 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Utopia of Users by G. K. Chesterton. Section 1. A Song of Swords. A Drove of Cattle came into a village called Swords and was stopped by the rioters from the daily paper. In the place called Swords on the Irish Road, it's told for a new renown, how we held the horns of the cattle, and how we will hold the horns of the devil now. Air the lord of hell with the horn on his brow is crowned in Dublin town. Light in the east and light in the west and light on the crew of lords, on the souls that suddenly all men knew, and the green flag flew and the red flag flew, and many a wheel of the world stopped too, when the cattle were stopped at Swords. Be they sinners or less than saints that smite in the street for rage, we know where the shame shines bright, we know that you they smite at, you they're foe. Lords of the lawless wage and lo, this is your lawful wage. You pinched a child to a torture price that you dared not name in words, so black a jest was the silver bit that your own speech shook for the shame of it, and the coward was playing as a cow they hit when the cattle have strayed at Swords. The wheel of the torrent of wives went round to breakman's brotherhood. You gave the good Irish blood to grease the clubs of your country's enemies. You saw the brave man beat to the knees, and you saw that it was good. The rope of the rich is long and long the longest of the hangman's cords, but the kings and crowds are holding their breath in a giant shadow or all beneath, where God stands holding the scales of death between the cattle and Swords. Happily the lords that hire and lend the lowest of all men's lords, who sell their kind like kind at a fair, will find no head of their cattle there, but faces of men where cattle were, faces of men and Swords. EUTOPIA OF USERERS Part 1. Art and Advertisement I propose, subject to the patience of the reader, to devote two or three articles to prophecy. Like all healthy-minded prophets, sacred and profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in the hope that my prophecy may not come true. The prediction made by the truth soothsayer is like the warning given by a good doctor. And the doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to death has revived to life. The threat is justified at the very moment when it is falsified. Now I have said again and again, and I shall continue to say again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions, that we must hit capitalism and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that it is growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists as masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie when they claim philanthropy. They no more feel any particular love of men than Elbu felt in affection for Chinaman. They lie when they say they have reached the position through their own organizing ability. They generally have to pay men to organize the mind exactly as they pay men to go down it. They often lie about the present wealth, as they generally lie about their past poverty. But when they say that they are going in for a constructive social policy, they do not lie. They really are going in for a constructive social policy, and we must go in for an equally destructive social policy and destroy, while it is still half constructed, the accursed thing which they construct, the example of the arts. Now I propose to take one after another certain aspects and departments of modern life and describe what I think they will be like in this paradise of plutocrats, this utopia of gold and brass in which the great story of England seems so likely to end. I propose to say what I think our new masters, the mere millionaires, will do with certain human interests in institutions such as art, science, jurisprudence or religion, unless we strike soon enough to prevent them. And for the sake of argument I will take in this article the example of the arts. Most people have seen a picture called Bubbles, which is used for the advertisement of a celebrated soap, a small cake of which is introduced into the pictorial design. And anybody with an instinct for design, the characterist of the Daily Herald for instance, will guess that it was not originally a part of the design. He will see that the cake of soap destroys the picture as a picture, as much as the cake of soap had been used to scrub off the paint. Small as it is, it breaks and confuses the whole balance of objects in the composition. I offer no judgment here upon Mille's action in the matter. In fact, I do not know what it was. The important point for me at the moment is that the picture was not painted for the soap, but the soap added to the picture. And the spirit of the corrupting change which has separated us from that Victorian epic can best be seen in this, that the Victorian atmosphere with all its faults did not permit such a style of patronage to pass as a matter, of course. Michelangelo may have been proud to have helped an emperor or a pope, though indeed I think he was prouder than they were on his own account. I do not believe Sir John Mille's was proud of having helped a soap boiler. I do not say he thought it wrong, but he was not proud of it. And that marks precisely the change from this time to our own. Our merchants have really adopted the style of the merchant princes. They have begun openly to dominate the civilization of the state, as the emperors and popes openly dominated in Italy. In Mille's time, broadly speaking, art was supposed to mean good art. Advertisement was supposed to mean inferior art. The head of a black man painted to advertise somebody's blacking could be a rough symbol like an insign. The black man had only to be black enough. An artist exhibiting the picture of a negro was expected to know that a black man is not so black as he is painted. He was expected to render a thousand tints of gray and brown and violet, for there is no such thing as a black man, just as there is no such thing as a white man. A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. The first effect. I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist, if we allow him to triumph, will be that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement. I do not necessarily mean that there will be no good art. Much of it might be. Much of it already is very good art. You may put it, if you please, in the form that there has been a vast improvement in advertisements. Certainly there would be nothing surprising if the head of a negro advertising somebody's blacking nowadays were finished with as careful and subtle colors as one of the old and superstitious painters would have wasted on the negro king who brought the gifts to Christ. But the improvement of advertisements is the degradation of artists. It is their degradation for this clear and vital reason that the artist will work not only to please the rich, but only to increase their riches, which is a considerable step lower. After all, it was as a human being that a pope took pleasure in a cartoon of Raphael or a prince took pleasure in a statuette of Selene. The prince paid for the statuette, but he did not expect the statuette to pay him. It is my impression that no cake of soap can be found anywhere in the cartoons which the pope ordered of Raphael. And no one who knows the small-minded cynicism of our plutocracy, its secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of conscience can doubt that the artist's advertiser will often be assisting enterprises over which he will have no moral control and of which he could feel no moral approval. He will be working to spread quack medicines, queer investments, and will work for Marconi instead of Medici. And to this base ingenuity he will have to bend the proudest and purest of the virtues of the intellect, the power to attract his brethren, and the noblest duty of praise. For that picture by Melaise is a very allegorical picture. It is almost the prophecy of what uses are awaiting the beauty of the child unborn. The praise will be of a kind that may correctly be called soap, and the enterprises of a kind that may truly be described as bubbles. Part 2. Letters and the New Laureates In these articles I can only take two or three examples of the first and fundamental fact of our time. I mean the fact that the capitalists of our community are becoming quite openly the kings of it. In my last and first article I took the case of art and advertisement. I pointed out that art must be growing worse merely because advertisement is growing better. In those days Melaise condescended to peer soap, and these days I really think it would be peers who condescends to Melaise. But here I turn to an art I know more about, that of journalism. Only in my ease the art verges on artlessness. The great difficulty with the English lies in the absence of something one may call democratic imagination. We find it easy to realize an individual, but very hard to realize that the great masses consist of individuals. Our system has been aristocratic, in the special sense of there being only a few actors on the stage. And the back scene is kept quite dark, though it is really a throng of faces. Home rule tended to be not so much the Irish as the grand old man. The Boer War tended to be not so much South Africa as simply Joe. And it is the amusing but distressing fact that every class of political leadership, as it comes to the front in its turn, catches the rays of this isolating limelight and becomes a small aristocracy. Certainly no one has the aristocratic complaints so badly as the Labour Party. At the recent Congress the real difference between Larkin and the English Labour leaders was not so much in anything right or wrong, in what he said, as in something elemental and even mystical in the way he suggested Amab. But it must be plain, even to those who agree with a more official policy, that for Mr. Havelach Wilson, the principal question was Mr. Havelach Wilson, and that Mr. Sexton was mainly considering the dignity and fine feelings of Mr. Sexton. You may say they were as sensitive as aristocrats or as sulky as babies. The point is that the feeling was personal. But Larkin liked Anton, not only talks like ten thousand men talking, but he also has some of the carelessness of the Colossus of Arsiss, a dance of degradation. It is needless to say that this respecting of persons has led all the other parties a dance of degradation. We ruin South Africa because it would be a slight on Lord Gladstone to save South Africa. We have a bad army because it would be a snub to Lord Heldane to have a good army, and no Tory is allowed to say Marconi, for fear Mr. George should say Canock. But this curious personal element with its appalling lack of patriotism has appeared in a new and curious form in