 XVI. The Secret Society of Mankind With that fantastic love of paradox which gives pain to so many critics, I once suggested that there may be some truth in the notion of the brotherhood of men. This was naturally a subject for severe criticism from the modern or modernist standpoint, and I remember that the cleverest refutation of it occurred in a book which was called We Moderns. It was written by a Mr. Edward Moore, and very well written too. Indeed, the author did himself some injustice in insisting on his own modernity, for he was not so very modern after all, but really quite lucid and coherent. But I will venture to take his remark as a text here, because it concerns a matter on which most moderns darken counsel in a highly incoherent manner. It concerns the nature of the unity of men, which I did certainly state in its more defiant form as the equality of man. And I said that this norm or meeting-place of mankind can be found in the two extremes of the comic and the tragic. I said that no individual tragedy could be so tragic as having to die, and all men have equally to die. I said that nothing can be funnier than having two legs, and all men can join equally in the joke. The critic in question was terribly severe on this remark. I believe that the words of his condemnation ran as follows. Well, in this passage there is an error so plain it is almost inconceivable that a responsible thinker could have put it forward, even in jest. For it is clear that the tragic and comic elements of which Mr. Chesterton speaks make not only mankind but all life equal. Everything that lives must die, and therefore it is, in Mr. Chesterton's sense, tragic. Everything that lives has shape, and therefore it is, in Mr. Chesterton's sense, comic. His premises lead to the equality not of mankind but of all that lives, whether it be Leviathan or Butterfly, Oak or Violet, Worm or Eagle. Would that he had said this. Then we who affirm inequality would be the first to echo him. I do not feel it hard to show that where Mr. Moore thinks equality wrong is exactly where it is right, and I will begin with mortality, promising that the same is true for those who believe it of immortality. Both are absolutes. A man cannot be somewhat mortal, or can he be rather immortal. To begin with, it must be understood that having any quality in being black or white is not even the same as being equally black or white. It is generally fair to take a familiar illustration, and I will take the ordinary expression about being all in the same boat. Mr. Moore and I, and all men, are not only all in the same boat, but have a very real equality implied in that fact. Nevertheless, since there is a word inner, as well as a word in, there is a sense in which some of us might be more in the boat than others. My fellow passengers might have stowed me at the bottom of the boat, and sat on top of me, moved by a natural distaste from my sitting on top of them. I have noticed that I am often thus packed in a preliminary fashion into the back seats or basic parts of cabs, cars, or boats. There being evidently a feeling that I am the stuff of which the foundations of an edifice are made, rather than its toppling minarets or tapering spires. Meanwhile Mr. Moore might be surveying the world from the masthead, if there were one, or leaning out over the prow with the forward gestures of a leader of men, or even sitting by preference on the edge of the boat, with his feet patling in the water, to indicate the utmost possible aristocratic detachment from us and our concerns. Nevertheless, in the large and ultimate matters which are the whole meaning of the phrase All in the Same Boat, we should be all equally in the same boat. We should be all equally dependent upon the reassuring fact that a boat can float. If it did not float but sink, each one of us would have lost his one and only boat at the same decisive time and in the same disconcerting manner. If the king of the cannibal islands, upon whose principle island we might suffer the inconvenience of being wrecked, were to exclaim in a loud voice, I will eat every single man who has arrived by that identical boat and no other, we should all be eaten, and we should all be equally eaten. For being eaten, considered as a tragedy, is not a matter of degree. Now there is a fault in every analogy. But the fault in my analogy is not a fault in my argument. It is the chief fault in Mr. Moore's argument. It may be said that even in a shipwreck men are not equal, for some of us might be so strong that we could swim to the shore, or some of us might be so tough that the island king would repent of his rash vow after the first bite. But it is precisely here that I have again, as delicately as possible, to draw the reader's attention to the modest and little-known institution called death. We are all in a boat which will certainly drown us all, and drown us equally, the strongest with the weakest. We sail to the land of an ogre, Edax Rerum, who devours all without boat distinction. And the meaning in the phrase about being all in the same boat is not that there are no degrees among the people in a boat, but that all those degrees are nothing compared with the stupendous fact that the boat goes home or goes down. And it is when I come to the particular criticism on my remarks about the fact of having to die that I feel most confident that I was right and that Mr. Moore is wrong. It will be noted that I spoke of the fact of having to die, not the fact of dying. The brotherhood of men, being a spiritual thing, is not concerned merely with the truth that all men will die, but with the truth that all men know it. It is true, as Mr. Moore says, that everything will die, whether it be leviathan or butterfly, oak or violet, worm or eagle. But exactly what, at the very start, we do not know, is whether they know it. Can Mr. Moore draw forth leviathan with a hook and extract his hopes and fears about the heavenly harpooner? Can he worm its philosophy out of a worm, or get the caterpillar to talk about the faint possibility of a butterfly? The caterpillar on the leaf may repeat to Blake his mother's grief, but it does not repeat to anybody its own grief about its own mother. Can he know whether oaks confront their fate with hearts of oak, as the phrase is used in a sailor's song? He cannot. And this is the whole point about human brotherhood, the point the vegetarians cannot see. This is why a harpooner is not an assassin. This is why eating whale's blubber, though not attractive to the fancy, is not repulsive to the conscience. We do not know what a whale thinks of death, still less what the other whales think of his being killed and eaten. He may be a pessimistic whale, and be perpetually wishing that this too, too solid blubber would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. He may be a fanatical whale, and feel frantically certain of passing instantly into a polar paradise of whales, ruled by the sacred whale who swallowed Jonah. But we can elicit no sign or gesture from him suggestive of such reflections. And the working common sense of the thing is that no creatures outside man seem to have any sense of death at all. Mr. Moore has therefore chosen a strangely unlucky point upon which to challenge the true egalitarian doctrine. Almost the most arresting, and even startling, stamp of the solidarity and sameness of mankind is precisely this fact, not only of death, but of the shadow of death. We do know of any man whatever what we do not know of any other thing whatever, that his death is what we call a tragedy. From the fact that it is a tragedy, flow all the forms and tests by which we say it is a murder or an execution, a martyrdom or a suicide. They all depend on an echo or vibration, not only in the soul of man, but in the souls of all men. Oddly enough, Mr. Moore has made exactly the same mistake about the comic as about the tragic. It is true, I think, that almost everything which has a shape is humorous. But it is not true that everything which has a shape has a sense of humor. The whale may be laughable, but it is not the whale who laughs. The image indeed is almost alarming. At the instant the question is raised, we collide with another colossal fact, dwarfing all human differentiations, the fact that man is the only creature who does laugh. In the presence of this prodigious fact, the fact that men laugh in different degrees and at different things shrivels not merely into insignificance, but into invisibility. It is true that I have often felt the physical universe as something like a firework display, the most practical of all practical jokes. But if the cosmos is meant for a joke, men seem to be the only cosmic conspirators who have been let into the joke. There could be no fraternity like our free masonry in that secret pleasure. It is true that there are no limits to this jesting faculty, that it is not confined to common human jests, but it is confined to human jesters. Mr. Moore may burst out laughing when he beholds the morning star, or be thrown into convulsions of amusement by the effect of moonrise seen through a mist. He may, to quote his own catalogue, see all the fun of an eagle or an oak tree. We may come upon him in some quiet dell, rolling about an uproarious mirth at the side of a violet. But we shall not find the violet in a state of uproarious mirth at Mr. Moore. He may laugh at the worm, but the worm will not turn and laugh at him. For that comfort he must come to his fellow sinners. I shall always be ready to oblige. The truth involved here has had many names. That man is the image of God. That he is the microcosm. That he is the measure of all things. He is the microcosm in the sense that he is the mirror, the only crystal we know in which the fantasy and fear in things are, in the double and real sense, things of reflection. In the presence of this mysterious monopoly, the differences of men are like dust. This is what the equality of men means to me, and that is the only intelligible thing it ever meant to anybody. The common things of men infinitely outclass all classes. For a man to disagree with this it is necessary that he should understand it. Mr. Moore may really disagree with it. But the ordinary modern anti-egalitarian does not understand it, or apparently anything else. If a man says he had some transcendental dogma of his own, as Mr. Moore may possibly have, which mixes man with nature or claims to see other values in men, I shall say no more than that my religion is different from his, and I am uncommonly glad of it. But if he simply says that men cannot be equal because some of them are clever and some of them are stupid, why then I shall merely agree, not without tears, that some of them are very stupid. