Principles of social reconstruction

PRINCIPLES of SOCIAL
RECONSTRUCTION

EXTRACTS FROM EARLY REVIEWS

"At length the war has given us a much bigger and deeper
book of prophecy, and the man who has written it is the ablest
and most unpopular figure in contemporary England. It will
outlive the war by many a year and decade. Mr. Russell has
written a big and living book. We question whether a more
brilliant statement of the Liberal philosophy has been written
since the last world war created Liberalism." — The Nation.

" Mr. Bertrand Russell has written a thoroughly mischievous
book, and it is all the more mischievous because, being a
cultivated man, he has at his service a felicitous literary style
which may possess some attractions for the unwary minds of
prejudiced partisans and loose thinkers." — LORD CROMER in
the Spectator.

"Essentially a discussion rather of principles than of any
definite programme, being an examination and comparison of
the possessive and the creative impulses." — Times.

" Mr. Russell's principles are, with few exceptions, of the
very best." — Westminster Gazette.

" Mr. Russell . . . brings no comfort to the enemy, whom he
severely trounces for their crime against civilization." — Land
and Water.

PRINCIPLES of SOCIAL
RECONSTRUCTION

BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S.

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE +o MUSEUM STREET, W,C.

First published November igi6
Reprinted . . January 79/7

(All rights reserved)

PREFACE

THE following lectures were written in 1915,
and delivered in the beginning of 1916. I
had hoped to re-write them considerably, and
make them somewhat less inadequate to their
theme ; but other work, which seemed more
pressing, intervened, and the prospect of oppor-
tunity for leisurely revision remains remote.

My aim is to suggest a philosophy of politics
based upon the belief that impulse has more
effect than conscious purpose in moulding men's
lives. Most impulses may be divided into two
groups, the possessive and the creative, accord-
ing as they aim at acquiring or retaining some-
thing that cannot be shared, or at bringing
into the world some valuable thing, such as
knowledge or art or goodwill, in which there is
no private property. J consider the best life
that which is most built on creative impulses,
and the worst that which is most inspired by
love of possession. Political institutions have
a very great influence upon the dispositions of
men and women, and should be such as to

5

Preface

promote creativeness at the expense of posses -
siveness. The State, war, and property are
the chief political embodiments of the posses-
sive impulses ; education, marriage, and
religion ought to embody the creative impulses,
though at present they do so very inadequately.
Liberation of creativeness ought to be the
principle of reform both in politics and in
economics. It is this conviction which has
led to the writing of these lectures.

September 1916.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH . . .9

II. THE STATE. . . . . - 44

III. WAR AS AN INSTITUTION . . . -77

IV. PROPERTY . . . . . .Ill

V. EDUCATION . . . . -143
VI. MARRIAGE AND THE POPULATION QUESTION . 1 68

VII. RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES . . . 197

VIII. WHAT WE CAN DO . . , . .224

Le souffle, le rhythme, la vraie force populaire
manqua a la reaction. Elle eut les rois, les tresors,
les armees; elle ecrasa les peuples, mais elle resta
muette. Elle tua en silence; elle ne put parler
qu'avec le canon sur ses horribles champs de
bataille. . . . Tuer quinze millions d'hommes par
la faim et 1'epee, a la bonne heure, cela se peut.
Mais faire un petit chant, un air aime de tous, voila
ce que nulle machination ne donnera. . . . Don
reserve, beni. . . . Ce chant peut-etre a 1'aube jaillira
d'un cceur simple, ou 1'alouette le trouvera en mon-
tant au soleil, de son sillon d'avril.

MICHELET.

PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL
RECONSTRUCTION

i

THE PRINCIPLE OF. GROWTH

To all who are capable of new impressions
and fresh thought, some modification of former
beliefs and hopes has been brought by the
war. What the modification has been has
depended, in each case, upon character and
circumstance ; but in one form or another it
has been almost universal. To me, the chief
thing to be learnt through the war has been
a certain view of the springs of human action,
what they are, and what we may legitimately
hope that they will become. This view, if it
is true, seems to afford a basis for political
philosophy more capable of standing erect in a
time of crisis than the philosophy of traditional
Liberalism has shown itself to be . The follow-
ing lectures, though only one of them will deal
with war, are all inspired by a view of the
springs of action which has been suggested

9

Principles of Social Reconstruction

by the war. And all of them are informed by
the hope of seeing such political institutions
established in Europe as shall make men
averse from war— a hope which I firmly believe
to be realizable, though not without a great
and fundamental reconstruction pf economic
and social life.

To one who stands outside the cycle of
beliefs and passions which make the war seem
necessary, an isolation, an almost unbearable
separation from the general activity, becomes
unavoidable. At the very moment when the
universal disaster raises compassion in the
highest degree, compassion itself compels
aloofness from the impulse to self-destruction
which has swept over Europe. The helpless
longing to save men from the ruin towards
which they are hastening makes it necessary
to oppose the stream, to incur hostility, to be
thought unfeeling;, to lose for the moment the
power of winning belief. It is impossible to
prevent others from feeling hostile, but it is
possible to avoid any reciprocal hostility on
one's own part, by imaginative understanding
and the sympathy which grows out of it. And
without understanding and sympathy it is
impossible to find a cure for the evil from
which the world is suffering.

There are two views of the war neither of
which seems to me adequate. The usual view
in this country is that it is due to the wicked-

10

The Principle of Growth

ness of the Germans ; the view of most pacifists
is that it is due to the diplomatic tangle and
to the ambitions of Governments. I think
both these views fail to realize the extent
to which war grows out of ordinary human
nature. Germans, and also the men who com-
pose Governments, are on the whole average
human beings, actuated by the same passions
that actuate others, not differing much from the
rest of the world except in their circumstances.
War is accepted by men who are neither
Germans nor diplomatists with a readiness, an
acquiescence in untrue and inadequate reasons,
which would not be possible if any deep repug1-
nance to war were widespread hi other nations
or classes. The untrue things which men
believe, and the true things which they dis-
believe, are an index to their impulses — not
necessarily to individual impulses in each case
(since beliefs are contagious), but to the
general impulses of the community. We all
believe many things which we have no good
ground for believing, because, subconsciously,
our nature craves certain kinds of action which
these beliefs would render reasonable if they
were true. Unfounded beliefs are the homage
which impulse pays to reason ; and thus it is
with the beliefs which, opposite but similar,
make men here and in Germany believe it their
duty to prosecute the war.

The first thought which naturally occurs to

n

Principles of Social Reconstruction

one who accepts this view is that it would
be well if men were more under the dominion
of reason. War, to those who see that it must
necessarily do untold harm to all the com-
batants, seems a mere madness, a collective
insanity in which all that has been known in
time of .peace is forgotten. If impulses were
more Controlled, if thought were less dominated
by passion, men would guard their minds
against the approaches of war fever, and dis-
putes would be adjusted amicably. This is
true, but it is not by itself sufficient. It is
only those in whom the desire to think truly
is itself a passion who will find this desire
adequate to control the passions of war. Only
passion can control passion, and only a con-
trary impulse or desire can check impulse.
Reason, as it is preached by traditional moral-
ists, is too negative, too little living, to make
a good life. It is not by reason alone that wars
can be prevented, but by a positive life of
impulses and passions antagonistic to those that
lead to war. It is the life of impulse that
needs to be changed, not only the life of
conscious thought.

All human activity springs from two sources :
impulse and desire. The part played by desire
has always been sufficiently recognized. When
men find themselves not fully contented, and
not able instantly to procure what will cause
content, imagination brings before their minds

12

The Principle of Growth

the thought of thing's which they believe would
make them happy. All desire involves an
interval of time between the consciousness of
a need and the opportunity for satisfying it.
The acts inspired biy desire may be in them-
selves painful, the time before satisfaction can
be achieved may be very long, the object
desired may be something outside our own
lives, and even after our own death. Will, as
a directing force, consists mainly in following
desires for more or less distant objects, in spite
of the painfulness of the acts involved and the
solicitations of incompatible but more imme-
diate desires and impulses . All this is familiar,
and political philosophy hitherto has been
almost entirely based upon desire as the source
of human actions.

But desire governs no more than a part of
human activity, and that not the most impor-
tant but only the rrtore conscious, explicit, and
civilized part.

In all the miore instinctive part of our nature
we are dominated by impulses to certain kinds
of activity, not by desires for certain ends.
Children run and' shout, not because of any
good which they expect to realize, but because
of a direct im'pulse to running and shouting.
Dogs bay the moon, not because they consider
that it is to their advantage to do so, but
because they feel an impulse to bark. It is not
any purpose, but merely an impulse;, that

13

Principles of Social Reconstruction

prompts such actions as eating, drinking1,
love-making, quarrelling, boasting. Those who
believe that man is a rational animal will say
that people boast in order that others may have
a good opinion of them; ; but most of us can
recall occasions when we have boasted in spite
of knowing that we should be despised for it.
Instinctive acts normally achieve some result
which is agreeable to the natural man, but they
are not performed from desire for this result.
They are performed from direct impulse, and
the imipulse is often strong even in cases in
which the normal desirable result cannot follow.
Grown men like to imagine themselves more
rational than children and dogs, and uncon-
sciously conceal from themselves how great a
part impulse plays in their lives. This uncon-
scious concealment always follows a certain
general plan . When an impulse is not indulged
in the moment in which it arises, there grows
up a desire for the expected consequences of
indulging the impulse. If some of the conse-
quences which are reasonably to be expected
are clearly disagreeable, a conflict between
foresight and impulse arises. If the impulse
is weak, foresight may conquer ; this is what
is called acting on reason. If the imipulse is
strong, either foresight will be falsified, and
the disagreeable consequences will be forgotten,
or, in men of a heroic mould, the consequences
may be recklessly accepted. »When Macbeth

14

The Principle of Growth

realizes that he is doomed to defeat, he does
not shrink from the fight ; he exclaims : —

Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, Hold, enough !

But such strength and recklessness of
impulse is rare. Most men, when their impulse
is strong, succeed in persuading themselves,
usually by a subconscious selectiveness of
attention, that agreeable consequences will
follow from the indulgence of their impulse.
Whole philosophies, whole systems of ethical
valuation, spring up in this way : they are
the embodiment of a kind of thought which is
subservient to impulse, which aims at providing
a quasi -rational ground for the indulgence of
impulse. The only thought Which is genuine
is that which springs out of the intellectual
impulse of curiosity, leading to the desire to
know and understand. But most of what
passes for thought is inspired by some non-
intellectual impulse, and is merely a means of
persuading ourselves that we shall not be
disappointed or do harm1 if we indulge this
impulse.1

When an impulse is restrained, we feel
discomfort or even violent pain. We may
indulge the impulse in order to escape from

1 On this subject compare Bernard Hart's "Psychology
of Insanity" (Cambridge University Press, 1914), chap, v,
especially pp. 62-5.

15

Principles of Social Reconstruction

this pain, and our action is then one which has
a purpose. But the pain only exists because
of the imipulse, and the impulse itself is directed
to an act, not to escaping from the pain of
restraining the impulse. The impulse itself
remains without a purpose, and the purpose
of escaping from pain only arises when the
impulse has been momentarily restrained.

Impulse is at the basis of our activity, much
more than desire . Desire has its place, but not
so large a place as it seems to have. Impulses
bring with them a whole train of subservient
fictitious desires : they make men feel that
they desire the results which will follow from
indulging the impulses, and' that they are acting
for the sake of these results, when in fact their
action has no motive outside itself. A man
may write a book or paint a picture under the
belief that he desires the praise which it will
bring him,1 ; but as soon as it is finished, if
his creative impulse is not exhausted, what
he has done grows uninteresting to him, and
he begins a new piece of work. What applies
to artistic creation applies equally to all that is
most vital in our lives : direct impulse is what
moves us, and the desires which we think we
have are a mere garment for the impulse.

Desire, as opposed to impulse, has, it is true,
a large and increasing share in the regula-
tion of men's lives . Im'pulse is erratic and
anarchical, not easily fitted into a well-regu-

16

The Principle of Growth

lated system ; it may be tolerated in children
and artists, but it is not thought proper to men
who hope to be taken seriously. [Almost all
paid work is done from desire, not from
impulse : the Work itself is more or less
irksome, but the payment for it is desired.
The serious activities that fill a man's working
hours are, excepit in a few fortunate individuals,,
governed mainly by purposes, not by impulses
towards those activities. In this hardly any
one sees an evil, because the place of impulse
in a satisfactory existence is not recognized.
An impulse, to one who does not share it
actually or imaginatively, will always seem to
be mad . All impulse is essentially blind, in the
sense that it does not spring from any prevision
of 'consequences . The man who does not share
the impulse will form a different estimate as
to what the consequences will be, and as to
whether those that must ensue are desirable.
This difference of opinion will seem to be
ethical or intellectual, whereas its real basis is
a difference of impulse. No genuine agree-
ment will be reached, in such a case, so long as
the difference of impulse persists. In all men
who have any vigorous life, there are strong
impulses such as may seem utterly unreason-
able to others. Blind impulses sometimes lead
to destruction and death, but at other times
they lead to the biest things the world contains.
Blind impulse is the source of war, but it is

17 B

Principles of Social Reconstruction

also the source of science, and art, and love.
It is not the weakening of impulse that is to
be desired, but the direction of impulse towards
life and growth rather than towards death and
decay.

The complete control of impulse by will,
which is sometimes preached by moralists, and
often enforced by economic necessity, is not
really desirable. A life governed by purposes
and desires, to the exclusion of impulse, is a
tiring life ; it exhausts vitality, and leaves a
man, in the end, indifferent to the very purposes
which 'he has 'been trying to achieve. When
a whole nation lives in this way, the whole
nation tends to become feeble, without enough
grasp to recognize and overcome the obstacles
to its desires. Industrialism and organization
are constantly forcing civilized nations to live
more 'and more by purpose rather than impulse .
In the long run such a mlode of existence, if
it does not dry up the springs of life, produces
new impulses, not of the kind which the will
has been in the habit of controlling or of which
thought is conscious. These new impulses are
apt to be Worse in their effects than those that
have been checked. Excessive discipline,
especially when it is imposed from without,
often issues in impulses of cruelty and destruc-
tion ; this is one reason why militarism has a
bad effect on national character. Either lack
of vitality, or impulses which are oppressive

18

The Principle of Growth

and against life, will almost always result if
the spontaneous impulses are not able to find
an outlet. A man's impulses are not fixed
from the beginning by his native disposition :
within certain wide limits, they are profoundly
modified by his circumstances and his way of
life. The nature of these modifications ought
to be studied, and the results of such study
ought to be taken account of in judging the
good or harm that is done by political and
social institutions.

The war has grown, in the main, out of the
life of impulse, not out of reason or desire.
There is an impulse of aggression, and an im-
pulse of resistance to aggression. Either may,
on occasion, be in accordance with reason, but
both are operative in many cases in which they
are quite contrary to reason. Each impulse
produces a whole harvest of attendant beliefs.
The beliefs appropriate to the impulse of
aggression may be seen in Bernhardi, or in the
early Mohammedan conquerors, or, in full per-
fection, in the Book of Joshua. There is first
of all a conviction of the superior excellence
of one's own group, a certainty that they are
in some sense the chosen people. This justi-
fies the feeling that only the good and evil
of one's own group is of real importance,
aSnd that the rest of the world is to be
regarded merely as material for the triumph or
salvation of the higher race. In modern

19

Principles of Social Reconstruction

politics this attitude is embodied in imperial-
ism. Europe as a whole has this attitude
towards Asia and Africa, and many Germans
have this attitude towards the rest of Europe.

Correlative to the impulse of aggression is the
impulse of resistance to aggression. This im-
pulse is exemplified in the attitude of the Israel-
ites to the Philistines or of mediaeval Europe
to the Mohammedans. The beliefs which
it produces are beliefs in the peculiar wicked-
ness of those whose aggression is feared, and
in the immense value of national customs which
they might suppress if they were victorious.
When the war broke out, all the reactionaries
in England and France began to speak of
the danger to democracy, although until that
moment they had opposed democracy with all
their strength. They were not insincere in
so speaking : the impulse of resistance to
Germany made them value whatever was
endangered by the German attack . They loved
democracy because they hated Germany ; but
they thought they hated Germany because they
loved democracy.

The correlative impulses of aggression and
resistance to aggression have both been opera-
tive in all the countries engaged in the war.
Those who have not been dominated by one or
other of these impulses may. be roughly divided
into three classes . There are, first, men whose
national sentiment is antagonistic to the State

20

The Principle of Growth

to which they are subject. This class includes
some Irish, Holes, Einns, Jews, arid other
members of oppressed nations . Erom our point
of view, these men may be omitted from our
consideration, since they have the same impul-
sive nature as those who fight, and .differ merely
in external circumstances.

The second class of men who have not been
part of the force supporting the war have been
those whose impulsive nature is more or less
atrophied. Opponents of pacifism suppose that
all pacifists belong! to this class, except when
they are in German pay. It is thought that
pacifists are bloodless, men without passions,
men who can look on and reason with cold
detachment while their brothers are giving
their lives for their country. Amjong those
who are merely passively pacifist, and do no
more than abstain from actively taking part
in the war, there may be a certain proportion
of whom this is true. I think the supporters
of war would be right in decrying such men.
In spite of all the destruction which is wrought
by the impulses that lead to war, there is more
hope for a nation which has these impulses
than for a nation in which all impulse is dead.
Impulse is the expression of life, and while
it exists there is hope of its turning towards
life instead of towards death ; but lack of
impulse is death, and out of death no new life
will come.

21

Principles of Social Reconstruction

The active pacifists, however, are not of this
class : they are not men without impulsive
force, but men in whom some impulse to which
war is hostile is strong enough to overcome
the impulses that lead to war. It is not the act
of a passionless man to throw himself athwart
the whole movement of the national life, to
urge an outwardly hopeless cause, to incur
obloquy and to resist the contagion of collective
emotion. The impulse to avoid the hostility of
public opinion is one of the strongest in human
nature, and can only be overcome by an unusual
force of direct and uncalculating impulse ; it
is not cold reason alone that can prompt such
an act.

Impulses may be divided into those that
make for life and those that make for death.
The impulses embodied in the war are among
those that make for death. Any one of the
impulses that make for life, if it is strong
enough, will lead a man to stand out against
the war. Some of these impulses are only
strong in highly civilized men ; some are part
of common humanity. The impulses towards
art and science are among the more civilized
of those that make for life. Many artists have
remained wholly untouched by the passions of
the war, not from1 feebleness of feeling, but
because the creative instinct, the pursuit of a
vision, makes them critical of the assaults of
national passion, and not responsive to the

22

The Principle of Growth

myth in which the impulse of pugnacity clothes
itself. And the few men in whom the scientific
impulse is dominant have noticed the rival
myths of warring groups, and have been led
through understanding to neutrality. But it is
not out of such refined impulses that a popular
force can be generated which shall be sufficient
to transform the world.

There are three forces on the side of life
which require no exceptional mental endow-
ment, which are not very rare at present, and
might be very common under better social
institutions. They are love, the instinct of
constructiveness, and the joy of life. All three
are checked and enfeebled at present by the
conditions under which men live — not only the
less outwardly fortunate, but also the majority
of the well-to-do. Our institutions rest upon
injustice and authority : it is only by closing
our hearts against sympathy and our minds
against truth that we can endure the oppres-
sions and unfairnesses by which we profit . The
conventional conception of what constitutes
success leads most men to live a life in which
their most vital impulses are sacrificed, and
the joy of life is lost in listless weariness . Our
economic system compels almost all men to
carry out the purposes of others rather than
their own, making them feel impotent in action
and only able to secure a certain modicum of
passive pleasure. All these things destroy the

23

Principles of Social Reconstruction

vigour of the community, the expansive affec-
tions of individuals, and the power of viewing
the world generously. All these things are
unnecessary and can be ended by wisdom and
courage. If they were ended, the impulsive
life of men would become wholly different, and
the human race might travel towards a new
happiness and a new vigour. To urge this
hope is the purpose of these lectures .

The impulses and desires of men and wonK.ii,
in so far as they are of real importance in
their lives, are not detached one from another,
but proceed from a central principle of growth,
an instinctive urgency leading them in a
certain direction, as trees seek the light. So
long as this instinctive movement is not
thwarted, whatever misfortunes may occur are
not fundamental disasters, and do not produce
those distortions which result from interference
with natural growth. This intimate centre in
each human being is what imagination must
apprehend if we are to understand him intui-
tively. It differs from man to man, and
determines for each man the type of excellence
of which he is capable. The utmost that social
institutions can do for a man is to make his
owtn growth free and vigorous : they cannot
force him to grow according to the pattern
of another man. There are in men some
impulses and desires — for example, those
towards drugs — which do not grow out of the

24

The Principle of Growth

central principle ; such impulses, when they
become strong enough to be harmful, have to
be checked by self -discipline. Other impulses,
though they may grow out of the central prin-
ciple in the individual, may be injurious to
the growth of others, and they need to be
checked in the interest of others. But in the
main, the impulses which are injurious to
others tend to result from1 thwarted growth,
and to be least in those who have been un-
impeded in their instinctive development.

Men, like trees, require for their growth
the right soil and a sufficient freedom from
oppression. These can be helped or hindered
by political institutions. But the soil and
the freedom required for a man's growth are
immeasurably more difficult to discover and
to obtain than the soil and the freedom required
for the growth of a tree. And the full growth
which may be hoped for cannot be defined or
demonstrated ; it is subtle and complex, it can
only be felt by a delicate intuition and dimly
apprehended by imagination and respect. It
depends not only or chiefly upon the physical
environment, but upon beliefs and affections,
upon opportunities for action, and upon the
whole life of the community. The more
developed and civilized the type of man the
more elaborate are the conditions of his growth,
and the more dependent they become upon
the general state of the society in which he

25

Principles of Social Reconstruction

lives. A map's needs and desires are not
confined to his own life. If his mind is
comprehensive and his imagination vivid, the
failures of the community to which he
belongs are his failures, and its successes are
his successes : according as his community
succeeds or fails, his own growth is nourished
or impeded.

In the modern world, the principle of growth
in most men and women is hampered by insti-
tutions inherited from a simpler age. By the
progress of thought and knowledge, and by the
increase in command over the forces of the
physical world, new possibilities of growth have
come into existence, and have given rise to
new claims which m!ust be satisfied if those
who make them are not to be thwarted . There
is less acquiescence in limitations which are
no longer unavoidable, and less possibility of
a good life while those limitations remain.
Institutions which give much greater oppor-
tunities to some ^classes than to others are no
longer recognized as just by the less fortunate,
though the more fortunate still defend them
vehemently. Hence arises a universal strife,
in which tradition and authority are arrayed
against liberty and justice. Our professed
morality, being traditional, loses its hold upon
those who are in revolt. Co-operation between
the defenders of the old and the champions of
the new has become almost impossible. An

26

The Principle of Growth

intimate disunion has entered into almost all
the relations of life in continually increasing
measure. In the fight for freedom, men and
women become increasingly unable to break
dowfr the walls of the Ego and achieve the
growth which comes from a real and vital
union .

All our institutions have their historic basis
in Authority. The unquestioned authority of the
Oriental despot found1 its religjious expression
in the omnipotent Creator, whose glory was
the sole end of mian, and against whom man
had no rights . This authority descended to the
Emperor and the Pope, to the kings of the
Middle Ages, to the nobles in the feudal hier-
archy, and even to every husband and father
in his dealings with his wife and children . The
Church was the (direct embodiment of the
Divine authority, the State and the law were
constituted by the authority of the King, private
property in land grew out of the authority
of conquering barons, and the family was
governed by the authority of the pater-
familias .

The institutions of the Middle ages permitted
only a fortunate few to develop freely : the
vast majority of mankind existed to minister
to the few. But so long as authority was
genuinely respected and acknowledged even by
its least fortunate subjects, mediaeval society
remained organic and not fundamentally hostile

27

Principles of Social Reconstruction

to life, since outward submission was com-
patible with inward freedom because it was
voluntary. The institutions of Western Chris-
tendom embodied a theory which was really
believed, as no theory by which our present
institutions can be defended is now believed.
The mediaeval theory of life broke down
through its failure to satisfy men's demands
for justice and liberty. Under the stress
of oppression, when rulers exceeded their
theoretical powers, the victims were forced to
realize that they themselves also had rights,
a,nd need not live merely to increase the glory
of the few. Gradually it came to be seen that
if men have power, they are likely to abuse it,
and that authority in practice means tyranny.
Because the claim to justice was resisted by
the holders of power, men became more
and more separate units, each fighting for his
own rights, not a genuine community bound
together by an organic common purpose. This
absence of a common purpose has become a
source of unhappiness. One of the reasons
which led many men to welcome the outbreak
of the present war was that it made each nation
again a Whole community with a single purpose .
It did this by destroying, for the present,
the beginnings of a single purpose in the civil-
ized world as a whole ; but these beginnings
were as yet so feeble that few were much
affected by their destruction. Men rejoiced in

28

The Principle of Growth

the new sense of unity with their compatriots
more than they minded1 the increased separation
from their enemies.

The hardening and separation of the indi-
vidual in the course of the fight for freedom
has been inevitable!, and is not likely ever to
be wholly undone. What is necessary, if an
organic society is to grow up, is that our insti-
tutions ishould be so fundamentally changed as
to embody that new respect for the individual
and his rights which modern feeling demands.
The mediaeval Empire and Church swept away
the individual. There were heretics, but they
were massacred relentlessly, without any of the
qualms aroused by later persecutions. And
they, like their persecutors, were persuaded that
there ought to be one universal Church : they
differed only as to what its creed should be.
Among a few men of art and letters, the
Renaissance undermined the mediaeval theory,
without, however, replacing it by anything but
scepticism and confusion. The first serious
breach in this mediaeval theory was caused by
Luther's assertion of the right of private judg-
ment and the fallibility of General Councils .
Out of this assertion grew inevitably, with time,
the belief that a man's religion could not
be determined for him1 by authority, but must
be left to the free choice of each individiual.
It was in matters of religion that the battle
for liberty began, and it is in matters of

29

Principles of Social Reconstruction

religion that it has come nearest to a complete
victory.1

The development through extreme individu-
alism to strife, and thence, one hopes, to a new
redintegration, is to be seen in almost every
department of life. Claims are advanced in
the name of justice, and resisted in the
name of tradition and prescriptive right. Each
side honestly believes that it deserves to
triumph, because two theories of society exist
side by side in our thought, and men choose,
unconsciously, the theory which fits their case.
Because the battle! is long and arduous all
general theory is gradually forgotten ; in the
end, nothing remains but self-assertion, and
when the oppressed win freedom they are as
oppressive as their former masters.

This is seen most crudely in the case of what
is called nationalism. Nationalism, in theory,
is the doctrine that men, by their sympathies
and traditions, form natural groups, called
" nations," each of which ought to be united
under one central Government. In the main
this doctrine may be conceded. But in
practice the doctrine takes a more personal
form. " I belong," the oppressed nationalist
argues, " by sympathy and tradition to nation
A, but I am1 subject to a government which is

1 This was written before Christianity had become punish-
able by ten years' penal servitude under the Military Service
Act (No. 2). [Note added in 1916.]

30

The Principle of Growth

in the hands of nation B. This is an injustice,
not only because of the general principle of
nationalism, but because nation A is generous,
progressive, and civilized, While nation B
is oppressive, retrograde, and' barbarous.
Because this is so, nation A deserves 'to prosper;,
while nation B deserves to be abased." The
inhabitants of nation B are naturally deaf to
the claims of abstract justice, when they are
accompanied by personal hostility and con-
tempt. Presently, however, in the course of
war, nation A acquires its freedom. The
energy and pridJe which have achieved free-
dom generate a momentum which leads on,
almost infallibly, to the attempt at foreign
conquest, or to the refusal of liberty to some
smaller nation . " What ? You say that nation
C, which forms part of our State, has the same
rights against us as we had against nation A?
But that is absurd. Nation C is swinish and
turbulent, incapable of good government, need-
ing a strong hand if it is not to be a menace
and a disturbance to all its neighbours." So
the English used to speak of the Irish, so the
Germans and Russians speak of the Poles, so
the Galician Poles speak of the Ruthenes, so
the Austrians used to speajk of the Magyars,
so the Magyars! speak of the South Slav
sympathizers with Serbia, so the Serbs speak
of the Macedonian Bulgars. In this way
nationalism, unobjectionable in theory, leads

Principles of Social Reconstruction

by a natural movement to oppression and wars
of conquest. No sooner was France free from
the English, in the fifteenth century, than it
embarked upon the conquest of Italy ; no
sooner was Spain freed from the Moors than
it entered into more than a century of conflict
with France for the supremacy in Europe. The
case of Germany is very interesting in this
respect. At the beginning of the eighteenth
century German culture was French : French
was the language of the Courts, the language
in which Leibniz wrote his philosophy, the
universal language of polite letters and learn-
ing. National consciousness hardly existed.
Then a series of great men created a self-
respect in Germany by their achievements in
poetry, music, philosophy, and science. But
politically German nationalism was only created
by Napoleon's oppression and the uprising of
1813. After centuries during which every
disturbance of the peace of Europe began with
a French or Swedish or Russian invasion of
Germany, the Germans discovered that by
sufficient effort and union they could keep
foreign armies off their territory. But the
effort required had been too great to cease
when its purely defensive purpose had been
achieved by the defeat of Napoleon. Now, ia
hundred years later, they are still engaged in
the same movement, which has become one of
aggression and conquest. Whether we are now

32

The Principle of Growth

seeing the end of the movement it is not yet
possible to guess.

If men had any strong sense of a community
of nations, nationalism would serve to define
the boundaries of the various nations. But
because men only feel community within their
own nation, nothing but force is able to make
them respect the rights of other nations, even
when they are asserting exactly similar rights
on their own behalf.

An analogous development is to be expected,
with the course of time, in the conflict between
capital and labour, which has existed since the
growth of the industrial system, and in the
conflict between men and women, which is still
in its infancy.

What is wanted, in these various conflicts;,
is some principle, genuinely believed, which
will have justice for its outcome. The tug of
war of mutual self-assertion can only result
in justice through an accidental equality of
force. It is no use to attempt any bolstering
up of institutions based on authority, since all
such institutions involve injustice, and injustice
once realized cannot be perpetuated without
fundamental damage both to those who uphold
it and to those who resist it. The damage
consists in the hardening of the walls of the
Ego, making them a prison instead of a
window . Unimpeded growth in the individual
depends upon many contacts with other people,

33 c

Principles of Social Reconstruction

which must be of the nature of free co-opera-
tion, not of enforced service. While the belief
in authority was alive, free co-operation was
compatible with inequality and subjection, but
now equality and mutual freedom are neces-
sary. All institutions, if they are not to hamper
individual growth, must be based as far as
possible upon voluntary combination, rather
than the force of the law or the traditional
authority of the holders of power. None of
our institutions can survive the application
of this principle without great and fundamental
changes ; but these changes are imperatively
necessary if the world is to be withheld from
dissolving into hard separate units each at war
with all the others.

The two chief sources of good relations
between individuals are instinctive liking and
a common purpose. Of these two, a common
purpose might seem more important politically,
but, in fact, it is often the outcome, not the
cause, of instinctive liking, or of a common
instinctive aversion. Biological groups, from
the family to the nation, are constituted by a
greater or less degree of instinctive liking,
and build their common purposes on this
foundation .

Instinctive liking is the feeling which makes
us take pleasure in another person's company,
find an exhilaration in his presence, wish to
talk with him, work with him, play with him.

34

The Principle of Growth

The extreme form of it is being in love, but its
fainter forms, and even the very faintest, have
political importance . The presence of a person
who is instinctively disliked tends to make any
other person more likeable. An anti-Semite
will love any fellow-Christian when a Jew is
present. In China, or the wilds of Africa,
any white man would be welcomed with joy.
A common aversion is one of the most frequent
causes of mild instinctive liking.

Men differ enormously in the frequency and
intensity of their instinctive likings, and the
same man will differ greatly at different times.
One may take Carlyle and Walt Whitman as
opposite poles in this respect. To Carlyle, at
any rate in later life, most men and women
were repulsive ; they inspired an instinctive
aversion which made him find pleasure in
imagining them under the guillotine or perish-
ing in battle. This led him to belittle most
men, finding satisfaction only in those who
had been notably destructive of human life-
Frederick the Great, Dr. Fraincia, and Governor
Eyre. It led him to love war and violence,
and to despise the weak and the oppressed—
for example, the " thirty thousand distressed
needlewomen," on whom he was never weary
of venting his scorn. His morals and his
politics, in later life, were inspired through and
through by repugnance to almost the whole
human race.

35

Principles of Social Reconstruction

Walt Whitman, on the contrary, had a warm,
expansive feeling towards the vast majority of
men and women. His queer catalogues seemed
to him interesting because each item came
before his imagination as an object of delight.
The sort of joy which most people feel only
in those who are exceptionally beautiful or
splendid Walt Whitman felt in almost every-
body. Out of this universal liking grew
optimism, a belief in democracy, and a con-
viction that it is easy for men to live together
in peace and amity. His philosophy and
politics, like Carlyle's, were based upon his
instinctive attitude towards ordinary men and
women.

