Mankind in the Making Part 8

It will be argued that this enumeration of American and British defects is a mere expansion of that familiar proposition of the logic textbooks, "all men are mortal." You have here, says the objector, one of two alternatives, either you must draw your administrators, your legislators, your sources of honour and reward from a limited, hereditary, and specially-trained cla.s.s, who will hold power as a right, or you must rely upon the popular choice exercised in the shop and at the polling booth. What else can you have but inheritance or election, or some blend of the two, blending their faults? Each system has its disadvantages, and the disadvantages of each system may be minimized by education; in particular by keeping the culture and code of honour of your ruling cla.s.s high in the former case and by keeping your common schools efficient in the latter. But the essential evils of each system are--essential evils, and one has to suffer them and struggle against them, as one has to struggle perpetually with the pathogenic bacteria that infest the world. The theory of monarchy is, no doubt, inferior to the democratic theory in stimulus, but the latter fails in qualitative effect, much more than the former. There, the objector submits, lies the quintessence of the matter. Both systems need watching, need criticism, the pruning knife and the stimulant, and neither is bad enough to justify a revolutionary change to the other. In some such conclusion as this most of the English people with whom one can discuss this question have come to rest, and it is to this way of looking at the matter that one must ascribe the apathetic acquiescence in the British hereditary system, upon which I have already remarked. There is a frank and excessive admission of every real and imaginary fault of the American system, and with the proposition that we are on the horns of a dilemma, the discussion is dismissed.

But are we indeed on the horns of a dilemma, and is there no alternative to hereditary government tempered by elections, or government by the ward politician and the polling booth? Cannot we have that sense and tradition of equal opportunity for all who are born into this world, that generous and complete acknowledgment of the principle of promotion from the ranks that is the precious birthright of the American, without the political gerrymandering, the practical falsification, that restricts that general freedom at last only to the energetic, and that subordinates quality to quant.i.ty in every affair of life? It is evident that for the New Republican to admit that the thing is indeed a dilemma, that there is nothing for it but to make the best of whichever bad thing we have at hand, that we cannot have all we desire but only a greater or a lesser moiety, is a most melancholy and hampering admission.

And, certainly, no New Republican will agree without a certain mental struggle, without a thorough and earnest inquiry into the possibility of a third direction.

This matter has two aspects, it presents itself as two questions; the question first of all of administration, and the question of honour and privilege. What is it that the New Republican idea really requires in these two matters? In the matter of administration it requires that every child growing up in a state should feel that he is part owner of his state, completely free in his members.h.i.+p, and equal in opportunity to all other children--and it also wants to secure the management of affairs in the hands of the very best men, not the noisiest, not the richest or most skilfully advertised, but the best. Can these two things be reconciled? In the matter of honour and privilege, the New Republican idea requires a separation of honour from notoriety; it requires some visible and forcible expression of the essential conception that there are things more honourable than getting either votes or money; it requires a cla.s.s and distinctions and privileges embodying that idea--and also it wants to ensure that through the whole range of life there shall not be one door locked against the effort of the citizen to accomplish the best that is in him. Can these two things be reconciled also?

I have the temerity to think that in both cases the conflicting requirements can be reconciled far more completely than is commonly supposed.

Let us take, first of all, the question of the reconciliation as it is presented in the administration of public affairs. The days have come when the most democratic-minded of men must begin to admit that the appointment of all rulers and officials by polling the manhood, or most of the manhood, of a country does not work--let us say perfectly--and at no level of educational efficiency does it ever seem likely to work in the way those who established it hoped. By thousands of the most varied experiments the nineteenth century has proved this up to the hilt. The fact that elections can only be worked as a choice between two selected candidates, or groups of candidates, is the unforeseen and unavoidable mechanical defect of all electoral methods with large electorates.

Education has nothing to do with that. The elections for the English University members are manipulated just as much as the elections in the least literate of the Irish const.i.tuencies. [Footnote: There is a very suggestive book on this aspect of our general question, _The Crowd_, by M. Gustave le Bon, which should interest any one who finds this paper interesting. And the English reader who would like a fuller treatment of this question has now available also Ostrogorski's great work, _Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties_.] It is not a question of accidentals, but a question of the essential mechanism. Men have sought out and considered all sorts of devices for qualifying the present method by polling; Mills's plural voting for educated men will occur to the reader; Hare's system of vote collection, and the negative voting of Doctor Grece; and the defects of these inventions have been sufficiently obvious to prevent even a trial. The changes have been rung upon methods of counting; c.u.mulative votes and the prohibition of plumping, and so on, have been tried without any essential modification of the results. There are various devices for introducing "stages" in the electoral process; the const.i.tuency elects electors, who elect the rulers and officers, for example, and there is also that futile attempt to bring in the non-political specialist, the method of electing governing bodies with power to "co-opt." Of course they "co-opt"

their fellow politicians, rejected candidates, and so on. Among other expedients that people have discussed, are such as would make it necessary for a man to take some trouble and display some foresight to get registered as a voter or to pa.s.s an examination to that end, and such as would confront him with a voting paper so complex, that only a very intelligent and painstaking man would be able to fill it up without disqualification. It certainly seems a reasonable thing to require that the voter should be able at least to write out fully and spell correctly the name of the man of his choice. Except for the last, there is scarcely any of these things but its adoption would strengthen the power of the political organizer, which they aim to defeat. Any complication increases the need and the power of organization. It is possible to believe--the writer believes--that with all this burthen of shortcomings, the democratic election system is still, on the whole, better than a system of hereditary privilege, but that is no reason for concealing how defective and disappointing its practical outcome has been, nor for resting contented with it in its present form. [Footnote: The statement of the case is not complete unless we mention that, to the method of rule by hereditary rulers and the appointment of officials by n.o.ble patrons on the one hand, and of rule by politicians exercising patronage on the other, there is added in the British system the Chinese method of selecting officials by compet.i.tive examination. Within its limits this has worked as a most admirable corrective to patronage; it is one of the chief factors in the cleanhandedness of British politicians, and it is continually importing fresh young men from outside to keep officialdom in touch with the general educated world.

