 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton. Part I. The False Theory. CHAPTER VI. The Unanswered Challenge. Dr. Sally B. did me the honor of referring to me in one of his addresses on this subject, and said that even I cannot produce any but a feeble-minded child from a feeble-minded ancestry. To which I reply, first of all, that he cannot produce a feeble-minded child. The whole point of our contention is that this phrase conveys nothing fixed and outside opinion. There is such a thing as mania which has always been segregated. There is such a thing as idiocy which has always been segregated. But feeble-mindedness is a new phrase under which you might segregate anybody. It is essential that this fundamental fallacy in the use of statistics should be got somehow into the modern mind. Such people must be made to see the point, which is surely plain enough, that it is useless to have exact figures, if they are exact figures, about an inexact phrase. If I say there are five fools in Acton, it is surely quite clear that though no mathematician can make five the same as four or six, that will not stop you or anyone else from finding a few more fools in Acton. Now weak-mindedness, like folly, is a term divided from madness in this vital manner, that in one sense it applies to all men, in another to most men, in another to very many men, and so on. It is as if Dr. Saley B. were to say, vanity I find is undoubtedly hereditary. Here is Mrs. Jones, who was very sensitive about her son that's being criticized, and I found her little daughter in a new frock looking in the glass. The experiment is conclusive. The demonstration is complete. There, in the first generation, is the artistic temperament, that is vanity, and there in the second generation is dress, and that is vanity. We should answer, my friend, all is vanity. Vanity and vexation of spirit, especially when one has to listen to logic of your favorite kind. Obviously all human beings must value themselves, and obviously there is an all-such valuation in an element of weakness, since it is not the valuation of eternal justice. What is the use of your finding by experiment in some people a thing we know by reason must be in all of them? Here it will be well the pause a moment, and avert one possible misunderstanding. I do not mean that you and I cannot and do not practically see and personally remark on this or that eccentric or intermediate type for which the word feeble-minded might be a very convenient word, and might correspond to a genuine though indefinable fact of experience. In the same way we might speak and do speak of such and such a person being mad with vanity, without wanting two keepers to walk in and take the person off. But I ask the reader to remember always that I am talking of words, not as they are used in talk or novels, but as they will be used and have been used in warrants and certificates and acts of parliament. The distinction between the two is perfectly clear and practical. The difference is that a novelist or a talker can be trusted to try and hit the mark. It is all to his glory that the cap should fit, that the type should be recognized, that he should in a literary sense hang the right man. But it is by no means always to the interests of governments or officials to hang the right man. The fact that they often do stretch words in order to cover cases is the whole foundation of having any fixed laws or free institutions at all. My point is not that I have never met anyone whom I should call feeble-minded, rather than mad or imbecile. My point is that if I wanted to dispossess a nephew, oust a rival, silence a blackmailer, or get rid of an important widow, there is nothing in logic to prevent my calling them feeble-minded, too. And the bigger the charge is, the less they will be able to disprove it. One does not, as I have said, need to deny heredity in order to resist such legislation, any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning. I admit there may be such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness. I believe there is such a thing as witchcraft. Believing that there are spirits, I am bound in mere reason to suppose that there are probably evil spirits. Believing that there are evil spirits, I am bound in mere reason to suppose that some men grow evil by dealing with them. All that is mere rationalism. The superstition, that is the unreasoning repugnance and terror, is in the person who admits there can be angels, but denies there can be devils. The superstition is in the person who admits there can be devils, but denies there can be diabolists. Yet I should certainly resist any effort to search for witches, for a perfectly simple reason, which is the key of the whole of this controversy. The reason is that it is one thing to believe in witches and quite another to believe in witch-smellers. I have more respect for the old witch-finders than for the eugenists, who go about persecuting the fool of the family, because the witch-finders, according to their own conviction, ran a risk. Witches were not the feeble-minded but the strong-minded, the evil mesmerists, the rulers of the elements. Many a raid on a witch, right or wrong, seemed the villagers who did it a right popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny, a papacy of sin. Yet we know that the thing degenerated into a rabid and despicable persecution of the feeble or the old. It ended by being a war upon the weak. It ended by being what eugenics begin by being. When I said above that I believe in witches, but not in witch-smellers, I stated my full position about the conception of heredity. That half-formed philosophy of fears and omens, of curses and weird recurrence and darkness and the doom of blood, which, as preached to humanity today, is often more inhuman than witchcraft itself. I do not deny that this dark element exists. I only affirm that it is dark, or in other words that its most strenuous students are evidently in the dark about it. I would no more trust Dr. Carl Pearson on a heredity-hunt than on a heresy-hunt. I am perfectly ready to give my reasons for thinking this, and I believe any well-balanced person, if he reflects on them, will think as I do. There are two senses in which a man may be said to know or not know a subject. I know the subject of arithmetic, for instance. That is, I am not good at it, but I know what it is. I am sufficiently familiar with its use to see the absurdity of anyone who says, so vulgar a fraction cannot be mentioned before ladies, or this unit is unionist, I hope. Considering myself for one moment as an arithmetician, I may say that I know next to nothing about my subject, but I know my subject. I know it in the street. There is the other kind of man, like Dr. Carl Pearson, who undoubtedly knows a vast amount about his subject, who undoubtedly lives in great forests of facts concerning kinship and inheritance, but it is not by any means the same thing to have searched the forests and to have recognized the frontiers. Indeed, the two things generally belong to two very different types of mind. I gravely doubt whether the astronomer royal would write the best essay on the relations between astronomy and astrology. I doubt whether the president of the geographical society could give the best definition and history of the words geography and geology. Now the students of heredity especially understood all of their subject except their subject. They were, I suppose, bred and born in that briar patch, and have really explored it without coming to the end of it. That is, they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying. I do not propose to rely merely on myself to tell them what they are studying. I propose as will be seen in a moment to call the testimony of a great man who has himself studied it, but to begin with, the domain of heredity, for those who see its frontiers, is a sort of triangle enclosed on its three sides by three facts. The first is that heredity undoubtedly exists, or there would be no such thing as a family likeness, and every marriage might suddenly produce a small negro. The second is that even simple heredity can never be simple. Its complexity must be literally unfathomable, for in that field fight unthinkable millions. But yet again, it never is simply heredity. For the instant anyone is, he experiences. The third is that these innumerable ancient influences, these instant inundations of experiences come together, according to a combination that is unlike anything else on this earth. It is a combination that does combine. It cannot be sorted out again, even on the day of judgment. Two totally different people have become, in the sense, most sacred, frightful, and unanswerable, one flesh. If a golden-haired Scandinavian girl has married a very swarthy Jew, the Scandinavian side of the family may say till they are blue in the face that the baby has his mother's nose or his mother's eyes. They can never be certain the black-haired bed-owen is not present in every feature, in every inch. In the person of the baby he may have gently pulled his wife's nose. In the person of the baby he may have partly blacked his wife's eyes. Those are the three first facts of heredity, that it exists, that it is subtle and made of a million elements, that it is simple and cannot be unmade into those elements. To summarize, you know there is wine in the soup. You do not know how many wines there are in the soup, because you do not know how many wines there are in the world. And you never will know, because all chemists, all cooks, and all common sense people tell you, that the soup is of such a sort that it can never be chemically analyzed. That is a perfectly fair parallel to the heredity element in the human soul. There are many ways in which one can feel that there is wine in the soup, as in a sudden tasting of a wine specially favored. That corresponds to seeing suddenly, flash on the young face, the image of some ancestor you have known. But even then the taster cannot be certain he is not tasting one familiar wine among many unfamiliar ones, or seeing one known ancestor among a million unknown ancestors. Another way is to get drunk on the soup, which corresponds to the case of those who say they are driven to sin and death by hereditary doom. But even then the drunkard cannot be certain it was the soup, any more than the traditional drunkard who is certain it was the salmon. Those are the facts about heredity, which anyone can see. The deep shot of them is not only that a miss is as good as a mile, but a miss is as good as a win. If the child has his parent's nose, or noses, that may be heredity. But if he has not, that may be heredity too. And as we need not take heredity lightly, because two generations differ, so we need not take heredity a scrap more seriously because two generations are similar. The thing is in there, in what cases we know not, in what proportion we know not, and we cannot know. Now it is just here that the decent difference of function between Dr. Saley Bee's trade and mine comes in. It is his business to study human