There is no objective reason to be given to
show that one of these attitudes is essentially
more rational than the other. If a man finds
people repulsive, no argument can prove to
him that they are not so. But both his own
desires and other people's are much more likely
to find satisfaction if he resembles Walt Whit-
man than if he resembles Carlyle. A world of
Walt Whitmans would be happier and more
capable of realizing its purposes than a world
of Carlyles. For this reason, we shall desire,
if we can, to increase the amount of instinctive
liking in the world and diminish the amount of
instinctive aversion. This is perhaps the most
important of all the effects by which political
institutions ought to be judged.

36

The Principle of Growth

The other source of good relations between
individuals is a common purpose, especially
where that purpose cannot be achieved without
co-operation. Such organizations as trade
unions and political parties are constituted
almost wholly by a common purpose ; whatever
instinctive liking may come to be associated
with them is the result of the common purpose,
not its cause. Economic organizations, such as
railway companies., subsist for a purpose, but
this purpose need only actually exist in those
who direct the organization : the ordinary wage-
earner need have no purpose beyond earning
his wages. This is a defect in economic
organizations, and ought to be remedied. One
of the objects of syndicalism is to remedy this
defect .

Marriage is (or should be) based on
instinctive liking, but as soon as there are
children, or the wish for children, it acquires
the additional strength of a common purpose.
It is this chiefly which distinguishes it from an
irregular connexion not intended to lead to
children. Often, in fact, the common purpose
survives, and remains a strong tie, after the
instinctive liking has faded.

A nation, when it is real and not artificial,
is founded upon a faint degree of instinctive
liking for compatriots and a common instinctive
aversion from foreigners. When an English-
man returns to Dover or Folkestone after being

37

Principles of Social Reconstruction

on the Continent, he feels something friendly
in the familiar ways : the casual porters, the
shouting paper boys, the women serving bad
tea, all warm his heart, and seem more
" natural," more what human beings ought to
be, than the foreigners with their strange habits
of behaviour. He is ready to believe that all
English people are good souls, while many
foreigners are full of designing wickedness.
It is such feelings that make it easy to organize
a nation into a governmental unit. And when
that has happened, a common purpose is
added, as in marriage. Foreigners would like
to invade our country and lay it waste, to kill
us in battle, to humble our pride. Those who
co-operate with us in preventing this disaster
are our friends, and their co-operation inten-
sifies our instinctive liking. But common
purposes do not constitute the whole source of
our love of country : allies, even of long
standing, do not call out the same feelings as
are called out by our compatriots. Instinctive
liking, resulting largely from similar habits and
customs, is an essential element in patriotism,
and, indeed, the foundation upon which the
whole feeling rests.

If men's natural growth is to be promoted
and not hindered by their environment, if as
many as possible of their desires and needs are
to be satisfied, political institutions must, as
far as possible, embody common purposes and

3«

The Principle of Growth

foster instinctive liking. These two objects are
interconnected, for nothing is so destructive
of instinctive liking as thwarted purposes and
unsatisfied needs, and nothing facilitates co-
operation for common purposes so much as
instinctive liking. When a man's growth is
unimpeded., his self-respect remains intact, and
he is not inclined to regard others as his
enemies. But when, for whatever reason, his
growth is impeded1, or he is compelled to grow
into some twisted and unnatural shape, his
instinct presents the environment as his enemy,
and he becomes filled with hatred. The joy of
life abandons him, and malevolence takes the
place of friendliness. The malevolence of
hunchbacks and cripples is proverbial ; and
a similar malevolence is to be found in those
who have been crippled in less obvious ways.
Real freedom, if it could be brought about,
would go a long way towards destroying
hatred .

There is a not uncommon belief that what is
instinctive in us cannot be changed, but must
be simply accepted and made the best of. This
is by no means the case. No doubt we have a
certain native disposition, different in different
people, which co-operates with outside circum-
stances in producing a certain character. But
even the instinctive part of our character is
very malleable . It may be changed by beliefs,
by material circumstances, by social circum-

39

Principles of Social Reconstruction

stances, and by institutions. A Dutchman has
probably much the same, native disposition as
a German, but his instincts in adult life are
very different owing to the absence of mili-
tarism and of the pride of a Great Power. It
is obvious that the instincts of celibates become
profoundly different from those of other men
and women. Almost any instinct is capable of
many different forms according to the nature
of the outlets which it finds. The same instinct
which leads to artistic or intellectual creative -
ness may, under other circumstances, lead to
love of war. The fact that an activity or belief
is an outcome of instinct is therefore no reason
for regarding it as unalterable.

This applies to people's instinctive likes and
dislikes as well as to their other instincts. It
is natural to men, as to other animals, to like
some of their species and dislike others ; but
the proportion of like and dislike depends on
circumstances, often on quite trivial circum-
stances. Most of Carlyle's misanthropy is
attributable ,to dyspepsia ; probably a suitable
medical regimen would have given him a com-
pletely different outlook on the world. The
defect of punishment, as a means of dealing
with impulses which the community wishes to
discourage, is that it does nothing to prevent
the existence of the impulses, but merely
endeavours to check their indulgence by an
appeal to self-interest. This method, since it

40

The Principle of Growth

does not eradicate the impulses, probably only
drives them to find1 other outlets even when it
is successful in its immediate object ; and if
the impulses are strong, mere self - interest
is not likely to curb them effectually, since
it is not a very powerful motive except
with unusually reasonable and rather passion-
less people. It is thought to be a stronger
motive than it is, because our moods make us
deceive ourselves as to our interest, and lead
us to believe that it is consistent with the
actions to which we are prompted by desire or
impulse.

Thus the commonplace that human nature
cannot be changed is untrue. We all know
that our own characters and those of our
acquaintance are greatly affected by circum-
stances ; and what is true of individuals is
true also of nations. The root causes of
changes in average human nature are generally
either purely material changes — for instance, of
climate — or changes in the degree of man's
control over the material world. We may
ignore the purely material changes, since these
do not much concern the politician. But the
changes due to man's increased control over
the material world, by inventions and science,
are of profound present importance. Through
the industrial revolution, they have radically
altered the daily lives of men ; and by creat-
ing huge economic organizations, they have

41

Principles of Social Reconstruction

altered the whole structure of society. The
general beliefs of men, which are, in the main,
a product of instinct and circumstance, have
become very different from what they were in
the eighteenth century. But our institutions
are not yet suited either to the instincts
developed by our new circumstances, or to our
real beliefs. Institutions have a life of their
own, and often outlast the circumstances which
made them a fit garment for instinct. This
applies, in varying degrees, to almost all the
institutions which we have inherited from1 the
past : the State, private property, the patriar-
chal family, the Churches, armies and navies.
All of these have become in some degree
oppressive, in some measure hostile to life.

In any serious attempt at political recon-
struction, it is necessary to realize what are the
vital needs of ordinary men and women. It
is customary, in political thought, to assume
that the only needs with which politics is con-
cerned are economic needs. This view is quite
inadequate to account for such an event as
the present war, since any economic motives
that may be assigned for it are to a great
extent mythical, and its true causes must be
sought for outside the economic sphere . Needs
which are normally satisfied without conscious
effort remain unrecognized, and this results in
a working theory of human needs which is far
too simple. Owing chiefly to industrialism,

42

The Principle of Growth

many needs which were formerly satisfied with-
out effort now remain unsatisfied in most men
and women. But the old unduly simple theory
of human needs survives, making men overlook
the source of the new lack of satisfaction, and
invent quite false theories as to why they are
dissatisfied. Socialism as a panacea seems to
me to be mistaken in this way, since it is too
ready to suppose that better economic con-
ditions will of themselves make men happy.
It is not only more material goods that men
need, but more freedom, more self-direction,
more outlet for creativeness, more opportunity
for the joy of life, more voluntary co-operation,
and less involuntary subservience to purposes
not their own. All these things the institutions
of the future must help to produce, if our
increase of knowledge and power over Nature is
to bear its full fruit in bringing about a good
life. ; !

43

II

THE STATE

UNDER the influence of socialism, most liberal
thought in recent years has been in favour of
increasing the power of the State, but more or
less hostile to the power of private property.
On the other hand, syndicalism has been hostile
both to the State and to private property. I
believe that syndicalism is more nearly right
than socialism in this respect, that both private
property and the State, which are the two most
powerful institutions of the modern world, have
become harmful to life through excess of
power, and that both are hastening the loss
of vitality from which the civilized world in-
creasingly suffers. The two institutions are
closely connected, but for the present I wish
to consider only the State. I shall try to show
how great, how unnecessary, how harmful,
many of its powers are, and how enormously
they might be diminished without loss of what
is useful in its activity. But I shall admit that
in certain directions its functions ought to be
extended rather than curtailed.

Some of the functions of the State, such as

44

The State

the Post Office and elementary education, might
be performed by private agencies, and are only
undertaken by the State from motives of con-
venience. But other matters, such as the law,
the police, the Army, and the Navy, belong
more essentially to the State : so long as there
is a State at all it is difficult to imagine these
matters in private hands. The distinction
between socialism and individualism turns on
the non-essential functions of the State, which
the socialist wishes to extend and the indi-
vidualist to restrict. It is the essential func-
tions, which are admitted by individualists and
socialists alike, that I wish to criticize, since
the others do not appear to me in themselves
objectionable.

The essence of the State is that it is the
repository of the collective force of its citizens.
This force takes two forms, one internal and
one external. The internal form is the law
and the police ; the external form is the power
of waging war, as embodied in the Army and
Navy. The State is constituted by the com-
bination of all the inhabitants in a certain area
using their united force in accordance with the
commands of a Government. In a civilized
State force is only employed against its own
citizens in accordance with rules previously laid
down, which constitute the criminal law. But
the employment of force against foreigners
is not regulated by any code of rules, and

45

Principles of Social Reconstruction

proceeds, with few exceptions, according to
some real or fancied national interest.

There can be no doubt that force employed
according to law is less pernicious than force
employed capriciously. If international law
could acquire sufficient hold on men's alle-
giance to regulate the relations of States, a
very great advance on our present condition
would have been made. The primitive anarchy
which precedes law is worse than law. But
I believe there is a possibility of a stage to
some extent above law, where the advantages
now secured by the law are secured without
loss of freedom, and without the disadvantages
which the law and the police render inevitable.
Probably some repository of force in the back-
ground will remain necessary, but the actual
employment of force may become very rare,
and the degree of force required very small.
The anarchy which precedes law gives free-
dom only to the strong ; the condition to be
aimed at will give freedom as nearly as possible
to every one. It will do this, not by pre-
venting altogether the existence of organized
force, but by limiting the occasions for its
employment to the greatest possible extent.

The power of the State is only limited
internally by the fear of rebellion and ex-
ternally by the fear of defeat in war. Subject
to these restrictions, it is absolute. In practice,
it can seize men's property through taxation,

46

The State

determine the law of marriage and inheritance,
punish the expression of opinions which it
dislikes, put men to death for wishing the
region they inhabit to belong to a different
State, and order all able-bodied males to risk
their lives in battle whenever it considers war
desirable. On many matters disagreement
with the purposes and opinions of the State
is criminal. Probably the freest States in the
world, before the war, were America and
England ; yet in America no immigrant may
land until he has professed disbelief in
anarchism and polygamy, while in England
men were sent to prison in recent years for
expressing disagreement with the Christian
religion ' or agreement with the teaching of
Christ.2 In time of war, all criticism of the
external policy of the State is criminal. Cer-
tain objects having appeared desirable to the
majority, or to the effective holders of power,
those who do not consider these objects desir-
able are exposed to pains and penalties not
unlike those suffered by heretics in the past.
The extent of the tyranny thus exercised is
concealed by its very success : few men con-
sider it worth while to incur a persecution
which is almost certain to be thorough and
effective .

1 The blasphemy prosecutions.

2 The syndicalist prosecutions. [The punishment of con-
scientious objectors must now be added, 1916.]

47

Principles of Social Reconstruction

Universal military service is perhaps the
extreme example of the power of the State,
and the supreme illustration of the difference
between its attitude to its own citizens and
its attitude to the citizens of other States.
The State punishes, with impartial rigour, both
those who kill their compatriots and those who
refuse to kill foreigners. On the whole, the
latter is considered the graver crime. The
phenomenon of war is familiar, and men fail
to realize its strangeness ; to those who stand
inside the cycle of instincts which lead to war
it all seems natural and reasonable. But to
those who stand outside the strangeness of it
grows with familiarity. It is amazing that the
vast majority of men should tolerate a system
which compels them to submit to all the horrors
of the battlefield at any moment when their
Government commands them to do so. A
French artist, indifferent to politics, attentive
only to his painting, suddenly finds himself
called upon to shoot Germans, who, his friends
assure him, are a disgrace to the human race.
A German musician, equally unknowing, is
called upon to shoot the perfidious French-
man. Why cannot the two men declare a
mutual neutrality ? Why not leave war to those
who like it and bring it on? Yet if the two
men declared a mutual neutrality they would
be shot by their compatriots. To avoid this
fate they try to shoot each other. If the world

48

The State

loses the artist, not the musician, Germany
rejoices ; if the world loses the musician, not
the artist, France rejoices. No one remem-
bers the loss to civilization, which is equal
whichever is killed .

This is the politics of Bedlam. If the artist
and the musician had been allowed to stand
aside from the war, nothing but unmitigated
good to mankind would have resulted. The
power of the State, which makes this impos-
sible, is a wholly evil thing, quite as evil as
the power of the Church which in former days
put men to death for unorthodox thought . Yet
if, even in time of peace, an international
league were founded to consist of Frenchmen
and Germans in equal numbers, all pledged not
to take part in war, the French State and the
German State would persecute it with equal
ferocity. Blind obedience, unlimited willing-
ness to kill and die, are exacted of the modem
citizens of a democracy as much as of the
Janizaries of mediaeval sultans or the secret
agents of Oriental despots.1

The power of the State may be brought to
bear, as it often is in England, through public
opinion rather than through the laws. By
oratory and the influence of the Press, public

1 "In a democratic country it is the majority who must
after all rule, and the minority will be obliged to submit
with the best grace possible " ( Westminster Gazette on
Conscription, December 29, 1915).

49 D

Principles of Social Reconstruction

opinion is largely created by the State, and a
tyrannous public opinion is as great an enemy
to liberty as tyrannous laws. If the young
man who will not fight finds that he is dis-
missed from his employment, insulted in the
streets, cold-shouldered by his friends, and
thrown over with scorn by any woman who
may formerly have liked him, he will feel the
penalty quite as hard to bear as a death
sentence.1 A free community requires not only

1 " Some very strong remarks on the conduct of the ' white
feather' women were made by Mr. Reginald Kemp, the
Deputy Coroner for West Middlesex, at an inquest at
Baling on Saturday on Richard Charles Roberts, aged
thirty-four, a taxicab driver, of Shepherd's Bush, who com-
mitted suicide in consequence of worry caused by his
rejection from the Army and the taunts of women and
other amateur recruiters.

It was stated that he tried to join the Army in October,
but was rejected on account of a weak heart. That alone,
said his widow, had depressed him, and he had been worried
because he thought he would lose his licence owing to the
state of his heart. He had also been troubled by the dangerous
illness of a child.

A soldier relative said that the deceased's life had been
made 'a perfect misery' by women who taunted him and
called him a coward because he did not join the Army. A
few days ago two women in Maida Vale insulted him ' some-
thing shocking.'

The Coroner, speaking with some warmth, said the
conduct of such women was abominable. It was scan-
dalous that women who knew nothing of individual circum-
stances should be allowed to go about making unbearable the
lives of men who had tried to do their duty. It was a pity

50

The State

legal freedom, but a tolerant public opinion,
an absence of that instinctive inquisition into
our neighbours' affairs which, under the guise
of upholding a high moral standard, enables
good people to indulge unconsciously a dis-
position to cruelty and persecution. Thinking
ill of others is not in itself a good reason for
thinking well of ourselves. But so long as
this is not recognized, and so long as the State
can manufacture public opinion, except in the
rare cases where it is revolutionary, public
opinion must be reckoned as a definite part
of the power of the State.

The power of the State outside its own
borders is in the main derived from war or the
threat of war. Some power is derived from
the ability to persuade its citizens to lend money
or not to lend it, but this is unimportant in
comparison with the power derived from armies
and navies. The external activity of the State
—with exceptions so rare as to be negligible —
is selfish. Sometimes selfishness is mitigated
by the need of retaining the goodwill of other
States, but this only modifies the methods
employed, not the ends pursued. The ends
pursued, apart from mere defence against other
States, are, on the one hand, opportunities for

they had nothing better to do. Here was a man who perhaps
had been driven to death by a pack of silly women. He
hoped something would soon be done to put a stop to such
conduct" (Daily News, July 26, 1915).

51

Principles of Social Reconstruction

successful exploitation of weak or uncivilized
countries, on the other hand, power and
prestige, which are considered more glorious
and less material than money. In pursuit of
these objects, no State hesitates to put to death
innumerable foreigners whose happiness is not
compatible with exploitation or subjection, or
to devastate territories into which it is thought
necessary to strike terror. Apart from the
present war, such acts have been performed
within the last twenty years by many minor
States and by all the Great Powers J except
Austria ; and in the case of Austria only the
opportunity, not the will, was lacking.

•Why do men acquiesce in the power of the
State? There are many reasons, some tra-
ditional, some very present and pressing.

The traditional reason for obedience to the
State is personal loyalty to the sovereign.
European States grew up under the feudal
system, and were originally the several terri-
tories owned by feudal chief sv But this source
of obedience has decayed, and probably now
counts for little except in Japan, and to a
lesser extent in Russia.

Tribal feeling, which always underlay loyalty
to the sovereign, has remained as strong as it
ever was, and is now the chief support for the

1 By England in South Africa, America in the Philippines,
France in Morocco, Italy in Tripoli, Germany in South- West
Africa, Russia in Persia and Manchuria, Japan in Manchuria.

52

The State

power of the State. Almost every man finds
it essential to his happiness to feel himself a
member of a group, animated by common
friendships and enmities and banded together
for defence and attack. But such groups are
of two kinds : there are those which are essen-
tially enlargements of the family, and there
are those which are based upon a conscious
common purpose. Nations belong to the first
kind, Churches to the second. At times when
men are profoundly swayed by creeds national
divisions tend to break down, as they did in
the wars of religion after the Reformation.
At such times a common creed is a stronger
bond than a common nationality. To a much
slighter extent, the same thing has occurred
in the modern world with the rise of socialism.
Men who disbelieve in private property, and
feel the capitalist to be the real enemy, have a
bond which transcends national divisions. It
has not been found strong enough to resist the
passions aroused by the present war, but it
has made them less bitter among socialists
than among others, and has kept alive the
hope of a European community to be
reconstructed when the war is over. In
the main, however, the universal disbelief in
creeds has left tribal feeling triumphant, and
has made nationalism stronger than at any
previous period of the world's history. A few
sincere Christians, a few sincere socialists, have

53

Principles of Social Reconstruction

found in their creed a force capable of resist-
ing the assaults of national passion, but they
have been too few to influence the course of
events or even to cause serious anxiety to the
Governments .

It is chiefly tribal feeling that generates the
unity of a national State, but it is not only tribal
feeling that generates its strength. Its strength
results principally from two fears, neither of
which is unreasonable : the fear of crime and
anarchy within, and the fear of aggression from
without.

The internal orderliness of a civilized com-
munity is a great achievement, chiefly brought
about by the increased authority of the State.
It would be inconvenient if peaceable citizens
were constantly in imminent risk of being
robbed and murdered. Civilized life would
become almost impossible if adventurous
people could organize private armies for pur-
poses of plunder. These conditions existed in
the Middle Ages, and have not passed away
without a great struggle. It is thought by
many— especially by the rich, who derive the
greatest advantage from law and order— that
any diminution in the power of the State might
bring back a condition of universal anarchy.
They regard strikes as portents of dissolution.
They are terrified by such organizations as the
Confederation Ge'ne'rale du Travail and the
International Workers of the World. They

54

The State

remember the French Revolution, and feel a
not unnatural desire to keep their heads on
their shoulders. They dread particularly any
political theory which seems to excuse private
crimes, such as sabotage and political assas-
sination. Against these dangers they see no
protection except the maintenance of the
authority of the State, and the belief that all
resistance to the State is wicked.

Fear of the danger within is enhanced by
fear of the danger without. Every State is
exposed at all times to the risk of foreign
invasion. No means has hitherto been devised
for minimizing this risk except the increase of
armaments. But the armaments which are
nominally intended to repel invasion may also
be used to invade. And so the means adopted
to diminish the external fear have the effect
of increasing it, and of enormously enhancing
the destructiveness of war when it does break
out, In this way a reign of terror becomes
universal, and the State acquires everywhere
something of the character of the Comite du
Salut Public.

The tribal feeling out of which the State
develops is natural, and the fear by which
the State is strengthened is reasonable under
present circumstances. And in addition to
these two, there is a third source of strength
in a national State, namely patriotism in its
religious aspect.

55

Principles of Social Reconstruction

Patriotism is a very complex feeling, built
up out of primitive instincts and highly intel-
lectual convictions. There is love of home
and family and friends, making us peculiarly
anxious to preserve our own country from in-
vasion. There is the mild instinctive liking
for compatriots as against foreigners. There
is pride, which is bound up with the success
of the community to which we feel that we
belong. There is a belief, suggested by pride
but reinforced by history, that one's own nation
represents a great tradition and stands for
ideals that are important to the human race.
But besides all these, there is another element,
at once nobler and more open to attack, an
element of worship, of willing sacrifice, of joy-
ful merging of the individual life in the life
of the nation. This religious element in
patriotism is essential to the strength of the
State, since it enlists the best that is in most
men on the side of national sacrifice.

The religious element in patriotism is rein-
forced by education, especially by a know-
ledge of the history and literature of one's own
country, provided it is not accompanied by
much knowledge of the history and literature
of other countries. In every civilized country
all instruction of the young emphasizes the
merits of their own nation and the faults of
other nations. It comes to be universally
believed that one's own nation, because of its

56

The State

superiority, deserves support in a quarrel, how-
ever the quarrel may have originated. This
belief is so genuine and deep that it makes
men endure patiently, almost gladly, the losses
and hardships and sufferings entailed by war.
Like all sincerely believed religions, it gives
an outlook on life, based upon instinct but
sublimating it, causing a devotion to an end
greater than any personal end, but containing
many personal ends as it were in solution.

Patriotism as a religion is unsatisfactory
because of its lack of universality. The good at
which it aims is a good for one's own nation
only, not for all mankind. The desires which it
inspires in an Englishman are not the same as
the desires which it inspires in a German. A
world full of patriots may be a world full of
strife. The more intensely a nation believes
in its patriotism, the more fanatically indif-
ferent it will become to the damage suffered by
other nations. When once men have learnt
to subordinate their own good to the good of
a larger whole, there can be no valid reason
for stopping short of the human race. It is
the admixture of national pride that makes it
so easy in practice for men's impulses towards
sacrifice to stop short at the frontiers of their
own country. It is this admixture that poisons
patriotism, and makes it inferior, as a religion,
to beliefs which aim at the salvation of all
mankind. We cannot avoid having more love

57

Principles of Social Reconstruction

for our own country than for other countries,
and there is no reason why we should wish to
avoid it, any more than we should wish to love
all individual men and women equally. But
any adequate religion will lead us to temper
inequality of affection by love of justice, and
to universalize our aims by realizing the com-
mon needs of man. This change was effected
by Christianity in Judaism, and must be
effected in any merely national religion before
it can be purged of evil.

In practice, patriotism has many other
enemies to contend with. Cosmopolitanism
cannot fail to grow as men acquire more know-
ledge of foreign countries by education and
travel. There is also a kind of individualism
which is continually increasing, a realization
that every man ought to be as nearly free as
possible to choose his own ends, not compelled
by a geographical accident to pursue ends
forced upon him by the community. Socialism,
syndicalism, and anti-capitalist movements
generally, are against patriotism in their ten-
dency, since they make men aware that the
present State is largely concerned in defend-
ing the privileges of the rich, and that many
of the conflicts between States have their
origin in the financial interests of a few pluto-
crats. This kind of opposition is perhaps
temporary, a mere incident in the struggle of
labour to acquire power. Australia, where

58

The State

labour feels its triumph secure, is full of
patriotism and militarism, based upon deter-
mination to prevent foreign labour from sharing
the benefits of a privileged position. It is not
unlikely that England might develop a similar
nationalism if it became a socialist State.
But it is probable that such nationalism would
be purely defensive. Schemes of foreign
aggression, entailing great loss of life and
wealth in the nation which adopts them, would
hardly be initiated except by those whose
instincts of dominion have been sharpened
through the power derived from private
property and the institutions of the capitalist
State.

The evil wrought in the modern world by the
excessive power of the State is very great, and
very little recognized.

The chief harm wrought by the State is
promotion of efficiency in war. If all States
increase their strength, the balance of power
is unchanged, and no one State has a better
chance of victory than before. And when the
means of offence exist, even though their
original purpose may have been defensive, the
temptation to use them is likely, sooner or
later, to prove overwhelming. In this way the
very measures which promoted security within
the borders of the State promote insecurity
elsewhere. It is of the essence of the State
to suppress violence within and to facilitate

59

Principles of Social Reconstruction

it without. The State makes an entirely arti-
ficial division of mankind and of our duties
towards them : towards one group we are
bound by the law, towards the other only by
the prudence of highwaymen. The State is
rendered evil by its exclusions, and by the
fact that, whenever it embarks upon aggressive
war, it becomes a combination of men for
murder and robbery. The present system is
irrational, since external and internal anarchy
must be both right or both wrong. It is sup-
ported because, so long as others adopt it, it
is thought the only road to safety, and because
it secures the pleasures of triumph and
dominion, which cannot be obtained in a good
community. If these pleasures were no longer
sought, or no longer possible to obtain, the
problem of securing safety from invasion would
not be difficult.

Apart from war, the modern great State
is harmful from its vastness and the resulting
sense of individual helplessness. The citizen
who is out of sympathy with the aims of the
State, unless he is a man of very rare gifts,,
cannot hope to persuade the State to adopt
purposes which seem to him better. Even in
a democracy, all questions except a very few
are decided by a small number of officials and
eminent men ; and even the few questions
which are left to the popular vote are decided
by a diffused mass -psychology, not by indi-

60

The State

vidual initiative. This is especially noticeable
in a country like the United States, where, in
spite of democracy, most men have a sense
of almost complete impotence in regard to all
large issues. In so vast a country the popular
will is like one of the forces of Nature,
and seems nearly as much outside the control
of any one man. This state of things leads,
not only in America but in all large States, to
something of the weariness and discouragement
that we associate with the Roman Empire.
Modern States, as opposed to the small city
States of ancient Greece or mediaeval Italy,
leave little room for initiative, and fail to
develop in most men any sense of ability to
control their political destinies. The few men
who achieve power in such States are men of
abnormal ambition and thirst for dominion,
combined with skill in cajolery and subtlety
in negotiation. All the rest are dwarfed by
knowledge of their own impotence.

A curious survival from the old monarchical
idea of the State is the belief that there is some
peculiar wickedness in a wish to secede on
the part of any section of the population. If
Ireland or Poland desires independence, it is
thought obvious that this desire must be strenu-
ously resisted, and any attempt to secure it is
condemned as ' high treason." The only
instance to the contrary that I can remember
is the separation of Norway and Sweden, which

61

Principles of Social Reconstruction

was commended but not imitated. In other
cases, nothing but defeat in war has induced
States to part with territory : although this
attitude is taken for granted, it is not one which
would be adopted if the State had better ends
in view. The reason for its adoption is that
the chief end of almost all great States is power,
especially power in war. And power in war
is often increased by the inclusion of unwilling
citizens. If the well-being of the citizens were
the end in view, the question whether a certain
area should be included, or should form a
separate State, would be left freely to the
decision of that area. If this principle were
adopted, one of the main reasons for war would
be obviated, and one of the most tyrannical
elements in the State would be removed.

The principal source of the harm done by
the State is the fact that power is its chief
end. This is not the case in America, because
America is safe against aggression ' ; but in
all other great nations the chief aim of the
State is to possess the greatest possible amount
of external force. To this end, the liberty of the
citizens is curtailed, and anti-militarist propa-
ganda is severely punished. This attitude is
rooted in pride and fear : pride, which refuses
to be conciliatory, and fear, which dreads the
results of foreign pride conflicting with our
own pride. It seems something of a historical

1 This was written in 1915.
62

The State

accident that these two passions, which by no
means exhaust the political passions of the
ordinary man, should so completely determine
the external policy of the Sta,te . Without ipride,
there would be no occasion for fear : fear on
the part of one nation is due to the supposed
pride of another nation. Pride of dominion,
unwillingness to decide disputes otherwise than
by force or the threat of force, is a habit of
mind greatly encouraged by the possession of
power. Those who have long been in the
habit of exercising power become autocratic
and quarrelsome, incapable of regarding an
equal otherwise than as a rival. It is notorious
that head masters' conferences are more liable
to violent disagreements than most similar
bodies : each head master tries to treat the
others as he treats his own boys ; they resent
such treatment, and he resents their resentment .
Men who have the habit of authority are
peculiarly unfit for friendly negotiation ; <but
the official relations of States are mainly in the
hands of men with a great deal of authority in
their own country. This is, of course, more
particularly the case where there is a monarch
who actually governs. It is less true where
there is a governing oligarchy, and still less
true where there is some approach to real
democracy. But it is true to a considerable
extent in all countries, because Prime Ministers
and Foreign Secretaries are necessarily men

63

Principles of Social Reconstruction

in authority. The first step towards remedying
this state of things is a genuine interest in
foreign affairs on the part of the ordinary
citizen, and an insistence that national pride
shall not be allowed to jeopardize his other
interests. During War, when he is roused, he is
willing to sacrifice everything to pride ; but in
quiet times he will be far more ready than men
in authority to realize that foreign affairs, like
private concerns, ought to be settled amicably
according to principles, not brutally by force
or the threat of force .

The effect of personal bias in the men who
actually compose the Government may be seen
very clearly in labour disputes. French syndi-
calists affirm that the State is simply a product
of capitalism, a part of the weapons which
capital employs in its conflict with labour.
Even in democratic States there is much to
bear out this view. In strikes it is common
to order out the soldiers to coerce the strikers ;
although the employers are much fewer, and
much easier to coerce, the soldiers are never
employed against them. When labour troubles
paralyse the industry of a country, it is the
men who are thought to be unpatriotic, not
the masters, though clearly the responsibility
belongs to both sides. The chief reason for
this attitude on the part of Governments
is that the men composing them belong, by
their success if not by their origin, to the same

64

The State

class as the great employers of labour. Their
bias and their associates combine to make
them view strikes and lock-outs from the
standpoint of the rich. In a democracy public
opinion and the need of conciliating political
supporters partially correct these plutocratic
influences, but the correction is always only
partial. And the same influences which warp
the views of Governments on labour questions
also warp their views on foreign affairs, with
the added disadvantage that the ordinary citizen
has much fewer means of arriving at an
independent judgment.

The excessive power of the State, partly
through internal oppression, but principally
through war and the fear of war, is one of the
chief causes of misery in the modern world,
and one of the main reasons for the discourage-
ment which prevents men from growing to their
full mental stature. Some means of curing
this excessive power must be found if men
are not to be organized into despair, as they
were in the Roman Empire.

The State has one purpose which is on the
whole good, namely, the substitution of law
for force in the relations of men. But this
purpose can only be fully achieved by a
world-State, without which international rela-
tions cannot be made subject to law. And
although law is better than force, law is still
not the best way of settling disputes. Law

65 E

Principles of Social Reconstruction

is too static, too much on the side af what
is -decaying, too little on the side of what is
growing . So long as law is in theory supreme,
it will (have to 'be tempered, from time to time,
by internal revolution and external war. These
can pnly be prevented by perpetual readiness
to alter the law in accordance with the present
balance of forces. If this is not done, the
motives for appealing to force will sooner or
later become irresistible. A world -State or
federation of States, if it is to be successful,
will have to decide questions, not by the legal
maxims which would be applied by the Hague
tribunal, but as far as possible in the same
sense in which they would be decided by war.
The function of authority should be to render
the appeal to force unnecessary, not to give
decisions contrary to those which would be
reached by force.

This view may be thought by some to be
immoral. It may be said that the object of
civilization should be to secure justice, not to
give the victory to the strong. But when this
antithesis is allowed to pass, it is forgotten
that love of justice may itself set force in
motion. A Legislature which wishes to decide
an issue in' the same way as it would be decided
if there were an aplpeal to force will necessarily
take account of justice, .provided justice is so
flagrantly on one side that disinterested parties
are willing to take up the quarrel. If a strong

66

The State

man assaults a weak man in the streets of
London, the balance of force is on the side
of the weak man, because, even if the police
did not appear, casual passers-by would step
in to defend him. It is sheer cant to speak of
a contest of might against right, and at the
same time to hope for a victory of the right.
If the contest is really between might and right,
that {m\eans that right will be beaten. What
is obscurely intended, when this phrase is
used, is that the stronger side is only rendered
stronger by men's Isense of right. But men's
sense of right is very subjective, and is only
one factor in deciding the preponderance of
force. What is desirable in a Legislature is,
not that it should decide by its personal sense
of right, but that at should decide in a way
which is felt to make an appeal to force
unnecessary.

