 Chapter 4 The Vengeance of the Flesh By a quaint paradox, we generally miss the meaning of simple stories, because we are not subtle enough to understand their simplicity. As long as men were in sympathy with some particular religion or other romance of things in general, they saw the thing solid and swallowed it whole, knowing that it could not disagree with them. But the moment men have lost the instinct of being simple in order to understand it, they have to be very subtle in order to understand it. We can find, for instance, a very good working case in those old puritanical nursery tales about the terrible punishment of trivial sins, about how Tommy was drowned for fishing on the Sabbath, or Sammy struck by lightning for going out after dark. Now these moral stories are immoral, because Calvinism is immoral. They are wrong, because puritanism is wrong. But they are not quite so wrong. They are not a quarter so wrong, as many superficial sages have supposed. The truth is that everything that ever came out of a human mouth had a human meaning, and not one of the fixed fools of history was such a fool as he looks. And when our great-uncles or great-grandmothers told a child he might be drowned by breaking the Sabbath, their souls, though undoubtedly as touched on said in a perilous state, were not in quite so simple a state as is suggested by supposing that their God was a devil who dropped babies into the tames for a trifle. This form of religious literature is a morbid form, if taken by itself, but it did correspond to a certain reality in psychology which most people of any religion, or even of none, have felt a touch at some time or other. Leaving out theological terms as far as possible, it is the subconscious feeling that one can be wrong with nature as well as right with nature. That the point of wrongness may be a detail in the superstitions of heathens, this is often a triviality, but that if one is really wrong with nature, there is no particular reason why all her rivers should not drown, or all her storm-bold strike one who is, by this vague yet vivid hypothesis, her enemy. This may be a mental sickness, but it is too human or too mortal a sickness to be called solely a superstition. It is not solely a superstition, it is not simply superimposed upon human nature by something that has got on top of it. It flourishes without check among non-Christian systems, and it flourishes especially in Calvinism, because Calvinism is the most non-Christian of Christian systems. But like everything else that inheres in the natural senses and spirit of man, it has something in it that is not stark unreason. It is an ill, and it generally is. He is one of the ills that flesh is heir to, but he is the lawful heir. And like many other dubious or dangerous human instincts or appetites, it is sometimes useful as a warning against worse things. Now the trouble of the nineteenth century very largely came from the loss of this, the loss of what we may call the natural and heathen mysticism. When modern critics say that Julius Caesar did not believe in Jupiter, or that Pope Leo did not believe in Catholicism, they overlook an essential difference between those ages and ours. Perhaps Julius did not believe in Jupiter, but he did not disbelieve in Jupiter. There was nothing in his philosophy, or the philosophy of that age that could forbid him to think that there was a spirit, personal and predominant, in the world. But the modern materialists are not permitted to doubt. They are forbidden to believe. Hence, while the heathen might avail himself of accidental omens, queer coincidences, or casual dreams without knowing for certain whether they were really hints from heaven or premonitory movements in his own brain, the modern Christian turned heathen must not entertain such notions at all, but must reject the oracle as the altar. The modern skeptic was drugged against all that was natural in the supernatural. And this was why the modern tyrant marched upon his doom as a tyrant literally pagan might possibly not have done. There is one idea of this kind that runs through most popular tales. Those for instance on which Shakespeare is so often based, an idea that is profoundly immoral, even if the tales are immoral. It is what may be called the flaw in the deed, the idea that if I take my advantage to the full I shall hear of something to my disadvantage. Thus Midas fell into a fallacy about the currency and soon had a reason to become something more than a bimetalist. Thus Macbeth had a fancy about forestry. He could not see the trees for the wood. He forgot that, though a place cannot be moved, the trees that grow on it can. The Shylock had a fallacy of physiology. He forgot that if you break into the house of life you find it a bloody house in the most emphatic sense. But the modern capitalist did not read fairy tales, and never looked for the little omens at the turnings of the road. He or the most intelligent section of him had by now realized his position, and knew in his heart it was a false position. He thought a margin of man out of work was good for his business. He could no longer really think it was good for his country. He could no longer be the old hard-headed man who simply did not understand things. He could only be the hard-hearted man who faced them. But he still marched on. He was sure he had made no mistake. However, he had made a mistake, as definite as a mistake in multiplication. It may be summarized thus that the same inequality and insecurity that makes cheap labor may make bad labor, and at last no labor at all. It was as if a man who wanted something from an enemy should at last reduce the enemy to come knocking at his door in the despair of winter, should keep him waiting in the snow to sharpen the bargain, and then come out to find the man dead upon the doorway. He had discovered the divine boomerang. His sin had found him out. The experiment of individualism, the keeping of the worker half in and half out of work, was far too ingenious not to contain a flaw. It was too delicate a balance to work, entirely within the strength of the starved and the vigilance of the benighted. It was too desperate a course to rely wholly on desperation. And as time went on, the terrible truth slowly declared itself. The degraded class was really degenerating. It was right and proper enough to use a man as a tool, but the tool ceaselessly used was being used up. It was quite reasonable and respectable, of course, to fling a man away like a tool. But when it was flung away in the rain, the tool rusted. But the comparison to a tool was insufficient for an awful reason that had already begun to dawn upon the master's mind. If you pick up a hammer, you do not find a whole family of nails clinging to it. If you fling away a chisel by the roadside, it does not litter and leave a lot of little chisels. But the meanest of the tools, man, had still this strange privilege which God had given him, doubtless by mistake. Despite all improvements in machinery, the most important part of the machinery, the fittings technically described in the trade as hands, were apparently growing worse. The firm was not only encumbered with one useless servant, but he immediately turned himself into five useless servants. The poor should not be emancipated, the old reactionaries used to say, until they are fit for freedom. But if his downrush went on, it looked as if the poor would not stand high enough to be fit for slavery. So at least it seemed doubtless in a great degree, subconsciously, to the man who had wagered all his wealth on the usefulness of the poor to the rich and the dependence of the rich on the poor. The time came at last when the rather reckless breeding in the abyss below ceased to be a supply and began to be something like a wastage, ceased to be something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor could obtain and were therefore disproportionately pursued, and by the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences began to appear. To a much less extent than the eugenics assert, but still to a notable extent in a much looser sense than the eugenics assume, but still in some sort of sense, the types that were inadequate or incalculable or uncontrollable began to increase. Under the hedges of the country, on the seats of the parks, loafing under the bridges or leaning over the embankment began to appear a new race of men, men who are certainly not mad, whom we shall gain no scientific light by calling feeble-minded, but who are in varying individual degrees dazed or drink sodden or lazy or tricky or tired in body and spirit. In a far less degree than the tea-totalers tell us, but still in a large degree, the traffic in gin and bad beer itself a capitalist enterprise fostered the evil, though it had not begun it. Men who had no human bond with the instructed men, men who seemed to him monsters and creatures without mind, became an eyesore in the marketplace and terror on the empty roads. The rich were afraid. Moreover, as I have hinted before, the act of keeping the destitute out of public life and crushing them under confused laws had an effect on their intelligences, which paralyzes them even as a proletariat. Men people talk of reason versus authority, but authority itself involves reason, or its orders would not even be understood. If you say to your valet, look after the buttons on my waistcoat, he may do it, even if you throw a boot at his head. But if you say to him, look after the buttons on my top hat, he will not do it, though you empty a boot-shop over him. If you say to a schoolboy, write out that ode of horrors from memory in the original Latin, he may do it without a flogging. If you say write out that ode of horrors in the original German, he will not do it with a thousand floggings. If he will not learn logic, he certainly will not learn Latin. And the ludicrous laws to which the needy are subjected, such as that which punishes the homeless for not going home, have really, I think, a great deal to do with a certain increase in the sheepessness and short-wittedness, and therefore in their industrial inefficiency. By one of the monstrosities of the feeble-minded theory, a man actually acquitted by judge and jury could then be examined by doctors as to the state of his mind, presumably in order to discover by what diseased eccentricity he had refrained from the crime. In other words, when the police cannot jail a man who is innocent of doing something, they jail him