health and sickness as a whole, in a spirit of more or less enlightened guesswork. And it is perfectly natural that he should allow for heredity here, there, and everywhere, as a man climbing a mountain, or sailing a boat, will allow for weather without even explaining it to himself. An utterly different attitude is incumbent on any conscientious man writing about what laws should be enforced, or about how commonwealths should be governed. And when we consider how plain a fact is murder, and yet how hesitant and even hazy we all grow about the guilt of a murderer, when we consider how simple an act is stealing, and yet how hard it is to convict and punish those rich commercial pirates who steal the most, when we consider how cruel and clumsy the law can be, even about things as old and plain as the Ten Commandments. I simply cannot conceive any responsible person proposing to legislate on our broken knowledge and bottomless ignorance of heredity. But though I have to consider this dull matter in its due logical order, it appears to me that this part of the matter has been settled, and settled in a most masterly way by somebody who has infinitely more right to speak on it than I have. Our press seems to have a perfect genius for fitting people with caps that don't fit, and affixing the wrong terms of eulogy, and even the wrong terms of abuse. And just as people will talk of Bernard Shaw as a naughty winking period, when he is the last great Puritan, and really believes in respectability, just as C. Parvalay said it, etc., they will talk of my own paradoxes when I pass my life in preaching that the truisms are true, so an enormous number of newspaper readers seem to have it fixed firmly in their heads that Mr. H. G. Wells is a harsh and horrible eugenist in great goblin spectacles, who wants to put us all into metallic microscopes and dissect us with metallic tools. As a matter of fact, of course, Mr. Wells, so far from being too definite, is generally not definite enough. He is an absolute wizard in the appreciation of atmospheres and the openings of vistas, but his answers are more agnostic than his questions. His books will do everything except shut. And so far from being the sort of man who would stop a man from propagating, he cannot even stop a full stop. He is not eugenic enough to prevent the black dot at the end of a sentence from reading a line of little dots. But this is not the clear-cut blunder of which I spoke. The real blunder is this. Mr. Wells deserves a tiara of crowns and a garland of medals, for all kinds of reasons. But if I were restricted on grounds of public economy to giving Mr. Wells only one medal, Obsivus Sirvato, I would give him a medal as the eugenist who destroyed eugenics. For every one spoke of him rightly or wrongly as the eugenist, and he certainly had, as I have not, the training and type of culture required to consider the matter merely in a biological and not in a generally moral sense. The result was that in that fine book, Mankind in the Making, where he inevitably came to grips with the problem, he threw down to the eugenist an intellectual challenge which seems to me unanswerable, but which at any rate is unanswered. I do not mean that no remote eugenist wrote upon the subject, for it is impossible to read all writings, especially eugenist writings. I do mean that the leading eugenist write as if this challenge had never been offered. The gauntlet lies unlifted on the ground. Having given honor for the idea where it is due, I may be permitted to summarize it myself for the sake of brevity. Mr. Wells' point was this. That we cannot be certain about the inheritance of health, because health is not a quality. It is not a thing like darkness in the hair or length in the limbs. It is a relation, a balance. You have a tall, strong man, but his very strength depends on his not being too tall for his strength. You catch a healthy, full-blooded fellow, but his very health depends on his being not too full of blood. A heart that is strong for a dwarf will be weak for a giant. A nervous system that would kill a man with a trace of certain illness will sustain him to ninety if he has no trace of that illness. Nay, the same nervous system might kill him if he had an excess of some other comparatively healthy thing. Seeing therefore that there are apparently healthy people of all types, it is obvious that if you make two of them, you may even then produce a discord out of two inconsistent harmonies. It is obvious that you can no more be certain of a good offspring than you can be certain of a good tune if you play two fine airs at once on the same piano. You can be even less certain of it in the more delicate case of beauty, of which the eugenics talk a great deal. Mary, two handsome people whose noses tend to the aquiline and their baby for all you know may be a goblin with a nose like an enormous parrot. Indeed, I actually know a case of this kind. The eugenist has to settle not the result of fixing one steady thing to a second steady thing, but what will happen when one toppling and dizzy equilibrium crashes into another? This is the interesting conclusion. It is on this degree of knowledge that we are asked to abandon the universal morality of mankind. When we have stopped the lover from marrying the unfortunate woman he loves, when we have found him another uproariously healthy female whom he does not love in the least, even then we have no logical evidence that the result may not be as horrid and as dangerous as if he had behaved like a man of honor. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Eugenics and Other Evils by G.K. Chesterton Part 1 The False Theory Chapter 7 The Established Church of Doubt Let us now finally consider what the honest eugenists do mean, since it has become increasingly evident that they cannot mean what they say. Unfortunately, the obstacles to any explanation of this are such as to insist on a circuitous approach. The tendency of all that is printed and much that is spoken today is to be in the only true sense behind the times. It is because it is always in a hurry that it is always too late. Give an ordinary man a day to write an article, and he will remember the things that he has really heard latest and may even in the last glory of sunset begin to think of what he thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the nearest textbook on the topic and make the best mosaic he may out of classical quotations and old authorities. Give him ten minutes to write it, and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery, where he learnt his stalest proverbs, or the old school, where he learnt his stalest politics. The quicker goes the journalist, the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which every day is less worth delivering at all. The poor, panting critic falls farther and farther behind the motor car of modern fact. Fifty years ago he was barely fifteen years behind the time. Fifteen years ago he was not more than fifty years behind the times. Just now he is rather more than a hundred years behind the times, and the proof of it is that the things he says though manifest nonsense about our society today really were true about our society some hundred and thirty years ago. The best instance of his belated state is perpetual assertion that the supernatural is less and less believed. It is a perfectly true and realistic account of the eighteenth century. It is the worst possible account of this age of physics and spirit healers and fakers and fashionable fortune tellers. In fact, I generally reply in eighteenth century language to this eighteenth century illusion. If somebody says to me, the creeds are crumbling, I reply, and the king of Prussia, who is himself a free thinker, is certainly capturing Silesia from the Catholic Empress. If somebody says, miracles must be considered in the light of rational experience, I answered effably, but I hope that our enlightened leader Herbert will not insist on guillotining that poor French queen. If somebody says, we must watch for the rise of some new religion which can commend itself to reason, I reply, but how much more necessary is it to watch for the rise of some military adventurer who may destroy the Republic, and to my mind, that young major bone apart has a rather restless air. It is only in such language from the age of reason that we can answer such things. The age we live in is something more than an age of superstition, but it is only with one example of this that I am concerned here. I mean the error that still sends men marching about, disestablishing churches, and talking of the tyranny of compulsory church teaching, or compulsory church tithes. I do not wish for an irrelevant misunderstanding here. I would myself certainly disestablish any church that had a numerical minority, like the Irish or the Welsh, and I think it would do a great deal of good to genuine churches that have a partly conventional majority, like the English or even the Russian. But I should only do this if I had nothing else to do, and just now there is very much else to do, for religion, orthodox or unorthodox, is not just now relying on the weapons of state establishment at all. The Pope practically made no attempt to preserve the Concordant, but seemed rather relieved at the independence his church has gained by the change. In Russia the one real charge brought by the religious people, especially Roman Catholics, against the Orthodox Church, is not its orthodoxy or heterodoxy, but its abject dependence on the state. In England we can almost measure the Anglican's fervor for his church by his comparative coolness about its establishment, that is, its control by a parliament of Scotch Presbyterians like Belfort or Welsh Congregationalists like Lloyd George. In Scotland the powerful combination of the two great sects outside the establishment have left it in a position in which it feels no disposition to boast of being called by mere lawyers the Church of Scotland. I'm not here arguing that churches should not depend upon state, nor that they do not depend upon much worse things. It may be reasonably maintained that the strength of Romanism, though it be not in any national police, is in a moral police more rigid and vigilant. You may be reasonably maintained that the strength of Anglicanism, though it not be in establishment, is in aristocracy and its shadow, which is called snobbishness. All I assert here is that the churches are not now leaning heavily on their political establishment. They are not using heavily the secular arm. Almost everywhere their legal ties have been modified, their legal boards of control have been mixed. They may still employ tyranny and worse tyranny. I'm not considering that. They are not specially using that special tyranny which consists in using the government. The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools. The creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment. The creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen. That creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with evolution and has