Having considered what the State ought not
to do, I come now to what it ought to do.

Apart from war and the preservation of
internal order, there are certain more positive
functions which the State performs, and
certain others which it ought to perform.

We may lay down two principles as regards
these .positive functions.

First : there are matters in which the wel-
fare of the whole community depends upon the
practically universal attainment of a certain
minimum ; in such cases the State has the

67

Principles of Social Reconstruction

right to insist upon this minimum being
attained .

Secondly : there are ways in which, by
insisting upon the maintenance of law, the
State, if it does nothing further, renders
possible various forms of injustice which
would otherwise be prevented by the anger of
their victims. Such injustices ought, as far as
possible, to be prevented by the State.

The most obvious example of a matter where
the general welfare depends upon a universal
minimum is sanitation and the prevention lof
infectious diseases. A single case of plague,
if it is neglected, may cause disaster to a whole
community. No one can reasonably maintain,
on general grounds of liberty, that a man
suffering from plague ought to be left free to
spread infection far and wide. Exactly similar
considerations apply to drainage, notification
of fevers, and kindred matters. The inter-
ference with liberty remains an evil, but in
some cases it is clearly a smaller evil than the
spread of disease which liberty would produce.
The stamping out of malaria and yellow fever
by destroying mosquitoes is perhaps the most
striking example of the good which can be
done in this way. But when the good is small
or doubtful, and the interference with liberty
is great, it becomes better to endure a certain
amount of preventable disease rather than'
suffer a scientific tyranny.

68

The State

Compulsory education comes under the same
head as sanitation. The existence of ignorant
masses in a population is a danger to the com-
munity ; when a considerable percentage are
illiterate, the whole machinery of government
has to take account of the fact. Democracy
in its modern form would be quite impossible
in a nation where many men cannot read. But
in this case there is not the same need of
absolute universality as in the case of sanitary
measures. The gipsies, whose mode of life
has been rendered almost impossible by the
education authorities, might well have been
allowed to remain a picturesque exception.
But apart from such rather unimportant excep-
tions, the argument for compulsory education
is irresistible.

What the State does for the care of children
at present is less than what ought to be done,
not more. Children are not capable of looking
after their own interests, and parental responsi-
bility is in many ways inadequate. It is clear
that the State alone can insist upon the children
being provided with the minimum of knowledge
and health which, for the time being, satisfies
the conscience of the community.

The encouragement of scientific research is
another matter which comes rightly within the
powers of the State, because the benefits of
discoveries accrue to the community, while
the investigations are expensive and never

69

Principles of Social Reconstruction

individually certain of achieving any result . In
this matter, Great Britain lags behind all other
civilized countries.

The second kind of powers which the State
ought to possess afe those that aim at dimin-
ishing economic injustice. It is this kind
that 'has been emphasized1 by socialists. The
law creates or facilitates monopolies, and
monopolies are able to exact a toll from the
community. The most glaring example is the
private ownership of land. Railways are at
present controlled by the State, since rates are
fixed by law ; and it is clear that if they were
uncontrolled, they would acquire a dangerous
degree of power.1 Such considerations, if they
stood alone would justify complete socialism.
But I think justice, by itself, is, like law, too
static to be made a supreme political prin-
ciple : it does not, when it has been achieved,
contain any seeds of new life or any impetus
to development. For this reason, when we
wish to remedy an injustice, it is important
to consider whether, in so doing, we shall be
destroying the incentive to some form of
vigorous action which is on the whole useful
to the cotntaunity. No such form of action,
so far as I can see, is associated with private
ownership of land or of any other source of
economic rent ; if this is the case, it follows

1 This would be as true under a syndicalist regime as it is
at present.

70

The State

that the State ought to be the primary recipient
of rent.

If all these powers are allowed to the
State, what becomes of the attempt to rescue
individual liberty from its tyranny?

This is part of the general problem which
confronts all those who still care for the ideals
which inspired liberalism, namely the problem
of combining liberty and personal initiative with
organization. Politics and economics are more
and more dominated by vast organizations, in
face of which the individual is in danger of
becoming powerless. The State is the greatest
of these organizations, and the most serious
menace to liberty. And' yet it seems that many
of its functions must be extended rather than
curtailed.

There is one way by which organization and
liberty can be combined, and that is, by
securing power for voluntary organizations,
consisting of men who have chosen to belong
to them be'cause they embody some purpose
which all their members consider important,
not a purpose imposed by accident or outside
force. The State, being geographical, cannot
be a wholly voluntary association, but for that
very reason there is need of a strong public
opinion to restrain it from a tyrannical use of
its powers. This public opinion, in most
matters, can only be secured by combinations
of those who have certain interests or desires
in common.

Principles of Social Reconstruction

The positive purposes of the State, over and
above the preservation of order, ought as far
as possible to be carried out, not by the State
itself, but by independent organizations, which
should be left completely free so long as they
satisfied the State that they were not falling
below a netessary minimum. This occurs to
a certain limited extent at present in regard to
elementary education. The universities, also,
may be regarded as acting for the State in the
matter of higher education and research, except
that in their case no minimum of achievement
is exacted. In the economic sphere, the State
ought to exercise control, but ought to leave
initiative to others. There is every reason to
multiply opportunities of initiative, and to give
the greatest possible share of initiative to each
individual, for if this is not done there will be
a general sense of impotence and discourage-
ment. There ought to be a constant endeavour
to leave the more positive aspects of govern-
ment in the hands of voluntary organizations,
the purpose of the .State being merely to exact
efficiency and to secure an amicable settlement
of disputes, whether within or without its own
borders. And with this ought to be combined
the greatest possible toleration of exceptions
and the least possible insistence upon uniform
system.

A good deal may be achieved through local
government by trades as well as by areas . This

The State

is the most original idea in syndicalism, and
it is valuable as a check upon the tyranny
which the community may be tempted to
exercise over certain classes of its members.
All strong organizations which embody a
sectional public opinion, such as trade unions,
co-operative societies, professions, and univer-
sities, are to be welcomed as safeguards of
liberty and opportunities for initiative. And
there is need of a strong public opinion in
favour of liberty itself. The old battles for
freedom of thought and freedom of speech,
which it was thought had been definitively won,
will have to be fought all over again, since
most men are only willing to accord freedom
to opinions which happen to be popular. Insti-
tutions cannot preserve liberty unless men
realize that liberty is precious and are willing
to exert themselves to keep it alive.

There is a traditional objection to every
imperium in imperio, but this is only the
jealousy of the tyrant. In actual fact, the
modern State contains many organizations
which it cannot defeat^ except perhaps on rare
occasions when public opinion is roused against
them. Mr. Lloyd George's long fight with the
medical profession over the Insurance Act was
full of Homeric fluctuations of fortune. The
Welsh miners in 1915 routed the whole power
of the State, backed by an excited nation. As
for the financiers, no Government would dream

73

Principles of Social Reconstruction

of a conflict with them1. When all other classes
are exhorted to patriotism, they are allowed
their 4^ per cent, and an increase of interest
on their consols. It is well understood on all
sides that an appeal to their patriotism would
show gross ignorance of 'the world. It is
against the traditions of the State to extort
their money by threatening to withdraw police
protection. This is not due to the difficulty of
such a measure, but only to the fact that great
wealth wins genuine admiration from us all,
and we cannot 'bear to think of a very rich
man being treated with disrespect.

The existence of strong organizations within
the State, such as trade unions, is not unde-
sirable except from the point of view of the
official who wishes to wield unlimited power,
or of the rival organizations, such as federa-
tions of employers, which would prefer a dis-
organized adversary. In view of the vastness of
the State, most men can find little political out-
let for initiative except in subordinate organiza-
tions formed for specific purposes. Without
an outlet for political initiative, men lose their
social vigour and their interest in public affairs :
they become a prey to corrupt wire-pullers, or
to sensation-mongers who have the art of
capturing a tired and vagrant attention. The
cure for this is to increase rather than diminish
the powers of voluntary organizations, to give
every man a sphere of political activity small

74

The State

enough for his interest and his capacity, and
to confine the functions of the State, as far as
possible, to the maintenance of peace among
rival interests . The essential merit of the State
is that it prevents the internal use of force by
private persons . Its essential demerits are, that
it promotes the external use of force, and that,
by its great size, it makes each individual feel
impotent even in a democracy. I shall return
in a later lecture to the question of preventing
war. The prevention of the sense of individual
impotence cannot be achieved by a return to
the small City State, which would be as
reactionary as a return to the days before
machinery. It must be achieved by a method
which is in the direction of present tendencies,.
Such a method would be the increasing devolu-
tion of positive political initiative to bodies
formed voluntarily for specific purposes, leaving
the State rather in the position of a federal
authority or a court of arbitration. The State
would then confine itself to insisting upon some
settlement of rival interests : its only principle
in deciding what is the right settlement would be
an attempt to find the measure most acceptable,
on the whole, to all the parties concerned.
This is the direction in which democratic States
naturally tend, except in so far as they are
turned aside by war or the fear of war. So
long as war remains a daily imminent danger,
the State will remain a Moloch, sacrificing

75

Principles .of Social Reconstruction

sometimes the life of the individual, and always
his unfettered development, to the barren
struggle for mastery in the competition with
other States. In internal as in external affairs,
the worst enemy of freedom is war.

76

Ill

WAR AS AN INSTITUTION

IN spite of the fact that most nations, at most
times, are at peace, war is one of the per-
manent institutions of all free communities, just
as Parliament is one of our permanent insti-
tutions in spite of the fact that it is not always
sitting. It is war as a permanent institution
that I wish to consider : why men tolerate
it ; why they ought not to tolerate it ; what
hope there is of their coming not to tolerate
it ; and how they could abolish it if they
wished to do so.

•War is a conflict between two groups, each
of which attempts to kill and maim as many
as possible of the other group in order to
achieve some object which it desires. The
object is generally either power or wealth. It
is a pleasure to exercise authority over other
men, and it is a pleasure to live on the produce
of other men's labour. The victor in war
can enjoy more of these delights than the van-
quished. But war, like all other natural
activities, is not so much prompted by the
end which it has in view as by an impulse to

77

Principles of Social Reconstruction

the activity itself. Very often men desire an
end, not on its own account, but because their
nature demands the actions which will lead
to the end. And so it is in this case : the ends
to be achieved by war appear in prospect far
more important than they will appear when
they are realized, because war itself is a fulfil-
ment of one side of our nature. If men's
actions sprang from desires for what would
in fact bring happiness, the purely rational
arguments against war would have long ago
put an end to it. What makes war difficult
to suppress is that it springs from an impulse,
rather than from a calculation of the advan-
tages to be derived from war.

•War differs from the employment of force
by the police through the fact that the actions
of the police are ordered by a neutral authority,
whereas in war it is the parties to the dispute
themselves who set force in motion. This
distinction is not absolute, since the State is
not always wholly neutral in internal dis-
turbances. When strikers are shot down, the
State is taking the iside of the rich. When
opinions adverse to the existing State are
punished, the State is obviously one of the
parties to the dispute. And from the sup-
pression of individual opinion up to civil war
all gradations are possible. But broadly
speaking, force employed according to laws
previously laid down by the community as ;\

78

War as an Institution

whole may be distinguished from force em-
ployed by one community against another on
occasions of which the one community is the
sole judge. I have dwelt upon this difference
because I do not think the use of force by
the police can be wholly eliminated, and I
think a similar use of force in international
affairs is the best hope of permanent peace.
At present, international affairs are regulated
by the principle that a nation must not inter-
vene unless its interests are involved : diplo-
matic usage forbids intervention for the mere
maintenance of international law . America knay
protest when American citizens are drowned
by German submarines, but must not protest
when no American citizens are involved. The
case would be analogous in internal affairs if
the police would only interfere with murder
when it happened that a policeman had been
killed. So long as this principle prevails in
the relations of States, the power of neutrals
cannot be effectively employed to prevent war.
In every civilized country two forces co-
operate to produce war. In ordinary times
some men— usually a small proportion of the
population— are bellicose : they predict war,
and obviously are not unhappy in the prospect.
So long as war is not imminent, the bulk of
the population pay little attention to these
men, and do not actively either support or
oppose them. But when war begins to seem

79

Principles of Social Reconstruction

very near, a war -fever seizes hold of people,
and those who were already bellicose find
themselves enthusiastically supported by all but
an insignificant minority. The impulses which
inspire war -fever are rather different from those
which make some men bellicose in ordinary
times. Only educated men are likely to be
warlike at ordinary times, since they alone are
vividly aware of other countries or of the part
which their own nation might play in the affairs
of the world. But it is only their knowledge,
not their nature, that distinguishes them from
their more ignorant 'compatriots.

To take the most obvious example, German
policy, in recent years before the war, was not
averse from war, and not friendly to England.
It is worth while to try to understand the state
of mind from which this policy sprang.

The men who direct German policy are, to
begin with, patriotic to an extent which is
almost unknown in France and England. The
interests of Germany appear to them unques-
tionably the only interests they need take into
account. What injury may, in pursuing those
interests, be done to other nations, what
destruction may be brought upon populations
and cities, what irreparable damage may result
to civilization, it is not for them to consider.
If they can confer what they regard as benefits
upon Germany, everything else is of no account.

The second noteworthy point about German

80

War as an Institution

policy is that its conception of national welfare
is mainly competitive. It is not the intrinsic
wealth of Germany, whether materially or
mentally, that the rulers of Germany consider
important : it is the comparative wealth in the
competition with other civilized countries . For
this reason the destruction of good things
abroad appears to them almost as desirable as
the creation of good things in Germany. In
most parts of the world the French are re-
garded as the most civilized of nations : their
art and their literature and their way of life
have an attraction for foreigners which those
of Germany do not have. The English have
developed political liberty, and the art of main-
taining an Empire with a 'minimum1 of coercion,
in a way for which Germany, hitherto, has shown
no aptitude. These are grounds for envy, and
envy wishes to destroy what is good in other
countries. German militarists, quite rightly,
judged that what was best in France and
England would probably be destroyed by a
great war, even if France and England were
not in the end defeated in the actual fighting.
I have seen a list of young French writers
killed on the battlefield ; probably the Ger-
man authorities have also seen it, and have
reflected with joy that another year of such
losses will destroy French literature for a
generation— perhaps, through loss of tradition,
for ever. Every outburst against liberty in

81 F

Principles of Social Reconstruction

our more bellicose newspapers, every incite-
ment to persecution of defenceless Germans,
every mark of growing ferocity in our attitude,
must be read with delight by German patriots,
as proving their success in robbing us of our
best, and in forcing us to imitate whatever is
worst in Prussia.

But what the rulers of Germany have envied
us most is power and wealth— the power
derived from command of the seas and the
straits, the wealth derived from a century of
industrial supremacy. In both these respects
they feel that their deserts are higher than
ours. They have devoted far more thought
and skill to military and industrial organiza-
tion. Their average of intelligence and know-
ledge is far superior ; their capacity for pur-
suing an attainable end, unitedly and with fore-
thought, is infinitely greater. Yet we, merely
(as they think) because we had a start in the
race, have achieved a vastly larger Empire than
they have, and an enormously greater control
of capital . All this is unbearable ; yet nothing
but a great war can alter it.

Besides all these feelings, there is in many
Germans, especially in those who know us best,
a hot hatred of us on account of our pride.
Farina ta degli Uberti surveyed Hell " come
avesse lo Inferno in gran dispitto" Just so,
by German accounts, English officer prisoners
look round them among their captors— holding

82

War as an Institution

aloof, as though the enemy were noxious un-
clean creatures, toads or slugs or centipedes,
which a man does not touch willingly, and
shakes off with loathing if he is forced to
touch them for a moment. It is easy to
imagine how the devils hated Farinata, and
inflicted greater pains upon him1 than upon his
neighbours, hoping to win recognition by some
slight wincing on his part, driven to frenzy
by his continuing to behave as if they did not
exist. In just the same way the Germans are
maddened by our spiritual immobility. At
bottom we have regarded the Germans as one
regards flies on a hot day : they lare a nuisance,
one has to brush them off, but it would not
occur to one to be turned aside by them.
When the initial certainty of victory faded for
a time we began to be affected inwardly by
the Germans. If we had continued to fail in
our military enterprises, we should in time have
realized that they are human beings, not 'just
a tiresome circumstance. Then perhaps we
should have hated them with a hatred which
they would have had no reason to resent . And
from such a hatred it would be only a short
journey to a genuine rapprochement.

The problem which must be solved, if the
future of the world is to be less terrible than its
present, is the problem of preventing nations
from getting into the moods of England and
Germany at the outbreak of the war. These

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

two nations as they were at that moment might
be taken as almost mythical representatives of
pride and envy— cold pride and hot envy. Ger-
many declaimed passionately : " You, England,
swollen and decrepit, you overshadow my whole
growth— your rotting branches keep the sun
from shining upon me and the rain from nour-
ishing me. Your spreading foliage must be
lopped, your symmetrical beauty must be
destroyed, that I too may have freedom to grow,
that my young vigour may no longer be im-
peded by your decaying mass." England,
bored and aloof, unconscious of the claims of
outside forces, attempted absent-mindedly to
sweep away the upstart disturber of medita-
tion ; but the upstart was not swept away,
and remains even now with some prospect of
making good his claim. The claim and the
resistance to it are alike folly. Germany had
no good ground for envy ; we had no good
ground for resisting whatever in Germany's
demands was compatible with our continued
existence. Is there any method of averting
such reciprocal folly in the future?

I think if either the English or the Germans
were capable of thinking in terms of indi-
vidual welfare rather than national pride, they
would have seen that, at every moment during
the war the wisest course would have been to
conclude peace at once, on the best terms that
could have been obtained. This course, I am

84

War as an Institution

convinced, would have been the wisest for each
separate nation, as well as for civilization in
general. The utmost evil that the enemy could
inflict through an unfavourable peace would
be a trifle compared to the evil which all the
nations inflict upon themselves by continuing
to fight. What blinds us to this obvious fact
is pride, the pride which makes the acknow-
ledgment of defeat intolerable, and clothes
itself in the garb of reason by suggesting all
kinds of evils which are supposed to result
from admitting defeat. But the only real evil
of defeat is humiliation, and humiliation is sub-
jective ; we shall not feel humiliated if we
become persuaded that it was a mistake to
engage in the war, and that it is better to
pursue other tasks not dependent upon world-
dominion. If either the English or the Ger-
mans could admit this inwardly, any peace
which did not destroy national independence
could be accepted without real loss in the self-
respect which is essential to a good life.

The mood in which Germany embarked upon
the war was abominable, but it was a mood
fostered by the habitual mood of England.
We have prided ourselves upon our territory
and our wealth ; we have been ready at all
times to defend by force of arms what we have
conquered in India and Africa. If we had
realized the futility of empire, and had shown
a willingness to yield colonies to Germany

Principles of Social Reconstruction

without waiting for the threat of force, we
might have been in a position to persuade
the Germans that their ambitions were foolish,
and that the respect of the world was not to
be won by an imperialist policy. But by our
resistance we showed that we shared their
standards. We, being in possession, became
enamoured of the status quo. The Germans
were willing to make war to upset the status
quo ; we were willing to make war to prevent
its being upset in Germany's favour. So con-
vinced were we of the sacredness of the status
quo that we never realized how advantageous
it was to us, or how, by insisting upon it, we
shared the responsibility for the war. In a
world where nations grow and decay, where
forces change and populations become cramped,
it is not possible or desirable to maintain the
status quo for ever. If peace is to be pre-
served, nations must learn to accept unfavour-
able alterations of the map without feeling that
they must first be defeated in war, or that
in yielding they incur a humiliation.

It is the insistence of legalists and friends
of peace upon the maintenance of the status
quo that has driven Germany into militarism.
Germany had as good a right to an Empire as
any other Great Power, but could only acquire
an Empire through war. Love of peace has
been too much associated with a static con-
ception of international relations. In economic

86

War as an Institution

disputes we all know that whatever is vigorous
in the wage -earning classes is opposed to
" industrial peace," because the existing dis-
tribution of wealth is felt to be unfair. Those
who enjoy a privileged position endeavour to
bolster up their claims by appealing to the
desire for peace, and decrying those who pro-
mote strife between the classes. It never
occurs to them that by opposing changes
without considering whether they are just,
the capitalists share the responsibility for the
class war. And in exactly the same way
England shares the responsibility for Ger-
many's war. If actual war is ever to cease
there will have to be political methods of
achieving the results which now can only be
achieved by successful fighting, and nations
will have voluntarily to admit adverse claims
which appear just in the judgment of neutrals.
It is only by some such admission, embody-
ing itself in a Parliament of the nations with
full power to alter the distribution of territory,
that militarism can be permanently overcome.
It may be that the present war will bring, in
the -Western nations, a change of mood and
outlook sufficient to make such an institution
possible. It may be that more wars and
more destruction will be necessary before the
majority of civilized men rebel against the
brutality and futile destruction of modern war.
But unless our standards of civilization and

87

Principles of Social Reconstruction

our powers of constructive thought are to be
permanently lowered, I cannot doubt that,
sooner or later, reason will conquer the blind
impulses which now lead nations into war.
And if a large majority of the Great Powers
had a firm determination that peace should
be preserved, there would be no difficulty in
devising diplomatic machinery for the settle-
ment of disputes, and in establishing educa-
tional system's which would implant in the
minds of the young an ineradicable horror of
the slaughter which they are now taught to
admire .

Besides the conscious and deliberate forces
leading to war, there are the inarticulate feel-
ings of common men, which, in most civilized
countries, are always ready to burst into war
fever at the bidding of statesmen. If peace
is to be secure, the readiness to catch war
fever must be somehow diminished. -Whoever
wishes to succeed in this must first under-
stand what war fever is and why it arises.

The men who have an important influence
in the world, whether for good or evil, are
dominated as a rule by a threefold desire :
they desire, first, an activity which calls fully
into play the faculties in which they feel that
they excel ; secondly, the sense of successfully
overcoming resistance ; thirdly, the respect of
others on account of their success. The third
of these desires is sometimes absent : some

88

War as an Institution

men who have been great have been without
the " last infirmity," and have been content
with their own sense of success, or merely with
the joy of difficult effort. But as a rule all
three are present. Some men's talents are
specialized, so that their choice of activities is
circumscribed by the nature of their faculties ;
other men have, in youth, such a wide range
of possible aptitudes that their choice is chiefly
determined by the varying degrees of respect
which public opinion gives to different kinds
of success.

The same desires, usually in a less marked
degree, exist in men who have no exceptional
talents. But such men cannot achieve any-
thing very difficult by their individual efforts ;
for them, as units, it is impossible to acquire
the sense of greatness or the triumph of strong
resistance overcome. Their separate lives are
unadventurous and dull. In the morning they
go to the office or the plough, in the evening
they return, tired and silent, to the sober
monotony of wife and children. Believing that
security is the supreme good, they have insured
against sickness and death, and have found
an employment where they have little fear of
dismissal and no hope of any great rise. But
security, once achieved, brings a Nemesis of
ennui. Adventure, imagination, risk, also have
their claims ; but how can these claims be
satisfied by the ordinary wage-earner? Even

89

Principles of Social Reconstruction

if it were possible to satisfy them, the claims
of wife and children have priority and must
not be neglected.

To this victim of order and good organiza-
tion the realization comes, in some moment of
sudden crisis, that he belongs to a nation, that
his nation may take risks, may engage in
difficult enterprises, enjoy the hot passion of
doubtful combat, stimulate adventure and
imagination by military expeditions to Mount
Sinai and the Garden of Eden. What his
nation does, in some sense, he does ; what his
nation suffers, he suffers. The long years of
private caution are avenged by a wild plunge
into public madness. All the horrid duties
of thrift and order and care which he has
learnt to fulfil in private are thought not to
apply to public affairs : it is patriotic and noble
to be reckless for the nation, though it would
be wicked to be reckless for oneself. The
old primitive passions, which civilization has
denied, surge up all the stronger for repression .
In a moment imagination and instinct travel
back through the centuries, and the wild man
of the woods emerges from the mental prison
in which he has been confined. This is the
deeper part of the psychology of the war
fever .

But besides the irrational and instinctive
element in the war fever, there is always also,
if only as a liberator of primitive impulse, a

90

War as an Institution

certain amount of quasi -rational calculation and
what is euphemistically called " thought." The
war fever very seldom1 seizes a nation unless
it believes that it will be victorious. Un-
doubtedly, under the influence of excitement,
men over-estimate their chances of success ;
but there is some proportion between what
is hoped and what a rational man would expect .
Holland, though quite as humane as England,
had no impulse to go to war on behalf of
Belgium, because the likelihood of disaster was
so obviously overwhelming. The London
populace, if they had known how the war was
going to develop, would not have rejoiced as
they did on that August Bank Holiday long
ago. A nation which has had a recent ex-
perience of war, and has come to know that a
war is almost always more painful than it is
expected to be at the outset, becomes much
less liable to war fever until a new generation
grows up. The element of rationality in war
fever is recognized by Governments and jour-
nalists who desire war, as may be seen by their
invariably minimizing the perils of a war which
they wish to provoke. At the beginning of
the South African War Sir William Butler
was dismissed, apparently for suggesting that
sixty thousand men and three months might
not suffice to subdue the Boer Republics. And
when the war proved long and difficult, the
nation turned against those who had made it.

Principles of Social Reconstruction

We may assume, I think, without attributing
too great a share to reason in human affairs,
that a nation would not suffer from war fever
in a case where every sane man could see that
defeat was very probable.

The importance of this lies in the fact that
it would make aggressive war very unlikely
if its chances of success were very small. If
the peace-loving nations were sufficiently strong
to be obviously capable of defeating the
nations which were willing to wage aggressive
war, the peace-loving nations might form an
alliance and agree to fight jointly against any
nation which refused to submit its claims to
an International Council. Before the present
war we might have reasonably hoped to secure
the peace of the world in some such way ; but
the military strength of Germany has shown
that such a scheme has no great chance of
success at present. Perhaps at some not far
distant date it may be made more feasible by
developments of policy in America.

The economic and political forces which
make for war could be easily curbed if the
will to peace existed strongly in all civilized
nations. But so long as the populations are
liable to war fever, all work for peace must
be precarious ; and if war fever could not be
aroused, political and economic forces would
be powerless to produce any long or very

destructive war. The fundamental problem for

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War as an Institution

the pacifist is to prevent the impulse towards
war which seizes whole communities from time
to time. And this can only be done by far-
reaching changes in education, in the economic
structure of society, and in the moral code
by which public opinion controls the lives of
men and women.1

A great many of the impulses which now lead
nations to go to war are in themselves essential
to any vigorous or progressive life. Without
imagination and love of adventure a society
soon becomes stagnant and begins to decay.
Conflict, provided it is not destructive and
brutal, is necessary in order to stimulate men's
activities, and to secure the victory of what is
living over what is dead or merely traditional.
The wish for the triumph of one's cause, the
sense of solidarity with large bodies of men,
are not things which a wise man will wish to
destroy. It is only the outcome in death and
destruction and hatred that is evil. The
problem is, to keep these impulses, without
making war the outlet for them.

All Utopias that have hitherto been con-
structed are intolerably dull. Any man with
any force in him would rather live in this world,
with all its ghastly horrors, than in Plato's
Republic or among Swift's Houyhnhnms. The

1 These changes, which are to be desired on their own
account, not only in order to prevent war, will be discussed
in later lectures.

* 93

Principles of Social Reconstruction

men who make Utopias proceed upon a radi-
cally false assumption as to what constitutes
a good life. They conceive that it is possible
to imagine a certain state of society and a
certain way of life which should be once for all
recognized as good, and should then continue
for ever and ever. They do not realize that
much the greater part of a man's happiness
depends upon activity, and only a very small
remnant consists in passive enjoyment. Even
the pleasures which do consist in enjoyment are
only satisfactory, to most men, when they
come in the intervals of activity. Social
reformers, like inventors of Utopias, are apt
to forget this very obvious fact of human
nature. They aim rather at securing more
leisure, and more opportunity for enjoying it,
than at making work itself more satisfactory,
more consonant with impulse, and a better
outlet for creativeness and the desire to employ
one's faculties. -Work, in the modern world,
is, to almost all who depend on earnings, mere
work, not an embodiment of the desire for
activity. Probably this is to a considerable
extent inevitable. But in so far as it can be
prevented something will be done to give a
peaceful outlet to some of the impulses which
lead to war.

It would, of course, be easy to bring about
peace if there were no vigour in the world.
The Roman Empire was pacific and unpro-

94

War as an Institution

ductive ; the Athens of Pericles was the most
productive and almost the most warlike com-
munity known to history. The only form of
production in which our own age excels is
science, and in science Germany, the most war-
like of Great Powers, is supreme. It is useless
to multiply examples ; but it is plain that the
very same vital energy which produces all that
is best also produces war and the love of war.
This is the basis of the opposition to pacifism
felt by many men whose aim's and activities
are by no means brutal . Pacifiism, in practice,
too often expresses merely lack of force, not
the refusal to use force in thwarting others.
Pacifism, if it is to be both victorious and
beneficent, must find an outlet, compatible with
humane feeling, for the vigour which now leads
nations into war and destruction.

This problem was considered by William
James in an admirable address on " The Moral
Equivalent of War," delivered to a congress of
pacifists during the Spanish-American War of
1898. His statement of the problem could not
be bettered ; and so far as I know, he is
the only writer who has faced the problem
adequately. But his solution is not adequate ;
perhaps no adequate solution is possible. The
problem, however, is one of degree : every
additional peaceful outlet for men's energies
diminishes the force which urges nations
towards war, and makes war less frequent and

95

less fierce. And as a question of degree, it is
capable of more or less partial solutions.1

Every vigorous man needs some kind of
contest, some sense of resistance overcome, in
order to feel that he is exercising his faculties.
Under the influence of economics, a theory
has grown up that what men desire is wealth ;
this theory has tended to verify itself, because
people's actions are often determined by what
they think they desire rather than by what they
really desire. The less active members of a
community often do in fact desire wealth, since
it enables them to gratify a taste for passive
enjoyment, and to secure respect without exer-
tion. But the energetic men who make great
fortunes seldom desire the actual money : they
desire the sense of power through a contest, and
the joy of successful activity. For this reason,
those who are the most ruthless in making
money are often the most willing to give it away ;
there are many notorious examples of this
among American millionaires. The only ele-
ment of truth in the economic theory that these
men are actuated by desire for money is this :
owing to the fact that money is what is believed
to be desirable, the making of money is recog-
nized as the test of success. What is desired is
visible and indubitable success ; but this can

1 What is said on this subject in the present lecture is only
preliminary, since the subsequent lectures all deal with some
aspect of the same problem.

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War as an Institution

only be achieved by being one of the few who
reach a goal which many men would wish to
reach. For this reason, public opinion has a
great influence in directing the activities of
vigorous men. In America a millionaire is
more respected than a great artist ; this leads
men who might become either the one or the
other to choose to become millionaires. In
Renaissance Italy great artists were more
respected than millionaires, and the result was
the opposite of what it is in America.

Some pacifists and all militarists deprecate
social and political conflicts. In this the
militarists are in the right, from their point of
view; but the pacifists seem to me mistaken.
Conflicts of party politics, conflicts between
capital and labour, and generally all those con-
flicts of principle which do not involve war,
serve many useful purposes, and do very little
harm. They increase men's interest in public
affairs, they afford a comparatively innocent
outlet for the love of contest, and they help to
alter laws and institutions, when changing con-
ditions or greater knowledge create the wish
for an alteration. Everything that intensifies
political life tends to bring about a peaceful
interest of the same kind as the interest which
leads to desire for war. And in a democratic
community political questions give every voter
a sense of initiative and power and respon-
sibility which relieves his life of something

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

of its narrow unadventurousness . The object
of the pacifist should be to give men more and
more political control over their own lives, and
in particular to introduce democracy into the
management of industry, as the syndicalists
advise .

The problem for the reflective pacifist is
twofold : how to keep his own country at
peace, and how to preserve the peace of the
world. It is impossible that the peace of the
world should be preserved while nations are
liable to the mood in which Germany entered
upon the war— unless, indeed, one nation were
so obviously stronger than all others combined
as to make war unnecessary for that one and
hopeless for all the others. As this war has
dragged on its weary length, many people must
have asked themselves whether national inde-
pendence is worth the price that has to be
paid for it, Would it not perhaps be better
to secure universal peace by the supremacy of
one Power? "To secure peace by a world
federation " — so a submissive pacifist might
have argued during the first two years of the
war—" would require some faint glimmerings of
reason in rulers and peoples, and is therefore
out of the question ; but to secure it by allow-
ing Germany to dictate terms to Europe would
be easy. Since there is no other way of ending
war " — so our advocate of peace at any price
would contend—" let us adopt this way, which

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War as an Institution

happens at the moment to be open to us." It
is worth while to consider this view more
attentively than it is commonly considered.