for being too innocent to do anything. I do not suppose the man an idiot at all, but I can believe he feels more like one after the legal process than before. Thus all the factors, the bodily exhaustion, the harassing fear of hunger, the reckless refuge in sexuality and the black botheration of bad laws, combined to make the employee more unemployable. Now it is very important to understand here that there were two courses of action still open to the disappointed capitalists confronted by the new peril of this real or alleged decay. First he might have reversed his machine, so to speak, and started unwinding the long rope of dependency by which he had originally dragged the proletarian to his feet. In other words, he might have seen that the workmen had more money, more leisure, more luxuries, more status in the community, and then trusted to the normal instincts of reasonably happy human beings to produce a generation better-born, bred, and cared for than those tortured types that were less and less used to him. It might still not be too late to rebuild the human house upon such an architectural plan that poverty might fly out the window, with the reasonable prospect of love coming in at the door. In short, he might have let the English poor, the mass of whom were not weak-minded, though more of them were growing weaker, a reasonable chance, in the form of more money, of archiving their eugenical resurrection themselves. It has never been shown, and it cannot be shown, that the method would have failed. But it can be shown, and it must be closely and clearly noted, that the method had very strict limitations from the employer's own point of view. If they made the worker too comfortable, he would not work to increase another's comforts. If they made him too independent, he would not work like a dependent. If, for instance, his wages were so good that he could save out of them, he might cease to be a wage-runner. If his house or garden were his own, he might stand an economic siege in it. The whole capitalist experiment had been built upon his dependence. But now it was getting out of hand, not in the direction of freedom, but of frank helplessness. One might say that his dependence had got independent of control. But there was another way, and towards this the employer's ideas began. First darkly and unconsciously, but now more and more clearly the drift. Giving property, giving leisure, giving status, cost money. But there is one humanist force that costs nothing, as it does not cost the beggar a penny to indulge, so it would not cost the employer a penny to employ. He could not alter or improve the tables or the chairs on the cheap. But there were two pieces of furniture, labeled respectively the husband and the wife, whose relations were much cheaper. He could alter the marriage in the house in such a way as to promise himself the largest possible number of the kind of children he did want, with the smallest possible number of the kind he did not. He could divert the force of sex from producing vagabonds. He could harness to his high engines unbought the red unbroken river of the blood of a man in his youth, as he has already harnessed to them all the wild waste rivers of the world. CHAPTER 5 THE MEANNESS OF THE MOTIVE Now if any ask whether it be imaginable that an ordinary man of the wealthier type should analyze the problem or conceive the plan, the inhumanly far-seeking plan as I have set forth, the answer is certainly not. Many rich employers are too generous to do such a thing. Many are too stupid to know what they are doing. The eugenical opportunity I have described is but an ultimate analysis of a whole drift of thoughts in the type of man who does not analyze his thoughts. He sees a slouching tramp with a sick wife and a string of rickety children and honestly wonders what he can do with them. But the prosperity does not favor self-examination, and he does not even ask himself whether he means how can I help them or how can I use them. What he can still do for them or what they could still do for him. Probably he sincerely means both, but the latter much more than the former. He laments the breaking of the tools of mammon much more than the breaking of the images of God. It would be almost impossible to grope in the limbo of what he does think, but we can assert that there is one thing he does not think. He doesn't think this man might be as jolly as I am if he need not come to me for work or wages. That this is so that at the root the eugenicist is the employer. There are multitudinous proofs on every side, but they are of necessity miscellaneous and in many cases negative. The most enormous is, in a sense, the most negative, that no one seems able to imagine capitalist industrialism being sacrificed to any other object by a curious recurrent slip in the mind, as irritating as a catchy an o'clock, people miss the main thing and concentrate on the main thing. Modern conditions are treated as fixed, though the very word modern implies they are fugitive. Old ideas are treated as impossible, though their very antiquity often proves their permanence. Some years ago some ladies petitioned that the platforms of our big railway station should be raised, as it was more convenient for the hobble skirt. It never occurred to them to change to a sensible skirt. Still less did it occur to him that, compared with all the female fashions that have fluttered about on it, by this time St. Pancras is as historic as St. Peter's. I could still fill this book with examples of the universal unconscious assumption that life and sex must live by the laws of business or industrialism, and not vice versa. Examples from all the magazines, novels, and newspapers. In order to make it brief and typical, I take one case of a more or less eugenic sword from a paper that lies open in front of me, a paper that still bears on its forehead the boast of being peculiarly an organ of democracy and revolt. To this a man writes to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper classes prevent procreation. The man had the horrible playfulness to sign his letter hopeful. Well, there are certainly many methods by which people in the upper classes prevent procreation. One of them is what used to be called platonic friendship, till they found another name for it at the Old Bailey. I do not suppose the hopeful gentleman hopes for this, but some of us find the abortion he does hope for almost as abominable. That however is not the curious point. The curious point is that the hopeful one concludes by saying, When people have large families and small wages, not only is there a high infantile death rate, but often those who do live to grow up are stunted and weakened by having had to share the family income for a time with those who died early. There would be less unhappiness if there were no unwanted children. You will observe that he tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income desperately shared are the fixed points, like the day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage market. There are unwanted children, but unwanted by whom. This man does not really mean that the parents do not want to have them. He means that the employers do not want to pay them properly. Doubtless if you said to him directly, Are you in favor of low wages he would say no. But I am not in this chapter talking about the effect on such modern minds of a cross-examination to which they do not subject themselves. I am talking about the way their minds work, the instinctive trick and turn of their thoughts, the things they assume before the argument, and the way they faintly feel that the world is going. And frankly, the turn of their mind is to tell the child he is not wanted, as the turn of my mind is to tell the profiteer he is not wanted. Motherhood they feel, and the full childhood and the beauty of brothers and sisters are good things in their way. But not so good as a bad wage. About the mutilation of womanhood and the massacre of men unborn he signs himself hopeful. He is hopeful of female indignity, hopeful of human annihilation, but about improving the small bad wage he signs himself hopeless. This is the first evidence of motive, the ubiquitous assumption that life and love must fit into a fixed framework of employment, even as in the case of bad employment. The second evidence is the tacit and total neglect of the scientific question in all the departments in which it is not an employment question, as, for instance, the marriages of the princely patrician or merely plutocratic houses. I do not mean, of course, that no scientific men have originally tackled these, though I do not recall any cases. But I am not talking of the merits of individual men of science, but of the push and power behind this movement, the thing that is able to make it fashionable and politically important. I say if this power were an interest in truth or even in humanity, the first field in which to study would be in the weddings of the wealthy. Not only would the records be more lucid and the examples more in evidence, but the cases would be more interesting and more decisive, for the grand marriages have presented both extremes of the problem of pedigree, first the breeding in, and later the most incongruous cosmopolitan blends. It would really be interesting to note which worked the best or what point of compromise was safest, for the poor about whom the newspaper Eugenus are always talking cannot offer any test cases so complete. Waiters never had to marry waitresses, as princes had to marry princesses. And for the other extreme, housemaids seldom marry red Indians. It may be because they are none to marry, but to the millionaires, the continents are flying railway stations, and the most remote races can be rapidly linked together. A marriage in London or Paris may chain Ravenna to Chicago or Ben Cruchacin to Baghdad. Many European aristocrats marry Americans curiously the most mixed stock of the world, so that the disinterested eugenist with a little trouble might reveal rich stores of Negro or Asiatic blood to his delighted employer, instead of which he dulls our ears and distresses our refinement by tedious denunciations of the monochrome marriages of the poor. For there is something really pathetic about the eugenist neglect of the aristocrat and his family affairs. People still talk about the pride of pedigree, but it strikes me as the one point on which the aristocrats are most morbidly modest. We should be learned