But it does not apply, and it does not seem applicable, to the broader issues of politics, to the appointment and endors.e.m.e.nt of responsible rulers and legislators, where a score of qualities are of more importance than those an examination can gauge.]

Is polling really essential to the democratic idea? That is the question now very earnestly put to the reader. We are so terribly under the spell of established conditions, we are all so obsessed by the persuasion that the only conceivable way in which a man can be expressed politically is by himself voting in person, that we do all of us habitually overlook a possibility, a third choice, that lies ready to our hands. There is a way by means of which the indisputable evils of democratic government may be very greatly diminished, without destroying or even diminis.h.i.+ng--indeed, rather enhancing--that invigorating sense of unhampered possibilities, that the democratic idea involves. There is a way of choosing your public servants of all sorts and effectually controlling public affairs on perfectly sound democratic principles, _without ever having such a thing as an election, as it is now understood, at all_, a way which will permit of a deliberate choice between numerous candidates--a thing utterly impossible under the current system--which will certainly raise the average quality of our legislators, and be infinitely saner, juster, and more deliberate than our present method. And, moreover, it is a way that is typically the invention of the English people, and which they use to-day in another precisely parallel application, an application which they have elaborately tested and developed through a period of at least seven or eight hundred years, and which I must confess myself amazed to think has not already been applied to our public needs. This way is the Jury system. The Jury system was devised to meet almost exactly the same problem that faces us to-day, the problem of how on the one hand to avoid putting a man's life or property into the hands of a Ruler, a privileged person, whose interest might be unsympathetic or hostile, while on the other protecting him from the tumultuous judgments of a crowd--to save the accused from the arbitrary will of King and n.o.ble without flinging him to the mob. To-day it is exactly that problem over again that our peoples have to solve, except that instead of one individual affair we have now our general affairs to place under a parallel system. As the community that had originally been small enough and intimate enough to decide on the guilt or innocence of its members grew to difficult proportions, there developed this system of selecting by lot a number of its common citizens who were sworn, who were then specially instructed and prepared, and who, in an atmosphere of solemnity and responsibility in absolute contrast with the uproar of a public polling, considered the case and condemned or discharged the accused. Let me point out that this method is so universally recognized as superior to the common electoral method that any one who should propose to-day to take the fate of a man accused of murder out of the hands of a jury and place it in the hands of any British or American const.i.tuency whatever, even in the hands of such a highly intelligent const.i.tuency as one of the British universities, would be thought to be carrying crankiness beyond the border line of sanity.

Why then should we not apply the Jury system to the electoral riddle?

Suppose, for example, at the end of the Parliamentary term, instead of the present method of electing a member of Parliament, we were, with every precaution of publicity and with the most ingeniously impartial machine that could be invented, to select a Jury by lot, a Jury sufficiently numerous to be reasonably representative of the general feeling of the community and sufficiently small to be able to talk easily together and to do the business without debating society methods--between twenty and thirty, I think, might be a good working number--and suppose we were, after a ceremony of swearing them and perhaps after prayer or after a grave and dignified address to them upon the duty that lay before them, to place each of these juries in comfortable quarters for a few days and isolated from the world, to choose its legislator. They could hear, in public, under a time limit, the addresses of such candidates as had presented themselves, and they could receive, under a limit of length and with proper precautions for publicity, such doc.u.ments as the candidates chose to submit. They could also, in public, put any questions they chose to the candidates to elucidate their intentions or their antecedents, and they might at any stage decide unanimously to hear no more of and to dismiss this or that candidate who enc.u.mbered their deliberations. (This latter would be an effectual way of suppressing the candidature of cranks, and of half-witted and merely symbolical persons.) The Jury between and after their interrogations and audiences would withdraw from the public room to deliberate in privacy. Their deliberations which, of course, would be frank and conversational to a degree impossible under any other conditions, and free from the dodges of the expert vote manipulator altogether, would, for example, in the case of several candidates of the same or similar political colours, do away with the absurdity of the split vote. The jurymen of the same political hue could settle that affair among themselves before contributing to a final decision.

This Jury might have certain powers of inquest. Provision might be made for pleas against particular candidates; private individuals or the advocates of vigilance societies might appear against any particular candidate and submit the facts about any doubtful affair, financial or otherwise, in which that candidate had been involved. Witnesses might be called and heard on any question of fact, and the implicated candidate would explain his conduct. And at any stage the Jury might stop proceedings and report its selection for the vacant post. Then, at the expiration of a reasonable period, a year perhaps, or three years or seven years, another Jury might be summoned to decide whether the sitting member should continue in office unchallenged or be subjected to a fresh contest.

