 WISDOM AND THE WEATHER It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never common place. Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to everybody, can stop one's heart with the very thought of them. But while this is granted, something further may be claimed. It is not merely true that these universal things are strange. It is more over-true that they are subtle. In the last analysis, most common things will be found to be highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it. Thus they will call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That there is a strong and physical element in both romance and the mimetto mori makes them if possible more baffling than if they had been wholly intellectual. No man could say exactly how much his sexuality was colored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere boyish itch for irrevocable adventures, like running away to sea. No man could say how far his animal dread of the end was mixed up with the mystical traditions touching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things are animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part, and go home to their tea. It is complete error to suppose that because a thing is vulgar therefore it is not refined. That is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-room song of my youth which begins, in the gloaming, oh my darling, was vulgar enough as a song. But the connection between human passion and the twilight is nonetheless an exquisite and even inscrutable thing. Or to take another obvious instance. The jokes about a mother-in-law are scarcely delicate, but the problem of a mother-in-law is extremely delicate. A mother-in-law is subtle because she is a thing like the twilight. She is a mystical blend of two inconsistent things, law and a mother. The caricatures misrepresent her, but they arise out of a real human enigma. Comic cuts deals with the difficulty wrongly, but it would need George Meredith and his best to deal with the difficulty rightly. The nearest statement about the problem perhaps is this. It is not that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but that she must be very nice. But it is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have all heard despised as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argument, the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it the very nadir and scoff of good conversationalists. Now there are very deep reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well as deep. They lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. First of all it is a gesture of primeval worship. The sky must be invoked, and to begin everything with the weather is a sort of pagan way of beginning everything with prayer. Jones and Brown talk about the weather, but so do Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary idea in politeness, equality. For the very word politeness is only the Greek for citizenship. The word politeness is akin to the word policemen, a charming thought. Properly understood the citizen should be more polite than the gentleman. Perhaps the policeman should be the most courtly and elegant of the three. But all good manners must obviously begin with the sharing of something in a simple style. Two men should share an umbrella. If they have not got an umbrella they should at least share the rain with all its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy. For he maketh his son to shine. This is the second element in the weather. It's recognition of human equality in that we all have our hats under the dark blue-spangled umbrella of the universe. Arising out of this is the third wholesome strain in the custom. I mean that it begins with the body and with our inevitable bodily brotherhood. All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are already prigs and may soon be Christian scientists. Each human soul has, in a sense, to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind. Briefly, in the mere observation, a fine day. There is the whole great human idea of comradeship. Now, pure comradeship is another of those broad yet bewildering things. We all enjoy it, yet when we come to talk about it we almost always talk nonsense. Chiefly because we suppose it to be a simpler affair than it is. It is simple to conduct, but it is by no means simple to analyze. Comradeship is at the most only one half of human life. The other half is love, a thing so different that one might fancy it had been made for another universe. And I do not mean mere sex love. Any kind of concentrated passion, maternal love, or even the fiercer kinds of friendship are in their nature alien to pure comradeship. Both sides are essential to life, and both are known in differing degrees to everybody of every age or sex. But very broadly speaking, it may still be said that women stand for the dignity of love and men for the dignity of comradeship. I mean that the institution would hardly be expected if the males of the tribe did not mount guard over it. The affections in which women excel have so much more authority and intensity than pure comradeship would be washed away if it were not rallied and guarded in clubs, corps, colleges, banquets, and regiments. Most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful voice of love, seeking to destroy comradeship. All true comradeship has in it those three elements which I have remarked in the ordinary exclamation about the weather. First, it has a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky, emphasizing that we are all under the same cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat, the winged rock of Mr. Herbert Trench. Secondly, it recognizes this bond as an essential one, for comradeship is simply humanity seen in that one aspect in which men are really equal. The old writers were so entirely wise when they talked of the equality of men. They were also very wise not to mention women. Women are always authoritarian, they are always above or below. That is why marriage is a sort of poetical seesaw. There are only three things in the world that women do not understand, and they are liberty, equality, and fraternity. But men, a class little understood in the modern world, find these things the breath of their nostrils, and our most learned ladies will not even begin to understand them until they make allowance for this kind of cool camaraderie. Lastly, it contains the third quality of the weather, the insistence upon the body, and its indispensable satisfaction. No one has even begun to understand comradeship, who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism, which to many women appears only haugish. You may call the thing an orgy, or a sacrament. It is certainly an essential. It is, at root, a resistance to the super-soliciousness of the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness there is a sort of mad modesty, a desire to melt the separate soul into the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the thing that are common to all men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick. The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word affinity. There are clubs of a socialist sort where all the members, men and women, call each other comrade. I have no serious emotions hostile or otherwise about this particular habit. At the worst it is conventionality, and at the best, flirtation. I am convinced here only to point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers together, lilies and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums, and call them all daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word, daisy. If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if you include under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable prophetess, the interest of a man and a beautiful woman who baffles him, the pleasure of a philosophical old phogy and a girl who is impudent and innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most mountainous love. If you are going to call all of these comradeship, you will gain nothing. You will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and universal and open, but they are only one kind of flower. Comradeship is obvious and universal and open, but it is only one kind of affection. It has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment knows that this is impersonal. There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is strictly true to the masculine emotion. They call it speaking to the question. Women speak to each other. Men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to an intellectual man. Men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men are all impersonal, that is to say, republican. No one remembers after a really good talk who has said the good things. Every man speaks to a visionary multitude, a mystical cloud, that is called the club. It is obvious that this cool and careless quality which is essential to the collective affection of males involves disadvantages and dangers. It leads to spitting. It leads to coarse speech. It must lead to these things so long as it is honorable. Comradeship must be in some degree ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male friendship, the nostrils are stopped with the smell of abominable things. Friendship must be physically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes along with males when left entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure, and that is the strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young idealists in East End settlements losing their collars in the wash and living on tin salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict that if men were to live without women, they must not live without rules. Something of the same sort of artificial exactitude, of course, is obtained in an army, and an army also has to be in many ways monastic, only that it is celibacy without chastity. But these things do not apply to normal married men. These have quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive anarchy in the savage common sense of the other sex. There is only one very timid sort of man that is not afraid of women. End of Wisdom and the Weather Recording by Dave Volker St. Louis, Missouri Please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Jeannie What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton Part II Chapter III The Common Vision Now, this masculine love of an open and level camaraderie is the life within all democracies and attempts to govern by debate. Without it the Republic would be a dead formula. Even as it is, of course, the spirit of democracy frequently differs widely from the letter, and a pothouse is often a better test than a parliament. Democracy in its human sense is not arbitrement by the majority. It is not even arbitrement by everybody. It can be more nearly defined as arbitrement by anybody. I mean that it rests on the club habit of taking a total stranger for granted, of assuming certain things to be inevitably common to yourself and him. Only the things that anybody may be presumed to hold have the full authority of democracy. Look out the window and notice the first man who walks by. The Liberals may have swept England with an overwhelming majority, but you would not stake a button that the man is a Liberal. The Bible