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Fancies versus Feds by G. K. Chesterton. Section 17. The Sentimentalism of Divorce. Divorce is a thing which the newspapers now not only advertise but advocate, almost as if it were a pleasure in itself. It may be indeed that all the flowers and festivities will now be transferred from the fashionable wedding to the fashionable divorce. A superb iced and frosted divorce cake will be provided for the feast, and in military circles will be cut with the co-respondence sword. A dazzling display of divorce presents will be laid out for the inspection of the company, watched by a detective dressed as an ordinary divorce guest. Perhaps the old divorce breakfast will be revived. Anyhow, toasts will be drunk, the guests will assemble on the doorstep to see the husband and wife go off in opposite directions, and all will go merry as a divorce court bell. All this, though to some it might seem a little fanciful, would really be far less fantastic than the sort of things that are really set on the subject. I'm not going to discuss the depth and substance of that subject. I myself hold a mystical view of marriage, but I'm not going to debate it here. But merely in the interests of light and logic, I would protest against the way in which it is frequently debated. The process cannot rationally be called a debate at all. It is a sort of chorus of sentimentalists in the sensational newspapers, perpetually intoning some such formula as this. We respect marriage. We reverence marriage, holy, sacred, ineffably exquisite and ideal marriage. True marriage is love. And when love alters, marriage alters. And when love stops or begins again, marriage does the same. Wonderful, beautiful, beatific marriage. Now, with all reasonable sympathy with everything sentimental, I may remark that all that talk is tosh. Marriage is an institution like any other set up deliberately to have certain functions and limitations. It is an institution like private property or conscription or the legal liberties of the subject. To talk as if it were made or melted with certain changing moods is a mere waste of words. The object of private property is that as many citizens as possible should have a certain dignity and pleasure in being masters of material things. But suppose a dog stealer were to say that as soon as a man was bored with his dog, it ceased to be his dog, and he ceased to be responsible for it. Suppose he were to say that by merely coveting the dog, he could immediately morally possess the dog. The answer would be that the only way to make men responsible for dogs was to make the relation a legal one, apart from the likes and dislikes of the moment. Suppose a burglar were to say, private property I venerate, private property I revere, but I am convinced that Mr. Brown does not truly value his silver apostle spoons as such sacred objects should be valued. They have therefore ceased to be his property. In reality they have already become my property, for I appreciate their precious character as nobody else can do. Suppose a murderer were to say, what can be more amiable and admirable than human life lived with a due sense of its priceless opportunity. But I regret to observe that Mr. Robinson has lately been looking decidedly tired and melancholy. Life accepted in this depressing and demoralizing spirit can no longer truly be called life. It is rather my own exuberant and perhaps exaggerated joy of life which I must gratify by cutting his throat with a carving knife. It is obvious that these philosophers would fail to understand what we mean by a rule quite apart from the problem of its exceptions. They would fail to grasp what we mean by an institution, whether it be the institution of law, of property, or of marriage. A reasonable person will certainly reply to the burglar, you will hardly soothe us by merely poetical praises of property, because your case would be much more convincing if you denied, as the communists do, that property ought to exist at all. There may be, there certainly are, gross abuses in private property, but so long as it is an institution at all, it cannot alter merely with moods and emotions. A farm cannot simply float away from a farmer in proportion as his interest in it grows fainter than it was. A house cannot shift away by inches from a householder by certain fine shades of feeling that he happens to have about it. A dog cannot drift away like a dream and begin to belong to somebody else who happens just then to be dreaming of him. And neither can the serious social relation of husband and wife, of mother and father, or even of man and woman, be resolved in all its relations by passions and reactions of sentiment. This question is quite apart from the question of whether there are exceptions to the rule of loyalty or what they are. The primary point is that there is an institution to which to be loyal. If the new sentimentalists mean what they say, when they say they venerate that institution, they must not suggest that an institution can be actually identical with an emotion. And that is what their rhetoric does suggest so far as it can be said to suggest anything. These writers are always explaining to us why they believe in divorce. I think I can easily understand why they believe in divorce. What I do not understand is why they believe in marriage. Just as the philosophical burglar would be more philosophical if he were a Bolshevist. So this sort of divorce advocate would be more philosophical if he were a free lover. For his arguments never seem to touch on marriage as an institution or anything more than an individual experience. The real explanation of this strange indifference to the institutional idea is, I fancy, something not only deeper but wider. Something affecting all the institutions of the modern world. The truth is that these sociologists are not at all interested in promoting the sort of social life that marriage does promote. The sort of society of which marriage has always been the strongest pillar is what is sometimes called the distributive society. The society in which most of the citizens have a tolerable share of property, especially property in hand. Everywhere, all over the world, the farm goes with the family and the family with the farm. Unless the whole domestic group hold together with a sort of loyalty or local patriotism, unless the inheritance of property is logical and legitimate, unless the family quarrels are kept out of the courts of officialism, the tradition of family ownership cannot be handed on unimpaired. On the other hand, the servile state, which is the opposite of the distributive state, has always been rather embarrassed by the institution of marriage. It is an old story that the negro slavery of Uncle Tom's cabin did its worst work in the breaking up of families, but curiously enough, the same story is told from both sides. For the apologists of the slave states, or at least of the southern states, make the same admission even in their own defense. If they denied breaking up the slave family, it was because they denied that there was any slave family to break up. Free love is the direct enemy of freedom. It is the most obvious of all the bribes that can be offered by slavery. In servile societies, a vast amount of sexual laxity can go on in practice and even in theory, save when now and then some cranky speculator or crazy squire has a fad for some special breed of slaves like a breed of cattle. And even that lunacy would not last long, for lunatics are the minority among slave owners. Slavery has a much more sane and a much more subtle appeal to human nature than that. It is much more likely that, after a few such fads and freaks, the new servile state would settle down into the sleepy resignation of the old servile state. The old pagan repose in slavery as it was before Christianity came to trouble and perplex the world with ideals of liberty and chivalry. One of the conveniences of that pagan world is that below a certain level of society, nobody really need bother about pedigree or paternity at all. A new world began when slaves began to stand on their dignity as virgin martyrs. Christendom is the civilization that such martyrs made, and slavery is its returning enemy. But of all the bribes that the old pagan slavery can offer, this luxury and laxity is the strongest. Nor do I deny that the influences desiring the degradation of human dignity have here chosen their instrument well. End of section 17, recording by Linda Johnson. Section 18 of Fancy's Versus Fads. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Fancy's Versus Fads by G.K. Chesterton. Street cries and stretching the law. About a hundred years ago, some enemy sowed among our people the heresy that it is more practical to use a corkscrew to open a sardine tin or to employ a door scraper as a paperweight. Practical politics came to mean the habit of using everything for some other purpose than its own of snatching up anything as a substitute for something else. A law that had been meant to do one thing and had conspicuously failed to do it was always excused because it might do something totally different and perhaps directly contrary. A custom that was supposed to keep everything white was allowed to survive on condition that it made everything black. In reality, this is so far from being practical, that it does not even rise to the dignity of being lazy. At the best it can only claim to save trouble and it does not even do that. What it really means is that some people will take every other kind of trouble in the world if they are saved the trouble of thinking. They will sit for hours trying to open the tin with a corkscrew rather than make the mental effort of pursuing the abstract academic logical connection between a corkscrew and a cork. Here is an example of the sort of thing I mean which I came across in a daily paper today. A headline announces in staring letters and with startled notes of exclamation that some abominable judicial authority has made the monstrous decision that musicians playing in the street are not beggars. The journalist bitterly remarks that they may shove their hats under our very noses for money but yet we must not call them beggars. He follows this remark with several notes of exclamation and I feel inclined to add a few of my own. The most astonishing thing about the matter to my mind is that the journalist is quite innocent in his own indignation. It never so much as crosses his mind that organ grinders are not classed as beggars because they are not beggars. They may be as much of a nuisance as beggars. They may demand special legislation like beggars. It may be right and proper for every philanthropist to stop them, starve them, harry them, and hound them to death just as if they were beggars. But they are not beggars by any possible definition of begging. Nobody can be said to be a mere mendicant who is offering something in exchange for money, especially if it is something which some people like and are willing to pay for. A street singer is no more of a mendicant, the Madame Clara Butt, though the method and the scale of remuneration differs more or less. Anybody who sells anything in the streets or in the shops is begging in the sense of begging people to buy. Mr. Selfridge is begging people to buy. The Imperial International Universal Cosmic Stores is begging people to buy. The only possible definition of the actual beggar is not that he is begging people to buy, but that he has nothing to sell. Now it is interesting to ask ourselves what the newspaper really meant when it was so wildly illogical in what it said. Superficially, and as a matter of mood or feeling, we can all guess what was meant. The writer meant that street musicians looked very much like beggars because they wore thinner and dirtier clothes than his own, and that he had grown quite used to people who looked like that, being treated anyhow and arrested for everything. That is a state of mind not uncommon among those whom economic security has kept as superficial as a varnish, but what was intellectually involved in his vague argument was more interesting. What he meant was, in that deeper sense, that it would