ended in eugenics. Materialism is really our established church. For the government will really help it to persecute its heretics. Vaccination in its hundred years of experiment has been disputed almost as much as baptism in its approximate two thousand. But it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism. I'm not frightened of the word persecution when it is attributed to the churches nor is it in the least as a term of reproach that I attribute it to the men of science. It is as a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by our policies of a widely disputed theory incapable of final proof, then our priests are not now persecuting but our doctors are. The imposition of such dogmas constitutes a state church in an older and stronger sense than any that can be applied to any supernatural church today. There are still places where the religious minority is forbidden to assemble or to teach in this way or that and yet more where it is excluded from this or that public post. But I cannot now recall any place where it is compelled by the criminal law to go through the right of the official religion. Even the young Turks did not insist on all Macedonians being circumcised. Now here we find ourselves confronted with an amazing fact. When in the past opinions so arguable have been enforced by state violence, it has been at the instigation of fanatics who held them for fixed and flaming certainties. If truths could not be evaded by their enemies, neither could they be altered even by their friends. But what are the certain truths that the secular arm must now lift the sword to enforce? Why they are that very mass of bottomless questions and bewildered answers that we have been studying in the last chapters. Questions whose only interest is that they are trackless and mysterious. Answers whose only glory is that they are tentative and new. The devotee boasted that he would never abandon the faith and therefore he persecuted for the faith. But the doctor of science actually boasts that he will always abandon a hypothesis and yet he persecutes for the hypotheses. The inquisitor violently enforced his creed because it was unchangeable. The savant enforces it violently because he may change it the next day. Now this is a new sort of persecution. And one may be permitted to ask if it is an improvement on the old. The difference so far as one can see at first seems rather favorable to the old. If we are to be at the merciless mercy of man, most of us would rather be wracked for a creed that existed intensely in somebody's head rather than vivisected for a discovery that had not yet come into anyone's head, and possibly never would. A man would rather be tortured with thumb screws until he chose to see reason than tortured with a vivisecting knife until the vivisector chose to see reason. Yet that is the real difference between the two types of legal enforcement. If I gave in to the inquisitors, I should at least know what creed to profess. But even if I yelled out a credo when the eugenist had me on the rack, I should not know what creed to yell. I might get an extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed. They confessed quite a week ago. Now let no light-minded person say that I am here taking extravagant parallels, for the parallel is not only perfect but plain. For this reason, that the difference between torture and vivisection is not in any way affected by the fierceness or mildness of either. Whether they gave the rack half a turn or half a hundred, they were by hypotheses dealing with the truth which they knew to be there. Whether they vivisect painfully or painlessly, they are trying to find out whether the truth is there or not. The old inquisitors tortured to put their own opinions into somebody, but the new inquisitors' torture to get their own opinions out of him. They do not know what their own opinions are until the victim of vivisection tells them. The division of thought is a complete chasm for anyone who cares about thinking. The old persecutor was trying to teach the citizen with fire and sword. The new persecutor is trying to learn from the citizen with scalpel and germ injector. The master was meeker than the pupil will be. I could prove by many practical instances that even my illustrations are not exaggerated by many placid proposals I have heard for the vivisection of criminals or by the filthy incident of Dr. Neisser. But I prefer here to stick to a strictly logical line of distinction, and insist that, whereas in all previous persecutions, the violence was used to end our indecision. The whole point here is that the violence is used to end the indecision of the persecutors. This is what the honest eugenists really mean, so far as they mean anything. They mean that the public is to be given up not as a heathen land for conversion, but simply as a pedulum for experiment. That is the real rude barbaric sense behind this eugenic legislation. The eugenist doctors are not such fools as they look in the light of any logical inquiry about what they want. They do not know what they want, except that they want your soul and body and mind in order to find out. They are quite seriously, as they themselves might say, the first religion to be experimental instead of doctrinal. All other established churches have been based on somebody having found the truth. This is the first church that was ever based on not having found it. There is in them a perfectly sincere hope and enthusiasm. But it is not for us, but for what they might learn from us, if they could rule us as they can rabbits. They cannot tell us anything about heredity because they do not know anything about it. But they do quite honestly believe that they would know something about it when they had married and mismarried us for a few hundred years. They cannot tell us who is fit to wield such authority, for they know that nobody is, but they do quite honestly believe that when that authority has been abused for a very long time, somebody somehow will be evolved who is fit for the job. I am no Puritan, and no one who knows my opinions will consider a mere criminal charge if I say that they are simply gambling. The reckless gambler has no money in his pockets. He has only the ideas in his head. These gamblers have no ideas in their heads. They have only the money in their pockets. But they think that if they could use the money to buy a big society to experiment on, something like an idea might come to them at last. That is eugenics. I can find myself here to remarking that I do not like it. I may be very stingy, but I am willing to pay the scientist for what he does know. I draw the line at paying him for everything he doesn't know. I may be very cowardly, but I am willing to be hurt for what I think or what he thinks. I am not willing to be hurt or even inconvenienced for what he might happen to think after he had hurt me. The ordinary citizen may easily be more magnanimous than I and take the whole thing on trust, in which case his career may be happier in the next world. But I think sadder in this. At least I wish to point out to him that he will not be giving his glorious body as soldiers give it to the glory of a fixed flag or martyrs to the glory of a deathless god. He will be, in the strict sense of the Latin phrase, giving his vile body for an experiment, an experiment of which even the experimentalists knows neither the significance nor the end. I have, up to this point, treated the eugenists, I hope, as seriously as they treat themselves. I have attempted an analysis of their theory as if it were an utterly abstract and disinterested theory, and so considered there seems to be very little left of it. But before I go on in the second part of this book to talk of the ugly things that really are left, I wish to recapitulate the essential points in their essential order, lest any personal irrelevance or overemphasis to which I know myself to be prone should have confused the course of what I believe to be a perfectly fair and consistent argument. To make it yet clearer, I will summarize the thing under chapters and in quite short paragraphs. In the first chapter, I attempted to define the essential point in which eugenics can claim and does claim to be a new morality. That point is that it is possible to consider the baby in considering the bride. I do not adopt the ideal irresponsibility of the man who said, what has posterity done for us? But I do say, to start with, what can we do for posterity, except deal fairly with our contemporaries? Unless a man love his wife, whom he has seen, how shall he love his child, whom he has not seen? In the second chapter I point out that this division in the conscience cannot be met by mere mental confusions which would make any woman refusing any man a eugenist. There will always be something in the world which tends to keep outrageous unions exceptional. That influence is not eugenics, but laughter. In the third chapter I seek to describe the quite extraordinary atmosphere in which such things have become possible. I call that atmosphere anarchy, but insist that it is an anarchy in the centers where there should be authority. Government has become ungovernable. That is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless. That is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government. In this atmosphere it is natural enough that medical experts being authorities should go mad and attempt so crude and random and immature a dream as this of petting and petting and rather spoiling the babe unborn. In chapter 4 I point out how this impatience has burst through the narrow channel of the lunacy laws and has obliterated them by extending them. The whole point of the madman is that he is the exception that proves the rule. But eugenics seeks to treat the whole rule as a series of exceptions, to make all men mad. And on that ground there is hope for nobody, for all opinions have an author and all authors have a heredity. The mentality of the eugenist makes him believe in eugenics as much as the mentality of the reckless lover makes him violate eugenics. And both mentalities are, on the materialist hypotheses, equally the irresponsible product of more or less unknown physical causes. The real security of man against any logical eugenics is, like the false security of Macbeth. The only eugenist that could rationally attack him must be a man of no woman born. In the chapter following this, which is called The Flying Authority, I try in vain to locate and fix any authority that could rationally rule men in so rooted and universal a matter. Little would be gained by ordinary men doing it to each other. And if ordinary practitioners did it, they would very soon show by a thousand whims and quarrels that they were ordinary men. I then discuss the enlightened despotism of a few general professors of hygiene and found it unworkable, for an essential reason, that while we can always get men intelligent enough to know more than the rest of us about this or that accident or pain or pest, we cannot count on the appearance of great cosmic philosophers. And only