eugenists if we were allowed to know half as much of their heredity as we are of their hairdressing. We see the modern aristocrat in the most human poses in the illustrated papers playing with his dog or parrot. Nay, we see him playing with his child or his grandchild. But there is something heart-rending in his refusal to play with his grandfather. There is often something vague and even fantastic about the antecedents of our most established families, which would afford the eugenist admirable scope not only for investigation, but for experiment. Certainly, if he could obtain the necessary powers, the eugenist might bring off some startling effects with the mixed materials of the governing class. Supposed to take wild and hypothetical examples, he were to marry a Scotch Earl, say, to the daughter of a Jewish banker or an English duke, or an American parvenue of semi-Jewish extraction. What would happen? We have here an unexplored field. It remains unexplored not merely through snobbery and cowardice, but because the eugenist, at least the influential eugenist, half-consciously knows it is no part of his job. What he is really wanted for is to get the grip of the governing classes onto the unmanageable output of the poor people. It would not matter in the least if all Lord Caldrey's descendants grew up too weak to hold a tool or turn a wheel. It would matter very much, especially to Lord Caldrey, if all his employees grew up like that. The oligarch can be unemployable because he will not be employed. Thus the practical and popular exponent of eugenics has his face always turned towards the slums, and instinctively thinks in terms of them. If he talks of segregating some incurably vicious type of the sexual sort, he is thinking of a ruffian who assaults girls in lanes. He is not thinking of a millionaire like White, the victim of Thaw. If he speaks of the hopeless or feeble-mindedness, he is speaking of some stunted creature grasping at hopeless lessons in a poor school. He is not thinking of a millionaire like Thaw, the slayer of White. And this is not because he is such a brute as to like people like White or Thaw any more than we do, but because he knows that his problem is the degeneration of the useful classes. Because he knows that White would never have been a millionaire if all his workers had spent themselves on women, as White did, that Thaw would never have been a millionaire if all his servants had been Thaws. The ornaments may be allowed to decay, but the machinery must be mended. That is the second proof of the plutocratic impulse behind oligogenics, that no one thinks of applying it to the prominent classes. No one thinks of applying it where it could most easily be applied. A third proof is the strange new disposition to regard the poor as a race, as if they were a colony of Japanese or Chinese coolies. It can be most clearly seen by comparing it with the old, more individualist, charitable, and as eugenics might say, sentimental view of poverty. In Goldsmith or Dickens or Hood, there is a basic idea that the particular poor person are not to be so poor. It is some accident or some wrong. Oliver Twist or Tiny Tim are fairy princes waiting for their fairy godmother. They are held as slaves, but rather as the hero and heroine of a Spanish or Italian romance were held as slaves by the Moors. The modern poor are getting to be regarded as slaves in the separate and sweeping sense of the Negroes in the plantations. The bondage of the white hero to the black master was regarded as abnormal. The bondage of the black to the white master as normal. The eugenist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence of Tiny Tim as the sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of Cratchit. But, as a matter of fact, we have here a very good instance of how much more practically true to life is sentiment than cynicism. The poor are not a race or even a type. It is senseless to talk about breeding them. For they are not a breed. They are, in cold fact, what Dickens describes, a dustbin of individual accidents, of damage dignity, and often of damage gentility. The class very largely consists of perfectly promising children lost like Oliver Twist or crippled like Tiny Tim. It contains very valuable things like most dustbins. But the eugenist delusion of the barbaric breed in the abyss affects even those more gracious philanthropists who almost certainly do want to assist the destitute and not merely to exploit them. It seems to affect not only their minds, but their very eyesight. Thus, for instance, Mrs. Alec Tweety almost scornfully asks, when we go through the slums, do we see beautiful children? The answer is, yes, very often indeed. I have seen children in the slums quite pretty enough to be little now or the outcast whom Hood called young and so fair. Nor has the beauty anything necessarily to do with health. There are beautiful healthy children, beautiful dying children, ugly dying children, ugly uproarious children in Petticoat Lane or Park Lane. There are people of every physical and mental type of every sort of health and breeding in a single back street. They have nothing in common but the wrong we do to them. The important point is, however, that there is more fact and realism in the wildest and most elegant fictions about disinherited dukes and long lost daughters than there is in this eugenic attempt to make the poor all of a peace, a sort of black fungoid growth that is ceaselessly increasing in a chasm. There is a cheap sneer at poor landlady's that they always say they have seen better days. Nine times out of ten they say it, because it is true. What can be said of the great mass of Englishmen by anyone who knows any history except that they have seen better days? And a landlady's claim is not snobbish but rather spirited. It is her testimony to the truth in the old tales of which I spoke that she ought not to be so poor or so survival in status that a normal person ought to have more property and more power in the state than that. Such dreams of lost dignity are perhaps the only things that stand between us and the cattle-breeding paradise now promised. Such dreams by any means impotent. I remembered Mr. T. P. O'Connor wrote an interesting article about Madame Humbert in the course of which he said that Irish peasants and probably most peasants tended to have a half-fictitious family legend about an estate to which they were entitled. This was written in the time when Irish peasants were landless in their land and the delusion of the moneylenders who ruled the landlords. But the dream has conquered the realities. The phantom farms have materialized merely by tenaciously affirming the kind of pride that comes after a fall by remembering the old civilization and refusing the new, by recurring to an old claim that seemed to most Englishmen like the lie of a broken-down lodging-housekeeper at Margate. By all this the Irish have got what they want in solid mud and turf. The imaginary estate has conquered the three estates of the realm. But the homeless Englishman must not even remember a home. So far from his house being his castle he must not even have a castle in the air. He must have no memories. That is why he has taught no history. Why he has told none of the truth about the medieval civilization except a few cruelties and mistakes in chemistry? Why does a medieval burger never appear till he can appear in a shirt and a halter? Why does a medieval monastery never appear till it is corrupt enough to shock the innocence of Henry VIII? Why do we hear of the one charter? That of the barons and not a word of the charters of the carpenters, smiths, shipwrights, and all the rest? The reason is that the English peasant is not only not allowed to have an estate he is not even allowed to have lost one. The past has to be painted pitch black that it may be worse than the present. There is one strong, startling, outstanding thing about eugenics and that is its meanness. Wealth and the social science supported by wealth had tried an inhuman experiment. The experiment had entirely failed. They sought to make wealth accumulate and they made men decay. Then instead of confessing the error and trying to restore the wealth or attempting to repair the decay they are trying to cover their first cruel experiment with a more cruel experiment. They put a poisonous plaster on a poisoned wound. Filest of all they actually quote the bewilderment produced among the poor by their first blunder as a reason for allowing them to blunder again. They are apparently ready to arrest all the opponents of their system as mad merely because the system was maddening. Suppose a captain had collected volunteers in a hot waste country by the assurance that he could lead them to water and knew where to meet the rest of his regiment. Suppose he led them wrong to a place where the regiment could not be for days and there was no water. And suppose sunstroke struck them down on the sand after man and they kicked and danced and raved. And when at last the regiment came suppose the captain successfully concealed his mistake because all his men had suffered too much from it to testify to its ever having occurred. What would you think of the gallant captain? It is pretty much what I think of this particular captain of industry. Of course nobody supposes that all capitalists or most capitalists are conscious of any such intellectual trick. Most of them are as much bewildered as the battered proletariat. But there are some who are less well-meaning and more mean. These are leading their more generous colleagues towards the fulfilments of this ungenerous evasion if not towards the comprehension of it. Now a ruler of the capitalist civilization who has come to consider the idea of ultimately hurting and breeding the workers like cattle and certain contemporary problems to review, he has to consider what forces still exist in the modern world for the frustration of his design. The first question is how much remains of the old ideal of individual liberty. The second question is how far the modern mind is committed to such egalitarian ideas as may be implied in socialism. The third is whether there is any power of resistance in the tradition of the capitalist itself. These three questions for the future I shall consider in their order in the final chapters that follow. It is enough to say here that I think the progress of these ideals has broken down at the precise point where they will fail to prevent the experiment. Briefly the progress will have deprived the capitalist of his old individualist scruples without committing him to his new collectivist obligations. He is in a very perilous position for he has ceased to be a liberal without becoming a socialist. And the bridge by which he was crossing has broken above an abyss of anarchy. Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton Section 14 Part 2 The Real Aim Chapter 6 The Eclipse of Liberty If such a thing as the eugenics sociology had been suggested in the period from Fox to Gladstone it would have been far more fiercely repudiated by the Reformers than by the Conservatives. If Tories had regarded it as an insult to marriage radicals would have far more resolutely regarded it as an insult to citizenship. But in the interval we have suffered from a process resembling a sort of mystical parasite such as is told of so many gods and is true of so many great ideas. Liberty has produced skepticism and skepticism has destroyed Liberty. The lovers of Liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited and were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined when they were really leaving it undefended. Men finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom. But the important point to seize about this reactionary skepticism is that as it is bound to be unlimited in theory so it is bound to be unlimited in practice. In other words, the modern mind is set in an attitude which would enable it to advance not only towards eugenic legislation but towards any conceivable or inconceivable extravagances of eugenics. Those who reply to any plea for freedom invariably fall into a certain trap. I have debated with numberless different people on these matters and I confess I find it amusing to be tumbling into it one after another. I remember discussing it before a club a very active and intelligent suffragist and I cast it here for convenience in the form which it there assumed. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I say that to take away a poor man's pot of beer is to take away a poor man's personal liberty. It is very vital to note what is the usual or almost universal reply that people hardly ever do reply for some reason or another by saying that a man's liberty consists of such and such things but that beer is an exception that cannot be classed among them for such and such reasons. What they almost invariably do say is something like this. After all, what is liberty? Man must live as a member of society and must obey those laws which etc. etc. In other words, they collapse into a complete confession that they are attacking all liberty and any liberty that they do deny the very existence of the very possibility of liberty. In the very form of the answer, they admit the full scope of the accusation against them and trying to rebut the smaller accusation they plead guilty to the larger one. This distinction is very important as can be seen from any practical parallel. Suppose we wake up in the middle of the night and find that a neighbor has entered the house not by the front door but by the skylight. We may suspect that he has come after the fine old family jewelry. We may be reassured if he can refer it to a really exceptional event such as that he fell onto the roof out of an airplane or climbed onto the roof to escape from a mad dog. Short of the incredible, the stranger the story, the better the excuse. For an extraordinary event requires an extraordinary excuse. But we shall hardly be reassured if he merely gazes at us in a dreamy and wistful fashion and says, after all, what is property? Why should material objects be thus artificially attached? etc. etc. We shall merely realize that his attitude allows of his taking the jewelry and everything else. Or if the neighbor approaches us carrying a large knife dripping with blood we may be convinced by his story that he killed another neighbor in self-defense, that the quiet gentleman next door was really a homicidal maniac. We shall know that the homicidal mania is exceptional and that we ourselves are so happy as not to suffer from it and being free from the disease may be free from the danger. But it will not soothe us for the man with the gory knife to say softly and pensively, after all, what is human life? Why should we cling to it? Brief at best, sad at the brightest, it is itself but a disease from which etc. etc. We shall perceive that the skeptic is in a mood not only to murder us but to massacre everybody in the street. Exactly the same effect which would be produced by the question of what is property and what is life is produced by the question of what is liberty. It leaves the questioner free to disregard any liberty or, in other words, to take any liberties. The very thing he says is an anticipatory excuse for anything he may choose to do. If he gags a man to prevent him from indulging in profane swearing or locks him in the cold cellar to guard against his going on the spree, he can still be satisfied with saying, after all, what is liberty, man, is a member of etc. etc. That is the problem, and that is why there is now no protection against eugenics or any other experiments. If the man who took away beer as an unlawful pleasure had paused for a moment to define the lawful pleasures, there might be a different situation. If the man who had denied one liberty had taken the opportunity to affirm other liberties, there might be some defense for them. But it never occurs to them to admit any liberties at all. It never so much as crosses their minds. Hence the excuse for the last oppression. We'll always serve as well for the next oppression, and to that tyranny there can be no end. Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret and sacred places of personal freedom, where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it, and especially the sanctuary of sex. It is as easy to take away a man's wife or baby as to take away his beer when you can say what is liberty. Just as it is as easy to cut off his head and to cut off his hair if you are free to say what is life. There is no rational philosophy of human rights generally disseminated among the populace to which we can appeal in defense of even the most intimate or individual things that anyone can imagine. For so far as there was a vague principle in these things, that principle has been wholly changed. It used to be said that a man could have liberty so long as it did not interfere with the liberty of others. This did afford some rough justification for the ordinary legal view of the man with the pot of beer. For instance, it was logical to allow some degree of distinction between beer and tea on the ground that a man may be moved by excess of beer to throw the pot at someone's head. And it may be said that the spinster is seldom moved by excess of tea to throw the teapot at anyone's head. But the whole ground of argument is now changed for people do not consider what the drunkard does to others by throwing the pot but what he does to himself by drinking the beer. The argument is based on health, and it is said that the government must safeguard the health of the community. And the moment that is said, there ceases to be the shadow of a difference between beer and tea. People can certainly spoil their health with tea or with tobacco or with twenty other things, and there is no escape for the hygienic logician except to restrain and regulate them all. If he is to control the health of the community, he must necessarily control all the habits of all the citizens. And among the rest, their habits in the matter of sex. But there is more than this. It is not only true that it is the last liberties of man that are being taken away and not merely his first or most superficial liberties. It is also inevitable that the last liberties should be taken first. It is inevitable that the most private matter should be the most underpublic coercion. This inverse variation is very important, though very little realized. If a man's personal health is a public concern, his most private acts are more public than his most public acts. The official must deal more directly with his cleaning his teeth in the morning than with his using his tongue in the marketplace. The inspector must interfere more with how he sleeps in the middle of the night than with how he works in the course of the day. The private citizen must have much less to say about his bath or his bedroom window than about his vote or his banking account. The policeman must be in a new sense of private detective and shadow him in private affairs rather than in public affairs. A policeman must shut doors behind him for fear he should sneeze or shove pillows under him for fear he should snore. All this and things far more fantastic follow from the simple formula that the state must make itself responsible for the health of the citizen. But the point is that the policeman must deal primarily and promptly with the citizen in his relation to his home and only indirectly and more doubtfully with the citizen in his relation to his city. By the whole logic of this test, the king must hear what is said in the inner chamber and hardly notice what is proclaimed from the housetops. We have heard of a revolution that turns everything upside down, but this is almost literally a revolution that turns everything inside out. If a wary reactionary of the tradition of Metternich had wished in the nineteenth century to reverse the democratic tendency, he would naturally have begun by depriving the democracy of its margin of more dubious powers over the distant things. He might well begin, for instance, by removing the control of foreign affairs from popular assemblies. And there is a case for saying that a people may understand their own affairs without knowing anything whatever about foreign affairs. Then he might centralize great national questions leaving a great deal of local government in local questions. This would proceed so far for a long time before it occurred to the blackest terrorist of the despotic ages to interfere with a man's own habits in his own house. But the new sociologists and legislators are, by the nature of their theory, bound to begin where the despots leave off, even if they leave off where the despots begin. For them, as they would put it, the first things must be the very fountain of life, love, and birth, and babyhood. And these are always covered fountains flowing in the quiet courts of the home. For them, as Mr. H. G. Wells