This suggestion is advanced here in this concrete form merely to show the sort of thing that might be done; it is one sample suggestion, one of a great number of possible schemes of Election by Jury. But even in this state of crude suggestion, it is submitted that it does serve to show the practicability of a method of election more deliberate and thorough, more dignified, more calculated to impress the new generation with a sense of the gravity of the public choice, and infinitely more likely to give us good rulers than the present method, and that it would do so without sacrificing any essential good quality whatever inherent in the Democratic Idea. [Footnote: There are excellent possibilities, both in the United States and in this Empire, of trying over such a method as this, and of introducing it tentatively and piecemeal. In Great Britain already there are quite different methods of election for Parliament existing side by side. In the Hythe division of Kent, for example, I vote by ballot with elaborate secrecy; in the University of London I declare my vote in a room full of people. The British University const.i.tuencies, or one of them, might very readily be used as a practical test of this jury suggestion. There is nothing, I believe, in the Const.i.tution of the United States to prevent any one State resorting to this characteristically Anglo-Saxon method of appointing its representatives in Congress. It is not only in political inst.i.tutions that the method may be tried. Any societies or inst.i.tutions that have to send delegates to a conference or meeting might very easily bring this conception to a practical test. Even if it does not prove practicable as a subst.i.tute for election by polling, it might be found of some value for the appointment of members of the specialist type, for whom at present we generally resort to co-option. In many cases where the selection of specialists was desirable to complete public bodies, juries of educated men of the British Grand Jury type might be highly serviceable.] The case for the use of the Jury system becomes far stronger when we apply it to such problems as we now attempt to solve by co-opting experts upon various administrative bodies.

The necessity either of raising the quality of representative bodies or of replacing them not only in administration but in legislation by bureaucracies of officials appointed by elected or hereditary rulers, is one that presses on all thoughtful men, and is by no means an academic question needed to round off this New Republican theory. The necessity becomes more urgent every day, as scientific and economic developments raise first one affair and then another to the level of public or quasi-public functions. In the last century, locomotion, lighting, heating, education, forced themselves upon public control or public management, and now with the development of Trusts a whole host of businesses, that were once the affair of competing private concerns, claim the same attention. Government by hustings' bawling, newspaper clamour, and ward organization, is more perilous every day and more impotent, and unless we are prepared to see a government _de facto_ of rich business organizers override the government _de jure_, or to relapse upon a practical oligarchy of officials, an oligarchy that will certainly decline in efficiency in a generation or so, we must set ourselves most earnestly to this problem of improving representative methods. It is in the direction of the subst.i.tution of the Jury method for a general poll that the only practicable line of improvement known to the present writer seems to lie, and until it has been tried it cannot be conceded that democratic government has been tried and exhaustively proved inadequate to the complex needs of the modern state.

So much for the question of administration. We come now to a second need in the modern state if it is to get the best result from the citizens born into it, and that is the need of honours and privileges to reward and enhance services and exceptional personal qualities and so to stir and enn.o.ble that emulation which is, under proper direction, the most useful to the constructive statesman of all human motives. In the United States t.i.tles are prohibited by the const.i.tution, in Great Britain they go by prescription. But it is possible to imagine t.i.tles and privileges that are not hereditary, and that would be real symbols of human worth entirely in accordance with the Republican Idea. It is one of the stock charges against Republicanism that success in America is either political or financial. In England, in addition, success is also social, and there is, one must admit, a sort of recognition accorded to intellectual achievement, which some American scientific men have found reason to envy. In America, of course, just as in Great Britain, there exists that very enviable distinction, the honorary degree of a university; but in America it is tainted by the freedom with which bogus universities can be organized, and by the unchallenged a.s.sumptions of quacks. In Great Britain the honorary degree of a university, in spite of the fact that it goes almost as a matter of course to every casual Prince, is a highly desirable recognition of public services.

Beyond this there are certain British distinctions that might very advantageously be paralleled in America, the Fellows.h.i.+p of the Royal Society, for example, and that really very fine honour, as yet untainted by the cla.s.s of men who tout for baronetcies and peerages, the Privy Council.

There are certain points in this question that are too often overlooked.

In the first place, _honours and t.i.tles need not be hereditary_; in the second, _they need not be conferred by the political administration_; and, in the third, they are not only--as the French Legion of Honour shows--entirely compatible with, but _they are a necessary complement to the Republican Idea_.

The bad results of entrusting honours to the Government are equally obvious in France and Great Britain. They are predominantly given, quite naturally, for political services, because they are given by politicians too absorbed to be aware of men outside the political world. In Great Britain the process is modified rather than improved by what one knows as court influence. And in spite of the real and sustained efficiency of the Royal Society in distinguis.h.i.+ng meritorious scientific workers, the French Academy, which has long been captured by aristocratic dilettanti, and the English Royal Academy of Arts, demonstrate the essential defects and dangers of a body which fills its own gaps. But there is no reason why a national system of honours and t.i.tles should not be worked upon a quite new basis, suggested by these various considerations. Let us, simply for tangibleness, put the thing as a concrete plan for the reader's consideration.