such men can be even supposed to know more than we do about the normal conduct and common sanity. Every sort of man in short would shirk such a responsibility, except the worst sort of man who would accept it. I pass on in the next chapter to consider whether we know enough about heredity to act decisively, even if we were certain who ought to act. Here I refer the eugenics to the reply of Mr. Wells, which they have never dealt with to my knowledge or satisfaction. The important and primary objection that health is not a quality but a proportion of qualities so that even health married to health might produce the exaggeration called disease. It should be noted here, of course, that an individual biologist may quite honestly believe that he has found a fixed principle with the help of Weaseman or Mendel. But we're not discussing whether he knows enough to be justified in thinking, as is somewhat the habit of the anthropoid homo, that he is right. We are discussing whether we know enough, as responsible citizens, to put such powers into the hands of men who may be deceived or who may be deceivers. I conclude that we do not. In the last chapter of the first half of the book I give what is, I believe, the real secret of this confusion, the secret of what the eugenics really want. They want to be allowed to find out what they want. Not content with the endowment of research, they desire the establishment of research, that is, the making of it a nothing official and compulsory, like education or state insurance. But still, it is only research and not discovery. In short, they want a new kind of state church, which shall be an established church of doubt instead of faith. They have no science of eugenics at all, but they do really mean that if we will give ourselves up to be vivisected, they may very probably have one some day. I point out in more dignified diction that this is a bit thick, and now in the second half of this book we will proceed to the consideration of things that really exist. It is a deeply regret to say necessary to return to realities as they are in your daily life and mine. Our happy holiday and the land of nonsense is over. We shall see no more its beautiful city with the almost biblical name of Bosch, nor the forests full of mares' nests, nor the fields of tares that are ripened only by moonshine. We shall meet no longer those delicious monsters that might have talked in the same wild club with the snark and the jabberwock or the poble or the dong with a luminous nose. The father who can't make head or tail of the mother but thoroughly understands the child she will someday bear. The lawyer who has to run after his own laws almost as fast as the criminals run away from them. The two mad doctors who might discuss for a million years which of them has the right to lock up the other. The Grammarian who clings convulsively to the passive mood and says it is the duty of something to get itself done without any human assistance. The man who would marry giants to giants until the back breaks as children pile bricks upon bricks for the pleasure of seeing the staggering tower tumble down. And above all the superb man of science who wants you to pay him and crown him because he has so far found out nothing. These fairy tale comrades must leave us. They exist, but they have no influence in what is really going on. They are honest dupes and tools as you and I were very nearly being honest dupes and tools. If we come to think coolly of the world we live in, if we consider how very practical is the practical politician at least where cash is concerned, how very dull and earthy are most of the men who own the millions and manage the newspaper trusts, how very cautious and diverse from idealist upheaval are those that control this capitalist society. When we consider all this it is frankly incredible that eugenics should be a front bench fashionable topic and almost an act of parliament if it were in practice only the unfinished fantasy which it is as I have shown in pure reason. Even if it were a just revolution it would be much too revolutionary a revolution for modern statesmen if there were not something else behind. Even if it were a true ideal it would be much too idealistic and ideal for our practical men if there were not something real as well. Well there is something real as well. There is no reason in eugenics but there is plenty of motive. Its supporters are highly vague about its theory but they will be painfully practical about its practice and while I reiterate that many of its more eloquent agents are probably quite innocent instruments there are some even among eugenists who by this time know what they are doing. To them we shall not say what is eugenics or where on earth are you going but only woe unto you hypocrites that devour widow's houses and for a pretense use long words. The end of Chapter 8. The end of Part 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton. Section 9. Part 2. The Real Aim. Chapter 1. The impotence of impenitence. The root formula of an epic is always an unwritten law just as the law that is the first of all laws that which protects life from the murderer is written nowhere in the statute book. Nevertheless there is all the difference between having and not having a notion of this basic assumption in an epic. For instance the middle ages will simply puzzle us with their charities and cruelties, their asceticism and bright colors unless we catch their general eagerness for building and planning dividing this from that by walls and fences. The spirit that made architecture their most successful art. Thus even a slave seems sacred. The divinity that did hedge a king did also in one sense hedge a serf. For he could not be driven out from behind his hedges. Thus even liberty became a positive thing like a privilege and even when most men had it it was not opened like the freedom of a wilderness but bestowed like the freedom of a city. Or again the 17th century may seem a chaos of contradictions with its almost priggish praise of parliaments and its quite barbaric massacre of prisoners until we realize that if the middle ages was a house half built the 17th century was a house on fire. Panic was the note of it and that fierce fastidiousness and exclusiveness that comes from fear. Calvinism was its characteristic religion even in the Catholic Church. The insistence on the narrowness of the way and the fewness of the chosen. Suspicion was the note of its politics. Put not your trust in princes. It tried to thrash everything out by learned virulent and ceaseless controversy and it weeded its population by witch burning. Or yet again the 18th century will present pictures that seem utterly opposite and yet seem singularly typical of the time. The sack of Versailles and the vicar of Wakefield. The pastorals of Watteau and the dynamite speeches of Danton. But we shall understand them all better if we once catch sight of the idea of tidying up, which ran through the whole period. The quietest people being prouder of their tidiness, civilization, and sound taste than of any of their virtues, and the wildest people having, and this is the most important point, no love of wildness for its own sake, like Nietzsche or the anarchic poets, but only a readiness to employ it to get rid of unreason or disorder. With these epics it's not altogether impossible to say that some such form of words is a key. The epic for which it is almost impossible to find a form of words is our own. Nevertheless I think that with us the keyword is inevitability, or as I should be inclined to call it, impenitence. We are subconsciously dominated in all departments by the notion that there is no turning back, and it is rooted in materialism and the denial of free will. Take any handful of modern facts and compare them with the corresponding facts a few hundred years ago. Compare the modern party system with the political factions of the seventeenth century. The difference is that in the older time the party leaders not only really cut off each other's heads, but what is much more alarming, really repealed each other's laws. With us it has become traditional for one party to inherit and leave untouched the acts of the other when made, however bitterly they were attacked in the making. James II and his nephew William were neither of them very gay specimens, but they would have laughed at the idea of a continuous foreign policy. The Tories were not conservatives. They were in the literal sense reactionaries. They did not merely want to keep the stewards. They wanted to bring them back. Or again consider how obstinately the English medieval monarchy returned again and again to its vision of French possessions, trying to reverse the decision of fate, how Edward III returned to the charge after the defeats of John and Henry III, and Henry V after the failure of Edward III. And how even Mary had that written on her heart, which was neither her husband nor her religion, and then consider this, that we have comparatively lately known a universal orgy of the thing called imperialism. The unity of the empire. The only topic. Colonies counted like crown jewels, and the Union Jack waved across the world. And yet no one so much has dreamed, I will not say, of recovering the American colonies for the imperial unity, which would have been too dangerous a task for modern empire builders. But even of retelling the story from an imperial standpoint. Henry V justified the claims of Edward III. Joseph Chamberlain would not have dreamed of justifying the claims of George III. Shakespeare justifies the French War, and sticks to Talbot, and deifies the legend of Joan of Arc. Mr. Kipling would not dare to justify the American War, stick to Burgoyne, and defy the legend of Washington. Yet there really was much more to be said for George III than there ever was for Henry V. It was not said much less acted upon by the modern imperialists, because of this basic modern sense that, as the future is inevitable, so is the past irrevocable. Any fact so complete as the American exodus from the empire must be considered as final for aeons, though it hardly happened more than a hundred years ago. Merely because it has managed to occur, it must be called first, unnecessary evil, and then an indispensable good. I need not add that I do not want to reconquer America, but then I am not an imperialist. Then there is another way of testing it. Ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable. How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realize that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot. How few there were that knew that clouds were more immortal and more solid than the schools. For a thousand that regret compulsory education, there is the hundreds or the tens or the one who would repeal compulsory education. Indeed the very word proves my case by its unpromising and unfamiliar sound. At the beginning of our epic men talked with equal ease about reform and repeal. Now everybody talks about reform, but nobody talks about repeal. Our fathers did not talk of free trade, but of the repeal of the corn laws. They did not talk of home rule, but of the repeal of the union. In those days people talked of a repealer as the most practical of all politicians, the kind of politician that carries a club. Now the repealer is flung far into the province of an impossible idealism, and the leader of one of our great parties having said, in a heat of temporary sincerity, that he would repeal and actually had to write to all the papers to assure them that he would only amend it. I need not multiply instances, though they might be multiplied almost to a million. The note of the age is to suggest that the past may just as well be praised since it cannot be mended. Men actually in that past have toiled like ants and died like locusts to undo some previous settlement that seems secure, but we cannot do so much as repeal an act of parliament. We entertain the weak-minded notion that what is done can't be undone. Our view was well summarized by a typical Victorian song with the refrain, The mill will never grind again the water that is past. There are many answers to this. One which would involve a disquisition on the phenomena of apparition and dew we will hear avoid. Another is that, to the millions of simple country folk, the object of a mill is not to grind water, but to grind corn, and that, strange as it may seem, there really have been societies sufficiently vigilant and valiant to prevent their corn perpetually flowing away from them, to the tune of a sentimental song. Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault, it is a moral fault, hopeful. Yet not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made, it is also our spiritual refusal to admit we have made a mistake. It was the mere vanity in Mr. Brummel, when he sent away trays full of imperfectly knotted neck-cloths, lightly remarking, These are our failures. It is a good instance of the nearness of vanity to humility, for at least he had to admit that they were failures. But it would have been spiritual pride in Mr. Brummel, if he had tied on all the cravats, one on top of the other, lest his valet should discover that he had ever tied one badly. For in spiritual pride there is always an element of secrecy and solitude. Mr. Brummel would be satanic, also, which I fear would affect him more, he would be badly dressed. But he would be a perfect presentation of the modern publicist, who cannot do anything right because he must not admit that he ever did anything wrong. This strange, weak obscenity, this persistence in the wrong path of progress grows weaker and worse, as do all such weak things. And by the time in which I write its moral attitude has taken on something of the sinister and even the horrible, our mistakes have become our secrets. Editors and journalists tear up with a guilty air, all that remind them of the party promises unfulfilled, or the party ideals reproaching them. It is true of our statesmen, much more than our bishops, of whom Mr. Well said it, that socially, in evidence, they are intellectually in hiding. The society is heavy with unconfessed sins. Its mind is sore and silent with painful subjects. It has a constipation of conscience. There are many things it has done and allowed to be done which it does not really dare to think about. It calls them by other names, and tries to talk itself into faith into a false past, as men make up the things they would have said in a quarrel. Of these sins one lies buried deepest but most noisome, and though it is stifled, stinks. The true story of the relations of the rich man and the poor in England. The half-starved English proletarian is not only nearly a skeleton, but he is a skeleton in a cupboard. It may be said, in some surprise, that surely we hear today on every side the same story of the destitute proletariat and the social problem, of the sweating in the unskilled trades or the overcrowding in the slums. It is granted, but I said the true story. Untrue stories there are in plenty, on all sides of the discussion. There is the interesting story of the classic conscious proletarian of all lands, the chap who has solidarity and is always just going to abolish war. The Marxian socialist will tell you all about him, only he isn't there. A common English workman is just as incapable of thinking of a German as anything but a German as he is of thinking himself as anything but an Englishman. Then there's the opposite story, the story of the horrid man, who is an atheist, and wants to destroy the home. But who, for some private reason, prefers to call this socialism? He isn't there either. The prosperous socialists have homes exactly like yours and mine, and the poor socialists are not allowed by the individualists to have any at all. There is the story of the two workmen, which is a very nice and exciting story, about how one passed all the public houses in Cheepside and was made Lord Mayor on arriving at the Guildhall, while the other went into all the public houses and emerged quite ineligible for such a dignity. Alas, for this also is vanity. A thief might be come, Lord Mayor, but an honest workman certainly couldn't. Then there is the story of the relentless doom by which rich men were by economic laws forced to go on taking away money from poor men, although they simply longed to leave off. This is an unendurable thought to a free and Christian man, and the reader will be relieved to hear that it never happened. The rich could have left off stealing whenever they wanted to leave off. Only this never happened either. Then there is the story of the cunning Fabian, who sat on six committees at once, and so coaxed the rich man to become quite poor by simply repeating in a whisper that there are wheels within wheels. This talented man managed to take away the millionaire's motor car one wheel at a time till the millionaire had quite forgotten that he had ever had one. It was very clever of him to do this, only he has not done it. There is not a screw loose in the millionaire's motor, which is capable of running over the Fabian and leaving a flat corpse on the road at a moment's notice. All these stories are very fascinating stories to be told by the individualist and socialist in turn to the great Sultan of Capitalism, because if they left off amusing him for an instant he would cut off their heads. But if they once began to tell the true story of the Sultan to the Sultan, he would boil them in oil, and this they wish to avoid. The true story of the sin of the Sultan, he is always trying by listening to these stories to forget. As we have said before in this chapter, he would prefer not to remember, because he has made up his mind not to repent. It is a curious story, and I shall try to tell it truly in the two chapters that follow. In all ages the tyrant is hard because he is soft. If his car crashes over bleeding and accusing crowds, it is because he has chosen the path of least resistance. It is because it is much easier to ride down a human race than ride up a moderately steep hill. The fight of the oppressor is always a pillow fight. Commonly a war with cushions. Always a war for cushions. Saladin, the great Sultan, if I remember rightly, encountered it the great feat of swordsmanship to cut a cushion. And so indeed it is, as all of us can attest who have been for years past trying to cut into the swollen and windy corpulence of the modern compromise. That is it once cozy and cruel. For there is really in our world today the color and silence of the cushion divan, and that sense of palace within palace and garden within garden, which makes the rich irresponsibility of the East. Have we not already the wordless dance, the wineless banquet, and all that strange, un-Christian conception of luxury without laughter? Are we not already in an evil Arabian night, and walking the nightmare cities of an invisible despot? Does not our hangman strangle secretly the bearer of the bow-string? Are we not already eugenics, that is, eunuch-makers? Do we not see the bright eyes, the motionless faces, and all that presence of something that is dead and yet sleepless? It is the presence of the sin that is sealed with pride and impenitence. The story of how the sultan got his throne. But it is not the story he is listening to just now, but another story, which has been invented to cover it. The story called Eugenius, or the Adventures of One Not Born. A most varied and entrancing tale, which never fails to send him to sleep. CHAPTER II THE TRUE HISTORY OF A TRAMP He awoke in the dark ages, and smelt dawn in the dark, and knew he was not wholly a slave. It was as if in some tale of Hans Andersen, a stick or a stool, had been left in the garden all night, and had grown alive and struck root like a tree. For this is the truth behind the old legal fiction of the servile countries, that the slave is a chattel, that is, a piece of furniture, like a stick, or a stool. In the spiritual sense, I am certain it was never so unwholesome a fancy, as the spawn of Nightshe, supposed to-day. No human being, pagan or Christian, I am certain, ever thought of another human being as a chair or a table. The mind cannot base itself on the idea that a comet is a cabbage, nor can it base on the idea that a man is a stool. No man was ever unconscious of another's presence, or even indifferent to another's opinion. The lady who is said to have boasted her indifference to being naked before male slaves was showing off, or she meant something different. The lord who fed fishes by killing a slave was indulging in what most cannibals indulge in, a Satanist affection. The lady was consciously shameless, and the lord was consciously cruel. But it simply is not in the human reason to carve men like wood, or examine women like ivory, just as it is not in the human reason to think that two and two make five. But there was this truth in the legal simile of furniture, that the slave, though certainly a man, was in one sense a dead man, in the sense that he was movable. His locomotion was not his own. His master moved his arms and legs for him, as if he were a marionette. Now it is important, in the first degree, to realize here what would be involved in such a fable, as I have imagined, of a stool rooting itself like a shrub. For the general modern notion certainly is that life and liberty are in some way to be associated with novelty, and not standing still. But it is just because the stool is lifeless that it moves about. It is just because the tree is alive that it does stand still. That was the main difference between the pagan slave and the Christian serf. The serf still belonged to the lord, as the stick that struck root in the garden would have still belonged to the owner of the garden. But it would have become a live possession. Therefore the owner is forced by the laws of nature to treat it with some respect. Something becomes due from him. He cannot pull it up without killing it. It has gained a place in the garden or the society. But the moderns are quite wrong in supposing that mere change and holiday and variety have necessarily any element in this life that is only the seed of liberty. You