be a great convenience if the law that punishes beggars could be stretched to cover people who are certainly not beggars, but who may be as much of a botheration as beggars. In other words, he wanted to use the mendicity laws in a matter quite unconnected with mendicity, but he wanted to use the old laws because it would save the trouble of making new laws, as the corkscrew would save the trouble of going to look for the tin opener. And for this notion of the crooked and anomalous use of laws, for ends logically different from their own, he could, of course, find much support in the various sophists who have attacked reason in recent times. But as I have said, it does not really save trouble, and it is becoming increasingly doubtful whether it will even save disaster. It used to be said that this rough and ready method made the country richer, but it will be found less and less consoling to explain why the country is richer when the country is steadily growing poorer. It will not comfort us in the hour of failure to listen to long and ingenious explanations of our success. The truth is that this sort of practical compromise has not led to practical success. The success of England came as the culmination of the highly logical and theoretical 18th century. The method was already beginning to fail by the time we came to the end of the compromising and constitutional 19th century. Modern scientific civilization was launched by logicians. It was only wrecked by practical men. Anyhow, by this time everybody in England has given up pretending to be particularly rich. It is therefore no appropriate moment for proving that a course of being consistently unreasonable will always lead to riches. In truth it would be much more practical to be more logical. If street musicians are a nuisance, let them be legislated against for being a nuisance. If begging is really wrong, a logical law should be imposed on all beggars, and not merely on those whom particular persons happen to regard as being also nuisances. What this sort of opportunism does is simply to prevent any question being considered as a whole. I happen to think the whole modern attitude towards beggars is entirely heathen and inhuman. I should be prepared to maintain as a matter of general morality that it is intrinsically indefensible to punish human beings for asking for human assistance. I should say that it is intrinsically insane to urge people to give charity and forbid people to accept charity. Nobody is penalized for crying for help when he is drowning. Why should he be penalized for crying for help when he is starving? Everyone would expect to have to help a man to save his life in a shipwreck. Why not a man who has suffered a shipwreck of his life? A man may be in such a position by no conceivable fault of his own, but in any case, his fault has never urged against him in the parallel cases. A man is saved from the shipwreck without inquiry about whether he has blundered in the steering of his ship, and we fish him out of a pond before asking whose fault it was that he fell into it. A striking social satire might be ridden about a man who was rescued again and again out of mere motives of humanity in all the wildest places of the world, who was heroically rescued from a lion and skillfully saved out of a sinking ship, who was sought out on a desert island and scientifically recovered from a deadly swoon, and who only found himself suddenly deserted by all humanity when he reached the city that was his home. In the ultimate sense, therefore, I do not myself disapprove of mendicants, nor do I disapprove of musicians. It may not unfairly be retorted that this is because I am not a musician. I allow full weight to the fairness of the retort, but I cannot think at a good thing that even musicians should lose all their feelings except the feeling for music. And it may surely be said that a man must have lost most of his feelings if he does not feel the pathos of a barrel organ in a poor street, but there are other feelings besides pathos covered by any comprehensive veto upon street music and minstrelsy. There are feelings of history and even of patriotism. I have seen in certain rich and respectable quarters of London a notice saying that all street cries are forbidden. If there were a notice up to say that all old tombstones should be carted away like lumber, it would be rather less of an act of vandalism. Some of the old street cries of London are among the last links that we have with the London of Shakespeare and the London of Chaucer. When I meet a man who utters one, I am so far from regarding him as a beggar, it is I who should be a beggar and beg him to say it again. But in any case it should be made clear that we cannot make one law to do the work of another. If we have real reasons for forbidding something like a street cry, we should give the reasons that are real. We should forbid it because it is a cry, because it is a noise, because it is a nuisance or perhaps, according to our tastes, because it is old, because it is popular, because it is historic and a memory of Mary England. I suspect that the subconscious prejudice against it is rooted in the fact that the peddler or hawker is one of the few free men left in the modern city, that he often sells his own wares directly to the consumer and does not pay rent for a shop. But if the modern spirit wishes to veto him, to harry him or to hang, draw, and quarter him for being free, at least let it so far recognize his dignity as to define him, and let the law deal with him in principle, as well as in practice. End of Section 18 Read by the Storygirl LibriVox Recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Greg Giordano. Fancies vs. Fads by G. K. Chesterton. Section 19 Why Reformers Go Wrong Everybody says that each generation revolts against the last. Nobody seems to notice that it generally revolts against the revolt of the last. I mean that the latest grievance is really the last reform. To take but one example in passing. There is a new kind of novel which I have seen widely reviewed in the newspapers. No, it is not an improper novel. On the contrary, it is more proper, almost in the sense of prim, than its authors probably imagine. It is really a reaction towards a more old-fashioned morality, and away from a new-fashioned one. It is not so much a revolt of the daughters as a return of the grandmothers. Miss Mason Clare wrote a novel of the kind I mean, about a spinster whose life had been blighted by a tender and sensitive touch in her education, which had taught her, or rather expected her, always to, quote, behave beautifully, end quote. Mrs. Della Field wrote a story with the refreshing name of humbug on somewhat similar lines. It suggests that children are actually trained to deception, and especially self-deception, by a delicate and considerate treatment that continually appealed to their better feelings, which was always saying, quote, you would not hurt father, end quote. Now certainly a more old-fashioned and simple style of education did not invariably say, quote, you would not hurt father, end quote. Sometimes it preferred to say, quote, father will hurt you, end quote. I am not arguing for or against a father with the big stick. I am pointing out that Miss Sinclair and the modern novelists really are arguing for the father with the big stick, and against a more recent movement that is supposed to have reformed him. I myself can remember the time when the progressives offered us as a happy prospect, the very educational method which the novelists now describe so bitterly in retrospect. We were told that true education would only appeal to the better feelings of children, that it would devote itself entirely to telling them to live beautifully, that they would use no argument more arbitrary than saying, quote, you will not hurt father, end quote. That ethical education was the whole plan for the rising generation in the days of my youth. We were assured beforehand how much more effective such a psychological treatment would be than the bullying and blundering idea of authority. The hope of the future was in this humanitarian optimism in the training of the young. In other words, the hope was set on something which, when it is established, Mrs. Dellafield instantly calls humbug, and Miss Sinclair appears to hate as a sort of hell. What they are suffering from, apparently, is not the abuses of their grandfathers, but the most modern reforms of their fathers. These complaints are the first fruits of reformed education, of ethical societies and social idealists. I repeat that I am not, for the moment, talking about their opinions and not mine. I am not eulogizing either big sticks or psychological scalpels. I am pointing out that the outcry against the scalpel inevitably involves something of a case for the stick. I have never tied myself to a final belief in either. But I point out that the progressive generation after generation does elaborately tie himself up in new knots, and then roar and yell aloud to be untied. It seems a little hard on the late Victorian idealist to be so bitterly abused merely for being kind to his children. There is something a little unconsciously comic about the latest generation of critics who are crying out against their parents. Never, never can I forgive the tenderness with which my mother treated me. There is a certain irony in the bitterness which says, My soul cries for vengeance when I remember that papa was always polite at the breakfast table. My soul is seared by the persistent insolence of Uncle William, and refraining from clotting me over the head." It seems harsh to blame these idealists for idealizing human life, when they were only following what was seriously set before them as the only ideal of education. But if this is to be said for the late Victorian idealist, there is also something to be said for the early Victorian authoritarian. Upon their own argument, there is something to be said for Uncle William, if he did clot them over the head. It is rather hard, even on the great grandfather with the big stick, that we should still abuse him merely for having neglected the persuasive methods that we have ourselves abandoned. It is hard to revile him for not having discovered to be sound the very sentimentalities that we have since discovered to be rotten. For the case of these moderns is worst of all, when they do try to find any third ideal, which is neither the authority which they once condemned for not being persuasion, nor the persuasion which they now condemn for being worse than authority. The nearest they can get to any other alternative is some notion about individuality, about drawing out the true personality of the child, or allowing a human being to find his real self. It is perhaps the most utterly meaningless talk in the whole muddle of the modern world. How is a child of seven to decide whether he has or has not found his true individuality? How, for that matter, is any grown-up person to tell it for him? How is anybody to know whether anybody has become his true self? In the highest sense it can only be a matter of mysticism. It can only mean that there was a purpose in his creation. It can only be the purpose of God, and even then it is a mystery. In anybody who does not accept the purpose of God it can only be a muddle. It is so unmeaning that it cannot be called mystery, but only mystification. Humanly considered, a human personality is the only thing that does in