put it, life itself may be regarded merely as a tissue of births. Thus they are coerced by their own rational principle to begin all coercion at the other end, at the inside end. What happens to the outside end, the external and remote powers of the citizen? They do not very much care. And it is probable that the democratic institution of recent centuries will be allowed to decay in undisturbed dignity for a century or two more. Thus our civilization will find itself in an interesting situation, not without humor, in which the citizen is still supposed to wield imperial powers over the ends of the earth, but has admittedly no power over his own body and soul at all. He will still be consulted by politicians about whether opium is good for China men, but not about whether ale is good for him. He will be cross-examined for his opinions about the danger of allowing Kamasatka to have a war fleet, but not about allowing his own child to have a wooden sword. About all he will be consulted about, the delicate diplomatic crisis created by the proposed marriage of the Emperor of China, and not allowed to marry as he pleases. Part of this prophecy, or probability, has already been accomplished. The rest of it, in the absence of any protest, is in process of accomplishment. It would be easy to give an almost endless catalogue of examples to show how, in dealing with the poorer classes at least, coercion has already come near to a direct control of the relations of the sexes. But I am much more concerned in this chapter to point out that all these things have been adopted in principle, even where they have not been adopted in practice. It is much more vital to realize that the reformers have possessed themselves of a principle which will cover all such things if it be granted, and which is not sufficiently comprehended to be contradicted. It is a principle whereby the deepest things of the flesh and spirit must have the most direct relationship with the dictatorship of the state. They must have it by the whole reason and rationale upon which the thing depends. It is a system that might be symbolized by the telephone from headquarters standing by a man's bed. He must have a relation to government like his relation to God. That is, the more he goes into the inner chambers and the more he closes the doors, the more he is alone with the law. The social machinery which makes such a state uniform and submissive will be worked outwards from the household as from a handle or a single mechanical knob or button. In a horrible sense, loaded with fear and shame and every detail of dishonor, it will be true to say that charity begins at home. Charity will begin at home in the sense that all home children will be like charity children. Philanthropy will begin at home for all householders will be like paupers. Police administration will begin at home for all citizens will be like convicts, and when health and the humours of daily life have passed into the domain of this social discipline, when it is admitted that the community must primarily control the primary habits, when all laws begin, so to speak, next to the skin or nearest the vitals, then indeed it will appear absurd that marriage and maternity should not be similarly ordered. Then indeed it will seem to be illogical and it will be illogical that love should be free when life has lost its freedom. So passed to all appearance from the minds of men the strange dream and fantasy called freedom. Whatever be the future of these evolutionary experiments and their effect on civilization there is one land at least that has something to mourn. For us in England something will have perished which our fathers valued all the more because they hardly troubled to name it. And whatever be the stars of a more universal destiny the great star of our night has set. The English had missed many other things that men of the same origins had achieved or retained. Not to them was given, like the French, to establish eternal communes with clear codes of equality. Not to them, like the southern Germans, to keep the popular culture of their songs. Not to them, like the Irish, was it given to die daily for a great religion. But a spirit had been with them from the first which fenced with a hundred quaint customs and legal fictions the way of a man who wished to walk nameless and alone. It was not for nothing that they forgot all their laws to remember the name of an outlaw and filled the green heart of England with the figure of Robin Hood. It was not for nothing that even their princes of art and letters had about them something of kings incognito undiscovered by formal or academic fame so that no eye can follow the young Shakespeare as he came up the green lanes from Stratford or the young Dickens when he first lost himself among the lights of London. It is not for nothing that the very roads are crooked and capricious so that a man looking down on a map like a sneaky labyrinth could tell that he was looking on the home of a wandering people. A spirit, at once wild and familiar, rested upon its woodlands like a wind at rest. If that spirit be indeed departed, it matters little that it has been driven out by perversions it had itself permitted. By monsters it had idly let loose. Industrialism and capitalism and the rage for physical science were English experiments in the sense that the English lent themselves to their encouragement. But there was something else behind them and within them that was not they. Its name was liberty and it was our life. It may be that this delicate and tenacious spirit has at last evaporated. If so, it matters little what becomes of the external experiments of our nation in later time. That at which we look will be a dead thing alive with its own parasites. The English will have destroyed England. CHAPTER VII THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIALISM Socialism is one of the simplest ideas in the world and it has always puzzled me how there came to be so much bewilderment and misunderstanding and miserable mutual slander about it. At one time I agreed with socialism because it was simple. Now I disagree with socialism because it is too simple. Yet most of its opponents still seem to treat it not merely as an iniquity but as a mystery of iniquity which seems to mystify them even more than it meddens them. It may not seem strange that its antagonists should be puzzled about what it is. It may appear more curious and interesting that its admirers are equally puzzled. Its foes used to denounce socialism as anarchy which is its opposite. Its friends seem to suppose that it is a sort of optimism which is almost as much of an opposite. Friends and foes alike talked as if it involved a sort of faith in ideal human nature. Why? I could never imagine. The socialist system, in a more special sense than any other, is founded not on optimism but on original sin. It proposes that the state as the consequences of the community should possess all primary forms of property and that obviously on the ground that men cannot be trusted to own or barter or combine or compete without injury to themselves. Just as the state might own all the guns lest people should shoot each other so this state would own all the gold and land lest they should cheat or rack rent or exploit each other. It seems extraordinarily simple and even obvious and so it is. It is too obvious to be true but while it is obvious it seems almost incredible that anybody ever thought it optimistic. I am myself primarily opposed to socialism or collectivism or Bolshevism or whatever we call it for a primary reason not immediately involved here. The ideal of property. I say the ideal and not merely the idea and this alone disposes the moral mistake in the matter. It disposes of all the dreary doubts and the antisocialists about men not yet being angels and all the yet dreary hopes of the socialists about men soon being supermen. I do not admit that private property is a concession to baseness and selfishness. I think it is a point of honor. I think it is the most truly popular of all points of honor. But this, though it has everything to do with my plea for domestic dignity, has nothing to do with this passing summary of the situation of socialism. I only remark in passing that it is vain for the more vulgar sort of capitalist sneering at ideals to say to me that in order to have socialism you must alter human nature. I answer yes, you must alter it for the worse. The clouds were considerably cleared away from the meaning of socialism by the Fabians of the nineties. Mr. Bernard Shaw is sort of anti-romantic quiati who charge chivalry as chivalry-charged windmills with Sidney Webb for Hisancho Pansa. In so far as these paladins had a castle to defend we may say their castle was the post office the red pillar box was the immovable post against which the irresistible force of capitalist individualism was arrested. The postmen who said that nothing could be managed by the state were forced to admit that they trusted all their business letters and business telegrams to the state. After all it was not found necessary to have an office competing with another office trying to send out pinker postage stamps or more picturesque postmen. It was not necessary to efficiency that the postmistress should buy a penny stamp for a half penny and sell it for two pence or that she should haggle and beat customers down about the price of a postal order or that she should always take tenders for telegrams. There was obviously nothing actually impossible about the state management of national needs and the post office was at least tolerably managed though it was not always a model employer by any means. It might be made so by similar methods. It was not impossible that equitable pay and even equal pay could be given to the postmaster general and the postman. We had only to extend this rule of public responsibility and we should escape from all the terror of insecurity and torture of compassion which haggles humanity in the insane extremes of economic inequality and injustice. As Mr. Shaw put it, a man must save society's honour before he can save his own. That was one side of the argument that the change would remove inequality and there was an answer on the other side. It can be stated most truly by putting another model, institution and edifice side by side with the post office. It is even more of an ideal Republic or Commonwealth without competition or private profit. It supplies its citizens not only