There is one great historic example of a
long peace secured in this way,; I mean the
Roman Errfpire. We in England boast of the
Pax *Britannica which we kave imposed, in this
way, upon the warring races and religions in
India. If we are right in boasting of this, if
we have in fact conferred a benefit upon India
by enforced peace, the Germans would be
right in boasting if they could impose a Pax
Germanica upon Europe. Before the war, men
might have said that India and Europe are not
analogous, because India is less civilized than
Europe ; but now, I hope, no one would have
the effrontery to maintain anything so prepos-
terous. Repeatedly in modern history there
has been a chance of achieving European
unity by the hegemony of a single State ; but
always England, in obedience to the doctrine
of the Balance of Power, has prevented this
consummation, and preserved what our states-
men have called the " liberties of Europe."
It is this task upon which we are now engaged.
But I do not think our statesmen, or any others
among us, have made much effort to consider
whether the task is worth what it costs.

In one case we were clearly wrong : in
our resistance to revolutionary France. If
revolutionary France could have conquered the

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

Continent and Great Britain, the world would
now be happier, more civilized, and more free,
as well as more peaceful. But revolutionary
France was a quite exceptional case, because
its early conquests were made in the name of
liberty, against tyrants, not against peoples ;
and everywhere the French armies were
welcomed as liberators by all except rulers and
bigots. In the case of Philip II we were as
clearly right as we were wrong in 1793. But
in both cases our action is not to be judged
by some abstract diplomatic conception of the
" liberties of Europe," but by the ideals of
the Power seeking hegemony, and by the
probable effect upon the welfare of ordinary
men and women throughout Europe.

" 'Hegemony " is a very vague word, and
everything turns upon the degree of interfer-
ence with liberty which jt involves. There is
a degree of interference with liberty which is
fatal to many forms of national life ; for
example, Italy in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries was crushed by the supremacy
of Spain and Austria. If the Germans were
actually to annex French provinces, as they did
in 1871, they would probably inflict a serious
injury upon those provinces, and make them
less fruitful for civilization in general. For
such reasons national liberty is a matter of
real importance, and a Europe actually
governed by Germany would probably be very

IOO

War as an Institution

dead and unproductive. But if " hegemony "
merely means increased weight in diplomatic
questions, more coaling stations and posses-
sions in Africa, more power of securing advan-
tageous commercial treaties, then it can hardly
be supposed that it would do any vital damage
to other nations ; .certainly it would not do so
much damage as the present war is doing. I
cannot doubt that, before the war, a hegemony
of this kind would have abundantly satisfied
the Germans. But the effect of the war, so
far, has been ,to increase immeasurably all the
dangers which it was intended to avert. We
have now only the choice between certain
exhaustion of Europe in fighting Germany and
possible damage to the national life of France
by German tyranny. Stated in terms of civi-
lization and human welfare, not in terms of
national prestige, that is now in fact the issue.
Assuming that war is not ended by one State
conquering all the others, the only way in
which it can be permanently ended is by a
world-federation. So long as there are many
sovereign States, each with its own Army, there
can be no security that there will not be war.
There will have to be in the world only one
Army and one Navy before there will be any
reason to think that wars have ceased. This
means that, so far as the military functions
of the State are concerned, there will be only
one State, which will be world -wide.

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The civil functions of the State — legislative,
administrative, and judicial — have no very
essential connection with the military functions,
and there is no reason why both kinds of
functions should normally be exercised by the
same State. There is, in fact, every reason
why the civil State and the military State
should be different . The greater modern States
are already too large for most civil purposes,
but for military purposes they are not large
enough, since they are not world-wide. This
difference as to the desirable area for the two
kinds of State introduces a certain perplexity
and hesitation, when it is not realized that the
two functions have little necessary connection :
one set of considerations points towards small
States, the other towards continually larger
States. Of course, if there were an inter-
national Army and Navy, there would have to
be some international authority to set them in
motion. But this authority need never con-
cern itself with any of the internal affairs of
national States : it need only declare the rules
which should regulate their relations, and pro-
nounce judicially when those rules have been
so infringed as to call for the intervention of
the international force. 'How easily the limits
of the international authority could be fixed
may be seen by maoiy actual examples.

The civil and military State are often
different in practice, for many purposes. The

1 02

War as an Institution

South American Republics are sovereign
for all purposes except their relations with
Europe, in regard to which they are subject to
the United States : in dealings with Europe,
the Army and Navy of the United States are
their Army and Navy. Our self-governing
Dominions depend for their defence, not upon
their own forces, but upon our Navy. Most
Governments, nowadays, do not aim at formal
annexation of a country which they wish to
incorporate, but only at a protectorate — that
is, civil autonomy subject to military control.
Such autonomy is, of course, in practice
incomplete, because it does not enable the
" protected " country to adopt measures .which
are vetoed by the Rower in military control.
But it may be very nearly complete, as in the
case of our self-governing Dominions. At the
other extreme, it may become a mere farce,
as in Egypt. In the case of an alliance,
there is complete autonomy of the separate
allied countries, together with what is .practi-
cally a combination of their military forces
into one single force.

The great advantage of a large military
State is that it increases the area over which
internal war is not possible except by revolu-
tion. If England and Canada have a disagree-
ment, it is taken; as a matter of course that a
settlement shall be arrived at by discussion,
not by force. Still more is this the case if

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

Manchester and Liverpool have a quarrel, in
spite of the fact that each is autonomous for
many local purposes. No one would have
thought it reasonable that Liverpool should go
to war to prevent the construction of the
Manchester Ship Canal, although almost any
two Great Powers would have gone to war
over an issue of the same relative importance.
England and Russia would probably have gone
to war over Persia if they had not been allies ;
as it is, they arrived by diplomacy at much the
same iniquitous result as they would otherwise
have reached by fighting. Australia and Japan
would probably fight if they were both com-
pletely independent ; but both depend for their
liberties upon the British Navy, and therefore
they have to adjust their differences peaceably.
The chief disadvantage of a large military
State is that, when external war occurs, the
area affected is greater. The quadruple
Entente forms, for the present, one military
State ; the result is that, because of a dispute
between Austria and Serbia, Belgium is
devastated and Australians are killed in the
Dardanelles. Another disadvantage is that it
facilitates oppression. A large military State
is practically omnipotent against a small State,
and can impose its will, as England and Russia
did in Persia and as Austria-Hungary has been
doing in Serbia. It is impossible to make
sure of avoiding oppression by any purely

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War as an Institution

mechanical guarantees ; only a liberal and
humane spirit can afford a real protection. It
has been perfectly possible for England to
oppress Ireland, in spite of democracy and the
presence of Irish Members at Westminister.
Nor has the presence of Roles in the Reichstag
prevented the oppression of Brussian Poland.
But democracy and representative government
undoubtedly make oppression less probable :
they afford a means by which those who
might be oppressed can cause their wishes and
grievances to be publicly known, they render
it certain that only a minority can be oppressed,
and then only if the majority are nearly unani-
mous in wishing to oppress them. Also the
practice of oppression affords much more
pleasure to the governing classes, who actually
carry it out, than to the mass of the population .
For this reason ttop mass of the population,
where it has power, is likely to be less
tyrannical than an oligarchy or a bureaucracy.
In order to prevent war and at the same
time preserve liberty it is necessary that there
should be only one military State in the world,
and that when disputes between different
countries arise, it should act according to the
decision of a central authority. This is what
would naturally result from a federation of the
world; if such a thing ever came about. But
the prospect is remote, and it is worth while
to consider why it is so remote.

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

The unity of a nation is produced by similar
habits, instinctive liking, a common history,
and a common pride. The unity of a nation
is partly due to intrinsic affinities between its
citizens, but partly also to the pressure and
contrast of the outside world : if a nation were
isolated^ it would not have the same cohesion
or the same fervour of patriotism. When we
come to alliances of nations, it is seldom any-
thing except outside pressure that produces
solidarity. England and America, to some
extent, are drawn together by the same causes
which often make national unity : a ( more or
less) common language, similar political insti-
tutions, similar aims in international politics.
But England, France, and Russia were drawn
together solely by fear of Germany ; if
Germany had been annihilated by a natural
cataclysm, they would at once have begun to
hate one another, as they did before Germany
was strong. For this reason, the possibility
of co-operation in the present alliance against
Germany affords no ground whatever for
hoping that all the nations of the world might
co-operate permanently in a peaceful alliance.
The present motive for cohesion, namely a
common fear, 'would be gone, and could not
be replaced by any other motive unless men's
thoughts and purposes were very different from
what they are now.

The ultimate fact from which war results
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War as an Institution

is not economic or political, and does not rest
upon any mechanical difficulty of inventing
means for the peaceful settlement of inter-
national disputes . The ultimate fact from which
war results is the fact that a large propor-
tion of mankind have an impulse to conflict
rather than harmony, and can only be brought
to co-operate with others in resisting or attack-
ing a common enemy. This is the case in
private life as 'well as in the relations of States.
Most men, when they feel themselves suffi-
ciently strong, set to work to make themselves
feared rather than loved ; the wish to gain
the 'good opinion of others is confined, as a
rule, to those \vho 'have not acquired secure
power. The impulse to quarrelling and self-
assertion, the pleasure of getting one's own
way in spite of opposition, is native to most
men . It is this impulse, rather than any motive
of calculated self-interest, which produces war,
and causes the difficulty of bringing about a
World -State. 'And this impulse is not confined
to one nation ; it exists, in varying" degrees,
in all the vigorous nations of the world.

But although this impulse is strong, there
is no reason why it should be allowed to lead
to war. It was exactly the sarnie impulse
which led to duelling1 ; yet now civilized men
conduct their private quarrels without blood-
shed. If political contest within a World-State
were substituted for war, imagination would

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

soon accustom itself to the new situation, as it
has accustomed itself to the absence of duelling .
Through the influence of institutions and
habits, without any fundamental change in
human nature, men would learn to look back
upon war as we look upon the burning of
heretics or upon 'human sacrifice to heathen
deities. If I were to buy a revolver costing
several (pounds, in order to shoot my friend
with a view to stealing sixpence out of his
pocket, I should be thought neither very wise
nor very virtuous. But if I can get sixty-five
million accomplices to join me in this criminal
absurdity, I become one of a great and
glorious nation, nobly sacrificing the cost of
my revolver, perhaps even my life, in order
to secure the sixpence for the honour of my
country. Historians, who are almost invari-
ably sycophants, will praise me and my accom-
plices if we are successful, and say that we are
worthy successors of the heroes who overthrew
the might of Imperial Rome. But if my
opponents are victorious, if their sixpences are
defended at the cost of many pounds each
and the lives of a large proportion of the
population, then historians will call me a
brigand (as I am1), and praise the spirit and
self-sacrifice of those who resisted me.

War is surrounded with 'glamour, by
tradition, by Homer and the Old Testament,
by early education, by elaborate myths as to

108

War as an Institution

the importance of the issues involved, by the
heroism and self-sacrifice which these myths
call out. Jephthah sacrificing his daughter is
a heroic figure, but he would have let her live
if he had not been deceived by a myth,.
Mothers sending their sons to the battlefield
are heroic, but they are as much deceived as
Jephthah. And, in both cases alike, the
heroism which issues in cruelty would be
dispelled if there were not some strain of
barbarism in the imaginative outlook from
which myths spring. A God who can be
pleased by the sacrifice of an innocent girl
could only be worshipped by men to whom
the thought of receiving such a sacrifice is
not wholly abhorrent. iA nation which believes
that its welfare can only be secured by suffering
and inflicting hundreds of thousands of equally
horrible sacrifices, is a nation which has no
very spiritual conception oif what constitutes
national welfare. It would be better a hun-
dredfold to forgo material comfort, power,
pomp, and outward glory than to kill and be
killed, to hate and be hated, to throw away
in a mad moment of fury the bright heritage
of the ages. We have learnt gradually to free
our God from the savagery with which the
primitive Israelites and the Fathers endowed
Him : few of us now believe that it is His
pleasure to torture most of the human race in
an eternity of hell -fire. But we have not yet

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

learnt to free our national ideals from the
ancient taint. Devotion to the nation is
perhaps the deepest and most widespread
religion of thie "present age. Like the ancient
religions, it demand's its persecutions, its holo-
causts, its lurid heroic cruelties ; like them, it
is noble, primitive, brutal, and mad. Now, as
in the ipast, religion, lagging behind private
consciences through the weight of tradition,
steels the hearts of men against mercy and
their minds against truth. If the world is to
be saved, men must learn to be noble without
being cruel, to be filled with faith and yet
open to truth, to be inspired by great purposes
without hating those who try to thwart them.
But before this can happen, men must first
face the terrible realization that the g'ods before
whom they have bowed down were false gods
and the sacrifices they have made were vain.

1 10

IV

PROPERTY

AMONG the many gloomy novelists of the
realistic school, perhaps the most full of gloom
is Gissing. In common with all his characters,
he lives under the weight of a great oppres-
sion : the power of the fearful and yet adored
idol of Money. One of his typical stories
is " Eve's Ransom," where the heroine, with
various discreditable subterfuges, throws over
the poor man whom she loves in order to marry
the rich man whose income she loves still
better. The poor man, finding that the rich
man's income has given her a fuller life and
a better character than the poor man's love
could have given her, decides that she has
done quite right, and that he deserves to be
punished for his lack of money. In this story,
as in his other books, Gissing has set forth,
quite accurately, the actual dominion of money,
and the impersonal worship which it exacts
from the great majority of civilized mankind.
Gissing's facts are undeniable, and yet his
attitude produces a revolt in any reader who
has vital passions and masterful desires. His

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

worship of money is bound up with his con-
sciousness of inward defeat. And in the
modern world generally, it is the decay of life
which has promoted the religion of material
goods ; and1 the religion of material goods,
in its turn, has hastened the decay of life on
which it thrives. The man who worships
money has ceased to t hope for happiness
through his own efforts or in his own activities :
he looks upon happiness as a passive enjoy-
ment of pleasures derived from the outside
world. The artist or the lover does not worship
money in his moments of ardour, because his
desires are specific, and directed towards
objects which only he can create. And con-
versely, the worshipper of money can never
achieve greatness as an artist or a lover.

Love of money has been denounced by
moralists since the world began. I do not wish
to add another to the moral denunciations, of
which the efficacy in the past has not been
encouraging. I wish to show 'how the worship
of money is both an effect and a cause of
diminishing vitality, and how our institutions
might be changed so as to make the worship
of money grow less and the general vitality
grow more. It is not the desire for money as
a means to definite ends that is in question.
A struggling artist may desire money in order
to have leisure for his art, but this desire is
finite, and can be satisfied fully by a very

112

Property

modest sum. It is the worship of money that
I wish to consider : the belief that all values
may be irieasured in terms of money, and that
money is the ultimate test of success in life.
This belief is held in fact, if not in words, by
multitudes of men and women, and yet it is
not in harmony with human nature, since it
ignores vital needs and the instinctive tendency
towards some specific kind of growth. It
makes men treat as unimportant those of their
desires which run counter to the acquisition of
money, and yet such desires are, as a rule,
more important to well-being than any increase
of income. It leads men to mutilate their
own natures from a mistaken theory of what
constitutes success, and to give admiration to
enterprises which add nothing to human
welfare. It promotes a dead uniformity of
character and purpose, a diminution in the
joy of life, and a stress and strain which
leaves whole communities weary, discouraged,
and disillusioned.

America, the pioneer of Western progress, is
thought by many to display the worship of
money in its most perfect form. A well-to-do
American, who already has more than enough
money to satisfy all reasonable requirements,
very often continues to work at his office
with an assiduity which would only be pardon-
able it starvation were the alternative.

But England, except among a small minority,
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Principles of Social Reconstruction

is almost as much given over to the worship
of money as America. Love of money in
England takes, as a rule, the form of
snobbishly desiring to maintain a certain
social status, rather than of striving after
an indefinite increase of income. Men post-
pone marriage until they have an income
enabling them to have as many rooms and
servants in their house as they feel that their
dignity requires. This makes it necessary for
them while they are young to keep a watch
upon their affections, lest they should be led
into an imprudence : they acquire a cautious
habit of mind, and a fear of " giving themselves
away," which makes a free and vigorous life
impossible. In acting as they do they imagine
that they are being virtuous, since they would
feel it a hardship for a woman to be asked to
descend to a lower social status than that of
her parents, and a degradation to themselves
to marry a woman whose social status was not
equal to their own. The things of nature are
not valued in comparison with money. It is
not thought a hardship for a woman to have
to accept, as her only experience of love, the
prudent and limited attentions of a man whose
capacity for emotion has been lost during years
of wise restraint or sordid relations with women
whom he did not respect. The woman herself
does not know that it is a hardship ; for she,
too, has been taught prudence for fear of a

114

Property

descent in the social scale, and from early youth
she has had it instilled into her that strong!
feeling does not become a young woman. So
the two unite to slip through life in ignorance
of all that is worth knowing. Their ancestors
were not restrained from passion by the fear
of hell -fire, but they are restrained effectually
by a worse fear, the fear of coming down in
the world.

The same motives which lead men to marry
late also lead them to limit their families. Pro-
fessional men wish to send their sons to a
public school, though the education they will
obtain is no better than at a grammar school,
and the companions with whom they will asso-
ciate are more vicious. But snobdom has
decided that public schools are best, and from
its verdict there is no appeal. What makes
them the best is that they are the most expen-
sive. And the same social struggle, in varying
forms, runs through all classes except the very
highest and the very lowest. For this purpose
men and women make great moral efforts, and
show amazing powers of self-control ; but all
their efforts and all their self-control, being
not used for any creative end, serve merely
to dry up the well-spring of life within them',
to make them feeble, listless, and trivial. It
is not in such a soil that the passion which
produces genius can be nourished. Men's souls
have exchanged the wilderness for the draw-

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

ing -room : they have become cramped and
pretty and deformed, like Chinese women's
feet. Even the horrors of war have hardly
awakened them from the smug somnambulism
of respectability. And it is chiefly the worship
of money that has brought about this death-
like slumber of all that makes men great.

In France the worship of money takes the
form of thrift. It is not easy to make a fortune
in France, but an inherited competence is very
common, and where it exists the main purpose
of life is to hand it on undiminished, if not
increased. The French rentier is one of the
great forces in international politics : it is he
through whom F.rance has been strengthened
in diplomacy and weakened in war, by in-
creasing the supply of French capital and
diminishing the supply of French men. The
necessity of providing a dot for daughters, and
the subdivision of property by the law of in-
heritance, have made the family more power-
ful, as an institution, than in any other civilized
country. In order that the family may prosper,
it is kept small, and the individual members
are often sacrificed to it. The desire for family
continuity makes men timid and unadven-
turous : it is only in the organized proletariat
that the daring spirit survives which made the
Revolution and led the world in political
thought and practice. Through the influence
of money, the strength of the family has

116

Property

become a weakness to the nation by making
the population remain stationary and even
tend to decline. The same loye of safety is
beginning to produce the same effects else-
where ; but in this, as in many better things,
France has led the way.

In Germany the worship of money is more
recent than in Erance, England, and America ;
indeed, it hardly existed until after the Franco -
Prussian War. But it has been adopted now
with the same intensity and whole-heartedness
which have always marked German beliefs.
It is characteristic that, as in Erance the
worship of money is associated with the family,
so in Germany it is associated with the State.
Liszt, in deliberate revolt against the English
economists, taught his compatriots to think of
economics in national terms, and the German
who develops a business is felt, by others as
well as by himself, to be performing a service
to the State. Germans believe that England's
greatness is due to industrialism and Empire,
and that our success in these is due to an
intense nationalism. The apparent inter-
nationalism of our Free Trade policy they
regard as mere hypocrisy. They have set them-
selves to imitate what they believe we really are,
with only the hypocrisy omitted. It must be
admitted that their success has been amazing.
But in the process they have destroyed almost
all that made Germany of value to the world,

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

and they have not adopted whatever of good
there may have been among us, since that
was all swept aside in the wholesale condemna-
tion of " hypocrisy." And in adopting our
worst faults, they have made them far worse
by a system, a thoroughness, and a unanimity
of which we are happily incapable. Ger-
many's religion is of great importance to the
world, since Germans have a power of real
belief, and have the energy to acquire the
virtues and vices which their creed demands.
Eor the sake of the world, as well as for the
sake of Germany, we must hope that they will
soon abandon the worship of wealth which they
have unfortunately learnt from us.

Worship of money is no new thing, but it is
a more harmful thing than it used to be, for
several reasons. Industrialism has made work
more wearisome and intense, less capable of
affording pleasure and interest by the way to
the man who has undertaken it for the sake
of money. The power of limiting families has
opened a new field for the operation of thrift.
•The general increase in education and self-
discipline has made men more capable of pur-
suing a purpose consistently in spite of temp-
tations, and when the purpose is against life
it becomes more destructive with every increase
of tenacity in those who adopt it. The greater
productivity resulting from industrialism has
enabled us to devote more labour and capital

118

Property

to armies and navies for the protection of
our wealth from envious neighbours, and for
the exploitation of inferior races, which are
ruthlessly wasted by the capitalist regime.
Through the fear of losing money, forethought
and anxiety eat away men's power of happi-
ness, and the dread of misfortune becomes a
greater misfortune than the one which is
dreaded. The happiest men and women, as
we can all testify from our own experience,
are those who are indifferent to money because
they have some positive purpose which shuts
it out. And yet all our political thought,
whether Imperialist, Radical, or Socialist, con-
tinues to occupy itself almost exclusively with
men's economic desires, as though they alone
had real importance.

In judging of an industrial system, whether
the one under which we live or one proposed
by reformers, there are four main tests which
may be applied. We may consider whether
the system secures (i) the maximum of pro-
duction, or (2) justice in distribution, or (3)
a tolerable existence for producers, or (4) the
greatest possible freedom and stimulus to
vitality and progress. We may say, broadly,
that the present system aims only at the first
of these objects, while socialism aims at the
second and third. Some defenders of the
present system contend that technical progress
is better promoted by private enterprise than

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

it would be if industry were in the hands of
the State ; to this extent they recognize the
fourth of the objects we have enumerated.
But they recognize it only on the side of the
goods and the capitalist, not on the side of
the wage-earner. I believe that the fourth
is much the most important of the objects to
be aimed at, that the present system is fatal
to it, and that orthodox socialism might well
prove equally fatal.

One of the least questioned assumptions of
the capitalist system is, that production ought
to be increased in amount by every possible
means : by new kinds of machinery, by em-
ployment of women and boys, by making hours
of labour as long as is compatible with effi-
ciency. Central African natives, accustomed to
living on the raw fruits of the earth and defeat-
ing Manchester by dispensing with clothes, are
compelled to work by a hut tax which they
can only pay by taking employment under
European capitalists. It is admitted that they
are perfectly happy while they remain free from
European influences, and that industrialism
brings upon them, not only the unwonted
misery of confinement, but also death from
diseases to which white men have become
partially immune. It is admitted that the best
negro workers are the " raw natives," fresh
from the bush, uncontaminated by previous
experience of wage -earning. Nevertheless, no

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one effectively contends that they ought to be
preserved from the deterioration which we
bring, since no one effectively doubts that it
is good to increase the world's production at
no matter what cost.

The belief in the importance of production
has a fanatical irrationality and ruthlessness.
So long as something is produced, what it is
that is produced seems to be thought a matter
of no account. Our whole economic system
encourages this view, since fear of unemploy-
ment makes any kind of work a boon to wage-
earners. The mania for increasing production
has turned men's thoughts away from much
more important problems, and has prevented
the world from1 getting the benefits it might
have got out of the increased productivity of
labour.

When we are fed and clothed and housed,
further material goods are needed only for
ostentation.1 With modern methods, a certain
proportion of the population, without working
long hours, could do all the work that is really
necessary in the way of producing commodities .
The time which is now spent in producing
luxuries could be spient partly in enjoymient
and country holidays, partly in better educa-
tion, partly in work that is not manual or
subserving manual work. We couldj if we

1 Except by that small minority who are capable of artistic
enjoyment.

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

wished, have far more science and1 art, more
diffused knowledge and mental cultivation,
more leisure for wage - earners, and more
capacity for intelligent pleasures. At present
not only wages, but almost all earned incomes,
can only be obtained by working much longer
hours than men ought to work. A' man who
earns £800 a year by hard work could1 not,
as a rule, earn £400 a year by half as much
work. Often he 'could not earn anything if
he were not willing to work practically all
day and every day. Because of the excessive
belief in the value of production, it is thought
right and proper for mien to work long hours,
and the good that might result from shorter
hours is not realized. And all the cruelties of
the industrial system, not only in Europe but
even more in the tropics, arouse only an occa-
sional feeble protest from a few philanthropists .
This is because, owing to the distortion pro-
duced by our present economic methods,
men's conscious desires, in such matters, cover
only a very small part, and that not the most
important part, of the real needs affected by.
industrial work. If this is to be remedied, it
can only be by a different economic system,
in which the relation of activity to needs will
be less concealed and moYe direct.

The purpose of maximizing production will
not be achieved in the long run if our present
industrial system continues. Our present

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system is wasteful of human material, partly
through damage to the health and efficiency of
industrial workers, {especially when women and
children are employed, partly through the
fact that the best workers tend to have small
families and that the more civilized races are in
danger of gradual extinction. Every great city
is a centre of race -deterioration. For the case
of London this has been argued with a wealth
of statistical detail by Sir H. Llewelyn Smith * ;
and it cannot easily be doubted that it is
equally true in other cases. The same is true
of material resources : the minerals, the virgin
forests, and the newly developed wheatfields
of the world are being exhausted with a
reckless prodigality which entails almost a
certainty of hardship for future generations.

Socialists see the remedy in State ownership
of land and capital, combined with a more
just system of distribution. It cannot be
denied that our present system of distribution
is indefensible from every point of view,
including the point of view of justice. Our
system of distribution is regulated by law, and
is capable of being changed in many respects
which familiarity makes us regard as natural
and inevitable. We may distinguish four chief
sources of recognized legal rights to private
property : ( I ) a man's right to what he has
made himself ; ( 2 ) the right to interest on

1 Booth's " Life and Labour of the People," vol. iii.
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Principles of Social Reconstruction

capital Which has been lent ; ( 3 ) the ownership
of land; (4) inheritance. These form a
crescendo of respectability : capital is more
respectable than labour, land is more respect-
able than capital, and any form of wealth is
more respectable when it is inherited than when
it has been acquired by our own exertions.

A man's right to the produce of his own
labour has never, in fact, had more than a very
limited recognition from the law. The early
socialists, especially the English forerunners
of Marx, used to insist upon this right as the
basis of a just system' of distribution, but in
the complication of modern industrial processes
it is impossible to say what a man has produced .
What proportion of the goods carried by a
railway should belong to the goods porters
concerned in their journey? When a surgeon
saves a man's life by an operation, what
proportion of the commodities which the
man subsequently produces can the surgeon
justly claim? Such problems are insoluble.
And there is no special justice, even if they
were soluble, in allowing to each man what
he himself produces. Some men are stronger,
healthier, cleverer, than others, but there is no
reason for increasing these natural injustices
by the artificial injustices of the law. The
principle recommends itself partly as a way
of abolishing the very rich, partly as a way
of stimulating people to work hard. But the

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first of these objects can be better obtained
in other ways, and the second ceases to be
obviously desirable as soon as we cease to
worship money.

Interest arises naturally in any community
in which private property is unrestricted and
theft is punished, because some of the most
economical processes of production are slow,
and those who have the skill to perform them
may not have the means of living while they
are being completed. But the power of
lending money gives such great wealth and
influence to private capitalists that unless
strictly controlled it is not compatible with any
real freedom1 for the rest of the population.
Its effects at present, both in the industrial
world and in international politics, are so bad
that it seems imperatively necessary to devise
some means of curbing its power.

Private property in land has no justification
except historically through power of the sword.
In the beginning of feudal times, certain men
had enough military strength to be able to
force those whom they disliked not to live in a
certain area. Those whom they chose to leave
on the land beca'me their serfs, and were forced
to work for them in return for the gracious
permission to stay. In order to establish law
in place of private force, it was necessary, in
the main, to leave undisturbed the rights which
had been acquired by the sword. The land

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

became the property of those who had con-
quered it, and the serfs were allowed to give
rent instead of service. There is no justifica-
tion for private property in land, except
the historical necessity to conciliate turbulent
robbers who would not otherwise have obeyed
the law. This necessity arose in Europe many
centuries ago, but in Africa the whole process
is often quite recent. It is by this process,
slightly disguised, that the Kimberley diamond -
mines and the Rand gold-mines were acquired
in spite of prior native rights. It is a singular
example of human inertia that men should have
continued until now to endure the tyranny and
extortion which a small minority are able to
inflict by their possession of the land. No
good to the community, of any sort or kind,
results from the private ownership of land. If
men were reasonable, they would decree that
it should cease to-morrow, with no compen-
sation beyond a moderate life income to the
present holders.

The mere abolition of rent would not remove
injustice, since it would confer a capricious
advantage upon the occupiers of the best sites
and the most fertile land. It is necessary that
there should be rent, but it should be paid
to the State or to some body which performs
public services ; or, if the total rental were
more than is required for such purposes, it
might be paid into a common fund and divided

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equally among the populatton . Such a method
would be just, and would not only help to
relieve poverty, but would prevent wasteful
employment of land and the tyranny of local
magnates. Much that appears as the power
of capital is really the power of the landowner —
for example, the power of railway companies
and mine-owners. The evil and injustice of
the present system are glaring, but men's
patience of preventable evils to which they are
accustomed is so great that it is impossible to
guess when they will put an end to this strange
absurdity.

Inheritance, which is the source of the
greater part of the unearned income in the
world, is regarded by most men as a natural
right. Sometimes, as in England, the right
is inherent in the owner of property, who
may dispose of it in any way that seems good
to him. Sometimes, as in Erance, his right is
limited by the right of his family to inherit
at least a .portion of what he 'has to leave. But
neither the right to dispose of property by
will nor the right of children to inherit from,
parents has any basis outside the instincts of
possession and family pride. There may be
reasons for allowing a man whose work
is exceptionally fruitful — for instance, an
inventor— to enjoy, a larger income than is
enjoyed by the average citizen, but there can
be no good reason for allowing this privilege

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

to descend to his children and grandchildren
and so on for ever. The effect is to produce an
idle and exceptionally fortunate class, who are
influential through their money, and opposed to
reform for fear it should be directed against
them'selves. Their whole habit of thought
becomes timid, since they dread being forced
to acknowledge that their position is indefen-
sible ; yet snobbery and the wish to secure
their favour leads almost the whole middle
class to ape their manners and adopt their
opinions. In this way they become a poison
infecting the outlook of almost all educated
people .

It is 'sometimes said that without the incen-
tive of inheritance men would not work so
well. The great captains of industry, we are
assured, are actuated by the desire to found a
family, and would not; devote their lives to
unremitting toil without the hope of gratifying
this desire. I do not believe that any large
proportion of really useful work is done from
this motive. Ordinary work is done for the
sake of a living, and the very best work is done
for the interest of the work itself. Even the
captains of industry, who are thought ( perhaps
by themselves as well as by others) to be
aiming at founding a family, are probably more
actuated by love of power and by the adven-
turous pleasure of great enterprises. And if
there were some slight diminution in the

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amount of work done, it would be well worth
while in order to get rid of the idle rich,
with the oppression, feebleness, and corruption
which they inevitably introduce.

The present system1 of distribution is not
based upon any principle. Starting from a
system imposed by conquest, the arrangements
made by the conquerors for their own benefit
were stereotyped by the law, and have never
been fundamentally reconstructed. On what
principles ought the reconstruction to be based ?

Socialism, which is the most widely advo-
cated scheme of reconstruction, aims chiefly
at justice : the present inequalities of wealth
are unjust, and: socialism would abolish them.
It is not essential to socialism that all men
should have the same income, but it is essential
that inequalities should be justified, in each
case, by inequality of need' or of service per-
formed. There can be no disputing that the
present system1 is grossly unjust, and that
almost all that is unjust in it is harmful. But
I do not think justice alone is a sufficient
principle upon which to base an economic
reconstruction. Justice would be secured if all
were equally unhappy, as well as if all were
equally happy. Justice, by itself, when once
realized, contains ho source of new life. The
old type of Marxian revolutionary socialist
never dwelt, in imagination, upon the life of
communities after the establishment of the

129 i

Principles of Social Reconstruction

millennium. He imagined that, like the Prince
and Princess in a fairy story, they would live
happily ever after. But that, is not a condition
possible to human nature. Desire, activity,
purpose, are essential to a tolerable life, and
a millennium, though it may be a joy in
prospect, would be intolerable if it were actually
achieved.

The more modern socialists, it is true, have
lost most of the religious fervour which charac-
terized the pioneers, and view socialism as a
tendency rather than a definite goal. But they
still retain the view that Hvhat is of most political
importance to a man is his income, and that
the principal aim of a democratic politician
ought to be to increase the wages of labour.
I believe this involves too passive a conception
of what constitutes happiness. It is true that,
in the industrial world, large sections of the
population are too poor to have any possi-
bility of a good life ; but it is not true that a
good life 'will come of itself with a diminution
of poverty. Very few of the well-to-do classes
have a good life at 'present, and perhaps social-
ism would only substitute the evils which now
afflict the more prosperous in place of the evils
resulting from destitution.