fact emerge out of a combination of the forces inside the child and the forces outside. The child cannot grow up in a void or vacuum with no forces outside. Circumstances will control or contribute to his character, whether they are the grandfather's stick, or the father's persuasion, or the conversations among the characters of Ms. Mace and Claire. Who in the world is to say positively which of these things has or has not helped his real personality? What is his real personality? These philosophers talk as if there was a complete and complex animal curled up inside every baby, and we had nothing to do but to let it come out with a yell. As a matter of fact, we all know, in the case of the finest and most distinguished personalities, that it would be very difficult to disentangle them from the trials they have suffered, as well as from the truths they have found. But anyhow, these thinkers must give us some guidance as to how they propose to tell whether their transcendental notion of a true self has been realized or no. As it is, anybody can say, of any part of any personality, that it is or is not an artificial addition obscuring that personality. In fiction, most of the wild and anarchical characters strike me as entirely artificial. In real life, they would no doubt be much the same, if they could ever be met with in real life. But anyhow, they would be the products of experience, as well as of elemental impulses. They would be influenced in some way by all they had gone through, and anybody would be free to speculate on what they would have been like if they had never had such experiences. Anybody might amuse himself by trying to subtract the experiences and find the self, anybody who wanted to waste his time. Therefore, without feeling any fixed fanaticism for all the old methods, whether coercive or persuasive, I do think they both had a basis of common sense, which is wanting in this third theory. The parent, whether persuading or punishing the child, was at least aware of one simple truth. He knew that, in the most serious sense, God alone knows what the child is really like, or is meant to be really like. All we can do to him is to fill him with those truths which we believe to be equally true whatever he is like. We must have a code of morals which we believe to be applicable to all children, and impose it on this child, because it is applicable to all children. If it seems to be a part of his personality to be a swindler or a torturer, we must tell him that we do not want any personalities to be swindlers and torturers. In other words, we must believe in a religion or philosophy, firmly enough to take the responsibility of acting on it, however much the rising generations may knock or kick at the door. I know all about the word education, meaning drawing things out, and mere instruction, meaning putting things in. I respectfully reply that God alone knows what there is to draw out, but we can be reasonably responsible for what we are, ourselves, putting in. Fancy versus Fads by G. K. Chesterton. Section 20. The Innocence of the Criminal A phrase which we have all heard is sometimes uttered by some small man sentenced to some small town of imprisonment for either or both of two principal reasons for imprisoning a man in modern England, that he is known to the police and that he is not known to the magistrate when such a man receives a more or less temperate term of imprisonment, he is often reporting as having left the dock, saying that he would do it in his head, in his own self-consciousness. He is merely seeking to maintain his equilibrium by that dazed and helpless hilarity, which is the only philosophy allowed to him. But the phrase itself, like a great part of really popular slang, is highly symbolic. The English pauper, who tends to become numerically the predominant Englishman, does really reconcile himself to existence by putting himself in an inverted and grotesque posture towards it. He really does stand on his head because he is living in tops he turvied him. He finds himself in an upsidonia, fully as fantastic as Mr. Archibald Marshall's, and far less fair and logical, in a landscape as well as if the trees grew downward or the moon hung below his feet. He lives in a world in which the man who lends him money makes him a beggar. The man who gives him money makes him a criminal, in which when he is a criminal and known to the police, he becomes permanently liable to be arrested for other people's crimes. He is punished if his home is neglected, though there is nobody to look after it, and punished again if it is not neglected, and the children are kept from school to look after it. He is arrested for sleeping on private land, and arrested again for sleeping on public land, and arrested be it noted for the positive and explicit reason that he has no money to sleep anywhere else. In short, he is under the laws of such naked and admitted lunacy that they might quite as well tell him to pluck all the feathers off the cows, or to amputate the left leg of a whale. There is no possible way of behaving in such a pantomime city except as a sort of comic acrobat. A knock about comedian who does many things as possible on his head. He is, both by accident and design, a tumbler. He is a proverb about his children that they tumble up. It is the whole joke about his drunkenness that he tumbles down. But he is in a world in which standing straight or standing still have become both impossible and fatal. Meredith rightly conceived the only possible philosophy of this modern outlaw as that of juggling Jerry, and even what is called his swindling is mostly this sort of almost automatic juggling. His nearest approach to social status is a mere kinetic stability, like a top. There was indeed another tumbler called, in tradition, our Lady's Tumbler, who performed happier antics before a shrine in the days of superstition, and whose philosophy was more positive than juggling Jerry's or Meredith's. But a strenuous reform has passed through our own cities, careful of the survival of the fittest, and we have been able to preserve the antics while abolishing the altar. But though this form of reaction into ridicule and even self-ridicule is very natural, it is also very national. It is not only human reaction against injustice, nor perhaps the most obvious. The Irishman has shot his landlord. The Italian has joined a revolutionary secret society. The Russian has either thrown a bomb or gone on a pilgrimage long before the Englishman has come finally to the conclusion that existence is a joke. Even as he does so, he is too fully conscious that it would be too bad as a tragedy if it were not so good as a farce. It is further to be noticed that for the fact of ominous importance that this topsy-turvy English humor has, during the last six or seven generations, been more and more abandoned to the poorer orders. Sir John Falstaff is a knight. Tony Weller is a coachman, and his son Sam is a servant to the middle classes. And the recent developments of social discipline seem calculated to force Sam Weller into the status of the artful dodger. It is certain that a youth of that class who should do today a tenth of the things that Sam Weller did would, in one way or another, spend most of his life in jail. Today, indeed, it is the main object of social reform that he should spend the whole of his life in jail, but in a jail that can be used as a factory. That is the real meaning of all the talk about scientific criminology and remedial penalties. For such outcasts, punishment is to be abolished by being perpetrated. When men propose to eliminate retribution as vindictive, they mean two very simple things, ceasing altogether to punish the few who are rich, and enslaving all the rest for being poor. Nevertheless, this half-conscious buffoon who is the butt of our society is also the satirist of it. He is even the judge of it in the sense that he is the normal test by which it will be judged. In a number of quite practical matters, it is he who represents historic humanity and speaks naturally and truthfully where his judges and critics are crooked, crabbed, and superstitious. This can be seen, for instance, if we see him for a moment not in the doc, but in the witness box. In several books and newspapers I happen to read lately, I have noticed a certain tone touching the uneducated witness. Phrases like, quote, the vagueness characteristic of their class, close quote, or quote, easily confused as such witnesses are, close quote. Now such vagueness is simple truthfulness. Nine times out of ten, it is the confusion any man would show at any given instance about the complications which crowd human life. Nine times out of ten, it is avoided in the case of educated witnesses by the mere expedient of a legal fiction. The witness has a brief, like the barrister, he has consulted dates, he has made memoranda, he has frequently settled with solicitors exactly what he can safely say. His evidence is artificial, even when it is not fictitious. We might almost say it is fictitious when it is not false. The model testimony, regarded as the most regular of all in a law court, is constabulary testimony. What if the soldier said is not evidence? What the policeman says is often the only evidence. And what the policeman says is incredible as he says it. It is something like this, quote, I met the prisoner coming out of Chapman Junction Station and he told me he went to Mrs. Nehemiah Blag of 192 Pardmerg Terrace, West Ealing, about a cat which he had left there last Thursday week which she was going to keep if it was a good mouser and she told him it had killed a mouse in the back kitchen on Sunday morning so he had better leave it. She gave him a shilling for his trouble and he went to East Ealing Post Office where he bought two half penny stamps and a ball of string and then to the Imperial Stores at Ealing Broadway and bought a penny worth of mixed sweets. Coming out he met a friend and they went to the Green Dolphin and made an appointment for 530 the next day at the Third Lam Post in X-Teen Street, end quote, and so on. It is frankly impossible for anybody to say such a sentence, still more for anybody to remember it. If the thing is not a tissue of mere inventions it can only be the arbitrary summary of a very arbitrary cross examination conducted precisely as are the examinations of a secret police in Russia. The story was not only discovered bit by bit but discovered backwards. Mountains were in labor to bring forth that mouse in West Ealing. The police made a thorough official search of the man's mental boxes and baggage before the cat was left out of the bag. I am not here supposing the tale to be untrue. I am pointing out that the telling of it is unreal. The right way to tell the story is the way in which the prisoner told it to the policeman, not the way in which the policeman tells it to the court. It is the way in which all true tales are told, the way in which all men learn the news about their neighbors, the way in which we learned everything we know in childhood. It is the only real evidence for anything on this earth and it is not evidence in a court of law. The man who tells it is vague about some things, less vague about others, and so on in proportion, but is very vaguest among the stiff unreason of modern conditions. He is a judgment on those conditions. His very bewilderedment is a criticism and his very indecision is a decision against us. It is an old story that we are judged by the innocence of a child and every child is, in the French phrase, a terrible child. There is a true sense in which all our laws are judged by the innocence of a criminal. In politics, of course, the case is the same. I will defer the question of whether the democracy knows how to answer questions until the oligarchy knows how to ask them. Asking a man if he approves of tax reform is not only a silly but an insane question for it covers the wildest possibilities. Just as asking him whether he approves of trouser reform might mean anything from wearing no trousers to wearing a particular pattern of yellow trousers decorated with scarlet snakes. Talking about temperance when you mean pouring wine down the gutter is quite literally as senseless as talking about thrift when you mean throwing money into the sea. The rambling speech of yokels and tramps is as much wiser than this as a rambling walk in the woods is wiser than the mathematical straightness of a fall from a precipice. The present leaders of progress are, I think, very near to that precipice. All about their schemes and ideals, there is a saver of suicide. But the clown will go on talking in a living and therefore a leisurely fashion and the great truth of pure gossip which sprang up in simpler ages and was the fountain of all the literatures will flow on when our intricate and tortured society has died of its sins. End of section 20. Recording by Tom Mack. Section 21 of fancies versus fads. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Fancies versus Fads by G.K. Chesterton. Section 21. The Prudery of the Feminists. In the ultimate universal sense, I am astonished at the lack of astonishment. Starting from scratch, so to speak, we are all in the position of the first frog whose pious and compact prayer was, Lord, how You made me jump. Matthew Arnold told us to see life steadily and see it whole. But the flaw in his whole philosophy is that when we do see life whole, we do not see it steadily in Arnold's sense, but as a staggering prodigy of creation. There is a primeval light in which all stones are precious stones. A primeval darkness against which all flowers are as vivid as fireworks. Nevertheless, there is one kind of surprise that does surprise me. The more perhaps because it is not a true surprise but a super silliest fuss. There is a kind of man who not only claims his stone is the only pebble on the beach but declares it must be the one and only philosopher's stone because he is the one and only philosopher. He does not discover suddenly the sensational fact that grass is green. He discovers it very slowly and proves it still more slowly bringing us one blade of grass at a time. He is made haughty instead of humble by hitting on the obvious. The flowers do not make him open his eyes but rather cover them with spectacles. And this is even more true of the weeds and thorns. Even his bad news has been out. A young man told me he had abandoned his Bible religion and vicarage environment at the withering touch of one line of Fitzgerald. The flower that once is blown forever dies. Evangely pointed out that the Bible or the English burial service could have told him that man cometh up as a flower and is cut down. If that were self evidently final there would never have been any Bibles or any vicarages. I do not see how the flower can be any more dead when a mower can cut it down merely because a botanist can cut it up. It should further be remembered that the belief in the soul right or wrong arose and flourished among men who knew all there is to know about cutting down not unfrequently cutting each other down with considerable vivacity. The physical fact of death in a hundred horrid shapes was more naked and less veiled in times of faith or superstition than in times of science or skepticism. Often it was not merely those who had seen a man die but those who had seen him rot who were most certain that he was everlastingly alive. There is another case somewhat analogous to this discovery of the new disease of death. I am puzzled in somewhat the same way when I hear as we often hear just now somebody saying that he was formally opposed to female suffrage but was converted to it by the courage and patriotism shown by women in nursing and similar war work. Really I do not wish to be superior in my turn when I can only express my wonder in a question. But from what benighted dens can these people have crawled that they did not know that women are brave? What horrible sort of women have they known all their lives? Where do they come from? Or what is still a more opposite question? Where do they think they come from? Do they think they fell from the moon or were really found under cabbage leaves or brought over by sea storks? Do they as seems more likely believe they were produced chemically by Mr. Scheffer on principles of biogenesis? Should we any of us be here at all if women were not brave? Are we not all trophies of that war and triumph? Does not every man stand on the earth like a graven statue as the monument of the valor of a woman? As a matter of fact it is men much more than women who needed a war to redeem their reputation and who have redeemed it. There was much more plausibility in the suspicion that the old torture of blood and iron would prove too much for a somewhat drugged and materialistic male population long estranged from it. I have always suspected that this doubt about manhood was the real sting in the strange sex quarrel and the meaning of the new and nervous tattoo about the unhappiness of women. Man, like the master builder, was suspected by the female intelligence of having lost his nerve for climbing that dizzy battle tower he had built in times gone by. In this the war did certainly straighten out the sex tangle. But it did also make clear on how terrible a thread of tenure we hold our privileges and even our pleasures. For even bridge parties and champagne suppers take place on the top of that toppling war tower. An hour can come when even a man who cared for nothing but bridge would have to defend it like gracious. Or when the man who only lives for champagne would have to die for champagne, as certainly as thousands of French soldiers have died for that flat land of vines, when he would have to fight as hard for the wine as Jean Dark for oil of rams. Just as civilization is guarded by potential war, so it is guarded by potential revolution, we ought never to indulge in either without extreme provocation, but we ought to be cured forever of the fancy that extreme provocation is impossible. Against the tyrant within, as against the barbarian without, every voter should be a potential volunteer. Thou goest with women, forget not thy whip, said the Prussian philosopher. In some such echo, probably infected those who wanted a war to make them respect their wives and mothers. But there would really be a symbolic sense in saying, Thou goest with men, forget not thy sword. Men, coming to the council of the tribe, should sheath their swords, but not surrender them. Now I am not going to talk about female suffrage at this time of day, but these were the elements upon which a fair and sane opposition to it were founded. These are the risks of real politics, and the woman was not called upon to run such a risk, for the very simple reason that she was already running another risk. It was not laws that fixed her in the family, it was the very nature of the family. If the family was a fact in any very full sense, and if popular rule was also a fact in any very full sense, it was simply physically impossible for the woman to play the same part in such politics as the man. The difficulty was only evaded because the democracy was not a free democracy, or the family, not a free family. But whether this view was right or wrong, it is at least clear that the only honorable basis for any limitations of womanhood is the same as the basis of the respect for womanhood. It consisted in certain realities, which it may be undesirable to discuss, but is certainly even more undesirable to ignore. And my complaint against the more fussy feminists, so-called from their detestation of everything feminine, is that they do ignore these realities. I do not even propose the alternative of discussing them. On that point, I am myself content to be what some call conventional, and others, civilized. I do not in the least demand that anyone should accept my own deduction from them. And I do not care brass farthing with the deduction anybody accepts from such a rag as modern ballot paper. But I do suggest that the peril with which one half of humanity's perpetually at war should be at least present in the minds of those who are perpetually bragging about breaking conventions, rending veils, violating antiquated taboos. And in nine cases out of ten, it seems to be quite absent from their minds. The mere fact of using the argument before mentioned of women's strength vindicated by war work shows that it is absent from their minds. If this oddity of the new obscuratism means rather that women have shown the moral courage and mental capacity needed for important concerns, I am equally unable to summon up any surprise at the revelation. Nothing can well be more important than our own souls and bodies, and they, at their most delicate and determining period, are almost always and almost entirely confided to women. Those who have been appointed as educational experts in every age are not surely a new order of priestesses. If it means that in a historic crisis, all kinds of people must do all kinds of work, and that women are the more to be admired for doing work to which they are unaccustomed or even unsuited. It is a point which I should quite as easily concede. But if it means that in planning the foundations of a future society, we should ignore the one eternal and incurable contrast in humanity. If it means that we may now go ahead gaily as if there were really no difference at all, if it means, as I read in a magazine today, it is almost anyone may now read almost anywhere, that if such and such work is bad for women, it must be bad for men. If it means that patriotic women in munition factories prove that any woman can be happy in any factories, if in short it means that the huge and primeval facts of the family no longer block the way to a mere social assimilation and regimentation, then I say that the prospect is not one of liberty, but a perpetuation of the dreariest sort of humbug. It is not an emancipation. It is not even anarchy. It is simply prudery in the thoughts. It means that we have bolderized our brains as well as our books. It is every bit as senseless a surrender to superstitious decorum as it would be to force every woman to cut herself with a razor because it was not etiquette to admit that she cannot grow a beard. End of section 21 section 22 of fancies versus fads this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by april 6090 california united states of america fancies versus fads by gk chesterton how mad laws are made any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest the fashionable way of affecting a social reform is as follows to make the story clear and worthier of its wild and pointless process i will call the two chief agents in it the march hare and the hatter the hatter is mad in a quiet way but he is merely mad on making hats or rather on making money he has a huge and prosperous emporium which advertises all possible hats to fit all possible heads but