with stamps but with clothes and food and lodging and all they require. It observes considerable level of equality in these things, notably in the clothes. It not only supervises the letters but all their other human communications, notably the sort of evil communications that corrupt good manners. This twin model to the post office is called the prison and much of the scheme for a model state was regarded by its opponents as a scheme for a model prison. Good because it fed men equally but less acceptable since it imprisoned them equally. It is better to be in a bad prison than in a good one. From the standpoint of the prisoner this is not at all a paradox if only because in a bad prison he is more likely to escape. But apart from that a man was in many ways better off in the old dirty and corrupt prisons where he could bribe turnkeys to bring him drink and meet fellow prisoners to drink with. Now that is exactly the difference between the present system and the proposed system. It is not worth talking about respects the present system. Capitalism is a corrupt prison. That is the best that can be said for capitalism. But it is something to be said for it. For a man is a little freer in that corrupt prison than he would be in a complete prison. As a man can find one jailer more lax than another so he could find one employer more kind than another. He has at least a choice of tyrants. In any other case he finds the same tyrant at every turn. Mr. Shaw and other rational socialists have agreed that the state would be in practice government by a small group. Any independent man who disliked that group would find his foe waiting for him at the end of every road. It may be said of socialism therefore very briefly that its friends recommended it as increasing equality while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty. On the one hand it was said that the state could provide homes and meals for all and on the other it was answered that this could only be done by state officials who would inspect houses and regulate meals. The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in socialism and nothing that had ever been desired in it. Since it was supposed to gain equality at the sacrifice of liberty we proceed to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality. Indeed there was not the faintest attempt to gain equality, least of all economic equality but there was a very spirited and vigorous effort to eliminate liberty by means of an entirely new crop of crude regulations and interferences but it was not the social estate regulating those whom it fed like children or even like convicts. It was the capital estate rating those whom it had trampled and deserted in every sort of den like outlaws or broken men. It occurred to the wiser sociologists that after all it would be easy to proceed more promptly to the main business of bullying men without having gone through the laborious preliminary business of supporting them. After all it was easy to inspect the house without having helped to build it. It was even possible with luck to inspect the house in time to prevent it being built. All that is described in the documents of the housing problem. What the people of this age loved problems and hated solutions it would be easy to restrict the diet without providing the dinner. All that can be found in the documents of what is called temperance reform. In short people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of socialism but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad. All that official discipline about which the socialists themselves were in doubt or at least on the defensive was taken over bodily by the capitalists. They have now added all the bureaucratic tyrannies of a social estate to the old plutocratic tyrannies of a capitalist state. For the vital point is that it did not in the smallest degree diminish the inequalities of a capitalist state. It simply destroyed such individual liberties as remained among its victims. It did not enable any man to build a better house. It only limited the houses he might live in or how he might manage to live there, forbidding him to keep pigs or poultry or to sell beer or cider. It did not even add anything to a man's wages. It only took away something from a man's wages and locked it up, whether he liked it or not, in a sort of money box which was regarded as a medicine chest. It does not send food into the house to feed the children. It only sends an inspector into the house to punish the parents for having no food to feed them. It does not see that they have got a fire. It only punishes them for not having a fireguard. It does not even occur to it Now this anomalous situation will probably ultimately evolve into the survival state of Mr. Bellock's thesis. The poor will sink into slavery, yet might as correctly be said that the poor will rise into slavery. That is to say sooner or later it is very probable that the rich will take over the philanthropic as well as the tyrannic side of the bargain, and will feed men like slaves as well as hunting them like outlaws. For the purpose of my own argument it is not necessary to carry the process so far as this, or indeed any farther than it has already gone. The purely negative stage of interference at which we have stuck for the present is in itself quite favorable to all these eugenical experiments. The capitalist, whose half-conscious thought and course of action I have simplified into a story in the preceding chapters finds this insufficient solution quite sufficient for his purposes. What he has felt for a long time is that he must check or improve the reckless and random breeding of the submerged race, which is at once outstripping his requirements and failing to fulfill his needs. Now the anomalous situation has already accustomed him to stopping things. The first interferences with sex need only be negative, and there are already negative interferences without number, and the change of socialism brings us to the same conclusion as that of the ideal liberty as formally professed by liberalism. The ideal of liberty is lost and the ideal of socialism is changed until it is a mere excuse for the oppression of the poor. The first movements for intervention in the deepest domestic concerns of the poor all had this note of negative interference. Official papers were sent round by mothers in poor streets. Papers in which a total stranger asked these respectable women questions which a man would be killed for asking in the classes of what were called gentlemen, or in the countries of what were called free men. They were questions supposed to refer to the conditions of maternity. But the point is here that the reformers did not begin by building up those economic or material conditions. They did not attempt to pay money for the privileged property to create those conditions. They never give anything except orders. Another form of the intervention and one already mentioned is the kidnapping of children upon the most fantastic excuses of sham psychology. Some people established an apparatus of tests and trick questions which might make an amusing game of riddles for the family fireside, but seems an insufficient reason to create and dismembering the family. Others became interested in the hopeless moral condition of children born in the economic condition which they did not attempt to approve. They were great on the fact that crime was a disease and carried on their criminological studies so successfully as to open the reformatory for little boys who played truant. There was no reformatory for reformers. I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease. Finally, one thing may be added which is at least clear whether or not the organization of industry will issue positively a genical reconstruction of the family. It has already issued negatively as in the negations already noted in a partial destruction of it. It took the form of a propaganda of popular divorce, calculating at least to sum the masses to a new notion of the shifting and regrouping of families. I do not consider the question of divorce here as I have done elsewhere in its intrinsic character. I merely noted as one of these negative reforms which have been substituted for positive economic equality. It was preached with a weird hilarity as if the suicide of love were something not only humane but happy. But it need not be explained and certainly it need not be denied that the harassed poor of a diseased industrialism were indeed maintaining marriage under every disadvantage and often found individual relief in divorce. Industrialism does produce many unhappy marriages for the same reason that it produces so many unhappy men. But all the reforms were directed to rescuing the industrialism rather than the happiness. Poor couples were to be divorced because they were already divided. Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with modern abuses. When the tears are found in the wheat the greatest promptitude and practicality is always shown in burning the wheat and gathering the tears into the barn. And since the serpent coiled about the chalice had dropped his poison in the wine of Cana analysts were instantly active in the effort to preserve the poison and to pour away the wine. End of Section 15 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton Section 16 Part 2 The Real Aim Chapter 8 The End of the Household of Gods The only place where it's possible to find an echo of the mind of the English masses is either in conversation or in comic songs. The latter are obviously the more dubious but they are the only things recorded and quotable that come anywhere near it. We talk about the popular press but in truth there is no popular press. It may be a good thing but anyhow most readers would be mildly surprised if a newspaper-leading article were written in the language of a navvy. Sometimes the press is interested in things in which the democracy is also genuinely interested such as horse racing. Sometimes the press is about as popular as the press gang. We talk of Labour leaders in the Parliament but they would be highly unparliamentary if they talked like Labourers. The Bolshevists, I believe profess to promote something that they call proletarian art which only shows the word Bolshevism can sometimes be abbreviated into Bosch. That sort of Bolshevist is not a proletarian but rather the very thing he accuses everyone else of being. The Bolshevist is above all a bourgeoisie, a Jewish intellectual