 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Utopia of Usibers by G. K. Chesterton Section 7. Liberalism a Sample There is a certain daily paper in England towards which I feel very much as Tom Pinch fell toward Mr. Pecksniff immediately after he had found him out. The war upon Dickens was part of the general war on all Democrats about the eighties and nineties, which ushered in the brazen plutocracy of today. And one of the things that it was fashionable to say of Dickens in drawing rooms was that he had no subtlety and could not describe a complex frame of mind. Like most other things that are said in drawing rooms, it was a lie. Dickens was a very unequal writer, and his successes alternate with his failures. But his successes are subtle quite as often as they are simple. Thus, to take Martin Chuzzlewood alone, I should call the joke about the Lord Nozu a simple joke. But I should call the joke about Mrs. Todger's vision of a wooden leg a subtle joke. And no frame of mind was ever so self-contradictory and yet so realistic as that which Dickens describes when he says in effect that though Pinch knew now that there had never been such a person as Pecksniff in his ideal sense, he could not bring himself to insult the very face and form that had contained that legend. The parallel with liberal journalism is not perfect, because it was once honest, and Pecksniff presumably never was. And even when I come to feel a final incompatibility of temper, Pecksniff was not so Pecksniffian as he has since become. But the comparison is complete insofar as I share all the reluctance of Mr. Pinch. Some old heathen king was advised by one of the Celtic saints, I think, to burn what he had adored and adore what he had burnt. I am quite ready, if anyone will prove I was wrong, to adore what I have burnt, but I do really feel an unwillingness verging upon weakness to burning what I have adored. I think it is a weakness to be overcome in times as bad as these, when, as Mr. Orage wrote with something like splendid common sense the other day, there is such a lot to do, and so few people who will do it. So I will devote this article to considering one case of the astounding baseness to which liberal journalism has sunk. Mental Breakdown in Fleet Street One of the two or three streaks of light on our horizon can be perceived in this, that the moral breakdown of these papers has been accompanied by a mental breakdown also. The contemporary official paper, like the Daily News or the Daily Chronicle, I mean insofar as it deals with politics, simply cannot argue and simply does not pretend to argue. It considers the solution which it imagines that wealthy people want, and it signifies the same in the usual manner, which is not by holding up its hand, but by falling on its face. But there is no more curious quality in its degradation than a sort of carelessness at wants of hurry and fatigue with which it flings down its argument, or rather its refusal to argue. It does not even write a sophistry. It writes anything. It does not so much poison the reader's mind as simply assume that the reader hasn't got one. For instance, one of these papers printed an article on Sir Stuart Samuel, who, having broken the great liberal statute against corruption, will actually perhaps be asked to pay his own fine in spite of the fact that he can well afford to do so. The article says, if I remember a right, that the decision will cause general surprise and some indignation. That any modern government making a rich capitalist obey the law will cause general surprise may be true. Whether it will cause general indignation rather depends on whether our social intercourse is entirely confined to Park Lane or any such pigsties built of gold. But the journalist proceeds to say, his neck rising higher and higher out of his collar, and his hair rising higher and higher on his head, in short, his resemblance to the Dickens' original, increasing every instant, that he does not mean that the law against corruption should be less stringent, but that the burden should be borne by the whole community. This may mean that, whenever a rich man breaks the law, all the poor men ought to be made to pay his fine. But I will suppose a slightly less insane meaning. I will suppose it means that the whole power of the Commonwealth should be used to prosecute an offender of this kind. That, of course, can only mean that the matter will be decided by that instrument which still pretends to represent the whole power of the Commonwealth. In other words, the government will judge the government. Now, this is a perfectly plain piece of brute logic. We need not go into the other delicious things in the article as when it says that, in old times, Parliament had to be protected against royal invasion by the man in the street. Parliament has to be protected now against the man in the street. Parliament is simply the most detested and most detestable of all our national institutions. All that is evident enough. What is interesting is the blank and staring fallacy of the attempted reply when the journalist is ruined. A long while ago, before all the Liberals died, a Liberal introduced a bill to prevent Parliament being merely packed with the slaves of financial interests. For that purpose he established the excellent democratic principle that the private citizen as such might protest against public corruption. He was called the common informer. I believe the miserable party papers are really reduced to playing on the degradation of the two words in modern language. Now the word common in common informer means exactly what it means in common sense, or Book of Common Prayer, or above all in House of Commons. It does not mean anything low or vulgar any more than they do. The only difference is that the House of Commons really is low and vulgar, and the common informer isn't. It is just the same with the word informer. It does not mean spy or sneak. It means one who gives information. It means what journalist ought to mean. The only difference is that the common informer may be paid if he tells the truth. The common journalist will be ruined if he does. Now the quite plain point before the party journalist is this. If he really means that a corrupt bargain between a government and a contractor ought to be judged by public opinion, he must nowadays mean Parliament. That is the caucus that controls Parliament, and he must decide between one of two views. Either he means that there can be no such thing as a corrupt government, or he means that it is one of the characteristic qualities of a corrupt government to denounce its own corruption. I laugh, and I leave him his choice. The fatigue of Fleet Street. Why is the modern party political journalism so bad? Is it worse even than it intends to be? It praises its preposterous party leaders, though thick and thin, but it somehow succeeds in making them look greater fools than they are. This clumsiness clings even to the photographs of public men as they are snapshotted at public meetings. A sensitive politician, if there is such a thing, would, I should think, want to murder the man who snapshots him at those moments. For our general impression of a man's gesture or play a feature is made up of a series of vanishing instance, at any one of which he may look worse than our general impression records. Mr. Augustine Birrell, may have made quite a sensible and amusing speech in the course of which his audience would hardly have noticed that he resettled his necktie. Snapshot him, and he appears as convulsively clutching his throat in the agonies of strangulation, and with his head twisted on one side as if he had been hanged. Sir Edward Carson might make a perfectly good speech which no one thought wearisome, but might himself be just tired enough to shift from one leg to the other. Snapshot him, and he appears as holding one leg stiffly in the air and yawning enough to swallow the audience. But it is the prose narratives of the press that we find most manifestations of this strange ineptitude, this knack of exhibiting your own favorites in an unlucky light. It is not so much that the party journalists do not tell the truth as that they tell just enough of it to make it clear that they are telling lies. One of their favorite blunders is an amazing sort of bathos. They begin by telling you that some statesman said something brilliant in style or biting in wit, at which his hearers thrilled with terror or thundered with applause. And then they tell you what it was he said. Silly asses. Insane exaggeration. Here is an example from a leading liberal paper touching the debates on Home Rule. I am a home ruler, so my sympathies would be, if anything, on the side of the liberal paper upon that point. I merely quoted as an example of this ridiculous way of writing which, by insane exaggeration, actually makes its hero look smaller than he is. This was strange language to use about the hypocritical sham, and Mr. Asquith, knowing that the biggest battle of his career was upon him, hit back with out mercy. I should like first to know, he said, with a glance at his supporters, whether my proposals are accepted. That's all. And I really do not see why poor Mr. Asquith should be represented as having violated the Christian virtue of mercy by saying that. I myself could compose great many paragraphs upon the same model, each containing its stinging and perhaps unscrupulous epigram. As, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury, realizing that his choice now lay between denying God and earning the crown of martyrdom by dying in torments, spoke with a frenzy of religious passion that might have seemed fanatical under circumstances less intense. The children's service, he said firmly, with his face to the congregation, will be held at half-past four this afternoon, as usual. Or we might have Lord Roberts recognizing that he had now to face Armageddon, and that if he lost his last battle against overwhelming odds, the independence of England would be extinguished forever, addressed to his soldiers, looking at them and not falling off his horse, a speech which brought their national passions to boiling point, and might well have seen bloodthirsty in quieter times. It ended with the celebrated declaration that it was a fine day, or we might have the much greater excitement of reading something like this. The astronomer royal, having realized that the earth would certainly be smashed to pieces by a comet unless his requests in connection with wireless telegraphy were seriously considered, gave an address at the Royal Society, which under other circumstances would have seemed unduly dogmatic and emotional and deficient in scientific agnosticism. This address, which he delivered without any attempt to stand on his head, included a fierce and even ferocious declaration that it is generally easier to see the stars by night than by day. Now I cannot see on my conscience and reason that any one of my imaginary paragraphs is more ridiculous than the one real. Nobody can believe that Mr. Asquith regards his belated and careful compromises about home rule as the biggest battle of his career. It is only just to see him to say that he has had bigger battles than that. Nobody can believe that anybody of