In the existing labour movement, although
it is one of the most vital sources of change,
there are certain tendencies against which
reformers ought to be on their guard. The

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labour movement is in essence a movement
in favour of justice, based upon the belief that
the sacrifice of the many to the few is not
necessary now, whatever may have been the
case in the past. When labour was less pro-
ductive and education was less widespread,
an aristocratic civilization may have been the
only one possible : it may nave been necessary
that the many should contribute to the life of
the few, if the few were to transmit and increase
the world's possessions in art and' thought and
civilized existence. But this necessity is past
or rapidly passing, and there is no longer any
valid objection to the claims of justice. The
labour movement is morally irresistible, and
is not now seriously opposed except by pre-
judice and simple self-assertion. All living
thought is on its side ; what is against it is
traditional and dead. But although it itself
is living, it is not by any means certain that
it will make for life.

Labour is led by current political thought in
certain directions which would become repres-
sive and dangerous if they were to remain
strong after labour had triumphed. The
aspirations of the labour movement are, on
the whole, opposed by the great majority of
the educated classes, who feel a menace, not
only or chiefly to their personal comfort, but
to the civilized life in which they have their
part; which they profoundly believe to be

Principles of Social Reconstruction

important to the world. Owing to the oppo-
sition of the educated classes, labour, when it
is revolutionary and vigorous, tends to despise
all that the educated classes represent. When
it is more respectful, as its leaders tend to be
in England, the subtle and almost unconscious
influence of educated men is apt to sap
revolutionary ardour, producing doubt and
uncertainty instead of the swift, simple assur-
ance by which victory might have been won.
The very sympathy which the best men in the
well-to-do classes extend to labour, their very
readiness to admit the justice of its claims,
may have the effect of softening the opposition
of labour leaders to the status quo, and of
opening their minds to the suggestion that no
fundamental change is possible. Since these
influences affect leaders much more than the
rank and file, they, tend to produce in the
rank and file a distrust of leaders, and a desire
to seek out new leaders who will be less ready
to concede the claims of the more fortunate
classes. The result may be in the end a labour
movement as hostile to the life of the mind
as some terrified property-owners believe it
to be at present.

The claims of justice, narrowly interpreted,
may reinforce this tendency. It may be
thought unjust that some men should have
larger incomes or shorter hours of work than
ether men. But efficiency in mental work,

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including the work of education, certainly
requires more comfort and longer periods of
rest than are required for efficiency in physi-
cal work, if only because mental work is
not physiologically wholesome. If this is not
recognized, the life of the mind may suffer
through short - sightedness even more than
through deliberate hostility.

Education suffers at present, and may long
continue to suffer, through the desire of parents
that their children should earn money as soon
as ipossible. Every one knows that the half-
time system, for example, is bad ; but the
power of organized labour keeps it in existence.
It is clear that the curei for this evil, as for
those that are concerned with the population
question, is to relieve parents of the expense
of their children's education, and at the same
time to take away their right to appropriate
their children's earnings.

The way to prevent any dangerous opposi-
tion of labour to the life of the mind is not
to oppose the labour movement, which is too
strong to be opposed with justice. The right
way is, to show by actual practice that thought
is useful to labour, that without thought its
positive aims cannot be achieved, and that
there are mien in the world of thought who
are willing to devote their energies to helping
labour in its struggle. Such men, if they are
wise and sincere, can prevent labour from

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

becoming destructive of what is living in the
intellectual world.

Another danger in the aims of organized
labour is the danger of conservatism as to
methods of production. Improvements of
machinery or organization bring great advan-
tages to employers, but involve temporary and
sometimes permanent loss to the wage-earners.
For this reason, and also from mere instinctive
dislike of any change of habits, strong labour
organizations are often obstacles to technical
progress. The ultimate basis of all social
progress must be increased technical efficiency,
a greater result from a 'given amount of labour.
If labour were to offer an effective opposition to
this kind of progress, it would in the long
run paralyse all other progress. The way to
overcome the opposition of labour is not by
hostility or moral homilies, but by giving to
labour the direct interest in economical pro-
cesses which now belongs to the employers.
Here, as elsewhere, the unprogressive part of
a movement which is essentially progressive
is to be eliminated, not by decrying the whole
movement, but by giving it a wider sweep,
making it more progressive, and leading it to
demand an even greater change in the structure
of society than any that it had contemplated
in its inception.

The most important purpose that political
institutions can achieve is to keep alive in

'34

Property

individuals crcativeness, vigour, vitality, and
the joy of life. These things existed, for
example, in Elizabethan England in a way in
which they do not exist now. They stimulated
adventure, poetry, music, fine architecture, and
set going the whole movement out of which
England's greatness has sprung in every direc-
tion in which England has been great. These
things coexisted with injustice, but outweighed
it, and made a national life more admirable
than any that is likely to exist under socialism.
What is wanted in order to keep men
full of vitality is opportunity, not only security.
Security is merely a refuge from' fear ; oppor-
tunity is the source of hope. The chief test
of an economic system is not Whether it makes
men prosperous, or whether it secures distri-
butive justice (though these are both very
desirable), but whether it leaves men's instinc-
tive growth unimpeded. To achieve this
purpose, there are two main conditions which it
should fulfil : it should not cramp men's
private affections, and it should give the
greatest possible outlet to the impulse of
creation. There is in most men, until it
becomes atrophied by disuse, an instinct of
abstractiveness, a wish to make something.
The men who achieve most are, as a rule,
those in whom this instinct is strongest : such
men become artists, men of science, statesmen,
empire - builders, or captains of industry,

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

according to the accidents of temperament and
opportunity. The most beneficent and the
most harmful careers are inspired by this
impulse. Without it, the world would sink to
the level of Tibet : it would subsist, as it is
always prone to do, on the wisdom of its
ancestors, and each generation would sink more
deeply into a lifeless traditionalism.

But it is not only the remarkable men who
have the instinct of constructiveness, though
it is they who have it most strongly. It is
almost universal in boys, and in men it usually
survives in a greater or less degree, according
to the greater or less outlet which it is able to
find. Work inspired by this instinct is satis-
fying, even when it is irksome and difficult,
because every effort is as natural as the effort
of a dog pursuing a hare. The chief defect
of the present capitalistic system is that work
done for wages very seldom affords any outlet
for the creative impulse. The man who works
for wages has no choice as to what he shall
make : the whole creativeness of the process is
concentrated in the employer who orders the
work to be done. For this reason the work
becomes a merely external means to a certain
result, the earning of wages. Employers grow
indignant about the trade union rules for limita-
tion of output, but they have no right to be
indignant, since they do not permit the men
whom they employ to have any share in the

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purpose for which the work is undertaken.
And so the process of production, which should
form one instinctive cycle, becomes divided into
separate purposes, which can no longer provide
any satisfaction of instinct for those who do
the work.

This result is due to our industrial system,
but it would not be avoided by State socialism.
In a socialist community, the State would be the
employer, and the individual workman would
have almost as little control over his work as
he has at present. Such control as he could
exercise would be indirect, through political
channels, and would be too slight and round-
about to afford any appreciable satisfaction.
It is to be feared that instead' of an increase
of self - direction, there would only be an
increase of mutual interference.

The total abolition of private capitalistic
enterprise, which is demanded by Marxian
socialism, seems scarcely necessary. Most
men who construct sweeping systems of
reform, like most of those who defend the
status quo, do not allow enough for the
importance of exceptions and the undesirability
of rigid system. Provided the sphere of
capitalism is restricted, and a large proportion
of the population are rescued from1 its dominion,
there is no reason to wish it wholly abolished.
As a competitor and a rival, it might serve a
useful purpose in preventing more democratic

'37

Principles of Social Reconstruction

enterprises from sinking into sloth and techni-
cal conservatism. But it is of the very highest
importance that capitalism should become the
exception rather than the rule, and that the
bulk of the world's industry should be con-
ducted on a more democratic system.

Much of what is to be said against
militarism in the State is also to be said
against capitalism in the economic sphere.
Economic organizations, in the pursuit of
efficiency, grow larger and larger, and there
is no possibility of reversing this process. The
causes of their growth are technical, and large
organizations must be accepted as an essential
part of civilized society. But there is no reason
why their government should be centralized and
monarchical. The present economic system,
by robbing most men of initiative, is one of
the causes of the universal weariness which
devitalizes urban and industrial populations,
making them perpetually seek excitement, and
leading them to welcome even the outbreak of
war as a relief from the dreary monotony of
their daily lives .

If the vigour of the nation is to be preserved,
if we are to retain any capacity for new ideas,
if we are not to sink into a Chinese condition
of stereotyped immobility, the monarchical
organization of industry must be swept away.
All large businesses must become democratic
and federal in their government. The whole

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Property

wage-earning system is an abomination, not
only because of the social injustice which it
causes and perpetuates, but also because it
separates the man who does the work from
the purpose for which the work is done. The
whole of the controlling purpose is concen-
trated in the capitalist ; the purpose of the
wage-earner is not the produce, but the wages.
The purpose of the capitalist is to secure the
maximum of work for the minimum of wages ;
the purpose of the wage -earner is to secure the
maximum of wages for the minimum of work.
A system involving this essential conflict of
interests cannot be expected to work smoothly
or successfully, or to produce a community
with any pride in efficiency.

Two movements exist, one already well
advanced, the other in its infancy, which seem
capable, between them, of suggesting most of
what is needed. The two movements I mean
are the co-operative movement and syndi-
calism. The co-operative movement is capable
of replacing the wages system over a very wide
field, but it is not easy to see how it could be
applied to such things as railways. It is just
in these cases that the principles of syndicalism
are most easily applicable.

If organization is not to crush individuality,
membership of an organization ought to be
voluntary., not compulsory, and ought always
to carry with it a voice in the management;.

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

This is not the case with economic organiza-
tions, which give no opportunity for the pride
and pleasure that men find in an activity of
their own choice, provided it is not utterly
monotonous .

It must be admitted, however, that much of
the mechanical work which is necessary in
industry is probably not capable of being made
interesting in itself. But it will seem less
tedious than it does at present if those who do
it have a voice in the management of their
industry. And men who desire leisure for
other occupations might be given the oppor-
tunity of doing uninteresting work during
a few hours of the day for a low wage ; this
would give an opening to all who wished for
some activity not immediately profitable to
themselves. When everything that is possible
has been done to make work interesting, the
residue will have to be made endurable, as
almost all work is at present, by the inducement
of rewards outside the hours of labour. But
if these rewards are to be satisfactory, it is
essential that the uninteresting work should not
necessarily absorb a man's whole energies, and
that opportunities should exist for more or
less continuous activities during the remaining
hours. Such a system might be an immeasur-
able boon to artists, men of letters, and others
who produce for their own satisfaction works
which the public does not value soon enough

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Property

to secure a living for the producers ; and apart
from such rather rare cases, it might provide an
opportunity for young men and women with
intellectual ambitions to continue their educa-
tion after they have left school, or to prepare
themselves for careers which require an excep-
tionally long training.

The evils of the present system result from
the separation between the several interests of
consumer, producer, and capitalist. No one
of these three has the same interests as the
community or as either of the other two. The
co-operative system amalgamates the interests
of consumer and capitalist ; syndicalism would
amalgamate the interests of producer and
capitalist. Neither amalgamates all three, or
makes the interests of those who direct industry
quite identical with those of the community.
Neither, therefore, would wholly prevent
industrial strife, or obviate the need of the
State as arbitrator. But either would be
better than the present system, and probably
a mixture of both would cure most of the evils
of industrialism1 as it exists now. It is sur-
prising that, while men and women have
struggled to achieve political democracy, so
little has been done to introduce democracy
in industry. I believe incalculable benefits
might result from industrial democracy, either
on the co-operative model or with recognition
of a trade or industry as a unit for purposes of

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

government, with some kind of Home Rule
such as syndicalism aims at securing. There
is no reason why all governmental units should
be geographical : this system was necessary
in the past because of the slowness of means
of communication, but it is not necessary now.
By some such system many men might come
to feel again a pride in their work, and to find
again that outlet for the creative impulse which
is now denied to all but a fortunate few. Such
a system requires the abolition of the land-
owner and the restriction of the capitalist,
but does not entail equality of earnings. And
unlike socialism, it is not a static or final
system : it is hardly more than a framework
for energy and initiative. It is only by some
such method, I believe, that the free growth
of the individual can be reconciled with the
huge technical organizations which have been
rendered necessary by industrialism.

142

V
EDUCATION

No political theory is adequate unless it is
applicable to children as well as to men and
women. Theorists are mostly childless, or, if
they have children., they are carefully screened
from the disturbances which would be caused
by youthful turmoil. Some of them have
written books on education, but without, as
a rule, having; any actual children present to
their minds while they wrote. Those educa-
tional theorists who have had a knowledge of
children, such as the inventors of Kindergarten
and the Montessori system,1 have not always
had enough realization of the ultimate goal
of education to be able to deal successfully
with advanced instruction. I have not the
knowledge either of children or of education
which would enable me to supply whatever
defects there may be in the writings of others.
But some questions, concerning education as a
political institution, are involved in any hope
of social reconstruction, and are not usually

1 As regards the education of young children, Madame
Montessori's methods seem to me full of wisdom.

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

considered by writers on educational theory.
It is these questions that I wish to discuss.

The power of education in forming character
and opinion is very great and1 very generally
recognized. The genuine beliefs, though not
usually the professed precepts, of parents and
teachers are almost unconsciously acquired by
most children ; and even if they depart from
these beliefs in later life, something of them
remains deeply implanted, ready to emerge in
a time of stress or crisis. Education is, as a
rule, the strongest force on the side of what
exists and against fundamental change : threat-
ened institutions, while they are still powerful,
possess themselves of the educational machine,
and instil a respect for their own excellence into
the malleable minds of the young. Reformers
retort by trying to oust their opponents from
their position of vantage. The children them-
selves are not considered by either party ; they
are merely so much material, to be recruited
into one army or the other. If the children
themselves were considered, education would
not aim at making them belong to this party
or that, but at enabling them to choose intelli-
gently between the parties ; it would aim1 at
making them able to think, not at making them
think what their teachers think. Education
as a political weapon could not exist if we
respected the rights of children. If we
respected the rights of children, we should

144

Education

educate them so as to give them the knowledge
and the mental habits required for forming
independent opinions ; but education as a
political institution endeavours to form1 habits
and to circumscribe knowledge in such a way
as to make one set of opinions inevitable.

The two principles of justice and liberty,
which cover a very great deal of the social
reconstruction required, are not by themselves
sufficient where education is concerned.
Justice, in the literal sense of equal rights, is
obviously not wholly possible as regards
children. And as for liberty, it is, to begin
with, essentially negative : it condemns all
avoidable interference with freedom, without
giving a positive principle of construction.
But education is essentially constructive, and
requires some positive conception of what
constitutes a good life. And although liberty
is to be respected in education as much as is
compatible with instruction, and although a
very great deal more liberty than is customary
can be allowed without loss to instruction, yet
it is clear that some departure from complete
liberty is unavoidable if children are to be
taught anything, except in the case of unusually
intelligent children who are kept isolated from
more normal companions. This is one reason
for the great responsibility which rests upon
teachers : the children must, necessarily, be
more or less at the mercy of their elders, and

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

cannot make themselves the guardians of their
own interests. Authority in education is to
some extent unavoidable, and those who
educate have to find a way of exercising
authority in accordance with the spirit of
liberty.

Where authority is unavoidable, what is
needed is reverence. A man who is to educate
really well, and is to make the young grow
and develop into their full stature, must be
filled through and through with the spirit of
reverence. It is reverence towards others that
is lacking in those who advocate machine-
made cast-iron systems : militarism, capitalism,
Fabian scientific organization, and all the other
prisons into which reformers and reactionaries
try to force the human spirit. In education,
with its codes of rules emanating from a
Government office, its large classes and fixed
curriculum and overworked teachers, its deter-
mination to produce a dead level of glib
mediocrity, the lack of reverence for the
child is all but universal. Reverence requires
imagination and vital warmth ; it requires most
imagination in respect of those who have least
actual achievement or power. The child is
weak and superficially foolish, the teacher is
strong, and in an every-day sense wiser than
the child. The teacher without reverence, or
the bureaucrat without reverence, easily de-
spises the child for these outward inferiorities.

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Education

'He thinks it is his duty to " mould " the child :
in imagination he is thte potter with the clay.
And so he gives to the child some unnatural
shape, which hardens with age, producing
strains and spiritual dissatisfactions, out of
which grow cruelty and envy, and the belief
that others must be compelled to undergo the
same distortions.

The man who has reverence will not think
it his duty to "mould" the young. "He
feels in all that lives, but especially in human
beings, and most of all in children, something
sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something indi-
vidual and strangely precious, the growing
principle of life, an embodied fragment of the
dumb striving of the world. In the presence
of a child he feels an unaccountable humility —
a humility not easily defensible on any rational
ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom
than the easy self-confidence of many parents
and teachers. The outward helplessness of
the child and the appeal of dependence make
him; conscious of the responsibility of a trust.
His imagination shows him what the child
may become, for good or evil, how its impulses
may be developed or thwarted, how its hopes
must be dimmed and the life in it grow less
living, how its trust will be bruised and its
quick desires replaced by brooding will. All
this gives him a longing to help the child in its
own battle ; he would equip and strengthen

Principles of Social Reconstruction

it, not for some outside end proposed by the
State or by any other impersonal authority,
but for the ends which the child's own spirit
is obscurely seeking. The man who feels this
can wield the authority of an educator without
infringing the principle of liberty.

It is not in a spirit of reverence that

education is conducted by States and Churches

and the great institutions that are subservient

to them. What is considered in education is

hardly ever the boy or girl, the young man

or young woman, but almost always, in some

form, the maintenance of the existing order.

When the individual is considered, it is almost

exclusively with a view to worldly success —

making money or achieving a good position.

To be ordinary, and to acquire the art of getting

on, is the ideal which is set before the youthful

mind, except by. a few rare teachers who have

enough energy of belief to break through the

system within which they are expected to work.

Almost all education has a political motive :

it aims at strengthening some group, national

or religious or even social, in the competition

with other groups. It is this motive, in the

main, which determines the subjects taught, the

knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld,

and also decides what mental habits the pupils

are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is

done to foster the inward growth of mind and

spirit ; in fact, those twho have had most

148

Education

education are very often atrophied in their
mental arid spiritual life, devoid of impulse, and
possessing only certain mechanical aptitudes
which take the place of living thought.

Some of the things which education achieves
at present must continue to be achieved by
education in any civilized country. All children
must continue to be taught hojw to read and
write, and some must continue to acquire the
knowledge needed for such professions as
medicine or law or engineering. The higher
education required for the sciences and the arts
is necessary for those to whom it is suited.
Except in history arid religion and kindred
matters, the actual instruction is only inade-
quate, not positively harmful. The instruction
might be given in a more liberal spirit, with
more attempt to show its ultimate uses ; and of
course much of it is traditional and dead. But
in the main it is necessary, and would1 have to
form a part of any educational system.

It is in history and religion and other contro-
versial subjects that the actual instruction is
positively harmful. These subjects touch the
interests by which schools are maintained ; and
the interests maintain the schools in order that
certain views on these subjects may be instilled.
•History, in every country, is s,o taught as to
magnify that country : children learn to believe
that their own country has always been in the
right and almost always victorious, that it has

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

produced almost all the great men, and that
it is in all respects superior to all other
countries. Since these beliefs are flattering,
they are easily absorbed, and hardly ever
dislodged from instinct by later knowledge.

To take a simple and almost trivial example :
the facts about the battle of Waterloo :are known
in great detail and with minute accuracy ; but
the facts as taught in elementary schools will
be widely different in England, France, and
Germany. The ordinary English boy imagines
that the Prussians played hardly any part ; the
ordinary German boy imagines that Wellington
was practically defeated when the day was
retrieved by Bliicher's gallantry. If the
facts were taught accurately in both countries,
national pride would not be fostered to the
same extent, neither nation would feel so certain
of victory in the event of war, and the willing-
ness to fight would be diminished. It is this
result which has to be prevented. Every State
wishes to promote national pride, and is
conscious that this cannot be done by unbiased
history. The defenceless children are taught by
distortions and suppressions and suggestions.
The false ideas as to the history of the world
which are taught in the various countries are
of a kind which encourages strife and serves
to keep alive a bigoted nationalism. If good
relations between States were desired1, one of
the first steps ought to, be to submit all teaching

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Education

of history to an international commission, which
should produce neutral textbooks free from
the patriotic bias which is now demanded
everywhere.1

Exactly the same thing applies to religion.
Elementary schools are practically always in
the hands either of some religious body or of
a State which has a certain attitude towards
religion. A religious body exists through the
fact that its members all have certain definite
beliefs on subjects as to which the truth is not
ascertainable . Schools conducted by religious
bodies have to prevent the young, who are
often inquiring by nature, from discovering that
these definite beliefs are opposed by others
which are no more unreasonable, and that
many of the men best qualified to judge think
that there is no good evidence in favour of

1 THE TEACHING OF PATRIOTISM. His MAJESTY'S
APPROVAL.

THE King has been graciously pleased to accept a copy
of the little book containing suggestions to local education
authorities and teachers in Wales as to the teaching of
patriotism which has just been issued by the Welsh Depart-
ment of the Board of Education in connection with the
observance of the National Anniversary of St. David's Day.
His Private Secretary (Lord Stamfordham), in writing to
Mr. Alfred T. Davies, the Permanent Secretary of the Welsh
Department, says that his Majesty is much pleased with the
contents of the book, and trusts that the principles inculcated
in it will bear good fruit in the lives and characters of the
coming generation. — Morning Post, January 29, 1916.

Principles of Social Reconstruction

any definite belief. When the State is militantly
secular, as in France, State schools become
as dogmatic as those that are in the hands of
the Churches ( I understand that the word
" God " must not be mentioned in a French
elementary school). The result in all these
cases is the same : free inquiry is checked, and
on the most important matter in the world the
child is met with dogma or with stony silence.
It is not only in elementary education that
these evils exist. In more advanced education
they take subtler forms, and there is more
attempt to conceal them, but they are still
present. Eton and Oxford set a certain stamp
upon a man's mind, just as a Jesuit College does.
It can hardly be said that Eton and Oxford have
a conscious purpose, but they have a purpose
which is none the less strong and effective for
not being formulated. In almost all who have
been through them they produce a worship of
" good form," which is as destructive to life
and thought as the mediaeval Church. " Good
form " is quite compatible with a superficial
open-mindedness, a readiness to hear all sides,
and a certain urbanity towards opponents. But
it is not compatible with fundamental open-
mindedness, or with any inward readiness to
give weight to the other side. Its essence is
the assumption that what is most important
is a certain kind of behaviour, a behaviour
which minimizes friction between equals and

152

delicately impresses inferiors with a conviction
of their own crudity. As a political weapon
for preserving the privileges of the rich in a
snobbish democracy it is unsurpassable. As a
means of producing an agreeable social milieu
for those who have money with no strong beliefs
or unusual desires it has some merit. In every
other respect it is abominable.

The evils of " good forni " arise from two
sources : its perfect assurance of its own
Tightness, and its belief that correct manners
are more to be desired than intellect, or artistic
creation, or vital energy, or any of the other
sources of progress in the world. Perfect
assurance, by itself, is enough to destroy all
mental progress in those who have it. And
when it is combined with contempt for the
angularities and awkwardnesses that are almost
invariably associated with great mental power,
it becomes a source of destruction to all who
come in contact with it. " Good form "
is itself dead and incapable of growth ; and
by its attitude to those who are without it it
spreads its own death to many who might other-
wise have life. The harm which it has done
to well-to-do Englishmen, and to men whose
abilities have led! the well-to-do to notice
them, is incalculable. »

The prevention of free inquiry is unavoidable
so long as the purpose of education is to
produce belief rather than thought, to compel

Principles of Social Reconstruction

the young to hold positive opinions on doubtful
matters rather than to let them see the doubtful-
ness and be encouraged to independence of
mind. Education ought to foster the wish
for truth, not the conviction that some parti-
cular creed is the truth. But it is creeds thai
hold men together in fighting organizations :
Churches, States, political parties. It is inten-
sity of belief in a creed that produces efficiency
in fighting : victory comes to those who feel
the strongest certainty about matters on which
doubt is the only rational attitude . To produce
this intensity of belief and this efficiency in
fighting, the child's nature is warped, and its
free outlook is cramped, by cultivating inhi-
bitions as a check to the growth of new ideas.
In those whose minds are not very active the
result is the omnipotence of prejudice ; while
the few whose thought cannot be wholly killed
become cynical, intellectually hopeless, destruc-
tively critical, able to make all that is living
seem foolish, unable themselves to supply the
creative impulses which they destroy in others.
The success in fighting which is achieved
by suppressing freedom of thought is brief and
very worthless. In the long run mental vigour
is as essential to success as it is to a good life.
The conception of education as a form of drill,
a means of producing unanimity through
slavishness, is very common, and is defended
chiefly on the ground that it leads to victory.

Education

Those who enjoy parallels from ancient history
will point to the victory of Sparta over Athens
to enforce their moral. But it is Athens that
has had power over men's thoughts and imagi-
nation, not Sparta : any one of us, if we could
be born again into some past epoch, would
rather be born an Athenian than a Spartan.
And in the modern world so much intellect is
required in practical affairs that even the
external victory is more likely to be won by
intelligence than by docility. Education in
credulity leads by quick stages to mental decay ;
it is only by keeping alive the spirit of free
inquiry that the indispensable minimum of
progress can be achieved .

Certain mental habits are commonly instilled
by those fwho are engaged in educating :
obedience and discipline, ruthlessness in
the struggle for worldly success, contempt
towards opposing groups, and an unquestion-
ing credulity, a passive acceptance of the
teacher's wisdom1. All these habits are against
life. Instead of obedience and discipline, we
ought to aim1 at preserving independence and
impulse. Instead of ruthlessness, education
should try to develop justice in thought.
Instead of contempt, it ought to instil
reverence, and the attempt at understanding ;
towards the opinions of others it ought to
produce, not necessarily acquiescence, but only
such opposition as is combined with imaginative

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

apprehension and a clear realization of the
grounds for opposition. Instead of credu-
lity, the object should be to stimulate con-
structive doubt, the love of mental adventure,
the sense of worlds to conquer by enterprise
and boldness in thought. Contentment with
the status quo, and subordination of the
individual pupil to political aims, owing to
indifference to the things of the mind, are the
immediate causes of these evils ; but beneath
these causes there is one more fundamental,
the fact that education is treated as a means
of acquiring power over the pupil, not as a
means of nourishing his own growth. It is
in this that lack of reverence shows itself ; and
it is only by more reverence that a fundamental
reform can be effected.

Obedience and discipline are supposed to be
indispensable if order is to be kept in a class,
and if any instruction is to be given. To some
extent this is true ; but the extent is much less
than it is thought to be by thosse who regard
obedience and discipline as in themselves
desirable. Obedience, the yielding of one's will
to outside direction, is the counterpart of
authority. Both may be necessary in certain
cases. Refractory children, lunatics, and
criminals may require ' authority, and may
need to be forced to obey. But in so far as
this is necessary it is a misfortune : what is to
be desired is the free choice of ends with which

156

Education

it is not necessary to interfere. And educa-
tional reformers have shown that this is far
more possible than our fathers would ever have
believed.1 1 f

What makes obedience seem necessary in
schools is the large classes and overworked
teachers demanded by a false economy. Those
who have no experience of teaching are
incapable of imagining the expense of spirit
entailed by any really living instruction. They
think that teachers can reasonably be expected
to work as many hours as bank clerks . Intense
fatigue and irritable nerves are the result, and
an absolute necessity of performing the day's
task mechanically. But the task cannot be
performed mechanically except by exacting
obedience.

If we took education seriously, and thought
it as important to keep alive the minds of
children as to secure victory in war, we should
conduct education quite differently : we should
make sure of achieving the end, even if the
expense were a hundredfold greater than it is.
To many men and women a small amount of
teaching is a delight, and can be done with a
fresh zest and life which keeps most pupils
interested without any need of discipline. The
few who do not become interested might be

1 What Madame Montessori has achieved in the way of
minimizing obedience and discipline with advantage to
education is almost miraculous.

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

separated from the rest, and given a different
kind of instruction. A teacher ought to have
only as much teaching1 as can be done, on most
days, with actual pleasure in the work, and
with an awareness of the pupil's mental needs.
The result would be a relation of friendliness
instead of hostility between teacher and pupil,
a realization on the part of most pupils that
education serves to develop their own lives and
is not merely an outside imposition, interfering
with play and demanding many hours of sitting
still. All that is necessary to this end is
a greater expenditure of money, to secure
teachers with more leisure and with a natural
love of teaching.

Discipline, as it exists in schools, is very
largely an evil. There is a kind of discipline
which is necessary to almost all achievement,
and which perhaps is not sufficiently valued
by those who react against the purely external
discipline of traditional methods. The desir-
able kind of discipline is the kind that comes
from within, which consists in the power of
pursuing a distant object steadily, forgoing
and suffering many things on the way. This
involves the subordination of minor impulses to
will, the power of a directing action by large
creative desires even at moments when they
are not vividly alive. Without this, no serious
ambition, good or bad, can be realized, no
consistent purpose can dominate. This kind of

158

Education

discipline is very necessary, but can only result
from strong desires for ends not immediately
attainable, and can only be produced by educa-
tion if education fosters such desires, which it
seldom does at present. Such discipline springs
from one's own will, not from outside authority.
It is not this kind which is sought in most
schools, and it is not this kind which seems to
me an evil.

Although elementary education encourages
the undesirable discipline that consists in
passive obedience, and although hardly any
existing education encourages the moral disci-
pline of consistent self-direction, there is a
certain kind of purely mental discipline which
is produced by the traditional higher educa-
tion. The kind I mean is that which enables
a man to concentrate his thoughts at will upon
any matter that he has occasion to consider,
regardless of preoccupations or boredom or
intellectual difficulty. This quality, though it
has no important intrinsic excellence, greatly
enhances the efficiency of the mind as an
instrument. It is this that enables a lawyer
to master the scientific details of a patent case
which he forgets as soon as judgment has
been given, or a civil servant to deal quickly
with many different administrative questions in
succession. It is this that enables men to
forget private cares during business hours. In
a complicated world it is a very necessary

Principles of Social Reconstruction

faculty for those whose work requires mental
concentration .

Success in producing mental discipline is the
chief merit of traditional higher education. I
doubt whether it can be achieved except by
compelling or persuading active attention to
a prescribed task. It is for this reason chiefly
that I do not believe methods such as Madame
Montessori's applicable when the age of child-
hood has been passed. The essence of her
method consists in giving a choice of occupa-
tions, any one of which is interesting! to most
children, and all of which are instructive. The
child's attention is wholly spontaneous, as in
play ; it enjoys acquiring knowledge in this
way, and does not acquire any knowledge which
it does not desire. I am convinced that this
is the best method of education with young
children : the actual results make it almost
impossible to think otherwise. But it is diffi-
cult to see how this method can lead to control
of attention by the will. Many things which
must be thought about are uninteresting, and
even those thiat are interesting at first often
become very wearisome before they have been
considered as long as is necessary. The power
of giving prolonged attention is very important,
and it is hardly to be widely acquired except as
a habit induced originally by outside pressure.
Some few boys, it is true, have sufficiently
strong intellectual desires to be willing to

I6Q

Education

undergo all that is necessary by their own
initiative and free will ; but for all others an
external inducement is required in order to
make them learn any subject thoroughly.
There is among educational reformers a certain
fear of demanding great efforts, and in the
world at large a growing unwillingness to be
bored. Both these tendencies have their good
side, but both also have their dangers. The
mental discipline which is jeopardized can be
preserved by mere advice without external com-
pulsion whenever a boy's intellectual interest
and ambition can be sufficiently stimulated. A
good teacher ought to be able to do this for
any boy who is capable of much mental
achievement ; and for many of the others the
present purely bookish education is probably
not the best. In this way, so long as the
importance of mental discipline is realized, it
can probably be attained, whenever it is attain-
able, by appealing to the pupil's consciousness
of his own needs. So long as teachers are not
expected to succeed by this method, it is easy
for them to slip intp a slothful dullness, and
blame their pupils when the fault is really
their own.