other departments of life. The Department of Literature, especially a periodic literature, and the form it takes is in the next example I shall give of the way in which the capitalists are now appearing more and more openly as the masters and princes of the community. I will take a Victorian instance to mark the change, as I did in the case of advertisement of bubbles. It was said in my childhood, by the more apoplectic and elderly sort of Tory, that W. E. Gladstone was only a free trader, because he had a partnership in Guilvy's foreign wines. This was no doubt nonsense, but it had a dim symbolic or mainly prophetic truth in it. It was true to some extent even then, and it has been increasingly true since, that the statesman was often an ally of the salesman, and represented not only a nation of shopkeepers, but one particular shop. But in Gladstone's time, even if this was true, it was never the whole truth, and no one would have endured it as being admitted truth. The politician was not solely an eloquent and persuasive bagman travelling for certain businessmen. He was bound to mix even his corruption with some intelligible deals and rules of policy, and the proof of it is this, that at least it was the statesman who bulked large in the public eye, and his financial backer was entirely in the background. Old gentlemen might choke over their port with the moral certainty that the prime minister had shares in wine merchants, but the old gentlemen would have died on the spot if the wine merchant had really been made as important as the prime minister. If it had been Sir Walter Gilby, whom Disraeli denounced, or Punch Caracatured, if Sir Walter Gilby's favourite collars, with the design of which I am unacquainted, had grown as large as the wings of an archangel, if Sir Walter Gilby had been credited with successfully eliminating the British oak with his little hatchet, if near the temple and the courts of justice our sight was struck by a majestic statue of a wine merchant, or if the earnest conservative lady who threw a gingerbread knot at the premier had directed it toward the wine merchant instead, the shock to Victorian England would have been very great indeed. Halo's for employers. Now something very like that is happening. The mere wealthy employer is beginning to have not only the power but some of the glory. I have seen in several magazines lately, and magazines of a high class, the appearance of a new kind of article. Literary men are being employed to praise a big businessman personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past, they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers. They describe the capitalist brain of steel and heart of gold in a way that Englishmen hitherto have been at least in the habit of reserving for romantic figures like Garibaldi or Gordon. In one excellent magazine, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, who, when he likes, can write on letters like a man of letters, has some purple pages of praise of Sir Joseph Lyons, the man who runs those tea shop places. He incidentally brought in a delightful passage about the beautiful souls possessed by some people called Selman and Gluckstein. I think I like best the passage where he said that Lyons, charming social accomplishments, included a talent for imitating a Jew. The article is accompanied with a large and somewhat leering portrait of that shopkeeper, which makes the parlor trick in question particularly astonishing. Another literary man, who certainly ought to know better, wrote in another paper a piece of hero worship about Mr. Selfridge. No doubt the fashion will spread, and the art of words as polished and pointed by Ruskin or Meredith will be perfected yet further to explore the labyrinthine heart of Herod, or compare the simple stoicism of Marshall with the saintly charm of Snellgrove. Any man can be praised and rightly praised. If he only stands on two legs, he does something a cow cannot do. If a rich man can manage to stand on two legs for a reasonable time, it is called self-control. As only one leg it is called with some truth, self-sacrifice. I could say something nice and true about every man I have ever met. Therefore I do not doubt I could find something nice about Lyons or Selfridge, if I search for it. But I shall not. The nearest postman or cab man will provide me with just the same brain of steel and heart of gold as these unlucky, lucky men. To resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons, and all poets becoming court poets under kings that have taken no oath nor led us into any battle. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Parts of the tale of Puss in Boots or Jack and the Beanstalk may strike the realistic eye as a little unlikely and out of the common way, so to speak, but they do contain some very solid and very practical truths. For instance, it may be noted that both in Puss in Boots and Jack and the Beanstalk, if I remember are right. The ogre was not only an ogre, but also a magician. And it will generally be found that in all such popular narratives the king, if he is wicked king, is generally also a wizard. Now there is a very vital human truth enshrined in this. Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone, but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The sight of a millionaire is seldom in the ordinary sense and enchanting sight. Nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the gushing articles about him in the magazines he is a fascinating personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits. And so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted sort of people that ladies and gentlemen have allowed themselves to become. He does in a manner cast a spell such as that which imprison princes and princesses under the shapes of falcons or stags. He has truly turned men into sheep, as Searsie turned them into swine. Now the chief of the fairy tales, by which he gains this glory and glamour, is a certain hazy association he has managed to create between the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality. Numbers of the rabbit-witted ladies and gentlemen do really think, in spite of themselves and their experience, that so long as a shop has hundreds of different doors and a great many hot and unhealthy underground departments, they must be hot. This is very important. And more people than would be needed for a man of war or crowded cathedral to say this way, madam, and the next article, sir, it follows that the goods are good. In short they hold that the big businesses are business-like. They are not. Any housekeeper in a truthful mode, that is to say any housekeeper in a bad temper, will tell you that they are not. But housekeepers too are human and therefore inconsistent and complex and they do not always stick to the truth and bad temper. They are also affected by this queer idolatry of the enormous and elaborate and cannot help feeling that anything so complicated must go like clockwork. But complexity is no guarantee of accuracy in clockwork or anything else. A clock can be as wrong as the human head and a clock can stop as suddenly as the human heart. But this strange poetry of plutocracy prevails over people against their very senses. You write to one of the great London stores or Emporia asking, let us say, for an umbrella. A month or two afterwards you receive very elaborately constructed parcel containing a broken parasol. You are very pleased. You are gratified to reflect on what the vast number of assistants and employees had combined to break that parasol. You luxuriate in the memory of all those long rooms and departments and wonder in which of them the parasol that you never ordered was broken. Or you want a toy elephant for your child on Christmas day, as children, like all nice healthy people, are very ritualistic. Some week or so after twelfth night, let us say, you have the pleasure of removing three layers of pasteboards, five layers of brown paper, and fifteen layers of tissue paper, and discovering fragments of an artificial crocodile. You smile in an expansive spirit. You feel that your soul has been brought in by the vision of the incompetence conducted on so large a scale. You admire all the colossal and the present brain of the organizer of industry. To admit all his multitudinous cares did not disdain to remember his duty of smashing even the smallest toy of the smallest child. Or suppose you have asked him to send you some two roles of coconut matting, and suppose, after a due interval for reflection, he duly delivers to you the five roles of wire netting. You take pleasure in the consideration of a mystery which, of course, minds might have called a mistake. It consoles you to know how big the business is, and what an enormous number of people were needed to make such a mistake. That is the romance that has been told about the big shops in the literature and the art which they have bought, and which, as I said in my recent articles, will soon be quite indistinguishable from their ordinary advertisements. The literature is commercial, and it is only fair to say that the commerce is often really literary. It is no romance, but only rubbish. The big commercial concerns of today are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent. Indeed, that is, and always has been, the whole point of Monopoly, the old and sound argument against a Monopoly. It is only because it is incompetent that it has to be omnipotent. When one large shop occupies the whole of one side of a street, or sometimes both sides, it does so in order that men may be unable to get what they want, and may be forced to buy what they don't want. That the rapidly approaching kingdom of the capitalists will ruin art and litters, I have already said. I say here that in the only sense that it can be called human, it will ruin trade too. I will not let Christmas go by even when writing for a revolutionary paper, necessarily appealing to many, with none of my religious sympathies, without appealing to those sympathies. I knew a man who sent to a great rich shop for a figure for a group of Bethlehem. It arrived broken. I think that is exactly all that businessmen have now the sense to do. Or the war on holidays. The general proposition, not always easy to define exhaustively, that the reign of the capitalists will be the reign of the cad, that is, of the un-licked type, that is neither the citizen nor the gentleman, can be essentially studied in its attitude towards holidays. The special emblematic employer of today, especially the model employer, who is the worst sort, has in his starved and evil heart a sincere hatred of holidays. I do not mean that he necessarily wants all his workmen to work until they drop. That only occurs when he happens to be stupid as well as wicked. I do not mean to say that he is necessarily unwilling to grant what he would call decent hours of labor. He may treat men like dirt, but if you want to make money, even out of dirt, you must let it lie fallow by some rotation of rest. He may treat men as dogs, but unless he is a lunatic, he will, for certain periods, let sleeping dogs lie. But humane and reasonable hours for labor have nothing whatever to do with the idea of holidays. It is not even a question of ten-hour days and eight-hour days. It is not a question of cutting down leisure to the space necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer came to the conclusion, for some reason that he could get most out of his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his whole mental attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For his whole mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are alike useful for him and his business. All is indeed grist that comes to his mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in unconsciousness, as dogs still hunt in slumber. His grist is ground not only by the sounding wheels of iron, but by the soundless wheel of blood and brain. His sacks are still filling silently when the doors are shut on the streets and the sound of the grinding is low. The great holiday. Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or feeding him. And a holiday you give him back his body and soul. It is quite possible you may be doing him an injury, though he seldom thinks so, but that does not affect the question for those to whom a holiday is holy. Immorality is the great holiday. And a holiday, like the immorality in the old theologies, is a double edged privilege. But wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration of the man. If people ever looked at the printed word under their eye, the word recreation would be like the word resurrection, the blast of a trumpet. A man being merely useful is necessarily incomplete, especially if he be a modern man and means by being useful being utilitarian. A man going into a modern club gives up his hat. A man going into a modern factory gives up his head. He then goes in and works loyally for the old firm to build up the great fabric of commerce which can be done without a head. But when he has done work, he goes to the cloakroom like the man at the club and gets his head back again. That is the germ of the holiday. It may be urged that the club man who leaves his hat often goes away with another hat, and perhaps it may be the same with the factory man who has left his head. The hand that has lost its head may affect the fastidious as it makes metaphor, but God pardon us all, what an unmixed truth. We could almost prove the whole ease from the habit of calling human beings merely hands while they are working as if the hand were horribly cut off like the hand that has offended. As if while the sinner entered unmaimed, his unhappy hand still labored laying up riches for the lords of hell. But to return to the man whom we found waiting for his head in the cloakroom, it may be urged, we say, that he might take the wrong head like the wrong hat, but here the similarity ceases. For it has been observed by benevolent onlookers at life's drama that the hat taken away by mistake is frequently better than the real hat, whereas the head taken away after the hours of toil is certainly worse, stained with the cobwebs and dust of this dustbin of all the centuries. The Supreme Adventure All the words dedicated to places of eating and drinking are pure and poetic are pure and poetic words. Even the word hotel is the word hospital, and St. Julian, whose claret I drank this Christmas, was the patron saint of innkeepers, because as far as I can make out he was hospitable to lepers. Now I do not say that the ordinary hotel keeper in Piccadilly, or the avenue de l'opera, would embrace a leper, slap him on the back, and ask him to order what he liked, but I do say that hospitality is his trade virtue. And I do also say it is well to keep before our eyes the Supreme Adventure of virtue. If you are brave, think of the man who was braver than you. If you are kind, think of the man who was kinder than you. That is what was meant by having a patron saint. That is the link between the poor saint who received bodily lepers, and the great hotel proprietor who as a rule received spiritual lepers. But a word yet weaker than hotel illustrates the same point, the word restaurant. There again you have the admission that there is a definite building or statue to restore, that ineffasible image of man that some call the image of God. That is the holiday. It is the restaurant or restoring thing that by a blast of magic turns a man into himself. This complete and reconstructed man is the nightmare of modern capitalist. His whole scheme would crack down like a mirror of shallot if once a plain man were ready for his two plain duties, ready to live and ready to die. And that horror of holidays which marks the modern capitalist is very largely a horror of the vision of a whole human being, something that is not a hand or a head for figures, but an awful creature who has met himself in the wilderness. The employers will give time to eat, time to sleep. They are in a terror of a time to think. To anyone who knows any history it is wholly needless to say that holidays have been destroyed. As Mr. Bellock, who knows much more history than you or I, recently pointed out in the Poem All magazine, Shakespeare's title of Twelfth Night or What You Will simply meant that a winter carnival for everybody went on wildly until the Twelfth Night after Christmas. Those of my readers who work for modern offices or factories might ask their employer for a twelve-days holiday after Christmas and they might let me know the reply Section 5 The Church of the Servile State I confess I cannot see why mere blasphemy by itself should be an excuse for tyranny and treason, or how the mere isolated fact of a man not believing in God should be a reason for my believing in God. But the rather spinsterish flutter among some of the old free thinkers has put one tiny ripple of truth in it and that affects the idea which I wish to emphasize even to monotony in these pages. I mean the idea that the new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself. Now it is true that any positive creed true or false would tend to be independent of itself. It might be Roman Catholicism or Mohamedism or Materialism but if strongly held it would be a thorn in the side of the Servile State. The Moslem thinks all men immortal. The Materialist thinks all men mortal. But the Moslem does not think the rich Sinbad will live forever but the poor Sinbad will die on his deathbed. The Materialist does not think that Mr. Hackel will go to heaven while all the peasants will go to pot like their chickens. In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men but the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from humankind. He must be obviously above it or he would be obviously below it. Take even the least attractive and popular side of the larger religions today. Take the mere vetoes imposed by Islam on atheism or Catholicism. The Moslem veto upon intoxicants cuts across all classes but it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist who presides at a licensing committee and also at a large dinner. It is absolutely necessary for him to make a distinction between his wife who is an aristocrat and consults crystal-gazers and star-gazers in the West End and vulgar miracles claimed by gypsies or traveling showmen. The Catholic veto upon usury as defined in the dogmatic consoles cuts across all classes but it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist to make a distinction between his wife who is an aristocrat and consults crystal-gazers and star-gazers in the West End and all classes. But it is absolutely necessary for the capitalist to distinguish more delicately between two kinds of usury the kind he finds useful and the kind he does not find useful. The religion of the survival state must have no dogmas or definitions. It cannot afford to have any definitions. For definitions are very dreadful things. They do the two things that most men, especially comfortable men, cannot endure. They fight and they fight fair. Every religion apart from open devil worship must appeal to a virtue or the pretense of a virtue. But the virtue generally speaking does some good to everybody. It is therefore necessary to distinguish among the people it was meant to benefit those whom it does benefit. Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich and benefits nobody else. It was meant to benefit the rich and meant to benefit nobody else. And if you think this unwarranted I will put before you one plain question. There are some pleasures of the poor that may also mean profits for the rich. There are other pleasures of the poor which cannot mean profits for the rich. Watch this one contrast and you will watch the whole creation of a careful slavery. In the last resort the beer and soap end only in a froth. They are both below the high notice of a real religion. But there is just this difference that the soap makes the factory more satisfactory while the beer only makes the workman more satisfied. Wait and see if the soap does not increase and the beer decrease. Wait and see whether the religion of the survival state the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it. Many great religions, pagan and Christian, have insisted on wine. Only one, I think, has insisted on soap. You will find that in the New Testament attributed to the Pharisees. End of Section 2 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org A Utopia of Usurers by G. K. Chesterton Section 3 6. Science and the Eugenists The key fact in the new development of plutocracy is that it will use its own blunder as an excuse for further crimes. Everywhere the very completeness of the impoverishment is a reason for the enslavement. Though the men who impoverished were the same who enslaved. It is as if a highwayman not only took away a gentleman's horse and all his money, but then handed him over to the police for tramping without visible means of subsistence. And the most monstrous feature in this enormous meanness may be noted in the plutocratic appeal to science, or rather to the pseudoscience they call eugenics. The eugenists get the ear of the humane, but rather hazy clicks by saying that the present conditions under which people work and breathe are bad for the race. But the modern mind will not generally stretch beyond one step of reasoning and the consequence which appears to follow on the consideration of these conditions is by no means what would originally have been expected. If somebody says a rickety cradle