men, bodily present, either thundered or thrilled, had a man merely saying that he would like to know whether his proposals were accepted. No, it would be far better for Parliament if its doors were shut again and reporters were excluded. In that case the outer public did hear genuine rumors of almost gigantic eloquence, such as that which has perpetuated Pitt's reply against the charge of youth, or Fox's bludgeoning of the idea of war as a compromise. It would be much better to follow the old fashion and to let in no reporters at all than to follow the new fashion and select the stupidest reporters you can find. Their load of lies. Now why do people in Fleet Street talk such tosh? People in Fleet Street are not fools. Most of them have realized reality through work, some through starvation, some through damnation, or something damnably like it. I think it is simply and seriously true that they are tired of their job. As the General said in M. Rostan's play, a lot fatigue. I do really believe that this is one of the ways in which God, don't get flurry, nature if you like, is unexpectedly avenged on things infamous and unreasonable. And this method is that men's moral and even physical tenacity actually give out under such a load of lies. They go on writing their leading articles and their parliamentary reports. They go on doing it as a convict goes on picking okum. But the point is not that we are bored with their articles. The point is that they are. The work is done worse because it is done weekly and without human enthusiasm. And it is done weekly because of the truth we have told so many times in this book that it is not done for monarchy, for which men will die, or for democracy, for which men will die, or even for aristocracy, for which many men have died. It is done for a thing called capitalism, which stands out quite clearly in history in many curious ways. But the most curious thing about it is that no man has loved it, and no man died for it. The amnesty for aggression. If there is to rise out of all this red ruin, something like a Republic of Justice, it is essential that our view should be real views. That is, glimpses of lives and landscapes outside ourselves. It is essential that they should not be mere opium visions that begin and end in smoke, and so often in cannon smoke. I make no apology, therefore, for returning to the purely practical and realistic point I urged last week. The fact that we shall lose everything we might have gained if we lose the idea that the responsible person is responsible. For instance, it is almost especially so with the one or two things in which the British government or the British public really are behaving badly. The first and worst of them is the non-extension of the moratorium or truce of debtor and creditor to the very world where there are the poorest debtors and the cruelest creditors. This is infamous, and should be, if possible, more infamous to those who think the war right than to those who think it wrong. Everyone knows that the people who can least pay their debts are the people who are always trying to. Along the poor a payment may be as rash as a speculation. Along the rich a bankruptcy may be as safe as a bank. Considering the class from which private soldiers are taken, there is an atrocious meanness in the idea of buying their blood abroad while we sell their sticks at home. The English language, by the way, is full of delicate paradoxes. We talk of the private soldiers because they are really public soldiers, and we talk of the public schools because they are really private schools. Anyhow, the wrong is the sort that ought to be resisted as much in war as in peace. But as long as we speak of it as a cloudy conclusion, come to by an anonymous club called Parliament, or a mass tribunal called the Cabinet, we shall never get such a wrong righted. Somebody is officially responsible for the unfairness and that somebody ought to be hammered. The other example, less important but more ludicrous, is the silly boycott of Germans in England. Extending even to German music. I do not believe for a moment that the English people feel any such insane fastidiousness. Are the English artists who practice the particularly English art of watercolor to be forbidden to use Prussian blue? Are all old ladies to shoot their Pomeranian dogs? But though England would laugh at this, she will get the credit of it and will continue until we ask who the actual persons are who feel sure that we should shut her at a ballot of the Rhine. It is certain that we should find they are capitalists. It is very probable we should find they are foreigners. Some days ago the Official Council of the Independent Labor Party or the Independent Council of the Official Labor Party or the Independent and Official Council of the Labor Party I have got quite nervous about these names and distinctions. But they all seem to say the same thing. Began their manifesto by saying it would be difficult to assign the degrees of responsibility which each nation had for the outbreak of the war. Afterwards a writer in the Christian Commonwealth, Lamenting War in the name of Labor but in the language of my own romantic middle class said that all the nations must share the responsibility for this great calamity of war. Now exactly as we go on talking like that we shall have war after war and calamity after calamity until the crack of doom. It simply amounts to a promise of pardon to any person who will start a quarrel. It is an amnesty for assassins. The moment any man assaults any other man he makes all the other men as bad as himself. He has only to stab and to vanish in a fog of forgetfulness. The real eagles of iron, the predatory empires will be delighted with this doctrine. They will applaud the Labor concert or committee or whatever it is called. They will willingly take all the crime with only a quarter of the conscience. They will be as ready to share the memory as they are to share the spoil. The powers will divide responsibility as calmly as they divided Poland. The whole loathsome load. But I still stubbornly and meekly submit my point that you cannot end war without asking who began it. If you think somebody else, not Germany, began it then blame that somebody else. Do not blame everybody and nobody. Perhaps you think that a small sovereign people, fresh from two triumphant wars ought to discrown itself before sunrise because the nephew of a neighboring empire has been shot by his own subjects. Very well, then blame Serbia, and to the extent of your influence you might be preventing small kingdoms being obstinate or even princes being shot. Perhaps you think the whole thing was a huge conspiracy of Russia, with France as a dupe and Serbia as a pretext. Very well, then blame Russia, and to the extent of your influence you may be preventing great empires from making radical excuses for a raid. Perhaps you think France wrong for feeling what you call revenge but I should call recovery of stolen goods. Perhaps you blame Belgium for being sentimental about her frontier or England for being sentimental about her word. If so blame them, or whichever of them you think is to blame. Or again it is barely possible that you may think as I do that the whole loathsome load has been laid upon us by the monarchy which I have not named, still less wasted time in abusing. But if there be in Europe a military state which has not the religion of Russia yet has helped Russia to tyrannize over the Poles, that state cares not for religion but for tyranny. If there be a state in Europe which has not the religion of the Austrians but has helped Austria to bully the Servians, that state cares not for belief but for bullying. If there be in Europe any people or principality which respects neither republics nor religions to which the political ideal of Paris is as much a myth as the mystical idea of Moscow, then blame that and do more than blame. In the healthy and highly theological words of Robert Bletchford, drive it back to the hell from which it came, crying over spilled blood. But whatever you do, do not blame everybody for what was certainly done by somebody. It may be it is no good crying over spilled blood any more than over spilled milk. But we do not find the culprit any more by spilling the milk over everybody or by dubbing everybody with blood. Still less do we improve matters by watering the milk with our tears nor the blood either. To say that everybody is responsible means that nobody is responsible. If in the future we see Russia annexing Rutland as part of the old Kingdom of Muscovy, if we see Bavaria taking a sudden fancy to the Bank of England or the King of the Cannibal Islands suddenly demanding a tribute of edible boys and girls from England and America, we may be quite certain that the leader of the Labour Party will rise with a slight cough and say, it would be a difficult task to apportion the blame between the various claims which revived the court jester. I hope the government will not think just now about appointing a poet laureate. I hardly think they can be altogether in the right mood. The business just now before the country makes a very good detective story, but as a national epic it is a little depressing. Jingo literature always weakens the nation. But even healthy patriotic literature has its proper time and occasion. For instance, Mr. Neubolt, who has been suggested for the post, is a very fine poet. But I think his patriotic lyrics would just now rather jar upon a patriot. We are rather too much concerned about our practical seamanship to feel quite confident that Drake will return and drum them up the channel as he drummed them up long ago. On the contrary, we have an uncomfortable feeling that Drake's ship might suddenly go to the bottom because the capitalists have made Lloyd George abolish the plumesaw line. One could not, without being understood ironically, adjure the two party teams today to play up, play up, and play the game. Or to love the game more than the prize. And there is no national hero at this moment in the soldiering line unless perhaps it is major archer she, of whom anyone would be likely to say, said Millis, said Propatria. There is indeed one beautiful poem, Mr. Neubolt's, which may mingle faintly with one's thoughts in such times. But that, alas, is too a very different tune. I mean the one in which he echoes Turner's conception of the old wooden ship, vanishing with all the valiant memories of the English. There is a far bell ringing at the setting of the sun, and a phantom voice is singing of the great days done. There is a far bell ringing and a phantom voice is singing of a famed, forever clinging to the great days done. For the sun set breezes shiver to mare, to mare, and she is fading down the river. Well, only that you know I know whether she is fading down the river or not is quite enough for us to know, as King Alfred did, that a great many pirates have landed on both banks of the Thames. Praise and prophecy impossible. At this moment that is the only kind of patriotic poem that could satisfy the emotions of a patriotic person. But it certainly is not the sort of poem that is expected from a poet laureate, either on the highest or the lowest theory of his office. He is either a great minstrel