There might, for example, be a lowest stage which would include--as the English knighthood once included--almost every citizen capable of initiative, all the university graduates, all the men qualified to practice the responsible professions, all qualified teachers, all the men in the Army and Navy promoted to a certain rank, all seamen qualified to navigate a vessel, all the ministers recognized by properly organized religious bodies, all public officials exercising command; quasi-public organizations might nominate a certain proportion of their staffs, and organized trade-unions with any claim to skill, a certain proportion of their men, their "decent" men, and every artist or writer who could submit a pa.s.sable diploma work; it would be, in fact, a mark set upon every man or woman who was qualified to do something or who had done something, as distinguished from the man who had done nothing in the world, the mere common unenterprising esurient man. It might carry many little privileges in public matters--for instance, it might qualify for certain electoral juries. And from this cla.s.s the next rank might easily be drawn in a variety of ways. _In a modern democratic state there must be many fountains of honour._ That is a necessity upon which one cannot insist too much. There must be no court, no gang, no traditional inalterable tribunal. Local legislative bodies, for example,--in America, state legislatures and in England, county councils,--might confer rank on a limited number of men or women yearly; juries drawn from certain special const.i.tuencies, from the roll of the medical profession, or from the Army, might a.s.semble periodically to nominate their professional best, the Foreign or Colonial Office might confer recognition for political services, the university governing bodies might be entrusted with the power--just as in the middle ages many great men could confer knighthood. From among these distinguished gentlemen of the second grade still higher ranks might be drawn. Local juries might select a local chief dignitary as their "earl," let us say, from among the resident men of rank, and there is no reason why certain great const.i.tuencies, the medical calling, the engineers, should not specify one or two of their professional leaders, their "dukes." There are many occasions of local importance when an honourable figure-head is needed. The British fall back on the local hereditary peer or invite a prince, too often some poor creature great only by convention--and what the Americans do I do not know, unless they use a Boss. There are many occasions of something more than ceremonial importance when a responsible man publicly honoured and publicly known, and not a professional politician, is of the utmost convenience. And there are endless affairs, lists, gatherings, when the only alternative to rank is scramble. For myself I would not draw the line at such minor occasions for precedence. A Second Chamber is an essential part of the political scheme of all the English-speaking communities, and almost always it is intended to present stabler interests and a smaller and more selected const.i.tuency than the lower house. From such a life n.o.bility as I have sketched a Second Chamber could be drawn much as the Irish representative peers in the House of Lords are drawn from the general peerage of Ireland. It would be far less party bound and far less mercenary than the American Senate, and far more intelligent and capable than the British House of Lords. And either of these bodies could be brought under a process of deliberate conversion in this direction with scarcely any revolutionary shock at all. [Footnote: In the case of the House of Lords, for example, the process of conversion might begin by extending the Scotch and Irish system to England, and subst.i.tuting a lesser number of representative peers for the existing English peerage.

Then it would merely revive a question that was already under discussion in middle Victorian times, to create non-hereditary peerages in the three kingdoms. The several Privy Councils might next be added to the three national const.i.tuencies by which and from which the representative peers were appointed, and then advisory boards might be called from the various Universities and organized professions, and from authoritative Colonial bodies to recommend men to be added to the voting peerage. Life peers already exist. The law is represented by life peers. The lords spiritual are representative life peers--they are the senior bishops, and they are appointed to represent a corporation--the Established Church. So a generally non-hereditary functional n.o.bility might come into being without any violent break with the present condition of things. The conversion of the American Senate would be a more difficult matter, because the method of appointment of Senators is more stereotyped altogether, and, since 1800, unhappily quite bound up with the political party system. The Senate is not a body of varied and fluctuating origins into which new elements can be quietly inserted. An English writer cannot estimate how dear the sacred brace of Senators for each State may or may not be to the American heart. But the possibility of Congress delegating the power to appoint additional Senators to certain non-political bodies, or to juries of a specific const.i.tution, is at least thinkable as the beginning of a movement that would come at last into parallelism with that in the British Empire.]

When these issues of public honour and efficient democratic administration have begun to move towards a definite solution, the community will be in a position to extend the operation of the new methods towards a profounder revolution, the control of private property. "We are all Socialists nowadays," and it is needless, therefore, to argue here at any length to establish the fact that beyond quite personal belongings all Property is the creation of society, and in reality no more than an administrative device. At present, in spite of some quite hideous and mischievous local aspects, the inst.i.tution of Property, even in land and the shares of quasi-public businesses, probably gives as efficient a method of control, and even it may be a more efficient method of control than any that could be devised to replace it under existing conditions. We have no public bodies and no methods of check and control sufficiently trustworthy to justify extensive expropriations. Even the munic.i.p.alization of industries needs to go slowly until munic.i.p.al areas have been brought more into conformity with the conditions of efficient administration. Areas too cramped and areas that overlap spell waste and conflicting authorities, and premature munic.i.p.alization in such areas will lead only to the final triumph of the private company. Political efficiency must precede Socialism. [Footnote: See Appendix I. ] But there can be no doubt that the spectacle of irresponsible property is a terribly demoralizing force in the development of each generation. It is idle to deny that Property, both in Great Britain and America, works out into a practical repudiation of that equality, political democracy so eloquently a.s.serts.

There is a fatalistic submission to inferiority on the part of an overwhelming majority of those born poor, they hold themselves cheap in countless ways, and they accept as natural the use of wealth for wanton pleasure and purposes absolutely mischievous, they despair of effort in the public service, and find their only hope in gambling, sharp greedy trading, or in base acquiescences to the rich. The good New Republican can only regard our present system of Property as a terribly unsatisfactory expedient and seek with all his power to develop a better order to replace it.

There are certain lines of action in this matter that cannot but be beneficial, and it is upon these that the New Republican will, no doubt, go. One excellent thing, for example, would be to insist that beyond the limits of a reasonable amount of personal property, the community is justified in demanding a much higher degree of efficiency in the property-holder than in the case of the common citizen, to require him or her to be not only sane but capable, equal mentally and bodily to a great charge. The heir to a great property should possess a satisfactory knowledge of social and economic science, and should have studied with a view to his great responsibilities. The age of twenty-one is scarcely high enough for the management of a great estate, and to raise the age of free administration for the owners of great properties, and to specify a superannuation age would be a wise and justifiable measure.