may be read in all schools and respected in all law courts, but you would not bet a straw that he believes in the Bible. But you would bet your weak wages, let us say, that he believes in wearing clothes. You would bet that he believes that physical courage is a fine thing, or that parents have authority over children. Of course, he may be the millionth man who does not believe these things. If it comes to that, he may be the bearded lady dressed up as a man. But these prodigies are quite a different thing from any mere calculation of numbers. People who hold these views are not a minority, but a monstrosity. But of these universal dogmas that have full democratic authority, the only test is this test of anybody. What you would observe before any newcomer in a tavern, that is the real English law. The first man you see from the window? He is the King of England. The decay of taverns, which is but a part of the general decay of democracy, has undoubtedly weakened this masculine spirit of equality. I remember that a roomful of socialists literally laughed when I told them that there were no two no-blue words in all poetry than public house. They thought it was a joke. Why they should think it a joke? Since they want to make all houses public houses, I cannot imagine. But if anyone wishes to see the real rowdy egalitarianism which is necessary, to males at least, he can find it as well as anywhere in the great old tavern disputes which come down to us in such books as Boswell's Johnson. It is worthwhile to mention that one name especially, because the modern world in its morbidity has done it a strange injustice. The demeanor of Johnson, it is said, was harsh and despotic. It was occasionally harsh, but it was never despotic. Johnson was not in the least a despot. Johnson was a demagogue. He shouted against a shouting crowd. The very fact that he wrangled with other people is proof that other people were allowed to wrangle with him. His very brutality was based on the idea of an equal scrimmage like that of football. It is strictly true that he bawled and banged the table because he was a modest man. He was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed or even overlooked. Addison had exquisite manners and was the king of his company. He was polite to everybody, but superior to everybody. Therefore he has been handed down forever in the immortal insult of Pope. Like Cato give his little senate laws and sit attentive to his own applause. Johnson, so far from being king of his company, was a sort of Irish member of his own parliament. Addison was a courteous superior and was hated. Johnson was an insolent equal and therefore was loved by all who knew him, and handed down in a marvellous book, which is one of the mere miracles of love. This doctrine of equality is essential to conversation, so much may be admitted by anyone who knows what conversation is. Once arguing at a table in a tavern, the most famous man on earth would wish to be obscure so that his brilliant remarks might blaze like the stars on the background of his obscurity. To anything worth calling a man, nothing can be conceived more cold or cheerless than to be king of your company. But it may be said that in masculine sports and games, other than the great game of debate, there is definite emulation and eclipse. There is indeed emulation, but this is only an ardent sort of equality. Games are competitive because that is the only way of making them exciting. But if anyone doubts that men must forever return to the ideal of equality, it is only necessary to answer that there is such a thing as a handicap. If men exalted in mere superiority, they would seek to see how far such superiority could go. They would be glad when one strong runner came in miles ahead of all the rest. But what men like is not the triumph of superiors, but the struggle of equals. And therefore they introduce even into their competitive sports and artificial equality. It is sad to think how few of those who arrange our sporting handicaps can be supposed with any probability to realize that they are abstract and even severe Republicans. No, the real objection to equality and self-rule has nothing to do with any of these free and festive aspects of mankind. All men are Democrats when they are happy. The philosophic opponent of democracy would substantially sum up his position by saying that it will not work. Before going further, I will register in passing a protest against the assumption that working is the one test of humanity. Heaven does not work. It plays. Men are most themselves when they are free. And if I find that men are snobs in their work but Democrats on their holidays, I shall take the liberty to believe their holidays. But it is this question of work which really perplexes the question of equality, and it is with that that we must now deal. Perhaps the truth can be put most pointedly thus, that democracy has one real enemy, and that is civilization. Those utilitarian miracles which science has made are anti-democratic, not so much in their perversion or even in their practical result as in their primary shape and purpose. The frame-breaking rioters were right, not perhaps in thinking that machines would make fewer men workmen, but certainly in thinking that machines would make fewer men masters. More wheels do mean fewer handles. Fewer handles do mean fewer hands. The machinery of science must be individualistic and isolated. A mob can shout round a palace, but a mob cannot shout down a telephone. The specialist appears, and democracy is half spoiled at a stroke. End of the Common Vision. The Insane Necessity. Common conception among the dregs of Darwinian culture is that men have slowly worked their way out of inequality into a state of comparative equality. The truth is, I fancy, almost exactly the opposite. All men have normally and naturally begun with the idea of equality. They have only abandoned it late and reluctantly, and always for some material reason of detail. They have never naturally felt that one class of men was superior to another. They have always been driven to assume it through certain practical limitations of space and time. For example, there is one element which must always tend to oligarchy, or rather to despotism. I mean the element of hurry. If the house has caught fire, a man must ring up the fire engines. A committee cannot ring them up. If a camp is surprised by night, somebody must give the order to fire. There is no time to vote it. It is solely a question of the physical limitations of time and space. Not at all of any mental limitations and the mass of men commanded. If all the people in the house were men of destiny, it would still be better that they should not all talk into the telephone at once. Nay, it would be better that the silliest man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an army actually consisted of nothing but Hannibal's and Napoleon's, it would still be better in the case of a surprise that they should not all give orders together. Nay, it would be better if the stupidest of them all gave the orders. Thus, we see that merely military subordination, so far from resting on the inequality of men, actually rests on the equality of men. Discipline does not involve the Carlyleian notion that somebody is always right when everybody is wrong, and that we must discover and crown that somebody. On the contrary, discipline means that in certain frightfully rapid circumstances one can trust anybody so long as he is not everybody. The military spirit does not mean, as Carlyle fancied, obeying the strongest and wisest man. On the contrary, the military spirit means if anything obeying the weakest and stupidest man, obeying him merely because he is a man and not a thousand men. Submission to a weak man is discipline. Submission to a strong man is only servility. Now it can be easily shown that the thing we call aristocracy in Europe is not in its origin in spirit and aristocracy at all. It is not a system of spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the caste system of India, or even like the old Greek distinction between free men and slaves. It is simply the remains of a military organization framed partly to sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partly to break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam. The word duke simply means colonel, just as the word emperor simply means commander-in-chief. The whole story is told in the single title of Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, which merely means officers in the European army against the contemporary yellow peril. Now in an army nobody ever dreams of supposing that difference of rank represents a difference of moral reality. Nobody ever says about a regiment. Your major is very humorous and energetic. Your colonel, of course, must be even more humorous and yet more energetic. I know one ever says in reporting a mess room conversation, Lieutenant Jones was very witty but was naturally inferior to Captain Smith. The essence of an army is the idea of official inequality founded on unofficial equality. The colonel is not obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the colonel. Such was probably the spirit of the system of dukes in Counts when it first arose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome. With the decline of those necessities, it has gradually ceased to have meaning as a military organization and become honeycombed with unclean plutocracy. Even now it is not a spiritual aristocracy. It is not so bad as all that. It is simply an army without an enemy billeted upon the people. Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as comrade-like aspect. And the case of militarism is not the only case of such specialist submission. The tinker and tailor as well as the soldier and sailor require a certain rigidity of rapidity of action. At least if the tinker is not organized, that is largely why he does not tink on any large scale. The tinker and tailor often represent the two nomadic races in Europe, the gypsy and the Jew. But the Jew alone has influence because he alone accepts some sort of discipline. Man, we say, has two sides. The specialist side where he must have subordination and the social side where he must have equality. There is a truth in the saying that ten tailors go to make a man. But we must remember also that ten poets laureate or ten astronomers royal go to make a man too. Ten million tradesmen go to make man himself. But humanity consists of tradesmen when they are not talking shop. The peculiar peril of our time, which I call for argument's sake imperialism or caesarism, is the complete eclipse of comradeship and equality by specialism and domination. There are only two kinds of social structure conceivable, personal government and impersonal government. If my anarchic friends will not have rules, they will have rulers. Preferring personal government with its tact and flexibility is called royalism. Preferring impersonal government with its dogmas and definitions is called republicanism. Objecting broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is called bosh. At least I know no more philosophic word for it. You can be guided by the shudness or presence of mind of one ruler or by the equality and ascertain justice of one rule. But you must have one or the other, or