singing the victories of a great king, or he is a common court official, like the groom of the powder closet. In the first case his praises should be true, in the second case they will nearly always be false. But in either case he must praise. And what there is for him to praise just now, it would be precious, hard to say. And if there is no great hope of a real poet, there is still less hope of a real prophet. What Newman called, I think, the prophetical office, that is the institution of an inspired protest, even against an inspired religion, certainly would not do in modern England. The court is not likely to keep a Thame prophet in order to encourage him to be wild. It is not likely to pay a man to say that wolves shall howl in Downing Street, and vultures build their nests in Buckingham Palace. So vast has been the progress of humanity, that these two things are quite impossible. We cannot have a great poet praising kings. We cannot have a great prophet denouncing kings. So I have to fall back on a third suggestion. The Field for a Fool Instead of reviving the court poet, why not revive the court fool? He is the only person who could do any good at this moment, either to the royal or the judicial courts. The present political situation is utterly unsuitable for the purposes of a great poet, but it is particularly suitable for the purposes of a great buffoon. The Old Jester was under certain privileges. You could not resent the jokes of a fool, just as you cannot resent the sermons of a curate. Now what the present government of England wants is neither serious praise nor serious denunciations. What it wants is satire. What it wants, in other words, is realism given with gusto. When King Louis XI unexpectedly visited his enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, with a small escort, the Duke's gesture said he would give the king his fool's cap, for he was the fool now. And when the Duke replied with dignity, and suppose I treat him with all proper respect, the fool answered, then I will give it to you. That is the kind of thing that somebody ought to be free to say now. But if you say it now, you will be fined a hundred pounds, at the least. Carson's Dilemma For the things that have been happening lately are not merely things that one could joke about. They are themselves truly and intrinsically jokes. I mean that there is a sort of epigram of unreason in the situation itself as there was in the situation where there was jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today. Take, for instance, the extraordinary case of Sir Edward Carson. The point is not whether we regard his attitude in Belfast as the defiance of a sincere and dogmatic rebel or as the bluff of a party hack in Mounted Bank. The point is not whether we regard his defense of the government at the Old Bailey as a chivalrous and reluctant duty done as an advocate or a friend or as a mere case of a lawyer selling his soul for a fat brief. The point is that whichever of the two actions we approve and whichever of the four explanations we adopt, Sir Edward's position is still raving nonsense. On any argument he cannot escape from his dilemma. It may be argued that laws and customs should be obeyed, whatever our private feelings, and that it is an established custom to accept a brief in such a case. But then it is a somewhat more established custom to obey and act the parliament and to keep the peace. It may be argued that extreme misgovernment justifies men in Ulster or elsewhere in refusing to obey the law, but then it would justify them even more in refusing to appear professionally in a law court. etiquette cannot be at once so unimportant that Carson may shoot at the king's uniform and yet so important that he must always be ready to put on his own. The government cannot be so disreputable that Carson need not lay down his gun and yet so respectable that he is bound to put on his wig. Carson cannot at once be so fierce that he can kill in what he considers a good cause and yet so meek that he must argue in what he considers a bad cause. Obedience or disobedience, conventional or unconventional, a solicitor's letter cannot be more sacred than the king's writ. A blue bag cannot be more rational than the British flag. The thing is rubbish, read anyway, and the only difficulty is to get a joke good enough to express it. It is a case for the court jester. The fantasy of it could only be expressed by some huge ceremonial hoax. Carson ought to be crowned with the shamrocks and emeralds and followed by green-clad minstrels of the clan Nagale playing the wearing of the green. Belated chettiness by wireless. But all the recent events are like that. They are practical jokes. The jokes do not need to be made, they only need to be pointed out. You and I do not talk and act as the Isaac brothers talk and act by their own most favorable account of themselves. And even their account of themselves was by no means favorable. You and I do not talk of meeting our own born brother at a family function as if he were some infinitely distant cousin whom we only met at Christmas. You and I, when we suddenly feel inclined for a chat with the same brother about his dinner and the cold strike, do not generally select either wireless telegraphy or the Atlantic cable as the most obvious and economical channel for that outburst of belated chettiness. You and I do not talk if it is proposed to start a railway between Catsville and Dogtown as if the putting up of a station at Dogstown could have no kind of economic effect on the putting up of a station at Catsville. You and I do not think it candid to say that when we are at the one end of a telephone we have no sort of connection with the other end. These things have got into the region of farce and should be dealt with farcically, not even ferociously, a fool who shall be free. In the Roman Republic there was a tribune of the people whose person was inviolable like the ambassadors. There was much the same idea in Beckett's attempt to remove the priest who was then the popular champion from the ordinary courts. We shall have no tribute for we have no republic. We shall have no priest for we have no religion. The best we deserve or can expect is a fool who shall be free and who shall deliver us with laughter. The end of section 8 This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org A Utopia of Usurers by G. K. Chesterton Section 9 The Art of Missing the Point Missing the Point is a very fine art and has been carried to something like perfection by politicians and pressmen today. For the point is generally a very sharp point and it is, moreover, sharp at both ends. That is to say that both parties would probably impale themselves in an uncomfortable manner if they did not manage to avoid it altogether. I have just been looking at the election address of the official liberal candidate for the part of the country in which I live and though it is, if anything, rather more logical and free from Kant than most other documents of the sword it is an excellent example of this point. The candidate has to go boring on about free trade and land reform and education and nobody reading it could possibly imagine that in the town of Wycombe where the poll will be declared the capital of the Wycombe Division of Bucks which the candidate is contesting center of the important and vital trade on which it has driven a savage struggle about justice has been raging for months past between the poor and the rich as real as the French Revolution. The man offering himself at Wycombe as representative of the Wycombe Division simply says nothing about it at all. It is as if a man at the crisis of the French terror had offered himself as a deputy for the town of Paris and had said nothing about the monarchy nothing about the Republic nothing about the massacres nothing about the war but had explained with great clearness his views on the suppression of the Jansenists the literary style of Racine the suitability of Ternay for the post of Commander-in-Chief and the religious reflections of Madame Dementignon For at their best the candidate's topics are not topical. Home rule is a very good thing and modern education is a very bad thing but neither of them are things that anybody is talking about in High Wycombe. This is the first and simplest way of missing the point deliberately to avoid and ignore it. The candid candidate It would be an amusing experiment by the way to go to the point instead of avoiding it. What fun it would be to stand as a strict party candidate but issue a perfectly frank and cynical election address. Gentlemen Sir Alfred Cripps having been chosen for high judicial position and a seat in the House of Lords a by-election now becomes necessary and the electors of South Bucks are charged with the responsible duty of electing etc etc But suppose there were another candidate whose election address opened in plain manly style like this Gentlemen I hope of being myself chosen for a high judicial position or a seat in the House of Lords or considerably increasing my private fortune by some government appointment or at least inside information about the financial prospects I have decided that it is worth my while to disperse large sums of money to you on various pretexts and with even more reluctance to endure the bad speaking at bad ventilation at Parliament's House of Parliament so help me God I have very pronounced convictions on various political questions but I will not trouble my fellow citizens with them since I have quite made up my mind to abandon any or all of them if requested to do so by the upper classes The electors are therefore charged with the entirely irresponsible duty of electing a member or in other words I ask my neighbors round about this part who know I am not a bad chap in many ways to do me a good turn in my business just as I might ask them to change the sovereign My election will have no conceivable kind of effect on anything or anybody except myself so I ask as man to man the electors of the Southern or Wycombe division of the county of Buckingham to accept a ride in one of my motor cars and pull early to please a pal God save the king I do not know whether you or I would be elected if we presented ourselves with an election address of that kind but we should have had our fun and comparatively speaking saved our souls and I have a strong suspicion that we should be elected or rejected on a mechanical majority like anybody else Nobody having dreamed of reading an election address any more than an advertisement of a hair restore tyranny and headdress but there is another and more subtle way in which we may miss the point and that is not by keeping a dead silence about it but by being just witty enough to state it wrong Thus some of the liberal official papers have almost screwed up their courage to the sticking point about the bestial coup d'etat in South Africa They have screwed up the courage to the sticking point and it has stuck It cannot get any further because it has missed the main point The modern liberals make their feeble attempts to attack the introduction of slavery into South Africa by the Dutch and the Jews by a very typical evasion of the vital fact The vital fact is simply slavery Most of these Dutchmen have