[Footnote: Something of the sort is already secured in France by the power of the _Conseil de Famille_ to expropriate a spendthrift.]

There should also be a possibility of intervention in the case of maladministration, and a code of offences--habitual drunkenness, for example, a.s.saults of various kinds--offences that established the fact of unfitness and resulted in deposition, might be drawn up. It might be found desirable in the case of certain crimes and misdemeanours, to add to existing penalties the transfer of all real or share properties to trustees. Vigorous confiscation is a particularly logical punishment for the proven corruption of public officers by any property owner or group of property owners. Rich men who bribe are a danger to any state. Beyond the limits of lunacy it might be possible to define a condition of malignancy or ruthlessness that would justify confiscation, attempts to form corners in the necessities of life, for example, could be taken as evidence of such a condition. All such measures as this would be far more beneficial than the immediate improvement they would effect in public management. They would infect the whole social body with the sense that property was saturated with responsibility and was in effect a trust, and that would be a good influence upon rich and poor alike.

Moreover, as public bodies became more efficient and more trustworthy, the principle already established in British social polity by Sir William Vernon Harcourt's Death Duties, the principle of whittling great properties at each transfer, might be very materially extended. Every transfer of property might establish a state mortgage for some fraction of the value of that property. The fraction might be small when the recipient was a public inst.i.tution, considerable in the case of a son or daughter, and almost all for a distant relative or no kindred at all. By such devices the evil influence of property acquired by mere accidents would be reduced without any great discouragement of energetic, enterprising, and inventive men. And a man ambitious to found a family might still found one if he took care to marry wisely and train and educate his children to the level of the position he designed for them.

While the New Republican brings such expedients as this to bear upon property from above, there will also be the expedients of the Minimum Wage and the Minimum Standard of Life, already discussed in the third of these papers, controlling it from below. Limited in this way, property will resemble a river that once swamped a whole country-side, but has now been banked within its channel. Even when these expedients have been exhaustively worked out, they will fall far short of that "abolition of property" which is the crude expression of Socialism. There is a certain measure of property in a state which involves the maximum of individual freedom. Either above or below that Optimum one pa.s.ses towards slavery.

The New Republican is a New Republican, and he tests all things by their effect upon the evolution of man; he is a Socialist or an Individualist, a Free Trader or a Protectionist, a Republican or a Democrat just so far, and only so far, as these various principles of public policy subserve his greater end.

This crude sketch of a possible scheme of honour and privilege, and of an approximation towards the socialization of property will, at any rate, show that in this matter, as in the matter of political control, the alternative of the British system or the American system does not exhaust human possibilities. There is also the Twentieth Century System, which we New Republicans have to discover and discuss and bring to the test of experience. And for the sake of the education of our children, which is the cardinal business of our lives, we must refuse all convenient legal fictions and underhand ways, and see to it that the system is as true to the reality of life and to right and justice as we can, in our light and generation, make it. The child must learn not only from preacher and parent and book, but from the whole frame and order of life about it, that truth and sound living and service are the only trustworthy ways to either honour or power, and that, save for the unavoidable accidents of life, they are very certain ways. And then he will have a fair chance to grow up neither a smart and hustling cheat--for the American at his worst is no more and no less than that--nor a sluggish disingenuous sn.o.b--as the Briton too often becomes--but a proud, ambitious, clean-handed, and capable man.

VIII. THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION

-- 1

In the closing years of the school period comes the dawn of the process of adolescence, and the simple egotism, the egotistical affections of the child begin to be troubled by new interests, new vague impulses, and presently by a flood of as yet formless emotions. The race, the species, is claiming the individual, endeavouring to secure the individual for its greater ends. In the s.p.a.ce of a few years the almost s.e.xless boy and girl have become consciously s.e.xual, are troubled by the still mysterious possibilities of love, are stirred to discontent and adventure, are reaching out imaginatively or actively towards what is at last the recommencement of things, the essential fact in the perennial reshaping of the order of the world. This is indeed something of a second birth. At its beginning the child we have known begins to recede, the new individuality gathers itself together with a sort of shy jealousy, and withdraws from the confident intimacy of childhood into a secret seclusion; all parents know of that loss; at its end we have an adult, formed and determinate, for whom indeed the drama and conflict of life is still only beginning, but who is, nevertheless, in a very serious sense finished and made. The quaint, lovable, larval human being has pa.s.sed then into the full imago, before whom there is no further change in kind save age and decay.

This development of the s.e.xual being, of personal dreams, and the adult imagination is already commencing in the early teens. It goes on through all the later phases of the educational process, and it ends, or, rather, it is transformed by insensible degrees into the personal realities of adult life.

Now this second birth within the body of the first differs in many fundamental aspects from that first. The first birth and the body abound in inevitable things; for example, features, gestures apt.i.tudes, complexions, and colours, are inherited beyond any power of perversion; but the second birth is the unfolding not of shaped and settled things but of possibilities, of extraordinarily plastic mental faculties. No doubt there are in each developing individual dispositions towards this or that--tendencies, a bias in the texture this way or that--but the form of it all is extraordinarily a matter of suggestion and the influence of deliberate and accidental moulding forces. The universal Will to live is there, peeping out at first in little curiosities, inquiries, sudden disgusts, sudden fancies, the stumbling, slow realization that for this in a mysteriously predominant way we live, and growing stronger, growing presently, in the great mult.i.tude of cases, to pa.s.sionate preferences and powerful desires. This flow of s.e.x comes like a great river athwart the plain of our personal and egoistic schemes, a great river with its rapids, with its deep and silent places, a river of uncertain droughts, a river of overwhelming floods, a river no one who would escape drowning may afford to ignore. Moreover, it is the very axis and creator of our world valley, the source of all our power in life, and the irrigator of all things. In the microcosm of each individual, as in the microcosm of the race, this flood is a cardinal problem.