of the town and the real case against industrial intellectualism could hardly be put better than in this very comparison. There has never been such a thing as a proletarian art but there has emphatically been such a thing as peasant art and the only literature which even reminds us of the real tone and talk of the English working classes and in the comic song of the English Music Hall I first heard one of them on My Voice to America in the midst of the sea within the sight of the new world with the Statue of Liberty beginning to loom up on the horizon. From the lips of a young Scotch engineer of all people in the world I heard for the first time these immortal words from a London Music Hall song. Fathers got the sack from the waterworks because he might set the waterworks on fire. As I told my friends in America I think it no part of a patriot to boast and boasting itself is certainly not a thing to boast of. I doubt the persuasive power of English as exemplified in Kipling and no one can easily force it on foreigners too much even as exemplified in Dickens. I am no imperialist and only on rare and proper occasions a jingo but when I hear those words about Father and the waterworks when I hear under far off foreign skies anything so gloriously English as that then indeed I said to them then indeed I thank the goodness and the grace that on my birth has smiled and made me as you see me here a little English child. But that noble stanza about the waterworks has other elements of nobility besides nationality. It provides a compact and almost perfect summary of the whole social problem in industrial countries like England and America. If I wish to set forth systematically the elements of the ethical and economic problem in Pittsburgh or Sheffield I could do no better than to take these few words as a text and divide them up like the head of a sermon. Let me note the points in some rough fashion here. 1. Father This word is still in use among the more ignorant and ill-paid of the industrial community and is the badge of an old convention or unit called the family. A man and woman having vowed to be faithful to each other the man makes himself responsible for all the children of the woman and is thus generically called it must not be supposed that the poet or singer is necessarily one of the children. It may be the wife called by the same ritual mother. Poor English wives say father as poor Irish wives say himself, meaning the titular head of the house. The point to seize is that among the ignorant this convention or custom still exists. Father and the family are the foundations of thought. The natural authority still comes natural to the poet but it is overlaid and thwarted with more artificial authorities. The official, the schoolmaster, the policeman, the employer and so on. What these forces fighting the family are we shall see my dear brethren when we pass to our second heading which is Got the Sack. This idiom marks a later stage in the history of the language than the comparatively primitive word father. It is needless to discuss whether the term comes from Turkey or some other servile society. In America they say that father has been fired but it involves the whole of the unique economic system under which father has now to live. Though assumed by a family tradition to be a master he can now by industrial tradition be only a particular kind of servant a servant who has not the security of a slave. If he owned his own shop and tools he could not get the sack. If his master owned him he could not get the sack. The slave and the guildsman know where they will sleep every night. It was only the proletarian of individualist industrialism who could get the sack if not in the style of the Bosphorus at least in the sense of the embankment. We pass on to the third heading. From the Waterworks This detail of father's life is very important for this is the reply to most of the socialists as the last section is to so many of the capitalists. The Waterworks which employed father is a very large official impersonal institution. Whether it is technically a bureaucratic department or a big business makes little or no change for the father in connection with it. The Waterworks might or might not be nationalized and it would make no necessary difference to father being fired and no difference at all to his being accused of playing with fire. In fact if the capitalists are more likely to give him the sack the socialists are even more likely to forbid him the smoke. There is no freedom for father except in some sort of private ownership of things like water and fire. If he owned his own well his water could never be cut off and while he sits by his own fire his pipe can never be put out. That is the real meaning of property and the real argument against socialism probably the only argument against socialism for smoking. Nothing marks this queer intermediate phase of industrialism more strangely than while employers still claim the right to sack him like a stranger. They are already beginning to claim the right to supervise him like a son. Economically he can go and starve on the embankment but ethically and hygienically he must be controlled and cuddled in the nursery. Government repudiates all responsibility for seeing that he gets his bread but it anxiously accepts all responsibility for seeing that he does not get beer. It passes an insurance act to force him to provide himself with medicine but it is avowedly indifferent to whether he is able to provide himself with meals. Thus while the sack is inconsistent with the family the supervision is really inconsistent with the sack. The whole thing is a tangled chain of contradictions. It is true that in the special and sacred text of scripture we are here considering the smoking is forbidden on a general and public and not on a medicinal and private ground. But it is nonetheless relevant to remember that as his masters have already proved that alcohol is a poison they may soon prove that nicotine is a poison and it is most significant of all that this sort of danger is even greater in what is called the new democracy of America than in what is called the old oligarchy of England. When I was in America people were already defending tobacco. People who defend tobacco are on the road to proving that daylight is defensible or that it is not really sinful to sneeze. In other words, they are quietly going mad of his old cherry briar. Here we have the intermediate and anomalous position of the institution of property. The sentiments still exist even among the poor or perhaps specially among the poor but it is attached to toys rather than tools to the minor products rather than to the means of production. But something of the sanity of ownership is still to be observed. For instance, the element of custom and continuity. It was an old cherry briar systematically smoked by father in spite of all wiles and temptations to wood-binds an old companion possibly connected with various romantic or diverting events in father's life. It is perhaps a relic as well as a trinket. But because it is not a true tool, because it gives the man no grip on the creative energies of society it is with all the rest of his self-respect at the mercy of the thing called the sack. When he gets the sack from the waterworks it is only too probable he will have to pawn his old cherry briar because he might set the waterworks on fire. And that single line like the lovely single lines of the great poets is so full so final so perfect a picture of all the laws we pass and all the reasons we give for them so exact an analysis of the logic of all our precautions at the present time that the pen falls even from the hands of the commentator piece is left to speak for itself. Some such analysis as the above gives a better account than most of the anomalous attitude and situation of the English proletarian today. It is more appropriate because it is expressed in the words he actually uses which certainly do not include the word proletarian. It will be noted that everything that goes to make up that complexity is in an unfinished state. Property has not quite finished. Slavery has quite arrived. Marriage exists under difficulties. Social regimentation exists under restraints or rather under sub-refuges. The question which remains is which force is gaining on the other and whether the old forces are capable of resisting the new. I hope they are. But I recognize that they resist under more than one heavy handicap. The chief of these is that the family feeling of the workmen is by this time rather an instinct than an ideal. The obvious thing to protect an ideal is a religion. The obvious thing to protect the ideal of marriage is the Christian religion. And for various reasons which only a history of England could explain, though it hardly ever does, the working classes of this country have been much cut off from Christianity. I do not dream of denying indeed I should take every opportunity of affirming that monogamy and its domestic responsibilities can be defended on rational apart from religious grounds. But a religion is the practical protection of any moral idea which has to be popular and which has to be pugnacious. And our ideal if it is to survive will have to be both. Those who make merry over the landlady who has seen better days of whom something has been said already, commonly speak in the same jovial journalist about her household goods as her household gods. It would be much startled if they discovered how right they are. Exactly what is lacking to the modern materialist is something that can be what the household gods were to the ancient world. The household gods of the even were not only wood and stone. At least there is always much more than that in the stone of the hearthstone and the wood of the roof tree. So long as Christianity continued the tradition of patron saints and portable relics this idea of a blessing on the household could continue. If men had not domestic divinities at least they had divine domesticities. If Christianity was chilled with Puritanism and Rationalism this inner warmth or secret fire in the house faded on the hearth. But some of the embers still glow, or at least glimmer, and there is still a memory among the poor that their material possessions are something sacred. I know poor men for whom it is the romance of their lives to refuse big sums of money for an old copper warming pan. They don't want it in any sense of base utility. They do not use it as