may say, if you like, that an employer taking all his workpeople to a new factory in a garden city is giving them the greater freedom of forest landscapes and smokeless skies. If it comes to that, you can say that the slave traders took negroes from their narrow and brutish African hamlets and gave them the polish of foreign travel and medicinal breezes of a sea voyage. But the tiny seed of citizenship and independence there already was in the serfdom of the dark ages, had nothing to do with what nice things the Lord might do to the serf. It lay in the fact that there were some nasty things he could not do to the serf. There were not many, but there were some, and one of them was eviction. He could not make the serf utterly landless and desperate, utterly without access to the means of production, though doubtless it was rather the field that owned the serf than the serf that owned the field. But even if you call the serf a beast of the field, he was not what we have tried to make the townworkman, a beast with no field. Fulon said of the French peasants, let them eat grass. If he had said it of the modern London proletariat, they might well reply, you have not left us even grass to eat. There was therefore both in theory and practice some security for the serf, because he had come to life and rooted. The senior could not wait in the field, in all weathers, with a battleaxe, to prevent the serf scratching any living out of the ground. Any more than the man in my fairytale could sit out in the garden all night with an umbrella to prevent the shrub getting any rain. The relation of Lord and Serf, therefore, involves a combination of two things, inequality and security. I know there are people who will at once point wildly to all sorts of examples, true and false, of insecurity of life in the Middle Ages. But these are people who do not grasp what we mean by the characteristic institutions of a society. For the matter of that, there are plenty of examples of equality in the Middle Ages, as the craftsmen in their guild or the monks electing their abbot. But just as modern England is not a feudal country, though there is a quaint survival called Harrell's College, or Ireland is not a commercial country, though there is a quaint survival called Belfast, it is true of the bulk and shape of that society that came out of the Dark Ages and ended at the Reformation, that it did not care about giving everybody an equal position, but it did care about giving everybody a position. So that by the very beginning of that time, even the slave had become a slave one could not get rid of, like the Scotch servant who stubbornly asserted that if his master didn't know a good servant, he knew a good master. The free peasant in ancient or modern times is free to go or stay. The slave in ancient times was free neither to go nor stay. The serf was not free to go, but he was free to stay. Now what have we done with this man? It is quite simple. There is no historical complexity about it in that respect. We have taken away his freedom to stay. We have turned him out of his field, and whether it was injustice, like turning a free farmer out of his field or only cruelty to animals like turning a cow out of its field, the fact remains that he is out in the road. First and last, we have simply destroyed the security. We have not in the least destroyed the inequality. All classes, all creatures, kind or cruel, still see this lower stratum of society as separate from the upper strata and even the middle strata. He is as separate as the serf, a monster fallen from Mars, ignorant of our simplest word, would know the tramp was at the bottom of the ladder as well as he would have known it of the serf. The walls of mud are no longer round his boundaries, but only round his boots. The coarse bristling hedge is at the end of his chin and not his garden. But mud and bristles still stand out round him like a horrific halo and separate him from his kind. The Martian would have no difficulty in seeing he was the poorest person in the nation. It is just as impossible that he should marry an heiress, or fight a duel with a duke, or contest a seat at Westminster, or enter a club in Palmall, or take a scholarship at Balliol, or take a seat at an opera, or propose a good law, or protest against a bad one, as it was impossible to the serf. Where he differs is in something very different. He has lost what was possible to the serf. He can no longer scratch the bare earth by day or sleep on the bare earth by night without being colored by a policeman. Now when I say this man has been oppressed, as hardly any other man on earth has been oppressed, I am not using rhetoric. I have a clear meaning, which I am confident of explaining to any honest reader. I do not say he has been treated worse. I say he has been treated differently from the unfortunate in all ages. And the difference is this, that all the others were told to do something, and killed or tortured if they did anything else. This man is not told to do something. He is merely forbidden to do anything. When he was a slave, they said to him, Sleep in this shed. I will beat you if you sleep anywhere else. When he was a serf, they said to him, Let me find you in this field. I will hang you if I find you in anyone else's field. But now he is a tramp, they say to him. You shall be jailed if I find you in anyone else's field. But I will not give you a field. They say you shall be punished if you are caught sleeping outside your shed. But there is no shed. If you say that modern magistracies could never say any such mad contradictions, I answer with entire certainty that they do say them. A little while ago two tramps were summoned before a magistrate charged with sleeping in the open air when they had nowhere else to sleep. But this is not the full fun of the incident. The real fun is that each of them eagerly produced about two pence to prove that they could have got a bed but deliberately didn't. To which the policeman replied that two pence would not have got them a bed, that they could not possibly have got a bed. And therefore, argued that thoughtful officer, they ought to be punished for not getting one. The intelligent magistrate was much struck with the argument and proceeded to imprison these two men for not doing a thing they could not do. But he was careful to explain that if they had sinned needlessly and in wanton lawlessness they would have left the court with a stain on their characters, but as they could not avoid it they were very much to blame. These things are being done in every part of England every day. They have their parallels even in every daily paper, but they have no parallel in any other earthly people or period, except in that insane command to make bricks without straw which brought down all the plagues of Egypt. For the common historical joke about Henry VIII hanging a man for being Catholic and burning him for being Protestant is a symbolic joke only. The skeptic in the Tudor time could do something. He could always agree with Henry VIII. The desperate man today can do nothing. For you cannot agree with a maniac who sits on the bench with the straw sticking out of his hair and says, Procure three pence from nowhere, and I will give you leave to do without it. If it be answered that he can go to the workhouse, I reply that such an answer is founded on confused thinking. It is true that he is free to go to the workhouse, but only in the same sense in which the serf under the gibbet was free to find peace in the grave. Many of the poor greatly prefer the grave to the workhouse, but that is not at all my argument here. The point is this, that it could not have been the general policy of a lord towards serfs to kill them all like wasps. It could not have been his standing advice to serfs to say, get hanged. It cannot be the standing advice of magistrates to citizens to go to prison. And precisely as plainly, it cannot be the standing advice of rich men to very poor men to go to the workhouses. For that would mean the rich raising their own poor rates enormously to keep a vast and expensive establishment of slaves. Now it may come to this, says Mr. Bellock-Maynard, but it is not at all my argument here, because Mr. Bellock maintains, but it is not the theory on which what we call the workhouse does in fact rest. The very shape and even the very size of a workhouse expresses the fact that it was founded for certain quite exceptional human failures, like the lunatic asylum. Say to a man, go to the madhouse, and he will say, where in am I mad? Say to a tramp under a hedge, go to the house of exceptional failures and he will say with equal reason, I travel because I have no house, I walk because I have no horse, I sleep out because I have no bed. Wherein have I failed? And he may have the intelligence to add, indeed your worship, if somebody has failed, I think it is not I. I concede with all due haste that he might perhaps say me. The specialty then of this man's wrong is that it is the only historic wrong that has in it the quality of nonsense. It could only happen in a nightmare, not in a clear and rational hell. It is the top point of that anarchy in the governing mind which, as I said at the beginning, is the main trait of modernity, especially in England. But if the first note in our policy is madness, the next note is certainly meanness. There are two peculiarly mean and unmanly legal mantraps in which this wretched man is tripped up. The first is that which prevents him from doing what any ordinary savage or nomad would do, take his chance of an uneven subsistence on the rude bounty of nature. There is something very abject about forbidding this. Because it is precisely this adventurous and vagabond spirit which the educated classes praise most in their books, poems, and speeches. To feel the drag of the roads, to haunt in nameless hills and fish and seeker streams, to have no address save over the hills and far away, to be ready to breakfast on berries and the daybreak and sup on the sunset and a sodden crust, to feed on wild things and be a boy again. All this is the heartiest and sincerest impulse in recent culture, in the songs, tales of Stevenson, in the cult of George Borrow, and in the delightful little books published by Mr. Evie Lucas. It is the one true excuse in the core of imperialism, and it faintly softens the squalid prose and wooden-headed wickedness of the self-made man who came up to London with two pence in his pocket. But when a poorer but braver man with less than two pence in his pocket does the very thing we are always praising, makes the blue heavens his house, we send him to a house built for infamy and flogging, we take poverty itself, and only permit it with proper qualification. We allow only a poor man to be poor if he is rich, and we do this most savagely if he has sought to snatch his life by that particular thing of which our boyish adventure stories are fullest, hunting and fishing. The extremely severe English game laws hit most heavily what the highly reckless English romances praise most irresponsibly. All our literature