always felt like slave owners Most of these Jews have always felt like slaves Now that they are on top they have a particular and curious kind of impudence which is only known among young slaves But the liberal journalists will do their best to suggest that the South Africans wrong consisted in what they call martial law That is, there is something especially wicked about men doing an act of cruelty and khaki or in vermilion but not if it is done in dark blue with pewter buttons The tyrant who wears a buspie or a forage cap is abominable is excusable To be judged by soldiers is hell To be judged by lawyers is paradise Now the point must not be missed in this way What is wrong with the tyranny in Africa is not that it is run by soldiers it would be quite as bad or worse if it were run by policemen What is wrong is that for the first time since pagan times private men are being forced for a private man Men are being punished by imprisonment or exile for refusing to accept the job The fact that Botha can ride on a horse or fire off a gun makes him better rather than worse than any man like Sidney Webb or Philip Snowden who attempted the same slavery by much less manly methods The liberal party will try to divert the whole discussion to want about what they call militarism but the very terms of modern politics contradict it for when we talk of real rebels against the present system we call them militants and there will be none in the survival state the survival state again I read the other day in a quotation from a German paper the highly characteristic remark that Germany having annexed Belgium would soon reestablish its commerce and prosperity and that in particular arrangements were already being made for introducing into the new province the German laws for the protection of workmen I am quite content with that paragraph for the purpose of any controversy about what is called German atrocity if men I know had not told me they had themselves seen the bayonetting of a baby if the most respectable refugees did not bring with them stories of burning cottages yes and of burning cottagers as well if doctors did not report what they do report of the condition of girls in the hospitals if there were no facts if there were no photographs that one phrase I have quoted would be quite sufficient to satisfy me that the Prussians are tyrants tyrants in a particular and almost insane sense which makes them preeminent among the evil princes of the earth the first and most striking feature is a stupidity that rises into a sort of ghastly innocence the protection of workmen some workmen perhaps might have a fancy for being protected from shrapnel some might be glad to put up an umbrella that would ward off things dropping from the gentle zeppelin in heaven upon the place beneath some of these discontented proletarians have taken the same view as Vanderveld, their leader and are now energetically engaged in protecting themselves along the line of the sir I am glad to say not altogether without success it is probable that nearly all of the Belgian workers would on the whole prefer to be protected against bombs, sabers, burning cities starvation, torture and the treason of wicked kings in short it is probable it is at least possible in Pius is the idea that they would prefer to be protected against Germans and all they represent but if a Belgian workman is told that he is not to be protected against Germans but actually be protected by Germans I think he may be excused for staring his first impulse I imagine will be to ask against whom are there any worse people to come along but apart from the hellish irony of this humanitarian idea the question it raises is really one of solid importance for people whose politics are more or less like ours there is a very urgent point in that question against whom would the Belgian workmen be protected by the German laws and if we pursue it we shall be able to analyze something of that poison very largely a Prussian poison being in our own commonwealth to the enslavement of the weak and the secret strengthening of the strong for the Prussian armies are preeminently the advanced guard of the survival state I say this scientifically and quite apart from passion or even from preference I have no illusions about either Belgium or England both have been stained with the suit of capitalism and mere colonial ambition both have been caught at a disadvantage in such modern dirt and disorder both have come out much better than I should have expected countries so modern and so industrial to do but in England and Belgium there is capitalism mixed up with the great many other things strong things and things that pursue other aims clericalism for instance capitalism and sport and the remains of real aristocracy in England but Prussia is capitalism that is a gradually solidifying slavery and that majestic unity which she moves dragging all the dumb Germanies after her is due to the fact that her survival state is complete while ours is incomplete there are not mutinies there are not even mockeries the voice of national self-criticism has been extinguished forever for this people is already permanently cloven into a higher and lower class in its industry as much as its army its employers are in the strictest sense and most sinister sense captains of industry its proletariat is in the truest and most pitiable sense an army of labor in that atmosphere masters bear upon them the signs that they are more than men and to insult an officer is death if anyone asks how this extreme and unmistakable subordination of the employed to the employers is brought about we all know the answer it is brought about by hunger and hardness of heart accelerated by a certain kind of legislation of which we have had a good deal lately in England but which was almost invariably Mr. Herbert Samuel's suggestion that the poor should be able to put their money into little boxes and not be able to get it out again is the sort of standing symbol of all the rest I have forgotten how the poor were going to benefit eventually by what is for them indistinguishable from dropping six pence down a drain perhaps they were going to get it back someday perhaps when they could produce a hundred coupons out of the daily citizen perhaps when they got their hair cut perhaps when they consented to be inoculated or trip and or circumcised or something Germany is full of this sort of legislation and if you asked an innocent German who honestly believed in it what it was he would answer it was for the protection of workmen and if you asked again their protection from what you would have the whole plan and problem of the survival state plain in front of you whatever notion there is there is no notion whatever of protecting the employed person from his employer much less is there any idea of his ever being anywhere except under an employer whatever the capitalist wants he gets he may have the sense to want washed and well fed laborers rather than dirty and feeble ones and the restrictions may happen to exist in the form of laws from the Kaiser or bylaws from the Crubs but the Kaiser will not offend the Crubs and the Crubs will not offend the Kaiser laws of this kind then do not attempt to protect workmen against the injustice of the capitalist as the English trade unions did they do not attempt to protect workmen against the injustice of the state as the medieval guilds did obviously they cannot protect workmen against the foreign invader especially when as in the comic case of Belgium they are imposed by the foreign invader what then are such laws designed to protect workmen against tigers rattlesnakes hyenas oh my young friends oh my Christian brother they are designed to protect this poor person from something which to those of established rank is more horrid than many hyenas they are designed my friends to protect a man from himself from something that masters of the earth fear more than famine or war and which Prussia especially fears as everything fears that which would certainly be its end they are meant to protect a man against himself that is they are meant to protect a man against his manhood and if anyone reminds me that there is a socialist party in Germany I reply that there isn't end of section 9 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Utopia of Usibers by G.K. Chesterton section 10 The Empire of the Ignorant that anarchic future which the more timid Tories profess to fear has already fallen upon us we are ruled by ignorant people but the most ignorant people in modern Britain are to be found in the upper classes the middle class and especially the middle class I do not say it with the smallest petulance or even distaste these classes are often really beneficent in their breeding or their hospitality or their humanity to animals there is still no better company than the young at the two universities or the best of the old in the army or some of the other services also of course there are exceptions in the matter of learning Robert Murray or Professor Fillimore are not ignorant though they are gentlemen but when one looks up at any mass of the wealthier and most powerful classes at the grandstand at Epsom at the windows of Park Lane at the people in a full dressed debate or a fashionable wedding we should be safe in saying that they are for the most part the most ill-taught or untaught creatures in these islands literally illiterate it is indeed their feeble boast that they are not literally illiterate they are always saying the ancient barons could not sign their own names for they know less of history perhaps than of anything else the modern barons however can sign their own names or someone else's for a change they can sign their own names and that is about all they can do not face a fact or follow an argument or feel a tradition but least of all can they, upon any persuasion read through a plain impartial book English or foreign that is not specially written to soothe their panic or please their pride looking up at these seats of the mighty I can only say with something of despair what Robert Lowe said we must educate our masters I do not mean this as paradoxical or even as symbolical it is simply tame and true the modern English rich know nothing about these things not even about things to which they appeal compared with them the poor are pretty sure to get some enlightenment even if they cannot get liberty they must at least be technical an old apprentice learned to trade even if his master came like any Turk and banged him most severely the old housewife knew which side her bread was buttered even if it were so thin as to be almost imperceptible the old sailor knew the ropes even if he knew the ropes end consequently when any of these revolted they were concerned with things they knew pains, practical impossibilities or the personal record but they know the apprentice cried clubs and cracked his neighbor's heads with the precision and fineness of a touch which only manual craftsmen can give the housewives who flatly refused to cook the hot dinner knew how much or how little cold meat there was in the house the sailor who defied discipline by mutinying at the nor did not defy discipline in the sense of falling off the rigging or letting the water into the hold similarly