Ruthlessness in the economic struggle will
almost unavoidably be taught in schools so long
as the economic structure of society remains
unchanged. This must be particularly the case
in middle -class schools, which depend for their

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

numbers upon the good opinion of parents, and
secure the good opinion of parents by adver-
tising the successes of pupils. This is one of
many ways in which the competitive organiza-
tion of the State is harmful. Spontaneous and
disinterested desire for knowledge is not at all
uncommon in the young, and might be easily
aroused in many in whom it remains latent.
But it is remorselessly checked by teachers who
think only of examinations, diplomas, and
degrees. For the abler boys there is no time
for thought, no time for the indulgence of
intellectual taste, from the moment of first
going to school until the moment of leaving
the university. From1 first to last there is
nothing but one long drudgery of examination
tips and textbook facts. The most intelligent,
at the end, are disgusted with learning, longing
only to forget it and to escape into a life of
action. Yet there, as before, the economic
machine holds them prisoners, and all their
spontaneous desires are bruised and thwarted.
The examination system, and the fact that
instruction is treated mainly as training for a
livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge
from a purely utilitarian point of view, as the
road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
This would not matter so much if it affected
only those who have no genuine 'intellectual
interests. But unfortunately it affects most
those whose intellectual interests are strongest,

162

Education

since it is upon them that the pressure of
examinations falls with most severity. To them
most, but to all in some degree, education
appears ;as a means of acquiring superiority
over others ; it is infected through and through
with ruthlessness and glorification of social
inequality. Any free, disinterested considera-
tion shows that, whatever inequalities might
remain in a Utopia, the actual inequalities are
almost all contrary to justice. But our educa-
tional system tends to conceal this from all
except the failures, since those who succeed are
on the way to profit by the inequalities, with
every encouragement from the men who have
directed their education.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom
is easy to most boys and girls. It involves
no effort of independent thought, and seems
rational because the teacher knows more than
his pupils ; it is moreover the way to win the
favour of the teacher unless he is a very
exceptional mian. Yet the habit of passive
acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It
causes men to seek a leader, and to accept as
a leader whoever is established in that position.
It makes the power of Churches, Governments,
party caucuses, and all the other organizations
by which plain men are misled into supporting
old systems which' are harmful to the nation
and to themselves, lit is possible that there
would not be much independence of thought

163

Principles of Social Reconstruction

even if education did everything to promote
it ; but there would certainly be more than
there is at present. If the object were to make
pupils think, rather than to make them accept
certain conclusions, education would be con-
ducted quite differently : there would be less
rapidity of instruction and more discussion,
more occasions when pupils are encouraged
to express themselves, more attempt to make
education concern itself with matters in which
the pupils feel some interest.

Above all, there would be an endeavour
to rouse and stimulate the love of mental
adventure. The world in which we live is
various and astonishing : some of the things
that seem plainest grow more and more difficult
the more they are considered ; other things,
which might have been thought quite impossible
to discover, have nevertheless been laid bare
by genius and industry. The powers of
thought, the vast regions which it can master,
the much more vast regions which it can only
dimly suggest to imagination, give to those
whose minds have travelled beyond the daily
round an amazing richness of material, an
escape from the triviality and wearisomeness
of familiar routine, by which the whole of life
is filled with interest, and the prison walls of
the commonplace are broken down. The same
love of adventure which takes men to the South
Pole, the same passion for a conclusive trial

164

Education

of strength which leads some men to welcome
war, can find in creative thought an 'outlet which
is neither wasteful nor cruel, but increases the
dignity of man by incarnating in life some of
that shining splendour which the human spirit
is bringing down out of the unknown. To
give this joy, in a greater or less measure, to all
who are capable of it, is the supreme end for
which the education of the mind is to be
valued .

It will be said that the joy of mental adven-
ture must be rare, that there are few who
can appreciate it, and that ordinary education
can take no account of so aristocratic a good.
I do not believe this. The joy of mental
adventure is far commoner in the youn'g than
in grown men and women. Among children
it is very common, and grows naturally out of
the period of make-believe and fancy. It is
rare in later life because everything is done
to kill it during1 education. Men fear thought
as they fear nothing else on earth — more than
ruin, more even than death. Thought is
subversive and revolutionary, destructive and
terrible ; thought is merciless to privilege,
established 'institutions, and comfortable habits ;
thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to
authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of
the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell
and is not afraid'. It sees man, a feeble speck,
surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence ;

165

Principles of Social Reconstruction

yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it
were lord of the universe. Thought is great
and swift and free., the light of the world, and
the chief glory of mian.

But if thought is to become the possession
of many, not the privilege of the few, we must
have done with fear. It is fear that holds
men back — fear lest their cherished beliefs
should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions
by Which they live should prove harmful, fear
lest they themselves should prove less worthy
of respect than they have supposed themselves
to be. " Should the working man think freely
about property? Then what will become of
us, the rich1? Should young men and young
women think freely about sex ? Then what will
become of morality? Should soldiers think
freely about war? Then what will become of
military discipline ? Away 'with thought ! Back
into the shades of prejudice, lest property,
morals, and war should be endangered ! Better
men should be stupid, slothful, and oppressive
than that their thoughts should be free. For
if their thoughts were free they might not think
as we do. And at all costs this disaster must
be averted." So the opponents of thought argue
in the unconscious depths of their souls. And
so they act in their churches, their schools, and
their universities.

No institution inspired by fear can further
life. Hope, not fear, is the creative principle

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Education

in human affairs. All that has made man
great has sprung from the attempt to secure
what is good, not from the struggle to avert
what was thought evil. It is because modern
education is so seldom inspired by a great hope
that it so seldom achieves a great result. The
wish to preserve the past rather than the hope
of creating the future dominates the mind's of
those who control the teaching of the young.
Education should not aim at a passive aware-
ness of dead facts, but at an activity directed
towards the world that our efforts are to create .
It should be inspired, not by a regretful
hankering after the extinct beauties of Greece
and the Renaissance, but by a shining vision of
the society that is to be, of the triumphs that
thought will achieve in the time to come, and
of thfe ever -widen ing horizon of man's survey
over the universe. Those who are taught in
this spirit will be filled with life and' hope and
joy, able to bear their part in bringing to
mankind a future less sombre than the past,
with faith in the glory that human effort can
create .

167

VI

MARRIAGE AND THE POPULATION
QUESTION

THE influence of the Christian religion on
daily life has decayed very rapidly through-
out Europe during the last hundred years. Not
only has the proportion of nominal believers
declined, but even among those who believe
the intensity and dogmatism of belief is
enormously diminished. But there is one
social institution .Which is still profoundly
affected by the Christian tradition— I mean the
institution of marriage. The law and public
opinion as regards marriage are dominated
even now to a very great extent by the teach-
ings of the Church, which continue to influence
in this way the lives of men, women, and
children in their most intimate concerns.

It is marriage as a political institution that
I wish to consider, not marriage as a matter
for the private morality of each individual.
Marriage is regulated by law, and is regarded
as a matter in which the community has
a right to interfere. It is only the action
of the community in regard to marriage that

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Marriage and the Population Question

I am concerned to discuss : whether the
present action furthers the life of the com-
munity, and if not, in what ways it ought to
be changed.

There are two questions to be asked in
regard to any marriage system : first, how it
affects the development and character of the
men and women concerned ; secondly, what
is its influence on the propagation and educa-
tion of children. These two questions are
entirely distinct, and a system may well be
desirable from one of these two points of view
when it is very undesirable from the other. I
propose first to describe the present English
law and public opinion and practice in regard
to the relations of the sexes, then to consider
their effects as regards children, and finally
to consider how these effects, which are bad,
could be obviated by a system which would
also have a better influence on the character
and development of men and women.

The law in England is based upon the ex-
pectation that the great majority of marriages
will be lifelong. A marriage can only be
dissolved if either the wife or the husband,
but not both, can be proved to have com-
mitted adultery. In case the husband is the
" guilty party," he must also be guilty of cruelty
or desertion. Even when these conditions are
fulfilled, in practice only the well-to-do can
be divorced, because the expense is very

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

great.1 A marriage cannot be dissolved for
insanity or crime, or for cruelty, however
abominable, or for desertion, or for adultery
by both parties ; and it cannot be dissolved
for any cause whatever if both husband and
wife have agreed that they wish it dissolved.
In all these cases the law regards the man and
woman as bound together for life. A special
official, the King's Proctor, is employed to
prevent divorce when there is collusion and
when both parties have committed adultery.2

1 There was a provision for suits in forma pauperis, but for
various reasons this provision was nearly useless ; a new and
somewhat better provision has recently been made, but is still
very far from satisfactory.

2 The following letter (New Statesman, December 4, 1915)
illustrates the nature of his activities : —

DIVORCE AND WAR.
To the Editor of the " New Statesman."

SIR, — The following episodes may be of interest to your
readers. Under the new facilities for divorce offered to the
London poor, a poor woman recently obtained a decree nisi for
divorce against her husband, who had often covered her body
with bruises, infected her with a dangerous disease, and com-
mitted bigamy. By this bigamous marriage the husband had
ten illegitimate children. In order to prevent this decree being
made absolute, the Treasury spent at least ^200 of the taxes
in briefing a leading counsel and an eminent junior counsel
and in bringing about ten witnesses from a city a hundred
miles away to prove that this woman had committed casual
acts of adultery in 1895 an(^ 1898. The net result is that this
woman will probably be forced by destitution into further
adultery, and that the husband will be able to treat his

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Marriage and the Population Question

This interesting system embodies the opinions
held by the Church of England some fifty
years ago, and by most Nonconformists then
and now. It rests upon the assumption that
adultery is sin, and that when this sin has
been committed by one party to the marriage,
the other is entitled to revenge if he is rich.
But when both have committed the same sin,
or when the one who has not committed it
feels no righteous anger, the right to revenge
does not exist. As soon as this point of view
is understood, the law, which at first seems
somewhat strange, is seen to be perfectly con-
sistent. It rests, broadly speaking, upon four

mistress exactly as he treated his wife, with impunity, so
far as disease is concerned. In nearly every other civilized
country the marriage would have been dissolved, the children
could have been legitimated by subsequent marriage, and the
lawyers employed by the Treasury would not have earned the
large fees they did from the community for an achievement
which seems to most other lawyers thoroughly anti-social in
its effects. If any lawyers really feel that society is benefited
by this sort of litigation, why cannot they give their services
for nothing, like the lawyers who assisted the wife? If we
are to practise economy in war-time, why cannot the King's
Proctor be satisfied with a junior counsel only ? The fact
remains that many persons situated like the husband and wife
in question prefer to avoid having illegitimate children, and
the birth-rate accordingly suffers.

"The other episode is this. A divorce was obtained by
Mr. A. against Mrs. A. and Mr. B. Mr. B. was married and
Mrs. B., on hearing of the divorce proceedings, obtained a
decree nisi against Mr. B. Mr. B. is at any moment liable

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

propositions : ( i ) that sexual intercourse out-
side marriage is sin ; (2) that resentment of
adultery by the " innocent " party is a righteous
horror of wrong-doing; (3) that this resent-
ment, but nothing else, may be rightly regarded
as making a common life impossible ; (4) that
the poor have no right to fine feelings. The
Church of England, under the influence of
the High Church, has ceased to believe the
third of these propositions, but it still believes
the first and second, and does nothing actively
to show that it disbelieves the fourth.

The penalty for infringing the marriage law

to be called to the Front, but Mrs. B. has for some months
declined to make the decree nisi absolute, and this prevents
him marrying Mrs. A., as he feels in honour bound to do.
Yet the law allows any petitioner, male or female, to obtain
a decree nisi and to refrain from making it absolute for
motives which are probably discreditable. The Divorce
Law Commissioners strongly condemned this state of
things, and the hardship in question is immensely aggra-
vated in war-time, just as the war has given rise to many
cases of bigamy owing to the chivalrous desire of our soldiers
to obtain for the de facto wife and family the separation
allowance of the State. The legal wife is often united by
similar ties to another man. I commend these facts to con-
sideration in your columns, having regard to your frequent
complaints of a falling birth-rate. The iniquity of our
marriage laws is an important contributory cause to the
fall in question.

Yours, etc.,

E. S. P, HAYNES.
November 2()th.

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Marriage and the Population Question

is partly financial, but depends mainly upon
public opinion. A rather small section of the
public genuinely believes that sexual relations
outside marriage are wicked ; those who
believe this are naturally kept in ignorance of
the conduct of friends who feel otherwise, and
are able to go through life not knowing how
others live or what others think. This small
section of the public regards as depraved not
only actions, but opinions, which are contrary
to its principles. It is able to control the pro-
fessions of politicians through its influence on
elections, and the votes of the House of Lords
through the presence of the Bishops. By
these means it governs legislation, and makes
any change in the marriage law almost im-
possible. It is able, also, to secure in most
cases that a man who openly infringes the
marriage law shall be dismissed from his
employment or ruined by the defection of his
customers or clients. A doctor or lawyer, or
a tradesman in a country town, cannot make
a living, nor can a politician be in Parliament,
if he is publicly known to be " immoral."
Whatever a man's own conduct may be, he is
not likely to defend publicly those who have
been branded, lest some of the odium should
fall on him. Yet so long as a man has not
been branded, few men will object to him,
whatever they may know privately of his
behaviour in these respects.

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

Owing to the nature of the penalty, it falls
very unequally upon different professions. An
actor or journalist usually escapes all punish-
ment. An urban working man can almost
always do as he likes. A man of private means,
unless he wishes to take part in public life, need
not suffer at all if he has chosen his friends
suitably. Women, who formerly suffered more
than men, now suffer less, since there are large
circles in which no social penalty is inflicted,
and a very rapidly increasing number of women
who do not believe the conventional code. But
for the majority of men outside the working
classes the penalty is still sufficiently severe
to be prohibitive.

The result of this state of things is a wide-
spread but very flimsy hypocrisy, which allows
many infractions of the code, and forbids only
those which must become public. A man may
not live openly with a woman who is not his
wife, an unmarried woman may not have a
child, and neither man nor woman may get into
the divorce court. Subject to these restric-
tions, there is in practice very great freedom.
It is this practical freedom which makes the
state of the law seem tolerable to those who
do not accept the principles upon which it is
based. What has to be sacrificed to propitiate
the holders of strict views is not pleasure, but
only children and a common life and truth and
honesty. It cannot be supposed that this is

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Marriage and the Population Question

the result desired by those who maintain the
code, but equally it cannot be denied that this
is the result which they do in fact achieve.
Extra-matrimonial relations which do not lead
to children and are accompanied by a certain
amount of deceit remain unpunished, but severe
penalties fall on those which are honest or
lead to children.

Within marriage, the expense of children
leads to continually greater limitation of
families. The limitation is greatest among
those who have most sense of parental
responsibility and most wish to educate their
children well, since it is to them that the ex-
pense of children is most severe. But although
the economic motive for limiting families has
hitherto probably been the strongest, it is being
continually reinforced by another. Women are
acquiring freedom— not merely outward and
formal freedom, but inward freedom, enabling
them to think and feel genuinely, not accord-
ing to received maxims. To the men who
have prated confidently of women's natural
instincts, the result would be surprising if
they were aware of it. Very large num-
bers of women, when they are sufficiently
free to think for themselves, do not desire
to have children, or at most desire one
child in order not to miss the experience
which a child brings. There are women who
are intelligent and active -minded who resent

Principles of Social Reconstruction

the slavery to the body which is involved in
having children. There are ambitious women,
who desire a career which leaves no time
for children. There are women who love
pleasure and gaiety, and women who love the
admiration of men ; such women will at least
postpone child-bearing until their youth is
past. All these classes of women are
rapidly becoming more numerous, and it
may be safely assumed that their numbers
will continue to increase for many years to
come.

It is too soon to judge with any confidence
as to the effects of women's freedom upon
private life and upon the life of the nation.
But I think it is not too soon to see that it
will be profoundly different from the effect
expected by the pioneers of the women's move-
ment. Men have invented, and women in the
past have often accepted, a theory that women
are the guardians of the race, that their life
centres in motherhood, that all their instincts
and desires are directed, consciously or uncon-
sciously, to this end. Tolstoy's Natacha illus-
trates this theory : she is charming, gay, liable
to passion, until she is married ; then she
becomes merely a virtuous mother, without
any mental life. This result has Tolstoy's
entire approval. It must be admitted that it
is very desirable from the point of view of the
nation, whatever we may think of it in relation

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Marriage and the Population Question

to private life. It must also be admitted that
it is probably common among women who are
physically vigorous and not highly civilized.
But in countries like France and England it is
becoming increasingly rare. More and more
women find motherhood unsatisfying, not what
their needs demand. And more and more
there comes to be a conflict between their per-
sonal development and the future of the com-
munity. It is difficult to know what ought
to be done to mitigate this conflict, but I think
it is worth while to see what are likely to be
its effects if it is not mitigated.

Owing to the combination of economic pru-
dence with the increasing freedom of women,
there is at present a selective birth-rate of a
very singular kind.1 In France the population
is practically stationary, and in England it is
rapidly becoming so ; this means that some
sections are dwindling while others are in-
creasing. Unless some change occurs, the
sections that are dwindling will practically
become extinct, and the population will be
almost wholly replenished from the sections

1 Some interesting facts were given by Mr. Sidney Webb
in two letters to The Times, October n and 16, 1906; there
is also a Fabian tract on the subject: "The Decline in
the Birth-Rate," by Sidney Webb (No. 131). Some further
information may be found in " The Declining Birth-Rate :
Its National and International Significance," by A. News-
holme, M.D., M.R.C.S. (Cassell, 1911).

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

that are now increasing.1 The sections that
are dwindling include the whole middle -class
and the skilled artisans. The sections that are
increasing are the very poor, the shiftless
and drunkeii, the feeble-minded — feeble-minded
women, especially, are apt to be very prolific.
There is an increase in those sections of the
population which still actively believe the
Catholic religion, such as the Irish and the
Bretons, because the Catholic religion forbids
limitation of families. Within the classes that
are dwindling, it is the best elements that
are dwindling most rapidly. Working-class
boys of exceptional ability rise, by means of
scholarships, into the professional class ; they
naturally desire to marry into the class to which
they belong by education, not into the class
from which they spring ; but as they have
no money beyond what they earn, they cannot
marry young, or afford a large family. The
result is that in each generation the best ele-
ments are extracted from the working classes
and artificially sterilized, at least in comparison
with those who are left. In the professional

1 The fall in the death-rate, and especially in the infant
mortality, which has occurred concurrently with the fall in
the birth-rate, has hitherto been sufficiently great to allow the
population of Great Britain to go on increasing. But there
are obvious limits to the fall of the death-rate, whereas the
birth-rate might easily fall to a point which would make an
actual diminution of numbers unavoidable.

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Marriage and the Population Question

classes the young women who have initiative,
energy, or intelligence are as a rule not
inclined to marry young, or to have more than
one or two children when they do marry.
Marriage has been in the past the only obvious
means of livelihood for women ; pressure from
parents and fear of becoming an old maid com-
bined to force many women to marry in spite
of a complete absence of inclination for the
duties of a wife. But now a young woman
of ordinary intelligence can easily earn her
own living, and can acquire freedom and
experience without the permanent ties of a
husband and a family of children. The result
is that if she marries she marries late.

For these reasons, if an average sample of
children were taken out of the population of
England, and their parents were examined, it
would be found that prudence, energy, intellect,
and enlightenment were less common among
the parents than in the population in general ;
while shiftlessness, feeble-mindedness, stupidity,
and superstition were more common than
in the population in general. It would be
found that those who are prudent or ener-
getic or intelligent or enlightened actually
fail to reproduce their own numbers ; that is
to say, they do not on the average have as
manyias two children each who survive infancy.
On the other hand, those who have the opposite
qualities have, on the average, more than two

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

children each, and more than reproduce their
own numbers.

It is impossible to estimate the effect which
this will have upon the character of the popu-
lation without a much greater knowledge of
heredity than exists at present. But so long
as children continue to live with their parents,
parental example and early education must
have a great influence in developing their
character, even if we leave heredity entirely
out of account. Whatever may be thought
of genius, there can be no doubt that intelli-
gence, whether through heredity or through
education, tends to run in families, and that
the decay of the families in which it is com-
mon must lower the mental standard of the
population. It seems unquestionable that if
our economic system and our moral standards
remain unchanged, there will be, in the next
two or three generations, a rapid change for
the worse in the character of the population
in all civilized countries, and an actual diminu-
tion of numbers in the most civilized.

The diminution of numbers, in all likelihood,
will rectify itself in time through the elimina-
tion of those characteristics which at present
lead to a small birth-rate. Men and women
who can still believe the Catholic faith will
have a biological advantage ; gradually a race
will grow up which will be impervious to all
the assaults of reason, and will believe im-

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Marriage and the Population Question

perturbably that limitation of families leads to
hell-fire. Women who have mental interests,
who care about art or literature or politics,
who desire a career or who value their liberty,
will gradually grow rarer, and be more and
more replaced by a placid maternal type which
has no interests outside the home and no dis-
like of the burden of motherhood. This result,
which ages of masculine domination have
vainly striven to achieve, is likely to be the
final outcome of women's emancipation and
of their attempt to enter upon a wider sphere
than that to which the jealousy of men confined
them in the past.

Perhaps, if the facts could be ascertained,
it would be found that something of the same
kind occurred in the Roman Empire. The
decay of energy and intelligence during the
second, third, and fourth centuries of our era
has always remained more or less mysterious.
But there is reason to think that then, as now,
the best elements of the population in each
generation failed to reproduce themselves, and
that the least vigorous were, as a rule, those
to whom the continuance of the race was due.
One might be tempted to suppose that civiliza-
tion, when it has reached a certain height,
becomes unstable, and tends to decay through
some inherent weakness, some failure to adapt
the life of instinct to the intense mental life
of a period of high culture. But such vague

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

theories have always something glib and super-
stitious which makes them worthless as scien-
tific explanations or as guides to action. It
is not by a literary formula, but by detailed
and complex thought, that a true solution is
to be found.

Let us first be clear as to what we desire.
There is no importance in an increasing popu-
lation ; on the contrary, if the population of
Europe were stationary, it would be much easier
to promote economic reform and to avoid war.
What is regrettable at present is not the decline
of the birth-rate in itself, but the fact that
the decline is greatest in the best elements of
the population. There is reason, however, to
fear in the future three bad results : first, an
absolute decline in the numbers of English,
French, and Germans ; secondly, as a conse-
quence of this decline, their subjugation by
less civilized races and the extinction of their
tradition ; thirdly, a revival of their numbers
on a much lower plane of civilization, after
generations of selection of those who have
neither intelligence nor foresight. If this result
is to be avoided, the present unfortunate
selectiveness of the birth-rate must be some-
how stopped.

The problem is one which applies to the
whole of Western civilization. There is no
difficulty in discovering a theoretical solution,
but there is great difficulty in persuading men

182

Marriage and the Population Question

to adopt a solution in practice, because the
effects to be feared are not immediate and the
subject is one upon which people are not in
the habit of using their reason. If a rational
solution is ever adopted, the cause will probably
be international rivalry. It is obvious that if
one State— say Germany — adopted a rational
means of dealing: with the matter, it would
acquire an enormous advantage over other
States unless they did likewise. After the war,
it is possible that population questions will
attract more attention than they did before,
and it is likely that they will be studied from
the point of view of international rivalry. This
motive, unlike reason and humanity, is perhaps
strong enough to overcome men's objections to
a scientific treatment of the birth-rate.

In the past, at most periods and in most
societies, the instincts of men and women led
of themselves to a more than sufficient birth-
rate ; Malthus's statement of the population
question had been true enough up to the time
when he wrote. It is still true of barbarous
and semi-civilized races, and of the worst
elements among civilized races. But it has
become false as regards the more civilized half
of the population in Western Europe and
America. Among them, instinct no longer
suffices to keep numbers even stationary.

We may sum up the reasons for this in order
of importance, as follows :—

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

1 . The expense of children is very great
if parents are conscientious.

2. An increasing number of women desire
to have no children, or only one or two, in
order not to be hampered in their own
careers .

3. Owing to the excess of women, a large
number of women remain unmarried. These
women, though not debarred in practice from
relations with men, are debarred by the code
from having children. In this class are to
be found an enormous and increasing number
of women who earn their own living as typists,
in shops, or otherwise. The war has opened
many employments to women from which they
were formerly excluded, and this change is
probably only in part temporary.

If the sterilizing of the best parts of the
population is to be arrested, the first and
most pressing necessity is the removal of the
economic motives for limiting families. The
expense of children ought to be borne wholly
by the community. Their food and clothing
and education ought to be provided, not only
to the very poor as a matter of charity, but to
all classes as a matter of public interest. In
addition to this, a woman who is capable of
earning money, and who abandons wage -earn-
ing for motherhood, ought to receive from the
State as nearly as possible what she would
have received if she had not had children.

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Marriage and the Population Question

The only condition attached to State main-
tenance of the mother and the children should
be that both parents are physically and men-
tally sound in all ways likely to affect the
children. Those who are not sound should
not be debarred from having children, but
should continue, as at present, to bear the
expense of children themselves.

It ought to be recognized that the law is only
concerned with marriage through the question
of children, and should be indifferent to what
is called " morality," which is based upon
custom and texts of the Bible, not upon any
real consideration of the needs of the com-
munity. The excess women, who at present
are in every way discouraged from having
children, ought no longer to be discouraged.
If the State is to undertake the expense of
children, it has the right, on eugenic grounds,
to know who the father is, and to demand a
certain stability in a union. But there is no
reason to demand or expect a lifelong stability,
or to exact any ground for divorce beyond
mutual consent. This would make it possible
for the women who must at present remain
unmarried to have children if they wished it.
In this way an enormous and unnecessary
waste would be prevented, and a great deal of
needless unhappiness would be avoided.

There is no necessity to begin such a system
all at once. It might be begun tentatively

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

with certain exceptionally desirable sections of
the community. It might then be extended
gradually, with the experience of its working
which had been derived from the first experi-
ment. If the birth-rate were very much in-
creased, the eugenic conditions exacted might
be made more strict.

There are of course various practical diffi-
culties in the way of such a scheme : the
opposition of the Church and the upholders
of traditional morality, the fear of weakening
parental responsibility, and the expense. All
these, however, might be overcome. But
there remains one difficulty which it seems im-
possible to overcome completely in England,
and that is, that the whole conception is anti-
democratic, since it regards some men as better
than others, and would demand that the State
should bestow a better education upon the
children of some men than upon the children
of others . This is contrary to all the principles
of progressive politics in England. For this
reason it can hardly be expected that any such
method of dealing with the population question
will ever be adopted in its entirety in this coun-
try. Something of the sort may well be done
in Germany, and if so, it will assure German
hegemony as no merely military victory could
do. But among ourselves we can only hope
to see it adopted in some partial, piecemeal
fashion, and probably only after a change in

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Marriage and the Population Question

the economic structure of society which will
remove most of the artificial inequalities that
progressive parties are rightly trying to
diminish.

So far we have been considering the question
of the reproduction of the race, rather than the
effect of sex relations in fostering or hinder-
ing the development of men and women .
From the point of view of the race, what seems
needed is a complete removal of the economic
burdens due to children from all parents who
are not physically or mentally unfit, and as
much freedom in the law as is compatible with
public knowledge of paternity. Exactly the
same changes seem called for when the ques-
tion is considered from the point of view of
the men and women concerned.

In regard to marriage, as with all the other
traditional bonds between human beings, a very
extraordinary change is taking place, wholly
inevitable, wholly necessary as a stage in the
development of a new life, but by no means
wholly satisfactory until it is completed. All
the traditional bonds were based on authority
— of the king, the feudal baron, the priest, the
father, the husband. All these bonds, just
because they were based on authority, are dis-
solving or already dissolved, and the creation
of other bonds to take their place is as yet
very incomplete. Eor this reason human

relations have at present an unusual triviality,

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

and do less than they did formerly to break
down the hard walls of the Ego.

The ideal of marriage in the past depended
upon the authority of the husband, which was
admitted as a right by the wife. The husband
was free, the wife was a willing slave. In
all matters which concerned husband and wife
jointly, it was taken for granted that the
husband's fiat should be final. The wife was
expected to be faithful, while the husband,
except in very religious societies, was only
expected to throw a decent veil over his in-
fidelities. Families could not be limited except
by continence, and a wife had no recognized
right to demand continence, however she might
suffer from frequent children.

So long as the husband's right to authority
was unquestioningly believed by both men and
women, this system was fairly satisfactory, and
afforded to both a certain instinctive fulfilment
which is rarely achieved among educated
people now. Only one will, the husband's,
had to be taken into account, and there was no
need of the difficult adjustments required when
common decisions have to be reached by two
equal wills.* The wife's desires were not treated
seriously enough to enable them to thwart the
husband's needs, and the wife herself, unless
she was exceptionally selfish, did not seek self-
development, or see in marriage anything but
an opportunity for duties. Since she did not

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Marriage and the Population Question

seek or expect much happiness, she suffered
less, when happiness was not attained, than
a woman does now : her suffering contained
no element of indignation or surprise, and did
not readily turn into bitterness and sense of
injury .

The saintly, self-sacrificing woman whom our
ancestors praised had her place in a certain
organic conception of society, the conception
of the ordered hierarchy of authorities which
dominated the Middle Ages. She belongs to
the same order of ideas as the faithful servant,
the loyal subject, and the orthodox son of
the Church. This whole order of ideas has
vanished from the civilized world, and it is
to be hoped that it has vanished for ever, in
spite of the fact that the society which it pro-
duced was vital and in some ways full of
nobility. The old order has been destroyed
by the new ideals of justice and liberty, begin-
ning with religion, passing on to politics, and
reaching at last the private relations of mar-
riage and the family. When once the question
has been asked, " Why should a woman sub-
mit to a man ? " when once the answers derived
from tradition and the Bible have ceased to
satisfy, there is no longer any possibility of
maintaining the old subordination. To every
man who, has the power of thinking imper-
sonally and freely, it is obvious, as soon as
the question is asked, that the rights of women

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are precisely the same as the rights of men.
Whatever dangers and difficulties, whatever
temporary chaos, may be incurred in the transi-
tion to equality, the claims of reason are so
insistent and so clear that no opposition to
them can hope to be long successful.

Mutual liberty, which is now demanded, is
making the old form of marriage impossible.
But a new form, which shall be an equally
good vehicle for instinct, and an equal help to
spiritual growth, has not yet been developed.
For the present, women who are conscious of
liberty as something to be preserved are also
conscious of the difficulty of preserving it . The
wish for mastery is an ingredient in most men's
sexual passions, especially in those which are
strong and serious. It survives in many men
whose theories are entirely opposed to
despotism. The result is a fight for liberty
on the one side and for life on the othfer.
•Women feel that they must protect their in-
dividuality ; men feel, often very dumbly, that
the repression of instinct which is demanded
of them is incompatible with vigour and initi-
ative. The clash of these opposing moods
makes all real mingling of personalities im-
possible ; the man and woman remain hard,
separate units, continually asking themselves
whether anything of value to themselves is
resulting from the union. The effect is that
relations tend to become trivial and temporary,

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Marriage and the Population Question

a pleasure rather than the satisfaction of a
profound need, an excitement, not an attain-
ment. The fundamental loneliness into which
we are born remains untouched, and the hunger
for inner companionship remains unappeased.

No cheap and easy solution of this trouble
is possible. It is a trouble which affects most
the most civilized men and women, and is an
outcome of the increasing sense of individuality
which springs inevitably from mental progress.
I doubt if there is any radical cure except in
some form of religion, so firmly and sincerely
believed as to dominate even the life of instinct .
The individual is not the end and aim of his
own being : outside the individual, there is
the community, the future of mankind, the
immensity of the universe in which all our
hopes and fears are a mere pin-point. A man
and woman with reverence for the spirit of
life in each other, with an equal sense of their
own unimportance beside the whole life of man,
may become comrades without interference
with liberty, and may achieve the union of
instinct without doing violence to the life of
mind and spirit. As religion dominated the
old form of marriage, so religion must
dominate the new. But it must be a new
religion based upon liberty, justice, and love,
not upon authority and law and hell -fire.

A bad effect upon the relations of men and
women has been produced by the romantic

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movement, through directing attention to what
ought to be an incidental good, not the pur-
pose for which relations exist. Love is what
gives intrinsic value to a marriage, and, like
art and thought, it is one of the supreme things
which make human life worth preserving.
But though there is no good marriage without
love, the best marriages have a purpose which
goes beyond love. The love of two people for
each other is too circumscribed, too separate
from the community, to be by itself the main
purpose of a good life. It is not in itself a
sufficient source of activities, it is not suffi-
ciently prospective, to make an existence in
which ultimate satisfaction can be found. It
brings its great moments, and then its times
which are less great, which are unsatisfying
because they are less great. It becomes,
sooner or later, retrospective, a tomb of dead
joys, not a well-spring of new life. This evil
is inseparable from any purpose which is to
be achieved in a single supreme emotion. The
only adequate purposes are those which stretch
out into the future, which can never be fully
achieved, but are always growing, and infinite
with the infinity of human endeavour. And it
is only when love is linked to some infinite
purpose of this kind that it can have the
seriousness and depth of which it is capable.
For the great majority of men and women
seriousness in sex relations is most likely to

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be achieved through children. Children are
to most people rather a need than a desire :
instinct is as a rule only consciously directed
towards what used to lead to children. The
desire for children is apt to develop in middle
life, when the adventure of one's own existence
is past, when the friendships of youth seem
less important than they once did, when the
prospect of a lonely old age begins to terrify,
and the feeling of having no share in the
future becomes oppressive. Then those who,
while they were young, have had no sense that
children would be a fulfilment of their needs,
begin to regret their former contempt for the
normal, and to envy acquaintances whom
before they had thought humdrum. But owing
to economic causes it is often impossible for
the young, and especially for the best of the
young, to have children without sacrificing
things of vital importance to their own lives.
And so youth passes, and the need is felt top
late.

Needs without corresponding desires have
grown increasingly common as life has grown
more different from that primitive existence
from which our instincts are derived, and to
which, rather than to that of the present day,
they are still very largely adapted. An un-
satisfied need produces, in the end, as much
pain and as much distortion of character as
if it had been associated with a conscious

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desire. For this reason, as well as for the
sake of the race, it is important to remove the
present economic inducements to childlessness.
There is no necessity whatever to urge parent-
hood upon those who feel disinclined to it,
but there is necessity not to place obstacles
in the way of those who have no such
disinclination.