may mean a rickety baby, the natural deduction one would think would be to give the people a good cradle, or give them money enough to buy one. But that means higher wages and greater equalization of wealth and the plutocratic scientist with a slightly troubled expression turns his eyes and pinsnaz in another direction. Reduced to brutal terms of truth, his difficulty is this and simply this. More food, leisure and money for the workman would mean a better workman, better even from the point of view of anyone for whom he worked. But more food, leisure and money would also mean a more independent workman. A house with a decent fire and a full pantry would be a better house to make a chair or mend a clock in even from the customer's point of view than a hovel with a leaky roof and a cold hearth. But a house with a decent fire and a full pantry would also be a better house in which to refuse to make a chair or mend a clock. A much better house to do nothing in, and doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man. All but the hard-hearted must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it. As he stood gazing at the leaky roof and the rickety cradle in a pensive manner, there one day came into his mind a new and curious idea, one of the most strange, simple and horrible ideas that have ever risen from the deep pit of original sin. The roof could not be mended or at least it could not be mended much without upsetting the capitalist balance or rather disproportionate anxiety for a man with a roof is a man with a house and to that extent his house is his castle. The cradle could not be made to rock easier or at least not much easier without strengthening the hands of the poor household for the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world to that extent. But it occurred to the capitalist that there was one sort of furniture in the house that could be altered. The husband and wife could be altered. Birth costs nothing except in pain and valor and such old-fashioned things. But the merchant need pay no more for mating a strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the miner mates himself with a less robust female on certain broad lines of heredity to have some physical improvement without any moral, political or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a supply of strong and healthy slaves without coddling them with decent conditions. As the mill owners use the wind and the water to drive their mills they would use this natural force as something even cheaper and turn their wheels by diverting from its channels the blood of a man in his youth. That is what eugenics means and that is all that it means. Of the moral state of those who think of such things it does not become us to speak. The practical question is rather the intellectual one of whether their calculations are well founded and whether the men of science can or will guarantee them any such physical certainties. Fortunately it becomes clearer every day that they are scientifically speaking building on the shifting sand. The theory of breeding slaves breaks down through what a democrat calls the equality of men but which even an oligarchist will find himself forced to call the similarity of men. That is that though it is not true that all men are normal it is overwhelmingly certain that most men are normal. All the common eugenic arguments are drawn from extreme cases which even if human honor and laughter allowed of their being eliminated would not by their elimination greatly affect the mass. For the rest there remains the enormous weakness in eugenics that if ordinary men's judgment or liberty is to be discounted in relation to heredity the judgments of the judges must be discounted in relation to their heredity. The eugenic professor may or may not succeed in choosing a baby's parents. It is quite certain that he cannot succeed in choosing his own parents. All his thoughts including his eugenic thoughts are by the very principle of those thoughts flowing from a doubtful or tainted source. In short, we should need a perfectly wise man to do the thing at all and if he were a wise man he would not do it. 7. The Evolution of the Prison I have never understood why it is that those who talk most about evolution and talk about it at the very age of fashionable evolutionism do not see the one way in which evolution really does apply to our modern difficulty. There is of course an element of evolution in the universe and I know no religion or philosophy that ever entirely ignored it. Evolution, popularly speaking is that which happens to unconscious things. They grow unconsciously or fade unconsciously or rather some parts of them grow and at any given moment there is almost always some presence of the fading thing and some incompleteness in the growing one. Thus if I went to sleep for a hundred years like the sleeping beauty I wish I could. I could grow a beard unlike the sleeping beauty and just as I should grow hair if I were asleep I should grow grass if I were dead. Those whose religion it was that God was asleep in fact that he had a long beard and those whose philosophy it is that the universe is dead from the beginning being the grave of nobody in particular, think that is the way that grass can grow. In any case these developments only occur with dead or dreaming things. What happens when everyone is asleep is called evolution. What happens when everyone is awake is called revolution. There was once an honest man who never knew, but whose face I can almost see. He disframed in Victorian whiskers and fixed in a Victorian neck cloth who was balancing the achievements of France and England in civilization and social efficiencies. And when he came to the religious aspect he said that there were more stones and brick churches used in France. But on the other hand there are more sex in England. Whether such a lively disintegration is a proof of vitality in any valuable sense I have always doubted. The sun may breed maggots in a dead dog, but it is essential for such a liberation of life that the dog should be unconscious or to say the least of it absent-minded. Broadly speaking you may call the thing corruption if you happen to like dogs. You may call it evolution if you happen to like maggots. In either case it is what happens to things if you leave them alone. Evolutionist Error Now the modern evolutionists have made no real use of the idea of evolution especially in the matter of social prediction. They always fall into what is from their logical point of view the error of supposing that evolution knows what it is doing. They predict the state of the future as a fruit rounded and polished. About the whole point of evolution the only point there is in it is that no state will ever be rounded and polished because it will always contain some organs that outlive their use and some that have not yet fully found theirs. If we wish to prophesy what will happen we must imagine things now moderate grown enormous. Things now local, grown universal, things now promising, grown triumphant, primroses bigger than sunflowers and sparrows talking about like flamingos. In other words we must ask what modern institution has a future before it. What modern institution may have swollen to six times its present size in the social heat and growth of the future. I do not think the garden city will grow. But of that I may speak in my next and last article of this series. I do not think even the ordinary elementary school with its compulsory education will grow. Too many unlettered people hate the teacher for teaching and too many lettered people hate the teacher for not teaching. The garden city will not bear so much blossom. The young idea will not shoot unless it shoots the teacher. But the one flowering tree on the estate, the one natural expansion which I think will expand is the institution we call prison. Prisons for all. If the capitalists are allowed to erect their constructive capitalist community I speak quite seriously when I say that I think prison will become an almost universal experience. It will not necessarily be a cruel or shameful experience on these points. I concede certainly for the present purpose of debate. It may be a vastly improved experience. The conditions in the prison very possibly will be made more humane. But the prison will be made more humane only in order to contain more of humanity. I think little of the judgment and sense of humor of any man who can have watched recent police trials without realizing that it is no longer a question of whether the law has been broken by a crime but now solely a question of whether the situation could be mended by an imprisonment. It was so with Tom Mann. It was so with Larkin. It was so with poor Atheist who was kept in goal for saying something. He had been acquitted of saying. It is so in such cases day by day. We no longer lock a man up for doing something. We lock him up in the hope of his doing nothing. Given this principle it is evidently possible to make the mere conditions of punishment more moderate or more probably more secret. There really be more mercy in the prison on condition that there is less justice in the court. I should not be surprised if, before we are done with all this, a man was allowed to smoke in prison on condition of course that he had been put in prison for smoking. Now that is the process which in the absence of democratic protest will certainly proceed. Will certainly increase and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it. Prison may even lose its disgrace for a little time. It will be difficult to make it disgraceful when men like Larkin can be imprisoned for no reason at all just as his celebrated ancestor was hanged for no reason at all. But capitalist society which naturally does not know the meaning of honor cannot know the meaning of disgrace and it will still go on imprisoning for no reason at all or rather for that rather simple reason that makes a cat spring or a rat run away. It matters little whether our masters stoop to state the matter in the form that every prison should be a school or in the more candid form that every school should be a prison. They have already fulfilled their servile principle in the case of the schools. Everybody goes to the elementary schools except a few people who tell them to go there. I prophesy that unless our revolt succeeds nearly everyone will be going to prison with a precisely similar patience. End of Section 3 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Utopia of Usibers by G. K. Chesterton Section 4 8. The Lash for Labor If I were to prophesy that two hundred years hence a grocer would have the right and habit of beating the grocer's assistant with a stick or that the shop girls might be flogged as they already can be fined many would