he certainly nourishes in a cold conviction that it is really the duty of the heads to fit the hats this is his mild madness in other respects he is a stodgy and rather stupid millionaire now the man whom we will call the march hare is at first sight the flat contrary of this he is a wild intellectual and the leader of the hallows brigade it does not much matter why there is this quarrel between the hair and the hat it may be any progressive sophistry perhaps it is because he is a march hare and finds it hard to keep his hat on in a march wind perhaps it is because his ears are too long to allow him to wear a hat or perhaps he hopes that every emancipated member of the hallows brigade will eventually evolve ears as long as a hares or a donkeys the point is that anyone would fancy that the hair and the hatter would collide as a matter of fact they cooperate in other words every reform today is a treaty between the two most influential modern figures the great capitalist and the small fattest they are the father and mother of a new law and therefore it is so much of a mongrel as to be a monster what happens is something like this the line of least resistance is found between the two by a more subtle analysis of their real respective aims the intuitive eye of friendship detects a fine shade in the feelings of the hatter the desire of his heart when delicately apprehended is not necessarily that people should wear his hats but rather that they should buy them on the other hand even his fanatically consistent colleague has no particular objection to a human being purchasing a hat so long as he does not wreck his health blast his prospects and generally blow his brains out by the one suicidal act of putting it on between them they construct a law called the habitual hat pegs act which lays it down that every householder shall have not less than 23 hat pegs and that less these should accumulate unwholesome dust each must be covered by a hat in uninterrupted occupation or the thing might be managed some other way as by arranging that a great modern nobleman should wear an accumulation of hats one on top of the other in pleasing memory of what has often been the itinerant occupation of his youth broadly it would be enacted that hats might be used in various ways to take rabbits out of as in the case of conjurers or put pennies into as in the case of beggars or smash on the heads of scarecrows or stick on the tops of poles if only it were guaranteed that as many citizens as possible should be forced to go bareheaded thus the two most powerful elements in the governing class are satisfied of which the first is finance and the second fidgets the capitalist has made money and he only wanted to make money the social reformer has done something and he only wanted something to do now every one of the recent tricks about temperance and economy has been literally of this type i have chosen the names from a nonsense story merely for algebraic lucidity and universality what has really happened in our own shops and streets is every bit as nonsensical but quite recent events have confirmed this analysis with an accuracy which even the unconverted can hardly regard as a coincidence i have already traced the truth in the case of the liquor traffic but many public spirited persons of the prohibitionist school have found it very difficult to believe all temperance legislation is a compromise between a liquor merchant who wants to get rid of his liquor and a tea toddler who does not want his neighbors to get it but as the capitalist is much stronger than the crank the compromises lopsided as such the neighbors do get it but always in the wrong way but again since the crank has not a true creed but only an intellectual itch he cares much more to be up and doing than to understand what he has done as i said above he only wants to do something he has increased drunkenness anyhow all such reforms are upon the plan of my parable sometimes it is decreed that drinks shall only be sold in large quantities suitable to large incomes that is exactly like allowing one nobleman to wear 20 hats sometimes it is proposed that the state should take over the liquor traffic we hardly need to be told what that means when it is the plutocratic state it means quite simply this the policeman goes to the hatter and buys his whole stock of hats at a hundred pounds apiece and then parades the street handing out hats to those who may take his fancy and by blows of the truncheon forcing every man jack of the rest of them to pay a hundred pounds for a hat he does not get merely to divert the rivers of ale or gin from private power to public power or from poor men to rich men or from good taverns to back taverns is the sort of effort with which the faddists are satisfied and the liquor lords much more than satisfied there was a curious case of the same thing in the attempt to economize food during the great war the reformers did not wish really to economize food the great food profiteers would not let them the fussy person wants to force or forbid something under the conditions defining all such effort it must be something that will interfere with the citizen and will not interfere with the profiteer given such a problem we might almost predict for instance that he will propose the limitation of the number of courses at a restaurant it will not save the beef it is not meant to save the beef but to save the beef merchant there will actually be more food but if the cook is not allowed to turn the scraps into kick shots but why should a plutocracy including food profiteers object to more food being bought why for that matter should the pure-minded social idealist object to more food being bought as long as it is the wrong food that is sold his quite disinterested aim is not that food should be restricted but merely that freedom should be restricted when once he is assured that a sufficient number of thoughtless persons are really getting what they don't want he says he is building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land and so he is if the expression signifies handing over England to the wealthier Jews now the only way in which this conclusive explanation can be countered is by ridiculing as impossible the notion that so fantastic a compact can be clearly and coolly made the two attitudes are not logically interlocked like the antlers of stags they simply squeeze each other out of shape as in a wrestle of two rival jellyfish we should be far safer if they had the intellectual honesty of a bargain or a bride as it is they have an almost creepy quality which justifies the comparison to shapeless beasts of the sea i defy any rational man to deny that he has noticed something moon-struck and misshapen as apart from anything unjust or uncomfortable about the little laws which have lately been tripping him up laws which may tell him at any minute that he must not purchase tripentine before a certain tick of the clock or that if he buys a pound of tea he must also buy a penny worth of 10 tax the strictly correct word for such things is half-witted and they are half-witted because each of the two incongruous partners has only half his will they have not for instance the sweeping simplicity of the old sanctuary laws or even the old puritan persecutions but they are also half-witted because even the one mind is not the whole mind it is largely the subconscious mind which dares not trust itself in speech the drink capitalist dares not actually say to the tea toddler let me sell a quart bottle of whiskey to be drunk in a day and then i will let you pester a poor fellow who makes a pot of beer last half an hour that is exactly what happens in essence but it is easy to guess what happens in external form the tea toddler has 20 schemes for cutting off free citizens from the beverage of their fathers and out of these 20 the liquor lord without whose permission nothing can be done selects the one scheme which will not interfere with him and his money it is even more probable that the temperance reformer himself selects by an instinct for what he would call practical politics the one scheme which the liquor lord is likely to look at and it matters nothing that it is a scheme to witness for wonderland a scheme for abolishing hats while preserving hatters it might be a good thing to give the control of drink to the state if there were a state to give it to but there is not there is nothing but a congested compromise made by the pressure of powerful interests on each other the liquor lords may bargain with the other lords to take their abnormal tribute in a lump sum instead of a lifetime but not one of them will live the poorer the main point is that in passing through that plutocratic machinery even a mad opinion will always emerge in a shape more maniacal than its own and even the silliest fool can only do what the stupidest fool will let him end of section 22 section 23 of fancies versus fads this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org fancies versus fads by GK Chesterton the pagoda of progress there is one fashionable fallacy that crops up everywhere like a weed until a man feels inclined to devote the rest of his life to the hopeless task of weeding it out i take one example of it from a newspaper correspondence headed have women gone far enough it is immediately concerned with alleged impropriety in dress but i am not directly interested in that i quote one paragraph from a lady correspondent not because it is any worse than the same thing as stated by countless scholars and thinkers but rather because it is more clearly stated women have gone far enough that has always been the cry of the individual with the unprogressive mind it seems to me that until doomsday there will always be the type of man who will cry women have gone far enough but no one can stop the tide of evolution and women will still go on which raises the interesting question of where they will go to now as a matter of fact every thinking person wants to stop the tide of evolution that some particular mark in his own mind if i were to propose that people should wear no clothes at all the lady might be shocked but i should have as much right as anyone else to say that she was obviously an individual with an unprogressive mind if i were to propose that this reform should be imposed on people by force she would be justly indignant but i could answer her with her own argument that there had always been unprogressive people and would be till doomsday if i then propose that people should not only be stripped but skinned alive she might perhaps see several moral objections but her own argument would still hold good or as good as it held in her own case and i could say that evolution would not stop and the skinning would go on the argument is quite as good on my side as on hers and it is worthless on both of course it would be just as easy to urge people to progress or evolve in exactly the opposite direction it would be as easy to maintain that they ought to go on wearing more and more clothes it might be argued that savages wear fewer clothes and that clothes are a mark of civilization and that the evolution of them will go on i am highly civilized if i wear 10 hats and more highly civilized if i wear 12 hats when i have already evolved so far as to put on six pairs of trousers i must still hail the appearance of the seventh pair of trousers with the joy due to the waving banner of a great reform when we balance these two lunacies against