a warming pan. But it warms them for all that. It is indeed as Sergeant Buzzfuzz humorously observed a cover for a hidden fire. And the fire is that which burned before the strange and uncouth wooden gods like giant dolls in the huts of ancient Italy. It is a household god. And I can imagine some such neglected and unlucky Englishman dying with his eyes on the red gleam of that piece of copper as happier men have died with their eyes on the golden gleam of a chalice or cross. It will thus be noted that there has always been some connection between a mystical belief and the materials of domesticity that they generally go together and that now in a more mournful sense they are gone together. The working classes have no reserves of property with which to defend their relics of religion. They have no religion with which to sanctify and dignify their property. Above all they are under the enormous disadvantage of being right without knowing yet. They hold their sound principles as if they were sullen prejudices. They almost secret their small property as if it were often a poor woman will tell a magistrate that she sticks to her husband with the defiant and desperate air of a wanton resolved to run away from her husband. Often she will cry as hopelessly and as it were helplessly when deprived of her child as if she were a child deprived of her doll. Indeed a child in the street crying for her lost doll would probably receive more sympathy than she does. Meanwhile the fun goes on and many such conflicts are recorded even in the newspapers between heartbroken parents and housebreaking philanthropists always with one issue of course. There are any number of them that never get into the newspapers and we have to be flippant about these things as the only alternative to being rather fierce. And I have no desire to end on a note of universal ferocity. I know that many who set such machinery in motion do so for motives of sincere but confused compassion and many more from a dull but not dishonorable medical or legal habit. But if I and those who agree with me tend to some harshness and abruptness of condemnation of unworthy people need not be altogether impatient with our impatience. It is surely beneath them in the scope of their great schemes to complain of protests so ineffectual about wrongs so individual. I have considered in this chapter the chances of general democratic defense of domestic honor and have been compelled to the conclusion that they are not at present hopeful and it is at least clear that we cannot be founding on them any personal hopes. If this conclusion leaves us defeated we submit that it leaves us disinterested. Ours is not the sort of protest at least that promises anything even to the demagogue let alone the sycophant. Those we serve will never rule and those we pity will never rise. Parliament will never be surrounded by a mob of submerged grandmothers brandishing pawn tickets. There is no trade union of defective children. It is not very probable that modern government will be overturned by a few poor dingy devils who are sent to prison by mistake or rather by ordinary accident. Surely it is not for those magnificent socialists or those great reformers or reconstructors of capitalism sweeping onward to their scientific triumphs and caring for none of these things to murmur at our vain indignation. At least if it is vain it is less venal and insofar as it is hopeless it is also thankless. They have their great campaigns and cosmopolitan systems for the regimentation of millions and the records of science and progress. They need not be angry with us who plead for those who will never read our words or reward our effort even with gratitude. They need surely have no worse moods toward us than mystification seeing that in recalling these small things of broken hearts or homes we are but recording what cannot be recorded. Privial tragedies will fade faster and faster in the flux of time. Cries that fail in a furious and infinite wind wild words of despair that are written only upon running water unless, indeed, as some so stubbornly and strangely say, they are somewhere cut deep into a rock in the red granite of the wrath of God. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton Section 17 Part 2 The Real Aim Chapter 9 A Short Chapter Round about the year 1913 Eugenics was turned from a fed fashion. Then if I may so summarize the situation the joke began in earnest. The organizing mind which we have seen considering the problem of slump population the popular material and the possibility of protests felt at the time had come to open the campaign. Eugenics began to appear in big headlines in the Daily Press and big pictures in the illustrated papers. A foreign gentleman named Bulse living at Hamstead was advertised on a huge scale as having every intention of being the father of the Superman. It turned out not to be a superwoman and was called Eugenette. The parents were described as devoting themselves to the production of perfect prenatal conditions. They eliminated everything from their lives which did not tend towards complete happiness. Many might indeed be ready to do this, but in the voluminous contemporary journalism on the subject I can find no detailed notes about how it is done. Communications are opened with Mr. H. G. Wells with Dr. Saleyby and apparently with Dr. Carl Pearson. Every quality desired in the ideal baby was carefully cultivated in the parents. The problem of a sense of humor was felt to be a matter of great gravity. The Eugenette's couple naturally fearing they might be deficient on this side were so truly scientific as to have to resort to specialists. To cultivate a sense of fun they visited Harry Lauder and then Wilkie Bard and afterwards George Roby. But all it would appear in vain. To the newspaper reader, however, it looked as if the names of Metchinkoff and Steinmetz and Carl Pearson would soon be quite as familiar as those of Roby and Lauder and Bard. Arguments about these eugenic authorities reports of the controversies of the eugenic Congress filled countless columns. The fact that Mr. Boles, the creator of perfect prenatal conditions, was afterwards sued in a law court for keeping his own flat in conditions of filth and neglect, cast but a slight and momentary shadow upon the splendid dawn of the science. It would be vain to record any of the thousand testimonies to its triumph. In the nature of things this should be the longest chapter in the book or rather the beginning of another book. It should record in numberless examples the triumph popularizations of eugenics in England. But as a matter of fact this is not the first chapter but the last and this must be very short chapter because the whole of this story was cut short. A very curious thing happened. England went to war. This would in itself have been a sufficiently irritating interruption in the early life of eugenet and in the early establishment of eugenics. But a far more dreadful and disconcerting fact must be noted. With whom alas did England go to war? England went to war with the Superman in his native home. She went to war with that very land of scientific culture from which the very ideal of a Superman had come. She went to war with the whole of Dr. Steinmetz and presumably with at least half of Dr. Carl Pearson. She gave battle to the birthplace of nine-tenths of the professors who were the prophets of the new hope of humanity. In a few weeks the very name of a professor was a matter for Lowe Pibly and Murth. The very name of Niche, who had held up this hope of something superhuman to humanity, was laughed at for all the world as if he had been touched with lunacy. A new mood came upon the whole people. A mood of marching, of spontaneous soldiery vigilance and democratic discipline moving to the faint tune of bugles far away. Men began to talk strangely of old modern things. Of the countries of England, of its quiet landscapes, of motherhood and the half-buried religion of the race. Death shone on the land like a new daylight, making all things vivid and visibly dear. And in the presence of this awful actuality it seemed somehow or other as if even Mr. Bolts and the eugenic baby were things unaccountably far away and almost if one may say so funny. It requires explanation, and it may be briefly given. There was a province of Europe which had carried nearer to perfection than any other the type of order and foresight that are the subject of this book. It had long been the model state of all those more rational moralists who saw in science the ordered salvation of society. It was admittedly ahead of all other states in social reform. All systematic social reforms were proudly borrowed from it. Therefore when this province of Prussia found it convenient to extend its imperial system to the neighbouring and neutral state of Belgium all these scientific enthusiasts had a privilege not always granted to mere theorists. They had the gratification of seeing their great utopia at work on a grand scale and very close at hand. They had not to wait, like other evolutionary idealists something nearer to their dreams or leave it merely as a promise to posterity. They had not to wait for it as a distant thing like the vision of a future state. But in the flesh they had seen their paradise and they were very silent for five years. The thing died at last and the stench of it stank to the sky. It might be thought that so terrible a saviour would never altogether leave the memories of men, but men's memories are unstable things. It may be that gradually these day's dupes will gather again together and attempt again to believe their dreams and disbelieve their eyes. There may be some whose love of slavery is so ideal and disinterested that they are loyal to it even in its defeat. Wherever a fragment of that broken chain is found they will be found seeking it. But there are limits set in the everlasting mercy to him who has once been deceived and a second time deceives himself. They have seen their paragons of science and organization playing their part on land and sea showing their love of learning at Louvain and their love of humanity at Lille. For a time at least they have believed the testimony of their ancestors and if they do not believe now neither would they believe though one rose up from the dead though all the millions who died to destroy Prussianism stood up and testified against it. The End of Section 17 The End of Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton