapers, the speed and frequency of mails, and the like. Civilization is the progressive humanization of men in society, and all these things may or may not sustain a helpful relation to the process. At certain periods and places, indeed, the process has been carried notably further without any of them than it is now carried with all of them. When we learn to regard them intelligently, when we persuade ourselves that their benefit is potential and relative, not actual and absolute, then we are in the way of intelligently and quickly applying them to the furtherance of true civilization; but as long as we unintelligently regard them as absolute goods in themselves, we shall merely fumble with them.
A. J. N. 5. xii. 23.
IN BEHALF OF RELIGION
THERE is nothing new about the internal disturbance which is going on in certain of the Protestant churches, and which threatens two of them at least—the Presbyterian and Protestant Episcopal churches—with serious disruption. Ever since organized Christianity first ranged itself under a standard of intellectual belief and insisted upon identity of opinion as a condition of fellowship, it has suffered from frequent outbreaks of this kind; and as long as it keeps to this general policy, so long they may be expected to recur.
They are salutary and should be welcomed. They are not good for the contending factions or for the ecclesiastical organization as a whole. Before the outbreak takes place, both factions have become quite ruffled; if either wins a substantial advantage over the other, it tends to become tyrannous; and thus their progress in religion is retarded. The organization emerges from the battle with its official notion of the importance of opinion thoroughly inflated; and thus its progress in religion is retarded too. But for those within the organization who do not concern themselves with the place and function of opinion in matters of religion—and these are doubtless a large majority—and for the far greater number of religious persons who remain outside organized Christianity altogether, these controversies are very valuable. They never yet have failed, when their dust and smoke have subsided, to make the essential nature of religion more clearly and easily visible, and to throw out in higher relief the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.
We shall have more to say on this subject as the situation in the churches develops. At present we make only an observation or two, leading up to a practical suggestion. As between the modernists and the fundamentalists, the preponderance of one’s goodwill should be towards the former. Whether explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, they are doing somewhat more than their adversaries for the clearance and disengagement of religion. Religion is a temper, a frame of mind; the fruit of the Spirit is, as St. Paul says, love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control. It is probably not to be said that the modernists exhibit this temper in the present controversy more distinctly than their opponents; yet the terms of their contention are more favourable to the general apprehension of religion as a temper than the terms chosen by the fundamentalists. As in strictness between the two, therefore, the mind that is interested purely in the furtherance of religion would incline to the side of the modernists.
But it is not necessary to take sides in this controversy, nor is it appropriate to do so; because, as has invariably been the case, neither side has, from the point of view of religion itself, a sound cause. The proper attitude is that of Erasmus towards the early rivalries between Romanism and Protestantism. Erasmus saw that as far as religion is concerned, Protestantism rested on no more solid intellectual foundation than Romanism, and that the questions controverted between the two were therefore really negligible. Hence he refrained from partisanship and contented himself with continually pointing out that religion, properly speaking, was not involved in the discussion; that it was implicit neither in the dogmatic tenets of Romanism nor in those of Protestantism, but was a tertium quid not directly contemplated by either. His attitude was that which was taken on another occasion by St. Paul in reference to the great ecclesiastical controversy of his day, when he said that “in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything; nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by love.” In the present controversy in the Protestant Episcopal church, the thing is, therefore, not to take one’s stand with the reactionary bishops who say that the doctrine of the Virgin Birth must be believed; nor yet with the modernists who content themselves with saying that disbelief in that dogma is permissible within the doctrinal system of this branch of the church. The thing is to insist that this dogma, whatever it may represent as matter of fact, and whatever its status in any doctrinal system may be, has nevertheless no conceivable connexion with religion. It belongs in an entirely different order of truth. The truth of parthenogenesis, whatever that truth may be, is truth of science; it is not truth of religion; and from the standpoint of religion, it is utterly irrelevant and nugatory to dispute against it or to dispute for it or to concern oneself with it in any way except as matter of strict science.
Our practical suggestion to the modernists is that they should make their service to religion distinct, direct and positive instead, as now, of making it confused, indirect and negative. We would remind them that in all previous controversies men have appeared who laboured to put the controverted dogmas on their proper ground by discriminating sharply and powerfully between truth of science and truth of religion, and by showing, as one of the greatest of these apologists puts it, that “truth of science does not become truth of religion until it is made religious”—until, that is, it is informed and animated by the temper which is religion. Such were the Cambridge Platonists, Hales, to some extent Tillotson and Stillingfleet, and above all Jeremy Taylor, in the seventeenth century; such were Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth. What is needed now is a new apologetic which shall do for this generation in behalf of religion and of organized Christianity what Matthew Arnold did for the last; and shall do in behalf of the life, words and character of Jesus what was done by Renan. If our newer modernism will produce this apologetic, it will have done something positive and fruitful in the cause of religion, beside which its present efforts in the cause of a dubious and unimportant broad-church ecclesiasticism will appear of no great consequence.
A. J. N. 2. i. 24.
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