is full of praise of the chase, especially of the wild goose chase. But if a poor man followed, as Tennyson says, far as the wild swan wings, to where the world dips down to the sea and sands, Tennyson would scarcely allow him to catch it. If he found the wildest goose in the wildest fennland in the wildest regions of the sunset, he would very probably discover that the rich never sleep and that there are no wild things in England. In short, the English ruler is always appealing to a nation of sportsmen and concentrating all his efforts on preventing them from having any sport. The imperialist is always pointing out with exultation that the common Englishman can live by adventure anywhere on the globe. But if the common Englishman tries to live by adventure in England, he is treated as harshly as a thief and almost as harshly as an honest journalist. This is hypocrisy. The magistrate who gives his son treasure island and then imprisons a tramp is a hypocrite. The squire who is proud of English colonists and indulgent to English schoolboys but cruel to English poachers is drawing near that deep place wherein all liars have their part. But our point here is that the baseness is in the idea of bewildering the tramp, of leaving him no place for repentance. It is quite true, of course, that in the days of slavery or of serfdom the needy were fenced by yet fiercer penalties from spoiling the hunting of the rich. But in the older cases there were two very important differences, the second of which is our main subject in this chapter. The first is that in a comparatively wild society, however fond of hunting, it seems impossible that enclosing and gamekeeping can have been so omnipresent and efficient as in a society full of maps and policemen. The second difference is the one already noted, that if the slave or semi-slave was forbidden to get his food in the green wood, he was told to get it somewhere else. The note of unreason was absent. This is the first meanness, and the second is like unto it. If there is one thing of which cultivated modern letters is full beside adventure, it is altruism. We are always being told to help others, to regard our wealth as theirs, to do what good we can, for we shall not pass this way again. We are everywhere urged by humanitarians to help blame dogs over styles, though some humanitarians, it is true, seem to feel a colder interest in the case of lame men and women. Still, the chief fact of our literature, among all historic literatures, is human charity. But what is the chief fact of our legislation? The great outstanding fact of modern legislation, among all historic legislations, is the forbidding of human charity. It is this astonishing paradox, a thing in the teeth of all logic and conscience, that a man that takes another man's money with his leave can be punished as if he had taken it without his leave. All through those dark or dim ages behind us, through times of servile stagnation of feudal insolence, of pestilence and civil strife, and all else that can war down the week for the week to ask for charity was counted lawful, and to give that charity admirable. In all other countries in short, the casual bad deeds of bad men could be partly patched and mended by the casual good deeds of good men. But this is now forbidden, for it would leave the tramp a last chance if he could beg. Now it will be evident by this time that the interesting scientific experiment on the tramp entirely depends on leaving him no chance, and not, like the slave, one chance. Of the economic excuses offered for the persecution of beggars, it will be more natural to speak in the next chapter. It will suffice here to say that they are mere excuses for a policy that has been persistent while probably largely unconscious, with a selfish and atheistic unconsciousness. That policy was directed toward something, or he could never have cut so cleanly and cruelly across the sentimental but sincere modern trends to adventure and altruism. Its object is soon stated, it was directed toward making the very poor man work for the capitalist, for any wages or none. But all this, which I shall also deal with in the next chapter, is here only important as introducing the last truth touching the man of despair. The game laws have taken from him his human command of nature. The mendacity laws have taken from him his human demand on man. There is one human thing left. It is much harder to take from him. Debased by him and his betters, it is still something brought out of Eden, where God made him a demigod. It does not depend on money, and but little on time. He can create in his own image. The terrible truth is in the heart of a hundred legends and mysteries, as Jupiter could be hidden from all devouring time, as the Christ child could be hidden from Herod, so the child unborn is still hidden from the omniscient oppressor. He who lives not yet, he and he alone is left, and they seek his life to take it away. End of Chapter 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Eugenics and Other Ebles by G.K. Chesterton. Section 11. Part 2 The Real Aim. Chapter 3. True History of a Eugenist. He does not live in a dark lonely tower by the sea, from which I heard the screams of vivisected men and women. On the contrary, he lives in Mayfair. He does not wear great goblin spectacles that magnify his eyes to moons or diminish his neighbors to beetles. When he is more dignified, he wears single eyeglass. When he is more intelligent, a wink. He is not indeed holy without interest in heredity and eugenical biology, but his studies and experiments in this science have specialized almost exclusively an equus seller, the rapid or running horse. He is not a doctor, though he employs doctors to work up a case for eugenics, just as he employs doctors to correct the errors of his dinner. He is not a lawyer, though unfortunately often a magistrate. He is not an author or a journalist, though he not infrequently owns a newspaper. He is not a soldier, though he may have commission in the Yeomanry. Nor is he generally a gentleman, though often a nobleman. His wealth now commonly comes from a large staff of employed persons who scurry about in big buildings while he is playing golf. But he very often laid the foundations of his fortune in a very curious and poetical way, the nature of which I have never fully understood. It consisted in his walking about the street without a hat and going up to another man and saying, Suppose I have two hundred whales out of the North Sea, to which the other man replied, and let us imagine that I am in possession of two thousand elephant tusks. They then exchange, and the first man goes up to a third man and says, Supposing me to have lately come into the possession of two thousand elephant tusks, would you, etc., etc. If you play this game well, you become very rich. If you play it badly, you have to kill yourself, or try your luck at the bar. The man I am speaking about must have played it well, or at any rate, successfully. He was born about 1860, and he has been a member of parliament since about 1890. For the first half of his life he was a liberal. For the second half he has been a conservative. But his actual policy in parliament has remained largely unchanged and inconsistent. His policy in parliament is as follows. He takes a seat in a room down at Westminster, and takes from his breast pocket an excellent cigar case, from which in turn he takes an excellent cigar. This he lights up and converses with other owners of such cigars, an equest seller, or such matters as may afford him entertainment. Two or three times in the afternoon a bell rings whereupon he deposits the cigar in a ashtray, with a great particularity, taking care not to break the ash, and proceeds to an upstairs room flanked with two passages. He then walks into whichever of the two passages shall be indicated to him by a young man of the upper classes, holding a slip of paper. Having gone into this passage, he comes out of it again, is counted by the young man, and proceeds downstairs again, where he takes up the cigar once more, being careful not to break the ash. This process, which is known as representative government, has never called for any great variety in the manner of his life. Nevertheless, while his parliamentary policy is unchanged, his change from one side of the house to the other did correspond with a certain change in his general policy in commerce and social life. The change of the party label is by this time quite a trifling matter. But there was in his case a change of philosophy, or at least the change of project, though it was not so much becoming a Tory as becoming rather the wrong kind of socialist. He is a man with a history. It is a sad history, for he is certainly a less good man than he was when he started. That is why he is the man who is really behind eugenics. It is because he has degenerated that he has come to talking of degeneration. In his radical days, to quote from one who corresponded in some ways to this type, he was a much better man, because he was a much less enlightened one. The hard impudence of his first Manchester individualism was softened by two relatively humane qualities. The first was a much greater manliness in his pride. The second was a much greater sincerity in his optimism. For the first point the modern capitalist is merely industrial. But this man was also industrious. He was proud of hard work. Nay, he was even proud of low work if he could speak of it in the past and not the present. In fact, he invented a new kind of Victorian snobbishness, an inverted snobbishness. While the snobs of Thackeray turned muggins into de-morgans, while the snobs of Dickens wrote letters describing themselves as officers' daughters accustomed to every luxury, except spelling. The individualist spent his life in hiding his prosperous parents. He was more like an American plutocrat when he began, but has since lost the American simplicity. The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can't play, and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all. He becomes as far as possible another person, a country gentleman who has never heard of his shop, one whose left hand holding a gun knows not what his right hand doeth in a ledger. He uses peerage as an alias, and a large estate as a sort of alibi. A stern Scotch minister remarked concerning the same of Gulf with a terrible solemnity of manner. The man who plays Gulf, he neglects his business, he forsakes his wife, he forgets his God. He did not seem to realize that it is the chief aim of many a modern capitalist life, to forget all three. This abandonment of boyish vanity and work, this substitution of a senile vanity and indolence, this is the first respect in which the rich Englishman has fallen. He was more of a man when he was at least a master workman and not merely a master. The second important respect in which he was better at the beginning is this, that he did then in some hazy way half believe that he was enriching other people as well as himself. The optimism of the early Victorian individual