In speaking of the importance of preserving
seriousness in the relations of men and women,
I do not mean to suggest that relations which
are hot serious are always harmful . Traditional
morality has erred by laying stress on what
ought not to happen, rather than on what ought
to happen. What is important is that men and
women should find, sooner or later, the best
relation of which their natures are capable.
It is not always possible to know in advance
what will be the best, or to be sure of not
missing the best if everything that can be
doubted is rejected. Among primitive races,
a man wants a female, a woman wants a male,
and there is no such differentiation as makes
one a much more suitable companion than
another. But with the increasing complexity
of disposition that civilized life brings, it
becomes more and more difficult to find the
man or woman who will bring happiness, and
more and more necessary to make it not too
difficult to acknowledge a mistake. .

The present marriage law is an inheritance
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Marriage and the Population Question

from a simpler age, and is supported, in the
main, by unreasoning fears and by contempt
for all that is delicate and difficult in the life
of the mind. Owing to the law, large numbers
of men and women are condemned, so far
as their ostensible relations are concerned, to
the society of an utterly uncongenial com-
panion, with all the embittering consciousness
that escape is practically impossible. In these
circumstances, happier relations with others are
often sought, but they have to be clandestine,
without a common life, and without children.
Apart from the great evil of being clandestine,
such relations have some almost inevitable
drawbacks. They are liable to emphasize sex
unduly, to be exciting and disturbing ; and
it is hardly possible that they should bring a
real satisfaction of instinct. It is the com-
bination of love, children, and a comtnon life
that makes the best relation between a man
and a woman. The law at present confines
children and a common life within the bounds
of monogamy, but it cannot confine love. By
forcing many to separate love from children
and a common life, the law cramps their lives,
prevents them from1 reaching the full measure
of their possible development, and inflicts a
wholly unnecessary torture upon those who are
not content to become frivolous.

To sum up : The present state of the law,
of public opinion, and of our economic system

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is tending to degrade the quality of the race,
by making the worst half of the population the
parents of more than half of the next genera-
tion. At the same time, women's claim to
liberty is making the old form of marriage a
hindrance to the development of both men and
women. A new system' is required, if the
European nations are not to degenerate, and
if the relations of men and women are to have
the strong happiness and organic seriousness
which belonged to the best marriages in the
past . The new system must be based upon the
fact that to produce children is a service to the
community, and ought not to expose parents
to heavy pecuniary penalties. It will have to
recognize that neither the law nor public
opinion should concern itself with the private
relations of men and women, except where
children are concerned. It ought to remove
the inducements to make relations clandestine
and childless. It ought to admit that, although
lifelong monogamy is best when it is success-
ful, the increasing complexity of our needs
makes it increasingly often a failure for which
divorce is the best preventive. Here, as else-
where, liberty is the basis of political wisdom.
And when liberty has been won, what remains
to be desired must be left to the conscience
and religion of individual men and women.

196

VII
RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES

ALMOST all the changes which the world has
undergone 'since the end of the Middle Ages
are due to the discovery and diffusion of new
knowledge. This was the primary cause of
the Renaissance, thd Reformation, and the
industrial revolution. It was also, very directly,
the cause of the decay of dogmatic religion.
The study of classical texts and early Church
history, Copernican astronomy and physics,
Darwinian bioloigy and comparative anthro-
pology, have each in turn battered down some
part jof the edifice of Catholic dogma, until,
for almost all thinking and instructed people,
the most that seems defensible is some inner
spirit, some vague hope, and some not very
definite f eelirig of moral obligation . This result
might (perhaps have remained limited to the
educated minority, but for the fact that the
Churches have almost everywhere opposed
political progress with the same bitterness with
which they have opposed progress in thought.
Political eonservatisrri has brought the Churches
into conflict with whatever was vigorous in the

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working classes, and has spread free thought
in wide circles which might otherwise have
remained orthodox for centuries. The decay
of dogmatic religion is, for good or evil, one
of the most important facts in the modern
world. Its effects have hardly yet begun to
show themselves : what they will be it is
impossible to say, but they will certainly be
profound and far-reaching.

Religion is partly personal, partly social :
to the Protestant primarily personal, to the
Catholic primarily social. It is only when
the two elements are intimately blended that
religion becomes a powerful force in moulding
society. The Catholic Church, as it existed
from the time of Constantine to the time of the
Reformation, represented a blending which
would have seembd incredible if it had not been
actually achieved, the blending of Christ and
Caesar, of the morality of humble submission-
with the pride of Imperial Rome. Those who
loved the one could find it in the Thebaid ; those
who loved the other could admire it 'in the pomp
of metropolitan archbishops. In St. Erancis
and Innocent III the same two sides of
the Church are still represented. But since
the Reformation personal religion has been
increasingly outside the Catholic Church, while
the religion which has remained Catholic has
been increasingly a matter of institutions and
politics and historic continuity. This division

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has weakened the force of religion : religious
bodies have not 'been strengthened by the
enthusiasm arid single -mindedness of the men
in whom personal religion is strong, and these
men [have riot found their teaching diffused and
made permanent by the power of ecclesiastical
institutions .

The Catholic Church achieved, during the
Middle Ages, the most organic society and the
mbst harmonious inner synthesis of instinct,
mind, and spirit', that the -Western world has
ever known. St. Francis, Thomas Aquinas,
and Dante represent its summit as regards
individual development. The cathedrals, the
mendicant Orders, and the triumph of the
Papacy over the Empire represent its supreme
political success. But the perfection which
had been achieved1 was a narrow perfection :
instinct, mind, andi spirit all suffered from
curtailment in order to fit into the pattern ;
laymen found themselves subject to the Church
in ways Which1 they resented, and' the Church
used its power for rapacity and oppression.
The perfect synthesis was an enemy to new
growth, and after the time of Dante all that
was living in the world had first to fight for
its right to live against the representatives of
the old order. This fight is even now not
ended. Only when it is quite ended, both in
the external world of politics and in the internal
world of men's own thoughts, will it be

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possible for a new organic society and a new
inner synthesis to take the place which the
Church held for a thousand years.

The clerical profession suffers from two
causes, one of which it shares with some other
professions, while the other is peculiar to itself.
The cause peculiar to, it is the convention'
that clergymen are more virtuous than other
men. Any average selection of mankind, set
apart and told that it excels the rest in virtue,
must terid to sink below the average. This
is an ancient commonplace in regard to princes
and those who used to be called " the great."
But it is no less true as regards those of the
clergy who are not genuinely and by nature as
much better than the average as they are con-
ventionally supposed to be. The other source
of harm to the clerical profession is endow-
ments. Property which is only available for
those who will support an established institution
has a tendency to warp men's judgments as to
the excellence of the institution. The tendency
is aggravated when the property is associated
with social consideration and opportunities for
petty power. It is at its worst when the
institution is tied by law to an ancient creed,
almost impossible to change, and yet quite out
of touch with the unfettered thought of the
present day. All these causes combine to
damage the moral force of the Church.

It is not so much that the creed of the
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Church is the wrong one. What is amiss is
the mere existence of a creed. As soon as
income, position, and power are dependent
upon acceptance of no matter what creed,
intellectual honesty is imiperilled. Men will
tell themselves that a formal assent is justified
by the good' which it will enable them1 to do.
They fail to realize that, in those whose mental
life has any vigour, loss of complete intellectual
integrity puts an end1 to the power of dicing
good, by producing gradually in all directions
an inability to see truth simply. The strict-
ness of party discipline has introduced the isame
evil in politics ; there, because the evil is
comparatively new, it is visible to many who
think it unimportant as regards the Church.
But the evil is greater as regards the Church,
because religion is of more importance than
politics, and because it is more necessary that
the exponents of religion should be wholly free
from taint.

The evils we have been considering seem
inseparable from the existence of a professional
priesthood. If religion is not to be harmful
in a world of rapid change, it must, like the
Society of Friends, be carried on by men
who have other occupations during the week,
who do their religious work from enthusiasm,
without receiving any payment. And such
men, because they iknow the everyday world,
are not likely to fall into a remote morality

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which no one regard's as applicable to common
life. Being free, they will not be bound to
reach certain conclusions decided in advance,
but will be able to consider m'oral and religious
questions genuinely, without bias. Except in
a quite stationary society, no religious life can
be living or a real support to the spirit unless
it is freed from the incubus of a professional
priesthood .

It is largely for these reasons that so little
of what is valuable in morals and religion comes
nowadays from the men who are eminent in
the religious world. It is true that among
professed believers there are many who are
wholly sincere, who feel still the inspiration
which Christianity brought before it had
been weakened by the progress of knowledge.
These sincere believers are valuable to the
world because they keep alive the conviction
that the life of the spirit is what is of most
importance to men and women . Some of them,
in all the countries now at war, have had the
courage to preachi peace and love in the name
of Christ, and have done what lay in their
power to mitigate the bitterness of hatred . All
praise is due: to these men, and without them
the world would be even worse than it is.

But it is not through even the most sincere
and courageous believers in the traditional
religion that a new spirit can come into the
world. It is not through them that religion

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Religion and the Churches

can be brought back to those who have lost it
because their mind's were active, not because
their spirit was dead!. Believers in the tradi-
tional religion necessarily look to the past for
inspiration rather than to the future. They
seek wisdom in the teaching of Christ, which,
admirable as it is, remains .quite inadequate for
many of the sodial and spiritual issues of
mod'ern life. Art and! intellect and all theprob-
lems of government are ignored in the Gospels .
Those who, like Tolstoy, endeavour seriously
to take the Gospels as a guide to. life are
compelled to regard1 the ignorant peasant as
the best type of man, and. to brush aside
political questions by an extreme and imprac-
ticable anarchism1.

If a religious view of life and the world is
ever to reconquer the thoughts and feelings of
free -minded men and women, much that we
are accustomed to associate with religion will
have to be discarded. The first and greatest
change that is required is to establish a morality
of initiative, not a morality of submission, a
morality of hope rather than fear, of things
to be done rather than of things to be left
undone . It is not the whole duty of man to slip
through the world so as to escape the wrath
of God. The world is our world, and it rests
with us to make it a heaven or a hell. The
power is ours, and the kingdom and the glory
would be ours also if we had courage and

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insight to create them. The religious life that
we must seek will not be one of occasional
solemnity and superstitious prohibitions, it will
not be sad or ascetic, it will concern itself
little with rules of conduct. It will be inspired
by a vision of what human life may be, and
will be happy with the joy of creation, living
in a large free world of initiative and hope.
It will love mankind, not for what they are
to the outward eye, but for what imagination
shows that they have it in them to become.
It will not readily condemn, but it will give
praise to positive achievement rather than
negative sinlessness, to the joy of life, the
quick affection, the creative insight, by which
the world may grow young and beautiful and
filled with vigour.

" Religion " is a word which has many mean-
ings and a long history. In origin, it was
concerned with certain rites, inherited from a
remote past, performed originally for some
reason long since forgotten, and associated
from time to time with various myths to account
for their supposed importance. Much of this
lingers still. A religious man is one who
goes to church, a communicant, one who
" practises," as Catholics say. How he be-
haves otherwise, or how he feels concerning
life and man's place in the world, does not
bear upon the question whether he is " reli-
gious " in this simple but historically correct

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Religion and the Churches

sense. Many men and women are religious
in this sense without having in their natures
anything that deserves to be called religion
in the sense in which I mean the word. The
mere familiarity of the Church service has
made them impervious to it ; they are uncon-
scious of all the history and human experience
by which the liturgy has been enriched, and
unmoved by the glibly repeated words of the
Gospel, which condemn almost all the activities
of those who fancy themselves disciples of
Christ. This fate must overtake any habitual
rite : it is impossible that it should continue to
produce much effect after it has been performed
so often as to grow mechanical.

The activities of men may be roughly derived
from three sources, not in actual fact sharply
separate one from another, but sufficiently dis-
tinguishable to deserve different names. The
three sources I mean are instinct, mind, and
spirit, and of these three it is the life of the
spirit that makes religion.

The life of instinct includes all that man
shares with the lower animals, all that is con-
cerned with self-preservation and reproduction
and the desires and impulses derivative from
these. It includes vanity and love of posses-
sions, love of family, and even much of what
makes love of country. It includes all the
impulses that are essentially concerned with
the biological success of oneself or one's group

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—for among gregarious animals the life of
instinct includes the group. The impulses
which it includes may not in fact make for
success, and may often in fact militate against
it, but are nevertheless those of which success
is the raison d'etre, those which express the
animal nature of man and his position among
a world of competitors.

The life of the mind is the life of pursuit of
knowledge, from mere childish curiosity up to
the greatest efforts of thought . Curiosity exists
in animals, and serves an obvious biological
purpose ; but it is only in men that it passes
beyond the investigation of particular objects
which may be edible or poisonous, friendly or
hostile. Curiosity is the primary impulse out
of which the whole edifice of scientific know-
ledge has grown. Knowledge has been found
so useful that most actual acquisition of it is
no longer prompted by curiosity ; innumerable
other motives now contribute to foster the
intellectual life. Nevertheless, direct love of
knowledge and dislike of error still play a very
large part, especially with those who are most
successful in learning. No man acquires much
knowledge unless the acquisition is in itself
delightful to him, apart from any conscious-
ness of the use to which the knowledge may be
put. The impulse to acquire knowledge and
the activities which centre round it constitute
what I mean by the life of the mind. The life

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Religion and the Churches

of the mind consists of thought which is wholly
or partially impersonal, in the sense that it
concerns itself with objects on their own
account, and not merely on account of their
bearing upon our instinctive life.

The life of the spirit centres round imper-
sonal feeling, as the life of the mind centres
round impersonal thought. In this sense,
all art belongs to the life of the spirit,
though its greatness is derived from its
being also intimately bound up with the
life of instinct. Art starts from instinct
and rises into the region of the spirit ;
religion starts from the spirit and endeavours
to dominate and inform the life of instinct. It
is possible to feel the same interest in the joys
and sorrows of others as in our own, to love
and hate independently of all relation to our-
selves, to care about the destiny of man and
the development of the universe without a
thought that we are personally involved.
Reverence and worship, the sense of an
obligation to mankind, the feeling of im-
perativeness and acting under orders which
traditional religion has interpreted as Divine
inspiration, all belong to the life of the spirit.
And deeper than all these lies the sense of a
mystery half revealed, of a hidden wisdom and
glory, of a transfiguring vision in which com-
mon things lose their solid importance and
become a thin veil behind which the ultimate

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truth of the world is dimly seen. It is such
feelings that are the source of religion, and if
they were to die most of what is best would
vanish out of life.

Instinct, mind, and spirit are all essential
to a full life ; each has its own excellence and
its own corruption. Each can attain a spurious
excellence at the expense of the others ; each
has a tendency to encroach upon the others ;
but in the life which is to be sought all three
will be developed in co-ordination, and in-
timately blended in a single harmonious whole.
Among uncivilized men instinct is supreme,
and mind and spirit hardly exist. Among
educated men at the present day mind is
developed, as a rule, at the expense of both
instinct and spirit, producing a curious in-
humanity and lifelessness, a paucity of both
personal and impersonal desires, which leads
to cynicism and intellectual destructiveness.
Among ascetics and most of those who would
be called saints, the life of the spirit has been
developed at the expense of instinct and mind,
producing an outlook which is impossible to
those who have a healthy animal life and to
those who have a love of active thought. It
is not in any of these one-sided develop-
ments that we can find wisdom or a philosophy
which will bring new life to the civilized
world.

Among civilized men and women at the
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Religion and the Churches

present day it is rare to find instinct, mind,
and spirit in harmony . Very few have achieved
a practical philosophy which gives its due place
to each ; as a rule, instinct is at war with
either mind or spirit, and1 mind and spirit are
at war with each other. This strife compels
men and women to direct much of their energy
inwards, instead of being able to expend it
all in objective activities. When a man
achieves a precarious inward peace by the
defeat of a part of his nature, his vital forces
is impaired, and his growth is no longer quite
healthy. If men are to remain whole, it is
very necessary that they should achieve a
reconciliation of instinct, mind, and spirit.
Instinct is the source of vitality, the bond
that unites the life of the individual with the
life of the race, the basis of all profound sense
of union with others, and the means by which
the collective life nourishes the life of the
separate units. But instinct by itself leaves
us powerless to control the forces of Nature,
either in ourselves or in our physical environ-
ment, and keeps us in bondage to the same
unthinking impulse by which the trees grow.
Mind can liberate us from this bondage, by the
power of impersonal thought, which enables
us to judge critically the purely biological
purposes towards which instinct more or less
blindly tends. But mind, in its dealings with
instinct, is trierely critical : so far as instinct

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

is concerned, the unchecked activity of the
mind is apt to be destructive and to generate
cynicism. Spirit is an antidote to the cynicism
of mind : it universalizes the emotions that
spring from instinct, and by universalizing them
makes them impervious to mental criticism.
And when thought is informed by spirit it
loses its cruel, destructive quality ; it no longer
promotes the death of instinct, but only its
purification from insistence and ruthlessness
and its emancipation from the prison walls of
accidental circumstance. It is instinct that
gives force, mind that gives the means of
directing force to desired ends, and spirit that
suggests impersonal uses for force of a kind
that thought cannot discredit by criticism.
This is an outline of the parts that instinct,
mind, and spirit would play in a harmonious
life.

Instinct, mind, and spirit are each a help
to the others when their development is free
and unvitiated ; but when corruption comes
into any one of the three, not only does that
one fail, but the others also become poisoned.
All three must grow together. And if they
are to grow to their full stature in any one
man or woman, that man or woman must not
be isolated, but must be one of a. society where
growth is not thwarted and made crooked.

The life of instinct, when it is unchecked by
mind or spirit, consists of instinctive cycles,

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Religion and the Churches

which begin with impulses to more or less
definite acts, and pass on to satisfaction of
needs through the consequences of these im-
pulsive acts. Impulse and desire are not
directed towards the whole cycle, but only
towards its initiation : the rest is left to natural
causes. We desire to eat, but we do not desire
to be nourished unless we are valetudinarians.
Yet without the nourishment eating is a mere
momentary pleasure, not part of the general
impulse to life. Men desire sexual inter-
course, but they do not as a rule desire
children strongly or often. Yet without the
hope of children and its occasional realization,
sexual intercourse remains for most people an
isolated and separate pleasure, not uniting their
personal life with the life of mankind, not con-
tinuous with the central (purposes by which they
live, and not capable of bringing that pro-
found sense of fulfilment which comes from
completion by children. Most men, unless
the impulse is atrophied through disuse, feel
a desire to create something, great or small
according to their capacities. Some few are
able to satisfy this desire : some happy men
can create an' Empire, a science, a poem', or a
picture. The men of science, who have less
difficulty than any others in finding an outlet
for creativeness, are the happiest of intelligent
men in the modern world, since their creative
activity affords full satisfaction to mind and

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

spirit as well as to the instinct of creation.1 In
them a beginning is to be seen of the new
way of life which is to be sought ; in their
happiness we may perhaps find the germ of
a future happiness for all mankind. The rest,
with few exceptions, are thwarted in their
creative impulses. They cannot build their
own house or make their own garden, or direct
their own labour to producing what their free
choice would lead them to produce . In this way
the instinct of creation, which should lead on
to the life of mind and spirit, is checked
and turned aside. Too often it is turned
to destruction, as the only effective action which
remains possible. Out of its defeat grows
envy, and out of envy grows the impulse to
destroy the creativeness of more fortunate men .
This is one of the greatest sources of corruption
in the life of instinct.

The life of instinct is important, not only on
its own account, or because of the direct
usefulness of the actions which it inspires, but
also because, if it is unsatisfactory, the indi-
vidual life becomes detached and separated
from the general life of man. All really pro-
found sense of unity with others depends upon
instinct, upon co-operation or agreement in
some instinctive purpose. This is most obvious

1 I should add artists, but for the fact that most modern
artists seem to find much greater difficulty in creation than
men of science usually find.

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Religion and the Churches

in the relations of men and' women and parents
and children. But it is true also in wider
relations. It is true of large assemblies swayed
by a strong common emotion, and even of a
Whole nation in timjes of stress. It is part
of what makes the value of religion as a
social institution. -Where this feeling is wholly
absent, pther human beings seem distant and
aloof. >Where it is actively thwarted, other
human beingts become objects of instinctive
hostility. The aloofness or the instinctive
hostility may be masked by religious love,
which can be igiven to all men regardless of
their relation to ourselves. But religious love
does not bridge the gulf that parts man from
man : it looks across the gulf, it views others
with compassion or impersonal sympathy, but
it does not live with! the same life with which
they live. Instinct alone can do this, but only
when it is fruitful and sane and direct. To
this end it is necessary that instinctive cycles
should be fairly often completed, not inter-
rupted in the middle of their course. At
present they are constantly interrupted, partly
by purposes which conflict with them for
economic or other reasons, partly by the pursuit
of pleasure, which picks out the most agreeable
part of the cycle and avoids the rest. In this
way instinct is robbed of its imiportance and
seriousness ; it becomes incapable of bringing
any real fulfilment, its demands grow more

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

and more excessive, and life becomes no
longer a whole with a single movement, but
a series of detached moments, some of them
pleasurable, most of them full of weariness
and discouragenient.

The life of the mind, although supremely
excellent in itself, cannot bring health into the
life of instinct, except when it results in a not
too difficult outlet for the instinct of creation.
In other cases it is, as a rule, too widely
separated from instinct, too detached, too des-
titute of inward growth, to afford either a
vehicle for instinct or a means of subtilizing
and refining it. Thought is in its essence
impersonal and detached, instinct is in its
essence personal and tied to particular circum-
stances : between the two, unless both reach
a high level, there is a war which is not easily
appeased. This is the fundamental reason for
vitalism, futurism, pragmatism, and the various
other philosophies which advertise themselves
as vigorous and virile. All these represent the
attempt to find a mode of thought which shall
not be hostile to instinct. The attempt, in
itself, is deserving of praise, but the solution
offered is far too facile. What is proposed
amounts to a subordination of thought to
instinct, a refusal to allow thought to achieve
its own ideal. Thought which does not rise
above what is personal is not thought in any
true sense : it is merely, a more or less intelligent

214

Religion and the Churches

use of instinct. It is thought and spirit that
raise man above the level of the brutes. By
discarding them we may lose the proper
excellence of men, but cannot acquire the
excellence of animals. Thougnt must achieve
its full growth before a reconciliation with
instinct is attempted.

When refined thought and unrefined instinct
coexist, as they do in many intellectual men;,
the result is a complete disbelief in any
important good to be achieved by the help of
instinct. According to their disposition, some
such men will ais far as possible discard instinct
and become ascetic, while others will accept
it as a necessity, leaving it degraded and
separated from all that is really important in
their lives. Either of these courses prevents
instinct from remaining vital, or from being
a bond with others ; either produces a sense
of physical solitude, a gulf across which the
minds and spirits of others may speak, but not
their instincts . To very many men, the instinct
of patriotism, when the war broke out, was
the first instinct that had bridged the gulf, the
first that had made them feel a really profound
unity with others. This instinct, just because,
in its intense form, it was new and unfamiliar,
had remained uninfected by thought, not
paralysed or devitalized by doubt and cold
detachment. The sense of unity which it
brought is capable of being brought by the

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

instinctive life of more normal times, if thought
and spirit are not hostile to it. And so long
as this sense of unity is absent, instinct and
spirit cannot be in harmony, nor can the life
of the community have vigour and the seeds
of new growth.

The life of the mind, because of its detach-
ment, tends to separate a man inwardly from
other men, so longi as it is not balanced by
the life of the spirit. For this reason, mind
without spirit can render instinct corrupt or
atrophied, but cannot add any excellence to
the life of instinct. On this ground, some men
are hostile to thought. But no good purpose
is served by trying to prevent the growth of
thought, which has its own insistence, and if
checked in the directions in which it tends
naturally, will turn into other directions where
it is more harmful. And thought is in itself
God-like : if the opposition between thought
and instinct were irreconcilable, it would be
thought that ought to conquer. But the
opposition is not irreconcilable : all that
is necessary, is that both thought and instinct
should be informed' by the life of the spirit.

In order that human life should have vigour,
it is necessary for the instinctive impulses to
be strong and direct ; but in order that human
life should be good, these impulses must be
dominated and controlled by desires less per-
sonal and ruthless, less liable to lead to conflict

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than those that are inspired by instinct alone.
Something impersonal and universal is needed
over and above what springs out of the prin-
ciple of individual growth. It is this that is
given by the life of the spirit.

Patriotism' affords an example of the kind
of control which! is needed. Ratriotisrn! is
compounded' out of a number of instinctive
feelings and impulses : love of home, love of
those whose ways and outlook resemble our
own, the impulse to co-operation in a group, the
sense of pride in the achievements of one's
group. All these impulses and desires, like
everything belonging to the life of instinct, are
personal, in the sense that the feelings and
actions which they inspire towards others are
determined by the relation of those others to
ourselves, not by, what those others are intrinsi-
cally. All these im'pulses and desires unite to
produce a love of a mian's own country which
is more deeply implanted in the fibre of his
being, and more closely united1 to his vital
force, than any love not rooted in instinct.
But if spirit does not enter in to generalize
love of country, the exclusiveness of instinctive
love makes it a source of hatred of other
countries . What spirit can effect is to make us
realize that other countries equally are worthy
of love, that the vital warmth which makes
us love our own country reveals to us that
it deserves to be loved, and that only the

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Principles o( Social Reconstruction

poverty of Our nature prevents us from loving
all countries as we love our own. In this
way instinctive love can be extended in
imagination, and a sense of the value of all
mankind can grow up, which is more living
and intense than any that is possible to those
whose instinctive love is weak. Mind can only
show us that it is irrational to love our oiwn
country best ; it can weaken patriotism, but
cannot strengthen the love of all mankind.
Spirit alone can do this, by extending and
universalizing the love that is born of instinct.
And in doing this it checks and purifies what-
ever is insistent or ruthless or oppressively
personal in the life of instinct.

The same extension through spirit is neces-
sary with other instinctive loves, if they are
not to be enfeebled' or corrupted' by thought.
The love of husband and wife is capable of
being a very good thing, and when men and
women are sufficiently primitive, nothing but
instinct and good fortune is needed to make
it reach a certain limited perfection. But as
thought begins to assert its right to criticize
instinct the old simplicity becomes impossible.
The love of husband and wife, as unchecked
instinct leaves it, is too narrow and personal
to stand against the shafts of satire, until it is
enriched by the life of the spirit. The romantic
view of marriage, which our fathers and
mothers professed to believe, will not survive

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Religion and the Churches

an imaginative peregrination down a street of
suburban villas, each containing its couple, each
couple having congratulated themselves as
they first crossed the threshold, that here they
could love in peace, without interruption from
others, without Contact with the cold outside
world. The separateness and stuffiness, the
fine names for cowardices and1 timid vanities,
that are shut within the four walls of thousands
upon thousands of1 little villas, present them-
selves coldly and mercilessly to those in whom
mind is dominant at the expense of spirit.

Nothing is good ift the life of a humkn being
except the very best that his nature can achieve.
As men advance, things which have been
good cease to be good, merely because some-
thing better is possible. So it is with the life
of instinct : for those whose mental life is
strong, much that was really good while mind
remained less developed has now become bad
merely through the greater degree of truth in
their outlook on the world. The instinctive
man in love feels that his emotion is unique,
that the lady of his heart has perfections such
as no other woman ever equalled. The man
who has acquired the power of impersonal
thought realizes, when he is in love, that he
is one of so many millions of men who are in
love at this moment, that not more than one
of all the millions can be right in thinking his
love supreme, and that it is not likely that that

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

one is oneself. He perceives that the state of
being in love in those whose instinct is
unaffected by thought or spirit, is a state of
illusion, serving thei ends of Nature and making
a man a slave to the life of the species, not a
willing minister to the impersonal ends which
he sees to be good. Thought rejects this
slavery ; for no end that Nature may have in
view will thought abdicate, or forgo its right
to think truly. " Better the world should perish
than that I or any other human being should
believe a lie " — this is the religion of thought,
in whose scorchmgi flames the dross of the
world is being burnt away. It is a good
religion, and its work of destruction must be
completed. But it is not all that man has
need of. New growth must come after the
destruction, and new growth can come only
through the spirit.

Both patriotism and the love of man and
woman, when they are merely instinctive, have
the same defects : their exclusions, their
enclosing walls, their indifference or hostility
to the outside world. It is through this that
thought is led to satire, that comedy has in-
fected what men used to consider their holiest
feelings. The satire and the comedy are
justified, but not the death of instinct which
they may produce if they remain in supreme
command. They are justified, not as the last
word of wisdom, but as the gateway of pain

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Religion and the Churches

through which men pass to a new life, where
instinct is purified and yet nourished by the
deeper desires and insight of spirit.

The man who has the life of the spirit within
him views the love of man and woman, both
in himself and in others, quite differently from
the man who is exclusively dominated by
mind. He sees, in his moments of insight,
that in all human beings there is something
deserving of love, something mysterious, some-
thing appealing, a cry out of the night, a
groping journey, and a possible victory. When
his instinct loves, he welcomes its help in
seeing and feeling the value of the human being
whom he loves. Instinct becomes a rein-
forcement to spiritual insight. What instinct
tells him spiritual insight confirms, however
much the mind may be aware of littlenesses,
limitations, and enclosing walls that prevent
the spirit from shining forth1. His spirit divines
in all men what his instinct shows him in the
object of his love.

The love of parents for children has need
of the same transformation. The purely in-
stinctive love, unchecked by thought, unin-
formed by spirit, is exclusive, ruthless, and
unjust. No benefit to others is felt, by the
purely instinctive parent, to be worth an injury
to one's own children. Honour and conven-
tional morality place certain important practical
limitations on the vicarious selfishness of

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Principles of Social Reconstruction

parents, since a civilized community exacts a
certain minimum before it will give respect.
But within the limits allowed by public opinion,
parental affection, when it is merely instinctive,
will seek the advantage of children without
regard to others. Mind can weaken the im-
pulse to injustice, and diminish the force of
instinctive love, but it cannot keep the whole
force of instinctive love and turn it to more
universal ends. Spirit can do this. It can
leave the instinctive love of children undimmed,
and extend the poignant devotion of a parent,
in imagination, to the whole world. And
parental love itself will prompt the parent who
has the life of the spirit to give to his children
the sense of justice, the readiness for service,
the reverence, the will that controls self-seek-
ing, which he feels to be a greater good than
any personal success.

The life of the spirit has suffered in recent
times by its association with traditional religion,
by its apparent hostility to the life of the mind,
and by the fact that it has seemed to centre in
renunciation. The life of the spirit demands
readiness for renunciation when the occasion
arises, but is in its essence as positive and as
capable of enriching individual existence as
mind and instinct are. It brings with it the
joy of vision, of the mystery and profundity
of the world, of the contemplation of life, and
above all the joy of universal love. It liberates

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Religion and the Churches

those who have it from the prison-house of
insistent personal passion and mundane cares.
It gives freedom and breadth and beauty to
men's thoughts and feelings, and to all their
relations with others. It brings the solution
of doubts, the end of the feeling that all is
vanity. It restores harmony between mind and
instinct, and leads the separated unit back into
his place in the life of mankind. Eor those
who have once entered the world of thought,
it is only through spirit that happiness and
peace can return.

223

VIII
WHAT WE CAN DO

WHAT can we do for the world while we
live?

Many men and women would wish! to serve
mankind, but they are perplexed; and their
power seems infinitesimal. Despair seizes
them ; those who have the strongest passion
suffer most from' the sense of im'potence, and
are most liable to spiritual ruin through lack
of hope.

So long as we think only of the immediate
future, it seems that what we can do is not
much. It is probably impossible for us to
bring the war to an end. We cannot destroy
the excessive power of the State or of private
property. We cannot, here and now, bring new
life into education. In such matters, though
we may see the evil, we cannot quickly cure it
by any of the ordinary methods of politics.
We must recognize that the world is ruled in a
wrong spirit, and that a change of spirit will
not come from one day to the next. Our
expectations must not be for to-morrow, but
for the time when what is thought now by a»

224

few shall have become the common thought of
many. If we have courage and patience, we
can think the thoughts and feel the hopes by
which, sooner or later, men will be inspired,
and weariness and discouragement will be
turned into energy and ardour. For this
reason, the first thing we have to do is to be
clear in our own minds as to the kind of life
we think good and the kind of change that
we desire in the world.

The ultimate power of those whose thought
is vital is far greater than it seems to men
who suffer from the irrationality of con-
temporary politics. Religious toleration was
once the solitary speculation of a few bold
philosophers. Democracy, as a theory, arose
among a handful of men in Cromwell's army ;
by them, after the Restoration, it was carried
to America, where it came to fruition in
the -War of Independence. From America,
Lafayette and the other Frenchmen who fought
by the side of Washington brought the theory
of democracy to France, where it united itself
with the teaching of Rousseau and inspired
the Revolution. Socialism, whatever we may
think of its merits, is a great anld growing
power, which is transforming economic and
political life ; and socialism owes its origin
to a very small number of isolated theorists.
The movement against the subjection of women,
which has become irresistible and is not far

225 p

Principles of Social Reconstruction

from complete triumph, began in the same
way with a few impracticable idealists— Mary
Wollstonecraft, Shelley, John Stuart Mill. The
power of thought, in the long run, is greater
than any other human power. Those who
have the ability to think, and the imagination
to think in accordance with men's needs, are
likely to achieve the good they aim at sooner
or later, though probably not while they are
still alive.