each other the central point of sanity is surely apparent the man who headed his inquiry have women gone far enough was at least in a real sense stating the point rightly the point is that there is a far enough there is a point at which something that was once neglected becomes exaggerated something that is valuable up to that stage becomes undesirable after that stage it is possible for the human intellect to consider clearly at what stage or in what condition it would have enough complication of clothes or enough simplification of clothes or enough of any other social element or tendency it is possible to set a limit to the pagoda of human hats rising forever into infinity it is possible to count the human legs and after a brief calculation a lot to them the appropriate number of trousers there is such a thing as the miscalculation of making hats for a hydra or boots for a centipede just as there are such things as barefooted friars or the hatless brigade there are exceptions and exaggerations good and bad but the point is that they are not only both good and bad but they are good and bad in opposite directions let a man have what ideal of human costume or custom he likes that ideal must still consist of elements in a certain proportion and if that proportion is disturbed that ideal is destroyed let him once be clear in his own mind about what he wants and then whatever it is that he wants he will not want the tide of evolution to wash it away his ideal may be as revolutionary as he likes or as reactionary as he likes but it must remain as he likes it to make it more revolutionary or more reactionary is distortion to suggest it's growing more and more reactionary or revolutionary forever is demented nonsense how can a man know what he wants how can he even want what he wants if it will not even remain the same while he wants it the particular argument about women is not primarily the point but as a matter of fact it is a very good illustration of the point if a man thinks the victorian conventions kept women out of things they would be the happier for having his natural course is to consider what things they are not to think that any things will do so long as there are more of them this is only the sort of living logic everybody acts in life suppose somebody says don't you think all this wood could be used for something else besides palings we shall very probably answer well i dare say it could and perhaps begin to think of wooden boxes or wooden stools but we shall not see as in a sort of vision a vista of wooden razors wooden carving knives wooden coats and hats wooden pillows and pocket handkerchiefs if people had made a false and insufficient list of the uses of wood we shall try to make a true insufficient list of them but not imagine that the list can go on forever or include more and more of everything in the world i am not establishing a scientific parallel between wood and womanhood but there would be nothing disrespectful in the symbol considered as a symbol for wood is the most sacred of all substances it typifies the divine trade of the carpenter and men count themselves fortunate to touch it here it is only a working simile but the point of it is this that all this nonsense about progressive and unprogressive minds and the tide of evolution divides people into those who stick ignorantly to wood for one thing and those who attempt insanely to use wood for everything both seem to think at a highly eccentric suggestion that we should find out what wood is really useful for and use it for that they either profess to worship a wooden womanhood inside the wooden fences of certain trivial and temporary Victorian conventions or else they profess to see the future as a forest of dryads growing more and more feminine forever but it does not matter to the main question whether anybody else draws the line exactly where i do the point is that i am not doing an illogical thing but the only logical thing in drawing the line i think tennis for women normal and football for women quite abnormal and i am no more inconsistent than i am and having a wooden walking stick and not a wooden hat i do not particularly object to a female despot but i do object to a female demagogue and my distinction is as much founded on the substance of things as my eccentric conduct and having a wooden chair and table but not a wooden knife and fork you may think my division wrong the point is that it is not wrong in being a division all this fallacy of false progress tends to obscure the old common sense of all mankind which is still the common sense of every man in his own daily dealings that everything has its place and proportion and proper use and that it is rational to trust its use and distrust its abuse progress in the good sense does not consist in looking for a direction in which one can go on indefinitely for there is no such direction unless it be in quite transcendental things like the love of god it would be far truer to say that true progress consists in looking for the place where we can stop end of section 23 read by the story girl section 24 of fancies versus fans this is a leper fox recording all leper fox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit leperfox.org fancies versus fans by gk chesterton the myth of the mayflower agnosticism the ancient confession of ignorance was a singularly sane and healthy thing so far as it went unfortunately it has not gone as far as the 20th century it has declared in all ages as a heathen chief declared in the dark ages that the life of a man is like the flight of a bird across the fire lit room because we know nothing of whence it comes or whether it goes it would seem natural to apply it not only to man but to mankind but the moderans do not apply the same principle but the very opposite principle they specialize in the unknown origins and in the unknown future they dwell on the prehistoric and on the posthistoric or prophetic and neglect only the historic they will give a most detailed description of the habits of the bird when he was a sort of turodactyl only faintly to be traced in a fossil they will give an equally detailed description of the habits of the bird a hundred years hence when he shall have turned into a super bird or the dove of universal peace but the bird in the hand is worth far less to them than the two mysterious birds in these two impenetrable bushes they will publish a portrait with life letters and table talk of the missing link although he is missing they will publish a plan in documented history of how the social revolution happened though it has not happened yet it is the men who are not missing and the revolutions that have happened that they have rather a habit of overlooking anyone who has argued for instance with the young Jewish intellectuals who are the brain of Bolshevism knows that their whole system turns on the two pivots of the prehistoric and the prophetic they talk of the communism of prehistoric ages as if it were a thing like the crusades in the middle ages not even a probable conjecture but approved in familiar fact they will tell you exactly how private property arose in primitive times just as if they had been there and then they will take one gigantic leap overall human history and tell you about the inevitable communism of the future nothing seems to matter unless it is either new enough to be foretold or old enough to be forgotten Mr. H.G. Wells has hit off his human habit in the account of a very human character the American girl who glorifies Stonehenge in his last novel I do not make Mr. Wells responsible for her opinions though she is an attractive person and much too good for her Lothario but she interests me here because she typifies very truly another variation upon the same tendency to the prehistoric and the posthistoric must be added a third thing which may be called the onhistoric I mean the bad teaching of real history that such intelligent people so often suffer she sums up exactly what I mean when she says humorously that Stonehenge has been kept from her that Notre Dame is far less important and that this is the real starting point of the Mayflower now the Mayflower is a myth it is an intensely interesting example of a real modern myth I do not mean of course that the Mayflower never sailed any more than I admit that King Arthur never lived or that Roland never died I do not mean that the incident had no historic interest or that the man who figured in it had no heroic qualities any more than I deny that Charlemagne was a great man because the legend says he was 200 years old any more than I deny that the resistance of Roman Britain to the heathen invasion was valiant and valuable because the legend says that Arthur at Mount Baddon killed 900 men with his own hand I mean that there exists in millions of modern minds a traditional image or vision called the Mayflower which has far less relation to the real facts than Charlemagne's 200 years or Arthur's 900 corpses multitudes of people in England and America as intelligent and sympathetic as the young lady in Mr. Wells's novel think of the Mayflower as an origin or arch type like the Ark or at least the Argo perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say that they think the Mayflower discovered America they do really talk as if the Mayflower populated America above all they talk as if the establishment of New England had been the first informative example of the expansion of England they believe that English expansion was a Puritan experiment and that an expansion of Puritan ideas was also the expansion of what have been claimed as English ideas especially ideas of liberty the Puritans of New England were champions of religious freedom seeking to found a newer and freer state beyond the sea and thus becoming the origin and model of modern democracy all this betrays a lack of exactitude it is certainly nearer to exact truth to say that Merlin built the castle at Camelot by magic or that Roland broke the mountains in pieces with his unbroken sword for at least the old fables are faults on the right side they are symbols of the truth and not of the opposite of the truth they described Roland as brandishing his unbroken sword against the Muslims but not in favor of the Muslims and the New England Puritans would have regarded the establishment of real religious liberty exactly as Roland would have regarded the establishment of the religion of Mahond the fables describe Merlin as building a palace for a king and not a public hall for the London School of Economics and it would be quite insensible to read the Fabian politics of Mr Sidney Webb into the local kingships of the Dark Ages as to read anything remotely resembling modern liberality into the most savage of all the savage theological frenzies of the 17th century thus the Mayflower is not merely a fable but is much more false than fables generally are the revolt of the Puritans against the stewards was really a revolt against religious toleration I do not say the Puritans were never persecuted by their opponents but I do say to their great honor and glory that the Puritans never descended to the hypocrisy of pretending for a moment that they did not mean to persecute their opponents and in the main their quarrel with the stewards was that the stewards would not persecute those opponents enough not only was it then the Catholics were proposing toleration but it was they who had already actually established toleration in the state of Maryland before