regard it as a rather rash remark. It would be a rash remark. Prophecy is always unreliable unless we accept the kind which is avowedly irrational, mystical and supernatural prophecy. But relatively to nearly all the other prophecies that are being made around me today I should say my predictions that an exceptionally good chance. In short I think the grocer with the stick is a figure we are far more likely to see than the Superman or the Samurai or the true model employer or the perfect Fabian official citizen of the collective state and it is best for us to see the full ugliness of the transformation which is passing over our society in some such abrupt and even grotesque image of the end of it. The beginnings of a decline in every age of history have always had the appearance of being reforms. Nero not only fiddled while Rome was burning but he probably really paid more attention to the fiddled the royal solile like many other soliles was most splendid to all appearance a little before sunset and if I ask myself what will be the ultimate and final fruit of all our social reforms garden cities model employers, insurances exchanges, arbitration courts and so on then I say quite seriously I think it will be labor under the lash the sultan and the sack let us arrange in some order a number of converging considerations that all point in this direction it is broadly true no doubt that the weapon of the employer has hitherto been the threat of dismissal that is the threat of enforced starvation he is a sultan who need not order the bastinato so long as he can order the sack but there are not a few signs that this weapon is not quite sure that the weapon that this weapon is not quite so convenient and flexible a one as his increasing capacities require the fact of the introduction of finds secretly or openly and many shops and factories proves that it is convenient for the capitalist to have some temporary and adjustable form of punishment besides the final punishment of pure ruin nor is it difficult to see the common sense of this there wholly inhuman point of view the act of sacking a man is attended with the same disadvantages as the act of shooting a man one of which is that you get no more out of him it is I am told distinctly annoying to blow a fellow creature's brains out with a revolver and then suddenly remember that he was the only person who knew where to get the best Russian cigarettes so our sultan who is the orderer of the sack is also the bearer of the bow string a school in which there was no punishment to accept expulsion would be a school in which it would be very difficult to keep proper discipline and the sort of discipline on which the reformed capitalism will insist will be all of the type which in free nations is imposed only on children such a school would probably be in a chronic condition of breaking up for the holidays and the reasons for the insufficiency of this extreme instrument are also varied and evident the materialistic sociologists who talk about the survival of the fittest and the weakest going to the wall and whose way of looking at the world is to put on the latest and most powerful scientific spectacles and then shut their eyes frequently talks as if a workman were simply efficient or non-efficient as if a criminal were inclaimable or irreclaimable the employers have since enough at least to know better than that they can see that a servant may be useful in one way and exasperating in another that he may be bad in one part of his work and good in another that he may be occasionally drunk and yet generally indispensable just as a practical school master would know that a schoolboy can be at once the plague and the pride of the school under these circumstances unvarying penalties are obviously the most convenient things for the person keeping order and underling can be punished for coming late and yet do useful work when he comes it will be possible to give a wrap over the knuckles without wholly cutting off the right hand that has offended under these circumstances the employers have naturally resorted to fines but there is a further ground for believing that the process will go beyond fines before it is completed 2. The fine is based on the old European idea that everybody possesses private property in some reasonable degree but not only is this not true today but it is not being made any truer even by those who honestly believe that they are mending matters the great employers will often do something towards improving what they call the conditions of their workers and have his conditions as carefully arranged as a racehorse has and still have no more personal property than a racehorse if you take an average poor seamstress or a factory girl you will find that the power of chastising her through her property has very considerable limits it is almost as hard for the employer of labor to tax her for punishment as it is for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to tax her for revenue the next most obvious thing to think of, of course would be imprisonment and that might be effective enough under simpler conditions an old-fashioned shopkeeper might have locked up his apprentice in his coal-seller but his coal-seller would be a real pitch-dark coal-seller and the rest of his house would be a real human house everybody, especially the apprentice would see a most perceptible difference between the two for this, the whole tendency of the capitalist legislation and experiment is to make imprisonment much more general and automatic while making it or professing to make it more humane in other words the hygienic prison and the survival factory will become so uncommonly like each other that the poor man will hardly know or care whether he is at the moment expiating an offence or pulling a dividend in both places there will be the same sort of shiny tiles in neither place will there be any cell so unwholesome as a coal-seller or so wholesome as a home the weapon of the prison therefore, like the weapon of the fine will be found to have considerable limitations to its effectiveness when employed against the wretched reduced citizen of our day whether it can be property you cannot take from him what he has not got you cannot imprison a slave because you cannot enslave a slave the barbarous revival three most people on hearing the suggestion that it may come to corporal punishment at last as it did in every slave system I ever heard of including some that were generally kind and even successful will merely be struck with horror and feel that such a barbarous revival is unthinkable in the modern atmosphere how far it will be or need be a revival of the actual images and methods of ruder times I'll discuss in a moment but first, as another of the converging lines tend to corporal punishment consider this that for some reason or other the old full-bluttered and masculine humanitarianism in this matter it has weakened and fallen silent it has weakened and fallen silent in a very curious manner the precise reason for which I do not all together understand I knew the average liberal the average nonconformist minister the average labor member the average middle class socialist were with all their good qualities very deficient in what I consider a respect for the human soul but I did imagine that they had the ordinary modern respect for the human body the fact however is clear and incontrovertible in spite of the horror of all humane people in spite of the hesitation even of our corrupt and panic-stricken parliament measures can now be triumphantly passed for spreading or increasing the use of physical torture and for applying it to the newest and vaguest categories of crime 30 or 40 years ago nay, 20 years ago when Mr. F. Hugh O'Donnell and others forced a liberal government to drop the cat and nine tails like a scorpion we could have counted on a mass of honest hatred of such things we cannot count on it now 4 but lastly it is not necessary that in the factories of the future the institution of physical punishment should actually remind people of the jambok or the kanout it could easily be developed out of the many forms of physical discipline which are already used by employers on the excuses of education or hygiene already in some factories girls are obliged to swim whether they like it or not or do gymnastics whether they like it or not by a simple extension of hours or complication of exercises a pair of Swedish clubs could easily be so used as to leave their victims as exhausted as one who had come off the rack I think it extremely likely that they will be 9 the mask of socialism the chief aim of all honest socialists just now is to prevent the coming of socialism I do not say it as a snare but on the contrary as a compliment a compliment to their political instinct and public spirit I admit it may be called an exaggeration but there really is a sort of sham socialism that the modern politicians may quite possibly agree to set up if they do succeed in setting it up the battle for the poor is lost one must note first of all the general truth about the curious time we live in it will not be so difficult as some people may suppose to make the servile state look rather like socialism especially to the more pedantic kind of socialist the reason is this the old lucid and trenchant expounder of socialism such as Blatchlord or Fred Henderson always describes the economic power of the plutocrats as consisting in private property of course in a sense this is quite true though they too often miss the point that private property as such is not the same as property confined to the few but the truth is that the situation has grown much more subtle perhaps too subtle not to say too insane for great thinking theorists like Blatchford the rich man today does not only rule by using private property he also rules by treating public property as if it were private property a man like Lord Murray pulled the strings especially the purse strings but the whole point of his position was that all sorts of strings had got entangled the secret strength of the money he held did not lie merely in the fact that it was his money it lay precisely in the fact that nobody had any clear idea of whether it was his money or his successor's money or his brother's money or the Marconi Company's money or the Liberal Party's money or the English Nation's money it was buried treasure but it was not private property it was the acme of plutocracy because it was not private property now by following this precedent this unprincipled vagueness about official and unofficial monies by the cheerful habit of always mixing up the money in the pocket with the money in the till it would be quite possible to keep the rich as rich as ever in practice though they might have suffered confiscation in theory Mr. Lloyd