And from its very nature this is a discussion of especial difficulty, because it touches all of us--except for a few peculiar souls--so intimately and so disturbingly. I had purposed to call this paper "s.e.x and the Imagination," and then I had a sudden vision of the thing that happens. The vision presented a casual reader seated in a library, turning over books and magazines and casting much excellent wisdom aside, and then suddenly, as it were, waking up at that t.i.tle, arrested, displaying a furtive alertness, reading, flushed and eager, nosing through the article. That in a vignette is the trouble in all this discussion. Were we angels--! But we are not angels; we are all involved. If we are young we are deep in it, whether we would have it so or not; if we are old, even if we are quite old, our memories still stretch out, living sensitive threads from our tender vanity to the great trouble. Detachment is impossible. The nearest we can get to detachment is to recognize that.

About this question the tragi-comic web of human absurdity thickens to its closest. When has there ever been a lucid view or ever will be of this great business? Here is the common madness of our species, here is all a tissue of fine unreasonableness--to which, no doubt, we are in the present paper infinitesimally adding. One has a vision of preposterous proceedings; great, fat, wheezing, strigilated Roman emperors, neat Parisian gentlemen of the latest cult, the good Saint Anthony rolling on his thorns, and the piously obscene Durtal undergoing his expiatory temptations, Mahomet and Brigham Young receiving supplementary revelations, grim men babbling secrets to schoolgirls, enamoured errand boys, amorous old women, debauchees dreaming themselves thoroughly sensible men and going about their queer proceedings with insane self-satisfaction, beautiful witless young persons dressed in the most amazing things, all down the vista of history--a Vision of Fair Women--looking their conscious queenliest, sentimentalists crawling over every aspect and leaving tracks like snails, flushed young blockheads telling the world "all about women," intrigue, folly--you have as much of it as one pen may condense in old Burton's Anatomy--and through it all a vast mult.i.tude of decent, respectable bodies pretending to have quite solved the problem--until one day, almost shockingly, you get their secret from a careless something glancing out of the eyes. Most preposterous of all for some reason is a figure--one is maliciously disposed to present it as feminine and a little unattractive, goloshed for preference, and saying in a voice of cultivated flatness, "Why cannot we be perfectly plain and sensible, and speak quite frankly about this matter?" The answer to which one conceives, would be near the last conclusions of Philosophy.

So much seethes about the plain discussion of the question of s.e.xual inst.i.tutions. One echoes the intelligent inquiry of that quite imaginary, libellously conceived lady in goloshes with a smile and a sigh. As well might she ask, "Why shouldn't I keep my sandwiches in the Ark of the Covenant? There's room!" "Of course there's room," one answers, "but--As things are, Madam, it is inadvisable to try. You see--for one thing--people are so peculiar. The quant.i.ty of loose stones in this neighbourhood."

The predominant feeling about the discussion of these things is, to speak frankly, Fear. We know, very many of us, that our present state has many evil aspects, seems unjust and wasteful of human happiness, is full of secret and horrible dangers, abounding in cruelties and painful things; that our system of sanctions and prohibitions is wickedly venial, pressing far more gravely on the poor than on the rich, and that it is enormously sapped by sentimentalities of various sorts and undermined and qualified by secret cults; it is a clogged and an ill-made and dishonest machine, but we have a dread, in part instinctive, in part, no doubt, the suggestion of our upbringing and atmosphere, of any rash alterations, of any really free examination of its const.i.tution. We are not sure or satisfied where that process of examination may not take us; many more people can take machines to pieces than can put them together again. Mr. Grant Allen used to call our current prohibitions Taboos. Well, the fact is, in these matters there is something that is probably an instinct, a deeply felt necessity for Taboos. We know perhaps that our Taboos were not devised on absolutely reasonable grounds, but we are afraid of just how many may not collapse before a purely reasonable inquiry. We are afraid of thinking quite freely even in private. We doubt whether it is wise to begin, though only in the study and alone. "Why should we--? Why should we not--?" And the thought of a public discussion without limitations by a hasty myriad untrained to think, does, indeed, raise an image of consequences best conveyed perhaps by that fine indefinite phrase, "A Moral Chaos." These people who are for the free, frank, and open discussion a.s.sume so much; they either intend a sham with foregone conclusions, or they have not thought of all sorts of things inherent in the natural silliness of contemporary man.