But those who wish to gain the world by
thought must be content to lose it as a support
in the present. Most men go through life
without much questioning, accepting the beliefs
and practices which they find current, feeling
that the world will be their ally if they do
not put themselves in opposition to it. New
thought about the world is incompatible with
this comfortable acquiescence ; it requires a
certain intellectual detachment, a certain
solitary energy, a power of inwardly dominat-
ing the world and the outlook that the world
engenders. Without some willingness to be
lonely new thought cannot be achieved. And
it will not be achieved to any purpose if the
loneliness is accompanied by aloofness, so that
the wish for union with others dies, or if in-
tellectual detachment leads to contempt. It
is because the state of mind required is subtle
and difficult, because it is hard to be intel-
lectually detached yet not aloof, that fruitful

226

What We Can Do

thought on human affairs is not common, and
that most theorists are either conventional or
sterile. The right kind of thought is rare and
difficult, but it is not impotent. It is not the
fear of impotence that need turn us aside from
thought if we have the wish to bring new
hope into the world.

In seeking a political theory which is to
be useful at any given moment, what is wanted
is not the invention of a Utopia, but the dis-
covery of the best direction of movement.
The direction which is good at one time majy
be superficially very different from that which
is good at another time. Useful thought is
that which indicates the right direction for the
present time. But in judging what is the
right direction there are two general principles
which are always applicable.

1 . The growth and vitality of individuals
and 'Communities is to be .promoted as far as
possible. i !

2 . The growth of one individual or one com-
munity is to be as little as possible at the
expense of another.

The second of these principles, as applied
by an individual in his dealings with others,
is the principle of reverence, that the life of
another has the same importance which we
feel in our own life. As applied impersonally
in politics, it is the principle of liberty, or
rather it includes the principle of liberty as a

227

Principles of Social Reconstruction

part. Liberty in itself is a negative principle ;
it tells us not to interfere, but does not give
any basis for construction. It shows that many
political and social institutions are bad and
ought to be swept away, but it does not show
what ought to be put in their place. For this
reason a further principle is required, if our
political theory is not to be purely destructive.

The combination of our two principles is not
in practice an easy matter . Much of the vital
energy of the world runs into channels which
are oppressive. The Germans have shown
themselves extraordinarily full of vital energy,
but unfortunately in a form which seems
incompatible with the vitality of their neigh-
bours. Europe in general has more vital
energy than Africa, but it has used its energy
to drain Africa, through industrialism, of even
such life as the negroes possessed. The
vitality of south-eastern Europe is being
drained to supply cheap labour for the enter-
prise of American hiillionaires . The vitality
of men has been1 in the past a hindrance to
the development of women, and it is possible
that in the near future women may become
a similar hindrance to men. For such reasons
the principle of reverence, though not in itself
sufficient, is of very great importance, and is
able to indicate many of the political changes
that the world1 requires .

In order that both principles may be capable
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What We Can Do

of being satisfied, what is needed is a unifying
or integration, first of our individual lives, then
of the life of the community and of the world,
without sacrifice of individuality. The life of
an individual, the life of a community, and
even the life of mankind, ought to be, not a
number of separate fragments, but in some
sense a whole. When this is the case, the
growth of the individual is fostered, and is
not incompatible with the growth of other
individuals. In this way the two principles
are brought into harmony

What integrates an individual life is a
consistent creative purpose or unconscious
direction . Instinct alone will not suffice to give
unity to the life of a civilized man or woman :
there must be some dominant object, an
ambition, a desire for scientific or artistic
creation, a religious principle, or strong and
lasting affections . Unity of life is very difficult
for a man or woman who has suffered a certain
kind of defeat, the kind by which what should
have been the dominant impulse is checked
and made abortive. Most professions inflict
this kind of defeat upon a man at the very
outset. If a man becomes a journalist, he
probably has to write for a newspaper whose
politics he dislikes ; this kills his pride in
work and his sense of independence. Most
medical men find it very hard to succeed
without humbug, by which whatever scientific

229

Principles of Social Reconstruction

conscience they may have had is destroyed.
Politicians are obliged, not only to swallow
the party programme, but to pretend to be
saints, in order to conciliate religious sup-
porters ; hardly any man can enter Parlia-
ment without hypocrisy. In no profession
is there any respect for the native pride
without which a man cannot remain whole ;
the world ruthlessly crushes it out, because
it implies independence, and men desire to
enslave others more than they desire to be
free themselves. Inward freedom is infinitely
precious, and a society which will preserve it
is immeasurably to be' desired.

The principle of growth in a man is not
crushed necessarily by preventing him from
doing some definite thing, but it is often
crushed by persuading him' to do some-
thing else. The things that crush growth
are those that produce a sense of impo-
tence in the directions in which the vital
impulse wishes to be effective. The worst
things are those to which the will assents.
Often, chiefly from failure of self-knowledge,
a man's will is on a lower level than
his impulse : his impulse is towards some
kind of creation, while his will is towards
a conventional career, with a sufficient income
and the respect of his contemporaries . The
stereotyped illustration is the artist who pro-
duces shoddy work to please the public.

230

What We Can Do

But something of the artist's definiteness
of impulse exists in very many men who
are not artists. Because the impulse is deep
and dumb, because what is called common
sense is often against it, because a young
man can only follow it if he is willing to
set up his own obscure feeling's against the
wisdom and prudent maxims of elders and
friends, it happens in ninety-nine cases out
of a hundred that the creative impulse, out
of which a free and vigorous life might have
sprung, is checked and thwarted at the very
outset : the young! man consents to become a
tool, not an independent workman, a mere
means to the fulfilment of others, not the
artificer of what his own nature feels to
be good. In the moment when he makes
this act of consent something dies within
him. He can never again become a whole
man, never again have the undamaged self-
respect, the upright pride, which might have
kept him happy in his soul in spite of all
outward troubles and difficulties — except,
indeed, through conversion and a fundamental
change in his way of life.

Outward prohibitions, to which the will
gives no assent, are far less harmful than
the subtler inducements which seduce the will.
A serious disappointment in love may cause
the most poignant pain, but to a vigorous
man it will not do the same inward damage

231

Principles of Social Reconstruction

as is done by marrying for money. The
achievement of this or that special desire
is not what is essential : what is essential
is the direction, the kind of effectiveness
which is sought. When the fundamental
impulse is opposed by will, it is made to
feel helpless : it has no longer enough hope
to be powerful as a motive. Outward com-
pulsion does not do the same damage unless
it produces the same sense of impotence ; and
it will not produce the same sense of impo-
tence if the impulse is strong and courageous.
Some thwarting of special desires is unavoid-
able even in the best imaginable community,
since some men's desires, unchecked, lead
to the oppression or destruction of others.
In a good community Napoleon could not
have been allowed the profession of his choice,
but he might have found happiness as a
pioneer in Western America. He could not
have found happiness as a City clerk, and
no tolerable organization of society would
compel him to become a City clerk.

The integration of an individual life requires
that it should embody whatever creative
impulse a man may possess, and that his
education should1 have been such as to elicit
and fortify this impulse. The integration of
a community requires that the different creative
impulses of different men and women should
work together towards some common life, some

232

What We Can Do

common purpose, not necessarily conscious,
in which all the members of the community
find a help to their individual fulfilment.
Most of the activities that spring from vital
impulses consist of two parts : one creative,
which furthers one's own life and that of
others with the same kind of impulse or
circumstances, and one possessive, which
hinders the life of some group with a different
kind of impulse or circumstances. For this
reason, much of what is in itself most vital
may nevertheless work against life, as, for
example, seventeenth -century Puritanism did in
England, or as nationalism does throughout
Europe at the present day. Vitality easily
leads to strife or oppression, and so to
loss of vitality. War, at its outset, inte-
grates the life of a nation, but it disintegrates
the life of the world, and in the long run the
life of a nation too, when it is as severe as
the present war.

The 'War has made it clear that it is
impossible to produce a secure integration of
the life of a single community while the
relations between civilized countries are
governed by aggressiveness and suspicion.
For this reason any really powerful movement
of reform will have to be international. A
merely national movement is sure to fail
through fear of danger from without. Those
who desire a better world, or even a radical

233

Principles of Social Reconstruction

improvement in their own country, will have
to co -operate with those who have similar
desires in other countries,, and to devote
much of their energy to overcoming that
blind hostility which the war has intensified.
It is not in partial integrations, such as
patriotism alone can produce, that any ultimate
hope is to be found. The problem is, in
national and international questions as in
the individual life, to keep what is creative
in vital impulses, and: at the same time to
turn into other channels the part which is
at present destructive.

Men's impulses and desires may be divided
into those that are creative and those that
are possessive. Some of our activities are
directed to creating, what would not otherwise
exist, others are directed towards acquiring
or retaining what exists already. The typical
creative impulse is that of the artist ; the
typical possessive impulse is that of property.
The best life is that in which creative impulses
play the largest part and possessive impulses
the smallest. The best institutions are those
which produce the ^greatest possible creative-
ness and1 the least possessiveness compatible
with self-preservation. Possessiveness may be
defensive or aggressive : in the criminal law
it is defensive, and in criminals it is aggressive.
It may perhaps be admitted that the criminal
law is less abominable than the criminal, and

234

What We Can Do

that defensive possessiveness is unavoidable so
long as aggressive possessiveness exists. But
not even the most purely defensive forms of
possessiveness are in themselves admirable ;
indeed, as soon as they are strong they become
hostile to the creative imipulses. "Take no
thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What
shall we drink, or Wherewithal shall we be
clothed ? " Whoever has known a strong
creative impulse has known the value of this
precept in its exact and literal sense : it is
preoccupation with possessions, more than
anything else, that prevents men from living
freely and nobly. The State and Property are
the great embodiments of possessiveness ; it
is for this reason that they are against life, and
that they issue in war. Possession means
taking or keeping some good thing which
another is prevented from enjoying ; creation
means putting into the world a good thing
which otherwise no one would be able to enjoy.
Since the material goods of the world must be
divided among the population, and since some
men are by nature brigands, there must be
defensive possession, which will be regulated,
in a good community, by some principle
of impersonal injustice. But all this is only
the preface to a good life or good political
institutions, in which creation will altogether
outweigh possession, and distributive justice
will exist as an uninteresting matter of course.

235

Principles of Social Reconstruction

The supreme principle, both in politics and
in private life, should be to promote all that
is creative, and so to diminish the impulses
and desires that centre round possession. The
State at present is very largely an embodiment
of possessive impulses : internally, it protects
the rich against the poor ; externally, it uses
force for the exploitation of inferior races, and
for competition with other States. Our whole
economic system is concerned exclusively with
possession ; yet the production of goods is a
form of creation, and except in so far as it
is irredeemably mechanical and monotonous,
it might afford a vehicle for creative impulses.
A great deal might be achieved towards this
end by forming the producers of a certain
kind of commodity into an autonomous democ-
racy, subject to State control as regards the
price of their commodity but not as to the
manner of its production.

Education, marriage, and religion are essen-
tially creative, yet all three have been vitiated
by the intrusion of possessive motives. Edu-
cation is usually treated as a means of pro-
longing the status quo by instilling prejudices,
rather than of creating free thought and a
noble outlook by the example of generous
feeling and the stimulus of mental adventure.
In marriage, love, which is creative, is kept
in chains by jealousy, which is possessive.
Religion, which should set free the creative

236

What We Can Do

vision of the spirit, is usually more concerned
to repress the life of instinct and to combat
the subversiveness of thought. In all these
ways the fear that grows out of precarious
possession has replaced the hope inspired by
creative force. The wish to plunder others is
recognized, in theory, to be bad ; but the fear
of being plundered is little better. Yet these
two motives between them dominate nine-
tenths of politics and private life.

The creative impulses in different men are
essentially harmonious, since what one man
creates cannot be a hindrance to what another
is wishing to create. It is the possessive im-
pulses that involve conflict. Although, morally
and politically, the creative and possessive im-
pulses are opposites, yet psychologically either
passes easily into the other, according to the
accidents of circumstance and opportunity.
The genesis of impulses and the causes which
make them change ought to be studied ; edu-
cation and social institutions ought to be made
such as to strengthen the impulses which har-
monize in different men, and to weaken those
that involve conflict. I have no doubt that
what might be accomplished in this way is
almost unlimited.

It is rather through impulse than through
will that individual lives and the life of the
community can derive the strength and unity
of a single direction. Will is of two kinds,

237

Principles of Social Reconstruction

of which one is directed outward and the other
inward. The first, which is directed outward,
is called into play by external obstacles, either
the opposition of others or the technical diffi-
culties of an undertaking. This kind of will
is an expression of strong impulse or desire,
whenever instant success is impossible ; it
exists in all whose life is vigorous, and only
decays when their vital force is enfeebled. It
is necessary to success in any difficult enter-
prise, and without it great achievement is very
rare. But the will which is directed inward
is only necessary in so far as there is an inner
conflict of impulses or desires ; a perfectly
harmonious nature would have no occasion for
inward will. Such perfect harmony is of
course a scarcely realizable ideal : in all men
impulses arise which are incompatible with
their central purpose, and which must be
checked if their life as a whole is not to be
a failure. But this will happen least with
those whose central impulses are strongest ;
and it will happen less often in a society which
aims at freedom than in a society like ours,
which is full of artificial incompatibilities
created by antiquated institutions and a tyran-
nous public opinion. The power to exert in-
ward will when the occasion arises must always
be needed by those who wish their lives to
embody some central purpose, but with better
institutions the occasions when inward will is

238

What We Can Do

necessary might be made fewer and less im-
portant . This result is very much to be desired,
because when will checks impulses which are
only accidentally harmful, it diverts a force
which might be spent on overcoming outward
obstacles, and if the impulses checked are
strong and serious, it actually diminishes the
vital force available. A life full of inhibitions
is likely not to remain a very vigorous life, but
to become listless and without zest. Impulse
tends to die when it is constantly held in check ;
and if it does not die, it is apt to work under-
ground, and issue in some form1 much worse
than that in which it has been checked. For
these reasons the necessity for using inward
will ought to be avoided as much as possible,
and consistency of action ought to spring rather
from consistency of impulse than from control
of impulse by will.

The unifying of life ought not to demand the
suppression of the casual desires that make
amusement and play ; on the contrary, every-
thing ought to be done to make it easy to
combine the main purposes of life with all
kinds of pleasure that are not in their nature
harmful. Such things as habitual drunken-
ness, drugs, cruel sports, or pleasure in inflict-
ing pain are essentially harmful, but most of
the amusements that civilized men naturally
enjoy are either not harmful at all or only
accidentally harmful through some effect which

239

Principles of Social Reconstruction

might be avoided in a better society. What
is needed is, not asceticism or a drab
Puritanism, but capacity for strong impulses
and desires directed towards large creative
ends. When such impulses and desires are
vigorous, they bring with them, of themselves,
what is needed to make a good life.

But although amusement and adventure
ought to have their share, it is impossible to
create a good life if they are what is mainly
desired. Subjectivism, the habit of directing
thought and desire to our own states of mind
rather than to something objective, inevitably
makes life fragmentary and unprogressive .
-The man to whom amusement is the end of
life tends to lose interest gradually in the things
out of which he has been in the habit of obtain-
ing amusement, since he does not value these
things on their own account, but on account
of the feelings which they arouse in him.
When they are no longer amusing, boredom
drives him to seek some new stimulus, which
fails him in its turn. Amusement consists in
a series of moments without any essential
continuity ; a purpose which unifies life is one
which requires some prolonged activity, and
is like building a monument rather than a
child's castle in the sand.

Subjectivism has other forms beside the
mere pursuit of amusement. Many men, when
they are in love, are more interested in their

240

What We Can Do

own emotion than in the object of their love ;
such love does not lead to any essential union,
but leaves fundamental separateness un-
diminished. As soon as the emotion grows less
vivid the experience has served its purpose,
and there seems no motive for prolonging it.
In another way, the same evil of subjectivism1
was fostered by Protestant religion and
morality, since they directed attention to sin
and the state of the soul rather than to the
outer world and our relations with it. None of
these forms of subjectivism1 can prevent a
man's life from being fragmentary and isolated.
Only a life which springs out of dominant1
impulses directed to objective ends can be a
satisfactory whole, or be intimately united with
the lives of others.

The pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of
virtue alike suffer from subjectivism : Epi-
cureanism and Stoicism are infected with the
same taint. Marcus Aurelius, enacting good
laws in order that he might be virtuous, is
not an attractive figure. Subjectivism is a
natural outcome of a life in which there is
much more thought than a.ction : while outer
things are being remembered or desired, not
actually experienced, they seem to become
mere ideas. What they are in themselves
becomes less interesting to us than the effects
which they produce in our own minds. Such
a result tends to be brought about by increas-

241 Q

Principles of Social Reconstruction

ing civilization, because increasing civilization
continually diminishes the need for vivid action
and enhances the opportunities for thought.
But thought will not have this bad result if
it is active thought, directed towards achieving
some purpose ; it is only passive thought that
leads to subjectivism. What is needed is to
keep thought in intimate union with impulses
and desires, making it always itself an activity
with an objective purpose. Otherwise, thought
and impulse become enemies, to the great
detriment of both.

In order to make the lives of ayerage men
and women less fragmentary and separate, and
to give greater opportunity for carrying out
creative impulses, it is not enough to know the
goal we wish to reaich, or to proclaim the
excellence of what we desire to achieve. It
is necessary to understand the effect of in-
stitutions and beliefs upon the life of impulse,
and to discover ways of improving this effect
by a change in institutions. And when this
intellectual work hap been done, our thought
will still remain barren unless we can bring
it into relation with some powerful political
force. The only powerful political force from
which any help is to be expected in bringing
about such changes as seem needed is Labour.
The changes required are very largely such as
Labour may be expected to welcome, especially
during the time of hardship after the war.

242

What We Can Do

When the war is over, labour discontent is sure
to be very prevalent throughout Europe, and to
constitute a political force by means of which
a great and sweeping reconstruction may be
effected .

The civilized world has need of fundamental
change if it is to be saved from decay— change
both in its economic structure and in its phil-
osophy of life. Those of us who feel the need
of change must not sit still in dull despair :
we can, if we choose, profoundly influence the
future. -We can discover and preach the kind
of change that is required — the kind that pre-
serves what is positive in the vital beliefs of
our time, and, by eliminating what is negative
and inessential, produces a synthesis to which
all that is not purely reactionary can give alle-
giance. As soon as it has become clear what
kind of change is required, it will be possible
to work out its parts in more detail. But until
the war is ended there is little use in detail,
since we do not know what kind of world the
war will leave. The only thing that seems
indubitable is that much new thought will be
required in the new world produced by the
war. Traditional views will give little help.
It is clear that men's most important actions
are not guided by the sort of motives that are
emphasized in traditional political philosophies .
The impulses by which the war has been pro-
duced and sustained come out of a deeper

243

Principles of Social Reconstruction

region than that of most political argument.
And the opposition to the war, on the part of
those few who have opposed it, comes from the
same deep region. A political theory, if it is to
hold in times of stress, must take account of
the impulses that underlie explicit thought :
it must appeal to them', and it must discover
how to make them fruitful rather than
destructive .

Economic systems have a great influence in
promoting or destroying life. Except slavery,
the present industrial system is the most
destructive of life that has ever existed.
Machinery and large-scale production are in-
eradicable, and must survive in any better
system which is to replace the one under
which we live. Industrial federal democracy
is probably the best direction for reform to
take .

Philosophies of life, when they are widely
believed, also have a very great influence on
the vitality of a community. The most widely
accepted philosophy of life at present is that
what matters most to a man's happiness is
his income. This philosophy, apart from other
demerits, is harmful because it leads men to
aim at a result rather than an activity, an
enjoyment of material goods in which men are
not differentiated, rather than a creative im-
pulse which embodies each man's individuality.
More refined philosophies, such as are instilled

244

What We Can Do

by higher education, are too apt to fix attention
on the past rather than the future, and on
correct behaviour rather than effective action.
It is (not in such philosophies that men will
find the energy to bear lightly the weight of
tradition and of ever -accumulating knowledge.
The world has need of a philosophy, or a
religion, which will promote life. But in order
to promote life it is necessary to value some-
thing other than mere life. Life devoted only
to life is animal, without any real human value,
incapable of preserving men permanently from
weariness and the feeling that all is vanity. If
life is to be fully human it must serve some
end which seems, in some sense, outside human
life, some end which is impersonal and above
mankind, such as God or truth or beauty.
•Those who best promote life do not have life
for their purpose. They aim rather at what
seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing
into our human existence of something eternal,
something that appears to imagination to live
in a heaven remote from1 strife and failure and
the devouring jaws of Time. Contact with
this eternal world— even if it be only a world
of our imagining— brings a strength and a
fundamental peace which cannot be wholly
destroyed by the struggles and apparent
failures of our temporal life. It is this happy
contemplation of what is eternal that Spinoza
calls the intellectual love of God. To those

245

Principles of Social Reconstruction

who have once known it, it is the key of
wisdom .

What we have to do practically is different
for each one of us, according to our capacities
and opportunities. But if we have the life of
the spirit within us, what we must do and
what we must avoid will become apparent
to us.

By contact with what is eternal, by devoting
our life to bringing something of the Divine
into this troubled world, we can make our own
lives creative even now, even in the midst of
the cruelty and strife and hatred that surround
us on every hand. To make the individual
life creative is far harder in a community based
on possession than it would be in such a com-
munity as human effort may be able to build
up in the future. Those who are to begin the
regeneration of the world must face loneliness,
opposition, poverty, obloquy. They must be
able to live by truth and love, with a rational
unconquerable hope ; they must be honest and
wise, fearless, and guided by a consistent pur-
pose. A body of men and women so inspired
will conquer— first the difficulties and per-
plexities of their individual lives, then, in time,
though perhaps only in a long time, the outer
world. Wisdom and hope are what the world
needs ; and though it fights against them, it
gives its respect to them in the end.

When the Goths sacked Rome, St. Augustine
246

wrote the " City of God," putting a spiritual
hope in place of the material reality that
had been destroyed. Throughout the centuries
that followed St. Augustine's hope lived and
gave life, while Rome sank to a village of
hovels. For us too it is necessary to create
a new hope, to build up by our thought a
better world than the one which is hurling
itself into ruin. Because the times are bad,
more is required of us than would be required
in normal times. Only a supreme fire of
thought and spirit can save future generations
from the death that has befallen the genera-
tion which we knew and loved.

It has been my good fortune to come in
contact as a teacher with young men of many
different nations— young men in whom hope
was alive, in whom the creative energy existed
that would have realized in the world some
part at least of the imagined beauty by which
they lived. They have been swept into the
war, some on one side, some on the other.
Some are still fighting, some are maimed for
life, some are dead ; of those who survive it
is to be feared that many will have lost the
life of the spirit, that hope will have died, that
energy will be spent, and that the years to come
will be only a weary journey towards the grave .
Of all this tragedy, not a few of those who
teach seem to have no feeling : with ruthless
logic, they prove that these young men have

247

Principles of Social Reconstruction

been sacrificed unavoidably for some coldly
abstract end ; undisturbed themselves, they
lapse quickly into comfort after any momentary
assault of feeling. In such men the life of
the spirit is dead. If it were living, it would
go out to meet the spirit in the young, with
a love as poignant as the love of father or
mother. It would be unaware of the bounds
of self ; their tragedy would be its own. Some-
thing would cry out : '* No, this is not right ;
this is not good, this is not a holy cause, in
which the brightness of youth is destroyed and
dimmed. It is we, the old, who have sinned;
we have sent these young men to the battle-
field for our evil passions, our spiritual death,
our failure to live generously out of the warmth
of the heart and out of the living vision of
the spirit. Let us come out of this death, for
it is we who are dead, not the young men who
have died through our fear of life. Their very
ghosts have more life than we : they hold us
up for ever to the shame and obloquy of all
the ages to come. Out of their ghosts must
come life, and it is we whom they must
vivify."

248

INDEX

Africa, 228 ; England in South,
52 «. ; Germany in South-
West, 52 n.

America and the Philippines,
52 n. ; love of money in, 113

American War of Indepen-
dence, 225

Amusement, 240

Aquinas, Thomas, 199

Armaments, 55

Army, 45

Athens, 95

Augustine, St., 246

Aurelius, Marcus, 241

Australia, 58 ff. ; and Japan, 104

Austria and Serbia, dispute be-
tween, 104

Authority, 27, 33 ff., 187 ff.

Bernhardi, 19

Biological groups, 34

Birth-rate, 177

Blasphemy prosecutions, 47 n.

Booth's " Life and Labour of

the People," 123 n.
Butler, Sir W., and the South

African War," 91

Capitalism, 120, 136 ff.
Christ, teaching of, 47

Christianity, 58, 202
Clerical profession, 200
Comite du Salut Public, 55
Confederation Generate du

Travail, 54

Conscientious objectors, 47 n.
Co-operative movement, 139
Cosmopolitanism, 58
Cromwell's army and democ-
racy, 225

Dante, 199

Discipline in education, I56ff.

Divorce, 169; and war, 170 n.

Education, 133 ff., 143 ff., 236 ;

elementary, 159 ; higher, 160
Egypt, 103

Elizabethan England, 135
England /and South Africa,

52 n. ; and America, 106 ;

love of money in, 1 13 ff .
Epicureanism, 241
Eton, 152

European community, a, 53
Examination system, 162

Feudal System, 52
Force, use of, 46

249

Index

France and England in the
fifteenth century, 32 ; and
Morocco, 52 n. ; worship of
money in, 1 16

Francis, St., 198

Frederick the Great, 35

Free Trade, 117

Freedom of thought, 73 ; of
speech, 73

German culture in the eight-
eenth century, 32

German nationalism, 32

German policy, 80

Germany and science, 95 ; and
South- West Africa, 52 n. ;
invasion of, 32 ; worship of
money in, 117

Gissing, in

" Good Form," evils of, 153

Hart's " Psychology of In-
sanity," 15 n.
Hegemony, 100 ff.
History, teaching of, 149

Impulse and desire, 12 ff., 234
Impulse by will, control of, 18
Impulse towards war, 93
Industrialism, 42
Influence of the Press, 49
Inheritance, 127
Interest, 123*?.
International Council, an, 92
International law, 46
Ireland, 61 ; English oppres-
sion of, 31, 105
Irish, 21
Italy, 32 ; in Tripoli, 52 n.

James, William, 95
Japan and Manchuria, 52 n.
Jephthah, 109
Jews, 21

Justice, 28, 145 ; the claims of,
132

Kimberley diamond-mines, 126

Labour, 131, 242

Lafayette, 225

Law for force, substitution of,

65

Leibniz, 32

Liberalism, traditional, 9
Liberty, 28, 145 ; principle of,

227
Limitation of families, 175 ;

motives for, 115
Liszt, 117
Llewelyn Smith, Sir H., on

London, 123
Lloyd George, Mr., and the

Insurance Act, 73
Local government, 72
Luther, 29

Macbeth, 14

Magyars, 31

Malthus, 183

Manchuria, 52 n.

Marriage, 37, 236 ; and the

population question, 168 ff.
Middle Ages, institutions in

the, 27

Militarism in Australia, 59
Military Service Act (No. 2),

30 n.
Military service, universal, 48

250

Index

Mill, J. S., 226
Millennium, 130
Mind, 206

Mohammedans, 19, 20
Money, desire for, 96, in ff.
Montessori system, 143, 157 «.
Morocco, France in, 52 w.

Napoleon, 32, 232
Nationalism, 30 ff .
Nations, 53
Navy, 45

Norway and Sweden, separa-
tion of, 6 1

Obedience in education, 156
Old Testament, 108
Oxford, 152

Pacifists, 21 ff., 97

Parliament of the nations, a,
87

Patriotism, 55 ff., 217 ; teach-
ing of, 151 n.

Persia, 104 ; Russia in, 52 n.

Philip II, 100

Poland, 6 1

Poles, 21

Political institutions, 38

Possession, 235

Post Office, 45

Private property, 44, 53, 125

Production, belief in the im-
portance of, 121 ff.

Protestant religion, 241

Prussian Poland, oppression
of, 105

Public opinion, 49

Rand gold-miners, 126

Religion, 204, 236; and the
Churches, 197 ff.

Religious instruction, 149 ff .

Rent, 126

Reverence, 146, 227

Roman Empire, 61, 65, 94, 99,
181

Rousseau, 225

Russia in Persia and Man-
churia, 52 n.

Ruthenes, 31

Scientific research, State en-
couragement of, 69

Shelley, 226

Social and political conflicts,
desirability of, 97

Socialism, 44, 53, 58, 119, 123,
129, 225

Society of Friends, 201

South American Republics, 103

Spain and the Moors, 32

Sparta and Athens, 155

Spinoza, 245

Spirit, 207

State, civil and military, 102 ;
power of the, 49

State socialism, 137

Stoicism, 241

Subjectivism, 240 ff .

Swift's Houyhnhnms, 93

Syndicalism, 37, 44, 139

Syndicalist prosecutions, 47 «.

Syndicalists, French, 64

Tolstoy, 176, 203
Trade unions, 74
Tribal feeling, 52 ff .

251

Index

Triple Entente, 106
Tripoli, Italy in, 52 n.

United States, 61
Utopias, 93 ff.

War as an institution, 77 ff. ;
efficiency in, 59 ; two views
of the, 10

War fever, 90 ff .
Wealth, love of, 96
Webb, Mr. Sidney, 177 n.
Welsh miners, 73
" White feather " women, 50 n.
Whitman, Walt, 35 ff.
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 226
World-federation, a, 101
World-State, a, 107

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authentic and restrained in tone, but what most strikes the reader is its
extraordinary sincerity. No war book has yet appeared that gives so
strong an impression of reality, or which, on its own sheer merits, is more
worthy to survive the rage and tumult of battle.

The Diary of a French Private

1914—1915

BY GASTON RIOU
TRANSLATED BY E. AND C. PAUL

Crown 8vo, Cloth. 5/. net.

" M. Riou is rather more than a simple soldier. He is a writer of great
gifts — narrative power, humour, tenderness, and philosophical insight.
Moreover, his exceptional knowledge of Germany gives special value to
his account of his experiences as a prisoner of war." — Literary Supplement
of The Times.

My Experiences on Three
Fronts

BY SISTER MARTIN-NICHOLSON

Crown 8vo. 4-f. 6</. net.

A vivid account of the author's experiences in Belgium and Russia and
afterwards with the French and English troops.

Antwerp to Gallipoli

BY ARTHUR RUHL

Small Demy. 7'- 6^- net-

CONTENTS. — " The Germans are Coming ! "—Paris at Bay — After the
Marne— The Fall of Antwerp— Paris Again ; and Bordeaux : Journal of
a Fight from a London Fog— "The Great Days"— Two German Prison-
Camps—In the German Trenches at La Bassee— The Road to Constanti-
nople : Rumania and Bulgaria — The Adventure of the Fifty Hostages —
With the Turks at the Dardanelles— Soghan-Dere and the Flier of
Ak-Bash— A War Correspondents' Village— Cannon Fodder— East of
Lemberg : Through Austria- Hungary to the Galician Front— In the Dust
of the Russian Retreat.

Our Ultimate Aim in the War

BY GEORGE G. ARMSTRONG
Crown %vot cloth. is. 6d. net. Ptstage ^d.

" Strikes a note to which the best of his countrymen will respond." —
Times. " An able and thoughtful contribution." — Daily News.

The European Anarchy

BY G. LOWES DICKINSON

Author of " A Modern Symposium," etc., etc.

Crown 8vo, Cloth. 2ND EDITION. is. 6d. net. Postage \d.

" Every one should read this able and honest contribution to the most
necessary of all kinds of books at the present time — ' after the war '
literature." — Daily News.

11 This is one of the shrewdest books on the causes of the war that we
have read." — The Economist.

Towards a Lasting Settlement

BY G. LOWES DICKINSON, H. N. BRAILSFORD,

J. A. HOBSON, VERNON LEE, PHILIP

SNOWDEN, M.P., A. MAUD ROYDEN,

H. SIDEBOTHAM, AND OTHERS.
EDITED BY CHARLES RODEN BUXTON.

Cr. Svo, Cloth. SECOND IMPRESSION, zs. 6d. net. Postage $d.

" The essays are contributions of real help towards the solution of great
and inevitable problems." — PROF. GILBERT MURRAY in The Nation.

"It is truly a harbinger of Peace ... all its pages make for the
abolition of War." — Church Times.

Towards International
Government BY j. A. HOBSON

Crown 8vo, Cloth. THIRD IMPRESSION, is. 6d. net. Tostage \d.

" Always lucid, cogent, and unflinching in his argument, and . . .
eads us step by step towards the conclusion that . . . the boldest
solution is safest and simplest." — Manchester Guardian.

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LIMITED

A 000675862 "