you are not a nation but a nasty mess. Now men, in their aspect of equality and debate, adore the idea of rules. They develop and complicate them greatly to excess. A man finds far more regulations and definitions in his club where there are rules than in his home where there is a ruler. A deliberate assembly, the House of Commons, for instance, carries this mumory to the point of a methodical madness. The whole system is stiff with rigid unreason, like the royal court in Lewis Carroll. You would think the speaker would speak. Therefore he is mostly silent. You would think a man would take off his hat to stop and put it on to go away. Therefore he takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on to stop in. Names are forbidden and a man must call his own father my right honorable friend the member for West Birmingham. These are perhaps fantasies of decay, but fundamentally they answer a masculine appetite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational, are universal. Men feel that law is equal, even when it is not equitable. There is a wild fairness in the thing, as there is in tossing up. Again it is gravely unfortunate that when critics do attack such cases as the Commons, it is always on the points, perhaps the few points, where the Commons are right. They denounce the House as the talking shop and complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes. Now this is just one respect in which the Commons are actually like the common people. If they love leisure and long debate, it is because all men love it, that they really represent England. There the Parliament does approach to the virile virtues of the Pothouse. The real truth is that Adam braided in the introductory section when we spoke of the sense of home and property, as now we speak of the sense of council and community. All men do naturally love the idea of leisure, laughter, loud and equal argument, but there stands a specter in our hall. We are conscious of the towering modern challenge that is called specialism or cutthroat competition—business. Business will have nothing to do with leisure. Business will have no truck with comradeship. Business will pretend to know patience with all the legal fictions and fantastic handicaps by which comradeship protects its egalitarian ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged in the agreeable and typical task of sacking his own father, will certainly not refer to him as the right honorable clerk from the Laburnum Road, Brixton. Therefore there has arisen in modern life a literary fashion devoting itself to the romance of business, to great demigods of greed and to fairyland of finance. This popular philosophy is utterly despotic and anti-democratic. This fashion is the flower of that caesarism against which I am concerned to protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in the possession of a brain of steel. The fact that the real millionaire is rather more often strong in the possession of a head of wood does not alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The essential argument is specialists must be despots. Men must be specialists. You cannot have equality in a soap factory, so you cannot have it anywhere. You cannot have comradeship in a wheat corner, so you cannot have it at all. We must have commercial civilization, therefore we must destroy democracy. I know that plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to soar to such examples as soap or wheat. They generally confine themselves with fine freshness of mind to a comparison between the state and a ship. One anti-democratic writer remarked that he would not like to sail in a vessel in which the cabin boy had an equal vote with the captain. It might easily be urged an answer that many a ship, the Victoria for instance, was sunk because an admiral gave an order which a cabin boy could see was wrong. But this is a debating reply. The essential fallacy is both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact is that we were all born in a state. We were not all born on a ship, like some of our great British bankers. A ship still remains a specialist experiment, like a diving bell or a flying ship. In such peculiar perils, the need for a promptitude constitutes the need for autocracy. But we live and die in the vessel of the state. And if we cannot find freedom, camaraderie, and the popular element in the state, we cannot find it at all. And the modern doctrine of commercial despotism means that we shall not find it at all. Our specialist trades in their highly civilized state cannot, it says, be run without the whole brutal business of bossing and sacking, too old at forty and all the rest of the filth. And they must be run and therefore we call on Caesar. Nobody but the Superman could descend to do such dirty work. Now, to reiterate my title, this is what is wrong. This is the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul. If soap boiling is really inconsistent with brotherhood, so much the worst for soap boiling, not for brotherhood, if civilization really cannot get on with democracy, so much the worst for civilization, not for democracy, certainly it would be far better to go back to village communes if they really are communes. Certainly it would be better to do without soap rather than to do without society. Certainly we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical science and frenzied finance for one half hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern. I do not say the sacrifice will be necessary, I only say it will be easy. And of the insane necessity. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Barry Holdsworth, What's Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton, Part 3, Chapter 1, The Unmilitary Suffragette. It would be better to adopt in this chapter the same process that appeared a piece of mental justice in the last. My general opinions on the feminine question are such as many suffragettes would warmly approve and it would be easy to state them without any open reference to the current controversy. But just as it seemed more decent to say first that I was not in favour of imperialism even in its practical and popular sense, so it seems more decent to say the same of female suffrage in its practical and popular sense. In other words, it is only fair to state, however hurriedly, the superficial objection to the suffragettes before we go on to the really subtle questions behind the suffrage. Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection to the suffragettes is not that they are militant suffragettes. On the contrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a military thing. It has all the military virtues, one of which is that it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under certain rules, for arbitrary honour. The party that wins becomes the government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace. Now the suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this soldierly and decisive sense. First, because they are women. And secondly, because there are very few women. But they can raise something else, which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not create revolution. What they do create is anarchy. And the difference between these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its nature produces government. Anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading of King Charles or King Louis. But they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered, something occurred. You can only knock off the king's head once. But you can knock off the king's hat any number of times. Destruction is finite. Obstruction is infinite. So long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder, instead of an attempt to enforce a new order, there is no logical end to it. It can feed on itself and renew itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a consul, but only wanted to be a nuisance, he could possibly have prevented any government arising successfully out of the revolution. But such a proceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion. It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the suffragettes that makes their superficial problem. The problem is that their action has none of the advantages of ultimate violence. It does not afford a test. War is a dreadful thing, but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably. Numbers and an unnatural valour. One does discover the two urgent matters. How many rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever. There is also, of course, in the case of these women, the further falsity that is introduced by their sex. It is false to state the matter as a mere brutal question of strength. If his muscles give a man a vote, then his horse ought to have two votes, and his elephant five votes. The truth is more subtle than that. It is that bodily outbreak is a man's instinctive weapon, like the hooves to a horse or the tusks to an elephant. All riot is a threat of war, but the woman is brandishing a weapon she can never use. There are many weapons that she could and does use. If, for example, all the women nagged for a vote, they would get it in a month. But there again, one must remember, it would be necessary to get all the women to nag. And that brings us to the end of the political surface of the matter. The working objection to the suffrage philosophy is simply that overmastering millions of women do not agree with it. I am aware that some maintain that women ought to have votes, whether the majority wants them or not. But this is surely a strange and childish case of setting up formal democracy to the destruction of actual democracy. What should the mass of women decide if they do not decide their general place in the state? These people practically say that females may vote about everything except about female suffrage. But having again cleared my conscience of my merely political and possibly unpopular opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat the matter in a slower and more sympathetic style, attempt to trace the real roots of women's position in the western state, and the causes of our existing traditions, or perhaps prejudices, upon the point. And for this purpose, it is again necessary to travel far from the modern topic. The mere suffragette of today, and to go back to subjects which, though much more old, are, I think, considerably more fresh. End of the Unmilitary Suffragette. Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning, which at least we hear of early in the centuries and often among the tribes. Let me suppose that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these you will notice one speciality, that not one of them is special. Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing, made to supply many different needs, and while tottering pedants knows about to find the cause and origin of some old custom, the truth is that it had fifty causes, or a hundred origins. The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils, to cut throats, for a myriad in genius or innocent human objects. The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down, partly to point with, like a finger post, partly to balance with, like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with, like a cigarette, partly to kill with, like a club of a giant. It is a crutch and a cudgel, an elongated finger and an extra leg. The case is the same, of course, with the fire, about which the strangest modern views have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current, that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make checkered shadows on the walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and to be the red heart of a man's house, and that hearth for which, as the great heathens said, a man should die. Now it is the great mark of our modernity, that people are always proposing substitutes for these old things, and these substitutes always answer one purpose where the old thing answered ten. The modern man will wave a cigarette instead of a stick. He will cut his pencil with a little screwing pencil sharpener instead of a knife, and he will even boldly offer to be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a fire. I have my doubts about pencil sharpeners, even for sharpening pencils, and about hot water pipes, even for heat. But when we think of all of those other requirements that these institutions answered, there opens before us the whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization. We see as in a vision a world where a man tries to cut his throat with a pencil sharpener, where a man must learn single stick with a cigarette, where a man must try to toast muffins at electric lamps, and see red and golden castles in the surface of hot water pipes. The principle of which I speak can be seen everywhere in a comparison between the ancient and universal things, and the modern and specialist things. The object of a theodolite is to lie level. The object of a stick is to swing loose at any angle, to whirl like the very wheel of liberty. The object of a lancet is to lance. When used for slashing, gashing, ripping, lopping off heads and limbs, it is a disappointing instrument. The object of an electric light is merely to light, a despicable modesty, and the object of an asbestos stove, I wonder what is the object of an asbestos stove. If a man found a coil of rope in a desert, he could at least think of all the things that can be done with a coil of rope, and some of them might even be practical. He could tow a boat or lasso a horse, he could play cat's cradle or pick oak'em. He could construct a rope ladder for an eloping heiress, or corrode her boxes for a traveling maiden aunt. He could learn to tie a bow, or he could hang himself. Far otherwise with the unfortunate traveller who should find a telephone in the desert, you can telephone with a telephone, you cannot do anything else with it. And though this is one of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one degree from its full delirium when there is nobody to answer you. The contention is, in brief, that you must pull up a hundred routes, and not one, before you uproot any of these hori and simple expedience. It is only with great difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see that any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method has four or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions are quadrupeds, and some of them are centipedes. Consider these cases old and new, and you will observe the operation of a general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six purposes. Everywhere now there are six things, or rather, and there is the trouble, there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, we will not say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless or inexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone. I may any day thank God for the Lancet. And there is none of these brilliant and narrow inventions, except of course the asbestos stuff, which might not be at some moment necessary and lovely. But I do not think the most austere upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old many-sided institutions an element of unity and universality, which may well be preserved in its due proportion and place. Spiritually, at least, it will be admitted that some all-round balance is needed to equalize the extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to carry the parable of the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, the immortal maiden, has been a maid of all work as well as a servant of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos, and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and told fairy tales to the children. It was her business to confront the nameless gods, whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The large uses of religion have been broken up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearth have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The romance of ritual and colored emblem has been taken over by that narrowest of all trades, modern art, the sort called arts for art's sake, and men are in modern practice informed that they may use all symbols so long as they mean nothing by them. The romance of conscience has been dried up into the science of ethics, which may well be called decency for decency's sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and barren of artistic flower. The cry to the dim gods cut off from ethics and cosmology has become mere physical research. Everything has been sundered from everything else, and everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear of specialists dividing the tune from the words of a song on the ground that they spoil each other, and I did once meet a man who openly advocated the separation of almonds and raisins. This world is all one wild divorce court. Nevertheless there are many who still hear in their souls the thunder of authority of human habit. Those who man hath joined let no man thunder. This book must avoid religion, but there must I say be many religious and irreligious who will concede that this power of answering many purposes was a sort of strength which should not wholly die out of our lives. As a part of personal character even the moderns will agree that many sidedness is a merit and a merit that may easily be overlooked. This balance and universality has been the vision of many groups of men in many ages. It was the liberal education of Aristotle, the jack of all trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his friends, the august amateurousness of the cavalier person of quality like Sir William Temple or the great oral of Dorset. It has appeared in literature in our time in the most erratic and opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible music by Walter Pater, and enunciated through a foghorn by Walt Whitman. But the great mass of men have always been unable to achieve this literal universality because of the nature of their work in the world. Not let it be noted because of the existence of their work. Leonardo da Vinci must have worked pretty hard. On the other hand many a government office clerk, village constable, or elusive plumber may do to all human appearance no work at all and yet show no signs of the Aristotelian universalism. What makes it difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist. He has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. This is generally true of males from the first hunter to the last electrical engineer. Each has not merely to act but to excel. Nimrod has not only to be a mighty hunter before the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the other hunters. The electrical engineer has to be a very electrical engineer, or he is outstripped by engineers yet more electrical. Those very miracles of the human mind on which the modern world prides itself, and rightly in the main, would be impossible without a certain concentration which disturbs the pure balance of reason more than does religious bigotry. No creed can be so limiting as that awful adoration that the cobbler must not go beyond his last. So the largest and wildest shots of our world are but in one direction and with a defined trajectory. The gunner cannot go beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls short. The astronomer cannot go beyond his telescope, and his telescope goes such a little way. All these are like men who have stood on the high peak of a mountain and seen the horizon like a single ring, and who then descend down different paths toward different towns traveling slow or fast. It is right, there must be people traveling to different towns. There must be specialists, but shall no one behold the horizon? Shall all mankind be specialist surgeons or particular plumbers? Shall all humanity be monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman and a jack-of-all-trades. But it has also decided, among other things, that the jack-of-all-trades shall be a gill-of-all-trades. It has decided, rightly or wrongly, that this specialism and this universalism shall be divided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be left for men and wisdom for women. For cleverness kills wisdom. That is one of the few sad and certain things. But for women this ideal of comprehensive capacity, or common sense, must long ago have been washed away. It must have melted in the frightful furnaces of ambition and eager technicality. A man must be partly a one-idea man, because he is a one-weapon man, and he is flung naked into the fight. The world's demand comes to him direct, to his wife indirectly. In short, he must, as the books on success say, give his best, and what a small part of a man his best is. His second and third best are often much better. If he is the first violin, he must fiddle for life. He must not remember that he is a fine fourth bagpipe, a fair fifteenth billiard cue, a foil, a fountain pen, a hand at wist, a gun, and an image of God. End of The Universal Stick. Recording by David Lorimer, Van Cleave, Kentucky, March 29, 2009. dlorimer.blogspot.com The Emancipation of Domesticity. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nick Number. What's Wrong with the World? by G.K. Chesterton. Part 3, Chapter 3. The Emancipation of Domesticity. And it should be remarked in passing that this force upon a man to develop one feature has nothing to do with what is commonly called our competitive system, but would equally exist under any rationally conceivable kind of collectivism. Unless the socialists are frankly ready for a fall in the standard of violins, telescopes, and electric lights, they must somehow create a moral demand on the individual that he shall keep up his present concentration on these things. It was only by men being in some degree specialists that there ever were any telescopes. They must certainly be in some degree specialists in order to keep them going. It is not by making a man a state wage earner that you can prevent him thinking principally about the very difficult way he earns his wages. There is only one way to preserve in the world that high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfills the old vision of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected half of humanity, a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan, one who does not give her best, but gives her all. Our old analogy of the fire remains the most workable one. The fire need not blaze like electricity, nor boil like boiling water. Its point is that it blazes more than water and warms more than light. The wife is like the fire, or to put things in their proper proportion, the fire is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is expected to cook, not to excel in cooking, but to cook, to cook better than her husband who is earning the cook by lecturing on botany or breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is expected to tell tales to the children, not original and artistic tales, but tales, better tales than would probably be told by a first class cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to illuminate and ventilate, not by the most startling revelations or the wildest winds of thought, but better than a man can do it after breaking stones or lecturing. But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook, a schoolmistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress, a house decorator, but not a competitive house decorator, a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade, but twenty hobbies. She, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests. This is what has been really aimed at from the first in what is called the seclusion, or even the oppression of women. Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow. On the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one massive narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was unable to play at five or six professions, and so come almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades. But the woman's professions, unlike the child's, were all truly and almost terribly fruitful. So tragically real that nothing but her universality and balance prevented them being merely morbid. This is the substance of the contention I offer about the historic female position. I do not deny that women have been wronged and even tortured, but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much as they are tortured now by the absurd modern attempt to make them domestic emperorses and competitive clerks at the same time. I do not deny that even under the old tradition women had a harder time than men. That is why we take off our hats. I do not deny that all these various female functions were exasperating, but I say that there was some aim and meaning in keeping them various. I do not pause even to deny that woman was a servant, but at least she was a general servant. The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands for the idea of sanity, that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poets, but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatics. There must in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still. There must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeable, and many of the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as a center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience and even her pliability is merely the subservience and pliability of a universal remedy. She varies as medicines vary with the disease. She has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the kihote from being put upon and the bully from putting upon others. The French king wrote, But the truth is that woman always varies, and that is exactly why we always trust her. To correct every adventure and extravagance with its antidote in common sense is not as the modern seem to think, to be in the position of a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position of Aristotle, or at the lowest, Herbert Spencer, to be a universal morality, a complete system of thought. The slave flatters, the complete moralist rebukes. It is in short to be a trimmer in the true sense of that honorable term, which for some reason or other is always used in a sense exactly opposite to its own. It seems really to be supposed that a trimmer means a cowardly person who always goes over to the stronger side. It really means a highly chivalrous person who always goes over to the weaker side, like one who trims a boat by sitting where there are few people seated. Woman is a trimmer, and it is a generous, dangerous, and romantic trade. The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently plain one. Supposing it to be conceited that humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in dividing itself into two halves, respectively typifying the ideals of special talent and of general sanity, since they are genuinely difficult to combine completely in one mind, it is not difficult to see why the line of cleavage has followed the line of sex, or why the female became the emblem of the universal and the male of the special and superior. Two gigantic facts of nature fixed it thus. First that the woman who frequently fulfilled her functions literally could not be specially prominent in experiment and adventure, and second that the same natural operations surrounded her with very young children who required to be taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the same time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment, even when freed from modern rules and hours and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person, is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worthwhile to cast this burden on women in order to keep common sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult, but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question, for I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens, or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless, and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up. I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays, to be whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes, and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene, I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the rule of three and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task. I will never pity her for its smallness. But though the essential of the woman's task is universality, this does not, of course, prevent her from having one or two severe though largely wholesome prejudices. She has, on the whole, been more conscious than man that she is only one half of humanity, but she has expressed it, if one may say so of a lady, by getting her teeth into the two or three things which she thinks she stands for. I would observe here in parenthesis that much of the recent official trouble about women has arisen from the fact that they transfer to things of doubt and reason that sacred stubbornness only proper to the primary things which a woman was set to guard. One's own children, one's own altar ought to be a matter of principle, or, if you like, a matter of prejudice. On the other hand, who wrote Junius's letters ought not to be a principle or a prejudice. It ought to be a matter of free and almost indifferent inquiry. But take an energetic modern girl's secretary to a league to show that George III wrote Junius, and in three months she will believe it too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish waifood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well, and that is why they ought not to do it. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. What's Wrong of the World by G. K. Chesterton Part III. Section IV. The Romance of Thrift The larger part of womankind, however, have had to fight for things slightly more intoxicating to the eye than the desk or the typewriter. And it cannot be denied that in defending these, women have developed the quality called prejudice to a powerful and even menacing degree. But these prejudices will always be found to fortify the main position of the woman, that she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat within small compass, but on all sides. On the one or two points on which she really misunderstands the man's position, it is almost entirely in order to preserve her own. The two points on which woman, actually and of herself, is most tenacious, may be roughly summarised as the ideal of thrift and the ideal of dignity. Unfortunately for this book it is written by a male, and these two qualities, if not hateful to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But if we are to settle the sixth question at all fairly, all males must make an imaginative attempt to enter into the attitude of all good women to ward these two things. The difficulty exists especially, perhaps in the thing called thrift. We men have so much encouraged each other in throwing money right and left, that there has come at last to be a sort of chivalrous and poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a broader and more candid consideration the case scarcely stands so. Thrift is the really romantic thing, economy is more romantic than extravagance. Heaven knows I for once speak disinterestedly in the matter, for I cannot clearly remember saving a half penny ever since I was born. But the thing is true, economy properly understood is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative. Waste is unpoetic because it is negative. It is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustspin, and the one great objection to the new fastidious and ascetic homestead is simply that in such a moral minage the dustspin must be bigger than the house. If a man could undertake to make use of all things in his dustspin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare. When science began to use bright products, when science found that colours could be made out of coal tar, she made her greatest, and perhaps her only claim on the real respect of the human soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to use the byproducts, or in other words to rummage in the dustspin. A man can only fully comprehend it if he thinks of some sudden joke, or expedient, got up with such materials as may be found in a private house on a rainy day. A man's definite daily work is generally one with such rigid convenience of modern science that Thrift, the picking up of potential helps here and there, has almost become unmeaning to him. He comes across it most, as I say, when he's playing some game within four walls, when in charades a hearth rug will just do for a fur coat, or a T-cozy just do for a cocked hat, when a toy theatre needs timber and cardboard, and the house has just enough farwood and just enough band boxes. This is the man's occasional glimpse and pleasing parody of Thrift. But many a good housekeeper plays the same game every day with ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she's mean, but on the contrary because she's magnanimous, because she wishes her creative mercy to be over all her works, that not one sardine should be destroyed or cast as rubbish to the void when she has made the pile complete. The modern world must somehow be made to understand, in theology and other things, that her view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal, and yet come into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and liberal also. There is never a war between two sects, but only between two universal Catholic churches. The only possible collision is the collision of one cosmos with another. So, in a smaller way, it must be first made clear that this female economic ideal is a part of that female variety of outlook and all-round art of life which we have already attributed to the sex. Thrift is not a small or timid or provincial thing, it is part of that great idea of the woman watching on all sides, out of