George has four hundred a year as an MP but he not only gets much more as a minister he might at any time get immeasurably more by speculating on state secrets that are necessarily known to him some say that he has even attempted something of the kind now it would be quite possible to cut Mr. George down not to four hundred a year but to four pence a day and still leave him all these other and enormous financial superiority it must be remembered that a socialist state in any way resembling a modern state just however egalitarian it may be have the handling of huge sums and the enjoyment of large conveniences it is not improbable that the same men will handle and enjoy in much the same manner though in theory they're doing it as instruments and not as individuals for instance the prime minister has a private house which is also I grieve to inform that Edmonton Puritan a public house it is supposed to be a sort of government office though people do not generally give children's parties or go to bed in a government office I do not know where Mr. Herbert Samuel lives but I have no doubt he does himself well in the matter of decoration and furniture on the existing official parallel there is no need to move any of these things in order to socialize them there is no need to withdraw one diamond headed nail from the carpet a teaspoon from the tray it is only necessary to call it an official residence like 10 Downing Street I think it is not at all improbable that this plutocracy pretending to be a bureaucracy will be attempted or achieved our wealthy rulers will be in the position which grumblers in the world of sport sometimes attribute to some of the gentlemen players they assert that some of these are being professional only their pay is called their expenses this system might be run side by side with the theory of eco wages as absolute as that one laid down by Mr. Bernard Shaw but the theory of the state Mr. Herbert Samuel's and Mr. Lloyd George might be humble citizens dredging for their four pence a day and no better off than porters and coal heavers if they were presented to our mere senses what appeared to be the form of Mr. Herbert Samuel in an estracan coat at a motor car we should find the record of the expenditure if we could find it at all under the heading of speed limit extension inquiry commission if it fell to our lot to behold with the eye of flesh what seemed to be Mr. Lloyd George lying in a hammock and smoking a costly cigar we should know that the expenditure would be divided between the condition of rope and netting investigation department and the state of Cuban tobacco trade imperial inspectors report such is the society I think they will build unless we can knock it down as fast as they build it everything in it tolerable or intolerable we'll have but one use and that use what our ancestors used to call usance or usury its art may be good or bad but it will be an advertisement for usurers its literature may be good or bad but it will appeal to the patronage of usurers its scientific selection will select according to the needs of usurers its religion will be just charitable enough to pardon usurers its penal system will be just cruel enough to crush all the critics of usurers the truth of it will be slavery and the title of it may quite possibly be socialism end of section 4 this is a Librebox recording all Librebox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Librebox.org a utopia of usurers by G.K. Chesterton section 5 the escape we watched you building stone by stone the well washed cells and the well washed graves we shall inhabit but not own when Britons ever shall be slaves the waters waiting in the trough the tame oats are portion free there is enough and just enough and all is ready now but you have not caught us yet my lords you have us still to get a sorry army you'd have got is flags or rags that float and rot its drums are empty pan and pot its baggages and empty cot but you have not caught us yet a little and we might have slipped when came your rumours and your sales and the foiled rich men feeble lipped said and unsaid their sorry tales great god it needs a boulder bow we keep ten sheep inside a pen and we are sheep no longer now you are but masters we are men we give you all good thanks my lords we buy at easy price thanks for the thousands that you stole the bribes by wire the bets on coal the knowledge of that naked hole that hath delivered our flesh and soul out of your paradise we had held safe your parks but when men taunted you with bribe and fee we saw only the lord of men grin like an ape in climatry and humbly had we stood without your princely barns did we not see and pointed faces peering out what rats now own the granary it is too late too late my lords we give you back your grace you cannot with all conjoaling make the wet ditch or winds that sting or the pond wedding rings or drink or death the blacker thing than a smile upon your face the new raid two kinds of social reform one of which might conceivably free us at last while the other would certainly enslave us forever are exhibited in an easy working model in the two efforts that have been made for the soldiers wives I mean the effort to increase their allowance and the effort to curntail their alleged drinking in the preliminary consideration at any rate we must see the second question as quite detached from our own sympathies on the special subject of fermented liquor it could be applied to any other pleasure or ornament of life it will be applied to every other pleasure and ornament of life if the capitalist campaign can succeed the argument we know but it cannot be too often made clear an employer let us say pays a seamstress two pence a day and she does not seem to thrive on it so little perhaps does she thrive on it that the employer has even some difficulty in thriving upon her there are only two things that he can do and the distinction between them cuts the whole social and political world into it is a touchstone by which we can not sometimes but always distinguish economic quality from servile social reform he can give the girl some magnificent sum such as six pence a day to do as she likes with and trust that her improved health and temper will work for the benefit of his business or he may keep her to the original sum of a shilling a week but earmark each of the pennies to be used or not used for a particular purpose if she must not spend this penny on a bunch of violets or that penny on a novelette or that penny on a toy for some baby it is possible that she will concentrate her expenditure upon more physical necessities and so become from the employer's point of view a more efficient person without the trouble of adding two pence to her wages he has added two pennies worth to her food in short she has the holy satisfaction of being worth more without being paid more this capitalist genius person and as many polished characteristics but I think the most singular thing about him is his staggering lack of shame neither the hour of death nor the day of reckoning neither the tent of exile nor the house of mourning neither chivalry nor patriotism neither womanhood nor widowhood is safe at this supreme moment from his dirty little expedient of dieting the slave as similar bullies when they collect the slum rents put a foot upon the door these are always ready to push in a muddy wedge whenever there is a slit in a sundered household or a crack in a broken heart to a man of any manhood nothing can be conceived more lonesome and sacrilegious than even so much as asking whether a woman who has given up all she loved to death and the fatherland has or has not shown some weakness or comfort I know not in which of the two cases I should count myself the baser for inquiring a case where the charge was false or a case where it was true but the philanthropic employer of the sword I describe is not a man of any manhood in a sense he is not a man at all he shows some consciousness of the fact when he calls his workers men as distinct from masters he cannot comprehend the gallantry of custom-mongers or the delicacy that is quite common among cab men he finds this social reform by half-frations on the whole to his mercantile profit and it will be hard to get him to think of anything else but there are people assisting him people like the Duchess of Marlborough who know not their right hand from their left and to these we may legitimately address and a resume of some of the facts they do not know the Duchess of Marlborough is I believe an American and this separates her from the problem in a special way because the drink question of America is entirely different from the drink question in England but I wish the Duchess of Marlborough would pin up her private study side-by-side with the Declaration of Independence a document recording the following simple truths beer which is largely drunk in public houses is not a spirit or a grog or a cocktail or a drug it is the common English liquid for quenching the thirst it is so still among innumerable gentlemen until very lately was so among innumerable ladies most of us remember Danes of the last generation whose manners were fit for Versailles and who drank ale or stout as a matter of course school boys drank ale as a matter of course and their school masters gave it to them as a matter of course to tell a poor woman that she must not have any until half the day is over is simply cracked like telling a dog or a child that he must not have water 2 the public house is not a secret rendezvous of bad characters it is the open and obvious place for a certain purpose which all men used for that purpose until the rich began to be snobs and the poor to become slaves one might as well warn people against wilson junction 3 many poor people living houses where they cannot without great preparation offer hospitality 4 the climate of these picturesque islands does not favor conducting long conversations with one's oldest friends on an iron seat in the park 5 half past 11 a.m. is not early in the day for a woman who gets up before 6 6 the bodies and minds of these women belong to God and to themselves the new name to our community which is strong enough to save our community but which has not yet got a name let no one fancy I confess any unreality when I confess the namelessness the morality called puritanism the tendency called liberalism the reaction called Tory democracy had not only long been powerful but had practically done most of their work before these actual names were attached to them nevertheless I think it would be a good thing to have some portable and practical way of referring to those who think as we do in our main concern which is that men in England are ruled at this minute by the clock by brutes who refuse them bread by liars who refuse them news and by fools who cannot govern and therefore wish to enslave let me explain first why I am not satisfied with the word commonly used which I have often used myself in which in some context it is quite the right word to use I mean the word rebel passing over the fact that many who understand the justice of our cause as great many at the universities would still use the word rebel in its old and strict sense as meaning only a disturber of a just rule I pass to a much more practical point the word rebel understates our cause it is much too mild it lets our enemies off much too easily there is a tradition in all western life and letters of Prometheus defying the stars of man at war with the universe and dreaming what nature had never dared to dream all this is valuable in its place and proportion but it has nothing whatever to do with our ease or rather it very much weakens it the plutocrats will be only too pleased if we profess to preach a new morality for they know jolly well they have broken the old one they will be only too pleased to be able to say that we by our own confession are merely restless and negative that we are only what we call rebels and they call cranks but it is not true and we must not concede it to them for a moment the model millionaire is more of a crank than the socialists just as Nero was more of a crank than the Christians the barbarous has gone mad in the governing class today just as lust went mad in the circle of Nero by all the working and orthodox standards of sanity capitalism is insane I should not say to Mr. Rockefeller I am a rebel I should say I am a respectable man and you are not our lawless enemies but the vital point is that the confession of mere rebellion is the startling lawlessness of our enemies suppose a publisher's clerk politely asks his employer for a rise in his salary and on being refused said he must leave the employment suppose the employer knocked him down with a ruler, tied him up as a brown paper parcel addressed him in a fine business hand to the governor of Rio de Janeiro and then asked the policeman to promise never to arrest him for what he had done that is a precise copy of the pre-legal and moral principle of the deportation of the strikers they were assaulted and kidnapped for not accepting a contract and for nothing else and the act was so avowedly criminal that the law had to be altered afterwards to cover the crime now suppose some postal official between here and Rio de Janeiro had noticed a faint kicking inside the brown paper and had attempted to ascertain the cause and suppose the clerk could only explain in a muffled voice through the brown paper that he was by constitution and temperament a rebel don't you see that he would be rather understating his case don't you see he would be bearing his injuries must too meekly they might take him out of the parcel but they would very possibly put him into a madhouse instead symbolically speaking that is what they would like to do with us symbolically speaking the dirty misers who rule us will put us in a madhouse unless we can put them there or suppose a bank cashier were admittedly allowed to take the money out of the till and put it loose in his pocket more or less mixed up with his own money afterwards laying some of both at different odds on blue murder for the derby suppose when some depositor asked mildly what day the accountants came he smelt the astonished inquire on the nose crying slanderer mud slinger and suppose he then resigned his position suppose no books were shown suppose when the new cashier came to be initiated into his duties the old cashier did not tell him about the money but confided it to the honor and delicacy of his own maiden ant at Griglwood suppose he then went off in a yacht to visit the whale fisheries of the North Sea well in every moral and legal principle that is a precise account of the dealings with the party funds but what would the bankers say what would the clients say one thing I think I convention to promise the banker would not march up and down the office exclaiming in rapture I'm a rebel and if he said to the first indignant depositor you are a rebel I fear the depositor might answer you are a robber we have no need to elaborate arguments for breaking the law the capitalists have broken the law we have no need of further moralities they have broken their own morality it is as if you were to run down the street shouting communism communism share share after a man who had run away with your watch we want a term that will tell everybody that there is by the common standard frank fraud and cruelty pushed to their fierce extreme and that we are fighting them we are not in a state of divine discontent we are in an entirely human and entirely reasonable rage we say that we have been swindled and oppressed and we are quite ready and able to prove it it is a tribunal that allows us to call a swindler a swindler it is the protection of the present system that most of its tribunals do not I cannot at the moment think of any party name that would particularly distinguish us from our more powerful and prosperous opponents unless it were the name the old Jacobites gave themselves the honest party captured our standards we think it is plain for the purpose of facing these new and infamous modern facts we cannot with any safety depend on any of the old 19th century names socialist or communist or radical or liberal or labor they are all honorable names they all stand or stood for things in which we may still believe we can still apply them to other problems but not to this one we have no longer a monopoly of those names we understood that I am not speaking here the philosophical problem of their meaning but of the practical problem of their use when I called myself a radical I knew Mr. Belfour would not call himself a radical therefore there was some use in the word when I called myself a socialist I knew Lord Penron would not call himself a socialist therefore there was some use in the word but the capitalist in that aggressive march in fact of our time have captured our standards both in the military and philosophic sense of the word and it is useless for us to march under colors which they can carry as well as we do you believe in democracy the devils also believe in tremble do you believe in trade unionism the labor members also believe and tremble like a falling tea totem do you believe in the state the samuels also believe and grin do you believe in the centralization of empire so did be yet do you believe in the decentralization of empire so does Elbu do you believe in the brotherhood of men and do you, dear brother, believe that brother Arthur Henderson does not do you cry the world for the workers and do you imagine Philip Snowden would not what we need is a name that shall declare not that the modern trees and in tyranny are bad but that they are quite literally intolerable and that we mean to act accordingly I really think the limits would be as good a name as any but anyhow something is born among us that is as strong as an infant Hercules and it is part of my prejudices to want it christened I advertise for godfathers and godmothers section 5 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Utopia of Usurers by G. K. Chesterton section 6 a workman's history of England a thing which does not exist and which is very much wanted is a working man's history of England I do not mean a history written for working men there are whole dustbins of them I mean a history written by working men from the working men's standpoint I wish five generations of a fissures or a miners family who would incarnate themselves in one man and tell the story it is impossible to ignore altogether any comment coming from so eminent a literary as Mr. Lawrence Hausmann but I do not deal here so specially with his well-known conviction about votes for women as with another idea which is I think rather at the back of it if not with him at least with others and which concerns this matter of the true story of England for the true story is so entirely different from the false official story that the official classes tell that by this time the working class itself has largely its own experience either story can be quite logically linked up with female suffrage which therefore I leave where it is for the moment merely confessing that so long as we get hold of the right story and not the wrong story it seems to me a matter of secondary importance whether we link it up with female suffrage or not now the ordinary version of recent English history that most moderately educated people have absorbed from is something like this we emerge slowly from a semi-barbarism in which all the power and wealth were in the hands of the kings and a few nobles that the king's power was broken first and then in due time that of the nobles that this piecemeal improvement was brought about by one class after another waking up to a sense of citizenship and demanding a place in the national councils frequently by riot or violence and that in consequence of such menacing popular action the franchise was granted to one class after another and used more and more to improve the social conditions of those classes until we practically became a democracy save for such exceptions as that of women I do not think anyone will deny that something like that is the general idea of the educated man who reads newspapers and of the newspaper that he reads that is the view current at public schools and colleges it is part of the culture of all the classes that count for much in government and there is not one word of truth in it from beginning to end that great reform bill wealth and political power were very much more popularly distributed in the middle ages than they are now but we will pass all that and consider recent history the franchise has never been largely and liberally granted in England half the males have no vote and are not likely to get one it was never granted in reply to pressure from awakened sections of the democracy in every case there was a perfectly clear motive for granting it solely for the convenience of the aristocrats the great reform bill was not passed in response to such riots as that which destroyed a castle nor did the men who destroyed the castle get any advantage whatever out of the great reform bill the great reform bill was passed in order to seal an alliance between the landed aristocrats and the rich manufacturers of the north an alliance that rules us still and the chief object of that alliance was to prevent the English populace getting any political power in the general excitement of the French revolution no one can read Macaulay's speech on the Chartists for instance and not see that this is so disraeli's further extension of the suffrage was not affected by the