the modern proletariat however little it may know knows what it is talking about but the curious thing about the educated class is that exactly what it does not know is what it is talking about I mean that it is startlingly ignorant of those special things which it is supposed to invoke and keep it the things that workmen invoke may be uglier more acrid, more sordid but they know all about them they know enough arithmetic to know that prices have risen the kind 11 teen gentlemen is always there to make them fully understand the meaning of an interest some and the landlord will define rent as rigidly as Ricardo the doctors can always tell them the Latin for an empty stomach and when the poor man is treated for the time with some human respect by the cornet it almost seems a pity he is not alive to hear how legally he died against this bitter shrewd no-symbolic realism in the suffering classes it is commonly supposed that the more leisure class stand for certain legitimate ideas which also have their place in life such as history, reverence the love of the land well it might be no bad thing to have something even if it were something narrow that testified to the truths of religion or patriotism but such narrow things in the past have always at least known their own history the bigot knew his catechism the patriot knew his way home the astonishing thing about the modern rich is their real and sincere ignorance especially of the things they like no? take the most topical case you can find in any drawing room Belfast, Ulster Ulster is most assuredly a matter of history and there is a sense of which orange resistance is a matter of religion but go and ask any of the five hundred fluttering ladies at the garden party who find Carson so splendid and Belfast so thrilling what it is all about when it began, where it came from what it really maintains what was the history of Ulster what is the religion of Belfast do any of them know where Ulster and were in Gratton's time do any of them know what was the Protestantism that came from Scotland to that isle could any of them tell what part of the old Catholic system is really denied it was generally something that the fluttering ladies find in their own aglican churches every Sunday it were vain to ask them to state their doctrines of the Calvinist creed they could not state the doctrines of their own creed it were vain to tell them to read the history of Ireland they have never read the history of England it would matter as little that they do not know these things as that I do not know as that I do not know German but then German is not the only thing I am supposed to know history and ritual are the only things aristocrats are supposed to know and they do not know them smile and smile I am not fed on turtle soup and toque because of my exquisite intimacy with the style and idiom of Heiney and Richter the English governing class is fed on turtle soup and toque to represent the past of which it is literally ignorant as I am of the German irregular verbs and to present the religious traditions of the state when it does not know three words of theology as I do not know three words of German this is the last insult offered by the proud to the humble they ruled them by the smiling terror of an ancient secret they smile and smile but they have forgotten the secret the symbolism of Krupp the curious position of the Krupp firm in the awful story developing around us is not quite sufficiently grasped there is a kind of academic clarity of definition which does not see the proportions of things for which everything falls within a definition and nothing ever breaks beyond it to this type of mind which is valuable when it is set to special and narrow work there is no such thing as an exception that proves the rule if I vote for confiscating some say precisely what I should be doing if I took pennies out of a blind man's hat they are both denials of the principle of private property and are equally right and equally wrong according to our view of that principle I should find a great many distinctions to draw in such a manner first I should say that taking a user's money by proper authority is not robbery but recovery of stolen goods second I should say that even if there were no such thing as personal property there would still be such a thing as personal dignity and different modes of robbery would diminish it in very different ways similarly there is a truth but only a half truth in the saying that all modern powers alike rely on the capitalist and make war on the lines of capitalism it is true and it is disgraceful but it is not equally true and equally disgraceful it is not true that matinegro is as much ruled by financiers as Prussia just as it is not true that as many men in the Kaiserstrasse in Berlin wear long knives in their belts as wear them in the neighborhood of the Black Mountain it is not true that every peasant from one of the old Russian communes is the immediate servant of a rich man as is every employee of Mr. Rockefeller it is as false as the statement that no poor people in America can read or write there is an element of capitalism in all modern countries as there is an element of illiteracy in all modern countries there are some who think that the number of our fellow citizens who can sign their names ought to comfort us for the extreme fewness of those who have anything in the bank to sign it for but I am not one of these in any case the position of Krupp has certain interesting aspects when we talk of army contractors as among the base but active actualities of war we commonly mean that while the contractor benefits by the war the war on the whole rather suffers by the contractor we regard this on soldierly middleman with disgust or great anger or contemptuous acquiescence or commercial dread and silence according to our personal position and character we nowhere think of him as having anything to do with fighting in the final sense those worthy and wealthy persons who employ women's labor at a few shillings a week do not do it to obtain the best clothes for the soldiers but to make a sufficient profit on the worst the only argument is whether such clothes are just good enough for the soldiers or are too bad for anybody or anything we tolerate the contractor or we do not tolerate him but no one admires him especially and certainly no one gives him any credit for any success in the war Confessedly or unconfessedly we knock his profits not only off what goes to the taxpayer but what goes to the soldier we know the army will not fight any better at least because the clothes they wear were stitched by wretched women who could hardly see because their boots were made by harassed helots who never had time to think in war time it is very widely confessed that capitalism is not a good way of ruling a patriotic or self-respecting people and all sorts of other things from strict state organization to quite casual personal charity are hastily substituted for it is recognized that the great employer nine times out of ten is no more than the school boy or the page who pilfers tarts and sweets from the dishes as they go up and down how angry one is with him depends on temperament on the stage of the dinner also on the number of tarts now here comes in the real and sinister significance of crops there are many capitalists in Europe as rich as vulgar as selfish is rootedly opposed to any fellowship of the fortunate and unfortunate but there is no other capitalist who claims or can pretend to claim that he has very appreciably helped the activities of his people in war I will suppose that Lipton did not deserve the very severe criticisms made on his firm by Mr. Justice Darling but however blameless he was nobody can suppose that British soldiers would charge better with the bayonet because they had some particular kind of groceries inside them but crop can make a plausible claim that the huge infernal machines to which his country owes nearly all of its successes could only have been produced under the equally infernal conditions of the modern factory and the urban proletarian civilization that is why the victory of Germany would be simply the victory of crop and the victory of crop would be simply the victory of capitalism there and there alone capitalism would be able to point to something done successfully for a whole nation done as it would certainly maintain better than small free states or natural democracies could have done it I confess I think the modern Germans morally second rate and I think that even war when it is conducted most successfully by machinery is second rate war but this second rate war will become not only the first but the only brand if the cannon of crop should conquer and what is very much worse it will be the only intelligent answer that any capitalist has yet given against our case that capitalism is as wasteful and as weak as it is certainly wicked I do not fear any such finality for I happen to believe in the kind of men who fight best with bayonets and whose fathers hammered their own pikes for the French Revolution End of Section 10 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org A Utopia of Usurers by G. K. Chesterton Section 11 The Tower of Vibble Among the cloudy and symbolic stories in the beginning of the Bible there is one about a tower built with such vertical energy as to take a hold on heaven but ruined and resulting only in a confusion of tongues The story might be interpreted in many ways religiously as meaning that spiritual insulin starts all human separations irreligiously as meaning that the inhuman heavens grudged man his magnificent dream or merely satirically as suggesting that all attempts to reach a higher agreement always end in more disagreement than there was before It might be taken by the partially intelligent kensight as the judgment on Latin Christians for talking Latin It might be taken by the somewhat less intelligent Professor Harnack as a final proof that all prehistoric humanity talk German But when all was said the symbol would remain that a plain tower as straight as a sword as simple as a lily did nevertheless produce the deepest divisions that have been known among men In any case we of the world in revolt syndicalists, socialists guild socialists or whatever we call ourselves have no need to worry about the scripture or the allegory for whatever reason what is said to have happened to the people of Shinak has precisely and practically happened to us None of us who have known socialists or rather to speak more truthfully none of us who have been socialists can entertain the faintest doubt that a fine intellectual sincerity lay behind what was called La Internationale It was really felt that socialism was universal like arithmetic It was too true for idiom to turn a phrase In the formula of Karl Marx men could find that frigid fellowship which they find when they agree that two and two make four It was almost as broad minded as a religious dogma Yet this universal language has not succeeded at a moment of crisis in imposing itself on the whole world Nay, it has not at the moment of crisis succeeded in imposing itself on its own principal champions Herve is not talking economic Esperanto He's talking French Bebel is not talking economic