all the windows of the soul, and being answerable for everything. Four, in the average human house, there is one hole by which money comes in, and a hundred by which it goes out. Man has to do the one hole, woman with the hundred. But though the very stinginess of a woman is a part of her spiritual breath, it is nonetheless true that it brings her into conflict with a special kind of spiritual breath that belongs to the males of the tribe. It brings her into conflict with that shapeless cataract of comradeship, of chaotic feasting, and deafening debate which we noted in the last section. The very touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the more into antagonism, for one stands for universal vigilance, and the other for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moral weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity. He always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night, and he always thinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the public houses, and try to get their husbands home, simple-minded social workers always imagine that every husband is a tragic drunkard, and every wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs to them that the poor woman is only doing under course the conventions exactly what every fashionable hostess does, when she tries to get the men from arguing over cigars to come and gossip over the tea cups. These women are not exasperated merely at the amount of money that is wasted in beer. They are exasperated also at the amount of time that is wasted in talk. It is not merely what goeth into the mouth, but what cometh out the mouth that in their opinion defile if a man. They will raise against an argument, like their sisters of all ranks, the ridiculous objection that nobody is convinced by it, as if a man wanted to make a body slave of anybody with whom he had played single-stick. But the real female prejudice on this point is not without a basis. The real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace, but there is the necklace. A costa may ruin his wife for a pot of beer, and where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to crush her, to produce a result. The costa does not argue with another costa in order to convince him, but in order to enjoy at once the sound of his own voice, the cleanness of his own opinions, and the sense of masculine society. There is this element of a fine fruitlessness about the male enjoyments. Wine is poured into a bottomless bucket, thought plunges into a bottomless abyss. All this a set woman against the public house, that is against the parliament house. She is there to prevent waste, and the pub and the parliament are the very palaces of waste. In the upper classes the pub is called the club, but that makes no more difference to the reason than it does to the rhyme. High and low the woman's objection to the public house is perfectly definite and rational. It is that the public house wastes the energies that could be used on the private house. As it is about feminine and thrift against masculine waste, so it is about feminine dignity against masculine roundiness. The woman has a fixed and very well founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners, nobody else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity, and grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that there are many very polite men, but none that I ever heard of who were not either fascinating women or obeying them. But indeed the female ideal of dignity, like the female ideal of thrift, lies deeper and may easily be misunderstood. It rests ultimately on a strong idea of spiritual isolation, the same that makes women religious. They do not like being melted down, they dislike and avoid the mob. That anonymous quality we have remarked in the club conversation would be common and impertinent in a case of ladies. I remember an artistic and eager lady asking me in her grand green drawing room whether I believed in comradeship between the sexes and why not. I was driven back on offering the obvious and sincere answer. Because if I were to treat you for two minutes like a comrade you would turn me out of the house. The only certain rule on this subject is always to deal with women and never with women. Women is a profligate word. I have used it repeatedly in this chapter, but it always has a black art sound. It smells of oriental cynicism and hedonism. Every woman is a captive queen, but every crowd of women is only a harem broken loose. I am not expressing my own views here, but those of nearly all the women I have known. It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates other women individually, but I think it would be quite true to say that she detests them in a confused heap. And this is not because she despises her own sex, but because she respects it and respects especially that sanctity and separation of each item which is represented in manners by the idea of dignity and in morals by the idea of chastity. End of the Romance of Thrift The Coldness of Chloe This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vaughan Ollman What's Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton Part 3 Chapter 5 The Coldness of Chloe We hear much of the human error which accepts what is sham and what is real. But it is worthwhile to remember that with unfamiliar things we often mistake what is real for what is sham. It is true that a very young man may think the wig of an actress is her hair. But it is equally true that a child yet younger may call the hair of a negro his wig. Just because the wooly savage is remote and barbaric, he seems to be unnaturally neat and tidy. Everyone must have noticed the same thing in the fixed and almost offensive color of all unfamiliar things. Tropic birds and Tropic blossoms. Tropic birds look like staring toys out of a toy shop. Tropic flowers simply look like artificial flowers, like things cut out of wax. This is a deep matter and, I think, not unconnected with divinity. But anyhow, it's the truth that when we see things for the first time, we feel instantly that they are fictive creations. We feel the finger of God. It is only when we are thoroughly used to them, and our five wits are wearied, that we see them as wild and objectless, like the shapeless treetops or the shifting cloud. It is the design in nature that strikes us first. The sense of the crosses and confusions in that design only comes afterwards to experience an almost eerie monotony. If a man saw the stars abruptly by exit, he would think them as festive and as artificial as a firework. We talk of the folly of painting the lily. But if we saw the lily without warning, we should think that it was painted. We talk of the devil not being so black as he is painted, but that very phrase is a testimony to the kinship between what is called vivid and what is called artificial. If the modern sage had only one glimpse of grass and sky, he would say that the grass was not as green as it was painted, that sky was not as blue as it is painted. If one could see the whole universe suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored toy, just as the South American Hornbill looks like a bright-colored toy. And so they are. Both of them, I mean. But it was not with this aspect of the startling air of artifice about all strange things that I meant to deal. I mean merely as a guide to history that we should not be surprised if things rot in fashions remote from ours seem artificial. We should convince ourselves that nine times out of ten these things are nakedly and almost indecently honest. You will hear men talk of the frosted classicism of corneal or of the powdered pomposities of the 18th century. But all these phrases are very superficial. There never was an artificial epic. There never was an age of reason. Men were always men and women women. And their two generous appetites always were the expression of passion and the telling of truth. We can see something stiff and quaint in their mode of expression. Just as our descendants will see something stiff and quaint in our course's slumsket, our most nakedly pathological play. But men have never talked about anything but important things. And the next force in femininity, which we have to consider, can be considered best, perhaps, in some dusty old volume of verses by a person of quality. The 18th century is spoken of as a period of artificiality, in externals at least, but indeed there may be two words about that. In modern speech one uses artificiality as meaning indefinitely a sort of deceit. And the 18th century is far too artificial to deceive. It cultivated that completist art that does not conceal the art. It's fashions and costumes positively revealed nature by allowing artifice. As in that obvious instance of a barbering that frosted every head with the same silver. It would be fantastic to call this a quaint humility that concealed youth, but at least it was not one with the evil pride that conceals old age. Under the 18th century fashion people did not so much all pretend to be young, as all agree to be old. The same applies to the most odd and unnatural of their fashions. They were freakish, but they were not false. A lady may or may not be as red as she was painted, but plainly she was not so black as she was patched. But I only introduced the reader into this atmosphere of the older and franker fictions, so that he may be induced to have patience for a moment with a certain element which is very common in the decoration and literature of that age, and of the two centuries preceding it. It is necessary to mention in such connection, because it is exactly one of those things that look as superficial as powder, and are really as rooted as hair. In all the old flowery and pastoral love songs, those of the 17th and 18th centuries especially, you will find a perpetual reproach against women. In the matter of her coldness, ceaseless and stale similes that compare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to ice, or her bosom to snow. Now most of us have always supposed these old itinerant phrases to be a mere pattern of dead words, a thing like a cold wallpaper. Yet I think those old Cavalier poets who wrote about the coldness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth missed in nearly all the realistic novels of today. Our psychological romancers perpetually represent wives as striking terror into their husbands by rolling on the floor, gnashing their teeth, throwing about the furniture, or poisoning the coffee. All this upon some strange fixed theory that women are what they call emotional, but in truth the old and frigid form is much nearer to the vital fact. Most men, if they spoke with any sincerity, would agree that the most terrible quality in women, whether in friendship, courtship, or marriage, was not so much being emotional as being unemotional. There is an awful armour of ice which may be the legitimate protection of a more delicate organism, but whatever be the psychological explanation there can surely be no question of the fact. The instinctive cry of the female in anger is I take this as the most obvious and at the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality in the female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almost immeasurably misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cant