intellectual vivacity and pure republican theory of the mid-victorian agricultural laborer it was affected by a politician who saw an opportunity to dish the wigs and guessed that certain orthodoxies in the more prosperous artisan might yet give him a balance against the commercial radicals and while this very thin game of wire-pulling with the mere abstraction of the vote was being worked entirely by the oligarchs and entirely in their interests the solid and real thing that was going on was the steady despoiling of the poor of all power or wealth until they find themselves today upon the threshold of slavery that is the working man's history of England now as I have said I care comparatively little what is done with the mere voting part of the matter so long as it is not claimed in such a way as to allow the plutocrat to escape his responsibility for his crimes by pretending to be much more progressive or much more susceptible to popular protest than he ever has been and there is this danger that has led me one of them for instance says that women have been forced into their present industrial situations by the same iron economic laws that have compelled men I say that men have not been compelled by iron economic laws but in the main by the course and christless cynicism of other men but of course this way of talking is exactly in accordance with the fashionable and official version of English history thus you will read that these places where men of the poorest origin could be powerful grew corrupt and gradually decayed you will read that the medieval guilds a free workman yielded at last to an inevitable economic law you will read this and you will be reading lies they might as well say that Julius Caesar gradually decayed at the foot of Pompey's statue you might as well say that Abraham Lincoln yielded at last to an inevitable economic law the free medieval guilds did not decay they were murdered solid men with solid guns and hull birds armed with lawful warrants from living statesmen broke up their corporations and took away their hard cash from them in the same way the people in Cradley Heath are no more victims of a necessary economic law than the people in Pudumeo they are victims of a very terrible creature of whose sins much has been said since the beginning of the world and of whom it was said of old let us fall into the hands of God for his mercies are great but let us not fall into the hands of man the capitalist is in the dock now it is this offering of a false economic excuse for the sweater that is the danger in perpetually saying that the poor woman will use the vote and the poor man has not used it the poor man is prevented from using it prevented by the rich man and the poor woman would be prevented in exactly the same gross and stringent style I do not deny of course that there is something in English temperament and in the heritage of the last few centuries it makes the English workmen more tolerant of wrong than most foreign workmen would be but this only slightly modifies in fact of the moral responsibility to take an imperfect parallel if we said that Negro slaves would have rebelled if Negroes had been more educated we should be saying what is reasonable but if we were to say that it could by any possibility be represented as being the Negro's fault that he was at that moment in America and not in Africa we should be saying what is frankly unreasonable it is every bit as unreasonable to say the mere supineness of the English workmen has put them in the capitalist slave yard the capitalist has put them in the capitalist slave yard and very cunning smiths have hammered the chains it is just this creative criminality in the authors of the system that we must not allow to be slurred over the capitalist is in the dock today so far as I at least can prevent him he shall not get out of it the French Revolution and the Irish it will be long before the poison of the party system is worked out of the body politic some of its most indirect effects are the most dangerous one that is very dangerous just now is this that for most Englishmen the party system falsifies history and especially the history of revolutions it falsifies history because it simplifies history it paints everything either blue or buff in the style of its own silly circus politics while a real revolution has as many colors as the sunrise or as the end of the world and if we do not get rid of this error we shall make very bad blunders about the real revolution which seems to grow more and more probable especially among the Irish and any human familiarity with history will teach a man this first of all that party practically does not exist in a real revolution it is a game for quiet times if you take a boy who has been to one of the big private schools which are falsely called public schools and another boy who has been to one of those large public schools which are falsely called the board schools you will find some differences between the two chiefly a difference in the management of the voice but you will find they are both English in a special way and that their education has been essentially the same they are ignorant on the same subjects they have never heard of the same plain facts they have been taught the wrong answer to the same confusing question there is one fundamental element in the attitude of the Eaton master talking about playing the game and the elementary teacher training gutters-knives to sing what is the meaning of Empire Day and the name of that element is unhistoric it knows nothing really about England still less about Ireland or France and least of all of course about anything like the French Revolution Revolution by Snap Division now what general notion does the ordinary English boy thus taught to utter one ignorance in one or two accents yet to keep through life about the French Revolution it is the notion of the English House of Commons with an enormous radical majority on one side of the table and a small Tory minority on the other the majority voting Salad for a Republic the minority voting Salad for a Monarchy two teams tramping through two lobbies with no difference between their methods and ours except that, owing to some habit peculiar to Gaul the brief intervals were brightened by a riot or a massacre instead of by a whiskey and soda and a Marconi tip novels are much more reliable than histories in such matters for though an English novel about France does not tell the truth about France it does tell the truth about England and more than half the histories never tell the truth about anything and popular fiction I think bears witness to the general English impression the French Revolution is a snap division with an unusual turnover of votes on the one side stand a king and queen who are good but weak surrounded by nobles with rapiers drawn some of whom are good many of whom are wicked all of whom are good looking against these there is a formless mob of human beings wearing red caps and seemingly insane who all blindly follow Ruffians who are also retoricians some of whom die repentant and others unrepentant toward the end of the fourth act the leaders of this boiling mass of all men melted into one are called Miraboo, Robespierre Danton, Marat and so on it is conceded that their united frenzy may have been forced on them by the evils of the old regime that I think is the commonest English view of the French Revolution and it will not survive the reading of two pages of any real speech or letter of the period these human beings were human varied complex and inconsistent but the rich Englishman ignorant of revolutions would hardly believe you if you told him some of the common subtleties of the case tell him that Robespierre threw the red cap in the dirt and discussed while the king had worn it with a broad grin so to speak tell him that Danton, the fierce founder of the Republic of Terror said quite sincerely to a noble I am more monarchist than you tell him that the terror really seems to have been brought to an end chiefly by the efforts of people who particularly wanted to go on with it he will not believe these things he will not believe them because he has no humility and therefore no realism he has never been inside himself and so could never be inside another man the truth is that in the French affair everybody occupied an individual position every man talks sincerely if not because he was sincere then because he was angry My rare talked even more about God than about the Republic because he cared even more about God than about the Republic Danton talked even more about France than about the Republic because he cared even more about France than about the Republic Marat talked more about humanity than, either because that physician though himself somewhat needing a physician really cared about it the Nobles were divided from the next. The attitude of the king was quite different from the attitude of the queen. Certainly much more different than any differences between our liberals and Tories for the last twenty years. And it will sadden some of my friends to remember that it was the king who was the liberal, and the queen who was the Tory. There were not two people, I think, in that most practical crisis who stood in precisely the same attitude towards the situation, and that is why between them they saved Europe. It is when you really perceive the unity of mankind that you really perceive its variety. It is not a flippancy, it is a very sacred truth. To say that when men really understand that they are brothers, they instantly begin to fight. The revival of reality. Now these things are repeating themselves with an enormous reality in the Irish Revolution. You will not be able to make a party system out of the matter. Everybody is in revolt, therefore everybody is telling the truth. The nationalists will go on caring most for the nation, as Danton and the defenders of the frontier went on caring most for the nation. The priests will go on caring for the religion, as Robespierre went on caring most for religion. The socialists will go on caring most for the cure of physical suffering, as Marat went on caring most for it. It is out of these real differences that real things can be made, such as the modern French democracy. For by such tenacity everyone sees at last that there is something in the other person's position, and those drilled in party discipline see nothing, either past or present. And where there is nothing, there is Satan. For a long time past in our politics there has not only been no real battle, but no real bargain. No two men have bargained as Gladstone and Parnell bargained, each knowing the other to be a power. But in real revolutions men discover that no one man can really agree with another man, until he has disagreed with him. End of section six.