Esperanto He's talking German Blatchford is not talking economic Esperanto He's talking English And jolly good English too I do not know whether French is talking about the world's nursery speech but I am quite certain he will know more of it after this struggle than he knew before In short, whether or no there be a new union of hearts there has really and truly been a new division of tongues How are we to explain this singular truth even if we deplore it I dismiss with fitting disdain the notion that it is a mere result of military terrorism The socialist leaders of modern Europe are among the most sincere men in history and their nationalist note in this affair has had the ring of their sincerity I will not waste time on the speculation that Vanderveld is bullied by Belgian priests or that Blatchford is frightened by the horse guards outside Whitehall These great men support the enthusiasm of their conventional countrymen because they share it and they share it because there is though perhaps only at certain great moments such a thing as pure democracy Timur the Tartar I think celebrated some victory with a tower built entirely out of human skulls Perhaps he thought that would reach to heaven but there is no cement in such building The veins and ligaments that hold humanity together have long fallen away The skulls will roll impotently at a touch and a thousand more such trophies could only make the tower taller and crazier I think the modern official apparatus of votes is very like that tottering monument I think the Tartar counts it heads like an electioneering agent Sometimes when I have seen from the platform of some paltry party meeting the rows and rows of grinning upturned faces I felt inclined to say as the poet does in The Vision of Sin Welcome fellow citizens hollow hearts and empty heads Not that the people were personally hollow or empty but they had come on a hollow and empty business to help the good Mr. Binks to strengthen the insurance act against the wicked Mr. Jinx who would only promise to fortify the insurance act That night it did not blow the democratic gale yet it can blow on these as on others and when it does blow many things I for one am not above learning them The Marxian dogma which simplifies all conflicts to the class war is so much nobler a thing than the nose counting of the parliaments that one must apologize for the comparison and yet there is a comparison when we used to say that there were so many thousands of socialists in Germany we were counting by skulls when we said that the majority of the proletarians would be everywhere opposed to the minority consisting of capitalists we were counting by skulls well yes if all men's heads had been cut off from the rest of them as they were by the good sense at foresight of Timor the Tartar if they had no hearts or bellies to be moved no hand that flies up to ward off a weapon no foot that can feel a familiar soil if things were so the Marxian calculation is not only complete but correct as we know today the Marxian calculation is complete but it is not correct now this is the answer to the questions of some kind of critics whose actual words I have not within reach at the moment about whether my democracy meant the rule of the majority over the minority it means the rule of the rule the rule of the rule over the exception when a nation finds a soul that follows it with a body and does verily act like one living thing there is nothing to be said about those who are out of it except that they are out of it after talking about it in the abstract for decades this is democracy and it is marvelous in our eyes it is not the difference between 99 persons and 100 persons it is one person the people I do not know or care how many people dislike or dislike the pictures of weirds they could not be either justified or condemned by a mere majority of Belgians but I am very certain that the defiance of Prussia did not come from a majority of Belgians it came from Belgium one and indivisible atheists, priests princes of the blood French-ified shopkeepers Flemish boors men and women and children and that this sort of thing can happen the better for us for it is this spontaneous spiritual fellowship of communities under certain conditions to which the four or five most independent minds of Europe willingly bear witness today but is there no exception is there no one faithful among the unfaithful found is no great socialist politician still untouched by the patriotism of the vulgar yes the rugged Ramsey McDonald scarred with a hundred savage fights against the capitalist parties still lifts up his horny hand for peace what further need have we of witnesses I for my part am quite satisfied and do not doubt that Mr. McDonald will be as industrious in dampening down democracy in this form as in every other a real danger heaven forbid that I should once more wade in those swamps of logomacky and tautology in which the old guard of the determinist still seem to be floundering the question of fate and free will can never attain to a conclusion though it may attain to a conviction the shortest philosophic summary is that both cause and choice are ultimate ideas within us and that if one man denies choice because it seems contrary to cause the other man has quite as much right to deny cause because it seems contrary to choice the shortest ethical summary is that determinism either affects conduct or it does not if it does not it is morally not worth preaching if it does it must affect conduct in the direction of impotence and submission a writer in the clarion says reformer cannot help trying to reform nor the conservative help his conservatism but suppose the reformer tries to reform the conservative and turns him into another reformer either he can in which case determinism has made no difference at all or he can't in which case he can only have made reformers more hopeless and conservatives more obstinate and the shortest practical and political summary is that working men most probably will soon be much too busy using their free will to stop to prove that they have got it nevertheless I like to watch the determinist in the clarion cockpit every week as busy as the squirrel in a cage but being myself a squirrel leaping lightly from bow to bow and preferring the form of activity which occasionally ends in nuts I should not intervene in the matter even indirectly except upon a practical point and the point I have in mind is practical to the extent of deadly peril it is another of the numerous new ways in which the restless rich now walking the world with an awful insomnia may manage to catch us napping must be a mystery there are two letters in the clarion this week which in various ways interest me very much one is concerned to defend Darwin against the scientific revolt against him that was led by Samuel Butler and among other things it calls Bernard Shaw a back number well most certainly the origin of species is a back number insofar as any honest and interesting book ever can be but in pure philosophy nothing can be out of date since the universe must be a mystery even to the believer there is however one condition of things in which I do call it relevant to describe somebody as being behind the times that is when the man in question thinking of some state of affairs that has passed away is really helping the very things he would like to hinder the principle cannot alter but the problems can thus I should like to call a man behind the times who in the year 1872 pleaded for the peaceful German peasants against the triumphant militarism of Napoleon or I should call a man out of date who in the year 1892 wished for a stronger navy to compete with the navy of Holland because it had once swept the sea and sailed up the Thames and I certainly call a man or a movement out of date that in the year 1914 when we few are fighting a giant machine strengthened with all material wealth and worked with all the material sciences thinks that our chief danger is from an excess of moral and religious responsibility he reminds me of Mr. Snodgrass who had the presence of mind to call out fire when Mr. Pickwick fell through the ice the other letter consists of the usual wire-drawn argument for fatalism man cannot imagine the universe being created and therefore is compelled by his reason to think the universe without beginning or end which I may remark he cannot imagine either but the letter ends with something much more ominous than bad metaphysics here in the middle of the Clarion in the center of a clean and combative democratic sheet I meet again my deplorable old acquaintance the scientific criminologist the so-called evil doer should not be punished for his acts restrained in forty-eight hours I could probably get a petition to that effect signed by millionaires a short time ago a bill was introduced to hold irresponsible and restrain a whole new class of people who were incapable of managing their affairs with prudence read the supporters names on the back of that bill and see what sort of Democrats they were our heads of what is called popular science which means going to sleep to a lullaby of long words let us use our own brains a little and ask ourselves what is the real difference between punishing a man and restraining him the material difference may be any or none for punishment may be very mild and restraint may be very ruthless the man of course must dislike one as much as the other would not be necessary to restrain him at all and I assure you he will get no great glow of comfort out of your calling him irresponsible after you have made him impotent a man does not necessarily feel more free and easy in a straight waistcoat than in a stone cell the moral difference is that a man can be punished for a crime because he is born a citizen while he can be constrained because he is born a slave but one arresting and tremendous difference towers over all these doubtful or arguable differences there is one respect vital to all our liberties and all our lives in which the new restraint would be different from the old punishment it is of this that the plutocrats will take advantage the end of section 11 this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org a Utopia of Usurers by G. K. Chesterton section 12 the plain difference the perfectly plain difference is this all punishment even the most horrible upon the assumption that the extent of the evil is known and that a certain amount of expiation goes with it even if you hang the man you cannot hang him twice even if you burn him you cannot burn him for a month and in the case of all ordinary imprisonments the whole aim of free institutions from the beginning of the world has been to insist that a man should be convicted of a definite crime but the moment you admit this notion of medical restraint you must in fairness admit that it may go on as long as the authorities choose to think or say that it ought to go on the man's punishment refers to the past which is supposed to have been investigated and which in some degree at least has been investigated but his restraint refers to the future which his doctors, keepers and wardens get to investigate the simple result will be that in the scientific utopia of the Clarion men like Man or Syme or Larkin will