of immoralists. The proper name for the thing is modesty, but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whatever else it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets and a million lovers have called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the classical, and is at least the opposite of the grotesque. And since we are talking here chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere for emancipation, that a little while ago it was common for an advanced woman to claim the right to wear trousers, a right about his grotesque as the right to wear a false nose. Whether female liberty is much advanced by the act of wearing a skirt on each leg, I do not know. Perhaps Turkish women might offer some information on the point. But if the western woman walks about, as it were, trailing the curtains of the harem with her, it is quite certain that the woven mansion is meant for a perambulating palace, not for a perambulating prison. It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity, not female submission. It can be proved by the simplest of all tests. No ruler would deliberately dress up in the recognized fetters of a slave. No judge would appear covered with broad arrows. But when men wish to be safely impressive, as judges, priests, or kings, they do wear skirts, the long trailing robes of female dignity. The whole world is under petticoat government, for even men wear petticoats when they wish to govern. End of the Coldest of Khloe, Recording by Vaughn Ollman, v-o-n-s-t-a-k-e-s dot blogspot dot com. The pedant and the savage. This is a LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vaughn Ollman. What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton, Part 3, Chapter 6, The Pedant and the Savage. We say, then, that the female holds up with two strong arms, these two pillars of civilization. We say also that she could do neither but for her position. Her curious position of private omnipotence, universality on a small scale. The first element is thrift, not the destructive thrift of the miser, but the creative thrift of the peasant. The second element is dignity, which is but the expression of sacred personality and privacy. Now I know the question that will be abruptly and automatically asked by all, that know the dull tricks and turns of the modern sexual quarrel. The advanced person will at once begin to argue about whether these instincts are inherent and inevitable in women, or whether they are merely prejudices produced by her history and education. Now I do not propose to discuss whether a woman could now be educated out of her habits touching thrift and dignity, and that for two excellent reasons. First, it is a question which cannot conceivably ever find any answer. That is why modern people are so fond of it. From the nature of the case it is obviously impossible to decide whether any of the peculiarities of civilized man have been strictly necessary to his civilization. It is not self-evident, for instance, that even the habit of standing upright was the only path of human progress. There might have been a quadrupedal civilization, in which a city gentleman put on four boots to go to the city every morning. Or there might have been a reptilian civilization in which he rolled up to the office on his stomach. It is impossible to say that intelligence might not have developed in such creatures. All we can say is that man as he is walks upright, and that woman is something almost more upright than uprightness. And the second point is this, that upon the whole we rather prefer women, nay, even men, to walk upright, so we do not waste much of our noble lives in inventing any other way for them to walk. In short, my second reason for not speculating upon whether woman might get rid of these peculiarities is that I do not want her to get rid of them, nor does she. I will not exhaust my intelligence by inventing ways in which mankind might unlearn the violin, or forget how to ride horses. And the art of domesticity seems to me as special and as valuable as all the ancient arts of our race, nor do I propose to enter at all into those formless and floundering speculations about how woman was or is regarded in the primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savage countries which we cannot understand. Even if these people segregated their women for low or barbaric reasons, it would not make our reasons barbaric. And I am haunted with the tenacious suspicion that these people's feelings were really, under other forms, very much the same as ours. Some impatient trader, some superficial missionary, walks across an island and sees the squad digging in the fields while the man is playing a flute, and immediately says that the man is a mere lord of creation, and the woman a mere serf. He does not remember that he might see the same thing in half the back gardens in Brighton, merely because women are at once more conscientious and more impatient, while men are at once more quiescent and more greedy for pleasure. It may often be in Hawaii simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn't obeyed. I do not affirm that this is the whole truth, but I do affirm that we have too little comprehension of the souls of savages to know how far it is untrue. It is the same with the relations of our hasty and surface science, with the problem of sexual dignity and modesty. Professors find all over the world fragmentary ceremonies in which the bride affects some sort of reluctance, hides from her husband, or runs away from him. The professor then pompously proclaims that this is a survival of marriage by capture. I wonder he never says that the veil thrown over the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt whether women were ever married by capture. I think they pretend it to be, as they do still. It is equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift and dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness, the wastefulness, and the perpetual pleasure seeking of masculine companionship. Wise women allow for the thing. Foolish women try to crush it. But all women try to counteract it, and they do well. In many a home all around us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is reversed. The queen is in the counting-house, counting out the money. The king is in the parlor, eating bread and honey. But it must be strictly understood that the king has captured the honey in some heroic wars. The quarrel can be found in moldering gothic carvings and in crabbed Greek manuscripts. In every age and every land and every tribe and village has been waged the great sexual war between the private house and the public house. And I have seen a collection of medieval English poems divided into sections such as religious carols, drinking songs, and so on. And the section headed poems of domestic life consisted entirely, literally entirely, of the complaints of husbands who were bullied by their wives. Though the English was archaic, the words were in many cases precisely the same as those which I have heard in the streets and public houses of Battersea. Protests on behalf of an extension of time and talk. Protests against the nervous impatience and the devouring utilitarianism of the female. Such, I say, is the quarrel. It can never be anything but a quarrel. But the aim of all morals and all society is to keep it a lover's quarrel. End of The Coldness of Chloe, recording by Vaughn Ulman, V-O-N-S-T-A-K-E-S dot blogspot dot com. What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton, Part 3, Chapter 7, The Modern Surrender of Woman But in this corner called England, at the end of the century, there has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly, and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has been silently and abruptly ended. One of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the 20th century, within the last few years, the woman has, in public, surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along, that the public house, or parliament, is really more important than the private house, that politics are not, as woman has always maintained, an excuse for pots of beer, but a sacred solemnity to which new female worshippers may kneel, that talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable, but enviable, that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore, as a consequence, surely, that taverns are not a waste of money. All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers and grandmothers and great-aunts, all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport, drink, and party politics, and now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right, humbly imploring to be admitted into so much as an outer court from which she may catch a glimpse of those masculine merits which her airing sisters had so thoughtlessly scorned. Now this development naturally perturbs and even paralyzes us. Males, like females, in the course of that old fight between the public and private house, had indulged in overstatement and extravagance, feeling that they must keep up their end of the seesaw. We told our wives that parliament had sat late on most essential business, but it never crossed our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that everyone must have a vote in the country. Similarly, our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In both cases the idea was the same. It does not matter much, but if you let those things slide, there is chaos. We said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country, except that the men should be men and the women women. We knew this. We thought the women knew it even more clearly, and we thought the women would say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. The solemnity of politics, the necessity of boats, the necessity of Huggins, the necessity of buggins, all these flow in a polluted stream from the lips of all the suffragette speakers. I suppose in every fight however old one has a vague aspiration to conquer, but we never wanted to conquer women so completely as this. We only expected that they might leave us a little more margin for our nonsense. We never expected that they would accept it seriously as sense. Therefore I am all at sea about the existing situation. I scarcely know whether to be relieved or enraged by this substitution of the feeble platform lecture for the forcible curtain lecture. I am lost without the trenchant and candid Mrs. Caudill. I really do not know what to do with the prostrate and penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern woman has taken us all, so much by surprise, that it is desirable to pause a moment and collect our thoughts about what she is really saying. As I have already remarked, there is only one very simple answer to all this. These are not the modern women, but about one in two thousand of the modern women. This fact is important to a Democrat, but it is of very little importance to the typically modern mind. Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few. The only difference is whether it is the conservative few or the progressive few. It might be put somewhat coarsely, perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad. But in this state of things, the Democratic argument obviously falls out for the moment, and we are bound to take the prominent minority merely because it is prominent. Let us eliminate altogether from our minds the thousands of women who detest this cause and the millions of women who have hardly heard of it. Let us concede that the English people itself is not and will not be for a very long time within the sphere of practical politics. Let us confine ourselves to saying that these particular women want a vote, and to asking themselves what a vote is. If we ask these ladies, ourselves, what a vote is, we shall get a very vague reply. It is the only question, as a rule, for which they are not prepared. For the truth is that they go mainly by precedent, by the mere fact that men have votes already. So far from being a mutinous movement, it is really a very conservative one. It is in the narrowest rut of the British Constitution. Let us take a little wider and freer sweep of thought and ask ourselves what is the ultimate point and meaning of this odd business called voting? End of The Modern Surrender of Woman. Seemingly from the dawn of man, all nations have had governments, and all nations have been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly fallacious than to fancy that an inruder or simpler age is ruling, judging, and punishing appeared perfectly innocent and dignified. These things were always regarded as the penalties of the fall, as part of the humiliation of mankind, as bad in themselves. That the king can do no wrong was never anything but a legal fiction, and it is a legal fiction still. The doctrine of divine right was not a piece of idealism, but rather a piece of realism, a practical way of ruling amidst the ruin of humanity, a very pragmatist piece of faith. The religious basis of government was not so much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were never talked of as good things. They were always talked of as necessary evils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves, just as a modern businessman speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks. It's very horrible, but how else can society be conducted? A medieval scholastic regarded the possibility of a man being burnt to death, just as a modern businessman regards the possibility of a man being starved to death. It's a shocking torture, but can you organize a painless world? It is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without the question by hunger, as we have done without the question by fire. It is equally possible, for the matter of that, that a future society may reestablish legal torture with the whole apparatus of rack and faggot. The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague saver of science a method which it calls the third degree. This is simply the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue, which is surely uncommonly close to their exertion by bodily pain. And this is legal and scientific in America. Amateur, ordinary America, of course, simply burns people alive in broad daylight as they did in the Reformation Wars. But those some punishments are more inhumane than others. There is no such thing as a humane punishment, as long as nineteen men claim the right in any sense or shape to take hold of the twentieth man and make him even mildly uncomfortable. So long the whole proceeding must be a humiliating one for all concerned. And the proof of how poignantly men have always felt this lies in the fact that the headsmen and the hangmen, the jailers and the torturers, were always regarded not merely with fear but with contempt. While all kinds of careless smithers, bankrupt knights and swashbucklers and outlaws were regarded with indulgence or even admiration, to kill a man lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man lawfully was unpardonable. The most barefaced duelist might almost brandish his weapon, but the executioner was always masked. This is the first essential element in government, coercion, a necessary but not a noble element. I may remark in passing that when people say that government rests on force, they give an admirable instance of the foggy and muddled cynicism of modernity. Government does not rest on force. Government is force. It rests on consent or a conception of justice. A king or a community, holding a certain thing to be abnormal, evil, uses the general strength to crush it out. The strength is his tool, but the belief is his only sanction. You might as well say that glass is the real reason for telescopes. But arising from whatever reason, the act of government is coercive and is burdened with all the course and painful qualities of coercion. And if anyone asks what's the use of insisting on the ugliness of this task of state violence, since all mankind is condemned to employ it, I have a simple answer to that. It would be useless to insist on it if all humanity were condemned to it. But it's not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness, so long as half humanity is kept out of it. All government then is coercive. We happen to have created a government which is not only coercive but collective. There are only two kinds of government, as I've already said, the despotic and the democratic. Aristocracy is not a government, it is a riot. That most effective kind of riot, a riot of the rich. The most intelligent apologists of aristocracy, Sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never claimed for aristocracy any virtues but the virtues of a riot, the accidental virtues, courage, variety, and adventure. There is no case anywhere of aristocracy having established a universal and applicable order, as despots and democracies have often done, as the last Caesars created the Roman law, as the last Jacobins created the cold Napoleon. With the first of these elementary forms of government, that of the king or chieftain, we are not in this matter of the sexes immediately concerned. We shall return to it later when we mark how differently mankind has dealt with female claims in the despotic as against the democratic field. But for the moment the essential point is that in self-governing countries this coercion of criminals is a collective coercion. The abnormal person is theoretically thumped by a million fists, and kicked by a million feet. If a man is flogged we all flog him. If a man is hanged we all hang him. That is the only possible meaning of democracy, which can give any meaning to the first two syllables, and also to the last two. In this sense each citizen has the high responsibility of a rioter. Every statute is a declaration of war to be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. What's Wrong with the World by G. K. Chesterton Part 3 Feminism or the Mistake About Woman Chapter 9 Sincerity and the Gallows When, therefore, it is said that the tradition against female suffrage keeps women out of activity, social influence, and citizenship. Let us a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves what it actually does keep her out of. It does definitely keep her out of the collective act of coercion, the act of punishment by a mob. The human tradition does say that if 20 men hang a man from a tree or lamppost they shall be 20 men and not women. Now I do not think any reasonable suffragist will deny that exclusion from this function, to say the least of it, might be maintained to be a protection as well as a veto. No candid person will wholly dismiss the proposition that the idea of having a Lord Chancellor but not a Lady Chancellor may at least be connected with the idea of having a Headsman but not a Headswoman, a Hangman, but not a Hangwoman. Nor will it be adequate to answer, as is so often answered in this contention, that in modern civilization women would not really be required to capture, to sentence, or to slay, that all this is done indirectly that specialists kill our criminals as they kill our cattle. To urge this is not to urge the reality of the vote, but to urge its unreality. Democracy was meant to be a more direct way of ruling, not a more indirect way, and if we do not feel that we are all jailers so much the worst for us and for the prisoners. If it is really an unwombly thing to lock up a robber or a tyrant, it ought to be no softening of the situation that the woman does not feel as if she were doing the thing that she certainly is doing. It is bad enough that men can only associate on paper who could once associate in the street. It is bad enough that men have made a vote very much of a fiction. It is much worse that a great class should claim the vote because it is a fiction. Who would be sickened by it if it were a fact? If votes for women do not mean mobs for women, they do not mean what they were meant to mean. A woman can make a cross on a paper as well as a man. A child could do it as well as a woman, and a chimpanzee, after a few lessons, could do it as well as a child. But nobody ought to regard it merely as making a cross on paper. Everyone ought to regard it as what it ultimately is, branding the fleur d'allee, marking the broad arrow, signing the death warrant. Both men and women ought to face more fully the things they do or cause to be done, face them or leave off doing them. On that disastrous day when public executions were abolished, private executions were renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things grossly unsuited to the moral sentiment of a society cannot be safely done in broad daylight, but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting heretics alive in a private room. It is very likely, to speak in the manner foolishly called Irish, that if there were public executions there would be no executions. The only open air punishments, the pillory and the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law, and in actual practice they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as well as rotten eggs, of crying Hosanna as well as crucify. But I do not like the public executioner being turned into the private executioner. I think it is a crooked oriental sinister sort of business, in smells of the harem and the devalum, rather than the forum and the marketplace. In modern times the official has lost all the social honor and dignity of the common hangman. He is only the bearer of the bull string. Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal publicity, only in order to emphasize the fact that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else from which women have been excluded. I also say it to emphasize the fact that the mere modern veiling of the brutality does not make the situation different unless we openly say that we are giving the suffrage the suffrage not only because it is power, but because it is not, for in other words, that women are not so much to vote as to play voting. No suffragist, I suppose, would take up that position, and a few suffragists will wholly deny that this human necessity of pains and penalty is an ugly humiliating business, and that good motives as well as bad may have helped to keep women out of it. More than once I have remarked in these pages that female limitations may be the limits of a temple as well as of a prison, the disabilities of a priest and not of a pariah. I noted it, I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine dress, in the same way it is not evidently irrational if men decided that a woman, like a priest, must not be a shatter of blood.