was not wholly hypocritical. Some of the clearest headed and blackest-hearted of them, such as Malthus, saw where things were going and boldly based their Manchester City on pessimism instead of optimism. But this was not the general case. Most of the decent rich of the bright and cobbed and sort did have a kind of confused faith that the economic conflict would work well in the long run for everybody. They thought the troubles of the poor were incurable by state action. They thought that of all troubles. But they did not cold bloodedly contemplate the prospect of those troubles growing worse and worse. By one of those tricks or illusions of the brain to which the luxurious are subject in all ages, they sometimes seemed to feel as if the populace had triumphed symbolically in their own persons. They blasphemously thought about their thrones of gold what can only be said about a cross, that they being lifted up would draw all men after them. They were so full of the romance that anybody could be Lord Mayor, that they seemed to have slipped into thinking that everybody could. It seemed as if a hundred Dick Whittingtons, accompanied by a hundred cats, could all be accommodated at the mansion house. It was all nonsense. But it was not, until later, humbug. Step by step, however, with a horrid and increasing clearness, this man discovered what he was doing. It is generally one of the worst discoveries a man can make. At the beginning the British plutocrat was probably quite as honest in suggesting that every tramp carried a magic cat like Dick Whittington, as the Bonaparte's patriot was in saying that every French soldier carried a Marshal's baton at his knapsack. But it is exactly here that the difference and the danger appears. There is no comparison between a well-managed thing like Napoleon's army and an unmanageable thing like modern competition. Logically, doubtless it was impossible that every soldier should carry a Marshal's baton. They could not all be Marshal's any more than they could all be Mayor's. But if the French soldier did not always have a baton in his knapsack, he always had a knapsack. But when that self-helper, who bore the adorable name of Smiles, told the English tramp that he carried a coronet in his bundle, the English tramp had an unanswerable answer. He pointed out that he had no bundle. The powers that ruled him had not fitted him with a knapsack any more than they had fitted him with a future or even a present. The destitute Englishman, so far from hoping to become anything, had never been allowed even to be anything. The French soldier's ambition may have been in practice not only a short but even a deliberately shortened letter in which the top rungs were knocked out. But for the English it was the bottom rungs that were knocked out, so that they could not even begin to climb. And sooner or later, in exact proportion to his intelligence, the English plutocrat began to understand not only that the poor were impotent, but that their impotence had been his only power. The truth was not merely that his riches had left them poor. It was that nothing but their poverty could have been strong enough to make him rich. It is this paradox, as we shall see, that creates the curious difference between him and every other kind of robber. I think it is no more than justice to him to say that the knowledge where it has come to him has come to him slowly. And I think it came, as most things of common sense come, rather vaguely and as in a vision. That is, by the mere look of things. The old Cobb the Nighty employer was quite within his rights in arguing that Earth is not heaven, that the best obtainable arrangement might contain many necessary evils, and that Liverpool and Belfast might be growing more prosperous as a whole in spite of pathetic things that might be seen there. But I simply do not believe he has been able to look at Liverpool and Belfast and continue to think this. That is why he has turned himself into a sham country gentleman. Earth is not heaven, but the nearest we can get to heaven ought not to look like hell, and Liverpool and Belfast look like hell, whether they are or not. Such cities might be growing prosperous as a whole, though a few citizens were more miserable. But it was more and more broadly apparent that it was exactly and precisely as a whole that they were not growing more prosperous, but only the few citizens who were growing more prosperous by their increasing misery. You could not say a country was becoming a white man's country when there were more and more black men in it every day. You could not say a community was more and more masculine when it was producing more and more women. Nor can you say that a city is growing richer and richer when more and more of its inhabitants are very poor men. There might be a false agitation followed on the paths of individual cases in a community pretty normal in bulk. But the fact is that no one can take a cab across Liverpool without having a quite complete and unified impression that the pathos is not a pathos of individual cases, but a pathos in bulk. People talk of the Celtic sadness, but there are very few things in Ireland that look so sad as the Irishmen in Liverpool. The desolation of Tara is cheery compared with the desolation of Belfast. I recommend Mr. Yates and his mournful friends to turn their attention to the pathos of Belfast. I think if they hung up the harp that wants in Lord Furness's factory, there would be a chance of another spring breaking. Broadly, and as things bulk to the eye, towns like Leeds, if placed beside towns like Rowan or Florence or Chartres or Cologne, do actually look like beggars walking among burgers. After that overpowering and unpleasant impression, it is really useless to argue that they are richer because a few of their parasites get rich enough to live somewhere else. The point may be put another way, thus, that it is not so much that these more modern cities have this or that monopoly of good or evil. It is that they have every good in its fourth-rate form and every evil in its worst form. For instance, that interesting weekly paper, The Nation, amiably rebuked Mr. Bellock and myself for suggesting that revelry and the praise of fermented liquor were more characteristic of continental and Catholic communities than of communities with the religion and civilization of Belfast. I said that if we would cross the border into Scotland we should find out our mistake. Now not only have I crossed the border, but I have had considerable difficulty in crossing the road in a Scotch town on a festive evening. Men were literally lying like piled-up corpses in the gutters, and from broken bottles whiskey was pouring down the drains. I am not likely, therefore, to attribute a total inerrant abstinence to the whole of industrial Scotland. But I never said that drinking was a mark rather of the Catholic countries. I said that moderate drinking was a mark rather of the Catholic countries. In other words, I say of the common type of continental citizen. Not that he is the only person who is drinking, but that he is the only person who knows how to drink. Doubtless, gin is as much a feature of Hoxton as beer is a feature of Munich. But who is the connoisseur who prefers the gin of Hoxton to the beer of Munich? Doubtless, the Protestant Scotch asks for Scotch as the men of Burgundy ask for Burgundy. But do we find them lying and heaps on each side of the road when we walk through a Burgundian village? Do we find the French peasant ready to let Burgundy escape down the drain pipe? Now this is one point on which I accept the nation's challenge. It does not matter whether we are for alcohol or against it. On either argument, Glasgow is more objectionable than Rouen. The French abstainer makes less fuss. The French drinker gives less offence. It is so with property, with war, with everything I can understand a teetotaler being horrified on his principles at Italian wine-drinking. I simply cannot believe he could be more horrified at it than at a Hoxton gin-drinking. I can understand a pacifist with his special scruples disliking the militarism of Belfort. I flatly deny that he can dislike it any more than the militarism of Berlin. I can understand a good socialist hating the petty cares of the distributed peasant property. I deny that any good socialist can hate them more than he hates the large cares of Rockefeller. That is the unique tragedy of the plutocratic state today. It has no successes to hold up against the failures. It alleges to exist in Latin or other methods. You can, if you are well out of his reach, call the Irish rustic debased and superstitious. I defy you to contrast his debasement and superstition with the citizenship and enlightenment of the English rustic. Today the rich man knows in his heart that he is a cancer and not an organ of the state. He differs from all other thieves or parasites for this reason. That the brigand who takes by force wishes his victims to be rich. But he who wins by a one-sided contract actually wishes them to be poor. Rob Roy in a cavern, hearing a company approaching, will hope, or if in a pious mood, pray, that they may come laden with goods or gold. But Mr. Rockefeller in his factory knows that if those who pass are laden with goods they will pass on. He will, therefore, if in a pious mood pray that they may be destitute, and so be forced to work in his factory for him for a starvation wage. It is said, and also I believe disputed, that Blucher, riding through the richer parts of London, exclaimed, what a city to sack. But Blucher was a soldier if he was abandoned. The true sweater feels quite otherwise. It is when he drives through the poorest parts of London that he finds the streets paid with gold being paid with prostrate servants. It is when he sees the gray lean leagues of bow and poplar that his soul is uplifted and he knows he is secure. This is not rhetoric, but economics. I repeat that up to a point the profiteer was innocent because he was ignorant. He had been lured on by easy and accommodating events. He was an innocent as the new thane of Glamis was an innocent, as the new thane of Cotter was an innocent. But the king, the modern manufacturer like Macbeth, decided to march on under the mute menace of the heavens. He knew that the spoil of the four was in his houses, but he could not, after careful calculation, think of any way in which they could get it out of his houses without being arrested for housebreaking. He faced the future with a face flinty with pride and impenitence. This period can be dated practically by the period when the old genuine Protestant religion of England began to fail and the average businessman began to be agnostic, not so much because he did not know where he was as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to skepticism exactly as the poor took to drink because it was a way out. But in any case, the man who had made a mistake not only refused to unmake it, but decided to go on making it. But in this he made yet another most amusing mistake, which was the beginning of all eugenics.