On the whole I think a man or woman who is no longer a fabric of pure emotion may, if there is indeed the pa.s.sion for truth and the clear sight of things to justify research, venture upon this sinister seeming wilderness of speculation, and I think, too, it is very probable the courageous persistent explorer will end at last not so very remote from the starting-point, but above it, as it were, on a crest that will give a wider view, reaching over many things that now confine the lower vision. But these are perilous paths, it must always be remembered. This is no public playground. One may distrust the conventional code, and one may leave it in thought, long before one is justified in leaving it either in expressed opinion or in act. We are social animals; we cannot live alone; manifestly from the nature of the question, here, at any rate, we must a.s.sociate and group. For all who find the accepted righteousness not good enough or clear enough for them, there is the chance of an ironical destiny. We must look well to our company, as we come out of the city of the common practice and kick its dust from our superior soles. There is an abominable riff-raff gone into those thickets for purposes quite other than the discovery of the right thing to do, for quite other motives than our high intellectual desire. There are ugly rebels and born rascals, cheats by instinct, and liars to women, swinish unbelievers who would compromise us with their erratic pursuit of a miscellaneous collection of strange fancies and betray us callously at last. Because a man does not find the law pure justice, that is no reason why he should fake his gold to a thieves' kitchen; because he does not think the city a sanitary place, why he should pitch his tent on a dust-heap amidst pariah dogs. Because we criticize the old limitations that does not bind us to the creed of unfettered liberty.

I very much doubt if, when at last the days for the sane complete discussion of our s.e.xual problems come, it will give us anything at all in the way of "Liberty," as most people understand that word. In the place of the rusty old manacles, the chain and shot, the iron yoke, cruel, ill-fitting, violent implements from which it was yet possible to wriggle and escape to outlawry, it may be the world will discover only a completer restriction, will develop a scheme of neat gyves, light but efficient, beautifully adaptable to the wrists and ankles, never chafing, never oppressing, slipped on and worn until at last, like the mask of the Happy Hypocrite, they mould the wearer to their own ident.i.ty. But for all that--gyves!

Let us glance for a moment or so now, in the most tentative fas.h.i.+on, at some of the data for this inquiry, and then revert from this excursion into general theory to our more immediate business, to the manner in which our civilized community at present effects the emotional initiation of youth.

The intellectual trouble in the matter, as it presents itself to me, comes in upon this, that the question does not lie in one plane. So many discussions ignore this fact, and deal with it on one plane only. For example, we may take the whole business on the plane of the medical man, ignoring all other considerations. On that plane it would probably be almost easy to reason out a working system. It never has been done by the medical profession, as a whole, which is fairly understandable, or by any group of medical men, which is the more surprising, but it would be an extremely interesting thing to have done and a material contribution to the sane discussion of this problem. It would not solve it but it would illuminate certain aspects. Let the mere physiological problem be taken. We want healthy children and the best we can get. Let the medical man devise his scheme primarily for that. Understand we are shutting our eyes to every other consideration but physical or quasi-physical ones. Imagine the thing done, for example, by a Mr. Francis Galton, who had an absolutely open mind upon all other questions. Some form of polygamy, marriage of the most transient description, with reproduction barred to specified types, would probably come from such a speculation. But, in addition, a number of people who can have only a few children or none are, nevertheless, not adapted physiologically for celibacy. Conceive the medical man working that problem out upon purely materialistic lines and with an eye to all physiological and pathological peculiarities. The Tasmanians (now extinct) seem to have been somewhere near the probable result.

Then let us take one step up to a second stage of consideration, remaining still materialistic, and with the medical man still as our only guide. We want the children to grow up healthy; we want them to be taken care of. This means homes, homes of some sort. That may not abolish polygamy, but it will qualify it, it will certainly abolish any approach to promiscuity that was possible at the lowest stage, it will enhance the importance of motherhood and impose a number of limits upon the s.e.xual freedoms of men and women. People who have become parents, at any rate, must be tied to the children and one another. We come at once to much more definite marriage, to an organized family of some sort, be it only Plato's state community or something after the Oneida pattern, but with at least a system of guarantees and responsibilities. Let us add that we want the children to go through a serious educational process, and we find at once still further limitations coming in.

We discover the necessity of deferring experience, of pus.h.i.+ng back adolescence, of avoiding precocious stimulation with its consequent arrest of growth. We are already face to face with an enlarged case for decency, for a system of suppressions and of complicated Taboos.

Directly we let our thoughts pa.s.s out of this physical plane and rise so high as to consider the concurrent emotions--and I suppose to a large number of people these are at least as important as the physical aspects--we come to pride, we come to preference and jealousy, and so soon as we bring these to bear upon our physical scheme, crumpling and fissures begin. The complications have multiplied enormously. More especially that little trouble of preferences. These emotions we may educate indeed, but not altogether. Neither pride nor preference nor jealousy are to be tampered with lightly. We are making men, we are not planning a society of regulated slaves; we want fine upstanding personalities, and we shall not get them if we break them down to obedience in this particular--for the cardinal expression of freedom in the human life is surely this choice of a mate. There is indeed no freedom without this freedom. Our men and women in the future must feel free and responsible. It seems almost instinctive, at least in the youth of the white races, to exercise this power of choice, not simply rebelling when opposition is offered to it, but _wanting to rebel_; it is a socially good thing, and a thing we are justified in protecting if the odds are against it, this pa.s.sion for making the business one's very own private affair. Our citizens must not be caught and paired; it will never work like that. But in all social contrivances we must see to it that the freedoms we give are real freedoms. Our youths and maidens as they grow up out of the protection of our first taboos, grow into a world very largely in the hands of older people; strong men and experienced women are there before them, and we are justified in any effectual contrivance to save them from being "gobbled up"--against their real instincts. That works--the reflective man will discover--towards whittling the previous polygamy to still smaller proportions. Here, indeed, our present arrangements fail most lamentably; each year sees a hideous sacrifice of girls, mentally scarcely more than children--to our delicacy in discussion. We give freedom, and we do not give adequate knowledge, and we punish inexorably. There are a mult.i.tude of women, and not a few men, with lives hopelessly damaged by this blindfold freedom. So many poor girls, so many lads also, do not get a fair chance against the adult world.