not be put in prison because of what they have done they will be kept in prison because of what they might do indeed the builders of the new tyranny have already come very near to avowing this scientific and futuristic method when the lawyers tried to stop the suffragette from appearing at all they practically said we do not know your next week's crime because it isn't committed yet that we are scientifically certain you have the criminal type and by the sublime and unalterable laws of heredity all your poor little papers will inherit it this is a purely practical question and that is why I insist on it even in such strenuous times the writers on the Clarion have a perfect right to think Christianity is the foe of freedom or even that the stupidity and tyranny of the present government is due to the monkish mysticism of Lord Morley and Mr. John M. Robertson they have a right to think the theory of determinism as true as Kelvin thought it but I do not like seeing them walk straight into the enormous iron trap set open by the capitalists who find it convenient to make our law even more lawless than it is the rich men want a scientist to write them a letter de cache as a doctor writes a prescription and so they wish to seal up in a public goal the scandals of a private asylum yes the writers on the Clarion are indeed claiming irresponsibility for human beings but it is the government that will be irresponsible not the governed but I will tell them one small secret in conclusion there is nothing whatever wrong in the ancient and universal idea of punishment except that we are not punishing the right people the dregs of puritanism one peculiarity of the genuine kind of enemy of the people is that his slightest phrase is clamorous with all his sins pride, vanglory and hypocrisy seem present in his very grammar in his very verbs or adverbs or prepositions as well as in what he says which is generally bad enough thus I see that a nonconformist pastor in Bromley has been talking about the pathetic little presence of tobacco sent to the common soldiers this is how he talks about it he is reported as having said by the help of God they wanted this cigarette business stopped how one could write a volume on that sentence a great thick volume called the decline of the English middle class in taste, in style in philosophy, in feeling in political project the horrors of it are as unfathomable as hell first to begin with the trifle note something slip-shot and vague in the mere verbiage typical of those who prefer a catch word to a creed this cigarette business might mean anything but the pastor at Bromley will not interfere with that for the indignation of his school of thought even when it is sincere always instinctively and unconsciously swerves aside from anything that is rich and powerful like the partners in a big business and strikes instead at something that is poor and nameless like the soldiers in a trench nor does the expression make clear who they are whether the inhabitants of Britain or the inhabitants of Bromley or the inhabitants of this one crazy tabernacle in Bromley nor is it evident how it is going to be stopped or who is being asked to stop it all these things are trifles compared to the more terrible offenses of the phrase but they are not without their social and historical interest about the beginning of the 19th century the wealthy Puritan class generally the class of the employers of labour took a line of argument which was narrow but not nonsensical they saw the relation of rich and poor quite coldly as a contract but they saw that a contract holds both ways the Puritans of the middle class in short did in some sense start talking and thinking for themselves they are still talking they have long ago left off thinking they talk about the loyalty of workmen to their employers and God knows what rubbish and the first small certainty about the Reverend Gentleman who sentence I have quoted is that his brain stopped working as a clock stops years and years ago second consider the quality of the religious literature these people are always telling us that the English translated Bible is an appropriate addiction and so it is why then are they not trained they are always telling us that Bunyan the rude Midland tinker is as much worth reading as Chaucer or Spencer and so he is why then have they not read him I cannot believe that anyone who had seen even in a nightmare of the nursery a Pollyon straddling over the whole breath of the way could really write like that about a cigarette by the help of God they wanted this cigarette business stopped therefore with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven with Saint Michael smiter of Satan and captain of the chivalric God with all the ardour of the serfs and the flaming patience of the saints we will have this cigarette business stopped where has all the tradition of the great religious literature gone to that a man should come on such bathos with such a bump thirdly of course there is the lack of imaginative proportion which rises into a sort of towering blasphemy an enormous number of live young men are being hurt by shells hurt by bullets hurt by fever and hunger and horror of hope deferred hurt by lance blades and sword blades breaking into the bloody house of life but Mr. Price I think that's his name is still anxious that they should not be hurt by cigarettes that is the sort of maniacal isolation that can be found in the deserts of Bromley that cigarettes are bad for the health is a very tenable opinion to which the minister is quite entitled if he happens to think that the youth of smoke too many cigarettes and that he has any influence in urging on them the unhealthiness of the habit I should not blame him if he gave sermons or lectures about it with magic lantern slides so long as it was in Bromley and about Bromley cigarettes may be bad for the health bombs and bayonets and even barbed wire are not good for the health I never met a doctor who recommended but the trouble with this sort of man is that he cannot adjust himself to the scale of things he would do very good service if he would go among the rich aristocratic ladies and tell them not to take drugs in a chronic sense as people take opium in China but he would be doing very bad service if he were to go among the doctors and nurses on the field and tell them not to give drugs as they give Morphea in a hospital but it is the whole hypothesis of war it is his very nature and first principle that the man in the trench is almost as much a suffering and abnormal person as the man in the hospital hit or unhit conqueror or conquered he is by nature of the case having less pleasure than is proper and natural to man fourth not well here on the mere diabolical idiocy that can regard beer or tobacco as in some way evil and unseemly in themselves there is the most important element in this strange outbreak at least the most dangerous and the most important for us there is that main feature in the degradation of the old middle class the utter disappearance of its old appetite for liberty here there is no question of whether the men are to smoke cigarettes or the women choose to send cigarettes or even that the officers or doctors choose to allow cigarettes the whole thing is to cease and we may know one of the most recurrent ideas of the survival state it is mentioned in the passive mood it must be stopped and we must not even ask who has stopped it bad journalism the amazing decision of the government to employ methods quite alien to England and rather belonging to the police of the continent probably arises from the appearance of papers which are lucid and fighting like the papers of the continent the business may be put in many ways but one way of putting it is simply to say that a monopoly of bad journalism is resisting the possibility of good journalism journalism is not the same thing as literature but there is good and bad journalism as there is good and bad literature and there is good and bad football for the last 20 years or so the plutocrats who govern England have allowed the English nothing but bad journalism very bad journalism simply considered as journalism it always takes a considerable time to see the simple and central fact about anything all sorts of things have been said about the modern press especially the yellow press that it is Gingo or Philistine or sensational or wrongly inquisitive or vulgar or indecent or trivial but none of these things have anything really to do with the point the point about the press is that it is not what it is called it is not the popular press it is not the public press it is not an organ of public opinion it is a conspiracy very few millionaires all sufficiently similar in type to agree on the limits of what this great nation to which we belong may know about itself and its friends and enemies the ring is not quite complete there are old fashioned and honest papers but it is sufficiently near to complete to produce on the ordinary purchaser of news the practical effects of a corner and a monopoly he receives all his political information and all his political marching orders from what is by this time a sort of half conscious secret society with very few members but a great deal of money this enormous and essential fact is concealed for us by a number of legends that have passed into common speech there is the notion that the press is flashy or trivial because it is popular in other words an attempt is made at democracy by representing journalism as the natural literature of democracy all this is cold rubbish the democracy has no more to do with the papers than it has with the peerages the millionaire newspapers are vulgar and silly because the millionaires are vulgar and silly it is the proprietor not the editor not the sub-editor least of all the reader is as prairie of printed words the same slander on democracy can be noticed in the case of advertisements there is many a tender old Tory imagination that vaguely feels that our streets would be hung with estusians and tapestries if only the profane vulgar had not hung them with advertisements of saplow and sunlight soap but advertisement does not come from the unlettered many it comes from the refined few did you ever hear of a mob rising to placard the town hall with proclamations in favor of saplow did you ever see a poor ragged man laboriously drawing and painting a picture on the wall in favor of sunlight soap simply as a labor of love it is nonsense those who hang our public walls with ugly pictures are the same select few who hang their private walls with exquisite and expensive pictures the vulgarization of modern life has come from the governing class from the highly educated class most of the people who have posters in camberwell have peerages at Westminster but the strongest instance of all is that which has been unbroken until lately and still largely prevails in the monotony of the press the end of section 12 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org a Utopia of Users by G. K. Chesterton section 13 then comes that other legend the notion that men like the masters of the newspaper trusts give people what they want why it is the whole aim and definition of a trust that gives the people what it chooses in the old days when parliaments were free in England it was discovered that one courtier was allowed to sell all the silk and another to sell all the sweet wine a member of the House of Commons humorously asked to sell all the bread I really tremble to think what that sarcastic legislator would have said if he had been put off with the modern nonsense about gauging the public taste suppose the first courtier had said that by his shrewd self-made sense he had detected that people had a vague desire for silk and even a deep dim human desire to pay so much for it suppose the second courtier said that he had by his own rugged intellect discovered a general desire for wine and that people bought his wine at his price when they could buy no other suppose a third courtier had jumped up and said that people always bought his bread when they could get not anywhere else well that is a perfect parallel after bread the need of the people is knowledge said Denton knowledge is now a monopoly and comes through to the citizens in thin and selected streams exactly as bread might come to a besieged city men must wish to know what is happening whoever has the privilege of telling them they must listen to the messenger even if he is a liar they must listen to the liar even if he is a bore the official journalist for some time past has been both a bore and a liar but it was impossible until lately to neglect his sheets of news altogether lately the capitalist press really has begun to be neglected because its bad journalism was overpowering and appalling lately we have really begun to find out that capitalism cannot write just as it cannot fight or pray or make a joke or do any other stricken human thing but this discovery has been quite reason the capitalist newspaper was never actually unread until it was actually unreadable if you retain the survival superstition that the press has run by the capitalist is popular in any sense except that in which dirty water in a desert is popular consider the case of the column articles in praise of the men who own newspapers men of the type of Cadbury or Harmsworth men of the type of the small club of millionaires did you ever hear a plain man in a tram car or train talking about Carnegie's bright genial smile or Ross Child's simple easy hospitality did you ever hear an ordinary citizen ask what was the opinion of Sir Joseph Lyons about the hopes and fears of this or native land these few small minded men publish papers to praise themselves you could no more get an intelligent poor man to praise a millionaire soul except for hire then you could get him to sell a millionaire's soul except for hire and I repeat that though there are other aspects of the matter of the new plutocratic raid one of the most important is mere journalistic jealousy the yellow press is bad journalism and wishes to stop the appearance of good journalism there is no average member of the public who would not prefer to have Lloyd George discussed as what he is a Welshman of genius and ideals strangely fascinated by bad fashion and bad finance rather than discussed as what neither he nor anyone else ever was a perfect democrat or an utterly detestable demagogue there is no reader of a daily paper who would not feel more concern and more respect for Sir Rufus Isaacs as a man who had been a stock broker than as a man who happened to be an attorney general there is no man in the street who is not more interested in Lloyd George's investments than his land campaign there is no man in the street who could not understand and like Rufus Isaacs as a Jew better than he can possibly like him as a British statesman there is no sane journalist alive who would say that the official account of Marconis would be better copy than the true account that such newspapers as this have dragged out we have committed one crime against the newspaper which he will never forgive we point out that his papers are dull and we propose to print some papers that are interesting the poetry of the revolution everyone but a consistent and contented capitalist who must be something pretty near to a Satanist must rejoice at the spirit and success of the battle of the buses but one thing about it which happens to please me particularly was that it was fought in one aspect on a point such as the plutocratic fool calls unpractical it was fought about a symbol a badge a thing attended with no kind of practical results like the flags for which men allow themselves to fall down dead or the shrines for which men will walk some hundreds of miles from their homes when a man has an eye for business all that goes on this earth in that style is simply invisible to him but let us be charitable to the eye for business the eye has been pretty well blacked this time but I wish to insist here that it is exactly what is called the unpractical part of the thing that is really the practical the chief difference between men and the animals is that all men are artists though the overwhelming majority of us are bad artists as the old fable truly says lions do not make statues even the cunning of the fox can go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of the vultine paw and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes he hadn't got there are Chris Elephantine statues but no purely Elephantine ones and though we speak in a general way of an elephant trumpeting it is only by human blandishments that he can be induced to play the drum but man savage or civilized simple or complex always desires to see his own soul outside himself in some material embodiment he always wishes to point to a table in a temple or a cloth on a stick or a word on a scroll or a badge on a coat and say this is the best part of me if need be it shall be the rest of me that shall perish this is the method which seems so unbusiness like to the men with an eye to business this is also the method by which battles are won the symbolism of the badge the badge on a trade unionist coat is a piece of poetry in the genuine lucid and logical sense in which Milton defined poetry and he ought to know when he said that it was simple sensuous and passionate it is simple because many understand the word badge who might not even understand the word recognition is sensuous because it is visible and tangible it is incarnate as all the good gods have been and it is passionate in this perfectly practical sense which the man with an eye to business may some day learn more thoroughly than he likes that there are men who allow you to cross a word out in a theoretical document but who will not allow you to pull a big button off their bodily clothing merely because you have more money than they have now I think it is this sensuousness this passion and above all this simplicity that are most wanted in this promising revolt of our time for this simplicity is perhaps the only thing in which the best type of recent revolutionists had failed it has been our sorrow lately to salute the sunset of one of the very few clean and incorruptible careers in the most corruptible phase of Christendom the death of quelch naturally turns one's thought to those extreme Marxan theorists who whatever we may hold about their philosophy have certainly held their honor like iron and yet even in this instant of instinctive reverence I cannot feel that they were poetical enough that is childish enough to make a revolution they had all the audacity needed for speaking to the despot but not the simplicity needed for speaking to the democracy they were always accused of being too bitter against the capitalist but it always seemed to me that they were quite unconsciously of course much too kind to him they had a fatal habit of using long words even on occasions when he might with propriety have been described in very short words they called him a capitalist when almost anybody in Christendom would have called him a cad and cad is a word from the poetic vocabulary indicating rather a general and powerful reaction of the emotions than a status that could be defined in a work of economics the capitalist asleep in the sun let such long words crawl all over him like so many long soft furry caterpillars caterpillars cannot sting like wasps and in repeating that the old marxians have been perhaps the best and bravest men of our time I say also that they would have been better and braver still if they had never used a scientific word and never read anything but fairy tales the beastly individualist suppose I go on to a ship and the ship sinks almost immediately but I like the people in the bad ballads by reason of my clinging to a mask upon a desert island and eventually cast a rather suppose I am not cast on it but I'm kept bobbing about in the water because the only man on the island is what some would call an individualist and will not throw me a rope though coils of rope of the most annoying elaboration and neatness are conspicuous beside him as he stands upon the shore now it seems to me that if in my efforts to shout at this fellow creature and force the crashing breakers I call his position the insularistic position and my position the semi-amphibian position much valuable time may be lost I'm not an amphibian I am a drowning man and he is not an insularist or an individualist he is a beast or rather he is worse than any beast can be and if instead of letting me drown he makes me promise while I am drowning that if I come on shore it shall be as his bodily slave having no human claims hence forward forever then by the whole theory and practice of capitalism he becomes a capitalist he also becomes a cad now the language of poetry is simpler than that of prose as anyone can see who has read what the old-fashioned Protestant used to call confidentially his Bible and being simpler it is also truer and being truer it is also fiercer and for most of the infamies of our time there is really nothing plain enough except the plain language of poetry take let us say the case of the recent railway disaster and the equitable of the capitalist interests it is not a scientific problem for us to investigate it is a crime committed before our eyes committed perhaps by blind men or maniacs or men hypnotized or men in some other way unconscious but committed in broad daylight so that the corpse is bleeding on our doorstep good lives were lost because good lives do not pay and bad coals do pay it seems simply impossible to get any other meaning out of the matter except that and if in human history there be anything simple and anything horrible it seems to have been present in this matter if even after some study and understanding of the old religious passions which were the resurrection of Europe we cannot endure this extreme infamy of witches and heretics literally burned alive well the people in this affair were quite as literally burned alive and if when we have really tried to extend our charity beyond the borders of personal sympathy to all the complexity of class and creed we still feel something insolent about the triumphant and acquitted man who is in the wrong hear the men who are in the wrong are triumphant and acquitted it is no subject for science it is a subject for poetry but poetry of a terrible sword the end of section 13 the end of the utopia of usurers and other essays by G. K. Chesterton