the Puritans began to establish the most intolerant sort of intolerance in the state of New England and if the fable is fabulous touching the emancipation of religion it is yet more fabulous touching the expansion of empire that had been started long before either New England or Maryland by Raleigh who started it in Virginia Virginia is still perhaps the most English of the states certainly more English than New England and it was also the most typical and important of the states almost up to these last battle in the wilderness but I have only taken the Mayflower as an example of the general truth and in a way the truth has its consoling side modern men are not allowed to have any history but at least nothing can prevent men from having legends we have thus before us in a very true and typical modern picture the two essential parts of modern culture it consists first of false history and second of fancy history what the American tourists believed about Plymouth Rock was untrue which he believed about Stonehenge was only unfounded the popular story of primitive man cannot be proved the popular story of Puritanism can be disproved I can only sympathize with Mr. Wells and his heroine in feeling the imaginative stimulus of mysteries like Stonehenge but the imagination springs from the mystery that is the imagination springs from the ignorance it is the very greatness of Stonehenge that there is very little of it left it is its chief feature to be featureless we are very naturally and rightly moved to mystical emotions about signals from so far away along the path of the past but part of the poetry lies in our inability really to read the signals and this is what gives an interest and even an irony to the comparison half consciously invoked by the American lady herself when she asked what's Notre Dame to this and the answer that should be given to her is Notre Dame compared to this is true it is history it is humanity it is what has really happened what we know has really happened what we know is really happening still it is the central fact of your own civilization and it is the thing that has really been kept from you Notre Dame is not a myth Notre Dame is not a theory its interest is not spring from ignorance but from knowledge from a culture complicated with a hundred controversies and revolutions it is not featureless but carved into an incredible forest and labyrinth of fascinating features any one of which we could talk about for days it is not great because there is little of it but great because there is a great deal of it it is true that though there is a great deal of it Puritans may not be allowed to see a great deal in it whether they were those brought over in the Mayflower or only those brought up on the Mayflower but that is not the fault of Notre Dame but of the extraordinary evasion by which such people can dodge to right or left of it taking refuge in things more recent or things more remote Notre Dame on its merely human side is medieval civilization and therefore not a fable or a guess but a great solid determining part of modern civilization it is the whole modern debate about guilds for such cathedrals were built by the guilds it is the whole modern question of religion and irreligion for we know what religion it stands for while we really have not a notion what religion stone hinge stands for a druid temple is a ruin and a puritan ship by this time may well be called a wreck but a church is a challenge and that is why it is not answered end of section 24 section 25 of fancies versus fans this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org fancies versus fads by G.K. Chesterton much to modern history all wise men will agree that history ought to be taught more fully in the form of world history in that respect at least Mr. Wells gave us an excellent working model England is meaningless without Europe more meaningless than England without empire but those who would broaden history with human brotherhood too often suffer from a limitation not absent even from Mr. Wells they exchange the narrowness of a nation for the narrowness of a theory or even a fad they think they have a worldwide philosophy because they extend their own narrowness to the whole world a distinguished professor who is a member of the League of Nations Union has been telling an interviewer what he thinks history books should teach and it seems to me that according to his views if correctly reported the new histories would be rather more prejudiced and limited than the old he begins with a small but singular error which itself shows some lack of the imagination that can see two sides of a question he says textbooks of history should aim at truth it should not be possible for one version of the American war of independence to be taught in American schools and another in English schools now in point of fact the same version of that story is taught both in English and American schools it is the other version a very tenable one that is not allowed to be taught anywhere no American historian however American could be more positive that George III was wrong in George Washington right than all the English historians are what would show real independence of mind would be to state the case for George III and there was a very real case for George III I will not go into it here but every honest historical student will agree with me perhaps the fairest way of putting it is this that it was not really a case of a government resolved on tyranny but of a nation resolved on independence but if we sympathize with national independence surely there is something to be said for intellectual independence and the professor is far from being really sympathetic with intellectual independence he is so far from it that he wants both sides forced to tell the same story apparently whether they like it or not as a fact they do agree but apparently in any case the professor would coerce them into agreement and his extraordinary reason for this course is that history should aim at truth but suppose I do aim at truth and sincerely come to the conclusion that north was a patriot and Burke a sophist how would the professor prevent it being possible for me to teach what I think is true the truth is that it has never occurred to these progressive professors that there could be any view of any question except their own or what they call their own for it is only a tradition they have been taught a tradition as narrow as north's and now nearly as old but the professor goes on to say something much more interesting and curious after saying very truly that the past the plantagenet period for instance should not be made a mere matter of kings and battles he goes on to say what we want to see is the textbook of history and the teaching of it brought more closely into touch with the realities of the modern world the world of the division of labor between different countries of the application of science to industry of the shortening of the spaces of the earth by improvements in transport and with all that these realities imply now it seems to me obvious that what we want is exactly the opposite a child can see these realities of the modern world whether he is taught any history or not he will see them whether you want him to or not as he grows up he will learn by experience all about the improvements in transport its acceleration of zeppelins and its interruption by submarines he will realize for himself that the modern world is the world of the division of labor between nations for he will know that england has been turned into an isolated workshop with hardly food enough for a fortnight with a potential alternative of surrender or starvation or eating nails he will by the light of nature know all about the application of science to industry in war by chemical analysis of poison gas in peace by bright little pamphlets about fossey jaw he will know all that these realities imply about which also there is very much that might be said but even if we consider only the somewhat cheerier products of the division of labor and the application of science to industry there is quite as little need laboriously to instruct the infant and what he can see for himself a child has a very pure and poetical love of machinery a love in which there is nothing in the least evil or materialistic but it is hardly necessary to devote years to proving to him that motor cars have been invented as he can see them going by in the street it is not necessary to read up in the British Museum the details with which to demonstrate that there are really such things as tube stations or motor bicycles the child can see these things everywhere and the real danger obviously is that he should think they had existed always the danger is that he should know nothing of humanity except as it is under the special and sometimes cramping conditions of scientific industry and the division of labor it is that he should be unable to imagine any civilization without tube stations whatever it's substitutes in the way of temples or trophies of war it is that he should see man as a sort of cyclist centaur inseparable from his motorbike in short the whole danger of historical ignorance is that he may be as limited to his local circumstances as a savage on an island or a provincial in a decayed town or a historical professor in the League of Nations Union the whole object of history is to enlarge experience by imagination and this sort of history would enlarge neither imagination nor experience the whole object of history is to make us realize that humanity could be great and glorious under conditions quite different and even contrary to our own it is to teach us that men could achieve most profitable labor without our own division of labor it is to teach us that men could be industrious without being industrial it is to make us understand that there might be a world in which there was far less improvement in the transport for visiting various places and there might still be a very great improvement in the places visited the professor is perfectly right in saying that a history of the Plantagenet period ought not merely to record the succession of kings and battles but what audit to record is it to record only the absence of motors and electric lights should we say nothing of the Plantagenet period except that it did not have motorbikes I venture to suggest that we might record the presence of some things which the whole people had then and have not got now such as the guilds the great popular universities the use of the common lands the fraternity of the common creed I fear the professor will not follow me into matters so disturbing to his perfect picture of progress but in conclusion there is one little question I should like to ask him and it is this if you cannot see man divine and democratic under the disguises of all the centuries why on earth should you suppose you will be able to see him under the disguises of all the nations and tribes if the dark ages must be as dark as they look why are the black men not so black as they are painted if I may feel supercilious towards a Chaldean why not towards a China man if I may despise a Roman for not having a steam plow why not a Russian for not wanting a steam plow if scientific industry is the supreme historical test it divides us as much from backward peoples as from bygone peoples it divides even Europe peoples from each other and if that be the test why bother to join the league of nations union end of section 25