Things mend indeed in this respect; as one sign the percentage of illegitimate births in England has almost halved in fifty years, but it is clear we have much to revise before this leakage to perdition of unlucky creatures, for the most part girls no worse on the average, I honestly believe--until our penalties make them so--than other women, ceases. If our age of moral responsibility is high enough, then our age of complete knowledge is too high. But nevertheless, things are better than they were, and promise still to mend. All round we raise the age, the average age at marriage rises, just as, I believe, the average age at misconduct has risen. We may not be approaching a period of universal morality, but we do seem within sight of a time when people will know what they are doing.

That, however, is something of a digression. The intelligent inquirer who has squared his initially materialistic system of morals with the problems arising out of the necessity of sustaining pride and preference, is then invited to explore an adjacent thicket of this tortuous subject. It is, we hold, of supreme importance in our state to sustain in all our citizens, women as well as men, a sense of personal independence and responsibility. Particularly is this the case with mothers. An illiterate mother means a backward child, a downtrodden mother bears a dishonest man, an unwilling mother may even hate her children. Slaves and brutes are the s.e.xes where women are slaves.

The line of thought we are following out in these papers necessarily attaches distinctive importance to the woman as mother. Our system of morals, therefore, has to make it worth while and honourable to be a mother; it is particularly undesirable that it should be held to be right for a woman of exceptional charm or exceptional cleverness to evade motherhood, unless, perhaps, to become a teacher. A woman evading her high calling, must not be conceded the same claim upon men's toil and service as the mother-woman; more particularly Lady Greensleeves must not flaunt it over the housewife. And here also comes the question of the quality of jealousy, whether being wife of a man and mother of his children does not almost necessarily give a woman a feeling of exclusive possession in him, and whether, therefore, if we are earnest in our determination not to debase her, our last shred of polygamy does not vanish. From first to last, of course, it has been a.s.sumed that a prolific polygamy alone can be intended, for long before we have plumbed the bottom of the human heart we shall know enough to imagine what the ugly and pointless consequences of permitting sterile polygamy must be.

Then into all this tangle, whether as a light or an added confusion it is hard to say, comes the fact that while we are ever apt to talk of what "a woman" feels and what "a man" will do, and so contrive our code, there is, indeed, no such woman and no such man, but a vast variety of temperaments and dispositions, monadic, dyadic, and polymeric souls, and this sort of heart and brain and that. It is only the young fool and the brooding mattoid who believe in a special separate science of "women,"

there are all sorts of people, and some of each sort are women and some are men. With every stage in educational development people become more varied, or, at least, more conscious of their variety, more sensitively insistent upon the claim of their individualities over any general rules. Among the peasants of a countryside one may hope to order h.o.m.ogeneous lives, but not among the people of the coming state. It is well to sustain a home, it is n.o.ble to be a good mother, and splendid to bear children well and train them well, but we shall get no valid rules until we see clearly that life has other ways by which the future may be served. There are laws to be made and altered, there are roads and bridges to be built, figuratively and really; there is not only a succession of flesh and blood but of thought that is going on for ever.

To write a fruitful book or improve a widely used machine is just as much paternity as begetting a son.

The last temporary raft of a logical moral code goes to pieces at this, and its separated spars float here and there. So I will confess they float at present in my mind. I have no System--I wish I had--and I never encountered a system or any universal doctrine of s.e.xual conduct that did not seem to me to be reached by clinging tight to one or two of these dissevered spars and letting the rest drift disregarded, making a law for A, B, and C, and pretending that E and F are out of the question. That motherhood is a great and n.o.ble occupation for a good woman, and not to be lightly undertaken, is a manifest thing, and so also that to beget children and see them full grown in the world is the common triumph of life, as inconsequence is its common failure. That to live for pleasure is not only wickedness but folly, seems easy to admit, and equally foolish, as Saint Paul has intimated, must it be to waste a life of nervous energy in fighting down beyond a natural minimum our natural desires. That we must pitch our lives just as much as we can in the heroic key, and hem and control mere lasciviousness as it were a sort of leprosy of the soul, seems fairly certain. And all that love-making which involves lies, all sham heroics and s.h.i.+ning snares, a.s.suredly must go out of a higher order of social being, for here more than anywhere lying is the poison of life. But between these data there are great interrogative blanks no generalization will fill--cases, situations, temperaments. Each life, it seems to me, in that intelligent, conscious, social state to which the world is coming, must square itself to these things in its own way, and fill in the details of its individual moral code according to its needs. So it seems, at least, to one limited thinker.

To be frank, upon that common ground of decent behaviour, pride and self-respect, health and the heroic habit of thinking, we need for ourselves not so much rules as wisdom, and for others not, indeed, a foolish and indiscriminate toleration but at least patience, arrests of judgment, and the honest endeavour to understand. Now to help the imagination in these judgments, to enlarge and interpret experience, is most certainly one of the functions of literature. A good biography may give facts of infinite suggestion, and the great mult.i.tude of novels at present are, in fact, experiments in the science of this central field of human action, experiments in the "way of looking at" various cases and situations. They may be very misleading experiments, it is true, done with adulterated substances, dangerous chemicals, dirty flasks and unsound balances; but that is a question of their quality and not of their nature, they are experiments for all that. A good novel may become a very potent and convincing experiment indeed. Books in these matters are often so much quieter and cooler as counsellors than friends. And there, in truth, is my whole mind in this matter.

Meanwhile, as we work each one to solve his own problems, the young people are growing up about us.